Glubbdubdrib #10/27

First of all, what a great name for an island. Seriously; Swift must have had a lot of fun coming up with the names for some of the places in this book.

But anyway, I found the events that take place on Glubbdubdrib fascinating. Gulliver stays at the island for a time when he is waiting at Maldonada for a ship to take him to Luggnagg. He is entertained by the Governor for the duration of his stay talking to the ghosts of dead people, who the Governor can conjure up for the duration of 24 hours. I thought it was interesting that one of the first things Gulliver does the first time he is allowed to conjure up the spirits of his choosing to converse with, is to ask to see the ghosts of people who had killed tyrants. First he asks to see Caesar and Brutus (Brutus was one of the main conspirators responsible for Caesar’s assassination). When Gulliver sees Brutus, he is “struck with a profound veneration at the sight” (181) and describes his many virtues. Even Caesar, who is dead because of Brutus, tells Gulliver that nothing he himself had done was as great as what Brutus had done in having him killed.

Gulliver’s admiration for people who kill tyrants is made even more apparent in the next paragraph, where he gives the reader a summary of how he spent the rest of that day and what ghosts he had the Governor conjure up for him: “I chiefly fed my eyes with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers of liberty to oppressed and injured nations” (181). As I was reading this account of Gulliver’s first day of talking to spirits, I wondered why he put such an emphasis on this aspect of history, when he could have chosen to talk to literally anyone he wanted to. If Swift’s opinions can be assumed to be the same as Gulliver’s, it seems to me that this was an important issue for Swift. And in light of what we have been talking about in class and given Gulliver’s (and Swift’s?) apparent love of people who get rid of tyrants, I wonder what Swift would have thought of the American Revolution, had he lived to see it. #10/27

The Dark Side of Rationality in Houyhnhnm Society

In the fourth and final book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver finds himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of horses blessed with the gifts of speech and perfect rationality. After living amongst the Houyhnhnms for an extended period of time, Gulliver begins to deeply admire them for their “general disposition to all virtues” (482). Gulliver explains that the Houyhnhnms “have no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational creature; so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it” (482-483).

Like Enlightenment thinkers of his day, Gulliver views reason and rationality as essential virtues to be perpetually sought after. In such a view, the Houyhnhnms would seem like an ideal race; however, this rosy picture quickly becomes complicated by certain sinister undertones in Gulliver’s narration of life in the country of the Houyhnhnms. At one point in the text, Gulliver explains that Houyhnhnms do not understand the meaning of the word “opinion.” Because they are perfectly rational, they all come to the same conclusions given the same knowledge, and therefore, “controversies, wranglings, disputes, and positiveness in false or dubious propositions, are evils unknown among the Houyhnhnms” (483). While they see this as a positive thing, one must question what it means to live in a society with no dissenting opinions. Is this the result of absolute rationality, or of absolute conformity and oppression?

The sinister effects of such intellectual cohesiveness begin to come to light when Gulliver relates the story of the first debate to ever occur in the Houyhnhnm Grand Assembly. The question at hand was “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the Earth” (485). While the term “genocide” would not be coined for another two centuries, the Houyhnhnms are essentially debating (quite rationally) whether or not to commit genocide, without any seeming moral considerations.

Such an abuse of rational thought may be Swift’s attempt to give warning to Enlightenment thinkers of the day. While rationality is something to be desired in the decision-making thought process, absolute rationality without human sentiments, like emotion, altruism, and morality, can lead to dangerous calculations. #10/27