Anguished for a Houyhnhnm ‘Avatar’: Gulliver and Fantasies of Modern Selfhood

Abstract

This study begins with a hypothetical question, inspired by the movie Avatar (2009), “What if Lemuel Gulliver had had a Houyhnhnm avatar?” and explores Jonathan Swift’s foresightful critique of the wholeness fantasy of modern selfhood in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The core of the Avatar fantasy is that one can literally shed one’s body and plug into an avatar body that is truly one with the inner self—a Hollywood take on the debate on personal identity and change of bodies dating back to John Locke. As the notion of identity as a “one-one relation” is paradoxically predicated on supposing two-in-oneness, personal or self-identity in modern Western thought typically connotes the mind/body dualism, giving rise to thought experiments of escalating complexity from a mysterious switch of bodies (Locke) to surgical operations of brain transplant (e.g. Sydney Shoemaker and Bernard Williams). With recourse to the Lockean self-identity in consciousness, Avatar fantasizes a seamless union of mind and body, thus enacting Jake Sully’s passing as the indigenous Other. However, in so far as Sully has found the indigenous Na’vi in his own ethical image as the best of humans, his is no real case of passing but bodily confirmation of the self underneath, thus repeating at once the modern self’s wholeness fantasy and belief in the immutable core inside. Gulliver is likewise confronted with the indigenous Other, admittedly superior to him in mind and body (possibly based on seventeenth-century Jesuit accounts of the Japanese or Chinese), and would have badly wanted an equine avatar, to turn Houyhnhnm body and soul and naturalize to Houyhnhnmland. In Swiftian reality, Gulliver can only make shift by putting on clothes of Yahoo skin for want of a Houyhnhnm avatar, in an abject and implicitly suicidal attempt to deny his Yahoo self-turned Other. Gulliver’s wearing of Yahoo skin, tantamount to layering one Yahoo body upon another, fundamentally taunts the modern self’s fantasy for its double delusion of the mind/body, in-/outside, or self/Other divide and union.