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The Utopian
The Utopian consists of two intertwined storylines unfolding in two radically different settings. First, the story of Mesmer, who in 2411 sets out on his Journey, a rite of passage which is to last a year and a day, in a gloriously pansexual, matriarchal, and feminist utopia, told in the third person by a gentle and guileless narrator. The second storyline is set in Britain in 1979 and concerns Dr. Reed, a patriarchal and self-obsessed psychoanalyst, and his analysand, a young man called Mesmer Partridge, told in the first person by Reed in the voice of a spoilt, sarcastic, hostile curmudgeon. The two narratives entertain a complex, twisting relationship to one another, moving in all kinds of configuration, in which they intermittently appear to parallel, oppose, double, and subvert one another. Michael Westlake’s novel, first published in 1989, is thematically rich, weaving theories of politics, psychoanalysis, and feminism together in stylish and dazzlingly imaginative prose. Contains a new introduction from Toril Moi and an afterword from Andrew Collier.
“Mesmerizing in its brilliance and suggestion, The Utopian is a text we do not really know how to read. It confirms that Westlake is the most interesting novelist writing in England today.” Antony Easthope, Textual Practice
“Mesmerizing in its brilliance and suggestion, The Utopian is a text we do not really know how to read. It confirms that Westlake is the most interesting novelist writing in England today.” Antony Easthope, Textual Practice
210 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
22 people want to read
About the author
Michael Westlake
11 books4 followersMichael Westlake was born in 1942 and read philosophy at the London School of Economics, worked as a mathematics tutor and a taxi driver, researcher in an American think tank, journalist and lecturer in film studies.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 29, 2015
"The Utopian" as a title might be interpreted to signify an individual (ostensibly the co-starring lead character in the book) or it might also indicate that which is of the nature of being "utopian", and much like Huxley's Brave New World, the definition of what constitutes utopian is determined by the I of the Be Whole, dear.
Westlake juxtaposes the current state of world socio-politico-economic play (aka capitalism, free market etc), with its imagined antithesis (a society based on recreational pursuits with drudge tasks performed by technology, resources (including people and information) being freely able to move around the globe, self-organised at local, regional, and global levels, inter-personal relationships conducted without recourse to religious beliefs) through the interaction between the two antagonists, Mesmer and Gulliver, superficially that of patient (occupying the "utopian") and psychoanalyst (occupying "reality"), and creates an intertwined form of ab initio (Mesmer's third person past tense narrative) and in medias res (Gulliver's first person present tense). While Gulliver's commentary appears to prevail, the depiction of Mesmer's world is no less voluble in its rebuttal of Gulliver's (and obviously, neither name is an accident of writerly whimsy).
Within this structure, Westlake uses the note-taking or fact-presentation of the "case" to insert unalloyed details of human history and a litany of exploitation in the form of a series of lists (probably the longest literary list of the ills of modern civilisation extant) which form the impetus for Mesmer to choose self-delusion. Is not user-defined madness an agreeable escape from the imposed madness of the quotidian?
In keeping with the rejection of capitalism as a means for organising the productive use of resources, the text is spiced with alliterative neologisms, some of which approach a Brooke-Rose standard of invention and irony, eg moister-oyster, clitoral-littoral, sexed-text, sifting-shifting etc (complete with a dictionarised translation, as though, in the guise of Gulliver, Westlake is concerned his readers (such as they are) may not, from the context, discern the meaning, a concession CB-R would have generally eschewed (sorry Nathan)), and England's towns and counties are given a word-lift, of sorts.
Westlake correctly parodies (ie without becoming the thing parodied) the genres of epic quests and self-confessionals, and perhaps somewhat precipitately, alludes to the final denouement, reminiscent of Adair's Death of the Author and A Closed Book. Naturally, an imagined utopia abounds in that which pervades all epic fantasy quests, magic, but it is of the technologically advanced kind, and considerably more sophisticated in its real-world scientific foundations than a Mieville steampunk universe.
If the work has shortcomings, two seem apt: the first is that current understanding of cell behaviour implies that exploitation of resources is a blueprint at the cellular level (a tactic for gene survival, which may not dovetail with the strategy for species survival), and the text avoids any discussion of the impetus as to how capitalism is subverted other than the standard rhetoric of violent overthrow (itself a pattern of behaviour mirrored at the cellular level), in other words, Westlake presents a nicely integrated fait accompli based upon some other blueprint for social cohesion, the fundamentals of which at once hark back to the same violent underpinnings of current society (an equivalently valid and accurate accusation leveled at Marx for ignoring relativity theory (interaction of observer and observed) and time in his treatise on political economy) and the second being the sexuality expressed from the perspective of only one gender (and in particular, variations on a theme which predominantly reflect the commonly shared fantasies of that gender), despite the implied equivalent validity of the sexes and sexual relations inherent in a non-capitalist, non-religious based model of human interaction. Westlake's recourse to the Male Volence of Fraud Friend Freud may explain this lop-sided tendence.
The book, given its cross-genre dressing, should appeal to a broader spectrum of readers than it currently enjoys. Alas, unless it's made available as a reprint, that's probably not likely to change.
Westlake juxtaposes the current state of world socio-politico-economic play (aka capitalism, free market etc), with its imagined antithesis (a society based on recreational pursuits with drudge tasks performed by technology, resources (including people and information) being freely able to move around the globe, self-organised at local, regional, and global levels, inter-personal relationships conducted without recourse to religious beliefs) through the interaction between the two antagonists, Mesmer and Gulliver, superficially that of patient (occupying the "utopian") and psychoanalyst (occupying "reality"), and creates an intertwined form of ab initio (Mesmer's third person past tense narrative) and in medias res (Gulliver's first person present tense). While Gulliver's commentary appears to prevail, the depiction of Mesmer's world is no less voluble in its rebuttal of Gulliver's (and obviously, neither name is an accident of writerly whimsy).
Within this structure, Westlake uses the note-taking or fact-presentation of the "case" to insert unalloyed details of human history and a litany of exploitation in the form of a series of lists (probably the longest literary list of the ills of modern civilisation extant) which form the impetus for Mesmer to choose self-delusion. Is not user-defined madness an agreeable escape from the imposed madness of the quotidian?
In keeping with the rejection of capitalism as a means for organising the productive use of resources, the text is spiced with alliterative neologisms, some of which approach a Brooke-Rose standard of invention and irony, eg moister-oyster, clitoral-littoral, sexed-text, sifting-shifting etc (complete with a dictionarised translation, as though, in the guise of Gulliver, Westlake is concerned his readers (such as they are) may not, from the context, discern the meaning, a concession CB-R would have generally eschewed (sorry Nathan)), and England's towns and counties are given a word-lift, of sorts.
Westlake correctly parodies (ie without becoming the thing parodied) the genres of epic quests and self-confessionals, and perhaps somewhat precipitately, alludes to the final denouement, reminiscent of Adair's Death of the Author and A Closed Book. Naturally, an imagined utopia abounds in that which pervades all epic fantasy quests, magic, but it is of the technologically advanced kind, and considerably more sophisticated in its real-world scientific foundations than a Mieville steampunk universe.
If the work has shortcomings, two seem apt: the first is that current understanding of cell behaviour implies that exploitation of resources is a blueprint at the cellular level (a tactic for gene survival, which may not dovetail with the strategy for species survival), and the text avoids any discussion of the impetus as to how capitalism is subverted other than the standard rhetoric of violent overthrow (itself a pattern of behaviour mirrored at the cellular level), in other words, Westlake presents a nicely integrated fait accompli based upon some other blueprint for social cohesion, the fundamentals of which at once hark back to the same violent underpinnings of current society (an equivalently valid and accurate accusation leveled at Marx for ignoring relativity theory (interaction of observer and observed) and time in his treatise on political economy) and the second being the sexuality expressed from the perspective of only one gender (and in particular, variations on a theme which predominantly reflect the commonly shared fantasies of that gender), despite the implied equivalent validity of the sexes and sexual relations inherent in a non-capitalist, non-religious based model of human interaction. Westlake's recourse to the Male Volence of Fraud Friend Freud may explain this lop-sided tendence.
The book, given its cross-genre dressing, should appeal to a broader spectrum of readers than it currently enjoys. Alas, unless it's made available as a reprint, that's probably not likely to change.
April 28, 2015
Westlake’s third novel is ‘set’ in the late 1980s and concerns the treatment of Mesmer, an insane patient who resides in a communist matriarchy in 2411. Reminiscent of French surrealists/opaquists such as Marie Redonnet or Eric Chevillard, the novel is more committed to the euphonious sentence and comic wordplay than to a cohesive harmony between the two worlds, so can be savoured as both a surreal fantasy and a mild political satire, or neither, or merely appreciated for the author’s tirelessly inventive sentences and freewheeling imagination.
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June 8, 2018dang & i thought imaginary women was good... this one's got it all folks: a richly imagined fantasy world of the future, complete w/ matriarchal world gov't & omniscient bivalve & at least one dragon, as well as enough nods to lit-crit that you'll be giving each & every one of those lenses you heard about in methods of critical analysis sophomore year a workout. the segments narrated by the psychologist were (perforce) less interesting but they're also kinda the pb to the mesmer sections' j. read this probably!!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews