Persuasive Ironies: Utopian Readings of Swift and Krasicki

The ostensible goal of the utopian novel is to serve as the fictional embodiment of a theoretical ideal, the dream of a perfect society brought to life. This is especially true in the age of Enlightenment, a time that seemed to particularly believe in the emancipatory power of reason and its ability to rationally organize human existence. The novel is an obvious handmaiden to the utopian project, rendering the brave new world tangible and familiar while also acting as its advocate, persuading readers of its virtues. It seems surprising, then, to find two eighteenth-century utopian novels that not only critique utopian ideals but also call into question fiction’s ability to deliver utopianism’s message, or indeed, any kind of lesson at all. Yet the two novels I discuss in this article, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki’s Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom) (1776), do exactly that. Krasicki and Swift illustrate the ultimate disjunction between the human and the abstract, a problem that is at the heart of political theory itself. The inability of the universal to meaningfully encompass the individual casts doubt on political projects of universal freedom, which must ultimately be a freedom of the individual, and of self-determination. What makes their novels of particular interest is the way in which they simultaneously illuminate the limits of fiction’s powers of political pedagogy and its ability to portray those limits through its use of irony.

Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki is often considered to be the first Polish novel, and a typical text of the Enlightenment. The novel tells the story of a young man, Mikołaj, and his upbringing in Sarmatian Poland. Forced to leave the country because of financial problems, he travels to France, which he must also eventually flee because of money troubles. A shipwreck lands him on the island of Nipu, which most critics read as a fairly straightforward embodiment of Enlightenment principles, in line with other European visions of utopia.¹ After leaving Nipu, Mikołaj travels to the New World, and ultimately returns to Poland. Studies of the novel focus on its advocacy of Enlightenment values (though more recent criticism has begun to complicate this picture, as Teresa Kostkiewiczowa points out in a broad overview of this issue), but as I make clear here, the novel lends itself to a very different reading.² Swift was undeniably an influence on Krasicki: in fact, the narrator of Krasicki’s subsequent novel, Historia, is a character from Gulliver’s Travels, an immortal Strudlbrug from Luggnag, of Gulliver’s third voyage. Read alongside Gulliver’s Travels, the critique of Enlightenment values in Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki becomes far more apparent. Both novels not only articulate a similar problematic at the heart of utopian thought but also reflect more specifically on the role that fiction plays in illuminating these critiques.

At the center of both texts is an interrogation of the disjunct between theory and practice, between the particular and the universal. The universal has, of course, long been a problem for utopian thought, particularly for its fictional representations. The universal as a category is necessarily abstract and formal in nature: if it is to contain everyone, it cannot be too particular. But this is precisely what cripples the fictional efforts: the category becomes so broad that it loses sight of the individual. Fredric Jameson complains, for instance, that in utopian literature “the perspective is utterly anonymous. The citizens of utopia are grasped as a statistical population; there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential ‘lived experience.’”³ The characters become a uniform, undifferentiated mass, no longer recognizable as human. It is a curious conundrum, for this is the very problem that fiction ought to ameliorate, rendering the experience of utopian life tangible. Moreover, this tendency to paint humanity in its elementary forms also opens onto the dangers inherent in utopian planning; the slippage into totalitarianism that is so common in these works. To lose sight of the individual, it seems, is...