Swift’s Paradox: Literary Genius and Controversial Views
Swift’s Vision of Society and Humanity
Alas, not even the genius of Swift was equal to producing a specimen by which we could judge the poetry of the Houyhnhnms. It sounds as though it were chilly stuff (in heroic couplets, presumably), and not seriously in conflict with the principles of ‘Reason’. Happiness is notoriously difficult to describe, and pictures of a just and well-ordered society are seldom either attractive or convincing. Most creators of ‘favorable’ Utopias, however, are concerned to show what life could be like if it were lived more fully. Swift advocates a simple refusal of life, justifying this by the claim that ‘Reason’ consists in thwarting your instincts.
The Houyhnhnms: A Bleak Utopia
The Houyhnhnms, creatures without a history, continue for generation after generation to live prudently, maintaining their population at exactly the same level, avoiding all passion, suffering from no diseases, meeting death indifferently, and training up their young in the same principles — and all for what? In order that the same process may continue indefinitely. The notions that life here and now is worth living, or that it could be made worth living, or that it must be sacrificed for some future good, are all absent. The dreary world of the Houyhnhnms was about as good a Utopia as Swift could construct, granting that he neither believed in a ‘next world’ nor could get any pleasure out of certain normal activities.
Swift’s Critique of Humanity and Political Aims
This Houyhnhnm society is not really set up as something desirable in itself, but as the justification for another attack on humanity. The aim, as usual, is to humiliate Man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous, and above all that he stinks. The ultimate motive, probably, is a kind of envy: the envy of the ghost for the living, of the man who knows he cannot be happy for the others who — so he fears — may be a little happier than himself. The political expression of such an outlook must be either reactionary or nihilistic, because the person who holds it will want to prevent society from developing in some direction in which his pessimism may be cheated. One can do this either by blowing everything to pieces or by averting social change. Swift ultimately blew everything to pieces in the only way that was feasible before the atomic bomb — that is, he went mad — but, as I have tried to show, his political aims were on the whole reactionary ones.
Admiration Versus Agreement: The Case of Swift
From what I have written, it may have seemed that I am against Swift, and that my object is to refute him and even to belittle him. In a political and moral sense, I am against him, so far as I understand him. Yet, curiously enough, he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of. I read it first when I was eight — one day short of eight, to be exact, for I stole and furtively read the copy which was to be given me next day on my eighth birthday — and I have certainly not read it less than half a dozen times since. Its fascination seems inexhaustible. If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them. This raises the question: what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions and enjoyment of his work?
Literary Merit and Authorial Beliefs
It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of subject matter, that a book cannot be ‘good’ if it expresses a palpably false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for instance, any book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less ‘progressive’ in tendency. This ignores the fact that throughout history a similar struggle between progress and reaction has been raging, and that the best books of any one age have always been written from several different viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others.
The Writer as Propagandist: Sincerity and Sanity
Insofar as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly. Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by:
- A Catholic
- A Communist
- A Fascist
- A Pacifist
- An Anarchist
- Perhaps an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative
However, one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite, or a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought. Beyond that, what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction.
Swift’s Enduring Vision and Gulliver’s Travels
Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a worldview which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.