Seeds beneath the Snow: Anarchism in Nowhere

The moving obituary in today’s Guardian newspaper for the eminent British anarchist theorist Colin Ward (p.35) turns my thoughts to those pesky Anarchists who dominate the Socialist League meeting in the opening pages of News from Nowhere: ‘there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions’. So fractiously anarchistic are the SL Anarchists here that they don’t seem capable of agreeing even with each other as to what anarchism might represent!

So anarchism has a bafflingly paradoxical position in Morris’s utopia. It deeply shapes the vision of a fully achieved socialist society in the body of the book, with its decentralised, libertarian and ecologically responsible political and cultural habits. Yet, as the opening frame narrative shows, it is the greatest obstacle of all to the practical building of such a society in the first place because it disastrously fractures the unity a revolutionary party would need in order to grow into any meaningful challenge to a powerful capitalist system. News from Nowhere can neither live with anarchism (because with it a strong party cannot be built), nor live without it (because in that case a dangerously centralist State might install itself permanently in the post-revolutionary period).

We will need a new, appropriately paradoxical concept for thinking about the role of anarchism in Morris’s utopia, then; and I suggest that the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s (non-)concept of the pharmakon (which he derives from Plato) might serve our purpose. The pharmakon is both ‘cure’ and ‘poison’ simultaneously, or the illness and its cure. This is a contradiction that cannot be erased upwards in some benign Hegelian sublation or Aufhebung; but just remains in its stubborn and prickly unthinkability. And so it is with News from Nowhere: utopia can’t exist without its pesky anarchists, but it can’t exist with them either.

In Praise of Steampunk

Visiting my son in Oxford the other day, I took the opportunity to see both the Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the refitted Ashmolean Museum and the exhibition of Steampunk artefacts at the neglected Museum of the History of Science opposite Blackwells Bookshop in Broad Street.

The new Ashmolean is indeed a joy – spacious new galleries and stairways, so many additional objects on display, not to mention excellent breakfasts in its delightful rooftop restaurant. The nucleus of its Pre-Raphaelite collection is that of Thomas Combe, Printer to the University in the 1850s and the first important patron of the young PRB artists. In its attractive green display room this material was being perused silently and intently by an audience that was middle-class and middle-aged (if not older) to the last man and woman. Highlights for me were the Chaucer-decorated wardrobe which Burne-Jones gave to Morris as a wedding present and Charles Allston Collins’s lovely painting ‘Covent Thoughts’.

The Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, by contrast, was consigned to the cramped and dingy basement of the building – a daft curatorial decision if ever there was one. For on the day I visited it was absolutely packed, with people from the whole social and age range (including many children) chattily admiring the weird and wonderful ingenuity of the Victorianised artefacts on display. The contrast of this bustling enthusiasm with the hushed awe of the Pre-Raphaelite Room at the Ashmolean was wholly invigorating.

So it is the bizarre mechanical ingenuity of Steampunk - which is no longer just a minor science-fictional genre but, it seems, on the evidence of this exhibition, a whole emergent sub-culture - it is this extraordinary effort to reimagine the Victorians, to unleash a Victorian and Jules-Vernian technological future which never in fact happened, that is surely where the real energies are in our own current engagement with the nineteenth century. I may still love the hushed devotionalism of ‘Covent Thoughts’, but to my son and his contemporaries it is the fabulously complex goggles and helmets, the peculiar brass chronometers, mechanical animals and whirring robotic arms of Steampunk, that represent an exciting vision of the (neo-)Victorian age; and to which we should, I believe, make Morris’s work responsive too.

'Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?'

Listening to Radio 4's 'Today' programme over breakfast this morning, I learnt that the New Economics Foundation is recommending a working week of no more than 21 hours as a way of solving many of our contemporary social problems: overwork, unemployment, environmental depletion, and so on. With a working week of 21 hours we would, the NEF argues, again have time and leisure to be good parents and good citizens.

Yes indeed! But we have been here before, with the Manifesto of the Socialist League in 1885 arguing rousingly that after the revolution 'every man will ... receive the full value of his labour, without deduction for the profit of a master, and as all will have to work, and the waste now incurred by the pursuit of profit will be at an end, the amount of labour necessary for every individual to perform in order to carry on the essential work of the world will be reduced to something like two or three hours daily; so that every one will have abundant leisure for following intellectual or other pursuits congenial to his nature'.

'Fantasyland economics' was the kneejerk Establishment response to the NEF's suggestion on this morning's radio. Well, it is indeed utopian, and all the better for that. Morris's Socialist League felt that it could point immediately at the social agent - the organised working class - which could bring such desirable changes about. Our task is to find and mobilise such agents of change in our own, much more complex present.

Morris in Wonderland

In my book on William Morris in Oxford: The Campaigning Years, 1879-1895, I tried to get away from the over-familiar story of Morris as an Oxford undergraduate at Exeter College to tell the full story of his mature relationship to Oxford, of his return there as an architectural and political activist in later life. Around the colourful story of the nine speeches Morris gave in Oxford from 1879 onwards I tried to evoke the whole spectrum of his adult interactions with his old university.

And now, preparing for the first time a lecture on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books for my Victorian literature class, I find I have missed one minor aspect of that interaction. For the mathematics tutor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was indeed an Oxford phenomenon as ‘Lewis Carroll’ from the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. And Morris, it appears, had distinct views on this Oxonian brand of children’s literature. For as his daughter May informs us: ‘he never could sympathise with the enthusiasm children had a little later on for “Alice in Wonderland”. It was a type of child-literature that “gave him the fidgets”, he would say’.

Why, one wonders (since May herself doesn’t elaborate on this), should Morris have taken against the Alice books in this way? They look to us like very radical and subversive works, challenging many of the institutions and philosophical categories of Victorian establishment thought; and it is certainly no accident that Lewis Carroll was later canonised by the Surrealists. Yet perhaps what Morris himself saw in the books – and reacted against - is what Hugh Haughton in his fine Penguin Classics edition terms ’a travesty of the heroic Pre-Raphaelitism of Rossetti, Morris and the Laureate’s Idylls of the King’.

We will never now know for sure. So this remains an additional aspect of Morris’s mature relationship to Oxonian culture which invites further speculation.

Earthquakes in Utopia

The devastating consequences of the earthquake in Haiti have been in all our hearts and minds these last few days, though the international relief operation is now beginning to get into gear, thank goodness.

I found those harrowing television images reminding me of that curious moment in News from Nowhere, where Walter Allen, explaining to Dick and Guest the love tragedy in his neighbourhood that has so depressed him, suddenly announces: ‘And all this we could no more help than the earthquake of the year before last’ (chapter XXIV). Nothing, surely, could be more incongruous in the genial, sunlit, placid Thames Valley world of Morris’s utopia than this reference to an earthquake!

England does have occasional earth tremors, of course (I’ve experienced one or two myself over the years); and even more rarely it has the odd minor earthquake, which sometimes does some limited structural damage to buildings. There were a few of these in Victorian times and Morris may have known of them, though I can’t actually recall any such references in the Collected Letters.

But what, anyway, is an earthquake doing (albeit at second hand) in his utopia? I’m not sure that there has been any scholarly commentary on that remark of Walter Allen’s, so we are left free to speculate here. Is it, as with the earlier road-building episode in London, to show that socialist utopians can rise to tough physical challenges when they need to, that they are not always in upper-Thames holiday mode?

Possibly: the one thing we can say for sure is that utopia, which surely won’t be exempt from natural disasters, will be ready for them in a way that the desperately impoverished, dictator-blighted, crime- and violence-ridden society of contemporary Haiti so tragically isn’t.

Terry Eagleton on Utopia

‘Actually, I’ve not done enough thinking about utopia’, remarks my former supervisor Terry Eagleton in his genial new book of interviews (The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, p.228). The volume, which has a strong biographical as well as literary-theoretical dimension, vividly recalls Terry’s long stint at Oxford University from 1969 to 2001 and our shared ‘Oxford English Limited’ campaign to get some radical reforms to the very conservative version of English studies taught there in the 1980s. See my blog entry for 21.02.09 for details of our journal, News from Nowhere (nos 1-9). Bliss was it in that dawn to be an Eagleton postgraduate!

‘Well, do some more then!’ Matthew Beaumont, who so skilfully conducts the series of interviews, might well have retorted to Eagleton’s remark on utopia. I’ve pressed Terry myself in the past to write in detail on Morris’s News from Nowhere, so far without success; and now that he has turned up on the doorstep as a Visiting Research Professor at my own institution, Lancaster University, I shall continue to do so. No one’s thoughts on Morris’s great socialist utopia could be more worth having, in my view.

But has the William Morris Society itself done 'enough thinking about utopia’, Terry’s remark prompts me to ask. In its celebration of the amazing range of Morris’s writings and activities, has it given the issue of utopianism, where to me the most enduring thrust of his work lies, enough weight and centrality? I suspect not. We have various academic societies devoted to the study of utopias and utopianism, and there’s certainly some overlap of membership between them and the Morris Society; but I would like to see the latter put utopianism at the very core of what it does, in a firmly socialist context, perhaps even setting up an official ‘Utopian Studies Sub-Group’ to formally acknowledge the fact.

If we set our own house in order, with the Morris Society in some sense serving as a utopias think-tank for a wider Left culture, then we will have the moral and political authority to badger Terry Eagleton about the question of utopianism even more than we have done so far.

T.S. Eliot's Lost Lecture

On 12 September 1917 T.S. Eliot wrote to his mother about the new adult education classes he was preparing to teach: ‘I have begun to be very busy the last few days preparing my lectures. One set covers very much the same ground as my lectures at Southall last year, but more broadly, beginning with “The Makers of 19th Century Ideas”, lectures on Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Huxley, Spencer, Ruskin, Morris – then the poets, and then the novelists’.

Six weeks later, on 24 October, he wrote to her again, about a farm in Surrey at which he and his wife Vivien had been staying: ‘It is four miles from a village, completely in a forest … We had beautiful weather too. I took down books and prepared my lecture on William Morris. I no longer write them – I set down about three pages of notes. Vivien says I am getting better and better as a lecturer’.

Alas, that lecture, which would have been the most extended encounter between the greatest of all Anglo-American modernists and the greatest of all the Victorian prophets or Sages, has not survived. Instead, all we have are snippets, such as Eliot’s famous (and unfavourable) contrast of Morris’s ‘Nymph’s Song to Hylas’ with Andrew Marvell’s ‘bright hard precision’ in his seminal 1921 essay on Marvell’s poetry.

We can therefore only hope that Eliot’s three pages of lecture notes on Morris might still linger in some dusty attic or unconsulted archive somewhere and might one day blessedly resurface - a consummation devoutly to be wished.