POSITIONING AND CLOSURE: ON ae "READING-EFFECT” OF CONTEMPORARY U’ N FICTION Peter Fitting e Fifteen years ago, the critical consensus seemed to be that there was, "something of a paralysis of utopian thought and imagination,’ while SF itself had become a predominantly “pessimistic” genre.? Accordingly the recent revival of utopian themes in SF has been a surprising and, or many of us, an important and heartening development. The SF boom which began in the late 1960s--and which continues today--corresponds to the social upheavals in the developed capitalist countries and to the collapse of the dominant social consensus. The appearance of utopian themes within SF at that moment was a logical extension of SF's own inherent possibilities and potential, for, more than any other contemporary genre, it was a literature of alternatives, one which offered the reader and writer alternate times and places in opposition to the dominant forms which seemed bound to our own social reality.” Beyond the question of how or why SF became an important vehicle for the utopian imagination in 1970s, this development raises a number of more political questions, not all of which | can attempt to answer here. The first would be to explain the apparent waning of this utopian moment,‘ ‘Northrop Frye, “Varieties of pecary Utopias," in Frank Manuel ed. Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston 1966), p29. *This is a widely held view. arr for instance, Mark Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare (NYC 1967). See, for instance, Judity Merril’s use of the term “new mythology" in her reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late 1960s: "The as-yet unformulated contemporary mythology is the map modern man must use in the search for his soul. . . . An increasingly large part of serious speculative fiction, in and out of "science fiction," now concerns itself with the examination and analysis of mythology, and a significant, if smaller, segment with the creative search for viable modern myths." (December 1966), p3i. “The situation is, needless to say, quite different in France where a “Socialist” government has further contributed to the undermining of the utopian ideal. See, for instance, James Petras, “Europe's Counterfeit Reformists,” New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984), pp37-52. Anti-utopianism, thus, seems stronger in France: see, for instance, the second issue of Science Fiction (Paris 1984), and in particular, 23although it is perhaps too early to pass a final judgement. Another question would be to analyse the accompan’ retreat into fantasy fiction, a development which has. its political correlate in the projection of collective hopes and fears onto a president who represents a return to an imaginary lost past. Here my aims are more modest. 1 would like to look at the "reading-effect” of some recent utopian SF, namely: Samuel Delany's Triton (1976), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). In more specifically political terms, | would like to examine the effectiveness of this writing about alternate societies in terms of concrete social change: how to link a poetics of the future with a politics of the future. Within the Marxist tradition, the major critique of utopia lies with the argument that these writings would divert attention and energy away from concrete political action, a situation which, as Fredric Jameson has written, no longer obtains: For where in the older society (as in Marx's classic analysis) Utopian thought represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the Utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power of that system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image, The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is.* Roland Lew and Hubert Galle, “Sous les paves de |'enfer utopique," pp50-72. “Fredric Jameson, and Form (Princeton 1971), ppll0-111, This was written in the context of Bloch and Marcuse; but Jameson has also written on SF and utopia. See his "Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies IX, 2 (July 1982), ppl47-158; and his lengthy review of Louis Martin's Utopiques: "Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse," Diacri VII, 2 (June 1977), pp2-21. 24The revival of utopian themes has meant, for most of the writers involved, a reconsideration of the utopian project itself, most evident in some significant modifications in the contents and design of the utopian community; but evident, too, as | will argue in a moment, in some of the strategies employed for influencing the reader. In these newer works, then, the utopian project is often ambiguous. Le Guin, for instance, subtitles her novel, “an ambiguous utopia"; while Delany calls his a "heterotopia"*®; and all four novels describe societies which are far more open and problematic than earlier utopias. More specifically, each of these works depicts the struggle for utopia rather than the image of a finished and harmonious utopian society. In Delany's Triton, which is set in an enclosed city on one of Neptune's moons, the advanced technology of the 22nd century has made possible an almost completely free society whose members are guaranteed access to food and shelter. Although this society is threatened from without, by the “inner worlds” of Earth and Mars who wish to maintain their economic dominance over their former colonies--the smaller and sparsely settled "Outer Satellites"--the principal break with traditional utopian writing lies in the portrayal of a hero who is not happy. Whereas Delany problematizes the concept of utopia through an unhappy central character--one who is, moreover, not typical of the inhabitants of Triton, indeed, who is to blame for his unhappiness, Le Guin's reservations. about the utopian project’ go beyond individual failure to question the very possibility of a better society. On the world of Annares--juxtaposed in familiar fashion to a flawed world very much like our own--the original anarchist principals of the new community have congealed into a bureaucratic apparatus while many of the utopians themselves have internalized a conformity to the system. On the other hand, the most striking feature of the utopian society of [While away], in Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, is the absence of men. Formally it is the least conventional of these four novels: it is constructed of short chapters which mix narration and dialogue with polemic and passages addressed directly to the reader. The novel is set ‘Samuel Delany, Triton (NYC 1976), Bantam edition p345, in a quotation from Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. ‘Unlike the other three writers under consideration, LeGuin has written a number of dystopian works, particularly the stories, "The Ones who walk away from Omelas” (1973) and “The New Atlantis” (1975), and to some extent her novel, The Lathe of Heaven (1971). 25in the present (or at least in an alternate present) where Janet, from the Earth 900 years in the future, describes to Joanna and Jeannine how, after a plague had killed all the men, the women of Earth learned to fend for themselves and developed, in the process, a more human and nourishing society. But as we learn late in the novel, the “natural” emergence of the utopian society is a myth. The world without men is instead the result of a choice, for there was, in fact, an interim stage between the present and the future in which our world split into warring camps--men against women--and from which the women emerged victorious. Finally, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time depicts an unambiguously utopian world which is, nonetheless, under attack from without The central character is an impoverished Mexican-American woman in the present who has been institutionalized against her will and who is contacted telepathically from the future which she is then able to visit in the same way. As in The Female Man, the utopian society of Piercy's Mattapoisset is set on Earth in a future which can only come about through a struggle in the present: both novels portray characters from the future who have come to enlist help in our present in order to build a utopian future. Turning then to the effect of these works, it is a mistake to think that attention to the reader or to the effect of literature is new, born with what is now called “reader-response” criticism. There are various esthetic currents in the 20th century which have been concerned with the reader, of which the most important is that of didactic and committed art, and whose most famous practitioner is the communist playwrite Bertolt Brecht. His call for an art which would, “arouse [the spectator's] capacity for action” and "force [him] to take decisions"* was not simply a slogan, but a concrete political and esthetic project which he developed through the “alienation” or “estrangement” effect. Moreover, this effect is, as you probably know, central to Darko Su definition of SF as, “the literature of cognitive estrangement."” In his paper at the 1984 Utopian Studies conference, Kenneth Roemer reviewed some of the categories of external evidence available for studying a work's actual readers. But, "Bertolt Brecht, "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre,” p37 in Brecht on Theatre, ed, John Willett (NYC 1964). *Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven 1979) pp3-15. “The book contains an important chapter on utopias, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia.” 26as his paper suggested, the most problematic and potentially the most fruitful area for reader-oriented criticism lies in the examination of a work’s internal elements--the ways in which a specific literary text constructs its implied reader. Without reviewing here the [various] manifestations and developments of such criticism,** | would like to focus on several internal elements of recent utopian writing. My approach arises from the political concerns mentioned earlier--the potential effectiveness of utopian writing--and it originates as well in the recognition that different social activities and practices, beginning with the infant's acquisition of language and including literature and art, construct or “hail” (interpellate) specific individuals as psychological and social subjects. | am interested in the ways that the very form of a novel reproduces in the reader the unacknowledged acceptance of and adherence to the dominant ideology, and how traditional narrative strategies work to produce a subject for that ideology .** Although the most evident means by which a text constructs its reader is through the “shared reading conventions” of author and reader, it must be remembered that these conventions include not only the esthetic codes and generic expectations of SF and utopia, but the form of the novel itself; and more importantly, they include a number of frequently overlooked extra- or pre-literary conditions--beginning with the English language itself--which affect the interaction of text and reader insofar as they limit and determine what can be written or read at a given historical moment. In the case of utopian themes in SF, some 1°For a useful summary of these approaches, see Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions (Ithaca, New York 1982). See also Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis 1982). For an empirical treatment of these questions which goes beyond the usual "sociology of literature” approach (Escarpit), see Jacques Leenhardt and Pierre Jozsa, Lire la lecture: essai de sociologie de la lecture (Paris 1982). See also Brian Stapleford, "Notes towards a sociology of Science Fiction,” Foundation XV (January 1979) pp28-41. ‘This is of course a reference to the work of Louis Althusser, “Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d'etat,” La Pensee (mai-juin 1970) pp3-38, reprinted in English in Lenin and Philosophy (London 1971). Of the many applications and accounts in English, see R. Coward and J. Ellis, Language and Materialism (London 1977); see also my “Reality as Ideological Construct: A Reading of Five Novels by Philip K. Dick," Science Fiction Studies X, 2 (July 1983) pp219-236. 7of these conditions would include: 1) the “sexist” dimensions of the English language, an issue to which the most recent wave of feminism has called attention ,and which is a specific concern in Russ’ The Female Man and in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time; '? 2) the predominance, in the SF of the 1950s and early 1960s, of anti-utopian themes which reflected the larger social consensus of the period--albeit a consensus which had already begun to unravel. According to the dominant view, the ideal society had already been achieved and only minor adjustments and continuing technological improvements remained possible. The imagining of a different society was by definition the evocation of a degraded version of utopia, or the description of an alternative which threatened our own success and stability; 3) and carrying this further, one could say that the utopian imagination was effectively blocked during this period as well because of the historical linking of utopian thought with socialism--an alternative which, during the McCarthy period, it was literally impossible to write about favorably. !? But the widespread sense of contentment and prosperity was contradicted in the 1960s by the increasing militancy and atisfaction of various groups to whom the supposedly universal benefits of the American dream were denied, from the “discovery” of poverty in the United States (in Michael Harrington's book, The Other America), the Civil Rights movement and the mobilization é against the war in Vietnam to the reinvigorated women's movement along with the struggle or 42As, for instance, in Piercy's invention of a new possessive pronoun per (from person)--to replace his and her. Language is an issue in The Dispossessed, but not around sexism, i.e. the avoidance of t the possessive pronoun as a way of defeating "propertarianism. 13An extreme and amusing treatment of this theme can be found in F. Pohl and C. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953) which portrays satirically a future U8 US run by advertising conglomerates which is threatened by an underground organization united around what we would call today "ecological" issues. Insofar as they seek to conserve life on the planet they are called "Conservationists" or "gonsies"--a thinly disguised allusion to the contemporary paranoia about the “commies" in our own society. In many ways, SF was during the McCarthy period the only vehicle for social criticism. 28recognition of lesbians and gay men. This outburst of contestatory and liberatory demands was the moment of the rebirth of SF, now no longer as the fiction of technological optimism or pessimism, but increasingly as a literature of alternatives.** In the following analysis 1 will concentrate on two internal aspects of the reading conventions and narrative strategies of utopian writing which are significant in understanding how this recent writing tries to break out of the passivity and illusionism of the traditional reading experience in an effort to push the reader to work for change. These aspects are: 1) the "positioning" of the reader within the text: how the reader is addressed by the text as well as the perspective from which he or she views the utopian society; and 2) that of "“closure"--how the traditional novel manages social tensions through the return to harmony and stablity which mark its ending. '* These recent novels differ, in their construction of the reader, from the strategies of the traditional utopian novel. Although More's Utopia, for instance, has been described in terms of its dramatic structure, its basic form is that of a philosophic dialogue. Indeed, this rational mode of addressing or constructing the reader as an intelligent person, open to reasoned arguments, is the dominant form of utopian writing well into the nineteenth century. Thus, one of the developments apparent in the enormous success of Edward Bellamy's Looking backwards (1888) is precisely the alteration in the techniques of persuasion, for there has been a change in the intended audience (to the wider public of the newly formed middle-classes in the United States) as well as a shift from philosophic dialogue to utopian romance. As readers, we “For an overview of these developments, see my "The Modern Anglo-American SF Novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation,” Science n Studies VI, 1 (March 1979) pp59-76. On the 1960s, see The 60s Without Apology, ed. by Sohnya Sayre et al. (Minneapolis 1984). \*The term "positioning" is borrowed from feminist film theory, See Annette Kuhn, Women's pictures (London 1982). For “closure” see Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris 1970), Charles Grivel, Production de l'interet romanesque (The Hague 1973) and Tel quel: jorie d'ensemble (Paris 1968). On the management of social con’ iction in popular culture, see various works by Fredric Jameson, most noticeably his, "Retification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Ti 1 (Winter 1979) pp130-148 and his book The Pol Unconscious (Ithaca, New York 1981). 29are no longer addressed simply as listeners; we have become involved in an experience which goes beyond the discovery and apprehension of a better society, one in which the description of the ideal society forms the background to a sequence, however flimsy, of unfolding events which we follow through the eyes of a hero and in terms of his own changing attitudes and feelings. Thus the "novelization" of utopia involves a significant transformation: from the positioning of the reader as the addressee in a philosophic dialogue who is persuaded through reasoned presentation, to the process of identification with a fictional character where the reader is implicated on an emotional and experimental level as well as on the intellectual one, A similar shift in utopian writing can be seen in the evolution of another of its narrative conventions. For if the setting of a better society "somewhere else” (or “nowhere") implied, in earlier utopian writing, a permanency to the reader's situation, the impact of the Industrial and French revolutions was to render imaginable the possibility of changing one’s own society. While the dominant convention of the first moment of utopian writing was that of the voyage, it became, in the second moment, that of a temporal voyage, most familiarily through the topos (or commonplace) of the awakened sleeper, The figure of the dream, moreover, not only underlines the distance between the real and imagined worlds, but the absence of a connection between them. This is not to say that the works of the second period of utopian writing do not address the transition to utopia--both Bellamy and Morris have chapters explaining “how the change came about"=-but they do not attempt to involve the reader in such a transition. In contrast to such traditional utopias, contemporary utopian SF uses different strategies for the reader which | have called positioning and which include: the perspective from which the utopian society is depicted; the techniques of identification, namely the reader's identification with a character who is emotionally involved with the utopian community; and the “distance” between the reader's empirical reality and the utopia, including the contrasting of the two societies as well as attempts to break the reader's passivity through various "performative" strategies. In this sense, Piercy and Russ go further than Delany and Le Guin in their attempts to link their alternate worlds with the present. The libertarian city-state in Triton, for instance, has apparently emerged "naturally," as a result of 30the harsh conditions on a frontier world;** but there is no explanation of how its social forms or state apparatus have developed, and particularly, no indication of the amount of conscious choice or planning involved--in contrast, | think, to the other three novels. The reader is given a description of what some would consider the institutions and infrastructure of a “better” society, but there are few suggestions of a connection between it and our present day world. In The Dispossessed, on the other hand, which is set much further away in space and time, the utopian society of Annares is founded on the basis of a worked-out social philosophy. But the conveniently empty moon to which the followers of Odo emigrate to set up this society again discourages the reader from seriously considering how such a society could be achieved on our own planet. The Female Man and Woman on the Edge of Time, on the other hand, are set in the present and the reader's identification is with characters who--unlike Bellamy's Julian West--remain in the end in the present. Moreover, in each case, this character has been contacted from the future to help bring the utopian society into being. Through these characters the reader is “hailed” as a potential actor in the process of building utopia, unlike the passive role traditionally assigned to the reader, where it suffices to dream and to wait.*7 ‘*The locus classicus of the theme of the development of a libertarian society in the context of the harsh environment of a@ space colony is Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). But as opposed to the “welfare” system on Triton, (p178) the rule in Heinlein is “TAASTAFL": "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.” ‘7Professor Keneth Roemer has pointed out to me that a number of 19th century utopias do end iwth direct appeals to the reader, The second edition of Looking Backwards, for instance, ii fed a post-script addressed to the reader, while King Camp Gillette's The Ht t (1894) included certificates | which the read r could aS “buy stock in Gillette's “people's corporation,” and the back cover of Frederick V. Adam's President John Smith (1897) had an appeal to the reader to form “majority clubs." These appeals are part of the physical reality of the book and certainly are an attempt to link fiction and reality. Moreover, the total experience or act of ‘consuming’ narrative increasingly--since the advent of television--includes direct appeals which interrupt the actual narrative. Popular novels, too, often include forms of advertising: inserts and coupons etc. While this is not strictly equivalent to the 19th century novels 31The Female Man attempts to subvert a number of novelistic conventions in the recognition that, like language itself, these apparently neutral forms are neither natural nor neutral, but instruments for the maintenance of the status quo. The process of identification, as well as the ideological myth of a rational, unified subject is undermined through the presence of four overlapping characters whose names all begin with "J", including the authorial persona, Joanna: "I said goodbye and went off with with Laur, 1, Janet; | also watched them go, |, Joanna; moreover | went off to show Jael the city, 1, Jeannine, | Jael, | myself."?" Through her fictional practice, Russ reminds us that the positioning of the reader is actually an important feature of how we construct our own identities: we learn our roles and responses from reading novels even as we "know" that they are not real. This points to current debates around “stereotyping” in the novel, as Russ argued in her review of The Dispossessed.'* For whatever Le Guin's intentions, the reader was offered characters with whom to identify according to traditional sexist roles Under the concept of positioning, then, | have discussed how the reader is produced in these texts, beginning with the character from whose perspective the events and the utopian society are seen and experienced; and including performative strategies which attempt to directly engage the reader, rather than simply reaffirming the solitary and passive nature of the reading experience. Now | would like to argue that the technique of closure is a powerful mechanism for insuring that passivity, insofar as it returns the reader to an original tranquility and order which was disrupted at the beginning of the work. This basic narrative structure can be seen in Lookin kward, for instance, which opens with the disruption ofthe status quo as the hero awakes in the future where his friends and fiancee are long dead. From there the novel moves through moments of tension and disorder--his efforts to adjust--to a final resolution in which he realizes that this is a better society where he has found true happiness. This is the substance of the ideological effect of closure in the traditional novel: the mentioned above, 1! am only concerned in this paper with forms of appeals to the reader which are integrated into the narrative itself. ean Russ, The Female Man, Bantam edition (1975) p. “In The Mogazine of Fantasy and Science Fi 1975): 41- ion (March 32disruption of an established fictional order, followed by an eventual re-establishing of that order. In this way, the reader's anxieties vis a vis larger social contradictions are acknowledged and then displaced to the fictional concerns and tensions of the novel where they are resolved through the novel's own resolution of the fictional tensions and the return to harmony and order. Furthermore, in Looking Backward, the process of the persuasion of the reader is reproduced in the underlying structure of the novel. More's Utopia, written as a philosophic dialogue, ends with the skeptical assent of the addressee, the “stand-in” for the reader: In the meantime I cannot agree with everything that he said, for all his undoubted learning and experience. But | freely admit that there are many features of the Utopian Republic which | should like--though | hardly expect--to see adopted in Europe. ** Looking Backward, on the other hand, concludes with Julian happily ensconced in the utopian future: his--and the reader's--assent to that alternate society marked not only, or not so much, in intellectual terms, as in emotional ones. For Julian's gradual conversion to the principles of utopia is also a seduction; the novel ends with his love for the utopian “explainer's" daughter, a love which is of course recipocated and whose promised consumation closes the novel, just as his engagement to be married to a woman of his own time opened it, Closure is significant in terms of what it does and in terms of what it prevents In the present historical conjuncture, it is one of the methods through which literature serves the status quo, by reinscribing the reader within the dominant order which represents itself, like the traditional work of art, as whole and meaningful, without flaws or contradiction, The initial disruption which opens the traditional novel is a displaced expression of our collective fears and anxieties which is thus reassuringly dealt with at the novel's end. Thus at the end of The Dispossessed we have the figure of the return as the novel ends where it began, at the Annares spaceport. This novel is conclusive in another way, for although it ends with Shevek's commitment to struggle, it also concludes with the invention of the <>--the instantaneous communications device--which becomes then, in typical SF fashion, a technological solution 2°Thomas More, Utopia, Translated by Paul Turner (Londong 1965) p132. 33to social conflict insofar as it identifies imperfect communication as the problem. Closure is also important for what it prevents: writing which in the Brechtian terms | mention earlier, would <> It goes without saying that to write utopian fiction today implies a dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs and a desire for change. In this sense closure undermines this will to change through the <> of its formal return to the implied harmony which is disrupted at the novel's beginning. The ending of Triton is very different from the pacifying effect of the end of The Dispossessed; but the tactic of brining the reader to some sort of critical judgement through the absence of closure in Delany's novel is undermined by the fact that the reader had been turned too much towards one character's confusion and unhappiness, so that the only realization possible for the reader seems focused on the character of Bron himself. Indeed, in contrast to the other three novels, Delany's world lacks one of the central components of most utoian communities--a common ideal or philosophy. The government of Triton attempts to provide the minimal structures for the happiness and well-being of its citizens, but within this libertarian ideal state there is little sense of a collective commitment to those goals. Bron's unhappiness is, the reader feels, Bron's own fault; but at the same time, in the absence of collective ideals, his solitude and isolation do not seem surprising. The contrast with The Female Man and Woman on the Edge of Time is stri net only in -terms of their commitment to shared ideale, but in their attempts to break with the traditional novel to directly move the reader. In traditional terms, Woman on the Edge of Time might have ended with Connie's remaining in Mettapoisett (a la Bellamy), or at least with her successful escape from the hospital. By her desperate attempt to begin to struggle in the present--by poisoning the doctors’ coffee--and in the documents relative to her case which close the novel, the reader is refused any such comforting illusions. Connie is still trapped, probably under even more repressive and humiliating circumstances as the involuntary subject of experimental psychosurgery designed to control anti-social behavior. As with the ending of Triton, we are left with the pain and suffering of the principal character; but here that suffering has an identifiable cause which the reader is called upon to help end, as Connie has been asked to help: “We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That's 34why we reached you.” Similarly, The Female Man ends with a direct address to the reader: Remember we will all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. | swear it on my head. | wear it on my ten fingers. We will be our selves. Until then | am silent; | can no more. | am God's typewriter and the ribbon is typed out. Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France . . do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrooch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. In attempting to understand the effectiveness of recent utopian writing | have not looked at the question of the new social subjects who, since the 1960s, have been the audience for the discourses of social transformation; nor have | dealt with the empirical questions of “actual” readers as addressed by the sociology of reading. Instead I've argued that cultural practices such as reading are already socially meaningful, regardiess of authorial intentions or even individual responses; and that the forms and meanings of these practices, specifically the novel, have evolved in particular historical circumstances and serve to consolidate and maintain the political and ideological hegemony of the dominant class. | have argued, moreover, that the traditional form of the novel, through its structure of tension and resolution, is a mechanism for managing social anxieties and conflict: these tensions are acknowledged and then displaced onto the events and characters of the story, only to be resolved at the novel's end. Positioning, on the other hand, serves to reinforce the production of individual subjects within the social formations, as gendered and unified subjects who act in specified and comprehensible ways which are repeated over and over again through the stereotypes and patterned behavior of popular fiction. 35In recent utopian writing there has been, as I've tried to show, a questioning of closure: firstly, in the very design of utopia, for traditional closed and unitary utopias--from More through Bellamy--have been superseded by ambiguous utopias which are still struggling to come to be. Secondly, on a deeper structural level, the novels of Piercy and Russ in particular sought to implement their utopian politics through a break with the isolation and passivity fostered by the reading experience itself, by refusing to the reader the familiar satisfying closure of the traditional novel. The rhetorical strategies of the utopian tradition have evolved, from philosophic dialogue to attempts to seduce the reader into an acceptance of the utopian society through the character's own seduction. These four recent works reject such strategies in favor of involvement with characters who were themselves filled with question and doubts. For those to whom the idea of a better society is of more than academic interest, the better society will not come about as the result of dreaming, nor are its forms already determined: it must be struggled and fought for as Bee tells Connie: "We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That's why we reached you.” University of Toronto Positioning and Closure: On the "Reading Effect" of Contemporary Utopian Fiction Peter Fitting Utopian Studies No. 1 (1987), pp. 23-36 Published by: Penn State University Press Article Stable URL: http/Amww jstor org/stable/20718883 « Previous Item Next Item » 36