Definitions

Roman law defined property – jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur – as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law. A justification of the word “abuse” has been attempted on the grounds that it signifies not senseless and immoral abuse but only absolute domain – a vain distinction invented for the sanctification of property and without effect against the delights of enjoying it, which it neither prevents nor represses. The proprietor has the power to let his crops rot underfoot, sow his field with salt, milk his cows on the sand, turn his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park: are these acts “abuse” or not? In matters of property, use and abuse are necessarily indistinguishable.

According to the Declaration of Rights, published as a preface to the Constitution of '93, property is “the right to enjoy and dispose at will of one's goods, one's income, and the fruit of one's labour and industry.”

Code Napoléon, article 544: “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided we do not act against the laws and regulations.”

First memoir

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property? (1840) appeared at a crucial point in modern French history. Just ten years before, during the “three glorious days” of revolution in July 1830, the Orleanist monarchy had been founded with a fanfare of liberal bombast and high hopes, in some quarters, of fulfilling the aims of the first French Revolution. “What is the Third Estate?” the Abbé Sieyès had asked in 1789; and his answer – “Everything” – seemed now on the point of fulfillment, with the nation finally and truly united under the general will and according to the principles of liberty and justice. For a time this political dream of bourgeois hegemony, pursued within the framework of constitutional monarchy, was shared by workers as well as members of the propertied elite, who were following François Guizot's famous advice – “Enrich yourselves!”

Before the decade was up, however, the July Monarchy seemed to many observers to have degenerated into a tyranny of wealth and status hardly better than the Old Regime. Love of liberty had turned into a “religion of property.” The ruling principle was neither equality nor fraternity but sheer “egoism”; the nation celebrated by Guizot, Michelet, and others had become a scene of class struggle between owners and workers – the haves and the have-nots or, in the parlance of the day, the prolétaries versus the propriétaries.

Nothing is more striking in the composition of Gulliver's Travels than that Swift wanted to place Part III where he did, for it was evidently written after Part IV, and then deliberately inserted in its present position (Ehrenpreis, III.443-4). It is traditional, even automatic, to compare Part III unfavourably with the other parts of the Travels, but Swift's intentions in proceeding from ‘A Voyage to the Houhnhnms’ to the composition of a further Voyage, and then so decisively altering the order of composition seem to have been very little considered. In the absence of explicit authorial statement the best way of doing this is to carry out an open-minded critical exploration of Part III in relation to the Travels as a whole. And, to wipe the slate clean, it should be said here that there is no direct evidence that Part III uses earlier satiric materials discussed by Swift with his friends Arbuthnot, Gay and Pope, in the last years of Queen Anne (Ehrenpreis, III. 445). Arbuthnot's own feeling that, had he known of Swift's design, he ‘could have added such abundance of things upon every subject’ is evidence against this claim. Another often repeated claim, that Swift's satiric friends were less satisfied with Part III than the rest of the Travels comes down to Gay's report that ‘Critics… think the flying island is the least entertaining’ and Swift's statement to Pope that ‘Dr Arbuthnot likes the Projectors least, others you tell me the Flying Island…’ ﹛Heritage, pp. 63-4). These comments are comparative, concern only parts of Part III, and were made in the context of high appreciation of the newly published book.

Gulliver had not been home from Brobdingnag ten days when Captain William Robinson, an old acquaintance, came to his house and persuaded him to be Surgeon in his ship the Hope-well on a new voyage to the East-Indies. This new transition to a world of wonders, by now a convention within the text of the Travels, is more elaborate than usual.

As Swift worked on the first two books of Gulliver's Travels his friend Alexander Pope, having translated Homer's Iliad, proposed a new translation of the Odyssey, the first of all the voyage narratives of the marvellous. In Bk IX Odysseus and his crew are imprisoned by the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, the size of a mountain and with a voice like thunder. This barbarous shepherd eats several of Odysseus’ seamen before the remainder manage to put out his eye with a stake and regain their ship. Even then the ship is nearly sunk as the giant flings rocks after them into the sea in his blind fury. Pope's wonderful translation of this episode may be compared with the terrifyingly factual manner with which Swift makes Gulliver tell how he is abandoned by his shipmates on the shore of Brobdingnag as ‘a huge creature’, a ‘Monster’, wades after their boat into the sea (I. 1). In the second century AD the True History of the Greek Lucian takes the marvellous voyage further into the fantastic, so much so as to achieve a satiric effect widely imitated in the Renaissance.

In the Christian Middle Ages the marvellous became the property of the romance, whether in verse or prose, whether narrative of land or sea. During the long European Renaissance the tale of the marvellous underwent more or less concurrently several overlapping or interlacing transformations. It could be made over into more explicit and systematic allegory in which (for example) giants, dragons and enchantments embodied moral or theological concepts, as in Spenser's Faerie Queene or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It could, retaining some of its original wonder, survive in the popular form of chapbook romance, stories meant for the relatively uneducated and for children. The end of this particular evolution might be found in Swift's Tale of a Tub where he tells how the brothers Peter, Jack and Martin, in their early adventures, ‘encountered a reasonable quantity of giants, and slew certain dragons’. This not only reveals Swift's fascination with popular story, but captures exactly the late Renaissance critical spirit as it plays upon romance.

Lemuel Gulliver presents himself to the reader as an educated man (he has studied at Cambridge and Leyden) but of small fortune and no worldly success. He is in fact educated above his station. Apprenticed to a surgeon, he makes several unprofitable voyages, marries, practises as a physician, fails, goes to sea again, as ship's surgeon, again attempts to settle down and practise as a doctor but again fails to thrive, and eventually accepts an offer to sail in the Antelope with Captain William Pritchard to ‘the South-Sea’ (I.i.3—4). After the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1721 this particular wording sounds a faint but clear note of warning.

This voyage is at first ‘prosperous’, until a storm drives the Antelope onto a rock off the coast of Van Dieman's Land (part of Terra Australis Incognita). In the plain, practical English of Dampier or Defoe, and in a paragraph of inordinate length, Gulliver narrates his attempt to reach land in one of the ship's boats with six other members of the crew. They row until they are exhausted and must trust themselves ‘to the Mercy of the Waves’. The boat is then overturned by the wind, and Gulliver swims ‘as Fortune directed me… pushed forward by Wind and Tide’ (I. i. 5). He just manages to reach land and, from the physical struggle and the brandy he has drunk before leaving the ship, falls into a long and deep slumber. The reader notices that it is to the mercy of the waves only that Gulliver says he has entrusted himself, and that he has swum as Fortune, not Providence, directed.

Still in the same long paragraph Gulliver awakes at dawn unable to stir. His whole body is fastened to the ground, even his hair. He can only see the sky. But very gradually, aware of something alive moving over him, he is able to perceive ‘a human creature not six Inches high, with a Bow and Arrow in his Hands, and a Quiver at his Back’ (I. i. 6), walking up his chest.

Gulliver's Travels may by general agreement be about difficulties of identity and problems of judgement. But its means to the exposure of these difficulties and problems are descriptions of how people live together in communities of different kinds, how they are governed, or how they govern themselves. Thus the political and social events of Swift's age have a claim on our attention, for the ‘civil Commotions’ which Principal Secretary Reldresal informs Gulliver of in the Empire of Lilliput (I. 4) may in principle stem from the civil commotions of the kingdoms into which Swift was born and have, in their turn, a bearing on the whole history of his time.

‘The meaning of Swift's work will escape anybody who forgets that his English career, long and important as it was, only interrupted an Irish life’ (Ehrenpreis, Swift, I. 8). This claim by Swift's leading biographer in the later twentieth century is clearly important, the more important since historians now propose that the civil wars of the seventeenth century arose as much from the distinctness of the three kingdoms of the British monarchy as from general economic or ideological causes (Russell, Causes, pp. 26-8). Swift grew to young manhood mainly in Ireland, in the aftermath of both the devastating Cromwellian civil war in that kingdom, and of the precarious restoration of the monarchy and episcopal Anglican Church in all three kingdoms in 1660. Associated with the Protestant Ascendancy in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland, Swift saw a Roman Catholic monarch, James II and VII, begin to introduce pro-Catholic legislation, and thus provoke the defiance, in England, of the Seven Bishops of the established Church. He saw King James lose control of the political situation in the face of the expedition of the Prince of Orange, in 1688, but then found himself surrounded in his last year as a junior member of Trinity College, Dublin, by an Ireland almost all under the control of James II's Deputy, the Earl of Tyrconnel. Soon James himself would land there, and a pro-Catholic parliament sit in Dublin. In Scotland too there was civil war: only in England, the country of Swift's Anglican forebears, did the throne seem to have changed hands in peace.

Anyone who makes a statement about Swift's Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver … must soon expect to be confronted by a counter-statement perhaps equally plausible. That is the nature of Swift's book. It studies paradox and dilemma. The present monograph is nevertheless rash enough to aim at several specific goals. First, it seeks to focus upon the extraordinary narrative and imaginative achievement of the Travels which has too often been pushed to the margins of debate by a body of criticism largely concerned with satiric intention and final effect. That kind of criticism is, of course, provoked by the text and would have given Swift much wry satisfaction. The hermeneutic battles, especially on the significance of Part IV, are of great interest, yet they take us surprisingly far from the reading experience of the Travels upon which final interpretation must, in the last analysis, rest.

Secondly, I argue that the centre of Swift's art in this book is an ironic viewpoint: to be specific, the purposely unpredictable variation in relation between Gulliver and the reader, sometimes near identification, sometimes morally distanced. This sequence of significant involvement and detachment, evolved and intensified as it is, is a function of the complementary relation of Part and Part. The continuity of Gulliver as a simple and knowable character is essential to this, for change cannot be recognized as significant without a thread of continuity. The changing relation between Gulliver and reader is what makes the Travels so much more than merely a devastating attack on ‘that Animal called man’ which we might witness with shock, wonder and distaste. Swift's handling of Gulliver has a rhetorical design on the reader, lies in ambush for us, making the judgement of others quite inescapably and painfully the judgement of ourselves, and making us undergo all the emotions, gratifying or mortifying, of judging and being judged. It is tempting to argue that, by virtue of its ironic viewpoint, Gulliver's Travels is a landmark in literature. But here the Cervantes of Don Quixote has come before. Rather the Travels is a landmark for the power with which it turns ironic viewpoint against passivities and complacencies of its readers.

By comparison with Gulliver's earlier periods at home between voyages he now stays with his wife and family a whole five months, at the end of which Mrs Gulliver is again with child. Then, for the first time, Gulliver has the chance of a command: ‘an advantageous Offer made me to be Captain of the Adventure … to trade with the Indians in the South-Sea…’ (IV. i. 223-4). On this occasion we are not told Mrs Gulliver's view, save that her husband refers to her as ‘my poor Wife’ (IV. i. 223). If we review the circumstances in which in each of the four voyages Gulliver comes to a strange land, we shall see that he is treated worse as his travels go on. In Part I he is shipwrecked, in Part II deserted at a moment of peril, in Part III abandoned in an open boat by Japanese pirates, and now in Part IV he suffers a mutiny by his crew, is imprisoned on his own ship, and finally set ashore (in his best suit) on the first land they discover, as unknown to them as to Gulliver. ‘In this desolate Condition’ (IV. i. 224) he has, as usual, no recourse to prayer or religious self-examination. His recent refusal to trample on the crucifix appears to have no implications for him now.

In his new land Gulliver, expecting to find savages, enters a terrain of trees, grass, and several fields of oats. He finds a road on which there are tracks of human feet, of cows, and most of all of horses. What he actually sees first are some strange animals (‘At last I beheld several Animals in a Field, and one or two of the same Kind sitting in Trees’ - IV. i. 225). He gives a detailed physical description of them, their bodies, where hair grew on them and where it did not, their brown or buff-coloured skin, the different colours of their hair, how they often stood upright, sat down or lay down, how the females were smaller, with less hair on their bodies, and with dugs that hung low down between their ‘fore Feet’ and often touched the ground as they walked.