Gulliver's Travels, parts 1 and 2
Gulliver’s Travels is one of those books I probably never would have read without an outside push. I remember being made to read “A Modest Proposal” in high school English, which I found sort of abstractly funny but not very absorbing. Maybe I liked it enough to at least consider reading Gulliver, because I remember having a copy on my shelf, but I must have given up on it at some point; I can’t find that copy now. Maybe I was dissuaded by the terrible, saccharine cover on the edition I had, which featured a giant pair of hands holding glowing figurines.
Now I’m reading it for the Catherine Project’s core seminar. I just finished the first two parts—Gulliver’s encounters with the tiny people of Lillput and the enormous people of Brobdingnag—and it’s enormously fun and funny and charming. My six-year-old loves it too; she keeps asking me for another scene. I’m leaving out the nasty bits.
But the nasty bits are the funniest to me, if only because I didn’t at all expect them. (The terrible cover tricked me!) The first thing Gulliver does in both new lands he discovers is to take a shit. In Lilliput, the poor servants are consigned to carrying his feces away in wheelbarrows. In Brobdingnag (or Brobdingrag, as he insists in the preface it should have been spelled, which is also hilarious), he has to pantomime until his hosts understand what he needs and consent to carry him outside to the garden. In Lilliput the little people look up his pants and laugh in horror at the size of his testicles; in Brobdingnag he recalls with disgust having been made to stand (possibly naked?) atop the nipple of a lady of the court.
It’s all terribly weird, but I don’t think it’s just for shock value. The whole point of the book is to cast parts of our lives that seem so perfectly normal as to be forgettable into fresh relief. Both the vulgar and sublime come in for the same treatment.
I’ve heard that the book is supposed to be a brutal satire of English politics and religion and the rest, so much so that it could have gotten Swift in serious trouble, but it doesn’t really feel that biting to me yet. And I’m glad for that. There are clear moments of critique and ridicule, like when he describes how Lilliputians bury their dead upside down because they believe that God will turn the world upside down at the resurrection and they want to be ready, or when he talks about how stupid the Brobdingnagians are for not wanting to learn how to blow people up. But the book is capable of just being amusing and curious and weird; Swift doesn’t seem to be me straining to make everything into some negative allegory.
I’ll be interested this next week to get into the latter half of the book, because these first two parts are the only parts I’ve ever heard of, and really all the popular images seem to come from Part 1. The second half is a total mystery to me.