Gulliver's Travels

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 It’s a strange truth that sometimes an experience can be marred (or improved) by the opinions you carry before venturing into the voyeuristic. If you think a film is going to be a certain genre and then discover it’s not, your initial excitement is gone and you have to readjust yourself on the spot. I had that very experience with my chosen book for this week: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. 

Written as a satirical travel novel, Gulliver’s Travels chronicles the fantastical adventures of Lemuel Gulliver as he, through various storms and travelling mishaps, becomes stranded in several strange and mysterious countries that the ‘civilised’ world has not yet discovered. First he lands in a country where the people are tiny, and then to a place where there are giants, he visits a floating city, is granted hospitality by necromancers, and spends some time living in a world where horses and not humans are the superior beings. The more Gulliver sees of the world, the more his belief in the superiority of his Country and fellow Englishmen is picked apart and reduced to a barely veiled contempt for his fellow man.

Gulliver’s Travels is one of those classics in literature that has been rewritten and re-imagined beyond count: as film adaptations, a children’s novel, political satire, and even a travel book. My first exposure was, indeed, as a children’s adventure story, and so as I was reading the original, I was completely thrown by the fact that it’s not a children’s novel at all. 

For a while I really struggled with this book, but after I managed to adjust the way in which I was reading it, I was able to properly understand and even enjoy the satirical way in which it’s written. The hero’s journey is probably one of the most interesting in literature, as it sort of flips the normal trajectory on its head and leaves Gulliver enlightened by his travels, but also unable to function back in his home world. Through various adventures and misadventures, Gulliver’s patriotism and love for his fellow man, which is quite strong as it survives the greater portion of the novel, gets eroded over the duration to hatred and contempt and there’s a tasty irony in the fact that he ends his adventures in a seemingly worse state than when he began them.

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Swift’s unabashed debasement of the human species is interesting, and there’s a funny layer of irony in that he uses a lot of toilet humour/horror to illustrate his points – proving that humanity is not as progressively civilised as we believe ourselves to be. While the political aspect of the novel is somewhat dated, the overall satirical social commentary still packs a punch and the fact that all this is happening against a fantastical backdrop really makes the book stand out as a classic. 

Author: Jonathan Swift, 1726

Published: Benjamin Motte Jr. (London), 1726. Full titled: Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver.