How ironic that a book known for its scathing indictment of human nature, a book once published anonymously to avoid persecution, censored in England, and banned in Ireland, has become a revered children's classic.

Consider the abridged version of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Read and enjoyed by children for centuries, jolly Lemuel Gulliver gets lost at sea and wakes up on an island where little people hold him captive. Following an entertaining account of their differences and likenesses, Gulliver travels to three more unknown realms that mix the fantastic and the real: lands of giants, talking horses, and islands floating in the sky. One is reminded of Snow White, Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty. Gulliver joins them on the shelf of fairy tales as another imaginatively drawn story that is deeply satisfying to the imaginations of children.

Reading the original version of Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, is like discovering the friendly neighbor you've known for years is really an evil witch. Written in four parts, the reader follows Gulliver through these mythical lands. But almost immediately, the story seems to have a misanthropic twist. These are worlds in which good-natured Gulliver is violated, robbed, held captive, and exploited- often to a comical effect. Each civilization is a playground where Swift puts his disutopic political themes on display; a playground where children cannot play, and where the adult reader observes and inexorably recoils. Gulliver's Travels, at its core, is about the institutional corruption of politics, the absurdity of war, the injustices of colonization, and the physical grotesqueness of being human. And at the end, just when it seems every hypocrisy of every human society has been exposed, every rotten perspective given a lens for viewing, this savage satire comes to an unexpected and grim conclusion. Reaching an apogee of horrific descriptions (in the land of the talking horses), Swift attacks the degenerate nature of man himself. He directs the invective at everyone: the reader, gullible Gulliver, probably his mother, ultimately his own self. So profound is Swift's disillusionment that his hero is left ruined and, understandably, insane. There is no fairy tale here; it is a mordant inferno. One sets the book down and wonders if Swift is on the verge of suicide.

No one who knew Swift was likely shocked when he emerged from his self-imposed exile in Ireland with such a subversive manuscript in his hands. No one was likely surprised that his publisher omitted certain passages relating to particular political events so that it could go to the printing house. Swift certainly couldn't have been surprised when it was banned in his native Ireland for being "wicked and obscene." He was already the author of some of the best political propaganda and satire in the English language. Extensively involved first with the Whig and then the Tory party, Swift resided comfortably in the inner circle of English politics, tirelessly producing political pamphlets and articles parodying religious and political issues of his day. Always with a contentious tone, most were published anonymously or under pseudonyms. His most outrageous pamphlets were banned outright; "A Modest Proposal," for example, modestly proposed solving poverty in Ireland by selling Irish children for meat. It was when the Tories, Swift's ultimate political party, fell from power that he skulked back home to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." In this state, he wrote Gulliver's Travels.

In a letter to his friend, Alexander Pope, Swift said he wrote his book "to vex the world not divert it." And vex he did. William Mackpiece Thackeray famously declared Gulliver's Travels as "horrible, shameful, blasphemous, filthy in word, filthy in thought." Swift, he said, was "one of the most wretched of God's beings."

If Jonathan Swift is given the title "the greatest satirist in the English language", it is because his tales can be read on so many levels, and in so many different ages. Upon its publication, it revealed uncomfortable truths about English tyranny and raised such a fear of rebellion that it was banned in Ireland. Yet the world he created is so richly imagined that a fairy tale can be extracted even from the most disturbing scenes, despite the darker messages. The main message, of course, invoked by so many writers that it seems common sense, is that to be human in this world is, ultimately, tragic.

To read the satiric works of authors like Swift, Orwell, or Huxley (all banned in their time) is a much more powerful and satisfying experience than examining the political satire of a more contemporary satirist like Michael Moore. He may be able to make his hypercritical movies free of censorship, but perhaps his lack of boundaries renders him less effective. Perhaps we can learn more from a visionary like Swift, who faced limitations that challenged him to be cleverer than the government that imposed those limits. One need only look at the reasons we've fought the wars of the last fifty years to wonder if Swift's judgment of war is the most sane. For as time passes and civilization marches forward, the intensity and relevance of his vision grows only stronger, a discordant sound that reverberates clear and true, despite whether its heard or not.

-Katherine Ryder


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