Horse-like beings.

A detailed Summary of Horse-like beings.

In Book Four of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the protagonist Gulliver goes to visit a strange land in which the ruling class is composed of a race of intelligent horse-like beings, known as Houyhnhnms. The casual reader of Swift, who has approached Gulliver's Travels under the assumption that it is nothing more than a children's book, will doubtless view this as an amusing episode of fantasy, and read nothing more into it. However, Gulliver's Travels was never intended as a children's book in the first place; Swift wrote it as a satire on the British society of his day. And seen in this light, we can see the society of the Houyhnhnms as a satire on rationalism, the intellectual movement that had taken the early eighteenth century by storm.

To begin with, what is rationalism? J.A. Cuddon defines it as, "The theory or doctrine that human reason can provide a priori knowledge without intermediary sense data; the theory or doctrine that reason can pursue and attain truth for its own sake" (769). Cuddon further points out that, "The eighteenth century is referred to as a period of rationalism" (769). What this means is that during Swift's lifetime, people were coming to conclude that revealed knowledge as in, "such and such i

The Houyhnhnms favorite action seems to be the composition of poetry and the discussion of politics and philosophy, which not coincidentally were the favorite activities of eighteenth-century rationalists. Swift notes that the Houyhnhnms poetry, "excel [s] all other mortals; wherein the justness of their similes and the minuteness, as well as the exactitude of their descriptions, are indeed inimitable" (321). But this is not really what good poetry is, despite Gulliver's assertions to the contrary. The eighteenth century, most scholars feel today, produced rather uninspired poetry, precisely because it was so technically correct. Because poetry was so important to the Houyhnhnms, and also to the intelligentsia of Swift's own day, a few observations should be made about literary technique in the eighteenth century. Literature of this period tended to be very elegant and aristocratic, copying French manners and attitudes. Depending upon the type of literature being written, it also could be satirical or witty, and Swift himself was a master at satire. Audiences admired classic form and ease as exhibited in French literature of the period, and serious poets carefully cultivated a style that would achieve the maximum of clarity, precision, energy, and rationalism. Writers of this era disdained as "vulgar" the Elizabethan taste for wild imagination and outpourings of passion, preferring logic, conformity, and propriety -- what came to be called "Taste." J.B. Priestly explains this phenomena: "Though a general reading public came into existence and rapidly increased during this period. Most successful authors depended upon royal or aristocratic patronage, were members of this ruling society if only on humble and insecure terms, or if still outside it were determined to please it. So with Reason, "the triumph of consciousness, came taste, not private but public, concerned with what reasonable cultivated persons could enjoy together" (55). Thus what could be written and published was necessarily limited to what could be read aloud in the politest of company. The gentle reader might not agree with the satire of Swift, for example, but he need not fear it would offend his grandmother's delicate ears. Nothing, Priestly notes, "could be less suitable [to the eighteenth century sensibility] than the kind of poetry that is like a secret whispered by the poet to the reader" (56). It is not too surprising, then, that while Swift's era produced an abundance of scintillating wit, it produced not a single inspiring poet. This is not to say that poetry was not written and published during this period, for it was. But it ultimately fails as poetry. Priestly explains that "This age did not want what we now consider great poetry, and it dictated its terms to men of talent very clearly and sharply. Consciousness must appeal directly to consciousness; the unconscious, where the magic words lie hidden, must be excluded. The general must be preferred to the particular, the abstract to the concrete, the allegorical to the symbolical. "Everything must be written and then read in the clear light of reason" (56-57).

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Xenophobia, or the hatred of those ethnically or racially different than oneself, was an extremely sore subject with Swift. He had at one point in his life been the Dean of the Protestant Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland -- a position he may have been given to punish him for his virulent and very public defense of Irish rights (Foster, 155). In Swift's era much of Ireland was controlled by absentee British landlords, who pillaged the Irish economy and drove its people to the brink of starvation. The British rationalized this behavior (that word again!) by their conviction that the poor, uneducated, Catholic Irish were a completely different branch of the human species than the English. In other words, in the eighteenth century they looked at the Irish in much the same was, as they would come to

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Approximate Word count = 2718
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English