REVIEW-ARTICLES
- Robert
Griffin. Charting More's Utopia (Judith P. Jones. Thomas
More)
- Donald
Watson. Boundaries of Genre (Gary Saul Morson. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a
Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia)
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Robert Griffin
Charting More's Utopia
Judith P. Jones. Thomas More. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.
165p. $9.95.
Thomas More's authorship of the Utopia is the key to the controversy that has
accompanied his name over the centuries. Like Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the Utopia
appears to have confused or even deceived the simple-minded from the date of its
first publication in 1517. Nor have the more sophisticated been entirely at ease with it:
Sidney, for example, complained about it, albeit obliquely, in his Defence of Poesy. The
centuries have not resolved the question of More's tone, especially the issue of the
author's relationship to his persona in the text. Since the late 19th century the
focus of primary interest has been More's communism; but the real problem continues to be
stylistic, the question of tone.
The book under consideration here has the advantage of being a literary biography,
which means that the focus throughout is on More's literary works. Because the nature of
literary evidence, especially in the case of acknowledged fictions, precludes
allegorization in terms of the author's real life experience, the works are never reduced
to mere evidence for the life. We need to know the facts of More's life and times, of
course; and we especially need to know as much as possible of the complex personal motives
involved in the writing of the Utopia--i.e., More's ambivalence respecting the
pressures on him to become part of Henry VIII's administration.
Like Erasmus in The Praise of Folly, which was written in More's house and
dedicated to him, More attacks the folly and wickedness of the age and in doing so pursues
the Christian humanist's vocation to remake the world--to revive learning, to restore
ethics, to rectify the social order, and to reform the Church. But the Utopia is
not just a book of social reform and political theory; it is a literary product of
Christian humanism as well. And it is in clarifying what this entails that the book under
review is particularly helpful. Professor Jones spells out the unique combination of
classical and Christian influences that accounts in part for the Utopia's significance
as a work of the European literary renaissance.
The most pervasive classical influence in the Utopia is Platonic. The
characters evoke the authority of Plato several times; the idea for the Utopia and
some of its institutions clearly derive from the Republic; and the details of
Utopian life are often related to Plato's Laws and dialogues. But the book is
much more than an exercise in Platonism. Stylistically, it demonstrates the skillful use
of rhetorical techniques of More's Greek and Roman models, including the Greek Stoics, the
Epicureans, and the Cynics. The ironic texture is probably most indebted to More's study
of Lucian. A full catalogue of the probable influences would include several Latin
philosophers and the Latin historian Tacitus, besides the early Church fathers, especially
St Augustine. As dialogue, the Utopia instructs and entertains at such a complex
level of ambiguity, satire, and paradox that it is impossible to reduce it to a single
level of meaning. There are almost as many "readings" of the book as there are
readers of it, arid any attempt to formulate a simple and completely satisfactory
interpretation is like trying to stand firm in quicksand. As C.S. Lewis has said,
"as
long as we take the Utopia for a philosophical treatise it will 'give' wherever
we lean our weight."
However interesting More's Utopia may indeed be as a document in the history
of ideas, it continues to attract and beguile readers as a fiction, the first of its kind.
Oscar Wilde remarks somewhere that "a map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
always landing." Comprehending as it does things not dreamt of in our philosophies,
utopian fantasy has the potential to give a local habitation and a name to the life of our
desires.
Professor Jones's biography of Thomas More provides an excellent chart for locating the
Utopia, not geographically of course, but centrally in More's life and literary
production. She rightly sees it, along with the History of Richard III, as More's
most significant work.
Donald Watson
Boundaries of Genre
Gary Saul Morson. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions
of Literary Utopia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. xi +
219 p. $25.00.
Professor Morson's title refers to those limits which literary works of generic
peculiarity, like Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer, transgress. Such violations of
the conventions and expectations of the reader's hermeneutical territories, whether out of
ignorance of, indifference to, or rebellion against the traditions of form and style,
generate misreadings at the worst but can also seriously question the often sacrosanct
bases upon which contemporaneous generic practice implicitly and our contemporary genre
theory explicitly operate. In establishing a category, "threshold art," Morson
valuably and provocatively raises important problems concerning the relationship of genre
criticism, the theory of literary interpretation, intertextuality, and the production of
critical readings. The Boundaries of Genre provides moments of exasperation, many
of which result from the author's multiplication of terms--the terrorism of language so
seemingly epidemic among critics nowadays--but is also suggests possibilities for
rethinking the connections of classification and interpretation which students of utopian
fiction and SF will find profitable.
Before describing just what these are, a brief account of Dostoevsky's Diary may
be necessary, since it has certainly found its way to few bookshelves of the readers of
SFS. The Diary of a Writer was begun as a supplementary column to the periodical,
The Citizen, which Dostoevsky edited during 1873 and 1874. In 1876 he resumed its
publication, now as an independent monthly publication, suspending it again in 1877 to
write The Brothers Karamazov. A single issue appeared in 1880, and another in
1881. Dostoevsky announced that it would be again published monthly on a regular basis.
His death that year forestalled this plan. In all about 37 issues of the diary were
published; in bulk the Diary equals Crime and Punishment plus The
Brothers Karamazov (in the standard, Tomasevskij and Xalabaev edition).
The traditional genre that the Diary most resembles is the "feuilleton,"
a portion of a news periodical devoted to a miscellany of sketches, impressions,
cultural criticism, anecdotes, reportage of urban events, fiction, and parody. Dostoevsky
included all these elements--some of his best stories appeared in the Diary as
well as some of his inchoate sketches for The Brothers; but essentially he used
the Diary to establish a personal colloquy with the Russian people about whatever
interested him: politics, crime, women, religion, class, European hegemony, Russian
messianism, materialism, socialism, Orthodoxy. As Bakhtin says, it forms "an entire
encyclopedia of the contemporary life of his time:...full of both open and hidden polemics
with the various philosophical, religious, ideological, and scientific schools, tendencies
and currents of the time"; and, in Morson's words, it is puzzling in "its
thematic and formal heterogeneity" (p. 5). Only part of the Diary has been
translated into English (by Boris Brasol, 1949), and its usual function has been to
provide support for research into the compositional genetics of Raw Youth and The
Brothers. Although it appears to be "an amorphous collection of unrelated
pieces," Morson believes that Dostoevsky's correspondence confirms his theory that it
was designed to be read "as an integral (if idiosyncratic) literary work" (p.
ix).
Morson finds the key to this journalistic miscellany or encyclopedia in Dostoevsky's
continuing dramatization of "a dialogue of utopian faith with anti-utopian
skepticism" (p. 36). That he locates a thematic rather than a formal focus for
interpretation of the Diary leads him to the dubious choices a reader makes in
assuming the intertextuality of a work. Works which may be read according to "two
mutually exclusive sets of conventions" create the "hermeneutic perplexity that
characterizes boundary genres" (pp. 48-49). Genre theory itself will not resolve the
perplexity, and the authorial strategy involved may be intentional, as Morson explains in
his remarks on the "double encoding" designed to perplex Alyosha in Ivan's
narration of his Grand Inquisitor legend. Other, perhaps less intricate, examples of such
perplexity are the generic incompatibility of Gogol's grotesque and the deceitful encoding
of Tolstoy's retroactively reframing of the text in "Lucerne" or "The
Kreutzer Sonata."
The examples which Morson finds recurrent in the strategies of the Diary involve
Dostoevsky's reader in "the making of art" and "the experience of
reading" (p. 68). Morson's term for this technique of self-reflexivity and
self-cancellation is "meta-literature," images or stories about the creative
process. Metaliterary devices abound in the Diary: reports of crimes, trials, and
the daily horrors of St. Petersburg, unfinished fictions, intentionally rough sketches,
interruptions of narration by Dostoevsky's other scoffing voices, the diarist's
unsuccessful searches for matter, theme, and story. Such "feuilletonistic"
ramblings defamiliarize and decontextualize literature, depriving it of its perfect unity,
which assumes the order and relevance of all detail. The reader faces the author's
problems, struggles with him for solutions, witnesses his creativity, and shares the power
of his structuring imagination. Should such a moment threaten to become
"literature," a sudden juxtaposition may undermine completion, maintaining the
designed fragment as "metaliterature" through successive acts of intratextual
denials of closure. The finished stories of the Diary--"Bobok," "The Dream
of a Ridiculous Man," "The Peasant Marey"--merely reinforce its
metaliterary intentions.
All this makes Dostoevsky's Diary seem less tedious than previous critics had
thought, but what does it have to do with genre theory? Morson asserts that the Diary exemplifies
"threshold fiction," works which lie on the boundaries of fiction and
non-fiction. Utopia combines such a paradox: the good place which is no place, the fiction
which is not a fiction, the social fiction which would be social "fact." Clearly
many, if not most, literary utopias attempt to blur such distinctions, and the best of
them try to involve the reader in the making of their fictions. They insist upon the
disingenuous realism of the opening frame, but elude as much as possible the power of the
closing frame, "developing a special set of anti-closural devices" (p. 95).
Secondly, utopias doubly encode their fictions: as play and game, suspending historical
time; and as entrapment of a historical reader, whose aesthetic detachment occurs under
determinate social conditions which would restrict or disallow the fiction. Threshold art
as a description of utopian strategies seems preferable to seeing them as ways of
embedding ideologies or as ways of solving current social problems through fiction.
Building upon this distinction, Morson in his last and longest section takes on another
major problem of genre theory: intertextuality. Here he follows Mikhail Bakhtin's
definition of parody as the simultaneous "expression of two speakers," the
original speaker and a second who evaluates that utterance from a different point of view
(p. 108). Morson may, therefore, define anti-utopias as parodies of utopias and
meta-utopias as inconclusive dialogues between utopia and anti-utopia. The distinctions
here are useful. Anti-utopias belong to an anti-genre and so not only parody the target
genre, utopia, attempting to discredit not merely exemplars but the genre as a whole, but
also are indebted to the conventions of previous works in the anti-genre: Candide,
Notes from the Underground, We, 1984, A Clockwork Orange. However, anti-utopias
seldom raise the hermeneutic perplexity of threshold art; we may read Fahrenheit 451 as
SF and anti-utopia, for example, or Notes as novel and anti-utopia. Yet because
anti-utopia as an anti-genre forces the reader to recontextualize a genre of threshold
literature utopia, anti-utopias "characteristically parody--bare the devices of and
motives for-- utopian classificatory ambivalence" (p. 135). In short, the best
anti-utopias cannot help but become metafictions.
In parody and in anti-utopia the reader hears two voices, but they evoke no hermeneutic
perplexity: he knows with which voice he is to agree. Morson asserts that the two voices
in meta-utopia are equally unauthoritative. The author has anticipated the
reader's choice of one and taken steps to make choice itself a target of parody. The
perplexity is intended as part of the work, and the lack of resolution has been built in
by doubling and tripling the voices of parody. Self-cancellation! Morson points to
Erasmus's Praise of Folly and Notes from the Underground as meta-parodies,
and he admires meta-utopia as meta-parody for its "great formal, as well as
hermeneutic, complexity" (p. 146). His monograph ends with discussions of Wells's A
Modern Utopia, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Herzen's From the Other Shore,
More's Utopia, and The Diary as meta-utopias. These readings vary
greatly in their value, ranging from three worthless pages on The Tempest to
fairly elaborate and useful interpretations of the deliberate framebreaking and tonal
incompatibility in Wells's fiction and the paradoxical etiologies of The Diary. None,
however, is exactly a "meta-reading," that is, an "accounting for" the
variety of interpretations by connecting textual characteristics with the production of
"readings" (p. xi, 173). The consideration of the "textology" of
More's Utopia only delineates contemporary uncertainty about exactly what
constitutes a "text."
Nevertheless, Morson's study will provoke thought. His formalistic approach has not
produced definitive categories, but it can reshape the questions we ask. If, as the
editors of SFS believe, utopia and SF belong within the same covers, the most valuable
concept Morson discusses is that of threshold art, for, like utopian fiction, SF
exists at the "boundaries of genres." By putting into question the entire theory
of genre, both make their readers evaluate conventional genres as well as
re-examine exactly how to "read," that is, the "appropriate procedures for
discovering meaning" (p. 49). From this formal perplexity, one may then advance
to the true intention many utopian fictions and SF share: to reveal the
arbitrary, capricious nature of institutional hierarchies and the equally
fanciful metaphorical discourses about the nature of human nature. Is this
intention built into the fictive enterprise itself? Do its authors inevitably
face the self-destroying incompatibilities of formal play and ideological
politics? Is the quest for form and the reformulation of generic traditions the
essential means of pursuing the reader's re- education for the future? Are the
destabilization of generic classifications and the destabilization of
ideological structures parts of the same rhetoric? At the least, Morson helps us to these thresholds of cultural discourse
about utopia and SF.
Back to Home