The Star Chamber

I’ve just finished reading Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Like many of you reading this, I thought I was familiar with the story - I remember reading the book when I was at school, and in any case so much of the book has entered the common, collective memory that it’s virtually impossible not to have heard of Lilliput, its diminutive inhabitants or the Little Ender and Big Ender factions they divide themselves into.

In truth, however, the book presented a great deal I was completely unfamiliar with. In hindsight, I think I must previously have read only the first two parts (where Gulliver encounters the tiny Lilliputians, and then the giant Brobdingnagians) and it was approached very much as a children’s book. In actual fact, the book contains four parts, and I thought that the third of those - Gulliver’s voyage to a floating island populated by a bizarre astronomer-elite - was far and away the best part. Whether you think you’re familiar with Gulliver’s Travels or not, if you haven’t read it within the last few years - and if you can’t, for example, recall the difference between a Struldbrug and a Laputan - read it. It almost certainly contains more than you remember.

Of particular interest to me on this reading, though, was its narrative style. Three points stand out in particular:

• It has no real plot as such.
• It has almost no dialogue, perhaps two or three lines in the entire book.
• The narrator (Gulliver) ‘tells’ us everything, while the author ’shows’ almost nothing.

Strictly speaking, Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, and as such could be considered as distinct from a novel, but either way the point stands - it doesn’t have a conventional narrative, and doesn’t adhere to the form of what we’d call a novel in the modern sense. And yet, it’s one of the best-known written works there is. When I type ‘Lilliputian’, the spellchecker doesn’t underline it as an error, because the word has entered the dictionary (worryingly, it does however underline the word spellchecker). The word Yahoo is also taken from Gulliver’s Travels. The story is so well known that many more people are familiar with it than have actually read the book (doubtless in part thanks to the various adaptations for film and television over the years, as well as various derivative works, but also due simply to the extent to which the book has permeated the cultural fabric). An unconventional format, then, is certainly no barrier to success, or to popularity.

Furthermore, Gulliver’s Travels actually serves as an example when this kind of disregard for supposed ‘rules’ of good writing - such as ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ - is highly desirable. Everything about the story’s characters, setting and events is told to us in an incredibly plain fashion. Indeed the contents pages contain short summaries, repeated at the head of each chapter, which invariably spell out events before we even read about them. There’s certainly no attempt to construct an unfolding plot. The narrator’s stated mission in most cases is simply to describe to us factually the places and peoples he has met. All this is ‘telling’ of the very most blatant kind, but what it does it ’show’ us something else - something about ourselves, something about the folly of our ways, the preposterousness of our pretend logic, the dubiousness of many of our long-standing arguments, the inaccuracy of our assumptions, the misguidedness of our prejudices, the irrationality of our beliefs and the failings of our institutions.

It seems to me that the theory of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ is prevaricated upon the notion that the only thing a book is trying to ’show’ us is the story. That’s just not the case. Books can show us a lot more than that, and if they tell us something along, there’s certainly no crime in that.

Matt

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.