Literary Wonderlands Page 8
This reversal is seen in many facets of daily life: Erewhonian youths attend Universities of Unreason, where nothing useful is taught; and any form of machinery is proscribed on the grounds that, if allowed to develop, the machines will take over society. The state religion is a worship of the goddess Ydgrun, another partial anagram making reference to “Mrs. Grundy,” an off-stage character from Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), who had, by Butler’s time, become synonymous with censorious, “bluenosed” moralism.
Nosnibor—who is in the process of “recovering” from embezzling a widow and children out of all their money—takes Higgs under his wing after his release from prison, and the narrator falls in love with his daughter, Arowhena. He eventually escapes with her, and returns to the outside world by hot-air balloon. In Butler’s 1901 sequel, Erewhon Revisited, a widowed Higgs returns to discover that following his mysterious disappearance into the sky he has become the center of a “Sunchild” cult. Human beings it seems, the skeptical Butler asserts, will believe anything.
RICHARD WAGNER
THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG (1876)
This epic masterpiece of gods, heroes, and men is arguably the most extraordinary achievement in the history of opera.
There can be very few artists more explosively divisive than Richard Wagner (1813–83). The composer’s own ideas about racial supremacy and, later, the appropriation of his music by the Nazis (Adolf Hitler would claim Wagner as one of his favorite composers) have cast a dark shadow over his work. Scholars still struggle with the question of whether it is possible, or even acceptable, to separate the music from the man. And yet Wagner created some of the most celebrated music in history, and his “Ride of the Valkyries” is arguably one of the most recognized musical themes ever written.
Wagner created both the music and the libretto (the text) for his operas, and his perception of their staged performance as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a “total work of art” combining drama, music, scenery and spectacle—revolutionized the art form. His creative vision was most fully realized in the epic four-opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelung” (or “Der Ring des Nibelungen” in its original German), a masterpiece that took him nearly thirty years to write.
The “Ring” is set in a world of Northern mythology that the composer adapted to suit his own vision. Many other writers, notably Tolkien, have found inspiration in these same sources, but Wagner’s vision is original and distinctive. It is, to begin with, set on a consistently lofty plane. Wagner’s main source, the Norse epic “The Saga of the Volsungs,” is a story of great heroes, but they are human, and some are known to have actually existed. Wagner’s world, by contrast, is dominated by figures from mythology: the gods, the giants, the dwarfs, the Valkyries (who carry off slain warriors from the battlefield to Valhalla, Wotan’s home), and the Norns (female figures who control human destiny by spinning Fate). All of these beings are mentioned, if not in “The Saga of the Volsungs” then elsewhere in Old Norse literature, but Wagner expanded the roles of many of them and added others, notably the Rhinemaidens, who guard the Rhine’s gold from which the titular magic ring is eventually forged.
As part of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s mythological libretto and complex characterization are accompanied by a wealth of detailed stage directions (which must have been difficult to follow faithfully with only nineteenth-century technology). The opening scene of the first opera, The Rhinegold (Das Rheingold), for example, is set in swirling waters, with rocks, mist, and deep gorges, from which the dwarf Alberich (the “Nibelung” of the cycle’s title) snatches the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens. The second scene is set outside the majestic hall of Valhalla, which the giants Fasolt and Fafner have just finished building for Wotan, chief of the gods. And so it goes on throughout the cycle, from the smoking forges of Nibelheim (where Alberich makes the magic ring), to cloud-strewn mountaintops and bird-filled forests. Wagner’s capacity for epic world building knew no bounds. And yet curiously, unlike so many other world-creating artists, Wagner seems to have woven his intricate and detailed realm, with the specific intention of destroying it completely.
As The Rhinegold continues it is revealed that, in return for building Valhalla, Wotan has promised the giants the goddess Freia (his wife Fricka’s sister) as payment. Since Freia possesses the Golden Apples that keep the gods immortal, this is clearly a dangerous gamble. It appears Freia is indeed lost until Wotan’s clever and resourceful assistant Loge tells of Alberich’s powerful ring. The giants agree that they will return the goddess if Wotan can present the ring to them by evening.
Wotan and Loge then trick Alberich into giving up the ring, and the furious dwarf places a deadly curse upon it. Wotan attempts to keep the ring, but eventually surrenders it to the giants, whereupon the curse takes its lethal effect and Fafner beats Fasolt to death as they quarrel over the ring.
The Valkyrie (Die Walküre) continues the epic story, explaining that Wotan is desperate to regain the ring before Alberich does, fearing disaster for the gods. The laws of the gods, however, prevent him from seizing it back by force. It has to be done by a hero who is free from these laws, whom Wotan tries to create by siring a son, Siegmund, with Erda, the embodiment of the Earth. Siegmund, however, falls in love with his own twin sister, Sieglinde, and Wotan’s wife Fricka—guardian of propriety—insists that he must die. Wotan’s daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, attempts to protect Siegmund, but Wotan shatters his son’s sword and Siegmund is killed by Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding. Brünnhilde manages to rescue the pregnant Sieglinde and the broken sword, though the Valkyrie is punished for her disobedience by being cast into a magic sleep.
The third opera, Siegfried, centers on the eponymous hero, child of Siegmund and Sieglinde, who grows up knowing no fear. Taught by Alberich’s brother, Mime, Siegfried reforges his father’s sword, kills Fafner with it and recaptures the ring. He goes on to waken the sleeping Brünnhilde, and instantly falls in love with her.
The final part of the cycle, The Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), begins with the three Norns weaving the rope of Destiny. Their song reveals that the gods’ time will end and that Wotan will burn Valhalla.
Wotan’s scheming is finally defeated in this last installment by Alberich’s son Hagen. With a potion of oblivion he makes Siegfried forget his love for Brünnhilde, and sends him to her disguised as his half-brother Gunther. Siegfried takes back the ring and then hands Brünnhilde over to the real Gunther, but when Brünnhilde recognizes the ring, which she thought had been taken by Gunther, once again on Siegfried’s finger, she realizes that she has been deceived and accuses Siegfried of raping her in Gunther’s form. Hagen then murders Siegfried for the ring and also kills his brother.
The ring is at last regained by Brünnhilde, who takes it with her into the funeral pyre. In the last spectacle the Rhinemaidens flood the pyre, seize the ring and drown Hagen, while in the background the gods and heroes in Valhalla are lost in flame.
Many questions arise from Wagner’s complex plot. What happens in the end to Alberich? Why are the gods finally doomed along with Siegfried, when the ring is once again safe in the possession of the Rhinemaidens? The story is a fable of love and power, but the point of the fable remains an enigma. It has been interpreted as a critique of industrialization in modern society and, conversely, as an idealization of heroic force and individual energy.
Whatever Wagner’s intention with the “The Ring of the Nibelung,” its vast world has influenced all later attempts to portray apocalyptic themes in music, literature, art, and cinema. The most familiar being perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in which the “Ride of the Valkyries” is blasted from helicopter-mounted speakers as U.S. troops perform a bombing raid on a Vietnamese village.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TREASURE ISLAND (1883)
One of the world’s most enduring adventure stories, it is an engrossing and timeless tale of pirates, mutiny, buried treasure, and “x marks the spot.”
As Stevenson admitted to Henley, after the publication of Treasure Island: “It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot [the novel’s central villain] Long John Silver… the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.” Wooden legs were more usually associated in the nineteenth century, not with poets, but with sea-going men. At sea, if your leg was injured, in battle or even accidentally, immediate amputation was the surest remedy. Ships had no hospital facilities and cutting the damaged limb off at once and cauterizing the wound in boiling tar was the only protection against gangrene. Often the ship’s cook performed the operation using kitchen knives. A piece of timber was strapped on after the wound had healed. If a hand was lost, one of the meat hooks in the ship’s galley would serve as a replacement. (Captain Hook in Peter Pan, 1911, was directly inspired, as J. M. Barrie acknowledged, by Long John Silver).
Doctors pronounced Edinburgh—known as “auld reekie” because of its smog-filled air—hazardous for Stevenson’s health. Fanny and Louis did not have the funds to wander far and rented a cottage in Braemar in the Highlands. The weather was “absolutely and consistently vile” and the family was confined to the house. One day, in an effort to entertain Lloyd, Stevenson painted a map of an island.
… it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully colored; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets… as I paused on my map of “Treasure Island,” the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods.… The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.
The tale sprang from Stevenson’s pen at the rate of a chapter every morning. Other more serious writing chores were suspended. At this stage it was entirely a domestic enterprise. Luckily, for literature and for Stevenson’s career, a visitor, Dr. Alexander Hay Japp, was invited to listen to the ongoing tale. One should imagine Stevenson’s thrilling, Scots-accented voice as the first paragraph was read out:
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.
What Japp heard was the opening section of the story—that is, Billy Bones being tracked to the Admiral Benbow Inn by the Blind Pew; young Jim’s discovering the map of the island where Captain Flint’s treasure was buried; Squire Livesey and Dr. Trelawney joining forces with young Hawkins to mount an expedition on the good ship Hispaniola. Still to come were Long John Silver, the mutiny he leads aboard the Hispaniola, the marooned Ben Gunn, and the bloody fight to the death on the island. Eventually the heroes find the treasure and return home enriched beyond dreams. The villains get their just desserts—except for Silver, who escapes with his parrot and a pouch of doubloons. Stevenson, one guesses, may have foreseen a Treasure Island II, never written, about his amiable rogue.
As luck would have it, Japp was closely connected with the editor of the popular weekly comic, Young Folks. Based in London, the editor-proprietor was James Henderson, a fellow Scot. Why not, Japp suggested, publish the tale in Young Folks? It would make a welcome handful of “jingling guineas” for the author (who was, as it happened, in dire need of funds).
Stevenson completed the history of Jim Hawkins and Treasure Island was duly serialized, earning its author a little under £50, and Stevenson went on to make a small fortune from subsequent reprints. Treasure Island also heralded the arrival of a major new talent in British fiction. The story that had begun as a domestic entertainment, recited by the fireside to while away tedious days and nights, became a classic. One cannot imagine English fiction without it.
Astonishingly, given its later popularity, Treasure Island was not a great success in Young Folks. Arguably Stevenson’s story was too complex, psychologically, for the paper’s juvenile readership. And perhaps, more significantly, Treasure Island was rather too disturbing for young readers. The murder of Tom Redruth, for example, goes well beyond the routinely spilled gore relished by Victorian children. Silver has failed to recruit the Squire’s loyal man to the mutineers’ cause. It is Tom’s death sentence. On witnessing the brutal homicide, described gruesomely, Jim faints. And the reader, whether adult or child, also finds it hard to restrain a shudder—not least at the thought of Silver surviving, unpunished for this callous crime, and rewarded with ill-gotten gold, to crack further spines that may happen to raise his ire. Whatever happened to the poetic justice that is the stock in trade of children’s fiction?
Treasure Island is a richly complex work of imagination. And where did the novel’s imagined world begin? With a wooden leg, bad weather, and the chance visit of a stranger.
It was Silver’s voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.
“A SQUARE” (EDWIN A. ABBOTT)
FLATLAND: A ROMANCE OF MANY DIMENSIONS (1884)
This short classic of science fiction describes the mathematical journeys of A. Square through the varied dimensions of Spaceland, Lineland, and Pointland.
Mathematicians write interesting novels (such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, for example, here). Flatland’s author, Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1926), was a schoolteacher, a philologist, a theologian, and the possessor of one of the more playfully inquiring minds of his incurably inquiring age. In Flatland, he produced the prototype of the allegorical science-fiction story.
The novel—if it can be called such (it reads, at times, like an extended intellectual joke)—imagines a two-dimensional (that is, flat) universe. The narrator is “A Square,” a geometric everyman. The narrative takes the form of an extended meditation on life and social mores in his single-plane universe, and sets out the fate of those who question or transgress its boundaries. Addressing his readers privileged to live in “space,” Square explains:
Imagine a sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.
The first half of the book, especially, focuses on the rigid and hierarchical social structure of Flatland, and gives the book its reputation as a satire of Victorian social norms. Classes in Flatland are determined by the number of angles a character possesses, with many-sided polygons constituting a kind of aristocracy and isosceles triangles a working class, while regular quadrilaterals, like the narrator, are solidly middle class. Social mobility is limited and possible only for men (sons acquire additional angles with each generation), while women, who are lines only, ar
e unable to improve their station. In addition, women, who might be mistaken for “points” when seen head-on, are required to use separate doors and shout aloud when moving around Flatland, in order to avoid accidentally stabbing their countrymen.
While it might seem anachronistic or heavy-handed to attribute “feminist” consciousness to Abbott, he does seem to acknowledge his satirical intentions in the preface to a revised edition of the book, arguing that: “(until very recent times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.”
In the year 1999, as a new millennium dawns, Square dreams of an even less dimensional world—Lineland—where existence is unilinear (does a line have four sides, like a quadrilateral? It does if you draw it with a pencil, it doesn’t in geometry. Let your mind wrestle with that).
Like the hero of H. G. Wells’s story “The Country of the Blind” (1904), Square is unable to persuade the king of Lineland that there may be worlds other than that over which he is sovereign. Mathematicians, of course, are used to people not understanding what they are talking about. Square is himself bewildered by a spherical visitor from three-dimensional Spaceland (that is, our world). Are there yet other worlds with different geometries? Pointland, where all existence is confined to a single dot, is alluded to, but Sphere himself, in his turn, refuses to countenance the possibility of fourth, fifth, or higher dimensions beyond his, and our, own (though these are now a commonplace of modern physics and mathematics). Announcing his discoveries to his fellow Flatlanders, Square finds himself imprisoned for heresy. He has, so to speak, stepped over the line. Abbott’s tale is dedicated, as he declares, to “the enlargement of the imagination.” Many readers will find his imagined worlds brain-stretchers, indeed, but none the less entertaining for that.