2In a second part of A Revealed Knowledge published later the same year Brothers expands his reading of biblical prophecies to include more contemporary events in Europe. Considering the French Revolution to be divinely ordained, Brothers prophecies, amongst other events, the death of the Empress of Russia, the victory of the Emperor of Germany over the Electors following the signing of a peace treaty with France, the subsequent defeat of the Emperor at the hands of the French Republic, the victory of Russia over Poland and the Ottoman empire and its later defeat at the hands of the Swedes. Brothers affirms that the French monarchy will never return and that if Britain persists in waging war on France, it too will see its monarchy removed. Brothers told the king and Pitt of this important knowledge, but when he went to inform parliament on May 17^th 1792 he was treated with “unfeeling contempt and incivility” (24). Such treatment is perhaps unsurprising given Brothers’ defence of the French Revolution and his equating London with Sodom. He was finally arrested, charged with treason in 1795 and imprisoned despite being found insane.

3At this point Nathaniel Brassey Halhed came out in support of Brothers, first on the floor of the House of Commons and later in print. Halhed had entered politics in order to give his unstinting support to his mentor Warren Hastings, the former governor of Bengal, who was on the point of being finally acquitted after the extended trial which had opposed him in particular to Edmund Burke. Halhed not only offered his support to Brothers by replying to his detractors, he took his case into Parliament making a speech on March 31^st 1795 in which he moved that Brothers’ book should be printed and distributed for the benefit of MPs. In so doing he called down on himself almost universal derision and indeed hostility, given the political radicalism that underpinned Brothers’ prophecies. The only positive outcome he achieved was to secure the removal of Brothers from prison to a private asylum from which he continued to issue his prophetic writings. As for Halhed himself, his reputation was ruined. He left parliament and largely ceased his scholarly activities, living in seclusion until his death in 1830.

4What can have induced such an erudite scholar and a brilliant linguist, the author of a grammar of the Bengali language and the translator, from Persian, of the Code of Gentoo laws, originally dictated in Sanskrit as part of Hastings’ plan to apply local legal codes in the territories he governed, to fall for the extravagant delusions of Richard Brothers to the point of sacrificing his own career and reputation ? This is a question to which we will never know the answer, but the title of Williams’ pamphlet points to something more than a personal frailty. Clearly Williams saw Halhed’s case as symptomatic of a widespread propensity to credulity, to believing the unbelievable. The Age of Credulity has other resonances however. The previous year Williams had penned The Age of Infidelity, one of many replies to Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason, the first part of which had appeared the same year. Paine’s deist attack on revealed religion, on the authority of the Bible, and on the trinity of obfuscation that represented in his eyes mystery, miracles and prophecy, came forth from his imprisonment in Paris where he had fallen foul of the Committee of Public Safety. In the French context Paine was seeking to defend belief in a deity against secular atheism but in Britain his ideas, which were hardly new, where seen as threatening the very foundations of religious belief, particularly as his work was avidly read by the literate sections of the lower classes to whom it was clearly addressed.

5Paine sought to wean his readers from their unquestioning religious credulity : “Credulity, however, is not a crime, but it becomes criminal by resisting conviction. It is strangling in the womb of the conscience the efforts it makes to ascertain truth. We should never force belief upon ourselves in any thing.” (323) In denouncing the contradictions and absurdities that he saw as abounding in the scriptures, Paine seeks to oppose the new age of reason, one which the two revolutions in America and France had inaugurated, to the continued imposition of revealed religion. In this imposition, prophecy played a major role, despite the word having, according to Paine, been distorted from its original signification of poetry. Not only did he seek to explode the elaborate cross-referencing which had designated parts of the Old Testament as prophetic of what would happen in the New, but he poured ridicule on any attempt to derive subsequent historical meaning from books such as that of Daniel. Richard Brothers affirmed that the four beasts mentioned in Daniel chapter 7 signified George iii (the lion), the Empress of Russia (the bear), Louis xvi (the leopard) and the Emperor of Germany (the monster). Thomas Williams reiterated the orthodox interpretation of this vision as anticipating the fall of Babylon, the humiliation and conversion of Nebuchadnezzar, the cruelty of the Medo-Persians, the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. But for Paine, all such interpretations were just ridiculous speculations with no rational foundation whatsoever. Christians were as credulous to Paine as Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and other followers of Richard Brothers were to Williams. Williams’ attack on Paine’s infidelity would have been seen by Paine as mired in an irrational belief in the authority of biblical texts, while Paine was himself denounced for seeking to lead credulous and uneducated readers astray into the politics of sedition, revolution and deism.

6What these debates are about is not just questions of truth, but the even more fundamental question of belief, or, to give it its more derogatory and secular equivalent, credulity. Whereas orthodox Protestantism defended belief against the credulity of those who were deceived by fanaticism and superstition, deists denounced the credulity of all Christians. Some years earlier, but as part of the same debate, David Hume sought to navigate between the Scylla of outright rationalist dismissal of religious mysteries and the Charybdis of religious credulity. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) Hume first defines belief as no different in kind from other ideas : “An opinion, therefore, or belief [the synonymity of these two terms is in itself significant] may be most accurately defin’d, a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression” (144). Hume admits to considerable difficulty in taking this definition further. Despite his refusal to see belief as distinct from ideas, he nonetheless senses, recognizing that people in general think the same, that belief is in some way different. He finds this difference (and a way out of his difficulty) in the manner in which it is conceived : “An idea assented to [a belief] feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us : And this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness” (146). In thus distinguishing (if only in manner) belief from “the fictions of the imagination” (146) Hume walks a narrow and rather wobbly tightrope between making belief comparable to fiction and recognizing its distinctive, if ill-defined nature.

7As a corollary to this precarious analysis, Hume invokes the notion of credulity to distinguish belief in the unbelievable from belief which rests on a firmer basis : “No weakness of human nature is more universal and conspicuous than what we commonly call Credulity, or a too easy faith in the testimony of others” (162). Hume accounts for our propensity to credulity by the resemblance between the account of someone else and our own experience. Where such resemblance is lacking, as in the idea of the immortality of the soul, people are much less likely to be convinced. Yet what is most striking here is the introduction of the criterion of testimony, the credit accorded to someone else’s account of something of which we have no direct experience. If this line of enquiry seems not to be pursued in the Treatise, it is because Hume decided to suppress the chapter on miracles which subsequently appeared in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748). In the later work, Hume asserts that our belief, or disbelief, in extraordinary events such as miracles depends on our judgment of the probability of such events occurring on the basis firstly of the evidence of our own experience, secondly of evidence indicating proofs which go beyond our own experience, and finally on the credibility of the testimony which reports such events. These criteria might well be mutually contradictory, yet ultimately the superior evidence of our own and others’ knowledge and experience of the laws of nature must prevail. Hume can thus conclude, again somewhat tortuously, “[t]hat no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish : And even in that case, there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior” (174).

8Whilst leaving open the theoretical possibility that a testimony might be so entirely trustworthy that its supreme credibility would overrule all other proofs to the contrary, Hume goes on to say that no such testimony has been produced in the case of miracles so that belief in their having taken place, and by extension in the religion which is posited on their existence, can only be the result of “a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is contrary to custom and experience” (186). Most importantly for our purpose is the way in which the criterion of testimony makes fiction and religion strictly comparable, differing only in the strength or degree of credibility that can might be accorded to one or the other. Even though Hume also cites the sceptical adage recounted in Plutarch to the effect that “I should not believe such a story were it told me by Cato” (172), he considers that human responses to ‘stories’ are more often characterised by a credulity that inclines us to believe even the most ludicrous accounts :

With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners ? But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense ; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality : He may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause : Or even where this delusion has no place, vanity, excited by so strong a temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest of mankind in any other circumstances ; and self-interest with equal force. His auditors may not have, and commonly have not, sufficient judgment to canvass his evidence : What judgment they have, they renounce by principle, in these sublime and mysterious subjects : Or if they were ever so willing to employ it, a passion and a heated imagination disturb the regularity of its operations. Their credulity increases his impudence : And his impudence overpowers their credulity. (175)

9The link which Hume makes here between travel narratives and religious fanaticism places us firmly on Swiftian territory. But before I come to Gulliver’s Travels, and to Alain Bony’s detailed and scrupulous account of the ‘truths’ it expounds, we need to draw out some of the implications of Hume’s insight into the nature of readerly credulity.

11It is in this light that I offer the following remarks on Gulliver’s Travels and on a few aspects of Alain Bony’s brilliant analysis of this endlessly fascinating text (Discours et vérité). Throughout this book he seeks to situate Swift’s central preoccupation with truth within the parameters of the text itself, in its discursive logic, in its poetics. It is through a meticulous reading of the text, one that reveals how intimately he had come to know it, that both the narratorial and authorial dimensions of ‘truth’ are explored, these two dimensions being inextricably linked. The philosophical truths that the text encodes can only be expressed through the complex (but also comic) recourse to an unreliable narrator because such truths are not abstract precepts but rooted in human behaviour, in particular the dialogic activity of story-telling where the extent of the narrator’s credibility and the reader’s credulity are themselves only defined by the interaction (or transaction) that takes place between them. As Alain Bony writes, “La notion même de vérédiction prend ainsi dans les Voyages une configuration fuyante et variable” (26).

12Yet despite the transactional nature of truth in Gulliver’s Travels, the reader’s (and particularly the scholarly critic’s) desire to penetrate to the core of those philosophical truths which are perceived as being the standard by which all the various parameters of the narrative are to be judged, cannot be completely abandoned. Located within the text itself, truth will out and it is inevitably extrapolated in the form of a moral code or an authorial intention. This very human urge to escape a hall of mirrors and to discover the reality behind the image (one which A Tale of a Tub constantly frustrates) comes to the fore in the fourth book when Gulliver is forced to confront truths about his own human (Yahoo) condition, truths which lead him to madness and misanthropy, his only refuge being the retelling of his travels. Alain Bony adopts a resolutely ‘soft’ reading of this book, to use the rather confusing critical jargon that so defines a reading of the land of the Houyhnhnms as a dystopia and the horses as exemplifying the dangers of the sort of mathematical reasoning familiar from A Modest Proposal. Their inhuman, totalitarian perfection is seen as irreconcilable with the imperfections of the human condition :

Les Houyhnhnms sont condamnés à un autisme mortifère dont Gulliver dans son aveuglement n’a pas conscience, et qu’il va jusqu’à adopter pour lui-même. Pure construction intellectuelle, le pays des Houyhnhnms n’a finalement rien à proposer à l’humanité souffrante... En d’autres termes, l’écart est infranchissable entre la corruption humaine et la perfection houyhnhnm, qui ne sert qu’à designer, en le creusant irrémédiablement, cet écart, sans suggérer le moindre modèle, la moindre « maxime » d’action personnelle ou collective. (186-87)

13Some, such as Irvin Ehrenpreis, have read the fourth book as an attack on deism and the rationalist arguments of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins and John Toland. Alain Bony reads it more in the utopia/dystopia tradition. Either way, such ‘soft’ interpretations, often reinforced by an association of the Yahoos with the Irish poor, give the last part of Gulliver’s Travels a more normative philosophical framework than is generally accorded the rest of the book.

15Finally we have the real reader, one who is not ‘implied’, not configured by the text and whose relation to it is not just discursively but historically and culturally determined. And here we must confront the most important question of all. If the ‘soft’ interpretation is correct, why was book 4 so generally ‘misunderstood’ in the eighteenth century ? If it is an attack on the Houyhnhnms, why was it taken as a panegyric ? If Alain Bony’s reading is correct, the text, in terms of the transmission of its philosophical truth, was a failure. It could be argued that Swift deliberately set out to demonstrate the incapacity of readers to understand his book, but if so, who was he demonstrating this to ? How are we to account for this hiatus between a perceived authorial intention and its aborted realisation ?

*

16Part of the explanation for this ‘failure’ must be the way Gulliver’s unreliable voice proves incapable of articulating a serious philosophical satire on the Houyhnhnms. His accreditation of their ‘truth’ discredits it in the eyes of the sceptical reader who finds herself in the same position as the Houyhnhnms (or as the Brobdingnagians in book 2). If on the other hand the reader is credulous, then she will believe Gulliver’s account of the Houyhnhnms and will not question their reason either. It would seem that Swift, voluntarily or involuntarily, put himself in a double bind where credulous and incredulous readings, instead of being contradictory, lead to the same result. The perceived unreliability of a narrator can lead to the wholesale rejection of the narrative, but it requires an entirely new sort of reading for this unreliable narrator to be ‘trusted’ as the mouthpiece of truth.

17I cannot agree with Alain Bony that Gulliver’s Travels parodies and criticizes the emergent novel by anticipation. It seems to me to be a text whose nexus is the dichotomy of scepticism and credulity, one which informed so much religious debate in the early eighteenth century. In A Tale of a Tub, Swift had given his ironic definition of happiness as “a perpetual possession of being well deceived” (83) – in what he calls “this unbelieving age” (13). It is striking how little we have moved (backwards) from Richard Brothers, Thomas Williams and Tom Paine. The age of enlightenment had apparently done little to dissipate the propensity to credulity which Swift commends for the happiness of mankind :

In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity ; so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface, to that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of things, and then comes gravely back with the informations and discoveries that in the inside they are good for nothing. (Swift 83)

18An (ironic ?) motto for Gulliver’s Travels and all its critics, and one which I am sure made Alain Bony chuckle.