Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (again)

Back to the future of history's future, or something: this isn't my first read of Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (which for some reason has on its cover the label A Novel, as if we couldn't tell), but when I look back at my first post about it, I'm not the same person, and the world's not the same world, either.

At the moment, environmentally speaking, there's a kind of broad clash between what we might think of optimists and pessimists, what we might call possibilists and doomers (though there are better words for both loosely conceived positions). What they all share, it seems to me, is a sense that things need to change if the Earth is going to remain hospitable enough for human habitation, and while there appears to be radical conflict between these perspectives, in fact there's a more deeply radical--i.e. at the root--overlap, and it's for this reason that most of us, in my view at least, are at heart both possibilists and doomers.

We're going to make it, because we have to, else what's this all been for, every species changes and so does every environment, citius altius fortius, etc.

We're all going to die, it's inevitable, nobody gets out alive, the only constant is change, etc.

And so reading a novel like Ecotopia was differently fascinating this time around, and of course lots of people have always been thinking very hard indeed about the issues involved.

There's lots of pleasure to be had in reading this book, even if I'm about to start complaining about some of its elements. Its narrator, William Weston, is a curious guy who genuinely tries to immerse himself in a radically alternate version of America (the nation of Ecotopia being, of course, being Washington, Oregon, and northern California, after they've managed to secede from the US), and it's fun to watch him bumble along. The places he visits are beautiful, the people/characters are deeply imagined, and the architecture's fascinating, like miniaturized Gaudi crossed with hippie communes. The politics have always been tricky, and they're much trickier now, but if you can relax enough to accept simply that they're tricky and you'll need to reconsider all that later on, then as I say, there's pleasure to be had in reading this book.

Even if not everyone thinks that.

It's always been my view (an uncontroversial view, I think) that William Weston is meant to be a hyperbolically stereotypical American, whom the novel's readers are meant to partially reject all along even while identifying with him. Readers and reviewers who quibble with Weston's views therefore miss much of Callenbach's point: Weston has a limited, wrong-headed, corrosive perspective about many things, even if he's also in other ways a decent guy whom we'd all recognize among our acquaintance as someone you can trust and understand.

At book's end (SPOILER ALERT!), his conversion parallels Gulliver's and Crusoe's conversion experiences, in that all three men come to identify with the strange world/environment that they've spent time in, and so come away unfitted for the world in which they'd been ensconced before their isolation elsewhere. In all three cases, including in Ecotopia, the satire gets complicatedly unmoored in the closing pages, because the narrator's mindset no longer suits the world of his readers, nor the world of his compatriots, and so it becomes difficult to tell whether we're now meant to accept his perspective, or to see limitations in that as well. Swift doesn't want Gulliver to entirely reject British society, clearly; Crusoe's return has enough strange details that you'd have to think Defoe doesn't want that either (in that Crusoe is somehow deficient, struggling both to adapt and to remain true to his new self).

Does Callenbach want readers to vote for Ecotopian politics? I don't think he does, and not just because (per Jameson, in a remark that I refuse to co-attribute to Zizek) it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Clearly he's not on board with things as they are, of course, but this was an attempt to create a version of the world that'd be good to think with, so to speak, and I'm thinking both of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ursula Le Guin when I say that.

But go read this interview with Callenbach, 30 years after the novel was first published. Make up your own mind.

I don't think this novel is any less essential than it ever was, even if I don't often read its name or hear it mentioned whenever there's discussion of post-capitalism, responding to the threat of catastrophic climate change, or whatever else might represent a good time to think with Ecotopia. But it's a tougher first-time read these days, with its narrator's dated politics at times representing the novel's own dated politics, so I get it. Still, it's a valuable read, even if it's even harder to experience as a joy than it ever was.