Abstract: Through an analysis of the science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Drowned Giant” and its animated adaptation of the same name, this essay seeks to understand its central image: the giant. The analysis shows that the metaphor of “giants and dwarfs” in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels offers a way of reading Ballard’s giant. More specifically, Ballard’s portrayal of the relationship between the giant and his visitors constitutes a contemporary continuation of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, an episode in Western intellectual history.
Keywords: Ballard; the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns; giants and dwarfs; Swift.
I. Ballard’s Life and Ideas about Writing
“The Drowned Giant,” the eighth episode of the second season of Love, Death & Robots, is adapted from the short story of the same name by the celebrated British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard. The monologue of its protagonist, Steven, largely follows the story. Since the film advances its plot primarily through this monologue, it comes across rather like an audiobook. Perhaps to counteract that effect, the screenwriter introduces a little dialogue to break it up. The animation also adds and removes some of the original’s descriptions to meet the demands of the medium, but it does not alter the story’s intellectual core. Reading the original alongside the film can therefore give us a deeper understanding of its content and elements, one consistent with the author’s original meaning.
To understand the rich symbolism and metaphors of “The Drowned Giant,” we need some knowledge of Ballard’s life and intellectual interests. Born in Shanghai, China, in 1930, Ballard witnessed war and death as a child and suffered the hardships of war himself. When the Japanese army occupied Shanghai, he and his parents were confined in the Lunghua civilian internment camp, regaining their freedom only at the end of the Second World War. From then on, he began to reflect on human nature. This directly influenced his early disaster fiction; The Crystal World, for instance, emerged under that influence. Indeed, the trauma of the Second World War accompanied him throughout his writing life. In the original “The Drowned Giant,” the graffiti people scrawl on the giant includes the Nazi swastika: a visible imprint of war on his work.
Although he devoted himself to science fiction, Ballard was not blindly optimistic about the future of science. On the contrary, his work often shows social and technological development causing humanity to forfeit its own worth. He believed that the Heinlein–Asimov–Clarke school of science fiction in the mid-1950s had failed to realize the genre’s full potential because its writing was too optimistic about both the future and science. After “Hiroshima” and “Auschwitz,” people’s attitudes toward science had changed completely, yet science fiction’s optimism remained unchanged. The trouble with science fiction in the early 1950s was that its visions of science increasingly resembled magic, losing some of their reality and seriousness. For Ballard, science fiction should attend to our own most important domain, “inner space”: it should describe the meeting point between the inner world and external reality. It should explore the realm in which the mind collides with the outside world, rather than merely depict fantasies.1 The term “inner space” comes from the British science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock. “Science fiction should concentrate not on exploring outer space but on depicting ‘inner space.’ Stories may be set in the near future, but they need not describe spaceships or robots; instead, they should describe the workings of the human mind. Their protagonists may be ordinary people rather than scientists or explorers. The writing may take the form of experimental prose or dystopian literature, or concern itself with entropy or pessimistic views of the future.”2 Ballard’s commitment to exploring “inner space” is one reason so much of his science fiction bears the stamp of serious literature. “The Drowned Giant” is no exception. We may even find it difficult to decide whether his work is science fiction or serious literature; perhaps it is both. Although Love, Death & Robots treated this story as science fiction and animated it accordingly, it is really more like a beautifully written allegorical tale, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection. Besides, Ballard himself explicitly described the short piece as pure fantasy or allegory.3
Ballard’s attitude toward the Enlightenment also deserves attention. He questioned it on more than one occasion. In a 2003 interview with the Australian newspaper The Age, he said: “The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.” He also said that the Enlightenment had not succeeded: “In fact, we keep discovering things about ourselves that do not fit the idea that we are the civilized heirs to the entire Enlightenment tradition.”4 In any case, Ballard’s experiences, his interests as a writer, and his doubts about the Enlightenment will all provide clues and grounds for our thinking about the meaning of “The Drowned Giant.”
II. Literary Parallels to “The Drowned Giant”
Comparing “The Drowned Giant” with more widely known classics can help and inspire us as we explore its meaning. Interpretations of those classics are more mature and comprehensive. Once we discover similarities between works, we may be able to carry an interpretation from one to another, or find an illuminating perspective. Conversely, discovering differences beneath superficial similarities can help us rule out misleading approaches.
1. Melville’s Moby-Dick
Ballard repeatedly associates the giant with a whale, readily bringing Melville’s Moby-Dick to mind. The white whale, an enormous symbolic presence, may help us explore the giant’s meaning. Ballard seems to be alluding deliberately to Melville when the narrator observes that “this drowned leviathan had the mass and dimensions of the largest sperm whale.”5 The giant’s body is turned into fertilizer and livestock feed, suggesting that it is akin to whale blubber. In the film, when the protagonist visits the beach at night, numerous barrels appear on screen: they contain “whale oil” rendered from the giant’s fat. The scene in which butchers discuss dismembering the giant also suggests that his flesh eventually reaches their shops. These shots all seem to point toward an environmental theme. The story’s closing description of the giant’s remains merging with their ecological surroundings seems to reinforce the idea that environmental protection is its subject. By comparison, some scholarship on Moby-Dick takes an ecological approach. Yet, as everyone knows, an environmental theme certainly does not account for that work’s greatness. Such a theme offers only a superficial expression and understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature. Moby-Dick’s deeper subject is the exploration of that relationship itself, which in turn reflects a cultural atmosphere, a spiritual condition, and a way of life. Similarly, “The Drowned Giant” carries some suggestion of environmental protection, but this is neither its deepest nor its most fitting interpretation. The story and film may intend a kind of homage to Moby-Dick, making us aware of the growing tension between humanity and nature. But this is only a ladder, helping us climb further until we reach the question of human existence itself.
Rather than look for evidence that the giant is a whale, we should pay closer attention to a recurring clue: the visitors distort the memory of the giant’s existence until they forget him altogether. Steven, the film’s narrator, is precisely the one who does not forget. Unlike the story’s implicit suggestion, the film ends with the narrator explicitly stating that he has not forgotten the giant and dreaming of him coming back to life, gathering his fragments, and running back to the sea.6 This means that the story begins with disbelief in the giant’s existence and ends with everyone except the narrator forgetting that he existed. His absorption into the ecosystem serves to show not an environmental theme but people’s forgetting of him. We cannot hastily treat the giant as a metaphor for the white whale. First, we must address the relationship between the giant and the spectators’ remembering and forgetting.
2. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
“The Drowned Giant” and The Metamorphosis are both allegorical tales. Structurally, the former begins with the surreal event of a drowned giant’s arrival, while the latter likewise begins with an impossible event: Gregor discovers that he has become a large beetle. Apart from this one impossibility, the rest is relatively realistic. Both stories also have open endings. Ballard and Kafka confront the same problem: how the people in their stories change their attitudes toward a surreal object. Of course, how the “large beetle” and the “giant” regard themselves matters too. In the former, this emerges through Gregor’s thoughts after his transformation; in the latter, it emerges indirectly through the narrator’s imaginings of the giant’s feelings.
Ordinarily, someone who discovered that he had become a large beetle should instinctively be concerned about himself. His first problem would be how to become human again. But Gregor’s first concern is how to get to work. He continues to worry about his family’s livelihood, his father’s aging, and his sister’s education. It is as though the worst thing were not his becoming a beetle, but the harm this did to other people. A powerful tension develops between the protagonist’s attitude toward himself and others, and the attitudes of those around him toward him. His father remains cold toward him and uses violence to put him to death. His mother and sister are initially sympathetic but later grow cold as well. “His determination to eliminate himself was even stronger than his sister’s,” in a translation of the Chinese article’s quotation.7 Gregor goes willingly to his death: he makes this choice himself after realizing that he contributes nothing to the family and has instead become a burden. Returning to Ballard, people are initially drawn to the giant and filled with curiosity. Then they begin to revel on his body. As he is dismembered, their enthusiasm gradually cools. A few months later, everyone has forgotten that he existed; confronted with his enormous remains, they think these are merely the remains of a whale. In The Metamorphosis, changes in the family’s attitudes help us identify what Gregor symbolizes: the alienated worker, and the “mentally ill person” who seeks to eliminate himself under the pressure of his family’s coldness and oppression. The attitudes of the spectators, which Ballard foregrounds throughout, must likewise be an important clue to understanding the giant.
If the work’s central intention were to convey an environmental theme, or simply to present the relationship between humanity and the ecosystem, then the painstaking descriptions—in both story and film—of people moving from astonishment to indifference and finally forgetting the giant would be entirely superfluous. In fact, the very descriptions that make “The Drowned Giant” difficult to interpret also supply the clues for resolving those difficulties. The Metamorphosis likewise suggests that the key to understanding this allegorical tale lies in people’s changing attitudes toward the giant and their eventual forgetting of him.
III. The Giant as Metaphor
The giant’s identity is a mystery. He appears on the shore without warning after a violent rainstorm, and no one knows where he has come from. The original story also describes him as though he had fallen from the sky.8 This opening leaves considerable room for our search for his identity. Establishing who the giant is, or what he stands for, is crucial: it directly determines the direction of our interpretation. Seeing him as a symbol of a whale, for instance, leads toward an environmental reading, or generalities about reverence for nature. Yet the preceding analysis clearly indicates otherwise.
A close reading of the original reveals that, before the giant is dismembered, Ballard devotes more attention to describing him as an epic hero. As the dismemberment proceeds, descriptions of him as a whale become increasingly frequent. Ballard very likely does this to show that the giant is being forgotten and that people are mistakenly taking him for a whale. His handling of the narrative tells us that its emphasis lies in exposing the errors in the spectators’ memories. Moreover, the narrator describes everyone finally forgetting the giant, while the few who retain some impression of him mistakenly remember a whale. This description means that the narrator himself has never forgotten the giant’s existence. The film’s ending makes the same point: the narrator repeatedly dreams of the giant coming back to life, gathering the fragments of his body, and running toward the sea.
Following the clues the author has planted, let us explore the giant’s metaphorical meaning anew by tracing how people forget him. It is not difficult to see that this forgetting is itself a bizarre event. After all, so many people saw him with their own eyes. How could he be so easily forgotten, or the memory of him distorted into a memory of a whale? Understanding this is the key to understanding the work’s central meaning. It makes for an intriguing algebra problem. We might solve the riddle this way: let the giant be an unknown, X. Readers must return to the narrative and plot, working out what concrete image, substituted for X, best fits the context and logic and most plausibly explains the repeated descriptions of remembering and forgetting.
The giant is perfect; human beings are copies. Both the original and the film explain that the narrator is drawn to the giant not primarily by his enormous size but by his absolute existence, while we live in a world resembling the “absolute.” Compared with the giant, human beings are imperfect, insignificant copies of him.9 Put the other way around, this passage means that, if the giant did not exist, human beings might well consider themselves “absolute” and perfect beings. This immediately brings to mind the currents of anthropocentrism and scientism, though we shall set those aside for now. People eventually lose interest in the giant and even forget him. This means forgetting greatness, a wish to escape life in the giant’s shadow. For Plato, human beings are not perfect gods but imitators, beings with limits. People’s forgetting of the giant can be compared with the doctrine of the soul’s recollection. Losing their memory of the giant means losing knowledge of him; it means arrogance and a failure to understand “knowledge of one’s ignorance.” Thus, the passage leads us toward Plato’s reflections on the relationship between Forms and imitators, and toward the doctrine of recollection. What these teach us is “Know thyself” and “knowledge of one’s ignorance.” In light of Ballard’s doubts about the Enlightenment and his skepticism toward scientific optimists, we have reason to believe that he is expressing humanity’s ignorance, arrogance, and forgetfulness of its own limits. Here the giant seems more like a symbol of something approaching perfection and wisdom. This may bring us closer to his true metaphorical meaning.
The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the giant’s resemblance to an epic hero, frequently linking these descriptions to his character and contrasting it with the character of the human beings climbing over him. The giant, then, is more like an ancient hero, while modern people are dwarfs trampling and dismembering his body. Giants and dwarfs suggest a contrast between ancients and moderns—more specifically, between two kinds of character, that is, between ancient and modern souls. If the giant stands for the great souls of the ancients, many of the story’s implausible elements become plausible. In the film, he seems not to be dead but asleep. At any moment he might wake and crush the copies around him. The original says instead that the giant gazes at the sky, wholly unaware of these copies beside him. It describes a fisherman standing on his chest and signaling to the crowd, which approaches with cries of surprise and triumph. Yet when they actually draw near, the excited chatter falls away, at least among the narrator and his companions.10
As time passes, the giant’s appearance changes, and the narrator imagines corresponding changes in his state of mind. Initially a figure like a Greek hero, he gradually acquires an air of modest maturity; later, as he is dismembered, he seems to express pain and helplessness. Ballard uses the word “depredation” to describe what people do to him. His enormous body only increases his vulnerability.11 If books are now our only means of truly understanding the nobility of ancient souls, then the dwarfs’ dismemberment of the giant, and his apparent suffering, signify their distortion and misreading of the ancients, ultimately undoing the soul’s nobility. There is no contradiction between the initial emphasis on the giant’s greatness and perfection and this later description of his vulnerability. The former describes the sublimity of the ancients themselves. The latter makes a satirical point: the ancients cannot withstand the arbitrary dismantling carried out by modern people. Faced with later generations taking him apart, the giant is powerless. He must endure not only dismemberment but also the humiliation of people tampering with him at will. His virtues are embodied in ancient books; what people are doing is taking passages from those books out of context. What are the consequences of such distortions of the ancients? Ballard offers a hint in the graffiti people leave on the giant. It includes humorous slogans and Nazi swastikas. The humor seems to signify the undermining of the seriousness of ancient classics, while the Nazi symbol seems to signify that such undermining and tampering lead to devastating war. Ballard seems to be using this to satirize the Second World War and covertly tell us what caused it. He seems to regard war as a consequence of modernity: it is modernity that inflates people’s faith in reason and makes them forget divine teachings and the humility of the ancients. Yet the film omits precisely this crucial swastika.
As the dismemberment continues, the giant’s head is cut off and taken away.12 Sawing it off means that he finally loses his principal human features. The lumps of flesh before us look more like a collection of soulless signs, and people will no longer remember what reverence is. The disappearance of the giant’s human features also foretells the imminent forgetting of his existence. We find that the changes in his appearance and his experience of dismemberment over time bear a startling resemblance to the experience of Western people across the long course of history. The original states directly that, as the body is lost and the dismembered giant’s faint remaining human features disappear, the spectators lose interest.13 The irony is precisely that people’s dismemberment and tampering make the giant lose more and more of his sublimity—and the dwarfs eventually forget the very result they themselves have brought about.
A few months later, when the narrator sees the giant again, it is in dismembered form. By now, people have forgotten that he ever existed. The story also stresses that even the fisherman who first claimed to have discovered him has now forgotten him: a memory of an enormous sea monster has taken his place.14 If we understand the giant as the soul of the ancients, we can understand why people forget his existence so quickly and distort their memories by substituting a whale. For this is exactly what modern people have done to the ancients. Today’s dwarfs do not believe in the greatness of the ancients, or that greatness ever existed. From the height of modern souls, they look down into the depths of ancient souls. Both film and story quietly reflect on technological rationality and scientism.
Through this analysis, we finally understand what the giant stands for: the great figures of antiquity and their great qualities, preserved in the great books of antiquity, books filled with divine wisdom. The entire film presents a battle between ancients and moderns. The dwarfs appear to have defeated the giant. Yet, as the narrator says at the end of the film, the giant has not died: he has come back to life and run toward the sea on his own. This means that he has abandoned the arrogant dwarfs. If the giant stands for the souls of the ancients, their classics, and their wisdom, this reading can find confirmation in Gulliver’s Travels, which in turn allows us to understand the giant’s image more deeply. The whole story of “The Drowned Giant,” it turns out, is a metaphor for that episode in intellectual history, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.
IV. Reading “The Drowned Giant” through Gulliver’s Travels
Our preceding analysis shows that Moby-Dick rules out reading the giant as a metaphor for a whale, while The Metamorphosis suggests that we should seek his metaphorical meaning in the spectators’ changing attitudes. Gulliver’s Travels, however, can guide us directly toward the meaning Ballard intended. The connection between Ballard and Swift can also be traced. “If your first introduction to Ballard is by way of, say, his short story ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964), then you might think you have stumbled on to a master magical realist in the Swiftian tradition.”15 Comparing “The Drowned Giant” with Gulliver’s Travels, we discover that the spectators’ changing attitudes are precisely the changes in people’s attitudes toward the ancients. This also shows that the spectators are the moderns—the dwarfs—while the giant represents the ancients and the classics they wrote.
Indeed, Plato’s Phaedrus had already suggested that differences in the quality of souls resemble the difference in height between adults and children.16 Thus, as early as Plato, differences in stature served as an analogy for superiority and inferiority of soul. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift develops this analogy directly into an allegorical tale. Reading Swift in the context of his time and his reasons for writing, one interpretation argues that Gulliver’s Travels represents his more searching reflection on the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns and deserves to be called the most profound work of political philosophy produced during that quarrel. The contrast between Lilliput and Brobdingnag is a contrast between modern democratic government and ancient monarchy.17 I do not expect to extract a comparison of ancient and modern political regimes from a short piece like “The Drowned Giant” and its screen adaptation. That would undoubtedly run an enormous risk of overinterpretation. Besides, compared with the rich plot and symbolism of Gulliver’s Travels, “The Drowned Giant” is too brief: even if its contents are given symbolic meaning, they cannot be extended directly into an analogy between two political regimes. Although it does not rise to the level of a comparison between regimes, “The Drowned Giant” certainly does compare ancients and moderns—specifically, two qualities of soul. Of course, according to Plato’s Republic, the quality of the soul determines the form of the regime, so such an extension is certainly permissible. Here, however, we would do best to keep our interpretation close to Ballard’s text and the film’s script.
The narrator goes to investigate the scene as a scientist. His monologue tells us that, initially, he and his companions do not believe the giant exists. They support their disbelief with a modern scientific explanation: this is merely an optical illusion. This skepticism about the giant’s existence takes the standpoint of modern science. From Swift’s Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, we know that the Moderns used scientific development to disparage the ancients as stupid. But the Ancients’ rejoinder tells us that, even if modern people stand above the ancients in science, they are not therefore nobler in art or character. Indeed, it is quite possible that, if we always approach the ancients through modern scientific thinking, we will fail to discover them or will doubt their very existence. The narrator and the visitors are all dwarfs; they will not acknowledge that giants exist or have ever existed in the world. Yet the appearance of the giant’s corpse shatters this scientific understanding.
At first, people watch from a distance, reluctant to approach. As they slowly draw closer, the force of the contrast between giant and dwarfs provokes an uproar among the spectators. This uproar expresses the change in the dwarfs’ state of mind when confronted with a giant. They climb onto him and grow noisier, while he remains silent throughout, retaining the dignified countenance of an ancient Greek. A contrast between giant and dwarfs is established here. The original goes on to describe a pool of water in the giant’s palm, like the residue of another world, now being disturbed by people climbing his arm. If we connect these clues from the narrator’s perspective and recall Swift’s metaphor of giants and dwarfs, Ballard is presenting two kinds of character: the noisy, frivolous modern and the ancient who retains his bearing. Modern people do not cherish their connection with the classical world; their disturbance of the pool suggests as much. That disturbance is the beginning of all the destruction that follows, until the giant is trampled, dismembered, and finally forgotten altogether. In the same passage, the narrator expresses a wish to find clues to the giant’s identity, but his swollen body extinguishes that hope. This is a metaphor for our growing distance from classical antiquity, to the point where we can no longer find the clues that would allow us to understand it. The narrator does not know who the giant is, yet repeatedly suggests that he has a Greek face. This is a way of saying that we are forgetting the Greeks’ greatness.
Compare the rhetoric used to describe the giant and the spectators: its distribution of praise and blame agrees with Swift’s. The giant’s skin has the color of pearls and a sweet, potent scent, while people swarm around him like flies. Some young men crawl in his nostrils, barking like mad dogs. His enduring silence and stillness also contrast with the crowd’s fleeting clamor.18 The film does the same. Besides repeatedly suggesting that his Greek face and physique resemble an epic hero’s, it describes the changed giant as “discreet” and “modest,” with an air of maturity sustained by privilege and comfort—“well-fed maturity.”19 The spectators, meanwhile, are described as copies and shown to be noisy and uncivilized. This is plainly a contrast between the characters of giant and dwarfs. They clearly suggest noble and base character. We can compare Swift’s rhetoric in The Battle of the Books. He first uses dogs fighting over prey to satirize Hobbes, a champion of the Moderns, and then tells a fable about a bee and a spider.20 The bee stands for the ancients and the spider for the moderns. Comparing the two works, we can see that Ballard is indeed using rhetoric to contrast the quality of ancient and modern souls.
After the police abandon their cordon, thousands of people come to the beach. At least two hundred stand or sit on the giant, and once again the dwarfs are described in derogatory terms. That afternoon, the police return and clear a path for a group of anatomists and marine biologists from the university. When the police offer to help them climb onto the palm, the specialists decline. After the specialists return to the shore, the crowd once more climbs over the giant; the image here is of gulls flocking around an enormous fish. The police and scholars appear and disappear from the incident as though merely going through the motions. This seems to indicate that neither the state authorities nor the scholars have any sense of a duty to protect the giant. The result is that the crowds are allowed to pour in and the dwarfs are left to trample and damage him. The scene seems to say that, if the state neglects moral formation and leaves the populace to its own devices, the result is the forgetting of greatness, leaving our own souls impoverished and arrogant.
The dwarfs are exceptionally noisy, clambering over the dead giant’s body. Clearly, it is they, not he, who appear lively. Yet the narrator says that the giant remains alive to him and has greater vitality than the dwarfs watching him. This vitality plainly refers to something else. If giants and dwarfs stand for ancient and modern character, then this vitality should mean the classics and eternal values. The narrator later says that, by the time he climbed onto the giant, the giant had begun to surrender to the system of time: decay awaited him. It was this ceaseless transformation, this life within visible death, that gave the narrator the courage to step onto him. Giant and dwarfs alike must eventually surrender to the system of time. There are at least two meanings here. First, although the traditional classics and noble spirit represented by the giant withstand the test of time better than modern people do, he cannot prevent shallow moderns from forgetting that he existed, nor guarantee that they will not misunderstand or tamper with the classics. Second, the giant is not a god but a living being with limits. If even he has bodily limits, how can the dwarfs be arrogant? The narrator says that the indignities inflicted on the giant’s body make him seem more human, and also more vulnerable. This vulnerability unleashes a torrent of pent-up malice, inciting the tiny creatures around him to ravage and devour his enormous bulk. This satirizes the dwarfs’ subsequent, further dismantling and tampering. The film shows them covering the giant with graffiti but does not show the Nazi swastika. The original does, and the graffiti on his body seems to be Ballard’s criticism of Nazism. Ballard must have understood that the evil of Nazism was to a great extent the evil of modernity. The Nazi symbol seems to suggest that the Second World War and the evils of modern people are the bitter consequences of tampering with and forgetting the ancients. Once the giant’s head is cut off, his identity becomes increasingly obscure. People are no longer interested in him. The earlier decisions of the police and scholars were wrong. The scholars’ proper duty should have been to recognize the giant’s value and rely on the power of the police to protect him, preserving him as a permanent memory for humanity.
When the giant reappears, he is in fragments. This signifies people’s taking fragments of the classics out of context, and closely resembles postmodern deconstruction of the classical tradition. More seriously, people have already forgotten the giant. Even when looking at his fragments, they stubbornly insist that these are parts of a whale. The dwarfs have deconstructed his legacy and forgotten him. “God is dead”: there is no longer room in their hearts for sublimity and greatness. The film’s alteration of the original ending is worth noting: the narrator says that the giant is still alive, gathering his scattered fragments and returning to the ocean. This seems to suggest that the giant is deeply disappointed by the dwarfs’ conduct. He has taken his thought away with him and, disappointed, left us.
If the images of “giants and dwarfs” symbolize similar things in Ballard and Swift, then Allan Bloom’s reading of Gulliver’s Travels would serve equally well as a comment on “The Drowned Giant” and as a conclusion to this essay. In the wording quoted by the Chinese article, translated here: “‘We are all dwarfs, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.’ This humble posture expresses far too much self-satisfaction. Do giants let us climb onto them so easily? Is it their function to carry dwarfs on their shoulders? Perhaps they were once kind and amiable, but now they have thrown us to the ground and slipped away, leaving us only the illusion of a broader view. The groundless assumption that we are intimate with the great will soon lead the younger generation to deny that there are any giants and conclude that the whole story is a lie invented by their teachers to exalt themselves. I think the giants would despise this little comedy and joke.”21