Swift’s Struldbruggs

In one of his conversations with Boswell, Dr Johnson observes how superior The Tale of a Tub is to all Swift’s other work and says of Gulliver’s Travels: `When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest’.  He must sometimes have tired of Boswell asking him questions clearly designed to produce good copy and answered tongue-in-cheek.  Whether or not this is the case here, his remark is patently unfair and it is anyway not only big and little men that Swift’s imagination conjures up.  In A Voyage to Luggnagg, Gulliver is excited to be told that, in the country he is visiting, children are very occasionally born with a mark on their foreheads that indicates they will live forever.  The details are characteristically precise.  This mark, Swift writes, begins as a red circular spot over the left eyebrow, turns green at twelve, deep blue at twenty-five and then coal black twenty-years later by which point it is `as large as an English shilling’.

         Gulliver feels `inexpressible delight’ at hearing this news.  `Happy nation’, he says, `where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!’  Amused by his enthusiasm, his hosts ask how he would behave if he happened to born a Struldbrugg, as these children are called.  He replies that he would spend the first two hundred years establishing an independence that came from being `the wealthiest man in the kingdom’ while at the same time studying all the arts and sciences so that he was also its most well-informed member.  By paying close attention to public affairs, he would become `a living treasury of knowledge and wisdom’ and no doubt therefore `the oracle of the nation’.  In this manner he would confirm what had been his initial impression on first hearing about the Struldbruggs, that it was a happy people which could have amongst it `so many living examples of ancient virtue, and … masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages’.

         But immortality begins to seem less of a boon when Gulliver discovers that, although the Struldbruggs never die, they are not therefore exempted from growing old.  When the men reach eighty, for example, they have `not only the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying … At ninety’, the text goes on, `they lose their teeth and hair, but eat or drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite.  The diseases they were subject to, still continuing without increasing or diminishing.’  The result is that they learn to curse their own immortality and `whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive’.  It might well be thought that Swift has cheated here a little by imagining a highly compromised form of living for ever yet, if he hadn’t, he would have been faced with a problem familiar to those who argue for the resurrection of the body.  Just as it is difficult to imagine a soul freely choosing any particular stage of its body’s physical development in which to live again, so it might have been hard for Swift to propose a precise moment or period when that development stopped and immortality kicked in.  The solution he adopts is not without its moments of incoherence, however, since it is hard to see how someone could continue to age with illnesses which neither increase nor diminish.

         Growing old for ever is a gruesome prospect, as Swift makes clear and in ways one is tempted to say are also typical, different though they are from the realism of his description of the spot on the forehead.  The Struldbruggs, Gulliver notes, `were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men’.  No reason is given for this distinction.  I see from recent commentaries on poems by Swift such as `The Lady’s Dressing Room’ or `A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ that many now feel it is wrong to regard him as misogynistic but it is hard to know what other word fits his explanation that, should two Struldbruggs marry, their union is dissolved `by the courtesy of the kingdom’ when the younger of the two reaches eighty: `For the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence that those who are condemned without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife’.  But then I suppose it could be argued that what Swift is displaying here is not so much misogyny as a sense of humour of the Les Dawson variety.

Ageing is a natural process which does not only affect the body, as Swift was well aware.  `In talking’, he writes, the Struldbruggs `forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations’.  This is accurate description of what is  called `nominal aphasia’, a technical term which sometimes invites the response from sufferers, `But my aphasia is not just nominal’.  `For the same reason’, Swift continues, `they can never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end’.  Here we are more obviously in the territory of dementia or Alzheimer’s and the recognition of it certainly puts a damper on Gulliver’s initial idea that, if he were a Struldbrugg, he would garner so much life experience that, along with a few others, he could form an `immortal brotherhood’ which would guide and counsel society, giving `perpetual warning and instruction to mankind’.  In The Seven Samurai, that classic Japanese film of some time ago, the villagers go to seek advice from a spectacularly ancient man who lives apart from them all.  What Gulliver appears to be imagining is a whole group of equally decrepit figures.  In many societies of course the old have traditionally been respected but there are reasons to be sceptical about the wisdom of old age, although perhaps not to the extent of that ever-cheerful optimist T. S. Eliot in the last of his Four Quartets (`East Coker’).  `Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly’, he writes, having previously described their serenity as `only a deliberate hebetude’ and their wisdom `only the knowledge of dead secrets / Useless in the darkness into which they peered / Or from which they turned their eyes’.  In a quite different register is La Rochefoucauld who once claimed that `old people are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for on longer being a position to give bad examples’.

What is especially thought-provoking in Swift is his suggestion that, in Luggnagg, the language is always in flux so that after about two hundred years the Struldbruggs can no longer understand their neighbours and become `foreigners in their own country’.  Anyone who is now drawing a pension and listens to the latest rap singer, or his grandchildren chatting to each other, will know the feeling; and it is only likely to be intensified by reading magazines for the young (and some of the recent essays in the more avant-garde literary journals).  A two-hundred-year-old man from our time could probably still understand what people were saying if he could re-visit the period of his birth; but it’s a fair bet that he would indeed be a foreigner in his own country when his four hundredth birthday came along.