Week 7: Part IV: Chapters 1-6

[David]

Chapter 1
Toward the end of his last adventure, Gulliver declares,

I thought it more consistent with prudence and justice to pass the remainder of my days with my wife and family./

Here we learn

I continued at home with my wife and children about five months in a very happy condition, if I could have learned the lesson of knowing when I was well. I left my poor wife big with child. . .

Why does Gulliver continue to leave home?

The start of Gulliver’s adventures seem to start under progressively hostile conditions and human treachery.
1. Lilliput – Nature, shipwreck caused by a storm.
2. Brobdingnag – unavoidably left behind when the giants were seen.
3. Laputa – Attacked by other pirates and set to sea.
4. Houyhnhnms Land – Betrayed by his own crew members and marooned.

On the description of the Yahoos, Asimov notes in 1641 Europeans were just getting acquainted with the more human-like apes. What seems to be a chimpanzee from Africa was being kept in the Netherlands and there were also reports of a large human like animal in Borneo we know call the orangutan that Swift fashioned the Yahoos after. Swift was well ahead of his time because at the time there was still no hint of our hominid predecessors.

[David]

Chapter 2
Gulliver is compared to a Yahoo, but his clothes continue to cause the Houyhnhnms some doubt that Gulliver is a Yahoo. Is Swift suggesting that people hide their nature behind clothes? Gulliver seems to be the middle link between the horses and the yahoos, he is even given lodgings halfway between the Houyhnhnms’ house and the Yahoo’s stable.

The entry for, oats, in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary is, as a grain which, in England, was fed to horses and, in Scotland, was fed to men.” Gulliver is forced to eat oats, and this seems to be a swipe at Scotland for no other reason than, just because.

Chapter 3
They Houyhnhnms discover the secret of Gulliver’s clothing. I am puzzled by the naked vs. clothing. Are the horses supposed to represent the innocence of life before, “the fall”, as perfections of nature? They do not even have a term for, “lie”. But the Yahoos are also naked. Gulliver is the only one with clothing. Is Swift suggesting we should give up clothing when Gulliver says of his Houyhnhnm master: he could not understand why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had given.

Chapter 4
Like clothing, Power, government, war, law, punishment, and a thousand other things had no terms wherein that language could express them, which made the difficulty almost insuperable to give my master any conception of what I meant.. And like clothes hide the physical body, these human institutions hide, or attempt to compensate for human nature.

[Rafael]

I like when Gulliver make fun of english values or institutions. He was quite successful in this section. Swift was really fond of lawyers and judges.

I don't get the point of criticize the use of clothes, I don't know if he was just pointing it as hypocrisy. Maybe pointing it as religious hypocrisy? I don't know much about the religious controversies of his time, if there's any to start with.

[Donnally]

Rafael wrote: "Swift was really fond of lawyers and judges."

I assume this is sarcasm.

[Donnally]

I take the clothing as a reference to our fallen state. Adam and Eve in Eden didn't wear clothes. After eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons." (Genesis, 3.8).

Animals, who haven't fallen, don't wear clothes, and are guided by an innate understanding of natural law rather than by reason.

[David]

Donnally wrote: "I take the clothing as a reference to our fallen state. Adam and Eve in Eden didn't wear clothes. After eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, "the eyes of them both were opene..."

I was thinking along those lines, and explains the horses attitude toward clothing, but does that mean the naked Yahoo's have not "fallen"? Is the island some sort of Eden? I have some difficulty with that in the relationship between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos.

[Mike]

David wrote: "Donnally wrote: "I take the clothing as a reference to our fallen state. Adam and Eve in Eden didn't wear clothes. After eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, "the eyes of the..."

Interesting, if the Yahoo's are to represent the un-fallen human perhaps the reason why they are portray as being stupid is because they have not tasted the tree of knowledge.

[Tamara]

I see this section as a scathing indictment of the human tendency to conceal the truth.

We lie by saying the thing which is not;

Our lawyers intentionally obscure the truth by speaking in a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand;

Our physicians are in the profession or pretence of curing the sick;

The Chief Minister of State never tells a truth, but with an intent that you should take it for a lie; nor a lie, but with a design that you should take it for a truth. . .

Clothes are also a form of concealment. The Yahoos are brutes that run around naked. But at least they’re not obscuring the truth about who they are or what they are.

We wear clothes to conceal our bodies; we use words to conceal the truth.

[Rafael]

Donnally wrote: "Rafael wrote: "Swift was really fond of lawyers and judges."

I assume this is sarcasm."

It is.

[Donnally]

David wrote: "I was thinking along those lines, and explains the horses attitude toward clothing, but does that mean the naked Yahoo's have not "fallen"? Is the island some sort of Eden? "

But are the Yahoos really human? Or did Swift, long before Darwin and Huxley, have the insight that human beings are only evolved anthropoid apes?

[David]

Donnally wrote: "But are the Yahoos really human? Or did Swift, long before Darwin and Huxley, have the insight that human beings are only evolved anthropoid apes?"

I cannot imagine anyone at this time thinking humans were anything but descendants of Adam and Eve. As Asimov's notes above indicated he may have got the idea for the physical appearance of the Yahoos from rare reports of chimpanzees and orangutans and only resemble our evolutionary hominid ancestors from our post Darwin perspective.

In comparison to the close-up ugliness writ large in the Brobdingnagians, the Yahoos are more simply the physical expression of animal man embodied with all of man's imperfections and function as Swift's device to demonstrate how little we have morally progressed from the animals.

Another way of conceptualizing the Yahoos that helped me is taking Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde and removing the clothes and maybe some of the evil.

[Donnally]

David wrote: "I cannot imagine anyone at this time thinking humans were anything but descendants of Adam and Eve."

That's true, but the people of that time were familiar with what breeding could do to domesticated animals. Take dogs, for instance. Think of the difference between the first dogs and the breeds that were created by contact with human civilization. The first dogs would resemble mongrel curs: nasty, ragged, running around spraying their urine against the walls of houses. Compare them with a thoroughbred poodle living in a fine home. That would seem to correspond to the difference between Gulliver and the Yahoos.
Perhaps Swift is making the point that the Europeans of his day are just Yahoos underneath a thin veneer of civilization.

[David]

Swift's Yahoo's may not have been the herald of evolution, but Gulliver's denial of being a Yahoo, would certainly be echoed in the vehement denials of of man's descent from their hominid ancestors to come.

[Lily]

David wrote: "I cannot imagine anyone at this time thinking humans were anything but descendants of Adam and Eve...."

You raise an interesting question. How did humans unfamiliar with the Hebrew traditions conceptualize the origins/descent of man? I don't know that I have ever explored that one, beyond the some of the more fantastical birth stories.