A New ‘Wrinkle in Time’ | Hacker News Reader

A New ‘Wrinkle in Time’

wsj.com

165 pointsbenbreen24 comments

Anyone looking for L'Engle's views on politics and "security" should be looking in the many passages she _did_ publish. They might start with "A Swiftly Tilting Planet", set on the brink of a nuclear war.

This passage was well cut. The dialogue is clunky and Mr. Murry's views are overblown and poorly thought out. Worse, Meg's stated desire for "security" is completely out of step with her nonconformist character. She gets into fights to protect her brother, she refuses to do math as her teacher prefers because her way is better. She hates that she doesn't fit in, but she never tries to be "girly" or take up the interests of the other kids. This isn't a person with any sympathy for an overwhelming desire for security.

L'Engle may have been experimenting with this passage, maybe looking to balance the book against the possibility that it might be read as an anti-Soviet parable. Whatever the thought behind this passage, the book never needed such balance. It's firstly a wonderful story, with a theme of the dangers of conformities of all kinds.

Fear is a slippery thing. You can't eliminate it. You can't ignore it. You must bear it, when you have it. Bearing it causes suffering, of course. Putting it off means you'll suffer later, perhaps more than you might if you just handled it when it was smaller. I tell my daughter it's like piling up laundry in the corner of her room. At some point you are going to suffer a lot more by not having clothes to wear to school AND you still have to do a crap load of laundry all at once.

Fear based security is stupid, wasteful and simply puts off what fears you might have until some point trust is violated by those doing security. Then the real suffering begins.

Interesting, but well cut from the story. Clumsy, preachy, doesn't add. That's what editing is for. If you skip the editing stage, you end up with Ayn Rand.

Interesting. "Sounds too "Ayn Rand"" was exactly what I thought when reading that passage.

The implication here is that what was in the rough draft is somehow "true", when in fact it was cut and therefore the writer thought it was "false".

Everyone writes garbage, all the time, including the greatest writers. Indeed, when you do much serious literary criticism, one of the first things you learn is the (perhaps surprising) extent to which great writers can write terrible junk in their rough drafts. Sometimes terrible passages almost make it into print, as, for instance, the first chapter of Hemmingway's book "The Sun Also Rises", which had already been sent to the printing plant when Hemmingway, on advice from Scott Fitzgerald, sent a telegram asking that the first chapter be cut. You can find that cut chapter online, and everyone whose ever read it agrees that it is terrible -- cutting it was a very good idea.

Likewise, there are some famous cuts from Tolkien that would have been awful if they were included.

If the author decides to cut a passage, the author is saying "This isn't really true for this story, this is garbage." You would be unwise to read deep meaning into passages that get cut.

I read the book a few years ago, and have since read the excerpt. I think she was right to cut it, but only because it breaks up the flow of the story and seems rather heavy handed. In this sense it's "garbage." But I think it is completely consonant with the themes of the book. It's obvious that the dystopia in the book promises safety and security at the expense of a totalitarian society, so I don't know how one could read too much into it.

Exactly. "Writing is re-writing". The final draft, not the first, should be presumed to represent the author's best intentions. And authors actually do exist, and do have intentions, and can communicate those intentions, however imperfectly and incompletely.

Cutting something from the final draft of a work signals the author's intentions pretty clearly: they believed for whatever reason and by whatever standard mattered to them, that the work was better off without it. That may have been for artistic or commerical or political considerations, but whatever they were, they were the author's and it behooves us to honour them.

People who claim that authors do not have intentions or that those intentions cannot ever be known to any interesting degree seem to feel that they themselves are able to author works whose intentionality is fully decipherable. This is odd, not least because if communication between author and reader was not possible, it would follow that encryption is not possible, because encryption does nothing but interrupt the communication of the author's intentionality to the reader. An encrypted message can still be read as a string of random charcters, but none of the author's intentionality can be inferred. If the process of reading didn't involve inferring the author's intentionality, this would not be a problem, and an encrypted version of "A Wrinkle in Time" would be functionally identical to a plain-text one.

I first read this in grade school, and keep revisiting it decades later. My wife and I bonded over it when we met, and growing older, I find the messages even more apt.

I agree as well, the passage was best cut. It's a little too essay-like, a bit too wordy, in what was a scene where Meg could finally catch up with her father. But I'm really glad they found this and shared it, and it helps give a new perspective on what was guiding L'Engle's thoughts when she wrote the book.

Loved this book when I was a kid, as well (and there were sequels, I think?).

It's curious -- nowadays the summary of the plot only rings a vague bell, and "Camazotz" is not a name I recognize at all. I don't think I'd have remembered this passage, had it not been cut.

But the name of the protagonist's little brother -- Charles Wallace -- gave me a delicious little shiver. I doubt I've thought of this book much in 30 years, but there's a whole section of pathways in my brain that unlocks.

The point it makes adds to the story, but I think it's an awkward passage and I understand why it was cut.

The thought struck at the weird synchronicity of new JD Salinger, new Harper Lee, and now this. I'm not complaining of course.

How do we know its not a fake?

This is a nifty find, and might make a little bump in the popularity of an acknowledged classic, but faking it would hardly be worth risking her career & reputation.

The granddaughter's job is managing L'Engle's estate.

Plus, it seems to me that a fake would be quite possible to expose -- the age of the paper/ink, uniqueness of typewriter characters etc.. It's one page of an entire paper draft of the novel, typewritten (presumably on a single machine) 50 or so years ago.

It's just as well this passage was cut. Can you imagine this book having had any kind of readership in America had she dared be critical of the U.S. in her writing at the height of the Cold War?!

The book would have been burned in McCarthyist witch-hunts, she would have been arrested as a communist sympathiser.

She only had to substantially obfuscate the message of her book to manage to get it published in a backwards, repressive regime which fancies itself as a bastion of freedom.

Your speculations about what "would have been" – book burnings! imprisonment! – are ahistoric to the point of paranoid nuttyness.

The specific passages left out were a few slight intensifications of one theme. Leaving them out didn't 'obfuscate' anything. As the literary critics consulted by the WSJ suggest, the cuts arguably improved the book's narrative flow and timelessness.

Also note that by 1962, when Wrinkle in Time was published, the country was already 8 years past the peak of McCarthyism, with McCarthy discredited and dead. Even at the height of McCarthy's investigations, in the early 50s, the only metaphorical "book burning" that happened was the State Department pulling some books from its overseas outreach libraries.

That's an embarrassment, of course, but not the kind of persecution you're implying that L'Engle would've faced.

For cultural context, The Twilight Zone's original TV run was 1959-1964. It often featured the exact same kind of allegorical criticism of conformity and paranoia. A few extra words in Wrinkle in Time – about how even in democracies, "the sick longing for security is a dangerous thing" – would've been zero risk to the book's popularity or author.

There have been a lot of "book burnings" since 1960. The subject du jour to ban shifts slightly over the years, from racial issues to gender equality to same-sex marriage, but parents often end up in a frenzy over one thing or another.

Nothing about these elided Wrinkle in Time passages were especially controversial, then or now.

Other parts of Wrinkle in Time, in particular mentions of Jesus as sort-of coequal with other artists and scientists or Buddha, or its not-quite-Christian mysticism, have sometimes run afoul of some religious parents' groups.

But a few generic warnings to the effect that "craving total safety can be dangerous"? That's pretty much common wisdom, in any American era, and doesn't trigger claims of insult or depravity.

Look up when "The Crucible" came out. Go on, I'll wait.

'53. It got a very short initial run resultantly, and there was a lot of talk in the papers about the "controversy" of witchcraft, in order to shift the debate away from the contemporary context.

Sure, it may not have resulted in book-burning (do allow me some hyperbole!), but I stand by my point that had that passage remained, this would not be a staple of American youth reading today, and the book would have ended up either obscure or "controversial".

"Stranger in a Strange Land" was published in 1961, blasting established religion and conventional sexual morality. It wasn't a YA book but it certainly refutes the idea of the cultural censorship you assert.

It did start out as a YA book. Only, halfway through, RAH realized that he wanted to publish to a more mature audience. The first third of SiaSL hearkens back to his YA beginnings; the rest of it appeals to the rebellious. That book cemented my enjoyment of the rest of his writings because I bridged from child to adolescent at the time of reading.

I'm trying to determine what would have been construed as being critical to the U.S. in that passage.

National Socialism had been voted into power in Germany through legitimate means just a couple of decades prior to the book being released. I doubt it'd be taken as an implicit critique in pointing out that even democracies can be abused. After all, it was this realization during the formative years of the U.S. that lead to measures such as the Bill of Rights.

I don't think there's anything offensive here.

Others have already done some explaining, but I'd like to point out that the 1950s conformism thing has kernels of truth, even large kernels of truth, but you also have to account for the fact that the rebellion of the 1960s itself had to write a mythos of excessive conformity to justify itself. As is often the case, it overstated its case, because in the aggregate, social movements are really bad at restraint or subtlety. You must remember that the 1950s are still the era that gave birth to the 1960s et al, and it's a great deal more complicated than "the kids just rebelled for the first time in the entire history of man for no apparent reason".

Ironically, it is now this very 1960s rebellion that we still live today that is now entering an accelerated and probably inevitable disintegration of its own as it itself becomes an ideology of stultifying conformity. History is not without its ironies.

It's not like today is any different. The establishment has just traded Russians for Muslims and kept that drum beat right on going.

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