How Gulliver’s Travels drew on Gargantua and Pantagruel
A documented line of influence: Jonathan Swift demonstrably engaged François Rabelais’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais · 1532
RenaissanceThe influenced
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726
EnlightenmentRelevance
8/10
On Gulliver’s Travels’s page
- The wild, riotous ancestor of Gulliver's giants-and-islands satire
- Rabelais supplied the form Swift inherited — the voyage among strange peoples, the comedy of scale — but where Rabelais overflows with appetite, Swift goes cold and surgical
- Coleridge fixed the lineage in a phrase: Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco — the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Read Rabelais and you hear what got dried out
On Gargantua and Pantagruel’s page
- The grandfather of the satirical fantastic voyage — giants, grotesque scale, a loose-jointed romp through invented worlds
- Two centuries later Swift drains the laughter dry and points the joke at humanity: Rabelais's giants become Brobdingnag, his appetite for the absurd becomes a scalpel
- Coleridge's line says it best — Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco, the soul of Rabelais living in a dry place