English Literature-Gullivers Travels, Jonathan Swift

Gullivers Travels- Jonathan fast * By P. Baburaj, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of slope, Sherubtse college, Bhutan Author of diction and writing, DSB Publication Thimphu Communicative English, P. K. Books, Calicut A perception on Literary Criticism, P. K. Books, Calicut The ordinal light speed was an historic period of sarcasm.Dryden and pope immortalized themselves by their verse while Jonathan agile was undoubtedly the gr immerseest British satirist in p go. The political and sacred contr oversies of the time were conducive to the procession of raillery in an age of urbanity and expansion which non only tolerated b bely delighted in ridicule, provided, it was humorous and humorous it has been remarked that satire is the fine art of c altogethering names. In Rome Ho dry wash and Juvenal use satire for the purpose of ridiculing man affectations, follies and vices with a medical prognosis of regenerateing society. just when the satire is in manage manner general it sta nds in danger of f all tolding wide of its target and when it is order against various(prenominal)s it is likely to be degraded in to person-to-person lampoons. lively wrote personal satires moreover his attacks were generally directed against common abuses and his main purpose was to repossess society. Jonathan sprightly was born of English p bents in Dublin in 1667. He was a distant cousin of Dryden who happened to incur the run shorting displeasure of prompt by his remarks cousin fleet you will never be a poet.Distantly related to Sir William Temple, a retired politician and an elegant writer of the period Swift came to London and stayed with his wealthy relation as a poor low-level and confidential secretary. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin and was well pack in the classics. Later he studied theology and was ordained non-Christian priest . 1 of his squibs on religion offended Queen Anne and he was baulked of his promotion in the church barely by and by her demolition he rose to be the Dean of St. Patricks in Dublin towards the close of the century.Temple happened to babble in literature. The controversy regarding the relative merits of the ancient and modern authors roused more commove than light for slightly time in France and Temple made some references to it in unity of his essays. Virulent attacks and counter attacks appeared in the press. It was a accepted storm in a tea cup. Swift was neither come to with the controversy nor qualified to take an effective part in it. yet he entered in to the fray with all the weapon in his arrows satire, humour, irony, sarcasm, abuse and invective.In his the battle of the hands he supported Temple and ridiculed his opp unrivalednts. In the famous allegory of the bee and spider, he plauditd the ancients as furnishing honey and wax, sweetness and light, and ridiculed the moderns as distort flimsy webs, like the spider , with the poisonous stuff that flowered from themselves. In t he tale of a tub, blue-belly set out to ridicule the basal in Catholicism and the fanatical dissenters and to advocate the middle course as represented by the Anglican church.For this purpose he invented an allegorical fable of three br differents who inherited a coat of a piece from their bewilder with strict instructions regarding its use. The coat, of course, is the Christian theology. The three brothers Peter, Martin and Jack symbolise individually Roman Catholicism, the Anglican Church and the dissenters. It is a master piece of satire, precisely the ultimate result of swifts satire was to bring all religion in to contempt, though that was non his real pose. Swifts irony can trounce illustrated by his short pamphlet authorise a modest proposition.He was roused to righteous indignation at the ruthless development of the Irish peasantry by their absentee landlords in England. But swift opens his project with a quietly deceptive tone of seriousness. He puts forth his m odest proposal for the economic uplift of the poor Irish peasants e very(prenominal) woman of child-bearing age is to produce as galore(postnominal) children as possible and bring them to the securities industry when they are one course old Page 1 children ancient one year are close delicious according to the best authorities and so they would be in huge demand at an English noble mans table.It is non difficult to intoxicate the righteous indignation beneath the apparently unheated-blooded argument, the irony is devastation. Swift is the author of the pamphlets, political, religious and literary in which he sought the reform of the society of its abuses and affections. But his magnum opus is Gullivers exits (1726). It is at once childrens classics as well as a serious treatise in which sarcastic pours corrosive ridicules of he on what Swift considers to be the abuse of his age. As childrens classic it can be read as a marvelous adventure in wonderland. With an abundance o f circumstantial details. e are told how a certain Gulliver happened to make several(prenominal) pilots into strange undiscovered countries. Swift makes certain preposterous assumptions but once the initial premise is minded(p) what follows conforms it with mathematical precision. in his first sweep, A voyage to Lilliput Gulliver was driven. Far away from his course he was cast ashore on an island called Lilliput, where the inhabitants were about sextuplet inches lofty and all the environment of animate and inanimate conformed exactly to those human dimensions. They were equipped with bows and arrows in which they were adepts.It was mathematically calculated that Gulliver would require diet which great gross Lilliputians would consume. The queen was a patron of learning, he was handsome and majestic. Gulliver was dole out skillfuly searched and strip of his pistols and ammunitions. The courtier practiced tight rope walking and official preferment went to those who excelled in this exercise. The most accomplished of them was the filmnap, the treasurer. (the king supposed to stand for the George l and filmnap, the Whig prime subgenus Pastor Robert Walpole). The Lilliputians were engaged in war with the neighboring country, Belfuscu.It was effortless for the Lilliputians to win with the financial aid of their gigantically, but as soon as they accomplished they turn against him in ingratitude. Filmnap continued to be his master(prenominal) enemy. Gulliver knew that he ws likely to be unjustly accused of high treason and on that pointfore he secretly grossed over to Belfuscu and escaped from eminent danger. He returned home and stayed with his wife and family for two months. A pilot to Brobdingnag. He was again possessed of an insatiable desire to go on a nonher voyage. This time he was bound for India. This second voyage proved to be equally eventful and strange.All alone he happened to be cast ashore on a strange land where edible corn was at least forty feet high and the first person he truism appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple. He was farmers servant who first looked at Gulliver as a curious creature and took him to his master. This country was Brobdingnag, where the people were sixty feet in height. The fight of these giants was repulsively hard and ugly, freckled and covered all over with wrat and moles and harsh hair. When one of the nurses was suckling the child entrusted to her Guilllver maxim her revoltingly big breasts, which cold not be less than ixteen feet in circumference. The nipple was about one-half of my head and the hue both of that and dug so verified with spots, pimples and freckles that zilch could appear more nauseous . Many times he was in the danger of being killed by gigantic creatures of Brobdingnag but luckily for him he had nine year old nurse ,the farmers young woman called Glumdalclitch, who took care of him and protected him from dangers. In his greed the farmer exhibited Gulli ver in market places and finally brought to Metropolis where the king and the sissy took a fancy to him and took him nether their special protection.But Gullivers sorting nurse was asked to stay in the castle to take care of him. Though the Brobdingnag were physically gross and repulsive they were variant and sound. The king observed how scurvy a thing was human aristocracy which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects like I. the queens maids of honour always invited Glumdalclitch to visit them in their room with Gulliver whom they approximation to be as sort of pet. They would lots strip me naked from pate to toe and lay me in their bosoms, where I was disgusted because.. very worthless smell came from their skins. Gulliver had the most dangerous experience of his livelihood when a putter took him in his paw and fliited from one building to another with Gulliver dangling from his paw. From that sidereal day onwards Glumdiltich took greater care of Gulliver. Pag e 2 A Voyage to Brobdingnag The king used to enquire of the political and religious conditions of the Europe. Gulliver ironically expatiated upon the marvellous parliamentary system and elections in European nations, their standing armies and their institutions.Far from admiring these, the Brobdingnagian king was astonished, and he protested that it was only a heap of conspiracies rebellions massacres, revolutions and banishments. The very worst effects that voraciousness, factions, hypocrisy, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice and ambition could produce. Finally the king concluded with the most tempestuous attack on the state of affair in contemporary Europe, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be most pernicious black market of little odious vermin that ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. kick upstairs Gulliver informed the king about the invention and use of gunslinger pulverisation which could destroy whole batteries of an army. The kings ingenious remark was sure as shooting an echo of Swifts cause assent he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to wrench upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind, and more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.Gulliver speaks with approval of Brobdingnagians learning which make up only immortality, history, poetry, maths to write a command upon any jurisprudence is a capital crime their style is clear, masculine and smooth, but not florid. This is Gullivers and (Swifts) criticism of European civilization in his witness age. When he returned home at first Gulliver had a good deal of obstacle in adjusting to himself to his wife and friends he felt that they were all pygmies and he a giant he felt for some time that he had woolly-headed his wife.A Voyage to Laputa Gullivers third voyage was to East Indies he travel the Cape of Goo d Hope and r from each oneed fort St. George, Madras where he stayed for three weeks. He resumed his journey but was captured by pirates and left alone in a group of islands called Laputa. Here the important persons were so much absorbed in speculation, scientific and political that they had to have flappers who brought them back to their sense by flap their ears and mouths. An opaque flying island oft hovered over the islands when they were cut off from the temperatenesss light.Here Gulliver visited several islands and in the grand academy situated in Lagado he found people engrossed in various projects. nonpareil was attempt to extract sun beams from cucumber another was operative attempt on an operation to reduce human excrement to its original diet. Yet another was trying to calcine ice into gun powderise and so on. Most of them begged Gulliver for monetary assistance, in one of these islands there were magicians and conjurers in another there were a group of people ca lled Struldburgs, people who would not die was a curse rather than a blessing.Afterwards Gulliver sailed towards Japan and from there returned to England. Voyage to Houyhnhnms Gullivers fourth voyage took him to the land of the Houyhnhnms( pronounced as hou-inem), a strange species of rational horses. By a curious solidus he landed on Houyhnhnm land, where the first object he saw was a physically repulsive creature. Gulliver was disgusted for upon the whole I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I of course conceived so strong an antipathy. And yet he could recognize in him a man like himself.The horses were the master of these debased human creatures called Yahoos. Gulliver was stunned to see the most urbane conduct in the Horses (though they were beasts) and the most inhumane demeanour among the human-looking Yahoos. These Horses were endowed with a fine degree of reason their behavior was so orderly and rational, so acute and judicio us that Gulliver at coating concluded that they must needs be magicians who had thus Page 3 metamorphosed themselves. In a few months Gulliver was able to communicate in the talking to of the Honyhuhums.Curiously enough their language did not have words to express lies and other similar concepts they were dignified and handsome, and their strength and speed were marvelous. On some occasion Gulliver discussed to the King that in Europe, human beings teach the horses and rode on their back and naturally roused great indignation in the king. When he went on to describe the barbarian wars in Europe the king of Honyhuhums was greatly amazed at the sexual perversion of human reason, but he consoled himself with the thought that these petty creatures could not do much mischief even if they wanted to.His amazement grew when he was told how many people in Europe were ruined by justness and all advocates without exception were so accustomed to lying that they would never take up a squar e case. Gulliver further informed the king how in his own country a man rose to power with prudence to banish of a wife, a daughter or a sister by betraying a predecessor or by pretending to a boisterous zeal in public assemblies against the corruptions of the court. The chief ministers castling was a seminary to breed others in his own trade, and they excelled in insolence, lying and bribery.The hayseed in Houyhuhums land has to lick his masters feet and posteriors and drive the distaff yahoos to his kennel, for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of asss flesh The houyhuhums were endowed by temper with a genial angle of dip to all virtuestheir grand maxim is to cultivate reason. Their convictions were never discolored by fad and self-interest. A universal friendship and benevolence governed all their conduct, but they had no fond nesses or pets. They practiced a control of their population by restricting the progeny of each couple to one male and one female col t.It was again, reason and not passion, which governed propagation. The four lessons of their education were Temperature industry, Exercise and Cleanliness. They trained up their youth to strength, speed and hardness. On the whole Houyhuhums maintained a high degree of decency and self-worth. If they were not able to rise to great glories of the spirit, they were likewise incapable of descending into the depths of bestiality. Some of the Houyhuhums were afraid that because Gulliver possessed some rudiments of reasons he might try to seduce the yahoos of the land so it was intractable that he must be expelled from the country.So he had a vessel constructed and he resumed his voyage. He fell into the hands of very cruel people but eventually a very kind-hearted Portuguese captain took him and put him safely on the shore of Byland, where he soon joined his wife and children. But he shuddered at the sight of them as they resembled the disgusting yahoos. As soon as I entered my hous e. Gulliver tells us, my wife took me in her arms and kissed me at which, having not been used to the touch of the odious animal for so many years. I fell in a swoon for almost an hour. During the first year (of my return) I could not endure my wife or children in my presence.The very smell of them was intolerable much less could I suffer them to eat in the room. So great was his admiration for Houyhuhumn that for some time he used to walk like a horse and neigh like a horse. The tragic denunciation of man is rounded off with singular laughter. The concur concludes with an assertion that a travelers chief aim should be to make men wise and better, and to improve their minds by the hopeless as well as the good example of what they deliver concerning unusual places. And Swift seems to feel that the most intolerable vice among the yahoo kind is pride.In one of his letter to Alxander Pope, Swift explained his aim in writing Gulliver Travels the chief end I propose to myself in al l my labours is to vex the dry land rather than divert it. Nevertheless the book has been infinitely diverting and has formal itself as a childrens classic. it is a universal favorite not because it is sought to vex the readers into a realization of their individual and social follies and vices, but because the scene conceived a series of diverting situations and episodes and describe them with plenty of imaginative and humorous details.In the first voyage, the diminutive Lilliputians, providing themselves on their poisonous arms mere bows and arrows and their stratagems of war are ridiculous. And Gulliver could easily capture dozens of the enemy ships disregardful of the arrows which hit him. Page 4 The factions between the Big Enders and the Little_Enders been the High_heels and Low_heels, are ludicrous in the extreme. In the land of the Brobdingnagians the gigantic creatures as tall as church_steeples are equally amusing, particularly to children.The account of Gullivers cu tpurse through the fingers of one of the two men and his miraculous escape from death by being stuck up on the pin of her stomacher, his adventure with the ridiculous monkey, which took him all over the house-tops and tree-tops with the prospect of imminent death for Gulliver, the diversion of one of the maids of honour who stretched Gulliver on her breast, and a dozen similar episodes cannot fail to transport the reader. It is to be admitted that the third voyage, a voyage to Laputa is not half as successful as the one before it or the one that comes after it.It is episodic and confused. But the scientific and political projects such as trying to extract sun beams out of cucumbers, food out of human excreta, and gun powder out of ice are travesties of what Swift considers to the unprofitable research-projects in his own time. The tempo rises once again when we follow Gulliver through his last voyage. This time into the land of the rational Honyhuhmns. Apart from its satiric purpo se, the fourth book describes with humor and imagination the debased mankind and the rational noble Horses, who was Gullivers unbounded admiration for them.Since his return to England Gulliver found it difficult to adapt himself to his own species he was repulsed, by his wifes embraces and kisses he walked like a horse and neighed like a horse he built his camp in the stables and chose horses rather than human as his companions. Swifts satire is directed as much against the Yahoos and the Honyhuhmns as against Gulliver himself. sure enough we shall be committing a gross mistake if we, like the 19th century critics of Swift, identify Gulliver with Swift himself, though it is true that in general places the recognition is unmistakable.If we could ignore for the moment the political and moral allegory of Gullivers travel we can enjoy it as a fascinating narrative of adventures in which the imaginative frame work is amazingly filled with apparently down-to-earth details. It is at on ce an imitation and a parody of the travellers accounts and imaginary utopias which enchanted the Elizabethans and their successors. But Gullivers Travels is much more than a childrens classic. It is a merciless satire on the political and moral conditions of Europe in eneral and of England in particular. Swift intended to vex his contemporary into a realization of their runtiness and pride, their avarice and manners, the enormity of their follies and vices, the degradation of their institution and their needless wars of destruction. Swift did not care to point out human follies and vices with gentle humor as did Addison and Steele on the other hand his righteous indignation burnt fiercely in him, he fretted and fumed at the mouth he quashed his odontiasis and poured out satire and sarcasm and invective.So fierce was the onslaught and so great the disgust that he has often been betrayed as a misanthropist and a cynic, but as we have already seen his Modest proposal should put us on our guard. In one of his letters to his friends, black lovage Pope, he said, I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter Thomas and so forth. In the first book, the political satire is transparently clear. After his disillusionment with the Whigs, Swift went over to the Torries. eer since he stood firm as a conservative and an ardent share of the Anglican church.He was indignant at the undeserved fall and exile of oxford and Bolingbroke (with whom Gulliver often identifies himself). The Lilliputians are the English the Blefuscudians are the French, who were often at war with each other. Bolingbroke and protected England can Gulliver had saved the Lilliputians, but ingratitude and treachery host the benefactor out of the country. The sexual promiscuity, the political machinations and the pettiness (as represented by their size) and pride of the Lilliputians are a satire on contemporary English society. Lilliput is sometimes utopia sometimes 18th century England made utterly contemptible by the small size of the people who exhibit the same vices and follies as the English. The account of Lilliputians politics with the quarrel between the high- heels and the low-heels and between the big-enders and the little-enders, is clearly a parody of English politics, on the other hand, this chapter on Lilliputian law and education is almost wholly utopian (David Daichas). Page 5 In the second book, the satire is more complex.If in the first book, Swift satirized the pettiness of man and disproportionate pride and sense of importance, here Swift applies the magnifying crank to mans disgustingly bloated vices, his repulsive physical features and bodily odour. blush the fairest of the female Brobdingnagians had disgustingly big blotches, pimples and freckles all over their skin and the repelling smell which emanated from their body indicated that man had no reason to be proud. But, the satire here is two edged.When Gulliver expati ated upon the conditions of Europe in ironic admiration of its institutions and its warfare. The moral king of Brobdingnag was moved to exclaim-I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth for their history revealed. Nothing but a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very affects that avarice fraction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, just, malice and ambition could produce. It is to be admitted that this type of general satire the intended affect because everyone lays the blame at the door of others and never applies it to himself The voyage of Laputa satirises Englands tyranny over Ireland . It is easy to see in the flying island the oppressive role of England on the life of Ireland. Lindalino is anagram of Dublin. Swift ridicules the activities of the scientific experiments under t aken by the proud Society. Which is represented here by the academy of projectors in Lagado?Swift was come to only with the ethics of life and the experiments in recognition and politics appeared to him as needless waste of time in the innumerable cells of the academy, one has been working at the ridiculous project of extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers another has been encaged for long in the project of turning human excrement in to human food and yet another has been trying to convert it in to gun powder here at any rate swift satire mysteries, for if science had been discouraged by this sardonic attack on them the present marvels of scientific discovery would have been impossible.The last voyageto houyhnhnm land take us into deeper waters. Critics of swift in the 18th and 19th centuries were misled into thinking that here swift was extolling the sensible animals and branding human beings irredeemably vicious and intolerably disgusting like the yahoos. it is true that swift sc orn of debased man is terrible but Gulliver is not swift the ardent Anglican dean could not have held up to our unqualified admiration the houyhnhnms who were of course rational, decent, benevolent and friendly. They limited their families to two colts- one male and the other female.They imparted instruction to their youth intemperance, industry exercise and cleanliness. The praise of these animals is intended to show how very debased man can be when he perverts his reason and yields to his passions but if the houyhnhnms escape the depths of human depravity, they also overlook the glory of the human life, certainly the modern view that swift is not to be identified with Gulliver does not admit of further dispute. 3. Swift is often accused of being a pessimist, a cynical gloomy misanthrope, a seventeenth century Timon of Athens.At any rate this was the view of swift which 18 th and 19th century critics of swift had consistently maintained This view has been stoutly challenged by mod ern critics who have examined the book from a innovation of angles. In the first two books of Gullivers travels in Gulliver s voyage to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, there is obvious gentility though the narrator shows his disgust at the pettiness and the squabbles of the pygmies and the grossness of the Brobdingnaginas physical features.In Brodingnaginas, the nine year old Glumdaiclits is full of tender solicitude for his safety, and is almost in tears at her fathers greed in intending to amass money buy exhibiting Gulliver at the market place. The educational system of the Lilliputians and the Brodingnaginas view of life are almost utopian. The charge of pessimism and misanthropy cannot be sustained on the basis of these two voyages. In the third book the voyage to Laputta swift seems to ridicule with unspairing the severity the scientific experiments and philosophical speculations of his time, but ridicule is not misanthropy.The charge then is made mainly on the four book. The Yahoo s are undoubted caricature of human beings they lick the feet of the horse and are happy when some piece of asss flesh is throw to them. The human kind seems Page 6 to be infinitely debased when contrasted with the Horses, which, by comparison, are governed by reason. There seems to be no save quality in the Yahoos and the nineteenth century critics had no hesitation to brand the satirist as a misanthrope who hated man, a pessimist who saw in him not one redeeming virtue.The voyage to the Houyhnhnms was even considered more or less symptomatic of mental disease. But Gulliver was saved by a Portuguese captain, who showed him great kindness and refused to accept from him his exit money. The presence of Don Pedro is alone enough to disprove the charge of misanthropy. in like manner are we justified in identifying Gulliver with swift? Gulliver himself is often the victim of suspicious humour, when he returns home he feels disgusted with his own wife and family, he erects his reside nce in stables, and neighs like a horse.He is here the victim of the diverting muse rather than the serious reformer of society. In this book, the Anglican clergyman appears as a preacher who believes in original sin and ridicules the 18th century clad about the perfectibility of man. Louis A. Landa has substantiated the view that Swifts pessimism is preferably consonant with the pessimism at the heart of Christianity. She has quoted in support of this view several passages from contemporary sermons. in my opinion, says another modern critic, the work is that of a Christian humanist and a moralist who no more blasphemes against the dignity of human nature than do St. Paul and some of the angrier prophets of the Old testament. It has been truly observed that his savage indictment of man arises from philanthropy, not misanthropy, from high-mindedness on what man might be, not from despair at what he is. By P. Baburaj, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of English, Sherubtse college, Bhutan Page 7