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cross — and made a convincing case that hu
-
mans already had the technology to make the
world a much smaller place.
Jules Verne was initially inspired by a news
-
paper article (or so the storygoes) about travel
-
ing around the globe. Clearly,he grasped the
right idea at the right time. Someone
could
do
it in such a short amount of time, especially
with railroads recently built across America and
India; but up to that point, no one had. It was
a time when the optimism of the burgeoning
technological age seemed almost to be running
behind the technology.It was a world where
telegraph lines and steamboats were fueling
the British Empire., and it would eventu
-
ally pave the way for the global society we live
in today.What the time period lacked was an
evangelist for this brave new world. And by
stacking his work of science ction with scien
-
tic facts, Verne managed both to thrill and to
persuade in equal measure.
Readers of the serialized novel took Verne’s
words so seriously that bets were even placed
on the question (which seemed real enough) of
whether the ctional Fogg would actually arrive
in time. Before the century was out, daredevil
journalist Nellie Bly took up Fogg’schallenge
and managed to nish the trip with two days
to spare. It was ocial: the future had arrived.
Justas Verne took care to deal with the real
-
ity of transportation technology at the time of
writing, we too have taken careto represent the
vehicles as they really were (at least as far as we
were able). But the primary thrill of this book
lies not in verisimilitude but rather in Phileas
Fogg’spassionate chase of a technocratic
dream. His days are numbered here as he spans
continents and overcomes an almost endless se
-
ries of obstacles (not to say treacheries). As in
so many other travel stories, the journey ends
at the same place where the journey began; but
as with so many other travel stories, everything
has changed in the meantime. e London
where Fogg completes his circumnavigation is
part of a dierent world entirely.
•
Phileas Fogg’s
Incredibly Credible
Circumnavigation
From
Around the World in Eighty Days
By Jules Verne
1873
67.
A
merica may be the
land
of the free, but
the two leading contenders for the title
of “great American novel” actually take place
on the water. ForMelville, the ocean contained
all of humanity’sgreat secrets (and metaphors);
but for Twain, it was the water itself that was
the key. In
Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn
,
the
river is both the setting of the novel and its cen
-
tral theme. And the fact that it also paved the
way (so to speak) for the American road movie
is just an added bonus.
Although Huck Finn was born in a chil
-
dren’sbook (namely,
e Adventures of Tom
Sawyer
), his own story is not for kids. But
like so many children’sbooks,
Adventures of
HuckleberryFinn
is deeply concerned with
morality. Its metaphors and characters inter
-
act so organically that it’s often easy to forget
that the river really exists. It is always changing
yet always right there, and always in tension
with itself. But Twain’sriver (and, because he
was a former riverboat pilot, it really was his
river) is something more American than this
enduring ancient symbol.
e Mississippi is a river that literally di
-
vides our nation. It’sa river that, for Jim, is the
only road to freedom, and it only runs one way:
toward theslave-holding states. And with every
mile that Huck and Jim travel south, the more
perilous their journey becomes. But this is a
comedy as well as a tragedy (with the tragedy
mostly taking place o-stage), and as a result,
the more danger they encounter, the more out
-
landish the scenarios become.
As with so many great stories, danger lurks
around every bend, but it is people who arethe
trouble, and most of the people are on land. Life
on the river is thus “free and easy and comfort
-
able.” It’san oasis in every way.Once the pair
passes Cairo, however, it’shard not to view the
antebellum South as some sort of asylum for
the ignorant and insane. On all sides, the two
are surrounded by hucksters, racists, zealots,
bloody-minded aristocrats, and simple-minded
fools. Early on, Tom Sawyer accuses Huck of
having no imagination, but it is Huck’srole as
skeptic and arbitrator that illuminates the book
and the people around him. Always being grap
-
pled with by people on both sides, he stays in
the middle. He denes his own morality,makes
his own course, and continues on.
is map attempts to borrow Huck’s wis
-
dom and follows the river just as Twain pres
-
ents it: as a simple trail of water, heading in
a single direction, which nevertheless is full of
endless complexity and confusion. Sometimes
a river is just a river; but at other times, it’s
certainly not. After all, if you’vegotten to the
bottom of the Mississippi River, then you’re
probably dead; and if you think you’veheard
the last word on Huckleberry Finn, then you’ve
probably stopped listening. Rivers aren’trivers
when they stop moving.
•
Huckleberry Finn’s
Mississippi River Journey
From
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By
Mark Twain
1884
71.
N
o one would call Franz Kafka a kid-
friendly writer exactly,but his works have
a lot in common with children’sbooks. Like
them, Kafka’sworks possess a profound sim
-
plicity of vision and rely in large part on humor
for their emotional impact. But thereare also
times when Kafka’sstories and novels engage
with the central, and essentially childish, ques
-
tion of who we are, what our nature truly is.
And this question is as proper to humans as it
is to Babe the sheep-pig.
Red Peter begins his “report” bydeclaring
that “it is now nearly ve years since I was an
<
br /> ape,” but insisting that his distance from that
state is identical with that of the humans in at
-
tendance. He cannot become an ape again any
more than they can. We are eerily proximate
to our prehistory here, but with the blunt tool
of language we cannot quite grasp it. Wecan,
however, begin to draw a line (“the line an erst
-
while ape has had to follow in entering and es
-
tablishing himself in the world of men”). Or, at
least, Red Peter can. He has traveled that line.
It is a journey from unconsciousness to con
-
sciousness, from pre-language to language, and
it oers us everything while telling us nothing
about what we want to know.
is is a survival tale stripped down to its
barest details. When Peter, injured and insult
-
ed, is imprisoned in his cage, he knows only
one thing: “no way out.” No physical way out,
anyway (Red Peter pointedly refuses to use the
word “freedom”), but the will to live drives him
to seek “any” way as opposed to none. And
here is where the continuous line that he draws
splits dramatically apart. Red Peter is forced to
live, “yet as far as Hagenbeck was concerned,
the place for apes was in front of a locker —
well then, I had to stop being an ape.”
Red Peter does not say that he achieved this
change in an instant, but there is no way to ac
-
count for the birth of consciousness. He points
to the discrete moments — the sense of im
-
prisonment, the desire to get out, the pipe, the
bottle, and the word (“Hallo!”) — but he can
-
not take us with him on his journey.It ispast
and gone forever. He can, however, reect on
what it is that he has achieved from a new and
unique perspective. And as it was for Adam and
Eve, so it is for Peter: ere is a price to pay. As
he puts it, “One learns when one needs a way
out; one learns at all costs.”
e best way out is any way out, and the
only way out is humanity’s, so Peter takes what
is available to him. But his unspoken past re
-
mains — in his mind, as in his mate’s(“a half-
trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort
from her as apes do”) — and this unspeak
-
able yet deeply felt knowledge reminds us that
consciousness itself is not an answer. In fact, it
might be better to say that consciousness is the
entryway into the trial that is our lives. And as
Peter suggests through his willingness to take
his trousers down to show “the plain truth,” his
eort, like ours, remains fundamentally absurd.
(is is, in the end, the story of a talking ape
after all.)
•
An Education
From “A Report to an Academy”
By Franz Kafka
1917
79.
Innite Intelligence
From “The Library of Babel”
By Jorge Luis Borges
1941
H
ell has been imagined in a nearly innite
number of ways, but in all of these end
-
less variations — from
e Epic of Gilgamesh
to
e Inferno
to
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
— hell is always (and forever) a landscape, an
environment, a place. Or, as Borges puts it:
“e Universe (which others call the Library) is
composed of an indenite number of hexago
-
nal galleries… one after another, endlessly.” It
is this sense of geographic burden, the idea of
always being
here
, that allows “e Library of
Babel”
to function as both a philosophical es
-
say and an existential horror story.
Although the story is delivered in the style
of an instruction manual (one that is sur
-
prisingly hard to follow,it should be said),
there is also a thrilling pace to it, as the true
nature of this world is revealed in layers.
First we encounter the individual cell (“hex
-
agonal galleries, with vast air shafts between,
surrounded by very low railings”); then the
knowable world for a typical librarian (“I am
preparing to die just a few leagues from the
hexagon in which I was born”); and only then
do we get the God’seye view of this entire uni
-
verse (“e Library is total… its shelves regis
-
ter all possible combinations”). It all sounds so
straightforward, but complexity and paradox
are infused throughout. e original, simple-
sounding cell is actually quite dicult to imag
-
ine (or recreate, in this case). And despite the
incredible size of this universe, it is, on a hu
-
man scale, cramped and claustrophobic (“there
are two very small closets. In the rst, one may
sleep standing up”). But these details do not get
us any closer to comprehension. Innity itself
is full of paradoxes. And Borges, in these few
pages, is constantly shifting our perspective,
taking us to the brink of things and throwing
us o. Like the librarians of his story, the hu
-
man mind forever teeters on the brink when it
comes to questions of the innite.
As Borges teases out the implications of
his library,Borges’sskills as a philosopher are
immediately evident; but he was also a writer,
and as the story closes, the focus shifts again,
as the nightmarish depths of this world expand
to take on the emotional fears of the author as
well. After all, this is a world that contains
all
books, and as a result, any one book that an
author may write is of vanishing importance.
e clearest, loveliest, wisest volume takes its
place among the shelves, as does the volume
containing a repeating series of M’s, C’s, and
V’s. Our narrator holds out hope that order, at
least, is present here. But as with all things at
the Library,that dream is double-edged, as it is
that same order that will allow his body to fall,
unobstructed, to his grave in “the fathomless
air.”ese maps, in some ways, require little
imagination. Borges’swords have already creat
-
ed this world, but even when conned on four
sides it remains perilously easy to go plunging
into the abysses it implies. Man, the imperfect
librarian, can never rest easily here.
ere are no arrows on this map because, as
readers, we are everywhere and nowhere.
•
84.
Convergi
ng Paths
From “The Lottery”
By Shirley Jackson
1948
“
T
he Lottery”
is almost as famous for its
reception as it is for its contents. After it
was published in
e New Yorker
in , the
magazine received a barrage of letters and calls.
People were furious with Jackson for bringing
such darkness into their lives. But many sto
-
ries are dark. (H.P.Lovecraft had only died
ten years before, after all.) Something else was
happening here. Something that perhaps could
best be described as “uncanny.”
We recognize the town in “e Lottery”
and accept it without hesitation. Itis a typi
-
cal, familiar place, lled with typical, familiar
names: Adams, Allen, Bentham, Clark, Dun
-
bar,Graves,Hutchinson. And although we
sense that something here is rotten, the man
-
ner in which we as readers tend to discover
this story — in a prestigious weekly magazine,
in a library,or in a freshman English class —
makes the reveal just that much moreshock
-
ing. And no matter how many times we read it,
the shock always comes. is crime should not
be happening. Not here. And yet we also know
that it couldn’t happen any other way.
A black spot indicates the sacricial vic
-
tim. But that black spot infects and implicates
everyone in this unnamed town, killers and
killed alike. And it implicates us as well. In
the same way that a certain level of abstraction
allows us to project ourselves into characters
and concepts (like Mickey Mouse, love, clouds,
et cetera), this town’sblank demeanor and non
-
descript patronymics force us to consider the
ways in which we unintentionally (not to say
unwillingly) subscribe to thousands of lesser
crimes against our neighbors. e German
word for uncanny is
unheimliche
— the negative
expression of
heimliche
, or “homely.”We are
both profoundly at home here and yet pro