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Gulliver’s Travels seen from the future of 1984

Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1753) has a very fruitful posterity: in Out of the Silent
Planet (1938), for example, C. S. Lewis draws
on the Houyhnhnms as a model for his ideal race – the ‘Hrossa’, whose shape
may be something like a giant otter but whose name means ‘horse’ in Old
Norse. In Oryx and Crake (2003), Margaret Atwood uses a quotation from
the Travels as an epigraph, and alludes (usually indirectly) to that text. She
manifestly shares with Swift an anxiety about human pride, about treacherous
interference with nature, and about short-sighted notions of scientific progress. J. K. Toole uses
with colourful irony, both as a title and as an epigraph for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces
(1980), a quotation from Swift’s Thoughts on various subjects, moral and diverting. G. Orwell
considers Gulliver’s Travels one of the best novels ever written, with a long-lasting influence on
his thought1. These associations with Swift have the role of allowing the mentioned authors to
tap into the satiric energy associated with the Travels.2
In the following lines, we chose to focus on the influence of Swift on Orwell, and to
sketch the parallelism existing between Gulliver’s Travels and 1984 in regards to their approach
to the idea of a reductive language. In his famous novel 1984 (published in 1949), G. Orwell
predicts a future in which
thought can be controlled by an artificial language. The tone of
the Newspeak Appendix is quite clearly satirical, more

1
‘He is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels in particular is a book which seems
impossible to me to grow tired of. I read it first when I was eight – and I have certainly not read it less than a half
dozen times since. Its fascination seems inexhaustible’ (G. Orwell, The Collected Essays, vol. 4, Penguin Books,
1968, p. 257). During his time at BBC, Orwell staged an imaginary interview with this author, among these lines:
‘Since your day something has appeared called totalitarianism/ Swift: A new thing?/ It isn’t strictly new, it’s merely
been made practicable owing to modern weapons and modern methods of communication. You yourself wrote about
it with extraordinary prescience’ (Idem, Lost writings, Morrow and Company, 1985, p. 113-114). Cf. A. Reznikov,
George Orwell’s Theory of language, Writer’s Club Press, NY, p. 2. For further reading, see G. Orwell, ‘Politics vs.
Literature – An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, in Polemic, London, 1946.
2
Cf. A. Marshall, ‘Gulliver, Gulliveriana, and the Problem of Swiftian Satire’, in Bloom’s Critical Interpretations,
H. Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Literary Criticism, p. 121.

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reminiscent of Swift than anything else in the book. Newspeak seems rather
to be presented as the implausible fantasy of an overconfident regime. The novel parodies certain
varieties of political and managerial language,
encouraged by the rulers of Oceania, criticising them on the grounds that –
through jargon, euphemism, prefabrication, dead metaphors, stock phrases
and the like – they dissociate thought and language, turning the speaker into
an unconscious machine that is not expressing thought, and indeed, through
the deadness and the purely symbolic character of his language, is prevented
from thinking. So far
in these processes, Newspeak figures as an élite jargon symbolising privilege
and orthodoxy. But the rulers of the totalitarian society intend Newspeak to
have an even more powerful role. It will not simply cloud the truth on the
occasions when it is used. When, by 2050, it becomes the sole medium
known by members of the Inner and Outer Parties, it will totally shape what
people can say and therefore what they can think.
There is no suggestion that a deliberate organisation of language, like Newspeak,
can produce a diminished, fixed and inescapable world-view in its speakers.
However, the Newspeak proposal, though extreme and certainly
unachievable, is quite closely related to the more plausible claim that
language encourages a certain view of the world; closely enough to produce a
bit of a chill even in readers who see through Newspeak: one has to think
twice, and suppress a gut reaction that there is something plausible about
Newspeak. This reaction is the effect of the deadpan style of the
Newspeak Appendix; the technique resembles the satirical strategy of Swift, whom Orwell, as
said above, much admired.
The reader of Nineteen Eighty-Four can know a good deal about
Newspeak even before encountering the Appendix, through the examples of
its vocabulary which occur in the text and through the enthusiastic
description given in Part 1, Chapter 5 by Syme, a Newspeak expert working
on the Dictionary. Newspeak is a reduced version of English with a small,
carefully controlled vocabulary including a number of invented compound

2
words such as ‘Minitrue’, ‘Minipax’, ‘Newspeak’ itself, ‘doublethink’,
‘unperson’; similar compounds in the novel appear to be Newspeak but in
the Appendix are not: ‘thoughtcrime’ appears in the text but is replaced by
‘crimethink’ in the Appendix. Since the number of words in Newspeak is radically fewer than in
English, anything written in Standard English would be quite impossible to render in Newspeak,
e.g., the Declaration of Independence is impossible to translate in Newspeak. In the language of
the Houyhnhnms, there are also fewer words than in English: ‘power, government, war, law,
punishment, and a thousand other things had no terms wherein that language could express
them’3.
The habit of compounding appears
to be a structural preference of this reductive variety of English.
It is important to grasp that no ‘pure’ example of Newspeak is given in the
text of the novel: this absence is covered by the admission that the language
will not be completed until 2050, no one speaks it and so far it is used solely
for Times editorials. Syme’s account of Newspeak gives an informative succinct account of
Newspeak: he stresses the central principle of reduction of vocabulary, the
production by compounding of systems of related terms based on the same
root – ‘good’, ‘ungood’, ‘plusgood’ and ‘doubleplusgood’ in his example –
and the central function of Newspeak, to control thought:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it.
Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by
exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its
subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten ... the Revolution
will be complete when the language is perfect. 4

Newspeak is intended to replace English as the sole language of Party members, the
complete resource they could draw on for all communicative functions. The
absurdity of carrying out all our discourse in a very restricted language is
palpable. Orwell almost certainly had in mind a famous parallel absurdity in
Gulliver’s Travels. In Chapter 5 of Part 3, Gulliver visits the Academy of

3
J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Barnes and Nobles, 2003, p. 265.
4
G. Orwell, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, New York, 2013, p. 51.

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Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi. The city and its inhabitants are, like
London and the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in a sorry state:

The next Morning after my Arrival he took me in his Chariot to

see the Town, which is about half the Bigness of London; but the
Houses very strangely built, and most of them out of Repair. The
People in the Streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed,
5
and were generally in Rags.

The buildings and agriculture are ruinous because they are awaiting
improved methods of construction and farming to be devised by members of
the Academy (a satirical portrait of the Royal Society). The examples of the
projects of the academicians which are presented to Gulliver are without
exception preposterous and unworkable, such as could be devised only by an
intellectual élite out of touch with commonsense reality (as is also the case with the Party):
extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, building houses from the roof
down, dyeing cobwebs by feeding coloured flies to spiders, etc., etc. Two of
the projects are linguistic:

The first project was to shorten Discourse by cutting

Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles;
because in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.
The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words
whatsoever ... [S]ince Words are only Names for Things, it would
be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things
as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to
discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken
place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the
Women in Conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not
threatened to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the
Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the Manner of their
Forefathers: Such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science
are the common People. However, 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 Things upon his
Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend
him.6

5
J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 196.
6
Ibidem, p. 205.

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The reduction of language in the first scheme has some resemblance to the
‘clipping’ which is pointed out in the style of the ‘hybrid jargon’ of the
Ministry of Truth, and to the merger of parts of speech in Newspeak. The
uselessness of the second scheme has a closer relationship to Newspeak.
Notice that, like Newspeak, this project is framed in a class distinction: only
the ‘most Learned and Wise’, communicate through ‘Things’ carried on the
back, as the Party members are to use Newspeak; the Lagado equivalent of
the proles continue to use their tongues, as the proles retain Oldspeak. It is
implied that the élite academicians, anticipating their Ingsoc descendants,
are far from ‘learned and wise’, they are in fact utterly foolish to employ such
an unworkable system of communication. Now the real inconveniences of
Newspeak, as illuminated by this analogy, are the limitations of a finite
system, and the lack of provision for flexibility of meaning. You can only
carry so many ‘Things’ on your back and in your pockets, and these are
bound to be far less than the topics you will want to talk about: real human
language is infinitely creative and cannot be replaced by a restricted set of
signs. Equally, meanings in natural language are flexible and abstract, quite
unlike the fixity and precision of the academicians’ ‘Things’ or the fixed
concepts of the Newspeak:
It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as
we should call it) by abouy the year 2050. (…) It is with the final, perfected
version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary,
that we are concerned here. The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium
of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought
impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been
adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical
thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of
Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought
is dependent on words. The vocabulary was so constructed as to
give an exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning
that a Party member could properly wish to express, while
excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at
them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention
of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and
Newspeak and the Language of the Party

5
 by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. 7

This kind of plain expository language found in the Appendix is not found anywhere else
in the novel, though it bears some resemblance to the style of ‘the book’ passed by
O’Brien to Winston, though that is much more authoritarian and
argumentative. This style has no affinity to the more excitable and
fragmentary thoughts and speech of the main focaliser Winston, nor to the
demotic rhetoric of Orwell himself, as found in his passionately critical
essays. The Newspeak Appendix could not be written in the familiar
Orwellian voice, for that voice could not refrain from crying that the
Newspeak proposal is cynical self-delusion, humbug, swindle and perversion.
And this is not an official version issuing from the Party, since it is written in
Oldspeak. Orwell seems to have created a viewpoint which is both distinct from
his own persona, and quite outside the world of the fiction. To say that this
is the voice of ‘the narrator’ would be a mistake, for we have seen that there
is no distinguishable narrator in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the novel is
certainly not narrated in the manner in which the Appendix is phrased. The
voice of the Appendix may plausibly be attributed to a new, distinct and
anonymous figure with Gulliver-like characteristics: a traveller, or in modern
terms an anthropologist or a linguist, who studies a foreign society and its
products and reports with apparent objectivity what he sees and hears. Cues
to this role include the pronoun ‘we’ used in the above paragraph. The
first ‘we’ refers to the writer and his readership: Oldspeak is
explained in terms of what it would be called in the ‘home’ culture, somewhat
as Gulliver makes Lagado more comprehensible by comparing it to London.
This is a minimal cue, but ‘we’ is a demanding word, encouraging the reader
to participate by preferring Newspeak to the English of the ‘real’ culture.
The second ‘we’ has a different meaning: it is
the impersonal ‘we’ of science, suppressing an ‘I’ which might seem to flag
personal intervention inappropriately.
There is no ‘I’ in the text; contrast the writings in the mode of Orwell’s

7
1984, p. 254.

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persona, which use it liberally. The ‘objective’ style of science or factual reporting is also
suggested, unobtrusively, by a high proportion of passive verbs and by some nominal
forms replacing full verbs; both move personal involvement into the
background: ‘had been devised’, ‘were written’, ‘be carried out’, ‘embodied’,
‘to be suppressed’, etc.. Orwell follows Swift, then, in using a non-judgmental, matter-of-fact
style to report a project which to him was not only absurd (displayed in
Newspeak ‘examples’ which are so self-evidently barbarous, fatuous and
trivial that illustration is hardly necessary), but worse, philosophically and
morally ill-grounded.
It is characteristic of Orwell’s fundamental traditionalism and
romanticism that, in the Newspeak Appendix, he lets literature have the last
laugh on Newspeak. The natural creativity and the semantic openness, richness and suggestivity
of a real language like English are exploited to the
full in literary texts. These properties, as we have seen, are quite alien to
Newspeak (and to Swift’s Academy of Lagado), whose basic drive is towards closure and
explicitness8.
Ultimately, the abolition of the poetry of language supresses any sense of history. The
academicians of Lagado already know everything worth knowing as their society knows no
development and is stuck in place and time: for that reason they really neither need nor have a
history because there is nothing to pass over to new generations. Their limited number of words
serves their limited worldview. This is similar to the society in 1984: although technically there
is writing and history, in fact there is no history in the direct sense of the word as the objective
record of historic events.9 It is truly a Lilliputian world, one without a past or a future.

8
Cf. R. Fowler, ‘Newspeak and the Language of the Party’, in George Orwell’s 1984, H. Bloom (ed.), Chelsea
Publishing House, 2007, p. 93-108.
9
Cf. A. Reznikov, George Orwell’s Theory of language, p. 4-5.