The Grotesque Utopia: Joanna Russ, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Jane Palmer and Monique Wittig

Abstract

Fictional utopias can be deceptively unsatisfactory. Elsewhere I have even claimed they may be threatened by redundancy, being “among the most rigid (and rigidly reductive) of generically bound forms”² Literary fantasy in general has always had to negotiate the establishment’s determination to trivialize it as mere narrative formula. While increasingly successful challenges to these attitudes are mounted by such magic realist writers as Allende, Carter, Marquez and Rushdie, utopia still tends to carry a reductive stigma. Nevertheless, readers and writers of fantastic fiction continue to return to that space with an almost melancholic constancy, always looking to find a “shared identification with the trajectory of the ‘beyond’”.³ One might adopt, as a definition of that impulse, Susan Stewart’s term “longing”, for, as she affirms, the word not only refers to an exaggeration or unnatural overstepping (the elongation) of the limits and limitations of the real, but also a sense of ongoing, “yearning desire”,⁴ this surely being the presiding motivation behind these texts. In a conventional utopia we are confronted by a closed text and reduced parameters. But, as Stewart’s definition implies, “longing” has a more sustained dynamic that requires the ongoing textual interrogation of boundaries. In narratives that employ utopia as a destabilizing series of glimpses, or as a means of opening up a chink of light onto the unknown and unknowable beyond, we often find more interesting textual gaps, absences, lacunae: invitations that forbid as much as they instill desire.

And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings …¹