Study Guide/Discussion: Swift's Satire and Gulliver’s Travels

 Gulliver’s Travels is a work of satire, a genre of literature that simultaneously creates humor and critiques its society.  The satirist diminishes a revered thing by making it appear ridiculous, thus assuming a position of superiority to that revered thing — a position that the reader can usually share. 

 In DIRECT or FORMAL satire, the writer speaks directly to the reader, and the work’s persona is a carefully constructed character.  The classical inventors of the form were Horace (65-8 BC) and Juvenal (60-140 AD).  Both poets wrote verse satires that were extremely regular in form, though they ranged widely in topic.  The two styles differ chiefly in tone.

Horatian satire is:  tolerant, witty, wise and self-effacing, general

Juvenalian satire is: angry, caustic, resentful, personal

 In INDIRECT or NARRATIVE satire, characters make themselves ridiculous by their own actions — there is no need for a narrator to speak directly to the reader.  This type of satire can, of course, can be Horatian or Juvenalian in mood, though not usually in form.  Gulliver’s Travels offers a combination of Direct and Indirect satire forms, but Swift is one of the most famous English practitioners of Juvenalian satire in terms of his tone.  We’ll compare this tone to the more Horatian tone of Alexander Pope later.   

Link here to an excellent Gulliver's Travels website.

SPARKNOTES GUIDE TO "A MODEST PROPOSAL"

SPARKNOTES GUIDE TO GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

A USEFUL SET OF DEFINITIONS OF SATIRE

A few things to remember about Gulliver’s Travels:

Swift is satirizing (among other things) the conventions of the travel narrative — as well as the tendency of many readers to believe every word of the accounts they were reading.  The first three books of GT describe, in first person, the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who gets shipwrecked frequently on strange islands that are, in various ways, topsy-turvy reflections of England. 

·         His first voyage is to Lilliput, a land of tiny people (relative to Gulliver) whose petty, minutiae-obsessed ways poke fun at similar pettiness in English culture.  We learn that Gulliver is very good at recording details such as foreign customs, measurements and vocabulary, but very poor at putting this information into any useful perspective.

·         The 2^nd voyage, to Brobdingnag, an island of giants, satirizes England’s appetite for excess (in food, drink, and sex), as well as its over-inflated, grandiose feelings of self-importance. 

·         The 3^rd voyage, to the floating island of Laputa, populated by mad scientists and loony academics, satirizes the English craze for the latest technologies and “scientific” discoveries – and also satirizes the belief that the best solution for any problem is a technological one. 

·         The 4^th and final voyage, to the land of the Houyhnhnms  (pronounced “Hwinn-ems”), is the most complex, because Gulliver loses what little objectivity he ever possessed and becomes convinced that the godlike, rational horses that populate the island are indeed superior beings, and that the despicable, apelike Yahoos are indistinguishable from humans.  He becomes horribly confused as to which group he should identify himself with.

Note:  Gulliver’s name is based on the same root word as “gullible.”  Always question whether we are meant to share his opinions about what he sees.

 Swift particularly satirizes the trend in travel narrative for the narrators of such voyages to claim that they are impartial observers, purely empirical in their reasoning (i.e., their knowledge was supposedly based on observation alone).  The reality is that they often imposed their own cultural, political, and religious assumptions on what they observed. 

In Voyage IV, the Houyhnhnms, in their insistance on absolute rationality in all their thinking, satirize certain philosophical movements (such as Descartes) that assert that all problems can be solved by the use of pure reason — and that human emotion is a dangerous distraction.  As you read, ask yourself: would you want to live in the world of the Houyhnhnms?  Do you agree with their way of solving problems and engineering a society?

In a now classic essay, "Gulliver's Fourth Voyage: 'Hard' and 'Soft' Schools of Interpretation" (Quick Springs of Sense: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century, vol. 18, ed. Larry S. Champion; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1974), James L. Clifford describes what he sees as a struggle between two approaches to the last book of Gulliver's Travels.

"By 'hard' I mean an interpretation which stresses the shock and difficulty of the work, with almost tragic over-tones, while by 'soft' I mean the tendency to find comic passages and compromise solutions." Joseph F. Sena develops the contrast this way: for the "hard" school, "The Houyhnhnms are a norm or standard for conduct; Swift provides uncompromising standards of behavior to his reader; the ending of [the book] is poignant, even tragic"; for the "soft" school, "the Houyhnhnms serve a largely ironic function; Swift does not provide absolute standards; the ending of [the book] tends to be comic, with Swift directing laughter at both Gulliver and the reader" (in Approaches to Teaching Swift's Gulliver's Travels [NY: MLA, 1988]).
For Clifford, particular questions which seem crucial may be largely classified in four specific categories:
1. the meaning of the Yahoos,
2. the meaning of the Houyhnhnms,
3. the significance of Captain Mendez, and
4. the interpretation of the ending.

He goes on to exemplify the problems by listing a few explications that have been offered for the Houyhnhnms:
that they represent --
1. a vision of pre-lapsarian perfection, unattainable by man
2. an unattainable ideal which man should nevertheless strive to reach
3. an ideal limited by Swift's view of the nature of man
4. not an ideal objective, but an insulting impossibility
5. mere absence of vice
6. one of the two opposing sides of man's nature
7. pure reason, but not ideal
8. cold, inhuman beings, lacking Christian benevolence
9. deistic rationalism, which Swift hated
10. Bolingbroke (Earl of Oxford) and the rationalistic thinkers of his type (Swift named one of his horses "Bolingbroke")
11. merely rhetorical devides through which to attack man's pride in thinking himself better than animals
12. Trojan horses designed to betray credulous mankind
13. a narrative device in the classical tradition of satire...

http://virtual.park.uga.edu/%7E232/gulltrav.hardsoft.html

Study Questions: Gulliver’s Travels, Book Four

 1.  How does Gulliver's experience with the Houyhnhms comment on the Enlightenment debate as to whether man is a rational or sensible creature?  In other words, are humans -- and should humans be -- governed by their heads or their hearts?

 2.  Does Swift mean the Houyhnhms to represent an opposing, inhuman extreme of human behavior (as we assume he means the Yahoos to be), or does he offer them as an ideal to be admired and imitated?

 3.  Think about the implications of "the thing which is not."  How does Gulliver understand this phrase?  How do the Houyhnhms?  How does Swift?  And how are we, as readers of Swift's fictional work, meant to feel about the human ability to say "the thing which is not"?

 4.  What quality is Pedro de Mendez meant to represent to us?

Questions to ponder:

Spring 2004:  What kind of critique of empirical knowledge (i.e,. learning through experience rather than authority) might Swift be making in Voyage 4 of Gulliver's Travels?  Can you compare such a critique to the one(s) in Sir Gawain, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, Dr. Faustus, and Oroonoko?

Spring 2003:  Gulliver clearly venerates the Houyhnhnms, but, as in More’s Utopia, their land’s laws, while based on pure reason and logic, have some drawbacks when applied to human values and needs. Do you think, based on the example of the Houyhnhnms, that a society based solely on reason would be a good one?  Why or why not?   Offer at least one example from the text to support your argument.