Chapter two: The Dystopian Beast Fables
CHAPTER TWO
DYSTOPIAN BEAST FABLES
2.1. A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is not a mere book depicting voyages to imaginary lands whose reading makes the reader escape the real world, but it is a diagnosis of human nature.1 We cannot help feeling that the lands to which Gulliver, the protagonist of the travels, voyages are all within us, that is, they are the elements which constitute human nature.
Gulliver’s Travels is made up of four books, each one of them illuminates its predecessor. Nevertheless, Book IV is the focus of the scattered rays of Swift’s satire because A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhms deals with questions of grave consideration concerning human nature and subsumes the major issues explored in the previous parts, like man’s unfounded pride, the misuse of reason and the falsity of human perfection. Furthermore, the recurrent animal imagery which acts as a link between the parts is centralized in the final voyage.2
In Book IV, captain Lamuel Gulliver, a seafaring man who has set down his memories of four voyages to remote countries, is a victim of the treachery and mutiny of his seamen who turn out to be buccaneers. Abandoned on share, he encounters two species of animals. The first kind of the animals he observes are hairy, tailless apelike brutes that are extremely nasty and repulsive. Gulliver instinctively recoils from them with overpowering aversion. When one of them approaches him, Gulliver strikes it with his cutlass. Immediately the creatures retaliate by pelting and almost stifling Gulliver with their excrement. Gulliver is saved by the other animals who are neat, decent horses; their mere sight makes the filthy, ferocious beasts run away.
The horses’ behaviour is so orderly and so intelligent that Gulliver thinks them magicians in the form of horses. Soon Gulliver learns the language of these marvellous horses whose name is Houyhnhnms which is derived from a word meaning “the perfection of nature.”9 The Houyhnhnms seem to Gulliver to be the perfection of not only nature but also reason which leads immediately to certitude and does not allow disputes, passions and interests to blemish it. The Houyhnhnms manage their life in accordance with the dictates of perfect reason. These reasonable horses have no history because nothing unusual happens in their life. They have no literature, but they compose moral poetry. They cultivate friendship and benevolence as universal virtues. They are equally benevolent to everyone, they even have no special love for their colts; and in virtue of reason, they value most those who are eminent in virtue. Their marriage is arranged very reasonably. It is based on eugenic principles. No Houyhnhnm marries for either money or love, but for breeding; the couple produces two colts, and then cease to practice marital relations. Barring accidents, the Houyhnhnms die only out of old age. They accept death stoically with neither grief nor mourning because they regard it as a necessary consummation. Among the Houyhnhnms, all truths are self- evident and are met with universal consent. Hence, the Houyhnhnms neither have conception of the meaning of opinion nor argue the plausibility of a case.
Gulliver is favourably biased towards the Houyhnhnms. He gets used to their way of life which he regards as ascetic, healthy, happy and worthy of imitation. Gulliver’s happiness seems supreme and he hopes to stay for good in the Houyhnhnm land where there is not even words connoting evil except the term Yahoo which is used as an epithet to anything that is deficient or defective. Yahoo is also what the Houyhnhnms call the repugnant animals whom Gulliver has first faced.
The Houyhnhnm who first comes across Gulliver and whom he calls the Master-Horse gives Gulliver an account of the characteristics and habits of the Yahoos. These beasts not only live but also revel in filth and they use their excrement as a weapon. They are omnivorous, but they prefer garbage and rotten meet. The Master-Horse says that nothing in the Yahoos is more odious than their preference for eating what they steal at some distance, and their habit of sucking a certain root that makes them howl and then fall a sleep in dirt. Because of their nastiness and gluttony, the Yahoos are the only animals in the country that are subject to disease. The cure of their ills is a mixture of dung and urine forced down into the patient’s throat. These sordid brutes loathe each other more than the other species since each one of them wants to “have all to itself.” (chap. VII, p. 234). The Yahoos are fond of certain shining stones of different colours which they hoard. They are out of sorts and downright ill when these stones are missing. The fiercest Yahoo battles are about them, and while two Yahoos are fighting over the ownership of a stone, a third carries it off for himself. The Houyhnhnm can never understand how these stones can be of any use to a Yahoo. The Master- Horse also cannot discover the reason why some young Yahoos, who are seemingly healthy and need nothing, hide away and howl; Gulliver sees in this conduct a semblance of spleen. The Yahoos hold their females in common. The female Yahoos are lewd, coquettish and admit the males even when they are pregnant. Gulliver observes that there is no hog which can rival these lascivious brutes in nastiness. The Houyhnhnm notices that each Yahoo tribe has a ruling Yahoo which is the most deformed in body and the most mischievous in disposition. The ruling Yahoo has a favourite that performs the most menial and disgusting offices, like licking its feet and posteriors, and driving the female Yahoo to its kennel. The favourite is hated by the whole herd and it holds its office till a worse can be found. When it loses the favour of the ruling Yahoo, it is entirely covered by the excrement of all the Yahoos of the district.
Gulliver’s extreme veneration of the Houyhnhnms makes him change thoroughly his opinion of man. He decides to tell the Master-Horse as freely and as truthfully as possible about man. However, Gulliver is not absolutely truthful; he exaggerates man’s faults. His description of the human vices is the bitterest and the most vitriolic satire of the corruption of the human life. He begins by telling the Houyhnhnm about the innumberable causes of wars: princely ambition for wider power, religious disagreement, a neighbour’s weakness resulting from a natural disaster or civil strife, anticipation of attack by another country and a mutual desire for the same object. Gulliver also informs the Houyhnhnm about swords, guns, mines, dismemberments and corpses left to the dogs. Then, Gulliver criticizes ruthlessly the political system and its abuses by portraying the chief minister as a rascal who barters his wife’s and daughter’s chastity, and betrays and undermines his predecessors to attain higher status. Gulliver also exposes the malpractices of the major professions. He says that doctors are very skilful at prognosticating death which they can rarely prevent, and that the poison which medicine invent is of a great use to the statesman who wishes to get rid of his adversaries. He tells the Houyhnhnm that lawyers are bred to prove by multiplying words that black is white and vice versa, depending upon the amount of money they are paid. Gulliver defines money as the medium whereby man can quench his lust for luxury. For example, great sums of money enable man to eat the so-called gourmet food. In addition to its being an unnecessary and expensive diet, it undermines man’s health. Finally, Gulliver explains the genetic defects and venereal diseases of nobility. He says that nobility means to live in idleness, and to waste one’s fortune on extravagant tastes and habits. The noblemen are usually afflicted with physical evils which result from unwholesome eating and drinking and consorting with diseased prostitutes. Therefore, blue blood is so commonly known by sickly appearance that a healthy nobleman is suspected to be fathered by a coachman or a groom.
After listening to Gulliver’s terrible account of man’s vices, the Mater-Horse concludes that man is a Yahoo “to whose Share, by what Accident, he could not conjecture, some small Pittance of Reason had fallen.” (Chap.VII, p.233) Since man employs his mental faculties for intensifying and multiplying his natural vices, the Houyhnhnm sees in man not reason, but the perversions of reason which is worse than brutality itself. Gulliver agrees with the Master-Horse that man is a Yahoo in shape and disposition. First, Gulliver has been so revolted at the sight of the bestial Yahoo that he has not recognized their resemblance to the human beings and he has regarded them as a species of monkeys. Then, to his horror, he discovers a perfect human figure in it when the Houyhnhnms compare him to a Yahoo. Gulliver has a strong desire to observe the Yahoos closely. He walks among them accompanied by one of the Master-Horse’s servant, Sorrel Nag. Gulliver cannot reconcile himself to their vulgarity: they eat frogs, kennel in holes, hurl excrement at each other and are characterized by fiery sensuality. Gulliver seems to the Yahoos a handsome Yahoo-like creature; therefore, when he takes off his clothes to swim in a stream, he attracts a hot-blooded female Yahoo who leaps into the stream and embraces Gulliver’s naked body passionately and violently. Gulliver is sure that he would have been sexually assaulted, had his protector, Sorrel Nag, not saved him. To Gulliver, this situation which causes to him terrible mortification is an indisputable proof that he must be a perfect Yahoo in every limb and feature since the female Yahoo senses a natural inclination towards him. Gulliver himself feels in the same way, his own description of the she-Yahoo as less odious than the others shows that the Yahoo’s hold has kindled some sexual desire in him.
Gulliver begins to detest his Yahoo form. He shrinks from his own reflection in a pool. He determines to improve himself by changing himself into a horse. Gulliver start imitating the Houyhnhnm walk, speech and manners. However, Gulliver’s aspiration to be a Houyhnhnm frightens a number of the reasonable horses. They reason that Gulliver is a Yahoo in despite of his clothes, his bit of reasons and the rest of his niceties. Hence, they take offence at the Master-Horse’s keeping a Yahoo among them as if it were a Houyhnhnm. Gulliver is not even allowed to live in a Yahoo tribe because with his glimmerings of reasons, he may organize the Yahoo cattle and lead them to raid the Houyhnhnms. Consequently, all the Houyhnhnms determine that Gulliver should either work with the captured Yahoos which they use as beasts of burden or swim back to his native country. Gulliver is thunder-struck. Finally he gravely aggrees to depart the Houyhnhnm land. With the help of Sorrel Nag, Gulliver builds a canoe. When it is time to leave, his last request is to be allowed to kneel and kiss the hoof of the Master-Horse.
Gulliver does not wish to return to the human world, but to find a lonely isle where he can spend his final days in contemplating the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. He reaches a small island where he is attacked by naked savages whom he manages to escape. He also flees when there is a sail in sight because it represents to him the return to civilization with all its corruption and viciousness. However, a party of men finds Gulliver when it is sent to scout the shore. Meeting men of his own kind, Gulliver trembles with fear, hostility and revulsion-- this reaction reminds us of his first encounter with the barbarous Yahoos against whom he has reacted in the same way. The European seamen take him against his will to Portugal.
Gulliver shuns men whom he uniformally calls Yahoos. He refuses to wear clothes touched by men, he will not even put on a new suit if it is not aired for twenty-four hours. He stops up his nose with tobacco in order not to scent the human smell which offends him. He even tries to commit suicide. The captain of the Portuguese ship, Pedro de Mendez, is such a civil person that at last his difficult guest condescends to treat him as a creature having some little portion of reason. The Portuguese captain succeeds in persuading Gulliver to return to his native country, England.
Gulliver’s home-coming is an unhappy one. He cannot bear the sight or the smell of his family. He swoons when his wife greets him affectionately and he never asks about their newly born baby. The mere idea of caressing them nauseates him. He purchases two stallions whose company he prefers to that of his wife and children. He find happiness and friendship with the horses whereas it is too difficult for him to associate with the human creatures except the groom because he smells like horses. The book ends up with Gulliver warning anyone, having the least pride, not to appear before him.
In A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, neither little nor large men (the Lilliputians in Book I and the Brobdingnagians in Book II), but horses are supreme. The horse is the noblest animal, it is a faithful beast of burden, gaining certain nobility through its unquestionable loyalty and instinctive industry.4 However, the horse presented in Gulliver’s Travels, the Houyhnhnm, whose name signifies a horse does not have an ounce of a horse except in its outward form. Swift chooses this beautiful quadruped to be the embodiment of man’s “rational qualities as they might conceivably exist in some utopian world.”5 In this voyage, Swift makes us envision a rational utopia whose inhabitants believe that “Nature and Reason [are] Sufficient Guides for a Reasonable Animal,” and that “it is Reason only that maketh a Distinction of Persons, where there is a superior Degree in Virtue.” (chap. VIII, p. 242) Our reaction to this life of reason is an immediate withdrawl because it does not meet the essential human needs, it is a false paradise.
The reason-dominated creatures appear repellent in their lack of all the genuine affections that make life worth living and enrich the human existence. The robotlike Houyhnhnms overflow with neither joy nor grief. Indeed, there is monstrosity in the Houyhnhnms’ denial of the tender human sentiments. The insipid and drab Houyhnhnms take care of their children in virtue of reason, not out of instinctive parental love. The same thing applies to their marriage:
In their marriage . . . Strength is chiefly valued in the Male and Comeliness in Female, not upon the account of Love, but to perserve the Race from degenerating. . . . Courtship, Love, Presents, Joyntures, Settlements, have no place in their Thoughts; or Terms whereby to express them in their Language. The young Couple meet and are joined, merely because it is the Determination of their Parents and Friends. It is what they see done every Day, and they look upon it as one of the necessary Actions of a Rational Being.
(chap. VIII, p. 243)
With the same icy stoical calm which they show towards every incident in their impoverished life, the Houyhnhnms face death whose fear is naturally implanted in human nature. In spite of the fact that the life of the Houyhnhnms is pure and simple it is devoid of the glory and sublimity which can be attained by resisting and triumphing over the temptation to vices.
The cool and passionless existence of these unsympathetic creatures makes them monstrous, even the friendship which they show to Gulliver is distorted by their ruthless decision of ejecting him. The austere Master-Horse whom Gulliver has been extolling all the time accepts decidedly the banishment of Gulliver without caring to plead on Gulliver’s behalf. Gulliver is so enamoured of the Houyhnhnms that he cannot realize the irrationality of this step. After four years of conversing with the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is still to be regarded as a beast of burden; there is clearly something wrong with the Houyhnhnms’ way of thinking. The only affectionate member of this unfeeling race is Sorrel Nag, a humble Houyhnhnm servant who is “not born with equal talents of the mind, or a capacity to improve them.” (chap. VI, p. 231) Into his incompletely rational mind, some human warmth and devotion creep. Gulliver’s last link with the Houyhnhnms as he sails away in his canoe, which he has built with the help of this exceptionally benevolent and gentle Houyhnhnm, is the voice of “ Sorrel Nag (who always loved me) crying out . . . take care of thyself gentle Yahoo.” (chap. XI, p. 256)
In his essay “Politics vs. Literature: an examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” George Orwell points out that in the Houyhnhnm society not only feeling but also individualism is eliminated because the individual’s opinion has no place in it; public opinion is the only arbiter of the Houyhnhnm behaviours The Houyhnhnm does not have the right to make a choice, to dispute a decision and to lead a private life. On this account, Orwell describes the Houyhnhnm that lives in conformity with the order of reason as “a corpse . . . retaining physical life,” and he believes that the Houyhnhnm community has reached “the highest state of totalitarian organization”.6 Thus the rational, bloodless land, which is hedged round with rules and organizations, and which is void of all the creative thoughts and tender passions that create love, beauty and true art without which man becomes no better than a soulless machine, is undoubtedly dystopia. The Houyhnhnms, then, are by no means Swift’s ideal of reason but a satiric emblem of negative and inadequate rationality which Gulliver foolishly adopts.7
The rule of nothing-but-reason multiplies Gulliver’s worst vice which is pride. Although, at the close of the book, Gulliver inveighs against pride, Gulliver’s behaviours display the symptoms by which false pride is diagnosed. He acts as though he were immeasurably above his own kind. The experience in the Houyhnhnm land not only maddens but also alienates him from his own human race. He repudiates all his human obligations and becomes obsessed with overpowering animosity and detestation against man whom he considers as worse than the Yahoo:
When I thought of my Family, my Friends, my Countrymen, or Human Race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoo in Shape and Disposition, only a little civilized, and qualified with the Gift of Speech, but making no other use of reason, than to improve and multiply [their] Vices, whereof their Brethren in this Country [the Yahoos] had only the share that Nature allotted them.
(chap. X, p. 253)
Gulliver’s absurd infatuation with the false ideal disenables him to see the real one which is captain Pedro de Mendez who succours him.8 In his treatment with this conspicuously charitable captain, Gulliver evinces an infinite sense of superiority and contemptuous arrogance. He answers Don Pedro’s civilities with sullenness, and the smell of the captain nearly causes him to faint. However, Gulliver himself describes him as “a very courteous and generous person,” and he wonders “to find such civilities [in] a Yahoo.” (chap. XI, p. 259). Don Pedro, on one hand, treats Gulliver, whose voyage to the Houyhnhnm land makes him mad and misanthropic, with great humanity and inexhaustible patience till he becomes able to put up with the human company again; he returns love for hatred. On the other hand, the stern Master-Horse says nothing in defence of his unreserved admirer before the Houyhnhnms that resolve that Gulliver should be banished. The figure of the Portuguese captain, who is the paragon of virtue and the soul of kindness, re-affirms that the Houyhnhnms, which are as lifeless as a mathematical equation, are not Swift’s picture of an ethical ideal. The virtuous captain’s merits are beyond anything the Houyhnhnms can reason. In comparison with Don Pedro’s benevolence, compassion, charity, courtesy and honour, the Houyhnhnms’ rational virtues appear anaemic. They are incapable of the captain’s graces which unite passion and reason simply because they are destitute of every religious idea.9 It is true that reason is light, but there are some dark places in the human soul which can be penetrated only by the light of faith.
It is worth mentioning that the Houyhnhnms whose “grand Maxim is to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it.” (chap. VIII, p. 241) embody the defective ideals and ideologies which were held by Swift’s contemporaries. Swift lived in an age when it was a popular notion that man could reach the acme of his hopes of achieving perfectibility through his rationality.10 The eighteenth century was the age of pride--the pride in the sufficiency of the human reason. Swift censured those who were known for their exaltation of reason, especially the deists. These rationalists relied upon reason rather than revelation in their consideration of man’s relation to God and the universe.11 They even distrusted the Bible and made it, like any historical document, subject to experimental scrutiny. In his Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire, John M. Bullit gives a vivid depiction of what was happening to religion in Swift’s age. He refers to the emergence of the “ Religion of Reason” which is ascribed to the “philosophy of skeptical inquiry” which corroded man’s faith in the absolute certainty of the final judgment and undermined the belief in the heavenly rewards and punishments. Consequently, many men tended to pin their faith to the rewards and punishments of this world, “a faith founded on the capacity of reason to bring heaven down to earth.”12 Swift is a highly moral man who is shocked by the conversion of his contemporaries to rationalism. Swift opposes this excessive pride in reason as it leads to atheism which produces immorality, delusion and chaos. He assaults the irreligious and inhuman concept that man’s reason is a self-sufficient guide which enables him to dispense with not only faith but also feelings.
Swift is hostile to all the doctrines of the natural goodness of man which pervaded the eighteenth century thought. He believes that man in his natural state cannot live the life of reason because he is by nature full of passions and these deep-rooted passions cannot and must not be entirely restrained by reason. In his sermon entitled “On the Trinity,” Swift asserts that “Reason itself is true and just, but the Reason of every particular Man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his Interest, Passion and his Vices.”13 On this account, man cannot commit himself unswervingly to reason. Swift never doubts that man ought to make use of his reason to control his bad instincts whenever he can, but to be reason incarnate will be neither possible nor desirable if we are to remain human beings. A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms takes up the standpoint of the votaries of reason and exposes their untenable position. Gulliver is converted gradually to rationalism till he becomes a reason worshipper, this is shown when he prostrates before the Master-Horse upon departing to kiss his hoof. When Gulliver worships reason, he ironically becomes almost wholly devoid of any spark of reason. Moreover, because he tries to achieve something for which humanity is not fitted, he is ruined as a human being, and the failure of his fellows to attain his alien standards makes him loathe them.14 Thus monomania, bitterness and misanthropy will be the fate of those who are infatuated with false or one-sided theory of human nature.
The definition of man as a rational animal which sums up the complex human nature in terms of reason was very current during Swift’s age. In his famous letter written to Alexander Pope on the twenty-sixth of November 1726, which has been the cornerstone of many subsequent interpretations of the fourth voyage, Swift speaks about his endeavour to discredit the validity of the definition of man as a rational animal, and to prove that man is only capable of reason.15 Man cannot be a Houyhnhnm, he cannot be an animal that acts uniformly up to the dictates of reason because his nature is made up of not only a Houyhnhnm but also a Yahoo part.16 Swift, in Book IV, makes a comparison between men and Yahoos through which the moral flaws of man are vividly highlighted. The Yahoos collect and store shinning stones as men hoard gold, this habit stems from greed. Greed can also make the Yahoos as well as men hate, fight and butcher each other. The Yahoos are fond of a certain root which intoxicates them as wine does to man. The Yahoo’s disgusting and rotten fare is paralleled with man’s artificially valued, unwholesome diet. The Yahoos are liable to a fit of the sulks which reminds us of melancholy, the fashionable complaint of the rich. So, the Yahoo component includes the worst plagues which afflict human nature such as avarice, hostility, gluttony, spleen, lust and abysmal ignorance. Even the most reasonable men cannot transcend their Yahoo element; hence, man is in an urgent need of religion that helps him subdue his Yahoo nature and use his reason correctly. This is what Swift tries his utmost to teach the reason worshippers who are unconscious of the fact that reason is only apart of human nature whose goodness arises from feelings governed by conscience, subject to religion that cannot be revealed by the reasoner’s observations and axioms.
In spite of the fact that A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms reflects Swift’s repudiation of the eighteenth century which is known as being the Age of Reason, its penetration into human nature makes it applicable to all ages. For instance, the twentieth century is, in many ways, similar to the eighteenth; it has been charged with being too occupied with rationalism, to the detriment of the human values. Reason does not require absolute devotion and it always needs limits. Furthermore, Swift universalizes his book through the most powerful symbol in the whole work, the Yahoo. In addition to its being an incarnation of the malignant passions and evil dispositions which cause the fall of the sons of Adam, the Yahoo stands for the allurements of civilization which sicken man physically and morally.17 The bestial Yahoo is the emblem of the decadence and degeneration which lie in wait for man as the ultimate consequences of his quest for civilization. The book poses the question whether what we call civilization is a mere disguise of our bestiality or a true sublimation of it which can reverse the meaning of utopia from “nowhere” to “somewhere.”18
The fact that the inhabitants of the last land to which Gulliver voyages are not human beings, but horses have the following advantages: First, to emphasize man’s inability to attain pure rationality, Swift embodies it in a horse form. Possibly man is similar to the monkey in his form, but nothing in his shape can be like that of a horse.19 Gulliver’s attempts to change himself into a Houyhnhnm will certainly end up with an inevitable failure because his physique prevents him from becoming a horse. He can trot and neigh but he cannot acquire a fetlock or a pastern however hard he tries. So, the use of the animal imagery in Book IV is intended to show the remoteness and irrelevance of these rationally superior creatures to the ordinary life and the standards of mankind. The wholly reasonable horses have even less existence than the people of Thomas More’s Utopia. Thus the fabulous animals strengthen the nowhere meaning of the rational utopia. 20
Secondly, Swift sharpens his satire of the exaggerated optimism of the Age of Reason through the use of the animal imagery. In this voyage, the notion that reason is the special faculty which distinguishes man from the other animals is turned violently upside down by Swift. Book IV is founded upon “a division of animal species into the extremes of rational creatures, and irrational brutes, and on the paradoxical identification of the former with horses, and the latter with beings resembling man.”21 Here, appears obviously the idea of the chain of being with the transposition of men and horses which is intended to affront man’s unjustified excessive pride in his reason. In the traditional chain of being, man is placed roughly half-way between angels and animals. Swift’s contemporaries increasingly stressed that man is little lower than the angels, forgetting that he is little higher than the animals, and that the bestial element in his nature often outweighs the sensible one.22 Swift derides this infatuation with man through the presentation of the shattering image of the disgusting Yahoo-man that embodies the extreme view of man as helplessly irrational, decadent and depraved.23 Of course, Swift does not aim at debasing human nature, but at chastening the “Lump of Deformity” who is “smitten with pride” (chap. XII, p. 259)-- the pride which quenches the light of not only reason but also faith.24
Moreover, Swift strikes at man’s pride in his physique by showing how the human body appears to the lesser creatures, like the horses. The philosophers of the eighteenth century, on one hand, were never tired of admiring “the beautiful perfection of human body, its intricateness, its perfect articulation and its happy appropriateness to the particular place that man occupies in the scheme of being.”25 The Houyhnhnm, on the other hand, criticizes the human form as being defective, preposterous and inadequate, and assumes that the advantage is with the horse in every point wherein men and horses differ. The Houyhnhnm finds fault with
[Gulliver’s] Body, the Flatness of [his] Face, the Prominence of [his] Nose, [his] eyes placed directly in Front, so that [he] could not look on either Side without turning [his] Head . . . [the Houyhnhnm] knew not what could be the use of these several Clefts and Divisions in [Gulliver’s feet] behind, that these were too soft to bear the Hardness and Sharpness of Stones . . . that [his] whole Body wanted a Fence against Heat and Cold, which [Gulliver] was forced to put on and off every Day with Tediousness and Trouble.
(chap. IV, p. 218)
Finally, the austerity of the tragic vision of the dystopia is assuaged through the beast fable which is enjoyable in itself. Certainly, we cannot help feeling the comic aspect of the sight of the horses employed in domestic affairs, like the white mare threading a needle and the horses milking cows, reaping oats, carrying trays, eating dinner, and neighing their observations on Gulliver’s accent and his walking on his hinder feet. The scene of the horse-shaped creatures wielding a masterful whip and sitting on their hunches with dignity in carriages drawn by man-shaped creatures makes us fluctuate between laughter and outrage. Furthermore, one of the finest comic effect in the entire work is the eagerness with which the gullible Gulliver adopts the life of the horses. We laugh at his attempt to neigh and trot like a horse.
Thus, the good-humoured fantasy of the animals which appeals to the child in all of us enables Swift to create a masterpiece of comic art in which reason and imagination are united to please and instruct at the same time. This is why Gulliver’s Travels is, as George Orwell says:
A book which . . . seems impossible for me to grow tired of. . . . its fascination seems inexhaustible. If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.26
Orwell’s beast fable Animal Farm is one of the most amusing books which is wonderfully written with some of the penetration of A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Animal Farm occupies an important position besides Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels as a satirical animal tale on the human dystopia.
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