REVIEW-ESSAY
Elana Gomel
Memory of the Present
Carter F. Hanson. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future. Routledge, 2020. xvii+199 pp. $160 hc.
Utopia is about the future; memory is about the past. This seems so self-evident that the notion that memory can play a constitutive role in utopia appears far-fetched. If utopia is a vision of an ideal future, then it has to reject the less than ideal past. In many utopian texts, historical and individual memory is treated as a danger that must be regulated, contained, or expunged. Dystopia, utopia’s dark twin, is generally hostile to memory, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the repression of historical memory is necessary to maintain the oppressive regime of Ingsoc. But can utopia and memory be reconciled? In this interesting book, Carter F. Hanson makes a case that they can. If I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, I still believe it opens up a new field of inquiry.
Citing cognitive research, Hanson argues that memory is intrinsic to anticipation: “the conscious imagining or subconscious wish-dreaming of a better future must also draw on memories of our pasts” (xv). Thus, he posits that “memory is fundamental to and constitutive of utopianism, and that within the more specific domain of literary utopias, memory and forgetting often function as vital and complex components of a text’s utopian impulse” (xvi).
Of course, arguing that memory is constitutive of utopianism is not the same thing as showing that memory is an issue in literary utopias. Hanson’s book does an admirable job of the latter, situating literary utopias in the context of the “memory wars” of modernity, in which individual and collective memories are contested by emerging ideologies. The claim that memory is necessary for utopia is more problematic, however, running into the thorny thicket of definitions and historical periodization.
The book is wide ranging in its scope, covering texts from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993), M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). Not only are these texts written in different countries and in different historical periods, but they also embody incompatible views of what constitutes a perfect society. Bellamy’s industrial and regimented socialism would be seen as a nightmare in Piercy’s pastoral communitarianism; Le Guin’s “ambiguous utopia” is saved by science, which dooms humanity in Atwood.
Moreover, half of the texts Hanson discusses are dystopias, presenting a future society that is considerably worse than the present. It seems that at least implicitly he adopts the view of Krishan Kumar, who argues in Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987) that the two genres are structurally the same, and that dystopias offer a critique of the utopian vision based on an anti-utopian ideology. Later in the book, however, Hanson distinguishes between utopia and the utopian impulse, which is an open-ended desire for something different from the present state of the world. The problem is that all the novels he discusses are utopias and dystopias in the formal sense: texts that represent a blueprint for the future rooted in a specific ideology. The book is somewhat uneasily poised between utopia and utopianism, just as it is uneasily poised between memory as a psychological faculty and memory as a collective praxis. To adapt Donald Spence’s distinction between narrative and historical truth, the book deals with memory as cultural narrative, while conflating it with the cognitive ability to retain information about the historical past.
In his discussion of Thomas More’s Utopia, Hanson acknowledges that social perfection requires suppression or regulation of cultural memory: “Utopia largely dispenses with history and thus with the contingencies of memory” (19). This juxtaposition of history and utopia is a frequent claim in conservative critiques of the utopian project, as in Emil Cioran’s History and Utopia (1960). Indeed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is an extended argument in favor of the idea that history, in the sense of the collective or individual narrative of the past, is incompatible with the millenarian aspirations of a utopian ideology. While it is jarring to think of Oceania as a utopia, it is for O’Brien, who points out to Winston Smith that his resistance to Ingsoc is rooted in his being “the Last Man”: a discarded and outmoded subject generated by a discarded and outmoded social order. By clinging to his memories, Smith hopes that “human nature” will resist the encroachments of state ideology. O’Brien, however, proves that human nature is as malleable as written history, and that neither can escape social control. Hanson faults Orwell’s novel for the “closure of hope” and “the failure of memory to sustain the utopian impulse” (44). For Orwell, however, this failure is precisely the point: as in his gloomy foreshadowing of the triumph of Stalinism, he shows that the stasis of utopia and the contingency of history are incompatible.
A generation of scholars of utopia have attempted to resolve this standoff by redefining utopia in terms of a dynamic impulse rather than a static blueprint. Tom Moylan, Fredric Jameson, and Lyman Tower Sargent have tried to rescue utopia from accusations of totalitarianism and millennialism by insisting that literary utopias should be read in terms of “the possibility of imagining a radically different future” or as expressions of “the utopian imagination,” “preconceptual figures of that which is not yet attained” (Moylan 22-24). Hanson adopts this distinction between literary utopias and the utopian imagination, arguing that the utopian impulse is “the disruption” of what is, rather than a representation of what will be (Jameson 231).
If the utopian impulse is the inchoate desire for something else, however, something different from the present, its relationship with history and memory becomes equally fraught. Moylan finds the utopian impulse at work in what he calls “critical utopias”: works that assume “the risky task of reviving the emancipatory utopian imagination” in their “response to history by way of neutralizing the historical contradictions that generate the text” (40-41). Critical utopias perform what, for Moylan, is the necessary task of forgetting the past in order to generate genuinely new visions of the future.
But instead of liberating us from the shackles of the past, cultural amnesia goes hand in hand with what Jameson called our “incapacity to imagine the future” (289). In a series of articles written in the 1980s, when the impending collapse of socialism was plain to see, Jameson argued that the defeat of utopian ideologies made it impossible to imagine an alternative to global capitalism (the thesis later popularized by Francis Fukuyama in his End of History [1992]). The 1990s “end of history” has given rise to what Zygmunt Bauman calls “retrotopia”: the cultural dominance of nostalgia, in which social perfection is located in the past rather than the future. Retrotopia is evident in the rise of such sf subgenres as steampunk and Gaslamp, and in the obsession with the “future of the past” in pastiche and remake. Caught between the impossibility of imagining the future and the inability to forget the past, critical utopias and dystopias written today “show that struggling for the future necessarily involves attempting to harness the past in productive ways” (Hanson 67).
But what are “productive ways” of remembering the past? By analyzing two well-known critical utopias written in the 1970s, Hanson attempts to prove that memory can be an ally of the utopian impulse at large. His discussion of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, however,demonstrates the opposite: namely, that memory is inevitably assimilated to a particular ideological narrative that underpins the representation of an ideal society.
The two novels take very different approaches to memory: “Le Guin’s novel takes a skeptical view of culturally transmitted collective memory as a stultifying force that inhibits utopian progress, while Piercy’s novel privileges collective over individual memory as fundamental to utopian renewal” (70). In his detailed reading of The Dispossessed, Hanson argues that Le Guin’s representation of the seemingly utopian society of Anarres that is sliding into an oppressive and manipulative bureaucracy is informed by the opposition between collective and individual memory. The collective memory is subject to ideological manipulation both on the anarchist Anarres and on the capitalist Urras. The individual memory of the protagonist Shevek is what fuels his rebellion against both systems. But as many critics have pointed out, Shevek is a good old-fashioned humanist hero, a more successful Winston Smith, whose survival and (potential) triumph are enabled by the fact that the dubious utopia he escapes is not as totalizing as Oceania. Both Urras and Anarres falsify history to ensure the preservation of their economic and social systems: capitalism on Urras and quasi-communism on Anarres. The space of freedom Shevek carves out for himself lies not in the persistence of the memory of the past but rather in the geopolitical configuration of the present, in which the hostile ideologies of Urras and Anarres mutually neutralize each other.
Hanson’s reading of Le Guin elides the way in which her novel is located at a very particular point in history: the beginning of the dissident movement in the USSR and the gradual weakening of the Iron Curtain, allowing Western intellectuals to get a glimpse of the conditions in the country whose official self-designation was of a utopia in the making. Le Guin was well acquainted with prominent dissidents such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn and knew the dissident sf of the Strugatsky brothers. Recovery of historical memory was central to the dissident project, as was the critique of socialism for its inability to live up to its utopian promise. It is, in fact, possible to read The Dispossessed as a figural, or historical, allegory of the standoff between the USSR and the US in the waning days of the Cold War, and of the disillusionment of Western intellectuals with the Soviet project. It is not a rejection of the present in the name of the future but rather an attempt to analyze the present through the lens of the future that never was.
Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time takes a very different approach to collective memory than The Dispossessed. In Piercy’s utopia of Mattapoisett, collective memory narratives of various cultures are enacted by communities that have no genetic or historical connection to them. Memory becomes a “performative ritual” that “comes to fill the representational space that connects past and present” (97). But since these narratives are patently fictional, as Connie, the visitor from the present, points out, they constitute the same falsification of historical memory as the propaganda of Urras and Anarres.
Both Moylan and Hanson prefer Piercy’s “collective activism” to Le Guin’s liberal humanism (Moylan 154). But this judgment is dependent on the critic’s own ideological position. As Hanson recognizes, the opposite attitudes to historical memory embodied in these two roughly contemporaneous texts stem from their incompatible visions of social good. Memory is not an underpinning of utopia but a narrative residue of a utopian ideology.
Moving on to the contemporary dystopian moment, Hanson highlights the paradox at the heart of our present relationship with historicity. On the one hand, the rise of nostalgia and retrotopia is a consequence of the “incapacity to imagine the future” following the collapse of alternatives to global capitalism. On the other hand, postmodernity is also plagued by cultural amnesia, in which it becomes impossible to apprehend the past in all its irreducible alterity. Hanson describes this “simultaneity of cultural amnesia and interest in memory/memorializing” as the impetus behind the massive popularity of dystopian narratives, especially in YA literature (105). While the YA sf of earlier periods was optimistic about the future, presenting young readers with bright pictures of rocket ships, the conquest of space, and even Star Trek-like social progress, YA fiction today churns out an unending stream of gloomy visions, from Susan Collins’s The Hunger Games (2010) to James Dashner’s The Maze Runner series (2009-2020). The stunning market success of these narratives raises the question of what role they play in our relationship with time and history, especially since they are directed at young readers who are naturally oriented toward the future.
There seems to be at least a possibility that these YA dystopias uncover the flaws in the present by juxtaposing it with a radically different future, whether it is seen as better or worse. But Hanson notes, ruefully, that most young-adult dystopias “tilt heavily toward escapism and engage only superficially in sociopolitical critique” (107). Indeed, most of them valorize the present as a desirable alternative to the dismal future of gladiator games, human experimentation, or unbreathable air. In fact, I would argue that with the exception of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, written much earlier than the present flood of post-apocalyptic cozies, most of these texts are not dystopias at all. They are retrotopias, in which the past, whether our own present or the mythical past of the American Revolution in Hunger Games, becomes an object of collective desire; the restoration of the status quo is the only possible outcome of individual or collective struggle. And this past is not even the product of a collective memory but, rather, a simulacrum created in the neverending present. Indeed, Hanson sees YA dystopias as expressions of the temporal pathology that tends to “collapse our tripartite experience of time as past-present-future into one inchoate synchronicity” (106). In this sense, they can best be read as exaggerations of some aspects of the present, especially those that their young readers find fascinating or annoying, such as bureaucratic control in The Maze Runner series, social media in Feed, or self-as-spectacle in The Hunger Games. Their concern with memory is superficial at best, precisely because they do not engage with the past or the future in any significant way.
The same, paradoxically, is true about “adult” dystopias of climate change that Hanson discusses in his last chapter in the context of trauma studies. Trauma, in the wake of the pioneering work of Cathy Caruth and Dominic La Capra, has been conceptualized as a disruption of memory and the inability to create a coherent narrative of past-present-future. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and other climate fictions by Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson are predicated on a very different sense of temporality than the one that generated classic utopias/dystopias. The temporality of the Anthropocene is not one of chronology but rather of duration, an infinite interval of the present in which the ultimate catastrophe is always coming but never quite arrives: “prophecy no longer feels like a description of the future but rather, as a guide to the present....The messianic age is no longer something to prepare for; it is a current event” (Rushkoff 1). Memory becomes pathologized as a form of collective PTSD takes over our perception of history.
Finally, Hanson’s discussion of two classic dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Giver, showcases both the strength and weakness of his approach. The strength lies in his focus on an often overlooked aspect of the utopian/dystopian tradition: the way that visions of the future have been inextricably embroiled in the “memory wars” about the past. The weakness is his elision of the fact that utopia is always a product of a specific ideological vision. No utopia is universal because no concept of social good is universal. The role of memory in a utopia is the function of its underlying ideological narrative.
Orwell’s novel is, above all, his critique of Stalinism. His embrace of liberal humanism, with its emphasis on individual memory, functions as the counterweight to the totalitarian control of society effected through the manipulation of collective memory. Individual memory functions in the novel “as a form of [political] resistance” (Hanson 52). The fact that this resistance is ineffective and that individual memory is as easily corrupted as historical records, reflects the gloom of its historical moment, when the triumph of Stalinism appeared inevitable.
The Giver, written in 1993 after the collapse of the USSR, replicates the classic dystopian modality of its predecessor but in an ambivalent and nuanced way. Jonas’s society, without inequality, exploitation, racial strife, or violence, is everything Ingsoc promised but did not deliver. This social harmony is predicated, however, on the repression of memory and desire. Only by reliving individual memories of the past and by releasing them into the community can Jonas “restart” history and bring about the possibility of meaningful change. But since the novel ends with his possible death, this change is never articulated, nor is there any intimation of what “better” society can emerge from the community suddenly flooded by the memory of war, slavery, hunger, and strife. The moribund utopia is gone but the future is blank.
Hanson is aware that utopia and dystopia are not universal human categories but are linked to specific historical and cultural moments: “utopian and dystopian fictions are always grounded in, and responsive to, the historical moments in which they are written” (xiv). But this means that the historical memory that underpins the ideal society of, say, Bellamy, is quite different from Orwell’s, not to mention Anderson’s Feed. It is not simply that Orwell’s remembered past is Bellamy’s anticipated future, but rather that the collective historical narrative that informs each text discussed here is strikingly different both in its content and its form. While memory is a universal human faculty, historical memory is a specific structured narrative, which is, moreover, subject to the constant tug-of-war among different ideologies, power interests, and discursive formations.
Finally, the most obvious weakness of the book lies in its own re-enactment of historical forgetting. There is no mention of 1991 as the watershed when the collapse of the USSR ended the possibility of realizing a socialist utopia. There is no discussion of the rich tradition of utopian Soviet sf, which offers an interesting counterpart to the West’s conceptualization of memory and history. There is not even an entry for the USSR in the index. And yet Jameson’s discussion of the “foreclosing” of the utopian horizon in Seeds of Utopia (1994) or Fukuyama’s diagnosis of the end of history make little sense outside this particular historical configuration, just as Le Guin’s “ambiguous utopia” or Piercy’s utopian masquerade could only be read in relation to the waning of the Cold War or the counterculture of the 1960s. Our memory is always the memory of the present.
WORKS CITED
Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Polity, 2017.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaelogies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005. E-book.
Kumar, Krishnan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Blackwell, 1987.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Methuen, 1986.
Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything is Happening Now. Current (Penguin), 2013.
Spence, Donal. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation. Norton, 1982.
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