Louis Marin - Utopiques: Jeux D’Espaces Ch. 1., Story and Description

1. Louis Marin -Utopiques: Jeux D’Espaces Ch. 1., Story and Description

2. It will be helpful to state explicitly the intended point of the following illustrations and explanations. More’s Utopia is not being featured in this module because it is the most pertinent one for our modern age, although you may be surprised by the relevance of many of the responses More puts into the mouths of his characters. It is instead featured because Marin uses it as the basis for his own argument about the place of utopian speculation within a social environment that is structured by ideology, so it is both Marin’s method of analysis that you need to attend to, but also his general argument. This set of slides relates to his first chapter on More’s Utopia, and to get an overview of how it fits into the overall structure of Marin’s book, refer to the Word file attached to the webpage.

3. The second part of your second assignment asks you to use Marin’s argument and method as a source of worked examples to guide your own analysis of the text that you are featuring. The first diagram refers to the ‘syntagmatic’ organisation of the narrative – the term means the necessary sequence in which one element follows another through the narrative. However, this diagram only relates to the setting up of Raphael’s story of Utopus and the country that he founded. In other words, it refers to the framing of Raphael’s account given in Book One, not the details of Utopia itself given in More’s Book Two. It remains for you to consider how the following illustrations, extracted from the discussion taking place in Bruges, are best related to your own text, but the various comments here, together with the extended quotes in the Word file, should help!

4. Marin constructs the following plan in order to track what he calls ‘transformations’, and his first question is to ask how geography gets inserted into the narrative, and then to ask what significance can be attached to this process. At its most literal the transformation is said to be brought about by introducing a sequence within the network of names that provides a kind of temporality that is at one and the same time that of a discourse moving through a syntagmatic sequence and that of a story told by an actor. This anthropomorphises the syntagmatic sequence of the text – the names are simple marks along the way, but also significations for selected topics that feature in the voyage.

5. In more detail, Marin suggests that the narrative should be understood as a closed circle (refer to the previous notes in Word). This makes the point of departure corresponds to the point of arrival, and the repetition of a particular ‘mark’ – Portugal – is the linguistic substitute for a sense of circularity. The circle also achieves something else. The repetition of the same name in the story implies the co-presence of the same elements in an iconic space – the syntagmatic line of the narration, turned back upon itself, works so as to create a boundary, and a closed, internal, stable space, differentiating between an interior within which the geographical connections are mapped, and an exterior space that literally exists in the narrative as terra incognita.

6. Narrative Schema of Raphael’s voyage in terms of its sequence (syntagmatic view), p. 66. > Portugal > B A America Calcutta A versus B Sense of transformation < Ceylon < Portugal > America > Ceylon > Calcutta > Portugal A versus Non-A said versus non-said, determined versus non-determined.

7. It would be possible to introduce into this transformative operation various metrics indicating the relative significance of elements within the syntagmatic line. In so doing one begins to move towards an indication of the paradigmatic dimensions within the narrative – meaning the selection made at a particular point in a sequence from the range of possible alternatives then available or thought to be appropriate. In the following slide, Marin uses the pre-description given by Peter Gilles as a source and simply illustrates these paradigmatic potentials in terms of the apparent distance said to exist between the names making up the overall syntagm, e.g. Portugal is said to be very far from America, while Ceylon is close to Calcutta.

8. Schema of Raphael’s voyage transformed in terms of narrative emphasis, the paradigmatic dimension, p. 67. Portugal Calcutta Ceylon America Portugal America Ceylon Calcutta Portugal

9. At this point, Marin reflects again on the significance of the line and the limit created by this closed circle of names. The narrative sequence creates a linked chain in which each link appears to be the result of a binary selection between the marked term and a term that is not mentioned, e.g., Portugal versus a Not-Portugal, America versus a Not-America, etc. The experience of the narration enforces differentiation within the totality of differentiations constituting the overall schema, and this restores analogically, albeit selectively, the known world. Marin also notes that the closing of the chain reproduces the circle structure that one associates with the geographical world, but also, through the marked binaries referred to previously, their structure implies the existence of a non-world, i.e., a non-narrative world which is being excluded.

10. Marin concludes that these simple diagrams intended to identify a model within the story illustrate how narrative is capable of providing an equivalent to a world and implying its underlying structure. He moves on to consider the combination of story with geography. He starts by remarking that the four names given in the account of Peter Gilles trace the limits within which the story of the journey must be expressed, but they do so in a remarkable fashion: they develop an equivalence between story and geography through the circular structure previously identified.

11. Leaving the garrison where Vespucci left them, Raphael sets off with five companions across land and sea, travelling via villages, towns, and well-administered, and densely populated states, until they reach a zone of vast, baking deserts which extend on either side of the equatorial line. But once this zone is passed, little by little the natural world becomes more agreeable: the sky is not so glaring, the soil is covered by sweet grass, and the wild animals are not so savage. Finally, people appear, as do towns and villages, etc. and this pattern continues by earth and by sea. The following schema transcribes the syntagmatic line of the voyage.

12. Schema of Raphael’s story of the voyage, p. 69. Equatorial line towns civilised people states desert villages desert villages soil covered with soft grass towns Ceylon America A well administered garrison with a large civil population (b’) (‘f’) (d) (c) (b) (a) (d’) (f) (e) (a’) (c’) (e’)

13. The symmetrical organisation on either side of the equatorial line is almost a chiasma of villages, towns, and states on the one side, and of people, towns, and villages on the other. Inside the circular structure which envelops the totality of a geography known only through the place-names given, Raphael’s story traces a diametrical line between America and Ceylon, a line which redefines the equatorial line by separating the geographical space and the story space into a world and an anti-world like the surface of an invisible mirror. The following diagram is intended to illustrate these ideas of mirroring and circularity.

14. Schema of Raphael’s story of the voyage, p. 70. Equatorial line Calcutta Portugal Ceylon f’ e’ d’ c’ b’ a’ a b c d e f America

15. But also within Raphael’s description there is a history. He describes a sequence of boat-types that are used in the ‘anti-world’. Starting with flat-bottomed vessels using rolled papyrus sails, woven willow screens, or leather, canoes with sails of hemp, one finally reaches a description of ships like those of Portugal and England, including sailors experimenting with the use of the compass as discovered in More’s own modern time. The paradigm of boat-types deployed within the syntagm of the voyage indicates, through the division of geographical space, an historical progress indexed by navigational techniques, and more generally, by reference to material cultures and political society. America and Ceylon play, in the diametrical structure, ‘fill’ the role created by Portugal in the structure of circularity.

16. Structure of Raphael’s voyage in terms of its key names, p. 71. Portugal America Ceylon Equator As Marin concludes, symmetrical, balanced between the Orient and the Occident, the new and the old, the equatorial deserts mark both the degree zero of history and the axis of a symmetrical cartographic space, the inverse of Portugal, which in Raphael’s story is the symbolic representation of More’s England.

17. In terms of this double voyage – the internal and the external – between the topic headings and their related descriptive passages, what is accomplished, is their conversion through description into expressive forms. As to the containers of these forms, those holding history and geography in an equivalence, we have tried to produce a mapping of these transforming operations. Through so doing one finds within the text a figure emerging, a representation, within the very readability of the voyage, a table within the utopian discourse which constitutes the double marking of the topics being featured, interlaced throughout the fabric of the text by the doubled structure created through circularity and diametrical opposition. With this first figure based on the story’s patterns of description one begins to discern another figure which must now be pursued: that of the utopian itself.

18. We know that this blessed island is situated somewhere between America and Ceylon, but it is outside of the circle of topic headings that mark the pathway between the world and the anti-world. It combines, outside of circle and diameter, time and space, history and geography, in an existence that is neither a moment in history nor a location on a map, a place which will be a gap – a neuter – where it alone will be able to produce a once-upon-a-time - a perfect equivalence between poles: homologue of Portugal and of England, belonging to the same hemisphere as Ceylon and America, a projection, not an anti-world, not a new world, but Another World. It perhaps not by chance that Peter Gilles primes his evocation of Raphael’s story by inscribing it within the double epigraph of Death and of travel towards the gods.

19. This week’s review ends with some descriptive comments on the design of Utopia and on the pattern of stories within stories that features in More’s second book. First, then, here is a synopsis of the island’s construction. Marin describes this as a form of ‘synchrodiachronism’ deriving from both the description of the island’s parts and from the nature of its totality, and again, from the totality of details to the individual detail – a type of reading that is precisely that of an iconic representation constructed from the co-presence of its elements. A careful analysis of the beginning of Book II shows the two phases being defined syntagmatically by a globe succeeded by geometrical and metrical relationships such as to provide a metrical centre, a progressive and symmetrical narrowing towards the two poles (the lozenge shape, and then the inscription of second circle such as to produce the crescent moon and the island’s great harbour.

20. Succession of the representational sequence given for the Island of Utopia, p. 77.

21. This last slide might be thought to simply document the various anecdotes and illustrations that are offered by the characters and explanations introduced by the text. But as will have been anticipated by now, Marin argues that they have the paradoxical characteristic of inverting the normal agreement between a story and its description so that we end, in effect, by dealing with a double text in which the components are broken up and fragmented to varying degrees. Marin asks if this doubled space, animated by different modes and patterns of organisation characteristic of the game of utopia, is capable of leading us to an understanding of the utopian practice itself. To do so involves us in attempting to retrieve the separate and independent narratives – narratives that we never read as explicit and separate statements or propositions. If such a recovery is possible, we will be in a better position to understand the cultural significance of utopian writing.

22. Table showing the fragmented stories within Utopia, p. 83. Profane Origin Contacts with the Old World Sacred End + Story of Foundation Story of foundation Exterior Assimilation Interior Closing Opening sacred profane Closing Exterior Expansion Interior Opening warrior trader - Subject: Utopus Contacts with the Other World Subject: Utopus