The Voice of the Author in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels was first published in 1726 and several reprints, each with minor changes in text, were issued within a few years’ time, with the 1735 edition being generally regarded as the more authentic version. Since then, the popularity of the book has never ceased to increase. Swift was as hostile as Pope and the other founders of the Scriblerus Club to the regime of his time and the Hanoverian court and this attitude is reflected in various ways throughout the book, but Gulliver’s Travels suggests that we should look further than the confines of the eighteenth-century world. This paper explores the author’s voice in the narrative in order to look closely at the impact of Swift’s ideas on the reader. The attempt to identify several roles of the author suggests that the reader is perplexed by the narrator’s attitude and challenged to reformulate the entire perspective on the human race. The article, therefore, surveys the book by looking at different authorial voices used by Swift as a technical device to communicate his radical critique of human nature.

Introduction

When and how did Pope become the literary colossus we know today? Until now scholars of Pope’s early career have focused on his involvement with the so-called ‘Scriblerus Club’ comprising Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Parnell, and the circles of famous authors such as Joseph Addison and William Wycherley. This introduction begins by setting out a new context for understanding Pope’s early career: in the literary circles dominated by the Duke of Buckingham and his friends. It then explains the holistic methodological approach of the book and how its questions intersect with existing scholarship on Pope and his world. This is followed by a brief outline of the chapters.

Scriblerian Cognition

Members of the Scriblerus club were sceptical about the power of reason and about fashionable get-knowledgeable-quick schemes. For Swift in particular, scientific projectors were motivated more by the passion of pride than by a desire for truth. But some members of the group expressed a different attitude in their non-satirical works. Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot reflected on knowledge – especially self-knowledge – and found a positive role for the passions. Arbuthnot’s poem Know Thyself explicitly addresses the relationship between the bodily, affective self and knowledge. Both Arbuthnot in his poem and Pope in his Essay on Man employ the image of a maze to symbolise the difficulty of understanding human nature. This essay will consider how Pope, in his Essay on Man, addresses questions raised by Arbuthnot and Swift about the relations between the passions and cognition. In particular it will consider which takes priority – passion or reason – in the process that leads to knowledge. The notions of process and progress are also at issue in Pope’s account of the development of the arts and sciences. The essay will also analyse the tension between the maze and the plan – the experience of confusion versus the knowledge of a structure. I will suggest that the apparent scepticism about knowledge that Pope evokes in his rhetorical question at the start of the Essay is partly worked out or circumvented through the use of structural devices that attempt to arrive at certainty. The prose arguments, concluding statements and maxims suggest that the Essay arrives at a truth that was already known.