ART AND LITERATURE
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an old man who has a beautiful granddaughter with whom the narrator falls
in love. This aged person is known as a "grumbler," and his particular beef
is the already insinuated complaint that life in Nowhere is not interesting.
Since all competition in Utopia has been abolished, he wonders whether
existence has not become less brisk and lively. "You see," he says to the nar–
rator, "I have read not a few books of the past days, and certain
they
are
much more alive than those which are written now; and good sound unlim–
ited competition was the condition under which they were written....
There is a spirit of adventure in them, and signs of a capacity to extract
good out of evil which our literature quite lacks now...." And despite the
reproval of his lovely granddaughter and her contemporaries, he persists in
his perversity: "Well, for my part," he avers, "I like reading a good old book
with plenty of fun in it, like Thackeray's
vanity Fair.
Why don't you write
books like that now? Ask that question of your Bloomsbury sage."
It
is part
of Morris's admirable and uninflectedly simple integrity that questions
such as this simply don't get answered, or that the answers offered to them
by various characters are transparently inadequate.
In addition to all these there is the intense plangency and sadness of
the entire work; there has never been a more elegiac utopia.
It
is as if
Morris were not only saying farewell to his life (though he was to live for
five more years), to his age (he was born just before Victoria ascended to
the throne) and civilization, and to the momentous century. But it is also
as if it were being revealed to Morris that inside of every utopian vision
there are dystopian intimations, hints of schematic incompleteness, sound–
ings about systems and about presumption.
At the very same time that Morris was writing
News from Nowhere,
George Gissing was writing his best novel and the most important, unmit–
igated dystopia of the end of the nineteenth century.
New Grub Street
is an
anti-utopia representing the point of view of the new literary marketplace,
the exploding world of mass commercial journalism and literature and the
thorough commodification in the society of the time of literate and liter–
ary culture, writers, and the new mass audience of readers. One of the
characters, an altogether irreproachable hack writer who happens to be a
woman, wonders whether she is going to be replaced by an inanimate
object: "A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in
the newspaper, headed 'Literary Machine'; had it then been invented at
last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself,
to turn out books and articles?"
She slaves away at her writing in the Reading Room of the British
Museum, that same space in which Marx had bookwormed his way
through endless parliamentary papers toward revolution, and in which the
narrator of
News from Nowhere
is told at great length the entire history of
