Into the world of words

Abstract

If the world and all it contains awaits the writer’s touch to reawaken its dormant strangeness this must include the language he uses and the book he writes. Of all the acquisitions made by mankind in its development none is more wonderful, more curious, more deeply formative of consciousness and yet more likely to be taken for granted than language and the elaborate communicative forms, conventions, techniques and artefacts into which it has evolved. Gulliver’s Travels bears witness to this in various ways. Languages and language-learning are, for example, one of the essential ingredients of each of the voyages. The ways in which language is used and abused are an important indicator of the intellectual and moral condition of each of the lands Gulliver visits. And our attention is repeatedly drawn, through Gulliver’s references to his own book and his own writing, to the strangeness of Swift’s chosen way of depicting reality through an extravagant fiction which masquerades as Gulliver’s plain truth and indeed, to the strangeness of writing itself. It is with this in mind that I have in this section used an unmodernised text (though with page references to the Penguin edition).