Reading Afterthoughts on Gulliver

Reading Afterthoughts on Gulliver’s Travels
After finished reading this interesting book, I have to say that this is my first time to engage in such English book which is so fascinating and full of imagination. Because my most clear memory was the last part, so I am going to talk from here. Obviously, at the end of his travels I think Gulliver had turned into a lost linguistic man. What discourse he has existed in the never-never land of his dementia. He spends his time in his stable talking to his horse:” My horse understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day”( page 228). I doubt that how does Gulliver know the language of English horses? By his account that this land is thousands upon thousands of miles from England. Language even horse language dose not travel so easily from place to place, unless, of course , horse makes the only sound that the vocal disposition of their species allows, a kind of whinnying. Could it be that Gulliver’s conversations with his horses hold the same imaginary status as his other ventures and adventures? So I think that the author’s satire and the end of Gulliver’s travel is so unsettling that such a reading is neither unlikely nor
undesirable. It seems that throughout the Travels , language determines Gulliver’s sense of belonging, and his words become part of the circumstances he describes. When a six-inch being climbs on him in Lilliput, Gulliver reacts as if he feels a bug on his leg” (page 28). But as soon as he acclimates his expressions to the point view of his hosts. He urinates in public spaces and notices how the crowd scatters to the right and left “To avoid the torrent which feel with such noises and violence from me” (page.31). Gulliver’s so called water is only a “torrent” falling with “noise” and “violence” for the Lilliputians, surely not for him. He has changed perspective and his language follows suit. Similar transformations occur in the second voyage when Gulliver, now minuscule in comparison with his hosts, when he refers to his mistress, Glumdalclitch , as only “Forty foot high, being little for her age”( page 101), or when he points out what Wales from the known seas sometimes wash up on Brobdingag’s shores:”these Wales I have known so large that a man could hardly carry one upon his shoulders”( page 116). I reckon that there is no end to the pleasure Swift takes in manipulating language and perspective in Gulliver’s Travels ,and readers like me, gain the most the I pay a close attention. In the third voyage, Gulliver goes off on his
own jag about etymology of Laputa, which I read easily as the Spanish word for “whore”.
Lap in the old obsolete languages signifieth high, and untuh a governor, from which they say by corruption, was derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. But I do not approve of this derivation, which seems to be a little stained, I ventured to offer to the learned among them a conjecture of my own , that Laputa was quasi Lao outed, Lap signifying properly the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed a wing , which however I shall not obstrude, but submit to the judicious reader.( page 165)
It is easy enough to trach the author’s parody of modern etymological scholarship here, but just exactly what kind of expertise does Gulliver have in mind when he appeals to the judicious here, what what fascinates me. He is the only westerner who has never heard the language . How would anyone else in the world have any idea about his etymologies? Gulliver is so linguistically driven that he take particular pride in Lilliput, where he bears “ the highest tile of honor among them “(page 58), Nardac. BY unscrambling the letters the reader is left with canard, or practical joke, which may well define the entire enterprise in the Gulliver’s Travels. Perhaps the authors best satiric joke at the expense of language , beyond even all
the fanciful anagrams and nonsense words which occurs in the third voyage when Gulliver visits the Luggnaggians and has to abase himself with ritual gestures and sycophantic phrases learned by rote:”Icking gloffthrobb squuutserumm blhip mlashnalt, zwin, tnodbalkguff slhiohha hu y asht’and then, “Fluft drin yalerich dwuldum prastrad mirplush, which properly signifies, My tongue is in the mouth of my friend’ (Page 207)
It is no accident that when the text finally presents Gulliver as unbalanced the linguistic apparatus also goes awry. Gulliver’s dementia seems obviously.
That’s all what I see things from a language and linguistic point of view about Gulliver’s Travels.
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