On Olaf Stapledon's masterpiece, the novel Starmaker--
Fredric Jameson has a comment in Archaeologies of the Future to the effect that Starmaker is less a utopian work than the sort of work that would be written inside a utopia. He states it simply as an impression, but an impression of that sort, if it is sufficiently precise, must have a conceptual skeleton. What follows, then, is a brief attempt at dissection, by way of a thesis about utopianism:
I've come to think that the nature of early modern utopias and particularly More's is importantly different from that of their generic descendents. One might say that they are in the lineage of Plato's Laws, while the utopias of Morris, say, or Skinner, follow The Republic--the former utopias are cynical states, predicated on an opposition both to the real governments their interlocutors live in and to an implicit ideal state, which cannot be attained due to very nature of human affairs. There is a high hope of human possibility and a despairing knowledge of human necessity; the latter must not be attributed merely to utopia's nonexistence--the main source of despair, if there is one, in later utopias--but to its indequacy even as an imaginative construct. Christianity had to give the dream of a perfect politics the lie--even as a dream--but Plato had already done the same thing, for reasons not far removed, in his last & longest dialogue. This is the tradition of utopia that makes distopias unnecessary, even childish & simplistic. Utopia's situation between these two realities, the earthly and the divine is, so far as I can tell, generally ignored by theorists of utopianism, and for good reason; I'm not convinced that this is a characteristic of nineteenth or twentieth century utopias at all, with the exception of Stapledon's Starmaker.
What this characteristic means, in effect, is that every utopia could have its own utopia; that there is a potential infinite regress asymptotically approaching divinity or idealism or the void or whatever. Starmaker is structured in terms of this regress: the successive utopias of which the novel consists are each in turn consumed in superior models--each might be the utopia of the one before. In another work, this could continue forever (one could imagine a Borgesian story on such a theme) but in in Stapledon's novel it doesn't, because the novel is a mapping of a theoretical infinite regress onto a finite universe. Ideas might embed themselves one in another forever, but the imiginative space in which Starmaker progresses is eventually consumed. All that is left, then, is the encounter with the divinity the book has been steadily moving towards. I'd better not give away the ending--though as you've probably gathered, giving away the ending to this strange, marvelous book is like giving away the ending to a book by Hobbes or Hume, more of a transgression against sense than plot--but it is hard to read it except as a gesture to utopia's qualititive failure to attain the ideal.
This bears out, or with a little adjustment could be made to bear out, Jameson's observation. And though all this is apropos of nothing, yet because this blog claims to be a place for infinite regress, it's only fitting that, like Stapledon, I should make my method my matter.
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4 comments:
Sorry I didn't yet respond to your interesting post on T&C, Julianne-- I leave for Paris tomorrow and am a bit crazed as a result. BUT. I PROMISE to respond to this most recent posting. I'm really interested in utopia right now...not least because I saw Wall-E last night and am convinced that it has relevance.
More soon from across the pond.
Nice job making your "method your matter," J.
I'm fascinated by your suggestion that "every utopia could have its own utopia; that there is a potential infinite regress asymptotically approaching divinity or idealism or the void or whatever." I want to ask though: does this mean, as you indicate earlier, that dystopias are unneccessary? Isn't it the case that the "lesser" utopias in the chain of infinite regress are, in fact, dystopias? Even if we concede that utopia might be located in the gap or disjuncture between earthly and divine, I'm still unsure that we can discard the poles of utopia-dystopia. To put it another way: why isn't the "first draft," the least superior utopia, in fact some sort of dystopia? If we know that we are forever moving toward a purer, more ideal utopia, are the models we pass along the way really utopic?
I might be missing something here, but once I've got this straight in my head, it bears on much of the reading I've been doing lately. (And yes, on Wall-e)...
First, let me preface this response with acknowledging that I despise dystopias, so I am biased--I think they're (in general) the crudest form of ideology pretending to be the unmasking of ideology.
I may have too rigid an understanding of dystopianism here, but I see it as a form that's basically reacting to what it perceives as a naivete in utopianism, a naivete which perhaps exists in some utopias, but I don't think has any place in More's or those like it. Dystopianism says: a perfect politics cannot exist, and the ideal will be far worse, far more frightening, than reality. It is a parasitic genre, playing on the tendency of adherence to a single overarching value to turn authoritarian. Now I fully grant that this is a structural weakness in some utopias. But it certainly isn't in More's or Plato's Laws or Bacon's or Neville's or any number of others, because they never claimed that a perfect politics was possible. And for More, at least, human nature being what it is, even a significantly better politics is impossible.
What your point really clarifies for me, Sarah, is how that sort of infinite progress, even if it fall far, far short of ideals, is possible in Stapledon because he's writing about different species (aliens etc) and even stars (which have a special kind of intelligence). If you stick with humans, you really can't get very far unless you think they're infinitely teachable.
A final point: it may be that dystopianism has to occur in time rather than space--counterexamples?
Although I pretty much agree with your critique of dystopianism (especially with the fact that it is largely reactionary, to a naiveté that is as imagined as it is real), I'm not sure what to do with some of the literary examples I've had in mind.
I'm not talking about A Clockwork Orange, or 1984, or those works that are clearly dystopic in the ideological sense that you've criticized. But what about the literary naturalism of Zola, Dreiser, or Sherwood Anderson? These authors aren't dealing explicitly with the structural notions of utopia/dystopia that we've been discussing, but I have a hard time discarding some notion of dystopia when I read their work.
How do the grim/grotesque/harsh lives of these authors' characters fit into the picture? Maybe what I'm forgetting is that these authors are investigating human nature, rather than a philosophical or societal model. But maybe, as you say, Julianne, we fall so far short of the ideal because humans, unlike stars, remain so frequently unteachable.
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