A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, GLUBBDUBDRIB, LUGGNAGG, AND JAPAN:

Attacked by the pirates. Christian v/s heathen

The floating island represents the distance between the government and the people.

The king’s concern for the people below but he never comes below to meet people.

Servants with flappers standing beside their masters. Thinkers and scientists are busy in their day dreams. The king has two flappers.

The society seems nonhuman. The life here seems abstract and absurd.

The king’s way of giving punishment to the people.

Look of Laputans, their garments and signs on their garments

Gulliver finds things strange to Europe.

In Laputa people never enjoyed a minute’s peace of mind

The great lord of Laputa is universally reckoned as the most ignorant and stupid person among them.

Gulliver met women, tradesmen, flappers in two months.

He never received a reasonable answer from these people.

Gulliver saw people in the streets. Walked fast, looked wild.

People were busy in some experiments.

Long lasting material, extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, a new method for building houses, mix colours for painters, a new method of agriculture, weaving and spinning and a mathematical school.

Glubbdubdrib- the land of Sorcerers and magicians

Their power to call the dead spirit

Gulliver met renowned ancients who were known for their wit and learning.

Their skill in necromancy

Futility of life

Mortals – immortalizing youth People are opinionative, peevish,

covetous, morose, vain, talkative. They are not capable of friendship. They don’t have affection for anyone. Their prevailing passions are envy and impotent desires.

Fading youth but cannot defeat old age.

Women looked more horrible than men. Women should be taxed according to their beauty and their skill at dressing.

Deformed human beings, deformed culture.

The common problem Gulliver faces is of language.

The power is shown by their use of technology.

Futile attempts of educated people. They are so called educated. It is not for the betterment of the society.

THE LAND OF  HOUYHNHNMS: Transformation in Gulliver Gulliver no longer cares for human society. He quickly learns the language of

houyhnhnms. Gulliver tells them about his country where

human beings rule and horses are trained to work for them. Houyhnhnms are not ready to believe Gulliver.

Here animals are rational and cultured. The shocking part of this part is the revelation

of yahoos’ identity as human beings.

Gulliver talks about war and gives reason for that.

Gulliver also informs them about law and order of his nation.

Europeans described as yahoos. Their life style is different but their nature is the same.

Greed and selfishness in human nature Houyhnhnms have life of community. They

don’t live personal life. Gulliver thinks of his people as European

yahoos and he prefers to live with barbarians than with his own people.

Swift is challenging the traditional idea that humans are rational animals.

Swift believed in the original sin. In Further Thoughts on Religion he wrote:

“After his eating of the forbidden fruit, the course of nature was changed…. But men degenerate everyday, merely by the folly, the perverseness, the avarice, the tyranny, the pride, the treachery of inhumanity of their own kind.”

The Travels show the fall of men.

Swift attacked on the pride of men.

Gulliver’s Travels present the truth about human nature in opposition to illusion.

Love towards individuals but hate for the race.

Social Hierarchy

SOCIAL HIERARCHY: Gulliver- tormented by the social hierarchy. Gulliver’s voice is controlled. Swift makes

him unreliable and untrustworthy while inserting him into a variety of social situations with ever-changing conventions.

Gulliver tries to improve his position in hierarchy and is denied to do so.

Gulliver is a self-conscious narrator. His position is limited.

Swift goes beyond the languages those of class, gender and ethnicity by creating different languages and social systems and bringing his author character into them.

For a comic effect there should be a difference, a distance between the true author and a character author.

When Gulliver finds himself in different culture takes everything seriously and Swift is very serious at such points.

Critics tried to differentiate Swift’s life and his writings. Said claims “Swift as intellectual” but “a traditional intellectual”. He is not well-born. He is an outsider. Swift’s feelings of an anti-eNGLISH

Swift, here, does not try to change the system. He attempt to find out flaws. Swift presents the existing society with full of social hierarchy and fundamental feeling of insecurity in such society.

Gulliver and his odd travels are the result of Swift’s conflicted conscious. Gulliver is continuously trying to better his position in different society.

Gulliver- an English man belongs to middle class. “My father had a small estate in

Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge . . . where I resided for three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me (although I had a scanty allowance) was too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London” (Swift 49).

Gulliver had to end up his education in a society where education was a key to get a position.

Gulliver comes from a society which is closed off to him by the lack of money.

Gulliver’s decision to leave home for sea voyages indicates that he wanted to improve his position financially.

Gulliver-neither high nor low, and is prevented from attaining his goal.

Powerless Gulliver is allowed to survive by the power given by the king.

SWIFT’S VERISIMILITUDE

The novel is a work of fantasy. Verisimilitude is very similar to truth. The story is told in a first person

singular with an eyewitness account. Readers are directly addressed. The background is of the real world Imaginary characters and places with

some real world ‘touch’ Juxtaposition of real and unreal world

The reader may please to observe, that, in the last article of the recovery of my liberty, the emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1724 Lilliputians. Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty's mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians.

By which the reader may conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and exact economy of so great a price.

But at the same time the reader can hardly conceive my astonishment, to behold an island in the air, inhabited by men, who were able (as it should seem) to raise or sink, or put it into progressive motion, as they pleased.

The framework of the novel: a sense of realism and verisimilitude.

Fantastic nature of the tales and ironic layers of The Travels.

Tuveson points out “a constant shuttling back and forth between real and unreal, normal and absurd...”

Swift distinguishes between how man behaves and how  he thinks about the behavior.

Pride: deceives man. Man thinks about himself as rational and virtuous.

voyages 1 and 2 focus on criticism of various aspects of English society at the time, and man within this society, while voyages 3 and 4 are more preoccupied with human nature.

Houyhnhnms – more humanity than humans

Menippean satire is a term employed broadly to refer to prose satires that are complex in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative. The form is named after the Greek cynic Menippus

Jonathan Swift : A Misanthrope or Hater of Mankind in The Gulliver’s Travels

“I hate and detest that animal called man…”

‘human creature not more than six inches high’- Swift’s this presentation of an impossible physical smallness of the human race is desired to show the possible mental smallness.

Common human tendency to keep power by unfair means is presented in Book- 2.

The king of Brobdingnag: “I can not 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.”

The Houyhnhnms are ‘endued with a proportionable degree of reason’ and ‘orderly and rational, acute and judicious’ . The Houyhnhnms  are ‘the Perfection of Nature’ while “the yahoos … were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes”

“Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels describes man as ‘a lump of deformity and disease both in body and mind, smitten with pride’.”

Swift has so much  hatred towards mankind that he makes Gulliver tell- “I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the appellation of Yahoo, an odious animal, for which a had so utter an hatred.”

‘the cursed race of Yahoo’ “When I behold a lump of deformity

and disease both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience.”

Earl of Orrey, Swift’s earliest biographer, who says,

“no man [was] better acquainted [than Swift] with human nature, both in the highest’ and in the lowest scenes of life.”

According to Northrop Frye Menippean satire moves between styles and point of view.

“The novelist sees evils and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect.”

This type of satire is normally very intellectual and embodies an idea, an ideology or a mind-set.

An attack on mental attitudes rather than specific individual.