Gulliver's Travels
By Jonathan Swift
Edited by Christopher Fox
Boston: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press
1995. 480 pp.
Reviewed by Graham Milner
Why should activists on the left be interested in reading Jonathan Swift? Wasn't he the reactionary Tory misogynist and misanthrope who railed against humanity as "odious, pernicious vermin" and sympathised with the Jacobite right in 18th century England?
Well, for a start Karl Marx was certainly interested — enough so to possess the Collected Edition of Swift's writings and to have read and annotated them closely, especially Swift's writings on his native Ireland, oppressed then as now by English imperialism.
A master of satire, Swift argued ironically in "A Modest Proposal" (1729) that the children of the poor in Ireland should be eaten to prevent them from being a burden to their parents or the country. Leslie Stephen points out in his study of Swift that although "fearful to read", "Proposal" is "the most complete expression of burning indignation against intolerable wrongs".
Gulliver's Travels (1726) remains Swift's most widely read work. Often regarded as a book for children, the Travels are in fact a many-sided satirical onslaught on various aspects of human folly and vice. Writing to his friend Alexander Pope in 1725, Swift declared that his intention had been to "vex the world rather than divert it". In another letter he stated a belief that his book would "wonderfully mend the World".
The four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver — to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Laputa and to the Houyhnhnms, have in fact diverted the world ever since they appeared. The images of the six-inch high Lilliputians, the giant Brobdingnagians, the abstracted scientists and thinkers of the flying island of Laputa, and last but not least of the filthy, libidinous Yahoos and the rational, wise horses of Houyhnhnmland have established their place in imaginative literature alongside the satirical creations of Cervantes, Rabelais and Thomas More.
George Orwell, writing in 1946, declared, "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them". But Swift, while a rebel and iconoclast, has been identified by many, including Orwell, as a misanthrope — a view which can be sustained by a consideration of Gulliver's experiences in Houyhnhnmland, from which he emerges hating his fellow human beings, whom he has come to identify with the odious Yahoos.
Yet many critics have pointed out that it is a mistake to assume that Gulliver's voice is Swift's. Furthermore, Swift's presentation of the rational Houyhnhnms contains as much ironic condemnation as praise and he sharply distinguishes between the Yahoos and the human beings, including Gulliver, in Book Four.
Those who have seen Swift as a misogynist have to contend with the fact that the author had close friendships with at least three women, including Esther Johnson — "Stella", whom he may have married. Further, in Book One of the Travels, the voyage to Lilliput, many features of contemporary English society and politics are satirised, and Swift presents the case for equal educational opportunities for women.
Appended to this new edition of Gulliver's Travels are a number of essays written from contemporary critical perspectives, including feminism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (post-modernism). While these provide useful insights for the student, the editor could perhaps also have included a representative essay from the flourishing Marxist school of literary criticism. Critics writing in this tradition, such as Terry Eagleton, draw on a considerable body of work which includes the contributions of major thinkers such as Trotsky, Lukacs, Lucien Goldmann and Walter Benjamin.