Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Lilliputians
The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s wildly excessive
pride in its own puny existence. Swift fully intends the irony of
representing the tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the
most vainglorious and smug, both collectively and individually.
There is surely no character more odious in all of Gulliver’s travels
than the noxious Skyresh. There is more backbiting and conspiracy
in Lilliput than anywhere else, and more of the pettiness of small
minds who imagine themselves to be grand. Gulliver is a naïve consumer
of the Lilliputians’ grandiose imaginings: he is flattered by the
attention of their royal family and cowed by their threats of punishment,
forgetting that they have no real physical power over him. Their
formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is
a model of pompous and self-important verbiage, but it works quite
effectively on the naïve Gulliver.
The Lilliputians show off not only to Gulliver but to
themselves as well. There is no mention of armies proudly marching
in any of the other societies Gulliver visits—only in Lilliput and
neighboring Blefuscu are the six-inch inhabitants possessed of the
need to show off their patriotic glories with such displays. When
the Lilliputian emperor requests that Gulliver serve as a kind of
makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops to pass under, it is a
pathetic reminder that their grand parade—in full view of Gulliver’s
nether regions—is supremely silly, a basically absurd way to boost
the collective ego of the nation. Indeed, the war with Blefuscu
is itself an absurdity springing from wounded vanity, since the
cause is not a material concern like disputed territory but, rather,
the proper interpretation of scripture by the emperor’s forebears
and the hurt feelings resulting from the disagreement. All in all,
the Lilliputians symbolize misplaced human pride, and point out
Gulliver’s inability to diagnose it correctly.
Brobdingnagians
The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal, and
physical side of humans when examined up close and in great detail.
The philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to overlook the
routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts
of existence, but in Brobdingnag such facts become very important
for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and death. An eighteenth-century
philosopher could afford to ignore the fly buzzing around his head
or the skin pores on his servant girl, but in his shrunken state Gulliver
is forced to pay great attention to such things. He is forced take
the domestic sphere seriously as well. In other lands it is difficult
for Gulliver, being such an outsider, to get glimpses of family relations
or private affairs, but in Brobdingnag he is treated as a doll or
a plaything, and thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids
and the sexual lives of women. The Brobdingnagians do not symbolize
a solely negative human characteristic, as the Laputans do. They
are not merely ridiculous—some aspects of them are disgusting, like
their gigantic stench and the excrement left by their insects, but
others are noble, like the queen’s goodwill toward Gulliver and
the king’s commonsense views of politics. More than anything else,
the Brobdingnagians symbolize a dimension of human existence visible
at close range, under close scrutiny.
Laputans
The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge
that has no relation to human life and no use in the actual world.
As a profound cultural conservative, Swift was a critic of the newfangled ideas
springing up around him at the dawn of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
a period of great intellectual experimentation and theorization.
He much preferred the traditional knowledge that had been tested
over centuries. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that
has never been tested or applied, the ludicrous side of Enlightenment
intellectualism. Even down below in Balnibarbi, where the local
academy is more inclined to practical application, knowledge is
not made socially useful as Swift demands. Indeed, theoretical knowledge
there has proven positively disastrous, resulting in the ruin of
agriculture and architecture and the impoverishment of the population.
Even up above, the pursuit of theoretical understanding has not
improved the lot of the Laputans. They have few material worries,
dependent as they are upon the Balnibarbians below. But they are
tormented by worries about the trajectories of comets and other
astronomical speculations: their theories have not made them wise,
but neurotic and disagreeable. The Laputans do not symbolize reason
itself but rather the pursuit of a form of knowledge that is not
directly related to the improvement of human life.
Houyhnhnms
The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational existence,
a life governed by sense and moderation of which philosophers since
Plato have long dreamed. Indeed, there are echoes of Plato’s Republic in the
Houyhnhnms’ rejection of light entertainment and vain displays of
luxury, their appeal to reason rather than any holy writings as
the criterion for proper action, and their communal approach to
family planning. As in Plato’s ideal community, the Houyhnhnms have
no need to lie nor any word for lying. They do not use force but
only strong exhortation. Their subjugation of the Yahoos appears
more necessary than cruel and perhaps the best way to deal with
an unfortunate blot on their otherwise ideal society. In these ways
and others, the Houyhnhnms seem like model citizens, and Gulliver’s intense
grief when he is forced to leave them suggests that they have made
an impact on him greater than that of any other society he has visited.
His derangement on Don Pedro’s ship, in which he snubs the generous
man as a Yahoo-like creature, implies that he strongly identifies
with the Houyhnhnms.
But we may be less ready than Gulliver to take the Houyhnhnms as
ideals of human existence. They have no names in the narrative nor
any need for names, since they are virtually interchangeable, with
little individual identity. Their lives seem harmonious and happy,
although quite lacking in vigor, challenge, and excitement. Indeed,
this apparent ease may be why Swift chooses to make them horses
rather than human types like every other group in the novel. He
may be hinting, to those more insightful than Gulliver, that the Houyhnhnms
should not be considered human ideals at all. In any case, they
symbolize a standard of rational existence to be either espoused
or rejected by both Gulliver and us.
