Introduction
Two satiric texts, by Jonathan Swift and by Lewis Carroll, display the problem confronted here: the texts are mimetic displays of incomprehension. Jonathan Swift sends his narrator Gulliver on picaresque voyages, among them to Laputa, the flying island of sages. There he remarks that, “since words are only names for things,” the sages carry around bags of things, so that all references are deictic and ostensive. The sages claim this system “would serve as a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations.” The proposal is absurd, and even on its own terms would only “solve” the problem of concrete nouns.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing as Lewis Carroll, sends his protagonist Alice into a topsy-turvy world. There, the character Humpty Dumpty refuses to submit himself at all to the will or voice of any text, demanding to use words arbitrarily. He asks that every text submit to his own will. Language that is utterly isolated is functionally the same as langua...
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