Three days ago, I received a book in the mail called "The Four-Hour Day". It was a self-published, semi-autobiographical utopian novel sent as a gift by the author, Gabe Sinclair, a Baltimore machinist. Besides writing the book and publishing it himself, he even paid the $3.75 postage. One approaches such a gift with some trepidation. But as I stood at the mailbox flipping through the pages, I kept alighting on lines that delighted and surprised me with their craft, humour and insight. By the time I had hiked back back up the hill to the house I had been shamed and seduced into at least reading the introduction. One thing led to another and I finished the entire 264-page novel by the next morning. As sometimes happens with literature, subtleties of the composition keep occuring to me as afterthoughts. One such subtlety is that the novel is constructed as a fugue. Did I say "subtlety"? On page 33, The narrator explains how the novel is constructed as a fugue. It just takes a while for it to sink in. It's too early to tell if this book will change my life. But it has changed my estimation of the possibilities of the utopian novel. In the past year I've read several dystopias and one utopia -- Bellamy's classic Looking Backward. I don't usually think of specimens of the genre as Literature with a capital 'l', more as long illustrated essays. The last dystopia I tried to read was Michael Young's 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy. I found it unbearably tedious -- a clever notion tortured on the rack, a dissertation tattooed on a ventriloquist's dummy. The Four-Hour Day, by contrast, is a lyric poem peppered with prose meditations on everything from seed drills and eye contact to dialectic and god (with a lower case 'g' and no pronouns). It is no more "utopian", in the generic sense, than breathing clean air. The central action in The Four Hour Day revolves around a voyage to the far future in a time machine. As the book's title suggests and the narrator confirms, "I have seen the future, and it works less than we do." The inhabitants of Aurora, 2000 years hence work as little as they do because they actually enjoy it. But the action also revolves around the diaphanous distinction between lust and longing. Commercial culture (and I use the term culture advisedly) insists there really is no difference. The way to cut through the membrane of mystery and consumate our most intimate desires -- with no money down and easy payments on the installment plan -- is to treat the whole kit and caboodle unabashedly as lust. This also spares us the excruciating embarrassment of eye contact. "Aurorans believe there is only eye contact." At this point you may justifiably be wondering what lust and longing have to do with the future of work and the length of the working day. The narrator offers a hint early in the story when he suggests a kind of vicious circle between sexual frustration and superfluous mechanical invention. But here he's laying down a false, Freudian scent. Repressive sublimation is, after all, not exactly a new idea. By the mid-1950s, Marcuse was already diagnosing the malady of repressive de-sublimation. Looking back over his Eros and Civilization after reading The Four-Hour Day shows it up for the idle prattle that it is. "Words, good ideas and the U.S. Dollar weren't worth the paper they were printed on." The short answer is Sinclair doesn't pretend to have all the answers. In fact, the Aurorans themselves don't have all the answers and they know it. "So where is the hope? What conceivable reason is there to wonder about the four-hour day when it's so hard to find anyone able to see us clearly?" What Sinclair does have is a clear grasp of what the answers aren't and of the nature of the questions. The difficulty is that life, love and work are, like time, not linear. They can't simply be taken apart and put back together like a wrist watch. They have to be grasped together in all their complexity like a fugue. Or like a novel constructed as a fugue -- figuratively, a time machine. The Four-Hour Day is an example of the future it advocates. It is simultaneously both map and territory. It is literally "a labour of love" that patiently and attentively explores the relationship between work and eros. It is a gift. "Continuing on our present course is out of the question so all we have to do is create an atmosphere of expectation. Nothing can be rushed. Everything happens right on schedule." The Four-Hour Day is available on-line at http://www.fourhourday.org as either an electronic file or in hard copy. Get the hard copy. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
