Thus, Gulliver's journey from quintessential Englishman to depressed misanthrope, a journey that comes about through the disillusionment he suffers from his increasing acquisition of non-European languages (culminating finally in his acquisition of the
Houyhnhnm tongue and subsequent self-othering, only to have that process forcibly reversed), is a clever and insightful satire on the fear of losing one's Englishness through the acquisition of other languages and the exposure to other cultures, one that, through the gradual manifestation of Phillipson's subtractive fallacy, calls into question the very value of maintaining Englishness at all, if not the stability of the English language itself.
On the other hand, in the terms of that fiction, the Yahoos are, in
Houyhnhnm society, not fellow creatures but a species of noxious brute, like rats or insects, whom human societies exterminate for health and security reasons without traditionally raising the specter of culpable genocide.
If the Censure of the Yahoos could any Way affect me, I should have great Reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my Book of Travels ameer Fiction out of mine own Brain, and have gone so far as to drop Hints, that the
Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more Existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia.
Swift's
Houyhnhnms were creatures of supreme rationality.
Although we learn that Friendship is a key topic of
Houyhnhnm converse and poetry, there is little opportunity for any real mentor-protege friendship between Gulliver and his Master, whose amity is strictly species-bound.
smitten with Pride" (242), finally returns to his family in England, he longs for the
Houyhnhnm smell of horses, stables, and manure.
El verdadero otro en la fantasia viajera de Swift, el supuesto animal, el caballo o
Houyhnhnm, resulta un prodigio de limpieza y control corporal con relacion al visitante y los de su clase.
It is a republic of reason on the
Houyhnhnm model, the secular millennium which is Gulliver's destination in his solipsism.
He picked the
Houyhnhnm although he had many Yahoos from which to choose.
(Gulliver, it might be remembered, refers to his
Houyhnhnm captor as his "master.") More important than the tradition, however, is the character of Old Horse.
In shifts and starts, we lurched into Eastside Seattle,
Houyhnhnm country, where the VWs began to peel off to the Bellevue exits.
Gulliver believes he has found a perfect place, because the evils of
Houyhnhnm Land are concealed beneath a surface of uniform rationality and benevolence.
Gulliver lived in almost perfect contentment among the horses, until one day his host told him that the
Houyhnhnm Grand Assembly had decreed Gulliver either be treated as an ordinary Yahoo or be released to swim back to the land from which he had come.
