A Wrinkle in Time

This is my second time through A Wrinkle in Time. Although it is considered one of the "most memorable books from our childhood" by Anna Quindlen in the Appreciation, I didn't really have any memories the first time through it in grade 3(ish), nor was it a childhood fantasy novel that made a big impression on me. I think I enjoyed our class discussion of the theoretical considerations moreso than I did the actual book. That aside, I have a few thoughts to offer.

Narration:
To be honest, I was constantly annoyed at the narration and implausability of events. On one the one hand, I enjoyed the inclusion of time travel and the tesseract and what these concepts had to offer in relation to subverting the greatest sources of conformity. On the other hand, I thought the novel was actually written by a teenage girl. The perspective made the relations seem very self-centered and like the implausible fantasies of a teenage girl who needs to be the hero of her own life, find the perfect guy who likes her, and set herself apart from the rest of humanity because no one 'understands' her. For example, the family never questions Mrs Whatsit's visit (other than about the tesseract - but really, she takes off her boots and then leaves almost immediately, and that she knows whose house and what food they have in it - creepy). The way Calvin meets Meg and immediately tells details about himself that he's never shared before and becomes Meg's protector fits directly into a self fantasy of Meg. All of Meg's interactions with adults, boys, and her family are overly personal and way too dramatic. Anyways... my opinion aside, perhaps this perspective has purposeful intentions of drawing attention to the striving of humanity for social conformity (as the teenage years can be considered fundamental in establishing identity and personal understanding of oneself in the world).

Senses:
Throughout the novel, there seemed to be a heavy emphasis on the senses: sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell, as well as kinesthetic and "sixth" senses. Meg's description of the loss of senses demonstrates how important they really are: "She was alone in a fragment of nothingness. No light, no sound, no feeling" (65)

• Sight - While there is a constant tension between seeing and what cannot be seen, most of the characters depend on sight to see the "darkness" (the good and bad), to navigate, and to have the ability to get in/escape the prison. It is through sight that IT is able to penetrate and take over the mind of Charles Wallace (134).
  
• Touch - The tactile sense seems particularly important from the perspective of narrator Meg. She comments, "Then she felt her limbs again. Her legs and arms were tingling faintly...Is was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void" (65).
• Hearing - As important as hearing is when present, the absence of hearing draws fear and panic from Meg: "It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel" (65).
  
• Taste - Hunger and eating is abundant in the novel. There seems to be an emphasis on the physical needs of humanity. Calvin provides a good example when he eats "five bowls of stew, three saucers of Jello, and a dozen cookies" (52). The lack of taste presents a problem later on as well (141).
• Smell - Smell is mentioned repeatedly and may be a form of orienting Meg or reassuring her other senses. For example, she describes the sunlit field, saying, "...the air about them was moving with the delicious fragrance that comes only on the rarest of spring days when the sun's touch is gentle and the apple blossoms are just beginning to unfold" (67).
• Kinesthetic/Vestibulation - Meg's sense of bodily movement/awareness of the various parts of her body demonstrates a reliance on this sense, as well as her sense of gravity and position of her body relative to space and gravity. For example, she describes, "This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon" (65).
• Sixth senses - Calvin, Charles Wallace, and IT all make use of sixth senses. It could also be argued that Meg's sense of intuition could fall into this category.

I think the use of this constant reliance on senses could be considered a trope for our reliance on reason and rationality. On the other hand, when Meg is "alone in a fragment of nothingness" we find she still exists in the mind apart from her senses. Thus, an argument could be made for the existence of the mind and the being of consciousness. There is more than what can be felt, heard, tasted, seen, and that being is the essence of humanity through conscious experience...beyond reason and rationality.

Never Let Me Go 2

Souls:
I enjoyed the cloning for/against discussion that we had in class. I think it brought up two important questions: do clones have souls, and what is human? There are several dictionary definitions of what 'soul' means: a) the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life, b) the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe; c) the moral and emotional nature of human beings (1). In the strict sense of the word, the characters in the novel obviously demonstrate emotionality and human-ness in the way they act and think. I also found an interesting review on the topic, which made a valuable comment saying, "Certainly in the Western tradition religion has pretty much accepted, even required, the existence of a 'soul,' though its precise nature or function remains often marvelously, even elegantly, ambiguous" (2). It seems to me that Ishiguro does not try to make an outwardly convincing argument that clones have souls; instead, he slowly weaves the reader into the very essence of the characters in the novel. He subtly and subconsciously demonstrates that they do have souls by showing and involving the reader. The fact that the novel does not contain violence or any challenge to this world that has created a "socially organized and approved system of murder" (2) is all the more alarming to the reader.

Sources:
1)Merriam Webster Online Dictionary - http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/soul
2)Marvin Mirsky Review - http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v049/49.4mirsky.html

Dystopian Literature:
I have encountered Dystopian novels before without being introduced to the concept itself, so when the topic of Dystopian literature was brought up in class, the first novel that came to mind was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Never Let Me Go and The Road are similar in that the narration makes the book very "real" and involves the reader. Whereas Never Let Me Go seems to be contained in proper English and a typical or accepted form of grammatical structure, perhaps as a reflection of the containment of the clones and theme of socially accepted norms, The Road has a loss of punctuation that reflects that all that exists is the mind as there is nothing else left.

"Special":
The way that none of the characters challenged or questioned the way things were bothered me (as seen in my other post). What interests me is the way the students are told "they are special" over and over. Is this the downfall of humanity? In order to brainwash them all they need to do is to give them a sense of belonging, of reason, of purpose for their lives. This tie is strong enough to suppress individuality, imprison them in their predestined life, and prevent them from questioning. Is this really a fundamental quality of humans? - of the humans that created these clones and are given meaning in their superiority/importance of existence, of humans in real life (think of gangs and cults, or even social groupings in schools or society's hierarchies). Anyways, I digress...

Quote

--“Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization.” Tagore--

Never Let Me Go

--"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day." Albert Einstein--

Reading Never Let Me Go brought me back to the first day of class when we discussed social norms and somehow started listing things that would break social norms, such as showing up to class naked, singing on the desks, or reversing the roles of teacher and students. It was very strange to read from the perspective of growing up with knowledge of the outside world, but never questioning the boundary that contains the Hailsham students. These children are raised to be intelligent and somewhat normal children, but are raised in such a way that even after they leave Hailsham, they never try to escape or make a life different from what they've been 'programmed' to be. In fact, they seem to be stuck in an immature perspective of the functioning of the world (even as grown adults, they think as immature children). This begs the question of whether they ever really have freedom of choice. I obviously stand as an outsider (outside the novel) on the side that thinks raising people for their organs is an unjustifiable practice. And I was very frustrated as I read the novel, as I continuously hoped for just one of the characters to question, or just one of the characters to break out of the assumptions of their world. They even have a method of escape - access to vehicles - and how would anyone be able to tell between a 'normal' human and a 'clone'?

More importantly, the novel brought me back to the question of whether a freak is born or made. On the surface, the clones can be considered as the freaks. True, they are born different, because they are clones destined to be used as organ donors. Yet they are entirely made. They are designed as clones, they are raised as clones, and they are made to be clones. However, it is clear that if one of these clones were to be raised as a normal human, there would be no distinction between him/her and the next human over. Thus, there is nothing less 'freakish' about the humans that contrived this world of clones than the supposed freaks themselves. Perhaps this novel has more to say about the value of the human soul than anything else as the distinction of freak is shattered through the subtle and quiet nature of the text.

The novel places the reader in the view of the Hailsham children, but as soon as the reader steps away from the novel, he or she is placed in a position of the 'other.' While writing the first part of the blog, it dawned on me how frustrated I was over the Hailsham characters never questioning or trying to escape, yet I was much more removed and less frustrated at the idea that humanity could create this mess in the first place. I think it is as this 'other' that I am unable to fully grasp the position of the Hailsham characters; as an other I want freedom for the characters, yet when placed in their shoes through the narration, I still view the world as an other, causing my frustration for their inability to question the world.