News from Nowhere

I did get around to reading, at long last, William Morris’s most popular novel, the utopian News from Nowhere. This is one of those books that left a distinct mark on my intellectual life even without having been read, so I’m glad I was finally able to rectify that. Unfortunately, though it does seem to be his best-known, it doesn’t quite rank with the other two of his fantasy novels I’ve read (The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End) in terms of literary merit. For one thing, it is lacking for the most part in the antiquarian, Old English-inflected language which managed to grow on me so much in his fantasy novels. For another thing, even though there are characters and a setting and movement, there isn’t really that much of a story. The characters are very rarely in any sort of conflict, and the protagonist and narrator William Guest, though emotionally engaged, is largely passive throughout, being led around a post-revolutionary communist England by several of its beautiful inhabitants. It may rather lack in plot, but it still reads the way a Pre-Raphælite oil painting might look: rich and sumptuous and colourful, full of lively detail and worthy of close examination.

William Guest falls into sleep after a heated argument among the Hammersmith Socialists, and awakens in an England that is miraculously greener; brighter; cleaner; populated by fit, lively, happy and beautiful people. These people - chief among whom are Dick and Clara, a once-divorced and now-remarried couple - have an intense respect and enjoyment for their natural surroundings, and work not for the sake of busyness nor for the fear of starvation, but instead for the satisfaction in creating works of beauty. Gone are both the urban slums and (most of) the great houses, gone are the factories and the mills and the iron bridges; in their place are pleasant buildings of wood and stone reminiscent of both the European Middle Ages and the Middle East, as well as villages and forests reinvigorated through a solicitous attention to œcology. National borders are gone, but national distinctions remain to an extent - there are still Welsh and English and French cultures. Money exists only as a curio or as a vague remembrance of an unhappier past time. Law courts and prisons, too, are a thing of the past; even though crime still exists, the primary idea of justice is restorative, with the repentance of the wrongdoer being the desired goal.

However, Morris seems rather determined that the revolution he envisions will have little to no impact on traditional gender rôles or on the sexual division of labour: ‘women’s work’ is held of equal worth to ‘men’s work’, though the women of Morris’s utopia naturally gravitate to the domestic sphere, with a maternalism that is deemed to be natural and honourable. He even anticipates the objection that this view would be deemed ‘reactionary’, but Old Hammond has it that it would be truly retrograde to condemn a woman to live as a counterfeit man. Romantic love still very much exists (as we can see with William Guest’s waxing but hopeless attraction to the utopian Ellen), as well as marriage in an informal way, but the propertarian elements of marriage have been done away with. (In this, his ideas seem rather parallel to those of his contemporaries, the Serbian populist Svetozar Marković and the Swedish difference-feminist Ellen Key.) As with the later Christopher Lasch as well, Morris seemingly finds the ‘battle of the sexes’ to be something insurmountable by mere politics, but rather grounded in something deeper, more essential to the human condition. The preservation of sexual distinctions in this socialist utopia is particularly interesting, because it does point to a certain metaphysical dimension of Morris’s thought.

Another indication of this metaphysical dimension is Morris’s attitude toward work, expressed in the monologues of Old Hammond (and occasionally Dick and Clara themselves). There is a kind of equation in Morris’s thinking, that a society cannot be just if it cannot produce holistically-beautiful things. If I were a Straussian I would make much hay of the point that the meditation on craft is situated at the very middle of the book. But even as it is, when Morris tells us, through Old Hammond, that the consumer goods mass-manufactured under capitalism are ‘cheap’, ‘lowish average’ in quality, ‘useless’ and ‘transparent make-shifts’, it reads more like moralistic censure than like æsthetic disapproval. A key marker of his utopia is the return of handicraft, and the blurring, if not erasure, of the distinction between functionalism and art. This blurring-slash-erasure of the function-beauty distinction is, of course, classic Morris, and indeed one of the undergirding assumptions of the Arts and Crafts Movement which he midwifed. But again, this very materialistic understanding of art actually points to an unspoken Eleatic-Platonic doctrine of the commensurability of the transcendentals: which, again, strongly indicates the necessity of a metaphysics. Even though Morris’s utopian Englishmen in News from Nowhere make only deprecating allusions to the religion of former times, Morris is still both unable and unwilling to shake off this element of his Anglo-Catholic early education.

Note that this is also how Morris answers the common criticism or concern-trolling about socialism not being able to work in practice. Generally the sorts of people who issue such criticisms in the process make brazen appeals to the iron law of necessity and ‘sound œconomic principles’. But in so doing, they demonstrate in themselves a telling lack of metaphysics; for them, the ugliness of capitalism (which is what many in my generation truly revile about it) is justified on the grounds of the countervailing utilitarian material benefits that we reap from it. Morris is not trying to directly argue against this criticism, but instead to out-narrate it and show it as a hollow and even insecure position from an æsthetic and, yes, metaphysical perspective. The question is not whether or not socialism is practical, but rather: what kind of practice should a well-tuned soul actually want to see? His answer to this question, such as it is, lies in the character of Ellen, who is apparently Morris’s vision of a well-tuned soul, looking at the world through eyes of undiluted wonder and appreciation, and the one who most deeply enchants his narrator-persona William Guest.

Again, I would say that this book was instructive insofar as it provided a clear signpost for some of my previous thinking, theologically-informed as it was, on œconomic subjects. In terms of its literary merit, I would say that it is charming and even beautiful, but that it really doesn’t hold a candle to Morris’s prose romances. The only thing that saved Plato’s utopia from being dull were its parodical aspects and the tension between the philosopher and the politician which stood over and behind the whole thing. It is telling that the most interesting parts of Morris’s work came when he was indirectly interrogating his reader in a similar way about contemporary Victorian standards of justice and value. Despite these weaknesses, I would still hold this as an important work. So do not be surprised, gentle readers, to see Morris’s metaphysically-tinted political ideas crop up in my writing here more explicitly and more often.