What The Wrinkle Made Wise

SPOILER ALERT:
Plot details for A Wrinkle In Time follow.

"God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise."


A Wrinkle In Time is a book that should not work. It breaks with all the convention and follows none of the rules. The plot leaps from planet to planet, it's characters aren't very well fleshed out, and so much reasoning is left obscure. In the hands of any lesser writer, it'd be remembered as a strange fluke, if remembered at all, but in the hands of Madeleine L'Engle, it rises to the level of high fantasy.

The plot is about Meg Murry, a girl whose father, a scientist, has vanished. She now lives with her mother, also a scientist, her two twin brothers, and her genius younger brother, Charles Wallace. Meg is gifted, it is assumed, but does poorly in school and often gets into fights. So one can only imagine how intimidating the intellect of Charles Wallace who speaks like a Reginald Jeeves all too confident in his Jeopardy! skills. One night, her house is invaded by three witches, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit, who guide her on a mission to her rescue her father. These three wise women are each distinctly different. Mrs. Whatsit can transform into a silver centaur with rainbow wings. The bespectacled Mrs. Who says everything in literary quotes. Mrs. Which is the wisest of the three, who slurs her speech and has trouble materializing. They journey for their father by means of inter-dimensional travel, a concept well known is fiction today, but probably novel for the children in the 1960s. The idea is that there are five dimensions, the first a line, the second a square, the third a cube, the fourth time, and the fifth the tesseract. Much of the plot has the characters "tesser" between the planets. Readers feel as though they tesser through the pages.

In literature, prose is everything, and it is through prose alone that L'Engle is able to make a lackluster book read like a great one. She is confident, clear, and correct. Few words are wasted, and fewer are misplaced. Every sentence is laced with humor and honesty. Obvious to the child. Resonant to the adult. There are many choice passages to choose from, but I'll select one that occurs early on in book. It isn't one of the fantastical landscapes that we see later, but a description of the kitchen. The poetry in this description is that it is colored with atmosphere. We not only see the kitchen in our minds, but we feel it as well, "The warmth and light of the kitchen had relaxed her so that her attic fears were gone. The cocoa steamed flagrantly in the saucepan; geraniums bloomed on the windowsills and there was a bouquet of tiny yellow chrysanthemums in the center of the table. The curtains, red, with a blue-and-green geometrical pattern, were drawn, and seemed to reflect their cheerfulness throughout the room. The furnace purred like a great, sleepy animal; the lights glowed with steady radiance; outside, alone in the dark, the wind still battered against the house, but the angry power that has frightened Meg while she was alone in the attic was subdued by the familiar comfort of the kitchen. Underneath Mrs. Murry's chair Fortinbras let out a contented sigh" (11).

The various planets introduced on their journey are interesting, but not absorbing. When contrasted with other children's books that take us to strange places, like Alice In Wonderland, The Wizard Of Oz, or The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle In Time feels abridged. It lacks both the variation and the depth to leave the reader with enough of an impression. That being said, there are certainly moments of charm and wonder from some of the characters and the scenes they share. The first such instance is that of the Happy Medium, a woman dressed in Oriental garments who shows them the Earth through her crystal ball, they view the darkness choking their world, but the beauty of the pale blue dot, "Stars, comets, planets flashed across the sky, and then the earth came into view again, the darkened earth, closer, closer, till it filled the globe, and they had somehow gone through the darkness until the soft white of clouds and the gentle outline of continents shone clearly" (91). Another such instance is when they encounter the tentacle creature, Aunt Beast. Aunt Beast has no eyes to see with, so communication with her race is trying. They know nothing of sight, but everything of sensation, when it is cool, they know it is time to rest, and when it is warm, they know it is time to rise. A moving and imaginative scene occurs when Aunt Beast, who probably has no tongue, sings to Meg, "It was a music more tangible than form or sight. It had essence and structure. It supported Meg more firmly than the arms of Aunt Beast. It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words darkness and light had no meaning, and only this melody was real" (178). Such precious moments, but all too sparse. As much of the story is all over the place, as critic Michael Dirda wrote, "Artistically, the book is a mess; it's illogical, derivative and confusing, with a rushed and unconvincing ending. In 200 higgledy-piggledy pages, L'Engle throws together magic, folklore, science-fiction, dystopian nightmare, Christian religiosity, 1950's fears about communism, classic notions about individuality and conformity, mystical transcendence, some slapstick humor and a lot of sentimental pablum. One starts to look for the kitchen sink," (The Washington Post).

The most iconic, and my least favorite planet is the dystopian one of Camazotz. Everyone remembers the suburb where the kids come out with their basketballs and bounce them all at the exact same time. All are made to conform to the exact same image, "Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers" (99). The authorities behind the rule Camazotz are the intimating visage of a Man In Black with red glowing eyes, and the ridiculous one IT, a giant brain. IT communicates telepathically and can easily bring free-thinking minds to servitude through sheer force of will. While L'Engle's dark vision was undoubtedly a resonant parallel for Soviet Russia, it feels very much out of step with the more imaginative worlds seen thus far. It were as though the climax of The NeverEnding Story or The Chronicles of Narnia took place in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. A distracting and limiting detour. The dystopia itself is rather bland when compared to the far more visceral societies composed in The Hunger Games and The Giver. Fearsome it may be, but enlightening it is not. The best that can be said of this sequence its celebration of the individual. Meg succeeds in saving Charles Wallace not by any deus ex machina from the three witches, or even a supernatural ability, but out of her own capacity to love. It would've felt more satisfying had Meg and Charles a deeper relationship until that point, but it works for what it is. Meg has since been solidified as a protagonist who brought female audiences into the literary world of science-fiction, as Leonard Marcus, who wrote L'Engle's biography Searching For Madeleine, said, "Part of what made it seem so liberating to so many girls is that it allowed those with an analytic mind and an interest in the pursuit of science to read about a subject that at the time was not perceived of as a suitable course of study for girls," (Paul).

A Wrinkle In Time is at its center a Christian story about love, but it also implies that love is not exclusive to Christianity, as Christ is listed alongside The Buddha, Gandhi, and Schweitzer as exemplars of love who fight against the Dark Thing that threatens to suffocate the Earth. Yet the fighters also listed include artists like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Beethoven, as well as the scientists, Madame Curie, Einstein, and Copernicus. L'Engle clearly values knowledge and art alongside love, as all of these traits exemplify the highest traits of human character. Whereas totalitarianism degrades it. She erases the boundary between Mythos and Logos, arguing that the same language we use to understand nature can also be used to understand one another. Love is treasured as the highest of human features. Christ is only important insofar that he is its greatest exemplar, yet neither he nor his followers are love's sole inheritors. It is a love that can be expressed by any man, woman, or child, even the oddball Meg Murry.

It is a love that L'Engle sought her entire life, but struggled to find. Her husband had affairs, her father died of alcoholism, as did one of her children, and many of her other children and grandchildren resented her incorporation of their lives into her fiction. As for L'Engle, there was little difference between reality and fiction, indeed when by asked by The New Yorker to define "science-fiction", she said, "Isn't everything?" (Zarin). So she found that love, not with her family, but with fiction, as Cara Parks of The New Republic wrote, "Her desperate search for that idealized home eluded her in childhood and again as an adult, but eventually she did succeed; in the pages of A Wrinkle In Time, Meg welcomes readers to the land of understanding--an imperfect and beautifully human sanctuary from the ravages of adulthood," ("Ironing Out the Wrinkles--The Complexities of Madeleine L'Engle.") She may have been foolish to blur the lines of science and religion, reality and dream, but in her foolishness, perhaps, there lied wisdom.

Tesser well.



Bibliography

Dirda, Michael. "'A Wrinkle in Time': Let's hope the movie is better than the book." The Washington Post, February 27, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-wrinkle-in-time-lets-hope-the-movie-is-better-than-the-book/2018/02/27/48e1a260-1b19-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html?utm_term=.df034a9f147f

L'Engle, Madeliene. A Wrinkle In Time. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York. 1962. 11, 91, 99, 178. Print.


Parks, Cara. "Ironing Out the Wrinkles--The Complexities of Madeleine L'Engle." The New Republic, November 27, 2012. Web. https://newrepublic.com/article/110453/wrinkle-in-time-complexities-madeline-lengle-leonard-marcus

Paul, Pamela. 'A Wrinkle in Time' and Its Sci-Fi Heroine." The New York Times, January 27, 2012. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/a-wrinkle-in-time-and-its-sci-fi-heroine.html

Zarin, Cynthia. "The Storyteller." The New Yorker, April 12, 2004. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/12/the-storyteller-cynthia-zarin



Fantasy and Science Fiction

"Dinotopia Exists."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2016/07/dinotopia-exists.html

"The Meaning Of Paolini."
http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-meaning-of-paolini.html