Savage Indignation
The anonymously authored 1755 fiction A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth, abridged in 1802 as Bruceâs Voyage to Naples, has a somewhat curious ending.1 Bruce, the taleâs narrator, is propelled on his adventures by a want of money and friends: the younger brother in a family of unspecified size and rank, he receives but a small inheritance, after quickly running through which heâs disowned by his relations. Worse than the penury itself, however, is his discovery that the very people who had helped him exhaust his fortune are those who had slandered him to his kin. Indeed, he tells the reader, âOne in particular, whom I had entirely supported while my money lasted ⌠was at the head of those that railed the most against me; and I verily believe that he was the chief cause of my disgrace.â Obtaining employment at last as clerk to a sea captain, Bruce travels to Italy, where he soon tumbles into the opening of Mount Vesuvius. He then falls for about three thousand miles, until he finds himself at last in a subterranean utopia, notable for its illumination by jewels, for its use of birds instead of horses for transport, and, above all, for the generosity and goodness of its inhabitants. All of the citizens of this society being equal in fortune, ânothing but friendship, hospitality, and a brotherly affection to all their fellow-creatures, reigns in this happy world.â2
One day, when strolling through the underground empire, Bruce sees another person falling from the sky. It happens to be the very Mr. Worldly who had earlier repaid Bruceâs kindness by doing him âall the injury that lay in his powerâ (288). Telling Bruce feelingly of the guilt that overcame him and Bruceâs family in the wake of Bruceâs apparent demise, he begs forgiveness, which Bruce bestows; shortly after this reconciliation, Worldly dies of his injuries. Bruce eventually returns to England, where heâs welcomed by his relationsâbut only to be betrayed again. This time, the ingrate is Bruceâs professed friend Mr. Silvertongue, who âowes all he [has] in the world to [Bruceâs] familyâ but alerts a tailor to whom Bruce has an unpaid debt that Bruce has returned. The account fills Bruce with ârage and indignationâ (295) and seems to confirm the advice of his friend from the subterranean world: âLook henceforward on all mankind as your enemies, and guard against them as suchâ (295). The narrative ends with Bruce âkeep[ing] little companyâ and hoping for a return to the center of the earth, where people treat each other well and honestly and whereâas a trial scene in the middle of the tale attestsâno crime is held more reprehensible than that of ingratitude, which though almost unheard of in practice is punishable by death when it does occur (281).
What may seem odd about the episode of Mr. Silvertongue is that it so pointedly undercuts the prior reconciliation with Mr. Worldly. Either the reconciliation makes the closing betrayal seem gratuitous or the closing betrayal makes the reconciliation seem aberrant. Why undo the comedy of redemption with the machinations of another wretched ingrate? Or why, alternatively, complicate the picture of human turpitude with Mr. Worldlyâs sincere repentance? One part of the answer, of course, is that with the Mr. Worldly episode, the author lays a kind of trap, lulling the reader into a confidence in human beingsâ fundamental goodness that only makes the betrayal by Mr. Silvertongue more devastating. The fiction, in other words, betrays the reader just as Bruceâs world betrays Bruce, heightening indignation at the untrustworthiness of human beings in its final moments. Indeed its operation evokes the Roman rhetorical form of the indignatio, which penultimate section of the final part (peroratio) of a judicial oration was designed to arouse righteous anger (also called indignatio) against the speakerâs target.3
The readerâs sense of indignation at the close of Bruceâs Voyage may be particularly acute because Worldly, Silvertongue, and the defendant on trial in the utopian empire are not just any kinds of betrayers but ingrates specifically. Perhaps no intersubjective relation more reliably generates indignation than ingratitude, which seems doubly to wrong its victim because the latter seems to be owed a positive rather than a negative recompense or at least to enjoy a particularly strong claim to be spared ill treatment. In his role of trial judge, the emperor of the world at the center of Earth declares ingratitude âa crime so detestable in itself, that it ought above all others to be punished with the utmost severityâ; it makes his âblood run cold to repeat the wordâ (281). The episode thus echoes a moment in the first part of Jonathan Swiftâs Gulliverâs Travels at which the reader learns that among the Lilliputians, ingratitude is âa capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries; for they reason thus, that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he hath received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live.â4
The proximity between this remark and the representation of ingratitude in Bruceâs Voyage is no accident, of course. Gulliverâs Travels is clearly the great precedent for the later text, which in its 1755 version marks it debt by venturing that the practice of giving foreignersâ comments both in the original and in English translation has been used âby many of our Historians, not even the famous Gulliver himself excepted,â with âno other View than to fill up a Page.â5 Like Bruce, Gulliver is happy to place his tale within the lineage of utopian travelogue, if only negatively, noting in his prefatory letter that some âhave gone so far as to drop hints that the Houyhnhnms and yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopiaâ (5). And Gulliver partakes, too, of the later narratorâs encompassing indignation at human behavior. A few sentences further on in his preface, for example, he reports that after two years of following the example of the Houyhnhnm he calls his master, he was able to divest himself of âthat infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species, especially the Europeansâ (5). This kind of catalogue of human offenses notably makes its appearance more than once in Bruceâs Voyage (as it does in Gulliverâs Travels), as when one of Bruceâs interlocutors observes that âtreachery, deceit, fraud, ingratitude, slander, and backbiting are unknown among what you are pleased to call the brute part of creation. Strange they should be so universal among the rational part!â (265â66).
In Bruceâs Voyage, indignation enters the scene almost as soon as the narrator-hero arrives at the center of Earth. Upon his postdescent rescue by a member of that happy society, he tries to thank his benefactor by falling on his knees and kissing his hand, but the man snatches that hand away and âwith a most angry countenanceâ raises him from the ground. The mysterious behavior is explained when, shortly after, the rescuer prays for Godâs blessing: Bruce again falling prostrate and âembrac[ing] his feet,â the man flies from him âwith the utmost indignationâ and reminds him that ânone but God is to be worshipedâ (256). In Swiftâs narrative, indignation first appears by name in part 4, where itâs twice attributed to Gulliverâs Houyhnhnm masterâfirst on his hearing that yahoos presume to ride horses (194) and again when Gulliver tries âto give him some ideas of the desire of power and riches, of the terrible effects of lust, intemperance, malice and envyâ that prevail among human beings. At this, his master becomes âlike one whose imagination was struck with something never seen or heard of before,â lifting âup his eyes with amazement and indignationâ (197). Working up to its climactic condemnation of humanity, in other words, Swiftâs fiction, too, summons a breath of rhetorical indignatio, the master Houyhnhnm modeling the indignation that will become Gulliverâs dominant passion, as it will become Bruceâs, once the traveler returns to the society he had left.6
If in his moment of indignation the Houyhnhnm master anticipates Gulliver and perhaps the imagined reader of Gulliverâs Travels, however, he also stands in for Jonathan Swift, whose memorial in Saint Patrickâs Cathedral Dublin famously announces that the body of the Dean lies there, âUbi saeva Indignatio Ulterius Cor lacerare nequitâââwhere savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart.â Given that indignation evidently powers so much of Swiftâs writing, it seems apposite that this is the only emotion mentioned in the epitaph, which Swift himself composed; as Claude Rawson notes, saeva indignatio has been used by many to âdefine the character of Swiftâs satire.â Yet in Rawsonâs view, the epitaph also marks a departure for Swift, the âpervasive, and indeed defining, featureâ of whose style is an âinterplay between what are sometimes called [his] âintensitiesâ and the edgily playful guardedness which undercuts without neutralising them.â According to Rawson, Swift understood that âdisplaying rage would make him vulnerableâ and thus eschewed âJuvenalian majesties of satiric indignationâ in favor of âa more intimately needlingâ manner: Swift preferred to make his victims, as well as his readers, â âwriggle, howl, and skip,â ⌠rather than pounding them with indignant tirades which might only expose his own lack of composure.â In the epitaph, however, Swift âfor once adopts ⌠a note of Juvenalian grandeur, not only proclaiming the trademark indignatio of Juvenalâs first satire (facit indignatio versum, 1. 79) but accentuating it beyond the Roman original by adding the adjective saeva.â Rawson wonders whether the epitaph doesnât give vent to a declaration that âseemed to Swift unthinkable in his lifetime writings.â7
Careful as Rawsonâs reading is, it gives perhaps too little weight to the point that even Juvenalian tirades could be joined to claims to reasonableness. When one sees dreadful wrongs everywhere, Juvenal asserts in his first satire, âdifficile est saturam non scribere,â âit is difficult not to write satire.â8 In other words, there would be something aberrant in not decrying such tendencies.9 And thus if âfacit indignatio versumââif indignation makes satiric verse in the sense of impelling itâthen indignation serves not madness but sanity. As Andrew Stauffer has shown in Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism, indignation indeed became particularly prominent in the British print culture of the eighteenth centuryâs last decade, amid the bitter partisanship succeeding the French Revolution, because it could be adopted as a posture of impassioned rationality maintained against the irrational emotion to which oneâs opponent had succumbed. âLike Juvenal,â Stauffer writes, the Edmund Burke of the 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace âturns to indignatio as the only rational option for the bonus vir, the good man surveying a world gone wrong.â And though conservatives at first sought alone to seize âthe elevated ground of noble indignation,â both reactionaries and reformers were soon âclaiming righteous indignation as their weaponâ as debates over the meanings of the French Revolution ground on. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, presented âher anger as a rational, even requisite, response to falsehood, performed for the public good,â while Thomas Paine understood that indignation could serve revolution inasmuch as it was âan emotion predicated on the essential dignity of those who feel it.â To âclaim indignation,â Stauffer observes, âis to appropriate a three-fold bonus for oneâs anger: it is justified âŚ, it is righteous âŚ, and it is dignified.â10
Whatever attractions or dangers Swift discerned in the Juvenalian mode, his Gulliver, like the Bruce of Bruceâs Voyage, shares Juvenalâs self-positioning as a âgood man surveying a world gone wrong,â in Staufferâs formulation. With âsurveying,â Stauffer elegantly evokes the âequal, wide surveyâ described by John Barrellâthe idea that the landed gentleman of the British eighteenth century could have a meaningfully âpanoramicâ perspective on society by virtue of a âtwo-fold qualification to be regarded as disinterested: his permanent stake in the stability of the nation, and his freedom from engaging in any specific profession, trade, or occupation which might occlude his view of society as a whole.â11 But the word from Staufferâs epitome that really requires our attention is âworld.â For Juvenalâs sixteen satires present a catalogue of evilsâmany of them involving women usurping male authority, men lapsing into effeminacy, upstarts gaining power over their betters, criminal behavior proving profitable, inheritances being squandered, and infidelity or other sexual improprieties growing commonplaceâthat together add up to a totality of derangement, a world unhinged to the last degree. The astonishing spectacle of a man marrying another man, which comes at the culmination of Satire 2, serves as a voluble synecdoche for the state of things in a time that is, for Juvenal, radically out of joint.
Indeed so topsy-turvy is the world that, as the satirist says in 13, âif I discover an upright and blameless man, I liken him to a boy born half beast, or to fishes found by a marveling rustic under the plough, or to a pregnant mule.â The natural has become unnatural, and we âare living in a ninth age; an age more evil than that of ironâone for whose wickedness Nature herself can find no name, no metal from which to call it.â Things have thus reached their moral nadir relatively recently; and yet Juvenal also makes clear that there has for some time been no shortage of goads to indignation in the world, it being long since that Astraea (Justice) âwithdrew by degrees to heaven, with Chastity as her comrade, the two sisters taking flight together.â Thus, as the satirist tells us right after his facit indignatio versum, âall the doings of mankind, their vows, their fears, their angers and their pleasures, their joys and goings to and froââback to the postdiluvian emergence of Deucalion and Pyrrhaââshall form the motley subject of my page.â12
In thus expressing his intention, Juvenal highlights a crucial affinity between satire and comprehensiveness. Not every satirist explicitly takes the position that the world in general is in catastrophic condition, but a satire may strive to enhance its hold on the reader by some appeal to the sense that wrong is pervasive rather than localized, and lengthy narrative satires tend toward the encyclopedic in their presentation of ills. In François Rabelaisâs Gargantua and Pantagruel and in Gulliverâs Travels, this plenitude is facilitated by characters who travel widely, a device taken to yet more exotic lengths in the section of the 1755 Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth that was excised to make the more compact Bruceâs Voyage. This lengthy tract consists mainly of âThe History of an Inhabitant of the Air,â a fantastical and at times bawdy inset testimony by a four-thousand-year-old being from the planet Jupiter who passes successive lives on a comet, Saturn, Earth, Mars, and Earth again. Through these phases, the inhabitant witnesses earthly folly and evil in numerous guises (from tyrantsâ lust for power to lawyersâ prevarication, from social climbing to sexual incontinence) as well as several varieties of celestial contrapasso, including evildoersâ transformation into âhorrid and loathsome Beasts,â whose characteristics recall their vices pretransformation.13
Lacking âThe History of an Inhabitant of the Air,â Bruceâs Voyage is mainly taken up with the wonders of that subterranean society where there are no distinctions of rank, where greed is unheard of, where animals never suffer human cruelty, and where the first trial for a public misdeed to take place in at least sixty years (perhaps many more) is the aforementioned arraig...