Oh, Great
Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s lilliputian greatness
In the Review’s June 25 issue, Fintan O’Toole celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels (first published on October 28, 1726) by revisiting the novel’s “excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires” in the light of a new age of rapacious and brutal imperialists. In particular, given the deathless contemporary refrain about making things great, O’Toole focuses on Jonathan Swift’s “vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small?”
Swift, writing at a moment when “both European colonialism and the slave trade were expanding rapidly,” used the dizzying shift in perspective from the puny Lilliputians to the giant Brobdingnagians to elucidate how “greatness thus depends on there being a wretched of the earth.” And so it is that Donald Trump—a Yahoo if there ever was one—comes to sow wretchedness. As O’Toole observes, “Greatness promises fulfillment and security, but it is always radically insecure.”
Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are six articles from our archives about political satirists.
Gulliver’s Warning
Fintan O’Toole
This essay is adapted from a talk presented as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library earlier this year.
On November 8 it will be three hundred years since a travel book by a previously unknown author appeared in London. It was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Opposite the title page was a portrait of the writer, said to be “first a Surgeon, and then a CAPTAIN of several SHIPS.” Interspersed throughout the text were four maps accurately depicting known places like Sumatra, Japan, and North America, with newly discovered islands and peninsulas etched in. It looked like just another English voyager’s account from the still-unfolding age of European discovery, which was also the emerging age of European colonialism. This explorer is, indeed, a great believer in imperialism, explaining:
If a Prince send Forces into a Nation, where the People are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living.
The book is, of course, the great literary hoax written by Jonathan Swift, and we now call it Gulliver’s Travels. Unlike his ventriloquist’s dummy Lemuel Gulliver, Swift had a great hatred of colonialism, a rage that causes him late in the book to break character and assume a high style of savage indignation that is far beyond Gulliver’s own rhetorical powers:
Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.
To prepare the ground for this excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires, Swift draws his readers into a vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small? The first two of the book’s four parts are literature’s most famous game of greatness. Swift had read the work of his friend and fellow Irish Protestant George Berkeley, who pointed out that big and small are not absolute ideas. They depend on perception: “The Judgments we make of Greatness do, in like manner as those of Distance, depend on the Disposition of the Eyes.” Berkeley was concerned with questions of cognition, but Swift politicized those questions: if greatness and smallness are not objective realities, then neither are superiority and inferiority, civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness.
In Lilliput Gulliver finds himself a giant among tiny people—according to the disposition of their eyes, he is an immense and thus almighty creature. He experiences greatness in its most literal form. But on his next voyage, to Brobdingnag, he realizes that he is now the tiny person in a land inhabited by giants. His own body has not changed, but its meaning has been transformed. He describes his shock:
In this terrible Agitation of Mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose Inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World; where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my Hand, and perform those other Actions which will be recorded for ever in the Chronicles of that Empire, while Posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by Millions. I reflected what a Mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this Nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us…. Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the Right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison: It might have pleased Fortune to let the Lilliputians find some Nation, where the People were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious Race of Mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant Part of the World, whereof we have yet no Discovery?
What Gulliver experiences at this moment is the dizzying awareness that he can never really be at home again, either in his own body or in his own country. He can never be himself. He can never be normal. He must remember being his Lilliputian self, “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World,” or his Brobdingnagian self, the contemptibly inconsiderable homunculus. Since “nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison,” he is forced to hover neurotically between greatness and littleness. The terms of this comparison are strictly binary—there are only the great and the diminutive. One is either massively aggrandized or utterly mortified.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archives: Pure Irony
Fintan O’Toole on Jonathan Swift’s genius
Derek Jarrett on the gluttonous pleasures of Henry Fielding
Gabriel Josipovici on Rabelais’s intoxicating humor
Stephen Spender on how Eric Blair became George Orwell, plus a letter from George Orwell on what George Orwell really meant
V.S. Pritchett on the education of Alexander Pope
