As an objective comment on the world, Swift's is by far the most terrible

As an objective comment on the world, Swift's is by far the most terrible. For Swift had himself enough pettiness, as well as enough sin of pride, and lust of domination, to be able to expose and condemn mankind in its universal pettiness and pride and vanity and ambition; and his poetry, as well as his prose, attests that he hated the very smell of the human animal. We may think as we read Swift, how loathsome human beings are.

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Selected Essays

In short, I want eventually to lead us to the fairly obvious point that Gulliver's Travels, one of the greatest works of protest against modernity ever written, is no exercise in nostalgia but a call to shape the rapidly growing power of European culture in accordance with some old insights.

The yahoos now possess the secret of atomic energy and genetic engineering; their commercial zest is punching holes in the ozone and deforesting the planet. Meanwhile, in Moscow and Washington DC, the life expectancy of adult males is plummeting. Has all this increase in knowledge and power made us any more just towards each other?Ian Johnston,

Lecture on Swifts Gullivers TravelsOther professors at the same school invent simplified languages, write books by machinery, educate their pupils by inscribing the lesson on a wafer and causing them to swallow it, or propose to abolish individuality altogether, by cutting off part of the brain of one man and grafting it on to the head of another. There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of this chapter, because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious.

The Houyhnhnms, we are told, were unanimous on almost all subjects. The only question they ever discussed was how to deal with the Yahoos. Otherwise there was no room for disagreement among them, because the truth was either self-evident, or else it is undiscoverable and unimportant. They had apparently no word for opinion in their language and in their conversation there was no difference of sentiments. They have reached, in fact, the highest stage of totalitarian organisation, the stage when conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force.

In other words, we know everything already, so why should dissident opinions be tolerated? The totalitarian society of the Houyhnhnms, where there can be no freedom and no development, follows naturally from this.

George Orwell,

Politics vs Literature: an Examination of Gullivers Travels

Orwell: Perhaps the most brilliant thing you ever wrote was the description of the scientific academy in Part III of Gullivers Travels, but after all you were wrong. You thought the whole process of scientific research was absurd, because you could not believe that any tangible result would ever come out of it. But after all the results have come. Modern machine civilization is there, for good or evil. And the poorest person nowadays is better off, so far as physical comfort goes, than a nobleman in Saxon Times, or even in the reign of Queen Ann.

Swift: Has that added anything to true wisdom or true refinement?

George Orwell,

"Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift"

It was Gulliver that made people think that Swift was a misanthrope, a hater of his own Yahoo-species. He denied it: I tell you after all that I do not hate mankind: it is vous autres who hate them, because you would have them reasonable animals, and are angry for being disappointed.

Thomas Sheridan, quoting Bolingbrokes description of Swift as a hypocrite reversd, thought him a man of very great piety and true religion, who always wore a mask. () Swift loathed false piety. I hate Lent; I hate different diets and sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks, he told Stella, wishing her a merry Lent.

Victoria Glendinning,

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swifts concern for the mentally ill began in London, where he was a governor of the Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam). Swift was horrified by the practice of putting mad inmates on display to amuse the public.

While he was Dean of St. Patricks, Swift decided to found a hospital for mental patients. In the 1730s, he began to search for suitable sites. Finally he settled on a place near Dr. Steevens Hospital, which offered general medical care. Swift drew up a constitution to govern the hospital and, with typical wit, summed up his great project in this rhyme:

He left the little wealth he had

To build a house for fools and mad;

Showing in one satiric touch

No nation needed it so much

From Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, 1731

In 1742, following a stroke, Swift himself was declared of unsound mind and memory. He died three years later, leaving 12,000 for the founding of St. Patricks Hospital. The hospital continues to be one of the leading psychiatric institutions in these islands.

From a panel illustrating Swifts life, set in St Patricks Church, Dublin, where he was buried.

The form used by these authors (Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire) is the Menippean satire. () The Menippean satire deals less with people than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behaviour. The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and present people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.

Northrop Frye

Anatomy of Criticism

() Il Gulliver nato anche come reazione parodistica e satirica al successo di Robinson Crusoe. I due romanzi sono antitetici: lopera di Defoe rappresenta il manifesto letterario e filosofico della borghesia mercantile inglese, votata a conquiste territoriali e alla colonizzazione; il Gulliver ribalta questa concezione e non presta alcuna fiducia nelle capacit individuali delluomo, non concede nulla allidea del progresso, dominato da unamara visione del mondo.

Lantitesi vale anche per i due protagonisti: Robinson luomo che si fa da s e che esalta i valori della borghesia mercantile; Gulliver, rovesciamento parodistico di Robinson, non riesce a trarre alcun vantaggio dai suoi viaggi, ritorna sempre deluso dopo aver nutrito lutopia di un mondo e una societ incorrotti e governati esclusivamente da ragione e virt.

In Italia, cos scarsamente attenta allopera di Swift, il Gulliver subisce un singolare processo di svuotamento e banalizzazione: da feroce e brutale atto di accusa contro lumanit diventa libro destinato ai ragazzi, il racconto viene ridotto ai primi due viaggi e limitato alla trovata di un uomo nella terra dei nani un uomo nella terra dei giganti, se ne fa un romanzo di puro e scialbo divertimento, si elimina ogni elemento che non venga ritenuto adatto ai bambini.

Carmine De Luca

Guida alla lettura dei Viaggi di Gulliver,

Ed. Archimede