REVIEWS 121 Morch, Audun J. TheNovelisticApproach to the UtopianQuestion: Platonov's 'Cevengur' in theLightofDostoevskij's Anti-Utopian Legacy. Acta Humaniora, 48. Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo, and Scandinavian University Press,Oslo, I998. iX+ 206 pp. Bibliography.Index. Priceunknown. FREDRIC JAMESON, in his TheSeeds ofTime(New York, 1994), commented that Andrei Platonov 'has come in the last ten years to be endowed with extraordinaryaesthetic and moral authority comparable only to the status of Kafka in the West' (p. 79). AudunJ. Morch's book is opportune as well as ambitiousin its attemptto (re)contextualizePlatonov's Chevengur in the legacy of anti-utopianism.The centralquestionof his studyisthe novelisticapproach to the utopian problem, or 'the nature of the typically novelistic reaction to utopian ideology' (p. i), although Morch properly limits the subject of his concrete analysisto Chevengur and Dostoevskii'sBesy. The concept of utopia is multi-faceted. It implies both 'eu-topia' (a good place) and 'ou-topia' (no-place). According to Morch, its third constituent is 'willto realization',i.e., 'the urge to actualize the utopia in the realworld' (p. I6). This inherent complexity of meaning enables him to define also the main strategiesof anti-utopianism:'dystopia'(a bad place);metaphoricalspatiality as a negation of utopia'snon-spatiality;and, finally,refutationof the very will to realize utopia in this world, as exemplified by Dostoevskii's Zapiskiiz podpol'ia hispolemical responseto Chernyshevskii'sChto delat'? Morch's understandingof anti-utopia is much broader than the 'classical' dystopias of Zamiatin's My and Orwell's I984. Referring to Gary Morson's TheBoundaries ofGenre (Austin,I 98I), M0rch successfullyexplicatesthe dialogic natureof Besyand Chevengur as anti-utopiantexts. The most importantpart of the book is M0rch's analysisof the 'spatiality' of Chevengur and the novel genre as a whole. Morch argues that the novel should be regarded as a spatial genre while utopia is, by definition, nonspatial . The latter is so vulnerable to spatiality as 'the necessary roomfor a dialogic discourse' (p. I75) that utopia represented in the novelistic space easily 'degenerates' into anti-utopia. In other words, spatialization is the essential anti-outopian strategy of the novel. M0rch's close analysis of the structureof the chronotopes in Chevengur leads him to conclude that 'itis in his unique dialogization ofthechronotope thatPlatonov'smost importantcontribution to the furtherdevelopment of the novel genre makesitselfmanifest'(p. I87). Morch bases his analysison the premise that utopia is monologic and nonspatial , and that it is incompatible with the novel genre which is dialogic and spatial.Nevertheless,he underestimatesa wide varietyof literaryutopias. His comparisonof monologic utopiaswith the dialogic novel is too staticto give a proper illustration of the relationship between those two genres in modern European literature. Although utopia is, in principle, inclined toward the perfect stasis, a considerable number of literary utopias also show traits of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the 'novelization' of other genres; i.e., the incorporation of 'laughter,irony, humor, elements of self-parodyand [... .] a certain semantic openendedness' (7The Dialogic Imagination, Austin, I98I, P. 7). As Morch also admits,utopian texts are, to a greateror lesserextent, sensitive to their contemporarycontexts, and become all the more dialogized for their 122 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 cravingforthe monologic 'Truth'.Thus, critics,includingGaryMorson, have discerned elements of self-parody even in Thomas More's original utopian text. In spite of Morch's definition of utopia as a non-spatial, tractariangenre, there are several spatialimages, or chronotopes, which are typical of literary utopias. These, along with dystopias,can be characterizedby theirfixed, oftrepeated chronotopes such as an island, a central square, a river (William Morris'sNewsfromNowhere, I89I) and a wall that separatesthe ideal society from the savage world outside (Zamiatin's My). Morch, however, regards these spatial images as, at best, a compromise. A chronotope of utopia, he argues, 'cannot by definition be possible' (p. I69), and yet this ignores the necessityfor a definitionwell-suitednot only to tractarian,but also to literary utopias in order that an effectivecontrastivestudyof utopia and the novel be achieved. These minor criticisms notwithstanding, M0rch makes an important contribution to our understandingof Platonov's deeply enigmatic novel -- a work that has well outlived the Soviet regime that bore it -and provides a challenging and compelling reading in the context of the broad scope...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
May 10, 2012
N Cavalli-Björkman + 6
