Summary
Satirist whose Gulliver’s Travels is, in the forty-fourth essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, the most devastating refutation of the consolation that despite all losses “we have really been the winners”: a political satire, not a novel, with an extremely depressing end, in which there are no winners at all (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.496-498).
Details
- In Lilliput Gulliver’s strength is both undeniable — he can entertain the queen’s cavalry on his handkerchief — and a curious weakness: he offends the queen by urinating on her palace to put out a fire, falls victim to a palace plot whose result is either to blind him or to starve him slowly, and flees to neighboring “Blefescu” (as printed) (PDF p.496).
- In Brobdingnag, a tiny humanoid among giants, his patronizing defense of Europe draws the king’s devastating answer allowing no saving grace: “I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.” (quoted, from p.132, PDF p.497).
- Having made Gulliver first too big, then too small, for his context, Swift eliminates the possibility that hidden potential or latent goodness might flourish relative to the environment; in the final voyage Gulliver concludes that the Yahoos — the human race — represent a totally lost cause among the Houyhnhnms, whose assembly issues an Exhortation condemning him to exile and deportation, and he returns to England mortified by his own being (PDF p.497).
- Swift’s implication is that at the summing-up human existence simply defeats all causes, good or bad; in strictness he belongs with Cervantes, Flaubert and Hardy, but is unkinder and less charitable than they are — even Yeats’s “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” is mild and pious by comparison (PDF p.497-498).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Thomas Hardy, Late Style