Gulliver's Eighteenth-Century iPhone

The Jonathan Swift Reading Challenge

Welcome to our read-through of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Over the last couple of weeks, we have discussed the front-matter to the 1735 edition in this post, and we have briefly covered Swift's biography in this post. Today, we will join Gulliver for the first of his four journeys. We will concentrate on the crucial first two chapters.

Chapter 1: my good master, Mr. Bates

From the first couple of paragraphs, the reader is given signals that Gulliver is both Swift and not Swift: certain biographical details align, like Gulliver's status as a third son and his going to college at the age of 14. But, of course, the vocation is different (since Swift was not a physician). But more subtly, Swift creates some ironic distance between author and character through the first-person narrator, who sometimes seems a bit clueless.

For example over the course of the first two paragraphs, Gulliver refers multiple times to Mr. James Bates, to whom he is apprenticed as a young man. He is referred to, successively, as "Mr. James Bates," "Mr. Bates," "my good master, Mr. Bates," and "Mr. Bates, my master." Finally, at the beginning of the third paragraph, he calls him "my good master Bates." Gulliver is apparently unaware that he has made generations of snotty schoolchildren giggle, but Swift certainly knows what he is doing.

Little word games like this are, of course, decipherable to the close reader; there is, however, a great deal of satirical allusiveness throughout the book that is either veiled or topical (or both), much of which will elude the twenty-first-century reader. For example, there are aspects of this first chapter that suggest a parody of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which had caused a sensation upon its publication in 1719. The reference to Gulliver's pecuniary difficulties shortly after his marriage and acquisition of the dowry seems to be a shot at Defoe, who infamously married an heiress, spent all of her money, and then went to prison for debt. Defoe was a low-church dissenter and a Whig—and so the object of Swift's contempt.

The good thing about these subtle references is that they are not necessary for the reader to grasp the narrative or for an understanding of its main satirical thrust. For example, it is surely not a coincidence that Gulliver's first shipwreck occurs on the fifth of November, the date of the discovery of Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot in 1605, but the reader need not be aware of this in order to appreciate the adventure that follows—beginning with the iconic scene of Gulliver tied to the ground by the Lilliputians that follows.

One aspect of this scene that is worth noting is that Swift's prose style does not change as we move from the realistic to the fantastical; there is no equivalent to the move from black-and-white to color in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. Gulliver remains consistent in his bland reporting of the "facts" as they occurred. An effect of this consistency is that it normalizes many of the ridiculous situations that follow, as well as Gulliver's own naïveté.

Actual photo of the contents of Gulliver’s pockets, as inventoried by the Lilliputians. Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash

Chapter 2: that uneasy load

In addition to Gulliver's cluelessness, there is his preoccupation with bodily functions that first surfaces in these opening chapters—from his copious urination (to the astonishment of the Lilliputians) to his meticulous description of his means of defecation, complete with the workers assigned to carry away his excrement in wheelbarrows—surely the worst job in Lilliput. Furthermore, he takes pains to explain his interest in relating this information:

I would not have dwelt so long upon such a circumstance, that perhaps at first sight may appear not very momentous; if I had not thought it necessary to justify my character in the point of cleanliness to the world; which I am told, some of my maligners have been pleased, upon this and other occasions, to call in question.

In order to explain how clean he is, he tells us in great detail his method of defecation—of how he comes to discharge his "body of that uneasy load." This is an early example of how Gulliver, through the course of the narrative, becomes more and more the primary object of satire himself, though in this first voyage, the Lilliputians are horrendous enough to overshadow any of his eccentricities. This is also another example of how Gulliver both is and is not Swift. He is not self-aware like his creator, but the passage is clear reference to criticism of the scatological nature of much of Swift's work.

Swift never lets us forget that we are bodies, that we eat, drink, fart, piss, and shit every day, that no amount of pretension or abstraction can alter this. In his notorious poem "The Lady's Dressing Room," for example, the lovestruck young Strephon visits the vacant room of the fair Celia, only to discover what is left behind after she makes herself beautiful:

So things, which must not be expressed, 
When plumped into the reeking chest, 
Send up an excremental smell 
To taint the parts from whence they fell. 
The petticoats and gown perfume, 
Which waft a stink round every room. 
Thus finishing his grand survey, 
Disgusted Strephon stole away 
Repeating in his amorous fits, 
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

This constant awareness of our bodily nature is in contrast to Gulliver's apparent inability to recognize that his own bodily powers as a towering giant should transcend his reflexive respect for authority—as he, for example, prostrates himself before the six-inch Emperor of Lilliput to beg for his freedom. (In class I act this out by dropping to my knees before a whiteboard marker.)

This chapter also includes the Lilliputian inventory of the contents of Gulliver's pockets, including his brace of pistols. Most interesting is his pocket watch, which they cannot make out at all. While wearable watches had been in use for more than a century, the pocket watch as we know it came into fashion after the court of Charles II introduced waistcoats to the English aristocracy in the 1670s. What is extraordinary to the modern reader, however, is the resonance of the description in our own age:

He put this engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water-mill. And we conjecture it is either some unknown animal or a god that he worships: but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us (if we understood him right, for expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

This is an eighteenth-century iPhone.

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We will pick it up again next week, as the political and religious satire becomes more intense. Meanwhile, in the comments, let us know if you have read this before, and how attuned you have been to Swift's satire. Did you read it as a child as an amusing adventure, or did you read every footnote in order to catch the topical references?

And do you agree with my assessment that Swift is a writer for our time, despite the fact that Gulliver's Travels was first published three centuries ago?

Some early eighteenth-century listening

To accompany your reading this week, I recommend this exquisite record of Bach’s Orchestral Suites by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. Here are links to the album:

Bach’s Orchestral Suites on Apple Music

Bach’s Orchestral Suites on Spotify

Here is a rough reading schedule:

• Part One (Lilliput): September 11th and 18th

• Part Two (Brobdingnag): September 25th and October 2nd

• Part Three (Laputa, etc.): October 9th and 16th

• Part Four (the Houyhnhnms): October 23rd and 30th

Along the way, I will mention other, shorter texts that you might check out, and I'll be commenting specifically on "A Modest Proposal" in the final couple of weeks of our reading. Also, I may be posting a few little bonus posts along with the main installments.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet pocket watch to yours.

Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash