A detail that may be lost to contemporary readers is how popular travelogue stories were in previous generations. There was a real artform to making foreign lands alluring on the page, creating something for those unable to visit them and inspire their imaginations. Nobody knew if they were being honest, but the writers with the purplest of prose could manipulate and turn their mentality into the embodiment of a culture that could not be refuted. There's been endless masterpieces in that genre, though it was also something bound to be held up to ridicule like "Don Quixote" with chivalrous knights in a former time.
Alas, here comes Jonathan Swift. As one of the great satirists of early literature, his story "Gulliver's Travels" comes as forceful as a wrecking ball to the tropes. Unlike his other works, people have argued what his larger message is here and whether the satire is commenting on a certain text. Is this a commentary on Ireland's feelings towards England's colonization habits? Is this an attack on intellectualization as being useless? It sort of is all there, but so is a scatalogical undertone that makes the text simultaneously juvenile. Is Gulliver supposed to be aspirational or a complete buffoon? Nobody knows for sure, and it's arguably what makes it one of the defining satires of its era.
Anyone curious to know if Swift is being serious won't have ot wait long to get answers. Along with blowhard language that extenuates the banal into self-serious garbage, he includes knowledge of his crew dying. This includes his leader Master Bates. Swift's willingness to embrace a cheekiness is what gives this text longevity, breaking free from the social elites that would see travelers as men of high regard. Gulliver is in a lot of ways reprehensible. It explains how his journey ends. For as much as he could be triumphant in ways reminiscent of Homer's "Odyssey," he instead starts nobly and slowly finds himself becoming disinterested in the formalities of mankind. He'd rather reduce himself to an animal instead of deal with math and logic. It's no Lewis Carroll in fool-proof logic, but it still has some fun head scratchers.
A lot of the worlds that he visits have become timeless synonyms and reflect the different ways that people feel disconnected from each other. While it's ultimately a humorous story, it's one that also features an attempt to understand a pretentious logic and give it clarity. Instead, it's all evidence that the average person would be bored by it. The spectacle would cease to matter and soon one would regress to their everyday behavior. For as gross as this novel is, there's still room to argue that it's an effective satire because it also points out that Gulliver, not the people he meets, is obnoxious. He's more self-imploding and it can lead to some questions for future visitors.
In a lot of ways, the text is dated and maybe doesn't land to the more intricate satires that followed. Even then, readers would be done a disservice to not consider giving this tale at least one round. It's not exactly the most insightful, but it still features enough wonderful ideas to make one want to travel the world and see the wonders for themselves. This takes apart the travelogue journey so wonderfully and returns the urge to circumnavigate back to the people. "Gulliver's Travels" is ultimately too silly and nonsensical to be mistaken for the other texts but, at the same time, it's hard to not see the other works in the same ligth afterwards. If satire is meant to poke holes in the subject, then this takes a bowie knife and slices down the middle. It's quite an absurd, wacky time that in some ways is dated but whose mentality is very much still alive and well.
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