Travel and Translation

Travel and Translation: Textuality in "Gulliver's Travels"
Author(s): GRANT HOLLY

Source: Criticism, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring 1979), pp. 134-152
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23102758
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GRANT HOLLY4
Travel and Translation: Textuality in

"Gulliver's Travels "
I take it as axiomatic that intertextuality, acknowledged and un

acknowledged, is always at work in our readings of " individual" texts,
and, therefore, I can say without embarassment that in part, at least,
this essay, itself a part of a larger study on the nature of interpretation,
grows out of a reading of Freud's theory of repression.1 What is so
important in Freud's theory, which is logically, if not chronologically,
the source of most modern theories of interpretation, is the way it both
suggests and represses the identification of the interpretive act with
repression itself.2 For Freud repression is not merely the process which
confines or conceals material which interpretation attempts to recover,
though that is what the apparent psychological imperialism of his pro
ject taken as a whole seems to suggest (" Where id was, ego shall be ").
It is also a process of creation, elaboration, explanation, and interpre
tation.® What is repressed, in other words (and this is true both in
* Grant Holly is an Associate Professor of English at Hobart and William

Smith Colleges. This essay is taken from a longer study in progress.
1For a history of Freud's use of the concept of repression and an assessment
of its importance in his work, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language
of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., Inc., 1973), pp. 390-94.
2 The work of both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida is witness to the
importance of this idea. See Derrida's " Freud and the Scene of Writing,"
trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, No. 48, 74-117. On p. 113, for
example, Derrida says "Writing is unthinkable without repression," an idea
which Mehlman contextualizes in Derrida's .. effort... to show that the play
of difference, which has generally been viewed as exterior to a (spatial or
temporal) present, is, in fact, already at work within that present as the con
dition of its possibility. Whereby the very distinction between inner and outer
is thrown into question...," Introductory Note, p. 73.
3 See Freud's "Repression" (1915), The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey,
et. al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 14, 146-58—especially p. 149, where
Freud describes the proliferative and expressive qualities of repression and pp.
154-158 where he discusses " substitute formations." When Freud discusses
dream interpretation in The Interpretation of Dreams and The Introductory
Lectures, it is clear that the dream, the greatest project of the unconscious, is
constituted by the dreamer's sleep experience, his waking account, the analyst's
134
Copyright © 1979 by Wayne State University Press
Textuality in " Gulliver's Travels " 135
terms of the being of the reader and the being of the text), is the
dominance of signifying over the signified. This repression is per
petuated in all analytics which seek to discover the meaning or mean
ings of the text.
The essay on Gulliver's Travels which follows is divided into two
parts. The first attempts to show the way in which Swift's text makes
signifying its subject, by implying a vast textuality which incor
porates the reader and which, therefore, he can participate in but is
no longer free to comment on.4 As a way of avoiding the hypostasizing
of signifying as the signified of the text, the second part of the essay
attempts to indicate the problematic of differencing along which
signifying plays without fear of falling into sense or significance.
The World and the Book
It must—and the paradox is ever-changing yet inescapable

say, for the first time, what has already been said, and repeat
tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said.... Commentary
averts the chance element of discourse by giving it its due; it
gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text
itself, but on the condition that it is the text which is uttered
and, in some ways, finalized.... The novelty lies no longer
in what is said, but in its reappearance.
Michel Foucault,
" Discourse on Language "
Gulliver''s Travels elaborates a problematic of redundancy: a pro

blematic which predicates the impossibility of escaping resemblances
and the necessity of repetition. In spite of the apparent strangeness of
his adventures, it is impossible for there to be generated in Gulliver's
narrative a story which is not like other stories, just as it is impossible
for Gulliver to make a voyage which does not take him home—both
in terms of its ultimate destination and the standards according to which
interpretation, the analysand's response, etc. Similarly, the fact that the dream
is neither the latent nor the manifest content alone but the shifting relationship
between them, opens the way for a potentially endless series of interpretations.
41 wish to make it clear at this point that my critique of Swift criticism
is not directed to the substance or the imaginativeness of that large body of
writing, but to its point of view. Instead of accounting for the text, it seems to
me that criticism participates in it, rewriting it and transforming it in the process.
136 Cjrant Holly
he views his discoveries—or for him to encounter a creature which does

not resemble man. Gulliver can never really voyage because he can
never exceed the limits of what he already knows.
Though this is not the usual statement of the case, it is in fact con
sonant with the critical approaches to the Travels which are usually
taken. Most criticism, whether historical or interpretive, is com
mitted to dealing with the text in terms of its signified, to attempting to
recover the original clarity and wholeness of that signified before it
fell into writing and was broken by articulations. The text qua text,
the text as signifying material, cunningly eludes the analyst, who reads
it merely as an arrow that points to a signified of transcendental im
portance, or gazes through its " transparency" to regions beyond.
Paradoxically, however, the code of analysis will not admit either the
" transcendental" or the " beyond " into the parameters of its com
mentary. Analysis is pinioned by the opposing intentions of eluding
the text and being faithful to it; and while in the service of the former,
it seeks to be original and innovative, it must, according to the con
straints of the latter, labor like Borges' Pierre Menard to repeat in its
own time and place the object of its commentary—to say, for the
first time, what has already been said.
One consequence of this situation is that literary analysis turns out
to be a ritual and compulsive (rather than analytic) activity, for in
terms both of the text upon which it comments and the audience to
which it speaks (fellow critics), it must invent a predetermined har
* There are, of course, a great many essays on Gulliver's Travels arrayed along
the spectrum of literary concern from the historical to the interpretive. Never
theless, whether we are dealing with Harold Williams' identification of the
political allegory in Book I, or N. O. Brown's discovery of Freud's theorem
of the " identity of what is highest or lowest in human nature," i. e., of " the
anal character of civilization," the text is being looked at as the index of a
significance which on the one hand seems to pre-exist it, and, on the other,
conforms neatly to the kind of understanding the reader brings to it. In, " The
Publisher to the Reader," " Richard Sympson " explains that his editorial practice
was governed by his determination "to fit the Works as much as possible to the
general Capacity of Readers." In addition, a number of influential studies
regard the Travels as containing moral and philosophical lessons which teach the
folly of pride and imply the value of moderation. See, for example, Samuel
Holt Monk, "The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver," Sewctne Reznew, 73 (1955 , 48-71;
and Kathleen Williams, " Gulliver's Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," ELH, 18
(1951), 275-86. The strategy of these approaches is the establishment of an
intellectual and moral center, which acts like a charmed circle protecting those
in the know.
Textuality in Gulliver s Travels " 137
mony. The true innovativeness of criticism resides in its ability to

feign surprise at the discovery in the text of the very principles which
animate its own discourse. Another consequence is that while analysis
masquerades as a different kind of discourse from the texts it talks
about, it is in fact an extension of those texts.
Satire is especially seductive in this regard, because it seems to posit
the unspoken view of an author, a truth or truths beyond the in
stabilities of signifying, temptingly obscured by the text, fetchingly
draped in fable; as well as suggesting that the elements of the nar
rative are substitutes, perhaps part of a systematic code, which stands
for things for which there are in fact no substitutes.
The flexible text of the Scriblerian tradition, however, with its
true beginnings which are false beginnings, its pseudonymous editors,
publishers, friends of the author, its personae, its annotations, its sys
tematic way in other words, of blurring the distinctions between outside
and inside, the world and the book, attacks the illusions of the authorita
tive text, a signified which can escape the signifying process, and a
commentary which is part of a different discourse from the work it
comments on. These latter ideas are the very foundations of criticism,
and one suspects, its rctison d'etre, for they permit us to assert our
superiority to the work, to proclaim our understanding of what it is
about, and thus to locate ourselves beyond the flux of its signifying in
the " real world " to which it refers.
On the other hand, the boundaries which separate the world of
Gulliver's Travels from the world to which it refers turn out to be
self-effacing: both in terms of the story and the manuscript tradition.
The task essential to essays on Gulliver's Travels of repeating in their
own time and place what has been repeated in the text—the original
conception or fact which existed before writing in the mind of the
author, or in the world in which he lived, and which, coincidentally,
happens to conform to the essayist's understanding—is disconcertingly
the same task undertaken by Gulliver himself. Wherever he goes and
whatever he sees, his experiences are communicated as a ratio of what
is already familiar to him. The Lilliputians are twelve times smaller
than man, while the Brobdingnagians are twelve times larger, Glubb
dubdrib is about one-third the size of the Isle of Wight, Brobdingnag
has a liquor which tastes like a " small Cider," flies the size of " a Dun
stable Lark " and wasps which are " as large as Partridges " and sound
like the "Drone of Bagpipes" (III, iii). The examples are countless.
Gulliver is always linked to the familiar by a chain of similes. For
138 Grant Holly
him and his reader alike, the Travels takes place in an atmosphere of
metaphor which makes everything comparable to something else.6
Similarly, though it is well known that Swift complained of the liberties
that Mott, the bookseller, took with his work, it is equally well known
that Swift took pains to occult his own relationship to the Travels.'1
Mott told Pope that the manuscript was " dropped at his house in the
dark, from a hackney coach," and the instructions that went along with
it encouraged the publisher to make whatever alterations his skill and
judgment in determining the tastes of readers deemed necessary.8
When Faulkner asked Swift for a correct version, the copy to which
he was sent turned out to be nonexistent. Indeed, though there exist
corrected versions of the Travels, they differ from one another and are
apparently not the origin of Faulkner's 1735 edition (generally con
sidered authoritative), the source of which remains obscure.9
This strategy, not unusual for Swift, of disguising the ownership
of his work, is not merely part of the history of the book, i. e., the
history of its coming into being as an object quite apart from the
possibilities of signifying it opens, it is the very stuff of its natural
history, i. e., the principle of its elaboration through displacement,
substitution, translation: the flow of textuality on which the potentially
quiescent book is perpetually carried towards other shores. In Gul
liver's letter to his cousin, dated 1727 but conjectured to have been
composed for the 1735 edition where it first appears, Gulliver com
plains about the addition, to the first edition, of remarks about Queen
Anne which he says he never made, but admits they are an accurate
representation of his views.10 Additions to the work, in other words,
0 My use of the terms " metaphor " and " metonymy " is drawn from Roman
Jakobson, " The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," in Chapter 5 of Fundamen
tals of Language by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle (1956), reprinted in
Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), pp. 1113-16.
7 Harold Williams, "Introduction" to Gulliver's Travels in The Prose Works
of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), pp. xxi
xxviii. References to Gulliver's Travels come from this edition and will be
cited parenthetically.
8A. Norman Jeffares, "Introduction," to Fair Liberty was all His Cry. A
Tercentenary Tribute to Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745, ed. A. Norman Jeffares
(New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. x, and Williams, p. xxiv.
0 Harold Williams, pp. xxiv-xxviii.
10" But I do not remember I gave you Power to consent, that any thing
should be inserted: Therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing
seem to be in keeping with it. When he complains shortly thereafter

that his cousin has " either omitted some material Circumstances or
minced or changed them in a Manner that I do hardly know mine own
Work," it may mean that the text has been altered beyond recognition
from its original fixed significance, but it can also mean that the
boundaries between the original and interpolations are indistinguishable,
thus obliterating the uniqueness of the original—making it just another
version. The manuscript, he goes on to say, has been destroyed. He
has supplied corrections, but he is uncertain of them.11 Since the one
which he mentions, that " Brobdingnag" ought to appear " Brob
dingrag," has been completely ignored by the editor, and since Gulliver
regards language as moving steadily towards the unintelligible (" as I
remember upon each Return to mine own Country, their old Dialect
was so altered that I could Hardly understand the new," A Letter
from Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson), we have no reason to believe
that there can be an authoritative text or a definitive reading: like the
changing dialect, the text may be in a state of perpetual metamorphosis.
In Gulliver's Travels the narrative gestures to wards itself as signifying
material in the repeated occurrence of emblems of the text—instances
within the narrative which replace the signified or transform it into the
image of another text—from which we can infer that the way out of
the narrative is barred by the proliferation of substitutions, translations,
and comparisons which constitute an endless and inescapable textuality.
The alternations of reduction and expansion which characterize the
first two books of the Travels, for example, are emblematic of the
interchangeability of the world and the book. Gulliver, the student
of medicine, navigation, languages, of " the best Authors, ancient and
modern; being always provided with a great Number of Books,"
(I, i)—finds himself besieged by beings the size of illustrations. Like
the reader of the Travels compelled to replicate his approach to it in
of that Kind; particularly a Paragraph about her Majesty the late Queen Anne,
of most pious and glorious Memory; although I did reverence and esteem her
more than any of human Species." (A Letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin
Sympson).
11" I hear the original Manuscript is all destroyed, since the Publication of my
Book. Neither have I any Copy left; however, I have sent you some Cor
rections, which you may insert, if ever there should be a second Edition: And
yet I cannot stand to them, but shall leave that Matter to my Judicious and
candid Readers, to adjust it as they please " (A Letter from Capt. Gulliver to
his Cousin Sympson),
140 Grant Holly
his reading, Gulliver is a prisoner of his own world reduced to the

dimensions of the book. This, however, is not the only permutation of
the situation. Gulliver, the gigantic form whose limbs are virtually
beyond the ken of the Lilliputians, whose body they swarm over like
ciphers on a page, is himself the emblem of that textuality into which
the reader, like the Lilliputians, descends, and where all that he
encounters reflects the textuality that engenders it, producing, like
the Lilliputians' account of the contents of Gulliver's pockets, a po
tentially endless round of circumlocutions. The voyage to Brob
dingnag emphasizes this process by reversing it: the text expands to
the size of the world and Gulliver enters it, literally, inhabiting the
miniature world of their toys, walking through the pages of a book in
order to read it, pacing a map of the kingdom even as he paced the
island of Lilliput. What was once construed as the world, is now, in
a larger context, shown to be a text, a transformation by contextuali
zation that implicates the reader and his world as well.
As opposed to the interpretations of Gulliver's Travels which see
it formulating its significance at a high pitch of meaningfulness above
language and beyond the characterizations of its text, I suggest that
we regard its " meanings" as part of the strategy of self-perpetuation
of a signifying urge, more powerful than " meaning," but being no
more than it is, on the surface, ready to efface itself to create the illu
sion of an independent purpose, a beyond which can be voyaged into,
an otherness which can be discovered. Gulliver's experience, indeed
his very being, betrays this signifying urge. For him, expression is
constantly beneath the semantic and comprehensible. As a perpetual
foreigner, even on his returns home, Gulliver is always addressed in
an alien " jabber," to use his own word. As an oddity wherever he
goes, Gulliver's significance is constantly being read not only in what
he says, but in what he is, in the ambiguous signs of his size and shape.
In Lilliput, his significance is understood in terms of his bodily func
tions, in the impact of his great hands and feet, and in the continued
signifying of decay which would be brought about by his death. In
Houyhnhnm land he is read according to his physical shape and the
affectation of clothing—a system of signs which indicates the limits of
the body. In Book III, Gulliver takes the place of the reader, con
fronting in the Academy of Lagado and the series of adventures that
follow, analogues to the episode to which we have just alluded: the
project for the decipherment of feces, or the perpetual translation of
speech brought about by the endless physical and mental decay of the
Struldbruggs, for example. Throughout, his own attempt to com

municate and the responses of those he meets take place on the level
of cries and gestures, on the mute and strident level of physiology,
of a speech which is ingrained beyond any hope of interpretation.
The spectrum of this speech ranges from the undefinable roars of the
Yahoos to the inarticulatable speech of the Houyhnhnms—ranges, in
other words, along a continuum of ambiguous noise which Gulliver
perpetuates (since it is incomprehensible) in his " understanding " as
we do in ours.
Let us say then that the true subject of Gulliver's Travels is the
legendary discourse which animates the narrative. This legend mani
fests itself in two ways. In the first it is seen by Gulliver and the
reader as an ever-receding spirituality, a ghostly presence12 which
flies before the material onslaught of the events which constitute Gul
liver's life or the signifiers which confront the reader, in precisely the
same way that the purposes of Gulliver's voyages elude his efforts to
achieve them, and Gulliver's account of his travels fails to eliminate
the reader's questions concerning (the significance of) what took place.
This is the teleological aspect of the legend, the aspect which awaits
the reader, veiled in the darkness of the unsaid, and towards which
the narrative gazes for the solution of questions of meaning and
purpose. Insofar as the narrative is seen as pursuing this legend, it
is being read metonymically, i. e., as a series of parts building towards
completion.13
But there is implicit in this manifestation of the legend another
aspect, one which reverses the priorities and expectations of the first.
The sign of this second manifestation of the legend is the analogical
relationship which joins what are generally considered to be distinct
categories: the world and events (out there) on the one hand, and the
text and signifiers on the other. What are for Gulliver " the events "
which make up his " life " are for the reader merely signifiers which
enable him to read. On the other hand, Gulliver, forced to encounter
his " experiences " as a foreigner, is constantly " living his life " on
the level of signifiers, i. e., as a reader, while the " reader," whose
12 See, for example, F. R. Leavis, " The Irony of Swift," originally published in
Determinations, 1934, rptd. in Fair Liberty was all His Cry, ed. A. N. JefTares,
p. 118: "The positive itself appears only negatively—a kind of skeletal presence,
rigid enough, but without life or body; a necessary precondition as it were
of direct negation."
18 See above, n. 6.
142 Grant Holly
work the narrative is, whose " reading " is a making because his effort
is needed to transform the text, though he may discuss the narrative
as a record of events, as the sign of a transcendental signified, experi
ences it as an event in itself.14 The narrative, from this point of view, is
its own legend, the long signature of narrativity.
It is this aspect of the narrative that elaborates a problematic of
redundancy, for in it narrativity, which is a kind of signifying, is
itself revealed as the signified. And the tendency towards the ex
pressed, towards, that is, a revelation of purpose or meaning, is re
peatedly included in the larger strategy of exploiting the means of
expression.
Consider, for example, the initial paragraph of the first chapter of
Part One, " A Voyage to Lilliput" : 15
My Father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire-, I was

the Third of five Sons. He sent me to Emanuel-College in
Cambridge, at Fourteen Years old, where I resided three
Years, and applied my self close to my Studies: But the Charge
of maintaining me (although I had a very scanty Allowance)
being too great for a narrow Fortune; I was bound Appren
tice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent Surgeon in London, with
whom I continued four Years; and my Father now and then
sending me small Sums of Money, I laid them out in learning
Navigation, and other Parts of the Mathematicks, useful to
those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be
some time or other my Fortune to do. When I left Mr.
Bates, I went down to my Father; where, by the Assistance
of him and my uncle John, and some other Relations, I got
Forty Pounds, and a Promise of Thirty Pounds a Year to
maintain me at Ley den: There I studied Physick two Years
and seven Months, knowing it would be useful in long Voy
ages.
The overall tone of the paragraph is one of explanation. In telling us

that his father's estate is " small" and that he is the third of five sons,
14 Julia Kristeva, " Phonetics, Phonology and the Impulsional Bases," trans.
Caren Greenberg, Diacritics, 4, No. 3 (1974), 33-37, and Philip E. Lewis, Revo
lutionary Semiotics," Diacritics, 4, No. 3 (1974), 28-32.
15 Merritt Lawlis, " Swift's Uses of Narrative: The Third Chapter of the
Voyage to Lilliput," JEPQ, 72 (1973), 1-16, has a similar interpretation of the
first paragraph. However, his conclusion, that the work has a number of meanings,
is fundamentally different from my own, which attempts to indicate the dynamics
of its signifying.
Textuality in "Gulliver's Travels" 143
Gulliver alludes to circumstances of economic and social constraint

which will presumably contribute to an explanation of why something
happened, of how he got to be where he is, etc. However, what
follows is a series of statements, each of which perpetuates the tone
of explanation because it is eliminated as an explanation by the suc
ceeding statement. Gulliver's career at college might well be what
the first sentence explained; or the details of that career: Emanuel
College, Cambridge, his being fourteen years old, the three years
residency and his dedication to his studies, might contribute directly
to an explanation. Neither of these alternatives is the case, however.
" But" seems to negate what has immediately preceded it. The phrase
which it initiates reinvokes the issue of economic and social constraint
and could serve, it is true, as an explanation for Gulliver's being
" bound Apprentice " (though not for why he is apprenticed to a
physician, or to "Mr. James Bates"). Further, his being apprenticed
to a physician named Mr. James Bates might be part of an explanation,
but at this point, these explanations, and potential explanations, are
themselves undermined. Gulliver chooses to spend his allowance on
the study of navigation, and he reveals that he has, all along, intended
to travel.
The force of this revelation transforms everything that has preceded

it. Clearly, the paragraph builds up to the word " travel." It is
presumably the outcome which the information that preceded it ex
plains. Yet none of this information really bears directly and in itself
on Gulliver becoming a traveler. The explanation of this outcome is,
interestingly enough, attributed simultaneously to the most internal
and the most external of sources: " Belief," " always " held, and there
fore, the implication is, more profound than any reasons which might
be found to justify it, and " Fortune," which is always mysterious and
beyond the reach of explanation. The intimate and the vast, each in
its own way, appeals to our sense of the inadequacy of language, and to
a signified outside the influence of the sign. (What I really mean in
terms of the ego's private sense of the inexpressible value of what he
says, and What 1 really mean in terms of the significance of the
ego's life taken as a whole). If "Fortune" is the explanation, the
cause of which " travel" is the inevitable result, then what precedes
Gulliver's revelation is less an explanation than it is a demonstration:
in this case a demonstration of the way in which fortune is signified by
a series of irrelevant explanations; and, in any case, if we use this
paragraph as a paradigm for the whole text, of the way in which the
144 Grant Holly
text will seem to require something not textual, some transcendental

signified, to explain its significance. This view is represented by all
those critics who see Swift's satire as saying one thing by saying some
thing else, or who think of the narrative in terms of what view, philo
sophy, politics, etc., it criticizes or advocates.
However, this view cannot be sustained if we pursue our analysis.
" Fortune " does not suffice as an explanation, because what it explains
is by its very nature unfinished, or more properly, in transit. Indeed,
strictly defined, " travel" is pure process, neither here nor there, but
a perpetual on-the-way. Far from permitting the cessation of the
series of postponements that preceded it, " travel " seems to perpetuate
them in an image. It is, in other words, a redundancy. Moreover, it
is not " travel," alone, that we are given here, but Gulliver's intention
to travel. In this context, I submit, to intend to travel is rather like
meditating on the possibility of staring fixedly out the window: the
one is the iconic equivalent of the other. The phenomenon of intention
(which is part of the tone of explanation) seems to suspend the
occurrence of the event, i. e., " life " or " travel" for Gulliver and the
signified for the reader, and offers in its place a scries of preparations.
In so doing, it creates the illusion that the narrative develops according
to the rule of metonymic contingency, i. e., what is said is one of the
potential outcomes of what has been said, and, in its turn, predicates
a congeries of possibilities, one of which is what will be said. And
in a sense this is true.16 However, in this passage, the past, present
and future of narrative are also ways of saying the same thing.
To make this point it is worth considering these aspects of the
narrative one at a time. 1) The future is clearly the direction in which
the paragraph points, and the realm which contains the anticipated
and, therefore, apparently unexperienced "travel." 2) The past, just
as clearly, has been a time taken up by postponements and preparations.
Here, however, the situation becomes more complex. Since travel is
itself oriented towards the future, and since travel is the process which
postpones " being here" from one place to another and marks the
period of preparation which separates departure from arrival, there
is the clear sense that what has been postponed or prepared for is
embedded in the postponement and in the preparation—that the future,
in other words, is embedded in the past. This somewhat abstract
statement of the case applies to the series of non-events (non-arrivals)
10 See below, pp. 150-151.
which constitute the paragraph up to the mention of travel. At that

point, as we have already noted, the redundancy is doubled by the
merger of travel and intention. After travel is mentioned, Gulliver
proceeds to relate a series of unacknowledged trips. He leaves Mr.
Bates, goes to his father, and is suddenly (without any account of his
journey) in Leyden, and all this is merely preparation for travel. Once
we have been sensitized to this proliferation of equivalences, we cannot
help but notice that the study of " Physic " [for] " two Years and
seven Months " is itself a long voyage. The predominant force in the
paragraph has become metaphor. 3) Throughout Gulliver's repetition
(narration) of his past, he suppresses the present moment implicit in
that past when actual travelling took place. This present is repeated
in the reader's present, for the process of reading is analogous to the
process of travelling, especially in that the reader suppresses this pro
cess (signifying) in expectation of an explanation (signified), just as
Gulliver has suppressed his actual travelling in expectation of taking
a trip.
11
The Mirror and the Map

Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherin Beholders do generally dis
cover every body's Face but their Own....
1 he Battle of the Books
At last I beheld several Animals standing in a Field...

aulliver s Travels
The definition of satire which opens the " Author's Preface to ' The
Battle of the Books' " is certainly an epigram on the extent of human
pride and the reluctance with which men engage in self-criticism—
among the main themes drawn from Swift's satires by modern readers—■
but it is both more than that and a remark of a different order. This
extraordinary statement, which encourages us to think of a book as a
mirror and a reader both as the characters within and author of the
text, marshals the machinery of repetition as part of a strategy of
displacement and alteration. What is it that the beholder sees but fails
to recognize in the glass but his own beholding, i. e., the process by
which the text as an empty signifying is given a face by his reading.17
"See Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the
I," Merits, A Selection, trans., Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton,
1978), pp. 1-7.
146 Grant Holly
The word " translation " implies a journey which is a journey home:
the return to what was already, if only potentially, there—an assertion
of the mirror symmetry of things. At the same time, however,
translation begins a never-ending process—the ever-renewed recog
nition of discrepancies which lead to an endless round of compensatory
circumlocutions. So, for example, the Lilliputian explorers who descend
into Gulliver's pockets to catalogue their contents must translate what
they find into familiar terms. The process destroys the validity of
names, but offers no alternative to them. Things disappear beneath a
cloud of words which grows with the proddings of analysis, until we
must suspect that the significance of names is their gesture towards the
system which produces them, a gesture which is acted out in their end
less proliferation into other names.
For the returning Gulliver, home is not what it used to be. A
new child, a race of Lilliputian sheep and a collection of Brobding
nagian ephemera (which translate the hairs of the king's beard into a
comb, and a corn from the maid-of-honor's foot into a cup), the
uncontrollable desire to warn the natives of his homeland to beware
lest he crush them, or to prance and nay with the horses, his final
inability to tolerate the smell of the place, and the perception that
even the words which were once familiar to him have undergone an
apparent transformation of significance which obscures the outlines
of meaning in general, all contribute to the sense of an ineluctable
metamorphosis—entropy disturbing the order of the features in the
face of identity. Gulliver returns from the looking-glass world, the
world which is like his oivn, to find that nothing is the same, that his
world is merely like the one he has left. In this sea of likenesses,
there is no point of reference, no world beyond the text, only a series
of maps and the idea of mapping.18
Indeed, what the Travels reflects is the process of mapping. The
letter from " Richard Sympson " entitled " The Publisher to the Reader "
which is part of the 1726 edition, admits the "bold" editing of "in
numerable Passages relative to the Winds and Tides, as well as Vari
18 The thoughts of contemporary geographers are interesting in this regard.

Robinson and Petchenick, for example, conclude in The Nature of Maps (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976), "...a map is a graphic representation of a
milieu," (p. 16), and " There is no constant, apart, ' objective' reality either in
the milieu or in the map" (p. 69). As my colleagues Eugen Baer and Ben Atkinson
have pointed out in conversation, Korzybski's distinction between the map and
the territory seems to be falacious. The map is the territory.
ations and Bearings in the several Voyages.... Likewise the accounts of

Longitudes and Latitudes... to fit the Work as much as possible to
the general Capacity of Readers." Of course this is part of the satire
on nautical language—that there could be so much struck out and
still so much left behind, indicates the extravagancies of this sort of
jargon. On the other hand, the work's first claim to verisimilitude is
through the integrity of these kinds of references, and through the
mapping that they would permit. The implication is that it is not what
the geologists call " real-world structures " 10 but mapping itself, the sys
tem, or mode of dispersal, which can create the illusion of a world,
which the text maps. This is not to say that the contemporary reader, at
least, would expect to be able to find the flying island of Lilliput by
paying careful attention to the text, and to doubt its veracity if he
could not. To do so would be regarded as incredibly naive. However,
the way satire is typically regarded makes it the map of some distinct
but nevertheless substantial continent or archipelago of meaning. By
analogy, reading does not carry us beyond the text but situates us within
it. What Gulliver''s Travels satirizes can be said to be the illusion of a
world beyond the map, of a signified beyond the flux of signifying.
What it reveals is that the notion of a world beyond the map and of a
text which can be confined in a book are themselves part of a discourse,
which speaks the world, and which, in every utterance about the
world, is being mapped.20
We can chart four ways in which Gulliver's Travels reflects map
ping, each of which characterizes not only what takes place in the
narrative, but also our reading of it. First, there is the project of
mapping by innuendo which we are encouraged to engage in because of
the general ambience of satire. This charting of the invisible by what
is visible on the mirror's surface is like the work of the Lilliputian
tailors who fashion a suit of clothes for Gulliver based on calcu
lations derived from the measurement of his thumb, and seems to be
emblematic of the way this section should be read: asking the reader
to work from smaller to larger, drawing a picture of his own world
from Gulliver's account of the Lilliputians'. However, the " larger "
of the Brobdingnagian adventure which follows, and the caricature of
19 David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1969,

paperback edition 1973, rpt. 1976), p. 372: " The map is, therefore, simply a
model of a theory about the real world structures."
20 My use of the term " discourse" is derived from Michel Foucault, The
Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random
House, 1972), pp. 21-76.
148 Grant Holly
the work of the Lilliputian tailors by the mathematics of Laputa

Book III, suggests that once begun, mapping leads only to a series
versions.
Here we see the close relationship of the mirror and the map, both
of which in their purest sense attempt to replicate the world—the
former at a glance, the latter by the patient elaboration of a repre
sentational network so refined that nothing will be able to escape it.
This is the fantasy that Josiah Royce engaged in his The World
and the Individual (1899):
Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been
leveled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a
map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the
soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered
on the map; everything there has its correspondence. This
map, in such a case, should contain the map of a map, which
should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to
infinity.21
Just as mirrors map the beholder, dispersing his image according to the
rules of their surface, so maps mirror the techniques of beholding,
arranging everything for the convenience of reading.22 In Brobdingnag,
Gulliver cannot " forbear smiling " :
when the Queen used to place me upon her Hand towards a

Looking-Glass, by which both our persons appeared before
me in full View together; and there could be nothing more
ridiculous than the Comparison: So that I began to imagine
myself dwindled many Degrees below my usual Size. (II, iii)
Gulliver is hardly freed by his self-awareness, however. To break
the mirror's spell and redefine the normal, he still must map the
Brobdingnagians onto his own world. This problem is the same
for the reader who must deal with the lies of the narrative like the
Houyhnhnms—asserting the existence of that which he denies—thus
making the preposterous the border of truth.
The second form of mapping is the rhetorical mapping which we
21 Quoted by Jorge Luis Borges, " Partial Magic in the Quixote," trans.
Anthony Kerrigan, Labyrinths, eds. Donald Yates and James Irbey (New York:
New Directions, 1964), pp. 195-96.
22 For an important discussion of mirrors and maps, see Sir Ernst Gombrich,
" Review Lecture, Mirror and Map: Theories of Pictorial Representation,"
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B, 270, 119-49.
have already discussed in our analysis of the first paragraph of Book I.

It consists of the accumulation of details with the apparent intention
of outlining a purpose or, in the case of the navigational information,
a place. Since the details fail finally to be resolved into any pattern or
outline, we must conclude that it is the role reading plays in com
pleting the rhetorical gestalt which is being mapped.
The third form of mapping is embodied in the graphics of Gulliver's
Travels: in the size and shape of the book, the kinds of type, the
table of contents, the layout of books and chapters, headnotes, en
graved scenes and designs, and, of course, the maps and diagrams.
These are aspects of the work on which Swift probably had no direct
influence. Nevertheless, they have every right to be considered in an
analysis of the Travels since, as I have argued, Gulliver's Travels is
about techniques of portraying significant structures. The work na
turally includes the crafts which support its bid for our attention and
belief—at whatever level. When we open Gulliver's Travels, for ex
ample, we are confronted by a " portrait" of its protagonist which
sits on a pedestal on which appears CAPT. LEMUEL GULLIVER
with the epithet from Horace, Splendide Mendax, in script beneath.23
The oval which frames the portrait is a shape common to both portraits
and mirrors, thus underlining the mimetic aspirations of this kind of
painting. But the image is not a portrait, pure and simple, for two
reasons, both of which indicate the decay of the signified and the
predominance of signifying. In the first place, it is the engraving of
a portrait, which implies that it is a representation of a representation,
a double translation which, though it still achieves the illusion of a
three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space, presents itself
much more openly as a mapping, the product of the conventional cuts
and striations of a style of engraving.
In the second place, the image cannot be considered a portrait in
the usual sense because there is no such person as " Lemuel Gulliver."
The frontispiece is marked with the portrait of a skull: it merely
exemplifies a mode of signifying—advertises or catalogues a style of
engraving which, since in this context it is tied to no thing to be
engraved can be regarded as pure fabrication. Following this thought
one step further, we can see that the signified of this mode of signifying
23 The frontispiece to which I am referring is the one which appeared in

Faulkner's edition of 1735, and which has been reproduced in the standard
edition. To discuss the different images of " Lemuel Gulliver" which appeared
in the early editions of the Travels would require only that I change the details
of my analysis, not its conclusions.
150 Grant Holly
can be nothing other than the literal " Gulliver," the name inscribed
on the pedestal below, which is itself a mode of signifying, unattached
to any particular signified but undergoing a continuous process of
translation, beginning with the epithet from Horace (which itself
requires translation) and leading into the text beyond. As we look
at the whole design, what we see is the sign of engraving balanced on
the engraving of a sign. What is reflected in the mirror's frame is
technique, reading and writing—the discourse that maps the body and
according to which the body is read (Gulliver as physician and navi
gator). While on the blank face of the pedestal, the reflection of
Gulliver as pure language, a signifier floating over a signifier, over
a double which is another, maps the characteristics of the face above—
the heavy black of the eyebrows over the flexible, wiry lines of the
other features. Both parts of the frontispiece merge on the level of
the interchange of line. The circle of the frame and the rectangles
of the background seem to establish the abstract of this linearity,
forming in the process the indecipherable hieroglyph of its signature,
while within these limits the different realms of picture and language
are joined in the larger problematic of differentiation which engenders
signifying.
Finally there is the mapping of so-called human characteristics on
fantastic creatures. Against the critical commonplace that the Travels
defines " man " by a process of triangulation, as the unspoken signified
implied by the extremes of the text, I offer the view that it indicates
" man " at every point. The extremes which separate the Lilliputians
and Brobdingnagians, Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, and the way, for
example, the imagining of the Houyhnhnm race involves contorting
their bodies into a sitting position and their using the pastern and hoof
in the manner of the opposing thumb and forefinger, prove the elasticity
of the concept " human." " Man " is the reflection of a discursive
order, whatever constitutes the subject of reading and writing. The
text prepares us for this view by making the human difficult to recog
nize on what we would have thought were its own terms. The work
stretches the limits of the human so that the distinction between man
and animal disappears. Great animals become mere mouthfuls for
the voracious appetite of Gulliver in Lilliput. In Brobdingnag he is
reduced to contesting his existence with insects. The natives take him
for a kind of weasel, a monkey takes him for its young. By the time
he is embraced by the Yahoo female in the fourth book, the idea of
human has been so identified with the animal that it is possible for
the animal to be identified with the human. " I fell into a beaten
Road, where I saw many Tracks of human Feet, and some Cows, but
most of Horses," says Gulliver, marooned in Houyhnhnm land. " At
last I beheld several Animals in a Field..(IV, i). Here we see
the absolute separation of signifier and signified—for as Gulliver's ad
venture in Book IV goes on to demonstrate, any of the signs over
which he puzzles on the roadway can be the signifiers of a creature
with human characteristics.
Rather than thinking of Gulliver's Travels as the sign of some
signified, however complex, I suggest we think of it as a demon
stration of the way the signified grows out of the signifier, think of
it as a sign of signifying. From this point of view, the text loses its
purposiveness and progresses by means of associations which in them
selves indicate a compulsive signifying. As the third book opens, we
find Gulliver, acting out elements of his name, living the life of a gull:
surrounded by sea, he rests upon a rocky island, reposes in nests made
of dry seaweed, dines on eggs. Islands and eggs reflecting one another
in their roundness and reifying the circularity which connects Gulliver's
life with his name, proliferate into more islands, a series of them ex
plored by Gulliver, until island and egg merge in the flying island.
There the predominance of the sign is perpetuated in the geometrical
designs which emblazon the clothing of the inhabitants (an indecipher
able writing, like the [nearly legible] marks which fill the illustration
of the automatic writing machine), by the immersion of the Laputans
in the self-contained languages of mathematics and music, and the
repetition of circularity which marks the relationship of master and
servant, the island and the land beneath, tyrant and tyrannized, body
and mind—indeed a host of gull and egg questions around which the
book turns—until we realize that Gulliver's return home is no more
than the inevitable folding back of the text upon itself.
When Gulliver tells us that in Brobdingnag, " After much Debate,
they concluded unanimously that I was only Replum Scalcath, which
is interpreted literally Lusus Naturae..(II, iii), a modern editor
demonstrates the potency of this literalness by glossing Lusus Naturae
as a "a freak of nature"—now the literal translation of a literal
translation. It almost goes without saying that the literal phrase " a
freak of nature " is not transparent enough not to require glossing
itself, and that the gloss would require its own gloss and so on until
the resources of the lexicon had been exhausted. The literal cannot
be regarded as the most basic level, the very type of the signified. It
152 Grant Holly
is instead the stuff of signifying, the proliferation of letters, of which

meaning is a transient by-product. In this regard, Gulliver is a char
acter in the literal sense, a man of letters. The hard and soft sounds
of his name map the gateways of articulation, give us a sense of the
texture through which the paths of significance must be broken. Where
he goes and what he sees seem to grow out of his name: Lemuel
Gulliver, Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Glumdalclitch, Lagado, Glubbdubdrib,
Luggnagg, Struldbruggs.... Throughout there is the rhythm of dac
tyls and anapests, like the clatter of horses' hoofs, nagging evidence
of a level of marking and articulation more persistent than sense.
" The Houyhnhnms," we are told, " have no Letters," but they are
nothing but letters, the very principle of the unintelligible signifying
temporarily repressed by a conventional pronunciation. " The whin
ing of a horse, perhaps best pronounced, Whin-num," ventures an
editor, indicating my pronunciation and perhaps yours as well, but
we should not let this habit obscure the indecipherability of the marks.
" When I offered to slacken my Pace, he would cry, Hhuun, Hhuun;
I guessed his Meaning and gave him to understand, as well I could,
that I was weary, and not able to walk faster; upon which he would
stand awhile to let me rest" (IV, i). I am not arguing that "the
English Orthography " (IV, i) is inadequate for recording the cries of
horses (because that might imply that there was some accurate ortho
graphy), nor would I say nay to the reader who says he knows the
equine sound to which Gulliver refers with " hhuun." On the contrary,
I want to suggest the aptness of this orthography which, in the face of
an unspeakable language, develops an unpronounceable script. As the
history of criticism of the Travels shows, the meaning of Houyhnhnm
words, either in themselves or in Gulliver's translation of them (and we
must not forget that much of the narrative is a translation) is highly
debatable. In the same way, whatever pronunciation we choose for
the Houyhnhnm words represses a host of others. It is this repression
which I have tried to indicate in this essay. This has been a difficult
task since I believe there is nothing to repress: the something for
which we might look, the signified of the text, the meaning of the
text, is itself the invention of repression. What is repressed is a
signifying that has no meaning other than what it is (for it is our
being): the hydraulics of life and death which, like the coursing of
blood through our veins, we learn not to hear.

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Travel and Translation: Textuality in "Gulliver's Travels"

Author(s): GRANT HOLLY

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Travel and Translation: Textuality in

I take it as axiomatic that intertextuality, acknowledged and un

* Grant Holly is an Associate Professor of English at Hobart and William

Copyright © 1979 by Wayne State University Press

The World and the Book

It must—and the paradox is ever-changing yet inescapable

Gulliver''s Travels elaborates a problematic of redundancy: a pro

he views his discoveries—or for him to encounter a creature which does

mony. The true innovativeness of criticism resides in its ability to

seem to be in keeping with it. When he complains shortly thereafter

his reading, Gulliver is a prisoner of his own world reduced to the

Struldbruggs, for example. Throughout, his own attempt to com

My Father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire-, I was

The overall tone of the paragraph is one of explanation. In telling us

Gulliver alludes to circumstances of economic and social constraint

The force of this revelation transforms everything that has preceded

text will seem to require something not textual, some transcendental

10 See below, pp. 150-151.

which constitute the paragraph up to the mention of travel. At that

The Mirror and the Map

At last I beheld several Animals standing in a Field...

18 The thoughts of contemporary geographers are interesting in this regard.

ations and Bearings in the several Voyages.... Likewise the accounts of

19 David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1969,

the work of the Lilliputian tailors by the mathematics of Laputa

when the Queen used to place me upon her Hand towards a

have already discussed in our analysis of the first paragraph of Book I.

23 The frontispiece to which I am referring is the one which appeared in

is instead the stuff of signifying, the proliferation of letters, of which

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