The Utopia Project

Better to Have Gone

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Better to Have Gone

Memoir, utopia and belonging in the postcolony

Research seminar, English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town. 8 April 2021.

I cannot thank you enough for your letter… I have read it twice and intend to read it again. It told me so much about your thinking. I admire you on your pilgrimage. May it have a good ending. But no matter, better to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly. At the end of my life I realize that there is nothing worthwhile except love and compassion and the search, which I have not made, for reality. — John Walker III to his son.

In Better to Have Gone (2021), the non-fiction writer Akash Kapur weaves family memoir together with a history of Auroville, an intentional community or ‘living laboratory’ in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Subtitled ‘Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia’, Kapur’s personal quest to understand the deaths of two founder members of Auroville widens out into a reflection on 20th-century utopianism and its discontents. Here I consider the problems and possibilities of life writing within this complex social terrain, mindful of what historian Jessica Namakkal calls ‘the paradox of a postcolonial utopia’. At the same time, I explore Kapur’s work as a departure from the scepticism which tends to inform mainstream cultural responses to utopian thought, tracing how it returns to ideas that are often written off as discredited, unworkable or dangerous.

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Ambiguous Utopias

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Ambiguous Utopias

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace.
I started by reading a whole mess of utopias… — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, is styled as kind of tourist’s guide to outlandish literary worlds. It comes in at over 2000 entries and 700 pages: a mock scholarly reference work, a tribute to the deep human urge to dream up other worlds (and draw maps of them).

Paging through, you might recognise names from childhood: Middle-Earth, Earthsea and Narnia. There is Oz, Brigadoon, Kor, Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the Island of the Roc. Some of the more extensive imaginary worlds, like Tolkien’s, are broken down into sub-entries – Minas Tirith, Cirith Ungol, Pelennor Fields – syllables that are strange but comfortingly familiar to me, names bringing back the paradise of childhood reading.

Then there are worlds encountered later in life: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s jungle village Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its plagues of insomnia and amnesia and butterflies. The Pacific island of Gondal, dreamed up by the Brontë sisters. Many islands of course: Thomas More’s Utopia and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon are there; so are Lotus-Eaters Island and Caliban’s Island (see Prospero’s Island).

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