Review of Gullivers Travels, by Jonathon Swift

Grade: B
Though most of us like to imagine ourselves anonymous as we crackle along the corners and concourses of these internets, individual character still has an annoying tendency of poking through. You can try to control your electronic output, position your profile in the best available light, and so on, but few of us are quite the actors as we imagine, and once you get the dynamic down, knowing people online doesn't have many fundamental differences with knowing them on the outside. Of my handful of pixellated pals, hipparchia is probably the worst offender of badly-hidden anonymity--she's got half a dozen versions of herself floating around (that I know of), but she can't keep her genuine and idiosyncratic charm out of any of them. She's got the likability and affability thing down, but she's also been known on occasion to strike an argument with a giant and necessary 2x4. Hipparchia is great.

If you're a more observant reader than me, you'll probably pick up right away that someone named hipparchia (among other things) is a horse-lover. In fact, I've got it on pretty good authority that rule by intelligent horses beats rule by dumbasses any day of the week. I can make a good guess as to what human novels such a creature might prefer, and so I reviewed one. As for me, I'm glad hipparchia still bothers to slum it with us yahoos.

The conventional way to introduce Gulliver's Travels as an adult is as a series of shocked revelations. Why, it's not a children's book at all. Oh my. Gasp, choke. I suppose that I got some of that when I was twelve, but to be fair, thanks to my parents' draconian television policies, I read Swift well before I ever caught wind of any terrible kiddified version. My grownup self was more interested in how the vitriol held up. My opinion is mixed.

You could maybe forgive producers their tender renditions if they only read half of the thing (which I suspect gives their attention spans too much credit). Swift's game throughout the book is as much to poke holes of honesty into various human fantasies (size, immortality, utopia) as into actual human institutions and character. Gulliver's voyages to Lilliput and Brogdingnag play more for straight laughs than scathing ones, and while it's funny enough to consider Gulliver fighting disgusting Brobdingnagian flies over scraps of meat (and so forth), the author is only knocking down houses of his own construction when he does that. The first half of the book isn't empty of political satire, but what's there is of a roughly Seussian sort, reduced enough into silliness that it doesn't sting very much.

The protagonist spends a lot of time treating with kings and nobles, and Swift doesn't knock them very hard from Gulliver's point of view, instead he treats them with a naive and likable narrative voice. In this mode, Swift's probably at his best when he lets his character get indignant about defending some horrible human institution or other. I didn't feel that he was painting monarchy as an evil in itself, merely a corrupted one, as all of our endeavors must be. His portrait of an essentially defective human nature suffuses every page.

Swift's pen gets sharper as the story progresses, however, and he gets consequently funnier too. His swipes at the Academy are priceless, whether it's scientists attempting to recover food from excrement and sunlight from cucumbers, extorting funding, or engaging in the self-evidently futile pursuit of competent and just government, Swift's in his highest gear driving across the kingdom of the floating island. If you were looking to skim this novel, I'd recommend skipping all the crap about the little people.

Gulliver's final journey is to a populated by a utopian society of reason-endowed horses and nasty, brutish, unintelligent humans. It's a mechanism, of course, to mock our faulty pretenses toward reason, but I didn't find myself liking the houyhnhnms all that much, with their annoying certitude (none really accepted their bestial natures in other societies), and their intolerance. Though Gulliver, like all humans, may be an imperfect intellect, the houyhnhnms cast him out only because he resembles the other yahoos. Swift (perhaps remarkably, given his times, and all his generalities about fictional foreign societies) avoids racist ideas, but the houyhnhnms, while admirably not dumbasses, are a bunch of speciesist bastards. Screw them.

Satire, like any writing, is an art. To succeed at it, you need to both tell the truth (or at least a truth), the harder the better, and you also have to be funny without being too silly. Now and then, Swift's truths seem a little easy, and he sometimes treats his subjects a little indulgently. He's an adorable sort of misanthrope. Which is maybe not a bad fit for hipparchia at all.

Organization
Author: Jonathon Swift
Title: Gulliver's Travels
Genre: fiction, satire, classic literature

Review of Candide by Voltaire

Grade: B+

You gotta love IOZ. A book that represents that guy would almost have to be a satire, the more caustic, the more felicitous, the better. The subject would certainly have to be the poverty of the human condition, especially in a time of war, but not too heavy on that egalitarian crap please, an intellectual and aristocratic cast would be more his angle: IOZ is the kind of guy who can draw the line between equality and justice. Can anybody think of an author that reflects IOZ's puckish passion, his airy artifice, silly pseudonym, flagrant Francophilia? Yeah, I think I've got something.

Candide works at its most obvious level as a travelogue of eighteenth century woe, a thumb of the nose at any divine optimization, however ineffable. The eponymous character starts his days in a cozy fortress in Germany, makes some eyes at the baron's daughter, which earns him a big boot o' exile, and things only go downhill from there for the poor bastard. Candide chases his beloved Cunégonde across the old world and the new, at various times conscripted, beaten near to death, taken sick, driven to murder, and bearing witness to the gravest misfortune of others. Voltaire tries to outdo himself with atrocity (looking, sadly enough, not very far at all), but his touch is so light, and his pace so quick, that, well, it's not that you don't notice--that would miss the point--but you can't get through something like this without a tremendous helping of humor.

You'd think the repetition of theme would get old too--for most of the novel, Voltaire doesn't stray far from his idea that life is a miserable farce--but the tone is what keeps you engaged. It's why satire, done well, is brilliant. Voltaire seems to take a poke at every stodgy and horrible artifact of the pre-Enlightenment society that he can think of, and while I'd be lying if I claimed a deep familiarity with the literature of his time, he seems to be mocking with the form of this novel the clumsy romance of his (or any) day, and the unreadable Puritanical allegory that infected the previous century. Candide, as his name implies, is an impressionable shell of a man, but, while luckier than most (he's got to live through the hundred and so pages after all, if sometimes barely), he suffers the consequences of his naivete as such a creature might really be expected to. (Uh, usually.)

Voltaire skims a wide range of current events to establish the futility of optimism. A quarter millennium later, this modern reader was happy enough for the contextual footnotes. I picture some future generation of historians chuckling at America: the Book, as oblivious of 8/10 of the relevance as I was for Candide. Voltaire's prose, even in English, is witty and enjoyable, which highlights my general hatred of translations. For the bit of wordplay I caught, it kills me to know how droll the thing was in its original French, and in its original context. But regardless of how heavy it leans on popular references, it's the universal themes that keep Candide robust through the centuries. No one remembers whatever the hell Leibniz was on about philosophically, but that doofus Pangloss resonates to this day.

I was amused in this novel (and considering Jonathon Swift too) to compare the role of pamphleteers in the eighteenth century to bloggers today. Voltaire has a special place in his heart for the unlettered critics and hecklers. For the record, I'll accept his description for this sort of writing, cranked out by "one of those vipers in literature who nourish themselves with their own venom, a pamphlet-monger...a writer of pamphlets, a fool." Shit, I can't explain the blogosphere better than a Frenchman 250 years ago.

No review of Candide is complete without a dissection of the ending. I'll spare you the trouble: it sucked, a total cop-out, replete with the future-is-what-you-make-of-it shit, a coda as trite and necessary as Roger Waters brought us in The Wall or Mike Judge in Office Space. If not optimism, then at least there's honesty, something something, blah blah blah. But on the plus side, as I read the conclusion, eyes a-rolling, a fluffy white kitten (honest to god) happened to curl herself up in my arm. Maybe this is the best of all possible worlds after all.

Keifus

Organization
Author: Voltaire
Title: Candide
Genre: fiction, satire, classic literature