‘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 16th 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 17th and 18th 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].
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].
 |
| 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].
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’.
 |
| 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 16th
century, and the Sans Souci Palace represents the glory of the Prussian Empire
under Frederick the Great in the 18th 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
[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
