Gulliver's Travels

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Gulliver's Travels Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, or for short Gulliver's Travels, 1726, modified 1735) is a prose satire by Irish clergyman and writer Jonathan Swift, in which he mocks the "travelling" of the European society of his time and even of human nature. It is Swift's best-known long story work, and a classic of world literature.

The book became famous as soon as it was published; John Gay said in a 1726 letter to Swift that it "is universally read, from the Council Cabinet to the nursery"; since then it has never gone out of print and has inspired numerous allusions, adaptations, and imitations.

Plot

The book is presented to us as the narrative of a traveler named Lemuel Gulliver, who was "at first a surgeon, and afterwards a captain of various ships." The text is presented as a first-person narrative by the supposed author, and the name "Gulliver" does not appear in the book other than in the title. It is divided into four parts, each representing a different journey.

Structure

Part I: Journey to Lilliput

Part II: Journey to Brobdingnag

Part III: Journey to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan

Part IV: Journey to the country of the Houyhnhnms

7 September 1710-5 December 1715

Gulliver arguing with Houyhnhnms (ilustration of 1856 by J.J. Grandville.)

Despite his intention to stay home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a 35-ton merchant ship as he grows bored as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find additions to his crew, and he believes that these new crew members turn the rest of the crew against him. They mutiny and, after keeping him on board against his will, they decide to leave him on the first piece of land they see and continue their journey as pirates. He is abandoned in a lifeboat and arrives first before a race of what appear to be hideous misshapen creatures to whom he takes a violent dislike. He soon meets a talkative horse and realizes that these animals —in their language Houyhnhnm, which means perfect in nature— are the rulers and the misshapen creatures called Yahoos, they are wild human beings.

Gulliver becomes a member of the horse company and comes to both emulate and admire the Houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting humans as beings endowed with a semblance of reason that they only use to exacerbate vices that nature gave them. However, an assembly of the Houyhnhnms decides that Gulliver, a yahoo with some reason, is a danger to their civilization and is expelled. He is rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is upset to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a generous, courteous, and wise person.

He returns home to England. However, he is unable to come to terms with life among the & # 34;yahoos & # 34; humans and becomes a hermit, staying at home, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day talking to the horses in his stables.

Composition and history

It is uncertain when Swift began writing Gulliver's Travels (much of the writing was done at Loughry Manor in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone while Swift remained there) but some sources^{[citation needed]} suggest an earlier date, 1713, when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot, and others formed the Scriblerus Club for the purpose of satirizing popular literary genres. According to these accounts, Swift was tasked with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus, and also satirizing the 'travel narrative' subgenre. It is known from Swift's correspondence that the composition itself began in 1720 with Parts I and II written first, then Part IV in 1723 and Part III written in 1724; but reforms were being made even while Swift was writing the Drapier Letters. By August 1725 the book was finished and as Gulliver's Travels was clearly anti-Whig satire it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied in such a way that his writing could not be used as evidence if he was persecuted for it, as had been the case with some of his Irish pamphlets (the Drapier Letters). In March 1726, Swift traveled to London to have his work published; the manuscript was secretly delivered to publisher Benjamin Motte, who used five different printers to speed production and prevent piracy. Motte, acknowledging a bestseller, but fearful of prosecution, cut or altered the most offensive passages (such as descriptions of the courtly contests in Lilliput and the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defense of Queen Anne in Part II, and published it. The first edition was released in two volumes on October 28, 1726, priced at 8s. 6d.

Motte published Gulliver's Travels anonymously, and as was often the case with works of fashion, many sequels followed (Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput), parodies (Two Lilliputian Odes, The first on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extinguish'd the Palace Fire...) and "claves" (Gulliver Decipher'd and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd, the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's Tale of a Barrel in 1705). For the most part, they were printed anonymously (occasionally pseudonymously) and quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with them and disavowed them in Faulkner's 1735 edition. Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five Verses on Gulliver's Travels, which were well liked. so much to Swift that she added them to the second edition of the book, though they are rarely included these days.

Faulkner's Edition (1735)

In 1735, an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a body of Swift's works, Volume II of which contained Gulliver's Travels. As disclosed in the "Caution to Reader" of Faulkner, Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) who reproduced most of the manuscript without Motte's emendations, the original manuscript having been destroyed. It is also believed, though not proven, that Swift at least proofread Faulkner's edition before it went to print. In general, this is what is considered the first edition of Gulliver's Travels with one small exception. This edition had an added piece by Swift, A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson ("A letter from Captain Gulliver to his cousin Sympson"), which complained about Motte's alterations to the original text, saying that he had changed it so much that "I hardly recognize it as my work" and repudiating all of Motte's changes as well as all of the "clues," libels, parodies, sequels, and sequels that had appeared in the intervening years. This letter is now part of many standard texts.

Lindalino

The five-paragraph episode in Part III, recounting the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an obvious allegory for the affair of the Drapier Letters that Swift he was proud. Lindalino represented Dublin and the Laputa impositions represented the British imposition of William Wood's poor quality copper common currency. Faulkner had omitted this passage, either out of political sensitivity as an Irish publisher printing an anti-British satire, or possibly because the text he was working with did not include the passage. In 1899, the fragment was included in a new edition of the Complete Works. Modern editions derive from Faulkner's edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addition.

Isaac Asimov points out in The Annotated Gulliver that Lindalino is considered to be a transcript of Dublin, composed of double "lins"; hence Dublin.

Main Themes

The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1803), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gulliver's Travels has been variously labeled: from Menippean satire to children's story, from proto-science fiction to predecessor of the modern novel.

Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels can be seen as a systematic refutation of Defoe's optimistic account of human capacity. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man, Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to reject the idea that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded this thought as a dangerous endorsement of the radical political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and for this reason Gulliver finds himself again and again in established societies, rather than on desert islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to work as a surgeon on his ship during the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.

Scholar Allan Bloom notes that Swift's critique of science (the Laputa experiments) is the first questioning by a modern liberal democrat of the effects and cost to a society that accepts and celebrates policies that pursue progress scientist.

One possible reason this book has achieved classic status is that it can be viewed in different ways by different people. In general terms, the themes of the book are three:

A satirical view of the state of European governments, and the minimum differences between religions.
An inquiry into whether man is inherently corrupt or becomes corrupt.
A new affirmation of the old dispute of "the old versus the modern" that Swift had already dealt with in The Battle of the Books.

In terms of narrative and construction, the parts follow a pattern:

The causes of Gulliver's misfortunes are becoming more and more perverse as time goes by: first he suffers a shipwreck, then he is abandoned, the third are attacked by unknown people and finally attacked by his own crew.
Gulliver's attitude is hardened as the book progresses: he is sincerely surprised by the wickedness and polytique of the Liliputiians, but finds that the behavior of the Yahoos in the fourth part of the book a reflection of human behavior.
Each part is the reverse of the previous one: Gulliver is large/small/slip/ignorant, countries are complex/simpl/scientific/natural, and forms of government are worse/best/best/better than that of England.
Gulliver's point of view between parts is reflected by that of his antagonists in the contrasting part: Gulliver sees the small liliputiens as perverse and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe exactly the same way; Gulliver sees the laputians as irrational, and his master houyhnm sees humanity this way.
No form of government is ideal: the brobdingnagian simplists enjoy public executions and have the streets infested with beggars, the honest and stretched houyhnms who have no word for lies are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as yahoo and are equally indifferent about their reaction to being expelled.
Specific individuals can be good even if the race is bad: Gulliver finds a friend in all his travels and, despite the rejection and horror of Gulliver towards all the yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the end of the novel.

Equally interesting is Gulliver's character himself: he progresses from cheerful optimism at the beginning of the first part to pompous misanthropic at the end. In this sense, Gulliver's Travels is a complex and very modern novel. There are subtle changes throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in the land of Houyhnhnm, as yahoos.

Throughout the novel, Gulliver is portrayed as gullible; he believes everything he is told, he never grasps deep meanings, he is an honest man, and he expects others to be too. This achieves fun and irony; what Gulliver says can be trusted to be accurate, and he does not always understand the meaning of what he perceives.

Also, although Gulliver is portrayed as a "man in the street" run-of-the-mill, lacking in higher education, he possesses a remarkable natural ability for languages. He is quickly fluent in the native tongue of whatever strange land he finds himself in, a literary device that adds great understanding and humor to Swift's work.

Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often regarded as a children's story, due to the popularity of the (often redacted) Lilliput section as a children's book. You can still buy books called Gulliver's Travels that contain only parts of the journey to Lilliput.

Character analysis

Pedro de Mendez is the name of the Portuguese captain who rescues Gulliver in Book IV. When Gulliver is forced to leave the island of Houyhnhnms, his plan is to "discover some uninhabited island"; where to live alone Instead, he is rescued by Don Pedro's crew. Despite Gulliver's appearance, dressed in furs and talking like a horse, Don Pedro treats him with compassion and takes him to Lisbon.

Although Don Pedro appears only briefly, he has become an important figure in the debate between the so-called "soft school" and "hard school" of readers of Gulliver's Travels. The "soft" they argue that Gulliver is the object of Swift's satire and that Don Pedro represents an ideal of generosity and human kindness. To critics of the hard school, Gulliver sees naked failure as the center of human nature, and Don Pedro is only a minor character who, in Gulliver's words, is "an animal endowed with some part of reason.";.

Cultural Influences

Gulliver and a gianta painting by Tadeusz Pruszkowski (National Museum in Warsaw).

From 1738 to 1746, Edward Cave published in occasional issues of The Gentleman's Magazine semi-fictional accounts of contemporary debates in the two Houses of Parliament under the title Debates in the Lilliput Senate. The name of the participants in the debates, other individuals mentioned, current and past politicians and monarchs, and most of the other countries and cities of Europe ("Degulia") and America ("Columbia& #34;) were thinly disguised under a variety of Swiftian pseudonyms. The concealed names, and the claim that the accounts were really translations of speeches by Lilliputian politicians, were a reaction to an Act of Parliament that prohibited the publication of accounts of their debates. Cave employed several writers for this series: William Guthrie (June 1738-November 1740), Samuel Johnson (November 1740-February 1743), and John Hawkesworth (February 1743-December 1746).

It is possible that this work by Swift influenced a story by Voltaire: Micromégas, from 1750, which tells of a visit to Earth by a gigantic extraterrestrial being. In the same narrative there is a mention of the moons of Mars similar to that of the Voyage to Laputa.

Swift Crater, on Mars' moon Deimos, is named for Jonathan Swift.

The term lilliputian has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and dainty. There is even a brand of small cigars called Lilliput. There are a number of collectible model houses known as 'Lilliput Lane'. The smallest screw-in bulb (5mm diameter) in the Edison screw series is called the 'Lilliput Edison Screw'. In Dutch and Czech, the words Lilliputter and liliput(á)n respectively are used for adults less than 1.30 m tall. Brobdingnagian appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for very large or gigantic.

In the same vein, the term yahoo is often found synonymous with ruffian or thug. In the Oxford English Dictionary it is defined as "a violent, rude or noisy person" and its origins are attributed to Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms big-endian and little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of ordering bytes in memory. The terms derive from one of the satirical conflicts in the book, in which two religious sects of Lilliputians are divided between those who break the boiled egg by the narrow part and those who do it by the wide part.

In other works

Sequels and imitations

Initial publication Gulliver's travels He was followed by many sequels.
The first was a work published anonymously, Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, published in 1727, which expands the account of Gulliver's stay in Liliput and Blefuscu by adding several gossip about scandalous episodes in the Liliputiense court.
Abbé Pierre Desfontaines, the first translator of Swift's history to French, wrote a sequel, Le Nouveau Gulliver ou Voyages de Jean Gulliver, fils du capitaine Lemuel Gulliver (The new Gulliver, or the travels of John Gulliver, the son of Captain Lemuel Gulliver), published in 1730. Gulliver's son has several fantastic and satirical adventures.
Donald Grant Mitchell versioned part I of the novel as a children's story, published in the magazine St. Nicholas in 1874.
Soviet-Ukrainian science writer Vladimir Savchenko published Fifth trip of Gulliver-The journey of Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships to the land of the Tikitakas (in Russian, Пятое путешествие Гуливера – Путешествие мюэля Гуливера, сначала хирурга, а апом капиткана
Gulliver's travels beyond the Moon (vomiting urge to renew the spirits of the year 1965, Garibā no Uchū Ryokō, "The Space Trips of Gulliver") is an animé of 1965, which presents Gulliver already old on a space trip, in the company of a boy, a raven, a talking toy soldier and a dog. The film, although it was a production for children, presented an alien world where the robots had taken the pode, thus continuing Swift's critical vein.
Hanna-Barbera produced two adaptations Gulliver's travels, one was a series of animation for television entitled The Adventures of Gulliver from 1968 to 1969 and the other was a special animated for the television of 1979 entitled Gulliver's travels.
American doctor John Paul Brady published in 1987 A trip to Inishneefa: a first-hand account of Lemuel Gulliver's fifth trip (Santa Barbara: John Daniel), a parody of Irish history like Swift.
"L. Gulliver" appears in the comic by Alan Moore The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume 1 as a member of an earlier Society of Extraordinary Men since the 1780s.
Frigyes Karinthy turned Gulliver into the hero of his two novels: Travel to Fa-re-mi-do (1916) and Chapel (1920) [18].
Lao She wrote "Notes about the city of cats" in Swift style. The civilization of the Martian cats is a satire about the contemporary Chinese society of the author.
Hungarian writer in Esperanto Sándor Szathmári wrote his novel Travel to Kazochinia in the form of another trip from Gulliver.
Argentine writer Edgar Brau wrote a novel entitled: Captain Lemuel Gulliver's last trippublished in 1998. The story is located in 1722, just after Gulliver's last trip and is located in the Rio de la Plata. In the same style as Swift, the author satirizes the customs of Argentine society.
Canadian writer Brett Wiens wrote On Swift Wings: The Travails of Cygnus, (On the wings of Swift: The works of Cygnus) published in 2019; an update of "The Travels of Gulliver". The protagonist is Cygnus, a young man who survives an airplane accident, on an island where the villages described in the novel by Swift live, who have evolved over the three centuries since their interaction with Gulliver.

Allusions

In the novel by Dostoyevsky, The Demoniates (1872) alludes that Gulliver, upon returning from Liliput, considered himself a giant as an example of the force of custom in the life of Stepan Trofimovich Verhovenski, one of his protagonists.

The short story of Philip K. Dick "Prize Ship" (1954) vaguely refers to Gulliver's travels
In the ninth book of the series The Time Wars, The Lilliput Legion Simon Hawke's "Lemuel Gulliver" legion, the protagonists meet Lemuel Gulliver and battle with the army that puts title to the work.
The BBC Radio 4 comedy series Brian Gulliver's Travels ("The Trips of Brian Gulliver") by Bill Dare is a satirical comedy about a travel documentary presenter, Brian Gulliver (played by Neil Pearson), who talks about his adventures on the still undiscovered continent of Clafenia. Gulliver's travels It was the only book Dare read while he was in college.
The year 1986 Laputa: Castle in the sky (Japanese: Speakfast מווה, / Tenkū no Shiro Rapyuta) directed by Hayao Miyazaki and launched by Studio Ghibli, focuses on a floating city known as Laputa.
In the movie Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, the maps of the Gulliver Travels are an element of the plot that leads to find the "Mysterious Island" described by Verne. Already on the island, the protagonists find tiny elephants and giant butterflies that evoke the fauna of Liliput and Brobdingnag.
In the movie Dr. Strangelovea B-52 nuclear-headed bomber aims at a scientific research laboratory in the fictional Soviet city of Laputa.
In the rimed tale The Butter Battle Book (The Butter Battle Book) by American writer Dr. Seuss the Yooks and Zooks they are at war because of the way to unite the butter in the bread, in reference to the dispute between the liliputiens and the blefuscudians about how to bake a hard egg. In the context, the author compares this trivial difference with the arms race during the Cold War.
The same allusion appears in Ray Bradbury's novel, Fahrenheit 451 When the main character, Guy Montag, reads Millie a quote from "Gulliver's travels": "It is estimated that eleven thousand people have suffered death on several occasions rather than having to break their eggs at the smallest end." In this case it refers to the fact that human beings conflict for trivial or absurd reasons.
In the history of Doctor Who The Mind Robber and his novelization, the character of Gulliver appears among other inhabitants of a completely fictional world.
In Old Man's War by John Scalzi, John Perry has to fight against a race of aliens called the Covandu, to which he compares to the Liliputiians by size.
In Horses Asteroid, by Charle E Fritsch, first story of an anthology of the same name published in 1970, is told that the houyhnhnms They have abandoned the Earth in a spacecraft and settled into an asteroid.

Accommodations

Portada de comic by Lilian Chesney

Music

In 1728 the Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann composed a suite in five movements for two violins based on the book of Swift. Telemann's piece is usually known as Gulliver's travels, and presents the Liliputiians and the brobdingnagians in a particularly vivid way through rhythms and tempos. The piece is part of Der getreue Musik-meister Telemann's "Resolved Music Master").
The ambient band Soufferance based his 2010 conceptual album on this book. Title "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the Mind", the album presents a single 65-minute long song, which is titled "The Thoughts and Memoirs of Mike Lachaire, First to Strange Individual, and then to Philosopher", in reference to the full title of the original book.

Cinema, television and radio

Gulliver's travels, 1939.

Gulliver's Travels has been adapted several times for film, television and radio. Most of the movies totally ignore the satirical element.

The new Gulliver (1935): this soviet version of the trip to Liliput was praised by the breaker animation work of director Aleksandr Ptushko, and script by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (not accredited).
Gulliver's travels (1939): a classic animation by Max Fleischer of the adventures of Gulliver in Liliput. This was the first long animated version after Snow White and the seven dwarfs Disney, and it was meant to be especially for children. The film then derived in two short series: the Gabby drawings on a liliputiense film compinche, and Animated Antics drawings starring Sneak, Snoop and Snitch (the three villains) and Twinkletoes (the courier pigeon).
The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960): an adaptation vague starring Kerwin Mathews and having stop motion effects by Ray Harryhausen.
Prípad pro zacínajícího kata (1970): a satirical film by the Czech Pavel Juráček, based on the third book, indirectly representing the communist Czechoslovakia, kept byoc after its launch.
Gulliver a törpék országában (1974) Directed by András Rajnai for Hungarian television (MTV), this one-hour show is an adaptation of the trip from Gulliver to Brobdingnag.
Gulliver's travels (1977): partly live, partly animated, starring Richard Harris.
Gulliver's travels (1979): an adaptation as a television film made in Australia. It was produced by Southern Star Group for Famous Classic Tales, with the voices of Julie Bennett, Regis Cordic, Ross Martin, Don Messick, Hal Smith, John Stephenson, and Janet Waldo.
Gulliver az oriások országában (1980). The second adaptation of András Rajnai for Hungarian Television (MTV), this show deals with the trip to Liliput.
Gulliver in Liliput (1981): BBC Classics Television. Starring Andrew Burt and Elisabeth Sladen.
Travel of Gulliver It was produced by Saban Entertainment. It was transmitted from 8 September 1992 to 29 June 1993. It is an adaptation of the novel, and covers a total of 26 episodes.
Gulliver's travels (1996): Live, two parts, TV miniserie with special effects starring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, also presenting a variety of cameo movie stars.
Crayola Kids Adventures: Tales of Gulliver's Travels (1997): Live, directly to video, for children with Adam Wylie as Gulliver.
Jajantaram Mamantaram (2003): Live, Indian film for children, starring Javed Jaffrey.
Gulliver’s travels (2010): Modernized, live, recreates the adventures of Liliput with Jack Black, and also appear Billy Connolly, James Corden, Amanda Peet, Chris O'Dowd, Catherine Tate, Jason Segel, Emily Blunt and Olly Alexander.

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