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Unit 26: Swift–Hints Towards An Essay on Conversation ...

Textual Bases for my Claim Notes
The realization that Swift had been aware of aspects of language which linguists have only come
to grapple with recently first came to me when reading Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (henceforth Gulliver),
especially Part III, Ch 5, where the author describes a machine which generates books of
“philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology without the least assistance from
genius or study”. Gulliver gullibly observes that “everyone knew how laborious the usual method
is of attaining to arts and sciences”. The professor of the Academy of Lagado who invented this
engine (worked by 40 pupils who cranked handles and transcribed the output) told Gulliver that
he had emptied the whole vocabulary into the frame and made the strictest computation of the
general proportion there is in books between the number of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other
parts of speech. Chalker, in his endnotes to the 1967 Penguin Classic Edition of Gulliver, suggests
that this Professor might be based on John Peters, who published a pamphlet, Artificial Versifying:
A New Way to Make Latin Verses (1678), which was lampooned by Steele in The Spectator No 220:
This virtuoso, being a mathematician, has according to his taste, thrown the art of poetry into a
short problem, and contrived tables by which anyone without knowing a word of grammar or
sense may, to his great comfort, be able to compose, or rather to erect, Latin verses.
Swift may also have been thinking of the work on artificial languages done by George Dalgarno
(1661) in Ars Signorum and Bishop John Wilkins (1668) in his An Essay Toward a Real Character and
a Philosophical Language. If he was poking fun at Dalgarno’s and Wilkins’s ill-fated schemes to
generate knowledge by inventing a new universal language of science, Swift showed himself to be
aware of the mechanics of such knowledge-generation through the patterns of language. As in
much of Swift’s satire, it is often difficult to situate where Swift himself stands on the issue he is
subjecting to irony, parody and other literary devices. The insouciance of Gulliver when faced
with the marvellous scientific riches of Lagado might lead the unsuspecting reader to think that
Swift, as author, was against the new science. His subtle deployment of the dual standpoints of
author and narrator creates a hall of mirrors to puzzle readers.
There are a number of examples in Swift’s other works where he seems almost to savour the
bodily or physical aspect of words and language. For example, in the introduction to Section One
of Tale of a Tub (1704), he characterizes words as Bodies of much weight and gravity, as is manifest
from those deep impressions they make and leave upon us; and therefore must be delivered from
a due altitude, or else they will neither carry a good aim, nor fall with sufficient force.
Swift, in the same section, then dwells on books as substantial entities or indeed as living beings
to be marshalled in a battle between three institutions, Grub Street (representing the journalists),
Gresham (the Royal Society) and Will’s Café (the poets):
I am informed, our two rivals have lately made an offer of to enter into the lists with united forces,
and challenge us to a comparison of books, both as to weight and number … Where can they find
scales of capacity enough for the first; or an arithmetician of capacity enough for the second?
Allowing the word and the book to become flesh comes through often in his work:
When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it see meth to me to be alive and talking to me
(“Thoughts on various subjects”). Hammond (1999) observes how Swiftian irony works by
“materializing the abstract or by literalizing the figurative” often through the use of pun.
In the first page of his brief A Critical essay upon the faculties of the human mind (1708), where Swift
apes a serious essay, we find a reductio ad adsurdum of Epicurus’s cosmogony:
How can the Epicurean’s opinion be true, that the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse
of atoms: which I will no more believe, than that the accidental jumbling of the letters of the
alphabet, could fall by chance into a most ingenious and learned treatise of philosophy.
It is the rhetorical aside about the stochastic generation of text which is interesting here in the way
it presages the professors in the School of Languages at the Academy of Lagado. Swift is laughing

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