Orbis Litterarum (1983), 38, 13-23

Gulliver’s Travels A Study in the Aesthetics of the roman a these

F. J . Billeskov Jansen, Copenhagen

Gulliver’s Travels is a novel in which the author’s own convictions are perceived throughout, even when he employs irony. It is a roman d th2se - a didactic novel with a thesis - the structure of which can be viewed as a pattern of concentric circles that are mutually interrelated. At the hub of the novel we note Swift’s incontrovertible antipathy toward human odours. Swift’s aversion toward people is an idiosyncrasy that finds expression in the novel’s various strata. When he imitates descriptive accounts of various bodies politic and depicts fictitious societies, he is an aggressive critic of technical progress. When he imitates fantastic narratives and tells of giant women, his Gulliver is repulsed by such women. And at the perimeter of the novel, where Swift parodies travel literature, he cannot resist an ironic caricature of the nautical minutiae with which that literature often was burdened.

Here we are in the autumn of 1982 reading, in a novel of 1726, what a man observes early one morning on a rocky island east of Japan: “The Sky was perfectly clear, and the Sun so hot, that I was forced to turn my Face from it: When all on a Sudden it became obscured, as I thought, in a Manner very different from what happens by the Interposition ofa Cloud. I turned back, and perceived a vast Opake Body between me and the Sun, moving forwards towards the Island . . . As it approached nearer over the Place where I was, it appeared to be a firm Substance, the Bottom flat, smooth, and shining very bright from the Reflexion of the Sea below” (Gulliver’s Travels. Norton Critical Edition ; edited R. A. Greenberg. Revised 1970. p. 130). We can hardly fail to exclaim, ‘A flying saucer !’ and we expect the beings already sighted by the man on the rock to turn out to be emissaries of Mars or Jupiter. But this is not the intention at all. The Flying Island, as this body is soon designated, is closely linked to our own earth, for the aerial island is steered by means of a gigantic magnet, which the crew can adjust so that the island either approaches or withdraws from a particular mineral that is found only in one area. On this flying island live the king and his court, and in this isolation he rules the land beneath him. The flying or floating island (Part 111, chapter 1) has thus nothing at all to do with the unidentified flying objects of our time.

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So we have to be wary of ascribing to a classic work greater topicality than it can bear. At times older writers can, quite unwittingly, prove farsighted. When Gulliver reaches the country beneath the flying island, he there visits a research centre, an “academy of projectors,” and he describes in detail the work of these scientific projectors. He is much fascinated by a machine or frame twenty foot square. “The Superficies was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order.”The professor assures him that “he had emptyed the whole Vocabulary into his Frame, and made the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.” Well, is this not a computer fed with the whole word-stock of a particular language and now ready for programming? There is a picture of the machine : by means of numerous cranks along the edge, the wooden pieces are moved arbitrarily, and from the results texts can be read, and on this machine books can be composed about “Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study” (111, 5). The professor calls it “a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations” and his scientific jargon has a fine ring about it. In this satire upon the multifarious scientific initiatives of the Royal Society, Swift has come close to modern reality.

From among the projectors of the strange country, the writer picks out for mockery a researcher who for eight years had been working on extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and pouring them into bottles to be used in cool summers; another who was seeking to extract the original food from human faeces; and a third who was trying to replace silk with cobwebs. On the same level as this, he tells about professors who were trying to “contrive new Rules and Methods of Agriculture and Building, and new Instruments and Tools for all Trades and Manufactures, whereby, as they undertake, one Man shall do the Work of Ten; a Palace may be built in a Week, of Materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. All the Fruits of the Earth shall come to Maturity at whatever Season we think fit to chuse.” Swift continues that “none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste.” All energy is devoted to these - the reader is intended to think, unrealisable - projects. In Gulliver’s Travels there is no faith in natural philosophy, i.e. mathematics, physics, and chemistry ; contempt for the theoretical sciences is established, and no chances of a technological advance are glimpsed.

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For a third time, with a knowledge of our own age, we approach Swift’s text. This time a bell really does seem to ring, we feel. The traveller in the book, Gulliver, encounters some people who know that they can never die. When these people reach the age of eighty, they are possessed by envy and impotent desires, and at ninety they lose their teeth and hair and their sense of taste. When they speak they cannot remember what things are called, or even the names of their closest friends and relatives. Since language changes, after a couple of hundred years they are practically incapable of carrying on a conversation with later generations. They are strangers in their own land, despised and hated by all. These dotards are loathsome and the women are even more repellent than the men. We are nauseated, as in Beckett’s Endgame (Fin departie, 1956), where two old people are put in garbage bins. But we are hardly justified in enlisting Swift as a supporter of Beckett’s view of the absurdity of human existence and the dissolution of identity, of which old age is merely one example. Swift’s intention in describing the uglinesses of senility is quite plainly revealed in the commentary that follows : A couple of these human wrecks sent to the traveller’s own country would help his countrymen to overcome their fear of death.

For in Gulliver’s Travels the author continually intrudes : his intentions are almost impossible to mistake even when he uses irony. This travel memoir is a novel of ideas, it takes sides passionately for or against particular ideas. The author’s ideas are summed up in an ideal and its opposite. The thoughts of the book unite like a bunch of threads into a “tendency.” A work of fiction of this kind, a sort of propaganda novel, a roman a these, has a rare unity of meaning. When, as in Gulliver’s Travels, the whole thing is done with great intelligence and burning passion, it is worth analyzing its structure, the layers in the aesthetic construction of the novel. It can be conceived as a system of concentric circles, each interacting upon all the others. To varying degrees these circles have affinity with different literary genres. And besides, they plot out all positions between realism and an abandon to fantasy.

I1 The outermost layer or circle is a simulated topical or historical reality. The narrator immediately establishes his identity: “My Father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.” In the brief autobiography we see Lemuel Gulliver acquiring knowledge and skills within medicine and navigation, which he is going to need on his travels. We learn that it is on account of a decline in his medical practice that he goes to sea as a ship’s surgeon, that he makes several trips, and then decides to remain at home with his wife and children, but for financial reasons has to set off again. In this dry biographical opening we are on the firm ground of realities, even when the Antelope, with

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Captain William Prichard as master, puts to sea from Bristol on 4 May 1699. Each of the book’s four parts opens by specifying the ship, the master, the port and the date: 20 June 1702; 5 August 1706; 7 September 1710. In the same way all four parts conclude with the date of Gulliver’s arrival home. On the way latitudes and longitudes are given and the strange countries that Gulliver visits are drawn in on four maps. On all these, or in the text, the position is given in relation to well-known geographical localities. The voyage out and the voyage home have the credibility of ships’-logs. Altogether, in these four parts of the book we are among ordinary seamen and merchants, and the unpretentious title-page : Travels into several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships. London 1126, is very much in keeping, as is the portrait engraving of Captain Lemuel Gulliver in the 58th year of his age.

As an exceedingly good example of an authentic travel memoir, I mention : A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708.1709, 1710, and 1711 by the Ships Duke and Dutchess of Bristol. By Capt. Edward Cooke (London 1712). This is not only an account of a voyage but also a manual for ships’-masters, therefore there are notes about winds, currents, and compass variations. There are several maps and charts, ranging from a world map to a map of the island Juan Fernandez, from which Alexander Selkirk had just returned home (Oct. 171 1) after his long sojourn there. Cooke’s book is among the first accounts of Selkirk’s experiences, which in 1719 passed into Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In a preface to the reader, Swift has an imaginary publisher, Richard Simpson, take pride in having shortened Gulliver’s manuscript by half by striking “out innumerable Passages relating to the Winds and Tides, as well as to the Variations and Bearings,” and this may very well be a gibe at Cooke’s Voyage.

A framework has thus been made for creating credibility - and also for denying it. No one can mistake the irony, for in his preface the publisher emphasizes that Mr Gulliver is a man of sober veracity, among his neighbours it has become a “Sort of Proverb . . . when any one affirmed a Thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it.” The edition of 1735 is expanded with a letter from Gulliver to Simpson protesting against the abbreviations and other alterations that have been made. An ironical interplay thus enlivens the outermost circle, the circle of realities.

I11 While the openings of Gulliver’s four memorable journeys are roughly the same, there is a studied variation in the transitions from sober reality to the strange experiences. On the first voyage, Gulliver’s vessel is blown off course and runs on

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a rock, the crew take to the boat, which capsizes, and Gulliver alone is cast up onto the land of the Lilliputians. On the second journey the ship is again broken up, a boat is sent to an island to fetch fresh water, the crew are pursued by a giant and have to flee into the boat, leaving Gulliver on the shore. The third time Gulliver’s ship is boarded by pirates who later put him off in an open boat with provisions for four days. He reaches land on a coast where, the next day, he sights the flying island. On Gulliver’s final voyage, on which he himself is the captain, the crew mutiny and put him ashore on an unknown land, which proves to be the highly developed kingdom of horses.

Examining all this closely, we can trace, in each of these sceneries, the passage from the world of reality to the world of fantasy. As if by chance, a phenomenon - a Tom Thumb, a giant, a flying body, a talking horse - appears in Gulliver’s field of vision and is accepted without further ado both by him and by us on the same level as the characters and objects we have encountered hitherto in the book. As if by a dissolve technique our usual existence merges into the world of the fairy-tale. We note that each time Swift first secures us firm ground within the normal everyday world. Then, taking off from reality, he jumps out of everyday life into the fairy-tale. And the second circle in the structure of this novel is indeed that of the folk-tale. This applies most signally to the first two parts, the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. In folk-tale country live dwarfs and giants, tiny elves and gigantic trolls, and any child quickly becomes familiar with the little and big people of fantasy. It is this stroke of genius that has made Gulliver’s travels to the lands of the Lilliputians and the giants into a children’s book. Swift’s imagination is akin to that of the fairy-tale, but he goes beyond it here by constistently diminishing or magnifying all the beings and objects that surround the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians respectively. Among the former, horses and cows are tiny, and among the latter, flies and gnats are enormous. Children willingly follow the author in this systematizing fantasy. Little girls are enraptured by the doll society, and little boys identify with Gulliver, first when he captures an enemy fleet by attaching cords to the ships, then later, among the giants, when he slays a lethal rat with his sword.

In 1726 the fairy-tale had not yet gained a foothold on the recognized literary level, even though, in 1697, Charles Perrault had collected and published some children’s tales, and The Arabian Nights and other Oriental collections had reached the ken of the West around 1700.

But the age of classicism had other sources of fantasy. Today, we can scarcely conceive the role which Ovid’s Metamorphoses played for all those who had passed through a grammar school. These fifteen books filled with the myths and tales of antiquity, related in well-turned and not too difficult verses, were rich fare for schoolboys of all countries - and among them, of course, those who were

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later to become poets and learned writers. Ovid was the favourite author of Holberg, who was completely enamoured of the Metamorphoses and even attempted to make an odd Danish counterpart to them, Metamorphosis (1726). Ovid’s narrative art exerted considerable influence on the epic imagination of Holberg as this found expression in Niels Klim’s Journey under the Ground- this is plain from the way in which Holberg employs quotations from Ovid. Thus Klim’s descent to the planet Nazar is inspired in words and movement by the fall of Phaethon after his attempt to drive the sun-chariot across the sky (Metam. 11. 153ff.). In Ovid, too, Swift had seen giants storming Olympus (Metam. I. 89- 162). He had also seen a host of ants growing at the behest of Jupiter, then becoming erect and acquiring human shape and stature, and these tiny ants became the people of the Myrmidons (Metam. VII. 515461). From Homer and other classical authors the Pygmies were known, a race of dwarfs in the interior of legendary Africa. They fought against the cranes as Gulliver does against the rats. When Gulliver awakes on the beach of Lilliput, he has been tied and bound by the tiny people. Later he is led to the capital city, and there chained up in a great building, an abandoned temple. Herodotus told of some bold young men who had penetrated far into the Libyan desert, where they had come upon an overgrown plain, where some tiny men had seized them and carried them through some swamps, where all the inhabitants were likewise tiny (11.32).

IV During his account of his journey to Lilliput, Gulliver says : “Although I intend to leave the Description of this Empire to a particular Treatise, yet in the mean time I am content to gratify the curious Reader with some general Ideas.” (1.6). In other places similar expressions occur. This is a useful hint to us. In all the fairy-tale countries to which Swift leads us, he arranges his fantasies according to a pattern that has a clear model in a particular literary genre that flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the description of a state, which forms the third ring of the system. The keyword of the genre is “state” (Latin : status; German: Staat; French: etat). An obvious model for Swift was Edward Chamberlayne’s The Present State of Great Britain, which appeared in 1699 and reached its 27th edition in 1726. It was immediately translated into German under the title Der gegenwartige Staat des Konigreichs Engelland (1 670) and into French as L’Estat prbent de I’Angleterre (1671). In 1673 the diplomate and statesman Sir William Temple had published a widely read book Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which in its French translation was entitled Remarques sur l’estat des Provinces Unies des Pais-Bas (1674). This work was continually reprinted, for instance in Temple’s Works (1720). With one

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break Swift had been Sir William’s private secretary from 1689 to 1699, when the distinguished gentleman died.

Such works were very much favourite reading throughout Europe. Holberg knew this book, and his “Appendix to his Historical Introduction” (1713), which is “drawn from the most reliable descriptions of states,” depicts Germany, England and Holland. Later, Holberg published a great national work of the same kind, Description of Denmark and Norway (1 729), which, in a new edition, was given the title The Spiritual and Secular State of Denmark and Norway (1747). It is interesting that in Peder Paars(l719) Holberg follows the same model in his satirical description of the state on the isle of Anholt. Paars wants to know:

What laws, What government, police, worship and belief, Are found among the habitants of this reef.

For there was, in fact, a set scheme for these descriptions of a state or society, and it’s natural here to cite Temple’s chapter headings:

Of the Rise and Progress of the United Provinces. Of their Government. Of their Situation. Of their People and Dispositions. Of their Religion. Of their Trade. Of their Forces and Revenues. The Causes of their Fall, in 1672.

V This demographic genre governed Swift’s rational imagination, both when he was reporting Gulliver’s observations as it were chapter by chapter, and also when he allowed these observations to emerge in the course of the action. But in both cases the fantasies were subjected to evaluation. If it is the traits from the folk-tale in Gulliver’s Travels that make the book into children’s reading, then it is the intellectual critique that gives it adult status, and we have thus entered the fourth circle of the structure, that of criticism.

This book has a will, a direction, an intention, which breaks through on every hand. The story is set, to quote the title-page, among “remote nations,” but in fact it deals with very nearby conditions in England and, more vaguely, on the European continent. Swift’s commentators have had no difficulty in pointing out the conditions in politics, the legal system, and science that Swift was trying to castigate.

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This critical and satirical attitude has found many literary forms of expression.

In classical Greece, Plato, in his lengthy and rather dry dialogue The Republic, set forth how justice could be realized in all parts of the community. Plato’s exposition of the ideal state was thus direct, thetic.

In late antiquity Lucian wrote fantastic travel descriptions. Zcaromenippos or the Voyage above the Clouds tells of a man who straps wings to his back and flies beyond the moon to the habitation of Zeus. From above he can see what is going on on earth and hear men’s prayers to Zeus - and fine things they were praying about, too! D u e Histories is more literary. In order to parody Homer and other fabulists, Lucian relates a journey to some countries populated by imaginary beings and a lengthy stay on the way there in the belly of a huge whale!

The Englishman Thomas More (Morus) introduces his Latin travel romance Utopia (1516) with pointed criticism of English conditions and then leads his reader to an island near to recently discovered America where all desired social, humane, and economic advances have been achieved. Society on Utopia, whose name, “nowhere,” has for all posterity come to stand for the ideal state, is described with a fervour for humaneness and justice that is still contagious.

There is much of narrative fantasy in the Frenchman Cyrano de Bergerac, who relates the history of the kingdoms of the moon and the sun (Histoire comique des dtats et empires de la Lune et du Soleil, 165662). By means of ingenious inventions Cyrano first reaches the moon, where some enormous humanoid beings live who, however, walk on all fours, and later reaches the sun, where the inhabitants are birds. Both these peoples are spiritually and morally far superior to earthlings.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift (like Holberg, for instance, after him) mingled Utopian states with societies of lesser quality. Lilliput can be lauded for sensible penal measures and principles of education, but the emperor evaluates his officials by their skill at leaping over the rod he holds out. In Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, the ruler has a much higher morality than among the dwarfs. Of both countries it is said that in former times they were on a higher level. The empire of Laputa has been ruined by mathematics and music, which is mathematics as an art form, and the inhabitants lack creative imagination and originality. In contrast to this super-scientific community stands the state of the wise horses. There a high ethical standard has been achieved without a bookish culture being necessary. But along with these horses, whose noble neighing can be heard in their name, Houyhnhnm, there is also a race of humans, the Yahoos, whose appearance and way of life are indescribably brutish and disgusting.

VI But with the description of these Yahoos we have reached the innermost circle,

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where we alone find the word: Swift. Gulliver is not identical with the author, but nevertheless not completely separate from him either. With most of his person he belongs to the fictional travelogue. Here he is used not only as a pervading figure, but also as a typical Englishman who, faced with alien laws and habits, immediately praises his own, then is slowly brought to admit that much of what he now sees is better than at home. Gulliver’s attitude is not constistent: he saves Lilliput and then refuses to participate in an offensive war, but he despises the king of the giants for not wishing to accept the invention of gunpowder, which Gulliver is willing to give him, so that he can conquer other countries. It is to Gulliver’s credit that he deeply admires his host among the horse people for his fine mind, but with this he does of course combine, to an intensified degree, the contempt of the Houyhnhnms for the lowly Yahoos. When Gulliver again comes in contact with humans he identifies them with the Yahoos. He boards a Portuguese ship and is close to swooning at the mere smell of the captain and his men. Back in England again, Gulliver faints away when his wife embraces him, and not until many years have passed does he allow her and the children to eat with him. “The first Money I laid out was to buy two young Stone-Horses [stallions], which I keep in a good Stable, and next to them the Groom is my greatest favourite; for I feel my Spirits revived by the Smell he contracts in the Stable. My Horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four Hours every Day. They are Strangers to Bridle or Saddle ; they live in great Amity with me, and Friendship to each other.” With these words we are beyond all social criticism. Gulliver-Swift is possessed by a loathing of humanity that no reforms, no improvements of society or the individual can mend. So fundamental a contempt for man is rare, not to say unique, in the annals of imaginary journeys. From here light is cast backward ; the few touches of erotic salaciousness that the book contains are imbued with disgust at the female sex. When, shortly after his arrival among the giants, Gulliver saw a wet- nurse suckling a baby he nearly died at the sight of her breast, the enormous nipple with spots and freckles. “This made me reflect upon the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying Glass, where we find Experiment that the smoothest and whitest Skins look rough and coarse, and ill coloured.” (11.1). Gulliver was fond of his nine-year-old girl helper, who treated him with gentleness as if he were her doll, but at court the ladies “would often strip me naked from Top to Toe, and lay me at full Length in their Bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted; because, to say the Truth, a very offensive Smell came from their Skins” (11.5).

For a moment one might be tempted to ascribe to the author a kind of rococo dalliance when he has Gulliver relate that “the handsomest among these Maids

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of Honour, a pleasant frolicksome Girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples; with many other Tricks.” But the experience is unequivocably nasty; Gulliver feels so badly about it that he begs to be allowed not to meet the young lady.

Gulliver’s Travels is a novel of ideas; it has a thesis that can be formulated into a system. One can trace out the author’s ideal of justice and humanity and, in many details, the right relation he envisages between ruler and subjects, between the social classes, between parents and children, and much else. But we have seen that the ideality of the book is broken by a very material or indeed physical idiosyncrasy, an obviously private aversion evoked by impressions of smell and sight, particularly from women. If we then follow up this observation in passing outward through the series of circles outlined above, we perceive an all too human background to the book‘s criticism of established values, an aggressive urge, an irritability, which can strike at random when an instinct of justice does not guide or rational reflexion does not control it.

Thus when Swift is outlining a whole description of a state on the pattern of the popular genre, one may begin to feel doubts about the utility which the author ascribes to his efforts. For Swift was hardly a believer in progress. From his employer and almost friend, William Temple, he had learnt that antiquity was superior to the present. Defenders of modern times had quoted in evidence that the intention of gunpowder had led to the conquering of colonies and thus to the expansion of Christianity, and also that the art of printing had conduced to the improvement of morals. In this book Swift denies both these technological advances.

We pass over to the circle of the fairy-tale. Swift was born in Ireland, an eldorado of legends, fairy-tales and fantastic stories. In the rich Irish folklore there is no lack of either dwarfs or giants. The family was English, but young Jonathan lived his first years almost exclusively with his Irish nurse, and it is permissible to imagine the notions with which she may have filled his childish mind.

This disgust and aggressiveness, as well as the pedagogical logic of the folktale were doubtless part of Swift’s personality, but on the very outermost circle of the system, the maritime fiction, we can perhaps sense Swift himself in the author’s multifarious attitude to the seaman’s style of writing. Swift was an untravelled landlubber. He uses seafaring expressions to keep his fiction firmly centred on its main character, but on occasions he parodies the style : “Finding it was like to overblow, we took in our Spritsail, and stood by to hand the Fore-sail’’ and so on for half a page (11.1). But the author has many layers of irony to draw out: he makes fun of Gulliver’s penchant for maritime expressions, and thus hints at his own ignorance. The irony passes into self-irony. Then the fictitious publisher

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takes credit for having removed the “minute Descriptions of the Management of the Ship in Storms, in the Style of Sailors.” Then in the next edition Gulliver claims in a letter to the publisher that some people have found fault with his “Sea-Language, as not proper in many Parts, nor now in Use. I cannot help it. In my first Voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest Mariners, and learned to speak as they did.”

In the aesthetics of genres, the roman a thtse, the novel of ideas, is a borderline case; it stands on the boundary between fiction, i.e. free creation, and education in its widest sense, propaganda. In a case like Swift’s Gulliver an interpreter has a good chance of understanding both the ideas which the novel is propounding and also the volcanic mind that breaks the pattern of ideality.

F. J. Billeskov Jansen. Born 1907. Emeritus professor, University of Copenhagen. Dr. phil; fil. dr.; dr. philos. Has published Sources vives de la Penset de Montaigne (1935). Ludvig Holberg (TWAYNE, 1974). S. Kierkegaards litterare Kunst ( 3 . ed. 1979). Verdenslitteratur. Menneskebilledet fra Oldtid ti1 Nutid (1982).