Page 37 - Gullivers

I do not know if any radio-show guest has ever selected Gulliver’s Travels as the one book he or she would choose to take to a desert island, but it would certainly be my choice. Not only is Gulliver’s Travels a highly entertaining tale, ideal reading-matter for those long days lying in the shade of an obliging palm-tree, but it is also a book with a serious message about human pride and self-delusion – a book which, every time I re-read it, seems to grow in significance. The proper title of the work is not Gulliver’s Travels at all, of course, but Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in four parts by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships. This full title gives us a potted biography of the supposed author and indicates that there are four separate voyages. As we leaf through the book, we find that each of the four parts has a separate map to accompany it, a map which indicates previously undiscovered lands not far from places we do know exist – Japan, for instance. And, if we should have any doubts about the authenticity of the whole work as we begin to read the text, we are likely to find that our copy contains a letter from a Richard Sympson to the reader assuring him that Lemuel Gulliver is a real
man, his old and ‘intimate friend’: so it all seems to be genuine. And this is part of the point; the anonymous author has lured us into what seems to be a simple travel tale – which makes it all the more surprising and even shocking for us to discover that the book in our hands is not a genuine travel tale at all. In fact, as we soon discover, it is a thoroughly mixed sort of a book – part fictional adventure tale, part children’s story, part morality tale, part satirical assault on man’s pride, part sombre reflection of the horrors of the world. We realise we have been duped, but we continue reading our way into
the text, nonetheless, gradually becoming more and more fully involved and
more and more fascinated by what we read; in the end we realise that we are becoming part of the process of the book as we begin to react to Gulliver’s singular views of the strange creatures he encounters and to the decidedly negative opinions these strange creatures have
of him. This is a book with a ‘message’; we discover that, if we are prepared to become creatively involved in the book, to respond to its outrageous exaggerations
– its distorted perspectives – that very involvement will bring us beyond the book
II. Some Thoughts on Gulliver’s Travels
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