Summary: Chapter IV
Gulliver feels neglected on Laputa, since the inhabitants
seem interested only in mathematics and music and are far superior
to him in their knowledge. He is bored by their conversation and
wants to leave. There is one lord of the court whom Gulliver finds
to be intelligent and curious, but who is regarded by the other
inhabitants of Laputa as stupid because he has no ear for music.
Gulliver asks this lord to petition the king to let him leave the
island. The petition succeeds, and he is let down on the mountains
above Lagado. He visits another lord, named Munodi, and is invited
to stay at his home.
Gulliver and Munodi visit a nearby town, which Gulliver
finds to be populated by poorly-dressed inhabitants living in shabby
houses. The soil is badly cultivated and the people appear miserable.
They then travel to Munodi’s country house, first passing many barren fields
but then arriving in a lush green area that Munodi says belongs
to his estate. He says that the other lords criticize him heavily
for the “mismanagement” of his land.
Munodi explains that forty years ago some people went
to Laputa and returned with new ideas about mathematics and art. They
decided to establish an academy in Lagado to develop new theories
on agriculture and construction and to initiate projects to improve
the lives of the city’s inhabitants. However, the theories have
never produced any results and the new techniques have left the
country in ruin. He encourages Gulliver to visit the academy, which
Gulliver is glad to do since he was once intrigued by projects of
this sort himself.
Summary: Chapter V
Gulliver visits the academy, where he meets a man engaged
in a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. He also meets a
scientist trying to turn excrement back into food. Another is attempting to
turn ice into gunpowder and is writing a treatise about the malleability
of fire, hoping to have it published. An architect is designing
a way to build houses from the roof down, and a blind master is teaching
his blind apprentices to mix colors for painters according to smell
and touch. An agronomist is designing a method of plowing fields
with hogs by first burying food in the ground and then letting the
hogs loose to dig it out. A doctor in another room tries to cure patients
by blowing air through them. Gulliver leaves him trying to revive
a dog that he has killed by supposedly curing it in this way.
On the other side of the academy there are people engaged
in speculative learning. One professor has a class full of boys
working from a machine that produces random sets of words. Using
this machine, the teacher claims, anyone can write a book on philosophy or
politics. A linguist in another room is attempting to remove all the
elements of language except nouns. Such pruning, he claims, would
make language more concise and prolong lives, since every word spoken
is detrimental to the human body. Since nouns are only things, furthermore,
it would be even easier to carry things and never speak at all.
Another professor tries to teach mathematics by having his students
eat wafers that have mathematical proofs written on them.
Summary: Chapter VI
Gulliver then visits professors who are studying issues
of government. One claims that women should be taxed according to
their beauty and skill at dressing, and another claims that conspiracies against
the government could be discovered by studying the excrement of
subjects. Gulliver grows tired of the academy and begins to yearn
for a return to England.
