How do we escape a present that is ‘an endless state of being somewhere on the spectrum between feudalism and fascism’?
This is an edited extract from an article I wrote over fifteen years ago in which I defined the generic formula of the fool’s errand: ‘the fool sets out to recover human plenitude, in the knowledge that it is irrecoverable and, therefore, is certain of eventual failure but en route finds happiness at the roadside, as everything works out like a dream.’ In the extract, I particularly look at The Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and Franz Kafka’s The Castle. The critics I use are Lukács, Jameson, Žižek, Benjamin and Empson, so this is a bit of a relic of my full-on Western Marxist phase. The bits of the paper, I’m not extracting are the opening 6-page disquisition on Lukács’s The Historical Novel and the closing analysis of George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (which ties nicely with le Guin’s George Orr, but doesn’t add to the generic formula). To be honest, the idea of the article could have been better worked out at book length but I ended up doing other things instead. My purpose in posting is that I want to resurrect the argument for something I’m writing this month. In particular, I want to apply the idea to Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist but, at the same time, make it less male and more digestible and reframe it against slightly different political frameworks. So, there will be a follow-up at some point, which might be a more welcoming read than this one.
The full article is: Nick Hubble, ‘Historical Psychology, Utopian Dreams and Other Fool’s Errands’, Modernist Cultures 3: 2, 2008: 192-207. There is a PDF available on my academia.edu page.
[Extract begins]
In Some Versions of Pastoral, William Empson employs a form of the dream logic which allows A to be both itself and B simultaneously, in his concept of ‘Comic Primness, the double irony in the acceptance of a convention’.[i] He describes the different levels of Comic Primness in relation to what he calls the ‘mock-pastoral’ of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. The first type can be seen in examples where the speaker apparently straightforwardly accepts conventions but in such a manner that the activities of any ordinary person remain evidently unaffected. In the second type, speakers accept conventions in a manner that implies they are wrong – as in the better-known form of single critical irony – but this is compounded by the further irony that the speaker will nevertheless comply, either out of weakness or from selfish motives. In the third and full type of Comic Primness, the speaker simultaneously accepts and revolts against the convention adopted primly:
For this pleasure of effective momentary simplification the arguments of the two sides must be pulling their weight on the ironist, and though he might be sincerely indignant if told so it is fair to call him conscious of them. A character who accepts this way of thinking tends to be forced into isolation by sheer strength of mind, and so into a philosophy of Independence (171).
The essay on ‘Proletarian Literature’ with which Empson begins his book, makes it clear that he is tracing this ‘trick of thought’ through a historical series (25). In these terms, The Beggar’s Opera with its popular audience, can be seen as a nodal point in the historical extension of this model form of independent agency from the restricted readership of the metaphysical poets to the potentially mass readership of proletarian literature in the 1930s.[ii] It is participation in an ongoing process of transition and transformation of the world, that prevents the particular versions of pastoral which Empson discusses from functioning in the modern manner identified by Williams and Berman. The similarities with Lukács’s position are particularly brought out in the way that Empson uncannily anticipates Lukács’s discussion of Scott’s use of ordinary people to express the historical quality of human grandeur when describing the trick of the pastoral figure of l’homme moyen sensual as being ‘that he refuses to recognise the grandeur of the senses which he cannot keep out of his words’ (172).
To return to Fredric Jameson’s terminology, we can now think about genres capable of registering their own content as cultural forms that generate agency by combining dream logic and historical transition – rather as balance and movement are both essential for riding a bicycle – whether the result is Gay’s mock pastoral as described by Empson or Scott’s historical novel as described by Lukács. These qualities were also present in the genres which emerged following the historical novel’s loss of the capacity to register its own content: the science fiction of H.G. Wells in which the equivalent ‘historical psychology’ of the present is generated from the perspective of the future and modernism, in which it is generated from the perspective of the past. As suggested, these genres in turn fell off their bikes after losing their sense of psychological balance or historical transition or both. However, much as Lukács’s rejection of the validity of sexual and consumer desires as expressions of popular desire led him to subsume his own insights into historical psychology within the Marxist orthodoxy of historical materialism, critical orthodoxy has had the effect of stifling these genres when what was needed was a radical return to first principles. The only genre which was able to meet Lukács’s call for ‘a renewal in the form of a negation of a negation’ was science fiction [edit: and fantasy] and this was because it found itself another petty-bourgeois oppositional writer to match Wells: Philip K Dick [edit: today I’d expand this to include other examples, including many women writers, but Dick remains important to this argument].
By negating the triumphalist technological determinism of ‘Golden-Age’ SF, Dick restored the capacity of the genre to register its own content. Jameson argues that Dick returns to the spirit of Wells and Verne in his technique of rendering ‘our present historical by turning it into the past of a fantasised future’, but with the significant difference that ‘his late twentieth-century object-world (unlike the gleaming technological futures of Verne or Wells) tends to disintegrate under its own momentum, disengaging films of dust over all its surfaces, growing spongy, tearing apart like rotten cloth or becoming as unreliable as a floorboard you put your foot through’ (345-6). At the same time: ‘Dick’s work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterises all modern literature of any consequence … [by] retain[ing] possession and use of both apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive subjective and objective explanation systems all at once’ (350). Jameson takes pains to point out that this utilization of dream logic is prevented from collapsing into the fantasies and dream narratives of Symbolism and Modernism by always being given a causal attribution such as drugs or schizophrenia. Thus, psychology is reunited with historicity, only with the strange twist that this time material objects also gain agency by reasserting their use value. Summarising Jameson’s analysis, it is possible to suggest that Dick creates a small (university) town ‘pastoral’ (362) in which commodities, themselves, rediscover the grandeur of their being and so the possibility of a utopian future is generated that is independent of any recognisable discourse of progress and, therefore, not complicit with state systems of power. While Dick’s strengths are intimately bound up (and reinforced by) his undoubted idiosyncrasies, his combination of individualism with collectivity, and subjectivity with objectivity, while snubbing large scale organisation of politics or anything else, amounts to a technique of utopian revitalisation by default which was subsequently to assume a more explicit role in the genre.
One of Jameson’s key examples is the Strugatsky brothers’ fully self-referential Roadside Picnic: ‘its narrative production determined by the structural impossibility of producing that Utopian text which it nonetheless miraculously becomes’ (295). Here, a radically other space, the Zone, has appeared alongside a small town and offers both magical objects and terrible risks to the ‘stalkers’ prepared to venture inside.[iii] A character in the book explains the origin and nature of the Zone using the metaphor of a picnic:
Imagine a picnic … Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car drives off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out of the car carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Gas and oil spilled on the grass. Old spark plugs and … apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow … a roadside picnic, on some road in the cosmos.[iv]
In other words, the picnic remains have been left by aliens and we are the animal witnesses confronted by what Jameson describes as ‘the traces and marks of superhuman pleasure, which individual humans can hardly imagine’ (75). That, nonetheless, these traces lead to a utopian glimpse of ‘happiness for everybody’, is a product of the pastoral structure of the book. Red, the Strugatskys’ stalker protagonist, is a ‘fool’, an ordinary man who ‘kept pushing hope away, trampling on it, mocking it, trying to drink it away, because that was the way he was used to living’[v] and yet throughout he has been unable to keep the human grandeur out of his words:
You’re absolutely right. Our little town is a hole. It always has been and still is. But now it is a hole into the future. We’re going to dump so much stuff through this hole into your lousy world that everything will change in it. Life will be different. It’ll be fair. Everyone will have everything that he needs. Some hole, huh? Knowledge comes through this hole. And when we have the knowledge, we’ll make everyone rich, and we’ll fly to the stars, and go anywhere we want. That’s the kind of hole we have here.[vi]
His hard life of grifting attains a poetic stature only during those periods when he is in the Zone, ‘moving quickly, but without rushing, clever and premeditatedly’.[vii] Here, unlike the outside world, everything always works out for him. During the final trip to the Zone to find the Golden Ball that grants wishes, he is even enabled to express the hope which he embodies. Although these words, which close the book, originate with the idealistic college student, Arthur, who is projected to be a future lawyer, cabinet minister or even president, all complicity with power structures is negated as Red sacrifices him to the ‘meat-mincer’. Staggering down the final slope to make his wish, Red furiously reflects that he doesn’t have the education or the words to express himself: ‘Look into my heart. You take from me what it is I want … it just can’t be that I would want something bad! Damn it all, I can’t think of anything, except those words of his … “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”’ [viii]
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s celebrated film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, similarly privileges ‘God’s fool’ Red over the representatives of the power system, the writer and the scientist who accompany him into the Zone. According to Red, all intellectuals can think about is how to sell themselves not too cheap because the organ that people believe with has atrophied in them: ‘can anyone live like that?’[ix] Here, a dreamlike utopian difference is represented by the scenes in the Zone and those involving Red’s genetically mutated daughter being shot in colour. The famous closing shot of a glass moving on the table in front of the girl indicates her telekinesis and the promise of a transfigured future.
As Jameson observes, Roadside Picnic ‘cannot be coherently decoded as yet another samizdat message or expression of liberal political protest by Soviet dissidents’ (294) and the same also applies to Stalker. It makes more sense to view them as hybrids mixing the resources of science fiction with older European traditions, such as those of fairy tales and storytelling discussed by Walter Benjamin.[x] In particular, Roadside Picnic accords with one of Benjamin’s conclusions: ‘The liberating magic with the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man.’[xi] However, it is the science fiction element of Red’s ‘hole into the future’ which gives the book its peculiar historical quality and renders it a concrete, rather than abstract, prehistory of the future. Benjamin links storytelling closely to the artisan class and it is interesting to reflect how this class was subsumed into the wider lower middle classes of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, from which the science fiction storytellers such as Wells and Dick emerged. What Benjamin wrote about another member of this class, the insurance clerk Franz Kafka, can also be directly applied to Roadside Picnic: ‘once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream’.[xii] As we know, Red is a fool and just as Benjamin notes that the figure of the fool in fairytales ‘shows us how mankind “acts dumb” towards the myth [i.e. resists power structures]’,[xiii] he also notes of Kafka: ‘Folly lies at the heart of Kafka’s favourites – from Don Quixote via the assistants to the animals … This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: first that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second that only a fool’s help is real help.’[xiv] Benjamin argues that this folly is one of the products of the decay of wisdom and that although it has squandered the substance of wisdom, it preserves its attractiveness and assurance. If wisdom is understood as the recognition that there is no such thing as human plenitude and that, therefore, agency is dependent on maintaining a state of equilibrium similar to that implied by Lukács’s concept of ‘historical psychology’, then Benjamin’s account of folly can be read as an explanation for the persistence of hope in a world from which any determinate sense of history has been lost. It is possible to set out a generic formula for what might be termed the fool’s errand: the fool sets out to recover human plenitude, in the knowledge that it is irrecoverable and, therefore, is certain of eventual failure but en route finds happiness at the roadside, as everything works out like a dream. It should be noted that Benjamin’s work, itself, may also be read as a fool’s errand.
This fool’s errand structure can clearly be discerned in Kafka’s The Castle. The very fact that K. is shown to be prepared to put up with the ‘continual petty annoyances of life’ precisely because he is striving for something incommensurably beyond any normal assessment of ‘an honoured and comfortable life’, [xv] marks him out as seeking the unseekable.Yet in the context of what one character describes as ‘suffering under the immediate present,’[xvi] which in Kafka’s case encompassed an endless state of being somewhere on the spectrum between feudalism and fascism, what other basis for action could there be? The hope in the book coincides precisely with the belief of the little boy, Hans, that although ‘for the moment K. was wretched and looked down on, yet in an almost unimaginable and distant future he would excel everybody’.[xvii] The nearest we get to the expression of this hope are the passages in which K. lies in bed with the secretary Bürgel, half asleep in a dream state, having come unannounced as an applicant in the middle of the night, listening to Bürgel explain how it would be impossible for an applicant to come unannounced in the middle of the night and in the process revealing the heart of the heartless world of clerical bureaucracy:
Granted if the applicant is actually in the room things are in a very bad way … The never-beheld, always-expected applicant, truly thirstingly expected and always reasonably regarded as out of reach – there this applicant sits. By his mute presence, if by nothing else, he constitutes an invitation to penetrate into his poor life, to look around there as in one’s own property and there to suffer with him under the weight of his futile demands … The applicant wrings from us in the night, as the robber does in the forest, sacrifices of which we would otherwise never be capable … Nevertheless, we are happy. How suicidal happiness can be! … With the loquacity of those who are happy one has to explain everything to him. Without being able to spare oneself in the slightest one must show him in detail what has happened and for what reasons this has happened, how extraordinarily rare and how uniquely great the opportunity is, one must show how the applicant, though he has stumbled into this opportunity in utter helplessness such as no other being is capable of than precisely an applicant, can, however, now, if he wants to, Land Surveyor, dominate everything and to that end has to do nothing but in some way or other put forward his plea, for which fulfilment is already waiting.[xviii]
That the narrative movement that allows this encounter to work out for K. as in a dream, also generates a glimpse of utopia – a world in which bureaucrats and citizens will come together in mutual recognition and fulfilment, from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs – suggests that the narrative production of utopia may operate in the same manner as, according to Freud, the dream work produces dreams. Utopia being directly created by dream work is the central story line of Jameson’s other key example of how science fiction turned from narrating the future to narrating the impossibility of narrating the future: Ursula Le Guin’s homage to Dick, The Lathe of Heaven. Here, the resonantly named George Orr, despite being ‘a fool, a passive nothing of a man’,[xix] has unwanted dreams which change reality. His psychiatrist, Haber, doesn’t attempt to cure him but sets out to use this power by proxy to transform the world for the benefit of humankind; but, of course, every attempted change for the good is always accompanied by some unexpected monstrous consequence. For example, when in seeking to solve overpopulation, Haber instructs Orr to dream about a world full of room to move around in, he dreams of a plague and wakes up to find that he has ‘obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century’ (71). The trouble is, as Haber comes to realise, that Orr is not only either/or but also ‘both, neither … Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point’ (118). He is the point on which the world turns, but with no sense of transition he is, again in Haber’s words, ‘a moral jellyfish’ who can only dream ‘cheap utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian concepts perhaps’ (126-7). It is difficult not to read this as an intertextual comment on George Orwell – in one of the book’s many alternate histories, the US Constitution is rewritten in 1984 to form a police state (93) – but it is important to remember that the fool is able to resist power structures, by acting dumb if necessary, which is what Orr is doing here in resisting Haber’s will to progress. In the end, it is this resistance itself which generates its own sense of transition as when, in response to Haber’s demand for world peace, Orr dreams that aliens have landed on the moon thus uniting the people of the Earth in opposition, and then, when commanded to dream that the aliens leave the moon, Orr dreams that they invade Earth – on ‘April Fool’s Day’ (98) no less! The telepathic aliens teach Orr that ‘Everything dreams … Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes … A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully – as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously’ (143). This sets up the final twist of the novel, in which Haber, having convinced himself that he can dream effectively with the aid of the Augmentor he has developed and thus bring progressive change to the world without sabotage, first gets Orr to dream that he is normal so that he can no longer effectively dream, before starting to dream himself. As he dreams, buildings begin to melt and the landscape visibly alters: ‘The funicular was crossing the river now, high above the water. But there was no water. The river had run dry … They swung rapidly over the dissolving city, low enough to hear the rumbling and the cries’ (146). Orr, alone, remains unaffected because his middle-of-the-scale normality means he is still at the point of perfect balance and, therefore, he is able to walk through the ensuing nothingness – ‘an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth’ (147) – and switch off the Augmentor, thus bringing the ceaseless dialectic of modernity to a shuddering halt. What is left are mutant but benign ‘suburbs of chaos’:
Orr returned to downtown Portland by boat. Transportation was still rather confused; pieces, remnants, and commencements of about six different public-transportation systems cluttered up the city. Reed College had a subway station, but no subway; the funicular to Washington Park ended at the entrance to a tunnel which went half way under the Willamette and then stopped. Meanwhile, an enterprising fellow had refitted a couple of boats that used to run tours up and down the Willamette and Columbia, and was using them as ferries on regular runs between Linnton, Vancouver, Portland, and Oregon City. It made a pleasant trip (153).
The resultant version of utopia is somewhat like Dick’s small town pastoral, in which Orr, no longer plagued by effective dreams, works for an alien designing kitchenware. This meets what Lukács describes in The Historical Novel as the ‘epic requirement’ for popular figures or ordinary heroes to return to everyday life after the completion of their ‘mission’ in order to emphasise how the heroic attributes do not belong to the individual but ‘are always dormant in the people’ (56-7). However, it should also be noted that Orr remains the point on which his world turns but so is everyone else in this ongoing condition of fruitful chaos, which combines individuality with collectivity [edit: at some point after writing this, I progressed to framing such conjunctions in terms of intersubjectivity and intersectionality].
It may be suggested that peculiarly muddled utopian resolution of the book reflects the jumbled ideas expressed in it. Jameson distinguishes between the book’s ideological and aesthetic levels:
The ideological content of Le Guin’s novel is clear, although its political resonance is ambiguous: from the central position of her mystical Taoism, the effort … to transform society in a liberal or revolutionary way is seen … as a dangerous expression of individual hubris and a destructive tampering with the rhythms of ‘nature’. Politically, of course, this ideological message may be read either as the liberal’s anxiety in the face of a genuinely revolutionary transformation of society or as the expression of more conservative misgivings about the New Deal-type reformism and do-goodism of the welfare state.
On the aesthetic level … this book is “about” its own process of production, which is recognised as impossible: George Orr cannot dream Utopia; yet in the very process of exploring the contradictions of that production, the narrative gets written, and “Utopia” is “produced” in the very movement by which we are shown that an “achieved” Utopia – a full representation – is a contradiction in terms’ (293-4).
It is this combination of political ambiguity [edit: I would defend Le Guin’s anarchism more vigorously today] and contradictory structure, along with its content, which gives The Lathe of Heaven particular value in foregrounding the role of dream work in utopian texts and fool’s errands. For example, taking the matter of structure first, while it might appear paradoxical that utopia is produced by the very movement which demonstrates the impossibility of achieving it, the concept is much easier to accept if utopia is considered a type of dream. Dreams are produced by exactly the movements which demonstrate the impossibility of fulfilling the underlying wish provoking them, while still managing to satisfy that wish in a distorted way. Or, in Freudian terms, the dream work distorts – by processes of condensation, displacement and secondary revision in the interests of ego defence – the latent dream thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. Analytical interpretation, on the other hand, ‘proceeds in the contrary direction … endeavour[ing] to arrive at the latent dream from the manifest one’.[xx] As far as the point of interpretation is to uncover what is wrong with the patient and thereby help them to an accommodation with reality, The Lathe of Heaven is, on one level, quite orthodox: interpretation of the effective dreams suggests there is something wrong with latent reformist desire and the cure is for people to accommodate themselves to the messiness of reality.
However, such a reading obscures the rather more fundamental point that Le Guin’s fictional conceit of dreams coming truereverses the central Freudian precepts because by privileging the manifest content over the latent content of the dream, it is necessarily implying that it is the dream work rather than the work of interpretation which leads to an accommodation with reality – in this case, some form of Taoist dream state. The problem now becomes one of how to construct the correct latent dream thought in order to generate the required manifest content for the dream, which can be more generally expressed, as Jameson puts it, by the question of ‘how to fulfil a wish’ (72). Viewed from this perspective, the novel once again appears less helpful because the dichotomy between Haber’s wishes for a better world always going wrong and Orr’s wishes to be normal eventually resulting in a small-scale utopia, seems rather too simple – or, indeed, ideological – to provide a model that can be replicated. Here, though, it is useful to remember Slavoj Žižek’s point that the basic matrix of the dream work is often misunderstood because a distinction has to be made between ‘the latent dream thought and the unconscious desire articulated in the dream: in the dream-work, the latent thought is ciphered/displaced, but it is through this very displacement that the other truly unconscious thought articulates itself’.[xxi] Once this is considered, it can be seen that the significant difference between Haber and Orr lies between their truly unconscious desires. It is Haber’s own unconscious desires that distort his wish for a better society and one can interpret them from the book as a violent hatred of difference – for example, when he commands Orr to dream a solution to the ‘colour problem’, the result is that everyone in the world turns the same shade of grey (111) – and, by extension, a violent hatred of stimuli equating to the death drive. The real question of the book, then, is what are the unconscious desires of Orr that distort his wish to be normal into the concluding utopia, given that the implied Taoist argument does not constitute a sufficient cause in terms of the dream-work structure of the book. One possible answer is that he is driven by a desire for happiness, which because of the demands of everyday life remains otherwise unacknowledged except by the occasional failure to keep a sense of human grandeur from his words.
Following on from Benjamin’s argument and the examples of Roadside Picnic, The Castle and The Lathe of Heaven, it is now possible to construct a structural argument as to how the fool’s errand functions. The model for this argument is Žižek’s claim that ‘temporally and logically, the Hamlet narrative is earlier than the Oedipal myth’.[xxii] Temporally, the basic narrative of the evil bother killing the king and the son playing the fool to survive the rule of his uncle is older than the explicit form of the Oedipal myth. Logically, although the standard psychoanalytical reading would suggest that in Hamlet the Oedipal desires for incest and patricide are distorted and displaced into a form reflecting the moral shift from antiquity to modernity, Žižek argues that the mechanism of unconscious displacement works differently: ‘something that is logically earlier is perceptible only as a later, secondary distortion of some allegedly “original” narrative’.[xxiii] He goes on to suggest that the unconscious factor causing the distortion is suppressed knowledge of the triangular relationship of desire with the parents. The difference, then, is that Oedipus is able to kill his father because he doesn’t know what he is doing, whereas Hamlet does know and is therefore unable to revenge his father’s death. These positions can be reduced to formulae – ‘He doesn’t know it, although he does it’ and ‘He knows it, and therefore cannot do it’ – to which Žižek adds a third: ‘He knows very well what he is doing; none the less, he does it.’[xxiv] This latter defines the contemporary hero, as opposed to the traditional and early modern versions, and is an ambiguous combination of knowledge and act encompassing a range of positions from low cynicism to high tragedy to something like the Kierkegaardian teleological suspension of the ethical without the leap of faith: ‘when a higher necessity compels me to betray the very ethical substance of my being’.[xxv] [Edit: this model of the contemporary hero looks a lot more dodgy to me now than it did at the time. I think we can get to a utopian version of this but I don’t think it is going to come through the patriarchal and symbolic structures identified by Žižek.]
Following Žižek’s model [edit: a phrase I can’t imagine myself using today], we can approach the fool’s errand as the secondary distortion of an allegedly “original” narrative, which rather than having a fool set out in search of plenitude and finding happiness at the roadside instead, consists of a successful journey. According to Freud, all such journeys lead to an ancient goal: ‘an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads’.[xxvi] A standard psychoanalytical reading of the fool’s errand would therefore suggest that it involves a distortion of the death drive. However, given that the fool’s errand is an older narrative than the death drive – Benjamin argues that storytellers borrowed their authority from death[xxvii] and without their tales of liberation there would be no state of being from which to return to the origin – an unconscious factor must be causing the distortion, and this can only be suppressed knowledge of the death drive or, rather, of that desire for plenitude which underlies the death drive The difference, then, is that the ‘living entity’ is able to reach death without too many diversions because it doesn’t know what it is doing, whereas the fool does know and is therefore liable to follow every false trail. It is the realisation of failure which shifts focus from the goal to the journey itself and the realisation that, in the words of one of Benjamin’s exemplary storytellers, ‘it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive’.[xxviii] This is the true state of mind of the fool in which the formula of ‘he knows very well what he is doing; none the less, he does it’ is shown to operate in the manner of Empson’s pastoral trick of thought. By simultaneously accepting and revolting against the desire for plenitude, the fool is able to hold the gap between subject and object in a productive tension that permits both some satisfaction of desire and the possibility of transferring that desire. This mobile condition of equilibrium leads the fool not towards an inanimate state, but rather into that complicity with liberated nature which Benjamin described as happiness.[xxix]
[Extract ends]
I think there is a certain amount of ambiguity still here. I have also translated these ideas into quantum mechanics in this article on Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent, with additional discussion of Mary Gentle’s Ash and Adam Roberts’s Yellow Blue Tibia – although, again, I would probably reframe this today. At one point, I was also going to expand the argument with cyborgs and spaghetti westerns. But, in the immediate future, I will attempt to reframe it more gently with respect to Lud-in-the-Mist and we’ll see if that has any legs.
[i] William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 170.
[ii] For further discussion see Nick Hubble, ‘Intermodern Pastoral: William Empson and George Orwell’ in David James and Philip Tew, eds, New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008).
[iii] Following Chernobyl, the term ‘stalker’ has become popularly applied to those prepared to risk the area of radiation.
[iv] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic [1972], trs. A.W. Bouis, (London: Gollancz, 2007), 102-3.
[v] Ibid., 125.
[vi] Ibid., 36.
[vii] Ibid., 80.
[viii] Ibid., 145.
[ix] Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, (USSR: Mosfilm Studio, 1979)
[x] See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trs. Harry Zohn (Hammersmith: Fontana, 1992), 83-107.
[xi] Ibid., 101.
[xii] Ibid., 143.
[xiii] Ibid., 101.
[xiv] Ibid., 142.
[xv] Franz Kafka, The Castle, trs. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 146.
[xvi] Ibid., 195.
[xvii] Ibid., 144.
[xviii] Ibid., 252-4.
[xix] Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven [1971] (London: Granada Publishing, 1984), 107.
[xx] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trs. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 204.
Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 11.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Ibid.
[xxiv] Ibid., 13.
[xxv] Ibid., 14.
[xxvi] Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trs. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)310.
[xxvii] Benjamin, Illuminations, 93.
[xxviii] Robert Louis Stevenson
[xxix] Benjamin, Illuminations, 101.
Prospective Cultures 