A Hopeless Project: Gulliver Inside the Language of Science in Book III

It is conventional to start a paper on “The Voyage to Laputa...” by asserting that it is the least popular and least studied part of Gulliver’s Travels. So common has this convention become, that its second part (the bit about “least studied”) is rapidly becoming indefensible. ¹ Most defenders of Book III (and that is inevitably what those of us who write about it become) seek to define and ascribe some sort of unifying coherence to it, to find whether, if the text can be properly understood, Swift’s argument proves to be comprehensive and strong. Although none of their arguments has been indefensible and most have been plausible, none (not even Mezciems’ sophisticated attempt to demonstrate that its unity lies in discontinuity and collapse) has proved definitive; and none has managed to eradicate the suspicion that it is a rather messy, miscellaneous, and even fragmented section of Gulliver’s Travels.

Instead of questing for the interpretation that might end all dispute and discomfort, I propose to explore the reasons why such an interpretation has not been found and probably will not. This is a narrowly defined task, but it also has wider implications for the way we read Swift’s parodic prose. The reason for this is that, in this part of Gulliver’s Travels as in many places throughout Swift’s parodic writings, the text interweaves several dissonant rhetorical structures ungoverned by any single one. The most persistently fascinating thing about Swift’s prose is its capacity to adopt and shift into multiple rhetorical modes that express various (often contradictory) cultural loyalties. This capacity is why dispute about Swift’s life and politics is endless, even while fruitful. I shall pursue the line of thought I have addressed elsewhere in relation to A Tale of a Tub—that Swift’s writing should be treated as parody first, and extracting the messages from the satire should be left until that medium is well understood. ² More controversially, I want to show that the ironic openness to parodic threads means that a final, unitary coherence of satirical argument is not available in “The Voyage to Laputa” and is not the point.

The easy way to do this would be to rely on post-structuralist dogma about the radical indeterminacy of signification. That way I would be sure of success even before I set out. Unfortunately, however, I would be confining myself to demonstrating very little, because, if one concedes a priori that linguistic structures never hold, then I would be saying nothing distinctive about Book III. Instead, I accept that reasonable structural coherence of argument is, in principle, possible. If you play the Derridean game of demanding absolute rigor and consistency from a rhetorical structure, then this notion will not stand, but neither will anything else in language. ³ There is, however, some point in saying that oblique ironic texts such as Absalom and Achitophel and The Dunciad make an intelligible case. Such a case can be made to break down under concerted deconstructive probing; but it is a function of rhetoric as a mode and, more particularly, of satire as a genre, that a dominant argument be conveyed. Structural coherence of argument is neither the mode nor the point of Book III, however; for its parodic structures and miscellaneous details intentionally open up various meanings and various readings. It is not a satire if by that one means a focused and systematic attack on a single object (an impoverished definition, if ever there were one).

There is no future in arguing from this that Swift is a failed rhetorician, let alone a failed satirist. It makes more sense to assume that Swift is doing something different, that he is not delivering a covert sermon, either on conventional Christian themes (at the one extreme) or on radical indeterminacy (at the other). Perhaps he is doing both these things, and he is certainly also doing more. The most persistent feature of Swiftian parody is the way it calls up styles of language without fully or sincerely inhabiting them. It calls up rhetorics as...