In the third voyage Gulliver goes off on his own jag about the etymology of Laputa, which we read easily as the Spanish word for “whore.”

Lap in the old obsolete language signifieth high, and untuh a governor, from which they say by corruption was derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. But I do not approve of this derivation, which seems to be a little strained. I ventured to offer to the learned among them a conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi Lap outed, Lap signifying properly the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed a wing, which however I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader (p. 165).

It is easy enough to track Swift’s parody of modern etymological scholarship here, but just exactly what kind of expertise does Gulliver have in mind when he appeals to the judicious reader? He is the only westerner who has ever heard the language. How would anyone else in the world have any idea about its etymologies? Gulliver is so lin guistically driven that he takes particular pride in Lilliput, where he bears “the highest title of honour among them” (p. 58), Nardac. By unscrambling the letters the reader is left with canard, or practical joke, which may well define the entire enterprise in the Travels. Perhaps Swift’s best satiric joke at the expense of language—beyond even all the fanciful anagrams and nonsense words—occurs in the third voyage when Gulliver visits the Luggnaggians and has to abase himself with ritual gestures and sycophantic phrases learned by rote: “Ickpling gloffthrobb squutserumm blhiop mlashnalt, zwin, tnodbalkguff slhiophad gurdlubh asht” and then, “Fluft drin yalerick dwuldum prastrad mirplush, which properly signifies, My tongue is in the mouth of my friend” (p. 207). The sequence of gibberish actually sounds as if Gulliver speaks with his tongue in someone else’s mouth.

It is no accident that when the text finally presents Gulliver as unbalanced the linguistic apparatus also goes awry. Gulliver’s dementia seems rooted in one of Swift’s continual satiric obsessions, the confusion of reality and the descriptive language available to record it. In Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver sees a horse in a field who “neighed three or four times, but in so different a cadence, that I almost began to think he was speaking to himself in some language of his own” (p. 226). Most likely, Gulliver hears no more than the simple neighing of horses, and he imposes upon that sound system a language that he thinks he speaks and continues to speak when he finally returns home. The text only points out words that in their orthography sound like versions of horse sounds, sounds that Gulliver begins to mimic, and sounds that even Gulliver describes in terms that signal distrust, the horse “neighing several times by turns, and varying the sound, which seemed to be almost articulate” (p. 227). Gulliver here bases all that he experiences and thinks he experiences on the natural sounds of horses. He loses his mind when he loses the ability to distinguish language from sounds.

At the end of his Travels Gulliver is a lost linguistic soul. What discourse he has exists in the never-never land of his own dementia. He spends his time in his stable talking to horses: “My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day” (p. 228). But how does Gulliver know the language of English horses? Houyhnhnmland, by his account, is thousands upon thousands of miles from England. Language (even horse language) does not travel so easily from place to place, unless, of course, horses make the only sound the vocal disposition of their species allows, a kind of whinnying. Could it be that Gulliver’s conversations with his horses hold the same imaginary status as his other ventures and adventures? Swift’s satire at the end of the Travels is so unsettling that such a reading is neither unlikely nor undesirable.

 

Michael Seidel is a Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has written widely on eighteenth-century literature, especially on satire and on the early novel. His books include Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (1979), Exile and the Narrative Imagination (1986), and Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (1991). He is associate editor of the Columbia History of British Fiction and coeditor of the first two volumes in the Stoke-Newington Complete Works of Daniel Defoe. He has also written two books on James Joyce, and two others on the history of baseball.

TRAVELS
INTO SEVERAL
Remote Nations
OF THE
WORLD

 

 

By Captain LEMUEL GULLIVER

 

 

 

Part I. A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT

 

Part II. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG

 

Part III. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA &c

 

Part IV. A VOYAGE TO THE

 

 

HOUYHNHNMS

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Mr. Sympson’s letter to Captain Gulliver,a prefixed to this volume, will make a long advertisement unnecessary. Those interpolations complained of by the Captain, were made by a person since deceased, on whose judgment the publisher relied to make any alterations that might be thought necessary. But, this person, not rightly comprehending the scheme of the author, nor able to imitate his plain simple style, thought fit among many other alterations and insertions, to compliment the memory of her late majesty, by saying, that she governed without a chief minister. We are assured, that the copy sent to the bookseller in London, was a transcript of the original, which original being in the possession of a very worthy gentleman in London, and a most intimate friend of the author’s; after he had bought the book in sheets, and compared it with the originals, bound it up with blank leaves, and made those corrections, which the reader will find in our edition. For, the same gentleman did us the favor to let us transcribe his corrections.

A Letter from Capt.