Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Structuralist approach
Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including
literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described
structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair." Structuralism was heavily
influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly
useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of the phoneme and his idea that phonemes exist in
two kinds of relationships: diachronic or "horizontal" and synchronic or "vertical". Structuralists
followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in terms of binary
oppositions. In analyzing texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms
modulate until they are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a
structuralist reading of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the
rebellious angels becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son
of God, the mediating third term.
Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and development,
it was influenced by American thinkers as well.
In the structuralist approach the writing is related to underlying patterns of symmetry which
are held to be common to all societies. Evidence is drawn from sociology and anthropology, and the
approach attempts to place the work in larger context rather than assess its quality.
Swift's greatest satire, Gulliver's Travels, is considered one of the most important works in
the history of world literature. The general theme of Gulliver's Travels is a satirical examination of
human nature, man's potential for depravity, and the dangers of the misuse of reason. The tone of
voice is ironical. The irony is explained by a gap, a lack of space between what is written in text
and meaning. Throughout the volume Swift attacked the baseness of humankind even as he
suggested the greatest virtues of the human race; he also attacked the folly of human learning and
political systems even as he implied the proper functions of art, science, and government. Satire is a
mediator between two perceptions - the ideal perception and the un illusioned perception. Swift
makes a satirical attack on humanity, and human nature.
The main object of the satire in Gulliver's Travels is human nature itself, specifically Man's
pride as it manifests in "pettiness, grossness, rational absurdity, and animality," (Tuveson, 57).
Satirical device: travel and distortion or exaggeration of space: he places his story in a distant placea new world. The text is precise, the book is divided into four parts (books), written in the form of
imaginary trip to four islands, which are exaggerated four aspects of the world, that Jonathan Swift
"fight". The books are not linked, every trip is another island destination which is utopian unreal.
The author says that society is different from reality, even if the reader recognizes some elements,
this allows the author to play with any political pattern in order to satirize. Gulliver is a mask of the
author, a persona, which is the eyes through which we look into all the action. Gulliver is not a
hero, he has some qualities (age, education, profession: a physician), but changes during the trip.
Gulliver's character, as a satirical device, serves Swift's ends by being both a mouthpiece for some
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of Swift's ideals and criticisms and as an illustration of them (Ewald, 138-9). The characters operate
on a vertical axis. Swift turns each defect into a quality and the result is a comical one. Thus,
critiques on human nature are made through Gulliver's observations as well as through Gulliver's
own transformation from a "naive individual...into a wise and skeptical misanthrope".
Written in the form of a travel journal, Gulliver's Travels is the fictional account of four
extraordinary voyages made by Lemuel Gulliver, a physician who signs on to serve as a ship's
surgeon when he is unable to provide his family with a sufficient income in London. Gulliver's
Travels depicts one man's journeys to several strange and unusual lands.
Each of the four voyages in Gulliver's Travels serves as a vehicle for Swift to expose and
excoriate some aspect of human folly. The first voyage has been interpreted as an allegorical satire
of the political events of the early eighteenth century, a commentary on the moral state of England,
a general satire on the pettiness of human desires for wealth and power, and a depiction of the
effects of unwarranted pride and self-promotion. The war with the tiny neighboring island of
Blefuscu represents England's rivalry with France. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver's diminutive status
serves as a reminder of how perspective and viewpoint alter one's condition and claims to power in
society. The imperfect, yet highly moral Brobdingnagians represent, according to many critics,
Swift's conception of ethical rulers. The voyage to Laputa, the flying island, is a scathing attack
upon science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reveals Swift's thorough acquaintance
with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the leading publication of the scientific
community of his day. The third voyage unequivocally manifests Swift's contempt and disdain for
abstract theory and ideology that is not of practical service to humans. The satire in Voyage three
attacks both the deficiency of common sense and the consequences of corrupt judgment (Quintana,
317). One of the most interesting comments on the human condition is the description of the
immortal Struldbrugs. Swift's treatment of the subject of immortality is characteristically practical
and down to earth. What would it really be like to live in perpetuity? His answer: A living death.
Here, he implies the importance of a moral structure to human life; reason is not enough and
immortality would only make things worse. But it is the voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms that
reveals Swift's ultimate satiric object-man's inability to come to terms with his true nature. In
particular, the Houyhnhnms are interpreted as symbols and examples of a human order that,
although unattainable, deserves to remain an ideal, while the Yahoos are found to be the
representatives of the depths of humanity's potential fall if that ideal is abandoned. It is obvious that
the interpretations and verdict placed the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, after all, in the central
problemathic of Swift. The Yahoos are viewed as a satiric representation of debased humanity,
while taking the Houyhnhnms as representatives of Swift's ideals of rationality and order. The two
races are thus interpreted as symbols of the dual nature of humanity, with Gulliver's misanthropy
based on his perception of the flaws of human nature and the failure of humanity to develop its
potential for reason, harmony, and order. Another point of view considers both the Houyhnhnms
and Yahoos to be the subject of satire, with the Yahoos representing the physical baseness of
humans and the Houyhnhnms representing the fatuousness of the idea that humans will ever achieve
a rationally-ordered existence (Downie, 116).
By structuring the Travels in this contrasting fashion and using specific narrative devices
such as the various metaphors and allusions and the projection of moral and intellectual differences
as physical dimensions, Swift creates a nuanced satire of contemporary life. In general, Gulliver is
considered a flexible persona manipulated by Swift to present a diversity of views or satirical
situations and to indicate the complexity, the ultimate indefinability, of human nature. Close textual
analysis has demonstrated the complicated elements of Swift's works and proven that they do not
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always reflect his personal opinions, but are carefully written to reflect the opinions of Swift's
created narrators. A master of simple yet vividly descriptive prose and of a style so direct that if
often masks the complexity of his irony, Swift is praised for his ability to craft his satires entirely
through the eyes of a created persona. He is now regarded as a complex though not mysterious man
who created works of art which will permit no single interpretation.
Most of the criticism in the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms is directed at human nature itself,
although the trend to more particular targets begun in the third voyage is continued with glancing,
but increasingly direct blows to the subjects of war-destruction clothed in the pretext of valour and
patriotism, lawyers-social parasites who measure their worth by their excellence at deception and
therefore, actually inhibit justice, and money-the greed of a few is fed by the labor and poverty of
the many, as well as the relative uselessness and corruption of these priveleged few (Lock, 47). In
addition, Swift makes some very cogent observations on imperialism in the concluding chapter
which point out the arrogance and self deception of European nations when they claim to civilize,
through brutality and oppression, groups of indigenous people who were often mild and harmless.
Of course, as Swift implies, the real goal of imperialism is greed. Swift uses situational irony rather
than verbal or dramatic irony. In situational irony a development, a result or an ending is the
opposite of what one expects. The most ironic point occurs when the author disclaims that this
attack on imperialist countries does not include Britain, which history shows was equally as brutal
as its European rivals and, in many cases, even more so, considering its Empire became at one time
the largest of any European country. What I found most interesting was how many critics took this
disclaimer seriously as an expression of the author's patriotism, (Ewald, 143-144, Bullitt, 64). It
seems obvious that Swift is making the point that Gulliver's naive patriotism, the last remnant of
identification he has with his own kind, is misplaced and it is Swift's final, palpable hit.
In this paper I want to look again at the role played in Swift’s work, and especially in
Gulliver’s Travels, by one particular aspect of Christian teaching – the doctrine of Original Sin. For
what Swift is seeking to establish through his corrosive satire on human vanity is, it would seem,
the prevalence of the plague of sin, and the need which all human beings therefore have for a
physician – for the redemption promised by Christ. In Swift’s orthodox Christian vision this
redemption is conditional on an inward acceptance of the burden of sin; before individuals can be
redeemed they must first reconcile themselves to the fact that their status in the eyes of God is that
of “a diminutive insect”; before their souls may be cleansed, they must first recognise the blackness
of their unregenerate nature in the image which is provided by the Yahoos. Swift’s implied moral is
that the truth about human nature is a humiliating one, and that men and women can face it only by
drawing on the strength provided by the Christian faith. Throughout all the calamities to which he is
exposed in the course of his voyages Gulliver does not once invoke the aid of God. Yet Gulliver
himself reacts to his plight with obstinate pride and a kind of theological obtuseness. The “natural”
reaction of any Christian who found himself in Gulliver’s position would be to engage in prayer.
The very fact that Gulliver adopts a “supplicating posture and places his hands together” helps to
evoke this reaction. But Swift’s seemingly studied refusal to use the word “pray” draws attention to
Gulliver’s godlessness. Gulliver is thus shown adopting the attitude of prayer but – and here there is
perhaps a hint of anti-Catholic satire – the words he utters are apparently meaningless, devoid of
any inward spiritual commitment, or any recognition of his “real” status in the eyes of God.
Gulliver’s crisis of identity at the end of his second voyage prefigures a similar crisis which is
produced by his experience in the land of the Houyhnhnms. Here, having been forced to an
intellectual recognition of his kinship with the Yahoos, who are, in effect, the personification of
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Original Sin, Gulliver is unable to ratify this recognition emotionally. While he readily applies the
term “Yahoo” to others, he cannot contemplate his own Yahoo- nature without fleeing from it in
horror. The very essence of the doctrine of Original Sin was to be found in the attack it made on
spiritual pride. The way in which it made this attack was by offering a theory of human nature
according to which men and women, rather than being in control of their own lives, were doomed to
remain the prey of a seething and unclean mass of impulses and desires which had become, through
Adam’s fall, an ineradicable part of their nature. Individuals might seek to control these impulses
through the use of reason, but they could never hope to escape from them within their earthly lives.
The traditional Christian faith rested on two things, “the corruption of nature and redemption by
Jesus Christ”. We can only understand Swift’s satirical intentions if we recognise that the
excrement-loving Yahoos which Gulliver encounters in his Fourth Voyage are to be seen as an
imaginative representation of this sinful carnal body. “Unregenerate man” is in this way presented
by Swift in very much the same way as he had been by St Augustine and countless other exponents
of the traditional doctrine of Original Sin – as a “lump of deformity and diseases both in body and
mind, smitten with pride” (Davis, 65).
As a result brambles have begun to grow up once again over a path which had never been
entirely cleared. If the path were unimportant this would not greatly matter. But if the path is the
most important of all the critical routes which can give us access to Swift’s intended meaning in
Gulliver’s Travels, then it is time it was opened up once again. In what follows I want both to try to
travel some way along the original path and to take a particular fork which has never been opened
up before but which leads straight into the very allegorical heart of Swift’s masterpiece.
On the surface, Book four seems to argue that reason is the one quality, when properly
developed, that can elevate man to his ultimate potential. But ironically it is the horse-like
Houyhnhnms that possess this perfect development of reason, whereas the Yahoos, whom Gulliver
most resembles, are primitive and bestial. I agree with that Voyage four contains Swift's clearest
attack on human pride. Indeed, the quality of reason only enables humans "to aggravate their natural
corruptions and to acquire new ones which Nature had not intended." Even a dispassionate view of
human history would find it difficult to dispute this conclusion. Whereas the attacks on human
nature in the first three Voyages deal with actions that are symptomatic of man's nature-"the
corrosive satire of the last voyage is concerned with the springs and causes of action" (Tuveson,
80), in other words, the essence of man. As such, the satire directed against the pretensions of court,
political corruption, and the excesses of speculative reasoning may divert and disturb Gulliver, and
the reader, but it is possible to distance oneself from the attacks. But the object of the satiric attack
in the last voyage is man himself: it is Gulliver and the reader. Here, "Swift is attacking the Yahoo
in each of us". Human nature is cut into two parts: The Houyhnhnms possess reason and
benevolence, and selfish appetites and brutish awareness are left for the Yahoos. The microscopic
analysis of the human form that took place in the second voyage is now used to analyze the defects
of man's moral nature, and it is pride that prevents man from recognizing his flaws and dealing with
them. When Gulliver experiences the shock of recognition that he, too, is a Yahoo, Gulliver passes
from being a "perfect example a character acting in ignorance of his condition" to experiencing" a
terrifying insight into evil is accompanied by all the bitterness of a profound disillusionment"
(Bullitt, 61, 65). Yet, I agree with many of the critics who say that though Gulliver makes the
mistake of identifying himself completely with the Yahoos, Swift and the reader do not. "For the
truth, as we are meant to realize, is that man is neither irrational physicality like the Yahoos nor
passionless rationality like the Houyhnhnms" but are something in between. We are meant to be
repulsed by the chilling calmness with which the Houyhnhnms accept death as described in Chapter
nine as much as we are by the selfishness of the Yahoos, and it is clear Swift does not present
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Gulliver's comic and absurd withdrawal from people as a viable solution. However, the
Houyhnhnms are not an ideal of human nature either. Swift uses them to show how reason
uninformed by love, compassion, and empathy is also an inadequate method to deal with the myriad
aspects of the human situation. Instead, Swift wants us to be shocked out of the pride that allows us
to deceive ourselves into thinking man is completely virtuous when he is not by experiencing, with
Gulliver, our own limitations without making Gulliver's final mistake. The solution to the human
dilemma is not so simple as Gulliver's rejection of humanity, and Swift's final success, in terms of
stimulating response, is that, after masterfully dissecting and presenting the problem, he leaves the
application of his lessons to "the judicious reader" (Quintana, 183). For the Yahoos are portrayed
not only as excrementally unclean, but as driven by uncontrollable sexual and sadistic impulses and
as possessed by an animal lust for financial gain. The implicit moral of Swift’s religious satire is
that human beings can be saved from their own destructive and naive self-love only by accepting
the hideousness of their animality and the depth of their carnal sinfulness.
Rather than follow the orthodox Christian course, which would be to accept his own
sinfulness and then seek redemption through Christ, Gulliver attempts to deny the reality of sin by
repudiating his own Yahoo-identity. The pattern which underlies his behaviour is outlined by the
words which Swift puts into the mouth of the Houyhnhnm master: “He said that the Yahoos were
known to hate one another more than they did any different species of animals; and the reason
usually assigned, was, the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in
themselves.” (Eddy, 107).
In his attempt to locate his carnal and sinful self wholly outside his own identity Gulliver
repeatedly indulges in what is, in effect, a form of psychological projection. As he anxiously
attributes his own sensuality and sinfulness to the Yahoos, he is driven towards a deeper and deeper
identification with the rational, pure and godlike Houyhnhnms – an identification so intense that he
eventually succumbs to the delusion that he is a horse. Having defined the species to which he
himself belongs as alien, inferior and sinful, he is able to listen with rational neutrality to a report of
a discussion held by the Houyhnhnm assembly on the question: “whether the Yahoos should be
exterminated from the face of the earth”. Later his attitude towards the Yahoos hardens to a cruel
and pitiless readiness to exploit them and their bodies for his own ends. In order to construct the
canoe by which he effects his escape from the island, Gulliver uses “the skins of Yahoos well
stitched together”. Gulliver’s alienation from his own species continues when he returns home.
There he finds the smell of his own wife and children offensive and treats them as though they were
a source of a dangerous contagion: “ . . . during the first year I could not endure my wife and
children in my presence, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they
dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, neither was I ever able to let one
of them take me by the hand.” Succumbing to a complete derangement of his identity and shrinking
back from what he evidently experiences as the pollution of his fellow human beings, Gulliver
seeks out the society of the horses in his stable. With these pure beings he converses, in his
neighing, whinnying voice, “for at least four hours every day”.
Gulliver’s Travels is, in many respects, a book rich in psychological insight. For Swift does
not only come close to recognising the role played by compensatory fantasy in the imaginative
construction of the human identity, he also recognises, above all in the fourth book, the strategies of
projection which are part of the same psychological complex.
Deane Swift, the biographer of his cousin Jonathan, recognised this in a way that most
modern literary critics have failed to do when he wrote that, in describing the Yahoos, Swift was
fulfilling his duties as “a preacher of righteousness” and “a watchman of the Christian faith”: “And
shall we condemn a preacher of righteousness for exposing under the character of a nasty,
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unteachable Yahoo the deformity, the blackness, the filthiness, and corruption of those hellish
abominable vices, which inflame the wrath of God against the children of disobedience.”
For many critics, Gulliver's Travels" is in a sense, a tragic work...in that it is the picture of
man's collapse before his corrupt nature, and of his defiance in face of the collapse" (Dobree, 447).
Yet, obviously Swift felt that humbling human pride, enabling a more honest selfassessment, was absolutely vital to addressing the suffering and injustice so prevalent in human life.
Contrary to many who label Swift a misanthropist, only a man who cared deeply about humanity
could have produced a work like Gulliver's Travels. Weilding the scalpel of satire, Swift cuts
through our self-deception to our pride, the source of our moral denial and inertia. As we travel with
Gulliver through the voyages, Swift brilliantly peels away our pretensions, layer by layer, until he
shows us what we are and challenges us, intensely and urgently, to be better. In Gulliver's Travels,
Jonathan Swift continues to vex the world so that it might awaken to the fact that humankind needs
saving, but it has to save it self.
Bibliograhy
Bullitt, John M. Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1966.
Davis, Herbert. Jonathan Swift: Essays on His Satires and Other Studies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1964.
Dobree, Bonamy. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century. Oxford, Great Britain:
Oxford University Press, 1959.
Downie, J. A. Jonathan Swift: Political Writer. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Eddy, William A. Gulliver's Travels: A Critical Study. New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1963.
Ewald, William Bragg. The Masks of Jonathan Swift. Oxford, Great Britain: Basil Blackwell, 1954.
Lock, F. P. The Politics of Gulliver's Travels. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Quintana, Ricardo. The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift. Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1965.
Tuveson, Ernest. (Ed.) Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.
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