(part 2 of 4) 1963: A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle
"Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract."
(part 1 is here, part 3 is here)
Do you remember what a tesseract is, as described in A Wrinkle In Time? It’s the actual wrinkle, the way of bending space and time to travel great interstellar distances instantly. It’s the squaring of the fourth dimension, time, which itself is the squaring of our third dimension, space, which itself is the squaring of the second dimension, a flat surface.
Maybe that doesn’t make any sense, but you might remember two of Meg’s “guardian angels” trying to explain it with a visual aid in chapter five of Wrinkle, as Mrs. Who holds up the hem of her skirt and lets an ant crawl across, and Mrs. Whatsit narrates that “if a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs. Who’s right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk for him if he had to walk straight across.” At this point, Mrs. Who suddenly brings her hands together, and the ant is able to travel the same distance across the skirt in a single step. “Now, you see, he would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel.” The ant’s journey, as well as the examples of “squaring the square”, are accompanied with the book’s only illustrations1. I once, as an adult, had a conversation about this book with another adult; neither of us had read the book in years, and when I mentioned the title, my friend immediately mimed the “bringing my hands together so the ant can get to the other end of the hem” gesture. It is the single most famous image from the book, which makes it one of the most famous images in all of American children’s literature.
Still, that doesn’t really explain the mechanics of how these things work, and that’s a very common characteristic of L’Engle’s writing, especially in her series about the Murry family: L’Engle’s worlds are notoriously difficult to visualize. This even becomes a major theme in the novel, as the alien character of Aunt Beast does not have eyes, and explains to Meg how she (he? they?) gets to experience the world without a sense of sight. Even the characters with eyes can’t process what’s in front of them. Interstellar travel happens in the blink of an eye. Angels are balls of wings and eyes. IT is a horrifying brain on a table. Dr. Murry is trapped in a transparent column that becomes intangible if you wear Mrs. Who’s spectacles, but then the spectacles lose their “virtue”. L’Engle’s descriptions throughout the novel jump across different sensory inputs, as if deliberately crafted to tell you “don’t even try to imagine this in your mind, it can’t be done”:
“She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the some time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.”
“The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt she could almost reach out and touch them.”
“Meg could feel a rhythmical pulsing. It was a pulsing not only about her, but in her as well, as though the rhythm of her heart was no longer her own but was being worked by some outside force…the inexorable beat within and without continued. For a moment she could neither move nor look around to see what was happening to the others. She simply had to stand there, trying to balance herself into the artificial rhythm of her heart and lungs. Her eyes seemed to swim in a sea of red.”
“At first his words had been frozen and now the wind was mild: was it icy cold here or warm?”
“Meg tried again, but she could not get a visual concept out of her mind. She tried to think of Mrs. Whatsit explaining tessering. She tried to think of them in terms of mathematics.
Wrinkle was adapted into a film twice, and neither movie was very good, mainly because it’s too hard to translate these worlds into a visual medium. And in L’Engle’s first sequel to Wrinkle, 1973’s A Wind In The Door, things get even weirder, as the entire second half of the novel takes place inside one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell!); Meg and Calvin - and their new, literally cherubic sidekick, Proginoskes - move and communicate within Charles Wallace’s body primarily through “kything”, which I could try to describe as a blend of astral projection and ESP, but that wouldn’t really be accurate, but also nothing else really gets closer.
All of this sets L’Engle apart from other science fiction writers; it certainly sets her apart from writers in the current era, where worldbuilding and backstory and details are all critical parts of genre fiction. No other works of science fiction today could possibly function like Wrinkle. You can't build a world this way. There's nothing else like this, nothing else that took us to another alien reality that was deliberately written to be impossible to visualize. It wasn't until, as research for this piece, I read a 2015 discussion on A Wind In The Door that described the plot as "anime-like" that it finally clicked for me.
Oh, right. There is one other work of science fiction that functions like this. And it's also, in a way, about Angels. Cruel ones.
On YouTube, somebody has uploaded a clip of the infamous final scene of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the legendary 1995 Japanese series that still exerts a gravitation-level influence across all anime genres. One commenter wrote "Show?"; that is, they didn't recognize the clip and wanted to know from what show the clip came. The original poster responded, simply, "no", following that immediately with another reply: "this is for your own good". This is probably the only correct response to a stranger who wants to learn more about Evangelion, the show that inspired countless obsessive fans in its native home of Japan and its other native home of internet weirdos: absolutely not, protect yourself before you get lost in here too.
Or, as a user on Tumblr once put it: "Evangelion is the best anime ever and also absolute dogshit. Everybody should watch it. I don't recommend it to anyone."
I love Evangelion, a series that, on paper, is a cartoon for children about robots who fight aliens. It's actually about a great deal more than that, and its depiction of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, its exploration of grief and loneliness, and its complex array of religious allusions all build the series into something that punches far above its weight for a children's anime series. But I mainly want to talk about the last few episodes of the series, when three things happened related to the production.
First, the studio making the series ran out of money: there was no budget to adequately animate the end of the story. Second, the writers ran out of time: script revisions flew back and forth and got delivered to the actors and animators at the last second, and this also understandably complicated the animation process. And finally, the showrunner, Hideaki Anno, was suffering from a serious depressive episode and would attempt to take his own life shortly after the conclusion of the series (thankfully, he did not suceed, and is still a celebrated writer today). And this all led to an incredibly controversial and polarizing ending to a 26-episode anime series, which has since been re-adapted and re-configured multiple times through multiple films and manga.
To summarize and oversimplify: Evangelion had been building up to a massive baroque final sci-fi battle, led by the teenage Shinji Ikari against the invading mysterious beings known as Angels, but this battle was also expected to trigger the “human instrumentality project” in which all of human consciousness would be merged into a single entity, at which point Shinji, exhausted from the epic bloody battle against the Angels in the irradiated city of “Tokyo-3”, would fight to retain his individuality and break free of the human instrumentality project. The animators had 44 minutes - the final two episodes of the series - to depict all of this, which was basically impossible to depict, with no money, no time, and a head writer who was busy holding on for dear life. So how do you do that?
Well, what happened in Evangelion is that they went in a different direction entirely. The final episodes of the series essentially take place entirely in Shinji Ikari’s head. Because of time constraints, the later episodes of the series literally have a lower frame count than the earliest episodes of the show. There were more still images, with no animated movement whatsoever, throughout the later episodes, and in the final episodes you are looking at long shots of minimally-colored, minimally-textured still line drawings as you hear Shinji’s internal monologue and the other characters, acting as other elements of his subconscious, help him process what is happening. It is unlike anything else I’ve seen in animation, and certainly unlike anything I would expect from a series that, again, started out with “do you think those robots can fight those aliens?”
There are no battles, there is no action, there is barely any movement. The protagonist is Shinji thinking to himself, positioned against the primary antagonist, which is also Shinji thinking to himself. And as Shinji crawls through his own consciousness, he eventually arrives at gratitude for the people around him, for the hardships that have turned him into the person that he now is, and he blurts out in revelation “it’s okay for me to be here!” At this, his subconscious prison shatters, the Human Instrumentality Project falls apart, and Shinji finds himself surrounded by the people who love him, all congratulating him. Roll credits.
The Japanese title of Evangelion’s final episode translates to “The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World.” The English title is “Take care of yourself.”. Evangelion is an anime series whose message is “it is okay for you to be here”. Space and time are collapsing in ways you cannot visualize or understand. The world is weird and horrifying and pulsing and moldy and unknowable. You are slammed into the consciousnesses of others, pillars of light that you cannot fully understand or draw into yourself, just as they cannot fully understand you. Meg Murry sees all of this and struggles to process any of it, especially given her own low sense of self-worth. All she wants to do is run away. Shinji responds very similarly, symbolized by extended shots of him sitting in his folding chair like a whiny little bitch:
But as both characters realize, it is okay for you to be here. You are still worthy of love, you are still worthy of individuality, you are still worthy of being you. The climactic final battle of A Wrinkle In Time is Meg loving her little brother (which is not shown as a tangible action) so she can free him from the hypnotic power of a giant evil brain (which is barely described, and no description would help), using the advice she received from a seraph (who is literally indescribable), on an alien planet she reached by bending time like the hem of her skirt (which doesn’t make any sense). How can an author possibly depict all of this in a book for children, particularly one that steamrolled over so many previous conventions of children’s science fiction? Well, L’Engle was a lot less concerned with “depicting” the un-depictable - seraphim, wrinkles, Aunt Beast who shouts love at the heart of an alien world - than hammering home the message, a critical message for every child to hear, that “it’s okay for you to be here”.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the second of four installments on Madeleine L’Engle's 1963 medalist, A Wrinkle In Time.
Bruce Coville, in what was likely a direct homage to Wrinkle, used a similar explanation of interstellar travel in the still-excellent My Teacher Glows In The Dark, only the character doing the explaining used a spaghetti-type noodle instead of a hemline.