Atwood - Dire Cartographies : the Roads To Ustopia And The Handmaids Tale

What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces.

REBECCA SOLNIT, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

after WWII utopia was no longer just a synonym for naivet. It was dangerous. Now, decades further on, in a new century and a new millennium, earnest utopian thought and earnest utopians are a glowing ember at best, and utopias legion failures seem to suggest that the best course of action would be to crush itsnuff it for good.

J. C. HALLMAN, In Eutopia

T his essay is about literary utopias and dystopias, and how it came to pass that I found myself writing about them, and thenmany years laterattempting something in that form myself. Ustopia is a word I made up by combining utopia and dystopiathe imagined perfect society and its oppositebecause, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.

The dire might at first glance appear to be connected only to the obverse or dystopic side of this coin, where unpleasantness prevails, though most utopias viewed slantwisefrom the point of view of people who dont fit into their high standards of perfectionare equally dire. But before expanding on that notion, Ill begin with the second word of my title: cartographies.

Cartography is map-drawing, and the brain is, among other things, a map-making entity. Not only our brains, but also those of other animals with brains. And not only the brains of other animals with brains: even the lowly slime mould, entirely devoid of a central nervous system, maps its adjacent space, figuring outfor instancethe closest route to enjoyable foods. (It prefers oatmeal.) From our earliest days, as soon as we can crawl around on the floor, we are inscribing maps of our surroundings onto the neural pathways in our brains andreciprocallyinscribing our own tracks, markings, and namings and claimings onto the landscape itself. Snails make trails, and so do beavers, and so do tree-scratching bears and hydrant-marking dogs, and soquintessentiallydo we. Were almost as good at finding the shortest path to enjoyable foods as slime moulds are, although our choice may not be oatmeal.

With every map theres an edgea border between the known and the unknown. In old medieval and early Renaissance maps, the edges were where the monsters were drawnthe sea serpents and many-headed hydras, which were, as we say, off the map. Monsters live under the bed when youre little because you cant see under the bed when youre actually in the bed. And thats whats scary about darkness for a lot of people: the unknown. The known is finite, the unknown is infinite: anything at all may lurk in it. Grendel, the monster in Beowulf, is termedin John Gardners reworking of himearth rim roamer and walker of the worlds weird wall. Thats where monsters liveat the edges, at the borders. Monsters also live at the edges of our consciousnessduring the day and in stable times, that is. They take full possession of our field of vision only when were asleep or entranced in some way, as suggested by the title of Goyas enigmatic engraving of 1799, The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters.

Why do we so frequently put monsters at the edges of the maps, or under the bed, and alsoin some of its formsin stories of the adventure-romance type? As Roberto Calasso sagely notes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, heroes need monsters in order to establish their heroic credentials through combat, but monsters most emphatically do not need heroes. And once the monsters are slain, the heroes die as well, to be replaced by urban planning with its crisp maps of the known, and then, in the shadow world hidden or possibly pushed aside by those maps, by more monsters, who are endlessly re-created so that yet more heroesdetectives, spies, police officers, secret agents, and their likemay do battle with them.