The 1961 novel that made Heinlein’s reputation beyond sf has earned annoyance, fascination, and awe—sometimes in different readers, sometimes simultaneously in the same reader. It was an unexpected performance for Heinlein. Unlike his earlier adult novels intended for magazine publication, it is not written in substantial episodes with obvious breaks for serial pauses. Nor is it like the tightly controlled juvenile novels, compact in length and tightly plotted around a series of cause and effect actions. Instead, it is very long, loosely structured to permit vast stretches of talk, and vividly scornful of sexual and religious taboos (though shy of physical description of taboo-violating activities). Many of Heinlein’s stories were written very rapidly, in a burst of inspiration; Stranger gestated for over a decade. The novel required extra effort at a time when its sale—let alone wide and continuing popularity—was uncertain. It evidently is a book Heinlein needed to write, one that utilized both his personal concerns and his considerable experience as a writer.
Never serialized, Stranger exists in two versions: the one abridged by Heinlein at his hardcover publisher’s request, to reduce the time spent talking about sex and religion, and the longer original manuscript published after his death. It’s the latter that we will be considering because it certainly is Heinlein’s preferred text. In its unfettered version, the story does seem to lurch and ramble, from a beginning that feels like a typical fast-moving sf adventure into what sometimes seems interminable pontification interrupted by discordant background summaries; the book’s form seems improvised, becoming whatever is needed at the moment. In practice, somehow, all this turns out to be more amusing than discomforting.
Reviewers and critics have had difficulty coping with Stranger, from early opinions that it is an ill-constructed sf novel to later admiration of it as a profound philosophical statement. Both positions seem exaggerated. One interesting literary analysis, William H. Patterson, Jr., and Andrew Thornton’s The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land argues that the book is not really a novel but a satirical anatomy along the lines of Tristram Shandy. Nevertheless, Stranger does feel like a novel because the unruly masses of satirical conversation and description coalesce around a central character who remains the focus of readers’ attention. In form, thus, Stranger resembles a Bildungsroman, a narrative tracing a young person’s maturation. In the case of Stranger, the young person is Michael Valentine Smith, better known as Mike, and the action begins some time after his physical birth but during his emergence as a human being. After his parents, along with all the other members of the first expedition from Earth to Mars died/murdered each other/killed themselves, Mike was left as a helpless newborn baby but was raised by the native Martians as one of them: He grew up thinking like a Martian and living as much like one as his different physiology would permit. When he is brought back to Earth by the second expedition to Mars (its arrival delayed considerably by World War III), Mike is physically a young man but is mentally and physically unable to function in human society: He withdraws into a deathlike trance when confronted with serious emotional conflict. Thus he is especially vulnerable to external control, and his immense potential wealth tempts government officials to keep him from ever becoming conscious of himself as a rival for power.
Heinlein offers glimpses inside Mike’s consciousness to show how alien his perceptions are and how difficult it will be for him to leave that immobile state. In part, the alienness is communicated by Mike’s tentative grasp of colloquial English; for example, “How do you feel?” offers a baffling tangle of alternative interpretations. Mike thus falls into using more precise Martian terms such as “grok” that may baffle Earth humans. From context, readers soon can recognize that “to grok” means “to understand,” but further observation of Mike’s thinking expands that superficial definition to include “to thoroughly comprehend,” “to absorb sympathetically,” “to extend oneself into,” “to drink,” “to deeply love” (or “hate”), etc. Fortunately, nurse Gillian Boardman is curious enough to sneak into the hospital room where Mike is sequestered, then to try to talk with him and also to share a drink of water with him, though she has no idea that doing this makes her Mike’s “water brother,” another Martian concept that is much more profound than most Earth-raised humans are prepared to imagine since they don’t appreciate water as a rare and precious substance. Even more fortunately, Jill is inspired by her newsman boyfriend, Ben Caxton, to smuggle Mike out of the hospital. After their escape, Mike reveals part of what he has learned from the Martians when he innocently discorporates—kills or at least thinks out of existence—two government thugs who are menacing his water brother Jill. At this point, nevertheless, Mike still is essentially a vulnerable infant, likely to draw up into a fetal position and helplessly dependent on others for protection and social guidance.
The “other” who takes over Mike’s development—and dominates the book for many pages thereafter—is Jubal Harshaw, to whom Jill flees after Ben is kidnapped by government goons. “LL.B., M.D., Sc.D., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, and neo-pessimist philosopher,” Jubal knows how to do almost everything or can at least talk convincingly about it. Currently, he earns money as a writer in all genres and media, an apparently lucrative occupation since he lives in a private estate with two male assistants and three beautiful female secretaries. It is a determinedly unconventional lifestyle, keeping everything that makes Jubal comfortable and discarding everything else.
Over the next few hundred pages, while manipulating official protocol to keep Mike safe, Jubal demonstrates why he is a good mentor for the infant-man. He describes himself as a writer of “trash” and refuses to look at a piece once he’s finished dictating it. Nevertheless, when he finished dictating one sentimental yarn about a little lost kitten wandering about on Christmas Eve both he and the secretary are weeping, “both bathed in a catharsis of schmaltz,” He is not simply a calculating hack, exploiting the reading public; instead he shares the values he volubly mocks. He displays a working awareness that Trash and Truth may not be mutually exclusive terms, not the last time that Stranger demonstrates the compatibility of apparent opposites.
It also is true that Jubal is responsible for creating a family—a group of humans that sustains him practically and emotionally. The flesh and blood daughters he reared have settled into conventional, respectable lifestyles and consequently have little use for him. When he speaks of his “family,” he means the people he has gathered to live with him—or, as in the cases of Jill and Mike, ones who have sought him out and earned his protection. An outsider observes their operation as “a pleasant family picnic, made easy by Jubal’s gift for warm informality.” Mike, with his innocent willingness to welcome anyone as a water brother, can learn from this example.
One limitation, despite Jubal’s general tolerance, is his reluctance to involve himself very far outside his comfortable enclave. As he says, “All I want is to live my own lazy, useless life, sleep in my own bed—and not be bothered!” This appears ironic since Jubal proclaims it after heroic exertion on Mike’s behalf, but that was a personal, individual effort. The range of sensitivity that lets Jubal appreciate different aspects of a single person also keeps him from having faith in any one more-than-individual value. The fact that he can convince—and unconvince—himself of almost anything once he starts talking makes him reluctant to commit to any big, long-term cause. His hesitation is demonstrated by his attitude toward religion. When Mike insists on visiting a church of the folksy, apparently commercially contrived Fosterite religion, Jubal reveals that his parents wanted him to be a preacher and that he believes he could have been a successful evangelist “with just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance.... But I lacked the necessary confidence in my own infallibility; I could never be a prophet ... just a critic—which is a poor thing at best, a sort of fourth-rate prophet suffering from delusions of gender.” In short, Jubal’s appreciation of how thoroughly individual experience is subjective keeps him from recognizing that there might be anything larger than human that would deserve profound belief or sustained action.
Jubal dominates a large portion of Stranger, by the sheer mass of his provocative critical pronouncements, and every time he reappears in the novel’s later pages he claims special respect. After all, he is Mike’s surrogate father, his first human teacher. He is exactly the person Mike needs early in his life, to protect him and to serve as an example, so that Mike has the opportunity to observe a complicated, confident man in action, to appreciate his considerable virtues but also to recognize his shortcomings—and then to leave, when the young man must continue his own development. This happens as Mike discovers the wonderful possibilities of religion and sex, areas of human experience for which Jubal mistakenly considers himself too well-informed or too old.
Mike’s apprenticeship in religion and sex actually take place largely simultaneously, his discoveries in one field reinforcing his understanding of the other.
For a jaded outsider like Jubal, the Fosterite church is a sham, a commercial venture created simply to fleece the rubes. Mike, who can approach the emotional hoopla of a Fosterite service with an innocently open mind, recognizes the truth under the superficial phoniness. He can see that shared religious ecstasy is a good thing because it leads to “a growing-closer.” Even though Bishop Digby, the current church head, is an obnoxious fraud whom Mike inconspicuously discorporates, the religion itself reveals a genuine human need and accomplishment that he must ponder quietly while Jubal scoffs loudly and long. As Mike ponders the concept of “church” alone at night, he encounters one of his water brothers. When conversation leads to sex and they have “merged, grokking together,” Mike “softly and triumphantly” states, “Thou art God,” and she exclaims the same at the moment of orgasm.
This act of sex thus confirms a Martian concept whose English translation is sometimes pooh-poohed by human authority figures as too simple-minded and naïve. Several other points about this scene are worth noting. For one thing, while Mike and his partner are chatting, Mike shows how his orientation has changed by correcting himself after referring to “my people—the Martians, I mean; I grok now that you are my people.” Readers also should note that Mike’s sexual partner remains anonymous at this point. It’s safe to assume that the person is female; homosexual behavior is acceptable in Heinlein’s later fiction, but it’s never encouraged. Beyond that, like the people in Jubal’s family at the time, readers might assume that Jill must be the one—but, as the story later reveals, that’s not necessarily true. Earlier, each woman Mike innocently kissed had been aroused not because he was signaling that he wanted to have sex with her but because he gave his full attention to each kiss: He made each of them feel special. Yet, in apparent contradiction, this scene demonstrates that sex/grokking/growing-closer is an escape from individual personality, so that Mike feels himself “almost ready to discorporate” as he hears the reaffirmation of their shared Godhood.
To make sense of what he is experiencing, Mike must go out into the world. Accompanied by Jill, he becomes a stage magician in a traveling carnival. His Martian education lets him really do things that Earthborn illusionists must fake, but he isn’t a success as a performer. As the carny barker who fires Mike explains, he doesn’t have a feel for what a chump in the crowd wants: “He wants ... Mystery! He wants to think that the world is a romantic place when he knows damn well it ain’t.” Ironically, the barker recommends that Mike learn how an ordinary human chump thinks by going out and becoming one—essentially what Mike is attempting. He can’t actually unmake himself and become a gullible, ordinary human; however, he can learn that all people, even the Man from Mars, are painfully conscious of their limitations but yearn for something more: “Mystery!”
He discovers an apostle of mystery among one of the carny folk whom it would be easy to dismiss on first glance as a freak: Patty the tattooed lady. Besides being sexually attractive and willing, Patty joins Mike and Jill because she senses that they are looking for the same thing as Fosterite seekers. It turns out that she knew Foster personally and can testify to his sincerity. She compares him to Mike, explaining that Foster also “had been really and truly a man while he was on Earth, but had been also and always had been, an archangel, even though he had not known it himself.” The comparison of Foster—and, by extension now, Mike—to Jesus becomes pervasive as the story continues.
So sex and religion merge again, as Patty feels “overpowering religious ecstasy like heat lightning in her loins” when she’s with Mike and Jill. Personalities merge again too, as “brother” equals “self” in Mike and Jill’s telepathic conversation. Now, however, Mike is ready to go even farther as he reconsiders his estimate of what earlier in the story had seemed to be the Martians’ superiority to humans. Martians had appeared to be more serenely mature because they feel no sexual tension and also don’t fear death since they know the spirits of discorporated Martians simply pass on to the next stage of existence by becoming “Old Ones.” Actually, Mike “had grokked, when first he had known it fully, that physical human love ... itself was a growing-closer, a very great goodness—and (so far as he knew) unknown even to the Old Ones of his former people.” Making the effort to overcome frustrating boundaries actually may make humans superior to Martians if they can learn new things that will help them and unlearn old things that won’t.
One thing Earthborn humans need to learn is the Martian language. Even though Mike now is moving past Martian thinking, he used the vocabulary and grammar of Martian in forming his first approach to understanding life on Earth, so other people who need to reach the same understanding will have to use the same conceptual framework. A conversation between Jubal and Dr. Mahmoud described language as a “‘map’ of the universe,” stating that different languages express different conceptions of reality. Martian thus contains a unique understanding of how things work, as shown in how the word “grok” demands a much more total immersion and absorption than its casual translation as “know.” The “maps” contained in human language on Earth reflect a territory shrouded by underestimation of human potential. That’s why Jill, who has absorbed some Martian from Mike, sees that Patty’s attempt in English to describe Foster’s dual identities is fuzzy. The subject could be much more clearly approached in Martian. Having learned Martian as a child, Mike is able to imagine the universe differently than most humans, including a different understanding of natural laws. Because he doesn’t know that it’s “impossible,” he sees nothing extraordinary about communicating telepathically with Jill (but only in Martian), teleporting himself, moving and discorporating objects or people, etc. He can’t teach others how to do these useful tricks until they have learned the language and share the viewpoint that makes the tricks possible; then people will not find such actions remarkable but perform them as casually as Mike does.
At the same time, people need to unlearn the attitudes that keep them isolated, able to express their desires for escape only in confused, unfocused groping. Much earlier in the story, when Mike was a celebrity living with Jubal, Jill went through his fan mail and was disturbed by “filthy” pictures from female fans. What Mike noticed was the “beautiful pain” on the face of one unclothed but enthusiastic admirer. When she becomes more experienced (and more fluent in Martian), Jill parades her beautiful body as a Las Vegas showgirl, telepathically sharing with Mike the lust she rouses in a member of the audience and agreeing that the experience is “Beautiful agony.” It evidently is both wonderful and awful to expose oneself to others. Jill must force herself to discard the unconscious prissiness that makes her hesitate to open herself to new experience.
As Mike struggles to learn, he still has things to unlearn. Hung up on Martian norms, he has had no practice in believing something that he can’t directly experience. Consequently, it confuses him that humans aren’t aware of the souls of the discorporated. Could that mean that, unlike Martian Old Ones, human souls don’t survive? Or, even worse, that humans don’t even have souls? Jill smiles “with sober serenity” as she replies that the two of them are one and are God eternally. But Mike is unsatisfied. He impatiently dismisses science for not asking the questions he wants answered and religions for demanding that worshipers accept their precut answers on faith.
Perhaps the most difficult thing Mike has to learn is that holding two incompatible things next to each other can lead not to anger or dismay but instead to serene, smiling acceptance. He needs to learn the difference between tragedy and comedy. Both focus on surprise, the difference between the ideal and the actual. Essentially, tragedy shows that all humans will fail, the height of their glorious dreams only emphasizing the depths of their defeat. Comedy acknowledges that this is true—but not always. Comedy insists that it’s possible, however barely and briefly, to see the gap between what was expected and what actually happened, to realize that one has not been destroyed by the difference, and then to laugh or at least smile calmly. After the outburst quoted above, Jill smiles and says, “Mike, you just made a joke.” He objects that he didn’t mean his comment as a joke and furthermore objects that Jill doesn’t laugh as she used to: “I haven’t learned to laugh; instead you’ve forgotten how. Instead of my becoming human ... you’re becoming Martian.” Since Martians see with wider senses than humans, they are harder to surprise. That means they don’t need humor to release tension when their expectations go amiss. Mike finally sees the need for humor during a visit to the zoo when he watches monkeys mistreating each other. Then he laughs uncontrollably and tells Jill that at last he has “found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much ... because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.” He adds that “The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery ... and a sharing ... against pain and sorrow and defeat.... All the things that are funny to humans either physically cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen.”
The humor that Mike discovers leads finally not to mere dismissive laughter but to calm acceptance that incompatible things can be equally true. Humans are isolated, frightened, confused—especially in contrast to the wise, mind-sharing Martians. It’s also true, however, that they sometimes recognize their unhappy condition and so struggle to grow closer, to see more clearly, to apprehend a Mystery. They need better sex and more communion so that they can stop hurting each other and themselves. They need to grok. Mike sympathizes with his fellow human beings now that he has realized that he is one himself. He wants to help his brothers, and he sees that the human institution created out of their dreadful tangle of needs is the church. Perhaps all religions on Earth are not just false but simultaneously true. And so, at the end of this section of the novel, he pulls together what he has learned thus far and asks Jill what he has to do to become an ordained minister.
At this point, the novel’s focus shifts yet again. At the beginning, it was difficult for readers to get close to Mike because he was only potentially human; after he has been through the education described above, he is again difficult to describe directly because he has become such an extraordinary human. Therefore, he must be seen largely through the observations of others. Since he has been explicitly compared to Foster and implicitly to Jesus, however, readers can use those templates to imagine Mike’s maturity and to anticipate the rest of his career. Mike will tell people that they should love one another. He will gather followers who embrace the message even when they don’t fully understand it. He will antagonize people who are angered by his challenge to their fixed beliefs—and also people whose power is based on exploiting fixed beliefs. His enemies will kill him. After his death, his disciples will recognize that his teachings have survived in them, so that he actually will have succeeded.
The last section of the novel returns to the perspective of Jubal Harshaw, whose conversation shows that he already knows everything necessary to comprehend the last stage of Mike’s life on Earth, though he doesn’t realize it yet. Jubal has been happy to see that Mike has “developed a sense of humor” and been properly amused by the pranks Mike has played on pompous Earth humans; for example, he is pleased to hear of Mike’s being thrown out of a theological seminary and of his climaxing a brief career in the armed services by discorporating the pants of the officers watching troops on parade. With his jaded view of religion, however, Jubal is much less comfortable with the news that Mike has founded The Church of All Worlds. Jubal shows his uneasiness when Ben Caxton, Jill’s erstwhile boyfriend, shows up with an account of his visit to Mike’s church, First, however, the gregarious Jubal shares some pertinent, but as yet apparently unrelated, opinions. In his sculpture gallery, Jubal lingers over replicas of Rodin’s La Belle Heaulmière and The Fallen Caryatid (a gift from Mike much earlier in the story), calling the Caryatid an example of “Victory in defeat”; leading up to that, he speaks respectfully of Christian art that symbolizes “the Agony and Sacrifice of God.” While he is on the subject of art, Jubal insists that an artist needs to reach a popular audience in the form of “customers.” He understands, in other words, that appealing to the fundamental human needs of a crowd is a good thing, that spreading one’s vision widely also is good, and that apparent failure actually may vindicate effort. Then, after this unconscious preparation, Jubal is willing to listen to Ben’s urgent complaint.
Ben has just come from a visit to The Church of All Worlds headquarters, the Nest, where he was welcomed too warmly for his inhibited taste. Clothing was optional, and enthusiastic (heterosexual) sex was encouraged; Ben was embarrassed by the proceedings and obsessed with keeping his underpants on. When Jill tried to explain at length about the nature of the church, Ben was distracted by the naked bodies on display. He even heard Mike himself explaining that “We humans have something that my former people don’t even dream of: ... The blessing of being male and female.” Somehow Ben willfully misinterpreted this clear statement, seeing Mike’s followers as “victims.” Thus, rather than exposing himself to any more emotional challenge, Ben ran away.
Ben is shocked that Jubal isn’t shocked by this account. Instead, in a Socratic dialogue, Jubal patiently prods Ben with questions until he admits that when he glimpsed Mike having sex with Jill he actually felt “hurt and jealous”; then Jubal sadly comments that “I am afraid that you—and I, too, I admit—lack the angelic innocence to abide by the perfect morality those people live by.” He glumly forecasts the failure of Mike’s church, like many idealistic efforts that have gone before. Having talked himself into a better understanding of and more thorough sympathy with Mike’s efforts, Jubal encourages Ben to return to the Nest and give Mike’s way an honest try. He shouldn’t wait. There may not be much time left. When a wire from Ben confirms that he is learning Martian and having fun, Jubal has no excuse not to go and check out the situation for himself.
He arrives at a moment of crisis. The church building has been burned, and Mike and his followers are fugitives from “justice.” Superficially, a sense of doom hangs over the novel’s last pages. When Ben explains to Jubal that Mike was simply the first human to become aware of our potential, like Prometheus sharing fire with the world, Jubal replies that “As I recall, Prometheus paid a high price for bringing fire to mankind.” Governments, organized religion, criminal syndicates—they all hate Mike. He understands what his enemies will do if they catch him, so he frantically is recording a course in the Martian language to leave behind as a legacy. But, once that is complete, he will go out in public. He can’t hide. That would be against his nature: “Freedom of self—and utter responsibility for self. Thou art God,” Ben explains. Even Mike himself is not entirely sure he understands what’s going on, as he says in a necessarily hurried interview with Jubal; if overcoming the tension between male and female is what makes Earth “rich and wonderful,” what if conflict between individuals and groups is a necessary part of being human? Nevertheless, despite the impending doom, Mike and his followers are blithely serene. Mike takes the responsibility for facing a murderous crowd even though he fully groks what must happen to him.
After he is killed by the mob, his followers gather for a communal meal. Before The Church of All Worlds was founded, Jill remarked that even though she had enjoyed using her physical body—as had Mike—she won’t regret leaving it behind, but she does hope that Mike will consume it after she dies. “Oh, I’ll eat you all right—unless I discorporate first,” he replies. Just as Jesus instructed his disciples that they should consider the bread shared at the Last Supper to be His body broken for them and to be consumed in His remembrance, Mike for his new church adapts a Martian custom of devouring dead loved ones. Before leaving the safety of the church community for his martyrdom, Mike had severed some of his flesh to be boiled into broth and consumed by his disciples. Jubal has attempted suicide when he imagines that Mike is dead and gone; he is summoned back to life by Mike’s presence, showing that he is merely dead, not gone. When Jubal regains consciousness, he still has the “slightly bitter taste” of the suicide drug in his mouth, but Patty’s loving kiss leaves him “feeling strong, with her own serene acceptance shared, no bitterness left.” They all drink the broth together, calmly and hopefully, and Jubal gruffly agrees to start learning Martian while he also begins dictating Mike’s story to share with a general audience.
This demonstration of victory in defeat ends Mike’s story—but not quite. The last chapter is set in a slangy, rudely comic version of the afterlife glimpsed in chapters unexpectedly inserted throughout the novel. Earlier in these interpolations, an angelic version of Foster (founder of Fosterism) converses with an angelic version of Digby (the Fosterite bishop Mike discorporated). Foster points out that if he’s not upset at Digby for murdering him, then Digby has no reason to be angry because Mike killed him. One’s perspective dictates how unseriously such mortal affairs should be taken. The chapters containing this unexpectedly remote perspective interrupt Mike’s career to remind readers that, hey, just because this is serious stuff that doesn’t mean you have to take it seriously. The chapters also include news reports, such as a bulletin that the Martians are considering “the artistic necessity of destroying Earth,” followed by such factoids as that one baby was washed to safety by a tidal wave that killed 13,000 people; the child grew up to earn a considerable reputation “for loud and sustained belching.” Readers might assume that Earth’s fate is more significant than one individual’s, just as they might assume that the child’s survival must be more significant than what his later life shows. But not necessarily.
The novel leaves questions of ultimate significance unanswered. Personally, Foster may be Digby’s superior, but he appears to be a lower-level member of an angelic hierarchy or bureaucracy. Angels themselves can’t interfere with mortal actions. When Foster refers to a “Boss,” he may be suggesting that Someone is in charge, determining events, but that also remains unclear. These sections drop hints, suggest possibilities—but leave the overall picture unresolved, suggesting that if even angels don’t comprehend what’s going on, ordinary humans (especially readers) won’t be able to either. Foster does mention that the Archangel Michael has been missing from their Club, and Digby identifies him as “that over-age juvenile delinquent that sent me to the showers.” In the novel’s last chapter, thus, after Mike is discorporated, the Archangel Michael shows up as Digby’s new supervisor. By that point, Digby has unlearned the personal resentment he felt and doesn’t even remember meeting Mike before. So they get back to their assigned work. Readers may not be satisfied, but perhaps lack of final resolution is not such a bad thing if it leaves them actively questioning. As Foster concludes with a question of his own, shooing the others away from unproductive ruminations, there’s too much to do and no time to waste: “Certainly ‘Thou art God’—but who isn’t?”
Rude, free-wheeling, and frustrating, Stranger challenges readers as it defies traditional literary criticism. Readers should remember that Jubal has little use for nit-picking analysis, calling a critic a failed creator, an impotent would-be visionary, “a poor thing at best, a sort of fourth-rate prophet suffering from delusions of gender.” Readers can do better than that if they can accept the freedom and responsibility of Godship. To the indignant question “Is nothing sacred?,” Mike, Foster, and Jubal might reply that of course there are many things in our experience that deserve serious attention and love. However, we can’t count on established institutions to tell us what to worship. Anything that takes itself too seriously, acting so pretentious and exclusively Holy that it can’t stand to be laughed at, thus becomes a fair target for humor.
Stranger in a Strange Land is very funny and extremely serious. Simultaneously. Of course.