Post‐Pill Paradise Lost: John Updike's Couples

Abstract

Reviewing some books about Utopia recently (Encounter, April, 1969), I ventured the suggestion that ‘Eros is traditionally an anti-utopian force, though he is catered for in the specialized utopias of pornography—what Stephen Marcus has called “Pornopia”. I used the word ‘traditionally’ because we have seen in modern times the emergence of a school of thought that may properly be termed ‘utopian’, in that it is concerned to construct ideal models of the good life, but which inverts the values we normally associate with Utopia, recommending not the enhanced exercise of rationality but the liberation of instinct, not the perfecting of the mind, but ‘the resurrection of the body’. The latter phrase is adopted by Norman O. Brown as a concluding slogan in Life Against Death (1959), a representative text of the new utopianism. It is not, of course, wholly new, and may be readily traced back to earlier sources—to Nietzsche, to Lawrence and, pre-eminently, to Freud, on whom Life Against Death is a commentary.Brown begins with the paradox propounded by Freud, that civilization or ‘culture’ (which is prized by traditional utopists, and which they wish to perfect) is based on the repression and sublimation of erotic energy. Freud himself was shifty about the proportionate loss and gain of this process, but Brown is quite certain and uncompromising: civilization is self-evidently neurotic, and the only solution is to end the tyranny of the reality-principle, to substitute ‘conscious play’ for alienated labour as the mainspring of society, and to restore to adult sexuality, narrowly fixated on genital and procreative functions, the ‘polymorphous perverse’ of infantile eroticism.