Firstly, the act of reading is a lot more complicated than that model allowed for, perhaps especially when you´re dealing wich a text that is as rich and rewarding and endlessly engaging as the one cited here (or, perhaps, as rich as most of the texts we´ve all agreed to call "classics" of literature).

John Clifford can think of at least four quite different ways in which one might read it. It´s an excerpt from a book published anonymously in London in the year 1726. In it, a world travaller whop identifies himself as one Lamuel Gulliver describes a custom he´s observed in a country he visited. He calls the participans "Rope-Dancers":

This diversion is only practised by those people who are candidates for great employments, and high favour, at court. They are trained in this art from their youth, and are not always of noble birth, or liberal education. When a great office is vacant either by death or disgrace (Which of ten happens), five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to enternain his Majesty and the court with a dance on the rope, and whoever jumps the highest without falling, succeeds in the office.

Very often the chief ministers themselves are commanded to show their skill, and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their faculty. Flimnap, the treasurer, is allowed to cut a caper on the strait rope, at least an inch higher than any other Lord in the whole Empire.

In an article in college English in 1987, William Dowling, a respected scholar of eighteenth-century literature, pointed out that when he studied Swift in university, this-in-part-is what was offered by the notes on that passage in the text he used.

Flimnap represents the famous whig statesman, Sir Robert Walpole, head of the government from 1715 to 1717 and from 1721 to 1742.

His political dexterity is here satirized. Swift disliked him both as a man and a politician.....Reldresal [is] possibly Lord Carteret, Secretary of State in 1721 and later Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland;.....

Also Dowling phrases it, "The most unrepentant biographical-historical critic who ever lived might see, one supposes, the sense in which this sort of thing spells death in the classroom".

It is clear, that Louis Landa, who wrote the notes to that edition, believed that it was important the complex political and social allegory of gulliver´s visit to Lilliput.

According to John, it is apparent that Swift´s book was primarily a source of information about the eighteenth century, an example of literary history, or evidence about the author´s life.

John increases that, looking at Gulliver in Lilliput in such a way you are likely to find interpretations like this appropiate: Gulliver represents Lord Bolingbroke, "tired down" (politically immmobilized) by a legion of (morally or intellectually) tiny bureaucrats and packthread laws. Lilliput is England, and Blefescu, across the channel, is France. The Emperor of Lilliput is George I, however, Arthur case exemplified in a sort of allegorizing that much of the description of his physical and mental characteristics is inconsistent with the facts.

John Clifford expresses that he was able to read Swift without being directly involved at all. With the same words that he says it : " I could admire his skill, even gasp at his rhetorical brillance, and still hold myself quite aloof from the implications of his ideas. Thus I never understood at all why so many nineteenth-century literary figures--—e most well know was William Makepeace Thackeray—were so outraged, even angry, at Swift for being cynical and occasionally obscene and outrageously skeptical about human dignity".

Afterwarda, among lots of other changes, the new critics offered a new way to read Gulliver. Dowling presents an excellent description of the impact of New Criticism on the way he taught Swift. At the same time it suggests something more general about what the new criticism was.

What New Criticism said, in a word, was that this episode wasn´t about Robert Walpole, head of the government from 1721 to 1742 : it was about politicians, who are still there, walking tightropes, in this morning´s NEW YORK Times.

Flimnap was a politician, but he was not Walpole; he was, as Fielding says about the lawyer in Joseph Andrews, someone who has been alive these four thousand years (526).

According to Dowling and John, the Flimnap and Reldressal passage is just a sort of "automatically" became a comment on politicians in general.

John Clifford believes that in Gulliver´s Travels, different events and passages became central.

Klaus Zöllner has shown how the choices of passages that scholars quoted from Gulliver to prove their various contentions changed over the course of this period.—how, for instance, passages concerned wich text gradually replaced passages concerned wich philosophy. The Flimnap and Reldresal passages became more like background, and they were replaced in the center of our lens by passages like the wonderful, ironic attack on war, when Gulliver explains to the poor, dumb king of Brobdingnag why he ought to be happy to have the secret of gunpowder.

Poor Gulliver does not understand the king´s appalled reponse.

John comments what New Criticism did with a passage, of course, was to direct our attention to its exquisite and elegant irony—to the facts, for instance, that Gulliver had just previously betrayed himself to the king as a menber of what the king now called "the most pernicious race of little odious Vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the eart" (Davis 132), and that Gulliver himself clearly has not the least idea why the king is beloved by his people, or what makes him an excellent king.

John commes back to reading Swift to make a little clearer what he means:

"What happened was that a new way to read the book was substituted for the old one. The new one asked us to be aware of irony and paradox and ambiguity rather than to know or learn about historical background, and it thus asked a reader to make a quite different set of connetions among elements of the text.

Instead of asking students to connect Flimnap with Jonathan Swift´s spedific political and social context—with Robert Walpole –we asked them to connect him with the narrator´s and his ironist´s views, with Reldresal and the king and with other elements within the book ( At the same time, it was at least in part the specialist knowledge of Walpole and of Swift´s social context that made it possible for us to see what kinds of connections were likely to be fruitful, althogh most of us were not aware not of it)".

In addition to his, John says Flimnap and the rope dancing only appear once in the text: even the notion of parliamentary democracy is a preocupation that really only occurs in book one, and he has a very difficult time connecting it with the rest of Gulliver.

It´s the same with the king of Brobdingnag and the gunpowder: Switf´s skepticism about technology does come up elsewhere, but you´d hardly calt it the controllig theme of the book –unless, of course, you were writing an article and trying to gaintenure or promotion.

As Dowling phrases it "The same New Critical magic that made Dryden´s and pope´s poetry and Switf´s prose universal also rendered it in a curious sense bodiless, robbed it of the rootedness in human history that allows it to speak about history in a way no literature more apenly engaged with cosmic or universal issues can do" (527).

In other words, "If Swift was really about politics as an abstract idea, he somehow didn´t seen nearly as interesting as he would have seemed to someone- a contemporary, perhaps, or a carefully and fully informed and educated modern reader –who knew and cared about Walpole and parliamentary history. He wasn´t really the same Swift any more".

John emphasizes a number of things seemed very important to him. One of them, for example, was the fact that Swift was an Irishman. John had known that before, of course, but it hadn´t seemed very significant. Most of Swift´s major works were really written in English contexts, so they didn´t tell you much about Ireland, nor did you need to know much about Ireland to identify Flimnap. And if Gulliver was really about abstract ideas, and if Swift´s intentions were irrellevant to a reading of the text, it did not much matter what nationality Swift was.

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