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Prose

Notes Swift seems to have been very sensitive to the differences between writing and speaking … Each
activity can take two forms, which we may call correct on the one hand and debased on the other
(Said, 1999: 32).
Satire and Thought Experiments

The power and vehemence of Swift’s irony is world-renowned. In the voyage to Laputa in Book
III of Gulliver, he excoriates the more extravagant antics of the scientists of his day as reported in
the Transactions of the Royal Society. Most of the incredible schemes ridiculed in the Grand Academy
of Lagado visited by Gulliver in his voyage to Laputa have been traced to real experiments carried
out by members of the Royal Society, whose premises, at Gresham College, Swift himself had
visited in 1710. One of the features of Swift’s deployment of irony to achieve his satire, which
certain critics have remarked (e.g., Leavis, 1952), is that while his target suffers so also does the
positive side he wishes to defend. In perhaps his most celebrated satire, A Modest Proposal, the
English are depicted as cannibalising the Irish, but the Irish peasantry are not spared and come
across as cannibals themselves and somehow complicitous in their own indigence. As Leavis
(1952: 73-87) expresses it:
The continuous and unpredictable movement of the attack, which turns this way and that …
inexhaustibly surprising-making again an odd contrast with the sustained and level gravity of the
tone. If Swift does for a moment appear to settle down to a formula it is only in order to betray; to
induce a trust in the solid ground before opening the pitfall.
Another feature of such a balancing act is that to be effective the ironic praise he heaps on his
quarry must be convincing. Swift was able to ‘get inside’ his adversary. In the passage about the
machine to generate philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology, discussed in
Section 3 above, Swift shows that he had thought through the construction of word frequency
counts and the analysis of language according to the proportion of nouns, verbs and other parts of
speech. It is only in recent years that linguists have been able to discuss the relative frequency of
parts of speech with much degree of certainty and the recent literature of corpus linguistics (e.g.,
Biber, 1999) discusses the proportion of verbs to nouns in different registers, viz. conversation,
news reportage, academic writing and fiction.
Even Swift’s closest friends (Pope, Steele and Arbuthnot, the latter himself a scientist) were surprised
by the viciousness of his attack on the scientists of his day. Perhaps as in all his celebrated satires
the author’s position lies somewhere in the middle (or nowhere?) and he merely covers his tracks
by his scatter-gun use of irony, well described by Leavis above. In modern parlance, might Swift
be described as the first linguistic terrorist?
Regardless of how this last question is answered, there is little doubt that Swift deliberately hid
himself in many of his famous satires so that, for instance, we are still not sure if he thought all
men or only the Irish were Yahoos, or whether he thought we should strive to become Houyhnhnms
(rational animals), or whether he saw both Yahoo and Houyhnhnm as undesirable and lamentable
states of being. This technique, by a stretch of the imagination, could be compared to the
philosophical dialogues beloved of his friend George Berkeley, or of Plato. The use to which
Danny Cohen (1980), as discussed above, put the Lilliputian and Blefuscan satire from Book I of
Gulliver shows the power which such thought experiments can generate. The difference between
Swift’s satires and Berkeley’s and Plato’s dialogues is that they enable Swift to efface himself
completely from the debate.
Swift’s One Published and Signed Work on Language
Contradiction is not far away in the work of Swift. When we come to examine the work which
most openly presents Swift’s view of language, Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining
the English Tongue (1712), we find him advocating the appointment of a society, along the lines of

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