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An enduring preoccupation ofJonathan Swift's writing is the attempt to find an acceptable relationship between words and their objects. Throughout his life Swift was tormented by the dangerous plasticity of language. Its bewildering evolutions were capable of reducing language to a set of arbitrary signifiers that severed the connexion between utterance and meaning. It was not that he shared the age's aspiration towards a linguistic purity that would ensure the complete transparency of language: as Thomas Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, expressed it so memorably, a desire to 'return back to primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words'.2 Swift was contemptuous of the various attempts to re-create a lost linguistic Eden where words were identical with the realities they signified, free of the inevitable distortion that occurs when, as Locke argued, they become concepts in the human mind. In Gulliver's Travels the proposal for abolishing words and replacing them by things is a reductio of such schemes as that of Bishop Wilkins to introduce a philosophical language. When Denis Donoghue says that 'Swift was uneasy with anything that did not occupy space; so he treated words as if they were things' he emphasizes only one side of the equation.3 It is truer to say that Swift struggled to find a language that was truly human, a language in which the words that we produce are meaningful sounds that secure the relationship between the material world and the spiritual being of man. Any kind of
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