The Strange case of Mr. Swift

[Terrance]

I've mentioned the strange case of Mr. Swift several times.
For shits and grins, here is a portion of Louis A. Landa's
Introduction to Gulliver's Travels. 

Biography and criticism have reciprocal influences; and the 
conception of Swift as a man has been greatly influenced by
the criticism of Gulliver's Travels. The masterpiece became
the man. The book became an ethical or psychological case
history, or both, of its author in which the presumed
intolerable misanthropy of Part IV, its debasement of
humankind, showed -as Swift's first biographer maintained
that Swift himself was the degenerate Yahoo he had so
infamously depicted as representative of man. Other
commentators of the later eighteenth century took a similar
high moral line. 

A man who could thus libel human nature must be reflecting,
it seemed, his own moral deformity and defiled imagination.
Inevitably, and unconsciously, the degraded nature of the
author had a subtle influence on literary judgment. The
ethical culpability of the writer lent strength to the view
that the Fourth Voyage is an artistic failure, as though a
Buddhist should deny the literary worth of Dante's Divine
Comedy or Milton's
Paradise Lost because they are doctrinally unsound. Yet it
ought to
be said to the honor of the eighteenth-century commentators
that they
paid the author of Gulliver's Travels the compliment of
believing him
a sane man. It remained for the nineteenth-century critics
to take
a new tack and elaborate a less defensible charge. Though
they readily accepted the view that Part IV could be
explained in terms of a
depraved author, they added that it might well be explained
in terms
of a mad one. Early in the century Sir Walter Scott,
repelled by "this horrible outline of mankind degraded to a
bestial state," thought it must be the result of "of the
first impressions of...incipient mental disease." The"
theory of malignancy was supplemented by the theory of
lunacy. It was then only a step to Thackeray's advice to his
audience, when he was lecturing on the eighteenth century
humorists,
that Part IV should not be read. Pass over it, he counseled
his hearers and hoot its author for -this portion of the
book -"filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging,
obscene." Similarly Edmund Gosse, a product of the second
half of the nineteenth century, whose prolific criticism
spanned the Victorian period and the first three
decades of the twentieth century, found evidence of a
diseased brain
in the Fourth Voyage, which banished it from decent
households.
It is not surprising that in our century the psychoanalysts
have seized
on so attractive a subject as Swift and now we find Gulliver
explained
in terms of neuroses and complexes. Witness these words from
The
Psychoanalytic Review ( 1942) : Gulliver's Travels "may be
viewed
as a neurotic fantasy with coprophilia as its main content." 

" It furnishes abundant evidence of the neurotic make up of
its author and
discloses in him a  number of perverse trends indicative of
fixation
at the anal sadistic stage of libidinal development. Most
con-
spicuous among those perverse trends is that of coprophilia,
although the work furnishes evidence of numerous other
related
neurotic characteristics accompanying the general picture of
psychosexual infantilism and emotional immaturity."


By a diligent search the psychoanalyst was able to discover
"evidence"
that the author was afflicted with a formidable variety of
neurotic
tendencies, including misogyny, mysophilia, mysophobia,
voyeurism,
exhibitionism, and compensatory potency reactions. This
indeed is
helpful! And it carries conviction in direct proportion to
its help-
fulness. If the psychoanalytic approach seems to have in it
an element
of absurdity, we should recognize that it is only a logical
extension
of the disordered-intellect theory of the nineteenth
century, the chief
difference being that the terminology has changed and that
the psychoanalyst frankly sees Gulliver's Travels as a case
history , whereas
many earlier critics were presumably making a literary
appraisal.
Perhaps these crude and amateur attempts deserve little
attention,
yet they are a phenomenon that the serious reader of Swift
can hardly
ignore in the light of their recurrence and their
effectiveness in perpetuating myths. And they sometimes come
with persuasiveness and
literary flavor, as in Aldoux Huxley's essay on Swift in Do
What You
Will ( 1929) where Huxley arrives at an amazingly
over-simplified
explanation of Swift's genius: "Swift's greatness," he
writes, "lies in
the intensity, the almost insane violence, of that 'hatred
of bowels'
which is the essence of his misanthropy and which underlies
the whole
of his work." The critics who have relied on a theory of
insanity or
disordered intellect to explain Swift have vitiated their
case by re-
sorting to ex post facto reasoning. The failure of Swift's
faculties
towards the end of his life, some fifteen or sixteen years
after the
publication of Gulliver's Travels, has been seized upon to
explain
something the critics neither liked nor understood. It
seemed to
them valid to push his "insanity" back in time, to look
retrospectively
at the intolerable Fourth Voyage of Gulliver, and to infer
that he
must have been at least incipiently mad when he wrote it.
Yet the
same commentators who observe manifestations of a disordered
in-
tellect in Part IV have not thought to question the
intellect behind
the Third Voyage, which we now know was composed in point of
time after the Fourth. These same commentators have nothing
but
praise for the vigor, the keenness, the sanity, and the
humanity of the
mind that produced the Drapier's Letters, the first of which
Swift was
writing only a month after completing a draft of Part IV of
Gulliver.
This is not to deny that a central fact in Swift's life and
his works
is his pessimism. If we reject the extreme view that his
life was com-
pounded of bitter malignity, raging madness, and black
misanthropy,
or even the more moderate tradition that misery and gloom
were
pervasive in his daily existence, we still must grant that
his pessimism
was real and ample.