Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature : Memory of the Future 9780367858612, 9781003082651

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“Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future offers a highly original, wide-ranging, theoretically informed discussion of the role of memory in utopian and dystopian literature. The book breaks new ground on various fronts by putting forward innovative readings of familiar texts in the context of a fascinating dialogue between utopian studies and memory studies. A noteworthy contribution to our understanding of utopias and dystopias.” — Sean Seeger, University of Essex, UK

Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature

For a genre that imagines possible futures as a means of critiquing the present, utopian/dystopian fiction has been surprisingly obsessed with how the past is remembered. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future examines modern and contemporary utopian/ dystopian literature’s preoccupation with memory, asserting that from the nineteenth century onward, memory and forgetting feature as key problematics in the genre as well as sources of the utopian impulse. Through a series of close readings of utopian/dystopian novels informed by theory and dialectics, Hanson provides a case study history of how and why memory emerged as a problem for utopia, and how recent dystopian texts situate memory as a crucial mode of utopian agency. Hanson demonstrates that many modern and contemporary writers of the genre consider the presence of certain forms of memory to be necessary to the project of imagining better societies or avoiding possible dystopian outcomes. Carter F. Hanson is Professor of English at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. He is the author of Emigration, Nation, Vocation: The Literature of English Emigration to Canada, 1825–1900 (Michigan State UP, 2009) as well as articles on utopian/dystopian literature and utopianism published in Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, Utopian Studies, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory.

Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature Memory of the Future Carter F. Hanson

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Carter F. Hanson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-85861-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08265-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For my loving parents, Bradley and Marion Hanson, and my cherished family—my wife Michelle and our daughters Sophie and Elsa

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

xi xiii

1

A Brief History of Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives

14

2

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory

65

3

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction and Cultural Amnesia

105

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Dialectic of Trauma

143

Works Cited Index

183 193

4

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to those who helped me on the journey of completing this book. I am very thankful to Peter Sands, Gib Prettyman, and Carrie Hintz for welcoming me into the Utopian Studies community, and making me feel I have a home there. I have learned a great deal from these excellent and generous scholars; they have supported my work, and both Peter and Gib served as keynote speakers for the Midwest Conference on Utopian Studies, which I established with my good friend Mardy Philippian (Lewis University). At Valparaiso University, I am grateful for the many students who have taken my course on utopian/dystopian literature, and with whom I’ve been able to think through many of the texts I discuss in this book. Thank you to my dear colleague and friend Betsy Burow-Flak for reading parts of the manuscript and discussing them with me. A Valparaiso University Research Professorship in 2014 enabled me to write key sections of the manuscript, and I am thankful to the deans and department chairs who generously provided the funds needed to host the Midwest Conference on Utopian Studies. Several parts of this book appeared in earlier form in journals, and I am grateful to the publishers for their kind permission to reprint my work. The section of Chapter 3 on Lois Lowry’s The Giver appeared in Extrapolation, vol. 50, Spring 2009, published by Liverpool University Press. The section of Chapter 2 on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed appeared in Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, July 2013, published by SF-TH Inc. The section of Chapter 3 on M. T. Anderson’s Feed appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3, Fall 2015, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The section of Chapter 2 on Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time appeared in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 30, no. 4, 2019, published by Taylor & Francis. Lastly, to Michelle, who has supported me through everything, shared every trial, and brought me so much joy. Thank you for loving me so wonderfully; I can think of no better reason for working to bring utopia closer than to be able to share it with you.

Preface

About fifteen years ago, I was asked to teach a course in children’s literature because a senior colleague from the Education department at my university, who was a great lover of children’s literature and who usually taught that course, was unavailable. Although I had published some work on long out-of-print Victorian boys’ adventure fiction, I knew virtually nothing about contemporary children’s literature, and so as a starting point, I visited my senior colleague and asked her for some tips on what I should teach. The novel she recommended most highly was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. The name meant nothing to me, but I gladly took my colleague’s advice and ordered a desk copy of Lowry’s book. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that reading The Giver changed the course of my academic life. I was utterly captivated by Lowry’s treatment of memory in the novel and told myself that I should write an article about it. But at the time, I was trying to write my first book on the very different topic of nineteenth-century English middle-class emigration to Canada, so Lowry got put on hold for several years. When I finally came back to The Giver, I realized I had another knowledge deficit—I lacked a fundamental context for reading Lowry’s dystopian novel due to somehow making it through high school, college, and graduate school without ever having been assigned the canonical dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. It was through the process of reading the classic twentieth-century dystopias and writing my article on The Giver that I discovered I greatly enjoyed this kind of speculative fiction and wanted to devote my scholarly and teaching energies to it. This book is the long culmination of that journey. The interest in memory that Lowry’s novel sparked in me persisted, and by continuing to look at the ways in which memory impacted utopian and dystopian narratives, I rather unintentionally positioned myself within two rapidly growing fields. Although memory scholar Anne Whitehead rightly points out that there has been “a long history of engagement with memory in the West,” over the past twenty-five years, the critical preoccupation with memory in the humanities has grown into a full-blown “memory boom,” complete with its own internal methodological critics (3). Drawing on the work of Andreas Huyssen and

xiv Preface David Lowenthal, among others, Whitehead diagnoses the contemporary memory obsession as a response (or pushback) to things like rapid technological change that engenders amnesia, mass immigrant and diasporic movements that engender nostalgia, and legacies of genocide that engender the need to testify and remember (1–2). Indicating the growing potency of memory as a cultural signifier and the coalescing interests of memory researchers in the humanities with those of cognitive psychologists and neurobiologists, the interdisciplinary academic journal Memory Studies launched in 2008, the same year that a far different kind of boom was born: the boom of the young adult dystopian novel. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games appeared in 2008, and within two years, the already trending uptick in the publication of dystopian narratives turned into a tidal wave. YA publishers respond very quickly to teen obsessions, so just as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight precipitated a glut of YA vampire literature starting in 2005, The Hunger Games meant that soon, YA bookstore shelf space was inundated with dystopian adventure romances. Teenagers, including my own daughters, started casually dropping the words “dystopia” and “dystopian” like they had been using them their whole lives. And while some other sections of my department’s general education course under-enrolled, I had no trouble getting students for my suddenly fashionable course entitled Utopian/ Dystopian Literature. The confluence of the memory boom with the mainstreaming of dystopian motifs in popular culture suggested that the time was right for a consideration of how memory functions—how memory operates as a form of agency—within recent utopian and dystopian narratives. Memory has seldom figured prominently in literary analyses of major utopian and dystopian texts, and for understandable reasons, it holds no place in any popular or “commonplace” conception of utopia. In everyday usage, utopia is a notion or a place that belongs to the future; to the imaginary or hypothetical; or, worse, to the impossible. As Raffaella Baccolini indicates, “by its very nature, [Utopia] is ‘forward looking,’ thus contributing to the notion that it may sound paradoxical to speak of history and Utopia.”1 At a quick glance then, the future orientation of most literary utopias and dystopias, and of utopia as a general concept, renders memory (and history) seemingly peripheral to textual analysis and irrelevant to the imagining of a society defined by its very nonexistence (Sargent 9). But, of course, utopian and dystopian fictions are always grounded in, and responsive to, the historical moments in which they are written. Moreover, the concept of utopianism provides us a helpful entry point for suggesting a relationship between memory and utopia, and the use value (even necessity) of memory to the utopian imagination. In his astute essay “Remembering the Future,” Vincent Geoghegan takes on exactly this task of asking, “Can memory have a utopian function?” (16). Geoghegan fleshes out Lyman Tower Sargent’s well-known and

Preface  xv succinct definition of utopianism as “social dreaming” by saying that utopianism describes “the human need and capacity to create a desirable environment; a conscious and unconscious rearranging of reality, usually involving an imagined future” (15–16). Pointing out that phenomena such as nostalgia and peoples’ self-deceptive tendency to idealize the past demonstrate that memory frequently has an intrinsic utopian component (17), Geoghegan also shows that memory is at the heart of group belonging or rootedness (although such memories are often used politically for nationalist agendas) (27–31) and examines in the work of philosophers Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse the liberating capacity of the remembered past to envision the future anew (more on this in the analysis to follow) (21–25). Geoghegan’s assessment that utopianism can be “grounded in the historically evolving memories of groups of individuals” finds corroboration in recent psychological research exploring the significant role of memory in imagining the future (31). Numerous studies show that imagining future scenarios activates neural and cognitive processes very similar to those involved in remembering past events. Evidence from leading memory researcher Daniel Schacter and other cognitive psychologists demonstrates that “remembering past experiences and imagining future experiences both rely heavily on a particular form of memory known as episodic memory,” which enables recollection of specific past personal experiences in detail—what Schacter describes as “‘mental time travel’” (Schacter and Madore 246). Andrew MacLeod, a prominent researcher in the area of prospection—mental representation of the future—affirms that a growing body of evidence “points to episodic memory and future-thinking as being very closely related and both are connected to well-being and mental health” (266). Describing the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis developed by Schacter and Addis (2007), MacLeod writes that the “hypothesis proposes that the main function of episodic memory is to help people navigate the future successfully” (270). If episodic memory is intrinsic to being able to imagine the future, then the conscious imagining or subconscious wish-dreaming of a better future must also draw on memories of our pasts. Extrapolating this neural-cognitive model of the similarity between memory and future-thinking back out to a cultural scale, we again encounter arguments in favor of the productive interdependency of past- and future-oriented discourses. Andreas Huyssen, for instance, maintains that neither promising visions of the future nor compulsive memorialization of the past are alone socially generative. We need, he insists, articulations of both past and future to address our social and political dissatisfactions with the present (Present 6). Of course, the extent to which memory and future-thinking might be commensurate raises important questions about utopianism’s limits of possibility. Fredric Jameson’s well-known investigations of utopia tend to assert that “even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs

xvi Preface made up of bits and pieces of the here and now,” suggesting that “at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment” (Archaeologies xiii). Acknowledging memory’s role in the epistemological limitations that potentially cordon off realms of the unknowable from our imaginations, this book nevertheless posits utopia’s positive function in projecting alternative visions of systemic (or even reformist) change. I take it as a grounding assumption that memory is fundamental to and constitutive of utopianism, and that within the more specific domain of literary utopias, memory and forgetting often function as vital and complex components of a text’s utopian impulse. More specifically still, I will argue that several of the utopian and dystopian texts to be discussed situate collective memory or memory as historical consciousness as pivotal to the very possibility of maintaining utopian social progress or of instigating such progress in the first place. The Introduction that follows gives definitional consideration to memory as a collective phenomenon before turning to utopian/dystopian fiction’s status as a counter-discursive mode that dialectically challenges dominant discursive formations. Chapter 1 then traces the emergence of memory as a matter of modern historical concern and how those concerns manifest in utopian/dystopian literary narratives. Applying a case study approach to Richard Terdiman’s reminder that “Even memory has a history,” Chapter 1 begins with a brief discussion of More’s Utopia (1516) as the paradigmatic early narrative utopia where memory figures primarily through its absence (Present 3). I then consider the historical determinants that, beginning in the early 1700s but accelerating in the aftermath of the French Revolution, made memory culturally fraught. Rapid social transformations wrought by capitalism and commodity culture created a modern awareness of memory as both lost and menacingly present, a sense of historical and existential displacement that investment in the idea of the nation-state was meant to resolve. In the late-nineteenth century United States, however, unprecedented economic recessions shook the certainty of conviction in the American narrative of capitalist progress and produced an outpouring of utopian alternative visions. I examine the most famous and influential of these, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), which argues that memory stands as an obstacle, an unneeded hindrance to utopian social evolution. Finally, the last case study of memory’s emergence as central to narrative utopias looks at George Orwell’s dystopian inversion of utopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In projecting the tendencies of modern totalitarian regimes as a warning of what the nation-state could become, Orwell questions the possibility of memory sustaining the utopian impulse under conditions where all forms of archival and collective memory are altered or destroyed.

Preface  xvii Chapter 2 examines the positive utopia’s prominent reemergence in the 1970s in the guise of the “critical utopia”: a new approach to the form that sought to avoid the static quality of earlier narrative utopias by dealing with history as operative. In this vein, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) interrogate the efficacy of collective memory practices as a means of actuating utopian change over time. To elucidate Le Guin’s nuanced position on collective memory, I pair her oft-discussed novel with its too-neglected companion story “The Day Before the Revolution,” which is set about 150 years before the events of The Dispossessed. The historical tendency revealed by this pairing of texts, which speaks to Pierre Nora’s concept of modern archival memory sites, suggests that collective modes of memory are responsible for social stagnation. Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time can be read as an indirect response to Le Guin’s position. Piercy imagines a future utopian community sustained and energized by its highly intentional approach to ritual collective memory. Le Guin and Piercy arrive at essentially opposite conclusions; whereas Le Guin suggests that collective modes of remembering occlude social evolution, Piercy maintains that performative rituals of remembrance function as a cultural anvil for shaping and reshaping utopia. Chapter 3 looks at the most recent fin-de-siècle as a moment in which, as theorized by Andreas Huyssen, cultural memory gravitated in two opposing and contradictory directions at once: the impulse to memorialize history through museums and monuments, and to organize important issues of cultural identity around questions of memory, on the one hand, and the tendency toward widespread cultural amnesia in the face of a rapidly evolving mediascape that seems to collapse past, present, and future into a synchronicity, on the other hand. Within this context, two notable dystopias, Lois Lowry’s classic children’s novel The Giver (1993) and M. T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed (2002), warn of the dangers of existing in a state of amnesiac atemporality. Amnesia in these texts produces subjects and societies oblivious to causality/consequences and devoid of affective depth. While highly divergent in their plots, narrative modes, and utopian outlooks, Lowry and Anderson’s novels both situate memory in the form of historical consciousness—particularly memory formed through semi-conscious dream states—as perhaps the sole means by which dystopian finalities may be averted. Chapter 4 concludes the book by approaching Margaret Atwood’s recent MaddAddam trilogy of dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels— Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—through the lens of theories of traumatic memory. Cathy Caruth’s influential model of cultural trauma, which considers trauma as deeply paradoxical in its relation to memory and thus resistant to

xviii Preface representation, has been challenged by critics like Roger Luckhurst, who sees trauma as generating many forms of cultural response. Invoking Ulrich Beck’s well-known formulation of modern risk society, Luckhurst posits that trauma’s ubiquitous cultural presence reflects the need to express the damage caused by capitalist risk society. Following Luckhurst’s tack, I propose that trauma and risk form the critical terrain of contemporary Western dystopian fiction, emplotted most fully by Atwood’s trilogy, which imagines a post-apocalyptic and nascent posthuman future ensuing from a neoliberal dystopian past. Narratologically, the trilogy’s “dialectic of trauma” organizes the temporal movement of the novels so that the protagonists’ reliving of traumatic memories illustrates Atwood’s warning about how democratic societies can give way to emerging (and already existent) formations of dystopian hypertrophied capitalism, which then produce the conditions for the ultimate trauma of an engineered apocalypse. But rather than resign memory entirely to the post-traumatic symptom, Atwood’s trilogy, as it progresses, shifts the locus of memory from traumatic repetition to a narrative “working through” of the past that opens up proto-utopian possibilities for the future. Utilizing Paul Ricoeur’s conception that history and fiction constantly borrow from each other to give shape to time, I delineate how in MaddAddam, Atwood effects a doubling of the narrator as a historian of traumatic memory. Atwood’s own narrative chronicling of a dystopian/apocalyptic history gets radically rewritten by her protagonist Toby as a mytho-history that will serve as the collective memory of the surviving human/posthuman collective. Memory, then, even after the end of the known world, continues to function as the basis of the utopian impulse. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate memory’s indispensable function in imagining better or worse possible futures, with an emphasis on how memory supports the counter-discursive project of critiquing the present.

Note 1 Raffaella Baccolini, “‘A Useful Knowledge of the Present Is Rooted in the Past’: Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling,” 114. Baccolini credits Kenneth Roemer’s The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900 (1976) with identifying the “forward looking” quality of American literary utopias.

Introduction Memory, Utopian Theory, Counter-Discourse

Despite criticism’s dislike of universalisms or essentialisms, it is probably safe to say that memory is an innate human capacity and remembering and forgetting universal human activities; but for all that, memory remains difficult to define. Terms proliferate in the attempt to name the activities and types of memory: we remember, recall, recollect, reminisce, remind, recognize, and when desire underwrites memory, as in nostalgia, we long for; our minds utilize long-term, short-term/working, episodic, semantic (general knowledge and information retrieval), procedural (skill acquisition, muscle), implicit (unconscious), and sometimes eidetic (photographic) memory (Schacter and Madore 246). The neural processes of memory are so overlapping and varied, and memory’s representations of the past so malleable and susceptible to distortion, that saying exactly “what” memory is proves elusive. This slipperiness may stem in part from memory being a sequential but also deeply refracted process. First we memorize and then we remember, but the result disturbs the singularity of the present. To diagram a memory event, we could say that initially some sensory input or cognitive information from the flow of consciousness is registered in the mind and retained, whether perfectly or imperfectly. Psychologists refer to this stored information as an engram. (More colloquially, I might say that memorization results in something being “in my memory,” —the store of what I have retained—but just how the memorization occurs, how the memorized input gets “there,” and exactly where that “there” is in my mind escapes my conscious awareness.) This ambiguity accords with research maintaining that no central memory storage region exists in the brain.1 Then, after moments or years pass, another sensory input acts as a retrieval cue, triggering a response from the earlier retained material. The interaction between the two contents produces the subjective experience of remembering (Schacter, Searching 70). Richard Terdiman stresses that in the act of remembering, the clear demarcation between “then” and “now” breaks down; memory is that “complex of practices and means by which the past invests the present” (Present Past 8). Drawing on the philosophy of temporality, Terdiman argues that meaning itself cannot be made without memory. All acts of perception require time, thus

2 Introduction memory “underlies the possibility of intelligibility as its precondition” (9). Or, as Maurice Halbwachs put it, “there are hence no perceptions without recollections” (1992: 168–69). If memory allows for meaning, memory must also be imbricated in culture. Culture absent of memory ceases to exist, or rather, never forms in the first place. Culture conceived as memory raises the contested question of the status of collective memory—the form of memory, whether it is termed collective, cultural, social, or public—that has been a major driver of the humanities memory boom. Postulating collective memory—the notion that groups of people possess “shared” memories and hold common meanings about the past—requires a less biological understanding of memory as humans cannot directly (i.e. mind-tomind) transmit or inhabit others’ memories. Nearly all discussions of collective memory build from sociologist Halbwachs’s groundbreaking early twentieth-century work on group memories. In rejecting his mentor Henri Bergson’s theory that individuals memorize intact their every life experience and then most fully access those unconscious memories through dreams, Halbwachs contended that individuals only remember within the framework of a group (Whitehead 126–29). Individuals belong to any number of family and social groups through which their memories take shape and are given meaning; for Halbwachs, these memories in fact reside within the group and remain intact or fade away depending on the group’s membership and concerns. Individual identity only coheres to the extent that individual memories are called up by interactions within groups: everyone has a capacity for memory [mémoire] that is unlike that of anyone else . . . But individual memory is nevertheless a part or an aspect of group memory, since each impression and each fact . . . leaves a lasting memory only to the extent that . . . it is connected with the thoughts that come to us from the social milieu. (Halbwachs 1992: 53) Numerous critics since Halbwachs, some of whom will be discussed in the chapters to follow, have taken issue with Halbwachs’s erasure of individual memory and responded to his distinction between memory and history. For Halbwachs, history—or the need for written history— emerges only after a social group’s collective memory dies out: “General history starts only when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up” (Halbwachs 1980: 78). Collective memories, because they solidify a social group’s identity, tend to favor images and feelings of continuity, whereas history foregrounds the contingencies of constant social flux (Whitehead 131). The type of distinction between memory and history found in Halbwachs is both affirmed and contested within memory studies, depending on a critic’s approach. When

Introduction  3 construed as a kind of embodied practice, as in historian Pierre Nora’s work, memory also tends to be seen as antecedent to, and privileged over, histoire, which merely substitutes for the genuine presence of collective memory. (Although as critics point out, Nora refines and extends Halbwachs’s view of history considerably.)2 When, as in Terdiman’s poststructuralist model, memory is theorized as representation as opposed to reproduction—the figuration of outward reality (or the real) in consciousness—memory produces something new that is already “inevitably and constitutively historical” (70, original emphasis). No fully realized analysis of memory’s relation to utopia seems possible without a working notion of collective memory. Utopianism is social dreaming and literary utopias imagine societies, large or small, that improve on the societies in which their authors actually lived. To assert that memory possesses a viable utopian function means then that memory must extend beyond the purely atomistic level of individual recall and operate on a collective plane. Accordingly, this book takes no narrow definitional stance on memory. While I recognize the biological basis for memory, the forms of memory that interest me here and which yield critical insights on the emergence and continued persistence of memory in utopian and dystopian fiction, do not often correspond with a strictly neurological or psychological scheme. Like Geoghegan and Terdiman, I do not construe memory as a thing, a singular function, a place or a destination, but rather as a set of varied practices and discursive systems. The way that I am construing memory as subjective meaning-making and as historically situated emphasizes its discursivity. While it seems credible that some memory processes occur at a level beneath meaning— unfiltered memory fragments that screen across the mind’s eye too rapidly and inchoately to process and then disappear—memory events that we can accurately describe as remembering involve degrees of conscious awareness. The process by which we consciously create meaning through the interplay of new experiential stimuli reactivating stored engrams occurs discursively—“language itself [is] the primary product and primary mechanism of memory” (Terdiman 46; original emphasis). The same can be said of utopian social dreaming, whether that dreaming manifests in semiconscious daydreams or in literary works. Bloch’s theory of the centrality of literature and daydreams to the realization of the Not-YetConscious points clearly to its foundation in language (Zipes xxxii–iii). Only through language does Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness of the future find articulation or accrue meaning. Even memory researchers, attempting to pinpoint the importance of episodic memory to imagining future events, indicate that another possible explanation for “commonalities between remembering and imagining” lies in “non-episodic factors such as narrative style or communicative goals that shape the expression of both memory and imagination” (Schacter and Madore 245). Rather than invalidating Schacter and Addis’s constructive episodic

4 Introduction simulation hypothesis, such evidence underscores that, beyond whatever neurochemical processes are involved in representing the past and future, language is the medium. It is worth risking the self-evident to point out that the discursive processes and systems through which memory does its work on the past—rendering consciousness into coherence, scaffolding individual and collective experience, stabilizing commitments and beliefs, shaping affect and desire, and more—are only ever experienced in the present. Memory traces reappear, whether bidden or unbidden, in response to the present. Utopian dreams, whether semiconscious daydreaming or more reflective forms of cognition, are also called forth by present insufficiencies. Utopian dreaming about possible futures and memory’s representations of the past both meet in the present and speak dialectically to the present’s concerns. The past adheres in the present but is always other; critically engaged utopianism contests the present, rendering imaginatively a demystified and transformed present into a better future. These overlapping vectors reveal the dialectic at work in the act of attending carefully to the past and future in the present. Geoghegan argues that doing so in a collective fashion opens the door for a utopianism which is grounded in the historically evolving memories of groups of individuals. The future, in this conception, is not a return to the past but draws sustenance from this past. Memory is the means in the present to ground the future in the past. (31) Literary utopias and dystopias, in part because they tend to focus explicitly on modes of production and lived material realities, also perform valuable dialectical work. In a companion article to his book The Birth of Theory, Andrew Cole writes that any historical period is always in tension with the individual examples emerging from within its frame, examples that have a share in conceptualizing a period precisely because they conceptualize through other means: through figuration. Examples—be they poems, paintings, sculptures [or literary utopias]—are never adequate to their moment. Rather, they are behind or ahead. They contradict their age and one another. Or to turn this formulation around: every present moment is a tangle of emergent and residual forms. (810–11) Cole’s assertion that every period exists in tension with itself echoes Ernst Bloch’s description of the present as non-contemporaneous in Heritage of Our Times (1935), Bloch’s defense of what he saw as the generative elements of the German cultural tradition against Nazi appropriation. Bloch begins his examination of non-contemporaneity

Introduction  5 (Ungleichzeitigkeit) with the observation that “Not all people exist in the same Now” (Heritage 97). Remnants of the pre-capitalist past, like the peasantry, still remain; their “non-desire for the Now” forms a “contradictory element” that is “subjectively non-contemporaneous” (108). Such subjective desires coincide in the present along with “objectively non-contemporaneous element[s] as a continuing influence of older circumstances and forms of production . . . as well as of older superstructures” (108). At the same time as the past continues to influence the present, the present also contains portents of the future, elements which point to a time of fulfillment. These non-synchronous elements of “prevented future” in the present reveal, as Matthew Beaumont discusses Bloch, that the “future, like the past, shapes the present from the inside” (Spectre 7). Utopian and dystopian narratives, then, particularly some of the novels to be discussed that imagine a future while simultaneously pondering the social value of the past to that imagined future present, narratively figure Cole and Bloch’s formulation that every present is a “tangle of emergent and residual forms” in remarkably vivid terms. One cannot broach the subject of utopia as dialectic, of course, without addressing Fredric Jameson’s seminal investigations into utopia within the broader question of utopia’s definition. Beginning first with the larger matter of giving utopia definitional clarity, Lyman Tower Sargent and Ruth Levitas have both offered accessible and largely compatible definitions. In addition to the wonderfully concise “social dreaming” as constituting utopianism, Sargent considers utopian literature “as a subset of [this] broader phenomenon,” defining the positive literary utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (3, 9). Sociologist and utopian theorist Levitas also takes up the task of defining utopia in her important book The Concept of Utopia (1990). In her survey of utopian thought, which focuses primarily on theory, not literature, Levitas discerns that philosophers have tended to define utopia in one of three ways: in terms of the content of utopian texts, the form of utopian texts, or according to utopia’s function. Levitas rejects content and form as adequate bases for definition because the textual content and textual forms of utopian writing are at once too variable and too limited in scope to provide a comprehensive definition of all utopian activity. Levitas settles instead on utopia’s function, or vocation, which she defines as the “education of desire” (7). Thus, as Sargent points out, Levitas’s definition of utopia correlates closely to his notion of utopianism (3), but Levitas stresses more emphatically utopia as a praxis: through the education of desire for better modes of living and being, “the function of utopia is to catalyze [social] change” (191). The utopian function has no telos or essential qualities; the perceived need of and desire for change arises out of fully historical and socially

6 Introduction constructed conditions. Levitas warns that utopian desire can veer off into co-opted forms of emotional compensation or abstract theorizing divorced from political intent, but when oriented toward social change, “utopia works towards an understanding of what is necessary for human fulfillment and towards a broadening, deepening and raising of aspirations in terms different from those dominating the mundane present” (Method 4). In her more recent work Utopia as Method (2013), Levitas adds greater specificity to her concept of utopia as desire by recasting it as a method, as opposed to a goal. Levitas calls for leveraging the practice of “speculative sociology” to generate “holistic outline[s]” of alternative societies that “do not remain at the level of abstract principles such as equality and justice but deal with concrete instantiations of these in specific social institutions, described systematically as an integrated whole” (xiii–iv). Levitas names this method the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, which has three modes. The archaeological mode uncovers and lays bare the often implicit “images of the good society” in already existing social, political, and economic programs or policies (153). The ontological mode reflects on what constitutes human flourishing and how a society that enables human flourishing might shape what we take to be human nature. Lastly, the architectural mode does what literary utopias have always done—imagines a “reconstructed world and describ[es] its social institutions” (197). Even more emphatically than the well-known formulation of utopia as a process, which derives from Bloch and to which Jameson subscribes, Levitas’s rethinking of utopia as method seeks to actualize its use value and rescue the concept from prevailing understandings of utopia as a perfect and therefore unrealizable society or place. Jameson shares Levitas’s belief in utopia as a conceptual necessity for imagining any radical social alternative to the totality of global capital. Multiple critics, notably Phillip Wegner and Tom Moylan, have provided excellent and thorough overviews of Jameson’s prolific engagement with utopia, so I will do so much more compactly. For Jameson, utopia persists in a dialectical relationship with ideology—not separate from it—but weaving through ideology in various manifestations that resist closure and reveal “provocative but dispensable figures of possible new ways of living and possible ways toward them” (Moylan, Scraps 94). Utopia is a “dialectical tool” that exposes the unevenness of the apparent “closed totality” of capital to reveal a future utopian horizon.3 Jameson aims then to uncover the means by which utopian texts and practices defamiliarize our impoverished imaginations to enable us to glimpse this horizon of Bloch’s “not yet.” Jameson’s approach to utopian literature can thus be construed as archaeological, but rather than focusing on bringing forth the specific content of given texts, he investigates the “formal operations of the utopian text and their relationship with the utopian process” (Moylan 92). One of these operations Jameson calls “neutralization,”

Introduction  7 borrowing Louis Marin’s term from his book Utopiques (1973), which signifies the utopia’s “point-by-point negation or canceling” of its own historical and ideological context in order to open up space for a vision of possible alternatives.4 But in the essay “Progress Versus Utopia” (1982), Jameson argues that utopian literature’s “deepest vocation” is to reveal “our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself,” and this inability or “failure” extends to the utopian text’s own detailed description of a transformed society (what Levitas would term its architecture) (“Progress” 153). Jameson’s utopian dialectic recognizes the temporal bind I alluded to above in that any future a utopian text might imagine arises only from “within the horizons of its present” (Wegner 63). Thus, since there is no way for us to directly apprehend or envision a future moment of fulfillment, the particular details of a utopian text are not so crucial; rather, the text’s political value lies in its pre-figurative work of enabling “us to conceptualize for the first time the place that such a description [the text] must one day fill” (Wegner 65). Finding the utopian horizon more remote than ever in The Seeds of Time (1994), Jameson gravitates toward greater emphasis on utopian literature’s pedagogical stake (or function) in seeding social change. As Wegner puts it, for Jameson, where classic literary utopias “fall short is in their lack of attention to the central political question: how might we begin the process of implementing [a] new reality?” (70). Accordingly, in his most recent major work on utopia, Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Jameson, given that “the undesirability of change is everywhere dogmatically affirmed,” asserts that the political function and form of Utopia today is to be the “discursive strategy” of disruption (231). The utopian form of disruption resides not in visions of what a utopian after-time would look like, but in the principle of the “radical break” itself, which rebuts the conviction that no alternatives are possible (231). I am highly indebted to the utopian formulations of both Levitas and Jameson. My understandings of utopia as concept and of utopian narrative have been deeply shaped by their work. Nevertheless, my critical practice is my own and I do not aim at attempting to mimic their work or their methodologies. Like some other literary critics in utopian studies, I find the relative neglect of the express content of utopian narratives found in much of Jameson’s work to be nagging. In the highly influential Postmodernism (1991), for instance, Jameson applies his understanding of utopian figurations as representational, as opposed to fully worked-out schemas, to newer kinds of aesthetic forms like a Robert Gober conceptual art installation that does not even seem to aim at “the production of some form of Utopian space but rather [at] the production of the concept of such space” (165). In locating the utopian in an installation that “does not seek . . . to spring the representation of some new kind of [space] onto the Utopian screen of the mind’s eye,” —that does not aim at representation as such—Jameson appears to place us

8 Introduction at even a further remove from the type of content-rich utopian thought experiments that attract readers and critics (165).5 Moylan and Peter Fitting have both addressed the difficulty for the critic/reader arising from Jameson’s insistence that utopias are fruitful as imaginative prefigurations of an ungraspable utopian horizon, but not as serious and potentially feasible plans for the future (Moylan 95–99). Although he does occasionally dwell on the utopian features of particular texts, Wegner argues that Jameson’s method moves us away from a concern with the theoretical discourse imagined to be taking place in any utopia—its reputed “ideas,” for example, about society, work, leisure, or even human “nature”—and toward the pedagogical force of the representational practice in which it is engaged: the ways it re-educates the desires of its audience, enabling them to grow the “new organs” necessary also to “live” and later “perceive” a newly emerging social and cultural reality. (68) It is this focus on the “pedagogical force,” or praxis, of utopia that Fitting finds challenging, wondering, “if it is not still useful to acknowledge the role that utopian representation plays in the imagining of an alternative”: If the utopia is to be considered as a form of praxis, it must be one which like the often cited bust of Apollo in Rilke’s sonnet, will force us to acknowledge that “you must change your life.” Yet this is the crux of the dilemma, for the specificity of the literary utopia lies not in some ideal of beauty which reminds us of the insufficiency of our own lives, not in its ability to express the utopian impulse, to “figure” in some metaphorical way “the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopia or classless society” (1981: 291), nor even to negate or neutralize ideological contradictions, although the literary utopia may also do all of these things. Many of us still think that the special task of the utopia—and I am thinking precisely of the revival of the 1970s—was to reach a different audience with images of, with the look and feel and shape and experiences of what an alternative might and could actually be . . . in the sense of an entire world or social system. (14–15) I share Fitting’s sense of the “dilemma”; as much as I value Jameson’s compelling project, I nevertheless want to read utopias like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time “as if they were meant to be taken literally” (Fitting 11). As an invested reader, I want to consider Piercy’s highly detailed vision of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts in 2137 seriously on its own terms and not as metaphor, as well as maintain a sense of

Introduction  9 Jameson’s dialectical imperative by identifying a mode of critique that best traces how utopian and dystopian futures draw on memory as a praxis to pull the past forward to engage their presents. To this end, I propose to initially situate the utopian and dystopian texts under discussion using a critical nomenclature from outside the discipline of utopian studies—Terdiman’s designation of the counter-discourse. First, however, I must address the fact that as much as this introduction appertains to utopia as desire, representation, and praxis, since the 1970s the literary production of utopias has remained at low ebb. As Fitting notes after mentioning the utopian “revival” of the 1970s, “those utopias are no longer being written” (15). The Anglo-American conservative turn of the 1980s coinciding with the dissipation of radical social movements precipitated a return to the twentieth-century ascendance of dystopian writing.6 To the extent that memory can be said to be a central narrative concern and critical form of agency in recent utopian/dystopian fiction, it must be found primarily in dystopia. In their important work on dystopian narrative form, Baccolini and Moylan establish just such a vital link between memory and discursivity.7 Unlike utopian narratives, which typically commence with a journey through space or time or dream to the better place, dystopias begin in medias res with protagonist and reader both immersed in the other world. Although often initially content with their society, dystopian protagonists experience injustices and/or contradictions that impel them to resist the hegemonic order in ways that may or may not ultimately change their society. This central conflict, what Baccolini and Moylan term the “structural strategy of narrative and counter-narrative,” usually hinges on “the control of language” (5). Dystopian regimes maintain power through discursive control of information and history, and dystopian dissidents attempt to resist by reclaiming language. The most famous example of this dynamic, of course, is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party enacts its slogan of “Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” by constantly altering and rewriting history “day by day and minute by minute” (37, 162). Dissident protagonist Winston Smith, who contributes to the Party’s “corrections” of history in his job at the Ministry of Truth, seeks to recover evidence of events as they actually happened, and at one point holds in his hands an unadulterated newspaper clipping proving the scale of the Party’s fabrications. Such textual evidence bolsters Winston’s childhood memories that tell him living conditions have worsened drastically under the Party’s rule. In this vein, Moylan argues that, An important result of the reappropriation of language by the dystopian misfits and rebels is the reconstitution of empowering memory. With the past suppressed and the present reduced to the empirica of daily life, dystopian subjects usually lose all recollection of the way

10 Introduction things were before the new order, but by regaining language they also recover the ability to draw on the alternative truths of the past and ‘speak back’ to hegemonic power. (Scraps 149) Discovering through memory that life in the past was better than in the present, dystopian dissidents, while perhaps prone to nostalgia, find a utopian focal point in the past that channels their resistance. The contentious relationship between memory, language, and extrapolated history witnessed in novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to the broader status of dystopia in relation to actual history. All literary utopias are products of historical moments, but Baccolini suggests that to an even greater degree than utopia, dystopia responds to particular historical pressures (“A Useful Knowledge” 115). Dystopias could be said to be the proleptic diegesis of given historical vectors. Acting as more or less explicit warnings, dystopias adumbrate the possible consequences if certain contemporary social trends continue. And while the genre seeks to provoke critical reflection on the present by challenging its ideological pull, many dystopias and critical dystopias retain a future utopian horizon, or the possibility of one, even if it lies outside the text itself. For this reason, rather than defining literary utopias and dystopias as highly discrete phenomena, this book treats them as contrapuntal polemical nodes engaged in the work of educating desire. But to concretize the textuality of utopian/dystopian literature as representations of better or worse societies, as opposed to a seemingly more disembodied understanding of utopia as desire or “pedagogical force,” I am also defining utopia and dystopia as counterdiscourses, drawing on the theoretical work of Richard Terdiman. While utopian/dystopian fiction is not commonly framed in terms of discourse theory, such framing usefully models the contestations with hegemony in which utopia and dystopia engage. Terdiman’s underutilized work, which sits at the intersection of discourse theory, semiotics, Marxist theory, and later, memory studies, helps situate utopian/ dystopian fiction as instantiations of counterhegemonic discourse that dialectically reveal internal fissures in dominant discourse. I should stress at the outset that I do not intend to treat utopian/dystopian literature as a discursive formation in any rigid sense. The textual readings in the chapters to follow draw on a number of bodies of theory and are not an exercise in discourse analysis. And though utopian fiction and dystopian fiction are perhaps homologous, I do not intend to imply an ideological homogeneity within utopia/dystopia, which speaks from any number of sociopolitical vantage points. Terdiman argues that “[t]he varieties of counter-discourse are related only in that they contest the dominant” (Discourse 68). Nevertheless, conceptualizing utopia/dystopia as a counter-discourse facilitates naming the adversary (or adversaries)

Introduction  11 particular utopias and dystopias imagine for themselves, theorized in more general terms as dominant discourses. Terdiman’s historicization of discourse as a product of liberal capitalism also helps account for the uptick in literary production of utopias and dystopias from the nineteenth century onwards. Following Foucault, discourses are domains of production and circulation of socially determined and determining statements that are regulated in some way and have a similar force of effect (Mills 7–11). In Terdiman’s usage, “discourses are what give differential substance to membership in a social group or class or formation, which mediate an internal sense of belonging, an outward sense of otherness” (54). The discourses through which society and social groups are constituted are not static but form a “shifting, multiform network of linked assertions and subversions, or normalized and heterodox speech” (16). By utilizing Jameson’s observation about desire that transgressions, because they presuppose a law or norm that they violate, end up reaffirming that law or norm, Terdiman proposes that oppositional counter-discourses always exist dialectically entwined with the dominant formations they seek to replace.8 Thus, no discourse, however dominant or normalized, is seamless or impregnable. Conceiving of culture as a field of struggle, then, Terdiman seeks to show how contestations over the control of meaning, what he terms symbolic resistance, play out linguistically, which leads him to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Hegemony accounts conceptually for the complex ways that a dominant social cohort manages to exert control and “articulate its interests in terms which other social groups accept as their own,” during the period after traditional authoritarian states in the West gave way to more republican and market oriented formations (Discourse 42–43, also 53). Terdiman argues that the market itself gave rise to new discursive output—both hegemonic and counterhegemonic—in that the market “loosened the relation between counter-discursive production and any direct political threat. It  was constitutive of the system, a figure of its distinctness, that ‘opposition’ was legitimized” (53).9 Yet in spite of the sanctioning of counter-discourses, the regulative power of discourse nevertheless coalesces within dominant institutions—the nation, the law, consumer capitalism, science, medicine—that endlessly (re)legitimize themselves and become internalized within subjects to the point of invisibility and ubiquity. This internalization of authorized discourses produces lived dispositions, what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu terms habitus, that appear to be free and spontaneous, but are in fact objectively structured and constrained (Bourdieu 78–79). Hence, the operative mode of a dominant discourse, Terdiman argues, is to “go without saying.” The dominant is the discourse whose presence is defined by the social impossibility of its absence. . . . Such false totalization is an immanent law in capitalist socioeconomies. . . .

12 Introduction This implicit dynamic helps us to understand the frequency and diversity of the ideological impulse toward seeing dominant social practices and perceptions as “universal” . . . . The claim of universality was sustainable because, as even its opponents in the period conceived it, “there was no alternative to capitalism as a method of economic development.” But acceptance of such an unanswerable premise entailed acceptance of an entire network of ideological and rhetorical consequences. The dominant discourses thus came to appear as the naturalized expression of the social formation itself, as the self-evident form of utterance, the system of sense-making which, precisely, “went without saying.”10 Threading back to Jameson, utopia and dystopia can be figured as dialectical tools of counter-discourse that produce an analytic critical distance which enables the “unsaid” of dominant discourses to be glimpsed as social constructions. Through their extrapolative figurations, utopia and dystopia restore to view contradictions within dominant discourses; and while they inherently register the dominant itself in their discursive dissent, utopia and dystopia articulate possible better alternatives or regressive outcomes that call the efficacy of present systems into question. It is in this vein that Jameson underscores the “explicit intertextuality” of literary utopias: “few other literary forms have so brazenly affirmed themselves as argument and counterargument” (Archaeologies 2). While utopian and dystopian fictions strategically resist or challenge dominant discourses, it is important to remember that they do so in part because of the failure of mass populist social movements to remake society. Terdiman notes (with a Francocentric focus) that since the demise of nineteenth-century European anti-capitalist movements, “revolutionary social force . . . [has] become radically displaced in consciousness”— essentially relegated to counter-discursive practices such as literary utopias (67, my emphasis). But literature as a form of counter-discourse wields limited power against the dominant, because “the apparatus of dominant discourse, unlike the text, has no final sentence and never concludes. The clichés run along endlessly under their own power. Under such conditions of combat, the literary inevitably appears outflanked” (60). In this way, both Terdiman and Jameson project the seeming impossibility of counter-discursive triumph and realizing utopia, respectively, even as they maintain the indispensability of these, I would argue, functionally analogous categories. Utopian and dystopian fictions can be many things—they are typically not univocal, monologic expressions of dissent, but frequently highly playful and tonally multivalent—but in their capacity as counter-discursive criticism, they can be considered “the prolongation of a social process which was blocked off in more material arenas of productive activity and struggle” (Discourse 80). The remainder of this book will examine the emergence of memory as a

Introduction  13 matter of concern in modern utopian/dystopian narrative, and through a sequence of close textual readings of late twentieth- and early twentyfirst century texts, demonstrate that memory figures as vital to the “social process” of struggling for a better world.

Notes

1

A Brief History of Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives

I. More’s Utopia: Ritual and Static Temporality Even a relatively quick gloss of the utopian genre’s namesake text reveals that memory was no preoccupation at the genre’s outset. That is not to say that memory, particularly collective memory, lacks constructive power in Thomas More’s Utopia; on the contrary, memory operations figure importantly in the imagined social world of the Utopians due to its ritual nature. But memory itself remains unexamined as an object of thought or anxiety for More’s island denizens, for More himself, and, insofar as the text speaks for its epoch of production, for sixteenth-century consciousness. For pre-capitalist sixteenth-century Europe and considerably after, memory existed largely undifferentiated from lived traditions and the norms established by the leading families in county districts.1 In the essay “Utopia, The City and The Machine,” Lewis Mumford argues that already in the sixteenth century, the Copernican revolution ushered in the conditions for the ideology of science to begin to assemble the largely human components—scientists, administrators, engineers, uniformed standing armies—of the “Invisible Machine” of absolute state power. Mumford suggests that this development of statecraft machinery eventually effected a far greater social change than the industrial revolution, but since the evolution toward the modern sovereign state took more than three hundred years to complete, it went largely unremarked by contemporary observers (19–22). In a similar vein, Stephen Greenblatt notes that in the Renaissance, relations between the royal court and the intellectual class to which More belonged, which was starting to move out of the Church and into its own group status, were already in flux (36). However, this evolution of form among the elites did not broadly impact the social order. Not until the French revolutionary period did the social and existential shockwaves of totalizing change substantially unsettle a wide swath of the Western psyche. Thus, More’s Utopia’s relationship to memory, temporality, and history remains fairly normative for narrative utopias until the long nineteenth-century’s acceleration of social change finally brings memory, and memory’s utopian coordinates, into fraught self-consciousness. Such a claim perhaps ensures a degree

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  15 of overgeneralization; as Sargent reminds us, the history of utopian literature tends to be more diverse and dynamic than we give it credit for (“Five Hundred Years” 186). But because this book does not aim at a broad survey of early utopias—being concerned primarily with twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts—and because the narrative devices More introduced, such as the journey and the narrative interlocutors, proved so enduring to the literary utopia, More’s text will be made to stand for utopias extending until shortly prior to the French Revolution, spanning several centuries. The long gestation period of the modern state as described by Mumford gave rise, beginning with More, to a particular articulation of the human desire for fulfillment—that of utopia as a “project” of programmatic social change. Zygmunt Bauman argues that this utopian form was defined by two distinct attributes: territoriality and finality. Utopia as a topos—a spatially discrete place—reflects the fact that in the phase of “solid modernity,” power and sovereignty were always territorially defined; accordingly, utopian conceptions of the good society took the territoriality of well-ordered power for granted (“Utopia with No Topos” 12–14). Moreover, the sought-for change that would usher in an ideal society was meant to be final and immune to vicissitudes. In its territoriality, Bauman remarks that—as evidenced by More’s nod to Plato’s Republic in designating the city as the ideal social form for human governance and flourishing—that the utopian imagination was “essentially architectural and urbanistic” (14). The city, therefore, became the design space on which the utopian writer imprinted a more desirable and consistent social alternative to what currently existed. Critics have differed, however, on determining the means, or method, by which the utopianist extrapolates an alternative future for the city. In his classic essay on literary utopias, Northrop Frye posits that the utopian writer examines the “significant elements” in his or her society, and then “the utopia itself shows what society would be like if those elements were fully developed” (26). This is utopia by evolution or addition. Much more recently, and convincingly, Jameson has argued that the utopianist begins with negation—identifying the one specific social evil from which all others proceed and calling for its removal. For More, that evil (and dominant discourse) is money and property, and later utopianists from Campanella to Morris retain More’s fundamental abolition and augment it with other concerns or innovations (Archaeologies 12). Taking the negation of money and property as More’s starting point, Jameson also identifies “the four raw materials of [the text’s] representation”— the cluster of historical/cultural elements More synthesizes into Utopia: classical Greece (humanism), the monastery, tribal communism, and the reform spirit of Protestantism (24). While Jameson more correctly locates the utopianist’s diagnostic origin point in negation, Frye’s particular understanding of the utopian

16  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives genre’s formal workings nevertheless helps to underscore memory’s implicit centrality to early narrative utopias. Frye argues that in constructing an imaginary society, the utopian writer almost invariably describes the behavior of that society ritually (26). The utopian writer (and the utopian guide) concern themselves only with those social behaviors which are typical and which demonstrate the efficacy of the utopia over and against the writer’s (and the utopian visitor’s) society. The importance of these sanctioned ritual behaviors is in their perceived reasonableness: rituals are apparently irrational acts which become rational when their significance is explained. In such utopias the guide explains the structure of the society and thereby the significance of the behavior being observed. Hence, the behavior of society is presented as rationally motivated. . . . [However], [t]he utopian romance does not present society as governed by reason; it presents it as governed by ritual habit, or prescribed social behavior, which is explained rationally. (26–27) As Frye suggests, More conceives his Utopia as ordered by a preponderance of ritual. Hythloday represents every behavior in Utopia as a collective behavior since he mentions very few discrete individuals or incidents from his five years spent in Amaurot. But he does not neglect to explain the motivation behind each habitual form, whether it be the Utopians’ mode of dress, labor, leisure, or religious worship. Hythloday’s syntax reinforces continually the rational grounds of the Utopians’ behavioral choices: “it is their opinion that Nature . . .” (38); “For they account it a very just cause . . .” (38); “They therefore think it is reasonable that . . .” (59). Social and personal conduct in Utopia straddles the line between reasoned choice and ritual habit. Citizens are not bound thoughtlessly or superstitiously to tradition, yet traditions hold sway. The ritual of presenting betrothed couples to each other naked is “constantly observed,” so as to be habitual, but is also “accounted perfectly consistent with wisdom” (58). Ritual behaviors abound in Utopia and later utopias, such as Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), and function as collective forms of identity formation. More and Campanella give no representation of the interior lives of individual utopian subjects, meaning that memory is not, as Frances Ferguson writes, “implicated in what we mean by the internalization of experience, the psychologization of everyday life that we connect with modernity, in as much as memory [is] identical with reflection” (510). Hythloday’s individual feat of episodic and semantic memory in recounting his knowledge of the island aside, memory in Utopia can be said to coincide closely with Halbwachs’s thesis that people only remember in the context of groups. In Halbwachs’s understanding, collective memory would coalesce around the ritual behaviors that give meaning and cohesion to family and social groups. In his important extension of Halbwachs, Paul Connerton argues that it is

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  17 largely through rituals and bodily practices themselves that collective memory is sustained and transmitted.2 Connerton’s work, and ritual as a performative mode of memory, will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, but here, I want to emphasize two things: first, it is crucial to note that the efficacy of the Utopians’ rituals is never in question—More’s text betrays no anxiety over whether established rituals will continue to produce the desired social behaviors over time. Collective memory is assumed stable both synchronically and diachronically, an enduring trait of the utopian form until the twentieth century. Second, despite the great prevalence of ritual, which would suggest Utopus’s heirs are rooted in mémoire, in Nora’s sense of organically lived traditions and history, Utopian society actually appears to be divorced from history. Put more specifically, More’s text obscures ritual’s origin in historically constituted memory because More shifts the Urgrund of the society’s ritual behaviors from a political and social rejection of private property to a theological corrective against the sin of pride. Before looking at the specific way in which More’s treatment of pride works to detach Utopia from history, we can usefully consider Jameson’s broader observation that the utopia as a generic form seems to erase the historical elements that give rise to it. Arguing that the utopian form emerges in part to give a certain completion to genres such as the mirror for princes (Machiavelli) and written constitutions, Jameson notes that It is a paradox that a form so absolutely dependent on historical circumstance (it flourishes only in specific conditions and on certain rare historical occasions) should give the appearance of being supremely ahistorical; that a form which inevitably arouses political passions should seem to avoid or to abolish the political altogether. (37) Jameson accounts for this paradox by looking at the genre of “moral fables about non-existent states” in Book One of Utopia that More/ Hythloday utilize as object lessons in political conduct: namely, the Macarians, whose king limits his personal wealth; the Achorians, who find conquering a neighboring kingdom more trouble than it’s worth; and the Polylerites, who sentence thieves to forced labor instead of the gallows (38). Looking at the Polylerite episode in particular, Jameson echoes Marin’s earlier claim that it is internally contradictory: if the Polylerits are such a “happy nation,” why is there theft?3 Or, if there is very little theft, how can it be proven that the Polylerit penal code, and not other factors, is responsible? Jameson concludes the discussion by arguing that More can only solve these contradictions by concocting a representational space more fully removed from the historical world. One cannot—such is the lesson of these extrapolations—change individual features of current reality. A reform which singles out

18  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives this or that vice, this or that flaw or error in the system, with a view towards modifying that feature alone, quickly discovers . . . a multitude of unexpected yet constitutive links with all the other features in the system. . . . Thus, in order to adequately represent such changes, the modification of reality must be absolute and totalizing: and this impulsion of the Utopian text is at one with a revolutionary and systemic concept of change rather than a reformist one. (39) The utopian form, while born out of highly specific politico-historical conditions, depends upon a kind of self-referential, ahistoricized space. For More, the geographic separation of Utopia from the world as a man-made island reinforces and augments its seeming ahistorical existence; in Christian theological terms, Utopia is a model of being in the world but not of it.4 The ritual behaviors that give meaning to social existence in Utopia derive ostensibly from the desire to embody the concept of the commonwealth in its absolute sense—to ensure that in a land where no one has property that “all men zealously pursue the good of the public” (Utopia 81). At the end of Book One, Hythloday argues that the abolition of private property must be unconditional; Hythloday’s view on property coincides, in fact, with Jameson’s assertion above that the utopian genre depends upon systemic as opposed to reformist change. If property is not entirely “taken away,” any other laws that a government enacted to improve the health of the social organism, “might allay and mitigate the disease, but it could never quite be healed” (24–25). To this extent, then, if we take Hythloday’s view as More’s (not usually a safe assumption), Utopia was meant to express More’s political and historically determined convictions about property, but in attempting to represent such a commonwealth, one literally severed away from the rest of the world, the text accrues its ahistorical appearance. Even so, minor details in the text show that the Utopians’ ritual behaviors could still be said to have a certain internal grounding in historical memory; Hythloday mentions, for instance, that the island’s preserved historical records date back 1,760 years, and certain memorial practices, such as erecting statues in honor of highly virtuous men to “perpetuate the remembrance of their actions,” indicate historical consciousness (61). While such details produce a certain mimetic impression of historicity, More’s abrupt shift at the end of Book Two, where he names human pride, rather than property, as the fundamental adversary of a true commonwealth, recasts the entirety of Book Two as a type of meditation on human failing. In the well-known passage, Hythloday laments that all nations, in obedience to Christ’s commands, would have already adopted the laws of the Utopians if not for pride, “that plague of human nature . . . that infernal serpent that creeps into the breasts of mortals” (83–84). Re-reading Book Two in this light, what seems More’s most playful critique of the dominant discourse of property and money being the measure of all things—the

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives 19 famous account of the Utopians’ use of gold and silver for making chamber pots and slaves’ chains—becomes a morally serious reflection on the temptations of pride and its attendant sins of vanity and envy. As Hythloday says, “they take care, by all possible means, to render gold and silver of no esteem,” which suggests a slippage from social satire to serious moral or religious tract (44, emphasis added). More’s imbrication of the metaphysical and the political (and attributing final causation to the former) works to dehistoricize Utopian ritual behaviors, positioning not private property and the forms of oppression it engenders, but human nature itself as their intended target.5 In this context, memory loses any collective historical function, and the importance of ritual as a form of collective memory goes unremarked in the text because the ultimate consequences of failing to heed such rituals lies not in history but in the soul. In his summation of Utopia, Jameson expands on this point and further explains the auto-referential, ahistorical quality of the text by triangulating its three nodes, or “ideologemes,” of pride, money (gold), and egalitarianism. Each of these ideologemes represents a different sphere or dimension of activity: pride, the psychological or theological; money and gold, the economic and political; egalitarianism, the sphere of social existence. None of the terms can simply correct or cancel the others out (lack of social hierarchy does not negate pride, for instance) because each represents “a move from one dimension to another,”—from the soul to social existence to the economic realm (40). Jameson argues that, no single realm can define its elements completely in its own terms, but must borrow from the other ones at the same time that it differentiates itself from them. . . . The rotation of these three ideologemes is itself the source of Utopia’s seeming autonomy on the representational level, and rescues the text from the status of a mere tract on any one of the themes (a pamphlet against money, for example, or a theological treatise on pride, a revolutionary broadbill denouncing social hierarchy). (41) More’s island contains an internal density of ideological reference points, and the text as a whole synthesizes a plethora of generic antecedents, but in devising a self-contained world, or “pocket utopia,” Utopia largely dispenses with history and thus with the contingencies of memory. Sargent rightly cautions against reading Utopia or other island utopias such as Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) as entirely static or immune to change; many Utopians convert to Christianity after hearing Hythloday’s testimony and the collegians of Salomon’s House send explorers to other lands to “bring us the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts.”6 But nevertheless, the overriding hermetic quality of the early utopias, along with their pre-modern subjectivity, arrests memory as a matter of concern or agency in the imaginative quest for better societies.

20  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives

II. The Memory Crisis In the world of nascent modernity, Utopia opened up a representational space for imagining social alternatives, but without fully reckoning with the movement of history. More’s framework for Utopia became a repeated pattern and coalesced into a genre, but by the late twentieth century, the timelessness of literary utopias became a point of critique. Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Pacific Edge (1988), itself a utopia set in the year 2065, features intermittent journal entries from 2012 written by Tom Barnard, a young lawyer who, frustrated by the possibilities for social change, attempts to write a utopia instead. But the utopian form creates its own frustrations for Barnard; he writes: What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start. So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? (95; original italics) Robinson voices explicitly the critique implicit in Marge Piercy’s slightly earlier critical utopia Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), that the literary utopia’s conceptual template neglects to “deal with history as it stands,” and also fails to account for historical flux (Robinson 95). Robinson indicts the entire corpus of the utopian genre, from More to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), for removing utopia to a virgin elsewhere and thereby diminishing its use value. Although Robinson does not articulate the issue as such, the problem of utopias being sequestered from history is a problem of memory. Island utopias implicitly “work” because their inhabitants don’t have to remember the weight of history; they are simultaneously a “cheat” that readers resent because we don’t get to just forget—our past continues to haunt the present. Our concern at this point is not to address the specific merits of Robinson’s critique, or to enumerate all the important literary utopias implicated by his claim, but rather to ask what historical and ideological developments enabled Robinson’s critique in the first place. What transformations of the intellectual and social landscape—what altered conceptions of temporality, history, representation—first created the conditions of possibility in which Robinson would come to find the static literary utopia deeply problematic? This book’s contention is that the genesis of such critique lies in the cultural perturbations of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that made memory itself seem cut off from history and history emerge as a discipline of ordering time. Through the seismic social upheavals of the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), in particular, memory and the past became matters of considerable anxiety; the

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  21 past seemed irretrievably lost, memory unmoored, and the uncertain present became consciously experienced and conceptualized as history. In the century leading up to the French Revolution, understandings (and the perceived function) of memory moved away from the classical and Renaissance “art of memory” model, which emphasized precise retrieval or reproduction, to use John Frow’s and Richard Terdiman’s terms, respectively.7 Through the writings of Locke, Rousseau, and later, Wordsworth, Anne Whitehead posits that memory took a “turn inward” and became concerned primarily with individual identity (51). Locke’s reflections on memory in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1700) mark a pivotal shift toward the modern; here Locke contends that memory underlies the crucial “continuity of consciousness” that is personal identity (Whitehead 56). Locke’s attention to the fact that consciousness and memory are frequently interrupted by forgetfulness and sleep, or in severe cases, amnesia, also speaks to the contingencies of identity. Later, in the Romantic period, Frances Ferguson finds an expanded moral component to memory in her concept of romantic memory, wherein one’s memories of self have to contend with the “claims of the collective”—for example, having to wrestle with memories of how one’s actions affected, or might have affected, others (510). In the course of her wide-ranging argument, Ferguson focuses on a moment from Book XII of Wordsworth’s The Prelude where Wordsworth recalls the death of his father. In this passage, Wordsworth associates waiting eagerly to be picked up from school for a Christmas holiday with the death of his father less than ten days later, seeming to imply that his desire to leave brought on his father’s death. The memory association creates guilt: “The event / With all the sorrow that it brought, appeared / A chastisement” (1850, 12.309–11). The upshot, Ferguson proceeds to gloss, is that Wordsworth also marshals memory in a way that defends him from the conviction of having caused his father’s death (528–29). Memory operates as both cause and cure. Ferguson suggests of this complex, multidirectional memory that in so far as one’s sense of having acted involves an expansive time frame, the consciousness of oneself as a moral agent . . . continually charges the memory with the task of observing and retaining the materials that may come to be actions. Were this expansive memory to expand forever, it would produce a kind of anticipatory guilt of massive—indeed, paralyzing—proportions. (529) For scholars attempting to trace memory’s vicissitudes over time, the uneasy relationship between individual memory and the claims of others, and the potential of memory to overwhelm individuals, signal a transition into a historical moment where memory comes to be seen as a problem.

22  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives Within the utopian genre, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1771 novel L’An Duex Mille Quatre Cent Quarante (The Year 2440, translated in English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), one of the first narrative utopias to be set in the future, perhaps best captures this transitional moment in the way it reflects earlier periods by overlooking memory’s pull on identity but also apprehends modern tendencies by acknowledging the weight of history. On one hand, concerning his unnamed narrator, Mercier seems blithely uninterested in how an extreme leap forward in time—with its disruption in the continuity of memory and consciousness—might provoke an identity crisis. The narrator, after an evening spent conversing with an English companion who decries the evils of Paris, falls asleep and dreams that he wakes up 732 years later to find Paris transformed by the triumph of reason and absence of despotism. Apart from the momentary shock of seeing himself in the mirror as a very old man, the dreaming narrator experiences no terror or grief at the thought that “thirty generations” have died since he was last conscious (i). On the other hand, however, Mercier evinces a concern with how knowledge of human history could potentially corrupt the mind. When discussing the education of children, the narrator’s utopian guide, himself a “man of learning” (17), says We teach them little history, because history is the disgrace of humanity, every page being crowded with crimes and follies. God forbid that we should set before their eyes such examples of rapine and ambition. By the pedantry of history, kings have been raised to gods. We teach our children a logic more certain, and ideas more just. . . . What! when the time is so short and rapid, shall we employ our children in crowding their memories with a number of names, of dates, of facts, and genealogical trees? What wretched trifling, when the vast fields of morality and physics lie open before us! It is  to no purpose to say that history furnishes examples of instruction to succeeding ages; they are pernicious and infamous examples [;] . . . from children such pictures should be concealed. (62–64) Memory should be kept free from the degenerative influence of history, Mercier’s utopian argues, for only the man of “determined resolution” can behold “such a representation without terror” (64). In the novel, twenty-fifth-century French collective memory’s freedom from the knowledge of, or morbid interest in, the “crimes and follies” of the past shows in how a crowd of Parisians, upon learning that a 760-year-old man is in their midst, utters little more than, “Oh! what a curiosity!” (18). The belief in the oppressive moral weight of history seen in Mercier’s novel, and the potential of memory to overwhelm impressionable sensibilities as diagnosed in Ferguson’s discussion of Wordsworth, stand

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  23 as two examples of authors attempting to “assimilate the rapid and pervasive historical transformations that were occurring” shortly before and after the Revolution (Whitehead 80). Whitehead positions such texts—Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798), one of the most discussed poetic treatments of memory, being a central example—at the cusp of the modern period characterized by Terdiman as coping with memory that is both simultaneously absent and overwhelmingly present. Terdiman’s exceptional book Present Past frames modernity’s social and theoretical unease about the workings of memory and the past’s relationship to the present as a “memory crisis”—the sense that the “past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness” (4). Terdiman seeks to elucidate the causes and consequences of the disruption of what we might call pre-modern memory, meaning the traditional (and pre-capitalist) perception held by individuals and societies of the deep, organic continuity—the uninterrupted connection—between the past and present. Terdiman locates the disruption of this traditional perception (and thus, the alteration of the faculty of memory itself) largely in the processes of capital that, starting around the Revolutionary period in Western Europe, redefined social existence. Looking at the same period, historian Peter Fritzsche argues that the “early nineteenth-century moment of revolution, war, and industrialization” created a profound “disconnection from the past” (5). Fritzsche emphasizes that the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic wars generated mass displacements of peoples and so upended tradition that temporality seemed restructured: Whereas Enlightenment thinkers conceived of the present as the most forward point of a great continuum of progress that pushed on and on, after the French Revolution observers were more apt to think of the present as a point of transition, one which moved away from the past. (Fritzsche 54) Reinhart Koselleck suggests that statesmen lost their sense of history as cyclical—when the past could be assumed to inhere in the future—even prior to the Revolution; the feeling of change and progress accelerated and abbreviated the space of experiences, robbed them of their constancy, and continually brought into play new, unknown factors, so that even the actuality or complexity of these unknown quantities could not be ascertained. This began to be apparent well before the French Revolution. (17) Terdiman, meanwhile, finds the sense of temporal dislocation embedded within the systemic changes to daily experience and consciousness

24  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives wrought by capital’s growth. First and foremost, industrialization—the application of machine power to production—not only brought into existence a new world of objects but fundamentally altered the way entire socioeconomic groups experienced time. In drastically short order, rhythms of labor and daily life that for centuries had been determined by the seasons were brought under the regulation of the clock (Stearns 58). The removal of work from the home—the shift of the site of labor from the home to factories, offices, and the like—led to the “increasing abstraction of psychosocial life . . . [where] the objects of concern to individuals were typically out of sight” (Terdiman 30; Stearns 61). Large-scale migration to cities, especially in England, not only interrupted traditional extended family structures (and consequently oral repositories of memory), but also created large urban populations with no collective memory of the cities they inhabited (Altick 76–77). The “massification” of public life, to borrow Lukács’s term, through print media, consumer products, and state education, along with the concomitant movement toward written and archival forms of memory, gave to daily experience an increasingly impersonal and institutionalized character. Additionally, Terdiman and Fritzsche each identify the rise of history as a discipline as the clearest indication that the memory crisis—the apprehension of the present’s profound disconnect from the past—had entered into cultural consciousness, both in Europe and North America.8 Pierre Nora also argues similarly regarding history being the modern and fundamental opposite of living collective memory: “Perhaps the most tangible sign of the split between history and memory has been the emergence of a history of history, the awakening. . . of a historiographical consciousness” (9). While the discipline of history lends an important and fruitful conceptual rigor to the investigation of the past, Terdiman, Fritzsche, and Nora all allude to a deep perception of loss as history’s precondition. Finally, it should be noted that the cataclysms of temporality experienced during the early nineteenth century did not subside; Matthew Beaumont stresses that at the fin de siècle, prolonged economic crises from the 1870s on deeply unsettled mid-Victorian views of progress and produced the effect of making the present seem “discontinuous, disjointed” (11). Although Terdiman acknowledges the entire range of nineteenthcentury social transformations mentioned above, he suggests that the nature of the memory crisis as a whole might best be understood in the figure of the commodity. The mystification surrounding commodities highlights the larger problematic status of memory in the age of capital, perhaps captured most pithily in the aphorism of Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “all reification is a forgetting.”9 Tracing Lukács’s and Adorno’s developments of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, Terdiman shows that the mass production of commodities— what he calls the commodity process—“systematically gets forgotten”

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  25 and then reified (12, original emphasis). Because the “experience of commodification and the process of reification cut entities off from their own history,” masking the memory of their production from both consumers and the people producing them, commodities accrue an enigmatic status (12). Terdiman asserts that “the enigma of the commodity is a memory disorder,” because commodities, even those manufactured purposely as souvenirs, undermine the normally close connection that physical objects have with our remembrance (12–13, original emphasis). What gets obscured, ultimately, in the commodity process is the memory of process itself. The commodity serves as a particularly apt example of the modern memory crisis since it draws attention both to the problem of forgetting and to the disquieting recollection of how cut off we are from the past. Thus, Terdiman characterizes nineteenth-century Europe as dealing with two interrelated memory maladies: people (especially intellectuals) worried about forgetting at the same time that they were troubled by memory’s persistence; in other words, the apparently opposing problems of “too little memory and too much” (14, original emphasis). In a series of essays on maladies de la mémoire in nineteenth-century France, intellectual historian Michael S. Roth concurs that French culture grappled with the “dangers and excitement of too much forgetting and too much remembering” due to rapid social change, causing philosophers and medical doctors to diagnose “how much of a connection to the past was good for us” (21). Terdiman’s emphasis on the memory loss entailed in capitalism’s developmental processes, and his concluding observation about the enigmatic abstraction of commodities, that “[t]o understand what we have made, we have to be able to remember it,” also suggests an underlying irony in Robinson’s assessment in Pacific Edge that literary utopias circumvent historical process altogether (12). Readers of literary utopias, Robinson asserts, desire a path from here to utopia that deals with our history as it actually is, meaning where we’ve come from. They desire in narrative form the architectural mode of Levitas’s Imaginary Reconstitution of Society with due attention to process. But if the Marxist account of the mystification of commodities and the real conditions of social existence holds true, then we cannot fully remember where we’ve come from or how we arrived here/now. We read utopias seeking a certain kind of process clarity about a possible future that we don’t remember we’ve forgotten (or never knew) about the actual past. Recalling the negative function of utopias, we could say that the lack of attention to historical process so readily apparent in literary utopias underscores our own inability to remember the processes of capital. The nineteenth-century disequilibrium created by rapid social transformations under capitalism produced various analytical responses by scholars who adopted social scientific models to diagram the shift from traditional to modern social structures. Perhaps the most influential was sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s 1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft

26  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives (Community and Society), a dichotomous framing of the distance between past and present. Although Tönnies’s binary categories represent stages of social development (Gemeinschaft gives way to Gesellschaft), they are actually conceptual “ideal types” meant to characterize defining social traits that are more or less present in any given historical moment (Loomis and McKinney 7). For Tönnies, Gemeinschaft denotes a “unity of being” rooted in kinship, a “living organism” that is the “lasting and genuine form of living together” (Tönnies 42, 35). Gesellschaft, meanwhile, is artificial and mechanistic, a “mere coexistence of people independent of each other” (34). Traditional communities endure across generations and organically reproduce like values (62), so that there “exists a Gemeinschaft of language, of folkways or mores, or of beliefs; but, by way of contrast, Gesellschaft exists in the realm of business, travel, or sciences” (34). While Loomis and McKinney point out that Tönnies denied any intent of positing Gemeinschaft as good and Gesellschaft as bad, the emotive valences of his descriptions suggest not so much a social development or transition as a desolation (2–3). In this tone, Tönnies may have been influenced by German historian W. H. Riehl, whose multi-volume work, The Natural History of the German People (1851–69), was praised at length by George Eliot in her 1856 Westminster Review essay for its portrayal of the German peasantry. Like Tönnies, Riehl saw the rise of market relations (e.g. the proletariat) as a “decomposition” of the social organism; in Eliot’s words, Riehl found “many disintegrating forces have been at work on the peasant character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at a greater pace than development” (Sheppard 172, 157). Both German scholars (and Eliot) saw in the advent of the modern a troubling loss of the past and of social unity, and thus, of collective memory. So, if the Gesellschaft of early modernity suffered from genesis amnesia, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, concerning its origins within capitalism, but at the same time revolutionary era Europeans were beset by too much remembering in mourning the loss of what they perceived as traditional life, what conceptual frameworks or institutions emerged to replace tradition and give shape to memory? (Bourdieu 79).10 Historians and theorists point, of course, to the nation (or the nation-state) as modernity’s constitutive form. Benedict Anderson, arguing that nation-ness comes into being at the end of the eighteenth century, suggests that declining religious communities and monarchic dynasties were the cultural schemes out of which, and against which, the nation gathered meaning and intense emotional investment (11–22). The new imagined political communities of nations, as famously defined by Anderson, brought forth “a radically changed form of consciousness,” requiring the remembering of the nation’s supposed antiquity and the forgetting of former modes of social organization (xiv). Anderson observes that the new nationalisms of Europe, following the slightly earlier nationalisms in North and

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  27 South America, “almost immediately began to imagine themselves as ‘awakening from sleep,’ ” a trope that invoked a misty antiquity that had been rediscovered and remembered anew (195). Nations only sustained legitimacy when their members felt a kinship and sense of belonging grounded in some kind of ancestral memory; the solution to the need for such remembering, Anderson notes, was “found in History, or rather History emplotted in particular ways,” an assertion which accords with Terdiman and Nora’s claims that history as a discipline signals the memory crisis of modern consciousness (198). Writing in a more theoretical register, Phillip Wegner also posits that the nation-state, as the spatial and political form of modernity, becomes established in part through the representational work of history—more specifically, the unique construction of history performed by the narrative utopia. In Imaginary Communities (2002), Wegner argues that narrative utopias have had real pedagogical and political effects, and thus have influenced the formation of the nation-state as a spatial and socio-cultural construct (xvi). Utopias are often produced in moments of change when the conception of the nation is contested or in crisis, and, in entering that fray, the narrative utopia engages not in mimesis—attempting to represent the world as it is—but rather, in its dialectical relationship with ideology, the utopia performs its unique vocation by remapping the nation-spaces of modernity (xvii–23). Working through the question posed by Terry Eagleton—“What traumatic upheaval of perception is involved in thinking of the political no longer as a question of local sovereignty, of something interwoven with the labor and kinship relations of a specific place, but as an abstract national formation?”—Wegner contends that More’s Utopia, despite its ahistoricism, enacts an “estranging deterritorialization” on feudal culture that opens up the present in a new way, and then overlays a “reterritorialization that is only later understood to be the form of the modern nation-state.”11 The rethinking of space that eventually normalized the nation-state in the Western psyche involved, as Anderson suggests, certain kinds of remembering and forgetting, and whereas early narrative utopias largely ignored temporality (and thus memory) as a determinant, in the late nineteenth century, the pressures of capital operating on the nation-state in tandem with the new historical consciousness brought the problem of memory into self-conscious relief in the American utopian project of Edward Bellamy.

III. Bellamy’s Utopia of Forgetting and the Morality of Memory Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887 stands as a singular achievement in the history of narrative utopias; one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century, perhaps trailing only Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in copies sold, Looking Backward

28  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives provoked copious imitations, responses, and rebuttals from other writers around the world.12 But most uniquely, Bellamy’s utopia, which imagines capitalist America transformed through the secular religion of national solidarity into a system of nationalized industry and employment, generated actual political momentum in the United States. Inspired by the ethics of solidarity and equality that Bellamy dubbed Nationalism (meant to distinguish from socialism, which Bellamy considered European, materialist, and prone to violent agitation), readers of Looking Backward, often with disparate agendas, created organizations to discuss Bellamy’s ideas and engage in political activism. Beginning with the first Nationalist group formed in Boston in 1888 by a cohort of journalists, literati, and retired military officers who started The Nationalist magazine, the movement soon grew to around 160 Nationalist clubs nationwide. Bellamy himself, the introverted, tuberculosis-stricken journalist/novelist, dedicated himself to the Nationalist crusade by editing The New Nation weekly paper and campaigning to shape the ideological agenda of Populism (the People’s Party).13 As numerous critics have pointed out, Bellamy’s utopia found such a receptive audience in part because it reassuringly depicted a sweeping, peaceful, and seemingly inevitable solution to the pressing disputes between labor and capital (what Bellamy’s narrator Julian West terms “the labor question”) that many Americans of the time felt to be a national crisis.14 West, a young leisured Bostonian, induced into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 to treat his insomnia, wakes in the year 2000 to find society utterly transformed along broadly egalitarian lines. Having lost every mooring of his identity, including his fiancée Edith Bartlett, West is integrated into the “new world” by Dr. Leete, his wife, and daughter Edith, to whom West eventually becomes engaged (125). Ultimately given a job as a historian and living witness of America’s Gilded Age, which provides the novel its narrative frame, West writes that in the 1880s, the “relation between the workingman and the employer, between labor and capital,” had become “dislocated” (Looking Backward 10). West reminds his utopian readers in 2000 of the “nearly incessant” labor strikes that characterized market society from the “great business crisis” (depression) of 1873 on, a truth certainly not lost on Bellamy’s actual nineteenth-century readers (9). The rise of industrial monopolies after the Civil War without regulatory interference from federal or state government precipitated explosive growth in cheap wage labor and the rampant exploitation of male, female, and child workers. Unionizing laborers, facing starvation during depression periods and poverty at the best of times, sought relief through collective action and staged 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905, involving seven million workers. But the frequent violence of large strikes, particularly the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which left over a hundred dead, stirred the memory of the 1871 Paris Commune revolution, which had received extensive US

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  29 newspaper coverage, and led many middle-class Americans, including Bellamy, to fear widespread revolution at home.15 As John Thomas has shown, Bellamy believed the “uneducated class of workers lacked the means to create a viable politics or genuine culture of their own, a dismissal made easier by his ignorance of the ethnic, religious, and linguistic richness of American working-class life” (Alternative 234). The 1886 demonstration at Chicago’s Haymarket Square by socialist and anarchist groups protesting the deaths of four striking workers—which resulted in a bomb throwing, police firing on protesters, and scores dead or injured—solidified Bellamy’s suspicion of organized labor while he was writing Looking Backward. Although the identity of the bomb thrower remained unestablished, the conviction of seven foreign-born anarchist leaders convinced many middle-class observers that unions amounted to a foreign insurgency. Bellamy’s Julian West suggests as much when he characterizes anarchists as a “small band of men” who “proposed to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas by threats of violence” (11). West also admits that his former self bore animus toward the laboring classes for stopping construction of his Boston home, thus delaying his marriage to Edith Bartlett. Prior to giving any specifics about labor and capital relations in the opening chapter of Looking Backward, West first attempts to describe 1880s America to his twentieth-century reader in moral terms with an affective parable. Bellamy’s famous parable compares society to a stagecoach driven by “hunger” and pulled by “masses of humanity” toiling along a “very hilly and sandy road,” while the affluent passengers riding in the coach tried to preserve their comfortable seats, fearing that each “jolt” in the road—and such “accidents” were frequent—might topple them (6–7). In narrating the parable, West implicates himself morally, acknowledging that he was once one of the passengers who believed himself better than his “brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope,” and was hardened to their suffering (8). As counter-discourse, Bellamy’s parable openly challenges the inhumanity of industrial capitalism and the prevailing conviction “that there was no other way in which Society could get along” (8). But Bellamy also reveals certain misgivings about the labor movement, particularly through what the parable itself conceals. Building on Alan Trachtenberg’s incisive account of middle-class responses to strikes and labor crises, Wegner notes that the parable underscores the threat, perceived by middle-class commentators, of wide social disorder—the “general overturn” of the coach, as Bellamy writes, not being blamed specifically on the wealthy passengers but seemingly just as attributable to the laboring poor’s “leaping and plunging.”16 The potential for widespread social cataclysm portended by a loss of order threatened Bellamy’s belief in progress “ever onward and upward,” as expressed in Julian West’s preface (4). Jonathan Auerbach goes further in arguing that while ostensibly intended to represent “the relations of

30  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives the rich and poor to one another” (LB 6), the coach analogy actually “manages to obscure the very relations it would reveal”: Steered by the abstraction “hunger” toward no destination in particular, both passengers and the harnessed toilers are at the mercy of mysterious forces that have nothing to do with their relations to one another. The dislocated relation between labor and capital is relocated in the friction between coach and road, thereby draining persons, rich and poor, of any power to change the direction of the nation. (29) The parable, then, while potent in its expressions of sympathy for the working poor, makes no indictment of their exploitation by the rich. This obfuscation of the workings of power extends quickly outwards in the text. Just paragraphs later, when West names some of labor’s particular demands—“for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings, better educational advantages”—he omits who they are demanded from (10). Bellamy effects the very dislocation he says pervades labor and capital relations by removing capital from its position of agency; in assessing the working classes’ demands, he explains by way of circumlocution that they are “demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it then was” (10). The possibility of the “world” accruing wealth—seemingly of its own accord—is thus divorced from any machinations of the rich. The critical payload for Bellamy of his “dismissal of the fundamental problems of power and decision-making,” as Thomas writes, his refusal to say who gets to say, is a utopian America that occludes the possibility of national discord (Introduction 86). Bellamy’s future United States features no actual states—state governments being unnecessary impediments to a national legislature with no real authority and nothing to do, for, as Dr. Leete explains to West, the “fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation” (123). But the national solidarity Bellamy covets only becomes achievable by erasing problematic identities and contentious histories from America’s narrative. In his terrific analysis of Looking Backward, Wegner concludes that “[f]or Bellamy, the modern American nation-state can be formed only through a collective act of forgetting, a breaking of the bonds of the past, and a reorientation toward a single future” (63). In other words, Bellamy’s novel perfectly encapsulates the modern perception of an overabundance of memory and the “dangers” of “too much remembering,” and argues that utopia in fact depends on freedom from memory. Narrative utopias often rely structurally on moments of perception and recognition of, and then mental assimilation to, the utopian society as utopian, a sequence critical not only for narrative protagonists but

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  31 also for readers. But the efficacy of such a sequence for the reader depends upon a certain estrangement from the reader’s status quo that allows for a utopian vista. As Jameson famously argues in “Progress Versus Utopia” regarding the relationship between science fiction’s form of representation and its “ostensible content—the future,” the purpose of SF’s “apparent realism” is “not to give us ‘images’ of the future. . . but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present” (151). Since modern historical consciousness, meaning an historiographical awareness of the radical disconnect between present and past, emerged in tandem with capitalism, Jameson suggests that capitalism requires a different experience of temporality from earlier socio-economic modes such as feudalism: “it demands a memory of qualitative social change, a concrete vision of the past which we may expect to find completed by that far more abstract and empty conception of some future terminus which we sometimes call ‘progress’” (149). As a modern narrative utopia, Looking Backward attempts to fulfill its utopian vocation by negotiating temporality in just this way: it defamiliarizes the present moment of 1888 by depicting it as memory, as a “concrete vision of the past,” an obsolete and chaotic era entirely superseded by “progress.” Matthew Beaumont contends that Bellamy’s much imitated tactic of historicizing the present by casting it as “the pre-history of the future” stands as his “greatest achievement.”17 Bellamy succeeds in giving his readers the necessary critical vantage point from which to perceive a moral and systemic wretchedness within the present. Invoking Goethe’s line “If you want me to show you the vicinity, you must first climb to the roof,” quoted by Bloch as an epigraph to his essay “On the Present in Literature,” Beaumont discusses Bloch’s concern with the problem of representing the present objectively (Beaumont 41). Bloch argues that “all nearness makes matters difficult, and if it is too close, then one is blinded” (“Present” 208). The immediate lived moment—the “right now”—exists for us “in the dark” because it lacks distance, but even our more mediated sense of the “present” is difficult to represent “in comparison with the portrayal of times long since gone” (208). Just as the novel’s principal plot device creates an important perspectival distance for the reader, Beaumont observes that in order for the just-awoken Julian West to recognize his temporal-spatial location in the utopia of twentieth-century Boston, he needs to “first climb to the roof.” Naturally enough, West is incredulous when told by his “mysterious host” Dr. Leete that he has slept for 113 years; he suspects a conspiracy or elaborate joke (18). To enable West to convince himself that it is indeed the year 2000, Leete leads West to a lookout on his rooftop so West can survey his surroundings: At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not continuous blocks

32  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives but set in larger or smaller enclosures stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees. . . . Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before. Raising my eyes at last towards the horizon . . . Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not one of its green islets missing. (22) In the cityscape below him, West detects none of the squalor of nineteenthcentury Boston; one brief panoramic view of the clean geometric lines and civic green spaces—hallmarks of utopian city planning—convinces him of the strange truth of his situation.18 In the excitement caused by the sight of his city seemingly magically transformed, West explains to his reader that his thoughts and curiosity became entirely occupied with his new surroundings, and that “[f]or the time my memory of my former life was, as it were, in abeyance” (24). Assimilating to the “magnificence” and “material prosperity” of the new utopian world quickly (albeit temporarily) takes precedence over grappling with the loss of his former life (24). However, as numerous critics have observed, the most striking feature of Bellamy’s vision of utopian Boston is not its magnificence, but its emptiness.19 The city West overlooks contains innumerable physical features conducive to urban living, but apparently, no human inhabitants. Even more remarkable is West’s fevered sojourn into the city in Chapter 7. In one of the novel’s most arresting moments, after a late-night discourse from Dr. Leete on the seamless transition from monopoly capitalism to the nationalized industrial army (which Bellamy considered his signature idea), Julian West wakes from sleep unable to determine where or who he is: I sat up thus in bed staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal identity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has received . . . the individualizing touches which make it a person. (45) Finally recalling his situation, West experiences the “emotional crisis” of feeling “that I was two persons, that my identity was double,” and seeking a diversion, runs out of the Leete’s house and wanders the streets for two hours (46). As he walks, West experiences another doubleness, that of the images of both cities (Boston in 1887 and 2000) superimposing themselves on his mind’s eye, but more significantly here, when encountered close up, the city seems no less vacant than when viewed from the house-top. West makes no mention of seeing any people, only remarking on familiar landmarks, a lacuna reinforced by the fact that during the

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  33 entirety of the novel, the Leetes neither introduce West to anyone nor have any social interactions themselves outside of the family circle. To some extent, the seemingly empty city, which is mirrored in the staid, affectless family life of the Leetes, reflects the reclusive Bellamy’s distaste for strong emotional attachment. Well before Looking Backward, Bellamy wrote in his journals that “These intense emotions, whether of pain or pleasure, we do not want them”; that desire then gets lived out by the Martian characters of his 1886 story “The Blindman’s World,” who, always knowing the future but having virtually no memory, face the approaching deaths of friends by becoming “indifferent to them.”20 Instead of mourning, relationships nearing their end essentially get forgotten. But more germane to our discussion of Looking Backward itself, the absence of visible Bostonians comes as the result of Bellamy’s need to remove human labor from utopia, because labor—entailing the whole organizational minefield of industrial labor and capital relations— threatens the ideal of “the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man” (LB 78). Of course, for a utopia so concerned with labor, Looking Backward depicts precious little of it—virtually none, in fact. Production itself is entirely replaced in the text with descriptions of the distribution of already produced goods, a “prodigiously” efficient logistics system of central dispatching warehouses, grand pavilions (think shopping malls or department stores) filled with product samples, and pneumatic tubes for home delivery (106). On the consumption end, Edith Leete, an “indefatigable shopper,” takes West to one of the nearby “distributing establishments” (pavilions), a “vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome . . . a hundred feet above,” to select a muslin sample (58, 60). But unlike in the large department stores of the 1880s like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor that specialized “not only in selling multiple lines of consumer goods but in the presentation, the advertisement, of such goods as desirable, as necessary,” no one sells Edith Leete anything (Trachtenberg 130). Only after inspecting the muslin samples herself, reading the government printed information cards giving details about each article, and making her selection, does Edith press a button that summons a clerk who wordlessly takes her order. (This clerk and the waiter, mentioned below, are the only individuals besides the Leetes who West encounters in utopia.) When West asks, “The clerk has, then, nothing to say about the goods he sells?”, Edith replies, “Nothing at all. It is not necessary that he should know or profess to know anything about them. Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are all that are required of him” (61). Considering the representation of the entire market process, then, from the manufacturing of goods to the distribution, selling, and consumption of said goods, Bellamy performs a double erasure of production and buying/selling. Beginning with productive labor, Wegner argues that “[t]he very absence of work in the text

34  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives signals the nature of the social morass that Bellamy hoped to avoid in his society: the problem of the modern industrial laborer”—those laborers being often, in Bellamy’s view, alien, unassimilated, and thus resistant to solidarity (78, also 72). Bellamy’s avoidance of work includes not only the invisibility of actual labor but even the discussion of work, except in the abstract. While Dr. Leete explains, for instance, that all men ages 21– 24 are assigned “to all sorts of miscellaneous occupations not requiring special skill,” Leete never mentions what work he did during that time of his life, nor at any other point of his career (LB 92). Leete’s reticence on the matter of work reflects his belief that work is really just “a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties,” or to the leisurely “pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation” (115). The overriding “neutralization of the place of work in the text clears a narrative space” for a new kind of activity, then, that of a middle-class commodity consumerism and the service industry which must support it (Wegner 78). The Leete’s private dining room within the communal dining hall is one such space, where we briefly see an unnamed waiter who will serve the meal (although this service is not actually shown), while the productive labor of cooking remains out of view. Wegner finds, then, that Bellamy’s utopia envisions a “consumerist paradise wherein the dilemmas of industrialism have been wished away, a world of reified commodities from which every trace of labor has been expunged” (80). Auerbach points out, however, that even consumption is removed from the text. Commodities may abound, but no one actually sells or buys them. In order to “divest commodities of their fetishistic aura, [Bellamy] must also deny them as socially mediated”; hence, the fabric clerk is merely a functionary, not a salesman, and the so-called “store” features “no display of goods in the great windows, or any device to advertise wares, or attract custom” (Auerbach 36; LB 60). The text represents shopping as close to non-transactional as possible, because [r]ecognizing that buying requires selling and that selling is a form of persuasion that introduces problematic power relations, Bellamy imagines a perfect fit between the desires of the individual and the provisions of the state, with no one in the middle to mess up the transparent equation. (36) Out of the desire not to introduce any social elements that might disturb his utopia’s equilibrium, Bellamy attempts to empty all social relations of power mainly by erasing the relations themselves. To wit, Dr. Leete maintains that the dining hall waiter does not consider his service menial or degrading because he does not really serve the Leete family; “It is always the nation which he is serving” (LB 92). In this way, Auerbach suggests, “there are no social groupings to mediate between the individual and the

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  35 ‘one source’ that fixes individuality, the tautological Nation: no classes, no communities, no interpersonal relations” (37). I contend that Bellamy sees this vacating maneuver—which serves as his solution to the problem of “others,” the problem of power, and the problem of solidarity—ultimately as a question of memory. Memory, for Bellamy, is finally no less problematic than the totality of industrial capitalism as an obstacle to utopia. Bellamy’s concern with memory long pre-dates his role as would-be utopian prophet, so it is both important and necessary, particularly given that memory figures less overtly in Looking Backward than in some earlier works, to determine its centrality to his pre-utopian thought and texts. Bellamy considered memory troublesome for two primary, interrelated reasons. The first stems from the residual Calvinism of his upbringing; Bellamy’s father, a Baptist clergyman who descended from a disciple of Jonathan Edwards, did not preach stern Calvinist determinism, but nevertheless throughout his youth Bellamy felt “a paralyzing guilt and dread from which he constantly struggled to free himself” (Thomas 3). Seeking a release from guilt and a coherent substitute for received Christianity, Bellamy wrote copious sketches, fragments, and unfinished stories that coalesced around the idea that the self was a duality of limited personal consciousness and larger impersonal affinities for universal communion and egolessness. The unpublished 1874 essay “The Religion of Solidarity,” heavily influenced by Emerson, solidified for Bellamy his “philosophy of life,” and argues that the personality “is segregation, is partition, is confinement,” and that only by melding with the “oneness of our universal parts which over-arches and includes all individual diversities” does the individual transcend spiritual alienation.21 A surfeit of memory, of dwelling on the past, traps one in one’s personal preoccupations, which for Bellamy meant guilt and brooding. Memory proves problematic in a second way, following from the first, by impeding the inherently progressive, evolving nature of human beings and human civilization. If thinkers of the French revolutionary period felt disconcerted by the perceived chasm between past and present which precipitated the memory crisis, Bellamy embraced it. Severing the past from society’s present meant that the present could move unencumbered into the future. Bellamy explores the trammels of individual memory most thoroughly in his 1880 short novel Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process. Laden with the facile sentimentality characteristic of Bellamy’s fiction, the novel begins at a small-town prayer meeting with George Bayley, a young man who a year previous had embezzled minor funds from his employer. Having converted at a revival and been forgiven by the town for his lapse, George laments to his fellow parishioners that “Forgiving sins . . . is not blotting them out. . . . It leaves them in the memory. . . . Just think how blessed a thing for men it would be if . . . their memories could be cleansed and disinfected at the same time their hearts were purified” (DHP 11–13). Unable to live with his guilt, Bayley commits suicide. The novel then plays

36  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives out the possibility of Bayley’s wish in the romance of fellow locals Madeline Brand and Henry Burr. The spirited but fickle Madeline spurns the steadfast courtship of Henry for the advances of the town’s new druggist, who compromises and deserts her. Guilt-stricken by the scandal, Madeline flees to Boston, planning to kill herself, but Henry finds her and declares his wish to marry. In the ensuing weeks, Henry tries unsuccessfully to revive Madeline’s spirits, until one day Madeline tells him she has read about a doctor who has invented a galvanic method for “The Extirpation of Thought Processes” (95). The eponymous Dr. Heidenhoff performs his technique on Madeline, all the while touting the moral benefits of freeing oneself from memory to Henry: “it is the memory of our past sins which demoralizes us, by imparting a sense of weakness and causing loss of self-respect. . . . Memory is the principle of moral degeneration. Remembered sin is the most utterly diabolical influence in the universe” (119–20). Similarly, in the story “The Blindman’s World,” the Martian emissary tells Professor Larrabee, who travels to Mars in a dream state, “We . . . despise the past, and never dwell upon it. Memory with us, far from being the morbid and monstrous growth it is with you, is scarcely more than a rudimentary faculty. We live wholly in the future and the present” (“BW” 311, added emphasis). Upon waking from Heidenhoff’s treatment, Madeline remembers nothing of her “shame” and she and Henry return home in high spirits, at which point Henry himself wakes up and realizes the entire encounter with Dr. Heidenhoff was a dream. Instead of being saved from memory, Madeline has killed herself. According to the novel’s speculative plot, memory is little more than a noose. Bellamy’s correlating argument to the notion of memory as pathology—the claim that memory infects individuals and then induces “moral degeneration”—suggests that memory violates humanity’s nature as a progressive species. The frame narrator of “The Blindman’s World,” an unnamed colleague who publishes the late Professor Larrabee’s papers, declares, after reading Larrabee’s account of his visit to Mars and learning of the Martians’ gift of “foresight,” that human nature has been cheated by memory: The lack of foresight among the human faculties, a lack I had scarcely thought of before, now impresses me, ever more deeply, as a fact out of harmony with the rest of our nature, belying its promise,  —a moral mutilation, a deprivation arbitrary and unaccountable. The spectacle of a race doomed to walk backward, beholding only what has gone by . . . comes over me from time to time. . . . I dream of a world where love always wears a smile, where the partings are as tearless as our meetings, and death is king no more. I have a fancy, which I like to cherish, that the people of that happy sphere, fancied though it may be, represent the ideal and normal type of our race. (318)

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  37 The narrator condemns memory for warping human nature and its potential, and fancies that living entirely by prospection constitutes the human ideal. Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process makes the same argument using the question of punitive justice. Punishing a man for a past crime—whether twenty years ago or two hours—makes no sense, the Doctor argues, for the reason that human beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same. . . . the difference between the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make them different persons for all moral purposes. (121) What is past is “eternally past” and best forgotten because human beings are constantly in the process of becoming (DHP 123). In Looking Backward, Bellamy returns to this ontological thesis and historicizes it as social evolution. On a Sunday, instead of going to church and having to interact with other people, West and Dr. Leete listen to a sermon delivered over the “telephone” (i.e. radio) by a Mr. Barton. Barton concludes his sermon on the essential goodness of human nature by lauding humanity’s upward trajectory: humanity has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth century, its profound pessimism as to the future of humanity, the animating idea of the present age is . . . the unbounded possibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind from generation to generation [is] . . . the realization of God’s ideal of it. (LB 170–71) In a postscript added to the second edition of Looking Backward defending the novel’s optimism against a reviewer who claimed a realistic time frame to achieve the social transformation depicted was 7,500 years, Bellamy argues that his novel proceeds “in accordance with the principles of evolution” and “the indications of probability” (195). From Bellamy’s social standpoint, using his detractor’s claim as an example, memory serves only to lock the present into “dreary hopelessness,” whereas his homilist Mr. Barton, alluding to West’s appearance from the past, suggests that the bright “new phase” of human development is possible in part because, “[a]lready we have well-nigh forgotten, except when it is especially called to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was not always with men as it is now” (170). By invoking West’s ghost-like presence in utopia, Bellamy signals his intention to embody his utopia’s social evolution in the figure of the narrator himself.

38  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives Given that Looking Backward is “in form a fanciful romance” (albeit a form Bellamy tired of once he came to think of himself as a reformer), Bellamy seems less interested in the question of what the presence of a time traveler will mean for the utopian society of 2000 than in how Julian West will cope mentally with being thrust into the future (Postscript 195). And it is through West’s dilemma, which Thomas terms a “psychological drama of conversion” that Bellamy attempts to establish to his readers the benefits of forgetting about the past (Alternative 238). Wegner remarks perceptively that in order to fully assimilate into the new society and its values, West must lose his memory—not literally, but to the extent that memories of his past life no longer have any “affective hold” on him (95). West tells his new/old love Edith Leete (revealed as the great-granddaughter of West’s original fiancée Edith Bartlett), “I remember everything connected with my former life, but with a total lack of keen sensation. . . . my feelings about what I remember are as faint as if to my consciousness, as well as in fact, a hundred years had intervened” (126). Later, feeling disconsolate after hearing Mr. Barton’s sermon because it reminds him of the “vast moral gap” between the new world and his former world, West seeks comfort by returning to his subterranean sleeping chamber: “Seeking aid from the familiar surroundings, I endeavored to find a sad sort of consolation in reviving the past and summoning up the forms and faces that were about me in my former life. It was in vain. There was no longer any life in them” (172–73). In just mere days, West loses, or forgets, any feelings of loss or affection associated with his nineteenth-century life. So complete, in fact, is West’s assimilation that in the final chapter, when West wakes up back in the nineteenth century, he finds it “intolerable” (191). Walking through the Boston of 1887 and seeing the “festering mass of human wretchedness about me,” West feels agonies of guilt for what he now, after witnessing the future, recognizes as his callous disregard for human suffering (189). West returns to his old acquaintances, including his fiancée Edith Bartlett, and tries unsuccessfully and heartrendingly to convince them of the folly of industrial capitalism, at which point he awakes again in Dr. Leete’s home, this time to stay. In reversing the typical dream device and making utopia the reality and the present the nightmare, Bellamy encodes utopia as West’s true home; repentant and entirely converted to the new society, West can now fully forget the nightmare that is the past. Appropriating Derrida’s notion of the specter—the hauntings that unsettle and disarticulate the present—Beaumont situates Julian West the time traveler as the “spectral, anamorphic gaze of utopia.”22 “The role of the spectre, in the form of Bellamy’s time traveller from the future, who stands in for utopia,” Beaumont contends, “is to divide the present from itself, or reveal its self-divisions, and so to excavate an alternative future” (16). As a figuration of a “prevented future,” to use Bloch’s term, West points to the contradictory nature of the present—its

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  39 non-contemporaneousness. I would like to suggest, however, that another way West’s time traveling brings forth “self-divisions” is in Bellamy’s stated valuation of memory as morally detrimental. In Chapter 13, Edith Leete says to West, “I was thinking what I could do to make you feel at home . . . .What would you say if I were to introduce you to some very nice people of your own times, whom I am sure you used to be well acquainted with?” (85). Edith takes West to a room full of books: “Here are your friends,” said Edith, indicating one of the cases, and as my eye glanced over the names on the backs of the volumes, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal fulfillment would have been a disappointment. (86) Left to himself, West takes up a volume of Dickens, his favorite author (and like Bellamy, an author with a middle-class reformer’s conscience). I quote West’s response to rereading Dickens at some length: Any volume with which I had been familiar would have produced an extraordinary impression, read under my present circumstances, but my exceptional familiarity with Dickens, and his consequent power to call up the associations of my former life, gave to his writings an effect no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment. However new and astonishing one’s surroundings, the tendency is to become a part of them so soon that almost from the first the power to see them objectively and fully measure their strangeness, is lost. That power, already dulled in my case, the pages of Dickens restored by carrying me back through their associations to the standpoint of my former life. With a clearness which I had not been able before to attain, I saw now the past and present, like contrasting pictures, side by side. . . . During the hour or two that I sat there with Dickens open before me, I did not actually read more than a couple of pages. Every paragraph, every phrase, brought up some new aspect of the world-transformation which had taken place . . . . As meditating thus in Dr. Leete’s library I gradually attained a more clear and coherent idea of the prodigious spectacle which I had been so strangely enabled to view, I was filled with a deepening wonder at the seeming capriciousness of the fate that had been given to one who so little deserved it . . . . I had neither foreseen the new world nor toiled for it, as many about me had done regardless of the scorn of fools or the misconstruction of the good. (87)

40  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives Noting how quickly one adapts to new environments, West makes explicit Bloch’s concern with the problem of seeing (and representing) the present objectively. West recognizes that in just a few days his “power” to measure his new surroundings objectively has “already dulled.” West finds that reading Dickens restores that power to him, not primarily due to the text’s inherent artistic force, but because rereading Dickens constitutes a memory event. In psychological terms, the sensory input of perusing Dickens functions as a retrieval cue that triggers West’s subjective memories of his now suddenly distant past. West regains the ability to see the new society objectively due to how “the pages of Dickens . . . carr[ied] me back through their associations to the standpoint of my former life.” Rereading Dickens in his new temporal location, in other words, serves as a conduit for memory. The memories called forth by reading Dickens comingle with West’s present observations of the new society, suggesting how, as Terdiman insists, “the past invests the present”; moreover, the memories of West’s former life help historicize his present experience by providing a reference point: “with a clearness which I had not been able before to attain, I saw now the past and present, like contrasting pictures, side by side” (Present 8). Memory crystalizes for West, as if studying a Jacob Riis photograph of a tenement slum alongside the view from Dr. Leete’s rooftop, the temporal distance he has traversed. But most saliently, the memories of West’s former life called up by reading Dickens perform the kind of salutary moral work which elsewhere Bellamy claims memory only destroys. In addition to enabling West to view his new present objectively, “[e]very paragraph, every phrase” of Dickens stirs ruminations that drive home how unworthy he is to see utopia. In Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process, the guilty memory of one moral lapse dooms both George Bayley and Madeline Brand to suicide, but here, such memory works for West’s redemption; rather than sink under the weight of guilt, West aspires to be worthy of those who worked to realize the vision he is witnessing. If, as his fiction dealing with memory suggests, Bellamy believed the nation of solidarity depended on relinquishing memory and historical retrospectivity, Looking Backward also unintentionally demonstrates memory’s efficacy as a basis for the utopian impulse. Looking Backward ushered in a most prolific decade of utopian literary production; as Roemer’s definitive book on the period attests, during the fin-de-siècle writers channeled the energies of the times into an array of utopian visions. But in the twentieth century those visions turned dark. The First World War’s definitive closure of the teleological view of history as a narrative of unbroken progress, and the subsequent rise of totalitarian and fascist regimes, led to the dystopian turn in literature, as well as the anti-utopian rejection of utopian dreams and plans as such. Perhaps the most widely read of all dystopian fictions from the first half of the twentieth century, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  41 takes aim at the crisis of the technological nation-state in a way that foregrounds memory’s stake in modern political subjectivity. If Looking Backward attempts to address the modern anxiety of there being too much memory, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four examines the dystopian ramifications of too little memory.

IV. Orwell, Dystopia, and the Limits of Memory In his 1962 New Republic essay entitled “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” Irving Howe begins by quoting Max Eastman, the twenties socialist radical turned Cold War defender of free market liberalism, who in 1922 wrote: “I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and Communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life” (13). Howe avers that Eastman’s sentiment encapsulates the fears that engendered the dystopian fictions of Yevgeny Zamyatin (We, 1924), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949). In this early piece of dystopian scholarship, Howe argues that the new sub-genre of novel he labels anti-utopia—which predates Sargent’s essential distinction between the anti-utopia and the dystopia in the 1975 article “Utopia—The Problem of Definition,” —constitutes a particular mode of literary response by writers on the Left who foresee that the very future of progress they anticipated could prove monstrous: Behind the anti-utopian novel lies not merely the frightful vision of a totalitarian world . . . . there is also the churning fear that history itself has proved to be a cheat. And a cheat not because it has turned away from our expectations, but because it betrays our hopes precisely through an inverted fulfillment of those expectations. Not progress denied but progress realized, is the nightmare haunting the anti-utopian novel. 23 The inversion of the utopian dream longed for by Zamyatin, an early Bolshevik dissident, and Orwell, committed to democratic socialism but adamantly opposed to Stalinism, results in their projections of a world approaching “some enormous efficient machine-made doom,” as Eastman writes. Howe describes the “functional rationalism,” using Mannheim’s term, of such an organized, contingency-free society as a “world of total integration” (14). Two years after Howe’s essay, Herbert Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man, which takes the “total administration” of advanced industrial society as its subject. Marcuse argues that all such societies, regardless of political mode, tend to be totalitarian. Totalitarianism, Marcuse insists, “is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination” of national and corporate interests perfectly compatible

42  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives with capitalism (3). As advanced industrialism altered the natural and social worlds through processes of technical progress that produced rapid economic growth, the capacity of the proletariat and bourgeoisie to be agents of substantive social transformation receded. These classes are folded into a totalizing system that stifles dissent and “seems to be capable of containing social change” (xii). In its power to assimilate subjects by manufacturing a commodity world of false needs, modern industrial society suffocates “those needs which demand liberation . . . while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society,” thus demonstrating the irrational nature of its seeming rationality (7). Or, as Howe describes the world of total integration, “[t]he rational raised to an irrational power becomes its god” (14). From such a system, Marcuse contends, emerges a pervasive pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior. The totalitarian coordination of society succeeds, ultimately, by creating a media landscape that constantly revalidates the imperatives of the system and closes down the “universe of discourse” by deflecting “two-dimensional, dialectical modes of thought” (85). Another way to state Marcuse’s claim would be to say that under the irrationality of totalitarianism, critical habits of mind tend, as Terdiman suggests occurs with the commodity process, to systematically get forgotten. In Marcuse’s formulation, the ascendency of one-dimensional thought and the de-differentiation of linguistic meaning over and against dialectical thought which comprehends historical causation, disrupts a society’s perception of diachrony. According to Marcuse, the suppression of this [dialectical] dimension in the societal universe of operational rationality is a suppression of history . . . . It is suppression of the society’s own past—and of its future, [and] inasmuch as this future invokes the qualitative change, the negation of the present. (97) As one-dimensional discourse flattens out thought by arresting dialectical critique, it also flattens out history, or temporality. Here we might usefully return to Howe’s essay, because in his assessment of the dystopian genre, Howe somewhat anticipates Marcuse’s concern with the negation of history and links that concern explicitly to the formal workings of “anti-utopian” narratives. Moylan notes that of the early commentators on dystopian fiction, Howe was the first to attempt to identify the genre’s formal properties (Scraps 125). In distinguishing the criteria of the “anti-utopia” from those of the literary novel, Howe points to five defining characteristics, such as “1) It posits a ‘flaw’ in the perfection of the perfect”, “3) It must be clever in the management of its substantiating detail”, and “4) It must strain our sense of the probable while not violating our attachment to the plausible” (16). Howe’s second and fifth

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  43 formal means are of particular interest here. The second reads in part: “2) It must be in the grip of an idea at once dramatically simple and historically complex: an idea that has become a commanding passion. The idea consists, finally, in a catastrophic transmutation of values, a stoppage of history at the expense of its actors” (16). Howe recognizes that for Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, the “idea” of the totalizing society, whether brutally dictatorial or not, brings history to a stop in a way that diminishes their protagonists. On the other hand, Howe ends by invoking the necessity, on the part of the reader, of the very type of dialectical thought Marcuse finds endangered by late capitalism: 5) In presenting the nightmare of history undone, it must depend on the ability of its readers to engage in an act of historical recollection. This means, above all, to remember the power that the idea of utopia has had in Western society. . . . The enchanted dream has become a nightmare, but a nightmare projected with such power as to validate the continuing urgency of the dream. (16) Only historical memory, only the dialectical capacity to first remember the significance of the utopian dream and then to engage with its negation, brings the dystopian narrative to fruition. Taken together, Howe and Marcuse help triangulate the set of concerns primary to my reading of Orwell’s novel: totalitarianism/the nation; rationality/irrationality; and memory/history. While a similar general cluster of concerns informs Bellamy’s utopian project and motivates his wish to forsake memory, Orwell, responding to the trend of European totalitarian dictatorships, warns of a potentially far direr outcome resulting from the loss of memory. Whereas Bellamy considered memory (and thus history) an irrational threat to the prospect of a religion of national solidarity, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell finds the deficit of memory produced by the irrationality of totalitarianism to be greater than any liberating power memory may possess for individuals. Orwell indeed makes the domination of subjects under totalitarianism so absolute that any possible utopian horizon seems to disappear from his text, a fact which led to the novel’s rapid appropriation by Cold War ideologists as a condemnation of socialism in any form. 24 The seeming invincibility of the Party’s power and the narrative’s dismissal of any conceivable systemic change make the novel skirt unintentionally close to anti-utopianism. Critics have diagnosed this narrative closure in various ways. In his essential book on Orwell, Raymond Williams argues that by attributing every mode of oppression to a “single political tendency,” Orwell not only misrepresents socialism, but also grossly misrepresents the proletariat and the possibilities of resistance (78). Wegner asserts that the near impossibility of imagining any historical process whereby

44  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives democratic socialism (or any kind of positive alternative) might emerge leads the reader to conclude that all forms of sweeping social change invariably end in totalitarianism (191). The only possible better society therefore resides in the past, not the future, giving the novel its nostalgic political frame. Robert Paul Resch argues that even though the appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” seems to posit a future perspective from where the Party no longer exists, Orwell’s middle-class elitism prevents him from imagining a revolt of the proles or a revolutionary alliance of the proles and Outer Party. Granting these assessments of the novel as essentially valid, I propose to approach Orwell’s closure of hope as an examination of the failure of memory to sustain the utopian impulse. Nineteen Eighty-Four is heavily preoccupied with how memory, both personal and collective, is controlled and destroyed by totalitarian rule. By first projecting a scenario that imagines the complete alteration and/or destruction of every form of public archival memory, and then by rejecting the possibility of any meaningful collective memory circulating among the proles, Orwell situates personal anamnesis as the only potential utopian faculty. However, while establishing the importance of anamnesis to Winston Smith’s efforts to find an Archimedean point from which to view Big Brother’s version of reality, Orwell’s skepticism about modernity ultimately leads him to deny remembrance the kind of utopian valence found by some theorists. According to Marcuse’s appropriation of Freud in Eros and Civilization (1955), for instance, remembering the forgotten “archaic” past of humanity’s non-repression opens up utopian possibilities. While Orwell alludes to a similar ancestral memory in the novel, it remains atomized within Winston Smith’s solitary consciousness. Rather than anticipating Marcuse’s theory of liberating memory, Orwell’s depiction of Winston’s remembrances hews closer to Benjamin’s use of Proust’s notion of mémoire involontaire to characterize the fragmentary nature of modern experience that isolates subjects one from another. Ultimately, despite the remembrances of his own past, Winston Smith cannot truly “engage in an act of historical recollection,” as Howe says, in a way that validates “the continuing urgency of the [utopian] dream” (16, emphasis modified). Looking at Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as works of fantasy broadly construed, Alex Zwerdling maintains that in these late works Orwell turned away from his style of closely observed realism hoping to find a vehicle to critique the “irrational forces” dominating the world of the 1940s (193). Orwell’s journalism of the period makes clear that he saw Europe as engulfed by militarist nationalism. In his 1941 essay “Wells, Hitler and the World State,” Orwell chastises H. G. Wells, the longtime prophet of the scientific, rationally planned World State for being “too sane to understand the modern world.”25 Indicting Wells’s brand of utopianism, which conflates scientific reason with common sense, as “shallow” and “inadequate” in 1941, Orwell argues that

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  45 the “aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol” of the fallacy of rationally planned progress (CEJL 2:143). Wells, with his non-militarist liberalism, fails to understand “that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity,” and hence fails to understand Hitler as a true danger (144). It is just such primitive loyalty to the idea of England, Orwell insists, that has staved off defeat at the hands of Hitler. We see Orwell not only defending English wartime patriotism here, but also grappling with modern totalitarianism as a combination of the atavistic and scientific, the insane and the programmatic. Resch demonstrates that in the thirties, Orwell began using the term “totalitarianism” to delineate the paradoxical similarity between Stalin’s “perversion of socialist ideals” and Hitler’s fascism 26 (“Middle Class” 142). Troubled by how Stalin and Hitler joined dictatorial cruelty with total bureaucratic control, Orwell found, similarly to Marcuse, that totalitarianism encompassed “the nihilistic will to power of party dictatorship and the rational, bureaucratic organization of state power” (142). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, we see that the Party’s panoptic and terrorizing control of Outer Party members derives, as with Orwell’s example of airplanes as indiscriminate killing instruments, from the appropriation of the scientific by the despotic. Winston Smith learns from reading Goldstein’s book (likely authored by O’Brien) that in Oceania, “technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty” (201). One of the most striking elements of how in Oceania the will to power and the apparatus of state bureaucracy converge to destroy human liberty and social community is the Party’s assault on history and memory. The “universe of discourse” created by the Party, such as it is, aims at rendering dialectical thought impossible. Philosophers and political theorists, such as Hannah Arendt and Marcuse, as well as literary critics, have observed that totalitarian regimes maintain power over their subjects in part by controlling their experience and understanding of history and time. The infallibility of the ruler/ regime depends upon a manipulation of truth and the past that accords with the needs of the present moment. The heterodox reality of the past poses a threat to “the fundaments of another, entirely fictitious world” created by totalitarian leaders; thus, history must become a record wherein dominated subjects may read only such “facts” as comport with the fantasy of party propaganda (Arendt 362). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party openly acknowledges the political importance of manipulating history/time and advertises its practice of such manipulation: “Who controls the past, ran the Party slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (37). Theo Finigan contends that “the simultaneous control of personal memory and national, collective history is perhaps the founding principle of Ingsoc doctrine” (437). To that end, not

46  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives only does the Party’s Ministry of Truth produce the culture industry’s entire output so as to control all possible sources of discursive memory, it constantly reproduces that output so that no evidence which differs from the Party’s present stance ever remains in existence. History, in any kind of established or indelible form, then, ceases to exist. The archive, to which the Party devotes tremendous resources and staffing to fabricate, proves just as transient as the present itself. Winston, who himself rewrites past newspaper articles for the Ministry of Truth so they agree with the Party’s current statements, understands the scope of the Party’s incessant production and revisionism: This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might . . . have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. . . . And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels . . . . And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. (42–43, 45) While the sheer wastage of resources, both human and material, required to perpetrate the imposture of infallibility on such a scale signals the operation’s irrational bent, Winston acknowledges its efficacy at depriving one’s memory of any external foothold: “The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?” (38). Later, he explains to Julia that

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  47 “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right” (162). Within this ever-present, Winston is left to wonder, “Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?” (62). Winston’s silent aside raises the question of the extent to which individuals can remember, individually or collectively, under a regime whose “central tenet” is the “mutability of the past,” and under the “prevailing mental condition [of] controlled insanity” (222, 225). In Goldstein’s book, “controlled insanity” refers to the Party’s mental discipline of doublethink, which amounts, above all, to a “training of memory” (222). Orthodoxy requires that a Party member be adept at holding two contradictory beliefs in [his or her] mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. (223) That the considerable mental dexterity required for successful doublethink, which amounts to “an unending series of victories over your own memory,” aims at nothing less than a self-induced historical obliviousness reveals the perverse irony of the discipline (37). O’Brien, in his role as Winston’s interrogator and torturer, engages this sense of irony when he diagnoses Winston’s years of dissidence and failure to practice doublethink not as rebellion but as illness, telling Winston, “You suffer from a defective memory” (258). While Resch has argued persuasively that the extreme oppression suffered by Outer Party members like Winston makes it illogical, even impossible, for them to voluntarily exercise doublethink, within the diegetic world of the text the discipline effectively neutralizes memory and its subversive potential for most Party members, resulting in an extreme one-dimensionality of thought.27 In Marcuse’s terms, onedimensional thought derives from a “logic of domination” that precludes true autonomous thought.28 Under domination, the false consciousness created by the imperatives of the system becomes the true, or only, consciousness. Both Syme, the philologist working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary, who waxes enthusiastic about “the beauty of the destruction of words” which will “narrow the range of thought,” and Ampleforth, the poet translating Kipling into Newspeak, are intelligent but pedantic formalists who never question the Party’s fabrications (55). Syme, along with a cafeteria full of comrades, doesn’t blink when the telescreen announces an increase of the chocolate ration to twenty grams, when, as Winston knows, the Party had announced just one day earlier that the chocolate ration would need to be reduced from thirty to twenty grams. Winston attributes Syme’s willingness to credit the Party’s obvious lie about the ration to doublethink (62). With less intelligent members,

48  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives Party ideology so subsumes thought that doublethink is entirely unnecessary. Indicative of Orwell’s problematic depiction of women in the novel, Winston remembers his separated wife Katharine as “the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.”29 In Winston’s judgment, Katharine, and his equally dull neighbor Parsons, never possessed, let alone lost, the ability to ascertain the validity of a statement based on prior statements or events. Winston concludes that if remembrance of the unadulterated past occurs anywhere, it must be among the working-class proles. Orwell’s commitment, as he wrote in his 1941 pamphlet “The Lion and the Unicorn,” to the “fundamental shift of power” needed to bring about the “equality of incomes” and “political democracy” of socialism, signaled his ongoing opposition to a class-based society (CEJL 2: 86, 80). Earlier, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell lamented the “curse of class-difference,” and in calling out the easy posture of the middle-class, left-wing intellectual who “merely wish[es] classdistinctions away,” Orwell acknowledges the hard work involved in overcoming class prejudices: The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. . . . if I want real contact with [a proletarian], I have got to make an effort for which very likely I am unprepared. For to get outside of the class-racket . . . . I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person. What is involved is . . . a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life. (137, 141–42) Due to the intractable reality of class differences in the absence of a genuine populism that could effect such an “abandonment,” Orwell concludes the book by arguing that Socialists need to “take those miserable class-stigmata for granted and emphasize them as little as possible” (201–02). Rather than trumpeting jargon like “class consciousness” and “bourgeois ideology” that scares and antagonizes the middle class, Socialists need to demonstrate “just where the line of cleavage between exploiter and exploited comes” so that “all people with small, insecure incomes” can realize their shared values and align in opposition to capitalism, regardless of class backgrounds or attitudes (202, 199). As Resch parses Orwell’s ideological stance, Orwell advocates for a vision of socialism “based on an alliance of the middle and working classes” that assumes a confluence of values but disregards any “fundamental

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  49 economic conflict between the two classes” (“Middle Class” 148). Resch insists that despite his anti-elitism and his belief that middle-class libertarian values and working-class egalitarian values could combine under socialism to overturn capitalism and help defeat totalitarianism, Orwell nevertheless retained an “unconscious impulse to valorize superior individuals at the expense of the inferior masses” (149). Thus, Orwell’s ideological intention in Nineteen Eighty-Four to depict Winston and the proles as “complementary forces” who are destroyed by totalitarianism gets sabotaged by the text’s insistence on Winston’s superiority to the inferior proles (Resch 155). Resch’s important analysis of Orwell’s middle-class bias, which works to naturalize the proles’ subjected status, helps explain how the proles, who despite making up 85 percent of Oceania’s population and who compared to Outer Party members are unmolested by Party surveillance, manage to retain scarcely a trace of memory, archival or anamnestic, pertaining to lived conditions prior to or under the Party. Winston, of course, writes in his diary, “If there is hope . . . it lies in the proles”; but despite trying to “cling” intellectually to the hope that the proles will topple the Party, he acknowledges it to be a “statement of mystical truth and a palpable absurdity” (85, 89). Written on the page, expressing hope in the disembodied proles “sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith” (89). When Winston does encounter working class people on the street, he mostly “watched them disgustedly,” dismayed that they can only focus their anger on “petty specific grievances” (73, 75). Such disgust gets confirmed when Winston tries to ask an old prole man in a bar about life before the Party and finds that “The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details” (95). In certain moments of recollection, as when Winston contemplates the memory of a dream of his mother comforting his little sister in her arms, he becomes momentarily convinced that the proles have preserved the same “primitive emotions” of family loyalty and have “stayed human” (172). Such moments ascribe to the proles the kind of decency and “gentleness” that Orwell considered the English common people’s most defining trait (“Lion” 60). However, undercutting and largely overriding Winston’s felt (but not known) belief that the “proles are human beings,” is the Party ideology that equates proles with animals (173). The Party maintains that because the proles are “natural inferiors,” they can be largely “[l]eft to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina” (74). Orwell’s allusion to cattle recalls the opening of Nietzsche’s meditation on historicism, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874). Nietzsche writes: Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest . . . from morn till night and from day to day . . . . This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than

50  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness . . . . [A human being] cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past . . . . [but] the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present. (60–61) Like the cattle invoked by Nietzsche, the proles, according to the Party, exist in a free but mindless state; proles pose no threat to the Party because even without the indoctrination and alteration of the past that destroys historicity for Party members, they live according to an “ancestral pattern” that is nevertheless ahistorical: “Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and, above all, gambling, filled up the horizons of their minds” (74, emphasis added). Winston does not seriously question this Party assessment; in fact, in precisely the same moment when Winston feels with greatest confidence that “If there was hope, it lay in the proles!”, he dismisses them entirely as thinking, historical human beings (229). In their last encounter in the apartment above Mr. Charrington’s shop, just moments before the Thought Police crash through the window and Charrington reveals himself as a Thought Police operative, Winston and Julia look down into the yard below and watch the prole washerwoman hanging laundry and singing a popular ballad to herself. Winston has observed this woman before, but this time wonders about the hardships of her life and feels that her “solid, contourless body, like a block of granite” is beautiful (228). In this moment, Winston feels a “mystical reverence” for the woman and knows, without having finished Goldstein’s book, that Goldstein’s “final message” would be that “The future belonged to the proles” (229). However, in the very act of attributing humanity and agency to the washerwoman and all proles, Winston denies it. Looking at the woman from above, Winston thinks, “The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly” (228, emphasis added). Then, noticing the cloudless sky at dusk, Winston extrapolates the washerwoman’s lack of a mind outward to the whole world of proles: the people under the sky were also very much the same— everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies . . . people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. (229, emphasis added) For Winston, the power of the proles lies in their fecundity; absent of any thought, their sheer animalistic re-productivity makes them “immortal.” Hoping that at last the proles’ strength will “change into consciousness,”

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  51 Winston believes that “until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill” (229). Winston’s view of the proles takes on the quality of Bellamy’s ignorance of working-class cultures. If it takes a thousand years for the proles to become conscious, they will have passed on no cultural memory or heritage; “like birds,” they possess only a bodily, but mindless, vitality. By ascribing to the proles a thoughtless subjectivity and lives of solely muscular activity, Orwell reinscribes the Party’s “endless present” onto the working-class world of the novel, leaving Winston as the sole repository of memory or any nascent utopian impulse. Because of his refusal to practice doublethink, and due to his high intelligence (but not higher than average morality), Winston Smith is tortured by memory. In his quotidian life, Winston struggles to maintain a grip on the past as objective and external to the Party’s reality. According to Goldstein’s book, “the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries” (221). With no documentary means to establish whether life in pre-revolutionary capitalist England was an abject world of slavery and poverty as depicted in Party textbooks, citizens accept the Party’s “statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations . . . than the people of fifty years ago” (77). Against this opaque cloak of forged history, Winston keeps a mental log of memory traces that help to establish a basis of comparison and demonstrate history’s alterity from the Party narrative. Winston particularly treasures the memory of having held “between his fingers” an actual “fragment of the abolished past”—the photograph of early Party leaders Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—that constitutes a piece of “concrete, unmistakable evidence” of the Party’s fabrications (78, 82). Such moments of clear archival evidence being incredibly rare, however, Winston draws on residual objects and bodily impressions as memory traces. Winston’s diary, and the glass paperweight, which he likes instinctively because it is “a little chunk of history that they have forgotten to alter,” point to a world less bare than his dilapidated reality (152). Winston also accesses what Finigan refers to as a “somatic archive” of sensations that call forth what Winston interprets as inherited memories carried in the body (446). The room above Mr. Charrington’s shop, for example, awakens in Winston “a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this . . . utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you” (100). Each time Winston ruminates on the question, “Had it always been like this?”, his body registers “the mute protest in [his] own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions [he] lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different” (62, 76). When Winston repeats to

52  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives himself the rhyme recalled by Mr. Charrington—“‘Oranges and lemons’ say the bells of St. Clement’s”—he has “the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. . . . Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing” (102–03). And Winston’s desire for Julia, of course, is intermixed with the belief that giving oneself up to sexual abandon was a “gesture belonging to the ancient time,” a recovery of what has been lost (33). In most of the instances just mentioned, Winston encounters memory in what could be termed a semi-autobiographical mode: Winston feels connected to and validated by the memories, but they do not refer distinctly to his own lived experience. The “ancestral” memories are more intuited than recalled, more felt than clearly remembered. But just as crucially to memory’s potential as a form of resistance, Winston also struggles consciously to retrieve, or unlock, memories from his prerevolutionary childhood that could anchor his past to concrete details. Since Winston considers the future to be “unimaginable,” consisting only of “annihilation,” his past, misty as it is, takes on special importance as confirmation that a better world was possible (28,29). However, Winston’s memories prove stubbornly immune to his volition. In the narrative’s opening moments, Winston tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. . . . But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible. (5) In subsequent chapters the reader finds Winston “struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood,” again to no avail, in part because every material trace that could function as a touchstone, or “background,” for Winston’s early life, such as “Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered” (34, 102). Orwell emphasizes the difficulty of recall under conditions in which “there were no external records that you could refer to”; but the efficacy of Winston’s deliberate effort at anamnesis, regardless of conditions, can in itself be questioned (34). In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), collected in Illuminations, Benjamin discusses Proust’s assessment of the important theory of memory and experience Henri Bergson proposed in Matter and Memory (1896). Bergson distinguished between two types of memory: habit or body memory—deriving from repetitious behaviors—and pure memory—experiential life memories preserved in the unconscious.30 Proust knew Bergson’s book well, and in In Search

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  53 of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), Proust develops the dichotomy of voluntary and involuntary memory that shares similarities with but also diverges from Bergson’s categories. In Benjamin’s view, Bergson incorrectly posits mémoire pure, the contemplative form of memory, as a matter of the conscious will: “[Bergson] leads us to believe that turning to the contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a matter of free choice” (Illuminations 157–58). Benjamin, drawn to the idea that the body, as opposed to the mind, is the site of memory and forgetting, rejects Bergson’s conception that mnemonic triggers can be controlled by the will. As Gerhard Richter writes, “For Benjamin, there can be no mnemonic citation that is under the conscious rule of the corpus in which it occurs” (188). Benjamin thus approves Proust’s rejection of Bergson’s willed memory through the concept of mémoire involontaire. Benjamin notes how Proust establishes the qualitative difference between voluntary and involuntary memory in the famous first section of his work by contrasting his conscious attempts to recall his childhood town of Combray with the taste of the “madeleine” cake that unexpectedly “transported him back to the past” (Illuminations 158). Benjamin writes that before the “madeleine,” Proust had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of attentiveness. This he calls the mémoire volontaire, and it is its characteristic that the information which it gives about the past retains no trace of it. It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile. (158) Benjamin and Proust maintain that the attempt to retrieve memory “in the service of the intellect” calls up images largely devoid of truth, so it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell negates Winston’s efforts at conscious recollection as a source of meaningful resistance to Party domination (158). The most generative anamnestic moments in Nineteen Eighty-Four are unbidden. Just as Winston experiences instinctive “ancestral” impressions within his body, sensory stimulations also trigger vivid and involuntary recollections of his lived past. When Julia unwraps a bar of real chocolate, for instance, “The first whiff of its scent . . . stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling” (128). This memory lingers in Winston’s consciousness until he “pushed it away from him,” only to have it resurface later in a dream (128). Dreams, in fact, or in some cases, the memory images stirred by dreams which Winston then contemplates after waking and narrates into coherent meaning, figure as the most compelling memory cues in the novel. Theorists disagree, of course, regarding the value of dreams as a vessel of memory. As mentioned in the Introduction, Bergson

54  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives maintained that because dreams connect us to the unconscious where pure memory is stored indelibly, they function as a vehicle for memory; his erstwhile pupil Halbwachs, however, dismissed that claim, arguing firmly in On Collective Memory that one’s past cannot be relived through dreams (Collective 41–42). Orwell’s treatment of dreams (as is not uncommon in literature and film) follows a Bergsonian approach, but since Winston’s most powerful memories are woven, using Benjamin’s term, from the unconscious, they are also recalcitrant.31 Winston’s unbidden dreams revolve around his mother and his own repressed guilt concerning her disappearance. In my reading, the novel’s two significant dream/memory sequences featuring (primarily) Winston’s mother speak to the heart of Orwell’s position on memory, history, modernity, and utopia. Unlike Bellamy, Orwell makes no assertion that relinquishing memory gestures toward utopia. Memory retains a value for Orwell, demonstrated in the fact that Winston’s memory functions as the primary counter-discourse to the Party’s version of reality. Orwell certainly recognizes the insurgent potentiality of memory, hence the Party’s obsession with controlling it. As Marcuse writes, Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of “mediation” which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again, but whereas in reality, the former [terror] recurs in ever new forms, the latter remains hope. (One-Dimensional Man, 98) Nineteen Eighty-Four acknowledges emphatically the “subversive contents” of memory. However, as I will attempt to show by reading the novel’s dream sequences through Benjamin’s articulation of memory and modern experience and Wegner’s reading of Orwell’s anti-modernism, Orwell closes the door on memory as a means of radical utopian hope. The third chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four begins with Winston in the act of dreaming about his mother, but in a curious twist, Orwell narrates the dream as if Winston is simultaneously thinking on a conscious level: “Winston was dreaming of his mother. He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared” (31, emphasis added). Orwell explains this coincidence by saying that “It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake” (32). In other words, Winston’s dream consists of shocks of recognition (anagnorisis), the form of memory particularly valued by Bloch, which will be discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 3. In Winston’s dreamscape,

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  55 his mother and little sister are sinking in deep water, looking up at him with the knowledge that “they must die in order that he might remain alive” (32). Winston realizes from these images that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. . . . Such things, he saw, could not happen today. (32) In an elaboration of this first dream occurring months later in the apartment with Julia, Winston wakes from another dream in which “he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years” (167–68). Winston remembers his constant hunger as a young boy, then one day snatching his sister’s portion of a chocolate bar and running out of the apartment only to return hours later to find his mother and sister disappeared. But most vividly, Winston remembers his mother folding his sister in her arm to comfort her; this “enveloping, protecting gesture” contains the dream’s “whole meaning” (171). As with the earlier dream, Winston perceives, above all, the non-contemporaneity of his mother’s gesture. While not an “intelligent” woman, Winston recalls his mother possessing a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. . . . The terrible thing the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. (171–72) Winston’s conviction that the possibility of his mother’s private gesture of love and loyalty, like the possibility of tragedy, no longer exists— exists, that is, only in memory and in the past, or, as mentioned above, for the proles—alludes to the larger question of Orwell’s view of the limits of modern experience itself. Benjamin again proves helpful because in his reflections on urban isolation and the emptiness of mechanized labor, he connects the lack of depth in modern experience to that of memory.

56  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives Returning to Benjamin’s thoughts on Proust, we find that Benjamin questions Proust’s assertion that “it depends entirely on chance” whether one ever comes across the material objects that will trigger involuntary memories which allow one to “take hold of his experience” (Illuminations 158). Benjamin argues that it “is by no means inevitable” that the individual has become dependent on chance for meaningful memories; rather, memory and the psyche become disjointed precisely because the individual “is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience” (158). Reliance on purely chance encounters with memory “is part of the inventory of the individual who is isolated in many ways” (159). Isolation and the inability to assimilate the concentrated flow of data from the world (Benjamin uses newspapers as an example), both precipitate and result from the deterioration of modern experience. To capture the slippage he perceived in the nature of experience, Benjamin distinguished, as Martin Jay writes, “between the integrated, meaningful experience he called ‘Erfahrung’ and the atomizing, incoherent alternative he called ‘Erlebnis’” (5). Benjamin epitomizes Erlebnis in the highly discrete labor of the unskilled factory worker, whose work is “sealed off from experience” because it is never seen to completion (176); life in this mode “has the miserable endlessness of a scroll. Tradition is excluded from it. It is the quintessence of a passing moment (Erlebnis) that struts about in the borrowed garb of experience” (185). Erfahrung, on the other hand, denotes a depth of experience rooted in traditions, festivals, and rituals that comingle with individual memory, and owing to their recurring nature, periodically trigger involuntary memories. When the “contents of the individual past combine with materials of the collective past” in this way, involuntary memory flourishes and enriches life; conversely, modern impoverished experience (Erlebnis) brings with it the impoverishment of memory (159). The question for us with regard to Orwell is not a matter of trying to map an exact correspondence between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Benjamin’s categories, which would not hold. Whereas Benjamin sees the communal tradition of Erfahrung as something of a precondition for involuntary memory, Winston Smith clearly experiences involuntary memories under the Party’s totalitarian “endless present.” The value of Benjamin’s correlation of memory with experience comes from allowing us to better assess the novel’s utopian unconscious through its representation of Winton’s involuntary memories. Writing on Benjamin’s technique of montage, Margaret Cohen asserts that for Benjamin, montage was more than a style, it was also a “philosophy of history: it entailed focusing on the discontinuities separating past and present, and emphasizing a utopian rather than progressive notion of historical transformation, as a way to preserve a reservoir of hope in otherwise damaged life” (200). No such “reservoir of hope” prevails in Nineteen Eighty-Four. While Winston’s involuntary memories of his past strengthen his hatred of the Party’s

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  57 manipulations, and while the private emotions of love and loyalty which governed his mother’s protective gesture provide proof of the attenuated range of experience available to Party members in the present, the discontinuity between past (memory) and present (experience) does not prefigure a utopian transformation whereby experience could regain depth and meaning. Nothing in Winston’s dreams, or the memories worked through after dreaming, signal any possibility for liberation; nothing can shake his futile view of experience, summed up in his statement to Julia, “We are the dead” (230). The love necessary to occasion something like tragedy stays locked in “the ancient time”; whatever Winston might do or not do “made literally no difference”; Winston believes the Party’s rule could easily last a thousand years (32, 172, 229). These closures of the future call us back to Irving Howe’s conclusion that dystopian narratives depend on the reader engaging in an act of historical recollection that reaffirms the urgent necessity of utopian dreams. While Winston’s dreams and their attendant memories are certainly a form of historical recollection, they nevertheless work to disallow both Winston himself and the reader a sense of history as a utopian fulcrum. To properly locate the ideological tendency of Orwell’s treatment of memory, then, we can conclude by examining how, instead of adumbrating a future-oriented utopian horizon, memory points only to a nostalgic past. In Winston’s first dream, after Winston sees his mother and sister sinking in deep water, the images shift abruptly to the pastoral Golden Country, the sun-dappled “rabbit-bitten pasture” that “recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country” (32–33). According to Wegner, the Golden Country, along with objects and places such as the glass paperweight and Mr. Charrington’s apartment where Winston and Julia reenact domestic life, all function as aesthetic objects that give access to the repressed historical past: “the aesthetic object becomes a material embodiment of the memory of happiness in a world where such happiness no longer exists” (207). Wegner draws astutely on Mannheim’s typology of utopian mentalities to argue that for Orwell, the best possible outcome in terms of human society exists already and only in the past (197). In Ideology and Utopia (1929, English 1936) sociologist Karl Mannheim defines as utopian any collective state of mind that “is incongruous with the state of reality in which it occurs,” and when put into praxis, tends to upend “the order of things prevailing at the time. 32 Mannheim postulates four different utopian “mentalities” that emerge in historical succession and have transforming effects on existing reality; these “ideal types” can also exist simultaneously as “antagonistic counter-utopias” to each other since they represent the historical wishes of competing social strata (187). The four modern utopian mentalities from the Reformation onward are, namely, Orgiastic Chiliasm (e.g. Anabaptists), the

58

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Liberal-Humanitarian Idea, the Conservative Idea, and the SocialistCommunist Utopia. Whereas the liberalist idea represents bourgeois reformist rationalism, the conservative mentality is not properly utopian, as it reflects the reality of the already dominant class; however, “[g]oaded on by opposing theories,” the conservative mentality “discovers its idea only ex post facto,” that idea being to preserve tradition—that which “has come into existence slowly and gradually” (207, 211–12). Mannheim here particularly stresses each mentality’s temporal orientation. While “for liberalism the future was everything and the past nothing,” the conservative mode’s “time-sense” finds significance in duration; “Consequently not only is attention turned to the past and the attempt made to rescue it from oblivion, but the presentness and immediacy of the whole past becomes an actual experience. . . . the past is experienced as virtually present” (211–12). In terms of historical imagination, then, according to Hayden White, Conservatives are inclined to imagine historical evolution as a progressive elaboration of the institutional structure that currently prevails, which structure they regard as a ‘utopia’—that is, the best form of society that men can ‘realistically’ hope for . . . . By contrast, Liberals imagine a time in the future when this structure will have been improved. (Metahistory 25) In his synthesis of Mannheim and White, Wegner shows how Orwell (as well as Zamyatin) critiques the liberal progressive perspective of history as in thrall to an ever-increasing rationalized modernization, the very brand of utopianism espoused by H.G. Wells. As Winston reads in Goldstein’s book, this is the future “nearly every literate person” of the early twentieth century subscribed to: a “vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete” (196). Whereas in We, Zamyatin proposes the “infinite revolution” as an anarchist antidote to this telos of rationalization, Wegner argues that Orwell’s political skepticism about revolution—in evidence already in a 1945 review where Orwell asserts that throughout history, revolutions have “simply led to a change of masters,” —leaves him no means of envisioning in Nineteen Eighty-Four a radical alternative to class-bound modernized society.33 Orwell’s temporal skepticism also forecloses on the socialist/communist mentality as conceived by Mannheim. Mannheim writes, similarly to Bloch, that in the socialist mentality, “the future is always testing itself in the present” because “the future is being prepared in it” (221). Nineteen Eighty-Four patently rejects this conception of the present as forward looking and entangled with the future. Although Winston feels

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  59 an inclination to dedicate his journal to the future, he sees his present experience as utterly estranged from what is to come: “How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless” (9). Thus, unintentionally and in contradiction to Orwell’s stated political beliefs, Nineteen Eighty-Four takes on the position of Mannheim’s conservative utopia. Importantly, Orwell lands in the conservative mentality not passively by way of default, but by way of nostalgia. Zwerdling, for instance, maintains that Orwell’s love for the English countryside, the rhythms of workingclass life, and his “nostalgia for the world of the recent past are all transferred” into the novel (200). Just as Winston’s dreams/memories of his mother evoke particularly gendered notions of family life and parental roles reminiscent of Orwell’s childhood, the furnishings of Charrington’s apartment which stir “a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory” in Winston also recall the domestic aesthetic of Orwell’s own childhood England.34 The nostalgia kindled by the apartment expresses a kind of wish-projection of experience whereby, as Mannheim describes the conservative mentality, “the past is experienced as virtually present” (212). Sequestered in the apartment, Winston and Julia daydream of escape but know that they are really “spinning out a present that had no future” (159). Much more vivid than any hopes for the future are their recreations of moments of past gratification or fulfillment. Julia’s use of makeup and her desire to get ahold of a “real woman’s frock” and high-heeled shoes in order “to be a woman, not a Party comrade,” suggests a deeply conventional return to stereotypes of feminine allure.35 The “huge mahogany bed” in which they make love itself invites identification with past experience (149). Winston remembers sleeping in a double bed (now outlawed for Party members) occasionally as a boy and, waking in the bed, wonders whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, and man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. (150) Reenacting, as it were, the languid summer evenings of past lovers deepens the pleasure of the moment; if anywhere in the novel, such moments redolent of a past prior to a hyper-rationalized efficient modernity suggest Benjamin’s understanding of integrated experience (Erfahrung). For Orwell, then, such visions of a refurbished past constitute the limit of memory’s efficacy. Memory does not work through the present to

60  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives bring forth elements of “prevented future,” but only to concretize the authenticity of the past. Thinking through the legacy of Orwell’s pessimism regarding memory, the future, and utopia, we might conclude by saying that Nineteen Eighty-Four gestures forward to the type of present-day investment in the past diagnosed by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his posthumous book Retrotopia (2017). Based on his well-known concept of liquid modernity, the historical phase in which territorial sovereignty ceases to be the locus of power, Bauman had suggested, in his 2003 essay “Utopia with No Topos,” that the utopian impulse existed only in privatized, individual hopes for the future removed from any belief in the efficacy of states. However, by 2017, Bauman found that this first negation of the sovereign state model of utopia had itself been eclipsed, this time by retrotopias. Retrotopia names the pervasive fear of the future that redirects hopes for security with freedom to the past; desired elements of an actual or putative past, believed to be “unduly abandoned or recklessly allowed to erode,” are selectively and romantically remembered (9). In ways similar to Orwell, the nostalgia of present-day retrotopia relies on a largely tribal understanding of community, the conviction that the past provides the best possible social model, and the belief that the future holds no promise for collective change. In between Orwell’s narrative capitulation to the apparent omnipotence of Cold War totalitarianism and the contemporary disinvestment in the possibility of better societies, however, the utopian dream and utopian narrative found new life. Twenty-five years after the near antiutopianism of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the literary utopia made a significant resurgence in the guise of the “critical utopia,” an evolution in the genre that reset the question of memory’s function in the utopian imagination. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of the “critical utopia” and its important engagement with collective memory.

Notes 1 See Terdiman, Present Past, 6; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7–9; David Hey, The Grass Roots of English History: Local Societies in England before the Industrial Revolution, 1–3, 189. 2 See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge UP, 1989, 38–40. 3 More, Utopia, 12. Jameson refers readers to Chapter 7 of Marin’s Utopiques and also Wegner, Imaginary Communities, 40–45. 4 For the source of the oft-repeated belief that Christians are called to be in the world, but not of it, see the Gospel of John, Chapter 17. 5 In no way do I intend to suggest that all forms of ritual rooted in religion or metaphysics are inherently ahistorical. Many religious rites, for instance the Christian Eucharist or the Shiite Muharram festival, reenact historical events. Connerton focuses particularly on religious rites as performative reenactments by which collective memory is transmitted historically; see Connerton, 61–71.

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  61







62  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives

14

15

16

17

18

19 20 21

22 23

thoroughly documented Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement, claims 160 clubs (p. 327). Cecilia Tichi agrees, stating that by “1890 there were 162 Bellamy Clubs in twenty-seven states” (Introduction, 22). On the late nineteenth century as a period of crisis, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 70–100; Kenneth Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity, 4–6; Jonathan Auerbach, “‘The Nation Organized’: Utopian Impotence in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward,” 24; Wegner, Imaginary Communities, 64. On labor strikes in the Gilded Age and the cultural turn against organized labor, see Michael Schaller et al., American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context, 662–65; Alan Trachtenberg also gives statistics on strikes in The Incorporation of America, 80, 89. Quoted text from Looking Backward, 7. See Wegner, Imaginary Communities, 66, and Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 71. For two notable readings that argue that Bellamy’s utopia looks nostalgically to the past, see R. Jackson Wilson, “Experience and Utopia: The Making of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward,” Journal of American Studies vol. 11, 1977, 45–60, and Milton Cantor, “The Backward Look of Bellamy’s Socialism,” in Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai, U of Massachusetts P, 21–36. Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle, 48. Bellamy popularized, but did not invent, the utopian future history. Brian Stableford identifies the 1770 French novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’An deux mille quatre cente quarante. Reve s’il fût jamais, published in 1775 in English as Memoirs of the Year 2500 as the first modern utopia set in the future of a real city, Paris. See News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances, 10. Nathaniel Robert Walker contends that the first such utopia is Samuel Gott’s 1648 work Nova Solyma; see “Lost in the City of Light: Dystopia and Utopia in the Wake of Haussmann’s Paris,” Utopian Studies, vol. 25, no.1, 2014, 50. On the tradition of city planning, Beaumont quotes John W. Reps’s study of Thomas Jefferson’s town designs, “Thomas Jefferson’s Checkerboard Towns,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 20, 1961, 109–10. But nineteenth-century European urban schemes, particularly Haussmann’s massive rebuilding of Paris (1854–70) during the rule of Napoleon III, are equally apropos. On Haussmann, see David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, Free Press, 1995. See Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia, 45; Auerbach, “The Nation Organized,” 28. Bellamy’s journal quoted in John L. Thomas, Introduction, 63. “The Blindman’s World,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1886, is reprinted in Franklin, Future Perfect, 302–18; quoted passage from p. 312. The Religion of Solidarity” is collected in Arthur E. Morgan, The Philosophy of Edward Bellamy, 6–25; quoted passages from pp. 6, 10, 15. Auerbach discusses in detail the ways in which Bellamy appropriates Emerson’s concepts; see “The Nation Organized,” 38–40. Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia, 14. Beaumont draws from Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994. Howe, “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” 13–14. For a thorough discussion of the early history of criticism on dystopian fiction and the importance of Sargent’s definitional distinction between the anti-utopia and dystopia, see Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, 121–37.

Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives  63 24 On the use of Nineteen Eighty-Four by Cold War ideologists to attack socialism and to defend capitalism as the “moral antithesis of totalitarianism,” see Robert Paul Resch, “Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 150–53. See also Raymond Williams, George Orwell, 77. 25 See The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, volume 2, 145; cited parenthetically hereafter as CEJL. 26 Resch, “Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 142. Orwell also began using the term “oligarchical collectivism” to describe Hitler and Stalin’s regimes prior to the novel. In his 1940 review of Franz Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy, Orwell writes that “The two régimes, having started at opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism” (CEJL, vol. 2, 25). 27 In his sophisticated analysis of the political unconscious of Nineteen EightyFour’s class politics, Resch concludes that while for the Inner Party doublethink makes sense, for the Outer Party it is oxymoronic. Moreover, the Outer Party as a whole, Resch argues, “is an impossible combination of total coercion and total cooperation” (165). See pages 164–67 for this discussion. 28 I should note that I am applying Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional thought to a somewhat different social context than the advanced industrial (late capitalist) society that concerns Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. For Marcuse, the logic of domination refers not, as doublethink does, to a blatant rejection/revision of the evidence of one’s own senses, but to the scientific/technical rational worldview that has become equated with Reason itself and which overrides all non-empirical values. 29 Orwell, 69. For scholarship on Orwell’s views on women, see Leslie Tentler, “‘I’m Not Literary Dear’: George Orwell on Women and the Family,” in The Future of Nineteen Eighty-Four, edited by Ejner Jensen, U of Michigan P, 1984, 47–63; Anne K. Mellor, “‘You’re Only a Rebel from the Waist Downwards’: Orwell’s View of Women,” in On Nineteen Eighty-Four, edited by Peter Stansky, Stanford Alumni Association, 1983, 115–25. 30 For a helpful and more detailed discussion of Bergson’s memory dichotomy, see Whitehead, Memory, 102–03. For a discussion of Benjamin’s view of body memory and his reading of Proust, see Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, 185–93. 31 Benjamin invokes the notion of weaving memory, which is both a weaving and unwinding, both a remembering and a forgetting, using the figure of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who weaves and unravels a burial shroud as a delaying tactic to put off suitors. See “The Image of Proust” in Illuminations, 202. 32 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 173. For a helpful and thorough discussion of Mannheim and his critics, see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 78–96. 33 See Wegner p. 196 for this portion of his argument. Wegner quotes Orwell’s November 1945 essay “Catastrophic Gradualism,” which discusses Arthur Koestler’s collection of essays The Yogi and the Commissar. See CEJL, volume 4, 15–19. (I cannot recommend Wegner’s reading of Orwell in Imaginary Communities highly enough. See Chapter 6, pp. 183–228. In addition to his use of Mannheim, Wegner also situates Orwell’s nostalgic anti-modernism by way of Habermas’s topoi of modern rationality, and Orwell’s fear that the mass culture industry would decimate English cultural autonomy by way of Walter Ong’s concept of secondary orality.) The content and tone of Orwell’s assertion about revolts leading only to “a change

64  Memory’s Emergence in Utopian Narratives of masters” owes much to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham, who predicted that managerial society would tend toward totalitarianism, wrote: “the net result of each revolt was merely to establish a new tyranny” (qtd in Steinhoff 46). On Burnham’s considerable influence on Orwell and Orwell’s frequent commentaries on Burnham’s books, see William Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984, 43–54. 34 For a discussion of Orwell’s views on women and family life, see Tentler, “I’m Not Literary Dear,” 47–49, 58–62. Wegner connects the glass paperweight and the interior décor of the apartment to Orwell’s childhood, noting that, not coincidentally, the decade of Orwell’s young childhood (1903–13) also coincides with the summit of imperial Britain’s power, 207. 35 Orwell 149. For a discussion of the conventional sexual ethic of dystopian narratives, see Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia, 121–25.

2

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory

The 1960s and 1970s brought with them a well-documented upswing in utopian energies. New experiments in intentional communal living flourished across the United States, fueled by a heady mix of oppositional anger and hopeful optimism.1 Anti-war and anti-conformist movements disillusioned with the failure of the United States’ post-World War II utopian promise coalesced with ecological, feminist, socialist, mutual aid, peace, and psychedelic activists who, inspired by the widespread social upheaval, believed that major change was possible and even imminent. In response to these movements, numerous writers of leftist sensibilities sharing broadly feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist commitments took up the question of utopia anew and produced visions of better societies that were subversively different in content and form from the older utopian canon. In his 1986 book Demand the Impossible, Tom Moylan famously labeled this new breed of 1970s utopias as critical utopias, with four texts acting as the linchpins of the emerging subgenre—Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1974), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Samuel R. Delany’s Triton (1976). Moylan argued that the critical utopia was “‘Critical’ in the Enlightenment sense of critique— that is expressions of oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of both the genre itself and the historical situation” (10). In their “awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition,” particularly the highly static nature of most literary utopias, the authors of the new critical utopia “reject[ed] utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream” (10). Critical utopias mark the point in literary history in which Zygmunt Bauman’s two fundamental attributes of utopian thought prior to the era of “liquid modernity”—finality and territoriality—begin to be called into question (“Utopia with No Topos” 11–25). As Moylan points out, presenting utopia as a fully achieved and perfected fact has the effect of “reduc[ing] alternative visions to closed and boring perfect systems that negate the utopian impulse that generated them” (151). To avoid rigid and closed versions of utopia, writers like Russ, Le Guin, Piercy, and Delany, who came to utopian writing largely through science fiction, took to heart the credo of Zamyatin’s heroine I-330 in We (1924), who

66  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory proclaims, “There is no final [revolution]. The number of revolutions is infinite” (168). As the preeminent bibliographer of utopian narratives, Sargent reminds us that utopias continue to be written each year; yet it is nevertheless the case, as mentioned in the Introduction, that the above-named utopias of the 1970s represent the last flourishing of the genre in the English-speaking world. 2 The paucity of recent narrative utopias of note raises the question of the genre’s continuing viability. In the conclusion to Archaeologies of the Future (2005) entitled “The Future as Disruption,” Fredric Jameson assesses the formal possibilities for utopian narratives after fully globalized late-capitalism and postmodernity took hold in the 1980s and seemingly brought the traditional literary utopia to an end. Jameson argues that Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time “marks a fundamental break” in the utopian genre, echoing Perry Anderson, who notes that Piercy’s novel was the last utopia of “wide resonance.”3 Both critics point out that after Piercy, utopias offering blueprints for social change were no longer written, eventually giving rise to the question of Utopia’s future formal properties. Given global capitalism’s apparent permanence and the degree to which it has rendered radical change almost inconceivable, Jameson suggests that Utopia now resides in its very impossibility. He posits the radical disruptive break itself, and not its utopian aftermath, as the new utopian form: Disruption is, then, the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes . . . The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break. (231–32) Somewhat surprisingly, Jameson ends his far-ranging interrogation of the new spirit of Utopia as disruption by going back to Woman on the Edge of Time and invoking its orientation toward the present and the future. Traditional though it may be in some of its formal elements (e.g. the voyage to a better elsewhere), Jameson finds in Piercy’s novel a much-needed articulation of the present and future as threatened and requiring struggle. As Bee, one of Piercy’s utopians from 2137, explains to time-traveling protagonist Connie Ramos, “We must fight to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That’s why we reached you” (190). Jameson’s discussion of Woman on the Edge of Time points to the critical utopia’s central concern with temporality. One of the principal ways that critical utopias of the 1970s differ from and challenge the

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  67 classical genre is in their conviction that historical time and Utopia are highly fluid and contingent entities, respectively, and it is this conviction that the future is undetermined that gives these utopias their particular twenty-first century relevance. The so-called end of history declared by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, meaning no stage of social development exists beyond liberal-democratic capitalism, presaged the enduring socio-political stasis and suspension of utopian imagery diagnosed by numerous critics. Indeed, American sociologist Erik Olin Wright (2011) observes that talking of socialism as a systemic, utopian alternative to capitalism often lacks credibility.4 Perry Anderson explains utopianism’s devaluation at the turn of the century as the result of “three decades of nearly unbroken political defeats for every force that once fought against the established order.” Thatcherism had meant that “it was no longer even necessary to proclaim that capitalism was superior to socialism . . . it was the only conceivable social system” (71). Boaventura de Sousa Santos encapsulates both Wright and Anderson by maintaining that we inhabit a neo-liberal “conservative utopia” based on the criteria of market efficiency and the total denial of possible alternatives to the present reality (10–11). And Jameson, of course, has frequently noted our inability to imagine any alternative to world capitalism, sometimes casting the problem in the register of history (or historicity) itself: “But I think it would be better to characterize all this [the end of the world] in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here.”5 In the situation Jameson describes, and since very few writers today are grappling with how things might be different and better, it is more valuable than ever to return to the critical utopias that assert the possibility of the future as novum, not as repetition. This chapter aims to take up the critical utopia’s concern with temporality by addressing how the two best-known and most critically assessed novels of the type, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, negotiate memory in relation to Utopia’s approach to the present and the future. Le Guin and Piercy want us to “think the break itself,” to imagine moments of rupture, but also to contend with how an ongoing utopia would need to deal with its past in order to avoid devolving into stasis and centralized power. Their novels show that struggling for the future necessarily involves attempting to harness the past in productive ways. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise; as Richard Terdiman writes, the “aspiration to negate [the] practices and discourses” of History in order to find liberation in the future is self-defeating: But by the nature of the problem this negation can itself only be imagined in the manner devised by the past for its own overcoming. We have no memory of the future; or rather, we can remember the future only as a counterdiscourse of the past, regulated by the past in

68  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory the mode of all such inevitably unidirectional determinations . . . [thus] even utopias turn out to be memory effects. (Present 50–51, verb tense slightly modified) Le Guin and Piercy each recognize that the past must be reckoned with even in (perhaps especially in) Utopia in order to avoid the reification of social hierarchies, but they disagree on which modalities of memory best achieve that objective. Whereas Le Guin’s The Dispossessed looks skeptically on collective forms of remembering as tending toward stases of social evolution, Woman on the Edge of Time argues that it is indeed the ritual practices of collective memory, not the individual, that work to sustain the utopian impulse.

I. Critical Utopias and Temporality Engaged in the politics of autonomy and feminism, critical utopias of the 1970s share an abiding vision of decentralized state power, meaning that they seek to locate strategies whereby the drift toward concentrations of power may be averted over time. Critical utopias therefore draw implicitly on Bloch’s understanding of utopia as process. Against the colloquial and derisive notion that utopias are impossible, Bloch situates utopia within the Not-Yet-Become, an as yet unrealized but very possible future in a world that is unfinished. In her indispensable analysis of Bloch, Ruth Levitas suggests that “[o]nce the world is seen as in a constant state of process, but a process whose direction and outcome is not predetermined, there are always many possible futures—futures which are real possibilities, rather than merely formal possibilities” (102). Woman on the Edge of Time, for instance, closely replicates Bloch’s vision of the undetermined future, seen in the utopian community of Mattapoisett’s insistence that they must fight “to be the future that happens,” or, as Luciente, Connie Ramos’s main guide and conduit into the future, explains the precariousness of their timeline: “there was a thirty-year war that culminated in a revolution that set up what we have. Or else there wasn’t and we don’t exist” (198). In the critical utopia, history and utopia are never a fait accompli. Piercy especially accentuates this notion by supposing coexisting and inter-penetrating timeframes that make the past itself vulnerable to erasure. Similarly, in The Dispossessed, Le Guin’s hero Shevek also stresses the instability of the present (304–05), and his utopian society, the moon colony of Anarres, which is relatively established and over a hundred years old, must continually negotiate its existence internally and externally. Operating with the notion of utopia as continual process, critical utopias tend to stress not only contentious problems of geopolitics, but even more importantly, the unfinished and imperfect nature of community. Matters of personal ego, labor distribution, the status of gender,

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  69 criminal justice, and assimilation, as well as romantic and professional rivalries all present difficulties that require smoothing over, working through, and/or good old-fashioned political debate. In the canonical utopias, questions of communal living are presented as fully and harmoniously resolved, because, as Northrop Frye indicates, the writer describes the behavior in utopia ritually: the utopia “does not present society as governed by reason; it presents it as governed by ritual habit, or prescribed social behavior, which is explained rationally” (27). In More’s Utopia, Hythloday recounts a myriad of social practices rife with potential for disgruntlement and dispute, but which seemingly generate no friction. According to Hythloday, the selection of magistrates, the exchange of goods at market, the agricultural labor requirement, and the naked courtship ritual breed no resentments or power struggles. Along with a focus on habitual, or wholly typical, behaviors, early utopias, like More’s or Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), feature no individual characters or voices native to the utopian society itself, which, first, renders the reader’s perspective on utopia distant and strictly observational, and second, flattens temporality. Later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts, like Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), and Wells’s Men Like Gods (1922), all depict native inhabitants who serve as guides and/or expositors, and who are, to a greater (Morris) or lesser (Wells) extent, developed as characters with distinct personalities. Nevertheless, as much as readers come to understand the ideological convictions of such figures as Bellamy’s Dr. Leete or Morris’s Old Hammond, their lived points-of-view and inner thoughts remain hidden, as does the experiential consciousness of living in utopia for a duration. In Men Like Gods, Wells’s protagonist Mr. Barnstaple, one of a group of holiday makers who inadvertently jump dimensions from England to Utopia, is left to wonder, “how did it feel to be living in Utopia?. . . It must be a good life for those who had been educated to live it, indeed a most enviable life” (171–72). Despite actually being in Utopia and communicating with its residents, Barnstaple can only conjecture about living there. Readers of early utopias typically share Barnstaple’s uncertainty because the texts (understandably) forego the formidable task of imagining utopia from the point-of-view of a utopian citizen. Using a variety of narrative strategies, critical utopias of the 1970s successfully bridge the chasm between observing and inhabiting a utopian imaginary. In The Dispossessed, for instance, Le Guin dispenses with the visitor-in-utopia structure and makes her protagonist, the physicist Shevek, part of her utopian society (although Shevek does travel off-world and is something of a loner). In Triton, Delany finesses the tension between providing readers a lived perspective of utopia with the critical distance helpful for assessing it by making his protagonist Bron a cranky outlier in his society on Neptune’s moon. Piercy adopts the more

70  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory traditional visitor’s view of utopia but also transcends it by inventing a larger cast of utopian characters who interact with each other fully, naturally, and imperfectly, and who have more to do than just expound on the virtues of their way of life. This includes negotiating among themselves the demands of living in community. Writers of critical utopias depict their utopian societies as living organisms, where communities are subject to pressures and forced to confront changes, and often respond imperfectly to these challenges. In short, critical utopias are communities living in dialectical history, narratively situated within a flow of historical time as opposed to the atemporality of traditional utopian thought experiments. As fictive historical entities, critical utopian societies inhabit the present in relation to a past that exerts sway over current personal relationships and social practices. As such, memory, in both its individual and cultural iterations, takes on far greater importance in critical utopias than in most fully achieved, static, centralized utopias. Critical utopias negate the negation of the importance of memory performed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century utopias such as Looking Backward and Gilman’s Herland.6 But critical utopias go beyond simply acknowledging memory as important; they explore the particular function(s) and efficacy of memory as an instrument for creating/maintaining dynamic yet unified communities and as a means for resisting centralized state interests. Critical utopias also investigate the tensions between individual and collective memory practices. In what follows, I will read The Dispossessed (along with its companion story, “The Day Before the Revolution”) and Woman on the Edge of Time as texts that offer essentially competing visions of how collective memory undergirds community in utopia. Le Guin’s novel takes a skeptical view of culturally transmitted collective memory as a stultifying force that inhibits utopian progress, while Piercy’s novel privileges collective over individual memory as fundamental to utopian renewal. Though they do not agree on the efficacy of collective memory as it threads itself through utopian praxes, Le Guin’s and Piercy’s novels, taken together, consider memory vital both to imagining utopia as an ongoing, historicized process and to the problems attendant on transcending the centralized state as the locus of identity.

II. Le Guin’s Ambiguous Utopia Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed carries the well-known subtitle An Ambiguous Utopia, a subtitle that accords both with Moylan’s original categorization of critical utopias as being aware of the genre’s tendency to reduce utopia to “closed and boring perfect systems,” and with Sargent’s later definition of the critical utopia as portraying a society intended to be viewed as better than the reader’s own, but with “difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  71 solve” (“Three Faces” 9). The questions of how, or to what extent, Le Guin avoids writing herself into a closed system, and what constitutes the ambiguity of her “ambiguous utopia” are deeply interrelated. Marxist critics such as Moylan and Jameson have argued that The Dispossessed largely fails to sustain a utopia that remains historically protean and open to decentralized progress. In his early essay “World Reduction in Le Guin,” Jameson suggests that in order to imagine a utopia at all (no easy task, he says, given that monopoly capital “feels so massively in place” [223]), Le Guin employs a narrative technique of “world reduction”: a mode of “surgical excision of empirical reality . . . in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification” (223). Through these simplifications of reality, Jameson insists that for Le Guin utopia becomes a place where humanity is “released from the multiple determinisms (economic, political, social) of history itself” (227). My reading of The Dispossessed suggests that Jameson’s assessment overstates the degree to which Le Guin ignores history and forecloses on the utopian impulse. Rather, I will argue that Le Guin’s engagement with historical causation, and her commitment to but also skepticism about ongoing utopian progress, are all centrally grounded in her nuanced understanding of how societies remember. Specifically, Le Guin demonstrates that the ways in which her anarchist communities collectively remember and memorialize their past produces reductive effects that tend toward social closure. She asserts that individual agency, or at most the agency of small collectives, must preserve the utopian impulse. Le Guin’s reliance on individual initiative as a conduit for change, her ambivalence about the utopian impulse as a public endeavor, and the role of memory in that ambivalence are all better understood by reading The Dispossessed along with its companion story “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974), set a century and a half prior to the events of the novel. In these two texts, Le Guin situates collective memory, as well as the Odonian historical tradition, as the means by which the Odonian/ Anarresti people gradually lose sight of the idea of utopia as process, as well as their rights and responsibilities as free people. Approaching Le Guin’s utopian writing through the critical lens of memory studies is not common practice. Looking back over the scholarship on The Dispossessed, there are the Marxist readings just mentioned; there are also feminist appraisals, discussions of political theory and the novel’s place within the utopian tradition, and approaches through Carl Jung and the Tao. The last two are not surprising, since Le Guin’s own essays acknowledge the centrality of Jungian psychology and Taoist philosophy to her fiction.7 As a “mythopoeic writer” of fantasy and science fiction (sf), Le Guin generally attracts little attention from historicist-minded critics (Spivack 6). The Dispossessed, however,

72  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory particularly invites historicist readings, largely because the novel’s pairing with “The Day Before the Revolution” creates a more finite temporal vista and a clearer causal logic than the vast scale of Le Guin’s Hainish universe, which in the course of seven novels, numerous stories, and many centuries of galactic time, posits a future history of about ninety worlds sharing a common human ancestry on the planet Hain and a common federation known as the Ekumen.8 Given their close relation, it is surprising how seldom critics discuss “The Day Before the Revolution” and The Dispossessed in tandem.9 I aim to offer a close reading of “The Day Before the Revolution,” a story saturated with memories of personal loss, as a text that also depicts the formation of patterns of social remembering that play out in The Dispossessed as inhibitors of utopian progress. Together, the two texts establish a dialectical relationship between memory and utopia/dystopia. Unlike the works discussed in the previous chapter by More, Bellamy, and Orwell, in which, respectively, utopia exists outside of the stream of history, utopia must sever its memory of the past, or utopia can only be found in the past, Le Guin takes a more dialogic approach. Le Guin demonstrates that while memory in its corporate form leads to social stagnation over time, individuals must undergo a full reckoning with memory in order to sustain utopian revolution. In terms of narrative chronology, “The Day Before the Revolution” is the starting point of Le Guin’s entire Hainish cycle. It is told from the perspective of Laia Odo, the anarchist leader—a writer, theorist, activist, revolutionary, and political prisoner—whose ideas “had started a world revolution” on the planet Urras (21). On the day in question, Odo, now a seventy-two-year-old woman suffering the effects of a recent stroke, struggles with feelings of ambivalence at the news that an anarchist secession in the nation of Thu is leading to a general strike and revolution in her nation of A-Io, a revolution Odo has caused but will not live to see. The story focuses on Odo’s mindset and emotions, which vacillate between “self-pity, then self-praise,” defiance and resignation, action and inertia, as she goes about her daily routine at the communal Odonian house where she lives (23). Everyone around Odo is caught up in the urgency of the moment, the pregnant now that will open up the utopian future: “It appeared that a demonstration was being planned. Events in Thu were moving so fast that the mood here had caught fire, and something must be done” (30). But Odo herself feels strangely detached from all the activity and excitement, and that is because, despite its forward-looking, anticipatory title, the story’s true narrative engine is memory. Odo’s remembrances of the past dominate her consciousness and hence the story, and while structurally the story pivots between memory and the present, Odo’s memories are not simply triggered by the news that the anarchist Revolution will finally begin in full. In other words, the impending revolution does not act as a retrieval cue that sets

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  73 off a series of analeptic scenes in order to provide Odo’s back story. Even before Odo gets dressed and goes down to the commons for breakfast, where she learns of the revolution unfolding in Thu, she has already scolded herself thus: “In the old days. For God’s love, couldn’t she think of anything today but the old days?” (20). The story begins with Odo’s dream of her long dead husband, Taviri Aseio. In the dream, Odo attempts to reach Taviri across a crowded political rally before it spills out into a field covered in tall white-flowered weeds. Running to reach out for Taviri’s hand, Odo finds she cannot stop; afraid of falling into a pit, she stops and then awakes. Sitting up in bed, trying to remember what Taviri had said in the dream, Odo examines her decrepit feet. “Disgusting. Sad, depressing. Mean. Pitiful,” she thinks, before falling into the remembrance of her “first weeks of the nine years” in prison, when she learned Taviri had been killed fighting in the capital city (19). Remembering Taviri as her “husband” causes Odo to reflect on the tension between her public and private personas: “The word she should use as a good Odonian, of course, was ‘partner.’ But why the hell did she have to be a good Odonian?” (20). On this day, Odo is clearly preoccupied with her memories, independent of any external influences. Yet reading the news of the Thuvian uprising serves to focus Odo’s memories more sharply on herself as “history” and to question her relevance to the revolution at hand. Charlotte Spivack notes that Odo’s character is marked by a deep ambivalence, exemplified in Odo’s clinical self-assessments of her body and epitomized in “her relationship to her own role in the impending revolution” (86). Odo knows that her followers treat her with great respect. She doubts whether she would be given such a large room to herself if she hadn’t been Odo for “[f]avoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere” (21). And she is still in demand. She has her own secretary, Noi, who keeps her schedule and writes out her dictated letters to various groups and provinces. Yet despite the deference she receives and her continued role as leader/sage/spokesperson, Odo finds that she cannot “share in their excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It’s not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, to accept being out of it when you’ve been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years” (21). Odo knows she is going to witness this definitive stage of the revolution (“it’s the real thing, this time” [25], Noi tells her) from the sidelines. Odo’s agitation at being relegated to the status of an observer, and her inability to feel any sense of triumph (“After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory”) causes a swell of irritation (25). She breaks off dictating a letter and dismisses Noi: “There is something else I have to do!” (26). Odo’s angry assertion is largely irrational, for “she had nothing else to do. She never had had anything else to do. This was her work: her lifework”; but it marks a central tension in the story (26). Odo decides

74  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory that what she has to do is “to go out. To get into the streets” (27). In her desire to go outside, Odo attempts to exert her agency, to take action in a wholly spontaneous way that gets her outside of her public persona as Odo, “Famous revolutionary, author of Community, The Analogy, etc. etc.” at the same moment that she experiences herself as a living, yet commemorative, site of public memory (29). Just after she dismisses Noi, Odo remembers a group of foreign students is coming to visit her that afternoon. Odo likes young people; she feels she learns from them: but they didn’t learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! . . . . They accepted their tonguelashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb. She! She who had mined the shipyards in Seissero . . . she who had screeched, and sworn, and kicked policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said HERE WAS FOUNDED THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF A-IO ETC, pssssssss to all that! And now she was everybody’s grandmamma, the dear old lady, the sweet old monument. (26) French historian Pierre Nora’s work on collective memory is helpful in explaining Odo’s mindset and the process by which Odo is converted into a “monument.” Nora’s important essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” the introduction to a seven-volume work on French national memory, posits three stages of western time: the premodern stage of organic societies rooted in memory that unselfconsciously reenact and reinvent living traditions; the modern industrial age where organic memory gives way to historical representations of the past grouped around the idea of the supremacy of the nation-state; and, starting in the mid-twentieth century, the atomization of national history into “individual, and subjective” forms of self-knowledge, where in place of “true memory” arises the archival tendency to attempt documenting everything out of “anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future” (13). While scholars fairly critique Nora for using memory and history as antithetical terms in a way that nostalgically privileges memory as sacred, and though Le Guin’s imaginary state of A-Io cannot simply be equated wholesale with twentieth-century Europe or North America, Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, usefully situates Odo within a process of cultural production and consumption.10 In the passage above, Odo’s frustration stems partly from the realization that she has nothing new to teach others, but more importantly

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  75 from the feeling that she has become a piece of commemorative history. Now, instead of listening to her, people “just came to look”: she exists already in the past tense as a lieu de mémoire, a memory site, a “monument” to the person she used to be. Nora argues that sites of memory are compensatory; they are localized substitutes for milieux de mémoire, “real environments of memory” that no longer exist (7). While Nora does not designate living persons as memory sites, his analysis of the progression of French historical consciousness and the psychological need for memory sites is analogous to the evolution of Odo’s society. Odo’s country of A-Io, a modern industrialized state driven by market capitalism, approximates Nora’s second stage, where collective memory organizes around the nation-state, exemplified by the “big brass plaque in Capitol Square.” Within A-Io, enclaves of communal anarchist Odonians have cut themselves loose from the master narrative of the state, attempting to create a society based on mutual aid and non-ownership of property. According to their principles, Odo’s followers are semiotic minimalists; when Odo goes outside, she ruminates on the fact that the cooperative house where she lives used to be a bank, but never having been renamed, is still just called “The Bank.” The anarchist Movement, she notes, was not strong on names. They had no flag. Slogans came and went as the need did. There was always the Circle of Life to scratch on walls and pavements where Authority would have to see it. But when it came to names they were indifferent, accepting and ignoring whatever they got called, afraid of being pinned down and penned in. (28) The history of Odo’s revolutionary movement already spans fifty years at this point; understandably, a desire exists to honor and remember that history, but in their rejection of state authority and their orientation toward the future, Odonians also reject most conventional forms of symbolism, commemoration, and ritual. This tension produces the void that sites of memory are created to fill. Nora argues that lieux de mémoire make their appearance by virtue of the deritualization of our world— producing, manifesting . . . and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past. (12) In western culture, rapid social change and deritualization lead to archival proliferation. “Modern memory,” Nora contends, “is, above all, archival. . . . Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals . . . monuments, sanctuaries . . . these are the boundary stones of another age, illusions of

76  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory eternity” (13, 12). Odonian culture, however, though equally absorbed with transformation, renewal, and the future, eschews archivalism and the compulsion to preserve and protect; at Odo’s cooperative house, for example, “They kept their sacks of meal in the bombproof money-vault, and aged their cider in kegs in safe deposit boxes” (28). Still, the desire to remember remains, and in the absence of material memory traces and since she is still living, Odo’s followers, to her chagrin, flock to her. Compounding Odo’s irritation at being viewed (at least in her perception) in the past tense as “the dear old lady, the sweet old monument” is the sense of being severely misremembered—remembered in the wrong way for the wrong things. Odo believes her young visitors revere her as a famous author and archetypal maternal figure, roles that completely overlook her decades of revolutionary, perhaps even terrorist, action against the state: “She who had mined the shipyards at Seissero, and had cursed Premier Inoilte to his face . . . she who had screeched, and sworn, and kicked policemen, and spat at priests” (26). The disconnect between Odo’s lived experience and her budding legacy highlights the complex nature of collective memory. Cultural historian Wulf Kansteiner argues that one of the methodological weaknesses of memory studies has been the failure to adequately conceptualize memory reception. Scholars tend to assume that the meaning of a memory artifact, like a museum, “is prescribed by its maker’s conscious or unconscious objectives” (186). In fact, Kansteiner contends, collective memory emerges from the interplay of three historical components: “the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests” (180). Odo experiences firsthand the propensity of memory consumers to ignore or interpret aspects of her life to fit their need for a protective figure. The self-identity she wrestles with throughout the story, the struggle to accept her stroke-damaged body as part of herself, the realization that she is still the six-year-old girl “with scabby knees” that she has always been—none of these self-conceptions or personal memories have any bearing on how Odo will be remembered by her followers or to what uses future memory consumers will put her legacy. Odo herself will not even witness the beginning of the Revolution; after being helped home by a woman who finds her slumped on a doorstep, Odo is asked to speak the next morning at the general meeting. “‘Tomorrow? Oh, I won’t be here tomorrow,’ she said brusquely. . . . What on earth had made her say that? What a thing to say on the eve of the Revolution, even if it was true” (30). Odo intuits that a final stroke awaits her as she climbs the stairs to her room, “but she was no longer afraid to fall” (30). As Le Guin brings Odo’s life to an end, her individual memories of self, husband, and revolution are lost and subsumed by the monumental

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  77 Odo her followers want and need her to be. The collective memory of Odo that accrues during her lifetime, however counter to Odo’s own wishes, no doubt serves some productive function by giving a young revolutionary movement a symbolic and ideological figurehead; but in The Dispossessed we see how the enduring memory of Odo and of Urras animates society on Anarres in increasingly entrenched ways that contribute to the ambiguity of Le Guin’s utopia. The Odonian revolution on Urras culminates with a million-person migration to the moon Anarres, a world of real estate bestowed on the anarchists by Urras’s Council of World Governments (dominated by A-Io in U.N. fashion) in exchange for status quo politics at home and the moon’s mineral resources. Seven generations later, when the events of The Dispossessed take place, Odo’s anarchist descendants, driven by their collective memory (as opposed to actual experience) of oppression by Urras, have closed off their society from contact with Urras and other planets to avoid being corrupted. The novel’s protagonist, the gifted physicist Shevek, attempting to bridge the sequential and simultaneous theories of time into a unified temporal theory, feels stymied by Anarres’s isolation and cultural rigidity. Shevek travels to Urras to work with other leading physicists, intending to complete and then share his unified temporal theory, which will pave the way for instantaneous interstellar communication; Shevek also hopes to “unbuild walls” of memory between Anarres and Urras and reawaken his society’s Odonian revolutionary ethos (7). Structurally, the novel begins with Shevek’s departure for Urras; its chapters alternate between Shevek’s stay on Urras, which ends just before landing on Anarres on his return home, and his life’s story on Anarres, which ends with his decision to leave for Urras. Shevek’s attempt to reconnect the threads of the future (Anarres) with the past (Urras) in order to actualize the present not only mirrors the novel’s chiastic structure, it is also meant to ensure that Le Guin’s utopia can develop and evolve without collapsing into a closed system. Le Guin constructs Anarresti society on the desert moon as high-tech Spartan survivalism grounded in the cooperative ethic of mutual aid.11 In the moneyless, non-property-owning economy organized around local work syndicates and coordinated by a central Production Distribution Committee, Anarresti men and women try to balance their freely chosen vocations with the work needed for basic social functioning. Le Guin acknowledges the difficulty of achieving this balance, using the tension between public and private needs and public and private conscience— tensions deeply enmeshed in how Anarresti people understand what it means to be Odonian—to explore the onset of social stagnation. Le Guin’s critical portrayal of Anarres’s increasingly static and isolationist society, its gradual centralization of power, and its failure to revolutionize human nature simply by abolishing private property, are the chief means of demonstrating her utopia’s incompleteness or “ambiguity.”

78  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory Critics interested in The Dispossessed’s limitations as a utopia point out that the novel is also rife with unintentional ambiguities that further distill its utopian potential. Moylan and John Fekete argue that the novel falls into the philosophical trap of endorsing the very kind of totalizing system of global capitalism that it critiques.12 The impetus for utopian change in the novel, they claim, is restricted to the actions of one exceptional individual (Shevek) within a world system, rather than a radical decentering of the system.13 Utopia, therefore, remains inadvertently sealed off from true historical progression. The strength of such arguments is hard to deny and what follows does not argue away every problematic or limiting feature of Le Guin’s narrative logic, but I do question the premise that Le Guin essentially removes Anarres from history (Jameson), fails to recognize her vision of history’s circularity (Moylan), or forestalls utopian change. Rather than refracting historical complexity into simplification, Le Guin intricately examines the durative effects of collective memory practices and provides within the plot itself a clear narrative of historical causation that explains why the utopian impulse on Anarres gets reduced, at least temporarily, and not necessarily ineffectively, from the collective down to the level of individual agency. The Dispossessed’s early chapters (indeed, the entire novel) cohere around the symbol of a wall. The novel’s first sentence, “There was a wall,” indicates the boundary around Anarres’s sole spaceport, a wall that “shut in” the freighters from Urras and “enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free” (2). Viewed from the other side, however, “the whole planet was inside it, a prison camp” (2). The series of vignettes recounting Shevek’s early childhood and adolescence echo the image of Anarres as prison camp despite its lack of laws and centralized state authority. As a precocious and singular eightyear-old, Shevek tries to explain his vision of sequential time—the thrown rock that never reaches the tree—to his school class, but is reprimanded for “egoizing,” engaging in self-focused speech. Soon after, Shevek dreams of a large wall blocking his path; on the ground nearby, Shevek finds a stone with a number in it: “the primal number, that was both unity and plurality. ‘That is the cornerstone,’ said a voice of dear familiarity, and Shevek was pierced through with joy. There was no wall in the shadows” (30). Shevek’s dream and its shock of joy function along the lines of what Ernst Bloch terms the novum: the surprising and unexpected quality of the new that opens up the latent potential of a radically different future.14 Shevek’s lifelong yearning and grasping for “the balance, the pattern” of space-time could be explained simply as part of his personality; but in the larger arc of Le Guin’s Hainish metahistory, Shevek himself embodies the novum and the utopian impulse to break through the present into future possibility (27).

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  79 The wall that disappears in Shevek’s dream remains very much present in his life, and as numerous critics have indicated, the wall is of his society’s own making. James Bittner, who describes Anarres as the model for Le Guin’s Ekumen and its principles writ small, points out that Odo planned for an interconnected urban society of cooperative syndicates without a “controlling center” or “the self-perpetuating machinery of bureaucracy” that enables “individuals seeking to become captains, bosses, chiefs of state” (Dispossessed 84). Despite these intentions, Anarresti society gradually develops a counterrevolutionary tendency “that obstructs change and gives rein to the very impulses it was designed to rein in” (Bittner 120). Shevek’s adolescent friends Bedap and Tirin recognize the ossifying drift of Anarresti society much sooner than their peers, and Le Guin uses them to voice much of her utopia’s ambiguity. Bedap argues that public opinion is the “unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind” and that the Production Distribution Committee (PDC) has become an “archistic bureaucracy” (145). Shevek angrily dismisses Bedap’s social critiques at first, but much later comes to agree that the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate— we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. (287–88) Shevek feels the truth of this situation in his bones, and ultimately reacts against it, but cannot account for its origin. An acute social observer, Bedap takes a long historical view of the problem that speaks to collective remembering and forgetting. He argues that any technological society that depends on people’s expertise will gravitate toward stability: But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian anymore than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that. We don’t educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids learn to parrot Odo’s words as if they were laws—the ultimate blasphemy! (147; emphasis in original)

80  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory Over time, the Anarresti people have forgotten that the libertarian slant of Odonian philosophy is not natural but must be taught, just as Odo instructed her young visitors to “Think your own thoughts!” Instead, seven generations of memory consumers since Odo have invoked her name and read, memorized, and taught her words to the point that her ideas have become statutes divested of their revolutionary import. “The Day Before the Revolution” suggests Odo’s recognition of the Odonian impulse to idolize her. Struggling to dictate a letter to the northern provinces of A-Io, Odo says, “‘Remember that at this stage your brotherhood is vulnerable to the threat of . . . no, to the danger . . . to . . .’ She groped till Noi suggested, ‘The danger of leader-worship?’ ‘All right’” (25). Although Odo does not utter the term, possibly out of reluctance, Le Guin shows her own cognizance that the scenario she has constructed—a widespread revolution spearheaded by the ideas of one individual—is liable to produce idolatry in the short term and restrictions of intellectual freedom in the long term. Static reverence for Odo’s ideas in The Dispossessed is perpetuated simply by their enduring presence as material traces—that is, as written texts. Cultural historian Jan Assmann’s work on collective memory distinguishes between what he calls communicative memory—for example, informal conversations about the past that have a relatively short temporal horizon—and cultural memory, the material artifacts of memory, such as texts, images, museums, and memorials designed to serve as the “culturally institutionalized heritage of a society” and to preserve “the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity” (130). Odonians on Anarres practice a rich variety of arts and crafts, but as on Urras they forego most types of ceremonialism, so Odo’s writings remain one of the few crystallizations of shared knowledge that stabilize Anarrestis’s self-image, connecting them to their past. (Significantly, the lone statue of Odo on Anarres figures her sitting on a park bench, reading the proof pages of The Social Organism.) If anything functions as such, Odo’s writings are surely the “institutionalized heritage” of Anarres; moreover, against Odo’s intentions, the Anarresti gradually canonize her works as sacred texts (111). Though some of Odo’s ideas are still debated in Shevek’s time, for instance her views on sexual monogamy, she has in effect become a canonized secular saint. The dilution from full personhood into maternal icon that Odo resents at the end of her life replays itself on Anarres with her textual legacy. For a society seeking to maximize individual choice and responsibility, a surprising lack of ideological plurality on Anarres causes Odo to be remembered, and her political theories to be taught, in a monologic way. It is worth recalling that Anarres was built as an intentional society consisting of individuals, who, whatever their personal differences, chose to emigrate due to their adherence to Odonian principles. For seven generations, until Shevek’s decision to go to Urras, no political

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  81 schism or alternative ideology has radically changed the political landscape or challenged Odo’s now mythic status. Barry Schwartz, writing on Abraham Lincoln’s place in American memory, argues that “[c]ollective memory works by subsuming individual experiences under cultural schemes that make them comprehensible and, therefore, meaningful” (xi). Le Guin’s anarchist society, oddly enough, is an ideal location for a strong sense of collective memory to take root, because only one major “cultural scheme” exists on Anarres. There are no political parties, no diverse ethnic groups or social classes, no mass entertainment media to offer alternative identities to the Odonian one. In the absence of competing cultural schemes or political narratives, Anarresti society has congealed ideologically around the monumentalized figure of Odo, “whose ideas were central and abiding in [Shevek’s] mind and the mind of everyone he knew” (Dispossessed 89). These examples of cultural streamlining support Jameson’s formidable assessment of Le Guin’s technique of “world-reduction” as the means to imagine utopia. But where Jameson seems to assume these social conditions exist as permanent states, Le Guin indicates they have been produced over time. Jameson overlooks the ways in which Le Guin depicts collective memory as part of the psychological, social, and political processes of history that initially led to regressive social entrenchment on Anarres. John Fekete and Robert Philmus both note, for example, that the Anarresti self-conception is predicated on an emphatic “rupture” between Anarres and Urras that defines itself mostly in terms of what it opposes.15 Yet this opposition does not occur organically as a result of isolation; Odonian education actively inculcates and produces the memory of Urras as an oppressive hell: Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson. . . . They had. . . seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. ‘A famine in Bachifoil Province in the Nation of Thu,’ the commenter’s voice had said. ‘Bodies of children dead of starvation are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io. . . women kept for the sexual use of the propertied class. . . lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class.’ A close-up of dinnertime: soft mouths champing and smiling. . . [t]hen a switch back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child. . . ‘Side by side,’ the quiet voice had said. (37) These propaganda films about Urras are the Anarresti children’s only exposure to their ancestral world; no other voices from Urras complement or contend with the films’ voiceovers. Shevek’s friend Tirin challenges

82  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory his world’s entrenched and officially sanctioned collective memory when he questions the age, accuracy, and intent of the films: “How old are those films? . . . . things could be entirely different now on Urras . . . . [W]e only know what we’re told. And do you know what we’re told? . . . detest Urras, hate Urras, fear Urras,” (37–38). Tirin’s frustration that his only knowledge of Urras comes from the mouth of authority unwittingly shows how culturally shared memories do not literally exist but rather, as Jan Assmann has theorized, only reconstruct the past, always in relation to, and with a heavy bias toward, contemporary events and agendas (130). Likewise, in her book on memory in postwar Europe, Nancy Wood stresses the performative and intentional aspects of cultural memory formations: public memory—whatever its unconscious vicissitudes—testifies to a will or desire on the part of some social group or disposition of power to select and organize representations of the past so that these will be embraced by individuals as their own. If particular representations of the past have permeated the public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality—social, political, institutional and so on—that promotes or authorizes their entry. (2) Tirin’s critique of his education, of the fact that “All the material on Urras available to students is the same,” demonstrates the powerful political will to remember Urras as the dangerous, diametrically opposite other (38). Given the public inertia afflicting Anarres as the result of such memory practices, the question then becomes: to what extent does Le Guin move her utopia forward, restore utopia to its proper state of ongoing process, “make an Anarres beyond Anarres, a new beginning” (331)? The question remains somewhat unanswered, because Shevek is still en route back to Anarres when the novel ends; the public reception he will receive is unknown. Samuel R. Delany argues that the novel falls short of its ambition; Moylan argues that Le Guin’s reliance on an individual hero prevents any transformational breakthrough: “What more can be expected of a lone individual attempting social revolution than such a cooptation in the very name of that revolution back into the service of the status quo, indeed improving and extending the profit of that given system?” (117). As incomplete or circular as Le Guin’s conclusion may seem, however, it is structurally intrinsic to the novel and does not negate its utopian drive. Le Guin’s temporal orientation, in conjunction with her skepticism about the tendency of collective memory practices to coalesce into moral directives that gradually suffocate the individual’s ability to “behave like [an] anarchist,” produces a utopian impulse that resides initially in the individual, or at most in small groups (336).

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  83 This is neither politically fashionable nor a full exposure of the ideologies of the world systems involved, but it is also not solipsistic or inimical to utopian change. James Bittner correctly identifies that Le Guin’s overriding concern is not the future, the not yet of utopia, but the present moment; paraphrasing Northrop Frye, Bittner argues that in The Dispossessed, the only answer to the question “When is utopia?” is “now” (120). As counterintuitive as it may seem for a novel set in a distant future that depicts a moon colony afraid of its past, a home world intent on exploiting the future with new technology, and a protagonist who is himself the novum, The Dispossessed focuses fully on the now. Unlike Bloch’s dynamic of hope, which feeds off the insufficiency of the present to keep future potentialities open, Le Guin posits the full actualization of the present. To harness the coexistence of Being and Becoming residing in the present, Le Guin argues that the past cannot be locked securely in the past. In his meeting with the Terran ambassador Keng on Urras, Shevek claims that the continuous interpenetration of the past, present, and future demands that time be accepted not only as real but as fluid: You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it’s something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . . And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real; only their reality makes the present real. (304–05) Denying the dynamic nature of time in its totality inhibits a full recognition of the present’s dynamism—its instability and lack of solidity—that allows for hope and change. Shevek scolds Earth’s representative for her chronosophical myopia, but also recognizes that the same condition afflicts Anarres. For Le Guin, the utopian impulse immanent in the present originates largely outside of well-established or dominant cultural schemes, because the collective memory practices that support those schemes work to solidify the past and to preclude change. This is true not only of the Terrans or the Anarresti, who might be forgiven for hypostatizing Odo’s theories considering they have had to move off-world to live them out; but also of the propertarians of Urras, who take a blithe view of their archival past. Spending a day in Nio Esseia, A-Io’s capital city, in an attempt

84  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory to get in touch with the country’s working people, Shevek instead ends up leisurely passing the time with Vea, the wealthy sister of one of the Urrasti physicists hosting Shevek. Vea takes Shevek to the Old Palace, “preserved as a museum of the ancient times of royalty. . . . Portraits of arrogant lords and princes stared at them from the brocade-covered walls and the covered chimneypieces. The rooms were full of silver, gold, crystal, rare woods, tapestries, and jewels” (189–90). Viewing the display of Queen Teaea’s ancient cloak, made from the flayed skin of rebels, angers Shevek, who, once outside, “look[s] back at the palace walls with hatred” and asks, “Why do you people cling to your shame?” (190). Vea responds rather heedlessly, “But it’s all just history. Things like that couldn’t happen now!” (190). The conflation of opulent wealth and violence commemorated in the display cases, which feels immediate and visceral to Shevek (and is almost prescient given the demonstration massacre that occurs later), is nothing more than an assemblage of lavish curios to Vea, who “loved to look at the jewelry there” (189). Vea, not surprisingly, sees no connection between her own wealth, state violence against A-Io’s working poor, and the ancient royals’ murder of rebels. Le Guin signals that Vea’s dismissal of the museum’s chronicle of brutality as “just history” represents a larger, collective Iotic memory in her description of the museum’s guards, who wear “bored faces, tired, tired of standing all day among strangers doing a useless task” (190). Nancy Wood, discussing Nora’s assessment of how the function of collective memory is recast in modernity, points out that “it is Nora’s contention that our historical sensibility has itself been transformed from one that looks to the past to affirm a causal relation between past and present to one that views the past as mere heritage” (4). The Old Palace museum is clearly designed to be viewed as “mere heritage,” part of the institutionalized memory of A-Io; it reflects the intention to archive the past yet also to represent A-Io’s past as ontologically complete, unchangeable, and dissociated from the present. To escape from this narrative and from the “jail” of his university confines on Urras, Shevek must go underground to meet with the workingclass socialist-libertarian revolutionaries, who actively cultivate a different collective memory, that of the Odonian promise. Tuio Maedda, leader of a group of nonviolent activists, says to Shevek, “Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years?. . . . To know that it exists . . . that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream!” (257). In this episode we see memory on a collective scale functioning with a progressive trajectory as a mode of oppositional politics, prior to any cultural entrenchment, acknowledging the past as real but also as unfinished and commingling with the present. Here, if anywhere, it is regrettable that Le Guin rather fetishizes Shevek’s heroic solitariness and the impact he has “[w]alking amongst” the revolutionaries, who see him as a savior, at the expense of the utopian potential

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  85 of populist activism (257). Le Guin’s apparent reliance on the lone hero raises the possibility that utopia becomes nothing more than an effete individual aspiration, not a collective form of social dreaming turned into action. Yet Le Guin averts this outcome, first by projecting the efficacy of Shevek’s action into the future of the Hainish timeline (that she had already conceived and written), and then by demonstrating that even the singular hero is part of a collective, however small. Le Guin does not directly show us the outcome of Shevek’s efforts to “unbuild walls” between Anarres and Urras and re-revolutionize his world (289). We know, however, from novels set later in the Hainish cycle, that one tangible gain of Shevek’s work is the ansible, the interstellar communications device that ushers in the age of the Ekumen. According to some critics, Le Guin’s ansible, though critical to the fundamental coherence of the Hainish metanarrative, functions weakly as a tool of utopian progress. Moylan particularly attacks Le Guin’s denouement for offering up an “electronic commodity” (the ansible) as the solution to historical contradictions: “We are left not with a vision that goes beyond world capitalism in a formal expression of discontinuity and openness but rather one based on information technology” (116). I would argue that Moylan underestimates the utopian import of the ansible, in part because even though Moylan’s and Jameson’s critiques of Le Guin’s supposedly closed system have much to recommend them, it is fair to point out that their analyses have their own brand of conceptual closure; namely, they take it as an absolute given that utopian progress can only occur outside of capitalism. Witness, however, the powerful role that information technologies played in 2011’s popular uprisings in the Middle East, technologies that fed young peoples’ discontent with autocratic rule and enabled them to organize protest efforts. More recently, social media has proven integral to many activist movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #JeSuisCharlie, and #MeToo.16 As Fareed Zakaria commented at the time of the Arab Spring, It’s too simple to say that what happened in Tunisia and Egypt happened because of Facebook. But technology—satellite television, computers, mobile phones and the Internet—has played a powerful role in informing, educating and connecting people in the region. Such advances empower individuals and disempower the state. (31) If the specific changes to be wrought on Anarres by the ansible remain unknown, there will undoubtedly be change; the transformative potential of the ansible will, at the very least, fundamentally challenge Anarres’s insularity and static collective memory. Jameson asserts that in The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin’s attempt to envision a technologically developed nation (Karhide) without capitalism results in an

86  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory “unhistorical society” where “nothing happens” (228; emphasis in original). On Anarres, ansible technology will not likely alter conditions of resource scarcity or quickly usher in capitalism, but the influx of new information from other worlds will reinsert society into the flow of historical time. Dialogue with and even just heightened awareness of other worlds are unlikely to overturn the Odonian cultural scheme, but Odonians will, on a collective level, be compelled to ask more questions. The power of the ansible simultaneously to transcend individual consciousness and memory, changing Anarresti society, portends a healthy destabilization of entrenched collective memory practices. Even prior to the realization of the ansible, Le Guin signals that Anarres is ripe for a rethinking. The great furor caused by Shevek’s departure for Urras, “more virulent than they expected,” ensures that his return will occasion much debate, especially since he is bringing with him the Hainishman Ketho, first mate of the Davenant, who wants to experience Anarres (309). Debate lies at the heart of Shevek’s activity as an anarchist—the desire “to shake things up, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions” (336). If Le Guin skeptically refrains from envisioning a collective mode of utopian praxis, she posits the individual’s and/or small group’s ability to create fertile ground for social change. Shevek believes that while “only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change” (290). But if Shevek is in many ways the consummate outsider, “uninfluenced by others,” following no law but that of his private conscience, it is important not to overstate the degree to which he acts entirely alone (51). Shevek never attempts to break the memory habits of his fellow Anarresti purely on his own. Instead, he and Takver (his partner) join Bedap to form the Syndicate of Initiative to print controversial texts and establish radio communications with Urras. During Shevek’s stay on Urras, his colleagues continue their work of advocating for the reopening of Anarres to new settlers. As Shevek informs Ketho about their impending landing on Anarres, “A lot of enemies and a lot of friends will be there. The good news is the friends. . . . It seems there are more of them than when I left. . . . Things are . . . a little broken on Anarres. . . . All this has been going on while I was gone” (334, 336, emphasis added). Public opinion turns a degree in Shevek’s favor, not due to his grand gesture of leaving Anarres but to the success of his friends at communicating his vision in his absence. Le Guin does not completely atomize the work of utopian progress; collectivity, if only on a micro scale, proves efficacious. Nevertheless, Le Guin shows repeatedly in “The Day Before the Revolution” and The Dispossessed that when memory is understood to transcend individual consciousness and becomes collectively sanctioned as intangible or material lieux de mémoire, it tends, over time, to cut off the past from the present and future, limiting the utopian imagination. To reboot the

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  87 utopian project on Anarres, Le Guin instead offers the exile Shevek, who understands that “unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go” (161). Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia does not do all that readers and critics might hope in terms of breaking away from current world systems, but hers is not a utopia that avoids the implications of how people remember their history.

III. Individual Memory and the Utopian Impulse in Woman on the Edge of Time Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is not an intentional response to The Dispossessed as is Delany’s Triton, although my reading of Piercy situates her novel as a counterpoint to Le Guin. Woman on the Edge of Time implicitly opposes Le Guin’s position that collective memory inhibits utopian progress, albeit in a way that, like Le Guin, strongly advocates for individual action. In line with Le Guin’s anarcho- communist stance, Piercy critiques the mechanisms of institutionalized power, especially mental health institutions, that can render individuals powerless. Over the course of the novel, Piercy radicalizes her deeply marginalized protagonist, Connie Ramos, to the point of committing a multiple homicide in a fight against the mental health system experimenting on her against her will, as a way of fighting to ensure the existence of the utopia she visited 161 years in the future. Through Connie’s character and the utopian community of Mattapoisett, Piercy demonstrates her clear commitment to individual autonomy of action and belief. Nevertheless, Piercy’s utopia draws much of its strength and communal ethos from ritualized collective memory practices that enable rather than cripple utopian development. In fact, individual memory proves less efficacious in the novel as a source of utopian agency than its collective counterpart. Unlike Delany and Le Guin, Marge Piercy did not emerge as a prominent writer from within the genre of science fiction or its culture. While Piercy and the other writers of critical utopias in the 1970s share an overall political outlook, Piercy’s particular feminist and radical commitments stem, as Moylan points out, not from the sf community but from her leftist political activism during the 1960s (122). Though best known for her sf/utopian/dystopian novels, specifically Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She, and It (1991), much of Piercy’s work is contemporary realist fiction; and regardless of setting or genre, all of Piercy’s fiction centrally concerns the lives and experiences of women. Piercy begins her fourth novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, in present day (1976) New York City, where much of the story (and in the most literal sense, all of the story) takes place, and then intertwines her vision of a possible utopian future with Connie Ramos’s desperate reality.

88  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory Ramos is a thirty-seven-year-old Chicana woman beaten down by a history of loss, poverty, abuse, institutionalization, and regret. Piercy provides frequent glimpses of Ramos’s past as Connie slips into tortured memories of her life. After migrating from a poor Mexican village to Chicago as a young girl, Connie endured a brutal father to graduate high school. As part of her constant struggle for self-worth, Connie demonstrates her resilience and ambition by pursuing a teaching career; “To feel pride. Oh, she had been allowed to feel that briefly when she had gone to the community college in Chicago to study to be a teacher” (236). However, a brief relationship with a manipulative white classmate leaves Connie pregnant and deserted. After an abortion without anesthetic, Connie manages to get to New York, where a year later she marries Martín and has a daughter, Angelina (236–37). After Martín’s death in a fight, a second, highly abusive husband abandons her and her subsequent lover, the blind pickpocket Claud, with whom Connie is happy, dies in prison after volunteering for a medical experiment and contracting hepatitis. Grieving, and attempting to cope with renewed poverty, Connie, in a moment of overwhelming despair and frustration, beats four-year-old Angelina and accidentally breaks her wrist. Designated a child abuser by the state, Connie loses custody of Angelina (who a white couple later adopts), is committed to Rockover State Psychiatric Hospital and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The novel begins roughly two years after Connie’s release when her frightened niece, Dolly, arrives at Connie’s flat seeking refuge from her violent pimp/lover, Geraldo. Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly’s defense, but after being knocked unconscious by Geraldo’s thugs, Geraldo gets Connie recommitted for beating Dolly (a version of events corroborated by Dolly to spare herself further violence from Geraldo). The perfectly sane Connie spends the rest of the novel imprisoned in psychiatric wards, trying to escape or negotiate her release before an experimental behavior modifying brain surgery, reminiscent of the Great Operation in Zamyatin’s We, can rob her of her own inner life. Piercy juxtaposes Connie’s confinement and designation of insanity by the state with her unique mental expansiveness, or receptivity, that enables her to be reached telepathically by Luciente, an emissary from a utopian future. Luciente explains to Connie that she is “an unusual person. Your mind is unusual. You’re what we call a catcher, a receptive . . . whose mind and nervous systems are open, receptive, to an unusual extent” (34). Luciente, who Connie initially believes to be a man but later discovers is a woman, begins by projecting her consciousness into Connie’s mind in New York. Luciente seems to be physically real, but explains that “the appearance is not a physical presence, but is . . . as if it were” (58). The connection between them is purely one of consciousness. Finding that filthy, noisy New York “unnerves” her, Luciente contrives to pull Connie’s consciousness into the future—to

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  89 Mattapoisett, Massachusetts in 2137 (35). Piercy does not, for obvious reasons, explain in detail how Luciente and Connie manage to mentally connect across time, a process variously described by critics as telepathy, hallucination, dream state, or altered state of (un)consciousness, or as a mixture of all of these. Donna Fancourt observes that Connie’s initial awareness of Luciente’s presence comes from “hazy memories of dreams,” but that these dreams and memories “soon overlap into daydreams and increasingly longer states of [willed] unconsciousness” (105). Franziska Gygax notes that Connie’s initial passivity in receiving contact from Luciente evolves into actively launching her mind toward the future as she gradually gives her assent to Mattapoisett (54). Fancourt argues that Connie’s mental receptivity represents “an opening of her mind toward different ontological possibilities,” concurring with Moylan who asserts that Connie’s “telepathic empathy” demonstrates the “beneficial effect” of utopian dreaming as conceived by Bloch (Fancourt 106; Moylan 153). From the beginning, memory plays an important role in Connie’s connection with Luciente, although memory itself is not the mechanism or technique by which they connect—that, more accurately, is a special form of attentiveness. Yet beyond the short-term recall of her dreams in which Luciente appears, Connie’s memory both enables and motivates her connection to the future and productively orients her toward the utopian impulse. Part of Connie’s unique mental receptivity stems from an ability to anticipate certain events in her life before they occur. Ruminating on Luciente’s claim that she is a “catcher,” Connie acknowledges to herself that it is true: Sometimes Connie knew at once things about others she should not know. She had known Luis [her brother] was going to leave one of his wives before he knew he had decided. Her husband Eddie had called her a witch more than once—for instance when he had been with another woman . . . . Often when Eddie was about to strike her, she knew it and cowered before he drew back his hand for a blow. (35–36) While such anticipation may seem unrelated to memory, Margaret Atwood suggests otherwise. Speaking on the function of memory, Atwood argues that “We don’t have a memory so we can remember the past. We have a memory so we can anticipate the future.”17 Piercy amplifies in Connie the capacity for prospection—mental representation of the future—and her awareness of how prior behaviors predict the future. Atwood’s comment on the anticipatory nature of memory also speaks to its narrative tendency to construct meaning through plot. Connie can “read,” if only partially, the events in her life through the logic Peter Brooks calls the “anticipation of retrospection”; she reads her present

90  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory “in relation to a future” she knows “to be already in place” (Reading 23; original emphasis). Much later in the novel, after her accidental visit to Gildina 547’s dystopian future, Connie immediately reads that occurrence in relation to a larger plot—that it was part of “Luciente’s war, and she was enlisted in it” (295). Connie perceives no real value in this ability—“If this was a gift, she could not see what good it had ever done her. When Eddie was going to hit her, he hit her anyhow”—but her nuanced memory of the past and her understanding of memory’s relation to what is to come unconsciously shapes her desire for the future (36). Incarceration, first at Rockover and then at the experimental ward at the New York Neuropsychiatric Institute, leaves Connie with only dread of the future and an excess of time to dwell on the past. Trapped in a system of patriarchal oppression she cannot control, and forcibly drugged, Connie frequently retreats, or descends, into memory. Connie is particularly tormented by memories of Claud, her lover, and daughter Angelina, that fill her with loss and regret. During a period of isolated confinement, these memories prove so haunting that Connie decides for the first time to try to initiate contact with the future: “She could not stand remembering! She had felt disgusted by Luciente and Bee, but she did not care. She had to get out of here. She had to turn off her memory. She tried to open her mind . . . . she begged, ‘Luciente, let me visit!’” (105). Such episodes more properly constitute escape than social dreaming or any concrete utopian impulse; at this stage, Connie simply desires relief from her surroundings and her memory. Connie does not yet aspire to a better society; indeed, her first “visit” to Mattapoisett leaves her underwhelmed and offended by its social customs. Yet soon after, Connie experiences a profound confluence of future and past, where the tug of memory combines with the realization of what the future could be in a way that, using Levitas’s terminology, reeducates Connie’s desire toward utopia. During a visit to Mattapoisett, Luciente and her two lovers (or “pillow friends”), Bee and Jackrabbit, invite Connie to see a children’s house where kids live and learn together. While there, Connie sees Jackrabbit playing with a young “brown-skinned girl with dark braids” who reminds Connie of her daughter (132): “Angelina!” she cried out, and her voice burst from her like a bubble of blood from her mouth. . . . Angelina! Or any brown-skinned girl child of seven or so . . . . Suddenly she assented with all her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett, to Angelina hidden forever one hundred fifty years into the future, even if she should never see her again. For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena. Yes, you can have my child, you can keep my child. Even with your obscenities and your talking cats. . . . She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she will grow up much better and

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  91 stronger and smarter than I. . . . Take her, keep her! . . . People of the rainbow with its end fixed in earth, I give her to you! (133) Connie’s love and pain-filled memories of Angelina compel her to realize that Mattapoisett, for all its strangeness, offers children a far better chance to flourish than any alternative she can imagine. The collision of memory and the future gives distinct shape to her dissatisfaction with the present. Ernst Bloch, speaking in 1968, observed that: Dissatisfaction is easy to have, widespread everywhere and no doubt better than nothing. How good it is can be seen in our days, in the student uprisings. But what road leads from the initially psychological state of dissatisfaction to revolt? Dissatisfaction is not enough. One must know not only what one does not want, but also what one wants. (Landmann 169) In Woman on the Edge of Time, memory not only feeds Connie’s dissatisfaction with the present, it also helps her to know what she wants from the future: a world where Angelina could live strong and free. It is worth noticing how Piercy refrains from having Mattapoisett grant Connie’s deepest wish of getting Angelina back again. In fact, according to its rejection of uterine birth as a form of gender hierarchy, Mattapoisett would deny Connie the very role of being a biological mother at all. By conceiving utopia in terms far different from what Connie herself would most desire, Piercy stresses the difference between utopia and simple wish fulfillment. Utopia inheres in its radical otherness—the future as disruption—and necessarily comes as a shock to the present. In the same way, the sight of the girl reminding Connie of Angelina also creates a startling moment of anagnorisis, Bloch’s term from the Greek for recognition (a term that will be discussed further in the next chapter). Using examples like Electra’s recognition of Orestes at Agamemnon’s tomb or Joseph’s brothers’ recognition of him in Egypt, Bloch describes anagnorisis as “a shock: he whom they cast into a pit suddenly stands there, powerful and handsome before them (Joseph and his brothers)” (178). Anagnorisis, Bloch argues, depends on distance between a “former and present reality” to create shock (179); Connie believes the girl in Mattapoisett looks like how Angelina, whom Connie has not seen for three years, would look at age seven. Most importantly for Bloch, anagnorisis is the form of memory that contains a utopian valence because the shock of recognition brings past and present together in creative, enlightening ways: Anagnorisis is a symbol that the present is never completely new, that it has historical depth, that it had prior existence in another form and was preparing itself. . . . Nature and our own self are

92  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory hidden from us. We are surrounded by signs which we do not understand. At rare moments, however, the signs become clear. An incognito is lifted. (181) In Connie’s case, memories of loss collide with a future vision to induce the recognition that even if she never saw Angelina again, she would “give her to Luciente to mother” (133). Painful memories alone do not educate Connie Ramos’s desire toward utopia or move her to act with utopian intent, but Piercy’s narrative reveals that individual memory can hold latent utopian potential that when tapped, enables a powerful human agency. Woman on the Edge of Time argues that disenfranchised women, figured in the text by Connie and the few other receptives—mostly women “in mental hospitals and prisons,” —can and do possess the necessary agency to affect the shape of history (188). Although the utopians of Mattapoisett believe that their future timeline depends upon efforts in the past—which evokes Bloch’s claim that “Most of the past is interrupted future, future in the past”—they themselves cannot remake the past in their favor (Landmann 179). Their hope is that Connie’s individual action will lead to a larger collective struggle for social change, as suggested in Bee’s warning to Connie: “You of your time may fail to struggle together” (190). Luciente also identifies “struggl[ing] together” as the ultimate objective. When Luciente’s seven-year-old daughter Dawn describes a dream about flying solo into the past to stop a nuclear meltdown, and declares, “I want to do something very important,” Luciente gently instructs her about the value of working collectively. “Dawn, it isn’t bad to want to help, to want to work, to seize history. . . . But to want to do it alone is less good” (189, emphasis added). Similarly, when Connie derides the notion of revolution as “Noise in the streets and nothing changes,” the objection comes immediately: “No, Connie! It’s the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school!” (190). The utopia of Mattapoisett, in other words, only exists and can continue to exist through the collective effort, and indeed the violent struggle, of many. Contrary to Le Guin’s position, Piercy argues that collective memory practices, while they do not replace the necessity of activist resistance, serve as a vital part of the collectivity of utopia, contribute to the continued development of utopia, prevent the stoppage of history (in Fukuyama’s sense) and help to steer utopia away from centralized power.

IV. Collective Memory and Causality in Piercy’s Utopia The makeup of Piercy’s utopia has been described in full detail by multiple scholars, so a more succinct summation should suffice here.18

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  93 Mattapoisett, located in the former Massachusetts, is a low-density village (pop. 600) in a regional network of small communities that exchange resources non-monetarily with the aim of each region being agriculturally self-sufficient, or “ownfed” (92). Decentralized governing councils preside at the local and regional level on an as-needed basis; more globally, erstwhile imperial powers negotiate reparations with former colonies. Characterized by Moylan and Karen Adams as a pastoral utopia, Mattapoisett fully blends high technology, such as automated factories and small high-speed aircraft called “floaters,” with simple and sustainable practices (Moylan 126–27; Adams 39). Adults are generally non-monogamous and couple with various “pillow friends” as affections change; each adult has his or her own private dwelling. Non-nuclear families prevail, with parenting following what Elaine Hoffman Baruch describes as the “equality of androgyny”: three non-romantically involved adults decide to co-parent a child together; both female and male parents can breastfeed, and fetuses grow in a mechanical “brooder” (Baruch 44). Education aims for the practical—with children learning largely by doing as opposed to being in classrooms—but also for deep levels of spiritual self-knowledge, or “inknowing.” At age twelve, children become adult members following a weeklong rite of passage alone in a remote location, after which they choose their own name. Piercy signals the community’s ideological bent through the selection of names taken from nature—Otter, Jackrabbit, White Oak—or from leading women and leftist historical figures of various ethnicities— Diana, Susan B, Sacco-Vanzetti, Bolivar. The community celebrates frequent holidays and feasts and strives to avoid all abuses of power and greed. Yet the pastoral peacefulness and abiding sense of belonging that Mattapoisett enjoys does not come without sacrifice. Luciente’s entire society is still at war with the remnants of the totalitarian and multinational corporate forces that used to dominate the world but that now operate mainly from the Arctic regions and space platforms. In the famous and influential Chapter 15, Connie unintentionally hurls herself into an alternate timeline where these dystopian forces, complete with their cyborg soldiers, rule everything. The existence of a possible dystopian future dramatizes the Mattapoisettans’ frequent plea to Connie that their utopian achievement is far from secure: “Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. . . . Alternate universes coexist. Probabilities clash and possibilities wink out forever” (169). The novel’s vivid dystopian vision and repeated warnings about the fragility of utopia characterize what Keith Booker calls Piercy’s dialogic mixing of genres—realism and fantasy, utopia and dystopia—and underscore the critical utopia as a utopia of process (340). Piercy’s rejection of the inevitability of revolution and the arrival of utopia, or, if once established, the idea that a utopia will simply continue,

94  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory puts additional pressure on her inhabitants of Mattapoisett to act with a high degree of intentionality and self-knowledge. Frye, as noted above, classifies utopian behavior as rationally explained ritual, which suggests that narrative utopias, whether pastoral/environmental as by Morris or Callenbach, or statist like those of More and Wells, represent behavioral norms and structures of feeling as deliberately cultivated, as opposed to being unquestioned traditions. Piercy’s endangered utopia increases the need to deliberate well, to fully understand how and why certain cultural practices have efficacy. The multiple timeframes of the novel—both linear and parallel—greatly emphasize causality, further exacerbating the need for Mattapoisett to try to safeguard its existence by aligning past, present, and future in terms of intent, ideology, and lived practices. Moreover, the Mattapoisettans’ acute awareness of the indeterminacy of all three points in time means they must be highly adaptive and not unduly wedded to any one cultural scheme. In such a milieu, how, and the extent to which, collective memory infuses a utopian society speaks to that utopia’s capacity for cultural dexterity. One possible alternative to Le Guin’s concern that cultural memory begets centralization of power, of course, would be to minimize memory altogether (although not necessarily in the same form of willed forgetting that Bellamy advocates for in Looking Backward). Such a society might stress rapid social evolution over continuity, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, or more commonly, employ “world reduction” on a total scale to avoid historicity. In Woman on the Edge of Time, Piercy takes neither of these routes, but rather aims to show her deeply intentional utopians as both fully invested in cultural memory and open to change. Patterns of social/cultural remembering in Mattapoisett develop as an extension of three firmly held and interrelated beliefs: the belief in the importance of self-knowledge; the belief in connecting with others as vital to social health; and the belief in human life as being part of the natural life cycle. In making her critique of the mental health profession, Piercy contrasts New York state’s absolute authority to diagnose and classify Connie with the Mattapoisettans’ regard for self-knowledge. Connie learns that she cannot even describe her own symptoms to nurses or doctors for “The authority of the physician is undermined if the patient presumes to make a diagnostic statement” (11). In Piercy’s utopia, by contrast, children learn to gauge their own biofeedback as an early step to knowing themselves and developing heightened sensitivity toward others. Cultivating deep connections means great emotional pain when friends and lovers die, but the Mattapoisettans opt against using their considerable skill in genetics (Luciente is a plant geneticist, for instance) to extend human life. Connie is initially shocked that lifespans have not lengthened: “You still get sick. You grow old. You die. I thought in a hundred and fifty years some of these problems would be solved, anyhow!” (125). Luciente’s rebuttal stresses the holistic nature of

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  95 humanity: “But Connie, some problems you solve only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer. . . . To pretend we are not made of elements ancient as the earth, that we do not owe those elements back to the web of all living” (117, 154). The “web” of self/other/nature that forms the one overriding ethical and spiritual focus of Mattapoisett poses the danger of calcifying into a rigid dogma as Odonianism begins to do in The Dispossessed. However, in her analysis of altered states of consciousness in the novel (e.g. time travel as well as techniques such as “coning” and “worming”), Fancourt argues that “connection with others, psychologically, emotionally and physically, provides not only the key to mental health, but also individual and collective change” (106). I concur with Fancourt that Piercy’s utopia remains open to “collective change” and thus avoids the ideological rigidity that plagues Anarres; but rather than focus on internal altered states, my analysis will delineate the structural aspects of Mattapoisett’s approach to the past that preserve social elasticity. Wulf Kansteiner correctly warns against using the lexicon and psychology of personal memory to analyze cultural memory, but it is worth noting that a culture which highly values individual memory as important to holistic well-being will likely also find value in social forms of remembering (Kansteiner 186). In Luciente’s society, to abuse or disregard memory constitutes a violation of personhood; Luciente, for instance, regards the medical experimentation forced on Connie as appalling “arrogance” given, as she says, that the so-called mental health experts of the 1970s “had not even a theory of memory!” (216). To augment their individual memories, everyone in Mattapoisett wears on their wrist a “kenner,” a highly integrated mini-computer that serves as a “memory annex” (57). Kenners archive memory on the individual level, but in order to transmit memory across generations, Piercy’s utopians turn from technology to far more traditional acts of cultural performance and ritual. It could be argued, and from Connie’s perspective it seems true, that Mattapoisett’s entire theory of culture is performative since they reject culture as a product of genetic bloodline but retain the importance of enacted heritage. Connie learns from Bee that “Wamponaug Indians are the source of our culture. Our past. Every village has a culture” (95). Connie expresses shock at this news, since no she has met, like Bee, who is black, appears Native American. Bee explains that the apparent disconnect is no happenstance but by design: decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we

96  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory don’t want the melting pot where everybody ends up thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness. (96) The somewhat arbitrary selection of a cultural heritage seems “invented” and “[a]rtificial” to Connie, but the villagers find value in connecting to and learning from the past (96). Luciente relates that during each “November we hunt for a short period. That is, our village does. We’re Wamponaug Indians. We need some experience with free-living animals as prey and predator, to body the past of our tribe fully” (92). The annual hunt characterizes Mattapoisett’s belief in culture as embodied performance. Simply knowing about the culture of the Wamponaug is deemed insufficient; hunting activates and transmits the culture in the physical form of (re)enactment, and this mode of cultural memory as performative ritual takes precedence over other modes of historical transmission. The prevalence of ritual in Mattapoisett stands in contrast to the society’s lack of a received textual tradition. Recall that Le Guin stresses her utopia’s grounding in the theoretical-political writings of Laia Odo, author of Community, The Analogy, The Social Organism and other texts. Piercy’s utopia, by contrast, has no founding proclamation or legal texts—no manifesto or constitution—two genres that Jameson argues the Utopian form itself “comes into being to complement” (Archaeologies 37). Members of Mattapoisett clearly read texts and they share and disseminate ideas in written form on occasion, but no particular authors or texts seem to possess especial clout. No character from Mattapoisett ever refers to a book by name, and the historical record of freedom movements that preceded Mattapoisett is taught to children not through books, but through performative reenactments with little regard for accuracy. Luciente tells Connie about the upcoming feast of July nineteenth, date of Seneca Equal Rights Convention, beginning women’s movement. Myself, I play Harriet Tubman. I say a great speech—Ain’t I a woman?—that I give just before I lead the slaves to revolt and sack the Pentagon, a large machine producing radiation on the Potomac—a military industrial machine? “Oh, is that how it happened?” [Connie] said. “In what century was that battle?” Grasp, that’s the essence of it. History gets telescoped a little. The kids get restless if the ritual runs too long. They like best the part where they sack the Pentagon. (165) While Luciente knows the ritual takes liberties with the historical record in order to keep the children entertained, it is not entirely clear how precisely she herself knows (or cares about) the accurate record.

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  97 Adults in Mattapoisett certainly exhibit a more nuanced understanding than the ritual suggests, and Luciente chides Connie because “The history you people celebrate—all kings and presidents and Columbus . . . was just as legendary” (166). But at the same time, Luciente misnames the Seneca Falls Convention, seems not entirely sure about the nature of the Pentagon (“a military industrial machine?”), and cares most that the ritual embodies “vital ideas in the struggle” (166; emphasis added). Performing a revolutionary historical narrative on stage that eschews facts in favor of “essence,” invoking figures like Tubman in a respectful yet playful way, knowingly undercuts the sense of solemnity about the past common to commemoration ceremonies. One likely reason for this is that Mattapoisett, as an intentional community/society, evolved from no one individual’s vision. Piercy’s utopians claim no founding visionary or builder, like Odo, Utopus, Owen (New Harmony) or Noyes (Oneida). As with the lack of a founding text, neither Luciente nor her fellow villagers ever mentions the name of an important revolutionary figure from their recent past whom they revere. Piercy conveys the impression that utopia comes into being entirely through the grassroots efforts of “the people”—activists doing the work of social change from the ground up—and not from theoreticians or singular individuals. This is not to argue that Piercy intends Mattapoisett to appear unplanned or in any way haphazard; rather, her utopia takes the long historical view of social development that figures the temporal discrepancy between the normal human lifespan and “the incomparably longer temporal rhythms of history itself” (Jameson 7). Early in the novel, when Connie expresses dismay at seeing people from the future living as “peasants,” which reminds her of her grandparents who “scratched out a dirt-poor life,” Luciente asks her to consider the future from a historical slant instead of an sf slant: Connie, wait a little, trust a little. We have great belief in our ways. . . . Think of it this way: there was much good in the life the ancestors led here on this continent before the white man came conquering. There was much brought that was useful. It has taken a long time to put the old good with the new good into a greater good. (62–63, emphasis added) Luciente emphasizes the historicity and intentionality of Mattapoisett, but without a corpus of grounding secular or sacred texts, and without any visionary founder(s), performative ritual comes to fill the representational space that connects past and present. In Mattapoisett, frequent remembrances and feasts (18 major holidays, 10 minor), such as the July 19th feast, are the central means of transmitting shared memories. In his book How Societies Remember, social anthropologist Paul Connerton points out that “to study the social formation of memory is to study those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible” (39). Connerton argues that

98  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory psychoanalysts, who study personal memory, psychologists, who study cognitive memory, and semioticians, who attempt to decode patterns of social meaning in structural linguistic fashion, almost entirely overlook the role that physical habit-memory—the repetitious performance of social and ritual gestures—plays in the transfer of memory across generations. Expanding on Bergson’s concept of habit memory, Connerton contends that shared knowledge of the past is “conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances,” for instance commemorative ceremonies like the Christian Eucharist that function not only as symbolic representations but also performative reenactments (40). When placed within Jan Assmann’s memory continuum that extends from the ephemeral “communicative memory” to the more durable “cultural memory”—that “body of reusable texts, images, and rituals . . . whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize . . . [a] society’s self-image”—Connerton’s focus on performative ritual habits fits into the latter category (Assmann 132). According to Assmann, cultural memory maintains the memory of fixed events in the past through texts, buildings, and monuments, but also through forms of ceremonial and “institutional communication,” such as recitations, observances, rites, and festivals that create a space of “retrospective contemplativeness” (129). Mattapoisett appears not to invest in physical monuments or shrines, but ceremonial/festival occasions loom large as “acts of transfer.” A frequent feature of Mattapoisettan festivals are “holies”—holographic projections—created by “spectaclers” or graphic artists that serve as historical narratives. During one regional feast, Connie witnesses two young artists, Jackrabbit and Bolivar, present their holi to a crowded auditorium. The holi gives a sweeping visual history of humanity’s extermination of animal species, each series of images merging seamlessly into the next, and ends with androgynous human figures flowing into and out of the earth (172–73). The ethereal quality of the holograms aptly captures how they hover between the ephemera of short-term communicative memory and the more permanent or fixed reusable texts and images of cultural memory. The holi’s ambiguous ending sequence also suggests its openness to interpretation; in fact, Luciente and Bolivar later argue over the historical, political, and aesthetic implications of the holi (203–04). Mattapoisett’s artists and their festivals create a culture of circulating images that promote collective memory, but do so in ways that deliberately forego some of the retrospective, reverential, and inflexible qualities typical of commemorative ceremonies. It is through this particular approach that Piercy casts ritual as a collective memory practice that energizes the community but also resists the drift toward centralization. Just as the July 19th holiday playfully rewrites Mattapoisett’s prehistory, the community’s only holiday actually named for a historical forebear, “named for a heroine of [Connie’s] time,” is Washoe Day, which commemorates not a human but “a chimpanzee [1965–2007] who was

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  99 the first animal to learn to sign between species” (91). That Washoe Day is designated as the holiday “when we celebrate our new community” indicates Mattapoisett’s tendency to not revere individual (human) achievement and to de-solemnize ritual. Mattapoisett’s important rite of passage into adulthood functions similarly to Washoe Day in that it also hearkens to the past but simultaneously denies primacy to the past. Initiations that represent the threshold between childhood and adulthood always look both to the future and past. The new adult closes the door on childhood and looks forward to adult privileges and responsibilities, and the community also celebrates the initiate’s joining the long lineage of those who came before. Welcoming new adults into the community assures that the community and its history will survive into the next generation. In Mattapoisett, youths at around age twelve spend a week alone in a remote “wilderness area,” and upon their return, their three co-mothers cannot speak to them for three months (108). The parental separation, Otter explains, destroys any prior dependencies, “Lest we forget we aren’t mothers anymore and person is an equal member. Threemonth usually gives anyone a solid footing and breaks down the old habits of depending” (108). Not surprisingly, Connie finds this rather severe survival test dangerous and “crazy,” but Bee argues its necessity: “We take the chance. We have found no way to break dependencies without some risk. What we can’t risk is our young people remaining stuck in old patterns” (108, emphasis added). Piercy’s utopians consider disrupting old behavioral patterns far more important than preserving continuity. Their rite of passage into adulthood, which contains formalistic ritual patterns and has acquired all the force of a tradition, nevertheless deliberately seeks to destabilize the past. Young people are encouraged to “transit from childhood to full member of [the] community” at an early age to stimulate innovative, independent thinking that will move Mattapoisett forward. The rite of passage, in other words, exists not to promote any “retrospective contemplativeness,” but just the opposite. The lengthy formal duration of the rite (one week plus three months) drives home Connerton’s important point that Rites are not limited in their effect to the ritual occasion. It is true that rituals tend to occur at special places at fixed times. And it is the case that many rites mark beginnings and endings, both in individual life-crisis ceremonies—for example those associated with birth, puberty, marriage, and death—and in recurrent calendrical ceremonies. But whatever is demonstrated in rites permeates also non-ritual behavior and mentality. (44) The length of the adulthood rite explicitly seeks to ensure that the initiate’s “non-ritual behavior and mentality” will permanently incline toward self-reliance and away from rote acceptance of received authority.

100  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory The adulthood initiation, like many of Mattapoisett’s rituals, contains very little in the way of scripted recitations or movements. Similarly, the community’s death rituals, while they follow a general formal sequence and feature ceremonial dress, employ more free-flowing elements than most Western funeral/burial rites. Late in the novel, the young man Jackrabbit, lover of Luciente, dies in battle, a loss that shocks the community. Piercy devotes eighteen pages of text to narrating the many eulogies and songs offered at Jackrabbit’s wake. Over a long night, when the community and visitors from elsewhere who knew Jackrabbit gather in the meetinghouse, people sing and eulogize about Jackrabbit in no particular order as others listen, drink coffee, sleep, and smoke marijuana or other herbs. While wakes and burials usually occur too infrequently for their rituals to become ingrained habit-memory, the extensive length of Jackrabbit’s wake coupled with what I would call its formal formlessness indicates three things: an appreciation for and enjoyment of ritual, a general antipathy toward rigidity, and an awareness that people process grief differently over different lengths of time that only a fluid approach to ritual can accommodate. Connerton emphasizes that when compared to myths and to everyday speech, rituals tend to have limited “potential for variance” (57). The inflexibility of rituals, he argues, stems from the desire to maintain stability, and this desire for the “celebration of recurrence is no monopoly of traditional societies” (63). Modern societies, Connerton argues, regularly invent new rites to compensate for the relentless upheavals and innovations wrought by capitalism: That is why invented rites, involving sets of recorded rules and procedures, as in modern coronation rites, are marked out by their inflexibility. By virtue of their procedural inflexibility they are held to represent, as nowhere else, the idea of the unchanging for a society of institutionalized innovation. Their intention is reassurance and their mood is nostalgic. It is not, therefore, the experience of recapitulative imitation, of mythic identification, but the display of formal structure that is the most evident mark of such rites. (64) The rituals Piercy invents for Mattapoisett differ significantly from Connerton’s description of modern rites. Her utopia’s rejection of capitalism and a moneyed economy fundamentally alters how its citizens view social innovation. Rather than being the product of seemingly faceless and uncontrollable economic forces exerting pressure from without, innovation comes from within—from individuals and small groups exploring their capacity to evolve. Change becomes far less threatening, and while the past can be honored and transmitted through ritual, nostalgia dissipates as the prevailing mood. Mattapoisett’s invented rituals, therefore, exhibit far more flexibility than Connerton discerns in the structure of

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  101 modern rites under capitalism. Piercy, in fact, explicitly addresses Mattapoisett’s desire to avoid rigidity, both in everyday life and in ritual. When Connie disparages the highly rustic appearance of Mattapoisett, for example, Luciente rebuts, “But we like it this way! . . . We’d change it if we didn’t like it, how not? We’re always changing things around. As they say, what isn’t living dies” (62). Later, Bee describes the community’s rituals as a continual work in progress: “Comprend, we sweat out our rituals together. We change them; we’re all the time changing them! But they body our sense of good” (109). Piercy’s emphasis on the mutability of Mattapoisett’s rituals indicates her awareness of how rigid ceremonial forms of collective memory tend to manifest a fear of the future and a bias toward the interests of state power and the status quo. Kansteiner’s concept of collective memory as a process of cultural production and consumption, where “memory makers” produce or manipulate representations of the past that “memory consumers” use or ignore, again proves helpful in understanding how Piercy democratizes collective memory (180). In Mattapoisett, no real distinction exists between memory makers and consumers, between production and reception history—the makers of ritual are their own consumers and hence rituals change according to the present needs of the participants involved, not the state. Piercy’s overriding concern with collective action (despite the long narrative build-up to Connie’s decisive act) drives her novel’s utopian gambit: that a utopian community can continually revise itself as it moves in historical time, not through momentous innovations by a singular individual, but through small communal acts of experimentation and foresight. In summing up the novel, Moylan writes of Piercy, She describes a collective activism that preserves the importance of the individual person. However, it is an activism that involves more risk and destruction than the travelling and negotiations of a Shevek do, as well as one that leads to a revolutionary society rather than separatism or compromising détente. (154) I agree that by leading Connie to a revolutionary act of murder and by founding her utopian society on a thirty-year revolution, Piercy endorses I-330’s claim in We that “the number of revolutions is infinite” (168). Yet I would argue that once established, the actual utopian ethos of life in Mattapoisett feels more evolutionary than revolutionary. The utopian sensibility of the villagers of Mattapoisett is one that engages in collective and festive remembrances of the past, but also one that does not consecrate the past. Piercy’s utopians treat collective forms of ritual remembering as intrinsically important to societal health, but not as hermetic practices. Woman on the Edge of Time argues against Le Guin’s assertion that collective memory works to ossify culture and preclude

102  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory change; on the contrary, Piercy imbeds the utopian impulse within adaptive rituals of remembrance. Piercy’s approach to temporality as a whole, then, seeks to unify the protean operations of memory centered in the body with the sense of history, not simply as the past but as movement into the future; and it is just this convergence, speculates Jameson, that signals Utopia: it is worth pointing out that at some point discussions of temporality always bifurcate into the two paths of existential experience (in which questions of memory seem to predominate) and of historical time, with its urgent interrogations of the future. I will argue that it is precisely in Utopia that these two dimensions are seamlessly reunited and that existential time is taken up into a historical time which is paradoxically also the end of time, the end of history. (Archaeologies 7) In Woman on the Edge of Time, Piercy’s “interrogations of the future” first and foremost concern its indeterminacy—the belief that the future has not yet been, and can never be, fully written. To bring about a future that remains utopian, and thus, of necessity, remains open to change, Piercy’s utopians do not study history so much as engage it through culturally elastic modes of memory. In exploring the utopian possibilities of living in community, Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy pay particular attention to the implications and challenges of collective remembering within diachrony. In Chapter 3, as we shift from 1970s critical utopias to 1990s/2000s dystopias written for children and young adults, our concern becomes the implications of collective forgetting. The striking dystopian visions of Lois Lowry and M. T. Anderson warn of the costs of a synchronic existence devoid of historicity, and point to the restorative potential of memory.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Richard Fairfield et al., The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the ’60s and ’70s, Process Media, 2010. 2 Writing in 1976, the same year as Woman on the Edge of Time was published, Sargent corrected the misperception that utopias stopped being written in the twentieth century: “there have been one or more positive utopias published in English in every year of this century so far, plus others in other languages.” See “Themes in Utopian Fiction in English Before Wells,” 275. Much more recently in Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (2010), Sargent affirms that utopias continue to be published, both in print and online (31–32). 3 See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 211; Perry Anderson, “The River of Time,” 71. 4 See the opening paragraphs of Wright’s lecture “Real Utopias in and beyond Capitalism: Taking the ‘Social’ in Socialism Seriously.”

The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory  103







104  The Critical Utopia and Collective Memory

14 15 16

17

18

of Anarres and Urras to embody the dualistic “component elements of the self” (260). See Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature, 241–62. For a thorough discussion of Bloch’s concepts of the novum and the anticipatory consciousness of the Not-Yet-Conscious, see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 83–105. See Fekete, 131–32, and Philmus, 126–27. The Pew Research Center reported on the impact of social media on activist movements in a 2018 study published on the fifth anniversary month of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. See Monica Anderson, et al, “Activism in the Social Media Age,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2018, www.pewinternet. org/2018/07/11/activism-in-the-social-media-age/. From Atwood’s lecture, “We Are What We Tell: Stories as Human,” delivered at Notre Dame University, April 9, 2014. Leading memory researchers have also established that remembering past episodes and imagining the future both depend on episodic memory, which enables recollection of specific past personal experiences in detail. See Schacter and Madore (2016) and MacLeod (2016). See Karen Adams, 39–49, and Moylan, 126–34.

3

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction and Cultural Amnesia

Andreas Huyssen’s 1995 book Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia represents a significant diagnostic moment in the study of modern cultural memory. With the millennium looming on the horizon, Huyssen assessed the prevailing “obsessions with memory in contemporary [Western] culture” that he saw moving in contradictory directions (3). On the one hand, the loss of memory that Adorno first theorized during an earlier stage of capitalism as a product of mass produced culture, was accelerating due to the proliferation of information technologies and creating a widespread cultural amnesia, or postmodern loss of historical consciousness. On the other hand, Huyssen noted a simultaneous boom in the discourses and institutionalization of memory from the early 1980s on: identity debates surrounding minority or exilic groups coalesced around questions of cultural memory, and Western countries built museums and memorials at an unremitting pace (5). Huyssen suggests that this “major and puzzling contradiction in our culture”—the simultaneity of cultural amnesia and interest in memory/ memorializing—points to how we think about and experience time (5). He argues that the “current obsession with memory. . . . is a sign of the crisis of that structure of temporality that marked the age of modernity with its celebration of the new as utopian, as radically and irreducibly other” (6). Not only do Western cultures no longer assume a historical telos of progress, the future/new itself seems more of a threat than a possibility, as Bauman also asserts in Retrotopia (Bauman 6). Instead of conceiving, with the modernist’s optimism, of the future as a surpassing of the present, Huyssen observes that at the fin-de-siècle our “structure of temporality” shifted so that “the future seems to fold itself back into the past” (8). In his 2003 book Present Pasts, Huyssen describes this phenomenological reframing of temporality as the shift from “present futures to present pasts” (11). Thinking this shift historically, we can go back to the early nineteenthcentury “memory crisis,” when, as Terdiman, Nora, and others have argued, history and memory diverged; or rather, a distinct historiographical consciousness emerged. By 1874, when Nietzsche wrote in the foreword to “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” that

106  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction “we are all suffering from a consuming fever of history,” he sought relief from what he considered the burdensome weight of this acute historical awareness (60). Huyssen contends that Nietzsche stands at the beginning of an intellectual trajectory from Bergson to Proust, from Frued to Benjamin, that articulated the classical modernist formulations of memory as alternative to the discourses of objectifying and legitimizing history, and as cure to the pathologies of modern life. (Twilight 6) As we saw in Chapter 1, for instance, Benjamin tied Proust’s notion of involuntary memory to the kind of meaningful experience (Erfahrung) that was at odds with mechanized and homogenized empty time. But in the contemporary moment, Huyssen insists, we no longer look to memory as an antidote to history because amnesia has already consumed it, nor do we necessarily see memory as vital to envisioning the future, because even though “we still harbor high-tech fantasies for the future, . . . the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete” (9). Despite our wishes for technological salvation, the enveloping speed with which digital technologies overtake and arrange our existence tends to collapse the tripartite experience of time as past-present-future into one inchoate synchronicity. In the same way that Svetlana Boym sees the turn-of-the-century “epidemic of nostalgia” as a “defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals,” Huyssen hypothesizes that the cultural appetite for memory suggests a desire for “temporal anchoring,” for slowing down, and as such, represents a potentially productive “contestation” with synchronous time (Boym xiv; Huyssen 7, 9). While Huyssen argues that the postmodern vectors of memory and amnesia are not inherently opposed (the more we are called on to remember in the information age, for instance, “the stronger the need to forget”), they nevertheless carry undeniable utopian and dystopian valences (Present 18). Absent any stable temporal grounding, the fear of forgetting, which is perhaps the same thing as a palpable pressure to remember, easily gives way to dystopian misgivings about total oblivion. Additionally, the trend away from mythologizing the present in order to secure the future (present futures), and toward memorializing the past, can suggest not only elements of nostalgia (either productive or regressive) but also the fear that the future will simply be a repetition of twentieth-century violence and oppression. Running counter to these dystopian currents, memory continues to figure as the way back to some kind of authentic and latently utopian historicity not supported by the print or digital archive. These utopian and dystopian connotations

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  107 manifest particularly in key narrative utopias of the fin-de-siècle/turnof-the-century. This chapter looks at how two seminal dystopias of the period, Lois Lowry’s children’s novel The Giver (1993) and M. T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed (2002), engage in the turn-of-the-century memory debates by warning of the costs of cultural amnesia. As I mentioned at the outset of the book, in recent years the genre of young adult literature has been almost synonymous with dystopian fiction in the popular imagination. Upon its publication in 2008, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games rode word-of-mouth acclaim from young readers to a tidal wave of popularity which culminated in a commercially and critically successful film franchise (2012–15). For the better part of a decade after Collins concluded her Hunger Games trilogy in 2010, young adult dystopias became almost self-replicating in number as American publishers and authors attempted to duplicate Collins’s success and capitalize on young readers’ appetite for more of the same, only different.1 Bookstore shelf space devoted to young adult “dystopian romances” proliferated, signaling the influence of Collins’s plot device of an intrepid heroine torn between her feelings for two male love interests. Sizing up the discourse of this fiction in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers (2013), Balaka Basu, Katherine Broad, and Carrie Hintz contend that structurally these novels address a variety of social and political questions, such as ecological destruction and social conformity, by revolving “around two contrasting poles: education and escape” (5). In general terms, dystopian novels for young adults blend unambiguous didacticism with escapist release from everyday norms. The problem as I see it, however, is that most young adult dystopias from the period 2008 to 2015 tilt heavily toward escapism and engage only superficially in sociopolitical critique. 2 Veronica Roth’s highly popular Divergent series or Lauren Oliver’s Delirium series, for example, offer no credible extrapolation of contemporary society and hence no credible cautionary warning about where it might be heading. Because these novels can be understood, as Laura Miller writes, “as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience” which follow “a logic more archetypal than rational,” their imagined social and/or governmental structures serve largely as backdrop to romantic concerns (135). Ally Condie’s popular Matched (2010), for instance, imagines a sterile, choice-free society similar to that described in Lowry’s The Giver, but with a plot focused on finding one’s true love, as opposed to settling for a government-selected spouse. These “dystopian romances” can be thought of as anti-utopian dystopias, the term Tom Moylan uses to denote dystopias that offer no conceptual linkage with, or reject the possibility of, utopia; in the case of Matched and of Delirium and their sequels, the novels seek not the opening of a new utopian space but only a return to the present status quo in which girls can choose their own

108  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction boyfriends (Scraps 155–57). As novels that fit the prevailing mood of a “historical moment in which,” Wegner argues, “we have become deeply suspicious of even the hope of radical social change,” Matched and Delirium easily allow readers to forget about reflecting on their own society and to just take comfort in the fact that at least their world is not like those worlds (Imaginary 148). The merits of The Hunger Games notwithstanding, its massive success and romantic formula created a literary market that encouraged imitators to neglect the dystopian genre’s vocation as a counter-discourse. Not incidentally, then, many of the best recent narrative utopias for children and/or young adults, such as Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion (2002), come from the decade and a half immediately preceding Collins’s dystopia. I would argue that The Giver and Anderson’s Feed are the two most provocative and culturally impactful of these dystopias, not only because of their artistic brilliance, but because they directly address the timely question of the loss of collective memory. The two novels come at the question, however, in very different ways, due in part to each author’s distinctive approach and intended audience. Lowry’s symbolically rich, even mystical, text, one of the most commonly taught and read American novels for ages 9–12, treats cultural amnesia in a decidedly apolitical fashion in a scenario far removed from the currents of a market economy. Nevertheless, as Anastasia Ulanowicz observes, The Giver features a community experiencing a crisis of memory that “uncannily resembles that of our own contemporary moment.”3 Anderson’s more profane novel, on the other hand, aimed at an older teen readership, depicts cynical and ultra-high-tech American consumerism and the amnesia it engenders as dystopia writ large. Accordingly, while both novels posit memory in the form of historical consciousness as a source of utopian hope, in Feed that hope remains far more muted.

I. Memory and Bloch’s Not-Yet in The Giver Following the discussion of Nineteen Eighty-Four at the end of Chapter 1 as a dystopia which seals off any possible utopian hope from the narrative proper, we might remind ourselves of Baccolini and Moylan’s dictum that “dystopia shares with eutopia the general vocation of utopianism that Sargent characterizes as social dreaming” (Dark Horizons 5). Unlike the anti-utopia, which philosophically rejects “any Utopian effort to create a new society, or even. . . any fantasy of doing so” (Jameson, Seeds 54), and which “always manages to revert to its baseline project of producing and reproducing the ruling order of things,” dystopia is more ambivalent in nature (Moylan, Scraps 140). Lois Lowry’s The Giver fully inhabits this dystopian discursive space of ambivalence: while Lowry’s imagined society is an engineered Utopia gone wrong due to its extinction of aesthetics and personal choice, through her protagonist’s

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  109 alienation from his society and resistance to it, the novel offers hope for a better future. Central to The Giver’s dystopian ambiguity between the poles of utopia and anti-utopia is its treatment of memory. Not dissimilarly to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, The Giver warns against the dangers of cultural amnesia by depicting the suppression of historical memory as a tool of social control and the production of infantile citizens. But Lowry also shows that memory, when not brought entirely under state control, is a source of considerable individual and emancipating power. I aim to elucidate Lowry’s treatment of memory by utilizing Bloch’s theory of the relationship between memory and the not-yet of Utopia to lend analytical clarity to Lowry’s highly figurative and unscientific explanation of how memory works in the novel. Lowry’s method of transmitting memory from Giver to Receiver, the point at which the narrative moves from science fiction into fantasy, can be read as a dramatization of Bloch’s concepts of recognition (anagnorisis) and the Not-Yet-Conscious, a reading which demonstrates Lowry’s thesis that memory, historical awareness, and hope can be harnessed to bring about resistance and significant change. By privileging memory as the novel’s one means of anticipating an alternate, better existence, which is the hope embodied in the Not-Yet-Conscious, Lowry rejects amnesia as culturally viable and argues for an asynchronous structure of temporality where past, present, and future abide. The protagonist of The Giver, twelve-year-old Jonas, lives in a small, sedate community within a future society where life is governed by extensive rules, rituals, and surveillance. Each day, adults, whose spouses and children have been chosen for them, bicycle off to jobs assigned to them before returning to their domiciles to eat the prepared meal delivered to them at a specific time. Family breakfast time includes the obligatory “sharing of dreams” and evening meals the “telling of feelings” to diffuse any unwanted emotional build-up, and each citizen’s actions and words are closely monitored for rule violations. Idiosyncratic family rituals aside, the novel’s highly regulated society shares many similarities with the social objectives of canonical, pre-twentiethcentury narrative utopias. Chris Ferns writes that the early utopias portray “utopian society as something to be imposed on humanity in its own best interests. . . . What such utopias offered was stability, security, freedom from hunger, from endless toil, from war” (Narrating 14). More’s Utopians, for example, live in “a sternly righteous and puritanical State, where few of us would feel quite happy,” but they enjoy civil order, plentiful food, good medical care, and six-hour work days (Chambers 125). The Giver can be reasonably examined as utopian in the sense More intended; like the Utopians, Lowry’s citizens enjoy absolute stability, safety, and freedom from any material want. In both societies, community elders make all key decisions; in both, wrongdoers are punished through forms of banishment, either slavery or “release.”

110  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction Each society maintains high levels of general satisfaction, civic participation, and communal responsibility, due, in no small part, to the fact that citizens live without fear. While highly authoritarian societies, in other words, Utopus’s island and Jonas’s community lack the irrational cruelty and “nihilistic will to power” of totalitarian states (Resch 142). In narrative terms, The Giver also resembles traditional literary utopias by not being satirical. Certainly not all scholars specify satire as intrinsic to dystopian narrative, but it remains commonly regarded as a formal characteristic of the genre. Ferns, for example, broadly defines dystopia as “combining a parodic inversion of the traditional utopia with satire on contemporary society” (105). However, in keeping with Lowry’s assertion, “I don’t make political statements” (Hintz 197), The Giver has no easily identifiable satiric target, unlike Orwell’s critique of Stalinism or Atwood’s satire of religious fundamentalism in The Handmaid’s Tale. The tendency, then, to consider The Giver dystopian instead of utopian in spite of the absence of satire can be attributed to several factors. First, unlike Hythloday’s enthusiastic account of his visit to Utopia, Lowry’s third-person narrator remains detached, and both Jonas (once he becomes the new Receiver) and the Giver express severe dissatisfaction with their society. Second, Lowry also takes measures of social control a step further than More. Where Utopians work obligatory two-year shifts as farmers, Lowry’s citizens have their entire life’s work and even marital status decided by the Committee of Elders. Where elderly and infirm Utopians are encouraged, but not forced, to commit suicide, the Old in Jonas’s community are euthanized without their knowledge or consent. But the most important difference in the texts’ reception histories, of course, is their historical conditions of origin. For poor sixteenth-century English peasants struggling to survive under the Enclosure Acts, More’s social vision would have undoubtedly held great appeal. To Lowry’s original audience of young American readers in the 1990s, though, accustomed to relative peace, economic prosperity and personal freedom, and highly skeptical of authority, Jonas’s society seems oppressive, lifeless, and robotic. The peaceful orderliness that pervades Jonas’s community and which makes its governing structure of Sameness appear somewhat benign, in spite of its dependence on “an elaborate system of discipline and punishment,” is largely a function of the absence of memory (Latham 134). We have seen Bellamy argue that in order for utopian transformation to occur, societies must jettison the painful psychological fetters of history and forget about the past. Whereas Bellamy insists that cultivating amnesia promotes psychological health and social change, dystopian narratives stress the individual and cultural damage caused by the eradication of memory. Moylan argues that one of the most important features of dystopian writing is its “ability to register the impact of an unseen and unexamined social system on the everyday lives of everyday people” (xiii). Memory is integral to the dystopian project because in many texts

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  111 the repression of memory keeps the social system “unseen and unexamined,” and the recovery of memory (or some connection to the past) allows the protagonist to recognize his or her “situation for what it really is and thus to trace the relationship between individual experience and the operation of the entire system” (xiii). In Brave New World, for instance, World Controller Mustapha Mond explains that the Fordism ‘History is bunk’ underpins the State’s program of producing docile, infantile citizens, who are given stability and ‘happiness’ in exchange for truth: “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t” (201). John “the Savage’s” rejection of the World State’s amnesiac ideology is rooted in his knowledge and appreciation of the 900-year-old works of William Shakespeare. The Giver, like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, designates historical memory as a threat to the hegemony of the state by highlighting its notable absence. Jonas’s community is devoid of art—both visual and aural culture—as well as memorial culture. Citizens have no access to books and history is not taught in schools. The community features utilitarian buildings named for their function—Rehabilitation Center, Nurturing Center, Birthing Center, Recreation Area—but no museums, monuments, sculptures, or commemorative sites. Homes contain, apparently, no telephones, newspapers, televisions, computers, or other electronic media devices. Contact with nearby communities is very limited and with the larger world unknown. Constant surveillance and the medical suppression of adolescent ‘Stirrings’ discourage inquisitiveness and exploration. The stability and static nature of Sameness—a complex, centuries old system of genetic, social, and geographical homogeneity that governs Jonas’s society and which inhibits the ability to see colors, forbids monetary currency and distinctions based on wealth, and controls the weather—depends upon a contented populace who ask few questions and perceive little need for change. To this end, the community established the position of Receiver of Memory (the position for which Jonas is selected and which drives the plot of the novel), where one individual is responsible for holding all memories of the past so that others can live unburdened by the pain, knowledge and guilt of human history (Levy 53–54). Sameness not only entails the radical erasure of individual and social difference, then, but also the contraction of the structure of temporality into a repeating synchronicity. Before he becomes the Receiver, Jonas essentially has no concept of diachrony, because beyond the omission of history in education and public spaces, the community systematically truncates each family unit’s genealogy. Jonas remembers his own past, and asks questions about his parents’ childhoods, but since parents whose children have grown up are removed to separate Childless Adults quarters, and then later, to the House of the Old without any family contact, Jonas

112  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction will never see his parents again once he is an adult and has never even heard of grandparents. Details about an individual’s own life, such as age and volunteer hours, are logged in the public archive—the Hall of Open Records—but nothing that refers to prior generations. Jonas’s apprehension of the historical past consists solely of a few apocryphal rumors, such as “Once, long ago, it was whispered among the children, an Eleven had arrived at the Ceremony of Twelve” and was shamefully given no Assignment because he had not completed his volunteer hours (28). Jonas lacks not only temporal but also geopolitical awareness; he has, literally, no idea where in the world he lives. While The Giver presumably takes place somewhere in North America, Lowry makes no mention of continents, let alone nation-states or other geo-political entities. Jonas’s community does not even have a name other than the “Community.” This community connects to a larger political body, as evidenced by the search planes that hunt for him once he flees, and the cargo planes that deliver supplies, but Jonas has no knowledge of their point of origin. Jonas knows only a terraformed Sameness, his myopic worldview limited entirely to similar “outlying communities” (166). Everything else is simply “Elsewhere.” Lowry’s microcosmic depiction of nearly self-contained communities resembles Oryx and Crake’s world of high-security corporate Compounds surrounded by “pleeblands,” and both resemble the world foreseen by globalization and denationalization expert Saskia Sassen, who in 2006 predicted “the formation of partial, often very specialised, assemblages of bits and pieces of territory, of authority, of rights, that used to be lodged in national states” (Sutherland 24–25). The combination of his lack of geographical and historical awareness makes Jonas thoroughly confused when he is selected as the new Receiver of Memory and the Giver (the name the current Receiver gives himself) attempts to explain the scope of the memories Jonas is to receive: “I’m sorry sir. . . . I don’t know what you mean when you say ‘the whole world’ or ‘generations before him.’ I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now” (78). Paul Connerton’s work on memory as a social faculty helps to explain Jonas’s bafflement. Adapting Halbwachs’s theory that individual memories exist embedded within frameworks of group memories, Connerton emphasizes the “acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible” (39): if we are to say that a social group, whose duration exceeds that of the lifespan of any single individual, is able to remember in common, it is not sufficient that the various members who compose that group at any given moment should be able to retain the mental representations relating to the past of the group. It is necessary also that the older members of the group should not neglect to transmit these representations to the younger members of the group. (38)

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  113 This type of simple and informal narrative passed from elder to youth does not occur in Jonas’s world, since apart from parental child-rearing, no generation has sustained contact with any other. As noted in the previous chapter, Connerton argues that collective, as distinct from individual, memory gets transmitted and sustained primarily through ritual performances such as commemorative ceremonies. Examining a wide range of formal ritualized commemorations from major religions and national and political factions, Connerton contends that what makes commemorations so important to social memory and what sets them apart from the more general category of rites, is that they do not simply imply continuity with the past but explicitly claim such continuity. And many of them. . . do so by ritually re-enacting a narrative of events held to have taken place at some past time. (45) Connerton perceives that modernity, grounded in economic development and constant transformation, is inimical to any true identification with the past since the “principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence,” which gives modern invented rites an artificially nostalgic tone (64). Yet even though Jonas’s community exists outside of modernity—there is no ceaseless expansion of market forces or culture of disposable innovation to inhibit collective memory—and even though its citizens regularly perform rituals, Jonas and his fellow townspeople have no formal practices which give them access to their past. The annual community Ceremony (the focus of the first third of the novel), which covers the Ceremony of Naming newchildren through the Ceremony of Twelve, where twelve-year-olds receive their vocational Assignments, contains a great many “more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances” which give them symbolic significance (Connerton 45). But the symbolism of receiving tunic pockets for Eights or the cutting of hair for Tens is almost entirely self-referential, signifying one age group’s increased maturity, albeit within the context of increased responsibilities to the larger community. At no point does the usual Ceremony invoke the community’s past or the present community’s continuity with it; no mythic or historical origins are ritually re-enacted, no founding Elders eulogized. Only moments of the recent past (falling within the short temporal horizon of Jan Assmann’s category of communicative memory) receive mention at the Ceremony, such as the assignment of a replacement child named Caleb to a couple whose first Caleb drowned. Jonas’s selection as the new Receiver of Memory, a very rare event, is also unusual because it momentarily ruptures the community’s atemporality and even acknowledges its amnesia. The public choice of Jonas as the community’s repository of memory formally, if somewhat implicitly, acknowledges that the community has a historical past and that

114  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction memory and knowledge about this past exist but are off-limits to all but one person. The potential of this admission to rouse dissension or at least curiosity among citizens about their past, and its failure to do so, signals Lowry’s argument that ahistoricity breeds political and ethical passivity. The community’s relationship to memory and history, beyond being mostly unintelligible abstractions, is that of a pain to be avoided. The Chief Elder says, “We failed in our last selection [. . .]. It was ten years ago, when Jonas was just a toddler. I will not dwell on the experience because it causes us all terrible discomfort” (61), and emphasizes that Jonas “will be faced [. . .] with pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend” (63). To the Committee of Elders and the wider collective, acknowledgement of the past brings discomfort and pain, but Lowry shows that living without a past and its accompanying pain numbs emotional capacity and creates a citizenry with barely childlike levels of ethical intelligence. In the most shocking example of this, Jonas’s father, a professional child nurturer, good-naturedly euthanizes a newborn baby with no understanding that he has taken a life. Significantly, it is only due to having begun his training as Receiver that Jonas, who views the killing of the newborn, understands its meaning. Lowry thus posits memory both as critical to full human development, and through Jonas’s apprenticeship with the Giver, as the novel’s one source of utopian impulse for a different future. The memories Jonas receives during his training to become the new Receiver of Memory gradually cause him to reject the founding principles of his society and to voluntarily exile himself from the community, leaving behind a cascade of memories that will perhaps permanently disrupt Sameness. The means by which Jonas receives these memories is pivotal to his transformation. In the community, only the Giver has access to books (apart from directories, dictionaries, and the Book of Rules), yet despite the Giver’s thousands of volumes, Jonas never reads as part of his training. Instead, he removes his tunic and reclines face down while the Giver places his hands on Jonas’s back and passes memories into Jonas. As Michael Levy rightly indicates, the transference of memory represents the point at which Lowry’s novel moves from science fiction into fantasy (53), and in fact, almost nothing related to memory in The Giver can be explained scientifically, from the Giver’s loss of a memory once he has given it to Jonas, to the way memories apparently exist as place bound entities independent of individual consciousness (so when Jonas leaves his community, the memories remain behind and become collective memories). When the Giver transmits memories to Jonas, Jonas inhabits them; they come to him as first-hand lived experiences, full of sensations and emotions rather than detached observations. Jonas finds when he receives his first memory of sledding in snow that One part of his consciousness knew that he was still lying there, on the bed, in the Annex room. Yet another, separate part of his being

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  115 was upright now, in a sitting position, and beneath him he could feel that he was not on the soft decorated bedcovering at all, but rather seated on a flat, hard surface. . . . And he could see, though his eyes were closed. (81) Interestingly, the Giver, whose memory it just was, is nowhere present in the scene. By receiving memories through a wakeful dream state as lived experience, as opposed to a more passive method, Jonas takes full possession of them. They become distinctly his memories and his past, not just a generalized historical past. This is true to such an extent that Jonas is able to “perceive” without being told, the names for things he has never actually experienced or heard of, such as sunshine (85). More importantly, the memories Jonas receives from the Giver call forth another layer of memory that is not received but created. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), when the protagonist Case meets the Artificial Intelligence (AI) called Wintermute within cyberspace, the AI accesses Case’s digitally stored memory to appear in the form of people from Case’s past. Amy Novak shows that Wintermute’s holographic simulacra of memories provoke both actual memories and action from Case. The simulated images from Case’s past “do not replace Case’s memory, but instead [. . .] conjure forth memory” (401). The images not only trigger Case’s own memory, they also create “a fury in him that propels him into action,” leading him to assist Wintermute in changing the matrix (401). Jonas experiences a similar layering of memory in The Giver; as with Case, the memory images Jonas receives from an external source (which are more than just simulations) engender further memory, but a form of memory that reaches beyond recollection. Jonas’s new memory, conceived in a dream, takes on a spatial dimension and becomes a place he wants to arrive at. The night after his first day of training, Jonas dreams repeatedly of sledding down the snowy hill: Always, in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something—he could not grasp what—that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. (88) Jonas’s ungraspable but yet perceived destination, which looms large at the novel’s end, is a product of memory but also beyond memory, a something yet-to-be experienced, a future/past of utopian longing. Though not intentionally written as such, Lowry’s ambiguous treatment of memory can most usefully be understood as an enactment of Bloch’s concept of anticipatory consciousness, and as a vivid illustration

116  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction of the importance of Bloch’s distinction between memory as recognition (anagnorisis) versus memory as recollection (anamnesis). As  is well known, Bloch’s unorthodox Marxism—heavily imbued with millenarianism and anti-materialist in its appropriation of the ideal of Utopia—can be fairly critiqued as overly subjective, but has been deeply influential within utopian studies. Bloch considered memory to have a valuable utopian function, and in The Giver, memory leads directly to utopian desire because it is only by unlocking the past that Jonas can start to contemplate the future. The fact that Jonas receives memories of the distant past as his own lived experiences means that in a sense he has many lifetimes of experience with which to approach the future. In his essay on memory and Utopia, Vincent Geoghegan writes, My past memories will have a constitutive role in the forging of my present and future perceptions. Since I am not a blank sheet or piece of blotting paper, but rather a dynamic, constructive perceiver, I enter the future with a body of assumptions and preoccupations located in memory. [. . .] In this sense I can be said to be ‘remembering the future.’ (17–18) Bloch’s theory of memory emphasizes the friction between past and present that unleashes creative potential for the future. Bloch rejects the Platonic conception of memory as recollection (anamnesis), in which the search for truth leads always to the recollection of perfect universal forms. In conversation with philosopher Michael Landmann in 1968, Bloch argues that the “doctrine of anamnesis claims that we have knowledge only because we formerly knew. But then there could be no fundamentally new knowledge, no future knowledge. [. . .] Amamnesis [. . .] makes everything a gigantic déjà vu, as if everything had already been” (178). With anagnorisis, however, the new is never completely new for us because we bring with us something to measure it by. We always relate what we find to earlier experience or to an image we have of it. [. . .] Anamnesis provides the reassuring evidence of complete similarity; anagnorisis, however, is linked with reality by only a thin thread; it is therefore alarming. (178) Similarly, Harvard psychologist and memory researcher Daniel Schacter argues that memory is more than simply retrieving stored information that we already know: for the rememberer, the engram (the stored fragments of an episode) and the memory (the subjective experience of recollecting a past event) are not the same thing. . . . Although it is often assumed that

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  117 a retrieval cue merely arouses or activates a memory that is slumbering in the recesses of the brain, I have hinted at an alternative: the cue combines with the engram to yield a new, emergent identity—the recollective experience of the rememberer—that differs from either of its constituents. This idea was intimated in some of Proust’s writings, in which memories emerge from comparing and combining a present situation with a past one. . . (70) Bloch’s conception of anagnorisis resembles Schacter’s understanding of memory as subjective and creative, but with greater emphasis on memory’s generative potential. Bloch stresses that “anagnorisis is a shock” (178) where in “rare moments” (181) our past meets the present to give new understanding: It doesn’t mean merely that I recognize A which I see before me, as the B [. . .] I formerly knew, but also the opposite: that I only now recognize the B I knew as the newly known A, that what I previously did not understand [. . .] is made essentially clear by a new experience. (181) The plan Jonas conceives with the Giver for Jonas to leave the community and release his memories back into the population, a radical reshaping of the future, proceeds from just such a shock of recognition (anagnorisis). In the course of his training, Jonas receives in fairly quick succession memories and knowledge of death (Civil War, Chapter 15) and familial love (Chapter 16). He is still assimilating these concepts, telling the infant Gabriel hopefully at night that “Things could change, Gabe. . . . There could be love” (128–29), when a new experience shocks him into action. Seeing his father kill the identical twin newchild (the retrieval cue) confirms what Jonas already knows about violent or unnatural death, but when combined with the memory of familial love and the bonds between generations (engrams), the infanticide reveals the moral horror of his father’s act, a complete violation of his role as Nurturer, and the terrifying recognition that his society ignorantly commits gross injustice merely in the name of organization. From this point on, Jonas is intent on Elsewhere. During his training, after the immediacy of receiving new memories wears off, Jonas often experiences a residual realization of lack, of what his society has forfeited by transitioning to Sameness. In Notes from Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic and Social Transformation, Jennifer Burwell observes that some critics of utopian literature, particularly Jameson, see the halcyon future imagined by such literature as the “illusory resolution of the contradictions in this society,” which the critic then works to expose (41). In a far less deliberate way, The Giver rewinds this scenario to similar effect in Jonas’s case: rather than the imagined future, Jonas’s memories of the past expose the contradiction

118  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction that the utopian peace and order of his present society depends on unseen violence. Jonas’s memories lead to hope that things could be different, a mental orientation fundamental to Bloch’s utopianism. Bloch critiqued Western philosophy’s tendency to view the world as ontologically finished or complete, and its corresponding disregard for the undetermined better future for which people are hoping.4 In his massive The Principle of Hope (written 1938–47, revised 1953 and 1959), Bloch expands the study of utopian hope far beyond the traditional literary utopia. “Indeed,” writes Bloch, “the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary. . . to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia” (15). To catalogue the world’s cultural repositories of hope, Bloch considers fairy-tales, music, architecture, circuses, alchemy, daydreams and many other types of “wishful images” as viable forms of utopian desire. For Bloch, these types of desire are not merely fanciful diversions but productive instances of hope through which humans glimpse or anticipate a better future. This utopian impulse, or anticipatory consciousness, is a manifestation of what Bloch terms the Not-Yet-Conscious, an individual’s pre-conscious and creative anticipation of a potentially realizable future, the Not-Yet-Become (Levitas 87). Starting with his first book, The Spirit of Utopia (1918), Bloch developed a theory about the importance of daydreams and literature (and other aesthetic forms) to the Not-YetConscious. Bloch argues that the “daydream can furnish inspirations which do not require interpreting, but working out, it builds castles in the air as blueprints too, and not always just fictitious ones” (Hope 86). Jack Zipes, in his discussion of Bloch, points out that “Unlike dreams, which house repressed and forgotten desires and experiences, daydreams can be productive for the formation of individuals and the world since they occur in semiconsciousness and point to real, objective possibilities” (xxxii). Literature goes even further than daydreams because it provides images through which individuals can critically ascertain what is needed to transcend human alienation. Bloch writes that in literature, anticipatory consciousness can occur because objects are depicted in a “dialectically open space” in which the object is immanently more achieved, more thoroughly formed, more essential than in the immediate-sensory or immediate-historical occurrence of this Object. [. . .] everything that appears in the artistic image is sharpened or condensed to a decisiveness that the reality of experience in fact only seldom shows, but that is most definitely inherent in the subjects. (215) In The Giver, Jonas does not have time to utilize the literature available to him as the new Receiver, but his experience of receiving memories

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  119 closely approximates the utopian effects of daydreams and literature described by Bloch. The physical sensation of receiving is for Jonas akin to an intense daydream, but the cognitive result more closely resembles the anticipation engendered by the “sharpened or condensed” images of literature. In Bloch’s philosophy, the startling nature of Jonas’s memories represents the Novum, the quality of the new that points toward the Not-Yet-Become. Jonas’s new memories are genuinely new in that they exist completely outside of his society’s ideology, and through them, he not only perceives what his society lacks but also begins to actively anticipate a future with collectively held memories—in other words, a future without amnesia. It could be claimed, of course, that Jonas’s memories function simply as recollection and lead back only to a similar kind of nostalgic, idealized recent past that Orwell reverts to in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most recent young adult dystopias, after all, do little more than reinscribe the norms of bourgeois culture, and Ferns notes that in the classic dystopias, “the past. . . becomes the main source of the values in comparison with which dystopian society is judged and found wanting” (119). The Giver certainly endorses the values of the past (our past) over the values of Sameness, but I would argue that Lowry does not intend just to recuperate twentieth-century Western individualism. Rather, Lowry’s treatment of memory as recognition (anagnorisis) indicates a forward utopian momentum. As Bloch writes of daydreams, in what could be a description of Jonas’s sledding memory, the “day-fantasy begins. . . with wishes, but carries them radically to their conclusion, wants to get to the place of their fulfilment” (95, emphasis added). Marcuse’s appropriation of Freud also provides insight into the relationship between memory and the future, and why Jonas’s favorite memory of familial love is crucial to the novel’s ending. Marcuse argues that the “truth value” of memory is its ability to “preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual, but which had once been fulfilled in his dim past and which are never entirely forgotten” (Eros 33). Recapturing the truth of memory from the restraints of rationality leads to the desire for the “conscious recreation” of happiness in the future; Marcuse writes, The liberation of the past does not end in its reconciliation with the present. Against the self-imposed restraint of the discoverer, the orientation on the past tends toward an orientation on the future. The recherche du temps perdu becomes the vehicle for future liberation. (33) In a similar vein, the semiotician provocateur Murray Jay Siskind in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) radically reinterprets the experience of déjà vu as pre-visioning the future as opposed to reliving the past, so

120  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction that memory functions more as recognition instead of recollection and becomes oriented on the yet-to-be: Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can’t fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically supernatural stuff. We’re seeing into the future but haven’t learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material. (151) The escape plan Jonas hatches with the Giver calls for him to leave the community by hiding in the back of a vehicle when the rest of the town is preoccupied with the annual Ceremony. But when Jonas learns that the newchild Gabriel—who like Jonas has pale eyes and is able to receive memories from Jonas—is scheduled for immediate Release due to failure to thrive, Jonas is forced to flee with the infant on his bicycle. Many days later, after eluding the search planes hunting for them, they end up, near death, on a snow-covered hill. At the summit, almost frozen and without hope, Jonas suddenly feels joy and recognizes his whereabouts as the sledding hill of his dream. Jonas tells Gabriel, “‘I remember this place, Gabe.’ And it was true. But it was not a grasping of a thin and burdensome recollection; this was different. This was something that he could keep. It was a memory of his own” (178, emphasis added). Jonas knows the sled, which becomes literally his “vehicle for future liberation,” is waiting for him because he is, in a real sense, remembering his future. In his precognitive dream, Jonas perceived there was a destination waiting beyond where the sled stopped; now, with Gabriel, Jonas feels sure the sled is heading for the “final destination. . . the Elsewhere that held their future and their past” and “he recognized. . . the red, blue, and yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families created and kept memories, where they celebrated love” (179). The past is contained in Jonas’s destination, but it is not a static already-has-been that he arrives at. The destination is also a place pregnant with expectation and future possibilities. Families create new memories, not just keep them, and Jonas knows that they “were waiting for him; and that they were waiting, too, for the baby” (180). Lowry’s ending is famously and richly ambiguous, and it is not entirely clear whether Jonas really finds the sled or really sees Christmas lights. Michael Levy considers this “improbable,” arguing that “it seems likely that he’s hallucinating” (56). I disagree, not because Jonas’s movement “across vast distances of space and time” (180) can be explained rationally, but because Lowry has much earlier situated memory in the fantastic in order to demonstrate its effects and its power. Jonas’s final journey is nothing if not a journey through and

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  121 beyond memory, so to discount the final scene as hallucination requires the entire process by which Jonas acquired his memories from the Giver to be dismissed as imaginary, for it is no less fantastic. What seems clear to me is that whatever utopian hope resides in the ending, it is memory, the novel’s one real agent of change, which makes it possible. The Giver is a striking object lesson in the human and political costs of relinquishing historical memory. Without directly satirizing contemporary American culture, Lowry critiques the anesthetizing effects of cultural amnesia—“the ability to forget”—which Marcuse argues is the “mental faculty which sustains submissiveness and renunciation” (163). Jonas’s decision to abandon his role as Receiver of Memory forces his community to bear memories of the past so they can truly feel love and anguish and understand the implications of their actions. The result, if successful, will be to end the atemporal ever-present in which his townspeople live and return them to historical time. As much as the novel focuses on recovering the past as the means to achieving full humanity, Lowry shows that memory is the primary utopian tool for opening up the future. Lowry’s concern with temporality situates utopia in a dialectical relationship with history and memory, a stance which controverts the ostensible utopia of synchronicity represented by Jonas’s sterile future community. Lowry’s novel evokes Mannheim’s warning in Ideology and Utopia regarding the disappearance of utopian thought in human affairs: It is possible, therefore, that in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideological and utopian elements. But the complete elimination of reality-transcending elements from our world would lead us to a ‘matter-of-factness’ which ultimately would mean the decay of the human will. . . . The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. (235–36) The Giver imagines just such a static world, one designed to bring time to a stop, to foreclose any possibility of the new by extirpating every “reality-transcending element” from consciousness. Mannheim stresses the interdependence of utopia and history: utopian aspiration depends on each moment not being merely “a repetition of the past”; history, as an ongoing human endeavor, depends on “the necessity of wilfully choosing our course and, in close connection with it, the need for an imperative (a utopia) to drive us onward” (234). Likewise, The Giver contends that the survival of utopia as an idea requires historical flux—the interpenetration of the past, present, and future—and attests to the renewal of utopian momentum found in memory. The Giver can be read, then, as a tacit rebuttal to the end of history/end of utopia proclamations, most

122  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction famously in the United States by Fukuyama, occasioned by the neoconservative response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 90’s moment of its publication, The Giver testifies to the durability of the utopian imagination. The fact that the novel looks predominately to the past instead of the future in no way concedes to utopia’s purported obsolescence, but instead confirms Huyssen’s assertion that “the past is often invested with utopian energies oriented toward the future” (Twilight 88). The Giver’s hopeful, if ambiguous, denouement challenges the antiutopian conviction that history as ideological contestation has run its course, and warns against the amnesia that such a conviction invites. Almost a decade later, M. T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) addresses a different amnesiac and anti-utopian current running through the critical landscape, that of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. Baudrillard’s provocative but overblown thesis (1981, 1983)—that in the postmodern media landscape the real itself disintegrates into simulacra—denies utopia a topos, a theoretical landing place within, and counterpoint to, the real. In his critique of Baudrillard’s account of postmodernism, Huyssen disputes this negation of the possibility of utopia: If the dialectic between a given reality and the desire for imagined other worlds is constitutive for utopian thought, then the appearance of reality itself as u-topia, as simulacrum on the screen implies the actual disappearance of reality as we thought we knew it. Together with reality, utopia itself is thrown into a tail-spin. By occupying a no-place, reality itself vanishes, making utopia a practical and theoretical impossibility. (91) In Feed, Anderson takes the Baudrillardian postmodern scenario to the point where the dissolution of the real actually commences, leaving utopia with very little foothold. Anderson projects Baudrillard’s television reality paradigm forward, past the present and into a future where the Internet’s global networks run on neural pathways, and the marketing potential of the simulacrum has been fully and brutally monetized. Because Anderson pays particular attention to how the aesthetic dimension of this postmodern hyperreal gives rise to cultural amnesia, which in turn diminishes the “present-ness” of the real, the question of memory’s efficacy as an anchor in the real and as a possible utopian corrective to the dystopian spiral is central to the novel.

II. Postmodern Aesthetics and the Loss of Historicity in Feed Feed, an important exception to the critique-deprived dystopia that proliferated during the young adult post-Hunger Games dystopia boom,

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  123 unabashedly positions itself as an urgent cautionary tale and takes direct aim at the problem of social forgetting and the absence of critical reflection. Favoring acute observation over escapist action, Anderson depicts the enormous social costs caused by the disappearance of historical memory in a digital age ironically inundated with storable data, and suggests that the recovery (or cultivation) of critically engaged memory is perhaps the best hope for staving off total global catastrophe. Set in the late twenty-first century (or perhaps later), Feed depicts the vapid life of teenaged narrator Titus and his friends, all of whom have the feed: a nanotech interface implanted in the brain (usually at birth), that connects the user directly into cyberspace. Feed users gain the ability to “m-chat”—to communicate telepathically with others—to shop, to consume media content, and to record and retrieve massive amounts of data without any external device. However, users have only limited control over their feeds and are bombarded incessantly with targeted advertisements. Anderson presents a United States that has happily acquiesced to this trade off and largely given up any attempt at resisting corporate hegemony. Titus and the rest of the 73% of Americans with feeds mainly view life as an unending spree of compulsive shopping, an outlook inculcated by the corporate-owned School™ system. They are unaware of or unconcerned about the total environmental collapse occurring around them or the minority of Americans without feeds. As one of the most acclaimed young adult novels of the past twenty years, Feed has attracted considerable attention from scholars of adolescent fiction, science fiction, and utopian studies for its unflinching critique of late-capitalist consumerism. Michael Levy has noted the great extent to which life in Feed reflects Baudrillard’s more restrained assertion in 1968 that freedom in late capitalism largely means the freedom “to project one’s desires onto produced goods.”5 Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons insightfully examine the “ecological and human consequences” of a global consumer capitalism that dooms individuals to the hazards of what Ulrich Beck terms risk society (128). Abbie Ventura explores the conditions of possibility for youth resistance in the commodity capitalism of Feed that erases human subjectivity (92). And in a reading of Feed as a post 9/11 text, Sara Schwebel argues that mass consumption “stands in” for the military response to terrorism which itself displaces the discomfort of having to face, or reflect on, political realities (206). My reading of Feed seeks to build on these valuable analyses of consumer capitalism in the novel to argue that beyond its critique of the economic instruments by which global capitalism co-opts individuals, Feed pointedly questions the entire cultural and aesthetic condition of postmodernity as the “cultural logic” that both follows from technocapitalism and accelerates its growth. By examining how Feed scrutinizes postmodern aesthetics and explores the possibilities for some kind of utopian change through Levitas’s notion of the “education of desire”

124  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (143), I will argue that ahistoricity and cultural amnesia, as byproducts and drivers of consumerism, characterize postmodernity in the novel as much as consumption itself, and that true acts of remembering (as distinct from digitally recorded “memories”) figure importantly in Anderson’s dystopia as moments of transformative potential. Descriptions and diagnoses of postmodernity abound, of course, so rather than situating Feed primarily through Baudrillard’s hyperreal, which proves more useful as a schema of the novel’s constitutive social order, I will utilize Jameson’s seminal Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which, while not without numerous critics, is the text that best helps elucidate Feed as a mordant cultural satire.6 Anderson’s novel differs strikingly from most young adult dystopian fictions in key structural respects that facilitate and sharpen its social critique, and which speak to Anderson’s conviction that young adult readers can handle challenging texts.7 First, Anderson breaks with what Kay Sambell, Perry Nodelman and others describe as the “unspoken convention” of providing young readers of dystopian literature with a hopeful ending.8 Whereas Lowry, writing for a younger audience, agrees with the convention, saying “I can’t imagine writing a book that doesn’t have a hopeful ending,” Anderson ends Feed somberly with the death of Titus’s girlfriend Violet (Hintz 199). Early in the novel, Titus and Violet meet for the first time on the moon and go to a dance club called the Rumble Spot; while there, the two have their feeds hacked by a protester from the so-called Coalition of Pity who touches their necks with a metal rod, causing their feeds to freeze up and broadcast the message, “We enter a time of calamity!” (30). After being disconnected from the feed for several days for medical observation, Titus makes a full recovery but the damage to Violet’s feed proves irreversible and ultimately fatal. As the only youth character who directly attempts to resist the feed by confusing its attempts to market to her, Violet is later denied medical assistance by FeedTech Corp for her damaged feed because she failed to be a “reliable investment” (195). So though he certainly advocates for reader resistance to consumerist norms and postmodern ahistoricity, Anderson emphasizes the risks of activist agency. Anderson also denies his readers a reassuring narrative vantage point. As Bullen and Parsons have analyzed in greater detail, Titus is an unsympathetic and frequently doltish narrator who places the implied reader in the uncomfortable position of identifying with his modes of recreation—shopping, chatting (i.e. texting), parties—but recoiling from his callousness and stupidity (134–36). Basing the narrative voice “on profound irony and a wry parody” rather than on readerly sympathy significantly heightens Feed’s satiric stance (136). Where most recent young adult dystopias largely forego satire in favor of action-adventure and romance, Anderson wants to fully engage the satiric impulse, and this leads to a narrative that dispenses with a common

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  125 dystopian trope: the apocalyptic rupture or radical break from our current moment. While the United States in Feed is an environmental dead zone and is rapidly hurtling toward its demise, as yet there has been no nuclear war or biological holocaust as in Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher’s Fire-Us Trilogy (2002–03), no massive climate change induced flooding as in Paolo Bacigalupi’s excellent Ship Breaker (2010), and no political upheaval whereby the United States has been destroyed and replaced, as in the Panem of Collins’s The Hunger Games, or the Republic of America in Marie Lu’s Legend (2011). In Feed, American society and American capitalism have simply proceeded apace without interruption. Rather than providing an “elsewhere” that distances the reader from contemporary social conditions and economic modes of postindustrial capitalism, M.T. Anderson extrapolates a future based on entirely familiar consumer habits and Internet technology. So, whereas discussions of postmodernism would seem less immediate in the ravaged, low-tech Gulf Coast world of Ship Breaker, where protagonist Nailer struggles tenaciously just to survive, Anderson intends his future America to be thoroughly postmodern and ripe for satire. To be sure, Anderson employs some of the common forms of science-fiction estrangement to signal to teen readers that Titus’s world differs somewhat from their own. For instance, on the novel’s first page, Titus and his friends rocket to the moon for spring break, and Titus has previously vacationed on Mars. Anderson’s wonderfully inventive (and funny) teenspeak also challenges readers to learn an entirely new lexicon of slang. But Feed leaves intact so many common features of American teen life, from shopping malls and reality TV to pop music and playing Spin the Bottle, that the dominant impression is one of familiarity and proximity. Anderson uses this mise-en-scène to pithily skewer many facets of consumer culture, such as supersized fast food and disposability. In one mall scene, Titus wheels around “a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot cross bun from Bun in a Barrow” (80), and after a family dinner, Titus’s mom throws away the “disposable table” (106). These brief episodes, while instructive in themselves, also help to make concrete Anderson’s larger satiric concern of postmodern amnesia, or ahistoricity. Amnesia, of both the individual and cultural variety, features prominently in several recent dystopias for younger readers. In addition to The Giver, where Jonas holds all memories of the past so others can be unburdened, in James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2009), boys turn up in a giant maze with their memories completely wiped. The youth of The Kindling (Fire-Us, Book 1) remember almost nothing from the “Before Time” that preceded the plague that killed all adults. In each text, the loss, absence, and/or recovery of memory figures centrally in the characters’ search for identity. Feed, however, treats memory differently, in that characters have not lost (except in one key instance, discussed below) or repressed their memories, nor does one serve as a repository of

126  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction memory. Rather, characters in Feed theoretically have access to almost infinite quantities of both personal and cultural memory, but create a world devoid of historicity. Titus and his companions inhabit (or live as if they do) a consequence- and responsibility-free zone that flattens temporality. Ventura notes that people with the feed “lack a concept of time due to the immediacy and gratification the feed provides: the feed is able to manufacture desires instantaneously, as well as fulfill them in the same instant” (92). Existence on the feed positions the subject in an even more totalizing variant of what media analyst Douglas Rushkoff terms “present shock,” the “diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is” (2). The constant now-ness of life, where nothing gets old because trends of consumption so quickly become obsolete (in a nightclub on the moon, Titus’s friends Quendy and Loga retreat to the bathroom mid-evening because “hairstyles had changed” [Anderson, Feed 16]), contributes to the loss of organic historical time that occurs, Jameson argues, when “aesthetic production. . . [becomes] integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods. . . at ever greater rates of turnover” (4). Advertising and direct marketing, which constitute the feed’s primary functions, create a seamless link merging aesthetic and commodity consumption. As Violet (who did not get a feed until she was seven and who was homeschooled by her professor father) points out to Titus, “Music is marketing. . . There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles” (83). In this milieu, even human impulses that are imbedded in futurity and require the ability to imagine beyond the immediate present—such as desire, anticipation, and hope—are coopted by the feed. The activist group Coalition of Pity, whose member hacks Titus’s and Violet’s feeds on the moon, uses the tagline, “We enter a time of calamity,” in an attempt to get people to think diachronically (30). But for young people such as Titus who only know life on the feed, the future is simply more commodities. Titus explains the success of feed technology as follows: “But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard.” (40; emphasis added).9 Data corporations such as Feedlink and OnFeed preempt and fill up future-oriented mental spaces with images of things. The omnipresence of the image not only drives consumer behavior in Feed, it also forecloses historicity in a way that Jameson considers characteristic of postmodernity. Jameson connects Baudrillard’s view that the production of simulacra has replaced the production of things with a paraphrasing of Guy Debord’s assertion in The Society of the

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  127 Spectacle (1967): “the image has become the final form of commodity reification” (Jameson 18).10 Jameson goes on to contend that “our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time” (16). The “new spatial logic of the simulacrum” introduces a paradigm whereby the past, what “used to be historical time,” no longer coheres around organically lived traditions or even prior modes of historiography, but has itself “become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (18). Formations of spatial/visual simulacra such as photographs and television, or the Internet (in its infancy when Jameson wrote Postmodernism), produce a culture of image saturation that reduces the past to something akin to a linguistic referent, available only as a pastiche of visual styles. Jameson defines pastiche as imitation without satiric intention, a “blank parody” that resorts to recycling the past because the commodification of aesthetics precludes true original style (17). Pastiche coincides with avid “consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and pseudo-events and ‘spectacles,’ ” which aptly describes both the form of Feed as a whole, with its numerous interchapters of advertisements, and more particularly, the novel’s world of fashion (18). Arriving at a party, Titus and Violet are shocked to find that their friends look “like they’d been burned and hit with stuff,” but are actually just wearing “Riot Gear. It’s retro. It’s beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It’s been big since earlier this week. . . . ‘Hey’ said Loga to Quendy, pointing. ‘Kent State collection, right?’” (127–28). Riot Gear is pure pastiche—mimicry without any intended political commentary beyond the image/commodity itself. When Violet audaciously inquires which riot a “Watts Riot top” references, Calista dismisses the question by negating the historical particularity of all riots: “‘Like, a riot,’ said Calista. ‘I don’t know, Violet. Like, when people start breaking windows and beating each other up, and they have to call in the cops. A riot. You know. Riot?’” (131). Later in the novel, Anderson alludes to how fashions like Riot Gear, which trade on images of the past, speak to the vacuity of the present moment in a way that recalls Jameson’s notion of nostalgia for the present. Jameson observes that among the most symptomatic and telling aesthetic products of a postmodernism devoid of historicity, yet addicted to images of history, are so-called nostalgia films that reveal “the incompatibility of a postmodernist ‘nostalgia’ art language with genuine historicity” (19). Films such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), which features a contemporary setting imbued with a hazy thirties “pastness,” offer a stylized nostalgia for the present, an aesthetic mode that Jameson argues reveals “the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (21). In a similar vein, Feed heightens the dissonance between

128  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction aesthetic representations of the past and current lived experience to the point that nostalgia for the present becomes literally crippling. Late in the novel, when Titus recaps how most people are losing their hair and skin, he mentions that there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. It happened to Calista and Loga. (219) Here, the retro fashion industry cannibalizes the past with such increasing frequency that nostalgia turns in on itself, and real time becomes its own pastiche, leaving hipsters frozen in a lived present so devoid of meaning or affect that it is experienced only as if it were being watched wistfully on the feed. Here, we see clearly the Baudrillardian breakdown of the distinction between reality and representation; rapidly replaced iterations of fashion nostalgia—simulacra with no originals—overlay and finally short circuit lived real time. By showing that the feed can instantly popularize historical simulacra emptied of all history, as with Riot Gear, Anderson demonstrates the inverse relationship that exists between image density and historicity. In our current moment, television and digital media successfully position the subject within densely mediated environments, but these formations, which are external to the body, only remotely approximate the full sensory experience of the feed-brain interface imagined in Feed, and the degree to which the feed encloses users within its own semiotic universe and distances them from any former historical continuity. When Titus gets his feed service restored four days after being hacked, he feels literally immersed in images: “And the feed was pouring in on us now, all of it, all of the feednet, and we could feel all of our favorites, and there were our files, and our m-chatlines. It came down on us like water. It came down like frickin’ spring rains, and we were dancing in it” (58). Anderson frequently “includes” italicized snippets from ads and feedcasts to give readers an impression of life with the feed, for instance, “If you liked ‘I’ll Sex You In,’ you’ll love these other popular slump-rock epics by. . .” (59). While such copy exists only as text on the page for the novel’s reader, Anderson makes clear that the feed interpellates its subjects visually: Images of Coke falling in rivulets down chiseled mountainsides; children being held toward the sun; blades slicing grass; a hand, a hand extended toward the lemonade like God’s at Creation; boys in

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  129 Gap tees shot from a rocket; more lining up with tin helmets; Nike grav-gear plunging into Montana; a choir of Jamaican girls dressed in pinafores and strap-on solar cells. . . (22) High-volume advertising images, screened across the mind’s eye, not only seduce feed users into making purchases but also become the principal narrative by which even users like the sophisticated Violet understand and measure their existence. Unlike the unreflective Titus, Violet views the feed with a conflicted mixture of criticism, longing, and complicity. A highly intelligent young woman who reads and writes (Titus can barely do either), Violet maintains that the feed is creating a nation of “ignorant, self-centered idiots” (93). Yet her deepest desire is to have the “normal” teen life of parties, boyfriends, and shopping that she has seen on the feed. Because of its late installation, the moon hack causes irreparable damage to Violet’s feed, and her body functions begin to shut down. Recognizing that she has little time left, Violet repeatedly tells Titus that she is “going to really live” (204), but after reciting a lengthy wish list of activities, she realizes achingly that Everything I think of when I think of really living, living to the full—all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. See what I mean? My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits. My god. What am I, without the feed? It’s all from the feed credits. My idea of real life. (174; m-chat italics) Though Violet prides herself on thinking outside the feed and being grounded in the real, her idealized life, her hopes and dreams for future self-actualization, amount to little more than images of other already simulated feed images. While Violet nevertheless manages to maintain a relative depth of feeling, Titus epitomizes the human “depthlessness” produced by the deliberate and formal superficiality of the feed. Michael Levy observes that the “entire population” of Feed “seems to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder” (10). I would argue that the more salient feature of Titus’s psyche is his inability to feel. Titus resembles “an empty shell,” emotionally incapable of empathizing with or even really conversing with Violet once he learns that she is “broken” (Anderson, Feed, 186; 161). His emotional callowness mirrors Jameson’s well-known, and now (with the rise of affect theory) much contested pronouncement on “the waning of affect” in postmodern culture, where “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense,” alienates us from our own emotions, as Adam Roberts explains, and dulls our response to stimuli such as excessive violence (Jameson 9; Roberts 124). Titus exhibits just this

130  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction type of desensitization, not only in relation to Violet, but also, tellingly, in relation to a painted image. In his hospital room following the feed hack, a bored and feed-deprived Titus stares at his walls: There were five walls, because the room was irregular. One of them had a picture of a boat on it. The boat was on a pond or maybe lake. I couldn’t find anything interesting about that picture at all. There was nothing that was about to happen or had just happened. I couldn’t figure out even the littlest reason to paint a picture like that. (37) The motionless image, removed from the cacophony of the feed, elicits no feeling from Titus beyond a vacant incredulity. For Titus, the painted image is atemporal; unless the boat actually moves in space, unless the “about to happen or had just happened” are provided for him by the feed, Titus not only cannot feel anything about the boat, he cannot imagine a future or past for it. Anderson here again establishes the link between aesthetics and historicity; the feed’s endless procession of moving images does provide a simulacrum of time passing, but because they are utterly decontextualized and exist only to reify commodities, feed images in fact inhibit the subject’s ability to conceptualize time and to feel its affective “weight.” As Jameson concludes, “The waning of affect [might be] characterized. . . as the waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and memory” (16).

III. Remembering, Dreaming, and the Possibility of Recovering Historical Consciousness Memory may not be mysterious or deeply felt in Feed, but it is also not absent; in fact, it is everywhere and more accessible than ever before. In one of the major conceptual moves in Feed, although one not likely to be noticed by younger readers, Anderson differentiates sharply between memory and historicity. The novel’s characters (except for Violet and her father) live almost entirely synchronic lives, determinedly unaware of the consequences of their consumption—how American capitalism has, over time, destroyed nearly every ecosystem—even to the point of failing to recognize the cause of their own skin lesions. Anderson ironically juxtaposes this willful forgetting, the feed-induced cultural amnesia that pervades society, against the digitization of personal memory that makes every lived moment recordable and archivable. Anderson in effect dramatizes the archival tendency of a postmodern culture that, as theorized by Pierre Nora and others, accumulates and stores countless traces of the past to offset the anxiety of having no historical moorings. However, as the novel demonstrates, memory that exists solely as retrievable digital data lacks the efficacy to effect change because it remains a function of

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  131 the feed. Anderson makes a fundamental distinction, I contend, between memory as data and the more human acts of remembering and dreaming that hold the potential to educate desire toward utopian progress. A common conceit of memory flashbacks in Hollywood cinema is that a character’s recollection of a past event plays just like a film, as if the character were able to hit a memory playback button and relive a memory frame by frame. This technique is understandable given the medium, but it also misrepresents memory and the brain as a kind of human video recorder. In Feed, Anderson construes memory in much the same fashion, with the addition that the feed can capture actual physical sensations. In short, the feed records everything a person sees and feels and stores those experiences and sensations for retrievable playback. For instance, near the end of the novel, Titus’s father goes whale hunting as part of a corporate team building exercise; on his return he “broadcasts” the memory to the family: “Okay, here you see us in the little whaleboat. . . . We’ve spotted a whale, and we’re rowing out to it. This was awesome. Totally awesome. Can you feel the spray?” (220). Titus remarks, “it was making me a little sick to my stomach, because it was going up and down, . . . and I think Dad must’ve been sick to his stomach, because the feed was broadcasting his stomach sickness” (221). Anderson accounts for this rather incredible technological feat by emphasizing the complete interconnectivity of the brain and the feed. The feed is far from being simply a “chip in the head” that links a person to the Internet, a scenario which would render the feed an augmentation of the type featured in science fiction novels such as Greg Bear’s Moving Mars (1993) or Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012). The protagonist of 2312, Swan er Hong, is augmented with a quantum computer (qube) nicknamed Pauline. Pauline performs infinitely difficult calculations, records everything Swan says, and serves as her conversation partner, but she can also be turned off. Pauline is not part of Swan’s brain, nor does she control any of Swan’s normal brain functions. The feed functions much differently; after the hacker damages Violet’s feed, she explains to Titus that it cannot be turned off because it “replaces too many basic functions” (206). “The feed,” Violet informs him, “is tied into everything. Your body control, your emotions, your memory”; even when disconnected, “the feed [is] still on. It’s part of the brain” (136–37). Anderson envisions the feed as fully part of the brain in order to suggest that what might appear to be a symbiotic relationship of biology and technology is actually parasitic. The erosion of human subjectivity occurs at the material level of the body, since as Ventura notes, the brain “simply become[s] an extension of the technology, with the technology as the primary site of intelligence” (92). Violet is all too literally impaired by her cybernetic body, and as she screams at Titus’s friends in one climactic scene, “You don’t have the feed! You are feed! You’re feed!” (Feed 160; emphasis in original). The feed’s replacement of human brain functions changes the feed from a consumer device into a consuming one.

132  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction The novel’s depiction of the feed as parasitic technology suggests an inverse relationship between a feed user’s nearly infinite capacity to archive memory and the individual and cultural efficacy of that memory. In part, this dynamic of “more is less” derives from what prominent commentator on technology and culture, Nicholas Carr, describes as the digital age’s mistaken metaphor of portraying the human brain as a computer and human memory as data: Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not. Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. . . . The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, . . . we risk emptying our minds of their riches. . . . The Web is a technology of forgetfulness. (191–93) Rather than freeing up additional brain space for more creative work, offloading the task of remembering onto computers inhibits our longterm memory from forming the “complex concepts, or ‘schemas’. . . [that] give depth and richness to our thinking” (Carr 124). As Bullen and Parsons point out, Titus’s claims that “Everyone is super smart now” and “it’s really great to know everything about everything whenever we want, to have it just like, in our brain, just sitting there,” unwittingly reveal the extent to which this vast trove of data lies completely inert (Feed 39–40; Bullen and Parsons 136). Titus does not “know” or cannot remember, “which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit,” since he has never had to retain information such as which war Washington actually fought in (39). Focusing more on the realm of images, Jameson also remarks on the seeming paradox that a postmodern “society bereft of all historicity” should at the same time develop “an addiction to the photographic image [which] is itself a tangible symptom of an omnipresent, omnivorous, and well-nigh libidinal historicism”—as manifested in nostalgia films (18). Nora’s theory of the archival tendency of postmodern society helps explain the formation of such a “libidinal,” ersatz historicism. As outlined in the previous chapter, Nora (1989) articulates three stages of Western history. The early premodern stage of organic, tradition bound societies rooted in unconscious memory gives way to the industrial nation state and the rise of historiographies primarily seeking to unify a sense of nationhood. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the nation as primal narrative dissolves into “individual, and subjective” forms of self-knowledge whereby memory becomes “a purely private phenomenon” (11). Nora argues that true environments of memory, where “Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name,” no longer exist (8); in their place, memory sites, or lieux de mémoire, “originate

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  133 with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries. . . because such activities no longer occur naturally” (12). Nora perhaps over-asserts what he sees as a fundamental opposition between memory and history, but the particular relevance of Nora to Feed, which I will quote at length, comes from Nora’s insight that Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs— hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past. Fear of a rapid and final disappearance combines with anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future. . . . Memory has been wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstitution. Its new vocation is to record; delegating to the archive the responsibility of remembering, it sheds its signs upon depositing them there, as a snake sheds its skin. What we call memory is in fact the gigantic and breathtaking storehouse of a material stock of what it would be impossible for us to remember, an unlimited repertoire of what might need to be recalled. (13) While storing memory in gigantic quantities may alleviate certain anxieties, Nora suggests that the movement of memory “from the inside” to externally archived traces displaces the “responsibility of remembering” onto the archive itself, causing memory to lose its centrality as an individual or social engine. When Titus’s father visits the moon hospital following his son’s run-in with the feed hacker, for instance, he tells Titus that the police “want to subpoena your memories,” as if they exist completely independently and the subpoena will require nothing of Titus himself (47). Over the course of the novel as a whole, however, Anderson primarily demonstrates the thrust of Nora’s assessment through Titus and Violet’s relationship. Violet’s gradual loss of body functions includes the loss of a distinct cluster of memories. After a major seizure, Violet tells Titus (via italicized m-chat), “I lost a year of my memories. . . . During the seizure. I can’t remember anything from the year before I got the feed. When I was six. The information is just gone. There’s nothing there” (172). Understandably, Violet fears the loss could become total. In another message she tells Titus, I’m afraid my memory will go soon. When I try to think about that year that disappeared. . . I can’t remember anything. I can remember

134  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction remembering, but I can’t remember anything that happened to me right before I got the feed. I’m afraid I’m going to lose my past. Who are we, if we don’t have a past? So I’m going to tell you some things. Especially the things before I got the feed. . . . I’m going to tell you everything. Some day, I might want you to tell it back to me. (199–200) Violet’s fear that her very identity depends upon her having a past reveals her uncharacteristic concern with temporality, but like any typical feed user, she also tends to conceive of memory as data or “information.” Violet does not actually “tell” Titus anything in the traditional sense, perhaps because she rarely sees him in person after her seizure due to her homebound state and Titus’s avoidance of her. Rather, Violet sends memory file after memory file for him to view. Interestingly, even memories that predate Violet’s feed installation are somehow archived within the feed and transferable as “full feed-simulations.” Titus’s response when he receives Violet’s memory cache points both to Nora’s claim that postmodern memory defers the responsibility of remembering onto the archive itself, and to Anderson’s distinction between data memory and true remembering. Violet sends her memory files to Titus so that he can remember her past and “tell it back to [her],” but he opts not to remember or even to store the memories. Rather, he simply deletes them, unopened, to avoid the emotional involvement: She kept sending things. I didn’t open them. I let them sit. I was walking around School™ the next day, feeling them like, feeling them crowd me. . . . I went home that afternoon. In the upcar, I was afraid I would look at the memories. They were getting bigger. She was sending them every few minutes. . . . I got home. I had a headache. . . . Finally, I got a message that she’d stopped. . . . I deleted everything she had sent me. (200) Titus feels a twinge of guilt and remorse for dumping Violet’s memory data and for lying to her that he never received the files, but the astonishing ease with which Titus declines the “responsibility of remembering” Violet’s past indicates the sheer disposability of feed memory. Since Violet’s memories come over the feed, Titus considers them barely more than so much image data crowding his brain. He falls back on the idea that Violet’s memories are not really lost; they are still archived in the feed and infinitely recoupable as long as she survives (and possibly even after). In his guilt, Titus even suggests that “You could send the memories to me again” (206). In a collection of essays on cyberpunk fiction published in 1992, Brooks Landon argues that in a culture of information overload, fiction

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  135 writers increasingly contemplate the virtues of forgetting over the burden of remembering so much information. Titus and other feed users arguably fit the profile of a culture that, in the manner advocated by Bellamy a century prior to cyberpunk, forsakes memory in favor of forgetting, although Titus never burdens himself with trying to remember anything in the first place. In Novak’s later essay on memory in Gibson’s Neuromancer, however, she takes issue with Landon’s contention that information “is the stuff of memory” (Landon 157), which is how Violet has been conditioned to think of memory; as she says of her loss, “the information is just gone.” Novak, in a vein similar to the stance taken by Carr, argues that Landon posits a “reductive understanding. . . of both the content of memory and the way it structures our relationship to the past, present, and even the future. Our memories are not simply reducible to pieces of data” (395–96). While Novak somewhat oversimplifies Landon’s position, I would argue that Feed, in its critique of archived and disposable feed memory, bears out her corrective that human memory transcends information and information recall. Since the feed records users’ conscious, wakeful activity, the novel posits the dream state as an alternative kind of memory space that while not removed from the feed, opens the possibility for a critical awareness that undermines its ahistoricism. Anderson makes clear that the feed/brain interface means that users are never free from the feed’s influence, even in sleep. Titus’s happiest moment in the novel, the point where he thinks, “Right then, everything seemed perfect,” occurs after returning home from a date with Violet (119). Once in bed, in a passage culminating with the spiritual reflections of Julian of Norwich (1342–416), Titus describes how fully the feed permeates sleep and manufactures contentment: I could feel my family all around me. I could trace their feeds faintly. . . . Smell Factor was dreaming while a fun-site with talking giraffes  sang him songs and showed him wonderful things in different shapes. My parents were upstairs going in mal, which they wouldn’t want me to know, but which I could tell, because they chose a really flashy, expensive malfunction site that was easy to trace. . . . I could feel all of my family asleep in their own way. . . and the feed spoke to me real quiet about new trends, about pants that should be shorter or longer, and bands I should know. . . and friends of many colors were all drinking Coke, and beer was washing through mountain passes. . . . and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again: All shall be well. . . and all shall be well. . . and all manner of things shall be well. (120; emphasis in original) On the ensuing page, Anderson contextualizes Titus’s family’s particular brand of feed-induced dreaming with an italicized excerpt from a

136  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction feedcast that explicitly triangulates the relationship between the feed, dreams, and American culture: We are a new people. It is now the age of oneiric culture, the culture of dreams. And we are the nation of dreams. We are seers. We are wizards. . . . We have only to stretch out our hand and desire, and what we wish for settles like a kerchief in our palm. . . . What we wish for, is ours. (121) Dreams, according to the feedcast, are synonymous with desires. Dreams function not as free-floating, creative expressions of the unconscious mind, but simply as articulations of wish fulfillment, as precursors to acquisition and consumption. In this formulation, dreams have power, or cultural purchase, only because the feed can transform them into tangible products. FeedTech, in fact, touts the slogan, “making your dreams into hard fact™” (125). Anderson, then, does not position dreams as an easy antithesis to the feed; nor are dreams unambiguous signifiers of the utopian impulse. However, while the feed routinely appropriates users’ dream space, Anderson also depicts two instances primarily featuring Titus, as opposed to the more resistance-minded Violet, that show dreams (or dream-like states) triggering forms of remembering removed from the feed. After resuming normal feed service following the moon hack, Titus twice has his feed “nudged,” or tapped into, while dreaming. During the first dream, in which Titus is given free games to play, he feels that “someone was nudging my feed. . . . In my dream, I asked them who they were. In my dream, they told me they were the police. . . . In my dream, I said who were they really?” (76). At the end of the chapter, Titus says, “In my dream, I thought they were the hacker group, the Coalition of Pity. But when I woke up, I didn’t remember that for weeks” (77). The Coalition of Pity’s precise intentions remain unknown, but they apparently want to remain in contact with Titus and possibly to recruit him. For weeks after the dream, Titus only remembers the games, but then, in a moment of recall unassisted and unarchived by the feed, he remembers thinking/dreaming about the Coalition. Memory exists here in a form other than the simulacrum, operates free of feed control, and for purposes other than playback. Then, the same night that he tracks his family sleeping and the feed heralds the culture of dreams, Titus has “nightmares” after he feels someone “poking my head with a broom handle” (122). The nightmares consist of all these pictures, and I was seeing all over the world, and there were explanations, but I was still asleep, and I couldn’t figure them out. I saw khakis that were really cheap, only $150, but I didn’t like the

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  137 stitching, and then I saw them torn and there was blood on them. It was a riot on a street, and people were screaming in some other language. . . and the police were moving forward on horses. . . . They were in front of factories, and clouds of gas drifted through them and the American flags they were burning started to spark big, and the gas got darker and darker, and the people sped up, like a joke, grabbing at their necks and waving and sitting and slapping the ground. They fell down. . . . I saw fields and fields of black, it was this disgusting black shit, spread for miles. (123) Violet jolts Titus awake at this point, via the feed, having also received images from an untraced source, presumably the Coalition of Pity. On one level, the Coalition’s often random stream of feed images functions no differently from any typical ad montage, and as disembodied, digital simulacra, the images are no more real or present than other feed images. On another level, however, the image sequence attempts to transcend the ahistoricism of pastiche by invoking causation. Unlike Calista’s heedless view of riots as simply people breaking windows and beating each other (a view that befits the pastiche of Riot Gear fashion), Titus’s “dream” about a riot establishes a connection between “really cheap” $150 khakis and protesting textile factory workers gassed by police. Titus is unable to process the “explanations” provided that would further historicize the riot, but the images themselves aim to “nudge” him toward an understanding of the true cost of his cheap consumer products. The Coalition image stream thus employs the medium of the feed but subverts its ideology of consumption free from consequence. While the images may or may not tangibly influence Titus in the future, they definitely strike a chord. As Violet frantically attempts to get FeedTech customer service to track the intruder, Titus merely asks, “Can I go back to sleep? . . . I had these really weird dreams” (125). Perhaps not surprisingly, in a time when even mind-space is not one’s own, Titus has no fear or paranoia about the Coalition’s access to his feed. Titus certainly sleeps when contacted by the Coalition of Pity, but whether the feed-implanted images he sees, as opposed to images derived from his own unconscious mind, constitute real dreaming remains debatable. Questions of ethics and privacy aside, I would argue that Titus’s implanted dreams carry greater utopian potential than regular dreams in terms of grounding Titus in temporal historicity because they take on the qualities of daydreams as theorized by Bloch. Like the fully realized memories Jonas receives through a waking dream state in The Giver, Titus experiences the Coalition’s implanted “nightmare” images almost semi-consciously. Unlike sleep dreams that release repressed and/ or refracted desires and fears, Bloch asserts that daydreams can “furnish inspirations” that lead to anticipation of the Not-Yet-Become (Principle

138  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction of Hope 86). Titus’s dreams from the Coalition exist between normal dreams and daydreams but reside closer to daydreams because they engender new memory not archived by the feed. Whereas typical sleep dreams exist ephemerally and are often lost immediately upon waking, Titus recalls weeks afterwards his link with the Coalition. Remembering something genuinely new, and with a critical eye, rather than retrieving already archived memory data, gestures toward the Novum, Bloch’s quality of the new that adheres in the Not-Yet-Become. That it takes Titus weeks to bring forth the memory of the Coalition’s presence in his dream also suggests, as Michael Rothberg asserts in Multidirectional Memory, that “memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or action” (4). Accessing digital feed memory, by contrast, requires no effort or “working through.” Titus’s new memory, and the potential that he will further work through the riot images seen in his dream to remember the oppression of the garment workers making his khakis, recuperates the nearly extinguished thread of Feed’s utopian counternarrative embodied by Violet and gestures toward a form of the real outside of hyperreality. Titus’s potential to hold onto future memory in a form not archived or fed to him by the feed opens up the possibility of a form of feed resistance not acknowledged or highly valued by most critics. Ventura argues that Anderson “suggests that globalized production and consumption deny subjectivity and any potential for resistance” (94), and that in revealing the severe limitations of Violet’s individual attempt at social change, Anderson “suggests an inability to resist commodity culture without the participation of all citizens” (101). To be sure, Anderson does not depict Titus actively building on Violet’s resistance, nor does he allude to a broad-based center of resistance from within the United States, but the dream episodes point to the possibility of both. The implanted dream images might well “nudge” Titus into developing a historical consciousness, an engaged critical memory that disrupts the ever-present now of the feed. Titus’s link with the shadowy Coalition of Pity, which has hitherto been ignored as a potential source of viable resistance (or of the utopian impulse), also indicates he will not be left entirely to his own vacuous ways. In terms of scale, the Coalition falls well short of Antonio Negri’s concept of the multitude that Ventura advocates for, but it does represent a collective attempt at seeding mindful change. Mindfulness and morally informed choices likely constitute the limits of possibility for resistance in Feed. Working from Brian Massumi’s contention that since escape from the formational powers of the law and capitalism is impossible, freedom is only a freedom of degree, Jacobo Canady argues that even for Violet, much less Titus, no space of identity outside of capitalism exists (279). Even if Titus decides to resist the feed, he will still remain a consumer in a commodity culture. What Anderson leaves available, though, through the glimpses of historical

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  139 consciousness and critical memory, is the reeducation of Titus’s desire toward less consumption and greater social equity. While not the revolutionary praxis typically looked for by utopian critics, the redemptive and social power of the moral choice should not be overlooked. In his 1978 essay “Utopia and Science Fiction,” Raymond Williams reflects on the major shift in utopian thinking and utopian narrative form represented by Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), in which a million people turn their backs on the stable affluence of home world Urras to live in mutuality on the barren desert moon Anarres. Such a move, Williams asserts, is characteristic of the critical utopia, in which a privileged affluence is at once assumed and rejected: assumed and in its own ways enjoyed, yet known, from inside, as lying and corrupt; rejected, from in close, because of its successful corruption; rejected, further out, by learning and imagining the condition of the excluded others. (211; emphasis in original) The trajectory of learning to reject a corrupt affluence ends, Williams says, with the choice “to take the poorer material option for a clear moral advantage” (211). Titus has not made this potent moral choice in Feed, but the dream images provide the initial material he needs to work through to an informed understanding of the “excluded others” who manufacture his consumer goods. The ending of Feed reiterates the importance of fully human remembering over and against data retrieval and retains the dim but not extinct utopian hope engendered by Titus’s dream memories. Titus visits the comatose Violet on her death bed, and sitting next to her, tells her bits of stories: “They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories” (233). Titus begins by reciting fragments of news and historical trivia retrieved from the feed. (Even this small task takes some effort since it requires Titus to actively seek out information.) The last bit of feed data Titus retrieves for Violet once again positions dreams as a pivot between feed recall and genuine remembering. He tells her that “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking. . . on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams” (233). Thinking about dreams for a moment seems to work almost like a “nudge” for Titus, and moves him out of dredging up archived snippets from the feed and into his own memory. Titus decides to tell a story he does not need the feed to remember for him: And [then] I whispered, ‘Violet. . .Violet? There’s one story I’ll keep telling you. I’ll keep telling it. You’re the story. I don’t want you to

140  Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction forget. When you wake up, I want you to remember yourself. I’m going to remember. You’re still there, as long as I can remember you. (233) Titus proceeds to tell Violet the story of their relationship, narrating it as if it were a trailer for a feedcast: “It’s about this meg normal guy, who doesn’t think about anything until one wacky day. . . . Together, the two crazy kids grow. . . and learn an important lesson about love. They learn to resist the feed” (234). For Titus, remembering Violet and their relationship means remembering that together, “They learn to resist the feed.” Bullen and Parsons, like Ventura, conclude that “resistance is not [actually] possible” for Titus since he remains thoroughly enmeshed in the feed and that any impetus to action falls to the novel’s reader (138). They argue, and Schwebel agrees, that Titus can only tell his love story in “Hollywood clichés,” unable to avoid being a “mouthpiece” for the feed’s “corporate interests” (Bullen and Parsons 138; Schwebel 203). I read the ending somewhat more hopefully, based on the way Anderson has Titus move from data retrieval, to a dream reference, to his own desire to remember Violet in their final meeting. While Titus does utilize the feed’s discursive tropes, I contend that at this point he knowingly employs irony in narrating his and Violet’s doomed love as a “coming attraction.” (Earlier in the novel, Violet remarks that among his friends, Titus alone uses metaphor.) I agree that Feed offers no fully formed utopian trajectory or redemptive hope and that Anderson’s somber ending, “set against the backdrop of America in its final days,” leaves no room for a dramatic rescue and only a slim chance of averting catastrophe (234). Unlike Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games series, Titus will not ignite or become the face of a revolution. However, through Titus’s gradually awakening sense of historicity and experiential memory, Feed suggests that he has the capacity for change; more importantly, the novel points readers toward the importance of diachronic, historical awareness as a mode of actual resistance to postmodernity’s cultural logic. Huyssen’s postulation that the turn-of-the-century wont to memorialize represents a felt need for grounding in a stable present, a present differentiated from the past and future, indicates a cultural desire to slow down the mediascape onslaught and remember where we’ve come from. Anderson argues that such remembering must occur at a remove from the digital archive, that it must be critical, reflective human remembering; otherwise memory gets used in the service of consumption and loses its subversive utopian potential. But what happens when human remembering itself becomes the problem, when remembering not only occurs, but occurs incessantly and uncontrollably? Chapter 4 concludes the book by examining the recent dystopian fiction of Margaret Atwood, whose

Children’s/Young Adult Dystopian Fiction  141 speculative MaddAddam trilogy tells of a bio-engineered holocaust from the perspective of characters afflicted with traumatic memories. In so doing, Atwood negotiates a dystopian future through one of the dominant cultural signifiers of the present: the sign of trauma.

Notes 1 In an October 2017 article published on the website Vox, Constance Grady declared that the boom in young adult dystopian literature was over and had been superseded by stories about teen suicide. Grady cites, among other things, the cash grab mentality of the dystopian publishing trend for bringing it to an end. 2 Utopian studies scholars tend to see social critique, typically in the form of prophetic warning, as intrinsic to dystopian narrative. Baccolini and Moylan assert that dystopia “has served as a prophetic vehicle. . . for writers with an ethical and political concern for warning us of terrible sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the iron cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside” (2). Building off of Sargent’s widely accepted distinction between dystopia and anti-utopia, Baccolini and Moylan argue that situated between the “historical antinomies of Utopia and Anti-Utopia. . . the typical dystopian text is an exercise in a politically charged form of hybrid textuality,” where the formal tension between the narrative of hegemonic order and “counter-narrative of resistance” creates the space for “social critique” (Sargent, “Three Faces,” 3; Baccolini and Moylan 5–6). 3 See Ulanowicz’s Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images, 33. Ulanowicz’s excellent book theorizes the relationship between children’s literature and second-generation memory, the order of memory wherein an individual consciously, and with a high degree of self-awareness, incorporates her elders’ memories of past traumatic events that she herself did not directly experience into her own “mnemonic repertoire” (4). This type of palimpsestic second-generation memory respectfully engages with historical traumas, especially the Holocaust, and involves the subject’s creative interpretation of her own present and her elders’ pasts (5). With its intergenerational focus and its tactile and ritual mode of transmitting memories, which puts Jonas in the metaphoric position of being a witness to the Giver’s traumatic memories, Ulanowicz positions The Giver as an especially apt example of second-generation memory. Interestingly, at the same time (2013) and without knowledge of each other’s work, Ulanowicz and I were both applying Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, to literary characters: her to the character of the Giver, and me to Le Guin’s character Laia Odo in “The Day Before the Revolution” (see Chapter 2). 4 My reading of Bloch is indebted to Ruth Levitas’s thorough analysis of Bloch’s utopian thought in The Concept of Utopia, especially Chapter 4, “Utopian Hope: Ernst Bloch and Reclaiming the Future,” 83–105. 5 See Michael Levy, “’The Sublimation of Real Life’: Malls, Shopping, and Advertising in Recent Young Adult SF,” 10–12. The quoted phrase comes from Baudrillard’s “System of Objects” in Selected Writings, 13–31, at 16. 6 For an early and sharp critique of Jameson’s methodology, see Norman K. Denzin’s 1991 book, Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema (41–48). For more recent critiques grounded

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7

8 9 10

in affect theory, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), and Ann Pelligrini and Jasbir Puar’s “Affect” in Social Text. Notably, Huyssen also rejects much of Jameson’s view of the postmodern due to his positions on temporality. In Twilight Memories (1995), Huyssen contends that Jameson’s critique of nostalgia and the disappearance of historicity “seems quite one-sided. It remains hopelessly locked into the futuristic dimension of utopia in its patchworking of a teleological Marxism with a Blochian utopianism” (88). In Present Pasts (2003), Huyssen disputes Jameson’s major claim that postmodernism orients around categories of space instead of time (11–12). On Anderson’s respect for the intellect of teen readers, consult his speech “On the Intelligence of Teens,” on accepting a 2009 Printz Honor for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II. Available at On the convention of hopeful endings in children’s and young adult literature, see Kay Sambell, 163–78. The quoted phrase comes from Nodelman, “Doing Violence to Conventions,” at 19. It is worth noting that Titus only narrates a brief history of the feed (about which he is largely ignorant) while he is disconnected from the feed. Jameson’s “quote” from Debord, which has often been re-quoted by other authors, does not actually appear verbatim in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

4

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Dialectic of Trauma

I. Cultural Trauma Theory and Risk Society It has become commonplace in the twenty-first century to approach both subjectivity and history from the perspective of trauma. As a diagnostic category and psychic phenomenon, trauma has traveled between the personal and public, the therapeutic and cultural realms, and become a dominant interpretive frame for both. Since the American Psychiatric Association first included Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a syndrome in its 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, trauma has increasingly organized therapeutic and popular understandings of human psychology, experience, and memory. Initially reserved as a diagnosis for individuals directly impacted by atrocities, wars, or other limit events, PTSD and the victim and/or survivor status that accompanies it have proliferated as identity markers (Luckhurst 1–2). As a recognized condition, PTSD helped to destigmatize and unlock histories of domestic and sexual abuse, and in the process, created intense cultural interest in testimonies and memoirs of traumatic survival that permeated Western culture in the 1990s. At the same time, trauma was and has been central to efforts to represent, understand, and come to terms with major historical events, most especially the Holocaust. The growth of these multivalent discourses of trauma was both facilitated by, and in turn provided the grounds for, the development of cultural trauma theory, an influential body of work that draws heavily from poststructuralist and psychoanalytic concepts. By the early 2000s, the prolific output of writing, film, and theory of these popular and scholarly trauma discourses had also generated numerous areas of controversy: in popular discourse, the prevalence of trauma narratives conferring a privileged aura of authenticity to tragic experiences and those who survived them (Luckhurst 133–34); in historiography, the tendency for historians to lose critical distance and to slip into full identification with victims of trauma (LaCapra 146); and in cultural trauma theory, an overemphasis on trauma as unresolvable paradox that forecloses the future (Huyssen, Present 8). And encompassing all of these forms of potential excess was the conflation, sensed by multiple critics, that “contemporary culture,

144  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma or even all history, is essentially traumatic or that everyone in the post-Holocaust context is a survivor” (LaCapra x; also Huyssen 8–9; Kansteiner, “Genealogy,” 203–04). To the limited extent that such an overreach legitimately conveys how traumatic events haunt everyone, the prevalence of amnesia in contemporary culture—discussed in relation to M. T. Anderson’s Feed in the previous chapter as a myopic immersion in the culture of consumption—could be understood as a kind of traumainduced avoidance reflex. Trauma is widely theorized to bear directly on memory because of its associated symptoms of recurrence and temporal delay: a traumatizing event not fully integrated into consciousness in the moment of occurrence tends to recur later in the victim in the form of recurring dreams, disturbing flashbacks, or situations that suddenly draw the victim back into the traumatic moment. While instances of recurrence constitute only some of the possible aftereffects of trauma, the intensity and persistence of traumatic memories often result in profound disruptions to a victim’s identity and ability to engage in life in the present. More broadly, and suggestive of how trauma largely subsumed the field of memory studies, Huyssen notes that It has been all too tempting to some to think of trauma as the hidden core of all memory. After all, both memory and trauma are predicated on the absence of that which is negotiated in memory or in the traumatic symptom. Both are marked by instability, transitoriness, and structures of repetition. (8) Huyssen’s assessment of the ascendancy of what Wulf Kansteiner terms the cultural trauma metaphor refers implicitly to the influential work of Cathy Caruth, who in the 1990s synthesized elements of Freud, psychological research, and a poststructuralist approach to the problem of representation into a highly accessible and adaptable model of cultural trauma. As a way to highlight the stakes of contemporary trauma discourse in the humanities, a brief gloss of Caruth’s work and the exceptions critics have taken with it is in order.1 In two introductory essays to special issues of American Imago in 1991 (essays which were reprinted and more widely disseminated in Caruth’s 1995 collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory), Caruth delineates trauma as deeply paradoxical in its relation to memory. In her concern with the structure of the traumatic experience, Caruth asserts that while trauma survivors lack conscious access to memory of the event, the recurring dreams or flashbacks return in exact, literal, and non-symbolic form—a paradox “between the elision of memory and the precision of recall” (Trauma 153). This aporia of memory coincides with a paradox of meaning/knowing: “the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even seeing, an overwhelming occurrence

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  145 that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event” (5) creates a gap or belatedness in understanding that Caruth considers a “crisis of truth” and, therefore, a crisis of history (6). In her 1996 book Unclaimed Experience, in a reading of Freud’s last work that dealt explicitly with trauma, Moses and Monotheism (1939), Caruth writes that “For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (18). The resistance of history to representation—the notion that historical knowledge results precisely from a failure or caesura of representation, which Caruth extrapolates from Paul de Man’s deconstructive and performative theory of language—is the principal move by which Caruth implies that all of modern history can be rendered traumatic (Kansteiner 204). While no one disputes the success of Caruth’s formulations in shaping the postmodernist terrain of trauma representations, her work has been repeatedly attacked for its insistence on the literal quality of traumatic memory and its lack of historical specificity. In Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), Ruth Leys devotes two entire chapters to debunking Caruth and physician Bessel van der Kolk’s mutually supportive work which holds— without scientific warrant according to Leys—that because traumatic memory is absolutely literal, it exists outside of representation, and thus any attempt to narrate or testify to the traumatic past is “necessarily a misrepresentation” (253). Leys argues that Caruth omits contradictory elements in Freud to support her literalist and performative understandings of trauma whereby a text itself can become a “site of trauma” that preserves history within its gaps (Leys 286; Caruth, Unclaimed, 20). Rather than transmitting knowledge about the past, narrating trauma transmits (by way of “infection”) the trauma itself to listeners and readers, even to the point of “haunting later generations,” regardless of their position as victims, perpetrators, or bystanders (284). Sharing Leys’s anger at how Caruth “tends to dilute and generalize the notion of trauma” (Leys 305), Kansteiner avers that by highlighting the “alleged traumatic component in all representations of history, [Caruth] has transformed the experience of trauma into a basic anthropological condition” (204). Lastly, without direct reference to Caruth, but particularly germane to this book, Huyssen contends that to construe all memory as traumatic “would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss. It would deny human agency and lock us into compulsive repetition” (8). What this synopsis of Caruth and her detractors should make clear is that contemporary trauma discourse is a multi-disciplinary and often contested arena, and that in all situations, but perhaps especially for historians, critics, or practitioners writing about traumatic histories or aftermaths and the people involved, trauma brings with it an ethical

146  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma dimension. Historians such as Kansteiner, concerned with the exceptionality of the Holocaust, argue that cultural trauma theory both overapplies the concept of trauma to what is actually a fairly rare occurrence, and inclines toward an aestheticization of trauma that domesticates it (216). However, as Roger Luckhurst argues, citing philosopher Bruno Latour’s well-known theory of scientific knowledge and facts as “networked” within institutions, politics, and culture, trauma is a hybrid concept, one densely imbricated within multiple epistemologies, and that because of trauma’s very heterogeneity, cultural and literary narratives have “been integral not just in consolidating the idea of post-traumatic subjectivity, but have actively helped form it” (15). Postulating literature’s legitimate role in conveying understanding of traumatic experiences, though, raises the question of the possibility of narrating that which has been widely construed as beyond the limits of narrative. Luckhurst points out that the relationship between trauma as a shock which disrupts meaning and the post-traumatic attempt to assimilate that shock is a “fundamental tension between interruption and flow, blockage and movement” (79). Luckhurst is keen to resist the cultural theory, put forward by Jean-Francois Lyotard and then Caruth and others, of trauma as unpresentable—that trauma can exist only in aporetic and fragmented narrative forms that mimic the rupture of narrative by trauma. With his wide multi-disciplinary grasp, Luckhurst notes that at the same time that cultural trauma theory was rejecting narrative as “betraying traumatic singularity,” academic psychologists were latching on to narrative as a vital therapeutic tool (82). Moreover, he observes, our culture is saturated with stories that see trauma not as a blockage but as a positive spur to narrative. Beyond post-structuralist trauma theory . . . a wide diversity of high, middle and low cultural forms have provided a repertoire of compelling ways to articulate that apparently paradoxical thing, the trauma narrative. (83) Culture has supplied a range of narrative forms that enable the disruptive effects of trauma on identity and memory to be communicated. This fact, Luckhurst proposes, is “perhaps the strongest claim for examining cultural articulations of trauma, for if trauma can be seen as a problem of narrative knowledge, then aesthetics foregrounds the artifices of narrative construction” (80). With that aesthetic imperative in mind, this chapter will examine how Margaret Atwood’s recent series of dystopian novels—the MaddAddam trilogy—narratively constructs post-traumatic subjectivity to articulate both the human costs of socioeconomic and scientific practices that imperil human civilization, and, as texts that see trauma as a “spur to narrative,” a way to illustrate a process of working through traumatic memory.

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  147 Sociologist Ulrich Beck famously argues that in late modernity, risk becomes socially reflexive: “hazards and insecurities [are] induced and introduced by modernization itself” (21; original emphasis). In a cycle in which industrial society produces civilizational level risks and then exploits the economic and political potential of the risks it creates, the risk society becomes “a catastrophic society. In it the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm” (24). In his conclusion to The Trauma Question (2008), Luckhurst invokes Beck’s concept of risk society to speculate that trauma’s current status as a paradigm, its ubiquitous presence in contemporary cultural narratives, derives from a widely diffused need to articulate the psychological damage caused by modern capitalism: PTSD coincides with late modernity, and it is surely significant that the success of this term has been coincident with an intensive phase of neo-liberal capitalism that has transformed economies and thus societies, cultures, narratives and selves over the last thirty years. The appeal of the language of trauma might be because it is a specialized sub-set of the discourse that dominates this intensive capitalist environment: risk. In the risk society, the process of modernization itself becomes the source of difficulty rather than the solution: over-population, technological saturation, pollution, or over-dependency on complex technological ensembles generate ever more risks. . . . [Trauma] is a cusp term, both a product of modernity and a description of what occurs when modern systems fail. (213–14) I want to propose that the confluence of trauma and risk forms the new topos of contemporary dystopian fiction. It would be too reaching, however, to claim that all recent dystopian fiction coheres around the signs of trauma and capitalist risk (in the way that Jameson asserts the discursive strategy of disruption for Utopia), because there are examples, particularly from outside the West, where the current dystopian form functions in a counter-discursive mode to critique the blunt instrument of authoritarian power as the perpetrator of trauma and the creator of risk. Basma Abdel Aziz’s dystopia The Queue (2013, English 2016), for instance, takes fairly undisguised aim at the oppression of the Sisi regime in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Abdel Aziz, herself a psychiatrist as well as journalist and novelist, has treated victims of political torture at the Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture in Cairo. Other examples of recent Egyptian futurist dystopian fiction addressing the traumatic return of repression include Mohammed Rabie’s Otared (2016) and Nael Eltoukhy’s Women of Karantina (2013, English 2015). While Luckhurst’s formulation does not aptly describe the recent wave of Arabic dystopian fiction, I would

148  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma claim that recognizing the discourse of trauma as interrelated with risk society perfectly captures the impetus of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, the most accomplished and sustained work of the dystopian imagination in the first two decades of this century. Atwood’s investment in trauma is less personal than Abdel Aziz’s and her formal and topical concerns that address trauma are more wide ranging than Abdel Aziz’s concentrated focus on the absurdity of life under authoritarianism. Over the course of three novels—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—Atwood develops what I term a dialectic of trauma that serves two concomitant narratological and thematic aims. The narratological component of the dialectic of trauma speaks to the way that traumatic memory organizes the temporal flow of the MaddAddam novels. While Atwood abides by the common dystopian and post-apocalyptic formal technique of opening in medias res, she finesses and complicates it by narrating much of each novel from the past, and by adding a distinct timeframe to the typical before and after temporality of revolution/rupture. The resulting tripartite temporal scheme of “before, after, and after that,” wherein the reader inhabits the before and Atwood’s characters the after and after that, with trauma/ memory as the vehicle between the latter two, allows Atwood to bring a depth of critical attention to dialectical processes of catastrophic change within a hypertrophied neoliberal risk society. I will argue that a primary function of memory in the MaddAddam novels is to illustrate this dialectic: post-traumatic memory brings forth, narratologically, the diachronic process of the residual formations of Western liberal democracy giving way to emergent formations of dystopian hyper-capitalism, which then produce an apocalypse and its traumatic aftermath. Throughout the series, Atwood stresses that apocalypse is less a singular limit event or radical break and more the result of an accumulation of historical traumas attendant on the dismantling of the public sphere over time. Thinking the MaddAddam series in relation to Bloch’s dialectical conception of the present as non-contemporaneous, then, apocalypse does not happen in some kind of pure form; rather, apocalypse represents a non-synchronous element of the future breaking into a fully free-market dystopian present, which itself contains remnants of the “before” of neoliberal nation-states. The novels’ recursive structures, emplotted by their protagonists’ constant encounters with memory (whether compulsive or voluntary), provide the means by which Atwood instantiates the dialectic of trauma. The second, more thematic element of the dialectic of trauma I read in Atwood’s trilogy concerns the posthuman trajectory of her doomsday scenario. Considering the scale of devastation, violence, and mendacity depicted in what leads to a near extinction event, one could read Oryx and Crake in particular as adopting the view of late modern risk society as inherently traumatic—meaning that trauma becomes the crux of memory itself. But, as mentioned above,

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  149 Huyssen warns that collapsing memory into trauma would render memory “too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering and loss,” negating human agency (8). Atwood avoids this conflation by gradually shifting the locus of memory across her trilogy: from post-traumatic repetition in Oryx and Crake to a narrative working through of traumatic pasts in MaddAddam, Atwood uses memory to enact her version of the hybrid utopia/dystopia—the “ustopia”—and to posit story memory as the vital link between a human present and posthuman future.

II. Traumatic Memory and the Dialectic of Dystopia and Post-Apocalypse in the MaddAddam Novels Told from multiple characters’ vantage points, Atwood’s MaddAddam series recounts the final few decades of the United States in a near future in the throes of unregulated capitalism and climate change, before an engineered pandemic decimates humanity, paving the way for a new world with multiple dominant species, human and otherwise. Narratively, the MaddAddam novels all share the same recursive timeline and the same technique of beginning near their chronological end points and then alternating between that post-apocalyptic “present time” and a dystopian “past.” Thus, the two latter novels in the trilogy function less as linear, progressive sequels than as interrelated companion histories, although both The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam do move the chronology at least incrementally forward. In each novel, memory is the medium by which Atwood conveys readers between the post-apocalyptic and dystopian timeframes, and just as the novels function in hybrid, genrebending fashion, I want to argue that Atwood employs memory in multiple ways that point both toward the past and the future. In her commentaries on the MaddAddam series, Atwood has stressed its hybrid quality. In an oft-cited piece published in PMLA in 2004 that explains her preference for the term speculative fiction over science fiction, Atwood maintains that unlike The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake “is not a classic dystopia” because it does not provide a full overview of the structure of the society in it . . . . I’d say instead that Oryx and Crake is a combination antigravity ray and marshmallow toaster. It’s an adventure romance—that is, the hero goes on a quest—coupled with a Menippean satire, the literary form that deals in intellectual obsession. (517) While rightly distinguishing Oryx and Crake from its dystopian forebears, Atwood, in a lecture published in In Other Worlds (2011), confirms that Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are indeed dystopias that (like nearly all dystopias) contain the kernel of a utopia

150  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma within them, making them what Atwood refers to as hybrid “ustopias” (91–93). Atwood also notes that critics have described the novels as “apocalyptic,” but to her mind, in a “true apocalypse everything on Earth is destroyed, whereas in these two books the only element that’s annihilated is the human race, or most of it” (93). One could justifiably take issue with Atwood’s quibble. For one thing, it is not exactly true that only humanity gets annihilated in the MaddAddam novels; nearly all technological infrastructures (e.g. power grids, computer mainframes, transit systems) are also destroyed or inoperable. For another, Atwood underestimates the importance of the post-apocalyptic scenario (or the post-apocalyptic as a genre) to the hybrid structural dynamic of her novels and the reader’s grasp of their allegorical force. Atwood rejects the label “apocalyptic” because she views her novels as “ustopian” instead, whereas I would stress that the MaddAddams are dystopian and apocalyptic both—a point crucial to how they situate the reader temporally and ideologically. A brief summary of the opening chapters of Oryx and Crake can convey its hybrid apocalyptic/dystopian nature. The novel opens with a character called Snowman waking up on a seashore, not merely alone or on a camping trip gone wrong but at history’s end: Out of habit he looks at his watch . . . although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is. (3) To stave off the existential fear of believing himself to be the last human alive, Snowman occupies himself with tending to his scavenged food supply, and more unsettlingly, interacting with, and watching out for, the guileless “Children of Crake,” bioengineered humanoids designed by his former friend Crake (real name Glenn) to be an improved replacement species for the billions of humans Crake killed off a few months before with a pandemic of his own making. Atwood juxtaposes this post-apocalyptic scenario with scenes from Snowman’s childhood: “Once upon a time, Snowman wasn’t Snowman. Instead he was Jimmy. He’d been a good boy then” (15). Alluding to her well-known interest in fairy tales, Atwood introduces Jimmy’s pre-apocalyptic life in an idiom that intimates regret for the loss of a better life, but then quickly upends this assumption.2 Jimmy’s earliest detailed memory pertains to an act of corporate sabotage: a huge bonfire of dead livestock burned to contain a planted infectious disease at OrganInc Farms, the “compound” where Jimmy’s father works as the genetic architect on a strain of giant pigs hosting customizable human-tissue organs for transplant (15–23). The so-called pigoons are just one of many new animal hybrids—e.g. wolvogs,

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  151 rakunks, liobams—and weaponized viruses created by the free-wheeling gene splicers who form part of the elite class that lives in walled corporate compounds, while everyone else scrabbles to survive in the dangerous urban “pleeblands.” Not that the compounds are danger-free zones; in a world of climate change-induced scarcity, Jimmy’s father tells him that corporate security—the “CorpSeCorps men”—had to be on constant alert. When there wsas so much at stake, there was no telling what the other side might resort to. The other side, or the other sides: it wasn’t just one other side you had to watch out for. Other companies, other countries, various factions and plotters. There was too much hardware around, said Jimmy’s father. Too much hardware, too much software, too many hostile bioforms, too many weapons of every kind. And too much envy and fanaticism and bad faith. (27–28) Jimmy’s “once upon a time” is thus nothing more than a steroidal dystopian rendition of our own capitalist moment. Within the first few chapters, then, Atwood both establishes the post-apocalyptic frame of the now time and adduces the intense risk factors at play in the recent past. Raffaella Baccolini observes that a common feature of many utopias and dystopias is that they “look back to an idealized or romanticized past that is then projected into the future” (e.g. News from Nowhere, Nineteen Eighty-Four), which of course positions the reader to adopt the idealization (“Useful Knowledge” 114). Gerry Canavan makes a similar observation regarding most post-apocalyptic fiction: the pre-apocalyptic time and place becomes a “longed-for object of nostalgia. . . . a lost Golden Age to be mourned” (141). Atwood’s decision to write a dystopia wrapped within an apocalypse, to make the narrative pre-apocalyptic time by many measures worse than the post-apocalyptic, complicates the typical ideological, affective, and temporal orientation of such fiction by denying the reader a sense of the “before time”—while more familiar—as clearly preferable. Post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction both rely on a temporal rupture from the present, but in post-apocalyptic fiction this rupture is absolute and cataclysmic—time and history reset. Katherine Snyder writes that Post-apocalyptic fiction serves as rehearsal or preview for its readers, an opportunity to witness in fantasy origins and endings that are fundamentally unwitnessable. We are horrified and yet thrilled to see ourselves and our world in the unthinkable plight portrayed. (479) Snyder’s emphasis on “rehearsal”—the preparation for or enactment of a near-extinction event—indicates the reader’s temporal orientation as forward looking. The apocalypse creates a total rift between our

152  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma present and post-apocalyptic futurity; once the apocalyptic moment has passed, with no hope of recovering the longed-for past, the reader is left to ask, or imagine, where do we go from here? Dystopian fiction’s remove from the present may also come in the form of sudden rupture, but is more often imagined as a process or even gradual evolution with no decisive break, as in Anderson’s Feed. Whereas human society as such no longer exists in the near aftermath of an apocalypse, as seen in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Snowman’s present moment in Oryx and Crake, dystopias depict (dys)functioning societies. For the cautionary element of dystopia to work, readers must recognize their own world in the imagined future. 3 Dystopias project into the future, but by not crossing the history-obliterating chasm into post-apocalyptic time, dystopias more directly situate readers in relation to their own time, so as to ask, if the status quo holds, will we end up here? By joining a dystopian and an apocalyptic temporal framework together as a sequence, and thereby asking both questions, Atwood draws increased attention to the causational factors at work in producing an apocalypse and to the possibilities of its aftermath. Rather than abrupt rupture, Crake’s apocalypse becomes the result of an extended process of the accumulated risks and traumas that inhere in a hyper-capitalist dystopia. If, as Luckhurst suggests, trauma discourse is a subset of risk society, the MaddAddam series posits that dystopia and apocalypse are too. Like trauma, dystopia and apocalypse are “both a product of modernity and a description of what occurs when modern systems fail” (Luckhurst 214). Trauma and risk being the through lines in Atwood’s dystopianturned-post-apocalyptic world, memory is the connective tissue between them. In Oryx and Crake, Snowman’s post-traumatic memories—of the pandemic, his unwitting complicity in it, and his witnessing of Crake’s murder of their mutual lover Oryx—serve as the structuring device of the narrative entire, and do so in a way that illustrates why Caruth’s formulation of trauma as comprising recurrence and temporal delay has proven so useful to scholars interested in narrative. As Snyder remarks, “Snowman’s post-apocalyptic plight literalizes the temporal disruption that has come to be understood as a hallmark of traumatized consciousness” (472). In Caruth’s understanding, trauma’s full impact only manifests in a victim belatedly, and thus the past traumatic event and the present symptomatic response mutually determine each other’s meaning; Snyder astutely observes that in Oryx and Crake, this “doubled temporality” of trauma mirrors the narrative’s “doubled time scheme” (472, 475). For the first twelve sections of the novel, the narrative alternates between Snowman’s present moment and Snowman’s memories of his/ Jimmy’s childhood and young adulthood. In the present, Snowman’s primary action—what Atwood refers to in PMLA as his adventure romance quest—is his decision to return to Crake’s domed laboratory, dubbed

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  153 Paradice, within the RejoovenEsense Compound. There, Snowman knows, he can scavenge canned food, alcohol, and, most importantly, a spray gun to hunt and ward off predatory animal hybrids (151). But going back to Paradice, where the Crakers were created and where Crake killed Oryx and Jimmy shot Crake, means returning to the site of trauma and retracing in reverse his original trek out of Paradice, when he led the Crakers to the seashore after the pandemic. The disembodied voice of Oryx, one of several that Snowman hears in his head, warns him: But you don’t want to go back there, do you? a soft voice whispers. “Not particularly.” Because? “Because nothing.” Go on, say it. “I forget.” No, you don’t. You’ve forgotten nothing. (152) Snowman’s refusal to acknowledge what he knows he remembers approaches what Caruth considers trauma’s “enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even seeing, an overwhelming occurrence” (Trauma 5). Snowman’s journey back to Paradice in the present runs on a narrative track that eventually converges with the “memory chapters” about Jimmy’s life that get closer and closer to the present until, at the end of Section 12, his memory of the double killing of Oryx and Crake coincides with his arrival back at the Paradice airlock where their corpses lie. The final two sections of the novel (14 and 15) are narrated entirely in the present, with the story, the chronological sequence of events, and the plot, the order in which those events are narrated, in synchrony.4 Beyond contriving an overall narrative structure which compels Snowman to ultimately confront, or re-witness, that which has threatened his physical and psychic integrity of self, Atwood overtly calls attention throughout the novel to how Snowman’s memories and his present moment bleed into each other in unwelcome ways. Early in the novel, Snowman says out loud, “‘Now I’m alone. . . . Alone on a wide, wide sea.’ One more scrap from the burning scrapbook in his head” (10). The image of the “burning scrapbook” attests to Snowman’s inability to keep memory at bay. The chapter “Rakunk” begins with Snowman noticing a young rakunk under a nearby bush; the sight of the rakunk then triggers a memory of Jimmy getting a pet rakunk for his tenth birthday along with a large dollop of family dysfunction (49). The later chapter “Pigoons” reverses the order, with the past as prelude to the present: the chapter begins with Jimmy, age five, in his kitchen at lunchtime, wondering where his mother is; there’s a scraping sound coming from

154  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma the wall, at which point he wakes up. Snowman is in the gatehouse of the RejoovenEsense compound and a land crab is digging through the wall: “He hates these dreams. The present’s bad enough without the past getting mixed into it” (265). As indicated by such dreams and the voices Snowman hears in his mind, Atwood leaves little doubt that Snowman is possessed by unbidden memory. But another symptom of his traumatized state is memory loss. Snowman wants to resist his mind’s memory drain in order to retain his grip on language, but in all other respects he desires and tries to achieve oblivion. Consequently, he embodies Terdiman’s rendering of modernity’s memory crisis as consisting of the opposing problems of “too little memory and too much” (14). Atwood reveals Snowman’s memory deficit immediately in the novel’s opening chapter; while rummaging through his meager food stash, Snowman blurts out, ‘It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity’. . . . He has the feeling he’s quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another. He can’t recall ever having read such a thing, but that means nothing. There are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where memory used to be. (4–5) Snowman’s regret over memory loss, his feeling that his brain has been truncated to a “stub,” always concerns language, because Jimmy, as a “word” person in a culture that only valued “numbers people,” had seen himself as a preserver of archaic words (25). But this desire to remember words has to directly compete with Snowman’s desire to forget his lived past. In the memory chapter “Hammer,” young Jimmy receives cryptic postcards from his mother who’s absconded from compound life and deserted him. The memory haunts Snowman: “I am not my childhood,” Snowman says out loud. He hates these replays. He can’t turn them off, he can’t change the subject, he can’t leave the room. What he needs is more inner discipline, or a mystic syllable he could repeat over and over to tune himself out. What were those things called? Mantras. . . . “Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valence. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been. (68) The impulse to remember words and the desire to shut down memories of his childhood occur simultaneously, and these conflicting inclinations inhere in the name Snowman itself. The reader learns early on

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  155 that Snowman has selected his name in part to flaunt Crake’s linguistic injunction: It was one of Crake’s rules that no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent . . . could not be demonstrated. No unicorns, no griffins . . . . But those rules no longer apply, and it’s given Snowman a bitter pleasure to adopt this dubious label. The Abominable Snowman—existing and not existing. . . . For present purposes he’s shortened the name. He’s only Snowman. He’s kept the abominable part to himself. (7–8) Snowman wants to remember the word “abominable” and its uncanny connotations, but at the same time the moniker Snowman is an attempt to forget. When Jimmy first presents himself to the Crakers in the Paradice dome weeks after the pandemic, he tells them, ‘My name is Snowman,’ said Jimmy, who had thought this over. He no longer wanted to be Jimmy . . . . He needed to forget the past—the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation. . . . Perhaps a different name would do that for him. (348–49) Snowman’s desire for full oblivion, to forget “the past in any form,” speaks to the fact that it is not only Crake’s apocalypse that has had traumatic weight in Snowman’s life—and this is central to Atwood’s design of the dialectic of trauma. Dystopian risk society creates abundant trauma of its own and conditions favorable to apocalyptic catastrophes; or rather, apocalypse proves to be a non-contemporaneous element of the dystopian present. Snyder argues, correctly, that Snowman’s primary apocalyptic trauma gets refracted through the whole series of smaller traumas that puncture Jimmy’s life, most especially his mother’s decision to abandon him. Oryx and Crake demonstrates how the trauma of the protagonist’s early losses . . . sets the stage for the re-enactment of cataclysmic trauma on the global stage. By juxtaposing the horror of human extinction with more mundane, private losses, or even with absence as a defining condition of human subjectivity itself, Oryx and Crake challenges its characters’ and readers’ attempts to draw a cordon sanitaire between what happens at home and what happens in (and to) the world. (473) Snyder’s wording alludes to Dominick LaCapra’s important distinction between absence and loss in dealing with trauma. In Writing History,

156  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma Writing Trauma (2001), LaCapra argues that when specific historical losses get generalized into metaphysical notions of absence, they cannot be adequately addressed: “When loss is converted into . . . absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed” (46). Conversely, notes LaCapra, “absence at a ‘foundational’ level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses” (46). The common elision of the difference between transhistorical absence and historical loss bears witness to the disorienting power of trauma and the post-traumatic. LaCapra suggests that “The very conflation attests to the way one remains possessed or haunted by the past, whose ghosts and shrouds resist distinctions,” such as the distinction between then and now (46). In narrating traumatic moments in Jimmy’s past, Atwood indeed characterizes them as a conflation of absence and loss that confuses the distinction between then and now and enacts the impasse of impossible mourning. After years of questioning him about his mother’s disappearance, the CorpSeCorps finally show Jimmy video of a woman he recognizes as his mother being shot by firing squad for “treason” (i.e. “hampering the dissemination of commercial products” (286)). Jimmy spirals into a fruitless mourning, full of the repetition compulsion of his sex addiction and without any critical distance from his traumatic memories: The next few weeks were the worst he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he’d lost, or— sadder—had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn’t even know who’d wasted it. He was angry most days. At  first he sought out his various lovers, but he was moody with them . . . . In earlier days he would have made his mother’s death into a psychodrama, harvested some sympathy, but that wasn’t what he wanted now. What did he want? (259) It is not surprising, perhaps, that Jimmy compounds loss and absence since the shocking loss of viewing his mother’s execution reactivates memories of what Jimmy has experienced as absence ever since his mother left him. And to a degree, Jimmy’s overriding memory of absence—the what he “had never had in the first place”—suggests he remains haunted in a way that coincides with LaCapra’s understanding of what happens when loss gets “conflated with absence and conceived as constitutive of existence” itself (49). But Atwood’s attention to what I am calling the dialectic of trauma, the diachronic transition from dystopia to apocalypse, also works to frame absence differently from how LaCapra says traditional texts narrate it. In line with Canavan’s statement that most post-apocalyptic fiction regards the pre-apocalyptic time as a “lost Golden Age to be mourned” (141), LaCapra similarly remarks that in

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  157 conventional narratives, specific losses typically get conflated with the generalized absence of a mythic state of unity or wholeness that can, in the end, be reclaimed through redemptive means (48–57). Such narratives therefore tend to correlate loss/absence with lack—a perceived deficiency “of something that ought to be there,” together with the implication that “whatever would fill or compensate for it [the lack] was once there” (53; emphasis added). LaCapra acknowledges that many major modernist and contemporary novelists productively problematize this structure by affirming “absence as absence rather than as loss or lack,” and Atwood is no exception (56). Jimmy’s awareness of all “he had never had in the first place” rejects the full conversion of loss into the absence of a wholeness which once was; though Jimmy once had his mother (however detached and depressed), he knows instinctively that there was much else he never had. Rather than mourning the before time preceding the apocalypse as a prelapsarian moment that had supplied what was lacking, Atwood attests to the historically derived (as opposed to essential) absences that mark existence in an accelerated dystopian risk society. Perhaps the most prevalent historically derived absence in the world Jimmy and Crake come of age in is the absence of affect. Drawing on the work of Sunder Rajan, Stefan Helmreich, and others, Amelia Defalco has argued that the MaddAddam novels depict a system of biocapitalism, where biological materials like genomes become commodified and increasingly manipulated for the purposes of product- and profit-making (433). Not incidentally, memory also becomes ruthlessly commodified and firewalled in service of the biocapitalist project; in MaddAddam, Zeb recalls posters at HelthWyzer West warning employees “YOUR MEMORY IS OUR IP, SO WE’LL PROTECT IT FOR YOU!” (233). The consequence of not being vigilant could be having one’s neural data “strip-mine[d]” by “brainscrapers” hired by a rival Compound (69). In such a milieu—an emerging one in the reader’s present but fully realized in the world of MaddAddam—human bodies become valued merely as instrumental, quantifiable information to the exclusion of an ontology of “relationality, affectivity, and care” (Defalco 440). Growing up in a biotech compound culture that routinely treats life, as Jimmy’s father does, as “just proteins” (Oryx and Crake 57), just cells whose capacities have been quantified and determined, Jimmy (but also Crake) experiences a deficit of attention to the body’s need for care. More than anything, tender, affective care constitutes what Jimmy “had never had in the first place.” In fact, Jimmy’s “sole satisfying childhood experience of (seemingly) mutually beneficial care involves a nonhuman animal,” Jimmy’s pet rakunk Killer, that likes to cuddle with him (Defalco 442). When Jimmy’s mother flees the HelthWyzer compound because she is sickened by the lack of ethical concern endemic to biocapitalism, she takes Killer with her to “liberate” her, meaning that Jimmy is doubly abandoned (61). Defalco observes that “These absent figures of care and attachment—his depressive, remote mother and his hybrid creature friend—haunt him

158  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma throughout the trilogy. . . . Without them Jimmy becomes increasingly suspicious of and alienated from affects, both his own and others” (443). As teenagers, Jimmy and Crake spend time after school getting high and watching live executions, animal torture/killing, assisted suicides, and child pornography on the Internet. With the exception of seeing Oryx for the first time as a young girl on the HottTotts website and feeling suddenly “culpable,” Jimmy only ever feels “he’d had no control,” but never feels pity or empathy for any suffering being from his digitally mediated vantage point (91, 87). Jimmy notices that Crake “didn’t seem to be affected by anything he saw” (86). Years later, after the pandemic and after a lifetime of affect deficit, Snowman has difficulty even identifying his own tears as tears—“The salt water is running down his face again. He never knows when that will happen and he can never stop it”—or discerning their import (11). The disconnect between Snowman’s tears and his recurring memories suggests his inability to begin to come to terms with his past. Keeping Atwood’s temporal structuring device in mind, we can say that while Defalco’s argument establishes that biocapitalism devalues affect and engenders the conditions of Jimmy’s trauma of abandonment, it is Snowman’s post-traumatic memories of absence, his inability to turn such memories off, which ultimately narrates that absence. The biocapitalist economy we see the Compounds invest and exploit in the MaddAddam novels can be understood as a subsystem within a larger field of neoliberal risk society untrammeled by any form of regulation. In pursuit of the dialectic of residual and emergent forms through which Atwood imagines a historical process leading to catastrophe, I would argue that the total market deregulation Atwood envisions, followed by the CorpSeCorp’s takeover of that vacuum, results from the ravages of rapid climate change. Chris Vials, to whose analysis I will return shortly, expertly delineates Atwood’s critique of how neoliberal market logic destroys the public sphere, but he does not identify climate change’s critical role as a catalyst for this process. Atwood forcefully, if somewhat obliquely, situates climate change as the crisis which moves the needle from our present economy to full free market tyranny. In a 2015 interview on science, climate, and fiction writing, Atwood said, I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change because when people think climate change, they think maybe it’s going to rain more or something like that. It’s much more extensive a change than that because when you change patterns of where it rains and how much and where it doesn’t rain, you’re also affecting just about everything. (Finn) While Atwood mentions in the same interview that climate change is only “the background” to the MaddAddam novels, in part because the

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  159 change has already happened, her preference for the term “everything change” indicates the extent to which the disruptive power of climate change can transform society. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s brief environmental references show climate change as reshaping the landscape itself and driving resource scarcity. After high school, Crake attends the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute; “It was like going to Harvard had been, back before it got drowned” (173). New York City is now New New York. Employees at OrganInc Farms are assured that defunct pigoons, which contain human cells, are not processed for food, but as “the vast tundra bubbled with methane, and the drought in the midcontinental plains regions went on and on, and the Asian steppes turned to sand dunes, and meat became harder to come by, some people had their doubts” (24). Later, as adults, Crake confirms to Jimmy that “Demand for resources has exceeded supply for decades in marginal geopolitical areas, hence the famines and droughts; but very soon, demand is going to exceed supply for everyone” (295).5 In The Year of the Flood, readers learn that Amanda, the orphan pleebrat young Ren befriends and takes home to join the God’s Gardeners, is a climate refugee from Texas. “A lot of Texas refugees had turned up after the hurricanes and then the droughts. They were mostly illegal” (76). After her father was killed in a hurricane and her mother died from lack of clean drinking water, Amanda manages to make it past the “Wall they’re building to keep the Tex refugees out, because just the fence wasn’t enough. There’s men with sprayguns—it’s a CorpSeCorps wall” (85). Prior to working her way north, Amanda also snuck away from a football stadium refugee camp where “the refugees were supposed to be farmed out to work in whatever job they were told to. ‘No free lunch,’ people were saying: you had to pay for everything, one way or another” (85). The economic exploitation of refugees and the CorpSeCorp’s supplanting of the federal government fits Naomi Klein’s well-known concept of “disaster capitalism”: “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (6). While Atwood never explicitly attributes the rise of the CorpSeCorps, or the concomitant disappearance of all forms of local, state, and federal government, to climate disasters, the logic is clear. States and communities overwhelmed by weather disasters and their attendant infrastructure damage, public health crises, and refugee influxes/exfluxes, pave the way for the selling off (or possibly the usurpation) of portions of the state to private entities. In The Year of the Flood, when Toby was a child, her father lost the family’s ten acre home to CorpSeCorps machinations. Already, back then, the CorpSeCorps were consolidating their power. They’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations, but then they’d taken over when the local police forces collapsed for

160  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma lack of funding, and people liked that at first because the Corporations paid, but now the CorpSeCorps were sending their tentacles everywhere.6 (25) Large-scale shocks decimate governments’ abilities to cope, opening the door for the corporate sector to take over and sweep away any regulatory obstacles to private contracts and free markets. In their depiction of the total absence of Keynesian restraints, Vials argues that the MaddAddam novels provide the fullest fictive example of economic historian Karl Polanyi’s theorization of the “relationship between free markets, human dislocation, and political tyranny” (236). In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi wrote that a purely self-adjusting market “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness” (3). Projecting Polanyi’s thesis into the near future, Atwood debunks the contemporary neoliberal nostrum that problems in the free market can be fixed with more free market capitalism. According to Vials, A long-standing paradox of market liberalism is key to the historical ground of the MaddAddam trilogy. That is, why does a political discourse that posits a universal human capacity for reason and an ever-increasing terrain for human self-determination continually reproduce a set of institutions that limit democratic participation? For the world of Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood is one where the utopian dream of the self-regulating market has been achieved: but despite the absence of the nation-state, it is nonetheless a tyranny at the level of lived experience, even for the privileged. (240) The CorpSeCorps not only tyrannizes through political murders and the violent suppression of civil rights; its primary directive consists of “bulldozing the planet flat and grabbing anything of value” (MaddAddam 69). In the process, it manufactures widespread social risks which it then proceeds to exploit and monetize—epitomized in the biocapitalist realm by HelthWyzer using its own brand of vitamin supplements to distribute custom-made diseases to which only HelthWyzer holds the antidotes. That Jimmy, who enjoys the relative privilege of life in the Compounds, figures as a victim of trauma long before the apocalypse hits, serves to underscore just how vulnerable more disenfranchised characters from the pleeblands are to risk factors created by the total market liberalism unleashed by climate change and the rise of the CorpSeCorps. Trauma becomes the rule, not the exception for Atwood’s principal characters. In The Year of the Flood, following Toby’s mother’s death from the just mentioned HelthWyzer scheme and her father’s suicide, Toby burns her

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  161 identity to evade CorpSeCorps harassment for her father’s debts and disappears into the deep pleebland slums. There, she sells her labor and her eggs, ending up working at SecretBurgers, where she is repeatedly raped and brutalized by the manager, Blanco, who kills with impunity. The traumatic violence makes Toby long for a past which she has repressed because it too was traumatic: Ever since her family had died in such sad ways, ever since she herself had disappeared from official view, Toby had tried not to think about her earlier life. She’d covered it in ice, she’d frozen it. Now she longed desperately to be back there in the past—even the bad parts, even the grief—because her present life was torture. She tried to picture her two faraway, long-ago parents, watching over her like guardian spirits, but she saw only mist. (38) In MaddAddam, Zeb also has a traumatic childhood that he tries to repress. Years after being physically and psychologically abused by his father “the Rev,” the sadistic preacher-cum-entrepreneur leader of the Church of PetrOleum cult, Zeb encounters a very young Glenn/Crake at the HelthWyzer West Compound. How old exactly was Glenn? Eight, nine, ten? It was hard for Zeb to tell because he didn’t like to remember what his own life had been like when he’d been eight or nine or ten. He’d spent too much time in the dark back then, one way or another. All of that needed to be forgotten, and he’d worked at forgetting it. Still, when he saw a boy of that age the first thing he wanted to say was, Run away! Run away very fast! And the second thing was, Grow bigger! Grow very big! If you could grow very big, then whoever they were could cease to have power over you. . . . There must have been a they in the life of young Glenn, or maybe an it: something that was haunting him. He had that look about him, a look Zeb used to catch glimpses of when he saw himself unawares in the mirror: a wary, distrustful look, as if he didn’t know what bush or parking lot or piece of furniture was going to chasm suddenly to reveal the lurking enemy or the bottomless pit. Though Glenn had no scars, no bruises . . . so what was that haunting entity? Nothing definite, perhaps. More like a lack, a vacuum. (235–36) Zeb knows the feeling that all of Atwood’s traumatized characters— Ren, Toby, Jimmy, even Oryx, who was “acting all the time”—surely felt at some point in their young lives, which Ren, prior to going to work at Scales and Tails, expresses as, “Everything was ruined and destroyed, and there was no safe place for me” (Flood 306, 302). Zeb’s backstory fits Atwood’s vision of a United States devoid of safety (despite being run as

162  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma a security state) and stable families, but Atwood’s more surprising move in the final novel of the trilogy involves humanizing Crake as a victim of trauma. Atwood revises Jimmy’s earlier assessment of Crake as not seeming affected by anything. The impetus for Crake’s coldly intellectual dismissal of human beings as “faulty” “hormone robots” (O&C 203) becomes more than just biocapitalist instrumentality taken to its logical extreme; or, in Canavan’s reading, Crake’s embrace of catastrophic “deep-ecology” as a neo-Malthusian calculus (145–50). Crake, quite like Jimmy, is haunted, perhaps by a combination of betrayal (his mother’s infidelity, soon to be followed by his father’s murder by CorpSeCorps) and something less definite, “a lack, a vacuum,” that manifests partly as touch aversion (Zeb notices that at even at age 8–10, Glenn manages to not have anyone, including his mother, touch him). Atwood’s rendition of Glenn/Crake in MaddAddam as haunted gives new meaning to the moment in Oryx and Crake when during their student days, Jimmy visits Crake at Watson-Crick and discovers that Crake screams every night in his sleep. Recalling this after the apocalypse, Snowman thinks, “Every moment he’s lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much” (218). Whereas Snowman assumes that Crake was dreaming of the end-of-the-world future he would create, Zeb’s recognition of his traumatized younger self in Glenn’s haunted look raises the possibility that Crake’s screams point to a post-traumatic reliving, or what LaCapra terms acting out, of occurrences in his past. In the world of MaddAddam, Crake remains, without doubt, a singular character in terms of sheer brilliance, ruthlessness, manipulation, misanthropy, and intellectual passion for the idea that if human beings are to continue to inhabit the earth, those human beings will have to be profoundly different from us. However, by figuring Crake as yet another victim of trauma (albeit a trauma that is not entirely defined), no different in this crucial respect from any other of her characters, Atwood positions the limit event of Crake’s apocalypse less as an aberration, less as the plotting of a mad inscrutable genius, than as the predictable outcome of the workings of hyper-capitalist risk society. Crake, we learn, seems touched by the same disaffecting, destabilizing, and ultimately traumatic types of experience risk society inflicts on his peers, and so, groomed within a Compound culture that already views human life through an anti-humanistic and commodified lens, he rejects humanity as worth saving and acts in a dispassionate way to reboot the species along ecologically deterministic lines.7 If we give credence to Atwood’s perhaps exaggerated claim that the world of MaddAddam “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent,” then the apocalypse functions not only as Jameson’s “radical break,” but also as a non- contemporaneous, emergent, and entirely plausible form within the present that happens to end human life and society as we know it (“Writing O&C”). To the extent that readers see the near human extinction event in Oryx and Crake as a rehearsal of what inevitably will befall capitalist society, or as the

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  163 deterministic outcome of humans’ faulty DNA, Atwood’s opening novel can seem like an anti-utopian salvo of despair. But Canavan reminds readers that Atwood’s project is “unmistakably satirical” in tone, that both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood end with characters having to make radically undetermined choices, and that so many of the God’s Gardeners manage to survive the apocalypse that the novels function as an “allegory [of] the urgent necessity of radically changing our social relations and anti-ecological lifestyles—of choosing to make a better social world before it is too late for the natural one” (152, 155). Hope, in other words, resides within the dystopian/apocalyptic matrix of the novels—the “ustopia” of Atwood’s formulation. And if we think that hope not only allegorically but also dialectically, if we set aside the before/after apocalyptic dichotomy of ordering time and consider what comes after Crake’s apocalypse not as Toby construes it—as “Now that history is over”—but as a next phase of (post)human history, we see that traumatized subjectivities in Atwood’s trilogy begin to deal with memory in ways that permit working through traumatic occurrences and engaging the present and future (MaddAddam 33). In what follows, I will argue that, as opposed to traditional dystopias, Atwood maintains utopian hope clearly within the pages of her trilogy, and presents that utopian arc as a narrative working through of traumatic memory that moves beyond aporia into healing.8

III. The Posthuman Proto-Utopia: Story Memory as the Working through of Trauma Starting with The Year of the Flood, while Atwood continues to focus on the traumatic/post-traumatic histories of individuals caught up in catastrophic risk society, this time the pleeblanders Toby and Ren, she also shows memory at work in ways that explicitly resist the monoculture of the market economy. Atwood’s eco-religious separatist group, the God’s Gardeners, are preparing for the apocalypse they call the Waterless Flood, “in which all buying and selling will cease, and we will find ourselves thrown back upon our own resources” (126). Led by the enigmatic Adam One, the Gardeners combine a deep suspicion of the “Exfernal” world and its values—entailing a rejection of consumerism and human exceptionalism—with an embrace of holistic agri/ api/horticulture and a theological pastiche of science-accommodating Judeo-Christian and New Age concepts. Given their status as a barely tolerated and then later outlawed group by the CorpSeCorps, the Gardeners operate literally by memory. Ren remembers: Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. This is what the Gardeners taught us, when I was a child among them. They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from

164  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever . . . . As for writing, it was dangerous . . . because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down. (6) The Gardeners believe that the coming Waterless Flood will destroy nearly everyone on Earth except for them, embodying both the moral dualism common to End-time millenarianism that separates the world into friend and enemy (here Exfernal), and also the corresponding belief that, as believers, they are privy to what God and history have in store (Garrard 94). Atwood playfully satirizes the overly self-serious elements of the Gardeners’ “scrambled” theology, but she is surprisingly evenhanded regarding their melding of science and spirituality, and sympathetic to their sustainability practices, as evidenced by her book tour featuring performances of the Gardener hymns and her website enabling readers to calculate their carbon footprint and nominate environmentalist “saints” (Flood 46; Osborne 39). Given the current relevance of apocalyptic thinking amidst the contexts of industrial risk society, climate change, and widespread terrorism of various stripes, the rhetorical implications of Atwood’s fictive apocalyptic sect are of interest. While Atwood herself writes within a postmodern mode that, as Teresa Heffernan suggests of contemporary approaches to apocalypse, “resists the pull of imagined or real absolute ends” in favor of embracing multiple possibilities, the God’s Gardeners view the apocalypse from a more literal standpoint (14). In her analysis of the Gardeners’ apocalypticism, Hope Jennings draws on Greg Garrard’s discussion of the rhetorical strategies of tragic and comic apocalypse, which Garrard himself develops from rhetorician Stephen O’Leary’s 1994 book Arguing the Apocalypse. Garrard argues in Ecocriticism that because the tradition of tragic apocalypticism treats the prophecy of a coming-soon catastrophe as completely authoritative and literal, it considers a cataclysmic end to be “predetermined” and rooted in human guilt (95). The comic apocalyptic plot, meanwhile, regards apocalypse more figuratively, as more open to human agency—with a resulting emphasis on averting the catastrophe—and as part of a temporal scheme that is “open-ended and episodic” rather than determined and “epochal” (95). Jennings posits that “the God’s Gardeners espouse the tragic view while the narrative framework and tone of the text itself presents a comic vision” (13). While I agree with this overall assessment of how Atwood negotiates apocalyptic tensions, I would argue that Jennings too rigidly characterizes the Gardeners’ theology and practice as tragic. Jennings does correctly point to Atwood’s satiric handling of the Gardeners’ contradictory beliefs and behaviors. For all their emphasis on the non-literality of Judeo-Christian scripture, for example, the Adams

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  165 and Eves get bogged down in minute discussions of the nature of Adam’s teeth, or God providing “coats of skins” for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 (Flood 240–41). And Ren, as a youngster, notices that “The Gardeners were strict about not killing Life, but on the other hand they said Death was a natural process, which was sort of a contradiction” (59). From these and other instances, Jennings asserts that Adam One uses his scriptural exegeses to make the Bible fit his “overly literal interpretations of the signs of oncoming apocalypse” and that he defines the Gardeners’ proper role as being passive witnesses to catastrophe (as opposed to trying to save lives), which leads to “despair and nihilism” (14–15).9 In contrast to what she sees as the Gardeners’ passive and paranoid desire for the end, Jennings argues that Atwood offers the “possibility of human survival and/or redemption” found in the “(skeptical) faith” of “Toby’s pragmatic integrity and Ren’s resilient optimism” (16). Atwood, Jennings avers, does not intend readers to credit or take seriously the Gardeners’ brand of apocalypticism, but instead locates hope in her two female protagonists who have a critical distance from the Gardeners’ belief system (13). While Jennings’s reading has much to recommend it, I contend that taking the Gardeners’ stance as entirely tragic overlooks the utopian potency embedded in their vision of a (largely) posthuman future that will ask one thing of those who remain: to live very different lives from how we currently live them. Despite their conviction of impending doom, the God’s Gardeners’ day-to-day practice actually trends utopian, consisting largely of a collective memory of “saintly” inspiration and hope that works to counteract some of its individual members’ tendency to despair. Toby, for instance, during her time at the AnooYoo Spa after the Waterless Flood, not only realizes her own inability to keep hopeful memories alive in the present, she also recalls feeling hopelessness as a young adult. Waking from a dream featuring her parents but from which she herself is absent, Toby, in tears, thinks, “I wasn’t in the picture because I’m the frame . . . It’s not really the past. It’s only me, holding it all together. It’s only a handful of fading neural pathways. It’s only a mirage” (239). Toby’s unconscious mind attempts to stitch together a “tranquil” memory of childhood that her waking mind recognizes as a fabrication, not even a false memory per se, only a flat “picture on a wall” (239). Reflecting on the loss of her parents and her early happy childhood, Toby recalls that already by the time she went to university at the Martha Graham Academy, she felt the weight of a world catastrophe looming: Surely I was an optimistic person back then, she thinks. . . . I knew there were things wrong in the world, . . . But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else. By the time she’d reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for

166  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma a heavy stone footfall, then the knock on the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. (239) While Gardener eschatology predicts the very cataclysm Toby fears, its spiritual focus and rituals revolve around calendrical observances and celebrations of recurrence that, in addition to serving as the novel’s structuring device, draw adherents into patterns of hopeful remembrance that affirm humans’ coexistence with all living things through time. In his sermon for the Festival of Arks, Adam One says, “We God’s Gardeners are a plural Noah,” stressing that, like their scriptural ancestor, the Gardeners are in covenant with God and “every living creature” in perpetuity (91). Accordingly, the Festival of Arks is both commemorative and anticipatory; as Adam says, “On this day we mourn, but we also rejoice” (89). While mourning humanity’s destruction of countless species, the Gardeners rejoice that the Earth has before and will again renew itself. Thus, after the Flood, Adam One tells his followers that “What a cause for rejoicing is this rearranged world in which we find ourselves! . . . Even now, my Friends, the rainforest must be regenerating!” (371–72). The utopian impulse contained in such rejoicing differs, no doubt, from typical formations of utopian thought found in utopias of human contrivance, as Sargent terms them—utopias that “imagine that every aspect of social order can be susceptible to human control” (Introduction 3). The Gardeners assume—very realistically, given their circumstances— just the opposite. While locked in the Sticky Zone at Scales and Tails, Ren recalls that “Adam One used to say, If you can’t stop the waves, go sailing. Or else, What can’t be mended may still be tended. . . . Which meant that even bad things did some good because they were a challenge and you didn’t always know what good effects they might have” (Flood 279). Later, when Toby takes in a very sick and beaten Ren at the AnooYoo Spa, the willingness to give up what may feel like control and allow a situation to unfold, combined with a Gardeners’ teaching about compassion, helps reorient Toby toward the possibility of the future. Toby considers euthanizing the feverish Ren instead of nursing her back to health as a way of preserving her own limited food supply. This is going to be a lot of work, thinks Toby. And when Ren recovers—if she recovers—there will be two people eating instead of one. So the food stash will be gone twice as quickly. . . . Toby

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  167 considers the Death Angels. It wouldn’t take much. Just a little, in Ren’s weakened condition. Put her out of her misery. . . . I am an unworthy person, Toby thinks. Merely to have such an idea. . . . Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. (357–58) The next day, Toby is thankful she allowed Ren to live: “Now she’d like to cure her, cherish her, for isn’t it miraculous that Ren is here? . . . Just to have a second person on the premises . . . makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house” (360). The presence of Ren, which Toby now interprets through the Gardeners’ mindset of thankfulness, despite however much feeding Ren might accelerate her own starvation timeline, makes Toby believe that life might be able to go on. The concluding chapters of The Year of the Flood both look forward to the posthuman trajectory of Atwood’s doomsday scenario and confirm the efficacy of forms of ritual and spiritual memory as integral to the utopian arc of the MaddAddam trilogy. In his final spoken sermon, on the observance of Saint Julian and All Souls, Adam One intuits that he will soon die of the pandemic. Reciting from memory a passage from St. Julian of Norwich (whom Anderson also quotes, perhaps more cynically, in Feed) on God’s eternal cosmos, Adam strikes a tone of both resignation and hope. The world’s permanence is maintained by God, but Adam rejects the notion of humanity’s permanence promised by millenarian visions of a new Earth, for “why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place” (424). While admittedly tragic in his view of human destiny at this point, Adam looks to the possibility of a posthuman future and also preaches forgiveness of those who have persecuted and murdered and extinguished, saying, “This forgiveness is the hardest task we shall ever be called upon to perform” (425). The difficulty of forgiving enemies, of recognizing them as part of “All Souls,” gestures toward the hope of reconciliation. The coinciding denouement aligns temporally and spatially with the final scene of Oryx and Crake, with Toby and Ren, from one angle, and a delirious Jimmy, from another, all converging on the Painballers and a shackled Amanda. Managing to free Amanda and subdue the two Painballers, both Toby and Ren rely on habit memory learned from the Gardeners: Ren ties up the two men by braiding a piece of Toby’s clothing—“if there’s one thing the Gardeners taught you, it was craft uses for recycled materials”—and Toby, on the grounds that it is the feast night of Saint Julian and All Souls, refrains from inflicting any

168  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma vengeance on the criminals, shares food with them, and maintains equanimity by practicing the commemorative ritual, praying for strength from all absent and departed souls (429). Atwood juxtaposes this moment of the past infusing and sustaining the present with the novel’s final image, that of Crake’s intended replacement species for humans singing and approaching the encampment by torchlight. The Year of the Flood replies to or somewhat rewrites the bleak pessimism of Oryx and Crake, where, in the former novel, post-apocalyptic time for Snowman follows after dystopian risk society as a continual, belated reliving of traumatizing experiences. The Year of the Flood, on the other hand, while not minimizing the destructive and traumatizing impacts of dystopian neoliberalism and apocalyptic rupture, holds out the possibility that humans can change in order to avoid an absolute doomsday, but also, if/ when an apocalypse does come to pass, asserts that a future of sorts will follow that is still dependent on lessons from the past. MaddAddam, Atwood’s conclusion to her trilogy, shifts the narrative ground further into a posthuman, proto-utopian future that works through the human past of capitalism’s death spiral, and radically reshapes its traumatic excess into a posthuman form of mytho-history. MaddAddam resembles its prequels in structure and narrative chronology, but also differs from them in these same aspects. As with the two earlier novels, MaddAddam alternates between the decades of dystopia preceding Crake’s apocalypse—this time focusing on Zeb’s backstory— and the present moment in the post-apocalyptic world. Unlike its predecessors, however, which share virtually the exact same chronology told from two different vantage points—Jimmy’s Compound perspective and Toby and Ren’s pleebland perspective—the final novel begins in the post-apocalyptic moment at the point where The Year of the Flood ends and moves the story considerably forward in time. Also, the impetus and means of narrating Zeb’s pre-apocalyptic life—his years on the run from the Rev and his deep cover exploits with the counter-Corporate insurgent group MaddAddam—differ from how Atwood tells the early lives of Jimmy, Toby, and Ren. Narratively, Oryx and Crake essentially unfolds as the unbidden repetition of Jimmy’s traumatic memories; these memories play only in Snowman’s mind because he has no one to tell them to. In The Year of the Flood, the occasion for narrating the pre-apocalyptic lives of Toby and Ren also depends on both women’s total isolation from other people. Toby and Ren, who do not have Jimmy’s vaccine immunity to the pandemic, survive only because they are by choice or by chance quarantined away from everyone, Toby at the AnooYoo Spa and Ren at Scales and Tails. During the long aftermath of the cataclysm, as a way of dealing with their terrifying isolation, both women dwell on their memories of the past. In MaddAddam, however, Zeb’s history emerges as an actual telling and then retelling of his life occasioned by the Crakers’ need for

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  169 narrative meaning and religious certitude. Whereas the doubled temporality of Jimmy/Snowman’s trauma creates the structural dynamic of Oryx and Crake and the Gardeners’ liturgical calendar gives shape to The Year of the Flood, the ritual and psychological importance of telling and hearing stories in a post-apocalyptic world drives MaddAddam. The trilogy as a whole supposes a grounding reality of “the situation of what used to be thought of as the human race” (MaddAddam 91); namely, that the Crakers might replace the few surviving humans and become, as Crake planned, the reboot for humanity as a species. Despite Crake’s intentions, though, the Crakers exhibit curiosity and symbolic capacities and want to know why they exist. From Snowman, who needed to explain the world to them in terms they could understand, the Crakers have inherited a cosmogony of a divine Crake who created them and cleared away “the chaos” of before. In MaddAddam, the Crakers demand that Toby, as “the helper of Snowman-the-Jimmy,” take over the near-comatose Jimmy’s regular task of telling them “the stories of Crake” (38). In Jimmy’s estimation, the whole point of the story he spun for the Crakers was to “keep them from finding out what a bogus fraud everything is” (265). The Crakers also harbor a fascination with Zeb, who, they’ve been told, “eats a bear!” (48), and to appease their demand for Toby to tell them the story of Zeb, Toby must first learn the story of the man she loves but knows little about, save for their shared experience in the God’s Gardeners. Over a series of long nights, Toby pries Zeb’s story from him so that she can retell it to the Crakers in drastically altered and sanitized form: “There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too” (56). Toby’s story of Zeb then becomes part of Craker folklore, told alongside the more sacred stories of Crake and of Oryx (who created the animals). For the Crakers, hearing the stories daily of Crake, Oryx, and Zeb creates a worldview, an understanding of their place in a world whose prior history is incomprehensible to them precisely because their minds are engineered not to understand it. Stories provide the Crakers their only anchoring framework; as Toby notices, the Crakers “have no festivals, no calendars, no deadlines. No long-term goals” (136). Ultimately, by virtue of being written down by the Craker named Blackbeard, whom Toby teaches to read and write, the collection of stories about Crake, Oryx, and Zeb become the first posthuman mytho-historic account of the world. Each of the five sections of the novel dedicated to Zeb’s story follows the same structural pattern of beginning in the present with a short moment of quiet intimacy between Toby and Zeb, in which Toby requests portions of Zeb’s life story. As discussed earlier, Zeb’s traumatic childhood brought with it an early adulthood compulsion to forget his past: “He’d spent too much time in the dark back then, one way or another. All

170  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma of that needed to be forgotten, and he’d worked at forgetting it” (235). A couple of decades and one apocalypse later, Zeb is still reluctant to recollect his life; Toby has to plead with Zeb to fill in his story for her: “Help me out here,” says Toby. “I need more to go on, for the Crakers. They’re insatiable on the subject of you.” . . . “You’re their hero. They want your life story. Your miraculous origins, your supernatural deeds . . . You’re like royalty to them.” “Why me?” says Zeb. “I thought Crake did away with all that. They aren’t supposed to be interested.” “Well, they are. They’re obsessed with you. You’re their rock star.” . . . “At the very least I need the basics. The raw material.” Does she want to know about Zeb for the sake of the Crakers, or for herself? Both. But mostly for herself. . . . Zeb sighs. “I hate going back to all that. I had to live it, I don’t like reliving it. Who cares?” “I do,” says Toby. And so do you, she thinks. You still do care. “I’m listening.” (106) After these exchanges at the beginning of each section come Toby’s renditions of Zeb’s story for the Crakers, as in “The Story of the Birth of Zeb,” where Toby begins by following the ritual requirement of wearing Snowman’s Red Sox baseball cap, eating the offertory fish, and “listening” to Snowman’s shiny watch, through which Toby can supposedly hear Crake speak. Each time Toby tells a story—“A very long time ago, in the days of the chaos—before Crake cleared it all away—Zeb lived in the bone cave of his mother” (107)—she must pause to check the Crakers’ habitual singing and answer their incessant questions: “I will stop telling this story if you sing. Because it makes me forget what I am telling. . . . I don’t know why some people then were not kind. It was a thing of the chaos. . . . A manner of speaking means . . .” (108–09). Lastly come several chapters of Zeb’s detailed backstory, narrated by Atwood in free indirect discourse, interspersed with bits of dialogue between Zeb and Toby. These sections about Zeb’s life allow Atwood to further develop her dialectic of trauma; because Zeb and Toby are a generation older than Jimmy and Ren, Zeb’s particular history of being Adam One’s brother and his work with MaddAddam prior to the existence of the God’s Gardeners, extends Atwood’s dystopian history back several decades, provides additional detail to her depiction of catastrophic risk society, and fleshes out the myriad of interconnections between characters. Moreover, the Zeb sections of the novel signal that Atwood’s particular focus in MaddAddam on storytelling extends beyond the Crakers’ psychic need for repetition and reassurance. Stories are also crucial for humans coping with an apocalyptic loss, a loss which deprives the

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  171 remaining human society of nearly all normalized social and ritual processes. Like the Crakers, the surviving humans are left with “no calendars, no deadlines” but also no institutions or codified legal structure to govern daily existence. While the Crakers happen to derive no “longterm goals” from the daily telling of their folklore, Peter Brooks reminds us that (for humans), “Plots are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving” (12). The goal of storytelling in the post-apocalyptic world, echoing Toby’s belief that she and Zeb still care about how the traumas of the past impinge on the present, is to work through the past to arrive at a belief in the future, to refuse “to allow temporality to be meaningless” (Brooks 323). Canavan argues that the “political content of both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood is predicated on the increasingly desperate need to find some ‘outside’ to the closed, totalizing system called capitalism, which has . . . remade all of human history . . . in its image” (154). MaddAddam, to a far greater extent than the first two novels, imagines that post-capitalist “outside” as a “forward-moving” concern; as a result, Atwood largely dispenses with the satiric jeremiad to concentrate on how story memory will enable the human and the posthuman (the Crakers and possibly the pigoons also) to evolve productively together and to possibly fashion a utopia. Early in the trilogy’s conclusion, Atwood gestures figuratively toward how stories contribute to the emotional healing necessary for a belief in the future by triangulating stories with love and home. After rescuing Amanda, Toby and crew have made it back to the cobb house and garden home base of the surviving MaddAddamites and Gardeners. Toby is deathly worried, though, because Zeb has not returned from a scouting mission to find Adam One. When Zeb finally gets back, Toby cries with relief but also regret for not having the heart to execute the Painballers (who subsequently escaped) on the feast of Saint Julian: She turns away to leave: if she’s going to snivel, she should do it alone. Alone is how she feels, alone is how she’ll always be. Then she’s enfolded [by Zeb]. She’d waited so long, she’d given up waiting. She’d longed for this, and denied it was possible. But now how easy it is, like coming home must have been once, for those who’d had homes. Walking through the doorway into the familiar, the place that knows you, opens to you, allows you in. Tells you the stories you’ve needed to hear. Stories of the hands as well, and of the mouth. (49; emphasis added) Through past traumas of losing her parents and being brutalized by Blanco, Toby has constructed a self-narrative of being alone and unlovable. In the act of Zeb’s embrace of Toby, Atwood stresses that everyone, not just the Crakers, needs to hear certain stories and that stories are

172  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma constitutive of belonging, but also desire. In his formulation of narrative as desire, Brooks notes that in the modern novel, ambition becomes the paradigmatic desire, the “dominant dynamic of plot: a force that drives the protagonist forward . . . . to have, to do, and to be more” (39). But in the existential state of post-apocalyptic temporality, Atwood essentially reverses the causal relationship of ambition and narrative/story. Rather than positing ambition as the dynamic that drives plot/narrative forward, Atwood asserts that the idea to create narrative is first necessary to produce any real ambition. Waking up one morning and realizing she can no longer remember what day in the Gardener calendar it is, or all the words of a Gardener prayer, Toby discerns the haziness of post-apocalyptic time because the prospect of any definite future seems so improbable. She notices in herself the tendency to live only for her nights with Zeb, finding herself losing track of what she’s doing and then prodding herself: Move. Move now. Get moving. You need to . . . But what exactly is it she needs to do? It isn’t only her . . . . She’s noticed others . . . . [s]tanding still for no reason, listening though no one’s talking. Then jerking themselves back to the tangible, visibly making an effort. . . . It’s tempting to drift, as the Crakers seem to. (136) Toby recalls having the same feelings during her time at the AnooYoo Spa: Fending off the temptation to wander away . . . . It was like a trance, or sleepwalking. Give yourself up. Give up. Blend with the universe. You might as well. It was as if something or someone was whispering, enticing her into the darkness: Come in, come over here. Finish. It will be a relief. (137) As a deterrent to apathy and oblivion, Toby decides she should again take up keeping a daily journal as she did at the Spa; “She could [even] go further, and record the ways and sayings of the now-vanished God’s Gardeners for the future; for generations yet unborn . . . . If there is anyone in the future, that is; and if they’ll be able to read; which, come to think of it, are two big ifs” (135). Toby commences her journal, but like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, finds it difficult to imagine any future reader: “What else to write, besides the bare-facts daily chronicle she’s begun? What kind of story—what kind of history will be of any use at all, to people she can’t know will exist, in the future she can’t foresee?” (203). In the absence of clear certainty, Toby can only write her way into the belief that the future will happen, that people will survive to read her account. Remembering

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  173 the story of the past, setting it down as history, implies the assumption of a future, an act which generates the desire or ambition to bring the future into being. Although one might construe such belief as a form of blank, content-less utopianism, Toby’s act of rendering the past as story/ history for those in the future more accurately expresses Bloch’s Not-YetBecome: rejecting the notion of the world as finished (and done for) and maintaining an ethos of openness to the possibilities of a material world that is—and nowhere would this be truer than in an emergent post-apocalyptic society—unfinished and in a state of process. In her storytelling to the Crakers, Toby models this ethos of the unfinished as something generative, as something expecting a future actual presence: This is the story of Zeb and the Snake Women. . . . I have already told the beginning, so right now it’s the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story. I am not in this part of the story; it hasn’t come to the part with me. But I’m waiting, far off in the future. I’m waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you. (256–57; emphasis added) The consistent operation of storytelling in MaddAddam, both Zeb’s telling of a repressed traumatic past to Toby, which stands as a microcosm of late-capitalist risk society, and Toby’s conversion of that narrative into mytho-history for the Crakers, raises the question of narrative’s capacity to address the wounds of trauma. While critical theory, as noted at the outset of the chapter, has tended to view trauma as antithetical to representation and thus figure-able only as a rupture or an aporia in narrative, Luckhurst proposes an alternative through the narrative theory developed by Paul Ricoeur in his three-volume work Time and Narrative. Ricoeur begins with the proposition that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience” (1:3). Ricoeur broadly defines narrative as inclusive of fiction, history, folklore, and myth. Outside of narrative, as Ricoeur’s analysis of Augustine shows, we struggle to grasp time—does time exist? If it is without being, can it be measured? “The intelligibility engendered by emplotment,” however, is often challenged, both by experimental modes of narration and by historical “uniquely unique events” of horror, such as Auschwitz (1:54; 3:188). According to Ricoeur, emplotment consists of the tension that he terms “discordant concordance”; for example, the discordance wrought by modern modes of narration that fragment and “dechronologize” narrative manages ultimately to be brought into concordance by the overriding imperative of narrative itself to integrate disparate strands in order to give meaning to

174  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma temporal existence (Ricoeur 1:30; Luckhurst 84–85). While epoch-defining traumas, such as the Holocaust, also threaten our ability to understand, Luckhurst emphasizes that Ricoeur “reaffirms the role of fictional narrative against frozen horror” (85). As Ricoeur writes, “Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and weep” while also permitting “historiography to live up to the task of memory” (3:188–89). Indeed, Ricoeur argues that fiction and history are constantly interwoven and borrow from each other to concretize their own ways of seeing, which only happens insofar as “history in some way makes use of fiction to refigure time and, on the other hand, fiction makes use of history for the same ends” (3:181). The so-called “fictionalization of history” is particularly important for ethically representing the individuation of suffering attendant on a trauma that historical explanation alone cannot encompass (3:181,188). Concurrently, by the “historization of fiction,” Ricoeur insists that all “Fictional narrative is quasi-historical to the extent that the unreal events that it relates are past facts for the narrative voice that addresses itself to the reader” (3:190). By recounting something fictional “as if it were past,” fiction detects “possibilities that were not actualized in the historical past”; or, in utopian/dystopian narrative, fiction depicts “as if past” certain possibilities that may actualize in the future (3:189,191). Ricoeur’s understanding of fiction and history as interwoven is suggestive of Atwood’s narrative deployment in MaddAddam. The concept of the “historization of fiction,” which, in keeping with Ricoeur’s objection that structuralism capitulated to the notion of the text as a closed object removed from the intentionalities of authors and readers, underscores how narrators influence the temporal operations of texts (Macey 332). Taking a quick glance beyond Atwood’s maneuverings as the narrative voice of MaddAddam, we can see that the historization of fiction as a conceptual node accords with the tight correlation between history and dystopian fiction “as warning,” and with Atwood’s assertion that the MaddAddam plotline invents nothing really new and could very well be actualized. Returning to the text with Ricoeur’s claim that all fiction is quasi-historical due to the apparent pastness of the events related by the narrator (even in present tense, temporal lags exist between phenomena and narration, and narration and reading), Atwood’s narrative manifestly presents a history. In addition to the before/after temporal scheme of rupture inherent to post-apocalyptic fiction, Atwood, as we have seen, constructs a historical dialectic of new forms of social organization emerging from existing forms of neoliberalism. Numerous times within the MaddAddam novels, Atwood uses the phrase “Already, back then,” or a similar variant (e.g. “But back then, in the early days” or “in those days”; MaddAddam 298, 59) to signal, without pinpointing an exact time period, that social and historical processes of change have continually been in play. But here I want to settle on one of Atwood’s

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  175 primary modes of narrating the trilogy, that of free indirect style, as a central means by which she effects the historization of fiction and positions the narrative voice as a historian of the traumatic. Free indirect style, or free indirect discourse, combines a third-person narration with elements of a character’s first-person consciousness and direct speech. In Madame Bovary on Trial (1982), LaCapra observes that “Free indirect style has the peculiarity of being very easy to recognize but rather difficult to analyze” (126). Atwood employs free indirect style throughout the trilogy, interspersed with directly quoted dialogue, passages of third-person “objective” description, and the notable exception of Ren’s sections of The Year of the Flood, which are narrated in firstperson to distinguish them from Toby’s third-person/free indirect sections. Through free indirect style, Atwood brings the reader into the immediate proximity of characters’ thoughts but retains an overlay of distance that enables readers to observe from without; for instance, in Oryx and Crake, Jimmy, depressed from his mother’s death, half-dreams a vision of young girls in danger: “Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger, a fanged animal gazing out from the shadowy cave of the space inside his own skull” (261). Here, Jimmy represents himself to himself as a potential agent of violence (the “fanged animal”), but the reader remains just external to the psychodrama. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra interrogates the efficacy of free indirect style for the purposes of historiography dealing with limit events. LaCapra first traces an argument made by Hayden White, well known for defending the fictive (or tropological) structures that undergird historiography, regarding Holocaust representation.10 White takes up Berel Lang’s oversimplified appropriation of Roland Barthes’s essay “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?”, in which Lang invokes the intransitive (“the writer who writes-himself”) as “a model of the kind of discourse appropriate to” Jewish representation of the Holocaust (White, “Historical,” 47). While White acknowledges that Barthes himself looked to recuperate the ancient Greek intransitive “middle voice” as a way to distinguish modernism’s resistance to binary opposites (subject/object, fact/fiction) from classical realism, he ultimately agrees with Lang on the virtues of the intransitive middle voice: What all this suggests is that modernist modes of representation may offer possibilities of representing the reality of both the Holocaust and the experience of it that no other version of realism could do. Indeed, we can follow out Lang’s suggestion that the best way to represent the Holocaust and the experience of it may well be by a kind of ‘intransitive writing’ which lays no claim to the kind of realism aspired to by the nineteenth-century historians and writers. But we may want to consider that by intransitive writing we must intend something like the relationship to that event expressed in the middle voice. (52)

176  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma In criticizing White for advocating “the middle voice in undifferentiated terms as the proper way of representing the Holocaust,” LaCapra observes that White “tends to conflate the middle voice with intransitive writing” (25, 19). LaCapra points out that “Modern languages do not have a middle voice in grammar but may at best allow for a discursive analogue of it” (19). In other words, LaCapra argues for a broader understanding of the middle voice than strictly intransitive writing, and as concerns historiography, suggests that a modulated approach to the middle voice is called for in difficult cases involving empathic identification with the subject: “the use in historiography of some discursive analogue of the middle voice might be most justified with respect to one’s most tangled and difficult relations of proximity and distance with regard to the other” (29). Rather than commending the intransitive as the most suitable voice for writing trauma, LaCapra looks instead to free indirect discourse (Erlebte Rede) as a “hybridized, internally dialogized form” wherein the narrator engages with the object of narration using techniques that employ “modulations of irony and empathy, distance and proximity” (196–97). I would suggest that by narrating the MaddAddam novels frequently using free indirect style, Atwood approximates the historiographical mode described by LaCapra.11 As a dialogic narrative form, free indirect style suits Atwood’s intention to have her readers empathize with the traumas suffered and relived by her protagonists, but at the same time to ironically/satirically situate at least some of her protagonists as complicit in the catastrophes that traumatize. As a youth, Jimmy reels from the loss of his mother, but thoughtlessly participates (as does Crake) in the exploitative porn industry that victimizes countless girls and boys and their families. Years later, the reader can identify and empathize with Snowman’s regret at not realizing Crake’s plan—“How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks”—yet, by representing Snowman’s consciousness in the third person, Atwood maintains a distance that clearly establishes Jimmy’s prior unwillingness to look at his situation critically: “There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured” (O & C 184). In a similar vein, Atwood narrates moments where Zeb relives the trauma of being abused by his father in free indirect style—“Have you been sick? What’s that on your chin? He said, You’re a dog, eat your own vomit . . .”—which generates sympathy for Zeb’s later murder of the Rev using HelthWyzer’s evil disease pills (MaddAddam 77). However, Atwood also wants readers to recognize that Zeb’s own bioresistance maneuvers with MaddAddam, however intentioned, amount to terroristic “time bombs” (Flood 333), a fact compounded by the MaddAddamites’ general refusal to own their complicity for doing “the heavy lifting on the BlyssPluss pill” (the delivery device of Crake’s pandemic) (395; see also Jennings 15). By slipping

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  177 in and out of free indirect style, by frequently modulating or inflecting her narrative voice, Atwood approaches her dialectic of trauma somewhat like a historian of trauma (albeit more playfully), carefully weighing the responsibilities of representation. The counterpart to Ricoeur’s historization of fiction is the “fictionalization of history,” which, within the text of MaddAddam, becomes literalized in Toby’s storytelling duties to the Crakers. Toby’s weaving of Zeb’s story for the Crakers can be seen as a particular attempt at working through trauma by achieving distance from it. LaCapra has defined “working through” as a “countervailing force” (but not a totally different process) to the acting out, or compulsive repetition, of trauma (143). In working through, a person tries to gain critical distance on a problem and to distinguish between past, present, and future. . . . for the victim, this means the ability to say to oneself: ‘Yes, that happened to me back then. It was distressing, overwhelming, . . . but I’m existing here and now, and this is different from back then.’ . . . it’s via the working through that one acquires the possibility of being an ethical and political agent. (143–44) It is important to state that Toby’s mythic storytelling does not correspond exactly to LaCapra’s process of working through. For one thing, Toby is not telling of her own experience as a victim, although she has been one. I also do not mean to suggest that Toby’s act of storytelling equates with the act of bearing witness to a traumatic event; nor does Toby’s role as “oral historian” approach the fraught position of the historian of limit events, who must navigate the situation of “being transferentially implicated in the problems” the historian studies, as in, for instance, falling into full identification with the experience of victims (LaCapra 147). Nevertheless, in her telling, Toby spontaneously and creatively renders Zeb’s experience in dystopian risk society (“So Zeb wandered deeper and deeper into dangerous places, where there were a great many bad men doing cruel and hurtful things”) as an experience where Zeb could say, “Oh Fuck! And Fuck flew through the air, and spoke to Zeb, and said he would help Zeb get away safely” (164–65).12 This approach limns pre-apocalyptic time and experience as essentially comic, not tragic. While not in any literal way truthful to the particulars of Zeb’s experiences, and while it is tempting to see her rendition as facile, Toby’s fictionalized history effects a certain temporal and emotional distance from the chaos of the time leading up to the apocalypse. In stressing that the chaos threatening Zeb is safely in the past, and in her comic (although seriously told) treatment of his life, Toby possibly provides an emotional release to Zeb: “That’s enough of the story  for  tonight.

178  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma You  already know that Zeb got away safely because he’s sitting right over there, isn’t he? And he’s very happy to be hearing this story. That is why he is laughing now” (165). Toby’s storytelling gestures toward working through for herself and for Zeb in that, as LaCapra writes, “to the extent one works through trauma . . . one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future” (22). Toby’s conversion of Zeb’s difficult past into part of the Crakers’ mytho-history bears out Luckhurst’s reading of Ricoeur, which suggests that traumatic discordance is the constant spur to innovations in narrative concordance. . . . Narrative is spurred to shape this disruptive anomaly into new kinds of forms, each foregrounding, sometimes more, sometimes less, the violent tension between discordance and concordance. These new forms in turn become the places where we try out the re-significations of self that trauma has wrought on contemporary subjectivity. (85–86) In her role as historian, Toby writes down the story of Zeb—who is refigured as “our Defender against the bad men who did cruel and hurtful things”—alongside the stories of Crake and Oryx, which together become the Book of Toby passed on to the Crakers (387). The traumas of pre-apocalyptic time as well as the apocalypse itself get reworked into a fictional history of “this safe and beautiful World for us to live in,” which serves as the Crakers’ collective memory (387). While Jimmy views his storytelling cynically as covering up “what a bogus fraud everything is,” Toby’s account, however fictionalized, functions as “a thing of hope” which anchors the new human/posthuman collective (390). As Toby remembers from listening skeptically to Pilar’s story that bees can carry messages from the dead, “People need such stories, Pilar once said, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void” (154). As Atwood’s trilogy completes its arc from neoliberal dystopia to apocalyptic rupture to post-apocalyptic proto-utopia, Toby and Blackbeard’s written mytho-history, as the formational text of a new collective memory, concretizes the human/posthuman need for bodies of archival and living memory. Although the humans who remain after the deaths of Zeb and Toby (e.g. Ren, Crozier, Swift Fox) do not share the Crakers’ belief in their stories, the growing number of hybrid children born to human and Craker parents mentioned at the end of the novel foretells that the Craker cosmogony will become part of the narrative fabric of the entire collective. The Crakers’ ongoing use of the Words of Crake, Oryx, Zeb, and Toby indicates a certain continuity within change in

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  179 Atwood’s conception of culture. If, as has been argued, Oryx and Crake commits to a “conventional humanism that values high culture” as the unique product of human consciousness, by the end of the trilogy Atwood shifts toward a more critical posthumanist stance which questions human exceptionalism and locates cultural aspiration and achievement within multiple forms of consciousness.13 What does not change in Atwood’s future vision, however, is the belief that memory is foundational to culture and society, and thus to utopian change. To want a better future, groups have to be able to remember something of their past. Given the Crakers’ notable lack of repressive self-consciousness, it is possible that in their future, their collective memory will function like the liberating, recovered “archaic” past of freedom theorized by Marcuse. Or, more prosaically, as the hybrid, co-developing, and interdependent human/posthuman collective starts to set its eyes on the future, its social dreaming might become rooted in the historically evolving memories of its members. Whichever way or whatever form humanity evolves into following the end of the world, the MaddAddam trilogy suggests, as has this entire book, that memory will function as its lodestar and be a precondition for utopian dreaming.

Notes 1 Since Luckhurst, Leys, LeCapra, and Kansteiner have all discussed/critiqued Caruth’s formulations and the lineage that informs her understanding of trauma—Freud, Adorno, Lyotard, de Man, and the Yale School—in significant depth, my summation will be much more cursory. See Luckhurst 4–10; Leys 266–97; LeCapra 181–85; Kansteiner 203–07. 2 On Atwood’s interest and long engagement with fairy tales, see, for instance, her “Grimms’ Remembered,” in Donald Haase, ed. The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, Wayne State UP, 1993; her novel The Robber Bride (1993); her short story “There Was Once” in Good Bones, 1992; Shraron Rose Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, Mississippi UP, 2010. 3 On the fundamental point that utopian/dystopian worlds, like science fiction worlds, need to be recognizable but also unrecognizable at the same time, see Darko Suvin’s classic Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 53–54; also Snyder 470. 4 Luckhurst helpfully shows how Boris Tomashevsky’s formalist essay “Thematics,” which argues that story (fabula) and plot (sjuzet) are never completely in sync because the time of the narrative (what’s happening) can never be exactly the same moment as the moment of narration, was adapted by Peter Brooks (see “Freud’s Masterplot” chapter in Reading for the Plot, 1984) into a “traumatic theory of narrative” (83). Tomashevsky and Brooks’s theories, Luckhurst argues, point to how the “mechanics of narrative structure . . . relates the allure of storytelling to an inaugurating trauma” (84). For other discussions of Oryx and Crake’s narrative structure, see Snyder 475–76 and Howells 170–73. 5 Zeb’s deep cover exploits with the Bearlift outfit in MaddAddam detail the evolving economic landscape of resource scarcity. Bearlift was a

180  MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma well-meaning scam that airlifted “rancid biotrash around the far north” to feed the starving bear population (58). Toby is surprised by this form of resource allocation. ‘This was before the oil shortage really kicked in?’ says Toby. ‘And the carbon garboil business took off. Otherwise, they’d never have let you waste such valuable primary material on bears.’ ‘It was before a lot of things,’ says Zeb. ‘Though oil prices were already getting pretty steep’. (58) 6 Atwood embeds this brief backstory of the CorpSeCorps within layers of memory and history. In the present moment of the text, in the weeks after Crake’s pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby is holed up at the AnooYoo Spa. She has her father’s old hunting rifle, which her father had buried years before when the CorpSeCorps had outlawed firearms, and which she had she dug up during a trek to her parents’ old neighborhood in the early days of the pandemic. The rifle triggers childhood memories of her father’s refusal to sell their house to a developer. “He thought the world was still the way it had been fifty years before, thinks Toby. He shouldn’t have been so stubborn. Already, back then, the CorpSeCorps were consolidating their power” (25). Toby’s father believed the world was still like it had been fifty years previous—meaning how the United States exists in the reader’s present, with fairly robust levels of democratic participation and civic government. But that United States already no longer exists for young Toby and her parents. The CorpSeCorps, then, does not appear overnight, nor does the breakdown of the public sphere happen instantly, a point which reinforces Atwood’s assertion in “Writing Oryx and Crake” that “Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on?” 7 For other discussions of how Crake embodies the instrumental and profit-driven values of the Compounds, see for instance, Ariel Kroon’s analysis of Crake’s affect in “Reasonably Insane,” 18–33. 8 Baccolini and Moylan distinguish between traditional dystopias that keep utopian hope outside the text itself and critical dystopias which function more ambiguously and allow utopian hope within the text. See Dark Horizons, “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories” 7. 9 Contrary to being passive victims who abnegate their responsibilities to work for the present, as Jennings suggests, the Gardeners combine preparation for approaching disaster—e.g. constructing their Ararats (food reservoirs)— with active efforts to protect lives and subvert the Corporations: Adam One bravely saves Toby from an almost certain death at the hands of Blanco at SecretBurgers, and the Gardeners provide high-risk sanctuary and safe passage for Jimmy’s mother and other corporate insiders who defect. 10 See White’s “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” 37–53. 11 I do not intend to suggest an exact correspondence between LaCapra’s historiographical nod to free indirect style and Atwood’s narrative voice. The primary difference between them is that LaCapra identifies free indirect style as the appropriate mode for writing trauma when the historian is “empathically unsettled and able to judge or even predicate only in a hesitant, tentative fashion. It would not seem to be a vehicle for truth claims or for ethico-political judgments having any significant degree of decisiveness” (197). In the earlier Madame Bovary on Trial, LaCapra states that free indirect style “can

MaddAddam Trilogy and Dialectic of Trauma  181 be seen as a self-questioning mode of satire” (149). Atwood writes with no apparent uncertainty or ethical hesitancy to make satirical judgments about the state of the world. 12 Toby creates the character of Fuck as a spiritual “friend and helper” (164) to Zeb and Snowman-the-Jimmy because the Crakers overhear Jimmy, in his fevered delirium, mutter “Oh fuck” (146). Because the Crakers address other people as Oh Toby, Oh Snowman, etc., they surmise that Jimmy is calling to a person named Fuck. The Craker Abraham Lincoln asks, “Who is this Fuck? . . . Why is he talking to this Fuck? That is not the name of anyone here” (146). 13 On Atwood’s “conventional humanism” in Oryx and Crake, see Ursula Heise, “The Android and the Animal,” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 503–10, at 507; quoted here in Defalco 436. Defalco discusses critical posthumanism in relation to Atwood, 436–37.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abdel Aziz, Basma 148; The Queue 147 activist movements 85, 104n16 Adams, Karen 93 Addis, Donna Rose 3 Adorno, Theodor W. 105; Dialectic of Enlightenment 24 American Psychiatric Association 143 anagnorisis 91–2, 109, 116–17, 119 anamnesis 116 ancestral memory 27, 44, 51–3, 59 Anderson, Benedict 26–7 Anderson, M. T. 102, 128, 130, 131, 133–6, 138, 140, 142n7; Feed 107, 108, 122–30, 144, 152 Anderson, Perry 67 Animal Farm (Orwell) 44 anti-modernism 54 anti-utopianism 43; dystopias 107; narratives 42 apocalypticism 164, 165 Appadurai, Arjun 61n9 Archaeologies of the Future (Jameson) 7, 66 archistic bureaucracy 79 Arendt, Hannah 45 Arguing the Apocalypse (O’Leary) 164 Armstrong, Jennifer: Fire-Us Trilogy 125 “art of memory” model 21 Assmann, Jan 80, 98 Atwood, Margaret 89, 104n17, 110, 140–141, 180n6, 180n11; The Handmaid’s Tale 10; MaddAddam trilogy 146, 148–63, 167–79; Oryx and Crake 148–50, 152, 155, 159, 162, 163, 167, 168, 171, 175, 179;

The Year of the Flood (Atwood) 149, 159–61, 163–8 Auerbach, Jonathan 29–30, 34 Baccolini, Raffaella 9, 10, 108, 141n2, 151, 180n8 Bacigalupi, Paolo: Ship Breaker 125 Bacon, Francis: New Atlantis 19 Baruch, Elaine Hoffman 93 Basu, Balaka: Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers 107 Baudrillard, Jean 122–4, 126 Bauman, Zygmunt 15, 65; Retrotopia 60, 105 Bear, Greg: Moving Mars 131 Beaumont, Matthew 5, 24, 31, 38 Beck, Ulrich 147 Bellamy, Edward 27, 43, 51, 54, 110; “The Blindman’s World” 33, 36; Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process 35–41; Looking Backward 27–41, 69, 70 Benjamin, Walter 44, 54–6, 59, 106; Illuminations 52 Bergson, Henri 2, 53, 98; Matter and Memory 52 The Birth of Theory (Cole) 4 Bittner, James 79, 83 “The Blindman’s World” (Bellamy) 33, 36 Bloch, Ernst 3, 5, 6, 31, 40, 68, 78, 83, 91, 108–22, 137, 138, 141n4, 148, 173; Heritage of Our Times 4; The Principle of Hope 118; The Spirit of Utopia 118 Body Heat (Kasdan) 127 Booker, Keith 93 Bourdieu, Pierre 11, 26

194 Index Boym, Svetlana 106 Brave New World (Huxley) 109, 111 Broad, Katherine: Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers 107 Brooks, Peter 89, 171, 172, 179n4 Bullen, Elizabeth 123, 132, 140 Burwell, Jennifer: Notes from Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic and Social Transformation 117 Butcher, Nancy: Fire-Us Trilogy 125 Callenbach, Ernestt 94 Campanella, Tommaso 15; The City of the Sun 16, 69 Canady, Jacobo 138 Canavan, Gerry 151, 156, 171 canonical utopias 69 capitalism 31, 41–3, 49, 66, 85–6, 100–1, 105, 123, 130, 149; commodity 123; developmental processes 25; disaster 159; free market 160; industrial 29, 35, 38; liberal 11; liberal-democratic 67; modern 147 Carr, Nicholas 132, 135 Caruth, Cathy 144, 146, 152, 153; Unclaimed Experience 145 The City of the Sun (Campanella) 16, 69 Coalition of Pity 124, 126, 128, 136–8 Cohen, Margaret 56 Cold War 41, 43, 60 Cole, Andrew: The Birth of Theory 4 collective memory 2, 3, 14, 17, 19, 22, 24, 44, 60, 70, 74, 77, 80–3, 113, 178; and causality 92–102; function of 84 Collins, Suzanne 108; The Hunger Games 107, 108, 125 commodity 24–5, 34, 42; analysis of 24; capitalism 123; culture 138; electronic 85; spectacle grounded in 61n9 communal living 65, 69 communicative memory 80 The Concept of Utopia (Levitas) 5 Condie, Ally: Matched 107, 108 Connerton, Paul 16–17, 98–100, 112, 113; How Societies Remember 97 conservative mentality 58, 59 constructive episodic simulation hypothesis 3–4

consumerism 34, 108, 123, 124, 163 Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers (Basu, Broad and Hintz) 107 contemporary trauma discourse 144, 145 Copernican revolution 14 counter-discourse 9–12, 13n9, 29, 54 critical utopias 20, 60, 65–7, 102; characteristic of 139; and temporality 68–70; writers of 70, 87 cultural amnesia 105, 107–9, 121, 122, 124, 130 cultural memory 51, 80, 82, 94–6, 98, 105, 126 cultural trauma theory 143–9 culture: as field of struggle 11; memory in 2; United States 136 Dashner, James: The Maze Runner 125 “The Day Before the Revolution” (Le Guin) 71–2, 80, 86 Debord, Guy 61n9; The Society of the Spectacle 126–7 Defalco, Amelia 157, 158 Delany, Samuel R. 82; Triton 65, 69, 87 DeLillo, Don: White Noise 119–20 Demand the Impossible (Moylan) 65 democratic socialism 41, 44 Derrida, Jacques 38 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 143 dialectic: of dystopia 149–63; historical 70, 174; of residual and emergent forms 158; of trauma 148, 155, 156, 177; utopia as 5 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 24 disaster capitalism 159 discourse 10–12; one-dimensional 42; of trauma 143 discursive memory 46 discursivity 3, 9 The Dispossessed (Le Guin) 20, 65, 67, 68, 70–87, 95, 103n9, 103n13, 139 Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (Bellamy) 35–41 dystopia 9, 10, 40–60, 102, 141n2; dialectic of 149–63; fictions 12, 152, 174; hyper-capitalism 148; narratives 5, 110; regimes 9; risk society 155; scholarship 41; utopias and 151

Index  195 Eagleton, Terry 27 Eastman, Max 41 “education of desire” 5, 123–4 Edwards, Jonathan 35 Ekumen 72, 79, 85 electronic commodity 85 Eliot, George 26 Eltoukhy, Nael: Women of Karantina 147 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 35 engram 1, 3, 116 “equality of androgyny” 93 Erfahrung 56, 59, 106 Erlebnis 56 Eros and Civilization (Marcuse) 44 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 21 European totalitarian dictatorships 43 Farmer, Nancy: The House of the Scorpion 108 Feed (Anderson) 107, 108, 122–30, 144, 152; remembering, dreaming, and possibility of recovering historical consciousness 130–41 Fekete, John 78, 81, 103n11 The Female Man (Russ) 65 Ferguson, Frances 16, 21, 22 Ferns, Chris 109, 110, 119 feudalism 31 fiction: historization of 174, 177; and history 174; history and dystopian 174; post-apocalyptic 151, 156, 174; science 31, 65, 71, 87, 109, 114, 123, 131, 149; utopian 12; young adult dystopia 124 “fictionalization of history” 174, 177 Finigan, Theo 45, 51 Fire-Us Trilogy (Armstrong and Butcher) 125 Fitting, Peter 8, 9 Foucault, Michel 11 free indirect style/discourse 175–7 free market capitalism 160 French Revolution 21, 23 French revolutionary period 14 Freud, Sigmund 44; Moses and Monotheism 145 Fritzsche, Peter 23, 24, 61n8 Frow, John 21, 61n9 Frye, Northrop 15, 16, 69, 83, 94 Fukuyama, Francis 67 functional rationalism 41

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Tönnies) 25–6 Geoghegan, Vincent 3, 4, 116 Gibson, William: Neuromancer 115, 135 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Herland 70 The Giver (Lowry) 107–22, 137 Gober, Robert 7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 31 Gramsci, Antonio 11 Great Railroad Strike (1877) 28 The Great Transformation (Polanyi) 160 Greenblatt, Stephen 14 group memory 2, 112 Gygax, Franziska 89 habit memory 98, 100, 167 Hainish cycle 72, 85 Halbwachs, Maurice 2, 112; On Collective Memory 54 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 10 Heffernan, Teresa 164 hegemony 10, 11, 111, 123 Heritage of Our Times (Bloch) 4 Herland (Gilman) 70 He, She, and It (Piercy) 87 Hintz, Carrie: Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers 107 historical memory 18, 43, 109, 111, 121, 123 historicism 49, 132 historicity 18, 50, 97; loss of 122–30; memory and 130; temporal 137; utopian 106 historization of fiction 174, 177 history: dialectical 70; and dystopian fiction 174; fiction and 174; and memory 114, 133; representational work of 27 Holocaust 143, 146, 174–6 Horkheimer, Max: Dialectic of Enlightenment 24 The House of the Scorpion (Farmer) 108 Howe, Irving 41, 43, 57 How Societies Remember (Connerton) 97 The Hunger Games (Collins) 107, 108, 125 Huxley, Aldous 41, 43

196 Index Huyssen, Andreas 106, 122, 140, 144, 145, 149; Present Pasts 105; Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia 105 hybrid “ustopias” 149–50 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim) 57, 121 Illuminations (Benjamin) 52 Imaginary Communities (Wegner) 27 Imaginary Reconstitution of Society 6 individual memory 2, 70, 76–7, 87–92, 95 industrial capitalism 29, 35, 38 industrialism 34, 42 industrialization 23, 24 industrial monopolies, rise of 28 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 52–3 intransitive middle voice 175–6 “Invisible Machine” 14 involuntary memory 53, 56–7, 106 Jameson, Fredric 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13n5, 15, 17, 19, 31, 67, 71, 81, 85, 102, 126, 127, 129, 130; Archaeologies of the Future 7, 66; Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 7, 124; The Seeds of Time 7 Jay, Martin 56 Jung, Carl 71 Kansteiner, Wulf 76, 95, 144, 146 Kasdan, Lawrence: Body Heat 127 Khouri, Nadia 103n11 Klein, Naomi 159 Kolk, Bessel van der 145 Koselleck, Reinhart 23 LaCapra, Dominick 157, 176–8, 180n11; Madame Bovary on Trial 175, 180n11; Writing History, Writing Trauma 155–6, 175 Landon, Brooks 134 L’An Duex Mille Quatre Cent Quarante (Mercier) 22 Lang, Berel 175 Latour, Bruno 146 The Left Hand of Darkness, (Le Guin) 85 Legend (Lu) 125 Le Guin, Ursula K. 94, 101, 102, 103n11; “The Day Before the

Revolution” 71–2, 80, 86; The Dispossessed 20, 65, 67, 68, 70–87, 95, 103n9, 103n13, 139; The Left Hand of Darkness, 85 Levitas, Ruth 7, 25, 68; The Concept of Utopia 5; Utopia as Method 6 Levy, Michael 114, 120, 123, 129 Leys, Ruth: Trauma: A Genealogy 145 liberal capitalism 11 liberal-democratic capitalism 67 lieux de mémoire 74, 75, 86 liquid modernity 60 Locke, John: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 21 Looking Backward (Bellamy) 27–41, 69, 70 Loomis, Charles P. 26 Lowry, Lois 102, 124; The Giver 107–22 Luckhurst, Roger 146, 152, 174, 178, 179n4; The Trauma Question 147 Lukács, Georg 24 Lu, Marie: Legend 125 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 146 Madame Bovary on Trial (LaCapra) 175, 180n11 MaddAddam (2013) 148–63, 168–71, 173, 174, 177, 179–80n5 MaddAddam trilogy (Atwood) 146, 148–63, 167–79 Mannheim, Karl 41, 58; Ideology and Utopia 57, 121 Man, Paul de 145 Marcuse, Herbert 45, 47, 54, 63n28, 119; Eros and Civilization 44; OneDimensional Man 41–2, 63n28 Marin, Louis 17; Utopiques 7 mass medium 61n8 Massumi, Brian 138 Matched (Condie) 107, 108 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 52 The Maze Runner (Dashner) 125 McCarthy, Cormac: The Road 152 McKinney, John C. 26 memory: activities and types of 1; ancestral 27, 44, 51–3, 59; collective historical function loss 19; communicative 80; cultural 2, 51, 80, 82, 94–6, 98, 105, 126; discursive 46; group 2, 112; habit 98, 100, 167; historical 18, 43, 109, 111, 121, 123; and history 114, 133; individual 2, 70, 76–7,

Index  197 87–92, 95; involuntary 53, 56–7, 106; limits of 41–60; loss of 105; methodological weaknesses of 76; morality of 27–41; multidirectional 21; neural processes of 1; and Not-Yet-Conscious 108–22; performative mode of 17; Platonic conception of 116; postmodern 134; postmodern vectors of 106; post-traumatic 148, 152, 158; problem of 35; relation to utopia 3; romantic 21; as social faculty 112; social formation of 97; as subjective and creative 117; transference of 114; traumatic 144–6, 149–63; unconscious 2, 132; voluntary 53; as working through of trauma 163–79 memory crisis 20–7, 105, 154 Men Like Gods (Wells) 69 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien: L’An Duex Mille Quatre Cent Quarante 22 Miller, Laura 107 modern capitalism 147 modernity 16, 23, 26, 105, 113; collective memory function in 84; liquid 60, 65; nation-spaces of 27; spatial and political form of 27 morality, of memory 27–41 More, Thomas 94, 110, 144; Utopia 14–20, 69 Morris, William 15, 94; News from Nowhere 69 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 145 Moving Mars (Bear) 131 Moylan, Tom 6, 8, 9, 42, 70, 71, 78, 85, 87, 89, 93, 101, 103n11, 108, 110, 141n2, 180n8; Demand the Impossible 65 multidirectional memory 21 Multidirectional Memory (Rothberg) 138 Mumford, Lewis 15; “Utopia, The City and The Machine” 14 The Natural History of the German People (Riehl) 26 neo-liberal “conservative utopia” 67 neoliberalism 174; dystopian 168 Neuromancer (Gibson) 115, 135 New Atlantis (Bacon) 19 News from Nowhere (Morris) 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich 49–50, 105–6

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 9, 10, 40–60, 63n27, 108, 109, 111, 119, 172 Nodelman, Perry 124 Nora, Pierre 3, 24, 27, 74, 75, 105, 130, 132–4 Notes from Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic and Social Transformation (Burwell) 118 O’Leary, Stephen: Arguing the Apocalypse 164 Oliver, Lauren 107 On Collective Memory (Halbwachs) 54 one-dimensional discourse 42 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 41–2, 63n28 “oral historian” approach 177 Orwell, George 40, 110; Animal Farm 44; Nineteen Eighty-Four 9, 10, 40–60, 172; The Road to Wigan Pier 48 Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 112, 148–50, 152, 155, 159, 162, 163, 167, 168, 171, 175, 178–9 Otared (Rabie) 147 Pacific Edge (Robinson) 20, 25 Paris Commune revolution (1871) 28–9 Parsons, Elizabeth 123, 132, 140 Philmus, Robert 81 Piercy, Marge 69; collective memory and causality in utopia 92–102; He, She, and It 87; Woman on the Edge of Time 8, 20, 65–8, 70, 87–92, 101, 102, 102n2 Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation 160 post-apocalypse 149–63 post-apocalyptic fiction 151, 156, 174 post-apocalyptic society 173 posthuman proto-utopia 163–79 postmodern aesthetics 122–30 postmodernism 122, 125, 127 Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) 7, 124 postmodern memory 134 postmodern society 132 poststructuralist model 3 post-traumatic memory 148, 152, 158 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 143

198 Index The Prelude (Wordsworth) 21 Present Past (Terdiman) 23 Present Pasts (Huyssen) 105 “prevented future” 5, 38, 60 The Principle of Hope (Bloch) 118 Production Distribution Committee (PDC) 77, 79 Proust, Marcel 44, 52, 56, 106; In Search of Lost Time 52–3 The Queue (Abdel Aziz ) 147 Rabie, Mohammed: Otared 147 radical social movements 9 religious rites 60n5 Renaissance 14, 21 representational space 17, 20, 97 Resch, Robert Paul 44, 47, 48–9, 63n27 Retrotopia (Bauman) 60, 105 revolutionary/industrial era 61n10 Richter, Gerhard 53 Ricoeur, Paul 174, 177, 178; Time and Narrative 173 Riehl, W. H.: The Natural History of the German People 26 Riis, Jacob 40 Riot Gear 127, 128 risk society 143–9, 163; dystopian 155 ritual behaviors 16–19 The Road (McCarthy) 152 The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell) 48 Roberts, Adam 129 Robinson, Kim Stanley: 2312 94, 131; Pacific Edge 20, 25 Roemer, Kenneth 40 romantic memory 21 Rothberg, Michael: Multidirectional Memory 138 Roth, Michael S. 25 Roth, Veronica 107 Rushkoff, Douglas 126 Russ, Joanna: The Female Man 65 Sambell, Kay 124 Sargent, Lyman Tower 5, 15, 19, 66, 70, 108 Sassen, Saskia 112 Schacter, Daniel 3, 116, 117 Schwartz, Barry 81 Schwebel, Sara 123, 140 science: fiction 31, 65, 71, 87, 109, 114, 123, 131, 149; ideology of 14

The Seeds of Time (Jameson) 7 semi-autobiographical mode 52 Seneca Falls Convention 97 Ship Breaker (Bacigalupi) 125 Smith, Winston 9, 172 Snyder, Katherine 151 social behaviors 16, 17, 69 social dreaming 3, 5, 85, 90, 108, 179 socialism 28, 41, 43, 48, 49, 61n13, 67 social transformations 24, 25, 37, 42 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 126–7 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de 67 space: representational 17, 20, 97; rethinking of 27; of retrospective contemplativeness 98; utopian 7, 107 The Spirit of Utopia (Bloch) 118 static temporality 14–19 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 27 temporality: critical utopias and 68–70; philosophy of 1; static 14–19 Terdiman, Richard 1, 3, 9–12, 21, 24, 25, 27, 40, 42, 61n9, 67, 105, 154; Present Past 23 “Thematics” (Tomashevsky) 179n4 Thomas, John 29, 30 Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 173 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth) 23 Tomashevsky, Boris: “Thematics” 179n4 Tönnies, Ferdinand: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 25–6 totalitarianism 41, 44, 45, 49, 60 Trachtenberg, Alan 29 trauma 143; dialectic of 148; disruptive effects of 146; investment in 148; on memory 144; memory as working through of 163–79; multivalent discourses of 143; representations 145; and risk 152 Trauma: A Genealogy (Leys) 145 The Trauma Question (Luckhurst) 147 traumatic memory 145, 146, 149–63 Triton (Delany) 65, 69, 87 Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Huyssen) 105 2312 (Robinson) 94, 131

Index  199 Ulanowicz, Anastasia 108 Unclaimed Experience (Caruth) 145 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 27 unconscious memory 2, 132 United States: culture of 136; postWorld War II utopian promise 65 utopia: behavior 94; as “dialectical tool” 6; dreaming 4, 89, 179; and dystopias 151; of forgetting and morality of memory 27–41; geographic separation of 18; literary production of 9; memory and 116; political function and form of 7; possibility of 122; ritual behaviors 16–19; social existence in 18 Utopia (More) 14–20, 69 “Utopia and Science Fiction” (Williams) 139 Utopia as Method (Levitas) 6 utopia horizon 6–8, 10, 43, 57 utopian/dystopian literature, textuality of 10 utopian fictions 12 utopian form 7, 15, 17, 18, 20, 66, 96 utopian impulse 40, 44, 51, 60, 65, 68, 71, 78, 82, 83, 87–92, 102, 114, 118, 136, 166 utopianism 3–5, 44, 58, 60, 67, 108, 118, 173 utopian literature 5–7; critics of 117; history of 15 utopian narratives 5, 7, 9, 16, 22, 27, 30–1, 60, 66, 106–8 utopian thought 5, 8, 141n4; attributes of 65; formations of 166; in human affairs 121; traditional 70

“Utopia, The City and The Machine” (Mumford) 14 Utopiques (Marin) 7 Vials, Chris 158, 160 voluntary memory 53 Wegner, Phillip 6–8, 29, 30, 33, 43, 54, 57, 58, 108; Imaginary Communities 27 Wells, H. G. 44, 45, 58, 94; Men Like Gods 69 White, Hayden 58 White Noise (DeLillo) 119–20 Williams, Raymond 43; “Utopia and Science Fiction” 139 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) 8, 20, 65–8, 70, 87–92, 101, 102, 102n2 Women of Karantina (Eltoukhy) 147 Wood, Nancy 82, 84 Wordsworth, William 22; The Prelude 21; “Tintern Abbey” 23 Wright, Erik Olin 67 Writing History, Writing Trauma (LaCapra) 155–6, 175 The Year of the Flood (Atwood) 149, 159–61, 163–79 young adult dystopia 107, 124–5; fictions 124; literature 107, 141n1 Zakaria, Fareed 85 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 40, 43, 58, 88 Zipes, Jack 118 Zwerdling, Alex 44, 59