Samuel Butler - Erewhon

Erewhon has its place among those works of literature which in the absence of high imagination are preserved because they contain thought, freshness and originality. Butlers power as a debunker of emotional and religious hypocrisy projects itself through the faade of the conservative Englishman: a combination still capable of alienating and appealing to his readers. Paradoxical as a social figure, he is no less so as a stylist. Not sardonic enough to be the court-fool, he was too serious only to play the buffoon. In his practice of inverting as well as inventing epigrams he combined complaisance of tone with earnestness of intention, but both were used as weapons against the unthinking acceptance of ideas and attitudes, which Butler regarded as the arch-enemy in life, and the greatest insult the reader could pay to the writer. As his critics were quick to observe, he succeeded in alienating his public; but that was part of his idiosyncratic integrity, and provides a further reason for his survival. The case of Samuel Butler contains many oddities; but not the least is that this middle-class gentleman of independent means deeply influenced the thought of George Bernard Shaw, and developed a literary technique now associated with Bertolt Brecht.

Erewhon is not either in form or content a conventional novel. It originated in a series of articles which Butler wrote for the New Zealand paper, The Press, during his time as a sheep-farmer between the years of 1860 and 1864. His emigration was brought about by his decision not to follow his fathers footsteps into the Church, and his rejection of the other traditional careers which opened out from his education at Shrewsbury and Cambridge. The liberalization of his mind was hastened in New Zealand by his reading of Darwins Origin of Species, which had been published in 1859. This did not merely confirm his renunciation of the Christian religion in which he had been strictly brought up, but made him determined to spread what he saw as the new doctrine of evolution. Characteristically, he chose to do so in a light-hearted manner. The resulting articles, Darwin among the Machines, The Mechanical Creation, Lucubratio Ebria (a drunken lucubration), formed the basis of The Book of Machines in Erewhon when it came to be written some ten years later.

In the meanwhile he had sold his successful sheep-run and come back to England, where he attempted to train himself as a painter at Hatherleys Art School. His views on crime, religious hypocrisy and family life had also been formed, and persisted in engaging his attention. He had, it was clear, the makings of a collection of essays, conceived in his own fresh and satirical style. But he was still a long way from writing a novel which would demand cohesion and a talent for creating imaginary characters. He chose to solve the problem by setting his ideas in the context of the one fictional genre which was not rigorous in either respect the book of imaginary travels. The land of nowhere gave him the context to play with his ideas as he wished where a more serious anthology would have directed attention in quite the wrong way to their deliberate and sustained illogicalities.

Anyone who takes a look at A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, an account of Butlers first year in New Zealand, and then compares it with Erewhon, will begin to feel the distinctive way in which his mind works. Much in the first five chapters of Erewhon is derived from the landscape around Butlers sheep-run at Mesopotamia, and the route taken by Higgs into Erewhon is faithful to the actual landscape. In both, Butler demonstrates a keen and uncluttered eye for detailed observation, and the craft to evoke the feeling of a land in which the practical aims of the settler are tempered by a romantic appreciation of the lonely and the solemn. Lucidity in description goes hand in hand with evenness of narration, making a fine overture from these opening chapters of Erewhon. Disclosing none of the works major themes, it succeeds in compelling the reader to want to explore the mysterious land on the farther side of the mountains.

Once over the range, the evocation of English colonial life in New Zealand gives way abruptly to a landscape and people derived from Butlers love of Northern Italy, and the paintings of Giorgione, Bellini and Salvator Rosa. His use of discontinuity is at one level clever; it induces a sense of having arrived somewhere different; but it also dislocates, in this case, the readers involvement a weakness which Swift always succeeds in avoiding. The lack of sufficient artistry is unfortunately made more noticeable by the succeeding account of Higgss affair with his jailers daughter, Yram. Butlers writing is always especially impoverished when dealing with the relationships between men and women. His own fear of women caused perhaps an imaginative debility, and a distasteful attempt at titillation.