Postcolonial fiction: Utopia or Dystopia?

‘For readers reared on travellers’ tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands and shady trees where brooks run to quench the castaway’s thirst and ripe fruit falls into his hand, (…). But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place (…)’[1] tells Susan Barton in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In this extract, the author re-adapts an essential feature of utopian fiction, that is, the motif of the island: Coetzee mocks its traditional association to abundance and possession; indeed, the novel’s male hero, Cruso[2], does his utmost make the place his.

Significantly, literary critic J.K Noyes argues that in the colonial mentality, conquered space is recreated as a Promised Land, a utopian place that is made anew and where colonialism pervades every aspect of social life[3].

Utopia can refer to both a place and a literary genre. Etymologically, the term means ‘no-where’, (u: no and topos: place in Ancient Greek) or ‘good place’ (eu: good and topos:  place). It was coined in 1516 by British author Thomas More, to refer to the place and society that are described in his eponymous tale, in which he stabilises the characteristics of the genre. The island of Utopia, formed of 54 geometrical cities, is depicted as an ideal place of social harmony, in order to criticize the social ills of 16^th century Britain. This genre enabled writers to build a political ideal that, in the traditional storyline, was discovered by a foreign traveller. As in the 17^th and 18^th centuries Britain became progressively a major European power and sought to extend its supremacy over new-discovered colonies, it may not be surprising to find the motif of Utopia in works of British literature, such as Shakespeare’s Tempest (1610) and Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)[4]. A century later however, with the rise of imperialism, globalisation and through the intensification of industrialisation, the utopian island was either re-cast as a remote pastoral suffused with nostalgia (see William Morris’ 1890 News from Nowhere) or a Dystopia[5], the exact reversal of the traditional genre by creating a totalising, nightmarish society. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon[6] seemed to have been a precursor of a genre favoured by British authors in the 20th century, whereas in the 1980s, utopian and dystopian fiction were means for postcolonial authors to exploit their links with the former British Empire. For Ralph Pordzik the utopian genre is naturally linked to postcolonial literature since it addresses the notions of national identity and culture[7].

Plato's vision of the Altantis

We will then analyse the characteristic features and tropes of utopias in the works of Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966), V.S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River, 1979), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981) and J.M. Coetzee (Foe, 1986) as related to British canons of the utopian/dystopian genre. Instead of exploring this dichotomy, these postcolonial authors favour the patterns of heteropias to emphasize the multiplicity of imagined spaces[8]. Utopian fiction is then a means of fictionalising space and culture, even if these writers attempt to ‘decolonise’ Utopia, by creating highly subjective topoi through the exploitation of distinctive styles and the invention of multicultural protagonists.

        

Utopian features enable authors to fictionalise space and cultural identity: by taking up utopian tropes, postcolonial writers re-asses the ambiguity of the original canon that stands between the ideal and the real, between a literary genre and a political space. The topoi of national identity are conveyed through typical features of utopian fiction: spaces and figures.

The utopian space can be found in two different types of places: the island and the city. Both places are remote and distant to any well-known part on the surface of the globe. If Thomas More’s Utopia is located ‘somewhere between Europe and America’, it seems utterly difficult to reach it on account of its remoteness and uncertain localisation. That is why Erewhon’s subtitle is ‘Over the Range’, as for the traveller, only some natural catastrophe can enable him to get to the utopian space.

The shipwreck is then the most traditional motif that causes the main character of the story to discover the island. This is what happens to Robinson Crusoe who will later be the master of the place, and, similarly, to Susan Barton in J.M Coetzee’s Foe. To strengthen this connection to Utopia, Coetzee shows that the space of the island is submitted to a clear-cut organisation by Cruso’s partriarchal figure, even though with no apparent purpose: the hillside is geometrically divided to create a clear, pure space that reminds one of the circular division of space in More’s tale. Coetzee reinforces this aspect of purity with Cruso’s declaration on page 33, as if the clearing of space by removing any type of growth was a sign of civilisation: ‘ ‘‘ The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. (…)’.

Jean Rhys also establishes this link between the utopian space and Nature, but in a different way. When Rochester compares former slave Amélie to an innocent and gentle person, the author addresses the problem of the colonizer/traveller’s gaze: indeed, Rochester perceives the inhabitants of the island as noble savages, persons living in harmony with Nature. The noble savage, according to the coloniser’s ideal, is able to create a utopian space remote from the corruptions of modern civilisation. The theme appears through Rochester’s description of Amélie, as if she was attuned to Nature in a whole-like vision, an impression which is emphasised thanks to the use of the first person pronoun: ‘I could not imagine different weather or a different sky (…) I knew that the girl would be wearing a white dress. Brown and white she would be, her curls (…) her feet bare. There would be the sky and the mountains, the flowers and the girl (…)’[9]. 

Mumbai today: between modernity and tradition

On the other hand, the theme of perfect civilisation can appear through the modernity of urbanism. This feature is especially striking in Midnight’s Children: the magical qualities of postcolonial Bombay resonate with desire and idealism. Saleem, the main character of the story, considers the city as a collection of sensorial data, thus opening up the possibility for remembrance. This conception may be interpreted as an alternative to the imperial rule, a place where Saleem is able to ‘revise and revise, improve and improve’[10]. The embracement of modernity in the city of Bombay is nevertheless associated to a mythical past (‘It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or (…) Hotels or movie studios’), hence Saleem’s desperate attempt to find the day of the city’s deity, Mumbadevi, on the calendar[11].

Therefore, in Foe and Midnight Children, the invention of postcolonial space relies on the main protagonists’ perception. Similarly, the vision of utopian fiction characters influences the way they conceive the foreign place in which they are immersed. The traveller figure is essential to the discovering of Utopias since it increases the sense of estrangement both for the narrator and the reader. In Gulliver’s Travels, the eponymous character’s journey enables the author to play with different ranges of scales in a quasi-scientific manner: he goes successively to the land of Lulliput – to stress that even tiny people are capable of cruelty since Gulliver is sentenced to be blinded - and to the land of Houyhnhnms. This strange land is inhabited by horses, whose name means ‘the perfection of nature’, and provides the reader with the ideal society-in-reverse: the horses, capable of humanity, reveal the humans’ bestial behaviour. Similarly, Marlow in Heart of Darkness makes a nightmarish journey in which he comes across slaves that lack any human trait; the description of the mass of ‘slowly’ ‘dying’ ‘black shapes’ that he encounters in the Company’s Station has him ‘stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno’[12].

The dystopian traits that may appear in colonial fiction are deliberately taken up by postcolonial writers who seek to re-adapt the traveller figure canon. If this traveller is re-cast as the figure of the migrant, his feeling of uneasiness is omnipotent after being displaced. In Naipaul’s novel, Salim – who is from India - is constantly thinking about his foreignness in this strange, new country. Naipaul then creates a dystopian world in which ‘new’ Africa is overwhelmed by modernity: ‘The President had wished to show us a new Africa. And I saw Africa in a way I had never seen it before, saw the defeats and humiliations which until then I had regarded as just a fact of life’. The mix of awe and fascination for Africa is expressed through Salim’s admiration of machinery that already appears in the nightmarish dystopias of Heart of Darkness and 1984. In George Orwell’s novel, the omnipresence of the ‘telescreens’ hints at the citizens’ constant state of surveillance. Naipaul, on the other hand, conveys the nightmare of modernity through Salim’s admiration for aeroplanes. The dystopian qualities of surveillance appear at the moment when the police constantly spies on Metty, Salim’s associate[13].

Apocalypse Now: Coppola's adaptation of Heart of Darkness

The connection between A Bend in the River and 1984 is even more obvious through the figure of the President. His other name is the Big Man, reminding one of the Big Brother figure. Just like Orwell’s character, the Big Man is never characterised nor named: he is only an authoritarian patriarchal figure looming over every aspect of life in this African state: ‘There was a photograph of the President showing his chief’s stick ; and above it on the blue wall, (…) was painted DISCIPLINE AVANT TOUT’[14]. The totalitarian aspect of the catch-phrase is reinforced through the use of capital letters, that can be linked to Orwell’s ‘Big Brother is watching you’.

Thus, the ideal of national culture appearing through utopian/dystopian motifs of British canons and postcolonial fiction helps authors to fictionalise their relations to the British Empire. However, the specificity of utopian patterns in postcolonial novels lies in the way writers re-adapt those themes by decolonising the canon to create highly subjective utopias.

We will then see how, in these novels, the utopian/dystopian features are re-created through the visions of different characters, and that they depend on the perception of the coloniser or the colonised. Addressing the notion of a utopian past bring authors to find alternatives that mingle utopian and dystopian features.

 

In her essay on spatial politics in postcolonial novels, Sarah Upstone dedicates a chapter to the topos of the colonial house, to point out how, in the postcolonial novel, it is assimilated to a utopian space that seeks to perpetuate colonialism[15]. The past is embraced with nostalgia by the former members of the colonised class. The connection with Utopia is enhanced through the closure of the houses that are ‘microcosms’[16] of former colonial spaces. In Midnight’s Children, the utopian house appears in Methwold’s estate, a place re-created as a concentration of former European Empires. The estate is divided in four parts, all bearing the names of European castles, which used to be residences of monarchs. They all allude to the former glory of those European countries: Versailles is associated to the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, Buckingham Palace recalls the climax of the British Empire under Victoria’s reign, the Escorial Villa is a symbol of Spain that was the first European power in the 16^th century, and the Sans Souci Palace represents the glory of the Prussian Empire under Frederick the Great in the 18^th century.

Jean Rhys, on the other hand, hints at a remote past with the Coulibri Estate, representing the former glory of Antoinette’s Creole family. Antoinette is the heiress of ex-slave owners, and the Coulibri Estate used to be a plantation run by an upper-class family. Since the slaves have emancipated, Annette, Antoinette’s mother, longs for the colonial past, a symbol of fixity and stability. She seems obsessed by that ‘prosperous’[17] past that she associates with her happy marriage to Mr Cosway.

However, the past is also suffused by nostalgia in the vision of the colonised. The pre-colonial utopia appears as an alternative to the colonial rule, resisting to any type of interpretation. In Foe, the very body of Friday and his acts re-invent a locus amoenus (a space lying outside any limits and associated to a refuge), an attempt at seizing a mysterious space that Susan Barton fails to understand. Friday invents another type of space through writing: instead of copying the word ‘house’ that Susan has taught him, he draws ‘walking eyes’[18]. This appears as a parody of Robinson Crusoe’s fixed island and clear-cut, colonial-like hierarchy. Instead of nostalgia and longing for the past, the timelessness of the re-created utopia has become inscribed in the present: the utopia has become a uchronia[19].

Naipaul, in A Bend in the River, associates pre-colonial life in Africa to an absence of time and history, to the danger of comparing African people to Shakespearian calibans, untamed, uncivilised persons. Caliban, in Shakespeare’s play, is the epitome of the monstrous slave, his name being an anagram for ‘canibal’. In the chapter ‘Imperial Deixis’, Russell West-Pavlov insists on Naipaul’s vision of Africa as a continent slipping backward in an archaic time[20]: ‘You were in a place where the future had come and gone’ thinks Salim. This ‘self-cancelling temporality’ inscribes Africans to their local space in a very disturbing manner. The deterriolisation and decontextualisation in Naipaul’s novel is the author’s way of taking up the Conradian theme of dislocation caused by colonialism.

Sir Joseph Noel Paton, Caliban, 1868
Oil on canvas, 124,5 x 83,8 cm
Glasgow Museums

Similarly when one considers the conception of postcolonial critics such as ‘the diaspora’ or Frederic Jameson’s concept of ‘national allegory’, it is hard not to perceive those concepts to idealistic views[21]. Are not the ‘national allegory’ and the ‘third world’, in a way, utopian re-creations of the Westerner’s critical gaze on postcolonial literature? Even if, for Jameson, the Third World cannot be considered as an avatar of Orientalism, his conception of an unfixed cultural identity inscribed in the political sphere may seem stereotyped. That is why I would focus on Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘Newness’ since it appears as more relevant to analyse the concept of postcolonial heterotopia[22]. Criticising Jameson’s representation of postcolonial space and national allegory, Homi Bhabha points out that the ‘in-betweeness’[23] of postcolonial fiction is symbolised, not so much in the spatial politics of the novel, but more in the character’s gaze and their relation to time by creating ‘new world borders’[24].

The ‘in-betweeness’ of the utopian space is especially present in the minds of Jean Rhys’ characters. This impression is intensified through the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, to make a distinctive space built upon feelings and dreams. If, for Rochester, England represents the utmost utopian space of civilisation, it is barely real to his wife Antoinette: ‘ ‘‘Is it true’’ she said, ‘‘that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.’’ ’. Rochester’s answer too is quite meaningful; the utopian motif appears through the polyphony of the passage: ‘ ‘‘Well’’, I answered annoyed, ‘‘ that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’’ ’[25].

The end of Foe, on the other hand, presents an extremely uncertain utopian space. With the ‘home of Friday’, J.M. Coetzee creates both a sanctuary and a decayed space containing the corpses of the main protagonists. This place is not the island anymore, but rather an indistinct submarine locus, that cannot be described because it goes beyond human words and interpretations: ‘But this is not a place of words. (…) This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday’[26].

Is it possible then to remove any political agenda from the utopian spaces of postcolonial fiction? The best answer seems to lie in Rushdie’s Midnight Children Conference, a space existing in Saleem’s mind only, and yet connected to the destiny of India. Even if Saleem tries his best to invent a mental space for the Midnight Children, acknowledging their diversity, a growing awareness of failure takes grip of him. Nevertheless, he recognises his failure in positive terms. Because, if for Rushdie, the hope lying in India’s independence did not manage to fulfil its goals, the Midnight Children Conference might be a fictional re-creation of the Congress Party, an in-between space, no longer a remote land inscribed in the past or the future, but acknowledging the present.

Postcolonial authors re-adapt the canons of British utopian and dystopian fiction, not by adopting one single mode, but rather by juxtaposing utopias and dystopias in their novels and creating complex heterotopias that suit better the issues of cultural identities. Instead of a fixed place that the characters long for, the heterotopias of postcolonial fiction are highly symbolical worlds characterised by uncertainty and multiplicity, thus avoiding the clichés of the dichotomy Utopia/Dystopia. Furthermore, heterotopias address the present issues, and not so much an ideal that is unreachable. As far as the political agenda of heteropias is concerned, one could wonder if these authors seek to convey optimism or pessimism for the future… but the subtelty of heterotopias may lie in the fact that authors leave this answer to the reader. As a conclusion, Salman Rushdie’s pattern of ‘Snakes and Ladders’ seems to be the best to show how postcolonial writers try to grasp the complexity of the world by inventing balanced images and topoi: ‘the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake, a ladder will compensate (…) the duality of up against down, good against evil (…)’.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: fiction

Butler, Samuel. Erehwon. Or Over the Range. (1872) London : Western Cape, 1949

Coetzee, J.M. Foe. New York : Penguin Books, 1987

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. (1899) London : Penguin Popular Classics, 1994

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. (1719) Oxford, UK : Oxford World’s Classics, new ed, 2007

More, Thomas. Utopia. (1516) Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989

Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. London : Penguin Books, 1980

Orwell , George. 1984. (1948) London : Penguin Books, 2009

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London : Penguin Books, 1968

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. (1981) Croydon, UK : Vintage Books, 1995

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. (1710) Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008

Swift, Johnathan. Gulliver’s Travels. (1726) Penguin Popular Classics, London : Penguin Popular Classics, New ed, 2007

Secondary Sources: essays and articles

Bhabha, Homi. ‘How Newness Enters the World ; Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation’ in The Location of Culture. London : Routledge, 1994, pp. 212-235

De Lange Attie, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe, ed. Literary Landscapes : From Modernism to Postcolonialism. Basingtoke, UK : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Farris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments : Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, 2004

Jameson, Frederic. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social Text 15. 1986, pp.65-88

Lopez, Alfred J. Posts and Pasts : A Theory of Postcolonialism. New York : State University of New York Press, 2001

Pordzik, Ralph. The Quest for Poscolonial Utopia : A Comparative Introduction of the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures. New York : Peter Lang Publishing, 2001

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands : Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London : Vintage Books, 2010

Upstone, Sarah. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel. Farnham, UK : Ashgate Publishing, 2009

Wegner, Phillip E. Imaginary Communities : Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Territories of Modernity. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002

West-Pavlov, Russell. Spaces of Fiction/ Fictions of Space : Postcolonial Place and Literary Deixis. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

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[1] J. M Coetzee, Foe, New York : Penguin Books, 1987, p.7

[2] ‘Cruso’ is the spelling of Foe’s character based on Robinson Crusoe: J.M. Coetzee played with the canon of the 17th century by providing Defoe’s original protagonist’s name with another spelling.

[3] See J.K Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915, Chur: Harwood, 1992, p.162

[4] Amy Boesky in Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England interestingly points out that the success of the utopian genre in England and Britain at that time is due to the rise of a truly English or British national identity. Besides, the associations between Utopia and Britain is not foreign to the fact that Britain itself is an island that could be felt as a perfect embodiment of government, culture, structure and isolation. See Amy Broesky, Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

[5] ‘Dystopia’ comes from the Ancient Greek dus: bad, ill and topos: place. In literature and science-fiction, it refers to a futuristic society that has degraded into a repressive and highly controlled state, in which the former equalitarian principles of the utopia have been implemented to their extreme.

[6] Samuel Butler too plays on the title of his novel since the name of his dystopia is a palindrome for ‘Nowhere’. It is also interpreted as related to the present: ‘now-here’.

[7] See Ralph Pordzik, ‘Introducing Postcolonial Utopia’ in The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001, pp.1-10

[8] I am here alluding to the Foucaldian concept of heterotopia that I link to the stylistic modifications involved in postmodernist and postcolonial fiction. These are made through fragmentation and discontinuity of spaces to convey a sense of multiple reality.

[9] Wide Sargasso Sea, London: Penguin Books, 1966, p.91

[10] Midnight’s Children, Corydon: Vintage Books, 1995, p.460

[11] See Salman Rushide, Op. cit. p.93

[12] Heart of Darkness, London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994, p.24

[13] A Bend in The River, London: Penguin Books, 1980, p.216

[14] V.S Naipaul, Op.cit, p.217. The Big Man’s slogan can be translated by ‘Discipline above all’.

[15] See Sarah Upstone, ‘Reversal of Location: Postcolonial Homes’ in Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, Farnham  Ashgate Publishing, 2009, pp.115-145

[16] Sarah Upstone, Op.cit, p.122

[17] See Jean Rhys, Op.cit, p.5

[18] J.M. Coetzee, Op.cit, p.147

[19] U :non and chronos :time

[20] See Russell West-Pavlov, ‘Imperial Deixis’ in Spaces of Fiction : Postcolonial Place and Literary Deixis, New York : Palgrave Macmillan, pp.117-125

[21] See Frederic Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multicapitalism’

[22] See Homi Bhabha, How Newness Enters the World ; Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation’ in The Location of Culture. London : Routledge, 1994, pp. 212-235

[23] Homi Bhabha, Op.cit, p.214

[24] Homi Bhabha, Op.cit, p.212

[25] Jean Rhys, Op.cit, p.58

[26] J.M. Coetzee, Op.cit, p.157