"Upward, Not Northward": Flatland and the Quest for the New

"Upward, Not Northward": Flatland and the Quest for the New ELLIOT L. GILBERT University of California, Davis When perceptible amounts of new phenomenal being come to birth, must we hold them to be in all points predetermined and necessary outgrowths of the being already there, or shall we rather admit the possibility that originality may thus instill itself into reality? William James, Some Problems of Philosophy1 'Your country of two dimensions is not spacious enough to represent me, a [Sphere] of three, but can only exhibit a slice or section of me, which is what you call a Circle. . . . You cannot indeed see more than one of my sections, or Circles, at a time, for you have no power to raise your eye out of the plane of Flatland; but you can at least see that as I rise in space my sections become smaller. See now, I will rise; and the effect upon your eye will be that my Circle will become smaller and smaller till it dwindles to a point and finally vanishes." Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland Kaluza showed that electromagnetism is actually a form of gravity, but not the gravity of familiar physics. It is the gravity of an unseen dimension of space. . . . What the] was saying in his bold conjecture was that if we enlarge our vision of the universe to five dimensions there is really only one force field, and that is gravity; that electromagnetism is only that part of the gravitational field which operates in the extra dimension of space we have failed to recognize. . . . What he did provides a classic example of creative imagination. Paul Davies, Superforce2 IN 1980, THE ARION PRESS of San Francisco published a limited edition of Edwin A. Abbott's "romance of many dimensions," Flatland, printing the text on heavy, hand-laid paper in a single fan-fold gathering and providing for each copy elaborately machined aluminum covers and an equally formidable aluminum slipcase. This metallic sheathing of the volume argues, as the publisher no doubt intended it should, for the extraordinary value of the bibliographical objet—the fine paper and beautiful printing—being so dramatically guarded. But it also, though perhaps less consciously, seems to assert the value of the text itself, 391 ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 suggesting that Flatland, as a cultural artifact of unusual importance, must be carefully protected and preserved. For the purely literary survival of the Flatland text no such heroic precautions are necessary. The slim book by schoolmaster and Church of England cleric Abbott, first published more than a century ago, has since run through twenty-five editions, a number of which are even now in print; thus, the work hardly needs to be rescued from neglect or oblivion.3 What may be in some need of protection and preservation, however, is the thematic significance of this perennially charming story, part sciencefiction adventure, part Socratic dialogue, a significance that appears to have struck even the earliest readers as mysterious. "The book seems to have a purpose," wrote an 1884 reviewer in the Athenaeum, "but what that may be is hard to discover,"4 a judgment the New York Times seconded the following year when it described the first American edition of Flatland as "a very puzzling book."5 And nearly a hundred years later, Ray Bradbury, in his introduction to the Arion edition, suggests that Flatland continues to challenge interpretation, declaring that "Abbott pretends to be doing one thing, but is truly doing another."6 So many readers over so long a period have surely not been wrong to sense in Abbott's provocative little book some unstated thesis, and it will be my own thesis here that in Flatland we are dealing with an unassuming but insightful study of a persistent nineteenth-century preoccupation, the quest for new creative directions in a culture powerfully—if more and more uncomfortably—committed to history and tradition. In seeking sources for that new creativity, Abbott turns for help first to tradition and then to the individual but finds them both inadequate to the challenge, each capable only of reiterating what has already been done, what already exists. By the end of the book, therefore...