The first time I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was back when I was in seventh grade. At the time, I enjoyed the book because it was something different from all the other books I had read. For one, I was never a science-fiction fan, but I found myself engrossed in the possibility of a fifth dimension, of traveling through planets, and of tessering. I enjoyed the adventures of the Murry siblings so much that I had bought the other books by Madeleine L’Engle that ended all the way until Meg and Calvin’s marriage.

            But revisiting the book eight years later was something I had hardly expected to do. Furthermore, to read it in the context of what it says about God and man’s relationship with God was something entirely new to me. The more I read it though, the more I appreciated the book in a mature way.

            What follows is a reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time grounded on Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy on hope. Other philosophers will also be cited when the need arises. Rather than give a summary of the chronology of events, I shall choose certain themes and images employed by the novel and juxtapose these against Marcel and other philosophers.

 

The search for Mr. Murry

Mr. Murry, a physicist, has been missing for five years. No one knows where he has gone, and this only fuels more theories about his disappearance. Some say that he is dead; others say that he had left his family for another woman. Even his wife does not know where he is, but all the government has told her is that he is on a secret and dangerous mission, and that she can be proud of him.

           His disappearance is central to the novel: it is the event that furthers the plot. Because of the sudden arrival of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who in the lives of the Murry children and the revelation that there is such a thing as a tesseract, Meg and Charles Wallace –together with their friend Calvin—are able to embark on a search for their father. Through the powers of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Who, the children are able to travel –to tesser—into the fifth dimension. What this fifth dimension is, the novel was unable to explain concretely for the reader. Meg is shown to have understood what it was, but she could not find the words to explain it either.

            Such a search echoes St. Anselm of Canterbury, who laments that he seeks God but cannot see him. When St. Anselm says, “He desires to seek you, and does not know your face,”[1] it is something we would also expect Charles Wallace to say of his father, as Mr. Murry had disappeared when Charles Wallace was just a baby.

            However, there are many holes in using St. Anselm to discuss the novel. First, it does not seem right to say that Mr. Murry is a symbol for God: as his children search for him, so does St. Anselm search for God. Second, St. Anselm tries to prove the existence of God using reason, but it would not make any sense to say that the children are trying to prove their father’s existence. Third and most importantly, Mr. Murry finds himself trapped by darkness and he tries to fight against it. God, for St. Anselm, is found in an unapproachable light. These two contrasting images simply prevent me from using St. Anselm to analyze the novel further.

            St. Anselm only helps illustrate the kind of search the children embark on: a search for the father that they long to seek but cannot seem to find in this realm.

The Captive in the Darkness

            The Murry children cannot find their father because he is trapped behind a darkness outside their realm. Marcel first and foremost talks about captivity, where “I should consider myself a captive if I found myself… pledged by external constraint to a compulsory mode of existence involving restriction of every kind touching my personal actions.”[2]

Aside from the literal sense of being held captive behind the darkness, Mr. Murry is a captive in Marcel’s sense because external constraints –i.e. being in a different dimension—have forced him into the existence that he has now: an existence away from his family, away from his world. Being in another dimension restricts him from doing anything about his situation. This further illustrates Marcel’s statement that “all captivity partakes of the nature of alienation.”[3] The novel is able to capture this alienation by literally putting Mr. Murry in another planet, another dimension.

In a nutshell, Mr. Murry personifies Marcel’s idea that man finds himself enveloped in a darkness out of which he cannot even begin to dig.

 

Camazotz: the place that gave in to the Darkness

            It seems much easier just to give in to the darkness in which Mr. Murry finds himself, just as the planet Camazotz has done. Camazotz is a planet that represents the pessimistic individual. As all humans are shrouded in darkness, the pessimist has given up trying to escape the darkness. He faces it, sees that it is there, but does not trust that there could be something beyond it. Thus, he just chooses to believe that nothing better than this and he just stays in the darkness. In the same way, Camazotz has given up in its fight against the darkness. As a result, everyone is in despair. Such despair is manifested by the sameness of everything in the planet: children skipping in rhythm, doors opening all at the same time, identical houses up and down the block. This shows that it is easier just to conform to what everyone says, because exploring other options or being an “aberration” –as one woman put it—just puts one’s ego at risk. It is in such a planet that one finds no hope, precisely because no one wants to try to see the light. 

 

The Hope against the Darkness

            Mr. Murry’s situation seems quite hopeless. In fact, when the children hear that he is fighting the darkness, they are very frightened. However, Mrs. Whatsit reassures them, saying,

           

…Do not despair. Do you think we would have brought you here if there were no hope? We are asking you to do a difficult thing, but we are confident that you can do it. Your father needs help, he needs courage, and for his children he may be able to do what he cannot do for himself.[4]

 

            Here, it might help to look at Levinas’ idea of infinite responsibility. For Levinas, the Ego is able to break out of its totality when he responds to the call of the Other. This call is a call to be infinitely responsible for one another, to give oneself in service of the Other. As a parent, Mr. Murry has an infinite responsibility to care for his children. This, perhaps, can motivate him into “doing what he cannot do for himself.”

            But beyond the infinite responsibility, Mr. Murry must make himself available to his children. This is where Marcel comes in, as he emphasizes dying to one’s self to be open to the other. The only way for Mr. Murry to be with his children is if he breaks out of this darkness. He will have the courage to do this when he realizes that his children are threatened by the darkness too: he will want to protect them at all costs, so that they might all break out of this darkness.

            This is also where the children draw their courage: Meg and Charles Wallace have a mission to help their father, and this mission allows them to break away from themselves and their fears. Because of their desire to be with their father once more, they are willing to embark on the dangerous journey that could have them save him from the darkness.

 

Fighting the darkness

            However, they cannot do this on their own: neither Mr. Murry nor his children have it in their power to simply fight the darkness and win. Initially, the children do not even know what they exactly are up against, much less how to defeat it. Marcel’s words can serve as caution for the children: “We are quite unable to tell before an ordeal what that ordeal will do to us and what resources we shall find we possess with which to face it.”[5] This is why the Murry children receive “gifts” from Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which: with their guidance, the Murry children are given clues as to what they already have that they can use to defeat the darkness.

            For Calvin, it is his gift to communicate with all kinds of people. This illustrates Marcel’s philosophy that for one to enter into communion with the other, he must open himself to receive the other.

Charles is cautioned to remember that he does not know everything. This is so because, as Levinas would put it, it is our instinct to reduce the Other to the Same. It is precisely because of his arrogance and ego that Charles Wallace is put in grave danger: he believed too much in his capacity to distance himself from IT, in his power to pull himself out of the experience whenever he wanted to, that he refused to entertain the possibility of being overwhelmed by the darkness.

Meg’s anger and stubbornness gave her the courage to face the darkness, but even these were not enough to save them. When Charles Wallace falls under the spell of IT, she feels that all is lost. But perhaps this is because Meg has always treated the entire mission as a series of trials that she must overcome, trials that were external to her. That is why the inability to overcome the trials makes her lose hope. But Marcel says, “Hope means first accepting the trial as an integral part of the self.”[6] It is then that Meg realizes that only she can save Charles:

“… It has to be me. It can’t be anyone else. … I’m the one who’s closest to him. Father’s been away for so long, since Charles Wallace was a baby. They don’t know each other. And Calvin’s only known Charles for such a little time. … [I]t has to be me. There isn’t anyone else.”[7]

 

This again illustrates Marcel’s point that one can only come to communion with the other if he is open to the value of the other. The fact that Meg is closest to Charles Wallace means that Charles Wallace recognizes the value of Meg, thus he would be more open to receiving her and leaving the darkness.

Ultimately, Meg has the one thing that is able to draw Charles Wallace out of the darkness: love. She finds the courage to come back to Camazotz because she loves him and she wants to protect him, save him. As Charles Wallace responds and accepts this love, they are both saved from the darkness. Marcel expresses this clearly: “If I inspire another being with love which I value and to which I respond, that will be enough to create this spiritual interconnection.”[8] Literally, it is love that saves them both.

 

The God Question

            An ending in which all the characters are saved by love seems to be a little bit cheesy, but that is exactly what the novel has to say about God: that God is love, and that loving one another the way God has loved us all is the way to salvation. As Marcel describes the Thou as “the guarantee of the union which holds us together”[9] we see that the Thou is manifested in the love that united first Meg and her father, Meg and Charles Wallace, and even Calvin and Meg, as Calvin was given the command to take care of Meg.

            In the first place, it is love that drives Meg to search for her father. It is love that gives them the courage and strength needed to try and save him from the darkness. It is out of love that they were able to break through their egos and try to reach him. This shows that God is the very source of the communion we seek: He gives us the courage to try and break away from our totalities in order to make ourselves available to the other. He opens our eyes to see the value each person has, a value we seek to protect. He motivates us to put ourselves in service of the other. And it is by focusing on Him and His love, a love that He commands we share with the other, that we are able to overcome the darkness in which we dwell. In place of the darkness, we find that we dwell in God’s light the more we predispose ourselves to Him.  

            Marcel puts it quite aptly as this: “The fundamental relationship uniting the human soul and the mysterious reality which surrounds and at the same time confronts it… is a participation.”[10] But one may ask, a participation in what? I believe that it is a participation in life, as God is the source of all life. Man is able to form a relationship with God when he forms relationships with others: as Levinas would put it, the more we respond to the call of the Other, the more and more we see the trace of God in the Other.

            The novel A Wrinkle in Time is able to show just that: how Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin open themselves to respond to the call of their father from the darkness, embark on a mission where –as Marcel would put it—“[They] hope in Thee for us,” and are saved by their love for one another.