The productivity of ambivalence: Dialogic strategies in the utopian narratives of Wells, Huxley, Lessing, and Le Guin

Mikhail Bakhtin argues that every utterance evokes and endures a collision with the words of past utterances on the same subject: hence every utterance participates in social dialogues and carries with it at least a trace of ambivalence. This concept of the dialogism of all utterances illuminates in particular the utopian narratives of H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Doris Lessing and Ursula K. Le Guin. The ambivalence of these writers toward previous writings on utopia produces dialogic strategies in their fictions. Bakhtin's concepts of doublevoiced narration and chronotope help to reveal the socio-political struggles in language that inform stylistic choices. Hence they become appropriate tools for analyzing how these writers represent utopian hope using the "other's word.";The study explores dialogical effects in Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and A Modern Utopia; Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Ape and Essence, and Island; Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Shikasta and Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five; and Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and Always Coming Home. Three dialogues emerge within and between these texts, between these texts and the western tradition of utopia, and between these texts and readers. First, through innovative use of chronotopes and hybrid genres, these authors "reform" rationalist utopia by giving it an "unconscious"--a process which involves their texts in the problem of representing a synthesis of communality and individuality. Secondly, these authors both re-present and question the traditional notions of gender endemic to western narrative. Third, these authors exploit an analogy between the vulnerable "space" of the utopian community and the contested "space" of utopian discourse--putting these spaces into dialogue with each other. In their dialogues with Wells and Huxley over such oppositions as male/female, western/eastern, and civilized/primitive, Lessing and Le Guin openly question the ideology of utopian texts: whose utopian hope is represented? and "who" does the representing? Such concerns are evidence of the active reading fostered by the dialogic narratives for these four authors.