While reading Infinite Jest, Flatland is mentioned as compulsory reading for the ETA students and there’s a scene where the students have their copies of the book. This caught my attention and got me looking for (and buying) this book immediately. What first caught my attention is that this book was released in 1884, so a pretty old book. Also, it’s only 124-pages long, so it’s a nice rest from my beloved IJ.
Now, most of the book is spent on the setup: the book is set on Flatland, a land composed only of two dimensions, where the inhabitants are different geometrical figures. Women are lines and are the lowest of the lowest. The have a short spark, they are dumb and have short memory, having been cases where women get angry and kill their families, only to forget having doing so later. Since they are lines their extremely sharp edge is extremely powerful. Isosceles triangles are the soldiers, the lower their angles and longer their lines, the dumber and lower class. Next we have the equilateral triangles, squares and higher polygons. Circles are deemed to be the perfect shape and are the priests and leaders. There is an emphasis on lower classes, with peace being maintained by the promise of becoming better (squares’ children are pentagons, and pentagons’ children are hexagons, and son on).
Abbot spends a good time explaining the lack of a third dimension to the readers. A couple of chapters explain how since there are only two dimensions, lines are everything one can observe. Therefore, in order to recognize other people figures rely on three techniques: the art of hearing (each shape has a different voice), feeling (their angles), and the art of sight (eventhough you can only see a line, the different shades of further portions of the line let you know if there are angles).
Now, the climax of thr book comes when the main character and narrator, a square, dreams of visiting a one-dimensional land : lineland, where everything lies in only one line and the inhabitants are lines of different length. When the square talks to their leader he finds it hard to tell the line king there is other dimension and he is seen as a madman. The square, later is visited by a sphere from spaceland, and the square has the same problems understanding and realizing there is a higher dimension until the sphere takes the square on a three-dimensional ride and shows the square what he has been missing.
The square, finally enlightened, wants to spread the knowledge, but he is detained by a very opressive and conservative government, that doesn’t want the spread of the truth. The book finishes with the square in jail, being visited by his brother, who eants to believe everything the square says, but still cannot understand.
This book reminds me of Plato’s cave allegory, where everyone lives blinded in a cave seeing shades, and when someone gets out and wants to spread the truth, he is considered crazy. It is an interesting exercise to try to imagine if there is a higer dimension or if we are trapped in our own dimension limited by our mind’s understanding of the world. I mean, how can you explain a blind man the color yellow? How can you explain a two-dimensional man a third dimension? The sphere uses the analogy of going levels under and realizing the figures expand and have 2 points in the first dimension( line), 4 points in the second (square), and 8 points in the third (cube), a geometrical progression, so next dimension would have a figure with 16 terminal points. In the same vein, first dimension has 2 bounding points, second dimension has 4 bounding lines, third dimension has 6 bounding squares, sonin the same arithmetical progression, the next dimension would have 8 bounding cubes. This is a good exercise of litetslly trying to think outside the box (or outside the cube) while creating an entertaining universe and criticizing the Victorian society.
by LiterallySagan