Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [97]
The publisher’s objection was that I had sentimentalized Swift, having failed, apparently, to have read any detailed accounts of his Ufe and character. Here is how I did it:
“Go, traveler,” says his epitaph in Latin, “and imitate, if you can, one who strove with all his strength to champion liberty.” Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), an Anglican priest, wrote this about his own long life. He is buried beside his wife in Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he was dean for his final thirty-two years. It was in Dublin that he wrote Gulliver’s Travels, a book as enduring as any cathedral. The appointment to St. Patrick’s had disappointed him. He had hoped for a bishopric in England. Be that as it may, he became, according to Swift scholar Ricardo B. Quintana, “Dublin’s foremost citizen and Ireland’s great patriotic dean.” In our own thin-skinned and solemn society, it would be impossible for such a ferocious satirist to become the head of a cathedral and a treasured public man.
He began to write Gulliver’s Travels when he was about my age, which is fifty-four. He finished it when he was sixty. He was already recognized as one of the most bitterly funny writers of his or any time. His motives were invariably serious, however, and I now suggest that Gulliver’s Travels can be read as a series of highly responsible sermons, delivered during a crisis in Christian attitudes, one that is far from over yet. The crisis is this, in my opinion: It simply will not do for adult Christians to think of themselves as God’s little lambs anymore.
Swift died before the invention of the steam engine or the iron plow—or of the Constitution of the United States, for that matter. But he was aware of microscopes and telescopes and the calculus, and Harvey’s theories about the circulation of human blood, and Newton’s laws of motion, and all that. There were certainly strong hints around that the natural orders of things, so long so stubborn and mysterious, might in fact be wonderful clocks which could be tinkered with, which might even be taken apart and reassembled. Human reason was in the process of assuming powers to change life such as only armies and disasters had possessed before. So Dublin’s first citizen found it urgent that we take an unsentimental look, for the good of the universe, at the great apes that were suddenly doing such puissant thinking. Lambs, indeed!
In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift sets such high standards for unsentimentality about human beings that most of us can meet those standards only in wartime, and only briefly even then. He shrinks us, urinates on us, expands us and peers into all our nauseating apertures, encourages us to demonstrate our stupidity and mendaciousness, makes us hideously old. On paper he subjects us to every humiliating test that imaginative fiction can invent. And what is learned about us in the course of these Auschwitzian experiments? Only this, according to Swift’s hero, Captain Gulliver: that we are disgusting in the extreme. We can be sure that this is not Swift’s own opinion of us, thank God—for, before he allows Gulliver to declare us no better than vomit, he makes Gulliver insane. That has to be the deepest meaning of Gulliver’s adoration of horses, since Swift himself had no more than average respect for those dazed and skittish animals. Gulliver is no longer the reliable witness he was in Chapter I.
I had a teacher in high school who assured me that a person has to be at least a little insane to harp on human disgustingness as much as Swift does. And Swift harps on it long before Gulliver has gone insane. I would tell that teacher now, if she were still alive, that his harping is so relentless that it becomes ridiculous, and is meant to be ridiculous, and that Swift is teaching us a lesson almost as important as the one about our not being lambs: that our readiness to feel disgust for ourselves and others is not, perhaps, the guardian of civilization so many of us imagine it to be. Disgust, in fact, may