Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  Nineteen Eighty-Four centers on a triangular relationship between protagonist Winston Smith, his lover Julia, and O’Brien, an older male official of the ruling elite. The story is set in a near-future dystopia—although now in our past—where the major characters compete for our attention with the world of the story and its embedded satirical targets. Perhaps unfairly to Nineteen Eighty-Four as novel, it is the world of Orwell’s imagined 1984 that has determined Nineteen Eighty-Four’s continuing influence, and made “Orwellian” part of English political vocabulary.

  The central setting is “London, chief city of Airstrip One,” a province of the superpower Oceania (comprising North and South America, the United Kingdom, southern Africa, and Australasia). What was once the United Kingdom is now simply the airstrip nearest to Oceania’s two, alternately opposing and allied, superstates of Eurasia and Eastasia. Eurasia encompasses the rest of Europe and Russia, while the boundaries of Eastasia are less defined but include modern-day China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Orwell’s fictional divisions are a reflection of actual and forecast geopolitical alignments after World War II.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four is set against the backdrop of a global nuclear and civil war that raged during the 1950s. London is barely rebuilt and is still regularly hit by “rocket bombs.” Most people outside the ruling ministries are dirty, poor, and malnourished. Oceanian society is divided into a broad-based, three-tiered pyramid, with the Party Leader, Big Brother, at the apex (although it is not known if Big Brother is dead, or even existed). Around six million members of the Inner Party (known as “the brain of the State” and accounting for fewer than two percent of the population) are just below him, and below them the Outer Party (comprised of minor functionaries such as Smith). Below that come “the dumb masses… ‘the proles,’” about eighty-five percent of the population.

  Smith meets Julia at his workplace—the Ministry of Truth (a perversely named institution designed to edit and revise all existent texts to appear in support of the ruling Party)—and, on realizing their shared rejection of Big Brother, they begin an affair. Together they make contact with O’Brien in an effort to join the “Brotherhood” in resistance against the Party. Smith and Julia are eventually arrested by the Thought Police, the Party’s security services, and taken to the Ministry of Love—a place of torture designed specifically to destroy independent human and humane relationships.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four largely plays out in small, cramped spaces: Smith’s squalid apartment, ministry offices, and the tiny room over a shop in a “prole” neighborhood where Winston and Julia carry on their love affair. These confined environs are later echoed in the cells and interrogation rooms of the Ministry of Love, and climax in “Room 101” (the ultimate torture chamber containing a prisoner’s own worst nightmare, fear, or phobia). The pervading claustrophobia is only briefly punctuated by a countryside scene in which Winston and Julia make love for the first time and Winston’s dreams glimpses of the “Golden Country” of his past.

  Winston and Julia’s room over the shop, with its apparently safe enclosure and love-bed, is also evocative of the past world surviving, tenuously, among the proles: a world of private loyalties, emotionally charged sexuality, and simple decency. The room contains an old paperweight—“a little chunk of history” the Party overlooked, a “message from a hundred years ago”—a richly symbolic and fragile object that elegantly speaks volumes when contrasted with the massive pyramids of the Ministries. Lying in the bed with Julia in their room, Winston observes: “The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.” On another occasion, Winston thinks that a dream he has just had “occurred inside the glass paperweight,” that its essence was in “a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film [an event recorded at the beginning of his diary], trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopters blew them both to pieces.”

  It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—“child hero” was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

  The fragile paperweight correlates with Winston and Julia’s love, apparently safe enclosure, and with the world of the past; the pyramids correlate with hierarchy, bureaucracy on a monumental scale, and crushing totalitarian power. Centrally, the paperweight correlates with a past in which people could be “governed by private loyalties” and value “individual relationships,” a world where “a completely helpless gesture, an embrace… could have value in itself.”

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are all total-itarian states related to one another in cynical alliance or through hatred and warfare (although Julia is astute enough—more astute than Winston—to speculate that the war itself may be phony, with Oceania bombing its own people). The only hope in the novel is the faint one of the proles’ remaining human, and Winston and Julia’s time of love and loyalty, a “helpless gesture,” perhaps, but one with value.

  Orwell’s aim with Nineteen Eighty-Four was to highlight the totalitarian horrors of the first half of the twentieth century and thereby help to avoid their repetition. And he has arguably achieved his aim, as evidenced by the fact that so many of the ideas within the novel—“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” “doublethink,” “thoughtcrime,” “reality control”—have entered into common usage and remain as a warning.

  C. S. LEWIS

  THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA (1950–56)

  “Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!” C. S. Lewis’s enchanted realm beyond the wardrobe and its cast of magical inhabitants have captivated readers of all ages for decades.

  Born to a middle-class Anglo-Irish family in Belfast, Clive Staples Lewis (known to his friends and family as Jack), described himself as “a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” His mother died when he was nine and, although he remained close to his older brother Warren for the rest of his life, his relationship with his father was difficult. With Warren, he invented an imaginary realm the boys called Boxen, populated by animals who wore clothes and discussed politics, transport, and industry. Lewis himself dismissed it as “almost astonishingly prosaic.”

  The works of Beatrix Potter and E. Nesbit made the most powerful impressions on him as a small boy, and the narration and sibling relationships of the Chronicles show how strongly Nesbit shaped his notion of what children’s fiction should be. The irony and relatively sophisticated social comedy that both Nesbit and Lewis employ (for example, in the diary of the awful Eustace Scrub in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952) derive from the nineteenth-century British novel—Austen and Trollope—the sort of books Lewis loved.

  The critic William Empson called Lewis “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” This was chiefly because he read for pleasure. Although he could be narrow-minded and intolerant, Lewis’s literary criticism (rather unjustly overshadowed by his popular theological writings) shows him to be a magnanimous and sympathetic reader, always willing to meet an author halfway and forever mounting defenses for Latin allegorists that no one else bothered even to know about, let alone read. (He drew the line, however, at modernism, an aesthetic movement that the conservative Lewis regarded with knee-jerk hostility.) When his oldest friend reproached him for writing letters entirely about books, Lewis replied, “I leave to others all the sordid and uninteresting worries about so-called practical life, and share with you those joys and experiences which make that life desirable… but seriously, what can you have been thinking
about when you said “only” books, music, etc., just as if these weren’t the real things!”

  The medieval literature Lewis loved and that underpinned his own work was essentially syncretic—a fusion of pagan, folkloric, and Christian elements. It’s a deliberately patchwork aesthetic that seeks to collect and harmonize rather than to unify and homogenize, on the principle that all the things of this world testify to the infinitely varied goodness of God. So, likewise, the talking animals, Northern European dwarves, classical fauns, and Arthurian knights of Narnia all happily coexist under the banner of the lion god, Aslan. The underlying thinking is platonic—or, rather, neoplatonic: All these seemingly incompatible elements are not lies that contradict the truth and each other, but rather the many shadows that human beings have invented to conjure the one great reality we can never encounter directly in this life.

  The closest model for Narnia is the Faerie Land of Edmund Spenser (see here), the sixteenth-century English poet whose work was Lewis’s academic specialty. Like Faerie Land, and the Celtic notion of the underground kingdom of the Tuatha Dé Danann (which Lewis heard about as a boy from his Irish nurse), Narnia is a separate world that nevertheless intersects with our world at certain places and times, permitting the traffic of people between the two. The four Pevensie children enter Narnia through an enchanted wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, to find the land suffering under the tyrannous reign of the White Witch, who has cursed it to be “always winter and never Christmas.” The siblings are enlisted by Aslan to defeat the witch, but first the lion god must sacrifice his own life to pay for the treachery of Edmund Pevensie, then be triumphantly resurrected.

  In each of the other six Chronicles (with the exception of A Horse and His Boy), children from our world are brought over to save Narnia or Narnians. Yet, notably, surprisingly little of the action takes place in Narnia itself and, when it does, it is a Narnia gone wrong: frozen by the White Witch; its magical nature suppressed by the Telemarines in Prince Caspian; or sliding into corruption in the final Chronicle, The Last Battle. The quint-essential Narnia—best captured in the fireside tales of Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—is almost always seen from a distance, either in space or time, or else savored in brief snatches before the children are back to this world. This ideal Narnia is a never-ending round of pastoral revelry:

  … he told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure seeking with the wild red Dwarves in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor: and then about summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.

  So powerful is the Arcadian resonance in these books, that most readers—including the series’ most famous illustrator, Pauline Baynes—persist in seeing Narnia as a landscape of rolling hills and meadows with the occasional picturesque stand of trees. Lewis, however, described it as largely forested. Its population consists of talking beasts, larger and visibly more intelligent than ordinary “dumb” beasts and treated by all good Narnians as free, sentient beings. Other Narnians include fauns, satyrs, dwarves (who come in “red” and “black” varieties), dryads and naiads (tree and water spirits), centaurs, and assorted mythical creatures, ranging from minotaurs to werewolves. The magical population concurs that while Narnia is “not men’s country,” it nevertheless ought to be ruled by a small elite of human beings in obedience to a decree made by Aslan at the dawn of the world (The Magician’s Nephew, 1951).

  Narnia is bordered on the west and north by rugged and sparsely inhabited mountains, and its marshy northern borders are occasionally harried by hostile, man-eating giants. To the south lies Archenland, a friendly nation populated by a feudal human society. A harsh desert separates Archenland from the vaguely Turkic empire of Calormen, whose dark-skinned and be-turbaned rulers frequently entertain imperial designs on the “Northern barbarians.” The Calormenes own slaves, worship a frightening, multi-armed, and bird-headed god called Tash, and are described in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as “a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel, and ancient people.” Some Lewis proponents have maintained that this depiction is not “racist” but merely a thoughtless borrowing of hoary Western literary devices concerning the East. Whether there’s a substantive distinction between these two prejudices is debatable.

  To the east of Narnia lies the Great Eastern Ocean, speckled with the allegorical islands visited in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—the most medieval of the Chronicles and many readers’ favorite. Because Narnia’s world is flat, the furthest reaches of the Great Eastern Ocean abut on a wall of flowing water, beyond which is Aslan’s country, home to the souls of the virtuous dead. Far beneath the surface of Narnia lies the land of Bism, whose gnome inhabitants live happily on the banks of a river of fire and pick diamonds like fruit to squeeze for their juice.

  The marginal detail work on Narnia is pretty cursory; it’s like an old-fashioned movie set, the facades just convincing enough to serve as a setting for the narrative at hand. Even Narnia itself is scantily shaded-in. Narnia has no major cities—just two castles and a briefly mentioned market town, Chippingford. Despite the absence of any industry or agriculture to speak of, the inhabitants have somehow obtained such commodities as a sewing machine, orange marmalade, tea, and a seemingly endless supply of sausages and bacon.

  Does this incongruity matter? Not to millions of young readers, that’s for sure. Children, as a general rule, don’t even detect the religious symbolism that many adults find so glaring in the Chronicles. We seldom notice the flaws in the object of our desire, and that is what Narnia is—a shimmering, delicious mirage, just out of reach. Within its elusive borders is collected every wonder that ever delighted Lewis in the thousands of books he read, every adventure he longed for, every brave prince and doughty badger, every enchanted pool and misted mountain, every mermaid and leafy-haired dryad, every spired castle and green hill. It would be a motley collection indeed if it were not unified by the intensity of his desire, which, because it is effectively a child’s yearning, mysteriously preserved in the mind of a formidably well-read, middle-aged man, communicates most immediately to child readers.

  That doesn’t, however, make it merely childish. The desire to bring all of life’s joys together in celebration is an impulse that even those who can’t subscribe to Lewis’s faith can nevertheless still understand and share. In the case of Narnia, it isn’t the elaboration of the backdrop that casts the spell, that makes the place seem real in spite of its many absurdities, but the inexhaustible delight of the dancers who inhabit it, as well as the man who made it.

  ISAAC ASIMOV

  I, ROBOT (1950)

  As the science of robotics advances to an inevitable conclusion, the nine short stories of Asimov’s I, Robot chronicle a remarkably prescient future history from 1998 to 2052.

  Through nine stories originally published in the magazines Astounding Science Fiction and Super Science Stories between 1940 and 1950, the Russian-born American master of science fiction Isaac Asimov developed his vision of the future, our present, which now appears simultaneously naive and extraordinarily prescient. His foresight stems from an extraordinary imagination coupled to genuine facility for real science; he obtained a PhD in biochemistry in 1948 and joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine.

  The stories were published together in 1950 as I, Robot and together they present a future world of wonders, in which humanity is spread across the solar system: from flying cars, to mining operations on Mercury, to a network of interplanetary solar-power relay stations, and on to Hyper Base, where an experimental new warp drive will power a spaceship to the stars. The one un
ifying element to all these marvels is robots, specifically those designed by the monolithic corporation, U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc.

  Lawrence Robertson founded U.S. Robots in 1982, the same year in which Dr. Susan Calvin, the scientist who eventually becomes the company’s head robot psychologist, is born. Calvin does not appear in every story, but when Asimov “fixed up” his individual tales into a novel he devised a framing device in which the doctor, now seventy-five, is interviewed by a young journalist on the occasion of her retirement, offering the chance to reflect on her life and the intertwined history of robotics.

  A handful of other characters recur through the stories—notably the troubleshooting robotics engineers Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan—but more consistent than any one character is the process of continual change realized by rapid technological progress. In the first story, set in 1998, Robbie is a humanoid metal machine who cannot speak, who serves as a companion to a little girl, Gloria. By “Runaround,” set seventeen years later, talking robots are engaged in complex mining activities on Mercury.

  It is with this story that Asimov made his most inspired and enduring contribution to popular culture, codifying the “Three Laws of Robotics” as an essential protocol to govern the increasingly sophisticated behavior of robots and with the aim of ensuring that human safety remained paramount. Rules in place, the stories unfold as logic puzzles, with either Powell, Donovan, or, later, Calvin, required to resolve a situation arising from a robot interpreting the Laws in an unanticipated way, often with dangerous consequences.