»Dabei wird Hobbes' LEVIATHAN
chaulich.«
Gulliver's Travels an
illustration of "Leviathan"?
[continued]
>2. What is »Gulliver's Travels« about?
A story illustrating the basic idea I have sketched here should at least allow the reader to recognize some traces of Hobbes's reasoning in it. I can detect precious little of Hobbes in »Gulliver's Travels«. Granted, monarchs, tyrants and rulers, their behaviour and styles of governing do play a large role in Swift's book. They are essential in his satire which is outspokenly directed at 18th century Europe's crowned heads, their courts and their politics, both domestic and foreign.
At the end of chapter VII of »A Voyage to Brobdignag« Swift has the best chance to make use of Hobbes's theory. But he does not take it. In his narration, the king of Brobdignag never had his authority established by a social contract, this office has existed from times immemorial. There was in fact a civil war once, but it was resolved simply by setting up a strong standing army and putting the king in its command. Here it is evident that Swift was neither interested in Hobbes [though he mentions him in his writings], nor in a theory of the origins of the state, nor in any political theory whatever.
Still, to EJ's mind Swift's book is an illustration of Leviathan. It is evident that this idea cannot be the result of close reading of both texts. However, it makes some sense as the result of comparing the lasting memories the two books have created in EJ's mind.
Generally, Hobbes is mainly remembered for having discovered the primeval bellum omnium contra omnes. What is the lasting memory that Swift's readers will take along from his book? Children are delighted by the images of Gulliver the giant among the Lilliputians and of Gulliver the tiny among the giants of Brobdignag. However, an adult re-reading the book will be haunted by the anti-rousseauean pessimism permeating the book. It is thrust upon the reader in full force in chapter 6 of Book II, »A Voyage to Brobd
ignag«. There the king, having been briefed by Gulliver about a great many
details of European civilization, delivers his final judgment with truly
Swiftian bluntness:
»I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most
pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever
suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.»
As an illustration of this verdict Swift sends the Yahoos on the stage of
his book. The founders of the search engine YAHOO can impossibly have
read »Gulliver's Travels«, or they would have named their once so popular
Internet site otherwise. For the Yahoos that Gulliver encounters with terror
and disgust [but also with fascination, it seems] are humanoid creatures
embodying only the worst and beastly traits of man. They lack even the
minimum of reason that is required to see that in in the long run their
perpetual internecine strife is, to put it mildly, counter-productive. Even
less are they equipped to find and implement a rational solution in the form
of a social contract. No wonder they are the slaves and domestic animals of
the superhuman horses, the Houyhnhnms, noble creatures endowed by Swift with
all the rational virtues of man though with hardly any warm human emotions.
Swift's darkly pessimist image of man is not yet finished at this point.
Gulliver, and the reader with him, is shattered by the news that the
Houynhnhnms have determined, after having watched and studied him for a
while, that Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, the civilized and articulate representative
of the European middle class, is after all a member of the despicable race
of the Yahoos. All his efforts to become like a Houyhnhnm were in vain. Only
because the horses determine that there may be some vestiges of reason in
him he is not condemned right away to spend the rest of his life among those
filthy Yahoo monsters. Instead, the noble horses magnanimously exile him to
give him a chance to return to his particular race of Yahoos, i.e. to
England.
When he finally comes home it is soon evident what devastating impact that
lesson has had upon Gulliver's mind and behaviour. His fellow men appear as
Yahoos to him, he cannot even stand the presence of his wife and his
children. So he spends most of his day in his stable, trying to converse
with his horses. His family and friends believe he has gone crazy.
[to be continued]
--------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Günter Rebing
Hügel 20
D-53359 Rheinbach
Tel./Fax 02226-3980
Mobil 0177-5961331
E-Mail: g.rebing@eplus-online.de
und
Rebing@t-online.de
Markup © John King, July 2001.