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(Swift [1726] 1967, 315)
Gulliver s Travels does not just present a voice of pure reason that has
fallen into corruption, it also displays the tyranny of believing in pure
reason in the first place. To believe in a power of reason that is nothing
other than the capacity to question and free oneself from imposed
doctrines is to create a mythical site of original and uncontaminated
purity; all impure or contaminated forces must then be attributed to
reason s other. It is because the Houyhnhnms have no word for evil that
82 BEYOND IRONY AND SUBJECTIVITY
they must posit another body, the Yahoos, whom they use to refer to all
negative, evil and irrational qualities.
Gulliver s Travels is more than a satire on the tyrannical purity of
reason and its inherent xenophobia. Swift s ironic style precludes the
satire from having a distinct and locatable object. For most of the
narrative, Gulliver faithfully repeats the ideals of his former English
home in such a way as to unwittingly disclose their contradictions:
There are some laws and customs in this Empire very peculiar, and if
they were not so directly contrary to those of my own dear country, I
should be tempted to say a little in their justification (Swift [1726]
1967, 94). We may say that the irony lies both in Gulliver s sincere, but
self-betraying, repetition of English humanism, and in his wondrous
descriptions of all those foreign practices that are more intense versions
of the absurd rationalism he has left behind. But beyond the satirical
content, the absurd depictions of science, literalism, politics, vanity and
the human tendency to take one s own self as the measure of all things,
the style of Gulliver s Travels also displays the violence, risks and
tyranny of language and description. This is not just a satire that
belittles human nature; the voice itself is a display of that nature.
Gulliver is never outside or distinct from the follies he describes; either
the descriptions he gives are self-betraying or the absurdities he views
in other lands are allegorical doubles of his own culture. Gulliver is self-
betraying when his attempt to explain the glories of gunpowder to the
king of Brobdingnag is met with horror, a horror which Gulliver s
homeland, and Gulliver, tellingly lacks. Any broadminded reason would
be able to calculate the efficiency of such means of violence. This is a
form of irony that has no sense of the meaning of what it is saying. The
voice of Gulliver is presented as blind to its own violence:
A strange effect of narrow principles and short views! That a Prince
possessed of every quality which procures veneration, love, and
esteem; of strong parts, great wisdom and profound learning,
endued with admirable talents for government, and almost adored
by his subjects, should from a nice unnecessary scruple, whereof
in Europe we have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into
his hands, that would have made him absolute master of the lives,
liberties, and the fortunes of his people.
(Swift [1726] 1967, 175)
BEYOND IRONY AND SUBJECTIVITY 83
The object is not just England, nor Europe, nor the tendencies of human
nature, but also a tendency of speech itself. For there are other passages
where Gulliver, well before he meets the Houyhnhnms, praises a purely
literal language which, like gunpowder and the later plans for Yahoo
extermination, would eliminate distortion, ambiguity, conflict and
dissent: Their style is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid, for
they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary words, or using
various expressions (Swift [1726] 1967, 177). It would seem, then, that
if we read Gulliver ironically, as an object of derision, his commitment
to abstractions and transcendentals would place him laughably below
the literal Brobdingnagians, whom Gulliver at this stage sees as
impoverished precisely because they only have the discourses of
morality, history, poetry and (useful) mathematics; they lack
abstractions:
The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in
morality, history, poetry and mathematics, wherein they must be
allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what
may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture and all
mechanical arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And
as to ideas, entities, abstractions and transcendentals, I could
never drive the least conception into their heads.
(Swift [1726] 1967, 176)
It would seem, if we take Gulliver s commitment to abstractions as the
object of irony, that Swift s narrative would place a positive value upon
a pure masculine language. Much of Gulliver s Travels does, indeed,
lampoon the absurd and overly speculative projects of redundant
science and unfounded theories and suggests that learning and language
need to be recalled to life and the body. Most of the irony is in the
service of satire, attacking any elevated notions of humanity or reason
that have supposedly liberated themselves from desire. But the irony is
far more complex than this. The elimination of ambiguity and useless
language, or the commitment to complete literalism is both absurdly
impossible and contradictory. The attempt to eliminate the body or
physicality of language to speak the world itself only multiplies the
number of objects or bodies required for communication. Gulliver
describes the absurd projects of the people of Lagado who try to reduce
language to mathematical formulae or dispense with language
84 BEYOND IRONY AND SUBJECTIVITY
altogether. But Gulliver s very description exposes the inherent irony of
language. For it is the very nature of language as sign to be at once a
physical body and a sense other than that body. A pure language would
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