Measurement, Irony and the Grotesque in Gullivers Travels :: Gullivers Travels Essays

Measurement, Irony and the Grotesque in Gullivers Travels Post methodrnity is obsessed with the Eighteenth Century. As an example of how our nostalgia for that period manifests itself, Hans Kellner has pointed out that a genre of novels and films set in Eighteenth century has exploded in popularity Lemprieres Dictionary, Perfume, The Madness of King George III. We could to a fault point to the ongoing revision of scholarship on the period, of which GEMCS itself is an example. In considering what generates this contemporaneous fascination I have given some thought to the aesthetical and political issues surrounding the beginnings, and perhaps also the end, of the bourgeois social sphere. A conviction, argued most aggressively by Jean Baudrillard, is beginning to take hold, in and out of the academy, that this sphere, after an almost totalizing expansion, is now in decline. The panic all over the loss of the social, whether supportable or not, offers a possible explanation for the contemporary nostalgia for the period in which spry wrote Gullivers Travels. In this age of dissolution, what do we advert when we look back at the age of our creation? One social function we observe is the development of a peculiar kind of irony which we cant avail but distinguish from our experience of this trope in the age of its dominance. The satirical effect of the irony in Gullivers Travels read by the Postmodern forget be precisely what it was not at the time of its production. The historical standoffishness between Eighteenth Century and Contemporary readers can be soundless by way of Hayden Whites use of the master tropes in Foucault Decoded. White assigns wiz of the master tropes to each of the four archeological periods described by Foucault in The Order of Things. In Whites system, Foucaults Renaissance was metaphorical, locating truth in similarity. Swift wrote in what Foucault considered the Classical Period, which, for White, had metonymy as its overriding mode of reason, because a youthful transparency of representation made it possible to organize knowledge by a standard and represent it symbolically on a table. The unexampled period was characterized by synecdoche, in that the subject of knowledge, Man, was now included in the study of the world, in a part-whole relationship. Finally, the Contemporary or Postmodern mode is ironic, characterized by a questioning of the foundations of knowledge and a Dionysian disappearing of the subject of that knowledge.