Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland in 1667, at the age of 22 he left Ireland to go to England to serve
as a secretary to Sir William Temple.
In 1694 became an Anglican priest, and after Sir William death, he moved back to Ireland.
Around 1713 formed a group of satirists known as the “Scriblerus Club”. In 1742 was declared insane
after a period of ill health and three years after died.
In 1704 Swift published (anonymously) his first major satirical work, A Tale of a Tub, followed by
several other pamphlets. It was not until 1726 that he published his masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels.
Three years later, in 1729, Swift published A Modest Proposal, a grotesque satire on the Irish
problems of overpopulation and food shortage and the indifference of the English towards them. In
this savagely funny text, Swift suggests that babies make a succulent dish, especially when boiled,
and so comes up with a solution both to overpopulation and to starvation.
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
The book, a sort of science fiction story , was written in about 1726, a few years before he was
declared insane. The last years of his life were spent in complete solitude and isolation, through he
was very popular among common Irish people who had defended in front of the English government.
He actually ” did not have the love or hardly the civility of one man in power or station...".
He had been ill all his life, his illness grew worse and his mind was breaking down. He was declared
insane in 1742 and died in 1745.
Before being declared insane as a result of his neglected disease, the Meniere syndrome , he wrote
and completed Gulliver's Travels in an atmosphere of loneliness and hopeless fury, feeling “that he
was dying in a trap, poisoned by his own venom “.
Gulliver's Travels received an enthusiastic critic reception but it contained one of the most terrible
and negative analysis of Humanity ever written.
The common assumption is that Swift was a great hater of Mankind.
However, once he wrote: “ I do not hate mankind, it is you who hate them because you would have
them reasonable animals and are angry for being disappointed ".
It is true that in his analysis there is a dark vein of misanthropy.
In reality if we consider that he chose one of the harshest literary means of criticism: tragic satire to
explore the darkness within man.
Satire needs to use paradoxes, to distort things in order to destroy what is wrong, and not for
destruction's sake, but with a didactic aim.
The aim of satire is always didactic : he wanted men to realize what they were and teach them how
to be better human beings.
What he hated was lack of reason, rationality and balance , all perversions of intelligence and lack
of equilibrium. In the 18th century Man had tried to cut himself into two parts: Reason and Body.
Reason was considered the only good part and was trying to cut itself off from the flesh, instincts
and sexuality and was claiming to be able to stand isolated against Nature. This was not possible
and reasonable!
Swift’ s enraged love, through satire, wants to show it to man.
Gulliver is at times Swift mouthpiece but at others he is also alter ego observing the world as a
stranger and choosing parts as Gulliver does in the end, where Gulliver clearly represents the
mistakes made by the 18th century man who cut reason from the instincts and split a natural
harmonic whole.
However, hidden under humor, paradox and wit there is a great intellectual love for mankind. His
rage and fury come from a disillusioned love.
The story is divided into four parts:
In the first part the hero Lemuel Gulliver describes his shipwreck off the island of Lilliput. The
Lilliputians are the citizens of this island: they are tiny people, only six inches tall. During this period
in Lilliput he learns about local customs, culture and local political system. He helps this population
to win a war against another island: Belfuscu. After that he returns to England.
In the second part Gulliver sets off for India, but after a series of misadventures, finds himself
abandoned on the island of Brobdingnag, whose inhabitants are all giants.
The situation of Part 1 is reversed, as Gulliver is now regarded as something like a living doll that
children can play with. He is sold to the queen and has some discussions with the king about the
political situation in Europe, before returning to England.
In the third part Gulliver lands on the amazing flying island of Laputa with its capital Lagado, which
is populated by philosophers and scientists, all involved in bizarre and futile scientific research and
speculations.
The inventions in this part of the book though designed to ridicule scientific invention, inadvertently
anticipate many future technological and artistic developments.
From here Gulliver journeys to another two islands, Glubbdubdrib and Luggnagg, each with their
own absurdities. These also have a connection with the future, such as the immortal but infirm
Struldbrugs of Luggnag who anticipate a society in which the elderly can be kept alive long into old
age despite their sufferings.
In the last part Gulliver arrives in a land ruled by intelligent horses who call themselves the
Houyhnhnms, which is also the name of the island. They are served by a filthy, bestial, subhuman
race called the Yahoos.
Again, Gulliver spends his time trying to learn the language and the ways of the Houyhnhnms. He
assimilates them so well that when he returns home to his wife and children, he finds himself
disgusted by their ‘humanness’
Swift maintained that man is not a reasonable animal but is simply endowed with reason, which he
is not always able to use in the right way.
This contrast between "rationality and animality" underlies the whole work.
The four voyages may be interpreted as follows:

•in Book 1 (A voyage to Lilliput)

- rationality is represented by the Lilliputians, with their perfect organization and their profound
knowledge of all the mathematical sciences, in contrast with Gulliver, described only as a big
"body” dominated by physiological needs.
But the Lilliputians have perverted their rationality into an instrument of cruelty and domination
indeed they are initially kind to him, the Lilliputians see Gulliver as a giant baby and they use him
as their weapon to destroy their enemies.

• in Book 2 (A voyage to Brobdingang)

- the situation is reversed, the giants now embodying animality(they represent the human vanity),
with their large, disgusting bodies, and Gulliver rationality, thanks to his skill and ability. (But the
king of the giants, although physically repulsive, is generous and endowed with great moral sense,
as is shown by his comments to Gulliver, who attempts to demonstrate the superiority of his own
age and culture, by proudly describing the institutions of England, in fact
undermined by corruption and immorality)

• in Book 3 ( A voyage to Laputa)

The Laputans can be seen as a parody of the pretensions of abstract intellectual thinking, which
has no connection to reality, and also as a satire on England’s military and colonial ambitions
- the main themes are science, philosophy and their value as evidence of man's rationality, poetics
and linguistics. (But these purposes are ridiculed and often compared with others which are
perfectly absurd, to show that men are too proud of their rationality, and have forgotten their basic
common sense. Besides, showing that Swift had understood Bacon's experimental philosophy
and the direction taken by modern science, this section also reveals how 18th-century science
had totally lost the harmony betweenintellect and the senses characteristic, for example, of
Renaissance science). However, seen from a distance, the world of the Laputans is also a world
of lightness where ideas are liberated from the costraints of reality.

• in Book 4 ( A voyage to the country of Houyhnhnms)

This part, where horses rule over a bestial sub human race called the Yahoos, is one of the best
examples of Swiftian reversal. We are made to see Gulliver from the perspective of the horses, who
think at first that Gulliver is a Yahoo. Gulliver tries to convince them that his own race is not at all like
the Yahoos, but from the horses' point of view, the picture he portrays of the violent and vicious
society he comes from merely confirms that, underneath the masquerade of civilisation, humans are
indeed just like the Yahoos - only more sophisticated in their barbarism.
-reason is represented in its extreme, pure form by the horses, in contrast with the bodies of the
abominable Yahoos
(But the horses, although they are models of honesty and morality, ignore emotions, and
so they lack thepeculiar features that could make them “human”).
-in Book one or the voyage to Lilliput, is that of illustrating a microscopic world where people behave
in the same way as they do in our world. However, we can observe them and laugh at them without
realizing that we are laughing at ourselves.
- in book two or the voyage to the land of the Giants, he makes a bitter and more sarcastic satire of
England through the eyes of these good Giants.
England clearly appears as minuscule as Lilliput did through Gulliver's eyes. It is not only England,
but the whole mankind to be judged and laughed at by the King of the Giants, the good judge.
- In the third voyage all the 18th century emphasis on progress and technology and celebration of
rationality is attacked and ridiculed.
- In the last voyage to the land of the Noble Horses irony becomes subtler and the reader is taken
between the beastliness and instincts of the Yahoos , who offer him a terrible parody of his own
bodily image he does not recognize , and the rigid perspective of the wise Horses , which are indeed
rational, but to the extreme of mania and madness.
Thus, is man a rational animal? Does the animal embody reason or man embody “animality “?
When Gulliver comes back to England he has chosen parts and has chosen the rationality of the
Rational horses , he cannot afford human people's smell anymore, his children and wife's touch and
goes to live with his horses.
However, Gulliver’s final choice is not the demonstration of Swift's misanthropy, but only of
Gulliver’s folly. Gulliver is Everyman, the 18th century man , trying to cut reason off from the body
as required by Rationalism.

The lessons that Swift is trying to teach through his masterpiece is:
By his contrast-within-contrast technique, by the magnifying or diminutive perspective and the
alteration of scale and size, he dissects mankind, denouncing its follies and absurdities.
However, his satire is never purely destructive, coarse, violent and even revolting it may be, it
betrays Swift's wish for a greater use of common sense and greater balance between "rationality”
and “animality".
This may be seen in the fourth voyage .
Let us not forget that Gulliver's Travels is also a political satire as is particularly evident in the second
book, where he satirizes 18th-century English political, social and legal institutions and even more
so in the parts where he attacks the English political parties and religious conflicts of his time.
The latter may be seen in the passage “Big Endians vs Small Endians”.
As a matter of fact Swift ,through the paradoxes of satire , wanted to teach and show to his
contemporaries how man could change things.

Swift, in reality, was not a misanthrope. He was a radical disillusioned humanist and he did not share
Gulliver's views.
He believed that man was not an ANIMAL RATIONALE but he was only RATIONIX CAPAX. The
Travels are erected upon this Truth .
Men are neither like the Wise Horses, nor like the Yahoos of Book 4, they are animals capable of
reason, half reasonable and half yahoos ( that is with instincts , passions , emotions and feelings).
The worst that can happen to the Man is the splitting of these two complementary aspects.

THE STYLE
The style of this work is very plain and simple. Gulliver, like Crusoe, is a matter-of-fact man who
records the marvels he sees with careful detail, in the language of the traveller who speaks with
great seriousness about what he has seen and wants to be believed.
However, the novel's dense mixture of fantasy, political satire, moral fable and playfulness renders
it a highly complex work and critics have debated what Swift's intentions actually were. Many have
regarded it as a misanthropic book, a vicious attack on the human race as a whole. The book's
defenders, on the other hand, say that the book is a satire of man's hypocrisy, vanity and cruelty, his
small-mindedness and absurd pretensions.