In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [79]
I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a child, before I knew anything about the B-movie scientists. Nobody told me to read it; on the other hand, nobody told me not to. The edition I had was not a child’s version, of the kind that dwells on the cute little people and the funny giant people and the talking horses, but dodges any mention of nipples and urination, and downplays the excrement. These truncated versions also leave out most of Part Three—the floating island of Laputa, the Grand Academy of Lagado with its five hundred scientific experiments, and the immortal Struldbrugs of Luggnagg—as being incomprehensible to young minds. My edition was unabridged, and I didn’t skip any of it, Part Three included. I read the whole thing.
I thought it was pretty good. I didn’t yet know that Gulliver’s Travels was satirical, that Mr. Swift’s tongue had been rammed very firmly into his cheek while writing it, and that even the name “Gulliver,” so close to “gullible,” was a tip-off. I believed the letters printed at the beginning—the one from Mr. Gulliver himself, complaining about the shoddy way in which his book had been published, and the one from his cousin Mr. Sympson—so close to “simpleton,” I later realized—testifying to the truthfulness of Mr. Gulliver. I did understand that someone called Mr. Swift had had something to do with this book, but I didn’t think he’d just made all of it up. In early eighteenth-century terms, the book was a “bite”—a tall tale presented as the straight-faced truth in order to sucker the listener into believing it—and I got bitten.
Thus I first read this book in a practical and straightforward way, much in the way it is written. For instance, when Mr. Gulliver pissed on the fire in the royal Lilliputian palace in order to put it out, I didn’t find this either a potentially seditious poke at the pretensions of royalty and the unfairness of courts or a hilarious vulgarism. Rather, having been trained myself in the time-honoured woodsman’s ways of putting out campfires, I thought Mr. Gulliver had displayed an admirable presence of mind.
The miniature people and the giants did hint to me of fairy tales, but Part Three—the floating island and the scientific establishment—didn’t seem to me all that far-fetched. I was then living in what was still the golden or bug-eyed monster age of science fiction—the late 1940s—so I took spaceships for granted. This was before the disappointing news had come in—no intelligent life on Mars—and also before I’d read H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, in the light of which any life intelligent enough to build spaceships and come to Earth would be so much smarter than us that we’d be viewed by them as ambulatory kebabs. So I considered it entirely possible that, once I’d grown up, I might fly through space and meet some extraterrestrials, who then as now were considered to be bald, with very large eyes and heads.
Why then couldn’t there be a flying island such as Laputa? I thought the method of keeping the thing afloat with magnets was a little cumbersome—hadn’t Mr. Swift heard of jet propulsion?—but the idea of hovering over a country that was annoying you so they’d be in full shadow and their crops wouldn’t grow seemed quite smart. As for dropping stones onto them, it made perfect sense: kids of the immediately postwar generation were well versed in the advisability of air superiority, and knew a lot about bombers.
I didn’t understand why these floating-island people had to eat food cut into the shapes of musical instruments, but the flappers who hit them with inflated bladders to snap them out of their thought trances didn’t seem out of the question. My father was by that time teaching in the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto, and growing up among the scientists, and thus being able to observe them at work, I knew they could be like that: the head of the Zoology Department