Chapter Books

The Giver

I read this one a few months ago, but I’ve been familiarizing myself with it again for book club this month. Spoilers follow… Here are the things that jump out at me:

1. Language. Take this passage, for instance:

“Do you love me?”

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. “Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!”

“What do you mean?” Jonas asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated.

“Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete,” his mother explained carefully… “And of course our community can’t function smoothly if people don’t use precise language. You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me?’ The answer is ‘Yes,’” his mother said.

“Or,” his father suggested, “‘Do you take pride in my accomplishments?’ And the answer is wholeheartedly ‘Yes.’”

“Do you understand why it’s inappropriate to use a word like ‘love’?” Mother asked.

There are lots of examples of sanitized language, the main one being “release” rather than “death.” There are also examples of words — like Lily’s use of “anger” — used to represent things that are considerably less potent than the word really signifies. Once the range of experience and freedom are so drastically reduced, the correspondence between language and meaning loosens up a lot.

Carefully regulated speech in this book is a major way the society enforces conformity. We’ve all heard the debates about p.c. speech. Our scientific language — whether it’s in regard to “fetuses” or “smart bombs” — also relates, I think. Just the other night on the radio I heard the term “selective reduction” and thought of this book, particularly of the scene where Jonas’s father “releases” the weaker twin.

2. History (or historylessness). Recently I read Orwell’s 1984, and that book too portrayed a futuristic society with no history. The governing party had a whole department in charge of rewriting history every time something happened that wasn’t what Big Brother had predicted. The only thing that mattered was making him look infallible. There were these vents, tubes that sucked up old newspapers and past versions of events and sent them to a huge incinerator. There was no longer any record anywhere of the past, and without that external verification, people’s minds could be shaped however the dominant power wanted them to be shaped. 2+2 became 5, if they said so.

It’s interesting that The Giver varies that by including a Receiver of Memory. But the burden on one person is unbearable. And the idea that the past is something the general public must be protected from is just as strong as in 1984.

It raises some comparisons with public education too. One of the things that appealed to me about homeschooling was that we could learn history starting at a younger age, and learn it chronologically, getting the sequence and scope. When I learned it, it was in bits and pieces — Egypt in this unit, Athens in this one, a smattering of the American Revolution here, the three branches of government there. Starting earlier, and learning to love the story like my daughter is doing, gives it a priority that for whatever reason I never registered in public school. Learning about the Islamic Empire in Medieval History, then turning on the car radio and hearing about Muslims in Indonesia or Iran, we have an additional lens for “reading” the present.

If I weren’t homeschooling, would I be as aware of what happens to history in the mouths of political spokesmen? A great deal of distortion is about all we hear in the name of “history” as it’s thrown around in self-serving ways in public life, and if that were my only source of it I’d be at the mercy of the press and the politicos and whoever else had an agenda they wanted to prosecute by tapping into the ideals of our common heritage. As C.S. Lewis writes in “Learning in War-Time,” “The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”

3. Free will. Why did God give us free will when we can do such disastrous things with it? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world without any discomfort or discord? Wouldn’t it be great if a trusted body of elders were observing us all the time and were willing to bear the responsibility of telling us what to do with our lives? What would it do to our humanity? This book suggests that creating that kind of a world is the most disastrous use of all of our free will.

Comments Off on The Giver