ABSTRACT
In Faulkner's 1735 edition of Gulliver's Travels the first words identify the protagonist as 'splendide mendax', a liar for the public good. Eighteenth-century critics generally agreed about the first level of meaning: Swift and Gulliver intended to attack human nature and human behavior. An audience less naive than Sympson knows a 'splendide mendax' when it hears one neighing. In Gulliver's Travels, interpretation, by the human characters at least, is never merely a quest for truth and virtue; it always contains a desire to control the flux of meaning. The Travels has been a battleground where readers, both within and outside the text, resist the authorial powers of Swift and Gulliver and author their own texts in contrast to those of other readers. The emperor of Blefuscu's devious letter to his counterpart in Lilliput only reaffirms a lesson Gulliver has already begun to absorb: that neither mastering the secret intentions of authors nor issuing counter, revisionist texts of interpretation creates freedom.
