388.Guliver -- Jstor

Reader86

14 Bernie Selinger

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24777677

sense of evil and doom and of a universal nostalgia for a lost paradise."40

This lost paradise idea and Gulliver's subsequent loss of identity in England
correspond closely to two strong themes in the Travels, themes which
are conjoined: Gulliver's tendency to imitate the behavior of others; and
his tendency, which dictates the structure of the Travels, to get himself into
the same situation over and over—or, more cynically, "released from bond
age he hastens to put himself in bondage again."41

It is Gulliver's refusal to "imitate the bad Practice of too many among
my Brethren" (p. 20) that causes him (on a conscious level) to keep leaving
his homeland. Specifically, he is not able to identify with them. However,
we do find him imitating the Lilliputians in Brobdingnag. He adopts the Lilliputian
perspective and displays the hunger for power and the pettiness of
those little vermin. After leaving Brobdingnag he sees his rescuers as "pigmies"
and at home in England he tells us: "I began to think of my self in

Lilliput. I was afraid of trampling on every Traveller I met; and often called
aloud to have them stand out of the Way" (pp. 148-49). This is all leading
up to the supreme identification with the Houyhnhnms: he neighs his words
and trots like a horse; he tries to become a Houyhnhnm and believes that
every one else should become one as well. Gulliver's desire to imitate is
consistent with the actions of a child in the first stage of development and
it is necessary to his sense of identity: "a common form of behaviour in oral
characters is identification with the object by whom they want to be fed....
The development of a sense of identity grows out of the various identifications
experienced in childhood."42 Gulliver wants to be fed only by those he
trusts. Unfortunately, he identifies with them to the point of complete loss
of identity.43

Gulliver's need to get himself into the same situations—being set adrift,
captured, learning the language, imitating—is directly connected to his search
for identity and his search for a paradise. This compulsion to repeat "symbolizes
a wish to return to one's warm hungerless paradise before birth."44
The principle of repetition-compulsion, often noted by Freud, has been
developed into an identity principle: "the deepest motivation, beneath even
the pleasure principle, is the organism's drive to maintain its own continuity
of being, its identity.. .we will die rather than suffer a fundamental assault on
what we believe essential to our being...we are seduced into becoming our
selves by the love and nurture we receive in infancy."45

In Houyhnhnmland, then, Gulliver could have his cake and eat it too: he
has the worry-free protection of the matrix and he is moving toward a strong
sense of identity. Surely all readers respond to this. Equally surely, the Travels
imply, there is no actual, physical Utopia; thus one must be content to deal
with reality or, if this is unacceptable, one can, like Gulliver—the visionary
horse editing journals in order to "correct every Vice and Folly"—attempt
to change it. But Swift's satire, as an ironic form of self-definition, under
mines this as well because Gulliver, regardless of what he writes or imagines,
will always be confronted with the problem of the self: how to be a part of
and yet apart from that society. The need to create and recreate an identity
which, as we have seen, is directly supported by the oral imagery in the
Travels, sheds some light on the pleasures of reading and re-reading the book.
Each time we read it and try to talk about it we work through our own, often
comic, attempts at self-definition. However, if Swift's writings are merely
"neurotic fantasies," we can at least, as Norman 0. Brown proposes, "seek
to appreciate his insights into the universal neurosis of mankind."46 But we
can no longer allow Gulliver, or indeed Swift, to be laid to rest in the procrustean
bed that psychoanalytic critics have made for them.

Reader86

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