Scholarcast 48: Everybody Speaks: Utopia and Polyphony in The Commitments

Fredric Jameson proposes that a "utopia" is a political idea that hopes to transcend, or exist outside, politics, but that must, inevitably, begin inside politics – at "the moment of the suspension of the political," the political must inevitably return. This holds true for the utopian imagined community – a "Dublin soul band" – proposed and tested in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. If the imagined community represented by the band is haunted by the inevitable return of the political, the novel nonetheless embodies a utopia of speech – a Bakhtinian polyphony in which no one voice is figured as the privileged arbiter of meaning.