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DA VID OAKLEAF Trompe l'Oeil: Gulliver and the Distortions of the Observing Eye Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, is obviously an observer. The very title of his narrative appeals to popular interest in observations brought back from voyages of exploration - voyages that represent a geographical conquest of spac~ contemporary with Europe's mathematical conquest of space during the seventeenth -century scientific revolution. Peering through windows and eye glasses and perspective glasses, Gulliver observes both nature and manners. He observes natural curiosities, donating some giant wasp stings to Gresham College.He observes new lands, suggesting alterations to the world's maps. He observes courts and a public execution and a learned society, bringing back the plan of a machine to generate speculative knowledge mechanically. Finally, he publishes his observations , quarrelling with his critics as he does so. No fellow of the Royal Society could do more. Nevertheless, distortion is a more obvious feature of the Travels than the transparent record of experience recommended by that Society. Johnson'S dismissive comment that 'once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest' suggests that the book is based on systematic distortion; this implies that its exploration of science goes beyond its specific satire of the Royal Society and Cartesianism in book Ill. ' Surprisingly often, the Travels confronts the reader with the act ofobservation itself, emphasizing not only perspective glasses and empirical scepticism about the evidence of the senses but also, centrally, the dislocations of point of view inherent in observation. A fairer version of Johnson'S dismissal is Marjorie Hope Nicolson's suggestion that the two views through a perspective glass, one magnifying and one diminishing, determine the strategy of the first two voyages of the Travels. That perspective glass, however, is untrustworthy because it distorts sense impressions. When Galileo presented the results of his observations, for example, he learned that many men were highly sceptical of the images seen through his strange glass. In the Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton expresses this popular distrust of glasses by calling Galileo and earlier investigators of sight deluding magicians who promise 'to do strange miracles by glasses,' much as a modern sceptic announces that stage magicians somehow do it with mirrors. By Swift's day, this distrust has impressive support in philosophical distrust of the faculty of UNlYERSlTY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2, WINTER 198>'4 Trompe l'Oeil 167 sight itself. Since the ideal observer sees himself as pure mind confronting an objective order but is nevertheless dependent on sense impressions, the eye occupies the ambiguous boundary between mind and matter. The means of investigation consequently becomes an object of investigation for a long list of distinguished observers. Kepler finally discovered how the eye forms images because he was investigating how far the eye and its instruments might introduce errors into his astronomical calculations. Similarly, Descartes, who also wrote on optics, found it natural to begin his Meditations by doubting the evidence of his senses, while Locke, in opposition to Descartes, based knowledge on sense impressions but therefore asserted the limitations of human knowledge. Indeed, the empiricist distinction between primary qualities existing in objects themselves and secondary qualities created by the act of perception expresses the ambiguity of the eye's mediation between mind and matter. As the Travels often suggests, knowledge of sense impressions can be unreliable even before a glass distorts those impressions.' Gulliver's Houyhnhnm Master, for example, denies man any clearglass ofunderstanding that accurately reflects truth. He suggests instead 'some Quality fitted to increase our natural Vices; as the Reflection from a troubled Stream returns the Image of an ilI-shapen Body, not only larger, but more distorted." In this view, human reason is as naturally distorting as the human body is 'ill-shapen.' Although Gulliver comes to share this view, for reasons I discuss below, one has, so to speak, nagging doubts about the greater appropriateness of a horse's body to the clear glass of reason the Houyhnhnms seem to possess. Nevertheless, Gulliver's Master is a sound Baconian despite his provincialism, for Bacon too recognized the human...

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