CHAPTER 19

A trenchant satire qua travel journal, Gulliver's Travels was an immediate success upon its publication in 1726. Since that time the book has become, in various adaptations, a perennial classic, its occasional scatological references and progressively dark and pessimistic tone notwithstanding. Few today are aware of Jonathan Swift's derisive intentions towards early eighteenth-century English political parties, continental Europeans, the intelligentsia, and modern humanity in general. Indeed, Gulliver's Travels is often read by children who simply delight in its narrative accounts of miniscule Lilliputians, gigantic Brobdingnagians, ingeniously irrelevant Laputan Islanders, humanely sensible Houyhnhnms, and senselessly inhumane Yahoos.

In part 3, chapters 7–8, Gulliver avails himself of the opportunity to visit Glubbdudrib, an island inhabited by sorcerers and magicians, whose governor can conjure up the dead. For days on end, Gulliver is allowed to consort with the famous and infamous of history, though his "Questions must be confined within the Compass of the Times they lived in." Because his "first Inclination was to be entertained with Scenes of Pomp and Magnificence," he has the Governor summon up Alexander the Great on the field of battle. Although Alexander's Greek is difficult to comprehend, Gulliver learns that the great man actually died from excessive drink. When he sees Hannibal crossing the Alps, on the other hand, Gulliver is personally assured by the Carthaginian general that he "had not a Drop of Vinegar in his Camp."

The Governor continues to regale Gulliver with a tantalizing variety of travels backward in time, where he is privileged to behold the likes of Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, and the Roman Senate. Gulliver concludes chapter 7 of part 3 thus: "It would be tedious to trouble the Reader with relating what vast Numbers of illustrious Persons were called up, to gratify that insatiable Desire I had to see the World in every Period of Antiquity placed before me."

In chapter 8, Gulliver resumes his journey into previous centuries: "HAVING A DESIRE to see those Antients, who were most renowned for Wit and Learning, I set apart one Day on purpose." To this end, the Governor conjures up Homer and Aristotle and hundreds of their commentators, who "horribly misrepresented the Meaning of those Authors to Posterity." By and by Descartes and Gasssendi appear, and are urged to explain their systems to Aristotle, yet all manage to subvert one anothers' theories and demonstrate the transitory insubstantiality of human science.

Gulliver spends no fewer than five days consorting with "most of the Roman emperors," then several more days "seeing some of the modern Dead, who had made the greatest Figure for two or three hundred Years past in our own and other Countries of Europe." The latter included as many as two dozen kings with their ancestors "in order, for eight or nine Generations." Gulliver expresses his profound disappointment at their objectionably low and disreputable character:

Swift, through Gulliver, displays attitudes which are alternately favorable and unfavorable towards history, emphasizing the virtue of certain individuals while denouncing the depravity and weakness of entire populations and dynasties.

Gulliver's Travels constitutes one of the earliest examples of the science fiction genre and the time-travel sub-genre. Swift depicts the various historical periods visited from the point of view of a single narrator, and thus without recourse to diverse languages or literary styles. He supplies only enough details for the reader to imagine changes of time and place based on a presumed prior knowledge of history. The eclecticism of his imagery is, therefore, largely dependent on the reader's imaginative faculties.

By contrast, time-travel fiction of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to portray the differences between destinations in the past and future far more vividly, making for an extremely eclectic mix of characters, costumes, settings, and even languages.

This trend towards investing different "places in time" with distinctive local color is evident in one of the most romantic of all English novels, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). Wells set much of the action of his science-fiction masterpiece in the year 802701, when he envisioned a society divided into two distinct classes: the pale, photophobic Morlocks, subterranean descendants of modern industrialized laborers, and their "livestock"—the aristocratically beautiful but infantile Eloi dwelling on the Earth's surface.

The visionary Wells was an ardent student of history, as evidenced by his popular Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the World (1922). Not surprisingly, then, his arresting description of the central character's first contact with the Eloi and their world some 8,007 centuries hence (chap. 4) has an exotically archaeological flavor tinged with reminiscences of the greenery, flora, and ruins of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden.

The language of the child-like epicene Eloi (cf. the ancient Hebrew Elohim) is a "strange and very sweet and liquid tongue," perhaps related to the Phoenician (see below). They exhibit a "Dresden-china type of prettiness." With a Victorian botanical fervor, Wells's Time Traveler marvels at the "delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. . . . a long neglected and yet weedless garden." The Eloi lead him past a "sphinx of white marble . . . towards a vast gray edifice of fretted stone," where he discerns that the "arch of the doorway was richly carved" in the manner of "old Phoenician decorations, but "very badly broken and weather-worn." Inside he discovers that the floors, "made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal," were "so much worn, as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channeled along the more frequented ways." The fruit-eating Eloi seat themselves in the Asian manner on floor cushions at "innumerable tables made of slabs of polished stone."

Having exited through the building's portal, he is struck by the fact that everything seems "so entirely different" from the world he had known, but he still is able to recognize the Thames, which "had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position." Everywhere about him he finds a "ruinous splendour." Although houses and cottages are nowhere to be seen, here and there he finds "palace-like buildings" among the lush greenery. As he happens upon "a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola," he muses (perhaps punningly) about "the oddness of wells still existing."

Once atop the crest, he finds "a seat of some yellow metal . . . corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins' heads." From this vantage point he surveys the Thames river valley with its "great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied," and here and there "the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk."

Wells thus synthesized a vision of the future largely from elements of the historical past, in much the same way that filmmaker George Lucas established the set-design parameters for The Phantom Menace (1999).

The action of this Star Wars prequel takes place long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but as Steve Sansweet of Fan Relations at "starwars.com" explains,

To this end, the latest digital technology and actual historical sites, structures, furnishings, and props conspired to "take reality and turn it upside down a little bit," according to Phantom Menace design director Doug Chiang.² Production designer Gavin Bocquet acknowledges that Lucas "uses real locations and real architecture wherever he can. He feels that the audience is more susceptible to those environments if they subconsciously know they're real."³ Lucas himself recommended the Art Nouveau and Art Moderne styles for part of the film to achieve a fresh look, since the action unfolds a full generation earlier than the first Star Wars trilogy.

The overall design of the film had to be eclectic in order to establish a strong, readily identifiable profile for each of several distinct locations. According to Bocquet, the exterior of Anakin's desert hovel on the Planet Tatooine was based on the catacomb-like ksars used for grain storage in North African towns and villages (exteriors were shot in Tunisia).

For the Queen's palace on Naboo, the eighteenth-century Royal Palace of Caserta, near Naples, Italy, was chosen for its "classical, Greek-Roman feel." Chiang acknowledged, " We knew we needed some real-scale architecture to bounce off in terms of the design. It's very difficult to recreate a sophistication of architecture that's taken thousands of years to evolve." Since Lucas also was attracted to the "eclectic architectural mix" of Venice, the design team experimented with dramatic increases in scale, detail, and texture to create "a rich, multilayered aesthetic." Naboo's "organic" underwater Gungan played primarily off of Art Nouveau.

For the global megalopolis Coruscant, Art Moderne and the 1926 film Metropolis were seminal influences. Furnishing styles chosen included everything from Art Deco to Chinese.

That history has invested many of the recent products of popular culture is by no means a distinctly postmodern phenomenon: this was certainly the case in cinema—that most "modern" of artistic media—throughout the twentieth century. That history has become increasingly manifest in "high" culture with the advent of the new millennium signals a decided shift away from the narrowly contemporary, often elitist focus of twentieth-century modernism towards a broadly humanistic vision that embraces the past as a creative resource essential to meaningful artistic discourse and the restoration of a sense of community.

The mysterious interpenetration of past, present, and future so pronounced in the science-fiction genre became the conceptual basis for one of dramatist Tom Stoppard's most compelling plays, The Invention of Love (1997). Centered around the life and afterlife of British poet and Latin scholar A. E. Houseman (1869–1936), the play examines the nature and consequences of his unrequited love for the athletic young Moses Jackson, who inspired much of Houseman's later poetry. Today Houseman is perhaps best known for A Shropshire Lad, a collection of sixty-three poignantly retrospective ballads published in 1896.

Act 1 opens after Houseman's bodily death, as he stands on the banks of the River Styx awaiting the arrival of Charon to ferry him to his appointed destination in the Underworld. The wordy Houseman tries to engage the boatman in a spirited conversation in modern English, peppered with allusions to Greek and Roman authors and scholars, but Charon asks, "Could you keep quiet for a bit?"

After a passing reference to Helen of Troy and the off-stage yapping of Cerberus, Houseman espies a boat coming into view with Moses Jackson, Alfred W. Pollard, and his own younger self aboard. The latter engages in glib banter with the other two while the older Houseman looks on in passionate remembrance. As the young men's boat rows out of sight, the older Houseman exclaims, "I had only to stretch out my hand!—ripae ulterioris amore! . . . Oh, Mo! Mo! I would have died for you but I never had the luck!" Later, Houseman actually dialogs with his younger self, although by now this seeming temporal paradox is hardly remarkable, for in the afterlife, it seems, linear time is routinely suspended and the past is ever at hand.

The play as a whole is conceived in much the same fashion, with appearances from a stellar cast of literati who have passed into the afterlife, including Walter Pater at thirty-eight (c. 1877), John Ruskin at fifty-eight (c. 1877), and Oscar Wilde at forty-one (c. 1895). Each is brilliantly characterized in a manner strikingly consistent with his historical persona.

An important theme which runs throughout The Invention of Love is the tense relationship between High Victorian morality and the "Art for Art's sake" philosophy of the Aesthetic Movement, described in the Oxford Companion to English Literature as "the adoption of sentimental archaism as the ideal of beauty." This subject is repeatedly broached with extraordinary humor and wit, as the following line, spoken by Houseman to his younger self, illustrates:

Stoppard's consummately cohesive blending of the Classical and romantic in The Invention of Love is a remarkable literary tour de force. It reflects, as do so many other creative works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an expansive temporal sensibility and collateral engagement with the most fundamental questions of human identity.