The new “Gulliver's Travels” movie is a modern take on Lemuel Gulliver's trip to an island inhabited by tiny people, and his antics as their slave. The journey to Lilliput is often the only episode featured in abridged and children's editions of Jonathan Swift's 17th Century classic, but Gulliver visited other places. Swift wrote most satirically in his story of the land of the Houyhnhnms.
Abandoned in that unknown country by the mutinous crew of his ship, Gulliver discovers that horses rule there, and that they are more tidy, truthful and rational than Englishmen. They have their own cattle class, the Yahoos, who are grovelling, mute and, as Gulliver instantly recognises, human. And he proves himself the worst of the human race. Far from seeking to rouse his fellow men to their full potential, Gulliver cleaves to his horsy hosts. When they eventually kick him out, he sails back to England on a boat made mostly of Yahoo skin.
For a kinder, gentler, even cleaner utopia, read “Herland”, written in the early 20th Century by the American feminist socialist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. When three men land in a hidden country populated entirely by parthenogenetic females, they find a progressive nation, free of war, disease and vice.
Herland had excitement enough in its early days, when the women had just overthrown the men. But by the time of this narrative, women have ruled for 2000 years, and our three men are barely allowed out. The narrator frankly tells us not to expect adventures. So don't look for a “Herland” movie any time soon, though, for the record, there is “Sexmisja” (Sexmission), a Polish cinematic romp in which three men land in a futuristic world with only women in it. A want of drama gives us something to quibble about in this perfect world. Can art be created without sexual conflict? Once the men are gone, will we write utopian novels, or make blockbusters?
Dystopias are certainly better blockbuster material. In Pierre Boulle's “Planet of the Apes”, published in 1963, journalist Ulysse Merou and two scientists cross time and space into another solar system. They land on an Earth-like planet. They name it Soror and soon discover (after the obligatory naked woman) that Soror is ruled by apes. The book spawned movies, sequels, remakes and spoofs.
Ulysse finds evidence that apes civilised themselves by imitating an earlier, highly developed human society. When those humans became soft and dependent, their well-trained simian slaves took over the world. As for government, “The gorillas would simply have to imitate certain attitudes and deliver a few harangues, all based on the same model.” Sounds like parliaments anywhere, doesn't it?
And before all that, were humans aping someone else? The story has a disturbing circularity. Soror looks like our future, but is it also our past? Add to that the Soror apes' experiments on live humans, using electric shocks and partial lobotomies to blur the edges of mind and memory, and Boulle's novel gives us plenty to worry about.
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