Blog Posting #8-Caesar's Column (1-14)

An unexpectedly interesting and action-packed novel, Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column creates an introspective century-leap into the future that is our current past, and in the process evokes many of the overarching topics addressed in the class including speculation, technology, and the uncanny. It is the symbiosis of these related ideas which allows the text to propose many interesting questions regarding the direction in which civilization is going or has already gone.

This brings up a fundamental idea worth reflecting upon; that of the intended audience for this text. Since this text was written with a very specific, finite timeframe, was this text intended to be solely a warning for Donnelly’s age, or a time capsule with a do not open until 1988 stipulation? For me, given the pervasion of money (not even primarily physical anymore) and our eerily adherence to many tenets of this dystopian future so far, I favor the latter. That is this text was intended to offer social commentary on the subsequent future, and that the futures to follow should be leery of taking the easy path and not be called for mistakes a hundred years before they actually happen (obvious, or a lucky guess?). What does it say about our concept of civilization that people see only dark days on the horizon? In addition, what does it say about civilization that we are realizing, with ease, with relish, these dark premonitions? It wouldn’t surprise me if this text was not immensely popular in its heyday, not because it is a failure as a novel, but because it was not for Donnelly’s age to read.

Irrespective of his intended audience, Donnelly does do something very strange part-way into the text: he asks a character living in a dystopian world, Gabriel, to outline his idea of a utopian world. I find this strange because usually the utopian world is reveled at the end of the story, if at all, for dramatic and symbolic effect. The fact that Donnelly plops it right in the middle of a key plot sequence makes me wonder about his intentions. Why did I need to know at this point what Gabriel thought made a perfect world? It could be the fact that his perfect world would be quite unlike many of the cliché views. The fact that his perfect world, the closest thing to heaven on earth, involves removing interest from cash loans and distributing something so non-utopian as money indicates a different perspective of what constitutes perfection. Gabriel, the apparent innocent stranger in a strange land, still cannot come to terms with eliminating a form of monetary exchange. Even in “civilized” Uganda, utopia is merely a subtly modified dystopia. To me, it appears that the concept of civilization is off track, or possibly never was on track to begin with i.e. Rome, Persia, Egypt, Sumer ad infinitum.

So in this modern age, are we really any different than the civilizations which have failed before us? And is Donnelly, in writing this text, making an unorthodox attempt at breaking the vicious cycle?