A Square and the voice of the memoir

Use in the book

The opening voice knows more than its audience about Flatland and less than that audience about Space. This unstable distribution of knowledge is essential to its humour. He instructs privileged three-dimensional readers through elementary demonstrations, calls them happy, and describes institutions whose cruelty he often expects them to admire. The reader's superiority in one respect is offered as a temptation to complacency in another.

His social position matters to the prose. A lawyer's orderly classification and respect for established distinctions give authority to the survey of Part I. Phrases such as Law of Nature and public safety can make historically imposed arrangements sound beyond dispute. His professional identity returns in §2223 when private business and clients lose their hold on him. Conversion has an economic and domestic cost, not only an intellectual one.

The memoir is retrospective. The narrator who says that he once mistook his country for his universe already knows that his earlier certainty was false. Yet retrospective knowledge does not automatically cleanse his descriptions of rank and sex. His encounter with the Sphere enlarges perception faster than sympathy; after it he still withholds instruction from his Wife. The fictional Editor's account of changed opinions in the Preface23 must therefore be read beside, rather than substituted for, the memoir's stubborn habits.

There are also several senses of authorship. Abbott wrote the fiction; the title page attributes the illustrations to A Square; the fictional Editor reports the imprisoned narrator's explanations. These voices are related literary devices, not interchangeable witnesses. A Square's prejudices can make the satire possible precisely because Abbott does not interrupt every sentence to condemn them. Conversely, describing the speaker as unreliable does not make everything he reports false. The book needs his demonstrations, social observations, selective blindness and suffering to remain in contact.

Places to read

1. Title Page“With Illustrations by the Author, A Square” makes the narrator an ostensible maker of the book and its figures
2. § 12“my happy readers” establishes an address to privileged outsiders
3. § 12“I should have said ‘my universe’” is the narrator's explicit revision of an earlier limit
4. § 323“to which class I myself belong” places him within the hierarchy he describes
5. § 2223“I neglected my clients and my own business” gives his vocation a cost

In this edition

The title-page note connects the pseudonym with Edwin Abbott Abbott's repeated initial. This is the edition's biographical explanation, not a fact announced by the fictional narrator. Its introduction2345 also discusses Abbott's teaching and theology; neither supplies permission to assign every statement of the Square directly to Abbott.

A Square

The narrator's assumed name, simultaneously his geometrical form and his professional-class identity. The title page also assigns him the illustrations; this fictional authorship is distinct from Abbott's. Printed form: A Square (Title Page). See A Square and the voice of the memoir.

Historian

The role through which the Square partly explains his adoption of customary exclusions and judgements. The Editor's qualification leaves open whether descriptive reporting has become allegiance. Printed form: Historian (Preface23). See A Square and the voice of the memoir.

Memoirs

A retrospective account by the participant whose experiences are told. The prison narrative and its fictional editorial mediation distinguish these memoirs from the earlier inner treatise titled Through Flatland to Thoughtland. Printed form: Memoirs (Preface23). See A Square and the voice of the memoir.

A humble native addressing superior readers (contextual phrase)

Dedication: “a Humble Native of Flatland”. Humility is announced from a position that the reader can easily regard as inferior. Yet the address goes on to ask those superior readers for modesty, exposing the gap between receiving deference and deserving moral authority. Native also gives the speaker the role of a local guide explaining a strange society to visitors. Such a guide can know his world intimately without seeing the arrangements he has naturalised. The phrase therefore establishes both authority and limitation: he can teach outsiders, and those outsiders can recognise failings in him. The dedication asks whether the same reversal could happen to them. See Dedication and the reader being addressed and A Square and the voice of the memoir.

My country and my universe (contextual phrase)

§ 12: “my country” and “my universe”. The narrator corrects the second phrase into the first retrospectively. What he once called the whole of reality has become a region within a larger field. The modest verbal revision records an immense conceptual change. It also sets a recurring trap: a world newly recognised as larger can become another universe if its inhabitants refuse to imagine beyond it. Calling Spaceland a country instead of a final cosmos helps preserve the possibility that its horizon is provisional too. The opening sentence thus does philosophical work without introducing a special technical vocabulary; two ordinary possessive expressions carry the difference between belonging somewhere and exhausting everything. See A Square and the voice of the memoir and Space and Spaceland.