Sue Bennett
English Department
New Mexico Junior College
Samuel Holt Monk once called Gulliver's Travels a "complex book" (281). Indeed, few works of literature have inspired such diversity of critical opinion over such a long period of time. Critics have approached this seemingly straightforward travelogue using political science, mathematics, allegory, history, geography, biography, scatology, epistemology, pathology, mythology, theology, biology, morphology, and psychology.1 What is it about Gulliver's Travels that inspires so many readers to become incensed and involved, committed to finding a final answer to the enigmatic perplexities posed by this simple ship's captain concerning his four voyages?
Older, more traditional forms of criticism especially the expository style of the New Critics often set out to instruct the reader. For example, in 1945, Samuel Kliger used a new critical approach to explain that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics were limited in their views because they judged the degree of Swift's misanthropy "in accordance with the view of human nature that already held" (401).2 As Liz Bellamy explains, the standard criticism of Gulliver's Travels during the eighteenth century connected Gulliver with Swift:
The portrayal of the Houyhnhnms was regarded as an insult to humanity, and since Gulliver's opinions were identified with the views of his creator, Swift was increasingly represented as a moody misanthrope, driven to write by his hatred of the moral and physical character of mankind. (13)
Likewise, William Makepeace Thackeray's comments are representative o f many nineteenth-century critics:
. . . as for the moral [of Book IV], I think it horrible, shameful,
humanly, blasphemous; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say
we should hoot him.
. . . a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against
mankind tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of
manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious,
raging, obscene.
(qtd. in Greenberg vii)
However, Kliger insists that "the real question is not whether Swift is a misanthrope, but whether Gulliver is a misanthrope; in the latter case," according to Kliger, "the novel furnishes its own answers to the question" (402). In fact, Gulliver's misanthropy permeates Book IV. For example, when he first boards Captain Mendez' ship, he attempts "to leap into the Sea, and swim for [his] Life, rather than continue among Yahoos " (IV.xi.287).3 Furthermore, he admits that the sight of his wife and family fill him "only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt" and that the thought of being a parent spikes him "with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror" (IV.xi.289). My inquiry, though, does not focus on Gulliver's state of mind or even Swift's state of mind, but instead on the reader's state of mind during the act of reading Gulliver's Travels. After all, Swift has created an over determined text with multiple layers of meaning. Consequently, as readers follow the instructions given in the text, they create meaning for themselves by constantly producing, modifying, and correcting their understanding of the signified as they move from book to book. This dialectical relationship between text and reader depends upon the tension between the role offered by the text and the real reader's own attitudes, what Wolfgang Iser calls "re-creative dialectics" (ix-x). Although the individual experiences of each reader may be different, the structure that gives rise to these attitudes remains constant and demands that each reader "adopt an attitude," as Iser explains it, and this will place him or her into a "prearranged position in relation to the text" (217). I believe that this dyadic interaction merits analysis.
In his book, The Act of Reading, Iser views the text as extending beyond referential meaning; thus, the meaning of any one text cannot be narrowly defined, but rather meaning encompasses a whole spectrum of realizations. However, this spectrum is controlled by the structure of the text. As a result, readers are manipulated by what is concealed and what is revealed. Since Swift presents a constantly moving referential field as Gulliver travels from one country to another, the reader must also constantly reevaluate, reconsider, and reform previously formed concepts, thereby creating new gestalten. As readers become progressively more confused, puzzled, and disoriented, Swift encourages them to make choices, to create meaning, and to adopt new attitudes. The signs in the text transcend their own signifying when the reader produces a reality not actually present in the text itself. I wish to examine Books I, II, and IV of Gulliver's Travels, analyzing the effects on the reader of structural components such as indeterminacy, entrapment, negation, and tension.
First, readers are only interested and involved in the search for meaning if the meaning is not clear to begin with; therefore, the more implicit the meaning, the more challenging the search. The quest for meaning in Gulliver's Travels becomes quite complicated when we consider the variety of conflicting textual signals. For example, Swift attempts to establish some credibility for his narrator by including a distinguished-looking portrait of Capt. Gulliver and a note from Sympson claiming that Gulliver "was so distinguished for his Veracity, that it became a Sort of Proverb among his Neighbors at Redriff, when any one affirmed a Thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it" (9). In addition, the text contains a Table of Contents which suggests organization and progression (11-16), illustrated maps for each of the four episodes, and numerous translations.
However, the text is also accompanied by a personal letter from Gulliver himself in which he accuses Cousin Sympson of publishing "a very loose and uncorrect [sic] Account" of these travels (5). In fact, Sympson admits that he has "made bold to strike out innumerable Passages" in order to "fit the Work as much as possible to the general Capacity of Readers" (9-10). Furthermore, we learn to distrust both Gulliver's rational judgment his mathematical equations often do not add up (Merrill 620-25) as well as his emotional judgments. For example, Gulliver seems unable to discern much difference between the Yahoos who greet him by shitting on his head (IV.1.224) and the "Yahoo" Captain Mendez who treats Gulliver with so much courtesy and generosity (IV.xi.286).5 In other words, the book begins with indeterminacies and, rather than decreasing, Swift relentlessly increases the reader's confusion and disorientation.
Structurally, this indeterminacy revolves around geographic displacement. Although Gulliver attempts in each book to describe his location, the descriptions often leave us bewildered. In each book he is always thrown off course, and he takes his readers along with him. In addition, the forces that cause him to lose his way become increasingly more violent: first by shipwreck, next by abandonment, then by piracy, and finally by mutiny. Gulliver seems to be more and more disoriented with each voyage. For example, Gulliver has a vague idea of his geographic position when he reaches Lilliput and is fairly certain the islands are located "North-west of Van Diemen's Land" (I.i.20).6
In Book II, nonetheless, Gulliver claims that his ship is carried 500 leagues off course, somewhere east of the "Molucca Islands" and south of "Tartary"; even the "oldest Sailor on Board could not tell in what part of the World" they were (II.i.83-84). Similarly, Balnibarbi is depicted on the map for Book III as being in "parts Unknown" (152), somewhere to the east of Japan (III.xi.215). Finally, the journey to Houyhnhnmland is steeped in absolute secrecy and confusion because Gulliver is held prisoner in the cabin for many weeks, unable to observe what course the ship took. Because the mutineers had spoken of continuing to Madagascar, Gulliver assumes that Houyhnhnmland is somewhere south of the Cape of Good Hope (IV.xi.283).
Of course, geographic displacement is only the beginning of Swift's pattern of indeterminacy. He also uses point of view to create confusion. Since Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels in first person, Gulliver is our primary source of information. As a result, when he becomes threatened or thrown off balance, so do we. The only way to work out of that confusion, is to create meaning that is not in the text. Yet, trying to establish an absolute determinacy of a literary text is futile because as Iser points out "fictional texts constitute their own objects and do not copy something already in existence" (24).7 In fact, it is this indeterminacy that allows or demands the participation of the reader in producing meaning. In other words, the world of the text does not supply meaning, but it does guide and direct the reader toward the possibility of meaning. The more indeterminate a text is, the more possibilities there are. This dyadic interaction between text and reader creates a form of communication unique to literary fiction. Robert W. Uphaus explains that in Gulliver's Travels, "Swift has violated the reader's expectations of meaning so as to extend the range of the manifest fiction from a purely literary frame of reference to the more problematical nature of the reader's attempts to discern and sustain meaning" (273).
As a consequence, before the actual exploration of the various countries even begins, the reader is already in a state of confusion. The indeterminacy continues with the unfamiliar customs and rules, the various language problems, and Gulliver's struggles to communicate; in addition, however, the reader also experiences a sensation of entrapment. David M. Vieth offers this definition for literary entrapment:
Whether the technique is called entrapment, provocation, manipulation, enticement, dissimulation, or some equivalent term ("to entrap" is "to lure into a compromising statement or act"), the purpose is to assault, perplex, beguile, seduce, irritate, or "con" the reader into a response whose intensity seems out of all proportion to its cause. A work of entrapment is "open" rather than self-contained, kinetic rather than static, experiential rather than cognitive, induces process more than it creates a product, and generates awareness rather than knowledge. It is itself an event, a "happening"; it is significant for what is does, not for what it means. Through its incompleteness or internal contradictions, it tempts the reader to participate in the process of creation by supplying some kind of completeness or harmonizing of opposites out of his own imagination. . . . By disintegrating the reader's sense of self in relation to the literary work, the work analogically dares him to redefine this incriminated self in the context of a similarly incriminated universe that is more complex, muddled, and dismal than he had imagined. (230-31)
As Frederik Smith notes, since 1934 critics have been baffled by Swift's ability to trap his reader, but not until recently has the focus moved from "the text per se and toward the reader's response to that text" (37). Smith insists that Swift relies on his implied reader to separate himself or herself from the characterized reader and adopt a superior attitude. Yet, when the reader is then trapped in a no-win situation, a "double bind," he or she must then adopt "a perspective larger than the one . . . previously laid claim to" and recognize the difference between "abstract principle and pragmatic situation" (Smith 40-42). A. E. Dyson explains why even the most discerning reader often fails to recognize Swift's literary trap:
The technique is, of course, one of betrayal. A state of tension, not to say war, exists between Swift and his readers. The very tone in which he writes is turned into a weapon. It is the tone of polite conversation, friendly, and apparently dealing in commonplaces. Naturally our assent is captured, since the polite style, the guarantee of gentlemanly equality, is the last one in which we expect to be attacked or betrayed. But the propositions to which we find ourselves agreeing are in varying degrees monstrous, warped or absurd. . . . The technique of betrayal is made all the more insidious by Swift's masterly use of misdirection. No conjuror is more adept at making us look the wrong way. (310)
Swift cleverly introduces this theme of entrapment in Book I by portraying Gulliver as a gentle giant among the cute but petty little Lilliputians. Of course, in every book we tend to identify with Gulliver more than any of the strange creatures he encounters simply because he is so familiar, but never is this identification so strong as in Book I. We not only experience Gulliver's physical superiority to the Lilliputians, but we also experience a textual superiority of our own because of our condescending attitude toward Gulliver's reaction to his predicament. It is amusing to imagine Gulliver being chained up like a dog and groveling before the tiny king (I.ii.29.33). We also chuckle at the Lilliputian political puppets, which, despite (or perhaps because of) their resemblance to Western politicians, cannot be taken very seriously. As a result, the unsuspecting reader is primed for the turn of events in Book II.
In Brobdingnag we quickly regret our close identification with Gulliver because he is now the puppet, the pet, the baby doll, the freak whose most useful purpose seems to be serving as a boy toy for the ladies of the court, or as a plaything for Glumdalclitch (II.v.116-24). Swift's tour de force, though, occurs when he refuses to let us turn from an identification with Gulliver to one of kinship with the Brodingnagian king. As Gulliver describes the political machinations of Western society, we hardly have any choice but to agree with his assessment. However, when the king begins negating that value system, he threatens us and exposes our own prejudices. He states: "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" (II.vi.132). As our referential system begins to crumble and disintegrate, we become uncomfortable and a tension develops. However, the resolution of that tension cannot be found in the text. The structure has caused the tension, but only the reader can attempt to create a reconciliation. In other words, a void has been created, and we are trapped between the fictional implications of the text and the effect of those implications on our present reality.
Our sense of stability and self-assurance is in no way relieved by the disintegrating, fragmented travels through Book III. In fact, we cannot even use Gulliver as a touchstone in Book III because he seems to recede from the foreground, serving only as a mediator and tour guide. As Kathleen Williams observes,
In the "Voyage to Laputa," any still surviving notion that Gulliver is a safe guide through these strange countries is ended. He ceases to have any character and, in effect, vanishes. . . . Gulliver's virtual lack of function, indeed of existence . . . has a certain effectiveness in contributing to the atmosphere of meaningless activity and self-deceit, leading to a shadowy despair. . . . [He] merges completely into his surroundings, and serves merely to describe what he sees, so that we cannot take him seriously as an interpreter. (Swift 175-76)
But the disorientation for the reader increases dramatically in Book IV, partly because, as Jenny Mezciems points out, "for the first time, Gulliver cannot be identified as one of the same kind with his hosts or their servants" (18). Book IV also creates a new tension between text and reader because the reader must decide if Gulliver is correct in his assumption that people are as repulsive as Yahoos, if not more. Therefore, the tension that exists between Gulliver and his hosts in Books I and II now shifts to a tension between the reader and the other players. Although Gulliver recognizes himself as a Yahoo, he chooses to establish his self- identity with the Houyhnhnms. Consequently, the reader must also establish a means of self-identification which requires an examination of the value system that is being negated.
Although the single-meaning technique so celebrated by the New Critics depends upon collectively recognized values, Iser insists that criticism must expose rather than accept external frames of reference, which often are nothing more than a "sophisticated subjectivity" (23). This approach makes a historical work such as Gulliver's Travels even more challenging to critics because while reading it, we are far enough removed from the contemporary context that we can maintain a certain degree of objectivity; yet, to experience the work, we must play Swift's game. As a result, we are exposed to the deficiencies of eighteenth-century norms, but we must also reassess that value system and test its validity for our present situation.
In Gulliver's Travels, as in most fictional texts, the reader is not necessarily expected to agree with the narrator's attitudes but rather to react to them. The more contradictory Gulliver appears to be, the more involved we become. After all, reader response rests on the dialectical relationship between text and reader. The most challenging texts often produce the greatest effects because the reader must constantly probe beneath the disguise and distinguish between what is shown and what is concealed. Since much of Gulliver's Travels revolves around the idea of negation, perhaps we should reconsider the norms that governed Swift's society. One major tenet of Lockean empiricism that has remained a part of mainstream Western society is that we should be governed by rationalism and reason, that, in fact, to do otherwise spells disintegration and movement away from perfection. As a master satirist, Swift could see the fallacy inherent in such an absolute position. As a result, he portrays a succession of scenarios in Gulliver's Travels that present the accepted value system in an unacceptable situation. This forces readers to view the prevailing norms in an unfamiliar light, bringing about a reassess-ment.
Perhaps Swift's contemporaries were too closely associated with the norms that Swift negates. As Iser observes, if the reader is "induced to participate in the events of the text, only to find that he is then supposed to adopt a negative attitude toward values he does not wish to question, the result will often be open rejection of the book and its author" (202). Iser's theories help explain some of the vicious criticism of Gulliver's Travels especially by Swift's contemporaries. As readers realize that the authoritative orientation is being completely undermined, they must turn to a new frame of reference. If the reader rejects Gulliver's values as well as the values of the other characters, then he or she exists in a temporary void for which meaning must be created. It is at this point, then, that readers must measure their own value system against the one created in the book.
In Gulliver's Travels the norms balance precariously between opposing viewpoints between Gulliver and the inhabitants of the current country; therefore, the norms are set in opposition to one another and are constantly being negated, becoming progressively more severe and caustic. By the time we reach Book IV, Gulliver's defection to the Houyhnhnms leaves us in a lurch. If we agree with the systems that orient and control the Houyhnhnms, we must ignore the possibilities of human life governed also by human emotions. Yet, if we accept the instinctive, very human behavior of the Yahoos, we must simultaneously admit that the Lockean ideal of a perfection gained by rationality is not only unattainable, but also undesirable.
Negation reveals not representation, but exclusion. It indicates the amount of human experience which is not included in rigid principles or norms. As Gulliver looks at the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, he sees the two sides of human nature one that his society admired and one that his society abhorred. Yet, neither extreme is a satisfactory alternative, as Swift illustrates by ridiculing Gulliver's behavior back in England. The reader, then, must also adjust his or her perception of the human race, realizing finally that whether aspiring to total reason or sinking into abject instinctual behavior both extremes are undesirable. Both are a restriction on human nature.
This tension between the reader's own disposition and the discoveries in the text causes a meeting point between the two: the meaning of the text. Thus, the reader's own perception is broadened and new gestalten are formed. In other words, in Book IV it is not the excesses of rational or instinctive behavior that are negated, but rather their practical validity. The negation is partial, not total, and is carefully orchestrated by the structure of the text. By setting the norm against an unfamiliar background, the text exposes those aspects of the norm that were previously masked. We do not just add on; we restructure. The reader is in constant suspension between "illusion-forming and illusion-breaking" (Iser 127).
Except for didactic works, literature seldom makes alternative values explicit. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift exposes the deficiencies in the existing system, but he does not offer a replacement. He does activate that which had been deactivated by the current system, bringing to light a layer of the personality that had been ignored or hidden, but the reader must then deal with these inconsistencies and produce a reconciliation not available in the text. As John Morris suggests, "Swift's principal purpose in Gulliver is to provoke rather than to instruct, or to instruct by provocation. It is not in what he says that the meaning of the book finally declares itself, but in what we say in response to it" (370).
As a result, the reader must supply what is meant from what is said because the signifieds are constantly changing in the course of the reading. As Grant Holly explains, for Gulliver, "expression is constantly beneath the semantic and comprehensible" because the spectrum of speech "ranges from the undefinable roars of the Yahoos to the inarticulatable speech of the Houyhnhnms ranges, in other words, along a continuum of ambiguous noise" (140-41). But in the final analysis, all of the textual signals the maps, the publisher, the defensive letter, the different languages and laws still do not supply the meaning for Gulliver's Travels. The reader must complete that task.
Notes
1Representative examples of such studies include the following sources. For political science, see Seelye. For mathematics, see Calkins. For allegory, see Harth. For history and geography, see Case. For biography, see Ehrenpreis. For scatology, see Brown 179-201. For epistemology, see Louis 121-67. For pathology, see Landa 271-80. For mythology, see Grennan. For theology, see Crane 300-07. For biology, see Moog. For morphology, see Kelly. For psychology, see Greenacre 17-115. 2For other examples and comments on contemporary responses, see Williams' Swift: The Critical Heritage. 3All citations for Gulliver's Travels are from Vol. 11 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-68). 4Tippett explains that languages and language-learning are "one of the essential ingredients of each of the voyages. The ways in which language is used and abused are an important indicator of the intellectual and moral condition of each of the lands Gulliver visits" (82). As Tippett says, Gulliver is "no mean linguist," claiming to know "High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Lingua Franca" (82-83). As a result, Gulliver seems to speak with authority when he tells us in Book III that "Fluft drin Yalerick Dwuldum prastrad mirplush" means "My Tongue is in the Mouth of my Friend" (III.ix.205) and in Book IV that "Hnuy illa nyha maiah Yahoo" means "Take Care of thy self, gentle Yahoo" (IV.xi.283). 5For a useful critique of Gulliver's attitude toward humans, see Bellamy 106-08. 6For information on geographical inconsistencies, see Case 50-68. 7Freund uses Jonathan Culler's objections toward some reader response theories to expound on the deficiencies of Iser and like-minded critics: the reader "would be hero, successfully overcoming textual obstacles in the achievement of his quest for meaning and for self-realization. The stories told by . . . indeed, by all so-called reader-response criticisms belong to this category of narratives with a happy ending" (88). Freund also complains that Iser tries to straddle the fence one side is text-centered and hypothetical; the other is reader-centered and empirical (143). Her contention, though, is that any theory is doomed to deconstruct itself eventually:
When this exchange [of reader for text] is discovered to perpetuate rather than escape a determinate and positivistic structure of hierarchies, a further sequence of displacements and substitutions is introduced to erode the distance between the redefined terms until the irksome dichotomy of reader/text is abolished by an assimilation of the text into the reader or the reader into the text. . . . [Meantime, however,] some previously darkened or neglected feature of the text-reader relationship has been illuminated in the momentary flare. (10)
I believe Iser's theories provide an important, if momentary, illumination for Gulliver's Travels. Above all, I agree with Freund's claim that reader-response theory undertakes "to make the implicit features of 'reading' explicit" (6) because "the practice of supposedly impersonal and disinterested reading is never innocent and always infected by suppressed or unexamined presuppositions" (10). Furthermore, Tompkins also questions some of Iser's theories: [Iser claims that] "the reader's activity is only a fulfillment of what is already implicit in the structure of the work though [according to Tompkins] exactly how that structure limits his activity is never made clear" (xv). Nevertheless, Tompkins, like Freund, agrees that reader-response theories enhance literary criticism: Response-centered theory
denies the existence of any reality prior to language and claims for poetic and scientific discourse exactly the same relation to the real namely, that of socially constructed versions of it. . . . This assertion deprives science of its privileged position in relation to other forms of knowledge by declaring that the objectivity on which science bases its superiority is a fiction. (224)
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