Realism in Fantasy: Alternate Reality in the Land of Houyhnhnms “Suppose now, O most courageous of all dialecticians, that some and wise understanding creature such as a crane were in imitation of you to make a similar division and set up cranes against all the other living beings to their own special glorification at the same time jumbling together all the others including man under the appellation of brutes…” So the Stranger tells the Young Socrates in Plato’s Statesman to evince the error in dividing mankind into Hellenes as one species and all the other species under the common name of Barbarians. Alternate Realties have long been consulted by writers in reflecting upon the practices and conditions of contemporary society. Peter Hunt writes: “...fantasy allows us to speculate, to explore possibilities to indulge over private selves – to consider imaginatively things that cannot be (as opposed to speculation on things that might be, which produces science fiction) - it would seem to offer worlds of infinite possibility, of expansiveness, of liberation.” Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a popular fantasy fiction where the narrator Gulliver recounts his experiences of four voyages to four separate corners of the world. All the four kingdoms are unreal and figments of the author’s imagination (even though Swift’s narrator tries hard to make the reader believe that the places indeed exist on the face of the Earth). In Lilliput, Gulliver stays among people who are one-twelfth his size whereas in Brobdingnag, the situation is reversed. The people are as huge as twelve times his size. Laputa is, of course, a flying island and in the land of Houyhnhnms the horses are the rulers. For these obvious impossibilities, Gulliver’s Travels has often been dismissed as a children’s bedtime story. Peter Hunt further notes – “It is not surprising that fantasy and children’s literature have been associated with each other, because both are essentially democratic forms – democratized by seeing outside the solipsistic system of high culture.” However, fantasy literature is not merely a form of illusion; in fact, it almost always employs an intricate play of politics. Gulliver’s Travels, for instance, is a satirical allegory of eighteenth century England where Swift uses the fantastical space to force his readers to reconsider and rethink the flaws in the English socio-political scenario. In her essay, ‘ “Curiouser and curiouser”: Law in the Alice Books’, Catherine Siemann contends – “The chessboard world of the Looking-Glass country, on the other hand, is a totally rule-bound reflection of bourgeois society, where, as J.S. Mill has famously contended, laws and social strictures have combined together to eliminate individuality.” In Gulliver’s Travels, the parallel universe is best imagined in the fourth voyage to the land of Houyhnhnms where the horses take up the role of The Stranger’s cranes in questioning the rationality of the human beings. Following fatal misfortunes in a voyage, Gulliver lands up in a country where the Houyhnhnms are the masters and Yahoos are the servants. This world is sketched upon an inverse of the ‘normal’ human world where the Yahoos, standing in for the human beings therein, are the brutes - the “abominable creatures”, and the horses or the Houyhnhnms are “so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious”. As a major trope of the Alternate Reality fiction, Swift cleverly works upon its impossibility by making the ‘normal’ world ‘impossible’ within the space of his story. Gulliver says how his Houyhnhnm master had a difficult time imagining “how it was possible that the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the management of brutes?” Again, the domain of Alternate Reality, which is developed in order to question, often operates through the suspension of the narrator-protagonist’s identity. In the wonderland that gets “curiouser and curiouser” Alice asks “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” (Carroll L., Alice’s Bitacora
4
Vol 1.1
