Page 45 - Gullivers

writing verse, much of it in tandem with his friends. His fame continued to grow and, in the mid-1730s, the Dublin printer, George Faulkner, persuaded him to oversee a new, four-volume edition of his works, to be published in Dublin. When this work appeared in 1735, it was clear that Swift himself had overseen it and the text of Faulkner’s 1735 printing is the one normally used today. Over the years, Faulkner made a fortune from his many printings of Swift’s works.
Satire works on the reader because the world it pictures is so exaggerated
and absurd that, though he recognises elements of his own world in it, the reader finds himself laughing at the absurdities
of the satiric vision. We laugh when we see the tiny Gulliver acting the fool
for the enormous, Brobdingnagian farmer who ‘owns’ him, but we are also aware
of the cruelty of the farmer in almost working Gulliver to death for his own profit. Swift would expect our laugh at the scene to be an uncomfortable one since
it should alert us not only to the existence of human cruelty in our own world but
to the fact that we can so easily deceive ourselves into thinking that others’ cruelty has nothing to do with us. My reading
of Gulliver’s Travels suggests otherwise – that we are all tainted by human cruelty wherever and whenever it occurs, and that we owe it to ourselves to try and prevent it whenever we can. Equally, we may laugh at the petty political chicanery of the Lilliputian court but the behaviour of the courtiers is uncomfortably similar to that of politicians in our own world. Or again, we may find the behaviour of the King of Traldragdubb (forcing those who approach him to lick the floor as they approach
his throne) absurd until we read of some of the excesses of our own world. In each case, though the reader recognises the exaggeration (and laughs at it), his eyes are opened to the absurdities that pride and love of power bring to our own society and civilisation.
It is in the last part of Gulliver’s Travels, the book in which Gulliver visits the
land of the Houyhnhnms, that Swift’s satire on human failings is most wounding.
The horse-like Houyhnhnms, governed by reason rather than by brute emotions, see no difference between Gulliver (our human representative) and the detestable Yahoos whom they treat as slaves. As they see it, Gulliver looks like, sounds like, smells like and behaves like a yahoo –
II. Some Thoughts on Gulliver’s Travels
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