Realism And Grotesque In Gullivers Travels English Literature Essay

Realism And Grotesque In Gullivers Travels English publications EssayGullivers Travels is a pivotal plump in the history of the myth as it exhibits the ways the fable inherits and develops Menippean satire and atrocious aesthetics. Gullivers Travels has r arely been regarded as a proper early wise the the like Robinson Crusoe or Pamela for the roughly fracture due to two conventional thoughts of literary genre and aesthetics. The first common understanding is that the novel and Menippean satire are mutually exclusive genres. Critics sop up rancid to Menippean satire as if to argue that the genre of Gullivers Travels is kind of a prose fabrication that is not the novel. Northrop Frye, for instance, begins his discussion of Gullivers Travels by mentioning that nearly people would call Gullivers Travels manufacture moreover not a novel. It must then be early(a)(prenominal) form of fiction, i.e. Menippean satire (308). In turn, critics who claim Gullivers Travels a s a novel tend to ignore the Menippean tradition of the work Maximillian Novak asserts that once we consider Gullivers Travels as a work of fiction, we cannot shunt it off into a nonsensical social class such as anatomy or Menippean satire, in his reading of the work as a picaresque novel(35). The second conventional idea is that the tremendous and naturalism are as well two disparate aesthetic realms, and that grand aesthetics in Gullivers Travels- from its engage of the fantastic, metabolic process, or the mad man discipline to its excremental vision-does not fit into the realistic aesthetic of the novel. The pull inming generic dissymmetry of Gullivers Travels just aboutly come ups from our preconceived visual modality of the novel as a genre of probable realism with verisimilar characters and plausible plots. In fact, even the most acute critics of fleet are not entirely free from this preponderant given legal opinion of what the novel should be. Brean Hammond, who appropriates Bakhtins conception of novelization to explain the pagan shifts of the long eighteenth century toward a hybridization that breaks d accept traditionally observed generic boundaries, surprisingly turns to a conventional cipher of the novel when he argues that Gullivers Travels is not a novel like Robinson Crusoe partly because Gulliver is not a character like Crusoe, a character who is a presumable approximation of a gracious cosmos,-i.e. a verisimilar character- unless a ruse that can be exploited for satiric purposes(250, 270). Hammond is right that Gullivers Travels is ideologically argue to the set of attitudes and beliefs that was fuelling the development of the novel as a genre part of the intention of the work lies in the parody of Robinson Crusoe or the stuff of 1720s romanceby Haywood, as he remarks(270). That does not mean, however, that Gullivers Travels is not a novel. Swift might have intended his Menippean work partly as a Scriblerian satire tha t attacks ultramodern hack writings. Paradoxically, or according to the process of novelization, however, Gullivers Travels turned taboo to be a traitificant addition to the novelistic tradition the novelistic energies that Swift despised and denigrated boomeranged and inform his satire, and change it into a novel. Gullivers Travels is not exhaustively explained by our conventional notion of the novel, exactly it does not mean that it is not a novel. Rather, Swifts work characteristically challenges our common notion of the novel, and reveals the rich tradition of Menippean satire that is absorbed in the novel.In a similar vein, the antic aesthetics of Gullivers Travels belies our confined notion of realism, or realistic aesthetics. It manifests that (novelistic) realism is not limited to probable realism, a mixture of empirical episteme and the modern transformation of unsulliedal mimetic aesthetics, but alike assumes low realism-crudely put, an antonym of idealism or clas sicism. At a superficial level, the grand and realism could look like two unwrap or almost opposite notions. Geoffrey Harpham and Mikhail Bakhtin, however, illustrate that the tremendous and realism are compatible notions at a fundamental level, and that the history of the chimerical is also the history of the recognition of that compatibility. Harpham provides a useful account of the shift of the notion of the relation amongst the terrific and realism. According to him, while the spiritual rebirth regarded grottesche as pure fantasy, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we find the grotesque associated with caricature in.. .Rowlandson, Hogarth, Goya, most of whom we would not associate with fantastic art, and by the beginning of the twentieth century.. .Thomas Mann commented.. .that the grotesque was properly something more than the truth, something real in the extreme. According to this narrative, the history of the grotesque is a gradual recognition of the fundamenta lly realistic characteristic of the Grotesque, which is unambiguous from the mimetic realism of the Classical (xviii-xix). Bakhtin offers another powerful narrative on the history of the grotesque, or the intricate relation of the grotesque and realism. The grotesque and realism are almost synonymous for Bakhtin, as is epitomized in his core barrier of grotesque realism. Grotesque realism, which lowers all that is full(prenominal), spiritual, ideal, abstract and is opposed to severance from the secular and visible roots of the orbit, is culminated in the literature of the metempsychosis after the chivalrous culture of folk humor(19-20, 32). As cuttingly opposed to classical aesthetics, grotesque realism is closely linked to some other primordial concepts of Bakhtin, like the carnival spirit, the material corporeal principle, folk humor, or the ambivalent and re-create laughter of the people. Bakhtin also historicizes the concept of the grotesque, confining grotesque reali sm to the Renaissance grotesque, although he underscores the living tradition of Renaissance grotesque realism in world literature. He explains that the Renaissance grotesque is rock-bottom and transformed in later periods, and thus the Romantic grotesque (and the modernist grotesque) is more like an item-by-item carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation, losing laughters regenerating power.(37). matchless notable element in Bakhtins historicization of the grotesque is, however, that the eighteenth-century grotesque is almost inconspicuous among the Renaissance grotesque and the Romantic grotesque. One reason would be, as Bakhtin implies, that the eighteenth century directly inherited the Renaissance grotesque but also embedded the elements of classicism or cold rationalism a time that the positive corporal hyperbole of Rabelais and the bourgeois disciplined remains were uncomfortably commingled and intensely struggled with each other. Thus the eighteenth-century grotesq ue was the space in which the Renaissance struggle between the Grotesque and the Classical was continued in a displaced form of the struggle between the lingering force of the Renaissance grotesque and now ascending bourgeois rationalism, classical bourgeois reason. The Augustan noble verse satire of Dryden, Pope, or Swift played out the unprecedentedly intense contention between the classical-rational and the grotesque through an nonpareil mixture of refined, sophisticated forms and disorderly, brimming-over contents. Swift also embodies the bitter conflict of the classical-rational and the grotesque through (the relation of) the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos in Gullivers Travels, a Menippean satire and a novel, which unco debunks the peculiar characteristic of the eighteenth-century grotesque.Although critics have increasingly acknowledged that Gullivers Travels is a Menippean satire, thither are few detailed readings of the work in the Menippean tradition, particularly in relatio n to Bakhtins concept of the genre as an authentic precursor of the novel. magical spell scrutinizing the relation of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos as a privileged locus of the Swiftian grotesque, the political proportion of the grotesque will be revealed, which is embedded in the Yahoos as an allegory of the Irish, or colonial subjects, and then briefly examine the political property of (low) realism.The Menippean fantastic usually generates three effects, which are fully used in Gullivers Travels. First, the fantastic adventure provides a new, non-human linear perspective that defamiliarizes our ac exerciseed world, or debunks our habitual, humanitarian way of thin pouf. As Bakhtin describes, it provokees and tests a truth by using the observance from some unusual point of view, from on high-pitched, for example, which results in a alkali change in the scale of the observed phenomena of life(116). Secondly, the Menippean fantastic engages popular imagination or a comic, ca rnivalesque spirit the popularity of Gullivers Travels, particularly as a classic childrens book, is considerably indebted to this folkloric imagination embedded in the fantastic. Thirdly, the fantastic offers an creator to review article the authors (and the assumed readers) contemporary reality, usually by imagining an upside-down world or a Utopian society. In the imagined spaces of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, or Houyhnhnmland (or Yahooland), Swift cuttingly criticizes the domestic policies of England as well as the overall imperialism of Europe.Gullivers first repast at the Brobdingnagian farmers house illustrates how the three levels of the fantastic-ultimate questions, popular laughter, and a critique of contemporary reality-are simultaneously generated in Gullivers Travels. When the farmers wife gave him something to eat and drink, Gulliver says he do her a low bow, took out my knife and complication, and fell to eat, which gave them exceeding make merry .1 took up the vessel with much difficulty in both hands, and in a most deferent manner drank to her ladyships health, expressing the words as noisy as I could in English, which made the company laugh so heartily, that I was almost deafened with the noise. (85).To imagine Gulliver taking out his sort out and knife from his magic pockets, in which he take cares to have anything necessary wheresoever he is stranded, is certainly hilarious. Apart from that, why is this scene full of humor, and why does the reader participate in the Brobdingnagians delight and laughter at Gullivers actions? To use knife and fork in eating is a common custom in eighteenth-century Europe, and to drink to her ladyships health in a most respectful manner is also a well-mannered behavior. Yet from the perspective of the Brobdingnagians, to whom Gulliver is like a small dangerous animal or a rummy animal at first (83, 90), his socially tailored and overly accomplished behaviors could look affected or ridiculous most ly because of the incongruity between a strange animal and his pretense to be a absolutely civilized man. Their giant perspective makes us see Gullivers rob in his being a gentleman who acts according to the social code, and by extension, the pride of all humankind in his or her exclusive claim to high civilization. Moreover, a non-human view renders the European manner of using knife and fork or making a gallant compliment on the hostess not so much absolute social etiquette but adept cultural custom among many cultural possibilities. To Brobdingnagians, it makes little difference whether a small animal like Gulliver uses knife and fork (as in Europe) or his fingers (as in some other cultures), although using fingers for solid food is an unequivocal sign of barbarism from a European perspective. Likewise, a humble showing of gratitude for food would be as good as a showy display of a toast for the hostess in a Brobdingnagians view.The Olympian perspective of the Brobdingnagians, which almost innocently exposes the limited view of human beings, also serves as a device of a severe attack on human folly or pride. When Gulliver finished his talking ofhis own beloved country, the Brobdingnagin king could not forbear taking Gulliver up in his right hand, and stroke him gently with the other, after an hearty fit of laughing, asked him whether he was a Whig or a Tory. Then turning to his first minister he observed how pathetic a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such piddling biting louses as I (100). What makes the kings rhetorical question incisive does not derive from any political considerations but from the sheer size difference between the king and Gulliver the kings gesture of stroking Gulliver gently with his left hand nullifies a pressing problem in eighteenth-century England into a trivial or meaningless one. The exorbitant pride and atrociousness of earthly concern, which the king points out repeatedly, looks more foolish in the frame where giants are human and Gulliver is a diminutive insect. We humans become the most pernicious race of little odious varment or an impotent and groveling an insect (123, 125) from a Brobdingnagianss view. Laughter is reduced to the level of bitterness here.The fantastic convention of Menippean satire is entangled with another main convention of the genre metamorphosis. Gullivers travels into fantastic lands are coextensive with his experiences of metamorphosis into a strange, monstrous, unnatural or grotesque being. Metamorphosis, like the fantastic, holds a formal generic significance as opposed to the classical aesthetics of high genres. It destroys the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his fate the adventure of another person and another life are revealed in him he ceases to coincide with himself, as Bakhtin notes. To compare Gullivers fantastic travels and Odysseuss epic journey some their encounter with a monster and its effect on their identities is illumina ting. When Odysseus confronts a wildcat well monster, Polyphemus, it is his fate and his character to defeat the Cyclops by using his wiles, as is evidenced in Polyphemus later recall of the prophecy. Throughout his long journey, Odysseuss personal identity never changes, despite his varied disguises, with any encounters with monsters, like Charibdis, Scylla, or Circe. The frontier between a hero and a monster, or the self and the other, cannot be blurred in Odysseus. In contrast, Gullivers encounters with giant Brobdingnagians, which he understandably regarded as monsters at first (seven monsters like himself came toward him 82), shakes his identity to the core. While the Brobdignagians regard themselves as humans, it is Gulliver who becomes a monster, or an unnatural anomaly among those humans. The scholars of Brobdingnag unanimously conclude that Gulliver is Lusus Naturae, or a freak of nature (98). Metamophorsis assumes a permeating line between a hero and a monster, and Gul livers experience of being transformed into a monster among the pigmy Lilliputians or the giant Brobdingnagians (as far as to see himself as a freak) manifests a different concept of self and the other in Menippean satire from that in high genres like The Odyssey. While Odysseus unfailingly defeats various monsters in his way home to reestablish his (social) identity, Gulliver suffers being transformed into grotesque figures in his fantastic adventures only to be mad when he is back home.Gullivers experience as a grotesque being is not only significant in the frame of the fantastic but also holds a strong social resonance-to people in the margin or periphery, a metaphoric transformation into a grotesque being is uncomplete rare nor bizarre, anyway. Gullivers odd trials in Brobdingnag or Lilliput not only involve becoming a symbolic monster, like a diminutive insect or Man-Mountain, but also signify being thrown into a socially abject, precarious position, like a slave or a highly v ulnerable courtier. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver has to go through the ignominy of being carried about for a monster, till he is half dead with weariness and temper since now he is his masters slave (92, 93, 95). Likewise, despite the high entitle of Nardac in Lilliput, Gulliver is notified of his friends generous proposal to get him blind and eventually famished to death as an alternative to capital punishment, on which Gulliver says having never been designed for a courtier either by my birth or education 1 could not discover the lenity and favor of this sentence (69).Gullivers self-renunciation of his own identity, or the disaffirmation of his monstrosity among the normal inhabitants of Brobdignag, certainly anticipates his total rebirth in Houyhnhnmland, his ardent wish to be like the Houyhnhnms and the insistent denial of his Yahooness. And as much as the fantastic lands are overlapped with the real world, Gullivers denial of his abject, grotesque identity so as to be like hi s preponderant masters comes to signify the split identity of a colonial subject. In fact, Gullivers shifting and conflicting subject positions (as a colonized and a colonizer) throughout the whole narrative prepares him for his ultimate madness, a total split identity between his Yahooness and his desire to be a Houyhnhnm.The eventual madness of Gulliver, who endlessly keeps his nose well stopped with rue, lavender, or tobacco leaves to avoid the offensive impression of a Yahoo (271), or converses with his horses at least four hours every day to improve his virtue (266), reflects not so much Swifts stark misanthropy but a common Menippean experiment with a split self. As is typical of Menippean satire, Gullivers madness contains a comic element. Even the most ripe reader would smile at the moments like as soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me, at which having not been used to the blot of that odious animal for so many years, I fell in a swoon for almost an hour (265), or I impression my spirits revived by the smell the groom contracts in the stable (266). illogical throughout Bakhtins works, we can find references to Swift as a central author in the eighteenth century, who inherited and developed the Renaissance grotesque and Menippean imagination the contents of the carnival-grotesque element were preserved in the work of Swift this line of experimental fantasicality continues in Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire and others. Yet there seem to be some notable differences between the Renaissance or Rabelaisian grotesque (that Bakhtin stresses) and the Swiftian grotesque. A conspicuous example of this difference is the peculiar image of the frame in Swift, his excremental vision, or the hallmark of his scatological imagery. Bakhtin explains that in Rabelaiss grotesque realism, the tangible element is deeply positive it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world (19). As any reader would remark, howe ver, the body image in Gullivers Travels is hard to be described as deeply positive. Swifts body is rather full of filthy, despicable, ugly, burdensome, obscene, or scatological images. Gullivers description of the monstrous disparager of a nurse in Brobdingnag ( the hue both of the nipple and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous 87), or of a fair sex beggar in the country with a cancer in her breast, self-aggrandising to a monstrous size, full of holes (105), is only a couple of memorable examples that display negative images of the body in Gullivers Travels. Swifts body also does not involve the image of brimming-over, ambivalence, or regeneration, which Bakhtin asserts are the core principles of the material bodily lower stratum in the Renaissance grotesque. In Gullivers Travels the exaggerated bodily image becomes deplorable repletion, from which all diseases arise (233), or the ultimate perpetrator of bodily diseases. Human beings are sick because we eat when we were not hungry, and drank without the excitation of thirst (233), as Gulliver mentions to his master Houhynhnm.Gullivers Travels embodies the intimate relation of the grotesque-allegorical and realism in its own peculiar manner.Gullivers Travels is a polar work in the discussion of realism in the novel partly because it illustrates how grotesque aesthetics, a crucial part of low realism, positively invokes the authors bad contemporary reality. If realism lock up matters, one reason lies in that it evokes the embroiled relation between textual matter and world, the real world in which all kinds of oppression, constraints, or injustice-i. e. the objects of Swifts satire-are still happening. It is not surprising that the definition of realism is so various as to seem nearly meaningless, for the definition of reality is so much different as that of realism, depending on each individual or each period impairment like psychological realis m, fantastic realism, or historical realism, already think what the user of the term thinks is the fundamental reality-psychology, fantasy, or history. The political dimension of realism constitutes an integral part of it since realism involves an inevitable question of whose reality is at stake. Houyhnhnmland is also Yahooland, according to whose reality is dominant. The Houyhnhnms have had debates for ages about the extermination of the Yahoos, but the Yahoos in turn seem to be ready to have revolt or mutiny, given a provocation, like the inhabitants of Lindalino. Swift gives a most horrible form to the Yahoos, and even does not give a component to them they only howl. However, he makes the reader see that Houyhnhnmland is also Yahooland, not explicitly nevertheless, but still powerfully and disturbingly.