Dripping with Satire

According to writer Reinhold Neibuhr, laughter is how we deal with life's "incongruities." When something doesn't quite fit or match up, we laugh. Comedians rely on that to keep a crowd going. Talk show hosts use it to sway us to their side. And Johnathan Swift used it in Gulliver's Travels to blatantly criticize (read tear asunder) the incongruities in Victorian society.

There are few topics that Swift doesn't touch on. Victorian authority? Gulliver's first shipwreck washes him up on the shores of Liliput, a nation of tiny people ruled over by Emperor Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue, the "terror of the universe, whose dominions extend five thousand blustrugs (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe."

Gender roles and romantic relationships? After proving himself a friend to the genius mathematicians of Laputa, a flying nation that subdues those below it with blunt, magnetic aggression and complete destruction. These incredibly intelligent men, however, out of necessity would restrict the travel of their wives down to the surface. Because, as they had learned over the years, their wives would often go down to the surface cities, find a man who offered them passion, and then never come home. Gulliver takes the time to mention one particular woman who refused to go back to her husband, a very noble man in Laputa, choosing to stay with a drunken sailor who beat her often.

Roosevelt as Gulliver by William Allen Rogers (1904)

War and peace? There are several times that Gulliver shares with the nations he finds himself washed into (because the man just can't have a safe voyage, but won't stop going back out to sea) the violent capabilities of European technology. Some are impressed, some are disgusted. While Gulliver blusters through the nobility of their warfare, his listeners wonder how he can take such pride in machines that rend, debilitate, and murder with such brutal efficiency.

By the end of our ill-fated Gulliver's travels, he has made the decision to live as a recluse. Not because every trip ends with him being washed up on the shore of some undiscovered nation, but because his last voyage made it impossible to look on or smell another human being. After meeting the noble Houyhnhnms (horse people) and the vile and feral Yahoos (humans), he fears for his safety even among his own kind. For me, this last encounter is Swift's masterpiece. In very thinly-veiled descriptions of Yahoo life, Swift creates a mirror of Victorian society. He tells of the Houyhnhnms' confusion that the Yahoos constantly fight each other, seem to have a single ruler over groups, and cherish strange, shiny objects: even going so far as to kill each other over them. Sound familiar?

Ever read I Am America, and (So Can You!) or America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't by Stephen Colbert? They start to have the same feel after a while. You want to laugh--and you do--until you realize just how painfully relevant the satire is.

 Image credit to the Granger Collection