The Editor and the revised Preface

Use in the book

A preface23 normally stands outside a story to explain its making. Here it continues the story by reporting imprisonment, decline and conversations with the protagonist. Its position before the memoir gives later suffering an anticipatory presence. A reader knows from the outset that revelation will not simply produce triumph or acceptance.

The two defences are deliberately unequal. The Editor calls the Square's dimensional answer impregnable, but cannot give the same assurance about his moral defence. The latter is mediated through interpretation and summary because the Square is said to lack Spaceland's moral terminology. The phrase admits a problem larger than mistranslating a single word: the speaker's inherited concepts do not reliably express the values to which the defence appeals.

The account of changed opinions is consequential but qualified. The Square now inclines to a more favourable view of Women and the Isosceles; his historical descriptions have identified him, perhaps too closely, with customary historiography. The qualification preserves the evidence of bias in Part I rather than cancelling it. The Preface23 makes a distinction between reporting a society and endorsing it, while allowing that the narrator has not maintained that distinction securely.

The final refusal of a one-to-one correspondence between Flatland and Spaceland is also a rule for interpretation. The Circles can satirize aristocratic and clerical authority without every minor custom corresponding to a particular English institution. The hoped-for reader rejects both absolute impossibility and exhaustive certainty about what lies beyond experience. The Preface23 therefore corrects readers who would either dismiss the dimensional fiction as incoherent or reduce it to a fully decoded system.

Places to read

1. Preface23“By the Editor” installs an additional fictional speaker
2. Preface23“one of an intellectual, the other of a moral nature” organizes two different defences
3. Preface23“interpreter and summarizer” marks the second defence as mediated
4. Preface23“perhaps too closely” qualifies the Square's identification with established historians
5. Preface23“every minute detail” occurs in the warning against compulsory exact correspondence

In this edition

The Preface23 belongs to the revised second edition of 1884 and is absent from the first. Its references to pages 70, 81 and 88 are original-edition references, explained by the modern notes as passages in §§16, 18 and 19234567891011121314. They are not page references to this lexicon or to the supplied modern PDF.

Aristocratic

Favouring the rule or privileges of the highest class. The Square's reported disavowal of these tendencies is obscure and mediated by the fictional Editor, not an unqualified rewriting of the memoir. Printed form: aristocratic (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Celerity

Speed or swiftness, here the unexpectedly rapid demand for a second edition. The formal word sustains the fictional Editor's courteous public voice. Printed form: celerity (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Editor

The fictional Spacelander who represents the Square's explanations and qualifies their success. This character is distinct from the modern editor of the supplied annotated edition. Printed form: Editor (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Impregnable

Unable to be breached or refuted. The Editor applies this confident judgement to the intellectual defence, then expressly refuses equivalent confidence about the moral defence. Printed form: impregnable (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Interpreter and summarizer

The two roles claimed by the fictional Editor when transmitting the Square's moral defence. The phrase tells readers that they are receiving mediated interpretation rather than a literal transcript. Printed form: interpreter and summarizer (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Moral terminology

The vocabulary for describing and judging conduct. The Square's unfamiliarity with Spaceland's moral language is the Editor's reason for mediating his defence against the charge of misogyny. Printed form: moral terminology (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Objection

A challenge requiring an answer. The Preface23 separates a problem about visibility and thickness from a moral problem about the narrator's treatment of women, and grants the two replies different degrees of success. Printed form: objection (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

Woman hater

The hostile characterization levelled at the narrator by critics. The Editor does not simply dismiss it: he admits the defence is less convincing than the answer to the geometrical objection. Printed form: woman-hater (Preface23). See The Editor and the revised Preface.

But he is not the Square he once was (contextual phrase)

Preface23: “he is not the Square he once was”. The idiom usually marks a change in strength, character or ability; here its noun also names a geometrical class. The Editor does not report that the prisoner's body has acquired another number of sides. He reports the decline of a person whose class-name appears to promise a fixed identity. Imprisonment, mockery and ageing have reduced the witness's ability to express what he learned. The joke is quiet, and its human cost is not cancelled by the geometrical pun. It warns a reader that a later account may combine remembered revelation with damaged resources of recollection. See The Editor and the revised Preface and Memory and forgetting.