Page 78 - Gullivers

J.G. Thomson
by Alexander King’s images in shades of black, grey brown and sepia look as if they belong in a graphic novel. The coarser aspects of the story are emphasised: Gulliver is shown squatting behind a wall to relieve himself while his waste is carried off in wheelbarrows by bewigged servants, the child about to devour Gulliver is terrifying and his Yahoos are horrific. All
of these editions, and others, point up the adult potential that this story still holds, and cause regret that now it is a tale often relegated to the junior shelves of book shops and libraries.
J.J. Grandville’s 1838 edition presents an imaginative capturing of the intentions of Swift that still has the power to amaze and even shock. Born Jean Ignace-Isadore Gérard in Nancy in 1803; at the age
of 20 he went to Paris where he quickly established a reputation as a political cartoonist and lithographer; he is also noted for his fine lines and the quality
of the wood engravings made by highly skilled craftsmen from his drawings. Stringent censorship laws, however, turned him away from political satire and towards the less risky work of an illustrator of classic texts. In 1838 his illustrated version of Fables de La Fontaine was published and
quickly followed in the same year by
Voyages de Gulliver dans les Contrées Lointaines. In some scenes Grandville gives relatively literal interpretations of Swift’s narrative, especially in the earlier voyages, but elsewhere his fascination with
the bizarre and phantasmagoric reign supreme. This is most evident in his depiction of the Yahoos, described by Denis Donoghue in his foreword to
a 1988 reissue of the Grandville volume, as ‘appalling’. The ‘Rudiments of Lewdness, Coquetry, Censure and Scandal’ displayed by female Yahoos are given full reign;
most notably lewdness is to the fore when a Yahoo female displays her desire for Gulliver. Donoghue comments that ‘he [Grandville] is more disconcertingly revealed in drawings which show
nature not confounded so much as imperturbably grotesque’, and quotes Baudelaire ‘when I step into the
work of Grandville some sort of disquiet takes hold of me’. Grandville’s skill as
an artist is showcased too in the many vignettes and visual asides that embellish his pages, but it is undoubtedly in his grasp of Swift’s black humour that he excels;William Makepeace Thackeray, also an illustrator, called Grandville ‘the Swift
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