Inventions of Nemesis

Utopia, Indignation, and Justice

Douglas Mao

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691211640
• Sujet: Letteratura
• Sous-sujet: Critica letteraria politica

A wide-ranging reevaluation of utopian literature and philosophy, from Plato to Chang-Rae Lee Examining literary and philosophical writing about ideal societies from Greek antiquity to the present, Inventions of Nemesis offers a striking new take on utopia's fundamental project.Noting that utopian imagining has often been propelled by an angry conviction that society is badly arranged, Douglas Mao argues that utopia's essential aim has not been to secure happiness, order, or material goods, but rather to establish a condition of justice in which all have what they ought to have. He also makes the case that hostility to utopias has frequently been associated with a fear that they will transform humanity beyond recognition, doing away with the very subjects who should receive justice in a transformed world. Further, he shows how utopian writing speaks to contemporary debates about immigration, labor, and other global justice issues. Along the way, Inventions of Nemesis connects utopia to the Greek concept of nemesis, or indignation at a wrong ordering of things, and advances fresh readings of dozens of writers and thinkers—from Plato, Thomas More, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. G. Wells to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Fredric Jameson, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Chang-Rae Lee.Ambitious and timely, Inventions of Nemesis offers a vital reconsideration of what it really means to imagine an ideal society.

1

Utopian Nemesis

Savage Indignation

The anonymously authored 1755 fiction A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth, abridged in 1802 as Bruce’s Voyage to Naples, has a somewhat curious ending.¹ Bruce, the tale’s narrator, is propelled on his adventures by a want of money and friends: the younger brother in a family of unspecified size and rank, he receives but a small inheritance, after quickly running through which he’s disowned by his relations. Worse than the penury itself, however, is his discovery that the very people who had helped him exhaust his fortune are those who had slandered him to his kin. Indeed, he tells the reader, “One in particular, whom I had entirely supported while my money lasted … was at the head of those that railed the most against me; and I verily believe that he was the chief cause of my disgrace.” Obtaining employment at last as clerk to a sea captain, Bruce travels to Italy, where he soon tumbles into the opening of Mount Vesuvius. He then falls for about three thousand miles, until he finds himself at last in a subterranean utopia, notable for its illumination by jewels, for its use of birds instead of horses for transport, and, above all, for the generosity and goodness of its inhabitants. All of the citizens of this society being equal in fortune, “nothing but friendship, hospitality, and a brotherly affection to all their fellow-creatures, reigns in this happy world.”²

One day, when strolling through the underground empire, Bruce sees another person falling from the sky. It happens to be the very Mr. Worldly who had earlier repaid Bruce’s kindness by doing him “all the injury that lay in his power” (288). Telling Bruce feelingly of the guilt that overcame him and Bruce’s family in the wake of Bruce’s apparent demise, he begs forgiveness, which Bruce bestows; shortly after this reconciliation, Worldly dies of his injuries. Bruce eventually returns to England, where he’s welcomed by his relations—but only to be betrayed again. This time, the ingrate is Bruce’s professed friend Mr. Silvertongue, who “owes all he [has] in the world to [Bruce’s] family” but alerts a tailor to whom Bruce has an unpaid debt that Bruce has returned. The account fills Bruce with “rage and indignation” (295) and seems to confirm the advice of his friend from the subterranean world: “Look henceforward on all mankind as your enemies, and guard against them as such” (295). The narrative ends with Bruce “keep[ing] little company” and hoping for a return to the center of the earth, where people treat each other well and honestly and where—as a trial scene in the middle of the tale attests—no crime is held more reprehensible than that of ingratitude, which though almost unheard of in practice is punishable by death when it does occur (281).

What may seem odd about the episode of Mr. Silvertongue is that it so pointedly undercuts the prior reconciliation with Mr. Worldly. Either the reconciliation makes the closing betrayal seem gratuitous or the closing betrayal makes the reconciliation seem aberrant. Why undo the comedy of redemption with the machinations of another wretched ingrate? Or why, alternatively, complicate the picture of human turpitude with Mr. Worldly’s sincere repentance? One part of the answer, of course, is that with the Mr. Worldly episode, the author lays a kind of trap, lulling the reader into a confidence in human beings’ fundamental goodness that only makes the betrayal by Mr. Silvertongue more devastating. The fiction, in other words, betrays the reader just as Bruce’s world betrays Bruce, heightening indignation at the untrustworthiness of human beings in its final moments. Indeed its operation evokes the Roman rhetorical form of the indignatio, which penultimate section of the final part (peroratio) of a judicial oration was designed to arouse righteous anger (also called indignatio) against the speaker’s target.³

The reader’s sense of indignation at the close of Bruce’s Voyage may be particularly acute because Worldly, Silvertongue, and the defendant on trial in the utopian empire are not just any kinds of betrayers but ingrates specifically. Perhaps no intersubjective relation more reliably generates indignation than ingratitude, which seems doubly to wrong its victim because the latter seems to be owed a positive rather than a negative recompense or at least to enjoy a particularly strong claim to be spared ill treatment. In his role of trial judge, the emperor of the world at the center of Earth declares ingratitude “a crime so detestable in itself, that it ought above all others to be punished with the utmost severity”; it makes his “blood run cold to repeat the word” (281). The episode thus echoes a moment in the first part of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels at which the reader learns that among the Lilliputians, ingratitude is “a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries; for they reason thus, that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he hath received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live.”⁴

The proximity between this remark and the representation of ingratitude in Bruce’s Voyage is no accident, of course. Gulliver’s Travels is clearly the great precedent for the later text, which in its 1755 version marks it debt by venturing that the practice of giving foreigners’ comments both in the original and in English translation has been used “by many of our Historians, not even the famous Gulliver himself excepted,” with “no other View than to fill up a Page.”⁵ Like Bruce, Gulliver is happy to place his tale within the lineage of utopian travelogue, if only negatively, noting in his prefatory letter that some “have gone so far as to drop hints that the Houyhnhnms and yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia” (5). And Gulliver partakes, too, of the later narrator’s encompassing indignation at human behavior. A few sentences further on in his preface, for example, he reports that after two years of following the example of the Houyhnhnm he calls his master, he was able to divest himself of “that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species, especially the Europeans” (5). This kind of catalogue of human offenses notably makes its appearance more than once in Bruce’s Voyage (as it does in Gulliver’s Travels), as when one of Bruce’s interlocutors observes that “treachery, deceit, fraud, ingratitude, slander, and backbiting are unknown among what you are pleased to call the brute part of creation. Strange they should be so universal among the rational part!” (265–66).

In Bruce’s Voyage, indignation enters the scene almost as soon as the narrator-hero arrives at the center of Earth. Upon his postdescent rescue by a member of that happy society, he tries to thank his benefactor by falling on his knees and kissing his hand, but the man snatches that hand away and “with a most angry countenance” raises him from the ground. The mysterious behavior is explained when, shortly after, the rescuer prays for God’s blessing: Bruce again falling prostrate and “embrac[ing] his feet,” the man flies from him “with the utmost indignation” and reminds him that “none but God is to be worshiped” (256). In Swift’s narrative, indignation first appears by name in part 4, where it’s twice attributed to Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master—first on his hearing that yahoos presume to ride horses (194) and again when Gulliver tries “to give him some ideas of the desire of power and riches, of the terrible effects of lust, intemperance, malice and envy” that prevail among human beings. At this, his master becomes “like one whose imagination was struck with something never seen or heard of before,” lifting “up his eyes with amazement and indignation” (197). Working up to its climactic condemnation of humanity, in other words, Swift’s fiction, too, summons a breath of rhetorical indignatio, the master Houyhnhnm modeling the indignation that will become Gulliver’s dominant passion, as it will become Bruce’s, once the traveler returns to the society he had left.⁶

If in his moment of indignation the Houyhnhnm master anticipates Gulliver and perhaps the imagined reader of Gulliver’s Travels, however, he also stands in for Jonathan Swift, whose memorial in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin famously announces that the body of the Dean lies there, “Ubi saeva Indignatio Ulterius Cor lacerare nequit”—“where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart.” Given that indignation evidently powers so much of Swift’s writing, it seems apposite that this is the only emotion mentioned in the epitaph, which Swift himself composed; as Claude Rawson notes, saeva indignatio has been used by many to “define the character of Swift’s satire.” Yet in Rawson’s view, the epitaph also marks a departure for Swift, the “pervasive, and indeed defining, feature” of whose style is an “interplay between what are sometimes called [his] ‘intensities’ and the edgily playful guardedness which undercuts without neutralising them.” According to Rawson, Swift understood that “displaying rage would make him vulnerable” and thus eschewed “Juvenalian majesties of satiric indignation” in favor of “a more intimately needling” manner: Swift preferred to make his victims, as well as his readers, “ ‘wriggle, howl, and skip,’ … rather than pounding them with indignant tirades which might only expose his own lack of composure.” In the epitaph, however, Swift “for once adopts … a note of Juvenalian grandeur, not only proclaiming the trademark indignatio of Juvenal’s first satire (facit indignatio versum, 1. 79) but accentuating it beyond the Roman original by adding the adjective saeva.” Rawson wonders whether the epitaph doesn’t give vent to a declaration that “seemed to Swift unthinkable in his lifetime writings.”⁷

Careful as Rawson’s reading is, it gives perhaps too little weight to the point that even Juvenalian tirades could be joined to claims to reasonableness. When one sees dreadful wrongs everywhere, Juvenal asserts in his first satire, “difficile est saturam non scribere,” “it is difficult not to write satire.”⁸ In other words, there would be something aberrant in not decrying such tendencies.⁹ And thus if “facit indignatio versum”—if indignation makes satiric verse in the sense of impelling it—then indignation serves not madness but sanity. As Andrew Stauffer has shown in Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism, indignation indeed became particularly prominent in the British print culture of the eighteenth century’s last decade, amid the bitter partisanship succeeding the French Revolution, because it could be adopted as a posture of impassioned rationality maintained against the irrational emotion to which one’s opponent had succumbed. “Like Juvenal,” Stauffer writes, the Edmund Burke of the 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace “turns to indignatio as the only rational option for the bonus vir, the good man surveying a world gone wrong.” And though conservatives at first sought alone to seize “the elevated ground of noble indignation,” both reactionaries and reformers were soon “claiming righteous indignation as their weapon” as debates over the meanings of the French Revolution ground on. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, presented “her anger as a rational, even requisite, response to falsehood, performed for the public good,” while Thomas Paine understood that indignation could serve revolution inasmuch as it was “an emotion predicated on the essential dignity of those who feel it.” To “claim indignation,” Stauffer observes, “is to appropriate a three-fold bonus for one’s anger: it is justified …, it is righteous …, and it is dignified.”¹⁰

Whatever attractions or dangers Swift discerned in the Juvenalian mode, his Gulliver, like the Bruce of Bruce’s Voyage, shares Juvenal’s self-positioning as a “good man surveying a world gone wrong,” in Stauffer’s formulation. With “surveying,” Stauffer elegantly evokes the “equal, wide survey” described by John Barrell—the idea that the landed gentleman of the British eighteenth century could have a meaningfully “panoramic” perspective on society by virtue of a “two-fold qualification to be regarded as disinterested: his permanent stake in the stability of the nation, and his freedom from engaging in any specific profession, trade, or occupation which might occlude his view of society as a whole.”¹¹ But the word from Stauffer’s epitome that really requires our attention is “world.” For Juvenal’s sixteen satires present a catalogue of evils—many of them involving women usurping male authority, men lapsing into effeminacy, upstarts gaining power over their betters, criminal behavior proving profitable, inheritances being squandered, and infidelity or other sexual improprieties growing commonplace—that together add up to a totality of derangement, a world unhinged to the last degree. The astonishing spectacle of a man marrying another man, which comes at the culmination of Satire 2, serves as a voluble synecdoche for the state of things in a time that is, for Juvenal, radically out of joint.

Indeed so topsy-turvy is the world that, as the satirist says in 13, “if I discover an upright and blameless man, I liken him to a boy born half beast, or to fishes found by a marveling rustic under the plough, or to a pregnant mule.” The natural has become unnatural, and we “are living in a ninth age; an age more evil than that of iron—one for whose wickedness Nature herself can find no name, no metal from which to call it.” Things have thus reached their moral nadir relatively recently; and yet Juvenal also makes clear that there has for some time been no shortage of goads to indignation in the world, it being long since that Astraea (Justice) “withdrew by degrees to heaven, with Chastity as her comrade, the two sisters taking flight together.” Thus, as the satirist tells us right after his facit indignatio versum, “all the doings of mankind, their vows, their fears, their angers and their pleasures, their joys and goings to and fro”—back to the postdiluvian emergence of Deucalion and Pyrrha—“shall form the motley subject of my page.”¹²

In thus expressing his intention, Juvenal highlights a crucial affinity between satire and comprehensiveness. Not every satirist explicitly takes the position that the world in general is in catastrophic condition, but a satire may strive to enhance its hold on the reader by some appeal to the sense that wrong is pervasive rather than localized, and lengthy narrative satires tend toward the encyclopedic in their presentation of ills. In François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and in Gulliver’s Travels, this plenitude is facilitated by characters who travel widely, a device taken to yet more exotic lengths in the section of the 1755 Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth that was excised to make the more compact Bruce’s Voyage. This lengthy tract consists mainly of “The History of an Inhabitant of the Air,” a fantastical and at times bawdy inset testimony by a four-thousand-year-old being from the planet Jupiter who passes successive lives on a comet, Saturn, Earth, Mars, and Earth again. Through these phases, the inhabitant witnesses earthly folly and evil in numerous guises (from tyrants’ lust for power to lawyers’ prevarication, from social climbing to sexual incontinence) as well as several varieties of celestial contrapasso, including evildoers’ transformation into “horrid and loathsome Beasts,” whose characteristics recall their vices pretransformation.¹³

Lacking “The History of an Inhabitant of the Air,” Bruce’s Voyage is mainly taken up with the wonders of that subterranean society where there are no distinctions of rank, where greed is unheard of, where animals never suffer human cruelty, and where the first trial for a public misdeed to take place in at least sixty years (perhaps many more) is the aforementioned arraig...