Swiftian Reality and Houyhnhnm Reason

The 1927 edition of Samuel Butler’s anti-utopian tract Erewhon includes a critique serving as an introduction by Lewis Mumford. The critique contains an outline of Butler’s satirical targets, namely Darwinism and religious orthodoxy, as well as a scathing comment from Mumford on the very nature of utopian literature: “Utopias are usually written by people without humor; for an attempt to describe perfection must ignore all the shortcomings and perversions of the ideal, which are the ironic commentary of life upon its own effort to transcend its animal limitations”(Mumford xxi). In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the obtuse character of Lemuel Gulliver seems to fit Mumford’s description of utopian authors perfectly. Setting up the text as a travel narrative, Swift invites his readers to interact with a narrator and cultures that embody the limitations of Western culture, particularly the limitless promises of reason and progress in the Eighteenth-century.

Swift’s narrator, Gulliver, is unable to acknowledge the irony of a supposedly virtuous race of horses, Houyhnhnms, whose society is based on rigid segregation of breeds and species. By ignoring the limitations of Houyhnhnm culture such as their lack of written texts and static technology, Gulliver instead chooses to focus on negative aspects of British and/or Western society, thus producing a false-template for perfection on which he measures his own people. Gulliver’s idealism also impedes his ability to question the quality of a civilization built upon the ideal of reason, but unable to acknowledge even the possibility of mendacious speech and thought. By placing the reader beside Gulliver as he experiences the world of the Houyhnhnm, Swift is able to demonstrate the absurdity of a world where virtue and vice are genetically separate and lampoon the very ideals of the Age of Enlightenment.

As a native of England, Gulliver resides within the cradle of the Enlightenment – an emerging republic where monarchy had been replaced by suffrage and an acknowledgement of equality. Like the citizens of Gulliver’s (and Swift’s) England, Houyhnhnms are focused on ways in which reason can improve all aspects of life, all the time ignoring the unreasonable segregation of breeds. In Chapter 8, Gulliver relates details of Houyhnhnm society including their emphasis on coat color and how this determines which Houyhnhnms will marry (Swift 1270). Gulliver notes that couples “pass their lives…without jealousy, fondness, quarreling, or discontent”(Swift 1270), outlining a marital institution where reason, the center of Houyhnhnm philosophy, has replaced passion and maybe even love. By observing an animal that seems genetically devoid of emotion, Gulliver has unwittingly encountered a world in which reason is separate from desire. The Houyhnhnm are purely reasonable, while the inferior species, the Yahoo, are purely instinctive as focused on pleasure and passion.

Unlike the Houyhnhnm, Yahoos only consume food that is not their own, reproduce, and frighten Gulliver. They do not compose poetry or exercise their young, and they are only partially useful as a source of slave-labor. Yahoo nature is the exact opposite of the always reasonable Houyhnhnm nature, and completely lacking in any of the values of reason espoused by the opposite race, just as the Houyhnhnm race is completely lacking in any of the Dionysian impulsiveness of the Yahoos. This genetic separation of philosophies leads to a genocidal proposal by the Houyhnhnm leadership. Gulliver is invited to attend a “grand debate”; the debated question being “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the earth”(Swift 1271). It is here that Swift once again attacks the Enlightenment ideal, that reason can be separated permanently from the passions. By proposing to “exterminate” the Yahoo, the Houyhnhnm have in effect proposed to eliminate desire, sexuality, and want – emotions that often define reason.

Gulliver’s observance and subsequent praise of the Houyhnhnm assembly and debate lie in stark contrast to his own scathing critiques of the British legal system. Instead of acknowledging the logical limitations of Houyhnhnm culture, such as their lack of literacy and relatively primitive technology, Gulliver has unknowingly created a false-paradigm between British and Western institutions and the stunted constructs of a society where reason impedes progress. During his description of the British court system, Gulliver characterizes lawyers as individuals who “are bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white”(Swift 1258). Judges are described as “old or lazy and having been biased all their lives against truth and equity”(Swift 1258), and Gulliver further claims that the entire system seems created only to deprive innocent men of property, his example being a cow.

By doing so, Gulliver has made the mistake of comparing Eighteenth-century England with a land populated by a species who believe that either a Houyhnhnm or a Yahoo are born into their caste with no hope of social mobility. Gulliver seems clueless as to the true function of a legal system in a republic such as Great Britain. He seems unable to understand that attorneys must practice law as a necessity to protect ownership rights, a concept not present in Houyhnhnm culture. A legal system can and should be the product of a society where progress has enabled the development of a middle class, or property owners not connected to nobility. In Houyhnhnm culture, however, lawyers are not necessary as there is no hope for social mobility, as class is determined by genetics. This aspect of the horse society may be a satire of the Enlightenment’s failure to address the continued reliance on feudal systems of land ownership and even slavery, but this over-reliance on reason can also be viewed as the natural byproduct of separating the reasonable (Houyhnhnms) from the irrational (Yahoos), an impossibility when dealing with mankind, instead of horses.

Utilizing Gulliver as the reader’s guide or host within Houyhnhnm culture is useful as it allows Swift to emphasize the aforementioned “shortcomings and perversions of the ideal”, and further satirize the concept of utopia. Early in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift introduces the fact that these highly intelligent horses are unable to contemplate the idea of falsity or dishonesty. Gulliver engages in “frequent discourses” with his Houyhnhnm master in which he has “has occasion to talk of lying, and false representation”(Swift 1252). Gulliver’s “master” “has much difficulty” with the concept of mendacity and further explains that for Houyhnhnms “the use of speech was to make us understand one another” and that by lying “these ends were defeated”(Swift 1252). Gulliver’s master cannot begin to understand why man would want anyone to believe that “a thing” is black when it is actually white (Swift 1252).

Again, through this discourse with his Houyhnhnm master, Gulliver has unwittingly emphasized the limits of a society whose very speech patterns are based around the notion that reason and virtue are to be constantly acknowledged and expected. Gulliver is once again used as Swift’s person “without humor”, unable to understand that if one accepts reason as a desirable quality, then reason should have a purpose, to counter mendacity and the unreasonable side of humanity. Houyhnhnms seem unable to understand that without distrust virtue cannot exist merely for its own sake. The Enlightenment sought to combine the philosophies of ancient Greece with the logic of Newton, creating the possibility of a world where reason and virtue can help propel a civilization towards utopia with momentum generated by the energy of truth and nature.

Swift wanted his readers to understand that Gulliver’s lack of humor was a product of his naïve nature, a nature that Swift recognized in the utopian visionaries influenced by Enlightenment thought. Democracy is surely a result of reason and honest deliberation, but virtue and the natural energy of the universe are not the singular necessities of a thriving culture.

Houyhnhnms are unaware that evil may lurk in the heart of even the most reasonable of creatures. They believe that a Yahoo must be evil, as he lives outside of reason. They do not understand their own “animal limitations” and “shortcomings”, or inability to progress beyond a system where black is always black. The land of the Houyhnhnm is not a utopia, as suggested by Gulliver, but instead a totalitarian society where tyranny is enforced through an unquestioned worship of reason. Swift recognized the despotic potential for Enlightenment thought, as he recognized that human nature is much more complex than reason and the unreasonable, or Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. The author understood that in order to isolate virtue, deviancy must be eliminated, and in order to establish perfection, progress must be halted.


Works Cited

Mumford, Lewis. Introduction. Erewhon and Erewhon Revisted: Samuel Butler. New York: The Modern Library, 1927. XIX-XXVII.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Masters of British Literature: Vol. A. Ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson, Longman, 2008. 1241-1287.