Measurement, Irony and the Grotesque in Gullivers Travels :: Gullivers Travels Essays

Measurement, Irony and the Grotesque in Gullivers Travels Postmodernity is obsessed with the Eighteenth Century. As an example of how our nostalgia for that diaphragm manifests itself, Hans Kellner has pointed out that a genre of novels and films set in Eighteenth century has exploded in popularity Lemprieres Dictionary, Perfume, The Madness of King George III. We could similarly point to the ongoing adjustment of scholarship on the period, of which GEMCS itself is an example. In considering what generates this contemporary fascination I have given some thought to the aesthetic and political issues surrounding the beginnings, and perhaps also the end, of the bourgeois social sphere. A conviction, argued most aggressively by Jean Baudrillard, is beginning to take hold, in and out of the academy, that this sphere, after an almost totalizing expansion, is instantaneously in decline. The panic over the loss of the social, whether supportable or not, offers a realistic explanation for the contemporary nostalgia for the period in which Swift wrote Gullivers Travels. In this age of dissolution, what do we see when we look back at the age of our creation? One thing we observe is the development of a peculiar kind of irony which we cant tending but distinguish from our experience of this trope in the age of its dominance. The satirical effect of the irony in Gullivers Travels read by the Postmodern will be precisely what it was not at the time of its production. The historical distance between Eighteenth Century and Contemporary readers can be understood by elbow room of Hayden Whites use of the master tropes in Foucault Decoded. White assigns one of the master tropes to each of the four archeological periods described by Foucault in The Order of Things. In Whites system, Foucaults rebirth was metaphorical, locating truth in similarity. Swift wrote in what Foucault considered the Classical Period, which, for White, had metonymy as its overriding mode of reaso n, because a new transparency of representation made it possible to organize knowledge by a standard and represent it symbolically on a table. The Modern period was characterized by synecdoche, in that the subject of knowledge, Man, was now included in the study of the world, in a part-whole relationship. Finally, the Contemporary or Postmodern mode is ironic, characterized by a questioning of the foundations of knowledge and a Dionysian disappearance of the subject of that knowledge.