By Damian Flanagan

If you ever take a ferry from Britain across the Irish Sea to the Irish capital, Dublin, you find yourself presented with two intriguing boat options. Both vessels are themed on aspects of Ireland's (and more specifically Dublin's) literary heritage.

There is a large capacity car ferry called "Ulysses" which plays on James Joyce's famous novel detailing its hero's wanderings around Dublin on a single day: June 16, 1904. There are bars and restaurants on board referencing characters of the novel such as "Blazes Boylan" or "Leopold Bloom". The novel "Ulysses" itself harks back to Homer's great epic "The Odyssey" which describes the adventure-filled, 10-year journey home of the hero Odysseus from the Trojan War to his home of Ithaca. A journey to Dublin on "Ulysses" from North Wales may take you a leisurely 3.5 hours, the name of the boat cunningly seems to signal to you, but there are various distractions on board to keep you entertained.

On the other hand, you may wish to travel on a more rapid, smaller scale and stripped-down boat and for this there is a catamaran appropriately called "The Swift", which is punningly themed on the life story of Dublin's other great literary son, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). "The Swift" doesn't have a capacious bar or many other facilities but as you bump along the waves at a fast clip, you can read on the wall displays all about Swift's books like "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Tale of a Tub", and the age in which he lived.

These are two very clever, culturally enriching names for boats and my congratulations go out to whoever came up with such witty concepts. "The Swift" is doubly appropriate because Swift's life was profoundly defined by the connection between the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Although Swift was born in Dublin and spent most of his life there, he always operated within the cultural gravitational pull of London, where he lived on multiple occasions in his life, and London's literary circles were of profound significance to him.

The often uneasy relationship and power dynamic between Britain and Ireland is a central theme in many of Swift's works. In the third voyage of "Gulliver's Travels", for example, Gulliver arrives on the floating island of Laputa, whose occupants, like the elites of Enlightenment London, lose themselves in reveries of thought and must be snapped back to reality by servants shaking rattles at their side. The floating island draws its supplies from the island below and, as periodically happened in Ireland, if there are rumblings of rebellious discontent there, then Laputa simply positions itself so to block out the sun and forces the earthbound island into submission.

In fact, all of Gulliver's journeys are to disparate islands and the relationship between these imaginary islands offers Swift much material for satirical playfulness. On his first journey -- to the famous land of Lilliput, where the people are one-ninth as big as English people, Swift describes a nation in a semi-permanent state of war with the neighbouring island of Blefuscu, as Britain was itself in a semi-permanent state of war with France. Gulliver makes himself a hero to the Lilliputians by wading over to Blefuscu and pulling their entire fleet back to Lilliput with him.

All the imaginary islands of the journeys in "Gulliver's Travels" are meant to be located on the vastly distant other side of the world, but amidst these wide-ranging fanciful journeys Gulliver only ever visits one country that actually exists: Japan. In the Third Voyage, Gulliver's sloop is attacked by two pirate ships led by a Japanese captain and he is cast into the sea in a canoe before being rescued by the Laputians. And later, having passed along an archipelago of three imaginary islands in the Pacific, Gulliver is able to make his way back to Europe because the king of one island, Luggnagg, has cordial relations with the Emperor of Japan and because a state of "perpetual commerce" exists between them. Gulliver is granted an audience with the Emperor of Japan and is then allowed to travel to Nagasaki before shipping back home on a Dutch ship.

In the universe of Swift's imagination, Japan sits at the centre of a network of dream-like nations. At the time at which Swift was writing in the early 18th century, Japan was closed to all European trade apart from the small Dutch concession in the port of Nagasaki, but still maintained trade and diplomatic contacts with Korea and China. Japan therefore tended to exist in the European imagination as the ultimate in mysteriously unknown, but intriguingly sophisticated societies, offering a radically different social order to anything that existed in Europe.

Swift imagines there might be other island nations with open access to Japan and an island-to-island relationship of the kind that existed between Britain and Ireland. Whereas the island of Great Britain represents to Swift a kind of hovering, inescapable force field of economic and cultural power, the islands of Japan sit astride an archipelago of the imagination in which every aspect of social organization and power dynamics could be questioned and freely reimagined.

The significance of "Japan" not as a real nation, but as a portal to a world of free thinking and new possibilities, is perhaps not as clearly understood in the writings of Swift as it should be. Swift was possibly the first writer in the history of the world who looked to the vastly distant and unknown nation of Japan as a means of rethinking what it meant to be human.

There is something sweetly fitting about getting on a fast boat from Dublin called "The Swift" and travelling across the Irish Sea to the Laputa-like land of Great Britain. But I can't help thinking that if you were to embark on a truly Swiftian journey then you would fall asleep on board, and in a dream-like state, discover the next morning that the writing on the walls had somehow turned completely indecipherable, that the clothes of your fellow passengers were ones you had never seen before, and that "The Swift" was fast approaching the southern shoreline of Tokugawa Japan.

@DamianFlanagan

(This is Part 77 of a series)

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Damian Flanagan is an author and critic. He studied English Literature at Cambridge University and has a PhD in Japanese Literature from Kobe University. He is based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and the North-west of England. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature", "The Tower of London: Tales of Victorian London" and "Yukio Mishima".