Paper no.: 2 GUlliver's third voyage to "Laputa"

To evaluate my assignment

Gulliver’s Travels in Laputa, Balnibarbi, Laggnagg, Glubbdubdrib

• Summary and analysis of “Laputa”

Gulliver has been home in England only ten days when a visitor comes to his house, asking him to sail aboard his ship in two months’ time. Gulliver agrees and prepares to set out for the East Indies. On the voyage, pirates attack the ship. Gulliver hears a Dutch voice among them and speaks to the pirate in Dutch, begging to be set free since he and the pirate are both Christians. A Japanese pirate tells them they will not die, and Gulliver tells the Dutchman grows angry and punishes Gulliver by sending him out to see in a small boat with only four days’ worth of food.

Gulliver finds some island and goes ashore on one of them. He sets up camp but then notices something strange: the sun is mysteriously obscured for some time. He then sees a landmass dropping down from the sky and notices that it is crawling with people. He is baffled by this floating island and shouts up to its inhabitants. They lower the island and send down a chain by which he is drawn up.

Gulliver is immediately surrounded by people and notices that they are all quite odd. Their heads are all tilted to one side or the other, with one eye turned inward and the other looking up. Their clothes are adorned with images of celestial bodies and musical instruments. Some of the people are servants, and each of them carries a “flapper” made of a stick with a pouch tied to the end. Their job is to aid conversation by striking the ear of the listener and the mouth of the speaker at the appropriate times to prevent their masters’ minds from wandering off.

Gulliver is conveyed to the king, who sits behind a table loaded with mathematical instruments. They wait an hour before there is some opportunity to arouse the king from his thoughts, at which point he is struck with the flapper. The king says something, and Gulliver’s ear is struck with the flapper as well, even though he tries to explain that he does not require such actions. It becomes clear that he and the king cannot speak any of the same languages, so Gulliver is taken to an apartment and served dinner.

A teacher is sent to instruct Gulliver in the language of the island, and he is able to learn several sentences. He discovers that the name of the island is Laputa, which is their language means “floating island”. A tailor is also sent to provide him with new clothes, the king orders the island to be moved. In the movie version of Gulliver’s travel to the Laputa, for the tailor Gulliver spoke a dialogue that,

“Brilliant intellectuals employed techniques unknown to our tailors. Painstakingly they measured the circumference of my ears, the distance between my toes, the length of my eyelashes and even my shadow.”

“Hard to understand, then, the result.”

Here we find that he said something but hidden meaning is something else. Island is taken to a point above the capital city of the kingdom, Lagado, passing village along the way and collecting petition from the king’s subjects by means of ropes sent down to the lands below.

The language of the Laputans relies heavily on mathematical and musical concepts, as they value these theoretical disciplines above everything. The Laputans despise practical geometry, thinking it vulgar-so much so that they make sure that there are no right angles in their buildings. They are very good with charts and figures but very clumsy in practical matters. They practice astrology and dread changes in the celestial bodies.

The island is exactly circular and consists of 10,000 acres of land. At the center there is a cave for astronomers, containing all their instruments and a lodestone six yards long. It moves the island with the magnetic force, since it has two charges that can be reversed by means of an attached control. The mineral that acts upon the magnet is large enough to allow it to move only over the country directly beneath it. When the king wants to punish a particular region of the country, he can keep the island above it, depriving the lands below of sun and rain. Such measure failed to work in one town, where the rebellious inhabitant had stored provisions of food in advance. They planned to force the island to come so low that it would be trapped forever and to kill the king and his officials in order to take over the government. Instead, the king ordered the island to stop descending and gave in to town’s demands. The king is not allowed to leave the floating island, nor is his family.

Analysis:

Gulliver’s third voyage is more scattered than the others, involving stops at Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan. Swift completed the account of this voyage after that of the fourth voyage was already written, and there are hints that it was assembled from notes that swift had made for an earlier satire of abstract knowledge. Nonetheless, it plays a crucial role in the novel as a whole. Whereas the first two voyages are mostly satires of politics and ethics, the third voyage extends swift’s attack to science, learning, and abstract thought, offering a critique of excessive rationalism, or reliance on theory, during the Enlightenment.

Laputa is more complex than Lilliput or Brobdingnag because its strangeness is not based on differences of size but, instead, on the primacy of abstract theoretical concerns over concerns over concrete practical concerns in Laputan culture. Nonetheless, physical power is just as important in Laputa as it is in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Here, power is exercised not through physical size but through technology. The government floats over the rest of the kingdom, using technology to gain advantage over its subjects. The floating island is both a formidable weapon and an allegorical image that represents the distance between the government and the people it governs. The king is oblivious to the real concerns of the people below-indeed, he has never even been below. The nobility and scientific thinkers of the island are similarly far removed from the people and their concerns, so much so that they need to be aroused from their thoughts and daydreams by their servants. The need to regulate when people listen and when they talk by means of such intermediaries as the servants with their flappers is absurd, and the mechanized quality of this system demonstrates how nonhuman these people are. Indeed, abstract theory dominates all aspects of Laputan life, from language to architecture to geography. We are compelled to wonder whether the Laputans’ rigid adherence to such principles-their disdain for practical geometry, for example, leads them to renounce right angles-limits their society.

Swift continues to satirize specialized language in his description of the technique used to move the island from one place to another. The method of assigning letters to parts of a mechanism and then describing the movement of these parts from one point to another resembles the mechanistic philosophical and scientific of swift’s time. The use of this technique does nothing but obscure what Gulliver is trying to say, but he is so enamored of its supposed geometrical rigor that he uses it to excess, as he does earlier with naval language.

The Scientific Background of Swift’s Voyage to Laputa

Gulliver’s voyage to the Laputa has been most criticized and least understood. There is a general agreement that in interest and literary merit it falls short of the first two voyages. It is marked by multiplicity of themes; it is episodic in character. In its reflections upon life and humanity, it lacks the philosophic intuition of the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag and the power of the violent and savage attacks upon mankind in the voyage to the Houyhnhnms. Any reader sensitive to literary values must so far agree with the critics who disparage the tale. But another criticism as constantly brought against the voyage to Laputa cannot be so readily dismissed. Professor W.S.Eddy, one of the chief authorities upon the sources of Gulliver’s Travels, has implied the usual point of view when he writes: “There seems to be no motive for the story beyond a pointless and not to artfully contrived satire on mathematicians…. For this attack on theoretical science I can find no literary source or analogue, and conclude that it must have been inspired by one of swift’s literary ideocyncracies. Attempts have been made to detect allusions to the work of Newton and other contemporary scientists, cannot greatly increase for us slight importance of the satire on Laputa”.

Three themes in voyage of Laputa have been particularly censured by modern critics. Some are repelled by the Laputans with their curious combination of mathematics and music and their dread of a comet and the sun. others are distributed by the apparent lack of both unity and significance in the Balnibarians, particularly in the grand academy of Lagado. Most of all, the Flying Island has puzzled commentators who dismiss it as a “piece of magical apparatus”, a “gratuitous violation of natural laws” which offends the reader’s sense of probability.

Yes it is conceivable that swift, elsewhere so conscious of the unwritten law of probability, should have carelessly violated it in the voyage to Laputa alone? Professor Eddy in a later work has justly said:

“The compound of magic and mathematics, of fantasy and logic, of ribaldry and gravity, is a peculiar product of the disciplined yet imaginative mind of swift. There are two distinct kinds of imagination: one is creative and mystical, the other is constructive and rational. Swift had no command over the faerie architects who decree pleasure domes in Xanadu without regard to the laws of physics. His imagination, like that of Lewis Carroll, had a method in its apparent madness…. What seems so lawless is the product of the most rigid law”.

Swift’s imagination, we have long recognized, was eclectic; the mark of his genius lay less in original creation than in paradoxical and brilliant new combinations of familiar materials. Indeed, one of the sources of his humour to every generation of readers has been the recognition of old and familiar themes treated in novel fashion. Pygmies and giants, animals with the power of speech, have been the perennial stuff of fairytale and legends. The novelty in Gulliver’s Travels lies less in the material than in new combinations and the mood of treatment. The study of the sources of swift has been particularly rewarding in showing what the “constructive and rational” imagination may do to time-honoured themes. The very fact that the literary and political a background of Gulliver’s Travels has been established so completely leads the inquisitive reader to inquire whether the unrecognized sources of the voyage to Laputa may not be equally capable of verification. If the most assiduous searchers into sources can find “no literary source or analogue” for the peculiar themes in this voyage alone, must not those sources be sought elsewhere than in the literary traditions which swift inherited?

There were other important materials accessible to writes of romance and fantasy in swift’s generation, of which many availed themselves, the attempt of this study will be to show that swift borrowed for the voyage to Laputa even more than for the other tales, but that the sources of his borrowing were different. The mathematicians who feared the sun and comet, the projectors of the Grand Academy, the Flying Island these come to swift almost entirely from contemporary science. The sources for nearly all the theories of the Laputans and the Balnibarians are to be found in the work of swift’s contemporary scientists and particularly in the philosophical transactions of the royal society

Separation of women and state: Gulliver’s Idea of women as part of society but not part of society

Gulliver’s Travels shifts through a series of opposing theories and cultures. Each setting that Gulliver encounters, has an entirely different view of how that culture sees the world and thinks that it does, or should work. There is however, a rather interesting perspective that Gulliver continually takes on women. “Gender relations shift throughout the four part of Gulliver’s Travels as Gulliver defines the meanings of sexes in the countries he visit.” He has the tendency to entirely view women in their gender roles as compared to English women. He leads no thought that women can in fact be more or less than what English women are. Gulliver seems to characterized all women into either being more or less like English women-showing an idea that English women are the most superior of all women. Naussbaum states that, “Culture materialistic feminism, with its emphasis on the catalytic power if the contradictions that emanate from opposing concepts entities, and ways of knowing, continues to strive toward recognizing difference among women in theory and practice”. The idea is to draw out the instance that can readily be portrayed as sexist treatment, which are not necessarily such because of the circumstance of those involved. As one reviews the story, we see that Gulliver is very culturally centered in the ideals that were commonly shared about women during the 1700’s. the portrayals of women throughout the narrative seem to effectively alienate them as an entirely separate part of society. The ideas that women belong to society, but in turn are not actually a central part of it, is more of a secondary mechanism of sort. The general idea of feminism it that though man is considered as a whole, it is very often, through opinion, separated into male and female gender roles. Men in their roles lead society while women seem to stay in the background. Feminist critic reprimands this while showing.

The two sexes as equal in value as well as action. Men can be less than men and women can be more than women. This means that at any given time, a man can be stripped of his manhood and a woman can surpass a man in ability. This seems to be a motivator as to Gulliver’s negative outlook on women. Naussbaum talks about how Gulliver throughout the text continually compares the females he encounters with English women and how different they are. There is a continual idea of how his sexuality is in question as he is confronted by members of the opposite sex as well as his attraction to members of different species. The ideas are presented as they compare the presentation of each feminine character that Gulliver meets. His reactions to the situations and their general consideration in common society today are somewhat normal, yet Naussbaum does not really try to define what is normal per say. Though she does go into common customs and such as they were presented and considered. “Clearly Gulliver depicts women as beings who like the Laputan women are palpable of reason but are not reasonable creatures”. The idea is that Gulliver sees women by the social roles that they play and not by individual analysis. Each person is more than they appear to be. To assume that what we see is fact, is entirely unfair and one-sided when making any sort of critical analysis. This shows the common misconceptions that people generally had when the narrative was written. However, that is not say that sometimes people fill the roles that are laid out for them. There is a certain unfairness to the criticisms that are lain upon the character Gulliver. Though there are many points that can be made to parallel Gulliver to a feminist view and emasculate him, many of these instance are not considered to be actual cases of demasculinization. Murfin states, “It might seem that such a text would readily lend itself to a feminist reading in general, and feminist critique in particular. Such is not the case”.

When you get down to it you can draw parallels about anything. The contrast is such that Naussbaum seems to attack Gulliver as a misogynistic character, rather than study him as one. The apparent ideas that Gulliver does not see woman as more than a social, not political, part of society contributes to the feminist ideas. His time in Laputa proves that he does not show much respect for most women. He finds himself consorting mostly with woman, who are the most intelligible of anyone on the floating island, and though he understands them, he does not think that they are truly capable of reason. This he illustrates with the story of the wife of the prime minister of Laputa, who had escaped from the island and was living in rags with a deformed footman who mistreated and beat her. The presented idea being that living above on the miraculous island where she had in riches and comfort was the more sensible thought than when she decided to leave it all for a crippled miscreant. Most, if not all, could easily be lost on determining the cause of such irrational behavior. But in turn, this illustrates his disapproval of the female position. Men of this reason are considered more rational. This is possibly why Gulliver never the women of consequence are. This is a simple portrayal of social gender roles within a given society. The very depiction of such roles can be thought of as sexist, and a target for feminist criticism, but in truth one does not really understand the circumstance in its entirely. We easily see the role that has been placed on these characters such as the Laputan women, but one cannot so easily see whether the decisions of the women were included. Perhaps, it could.

Be that they willingly or unknowingly play these roles because of their own personalities. It could very well be that they follow these roles only because they are supposed to. Women seem to fulfill a purpose apart, as they are constantly scrutinized throughout the course of the text. Gulliver goes to great lengths to describe the women in comparison to the men and to English women in each of his discovered cultures. All of which seem to be in a very negative contrast to their counterparts. Their usefulness is questioned through Gulliver’s attitude. This is including Gulliver’s own wife, who has thought him dead several times over yet never taken a second husband, remaining faithful to him. His seeming contempt for her, especially upon his return from his disdain for the female as a degenerating part of culture. He sees her now as one of the filthy Yahoos, degenerating her as a human and making her out to be lesser than even that of the yahoos. This displacement of character is how Gulliver maintains his idea that women are merely a factor to society and not central mechanism. The misrepresentation by Gulliver throughout his travels is a terrible and common ideal of the 1700’s sexist culture. Gulliver depicts that which has held back so much of human progress through history. There was always that consideration of the untapped potential of women as advance thinkers only because they were thought to be incapable of such. The misogynistic nature of Gulliver is a reflection upon that which could benefit society as a whole. However we cannot assume that there are not those who would reject this accepting of women to a centralized role of society and simply continue in the well structured gender roles.

Web sourse:

www.enotes.laputavoyage.html

swift,johnathan. Gulliver's Travels. Boston : bedford/st martins, 1726

Tyson, lois. Critical theory today. New york: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006