GIVERS AND RECEIVERS

I was home recently, and had access to books that I normally associate with my childhood (which for some reason had gotten shoved into an obscure corner of the closet). I have been rereading important books in my life with the purpose of evaluating them in light of the project I'm working on, and it seemed totally obvious that I should start with the giver. this book sort of defined the second half of elementary school for me, reading-wise. because I was so young I didn't go all crazy researching lois lowry and reading interviews with her, as I would have now; but the story itself remains just as sharp in memory as it did when I first read it. in fact, now that I know a hell of a lot more than I did in fifth grade (thank god), I can now properly identify this story as a Myth with a capital M, something that is emblematic of some essential part of the human experience.

even in fifth grade I immediately knew after reading it that this book was something totally different from anything I'd read. my relationship with the characters and the story-world was natural and total. also, like any good myth, though you can't exactly see everything that's going to happen ahead of time, when it does happen you realize it's exactly what you expected. there's some kind of weird paradoxical relationship where a myth exists outside you - it's already there, you're living it, and yet it's only after you read the book that you knew you were living it. this book was some kind of knowledge I had never felt before and didn't know the name of, yet.

so now I took it up again and was just stunned at how fucking dead-on every single note is; every point that lowry should have hit is in there. I mean every single one. I was a little afraid that the story would seem trivial and cloying, since it's a kid's book; but honestly, I don't see why this couldn't be read by adults. the themes of it are just so huge and deftly handled. there's the idea of a controlled society, the cartoonish transformation of the world we know into something calm and absurdly soothing and predictable. this isn't so unique; it's in a lot of speculative fiction (wrinkle in time comes to mind). but then add this dynamic of the student and teacher, both absorbing and exposed to a kind of knowledge that the rest of society can't handle. jonas and the giver are basically shamans (shamen?), individuals who experience breaks from society and have to grapple with a depth of knowledge that most people don't.

so there's that. then there's the idea of the knowledge itself: the "seeing beyond" as lowry puts it, that's the cornerstone of like all metaphysics and, you could argue, all philosophy. the way she puts this in the book is just fucking beautiful. I realized as I read it that I had ripped it off recently, after not reading the book for at least ten years. that's how deeply this book was able to probe into me. jonas' particular special aptitude is seeing color; he sees an apple turn red, and then takes it home, trying to "make the thing happen again." the language is basic; there is really no clutter or wasted space in this book at all.

added to that, or rather working necessarily with all the stuff I just mentioned, is the idea of everyone in society having a "function"; this also reflects older societies, though I doubt they were so precise (or maybe their precision was a different kind); and of course the initiation represented by the "ceremonies" where they turn one year older, comes directly from older societies where youths are put through "rite of passage" ceremonies.

I mean, these are some extremely deep, extremely essential human ideas and archetypes that lowry's dealing with here, and her pacing and control of story is just dead fucking on. I just could not believe, on reading it again after so many years, how much she just nailed it.

I can't help but think also that it wouldn't be so successful if it weren't a book meant for young adults. really, the ideas (as I said) are adult-level, but the fact that it's a YA book means she's able to stick with a very simple language style, which is probably the way myths were told ages ago.

so it seems like everything just fell into place for a perfect book. and it finally occurred to me to research lois lowry and how she could possibly do something so perfect, and either I'm not finding the right interviews or she sort of did it on accident. this is what she says about how she thought of the book (from here):

My brother and I had prepared a photograph album filled with images to spark his memory. In 1956, he had had a green Chrysler that he loved. When he saw a picture of it, his eyes would always light up. That day, he came upon a picture of two little girls, and he said, “There you are with your sister. I can’t remember her name.” I told him her name was Helen. He looked a little puzzled, a little confused, and asked, “What ever happened to her?” I had to tell him that she had died; for him it was as if her death had just occurred. I turned the pages to show a house we had lived in, a dog that we had had. But within five minutes, there was another picture of the two daughters. He lit up again and said, “Oh, there you are with Helen. I can’t remember what happened to her.”

Driving back to the airport that day, I began to think about memory—how we use it, how painful it can be, yet how necessary. What if we could manipulate it? What if I could leave my mother with all those happy memories of puppies and picnics and take away the sad memory of the day her daughter died?

I began to play with the idea of people who had learned to manipulate memory. I realized such a story would have to be set in the future. I began creating a community quite different from the ones we now have. I never thought of the book as a science-fiction novel or that I might need to explain its technology. I still get letters from readers, usually boys, asking for specific details of how the weather was controlled or color removed from objects. But I didn’t feel a need to put technology in the book. Nor would I have known how to figure it out!

so, okay, I understand that ms. lowry, but then how did you hit on the idea of the transfer of knowledge through one shaman to the next generation? how did you position your story so that it touched on so many hallmarks of human nature - the rite of passage, the compartmentalized organization of society, the "ability to see beyond"? how the hell did you get all that just from thinking about your grandparents losing memories? I mean, part of that quoted paragraph sounds like the ideas that kaufman probably thought about when he created eternal sunshine - i.e., what if you could erase bad memories. when I think about this, it seems to me that she just created a myth by accident, which is so flabbergasting to me it's almost beyond belief.

I mean, there's a huge gap in my knowledge of her creative process, here. the problem is that the interviews and articles all treat this book like a kid's book; she's answering in the same simplified language that she writes in, which is only natural. but this book is complex enough to be discussed in adult language. there's a ton of potential room here for study on a high level, incorporating study of myth and narratology. I could write a dissertation on the complexities of this "novel for young adults".

which leads me to think that there are books, and then there are myths that happen to be books. the giver is one of the latter. when you read some of the criticisms of it - that "everything happens a certain way because it's supposed to happen that way", a common criticism that I have made myself of stories that seem too easily resolved - it's clear that the writer of those remarks is thinking on the level of book, and not myth, where events are necessarily meant to represent the course of an idea, and have to be anything but arbitrary.

as for this book's power to impart knowledge, I will just cite (from the same interview) the example of one reader:

Another boy came up to me at a recent book signing. He had just graduated from high school, and he gave me a letter and asked me to read it later. In this note, he told me that he went to a private school, and in senior year each student had to speak to the entire school at an assembly. When his turn came, he went up on the stage and said that he learned more from reading one book than anything else that had happened at school. It affected him more than any class he had taken or any lecture he had heard. Consequently, he wanted to share that book with the assembly. He began to read The Giver aloud; the 30 minutes for his speech time came and went. But then he said, “I am going to read this whole book; you can come and go as you want.” Many got up and left, and some stayed, and some came back. Over the course of the next several hours, he read the complete text of The Giver.

goes without saying that I agree and sympathize with this. the giver taught me way more than I realized, until reading it again. it's part of my DNA, at this point; has helped to make me aware of how we control our own societies, how we are alienating ourselves from nature (the animals in the giver are all "elsewhere", no one has ever seen them), and perhaps most importantly has given me an extremely potent metaphor for "seeing beyond" and the vocation that this can bring about. virtually every cornerstone of my own personal ethos, the principles that I consider most important, can be felt in this book. and yet I'm sure the book didn't create those sensibilities in me; it just greatly, greatly helped them emerge.

lois lowry is in her seventies and I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to correspond with her, but I sometimes wonder if she really understands just how important of a story she created with this book. perhaps her creative process was necessarily obscure to herself - if she had gone in consciously trying to create an Important Story, she might have failed miserably. instead, it seems like she just had an extremely acute instinct for story elements that hold great meaning.