The rôle of the Horses in “A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms”

THE ROLE OF THE HORSES IN "A VOYAGE TO THE HOUYHNHNMS" CONRAD SUITS I It is no longer the fashion in critical circles to believe that Swift was insane when he wrote the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels. Thanks to the acute insight of a number of our contemporaries, we are now invited to see that Gulliver himself was the mad party.' As a consequence we are to regard Gulliver as ridiculous, a figure of fun. This conclusion derives from the premise, if Swift were not mad, Gulliver must have been, because only a madman could have held such a low opinion of human beings as that developed in the fourth book. A number of present-day commentators on Swift would then, in a word, have someOne mad, for such deep-dyed misanthropy is the same thing as madness.' BaSing an argument on an alternative proposition can, however, be dangerous. In the present instance the critics have overlooked a third possibility, namely, that their own brains have undergone an unlucky shake, that in them fancy has got astride of reason and that consequently COmmon understanding, as well as common sense, has been kicked out of doors. It will be One of the purposes of this paper to suggest that Gulliver was not mad and therefore not a comic figure; rather that he made valid inferences about human nature from the evidence before him and so was as sane as his creator, or as you or I for that matter. I do not make this attempt on the principle that an ounce of my own wit is worth a ton of anyone else's, but on the grounds of the evidence and of what I conceive to be the nature of satire, neither of which considerations has anything novel about it. No one has suggested that Gulliver is a madman upon his arrival in Houyhnhnm Land. It is evident that when he encounters the horses for the first time he quite naturally assumes that they are simply of a superior breed and that the human inhabitants of the country consequently must be proportionately superior to any other human beings.' Gulliver has not been in this strange land for an hour when he is placed side by side with a Yahoo and is struck with the physical similarity between himself and the "abominable animal": Volume XXXIV, Number 2, January, 1965 THE HORSES IN (fA VOYAGE TO THE HOUYHNHNMS" 119 My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abominable animal a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed was Bat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth wide. But these differences are common to all savage nations.... The forefeet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails, the coarseness and brownness of the palms, and the hairiness on the backs. There was the same resemb1ance between our feet, with the same differences, which I knew very well, though the horses did not, because of my shoes and stockings; the same in every part of our bodies, except as to hairiness and colour ... [IV, i; italics mine]. The differences between them are triRing. It is true, to be sure, that the master Houyhnhnm, although he concludes that Gulliver "must be a perfect Yahoo,'" is perplexed by the physical differences between Gulliver and his own Yahoos: ... he said it was plain I must be a perfect Yahoo; but that I differed very much from the rest of my species, in the softness and whiteness and smoothness of my skin, my want of hair in several parts of my body, the shape and shortness of my claws behind and before, and my affectation of walking continually on my two hinder feet [IV, iii]. Furthermore, the report is spread abroad "of a wonderful Yahoo, that could speak like a Houyhnhnm, and seemed in his words and actions to discover some glimmerings of reason" (IV, iii). The point is that the Houyhnhnms themselves, not Gulliver, first observe these distinctions, sO that surely it is too early to say that Gulliver's wits have been upset by his "exaggerated...