In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [27]
7. Season-linked story cycle: For a good late-Victorian example, see William Morris, The Earthly Paradise.
8. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, from the film of that name.
9. Yeats’s nightingale: in “Sailing to Byzantium.”
10. Judith Merril: Told to this author.
Dire Cartographies:
The Roads to Ustopia
What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces.
REBECCA SOLNIT, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
… after WWII utopia was no longer just a synonym for naiveté. It was dangerous. Now, decades further on, in a new century and a new millennium, earnest utopian thought and earnest utopians are a glowing ember at best, and utopia’s legion failures seem to suggest that the best course of action would be to crush it—snuff it for good.
J. C. HALLMAN, In Eutopia
This chapter is about literary utopias and dystopias, and how it came to pass that I found myself writing about them, and then—many years later—attempting something in that form myself. Ustopia is a word I made up by combining utopia and dystopia—the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.
The “dire” might at first glance appear to be connected only to the obverse or dystopic side of this coin, where unpleasantness prevails, though most utopias viewed slantwise—from the point of view of people who don’t fit into their high standards of perfection—are equally dire. But before expanding on that notion, I’ll begin with the second word of my title: cartographies.
Cartography is map-drawing, and the brain is, among other things, a map-making entity. Not only our brains, but also those of other animals with brains. And not only the brains of other animals with brains: even the lowly slime mould, entirely devoid of a central nervous system, “maps” its adjacent space, figuring out—for instance—the closest route to enjoyable foods. (It prefers oatmeal.) From our earliest days, as soon as we can crawl around on the floor, we are inscribing maps of our surroundings onto the neural pathways in our brains and—reciprocally—inscribing our own tracks, markings, and namings and claimings onto the landscape itself. Snails make trails, and so do beavers, and so do tree-scratching bears and hydrant-marking dogs, and so—quintessentially—do we. We’re almost as good at finding the shortest path to enjoyable foods as slime moulds are, although our choice may not be oatmeal.
With every map there’s an edge—a border between the known and the unknown. In old medieval and early Renaissance maps, the edges were where the monsters were drawn—the sea serpents and many-headed hydras, which were, as we say, off the map. Monsters live under the bed when you’re little because you can’t see under the bed when you’re actually in the bed. And that’s what’s scary about darkness for a lot of people: the unknown. The known is finite, the unknown is infinite: anything at all may lurk in it. Grendel, the monster in Beowulf, is termed—in John Gardner’s reworking of him—“earth rim roamer” and “walker of the world’s weird wall.” That’s where monsters live—at the edges, at the borders. Monsters also live at the edges of our consciousness—during the day and in stable times, that is. They take full possession of our field of vision only when we’re “asleep” or entranced in some way, as suggested by the title of Goya’s enigmatic engraving of 1799, The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters.
Why do we so frequently put monsters at the edges of the maps, or under the bed, and also—in some of its forms—in stories of the adventure-romance type? As Roberto Calasso sagely notes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, heroes need monsters in order to establish their heroic credentials through combat, but monsters most emphatically do not need heroes. And once the monsters are slain, the heroes die as well, to be replaced by urban planning with its crisp maps of the known, and then, in the shadow world hidden or possibly pushed aside by those maps, by more monsters, who are endlessly