Abstract
It is on the flying island of Laputa that the quest for purity takes its most extreme and radical form in Gulliver’s Travels. Here inwardness is associated with theoretical speculation, which is given an ironically privileged position over practical geometry. As a consequence the boundaries and categories that serve to define the idea of purity in every culture now become emptied of content, as forms themselves become the object of veneration. The source for this devotion has often been described as ‘scientific’, but since it is clear that by ‘science’ Swift is referring to the entire intellectual matrix of Laputan society, Gulliver is allowed to observe its workings in institutions that are social, political and religious as well as scientific in the narrow sense of the term.
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Notes
Paul J. Korshin, ‘The Intellectual Context of Swift’s Flying Island’, PQ, L (1971) 638–46, provides an illuminating study of the intellectual background of this strange mixture of science, magic and superstition.
See, especially, Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, ‘Swift’s “Flying Island” in the Voyage to Laputa’, Annals of Science, II (1937) 405–30.
Pat Rogers, ‘Gulliver and the Engineers’, MLR, LXX (1975) 260–70, links the collapse of this project to the South Sea Bubble.
Donald Greene, ‘Swift: Some Caveats’, Studies in the Eighteenth-Century: II, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973) 356–8.
For an illuminating study of the close relation between these projects and contemporary experiments described in the Transactions of the Royal Society, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, ‘The Scientific Background of Swift’s Voyage to Laputa’, Annals of Science, II (1937) 299–334.
Peter Mathias, ‘Who Unbound Prometheus? Science and Technological Change, 1600–1800’, in The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) p. 81.
There have been several recent attempts to defend the thematic and structural unity of the third Voyage: Edmund Reiss, ‘The Importance of Swift’s Glubbdubdrib Episode’, JEGP. LIX (1960) 223–8;
J. K. Walton, ‘The Unity of the Travels’, Hermanathena, CIV (1967) 5–50;
and Jenny Mezciems, ‘The Unity of Swift’s “Voyage to Laputa”: Structure and Meaning in Utopian Fiction’, MLR, LXXII (1977) 1–21
See, e. g. Dennis Twitchett, ‘Some Remarks on Irrigation under the T’Ang’, T’Oung Pao, XLVIII (1958) 175–94;
and Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)
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© 1987 Charles H. Hinnant
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Hinnant, C.H. (1987). The System at War with Itself: the Quest for Purity in the Third Voyage. In: Purity and Defilement in Gulliver’s Travels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18889-5_4
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