I enjoyed Gulliver's Travels much more than I expected I would.

The satire was very clever in parts, like when the Lilliputian’s that wore higher heeled shoes than others which made them taller represented “high church” vs. the shorter (lower heeled inhabitants) “low church”. Also, the flying island (England) in part 3 being able to slam down on smaller islands (Ireland) was an interesting analogy. Gulliver being a giant in the first story vs. being small among giants in the second story and how the respective inhabitants treated him was interesting.

Throughout the four travels, Jonathan Swift progressed and got more worldly in scope, moving from specific political satire of his home country of England to a veritable lambasting of humanity in general with his depiction of the Yahoos. He got really pretty vicious with his view and critique of mankind in the last story.

The adventure part of Gulliver's Travels was also well done, but the formula (wasn’t it a shipwreck each time?) could have been changed up a bit in each story to add some variety. Perhaps going underground in a cave or getting lost in the jungle or just something different could have worked just as well?

4 stars.

Gulliver’s Travels confronts readers with a bleak illustration of a society whose reliance on counterproductive and self-destructive scientific innovations results in profound and far reaching consequences.

tHis systematic dismantling of experimental science through Juvenalian satire occurs in three stages. He begins his assault with the pointed allusion to the quality of human life as collateral damage in the wake of a scientific revolution which ushers in and is underpinned by a host of ineffective methods and inchoate rationales.


Lord Munoti’s description of a ravaged Balnibarbi brings into sharp focus the dismal failures of “new rules and methods of agriculture” (Swift

As Gulliver observes, "the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes” (Swift ).

More than an unintended consequence, the prevalent and prolonged food insecurity among the population of Balnibarbi is a direct result of the obstinacy and intellectual hubris which typifies ”the scientists, or “projectors” which comprise the scientific community.

tSwift’s description of their aims outlines and emphasizes more clearly the idiocy and counter productiveness which characterizes said community.

tIronically, those “persons of quality and gentry” who elect to maintain effective agricultural practices are” looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth’s men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country” (Swift). As is the nature of revolution, those who refuse to adopt change are dismissed as enemies of progress and are ostracized. The relationship between the quality of life which Lord Munodi and his immediate neighbors enjoy and his refusal to abandon “the old forms” signifies the second component of the satire’s underlying remark; in painting a society in which survival and progress are considered to be mutually exclusive , Swift, through cutting humor and imagery, emphasizes and further develops the idea that the unsound, impractical , and self-defeating aims and products of modern science are devoid of merit.

tSwift deals his ultimate and most devastating blow with a climactic depiction of the scientists at work. The “projectors” are figures emblematic of the arrogance and maladroitness which, according to Swift, characterizes the mechanical scientist. Their ill-conceived methodologies, rationales, and odd experimentations transcend folly and arrogance and meander into the realm of the repulsive and macabre. The “grand academy” wherein a beleaguered yet enthusiastic faculty presents various and bizarre courses of study, is described by Gulliver as a site of unmitigated insanity. One such “operation” involves “[reducing] human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odor exhale, and scrumming off the saliva” (Swift).

tSwift’s employment of scatological imagery aludes to the notion of experimental science as waste but also charges the arrogant experimental scientist with perpetuating the unnatural.

tAn experiment aimed toward the reversal of a natural “operation” of the body is at best a mark of intellectual arrogance and at worst a crime against nature.

tMore importantly, this scene reiterates the earlier point that the quality of human life cannot be improved by impractical and incoherent scientific methods but will invariably be sacrificed on a pyre of “progress” (Swift).
Swift rounds out his scathing critique of experimental science with a powerful depiction of its rationales and methods as not only counterproductive but deadly. During the visit to the academy, Gulliver” [complains] of a small fit of the colic…” (Swift): my conductor led me into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that disease, by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair of bellows, with a long slender muzzle of ivory: this he conveyed eight inches up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of then fundament; and this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient recovered. I saw him try both experiments upon a dog, but could not discern any effect from the former. After the latter the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companion. The dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavouring to recover him, by the same operation” (Swift).

tThis illustration of the failures of experimental science and the dangers inherent in relying on egotistical and maladroit intellectuals emphasizes the relationship between the arrogance which typifies the mechanical scientist and the futility in attempting to conquer the natural. The insane “doctor” whose deleterious and ill-conceived treatment for colic produces antithetical results is left fumbling, frantically but futilely attempting to resurrect the dead by performing the unsuccessful procedure again and again.

tUltimately, Swift’s” [contemptuous]” and more assertive critique, which he constructs on a foundation of stinging language and grotesque imagery, provides a clearer picture of the various ways in which the emerging scientific community’s undertakings and experiments served to complicate or threaten the quality of human life.

There are many here among us
Who think that life is but a joke.
Bob Dylan

When Gulliver first came to the light of day in the climate of a more genteel, and historically Georgian reader than those who read Pilgrim's Progress in the previous century, echoes of its hero, Christian, must have resounded through his or her mind!

This fantasy has haunted my steps and dogged my days all my life. It represents a Pilgrim's Progress for me, too - as well as for Dean Swift, being an Anglican priest - through the insalubriously and most lugubriously harrowing paysage moralisé that was my, and Swift's life.

But placed in historical context it’s a harangue against religious narrow-mindedness, liberalism, and intellectual freedom. A mixed kettle of fish!

Nevertheless, the politely Houyhnimic, and thus archly knowing Pilosopher-Kings of Georgian Britain judged Swift to be rather odd, as their modern counterparts, too, judged me. For we were both bipolar.

Just outta bounds. Beyond simple decency. A Stranger to intellectual progress. Why?

You see, when a kid first wakes up and chooses ethical behaviour, he often sees himself as catapulted into a Land of Liliputians. If he rebels, he is blacklisted by their establishment, tied to the ground with tiny inextricably knotted threads while he sleeps, and roundly excoriated by their tiny, tinnily middle-class voices.

In short, he is just too proud by a very unhealthy margin. In my case, to make matters worse, I just chuckled at them. Hence my bipolarity. I needed an outlet!

If he still is not heeled, he will then be courted and thus grossed out by the humunguously odorific Brobdingnagians. That’s his second temptation, and it is seldom met with diffidence. Gulliver, though, reacts with panic. As did I.

If still unrepentant and self-willed, his next stop will be Laputia and its surrounding archipilago of islands. For he must at least learn humility.

There he will be pegged as a danger both to himself and polite society, when he continues to value himself over others.

Refusing to recant, his final stop is the Isle of enervately intellectual Houyhmnms. Who disdain him. And rightly so, for they dwarf him in their paradoxical intelligence.

He will be from thenceforth exiled into ignominy - up crap creek without a paddle: he is condemned to SWIM back to Ireland. Thank heaven, then, for the small mercy (a canoe) he is then afforded!

And like Gulliver, crushed, I was finally humble.

Oh, and it's not a fantasy.

It’s the enforced progress of a half-baked pilgrim, who STILL only Regresses until he learned. That was me.

John Bunyan woulda just sighed and said that’s LIFE for us Christians, as we grow in faith, pride intact at first.

If we want to be saved, we must swallow that pride. Holus bolus.

We must not live a life that is a Slaughterhouse Five -

For you MAY be saved (and maybe not, if you haven't survived the trial).

For just like Billy Pilgrim, we still have a chronically Enlarged Ego that has simply gotta go:

By letting the Lord “trample out His wine press where His Grapes of Wrath are stored.” And believe me, we all deserve it. But how.

And so we reach Heaven.

The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at the place we started
And know the place for the first time.

#bibliotecaafectivă

Cine mai citește astăzi cartea lui Jonathan Swift? Cine știe că yahoo.mail - pe care-l folosim toți - trimite chiar la acest minunat roman? Voi comenta doar un episod foarte amuzant.

În Călătoriile lui Gulliver (III: 5), naratorul vizitează marea academie din Lagado, vede la lucru, într-o aulă, maşinăria lui Raymundus Lullus. Dar marea academie are o secţiune de savanţi filologi, care se dedică edificării unui limbaj universal, accesibil oricărei ființe din univers.

Cum arată noul limbaj? Iată un prim proiect. Cuvintele polisilabice sînt reduse la unităţi lexicale, formate dintr-o singură silabă. Sînt eliminate verbele, adjectivele, participiile. Rămîn doar substantivele, numele monosilabice. Oamenii vor discuta între ei doar prin silabe: pa, vu, ga, di, ke, zo. Din fericire, savanții lui Swift nu se mulțumesc doar cu atît. Limba perfectă se va dispensa și de silabe. Au sesizat un proiect nou.

Acum, cuvintele sunt desfiinţate complet. Dacă substantivele desemnează întotdeauna lucruri şi numai lucruri, e mai potrivit să aduci lucrurile însele, cînd vrei să exprimi ceva. Limba este cu adevărat universală, poate fi pricepută de oricine, discutăm arătînd lucruri și numai lucruri. Omul nu mai scoate sunete, nu-și mișcă buzele, arată cu degetul. Avantajul acestui limbaj este, în opinia academicienilor lui Jonathan Swift, protejarea gîtlejului şi plămînilor. Rostirea înverșunată de propoziții duce la coroziunea gîtlejului și la micşorarea volumul plămînilor. E mai bine să ţii gura închisă: te ferești în acest chip și de viruși, rămîi perfect sănătos pînă la moarte.

Dar e cu putință oare să cuvîntăm cu lucruri şi numai cu lucruri? N-am mai rosti propoziţia „Mărul e roşu”. Am prezenta pur şi simplu un măr roşu. Dacă am avea nevoie de lumină, am arăta iasca, amnarul, lampa cu fitil muiat în petrol. Dacă am dori să elogiem dulcele, am oferi celuilalt o stafidă, o fărîmă de zahăr candel brun, un sărut. Nimic mai simplu, nu?

I only remember the story of the Lilliputians from childhood & that was obviously edited, now that I have read the entire bizarre novel. It is a satire on the political and class structures in England at the time (17th & early 18thC) but without the extensive notes in my edition and the discussion by one of the GR classics groups, I certainly would not have been able to understand the subtext of this work. Although in Swift's contemporary time, this was dubbed a parody of the travelogues of the day, it is a fantastical work with a little science fiction thrown in on top of it. The first two books flow well into one another as mirror images of Gulliver's perspective, the 3rd book was disjointed to me and the 4th book definitely capped off Gulliver's journey both literally & thematically. Now I know where the term Yahoo came from and Gulliver portrays the bestial nature of man in this class of creatures. He is so disgusted by the Yahoos that when Gulliver returns to lands of man, he is unable to reintegrate into his family life and society as he can no longer distinguish between the Yahoos and mankind in general.

As Gulliver interacts with all these different cultures in his travels his outlook on life changes from one of wonder & curiosity to cynicism and finally disillusionment in humanity in the present without potential for improvement.

This was a re-read of an old favourite. I fell in love with this book in my teens and have returned to it a few times since (my teens were a long time ago).

Jonathan Swift was a satirist of the first order. While you can read this as a silly fantasy story (it works on two levels and the first time I read it as a pre-teen I enjoyed it purely as a silly fantasy tale) virtually everything in this book has a double-meaning. As with most, if not all, of the best satirists, Swift's commentaries are both hilarious and boiling-water-to-the-face scathing.

The book is intelligent, hilarious and (barely) conceals a seething rage in the author's heart that is aimed like a burning arrow at the society that surrounded him.

Swift is Savage!!!!!!!! in a burn to the world he torches the European ruling class and humanity as a whole in thefirst ever political satire. and therefore a precurser to a very popular modern genre. this version is not indented for children. in fact children will be bored to tear in some parts. I suggest reading the abridged versions in youth highlighting the Lilliput's and Brobdingnag. then later when able to understand the satire of Balnibarbi, Luggnagg & of course the Houyhnhyms. this will tie nostalgia with the new discoveries to enhance the experience. that what I did and I have a new revelation and enjoy the book every time I read it. published in 1726 in secret, about colonial Europe and human nature as a whole at a time when it could have been considered treason and heresy. being a satire of a different time period and written in the travel journel style, a no longer written genre popular of the day. very dry I did this then I did that style of writing. it is a fair to say the novel is obsolete to modern listeners. I perpose a different conjecture. if your like me your a little disillusioned by the current state of politics in America. I think you will enjoy this book. made me feel a lot better about the way we run our nation. as for the out dated style I found it similar to modern science fiction. ergo Star trek where new civilizations are encountered and compared to are own. Audible should have William Shatner read a version. maybe next time I read it I will imagine captain Kirk as the narrator. Gulliver is not a likeable character cowardly, prideful and misogynistic I found myself disliking him by books end. but I believe Gulliver himself is the biggest joke of all. swift being a irish clergyman the ideological opposite of a English surgeon and meant to be ridiculed.

I am not going to tell you my conjectures of the views in the book. because I hate being told what to think. Swift is not Suttle, and their are several study guides online. this book had been dissected, reviewed, and debated for centuries by greater minds then mine. I am just a Butcher from Georgia. I will tell you not to expect any profound answers for as Swift confessed the purpose of the story is to vex the world.

Oh man.
This book was sheer torture.

The writing was dry and bland and boring.
Swift had some really interesting ideas - An island of people no larger than your finger. Another island with people that are 60 feet tall. A floating island, an island of scientists, the island of Yahoos...but the execution was hard to appreciate.

I came very close to putting this novel down many many times.
I admit to not being a fan of early, victorian literature, but this was just painful.

"L'orgoglio, l'immancabile vizio degli stupidi"


Nell’immaginario dei lettori –e anche non- di questo romanzo c'è l’immagine di Gulliver disteso sulla spiaggia di Lilliput, con tanti omuncoli che gli camminano addosso, la medesima immagine che vedo ora ritratta nella copertina. E’ un’immagine parziale e limitata di questo capolavoro di Swift, perché, a mio parere, il viaggio di Gulliver a Lilliput, che è il primo dei quattro raccontati nel romanzo, è forse il meno interessante dal punto di vista del valore letterario dell’opera. Di sicuro è il racconto più fantastico e divertente, insieme con quello del viaggio immediatamente successivo, nel rovesciato regno di Brobdingnag, dove gli abitanti sono alti come torri e Gulliver è più piccolo del nano di corte della Regina. La loro lettura, accompagnata dalle vivide immagini davanti agli occhi delle disavventure del povero Gulliver, che, tra le altre, finisce per i tre quarti del corpo dentro l’ossobuco avidamente spolpato dalla regina di Brobdingnag, mi ha divertito e stimolato la fantasia. Negli ultimi due viaggi narrati nel libro, il tono cambia e predomina una sarcastica critica ai costumi e alle idee delle società cosiddette civili, dove regnano la superbia intellettuale e i sofismi machiavellici. E così nel regno di Lagado -in cui le uniche scienze studiate sono la matematica e la musica ma i cui abitanti creano solo sgorbi, case storte e vestiti sbilenchi-, si legge una feroce critica al razionalismo cartesiano, che considera la matematica il solo modello metodologico di tutto il sapere (non c’è spazio per la fantasia e l’invenzione). Mentre gli Houyhnhnm, animali simili ai cavalli, il cui paese è la meta dell’ultimo viaggio di Gulliver, governano e tengono come schiavi altre bestie, gli yahoo, del tutto simili agli uomini, e vivono secondo una concezione filosofica assimilabile all’illuminismo naturalistico, nel perfetto binomio Natura- Ragione che li rende razionali e immuni dai vizi umani quali la menzogna, la dissimulazione e tutto ciò che porta alla dubitazione intellettuale. Nonostante il tono di ammirazione per quest’ultimo popolo, la cui vita sembra perfetta, emergono critiche anche a questo sistema di pensiero, che non conosce dubbi ma solo certezze conoscitive, “giacchè la Ragione ci insegna ad asserire o negare soltanto le cose di cui siamo certi; e al di là del nostro sapere, né l’una né l’altra cosa è possibile..” Gulliver (cioè Swift), sempre straniero tra i suoi simili, dopo averci guidato in allegorici viaggi attraverso utopistici paesi con la finalità di mettere alla berlina i costumi dei contemporanei, giunge a una conclusione amarissima, una condanna senza appello, seppur con il sorriso sulle labbra, del genere umano che abusa della Ragione per svilirla in vizi e difetti che lo rendono avido e insensibile:”la mia riconciliazione con la specie degli yahoo in generale non sarebbe forse così difficile, se essi si accontentassero dei vizi e follie cui Natura li ha destinati…ma quando vedo un cumulo di deformità e malattie, così fisiche come spirituali, gonfiarsi di orgoglio, allora immediatamente crollano tutti i limiti della mia sopportazione”. Un insegnamento di valore universale, lasciatoci da un grande scrittore che è considerato un precursore dell’Illuminismo, ma anche capace di coglierne in anticipo gli aspetti negativi.

I was inspired to revisit Gulliver’s Travels by a recent reading of Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, and also by More’s Utopia, which I have read a couple of times over the past few years. It was fascinating to read GT with these two books in mind. More, who gets a reverent name-check in Book III, seems the presiding spirit for the first two books, with their airy, poised satire and subtle modulations of register; while Wells comes to mind in the much darker fourth book, which he drew on brilliantly in crafting his own perverse, island dystopia. Another book I was reminded of at moments was Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The floating magnetic island of Laputa, which communicates with its earth-bound subjects by lowering down strings on which they tie their petitions, only needed to be condensed into a perfectly chiselled paragraph to be quite at home in Calvino’s fabulous gazetteer.

I can see why many readers find Books I and II (Gulliver’s sojourns with the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians) the most successful parts of the book. They are certainly the parts where the book’s constituent elements —fantasy; wit; farce; polite satire; savage satire; philosophical reflection—are most completely in harmony. Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Swift’s art in these books as one-trick ponydom (“When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest”)—but that’s not fair at all. The perspectival tricks are a lot of fun, but they’re only the beginning. The Lilliput book devolves into a political morality tale halfway through, quite a biting one; while the Brobdingnag book introduces for the first time the motif of the rational Other’s view of the iniquities of European culture, which Swift will then develop in a far bleaker way in the fourth book. (Though I guess the Brobdingagian king’s assessment of Gulliver’s compatriots as “the most pernicious race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” would already qualify as bleak by most people’s standards.)

Perhaps as a result of having read Dr Moreau so recently, one aspect of GT that struck me quite forcefully in this reading was its fairly conspicuous dose of misogyny and sexual squeamishness. I’m not thinking here simply of Gulliver’s boilerplate sardonic reflections on women’s irrationality, vanity, sluttishness, etc., which are only to be expected in a work of this period. What I found more striking and intriguing was his seemingly complete lack of any sexual instinct—especially in a book that is anything but prudish about bodily functions generally—and the disgust that women’s bodies, and particularly their sexualized bodies, inspire in him. This is especially obvious in the “maids of honor” passage in the Brobdingnag book, but also in the episode in Book IV where a pubescent female Yahoo springs on our unsuspecting hero while he is bathing (and Swift devoted an entire later work, The Lady's Dressing Room, to this theme). This is something that Wells picks up on very nicely in the figure of Prendick in Dr Moreau.

It is partly this element of visceral, bodily disgust that I think makes Swift’s satire so distinctive and disruptive. He is clearly steeped in the classical tradition of satire, as was More, but he also seems close to Christian moralizing traditions that dwell on the body as corrupt and corrupting. Swift is often described as misanthropic, but that word seems too mild for the acute physical repulsion Gulliver feels towards humanity at the end of his travels. Anthropophobic seems closer to the mark.

I just read this review through prior to posting it and it struck me that I’m leaning perhaps too heavily on the work’s darker aspects. It’s also very funny, of course. As a random example, I loved the suggestion by a professor in Lagado’s “School of Political Projectors” for a fiscal system in which people are taxed on their outstanding qualities and talents, as estimated by themselves (with men who fancy themselves as lady-killers, for example, taxed on their own reporting of “the Number and Nature of the Favours they have received.”)

plz never make me do this again

هي مجموعة صفعات متتالية على وجه البشرية جمعاء..فعندما ترفضك الجياد الناطقة بلطف..لانها اكثر منك تحضرا و رشدا..اذن فلتعد يا "جاليفر "من رحلاتك الاربعة..حزينا كسيرا


لهذه الروايات مكانة خاصة في قلبي..فهي أول رحلاتي الطويلة لعالم الفانتازيا والخيال بلا حدود..فمن خلال الترجمة الرشيقة للعبقري كامل الكيلاني..قراتها في سن العاشرة بعربية فصيحة و تشكيل. .و لم ينطفىء انبهاري
فقراتها ملخصة بالإنجليزية..ثم في نسختها الكاملة في سن 30

أحببت اهل ليليبوت الاقزام السخفاء المتمسكين بالتقاليد..و الشكليات ..و العمالقة الهمج الذين كشفوا لجاليفر غروره و ضالته. .و الفلاسفة ..السحرة. .والمخلدون التعساء

وأخيرا و رغم خياله الفلسفي الجامح ..لم يحقق سويفت..هدفه من الحرب التي شنها على الجنس البشري..نفذت طبعات كتابه..و لكن ضحك الجميع من المغامرات واعتبروها. .طرائف عن حماقات شعوب اخرى

..وهكذا رحل سويفت صامتا...و فاقدا لعقله
الأسلوب قديم و على شكل مذكرات ..و كذلك اللغة .. لذا قد يكون اسهل على البعض قراءتها مختصرة فهي تنتمي لعام 1700..و لكن الحماقات ..والانانية و الحروب ..هي هي..و ستظل كما هي