by Leo Damrosch
Swift was the wittiest of men; Gulliver is humorless. Irony was a way of life for Swift; Gulliver is never ironic. And yet Gulliver seems real, in a way that suggests his creator identified with him and lived through the adventures with him. In George Faulkner’s 1735 edition of Swift’s collected works, the portraits of Swift and of Lemuel Gulliver are so similar as to make the connection obvious. The quote from Horace, splendide mendax, means “nobly mendacious,” and implies telling an untruth in a good cause. Gulliver’s Travels is a fantasy, but it is also true.
We are told that Gulliver had a good education at Cambridge and wanted to make a career there, “but the charge of maintaining me (although I had a very scanty allowance) being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London.”6 There may well be a memory of Swift’s scanty allowance at Trinity, and his subsequent employment by Sir William Temple. Gulliver’s first voyage begins in 1699 and his last one ends in 1715; those dates correspond to the period in Swift’s life between leaving Moor Park and leaving London for good. At the time of writing his travels, Gulliver is fifty-nine years old. Swift was about to turn fifty-nine when Gulliver’s Travels was published.
69. Dean Swift. D.St.P.D. means “Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin.”
70. Captain Gulliver, shown in the 1735 edition of Swift’s Works.
At one point the tiny Lilliputians think that Gulliver’s watch must be his god, because he never does anything without consulting it. According to Orrery, “Swift’s hours of walking and reading never varied; his motions were guided by his watch, which was so constantly held in his hand, or placed before him upon his table, that he seldom deviated many minutes in the daily revolution of his exercises and employments.” On this practice, Lady Orrery made an insightful comment: “The great regularity of his life, constantly measured by his watch, plainly showed his mind to be uneasy.”7
Gulliver’s Travels had something for everyone. “It offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life,” Walter Scott said, “low and coarse incident to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age and disappointed ambition.” The reader is ingratiatingly addressed as “the gentle reader,” and is called “indulgent,” “courteous,” “judicious,” and a long list of other compliments. At times Swift teases or taunts, but he knows he also has to give pleasure. “Gulliver is a happy man,” Arbuthnot told him, “that at his age can write such a merry book.”8
“BIG MEN AND LITTLE MEN”
Always ready to disparage Swift, Johnson roared in conversation, “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”9 Nothing could be further from the truth. What makes Gulliver’s Travels compelling is the miraculous balance between realism and fantasy. As in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the fantasy is grounded in a world of consistently believable details. The Lilliputians are exactly one-twelfth as tall as ourselves, and the Brobdingnagians twelve times taller. In early illustrations of Gulliver held down by tiny ropes, if you cover up his supine figure, everything else looks perfectly ordinary.
71. Gulliver tied down, shown in a 1727 French edition.
There’s not much psychological characterization, but physical sensations are vividly recorded, and Swift constantly makes us feel what it would be like to be Gulliver. When he regains consciousness after the shipwreck, he discovers that he’s unable to move:
As I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended mine eyes. I heard a confused noise about me, but in the posture I lay could see nothing except the sky. In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing gently forward over my breast, came almost up to my chin; when, bending my eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high.10
In part, Swift was critiquing the naïve realism of writers like Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe, often described as the first modern English novel, came out just seven years before Gulliver’s Travels. Defoe could never decide whether to admit that he had made up the story, or whether it required the pretense of veracity. His full title appeals to the stranger-than-fiction fashion: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years All Alone on an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Orinoco, Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck Wherein All Men Perished but Himself. In his preface Defoe said, with obvious equivocation, “The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.” But in a later defense he asserted defiantly, “It is most real that I had a parrot, and taught it to call me by my name; such a servant a savage, and afterwards a Christian, and that his name was called Friday.”11
Swift had to be remembering these claims of Defoe’s when he made “the publisher” declare at the start of Gulliver’s Travels, “There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it.” Arbuthnot was amused to hear of a sea captain who claimed he knew Gulliver personally, “but that the printer had mistaken, that he lived in Wapping and not at Rotherhithe.” Even more delicious, as Swift reported, was an Irish bishop who said, “That book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it.” It isn’t clear which parts the bishop did believe, if indeed Swift didn’t make him up.12
Arbuthnot mentions also that a friend of his went straight to the atlas to locate Lilliput on the map. As a fan of voyages, Swift understood that maps contribute verisimilitude. He probably didn’t see the ones that his London publisher commissioned until after the book came out, but since he let them stand in the 1735 edition, he must have approved of them. They look altogether plausible, with neighboring territories carefully traced from an atlas, but they make no sense if you compare them with a genuine map of the world.13
Proud of his circumstantial accuracy, Defoe was embarrassed when readers noticed that Crusoe stripped off his clothes before swimming out to the wrecked ship, but was still able to stuff his pockets with biscuits when he got there. More recently it has been observed that the contents of Gulliver’s pockets, if you put them all together, would fill a suitcase. At the Lilliputians’ orders he brings out, one by one, a handkerchief, a snuffbox, a diary, a comb, some coins, a razor, a clasp knife, a watch, a pair of pistols, spectacles, a telescope, and “several other little conveniences.”14 Conceivably this overload is Swift’s joke for attentive readers to pick up. But it’s also possible that he didn’t care. He wanted the illusion of reality, but only an illusion, and at this point in the story he needed the comb and the watch and the rest, not to mention a sword with which Gulliver somehow swam to shore in the storm.15
72. Lilliput on the map, from Motte’s edition of 1726. The Sunda Straits, between Sumatra and Java, appear at the top. Van Diemen’s Land, at the lower right, is the old name for Tasmania, but the location here is absurd, since Tasmania lies off the southeastern coast of Australia.
Since the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians are like us in every respect except size, the effect is to defamiliarize our everyday experience. Swift’s genius lies in making us see. Nothing could be more ordinary than a pocket watch, but not in the eyes of the Lilliputians: “Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain, with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. We directed him to draw out whatever was at the end of that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal; for on the tr
ansparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, until we found our fingers stopped with that lucid substance. He put this engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill.” Conversely, what is ordinary for the tiny people is strange for Gulliver, who watches a Lilliputian girl threading an invisible needle with invisible thread.16
73. Gulliver fighting the rat, by Willy Pogany.
A comparison with Alice in Wonderland helps to clarify Swift’s use of scale. Size mutates constantly in Alice, with a sort of dream logic. There’s nothing dreamy in Gulliver. Everything is completely normal, except that the relative proportions are disconcertingly altered. In Brobdingnag it’s small things that become huge. Gulliver is cruelly bruised by hailstones, falls from a table and is luckily caught on a lady’s pin, fights off a giant rat with his sword, struggles with an immense slimy frog that invades his little boat, and has a brush with death when a monkey as big as an elephant carries him up to a rooftop five hundred yards above the ground. As Claude Rawson says, these are Kafkaesque horrors.17 The vividness of Swift’s imagination is reflected in the wide range of superb illustrations, in many different styles, that artists have contributed to successive editions of his book.
On one occasion, when Gulliver witnesses a public execution, the difference in scale produces a nightmarish result. “The malefactor was fixed in a chair upon a scaffold erected for the purpose, and his head cut off at one blow with a sword of about forty foot long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d’eau at Versailles was not equal for the time it lasted; and the head, when it fell on the scaffold floor, gave such a bounce as made me start, although I were at least an English mile distant.”18
We know that Swift was much concerned with the vulnerability of the body, and many incidents reflect that concern. Even ordinary functions become disturbing. When the Lilliputians chain Gulliver to a disused temple, he is deeply embarrassed by the need to defecate. Eventually it’s arranged that servants should show up every morning and carry away the “offensive matter” in wheelbarrows. Gulliver says, “I would not have dwelt so long upon a circumstance that perhaps at first sight may appear not very momentous, if I had not thought it necessary to justify my character in point of cleanliness to the world; which, I am told, some of my maligners have been pleased, upon this and other occasions, to call in question.”19
Perhaps this alludes to the scandal of the Tale of a Tub, as does the episode in which Gulliver puts out the palace fire by urinating on it. As usual, Swift is doing two things at once; Gulliver chained to the temple is evocative of Swift chained to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A further detail looks arbitrary but isn’t, as Leslie Stephen noticed long ago. Gulliver is secured with “fourscore and eleven chains” that are fastened to his leg with “six-and-thirty padlocks.” The ostensible author of the Tale of a Tub had boasted, “Fourscore and eleven pamphlets have I written under three reigns, and for the service of six-and-thirty factions.”20 By the time he wrote Gulliver’s Travels, Swift had indeed worn himself out producing pamphlets, many of which were obstacles to career advancement.
When the subject of sex arises, it’s not enticing. Gulliver is present while the Brobdingnagian maids of honor strip naked, and he finds it “very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other motions [emotions] than those of horror and disgust.” Seen close up, their skin is coarse and discolored, and when they toy with him he is revolted: “The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples; with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over-particular.” Pope got the message, and sent Swift a poem in which Gulliver’s wife exclaims after the returns to England,
But on the maiden’s nipple when you rid,
Pray heaven ’twas all a wanton maiden did!
Nora Crow, who makes the plausible suggestion that Swift felt uneasy because he found women dangerously attractive, comments that “being employed as a dildo is the most literal form of female engulfment that a man could undergo.”21
Even breastfeeding, a universal activity inseparable from maternal tenderness, excites revulsion when Gulliver watches a farm wife nursing her baby.
I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape and colour. It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freckles that nothing could appear more nauseous; for I had a near sight of her, she sitting down the more conveniently to give suck, and I standing on the table. 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.22
People who believe that Swift loathed the body often quote this passage, but then they leave out that last sentence. A theme in Gulliver’s Travels is that everything is relative. English ladies are lovely because we don’t use magnifying glasses on them, and why would we want to? Gulliver recalls at this point that he himself seemed grotesque to the Lilliputians, who told him that they observed “great holes in my skin; that the stumps of my beard were ten times stronger than the bristles of a boar; and my complexion made up of several colours altogether disagreeable.” Conversely, all Lilliputians looked equally attractive to him, though they themselves considered some people ugly and others beautiful. It follows that for the Brobdingnagians, it would be wrong to suppose that “those vast creatures were actually deformed; for I must do them justice to say they are a comely race of people.”23
There was great interest in microscopes in Swift’s day, and books were published with highly detailed illustrations. Swift was familiar with Robert Hooke’s superbly illustrated Micrographia, from which the illustration of the louse (figure 74) is taken. Hooke was fascinated by a live louse under his microscope, noting that the blood it sucked from his hand “was of a very lovely ruby colour.” Gulliver is revolted, however, by lice infesting the beggars of Brobdingnag: “The most hateful sight of all was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than those of an European louse through a microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted like swine.”24
74. A louse as it appeared to Gulliver.
The closest bond Gulliver forms in Brobdingnag is with a daughter of the farmer who first discovers him, a nine-year-old girl who teaches him the language and becomes his faithful attendant.
My mistress had a daughter of nine years old, a child of towardly parts for her age. . . . She was likewise my schoolmistress to teach me the language. When I pointed to anything, she told me the name of it in her own tongue, so that in a few days I was able to call for whatever I had a mind to. She was very good-natured, and not above forty foot high, being little for her age. She gave me the name of Grildrig, which the family took up, and afterwards the whole kingdom. The word imports what the Latins call nanunculus, the Italians homunceletino, and the English mannikin. To her I chiefly owe my preservation in that country. We never parted while I was there; I called her my Glumdalclitch, or little nurse.25
75. Glumdalclitch, by Arthur Rackham.
Stella was nine when Swift first knew her, and now the tutorial relationship is reversed. Arthur Rackham’s Victorian illustration catches the affection well, though his Glumdalclitch looks more like an enchanting princess than a farm girl.
What really horrified Swift about the body was not physicality in itself, but decay. Most dreadful of all is the decay of the mind. Monitoring his occasional memory lapses with grim fascination, Swift dreaded the fate that finally did befall him, fifteen years after Gulliver’s Travels. In Luggnugg, i
n the third book, there are rare individuals called Struldbruggs, identifiable at birth by a red spot on the forehead, who will never die. Gulliver is thrilled. “I cried out as in a rapture, ‘Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!’” But it turns out that when Struldbruggs get old they face eternal senility, unable to remember the beginning of a sentence when they get to the end. An eighteenth-century reader commented that the spectacle of the Struldbruggs can help “to reconcile old age to the thoughts of a dissolution.”26
Gulliver’s Travels immediately became a classic for children as well as adults, and for a century it never occurred to anyone to abridge it or clean it up. Starting in 1829, the nipples of the maids of honor had to go, and likewise the descriptions of urinating and defecating. It was then hard to understand why Gulliver gets into trouble for putting out the palace fire—in one version he grabs “a reservoir of water kept for the especial use of the empress,” and in another there is vague mention of “a well meant but badly managed attempt to do her a service.” Other passages were deleted if they seemed hard for young readers to understand, but in every version the story retained its power. Padraic Colum, Joyce’s friend and a distinguished writer of children’s stories, described it as an inverted fairy tale: “In the fairy tale the little beings have beauty and graciousness, the giants are dull-witted, the beasts are helpful, and humanity is shown as triumphant. In Gulliver the little beings are hurtful, the giants have more insight than men, the beasts rule, and humanity is shown not as triumphant but as degraded and enslaved.”27