Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor's Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions represents not only a significant contribution in utopian studies; it is also a major intervention in contemporary literary studies and global cultural studies more generally. Each of the book's chapters is structured around a specific set of formal and generic questions, exploring in great detail and with a tremendous amount of insight recent feminist revisionings of older genres, including the bildungsroman, the novel of art, nonlinear histories, American historical novels, and finally, in an extraordinary turn, the works of contemporary Arab feminist writers, which, Wagner-Lawlor shows, "directly address the nature of the work left to do, as individuals and as communities in search of a better world" (154). Through her study, Wagner-Lawlor demonstrates, in a way that echoes the project of Fredric Jameson in his landmark 2005 book, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, that literary form is a significant aspect of the labors of invention and intervention that take place in these fictions. For example, in the conclusion to her superb opening chapter on the feminist speculative bildungsroman, Wagner-Lawlor argues, "In inventing formal and rhetorical disruptions to the traditional bildungsroman, these authors wrench open the closed-loop comedy of its conclusions. These contemporary texts are radically open-ended, privileging the process of history rather than a culminating verbal icon representing an alleged social ideal" (53). In this way, Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions contributes to an ongoing collective project to expand the definition of speculative utopian fiction beyond a reductive identification of it with science fiction.Indeed, the real brilliance of the book lies in the rich variety of contemporary works of fiction with which it engages. Bringing together in compelling ways works by English-language writers from both sides of the Atlantic—the British authors Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, and Jeanette Winterson; the U.S.-based Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Sontag, and Toni Morrison; Canadian Margaret Atwood and Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson—and then, in the outstanding and timely final chapter, expanding into the Arab world with fictions and memoirs by Shahrnush Parsipur, Fatima Mernissi, and Rajaa Alsanea, Wagner-Lawlor demonstrates the ubiquity of utopian desires in an extraordinary range of contemporary global feminist fiction. As this list indicates, a number of the books under examination are written by authors who are not usually put in the generic ghetto of science fiction, and some of the works discussed even stand outside the bounds of what are more conventionally considered utopian or dystopian fictions. In this way, Wagner-Lawlor both challenges the national, linguistic, and generic boundaries that still implicitly define too much work in literary and cultural studies and makes a compelling case for a rich and complex utopian impulse, to use Jameson's revamped Blochian concept, shooting through the very best work of contemporary global feminist fiction.In the book's introduction, Wagner-Lawlor notes, "The trace left behind in each novel is the proposal of a community based in what Winterson calls a 'beginning to love,' the potentiality of which is figured at times as a search for a way to a home that the feminist subject has never inhabited—and thus is figured as a portal of possibility. Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions emphasizes that this way of knowing oneself as 'the strange'—and thus open to self-consciousness and to imaginative sympathy—leads to a consideration of a theme not often directly treated in analyses of narrative utopias: the theme of hospitality" (20). A little later, Wagner-Lawlor builds on this insight when she notes, "Imaginative sympathy will be the critical faculty in play as I argue for a feminist version/vision of a hospitable utopia. Similarly these texts aspire to constructing a relationship of author and reader that is characterized by safety and welcome, not by mastery and control" (21). The importance of Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions thus lies not simply in its emphasis on the too often neglected theme of hospitality or even in its illumination of this strand in an extraordinary variety of texts; rather, it is to be found most dramatically manifest in the way the book itself enacts hospitality—generosity, thoroughness, and grace—in its very form. This occurs in the book's willingness to "listen," as the great twentieth-century literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin would have it, to what each of these texts has to say and in the invitation it extends to include understudied works, including those from beyond the horizons of Western, European, and American literature, to be central participants in any such conversation.Throughout the book, Wagner-Lawlor recovers the deep praxis of all literary and cultural labor: "The invention must be an intervention, a coming toward or across that comes between, and creates a new oppositionality—more like an apposition. Its figuration is not a field of war, but a field of play" (186). Moreover, as the book expands from Anglo-American English-language novels into Arabic fictions, it similarly shifts its focus to increasingly global horizons. There is also a distinct narrative arc in the book's organization, moving as it does from works that focus on individual strategies for carving out a place for the self in an inhospitable world, and in the process creating vibrant new forms of connection with others, to those that explicitly take up the project of imagining new forms of community. This movement reaches its climax in a provocative invocation in the book's closing pages of emergent practices of global climate change fiction, a body of work Wagner-Lawlor promises to take up more extensively in her future scholarship.This larger narrative structure is presented in microcosm in the marvelous opening chapter. Wagner-Lawlor begins the book by exploring the sense of ironic closure found in Carter's Heroes and Villains—"Carter's strategic choice of the bildungsroman exposes with profound irony the falseness of Marianne's own misguided naiveté and hope long before she admits it to herself. The dismal lesson: the odds were against her from the outset" (37)—only to show the subsequent opening up of the female bildungsroman to imaginings of new forms of agency and community taking place in Butler's Parable novels and Hopkinson's Midnight Robber: "The texts propose new conceptions of community and affiliation, other ways of living, and new ways of learning and of knowing" (37). A similar pattern of expansion and revision recurs in each of the subsequent chapters. In her next chapter, Wagner-Lawlor moves from Winterson's romantic and individualist conception of art to Atwood's vision of "art's promise of community" (89). Chapter 3 maps out the increasingly complex revisions of history, myth, and romance at work in novels by Le Guin, Lessing, Winterson, and Atwood. Chapter 4 traces an expansion from the critical national history found in Sontag's In America (an earlier version of this chapter can be found in the superb collection The Scandal of Susan Sontag, co-edited by Wagner-Lawlor) to the universal history of Morrison's Paradise: "But what Morrison offers and Sontag does not is a vision of hospitality centered in a particular and robust notion of love. In important ways Morrison's speculation builds off of earlier feminist utopian vision, but she exceeds her predecessors in her frank insistence on the inclusion of all outsiders, including the reader, in that communal vision" (137). Finally, in the outstanding and highly original final chapter, Wagner-Lawlor traces out the movement from Parsipur's "commitment to imagining a more vital identity for Iranian women" (167), through Mernissi's visioning of "a complex multi-dimensional structuring of both space and time" (175), and finally into Alsanea's global reimagining of the Internet as "an increasingly political, politicized, space," which thereby "enables a 'multiplication of agency' and, potentially at least, erodes the power of 'authorized voices' concerning religious and cultural notions of decorum" (179). Wagner-Lawlor brings all of this to a brilliant climax when she writes at the chapter's conclusion, "The global scaling of this vision (the dispersal of seeds, the 'serene planet,' cyberspace) confirms that these investments of desire are more than a momentary fantasy, but entanglements of reality and imagination expressed through gesture and language, animating desires in their cradle, birthing them into a widening political dimension" (184).Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions is a book from which I have already learned a tremendous amount, and continue to do so in each rereading, not only about vital recent works of global fiction but also about how we might read in new ways, and with new forms of hospitality, works with which we might already be familiar.