"But the main aim that I propose in all my labors is to irritate the world" Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Jonathan Swift In most ironic works there are two voices. Ellen Winner and Howard Gardner explain that, ironically, "what the speaker says is intentionally at odds with how the speaker knows the world" (428). Using the word “talking” twice in this sentence reveals a lot about irony. One of the speakers Winner and Gardner refer to is the actual voice that speaks to the audience in the play. The other voice is usually that of the author and hides behind the text or immediate voice, with a vision contrary to that of the first voice. In Jonathan Swift's short tongue-in-cheek work, "A Modest Proposal," there are two of these voices at work. One voice is the naive one present in the text, a voice that recommends the slaughter of children for the social good. The other, contrasting voice is Swift's mature voice that stands behind the text and uses the naive speaker to demonstrate the absurdity of the naive speaker's point of view. In Swift's work, Gulliver's Travels, he makes it clear that he will use multiple voices before the work even begins. Swift included a letter supposedly written by Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator of the Travels, as a preface to the work. In this light passage the reader is informed that a voice other than the author's will be used. The difference in meaning between the two voices is not known at this point, but in the rest of the work the contrast of these multiple voices is vital to the elucidation of Swift's purpose. In Gulliver's Travels, as in other ironic works, there is a first naïve voice in the text, a voice that, for the most part, manifests itself in Gulliver. But in the fourth book the irony takes some strange turns that eliminate the standard two-voice system of irony, such as that seen in "A Modest Proposal". Numerous creatures are introduced, each with a drastically different lifestyle. The standard by which these creatures are judged changes over the course of the work, creating multiple voices of judgment. In Gulliver's Travels it is clear that there is more than one voice, but it is not clear in which of the multiple voices Swift's feelings lie, and therefore the stable opinion by which these creatures are measured. This confusion forces the reader to examine the work for a stable voice. A possible stable solution for the mature ironic voice is Gulliver himself, as he is at the end of the book. At the beginning of the fourth book Gulliver has just been thrown off his ship and found himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle creatures who resemble horses but possess the ability to speak and reason. Gulliver is cared for by a master Houyhnhnm eager to learn about Gulliver's land. At the beginning of the fourth book, everything Gulliver tells the master Houyhnhnm is patently naive and even absurd. In describing the multiple causes of war to the master Houyhnhnm, Gulliver explains that, sometimes, the dispute between two princes consists in deciding which of them will move a third of his domains, where neither claims any rights. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another, for fear that the other will quarrel with him. Sometimes we go to war because the Enemy is too strong, sometimes because it is too weak. Sometimes our neighbors want the things we have, or have the things we want; and we both fight, until they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of war to invade a country after the people have been devastated by famine, destroyed by plague, or embroiled in factions among themselves. (184-5) And so the short monologue continues, with extremismand the one-sidedness of opinions constantly increasing. Gulliver, however, never makes any reference to this one-sidedness. His ignorance of the weight of his words in the first part of the fourth book marks him as a naive channel through which these harsh visions can pass. Gulliver's ignorance is emphasized by his vocalized desire to provide a completely unbiased account of the man. Before expressing the above harsh opinions, he says to the master Houyhnhnm: "I will set forth here the substance of what has passed between us concerning my country, reducing it to order as I can, without regard to the time of other circumstances, while I strictly adhere to Truth” (184). This contradiction between tone and desire indicates that Gulliver ignores his position. The one-sidedness that Gulliver does not recognize in his own words seems to be the mature voice of irony, Swift's own voice the case, Swift believes that the horribly one-sided view of man that Gulliver is unknowingly conveying is true. Gulliver's naivety is an oblique voice through which Swift can convey this fierce truth. This form of delivery seems reasonable given the disposition of Swift. As his autobiography tells us, “Swift was no fiery revolutionary” (Hunting 24), thus assuring us that if Swift had had these views of the man, he would not have wanted to express them angrily in a fiery diatribe. Furthermore, Swift would have known that no one would listen to the accusations of a screaming extremist. Shielding his opinions with irony, Gulliver's naivety, Swift, it seems, finds an effective way to express his harsh opinions somewhat calmly. Such a harsh view of the man would not be unusual for the time. Thomas Hobbes, an eminent philosopher who immediately preceded Swift, expressed similar beliefs. Hobbes, in his work Leviathan, describes the cause of war among men. He claims that: "We find three main causes of quarrel. First, competition; Second, Distrust; Third, Glory" (185). This point of view is quite similar to that expressed by Swift, as Gulliver. Hobbes goes on to say that "Force and fraud are at war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are neither of the faculties either of the body or of the mind" (188). For Hobbes the only thing that causes peace among men is the fear of death. In Gulliver's Travels there are characters remarkably similar to this Hobbesian conception of man: Yahoos are creatures similar to humans, but they have no saving features. Hobbes's conclusion is that men naturally live in a "brutal manner" (187), remarkably similar to the Yahoos. As Book IV progresses, however, Gulliver comes to see the perfection of the utopian Houyhnhnm society, and by contrasting this perfection with the version of humanity he has presented, he loses his naïve view of man. Among the Houyhnhnm, Gulliver tells us objectively, “Friendship and benevolence are the two chief virtues among the Houyhnhnm” (202). These positive traits are all governed by reason. There is no possibility of great evils such as war, lying and murder occurring in Houyhnhnm society. There are not even small conflicts such as "Discussions, controversies, and positivity in false or dubious propositions" (202). At the same time as he sees the virtues of the Houyhnhnm system, Gulliver realizes the evil of man: the Hobbesian or Yahoo vision of man; that vision Swift could be argued to have had from the beginning. As Gulliver's naivety disappears and he comes to see man as Yahoo, the irony in the play also seems to disappear; Gulliver adopts the previously established mature voice and breaks away from the naivety of the first voice: "When I thought of my family, ofmy friends, my countrymen, or the human race in general, I regarded them as they really were, Yahoos in Form and Disposition" (211). When Gulliver is forced by the Houyhnhnms to leave their community and rejoin the humans, including his wife and his children, complains that he would rather live on a lonely island than be with humans. Finally convinced that there is no such island, he mutters resignedly: "At last I obeyed, finding that I could do no better" (220). ) This maturation and subsequent loss of irony is not surprising because it comes at the end of the fourth book of this four-book work. It seems reasonable that Gulliver finally realizes what he has been ignorant of (and therefore what Swift was aware) throughout the work, thus allowing a certain closure to the work. In exchange for the irony, in these concluding pages we find a character who seems to be Swift's moral lesson for all of us. Swift seems to be saying that we should all face the truth that we are Hobbesian creatures, as Gulliver did. In light of this perception of history, Gulliver's desire for isolation upon returning home seems initially reasonable and even respectable, as John Gay refers to Swift, the Duchess The Dowager of Marlborough proudly said "that if she had known Gulliver, though had it been the worst enemy he ever had, he would have given up all his present acquaintances for his friendship" (qtd. in Correspondence 183). In proudly displaying her sympathy for Gulliver, the Duchess demonstrated her belief that her sympathy for Gulliver was also sympathy for a Swift who shared Gulliver's Hobbesian vision of man. And it's not just the less-than-academic duchesses who hold this view. William Thackeray and George Orwell may not have sympathized with the Duchess' desire to embrace Gulliver, but they agreed with her interpretation of the story. Thackeray argues that Swift "began to write his terrible allegory the meaning of which is that man is utterly wicked, desperate and imbecile, and his passions so monstrous, and his vaunted powers so paltry, that he is and deserves to be the slave of the brutes" (37). Orwell expresses a similar interpretation in "Politics vs. Literature"; “We are told that the Yahoos are human beings…Swift has exaggerated his fury and is shouting at his fellows, “You are dirtier than you are!” (255). But while Gulliver was shouting at his fellows, Swift was not doing anything of the sort. Orwell, Thackeray and the Duchess are all misguided in their interpretation that Swift agrees with Gulliver's belief that men are Hobbesian Creatures. Swift does not believe that Gulliver's will to abandon completely humanity is a fair measure of the value of humanity because it does not believe that humans are the Hobbesian characters that Gulliver comes to believe they are, before writing Gulliver's Travels. I tell you basically that I do not hate humanity" ( Correspondence 118). The Duchess, who believed she had rediscovered Swift's mature voice, actually represents, herself, the naive voice of this ironic story. Swift himself meticulously exposes the instability and contradictory nature of Gulliver's new Hobbesian belief. When Gulliver returns to society, he is firmly entrenched in his belief that the man is Yahoo. His first reaction to the Portuguese sailors who have to save him is "between Fear and Hate... When they began to speak, I thought I had never heard or seen anything so unnatural; for it seemed monstrous to me as if a Dog or a cow should speak in England, or a Yahoo in Houyhnhnms-Land" (217). But while Gulliver expresses nothing but contempt, the Portuguese sailors show nothing but benevolence and kindness, preciselywhat the Houyhnhnms hold in the highest esteem. Gulliver tells us that in their first words, after a brief interrogation of Gulliver, "They spoke to me with great humanity, and said that they were sure that their Captain would take me free to Lisbon" (217). When Gulliver meets the captain he is forced to admit that "he was a very kind and generous person," even though Gulliver was "ready to faint at the mere smell of him and his men" (218). Upon arriving in Lisbon, the Captain offers Gulliver everything he desires. “The Captain persuaded me to accept a newly made suit” (219) and also provided Gulliver with food and lodging. In addition to all this material generosity, the captain kindly and calmly accepts Gulliver's absurd hatred for man, and places him in the room furthest from the street of his house. In the end the Captain kindly forces Gulliver to return home and his wife. On departure, the Captain "loaned me twenty pounds. He kindly took leave of me, and embraced me at departure; which I bore as best I could" (220). This last scene of the Captain warmly embracing Gulliver, while Gulliver trembles in disgust at benevolence and kindness, captures the absurd distance Gulliver maintains from the kind people around him. It is strikingly evident that this Portuguese Captain does not possess any visible evil. The prudent reader finds himself annoyed by Gulliver's dogmatic refusal to see in this man the very traits that the Houyhnhnms glorified. Through this striking contrast Swift represents how offensive and extreme Gulliver's new Hobbesian vision of man is. By making Gulliver's vision seem absurd in this way, Swift makes his point on the matter perfectly clear: he exposes the truth of this Hobbesian vision of man as Yahoo that he seemed to convey so forcefully through Gulliver. Swift also makes Gulliver's opinions seem unfair. making them use superficial and unreasonable criteria to judge human beings; criterion such as their smell. When Gulliver's wife welcomes him home, Gulliver says, "not having been accustomed to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for nearly an hour... their very odor was intolerable" ( 220). Master Houyhnhnm had accused human beings of being like Yahoos in many ways, but the one point he praised was their cleanliness. The master had said that Gulliver "must be a perfect Yahoo; but that I differed greatly from the rest of my species, in the whiteness and smoothness of my skin, in the lack of hair in several parts of my body" (178 ) while later in the In the work, the master Houyhnhnm complains sympathetically to Gulliver about the Yahoos and their "strange disposition towards wickedness and filthiness; while there seems to be a natural love of cleanliness in all other animals" (198). Gulliver, therefore, finds in humans the only attribute for which the master Houyhnhnm did not criticize man. By constructing Gulliver to hate man only through this completely absurd statement, Swift highlights the absurdity of Gulliver's Hobbesian hatred of man. Sometimes making this change of point of view involves Swift in forced writing. Ironically, Swift wants to keep alive the belief that Gulliver's hatred of humans is reasonable, but at the same time Swift needs this narrator, who supposedly hates humans, to convey the positive aspects of humanity that Swift he knows that they exist in these and in all. men. The text shows this variety in lines like this one which describes what the Portuguese captain provided for Gulliver: "At last I wished to eat from my canoe; but he ordered me a fowl and some excellent wine, and then bade me be put to bed in onevery clean cabin" (218). Gulliver's flattering description of everything given to him is in stark contrast to Gulliver's feeling that the Captain imposed each of these luxuries on Gulliver. Place these contrasting descriptions directly adjacent to the one to another undermines Gulliver as a credible thinker on these points and allows Swift to pull off this difficult breakthrough By using forced sentences like this, Swift is able to achieve the breakthrough, but these points of tension are beacons that reveal the breakthrough that Swift is doing. But Gulliver left the land of Houyhnhnm with two new beliefs. The first is his new Hobbesian view of man as Yahoo, of which Swift denounces the error for the rational life of the Houyhnhnm. Even if Swift might not agree with the Hobbesian view of man, he might still believe in the Houyhnhnm's system of life. And indeed, this hypothesis is supported by many aspects of the Houyhnhnm's representation part of Swift. The Houyhnhnm have a system in which evil is entirely absent." As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general Disposition towards all Virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational Creature; so their great maxim is to cultivate Reason and be entirely governed by it" (202). This cultivation of reason leads the Houyhnhnm to regard friendship and benevolence as the two primary virtues. Holding reason in such high esteem and as natural was, again, not unusual for Swift's time. Swift would have found support for this view in the deistic philosophers of the time. Deists believed that a greater force controlled everything, a force that ensured that everything went smoothly. The exaggerated deist Pangloss, in Voltaire's Candide, succinctly summarizes this philosophy: "It is proved that things cannot be otherwise: for since everything was made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose" (18). This sentiment is exactly reflected by the master Houyhnhnm who states that it is impossible to imagine that "Nature, which works all things to Perfection, must endure any Pain in order to reproduce itself in our bodies" (190). Swift could easily have created the Houyhnhnms in all their perfection to demonstrate his belief in deistic philosophy. Orwell believes he has done this: “As his ideal being he chooses the horse” (43). But, while man is not the evil that Hobbesians would have us believe, Swift does not believe that man should emulate the Houyhnhnms. If Orwell had done a little homework, he would have seen that his view contradicts Swift's beliefs. Swift according to John Robertson “particularly disliked the deists, with their dependence on reason” (Cooper 45). Accordingly Swift exposes the shortcomings of the Houyhnhnms, as he did the shortcomings of Gulliver. In chapter nine the master Houyhnhnm has just returned from the Houyhnhnm congress and tells Gulliver about the meeting. He relates that “The question to be discussed was whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the Earth” (205). One side of the debate argued that the Yahoos should be exterminated, while the other side argued that the Houyhnhnm should simply attempt to control the Yahoos. The entire event is in direct contradiction to Gulliver's observation that "it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my Master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be arguable; for reason has taught to affirm or deny only where we are certain” (202) had previously stated that the Houyhnhnms had no opinions or debates, but this episode shows themin a speech that cannot be called anything other than debate. Master Houyhnhnm prefaced his explanation of the debate among the Houyhnhnms by saying that, although this debate was an old debate, it was also the only one that had ever occurred. But if they had had this debate many times before, then Master Houyhnhnm would surely have known what debate and opinion were when he made his point to Gulliver. These two descriptions of the Houyhnhnm are in direct contradiction and suggest that the optimism of the Houyhnhnm system is unwarranted. But it is not surprising that this is the only point ever debated among the Houyhnhnm since the Houyhnhnm conscientiously avoid everything. situation that could generate any opinion or emotion. There is no possibility of love between two grown Houyhnhnms because mates are carefully chosen based on hair color and disposition (203). (Swift showed his particular contempt for such a view in his journal, when he said "no wise man ever married according to the dictates of reason" (Thoughts 285)). Nor does love exist between an adult Houyhnhnm and a young Houyhnhnm. As Gulliver observes, "They have no passion for their Colts or Foles; but the care they take in training them proceeds entirely from the dictates of reason" (202). Houyhnhnms are able to eliminate conflict from their society only by completely avoiding any situation that might happen to be controversial or generate feelings. Swift himself mocks this pattern in an essay: “the Stoic pattern of satisfying our needs by cutting off our desires is like cutting off our own feet, when we want shoes” (Scott 277). This is exactly what Houyhnhnm do. They deny the possibility of any contentious issue by denying part of a full life and fencing one's life into a narrow area where no contention will occur. The Houyhnhnm are also denounced in chapter nine for their lack of benevolence. The Houyhnhnm take great pride in their benevolence, yet, for all their august reason, they seem never to have reflected on the meaning of benevolence. Does benevolence simply not harm those who do not harm you? If so, then the Houyhnhnm can claim their benevolence, as they coexist peacefully with all creatures except the Yahoos. However, the definition of benevolence must include some aspects of governing others. It appears that the Houyhnhnms were entrusted with the task of governing, or at least supervising, the Yahoos. This task offers the Houyhnhnm the only opportunity to show their benevolence. What do they do with this opportunity? They discuss whether they should exterminate their subjects. This scene does not fit well with Gulliver's observation that Houyhnhnms are "endowed by Nature with a general disposition towards all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature." the areas in which they can claim virtue are those areas in which virtue is the path of least resistance. Swift then creates some situations in which the Houyhnhnms would not have had an easy time maintaining their virtue. In each of these situations the defects and shortcomings of the Houyhnhnm system are highlighted. In fact, chapter nine, where all this exposition occurred, is, plot-wise, completely gratuitous. At no other point does Swift depart from Gulliver's tale and his conversations with the master Houyhnhnm. The inclusion of this chapter can only be seen as a sign that Swift was using it for his own moral ends. And so both of these strong possibilities for the mature ironic voice are eliminated by Swift. Both of the views Swift rejected were extreme views: the Hobbesian view was a belief in the pure evil of man, while the Hobbesian view, 1993).