Among the Struldbrugs

When Lemuel Gulliver is in Luggnagg , his hosts tell him about the Struldbrugs. These are ordinary humans in every respect, but for an apparently random genetic quirk which makes it impossible for them to die. Gulliver is excited by the idea:

I cryed out as in a Rapture; Happy Nation, where every Child hath at least a Chance for being immortal! Happy People who enjoy so many living Examples of antient Virtue, and have Masters ready to instruct them in the Wisdom of all our former Ages! But, happiest beyond all Comparison are those excellent Struldbrugs, who being born exempt from that universal Calamity of human Nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the Weight and Depression of Spirits caused by the continual Apprehension of Death.

(ed. Claude Rawson, Oxford 2005, p. 194)

This enthusiastic speech ironically echoes a moment in the Aeneid. Aeneas, weighed down with misfortunes, envies his comrades who died a glorious early death at Troy: 'O thrice and four times blest, whose fate it was to die before the eyes of their fathers'. The allusion is an early hint that Gulliver's enthusiasm might be misplaced – and so it proves. Having spoken at length on how he would spend eternity, the situation of the Struldbrugs is explained to him in more detail. Although they live for ever, they continue to age. The question Gulliver needs to address is 'not whether a Man would chuse always to be in the Prime of Youth, attended with Prosperity and Health; but how he would pass a perpetual Life under all the usual Disadvantages which old Age brings along with it'. The Struldbrugs have lost their teeth, their hair, their memory, and their ability to communicate. They can no longer hold public office or earn money; and the general public is reluctant to provide for them.

When Gulliver eventually meets some Struldbrugs, he remarks that 'they were the most mortifying Sight I ever beheld'. Mortifying should be taken literally. These creatures, unable to die themselves, create an urge to die in others. In Luggnagg, fear of death is unusual; Gulliver's first instinct is to take a couple of Struldbrugs back to England, in order to eliminate it there. The elderly serve, and have always served, as a kind of living memento mori. They have also traditionally provided – and this is something that Gulliver's Luggnaggian experience shows well – an opportunity for the young and the middle-aged to reflect on their own situation (the Struldbrugs are remarkably incidental to the various imaginings and accounts of them, and end up as the potential object of a show-and-tell).

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to old age as a topic in its own right, though. Helen Small's intelligent and richly suggestive book, The Long Life, is an attempt to redress the balance: an exploration of old age, as it has been represented in literature and philosophy. The dearth of philosophical work is especially striking: the most recent major work on the topic is Simone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse (Paris, 1970), a book which Small finds curiously apathetic. And even though depictions of old age are commonplace in canonical literature – Priam, Lear, Père Goriot (all of whom are discussed in The Long Life) – there is an overwhelming critical tendency to read these depictions allegorically: 'Old age in literature is rarely if ever only about itself – but as far as criticism is concerned, it has oddly rarely been much about itself at all' (p. 6).

Small describes her approach as 'essayistic', and the book is best read as a series of cumulative but potentially free-standing essays. In each chapter she begins by presenting a way of looking at old age, drawn from – among other things – metaphysics, sociology, or genetics (her breadth of reference is dizzying). She then proceeds to close reading of a literary text, or group of texts, allowing the theory already expounded to colour her analysis. This is an approach to literature which can easily grate; x viewed pointlessly...