SOURCE: Widdicombe, Richard Toby. “‘Dynamite in Disguise’: A Deconstructive Reading of Bellamy's Utopian Novels.” American Transcendental Quarterly New Series 3, no. 1 (March 1989): 69-84.

[In the following essay, Widdicombe claims that the literary devices in Looking Backward and Equality undermine Edward Bellamy's message.]

Ever since its publication in 1888, Looking Backward has been read as a particolored text, an admixture of the doctrinaire and the romantic, and while contemporary approaches, which have offered Marxist, feminist, and reader-response analyses of Bellamy's best-known novel, have widened our understanding of it, they have not changed the critical consensus. Yet, this consensus is misleading: Looking Backward presents a more complex spectacle than that of didacticism made marginally palatable by a sprinkling of romance, and the novel itself is infinitely more fascinating qua novel than its vaguely Hawthornesque appearance suggests. Looking Backward fails as didactic literature, but does so not because Bellamy's proposals are flawed or his romance substructure is too flimsy to support the weight of ideas. Altogether more remarkably, it fails because Bellamy deconstructs the foundations of his authorial stance by creating a text which is astonishingly writerly when it needs to be readerly if his didacticism is to succeed. On the one hand, he distracts the reader with a novel which is intrinsically perplexing as literature; on the other, he employs a self-destructive or quasi-schizophrenic narrator who acts, like “‘dynamite in disguise,’”¹ to explode the apparent message of Bellamy's doctrinaire utopianism.

In the endeavor to comprehend Bellamy's meaning in all its fullness I have intentionally created an eclectic blend of American deconstruction and Gallic post-structuralism. From Bloom's antithetical criticism and theories of revisionism, I have taken the ideas of misprision and the precursor-poet; from narrative theory and the work of, principally, Derrida and de Man, the ideas of unreliable narration, blindness and insight, and aporia; from Freud's “The ‘Uncanny,’” the heimlich/unheimlich dichotomy as it applies to Bellamy's treatment of his narrator; from Derrida's “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” the notion of decentering; and from J. Hillis Miller's “The Critic as Host,” the triad of deconstructive strategies—rhetorical, tropic, and etymological analysis—as each dissolves the polarities essential to Bellamy's didactic purpose. Throughout my reading of Looking Backward and its sequel Equality, I have questioned—as any critic must with a didactic text—“the pronouncements of any self-constituted authority for what it is repressing or what it is not saying” (Barbara Johnson in Salusinsky 167), and have focused particularly on the texts' “linguistic moment[s],” those “moment[s] in a work of literature when its own medium is put in question” (Miller 250).

For Bellamy—as for any utopian writer—the precursor-poet must be More, his indebtedness to Macnie's The Diothas (1883) and Gronlund's Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) notwithstanding. After all, More invented the term “utopia” and, so, drew the parameters that any label does around subsequent discussion. For Bellamy, however, the relation is made more problematic by the essential similarity of his Nationalist aims and More's communist views. The superficial differences which are bound to exist between texts published 372 years apart disguise a unity of purpose. Although what More had to say about war or about slaves could be of little interest to any post-bellum thinker, the views he expresses about (among other things) the topography of Utopia, its system of local government, its industry, its social arrangements, its attitudes to money, education, and work are so like Bellamy's in their essentials that the problem of ideological plagiarism forces Bellamy to misread his precursor's ideas. A key statement such as the following:

The main purpose of their whole economy is to give each person as much time free from physical drudgery as the needs of the community will allow, so that he can cultivate his mind—which they regard as the secret of a happy life.

(More 79)

might equally have appeared verbatim in Looking Backward, as—albeit in other words—it does when Dr. Leete intones at Julian West:

Know, O child of another race and yet the same, that the labor we have to render as our part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life.

(195-196)

Several forms of Bloomian misprision occur frequently in Looking Backward as the text moves from limitation through substitution to representation. Clinamen (or a swerving away through irony from the precursor's original meaning) appears in Bellamy's adoption of More's humorous use of names. Where More, however, had limited his use to Greek puns (Hythlodaeus means “babbler” in Greek and Syphograntus, “ruler of a pig-sty”), Bellamy invests his names with profound echoes which undercut the univocality essential to any didactic text. “Edith Leete,” for example, with its suggestion of Lethe (death) and Elite (hierarchy) subverts Bellamy's instructional intent even as it causes plurivocal resonance. Tessera (“the device of recognition that fits together the broken parts of a vessel, to make it whole again” [Bloom 17]) operates to fuse the limited perspectives of Utopia, Books One and Two, into a global utopia. Bellamy, however, hesitates to fulfill the logic of his own plan, and—by so doing—leaves himself vulnerable to charges of parochialism at best and, at worst, racism. Rather than make Nationalism ubiquitous, he restricts it to “the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America,” patriotically sees the United States as “pioneer of the evolution,” and condemns the “more backward races” to a limbo of gradual education up to “civilized” status (140). Ironically, Nationalism as state socialism smacks of nationalism as territorial superiority.

Three further Bloomian ratios of revision, Kenosis (“prior fullness” giving way to a “later emptiness” [18]), askesis (“limitation of meaning” or “realization of wandering signification” [19]), and apophrades (the illusion of anteriority to a precursor), each appear in several guises in Looking Backward and Equality. Kenosis manifests itself in the surprisingly long nineteen-page frame story of Julian West's mesmeric sleep and Looking Backward's surprisingly short conclusion of less than two pages, where satisfaction in the world of the future is symbolized by an image of submission. Neither aids in convincing the reader of the rightness of Bellamy's lesson; both suffer in comparison with the well-balanced approach in Utopia of problems (Book One) and solutions (Book Two). Askesis occurs in the chapter headings to Equality, where the wish is to direct the reader's thinking even before the proposal is made, and in the use—again in Equality—of numerous authority figures as narrators. In both cases, however, these strategies fail as an effort to evade More's influence, for while they do represent a departure from his model, they distort the linearity of the didactic mode by creating a multi-layered, confusing text (there are no less than nineteen narrators in Equality!) and by introducing an allusive play of signification. Thus Equality's Preface, which is supposedly a precis of Looking Backward's narrative, only makes the novel's status as a sequel dubious, and the headings to Chapters VI, XIX, and XXXI merely subvert the very closure they intend.

Finally, with apophrades the dilemma Bellamy found himself in as a belated utopian didact is fully laid bare. On the one hand, his wish to have Equality be apparently anterior to Looking Backward, to have it answer the complex questions that The New Nation had failed to, meant that he had rather clumsily to insert into the time span of events covered in Looking Backward (September 10-December 26, 2000) references to events that were never mentioned in that book, events such as the “air trips” which, Julian West disingenuously remarks, “I do not think that I have before referred to” (271). On the other, his need to create a “better” Utopia required him to do more impressively what More had already done. Hence Equality goes into an excruciatingly lengthy exposition of the conditions which led to Nationalism's evolution, and of the solutions which Nationalism provided. So might Utopia become an illustrative footnote to a “superior” work. However, the dynamics involved in coming before both his own work and More's—the pull between, in crude terms, narrative interlude and expository prose—tears Bellamy's didactic purpose to shreds. What the reader is left with is a remarkable, and remarkably dull, text which fails as a didactic work because it is unable to generate narrative interest except by a kind of cryptic apologia at the beginning of the final chapter. There, Bellamy (through Julian West) excuses the dullness of his novel and the almost complete lack of narrative in it in one sentence:

Full of wonder and fascination as was that occupation [of listening to Dr. Leete], it was prosaic business compared with the interest of a certain old story which his daughter and I were going over together [their romance], whereof but slight mention has been made, because it is a story which all know or ought to know for themselves.

(381)

The title of Equality's final chapter is—ironically, in light of the Hobson's Choice Bellamy presented himself with—“The Book of the Blind.”

For Bloom, then, deconstruction begins with the belated poet's effort to overcome his precursor, an effort which leads to misreading and misprision. For Derrida and de Man, deconstruction occurs elsewhere in a text, but, for the purposes of reading the peculiarities of Bellamy's utopian vision, just as usefully. For Derrida, a deconstructor's objective is to identify the “wrong element” in a text and to trace it as a “disruptive force” in the generation of meaning (Memoires 73), while for de Man deconstruction's “target” is to “reveal the existence of hidden articulations and fragmentations within assumedly monadic totalities” (249). Both theorists, then, are concerned with the ways in which a text undermines itself.

Looking Backward undermines itself, short-circuits its didactic message, by the depiction of its protagonist and “‘dynamite in disguise,’” Julian West. That Julian West is a particularly troubled figure has been occasionally commented on by students of the novel, by, for instance, Tom H. Towers and Wayne Fields. However, the depth of West's psychological fracturing and the damage it does to a didactic text—a text, that is, which demands the minimum of distortion in the narrative both within the message itself and between sender and receiver—have been little investigated and less understood.

West (as receiver) of the message from Dr. Leete and the year 2000 (as senders) is extraordinarily unsuited to his role of intermediary between author, text, and reader. Tom H. Towers has commented on West's insomnia as a “comprehensive symbol” of his “sense of social and psychic disturbance” (56), but fails to note why his insomnia disappears when he enters the world of 2000 A.D. Boston, and that there are other powerful indicators of the fragmentation of West's personality. Sequentially within the novel West hallucinates (13), enjoys his insomnia (22), displays paranoid tendencies (23), and suffers from a nervous disorder (24)—all this, moreover, even before he wakens from a mesmeric sleep to a new world. Once in the new world, he immediately shows further signs of his unsuitability as a conduit for Bellamy's “forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity …” (334). He is unreasonably suspicious (31, 36, 86), strange (36), hostile (37), feverishly elated and mentally intoxicated (44). Nor do these symptoms wear off, for although West does lose his objectivity (148)—and, with that, his capacity to make comprehensible the uniqueness of a future world—he remains in a “precarious nervous condition” (178), both confused (173) and lacking equilibrium (210). At the end of the novel, he quivers “in every nerve” (330) and continues to be burdened by a sense of appalling guilt (“how little [is] my worth,” he confesses to Edith Leete in the novel's final paragraph). This guilt may be understandable in a Calvinist, which West declares himself to be (200), but it has no objective correlative within the novel and makes it impossible, especially when conjoined with the other evidences of West's perpetually disturbed condition, for a reader to evaluate evenhandedly the novel's message.

If West's psychological problems as receiver muddy the clarity of Bellamy's didactic message, then it is surely important for the sender of the message, Dr. Leete, to prove a convincing mouthpiece for Nationalism. Yet, Dr. Leete's ethos undercuts the lessons Bellamy would have us learn, for he is at best a dubious figure. In the first chapter dealing with West's twentieth-century awakening (Chapter III), Dr. Leete makes his initial appearance androgynously (in the anonymous dialogue which begins the chapter [27]), moves on to the kind of smooth talking which “would have lent dignity to an argument that the moon was made of cheese” (33), adds more than a touch of the mad scientist with a “taste” for “chemical experiments” in an isolated “laboratory” (34), and concludes by confessing to deceit in his attempt to resuscitate West after his mesmeric sleep (35). Nor is his personality likely to engender respect, liking, or admiration in the reader (whose role it is, after all, to be instructed by him). Throughout the novel, he is by turns hostile (59), grim (72), unconcerned and unfriendly (85), sarcastic (169), and condescending (265). And Dr. Leete's helpers in the narrative are of little help at all to him in his lectures: Mrs. Leete delivers vacuous one-liners (84); Edith Leete is renowned for being an “indefatigable shopper” (99) and seems particularly obtuse as a listener (215); in the novel both seem perpetually to have just “retired” to bed (47).

However, the disruption of Bellamy's didactic purpose occurs not only in his characterization of Julian West and the Leetes, but in his transmission of the novel's message as well. This disruption in the novel's message is apparently deliberate (it is, at least, unnecessary) and rises not at all from its one likely source, a difference in the language spoken in 1887 and in 2000. The narrative of West's awakening in 2000 A.D. is embedded within a frame narrative told by an anonymous narrator who is the implied author of the text. This shadowy figure cannot be Bellamy himself (even though the only appearance he makes is in the “Author's Preface”) because he identifies himself as a citizen of the twentieth century (“Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century,” he begins [xix]). Yet, it is equally true that he cannot be Dr. Leete, for the preface refers to him by name and damns his “explanations” as “rather trite” (xx). Nor, finally, can it be Julian West, since “the author steps aside” at the end of the preface in order to allow “Mr. Julian West to speak for himself” (xxi).

This frame narrative would have been a marvellous idea on Bellamy's part if he had written a text intended to be judged as an artistic creation, for it does greatly increase the novel's polysemic value. In a didactic narrative, unfortunately, such a stratagem only increases the complexity of a message which, above all, should remain simple in order to be understood and learned from. Looking Backward, then, would seem to be the result of Julian West—at some point between September 20, 2000 (when the narrative ends) and December 26, 2000 (the date of the “Author's Preface” in the Houghton, Mifflin revised edition)—dictating his adventures to an unknown author working in the “Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston” (as the byline of the preface reads). The reader cannot know how much editing of West's reminiscences the implied author has performed on the text. However, that person's disingenuous remark that he will let West speak for himself, coming immediately after, as it does, his comment that the “subject” has received some kind of “treatment” (xxi) from him, leaves the reader fearing the worst and facing an aporia (here, a sort of hermeneutic blocked path) beyond which interpretation cannot go because the text is silent about the exact nature of the implied author's interference in the text.

Bellamy, of course, as writer of the text faced the identical aporia, and attempted to interpret it twice, once in 1890 and again in 1894. On both occasions, he achieved a de Manian “insight” whereby he revealed fundamental inconsistencies in the text. In “Why I Wrote ‘Looking Backward,’” he rebukes himself for having left “[b]arely enough story” in the novel “to decently drape the skeleton of the argument …” (Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! 202), whereas—as I have shown—the work is disproportionately a writerly text. In “How I Wrote ‘Looking Backward,’” he points out that he originally meant the text's perspective to be the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, and adds that he made his novel “conform to the laws of ordinary probability and commonly observed sequence” (224). The first comment explains the reason why—in the narrative—Dr. Leete and Julian West seem to battle for pre-eminence. The second is patently contradicted by Looking Backward's fancifulness, but does obliquely suggest why Bellamy should have remained loyal to the techniques of canonical literature even at the expense of clarity of message.

Looking Backward, however, is in ways more perversely writerly than Bellamy realized and than I have yet shown—and, again, it is the clarity of the narrative's message which suffers. The novel's frame narrative begins both the first (Ticknor) edition and the second or revised (Houghton, Mifflin) edition. Only the latter, however, ends with a Postscript, signed “EDWARD BELLAMY,” which is dated very precisely as a response to the Boston Transcript's March 30, 1888, review of Looking Backward. The first edition, then, leaves the frame narrative incomplete and the reader in a state of suspension; the second completes the frame, but does so in a way which leaves the reader thoroughly confused, for the implied, unnamed author of the “Author's Preface” has been instantly transported more than one hundred years back into the past and transmogrified into the actual author. Thus is the reader rudely awakened to the presence of a fiction, and the force of the novel's message dissipated.

This particular instance of textual disruption is the culmination of a strategy of direct authorial address which is perpetually at odds with the novel's purpose. Bellamy makes repeated use of this device (see, for instance, 7, 10, 14, 93) in order to characterize the reader of the novel, the ultimate addressee for his fiction. That characterization repeatedly situates the actual reader of the text as the implied reader in the year 2000 A.D. and, thus, makes him a willing believer whom the implied, unnamed author has no reason to persuade. Persuasion would be needless since, after all, any reader of 2000 A.D. would naturally assume the Nationalist eutopia to be better than any other possible social arrangement and markedly superior to late-nineteenth-century American society with all its ills. At the same time, Bellamy thoroughly perplexes the actual reader by referring in a sexist manner purportedly untypical of his eutopia to his “lady readers” and their expectations (14).

One surprise more awaits the diligent reader of Bellamy's novel as he adds a further level of signification to the narrative, a level which cuts across the text's already tortuous lines of communication and scrambles to the limits of intelligibility the message he would convey. His Industrial-Army theory remains as reasonably clear exposition; everything else is thrown into disarray. That further level is his treatment of Julian West as a debased avatar of Jesus Christ, a treatment which involves retelling Christ's story in reverse.

West was born December 26, 1857, one day after the traditional date of Christ's birth. From this brief detail, which Bellamy goes to some lengths to belabor in the opening paragraph of Chapter I, the novel then takes the reader on an ontological journey. First, to West's “death” which, like the Crucifixion, occurs on a Friday (at least according to 2000 time [271]) between the ninth and tenth hours (at least as measured by 1887 time [22, 29]). Again, like the Crucifixion, the event is accompanied by cataclysm (in the case of West, by fire and flood; in the case of Christ, by eclipse and earthquake). Next, to West's “Resurrection” which, still in synchrony with the Christian calendar, is completed on Sunday (271) and involves his being extracted from an underground chamber analogous to Christ's tomb. After this, West spends a week getting used to his new world before dreaming on the following Sunday of the Crucifixion as a gloss on nineteenth-century barbarism: “‘I have been in Golgotha,’” he says to Edith Bartlett, her family, and their guests. “‘I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!’” (326). The novel has retold Christ's story as West's and has done so largely in reverse, from his reawakening/resurrection to the crucifixion-as-dream.

Clearly, the projection of Julian West as Christ's debased avatar does not fit snugly onto the text, and yet one should not expect it to, for Bellamy's point (if, indeed, he was aware of the connection between Christ and West) is that any nineteenth-century visitor would find himself profoundly out of joint in 2000 A.D. Boston. This sense of alienation is fundamental to West's Weltanschauung, but its crowning symbol, of the narrator as an inverted Christ, is achieved despite that symbol's being thematically antithetical to Bellamy's eutopian vision and at considerable cost to the clarity of the novel's didactic message. The symbol resonates with meaning. Suggestions of the Second Coming and of Boston as New Jerusalem vie with hints of spiritual subversion: the “Author's Preface” is dated December 26, 2000 (as if to indicate belatedness); the period of West's suspended animation is palindromic—113 (years) 3 (months) 11 (days)—and connotes both circularity (as opposed to progress) and excess (11 is considered, in some numerological systems, as symbolizing intemperance, transgression, and sin); and Dr. Leete's showing West Boston from the vantage point of his belvedere (37-38) recalls Satan's temptation of Christ in the wilderness (Luke 4:2-12).² It causes West to look inwards (or “westward”), and apply only the dubious adjective “prodigious” to what he has seen (an application reinforced by his speculation shortly afterwards about whether he has been “transported from earth, say, to Paradise or Hades” [40-41]). This ambiguity of meaning disrupts the clear articulation of Bellamy's message even as it enriches the texture of the novel.

The puzzling figure of Julian West is not only unreliable, destructive, and oddly Christ-like, but also perfectly represents Freud's definition of the “uncanny” (unheimlich) in his pivotal 1919 essay of that name. West's embodiment of the unheimlich, however, cannot be dismissed as simply a literary curiosity, for it reveals something of great importance to our understanding of the extent to which Bellamy deconstructs his own didactic stance: the depth of the fissure in West's psyche, a fissure which always threatens, and at times succeeds, in splitting his personality in two.

For Freud, the uncanny is “in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (47). Besides repression—and its corollary, morbid anxiety—the sensation of the uncanny can be produced by “animism, magic and witchcraft, the omnipotence of thoughts,” “the castration complex” (48-49), and the disappearance of a distinction between the real and the imagined (50). It manifests itself as a sense of doubleness, associated (in literature) with a twinning of personality, event, and name, and (in psychoanalysis) with preservation against death, and with the fantasy and narcissistic phases of the construction of the ego. In both literature and psychoanalysis, and in real life as well, the unheimlich inevitably brings on feelings of terror (41-42) because its repetition seems inescapable (43) and compulsive (44).

Freud's definition of the uncanny and its causes and effects serves as a precise template for the personality of Julian West and his relation to the two societies in Looking Backward and, for that matter, Equality. What the narrator has repressed is most obviously his memories of the appalling conditions in late-nineteenth-century American society which have—as his discussions with Dr. Leete demonstrate—been as “old-established” in his mind as has his family's enjoyment of its unmerited privilege (Looking Backward 8). Yet, as Freud would have predicted, the unheimlich and the terror associated with it well up in West's mind repeatedly: in his crazed walk around Boston (Chapter VIII), in his nightmare of returning to Edith Bartlett's house (Chapter XXVIII), and in his compulsively repeated “pilgrimage” to his underground chamber (Chapters XX, XXIV, XXVII). Of the six causes for the unheimlich, West's role combines every one: morbid anxiety (his sense of guilt at being implicated in the depredations of the nineteenth century [149, 293-294, 331-332, 335]); animism (his return Lazarus-like from a mesmeric sleep, and his sensation of being without identity as he awakens for the second time [77]); magic and witchcraft (Dr. Pillsbury's inducing of a mesmeric trance, and the remarkable ability the Leetes possess to induce sleep); the omnipotence of thought (his ability, sometimes involuntarily exercised, to conjure up the past so that it overlays the present, as well as his power to control reality [78-79, 299]); and even the castration complex (his peculiar “Turkish Reveille” dream in which all of the “assembled flower of Moorish chivalry” except for West himself “bare” their “scimetars” before a “band of Nautch girls, round-limbed and luscious lipped” [139]).

Of the many literary and psychoanalytical effects of the unheimlich, West again embodies them all. The twinning of names occurs with Edith Bartlett and Edith Leete (both of whom are repeatedly referred to in the novel only as “Edith” and whom he cannot ultimately tell apart: “the two Ediths were blended in my thought,” West remarks, “nor have they ever since been clearly distinguished” [302]). The doubleness of events appears whenever West revisits old haunts: in Looking Backward, the underground chamber, and the peninsular part of Boston; in Equality, the nineteenth-century factory [54] and tenement [62-63], his “old sea-side place at Nahant” [64-65], and the church where he worshipped in his earlier life [253-254]). Indeed, the mystery in Looking Backward, which drives the plot, is “double” (249). West as doppelgänger recurs, too, like the burden of a song to emphasize and re-emphasize precisely that part of Bellamy's theme which is so at odds with his didactic utopianism. He awakens on his first Monday in 2000 A.D. Boston, and finds himself to be ‘two persons’ with an ‘identity’ that is ‘double’ (78). Almost a week later he still feels double, both in body and in mind, but has come to accept the fact: “‘If I am beside myself,’” he remarks to Edith Leete, “‘let me remain so’” (302). By the time Equality draws to a close he has gone beyond acceptance of doubleness to relish (349). And, finally, even the psychoanalytical associations of the unheimlich undermine Bellamy's didacticism by emphasizing the extraordinariness of West's preservation from death, by undercutting the reader's sympathy with his plight (he begins Looking Backward smugly [8] and ends Equality that way, too [381-382]), and by labeling both West's experiences and Bellamy's two novels as fantasy—what all utopian literature finally is.

According to Freud, the uncanniest idea of all is that of premature burial, which is itself a transformation of the wish to live permanently in the womb (50). Julian West's mesmeric sleep within the underground chamber and his removal from there through an entrance made by “removing one of the flagstones which formed the [chamber's] roof” (34) echo both articulations of this uncanniest thought, and symbolize how thoroughly West is defined by the unheimlich. The uncanny, with its central notion of the familiar within the unfamiliar, undercuts Bellamy's apparent lesson: that the world of 2000 A.D. is different from its precursor of 1887. If the latter was hell on earth, the undercurrent of the uncanny argues, then the former cannot be heaven—the opinion of the Leetes notwithstanding.

Yet, the presence of the unheimlich in the novel goes beyond undermining the year 2000 as symbol of a halcyon age and beyond destroying with doubleness West's integrity of self. It finally overturns the distinction between the real and the imagined so that the polarity upon which Bellamy's didacticism depends crumbles. For there is a real doubt at the end of Looking Backward whether West dreams of 1887 from the vantage point of 2000 A.D., or the reverse. The text opens with an “Author's Preface” dated December 26, 2000, but ends with another frame narrative which pulls the story back to 1887: the Postscript signed “EDWARD BELLAMY.” Within the novel itself, West begins by believing he has been tricked into thinking he is now living in 2000 A.D. (31-36), progresses to complete amnesia about the future world (76), remains convinced of the power of dreams to mimic the waking world (225-226), repeatedly suggests to Edith Leete that he dreamed part of what happened when he woke up in the year 2000 (245-246), and concludes with a half-hearted avowal that he has, indeed, lived on into the future Nationalist world, and not simply dreamed it (330-331). In fact, on into Equality West toys with the idea that the twentieth century is the dream and not the reality (65-66), while Edith Leete uses powers one associates more with fantasy and dream than reality and the waking world, powers which include the ability to control West's dreams (70).

I am not, of course, arguing that West believes he has returned to the nineteenth century at the end of Looking Backward, nor that Bellamy was writing a postmodern text in which the world of dream is the reality. Bellamy left West living in the year 2000. However, as I have shown, he did so only after marshaling all his energies to prove the contrary—that he had merely dreamed the future. Towards the end of the novel (225-226), he makes the reader's belief in the reality of 2000 A.D. wholly (and wholly unnecessarily) depend upon Dr. Leete's adequately demonstrating that the United States is as wealthy as he claims. If he fails to do so (and does he?), then the future depicted in the novel is all “moonshine” (225), the same, presumably, as that which “bathe[s]” (304) the garden during Julian West's and Edith Leete's last tryst. In the novel's final chapter, West asserts no fewer than six times in five pages (307-311) that the twentieth century was a dream, and he does so with great conviction: “It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there could be no kind of doubt about that” (310). Set against this certainty is the scene of his return to 2000 A.D., the last scene in the novel and one of marked brevity. In it, he mentions only once that the twentieth century is the reality (330-331), and does so with oddly unimpassioned words and by means of a “dungeon” metaphor which logically describes the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. His “spirit” then convinces him three times that it would have been “[b]etter truly” to be in the nineteenth century. Only after this moment of conscience does he go down into the garden to be forgiven by someone identified merely as “Edith” (Leete? Bartlett?). And, even if this is the twentieth century, Bellamy proceeds to undercut the novel's last image, of a “golden century,” by having it hark back six hundred years to the medieval period and its twin concepts of chivalry and courtly love:

When at length I raised by bowed head and looked forth from the window, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was gathering flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her, with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely less to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.

(332)

The scene is reminiscent of Chaucer's “Knight's Tale” and Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” as well as anticipating Brooke's “Melelaus and Helen I”:

                                                            He flung his sword away,
          And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there
The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.

(12-14)

One question remains to be answered: Why? Why should Bellamy so persistently and so variously try to undermine what he would teach, to demolish what he would build? Most of the last dozen years of his life (and some of the last twenty-five) were devoted to constructing the model of an ideal society and to convincing a sceptical world that it would work, yet his utopian fiction deconstructs that model to the point almost of mocking his devotion. I do not pretend to know the answer to this question; I do, however, have several theories which have at least the value of informed speculation.

It is, of course, true that his utopian fiction with its heavy emphasis on economic and social theory put him at odds with his own initial experience as a writer of romances. Such an observation, however, fails to explain anything but superficialities. It may be in part that Bellamy was an ironist intent upon undercutting both the characters' and the readers' expectations. Such an explanation, though, does not seem to be entirely borne out by his use of language in Looking Backward and Equality. Bellamy was no Austen. I think we come closer to an answer with the idea that he was at heart a deconstructionist. Bellamy was equally no Derrida, but his religious views and his practice in developing his utopian vision point to his being fundamentally concerned with the same enterprise as deconstruction: the meaning of meaning. His depiction of Julian West shows him to be searching as unsuccessfully as Derrida for some center around which to structure reality. This comment from Bellamy in his early twenties—“Seek a home, a center, a more intimate ego in the universe of things without,” because without that center everything is a “sad jumble” (Morgan, The Philosophy of Edward Bellamy [v])—sounds like an earnest, unsophisticated version of Derrida's belief that because perception does not exist, the center is only a hypothetical construct (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 271-272). Bellamy's religious position, as expressed in his seminal essay “The Religion of Solidarity” and in Reverend Barton's appearances in Looking Backward (Chapter XXVI) and Equality (Chapter XXXI), completes the picture of him as a deconstructionist, for that position rested on two beliefs: one, the dissolution of organized religion; the other, the existence of successive and separate selves within the individual, selves founded upon a universal soul shared by all humanity. In the latter belief, man combined “the aspirations of a god with the limitations of a clod” (“The Religion of Solidarity” 5), the god-like aspirations coming from the soul of “solidarity,” the earth-bound limitations from “the countless and varied guises of individuality” (16).

There is evidence, too, that Bellamy grew disenchanted with his utopian vision (although his affection for the “core” concept of the Industrial Army never wavered). He eliminated numerous technological inventions from Looking Backward not only, as he once suggested, “out of fear of diverting the attention of readers from the main theme” (“Why I Wrote ‘Looking Backward’” 202), but also, probably, to make the world of 2000 A.D. less futuristic and more achievable. He included—as my argument has obliquely shown—a remarkable number of dystopian elements in Looking Backward and Equality, the former possessing enough to make some reviewers think the novel a satire on utopianism (see, for example, Pentecost and Tucker). Here, he fits Culler's definition of the “practitioner of deconstruction,” who “works within the terms of the system but in order to breach it” (96). More radical and less easy to prove would be arguments that Equality is an unintentionally dull book unconsciously intended to discredit Bellamyesque utopianism, and that Looking Backward and Equality deliberately foreground the deconstructionist insight: every “literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode” (de Man 17). The first of these radical arguments can, however, find support in Bellamy's dawning realization that utopia was not to be so easily achieved (Morgan, Edward Bellamy 365), and in his concept of the dual personality common to all men. The second is a fact of language, and the intentionality of Bellamy's foregrounding of that fact apparent in the ubiquity with which West undermines the message Bellamy seeks to convey.

One final explanation for Bellamy's highly deconstructive utopianism is possible: that he deconstructed his didactic utopian novels by emphasizing fragmentariness over unity, and ambiguity over determinancy of meaning precisely because for him the creation of such narratives was utopia. The details of Bellamy's utopian fiction lend support to my argument. The ending of Looking Backward leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness. The way is clearly left open for a sequel even though Bellamy did not anticipate success and had talked of giving up fiction if the novel were a failure. That sequel, Equality, which was preceded by a substantively different second edition of Looking Backward, emphasizes intertextuality by summarizing Looking Backward in the preface and by flatly altering numerous details from the former text even though the two novels are temporally continuous. It ends even more oddly than did Looking Backward; it simply peters out, almost in mid-sentence.

It is as if Bellamy wanted to sustain the act of writing for as long as possible by denying the necessity of ending. The details of his writing method support such a view. He “devoted his dying years to Equality” (Brown 38), working on it from late 1893 until early 1897 when his health began to break down for the final time (Morgan, Edward Bellamy 67). With that novel ended (even if not completed), he moved on to arranging his short stories for publication as The Blindman's World and Other Stories (1898) (Morgan, Edward Bellamy 71). Throughout his career, he rewrote frequently (sometimes producing as many as ten drafts [Morgan, Edward Bellamy 189]), and worked obsessively (sometimes for days on end without respite [Morgan, Edward Bellamy 68]). His life as a writer creating utopia through writing is epitomized by a remark he made shortly before he died: “‘If God will spare my life a year longer, I think I can do the best work I have ever done’” (Morgan, Edward Bellamy 70). That his writing would have a deconstructive edge he realized more than a decade before Looking Backward was published. In one of his notebooks from the early 1870's he wrote:

heterogeneity is the law of the mind, unity the law of the book. No wonder the book gives little idea of the mind. For my part I am going for once to follow the law of the mind in making a book. … There is no order in the mind, the thoughts are a mob, not an army, and a mob of thoughts this book shall be.

(Morgan, Edward Bellamy 180)

That “book,” I would argue, is Bellamy's utopian fiction, his “Might-have-been-land” resting perpetually on “the insecurity of foundations” (Morgan, Edward Bellamy 177).

Notes

1. The quotation is from Looking Backward, 21, and refers to the instability of western civilization towards the end of the nineteenth century. I have used it with some license to refer to the narrator's instability and the instability of Bellamy's utopian fiction in general.

2. For the significance of the number 11, see Hopper 87, 101, 131, 152.

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———. Looking Backward 2000-1887. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1898.

———. “The Religion of Solidarity.” In his Selected Writings on Religion and Society. Ed. with Introd. Joseph Schiffman. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955; rpt. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1974. 3-57.

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