Samuel Butler (1) (1835–1902)

When I was reading this book for my Ph.D. exams in a coffee shop, a guy came up to me and asked, "Who's forcing you to read Samuel Butler?" "Uh, I guess I am," I replied, because no one suggested I put The Way of All Flesh on my exam list... except myself! He told me he pitied me. That's actually the main thing I remember about The Way of All Flesh, to be honest, other than a vague sense that it's sort of a less good rip-off of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (even though Way of All show more Flesh came first).

Even though it was published only two years after the Victorian era ended, it seems very modernist in its take on reason/logic, but also an extension of George Eliot's ideas in some ways. The book points out that we think we live in a world defined by reason, but we resolutely do not, despite the trappings of it: "They [reasonable people] settle smaller matters by the exercise of their own deliberation. More important ones, such as the cure of their own bodies and the bodies of those whom they love, the investment of their money, the extrication of their affairs from any serious mess – these things they generally entrust to others of whose capacity they know little save from general report; they act therefore on the strength of faith, not of knowledge" (306). The book ends up concluding that it is impossible to separate the subjective from the objective, the inner from the outer, the fact from the feeling:

The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object – external and internal – being unified as much as everything else. This will knock our whole system over, but then every system has got to be knocked over by something.
     Much the best way out of this difficulty is to go in for separation between internal and external – subject and object – when we find this convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient. This is illogical, but [...] all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these pages, that the just shall live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for conscience sake. Take any fact, and reason upon it to the bitter end, and it will ere long lead to this as the only refuge from some palpable folly. (327-8)

Forget modernist, this seems downright postmodernist: the Grand Narratives have failed us, so all you can really do is muddle through with the stories you've got, and they'll help you as much as they do, and not only is that okay, but maybe even it's for the best?

I vaguely remember the philosophy of the book, as thankfully I took notes, but do not at all remember the actual events of the book, even upon rereading those notes, so take that as you will. I seem to recall it belongs to that genre of post-Victorian takes on the Victorian era that still seems a little too Victorian for its own good (like Rachel Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady). That is to say, it's trying to push a new philosophy, but it's married to the most tedious aspects of the old plotting. The modernists would do this kind of thing much better. show less

The narrator of this story (anonymous, of course) discovers an entire civilization hidden beyond a mountain range in a nonspecific British colony very much like New Zealand. As the title implies, the civilization is very much like Victorian Britain, but backwards-- people go to jail for being sick, and are treated for committing crimes. The novel, published just a year after The Coming Race and similarly lacking in incident, really succeeds on the basis of this inversion, which Butler show more manages to stick to with amazing depth, exploring how people go to court for losing wives and how people fake crimes to get out of unwanted social obligations! In doing so, the novel exposes the somewhat arbitrary ways that Victorian Britain had constructed its own discourses of knowledge-- why should crime being entirely the perpetrator's fault and sickness entirely not?-- and these are discourses that continue to the present in many ways. Plus, these little reversals were just fun to read about: people are said to have "got the socks" when they have an urge to steal something trivial. (There's even a woman who fakes alcoholism to gain sympathy, but everyone knows she's lying as she never touches the stuff!)

There's also some material about the weird "Musical Banks" (everyone puts money in them, but no one quite knows why) and the very familiar "Colleges of Unreason" (where having a good idea is grounds for failure), but the most fascinating part of the novel is the excerpt from The Book of the Machines, the text that caused the Erewhonians to give up all technology. Well, up to a certain arbitrary point anyway, as it's admittedly impossible to have a civilization with no technology. Butler pulls together technological fears with Darwin's theories of natural selection, pointing out that machines are evolving-- continuously improving themselves, as inferior machines die out and better adapted ones take their place. And given how much faster machines evolve, shouldn't humanity be worried? The Erewhonians thought so, but there's also an excerpt from another philosopher who thought this was wrong because the evolution of machines is now the way humanity evolves, and they're essentially just an extension of ourselves. It's great, clever stuff: not only has Butler written what is surely one of the first oh-my-god-machines-are-going-to-take-over-the-world-and-kill-us-all stories, but he's also come up with the counterargument that precious few people are able to see, a full eleven decades before Donna Haraway's cyborg theory, and even eight decades before Asimov's greatest robot story, "The Evitable Conflict." It still stands up as a clever and thoughtful piece of writing, all the moreso for the fact that I can't figure out where Butler himself stands on the issue! show less

'Erewhon' podría enmarcarse en la llamada pre-ciencia ficción. El libro, escrito en 1872, nos cuenta el tiempo que vivió el protagonista y narrador en el país de Erewhon, una sociedad claramente distópica, pero que para sus habitantes es todo lo contrario, y aquí es donde entra en juego la parte utópica.

La historia comienza cuando el protagonista llega a una nueva región (aunque no se nombra en ningún momento, ésta parece ser Nueva Zelanda, lugar al que viajó el autor en su show more juventud), donde igual te encuentras zonas inhóspitas que montañas con nieves eternas. Su mayor ambición es encontrar buenas tierras para ganado, y es por ello que un buen día sale a explorar. Así es como da con un país oculto entre montañas del que no se tenía noticia alguna, Erewhon, cuyos habitantes tienen unas leyes y costumbres totalmente desquiciadas, y me quedo corto con el apelativo.

En Erewhon la enfermedad física está mal vista y según su gravedad puedes ir a la cárcel condenado a trabajos forzados. Sin embargo, la enfermedad moral no está tan mal vista. Si has estafado, el gobierno hará todo lo posible por rehabilitarte. El tema de los nacimientos tampoco tiene desperdicio. Un recien nacido es una gran ofensa para la familia, y más le valdría a éste haberse quedado en el reino de los nonatos. Con decir que el protagonista, a pesar de ser un extranjero, está bien visto por ser rubio, por ser inusual, está todo dicho. Y eso que llevaba un reloj de bolsillo, una aberración para los erewhonianos.

Los capítulos dedicados al Libro de las Máquinas son los mejores. En ellos se nos aclara porqué se prohibieron todas las máquinas en el país hace cientos de años. Es decir, que habiéndose adelantado al resto del mundo, renunciaron al progreso. Butler, el autor, realiza aquí un análisis sorprendente para la época: "¿No puede durar el mundo veinte millones de años todavía? Si así fuere, ¡qué no llegarán a ser las máquinas! ¿No sería más prudente cortar el mal de raíz prohibiendo los nuevos adelantos?"

El libro rezuma reflexiones de este tipo, la mar de interesantes. Pero también se hace muy aburrido. Butler se pone demasiado pedagógico a veces, y la historia se hace pesada. Una novela interesante sin más. show less

Witty, sarcastic attack on the institutions of Victorian England published in 1903 (but written decades earlier). Most of the humor still holds up, and I really enjoyed most of the book. I don't seek out novels of that period as a rule, because I generally dislike their prolixity and find their themes dated and uninteresting. This is an exception. It's on the 5 side of 4 stars.

SORTA SPOILER ALERT

I found the description of how alcohol destroys one poverty-stricken female character to be show more annoying, but perhaps Butler was just trying to avoid being overly politically correct (i.e., because opponents of religion, say, also had to believe that the poor were more virtuous than the wealthy). show less