Morris Online under Covid-19

This week I taught my last-ever undergraduate seminars, as the conclusion of a mini-course on Thomas Hardy’s poetry, so, like Coleridge’s snake with its tail in its mouth (his image for the organicist nature of the work of art), my academic career at its close has circled back to its origins, for Hardy’s poetry and novels were a big part of our A-level training at Southend High School for Boys under the adept tutelage of Mr A.J. Webster some decades back.  The surprising feature of these seminars was, then, not their literary content, but the fact that they took place online, as part of the remote teaching that British universities are currently practising under coronavirus lockdown (and may well still be practising this coming autumn term).

Many other intellectual and political projects have moved their own operations online in a wholesale fashion during the Covid-19 crisis.  My wife’s Lacanian psychoanalysis seminar, which had required her to take crack-of-dawn trains from Lancaster to London once a month, now holds its meetings via Zoom; and in fact is having more meetings rather than less in its enthusiasm for the new online medium.  Moreover, the geographical range of participants has increased, allowing people in other countries who could never have made it to London for a Saturday morning start to participate.  

Meantime, in the field of Morris studies, Ingrid Hansen has done an excellent job of organising ‘Morris Out Loud’, a reading-out of the entirety of News from Nowhere via Zoom on Monday evenings from 6.30pm.  But I’m not aware of anything much other than this by way of new Morrisian online offerings.  Yet it should surely have been possible for the William Morris Society, like my wife’s London Lacan group, to have broadcast the speaker meetings it has cancelled over the last couple of months through online forums instead – Microsoft Teams if not Zoom, or no doubt any of a good number of others I don’t know about.  And it too might have increased its audience by so doing.  

There was talk at last year’s Society AGM about the need ‘to increase our digital output’, though at that point it was Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that were mostly on the agenda.  But the coronavirus situation, which could now go on for a very long time indeed, makes it all the more urgent that that digital push is taken into new directions and the Society’s speaker programme got going again by online means.

In Praise of Communism

The global coronavirus crisis is leading to a resurgence of the crudest Cold War anti-Communist rhetoric, with the Tory MP Tom Tugendhat in this country being a particularly ardent practitioner.  The Chinese ‘Communist dictatorship’ then becomes the source of every aspect of the global pandemic: from the invention of the virus in a Wuhan laboratory in some conspiracy theories, through the intimidation and silencing of Doctor Li Wenliang who tried to alert China to the emerging health crisis, to the faking of mortality figures and subsequent fake news campaigns.  There may well be some truth in some of these claims; but taken collectively they add up to a new Cold War racist anti-Communism. 

At which point, Morrisians must surely stand up for communism, if not for China.  It was our hero’s preferred term for his political vision, and, as I have suggested before in this blog, aligning the pre-Leninist communism of Morris with the post-Leninist communism of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Jodi Dean is a compelling political task for us.  Coronavirus is not, as many politicians have asserted, indiscriminate: it may infect an occasional Boris Johnson, but it hits the poor hardest, since in crowded homes and work-places they cannot social distance, their jobs are lost first in any economic lockdown, and they may not have health cover or insurance.  A contemporary communism must speak out against the grotesque economic and health inequalities we are now witnessing so starkly all around us.

On the more scholarly and historical front, we are seeing some interesting work on the semantics of ‘communism’ in Morris’s texts.  Owen Holland’s splendid William Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration (2017) argues that ‘Morris’s intervention into the pastoral tradition can be construed as an attempt to shift the articulation of the communist idea in the direction of social revolution … [his] utopian text attempted to reorient the meaning of the word “communism” around a definition tied to the primacy of the political, as against the then-dominant identifications with utopian-communitarianism’ (pps.107, 118).  Holland grasps the centrality of the term ‘communism’ for Morris, and shrewdly maps its vagaries, as if it were an Empsonian ‘complex word’.

In thinking about the global future we want after Covid-19, the green-communism of Morris needs to be on the agenda again.  We can’t just be calling for the resumption of ‘business as normal’, in that over-used current phrase.  Capitalism-as-normal is generating appalling social divisions into the 1% and the 99%, and destroying our planet’s biological systems into the bargain (and it is more likely that process, rather than a Chinese laboratory, that gives us Covid-19 and the earlier pandemics of our century).  Far from allowing a reversion to Cold War anti-Communism, we should rework the vision and practice of communism to meet the challenges ahead. 

I would like to see the Morris Societies of the UK, the USA and Canada commit themselves to such a task on their websites: not just to plan tactics of immediate survival and reorganisation (important though these are), but to project some serious utopian thinking and mobilising for the years ahead.  Having handed in my notice to Lancaster University, I am now counting down the months to the moment when I can devote myself fulltime to that work.

Modernism's Rainbow

With the rainbow emerging as a symbol of hope in the coronavirus darkness – the children at the nursery opposite my house have painted a big one on a sheet of cardboard and hung it from their gate – we might recall modernism’s own rainbow, as articulated in the great utopian vision which Ursula Brangwen has in the closing paragraphs of D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow (1915).  Here it is:  

'And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill.  And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself.  In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of the iris where the bow should be.  Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow.  The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of the low houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. 

And the rainbow stood on the earth.  She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven.  She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitted to the over-arching heaven'.

So may we, like Ursula, catch glimpses of a juster society emerging from the current crisis.

Coronavirus: Some Morrisian Hopes

A week into the UK lockdown, can we hope, however tentatively, for new progressive values to emerge from the current crisis?  Can people rediscover the new limits imposed on their lives as opportunities, as a sensory re-immersion in the present and its simple local pleasures?  Of course, for many, economic anxieties will be severe, but there is still a chance that we might partially move to that Morrisian ethos evoked in News from Nowhere: ‘they were eager to discuss all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the last new house, the plenty or lack of such and such birds, and so on; and they talked of these things not in a fatuous and conventional way, but as taking, I say, real interest in them’.

Could those local libidinal investments then acquire a degree of theoretical articulation?  Might they move towards a critique of the frantically fast-moving globalised economic system which allowed a disease outbreak in Wuhan to become a planetary disaster so very swiftly?  Will the renewed admiration for our National Health Service and other expressions of social altruism and self-sacrifice point towards a renewal of solidarity against neo-liberal austerity and individualism?  Will anger at the past decade’s underfunding of public services, which leaves us so stretched and vulnerable at a time of general crisis, emerge and take political shape?

Severe crises affect national ‘structures of feeling’ (to borrow Raymond Williams’s old term) in deep but complex and unpredictable ways.  They can benefit the Right as well as the Left, and no crisis has its political effects of itself, by its own inbuilt momentum.  Hence the Morrisian-utopian task that Alain Badiou has recently enjoined upon us: ‘As for those of us who desire a real change in the political conditions of this country, we must take advantage of this epidemic interlude, and even of the – entirely necessary – isolation, to work on new figures of politics, on the project of new political sites, and on the trans-national progress of a third stage of communism after the brilliant one of its invention and the – interesting but ultimately defeated – stage of its statist experimentation’.

Coronavirus in Utopia

‘For our sick, they were many, and in very ill case; so that if they were not permitted to land, they ran danger of their lives’.  But when ‘we … came close to the shore, and offered to land … we saw divers of the people, with bastons in their hands, as it were forbidding us to land … warning us off by signs that they made’.

These words, which might have been uttered by the captains of the cruise ships Diamond Princess and Grand Princess, which were recently moored off Yokohama and San Francisco respectively without being able to land, are in fact from the opening of Francis Bacon’s 1627 utopian fragment New Atlantis.  Eventually, the 51 passengers on Bacon’s ship (‘whereof our sick were seventeen’) are allowed on shore, but they are then effectively quarantined in the House of Strangers.  The utopians naturally do not wear our modern facemasks in dealing with them, but the first utopian official who greeted the visitors had used a richly smelling fruit ‘for a preservative against infection’.

Early utopias are deeply afraid of infection, both medical and ideological; for New Atlantis has ‘interdicts and prohibitions … touching entrance of strangers … doubting novelties and commixture of manners’ as well as transmission of illness.  To what extent is this true of their successors?  Is Morris’s Hammersmith Guest House in News from Nowhere perhaps a version of Bacon’s House of Strangers, an institution where visitors are vetted to see whether they can be safely allowed to explore the new realm more generally?

Well, it is certainly a place where Dick Hammond is trying to stamp out certain kinds of intellectualism (i.e. the historical interests of Bob and Boffin); and critics have sometimes seen William Guest as carrying an ideological virus into the Thames valley, as when Marcus Waithe refers to the possibility of him ‘contaminating Nowhere’.  Morris’s utopians know that infection can be a political issue, with old Hammond referring to the British Government sending ‘blankets infected with small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-Skins’; and this local textual reference presumably inspired Barbara Gribble in 1985 to wonder more generally ‘how Dick or Walter would react to a sudden epidemic’. 

Perhaps we are about to find out, just beyond the boundaries of the text, as it were.  For we never do discover the nature of Philippa the carver’s illness, though it was clearly quite debilitating: ‘I was ill and unable to do anything all through April and May’.  Is she perhaps Patient Zero of the epidemic that Gribble envisages?  And if it were to spread as rapidly as coronavirus is doing in Europe at the moment, then Morris’s Nowhere may be about to face one of the great challenges of its existence.