What You’ll Love about… Gulliver’s Travels Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan by Jonathan Swift

Gordon Browne, Illustration of Gulliver gazing on the flying island of Laputa, from Gulliver’s Travels. Public Domain via The British Library.

Part III of Gulliver’s Travels is the hardest part to love. It’s more scatological, more abstract, and more mean-spirited than the other parts. It’s also more fragmented, and its fragmentation suggests that is served as kind of a repository for the ideas that Swift wasn’t able to develop into their own distinct parts.

There is a strong anti-intellectual and anti-academic tendency in all of Swift’s writing, and even though institutions of higher learning and some of their denizens deserve the scolding that Swift gives them, Swift sometimes condemns intellectualism too broadly. In Part III, he ridicules ideas that had merit, like Newton’s ideas on “attraction” (gravity). I don’t expect him to get it right every time, but I would wish for a little more discernment from one of my heroes.

The satire in Part III is squarely focused on learning and knowledge, particularly the newfangled interest in science and the humanities that was emerging in Swift’s time. It was far less common for regular people to attend college in Swift’s time, and since many academic fields were in their infancy, studies were highly speculative and experimental. Even though Swift’s original audience was educated and…