Erewhon: or,[Dune_(novel)|] Over the Range is a novel by Samuel Butler which was first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. Butler meant the title to be understood as the word "nowhere" backwards even though the letters "h" and "w" are transposed. The book is a satire on Victorian society. The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years, and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and which he wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement.
Content
The greater part of the book consists of a description of Erewhon. The nature of this nation is intended to be ambiguous. At first glance, Erewhon appears to be a Utopia, yet it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. Yet for all the failings of Erewhon, it is also clearly not a dystopia, such as that depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a satirical utopia, Erewhon has sometimes been compared to Gulliver's Travels, a classic novel by Jonathan Swift; the image of Utopia in this latter case also bears strong parallels with the self-view of the British Empire at the time. It can also be compared to the William Morris novel, News from Nowhere. Erewhon satirises various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. For example, according to Erewhonian law, offenders are treated as if they were ill, whereas ill people are looked upon as criminals. Another feature of Erewhon is the absence of machines; this is due to the widely shared perception by the Erewhonians that they are potentially dangerous. This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.
The Book of the Machines
Butler developed the three chapters of Erewhon that make up "The Book of the Machines" from a number of articles that he had contributed to The Press, which had just begun publication in Christchurch, New Zealand, beginning with "Darwin among the Machines". Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines might develop consciousness by natural selection. Many dismissed this as a joke; but, in his preface to the second edition, Butler wrote, "I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin's theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin."
Characters
Higgs—The narrator who informs the reader of the nature of Erewhonian society.
Chowbok —Higgs' guide into the mountains; he is a native who greatly fears the Erewhonians. He eventually abandons Higgs.
Yram—The daughter of Higgs' jailer who takes care of him when he first enters Erewhon. Her name is Mary spelled backwards.
Senoj Nosnibor—Higgs' host after he is released from prison; he hopes that Higgs will marry his elder daughter. His name is Robinson Jones backwards.
Zulora—Senoj Nosnibor's elder daughter—Higgs finds her unpleasant, but her father hopes Higgs will marry her. Her name is Aroluz backwards.
Arowhena—Senoj Nosnibor's younger daughter; she falls in love with Higgs and runs away with him.
Mahaina—A woman who claims to suffer from alcoholism but is believed to have a weak temperament.
Ydgrun—The incomprehensible goddess of the Erewhonians. Her name is an anagram of Grundy.
Reception
After its first release, this book sold far better than any of Butler's other works, perhaps because the British public assumed that the anonymous author was some better-known figure. In a 1945 broadcast, George Orwell praised the book and said that when Butler wrote Erewhon it needed "imagination of a very high order to see that machinery could be dangerous as well as useful." He recommended the novel, though not its sequel, Erewhon Revisited.
Influence and legacy
Deleuze and Guattari
The French philosopherGilles Deleuze used ideas from Butler's book at various points in the development of his philosophy of difference. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze refers to what he calls "Ideas" as "Erewhon". "Ideas are not concepts", he argues, but rather "a form of eternally positive differential multiplicity, distinguished from the identity of concepts." "Erewhon" refers to the "nomadic distributions" that pertain to simulacra, which "are not universals like the categories, nor are they the hic et nunc or nowhere, the diversity to which categories apply in representation." "Erewhon", in this reading, is "not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here." In his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze draws on Butler's "The Book of the Machines" to "go beyond" the "usual polemic between vitalism and mechanism" as it relates to their concept of "desiring-machines":
Other uses
In 1994, a group of ex-Yugoslavian writers in Amsterdam, who had established the PEN centre of Yugoslav Writers in Exile, published a single issue of a literary journal Erewhon. New Zealand sound art organisation, the Audio Foundation, published in 2012 an anthology edited by Bruce Russell named Erewhon Calling after Butler's book. In 2014, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins released his first feature film, titled Erewhon and based on Butler's book. It premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and the Edinburgh Art Festival. In "Smile", the second episode of the 2017 season of Doctor Who, the Doctor and Bill explore a spaceship named Erehwon. Despite the slightly different spelling, the episode writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce confirmed that this was a reference to Butler's novel. 'The Butlerian Jihad' is the name of the crusade to wipeout 'thinking machines' in the novel, Dune, by Frank Herbert. 'Erewhon' is the name of Los Angeles based natural foods grocery store. 'Erewhon' is also the name of an independent speculative fiction publishing company founded in 2018 by Liz Gorinsky.
