Gulliver's Travels and the contracts of fiction

Abstract

FICTIONAL BONA FIDES Mariners lie like old sea dogs. In James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), the adventuring hero, Leopold Bloom, never leaves the confines of his native city, but he does run into an old sailor named Murphy who boasts of his travels to several remote regions of the world. Bloom has his doubts about Murphy, “assuming he was the person he represented himself and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the q.t. somewhere” Listening to the yarns and finding something out of joint about them makes Bloom “nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides” (512). What does it mean to nourish suspicions about a narrator's bona fides? This is the very question that haunts Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and for good reason. Gulliver's Travels has been a notable gathering place, almost a convocation, for the severer sort of Western Critic who sees its satiric action as a vicious attack on the political and cultural institutions of eighteenth-century British civilization in the guise of a satiric send-up of travel literature. But what if Swift's satiric travel narrative is directed not simply at the experience of modern political, social, and intellectual life in England and Europe, but at the narrative bona fides of those middling fictional subjects who emerged during the early decades of the eighteenth century in England precisely to endorse the modern, progressivist, commercial vision of the world that Swift's satire bemoans? The novel is the literary form positing the fitness of a low-life, pseudoprofessional, or merchant-class narrator - Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton - to record the contingencies and changing valences of modern life. As such, it was a likely and predictable Swiftian target.