The Trauma of Absurdity in Brobdingnag
Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Chapters 1 and 2
Welcome back to our Gulliver’s Travels Reading Challenge. Over the last couple of weeks, we followed Gulliver to Lilliput, and now we sail with him to Brobdingnag.
While there are signs of Gulliver's limited imagination during his voyage to Lilliput, the voyage to Brobdingnag accelerates his descent into madness and, eventually, into misanthropy. Some critics are disinclined to analyze Gulliver's psychology, considering it anachronistic, but Swift clearly charts his character's mental decline, though his aim in doing so is entirely satirical. The result is that by the end of Part 2, Gulliver is having serious difficulties negotiating with reality, and we are placed in the uncomfortable position (as twenty-first-century readers) of laughing at someone who is clearly unwell. We may excuse ourselves, however, since the fantastical nature of Gulliver's adventures, along with Swift's ironic mode make it so that our laughter is akin to our response to, say, the sufferings of Looney Tunes's Coyote in his relentless pursuit of the Roadrunner.
Gulliver's sufferings in Brobdingnag are similarly ridiculous—the trauma of absurdity.
But he seems to be going off the rails even before he finds himself in the land of giants. After all, his relief to be back in England after his Lilliputian adventure lasts only two months before he once again sets off abroad. And this time his description of the sea voyage quickly devolves into a tangled web of nautical jargon, completely indecipherable to any readers who are not sailors themselves.
What is Swift doing here? The most obvious answer is that he is satirizing such nautical language that could be found in travel narratives of the time. However, he is also, to a greater extent in than in the first voyage, framing Gulliver as someone who cannot imagine anyone with a perspective that differs from his own—which is all the more ridiculous, considering the singularity of his experiences. Perhaps it is a self-defense mechanism—an ultimately futile effort to maintain his sanity, despite being forced to shift his perspective radically multiple times.
This shift in perspective is the primary focus of these opening chapters in Brobdingnag, and the most apparent difference in this shift from his time in Lilliput is the continuously life-threatening sequence of events resulting from his relative tininess. While the residents of Brobdingnag are, for the most part, more reasonable and gentle than the Lilliputians, Gulliver finds himself at the mercy of a giant scythe, the mouth of a monstrous baby, an elephant-sized monkey, a resentful, thirty-foot-tall "dwarf," along with myriad other dangers. All of these situations are absurd, and they are all traumatic—which makes it possible for us to laugh at Gulliver’s trauma, despite (or perhaps because of) our tendency to sympathize with the traumatized.
It also quickly becomes clear that while Brobdingnagians’ temperament, compared to the Lilliputians', is inversely proportional to their size, Gulliver is disgusted by their potent body odor, as well as the apparent ugliness of their skin (to Gulliver's microscope-like eyes) and deafened by their loud voices. Once again, Swift never lets us forget that we are bodies, with all of the physical reality that entails. When faced with the enormous, exposed breast of a wet nurse, for example, Gulliver reflects "upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass." He also thinks back to his time in Lilliput, retrospectively self-conscious of how he must have appeared to the residents of that tiny country.
In Brobdingnag, on the other hand, Gulliver becomes a sort of pet, as throughout his sojourn there he is compared to animals and looked after by his doting superiors, especially by Glumdalclitch, his "little nurse," who is "only" forty feet tall.
And, indeed, Gulliver in this portion of his travels may remind us of the chihuahua who, in order to make up for his diminutive size, carries himself with overblown pride and bluster, growling at a Doberman and snapping at a Great Dane—though his master may pick him up and carry him off at any moment.
This pride will carry over into the following chapters, as we will see Gulliver taking offense when the Brobdingnagian king laughs at his description of English political and military pretensions.
And we are back to where we began last week, with the deflating of the overblown and the self-important. Next time, we will consider other ways in which the satirical mode shifts from Lilliput to Brobdingnag, as Swift launches his attack against English politics and militarism.
Thanks for reading, from my giant, fancy internet typewriter to yours.
