Flesh in the Age of Reason (24 page)

Hacking deep into human nature, Swift exposed and explored the tensions between body and soul, flesh and spirit, that are thematic to this book, overtly highlighting those questions of identity – who does man think he is? – so fiercely debated in the Augustan decades. Evidently man was not the
homo rationalis
he pretended to be but rather, at best,
homo rationis capax
– a creature capable of rationality, though by implication falling short.

His ‘anthropological’ satire appears as its most diagrammatic in
Gulliver’s Travels
, published in 1726. Once you had the idea of the big men and little men, commented Dr Johnson, everything else followed. True, but Johnson abhorred Swift, and
Gulliver
is, in reality, more subtle and rewarding than that.

The voyage to Lilliput is primarily a kick at that arch butt of the Tories, Robert Walpole – who could take the rap for Swift’s enduring Hibernian exile. Walpole, the great manager and his supporting ‘Robinocracy’, are reduced to Lilliputian littleness, and the ecclesiastical disputes of the day are sent up in the rancorous but asinine conflicts between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians. In the first book, Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon, himself serves as a paragon of honest humanity and decency, exposing the Machiavellian diplomacy and politicking of the Lilliputians, whose rapacity and cunning are pantomimed by their stature: dwarfishness is a sure sign of a mean mind and base motives.

The satire takes a new twist when, on his second voyage, Gulliver visits Brobdingnag, whose inhabitants tower above him. The boot is now on the other foot, and it is Gulliver who is exposed as diminutive of stature and understanding alike. The Brobdingnagians furthermore excite Swift’s disgust at the flesh. Their very grossness exaggerates all the minute flaws and hideousness normally concealed from the eye by the limitations of human vision – as it were, they expose themselves – as Gulliver is reduced in the hands of his captors to a baby, pet or mannikin.

Not least, Gulliver/Swift is repelled at being turned into an impotent object of sexual desire by the lusts of the gigantic bosomy Brobdingnagian matrons: ‘Their Skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and Hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads; to say nothing further concerning the rest of their Persons.’ In one episode, he barely escapes being eaten alive by a large infant who is pacified only by ‘the last Remedy’, a ‘monstrous Breast’. Later, an even more ‘horrible Spectacle’ threatens to engulf him, a cancerous breast ‘swelled to a monstrous Size, full of Holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole Body’.

Though Swift is manifestly revolted by the flesh, any possibility of escaping it (seemingly Shaftesbury’s solution?) is scotched by the third book, the visit to Laputa. The islanders themselves aspire to transcend the flesh by losing themselves in lofty reasoning and recasting the sensory world all around into the abstractions of natural philosophy, quantity and geometry, rather as the advocates of the ‘new philosophy’ blotted out ‘secondary’ for ‘primary’ qualities. In the process, however, they hubristically blind themselves to reality and are useless at elementary practicalities – a trait Swift always mocked, despising as he did the myopic vanity of high-flown speculators. Small surprise that their wives slip off to have sex with males from a neighbouring island: their own husbands have lost touch with what makes them human.

In having Gulliver ridicule the futile attempts of the Laputans to divest, or rise above, the flesh, was Swift obliquely reflecting upon his own flawed and frustrating strategies for containing the old Adam? Fairly accepting of the most noxious Lilliputian and the grossest Brobdingnagian, Gulliver (and perhaps Swift) maintains that he has never seen ‘a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy People’ than the Laputans – they were, in fact, the most ‘disagreeable Companions’ he had ever met.

Equally it may be no accident that the third book of the travels also features the wretched Struldbrugs, the people who have discovered
the secret of how to avoid the fruits of the flesh, death. The price, however, for their fabulous longevity is that they inescapably grow thoroughly melancholy and wretched:

When they came to Fourscore Years, which is reckoned the Extremity of living in this Country, they had not only all the Follies and Infirmities of other old Men, but many more which arose from the dreadful Prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but uncapable of Friendship, and dead to all natural Affection, which ever descended below their Grand-children. Envy and impotent Desires, are their prevailing Passions…. The least miserable among them, appear to be those who turn to Dotage, and entirely lose their Memories; these meet with more Pity and Assistance, because they want many bad Qualities, which abound in others.
*

Idealized in the ‘golden age’ myth of the Greeks and the astonishing spans of Methuselah and other Old Testament patriarchs, longevity had ever had its allure, and a tradition of prolongevist writings had grown up, including those (as we have seen) of Luigi Cornaro. Swift countered by displaying the consequences of a thoughtless and short-sighted quest for longevity, for the Struldbrugs had achieved long life without permanent youth, fitness, vitality or, above all, good nature. Their extra years merely brought them the pains of crotchetiness and senility. Their decayed flesh and crabby minds were portrayed with a mixture of pity – in anticipation, doubtless, of his own coming old age – vehement disgust, and the perhaps orthodox Christian conviction that embodiment was a life sentence. If the Laputans, intent on obliterating their carcasses, were the most ‘disagreeable’ of Gulliver’s discoveries, the Struldbrugs were the most ‘mortifying’ – and, predictably, ‘the Women more horrible than the Men’. The Laputans’ futile dreams of transcendence were exacerbated by the Struldbrugian nightmare of everlasting mortality.

The culmination of the satire against human pretensions is, of course, the fourth voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos
– it is the philosophical key to
Gulliver’s Travels
, because it poses the key dilemma of
homo rationis capax
. Gulliver finds, to his consternation, that the creatures who are rational and graced by many of the qualities honoured in mankind – generosity, dignity, peaceableness, sociability – are not human at all but equine. Indeed, the Houyhnhnms, being horses, cannot even read, but they do speak, and they talk reason unlike anybody else Gulliver meets on his voyages into the unknown – that is, Swift’s travels in his moral imagination.

Mistrusting as he did the prating din of rival creeds, Swift gives these rational horses no books: they gain all the wisdom they need from nature. They cannot understand why Gulliver is so ashamed of some parts of his body as to fear nakedness. They have no words for disbelieving, because lying is to them unknown – language is for communicating one’s thoughts, why should it be used for concealment? ‘To clear up which’ – as so often, Gulliver is here apologetically doing his gullible best to make them grasp why human society was so vice-ridden – ‘I endeavoured to give him some Ideas of the Desire of Power and Riches; of the terrible Effects of Lust, Intemperance, Malice, and Envy…. After which, like one whose Imagination was struck with something never seen or heard of before, he would lift up his Eyes with Amazement and Indignation.’

Life among the Houyhnhnms is idyllic. Gulliver soon accustoms himself to a simple diet of grain, herbs and milk, ‘and I cannot but observe, that I never had one Hour’s Sickness’ – Swift, like Addison, held most illness resulted from over-eating and drinking, and bad medicine. Although like a Yahoo in physique, Gulliver is not treated as such, because he is endowed with reason, and he enters into discussion of affairs back in Europe with a wise Houyhnhnm. The latter is appalled to learn that in the recent war against France, ‘about a Million of Yahoos might have been killed’. Gulliver relates the causes of wars – ambitions, jealousies and such vain quarrels as ‘whether Flesh be Bread, or Bread be Flesh: Whether the juice of a certain Berry be Blood or Wine’ – not forgetting to boast of the vast ingenuity that goes into the making of ‘Cannons, Culverins, Muskets,
Carabines, Pistols, Bullets, Powder, Swords, Bayonets’, and so on. Although he detests Yahoos, the Houyhnhnm no more blames them than a bird of prey, because they are devoid of reason and so lack choice. When a creature blessed with reason misuses it, however, he makes things ‘worse than Brutality itself ’.

In starkest contrast to the wise and gentle Houyhnhnms are the loathsome Yahoos. These bestial beings with human traits – they are vicious, violent, aggressive and filthy in their habits – attack Gulliver and shit on him from the trees. It dawns on him that Yahoos are in essence humans minus (the capability for) reason. If to be human is to be a compound of mind and body, all is currently bemusing, because it is the horse, the Houyhnhnm, who is rational and the Yahoo, the humanoid, who is animalistic.

Bemused is how Gulliver himself ends up, because he returns to London from the land of the Houyhnhnms seething with loathing for his own race. On meeting his wife and children once more, he is disgusted by their touch, stench and habits: ‘As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell in a swoon for almost an hour.’ ‘During the first year’ he is back in England,

I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same Room. To this Hour they dare not presume to touch my Bread, or drink out of the same Cup; neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the Hand. The first Money I laid out was to buy two young Stone-Horses, which I keep in a good Stable, and next to them the Groom is my greatest Favourite; for I feel my Spirits revived by the Smell he contracts in the Stable. My Horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four Hours every Day. They are Strangers to Bridle or Saddle; they live in great Amity with me, and Friendship to each other.

Gulliver is clearly out of his mind: who but a lunatic would talk to horses? Yet he is a madman who has seen to the bottom of things. Misanthropy seems the rational course.

If in
Gulliver’s Travels
the satirical tropes are big-and-little and animal-and-human, in
A Tale of a Tub
Swift essays a different repertoire to dissociate, defamiliarize and deflate. There, it is clothes which conceal, reveal and symbolize the inner man, and the human paradox.

A Tale of a Tub
shows how Christians are no Christians. Above all, it exposes the splits between Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism, signified respectively by three heroes, Peter (standing for St Peter and Catholicism), Martin (Luther or Lutheranism) and Jack (Jean Calvin or Puritanism). Each is identified by his coat, and their respective claims to truth are flagged by the paltry insignia of external fashion – holy faith is worn on the sleeve and has been reduced to squabbles over buttons and lapels: ‘
That Fellow… has no Soul; where is his Shoulder-knot?
’ As often, Swift recruits an unreliable narrator (the ‘Hack’) to convince the reader of the rationality of such a reduction:

what is Man himself but a
Micro-Coat
, or rather a compleat Suit of Cloaths with all its Trimmings? As to his Body, there can be dispute; but examine even the Acquirements of his Mind, you will find them all contribute in their Order, towards furnishing out an exact Dress: To instance no more; Is not Religion a
Cloak
, Honesty a
Pair of Shoes
, worn out in the Dirt, Self-Love a
Surtout
, Vanity a
Shirt
, and Conscience a
Pair of Breeches
, which, tho’ a Cover for Lewdness as well as Nastiness, is easily slipt down for the Service of both.

The
Tale
expressed Swift’s particular detestation for bigots and zealots who were convinced that they, and they alone, possessed a corner on truth – by dint of divine authority in the case of the Catholic Church, or the Bible, as with Protestants. Fearful of the legacy of antinomian mechanic preachers and the presence of the ‘French prophets’ (who provoked Shaftesbury to his
Letter concerning Enthusiasm
), Swift, like so many contemporaries, lampooned perverted religion as a disgusting physical pathology: all that spiritual ‘inspiration’ was nothing but disorders of the guts. The promptings of (holy) spirit were nothing other than the animal spirits, all jarring and at cuffs.

The same was done with political greatness. Louis XIV was else where
shown by Swift to be not a true Sun King but a gilded meteor which had already passed its zenith:

Giddy he grows, and down is hurled
And as a mortal to his vile disease,
Falls sick in the posteriors of the world.

And this ‘vile disease’? A sly footnote informs us that it was a
fistula in ano
, that royal ailment suffered by Louis XIV, which for Swift said it all: all his glorious schemes emitted from his lowest and vilest orifice, the Sun King was a pain in the arse. Power lust was but a madness arising from a somatic pathology, as vapours arose from the bowels and nether regions to cloud the mind. Flesh was the great leveller:

The very same Principle that influenced a
Bully
to break the Windows of a Whore, who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a Great Prince to raise mighty Armies, and dream of nothing but Sieges, Battles and Victories…. The same Spirits which in their superior Progress would conquer a Kingdom, descending upon the
Anus
, conclude in a
Fistula
.