Gulliver Among the Laputians

Reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman has lead me to think about, for lack of a better term, fabulist satire. A major narrative element of O'Brien's book is the narrator's lengthy discourses (most of them in footnotes) on the theories of the fictional physicist/philosopher de Selby, who all but defines the term eccentric genius. The descriptions of de Selby's highminded but reality-detached scientific theories and philosophical musings immediately reminded me of the Laputians from Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Of the four sections of Swift's masterpiece, the section which includes the voyage to Laputa is probably the least well-remembered, coming in far behind the voyages to Lilliput (little people) and Brobdingnag (giants), and probably even behind the Country of the Houynhyms (horses), but it's probably my favorite. This description of the Laputians' daily lives is particularly delicious:

I observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas, or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those persons who are able to afford it always keep a flapper in their family, as one of their domestics; nor ever walk abroad, or make visits, without him. And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel.

Intellectuals who are so distracted that they would regularly fall off cliffs were it not for servants who slap them back into consciousness. Perfect.