The flesh and bones of Gulliver’s Travels

In Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, the anonymous Lilliputian courtier who tells Gulliver about the plot being hatched against him by the Emperor and his senior advisers also tells him what the Lilliputians plan to do with his corpse once he has been starved to death:

. . . immediately upon your Death, five or six Thousand of his Majesty’s Subjects might, in two or three Days, cut your Flesh from your Bones, take it away by Cart-loads, and bury it in distant Parts to prevent Infection; leaving the Skeleton as a Monument of Admiration to Posterity.

This punishment is no bad emblem for the fate of Gulliver’s Travels itself, which over the years has been eviscerated, dispersed and recycled. In particular, the fantastic bones and the satiric flesh of Gulliver’s Travels, an interplay so vital to the book’s impact, have over the centuries become detached. The skeleton of fantasy has survived with admiration. But the condition of that survival has often been the careful excision of the book’s satiric tissue – a tainted envelope too rank to be tolerated by much of posterity.

The correspondence between Jonathan Swift and his friends which followed the publication of Gulliver’s Travels reveals how quickly details of Swift’s narrative entered and circulated within their imaginative world. When Samuel Johnson gave the title ‘State of Affairs in Lilliput’ (1738) to the satiric introduction to the Gentleman’s Magazine’s accounts of parliamentary debates , which he himself would write between 1741 and 1744, it was a sign, not merely of the broad understanding among readers in Swift’s own lifetime of the presence of political satire in Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, but also of the spreading of Swift’s book into the imaginative life of the nation. Prompt translations into Dutch (1727), French (1727), German (1727) and Italian (1729), followed by later translations into Danish (1768), Swedish (1772), Russian (1780) and Portuguese (1793), show that by the end of the century Gulliver’s Travels had become a European phenomenon.

The profusion of ancillary publications, or ‘Gulliveriana’, spawned by the book also bears witness to its widespread imaginative adoption (as well as to the perennial human desire to make money on the back of someone else’s work). The later engagement with Swift’s moral acuity in Gulliver’s Travels by figures as opposed politically as William Godwin and Edmund Burke shows moreover that, despite Francis Jeffrey’s mean-spirited article in the Edinburgh Review attacking Swift for his Tory allegiances (‘a more unprincipled and base course of proceeding was never held up to the contempt and abhorrence of mankind’, Jeffrey fumed), appreciation of Gulliver’s Travels might transcend party boundaries.

Amid this general relishing of Gulliver’s Travels there was, however, from the first a discordant and strengthening note of censure. In Pope’s report on the book’s immediate reception, that ‘some indeed think it rather too bold, and too general a Satire’, we hear the first rumbling of the charge of misanthropy which was swelled by Swift’s close friend Orrery, who after Swift’s death would write:

In this last part of his imaginary travels, Swift has indulged a misanthropy that is intolerable. The representation which he has given us of human nature, must terrify, and even debase the mind of the reader who views it. His sallies of wit and humour lose all their force, nothing remaining but a melancholy, and disagreeable impression: and, . . . we are disgusted, not entertained; we are shocked, not instructed by the fable.

The same note was later amplified by William Makepeace Thackeray:

. . . dreadful it is to think that Swift knew the tendency of his creed – the fatal rocks towards which his logic desperately drifted. . . . it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies against Heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful allegory – of which the meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason.

These severe opinions would by the mid-19th century have almost drowned out more balanced alternatives. The textual consequence of this was a series of more or less bowdlerised editions, in which passages deemed to be offensive were silently removed. In the case of editions prepared for children, that minute textual surgery was often accompanied by the rough-and-ready amputation of Parts III and IV in their entirety. In a text so maimed and castrated, the political and satirical force of what remained could hardly make itself felt. 

This suited Jeffrey’s view of the text:

That the interest does not arise from the satire, but from the plausible description of physical wonders, seems to be farther proved by the fact, that the parts which please the least are those in which there is most satire and least of those wonders.

However, by the mid-20th century, and in the wake of the genocidal carnage of two world wars, Swift’s imagination suddenly looked alarmingly realistic and Gulliver’s Travels began to be read as a Baedeker for the puzzled observer of modern criminality and folly – a trend which began with Orwell’s important essay of 1946. 

In the light of contemporary horrors, it was no longer plausible to dismiss the darker patches of Swift’s imagination as inhuman, for they had become our very element. The energies of Swift’s mind (no matter how bleak his vision), and his ingenuity in giving that energy and vision appropriate and disturbing literary expression, now began to be more generously recognised. Following pioneers such as Flaubert and Conrad, even novelists as fastidious as Nabokov drew imaginative strength from Swift. In The Enchanter (1939), a dry run for Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s protagonist is obliged to marry the mother of the child he secretly desires. On his wedding night he imagines himself as a ‘little Gulliver’ lost in her ‘multiple caverns’, and repelled by the ‘rancid emanations of her wilted skin’.

But perhaps the most faithful modern response to Gulliver’s Travels is to be found in the philosophical fictions of Borges, pre-eminently in ‘Brodie’s Report’ (1970) – an engagement supported and informed by Borges’ many reflections on Swift in his critical writings. When he read Gulliver’s Travels, Borges understood that this ostensible account of voyages to remote nations was really the record of a voyage through a library, and his imagination vibrated in sympathy with that aspect of Swift’s project.

The long-running dispute between exponents of the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ interpretations of Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels revealed the continuance of the quest, in some quarters, to discover a more docile and ‘clubbable’ Swift. The hunt for that particular chimera later moved off into the thickets of postcolonialism, following the rediscovery of the anti-colonial sentiments of both Swift and Gulliver.

The press-ganging of Swift into regiments marching to the defence of causes he would have despised and ridiculed echoes the piecemeal dissection and sanitisation of Gulliver’s carcass by the Lilliputians. Nevertheless, however misguided their judgements and intentions, such conscriptions offer oblique homage to the gigantic, unsettling presence which, in 1726, Swift caused to be washed up on the shores of the human imagination when he published Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.