Liberty from or Property of the Text: Gulliver, a Compulsive Writer, in Gulliver’s Travels

Abstract

This essay explores the multiple layers of textuality that Jonathan Swift utilizes in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift oscillates his position toward the text by illustrating Gulliver’s incommensurable identity in the book. Throughout Gulliver’s Travels, Swift presents Gulliver in ways which demonstrate his own dual positions. One position shows his voice, while the other ridicules Gulliver’s behaviors and values. Swift’s portrayal of Gulliver’s changing identity and compulsive writing is essential to understanding the significance of Swift’s satiric writing. Thus, Gulliver’s duality portrays him as a sign in Swift’s text. Juxtaposed with Swift’s ambiguous attitude toward the text, his position toward his contemporary philosophy which produces the proliferation of text is revealed in the book. Swift contends that the expansion of the text does not guarantee the systematic advancement in knowledge that is supported by deduction and induction among his contemporaries, nor does it facilitate effective communication. Moreover, Swift compares the unconstrained production of text with the orality in Houyhnhnmland. Swift ridicules Gulliver’s compulsive writing, even though Gulliver admires the state of nature which does not contain text. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift reveals his satirist’s fantasy for nostalgia toward a world without culture that is corrupted by the overflow of the text and, at the same time, acknowledges the situation in which humankind has already accepted writing and thus cannot return to nature.