Society Cannot Be Flat: Hierarchy and Power in Gulliver's Travels (Critical Essay‪)‬

In many of his prose works, Jonathan Swift carefully establishes the persona of the narrator and fictional author, who tells whatever tale he has in mind. Swift purposefully endows these men with particular traits and backgrounds, and Lemuel Gulliver, the fictional travelogue writer of Gulliver's Travels, is no exception to this rule. In The Pen is Mightier than the Whore: Imperialism and Cultural Authority in Spenser and Swift, Lucille G. Appert uses Gulliver's Travels to show how Swift uses his writings to reform society; this argument, however, is fundamentally flawed because Swift satirizes Gulliver's own desire for social mobility by tormenting him with the persistence of social hierarchy. Swift controls Gulliver's voice and makes him unreliable and untrustworthy while inserting Gulliver into a variety of social situations with ever-changing conventions. Gulliver proves an excellent translator in every complicated world in which he finds himself, but he continually seeks to improve his position in the hierarchy, to be on equal footing with the characters Swift establishes as his betters. The author wins the power struggle here, denying Gulliver's attempts to change the status quo and thereby reinforcing it. Right from the start of the text Gulliver is clearly established as a self-conscious narrator, as defined in Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction; the text is fronted by notes from the "author" on the construction and publication of these tales. Gulliver's self-conscious narrative position is shown to be somewhat limited, however--he takes seriously this section of the text that the true author, Swift, makes obviously ironic. Gulliver's Travels even fits with Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of the comic novel: one that incorporates a multiplicity of language and belief systems that are "utilized to refract the author's intentions, are unmasked and destroyed as something false" (311). Swift goes beyond the languages Bakhtin expects--those of class, gender, and ethnicity--by creating different languages and social systems and bringing his author character into them. Bakhtin adds to his explanation of the characteristics of the comic novel by explaining that the languages and belief systems the "the posited author or teller" encounters must be distanced from the true author's belief system and language in order to achieve the comic effect "on the one hand to show the object of representation in a new light (to reveal new sides or dimensions in it) and on the other hand to illuminate in a new way the "expected" literary horizon, that horizon against which the particularities of the teller's tale are perceivable" (Bakhtin 312-313). Swift exceeds these criteria with the construction of Gulliver's Travels, as he takes great pains to establish a narrator who is starkly different from himself.