Remembering his time in Marsh's
Library, in the enclosure of St. Patrick's Cathedral,
Stephen thinks of the important Dublin-born writer Jonathan
Swift, who was Dean of that cathedral from 1713 to 1745.
Stephen thinks of the "furious dean" as
misanthopic and mentally ill, associating both states with the
fictional Gulliver who would (if he could) have deserted his
own species for the rational horses he met on a Pacific
island: "A hater of his kind ran from them to the
wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs
stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled."
In the fourth book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels,
the protagonist lands on an island populated by filthy,
inarticulate, avaricious, libidinous, and murderous apes
called Yahoos and orderly, logical, serene, selfless, kind
horses called Houyhnhnms. The apes clearly are intended as a
satirical portrait of human beings, as becomes clear when the
horses see the rational Gulliver without his clothes on and
realize with horror that they have been harboring a Yahoo. The
horses strike Gulliver, and many of his readers, as a utopian
alternative to human failings similar to those envisioned in
Sir Thomas More's Utopia and Plato's Republic.
But the horses need not be read so idealistically. In their
feelings (or lack of feelings) about childrearing and mourning
they seem simply inhuman, and their serious consideration of a
proposal to exterminate all the Yahoos associates them with
one of the worst propensities of humanity. Banished from the
island as a lovable but undeniable Yahoo, Gulliver returns to
England, in Stephen's words, "a hater of his kind." He stuffs
herbs in his nostrils to mask the unbearable smell of his own
wife and children, and his only happy moments are spent in the
company of the horses in his stable. Confronted with this
eccentric behavior, the reader who has sympathetically
followed Gulliver's narration cannot help but consider the
possibility that he has lost his wits.
Jonathan Swift was not mad; he suffered from Ménière's
disease. Nor was he completely a misanthrope; as Gifford
notes, he defined man not as a rational or irrational being
but as animal rationis capax, an animal capable of
reason. He hated the irrational mob as much as Stephen
supposes when he imagines him fleeing "The
hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close," but
he harbored deep, romantic affection for virtuous individuals.
In judging Swift to be a misanthropic lunatic, Stephen seems
to be following some dominant biographical and critical
opinions of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Swift plays a bigger role in Finnegans Wake than in
Ulysses, but Joyce's respect for the great
Anglo-Irish writer remained grudging. Ellmann notes that he
told Padraic Colum that "He made a mess of two women's lives."
And when Colum praised Swift's intensity, Joyce replied,
"There is more intensity in a single passage of Mangan's than
in all Swift's writing" (545n). Nevertheless, by associating
Swift with Joachim of Fiore
("Abbas father, furious dean, what offence laid
fire to their brains?"), Stephen seems to discern
high prophetic purpose in his ravings. In Stephen Hero
he has read an 1897 story by William Butler Yeats, "The Tables
of the Law," that links the two men. The protagonist, Owen
Aherne, says that "Jonathan Swift made a soul for the
gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself." It
does not seem improbable to connect Swift's uncompromising
moral aspirations with Stephen's own ambition, as he goes off
to exile at the end of A Portrait, "to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
