Swift’s Gentle Yahoo and the Arts in Our Time

Abstract

According to George Steiner “ours is today a civilization ‘after the word’”. Had Swift been alive today he would have been among the first to agree with Steiner that political propaganda and the languages of the market-place have devalued speech. The vacuum left by the death of God is occupied by science and economics. We live in a silicon world of bureaucracy, management and alienation. Is there a rôle for the arts in this régime? In Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels Swift guides us towards a defining point of balance which gives the basis for a revitalized argument that human nature needs the arts. Apotheosizing Science and Economics might delude us into thinking ourselves rational Houyhnhnms but we are Yahoos with a pittance of reason. The arts help us to maintain the gentleness which the Sorrel Nag, and Swift, can see in Gulliver as he leaves Houyhnhnmland to meet the grossness of his own kind. The wisdom of Swift is set in a broad context of other commentators and artists from Gustav Mahler to Béla Bartók, and from Henry Adams to Thomas Keneally.