SOURCE: “The Lament of the Midwives: Arthur C. Clarke and the Tradition,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 36-53.

In the nearly forty years since its publication the popularity of Childhood’s End shows little sign of diminishing. The variety of its subplots and the fascination of its main character Karellen may offer a partial reason for that popularity, as may the peculiar élan of its climax; but the coherence of the subplots, the import of Karellen, and the significance of the climax remain disputed. Yet the subplots parallel one another closely—both in pattern and in the two types of characters from which they are constructed—and illuminate the imagery and themes of the novel, centering on Karellen. An analysis of these patterns confirms and extends the contention of several critics that the novel succeeds through an intricate coherence. It creates a manifold lament for human inadequacy and isolation, rooted in bureaucratic specialization and sexual failure.

I

These several subplots may be identified as a series of quests by different characters: in the prologue, Hoffmann and Schneider; in part I, Stormgren; in parts II and III, Jean, Jan, and the children—Jeffrey and Jennifer; and, overarching all, Karellen. The alien’s quest, however, only becomes apparent after we have clarified the other characters and their interactions.

Hoffmann and Schneider may seem a special case, occupying barely five pages; yet they form a significant addition to the original novella, “Guardian Angel.” Their quest may be taken as a paradigm of those comprising the rest of the novel. Isolated from each other and from their colleagues, they represent “the cleavage” （4） between East and West and every other distance from itself which humanity suffers. Though isolated, however, they are not without aid from the intelligence officers Sandmeyer and Grigorievitch, each of whom assumes the blindness of his counterpart: “The Russian research departments probably don’t know what their own people are doing,” Sandmeyer claims, and Grigorievitch echoes him, “They don’t know a thing about us” （5）. To the extent that both happen to be wrong they seem a parody of second-rate minds guessing at what lies beyond them. Hoffmann and Schneider need these men for their organizations and equipment—the two visionaries cannot transcend earth and its days and nights for “the eternal sunshine of space” （3） without them—but such utility has limits.

The quest begins in the sleep of a volcano forming an island in the center of the Pacific, Earth’s largest ocean; Hoffmann is associated with its mountain peak. Schneider, on the other hand, is introduced standing beside Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on earth, lying in the middle of its largest continent. The two landscapes form mirror images, suggestive of the ascents and descents shaping the following narrative. These images fuse in the image of the iceberg at the end of the Prologue, a floating mountain with one-ninth of its mass breaking the waves and eight-ninths of its frozen waters submerged.

Between them Schneider and Hoffmann exemplify reactions to the appearance of the Overlords, ranging from the futility Schneider feels to the assent Hoffmann brings as they confront the supersession of human achievement as “nothing now” and the expectation of being “no longer alone” （7）. The cleavage seems healed. A visionary, who has needed the help of a blind assistant, descends and ascends to accomplish a quest that results in the abrogation of human effort, human isolation, and human time. In such an abrogation opposites join. This is the pattern structuring the novel in its several subplots.

The oldest section of the novel dealing with the quest of Stormgren has the pattern twice. Several of Clarke's additions clarified the structure, but it was already present in the novella. Stormgren’s quest, of which he is at first hardly aware, begins when he is in his chilly office at the top of the United Nations Building considering whether he ought to work so high above the people. Initially four men aid him, all of whom suffer from various limitations. Van Ryberg, while inventive in his various theories, is “not the man to take” （45） Stormgren’s role when he is gone. Wainwright, who accuses other men of blindness, cannot see the Overlords （14）; but he stirs the desire to see them in Stormgren, so that feelings of his own finitude rise with an evening meteor （26）. The Welshman, who suggests that “instruments could be devised” （45） to detect Karellen, is blind. Even Joe, “an overgrown baby” （36）, puts his finger “on the one weak spot in the Overlords’ rule” （33） and shakes Stormgren out of his passivity. Waking in his captors’ mine after their sleight of hand, Stormgren later escapes through the Overlords’ control of personal time and returns to his tower rejuvenated with the idea that a quest to see the alien is possible.

To fulfill this quest he descends twice to see Duval—whose name means of the valley—in the basement of the United Nations, hoping the scientist can construct an instrument to detect Karellen. To Duval the request presents “a very pretty problem” that appeals to his pragmatism （47）. To Stormgren success means the end of human isolation, for humans and the Overlords can “go together into the future”; in his personal isolation success means that “Karellen had trusted him” with “affection” and will someday “stand beside the grave of the first man ever to be his friend” （60）. He is like the dog Fey to Jeffrey Greggson later in the novel—and in neither case does a reunion occur. Earth no longer exists when Karellen salutes those he had known （216）. Notwithstanding Stormgren’s satisfaction, we must wonder how successful his quest has been.

The next quest is Jean’s, although she may be the character least aware of the quest she initiates. Nor does she impress the reader as a visionary; the novel follows the other quests closely, but Jean is shown mainly through the eyes of George Greggson, rather as Karellen is shown through the eyes of various humans. Though George seems more of a protagonist than she because of the thematic reason that moves him to the center of the novel, it is she, rather than he, who undergoes the pattern of the quest.

When introduced, Jean is coming down to Boyce’s party in George’s flyer, the Meteor, not out of any joy at Boyce’s marriage （she is rather catty through most of the affair）, but out of an interest in George—a successful interest as long as she does not tell him of previous psychic episodes “and perhaps scare him away” （102）. Her other reason for coming, the séance that Boyce has arranged with her connivance （92）, is less immediate; and the séance will not succeed unless they surrender to the apparently random motion of the plate across the hypnotic board. She is “flushed and excited” （94）, perhaps “credulous” （93）, drawn by what George regards as a “naïve and uncritical wonder” （148） like that of a child. But he nods off （96）, and at the crucial question, whose answer is not open to her, she also seems asleep and faints （97）. The séance is secondary to her contact with George, which they confirm in the flyer.

George initiates her second quest by proposing that they move to New Athens, despite its primitivism and the odd interest of its founders in time （145）, upon an isolated island in the Pacific. Though the founders of New Athens are concerned with the human future, their plan seems regressive to her, but she agrees to move if the children love it （140）. This part of the quest is fully realized through Jeffrey’s fascination with the sea （147）. When he is saved from the tsunami she takes a more active role, going to the psychologist with her own psychic experiences in mind. The children’s dreams and the “strange syncopation” （171） of Jennifer’s rattle （another experiment in time） wake Jean to the discovery of her children’s separation, so it is she, weeks later, who realizes when the random moment of the destruction of New Athens has arrived. George, who has helped bring her to this point, who was necessary to the conception of the children, is allowed only enough time for “a brief astonishment” before the island ascends atop its nuclear explosion （186）. It becomes the volcano that lay quiescent at the beginning of the novel.

Jan passes through this pattern four times, first when he descends from the roof at Boyce’s after he has seen the significant meteor （Hollow 74–76） to ask the all-important question at the séance, receive its answer with Jean’s unconscious help, and visit the Royal Astronomical Society, set on the top floor of the Science Center by “some humorous civil servant” （105）, to interpret the answer. In the second quest he consults Sullivan, as Stormgren had resorted to Duval, and sees another meteor in a luminous fish （114）. With the pattern in mind, Sullivan’s remark, “Aren’t you going in the wrong direction?” （116） must seem misplaced: Jan must descend in order to ascend, hibernating （129） in the belly of the whale and suffering the distortion of time of a relativistic speed. The third time, he descends to the Overlords’ planet, a clearly underworld experience: “If a man from medieval times could have seen this red-lit city, and the beings moving through it, he would certainly have believed himself in Hell” （191）. Several commentators have explored this infernal imagery, especially Samuelson （199–202）, Huntington （217）, and Goldman （197–206）; for our purposes, however, it is indifferent to the pattern whether the descent be to water or fire, and we may see in this fact, as often in the novel, a union of opposites that overarches its particulars. After enduring this place of specialization （192） and the “single giant eye” （194）, he is brought to the surface to see, with his human eyes and senses, the integrative vision of the mountain-eye-volcano-cyclone, or whatever it is, and to interpret it for the Overlords, who cannot see as he can （197）. Finally, he descends with them to the earth transformed, becomes as a child again “on a vast and empty plain” with a great parental voice booming out above （208）, and accepts their help to sit in their place, to climb “into the great chair” （211）, to see the end, and like the people of New Athens to rise upon the detonation of the planet. It is clearly in the subplot of Jan that the pattern receives its fullest elaboration.

The quest is also at work in the children. A minor version is Jeffrey’s adventure on Sparta, an extinct volcano （138） which offers physical, pragmatic daring in contrast to the intellect of New Athens. Significantly, it is a fairyland （149）—just as his dog is named Fey, which by a folk-etymology has been associated with fairies, whereas its actual meaning designates one about to die. When he sees the ocean peel from the shore, its treasures revealed, and rushes out “eager to see what wonders would be uncovered next” （150）, the Overlords rescue him. He must close his eyes not to see a boulder fused, though his feet feel the heat. The full descent for the children, the descent which all the others of the novel prepare and interpret, proceeds through the dreams with their odd time-distortions; the ascent is the mountains and the other visions they see in the dreams. Their ascent in the last chapters, after the dance and stasis, simply makes the outward sign of the interior vision the dreams hint at; their faces “emptier than the faces of the dead” （200）, that vision is necessarily opaque to us. Towards the end of this paper we can offer the outline of a reading of it.

II

An important result of this analysis is its clarification that there are only two kinds of characters in the novel: the visionaries, who despite their detachments are capable of insight and breakthrough; and their helpers, the specialists, who cannot integrate knowledge without them and who frequently remain ignorant of the insights they themselves have prepared. Hoffmann and Schneider are kept by the superpowers in an isolation they do not seem to regret. Stormgren’s detachment is emphatic as the novel opens; with his wife dead and his children grown, his connection to humanity has weakened （25）. Jean is a special case, given her marriage, but her interest in psychic possibilities may stem from a need to feel connected, a need sharpened by the extrasensory apprehensions she receives from her unconceived children. In any case, the marriage diminishes to simple fondness （162）; George does not seem to answer any passion in her. Jan too is isolated from others. His first love-affair has come to nothing; the serious detachment of incomprehension, of not being able to “imagine what had gone wrong,” preoccupies him when his story opens （88）. Later he asks his sister Maia to admit that “we never had very strong ties” （123）. As for the children, long before breakthrough their concerns lie outside adult ken; Jennifer Anne is too young to say a word. And for all these visionaries—the rehabilitated Germans, the widower, the rejected lovers, the pre-pubescents—the breakthrough isolates them even further: it is a shearing asunder in loneliness （7）, a sunlight dying on the edge of a lake （58）, a sitting in a high chair, a standing with dead faces, a “seeking the union they could never achieve” （186）. Breakthrough does not humanly connect.

Passion is sublimated into the integrative insights received in the various quests; the greatest passion these characters experience seems to be the rejuvenation and new zest for discovery that follow their descents. Shortly before he sights the ships, Hoffmann’s mind returns to the Schneider he knew in his youth （3）, and his feet “unconsciously … accelerated to the rhythm” of dance music （6）. We have noted Stormgren’s renewal and the renewal implicit in Jean’s betrothal. Jan returns to London, which he has not visited since childhood, feeling “a schoolboy zest” （103）. The children, of course, are children and become indistinguishably embryonic. A part of these characters’ childlike recovery lies in their amused superiority to the specialists: the V-2 men feel it towards their intelligence adjuncts; Stormgren feels it towards Van Ryberg, Duval, and Joe; Jan feels it towards Boyce; the children feel it towards adults; and Jean feels it towards Rasheverak, so much that she must suppress her laughter at an incongruous image of the alien that suddenly occurs to her （78）. In order for childhood to end, the visionary must return to it. In every case life takes on a new shape and meaning, sharply contrasted to the quotidian experience of the other characters. After such peak experiences, however, they collapse to a state that lies beyond pessimism and optimism.

One further, minor point may be made about the visionaries: so many of their names begin with the letter J—Jan, Jean, Jennifer, and Jeffrey—and most of these names are cognates of John/Yohanan, the Lord is gracious. I appreciate Hull’s suggestion of the Janus nature of Jan （17）, but surely more apt is John of Patmos and the apocalyptic vision. Jennifer’s middle name, Anne, in Hebrew Hannah, is the element in Yohanan that means gracious. It is impossible not to sense in these names a knotted relation that has to do, from the viewpoint of the Overlords, with the gratuitous nature of breakthrough.

What can be said of those who help the visionaries? Clearly Duval, Sullivan, the Welshman, and Salomon are all capable as scientists and men of action, but in every case something is lacking. Duval and Sullivan are parodied by the dilettante Boyce, and the Welshman and Salomon by the nationalist Joe; the sectarianism of the latter group may be emphasized in Ruth Shoenberger who at the séance “had some objection to taking part, … which caused Benny to make obscurely sarcastic remarks about people who still took the Talmud seriously” （93）. Yet like a scholar Ruth takes impeccable notes. With his narrow program which the Overlords obviate so simply, Wainwright is another of this group. Duval and Sullivan, especially, lack flair: it seems curious that the one “had never made a greater mark in the world of science” （48） and that the other had not achieved the “fame that sends a scientist’s name safely down the centuries” （118）. None of them will enter the promised land （143, 184）. But since George best represents this kind of role among the human characters, it is important for the novel’s central concerns that most of the narrative in the middle of the book should be experienced from his point of view and not Jean’s.

Hull believes that the characters are hardly “memorable as individuals” （16）, yet an homme moyen sensuel like George is consistent and memorable as a type. For instance, like the intelligence agents, like Duval and Boyce, like Sullivan who is associated with the gigantic eye of Lucifer, like the blind Welshman who suggests detection devices to Stormgren, like Karellen whose insufficient instruments are handed over to Jan, George is connected with visual imagery, as a professional scenic designer cursing television （137–38）. The helpers seem imperfectly visual.

In the Golden Age which the Overlords inaugurate much of humanity seems to become this kind of character; there are “plenty of technologists, but few original workers” （71）. Because of “an enormous efflorescence of the descriptive sciences such as geology, botany, and observational astronomy,” earth is busy with “so many amateur scientists gathering facts for their own amusement—but … few theoreticians correlating these facts” （72）. In the arts a similar process is at work, which is the point of the satire on the epigones of New Athens: “There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really new works” （72）. Observation and competence are the salient qualities of the generation and of the character, intent upon the niceties of visual discrimination, incapable of gestalt perception.

The confidence that flows from such limitations—even the blind man emanates reserves of power in his “piercing gray eyes” （37）—may affect what seems in some cases a sexual nonchalance. The Sullivans and Shoenbergers seem comfortably married; though Boyce and George have played the field, and George continues to do so, a part of the narrative is devoted to their settling into a matrimonial norm. The novel hardly suggests that they enjoy any startling romantic love; only Jan, a visionary, suffers from that, and the voice of the novel which can rise to solemnity at the children’s transfiguration is content to call his condition “the romantic illusion” （88）, a view that concurs in the worldly wisdom of the older George. Some characters, like Duval or the Welshman or Wainwright or Van Ryberg, may or may not be married; it is a matter of indifference to the narrative. But that indifference is the very point: they are sexually comfortable, capable, unremarkable. Nothing startlingly creative comes of their relations. In Jean’s clinical observation that males are “fundamentally polygamous” （76）, we see that these relations lack intensity. Sexual love supports neither passion nor meaning. Parallel to this passionlessness is a further lack: the helpers encountered by the visionaries in their descents cannot themselves descend to any depths, nor can they ascend; they are static. Boyce would have liked to have visited Sullivan “if it weren’t for his claustrophobia” （116）. The helpers inhabit a middle ground, risking little hurt.

To consider this lack in them is also to realize that, though very much about family relations, the novel has a dearth of women. Jean and Maia, the only significant ones, have a certain impact, but the impact of a mother rather than a lover. George ceases to see Jean as a lover rather soon in the novel. As for Maia, though we do not hear of children in her marriage, she certainly seems a mother towards Boyce, whom we must regard as boyish. She does not seem insubstantial, a Hindu Maya （Hull 27）; she seems more akin to the Greek Maia （whose name means mother or grandmother or nurse or midwife）, the goddess whose son Hermes, according to the Homeric hymn, stole the famous cattle herd of Apollo by drawing them into a cave （Shelley 680–99）. The myth is a model of the quest of the novel. Maia and Jean, whose maiden name Morrel means nightshade or black mare, then represent a rich but passive Mother Earth, which gives up its children in the powerful birth at the end of the novel: “There was nothing left of Earth: they had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them” （215）. To awake to such a potential the Mother needs the mediation of a man, any man; the person is a matter of indifference. Perhaps the novel shows “a sharing union which retains respect for free, informed choice” to be better than a “cold, selfish isolation” （Hull 30）, but a union of that sort does not seem possible. So it is for mediation that Jean needs George, whose name means farmer or, more precisely, worker of the earth, to stir her potentials, of which she is vaguely conscious. Though the meteor seems to rise, it in fact falls through the air to earth and points the downward path. George, like all those other helpers who sire the visionary, serves his purpose, but that is little consolation. So little contact is made that both parents might say with Karellen, “We are the midwives. But we ourselves are barren” （173）.

The Overlords are the main example of this character. We know very little about them, however, even by the end of the novel, and much of our knowledge is negative: they are “neither mammals, insects, nor reptiles” （79）, neither fish nor flesh nor fowl. Even their sexuality remains a blank, though the male pronoun is applied to them （Menger 97）. It is Karellen, however, who uses the image of the sterile midwife, and nearly all the characters who have the role of midwife are male. With “no fear of gravity” （193）, not even an indication that the gravity of earth has any ill effects on them, the Overlords have no fear of flying or of falling; sex has no terrors: it is nonexistent. They are comfortable.

The demonic imagery seems connected to a number of qualities. Like the other helpers they are intensely specialized and on their adopted planet dwell underground, apparently incapable of ascent. But they are also incapable of descent in that they do not seem to sleep （26）. This eternal vigilance is related to their perfect memory which implies total recall; they have no unconscious lying irretrievable to conscious control, liable to surprise them at random moments. Their incomprehension of reflex actions is a part of this lack of an unconscious （194）, also symbolized, as is their sterility, by the absence of an ocean on their planet （126）; lacking reflexes they also lack the surprise of a body. This unqualified consciousness, the “scholarship and virtuosity” and “over-whelming intellectual power” （15） which they display, are part of the Satanic promise in the discrimination of good and evil that precedes Deity; the snake, however, is left in the dust, as is Karellen, who remains in the isolation of his “vast and labyrinthine mind” （216）. Those immense eyes that must be shielded with sunglasses （131） symbolize an intelligence limited to the analytic.

Those large, shaded eyes also suggest the figure who may have been most decisive in Clarke's characterization of the Overlords. In the Apology Socrates compares himself to a gadfly who rouses the lazy horse of the State from its sleep. He is a myops, that is to say “one that closes its eyes,” and he stings into enlightenment those who encounter him （30e）. The dialogues frequently allude to his ugliness. But the most extended self-characterization he makes is in the Theaetetos, where he points out that his mother Phaenerete was “a noble, sturdy midwife” （149a）. Midwives aid at births and make marriages; they are skillful, with a hint of the awesome （149d）. And he is like them:

I have this in common with the midwives: I am sterile in regards to wisdom, and the reproach which many bring against me, that I question others but never reply myself about anything, because I am not wise, is true; the god forces me to act as a midwife, but forbids me to bear.

（150c）

The word for midwife that Socrates uses is maia. The self-deprecating form of the most typical intellectual of Western culture stands behind the sterile, myopic Overlords.

To understand them we must not ignore Rasheverak, Thanthalteresco, and Vindarten. It seems clear in their conversations that Rasheverak plays the role of Van Ryberg to Karellen as Stormgren. His name seems suggestive of the biophysicist Nicolas Rashevsky, to whom the novel alludes as “Rashavesky,” as it also seems to refer to the cyberneticist Wiener as “Weiner” （144）. Through the nineteen-forties Rashevsky’s works, Mathematical Theory of Human Relations, Mathematical Biophysics, and Mathematical Biology of Social Behavior, presented simplified mathematical models of phenomena such as “the formation of closed social classes, the interaction of military and economic factors in international relations, ‘individualistic’ and ‘collectivistic’ tendencies, patterns of social influence, and many others,” although Abraham Kaplan argues that these treatments were “so idealized as almost to lack all purchase on reality” （278）. In an oblique manner the limitations of Rasheverak imply a criticism of the dream represented in science fiction by Asimovean psychohistory. Thanthalteresco’s name suggests death and transfiguration, with that odd suffix echoing the arabesque or picturesque or the fresco; we cannot quite take him seriously. Vindarten may recall the rigor of Latin law, but perhaps more obviously has to do with wind, swiftness, and art, in his agility at languages. But Karellen’s name teases us the most, referring clearly to a carillon, parallel to that voice calling out over Jan in his dreams. A Christmas carol may also lie in his name; but with a slight change of accent the name becomes Carolyn—and the name of George’s mistress is Carolle （162）. In this series are combined an analytic treatment of human relations, death and change and whimsy, rigor and speed and language, the ringing of bells from a height, and a sexual ambiguity.

But if the Overlords are sexually ambiguous, it should come as no surprise that they are not only helpers but visionaries also. Coming from Carina in the constellation Argo, they are as surely as the Argonauts upon a quest. They descend upon earth and at the end ascend from it. The emissaries, Rasheverak, Thanthalteresco, and Vindarten, go to the humans for help, as Karellen must depend upon Stormgren. They suffer distortions of time: Vindarten must speak more slowly than his custom （190）, as must all the Overlords （98）, and all the aliens in their mission to earth must isolate themselves from their society since “the Relativity time-dilation effect worked both ways” （197）. Even their sterility is qualified slightly by Karellen’s remark that they “till the field” （204）. Karellen may not be rejuvenated at the end of the novel, but his sense of meaning is affirmed. He has moved beyond intellect into passion when oppressed by “a sadness that no logic could dispel” （215）, a further indication of Slusser’s claim that Karellen has been “humanized” （52）, that in him the human has been retrieved as lament （8–9）. As Wolfe saw, in his discussion of iconic images such as the alien, they “contain in themselves the dynamic tensions between known and unknown” （16）. Clarke's Overlords are an example of that pattern as they fuse in one complex figure both the visionary and the midwife, the mother and the father. Karellen is Hermes, the psychopompos trickster and “shepherd of thin dreams” （Shelley 680）, who brings the herd of the human race （in Greggson we may see Gregory, to awaken, or grex, the herd） back into the cave so that the new words, the prophetic words, may ring out. And he is Apollo, solar deity albeit fallen, who at the end of the hymn to Hermes exchanges gifts with that chthonic power （Shelley 697–99）. His power and elusiveness come from his comprehensive nature.

The corollary to the double role of the Overlord as midwife and visionary is the double role of Jean as visionary and midwife. The children that she bears have an odd relation to her, being potent in her life before their conception: her mind has been a mere “channel that, if only for a moment, let through knowledge which no one alive at that time could possess” （172）. The narrator emphasizes that the children will not belong to any parent; the orphaning to the parents is “a threat and a terror” （174）. Karellen reminds Jan, “You are not watching human children” （200）. The only mother seen from a child’s perspective, Jan’s, cannot be told of his leaving because “she would get hysterical, and I couldn’t face that” （121）. So Jean is incidental to the real life of the children, as though their conception were outside both her ken and her body; it is an implicit point that becomes explicit four years after Clarke's novel in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. The double role of midwife and visionary makes Jean difficult to read. She and Karellen, the two comprehensive characters, mirror each other’s duality.

There is some evidence in Clarke's alterations to “Guardian Angel,” the seed or first attempt towards its suggestive offspring, that he recognized these patterns of plot and character. Samuelson believes that the changes merely “removed some poor repartee, added more background, and diminished slightly the dependence on melodramatic effect” （233）. But more was involved: the relation of novella and novel that Goldman has argued is more dynamic （207）. The Prologue draws a clear line between visionary and midwife, doubling the pattern emphatically. The new first paragraph of Part I underlines Stormgren’s detachment （11）, reinforced in the new first paragraph of the third chapter, with further characterization of his widowhood （24）. Wainwright’s charge of blindness is new （14）. A long addition on the treatment that the Overlords accord South Africa culminates in a reversal of expectations （17）, materials important to the union of opposites the novel presents. Karellen’s dismissal of Lord Acton’s comment on power illustrates his own limitations as midwife （21–22）.

In the episode of the kidnap, Stormgren hopes that his captors can “uncover something new” （38）, a hope answered at the end of the sequence when “the words of his interrogator passed again through his memory” （45）. The description of Karellen’s probe is altered to “a small, featureless sphere” hovering “at eye-level,” adding to the optical imagery （42）. Stormgren’s escaping “quite forty years younger” was also added （43）. All of these details are small and cumulative.

But the episode with Duval was probably decisive for Clarke's purpose. Duval’s pointing out, “Anyway, it worked” （54）, underscores his technological concern; and a long addition epitomizes the plight of the midwife, from the amused perspective of the visionary:

Stormgren wondered why it was that a man like Duval—whose mind was incomparably more brilliant than his own—had never made a greater mark in the world of science. He remembered an unkind and probably inaccurate comment of a friend in the U.S. State Department. “The French produce the best second-raters in the world.”

（48）

It appears to have been important for the thematics of the novel to develop the character of the midwife, and we may see in these additions a preparation for that character to move into its center.

III

The novel works not only through the pattern of the quest and the relation of visionary and midwife. Coordinated with these structures of descent and ascent and of isolation and sterility is a complex of images amplifying them. One of these images, the tension between sight and blindness, has been treated at length by Hull in her catalogue of those uneasy eyes growing larger until the earth shines out like Emerson’s transparent eyeball （24–25）; we have seen how those eyes are associated with the midwives. They also look towards the images of sleep and waking and towards the oceanic images that are contrasted to barrenness and to the island.

To sleep is to arrive at insight. Karellen fails to sleep, but Stormgren, Jean, Jan, and the children must sleep in order to descend and to see; the midwives keep their eyes open in order to see minutiae. In Jennifer’s sleep especially—“There was no other word to describe the state she had entered,” the narrator says, emphasizing the metaphoric, inadequate nature of the language—there lay “a sense of latent power so terrifying that Jean could no longer bear to enter the nursery” （175）. The little girl, “lately known as the Poppet,” lying in her pupa-stage of transformation will not open her eyes again, “for sight was now as superfluous to her as to the many-sensed creatures of the lightless ocean depths” （171）. Only midwives, like the squid Lucifer, need to evolve eyes for the abyss.

This ocean which fascinates Jeffrey and in which the children experience breakthrough signifies life and unity in addition to the unconscious. In the submarine Jan hears “a steady background, into which all individual sounds had blended … as if he stood in the center of a forest that teemed with life—except that there he would have recognized some of the individual voices” （113）. Though unfamiliar and undifferentiated, the ocean is not placid: it is a “delirium” （125） or a “nightmare” （128） when human understanding reconstructs it, revealing “battles … fought in the endless night of the ocean depths, where the sperm whales hunted for their food” （125）. It is a battle within the purely unknown, perhaps only known through the representation as an allegory of visionary and midwife, for the squid with its “great, expressionless eyes … stared at its destroyer [the whale that will bear Jan]—though, in all probability, neither creature could see the other in the darkness of the abyss” （125）. It is not a life or a unity or a battle in which human life can survive. When the young boy stands with “eyes tightly closed, … into his mind was flooding knowledge—from somewhere or somewhen—which would overwhelm and destroy the half-formed creature who had been Jeffrey” （176）. But if the ocean dries away, all its alien life dies, as it does when revealed to the analytic eye during the tsunami and as it has in the barren landscape of the Overlord planet.

The ocean expresses the islands’ isolation by surrounding them; in the plans for New Athens “the ocean meant nothing as a physical barrier, but it still gave a sense of isolation” （143）. In this aspect it is the earth under the ocean, the volcanic earth of “the burning darkness” （149）, which contains disparate phenomena united in a new, oxymoronic creation. Karellen refers to this imagery indirectly when he compares total breakthrough to a chain reaction （172）, prefiguring the destruction and elevation of New Athens. Remarkably, in this imagery even a midwife may be made new. George is suffering a volcanic disturbance in his decision to go to New Athens （137–38）; and Karellen, in that duality we have seen, is identified by Duval as “a kink like the autograph of a mild earthquake” （54）. But the breakthrough of this imagery, the land apocalyptically thrusting through ocean, is destructive; no midwife survives it. In this language humans are “seeking the union they could never achieve,” and the isolated island meets the dawn shattered （186）.

Karellen makes the most explicit use of the ocean and island imagery:

Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but their individuality would be gone.

（172）

The passage may sound reminiscent of the passage in Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” to which Hemingway in 1940 was indebted for the title For Whom the Bell Tolls. The more significant source, however, is Matthew Arnold’s “To Marguerite. Continued,” which opens with these words:

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

（182）

The isolated islands feel “a longing like despair” in “their furthest caverns,” insisting they were once “Part of a single continent!” （182）. But the last stanza confirms their isolation:

Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

（182）

The main difference between this formulation and the images of the novel is that the fires in the poem are damped down; in Childhood’s End they erupt and destroy.

The inadequacy, unfocused lack of intensity, and vacillation lying behind these sexual failures may be discovered in “A Farewell,” a lyric that occurs in the sequence Switzerland earlier than the poem we have just considered:

This heart, I know,
To be long loved was never framed;
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.
And women—things that live and move
Mined by the fever of the soul—
They seek to find in those they love
Some strength, and promise of control.
They ask not kindness, gentle ways—
These they themselves have tried and known;
They ask a soul which never sways
With the blind gusts that shake their own.

（178）

The protagonist recognizes a weakness and passivity in himself which the woman rejects because she suffers from it herself. To rephrase the confession, the lover fails because he regards himself as too much like a woman. He has longed for a “trenchant force, / And will like a dividing spear” （178）, which always eludes him. His only hope for a union lies in gaining, “life past, / Clear prospect o’er our being’s whole” （179）. The hope is severely qualified. Only when dead may the lovers “be brought near, / And greet across infinity” （180）. The only love possible, in “Isolation. To Marguerite,” belongs to happier men who do not realize how isolated they are:

For they, at least,
Have dream’d two human hearts
might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end
Prolong’d; nor knew, although not less
Alone than thou, their loneliness.

（181）

To these comfortable souls, like Boyce and Duval, Karellen does not belong insofar as the alien, like the poet, is quite aware of his separation. Descending from his “remote and spheréd course / To haunt the place where passions reign—” but not to partake in them, he receives the order at the end of the novel, which is the lament of the poem, “Back to thy solitude again!” （181）.

The sexual dysfunction that the lyric sequence represents surrounds the imagery Karellen uses and the basic relations of the characters, especially George and Jean. Their everyday life may be reminiscent of that of the parents in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” which also shares with Childhood’s End two children’s desertion of their parents, the earth, and three-dimensional space for an oceanic experience （Padgett 253–56）. In that story the father is “a youngish, middle-aged man with gray-shot hair and a thinnish, prim-mouthed face” （230）, neither fish nor fowl, whom the story introduces with his wife at ritual martinis and chit-chat, a middle-class Thin Man and Nora. At the end of the story the ringing of the telephone suggests their marital distance （260）. Quite possibly the story showed Clarke a way to deal with the theme.

The closest we come to a positive apprehension of the unity the children enjoy is in the dream Jeffrey reports: “the distortion of the time scale” （166） in his vision of the apparent volcanoes, initiating breakthrough; the acceleration of time in the pulsating variable （167）; the freezing of time at the Pillars of the Dawn in the center of the Universe （168）, a phrase that recalls Stormgren’s perception before his descent of “a dawn frozen in the act of breaking” （25）; the geometric life of Hexanerax 2, on a flat plane of two-dimensions （168–69）; and finally the crystalline life in a time neither cyclic nor progressive, but “every moment … unique” （169）. So time accelerates, stops, and proceeds in a direction unknown to organic life, as in the novel time has frequently taken another direction. Not only is this Golden Age at the end of history rather than the beginning, and not only have the Overlords, descending for this Apocalypse, been remembered as a part of the Genesis, but time seems to run backwards in the ages of the visionaries as we move from widower to mother to adolescent to pre-pubescent and baby. The materials of life as we know it, the images of mountain and ocean, fire and ice, and the ages, exist in this vision but not as we would order them or at least as we ever could order them. They seem, in fact, materials of expression rather than what is expressed. The dreams of the children employ the union of opposites, a motif we have already noted in the work: “This is the primordial condition of things, and at the same time a most ideal achievement, because it is the union of elements eternally opposed. Conflict comes to rest, and everything is still or once again the original state of indistinguishable harmony” （Jung, The Symbolic Life 119）. This union is present in its purest form, the male-female polarity, in the marriage of Maia and Jan’s parents: “Mrs. Rodericks, who was coal black, had been born in Scotland, whereas her expatriate and blond husband had spent almost all his life in Haiti” （87–88）. What is united in this primordial state, however, seems compacted as a dangerous charge of energy （Jung, Psychological Types 202）. Conscious human life approaches it only to retreat, as Jean retreats from the latent power of Jennifer’s sleep, for it threatens transformation. This mythic energy represented by so many unions of opposites ensures that the climax of the novel is not merely melodramatic. From the first doubling of the Prologue the explosion of the planet at the end seems, in retrospect, inevitable.

Is that which ascends in the children human? Does the primordial state heal the isolation of the midwives? Although the text says that the Overmind has “drawn into its being all that the human race had ever achieved” （203）, the claim lies in the middle of an extended indirect discourse passing through Jan’s mind; he may be a visionary, with true visions—but the problem is whether such a vision can heal our inabilities to see or feel in union. I disagree with Hollow that “we identify … strongly with the Overmind” （85）. Recently Beatie has emphasized the incomprehensibility of that being. All that we know of it, as I have argued, is the way by which we try to conceive it. The novel in its plot, characters, and images offers little hope that humanity, in will or in works, can be lifted up: that which is lifted up is only a projection of health.

We are left with Karellen, the character in whom the others converge and to whom the reader has been moving, changing the unknown into the known, as Wolfe says, until thoroughly identified in him. He is looking up at that ascent:

Far off were the mountains, where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen. There the sun still walked. … And they could only watch and wonder; they could never scale those heights.

（215）

It is the same vision with which Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” concludes, in a passage rich with the union of opposites:

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun.

（534–35）

This represents the same hopeless search for the primordial energy that inspired an early passage in Arnold’s Switzerland: he looks up at the Alps to “the stir of forces / Whence issued the world” （177）. In each instance the energy remains inaccessible.

So like Karellen we are left. But if it is difficult to read the signs of breakthrough in relation to anything we know, the reason for our difficulty is painfully clear, insofar as we are midwives. The midwives are the main protagonists of the novel, to whom the narrative returns with increasing frequency, culminating in Karellen. In them, despite the novel’s often bland manner, indeed through it, a fear of undistinguished, undramatic, passionless failure is revealed. Since breakthrough is promised, but excluded from our means, instead of achieved vision the book concerns that Anglo projection of the French as “the best second-raters in the world”: barren, immature, unresponsive, shallow, merely intellectual, comfortable, incapable of contact, impotent. This is the area the book approaches repeatedly and transforms into a modicum of dignity in the ambiguous, self-deprecating figure of Karellen, “only a civil servant” （19）. Clarke had opportunity to contemplate such a fate as an auditor in HM Exchequer and as an assistant editor of that compendium of specializations, Physics Abstracts （Clarke, Ascent to Orbit 19, 117–19）. Although he has often seemed superbly confident of his abilities, we may recognize in him a man incapable of Heinlein’s convictions or of Asimov’s carefree productivity, a man developing his best work by inches, over years, a man elaborating his dreams through complex variations: the early Lion of Comarre foreshadowing so much in his fiction; the history of Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars; “Guardian Angel” and Childhood’s End, of course; “The Sentinel” and the several variations of 2001: A Space Odyssey; and recently The Songs of Distant Earth are all cases in point. Any ease of inspiration, any breakthrough, may seem distant in such an experience.

And so Childhood’s End remains a novel of lament, a lament sustained and prolonged through several quests and characters, a lament of the so human midwives isolated from each other and from their own ends.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Poetical Works. Ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry. London: Oxford UP, 1950.

Beatie, Bruce A. “Arthur C. Clarke and the Alien Encounter: The Background of Childhood’s End.” Extrapolation 30 （1989）: 53–69.

Clarke, Arthur C. Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984.

———. Childhood’s End. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1953.

———. “Guardian Angel.” The Sentinel. New York: Berkley Books, 1986. 39–81.

Goldman, Stephen H. “Immortal Man and Mortal Overlord: The Case for Intertextuality.” Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985. 193–208.

Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

Hull, Elizabeth Anne. “Fire and Ice: The Ironic Imagery of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood’s End.” Extrapolation 24 （1983）: 13–32.

Huntington, John. “From Man to Overmind: Arthur C. Clarke's Myth of Progress.” Olander and Greenberg 211–22.

Jung, C. G. Psychological Types. Trans. H. G. Baynes and R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

———. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

Kaplan, Abraham. “Sociology Learns the Language of Mathematics: Some Recent Studies Analyzed.” Commentary 14 （September 1952）: 274–84.

Kuttner, Henry. See Padgett, Lewis.

Menger, Lucy. “The Appeal of Childhood’s End.” Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction. Ed. Dick Riley. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. 87–108.

Moore, C. L. See Padgett, Lewis.

Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Taplinger, 1977.

Padgett, Lewis [Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore]. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Avon, 1971. 226–60.

Plato. Opera. Ed. John Burnet. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958.

Samuelson, David. “Childhood’s End: A Median Stage of Adolescence?” Olander and Greenberg 196–210.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and G. M. Matthews. London: Oxford UP, 1970.

Slusser, George Edgar. The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1978.

Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1979.