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Mireille Ozoux, Jonathan Swift linguiste : La norme et le jeu

Préface de Jean Viviès. Paris : Honoré Champion Éditeur, Littératures étrangères 37, Série « Littérature anglaise » 8, 2023, 456 p. ISBN : 978-2-7453-6006-9. 73,95 €
Daniel CAREY
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Mireille Ozoux, Jonathan Swift linguiste : La norme et le jeu

Préface de Jean Viviès. Paris : Honoré Champion Éditeur, Littératures étrangères 37, Série « Littérature anglaise » 8, 2023, 456 p. ISBN : 978-2-7453-6006-9. 73,95 €

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1Among the many challenges posed by Jonathan Swift is how to reconcile two very different approaches evident in his work. In some of his writings, he appears variously as moralist, priest, or projector, advocating in his own voice if not always in his own name for positions and schemes regarded by the author as valid and normative. In his most famous satirical works, by contrast, he leaves us with little or no access to a consistent norm and closes down avenues of escape in the comforts of corrective (as opposed to corrosive) satire. Swift’s impulse may come from the same source in both cases, a conservative sensibility agitated by error and idiocy, but the systematic nature of his satirical writings inevitably calls into question the viability of any attachment to stable truths.

2Mireille Ozoux’s study, Jonathan Swift linguiste: La norme et le jeu, tackles this question by placing language at the centre of the discussion. She begins the book with a generous setting of key issues in context, contrasting the ambitions of proponents of universal languages with the approach of John Locke in particular, whose nominalist position disposed of any natural connection between sign and signified while also advocating for rigorous attention to the use of words, most especially in philosophical settings. She then turns to Swift’s “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” (1712). Composed in the form of a letter to the Lord High Treasurer Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (Queen Anne’s Tory chief minister), the Proposal eschews satire in favour of a direct appeal to a sympathetic patron. Ozoux’s final section considers Swift’s satirical take on language matters in Gulliver’s Travels. The argument throughout is presented with great care and insight, offering a valuable account of the tensions, sources, and implications of Swift’s interventions in the domain of language.

3As Ozoux explains, Swift’s “Proposal” (closely related to his shorter piece in Tatler no. 230) shows his commitment to “idées foncièrement conservatrices” (233) and his at times reactionary desire to inhibit language change, regulate the language according to a standard, retain existing orthography (against those who would simplify it), and to achieve both purity and simplicity in linguistic expression (to counteract such corruptions as cant, the use of abbreviations, and neologisms). Dismayed by fashions in speech (promoted by playwrights, poets, and others), Swift upholds Elizabethan English as an ideal, brought to a halt by the evils of the Civil War which ushered in, he says, a raft of “Enthusiastick Jargon” (Swift, “Proposal for Correcting” 138). Some of his complaints have the quality of a crank about them, for example lamenting the existence of excessive monosyllables in English. Latin retains its authority for Swift who regrets that the Roman conquest did not occur in time or in such a way as to bring Britain into the fold of Romance languages. (His contemporary, the Anglo-Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob, dissented on this point. She praised the “Saxon Root, whose Branches were so copious and numerous” [Elstob iv]). Other wellsprings of suitable style exist in the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, so the resources are not exclusively ancient.

4Swift’s most intriguing proposition was to establish an Academy or Society to supervise the English language, clearly inspired by the Académie française and its role in determining correctness and regulating the admission of new words into the national vocabulary (although acknowledging French inspiration was inevitably tricky). Early proposals of this kind had appeared in England, in fact, prior to the creation of the Académie in 1635. But it was at the Restoration that more serious efforts came into play in the Royal Society, which set up a committee for “improving the English language” in 1664, attended by Edmund Waller and John Dryden among others (Birch 499).

5Swift made the invitation to Harley, in effect, to become the Richelieu of England. The goal was to develop a means, in Swift’s words, “for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever” (quoted 237) after necessary refinements had been put in place. This is Swift in the mode of reformer, not dyspeptic satirist, addressing the chief minister with a serious plan to ensure Harley’s fame through heroic intervention to preserve and “fix” (i.e. hold fast) the language. While describing Swift’s views in detail, Ozoux makes good use, among other sources, of Dr Johnson’s entertaining critical remarks on Swift’s project and scepticism about such an Academy as well as the complaints of the Whig exponent John Oldmixon who noted Swift’s far from polite forms of expression elsewhere in his writing. She also observes the difficulty of reconciling Swift’s argument and indeed confidence of success with his hostility elsewhere to institutions and his satirical take on projectors. This tension, coupled with Swift’s evident love of linguistic games, does not terminate in contradiction for Ozoux but rather stems from “une même attitude de résistance face au discours progressiste caractéristique de l’Enlightenment” (271).

6The third section of the study moves on to Gulliver’s Travels and considers how langues and langage figure in Swift’s “protéiforme” book (280). Ozoux suggests in her introduction to the section that the normative ideal revealed in Swift’s 1712 “Proposal” serves as an interpretive “boussole” or compass in order not to lose sight of “le nord/la norme” (278). While there are points of contact––for example in Gulliver’s commentary on the language in the country of the immortal Struldbruggs being constantly in flux, which has the effect that the aging residents can maintain no meaningful conversation after two hundred years with their mortal neighbours––there is too much satirical splintering in Gulliver’s Travels to hold reliably to any north star. Fortunately, she avoids hewing to this somewhat debatable premise and instead steers closer in this chapter to the approach indicated in the book’s final line where she remarks: “l’immense espace de jeu créé par Jonathan Swift insuffle au lecteur l’audace de se distancier de la norme, en lui offrant le bonheur de penser et de lire aux éclats” (415).

7Ozoux remarks that the third voyage constitutes the apogee of language commentary, but one of the virtues of her discussion is how thoroughly she engages with all of Gulliver’s linguistic encounters, from Lilliput and its enemies to Brobdingnag, and the ultimate journey among the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver himself draws attention to his “great Facility in learning Languages” (Swift, Gulliver’s Travels 224) (he has Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and some Greek), a gift that enables him to manage the daunting prospect of starting from scratch with the different peoples he meets along the way. She groups the languages of the Lilliputians and Laputians together as “jargonnantes” (299), with technical legal and astronomical vocabularies, for example, and an inherent opacity. The languages of Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, by contrast, are more straightforward and direct; the Brobdingnagians refuse corruption and preserve “un lien univoque entre le signifiant et le signifié” (301). In the fourth voyage, the Yahoo repertoire of expression is confined to “des gémissements, des grognements ou des hurlements” (356), more disagreeable to the ear than the braying of an ass, while their equine counterparts have a language with prelapsarian purity, establishing an “adéquation parfaite” (343) between language and thought. For Gulliver, meanwhile, the difficulty during that voyage in making himself understood to his noble hosts lies not in a lack of fluency on his part but rather in communicating concepts remote from Houyhnhnm experience, such as power, government, war, law and punishment. At the same time, as Ozoux notes, there is an abiding naivete in Gulliver, with his assiduous vocabulary lists which presuppose an uncomplicated process of language acquisition through mere substitution of words and ostensive definition.

8In the third voyage, Ozoux observes, the great contrast is between the abstract sensibilities of the king and court at Laputa, severed from practical application and contemptuous of Gulliver’s modest attainments in mathematics and music, and the materialist attitude to language upheld in the Academy of Lagado and its school of languages, where the projectors strive to reduce polysyllables to monosyllables and eliminate verbs and particles on the premise that “all things imaginable are but Nouns” (quoted 329). This notion is taken to comical extremes by local sages groaning under the weight of fardels full of things assembled for the purpose of direct communication. According to Gulliver this innovative approach had the additional virtue for its proponents of achieving the goal of a universal language, understandable to all. Reflection might be merited not just on the absurdity of this reductio but on its misconception of how language functions: the supposed stabilisation of meaning through clear reference to the noun in question (produced by rummaging through a prodigious sack) would communicate nothing without syntax and cases, even accepting the commitment to eliminate all forms of abstraction from particular to general.

9In the midst of a wide-ranging account, it’s a pity that Ozoux does not engage with one of the more striking language projects of the Lagado Academy. Gulliver tells us that a team in the “speculative” side of the house has been at work on a device designed to make it possible for anyone to write books of philosophy, poetry, law, and other subjects (Swift, Gulliver’s Travels 183). The PI on the project points to small wooden blocks with individual papers affixed to them with all the words of their language. In a vast frame, assistants crank forty handles, redistributing the words each time. The helpers then read out the several combinations, looking for phrases assembled at random. Many folio volumes of “broken Sentences” had been compiled, in expectation of a “compleat Body of Arts and Sciences” (Swift, Gulliver’s Travels 183) While exploding the concept of authorship, Swift neatly anticipates large language models of AI and their organising algorithms.

  • 1 One possible conduit was Swift’s friend and fellow cleric, the Irish-language scholar and advocate (...)

10The Swift of Ozoux’s book is largely an English Swift, suitably enough given the attention to the “Proposal” made to Harley and his hopes for further preferment. But there would be opportunities to enrich the account with further consideration of the Irish context. Swift’s brief piece “On Barbarous Definitions in Ireland” (probably composed after 1727) ––disagreeable in its attitudes to the Irish language and the Irish accent––contains some important reflections. Swift’s Polite Conversation (1738), on the other hand, steeped in proverbial phrases which raise their own issues of semantics and language change, includes a number derived from Irish sources (Bliss 23-30).1 The word “cant” itself may have an Irish origin.

11Ozoux’s interests lie especially in the area of theory, and one of the distinguishing features of the book is its productive engagement with linguistic authorities like Barbara Cassin and Jean-Jacques Lecercle, the narratology of Gérard Genette, and thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. None of this is overcrowded or overdone, with a deft handling of difficult conceptual material. The emphasis is largely on issues of textuality and arbitrariness of the sign, appropriately enough, supported equally by reference to prior Swift scholars, including critics Ann Cline Kelly, Marilyn Francus, Charles Scruggs, Jeffrey Hopes, Alain Bony, Alexis Tadié, and Jean Viviès.

  • 2 For relevant discussion, see Chloë Houston, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, and Ladan Niayesh, eds, Writi (...)

12Further opportunities exist for an historicist approach, building on Gulliver’s Travels as a text inhabiting the space of the travel book. Gulliver’s proclivity for imitating the speech of the Houyhnhnms after his expulsion from the land of his beloved horses (registered in a neighing accent on board the ship that rescues him and later at home in Redriff) represents a parody of Continental travellers and their inclination either to abandon their native tongue or to return with a lisping rendition of English, as satirists like Thomas More and Samuel Butler pointed out. A different analysis might look at Gulliver’s relationship to language learning of his period (Gallagher). Rarely is he in a position to avail of an interpreter, as so many travellers did at the time (the notable exception for him being in Maldonada where he hires a native of Luggnagg who had lived in Maldonada and could translate Gulliver’s fluent Balnibarian), a situation often elided in travel accounts.2

13This satisfying book makes a valuable contribution, offering a consistently intelligent and engaging tour through a major subject of Swiftian literary practice.

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Bibliographie

BIRCH, Thomas. The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. 1. A. Millar, 1756-57.

BLISS, Alan. “Irish Proverbs in Swift’s Polite Conversation”. Image & Illusion: Anglo-Irish Literature and its Contexts. A Festschrift for Roger McHugh. Ed. Maurice Harmon, Wolfhound Press, 1979.

ELSTOB, Elizabeth. The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue. W. Bowyer, 1715.

GALLAGHER, John. Learning Languages in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Ó NEACHTAIN, Tadhg. “Some Notes on Jonathan Swift and the Irish Language.” Féile Zozimus 1991. Ed. Vivian Uíbh Eachach, Baile Átha Cliath. Gael-Linn, 1992.

SWIFT, Jonathan. “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue”. 1712. Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: Polite Conversation, Directions to Servants and Other Works. Ed. Valerie Rumbold. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

SWIFT, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Paul Turner. Oxford University Press, 1971.

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Notes

1 One possible conduit was Swift’s friend and fellow cleric, the Irish-language scholar and advocate Anthony Raymond. Alan Harrison notes that Raymond was sent a collection of Irish proverbs by the scholar Tadhg Ó Neachtain. “Some Notes on Jonathan Swift and the Irish Language”, Féile Zozimus 1991. Eds. Vivian Uíbh Eachach, Baile Átha Cliath. Dublin,Gael-Linn, 1992, 44.

2 For relevant discussion, see Chloë Houston, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, and Ladan Niayesh, eds, Writing Distant Travels and Linguistic Otherness in Early Modern England (c. 1550–1660), Turnhout: Brepols, 2025; and in an Irish context, Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Daniel CAREY, « Mireille Ozoux, Jonathan Swift linguiste : La norme et le jeu »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/19800 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144qk

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Daniel CAREY

University of Galway

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