Newton and (Imp)aerial Science in Gulliver’s Travels

Abstract

The flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels is the most consummate of all Jonathan Swift’s “Edifices in the Air,” his signature emblem of the new science or new philosophy of his time, and this study offers a new reading of the Voyage to Laputa, with particular reference to Laputa’s mock-Newtonian aspects. Previous Swift scholarship on the Voyage to Laputa has channeled disproportionate interest to the projectors at Lagado and their likely sources, largely missing out on the centrality of Isaac Newton to Swift’s anti-Modern satire. Swift’s satire is leveled ambitiously at the latest superstar of the new philosophy, whose mathematical system of the world replaced the Cartesian mechanical philosophy he mocked in his early satire. The new/Newtonian philosophy informs the Voyage to Laputa as a whole but best materializes into the flying magnetic island of Laputa. Laputa is different from all flying vehicles in earlier lunar narratives, because it is a one-of-a-kind man-made celestial body whose motion depends on the steering of the hidden loadstone. Gulliver’s “philosophical Account” of Laputa’s motion is a parody of Newton’s gravity, the new theory of “Attraction,” with a glance at the older theory of seventeenth-century terrestrial magnetism after William Gilbert. Laputa is in itself an apparatus of its imperial rule over Balnibarbi, but ironically, Laputa’s own principle of motion subjects both its trajectory of “force” and aerial methods of oppression to the control of Balnibarbi’s mass. Swift’s satire in the Voyage to Laputa targets the collusion of the new philosophy and England’s imperial agenda and thwarts it by first rendering Laputa a mock-Newtonian moon or “Edifice in the Air” and then subjecting its motion to the gravity-like force of the larger-massed Balnibarbi.