Gulliver's Travels Turns 300: Swift's Warning About Reason

By Elena Vasquez

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels turned 300 this week — and its diagnosis of the modern world remains sharper than most books published this year. Swift had just turned 59 when the novel appeared in October 1726, a month before his birthday. He had already built his reputation with A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, plus pamphlets defending Irish goods and denouncing predatory currency devaluation.

What kind of book is it, really?

Often misremembered as a boy's adventure story, Gulliver's Travels is both a summation of and a rejoinder to the Enlightenment. Its target: the innumerable sins that follow when "the idolatry of reason leads to humans being treated as objects." Much of the humor runs on proportion. Gulliver, examining a Lilliputian, notes "a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back." He defeats Blefscu's navy like a child playing with toy boats, and stands trial for treason after putting out a palace fire by urinating on it.

The small-minded Lilliputians wage war over which end of an egg to crack — a clear echo of the theological disputes of Swift's day. The giant Brobdingnagians are kind and cerebral, yet their massive size exposes every pore, ulceration and body odor of the human form. Swift's biographer Leo Damrosch notes the author's position: "Whether in religion, science, or politics, people are all too frequently insane."

How savage was Swift?

At a 350th birthday celebration in Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole described Swift's "moral rage, the savage indignation that may have lacerated Swift's heart but that…can still blow open a passage" in our own. Swift's only comparably famous work, the 1729 essay "A Modest Proposal," recommends the Irish poor sell their children as meat to the ruling English. When Peter O'Toole performed it at Dublin's Gaiety Theater in 1954, Swift's two-centuries-old words drew boos and hisses. Swift himself stated his intent plainly: to "vex…rather than divert."

What does the novel say about reason?

The book is, in effect, the foundational critique of the Enlightenment's excesses, hypocrisies and hidden tyrannies. In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment that "the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity" — something Swift had seen two hundred years earlier. The floating island of Laputa, whose scholars "neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others," mocks the Royal Society in London. Its subjucated land below, Balnibarbi, is "unhappily cultivated, with houses ill-contrived and ruinous, and its people's countenances expressing misery and want." Swift also targets Francis Bacon's technocratic utopia The New Atlantis, with its pledge to enlarge "the bounds of human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible." As O'Toole put it: "Reason is no good without indignation."

Gulliver or Crusoe?

Swift dismissed his great rival Daniel Defoe in a 1709 pamphlet as an "illiterate scribbler," "grave, sententious, [and] dogmatical a rogue that there is no enduring him." Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe is a novel of schedules and economic strategizing — a colonist and capitalist. Gulliver is his opposite: a jaundiced observer of those systems' worst excesses.

Gulliver breaks only when he meets the Houyhnhnms, sentient, egalitarian horses, and realizes that humans — among whom "poor nations are hungry and rich nations are proud" — are really Yahoos. Back in England, he ends his days in his own stables. Swift did the same, dying at 77, buried beside his likely secret wife Stella in a cathedral where Cromwell had once stabled horses during his campaigns against the Irish.

In Swift's final image, the horses are "strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other." The book's most heartbreaking lesson: there is utopia, just not for us.