The Power of Words in Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Résumé du document

What is the common point between Gulliver's conversation with the various people he encounters during his travels, Swift's irony, and the book itself being considered both as a fairy tale for children and a bitter satire of the government of England and of humankind as a whole at the same time? These significant features were all made possible thanks to the power of words in their miscellaneous forms. Words in themselves are ordinary things, but in Gulliver's Travels more than in any other work of fiction, they are provided with extraordinary power. Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher, used to say that "without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men". We may reuse his sentence and adapt it to our study, by stating that without knowing the power of words, it is impossible to know men. This statement will be beautifully illustrated by the words in Gulliver's travels.

Extraits

[...] Undoubtedly, even today, the words of Gulliver's Travels, through the adventures in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the world of the Houyhnhnms, make children learn more about human nature. The written form of Gulliver's Travels not only appeals to children of all age, it is also a classic of a more mature literature. Adults are capable of reading the book between its lines, of understanding the satire hidden beneath the enchanting surface. Gulliver, but also Swift, as we shall see, often applies his approach to the reader of his narrative. [...]

[...] The Power of Words in Swift's Gulliver's Travels “Words have no legs, yet they walk” (Malian proverb). What is the common point between Gulliver's conversation with the various people he encounters during his travels, Swift's irony, and the book itself being considered as a fairy tale for children and a bitter satire of the government of England and of humankind as a whole at the same time? Those significant features were all made possible thanks to the power of words in its miscellaneous forms. [...]

[...] Gulliver's Travels may be defined as its contents -that is to say, Gulliver's narration proper-, but also as a material object meant to entertain people: the book itself. The words are the constituents of the book, of its pages, its characters and its plot. They make the fiction alive, they make the reader travel with Gulliver. Writing and travelling are inexorably linked in Gulliver's Travels, since the book has often been called an adventure tale, but it is more than that. The greatest power of the book is to be universal: it appeals to children as a wonderful fairy tale and delights adults with its bitter irony. [...]

[...] Smith, editor, The Genres of Gulliver's Travels, University of Delaware Press Paul Turner, Introduction to Gulliver's Travels, Oxford University Press J. K. Welcher, “Gulliver in the Market Place,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol pp. 125-139. [...]

[...] This remark allows us to point out the limitations of the power of communication and spoken words in Gulliver's Travels. If the force of language lies in moulding the characters and the action, it also partakes of Gulliver's destruction as a human being, since his imitation of the neighing of the Houyhnhnms is the final stage of his linguistic evolution, but also the point of no return if we consider that language is what distinguishes humans from animals. By neighing like a horse, Gulliver comes to a paradox: the metamorphosis of his voice is complete, but instead of acceding to some more knowledge, he turns to speak like animals, “imitating [ as near as [he can], the neighing of a horse”. [...]