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Jonathan Swift • Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels Lecture 1.2 à We are examining “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,” the fourth and final part of the picaresque prose tale Gulliver’s Travels (1726; amended 1735) by the Irish Anglican (Episcopal) priest and philosophe Jonathan Swift (1667-1749). Swift also used the following as the work’s title: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. à Quick review of picaresque genre (experienced also in Voltaire’s Candide): tale of protagonist who, influenced by one or more preceptors, travels from place to place, experiencing a series of didactic episodes. à A critical literary template for Gulliver’s Travels was the 1516 book Utopia (“no place”), written in Latin by the English Renaissance humanist and politician Thomas More. Utopia imagines an ideal New World island society. Each of the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels is divided into chapters; Part Four has twelve chapters. Essentially, Part Four posits an island nation (near Tasmania, southern Australia) ruled by a rational, stoic, and ingenuous (i.e. unaffected; naturally innocent) horse-people. à In effect, Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels assesses and satirizes the Enlightenment’s privileging of rationality and reason. Some Biographical Details about Swift à Author, most famously, of the first-person, fantasy travelogue Gulliver’s Travels and the satirical political polemic A Modest Proposal, Swift is fondly remembered in his native Ireland as “the Dean” — a reference to his service as dean or chief priest-administrator of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, the so-called national cathedral of the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Anglican (Episcopal) church, a Protestant denomination. A minority of Ireland’s population is Protestant. For years, a portrait of Swift featured on Ireland’s ten-punt note (similar to our ten-dollar bill). à Swift’s life is a study in hyphenated or hybrid identity, a phenomenon familiar to many Americans. At a time of religious tension in the “three kingdoms” of England-Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (which had the same monarch and would later become the United Kingdom), Swift was born in majority-Catholic Ireland to immigrant parents: an English Protestant couple. Thus, his identity was Anglo-Irish. He received undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), then Ireland’s only university (and open only to Episcopalians). à In 1689, Swift secured a job in England as private secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat whose home (Moor Park) featured an extensive library. Temple’s writings about language and diverse global cultures influenced Swift, and we can identify both concerns in Gulliver’s Travels. As regards language: In his treatise A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), Swift argued for the establishment of a regulatory authority to oversee the English language, then increasingly becoming a global means of communication. à In Gulliver’s Travels, a bay (reddish-brown) horse “trie[s]” or tests the title character’s linguistic ability by means of a hard-to-pronounce word, which Gulliver manages both to speak and to “[reduce] … to the English orthography [spelling system].” Based on a horse’s neigh, the word is the noun/substantive that names the horse-people who dominate Part Four of the text: Houyhnhnm. Reputedly, it means “nature’s perfection.” Although fundamentally rational, the horses have neither a writing system nor books; arguably, 1 the text implies that the Houyhnhnms’ language is that spoken by Adam and Eve in the prelapsarian (“before-the-Fall”) Garden of Eden. à While working for William Temple, Swift took some time off to be ordained a Church of Ireland (Anglican/Episcopal) priest in Ireland, and later he would lobby for that institution before the monarch, Queen Anne. However, up to 1713, the year he turned 46, the adult Swift based himself primarily (although not exclusively) at Moore Park and other venues in England. à In 1704, after Temple’s death, Swift published, anonymously, a volume containing several works that underscored his (Swift’s) talent as a satirical author, able to voice an unreliable narrator. Of particular note are: A Tale of a Tub (which takes aim at several Christian denominations); and The Battle of the Books (which uses an Ancient bee and a Modern spider to comment on tensions between old and new forces in intellectual life). à Among other activities, Swift contributed to The Tatler (precursor of The Spectator), a pioneering literary and society journal. Two of his Tatler poems — “A Description of the Morning”; “A Description of a City Shower” — interrogate urban life, a key dimension of the modern human experience. à Politically, Swift aligned himself with conservatism, producing propaganda for England’s principal conservative party, the Tories, and against its leading liberal party, the Whigs. à Swift hoped that his work for the Tories would yield a prestigious church appointment in England; however, that outcome did not transpire, for anti-Irish racism has historically been high in England. The English often derided Irishmen as “Paddies,” portraying them in cartoons as simian (i.e. looking and acting like monkeys or apes). The coterie known as Yahoos in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels is based on this simianization. à In a poem, “The Author upon Himself,” Swift specifically blamed Queen Anne his failure to gain a high-profile ecclesiastical position in England. Swift’s Irish Career à Swift’s political service did secure his receipt of the deanship of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the working- class Liberties of inner-city Dublin, a neighborhood characterized by severe poverty, which resulted in physical- and mental-health challenges for residents. à While Swift was reluctant to return to live in Ireland, he did roll up his sleeves when there, writing polemical pamphlets that pushed for industrial and agricultural development and less government regulation by the British colonial authorities. Important examples among these pamphlets are A Proposal for the Use of Irish Manufactures (1720) and A Short View of the State of Ireland (1728). à The latter text points out the irony of Ireland’s having a depressed farming sector given “the fruitfulness of the [Irish] soil to produce the necessaries and conveniences of life,” not just “for the inhabitants, but [also] for exportation into other countries.” It also insists that the Irish should be “governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free People” à Swift’s relationship to Ireland is perhaps comparable to how certain GS students had UGA as their first- choice school. In their hearts, they’d prefer the bulldog as their mascot, but nonetheless they wear the blue- white-gold GS colors and cheer for the Eagles. à Swift gained renowned across Ireland when his polemics, known as Drapier's Letters (1724-1725), pushed for economic reform through the fictional voice of a draper, posited as an honest, upright Irish tradesman, struggling to maintain a small business in the face of government taxation and regulations. In a later work, The Legion Club (1736), Swift took aim not at the English but rather at the Irish establishment — specifically, the Dublin-based Irish parliament — which he deemed corrupt. à Swift’s most famous economic pamphlet is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden (published in 1729, three years after Gulliver’s Travels debuted). Deploying the satirical conceit of breeding children for (domestic and export) food, that work’s aim is to 2 criticize how England’s colonial fettering of the Irish economy had resulted in famine after famine, despite the country’s having manifest potential for significant agricultural and industrial productivity. The breeding regime would be one male to every four women. à A Modest Proposal includes such over-the-top assertions as the following: “A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.” Also: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.” à Around 1714, along with some of their friends, Swift and Alexander Pope (an English Catholic Neo-Augustan poet) formed the Tory or conservative-leaning Scriblerus Club, which facilitated the production of highly consequential satirical writing. In time, Swift and Pope would collaborate on Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, by Alexander Pope, Esquire, and Dean Swift. à Although he never married, Swift had complicated relationships with two women: Esther (“Stella”) Johnson — alongside whom he is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin — and Hester or Esther (“Vanessa”) Vanhomrigh. Some critics have labeled Swift’s writings misogynistic (anti-woman); and there is little doubt that certain passages in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels suggest high female libidos, as if women are more governed by the Passions — and less by Reason — than men. However, as discussed later in this lecture, with respect to gender-equality, the horse-people operate a progressive educational system. à In anticipation of his death (which occurred in1749), Swift mandated that a considerable portion of his fortune be used to establish the still-extant St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, which serves the mentally ill. (Swift himself suffered from senility in his old age.) The epitaph he authored for display in the Dublin cathedral where he ministered characterizes him (in Latin) as “Champion of Liberty.” à Over the centuries, Swift’s literary reputation has been mixed.

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