When I started reading Gulliver’s Travels I was surprised to
find that my mind kept wandering to bad episodes of the adult-oriented
television show South Park. I don’t watch a lot of the show but something about
the book kept bringing me back to the four boys at a bus stop. I kept trying to
push these strange thoughts out of my head, but it was right around chapter 2
when I began to realize the connection between the two mediums. Specifically,
the passage where Gulliver describes the way he relieves himself at the beginning
of chapter 2 was what brought South Park foremost to my mind. Gulliver (Swift)
goes to great detail to describe the way he relieves himself when he is bound
by a chain by the Lilliputians. I found myself confused here, wondering if this
is meant to be humorous or if Swift was including all of this detail in order
to save face. It was during class when I began to realize that, like Defoe,
Swift sold Gulliver’s Travels as if it had been written by the fictional
protagonist of the story. With this knowledge, the idea of the author saving
face goes out the window. I concluded that Swift include this long paragraph
not only to make his readers laugh, but to also quietly remind them that they
are, in fact, reading a satirical work. The reason this reminds me of the
television show South Park is because Trey Parker and Matt Stone deliver their
brand of anti-political and anti-religious messages the same way. The humor is
certainly there in both cases; the term used in class to describe it was “scatological.”
But Gulliver’s Travels, like South Park, is a complicated political satire
cleverly wrapped up in a ludicrous bout of imagination. Jonathan Swift uses his
four stories to address various political and religious issues in the 1700’s in
the same way that Trey Parker and Matt Stone use different episodes of their
television show to address issues today. Swift truly may have stumbled onto a
clever way to mask his opinion in humor with the inclusion of this graphic
paragraph in the novel.
Interesting analogy. My question is: does a TV show make a novel? By that I mean to say that the term "episodic" very easily applies to TV - it means that all the episodes don't add up to anything larger. There is no one big moral to draw out of, let's say, The Simpsons or Three's Company. Does Gulliver's Travels add up to anything more than 4 stories. That's a question for Wednesday.
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