What Had I Done?

The best trick in Looking Backward is the double dream. Julian West wakes up in his underground chamber to the voice of his servant Sawyer, the familiar lamp, the glass of sherry Dr. Pillsbury prescribed. The twentieth century — its glorious city, its calm families, its freedom from want — was a dream. He is back in 1887.

And then Bellamy does something with the next fifteen pages that no economic argument could do.

West walks through Boston. He has seen it a thousand times before and noticed nothing unusual. Now he cannot take ten steps without flinching. The advertising: "Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!" The stores: ten thousand of them, miles of them, doing what one warehouse could do, all fighting each other, all wasting. The tenements: pale babies, hopeless women, brutalized children, and over each face a "ghostly face" — the ideal face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived.

He goes to his fiancée's dinner party and says: "I have been in Golgotha. I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross." They call him a madman and throw him out.

Then he wakes again. The nineteenth century was the dream within the dream.

The horror was real. The relief is real. And then: shame.

"What had I done to help on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice?"

Nothing. He had lived among those sights, had found them unremarkable, had gone about his own affairs. He had been "every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a worshiper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows." The salvation happened without him. He woke up on the other side of it, unearned.

The double dream is Bellamy's missionary technique. Utopian fiction usually shows you the better world and hopes you'll want it. Bellamy does something harder: he shows you the familiar world through the eyes of someone who has seen the better one, who cannot unsee it, who sees the ghostly faces — and then he makes you feel relief that it's over, and then he makes you ask: what did you do to end it?

The guilt is structurally necessary. The 1887 readers who felt the horror of West's walk through the tenement district, who felt the relief when he woke in the twentieth century — they were still in the tenement district. The relief was temporary. The shame was the message.

Twain said you can't argue your way to felt knowledge, that only direct experience creates the moral imperative to change. Bellamy couldn't give his readers direct experience of the twentieth century. But he could give them the next best thing: the experience of defamiliarization, of seeing 1887 through eyes that had seen 2000.

The double dream is argument-by-estrangement. Not "here is a better world, wouldn't you like it?" but "here is your world as it appears from the better one — now what are you going to do?"

The question West's voice asks himself is still live: What had I done?

Not "what have I done wrong" — the passive tense of guilt, looking backward. But "what action did I take toward the thing I said I wanted?" The deliverance from poverty, the end of the scramble, the rosebush transplanted from the bog — these were things people in 1888 could work toward. Bellamy was working toward them. He wrote the book toward them. Two million copies.

West wakes in the garden, Edith coming toward him fresh as morning, and kneels in the dust and confesses that he is not worthy. "Fortunate is he who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful."

There's something important here about the structure of unearned rescue. West didn't earn the twentieth century. He was just preserved by accident, and emerged into someone else's work. The least he can do is know that — carry the shame not as self-punishment but as the accurate understanding of his situation. He is a beneficiary of effort he didn't make. The only way to metabolize that is to do something with the life he's been given.

The dream-within-a-dream is the mechanism. The shame is the point.