The Persistence of Utopia and the Resources of Time

“What’s left for utopia?” This is a persistent question that should be put aside once and for all, given the ongoing resilience of utopian writing and its literary scholarship. The robustness of current literary utopian studies is exemplified in two recent monographs: Caroline Edwards’s Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel and Greg Forter’s Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds. The resources of critical mapping, both geographic and cognitive, characteristically put in play in utopian literature are joined in these books with complex notions of temporality, memory, and histories. Forter’s and Edwards’s monographs are models of close reading, illuminating fiction’s capacities for exposing the constructedness of historical (master) narratives and drawing out alternative narratives that are truer, for all their “fictionality,” than historical narratives. In recommending each book enthusiastically in its own right, I can also recommend reading them together as comparably rigorous engagements with what Edwards calls a “process of critical excavation in unearthing the utopian impulse,” and marking the linguistic, narratological, philosophical, political, and imaginative tools deployed in the (re)shaping of historical experience in terms of difference and critique (197).

Geographically, as their titles indicate, these are studies in contrast: Forter’s emphasis on postcoloniality links the worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, while Edwards focuses exclusively on British writers. But they share many broad thematics: history, historicity, and narrative; alternative conceptions of modernities; dimensions of temporalities; hauntology and abstract embodiments; the plasticity of form and the resources of generic resistance; redescriptions of the realist mode; nations, nationalisms, and post-national possibilities. These themes are attached to a framework informed by utopian theory and generic motifs: tropes of “double-vision,” cognitive mapping and possible futures, utopian desire and hope, identity, becoming, and collective self-becoming (Forter 2). Forter and Edwards are both meticulous readers and elegant writers, attentive to nuances of language and form, on one hand, and to theoretical complexities of narrative, on the other. Taken together, these studies represent substantial contributions to multiple disciplinary fields: postcolonial studies (Forter); British studies (Edwards); utopian studies, narratology, and philosophies of time (both).

Caroline Edwards’s exceptional Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel is in close conversation with a specifically British history of utopian literature, and with the late twentieth century’s deconstructive and post-structuralist reworkings of utopia. To say that this study tracks (more narrowly than Forter’s) the Blochian notion of temporality and the changing status of his concept of the “Not Yet” entering the twenty-first century is both true and misleading: the focus on philosophical notions of temporality set in motion by Bloch’s work provides the platform for the ambitious agenda of Edwards’s book. That agenda sounds straightforward enough: “firstly, identify latent moments of utopian expression and excavate their political content; and secondly, interrogate the ways in which temporal formations in narrative might productively be read as suggesting a reconfigured set of aesthetic, social and political coordinates in the twenty-first century” (Edwards 29). Edwards does not lay down a specific set of new generic guidelines, but urges us instead to let “this emerging caucus” (29) of contemporary texts take us where they will: their journey is ours, so let’s pay attention to the landmarks and be open to what appears in each Blochian “forward dawning” (27). The texts’ attachments to the rich resources of utopian literary history on the British islands are one “cache”—to use Edwards’s productive term—of conceptual resources; Bloch’s philosophical articulations of temporality and the theoretical investigations of the not-yet in utopian theory constitutes another cache. But there is a third: our own material “rooted[ness]” in the lived experiences of the world today, an entanglement of our own “lived time” with objective time (27).

Foregrounding the relationship of temporality...