64 pages • 2 hours read
Question 7
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Death
Throughout Question 7, Flanagan uses the motif of death to reflect on micro (personal) and macro (historical) narratives. It contributes to his discussion of Historical Connections Across Space and Time by acting as a node that ties together his two concepts of time in history, the cyclical, synchronistic notion of history as described by the Yolŋu “fourth tense” and the “chain reaction” notion of history wherein one event can trigger multiple events. For instance, when reflecting on his grandmother Mate, he writes “She sat in the dray, she sits in the dray, and even now, long after her death, she is sitting there still” (56). This description provides an example of how life cannot be stopped by death as life is not a single event but something that has happened, is happening, and will happen simultaneously. Flanagan himself describes his near-death experience at 21 as an actual death, following which his life as a writer began. This notion runs counter to linear concepts of time but aligns with a more fluid, cyclical notion of time.
Flanagan likewise reflects on death as a link in the chain of events that led to his life, noting that “that kiss [between Wells and West] would, in time, beget death which would, in turn beget me” (37). In this way, for Flanagan, life is linked to death sometimes in counterintuitive ways. He suggests it is possible that his father’s life was saved by the death of incalculable numbers of people in Hiroshima while rejecting that any kind of “moral calculus” can be done to assess whether dropping the bomb was the right thing to do (22). Flanagan believes death in both the micro and the macro is incalculable and difficult to reckon with through language.
Love
Flanagan named his text for “question 7” in Chekhov’s short story “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” Chekhov’s “question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world” (24). That question is summarized by Flanagan as “who loves longer” which he uses as a framework to explore unquantifiable, affective emotions, particularly love. Flanagan focuses on two examples of love to communicate this broader concept: the love his parents cultivated in his family and the love between Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. The love his parents had was a love that animated them and protected them from the outside world. As Flanagan writes, “For them to live, love had to exist, the love they valued above all things; they lived that love and they fought for that love and defended that love” (186). The power of this love his parents cultivated is shown when Flanagan describes his mother’s death bed, when she was surrounded by those who “she loved more than life itself” (182). Flanagan suggests this depth of feeling cannot be quantified or defined.
Similarly—although, Flanagan notes, with more destructive after-effects—West and Wells were drawn together by a turbulent attraction that West described as love. Flanagan credits the “turbulent” feelings Wells was experiencing at the beginning of this affair with the uneven and slightly unstable plot and ideas of the novel Wells was writing at the time, The World Set Free. He sees their kiss as the catalyst for a terrible chain reaction that resulted in the construction of the atomic bomb, providing an example of how love can have terrible unintended consequences that escape traditional notions of cause and effect.
Water
Water is a symbol used throughout Question 7 to represent change. This water comes in a variety of forms: rain, floods, oceans, rivers, and even bathtubs. Water’s role as a symbol in the text is exemplified by Flanagan’s reflection on his mother’s reaction to a flood. She saw the floodwaters as prefiguring “life upended, thrilling to the loss of control, or adventure, or the whole world turned fluid and upside down” (145). Several figures in the text are transformed by their time in and around water. For instance, in Flanagan’s fictionalized account of scientist Leo Szilard’s discovery of the nuclear chain reaction, Szilard is reading a lecture in the bath which plants the seed for his epiphany. (In actuality, Szilard attended the lecture and there is no account of him having taken a bath prior to his observation of the streetlights). Flanagan himself is changed as a result of his kayak accident when he was 21. He thinks of it as a delineating transformative moment in his life, writing: “In the depths of my soul there was simply before I died and after I died” (272). The importance of water is underlined by the fact that the book ends with Flanagan on a kayaking trip, returning with the rest of the group to the water. This moment suggests that, although change can be scary, it is a constant in life that must be faced.
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