Gullivers Travels as Utopian or dystopian fiction

Paper no 2 Neo Classical literature 
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Name : Ruchita Kankrecha A.

Roll no : 39

Paper no : Neo classical literature

Class : Sem 1

Topic : Gullivers Travels as utopian or dystopian fiction

Enrollment no : 2069108420190024

College : Department of English

Email Id : ruchikankrecha06@gmail.com

Submitted to : Department of English M. K Bhavnagar University

INTRODUCTION :

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin. He was an satirist, essayist, and poet. He loved the land of his birth. His famous works are

1.A Tale of a Tub (1704)

2.An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712) 3.Gulliver's Travels (1726)

4.A Modest Proposal (1729).

Swift's first major prose work is "A Tale of a Tub". demonstrates many of the themes and stylistic techniques. He would employ in his later work. It is at once wildly playful and funny while being pointed and harshly critical of its targets and  In its main thread. the Tale recounts the exploits of three sons. It is a representing the main threads of Christianity who receive a bequest from their father of a coat each, with the added instructions to make no alterations whatsoever. Swift was a prolific writer and notable for his satires. The most recent collection of his prose works comprises fourteen volumes. A recent edition of his complete poetry is 953 pages long.

One edition of his correspondence fills three volumes. He was a master of two styles of satire and his two famous styles are 

1.the Horatian and

2.Juvenalian styles.

His famous literary work is Gulliver’s Travels published in 1726. Gulliver Travels is apart from it’s great merit as classic for children, is a satire on human nature. Swift posed as a cynic and a misanthrope. His satire was harsh and bitter and he was steadfast in his concern for humanity or he was honest as critic. Like all good satires the principle aim of Gulliver’s Travels is to instruct and he wants to correct through ridicule. Gulliver Travels exposes with intensity the ugliness of human nature and the vices of conceit, pride or cruelty.

Gulliver's Travels is an adventure story and the story involving several voyages of Lemuel Gulliver who is protagonist of the story. He was went on several  unknown islands living with people and animals of unusual sizes, behaviours or  philosophies. but after each adventure, somehow he was able to return to his home in England where he recovers from these unusual experiences and then sets out again on a new voyage. In the story there are four voyages.

1.  A Voyage to Lilliput :

2.  A Voyage to Brobdingnag

3.  A Voyage to Laputa

4.A Voyage to the country of the Houyhnhums

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS AS UTOPIAN OR DYSTOPIAN FICTION

The term ‘Utopia’ has come to be synonymous with an ideal society. This term first used by Thomas More in his work UTOPIA (1516) and in this book he set out the vision of an ideal society. Plato’s REPUBLIC is considered a model of an ideal community. The Utopian community is perforce an imaginary. In an Utopian society the community holds privilege over the individual or conformity is an imperative. Dystopia was convinced of as the opposite of utopia. Utopia represents a moral land which can never exist in the real world and In this way Utopian places reflect wishes of the authors which can never come true. To name but a few are the realization of democracy and human rights or they try to improved medical care or nature conversation. Plato in his Utopia tried to give the idea of an ideal government based on the standards of the time. In his Republic, Plato depicted a state in which the rulers are philosophers, goods and women are communally owned, slavery is taken for granted, and the breeding of children is controlled on eugenic lines. An important element to mention is the letters that Gulliver sent to his cousin. In Gulliver’s Travels, the notion of estrangement can be traced in all four books without difficulty. The first book depicts the journey to Lilliput and The little mans themselves create the estranged effect as well as the setting of their land with small trees and a village with small houses:

"When I found myself on my feet, I looked about me, and must confess I never beheld a more entertaining prospect. The country around appeared like a continued garden, and the enclosed fields, which were generally forty feet square, resembled so many beds of flowers. These fields were intermingled with woods of half a sang, and the tallest trees, as I could judge, appeared to be seven feet high. I viewed the town on my left hand, which looked like the painted scene of a city in a theater. "

“Gulliver's Travels can be seen as Utopian in its refusal to concede that the ideal society can exist in the real world. As in Utopia, a seemingly ideal society can only be imagined far from English shores”. 

So Gulliver’s Travels can be read from the perspective of Utopian or we can also read from dystopian fiction as Lemuel Gulliver journeys from one voyage or one imaginary island community to author. A similar analysis can be for book two, where Gulliver on his second voyage to “Brobdingnag” meets the “Giants”. The setting again has been estranged by the thought of giant men and giant landscape and towns But the notion of novum can’t be concluded from it as it again consists of similar social structures. As for scientific matters, again there are no significant scientific elements to be discussed. Overall both books one and two fail to be considered as a science fiction work. He also examine the social and political structure in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and land of the Houyhnhums. The last voyage, the land if the Houyhnhums seems almost utopian but here again swift exposes a world where reason prevails in it’s perfection. Lilliput is populated by little people and they are scarcely distinguishable from one another. They are from a mass of humanity with no distinguishing features.

The Laputan community is a dystopia which relies on it’s Island subjects living below it for sustenance. The people of the floating Island are peculiarly shaped. The scientists of their good academy of Lagado are engaged in pointless experiments. The new land Gulliver visits in his third voyage are even more nightmarish because it becomes evident to him that among the polite and generous people. Gulliver describes them as the “Most mortifying sight” and “Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in proportion to their number of years, which is not to described. “

The country of the land Houyhnhums comes closest to being an utopia. The horses are the master. Gulliver described as “Orderly and rational” and “Acute and judicious. “ their purpose in life is to cultivate reason and be governed by it. Friendship came naturally to the Houyhnhums. Original lines from book are,

“If the censure of Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of my own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints that the Houyhnhums and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.”

The pragmatic society of Houyhnhnms is directed towards an idealistic organization, relationships and the general system of any civilized entity amd It is not entirely clear if Swift managed to accomplish the task of bringing this Utopian model successfully or not. One thing is for sure that out of this maze of conceptual imaginary worlds he managed to bring in the sights some negative aspects by playing and bringing the opposites as facts. Swift tried to introduce the reader with the new ideas rooted in the ancient Greece and thus fulfilling his intellectual duty.

 They are also practiced decency and civility. On the other hand the servants of the Houyhnhums are the detestable Yahoos and are described by Gulliver as “abominable” creatures. Gulliver is so taken up with the virtues of the inimitable Houyhnhums. They have grate difficulty adjusting with his family and his life in England when he returns there. He feels alienated there and spent most of his time with the horses in his stable because they resemble his former master.

CONCLUSION :

     So that it is interesting to note that in Gulliver’s description of England, its people and institutions, England is too emerge as a dystopia, an unpleasant, violent and corrupt society which does not practice what is preaches. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels gives some important aspects of science fiction genre in its use of the estrangement technique and the use of utopia and dystopia in its context. But overall the thing that brings this satire close to science fiction is the way it makes the readers think and  The epistemological questions that are raised in this book among our realization of social faults and the depiction of man in several conditions with its strengths and weakness both in body and mind, all lead to a “cognition” that are promised by a good science fiction story. Gulliver’s Travels does not fall completely in to the genre of science fiction, but it could have been one of the main inspirations and predecessors of this genre.