This is a seminar paper I wrote for a class on fiction of the Enlightenment. It fails in several ways, but I still like it.
May 3, 2012
In the “first book-length study of Swift published” (Rivero 309), John, the Earl of Orrery, declared of Jonathan Swift’s depiction of Yahoos and Houyhnhnms in Book Four of Gulliver’s Travels that “Swift has indulged a misanthropy that is intolerable” (309). Swift himself, in a letter to Alexander Pope, admitted that “I hate and detest the animal called man” (262) and seems to have set up the Yahoo as “a rebuke to man’s pride, a reminder of the many features that he tends to forget when he thinks of himself as a noble being created in the likeness of God—from physical imperfections to spiritual flaws such as pettiness, greed, filthiness, malice, and pervasive animality” (Heilman 278). The reader is intended to see “the Yahoo [as] a mirror in which human nature must see itself” (Ford 150), through the eyes of Gulliver, who declares that “Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, nor one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy” (Swift 189-90), and this view of the Yahoo, since Orrery first cringed from it, has not changed.
But of the other inhabitants of the island, the horsey Houyhnhnms, Swift draws a much more complex portrait. The Houyhnhnms seem to be the opposite of the Yahoos. Gulliver declares, after living among them and reducing his own self-esteem to the position of lowly Yahoo, that the “Noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general Disposition to all Virtues, and have no Conceptions or Ideas of what is Evil in a Rational Creature” (225), and presents throughout his account the Houyhnhnms as the most virtuous creatures he has ever encountered--to the point that “the Houyhnhnms brainwash Gulliver, expunging his human nature insofar as they can and replacing it with a pure and abstract rationality like their own” (Allison 492). When Gulliver returns home, he has been convinced that human beings are well-groomed Yahoos, and the narrative effect on the reader is to believe him: “[T]he reader is convinced by Gulliver’s relatively calm tone. He is neither railing nor sounding even slightly mad, so the reader tends to accept these statements as reasonable” (Goldberg 275). It’s easy to believe Gulliver: we’ve believed his report as accurate, if not betimes peculiar, for three volumes.
However, careful consideration of Gulliver’s change in Houyhnhnmland gives us another view: “For a good many years I have watched the responses of students to Part IV: almost invariably their spontaneous view of Gulliver is that he has gone off his rocker” (Heilman 281-2). There is something amiss in Gulliver’s report. A reader who trusts his claims of the Houyhnhnms “looks too exclusively at Gulliver’s laudatory terms for them, and not enough at the total drama of their tepid existence and their disruptive effect on Gulliver” (Heilman 283). Swift’s intentions in this section are quite complex: “Does he agree with Gulliver..., or is Swift attacking [the Houyhnhnm] behind Gulliver’s back...?” (Booth 320-1). The complexity of Swift’s presentation of Gulliver’s impressions of the Houyhnhnms has been long debated and takes two general forms: the “hard” reading, which assumes that “the Houyhnhnms...stand...as a positive ideal whose function is to judge the evil and irrationality of human society”; or a “soft” reading which “hold[s] that Swift’s satire is directed against the Houyhnhnms” (Beauchamp 201). Wayne Booth declared the situation irresolvable: “Unless there has been some permanent loss of clues to meanings which were clear to Swift’s contemporaries, we must conclude either that Swift’s norms are too complex or that their relations with Gulliver’s opinions are too complicated” (321).
The “hard” reading of the Houyhnhnms posits Houyhnhnmland as a utopia, or at least having “a number of important connections with the utopian tradition” (Reichert 180), which is meant to stand as an ideal against which human society and behavior can be measured and found wanting. As R. S. Crane and others have shown, this Houyhnhnm utopia seems to resemble the kind of state Plato presents in the Republic. In “Plato, Swift, and the Houyhnhms,” John F. Reichert traces connections between the attitudes and social norms of the Houyhnhnms with “rough equivalents...within the central discussion of knowledge in Books V, VI, and VII of The Republic” (181). The basic Houyhnhnm “view of reason as an immediate and intuitive process is in the Platonic tradition” (181), and they similarly share views Plato espouses in the Republic on eugenics, education, lying, and even death. Gulliver’s madness upon his return to England “was the result neither of any deficiencies in the Houyhnhnms’ way of life, nor in the fact that he tried to imitate them,” but “the result of his sudden return to actuality and his usual ineptness” (190). This reading of Houyhnhnmland puts the fault on human beings for not being more like the Houyhnhnms and Plato’s ideal. “It is not that we cannot attain virtue, but that we will not. Capable of reason, and therefore of happiness, we choose to be irrational and unhappy” (191-2).
But if Houyhnhnmland is an utopian ideal, and the Houyhnhnm “an equestrian version of the philosophers, creatures who transcend the imperfect modes of cognition that limit most mortals” (Beauchamp 202), then what is Gulliver? Gorman Beauchamp, revisiting Crane’s argument, suggests Gulliver is the one who has left Plato’s Cave of shadows and seen the sun. Gulliver’s failure is that he does not “serve that vision, as a true philosopher must, upon his return to the Cave” (205), his return to England, when it is in fact “the social obligation of the philosopher, the enlightened escapee who has seen the sun” (203), to do so. Swift’s condemnation is not of the Houyhnhnms, but of Gulliver’s “failure in his moral engagement [that] converts Gulliver into a misanthrope, despiser of the poor Yahoos he should help” (204). Beauchamp’s conclusion of Swift’s intention is that “Man, of course, can never be a Houyhnhnm, nor was meant to be, but the rational society of Houyhnhnmland nevertheless offers a goal of moral perfection toward which he should strive” (209).
What the utopian readers seem to forget, however, are the Yahoos, or the Houyhnhnm relationship with the Yahoos. The utopian Houyhnhnms are lauded as “man’s perfectly rational nature (curiously inhabiting a horse’s body), untainted by man’s animal traits,” but those “animal traits” have not vanished--they are given to the Yahoo, “who represent man’s apish, stupid, unredeemedly animal nature” (Frese 188). Jerry Frese suggests that “by examining how Gulliver is mistaken in his view of the Houyhnhnms we can better achieve an understanding of man’s nature [and] his relationship to his fellow-man” (188). Swift has presented us a choice: “the dichotomy of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos becomes our dilemma: we refuse the Yahoo half, even as we recognize the Houyhnhnm option is refused to us” (Frese 192). Frese finds that Gulliver’s “mistaken” view of the Houyhnhnm ignores that “there is no love among the Houyhnhnms” and “the Houyhnhnms also apparently have no moral sense with respect to others” (193). The widow Houyhnhnm’s excuse for lateness, that her “Husband dying late in the Morning, she was a good while consulting her Servants about a convenient place where his Body should be laid” seems to have no further effect on her mood, as she “behaved herself at our House, as chearfully as the rest” (Swift 231). This lack of emotion for a husband, a life-mate and partner, suggests the Houyhnhnms “are moral eunuchs, lacking a value-creating capacity of any kind. They are perfectly rational, equestrian computers without a moral programmer called conscience. They have no need of law because they have no contradictory impulses between good and evil” (Frese 193). Swift’s division of human nature between Houyhnhnm and Yahoo is, according to Frese, “falsely divide[d]...into the rational and the animal. In this bifurcation he omitted the third component of the human condition..., man’s value-creating capacity, his moral sense, his conscience, call it what you will” (194).
This lack of morality in the Houyhnhnm seems to emerge from their perfect rationality, and that weakness seems to support the “soft” reading of the Houyhnhnms: “Swift has singled out constituent parts of human nature and parceled these between two radically different kinds of beings, so that he might frame a parable commenting on diverse aspects of the human condition” (Allison 482). Swift is satirizing perfect Houyhnhnm reason, but according to Alexander W. Allison, “the Houyhnhnms do not ironically represent reason overreaching itself. They directly represent both the real capabilities of reason and its real limitations” (484). Houyhnhnm reason is “an intuitive power” (486), because it is innate to what they are, “reflect[ing] the instancy and inerrancy of brute instinct” (484). Tradition in Swift’s time, according to Allison, considered “such instinct...to be infallible because it represented the power of God acting directly on his creatures” (484). The aspect of Houyhnhnm reason that ought to “chill” us is “not...the abuse of reason but...its too exclusive and rigorous use” (487). “The Houyhnhnms are reasonable; they are even, in a manner, just; but they are merciless. It is their want of mercy rather than any rational aberration which alienates our sympathies from them” (489). Nevertheless, this is the creature against which we are supposed to judge the Yahoos, against which Gulliver condemns the whole human race.
Julia Goldberg puts “the Houyhnhnms in a Deist position, an all-knowing creature whose every thought must be accepted as ‘right’” (270), but this position derives from the structure of their language and “Gulliver’s belief...that the Houyhnhnm language is a true reflection of their absolute justness” (271). Despite the Houyhnhnm claim (and Gulliver’s acceptance) of ultimate Virtue, Houyhnhnm “existence is static, as reflected by the definition of their name: ‘the perfection of nature.’ There is no possibility for change or growth, and most importantly, no consideration that such ‘human’ things are necessary for a rational creature” (272-3). Nonetheless, “everything that Gulliver believes not to exist in the Houyhnhnms’ land, because they lack the language to express it, does exist. They simply do not recognize it” (Goldberg 275). The great debate of their council “implies a complete contradiction of what Gulliver claims to have just learned about the Houyhnhnms” (275). Even the Houyhnhnm “inability to question themselves or their actions” suggests the vice of pride, which is contrary to their declared virtuous nature (281). Goldberg likens the linguistic strategies of the Houyhnhnms and the “lack of linguistic permission to communicate unpleasant feelings and ideas” (272) to “America’s political correctness [as] ...an elevated and contrived system as opposed to a natural and true reflection” (271), which, ultimately, “increases, rather than obliterates” those “unpleasant feelings” (272). Goldberg’s pronouncement is that the Houyhnhnm lack “human integrity” (284).
In a slightly different way, Nic Panagopoulos comes to a similar conclusion. He notes what others have before him, that “for the Houyhnhnms, reason is instinct” (57), which leads the Houyhnhnms to have a high regard for themselves: “The Houyhnhnms regard themselves not only as more reasonable than their Yahoo neighbors, but as the only creatures capable of rational thought” (64). The Houyhnhnm do not necessarily notice this about themselves, as Goldberg points out: “only a creature who is able to recognize humility could recognize pride in the first place” (Goldberg 282). Panagopoulos suggests that “Gulliver’s Travels follows traditional Christian ethics in regarding pride as the gravest of sins” (63), which “has the power to lead astray even the consummate rationality personified by the Houyhnhnms” (64). Swift, according to Panagopoulos, is “implying...that the worship of reason practiced by the Moderns is a form of idolatry that seduces human beings away from God by encouraging them to place absolute trust in their self-sufficiency” (64).
However, Houyhnhnm reason is fundamentally limited, as Swift demonstrates in his portrayal (despite Gulliver’s inability to notice it). The Houyhnhnms
have no proper names, and this makes them strangely impersonal in their dealings with one another, as though possessing no individual identity. Consequently, they have no experience of private affection, and their family or sexual relationships never produce any bond of allegiance or love stronger than that owed to the community at large. (Panagopoulos 64)
Their rationality is focused on preservation of their static perfection, and “the instinct of self-preservation overrules every other impulse and consideration” (65). The Houyhnhnm cannot see the world from any other perspective, and all their rational perfection is directed toward this one end. Because “a creature can only judge using itself as the moral standard of those judgments” (71), the way in which they understand the world is based on how they see themselves within it. Hence, “the Houyhnhnms...preserve the Yahoos...because the benefits of exterminating them do not clearly outweigh the costs of keeping them alive” (65). This version of reason is “coldly functional, almost Machiavellian, in the way the end (the good of the race) is seen to justify the means” (65).
It is here in the Houyhnhnms’ ultimate response to the Yahoos that utopia seems to come undone. But the circumstances arise out of exactly the way in which Plato’s ideal city would function: “the super-rational horses of Houyhnhnmland dominate the purely instinctive Yahoos, just as the philosopher-king...reigns over the soldiers and workers representing the lower classes of society” (68). Panagopoulos argues that this super-rationality “would have endeared the Houyhnhnms” to Plato, especially
their being as good as they are rational: they cannot understand the need for lying or deception of any kind..., never try to take advantage of or abuse their fellow citizens, while “Unchastity” or infidelity in marriage is unheard of. In the case of the Houyhnhnms, therefore, we have a perfect illustration of the Socractic equation of knowledge with virtue. (Panagopolous 68)
It is the Yahoo lack of knowledge, “an error of the understanding that leads to erroneous action,” that Plato calls sin, not “a moral trespass in the religious sense” (69). Thus, the Yahoos, “since they have regressed to a state of nature and so possess neither free will nor moral understanding that would allow them to be held accountable for their actions” (69), cannot be subject to a theological sin—cannot be a theological opposite to the virtuous Houyhnhnms, but merely the rational opposite.
It is in the narrow dichotomies represented by Houyhnhnm and Yahoo that Panagopoulos makes his main point. He claims that Swift “is engaged in the deconstruction of such conceptual opposites as real/ideal, human/animal, rational/irrational, civilized/savage, self/other, true/false, and even good/evil, on which traditional Western ethics are based” (57). It should be noted that in his early criticism of Gulliver’s Travels, Orrery had already noted many of the themes these critics of the Houyhnhnms have discussed. Orrery calls Swift’s portrait of the Houyhnhnms “cold and insipid,” describing Houyhnhnm reason as “the pure instincts of brutes, unassisted by any knowledge of letters, acting within their own narrow sphere, merely for their immediate preservation. They are incapable of doing wrong, therefore they act right” (310). Orrery declares that “it is surely a very low character given to creatures, in whom the author would insinuate some degree of reason, that they act inoffensively, when they have neither the motive nor the power to act otherwise. Their virtuous qualities are only negative” (310). Orrery’s disgust with the Houyhnhnms seems to anticipate the “soft” reading of Book IV, but the idea that Swift may have been satirizing or “deconstructing” Houyhnhnm ideals in some complex way seems to have escaped him. It is only recently, in what Booth calls “the current fashion,” that critics “praise Swift for his ambiguities” (321), or as Panagopoulos does, see Swift’s portrayal as a post-modern deconstruction. Allison suggests that it takes a “modern liberal predilection for holding the judgment in suspension between opposed opinions” (481) to unlock Swift’s satire.
Panagopoulos perceives this mark of twentieth-century deconstruction as part of Swift’s intentions: “What emerges from the text is a picture of universal ambivalence and heterogeneity that only a postmodern critical perspective can fully do justice to” (68). This deconstruction occurs at the sites of those “conceptual opposites such as vice/virtue, sickness/health, even reason/unreason,” which are “presented as mutually generating and interdependent, so any vision of the world which separates the one from the other and places it above its fellow in ethical terms is partial and self-contradictory” (70). Hence,
“good” is always relative and predicated on the “non-good” while every utopia is founded on a dystopia. This explains why the Houyhnhnms do not decide to exterminate the Yahoo race altogether. They need the “evil” other to define themselves; destroying their imperfect Yahoo foils would mean undermining their own self-appointed role as the “Perfection of Nature.” (Panagopoulos 70)
This arises out of the same problem of language that Goldberg examines, which Panagopoulos also notes: “the only way in which these two species can be thought of as opposites is through the mediation of language--Houyhnhnm language” (Panagopoulos 70). Panagopoulos uses a twentieth-century conception of the way in which we understand the world to interpret Swift:
The fact that the Yahoos are inarticulate while the Houyhnhnms possess logos enables the latter to appropriate “the good” for themselves and to label the former as “evil.” So we see the whole question of civilization and savagery or of what is “rational” and “irrational” boil down to the use of language and the way the dominant discourse functions to produce value judgments that justify the practices of the dominant class, race, or species. The differences between the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos emerge as more linguistic than actual, or to use Hobbes’s phrase, “True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things.” (Panagopoulos 70-1)
The suggestion here seems to be that Swift was playing in the same realm as twentieth-century deconstructive notions of language: that language defines itself, and any description given in language is entirely based on that language and cannot reach beyond itself to touch the real world. Panagopolous argues that “rather than condemn mankind, Swift’s purpose in Book Four is to highlight the provisional, self-validating nature of human judgments by revealing the way that ‘truth’ lies not in the empirical world but in perception and language” (71). The Houyhnhnm definition of a lie does not touch the outside world: “the Thing which is not” is “the opposite of testifying to what is self-evident” within the bounds of their linguistic-conceptional framework, and not, as it is for humans, to “fabricate the facts knowingly and deliberately” (74). Ultimately, “the creatures that possess the power of language use it to reaffirm their moral superiority and, by extension, their authority over those that, to use Hobbes’s words, ‘accept names imposed by others’” (75).
Panagopoulos hints at another way in which Swift anticipates the twentieth century: By the same means that the producers of language “place themselves at the centre of the cosmos and convert all other beings into their objects,” so do the Houyhnhnm with the Yahoos, who “could stand for the Irish seen through English eyes..., reflect[ing] the process by which imperialism dehumanizes those peoples it intends to subjugate or exterminate” (62-3). This charge of Houyhnhnm totalitarian imperialism was one earlier taken up by George Orwell, who sees parts of Gulliver’s Travels as representing Swift’s “attack...on what would now be called totalitarianism” (213). Orwell considers that “intermittently, at least, Swift was a kind of anarchist, and Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels is a picture of an anarchistic society, not governed by law in the ordinary sense, but by the dictates of ‘Reason’, which are voluntarily accepted by everyone” (215). However, the “exhortation” by which Gulliver is compelled to leave Houyhnhnmland “illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of society,” and, Orwell explains, “in a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion” (215). The unanimity that rules the Houyhnhnm general assembly that arises “because the truth is always either self-evident, or else it is undiscoverable and unimportant” suggests that “[t]hey had reached...the highest stage of totalitarian organization, the stage when conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force” (216). No dissident opinions are tolerated, but this intolerance is directly related to Houyhnhnm incuriosity.
Bernard Harrison takes up Orwell’s discussion in his 2003 essay, “Houyhnhnm Virtue,” noting most of its salient points and Orwell’s concern with totalitarianism, as well as recuperating the major moves of the “soft”/”hard” debate “dating from forty or more years ago” (42). As it is the nature of Houyhnhnm reason itself which in fact brings about their intolerance and makes their anarchistic society in fact totalitarian, Harrison turns to examine the nature of their “reason” and examines “the various senses in which the terms ‘reason’ and ‘rational’ are deployed in Book IV” (45). He identifies two kinds of reason, human and Houyhnhnm, which seem to manifest in different ways. Very importantly for the rise of intolerant totalitarianism, the Houyhnhnm never debate anything and do not pursue any dialectic reasoning: “the Houyhnhnm do not apply discursive reason to the conduct of life because their style of reason is not discursive but intuitive, involving no elaboration of argument but simply ‘immediate conviction’” (46). As does Panagopoulos, Harrison notes the deployment of Houyhnhnm reason in functional service of the species as a whole rather than for individuals, the status of which they ignore:
All Houyhnhnm values...are instrumental: there can be no question, for an individual Houyhnhnm, of attaching an intrinsic value to another individual Houyhnhnm independently of that individual’s “rationality”: that is, his utility to, and readiness to serve the goals of the Houyhnhnm polity as a whole. But what are those goals? Simply, it would seem, the continued existence of that polity. (Harrison 54)
Houyhnhnm society is entirely “instrumental,” serving only to maintain itself without consideration of any other possibilities. This is the state of their utopia, into which Gulliver stumbles, an eternal, unchanging society built on values intrinsic to the nature of the creatures that populate it.
So where does this accumulation of various readings of Swift’s Houyhnhnms leave us? Booth’s irresolvable problem, of whether Houyhnhnmland represents a utopian ideal against which we are meant to measure ourselves or standing instead as an object of satire, seems to be more heavily weighted on the side of satire. While critics like Reichert note the many ways in which Houyhnhnmland mirrors a Platonic utopia, and, as did Beauchamp, they will argue that Gulliver serves as misunderstood messenger for this ideal, bringing like a deranged prophet the message of pure reason, other critics seem to have made a compelling case for the weaknesses that Swift portrays in Houyhnhnm reason, which, as Frese points out, seems in fact to be inhuman in its immoral adherence to rationality. As Allison suggests, Swift is unlikely to have missed the fact of these weaknesses that he portrays, and, Allison insists, Swift must have therefore been satirizing “merciless” reason. The Houyhnhnm creature itself seems to be full of weaknesses related to its strict adherence to reason--an adherence that Panagopoulos notes is apparently instinctual. But “brute instinct” shapes the way in which any creature apprehends its world: for the Houyhnhnm, who possess no individual identities and are blind to the faults of their inherent version of rationality, the very language by which they describe themselves and their world is based on that means of apprehension. These complex themes of language suggest that Swift was in fact engaged, beyond his historical moment, in a kind of twentieth-century deconstructive thinking that demolished key conceptual ideas of his time, including examining how a pure democracy can in fact become totalitarian. The division of “hard” and “soft” readings might be resolved by asking whether Swift is deconstructing utopia--which, it seems, based on these many critics, he is probably doing. Harrison, half way through his paper, suggests that “Two and a half centuries before Derrida..., Swift has equipped Gulliver with a self-deconstructing discourse: one which depends, not merely for its plausibility but for its very intelligibility, on the very concepts which it endeavors to displace and marginalize” (53).
But oddly, Harrison’s argument emerges out of a critique of the methodology by which most of the readings of Swift have been made: “The text of the Travels figures in [these analyses] merely as an arena in which to test interpretations of Swift’s intentions forged elsewhere” (42). This seems to echo criticism made by R. S. Crane years before, who saw literary critics making historical assumptions about Swift that dictated critical readings, giving “unifying principles of histories...something like the force of empirically established universal laws, ...used as guarantees of the probable correctness of any interpretations” (241). He suggests that critics ought to instead “start...with the assumption that our hypothesis may very well be false and..., only when having impartially considered all the counter-possibilities we can think of” should they then “permit ourselves to look upon it as fact” (238). Of course, critics do not do this, “otherwise we would not publish as much as we do” (238).
Crane traces these “special assumptions about the application of intellectual history to the exegesis of literary works” out of an assumption about “what was in Swift’s mind when he conceived the fourth Voyage” (236). Critics often assume that “the attitudes of Swift and his hero do indeed coincide up to a certain point” (232), or that “he [Gulliver] is...one of the targets of [Swift’s] satire--a character designed to convince us...of the absurdity...of [some] view of man’s nature” (233). In short, critics are presuming Swift’s intentions based on presumed historical pressures. Harrison also addresses this presumption, noting that Orwell assumes that “the views of Gulliver and those of Swift are interchangeable, at least in Book IV” (39) and stresses that a critic should understand Book IV to be “not a mirror of Swift’s mind but a thing made by Swift: a rhetorical machine” (42). Hence, “a text is a machine for reading”:
It is a device designed to promote a process or processes of thought on the part of the reader. And it is surely not clear that the outcome of that process need be the reader’s arrival at what critics have habitually thought of as a “meaning,” that is, some putative insight capable of being produced and brandished, with some relief, as what the text or the author “is finally saying.” (Harrison 43)
The separation of readings between the “hard” and “soft”, with each side piling up evidence, works toward that kind of teleological reading. Harrison suggests instead that perhaps this very division is in fact the “purpose” of the text: “Perhaps...we should stop trying to explain away the internal contradictions, the aporias, and so forth, as artifacts of inattention, logical incapacity or spleen on the part of Swift, and consider instead whether they may not be essential parts of the machine” (43).
Did Swift really anticipate Deconstruction? or is it more likely that the kinds of thinking that Deconstruction opened up offered a new way for critics to approach and apprehend Swift’s text? Orwell is obviously concerned with totalitarianism and brings it to every table he sits down to. In fact, Orwell’s comfort in ascribing to Swift some intention based on a constructed version of the author might be based on Eric Blair’s comfort in constructing his own alter ego in “George Orwell.” The only thing that Swift definitively “says” are the words put down in the novel (though obviously even that might be disputed based on editorial decisions). Everything else is interpretation, which fundamentally exists as secondary meaning that cannot be ascribed to the author of the original discourse.
Late in Harrison’s essay he declares, “Decide, though, we must, how Book IV is to be read: as a utopia or as a dystopia?” I disagree. I do not think we must decide: the Novel as a genre has itself quite a baggy definition because it is a baggy concept: and any sample novel taken at random will likely stretch the bounds of any definition we try to impose upon the overall genre. Any such critical description is inherently narrowing: the thing described cannot be contained within descriptive language without changing how we perceive it. It is a mistake to ever consider definition or discovery or reading to be exhaustive or accurate. As Harrison says, invoking Stanley Fish, “any ‘meaning’ we [would assign] depend[s] largely on the initial, and arbitrary, choice of a strategy of reading” (42). Implicit in this claim is that critical practice does not--and can not--find the meaning of a text, but merely explicates whatever “strategy of reading” with which it approaches the text, that is, the purpose and intention that the critic brings to the text. A critic sees the name “Jonathan Swift” and assumes “satire” rather than “fiction”--hence, as Robert Heilman notes, “Satirical indignation confers total rectitude on the Houyhnhnms; the fictional imagination reveals the limits of their authority” (280). Critical readings are always expositions of styles of reading, of presumptions brought to the text from outside, rather than discoveries of anything intrinsically extant in the text. Critics find their own intentions, not the intentions of the author. In the end, the Houyhnhnm are merely what we make of them, and they are also everything else.
Works Cited
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