ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the positive utopia’s reemergence in the 1970s in the guise of the “critical utopia”: a new approach to the form that sought to avoid the static quality of earlier utopias by dealing with history as operative. In this vein, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) interrogate the efficacy of collective memory practices as a means of actuating utopian change over time. To elucidate Le Guin’s nuanced position on collective memory, I pair her oft-discussed novel with its too neglected companion story “The Day Before the Revolution,” set 150 years before The Dispossessed. The historical tendency revealed by this pairing of texts, which speaks to Pierre Nora’s concept of modern archival memory sites, suggests that collective modes of memory are responsible for social stagnation. Piercy’s novel can be read as an indirect response to Le Guin’s position. Piercy imagines a future utopian community sustained and energized by its highly intentional approach to ritual collective memory. Le Guin and Piercy arrive at essentially opposite conclusions; whereas Le Guin argues that collective modes of remembering occlude social evolution, Piercy maintains that performative rituals of remembrance function as a cultural anvil for shaping and reshaping utopia.
