Fire in the Palace!

*Gulliver's Travels* Reading Challenge, Lilliput continued

Chapter 3: Shrinkage

Last week, many of us watched with relish as an overblown, self-aggrandizing, mendacious con man was cut down to size, was shown for what he really was. The recent New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt, entitled "Shrinkage," reminds us of a long satirical tradition of the diminishment of such figures—for example, an early-nineteenth-century cartoon by James Gillray, featured on the cover of the Oxford World Classics edition of Gulliver's Travels, which shows George III as the King of Brobdingnag and Napoleon as Gulliver.

In order to attain his "freedom" from captivity by the Lilliputians, Gulliver must swear to the "articles and constitutions" put to him by the Emperor. In order to do this he must pledge his oath in the Lilliputian way, "which was to hold my right foot in my left hand, to place the middle finger of my right hand on the crown of my head, and my thumb on the tip of my right ear." (I think this is a yoga pose). In class, I tell students that in order to feel the comic effect of this book, one must often form a mental picture of scenes that Gulliver describes in the most bland, deadpan prose. Only then can one appreciate the absurdity. So try this pose at home! Of course, the situation is already ridiculous, as we see Gulliver beg for his liberty on his knees before the six-inch emperor.

Much like our presidential-candidate-con-man, the Emperor, despite his smallness, must build himself up in the most hyperbolic terms possible. The "articles and constitutions" to which Gulliver must swear open with this:

GOLBASTO MOMAREN EVLAME GURDILO SHEFIN MULLY ULLY GUE, most Mighty Emperor of Lilliput, Delight and Terror of the Universe, whose Dominions extend five Thousand Blustrugs, (about twelve Miles in Circumference) to the Extremities of the Globe: Monarch of all Monarchs: Taller than the Sons of Men; whose Feet press down to the Center, and whose Head strikes agains the Sun: At whose Nod the Princes of the Earth shake their Knees; pleasant as the Spring, comfortable as the Summer, fruitful as Autumn, dreadful as Winter.

The pretensions of the Emperor are undercut by Gulliver's parenthetical translation of "five Thousand Blustrugs" to "about twelve Miles in Circumference." Of course, perspective makes all the difference, and size is relative. As the above cartoon demonstrates, when you look at a tiny figure up close through a telescope, they will appear monstrous.

In the decades before the publication of GT, the proliferation of the new technologies of the microscope and the telescope, along with their applications by members of the Royal Society had destabilized the universality of the perspective of the naked eye: there are huge things in the universe that appear small because they are far away, and there are tiny things that may appear large with magnification—optical as well as rhetorical. I would argue that these new technologies made a text like Gulliver's Travels possible because they reset the potential perspectives of the imagination.

Chapter 4: Big Endians and Little Endians

Swift challenges perspective in other ways as well—for example, through defamiliarizing religious practices. This chapter demonstrates that culturally specific rituals appear bizarre to outsiders, particularly when great conflicts arise from apparently trivial differences in practice or belief. Taken to its logical extreme, the choice of breaking an egg at its little end or its big end may lead to persecutions, executions, wars. The Catholic and Protestant parallels in this account are fairly obvious for anyone with a knowledge of the history of the Reformation, but one need not be a scholar to understand the satirical method here: the most minute and seemingly irrelevant differences may cause the most devastating conflicts.

High heels or low heels? The big end or the little end? Who cares? The Lilliputians certainly do.

But Swift is also laying groundwork here for Brobdingnag and the land of the Houyhnhnms, as it will become clear that from an outsider's perspective, England's religious and political disputes may appear ridiculous and irrelevant.

Chapter 5: Gulliver's Service to the Emperor

Altered perspectives once again figure in this chapter as an average-sized Englishman serves as the ultimate Lilliputian "weapon of mass destruction" by single-handedly absconding with the enemy naval fleet of Blefusu (a clear stand-in for France, both in its geographical proximity and its religious differences). But the most memorable (and grotesque) incident here is Gulliver putting out the fire in the Imperial palace "by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished."

Once again, we have a sequence of outrageous mental images related in Gulliver's bland prose—not only his urinating on the flames, but also the Lilliputians supplying him with thimble-sized barrels of water in order to fight the fire. This service proves to be Gulliver's downfall, since it is a crime punishable by death to "make water" in the palace. (What an inconvenient law!)

Chapter 6: Lilliputian Culture

This law against urinating in the palace is not the only strange Lilliputian custom: they bury their dead upside-down; they consider ingratitude a capital crime; and their iconic image of "Justice" holds a "bag of gold open in her right hand, and a sword sheathed in her left." Each of these cultural curiosities resonates with some aspect of English or European society.

The burial practice is justified by the belief that at the apocalypse, the world will turn upside down, and the dead will be resurrected right-side up—a superstition that to Swift was no stranger than those of the Catholics on the one hand and the dissenting Protestants on the other. The abhorrence of ingratitude resonates with the sentiments of the landed aristocracy in England and Ireland, which held that they should be generous to the peasantry, but also that they should receive gratitude (and labor) in return—an attitude that aimed to preserve the stratified social structure. And the notion that justice both rewards and punishes (and which is all-seeing rather than blind) ensures a system that invites bribery, corruption, and the paranoid deployment of power.

Though most of this chapter focuses on large-scale, societal satire, it concludes with one of the most personal episodes for Swift, as Gulliver is suspected of having an affair with "an excellent lady”—which may be a veiled reference to Swift’s long connection to Stella. (See this post for more on Stella.) Gulliver's insistence that he and the lady were never alone together ignores the practical improbability of a six-foot-tall man being involved sexually with a six-inch-tall woman—though in Brobdingnag, Swift will encourage the reader to imagine a similar sexual interaction with the male and female roles inverted. Once again, Gulliver is more concerned with deference to social custom than he is with physical realities.

Chapters 7: Escape from Lilliput

The reader by this point has a growing suspicion that the Lilliputians' monstrousness is inversely proportional to their size, and the revelation of the conspiracy against Gulliver confirms this, as the court debates whether to execute him for his supposed crimes (like pissing out the fire in the palace) or to be "merciful" and simply blind him, force him into slavery, and slowly starve him to death. Gulliver's response to this is striking: his older, more experienced self, who is writing this account, would have gladly acquiesced to such punishment, since he has since seen enough of the world to consider this sentence relatively mild, but "hurried on by the precipitancy of youth," he escapes to Blefuscu.

Chapter 8: Revolutionizing the Wool Industry (or perhaps not)

When I was a teenager, I lived in the UK for a year. Upon my return to the States, I clearly remember being surprised by the size of the cars and suburban houses, the traffic flowing in the wrong direction, and the enormous portions in restaurants. Within a week or so, however, my perspective became American once again.

Gulliver goes through something similar upon each return to England from his journeys abroad, though his lack of imagination hinders his readjustment. My favorite example of this is his expectation that by bringing tiny Lilliputian sheep to England, he will revolutionize the wool trade "by the fineness of the fleeces." He fails to realize, of course, that the tiny amount of wool that his sheep will produce could not have any effect on the industry, except perhaps to make clothing for dolls.

With each journey, as we will see, Gulliver's grasp of reality will become more tenuous.

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Next week, we are off to Brobdingnag. Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Rafaela Biazi on Unsplash