Half the Battle: Part V (of 8)
[Note: The following series, Half The Battle, is culled from a long paper I had to write reflecting on my entire experience in Goddard College's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. It focuses on my creative thesis, a novel entitled, Gods of the Hills: An Act of Secession.]
I: Yo Joe!
II: Walking Away Into A Novel
III: Three Times Lost
IV: An Adirondack Chair, a Third Eye, and a Skrinkle Lee
V: A Future without Utopia
Tradeoff Vicar exists in a slightly alternative world where the Boston Red Sox still haven’t won a World Series and where President Dick Cheney has been succeeded by a woman known as the Right Administrator, a woman who oversaw the repeal of the 22nd Amendment. It is a world much like my own, except the right-wing elements of the population have even more power than they did in 2006 (which is when I started writing the book).
Eliza Best, on the other hand, is born seven generations after Tradeoff Vicar, and in her world, the state of Vermont no longer exists. With such a blank slate, my book seemed poised to become a novel about utopia. Unfortunately, most utopian novels describe a system by which the ideal society must operate, and the primary desire driving my book was not the creation of such a system, but rather, the desire to secede from systems in general: consumerism, globalization, representative democracy, the military-industrial complex, standardized education, etc. My characters didn’t want to walk away from these systems only to replace them with others; they wanted to walk away entirely. They wanted to exist in a world where even the most basic systems of cause and effect are no more probable than the birth of a child with an extra-sensory third-eye. If Eliza’s world was a utopia, then it was so only in the sense that means “the land of no land,” and not in the sense that means “this land is better than any other.”
Though the set-up of my book seemed to beg for it, I didn’t want to write a utopian novel. I wanted to write something else. And to ensure I didn’t write a utopian novel by accident, I chose to make a study of the genre the focus of my long critical paper.
Concentrating on two utopian novels, Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, I investigated not only the characteristics of the utopian genre, but the entire concept of genre itself. This last question came up not because of any ideas I had at the beginning of the paper, but because of ideas I had during the writing of it. If I was to describe the utopian genre, I first had to have a clear understanding of what a genre was.
A genre, I decided, is bounded, contained, and separated from the genres that are, indeed, not it; at the same time, a genre contains within it a harmony of multivariate works. The concept of genre is spatial, measured in terms of within or without, and it defines an existing dimension of any literary work.
The problem with the spatial definition of genre is that it is static; it neglects a genre’s dynamism. If a genre is a harmony of multivariate works, dynamism is the way new works figure into that song. With dynamism, the boundaries of a genre become expressions of the conceptual forces emanating from individual works, and they are always subject to flux.
I wondered in my paper how a writer consciously attempts to reshape the lines of her chose genre. How could she work within a genre at the same time as she goes beyond it? These wasn’t just a theoretical question for the sake of my paper. They were the foundational questions of my entire creative project.
On the question of utopian literature, I discovered that utopian literary works present fictional social systems in values that cast them as positively transcendent, and they often do so by giving an outsider’s perspective on the characteristics of the fictional society. Works that do not include this perspective are necessarily attempts to innovate the genre.
The tradition of utopian literature often presents reality as an object of study. But during the course of my paper, I realized that utopian literature would be more effective if it illustrated the personal moments that are necessary to make a utopia real.
Perhaps the mistake that traditionalists make is not in inventing a utopian society to describe, but in allowing an outsider to describe it. By changing the dynamic from “object” to “subject,” an innovative piece of utopian literature apprehends not only laws and systems, but life. And it is the dynamism of life that will finally propel a reader into the land of no land.
My book wouldn’t be a utopian novel, but if it ended up being one by accident, I decided it would be, at the very least, an attempt to innovate the genre.
[Continue to Part VI: Nos Deiciamus In Nihilum]