by Leo Damrosch
76. Struldbruggs, by Arthur Rackham.
Not just children have enjoyed the fantasy. Daniel Boone, of all people, used to read Gulliver’s Travels aloud to his companions over the campfire. One of them came back one day boasting that he had just killed two Brobdernags near their capitol, Lulbegrud. He meant two buffalo, and the names were his version of Brobdingnag and Lorbrulgrud. Lulbegrud Creek still appears on maps of Kentucky.28
SATIRE
A Tale of a Tub is a satire from beginning to end; Gulliver’s Travels is only intermittently satiric, and the satire seldom gets in the way of the story. Partly that’s because Swift was highly skilled at making his allusions unspecific enough to escape prosecution. In his final revision he took care to anticipate potential problems, writing to Pope from Quilca, “I have employed my time (besides ditching) in finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my Travels, in four parts complete newly augmented, and intended for the press when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave enough to venture his ears.” Prisoners at the pillory sometimes had their ears lopped off, as Pope pretended to believe had happened to Daniel Defoe: “Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe.”29
The prizes for Lilliputian politicians who win the competition in leaping and creeping are silken threads, either blue, red, or green. These were the colors of the Orders of the Garter, the Bath, and the Thistle. Sir Robert Walpole was intensely proud of holding the Garter, but the allusion is too general to be actionable. Nevertheless, Swift’s printer prudently changed the colors to purple, yellow, and white, and the correct ones weren’t restored until later editions.30
Now and then a more elaborate narrative serves as an allegory of current events. Lord Munodi, the old-fashioned landlord whose estate was despised for prospering so well, is ordered to demolish an excellent watermill and replace it with a new one halfway up a hill. The rationale for this is that “wind and air” will add energy to the water, and so will gravity when it comes back down, making it twice as powerful as the river below. But of course an elaborate pumping system is now required, and the project is a complete failure.
As he loved to do, Swift has thus translated abstractions into concrete embodiment. A likely interpretation is that the old mill is the English economy, driven by the natural flow of trade and agriculture. The new mill is the South Sea Company, using the artificial pump of stockjobbing, which is as empty as wind and air, so inevitably the whole thing collapses.31
Closer to home for Irish readers is the story in book 3 of the flying island from which the rulers of Lagado govern their land. Managed by a huge movable lodestone, it can rise, descend, and travel from side to side. The nobles up there are totally out of touch with the real world, devoting themselves to abstract mathematics, and so absent-minded that servants called “flappers” have to touch their mouths with hollow bladders to remind them when it’s time to speak. But there are totalitarian possibilities as well. If the populace rebels, the island hovers above them long enough to block both sun and rain, resulting in “dearth and diseases.” The ultimate sanction would be to come all the way down and crush them, but this the king is reluctant to do, since the city’s towers and an especially tall spire in the middle might shatter his island’s base.
In an unpublished passage, Swift identified “the second city in the kingdom” as Lindalino, an obvious allusion to Dublin, second city after London. Its inhabitants build tall towers in which they secretly install lodestones of their own, and they also prepare “a vast quantity of the most combustible fuel, hoping to burst therewith the adamantine bottom of the island, if the lodestone project should miscarry.” The island arrives and pelts the city with rocks, and when they refuse to plead for mercy, it does descend. But the descent begins to accelerate, and after lowering small bits of lodestone on strings and feeling them tugged from below, the government realizes the danger it’s in. There is now no alternative but “to give the town their own conditions.”32
The allegory is easy to decode. First, court patronage was withheld from Ireland; then, with the hail of rocks, moderate repression was tried; and finally, total retaliation was planned. But just as the island’s base might be fatally shattered, so the hard-won equilibrium of the British political system is at risk. The combustible fuel is the stream of incendiary pamphlets, the Drapier’s Letters above all, that stirred up popular resistance. And the high spire is St. Patrick’s Cathedral.33
Once again, the narrative is effective even if one has never heard of William Wood and his halfpence. Swift was always skeptical of the claims of science, especially when it wastes its time on useless experimentation. Researchers at the Academy of Lagado kill a dog by pumping air into its anus, make pigs root around in fields to save the expense of plowing (“they had little or no crop”), and breed sheep that grow no wool (hoping “in a reasonable time to propagate the breed of naked sheep all over the kingdom”).34 But the flying island is different: it’s prophetic of a threat to human existence. The mad scientist Frankenstein creates a monster that turns against him, and Winston Churchill, in his great “This was their finest hour” speech, warned against a new kind of tyranny “made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Swift’s care to avoid obvious attacks on individuals was rewarded. After Gulliver’s Travels came out, Pope and Gay wrote to say that “the politicians to a man agree that it is free from particular reflections, but that the satire on general societies of men is too severe.” Shortly afterward Pope added, “None that I hear of accuse it of particular reflections (I mean no persons of consequence or good judgment; the mob of critics, you know, are always desirous to apply satire to those that they envy for being above them).”35 With great skill, Swift had achieved a trenchant critique of current affairs that applies equally well to other times and places. This universal relevance is what keeps Gulliver’s Travels fresh and alive nearly three centuries after it was written.
“I HATE AND DETEST THAT ANIMAL CALLED MAN”
The extraordinary Fourth Voyage is the most disturbing thing Swift ever wrote. Set ashore by pirates, Gulliver encounters disgusting apelike creatures that “discharge their excrements” onto him from a tree, and then a pair of strangely thoughtful horses that display obvious intelligence. Soon, with his gift for languages, he is able to converse with them and their friends, and he learns that they call themselves Houyhnhnms. The name should be pronounced “whinnim,” with a suggestion of whinnying, as T. H. White explains: “Swift used a ‘hou’ for the huffing part, and a Y for the squealy part, and the N’s and M’s are the part in the nose, Houyhnhnm. It is what a horse says.”36
The Houyhnhnms are coolly rational, so much so that they can’t understand the concept of lying and refer to it as “saying the thing which is not.” They can make no sense at all of Gulliver’s descriptions of money and lawsuits and warfare. For them, reason is a simple apprehension of reality, not the pretentious cleverness that humans call reason. They know nothing of metal or boats, don’t practice agriculture, and haven’t invented the wheel. Their oats grow naturally without needing to be cultivated, and they are pulled around on wheelless sledges by Yahoos—Swift invented the word—who serve them as beasts of burden. Illustrators always have trouble with the Houyhnhnms. Drawn naturalistically, they just look like ordinary horses, but when shown behaving in a civilized manner they seem faintly absurd. Willy Pogany’s Yahoos, however, are unusually well imagined.
77. Yahoos pulling a Houyhnhnm, by Willy Pogany.
The land of the Houyhnhnms—they don’t even give it a name—is a utopia, which means “nowhere” in Greek. That term has gotten so debased that many people think it just means a really nice place. More properly, it means the opposite of everything we know, a standard to measure our inadequacies against. Thomas More was a hero of Swift’s for standing up to Henry VIII and for his intelligence and wit, and More’s Utopia (along with Plato’s Republic) lies directly behind Swift’s Houyh
nhnms. A historian calls Utopia “the saddest of fairy tales—an indictment of humanity almost as terrible as Gulliver’s Travels.”37
One of Swift’s brilliant catalogues, toward the end of the book, pours out a torrent of disgust at the way human beings behave. Long as the list is, one gets the impression it could have been much longer:
I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion. I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression; here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire. Here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders or followers of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics [workmen]; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing masters.38
As Swift loved to do, he has made respectable professions alternate with the grossest crimes, as if there were no real difference.
The Houyhnhnms resemble the ancient Stoics, who sought to live according to nature, whatever that means, and according to reason. But if imaginary horses can live like that, real-life humans can’t. Swift wrote, fifteen years earlier, “The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”39
From a human point of view, there’s a lot that the Houyhnhnms lack. They have no sense of humor, which for Swift was a lifesaving gift. They have no religion, which might seem strange in a book by a clergyman, but the idea seems to be that with no experience of sin, they don’t need it. It’s not true, however, as is sometimes claimed, that they have no emotions. They just don’t have destructive ones. When Gulliver is ordered to sail away, “I often heard the sorrel nag (who always loved me) crying out Hnuy illa nyha, maiah Yahoo, Take care of thyself, gentle Yahoo.”40
The one thing the Houyhnhnms do hate is the Yahoos, their beasts of burden, who are incorrigibly vicious. For Gulliver it’s a horrifying moment of truth when he realizes that under their hairy pelts the Yahoos are shockingly similar to himself. One day he wants to cool off in a river, so with his friend the sorrel nag on guard, he takes off his clothes.
It happened that a young female Yahoo, standing behind a bank, saw the whole proceeding, and inflamed by desire, as the nag and I conjectured, came running with all speed and leaped into the water within five yards of the place where I bathed. I was never in my life so terribly frighted; the nag was grazing at some distance, not suspecting any harm. She embraced me after a most fulsome manner; I roared as loud as I could, and the nag came galloping towards me, whereupon she quitted her grasp with the utmost reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the time I was putting on my clothes.
The conclusion seems inescapable. “I could no longer deny that I was a real Yahoo in every limb and feature, since the females had a natural propensity to me as one of their own species. Neither was the hair of this brute of a red colour (which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular), but black as a sloe, and her countenance did not make an appearance altogether so hideous as the rest of the kind, for I think she could not be above eleven years old.” Is it conceivable that this reflects Swift’s anxiety about being sexually attracted to Stella as a girl? We know by his own report that her hair was “blacker than a raven.” The point about red hair is that it was considered ugly and also associated with lecherousness. There’s a curious “but” in a description of an acquaintance in the Journal to Stella: “The girl is handsome, and has good sense, but red hair.”41
Even if physical resemblance were dismissed as irrelevant, the affinities go far deeper than that. We really are Yahoos, it turns out, because we share their strongest passions. They fight over possessions even when there’s plenty to go around, they hoard “shining stones of several colours” and steal them from each other, they fawn on a leader who condescends to let his followers lick his rear end, and they “discharge their excrements” on anyone who loses favor with him. “But how far this might be applicable to our courts and favourites and ministers of state, my master said I could best determine.” It would have amused Swift to learn the term yahoo is used frequently in Dublin today, “often without consciousness of its Swiftian source, to mean a graceless and ill-mannered fellow.”42 Not just in Dublin, either.
The Yahoos aren’t fully human, of course, and none of them could ever be called “gentle” as Gulliver is, but that’s the point. Just as we have degenerated from Adam and Eve, so they have degenerated even further, showing what our worst tendencies would be if nothing held them in check. They are brutes, but brutes that tell us something about ourselves, and Gulliver is jolted out of his complacency. It might seem shocking that the Houyhnhnms castrate Yahoos and that Gulliver fashions his boat out of Yahoo skins. But the Houyhnhnms are shocked that we castrate horses, and until we stop wearing leather jackets and shoes we are in no position to feel superior.
From the beginning, some readers complained that Swift’s account of the Yahoos was a libel on human nature. “In painting Yahoos,” Orrery said sententiously, “he becomes one himself.” A century later Thackeray offered a wildly abusive impression of the author who could think them up: “a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind—tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.” That was in a book called The English Humorists.43
Other readers were less hostile, especially if they noticed that the Yahoos embody the traditional symbolism of original sin. Quoting Gulliver’s description of the cruelty of European warfare, John Wesley commented, “Is it not astonishing beyond expression that this is the naked truth? that within a short term of years, this has been the real case in almost every part of even the Christian world? And meanwhile we gravely talk of the ‘dignity of our nature’ in its present state!”44 Wesley was writing just as the Seven Years’ War, soon to be the target of Voltaire’s Candide, was getting under way.
For a long time after Swift’s death, the dementia of his final years was misinterpreted as insanity. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus has a lurid vision as he walks on the beach where Swift used to ride: “The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled.”45
More recently, it has been suggested that if anyone goes crazy, it’s Gulliver. He is so eager to emulate the Houyhnhnms that he starts trotting like them. When they tell him he has to leave, for fear that he may inspire the Yahoos to rebel, he does so with solemn respect:
I took a second leave of my master; but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth. I am not ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. Detractors are pleased to think it improbable that so illustrious a person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior as I. Neither have I forgot how apt some travelers are to boast of extraordinary favours they have received. But if these censurers were better acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the Houyhnhnms, they would soon change their opinion.46
This has been thought ridiculous, but is it any more so than kissing the hand
of a king or the slipper of a pope? Swift has his joke about travelers’ boastfulness, but the real target is our disposition to grovel before people in high places.
At the end of the story, Gulliver is revolted by human beings, even though a kindly Portuguese captain rescues him at sea. He can’t endure the smell of his own family when he gets home, and spends his days communing with his horses in the stable. There is no doubt that the experience of Houyhnhnmland has gravely disenchanted Gulliver. It amused Pope to imagine his wife’s distress:
Where sleeps my Gulliver? O tell me where?
The neighbours answer, “With the sorrel mare.”47
Whether or not Gulliver is comically unhinged, the challenge to our complacency remains. As he was finishing the book, Swift wrote to Pope:
I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards individuals. For instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counselor such a one, and Judge such a one; for so with physicians (I will not speak of my own trade), soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years (but do not tell), and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials towards a treatise 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 in Timon’s manner), the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so clear that it will admit of little dispute; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the point.48