My partial reactions to reading this collection of masterful irony and satire in 1996. Spoilers follow.

I enjoyed reading this cranky, misanthropic satire of superior wit and irony. The adventures in Lilliput didn’t interest me since they seemed the most time-bound, satire-wise of any in the novel; however, I did enjoy Gulliver urinating on the Lilliputian palace to put out a fire. What an image! The disgust Gulliver feels for the physical presence of the giant Brobdingnags foreshadows the disgust many an sf hero was to feel for the human body after altered perceptions done to changes in size or mentation. Swift’s misogyny (typical of early English literature) is particularly present in Gulliver’s hints that Brobdingnagian women use him for sexual stimulation. (Of course this novel stands as one of the great predecessors to all those stories of miniature people.) In the land of those giants, Swift has Gulliver ironically claim that Brobdingnagian charges of injustice, imperialism, venal politics, violence (Swift also attacks England having a standing army), are based in ignorance (they despise “mystery, refinement, and intrigue”), the lack of political science, and their isolation. However, he also admits to avoiding some questions to put England in the best light. I found the last half of the novel the most enjoyable, particularly Book 3. The Laputians (Swfit gives a bogus philology to a word derived from a Spanish profanity) are an intensely silly lot of abstract philosophers. Obsessed with music and geometric shapes – they eat food carved in geometric shapes and the forms of musical instruments – they are incapable of actually using geometry to build fit structures. (Swift was satirizing the current vogue for abstract theories of geometry and the music of the spheres.) The Laputians are so given over to their useless speculations that they have physically deviated from normal humans. One eye is turned inward, one eye outward. They have to be prompted by “flappers” to speak or listen since they are so immersed in theorizing and the collision of the Earth with a comet. Another symptom of the sterileness of their conduct since theories only really advance knowledge if communicated. Interestingly, they are concerned with the sun’s death (predicted by contemporary physics) . The latter idea was ridiculed by Swift but sounds prescient to modern readers. Newton himself said he could not absolutely predict that the Earth would not collide with the sun – another worry of the Laputuans. As with the Brobdingnagian king being horrified at the killing ability of gunpowder, Swift also shows the downside of technology with the Flying Island of the Laputuans used to quell rebellions. The Laputans are also quite fond of modernity (something Swift was opposed to) in the sense of despising old methods of agriculture and architecture. Unfortunately, their substitute methods are woefully inadequate and the country squalid. In the spirit of true revolutionaries (particularly the political ones that were to follow Swift), their failures only spur them on. I especially the bizarre schemes the Laputans work on (a satire of the Royal Academy): to use spiders to produce a spiderweb substitute for silk, a machine to produce books by randomly jumbling their order (and thus saving the trouble of writing books) and then the combinations edited (this could be the possible inspiration for Borges’ “The Library of Babel”), replacing language with physical objects to symbolize things, learning via ingestion of written mathematical formulae. Other Laputan schemes involve taxing men according to their professed number of lovers; women would be taxed according to their opinions of their beauty and fashion sense, detection of treason by examination of stool. Book 3 also features a unique feature of English-language literature: an attack on lawyers. Swift also deals with the old theme of immortality in his Struldbruggs. They are immortals with all the disadvantages and infirmities of old age. The part of the novel that can best be said to be proto-science fiction is Book 4 with its attack on humans delivered explicitly and implicitly by another sentient lifeform – here the Houyhnhums are intelligent horses Swift was quite fond of horses. In their land, humans are bestial “yahoos” (Swift invented the word) while Houyhnhums are morally, politically, and physically perfect – a model to which humans are found sadly wanting. Lawyers come in for a long attack. Women’s desire for luxuries is blamed on what Swift sees as an unhealthy appetite for foreign goods by Irish and English societies. The lifestyle of English nobles is depicted as idle and vapid. Disgust is expressed at the dirty, lewd, disease-ridden lives of the Yahoos. (Gulliver increasingly begins to identify with the Houyhnhums and is horrified when a young female yahoo wants to mate with him.) There is much talk of Yahoo excrement. Houyhnhum sex is purely procreational. Gulliver comes to live the Houyhnhums and is horrified to be expelled from their rational society. He finds his return to the world of man odious. He can barely tolerate the presence of his formerly beloved family much less have sex with his wife. This realistic psychological portrayal of identification by a human with a non-human society and alienation upon his return foreshadows some sf stories.

Other contents are:

“A Tale of a Tub"

“The Battle of the Books"

“The Bickerstaff Papers”

“The Tatler, No. CCXXX"

“The Examiner, No. 14"

“An Argument against Abolishing Christianity"

“The Drapier’s First Letter"

“The Intelligencer, No. IX"

“A Modest Proposal” ( )