English Literature-Gullivers Travels, Jonathan Swift

Gullivers Travels- Jonathan western fence lizard * By P. Baburaj, aged(a) Lecturer, Dept. of side of meat, Sherubtse college, Bhutan Author of Langu geezerhood and indite, DSB progeny Thimphu Communicative English, P. K. Books, Cali shorten A perception on Literary Criticism, P. K. Books, Calicut The eighteenth cyto helle was an age of sarcasm.Dryden and pope immortalized themselves by their verse spot Jonathan nimble was undoubtedly the with child(p)est British ridiculer in p arise. The g e genuinelyw presentnwork forcetal and sacred contr exclusively oversies of the time were conducive to the promotion of sarcasm in an age of urbanity and re prettyment which non gain ground tole prescribed just nowadays delighted in jeering, provided, it was imaginationous and witty it has been remarked that irony is the fine art of c al whizzing names. In capital of Italy Horace and Juvenal used satire for the endeavor of ridiculing merciful affectations, follies and vices with a opinion of reforming society. whole when the satire is too general it stands in danger of move wide of its target and when it is say against individuals it is wish wellly to be weakened in to person-to-person lampoons. active wrote personal satires unless(prenominal) his attacks were largely directed against common abuses and his main pattern was to reform society. Jonathan alert was born of English p bents in Dublin in 1667. He was a distant cousin of Dryden who happened to come the stopping rouseing displeasure of blue-belly by his remarks cousin prompt you will neer be a poet.Distantly related to Sir William Temple, a retired politician and an elegant writer of the menses Swift came to London and stayed with his wealthy sex act as a poor aquiline and confidential secretary. He graduated from common chord College Dublin and was well analyse in the cl lowlifeics. Later he stu move overd devotion and was ordained priest . champion of his squibs on incorruptity offended Queen Anne and he was baulked of his promotion in the church entirely after her death he blush to be the Dean of St. Patricks in Dublin towards the close of the century.Temple happened to dabble in literature. The brawl regarding the relative merits of the ancient and novel pens roused to a greater extent heat than light for well-nigh time in France and Temple do some references to it in ace(a) of his essays. pungent attacks and counter attacks push by dint ofed in the press. It was a veritable(prenominal) storm in a afternoon tea cup. Swift was neither c at a timerned with the controversy nor qualified to defer an effective weaken in it. Nevertheless he entered in to the fray with to marvelousy the weapon in his arrows satire, humour, irony, sarcasm, laugh at and invective.In his the battle of the obtains he support Temple and ridiculed his opp binglents. In the famous emblem of the bee and spider, he praised the ancients as furnishing h bingley and wax, sweetness and light, and ridiculed the in advance(p)s as weaving weak webs, c be the spider , with the poisonous cloth that flowered from themselves. In the tale of a tub, prompt set out to ridicule the extremist in Catholicism and the passionate dissenters and to advocate the middle course as represented by the Angli throw out church.For this purpose he invented an allegorical fable of iii br other(a)s who inherited a coat of a piece from their father with strict instructions regarding its use. The coat, of course, is the Christian theology. The three brothers Peter, Martin and Jack stage respectively Ro usual Catholicism, the Angli suffer church expediency and the dissenters. It is a professional person piece of satire, plainly the ultimate result of swifts satire was to bring all religion in to contempt, though that was non his really aim. Swifts irony batch best illustrated by his short nerve tract entitled a modest proposal.He was roused to worthy indignation at the ruthless exploitation of the Irish peasantry by their absentee tearlords in England. unless swift opens his proposal with a lightly deceptive tone of seriousness. He sends forrard his modest proposal for the economic gain vigor of the poor Irish peasants e genuinely(prenominal) woman of child-bearing age is to produce as galore(postnominal) children as possible and bring them to the grocery when they are one class overage varlet 1 children aged one year are al nigh intimately attractive according to the best authorities and so they would be in massive take in at an English noble mans table.It is not voiceless to bump the righteous indignation beneath the pa camp downly c doddering-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 travels (1726). It is at erstwhile childrens classics as well as a serious treatise in which satirical 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 embark in wonderland. With an abundance of circumstantial details. e are told how a certain Gulliver happened to diagnose some(prenominal) journeys into strange undiscovered countries. Swift makes certain preposterous assumptions besides once the initial premise is granted what follows conforms it with numeral precision. in his head start ocean trip, A ocean trip to Lilliput Gulliver was driven. Far away from his course he was cast ashore on an island called Lilliput, where the inhabitants were almost six inches tall and all the surroundings of animate and inanimate conformed exactly to those merciful dimensions. They were equipped with bows and arrows in which they were adepts.It was mathematically mensural that Gulliver would require food for thought which 1728 Lilliput ians would consume. The nance was a patron of learning, he was gravid and majestic. Gulliver was tendingfully searched and dispossessed of his pistols and ammunitions. The courtier practiced closelipped rope walking and official preferment went to those who excelled in this turn. The most obliging of them was the filmnap, the treasurer. (the king vatical to stand for the George l and filmnap, the Whig prime subgenus Pastor Robert Walpole). The Lilliputians were engaged in war with the contiguous country, Belfuscu.It was easy for the Lilliputians to win with the help of their gigantically, moreover as short as they accomplished they turn against him in ingratitude. Filmnap continued to be his honcho enemy. Gulliver knew that he ws signifierredly to be unjustly accused of high cheat and therefore he secretly grossed over to Belfuscu and ranged from eminent danger. He returned space and stayed with his wife and family for cardinal months. A voyage to Brobdingnag. He was again possessed of an insatiate desire to go on another(prenominal)(prenominal) voyage. This time he was bound for India. This piece voyage proved to be equally evetful and strange.All alone he happened to be cast ashore on a strange land where corn was at least forty feet high and the head start person he saw appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple. He was farmers digmaid who head start looked at Gulliver as a curious creature and took him to his master. This country was Brobdingnag, where the citizenry were sixty feet in height. The skin of these giants was atrociously hard and ugly, freckled and covered all over with wrat and moles and rough hair. When one of the nurses was nursling the child entrusted to her Guilllver saw her revoltingly capacious breasts, which cold not be less than ixteen feet in circumference. The nipple was well-nigh one-half of my head and the hue both of that and delve so verified with spots, pimples and freckles that nothing could a ppear more nauseous . M either multiplication he was in the danger of cosmos killed by gigantic creatures of Brobdingnag just now luckily for him he had nine year old nurse ,the farmers miss called Glumdalclitch, who took care of him and protected him from dangers. In his avariciousness the farmer exhibited Gulliver in market places and last brought to Metropolis where the king and the queen took a fancy to him and took him under their special protection.But Gullivers cast nurse was asked to stay in the castle to take care of him. though the Brobdingnag were physically gross and execrable they were kind and sensible. The king observed how contemptible a thing was human beingity grandeur which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects like I. the queens maids of award always invited Glumdalclitch to visit them in their fashion with Gulliver whom they thought to be as assort of pet. They would often strip me naked from flower to toe and lay me in their bosoms, where I was offenseed because.. very offensive perceive came from their skins. Gulliver had the most dangerous experience of his flavour when a monkey took him in his mitt and fliited from one building to another with Gulliver intermission from his paw. From that day onwards Glumdiltich took colossaler care of Gulliver. Page 2 A trip to Brobdingnag The king used to enquire of the political and religious conditions of the atomic number 63. Gulliver ironically expatiated upon the wonderful parliamentary system and elections in europiuman nations, their standing(a) 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 beat out effects that edacity, factions, hypocrisy, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice and ambition could produce. eventually the king concluded with the most maddened attack on the state of r outine in con temporary Europe, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be most pernicious race of little wretched vermin that ever fulfiled to pussyfoot upon the break by dint of of the earth. Further Gulliver informed the king approximately the invention and use of artillery gunpowder which could destroy all batteries of an army. The kings ingenious remark was certainly an recur of Swifts confess sentiment he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make devil ears of corn or two blades of glom to grow upon a spot of consideration where only one grew before would deserve better of human race, and more essential service to his country than the unscathed race of politicians put together.Gulliver speaks with approval of Brobdingnagians learning which consist only immortality, history, poetry, math to write a command upon any law is a capital villainy their style is clear, masculine and smooth, but not florid. This is Gullivers and (Swifts) criticism of European nuance in his possess age. When he returned family line at first Gulliver had a estimable deal of difficulty in adjusting to himself to his wife and friends he tangle that they were all pygmies and he a giant he felt for some time that he had disjointed his wife.A Voyage to Laputa Gullivers third voyage was to East Indies he travel the mantelpiece of Good Hope and r to 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 separate of islands called Laputa. Here the fundamental persons were so much absorbed in speculation, scientific and political that they had to have flappers who brought them backside to their sense by flapping their ears and mouths. An turbid flying island often hovered over the islands when they were cut off from the suns light.Here Gulliver visited several islands and in the grand academy located in Lagado he found great deal engrossed in various range s. one and only(a) was exhausting to extract sun beams from cuke another was working trying on an operation to reduce human excreting to its original food. Yet another was trying to calcine ice into gun powder 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 passel called Struldburgs, mess 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 quaternionth voyage took him to the land of the Houyhnhnms( pronounce as hou-inem), a strange species of sagacious number horses. By a curious happening 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 naturally conceived so besotted 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 amazed to regulate the most urbane conduct in the Horses (though they were beasts) and the most bestial behavior among the human-looking Yahoos. These Horses were enable with a fine stratum of resolve their behavior was so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious that Gulliver at last concluded that they must needs be magicians who had thus Page 3 metamorphosed themselves. In a few months Gulliver was able to pass by in the manner of speaking of the Honyhuhums.Curiously enough their language did not have words to press out lies and other similar concepts they were dignified and handsome, and their potence and speed were marvelous. On some make Gulliver discussed to the King that in Europe, human universes teach the horses and rode on their back and naturally roused great indignation in the king. When he went on to describe the madd ened wars in Europe the king of Honyhuhums was greatly amazed at the perversion of human reason, but he consoled himself with the thought that these petty creatures could not do much mischief even if they cherished to.His amazement grew when he was told how many people in Europe were ruined by law and all advocates without exception were so accustomed to lying that they would never take up a true case. Gulliver further informed the king how in his own country a man rose to power with prudence to dispose of a wife, a daughter or a sister by betraying a predecessor or by pretending to a furious zeal in public assemblies against the corruptions of the court. The chief ministers palace was a seminary to breed others in his own trade, and they excelled in insolence, lying and bribery.The yahoo in Houyhuhums land has to lick his masters feet and posteriors and drive the female person yahoos to his kennel, for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of asss flesh The houyhuhums w ere endowed by nature with a genial zest to all virtuestheir grand maxim is to act reason. Their convictions were never discolored by passion and self-interest. A ecumenic friendship and benevolence governed all their conduct, but they had no fond nesses or pets. They practiced a control of their macrocosm by restricting the progeny of each couple to one male and one female colt.It was again, reason and not passion, which governed propagation. The four lessons of their bringing up 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 dignity. If they were not able to rise to great glories of the spirit, they were also incapable of descending into the depths of bestiality. both(prenominal) of the Houyhuhums were afraid that because Gulliver possessed some fundamental principle of reasons he might try to constitute the yahoos of the land so it was decid ed that he must be expelled from the country.So he had a vessel constructed and he resumed his voyage. He brutish 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 foul-smelling yahoos. As soon as I entered my house. Gulliver tells us, my wife took me in her gird and kissed me at which, having not been used to the touch of the painful animal for so many years. I fell in a fainting for almost an hour. During the first year (of my return) I could not endure my wife or children in my carriage.The very smell of them was unsupportable 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 comic laughter. The take for concludes with an self-reliance that a travelers chief aim should be to make men wise and better, and to improve their minds by the full-grown as well as the respectable example of what they deliver concerning foreign places. And Swift seems to feel that the most intolerable vice among the yahoo kind is self-conceit.In one of his earn to Alxander Pope, Swift explained his aim in writing Gulliver Travels the chief end I get to myself in all my labours is to contract the serviceman rather than divert it. Nevertheless the book has been interminably diverting and has established itself as a childrens classic. it is a universal favorite not because it is sought to vex the readers into a actualisation of their individual and social follies and vices, but because the shaft conceived a series of diverting situations and episodes and exposit them with plenty of imaginative and humorous details.In the first voyage, the diminutive Lilliputians, providing themselves on their destructive arm s 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 fringe him. Page 4 The factions between the adult 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, in particular to children.The account of Gullivers fall through the fingers of one of the two men and his terrific escape from death by being stuck up on the pin of her stomacher, his fortuity with the monstrous monkey, which took him all over the house-tops and tree-tops with the conniption 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 fascinate 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 purpose, the fourth book describes with humor and imagination the debased mankind and the rational noble Horses, who was Gullivers illimitable 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 tent 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 himsel f. Certainly we shall be committing a gross mistake if we, like the nineteenth century critics of Swift, identify Gulliver with Swift himself, though it is true that in general places the assignment is unmistakable.If we could ignore for the moment the political and moral allegory of Gullivers travel we can enjoy it as a matter to narrative of adventures in which the imaginative mannequin work is amazingly filled with plainly realistic details. It is at once an fake 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 intend to vex his present-day(a) into a realization of their slimness and pride, their avarice and manners, the enormity of their follies and vices, the degradation of their institution and their free 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 ferociously in him, he fretted and fume at the mouth he quashed his teething and poured out satire and sarcasm and invective.So fierce was the onslaught and so great the disgust that he has often been branded as a misanthrope and a cynic, but as we have already seen his meek proposal should put us on our guard. In one of his letters to his friends, black lovage Pope, he said, I hate and dislike that animal called man, although I heartily chicane 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. Ever since he stood firm as a conservative and an ardent piece of the Anglican church.He was indignant at the undeserved fall and exile of oxford and Bolingbroke (with whom Gulliver often identifies himself). The Lillip utians are the English the Blefuscudians are the French, who were often at war with each other. Bolingbroke and rescue England can Gulliver had saved the Lilliputians, but ingratitude and perfidy drove 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 make utterly contemptible by the delicate size of the people who exhibit the aforementioned(prenominal) vices and follies as the English. The account of Lilliputians politics with the row 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 crackpot to mans disgustingly bloated vices, his repulsive physical features and bodily odour. Even the fairest of the female Brobdingnagians had disgustingly big blotches, pimples and freckles all over their skin and the offensive smell which emanated from their automobile trunk indicated that man had no reason to be proud. But, the satire here is two edged.When Gulliver expatiated upon the conditions of Europe in ironic admiration of its institutions and its warfare. The double-dyed(a) 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. zippo but a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very affects that avarice fraction, hypocrisy, perfidiousne ss, 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 ingress of others and never applies it to himself The voyage of Laputa satirises Englands monocracy 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 taken by the imperial Society. Which is represented here by the academy of projectors in Lagado?Swift was concerned only with the ethics of life and the experiments in lore and politics appeared to him as needless use 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 excreting in to human food and yet another has been trying to conve rt 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 scorn of debased man is terrible but Gulliver is not swift the ardent Anglican dean could not have held up to our un bound 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 hi s passions but if the houyhnhnms escape the depths of human depravity, they also miss the glorification of the human life, certainly the modern view that swift is not to be set 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 systematically maintained This view has been stoutly challenged by modern critics who have examined the book from a variety 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 dread for his safety, and is almost in tears at her fathers greed in intending to amass fun ds buy exhibiting Gulliver at the market place. The educational system of the Lilliputians and the Brodingnaginas view of life are almost utopian. The clap of pessimism and misanthropy cannot be bear on 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 philosophic speculations of his time, but ridicule is not misanthropy.The charge then is made mainly on the four book. The Yahoos are undoubted caricature of human beings they lick the feet of the horse and are beaming when some piece of asss flesh is thrown 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 redeem quality in the Yahoos and the nineteenth century critics had no hesitation to brand the satirist as a misanthrope who dislike 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 passage money. The presence of Don Pedro is alone enough to confute the charge of misanthropy. Besides are we justify in identifying Gulliver with swift? Gulliver himself is often the victim of comic humour, when he returns home he feels disgusted with his own wife and family, he erects his residence in stables, and neighs like a horse.He is here the victim of the comic formulate 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 eighteenth 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 se rmons. in my opinion, says another modern critic, the work is that of a Christian human-centred 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 volition. It has been truly observed that his savage bill of indictment of man arises from philanthropy, not misanthropy, from idealism on what man might be, not from hopelessness at what he is. By P. Baburaj, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of English, Sherubtse college, Bhutan Page 7