"... better than Gulliver's Travels"? Swiftian Traces in FPG's Great American Formicary
by
Martin Kuester, Philipps-Universität Marburg

1. FPG and Swift

Ever since the identity of the German writer and translator Felix Paul Greve with the Canadian novelist Frederick Philip Grove was discovered in the 1970s, our picture of FPG has become increasingly multi-faceted. In addition to being hailed as one of the fathers of realism in Canadian literature, he also was influenced by European turn-of the century aestheticism. But during his phenomenally productive career as a translator from English and other languages into German at the beginning of this century, Grove was of course also exposed to many other literary influences stretching from Oriental tales to French naturalism and German avant garde. I would like to trace yet another literary relationship in this paper: that of Felix Paul Greve and Frederick Philip Grove to the eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift.

That Felix Paul Greve and Frederick Philip Grove were strongly influenced by Swift's works has never been doubted. Even before the connection between the two FPGs was made, Greve was known as a translator and editor of Swift's work, and from the start the Swiftian overtones of some of Grove's works  have been clearly identified. The works in the Greve/Grove canon that are important in this context are above all Greve's four-volume edition of Swift's Prosaschriften in 1909/10, "Greve's final major translation project,"(Divay 129) and Grove's rather untypical novel Consider Her Ways of 1947, of which already one of the first reviews claimed that "there is a curious similarity between Swift's and Grove's purpose, viewpoint and technique" (Lydia Davison in the Montreal Gazette, Feb. 8, 1947, rpt. in Pacey, FPG 180-181). Gaby Divay even calls Consider Her Ways possibly Grove's "greatest, if unacknowlegded, tribute to Swift" (140). [1] As far as Greve's activities as an editor and translator of Swift's prose works are concerned, they have been of lasting effect: a 1960s' edition of Swift's satires published by Insel Verlag in Frankfurt consists largely of Greve's translations and so does a two-volume German edition of Swift's prose published by Ullstein Verlag in the late 1980s.

 2. FPG on Swift

The Swift connection has also been of interest in the context of establishing the connection between the German and Canadian existences of FPG. In a 1926 letter to The Canadian Bookman, Grove refers to an earlier article in this journal, in which Watson Kirkconnell claimed that Grove had edited "the first complete edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels" (Pacey in  Grove's Letters 38) in the 1890s in London. Grove's reply is that while he did not publish this edition, he was "instrumental (though not directly engaged) in bringing about the publication of two, perhaps three continental editions of Gulliver's Travels, my aim being to rescue the work from dying as a literary masterpiece to become a children's classic'" (Letters 39). Pacey comments: "Now of course there is no record of Frederick Philip Grove having had anything to do with editions of Gulliver's Travels - but Felix Paul Greve did indeed edit Swift in German translation, and for once Grove seems to have let his guard slightly down" (Pacey in Letters xiv). The edition mentioned was published in 1909/10 by Erich Reiss Verlag in Berlin and consists of four volumes - including Gulliver's Travels, or rather Gullivers Reisen - edited, introduced and annotated by Felix Paul Greve. In addition to the explanatory notes on the political background of Swift's satires, Greve seems to have contributed three substantial pieces: an "Einleitung" of 19 pages to the first volume (Prosaschriften I, 9-27), a biographical essay on Swift, "Jonathan Swift, eine Übersicht über sein Leben," at the beginning of the second volume (II, 11-21), and a fifteen-page introduction to Gulliver's Travels, in the fourth volume (IV, 11-25). The biographical essay is signed by the initials F. P. G., by the way.

Greve's introduction to the first volume mostly deals with the historical background of Swift's life and writing in Ireland. Still, I was struck by the fact that much of what Greve writes about Swift also seems to be true about the Frederick Philip Grove who comes across in his Canadian writing, especially in the various versions of Consider Her Ways that we know. Right at the beginning, Greve states, for example, that

Swift is generally known as a satirist. This term does not really do him justice: it is too limited a term. Swift was above all an intellectual, but he was the type of intellectual who applied all his logic to the criticism of the current state of affairs. It was two hundred years before our time that his mind was already the battlefield of those ideological struggles that nowadays still occupy the best minds of our country: the fight against any kind of sentimentality, against those empty phrases to which the English refer as "cant," and for justice. It is impossible to be more unpoetic than Swift, neither by instinct nor by dint of willpower. But the incandescent power of his pure intellect, the coolness of his spirit (if it is permitted to bring together these opposites) raises the achievement of his life, which is all in all a political and journalistic one, way above any other kind of public writing, with the exception perhaps of the corresponding peaks of the classical literatures of Greece and Rome. [2]

Some lines later, comparing Swift and Balzac, he calls these two authors antipodes:

The style of the latter [Balzac] resembles that of a painter sketching a portrait within a few seconds, but he always succeeds in dragging up something new and peculiar from a sea of infinite possibilities; the former [Swift] is tireless in his attempts, repeating them ten, twenty, a hundred times over, continuously striking his axe against the tree that will not fall, never admitting defeat, never giving in as long as the situation can be remedied by sheer action, for his stupendous pessimism is only aimed at human nature as such. What is productive about the latter [Balzac] is his Protean nature, his never-ending tendency towards metamorphosis imitating anything however small or large, and his never-failing sense of identity; what is productive about the other [Swift]  is his rigid sense of identity, his personality that cannot be shaken, his inability to change and the - as you might want to call it - limitation of his capacities. [3]

To the reader aware of Felix Paul Greve's career, these words written in 1909 seem to point not only backward to Swift and Balzac, but also backward to Felix Paul Greve's Protean career as a translator and writer in German in these years as well as forward to Frederick Philip Grove's sober and stern writing later composed in Canada on which his image as "a serious, ponderous writer" (Pacey, FPG 3) is based.

 3. FPG on Gulliver's Travels

In the introduction to his edition of Gulliver's Travels, Greve comments on Swift's pessimistic view of mankind and quotes from one of Swift's letters to Alexander Pope written in the year before Gulliver's Travels appeared:

I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it should be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy (though not Timons manner) The whole building of my Travells is erected: And I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my Opinion... (Swift, Correspondence III, 103) [4]

In his interpretation of Gulliver's report on his travels to Brobdingnag, the land of giants, Greve describes Swift's misanthropic method in detail, not knowing that he himself will in the future have recourse to a similar technique of showing a minuscule character in a land of giants:

Here ideals are set forth: there is a trace of utopia in this work. And the political satire of the state of European politics becomes more overt because it can simply describe the state of politics in Gulliver's home country instead of mirroring them in the description of imaginary beings such as the Lilliputians. But such passages ... admittedly have a certain bitter aftertaste. We laugh, but our laughter is full of sympathy. When, for example, the king takes Gulliver in his hand, turns to his ministers and remarks that human grandeur is contemptible indeed, as it can be mimicked by such diminutive and tiny insects. "And yet," he said,"I dare engage, those Creatures have their Titles and Distinctions of Honour; they contrive little Nests and Burrows, that they call Houses and Cities; they make a Figure in Dress and Equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray." [5]

 4. FPG's Response to Swift: Consider Her Ways

Grove claims to have spent over twenty years of his own career writing and re-writing that work in his own canon in which he describes a minuscule narrator travelling through a land of giants, Consider Her Ways. This work seems to represent a genuinely Canadian type of writing, an expedi­tion report, but this is an expedition report with a difference, supposedly written by an ant, not by a human explorer. But in Swiftian terms, this ant is certainly more than just an animal rationis capax: Wawa-quee ist the leader of an expedition of South American ants through Central America, across the Panama Canal, towards the Rocky Mountains, crossing the American continent all the way to New York, and finally back to Venezuela. And she leaves no doubt about her mental capacities, concluding one chapter with the confident assumption that "It will become abundantly clear that our own race [that is, that of the ants] stands at the very apex of creation as far as that creation is completed today" (Consider 5).

Not much sober realism here, obviously. Con­sider Her Ways is the book in the Grove canon that least fits the general image of Frede­rick Philip Grove as the father of Canadian realist fiction. That is probably why the books is rarely discussed in traditional studies of Canadian literature or just men­tioned in passing. On the other hand, one would not have expected Grove to be listed in international handbooks and guides to science fiction and fantasy, but that is where references to Consider Her Ways are to be found. John Robert Colombo calls Grove's Ant-Book the "most outrageous work of the Canadian fantastic imagination" (Colombo 35), and David Ketterer, besides drawing many parallels to Gulliver's Travels, counts Consider Her Ways among "the hight points of pioneer Canadian SF, achievements that would not soon be equaled, let alone surpassed" (Ketterer 26). From the point of view of mainstream Canadian writing, however, Desmond Pacey (Creative Writing 206), calls Consider Her Ways "a literary curiosity which, for all its occasional insight, added little to Grove's reputation."

5. The Ant Book and Its Successor

In his pseudo-autobiography In Search of Myself, Grove reports that he wrote a draft version of Consider Her Ways in the early 1920s. As he puts it, this early version turned into "a grumbling protest" and a "preachment" instead of being "a laughing comment on all life..." (Grove, Search 359). Arthur Phelps supposedly even referred condescendingly to this early version as a "pretty good sermon" (quoted by Spettigue, "Editor's Introduction" viii). This version exists in manu­script form in the U of M Archives bearing the title Man: His Habits, Social Organization and Outlook. This title of the manuscript parodies that of one of Grove's sources: W.M. Wheeler's Ants: Their Structure, Develop­ment and Be­havior (Spettigue, "Editor's Introduction" x). [6] Although it is written from the point of view of an ant and would thus offer many possibilities of narrative experimenta­tion with this ironic perspective from the outset, the 1920s manuscript is organized thematically like a political tract and almost devoid of any narrative content.

The process of rewriting that the novel underwent before final publication in 1947 turned the book into a lively expedition report. As Birk Sproxton puts it, "For­tunately, when Grove rewrote his Ant Book, he wrote it as a narrative..." (Sproxton  36) By 1933 the text had been completely revised, as Margaret Stobie points out:

The pulpit thumping is gone. Only the introduction survives from the script of eight years before. This is a new work, new in conception, in tone, and in the quality of the prose. It is a lively narrative of another of Grove's far-travelers. It was this text which was used some fourteen years later, with a few minor changes, for Consider Her Ways. (Stobie, FPG 162)

The narrative claims to be an expedition report written by ants from Central America: the "Narrative of an Expedition from the Tropics into the Northern Regions of the Continent ... compiled by Wawa-quee, R.S.F.O." Its title echoes those of many journals by Hearne, Mackenzie, Vancouver, etc. and in­vites the reader to compare Wawa-quee's techniques of emplotment with that of her human colleagues.  It was the aim of this expedition, and this indicates more than just a trace of hubris,

to trace the evolution of the nation Atta from the humblest beginnings of all ants and to make it possible for us to arrange the whole fauna of the globe, or of such portions of it as could be ex­plored, in the form of a ladder leading up to our own kind. (Consider 4)

 6. Swiftian Traces in Consider Her Ways

In the Ant-Book, FPG imitates a type of scientific writing in order to satirize human society. This is not the only level, though, on which parodic strategies work in this book. A specific model that Grove uses, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, is itself already a parody of the scientific discourse of its own time.

And, as McClelland and Stewart publishers quote their own author Ronald Suther­land on the cover of the NCL edition, Consider Her Ways is "a tour de force equal to if not better than Gulliver's Travels." Unfortunately they omit Sutherland's qualifi­cations that this is true "with respect to suspension of disbelief," and that "Consider Her Ways falls far short of Gulliver's Travels ... in the poignancy of the satire." His conclusion: "As social satire, Consider Her Ways is ineffectual; as an intriguing, highly informative, and singular narrative, the book is a success" (Sutherland 34, 35).

While parts of Gulliver's Travels show us eighteenth-century England as it might have been seen from a foreign or dissident per­spective (see Bloom), Consider Her Ways does a similar thing for North American society. The similari­ties be­tween Swift's and Grove's travel narratives often include word-for-word parallels. Many of the ants' "myrmecocentric" perspec­tives reflect Swiftian satire: For example, Grove adopts Swift's distinction between high heels and low heels among Lilliputians and applies it to North American men and women. Whereas Gulliver's Lilliputian interlocutor had explained that

... there have been two struggling Parties in this Empire, under the Names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low Heels on their Shoes, by which they distinguish themselves (Gulliver's Travels 30),

Grove makes the distinction between high and low heels that Swift had used in order to satirize Tories and Whigs in eighteenth-century England work  on the level of gender, and so he has his ant Wawa-quee remark on the large but clumsy North American bipeds:

... I remembered an anatomical peculiarity of the female foot as compared with that of a male. The fore-part of the foot consists, on its under side, of a huge, flat expanse which, towards the rear, curves up into a vault behind which there is a columnar heel; this heel is, in the female, much higher than in the male. I have sometimes thought that it would be possible to classify human beings by their heels: the higher it is, the larger the share of the female characteristics, even in males; and the lower it is, the larger the share of the male characteristics, even in females. I believe this would furnish a perfectly sound basis for division. (Consider 263)

Gulliver's watch glass, apparently made of "some transparent Metal" (Gulliver's Travels 18) is as new to the Lilliputians as the human zoologist Wheeler's test-tubes of a "rock-like, transparent substance" (Consider 30) or his unhookable "outer pair of eyes" (122) are to the ants.

Furthermore, Gul­liver's and Wawa-quee's methods of processing the raw data of their expedition reports in order to make them more readable, have much in common. While Gulliver reserves "farther Descriptions of this Kind ... for a greater Work, which is now almost ready for the Press" (Gulliver's Travels 29), Wawa-quee refers interested readers to more detailed reports elsewhere. Both insist on  their "strict veracity" (Consider 54).

In this context, it is interesting to note that the ant Wawa-quee, whose perspective Grove uses as the satirical "frame" in order to parody straight exploration reports, cannot, from her "myrmecocen­tric" (Consider 77) point of view, identify human satire as such. She is as gullible as Gulliver, for in the early version of the Ant Book, she de­scribes one "single exception" among human beings, one - one might say - homo rationis capax:

This man, whose name was Swift - let it be honoured henceforth among ants - though ... he saw himself forced to accept the services of horses, yet felt so profoundly mortified at this fact that, whenever he perforce claimed such service, he apologized to the noble beasts. (Man 89)

And the epilogue of the early Ant Book - supposedly by a Professor Contemnor - is as incredibly biased towards fascist ideas as Swift's Modest Proposal, which Gaby Divay has shown to be one of Grove's Swiftian favourites, was - ironically - insane.

7. Conclusion

Consider Her Ways thus proves to be a complex narrative. We can interpet it as an early example of Canadian science fiction or fantasy or emphasize its intertextual and parodic relationships towards satiric predecessors. Wawa-quee on the one hand clearly identifies and satirizes the drawbacks of human society, but on the other she is often blind to her own shortcomings and limitations: she turns from satirist to the butt of satire. With the humour arising from the narrator's inadequacies, Consider Her Ways provides lighter fare and is easier to swallow than some of the more sober and serious works by FPG. After all, it  was written by a novelist who - in a letter to Lorne Pierce - once remarked: "I was an ant myself, was I not, in the great American formicary" (quoted by Pierce, "Tribute" 188).