crumbles under the weight of new evidence, poets and writers can
believe again in the value and meaningfulness of their art.
Before we can talk of a cure, however, we have to diagnose the dis-
ease. Luckily, Swift provides a preliminary diagnosis in “A Voyage to
Laputa,” the third book of Gulliver’s Travels, where he describes an aca-
demic establishment as theory-maddened as our own. During Gulliver’s
visit to the Academy of Lagado, professors in the School of Language
there have (like our modern theorists) discovered that natural language
has dangerous properties that must be allayed. To reduce its harmful
effects on the human body, they first propose “to shorten discourse by
cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles”
since “in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.” Then, perhaps
sensing the chasm between “signifier” and “signified” posited by our
own theorists, the Lagadoan professors propose “... that since Words
are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to
carry about them such Thingsas necessary to express the particular
Business they are to discourse on.” Thus the professors of Lagado abol-
ish logocentrism at a stroke, replacing those slippery, dangerous, and
unstable things called wordswith an entirely new method of communi-
cation, whose operations Swift describes:... many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the new Scheme of
expressing themselves by Things: which hath only this inconvenience
attending it; that if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various Kinds, he
must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Thingsupon his
Back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have
often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the Weight of their
Packs, like Pedlars among us; who when they met in the Streets would lay
down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour
together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their
Burthens, and take their leave.
Swift adds that most people could pack enough implements to
engage in ordinary conversation, but complex situations required a more
elaborate artifice: rooms kept “full of all Things ready at Hand, requisite
to furnish Matter for this kind of artificial Converse.”
Absurd as it appears, the Lagadoan scheme is rooted in the best sci-
ence and philosophy of Swift’s era. Impressed by Descartes’s success at
reducing complex problems to their elements, Enlightenment thinkers
like Locke and Leibniz tried to apply the same method to language and
philosophy. Sharing Descartes’s atomism, Locke believed that words
could be fully understood if they were reduced to their constituent parts.142 Paul Lake