SWIFT, Jonathan

(1667-1745)

   Irish satirist, poet and cleric. His most famous work, perhaps the most important of all works of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts . . . byLemuel Gulliver (1726; rev 1735), better known today as Gulliver's Travels. The work is in part pure sf, and certainly makes use of and in some cases invents narrative strategies which are now basic to sf; its influence, both direct and indirect, on subsequent sf has been enormous, as for example on H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). In each of its 4 books Captain Gulliver finds himself marooned in an ALIEN culture. JS's SATIRE has two main forms: sometimes the culture in which he findshimself reflects aspects of British society in an exaggerated manner, so as to reveal its absurdities, and sometimes - more interestingly to sf readers - it is the differences between alien societies and ours which serve by contrast to make us see our own culture from a new perspective. This latter technique predominates in Book IV, "A Voyage to the Country ofthe Houyhnhnms", in which Gulliver finds himself stranded in a society of intelligent horses, who do not (for example) understand such concepts as war, the telling of untruths, or sexual passion. The details of their culture are more convincing than was commonly the case with satire of this kind, and the satire itself more complex. Although the story is often read as a forceful attack on mankind - the brutish Yahoos who live there are in fact humans - a more interesting reading, and one more readily supported from the text, is that Gulliver's admiring description of the life of pure intellect is part of Swift's ironic strategy, and that the reader is to see the horses as emotionally sterile and soulless. Swift's use of horse and Yahoo as sticks to beat one another is a double irony of a kind that has been much used in sf.Books I and II, in which Gulliver voyages to Lilliput, where everyone is very small, and to Brobdingnag, where everyoneis a giant (GREAT AND SMALL), are the best known, partly because bowdlerized versions have become children's classics; the originals are savage and bawdy. Book III is set in and around Laputa, an ISLAND floating in the air and largely populated by semi-crazed scientific researchers (the first important appearance of the mad SCIENTIST in literature); inthe distant city of Luggnagg live a group of depressing, senile immortals, "opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but uncapableof Friendship and dead to all natural Affection", the Struldbruggs. Many of the scientific experiments satirized by JS were to become staples of later sf; though he shows their absurdity, he also has sympathy for the imaginative enthusiasm with which they are carried out. Most of JS's work contains such paradoxes.Another satirical strategy of JS has become important to DYSTOPIAN writing generally: he takes an outrageous proposition and debates it quite deadpan, as if he not only supports it but does not seriously expect opposition. Thus he satirized the more inhuman attitudes to poverty (then as now) in A Modest Proposal (1729 chap) by suggesting that OVERPOPULATION and starvation in Ireland could both be cured at a stroke by using the children of the poor as food.

   PN

   See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ASTRONOMY; BULGARIA; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HUMOUR; IMMORTALITY; LOST WORLDS; MATHEMATICS; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; UTOPIAS.