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Sunday, August 22, 2010

Swift's Gulliver

I've finished re-reading Book 4 of Gulliver's Travels.  It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.  Gulliver's misanthropy and misogyny become more virulent as the work progresses.  The self-loathing seems to me to cross a line to occupy a view of humanity I'd simply rather not engage with because its psychotic.  Swift, in making his satirical point about the limits of reason and rational discourse, leaves no room for the fragility of our contradictory existence.  We're human.  We try, we try to make the best of life that we can and we succeed or fail to varying degrees.  We are not Houyhnhnms nor would we care to be.  Nor are we Yahoos, the unambiguously racist 18th Century representation of African people.  They weren't and we aren't beasts.  I'm glad that I'm finished with it (which is not exactly erudite literary criticism).

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