Utopia Limited: Post-Sixties and Postmodern American Fiction

Marianne DeKoven

Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995) 75-97

Both utopianism and postmodernism have been seen as quintessentially or characteristically American phenomena. ¹ This essay will investigate some interrelations between the two. I will begin (appropriately, I hope, for an essay on "historiographic" fiction) ² by telling a historical story in order to provide the necessary groundwork for my arguments.

The heyday of American utopianism, in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, saw the blossoming of hundreds of communities, the names of some of them at the heart of our cultural history (Brook Farm, the Shakers, the Icarians, Oneida, Amana, to mention a few of the best known). Socialist and, in the case of the Owenite communities, feminist egalitarianism were crucial to these utopian communities. ³ This historical utopian cornucopia also coincided, of course, with the heyday of slavery. The utopian movements overlapped with and sometimes embraced (fostered, were committed to) Abolitionism, with Brook Farm a prime instance. It is clear that utopianism and Abolitionism shared the universalist, Enlightenment ideals of human equality and freedom. I would argue that Radical Reconstruction, including most notably the Freedmen's Bureau (1865-1872), hoped and even attempted to realize the goals of utopianism and Abolition, and that the destruction of Reconstruction [End Page 75] marked the defeat, at least for that historical moment, of the social goals and visions of both. ⁴ The period in the 1870s and 1880s following the dissolution of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the ultimate defeat of Reconstruction, was a post-utopian historical moment. It witnessed the break-up and disappearance of most of the antebellum utopian communities, contemporaneous with the institution of slavery by other means in the sharecropping Black Belt South, and of systemic, often murderous racism throughout the country. At the same time, this period encompassed the stunning growth of industrial capitalism in the urban North, with its rampant social miseries as yet unchecked by subsequent radical and reformist movements.

American utopianism had another renaissance in the 1960s, with, again, hundreds of communities (none of them as famous or successful as their nineteenth-century predecessors) springing up all over the country. Like their predecessors, these communities were committed to egalitarianism and crucially linked to a resurgence of socialism, though there were many differences: 1960s communities were generally marked by an anarcho-syndicalist version of socialism, emphasizing personal, individual freedom, pleasure and fulfillment at the expense of group unity or coherence ("the common good"). ⁵ They were therefore much more ephemeral and fragile than the generally more group-oriented, and sometimes rigidly rule-governed, nineteenth-century communities. ⁶ Despite this difference of emphasis, however, the 60s communes were varyingly, loosely, but consistently committed to ideals of common ownership, equitably shared labor, and an egalitarian power structure based on the New Left ideal of participatory democracy (the hierarchical, guru-governed religious communes were an exception). ⁷ The antagonisms between the political New Left and the countercultural hippie utopian communes are well documented, but they should not obscure the fact that the New Left and the counterculture were two facets of a broad, general movement that had at its core a commitment to socialist egalitarianism--liberty, equality, community--including racial, class, and, sometimes, gender equality. These issues were highly complex and troubled: most hippies, and therefore most hippie communes, were white and middle-class. Further, because both radicalism and the counterculture were exaggeratedly macho and male dominated until the emergence of second-wave feminism in the final phase of (out of the ashes [End Page 76] of) the 60s, they usually reproduced dominant gender inequalities, often in exaggerated versions, despite their egalitarian ideologies.

Like the post-Reconstruction period, the period following the demise and defeat of the 60s--a period I would argue continues into the present--is also a post-utopian moment. ⁸ This post-utopian moment is the period we now call postmodernism, or postmodernity. Many studies mark the decline or end of egalitarian, socialist-based or -inspired utopianism in postmodernism. ⁹ In this essay, I want to discuss the status of utopianism in two postmodernist works of fiction, both of them set in the post-utopian early 1870s. I have chosen these two seemingly unrelated novels because they are both set just at the moment of the demise of the Freedmen's Bureau, with, in both cases, that historical moment used at once to account for and also to parallel our current situation: Toni Morrison's Beloved and E. L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. I will discuss the connections between these novels' visions of utopianism and their deployments of postmodernist narrative strategies.

Both Beloved and The Waterworks are engaged with utopian visions; in both, history destroys or distorts potential or attempted utopias. Both novels are thoroughly postmodernist in their narrative strategies, interweaving popular with "high literary" modes of fiction writing. ¹⁰ In both novels the failure or destruction of utopia is connected to slavery and its racist sequelae: the utopian possibilities of the late 60s--both 1860s and 1960s--are defeated by the intractability of slavery's legacy. For Doctorow, that defeat coincides with the deformations of urban industrial capitalism and its concomitant political corruption (capitalism appears in Beloved in the muted or displaced but crucial form of schoolteacher's brutal, dehumanizing, efficiency-oriented rationalism).

Morrison and Doctorow both delineate in the post-utopian 1870s the present of postmodernity. Doctorow saturates his 1870s New York with the crude inequality of vast, ill-gotten elite wealth in dialectic with mass poverty, squalor and wretchedness. Both are linked to the thoroughgoing corruption and degradation of public politics, everywhere suggestive of current post- or neo-Reaganite conditions--what Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, calls the global triumph of capitalism in its purest form. Beloved, though less explicitly than The Waterworks, evokes the aftermath of the 60s by using the end of the Freedmen's Bureau, signaling the nearing defeat of Reconstruction [End Page 77] itself, to suggest the failed utopian promise of Civil Rights, Black Power, and early second-wave feminism.

A characteristic postmodernist narrative strategy works in both novels to handle the dilemma of at once representing a powerful utopian desire and at the same time representing a thoroughgoing skepticism concerning the possibility of its fulfillment. This strategy is the refunctioning of sentimental, sensationalist popular genres--melodrama/ ghost story for Morrison, ¹¹ detective fiction for Doctorow--along with the traditional heterosexual romance plot, both to resolve and also to refuse to resolve or absolve the tragedy of loss and defeat at the center of each novel. ¹² An excess of apocalyptic fictional material that cannot be integrated into the resolutions conventional narrative forms enforce pushes into the ending of each novel, and also erupts through the prose surface of each throughout. This excess connects to the anti-conventional writing in each novel, which I consider the persistence of utopianism as modernist form within the reconfigured formal conventionality of postmodernism. ¹³ What I am calling modernist writing is most evident in the ellipses Doctorow uses throughout the novel, and also in the explicitly visionary passages in his prose. Morrison's poetic prose in general pushes at the limits of conventional writing; in Beloved, the ultimate scene of putative but ultimately murderous utopian fulfillment is written in fully experimental prose.

"Sweet Home" is Morrison's ineluctably clear indictment of the possibility of utopia in a slave country. ¹⁴ The acerbic irony of that plantation's name exceeds its allusion to "Home Sweet Home," forcefully undercutting America's claim to Edenic status. As in Eden, the power of naming at Sweet Home belongs to the patriarch; in this case, in this country, he is the white patriarch. The power of naming, both oneself and one's children, is crucial to this novel. Sethe and her mother insist on their right to name their children; Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid insist on the right to name themselves. The fact that all but two of the Sweet Home men are named Paul both highlights the de-individuation of slaves and also provides yet another ironic reference to the master's Christian tradition. The tree planted on Sethe's back by schoolteacher's student's whip is the Edenic tree of knowledge with a vengeance. There is no possibility of antebellum utopia in Beloved, because, simply, of slavery.

The novel acknowledges the white utopian aspirations of the antebellum period, in Mr. and Mrs. Garner's enlightened relations to their [End Page 78] slaves, in the name "Sweet Home," and in the almost livable life Sethe leads with Halle before the advent of schoolteacher. Utopia however is always-already contaminated by slavery: even at their best, the slaves' lives are only almost livable, and nothing like autonomous or free. The unusual (for slavery) autonomy of the "Sweet Home men" proves empty when Mr. Garner dies and Mrs. Garner feels that "she needed her brother-in-law [schoolteacher] and two boys 'cause people said she shouldn't be alone out there with nothing but Negroes" (197). Because their "freedom" was created by Mr. Garner, it died with him.

Toward the end of the novel, Morrison comments, by means of Paul D, on the nonfulfillment of America's Edenic promise:

In five tries he had not had one permanent success. Every one of his escapes . . . had been frustrated. Alone, undisguised, with visible skin, memorable hair and no whiteman to protect him, he never stayed uncaught. . . . And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. (268)

This passage evokes the beautiful (withheld rather than promised) land as the nurturant maternal body. The linkage of the utopian to the maternal, found frequently throughout Western figurations and analyses of utopia, will be an important element of the fictional configurations I analyze here.

Abolition is similarly at once given its due and undercut by Morrison. The Bodwins--the Abolitionists who enable Baby Suggs and her family to find shelter and employment--are clearly "good people." Bodwin remembers with nostalgia, as "heady days," the time "[t]wenty years ago when the Society was at its height in opposing slavery," when "'bleached nigger' is what his enemies called him, and . . . had caught him and shoe-blackened his face and hair" (260). For Bodwin, the heyday of Abolition was indeed a utopian time, betrayed in the post-war period. His thoughts resemble those of a current veteran of the 1960s: "Those heady days were gone now; what remained was the sludge of ill will; dashed hopes and difficulties beyond repair. . . . Nothing since was as stimulating as the old days of letters, petitions, meetings, debates, recruitment, quarrels, rescue and downright sedition" (260). [End Page 79]

The irony of Sethe seeing Bodwin as schoolteacher, when she attacks him with an ice pick at the end of the novel, is nonetheless sharply pointed. While the Bodwins expose themselves to considerable risk in the service of their Abolitionist beliefs, and they manage Sethe's release from prison, they do not see or treat African-Americans as equal to whites. Baby Suggs and, later, her granddaughter Denver both enter the Bodwin house through the back door. Denver, having obtained the "Service" (see below) employment in the Bodwin house that will allow her and Sethe to survive, affirms that the Bodwins are "good whitefolks." As she is about to leave through that back door, she sees,

sitting on a shelf . . . a blackboy's mouth full of money. His head was thrown back farther than a head could go, his hands were shoved in his pockets. Bulging like moons, two eyes were all the face he had above the gaping red mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced dots made of nail heads. And he was on his knees. His mouth, wide as a cup, held the coins needed to pay for a delivery or some other small service, but could just as well have held buttons, pins or crab-apple jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words "At Yo Service." (255)

Beyond exploitation, dehumanization, degradation, reification, and theft of labor, this remarkable figure suggests the tortures both of slavery and of post-war violence against African-Americans that are among Morrison's central concerns in this novel. ¹⁵ The "head thrown back farther than a head could go" and the "gaping red mouth . . . wide as a cup" suggest not only lynching (that suggestion reinforced by the bulging eyes) ¹⁶ but also the humiliation and torment of the collar and bit suffered by Paul D. The nails driven into the head suggest at once a generalized violence and also the most drastic sort of bodily imprisonment. "At Yo Service" and "on his knees" remind us again of the view of African-Americans held by (almost) all whites, even "good whitefolk" Abolitionists like the Bodwins. ¹⁷

Both the New World Eden and white Abolitionism are vitiated by slavery and racism, but there exists in this novel a much more potent, promising, and therefore more tragically destroyed utopian possibility. We see it first in the preaching Baby Suggs, holy, does in the Clearing, during the period between Halle's purchase of her freedom and Sethe's [End Page 80] arrival at 124 Bluestone Road with Denver in her arms and the tree of knowledge on her back. Baby Suggs had

decided that, because slave life had "busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue," she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart--which she put to work at once. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it [holy], she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. . . . Uncalled, unrobed, unanointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence. When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. (87)

The Clearing has strong utopian resonance, with its anonymous provenance, its anti-instrumentality, its spaciousness, and its depth in the woods--the primeval nature of the American Eden. Baby Suggs, self-named, is literally free of tainted institutions, "unchurched." Her congregation is a spontaneous egalitarian bonding, in nature, of the oppressed, for the purpose of mutual salvation.

They achieve this salvation not through any acceptance of dogma or practice of ritual or belief in divine intercession. Morrison explicitly circumvents Christianity: "She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or it glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine" (89). They achieve salvation through the inspiration of Baby Suggs' great heart and her moving language, by means of ecstatic laughing, dancing, singing, sobbing. Morrison represents in the Clearing the release through the body into love of the black body despised by white America: "'Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. . . . You got to love it, you!'" (88).

We learn of Baby Suggs' ministry in the Clearing only after it is [End Page 81] long since lost, when Sethe yearns for it in order to be able to bear the information Paul D has given her about Halle's end-information that has begun to catalyze her "rememory." Baby Suggs renounced her ministry in the wake of the unbearable events at the center of this novel, the "unspeakable unspoken" of slavery itself, whose objective correlative for Morrison is the necessity for a mother to murder her child in order to save her: "no notebook for my babies [to write down their 'animal characteristics'] and no measuring string neither" (198). Baby Suggs says "'those white things have taken all I had or dreamed . . . and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.' . . . Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrived" (89).

The event that empties the Clearing and deprives Baby Suggs of faith, love, imagination, and her heart itself, the historical event around which Morrison constructed this novel, takes us back to the linkage of the utopian and the maternal. Beloved is the child Sethe has been driven by the Fugitive Slave Act to kill in order to save her from slavery, the child she then named by paying by the letter with her body for a tombstone inscription. This child returns to claim her mother, into a space opened in Sethe for her by the reappearance of Paul D and the eruption of rememory into Sethe's life. The watery world of death from which Beloved returns is endowed by Morrison with deliberately multiple, ambiguous, undecidable suggestions at once of the womb, the underworld or afterlife, the specific circumstances of Beloved's death, and the general historical circumstances of the Middle Passage. This literally miraculous return restores mother and daughter to one another, and sister to sister (though that relation is largely non-reciprocal, with Denver desiring Beloved and Beloved desiring only Sethe).

Morrison constructs this space of maternal restoration and completion very explicitly as utopian. The three women form a closed whole of perfect mutual gratification. Paul D has decamped, leaving the three women alone at 124 Bluestone. First he had exorcised the ghost Beloved had become, enabling her return in bodily form. When that bodily presence becomes unbearable to him, he repudiates Sethe's action in murdering/saving Beloved by accusing Sethe of precisely the "animal characteristics" ("four feet," as he puts it) attributed to her by schoolteacher. The attribution of "animal characteristics" is what Sethe [End Page 82] killed Beloved in order to save her from. In his bitterness at his recognition that Sethe's love for her children outstrips anything she might feel toward him, and in his fear at the danger of a black woman loving her own, therefore herself, with such an absolute claim, he has accused her of a love that is "too thick" (164).

Ultimately, Morrison endorses Paul D's view. At first, the self-contained, absolute, world-excluding mother-daughter bond Sethe forms with Beloved appears to be a redemption not only of the crime against both their lives forced on Sethe by the Law of slavery, but also of the pre-Oedipal connection of the girl child to the mother's body advocated in much feminist theory as the ground for a revolutionary feminist praxis. This bond, however, proves to be monstrous and nearly itself murderous. ¹⁸ Beloved's absolute love for and dependence on Sethe gradually, steadily emerges as lethal to Sethe: Beloved is literally sucking away Sethe's life, growing fat on it as Sethe declines (Beloved looks pregnant as Sethe nears death). It is Denver, with her refusal of an absolute bond with Sethe, her link to her father (she looks like and yearns for Halle), her fear of her mother's "too-thick love," and her independence, who pushes outside this self-contained female utopia/dystopia, out into the community, and thereby saves herself and her mother.

Sethe's limitlessly abundant milk is a central figure in the novel of the utopian maternal, suggesting the revolutionary, 60s-inspired feminist utopianism of écriture féminine, specifically Hélène Cixous' call to women to write the female body in the "white ink" of mother's milk. In fact, the sequence culminating the bonding of the three women, a bonding so extreme that they become interchangeable with one another, is written in a version of écriture féminine, or experimental prose. It is filled with imagery of mother-daughter merging, and is reminiscent of Cixous' own writing: ¹⁹

in the night I hear chewing and swallowing and laughter it belongs to me she is the laugh I am the laugher I see her face which is mine . . . her face comes through the water a hot thing . . . my face is coming I have to have it I am looking for the join I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me I see me swim away a [End Page 83] hot thing . . . I want to be the two of us . . . she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing (212-213)

This writing is the embodiment, the literalization, of Sethe's "too-thick" maternal love, the "chewing and swallowing" of mutual engulfment. The theft of self perpetrated by slavery on Africans is represented by the violence of the theft of Sethe's milk--to Sethe this theft is even more intolerable than the brutal whipping that produces the "tree" on her back. Despite this theft, her milk is still miraculously ample and available for both daughters when Sethe arrives at the home of Baby Suggs, the matriarch of 124's maternal utopia. When Beloved returns, it appears as if the promise of Sethe's miraculous milk will be fulfilled in the face of, in defiance of, beyond and outside, the history of slavery and the violent defeat of Radical Reconstruction. But a utopia that excludes Stamp Paid is a utopia that denies black solidarity, the only hope located within history rather than, as utopian constructions in post-utopian times inevitably are, outside it (I refer to the important scene where Stamp Paid, hearing the three merged voices within the house, feels he cannot enter, cannot even bring himself to knock on the door when in fact, given what he has done, he has the right to enter any African-American house without knocking). Sethe's miraculous milk drains off into the succubus Beloved has become; its seemingly limitless flow is in fact limited by the extent of Sethe's own life.

The community of women, catalyzed by Denver, saves Sethe; Paul D returns to tell her that she, not her children, is her own "best thing" (273). The radical, absolute mother-daughter bond is broken, and lighter, thinner, reformist rather than revolutionary bonds take its place: individualist self-realization ("you your own best thing"), the romance plot (reconciliation with Paul D), and intermittently activated, potentially rejecting community (the praying circle of women who had turned their backs on Sethe's "too-thick love"). Radical black feminist utopia turned deadly gives way to mildly optimistic reform (black feminist rather than simply feminist because its maternality is a defiance of and alternative to the deformations of slavery).

Denver's successful move out into the world, her reintegration into the community, bringing Sethe with her, and the return of Paul D, do not end the novel. The reformist, post-utopian ending derived from [End Page 84] the conventions of mainstream bourgeois fiction (just as the central narrative structures of the novel are dependent on the ghost story, and sentimental, sensationalist melodrama) are succeeded, and to some extent supervened, by the final two-page section. Morrison gives the last word to the uncontainable, apocalyptic excess Beloved represents: "Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her"; she "erupts into her separate parts"; "They forgot her like a bad dream. . . . Remembering seemed unwise" (274). But "Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go" (275) and her name is the last word of the text. The experimental prose cited above and, more pervasively, the dense, magnificent poetic writing Morrison uses throughout, are the footprints of Beloved on the form of this novel. Further, the repeated refrain, "It was not a story to pass on," twice, then "This is not a story to pass on" (274- 275), represents, in its contradictory double-entendre of "pass on" as transmit and "pass on" as walk away from, the persistence of utopian desire in a postmodern fiction that at once passes on it and passes it on.

Where Beloved's evocations of 60s utopianism, and post-60s post-utopianism, are implicit, Doctorow's in The Waterworks are explicit, or as nearly so as they can be in a novel set in the 1870s. ²⁰ Morrison deploys refunctioned narrative conventions of sensationalist sentimental melodrama; Doctorow deploys those of sensationalist detective melodrama. I have already alluded to the strong parallel The Waterworks establishes between the brutal urban capitalism of the late nineteenth- and the late twentieth-centuries. Augustus Pemberton, one of the novel's villains--the father of one of its heroes, Martin--made his fortune first from the illegal slave trade, and then from Civil War profiteering: selling lethally inferior goods to the Union Army. He has built for himself, as the robber barons in fact did, a massive estate on the Hudson, Doctorow's descriptions of which evoke the unnatural monstrosity of the houses on the shore of Fitzgerald's West Egg (Gatsby is a profound influence on this novel, as we will see). In his megalomania, his wholehearted belief in his own invulnerability, which corresponds to Boss Tweed's fatal hubris (the breakup of Tammany Hall is one of the novel's subplots), Augustus Pemberton fakes his death and turns all his money over to the amoral genius Dr. Sartorius, who promises him longevity of indefinite term. He thereby impoverishes his young second wife and child, sentimentalized paragons in this stark moral melodrama. [End Page 85]

Dr. Sartorius is a figure of scientific/technological modernity, the Progress concerning which Doctorow is deeply skeptical. Dr. Sartorius promises Pemberton a version of eternal, or at least indefinitely prolonged life, which he hopes to achieve through his medical "experiments." These fiendish experiments are based on vampirizing the vital essence of poor orphan children and transfusing it into rich old men. Martin begins to unravel the plot when he digs up his father's supposed grave and finds there instead an oddly withered child--"a very shrunken corpse . . . in odd clothing . . . with a tiny leathered face with its eyes closed and lips pursed" (107). ²¹ Pemberton had consolidated his fortune through Civil War profiteering; Sartorius, in parallel fashion, had established his medical reputation as a brilliant army surgeon: "He had marched and ridden through the worst of our Civil War unscathed . . . either by its cannon and shot or by its issues. The seemingly endless carnage ended upon the table before him in his field surgery . . . as one continuously fascinating . . . wonderfully torn and broken and dying body . . . with endless things to be fixed" (213).

Sartorius' experiments are performed in a secret laboratory constructed within the "Waterworks" of the title, the upstate pumping station for New York City's water supply (the heart for its lifeblood). He establishes there what Martin explicitly calls an "obverse Eden" (188). Unlike Yeats' ambiguous utopia, Byzantium, it is a country exclusively for old men--old evil plutocrats who want to live forever by feeding off the lives of the impoverished young. Here is Martin's description of this perverse utopia:

It was in the nature of an indoor park, with gravel paths and plantings and cast-iron benches. It was all set inside a vaulted roof of glass and steel which cast a greenish light over everything. The conservatory was laid out to effect a forbearing harmony and peacefulness. [. . .] Enormous clay urns sprouted profusions of fronds and leaves that I knew on sight were not native. A kind of tepid steam or diffusion of watered air hissed out of ports or valves inset in the floor, so that the atmosphere was cloyingly humid. I could feel through the floor vibrations of the dynamo that was responsible. [. . .] It was as if I had stepped into another universe, a Creation, like . . . an obverse Eden. (187-88)

[End Page 86]

Late nineteenth-century capitalism as unchecked greed and exploitation, in unholy alliance with modern science and technology as amoral instrumentalist megalomania, have converted the American Eden into its obverse, an anti-Eden, with the machine dynamo vibrating with a vengeance in the ersatz garden.

Doctorow's post-utopianism is even more explicit elsewhere in the novel. The harbinger of Sartorius' demonic obverse Eden at the Waterworks is his "Home for Little Wanderers," the seemingly benign but in fact lethal orphanage where children are housed in order to die into the unnaturally prolonged lives of plutocrats. The narrator-hero, the journalist McIlvaine, accompanies the policeman-hero, Donne, on a stakeout of the orphanage, which is at 93rd St. and the East River. McIlvaine gives us a long, loving description of the still-pastoral landscape in process of urbanization:

At this time, the city north of Seventy-second Street was no longer country, but not yet city either. The houses were few and far between. Whole blocks had been scraped clear and laid out with surveyor string, but nothing was on them. [. . .] Here was a street set with paving stones that stopped at the edge of a pasture, there was a scaffolded half-risen apartment house through whose unframed windows you saw the sky [. . .] From Park Avenue and Ninety-third the unpaved road ran downhill in a gentle slope to the river. In the fields on either side pumpkins were scattered and trees were beginning to turn. The sounds of the city were distant, almost imperceptible. Donne and his men were encamped beneath a stand of yellowing weeping willow halfway between First and Second avenues. [. . .] Here and there in the field around us birds were scooting about in their dustbaths or hopping from brush to tree. High up over the river an undulant arrow of geese pointed south. (154-156)

Rearing up out of, and violently negating this bucolic scene is the Home for Little Wanderers:

a Romanesque structure of red stone trimmed in granite and with the turrets and small windows of an armory. The bottom half was obscured by a brick wall. A cast-iron gate gave [End Page 87] on to a courtyard. It looked its part--a very substantial building, lending substance to those who lived there. It was an outpost of our advancing civilization . . . like all our other institutions out at the edges--poorhouses, asylums for fallen women, homes for the deaf and dumb. (156)

McIlvaine so detests this manifestation of "our advancing civilization" that he is moved to the following reflection: "I fervently wished there were no buildings of any kind on this island. I envisioned the first Dutch sailors giving up on the place as a mosquito-infested swamp, and returning in their longboats to the ships . . ." (156).

Doctorow is alluding explicitly here to the famous ending of The Great Gatsby, where Nick imagines the Dutch sailors' vision of America, specifically New York, as the "fresh green breast of the new world . . . commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder." Unlike the modernist Fitzgerald, for whose narrative vision the "inessential houses" of Long Island can "melt away" so that he can see again the "fresh green breast of the new world" that "flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes," the postmodernist Doctorow sees those Dutch sailors not as surrogate Adams, beholders of utopia, but as emissaries of the "advancing civilization" that destroyed utopia. While Fitzgerald can see utopia again through the Dutch sailors' imagined eyes, Doctorow can only wish that those eyes had perceived not utopia but a "mosquito-infested swamp." Utopia can be reimagined by Doctorow/McIlvaine not through European eyes but only as the pre-Columbian home of Native Americans, those "savage polytheists of [his] mind":

Ever since this day [the day of the vision quoted above at the Home for Little Wanderers] I have dreamt sometimes . . . I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now . . . that if it were possible to lift this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth . . . and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables--all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath--how seedlings would sprout, and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills [. . .] A season or two of this and the mute, protesting culture buried for so many industrial years under the tenements and factories . . . would rise again . . . of the lean, religious Indians [End Page 88] of the bounteous earth, who lived without money or lasting architecture, close to the ground [. . .] always praying in solemn thanksgiving for their clear and short life in this quiet universe. Such love I have for those savage polytheists of my mind . . . those friends of light and leaf . . . those free men and women. . . . (163-164)

The remarkable image of industrial-capitalist Manhattan lifted like a scab to permit the regeneration of a pre-European New World Eden, peopled by what is self-consciously, admittedly a fantasy of pre-rationalist and therefore free "friends of light and leaf," marks Doctorow's post-utopian utopianism: utopia, as for Morrison, can only be imagined outside, and in explicit negation of, history.

As for Morrison, as well, utopian desire persists powerfully in this novel. Like those of Beloved, its narrative structures are mainly governed by the popular fictional conventions that make both novels bestsellers, capable of reaching a wide audience. Doctorow uses the conventions of the detective novel (unraveling the crime of the Waterworks, and bringing its perpetrators to justice, controls the plot; the novel's "hero" is a police detective, Donne) and of the closed or neatly resolved heterosexual romantic plot (in this novel's more-or-less happy ending, Donne marries Augustus Pemberton's young widow, and Martin finally marries his longsuffering childhood sweetheart). Also as in Beloved, however, the apocalyptic excess of the novel pushes against the closure installed by those conventions. At the most obvious level, McIlvaine himself (like Beloved) cannot be absorbed into the closing structure of heterosexual coupling. Similarly, McIlvaine's language, the prose of the novel itself, is broken throughout, as the lengthy citations here must have made clear, by erratic use of ellipsis. The ellipsis, like Faulkner's use of italics in The Sound and the Fury, is inconsistent--sometimes clearly motivated and sometimes not. It is a mark of what Morrison calls "the unspeakable" breaking into, disrupting, the smooth prose surface we would otherwise expect, marking the place of an absented, discredited, historically defeated, but nonetheless persistent utopian desire. The unspeakable, like the Nietzschean abyss of the modernists, deforms and reforms narrative convention. It is precisely this undecidable aggregation of popular convention with anti-conventional, modernist or experimental [End Page 89] narrative elements that marks for me the domain of serious or ambitious postmodernist fiction.

In The Waterworks, as in Beloved, the novel's ending is reserved for such an eruption of fictional excess, in this instance in a passage of powerfully evocative poetic prose reminiscent of the great modernists' and of Morrison's:

I remember how still the city was that afternoon as I walked uptown from the church. It was brilliantly sunny and terribly cold and the streets were empty. The footing was treacherous. Everything was thickly glazed. . . . Horsecars were frozen to their rails, as were the locomotives on their elevated railway of ice. . . . The masts and sheets of the ships in the docks were ensheathed in ice. . . . Ice floes lay in the viscous river. . . . The ironfronts of Broadway seemed in the sun to be burning in ice. . . . The trees on the side streets were of crystal. [. . .] my illusion was that the city had frozen in time. [. . .] all still, unmoving, stricken, as if the entire city of New York would be forever encased and frozen, aglitter and God-stunned. (252-253)

Like the riverside ground behind 124 carrying and erasing Beloved's footprints, this frozen, God-stunned city is marked, by its prose as well as by its figuration of apocalypse outside time and history, as the site of a defeated, absented, inevitably recurring utopian desire. ²²

The maternal is the locus of defeated utopia for Morrison, and maternality itself becomes monstrous in its historical deformation. For Doctorow, it is the paternal that has become the site of the betrayal or defeat of utopian possibility: The Waterworks is a father-quest, not for an idealized dead father but for a despised, criminally alive father. Beloved's utopian excess is lodged in the vanishing/returning footprints of a water-lost daughter; The Waterworks' in the curse of frozen water inflicted by God the Father. But in the postmodern destabilization of the characteristically modern Oedipal configuration and its attendant gender dualism, this difference (the maternal orientation of one novel, the paternal orientation of the other) loses defining significance. Morrison's maternal feminine African-American world, as victim of history, is no more capable of transcending history's depredations (surviving, defying, but not [End Page 90] transcending) than Doctorow's paternal masculine Euro-American world, agent of that victimization, is capable of transcending itself (dissecting, repudiating but not transcending).

As postmodern narratives, in which oppositional modernist writing cohabits with popular fictional convention, both novels choose and enact a postmodern form of resistance-from-within. They leave behind the modernist/avant-garde mode of wholesale opposition, in which the new aesthetic stands as representation, harbinger, embodiment of a world made new. The modernist/avant-garde, utopian model of totalized oppositionality was advocated most forcefully by Marcuse, perhaps the most wholehearted modern believer in the liberatory, transformative power of anti-realist aesthetics. He saw the modernist/avant-garde aesthetic revolution as an avatar of the "new sensibility," the de-repressed human consciousness that would bring into being a "realm of freedom which is not that of the present . . . a liberation which must precede the construction of a free society, one which necessitates an historical break with the past and the present" ("An Essay on Liberation" viii).

In postmodernity, we are beyond the moment of imagining that revolutionary political/aesthetic intentionality can produce such utter rupture with the past and the present. I would argue, nonetheless, that we live in the aftermath of a profound historical rupture--postmodernity itself--a rupture that did not break along the lines revolutionary (or any other) intentionality had in mind. Utopia in postmodernity is multiply defeated and discredited, yet it persists in the form not only of desire for elimination of domination, inequality and oppression but also of desire for transcendence itself. Morrison and Doctorow suffuse their post-utopian, genre-inflected bestsellers with high modernist affect and form. Similarly, the political imagination of postmodernity cannot encompass a universal utopia, but it can encompass building "piecemeal . . . a democratic society that will be as imperfect as the people who live in it": an imagination of struggle for local, partial, always-already compromised versions of the freedom, justice and equality that mark the utopian project.

The above quote is from a letter by a victim of Soviet-style utopia, written in Prague two days before the invasion of 1968. He is disgusted by what he considers the romantic unreality of Western radical utopianism of the late 60s, particularly that of Marcuse: [End Page 91]

The men I met are all properly repelled by the realities of authoritarian rule, but they keep on preaching the same weary Utopian ideologies that can lead to nothing else. They live in a romantic dream-world in which their dear radical rhetoric is perfectly consistent with their apparently sincere faith in freedom and justice. But do they really think they could apply their radical Utopia in a real world and still respect their libertarian commitments? Do they really think their utopia could be benign if their revolutions were not comic-opera coups on indulgent campuses but real ventures in the exercise of power? . . . It was not until I started visiting the West that I began to understand that a Sartre or a Marcuse can simply afford a great deal of illusion. You all live in a different era--you still believe in Utopia. . . . We've had our fill of Utopia. No more. Now we are building piecemeal, building a democratic society that will be as imperfect as the people who live in it. It will be socialist because it is an industrial and a democratic society--it just doesn't work the other way around. It won't be a Utopia, but it will be a human kind of society, fit for people to live in. ("a student friend in Prague," qtd. in Kohak, 389-390)

As for Morrison and Doctorow, the utopian for the "friend in Prague" is not only unrealizable but also utterly discredited, discarded, "of a different era." He not only settles for, but actively prefers, the limited possible. Yet like them, he still desperately desires the freedom and justice, the libertarian, socialist democracy, that have constituted the core vision of modernity's secular utopias. In "a human kind of society, fit for people to live in," the formulation conceived as definitive repudiation of and alternative to utopia, the great emancipatory Enlightenment-humanist project echoes. The intensity of this utopian desire is clear throughout his prose as well, in the very bitterness of his tone, just as the intensity of Morrison's and Doctorow's utopian desire is palpable in the push of their literary writing toward transcendence.

MARIANNE DEKOVEN is Professor of English at Rutgers University and her current project is a book on the transition to postmodernism in the 60s. She is author of A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (1983) and Ri ch and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (1991). She is also the guest editor of the upcoming MFS special issue on Gertrude Stein.

Notes

1. For an argument that the United States has been more influenced by utopianism than other societies because of its founding Revolutionary, Enlightenment commitments to liberty and equality, see Goodwin and Taylor, 183-184. For an argument that postmodernism, as a definitive break with modernism, is quintessentially North American, see Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern." My understanding and deployment of the term "utopian" is influenced by a number of utopian discourses, most notably those of Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse.

2. I refer to Hutcheon's term, "historiographic metafiction." She uses this term in The Poetics of Postmodernism to designate postmodern fiction that "is both metafictionally self-reflexive and yet speaking to us powerfully about real political and historical realities" (5).

3. For a thorough, highly informative discussion of the importance of feminism in Owenite socialist utopianism in England and the United States, see Taylor.

4. For a classic and highly influential discussion of the Freedmen's Bureau and its demise, see Du Bois, Chapter II, "Of the Dawn of Freedom," 10-29.

5. On the continuities of 1960s countercultural communes with nineteenth-century American utopian communities, see, for example, Gilbert.

6. See Starr. He also discusses the antagonism between hippies and New Left radicals.

7. For an extended discussion of the centrality of the concept of participatory democracy to the Port Huron Statement and to the New Left in general, see Miller.

8. For an analysis of postmodernism as post-utopian, see Jameson, "Secondary Elaborations (Conclusion)," in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 297-418, especially 334-340 and 401-406. See also Bammer.

9. See, perhaps most notably, Lyotard. In his Foreword, for example, Lyotard claims "This is the sense in which high modernism can be definitively certified as dead and as a thing of the past: its Utopian ambitions were unrealizable and its formal innovations exhausted" (xvii).

10. See Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism; also, Politics of Postmodernism. I take this aggregation of high-literary and popular narrative modes, resulting from the breakdown of the modernist "great divide" between art and popular culture, to be the most important characteristic of postmodernist fictional form (see Huyssen). Unlike modernism, which draws heavily on popular sources but assimilates them to its radically innovative, oppositional, high-art aesthetic practices, postmodernism leaves popular modes more or less intact. While many theorizations of the postmodern valorize popular culture, attacking modernism for its need to transform popular materials into high art, my argument here views the postmodern aggregation of popular and high-literary modes neutrally, descriptively. For an interesting recent discussion of Beloved as postmodern fiction, which in part addresses the issue of its composite form, see Perez-Torres.

11. Morrison also, of course, deploys the African-American genres of the slave narrative, the folk tale, storytelling and oral tradition in general.

12. See duCille, especially pages 143-145.

13. For discussions of modernist form as utopian, see for example Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Bloch, Marcuse, DeKoven. Clearly I am disagreeing with characterizations of postmodernism, such as those of Hassan or Lyotard, as primarily or typically formally experimentalist. Again, I am neither valorizing popular culture, as many pro-postmodernist arguments do, nor denigrating it, as many pro-modernist arguments do. I agree with Hutcheon that postmodernism is oppositional from a position within convention, in contradistinction to modernism, which defines itself as a negation of and alternative to convention.

14. See Rhodes.

15. This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he [Paul D] couldn't say exactly why, considering the coloredpeople he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn't remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies. (66)

Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He [Stamp Paid] smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. . . . It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, . . . he caught sight of something red on its bottom. . . . [it] was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. . . . "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" (180)

16. See Perez-Torres for another discussion of this passage.

17. The one exception is Amy Denver, a young destitute girl, escaping indenture, and therefore at the bottom of the white power structure. Like Sethe, she is abused and on the run; also like Sethe, she is almost superhumanly strong and resourceful. She delivers Denver, who is therefore named for her, and saves Sethe's life.

18. A great deal of feminist psychoanalytic maternalist criticism has been written on this novel. For a useful bibliography of articles on Beloved, including many in the above category, see Mix. My reading emphasizes the deformations of history rather than the problems of the absolute pre-Oedipal maternal bond as analyzed from within a non-historically-inflected psychoanalysis. For an argument with an emphasis on writing and constructions of maternity in African-American women's fiction, see Boyce Davies. Henderson's "Re-Membering the Body" is another article that has been very important to my understanding of Beloved.

19. Compare, for example, this passage from Cixous:

In woman there is always, more or less, something of "the mother" repairing and feeding, resisting separation . . . Text, my body: traversed by lilting flows; listen to me . . . it is the rhyth-me that laughs you; the one intimately addressed who makes all metaphors . . . the part of you that puts space between yourself and pushes you to inscribe your woman's style in language. Voice: milk that could go on forever. Found again. The lost mother/bitter-lost. Eternity: is voice mixed with milk. (93)

20. For discussions of Doctorow's use of the 1870s to evoke present-day New York, see for example Sante and Solotaroff.

21. Doctorow incorporates many ellipses into the text of The Waterworks. Those ellipses which are mine will be placed in brackets.

22. Unlike Morrison, Doctorow does not close with this apocalyptic passage. He adds one more sentence, which ominously but ambiguously relocates us in historical time and place: "And let me leave you with that illusion [the illusion of ice-encased New York lifted by God out of time]. . . though in reality we would soon be driving ourselves up Broadway in the new Year of Our Lord, 1872" (253). This metafictional moment leaves us in the year of the defeat of the Freedmen's Bureau.

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