[In the following essay, Suvin contends that utopian fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, using William Morris's News from Nowhere and Victorian science fiction of the 1880s as evidence to support this position.]

Historically, there is a very intimate connection between utopian fiction and other forms of what I have called science fiction in a larger sense, such as the extraordinary voyage, technological anticipation, anti-utopia and dystopia, among others. I have in fact argued that if science fiction is taken in that sense, then utopian fiction is not only, beyond a reasonable doubt, one of the historical roots of science fiction, but it can also be, logically if retroactively, subsumed into science fiction as one of its forms—that validated by and only by sociopolitics. While I do not intend to deny the usefulness of studying texts in all possible ways, for example, utopian fiction in connection with utopian colonies, I have elsewhere argued that when studied as fictional literature, utopia is most usefully seen as “the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction.”¹

I have further argued that this historical connection of utopian and science fiction is surely neither accidental nor insignificant. Some lines of that argument may be condensed as follows: If science fiction is a fictional genre “whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment,” and in addition a genre which is narratively dominated by a “fictional novum (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic” (MOSF, 7-8, 63), then its narrative in each case actualizes a different (though historical and not transcendental) world, with slightly or largely modified relationships and cultural norms. This “possible world” of the narrative is induced in the reader by means of a feedback oscillation between two imaginative realities. They are, on the one hand, the reader's participation in a conception of empirical reality that the collective social addressee of any text (or group of texts) possesses, and on the other hand, the narratively explicit modifications a given text supplies to that initial conception. In this light, the intimate traffic between utopian and science fiction reposes on the nearness and cultural interpenetration of the ideological categories that for the reader validate those two genres. That validating intertextual category is for utopian fiction sociopolitics, and for the mentioned cognate forms of science fiction it is (as the case may be) a strange otherness, technocracy, or corrupt and wrong ethics and politics.

Even more intimate (and possibly even more illuminating and lawful) is the connection of the narrative logics at hand. Any form of science fiction has unavoidably to explain the novum by means of a “lecture” strand, usually both masked and distributed into various narrative segments. Narratologically speaking, utopian fiction is science fiction in which that “lecture” is (still) systematically discursive. In other words, in utopian fiction the “lecture” is almost the whole plot. As Barthes has indicated, the plot of utopian fiction is a panoramic sweep conducted along the well-known, culturally current sociopolitical categories (geography, demography, religion, constitution, economics, warfare, and so on).²

I hope this introduction may at least sketchily indicate a context more significant than simple facticity or accident for a discussion of some not insignificant relationships between Morris and the science fiction of Victorian Britain in the decade preceding News from Nowhere. No doubt, this only contributes some further elements to, and, in the best case, identifies some foci of the much wider and more complex theme of “Morris and Intertextuality,” within which News from Nowhere would deserve a monograph of its own. My essay will have two different but, I hope, complementary parts, both of them arising from data presented and works whose context is discussed at more length in my book, Victorian Science Fiction. I shall deal first with the image of William Morris found in two brief science fiction “alternative histories” which postulate a bad socialist government in a near-future U.K. Second, I shall discuss two works of science fiction, one simply dystopian and one expressly anti-utopian, elements from which were (certainly or probably) refunctioned in News from Nowhere. This may allow some more general conclusions about a two-way relationship between Morris and the paraliterary science fiction discourse of his time, which appears to have been more intimate than heretofore assumed.

1. MORRIS AS A NARRATIVE AGENT IN THE 1880S SCIENCE FICTION

A booklet of thirty-five pages was published in London by Harrison and Sons in 1884 under the title The Socialist Revolution of 1888, by an Eye-Witness (VSF 25, 127). Two of the main investigators of the domain identify its author as “Fairfield,” no first name, without giving a reason for the attribution. In all the biographical handbooks and annual lists of Victorian professions from 1848 through 1900 inclusive (VSF 128-35, 165), the only Fairfield to be found is Edward Denny Fairfield, a Liberal civil servant in the Foreign Office. While some internal features of the narration would not be inconsistent with both liberalism and civil service, I have been unable to confirm or disprove this attribution. The story itself belongs to the form or subgenre I have called the “alternative history.” I have defined it in VSF as that science fiction subgenre in which an alternative locus, sharing the material and causal verisimilitude of the writer's empirical world, is used to articulate different possible solutions of such societal problems which are of sufficient importance to require an alteration in the overall history of the narrated world. After 1880, with the rise of social tensions in the whole of Britain, this form became dominant within science fiction, at the momentary expense of the Future War and the more lasting expense of the moribund Extraordinary Voyage form. More precisely, The Socialist Revolution of 1888 is, as its title spells out, a near-future variant of this small but recognized form of social discourse. In fact, it is the best from half a dozen short-range historical alternatives that sprang up suddenly during 1884-1885, whose choice of fictional form as well as relative brevity and absence of the author's true name testifies in all cases to an urgent intervening into the suddenly sharpening British political conflicts.

The plot of the booklet is not unshrewd nor unhumorous: Socialists led by Hyndman and Burne-Jones (!) revolt through mass demonstrations and seize London, and the troops fraternize with them. After one week, they hold a plebiscite that votes in socialism as against individualism by a margin of 7.5 to 5.5 million votes. The new, clearly quite legal government repeals private property, at which—in a transposition of the Paris Commune events—all British ships flee the country with the rich and their possessions on board. Morris is appointed minister for industries in the socialist government of 1888 as the only practical person in the whole crowd who knows how to keep the expenses of production down. This is not what one might call a “Cold Civil War” text, since it gives explicit credit to the socialists for genuine good will and also implies that their mass support stems from their addressing genuine grievances. Further, the story is written from the vantage point of a high civil servant, who as secretary of the Cabinet sees the personal working out of political maneuvers. However, it has an antisocialist horizon, and it depicts how societal confusion results from the loss of affluence, international financial pressures, and increase of state meddling à la Henry George. The government therefore becomes generally detested, and in particular all the women turn unanimously against it. The passive resistance of the people, as well as of the army and police, forces Hyndman's government to call another plebiscite which abolishes socialism by a vote of 9.5 million to 100 thousand (it is unclear what happened to the some 3.4 million voters who have disappeared since the first plebiscite: presumably they are those who fled the country, rather than abstainers). The new Liberal parliament eschews vengeance against the toppled regime, and in fact keeps one important measure it enacted: the Irish Home Rule. We must today sigh at the bloodless and, except for the initial catalysis, genuinely democratic nature of all the events, shaped within a fair-minded and for this subgenre unusually even-tempered, if somewhat ironical, liberal ideology. My initial parallel to 1871 Paris (always a presupposition in such U.K. alternative histories) must be therefore amended to the effect that this is a counter-project to the Paris Commune: the English, having a genuine parliamentary tradition, would deal with such an emergency better. This brief text implies, rather than openly states, that even within the “extravagant doctrinaires” that socialists notoriously are, there is one queer (but very English) chap, namely Morris, who actually knows what production means. I will refrain from making obviously possible twentieth-century parallels, and only remark that we hear nothing else of interest about Morris: one must assume he carries on in the liberal England, suitably chastened. At any rate and at a minimum, this text establishes that the theme of a possible nonviolent change of regime was current in the social discourse prior to Morris's text.

My second text is another booklet, this one thirty-six pages, The Next ’Ninety Three by W. A. Watlock, published in London by Field and Tuer in 1886. It belongs to the same subgenre of near-future alternative history, and the discrepancy of having a writer's signature may be only apparent, since another fruitless search through all the Victorian biographical sources for Britain and its Empire in the British Library (VSF, 128-36) turned up no evidence of such a person, so that this might well be a pseudonym. The pamphlet's discursive strategy can be seen from the subtitles: … or, Crown, Commune, and Colony: Told in a Citizen's Diary. The diary of a supporter of the egalitarian regime introduced in Britain by the 1893 “Equable Distribution of Property Act” is used to present the reader with its thus doubly authenticated results: Ireland is divided into thirty-eight kingdoms, the canny Scots proceed to fuse employers and employed, but the diary naturally focuses on the woes in England. Though divided into communes, it is subjected to an all-meddling state, which introduces an equal four-hour work day for all, including the intellectuals who are obliged to do manual work. It is mentioned in passing that William Morris rebels at the iniquities of state oppression and interference, and insults the powers that be, which has, however, no particular consequence. Finally, the ground having been prepared by universal discontent, a Colonial Legion from Australia brings about the Restitution to the old regime. This is a much less fair-minded, condemnatory rather than even-tempered companion to the previous booklet, but it will serve to indicate the opposite, “Conservative” rather than “Liberal,” end of the anti-socialist spectrum. It is quite interesting that the more Liberal booklet took Morris's democratism for granted and focused on his competence in production, while the Conservative view focused on his (obviously well-known) enmity toward centralized state authority. The strong-arm methods ascribed to all political factions are of a piece with the rhetorical expedient of “double negation” in which a supporter of the opposed faction testifies not only to its illusions and (mis)deeds but also to the inevitable disillusionment. It is a cruder piece of work than the first booklet, but it is again not without a certain polemical, anti-revolutionary shrewdness.

2. TWO NOVELS OF THE 1880S SCIENCE FICTION REFUNCTIONED IN NEWS FROM NOWHERE

It is well known that Morris wrote News from Nowhere among other things (to keep to the science fiction context only) as a counter-project to Bellamy's Looking Backward, and it has also been mentioned that he was certainly stimulated by Jefferies's After London and possibly by W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (MOSF, 187-88). However, it seems to me that these no doubt indispensable correlations display a one-sided emphasis on “high lit.” We do not have a full overview, I believe, of what Morris read, but it is quite possible that even had he usually read no semipolitical or other (by Victorian bourgeois standards) “lower” fiction—which is a dubious assumption—the mention of his figure and behavior in these two samples of alternative history would have been pointed out to him by political comrades or opponents. The case seems much strengthened by his possible (and in the second case highly probable) use of two “farther future” science fiction works by Dering and Besant, the first of which is sufficiently obscure.

That first work, In the Light of the Twentieth Century by Innominatus, whom I was able to identify as Edward Heneage Dering, is less interesting. Published in London by Hodges in 1886, it is a dream-vision of 155 pages, with a first-person narrator transferred to 1960. Dering himself (1827-1892), though son of an Anglican parson, converted in 1865 to Catholicism with his wife, novelist Lady Georgiana Chatterton, and lived the life of a recluse in a medieval country home, reputedly dressed in seventeenth-century costumes. He wrote seven novels to further his views, in addition to one book on Esoteric Buddhism, a pamphlet on philosophy, and a book of poems, and he translated from Italian books on philosophy and political science.³ His book is accordingly an eccentric ultramontane tract or anatomy very loosely allied to a novel, which fulminates against “Corporate freedom” (that is, state control), paganism, free-love flirtation, the outlawing of caritative endeavors, and other pet Catholic horrors. There is much religious discussion on a high philosophical level, and the narrative ends in uprisings of the mob.

However unlikely a companion to Morris's radically different utopia this might be, there are two elements in it which strike me as significantly similar. First, the framework: at the beginning, when the Ich-Erzähler comes to the future, his translation is explained to him—by interlocutors who belong to those better, ergo unsatisfied, people who even in this soul-destroying future long for happiness—as a result of “the force of your will against the actual state of things at the time, [which] affected your own state of being in that time” (p. 8). He had therefore “reduce[d] the action of the heart,” as the fakirs do, and slept his way to the future (p. 9). Further, at the end, as the narrator is being killed by the mob, he awakes: “‘Was it a dream? or am I delirious?’” he asks (p. 151). Second, the skipping over of a generation: Dering's narrator is expressly identified as being two generations into the future by the expedient of meeting the grandson of an old friend. This has no constitutive signification in his text, whereas in Morris it is meaningfully refunctioned into an enmity (as Middlebro’ put it) against the generation of the fathers, and by metonymy against patriarchal authority (cf. MOSF, 186). Nonetheless, the fact that Morris's main narrative agents are either old men (Old Hammond and William Guest, who is in some powerful ways identified as Hammond's alternative twin) or a range of young people, from children to rather young adults, introduces a discrepancy into the supposed realistic verisimilitude of News from Nowhere: it amounts to an absence of fathers, or for that matter mothers too, in other words, of the whole parental or adult generation. This might be partly explained by the incomplete refunctioning of Dering in Morris, no doubt due to powerful psychological pressures in the latter. A similar situation might obtain with the fuzziness of the “dream's” validation: Morris obviously would want to use neither an esoteric “force of the will” nor a fakir-type catalepsy, but he was in too much of a hurry, and probably too little interested, to supply a better motivation. Since I am in this essay not much interested in positivistic “sources,” I cheerfully acknowledge that this last element is almost certainly over-determined. Besides and before Bellamy, a “long sleep” was a commonplace of fantasy arrivals into the future from Washington Irving, Edmond About, and John Macnie on (cf. VSF passim). Most important, Morris's affinity for this feature was probably extra-literary, since it manifested itself from his earliest prose tales and poems on. Something similar might therefore hold also for the verbal parallels describing the narrator's puzzlement upon awakening. “Was it a dream?” is an utterance to be expected in this situation. Furthermore, the famous “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / … —do I wake or sleep?” ending from Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” Morris's great verse exemplar, would in itself have sufficed. Nonetheless, the exact semantic inversion of the second half of Dering's sentence, signaled by Morris's underline of was, seems more than accidental: “Or indeed was it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside … ?” This take-off would fit well with the putative relation Morris-Dering, which I submit is in some ways analogous to the relation Morris-Bellamy: in linguistic terms, semantico-pragmatic opposition coupled with syntactic parallelism; in ideological terms, a counter-project based on the stimulating irritation supplied by some significant reusable formal elements.

My most interesting exhibit is Walter Besant's novel of 198 pages, The Inner House, published by Arrowsmith's as their 1888 Christmas Annual. The popular novelist, historian, and do-gooder Besant was a well-known Victorian figure so that I need not recount his biography, except to mention that I found him to be the clearest example within this genre—and possibly within Victorian fiction as a whole—of social climber as pillar of Establishment, of novelist as virulently reactionary ideologist (VSF, 146, 401, 406, et passim). The novel begins with the discovery of immortality by the Carlylean Professor Schwarzbaum from Ganzweltweisst am Rhein in 1890. By some unexamined and perhaps burlesquely meant analogy, this discovery arrests decay in all domains, so that from the second chapter on the plot moves within an ironic “perfect Socialism” (p. 103). In it there is no property and little work, people all live and dine together and dress uniformly (the famous ant heap of petty-bourgeois antisocialism), births are allowed only to compensate for a mortal accident, and finally all emotions—religion, art, love, suffering, and competition (!)—are suppressed, so that life carries on in calm stupor. In a narratively clumsy move (perfectly consonant with the other aspects of this clumsy book), the story is told in first person by the arch-villain, an ex-servant and—horrors!—scientific egalitarian, the mainstay of the ruling College of Physicians. Of course, this alone would not establish a sufficient parallel between Besant's and Morris's texts, since the whole tradition of future alternative history (for example, Bellamy and the four texts discussed here) used a first-person narrator for obvious reasons of giving the reader an anchor of familiarity to counteract strangeness.

However, a second element suggests that this story is the source of another refunctioning by Morris. Almost all the oldsters were liquidated in a Great Slaughter at the beginning of Besant's “socialist” epoch. One of the few oldsters left is “the Curator of the Museum” in the new capital, who lives with his granddaughter Christine. Perusing old books in the museum, she rediscovers love, honor in battle (sic!), and the dignity of Death. With the help of a sailor “curiously unable to forget the old times” (p. 88), she revives the discontent of the quondam “gentle class” (p. 89); it is unclear why that class survived the Great Slaughter of the propertied, but Besant is above such petty consistencies since he wants to have both a horrible warning and a happy ending. This class revolts to regain leadership, land, wealth, and for good measure arts, amusement, and love. The “Inner House” of the title is where the Secret of Life is kept; the rebels, not being able to bring the people over to their side, secede from the College of Physicians' rule. I think it is beyond doubt that Old Hammond and Clara as well as their location at the country's central museum, the only source of a historical memory otherwise absent from the new society, are a refunctioning of the old curator and his granddaughter. The museum—which is from a forgotten anterior epoch that is not coincidentally the time of the story's author and original readers, and which exists to be visited by the traveler into the future—will be taken over from Morris in Wells's Time Machine and thence become a staple of much modern science fiction. Possibly, a few other touches in News from Nowhere may also be counter-projects to Besant's; for example, his emphasis on revival of love and jealousy may have suggested Morris's throwback murderer in chapter 24, as well as the backsliding due to book-reading by the grumbling laudator temporis acti in chapter 22 who is so eloquently put down by Clara in favor of the Book of Nature.

3. SOME CONCLUDING INDICATIONS ON MORRIS AND ON COUNTER-PROJECTS

I hope to have indicated the possibility, and perhaps the probability or the near-certainty, of a few matters that might fruitfully engage further attention by the community of Morris critics. First, it is by now accepted that Morris used some elements from the More-to-Bellamy utopian panoramas and the Jefferies-cum-Hudson devolutionary anticipations. However, the two works discussed in part I here do not only allow us to glean some testimonies as to Morris's image. Beyond that, they suggest the possibility of Morris's having been alerted through them (if in no other ways) to the existence of paraliterary forms such as the alternative history or the science fiction genre as a whole (of which alone I have found 182 new book-size titles published in the U.K. from 1848 through 1890). The discussion in part 2 here suggests, second, that Morris indeed knew at least the very “middlebrow” work of Besant and probably that of Dering. Further, it shows that Morris found ways to use at least Besant's “keeper of past knowledge” motif in the same way he used the “sleeping into the future” frame of Bellamy's, and possibly also of Dering's and some other writers: in a “contrary” proceeding of subversion and inversion to which I have applied the term of counter-project. Finally, he may also have in the same manner reused the evacuation of the adult generation from Dering's text.

Of course, Morris not only ideologically stood on their heads the elements he had (entirely or incompletely) refunctioned from Dering and Besant, but also, and just as important, he made triumphant sense of most of them. But this does not prevent us from using the insights obtained from the existence of such refunctionings for two purposes: first, to explain some minor but not uninteresting discrepancies in News from Nowhere; and second, to follow Morris's very process of refunctioning. That process is instructive on its own as the work of an artist who refuses the fetish of individualist originality. He proceeded, in my opinion quite rightly too, as all the great creators have done: he made lion-flesh of digested mutton. With Molière, he could have exclaimed: Je prends mon bien où je le trouve.

Morris's stance is also, last but not at all least, instructive as a formal procedure originating in the ethos and attitude of dialectical negation and sublation that seems common to consistent socialists, from Marx to Brecht (from whose playwriting practice I borrowed the term of counter-project), and which includes William Morris as one of its best practitioners. I would like to end this chapter—appropriately enough for one on Morris—with a pointer to possible general discussions about this procedure. A counter-project can, I think, be provisionally defined as the use of some significant aspects or relationships from one universe of discourse for contrary axiological conclusions in and by means of another universe of discourse, the induced value-judgments being intended to shape the reader's pragmatic orientation. As a rule, the discursive aspects will be narrative agents and/or narrative space-time—in this case, a grandfather-granddaughter pair in a future country's only museum and repository of information about the past. However, the notion of universe of discourse or (in more familiar semiotic fashion) of a Possible World, is not limited to fictional “possible worlds,” but comprises also nonfictional (doxological) “possible worlds.” As suggested, this will be particularly clear in the case of writers strongly committed to a salvational doctrine or belief about human relationships in everyday “reality”—socialists. The counter-project is obviously always some kind of inversion, and I would further speculate that it has an affinity with the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, or Marx's Poverty of Philosophy as counter-project to (rebuttal of) Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty. It must be added, nonetheless, first that we are here entering into extremely complex philosophical debates about Possible Worlds, and second that I know of no sustained discussion of the discursive form of counter-project. These first notes of mine are thus mainly a call for such a discussion, in an informed feedback with social history. In any such discussion, the whole opus of William Morris, and in particular News from Nowhere, will be a fulcrum.

Notes

1. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 61; see also the whole chapter leading up to this conclusion. Hereafter this work will be cited as MOSF and all parenthetical in-text references are to this edition. The present essay is based on that book and on my subsequent Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), hereafter cited as VSF; all parenthetical in-text references are to this text. In the first book, I argue for a theoretical definition of science fiction as a fictional genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition. I arrive at the position that the alternate reality or possible world induced in the reader(s) by a science fiction text is not a prophecy or even extrapolation but an analogy to unrealized possibilities in the addressee's or implied reader's empirical world. Therefore, however empirically unverifiable the narrative agents, objects, or events of science fiction may be, their constellation in all significant cases shapes a parable about ourselves. It is in this position that the deep epistemological (neither simply historical nor simply technical) kinship between science fiction and utopian fiction can be based. This argument is repeated in “Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction: Degrees of Kinship,” in Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (London and Kent: Kent State University Press, 1988). After the present essay was first given, at an MLA Session on William Morris in December 1984, I have expanded and modified my theoretical position, allowing more weight to the extrafictional connections of utopian fiction, in “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies,” Discours social/Social Discourse 1, no. 1 (1988): 87-108; also forthcoming in Giuseppe Saccaro del Buffa and Arthur O. Lewis, eds., Utopia e modernità (Rome: Gangemi).

2. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 117-20 and passim.

3. More elements for a characterization of E. H. Dering could be found in these books as well as in a memoir of his and another by his wife that he edited, all of which I confess to not having read; see VSF, 160, 227, and 238.