55.1.mackie

Gulliver and the Houyhnhnm Good Life

Erin Mackie

The Eighteenth Century, Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 109-115(Article)

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The Eighteenth Century, vol. 55, no. 1 Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

Gulliver and the Houyhnhnm Good Life

Erin MackieSyracuse University

Lauren Berlant challenges us “to reimagine state/society relations” so that “consumer forms of collectivity [are] not the main way” we “secure or fantasize securing everyday happiness.”1 We need to do this in order to halt the dynamic Berlant calls “cruel optimism” produced by our ongoing engagement in fanta-sies of the good life becoming increasingly implausible within the precarious conditions of late modern neoliberalism: “The fantasies that are fraying include, particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy.”2 For, even those who resist the corrosive conditions of “state/capital,” Berlant observes, most often fail to “protest themselves”— that is, to critically examine their own investments in the fantasies attached to the socio- political and economic conditions they protest.3 This failure can lead to exhaustion, feelings of incompetence and shame, and what Berlant calls the “worst” of shame’s “compensations,” its conversion into xenophobia.4 Any reimagining of the good life, then, seems predicated on this critical resistance to our own affective and imaginary investments. We must protest ourselves.

The twentieth- century fantasy of the good life that Berlant identifies here is rooted in the notion of transformational progress which has driven moder-nity since the seventeenth century. Like upward mobility and the “rise of the middle class,” notions of personal equality and affective intimacy develop in the eighteenth century, along with fantasies of a state and an economy support-ive of individual well- being. Berlant remarks the “fraying” of these fantasies in our late modernity, but these fantasies have ever been critically unraveled. No eighteenth- century writer more insistently and more effectively picked apart the premises and promises of modernity than Jonathan Swift.5 Reading Swift alongside Berlant helps to underscore her skepticism about these fantasies and the conditions that allowed their promises to seem attractive and plausible in the first place.6 Reading Berlant alongside Swift reanimates the urgency with which we confront his revelations.

Swift, poet of the unbearable, does not so much ask that question posed by

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Berlant as engineer the conditions of its fulfillment: “Can we bear to withdraw our consent to the forms that have pacified us?”7 As we accompany Swift in his imaginative evacuation of the promises of modernity, we witness the spectacle not simply of their collapse but of ourselves naked and at a loss without them. We do not know which way to turn; we call this an impasse. There is no place to turn; we call Swift a nihilist. A struggle with what may seem the perverse posing of impossible alternatives in Swift sharpens awareness of the difficulties of Berlant’s challenge.

A confrontation with Swiftian impasse exposes the tenacious obstacle in the concept of the alternative itself: how can any alternative be authorized outside the limits of the conditions of its conceptualization, that is, as truly alternative?8 Problems with alternatives open into the quandary of “optimism.” A degree of optimism about alternatives seems necessary both to pose and to accept the challenge of securing for the future a more viable notion of the good life. Yet optimism about the efficacy of projects of personal and social “improvement” is an affective disposition integral with the ideology of progress and the “upward mobility” characteristic of the now- tattered fantasy of the good life.9

Can we truly protest ourselves? Can a progressive project for the reformula-tion of an alternative good life secure us from the miseries of cruel optimism? Is there an optimism that isn’t cruel? Is there a happiness that eludes the con-dition defined by Swift’s Modern Author in A Tale of a Tub (1704): “a perpetual possession of being well deceived.”10 These are issues raised by Berlant’s recent work and they are those confronted by that epigone of modern progress and mobility, Gulliver, in the fourth book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

In the course of this final voyage, Gulliver encounters true happiness twice within two versions of the good life. The first is that of private domesticity, the second that of the rational utopia he encounters in Houyhnhnm Land. His movement between these is driven by a fantasy of upward mobility, first conceived in the familiar materialist terms of wealth and self- advancement and then displaced onto a moral ideal— becoming perfectly rational like the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver’s attachment to his Houyhnhnm ideal, a kind of ex-treme form of upward mobility into another species identity, operates much like the cruel optimism described by Berlant. That is, his devotion to his fantasy of Houyhnhnm good life does not produce but rather prevents actual happi-ness and, rather than facilitate reciprocity and relation, shuts him off from all in pathological misanthropy and misery.

Between the third and fourth voyages, Gulliver spends an unprecedented amount of time with his family: “I continued at home with my Wife and Chil-dren about Five Months in a very happy Condition, if I could have learned the Lesson of knowing when I was well.”11 The retrospective regret at happiness lost before it was recognized echoes that expressed by Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe after his first disastrous voyage: “Had I now had the Sense to have gone back to Hull, and have gone home, I had been happy.”12 Instead, driven by “those


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aspiring Thoughts which have since so completed my Ruin,” Crusoe goes out again and embarks on the course that ends in shipwrecked isolation.13 Like Crusoe, Gulliver is pestered by the itch of aspiration. offered the more lucra-tive and powerful position of captain, rather than as a mere surgeon, in a “stout Merchant- man of 350 Tuns,” Gulliver is seduced away from his home and fam-ily and happiness (187). Yet, in its original temporal dimension, this happy domesticity does not exist experientially. Gulliver, his sights set outward and upward, cannot see his happiness at home. Its value is released only by its loss in a future where the fantasy that occluded it has been dashed. Swift scholar Frank Boyle remarks on what this sentence says about happiness and the good life: “Is the ‘happy [human] Condition’ necessarily a part of a contrary- to- reality statement . . . ? Will the conditional that describes the path to human happiness ever be distinguishable from a description of the path not taken?”14

While Crusoe’s ruin is redeemed in Defoe’s narrative of the fortunate fall, Gulliver’s is only compounded in the cycle of negation that structures Book 4. For, once Crusoe’s “ruin” is “complete,” it is reversed. He and his narrative are converted: Crusoe confirms his salvation in the Lord, establishes absolute sover-eignty over his island, and is delivered safely home to a windfall fortune. Rather than disappointed, Crusoe’s pursuit of upward mobility is redoubled, achieved both materially and spiritually. In contrast, rejected by the Houyhnhnms, his relation to the good life ever more frustrated, fanatical, and fantastic, incapable of reentering human life, Gulliver returns home: “My Wife and Family received me with great Surprize and Joy . . . but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt” (244). So while Defoe’s narrative subscribes to progressive ideology correctively enhancing its terms to encompass spiritual alongside material achievement, Swift’s resolutely refuses it through a kind of redoubled critique that negatively mirrors the structure of Defoe’s affirmation. Gulliver can neither achieve his Houyhnhnm good life nor recapture the happiness he never knew he had enjoyed at home.15

The fantasies of wealth and power, so magically achieved in Crusoe, are re-lentlessly unraveled as Gulliver gives, over the course of several months, an ac-count to his Houyhnhnm master of the state of England, its place in the political geography of Europe, the causes of war, and the mechanisms of rule. Here, as in his discussions with the King of Brobdingnag in Book 2, Gulliver naively lays bare the social and cultural degradation, political corruption, brutality, squa-lor, waste, and sheer human misery that swarm forth from that ethical morass which Swift identified with modern Europe: shameless indulgence of luxury, vanity, and pride; economically, politically, and socially sanctioned devotion to blind and unbridled self- interest; the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power by the individual, the party, the corporation, and the state. Yet, whereas in Book 2 Gulliver survives the chronicle of shame he narrates with his nationalism and ethnocentrism pretty well intact, in Book 4 the palpable contrast between the world he describes and the conditions he finds in Houyhnhnm Land radi-



cally dislocates his identity and objectives: “I must freely confess, that the many Virtues of those excellent Quadrupeds placed in opposite View to human Cor-ruptions, had so far opened my Eyes and enlarged my Understanding, that I began to view the Actions and Passions of Man in a very different Light, and to think the Honour of my own Kind not worth managing” (217–18). Among the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver’s fantasy of the (early) modern good life unravels; renouncing it, Gulliver sets himself on a higher path: “I contracted such a Love and Veneration for the Inhabitants, that I entered on a firm Resolution never to return to human Kind, but to pass the rest of my Life among these admirable Houyhnhnms in the Contemplation and Practice of every Virtue” (218).

And so in Houyhnhnm Land Gulliver abides, at least for a moment, in a sec-ond scene of happiness, confident in his discovery of an alternative good life. But in a manner that recalls the negation of happiness of the book’s opening, his participation in the Houyhnhnm good life is announced and terminated in a single breath: “In the midst of all this Happiness, and when I looked upon myself to be fully settled for Life, my Master sent for me . . . [to] command me to swim back to the Place from whence I came” (235). The first happiness, with which the book opens, is experienced only as a lost potential— in Boyle’s words “the road not taken.” This second Houyhnhnm happiness is obviated as a kind of unreality— as unreal for Houyhnhnms as it is for humans— and so conforms to that other state of negation named by Boyle: “Is the ‘happy [human] Condi-tion’ necessarily a part of a contrary- to- reality statement?”16 Gulliver, at least, has come to believe that such is the case; he abandons all hope of being happy as a human. Yet, try as he might, he can’t shake his humanness. Confirming his very human capacity for mimicry and misrepresentation, Gulliver seeks to secure his happiness in a mode that not only denies the possibility of human happiness but at the same time is clownishly contrary to the Houyhnhnm real-ity he would access: “By conversing with the Houyhnhnms . . . I fell to imitate their Gait and Gesture . . . and my Friends often tell me in a blunt way, that I trot like a Horse” (235). Gulliver thus becomes the thing which is not, a living breathing falsehood; the Houyhnhnms have no word for this in their language and no place for it in their land.

Living in the pristine simplicity of an agricultural subsistence economy, with their devotion to truth, admirable system of education, “Temperance, Industry, Exercise, and Cleanliness” (227), rational schemes of planned parenthood, and nurturing of “Friendship and Benevolence” (226), the Houyhnhnms cultivate a life outside of all consumer forms and one in which reciprocity flourishes abun-dantly, if only among their own kind.17 So, I understand the Houyhnhnm good life as good indeed for the Houyhnhnms, and as a critical foil to the destructive and delusional good life fantasies pursued in Gulliver’s and Swift’s world, but as one that is clearly not good for Gulliver or any human.18

The problems that vex Gulliver’s relation to Houyhnhnm happiness are pro-found. First, Gulliver’s attachment to the Houyhnhnm ideal does not evade



the ethical taint of his pride or the socio- cultural determinants of his aspiration for upward mobility; it rather displaces these onto different objects. Nowhere is Gulliver more proud than in the final chapter of Book 4 where he autho-rizes his own conversion and his own reformist mission: “I write for the no-blest End, to inform and instruct Mankind, over whom I may, without Breach of Modesty, pretend to some Superiority from the Advantages I received by conversing so long among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms” (247). Next, as Michael McKeon notes, the Houyhnhnm ideal is a moral and communi-tarian ideal, thus it stands as a rebuke to the materialistic good life based on wealth and self- advancement, yet Gulliver’s emulation of it is chiefly material-ist, corporeal, and bleakly solipsistic.19 Finally, even as he strives most strenu-ously for Houyhnhnm- hood, Gulliver confirms his affinity with the Yahoos by his revulsion from them. The Yahoos, we learn from the Houyhnhnm master, “were known to hate one another more than they did any different Species of Animals; and the Reason usually assigned was, the odiousness of their own Shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in themselves” (219). But after he is compared side by side with a Yahoo and then sexually importuned by a Yahoo female, Gulliver is stripped of the security of separateness: “I could no longer deny, that I was a real Yahoo” (225). Gulliver’s hatred grows not because he cannot see Yahoo odiousness in himself but because he can.

So, the rationale assigned by Gulliver’s master for the inordinate Yahoo- Yahoo hatred seems mistaken; or perhaps it is the only one available to the less ethically and psychologically perplexed Houyhnhnms; or perhaps, and this is the reading I favor, it applies only to Yahoos and not to humans, like Gulliver, who merely imagine that they are Yahoos. In any case, in Gulliver’s self- loathing and shame Swift reveals an actual source of ethnic hatred.20 Iden-tified as that in himself which most threatens his access to the Houyhnhnm good life, Yahoo nature is reviled utterly and his participation in it is a source of mortifying shame for Gulliver: “When I happened to behold the reflection of my own Form in a Lake or a Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own person” (234–35).

In his abject fear and loathing of the Yahoos, Gulliver’s fidelity to the good life expresses itself in ways recalled by Berlant’s discussion of the “ready- to- hand fear formations” among some groups— like the Tea Partiers— who re-spond in destructive ways to the realization that their access to the good life is narrowing sharply. Rightly recognizing that the fantasies of “upward mo-bility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” are “fraying,” such vulnerable groups, Berlant posits, internalize the failure to achieve these goods as “shame” which converts outward: “The shame of being seen in one’s incompetence to life produces many compensations. The worst of them is in the conversion of shame into all the raging xenophobias we see in a variety of monocultural movements.”21



Banished by the Houyhnhnms, “in Horror and detestation” of himself, of Yahoos, of all humans, Gulliver clings to the fantasy of the Houyhnhnm good life against all odds and, most ironically, against all reason. Here he stands as an extreme example of those cited by Berlant who protest the circumstances that impede access to the good life, but fail to “protest themselves.” Berlant, supported by admirable social, ethical, and political rationales, is emphatically more sanguine than Swift (and few are not) about the possibility of the alter-native, of an optimism that is not cruel. Yet the spectacle of Gulliver riding roughshod over his own humanity, whinnying and trotting his course toward the Houyhnhnm good life, registers in vividly embodied form the fearsome force of the fantasies whose effects Berlant examines. Swift’s narrative moves through a cycle of failures which, while it forecloses the idea of human happi-ness, insists, as does Berlant’s analysis, on the disastrous effects of not heeding the ethical imperative to protest ourselves.

NoTES

1. Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, and Lauren Berlant, “Affect & the Politics of Auster-ity: An Interview Exchange with Lauren Berlant,” Variant 39/40 (Winter 2010): 3–6, 5.

2. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, 2011), 3.3. Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant, 3.4. Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant, 6.5. See, for example, Frank Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and its Satirist (Stanford,

2000); Clement Hawes, The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (New York, 2005), 139–68, and “Introduction: Gulliver’s Travels: Colonial Modernity Satirized” and “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse,” in Jonathan Swift: “Gulliver’s Travels” and Other Writings, ed. Hawes (Boston, 2004), 2–31 and 438–501; and Erin Mackie, “The Culture Market, The Marriage Market, and the Exchange of Language: Swift and the Progress of Desire,” in Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism, ed. Brian A. Con-nery and Kirk Combe (New York, 1995), 173–92, and “Swift and Mimetic Sickness,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 359–73.

6. Berlant admonishes us to acknowledge the limits and conditions of the very good life whose loss we may protest: “the good life model introduced after the war was already a sacrificial model, with softer shadows of longing and shame hovering around aspira-tions to normative positions of enjoyment, and just with softer landings than what we now confront” (Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant, 6).

7. Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant, 6.8. Granted, Berlant can be understood to urge us to construct new notions of the good life

more appropriate to the actual conditions in which we find ourselves; perhaps then our op-timism would not be so cruelly disappointed. Thus the new notion of the good life would be an alternative to the now obsolete one rather than to the existent conditions of its emergence. Yet, given the inhospitable and precarious nature of these conditions, the sense, or hope, in Berlant is that any notion of “everyday happiness” would qualify as an alternative to them.

9. Part and parcel of the modern notion of the good life, projects for improvement pro-liferated in the eighteenth century. Such projects, as in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), and the ideology of progress which animates them are persistent targets of Swift’s satire. In Swift the pursuit of modern “progress” always reverts to ruin.

10. Swift, “A Tale of a Tub” and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (ox-ford, 1986), 1–103, 83.



11. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels [1726], ed. Albert J. Rivero, Norton Critical Edition (New York, 2002), 187. Subsequent citations will appear in the text.

12. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe [1719], ed. J. Donald Crowley (oxford, 1972), 14.13. Defoe, 17.14. Boyle, 46n5.15. Michael McKeon comments on this contrast between Defoe’s and Swift’s repre-

sentation of their protagonists’ aspirations: “both men are engaged in postconversion projects of ‘improvement’; but whereas [Crusoe] is permitted by his author to project English society upon his island with impunity and to introject a divinity that sanctions his desires, Gulliver’s ethnocentric attempts to find an ideal England abroad are consis-tently frustrated, and the Houyhnhnms absolutely resist introjection” (The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 [Baltimore, 1987], 351).

16. Boyle, 46n5.17. on reciprocity and consumer forms, see Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant.18. Debate about the status of the Houyhnhnms as a positive ethical ideal in Swift’s

satire emerged with its publication and is ongoing. For a useful critical overview, see Christopher Fox, “A Critical History of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Jonathan Swift, “Gulliver’s Travels”: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston, 1995), 269–304. For the classic mid- twentieth- century summation of the issues and stakes of this debate, see James L. Clifford, “Gulliver’s Fourth Voyage: ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Schools of Interpretation,” Quick Springs of Sense: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Larry S. Chapman (Athens, Ga., 1974), 33–49.

19. McKeon, 355.20. The nature of the Yahoos is almost as widely discussed and disputed as that of the

Houyhnhnms. However, that their composition draws on stereotypes, especially African and Irish, in which the human and the bestial are indeterminate is generally accepted. See Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 2001), 221–66, and Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, 2010), 27–64; and Philip Armstrong, What Ani-mals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York, 2008), 5–98.

21. Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant, 4.


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