格列佛游记

He wakes and cannot move. Countless thin cords bind him head to foot, and several thousand people no taller than his little finger surround him, arrows aimed at his chest. That is how Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship's surgeon, wakes on a beach in the early eighteenth century, having just survived a shipwreck and drifted onto a country he has never heard of. From the first page the book makes you wince for its hero: bigger than an ant, smaller than a giant, every familiar scale thrown off. Read on and you see what the author is really doing: shrinking the world, then blowing it up, until the absurdities we normally can't quite see leap out on their own.

In 1726, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, published a travel narrative anonymously, an account of an English ship's surgeon washed up four times on four fantastical shores. On the surface it is a popular adventure story; underneath, it is one of the foundational works of English prose satire. Swift uses the skin of strange lands and stranger sights to strip bare, one by one, the factional infighting of the English court, the squabbles within the Church, the Royal Society's pet delusions, and the true color of human nature itself. Three centuries on, the book still lands on every must-read list, not because it is kind, but because it refuses to be.

There is only one protagonist: Lemuel Gulliver. A ship's surgeon by trade, practical, curious, sharp-memoried, who likes to observe and record, and likes finding his own superiority inside those observations just as much. The real blade in each of the four voyages is the supporting cast: Lilliput's vain, suspicious emperor; his treasurer Flimnap; the farmer in Brobdingnag who finds him in a wheat field; the farmer's nine-year-old nursemaid Glumdalclitch, who sews his tiny clothes by hand; Brobdingnag's wise but furious king; Lord Munodi, the one clear-headed man left in Balnibarbi, the mainland kingdom under Laputa's flying island; and the rational horse in the land of the Houyhnhnms who takes him in. In every voyage, the people around him work like a mirror, and what it reflects isn't Gulliver's courage but the true measure of the whole civilization he stands in for.

The rule of this world is simple: at every stop, the scale gets twisted. In Lilliput the people stand six inches tall; in Brobdingnag they are twelve times his size; the flying island of Laputa hovers in midair; and in the land of the Houyhnhnms, horses rule outright while human-shaped creatures are kept as livestock called Yahoos. Once the scale warps, familiar politics, familiar scholarship, familiar human nature all get dragged under a harsh spotlight, and what looked respectable rarely survives the glare.

Gulliver starts out as Lilliput's benefactor. He wades out and hauls back the emperor's entire fleet, driving off the old enemy Blefuscu. The little people who trembled while tying him down are now bowing to him. Then two things turn it around. First, he refuses to finish off Blefuscu completely: he holds onto a basic moral instinct, and the emperor's warmth cools instantly. Second, and worse, the queen's chambers catch fire, and with no water at hand, he puts it out the only way he can, on the spot. The palace is saved, but he has just broken the law against relieving oneself anywhere on the palace grounds. Between the two, the treasurer and his faction start building a case against him: treason, with blinding as the sentence.

What's worth dwelling on is the absurd costume Swift puts on this court intrigue. Courtiers split into High-Heels and Low-Heels, a divide that comes down to nothing but shoe heel height; the population splits into Big-Endians and Small-Endians over which end of a boiled egg you're supposed to crack, and they've been at war over it for years. Any reader can see through it: the heels stand in for the Whigs and Tories of Swift's England, and the two ends of the egg stand in for Catholics and Protestants. The sillier the pretext, the realer the bloodshed. This is Swift at his sharpest, using a fairy-tale-grade absurdity to reproduce the actual stink of real politics. I did a double take the first time I read about the war over eggs: isn't that just today's headlines in a different costume?

The second voyage twists the scale the other way: these people are twelve times his size. Gulliver wakes in a wheat field, cupped in a farmer's hand. The start of this leg is anything but gentle: the farmer quickly realizes he's found a walking goldmine, packs him into a small box, and tours him through town after town, charging admission and raking it in. Gulliver is worked nearly to death before the queen finally buys him off the farmer. The one who actually saves him is the farmer's nine-year-old daughter, Glumdalclitch. She sews his tiny clothes, teaches him the local language, and carries him wherever she goes. In the land of giants, she is the only person Gulliver can trust.

The centerpiece is Gulliver's long conversation with the King of Brobdingnag. Angling for credit, he offers up the formula for gunpowder, in his own mind a generous gift to a civilized people. The king doesn't laugh. His face darkens, and he delivers the sharpest line in the book, calling Europeans the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. Through the king, Swift throws Europe's entire history of war, colonization, and weaponry onto the table at once. This is the first time the book's knife turns from the court to civilization itself. The infighting in Lilliput was funny; this isn't.

The third voyage is the book's middle stretch, and the one adaptations most often cut, a loss every time. The flying island of Laputa hovers overhead, its court obsessed with music, mathematics, and astrology, hopeless at anything on the ground, so its mainland territory, Balnibarbi, lies in ruin below. Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado and finds scholars running new-method experiments: extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, turning excrement back into food, weaving cloth from spiders. The labs are a hive of activity; outside them, the fields yield nothing. The only estate actually thriving belongs to Lord Munodi, who refuses the new methods and farms the old way.

This section takes direct aim at the Royal Society. What Swift was warning about three centuries ago still sounds familiar: knowledge cut loose from reality can be exquisitely refined, perfectly self-consistent, and utterly indifferent to human suffering. When research becomes a private amusement, it isn't the scholar who pays for it, it's the taxpayers who fund him. Two more blows land before this leg ends. On the island of Glubbdubdrib, a sorcerer summons the great figures of history to be cross-examined, and the verdict is that most of history is lies. And in Luggnagg, the Struldbrugs are said to live forever, except that immortality here just means aging without end, growing more wretched every year, shunned by everyone around them. Eternal life turns out to be a punishment, not a gift.

On his fourth voyage, the crew mutinies and strands Gulliver on the coast of the land of the Houyhnhnms. Here, a race of horses called Houyhnhnms rule, wholly rational, incapable of deceit, while degraded human-shaped creatures, the Yahoos, are kept as livestock. A Houyhnhnm takes Gulliver in and educates him, and he comes, genuinely, to embrace their order, and in turn to see humanity, the Yahoos, as filthy, contemptible brutes. This is the book's most uncomfortable turn for the reader: you've followed him the whole way, and now you watch him being absorbed by a rationality not his own.

Swift asks a harsh question here: strip away the hats, the robes, the constitutions, the parliaments, and how far is what's left of a human being from those filthy, quarrelsome Yahoos? In the end, the Houyhnhnm assembly banishes Gulliver anyway, on the grounds that he resembles a Yahoo too closely. It's the cruelest cut the book deals him: he believed he'd been accepted into Houyhnhnm reason, and even the horses can see he's still that species underneath. Gulliver leaves heartbroken, not because he can't get home, but because he can't stay in the one world he actually wanted to belong to.

Gulliver returns to England to no embrace, no warm meal, no happily ever after. He can't stand his own family, can't bear his wife's smell, his children's hugs, the ordinary noise of his own species. He spends most of his time in the stable with his two horses, checking, over and over, whether they might have eyes like a Houyhnhnm's. That is where the book ends: misanthropic, isolated, close to breaking, with no comfort offered. That is Swift's whole position: he will not let a satire close on reconciliation, and he means for the reader to carry the discomfort all the way home.

Shrinking the world to six inches, or blowing it up twelvefold: this is Swift's sharpest device. Once a reader accepts the warped scale, power, scholarship, religion, and human nature all get dragged into the light, and the creases we normally never notice show. The four voyages build in a clear structure: the first skewers court factionalism, the second skewers civilization's flattering picture of itself, the third skewers scholarship divorced from human need, and the fourth drives the knife into human nature itself. Darker with every stop, and less willing, each time, to let the reader off.

For a reader today, the book is still an uncomfortable mirror. It offers no answers, only questions it forces on you: how much Yahoo are you willing to admit is in you? Are you willing to consider that the party you vote for, the side you believe in, the field you research, might be no different from arguing over which end of the egg to crack? None of that has been settled in three hundred years, but having the book ask once is better than pretending the question isn't there.

You can get the plot from this guide, but not the experience of reading the original. Swift's prose is one of the high points of eighteenth-century English writing, and that irony, cold clean through, describing on the surface while a blade waits underneath, never survives being retold secondhand. And there are things no summary can give you: the unease of counting Lilliput's five hundred cords for yourself, the moment the king's face falls after Gulliver offers up gunpowder, the shock of recognition walking into the Academy of Lagado, and, at the end, the suffocating loneliness of watching Gulliver crouch in his own stable, staring into his horses' nostrils. Read the book after you know the story, and you're reading a different book entirely. That book, only you can open.