Conservatism and the Future Self

Dissonance and Misreading in Aphra Behn’s ‘Oroonoko’ and Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels

To misread the Self-Other Problem is to invite a kind of internal dissonance, as witnessed in Behn’s Oroonoko and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. As renditions of conservative logic, both novels describe the subject as located within an absurd and inescapable cultural prison. Through this lens, contemporary relations between Self and Other, in an increasingly pluralistic and pre-apocalyptic intersubjective globe, are reduced to a paradox: of craving a better world, and wilfully denying all attempts to bring such a world into being.

For literature students, the Self-Other Problem is centrally one of ‘reading’. Academies of literature are primarily interested not in novels, essays, plays and poetry for their own sakes, but in the fashion of reading these texts expect of us: of reading critically, reflectively, empathically, creatively and with a wariness of interpretational possibilities. I suggest this is increasingly a matter less of scholarly convention than conscientious praxis. For wont of space I shall theorise neither this nor the Self-Other Problem itself so closely. But suffice it to say that most of us would admit to the sense that we register – or read, if you will – the people we encounter as composites of features, among which are differences: physical, behavioural and ideological differences. The question must then be asked: “What do we conclude from such reading?”

Consider the following quote from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726:

My reconcilement of the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which Nature had entitled them to. I am not the least provoked in the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of deformity, and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks with all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together. (Swift 2010, pp. 291)

This vital reflection arrives moments from the narrative’s end, as Gulliver contemplates his adventures in plurality. Thus the condemnation reveals all the more: after encountering various cultures, Gulliver proclaims his absolute allegiance to the familiar markers of his own culture – that which does not ‘provoke’ his disgust. For Gulliver, the role-players of his own society – “a lawyer, a pickpocket,” and similar figures of the Self – do not perturb him; but “deformity, and diseases both in body and mind” (i.e. ideas and bodies Other than his own) elicit only his resentment. Moreover, Gulliver naturalises his culture, hedging a defence of society’s imperfections, and assuming a certain neutral objectivity. Where his society fails to achieve the values of the public (i.e. producing criminals and corrupt officials), “this is all according to the due course of things”. This is no defence at all: if one were to object to corrupt politicians, to use Gulliver’s example, simply responding that we must “be content with those vices and follies only which Nature had entitled them to”, surely cannot suffice.

Swift depicts the Other as absurd to consolidate his nationalism and traditionalism, expressed in his assault on Enlightenment progress. He dismisses the scientific and arithmetic prowess of the Laputans: the numerical pedantry of their dining, their precise technologies keeping their city afloat used to torment the lands over which it hovers, and the extent to which their obsession with order leads them to hire flappers to communicate on behalf of employers, “because he [an employer] is always so wrapped up in cogitation that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice” (Swift 2010, pp. 150). Swift similarly ridicules the Houyhnhnms’ rationalist model of social perfectibility, wherein there exists no concept of fallibility: “Neither is reason, among them… mingled, obscured, or discoloured by passion and interest” (Swift 2010, 261)

Swift hereby pre-empts contemporary British conservative philosopher John Gray, who unambiguously concludes his essay on Santayana with:

Political wisdom lies in accepting this human lot, not in seeking to wish it away by vast projects of reform. We alleviate the human lot as best we can by repairing and renewing the traditional institutions we have inherited, where these are themselves founded on a sane awareness of the human condition. (Gray 2016, pp. 76)

Fundamental restructuring of society is considered impossible by virtue of humxnity’s inherent imperfections (Hamilton 2015). Thus, the paradox of Swift’s conservatism: on the one hand, a righteous defence of tradition, openly resentful of difference and modernity, yet on the other hand, acknowledging that culture (language, custom, religion, and an array of institutions)  – the repository of such tradition – is frequently, if not entirely, nonsensical.

Likewise in Oroonoko, Behn writes:

And why, said he, my dear friends and fellow-sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honourable battle? And are we by the chance of war become their slaves? This would not anger a noble heart, this would not animate a soldier’s soul. No, but we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools and cowards, and the support of rogues, runagades [sic] that have abandoned their own  countries for raping, murders, theft and villainies. (Behn 2003, pp. 89)

Oroonoko brandishes his cognitive dissonance: deploring ‘wrongful’ enslavement, but justifying the institution itself. The Prince disclaims: slavery is abhorrent only when it is “to an unknown people”, and only when one is not “vanquished… nobly in fight” or “won… in honourable battle”. He accepts local slavers of the continent; he condones the rights of a victorious warlord. War is even ascribed a kind of justice – that is, an event of fortune (hence: “by chance”), wherein a skirmish may plausibly result in either side’s triumph, and therefore to capture slaves is, so to say, ‘fair game’. Not only does this fail to reject slavery qua slavery, but defends it as a binding tradition shared by the slaves: that the ‘rightful’ slavery Oroonoko imagines is a cultural pillar which can unify them. Adjacent oppressive discourses follow: The speciesist objection to being “bought and sold like apes or monkeys”, which might be answered with: ‘Why should we accept the nonhumxn animal trade?’ The nationalist appeal to not “support[ing] rogues… that have abandoned their own countries” might similarly be met with: ‘For whose benefit do we pledge to nation states?’

Behn seems to imply that the contradictions of our culture are inescapable. As structural critique is anathema, the institution of slavery itself, a violent vector of capital, remains preserved and unquestioned. The sense of justice then operating in Behn’s critiques is a justice ethereal and impossible: longing for a rightful slavery – that is to say, a just oppression – which can neither exist in reality nor even in theory. As such, both novels arrive one at the stranglehold of conservatism: we can only – and indeed should – remain trapped in the oppressive quotidian present, however we despise it.

To subvert this stranglehold, however, one need only consider the recent rebirth of the South African students’ movement, and its more revolutionary elements. Here emerges a jukebox of demands centred on compensating for the wholesale Othering of vast portions of the student (and worker) constituency: the physical reconstruction of campus facilities for differently abled bodies, the renegotiation of employment conditions for working-class labourers of colour, a campus-wide campaign to generate a culture conscious of the power relations implicit in our identities (e.g. the ancient, universal epidemic of gender violence), and most controversially, the abolition of higher education fees.

This movement places under the microscope the Self-Other Problem, clarifying not merely the individual traumas, but the structural forces which realise, normalise and distribute these traumas as inevitabilities. Swift’s bewilderment at the Others he encounters only reinforces in him the primacy of his Englishness, rather than availing to him a pause for reflection on the possibilities for a more just system of ideologies, customs and institutions in Britain. Behn’s flailing sense that Oroonoko is wrongfully enslaved amounts to a defence of his royalty, not his personhood, again circumventing a moment for reflection on how suffering is systematised into a global economic order. When we view the Other – a rising tide of youths calling for the dissolution of white supremacist cishetero-patriarchy and ableist state-capitalism – are not the responses similarly paradoxical: “but that’s just the way it is”, “it’s like that all over the world”? Is this disdain for the Other nothing more than a conservative reaction to the future Self?

If we are to read more accurately our experiences of Self and Other, therefore, we must avoid the blinkered view of subjects as separate to the social orders in which we are shaped. To answer the call for ending systemic Othering with defences of the status quo, on the grounds that tradition is somehow sensible in ways advances in reason and science cannot be, is to endure Behn’s anguish over her royal slave, craving a justice the system cannot afford him; to languish in Swift’s resignation, the false notion that Gulliver’s cultural inheritance is all that he can ever have – and all he ever should.

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References

1. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Penguin Classics, edited by Janet Todd, 2003, pp. 89

2. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Collins Classics, 2010, pp. 261, 291

3. Gray, John. Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings. Penguin Books, 2016, pp. 76

4. Hamilton, Andy. “Conservatism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/conservatism/&gt;.