ABSTRACT
The Houyhnhnms have no system of writing. Unlike any other society in Gulliver's Travels, the Houyhnhnms have not taken the catastrophic fall into a world of letters. The Houyhnhnms are bound by a community of the voice; they bound by a language of pure sound, the neigh. The Houyhnhnms model that situation suggested at all points in Swift from A Tale of a Tub on as a good - no writing at all. Indeed, Swift criticism has in general tended to leave aside both the question of the satirist's view of his own medium and the problem of the written artifact that his texts raise. The theme of interpretation, however, suggests a deep structure in the Swiftian satire. The satire shocks and liberates because it points up how easily the text distracts us, co-opts us, and separates us from human connections. Finally, it is the hallucinatory perception in Swift that remains with us, not his programmatic effort to resurrect the text.
