Gulliver's Travels: The Real Thing

Jonathan Swift, in the English-speaking world, at least, is synonymous with barbed, bitter satire. Perhaps it is partly the circumstances of history -- Swift's time is no longer a living reality -- and partly the result of a dumbed-down, in-your-face contemporary culture -- so many are so willing to provide ready answers that we have largely lost the habit of reading between lines -- that the satire of Gulliver's Travels can be elusive. Reading between the lines, particularly, is something I have to remind myself to do -- I practice on the daily papers, these days, which itself seems very Swiftian.

This edition of Swift's masterpiece is another in the series of Barnes & Noble Classics. A quick glance at the entries under "The World of Jonathan Swift" helps to fix the context: Swift was on familiar terms with Alexander Pope, John Gay, the Earl of Oxford, Sir William Temple. During Swift's adult life, Catholic James II was forced to abdicate in favor of Protestant William and Mary, Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, Scotland and England became legally one country, Europe found itself embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession, George I succeeded to the throne of England, and Louis XIV was the great threat to English security. It was quite a busy time, and a time that is, to us, sometimes very strange.

Michael Seidel's Introduction begins with Swift's alterations to the original 1726 text of the "Travels." The effect of these changes -- three prefatory documents included in the 1735 edition, which this one reproduces -- is to establish that Lemuel Gulliver was mad when he wrote the original manuscript. Seidel also discusses the specifics of Swift's satire, the personalities and events that were the direct impulses for Swift's commentary, but makes the important point that Swift's focus on the psychology of the various lands Gulliver visited, and of Gulliver himself, far transcends any specifics of time or place. On the whole, I found Seidel's comments useful, although I think there is perhaps too much emphasis on Gulliver's madness as an explanation for his shifts in character -- shifts that I barely noticed -- there are gaps between the voyages, and over time, people do change..

One key thing to remember about reading Jonathan Swift, in my mind, at least, is that, while the stories and Gulliver's commentaries are fairly straightforward, and we know that in some cases Swift had very definite ideas about things, from this vantage I think that it is valuable to us as readers not to take anything at face value, so that the Houyhnhnms, for example, while extolled as a perfectly rational and reasonable culture, can also become a parody in their own right.

For a modern reader, there are portions that are heavy going -- the Houyhnhnms, in particular, I found not only distastefully arrogant and smug, but rather boring. In this edition, Seidel's endnotes are informative, and help one's understanding of the immediate context of Swift's book. Once again, though, I found the footnotes distracting, although there are not nearly so many of them as in other books in the series. The section of works inspired by Gulliver's Travels, in this case, misses the mark a little, and I would have liked to have seen more of a discussion of the influence of Swift's work on satire in general; "Swiftian satire" is so common a reference that such a discussion seems amply justified to me. With all the notes and addenda, of course, this edition is tailor-made for classroom use or for reading groups.

I can't say that I'm crazy about Gulliver's Travels, but I'm certainly glad I finally took the time to read it, if for no other reason than I now know exactly what I'm saying when I refer to "Swiftian satire."