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

The Emperor's New Clothes

The evidence of the might of the British Empire still very much exists today. Although debating that the US of A is the biggest kid on the block is fairly easy, the political structure of our global community is as much based on Victorian influence as it is American prowess. Many of the countries that were previously under the thumb of Britain are now close allies (including the US) and members of the Commonwealth of Nations (excluding the US). The incredible amount of power and control Britain held over the world in the 1700’s is still very easy to see and the fallout of that power even easier to criticize.

And this criticism isn’t new. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is a thinly-veiled satire of the British cultural, economic, and militaristic authority. At first as a surgeon for different naval expeditions and then later a captain, Gulliver, our protagonist, finds himself shipwrecked so many times as to make the reader wonder how he can still convince himself to get into a boat. And after every lost ship, Gulliver manages to find some fantastical society of humans or other creatures that he can learn from and associate himself with.

Each of these new societies is a mirror of some aspect of Britain or human nature. Summarizing the Orwell institute’s Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift uses each of these societies to point out some flaw in British society. Either by likeness or juxtaposition, the exaggerated caricatures that Gulliver meets reflect a trait that Swift feels needs to be improved. These aren’t hidden in any way and in at least one case a part of the book was omitted from publishing so as not to stir up civil contention.

British authority might have defined Johnathan Swift’s day and age, but that didn’t stop him and other writers from pointing out the flaws.

Image credit to: Burns Library, Boston College

Vindication? Or Damnation? The Problem with Context

Photo by Flickr user yaili

It may sound a little blasphemous coming from an undergraduate studying English, but the part I love most about studying old literature isn’t actually reading the text. I often feel like I should have spent more time studying history than English because I get so much more out of piece when I understand the historical context.

The problem with that enjoyment, however, is that we as people have a very hard time getting every aspect of the context down when we start looking backwards. Despite carefully kept records and trustworthy accounts, my little problem becomes magnified when we start going back hundreds of years to the Renaissance and try to accurately guess why people wrote and did things. A good example of this to me is the controversial Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli. His notorious writings have stretched down through the ages to gently mold our pop culture and character tropes with an influence akin to the much more recent H.P. Lovecraft. Because of Machiavelli, we have (for better or worse) House of Cards, Game of Thrones, and The Tudors. His works are the bread and butter of political intrigue and sound like a much more ancient, bitter, and cynical version of How to Win Friends and Influence People. 

But, the jury is still out on whether those words are serious or satire. And the debate centers around the context. 

Machiavelli wrote some fairly horrible things that are offensive to an ethical mind, but it doesn’t seem he spent his whole life living them. He was a republican during a time of monarchy who suffered publicly for his attempts to undermine the authority of the ruling Medici’s. There is a strong foundation for a belief that Machiavelli was one of the world’s most incredible satirists and critics of absolute power. We, however, can't be sure because we just don't fully know. 

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