Utopian Studies the Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies Vol
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Utopian Studies the journal of the society for utopian studies vol. 25, no. 2, 2014 UTS 25.2_FM.indd 1 18/09/14 10:34 AM UTS 25.2_FM.indd 2 18/09/14 10:34 AM Contents ARTICLES Factories, Utopias, Decoration and Upholstery: On Utopia, Modernism, and Everyday Life Antonis Balasopoulos 268 Sex in Utopia: Eutopian and Dystopian Sexual Relations Lyman Tower Sargent and Lucy Sargisson 299 Organizing the Impossible: Constitutional Law and Practice in Icaria Theodore Georgopoulos 321 Transcendental Meditation and the Remaking of an Iowa Farm Town Joseph Weber 341 As You Like It: The Thin Line Between Legitimate Utopia and Compensatory Vacation Ryan Farrar 359 Pop Goes Utopia: An Examination of Utopianism in Recent Electronic Dance Pop Carter F. Hanson 384 INTERVIEW “There Is No Silence”: An Interview with Marge Piercy Elton Furlanetto 416 RESPONSE Discrimination and Violence in Alfarabi’s Virtuous City: A Response to Alireza Omid Bakhsh Robert L’Arrivee 432 CONTRIBUTORS 450 UTS 25.2_FM.indd 3 18/09/14 10:34 AM subscription information Utopian Studies is the official journal of the Society for Utopian Studies. For membership and pricing information, please contact the SUS Treasurer: Gib Prettyman, Penn State Fayette, 2201 University Drive, Lemont Furnace, PA 15456, [email protected]. The society’s website is located at www.utoronto.ca/utopia. Institutions interested in subscribing should contact Johns Hopkins University Press, P.O. Box 19966, Baltimore, MD, 21211-0966, phone 1-800-548-1784 (outside USA and Canada please call 410-516-6987), email: [email protected]. All correspondence of a business nature, including permissions and advertising, should be addressed to The Pennsylvania State University Press, 820 N. University Drive, usb 1, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802. Or visit the Penn State Press journals website: http://psupress.org/journals/jnls_main.html. Copyright © 2014 by Society for Utopian Studies. All rights reserved. issn 1045-991x; e-issn 2154-9648. contributor information We prefer electronic submissions. Please check the website www.utoronto.ca/utopia for submission guidelines and/or e-mail the editor: [email protected]. To submit a manuscript, please visit www.editorialmanager.com/uts/and create an author profile. The online submission system will guide you through the steps to upload your manuscript to the editorial office. Manuscripts must follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Historical Abstracts, and America: History and Life. UTS 25.2_FM.indd 4 18/09/14 10:34 AM Articles UTS 25.2_01_Balasopoulos.indd 267 18/09/14 9:04 AM Factories, Utopias, Decoration and Upholstery: On Utopia, Modernism, and Everyday Life Antonis Balasopoulos abstract This essay explores the ways in which the notion of “everyday life” helps us stage a theoretically productive encounter between modernism/modernity and utopia within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary history. Taking Virginia Woolf’s critique of Edwardian writers as its starting point, it examines the hidden historical dimensions of the very idea of the everyday, its connection to modernity and, at the same time, to boredom as a specific symptom of that modernity. To illustrate the implications of this theoretical framework for literary study, I turn to two of the most emblematic texts of modernist and utopian aesthetics: James Joyce’s Ulysses and William Morris’s News from Nowhere. Whereas in Joyce, techni- cal and formal experimentation becomes a means of capturing daily life (including utopian daydreaming) in terms of an oscillation between capitalist commodification and the restlessness of bored distraction, Morris grasps everyday life as both steeped in boredom and removed from the suffering and restlessness associated with it. Thus, utopia reverses the modernist logic of innovation, making “novelty” not a formal dimension of the literary text but one that pertains to its projected, anticipated con- tent: life beyond the determinations of capitalist modernity. Utopian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2014 Copyright © 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA UTS 25.2_01_Balasopoulos.indd 268 18/09/14 9:04 AM antonis balasopoulos: Factories, Utopias, Decoration and Upholstery keywords: utopia, everyday life, literary history and theory, Lefebvre, Heidegger, Blanchot, Joyce, Proust, Morris To the extent that the nature of the relationship between utopian and mod- ernist fiction has preoccupied literary history at all, such reflection has tended to be overshadowed by the devastating irony with which Virginia Woolf treats the fiction of H. G. Wells, among other prominent writers of the so-called Edwardian period. In two interrelated essays originally pub- lished between 1923 and 1924—“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” and “ Character in Fiction”—Woolf inverts Arnold Bennett’s pejorative estimation of the modernists’ novelistic craft by pointing to the Edwardian’s own failure to live up to their standards, particularly when it comes to the crafting of fictional character. Above all, Woolf would argue, this failure consists in their inability to register the fact that “around 1910, human character changed”1 and hence, in their blindness toward the opacity and mystery of the ordinary, emblema- tized in a certain “Mrs Brown” Woolf claims to have encountered upon a railway carriage on a seemingly uneventful trip from Richmond to W aterloo. In terms of their purely literary value Wells’s books are, Woolf remarks cor- rosively, among those leaving one feeling so incomplete and dissatisfied that “in order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.”2 Utopian writing is heter- onomous writing, writing that fails to draw aesthetic value from itself and that effectively compensates for this failure by offering its readers lofty ideals and ambitious projects for the future; its magnanimity is a result of aesthetic penury. As for the reason for this penury, it is, in Woolf’s estimation, precisely the result of utopia’s blindness toward the richness and evasiveness of life as it is and as it is incarnated in the slight figure of Mrs Brown: Mrs Brown, I have said, was poorly dressed and very small. She had an anxious, harassed look. I doubt whether she was what you call an edu- cated woman. Seizing upon all these symptoms of the unsatisfactory condition of our primary schools with a rapidity to which I can do no justice, Mr Wells would instantly project upon the windo w-pane a vision of a better, breezier, jollier, happier, more adventurous and gallant world, where these musty railway carriages and funny old women do not exist; . where every citizen is generous and candid, 269 UTS 25.2_01_Balasopoulos.indd 269 18/09/14 9:04 AM Utopian Studies 25.2 manly and magnificent, and rather like Mr Wells himself. But nobody is in the least like Mrs Brown. There are no Mrs Browns in utopia.3 Unlike the modernist Woolf, to whom Mrs Brown made an “ overwhelming” impression, “pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning,”4 the staunchly Edwardian Wells instantly withdraws his gaze from her in order to “project” a utopian vision that both eliminates her and secretly aggran- dizes him, for utopia effectively involves a narcissistic projection that always already gets rid of otherness (and an emphatically male narcissistic projection, at that). It is the apotheosis of a look that refuses to see, relishing, as it were, its own blindness. Writers such as Wells “have looked very powerfully, search- ingly and sympathetically out of the window, at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage.”5 But they have never seen Mrs Brown, whose existential and literary defender is then Woolf herself, armed with her own heightened sensitivity to the mystery of human nature, “this flying spirit” that constitutes “solid, living, flesh-and-blood Mrs Brown.”6 Setting aside the remarkably orchestrated rhetorical play of these lines— wherein the train compartment’s window becomes now a narcissistic mir- ror, now a panoptic device, and in both cases a screen that blinds Wells’s and the Edwardians’ presumed gaze toward that which lies right before them—it is important to note that the logic of Woolf’s polemic against utopianism as one of the dominant genres of the late nineteenth century hinges on an extensive, if implicit, play with the categories of everyday life and boredom: The train ride upon which Mrs Brown is encountered is a purely quotidian affair, one of the innumerable unremarkable activities that constitute part of the experience of the city dweller; the scene upon which Woolf presumably happens is similarly devoid of drama, consisting in fact of nothing but spurts of seemingly indifferent conversation and silence between “Mrs Brown” and an eminently generic “Mr Smith”; the whole story of the encounter is self-disparagingly introduced as both “simple” and “pointless.” Indeed, the crux of the essay consists in revealing what is really at stake in Wells’s and the other Edwardians’ presumed boredom with such a scene, in their inability to see anything worth relating about it. It is precisely this presumed boredom that, through a striking inversion of perspective, makes Edwardian fiction boring. And it is the haste with which the Edwardian writer withdraws his gaze from that which he views as banally quotidian that prevents him from seeing Mrs Brown, who, sphinxlike, is in fact the personalized equivalent of 270 UTS 25.2_01_Balasopoulos.indd 270 18/09/14 9:04 AM antonis balasopoulos: Factories, Utopias, Decoration and Upholstery the enigma of everyday life itself: “For what, after all is character . when we cease to believe what we are told about her, and begin to search out her real meaning for ourselves? In the first place, her solidity disappears; .