To vex the world. Jonathan Swift’s Frustrated Humor
On the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s satire of his own society is remarkably relevant.
Jonathan Swift’s genius was to be understood by everyone. He was so insistent that his prose be plain enough for all readers that he once had his works read aloud to two servants. As each paragraph was read, he checked to see what they did and did not understand, and the work was edited until it was quite clear to the lads in livery. This care for the common reader made Swift one of those writers whom you will find quoted in everyday situations. When the Swift scholar Irvin Ehrenpreis was working in Dublin library, a young stack boy asked him who he was studying. “Ah yes,” said the boy on hearing Swift’s name, “burn everything English except their coals.”
Swift’s plainness became his greatest influence on later writers. T. S. Eliot once said the Drapier’s Letters were essential “to anyone who would be well-read in the literature of England.” Adam Smith certainly seems to have admired them. We know he rated Jonathan Swift among the best authors, and this line, taken from the first Letter, is sure to have influenced Smith:
… for my own Part, I am already resolved what to do; I have a pretty good Shop of Irish Stuffs and Silks, and instead of taking Mr WOOD’S bad Copper, I intende to Truck with my Neighbours the Butchers, and Bakers, and Brewers, and the rest…
That is Jonathan Swift in 1724. Adam Smith famously wrote in 1776 about our propensity to truck and barter, and of the butcher, brewer, and baker’s regard to their own self-interest. This little echo is characteristic of Swift’s great influence on those who followed him. It is the small source of a great river. Almost everyone knows some Swift. Most children have seen a picture, if not a film, of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Samuel Johnson, notoriously hostile to Swift (his great rival), said that once you had thought of the little people and the big people all the rest followed naturally. But this is not so.
The great pleasure of reading Swift is that his plainness is by no means simple. As the quotation chosen by that stack boy shows (taken from the 1720 pamphlet A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture), Swift was vicious in a good cause. He loved to let a sentence or paragraph unspool, like a fly making concentric circles above its landing place, before whipping down at the end with a snap. Consider the description of how Lilliputians order their writing on the page:
I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.
Swift is the master of a slow build-up and sudden turn of phrase that turns an innocent list into a vicious twist. The Travels is often discussed as a book of ideas, which it no doubt is, but it is also incredibly funny. The humor is essential to its moral organization.
The first book, the visit to the land of Lilliputian dwarves, is a sublime satire on the machinations of politics. Having worked in the British Parliament for two years, I find it screamingly funny – better than P. G. Wodehouse. Last year, I listened, as an experiment during a dismal train journey, to an audiobook version narrated by David Hyde Pierce (the actor who played Niles Crane in Frasier). Pierce gets the rhythms just right and I was helpless with laughter in Charing Cross Station. Swift benefits from being read aloud and will presumably continue to flourish in this new age of audio and video.
The political humor of the first book is remarkably relevant today. In Lilliput, Gulliver is visited by Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, who explains that the country is plagued by political partisanship. He tells Gulliver that “for about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves.” It is thought that the king favors the low heels, because “his majesty’s imperial heels are lower at least by a drurr than any of his court (drurr is a measure about the fourteenth part of an inch).”
The best is yet to come. The two parties are so at odds, they cannot even dine together. The high heels have more numbers, but the low heels have all the power. But this might change because the king’s son, the heir to the crown, has “one of his heels … higher than the other, which gives him a hobble in his gait.” The wife of the actual heir to the crown is known to have found this passage hilarious when the Travels were published. Reldresal goes on to relate the terrible religious civil wars Lilliput has experienced, all because of a dispute about whether an egg ought to be cracked at the big end or the little end. The real twist comes when we are told the religious text that inspires this dispute: “that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.”
In each of Gulliver’s first three voyages, this deceptive simplicity creates great pleasure. When the King of Lilliput’s palace catches fire, and Gulliver has the quick-thinking idea of urinating on it, we can conclude, as my old college tutor said, that Swift doesn’t mind pissing on the palace. But the humor becomes darker as we keep traveling. In Brobdingnag, the queen and her dwarf get a good deal of coarse enjoyment from bullying Gulliver (who is a dwarf to them). Several times, while the queen is diverted, Gulliver is in jeopardy. When, in the third voyage, he meets the wizards who can call up any shade of the dead at command, one of the requests Gulliver makes is political.
I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large Chamber, and a modern Representative in Counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an Assembly of Heroes and Demy-Gods, the other a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, and Bullies.
Now the comic twist at the end is unfunny. To call the English Parliament “a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, and Highwaymen” is good sport, and the sort of thing that modern so-called satirists still fill their days with. The final addition of “Bullies” has the same effect of bringing a twist to the list, but now it is a sharp turn away from humor. Swift jokes, but he really means it. In a poem written toward the end of his life, Swift says he “lashed the vice.” In passages like this, one chuckles along and then feels the lash at the end.
This is an inversion of the earlier pattern. In the first part of the Travels, what is serious becomes hilarious, whereas more and more in the third part, what is funny becomes grim. On arrival in Laputa, Gulliver observes the practice of flapping. The Laputans are so absorbed in their abstract speculations that unless a servant flaps them in the face with a bladder full of peas, “they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others.” There are many stories from history of the great men of ideas who are unable to complete basic tasks, like J. S. Mill being unable to flag a taxi or find a seat on a train without much dithering and worrying. Swift’s humor takes the Laputans to a great extreme of this comic trope.
And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel.
Kennel here means gutter and has the usual Swiftian effect – the humor builds slowly but unrelentingly toward that final image of the “intense speculator” being washed up in the gutter. But the joke cannot last long. Real human misery results from this sort of narrow inwardness. As he tours Laputa, Gulliver meets with a set of horrors.
Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevel, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic; those instructions they give being too refined for the intellects of their workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music.
And their worries about the heavens given them a perpetual anxiety.
These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minute’s peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us.
Swift mocks – but do we laugh? These worries mean the Laputans cannot sleep quietly nor “have any relish for the common pleasures” of life. The first thing they ask each other in the morning is about the sun’s health. They have a deeply irrational appetite for these speculations even though it keeps them in a state of angst. Swift writes: “This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear.” Again, this has the quality of a joke, but it is by now getting too dark for us to enjoy it in the same manner as the absurdities of Lilliput. When Gulliver descends from the flying island of Laputa to the town of Lagado below, conditions are truly miserable.
The next morning after my arrival, he took me in his chariot to see the town, which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. We passed through one of the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many labourers working…. I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want.
This is all drawn straight from the life of Ireland that Swift observed around him every day. The firm and common-sensical Christianity that lies just under all he writes was profoundly offended by the terrible human misery caused by England’s political domination of Ireland – the British government was like Laputa, hovering over its dominions, threatening to crush them, leaving the people starving, wild, and in rags. Swift is still lashing the vice, and it isn’t funny. His simple prose has become a means of indignation. The problem at hand isn’t complicated and requires no clever writing.
In the final voyage, to the land of the ultra-rational Houyhnhnms, this movement from laughter to horror is brought to a more vicious conclusion than anything else Swift wrote. He is famous today for the viciously satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal, in which, irate at Ireland being so compliant with English domination, and irked by his own exhortations having no effect, he advises people to eat their babies as a food substitute. A Modest Proposal is wickedly satirical, though there is a serious point being made that few can miss. But in the Travels, the satire gives way to the depiction of wickedness.
When Gulliver arrives in the Houyhnhnm country, he encounters the Yahoos, hairy, filthy creatures, part men, part monkey, who climb up in the trees and defecate all over him. They are base and vile, full of appetites and lacking reason. The Houyhnhnms, in contrast, are creatures of (supposed) pure reason, modeled on the tame horse in Socrates’s image of the soul in the Phaedrus. Gulliver is a gull for the idea that the Yahoos are despicable and the Houyhnhnms are ideal. He falls into a deep error of thinking that the Yahoos are inferior beings who are rightly enslaved. This happens because he knows himself to be something of a Yahoo. The Yahoos so resemble humans that one of them tries to sleep with Gulliver.
In his admiration for the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver loses all sense of morality. After he has lived among them for several years, Gulliver attends a “grand assembly” of the Houyhnhnms, at which they discuss “the only debate that ever happened in their country.” These supposedly rational beings have no word for lie, no concept of opinion, and never try to compel each other. And yet, “The question to be debated was, ‘whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?’”
The phrase “the face of the earth” echoes biblical references to genocide (Genesis 6:7: “I will destroy man who I have created from the face of the earth”) and the meaning here is unmistakable. Having enslaved the Yahoos, the rational Houyhnhnms also wish to exterminate them. Their rationality has led them to an extraordinary and vile hubris. Gulliver says, a few chapters earlier, that having seen the similarity between himself and the Yahoos, he came to lower his estimation of humankind as against the Houyhnhnms.
I must freely confess, that the many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human corruptions, 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.
No such reflection upon himself or the Houyhnhnms is made when he hears of their wish for genocide. Gulliver’s contribution is to suggest castrating the Yahoos rather than killing them outright. He becomes a willing participant in their enslavement and extermination.
I mentioned a custom we had of castrating Houyhnhnms when they were young, in order to render them tame; that the operation was easy and safe; that it was no shame to learn wisdom from brutes, as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, which besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put an end to the whole species, without destroying life.
We end the book feeling pity for Gulliver, rather than repulsion. He is mistaken, naive, irrational, and something of a fool. But at this moment, he is reprehensibly stupid. Swift, of course, speaks to us beyond Gulliver, satirizing the practices of his own society, and critiquing colonialism. What started as a joke has ended as an exhortation. Swift said he wrote the Travels to vex the world and, in his movement from hilarity to genocide, he has created a work of frustrated humor. The more we laugh to begin with, the sharper the turn at the end.
This piece was first published in Plough and is also available on PloughStack.
Fantastic, as ever. I’ve always thought Swift’s epitaph would make a good title for a documentary about him: ‘Savage Indignation’.
I was impressed by this a few days ago when I read it on PloughStack—and again after a 2nd reading. Thanks for your discussion of a text I love!