In Rough Country by Oates Joyce Carol

Author:Oates, Joyce Carol [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays, Reviews, Nonfiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-04-15T03:00:00+00:00

In deep disgust with his contemporaries, especially his fellow academicians at King’s College, Cambridge, Solanka becomes entranced by the possibility of seeing the world “miniaturized”:

It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size…A little modesty about the scale of human endeavor was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. Small was beautiful.

As Jonathan Swift demonstrates in the savage comedy of Gulliver’s Travels, “humanity” is but a matter of scale: rendered as dolls, miniaturized like the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s first voyage, we are reduced not only in size but in stature; our ideals, our suffering, our most grievous quarrels are revealed as ridiculous, and our “Great Minds” become comic characters to be exploited by the media. When Swift’s Gulliver ventures into the land of the Brobdignagians, he is revulsed by the giants’ physical ugliness even as, a doll-like Lilliputian in their eyes, his race is condemned by the King of Brobdignag in the most pitiless Swiftian terms:

I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. [Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,”]

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