42883 (Human being hypostases in "Gulliver’s travels" by Johnatan Swift), страница 3

“Although Gulliver is a bold adventurer who visits a multitude of strange lands, it is difficult to regard him as truly heroic. Even well before his slide into misanthropy at the end of the book, he simply does not show the stuff of which grand heroes are made. He is not cowardly—on the contrary, he undergoes the unnerving experiences of nearly being devoured by a giant rat, taken captive by pirates, shipwrecked on faraway shores, sexually assaulted by an eleven-year-old girl, and shot in the face with poison arrows”¹⁸. Additionally, the isolation from humanity that he endures for sixteen years must be hard to bear, though Gulliver rarely talks about such matters. Yet despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout his voyages, his character lacks basic greatness. This impression could be due to the fact that he rarely shows his feelings, reveals his soul, or experiences great passions of any sort. But other literary adventurers, like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, seem heroic without being particularly open about their emotions.

“What seems most lacking in Gulliver is not courage or feelings, but drive. One modern critic has described Gulliver as possessing the smallest will in all of Western literature: he is simply devoid of a sense of mission, a goal that would make his wandering into a quest. Odysseus’s goal is to get home again, Aeneas’s goal in Virgil’s Aeneid is to found Rome, but Gulliver’s goal on his sea voyage is uncertain. He says that he needs to make some money after the failure of his business, but he rarely mentions finances throughout the work and indeed almost never even mentions home. He has no awareness of any greatness in what he is doing or what he is working toward. In short, he has no aspirations. When he leaves home on his travels for the first time, he gives no impression that he regards himself as undertaking a great endeavor or embarking on a thrilling new challenge”¹⁹.

We may also note Gulliver’s lack of ingenuity and savvy. Other great travelers, such as Odysseus, get themselves out of dangerous situations by exercising their wit and ability to trick others. Gulliver seems too dull for any battles of wit and too unimaginative to think up tricks, and thus he ends up being passive in most of the situations in which he finds himself. He is held captive several times throughout his voyages, but he is never once released through his own stratagems, relying instead on chance factors for his liberation. Once presented with a way out, he works hard to escape, as when he repairs the boat he finds that delivers him from Blefuscu, but he is never actively ingenious in attaining freedom. This example summarizes quite well Gulliver’s intelligence, which is factual and practical rather than imaginative or introspective. Gulliver's journey becomes synecdochic when he serves a role in the visited society and this role has a reciprocal effect on his own character; he no longer can be said to function as a constant or impartial measure. His trustworthiness as narrator is undermined and his representations become opaque or fall under suspect. This blow to representation brings the grotesque into play. As Gulliver changes scenes, the multiplicity of perspectives forces an ironic mode on the reader, in which the grotesque gains destabilizing power.

Gulliver’s narrative begins much like other travel records of his time. The description of his youth and education provides background knowledge, establishes Gulliver’s position in English society, and causes the novel to resemble true-life accounts of travels at sea published during Swift’s lifetime. Swift imitates the style of a standard travelogue throughout the novel to heighten the satire. Here he creates a set of expectations in our minds, namely a short-lived belief in the truth of Gulliver’s observations. Later in the novel, Swift uses the style of the travelogue to exaggerate the absurdity of the people and places with which Gulliver comes into contact. “A fantastical style—one that made no attempt to seem truthful, accurate, or traditional—would have weakened the satire by making it irrelevant, but the factual, reportorial style of Gulliver’s Travels does the opposite”²⁰.

Gulliver is surprised to discover the Lilliputians but is not particularly shocked. This encounter is only the first of many in the novel in which we are asked to accept Gulliver’s extraordinary experiences as merely unusual.” Seeing the world through Gulliver’s eyes, we also adopt, for a moment, Gulliver’s view of the world. But at the same time, we can step back and recognize that the Lilliputians are nothing but a figment of Swift’s imagination”²¹. The distance between these two stances—the gullible Gulliver and the skeptical reader—is where the narrative’s multiple levels of meaning are created: on one level, we have a true-life story of adventure; on another, a purely fictional fairy tale; and on a third level, transcending the first two and closest to Swift’s original intention, a satirical critique of European pretensions to rationality and goodwill.

In the first voyage of Lilliput, he comes across tiny human beings, who are six inches high yet, so threatening and deceptive that Gulliver contemplates over their evil nature. The word 'Lilliput', when etymologically studied gives us the combined meaning of ‘little rustic’ or ‘little rascals’. Although big and mighty, Gulliver does services to the ungrateful king, much to the discomfort of Filmnap, the treasurer of the island. With his physical strength, Gulliver has the ability to crush and subdue the whole kingdom but he somehow controls his physical self since he suffers from mental torment for he is not able to understand the mentality of the Lilliputians, who, besides being manipulative and malignant in nature, condemn him even after he has been main instrument behind their victory in the battle against Blefescu, a neighboring island. Hence in the first part, Gulliver suffers from mental torment though he is physically powerful.

However, in the second voyage, that is, the voyage to Brobdingnag, Gulliver finds that he himself is a Lilliputian in the land of the giants. Here, he encounters all kinds of physical torment: A pumpkin, which is the size of a rock, is thrown at him; people use him as a toy. Finally, he finds himself at the king's court where, he innocently narrates the pathetic conditions of his country (political, religious, and social conditions of England.) On hearing this, the king scorns the socio-political proceedings in England. We must make a note that the word ‘Brobdingnag’ is a big word and so it signifies something large—implicating the generosity and the magnanimity of the Brobdingnagians. Gulliver himself is a Lilliputian since the king is cynical about his views on Gulliver’s hometown, just like the way Gulliver felt for the Lilliputians. Therefore, Brobdingnag becomes a land of physical torment for Gulliver. Mental torment, however, takes the back seat as Gulliver fails to get the insulting message from the king who has a scornful attitude towards Gulliver's homeland. At this point, it is better to make a note of the contrasts in the first two voyages.

In the third voyage, Gulliver comes across Laputa, the floating island, which is ruled by intellectuals such as scientists, mathematicians, political advisors and musicians—all geniuses who lack the sense of spirituality and morality. Idealistic in nature, the people of Laputa refuse to be practical for we find scientists trying to recycle human excretion back into food, politicians trying to solve problems by improbable ways. The most singular experience is the encounter with the immortals who lose physical strength as age progresses (death itself is much better, Gulliver feels.)The inhabitants of Laputa, who live in a world of illusion, indulge in the futility of speculation and of books. What really turns out to be their moment of glory—as they spend most of their time beating their brains about the improbable inventions—turns out to be their folly as they ignore the fact that their spouses are having an extra-marital affair. Therefore, they are indifferent to normal human relationships, and turn their heads towards science and politics. The Gulliver, who we see here, is just a silent spectator of the unusual happenings in Laputa. What Swift is trying to convey here is that ‘intellectuality’ is an obstacle to morality.

In the fourth voyage, we see a reversal of fortune, as the horses rule the land of Houyhnhnms, not the Yahoos—bestial creatures resembling man. Gulliver is surprised, and so are the horses when they come to know that they hail from contrasting backgrounds. The horses are so naïve that they ask him what is the meaning for ‘falsehood’. The horses lead a life of innocence, and they are synonymous with morality: Adultery, murder, and falsehood fail to exist in the land of the horses. Strongly moved by the good life of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver scorns humanity and finally becomes an admiring friend of the horses. Even after having reluctantly returned to his hometown, in the end of the story, he buys two horses and is seen interacting with the horses, totally disregarding his family, social status and the society around him.

2.2. Hypostases

At the beginning of the novel, Gulliver is an everyman through whose eyes the reader sees the inhabitants of the places he visits. For most of the book, merely recounts his observations in deadpan mode. He appears to have no will or desires, but is led from land to land by fate. He gives his detailed descriptions without judgment, and without the capacity for reflection and distance that the reader possesses. He often fails to see the ludicrous, greedy, and morally depraved nature of the people around him, whereas this is all too clear to the reader. This gap between Gulliver's and the reader's perception of events leads to dramatic irony (a literary device in which the reader or audience of a work knows more than the character).

As a middle-of-the-road human being, Gulliver finds himself to be morally superior to the Lilliputians but morally inferior to the Brobdingnagians. In Brobdingnag, his weakness becomes clear. It is his pride in, and loyalty to, England, which leads him to lie to the Brobdingnagian king in order to paint his country in a favorable light.

As Gulliver's education progresses, he makes more direct judgments on the societies he visits, though at first these are understated. For example, in Part I, Chapter V, after the ministers have plotted to kill Gulliver in gruesome ways for trivial offenses, he notes for the first time that courts and ministers may not be perfect. By the end of his stay in Laputa, he is overtly despondent about the Laputans' shortcomings and the ruined society that they have sacrificed to theoretical thought.

Gulliver is somewhat more tranquil and less restless at the end of the story than he is at the beginning. In desiring first to stay with the Houyhnhnms, then to find an island on which he can live in exile, Gulliver shows that his adventures have taught him that a simple life, one without the complexities and weaknesses of human society, may be best. At the same time, his tranquility is superficial—lying not far below the surface is a deep distaste for humanity that is aroused as soon as the crew of Don Pedro de Mendez captures him. “From our point of view, after we have looked at the world through Gulliver’s eyes for much of the novel, Gulliver undergoes several interesting transformations: from the naive Englishman to the experienced but still open-minded world traveler of the first two voyages; then to the jaded island-hopper of the third voyage; and finally to the cynical, disillusioned, and somewhat insane misanthrope of the fourth voyage”²².

Gulliver's stay in the land of the Houyhnhnms marks the complete loss of his objectivity and innocence. He finds himself midway between the rationality of the Houyhnhnms and the bestiality of the Yahoos. So impressed is he by the Houyhnhnms and so disgusted is he by the Yahoos that he becomes obsessed with trying to be like the Houyhnhnms, when he physically resembles the Yahoos far more. Finally, he gives way to an insanity in which he seems to believe himself to be a Houyhnhnm and rejects even the best of humankind because he believes them to be Yahoos. At the end of the book, Gulliver is still trying to re-acclimatize to life among humans. While condemning his fellow men for their pride, he fails to see that he himself has fallen victim to pride in his disgust at humanity. As a result, the reader ceases to look through his eyes to judge others and begins to look at him and judge him. He, too, becomes an object of satire.

Most of the time during his travels, Gulliver feels isolated from the societies he visits. He does not fit in anywhere, and even during his brief returns to England, he expresses no wish to stay and leaves as quickly as he can. This has led to some critics calling Gulliver's Travels the first novel of modern alienation.

The country of the Houyhnhnms is unique among the nations Gullliver visits because of its subjugation of the individual to the good of society as a whole, which leads to an orderly and well-run nation. The price is that there is little room for human-style individuality. Nobody can become attached to their children because they may be assigned to another family that has a shortage of children; mates are chosen not by individual preference, but for the good of the race; servanthood is genetically mandated. Only during his stay with the Houyhnhnms does Gulliver wish to assimilate into society. His attempts are ridiculous, leading to his taking on the gait and speech patterns of his horse hosts. More seriously, they are doomed to fail: the Houyhnhnms decide that he is not one of them and expel him. The only society to which Gulliver wishes to belong will not have him. Swift raises questions about the conflict between the individual and society, but does not resolve them.

In many ways, Gulliver’s role as a generic human is more important than any personal opinions or abilities he may have. Fate and circumstance conspire to lead him from place to place, while he never really asserts his own desires. By minimizing the importance of Gulliver as a specific person, Swift puts the focus on the social satire itself. At the same time, Gulliver himself becomes more and more a subject of satire as the story progresses. At the beginning, he is a standard issue European adventurer; by the end, he has become a misanthrope who totally rejects human society. It is in the fourth voyage that Gulliver becomes more than simply a pair of eyes through which we see a series of unusual societies. He is, instead, a jaded adventurer who has seen human follies—particularly that of pride—at their most extreme, and as a result has descended into what looks like, and probably is, a kind of madness.

Conclusions