[Book Review] Gulliver's Travels

Lilliput

Gulliver is a large man. General restlessness compels him to go on a long cruise (Unlike slave trader Daniel Defoe, it is not entirely clear what he intends to achieve via this trip). He gets lost at sea and is marooned on an island full of little people (who sound suspiciously like orientals - they have an emperor, multiple palaces, are godless, and do dangerous dances). I say little people but they aren’t that little - larger than ants, smaller than your forefinger (for reference, their tallest trees are 6 feet tall). Think BFG proportions. They enslave him (there are a lot of them, and they took him by surprise - he was enjoying an involuntary siesta) by showering him with an avalanche of little arrows and chaining him to a, well, something heavy (it is not immediately clear what he is chained to, thought it is made immediately clear that the chain is pretty sturdy).

Linguists are ordered to teach Gulliver the Lilliputian language, the same way humans do with gorillas, rhesus monkeys, capuchins, and other members of the primate family they are obsessed with. He is fed a steady diet of meat and alcohol. He strikes up a friendship with the emperor, his consort, and certain members of their retinue (including the Treasurer’s wife, which the Treasurer takes offense to).

Eventually they realize they have more in common than they thought they did

Eventually the Lilliputians make no attempt to learn more about the ways of the savage than he has from them (what could you possibly hope to learn from someone more primitive than yourself) nor do they overly interest themselves in his family history (his wife and children are never brought up), viewing him merely as a weapon of mass destruction. Gulliver fulfills his Lilliputian destiny by marching across the sea to Blefuscu and seizing their entire fleet (because grand larceny is a somewhat lesser crime than wanton destruction of property. Also, it sounds more intelligent) before their imminent invasion of Lilliput, forcing the Blefuscuans to sue for peace.

The emperor is pleased for a second or two, then realizes that Gulliver, who has served his purpose, is now no more than a drain of resources. It doesn’t help that Gulliver pissed all over the palace to put out a fire. Machinations of various hawkish types (who were rendered obsolete by Gulliver’s might in battle) in court bear fruit, and Gulliver is condemned to be blinded (as opposed to the more severe sentence of death). Gulliver flees to Blefuscu, and the Blefuscuans, glad to see the back of him, help him build a boat. Gulliver sets sail and encounters an English vessel, who brings him back to England (of course).

Gulliver goes into some detail on the laws and customs of the Lilliputian “empire”. Fraud and ingratitude are punishable by death. Accusing the innocent is punishable by death. Job applicants are selected based on morals rather than ability (better dumb mistakes than smart maliciousness). The natural act of wanting to procreate and showing tenderness towards your young deems Lilliputians unfit for parenthood - their offspring are surrendered to a state-run educational commune, and they pay for their upkeep and limited visitation rights. Officials are appointed to high office based on their rope-dancing prowess (which they are often called upon to redemonstrate, often with tragic consequences). They obsess over insignificant details, like which side of an egg to crack it from (this led to rebellion from breakaway factions).

Gulliver spends two months with his wife and family, and giving in to an insatiable desire to see other countries, takes leave of his wife, school-going son Johnny, married daughter Betty to go traveling again.

Brobdingnag

Gulliver is abandoned by his fellow crew when a giant chases them. The giant turns out to be a farmer who exploits Gulliver as a traveling exhibit. Gulliver is near death from exhaustion when the farmer sells his meal ticket to the queen for a thousand pieces of gold. The farmer’s nine-year-old daughter joins the royal household as primary caretaker of Gulliver.

Gulliver quickly supplants the queen’s favorite dwarf (implying that there are other less favored dwarfs who are never mentioned) as her favorite. The queen’s smith constructs a box (in essence a small room for privacy and containment of personal effects) for ease of transportation (of Gulliver).

The king initially perceives Gulliver to be a piece of elaborate clockwork (this idea is swiftly dismissed with closer examination).

Knowing the King to be a fan of musick, Gulliver makes an attempt to get into his good graces with some dismal spinet playing (which doesn’t go too well owing to his diminutive stature) and telling him of the invention of gunpowder (upon which the King deems him an impotent and groveling Insect to entertain such inhuman Ideas).

The King shows a keen interest in Gulliver’s homeland, and takes detailed and precise notes while Gulliver dilates upon the history, politics, judiciary, nobility, governance, education, and many other aspects of Britain and Europe, after which the King cannot help but conclude the bulk of humanity to be the most pecunious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

Here are some things about the Brobdingnagians. They learn only about Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematics - nothing that may not be applied to the improvement of life, agriculture, and mechanical arts (Gulliver deems their lack of abstract ideas defective). No law in the country exceeds in words the number of letters in their twenty-two letter alphabet. Crime and civil suits are absent. The king maintains an army to put down the odd rebellion. Public executions are considered a diversion.

When Gulliver isn’t busy facing a series of ridiculous and troublesome near-death run-ins with monkeys, frogs, flies, wasps, dwarf, and falls from not insignificant heights, he’s busy body-shaming maids-of-honor, who are too eager to grant him full view of their gargantuan breasts, nipples, nethers, and body odours. Yes, giant people are gross.

Gulliver is eventually spirited away from Brobdingnag by a passing bird, who drops his box in the middle of the ocean, which is then retrieved by a passing ship and towed back to England.

Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, Japan

Barely ten days on shore before Gulliver grows restless on shore and makes for the high seas, is set upon by Pirates and marooned in the middle of nowhere, where he discovers Laputa, the magnetic floating island!

The Laputians are perpetual thought engines. They wander about lost in their own thoughts, with brief pauses to fulfill basic bodily functions and respond to external stimuli. They employ a sort of servant known as a flapper, whose sole purpose is to follow their master around and slap him about with a pebble-filled bladder whenever this is necessary.

Their obsession with theoretical science, mathematics, and music lends itself to a wholly impractical, incompetent manner of life. Their houses are ill-built and clothes ill-sewn. Their food is cut in mathematical shapes. They are alarmed by slight movements in celestial bodies. Their women are vivacious sorts who carry out their infidelities right before the eyes of their sensory-impaired husbands.

The Laputians rule over a number of grounded vassal states, and enforce this rule by throwing stones from above to quell any disobedience.

Gulliver takes his leave of these tiresome folk and descends to one of these states, Balnibardi, where ruinous new rules and methods for agriculture, manufacture, building, trades put forth by the Academy of PROJECTORS have laid waste to once-fertile farmland. Gulliver visits Lagado, the capital of Balnibardi where said academy is based, and observes farcical experiments where scientists attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and ruck through human excrement for evidence of plots and conspiracies.

Gulliver then travels to Glubbdubdrib, where his necromantic hosts summon a series of ancient and modern historical figures and subject them to his questioning. Gulliver finds the ancient beyond reproach, and the modern full of prostitutes, cowards, sodomites, flatterers. At Luggnagg (some sort of East Asian kingdom?), he crawls upon his belly and licks the floor to seek an audience with the king, and is introduced to the decrepit Struldbrugs, who enjoy eternal life without eternal youth, and are declared legally dead at eighty and banished from society.

From Luggnagg he sails forth for Japan, skirts past a cross-stamping ceremony, and finds his way back to England.

Houyhnhnms

Gulliver spends a record five months with his wife and children, before ditching his wife and unborn child for the comfort of sea travel. As is custom by now, things go awry when his mutinous crew evict him from the ship and he is set ashore on the land of the Houyhnhnms (pronounced Whinnins).

The Houyhnhnms are the most noble beings ever to trot upon the face of this earth. What they lack in intellect and high culture, they compensate with universal friendship and benevolence. They treat family, friends, strangers, and neighbors with equal respect.

They have no natural fondness for colts or foals, and consider such feelings beneath the purely rational beings that they are. Upon death, they are buried in the most obscure places - they experience no joy or grief at their departure.

They have no word for lie (in place, they use the phrase “the thing which was not”), evil (using yahoo as a suffix to denote such meaning), or opinion (pure logic dictates the right path), or any concept of war, quarrels, money, diseases, government, or lawyers (Gulliver’s master found it inconceivable that there exists a race of lawyers whose sole purpose was to inflict injustice upon others for the sake of doing so).

They have a sort of Quarterly Youth Olympics where odes are sung in the honor of the champions. They have grand assemblies and council meetings where provisions are exchanged and notions are put forward. Notions, such as - should all yahoos be exterminated and replaced with asses? Gulliver’s master, inspired by what Gulliver tells him about humankind husbandry rituals, proposes that young yahoos be castrated to render them tame, so the entire race may die out and be replaced with asses in time.

Yahoos are vile, fetid, hairy humanoid creatures with claws that they use to climb trees. They consume raw meat and have a natural inclination to hurt one another. The females, especially the red-haired ones, are salacious (Gulliver is nearly raped by one).

Gulliver cannot help but observe the similarities between the yahoos and himself. He slowly loses his mind. He makes clothing out of yahoo skin. He lines his canoe (he is forced to make one after the Houyhnhnms vote him off the island - an intelligent Yahoo is too dangerous to be released to the general Yahoo population) with yahoo skin. He is rescued by a Portuguese Captain, Don Pedro, who is a wise, courteous, and generous man. Gulliver regards him with suspicion. He returns to England and renounces human society, preferring the company of two horses in the barn.

[Book Review] Frankenstein

Victor Frankenstein (no idea where the later “von” came from, maybe people conflated him with Doctor Doom) of Geneva goes to Ingolstadt for further studies in Natural Philosophy, and quickly surpasses his tutors. Swept up in religious fervour, he spends the next few years creating his Monster (built out of German body parts), whom he immediately rejects out of extreme ugliness. 

His Monster is naturally not too pleased about this, and after going through several further rounds of rejection (by some villagers, the guardian of a girl he saved, and the De Lacey family - the blind patriarch being the exception), decides to become a serial killer. He offs Victor’s youngest brother William (and frames their servant Justine for the crime) just to show he means business, and makes Victor an offer he can't refuse - make him a bride, and he will depart for the jungles of South America, never to return.

Accompanied by his best friend Henry Clarval, Victor goes on a sojourn through England and Scotland, picking up English and Scottish body parts along the way. At Orkney, he has an epiphany and realizes that maybe being the progenitor of an entire race of supermutants might not be such a good idea after all. The Monster watches in horror as he rends his nearly finished work asunder, and swears bloody vengeance.

Henry Clarval is swiftly dispatched, followed by Elizabeth Lavenza on their wedding night. A heartbroken Father (Alphonse) Frankenstein dies a few days later. Victor is not too pleased about this and, left with no purpose in life, pursues the Monster to the ends of the earth - across deserts, the Mediterranean, Russia, and eventually ending up at the North Pole, where he meets a marooned Robert Walton and his crew.

Captain Robert Walton obtains the friendship and inherits the will of a dying Victor, who manages to avert a mutiny with forceful words before drawing his final breath. The Monster appears and goes into a soliloquy about how being forced to do all these base things made him the basest of animals, and because one-upmanship is important, how sad he is compared to Victor. He declares that he will set himself upon a funeral pyre and departs, never to be seen again.

Random notes -

• The Monster : “Boo hoo hoo, look at me! I’m so erudite and talented and clever! I’ve read so many books (The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, Paradise Lost)! If only you’d give me a chance to impress you! You superficial lot! Die!”
• Also the Monster : “Look what you made me do! I’m such a gentle soul, overflowing with the milk of human kindness! Don’t you know how remorseful I feel every time I steel my heart to do these evil and devious things? Do you think I like taunting and framing and murdering?”
• The Monster is a self-absorbed narcissist who blames the world (and his parents) for making him do all the nasty things he does. You empathise with him for a short while after his inception, when he has an appreciation for the elements of the natural world, when he is bullied by various representatives of mankind, and before he goes on a self-righteous killing spree.
• Victor’s creation is an Ubermensch - Superhuman strength, speed, agility, intelligence, and ugliness (so basically an 8 feet tall ninja, or Beast from X-men). Nuclear weapons, as dangerous as they are, have no autonomy beyond that granted of their users.
• The obvious correlation today is AI

[Book Review] Peter Pan

Peter Pan is a murderous psychopath with mommy issues. He guts lost boys when they get too old, and cries in his sleep. He is unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality (simply imagining that he is full of food makes him full - a power the lost boys do not have, which is why they go hungry from time to time - they are too afraid to defy him). He is self-obsessed to the point where he does not recognize facts unless they are overtly pointed out to him (e.g. Wendy aging) and even still, it takes some effect on his part to make sense of it all. Self-obsession may be a useful protective mechanism to someone who has lived as long as Peter did. Why would you develop an attachment to anything when everything is transient, and the only constant is you? Time and faces have no meaning to an immortal - killing is as natural an act as eating or sleeping, and he hardly sticks to the agreement (where it was agreed between Mrs. Darling, Wendy, and Peter that Wendy would go to Neverland one week every year for “spring cleaning”) at the end since one year is as good as twenty.

There are several power factions in Neverland - The Redskins (led by Tiger Lily), the Lost Boys (led by Peter Pan), the Pirates (led by James Hook), wild animals (e.g. the Neverbird), and a massive crocodile who has developed a taste for Hook’s flesh after Peter threw it Hook’s dismembered right hand (the crocodile also ate a clock at some point and regularly emits ticking noises, which is how anyone tells the time in Neverland). The Redskins are nigh useless, while the Lost Boys are only relevant because of Peter. Their failure to keep one another in balance may suggest that the pirates are a recent addition. The pirates, as a cohesive unit, vastly overpower the Redskins or the Lost Boys (sans Peter Pan, who is an otherworldly force of nature), and indeed the failure of their leadership in the end proves to be their undoing, as Hook loses the plot and the pirates are picked off one by one by the Lost Boys.

The pirates have their own mommy issues, which may suggest that they used to be lost boys. Smee wants Wendy to be his mommy. Hook has some remnant trauma from his days at public school, where actions are categorized into good form and bad form. The only thing he truly cares about is his own good form (which may also mean his opponent’s resultant bad form). Manner of dress, manner of speech, general behavior, these are all examples of good form. Unnecessary movement when fighting (as Hook goads Peter into doing at the end before plunging to his death by crocodile) - that is bad form.

At the beginning of the story, Michael, John, and Wendy are whisked away to Neverland by Peter Pan. The lost boys all suffer from memory loss owing to the magical nature of the place, and it isn’t long before the three of them succumb to the same effects (sans Wendy, who retains a sense of self as she is older and wiser). Peter brought Wendy over to be his surrogate mommy, but Tinker Bell wants Peter all to herself (it seems that they have a one-sided romance) and tries to kill Wendy at the start. She deceives the lost boys into firing arrows at Wendy, who is only saved by a freak incident. As punishment, Peter disowns Tinker Bell for a week.Tinker Bell spends the remainder of the story flying around and emitting expletives (in fairy language), and slightly redeems herself by consuming the poison meant for Peter. She doesn’t die, of course - she is, within two paragraphs, revived by the belief of little children in fairies.

Hook is an odd character. He is seemingly the most intelligent character in the story (Peter Pan, while displaying occasional feats of cunning, is let down by his naivete and saved only by his immortality and luck), capable of hatching plots to poison the lost boys with a cake or Peter Pan with some cyanide-like substance he carries around for personal consumption. He bests the Redskins with geographical advantage, and figures out Slightly’s secret (that Slightly had altered the size of his tree trunk to fit him). He is hampered only by character flaws - his own overconfident and oversuspicious nature.

The lost boys are Slightly, Toodles (the best one - an English Gentleman with self-awareness), the twins, and a few more. They live in an underground house accessible only by their own bespoke tree trunks (when they grow too fat to use their tree trunks, Peter starves them until they shrink). This may sound ridiculous, but becomes an important plot point later in the story when Hook attempts to poison Peter.

Anyway, I understand the bewitching quality of Peter Pan - it may partly explain why JM Barrie and MJ have erm, psychiatric issues. If MJ believes himself to be Peter Pan, then his actions may be construed as those of an innocent child trapped in an adult male’s body.