Gulliver's Travels

The four voyages are required, and in their order: man seen from above, then from below, then as an intellect cut loose from use, then as an animal measured against a reason he does not have. Remove one and the argument loses a term; reorder them and the last voyage’s verdict arrives unprepared. Within the first, second and fourth parts very little is idle: the inventory of the pockets, the fire put out, the King of Brobdingnag’s questions, the Houyhnhnm master’s cross-examination all carry the argument. What holds the axis down is the third part, a miscellany of the flying island, the Academy of Lagado, the sorcerers’ island, the immortals and a stop in Japan, joined by travel rather than necessity: Balnibarbi or Glubbdubdrib could go without loss to the whole.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Man is not, in Swift’s own terms in a letter to Pope of 1725, animal rationale, but at most rationis capax, and his pride in his reason is the surest mark of its failure. The King of Brobdingnag, hearing Gulliver’s proud account of England, calls its people “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (II.6), and Gulliver’s offer of gunpowder proves the verdict as he makes it. The immortals disclose that the wish for long life is a wish for youth. Then the harder disclosure: a reason with no love in it is itself inhuman, and the man who worships it ends in a stable. Held a step from the top because the disclosure is of a type more than of a life: no human being in the book is known from within.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The elevation is cold and mostly dreadful, and it comes at intervals. Brobdingnag gives the sublime of the body seen too close: the beggars, the cancer in a woman’s breast, the maids of honour, the monkey carrying Gulliver to the roof, the eagle that drops his box into the sea. The immortals who decay without dying are among the most dreadful pages in English prose. The fourth part rises to terror in the Grand Assembly’s debate on exterminating the Yahoos, and to a desolate height in the last chapter, where Gulliver talks with two horses in his stable four hours a day. The first voyage reaches only charm. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the voice, which never permits itself transport, and the long stretches of the third part that do not rise at all.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Myth built, and load-bearing. Giants and pygmies are among the oldest figures there are; Swift makes them a measuring instrument, so that the same man is a giant and a toy in successive years, and his body becomes the scale on which the moral world is read. The rational horse and the bestial man reverse the order of creation, and the Yahoo, filthy, greedy and recognisably human, is a myth of the fall told without a garden. The immortals are Tithonus made a civil institution. The voyage out and the return estranged is the shape of every quest. Gulliver stays particular, a surgeon of modest means with a wife and children he keeps leaving, and the archetypes entered the common stock: Lilliput, the Yahoo, Laputa. Held off the top because the third part’s myths are evoked as satire rather than built.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The inheritance is plain: Lucian’s True History, More’s Utopia, Rabelais, Cyrano’s voyages to the moon and sun, the real voyage literature of Dampier, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose plain first-person realism Swift borrowed in order to turn it inside out. The turn is in two moves. The deadpan seaman’s report, with its latitudes and dimensions, is applied to the impossible, so that the form of credible testimony becomes the satire’s instrument; and the narrator himself becomes the satire’s last object, so that the reader cannot stand with him. The stake was real: the book was printed anonymously from a copy delivered in secret, its printer altered passages for fear of prosecution, and the fourth part risked, and drew, the charge of hatred of mankind. Held below 9.0 because the imaginary voyage and its satiric use were long established; the swerve is in the instrument more than in the form.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The plain memoir is the instrument: Gulliver reports everything with the same literal care, so that his credulity and his pride become visible exactly where he does not see them, in his defence of England to the King, in his pleasure at a Lilliputian title. The symmetry of the first two parts makes scale the argument; the fourth part’s inversion of man and beast is possible only because the reader has learned in the first two to read a body as a measure. The frame completes the form: in the letter to Sympson, written after his return, Gulliver complains that the world has not been reformed by his book in six months, and the satire closes over its narrator. Held off the top because the third part’s form is a container whose episodes could be told in any order and any frame.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence over three centuries. The central question is still open: whether the Houyhnhnms are Swift’s ideal or a second target, argued as the hard and the soft readings of the fourth part, with the kind Portuguese captain, Don Pedro de Mendez, as the evidence the misanthrope cannot see. F. R. Leavis’s “The Irony of Swift” (1934) read the irony as negation; George Orwell’s “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (1946) read it as the work of a reactionary he could not stop rereading; political, scientific and colonial readings continue, and the last chapter’s passage on colonies is still cited. It is a children’s book too, read first as a marvel and again as an indictment, and both readings stay true. The form yields as well: the narrator’s reliability shifts across the four parts.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field is English literature of the 1720s, the decade of Defoe’s novels, Pope’s Dunciad and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. The force: the book made prose satire into a whole fictional world with its own measures, and turned the new realist first-person narrative against the credulity that narrative asks of its reader; it is the summit of the Augustan satiric project in prose. Held below the top because what it redirected was satire and the fantastic voyage more than the novel’s main road, which Defoe and then Richardson set. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Gay wrote to Swift within weeks that it was read “from the cabinet-council to the nursery”; Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) and the philosophical tale descend from it, and so does a line of dystopian and satirical fiction through Orwell; it has been a children’s classic since the eighteenth century, filmed and adapted repeatedly; and English took “Lilliputian” and “Yahoo” from it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Survival over three centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole; the difference between the texts of 1726 and 1735 is a matter of passages restored, not lost, and the restored text is the one read. Presence: the widest of any prose work in English of its century, in print continuously since 1726, translated into most written languages, read by children in abridgment and by adults whole, taught in schools and universities, adapted for film and stage. Its surface is in part a topical satire, the axis’s named penalty: Walpole as Flimnap the rope-dancer, the quarrels of the High and Low Heels, the Royal Society in the Academy of Lagado, Wood’s halfpence. All of it has outlived its occasion and is read now without the key. Charged: much of its presence is as an abridged children’s tale of the first two voyages, presence of a part rather than of the work.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. The prose is among the most exactly controlled in the language: plain, numerical, unhurried, and ironic without ever signalling the irony. The skill is in the sentence that reports an atrocity in the tone of an inventory, as when the Lilliputian court proposes, as an act of lenity, only to put out Gulliver’s eyes. The scenes are made with a surgeon’s precision: the pockets, the fire, the farmer exhibiting Gulliver at fairs, the Houyhnhnm master’s patient incomprehension of lying, which he can only call “the thing which was not”. The proportions are calculated and kept. Charged: the third part, which strings episodes, and its satire of projectors, funny and thin; and Gulliver’s voice, sometimes a mouthpiece rather than a man.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Lilliputian emperor’s rope-dancers in the first voyage and Gulliver among his horses at the end of the fourth. One law governs both: man is measured against what he is not, smaller, larger, cleverer or more rational, and every measurement finds his pride. Each world keeps its own physics strictly, the scales above all. The tone runs from whimsy to disgust and the law holds across it, which is the book’s achievement: the comedy of the first voyage is the same instrument as the horror of the last. Charged: the third part, where the law loosens into a satire of learning that obeys a different measure; and Gulliver himself, gullible in one voyage and shrewd in another, so that his final transformation is willed by the argument more than grown.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Many orders, held by the measure of man. The state and its politics, in Lilliput’s court and Brobdingnag’s monarchy. War, in Blefuscu and in gunpowder. Law and its corruption, in Gulliver’s account of England. Learning and science, in Laputa and Lagado. History, in the dead summoned at Glubbdubdrib. Mortality and age, in the immortals. The body everywhere, in excretion, size, disease and appetite. Reason and nature, in the Houyhnhnms. Colonialism, in the last chapter. They are integrated, not listed: each world is a single judgment on all of them. Held below 9.0 because consciousness is thin, the sacred is mostly suppressed, appearing as the war of the Big-Endians, and the family and labour are sketched rather than held: Gulliver’s wife and children are kept thin until the end.

Score: 8.6 / 10