Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint Huckleberry Finn Great Expectations A Portrait of the Artist The Age of Innocence The Great Gatsby as a Young Man Alice’s Adventures in Gulliver’s Travels Pride and Prejudice Wonderland The Handmaid’s Tale Ragtime All Quiet on the Heart of Darkness The Red Badge of Western Front I Know Why the Courage As You Like It Caged Bird Sings The Rime of the The Ballad of the Sad The Iliad Ancient Mariner Café Jane Eyre The Rubáiyát of Omar Beowulf The Joy Luck Club Khayyám Black Boy The Jungle The Scarlet Letter The Bluest Eye Lord of the Flies Silas Marner The Canterbury Tales The Lord of the Rings Song of Solomon Cat on a Hot Tin Love in the Time of The Sound and the Roof Cholera Fury The Catcher in the The Man Without The Stranger Rye Qualities A Streetcar Named Catch-22 The Metamorphosis Desire The Chronicles of Miss Lonelyhearts Sula Narnia Moby-Dick The Tale of Genji The Color Purple My Ántonia A Tale of Two Cities Crime and Native Son The Tempest Punishment Night Their Eyes Were The Crucible 1984 Watching God Darkness at Noon The Odyssey Things Fall Apart Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex To Kill a Mockingbird The Death of Artemio The Old Man and the Ulysses Cruz Sea Waiting for Godot Don Quixote On the Road The Waste Land Emerson’s Essays One Flew Over the White Noise Emma Cuckoo’s Nest Wuthering Heights Fahrenheit 451 One Hundred Years of Young Goodman A Farewell to Arms Solitude Brown Frankenstein Persuasion Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels— New Edition Copyright ©2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. —New ed. p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7910-9628-4 (hardcover : alk. Paper) 1. Swift, Jonathan, 1667–1745. Gulliver’s Travels. 2. Satire, English—History and criticism. 3. Voyages, Imaginary— History and criticism. 4. Imaginary societies in literature. 5. Travelers in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Gulliver’s Travels. 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Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Satiric Norms, Swift’s Financial Satires and the Bank of Ireland Controversy of 1720–1721 9 Sean Moore How to Write Gulliver’s Travels 43 Irvin Ehrenpreis Mutiny on the Adventure: A Possible Source of Gulliver’s Travels 61 Alain Bony Lemuel Self-Translated; Or, Being an Ass in Houyhnhnmland 75 Michael J. Franklin Swift’s Caricatures of Newton: ‘Taylor,’ ‘Conjurer’ and ‘Workman in the Mint’ 101 Gregory Lynall Gulliver, Gulliveriana, and the Problem of Swiftian Satire 119 Ashley Marshall vi Contents Gulliver and the Horse: An Enquiry Into Equine Ethics 145 Nicolás Panagopoulos The Secret Memoirs of Lemuel Gulliver: Satire, Secrecy, and Swift 165 Melinda Rabb The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag 193 Deborah Needleman Armintor Gulliver as Pet and Pet Keeper: Talking Animals in Book 4 211 Ann Cline Kelly Chronology 235 Contributors 237 Bibliography 239 Acknowledgments 243 Index 245 Editor’s Note My Introduction explains the endless dialectical irony of Jonathan Swift in his perpetually canonical fantasy-satire. Sean Moore learnedly explores a crucial background for Swift’s satires: the Bank of Ireland dispute of 1720–1721. In an energetic essay, Irvin Ehrenpreis employs some Swiftian irony of his own as he urges the reader to a Borgesian project of writing Gulliver’s Travels. An illuminating source for Swift’s Gulliver saga is discovered by Alain Bony, after which Michael J. Franklin charmingly meditates upon Lemuel Gulliver’s self-deceptions in Houyhnhnmland. Swift’s fierce satires of Isaac Newton in Gulliver’s Travels are mapped by Gregory Lynall, while Ashley Marshall deftly shows how the insoluble nature of Swift’s irony may teach us to read and to live more flexibly. Houyhnhnm ethics are inquired into by Nicolás Panagopoulos, after which Melinda Rabb broods on Swiftian personal secrets in the Travels. Sexual politics in Brobdingnag are lingered over by Deborah Needle- man Armintor, and then this volume concludes with Ann Cline Kelly’s shrewd investigation of the psychology of pet-keeping in eighteenth-century Great Britain. viivii H A R O LD B loom Introduction jonathan swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS he terrible greatness of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub has much to do withT our sense of its excess, with its force being so exuberantly beyond its form (or its calculated formlessness). Gulliver’s Travels, the later and lesser work, has survived for the common reader, whereas Swift’s early master- piece has not. Like its descendant, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, A Tale of a Tub demands too much of the reader, but it more than rewards those demands, and it now seems unclear whether Sartor Resartus does or not. Gulliver’s first two voyages are loved by children (of all ages), while the third and fourth voyages, being more clearly by the Swift who wrote A Tale of a Tub, now make their appeal only to those who would benefit most from an immersion in the Tub. Gulliver himself is both the strength and the weakness of the book, and his character is particularly ambiguous in the great fourth voyage, to the country of the rational Houyhnhnms and the bestial Yahoos, who are and are not, respectively, horses and humans. The inability to resist a societal per- spectivism is at once Gulliver’s true weakness, and his curious strength as an observer. Swift’s barely concealed apprehension that the self is an abyss, that the ego is a fiction masking our fundamental nothingness, is exemplified by Gulliver, but on a level of commonplaceness far more bathetic than anything reductive in the Tale-teller. Poor Gulliver is a good enough man, but almost devoid of imagination. One way of describing him might be to name him the least Nietzschean character ever to appear in any narrative. Though a cease- less traveler, Gulliver lacks any desire to be elsewhere, or to be different. His pride is blind, and all too easily magnifies to pomposity, or declines to a self- 1 2 Harold Bloom contempt that is more truly a contempt for all other humans. If the Tale-teller is a Swiftian parody of one side of Swift, the anti-Cartesian, anti-Hobbesian, then Gulliver is a Swiftian parody of the great ironist’s own misanthropy. The reader of “A Voyage to Lilliput” is unlikely to forget the fatuity of Gulliver at the close of chapter 6: I am here obliged to vindicate the Reputation of an excellent Lady, who was an innocent Sufferer upon my Account. The Treasurer took a Fancy to be jealous of his Wife, from the Malice of some evil Tongues, who informed him that her Grace had taken a violent Affection for my Person; and the Court-Scandal ran for some Time that she once came privately to my Lodging. This I solemnly declare to be a most infamous Falshood, without any Grounds, farther than that her Grace was pleased to treat me with all innocent Marks of Freedom and Friendship. I own she came often to my House, but always publickly . I should not have dwelt so long upon this Particular, if it had been a Point wherein the Reputation of a great Lady is so nearly concerned, to say nothing of my own; although I had the Honour to be a Nardac, which the Treasurer himself is not; for all the World knows he is only a Clumglum, a Title inferior by one Degree, as that of a Marquess is to a Duke in England; yet I allow he preceded me in right of his Post. The great Nardac has so fallen into the societal perspective of Lilliput, that he sublimely forgets he is twelve times the size of the Clumglum’s virtu- ous wife, who therefore would have been quite safe with him were they naked and alone. Escaping back to England, Gulliver has learned nothing and sets forth on “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,” land of the giants, where he learns less than nothing: The Learning of this People is very defective; consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry and Mathematicks; wherein they must be allowed to excel.