Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

How to Read It

The book is short, but it does not begin quickly. Part I is a treatise in the Square’s own voice, the work of a careful man explaining his country to strangers, and its opening sections on the compass, the rain and the shape of houses can read like an inventory. They are laying foundations. The plane, the straight lines, the classes ranked by sides, the laws on Women and the methods of recognition are all set out in § 1–§ 5, and the jokes grow sharper as the reader learns the rules they turn on. Read Part I as a guidebook written by a native who is proud of his country and does not see what is absurd in it.

Two stretches ask for patience. The geometry of § 6, on how a trained eye tells one figure from another by the shading of a line in fog, is much easier with Abbott’s two figures than without them. A reader who draws a triangle and a pentagon on a card and looks along its edge at eye level will see the point at once. The political history of § 9–§ 10 is a mock chronicle, long and deliberately pompous, and it rewards the reader who listens to how the narrator tells it more than the one who follows every turn of the plot. Part II moves faster, and much of it is dialogue set out like a play, with the name of each speaker before his speech.

The figures are Abbott’s own, drawn as if by the narrator and lettered in his hand, and they show Flatland from above, as no Flatlander can see it, so that both the joke and the argument depend on them. Pause over each one. The notes at the foot of the page explain words, allusions and geometry and point out the targets of the satire, and they never look ahead in the story; a first reading can leave them aside, and a second can lean on them. Abbott’s own four notes are among them. The Key Words above gather the book’s special vocabulary for reference.

Abbott wrote the Preface for the second edition, after the first had been reviewed, and it looks back over the whole story; it can be read first, where he placed it, or kept until the story is done. The book’s first readers had no Preface at all.

Six questions may be worth carrying through the book, and the first three concern the narrator. How far does the Square see the injustice of the arrangements he describes, and where does the satire pass over his head? He writes as a historian, so whose history is he writing, and whose does he leave out? Are his opinions of Women and of the Isosceles his own, or simply those of his class and his country? Turning to knowledge, what can be known by inference that cannot be seen, and what is lost when a thing can only be inferred, as nearly everything in Flatland is? Can argument alone make a creature conceive of a direction in which it has never moved? As for the reader, where does the book place you, and how comfortable is that place?