Naïveté, Insanity, and the Temptations of Misanthropy

Gulliver’s letter to the editor

Gulliver hanging out with his main peeps. (Sorry about the pun.)

Dear reader,

As we begin our Swiftian reading challenge, I am re-posting a piece from last year in a slightly revised version. I had few subscribers at the time, so most of you have not seen it. In any case, it seems a good place to begin our reading, with the letter that opens Gulliver’s Travels. Next week, we will delve a bit into Swift’s life, as well as the first part of GT.

Yours,

John

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Why do human beings behave so badly? How should we respond to such behavior in ourselves and others? How can we thrive in a political climate that often seems to reward bad behavior and to punish virtue? While these seem like questions that are particularly apt in the twenty-first century, Jonathan Swift was asking them three-hundred years ago. And he may have some answers for us—if we read him carefully.

Swift is a lot closer to us in sensibility than chronology would suggest. While some scholars of postmodernism seem to think that self-conscious, ironic intertexuality was invented in the twentieth century by the likes of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, the briefest survey of literary history will quickly reveal this to be nonsense. We see it in Dante; we see it in what Chaucer does with Dante in The House of Fame; we see it in Tristram Shandy; we see it in Don Quixote, from the faux-autobiographical prologue through the funhouse-mirror self-reflexiveness of Volume Two—the book’s own presence within its fictive narrative. Take that, postmodernists. Cervantes is your daddy.

But if you want the clearest, most outrageous example of such ironic self-consciousness, look no further than Gulliver’s letter to his cousin Sympson in the 1735 edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. But as with all self-reflexive and allusive texts, we need a bit of context to understand why it is so remarkable and provocative.

When Gulliver’s Travels first dropped in 1726, it was a sensation; not only was the fanciful narrative irresistible, but it also touched a nerve (or many nerves) with its political, religious, and social satire. If you read the head note on the text in the Norton Anthology, you will learn that it was originally published anonymously, but this deemphasizes the playfulness of its publication, since it was presented as the authentic travelogue of Lemuel Gulliver and gave no suggestion that any other “author” was involved. Travelogues had been popular for a century and more, because they served up (mostly) real-life adventures that a (mostly) insular reading population could experience vicariously. Of course, most readers who were not children understood the fictitiousness of Gulliver’s Travels, and soon its actual authorship became an open secret.

The title page of the first edition of 1726. Note that Swift’s name does not appear, but Gulliver is the purported author.

Despite the success of the book, however, Swift was unhappy with early printings, in which the publishers had stripped the text of much of its satirical bite for fear of political reprisals. So in 1735, he set about publishing a corrected, more or less complete version of the text, which remains the basis for modern editions. But instead of including a traditional “author’s note” to explain the reasoning behind the new edition, he instead composed a letter by Gulliver himself to his “publisher,” his cousin Sympson, as well as a reply by Sympson explaining the reasons for his original cuts.

From the 1735 edition. Note that the title page states that “In this impression, several errors in the London and Dublin editions are corrected.”

Of course, if you have read Gulliver’s Travels, you know that by the end of part four, Gulliver’s misanthropy has metastasized into insanity, as he disdains all yahoos (humans), stuffs his nose with herbs so that he doesn’t smell human odor, walks and talks like a houyhnhnm (a horse), and spends hours each day in conversation with the two horses in his stable. The letter makes it clear that in the intervening years Gulliver has further isolated himself as he has become afraid that he will once again slip into human behavior, and he now avoids his own family and socializes almost exclusively with the “two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because, from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues, without any mixture of vice.”

If you have not read Gulliver’s Travels before, and you begin with this letter, then you have no idea what the hell is going on. What is a houyhnhnm? Why does he call people yahoos? Why is he spending all of his time talking to horses? Why should I read this book, which was written by someone who was clearly insane?

Sympson’s letter from “The Publisher to the Reader” only exacerbates the confusion, especially since he insists on Gulliver’s reputed honesty:

There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbors at Redriff, when anyone affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it.

But then Sympson goes on to explain the reasons for his earlier cuts: if he had not freely edited the manuscript, then the book would have been unreadably long and boring. He was “resolved to fit the work as much as possible to the general capacity of readers.”

What are we to make of all of this confusion? The answer lies in that self-conscious irony, and we may get a hint from Gulliver’s most extraordinary complaint of all: that the publication of his book, which from his perspective has so clearly demonstrated the corrupt nature of humanity, did not immediately result in the wholesale reform of society:

I cannot learn that my book hath produced one single effect according to my intentions; I desired you would let me know by a letter, when party and faction were extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common sense; and Smithfield blazing with pyramids of law books; the young nobility’s education entirely changed; the physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in virtue, honor, truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgraces of the press in prose and verse, condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink. These, and a thousand other reformations, I firmly counted upon by your own encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the precepts delivered in my book. And, it must be owned that seven months were a sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject . . .

In this passage, as is the case throughout the Travels, Gulliver is not Swift—and yet he sort of is Swift at the same time. The book revels in this doubleness. Clearly, Swift thought many of the aspects of society that Gulliver complains about were corrupt, and he was often accused of and even admitted to a kind of misanthropy. And yet, unlike his fictional double Gulliver, Swift never succumbed to complete and utter hatred of all humanity—which must inevitably lead to self-loathing and insanity. Why not?

The reason that Swift never followed Gulliver down this particular path of madness lies in the essential difference between them: he lacks Gulliver’s naïve idealism. Swift famously insisted that humanity should not be described as a rational animal, but rather as an animal capable of reason (animal rationis capax). Gulliver, on the other hand, is enough of an idealist, at least at first, that he thinks that humanity is reasonable and will reform if someone simply points out all of the problems. But as we all know, that way madness indeed lies—in the explosion of idealism and, ultimately, misanthropy. When society does not change after the publication of his book, Gulliver concludes that yahoos must not be capable of reason (or virtue) after all. He is done with people—all people, entirely.

But we still haven’t gotten to Swift’s implicit answers to our initial questions. If simply pointing out the problems doesn’t help, then how are we to respond to horrific human behavior? Must we despair? Must we simply despise people? Must we isolate ourselves and speak to no one but our pets? Or is there some third path available to us? To get at these difficult questions, we are going to have to read more deeply into the narrative of Gulliver’s Travels itself, which we will be doing over the next few weeks. I hope that you will join this wild ride.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Vitali Adutskevich on Unsplash