On Gulliver's Travels
The Search for a Communicative Utopia: Epistemology, Linguistics and Semiotics in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Since its publication in 1726, the critical response to Gulliver's Travels has gone through a series of shifts. Literary critics of the eighteenth century read this tale to find out what Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) had to say about the essence of human nature and human behavior. This critical approach continued into the nineteenth century, as critics continued to emphasize the intentions of the author. By the twentieth century, Swiftian critics were divided into a soft school and a hard school. The critics in the soft school read the book as being more comical than satirical, while the critics in the hard school saw it as being more satirical than comic. These two schools have been at odds with one another since the 1950s and consequently the last several decades have seen few new interpretations of the text. Today most if not all critics are agreed that the meaning of Travels rests on the sign-content of Swift's writings.
What is the sign ? Although the concept dates back to the time of the ancient Greeks, who conceived of Hermes as the bearer if signs, the concept was revitalized in the modern period by John Locke who outlined a theory of signs, or semiotics, in his writings. In this essay we will make a series of analyses of Travels, centering on three different ways of conceptualizing the sign -- epistemology, linguistics and semiotics. The work if three different thinkers will be called upon to help illustrate each of these readings: the epistemology of John Locke, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the non-linguistic semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Each of these theorists have their own conception of the sign. The first section of this essay, incorporating Locke's epistemology, will concentrate on the first two books of Travels; the second section, focusing on Saussure's linguistics, will look at the third book of Travels; and the third section will adopt Peirce's semiotics to analyze the final book of Swift's tale. The conclusions derived from these three sections will be used to test our thesis, that Gulliver's voyages are a journey through a number of communicative systems and, for this reason, Swift's text is open to each of these readings. We will also attempt to answer the question of to what degree can this book be read as the search for a communicative utopia ?
Gulliver's Travels, Books One and Two: Lilliput, Brobdingnag and the Epistemology of John Locke
As stated in the introduction, the concept of the sign resurfaces in the work of John Locke (1632-1704), whose Essay on Human Understanding (1690) was among the most influential works of the Enlightenment period. For critics like J.B. Schneewind, the central principle of Locke's philosophy is his epistemology, which he outlined in statements such as: "[Our knowledge of the world is based on the degree to which we can define] the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnance, of any of our ideas. ... Where this perception is, there is knowledge; and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of this knowledge."
The statement may be interpreted as reflecting Locke's nominalism, meaning his disbelief in the Platonic theory of essences. Here Locke says that individuals, being unable to gain access to the world of essences, must therefore obtain a knowledge of reality by viewing by viewing the many ways in which their ideas and reality agree of disagree with one another. Ultimately, Locke says, individuals come to possess a true understanding of the world by perceiving the way these ideas connect to one another. This process of definition must be carrier out by comparing one picture of reality with another. In this section I will demonstrate how the theories of John Locke help to illuminate Swift's text, particularly the first two books of Travels.
According to the critic W.B. Carnochan, Jonathan Swift's Travels bears comparison with Locke's Essay, for both works contain a similar method for defining human nature. In Locke's view, we are born into the world with a mind like a blank slate (tabula rasa), that is, a mind without any innate ideas. This blank mind is then immersed into the linguistic and philosophical culture of the world through a stream of sense-perceptions. This concept if the foundation of Locke's epistemology, or, his view of how the human mind comes to know things, for he considered the true essence of any living organism to be beyond the scope of reason, saying that "It is evident that we sort and name substances by their normal, and not by their real, essences." In a similar vein Swift, too, viewed the possibility of defining man according to his essential nature skeptically; he abandoned the traditional view of man as a rational animal in preference for a definition of man as an animal capable of rationality.
While on the surface the Travels are not concerned with questions of epistemology, Swift's titular character, Lemuel Gulliver, may be seen as an example of the Lockeian man. Book One of the Travels contains a great deal of evidence that Swift was influenced by Locke's epistemology, as there are several points in the narrative where Gulliver consciously reflects on his sense-perceptions. For instance, Gulliver's first moments of conscious thought are accompanied by an awareness of the confused state of his sense-perceptions. His arms and legs fastened, his hair tied, Gulliver wakes to find himself directly exposed to the heat of the sun, a burning light that offends his eyes. The activity of the Lilliputians is a confused noise as they assault his body, pricking his skin with arrows that, to Gulliver, seem to be tiny needles. Carnochan finds this image of Gulliver as the prisoner of the Lilliputians to resonate with Locke's epistemology, for here Swift presents an image of the man of sense-perceptions gone mad. In Swift's dramatization of Locke's epistemology, Gulliver regresses to the period of early infancy, an early developmental stage where one has no control over one's body. This is the time when, Locke says, "One spends the greater part of their time in sleep, and are seldom awake, but when either hunger calls for the teat, or pain...forces the mind to perceive, and attend to it." Like a newborn child, Gulliver awakens in Lilliput to a world dominated by a variety of sense-perceptions including vision and hearing, hunger and pain. Gulliver's condition in Book One may be considered as a symbol of the Lockeian man in the early stages of cognitive development , the period in which the mind is hardly more than a blank slate.
In the second book of Travels, Gulliver journeys to Brobdingnag, where he continues to experience the world through his senses. Compared to the Brobdingnagian giants, he is as small in this land as the Lilliputians were to him in his first voyage. Swift shows that Gulliver's ability to perceive reality has changed, as his senses are now super-acute. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver's ability to see and smell the world around him is refined to the ultimate degree: he notes his awareness of the offensive smell coming from the maids of honor and records the revulsion he felt when he beheld their naked bodies; he sees the physical imperfections of the people of Brobdingnag easily, the blemishes on their skin as well as the hairs on their bodies; this is a world where all the senses are sharpened in proportion to his littleness. Throughout his stay in Brobdingnag, Gulliver's super-acute sense-perceptions continually place him in danger, as the music of the court strikes him as being so loud that he feels that even the full force of the Royal Army could not equal it. In addition, Gulliver is continually surrounded by potentially painful sensations, as his life is threatened in simple occurrences like a shower of hail.
As a consequence of his stay in this country where his perceptions are augmented so radically, his progressive alienation from the world of the English people is furthered. This phenomenon, too, was predicted by Locke, who said: "Were our sense altered and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and outward scheme of things would have quite another face to us and, I am apt to think, would be inconsistent with our being." This statement corresponds well with the image of Gulliver in Brobdingnag, for he is precisely in the predicament as that which Locke predicted. Having fallen out of the world he normally habitats, in journeys through a world in which he can no longer function, other than be gawked at because his sense-perceptions do not correspond with the world in which he lives. Eventually, Gulliver learns to adjust to the country, but as a result of his adjustment his return from Brobdingnag is much more difficult than his return from Lilliput. Finding his countrymen to be more contemptible than humanized, Gulliver's experience resonates with Locke's belief that there is no knowledge that is natural or innate in humanity. Gulliver is unable to readjust to the proportions of the English world after his voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. He is unable to grasp that he has been restored to his original country and reacts to his wife and daughter as if they, too, were sixty feet tall like the Brobdingnagian giants. At the same time, he looks at the English countryside and is reminded of the dimensions of Lilliput.
In many ways Travels can be read as a rebuttal to the philosophy Locke promotes in his Essay. This side of Swift's work can be seen best in the final book of the Travels, where Swift presents Locke's epistemology in a satirical form, depicting the ultimate consequence of the understanding of human nature through sense-perception. After his return from the land of the Houyhnhnm horse-people, Gulliver, having been repulsed for so long by the humanlike countenance of the Yahoos, comes to look upon his own features with disgust: "[I await the day when I will be able to] behold my own figure often in a glass, and thus if possible habituate myself...to tolerate the sight of a human creature." With his return home after this final voyage, Swift reveals that Gulliver's approach to self-understanding on the basis of Locke's epistemology has led to his succumbing to a misanthropic and morally deluded image of human nature, placing him in a world in which he can find no satisfaction. To illustrate the potential dangers that underlie the acceptance of Locke's epistemology, Swift uses this literary narrative to reveal the problems inherent in Locke's theory of sense-perceptions. In the end, these portions of Travels may be read as a Swiftian parody of Locke's belief that his epistemological framework can be offered as the foundation of human existence.
Gulliver's Travels Book Three: A Voyage to Laputa and the Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure
Before we begin our reading of the third section of Swift's narrative, a digression into the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) will be necessary. In his Course in General Linguistics (1906-1911), Saussure posited a conception of the sign that contained a curious paradox. According to Saussure, the sign is made up of two components, the signifier and the signified. In linguistic terms, the signifier is a word that indicates either a material object or a concept, while the signified is the material object that is indicated by these words. In this way the complete sign is a binary construction, forges from the combination of signifier and signified. It is impossible for the value of a signifying term to be permanently fixed since, Saussure says, the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one. As a result there is no possibility of reaching an exact correspondence of value between sign and signifier, or between objects and words.
In addition, whenever words are said to correspond to concepts it can be shown, in all cases, that these relationships are purely differential; that is, they are defined negatively, in relation to other linguistic terms. This means that the context of a word is derived by comparison to those meanings that exist outside of it. As a result, the most precise characteristic of a word is in being what other words are not. In Saussure's linguistic universe, then, the most dominant values are those of opposition and difference, although some oppositions are more significant than others. Language, Saussure cautions us, is a form and not a substance; this edict is not to be overlooked, for at the root of all mistaken linguistic theories is the assumption that the linguistic phenomenon must already possess a substance. As seen in Book Three of Gulliver's Travels, the people of Laputa make exactly this mistake.
Many of the experiments in the Lagado Academy are performed by reversing the order of things: sunlight is derived from cucumbers; human waste becomes food that is ready to eat; a house is constructed from the top down; doctors cure sickness by replacing the internal with the external. In addition, many of the techniques developed in Lagado are experiements with language. Gulliver witnesses the workings of a machine that can produce a book automatically, realizing the desire of what Richard Rodino calls "perfect reader gratification through the creation of a text utterly free of authorial control." Taking a visit to the school of language, Gulliver describes the kind of experimentation in this field, where a perfect language is being developed. The scheme of a perfect language is presented in Laputa, as various members of the Lagado Academy conceptualize language is ways that attempt to eliminate lengthy discourses and other such problems inherent in communication.
Here Swift proposes a language in which speakers must have all the objects they wish to signify in the course of a conversation, literally, at hand. The plan for a language is created in imitation of Adamic language, where a perfect correspondence betweem sign and signifier allowed words to express the essence of the objects they designated. In Saussureian term this is a language where difference, which plays such a crucial role in Saussure's structural linguistics, has been eliminated. Curiously, this language theory may be seen as another example of Swift satirizing the work of Locke, in this case his theory of language. Under Locke's theory of signification, words and ideas were seen as signifiers and signifieds, and these two categories mirror one another. Swift alludes to Locke's philosophy of language directly when he says that all things imaginable are but nouns. Here Swift does what Saussure would do over one hundred years later, breaking with Locke's language theory by differentiating between sign and sign-content, between material concepts and material objects, and this allowed him to posit a differential system whereby meaning could be derived according to an individual's encounter with the world. While Saussure sets up a linguistic world differentiation and opposition, where the meanings of words are circumscribed by their differences to one another, the language Swift presents in Travels humorously described what language would be like if Locke's language theory was correct.
According to William Bowman Piper, the most prevalent elements in Travels are the disparities between language and experience. If this concept of language were actually realized, communication between people would not be more precise but would be absolutely impossible. This, says Pipe, may be seen as the effect of the communicative chasm that separates the people of the Lagado Academy from the experience of life, a distance that represents the differences between the accumulated ideas of Lagadio and those experiences which Gulliver brings with him from Europe, a set of ideas that marks him as a foreigner. Cowards and Ellis interpret Swift's comical presentation of this perfect language as a satirical attack on the Royal Society, whose members felt they could attain a true understanding of the world through an appropriately scientific philosophical discourse. In keeping with this point, Swift's text can be shown to work in terms of the communicative paradigm later advocated by Saussure, a paradigm shift that involved a radical break with the great champion of the Royal Society, John Locke.
Returning to our discussion of Locke, we finds that he saw language as having three main purposes: "To make known one man's thoughts to another, to do it with as much ease and quickness as possible and to thereby convey the knowledge of things." In keeping with Locke's definition, Swift portrays a language whose prime purpose is one of conveying thought from one person to another, which he satirically presents through a literalized metaphor, as the people who use this language become pack-horses who carry giant sacks containing all the objects they wish to indicate. While the above statement carries the weight of Locke's firm conviction and even self-assurance, Piper says that Locke grew ambivalent about the communicative process he outlined so confidently and, in the same essay, he came to alter his tone significantly. Eventually, Locke's skepticism of the link between words and ideas came to be reflected in his belief that, when people speak with one another, their speech usually refers to the things in their own imaginations, not to things as they really are. This is in direct contrast to Saussure, who proposes a theory of language where signs are both arbitrary and differential. Like the language theorists of Lagado, philosophers like Locke attempt to inhibit the production of difference by creating a language in which signifieds dominate to the exclusion of signifiers. In this way a universal language is created when the human mind if prevented from legitimizing any conceptual differences. This language, Swift ironically proposes, is the realization of a language that can be easily comprehended by all.
In simplifying Locke's picture of the communicative chain, Saussure formulated a viable alternative to Locke's theory of communication by altering it slightly. Conceptualizing language as a system that is both arbitrary and differential, Saussure allowed Locke's category of things to be replaced with the category of words, thereby forming a link between ideas and words and, simultaneously, situating both speaker and hearer in a non-subjective communicative space where the link between words and things is not subjected to various perspectives, as is Locke's link between ideas and things. In this way the structural linguistics of Saussure decreases the intricacies of Locke's philosophy of language, a system that passes through two sets of external elements, ideas and words, and back to what was originally posited, the original things themselves. Saussure altered Locke's definition by positing a relationship between speaker and hearer where the speaker, who encodes his ideas into words, is decoded by the hearer, who trasnlates his words into ideas. In Swift's parody of the Lockian communicative process, individuals who wish to speak to one another are unable to acts as interpreters, effectively excluding them as members of the communicative process.
The Academics of Lagado dream of a world that would inhibit the use of language in two ways. Not only would this language prevent people from facing the challenge of developing their ideas as clearly as language will allow, they are prevented from interpreting and judging the ideas that are set before them. While Carnochan in uncertain of Swift's motivating in composing his satirical attack on Locke's philosophy, he notes that Swift saw the work of his contemporaries, such as the anthropologist Edwards Tyson and the philosopher John Kirby as putting the notion of truth into doubt. Perhaps Swift had similar feelings about the man he called the 'judicious' Mr. Locke. Swift critiques the implicit nominalist or anti-essentialist outlook contained in Locke's philosophy through his description of the Academy in Laputa, where intellectuals plan to eliminate those words that do not designate material things. We shall explore Swift's critique of Locke's nominalist approach to language in greater detail in the next section of this essay.
Gulliver's Travels, Book Four: The Houyhnhnms and the Semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce
Unlike Locke or Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) conceived of the sign as something that is detahced from both linguistic experience and the communicative chain that stretches producer and receiver; he warns the interpreter against constructing an analysis of the sign limited to any one language. Both Lock's nominalism and Saussure's structuralism are simply insufficient compared to Peirce's method of semiotic analysis for Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In Peirce's semiotics, the interpretation of the sign is derived, not from its immediate linguistic reference, but from the relation between the sign itself and the object that is signified. In addition, Peirce's semiotic system includes the proposition that any additional thing that refers to an object is also a sign. In this way, Peirce's semiotics differs from that of Locks and Saussure in that the theory of communication advocated by Peirce erases the linguistic privilege held by the interpreter.
Although the linguitic components of human communication have been removed, Peirce's semiotics is stilll relevant to the communicative process. According to Jurgen Habermas, what remains are chains of "depersonalized sign sequences in which every sign refers as interpreted to the foregoing sign." Perice calls this kind of sign that refers to another sign in the communicative chain as an index. By indicating signs that exist independently of linguistic reference and can be used to stand in place of linguistic expressions, Peirce expands the borders of semiotic analysis to incorporate nonlinguistic features and meaningful actions such as gestures. Like actions performed through speech, gestures can be interpreted on the pre-existing model of the linguistic sign. By opening the sign up to exytraverbal forms of experience, Peirce allows one to see that even nonlinguistic structures of communication are open to interpretation and, potentially, are agents of communication in their own right.
John Sena finds that Travels abounds with such non-verbals forms of communication. His essay, "The Language of Gestures in Gulliver's Travels" shows how Swift makes nonlinguistic gestures into an important textual component. He says that Swift uses gestures as a means of communication between Gulliver and the individuals he meets in his voyages. By employing various gestures when he meets the inhabitants of Lilliput, Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver is able to speak their language to the extent that he is able to make himself intelligble. Sena claims that Travels exceeds all other fictional works in its ability to demonstrate the efficiency of gestures as a performative speech-act. In fact, Sena goes as far as to claim that Gulliver's use of these non-linguistic gesture are a form of communication that is "superior to either the written or spoken forms of language."
As evidence for his thesis, Sena offers the fact that from the many creatures Gulliver encounters, from six-inch high people to intelligent horses, all are able to interpret his gestures correctly. In all the countries Gulliver travels to, this same language of gestures transcends geographical distinctions. There are no instances in which a single gesture is found to possess two meaning that contradict one another. Book One features a communication gap between Gulliver and the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput. No matter what language Gulliver uses, he is unable to speak to the Lilliputians. He tries a number of European languages including French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch but, Swift says, "All to no purpose." While Gulliver and the Lilliputians have different languages, the gestural language they do share is able to supplement the communicative process, for Gulliver finally makes himself clear through these non-linguistic signs. During Gulliver's first weeks in Lilliput he is only able to participate in their non-verbal communicative universe, a time when the use of gestures assumes an all-important status.
At the beginning of the book, when Gulliver regains consciousness, he finds himself tied to the ground and begins to panic. Letting out a great road, Gulliver causes the Lilliputians to flee fvrom the giant man-mountain, until one member of this diminutive group returns and communicates with Gulliver by lifting up his hands and eyes by way of admiration. When the Lilliputian leader desires to communicate with Gulliver he has his soldiers cut the tiny ropes that constrict Gulliver's movements, enabling the Englishman to turn his head to observe his gestures as he speaks. Gulliver repeatedly informs the reader that he is unable to comprehend the language that his captors are using. However, the Lilliputians can infer Gulliver's meanings from his expressions of promises, pity and kindness. From Gulliver's observations, we see that gestures are able to convey more than the basic desires, but are able to connote the complex emotional attitudes of pity and kindness.
With this gesture Gulliver convinces the Lilliputians of his peaceful nature. He then makes known his hunger by putting his finger to his mouth and represented his thirst by making a sign that he wants a drink. Soon, Gulliver sees that his gestures have successfully conveyed the words he was unable to communicate. Before the arrival of the Imperial Majesty of Lilliput, the Lilliputians give Gulliver a sign that he should cease his eating and drinking. Gulliver then attempts to convey his desire for freedom by "making a sign with the hand that was loose, putting it to the other...and then to my own head and body, to signify that I desired my liberty." Interpreting this gesture correctly, the Imperial Majesty expresses his reply negatively, posing his body "in a posture to show that I should have meat and drink enough, and very good treatment."
This conversation in gestures contains the basic structure of the process Gulliver goes through in each one of his voyages. Through a variety of mimic gestures Gulliver is not only able to represent actions like eating and drinking but is able to communicate the distress he feel at being tied down like a prisoner. Sena defines mimic gestures as physical movements that imitate an action so clearly that it is easily recognizable to anyone who observes it. However, Gulliver does not communicate through mimic gestures exclusively, he also uses what Sena calls symbolic gestures. These are gestures that are specific to a group of people within a certain historical period and, as a result of their specificity, the significance of these gestures is confined to a limited number of individuals. Unlike linguistic words, whose meanings may be learned without having had direct experience of the object, symbolic gestures are difficult to interpret without having experienced the cultural context from which these gestures are derived. The use of symbolic gestures occurs when Gulliver, in trying to assure the Lilliputians of his placid temperment, presents a submissive manner, lifting up his left hand and both eyes to the sun, as if calling on God to witness his (non-verbal) declaration of truthfulness.
This gesture is unlike the actions mimicked by Gulliver in the earlier examples, and its effectiveness as a communicative sign rests on the assumption that the Lilliputians view similarly to the view Gulliver himself holds. This is a gesture that does not carry the same essential significance from culture to culture as does the gesture of pointing to one's mouth an imitating the consumption of food. In allowing this symbolic gesture to be effective as a communicative action, Swift reveals that when Gulliver raises his hand he indicates something that transcends the culture to which he belongs. Swift also betrays an assumption he makes of the Lilliputians; he assumed that they place a high value on human life. That Swift freely mixes his use of mimic gestures with symbolic gestures shows that he did not consider these two gestures to be in separate categories; rather, he allowed both type of gestures to be contained within a single communicative category. Sena attributes this quality in Swift's work to the fact that specific human gestures were not classified and analyzed untuil later in the eighteenth century. According to Sena, the people of Swift's time assumed that gestures were understood regardless of the social, cultural or anthropological spheres one inhabited. In his portrayal of a man who communicates easily through both mimic and symbolic gestures, Swift composed a text that simultaneously displayed a learned ability to discriminate between a number of languages and betrayed his ignorance of the fine distinctions between different cultures.
In the final book of Travels, where Gulliver enters the society of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, Swift employs an even greater range of communicative gestures than in the first three books. In each of the books, Gulliver's basic problem was one of using gestures to communicate with creatures that do not speak his language, but when Gulliver learns that the Houyhnhnms have their own language, he decides to gain competence in their language in order to communicate with them. When Gulliver encounters an Houyhnhnm for the first time, Swift takes this opportunity to write a lengthy account of communication through gestural language. While in the first three books of Travels the relaying of gestures enables Gulliver to communicate with other human creatures, the final books uses gestures to emphasize the anthropomorphic quality of the actions taken by non-human creatures. While the reader always conceives of a Houyhnhnm based on the image of a horse, Gulliver's description of their conduct humanizes them by drawing a correspondence between the movement of their equine bodies and the apparent rationality of their mannerisms. Swift does this by characterizing the horse's expression as one of wonder, by showing how the two horses walked together like person deliberating upon some affair of weight and by describing the sounds they made as the gestures of a philosopher.
When Gulliver eventually learns enough of the Houyhnhnm language to be able to converse, the leader of the Houyhnhnms requests to learn the culture and history of England. Gulliver willingly complies, but find that he has a difficult time translating this narrative of English history into the Houyhnhnm's language because they do not have words to convey many of the concepts Gulliver wishes to express. As Gulliver says, "Power, government, war, law, punishment and a thousand other things had no terms...which made the difficulty almost insuperable to give my Master any conception of what I meant." This presentation of the obstacles in communicating between Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms reveals another assumption Swift makes regarding language, that the structure of the language one uses is shaped by the moral attitudes of the speaker. The fact that the Houyhnhnms are a truly noble race is signaled by the fact that their language does not contain any distinctions between class and morality. The Houyhnhnms' freedom from the hierarchical system of power is symbolized b y their language, which is free from such words. Gulliver has such difficulty in translating his knowledge of English society into the Houyhnhnm's language that, finally, he is compelled to resort to circumlocutions. Only by making the most verbally effusive statements is the Houyhnhnm able to comprehend the meaning of his description of English life, although the entire process takes several days of intense conversation in order to transmit these ideas.
As this section has shown, the nonverbal language of gestures is of crucial importance in allowing Gulliver to communicate with the creatures he encounters in his voyages. Ultimately, the knowledge obtained from a comprehensive examination of how these non-linguistic signs function within the text is indispensible for the scholar who wishes to evaluate this text properly.
Conclusions: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as the Search for a Communicative Utopia
Through his voyages in four different lands Gulliver is exposed to a variety of semiotic systems. However, at the end of the book Gulliver is where he began, still a commoner in England, but now in a poor state of psychological health. Is this a man who has found a communicative utopia ? Only under certain conditions, then, can Gulliver's Travels be read as the search for a communicative utopia. In Deborah Wyrick's view, a reading of Gulliver's journey as the search for a communicative utopia must be viewed ironically since Swift's writings on language have been shown to contain his most conservative values. In corroboration with this statement, we have seen how Swift parodies those philosophies that propose to guarantee the effectiveness of communication, which is a conservative tactic, not a revolutionary or idealistic one.
In particular, our understanding of Swift's correction of Locke's doctrine of communication is beneficial in that it helps us to understand Travels as a masterpiece of satire. As we have seen, in his revision of Locke's theory of language, Swift unknowingly prefigures Saussure's theory of structural linguistics. Now that we know that Peirce's semiotics transcends the field of linguistics, might we suppose that Peirce is superior to both Locke and Saussure ? Rather than doing this, we should be wary of privileging one order of signification over another. If history has shown anything, says Wyrick, it has shown that all semiotic systems are destined to an inevitable devaluation. Perhaps this is what Jonathan Swift meant when he wrote, in a letter to Alexander Pope, that he heard of an Irish bishop who, having read Travels, declared that he "hardly believed a word of it."
Since its publication in 1726, the critical response to Gulliver's Travels has gone through a series of shifts. Literary critics of the eighteenth century read this tale to find out what Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) had to say about the essence of human nature and human behavior. This critical approach continued into the nineteenth century, as critics continued to emphasize the intentions of the author. By the twentieth century, Swiftian critics were divided into a soft school and a hard school. The critics in the soft school read the book as being more comical than satirical, while the critics in the hard school saw it as being more satirical than comic. These two schools have been at odds with one another since the 1950s and consequently the last several decades have seen few new interpretations of the text. Today most if not all critics are agreed that the meaning of Travels rests on the sign-content of Swift's writings.
What is the sign ? Although the concept dates back to the time of the ancient Greeks, who conceived of Hermes as the bearer if signs, the concept was revitalized in the modern period by John Locke who outlined a theory of signs, or semiotics, in his writings. In this essay we will make a series of analyses of Travels, centering on three different ways of conceptualizing the sign -- epistemology, linguistics and semiotics. The work if three different thinkers will be called upon to help illustrate each of these readings: the epistemology of John Locke, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the non-linguistic semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Each of these theorists have their own conception of the sign. The first section of this essay, incorporating Locke's epistemology, will concentrate on the first two books of Travels; the second section, focusing on Saussure's linguistics, will look at the third book of Travels; and the third section will adopt Peirce's semiotics to analyze the final book of Swift's tale. The conclusions derived from these three sections will be used to test our thesis, that Gulliver's voyages are a journey through a number of communicative systems and, for this reason, Swift's text is open to each of these readings. We will also attempt to answer the question of to what degree can this book be read as the search for a communicative utopia ?
Gulliver's Travels, Books One and Two: Lilliput, Brobdingnag and the Epistemology of John Locke
As stated in the introduction, the concept of the sign resurfaces in the work of John Locke (1632-1704), whose Essay on Human Understanding (1690) was among the most influential works of the Enlightenment period. For critics like J.B. Schneewind, the central principle of Locke's philosophy is his epistemology, which he outlined in statements such as: "[Our knowledge of the world is based on the degree to which we can define] the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnance, of any of our ideas. ... Where this perception is, there is knowledge; and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of this knowledge."
The statement may be interpreted as reflecting Locke's nominalism, meaning his disbelief in the Platonic theory of essences. Here Locke says that individuals, being unable to gain access to the world of essences, must therefore obtain a knowledge of reality by viewing by viewing the many ways in which their ideas and reality agree of disagree with one another. Ultimately, Locke says, individuals come to possess a true understanding of the world by perceiving the way these ideas connect to one another. This process of definition must be carrier out by comparing one picture of reality with another. In this section I will demonstrate how the theories of John Locke help to illuminate Swift's text, particularly the first two books of Travels.
According to the critic W.B. Carnochan, Jonathan Swift's Travels bears comparison with Locke's Essay, for both works contain a similar method for defining human nature. In Locke's view, we are born into the world with a mind like a blank slate (tabula rasa), that is, a mind without any innate ideas. This blank mind is then immersed into the linguistic and philosophical culture of the world through a stream of sense-perceptions. This concept if the foundation of Locke's epistemology, or, his view of how the human mind comes to know things, for he considered the true essence of any living organism to be beyond the scope of reason, saying that "It is evident that we sort and name substances by their normal, and not by their real, essences." In a similar vein Swift, too, viewed the possibility of defining man according to his essential nature skeptically; he abandoned the traditional view of man as a rational animal in preference for a definition of man as an animal capable of rationality.
While on the surface the Travels are not concerned with questions of epistemology, Swift's titular character, Lemuel Gulliver, may be seen as an example of the Lockeian man. Book One of the Travels contains a great deal of evidence that Swift was influenced by Locke's epistemology, as there are several points in the narrative where Gulliver consciously reflects on his sense-perceptions. For instance, Gulliver's first moments of conscious thought are accompanied by an awareness of the confused state of his sense-perceptions. His arms and legs fastened, his hair tied, Gulliver wakes to find himself directly exposed to the heat of the sun, a burning light that offends his eyes. The activity of the Lilliputians is a confused noise as they assault his body, pricking his skin with arrows that, to Gulliver, seem to be tiny needles. Carnochan finds this image of Gulliver as the prisoner of the Lilliputians to resonate with Locke's epistemology, for here Swift presents an image of the man of sense-perceptions gone mad. In Swift's dramatization of Locke's epistemology, Gulliver regresses to the period of early infancy, an early developmental stage where one has no control over one's body. This is the time when, Locke says, "One spends the greater part of their time in sleep, and are seldom awake, but when either hunger calls for the teat, or pain...forces the mind to perceive, and attend to it." Like a newborn child, Gulliver awakens in Lilliput to a world dominated by a variety of sense-perceptions including vision and hearing, hunger and pain. Gulliver's condition in Book One may be considered as a symbol of the Lockeian man in the early stages of cognitive development , the period in which the mind is hardly more than a blank slate.
In the second book of Travels, Gulliver journeys to Brobdingnag, where he continues to experience the world through his senses. Compared to the Brobdingnagian giants, he is as small in this land as the Lilliputians were to him in his first voyage. Swift shows that Gulliver's ability to perceive reality has changed, as his senses are now super-acute. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver's ability to see and smell the world around him is refined to the ultimate degree: he notes his awareness of the offensive smell coming from the maids of honor and records the revulsion he felt when he beheld their naked bodies; he sees the physical imperfections of the people of Brobdingnag easily, the blemishes on their skin as well as the hairs on their bodies; this is a world where all the senses are sharpened in proportion to his littleness. Throughout his stay in Brobdingnag, Gulliver's super-acute sense-perceptions continually place him in danger, as the music of the court strikes him as being so loud that he feels that even the full force of the Royal Army could not equal it. In addition, Gulliver is continually surrounded by potentially painful sensations, as his life is threatened in simple occurrences like a shower of hail.
As a consequence of his stay in this country where his perceptions are augmented so radically, his progressive alienation from the world of the English people is furthered. This phenomenon, too, was predicted by Locke, who said: "Were our sense altered and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and outward scheme of things would have quite another face to us and, I am apt to think, would be inconsistent with our being." This statement corresponds well with the image of Gulliver in Brobdingnag, for he is precisely in the predicament as that which Locke predicted. Having fallen out of the world he normally habitats, in journeys through a world in which he can no longer function, other than be gawked at because his sense-perceptions do not correspond with the world in which he lives. Eventually, Gulliver learns to adjust to the country, but as a result of his adjustment his return from Brobdingnag is much more difficult than his return from Lilliput. Finding his countrymen to be more contemptible than humanized, Gulliver's experience resonates with Locke's belief that there is no knowledge that is natural or innate in humanity. Gulliver is unable to readjust to the proportions of the English world after his voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. He is unable to grasp that he has been restored to his original country and reacts to his wife and daughter as if they, too, were sixty feet tall like the Brobdingnagian giants. At the same time, he looks at the English countryside and is reminded of the dimensions of Lilliput.
In many ways Travels can be read as a rebuttal to the philosophy Locke promotes in his Essay. This side of Swift's work can be seen best in the final book of the Travels, where Swift presents Locke's epistemology in a satirical form, depicting the ultimate consequence of the understanding of human nature through sense-perception. After his return from the land of the Houyhnhnm horse-people, Gulliver, having been repulsed for so long by the humanlike countenance of the Yahoos, comes to look upon his own features with disgust: "[I await the day when I will be able to] behold my own figure often in a glass, and thus if possible habituate myself...to tolerate the sight of a human creature." With his return home after this final voyage, Swift reveals that Gulliver's approach to self-understanding on the basis of Locke's epistemology has led to his succumbing to a misanthropic and morally deluded image of human nature, placing him in a world in which he can find no satisfaction. To illustrate the potential dangers that underlie the acceptance of Locke's epistemology, Swift uses this literary narrative to reveal the problems inherent in Locke's theory of sense-perceptions. In the end, these portions of Travels may be read as a Swiftian parody of Locke's belief that his epistemological framework can be offered as the foundation of human existence.
Gulliver's Travels Book Three: A Voyage to Laputa and the Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure
Before we begin our reading of the third section of Swift's narrative, a digression into the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) will be necessary. In his Course in General Linguistics (1906-1911), Saussure posited a conception of the sign that contained a curious paradox. According to Saussure, the sign is made up of two components, the signifier and the signified. In linguistic terms, the signifier is a word that indicates either a material object or a concept, while the signified is the material object that is indicated by these words. In this way the complete sign is a binary construction, forges from the combination of signifier and signified. It is impossible for the value of a signifying term to be permanently fixed since, Saussure says, the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one. As a result there is no possibility of reaching an exact correspondence of value between sign and signifier, or between objects and words.
In addition, whenever words are said to correspond to concepts it can be shown, in all cases, that these relationships are purely differential; that is, they are defined negatively, in relation to other linguistic terms. This means that the context of a word is derived by comparison to those meanings that exist outside of it. As a result, the most precise characteristic of a word is in being what other words are not. In Saussure's linguistic universe, then, the most dominant values are those of opposition and difference, although some oppositions are more significant than others. Language, Saussure cautions us, is a form and not a substance; this edict is not to be overlooked, for at the root of all mistaken linguistic theories is the assumption that the linguistic phenomenon must already possess a substance. As seen in Book Three of Gulliver's Travels, the people of Laputa make exactly this mistake.
Many of the experiments in the Lagado Academy are performed by reversing the order of things: sunlight is derived from cucumbers; human waste becomes food that is ready to eat; a house is constructed from the top down; doctors cure sickness by replacing the internal with the external. In addition, many of the techniques developed in Lagado are experiements with language. Gulliver witnesses the workings of a machine that can produce a book automatically, realizing the desire of what Richard Rodino calls "perfect reader gratification through the creation of a text utterly free of authorial control." Taking a visit to the school of language, Gulliver describes the kind of experimentation in this field, where a perfect language is being developed. The scheme of a perfect language is presented in Laputa, as various members of the Lagado Academy conceptualize language is ways that attempt to eliminate lengthy discourses and other such problems inherent in communication.
Here Swift proposes a language in which speakers must have all the objects they wish to signify in the course of a conversation, literally, at hand. The plan for a language is created in imitation of Adamic language, where a perfect correspondence betweem sign and signifier allowed words to express the essence of the objects they designated. In Saussureian term this is a language where difference, which plays such a crucial role in Saussure's structural linguistics, has been eliminated. Curiously, this language theory may be seen as another example of Swift satirizing the work of Locke, in this case his theory of language. Under Locke's theory of signification, words and ideas were seen as signifiers and signifieds, and these two categories mirror one another. Swift alludes to Locke's philosophy of language directly when he says that all things imaginable are but nouns. Here Swift does what Saussure would do over one hundred years later, breaking with Locke's language theory by differentiating between sign and sign-content, between material concepts and material objects, and this allowed him to posit a differential system whereby meaning could be derived according to an individual's encounter with the world. While Saussure sets up a linguistic world differentiation and opposition, where the meanings of words are circumscribed by their differences to one another, the language Swift presents in Travels humorously described what language would be like if Locke's language theory was correct.
According to William Bowman Piper, the most prevalent elements in Travels are the disparities between language and experience. If this concept of language were actually realized, communication between people would not be more precise but would be absolutely impossible. This, says Pipe, may be seen as the effect of the communicative chasm that separates the people of the Lagado Academy from the experience of life, a distance that represents the differences between the accumulated ideas of Lagadio and those experiences which Gulliver brings with him from Europe, a set of ideas that marks him as a foreigner. Cowards and Ellis interpret Swift's comical presentation of this perfect language as a satirical attack on the Royal Society, whose members felt they could attain a true understanding of the world through an appropriately scientific philosophical discourse. In keeping with this point, Swift's text can be shown to work in terms of the communicative paradigm later advocated by Saussure, a paradigm shift that involved a radical break with the great champion of the Royal Society, John Locke.
Returning to our discussion of Locke, we finds that he saw language as having three main purposes: "To make known one man's thoughts to another, to do it with as much ease and quickness as possible and to thereby convey the knowledge of things." In keeping with Locke's definition, Swift portrays a language whose prime purpose is one of conveying thought from one person to another, which he satirically presents through a literalized metaphor, as the people who use this language become pack-horses who carry giant sacks containing all the objects they wish to indicate. While the above statement carries the weight of Locke's firm conviction and even self-assurance, Piper says that Locke grew ambivalent about the communicative process he outlined so confidently and, in the same essay, he came to alter his tone significantly. Eventually, Locke's skepticism of the link between words and ideas came to be reflected in his belief that, when people speak with one another, their speech usually refers to the things in their own imaginations, not to things as they really are. This is in direct contrast to Saussure, who proposes a theory of language where signs are both arbitrary and differential. Like the language theorists of Lagado, philosophers like Locke attempt to inhibit the production of difference by creating a language in which signifieds dominate to the exclusion of signifiers. In this way a universal language is created when the human mind if prevented from legitimizing any conceptual differences. This language, Swift ironically proposes, is the realization of a language that can be easily comprehended by all.
In simplifying Locke's picture of the communicative chain, Saussure formulated a viable alternative to Locke's theory of communication by altering it slightly. Conceptualizing language as a system that is both arbitrary and differential, Saussure allowed Locke's category of things to be replaced with the category of words, thereby forming a link between ideas and words and, simultaneously, situating both speaker and hearer in a non-subjective communicative space where the link between words and things is not subjected to various perspectives, as is Locke's link between ideas and things. In this way the structural linguistics of Saussure decreases the intricacies of Locke's philosophy of language, a system that passes through two sets of external elements, ideas and words, and back to what was originally posited, the original things themselves. Saussure altered Locke's definition by positing a relationship between speaker and hearer where the speaker, who encodes his ideas into words, is decoded by the hearer, who trasnlates his words into ideas. In Swift's parody of the Lockian communicative process, individuals who wish to speak to one another are unable to acts as interpreters, effectively excluding them as members of the communicative process.
The Academics of Lagado dream of a world that would inhibit the use of language in two ways. Not only would this language prevent people from facing the challenge of developing their ideas as clearly as language will allow, they are prevented from interpreting and judging the ideas that are set before them. While Carnochan in uncertain of Swift's motivating in composing his satirical attack on Locke's philosophy, he notes that Swift saw the work of his contemporaries, such as the anthropologist Edwards Tyson and the philosopher John Kirby as putting the notion of truth into doubt. Perhaps Swift had similar feelings about the man he called the 'judicious' Mr. Locke. Swift critiques the implicit nominalist or anti-essentialist outlook contained in Locke's philosophy through his description of the Academy in Laputa, where intellectuals plan to eliminate those words that do not designate material things. We shall explore Swift's critique of Locke's nominalist approach to language in greater detail in the next section of this essay.
Gulliver's Travels, Book Four: The Houyhnhnms and the Semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce
Unlike Locke or Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) conceived of the sign as something that is detahced from both linguistic experience and the communicative chain that stretches producer and receiver; he warns the interpreter against constructing an analysis of the sign limited to any one language. Both Lock's nominalism and Saussure's structuralism are simply insufficient compared to Peirce's method of semiotic analysis for Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In Peirce's semiotics, the interpretation of the sign is derived, not from its immediate linguistic reference, but from the relation between the sign itself and the object that is signified. In addition, Peirce's semiotic system includes the proposition that any additional thing that refers to an object is also a sign. In this way, Peirce's semiotics differs from that of Locks and Saussure in that the theory of communication advocated by Peirce erases the linguistic privilege held by the interpreter.
Although the linguitic components of human communication have been removed, Peirce's semiotics is stilll relevant to the communicative process. According to Jurgen Habermas, what remains are chains of "depersonalized sign sequences in which every sign refers as interpreted to the foregoing sign." Perice calls this kind of sign that refers to another sign in the communicative chain as an index. By indicating signs that exist independently of linguistic reference and can be used to stand in place of linguistic expressions, Peirce expands the borders of semiotic analysis to incorporate nonlinguistic features and meaningful actions such as gestures. Like actions performed through speech, gestures can be interpreted on the pre-existing model of the linguistic sign. By opening the sign up to exytraverbal forms of experience, Peirce allows one to see that even nonlinguistic structures of communication are open to interpretation and, potentially, are agents of communication in their own right.
John Sena finds that Travels abounds with such non-verbals forms of communication. His essay, "The Language of Gestures in Gulliver's Travels" shows how Swift makes nonlinguistic gestures into an important textual component. He says that Swift uses gestures as a means of communication between Gulliver and the individuals he meets in his voyages. By employing various gestures when he meets the inhabitants of Lilliput, Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver is able to speak their language to the extent that he is able to make himself intelligble. Sena claims that Travels exceeds all other fictional works in its ability to demonstrate the efficiency of gestures as a performative speech-act. In fact, Sena goes as far as to claim that Gulliver's use of these non-linguistic gesture are a form of communication that is "superior to either the written or spoken forms of language."
As evidence for his thesis, Sena offers the fact that from the many creatures Gulliver encounters, from six-inch high people to intelligent horses, all are able to interpret his gestures correctly. In all the countries Gulliver travels to, this same language of gestures transcends geographical distinctions. There are no instances in which a single gesture is found to possess two meaning that contradict one another. Book One features a communication gap between Gulliver and the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput. No matter what language Gulliver uses, he is unable to speak to the Lilliputians. He tries a number of European languages including French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch but, Swift says, "All to no purpose." While Gulliver and the Lilliputians have different languages, the gestural language they do share is able to supplement the communicative process, for Gulliver finally makes himself clear through these non-linguistic signs. During Gulliver's first weeks in Lilliput he is only able to participate in their non-verbal communicative universe, a time when the use of gestures assumes an all-important status.
At the beginning of the book, when Gulliver regains consciousness, he finds himself tied to the ground and begins to panic. Letting out a great road, Gulliver causes the Lilliputians to flee fvrom the giant man-mountain, until one member of this diminutive group returns and communicates with Gulliver by lifting up his hands and eyes by way of admiration. When the Lilliputian leader desires to communicate with Gulliver he has his soldiers cut the tiny ropes that constrict Gulliver's movements, enabling the Englishman to turn his head to observe his gestures as he speaks. Gulliver repeatedly informs the reader that he is unable to comprehend the language that his captors are using. However, the Lilliputians can infer Gulliver's meanings from his expressions of promises, pity and kindness. From Gulliver's observations, we see that gestures are able to convey more than the basic desires, but are able to connote the complex emotional attitudes of pity and kindness.
With this gesture Gulliver convinces the Lilliputians of his peaceful nature. He then makes known his hunger by putting his finger to his mouth and represented his thirst by making a sign that he wants a drink. Soon, Gulliver sees that his gestures have successfully conveyed the words he was unable to communicate. Before the arrival of the Imperial Majesty of Lilliput, the Lilliputians give Gulliver a sign that he should cease his eating and drinking. Gulliver then attempts to convey his desire for freedom by "making a sign with the hand that was loose, putting it to the other...and then to my own head and body, to signify that I desired my liberty." Interpreting this gesture correctly, the Imperial Majesty expresses his reply negatively, posing his body "in a posture to show that I should have meat and drink enough, and very good treatment."
This conversation in gestures contains the basic structure of the process Gulliver goes through in each one of his voyages. Through a variety of mimic gestures Gulliver is not only able to represent actions like eating and drinking but is able to communicate the distress he feel at being tied down like a prisoner. Sena defines mimic gestures as physical movements that imitate an action so clearly that it is easily recognizable to anyone who observes it. However, Gulliver does not communicate through mimic gestures exclusively, he also uses what Sena calls symbolic gestures. These are gestures that are specific to a group of people within a certain historical period and, as a result of their specificity, the significance of these gestures is confined to a limited number of individuals. Unlike linguistic words, whose meanings may be learned without having had direct experience of the object, symbolic gestures are difficult to interpret without having experienced the cultural context from which these gestures are derived. The use of symbolic gestures occurs when Gulliver, in trying to assure the Lilliputians of his placid temperment, presents a submissive manner, lifting up his left hand and both eyes to the sun, as if calling on God to witness his (non-verbal) declaration of truthfulness.
This gesture is unlike the actions mimicked by Gulliver in the earlier examples, and its effectiveness as a communicative sign rests on the assumption that the Lilliputians view similarly to the view Gulliver himself holds. This is a gesture that does not carry the same essential significance from culture to culture as does the gesture of pointing to one's mouth an imitating the consumption of food. In allowing this symbolic gesture to be effective as a communicative action, Swift reveals that when Gulliver raises his hand he indicates something that transcends the culture to which he belongs. Swift also betrays an assumption he makes of the Lilliputians; he assumed that they place a high value on human life. That Swift freely mixes his use of mimic gestures with symbolic gestures shows that he did not consider these two gestures to be in separate categories; rather, he allowed both type of gestures to be contained within a single communicative category. Sena attributes this quality in Swift's work to the fact that specific human gestures were not classified and analyzed untuil later in the eighteenth century. According to Sena, the people of Swift's time assumed that gestures were understood regardless of the social, cultural or anthropological spheres one inhabited. In his portrayal of a man who communicates easily through both mimic and symbolic gestures, Swift composed a text that simultaneously displayed a learned ability to discriminate between a number of languages and betrayed his ignorance of the fine distinctions between different cultures.
In the final book of Travels, where Gulliver enters the society of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, Swift employs an even greater range of communicative gestures than in the first three books. In each of the books, Gulliver's basic problem was one of using gestures to communicate with creatures that do not speak his language, but when Gulliver learns that the Houyhnhnms have their own language, he decides to gain competence in their language in order to communicate with them. When Gulliver encounters an Houyhnhnm for the first time, Swift takes this opportunity to write a lengthy account of communication through gestural language. While in the first three books of Travels the relaying of gestures enables Gulliver to communicate with other human creatures, the final books uses gestures to emphasize the anthropomorphic quality of the actions taken by non-human creatures. While the reader always conceives of a Houyhnhnm based on the image of a horse, Gulliver's description of their conduct humanizes them by drawing a correspondence between the movement of their equine bodies and the apparent rationality of their mannerisms. Swift does this by characterizing the horse's expression as one of wonder, by showing how the two horses walked together like person deliberating upon some affair of weight and by describing the sounds they made as the gestures of a philosopher.
When Gulliver eventually learns enough of the Houyhnhnm language to be able to converse, the leader of the Houyhnhnms requests to learn the culture and history of England. Gulliver willingly complies, but find that he has a difficult time translating this narrative of English history into the Houyhnhnm's language because they do not have words to convey many of the concepts Gulliver wishes to express. As Gulliver says, "Power, government, war, law, punishment and a thousand other things had no terms...which made the difficulty almost insuperable to give my Master any conception of what I meant." This presentation of the obstacles in communicating between Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms reveals another assumption Swift makes regarding language, that the structure of the language one uses is shaped by the moral attitudes of the speaker. The fact that the Houyhnhnms are a truly noble race is signaled by the fact that their language does not contain any distinctions between class and morality. The Houyhnhnms' freedom from the hierarchical system of power is symbolized b y their language, which is free from such words. Gulliver has such difficulty in translating his knowledge of English society into the Houyhnhnm's language that, finally, he is compelled to resort to circumlocutions. Only by making the most verbally effusive statements is the Houyhnhnm able to comprehend the meaning of his description of English life, although the entire process takes several days of intense conversation in order to transmit these ideas.
As this section has shown, the nonverbal language of gestures is of crucial importance in allowing Gulliver to communicate with the creatures he encounters in his voyages. Ultimately, the knowledge obtained from a comprehensive examination of how these non-linguistic signs function within the text is indispensible for the scholar who wishes to evaluate this text properly.
Conclusions: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as the Search for a Communicative Utopia
Through his voyages in four different lands Gulliver is exposed to a variety of semiotic systems. However, at the end of the book Gulliver is where he began, still a commoner in England, but now in a poor state of psychological health. Is this a man who has found a communicative utopia ? Only under certain conditions, then, can Gulliver's Travels be read as the search for a communicative utopia. In Deborah Wyrick's view, a reading of Gulliver's journey as the search for a communicative utopia must be viewed ironically since Swift's writings on language have been shown to contain his most conservative values. In corroboration with this statement, we have seen how Swift parodies those philosophies that propose to guarantee the effectiveness of communication, which is a conservative tactic, not a revolutionary or idealistic one.
In particular, our understanding of Swift's correction of Locke's doctrine of communication is beneficial in that it helps us to understand Travels as a masterpiece of satire. As we have seen, in his revision of Locke's theory of language, Swift unknowingly prefigures Saussure's theory of structural linguistics. Now that we know that Peirce's semiotics transcends the field of linguistics, might we suppose that Peirce is superior to both Locke and Saussure ? Rather than doing this, we should be wary of privileging one order of signification over another. If history has shown anything, says Wyrick, it has shown that all semiotic systems are destined to an inevitable devaluation. Perhaps this is what Jonathan Swift meant when he wrote, in a letter to Alexander Pope, that he heard of an Irish bishop who, having read Travels, declared that he "hardly believed a word of it."
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 7:53 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home