Counterfactualism, utopia, and historical geography: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 297-304

  Kneale, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Alternative histories; Counterfactuals; Kim Stanley Robinson; Utopia; World without Europe

Indexed keywords

CRITICAL ANALYSIS; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY;

EUROPE;

EID: 77956408381     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2009.12.003     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. K.S.R. Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt, New York, 2002.
2. T. Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, London and New York, 1986, 10
3. L.T. Sargent, 'The three faces of utopianism revisited', Utopian Studies 5 (1994), 1-37
4. L. Armitt, Contemporary Women's Fiction and the Fantastic, Basingstoke and New York, In fact the failure of utopian blueprints in the twentieth century, together with this emerging focus on process, has led Jameson to the conclusion that 'the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively'. Utopias are not purely positive:The confusion arises from the formal properties of these texts, which also seem to offer blueprints: these are however maps and plans to be read negatively, as what is to be accomplished after the demolitions and the removals-112000, 15, 12.
5. Jameson, Archaeologies, xiii (note 8), 12.So we must shift our attention from the blueprint - the form of utopia and perfection as an end result - to the ongoing process of re-invention, critique and practice. This frees us to look for utopian encounters and dialogues in literary works that do not in themselves always appear to be 'utopian', just as Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope asked us to recognise the impulse of hope even in 'debased' mass cultural forms. Utopia can be found in the menippea, of which more in a moment, in science fiction, and in alternative history.12
6. B. Anderson, 'Transcending without transcendence': utopianism and an ethos of hope, Antipode. Utopia, history, and geographyUtopias have not always been set in the future. They compare two loci: the writer's own society and the alternative locus of the utopia, and before the nineteenth century, the latter was invariably set in areas unknown to the author (More's Utopia is in the Americas). Earlier perfect worlds - the city on the hill, New Jerusalem, or Cockaigne - also exist outside history, as Raymond Williams pointed out, and are not attainable by our efforts (Mikhail Bakhtin described the early modern pastoral idyll as an 'inverted utopia' because perfection is actually located in the past). Two developments led writers to locate utopias in the future: ideas of scientific progress and new forms of historical explanation (evolution, geological 'deep time', technological improvement, the 'natural laws of history' and scientific socialism) and the disappearance of blank spaces on (Northern) maps. As a consequence the nineteenth century saw utopias move away from 'nowhere' into a hazily seen future, created by what Williams called the 'willed transformation' of society.1338 (2006), 691-710
7. R. Williams, Utopia and science fiction, in: Problems in Materialism and Culture, London, 1979, 196-212
8. M.M. Bakhtin, Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: notes towards a historical poetics, in: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, In fact there is a connection between historical and utopian fictions. Jameson notes that the historical novel inspired a kind of popular historicism in readers as they considered the relationship between the present and the past. In the nineteenth-century, utopia and science fiction emerged to suggest that if things had been different in the past then they might be so again in the future. The location of utopia in the future is a historical development associated with an emphasis on the blueprint, and it relies on the idea that change happens in time and not in space. As Doreen Massey has pointed out, this assumption rests on a particular strand of philosophy and social theory. The way we spatialise utopia turns out to be important.141981, 84-258
9. Jameson, Archaeologies (note 8), Geographical attention has tended to focus on the character of the better place, covering spatial design and planning as instruments of social transformation, mapping and analysing Robert Owen's New Lanark, Kropotkin's rural planning, the Garden city movement, or utopian frontier settlements in the United States or Russia. If we follow the arguments above then we might also see utopian geographies in the liveliness of space. In fact the blueprint offers us a paradox. We assume that utopia must involve a 'willed transformation' where perfection lies in the future, but the utopian 'program' freezes change through static representation. As a result the utopian program is separated off from the rest of life, as Jameson suggests; 'Utopian space is an enclave within real social space', 'a foreign body within the social'. While the blueprint creates radical difference this is only because it creates a discrete space: the utopian city, village, or text. More's island was originally connected to another country, but a trench was dug to protect it from contamination from outside.15281-295
10. P.W. Porter and F. Lukermann, The geography of utopia, in: D. Lowenthal and M.J. Bowden (Eds), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirtland Wright, New York, 1976, 197-223; Jameson, Archaeologies (note 8), 15, 16.Instead we can see the utopian impulse in movement and the multiple nature of places, and in represented spaces of argument and critique where characters enter into dialogue with each other. Here utopia resembles the menippea or menippean satire (like Petronius' Satyricon and Apuleius' Golden Ass). More and Erasmus translated Lucian's Menippus into Latin, and Utopia does contain some satirical, topsy-turvy moments. The island's inhabitants mistake the ostentatiously-dressed Flatulentine ambassador for a clown because everyone except small children finds gold and jewels ridiculous. The menippea is interesting because Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that it involved 'the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea', which makes it fitting for a work of fiction intended to weigh and measure alternatives. Bakhtin suggested that particular sites - thresholds - represent places where this dialogue is staged: 'a 'point' where crisis, radical change, an unexpected turn of fate takes place'. These play a crucial role in Dostoevsky's novels, with encounters and dialogues starting in many places: 'The threshold, the foyer, the corridor, the landing, the stairway, its steps, doors opening onto the stairway, gates to front and back yards, and beyond these, the city: squares, streets, facades, taverns, dens, bridges, gutters'. Or simply on the road, where 'the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people - representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages - intersect'. Central to Bakhtin's argument, it seems, is the idea that these spaces are consequently not fixed, but multiple and open. This is the spatialisation of the utopian impulse.16
11. More, Utopia (note 9), 88; 'Flatulentine' is Paul Turner's appropriately carnivalesque translation. M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Minneapolis, 114, 169, 170, original emphases. Bakhtin, Forms of time and of the chronotope (note 13), 243.In conclusion, reading utopian fictions geographically might mean examining texts for evidence of sites of multiplicity, heterogeneity, or agonistic encounter. And if counterfactual fictions can be read in this way then they might be utopian, encouraging a kind of creative re-enchantment of the relationship between history and the present. Robinson's novel shows us how this can work. Beginning with some discussion of Robinson's counterfactual, the paper continues by examining the way that Robinson thinks and writes about history and geography.Counterfactuals in The Years of Rice and SaltTetlock, Lebow and Parker suggest that before 1500 it is relatively easy to think of plausible events that would prevent the rise of the West, while after 1800 it is almost impossible to find convincing ways of avoiding this outcome. Robinson's counterfactual - a plague that ravages Europe in the fourteenth century - is fairly plausible and provokes discussion throughout the novel. In the second book the scholar Ibn Ezra rejects the idea that divine judgement killed the Christians, as Muslims and Jews died alongside them in Iberia and the Balkans, while Christians survived in North Africa and elsewhere. Instead he argues that 'it was a matter of location' and after explaining Ibn Khaldun's miasmatic theory of disease he suggests that their urban, unhygienic way of life was to blame: 'perhaps they made their own plague- they created the conditions that killed them'. It becomes clear that 'the plague' is not an external agent or 'black box' but is produced through the interaction of people, rats, urban living and transport networks.171984
12. Tetlock, Lebow and Parker, Preface (note 3), 22; Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 134, 139.There is another counterfactual at the start of the novel, in the decision of Temur (Timur or Tamerlane) to head West rather than East into China, as he did in our world. In reality his death in Kazakhstan in 1405 prevented him from reaching Ming China; in Robinson's novel his death in the same year in Eastern Europe does not seem to have any consequences either. Bold, one of Temur's horsemen, remembers his Khan asking him where he should conquer next; he suggests flipping a coin. Later Temur's ghost tells him 'I flipped the coin just like you said, Bold. But it must have come up wrong'. Bold suggests that 'Maybe China would have been worse', but Temur disagrees; 'I should have gone to China'. We might ask why change Temur's path at all, if this does not affect anything, but it might be Robinson's way of suggesting that while contingency and chance are important, some changes - even the decisions of Great Men - have no further significance.18
13. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 18
14. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 583, 651, 583.20 2002
15. See S. Huston, Murray Bookchin on Mars! The production of nature in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, in: R. Kitchin and J. Kneale (Eds), Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction, London and New York, 2002, 167-179.
16. Tetlock and Parker, 'Experiments', 23.
17. Jameson, Archaeologies (note 8), 7
18. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 297.Arguing about it, one character says 'It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part!' For Robinson learning from history requires a fair amount of hope as well as critical anger.23
19. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 29924
20. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 128, 131, 392.Elsewhere contingency, change and chance receive attention from historians. One of Zhu Isao's students asks if history is the work of 'great men' or the masses. He replies:What has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, where habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to form history. In that sense I come down on the side of the masses.Robinson himself says that 'much of what we think of when we think of 'History' is just theater in a way: leaders, wars, the big public events - they all could happen any old way, and still underneath it all would be the great majority of humanity doing their work, and that work would tend to forge along at a certain pace as people tried to solve the problems of making themselves more comfortable in this world'. His example is the work of the Annales school and Robinson, like Braudel, is keen to imagine the hidden histories of the marginalised. One character says 'This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing'. Kirana echoes this later: 'What's interesting- is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially'.26
21. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 644; I. Szeman and M. Whiteman, Future politics: an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, Science Fiction Studies #93, 31 (2004), 177-188; Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 327, 537.At the end of the novel historians argue about whether it matters how history is written. The idea of emplotment, developed by 'Scholar White' (presumably this world's Hayden White), suggests that it does. 'Burmese history' represents a teleological story of progress, 'a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tales of nirvana successfully achieved'; it is opposed by ironic, nihilistic or entropic history, where only failure is guaranteed. Alongside these forms of emplotment are comedy and tragedy, both allowing reconciliation; history must always be a tragedy for the individual, though it can be a comedy for society, because social crises can be resolved: 'Over the long pulses of historical time, reconciliations can be achieved, that's the comedy; but every individual meets a tragic end'. The ideal history holds as many of these forms of plot as possible - and this is clearly Robinson's model for his own alternative historical fiction. In each book structure wars with contingency; individual tragedies resolve social problems.27
22. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 646-7, 662
23. See introduction to this special feature. This is of course the main theme of Years, but it is also part of the geographical imaginations of many characters. The Chinese exploring the Pacific coast of South America are surprised by the contrast between the great buildings of an Inca city and the crudeness of that civilisation's ocean-going vessels. One says 'I suppose if the Han dynasty had never fallen, this is what the coast of China would look like'. Later an Indian abbess suggests that documents discovered in Firanja (Europe) make it clear that 'the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world'. This counterfactual geographical imagination owes its existence to the three spatial phenomena mentioned earlier: movement, multiplicity, and agonistic encounter.29
24. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 190, 430.Movement also allows the novel's characters to realise their place in the world and the relativism of their assumptions about it. As Bistami travels from India to Mecca, through the Magrhib and into Iberia, and on into what used to be France he realises that 'Everywhere he went seemed the new centre of the world'. Seeing the great wildernesses of North America, Admiral Kheim realises 'he had taken China for reality itself- China had seemed to him the world. And China meant people. Built up, cultivated, parcelled off ha by ha, it was so completely a human world that Kheim had never considered that there might once have been a natural world different to it.'30
25. B. Warf, The way it wasn't: alternative histories, contingent geographies, in: R. Kitchin and J. Kneale (Eds), Lost in Space, 2002, 17-38, 17, 18
26. P.E. Tetlock, R.N. Lebow and G. Parker, Preface: unmaking the Middle Kingdom, in: Tetlock, Lebow and Parker (Eds), Unmaking the West: "What-if?" quote at 8-9. J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World, New York, 1993; Eight Eurocentric Historians, New York,Scenarios that Rewrite World History, Ann Arbor, 2006, 1-13, 2000.
27. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 132, 183
28. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 5, 145, 515
29. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 380, 384, 385, 399, 404-408
30. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 386, 441, 447, 554
31. Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt (note 1), 155-156, 541
32. Tetlock, Lebow and Parker, Preface (note 3), 3
33. K. Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Kent, 2001, 22
34. W. Moore, Bring the Jubilee, New York, 1953
35. D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven, 1979, 117.
36. J. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics, Princeton and Oxford, 2001; Warf, Way it wasn't (note 3), 21.
37. Warf, Way it wasn't (note 3), 26 (original emphasis), 20, 27 P.E. Tetlock and A. Belkin, Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics: logical, methodological and psychological perspectives, in: P.E. Tetlock and A. Belkin (Eds), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, Princeton, 1996, 1-38. For plausibility in Science Fiction see J. Kneale and R. Kitchin, Lost in space, in: Kitchin and Kneale (Eds), Lost in Space, 2002
38. B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1988
39. J. Law, Notes on the theory of the actor network: ordering, strategy and heterogeneity, at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-notes-on-ant.pdf, 1992, 2
40. Way it wasn't (note 3), 21; D. Massey, For Space, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 2005, 5
41. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, 1991, 159
42. F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York, 2005, xi; D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh, 2000
43. D. Pinder, In defence of utopian urbanism: imagining cities after the 'end of utopia', Geografiska Annaler 84B (2002), 229-241
44. D. Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism, Edinburgh, 2005
45. Jameson, Archaeologies (note 8), 4; T. More, Utopia, Harmondsworth, 1965