Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  The robots have “positronic” brains. They are conscious, but there is a tension between cybernetic “free will” and programming. That Susan shares her name with the theologian John Calvin, who argued the individual’s fate was predestined by God, does not seem coincidental. Indeed, the final story documents “The Inevitable Conflict.”

  Decades prior, in “Reason,” QT1, nicknamed Cutie, rejects the human explanation for its existence and creates its own religion. The robot determines it was created by the power source of the space station it is on, which it calls Master: “There is no Master but Master, and QT1 is His prophet.” By 2032, such are the advances in robotics that a political candidate is challenged to prove he is human. Finally, the machines become superior. Humanity barely notices.

  Ultimately, for a work written through the years of World War II and the early Cold War, I, Robot offers a remarkably optimistic vision of a peaceful future, of a transition to a postcapitalist, post-statist global economy. Inevitably a product of its time, I, Robot’s future remains largely a man’s world, with Calvin apparently the only successful woman, excepting a brief appearance by Madame Szegeczowska, co-coordinator of the European Region, and the fourth most powerful person in a society where all real power resides in the Machine.

  RAY BRADBURY

  FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953)

  A masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future where literature is on the brink of extinction.

  Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) wrote the first version of Fahrenheit 451, originally called “The Fireman,” in 1949, in nine days, on a rented typewriter in the basement of the library on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), campus. Surrounded by books as he wrote, grabbing them at random for inspiration, Bradbury liked to say that the library had written the story for him. The novel we know as Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953.

  Although he loved movies, the new medium of television was, in Bradbury’s view, a threat both to reading and to conversation, as people spent increasing amounts of time staring at a screen in their living rooms, rather than engaging with others or exploring ideas. He imagined the results after fifty years: giant “televisor” screens on multiple walls, social life replaced by soap opera families, tiny “Seashells” plugged into the ears providing a constant stream of music or chatter, and an increasing rejection of independent, critical thinking accompanying the fear of anyone being different.

  Into this nightmare of bland conformity, Bradbury incorporated his personal dislikes: speed, team sports, and modern art. He never learned to drive, but the citizens of his dystopia are not allowed to travel at less than fifty miles per hour, often crash, and enjoy running down pedestrians. Sports have replaced books as the major part of school curricula, and are prescribed (along with easily available tranquilizers and stimulants) for anyone whose behavior is out of line. Only abstract paintings are on display.

  In a powerful reversal of the norm, firemen start fires rather than putting them out. Their job is to seek out illegal caches of books and burn them. Since the Constitutional meanings of “happiness” and “a free and equal society” have been corrupted to mean that all must be made equal in order to be happy, firemen become the guardians of society.

  Guy Montag is a fireman, delighting in his destructive power until he meets a neighbor, self-described “crazy” teenager Clarisse, who asks him “Are you happy?” He cannot answer and begins to question his life.

  Montag’s boss, Captain Beatty, explains that books are so dangerous to human happiness because not one of them agrees with another. Some are offensive to particular groups, some make you feel unpleasant emotions, some make you dissatisfied with your lot, others force you to ask questions—they are like loaded guns in the wrong hands.

  When he sees a woman refuse to be parted from her books, choosing to burn with them, Montag believes they must be the thing that is lacking in his life. However, as another book lover, the philosopher Faber, tells him: “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radio and televisors, but are not.”

  The city in Fahrenheit 451 is unnamed, but is probably somewhere in California. The shadow of nuclear war hangs over all, yet the citizens are encouraged to believe that only “other people” die that way. But no matter how desperate things are, there is still a ray of hope. Outside the city, living simply in the countryside, former professors, librarians, and others have formed a resistance movement, not owning the banned books, but keeping them alive in their minds. They will pass the memorized texts on to their children by word of mouth, and they to their children, until the time is right for their return.

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1954–55)

  Classic and incredibly detailed fantasy world of Middle-earth; created by a mild-mannered language professor as a hobby, it went on to become the most influential imaginary world ever created.

  The Middle-earth of J. R. R. Tolkien’s (1892–1973) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is probably the best-known and most influential of all the many imaginary worlds of the twentieth century. The books have sold millions of copies in scores of languages, and yet the stories are remarkable for more than sheer numbers. Heroic fantasy existed before Tolkien, of course, but his success brought it into the mass-market. Very few later authors of fantasy have escaped his imprint—even those who have tried very hard to shed it—and many have testified that it was his work that made them writers.

  Tolkien’s commercial and popular success is ironic because he made almost no attempt to achieve it. No one could look less like a professional author. We know, now, that he started to write a version of his personal mythology as early as 1917, but although he rewrote it continually, he made little effort to have it published for twenty years, and then met with no success. The Hobbit (1937) might never have seen publication if a student of Tolkien’s had not mentioned it to an employee of the publisher George Allen and Unwin. When The Hobbit became moderately successful, Stanley Unwin asked him for a sequel. Tolkien started work on it right away, at Christmas 1937, but it was years before the sequel began to be published, in three volumes 1954–55, and by then The Lord of the Rings had ceased to be for children. Unwin expected the work to make a loss, but was prepared to take a chance on it—because the other side of the author’s apparent amateurishness is his originality.

  The Lord of the Rings is not the story of a quest, but of an anti-quest. The hero, the hobbit Frodo Baggins, is not trying to recover some lost object of power, like the Holy Grail, but to destroy forever one that he already has—the One Ring, found accidentally in the course of The Hobbit by his older cousin Bilbo Baggins. If the Dark Lord, Sauron, regains it, his power will become irresistible; if it is destroyed he will crumble—but the only place where the Ring can be destroyed is where it was forged, in the Cracks of Doom in the heart of Sauron’s own country of Mordor. Frodo, with his companion Sam, has to get there on his own. The wars and battles that occupy his other companions, though much more dramatic than Frodo’s stealthy journey, are secondary.

  Tolkien’s hobbits are a race or subspecies of small humans, rarely more than four feet tall, but in almost every other respect—including behavior and mindset—identical to the rustic English people of his own Victorian youth: cheerful, practical, unintellectual, and unadventurous. They live in the Shire, very like Tolkien’s home county of Worcestershire, and take no interest in the wider world of Middle-earth. It is Gandalf the wizard who decides, in The Hobbit, to shake them up by recommend
ing Bilbo as a professional burglar to a company of dwarves, setting off to recover their ancestral treasures from the dragon Smaug.

  The Lord of the Rings opens up far wider perspectives of space and time than The Hobbit, beginning with Gandalf explaining to Frodo what the Ring really is and what must be done to ensure its destruction. But a third and critical invention was there in the earlier work as well—the concept of Middle-earth. It has been rightly said that the hero of The Lord of the Rings is not Frodo, nor Aragorn, nor even Sam Gamgee, but Middle-earth itself. It is Middle-earth with which so many millions of readers have fallen in love. An initial feature of this mystical land is the variety of physical environment that it encompasses: the Misty Mountains, the prairies of the Riddermark, the Great River of Anduin, the Dead Marshes, but most of all, the forests: Mirkwood, the Old Forest, Fangorn Forest, and Lothlórien, all different, all lovingly described.

  Along with physical environments comes a variety of species. Tolkien would have been the first to acknowledge that his Middle-earth was not purely his own creation, but a re-creation, backed by his own unique professional knowledge of the lost world of early Northern fable and myth. From these tales Tolkien drew his cast of elves and dwarves, trolls and dragons, and even orcs and ents—both words that existed in Old English, and which moreover meant nothing (like hobbits) until Tolkien gave them life.

  Tolkien was a Professor, first of English Language at the University of Leeds, then of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, finally moving to the Merton Chair of English Language and Literature, also at Oxford. All his fiction is animated by his awareness of early Northern literatures—primarily, but not exclusively, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon—and even more by his attempt to make sense of what they said, which is often said to be self-contradictory or inadequate. Tolkien never accepted this. He believed instead that old authors and old ideas had simply been misunderstood, badly copied, or gone missing, and if he had to write a story or a poem to explain a problem or fill a gap—as he did with The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, published in 2009 nearly eighty years after it was written—then so be it. It should certainly not be forgotten that, quite apart from his fiction, he was in some areas the most learned man in the world.

  It is this knowledge that gives Middle-earth one more distinctive quality, and that is its sense of great age and complex history. Tolkien’s work made it almost mandatory for fantasy authors after him to include maps of their imaginary worlds, but further to this, at the end of The Lord of the Rings he also gave a hundred pages of history, chronicle, and family tree, with carefully considered alphabets and language-commentaries to boot. No one has had the resources to imitate this. As well as his vast learning, Middle-earth was, in his own mind, at least twenty years old by the time he started writing the trilogy, with already developed Elvish languages, characters, and even poetic traditions—The Lord of the Rings is full of poems, in many modes, mostly now quite unfamiliar. But Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits, as soon as they leave the Shire, recreate the experience of modern readers as they find themselves plunged into a world with a deep sense of history, often of ancient grudge. Bilbo’s dwarf-companions want revenge on Smaug the dragon, the Mines of Moria preserve the memory of the underground wars of orcs and dwarves, elves and dwarves also have old and recent enmities, the very landscape (like the English landscape) is covered with old barrows, ruined castles, memorials of forgotten people—all of them provoking a wish to know more, which is left unsatisfied. This thirst for a greater and deeper understanding of the roaming history that Tolkien created has been a major stimulus for later writers, poets, artists, and even composers.

  One last feature deserves to be considered as an explanation for Tolkien’s extraordinary success, and that is—rather surprisingly, in view of what has just been said—his contemporary relevance. Most of Tolkien’s own life was uneventful. He held one academic post after another for forty years, married the sweetheart of his teenage years, raised four children, and enjoyed popular fame only in retirement. However, his early life was unremittingly sad. His father died when he was four, his mother when he was twelve. Family life was replaced for him by life at school, but many of his school friends were killed during World War i when Tolkien also saw active service at the Somme with the Lancashire Fusiliers, until he fell victim to “trench fever,” a disease probably carried by lice. He rejected scornfully suggestions that the Ring was in some way an allegory of the A-bomb (his work was mostly complete before Hiroshima), but it resonates with the themes of power and dictatorship and the inevitable corruption of good intentions backed by power, which have been such a feature of twentieth-century life. Those who use the Ring become Ring-wraiths, eaten up by their cause and their obedience: a fantastic version of something all too familiar in reality.

  Along with this political suggestion goes unusual emotional depth. The Lord of the Rings includes a victory, but does not end with it. Frodo cannot be cured in Middle-earth, and has to leave for the Undying Lands. Not everyone can follow him. The elves, potentially immortal though they are, will die or dwindle if they stay, and if they leave will lose forever Middle-earth and the trees they love. The tree-herding ents are also doomed to species-extinction. If the dwarves and hobbits survive, it will be marginally and invisibly. Tolkien does death scenes brilliantly, even in the children’s book The Hobbit, but even stronger than his sense of death is his sense of loss, of which death is only a part. One can lose memories as well as people, and the loss even of Gollum is sad: He had a chance to save himself before he died, but failed to take it.

  Yet the counterpart of loss is determination. Tolkien’s work is studded with heroes of very different types: warriors and dragon-slayers like Aragorn and Bard the Bowman or Túrin in The Silmarillion; Beorn the were-bear in The Hobbit; Théoden King charging to death and glory in Lord of the Rings; and, throughout, the hobbits—not very aggressive but plugging gamely and cheerfully along like overburdened soldiers in the trenches. They are heroes, too, both hobbits and soldiers. In all Tolkien’s work, archaic and modern concepts interpenetrate, showing continuity beneath change, something in which he firmly believed. He brought back a whole inheritance of myth and legend in his vast world, and made it work for the present day.

  JUAN RULFO

  PEDRO PÁRAMO (1955)

  In this hugely influential novel, Juan Preciado sets out across Mexico to the spectral town of Comala, where dream and reality, past and present, and the realms of the living and dead, merge and overlap.

  Although Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) authored little more than two slender volumes of fiction in his lifetime—a short novel and a collection of short stories—he remains a towering literary figure to contemporary Latin American and Mexican authors. Rulfo is largely unknown outside of Spanish-speaking countries, though authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges have credited him as being one of the world’s greatest writers. The imaginary world Rulfo created in Pedro Páramo sent shock waves through the literary milieu and, although critics did not initially respond well to his work, Rulfo became a beacon to authors who were eager to engage in a type of writing that was unlike anything that came before.

  Pedro Páramo uses the layering of many alternate and alternating narrative voices, flashbacks and flash-forwards, and jumps around in time. The point of view of the first-person narrator, Juan Preciado, begins us on our journey, which alternates from character to character without warning, moving between first- and third-person narration, and from the living to the dead. It leaves the reader in a permanently perplexed, dreamlike state. Rulfo’s novel transports the reader to the imaginary and poignant wasteland of Comala—a journey that the reader may interpret as a descent into hell (the word itself means griddle, grill, or brazier)—as Juan attempts to carry out his mother’s dying wish for him to find his father. Pedro Páramo (the name means wasteland or barren plain) forces the reader to distinguish between the original narrator’s voice, the whispers of the dead in their crypts, Pedro Páramo’s frequent f
lashbacks to his own childhood and his love for Susana San Juan, Susana’s senseless musings in life and in death, the repeated phrases of Juan Preciado’s dying mother—who lauds the lush beauty of her native city, Comala—and Juan’s present, voiced perceptions of the city as a deserted and burned-out wasteland.

  Described as one of the most haunting works in the Spanish language, Rulfo’s use of time encapsulates a way of life that was and always will be recognizable as Mexican, with its unique cultural presentation of preand postrevolution life. The reader is continually involved in a process of orientation and reorientation with regard to space and time, until a sense of disorientation becomes the standard mode through which Rulfo’s narrative is framed. Rulfo uses the cacophony of narrative voices to portray the community of the crypt, where people are buried nearly on top of each other (especially if they are poor), and demonstrates that the dead seem to be more concerned with the cares of the living (or of the dead when they were living). They attempt to overhear Susana San Juan speaking aloud in the sleep of death in her crypt—as a person of means, she is farther away from the rest of the buried community so that the others have to strain to hear her.

  Rulfo jerks the reader in and out of linear time as he leapfrogs from one narrator to another, from one time period to another (and sometimes within another time period, like Borges’s box within a box within a box), to a flashback or even a flash-forward to the future from the perspective of the past, and always without the slightest notice. Rulfo knows that by keeping the reader disoriented in terms of causality we cannot grow comfortable with any sense of reliability in the novel. Yet the portrayal of many different narrative voices helps to create a simulacrum of the world and society. This simula-crum cannot be anything but a fantastic representation; however, the ghosts of Comala linger in our minds in the same way that a powerful event lingers in consciousness. No reader ever leaves Comala completely behind.