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“Splendide Mendax”: Authors, Characters, and Readers in Gulliver's Travels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Richard H. Rodino
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Abstract

Gulliver's Travels is a battleground of interpretation, both within and outside the text. Acts of interpretation within Gulliver's Travels—acts of writing and reading texts, of inventing characters for one's fictions and in turn becoming characters in others' fictions—signal a central controversy in eighteenth-century culture, in the relations of language to truth and to power, and in readers' unceasing stratagems for mastering what a text means over and against the human subject it seeks to represent. The epistemological question is thus inescapably also the political question of the fate of human subjects in a public sphere in which they are made objects in others' interpretations and fictions. As “splendide mendax,” Gulliver exemplifies how human attempts to totalize truth are forms of lying as well as expressions of power and, in the absence of these insights, too readily become expressions of injustice and violence.

Type
Cluster on Reader-Response Criticism
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 5 , October 1991 , pp. 1054 - 1070
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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