Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Microtopias: the post-apocalyptic communities of Jim Crace's The Pesthouse

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903169144

1470-1308

Caroline Edwards,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Bill Ashcroft, ‘Critical Utopias’, Textual Practice 21.3 (2007), pp. 411–431 (p. 411); see also Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2002), pp. xv–xvi; Poulod Borojerdi, ‘Rattling the Bars: Review of Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future’, New Left Review 48 (2007), pp. 109–123 (p. 109); Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), p. 106. See, for instance, Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 21, 801; Northrop Frye, ‘Varieties of Literary Utopias’, in Frank E. Manuel (eds), Utopias and Utopian Thought (London: Souvenir Press, 1973), p. 29; Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. x, 84–8; Krishan Kumar, Utopias and Anti-Utopias in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 380; Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. xii. Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 2. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002). Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. xvi; Jameson's call for ‘anti-anti-utopianism’ refers to what he calls Sartre's own ‘ingenious political slogan’ intended to mediate between ‘a flawed communism and an even more unacceptable anti-communism’ (p. xvi). Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 25. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 221; See also Lucy Sargisson's call for recognising a ‘plurality of voices’ in her concept of ‘transgressive utopianism’ in Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 1. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), pp. 936, 937. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, ‘Utopia, Dystopia and Cultural Controversy in Ever After and The Grimm Brothers’ Snow White’ in Marvels and Tales, 16, 2 (2002), pp. 201–213, (p. 208). Stephen Crook, ‘Utopia and Dystopia’ in Gary K. Browning, Abigail Halcli and Frank Webster (eds), Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present (London: Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 205–218, (p. 207). Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 12. Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1990), pp. 11–12. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 217. Peter Ruppert, Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias (London: The University of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 4. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 46. Kumar, Utopianism, p. 20. Crook, ‘Utopia and Dystopia’, p. 210. Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, ‘Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28 (1999), pp. 285–310, (p. 285). The link between utopia, dystopia and the apocalypse has also been outlined by David Ketterer, who views correspondences between utopia and dystopia as ‘exercises of the apocalyptic imagination’. Apocalyptic fictions, he argues, are utopian ‘to the extent that all works of satire, while pointing to a normative state, often also point to a “utopian” alternative’. David Ketterer, New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), pp. 93–4. Examples include: John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Awakes (1953) and The Chrysalids (1955); Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End (1953); John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1957); and Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957). Precursors to this cluster include M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901) and John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (London: Macmillan, 1933); (The US edition was published as Full Circle: A Tale [New York: Appleton, 1933]). Such as J. G. Ballard's The Wind From Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966); John Christopher's The World in Winter (1962), A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965), Pendulum (1968) and Empty World (1977); Michael Moorcock's Legends from the End of Time (1976) and A Messiah at the End of Time (1977) as well as the short stories “The End of all Songs” and “The Hollow Lands” in The Dancers at the End of Time sequence (1972–6); Brian W. Aldiss's Greybeard (1964); Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island (1973); James White's The Dream Millennium (1974); Graham Masterton's Plague (1977); and Sir John Hackett Jr's The Third World War (1978). One precursor to this third cluster of speculative, futuristic and post-apocalyptic ‘literary’ novels is Martin Amis's collection of short stories, Einstein's Monsters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987). We might note that contemporary British ‘genre’ fiction writers also continue to explore disaster, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic themes, for example: Philip Reeve's The Hungry City Chronicles – Mortal Engines, (London: Scholastic, 2001), Predator's Gold (London: Scholastic, 2004), Infernal Devices (London: Scholastic, 2006), A Darkling Plain (London: Scholastic, 2007); Adam Robert's The Snow (London: Gollancz, 2004); Neal Asher's Cowl (London: Tor, 2004); and Stephen Baxter's science fiction novels and short stories, including Stephen Baxter the Manifold series – Time (London: Voyager, 1999), Space (London: Voyager, 2000) and Origin (London: Voyager, 2001), Phase Space (London: Voyager, 2002), and more recently Weaver (London: Gollancz, 2008), and Flood (London: Gollancz, 2008). Ursula K Le Guin, ‘Head Cases’, review of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, The Guardian Online, 22 September 2007, accessed 27 August 2008: . Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies 5 (1994): pp. 1–37 (p. 3). Eugene Kamenka (ed), E. (1987). Utopias: Papers from the Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987): pp. 1–19 (p. 1). Fredric Jameson, ‘Globalization and Political Strategy’, New Left Review 4 (2000), pp. 49–68 (p. 56). Jameson also dwells on this theme in Archaeologies of the Future, where he writes: ‘What is crippling [about the ‘invincible universality of capitalism’] is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available’ (p. xii). The issue of literature's inability directly to refer to the contemporary socio-political world in which it is produced is observed by Peter Brooker in his article, ‘Terrorism and Counternarratives: Don DeLillo and the New York Imaginary’, New Formations 57 (2005/6), pp. 10–25. Brooker reflects on the ‘more oblique story telling’ narrative strategies used by DeLillo in response to 9/11, noting that: ‘At once ‘beyond words’ but the subject of endless words and around 40 million hits on the internet, 9/11 has proved paradoxically unrepresentable and endlessly represented’ (p. 10). Similarly, Pankaj Mishra writes that novels that directly address 9/11 fail in their explicitly political focus to account for ‘social and emotional reality’, Pankaj Mishra, ‘The End of Innocence’, The Guardian, 19 May 2007, available online, accessed 2 February 2008: . Jim Crace, Continent (London: William Heinemann, 1986), The Gift of Stones (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988), Arcadia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Signals of Distress (London: Viking, 1994), Quarantine (London: Viking, 1997), Being Dead (London: Viking, 1999). Crace quoted in Tew, Jim Crace, p. 60, 95, 116. Crace quoted in ibid., p. 195, 195. Crace quoted in ibid., p. 31. Jim Crace quoted in Caroline Moore, ‘Regressed to its Pioneering Past’ review of The Pesthouse in The Daily Telegraph Website, accessed 5 January 2008: . As Caroline Moore writes: ‘Crace's novels struggle to find a place for optimism in a bleak world: he seeks for the humanist equivalents of faith, hope and charity in a world dominated by Darwinian determinism, mortality and lust’. (ibid). Crace quoted in Tew, Jim Crace, pp. 193–4. Darko Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), p. 36. Crace quoted in Tew, Jim Crace, p. 171. Ibid., p. 99. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), pp. 124, 279. Ibid., pp. 71, 189, 234. Ibid., pp. 20, 138, 292. Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann: An Adventure (London: Flamingo, 1999). Doris Lessing, The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (London: Harper Perennial, 2006) (first published by Fourth Estate in 2005). Ibid., p. 166. Catriona Miller, ‘British Apocalypses Now – or Then?: The Uninvited Invasion: Earth and The Last Train’ in John R. Cook and Peter Wright, eds, British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker's Guide (London: I. B. Tauris and Company, 2006), pp. 263–282, (p. 264). Critics who have commented on the vogue for contemporary ‘literary’ novelists to utilise SF generic elements include Matt Thorne, Kai Maristed, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Michael Chabon: Matt Thorne, ‘Satire and SF meet – on another planet’, review of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, The Independent, 12 October 2007, accessed 27 August 2008: .; Kai Maristed, ‘Imagining a plundered, media-plagued Earth’, review of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, The Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2008, accessed 27 August 2008: .; Michael Chabon, ‘After the Apocalypse’, review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 54, No. 2, 15 February 2007, accessed 27 August 2008: .; and Ursula K Le Guin who writes that ‘[f]ormerly deep-dyed realists are producing novels so full of the tropes and fixtures and plotlines of science fiction that only the snarling tricephalic dogs who guard the Canon of Literature can tell the difference’, Ursula K Le Guin, ‘Head Cases’, review of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods. Michael Chabon, ‘After the Apocalypse’, review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Ibid. Andrew Lawless, ‘The Poet of Prose – Jim Crace in Interview’, Three Monkeys Online: The Free Current Affairs and Arts Magazine, February 2005, accessed 28 August 2008: . John Updike, Toward the End of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Michel Houellebecq, La Possibilité d'une île (Paris: Fayard, 2005), translated in English as The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Chabon, ‘After the Apocalypse’, review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy; M. John Harrison, ‘Clone alone’, review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, The Guardian, 26 February 2005, accessed 28 August 2008: . Tew, Jim Crace, pp. 6–7. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, pp. 1310–11. Siddhartha Deb, ‘Manifest Destiny in Reverse’, review of The Pesthouse in The Daily Telegraph Website, accessed 5 January 2008: . At other points in the novel, however, Nature engulfs man-made technologies, as, for example, with the secret bridge at Ferrytown which is almost instantly consumed by the river (93); similarly, the tarmac ‘Dreaming Highway’ is degraded by water (138). Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, p. 1336. John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 14. Urry develops his theory of non-human agency, arguing that: ‘This is not to suggest […] that humans do not exert agency. But they only do so in circumstances which are not of their own making; and it is those circumstances – the enduring and increasingly intimate relations of subjects and objects – that are of paramount significance’. (p. 14). Along these lines, Doris Lessing has recently argued that we need ‘some kind of education’ capable of posing a different set of relations between human agency and the natural or non/pre-technologised world. Doris Lessing, ‘On not winning the Novel Prize’, The Nobel Prize for Literature 2007 Acceptance Speech, nobelprize.org website, accessed 5 January 2008: . John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, Chapter 5, ‘Of Property’, Section 49, accessed 27 August 2008: .; Stuart Hall quoted in Peter Brooker (ed), Modernism/Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992), p. 24. We can trace this ‘disgrace’ in Don DeLillo's reflections on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001: ‘We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations’, quoted in Pankaj Mishra, ‘The End of Innocence’, The Guardian, 19 May 2007, available online, accessed 2 February 2008: . Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, pp. 972–3. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 46. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 209. James Q. Wilson qtd in Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 185. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 206. Ibid. This critical gesture – reconciling some mode of communication between the level of the individual or particular, and that of the universal, or social totality – has been made by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope, where he argues that ‘there is a large untilled terrain within which these discursive regimes have been conveniently separated from each other’, David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 15. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 206–7. Ibid. Maria Varsam, ‘Do the right Thing? Knowledge and Agency in Ursula Le Guin's “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” in José Eduardo Reis and Jorge Bastos da Silva (eds), Nowhere Somewhere: Writing, Space and the Construction of Utopia (Porto: Editora da Universidade do Porto, 2006), pp. 131–136 (p. 132). The sea has always occupied a central place in literary utopias as José Eduardo Reis and Jorge Bastos da Silva point out: ‘Every historian and essayist researching the phenomenology of utopia acknowledges, therefore, the catalytic role played by the sea and seafaring discoveries in the birth of utopia, both as a genre and a general term by which to refer to an indeterminate hope in the future well-being of humankind’, Reis and da Silva (eds) Nowhere Somewhere: Writing, Space and the Construction of Utopia, p. 10. Ibid., p. 123. Jim Crace quoted in Lawless, ‘The Poet of Prose – Jim Crace in Interview’. The idea that a completely ‘otherworldly’ distanciation from the world of Crace's readership is necessary to the utopian imaginary of The Pesthouse might also be supported by Fredric Jameson's theoretical position in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981). Jameson argues (drawing on Louis Althusser's concept of ‘expressive causality’) that ‘some deeper, underlying, and more “fundamental” narrative’ that offers the ‘master narrative’ or ‘political unconscious’ of all literary and theoretical texts can only be apprehended allegorically’ (p. 28). Similarly, in ‘Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia’, Salmagundi 10–11 (1969/70), pp. 52–68, he calls allegory ‘the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous, disconnected instants’ (pp. 60–61). It is interesting to note that debates over climate change and human intervention have recently been identified as signalling a change in discourse from ‘alarmism’ (apocalyptic) to ‘small actions’ (‘minor’ utopian), ‘‘Climate porn’ turning off public from action’, Institute for Public Policy Research website, 3 August 2006, accessed 25 January 2008: . DeKoven, Utopia Limited, pp. 270–1. The relationship between America and Utopia – specifically, as understood from a European point of view – has also been explored by Jean Baudrillard in America: ‘For the European, even today, America represents something akin to exile, a phantasy of emigration and, therefore, a form of interiorization of his or her own culture. At the same time, it corresponds to a violent extraversion and therefore to the zero degree of that same culture’, Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), p. 75. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 42. Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’ in Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics (trans. ed. Ronald Taylor) (London: Verso, 2002), p. 193. Jonathan Bate, ‘Where a cabbie's rantings are a holy text’, review of Will Self's The Book of Dave, The Daily Telegraph Online, accessed 26 August 2008: . Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 198. Ruth Levitas, qtd in David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 190. DeKoven, Utopia Limited, p. 287. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, pp. 1–2, 26–7.