Simultaneous relationship: “Ustopia”

There are links between the cycles, waves, or circles. They are not cleanly disconnected from each other. Ilana Pardes writes,

The spirit of the desert generation unsettles future generations as well.

Even when the Israelites finally invade Canaan, the wandering does not fully stop. Exile piles up on exile. The Promised Land throughout biblical times is regarded with a certain degree of ambivalence.⁵¹⁴

Margaret Atwood introduces a term which captures ambivalence with regard to utopia and dystopia well. She proposes the term “ustopia” rather than the separate terms dystopia and utopia, to show that one is often not separable from the other:

Ustopia is a word I made up by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.⁵¹⁵

Frye, Davies, and Sargent either explicitly or implicitly assume a relationship between utopia and dystopia which progresses from one to the other. Others take a more synchronic perspective, for which Atwood’s

513 Sargent, “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Cost of Eutopia,” 226.

514 Pardes, The Biography of Ancient Israel, 125.

515 Atwood, In Other Worlds, 66.

195

contraction “ustopia” would seem most appropriate.⁵¹⁶Atwood emphasises that within the utopia itself there is a potential dystopia – for example the punishments for dissenters that are available in a utopia, or romantic motifs of momentary happiness that appear in dystopias.

The most convincing and simplest argument in favour of the utopia incorporating everything at the same time rather than following alternating waves or cycles is found in the pun itself. It can be seen as mainly eu-topia, the good place, or as mainly ou-topia, the no-place.

Utopia is simultaneously ou-topos and eu-topos, the negative of the positive and the positive of the negative, one in the other, as if it were a monogram where both must be read, one, then the other, in the same literal figure immediately given.⁵¹⁷

The beauty of the pun is that it is not one or the other depending on how one turns this coin; it is both at the same time, which is hard to perceive and harder to imagine, because it is, on some level, as if both sides of a coin were seen simultaneously. One can only ever say that there are two sides and then say

“this is one” and “this is the other”, as I have attempted to do for the “ustopian”

elements of Numbers 13 above. What one wants to convey, however, is similar to the optical illusion called a thaumatrope, which is a fast-spinning disc, a bird on one side, an empty cage on the other, which, when spinning quickly, will look like there is a bird inside a cage.

It has been observed that the wilderness of the Pentateuch is full of ambiguity. This can be seen both in the pentateuchal passages about the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites and in passages making reference to the wilderness period in the prophetic books. The concept of the “ustopia”, or combined dystopia and utopia, can help to make sense of this phenomenon. An

“ustopian” reading of these passages might not attribute a specific perspective on the wilderness to different traditions but relies on reading the text as a whole.

516 “[…] within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over. Even in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – surely one of the most unrelievedly gloomy dystopias ever concocted – utopia is present, though minimally, in the form of an antique glass paperweight and a little woodland glade beside a stream. As for the utopias, from Thomas More onwards, there is always provision made for the renegades, those who don’t or won’t follow the rules: prison, enslavement, exile, exclusion, or execution.” Ibid.

517 Marin, Utopics, 91.

196

I want to advocate reading ambiguities in an integrated “ustopian” way rather than in a successive way.

Pardes writes, “Canaan is more perplexing than anticipated: it is both good and bad, ‘fat’ yet inhospitable.”⁵¹⁸ Pardes integrates the ambiguity and discusses the ambiguous Promised Land using concepts that integrate two aspects into one. The first concept is “wonder”⁵¹⁹ – that is, the startle reflex when encountering something new and unexpected, hesitating between fight and flight. The other concept is Freud’s unheimlich or uncanny, homely and familiar at the same time as un-homely and strange.⁵²⁰ Both of these concepts are defined by integrating two seemingly opposed reactions or perceptions.

Davies, on the other hand, sees a scribal debate as the cause of the simultaneous appearance of good and bad images of the wilderness in the book of Hosea.⁵²¹ The wilderness is already ambiguous in the Pentateuch, and “offers itself as a matrix for utopian/dystopian construction and reflection.”⁵²² This is an appropriate description of Numbers 13. The ambiguity Davies mentions indicates for him either a scribal debate or “if the entire text were assigned to a single author then he would be giving expression to an internal ambiguity.”⁵²³ While ambiguity appears as a tell-tale sign for the presence of “ustopia”, there might be no real dichotomy between utopian and dystopian portrayals of the wilderness, since each contains the other, and utopia and dystopia are, in fact, the same.

[…] I suggest that the contents and function of the book of Hosea, at least as read in the Persia [sic] period, do not distinguish between an evil past and a good future, but confront the possibilities of an evil and good future.⁵²⁴

While Davies writes specifically about the book of Hosea, the confrontation of an evil-and-good future is present in Numbers 13 too. In Numbers 13, though, the belief in the future as evil is portrayed as a belief that brings about

518 Pardes, The Biography of Ancient Israel, 101.

519 Ibid., 108.

520 Ibid., 113.

521 “We have in Hosea 2 a threat of return to wilderness, a dystopia; we also have a suggestion that wilderness might be a utopia, a return to a past time of innocence and loyalty.” Davies, “The Wilderness Years: Utopia and Dystopia in the Book of Hosea,” 168.

522 Ibid., 173.

523 Ibid., 165.

524 Ibid., 166.

197

punishment. “Ustopia” might be an explanation of why the wilderness and the Promised Land contain a sustained ambiguity. It is definitely a utopia, and utopias contain both utopian and dystopian aspects.