Books and plots bleed into each other. One book picks up the plot of another you recently read, extends it or twists it or blows it up. When recalling the storyline of one book you enjoyed and are recommending to a friend, you add in details from another book you read, similar or not. Your latest read unwittingly adapts a theme from your favourite childhood story. Like some kind of collective narrative, always growing.
I just finished Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, in which a woman who is branded as schizophrenic by 1960s America has psychic access to a future that contains both a fascist dystopia and socialist utopia, at war with each other. Before that, I read The Night Watch, which details an institutionalised war between the Light and the Dark, carried out by soldiers of varying magical gifts. At one point, one of the leaders of the Light describes the aim of his institution: to provide humanity with a social system that will create a utopic society in which, fundamentally, people respect each other. The question hidden within this plan is whether the ends justify the means.
Both societies are at war, both societies have a vision of a better society built on respect and a sense of human dignity. What I found interesting is that even the utopic society detailed in Piercy's novel has a vision of a better society, even this society has to live side by side with its moral opposite. To me, this suggests that our dreams of utopia may always remain just a dream. Built into the 'narrative genetic code' of a utopia is a fundamental contradiction: that humanity is made up of people of differing moral 'levels', or integrities, I suppose you could call it. It could never fully be realised, except perhaps in fiction, and even that must find some way to deal with the contradiction, whether by casting it outside itself or containing it within itself. This is something more than the idea (hijacked by hippies) of ying and yan, that reality is made up of moral opposites. It is humanity in which the contradiction exists only; reality might even be barren of the moral substance from which to build this kind of contradiction. So, I guess, even if we do create a fictional utopia which embraces everything, there would be someone within it who desires to do wrong, who would have to be forced to live a better life and so invalidate the utopia. Humanity's tragic flaw has many facets - hubris included - but perhaps it can be summed up in this, that we can never be at peace with ourselves, as individuals or societies.
My point, when I started this post, is that Woman on the Edge of Time took the ideas that were still haunting the corridors of my imagination, a bit like the smoke from a cigarette which spirals into the air for a bit before dispersing, and extended them. Both novels ask similar ideas, but more than this, they seem to inhabit the same narrative world. They feed off each other. Now I am reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and hopefully soon The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin, so let's see where this takes us...
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