The Undetermined Future: Temporality and Collective Memory in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time

Abstract

In his conclusion to Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Fredric Jameson observes that after fully-globalized capitalism and postmodernity ensued in the 1980s, the traditional literary utopia as a narrative form came to an abrupt end. Jameson argues that Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) “marks a fundamental break” in the utopian genre, echoing Perry Anderson, who notes that Piercy’s novel was the last utopia of “wide resonance.” Both critics point out that after Piercy, traditional utopias offering blueprints for social change are no longer written because global capitalism’s apparent permanence makes the possibility of radical change seem almost inconceivable. The future feels determined. The so-called end of history declared by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, meaning no stage of social development exists beyond liberal-democratic capitalism, famously presaged the enduring socio-political stasis and suspension of utopian imagery diagnosed by numerous critics. Indeed, American sociologist Erik Olin Wright observes that talking of socialism as a systemic, utopian alternative to capitalism often lacks credibility. 2 Anderson explains utopianism’s devaluation in the UK as the result of “three decades of nearly unbroken political defeats for every force that once fought against the established order.” Thatcherism hadmeant that “it was no longer even necessary to proclaim that capitalism was superior to socialism ... it was the only conceivable social system” (71). Boaventura de Sousa Santos encapsulates both Wright and Anderson by maintaining that we inhabit a neo-liberal “conservative utopia” based on the criteria ofmarket efficiency and the total denial of possible alternatives to the present reality (10–11). And Jameson, of course, has frequently noted our inability to imagine any alternative to world capitalism, sometimes casting the problem in the register of history (or historicity) itself: “But I think it would be better to characterize all this [the end of the world] in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here.” One could argue, then, that the particular twenty-first century relevance of Woman on the Edge of Time is its postulation that the future is not determined. To be sure, one principal way that Piercy’s novel, as a “critical utopia,” differs from and challenges the classical genre is in its conviction that historical time