'Swift Is Playing a Double Game Here'

Lemuel Gulliver has settled happily in the Land of the Houyhnhnms after his encounter with the Yahoos, “brute[s] in human form” and one of Swift’s gifts to the language. The OED defines Yahoo in the modern sense as “a person lacking cultivation or sensibility, a philistine; a lout; a hooligan.” Gulliver tells us he has “settled my little economy to my own heart's content.” The Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, have given him a room of his own, “about six yards from the house,” like a stable. His material needs are met by his “master”: “I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy.” What follows is a grand catalogue worthy of Robert Burton: 

“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; 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.”

 

A reader might wonder, aren’t the Houyhnhnms the good guys, unlike the brutish Yahoos? Aren’t they rational? Isn’t their society well-ordered? Isn’t Gulliver happy among them? Don’t they practice eugenics for the betterment of their race? As Hugh Kenner reminds us in The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968): “[When Gulliver] finally sails away from Houyhnhnmland, Swift in a flight of imagination worthy of the proprietors of Buchenwald has him make the sails of his boat out of Yahoo skin: young and fresh Yahoo, because the old ones’ skins are too tough.” To rub it in, Kenner adds parenthetically, “(Swift is playing a double game here, as so often, but let it pass.)”

 

Swift said he wrote Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it.” It is a vexing book, one irreducible to simplistic “lessons.” For centuries it has been marketed to children, with varying degrees of Bowdlerization, as a rollicking tale of adventure with giants and talking animals. The figure to watch is not the Yahoo or Houyhnhnm but Gulliver, the Yahoo-like Houyhnhnm or Houyhnhnm-like Yahoo.

 

Swift published Gulliver’s Travels on this date, October 28, in 1726.

 

[See Guy Davenport’s drawing of Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms on the cover of the first edition of The Counterfeiters.]