Gulliver's Travels Section: Book Reports
The sections on the public rewards of leaping and creeping or the endless disputes about whether one should eat one's eggs by breaking them at the bigger or the smaller end or the absurdity of the royal proclamations are obvious and funny distortions of the court life, the pompous pretentiousness of officials, and the religious disputes familiar to Swift's readers. At the same time, however, there are passages where he holds up the laws of Lilliput as some form of utopian ideal, in order to demonstrate just how much better they understand true reasonableness than do the Europeans. In book II, he does the same: for most of the time the people of Brobdingnag are again caricatured distorted Europeans, but clearly, the King of Brobdingnag is an ideal figure. This shift in perspective on the New World is at times confusing. Swift is, in effect, manipulating the fictional world to suit his immediate satirical purposes. It is easy enough to see what he is doing, but it does, in some sense, violate our built-up expectations. Just how are we supposed to take Lilliput and Brobdingna—as a distorted Europe or as a utopia or what? This lack of a consistent independent reality to the fictional world which he has created is one of the main reasons why Gulliver's Travels is not considered one of the first novels (since one of the requirements of a novel, it is maintained, is a consistent attitude towards the fictional reality one has created: one cannot simply manipulate it at will to prove a moral point). We can see Gulliver slowly becoming accustomed to a new kind of life, the life of reason that he is forced to imitate from the model supplied by the horses. We can begin to see that Gulliver is impressed by the orderly and rational conduct of life he sees in the Houyhnhnms but, while the Houyhnhnms may provide Gulliver with a model manner of life, Swift is forcing the careful reader to judge whether the life of the horses is indeed a proper model for the life of man. It may be true that a man can subsist on a diet of oats and milk and even thrive on them; but, are oats the only alternative to asses' flesh, the food of the Yahoos? In other words, Gulliver's choice of diet is not really the point; rather, his choice of diet signifies his choice of a manner of living. Houyhnhnm life is much simpler than human life because these ideal horses are not possessed with the impulse towards evil that is powerfully present in many. Man's life is a good deal more difficult; he can be good, but with great effort, while the Houyhnhnms are good without effort and are consequently not nearly so interesting as men are. Gulliver's great mistake is his blindness to the poignant difficulty involved in man's attempts to battle his basic instincts in order to lead the good life. Gulliver will be blinded by the glorious but inhuman example of the Houyhnhnms. In Book IV, Swift deals more consistently with this innuendo in the New World by dividing it into two groups; the satirized Europeans, the Yahoos, and the ideally reasonable creatures, the horses. So, here there is less of a sense of shifting purpose at work. That may help to account, in part, for the great power of the Fourth Voyage. For me Swift's language, though strong, is still in control. The vision is harsh, the anger extreme, but that's a sign of the intense moral anger Swift feels at the transformation of life around him in ways that are leading, he thinks, to moral disaster. The central Christian and Socratic emphasis on virtue is losing ground to something he sees as a facile illusion—that reason, wealth, money, and power could somehow do the job for us, which had been traditionally placed upon our moral characters. In the New World, faith, hope, and charity, Swift sees, are going to be irrelevant, because the rational organization of human experience and the application of the new reasoning to all aspects of human life is going to tempt human beings with a rich lure: the promise of happiness.
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