GROTESQUE IN GULLIVER´S TRAVELS.

A conviction, argued most aggressively by Jean Baudrillard is that: "the panic over the loss of the social, wether supportable or not, offers a posible explanation for the contemporary nostalgia for the period in which Swift wrote Gulliver,s Travels. In this age of dissolution, what do we see when we look back at the age of our creation? One thing we observe is the development of a peculiar kind of irony which we can´t help but distinghish from our experience of this trope in the age of its dominance. The satirical effect of the irony in Gulliver´s Travels read by the pastmodern will be precísely what it was not at the time of its production".

Swift wrote in what Foucault considered the classical period, which, for white, had metonymy as its overriding mode of reason, because a new trasparency of representation made it possible to organize knowledge by a standard and represent it symbolically on a table.

Foucault considered that the modern period was characterized by synecdoche in which the subject of knowledge, Man, was now included in the study of the world, in a part-whole relationship. Finally, the contemporary or postmorden mode is ironc, characterized by a questioning of the foundations of knowledge and a dionysian disappearance of the subject of that knowledge.

It is in this epistemological that Baudrillard argues that representation in no longer transparent, or even opaque, but impossible, as the world of signifieds has been swallowed by the world of signifiers, leaving only signifiers.

While Focault and White show the sciences of each period to be trapped withing a single trope, literature enjoy a singular ability to step outside, move between, or encompass more than one of these modal tropes.

According to Matthew Levy, literature invites its reader to draw metaphorical connections between the prose and what the reader sees as his or her own personal experience.

Gulliver´s functions as a measuring stick is metonymic: he comes from the British world ostensibly the land of the Real-and so the British reader feels he can be used to establish differences between the real and the fantasy worlds he visits. According to Matthew, this process reflects the ideological construction of the British subject in the Colonial period.

The aspect of the observed that can be measured by Gulliver serves to organize and name the whole, excluding whatever remains. In other words, just as a thermometer does not measure intelligence, the yardstick of rationality Gulliver finally brings down on the yahoos, fails to measure warmth, or any other human or British quality.

According to Matthew, Gulliver´s journey becomes synecdochic when he serves a role in the visited society and this role has a reciprocal effec on his own character, he no longer can be said to function as a constant or impartial measure.

His trustworthiness as a narrator is under mined and his representations become opaque or fall under suspect. This blow to representation brings the grotesque into play. As Gulliver changes scenes, the multiplicity of perspectives forces an ironic mode on the reader, in which the grotesque gains destabilizing power.

To clarify what it means that the grotesque destabilizes in an age of irony, Matthew examines, in contrast to this, the role of the grotesque in the aesthetic of Swift´s time, in the age of metonymy, measurement, and of course, reason.

In the politics and poetics of transgression, Stallybras and white document the active role played by literary artists in the creation of a public sphere in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.

Swift is given as example of an artist who used the grotesque as a domesticated sign of the jow intented to embarass the audience into self-regulation.

Matthew believes that the rhetorical effec of Swift´s irony was actually metonymic, reaffirming bourgeois values by employing the bodily grotesque as a signifier for the undesirable playhouse and carnival.

Despiste the fanciful nature of Swift´s writing, Swift´s ironic descriptions of science should not be read as broadside attacks against science and rationality, but against human fantasy when it intrudes on the careful empirical progress of knowledge.

-Frances Louis argues in Swift´s anatomy of misunder stading, in a chapter section significantly entitled "The Real Thing", that Swift, like the royal society friends he would have met in the coffee houses, believed in "an unquestioned physical reality to be approached straightaway".

His irony, then, could not have the effect of undermining any of the basic ideological assumptions of his readers in the age of metonymy.

Rather, his irony warns them away from the very ridiculousness you find in his writing and calls them back to the safety of the metonymic ideology of species-genus analytics: it guides them back to "The Real Thing".

-Jean Baudrillard arges that the radical expansions of this social sphere, which provided the environment in which Gulliver´s travels could not be written, has led to the loss of The Real Thing.

Besides, Baudrillard argues that the use-value of Swift´s employment of irony and the grotesque in Gulliver´s Travels could not be constant throughout these historical changes, thats its consumption now will mean precisely what it did not at the time of its production.

-Harold Bloom noted in a 1986 introduction that, in the fourth voyage of Gulliver´s Travels,"Swift rather dubiously seems to want it every which way at once, so that the yahoos both are and are not representations of ourselves, and the Houyhnhnms are and are not wholly admirable or ideal.

Or is it the nature of irony itself, which must weary us, or finally make us long for a true sublime, even if it should turn out to be grotesque?".

In the metonymic political-aesthetic of the early eighteenth century, this ironic trap had a fixed satirical message: separate and temper body and mind.

According to Matthew Levy, the satirical function of irony has transmuted into a pastiche, devoid of ideology. The reigning metonymic structure of classical thought ordained that no message, not even one more difficult to interpret than Gulliver´s, could have faield to reify the developing bourgeois ideology circulated within the early social sphere.

Now, reading withing the suction of the implosion of the bloated social sphere, meanings proliferate endlessly in excess, and excess which is indistinguishable from lack, and which causes even Harold Bloom to throw up his hands at the problem. In the words of this pastmordem reader, "Swift audaciously plays at the farthest limits of irony, limits that make satire impossible, because no norm exists to which we might hope to return".

Gulliver´s Travels signify everything and nothing.

Matthew argues that, if the rhetorical power of irony has developed in accordance with the social sphere´s explosion and implosion, so has the intertwined relevance of measurement and the grotesque.

The political and aesthetic regulation of measurement and grotesque represented an alienation of the shared space of the body in favor of a new, singular empiricism which harnessed the power of vision as never before.

The hidden origins of thought, the smallest particles. The previously unspeakable biology, the physical laws, even our unconscious motivations have all been brought to the surface by Gulliver´s power of observation and measurement. But, saying everything is visible at the surface now amounts to the same as revealing the absence of depth.

Acording to Matthew, there is no postmorden grotesque or sublime, because these suggest a source of values that can differentiate between the acceptable and the grotesque and an unknowable that can be suggested by the sublime. They have the amplified state of the grotesque and the sublime, the ob-scene: after the absolute success of metonymic reasoning, everything is more visible than visible.

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