ART AND LITERATURE
"-but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works
both ways."
''I'm sure
mine
only works one way," Alice remarked. I can't
remember things before they happen ."
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the
Queen remarked.
"What sort of things do
you
remember best?" Alice ventured to
ask.
. "Oh, things that happened the week after next," the Queen replied
in a careless tone.
285
This pertinent interchange comes, of course, from
Through the Looking
Glass, and What Alice Found There,
which was first published in 1872. Ends
of centuries, at least of recent date, tend to bring about certain modes of
imagining. One of them is caught up adroitly in my epigraphic opening:
the magical centurial numbers seem to incite in most of us, no matter how
secular or rational we claim to be, impulses to remember the future. And
success at this insuppressible impulse at forecasting through memory is sta–
tistically only slightly less probable than historians' preoccupations with
predicting the past. "Even looking backward," Conor Cruise O'Brien has
recently noted, "requires a lot of guesswork." Moreover, both behaviors are
nourished at the same inexhaustible sources.
.
One of the forms that such fanciful excursions take is that of the
utopia. Utopias have indeed a very long and complex history in our cul–
ture alone, as the immense scholarly literature devoted to their evolution
and analysis amply testifies. Nevertheless, the endings of the last two cen–
turies before our own, to pull up short at what for me is a barely
manageable interval of time, have worked with extraordinary effect to
stimulate thinking of a Utopian kind; and thinking or imagining of a
utopian character, it is my minimalist hypothesis, tends regularly (though
not inevitably or in the same person) to generate its counterpart and com–
plement-imaginations of a dystopian world, society, universe, or economy
of things . Inside of most utopias, it appears, there are dystopias scrambling
to get out.
At least this circumstance appears pretty clearly to have been the case
for the centuries that I have adverted to, although the end of each of them
was distinctively different if not singular-we cannot at this point recollect
how the remaining years of the present century and the millennium ahead
of us have turned out, nor on the other hand foretell the past that will then
occur. The end of the eighteenth century, however, it is now safe to say,
brought forth the most strenuous effort in human history until that time
to fabricate Utopia in the midst of the actual present. As a young adherent
and partisan of that event bore witness:
