Douglas Mao

The Lack of Repose

In a dialogue whose precedents include Oscar Wilde’s “Critic as Artist,” two fictional professors of English take up the relationship between aestheticism and quietism. Their conversation begins with a debate on the necessity of treating sociopolitical contexts when teaching literature then moves to connections among aesthetic experience, political disengagement, inactivity, and contemplation explored by Wilde, Miguel de Molinos, Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Walter Pater, Arthur Schopenhauer, Johann Winckelmann, and others. Having described the influence of nineteenth-century science and determinism on Wilde’s gospel of inaction, as well as Pater’s adaptation of the Winckelmannian view that people and things express their nature most truly when still, one speaker wonders whether aesthetic experience gains some of its significance from its affiliation with leisure. The other resists the idea that repose might constitute one of life’s key desiderata, but notes at the close how both his own view and his interlocutor’s are adumbrated in the Wallace Stevens poem that furnishes the dialogue its title.

The Point of It

This chapter is centrally concerned with two stories by E. M. Forster. One, ‘The Machine Stops’, has long been considered a classic of dystopian fiction. For George Kateb in Utopia and Its Enemies (1963), Forster’s story, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) taken together give vent to ‘almost every fear that utopian ends arouse’ (Kateb, 1963, p. 20); Tom Moylan draws the title of his 2000 study of dystopias, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, from the last phrase of Forster’s tale. ‘The Point of It’, published two years later, has not been discussed in relation to problems of utopia, but I will be arguing here that it offers key insights into the suite of values animating ‘The Machine Stops’ and, by extension, a number of anxieties informing an important strain of anti-utopian thinking. I will go on to suggest that another line of modernist writing furnishes an effective riposte to such anxieties, and that this riposte requires us to reconsider some prevailing assumptions about the relations between quotidian existence under capitalism and utopian imagining.

The Unseen Side of Things: Eliot and Stevens

Midway through Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s utopian fiction of 1872, the narrator describes the strange opinions and customs surrounding certain musical banks patronized by the inhabitants of the distant society upon which he has stumbled. These opinions and customs having much in common with aspects of religious observance in the England of his day, he offers the following reflections: It seems as though the need for some law over and above, and sometimes even conflicting with, the law of the land, must spring from something that lies deep down in man’s nature.… When man had grown to the perception that … the world and all that it contains, including man, is at the same time both seen and unseen, he felt the need of two rules of life, one for the seen, and the other for the unseen side of things. For the laws affecting the seen world he claimed the sanction of seen powers; for the unseen (of which he knows nothing save that it exists and is powerful) he appealed to the unseen power (of which, again, he knows nothing save that it exists and is powerful) to which he gives the name of God. (pp. 122–3) The architects of Butler’s utopia appear to have found a way to negotiate the call of the unseen side of things. But as writers from Sophocles in Antigone to Gauri Viswanathan in Outside the Fold (1998) remind us, religious belief and related forms of devotion may as readily destabilize social orders as support them.

Introduction: The Promise of Apathy

This essay is the journal editor’s introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear’s study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope —Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be preferable, and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism.