Gulliver's Travels

I picked up Gulliver's Travels expecting a children's adventure, the kind with tiny people and giants that you half remember from cartoons. The actual book surprised me within fifty pages. It is angrier and stranger than its reputation suggests, and by the final section it stops feeling like an adventure at all. Jonathan Swift was not writing bedtime stories. He was settling scores with politicians, scientists, philosophers, and pretty much the whole human race, and he used a shipwrecked surgeon to do it.

The publishing story is part of the joke. The book first appeared in London on 28 October 1726, issued by the bookseller Benjamin Motte, and it did not carry Swift's name. The title page called it Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships, with a fictitious Captain Richard Sympson presented as the editor. Readers at the time knew or guessed that the Anglo Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift, then Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, was behind it. Motte even softened some passages on his own authority, worried about libel suits from powerful men who might recognize themselves, and Swift was furious when he found out. The text I read is the Penguin Classics edition, which runs to 336 pages and follows the early text with its original illustrations and notes. Everything that follows matches that edition and the 1726 first publication, and the four voyages come in the order Swift gave them.

Lemuel Gulliver himself is worth noticing before the wonders start. He is not a hero in the modern sense. He is a middle class Englishman from Nottinghamshire, schooled at Cambridge and in Leiden, trained as a surgeon, married to a woman named Mary Burton, and chronically unable to stay home. Every voyage begins the same way. Business fails or a ship needs a surgeon, Gulliver signs on, something goes wrong at sea, and he washes up somewhere that is not on any map. He narrates everything in a flat, practical tone, full of measurements and bearings, as if he were writing a ship's log. That deadpan voice is what makes the satire work, because he reports impossible things the way another man would report the price of rope.

Lilliput and the smallness of politics

The first voyage is the famous one. Gulliver sails on the Antelope, which founders in a storm, and he swims until he collapses on a beach. When he wakes, he cannot move. Hundreds of tiny threads hold him down, and when he strains upward he sees people no more than six inches tall standing on his chest. These are the Lilliputians, and Swift spends a long time on the physical comedy of the situation. They build a machine to haul him upright. They climb his body with ladders. They feed him in miniature casks and then present him with an itemized bill for his upkeep, down to the cost of the chains.

Once the wonder settles, the politics begin, and this is where Swift sharpens the knife. Lilliput is split between two court factions, the High Heels and the Low Heels, whose entire difference is the height of their shoe heels, and the emperor favors one or the other as fashion dictates. The neighboring island of Blefuscu is Lilliput's mortal enemy, and the cause of the war is an egg. Years earlier the emperor's grandfather cut his finger breaking an egg at the big end, so his son ordered everyone to break eggs at the little end, and the resulting split between Big Endians and Little Endians has cost thousands of lives and sunk fleets. Gulliver captures the whole Blefuscudian navy by wading across the channel and pulling the ships with cables, an image every child remembers, and the Lilliputian court rewards him with a high title.

Then the tone darkens. Gulliver puts out a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it, an act of heroic plumbing that the empress never forgives. Ministers who once flattered him begin filing articles of treason against him, accusing him of secret dealings with Blefuscu and of planning to reduce the capital to obedience by force. The charges are absurd on purpose. Gulliver has done nothing but serve the state, and the state is preparing to blind him and starve him by degrees. He escapes to Blefuscu, finds an abandoned boat, and is picked up by an English merchantman. He comes home changed in a small way, restless and already half ashamed of ordinary English faction fights, which now look to him like arguments over heels and eggs. Most readers recognize their own workplace or parliament in this section, which is why it has lasted three hundred years.

Brobdingnag turns the spyglass around

The second voyage reverses the first. Gulliver sails on the Adventure, goes ashore for water in an unknown country, and is left behind when his companions flee from a giant. This time he is the tiny one. A farmer the size of a church steeple picks him up between finger and thumb, and Gulliver is carried home like a strange insect. The farmer's nine year old daughter, Glumdalclitch, takes charge of him. She makes him clothes, teaches him the language, and names him Grildrig, her little nurse. The affection between them is one of the few warm things in the book, and Swift writes it plainly, without sentiment getting in the way.

The farmer sees money in the creature and takes Gulliver to market towns to perform tricks for crowds, until the exhausted Gulliver is sold to the queen and installed at court in a traveling box fitted with tiny furniture. The king of Brobdingnag is curious about England and questions Gulliver at length about Parliament, courts, debt, and war. Gulliver gives a loyal account of his country, proud of its institutions, and the king listens and then delivers the most quoted verdict in the book, that the great body of Gulliver's countrymen must be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever allowed to crawl on the surface of the earth. It stings because the reader has just watched Gulliver describe things like colonial wars and party purges as if they were normal.

Swift keeps the physical comedy coming alongside the argument. A dwarf drops Gulliver into a bowl of cream. A monkey carries him to the roof. Hailstones the size of tennis balls knock him flat. Wasps as big as partridges attack him and he draws his little sword. A lapdog knocks his box over. Through all of it Gulliver keeps insisting on his dignity, which is the joke, since dignity is hard to keep when you are six inches tall and being licked by a dog. He also offers the king the secret of gunpowder, explaining cannon and mines with professional pride, and the king recoils in horror and forbids any mention of it again. The voyage ends when an eagle seizes the traveling box in its beak, carries it over the sea, and drops it, and Gulliver is fished out by a passing ship. He returns to England but his eyes take weeks to adjust. Everything at home looks tiny and mean to him, and his wife has to remind him not to shout, since he has grown used to bellowing at giants.

The flying island and the projectors of Lagado

The third voyage is the oddest and, for many readers, the hardest to get through, though I came to enjoy its sour comedy. Gulliver sails on the Hopewell, is captured by pirates, and is set adrift in a small boat. He lands on Balnibarbi and is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a great circular platform of adamantine that hovers by means of a magnetic lodestone and carries the king and his court above the subject lands. The Laputans are tall, abstracted men with heads tilted to one side, one eye turned inward and the other fixed on the stars. Each is attended by a servant with a bladder on a stick, whose job is to tap the master's mouth or ear when it is time to speak or listen, because otherwise the master drifts off into calculation and never notices.

Laputa lets Swift mock the learned societies of his day. The Laputans are brilliant at mathematics and music and hopeless at applying either to life. Their clothes hang badly because the tailors take measurements with quadrants and compasses and always miscalculate. Their houses are crooked because they despise practical geometry. The women of Laputa run off with footmen and stable boys because their husbands never look up from their theorems. There is a famous passage where Gulliver watches the king threaten rebellious cities below by hovering over them to block the sun, or by dropping stones, which is colonial rule drawn as a diagram.

Down on the ground at Balnibarbi, things are worse. Lord Munodi, a sensible country gentleman who farms in the old way, shows Gulliver neighbors whose estates lie in ruin because they follow the Academy of Lagado. The Academy is a large building full of projectors, men running experiments that will supposedly enrich the kingdom. Gulliver walks through room after room: one man trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers to warm houses, another trying to build houses starting from the roof downward, a third trying to turn human waste back into food, an architect planning to plow fields with hogs to save the cost of horses and manure. The blind man teaching colors by touch and the scholar writing books by turning a frame of word dice are easy to laugh at, but Swift means them as portraits of real schemes and pamphlets that London and Dublin took seriously.

The voyage keeps going after Lagado, which is why this section feels episodic. Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, the island of magicians, where the governor summons the dead to answer questions, and Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Aristotle appear and turn out smaller and more doubtful than their reputations. Then he reaches Luggnagg and hears of the Struldbruggs, wretches who are born immortal but keep aging, growing ever more diseased, forgetful, and despised, until Gulliver's envy of eternal life curdles into horror. He ends the voyage in Japan, where he dodges the required trampling on the crucifix by claiming to be Dutch, and takes a Dutch ship home. The whole third voyage reads like Swift emptying his notebook of everything that annoyed him about modern learning, and readers who work in universities or laboratories will recognize more targets than they might like.

Horses who reason and men who grunt

The fourth voyage is the darkest and the one people argue about most. Gulliver now sails as captain of the Adventure and his crew mutinies, locking him in his cabin and setting him ashore on an unknown island. There he meets creatures with long hair, beards like goats, and claws, who walk on two legs and grunt and fight over carrion. These are the Yahoos. Then intelligent horses appear, and Gulliver learns by slow degrees that in this country the horses, who call themselves Houyhnhnms, are the rational masters, while the Yahoos are kept as beasts of burden.

Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master takes him into the household, learns his story through patient lessons in language, and listens with growing disgust to accounts of European war, law, money, and government. The Houyhnhnms have no word for lying and call it saying the thing which is not. They have no lawyers, no wars, no money, no ambition. They mate by arrangement, raise children in common disciplines, and die without grief or ceremony. Gulliver comes to adore them and to measure every English custom against their calm and finds England wanting. He starts to trot and neigh in imitation. He begins to hate his own shape, since his body looks to him like a Yahoo wearing clothes.

The assembly of Houyhnhnms debates whether to exterminate the Yahoos or merely castrate the young ones to end the breed, a cold passage that Swift leaves standing without a comforting reply. The master, who has grown fond of Gulliver, must still tell him to leave, because the assembly rules that a Yahoo with reason is too dangerous to keep. Gulliver builds a canoe, sails to a Portuguese settlement, and is brought home by a sympathetic captain, Don Pedro de Mendez. Back in England he cannot bear his wife and children. He faints at their touch, buys two horses, and spends his days talking to the stable animals, convinced they understand him. The book ends with Gulliver insisting he wrote only for the public good and that his pride is cured, while every page shows a man eaten by a new kind of pride, the pride of despising everyone.

This is the section that divides readers, and I think that is deliberate. Some take it as Swift's final verdict that humans are Yahoos under the skin. Others read it as a warning against Gulliver himself, who has traded one folly for another by worshipping reason in horses and refusing love at home. The scene where Gulliver counts his own sins as a Yahoo and then lists English crimes with secret relish supports the second reading. He has learned the vocabulary of virtue and uses it to condemn, never to forgive.

What lasts and what drags

The satire still lands because Swift aims at habits rather than headlines. Courts that reward flattery, learned men who confuse models with life, colonists who call theft by fine names, and citizens who cheer wars paid for by others all survive in new clothes. The scenes that stay with me are small and physical: Gulliver reading the articles of impeachment against him in Lilliput, the Brobdingnagian king peering at him through a glass, the Lagado projector solemnly bottling cucumber sunbeams, the old Struldbrugg who cannot remember yesterday, the Houyhnhnm master pausing over the phrase saying the thing which is not. Swift writes these moments in plain sentences that move quickly, and the Penguin notes help with the period references without slowing the story.

There are fair criticisms, and a friend should hear them before starting. The third voyage sags in the middle because it is a string of visits rather than a plot, and the Lagado catalogue goes on long after the point is made. Swift's anger at women is ugly in places, especially the passages about Laputan wives and the Yahoo females, which read as contempt rather than comedy. The Houyhnhnm chapters repeat the same debate about human vice in slightly different words, and Gulliver's voice, so funny when he is measuring tiny sheep, grows flat when he is lecturing. Readers who want likable characters or a hero to root for will not find one here. Gulliver ends the book less human than he began it, and Swift offers no rescue.

Still, the book earns its place. It invented images that entered the language, from Big Endians to Yahoos to Lilliputian quarrels, and it set a pattern for every later story in which a traveler reports home from a strange country that looks suspiciously like home. Read it straight through rather than in extracts, because the effect depends on accumulation. Gulliver shrinks and grows and flies and trots, and with each change Swift asks the same question in a new form, which is what people look like when seen from somewhere else. The answer gets less comfortable every time, and that discomfort is the point Swift spent his life sharpening.