Laputa (fictional island)
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Jonathan Swift describes the island of Laputa in the novel Gulliver's Travels from 1726 . Laputa is an island that is 4½ miles (approximately 7¼ km) in diameter. A diamond magnet in the center makes the island float in combination with magnetic forces. For technical reasons, their range is limited to the area above Balnibarbi .
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After his adventures in Liliput and Brobdingnag, Lemuel Gulliver travels on a third voyage on a strange sailing ship at the request of a visitor. When this ship is attacked by pirates, Gulliver is not thrown into the sea by the grace of a Japanese, but is lowered into the water on a lifeboat with provisions. After arriving on an island, he goes ashore there. He notices that the sun is strangely darkened and discovers that there is a floating island in the air above it, full of people. He calls attention to himself, a chain is lowered, and he is pulled up to this floating island: Laputa.
Laputa is populated by people who all tilt their heads to one side or the other and look inward with one eye and upward with the other. He observes a society that is primarily interested in music, mathematics and (astro) physics. A society that is completely spiritualized and absorbed in thinking about phenomena of the cosmos - so deeply absorbed that servants are employed, so-called Climenole , who regularly work the head and brain with light blows through sandbags so as not to block the thinking of the inhabitants of Laputa to wander far and (at least) to bring them back to the island. Gulliver is on the one hand deeply impressed by these higher scientific standards and the technical skills of the islanders, on the other hand bored. He pays an audience to the king of Laputa and asks him to leave the flying island and visit the one below, Balnibarbi . This departure is granted to him. On Balnibarbi and in its capital Lagado , he got to know the misery of this island and its economic exploitation by Laputa, but also its resistance.
interpretation
The floating island of Laputa is seen by many sources as a weakly encrypted satire on the rule of Great Britain over Ireland, especially the Lagados uprising is interpreted as a contemporary uprising of the Irish against Great Britain. La Puta means in Spanish: the whore . It is likely that Swift had knowledge of this naming in his satire due to his knowledge of Spanish and chose it deliberately.
credentials
- A Case for an Apprentice Executioner ( Případ pro začínajícího kata ) by Pavel Juráček , 1969 (ČSSR 1969) is a Czech film from the Czech New Wave that explicitly refers to Swift's trip to Laputa . This film is specifically designed as a social satire for Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and was banned in connection with the crackdown on the Prague Spring.
- Laputa : A film by Helma Sanders-Brahms from 1986.
- Dr. Strange or: How I Learned to Love the Bomb : Satire by Stanley Kubrick (1964), the B-52 bomber's primary target is the ICBM complex in Laputa
- Laputa Verlag : A Berlin book publisher that publishes satirical, grotesque and absurd literature.
- Castle in the Sky : an anime of Hayao Miyazaki from the year 1986th
- Irrational Man by William Barrett (1958): Barrett uses the story of Laputa to illustrate the alienation of existentialism .
- The Elder Scrolls from 1994 to 2014, a computer game that shows references to Swift's flying island of Laputa and George Orwell .
- Mazda Laputa , a Japanese car that was produced from 1999 to 2006.
- Spaceship Enterprise , episode # 76 (first broadcast in 1969), which describes the cloud city Stratos , which shows clear references to Swift's Laputa.
- Motor Summer by John Crowley , post apocalyptic science fiction novel with a flying city called Laputa.
- Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro , post-apocalyptic science fiction manga with the floating city of Zalem / Tiphares, whose inhabitants oppress the surface dwellers.
See also
literature
- Complete text in English ( Project Gutenberg )
- Laputa (fictional island) at Zeno.org ., German translation.
- Jonathan Swift: "Gulliver's Travels" . 2nd Edition. Hamburg and Leipzig 1762, p. 462 ( "Gulliver's Travels" in Google Book Search).