The Novel

by Steven Moore

  During all the circus attractions of the novel, Swift keeps the focus on Gulliver’s moral development, which is a defining feature of novels, unlike fictional travel books and utopias where an often unnamed narrator merely reports what he sees and returns home unchanged. Gulliver’s Travels is many things, but at heart it is a character study of a man who fails to benefit from his unique moral education. Because the real world doesn’t match the one he grew up with—and one of the triumphs of the novel is the way Swift makes the unreal real—Gulliver rejects it entirely, instead of learning his lesson: his sessions with the king of Brobdingnag, the king-size moral treatise he reads immediately after, and his interviews with the spirits of historical figures all provide the means by which he can correct his view of the world, calibrating it to his newly acquired knowledge rather than “by his bias and partiality to the place of his birth” (4.7). But Gulliver can’t handle the truth, and fails to pick up on a distinction the Brobdingnagian king makes; His Majesty concluded from Gulliver’s evidence that the bulk of humans are odious vermin, not all. The king observes that Gulliver himself seems to “have escaped many vices of your country,” and during Gulliver’s travels he encounters a few people who treat him with selfless generosity, such as the Brobdingnagian girl Glumdalclitch and the sea captain who rescues him at the end, Pedro de Mendez. There’s also his wife, who apparently remains faithful during his 16 years of travel. But Gulliver fails to distinguish between individuals (as misanthropic Swift did in personal life) and goes from one extreme to another, from one of the greatest “lovers of mankind” (4.2) to one of the greatest haters, and from the extreme of Puritanism to the extreme of Houyhnhnm inhumanity. For characters in most novels, experience, like travel, broadens the mind and corrects earlier, usually misinformed assumptions about the world, but Gulliver has a fatal flaw that prevents him from acquiring a mature perspective on life, and it’s sad to see a fundamentally decent man turn into such a wretch. Gulliver’s Travels could as easily be shelved under Tragedy as under “Satire and Humor.”

  Swift drew upon earlier genres of fiction for his novel, and any well-annotated edition will reveal how much he borrowed from Lucian’s True Story, More’s Utopia, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cyrano’s Other World, and from any number of utopian fantasies, traveler’s tales, animal fables, science fictions, and political allegories. But Swift also took advantage of the growing use of realism in novels. We don’t even learn the name, much less the background, of the narrator of Bacon’s New Atlantis (which is parodied in the voyage to Laputa), but Gulliver’s Travels begins with the kind of backstory found in the more realistic novels of the day, including such subtly significant details as that Gulliver’s family came from Banbury and that he attended Cambridge, places associated with Puritanism, which goes a long way toward explaining many of his later actions. His status as a middle child means he can’t rely on an inheritance and must make his own way, and the fact that about the only thing he tells us about his wife is the size of her dowry gives us one more piece of characterization. As in Robinson Crusoe, the paucity of detail about his wife and family speaks volumes about his autistic personality, and like Defoe’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels is filled with realistic details about how a person might cope in unfamiliar surroundings. There are some brilliant touches, such as Gulliver’s unconscious habit of continuing to shout after he’s been rescued from Brobdingnag, the kind of detail that previous novelists wouldn’t have thought of. Nor did his predecessors deal with a person’s need to eliminate body waste; Swift rubs our noses in details about urination, defecation, and sweat, not to mention some nauseating close-ups of skin and complexions. For a so-called fantasy, Gulliver’s Travels is unprecedentedly realistic.

  At the same time, Swift’s use of fantasy to convert intellectual concepts into unforgettable metaphors is stunning, whether it’s exaggerating Gulliver’s physical relationship to others to symbolize his difficulty attaining a proper sense of proportion and perspective (too big and distant in part 1, too small and close in part 2), or the means by which Lilliputian politicians gain office, or the loony inventions of the Laputians. Like Swift, Gulliver strives “to express myself by similitudes” (4.4), and just “as the reflection from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill-shapen body, not only larger but more distorted” (4.5), Gulliver’s Travels functions as a funhouse mirror. It’s funny to some readers, disgusting to others, and a challenge to all to see clearly into Swift’s “troubled stream.” And like a deceptively clear stream, Gulliver’s “plain, simple style” (“Advertisement,” xxxii) refracts multiple levels of irony and conceals allusions to an encyclopedic range of materials.

  As with any popular, unusual work, Gulliver’s Travels launched a fleet of imitations, parodies, poems, and continuations—including one ascribed by Pope to Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput (1727)—all deservedly forgotten today.159 But its contribution to the art of the novel, its expansion of the genre’s possibilities, took longer to be appreciated and assimilated. Here was a novel that could appeal to children as well as to intellectuals, one that mixed comic episodes with philosophical speculations, one that began and ended like a conventional novel but mashed up a variety of genres in between. It’s a mode that few novelists (Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, Carroll) would attempt until the 20th century: William Burroughs acknowledged the influence of Swift on Naked Lunch, and Gulliver’s Travels provided the template for Black Humor, magic realism, and for novels like Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Self’s Great Apes, to name only a few. Gulliver’s Travels doesn’t belong to the fairly recent mainstream of the novel, but it is a man-of-war on the longer river of innovative fiction.

  Gulliver’s Travels was originally intended to be a publication of the Scriblerus Club, named after its strawman pedant Martinus Scriblerus, and at one point Gulliver’s travels were to be his own. The grave scholar is the protagonist of a hilarious novel entitled The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, written sporadically between 1714 and 1729 (though not published until 1741) principally by John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope, with some help from Swift and other Scriblerians (John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley). This little masterpiece of learned wit begins with glimpses of his prenatal existence and his eccentric education at the hands of his antiquarian father, who, like Sterne’s Walter Shandy, derives his pedagogy from ancient, often arcane sources. His father then hires a trifling tutor to teach young Martin rhetoric, logic, and metaphysics, and after that our scholar progresses to anatomy, psychology, and finally to literary criticism. Visiting a London sideshow, Martin falls in love with the blue-eyed blonde half of a pair of Siamese twins—Bohemian, actually—and after one of the most ludicrous courtships in literature (he looks forward to “leaping into the four soft arms of his mistress” [14]) he marries her/them, only to have the marriage annulled after one of the most ludicrous legal procedures in literature (his lawyer cites the mythical “Geryon with three heads and Briareus with a hundred hands” as precedents [15]). To mend his broken heart, he sets off on a series of travels, first to “the remains of the ancient Pygmean empire,” then to “the land of the giants,” then to “a whole kingdom of philosophers,” and finally to an unidentified location where “he discovers a vein of melancholy proceeding almost to a disgust of his species”—an itinerary that should sound familiar.160 Turning his back on love, Martin begins his academic career, and the short novel concludes with a preview of his discoveries and publications, including an essay “persuasive to people to eat their own children, which was so little understood as to be taken in ill part” (17).

  The Scriblerians have a field day with this humorless pedant, who knows just enough about enough subjects to appear learned, but who lacks the sense to put his learning to good use, squandering it instead on trivial topics and textual quibbling. A lightning rod for their thunderbolts of wit, Scriblerus provided the means “not merely of ridiculing the follies of party write
rs, critics, editors, and commentators,” Kerby-Miller writes, “but of satirizing all follies among men of learning, whether philosophers or artists, antiquarians or travelers, teachers or poets, lawyers or dancing masters” (29). Swift pursued the same project in A Tale of a Tub, but Martinus Scriblerus does so in the form of a more accessible bildungsroman, with enough attention to Scriblerus’s twisted upbringing and failed romance to make us almost feel sorry for the nerd as he begins his solitary life of Grub Street hackwork. The authors seem to have taken a perverse delight in collecting and satirizing examples of the abuses of learning, for their brilliant parodies of antiquarianism, rhetoric, legalese, abstract philosophy, and heroic romances are deeply erudite and uproariously funny. Unfairly neglected, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is one of the great comic novels of the 18th century.

  Among the publications by Scriblerus listed on the final page of the novel is “Notes and Prolegomena to the Dunciad.” Let me float this proposition down from the flying of island of Laputa:

  In 1728, Alexander Pope published his mock-epic poem The Dunciad, a three-book attack on all the poets and critics who had been harassing him all his professional life, and a grim satire on the decline of English culture, which he viewed with as much despair as his fellow Scriblerian Swft. In 1729, he reissued it as The Dunciad Variorum, edited by Martinus Scriblerus, who made it his own by engulfing the original poem in ponderous editorial matter: prefaces, voluminous notes, emendations, appendices, and an index. This is the same procedure Vladimir Nabokov followed 230 years later when he first wrote a mock-epic poem entitled “Pale Fire,” then added the crazed editorial apparatus by Charles Kingbote, thereby converting the poem into a novel. Can we call The Dunciad Variorum a proto-Nabokovian novel? I noted earlier that Nabokov modeled Kingbote partly on the narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, but the form of his novel was obviously suggested by The Dunciad.

  In one sense, it is a sequel to The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus: having learned how he was trained as a critic, the reader now watches him in action, bungling his way through Pope’s complex poem: he begins with a selection of “Testimonies to Our Author,” which mingle insults with praise, but he refuses to adjudicate: he doesn’t agree with the high praise Pope has received, but is too timid to venture an opinion of his own, so he concludes the section by stating “we shall determine on nothing but leave thee, gentle reader, to steer thy judgment equally between various opinions. . . .”161 As he sees it, a critic’s skill set includes “smartness, quick censure, vivacity of remark, certainty of asservation, [and] acerbity” (75), but not judgment. Scriblerus limits himself to textual quibbling, beginning with the title (should it be spelled Dunceiad, or even Dunceiade?), to identifying literary allusions (including some that have escaped the “poet himself” [74]), and to second-guessing the author’s intentions: “such is not surely the judgment of our poet . . .” (3.333n), “far be it from our author to suggest . . .” (4.607n). Like Pale Fire, The Dunciad Variorum can be read as a novel that dramatizes the contentious relationship between writers and their critics, the story of a third-rate scholar dealing with a first-class work clearly over his head, but vain and pompous enough to believe he truly understands the work and can correct its faults. (Scriblerus concludes his edition with several pages of errata.) Pope’s idea of having a dunce comment on his Dunciad, while not original, was a brilliant stroke;162 and while he obviously didn’t consider the variorum edition to be a novel per se, its thematic and formal resemblance to Nabokov’s novel makes it tempting to call it one avant la lettre. But this argument is starting to sound like one Scriblerus would make, so I’ll drop it.163

  Reluctant to take leave of the dazzling publications of the Scriblerus Club—do we have time to listen to Gay’s Beggar’s Opera?—I want to note one more unwitting contribution Jonathan Swift made to the novel. In 1738, he published a book known as Polite Conversation (full title: A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, According to the Most Polite Mode and Method Now Used at Court and in the Best Companies of England), a side project he had been working on since 1704. A parody of the instructional “courtesy” manuals of the time, it purports to be the work of a dotty old social parasite named Simon Wagstaff, who informs us that he has spent 36 years gathering witty remarks, clever comebacks, and fashionable proverbs from his time in polite society, and now wants to present them to the nation as a guide for aspiring socialites and as a cheatsheet for those who find themselves stuck in conversation with nothing to say. Wagstaff casts his examples in the form of a novella dramatizing a day in the lives of a half-dozen members of high society, which he summarizes in “The Argument”:

  Lord Sparkish and Colonel Atwit meet in the morning upon the Mall; Mr. Neverout joins them; they all go to breakfast at Lady Smart’s. Their conversation over tea, after which they part, but my lord and the two gentlemen are invited to dinner. Sir John Linger invited likewise, and comes a little too late. Their whole conversation at dinner, after which the ladies retire to their tea. The conversation of the ladies without the men, who are supposed to stay and drink a bottle, but in some time go to the ladies and drink tea with them. The conversation there. After which a party at quadrille until three in the morning, but no conversation set down. They all leave and go home.

  What follows is 70 pages of vapid dialogue exposing polite society as a clique of airheads who speak in clichés because they are incapable of an original thought. Here they are at dinner:

  Lord Smart. And the best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

  Lord Sparkish. What do you think of a little house well filled?

  Sir John. And a little land well tilled?

  Colonel Atwit. Aye, and a little wife well willed?

  Neverout. My lady Smart, pray help me to some of the breast of that goose.

  Lord Smart. Tom, I have heard that goose upon goose is false heraldry.

  Miss Notable. What! will you never have done stuffing?

  Lord Smart. This goose is quite raw. Well, God sends meat, but the Devil sends cooks.

  Neverout. Miss, can you tell which is the white goose, or the grey goose the gander?

  Miss Notable. They say a fool will ask more questions than twenty wise men can answer.

  Colonel Atwit. Indeed, Miss, Tom Neverout has posed [got the better of] you.

  Miss Notable. Why Colonel, every dog has his day. But I believe I shall never see a goose again without thinking on Mr. Neverout.

  Lord Smart. Well said, Miss. I’faith, girl, thou hast brought thyself off cleverly.164

  Wagstaff obviously thinks so, but as critic Mackie L. Jarrell observes, “What is gravely introduced as a model of good behavior turns out to be a holocaust of manners. The characters are not only bores, they are fatuous, rude, and obscene. They spit, yawn, stretch, scream and squall, pinch and slap each other, complain of the food and the smells in the room, slander their friends, insult each other grossly, and congratulate themselves shamelessly on their borrowed wit” (545–46).

  The social satire is obvious enough, but what’s more interesting is Swift’s decision to rely solely on dialogue to propel the plot—what little there is of it, mostly Neverout’s obnoxious attempts to seduce Miss Notable, whom Wagstaff calls his “hero” and “heroine,” both intended “as patterns for all young bachelors and single ladies to copy after” (35–36). Swift was one of the few novelists of the time to use dramatic form for prose fiction: he finished Polite Conversation the same year Crébillon was composing his dialogue-novels (The Opportunities of a Night, Fortunes in the Fire), but it more uncannily resembles the modernist novels of Ronald Firbank, both in social setting and satiric intent.165 Swift’s concern with clichéd conversation as a sign of cultural decline is shared by a number of later novelists who likewise expressed that concern in inventive fictions, such as the “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas” supplement to Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet; Joyce’s Ulysses (which, as Jarrell documents, contains
many quotations from Polite Conversation); “The Myles na gCopaleen Catechism of Cliché” by Flann O’Brien; the dialogue-heavy novels of William Gaddis; and Harry Mathews’s Selected Declarations of Independence. Polite Conservation is valued by lexicographers for its record of how one segment of society spoke during Queen Anne’s reign, but it is one more example why Swift can be regarded as a godfather of 20th-century experimental fiction.

  The fertile 1720s was followed by the fallow 1730s; the baton of innovative fiction was passed to the French for a decade, during which only a few English novels of note appeared. For example, there is the eccentric Happy Unfortunate; or, The Female Page (1732) by Elizabeth Boyd, misleadingly described in some reference books as “written entirely in blank verse rhythm.”166 This got me all excited until I looked at the opening sentence, which doesn’t resemble any species of verse: “A shipwrecked mariner who was cast on shore upon the fertile isle of Cyprus, friendless and alone, lost himself in the agreeable gardens of Duke Bellfond, a ruling statesman in that province.” The third paragraph, however, does scan as blank verse—“Here ’tis indeed the goddess keeps her court, and wantons with delight in every eye”—and thereafter the cadenced prose does indeed fall into a blank verse rhythm from time to time, not surprising from an author who also published poems and ballads. (The goddess is Venus: as in Wroth’s Urania, Cyprus is the island of free love.) Ernest Baker was closer to the mark when he described the style as “semi-metrical fustian” (128) and demonstrates by setting a paragraph from the novel in verse, in which the heroine rails against society’s rule that a woman should not openly express admiration for a man: