Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-02T04:33:47.757Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Swift's Laputians as a Caricature of the Cartesians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

David Renaker
David Renaker*
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The prevalent view that Book III of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes the Royal Society overlooks the fact that this book contains two satires, one on the Laputians and one on the Balnibarbians. The first of these satires gains point if we regard it as aimed at the Cartesians, interpreting Laputa as France, the land of the Cartesians, and Balnibarbi as England, the land of the Newtonians, characterizations made by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques. The Laputians’ fear of the extinction of the sun is fully justified by the cosmology of Descartes’s Principes; their musical mania exaggerates only slightly that of the Cartesian popularizer Marin Mersenne; their influence on the Balnibarbians, inspiring them to build the Academy of Lagado, represents the influence of Descartes on the Royal Academy, an influence that has been hitherto underestimated.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 5 , October 1979 , pp. 936 - 944
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Nicolson first published in Annals of Science, ii (1937), pp. 299–334; rpt. in Science and Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 110–54. Page references will be to the latter volume. In quotations from early printed sources, i, j, u, v, and w are brought into conformity with modern usage and diphthongs rendered ae and oe. Translations are original unless otherwise noted.

2 Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Herbert Davis, introd. Harold Williams (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), pp. 143, 145–47. All further references to this work appear in the text.

3 As has been noticed by Arthur E. Case, ed., Gulliver's Travels (New York: Ronald Press, n.d.), p. 186, n. 3.

4 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques ou lettres anglaises, ed. Raymond Naves (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), pp. 70–71.

5 Hooke, “Lectures of Light,” in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (London: Richard Waller, 1705; rpt. facsim. ed., introd. Richard Westfall, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1969), p. 94.

6 Christopher Scheiner, Rosa Ursina sive Sol ex Admirando Facularum & Macularum suarum Phoenomeno Varias … Ostensus (Bracciani: Andreas Phaeus, 1630), pp. 157, 202, 495, et passim.

7 Derham, “Observations upon the Spots That Have Been upon the Sun, from the Year 1703 to 1711. With a Letter of Mr. Crabtrie, in the Year 1640 upon the Same Subject,” Philosophical Transactions, Jan.–March 1711 (No. 329), p. 274.

8 The sun occupies about thirty minutes of arc; if it had lost five minutes by 1700 A.D. (6,700 years since the Creation), it would lose the rest in six times as long a period (6 × 6,700 = 40,200).

9 Descartes, Principes, ii, 33–34, in Œuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1964), ix, Pt. ii, 81–82.

10 Antoine Le Grand, An Entire Body of Philosophy, according to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes, trans. Richard Blome (London: Samuel Roycroft for Richard Blome, 1694), p. 161.

11 Descartes, mistaking Saturn's rings for satellites, gives Saturn two satellites, Jupiter four, and the earth one, so that the total number of orbiting bodies in our vortex becomes thirteen.

12 Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), p. 105.

13 Principes, p. 161 and n. The printed text of the Principes mentions only “certain historians” who have recorded the pallor or darkening of the sun; it is in a manuscript marginal note that Descartes quotes Pliny and Cedrenus.

14 Fontenelle, A Discovery of New Worlds, trans. Aphra Behn (London: William Canning, 1688), p. 154.

15 A Catalogue of Books, the Library of the Rev. Dr. Swift (Dublin, 1745), p. 4, facsim. ed. in Harold Williams, Dean Swift's Library (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932).

16 Sorbière, A Voyage to England, Containing Many Things Relating to the State of Learning, Religion and Other Curiosities of That Kingdom, trans, anon. (Paris, 1664; rpt. London: J. Woodward, 1708), p. 38.

17 Sprat, Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier's Voyage into England (London: John Martyn and James Allestry, 1665), pp. 241–42.

18 Glanvill, Plus Ultra (London: James Collins, 1668). sig. B3v.

19 Descartes, “Méditation troisième. De Dieu; qu'il existe,” in Œuvres, ix, Pt. i, 27.

20 Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. i (London: Thomas Basset, 1690).

21 Mersenne, “Sommaire des seize livres de la musique,” in Harmonie universelle (Paris: Guillaume Baudry, 1627), sigs. 2v – 4r. This edition contains only two of the projected sixteen books. The completed work (1636) contains nineteen books but lacks the “Sommaire.”

22 Mersenne, Harmonie universelle (1636), facsim. ed., introd. François Lesure (Paris: Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963), i, Bk. ii, 92.

23 Mersenne, “Livre de l'utilité de l'harmonie,” Harmonie universelle, facsim. ed., iii, 28–32.

24 Descartes, “De la façon de tailler les verres,” Discours x of La Dioptrique, in Descartes, Œuvres, vi, 211–27.

25 While this essay was in press, Harold and Rosaleen Love published their note “A Cartesian Allusion in Dryden and Lee's ‘Oedipus’ ” glossing these lines in the 1679 tragedy: “No sun to chear us: but a Bloody Globe / That rowls above; a bald and Beamless Fire; / His Face o'regrown with Scurf: the Sun's sick too; / Shortly he'll be an Earth” (Notes and Queries, 25 [1978], 35–37). I am grateful for this piece of evidence that Descartes's concept was current among Swift's coevals.