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 Mackie
Syracuse 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 shames 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 identies 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 rst 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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110 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Berlant as engineer the conditions of its fulllment: Can we bear to withdraw
our consent to the forms that have pacied 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 difculties
of Berlants 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 efcacy 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 isnt cruel? Is there a happiness that eludes the con-
dition dened by Swifts Modern Author in A Tale of a Tub (1704): a perpetual
possession of being well deceived.
10
These are issues raised by Berlants recent
work and they are those confronted by that epigone of modern progress and
mobility, Gulliver, in the fourth book of Swifts Gullivers Travels (1726).
In the course of this nal voyage, Gulliver encounters true happiness twice
within two versions of the good life. The rst 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, rst
conceived in the familiar materialist terms of wealth and self- advancement
and then displaced onto a moral ideal becoming perfectly rational like the
Houyhnhnms. Gullivers 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 Defoes Crusoe
after his rst 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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MACKIEGULLIVER AND THE HOUYHNHNM GOOD LIFE 111
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 Crusoes ruin is redeemed in Defoes narrative of the fortunate fall,
Gullivers is only compounded in the cycle of negation that structures Book 4.
For, once Crusoes ruin is complete, it is reversed. He and his narrative are
converted: Crusoe conrms his salvation in the Lord, establishes absolute sover-
eignty over his island, and is delivered safely home to a windfall fortune. Rather
than disappointed, Crusoes 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
lled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt (244). So while Defoes
narrative subscribes to progressive ideology correctively enhancing its terms to
encompass spiritual alongside material achievement, Swifts resolutely refuses
it through a kind of redoubled critique that negatively mirrors the structure of
Defoes afrmation. 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 identied 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 nds in Houyhnhnm Land radi-
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112 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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 (21718). Among
the Houyhnhnms, Gullivers 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 rm 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, condent in his discovery of an alternative good life.
But in a manner that recalls the negation of happiness of the books 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 rst happiness, with
which the book opens, is experienced only as a lost potential in Boyles 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 cant shake his humanness. Conrming
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 ourishes 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 Gullivers and Swifts world, but
as one that is clearly not good for Gulliver or any human.
18

The problems that vex Gullivers relation to Houyhnhnm happiness are pro-
found. First, Gullivers attachment to the Houyhnhnm ideal does not evade
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MACKIEGULLIVER AND THE HOUYHNHNM GOOD LIFE 113
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 nal 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 Gullivers emulation of it is chiey material-
ist, corporeal, and bleakly solipsistic.
19
Finally, even as he strives most strenu-
ously for Houyhnhnm- hood, Gulliver conrms his afnity 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). Gullivers hatred grows not because
he cannot see Yahoo odiousness in himself but because he can.
So, the rationale assigned by Gullivers 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 Gullivers
self- loathing and shame Swift reveals an actual source of ethnic hatred.
20
Iden-
tied 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 reection
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 (23435).
In his abject fear and loathing of the Yahoos, Gullivers delity to the good
life expresses itself in ways recalled by Berlants 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 ones 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

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114 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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. Swifts narrative moves
through a cycle of failures which, while it forecloses the idea of human happi-
ness, insists, as does Berlants 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): 36, 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),
13968, and Introduction: Gullivers Travels: Colonial Modernity Satirized and Three
Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse, in Jonathan Swift: Gullivers
Travels and Other Writings, ed. Hawes (Boston, 2004), 231 and 438501; 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), 17392, and Swift and Mimetic Sickness, The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 35973.
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 sacricial 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 nd 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 Swifts A Modest Proposal
(1729), and the ideology of progress which animates them are persistent targets of Swifts
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), 1103, 83.
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MACKIEGULLIVER AND THE HOUYHNHNM GOOD LIFE 115
11. Swift, Gullivers 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 Defoes and Swifts 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, Gullivers ethnocentric attempts to nd an ideal England abroad are consis-
tently frustrated, and the Houyhnhnms absolutely resist introjection (The Origins of the
English Novel, 16001740 [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 Swifts
satire emerged with its publication and is ongoing. For a useful critical overview, see
Christopher Fox, A Critical History of Gullivers Travels, in Jonathan Swift, Gullivers
Travels: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston, 1995), 269304. For the classic
mid- twentieth- century summation of the issues and stakes of this debate, see James L.
Clifford, Gullivers Fourth Voyage: Hard and Soft Schools of Interpretation, Quick
Springs of Sense: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Larry S. Chapman (Athens, Ga.,
1974), 3349.
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), 22166, and Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals
in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, 2010), 2764; and Philip Armstrong, What Ani-
mals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York, 2008), 598.
21. Helms, Vishmidt, and Berlant, 4.
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