Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)

This is one of the best things I have ever read. It is almost a cliche now to describe Gulliver’s Travels as a biting satire, but it is utterly true - and a wonderful one to boot. In a shortened, picture form, Gulliver’s Travels is one of the world’s most popular children’s book so the plot feels familiar and almost nostalgic. Along with rice cakes and marmite sandwiches, reading it took me back to my childhood. Suddenly I was eight again and running around the playground.

The story goes a bit like this. Gulliver leaves his wife and child to go travelling, and from then on has a set of the weirdest, most fantastical adventures ever set to paper. Shortly after leaving, Gulliver shipwrecks and stumbles upon Lilliput, the renowned land of little people that can walk around on his hand. After the ensuing adventures and a journey home, Gulliver embarks on a further bold voyage, but this time his ship flounders on Brobdingnag, a nation of giants where suddenly it is Gulliver who finds himself a little person. Next, after leaving, he finds all sorts of odd peoples – a floating island in the sky, magicians who can conjure the dead – and finally a land of wise and logical horses, the perspicacious Houyhnhnms. Alongside these omnibenevolent nags, he makes a discovery that turns his blood a-chill. Here, he encounters the infamous ‘Yahoos’. A savage, untameable, splenic animal that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance – in looks and habits – to the species of which Gulliver is a committed member: the unhumble human...

It's wonderful

There is just something so special about this book. It might not be the most significant aspect, perhaps, but I even loved the 16th century-style writing style. For example, every proper noun is capitalised, and letters starting with ‘h’ are always preceded with ‘an’: I saw with mine Eyes, an Hundred Savages advancing upon my poar Self.  This must have been standard at the time, but it now lends the books a delightful realism. I’m sure it gets edited out of a lot of modern editions, but I think that’s a mistake.

Gulliver’s personality binds the whole thing together like an egg in cake batter. His most striking characteristic is an ostentatious gallantry. Beached on Lilliput, and captured by the little people, he quickly pays tribute and accepts the rule of the tiny Lilliputian king, even though he is no bigger than his face; soon describing him as ‘my gracious majesty’. Ultimately, Gulliver feels entitled – being a British citizen of Her Majesty the Queen – to be treated civilly and with decorum. He expects to be welcomed into the court of every king, and for his needs to be met – food, wine and a new ‘suit of cloaths’ wherever on the globe he finds himself. This entitlement can lead him to be dreadfully naive, at times unaware of clear and present danger. 

What makes us human?

Yet what makes the book interesting is how Gulliver sees the world. It is a fascinating sum of contradictions. Gulliver is overtly proud of his country, and acts as an ambassador wherever he goes. But he also embarks on new life-styles with gusto. In three of the places he visits, he settles, stays for years, learns the language and embraces their lifestyle - even though it’s almost the opposite of his own. However, Gulliver thinks of his own society as far more sophisticated and on a ‘higher level’ than any of the civilisations he visits. In fact, nothing gets him questioning his homeland, until he meets the Yahoos....

The Yahoos are a breed of savage humans. Gulliver is repulsed by them because he sees the character of the despicable Yahoo’s mirrored in humans, and the character of the horses as far superior. So, he never quite manages to critique British society and it’s institutions – something that is changeable – but just the human character – which isn’t (especially not en masse). 

I think that’s quite significant, and clearly a Swiftian commentary on something. I see it as saying a range of things from a kind of Thatcherite proclamation that society doesn’t exist, to the idea that culture is just the emergent phenomena that arises out of the character’s of the people that live there. I think that’s dead wrong - and actually so would most sociologists today. Institutions are incredibly important, but Gulliver is only concerned with character. I can’t quite tell which side of the fence Swift himself sat on – but since his most vicious critique is on personality traits, I’ll put flag down and say that he got this one wrong. He savagely critiqued humans character - and finds fault with the echos of our animal urges in the way we live, but he didn’t stop to mention how amazing it is that we’ve developed institutions that work well despite all our Yahoo-like greed.

Life Lessons

I think I missed a lot of the satire in the book – especially since I’m not au fait with the subtleties of George I’s court – but I think I got the main point, and it’s exceptionally clever. By creating and describing so many fantastical species – little men, big men, magicians, talking horses – the book is essentially an exercise in frame setting. It is priming us, by poking fun at imaginary beings, to be able to picture ourselves objectively. Gulliver rocks up at Lilliput and finds a bunch of weird little people, but what if he rocked up in Britain, what strange species would he find there? Humans. 

Swift want us to take a long look at what we really are. For him it’s obvious. We’re just savages, monkeys, a slave to our urges. And we've painstakingly built a society that pretends we’re not. That’s problematic, because it means we’re literally unaware of how stupid some of our actions are. Once you start looking as Jonathan Swift wanted us to look, everything becomes ridiculous. From living in houses that are so far superfluous to our needs, to border conflicts, to political slanging matches. This is all comes from animalistic, primal urges – which are just stupid. And yet we pretend that there’s a good intelligent reason for everything, that things are the way they are for a reason. As a culture, we do not live rationally. Our selfish, grubbing instincts are built into the very fabric of our society. But, as I mentioned earlier, that’s only half the story. Actually, society is brilliant, amazing, incredible - and it’s a testament to human ingenuity that we’ve managed to design ourselves a system that succeeds not despite, but because of, the character of the human race. 

And yet, we can do more. We can continue to strive towards building a better world. To be better, to live better together, and to help those that get left behind. It's not all doom and gloom, but there's no time for complacency either. Let's get cracking...

Germinal (Émile Zola)

I asked a French friend about Germinal, by Emile Zola, and he said that since this book is on the French syllabus, it is often thought about with a groan. That’s a shame, because I loved all the books I read in school. For some people, I can imagine that remembering a novel they were forced to read, takes them back to those dusty, classrooms full of youthful boredom. For me, reading always had the opposite effect; novels I read in school let my imagination soar and transported me to distant worlds far away from the a lecturing, hectoring Mrs Gibbs. I thought Germinal was amazing. This book not only paints a vivid, and necessary, picture of poverty, but also provides some interesting challenges to the economic system we live in.

Germinal tells the story of a miner’s strike in 18th century France. Etienne is a poor but bright drifting worker. Impoverished and hungry, he comes across a mining village and falls into a job hewing coal. It’s backbreaking work. The villagers slog underground all day in the dark and the damp, but are barely paid enough to survive. Etienne becomes deeply radicalized by the suffering he sees around him; the capitalist system that allows this to continue must be immoral and corrupt.  At the same time, the coalmine bosses are trying to reduce the workers’ pay yet further. The villagers are scared that they simply will not be able to live under these harsh new terms. Etienne, with his staunch political views, is well placed to lead the coalminers into a standoff - a strike. This strike becomes bloody and brutal as the workers starve, and the company’s profits dry up. Anger bubbles and festers, and the standoff becomes a war. This is no longer about simply trying to win a bread-line wage. They want to send the whole system to hell. And at the root of it all is a crazy dream – that all men are equal under the sun.

My thoughts

This book is the perfect antidote to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  In Atlas Shrugged, unfettered capitalism leads to advancement and beatification of the human race. In Germinal it leads to effective slavery, conflict and suffering. I don’t think Ayn Rand’s was blind to the ‘Germinal’ critique, she just didn’t care. I think she would say that if a man let himself live a miserable existence  - in a coalmine or anywhere else - then he was a fool.  But the two books are perfect to read together. At times, they almost seem to be in dialogue with each other putting forward arguments and counter-arguments. For example, Atlas Shrugged posits that since it is the capitalist that takes the risk that creates wealth, they deserve the rewards. But Germinal neatly undercuts this by comparing these wealthy bourgeois throwing around a little of their money, whilst the workers stake their lives on the company.

Socialism

Germinal isn’t exactly an advocate for socialism. In fact, the socialist beliefs and believers are exposed throughout as somewhat naïve and all too human.  However, it certainly is a shrill voice highlighting rottenness at the core of the capitalist system. 

And I think it’s very effective. The descriptions of poverty in the book are vivid and crushing.  It’s always worth remembering that we belong to an economic system that can treat people very cruelly. And also that it is in our nature to accept and live with it, rather than to challenge it. The kind of suffering that Germinal describes is still endemic in the world today, and I feel far too – dangerously too – complacent about it.  Reading this novel flared up something inside of me, and I found it quite deeply radicalizing.  Whatever the cause, and whatever the reason, and however impossible it is to stop – I think it must be a universal declaration that this kind of suffering is wrong.

It is true though, that for those in the West, Germinal’s central point has become less relevant. The story describes how workers might get trapped in horrible working conditions with a wage that is not enough to survive. Today, the legacy of the Union movement has ensured a certain standard of work safety, and we have a minimum wage, both of which largely prevents the kind of situation that Germinal describes. 

Perhaps then, Germinal can be seen today as a good argument against socialism. A problem – poor working conditions and lower wagers - had a good solution within the current system. Beyond this, Germinal describes the wider rumblings of socialism  - calls to destroy the bosses, uniting all the workers of the world, totalitarianism. But none of this is effectual in the book, and none of it has been effective in real life.

I’d like to make one final moderating point. It’s easy to write a story that focuses on a salient example of human suffering, but it is harder to focus on the things that are not as visible. I’d suggest some things to keep in mind whilst reading. 1) If these miners weren’t employed in a coalmine, they might have been in worse work or unemployed, or dead from starvation. 2) The coal they were producing was powering the industrial revolution. This means a) it was directly improving thousands of peoples lives, powering hospitals, schools and saving lives b) it was a temporary phase the West needed to go through to develop. Billions of people are better off now – and that couldn’t have happened if men didn’t go down coalmines. 3) Worker’s conditions did improve, and worker’s did take a greater share of the profits 4) For most of history nasty jobs were normal, and it is only the capitalist system that has ever liberated people from it.

One more thing

Germinal is a really exciting book that will pull you into a dark and unfamiliar world.  Some of the scenes underground, trapped in bowels of this living mine are scarier and more claustrophic than any horror film I’ve seen.  But more than that, Germinal is a question, a challenge, and a call to arms to stand-up for the disenfranchised of the world.