positioning and closure on the reading effect of contemporary utopian fiction

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Positioning and Closure: On the "Reading Effect" of Contemporary Utopian Fiction Author(s): Peter Fitting Source: Utopian Studies, No. 1 (1987), pp. 23-36Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20718883Accessed: 28-01-2016 14:19 UTC

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POSITIONING AND CLOSURE: ON THE "READING-EFFECT" OF CONTEMPORARY UTOPIAN FICTION

Peter Fitting

Fifteen years ago, the critical consensus seemed to be that there was, "something of a paralysis of Utopian thought and imagination,"1 while SF itself had become a predominantly "pessimistic" genre.2 Accordingly the recent revival of Utopian themes in SF has been a surprising and, or many of us, an

important and heartening development. The SF boom which

began in the late 1960s--and which continues

today?corresponds to the social upheavals in the developed capitalist countries and to the collapse of the dominant social consensus. The appearance of Utopian themes within SF at that moment was a logical extension of SF's own inherent

possibilities and potential, for, more than any other

contemporary genre, it was a literature of alternatives, one which offered the reader and writer alternate times and places in opposition to the dominant forms which seemed bound to

our own social reality.3

Beyond the question of how or why SF became an

important vehicle for the Utopian imagination in 1970s, this

development raises a number of more political questions, not all of which I can attempt to answer here. The first would be to explain the apparent waning of this Utopian moment,4

xNorthrop Frye, "Varieties of Literary Utopias," in Frank Manuel ed. Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston 1966), p29. 2This is a widely held view. See, for instance, Mark

Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare (NYC 1967). 3See, for instance, Judity Merril's use of the term "new

mythology" in her reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late 1960s: "The as-yet unformulated

contemporary mythology is the map modern man must use in the search for his soul. ... An increasingly large part of serious speculative fiction, in and out of "science fiction," now concerns itself with the examination and analysis of

mythology, and a significant, if smaller, segment with the creative search for viable modern myths." (December 1966), p31. **The situation is, needless to say, quite different in France

where a "Socialist" government has further contributed to the

undermining of the Utopian ideal. See, for instance, James

Petras, "Europe's Counterfeit Reformists," New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984), pp37-52. Anti-utopianism, thus, seems stronger in France: see, for instance, the second issue of Science Fiction (Paris 1984), and in particular,

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although it is perhaps too early to pass a final judgement. Another question would be to analyse the accompanying retreat into fantasy fiction, a development which has its political correlate in the projection of collective hopes and fears onto a president who represents a return to an

imaginary lost past.

Here my aims are more modest. I would like to look at the "reading-effect" of some recent Utopian SF, namely: Samuel Delany's Triton (1976), Ursula K. Le Guin's The

Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). In more specifically political terms, I would like to examine the effectiveness of this writing about alternate societies in terms of concrete social change: how to link a poetics of the future with a politics of the future.

Within the Marxist tradition, the major critique of utopia lies with the argument that these writings would divert attention and energy away from concrete political action, a situation which, as Fredric Jameson has written, no longer obtains:

For where in the older society (as in Marx's classic analysis) Utopian thought represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the Utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power of that system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image. The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is.5

Roland Lew and Hubert Galle, "Sous les paves de l'enfer utopique," pp50-72. 5Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton 1971), pp110-111. This was written in the context of Bloch and Marcuse; but Jameson has also written on SF and utopia. See his "Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Science Fiction Studies IX, 2 (July 1982), pp147-158; and his

lengthy review of Louis Martin's Utopiques: "Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse," Diacritics VII, 2 (June 1977), pp2-21.

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The revival of Utopian themes has meant, for most of the writers involved, a reconsideration of the Utopian project itself, most evident in some significant modifications in the contents and design of the Utopian community; but evident, too, as I will argue in a moment, in some of the strategies employed for influencing the reader. In these newer works, then, the Utopian project is often ambiguous. Le Guin, for

instance, subtitles her novel, "an ambiguous utopia"; while

Delany calls his a "heterotopia"6; and all four novels describe societies which are far more open and problematic than earlier

utopias. More specifically, each of these works depicts the

struggle for utopia rather than the image of a finished and harmonious Utopian society.

In Delany's Triton, which is set in an enclosed city on one of Neptune's moons, the advanced technology of the 22nd

century has made possible an almost completely free society whose members are guaranteed access to food and shelter.

Although this society is threatened from without, by the "inner worlds" of Earth and Mars who wish to maintain their economic dominance over their former colonies--the smaller and

sparsely settled "Outer Satellites"--the principal break with traditional Utopian writing lies in the portrayal of a hero who is not happy. Whereas Delany problematizes the concept of

utopia through an unhappy central character?one who is, moreover, not typical of the inhabitants of Triton, indeed, who is to blame for his unhappiness, Le Guin's reservations about the Utopian project7 go beyond individual failure to

question the very possibility of a better society. On the world of Annares--juxtaposed in familiar fashion to a flawed world very much like our own--the original anarchist

principals of the new community have congealed into a bureaucratic apparatus while many of the Utopians themselves have internalized a conformity to the system.

On the other hand, the most striking feature of the

Utopian society of [While away], in Joanna Russ' The Female

Man, is the absence of men. Formally it is the least conventional of these four novels: it is constructed of short

chapters which mix narration and dialogue with polemic and

passages addressed directly to the reader. The novel is set

6Samuel Delany, Triton (NYC 1976), Bantam edition p345, in a

quotation from Michel Foucault, Les mots et jes choses. 7Unlike the other three writers under consideration, LeGuin has written a number of dystopian works, particularly the

stories, "The Ones who walk away from Ornelas" (1973) and "The New Atlantis" (1975), and to some extent her novel, The Lathe of Heaven (1971).

25



in the present (or at least in an alternate present) where Janet, from the Earth 900 years in the future, describes to Joanna and Jeannine how, after a plague had killed all the men, the women of Earth learned to fend for themselves and

developed, in the process, a more human and nourishing society. But as we learn late in the novel, the "natural" emergence of the Utopian society is a myth. The world without men is instead the result of a choice, for there was, in fact, an interim stage between the present and the future in which our world split into warring camps--men against

women--and from which the women emerged victorious.

Finally, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

depicts an unambiguously Utopian world which is, nonetheless, under attack from without. The central character is an

impoverished Mexican-American woman in the present who has been institutionalized against her will and who is contacted

telepathically from the future which she is then able to visit in the same way. As in The Female Man, the Utopian society

of Piercy's Mattapoisset is set on Earth in a future which can

only come about through a struggle in the present: both novels portray characters from the future who have come to enlist help in our present in order to build a Utopian future.

Turning then to the effect of these works, it is a mistake to think that attention to the reader or to the effect of literature is new, born with what is now called

"reader-response" criticism. There are various esthetic currents in the 20th century which have been concerned with the reader, of which the most important is that of didactic and committed art, and whose most famous practitioner is the communist playwrite Bertolt Brecht. His call for an art which would, "arouse [the spectator's] capacity for action" and "force [him] to take decisions"8 was not simply a slogan, but a concrete political and esthetic project which he developed through the "alienation" or "estrangement" effect. Moreover, this effect is, as you probably know, central to Darko Suvin's definition of SF as, "the literature of cognitive estrangement."9

In his paper at the 984 Utopian Studies conference, Kenneth Roemer reviewed some of the categories of external evidence available for studying a work's actual readers. But,

8Bertolt Brecht, "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre," p37 in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (NYC 1964). 9Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven 1979) pp3-15. The book contains an important chapter on

utopias, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia."

26



as his paper suggested, the most problematic and potentially the most fruitful area for reader-oriented criticism lies in the examination of a work's internal elements?the ways in which a

specific literary text constructs its implied reader. Without

reviewing here the [various] manifestations and developments of such criticism,10 I would like to focus on several internal elements of recent Utopian writing. My approach arises from the political concerns mentioned earlier?the potential effectiveness of Utopian writing ?and it originates as well in the recognition that different social activities and practices, beginning with the infant's acquisition of language and

including literature and art, construct or "hail" (interpellate) specific individuals as psychological and social subjects. I am interested in the ways that the very form of a novel

reproduces in the reader the unacknowledged acceptance of and adherence to the dominant ideology, and how traditional narrative strategies work to produce a subject for that

ideology. 11

Although the most evident means by which a text constructs its reader is through the "shared reading conventions" of author and reader, it must be remembered that these conventions include not only the esthetic codes and

generic expectations of SF and utopia, but the form of the novel itself; and more importantly, they include a number of

frequently overlooked extra- or pre-literary conditions ?beginning with the English language itself?which affect the interaction of text and reader insofar as they limit and determine what can be written or read at a given historical moment. In the case of Utopian themes in SF, some

10For a useful summary of these approaches, see Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions (Ithaca, New York 1982). See also Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis 1982). For an empirical treatment of these questions which goes beyond the usual "sociology of literature" approach (Escarpit), see Jacques Leenhardt and Pierre Jozsa, Lire ja lecture: essai de sociologie de ha lecture (Paris 1982). See also Brian Stapleford, "Notes towards a

sociology of Science Fiction," Foundation XV (January 1979) pp28-41. 11_rhis is of course a reference to the work of Louis

Althusser, "Ideologie et appareils id?ologiques d'etat," La Pensee (mai-juin 1970) pp3-38, reprinted m English im Lenin and Philosophy (London 1971). Of the many applications and accounts in English, see R. Coward and J. Ellis, Language and Materialism (London 1977); see also my "Reality as

Ideological Construct: A Reading of Five Novels by Philip K.

Dick," Science Fiction Studies X, 2 (July 1983) pp219-236.

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of these conditions would include:

1) the "sexist" dimensions of the English language, an

issue to which the most recent wave of feminism has called attention ,and which is a specific concern in Russ' The Female Man and in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time;12

2) the predominance, in the SF of the 1950s and early 1960s, of anti-utopian themes which reflected the larger social consensus of the period--albeit a consensus which had already begun to unravel. According to the dominant view, the ideal

society had already been achieved and only minor adjustments and continuing technological improvements remained possible. The imagining of a different society was by definition the evocation of a degraded version of utopia, or the description of an alternative which threatened our own success and

stability;

3) and carrying this further, one could say that the

Utopian imagination was effectively blocked during this period as well because of the historical linking of Utopian thought with socialism--an alternative which, during the McCarthy period, it was literally impossible to write about favorably.13

But the widespread sense of contentment and prosperity was contradicted in the 1960s by the increasing militancy and dissatisfaction of various groups to whom the supposedly universal benefits of the American dream were denied, from the "discovery" of poverty in the United States (in Michael

Harrington's book, The Other America), the Civil Rights movement and the mobilization against the war in Vietnam to the reinvigorated women's movement along with the struggle or

12As, for instance, in Piercy's invention of a new possessive pronoun-- per (from person)--to replace his and her.

Language is an issue in The Dispossessed, but not around

sexism, i.e. the avoidance of the possessive pronoun as a way of defeating "propertarianism.

"

13An extreme and amusing treatment of this theme can be found in F. Pohl and C. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants

(1953) which portrays satirically a future US run by advertising conglomerates which is threatened by an

underground organization united around what we would call

today "ecological" issues. Insofar as they seek to conserve life on the planet they are called "Conservationists" or "consies"--a thinly disguised allusion to the contemporary paranoia about the "commies" in our own society. In many ways, SF was during the McCarthy period the only vehicle for social criticism.

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recognition of lesbians and gay men. This outburst of

contestatory and liberatory demands was the moment of the rebirth of SF, now no longer as the fiction of technological optimism or pessimism, but increasingly as a literature of alternatives.lk

In the following analysis I will concentrate on two internal aspects of the reading conventions and narrative

strategies of Utopian writing which are significant in

understanding how this recent writing tries to break out of the passivity and illusionism of the traditional reading experience in an effort to push the reader to work for

change. These aspects are: 1) the "positioning" of the reader within the text: how the reader is addressed by the text as well as the perspective from which he or she views the Utopian society; and 2) that of "closure"--how the traditional novel manages social tensions through the return to

harmony and stablity which mark its ending.15

These recent novels differ, in their construction of the

reader, from the strategies of the traditional Utopian novel.

Although More's Utopia, for instance, has been described in terms of its dramatic structure, its basic form is that of a

philosophic dialogue. Indeed, this rational mode of addressing or constructing the reader as an intelligent person, open to reasoned arguments, is the dominant form of Utopian writing well into the nineteenth century. Thus, one of the

developments apparent in the enormous success of Edward

Bellamy's Looking backwards (1888) is precisely the alteration in the techniques of persuasion, for there has been a change in the intended audience (to the wider public of the newly formed middle-classes in the United States) as well as a shift from philosophic dialogue to Utopian romance. As readers, we

14For an overview of these developments, see my "The Modern

Anglo-American SF Novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation," Science Fiction Studies VI, 1 (March 1979) pp59-76. On the 1960s, see The 60s Without Apology, ed. by Sohnya Sayre et al. (Minneapolis 1984). 15The term "positioning" is borrowed from feminist film

theory. See Annette Kuhn, Women's pictures (London 1982). For "closure" see Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris 1970), Charles

Grivel, Production de l'int?r?t romanesque (The Hague 1973) and Tel quel : Theorie d'ensemble (Paris 1968). On the

management of social contradiction in popular culture, see various works by Fredric Jameson, most noticeably his, "Retif ication and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (Winter 1979) pp130-148 and his book The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, New York 1981).

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are no longer addressed simply as listeners; we have become involved in an experience which goes beyond the discovery and apprehension of a better society, one in which the description of the ideal society forms the background to a sequence, however flimsy, of unfolding events which we follow through the eyes of a hero and in terms of his own changing attitudes and feelings. Thus the "novelization" of utopia involves a significant transformation: from the positioning of the reader as the addressee in a philosophic dialogue who is persuaded through reasoned presentation, to the process of identification with a fictional character where the reader is implicated on an emotional and experimental level as well as on the intellectual one.

A similar shift in Utopian writing can be seen in the evolution of another of its narrative conventions. For if the setting of a better society "somewhere else" (or "nowhere") implied, in earlier Utopian writing, a permanency to the reader's situation, the impact of the Industrial and French revolutions was to render imaginable the possibility of

changing one's own society. While the dominant convention of the first moment of Utopian writing was that of the voyage, it became, in the second moment, that of a temporal voyage, most familiarily through the topos (or commonplace) of the awakened sleeper. The figure of the dream, moreover, not only underlines the distance between the real and imagined worlds, but the absence of a connection between them. This is not to say that the works of the second period of Utopian

writing do not address the transition to utopia--both Bellamy and Morris have chapters explaining "how the change came about"--but they do not attempt to involve the reader in such a transition.

In contrast to such traditional utopias, contemporary Utopian SF uses different strategies for the reader which I have called positioning and which include: the perspective from which the Utopian society is depicted; the techniques of identification, namely the reader's identification with a character who is emotionally involved with the Utopian community; and the "distance" between the reader's empirical reality and the utopia, including the contrasting of the two societies as well as attempts to break the reader's passivity through various "performative" strategies.

In this sense, Piercy and Russ go further than Delany and Le Guin in their attempts to link their alternate worlds with the present. The libertarian city-state in Triton, for instance, has apparently emerged "naturally," as a result of

30



the harsh conditions on a frontier world;16 but there is no

explanation of how its social forms or state apparatus have

developed, and particularly, no indication of the amount of conscious choice or planning involved ? in contrast, I think, to the other three novels. The reader is given a description of what some would consider the institutions and infrastructure of a "better" society, but there are few suggestions of a connection between it and our present day world. In The

Dispossessed, on the other hand, which is set much further

away in space and time, the Utopian society of Annares is founded on the basis of a worked-out social philosophy. But the conveniently empty moon to which the followers of Odo

emigrate to set up this society again discourages the reader from seriously considering how such a society could be achieved on our own planet.

The Female Man and Woman on the Edge of Time, on the other hand, are set in the present and the reader's identification is with characters who?unlike Bellamy's Julian

West?remain in the end in the present. Moreover, in each case, this character has been contacted from the future to

help bring the Utopian society into being. Through these characters the reader is "hailed" as a potential actor in the

process of building utopia, unlike the passive role

traditionally assigned to the reader, where it suffices to dream and to wait.17

16The locus classicus of the theme of the development of a libertarian society in the context of the harsh environment of a space colony is Robert Heinlein's The Moon [s a Harsh Mistress (1966). But as opposed to the "welfare" system on

Triton, (p178) the rule in Heinlein is "TAASTAFL" : "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." 17Professor Keneth Roemer has pointed out to me that a number of 19th century utopias do end iwth direct appeals to the reader. The second edition of Looking Backwards, for

instance, included a post-script addressed to the reader, while King Camp Gillette's The Human Drift (1894) included certificates which the reader could mail in to buy stock in Gillette's "people's corporation," and the back cover of Frederick V. Adam's President John Smith (1897) had an

appeal to the reader to form "majority clubs." These appeals are part of the physical reality of the book and certainly are an attempt to link fiction and reality. Moreover, the total

experience or act of 'consuming' narrative increasingly?since the advent of television ? includes direct appeals which

interrupt the actual narrative. Popular novels, too, often include forms of advertising: inserts and coupons etc. While this is not strictly equivalent to the 19th century novels

31



The Female Man attempts to subvert a number of novelistic conventions in the recognition that, like language itself, these apparently neutral forms are neither natural nor neutral, but instruments for the maintenance of the status quo. The process of identification, as well as the ideological myth of a rational, unified subject is undermined through the presence of four overlapping characters whose names all begin with "J", including the authorial persona, Joanna: "I said

goodbye and went off with with Laur, I, Janet; I also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the

city, I, Jeannine, I Jael, I myself."18 Through her fictional

practice, Russ reminds us that the positioning of the reader is actually an important feature of how we construct our own identities: we learn our roles and responses from reading novels even as we "know" that they are not real. This points to current debates around "stereotyping" in the novel, as Russ argued in her review of The Dispossessed.

19 For whatever Le Guin's intentions, the reader was offered characters with whom to identify according to traditional sexist roles.

Under the concept of positioning, then, I have discussed how the reader is produced in these texts, beginning with the character from whose perspective the events and the Utopian society are seen and experienced; and

including performative strategies which attempt to directly engage the reader, rather than simply reaffirming the solitary and passive nature of the reading experience. Now I would like to argue that the technique of closure is a powerful

mechanism for insuring that passivity, insofar as it returns the reader to an original tranquility and order which was

disrupted at the beginning of the work. This basic narrative structure can be seen in Looking Backward, for instance, which opens with the disruption of the status quo as the hero awakes in the future where his friends and fiancee are long dead. From there the novel moves through moments of tension and disordei?his efforts to adjust--to a final resolution in which he realizes that this is a better society

where he has found true happiness. This is the substance of the ideological effect of closure in the traditional novel: the

mentioned above, I am only concerned in this paper with forms of appeals to the reader which are integrated into the narrative itself. 18Joanna Russ, The Female Man, Bantam edition (1975) p. 212. 19ln The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (March 1975): 41-44.

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disruption of an established fictional order, followed by an eventual re-establishing of that order. In this way, the reader's anxieties vis a vis larger social contradictions are

acknowledged and then displaced to the fictional concerns and tensions of the novel where they are resolved through the novel's own resolution of the fictional tensions and the return to harmony and order. Furthermore, in Looking Backward, the process of the persuasion of the reader is reproduced in the underlying structure of the novel. More's Utopia, written as a philosophic dialogue, ends with the skeptical assent of the addressee, the "stand-in" for the reader:

In the meantime I cannot agree with everything that he said, for all his undoubted learning and

experience. But I freely admit that there are

many features of the Utopian Republic which I should like--though I hardly expect--to see

adopted in Europe.20

Looking Backward, on the other hand, concludes with Julian

happily ensconced in the Utopian future: his--and the reader's--assent to that alternate society marked not only, or not so much, in intellectual terms, as in emotional ones. For Julian's gradual conversion to the principles of utopia is also a seduction: the novel ends with his love for the Utopian "explainer's" daughter, a love which is of course recipocated and whose promised consumation closes the novel, just as his

engagement to be married to a woman of his own time opened it.

Closure is significant in terms of what it does and in terms of what it prevents. In the present historical

conjuncture, it is one of the methods through which literature serves the status quo, by reinscribing the reader within the dominant order which represents itself, like the traditional work of art, as whole and meaningful, without flaws or contradiction. The initial disruption which opens the traditional novel is a displaced expression of our collective fears and anxieties which is thus reassuringly dealt with at the novel's end. Thus at the end of The Dispossessed we have the figure of the return as the novel ends where it

began, at the Annares spaceport. This novel is conclusive in another way, for although it ends with Shevek's commitment to

struggle, it also concludes with the invention of the ?ansible?--the instantaneous communications device--which becomes then, in typical SF fashion, a technological solution

20Thomas More, Utopia, Translated by Paul Turner (Londong 1965) p132.

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to social conflict insofar as it identifies imperfect communication as the problem.

Closure is also important for what it prevents: writing which in the Brechtian terms I mention earlier, would ?arouse the [readers] capacity for action.? It goes without saying that to write Utopian fiction today implies a dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs and a desire for change.

In this sense closure undermines this will to change through the ?imaginary resolution? of its formal return to the implied harmony which is disrupted at the novel's

beginning.

The ending of Triton is very different from the

pacifying effect of the end of The Dispossessed; but the tactic of brining the reader to some sort of critical judgement through the absence of closure in Delany's novel is undermined by the fact that the reader had been turned too much towards one character's confusion and unhappiness, so that the only realization possible for the reader seems focused on the character of Bron himself. Indeed, in contrast to the other three novels, Delany's world lacks one of the central

components of most utoian communities ? a common ideal or

philosophy. The government of Triton attempts to provide the minimal structures for the happiness and well-being of its citizens, but within this libertarian ideal state there is little sense of a collective commitment to those goals. Bron's unhappiness is, the reader feels, Bron's own fault; but at the same time, in the absence of collective ideals, his solitude and isolation do not seem surprising.

The contrast with The Female Man and Woman on the

Edge of Time is striking, not only in terms of their commitment to shared ideals, but in their attempts to break with the traditional novel to directly move the reader. In traditional terms, Woman on the Edge of Time might have ended with Connie's remaining in Mettapoisett (a la Bellamy), or at least with her successful escape from the hospital. By her desperate attempt to begin to struggle in the present--by poisoning the doctors' coffee--and in the documents relative to her case which close the novel, the reader is refused any such comforting illusions. Connie is still trapped, probably under even more repressive and humiliating circumstances as the involuntary subject of experimental psychosurgery designed to control anti-social behavior. As with the ending of Triton, we are left with the pain and suffering of the principal character; but here that suffering has an identifiable cause which the reader is called upon to help end, as Connie has been asked to help: "We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That's

34



why we reached you."

Similarly, The Female Man ends with a direct address to the reader:

Remember we will all be changed. In a

moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. I swear it on my head. I wear it on my ten fingers. We will be our selves. Until then I am silent; I can no more. I am God's typewriter and the ribbon is typed out.

Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France . . . do not mutter angrily to yourself when young

persons read you to hrooch and hrooch and

guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate, do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses.

Rejoice, little book!

For on that day, we will be free.

In attempting to understand the effectiveness of recent

Utopian writing I have not looked at the question of the new social subjects who, since the 1960s, have been the audience for the discourses of social transformation; nor have I dealt with the empirical questions of "actual" readers as addressed

by the sociology of reading. Instead I've argued that cultural

practices such as reading are already socially meaningful, regardless of authorial intentions or even individual responses; and that the forms and meanings of these

practices, specifically the novel, have evolved in particular historical circumstances and serve to consolidate and maintain the political and ideological hegemony of the dominant class. I have argued, moreover, that the traditional form of the novel, through its structure of tension and resolution, is a mechanism for managing social anxieties and conflict: these tensions are acknowledged and then displaced onto the events and characters of the story, only to be resolved at the novel's end. Positioning, on the other hand, serves to reinforce the production of individual subjects within the social formations, as gendered and unified subjects who act in

specified and comprehensible ways which are repeated over and over again through the stereotypes and patterned behavior of popular fiction.

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In recent Utopian writing there has been, as I've tried to show, a questioning of closure: firstly, in the very design of utopia, for traditional closed and unitary utopias--f rom More through Bellamy--have been superseded by ambiguous utopias which are still struggling to come to be. Secondly, on a deeper structural level, the novels of Piercy and Russ in

particular sought to implement their Utopian politics through a break with the isolation and passivity fostered by the reading experience itself, by refusing to the reader the familiar

satisfying closure of the traditional novel. The rhetorical

strategies of the Utopian tradition have evolved, from

philosophic dialogue to attempts to seduce the reader into an

acceptance of the Utopian society through the character's own seduction. These four recent works reject such strategies in favor of involvement with characters who were themselves filled with question and doubts. For those to whom the idea of a better society is of more than academic interest, the better society will not come about as the result of dreaming, nor are its forms already determined: it must be struggled and fought for as Bee tells Connie: "We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that

happens. That's why we reached you."

University of Toronto

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positioning and closure on the reading effect of contemporary utopian fiction

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