Texter on Firchow, 'Modern Utopian Fictions: From H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch'


Peter Edgerly Firchow. Modern Utopian Fictions: From H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. xv + 203 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8132-1477-1.

Reviewed by Douglas Texter (English Department, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Published on H-Utopia (April, 2008)

Utopia as Literature

In Modern Utopian Fictions, Peter Edgerly Firchow argues that "in different ways and to different degrees, the depiction of utopia (and dystopia) in the modern period has become increasingly literary, so that what is utopian about these fictions must always be viewed, and interpreted, from the literary perspective" (pp. xii-xiii). Applying literary rather than sociological tools, Firchow traces the development of British utopian fiction from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) to Iris Murdoch's The Bell (1962). In between, he examines works by George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Huxley, Francis Fukuyama, Herbert Marcuse, George Orwell, and William Golding. Firchow includes much that is praiseworthy in this short book on utopian fiction. And, I will indeed praise parts of Modern Utopian Fictions below. Before I praise Firchow's work, though, I must bury a few significant problems. First, Firchow argues that for too long writers about utopia have been working from the perspective of the social sciences. Part of the raison d'être of Modern Utopian Fictions is to closely focus on the literary aspects of the novels under consideration. Firchow correctly asserts that many of the major commentators on utopian fiction and thought for the last half century or so have been social scientists. One thinks of Krishan Kumar (whom Firchow mentions), Lyman Tower Sargent, Karl Popper, and members of the Frankfurt School. However, many working on utopian fiction hail from the humanities. Examples include Tom Moylan and Kenneth Roemer; Firchow mentions none of these scholars. The second problem with Modern Utopian Fictions is its relative lack of awareness of a major approach to utopian literature in the last forty years or so: science fiction. Firchow writes: "Finally, we need to address the important literary question--though it's not merely a literary question, I think--as to whether there is such a thing as a genre of utopian fiction, with definable and predictable characteristics. And, if so, is there a corollary dystopian genre" (p. 10). Firchow ignores the generic and taxonomic work performed by Sargent and science fiction scholars, such as Darko Suvin, who posed answers to these questions long ago. Firchow's somewhat naive but quite earnest questions remind me of another professor, the one on Gilligan's Island, who, in his isolation in the South Pacific, joyfully shouted "Eureka" as he invented the hula hoop, in 1979. Finally, Firchow's selection of the book's end point--Iris Murdoch's The Bell--does not make sense to me. While Firchow admirably explicates The Bell, I just cannot view this novel--dealing with the personal and sexual shenanigans of the members of a postwar British intentional community--as utopian. If it is, its utopian qualities are akin to those of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). Both works seem to valorize tuning in, turning off, and dropping out, and they eschew large-scale attempts to deal with societal issues. In addition, I cannot help wondering about the lack of inclusion of Anthony Burgess's two dystopian novels written in 1962--The Wanting Seed and Clockwork Orange. By ending Modern Utopian Fictions with The Bell, Firchow, perhaps inadvertently, assigns to the development of the genre a trajectory I do not think it really had.

Now that I have dealt with the work's major flaws, I will turn my attention to its quite admirable strengths. Firchow's work displays his very well informed explication and his ability, in most instances, to make literary texts come alive. His treatment of Wells's The Time Machine is simply outstanding. In addition, in his chapter on Golding's Lord of the Flies (1959), Firchow displays an almost boyish enthusiasm for this work and praises a genre lambasted by most literary critics: the adventure story designed mostly for boys and men. "Lord of the Flies is undoubtedly a good read, despite its sometimes (and ultimately) depressing overtones. It is a good read because it is, on one level at least, a rousing adventure story, with lots of fantasy and suspense" (p. 133). Firchow's obvious relish for his texts as "good reads" is quite refreshing in an age in which fiction seems to be viewed as a mine from which nuggets of sometimes ersatz sociopolitical significance sit waiting to be extracted and sold by scholar entrepreneurs.

Ironically, in a work claiming to be interested in rehabilitating literature and viewing utopian fiction as just that--fiction--the very best chapter deals largely with works of sociology. Although Firchow often sounds like an academic version of Winston Churchill, vowing to fight the waves of sociological barbarians on the beaches and in the streets of literature, chapter 3 on Huxley, Fukuyama, and Marcuse proves his finest hour. In this chapter, Firchow shows the ways in which two ideologically opposed thinkers--the neo-con Allan Bloom disciple Francis Fukuyama and the Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse--said largely the same thing: that history would, in advanced capitalist societies, come to a screeching halt (although Fukuyama opines that boredom itself might restart history). Of course, Firchow is careful to note that this conclusion to history does not mean that events would simply cease to occur. Rather, history would end in the Hegelian sense. The modern liberal nation state would mark an endpoint in political development on Hegel's world stage of history. With the heroic struggles over, no more Napoleons would sit on their horses at future Jenas. The world would be (and perhaps already is) full of almost post-human last men. After the three major political-ideological-economic-military death struggles of the twentieth century--World War I, World War II, and the Cold War (really a World War III with relatively few shots fired)--the capitalist and liberal nation-state emerged triumphantly. With Muslim and Christian fundamentalism notwithstanding, no serious ideological challenge to capitalism exists. While tweaking of the system continues, the autopilot (or invisible hand) of liberal democracy and capitalism has been set definitively. Firchow then shows how Huxley in Brave New World (1932) and Ape and Essence (1948) more clear-sightedly deals with this end of history than either Fukuyama or Marcuse.

While I take issue with Firchow's ending of Modern Utopian Fiction with the seemingly incorrectly rung note of The Bell and his ignoring of some of the main lines, I find his enthusiasm for his texts refreshing and his work on the end of history meticulous. Other scholars of utopian fiction will as well.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=14373

Citation: Douglas Texter. Review of Firchow, Peter Edgerly, Modern Utopian Fictions: From H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch. H-Utopia, H-Net Reviews. April, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14373

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