ABSTRACT
Soyinka produced his retrospection of Gulliver’s Travels while imprisoned by the Federal Military Government of Nigeria for denouncing the military dictatorship and campaigning for a cease-fire in the war against Biafra. Not surprisingly, his poem “Gulliver,” included in a section of his prison poems (A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972) entitled Four Archetypes, is a scathing critique of neocolonial tyranny and totalitarianism throughout history. According to Lubomir Dolezel, revisions of classic works confront the “canonical proto-world by constructing a new, alternative fictional world.” Of the three distinct types of revisions—transposition, expansion and displacement—the notion of transposition is particularly applicable to Soyinka’s “Gulliver.” Transposition “preserves the design and the main story of the protoworld but locates them in a different temporal or spatial setting, or both. The proto-world and the successor world are parallel, but the rewrite tests the topicality of the canonical world by placing it in a new, usually contemporary, historical, political, and cultural setting” (206). By dramatizing himself as Gulliver in late-1960s Nigeria, Soyinka reveals that Gulliver’s experiences in Lilliput are analogous to the events that gave rise to his imprisonment. Yet Soyinka makes Swift’s legacy entirely his own by reintroducing Gulliver as a political prisoner, or prisoner of conscience, who is as much a victim of a corrupt totalitarian regime as the writer himself. 1 In doing so, Soyinka investigates the roots of tyranny and depicts the method with which dictatorships control their subjects by convincing them that their subjugation is due to their own weaknesses rather than the government’s domination. By creatively documenting the crimes against humanity he experienced in Nigeria, Soyinka delivers the message that the world cannot be silent as totalitarian regimes pledge “extinction of their [own] kind” (1.77).
