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Gulliver's Secret
From The Gulliver Code
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The Henrion Theory
In 1962, an English professor in Versailles, France, by the name of Pierre Henrion published a booklet called Jonathan Swift Confesses: Gulliver's Secret. In it, Henrion outlined his theory that the names of people, places and things in Gulliver's Travels are coded anagrams of real names, and that Swift himself gave broad hints of this in "A Voyage to Laputa."[1]
Henrion had done some code work for the French Underground in the Second World War, and came to realize that the word machine and other hints offered clues to unravelling Gulliver's secrets.
Henrion first remarked on the unusually common occurrence in the Travels of the phrase, "to make a shift". Secondly, in chapters V and VI of "A Voyage to Laputa", Swift speaks of a machine for the manufacture of words, and of "the anagrammatic method. "[2]
When learning the Laputan language, Gulliver is taught by a person who brings
- pen, ink, and paper, and three or four books, giving me to understand by signs, that he was sent to teach me the language. We sat together four hours, in which time I wrote down a great number of words in columns, with the translations over against them. I likewise made a shift to learn several short sentences.
- For my tutor would order one of my servants to fetch something, to turn about, to make a bow, or walk and the like, to sit, or stand, Then I took down the sentence in writing.
- After he had left me, I placed all my words with their interpretations in alphabetic order.[3]
This passage contains clues relating to Swift's own particular anagrammatic method.
The Word Machine of Lagado
The Lagado word machine, illustrated in some editions of the Travels, is "twenty foot square."[4] When three or four words (note the repetition of "three or four") are found that might make a sentence, they are dictated to scribes.
In the school of languages that Gulliver visits, there is a project to "shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one".[5]
In the second and later editions of the Travels, Swift provides the reader with two simple anagrams (of Britain and England) as a further clue. Gulliver tells a professor in the school of political projectors that
- in the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the natives called Langden...it is first agreed and settled among them what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot: then effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and other papers, and put the owners in chains. These papers are delivered to a set of artists, very dextrous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables and letters.[6]
This is Swift's cryptic description of the process of coding and decoding letters. Now to his satiric purpose, which is primarily political: Gulliver continues:
- For instance, they can decipher a close stool to signify a privy council...When this method fails, they have two others more effective, which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Thus N shall signify a plot, B a regiment of horse, L a fleet at sea. Or secondly by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say in a letter to a friend, Our brother Tom has just got the piles, a man of skill in this art would discover how the same letters which compose that sentence may be analysed into the following words: Resist a plot is brought home - the tour."[7]
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Notes
- ↑ Pierre Henrion, Jonathan Swift Avoue : I : Le Secret De Gulliver / Jonathan Swift Confesses : I : Gulliver's Secret. Published by the Author, Lycée Hoche, Versailles, 1962. I corresponded with Henrion before his death. He was not pleased with my critique of some of his conclusions, particularly my contention that his "(e)" theory was not correct. He never released his projected Volume 2. Perhaps he was sidetracked by his attempts to prove that William Shakespeare had encoded his real name, Francis Bacon, in all the original printings of his sonnets.
- ↑ Gulliver's Travels (ed. Landa), 156.
- ↑ Gulliver's Travels (ed. Landa), 129-30.
- ↑ Gulliver's Travels (ed. Landa), 148.
- ↑ Gulliver's Travels (ed. Landa), 150.
- ↑ Gulliver's Travels (ed. Landa), 155.
- ↑ Gulliver's Travels (ed. Landa), 155-56. La Tour was Bolingroke's home in France.
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