(1976)
Marge Piercy now has eight books to her credit, four novels and four books of poetry. Her work has always had the courage both of her convictions and of its own (the difference between the two has occasionally been one of her problems), and the present books are no exception. She is a serious writer who deserves the sort of considered attention which, too often, she does not get.
For instance, none of the reviews of Woman on the Edge of Time I’ve read to date seems even to have acknowledged its genre. Most have assumed that the book is intended as a realistic novel, for that is certainly how it starts out. It appears to be the slice-of-life story of a 37-year-old Chicana welfare recipient named Consuelo, whose past history we are given in the first few pages of the book. Consuelo had a child, was deserted by her husband, and subsequently took up with a black, blind pickpocket whose death drove her into a depression in which she accidently broke her daughter’s wrist. For this offence she was committed to a mental institution and has had her child taken away from her. The only person left for her to love is her doped-up prostitute niece Dolly, but in defending Dolly she breaks the nose of Dolly’s pimp and is recommitted by him. The rest of the book takes place “inside” (with one escape and one visit to the outside) and the descriptions of institutional life are enough to make the reader believe that Connie will be driven mad by sadistic doctors and indifferent attendants. This part of the book is rendered in excruciating, grotty, Zolaesque detail, pill by deadening pill, meal by cardboard meal, ordeal by ordeal, and as a rendition of what life in a New York bin is like for those without money or influence it is totally convincing and depressing.
However, even before Connie is recommitted she has been having visits from a strange creature named Luciente. Luciente turns out to be a visitor from the future; Connie thinks the visitor is a young man and is surprised when she is revealed as a woman. By making contact with Connie’s mind, Luciente can help Connie project herself into the world of the future, Luciente’s world. Connie travels there extensively, and needless to say the reader goes with her.
Some reviewers treated this part of the book as a regrettable daydream or even a hallucination caused by Connie’s madness. Such an interpretation undercuts the entire book. If Connie is insane, her struggles to escape from the institution must be viewed in an entirely different light from that in which the author puts them, and the doctors, the pimp and the indifferent family are somewhat justified in their callous treatment. Other reviewers did not see Connie as insane but took Luciente and her troupe to be a pointless exercise in “science fiction,” an exercise which should have no place in a piece of social realism. But Piercy is not that stupid. If she had intended a realistic novel she would have written one. Woman on the Edge of Time is a utopia, with all the virtues and shortcomings of the form, and many of the things reviewers found irksome are indigenous to the genre rather than the author.
By utopia, I mean books such as Morris’s News from Nowhere, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Hudson’s A Crystal Age, or even Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways. These differ greatly from plot-centred otherworld fantasies such as Tolkien’s, and though they may share some elements with “science fiction,” this category is too broad for them. The books I’ve mentioned all send an emissary from an oppressive contemporary society into the future as a sort of tourist-journalist, to check out improved conditions and report back. Such books are not really about the hero’s adventures, though a love affair of some sort is usually thrown in to sweeten the didactic pill. The real hero is the future society; the reader is intended to comparison-shop in company with the time-traveller, questioning the invariably polite inhabitants and grumbling over disconcerting details. The moral intent of such fables is to point out to us that our own undesirable conditions are not necessary: if things can be imagined differently, they can be done differently.
Hence the inevitable long-winded conversations in which traveller and tour guide, in this case, Connie and Luciente, plod through the day-to-day workings of their societies. What about sewage disposal? birth control? ecology? education? Books of this sort always contain conversations like this, and it is to Piercy’s credit that she has given us a very human and rather grouchy traveller and a guide who sometimes loses her temper. The world of the future depicted here is closest in spirit perhaps to Morris’s. It’s a village economy, with each village preserving the ethnic flavour of some worthy present-day minority: American Indian, American Black, European Jewish (suburban WASP is not represented). It is, however, racially mixed, sexually equal, and ecologically balanced. Women have “given up” childbirth in order that men won’t regret having given up power, and children are educated more or less communally, with a modified apprentice system. There’s quite a lot of advanced bio-feedback, and instant communication through “kenners,” which is uncomfortably reminiscent of silliness such as Dick Tracy’s two-way wristwatch radios. But they do have communal “fooders,” and, I’m happy to note, dishwashers.
Reading utopias is addictive —I found myself skipping through some perfectly acceptable passages about electric shock treatments and visiting hours at the asylum to find out what the inhabitants of Mattapoisett do about breast-feeding (both sexes indulge; men get hormone shots), about motherhood (bottle babies, elective “mothers,” production in balance with nature’s capacity to support it, adolescent separation rituals), about criminals (if incorrigible they’re executed, because no one wants to be a prison guard), even about what they use to mulch cabbages. Writing Utopias is addictive too, and Piercy expends a good deal of energy trying to get every last detail in, to get it right, and to make rather too sure we get the point.
Numerous dangers await the author of a Utopia. For one thing, inhabitants of Utopias somehow cannot help coming across as slightly sanctimonious and preachy; they’ve been like that since Thomas More. And in addition all Utopias suffer from the reader’s secret conviction that a perfect world would be dull, so Piercy is careful to liven things up with festivals, ceremonies, nice clothes, and a hopeful description of untrammeled sexual interchange. There are problems, of course, but we are allowed to see the inhabitants working them out through council meetings and “wormings,” a wonderful name for a session at which you accuse and complain. Some of these projections are a bit much: it’s especially hard to write about communication between cats and humans in any way that isn’t whimsical; and Utopian children have difficulty being anything but cute or bratty. But the language Piercy has devised for her Utopians has unexpected felicities as well as its leaden moments; some of the Utopian passages even manage to be oddly moving. The poignancy comes in part from Connie’s hunger for human contact and love, in part from the resemblances she sees between the Utopians and her lost child, lover, and friends. The outer virtues of Mattapoisett are overshadowed by an inner one: it is the only place where Connie is loved.
However, several issues are dodged. The Utopians refuse to fill Connie in on history, so we never find out much about how it all happened. They’re engaged in a war with an enemy, but we don’t learn much about this, either. And they tell Connie they are not “the” future, but only a possible future, and that they need her help in the present to avoid “winking out.” (I wish this didn’t sound so much like the resuscitation of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.) At one point Connie stumbles into another future—presumably what will happen if we don’t all put our shoulders to the wheel —in which women are termitelike objects, and the air is so polluted you can’t see the sky.
The Mattapoisett call to action only bewilders poor Connie, whose scope is of necessity limited. She ends by bumping off a few of the evil asylum shrinks, and because of the ambiguity of the last sections we’re left with the uneasy feeling that Mattapoisett may have been a paranoid fantasy after all. The only evidence against this interpretation is that Connie isn’t educated enough to have such a Utopian vision.
This is a genre more at home in 19th-century England than the America of the 1970s, where moral earnestness seems to have gone out of fashion. It’s a daring thing for Piercy to have attempted, and it’s entirely in keeping with her previous literary production that she should have done so. Woman on the Edge of Time is like a long inner dialogue in which Piercy answers her own questions about how a revised American society would work. The curious thing about serious Utopias, as opposed to the satirical or entertainment variety, is that their authors never seem to write more than one of them; perhaps because they are products, finally, of the moral rather than the literary sense.
To turn from Piercy’s Utopia to her poetry is to turn from an imagined world to an imagination, from a sense to a sensibility. The poetry investigates the values which Mattapoisett assumes as axioms, and for this reason —although Utopias intrigue me —I find the poetry more convincing. Piercy is committed to the search for honesty, however painful; to action, however futile; to getting it said and getting it done, however awkward the result may be. She’s a feminist and a radical, but her poetry fleshes out these concepts in complex and sometimes startling ways, and she’s no simpleminded sloganeer. “I ram on,” she says of herself and her poetry; “I must make from this soft body some useful thing.” And, most succinctly,
Like the common blackbird I sit in the wind
scrapping for my food, my place, my kind
sometimes shrieking and sometimes singing.
Her poetry is “unfashionable,” in that it is not flattish, understated, careful or bland. It reads as if she’s never been in a creative writing class. The words crowd, lavish and lush; metaphors logjam, polemic rages, similes breed similes and sometimes unconscious puns, and it’s all part of Piercy’s earthy aesthetic:
Better, I thought, for me in my rough being
to force makeshift connections,
patches, encounters, rows,
better to swim in trouble like a muddy river rising
than to become at last all thesis
correct, consistent but hollow
the finished ghost
of my own struggle.
And it is better, because out of all the surge and flux, the sometimes dutiful rhetoric, Piercy can build moments and sometimes whole poems that she would not have achieved with careful elegance. “People of the Shell,” for instance, is superb, and it is not alone. Lines and aphorisms surface, flash and sink, poems transform themselves, words swirl. The literary ancestor here is not Dickinson but Whitman, and the vision is finally, despite the small ironies, a romantic one.
Like Whitman, Piercy must be read in chunks, not sips, and appreciated for her courage, gut energy and verbal fecundity, not for laconic polish. Dancing is hard and you may fall down, her poetry implies, but she is going to dance anyway. She rams on, and the reader can only applaud.