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“In 1970, Robert C. Elliott wrote, ‘the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination. … Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of being able to achieve it but because we fear it.’ His groundbreaking study, The Shape of Utopia, confronted this fear of utopia eloquently. A still challenging and important study of the formalistic, literary and anthropological aspects of utopia, it has now been reissued with a thoughtful Introduction by Phillip E. Wegner and a wonderful tribute by Kim Stanley Robinson. Elliott influenced scholars and thinkers such as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Tom Moylan and it is timely to confront our fear of utopia again under the guidance of Elliott.” Nicole Pohl, Reader in the Department of English Literature and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University and General Editor of Utopian Studies.

Robert C. Elliott (1914–1981) was a Professor of English Literature and one of the founders of the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD from Brown University, and taught at Ohio State University from 1946–1964. He was also the author of The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960) and The Literary Persona (1982).

STUDIES IN A LITERARY GENRE

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT

“The originality of Elliott’s book on Utopia lay not only in its unsurpassed generic placement of such texts (their structural opposition to the satiric curse), but also in situating the fear of Utopias at the center of analysis, along with the centrality of Utopian aesthetics. Future Utopias will raise new problems and develop new answers, but they will always contain within themselves the origins Elliott so ably dramatizes here.” Fredric Jameson, Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University, author of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005) and, most recently, Representing Capital (2011).

THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA

Upon its original publication in 1970, Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of Utopia influenced both some of the major scholars of an emerging utopian and science fiction studies, including Darko Suvin, Louis Marin and Fredric Jameson, and authors of new utopian fiction ranging from Ursula K. Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson. The book establishes a deep genetic link between utopia and satire, and offers scintillating readings of classic works by Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Aldous Huxley and others. It charts the rise of an insidious “fear of utopia” that comes to characterize the first half of the twentieth century and investigates some of the aesthetic problems raised by the efforts to portray a utopian society, before concluding with brilliant speculations on the emerging practice of “anti-anti-utopia” - the reinvention of utopia for contemporary times. This Ralahine Classics edition also includes a new introduction by Phillip E. Wegner which situates the book in its context and argues for its continued significance today; a 1971 review of the book by the late author of utopian science fiction, Joanna Russ; and an opening tribute by one of Elliott’s former students, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the Department of English at the University of Florida, and the President of the Society for Utopian Studies. He received his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University. He is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002), Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), and the forthcoming Ralahine volume Ontologies of the Possible: Utopia, Science Fiction and Globalization.

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT Edited with an Introduction by PHILLIP E. WEGNER

ISBN 978-3-0343-0772-7

Ralahine Classics Ralahine Utopian Studies - Volume Ten

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

“In 1970, Robert C. Elliott wrote, ‘the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination. … Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of being able to achieve it but because we fear it.’ His groundbreaking study, The Shape of Utopia, confronted this fear of utopia eloquently. A still challenging and important study of the formalistic, literary and anthropological aspects of utopia, it has now been reissued with a thoughtful Introduction by Phillip E. Wegner and a wonderful tribute by Kim Stanley Robinson. Elliott influenced scholars and thinkers such as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Tom Moylan and it is timely to confront our fear of utopia again under the guidance of Elliott.” Nicole Pohl, Reader in the Department of English Literature and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University and General Editor of Utopian Studies.

Robert C. Elliott (1914–1981) was a Professor of English Literature and one of the founders of the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD from Brown University, and taught at Ohio State University from 1946–1964. He was also the author of The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960) and The Literary Persona (1982).

STUDIES IN A LITERARY GENRE

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT

“The originality of Elliott’s book on Utopia lay not only in its unsurpassed generic placement of such texts (their structural opposition to the satiric curse), but also in situating the fear of Utopias at the center of analysis, along with the centrality of Utopian aesthetics. Future Utopias will raise new problems and develop new answers, but they will always contain within themselves the origins Elliott so ably dramatizes here.” Fredric Jameson, Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University, author of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005) and, most recently, Representing Capital (2011).

THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA

Upon its original publication in 1970, Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of Utopia influenced both some of the major scholars of an emerging utopian and science fiction studies, including Darko Suvin, Louis Marin and Fredric Jameson, and authors of new utopian fiction ranging from Ursula K. Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson. The book establishes a deep genetic link between utopia and satire, and offers scintillating readings of classic works by Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Aldous Huxley and others. It charts the rise of an insidious “fear of utopia” that comes to characterize the first half of the twentieth century and investigates some of the aesthetic problems raised by the efforts to portray a utopian society, before concluding with brilliant speculations on the emerging practice of “anti-anti-utopia” - the reinvention of utopia for contemporary times. This Ralahine Classics edition also includes a new introduction by Phillip E. Wegner which situates the book in its context and argues for its continued significance today; a 1971 review of the book by the late author of utopian science fiction, Joanna Russ; and an opening tribute by one of Elliott’s former students, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the Department of English at the University of Florida, and the President of the Society for Utopian Studies. He received his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University. He is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002), Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), and the forthcoming Ralahine volume Ontologies of the Possible: Utopia, Science Fiction and Globalization.

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT Edited with an Introduction by PHILLIP E. WEGNER Ralahine Classics

Ralahine Utopian Studies - Volume Ten

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA

Ralahine Utopian Studies Series editors: Raffaella Baccolini (University of Bologna at Forlì) Joachim Fischer (University of Limerick) Michael J. Griffin (University of Limerick) Michael G. Kelly (University of Limerick) Tom Moylan (University of Limerick)

Volume 10

PETER LANG

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Robert C. Elliott

THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA STUDIES IN A LITERARY GENRE

Edited with an Introduction by Phillip E. Wegner

PETER LANG

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Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013930954

First published by the University of Chicago Press, 1970. Cover image: Francisco Goya, El entierro de la sardina [The Burial of the Sardine], c. 1812–1819. ISSN 1661-5875 ISBN 978-3-0343-0772-7 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0448-0 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2013 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

For two Utopians Joanna Russ & Nicole LaRose

Ralahine Classics

Utopia has been articulated and theorized for centuries. There is a matrix of commentary, critique, and celebration of utopian thought, writing, and practice that ranges from ancient Greece, into the European middle ages, throughout Asian and indigenous cultures, in Enlightenment thought and in Marxist and anarchist theory, and in the socio-political theories and movements (especially racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and national liberation; and ecology) of the last two centuries. While thoughtful writing on utopia has long been a part of what Ernst Bloch called our critical cultural heritage, a distinct body of multi- and inter-disciplinary work across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences emerged from the 1950s and 1960s onward under the name of ‘utopian studies’. In the interest of bringing the best of this scholarship to a wider, and new, public, the editors of Ralahine Utopian Studies are committed to identifying key titles that have gone out of print and publishing them in this series as classics in utopian scholarship.

Contents

Acknowledgements ix KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

A Tribute to Robert C. Elliott (2012)

xi

PHILLIP E. WEGNER

Introduction (2012)

xiii

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT

Preface (1970)

1

CHAPTER 1

Saturnalia, Satire, & Utopia

5

CHAPTER 2

The Shape of  Utopia 21 CHAPTER 3

Swift’s Utopias

37

CHAPTER 4

Hawthorne and Utopia: The Blithedale Romance 51 CHAPTER 5

The Fear of  Utopia

63

viii

CHAPTER 6

Aesthetics of  Utopia

77

CHAPTER 7

Anti-Anti-Utopia: Walden Two and Island 97 APPENDIX – JOANNA RUSS

Untitled Review (1971)

115

Notes 119 Index 131

Acknowledgements

The republication of  Robert C. Elliott’s contribution to utopian studies scholarship would not have been possible without the support of  Tom Moylan: he remains as much a visionary in the world of publishing as he has been in his scholarship, teaching, and administrative leadership. I would also like to thank the editors at the University of  Chicago Press and College English for allowing us to reprint Elliott’s book and the original review essay by Joanna Russ. Tom’s co-editor at the Ralahine series, Michael Grif fin, of fered some invaluable comments on the manuscript, as did the audience at the Society for Utopian Studies conference where I first presented parts of  the introduction. Our deepest thanks go to Kim Stanley Robinson for taking the time to share some of  his memories of  Robert C. Elliott as a teacher. The passionate and engaged students in my fall 2010 graduate seminar helped me appreciate in new ways the subtleties of  Elliott’s argument. Christabel Scaife has been a wonderfully helpful, and extraordinarily patient, editor throughout this process—I look forward to having the opportunity to continue to work with her in the coming years. Three research assistants at the University of  Florida—Jordan Youngblood, Sarah Traphagen, and Andrea Kraf ft—did an exceptional job of scanning and proofreading the entire manuscript, and I thank them for their assistance in a very busy time in my administrative and academic life. This republication is dedicated to two members of the Party of  Utopia who passed away within days of each other in the spring of 2011. While I never met Joanna Russ, her inf luence on all of us who work in utopian studies was profound, and it is a privilege to be able to reprint in this volume one of  her earliest essays. I did know Nicole very well—she was a stellar doctoral student at the University of  Florida, an extraordinary young teacher and mentor at the University of  Houston, and, in a far too brief  time, a significant contributor to the work of the Society for Utopian Studies—in fact, the latter has named its Graduate Student travel grant in her honor. They both are deeply missed.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

A Tribute to Robert C. Elliott (2012)

When I took Robert C. Elliott’s seminar on satire, at UC San Diego in 1975, he opened all of our eyes to the deep time behind this genre, taking it back into the shamanistic magic of  the Paleolithic, then on through the centuries into modern literature. During this long traverse he made it clear that utopia could be understood as the f lip side or the next step of satire, the dialectical turn at which point writers had to put their cards on the table and explain just what they thought would constitute the good society, the absence of which justified the savagery of  their attacks on things as they are. Elliott’s class and his books made for an unusually wide look at literary materials rarely discussed at all in English departments of  that time, and we benefitted greatly from his anthropological and historical approach; literature felt bigger and deeper when he was done with us. I enjoyed also bringing the work of  Philip K. Dick to his attention, and we agreed that in his early satirical novels Dick had clearly tried to lay a curse on Senator McCarthy in the style of  Archilochos. Now it is a great pleasure to see Elliott’s groundbreaking work on utopia returned to print. The same kind of wide-ranging approach that Elliott brought to satire is here is trained on utopia, beginning a discussion of utopian fiction that has never stopped. His book still makes a thoughtprovoking contribution to that discussion.

PHILLIP E. WEGNER

Introduction (2012)

Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of  Utopia is the fourth volume of  the Ralahine Classics, and an exceptional addition to the series. Elliott’s short book, originally published in 1970, should be of great interest to contemporary scholars and students. Indeed, it is perhaps only with the distance of  the last four decades, and the dramatic changes that have occurred in that time in literary and cultural scholarship, that we can begin to appreciate properly Elliott’s achievement. First, although largely overlooked in recent years, The Shape of  Utopia inf luenced in significant ways some of  the seminal works of what at that moment were the emergent fields of utopian and science fiction studies. For example, Darko Suvin invokes the book in his landmark 1973 essay, “Defining the Literary Genre of  Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea” (now reprinted in Suvin’s Ralahine collection, Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology [2010]). And Louis Marin writes in his indispensible Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (1973), “L’ouvrage essentiel est, sur ce point, le livre de Robert C. Elliott” (“The essential work is, on this point, the book of  Robert C. Elliott”) (Utopiques 108; Utopics 82). (I will return momentarily to the specific point to which Marin refers here.) The inf luence of  Elliott on Marin’s work was even more immediate, as in the years both their books were published, they were colleagues at the University of  California, San Diego, in the Department of  Literature that Elliott helped found and in which he served as a faculty member from 1964 until his premature death in 1981 at the age of 66.i San Diego was in the late 1960s and early 1970s a great incubator of utopian thought, as also on campus at that time were Herbert Marcuse, the German Marxist intellectual dubbed by the popular media the “father of  the New Left” and

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PHILLIP E. WEGNER

the author of  Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, also from 1970 (Elliott refers to Marcuse’s earlier An Essay on Liberation twice in his book);ii and, as a student, Kim Stanley Robinson, a writer who would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s as a leading contemporary author of utopian science fiction. Furthermore, joining Elliott and Marin on the faculty in Literature was Fredric Jameson, whose major work published the following year, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of  Literature (1971), put the question of utopia centrally on the table in any discussion of  Western Marxism. While I have already written about the importance of  Marin’s work for the development of  Jameson’s thought, Elliott’s inf luence could be considered equally profound.iii This is evident not only in the opening book, “The Desire Called Utopia,” of  Jameson’s monumental Archaeologies of  the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), where Elliott’s insights are referred to at a number of places, but also in Jameson’s earlier study, Fables of  Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979). Moreover, one of  Jameson’s most significant and widely discussed works of genre criticism, the essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of  Multinational Capitalism” (1986) was, Jameson notes, “written for an immediate occasion—the third memorial lecture in honor of my late colleague and friend Robert C. Elliott” (86). Secondly, Elliott’s book appeared on the eve of a veritable renaissance of new utopian visions, of which Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of  Time (1976), Samuel Delany’s Triton (1976), and the late Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) stand as only some of  the most well-known monuments. Le Guin acknowledges both the importance of  The Shape of  Utopia and her deep admiration for Elliott—“He was the truest of  teachers, the kindest of  friends”—in the first memorial lecture at San Diego, published under the title, “A NonEuclidean View of  California as a Cold Place to Be.” In particular, Le Guin notes the book’s critical attitude toward the classical “Euclidean” utopia, and points out that in the book’s conclusion the reader finds not “the closing but the opening of a door.” Russ too was deeply familiar with Elliott’s book, something indicated in her sometimes quite critical 1971 College English review, which we have included here as an appendix. The review

Introduction (2012)

xv

was originally published in the years in which Russ was completing The Female Man and only months before the appearance, in Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), of  her Nebula awardwinning short story, “When it Changed.”iv Tom Moylan and Peter Fitting would later describe this new fiction by Le Guin, Russ, and others as that of the critical utopia, and, as I hope to demonstrate below, the final chapters of  The Shape of  Utopia prefigure in some unexpected ways Moylan and Fitting’s insights. Elliott’s singular contribution to a nascent utopian studies, and the aspect of  his work that was most immediately acknowledged by the scholars named above, lies in what Jameson characterizes as the book’s “great dialectical proposition that, as a genre, Utopia is the opposite and the structural inversion of satire as such.” Jameson further points out that, “what Elliott meant by satire was not anti-political rejection of the unrealistic and fanciful Utopian programs such as the abolition of money and private property, but rather the passionate and prophetic onslaught on current conditions and on the wickedness and stupidity of  human beings in the fallen world of  the here and now” (Archaeologies 23). In this regard, The Shape of  Utopia must be understood as a complement to Elliott’s earlier classic study, The Power of  Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960). Already in the Preface to that earlier book, Elliott makes clear his deeply interdisciplinary approach, something that continues in The Shape of  Utopia: “My primary interests in this book are literary; but in trying to understand some of  the curious forms early satire takes—and the beliefs out of which the forms arise—I have gained what help I could from nonliterary disciplines, chief ly anthropology and psychology” (viii). Such an approach is in Elliott’s estimation a utopian gesture in its own right, as it challenges the strictures then defining a proper literary scholarship and of fers an alternative way of organizing our research communities: Let this single apology stand for many: I am not a linguist, not a classicist, not an anthropologist, and so on. I am uncomfortably aware of  the risks I take in venturing into foreign fields. But I have had the help of  learned friends, and I comfort myself with the knowledge that “fields” are artificial constructs: in any work aspiring to synthesis one must face up to the risks entailed. I believe the risk’s worth taking. (viii)

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In The Power of  Satire, Elliott marshals a vast array of  literary and anthropological evidence to show that the form finds its “origins in primitive magic and incantation:” “in Greece, in Arabia, in Ireland, satire was originally magic—or, more accurately, the satirist was often thought to possess preternatural powers” (vii and 50). Later, Elliott maintains, “when belief in its magical power has been brought under control of  the ego (does the belief ever really die?), then, through the creative act of a poet, satire may break out of  the forms which have restrained it and be free to develop in the ways appropriate to art” (The Power 98). Elliott’s parenthetical qualification here is crucial, for it is from these origins that emerges the deep sense of  the ef ficacy of  the form to intervene in the world in concrete ways. That is, satire is understood as no mere aesthetic play, but as a material social force in its own right. This too accounts for the anxiety with which the larger society encounters the figure of  the satirist: “In these situations the satirist-magician unquestionably inspires emotions of adulation and respect and awe. But in other, and possibly more characteristic, roles, he becomes the object of  hate and fear” (The Power 259). And while the satirist sees himself as “a true conservative … the preserver of  tradition, the true tradition from which there has been a grievous falling away,” in the end, Elliott contends, “the pressure of  his art works directly against the essentially conservative function which it is said to serve. Instead of shoring up foundations, it tears them down. It is revolutionary” (The Power 266 and 274–5). It is in the satirist that we thus find an exemplary figure of  the engaged critical intellectual, a figure absolutely necessary for any society to thrive and grow. In the opening chapter of  The Shape of  Utopia, Elliott extends this argument further, establishing a genetic link between satire and utopia, arguing that both practices find their roots in ancient Saturnalian festivals. During the “sacred time” of  the festivals, Elliott claims, it was believed that “the Golden Age will come again to earth,” and the poor and downtrodden “will enjoy the good things of  life on the same footing as the rich” (p. 8). However, there is another more anarchic dimension to these events: paralleling Mikhail Bakhtin’s more well-known claims about medieval and early modern carnivals,v Elliott notes that these festivals “provide permitted release from limitation and renunciation,” and involve ritualistic reversals

Introduction (2012)

xvii

of  the normal order of  things, such that “the slave mocks his master, the tribesman his chief; the priest burlesques the ceremony of  his church” (p. 14). “In this way,” Elliott maintains, “the Golden Age comes together with satire in the Saturnalian festival” (p. 14). These origins thus account for the “Janus-face” of all later literary utopias: “The portrayal of an ideal commonwealth has a double function: it establishes a standard, a goal; and by virtue of its existence alone it casts a critical light on society as presently constituted” (p. 19). It is on this basis that Elliott develops in the next two chapters of  his study what I am confident contemporary readers will still find to be provocative readings of  Thomas More’s Utopia and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Overturning long established assumptions about how we approach these works, Elliott argues for the need to read them and their kin first and foremost as literary genres, unfolding according to their own specific formal demands: “we need an interpretation that will tell us what Utopia is, that will place it with respect to the literary conventions which give it form and control its meaning” (p. 23). His challenge to the “dangerous assumption” that the character “More” in the text can be identified with Thomas More the biographical figure looks forward as well toward the argument of  Elliott’s final posthumously published study, The Literary Persona (1982).vi With this carefully developed argument, here as well as in The Power of  Satire, Elliott contributes to a revolution then just underway in literary studies, one that will ultimately open the doors to a new critical appreciation of a host of non-canonical and “paraliterary” genres. In his careful and attentive readings, Elliott further stresses the necessary dialectical presence of utopia and satire in both works, the dif ference between them being one of degree rather than of  kind. Of  More’s founding work in the genre, Elliott writes, “Here are the two sides of  Utopia: the negative, which exposes in a humorous way the evils af fecting the body politic; the positive, which provides a normative model to be imitated” (p. 24). Similarly, Elliott shows that in Swift’s work there are also positive as well as negative critical elements. The former are not, however, as too many readers assume, to be found in the land of  Houyhnhnms: “The purity of  the horses is preternatural—ideal in some sense, surely, but not as a model for man” (p. 49). Rather, Gulliver encounters it earlier in his

xviii

PHILLIP E. WEGNER

travels, in the land of  the giants, Brobdingnag: “England, he says, would do well to emulate their wise maxims in morality and government. In that sense alone, Brobdingnag is an ideal society: it represents an ideal to be aimed at, a utopia with practical meaning for man” (p. 41). That is, for Elliott, of  the various possible worlds represented in Swift’s text, only Brobdingnag is a utopia proper, produced in the spirit of  More’s founding work, in that it of fers a vision of an alternate social order realizable within the material constraints—natural and humanly made—of our world. In this, Elliott prefigures both Suvin’s fundamental insight concerning the materialism of utopian narratives and other forms of cognitive estranging literatures, a tradition that culminates in modern science fiction, and E.P. Thompson’s emphasis on the pedagogical work of  the genre, or the ways all utopias undertake an “education of desire” (791).vii And like Suvin and Thompson, Elliott concludes that in these labors lies the fundamental importance of utopian imaginings. However, it is precisely this work that Elliott contends has come under a significant assault during the course of  the twentieth century. One of  the earliest manifestations of  this changed sensibility, he maintains, is to be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), the subject of  Elliott’s fourth chapter. Interestingly, looking forward to claims he will again advance in his final chapter, Elliott concludes that as a work of  literature Hawthorne’s romance is a failure. Its real importance, however, is to be found in its “prescience:” “Hawthorne is on the verge of one of  the twentieth century’s most compulsive themes, the fear of utopia” (p. 61). This “fear of utopia” is explored in more detail in Elliott’s next chapter. Here, he argues that after the experiences of the middle part of  the century, “our two great wars, our mass bombings, our attempts at genocide—our collective plunge into barbarism” (p. 65), “the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination. Instead, we have utopias in negative—scores of  them—which, with their selective distortion of  the utopian impulse, satirize, caricature, call into question the idea of utopia itself … Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of  being able to achieve it but because we fear it. Utopia itself (in a special sense of  the term) has become the enemy” (p. 66). This fear was then given its most profound expression by Fyodor Dostoevski in his well-known parable of  the Grand Inquisitor

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from The Brothers Karamazov. As a result, Elliott claims, “The myth of  the future utopian state projected by the Grand Inquisitor constitutes a text on which the major negative utopias of our time—Eugene Zamyatin’s We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—are imaginative glosses” (p. 68). Elliott respects in these two modernist masterpieces of  the dystopian form, or what he calls the negative utopia,viii the care with which each author elaborates his narrative vision: “Zamyatin, a rigorous satirist, a highly gifted stylist—his style enacting the mechanical rhythms of  the future state—pushes utopia to this conclusion. Given the premises of  the Grand Inquisitor, here are the results” (p. 71). Similarly, Elliott writes of  Brave New World, “The tone of  Huxley’s book is sometimes f lippant, sometimes cynical: but he has respected the complexity of  the issues—issues that are a transliteration of  those enunciated with daemonic prescience by Dostoevski” (p. 72). The final turn of  the screw then comes in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “a true anti-utopia,” where even the pretense of bringing “happiness and the good life” to the masses has been dispensed with: in Orwell’s ultimate nightmarish vision, “the end of power is power—the power to stamp on the human face forever” (p. 73). A similar rigor is evident in the story that Elliott tells in his own study. Eschewing the exhaustive survey approach to literary utopias, he purposely limits his case studies in order to highlight the dialectical development of  the genre, tracing the ways in which the very narrative energies unleashed by More give rise during its more than four century long history to a specific set of mutations within the generic institution. In this regard, Elliott’s book bears a deep kinship with another of  the great dialectical literary histories produced in the twentieth century, Georg Lukács’s The Theory of  the Novel (1920). We can illustrate the main contours of the history of  the genre narrated by Elliott by employing the resources of the semiotic square first developed by the French semiotician A.J. Greimas, and further refined by Jameson and others.ix Such a presentation would appear as in Figure 1.

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PHILLIP E. WEGNER Golden Age Satire

Perfection/ Idealism

Positive

S

-S Negative Utopia

Utopia – -S

– S

Human Imperfection/ Materialsm

Negative

Anti-Utopia Figure 1: Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of  Utopia, chapters 1–5

If  Elliott’s study of  the literary utopia concluded at this point, its exemplary importance would still be considerable, not only for scholars and students of  this particular form but of  literary genre more generally. However, again much as the case with Lukács, Elliott does not end his story here. But whereas Lukács concludes his narration of  the history of  the novel with a glance at the figure of  Dostoevski, whose works he speculates may very well signal an end of  both the form of  the novel and its “epoch of absolute sinfulness” (a development that turned out, in a ruse of reason that was also a great disappointment for Lukács, to merely mark the beginning of a post-novelistic modernism), Elliott looks at the way a

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pair of recent writers attempt a knight’s leap beyond the dead-end marked out by the great Russian writer (Lukács, The Theory 152). It is the startlingly unexpected turn that The Shape of  Utopia takes in its final chapters that exemplifies, avant le lettre, the formal labors of utopian narratives described a few years later by Elliott’s colleague Marin. In his 1977 review of  Marin’s Utopiques, Jameson points out that Marin characterizes the narrative work of utopia as “the inversion of  Lévi-Strauss’ widely known program for the ‘structural study of myth’ ” (“Of  Islands” 77). If myth presents the ideological reality of a particular historical situation, the utopian figure comes into being through an operation Marin names neutralization, “a point-by-point negation or cancelling” of  that historical situation (“Of  Islands” 85). The brilliance of  Greimas’s semiotic square is that it allows us to ascertain directly the relationship between that historical ideological myth—which occupies the point of synthesis in the schema Greimas names the complex term—and neutralization— the latter located in the inverse or neutral position in Greimas’s square. In terms of  the Greimasian mapping presented a moment ago, it is thus evident that Elliott’s fundamental insight lies in his uncovering of a deep unexamined relationship between the primal figure of  the Golden Age and the contemporary anti-utopia (or what he refers to as the dystopia): the latter in Elliott’s reading stands as the end result, the negation of  the negation, of  the process begun by the “fear of utopia” first formalized in the dystopia (Elliott’s negative utopia). That is, anti-utopian thinking is the neutralization of  the “myth” of  the Golden Age, realized on Earth, if only for the briefest of moments, in the original Saturnalian festivals and given modern literary expression in the genre of utopia. This too suggests the deep idealism or mythic quality that anti-utopianism itself  has taken on in our time: the anti-utopia educates our desire to fear change in any form, and thus results in a far more static vision of  the world than that envisioned in any dystopian or negative utopian text. How then, Elliott’s book asks, might we begin to move beyond the closure of  the anti-utopian myth that had come to dominate by the midpoint of  the twentieth century? That is, how might we begin the arduous process of educating the desire for utopia to speak its name once again? Elliott of fers the first clues to an answer in the conclusion of chapter five:

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PHILLIP E. WEGNER Fifteen years later Huxley once more reversed himself on “utopia”; he spoke of  his last novel, Island, as Brave New World in reverse and characterized it as a “utopian fantasy,” using the term this time in its old and honorific sense. Perhaps this marks the first step in “utopia’s” redemption, for if  the word is to be redeemed it will have to be by someone who, like Huxley, has faced the issues posed by Dostoevski.

Elliott then concludes, “If we must in some sense believe in utopia still, we must do so on the condition that we face the Grand Inquisitor in all his power. It is not a confrontation to be lightly dared” (p. 75). The final two chapters of  Elliott’s study take up the task of  blocking out what will be necessary if such a revival of  the utopian imagination is to occur. Chapter 6, on the “aesthetics of utopia,” confronts the challenge issued by Frank Kermode in his claim that Huxley’s Island is “one of  the worst novels ever written” (p. 77). After surveying some of  the attempts to address the aesthetic problems raised by the genre, Elliott once again reiterates the danger of applying the criteria of novelistic excellence to the very dif ferent practice of utopia. Indeed, the latter should be understood as having far more kinship with what Northrop Frye describes as the anatomy, concerned “less with people as such than characters acting as mouthpieces of ideas or mental attitudes.” Thus, Elliott maintains, “We are as misguided to expect ‘roundness’ and complexity in the characterization of  Huxley’s Dr. MacPhail in Island as in that of  the numbers in We” (p. 91). Moreover, Elliott notes that this formal dif ference creates even more fundamental dif ficulties for anyone with pretensions to being both an artist and a creator of utopia visions: “If  the triumph of  the artist is, as Lionel Trilling has said, to share the material of pain we all share, utopia tries to eradicate that pain. Its function is to lower the temperature of  the culture, to reduce the amount of  ‘history’ in it; for history, we know, is equivalent to pain … To the degree that a literary artist helps bring about the conditions of utopia, he contributes to the death—or at least the severe debilitation—of  his art” (p. 95). All of  this should be taken as a ref lection, I believe, on the radical otherness of any authentic utopia, a theme that Jameson explores in far more detail in Archaeologies of  the Future. In the redeemed world of utopia, conditions will be so dif ferent that even our current conceptual machinery,

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including our sense of what makes great art, will be utterly transformed. This means however, Jameson maintains, that any authentic representation of  the radical altereity of utopia can only come about through “an absolute formalism, in which the new content emerges itself  from the form and is a projection of it” (Archaeologies 212). This strategy, which Jameson refers to in the Introduction to Archaeologies as “anti-anti-Utopianism,” involves, he argues in his concluding paragraphs, “a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. This is very far from a liberal capitulation to the necessity of capitalism, however; it is quite the opposite, a rattling of  the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived” (xvi and 232–3). The extent of  Jameson’s debt to Elliott, and the fact that Elliott’s own study engages in an equally rigorous dialectical thought process, are both indicated by the fact that Jameson’s “slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism” is drawn from the title of  Elliott’s final chapter. Here Elliott focuses his attention on two post-war utopian narratives, “B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) and Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962),” both of which brush “full against the dominant imagination of  the twentieth century.” These two books, he writes, are “our utopias, the two post-modern visions of  the good place that speak most cogently against despair. Inevitably, Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor hovers over both” (p. 97). Elliott argues that both narratives “take the precarious state of  twentieth-century Western society largely for granted.” However, he further claims that both “are fresh and interesting in that, although casting a negative light on our society, they are not Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four writ again. When they portray utopia—battered word!—they mean it” (p. 108). While Elliott clearly admires the daring and confidence of  Skinner’s work, he finds in Huxley’s the more exemplary achievement: Against the authoritarianism and singlemindedness of  Walden Two, where everything turns in on the idea of  behavioral engineering, Island presents a notably open and f lexible society, a model in some respects like that envisioned for a utopian future by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which appropriate elements of  both “cold” and “hot” societies are integrated. Island’s eclecticism is precisely what makes it interesting, its synthesis of ideas and modes of  thought from East and West. (p. 113)

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In the book’s penultimate paragraph, Elliott further claims, “Huxley (despite didactic mynah birds and an utterly intolerable Palanese version of  the Oedipus story) respects the magnitude of  the issues involved in the utopian enterprise. Pala’s people suf fer, and storm troopers take over at the end; but the Palanese have created a society in which it is not a profanation to be happy.” This, Elliott then concludes, is an “extraordinary achievement” on Huxley’s part (p. 114). A Greimasian representation of  the dialectic that Elliott traces here would appear as in Figure 2. Nineteen Eighty-Four Ape and Essence Anti-Utopia

SYMBOLIC

-----------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------Human Imperfection/ Static-ideal

Negative

S IMAGINARY We Brave New World negative utopias

-S Walden Two Post-modern utopias

– -S

– S

Dynamic/ Critical -----------------------------------------------------

REAL

Positive -------------------------------------------------

Island Anti-anti-utopia (“Critical Utopia”) Figure 2: Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of  Utopia, chapters 5–7

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This schematization enables me to of fer two final comments on Elliott’s achievement in his book. First, Elliott helps us recognize that this dialectical ladder is one climbed by Huxley himself: Aldous Huxley tested the idea of utopia more thoroughly than any other literary man of our day. Brave New World is utopia in caricature, a satire on the idea of utopia and our distortions of it. It is the classic warning of  the abyss that lies at the end of our simplistic search for happiness. Ape and Essence (1948) is Huxley’s dystopia, his Nineteen Eighty-Four, a hideous picture of  the United States after the next nuclear war … Island, Huxley’s last book, reverses the negative progress, presenting itself as an image of sanity and health. (p. 110)

It is this rigorous thinking through of  the formal possibilities of  the genre that thus enables Huxley to make the breakthrough that he does. Secondly, what emerges most clearly in these pages is a deep resonance between what Elliott finds intimated in Huxley’s final work and what Peter Fitting in his essay “The Modern Anglo-American SF Novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation” and Tom Moylan, first in his essay, “Beyond Negation: The Critical Utopias of  Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany,” and then even more prominently in his groundbreaking book, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), will later theorize as the critical utopia.x I encourage the reader to return as soon as possible after finishing Elliott’s book to Fitting’s and Moylan’s essays and Moylan’s book. However, for the purposes of  time, let this statement from Demand the Impossible stand in for his full and detailed exploration of  the specificity of  this recent mutation within the genre: A central concern in the critical utopia is the awareness of  the limitations of  the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as a blueprint while preserving it as a dream. Furthermore, the novels dwell on the conf lict between the originary world and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is more directly articulated. Finally, the novels focus on the continuing presence of dif ference and imperfection within utopian society itself and thus render more recognizable and dynamic alternatives. (Demand 10–11)

However, there is a fundamental dif ference in these significant early contributions to a then still developing utopian studies. While all three

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emerge from the same dynamic social and political context, Fitting and Moylan develop their theorization of  the critical utopia during the period of its full f lowering, as brilliant new work by Le Guin, Russ, Piercy, Delany, and others was being written and first appearing in print. Moreover, Moylan’s book length study is published at the moment when the explosions of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction more generally signal the closure of  the second science fictional modernist period known as the New Wave and for which the critical utopia was among its most significant achievements. In this regard, Demand the Impossible, among its other significant achievements, represents an implicit and pointed challenge to the conservatism of  these later developments.xi Elliott, on the other hand, of fers his “prescient” description of  the new critical utopias before the appearance of  these texts.xii In this regard, the narrative of  The Shape of  Utopia itself exemplifies the process Marin describes as utopic figuration. In Marin’s sense, the concept of  the critical utopia serves as the “absent referent” of  Elliott’s book (Utopiques 251; Utopics 196). In terms of  the subsequent history of  the genre, The Shape of  Utopia is thus “the schematizing activity of  the social and political imagination which has not yet found its concept [the founding of  the latter being the lasting achievement of  Fitting and Moylan]; a blind activity, but one that would trace for knowledge and for action the place, the topic of its concept” (211; 163).xiii Interestingly, Elliott argues that despite its great accomplishment, Island is, as a work of  literature, a failure: “The morally admirable ef fort is artistically disastrous. Huxley has no command of  the celebratory style … As with many utopias, one has to distinguish between social and literary importance: Island may well have the one; it certainly does not have the other” (p. 113). The questions thus arises, does Elliott fall here into the very reification of  the category of  literature he so successfully challenges in his earlier chapters? This is in fact the thrust of  Russ’s criticism of  the book: “Elliott seems to waver between perceiving Utopian fiction as sui generis, not to be judged by the same standards as other fiction, and the view that this is precisely what’s wrong with it—it’s a ‘bastard form,’ it’s inescapably thin” (p. 117). Russ’s review is, as the reader will soon discover, on the whole militantly critical and even at times dismissive (and even

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more so of  Robert M. Philmus’ Into the Unknown, which it also treats in its original publication). As I hope the preceding pages will indicate, it is an assessment with which I and other prominent readers are in profound disagreement. However, we include her review in this volume because it represents a significant document in its own right in the history of utopian studies, and one we are confident will be of interest to students and scholars. Russ’s review serves as an opportunity for her both to illuminate a fundamental limit existent at that moment in the development of utopian studies in particular and literary and cultural studies more generally, and articulate the grounds from which she, in her novelistic practice, will undertake a full reconstruction of  the utopian form. Russ writes that she finds Elliott’s major claims “adequate and what one might call minimally intelligent, but I don’t find in them anything out of  the commonplace—perhaps the penalty of ignoring modern science fiction, or R.D. Laing, or Wittgenstein, or critics like Samuel Delany (criticism of modern science fiction is squirreled away in ghetto periodicals, like so much else about the genre)” (p. 117). Russ is of course correct in this reading: Elliott’s book does not address in any substantial way modern science fiction, by which she means work produced in the post-war period and as part of  the then still f lourishing New Wave. And, as Russ goes on to point out and Fitting and Moylan later theorize, it will be precisely in the techniques developed by science fiction in this moment that the solution to the dilemmas of utopian representation will be realized. In what I take to be one of  the most significant insights in her essay, Russ notes, “Nonutopian science fiction seems to be developing all sorts of ways of dealing with lyric (or ‘static’ material), which Utopian novelists might well imitate. After all, Finding Out is itself a process, and perception is an act. Samuel Delany believes that in modern fiction the center of narrative interest has switched from the passions to the perceptions; if  this is true, it might well rescue Utopian fiction” (p. 117). While this new fiction remains beyond the purview of  Elliott’s study, it is ef fectively blocked out in it by his own rigorous narrative logic, Huxley’s Island serving as the placeholder, a name only, for what remains in 1970 work still to be done. Thus, rather than a failure on Elliott’s part, I take this blindness as indicative of  the real material limits of  the concrete institutional situation

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in which he is operating. Russ is again right in her assessment: in this moment, science fiction, as with any number of other so-called paraliterary or generic forms, remained on the outer periphery of academic literary criticism. Even if  his reading had extended to contemporary science fiction, for Elliott to have taken it up in any extensive way would have likely resulted in the further marginalization of  his book, and even the possibility that it would have never seen the light of day. And this would have meant that its significant contribution to the collective ef forts to knock down the walls of  the academic ghetto would have been lost. For while Russ issues a full frontal assault on the prison-house of academic criticism, Elliott works from within, undermining its stability through his patient chipping away at its walls, an ef fort not unlike that of  Andy Dufresne in the great utopian film, The Shawshank Redemption (1994).xiv At the same time, Elliott develops a rich and nuanced narrative of  the literary utopia’s history, a narrative whose very form enacts the dialectical thought processes, the critical estrangements and alternate figurations, of  the most accomplished of  the utopian fictions themselves. Elliott’s achievement here is thus no less extraordinary than that he attributes to Huxley: for his book too, as he writes in the last line of  the study, contributes significantly—as much as Russ and other writers of  her generation do on the fiction front and Fitting and Moylan on the theoretical—to having “made the old utopian goal—the centrally human goal— thinkable once more” (p. 114). These are achievements, and lessons, from which we still have a tremendous amount to learn when girding ourselves to confront our own dangerous anti-utopian times.

A Note on the Text Elliott and Russ’s texts stand largely as they originally appeared. I have made very few changes beyond the correction of a rare and clear typographical error. The capitalization, punctuation, and notation styles of  the originals

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are all retained. One stylistic change throughout is that I have spelled out the title of  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in honor of  the wishes of  the novel’s author.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Elliott, Robert C. The Literary Persona. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1982. ——. The Power of  Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Fitting, Peter. “The Modern Anglo-American SF Novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation.” Science Fiction Studies 17 (1979): 59–76. Herbert’s Hippopotamus. Dir. Paul Alexander Juutilainen. De Facto Fiction Films, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of  the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. ——. “Of  Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of  Utopian Discourse.” The Ideologies of  Theory: Essays, 1971–1986. Volume 2, The Syntax of  History. Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1989. 75–101. ——. “Third-World Literature in the Era of  Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall, 1986): 65–88. Le Guin, Ursula K. “A Non-Euclidean View of  California as a Cold Place to Be.” The Anarchist Library Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of  Utopia. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of  the Novel: A Historico-Philosphical Essay on the Forms of  Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. Marin, Louis. Utopiques: jeux d’espaces. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1973. ——. Utopics: The Semiological Play of  Textual Spaces. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1984. Moylan, Tom. “Beyond Negation: The Critical Utopias of  Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany.” Extrapolation 23, no. 3 (1980): 236–54. ——. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.

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——. “Global Economy, Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tension in William Gibson’s Cyberpunk Trilogy.” Minnesota Review 43/44 (1995): 182–97. ——. Scraps of  the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 2001. Norris, Christopher. “Robert C. Elliott and the Literary Persona.” The Yearbook of  English Studies 14 (1984): 287–90. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of  Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37. “Satire Special Number: Essays in Memory of  Robert C. Elliott 1914–1981.” The Yearbook of  English Studies 14 (1984). The Shawshank Redemption. Dir. Frank Darabont. Columbia Pictures, 1994. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of  Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Thompson, E.P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Revised ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Wegner, Phillip E. “Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of  Utopia in the Work of  Fredric Jameson.” Utopian Studies 9. 2 (1998): 58–73. ——. “Greimas avec Lacan; or, From the Symbolic to the Real in Dialectical Criticism.” Criticism 51. 2 (2009): 211–45. ——. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of  Modernity. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2002. ——. “Jameson’s Modernisms; or, the Desire Called Utopia.” Diacritics 37. 4 (Winter, 2007): 3–20. ——. “Learning to Live in History: Alternate Historicities and the 1990s in The Years of  Rice and Salt.” Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays. Ed. William J. Burling. Jef ferson, NC: MacFarland, 2009. 98–112. ——. Ontologies of  the Possible: Utopia, Science Fiction, and Globalization. Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming. ——. Periodizing Jameson; or, the Adventures of  Theory in Post-contemporary Times. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming.

ROBERT C. ELLIOTT

Preface (1970)

Just as in utopia it is easier to specify what has been avoided than what has been achieved, so it is easier to say what this book is not than what it is. It is not a history of utopias. Although the essays herein take into account most of  the best-known literary utopias, including negative ones, and some fairly obscure examples of  the kind, there is no attempt whatever at historical coverage. Ideology is not the central concern here either, although any study of a genre so imbedded in social and political issues must have its own ideological biases. I have not tried to conceal my own deep ambivalence about utopian modes of  thought. The essays that follow are of  two kinds: interpretive studies of individual literary utopias and genre studies of  the utopian mode itself. They are connected by certain thematic interests that run through the book. One of  the themes is structural and, I suppose, functional; it has to do with the relation of utopian literature to satire: the use of utopia as a strategy of satire, the distribution of positive and negative elements in the two genres. Gonzalo’s utopian speech in The Tempest ref lects the theme in part: I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of  traf fic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none … All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour; treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people.

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If  this has more of a Golden Age than a utopian f lavor about it, still Gonzalo expresses the characteristic negative emphasis of  the literature which issues from man’s fantasies about what life on earth could be like. A second theme, which is moral and political, may be summed up in the Latin phrase corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of  the best becomes the worst; or, as Shakespeare puts the same sentiment,   sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The theme has shadowed utopia from the beginning. It has particular significance for our day because of its importance in feeding the f lood of negative utopias that in the last forty or fifty years has swept away most of our dreams of a better world. Generous and large-spirited as many of  those dreams were, some were foolish and some dangerous. Although the uninhibited utopianizing imagination which produced them is alive again in certain areas of our culture (among the hippies, for example), as a motivating force for major social change it has for good reason nearly disappeared. Our history has made confident visions of  the wholesale reconstitution of society, like those of  the nineteenth century, impossible. Significantly, the New Left refuses to spell out details of  the society it hopes to establish. On the other hand, without an image of  the good life to guide him man loses his will to invent and shape the future; as Mannheim says, he becomes a thing. Our writers, no longer able to construct blueprints of  the desirable life of  the future, may find that necessity adds glamour to more modest goals. Kenneth Boulding welcomes the historical period on which we have entered—post-civilization, he calls it—because it of fers the possibility that slavery, poverty, exploitation, gross inequality, war, and disease—“these prime costs of civilization”—will fall to the vanishing point. We still have the chance to make the transition to this “modest utopia,” says Boulding—a chance which is probably not repeatable in this part of  the universe. Late as it is, there is still meat here for the literary imagination. A word on terminology: utopia is notoriously a tricky term as, given its birth in ambiguity, it must be. The word has broad and restricted meanings,

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positive and pejorative ones. Except that I write Utopia with a capital to indicate a place, I can make no claim to consistency of usage, relying instead on context to make clear the sense intended for the term and its derivatives at any given point. The first, second, and fifth essays of  this book appeared, in dif ferent form, in Yale Review, ELH, and Centennial Review, respectively. The first and the fifth essays appeared in German translation in Antaios. The sixth essay appeared in Italian translation in the issue of  Strumenti Critici devoted to American criticism ( June 1969). The fourth essay was written originally for Hawthorne Centenary Essays. Editors of  these publications have kindly given me permission to use the essays here. The third essay was presented in dif ferent form as a paper at the Second International Congress on the Enlightenment, held at St. Andrews University, Scotland, in August 1967. I am glad to be able to thank publicly the people and the institutions who have helped me in the preparation of  this book. In critical and creative ways my graduate students made me learn as I tried to teach. I have worked at the Widener Library at Harvard, the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the libraries at Ohio State University and the University of  California, San Diego. My work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of  Learned Societies. These are utopian institutions every one, and I am most grateful for their indispensible aid. Although it would not be entirely accurate to speak of either Ohio State University or the University of  California as utopian, I am equally grateful for the research grants and the support of various kinds they generously provided. Jan Altizer has been a most able editorial assistant. Several of my friends have read part or all of  this work at one stage or another of its development: Morton W. Bloomfield, Leicester Bradner, Sigurd Burckhardt, Robert M. Estrich, Richard Falk, Sydney Harth, Kurt H. Wolf f, Andrew Wright, and particularly Roy Harvey Pearce. I thank them all for their criticisms and suggestions—for their interest. Much more than thanks for Mary, who does not believe in utopia.

CHAPTER 1

Saturnalia, Satire, & Utopia

Engels once spoke of  Charles Fourier, the nineteenth century’s complete utopian, as one of  the greatest satirists of all time. The conjunction may seem odd; we normally think of utopia as associated with the ideal, satire with the actual, which (man and his institutions being what they are) usually proves to be the sordid, the foolish, the vicious. In fact, however, the two modes—utopia and satire—are linked in a complex network of genetic, historical, and formal relationships. Some of  these I propose to trace. First, a tangle of genetic lines which, in the way of  these matters, lead to unexpected places. “All Utopias,” writes Arthur Koestler, “are fed from the sources of mythology; the social engineer’s blueprints are merely revised editions of  the ancient text.” Insofar as utopia incorporates man’s longings for the good life, it is part of a complex of ideas that includes the Golden Age, the Earthly Paradise, the Fortunate Isles, the Islands of  the Blest, the Happy Otherworld, and so on. The archetypal text, at least for the Western world, is that of  Hesiod: In the beginning, the immortals    Who have their homes on Olympos created the golden generation of mortal people. These lived in Kronos’ time, when he    was the king in heaven. They lived as if  they were gods,    their hearts free from all sorrow, by themselves, and without hard work or pain;   no miserable old age came their way; their hands, their feet,    did not alter. They took pleasure in festivals,    and lived without troubles.

6

CHAPTER 1 When they died, it was as if  they fell asleep.   All goods were theirs. The fruitful grainland    yielded its harvest to them of its own accord; this was great and abundant,    while they at their pleasure quietly looked after their works,    in the midst of good things prosperous in f locks, on friendly terms    with the blessed immortals.xv

For the fifth race of man, for us of  the iron age, it was a good dream and it lasted, as Lionel Trilling has indicated, until it was dispossessed by the nightmare of  Dostoevski’s Underground Man. Variations of  Hesiod’s story probably existed long before his time in folktales of a magical land of plenty where wine runs in rivers and pancakes grow on trees. At any rate the Greek comic writers picked up these themes as a handy way of satirizing the literature of  the Golden Age, which even then (as ever since) was sadly stereotyped. An early example of  the satire is this from Teleclides: First there was peace among all things like water covering one’s hands. And the earth bore neither fear nor disease, but all things appeared of  their own accord. For every stream f lowed with wine, and barley cakes fought with wheat cakes to enter the mouths of men … And fishes, coming to men’s houses and baking themselves, would serve themselves upon the table … and roasted thrushes with milk cakes f lew down one’s gullet.xvi

The references to peace and to freedom from fear and disease make the target of  the parody clear enough; but parody or no, there is inevitable doubleness of ef fect—longing as well as laughter. Tales of  Cockaigne turn up in the folklore of many lands, nearly always with similar ef fects. An English version from the early fourteenth century makes Cockaigne out to be fairer than Paradise. Here is an abbey built entirely of  food, where geese f ly roasted from the spit advertising their own succulence: “Geese, all hot, all hot!” Here are rivers of oil and milk and honey and wine along which lusty monks chase willing nuns. Here (with the negative emphasis

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necessary in these matters) is no strife, no pain, no death. These lines (in a modern version by A.L. Morton) emphasize the longing: In Cockaigne we drink and eat Freely without care and sweat … Under heaven no land like this Of such joy and endless bliss. There is many a sweet sight, All is day, there is no night, There is no quarreling nor strife, There is no death but endless life … Every man takes what he will As of right, to eat his fill. All is common to young and old, To stout and strong, to meek and bold.xvii

On the other hand, much of  the poem is satirical; but satire is easily overwhelmed in such express outpouring of desire. One finds the same longing and the same laughter in “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a song sung in the United States by men on the bum in the 1930s. Cockaigne knows no limitations of space or time: in its untrussed moments every age shares Sir Epicure Mammon’s dream of  “a perpetuitie/Of  life, and lust.” America’s Rock Candy Mountain is an authentic part of  Cockaigne’s lush landscape. The Golden Age and Cockaigne provide the elements out of which the intellectual concept of utopia develops. We can see this happening in the literature of ancient Greece; Plato’s adoption of  the gold, silver, brass, and iron imagery from Hesiod to make palatable the “noble lie” of  The Republic is an emblem of  the process. When belief in the historical reality of  the Golden Age broke down, it became possible to bring many of  the ideal elements of  the myth into closer relation with the realities of man’s existence. Philosophers transferred the notion of an ideal life in the irrecoverable past into utopian tales of what the world might—even should—be like; the myth, that is, provided sustenance for a conceivable reality. It has been the same ever since.

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The Golden Age and utopia, the one a myth, the other a concept, are both projections of man’s wishful fantasies, answering to the longings for the good life which have moved him since before history began. “Véritable rêve de paysan fatigue”: so Maurice Croiset characterizes Hesiod’s account of  the Golden Age. Utopia comes ultimately from the same dream. Identity of origin, however, by no means implies identity of  function. Plato, undertaking the Socratic search for the meaning of justice, is led to conceive an ideal social order—a utopia; but justice, the object of  his search, would be USELESS, as David Hume emphatically put it, in a society like that of  the Golden Age.xviii The contours and customs of  these ideal lands are very dif ferent indeed. In Utopia, the work of  the world goes on, rationalized, cleaned up—often to the point where sewers hardly smell—given dignity; the work is there, nevertheless, as a necessary condition of  Utopia’s existence. In Cockaigne, says the song, “they hung the jerk that invented work.” Sebastian de Grazia makes the distinction thus: “Utopia is a possessor of culture; Cockaigne is possessed by the folk.”xix A dialogue of  Lucian neatly points up the functional dif ference. Just before the annual celebration of  the feast of  the Saturnalia, Cronosolon complains to the tutelary god Cronus about his poverty. Look, he says, how many pestilent rich fellows there are these days, while I and others like me, skilled in the liberal arts, have only want and trouble for bedfellows. And you, Cronus, will not “order things anew, and make us equal.”xx “In common life,” answers Cronus, “ ’tis no light matter to change the lots that Clotho and her sister Fates have laid upon you; but as touching the feast, I will set right your poverty.” The point is this: for the period of  the Saturnalia, Cronosolon and his fellows will enjoy the good things of  life on the same footing as the rich. During this sacred time the Golden Age will come again to earth—that, after all, is the meaning of  the festival. But this is a very dif ferent matter, Cronus points out, from changing the way things are in common life and making everybody equal; such af fairs are in his son Zeus’s jurisdiction, not in his. Clearly, if one does not believe in Zeus’s good will, or even in his existence, these become matters for man alone. Utopia is the application of man’s reason and his will to the myth. For the Golden Age is given by the gods, like the millennium in Christian eschatology, independently of man’s will. To be sure, heretical

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religious sects, intoxicated with dreams of millennial bliss, have tried to establish paradise on earth by fiat; some of  the bizarre results are brilliantly documented in Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of  the Millennium. But Utopia is dif ferent: Utopia (in the sense we are concerned with here) is man’s ef fort to work out imaginatively what happens—or what might happen—when the primal longings embodied in the myth confront the principle of reality. In this ef fort man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some remote time; he assumes the role of a creator himself. A characteristic of  the Golden Age, whatever the version, is that it exists outside history, usually before history begins: in illo tempore. In Hesiod’s account, it is true, men are timebound in the sense that they finally die—Et in Arcadia ego—but only after long lives joyously lived, without the suf ferings of old age. Other variations of  the paradise myth speak of a timeless, changeless, deathless existence, as in Hesiod’s own description of  the Islands of  the Blest, where the heroes who fought at Troy and Thebes live in perpetual joy; or as in the Irish myth of  the voyage of  Bran which in a stroke or two superbly dramatizes the distinction between mythical time and the time of  history. Bran and his men sail back to Ireland after having spent indeterminate ages in the Happy Otherworld. As they approach land, Bran calls out to a man on shore: “I am Bran, the son of  Febal.” The man responds: “We do not know such a one, though the Voyage of  Bran is in our ancient stories.” Then one of  Bran’s men leaps from the coracle to shore. “As soon as he touched the earth of  Ireland, forthwith he was a heap of ashes, as though he had been in the earth for many hundred years.”xxi Paradise is necessarily transhistoric. Planners of  Utopia have often tried to approximate that condition, aiming at a static perfection which would rule out the vicissitudes of  history and to some degree those of  time. Sparta, Athens, and Rome would not now be lying in ruins, wrote Jerome Busleyden in the sixteenth century, if  they had known and followed the laws expounded in Thomas More’s great Utopia: “On the contrary, they would have been still unfallen, still fortunate and prosperous, leading a happy existence, mistresses of  the world meanwhile.”xxii As with states, so with men: it is a rare utopia that does not broach the theme of immortality or greatly increased longevity in one form or another, from elixirs in Bacon’s New Atlantis to application

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of evolutionary theory in twentieth-century utopias. The attempt of utopian writers to freeze history—the fight of utopia against history—has prompted severe criticism of  the whole utopian enterprise; but the attempt has been merely one way in which man has tried to arrive imaginatively at the condition of paradise on earth. Ritual has provided another approach to the same state. The annual feast commemorating the reign of  Cronus (in his Roman form, Saturn) was avowedly a reenactment of  the Golden Age—a return to the time when all men were equal and the good things of  life were held in common. Out of  his primal authority Cronus reserved a few days in the year, he says in one of  Lucian’s dialogues, so that “men may remember what life was like in my days.”xxiii The happy anarchy of  his rule was recollected in Roman law which held that during the Saturnalian festival war could not be begun nor could criminals be punished—for what was war and who were criminals in the Golden Age? Lucian’s dialogues convey marvelously the atmosphere of  the Saturnalia, but at the same time they are permeated by his characteristic skepticism. Most celebrants are likely to have had a dif ferent attitude, to have felt that, for the few days of celebration, they were reliving the myth, actually participating in the far-of f age at the beginning of  things which answered to their deepest longings. The Saturnalia were more than an excuse to get drunk and (like Horace’s slave in the famous Satire) to say aloud what one thought of one’s superiors; they were themselves an abrogation of  time. In all imitations of archetypes, writes Mircea Eliade, “man is projected into the mythical epoch in which the archetypes were first revealed.” Profane time and history are abolished in the act of celebration, for one “is always contemporary with a myth, during the time when one repeats it or imitates the gestures of  the mythic personages.”xxiv Thus the divine ef ficacies of  the Saturnalia made present the joy that had been irrevocably lost from earth. Through the alchemy of ritual the age of iron was temporarily transmuted into gold. The forms that the Saturnalia take allow us to see what the memory of a Golden Age really means. To reenact it is to experience the extravagant joy of overthrowing the restraints, the inhibitions and renunciations, which, as the price we pay for civilization, trammel us relentlessly in the real world. The theme of  Saturnalia is reversal—reversal of values, of social

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roles, of social norms. The real world is a world peopled normally by a few camels and many ants, in Lucian’s image; under the dispensation of ritual it becomes a place where discrepancies disappear and all become equal. The Saturnalia are ruled over, not by a camel, but by a king chosen by lot; slaves sit down with their masters and are served by them; everyone speaks as he wills, eats and drinks as he pleases (as though Nature again produced lavishly for all), and enjoys a sexual liberty unthinkable at any other time. The Saturnalia mean release. In some of  the cognate festivals of  Western Europe the release is spectacularly explosive. Consider the Feast of  Fools as it was celebrated in Paris at New Year’s in the fifteenth century. This is from a contemporary account: Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of of fice. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders, or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of  the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theaters in shabby traps and carts; and rouse the laughter of  their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste.xxv

Again, reversal and release. The words of  the Magnificat—“He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of  low degree”—triggered the revelry of  the Feast of  Fools. It was an af fair largely of  the lower clergy (E.K. Chambers calls it “an ebullition of  the natural lout beneath the cassock”) who, like the lower orders at the Saturnalia, could on this occasion turn the distinctions of rank and status upside down, subject the ceremonial forms which ordered their lives to wild burlesque, give way to verbal and sexual license in a great outburst of pent-up repression. All order is repressive, not least that of  the Church. The Feast of  Fools is an anarchic blow at order, like the pagan feast at Rome a reaching out for a state of  “pure” freedom. In these rites which temporarily turn society inside out, ridicule, mockery, burlesque—in short, satire, using the word in its broad sense—seem always to have important functions. A characteristic of  Saturnalian festivals everywhere is that during the license of  the holiday the most sacred

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institutions may be subjected to mockery and sacrosanct individuals exposed to satire. To take an exotic example: among the Ashanti of  West Africa, a people so sensitive to ridicule that it often drives them to suicide, there is (or was recently) a festival period set apart in which even the sacred chief was satirized. “Wait until Friday,” said the chief, “when the people really begin to abuse me, and if you will come and do so too it will please me.” The high-priest explained to R.S. Rattray, the inquiring anthropologist, that the forebears of  the Ashanti had “ordained a time, once every year, when every man and woman, free man and slave, should have freedom to speak out just what was in their head, to tell their neighbors just what they thought of  them … [and] also the king or chief. When a man has spoken freely thus, he will feel his soul cool and quieted.”xxvi To speak out on these privileged occasions is almost always to make mocking verses—in Ashanti at the Apo ceremony: All is well today. We know that a Brong man eats rats, But we never knew that one of  the royal blood eats rats. But today we have seen our master, Ansah, eating rats. Today all is well and we may say so, say so, say so. At other times we may not say so, say so, say so.

In Latin at the Feast of  Fools: Gregis pastor Tityrus, asinorum dominus, noster est episcopus. eia, eia, eia, vocant nos ad gaudia Tityri cibaria. ad hominem Tityri, festum colant baculi satrapae et asini …xxvii

This is David Crowne’s translation:

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We make Titryus our pastor, Of  these asses lord and master, Episcopal ecclesiaster. Holy smoke! delicious scents Lead us by our noses hence Where the food’s in evidence. Granting Tityrus recognition, Men of asinine condition This feast of misrule do commission …

The uninhibited words of carnival are everywhere akin. This is the language of satire before satire becomes literature; it is preliterary as well as subliterary. These utterances are ritual gestures, marked of f  from real life by the parenthesis of  the holiday. It seems clear that the mechanisms behind the Apo ceremony of  the Ashanti are very like those that prompted the festival of  the Sacaea in Babylon, the Cronia in Greece, the Saturnalia and the Kalends in Rome, the Feast of  Fools in France, the Lord of  Misrule in England, and many other comparable rites of reversal. Diverse as the cultures concerned certainly are, the rites themselves can be brought under a single classification by an observation of  Freud: “In all renunciations and limitations imposed upon the ego a periodical infringement of  the prohibition is the rule; this indeed is shown by the institution of  festivals, which in origin are nothing less nor more than excesses provided by law and which owe their cheerful character to the release which they bring. The Saturnalia of  the Romans and our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred commandments.”xxviii The festivals provide permitted release from limitation and renunciation. In the Saturnalia that release is the sanctioned way to the Golden Age. Here is a clue to what the Golden Age actually is: a time or a condition in which limitation and renunciation do not exist. This is implicit in most accounts of  the Golden Age and occasionally it is made explicit.

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“O happy Golden Age,” exults the chorus in Samuel Daniel’s translation of  the famous passage from Tasso’s Aminta; the age was happy, however, not because of milk and honey and a bountifully burgeoning earth, but because man’s sexual instincts were still unrestrained, the “sweet delights of joyful amorous wights” not yet frustrated by That idle name of wind, That idol of deceit, that empty sound call’d Honor …

Instead of  Honor’s restrictive laws, men followed   golden laws like these Which Nature wrote. That’s lawful which doth please.

Tasso catches here the essence of  the myth. Because all restraints are undesirable, Saturnalian festivals take on their anarchic form: the slave mocks his master, the tribesman his chief; the priest burlesques the ceremony of  his church. These are ritual gestures abrogating rule: the ritual satire a negative means to the positive end. In this way, it seems to me, the Golden Age comes together with satire in the Saturnalian festival. But the Golden Age (or Cockaigne or other versions of  the Earthly Paradise) is not utopia; as we have seen it belongs to Cronus, not to Zeus. Nor is the ritual “satire” of  the festival equivalent to the literary art we know. These are the elements out of which individual artists were to create their much more sophisticated structures: Thomas More and William Morris their utopias, Horace and Alexander Pope their satires. The genetic relation of  the two modes, however, derives from the sanctioned license of  the holiday. It is a mighty leap from the festivals, which have the structure of ritual, to the literature of satire and utopia. In between, as it were, lie intermediate artistic forms which contain in various combinations and proportions relatively unassimilated ritualistic and mythical elements. A splendid example is the middle-Irish tale The Vision of  MacConglinne in which the stuf f of magic and folklore is used for highly sophisticated ends. The Vision is an epic of  food, a mock-epic rather, with all the ambivalence—the longings and the mockery—we associate with tales of  Cockaigne. The half-starved

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poet of  the story lets his imagination go wild: “Then in the harbour of  the lake before me I saw a juicy little coracle of  beef-fat, with its coating of  tallow, with its thwarts of curds, with its prow of  lard, with its stern of  butter … Then we rowed across the wide expanse of  New-Milk lake, through seas of  broth, past rivermouths of mead, over swelling boisterous waves of  buttermilk, by perpetual pools of gravy.”xxix Framing this vision of  Cockaigne is a structure of satire astonishing in its variety and comprehensiveness. Although the author of  the Vision reaches into Ireland’s most primitive traditions to exploit the ancient belief in magically ef ficacious satire, he also uses irony and ridicule and literary parody with delicacy and great sophistication. His target is nothing less than the religious and literary forms of medieval Ireland. From the most sacred Christian doctrine to the almost equally sacred heroic saga, MacConglinne’s mockery spares nothing. This is a Saturnalia outside the ritual frame, a ceremony of reversal shocking and hilarious in its ef fect. As Robin Flower says, the Vision “sums up and turns into gigantic ridicule the learning of  the earlier time much in the same way as François Rabelais at once typified and transcended the learning of  the later Middle Ages.”xxx A short step only separates The Vision of  MacConglinne, which is compounded of primitive materials out of  Cockaigne and ritual satire, from the art of  Rabelais. Some of  these matters are pulled together and given point by a curious incident in the career of  Francis Bacon, a man we are unlikely to think of in connection with Saturnalia, Cockaigne, and the like. In early December 1594, Bacon’s mother, mindful of  the holiday time to come, wrote in a letter: “I trust they will not mum nor mask nor sinfully revel at Gray’s Inn.” Revelry was much in the minds of  those of  Gray’s Inn, however; and on 20 December, the twelve days of  Christmas license were inaugurated by the Prince of  Purpoole (in common life, Mr. Henry Holmes of  Norfolk), the mock-king who with his court was to preside over the festivities. The first night’s revels went well: the burlesque of court activities, the bawdy personal gibes, the parody of  the administration of justice by the Crown in Council were all gaily received. Next night a performance of  Shakespeare’s A Comedy of  Errors climaxed activities, but this time revelers got out of  hand and the evening ended in wild confusion. Appalled by this blow to

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their prestige, members of  Gray’s Inn asked Francis Bacon to help write an entertainment that would recoup their lost honor. On the night of 3 January, Bacon’s Gesta Grayorum; or, the History of  the High and Mighty Prince Henry, Prince of  Purpoole, Arch Duke of  Stapulia was performed to great applause. A character in this resolutely sober interlude begs the Prince of  Purpoole to bend his mind to the conquest of nature, to undertake the “searching out, inventing, and discovering of all whatsoever is hid in secret in the world.” To this end, the Prince is advised to acquire a number of aids: an enormous library; a wonderful garden, complete with birds and beasts and fish so as to provide “in a small compass a model of universal nature”; a huge cabinet containing whatever rare objects the hand of man or “the shuf f le of  things” has produced; and a house fitted with all instruments so as to be a palace “fit for a philosopher’s stone.”xxxi In short, Bacon worked out in the Gesta Grayorum a first draft of  Solomon’s House, the heart of  his utopia, The New Atlantis. Bacon’s city of  Bensalem is a notably chaste community, “The Virgin of  the World.” How remarkable it is that the conception of  Solomon’s House, that Cockaigne of  the scientific imagination, should first have appeared in the context of a Saturnalian festival. Satire and the Golden Age are functionally linked in festival. They are associated in a dif ferent way, however, under the puzzlingly contradictory sign of  the god Saturn himself. A curious doubleness has characterized Cronus-Saturn from the beginning. He has a strongly benevolent aspect insofar as he was the ruler in the Golden Age, the happiest time ever known on earth. Furthermore, after his imprisonment by Zeus, he was released, Hesiod says, to rule in the Isles of  the Blest. To the Romans Saturn was the bringer of civilization to Italy, in addition to being god of agriculture and king of  the Golden Age. But the other side of  the myth is fearsome and dark: Cronus-Saturn castrated his father and ate his children. The sickle in the iconography of  Saturn is an agricultural tool or the castrating weapon, depending upon which aspect of  the myth is uppermost. He was the oldest of  the gods—professionally old, Panofsky says—and when the gods came to be identified with the planets, he was associated with the slowest and most remote of all.xxxii This dark side of  the myth may help account for the fact that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Saturn is simultaneously the beneficent ruler of a paradise on earth and a singularly malignant

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inf luence on human af fairs. In Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, “pale Saturnus the colde” boasts of  his powers: Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan; Myn is the prison in the derke cote; Myn is the stranglyng and hangyng by the throte, The murmure and the cherles rebellyng, The groynynge, and the pryvee empoysonyng My lookyng is the fader of pestilence. [11.2456–69]

Astrological lore regularly ascribes disasters like these, both public and personal, to Saturn. Lydgate in The Fall of  Princes characterizes Saturn’s inf luence in terms precisely like those above, then elsewhere in the same poem speaks of  the time when Saturn, Noah, and Abraham were alive in a golden age of  temperance and sobriety, when knights cherished chastity and heretics were properly punished. But Lydgate’s The Assembly of  Gods has Saturn dressed in frost and snow, holding a bloody falchion, wearing a necklace of icicles and a leaden crown.xxxiii During the Renaissance in England literary satire becomes associated with the malign aspect of  the Saturn character. An etymological tangle may be in part responsible. Thomas Drant in 1566 suggests the possibility that the word “satyre” may be derived from Saturn: Satyre of writhled waspyshe Saturne may be namde The Satyrist must be a wasper in moode, Testie and wrothe with vice and hers, to see both blamde But courteous and frendly to the good. As Saturne cuttes of  tymes with equall scythe: So this man cuttes downe synne, so coy and blythe.xxxiv

Whatever the explanation, the conventional tone for English satire during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries became that of cold, snarling invective. Satirists proudly speak of  themselves as Saturnian men, melancholy because of  his inf luence. Their obsessive concern with disease and death follows on the pattern of  their astrological patron; in an aggressive way they are eager to claim for themselves his most malignant powers.

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Thus Renaissance satire f launts its unpleasantly hectoring tone under the sanction of  the god who in another aspect presided over the Golden Age. When we turn from these genetic and tutelary ties to the formal relations between utopia and satire, we are on firmer ground. Aristophanes managed the conjunction superbly. Under the rule of women in the Ecclesiazusae, for example, all citizens are to be equal and share in wealth and pleasure:         mankind should possess In common the instruments of  happiness. Henceforth private property comes to an end— It’s all wrong for a man to have too much to spend, While others moan, starving; another we see Has acres of  land tilled prosperously, While this man has not enough earth for his grave. You’ll find men who haven’t a single lean slave While others have hundreds to run at their call … That’s over: all things are owned henceforth by all.xxxv

Law courts are to be converted to banqueting halls; marriage to be abolished in favor of complete sexual freedom: “the whole city of girls are your wives now, and gratis!” In short, Praxagora, the leader of  the female revolution, will rule over a hedonist’s Utopia. At the same time, of course, satire pervades the play—some of it directed inward at Utopia itself (perhaps even at portions of  Plato’s Republic), but more at the follies of  the real world outside. Aristophanes takes his women and their ideal state seriously. In a number of  his plays—Lysistrata, The Birds, The Clouds, Plutus—he sets up utopian themes as a baseline from which the satire thrusts out: they form the positive term of  the hilariously destructive attack. Satire and utopia seem naturally compatible if we think of the structure of  the formal verse satire, usually characterized by two main elements: the predominating negative part, which attacks folly or vice, and the understated positive part, which establishes a norm, a standard of excellence, against which folly and vice are judged. The literary utopia, on the other hand, reverses these proportions of negative and positive—as the Russian writer Eugene Zamyatin says, utopias have a plus sign—presentation of 

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the ideal overweighing the prescriptive attack on the bad old days which Utopia has happily transcended. (It may still be true that in many utopias, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, for example, the exposure of contemporary evils is the liveliest thing in the book.) But even without overt attack on contemporary society, utopia necessarily wears a Janus-face. The portrayal of an ideal commonwealth has a double function: it establishes a standard, a goal; and by virtue of its existence alone it casts a critical light on society as presently constituted. William Blake’s Songs of  Innocence, writes Northrop Frye, “satirize the state of experience, as the contrast which they present to it makes its hypocrisies more obviously shameful.” The utopia of  Rabelais’s Abbey of  Thélème is physically framed by negative and positive coordinates: upon the great gate of  the Abbey are set fourteen verses, the first seven a lively satirical catalogue of  those who may not enter, the second seven a welcome to the gay, the handsome, the pure, the honest—those who are to live a life governed by the quintessential utopian injunction: “Do what thou wilt.” Pantagruel, we recall, was born in Utopia. As the next essay shows in detail, it is in Thomas More’s Utopia itself  that the two modes satire and utopia are most clearly seen to be indivisible. They share the most elemental devices of structure. Many formal verse satires, for example, are framed by an encounter between a satirist and an adversary: in one of  his satires, “Horace” walks in the Forum and gets entangled in talk with an intolerable bore, or in another he goes to his learned friend Trebatius for advice and the two argue; or in his third satire “Juvenal” walks to the outskirts of  Rome with the disillusioned Umbricius, while the two discuss in graphic detail the horrors of metropolitan life. In each case the encounter sets the stage for a dialogue in which the satirist attacks some target against the resistance, or at least at the prompting, of  the adversary. So it is in Utopia. The governing fiction of  the work is that Thomas More, while he was on an embassy abroad (the historical man a character in his own fiction), meets a seafaring philosopher named Raphael Hythloday. The two talk throughout a long and memorable day in a garden in Antwerp. “More’s” function is to draw Hythloday out and to oppose him on certain issues, Hythloday’s defense of  the communism he found in the land of  Utopia, for example. “More” is the adversary. Hythloday’s role is to expose the corruption of contemporary society: “so God help me, I

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can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of  the commonwealth” and to set up against that corruption a norm: the picture of an ideal commonwealth, Utopia, “which alone of good right may take upon it the name.” Hythloday is a satirist—a magnificent satirist, commanding the entire range of  tones and rhetorical techniques available to his kind. He makes lavish use of  his talent. Just as satire is a necessary element of  the work which gave the literary form “utopia” its name, so, I should think, the utopias of  Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Houyhnhnmland are essential to the satire of  More’s great follower, Jonathan Swift. I suspect that we distinguish between Utopia as “a utopia” and Gulliver’s Travels as “a satire” primarily because of  the dif ference in distribution of positive and negative elements in the two works. Both are necessary to both kinds. To summarize: utopia is the secularization of  the myth of  the Golden Age, a myth incarnated in the festival of  the Saturnalia. Satire is the secular form of ritual mockery, ridicule, invective—ritual gestures which are integrally part of  the same festival. Thus utopia and satire are ancestrally linked in the celebration of  Saturn, a god who reigns over the earthly paradise, but who also by reason of  his concern with melancholy, disease, and death becomes the patron of snarling Renaissance satirists. The two modes are formally joined in More’s eponymous work, and indeed the very notion of utopia necessarily entails a negative appraisal of present conditions. Satire and utopia are not really separable, the one a critique of  the real world in the name of something better, the other a hopeful construct of a world that might be. The hope feeds the criticism, the criticism the hope. Writers of utopia have always known this: the one unanswerable argument for the utopian vision is a hard satirical look at the way things are today.

CHAPTER 2

The Shape of  Utopia

More’s Utopians are a peace-loving people, but their land was born to controversy. Many claim it: Catholics and Protestants, medievalists and moderns, socialists and communists; and a well-known historian has recently turned it over to the Nazis. Methods of  legitimating claims vary widely, although most are necessarily based upon ideological interpretations of  More’s book. Over the past generation, however, in all the welter of claim and counter-claim, one single interpretation has emerged to dominate the field. H.W. Donner calls it “the Roman Catholic interpretation” of  Utopia.xxxvi Its most trenchant, certainly most inf luential, statement is by R.W. Chambers; the interpretation, in brief, amounts to this: “When a Sixteenth-Century Catholic depicts a pagan state founded on Reason and Philosophy, he is not depicting his ultimate ideal … The underlying thought of Utopia always is, With nothing save Reason to guide them, the Utopians do this; and yet we Christian Englishmen, we Christian Europeans …! ”xxxvii This statement cuts cleanly through murky tangles of critical debate. It is founded upon awareness of  the relation between reason and revelation in Catholic doctrine, and the importance of  that relation in making judgments about Utopia; it is consonant with everything we know of  More and his life. Most recently this interpretation has received powerful support from Edward L. Surtz, S.J., in a number of articles and in two books he has written on More’s Utopia: The Praise of Pleasure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957) and The Praise of  Wisdom (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1957). Father Surtz begins and ends both books with versions of  the Chambers thesis, which he too calls “the ‘Catholic’ interpretation of  Utopia.”xxxviii The interpretation itself seems to me unassailable, the way of  labeling it open to question. How far, one is bound to ask, does acceptance of  this “Catholic” reading entail the acceptance of other Catholic interpretations

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which may seem corollary? The problem arises as one reads the work of  Father Surtz. In the preface to The Praise of  Wisdom, Father Surtz announces that his intention is to “produce additional evidence, throw more light, modify present interpretations, and draw new conclusions on intriguing but vexing problems.” The book and its companion volume fulfill splendidly this aim. But it is also true that in both books Father Surtz arrives at Catholic interpretations of various issues in Utopia which seem to me—and, I would assume, to a good many others—quite unacceptable. One admires the frankness with which he admits the perplexities, even the irritations, he has encountered in dealing with prickly religious and moral sentiments expressed in Utopia, but one cannot accept—even as satisfactory explanation—the way he has dealt with some of  them. To be specific: the Utopians notoriously recommend euthanasia for the incurably ill. There is no equivocation on this point in the text. As Raphael Hythloday reports matters, the Utopians believe that a man whose life has become torture to himself will be—and should be—glad to die; in these extreme cases the priests and magistrates exhort the patient to take his own life. Responding to this passage, Father Surtz deals roundly with the Utopians: they “need to be set straight by Christian revelation on this point.” Similarly, some Utopians “err,” he writes “in the maintenance of an extreme view of immortality,” for they think the souls of even brute animals are immortal. Because divorce is allowed in Utopia, Father Surtz scolds the inhabitants for violating the natural law “which is obligatory on all men, Christian and non-Christian, including the Utopians.” Mistakes like these would have become evident to the Utopians had they “been fortunate enough to possess supernatural revelation.”xxxix This way of dealing with religious questions in Utopia is not only to number Lady Macbeth’s children but to spank them as well. Perhaps it is a tribute to More’s creative powers that Father Surtz should treat the Utopians as though they were subject to judgments of  the same order as persons who actually live. “In his heart,” he writes of  Raphael Hythloday and his attitude toward Utopian communism, “he realizes that, given the general run of  Christians, his commonwealth, like the republic of  Plato, will never exist in the Christian West.”xl But Hythloday has no heart: as Dr. Johnson says, trees conjured up by the imagination are not capable of

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providing us shade. It is no good looking behind Hythloday’s words to concealed or unacknowledged meanings: Hythloday is only the words that the words of  Thomas More say he speaks. Father Surtz’s argument against Hythloday on Utopian communism is undoubtedly cogent from a doctrinal point of view, but it has little to do with the literary work in which the ideas on communism exist. The major problem is one of method. Father Surtz seeks to discover More’s “real intent and thought.” In the last chapter of The Praise of  Pleasure he writes that his method is “to study each problem by itself in the light of all [More’s] letters and writings and against the background of antecedent and contemporary literature and philosophy.” In the preface to The Praise of  Wisdom he says that he examines the “pertinent sections in the Utopia point by point … to determine the relation of each point to fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century formulations of  Catholic teaching.” The method provides us an admirable historical, philosophical, and religious context for the many vexed issues that arise in Utopia. Three chapters on communism in The Praise of  Pleasure, for example, af ford a comprehensive account of classical, scriptural, patristic, and humanist attitudes toward the matter. All the major issues of  Utopia are thus “placed.” We are given no sense, however, that these questions exist, not as abstract political, religious, or philosophical propositions, but as constitutive elements in a work of art. What is wanted instead of  the Catholic interpretation of communism is an interpretation of  Utopia that will show us how the question of communism is incorporated into the total structure of  the work. Father Surtz is aware of a problem of  literary interpretation; he recognizes the ironic structure of Utopia—in fact, he deplores it. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “for purposes of satire or irony [More] has introduced into his ‘philosophical city’ institutions which impart an air of realism but which he himself  terms silly or even absurd. Correct interpretation becomes troublesome and elusive.”xli The Utopia, by virtue of what it is, becomes an obstacle to Father Surtz’s purpose. Something is radically wrong. Clearly we need, not the Catholic or the Marxist or the city-planner interpretation of  Utopia, so much as we need an interpretation that will tell us what Utopia is, that will place it with respect to the literary conventions which give it form and control its meaning. In one sense, of course,

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Utopia made its own conventions: it is the beginning, it creates its own genre. More was like Adam in the Garden of  Eden: his use of  the name was constitutive; he named the thing and that is what it was. But in another sense the Adamic form was hardly new at all. Its structure, its use of characters, its rhetorical techniques, its purpose, its subject, its tone—all these have much in common with the conventions of a literary genre firmly, if ambiguously, fixed in literary history. Utopia has the shape and the feel—it has much of  the form—of satire. It is useful to think of it as a prose version with variations of  the formal verse satire composed by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. If we approach it in this way, we shall be able to adjust our expectations and our ways of interpreting and evaluating to conform to the laws of  the country to which Utopia belongs.xlii We can establish the general shape of  Utopia by putting together two comments of  More’s contemporaries. “If you have not read More’s Utopia,” writes Erasmus to his friend William Cop, “do look out for it, whenever you wish to be amused, or rather I should say, if you ever want to see the sources from which almost all the ills of  the body politic arise.” The second comment is from Jerome Busleyden’s letter to More, published with the Utopia: You have done the whole world inestimable service, he writes, “by delineating … an ideal commonwealth, a pattern and finished model of conduct, than which there has never been seen in the world one more wholesome in its institution, or more perfect, or to be thought more desirable.”xliii Here are the two sides of  Utopia: the negative, which exposes in a humorous way the evils af fecting the body politic; the positive, which provides a normative model to be imitated. “O holy commonwealth, which Christian ought to emulate” (O sanctam rempublicam, et uel Christianis imitandam), reads a marginal comment on the text by either Erasmus or Peter Giles. This general negative-positive structure is of course common enough in many forms of discourse. Saint Augustine very consciously organized The City of  God this way: the first ten books attacking erroneous beliefs, the last twelve establishing his own position, with destructive and constructive elements working through both parts. Sermons are often put together on this principle, as are literary-moral forms like the beast fable in which the greedy fox comes to a bad and instructive end. But for our purposes it is

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significant that this too is the characteristic skeletal shape of  the formal verse satire as it was written by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. The Roman satire divides readily into two disproportionate elements: part A (as Mary Claire Randolph has called it) in which some aspect of man’s foolish or vicious behavior is singled out for exposure and dissection, and part B, which consists (whether explicitly or implicitly) of an admonition to virtue and rational behavior.xliv It establishes the standard, the “positive,” against which vice and folly are judged. Utopia and Roman satire have in common this general structural outline, as well as many other canonical elements. So true is this that one must read the Utopia with an eye—and an ear—to complexities of  the kind one finds in Horace and Alexander Pope, testing the voices of  the speakers against the norms of  the work, weighing each shift of  tone for possible moral implication. The meaning of  the work as a whole is a function of  the way those voices work with and against each other: a function of  the pattern they form. More knew ancient satire well. Lucian was one of  his favorite authors: “If … there was ever anyone who fulfilled the Horatian precept and combined delight with instruction, I think Lucian certainly stood primus inter pares in this respect,” he wrote in the dedicatory epistle prefacing the translation into Latin of some of  Lucian’s dialogues on which he and Erasmus collaborated.xlv He often quoted from the Latin satirists, and it is clear that he had given a good deal of  thought to certain problems having to do with satire as a form. When the Louvain theologian Martin Dorp attacked Erasmus’s Praise of  Folly, More replied in a long letter in which he defends the Folly with arguments drawn from the apologiae of  the Roman satirists and from St. Jerome’s justification of  his own satire. More’s letter, together with the dedicatory essay to him in the Praise of  Folly and Erasmus’ own epistolary apologia written to the same Martin Dorp (who in real life played the conventional role of  the adversarius in satire), form an elaborate compendium of arguments satirists have always used to justify their ambiguous art.xlvi As we saw in the preceding essay, Utopia is like many formal verse satires in that it is framed by an encounter between a satirist and an adversary. In this case “More” has the minor role, eliciting comment, prodding gently,

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objecting mildly, while Raphael Hythloday lays about him with the fervor of a Persius or a Juvenal. The provenance of  these roles is particularly clear in the first book. At one point a query by “More” leads Hythloday into reminiscence about his stay years before with Cardinal Morton in England. He recalls a foolish argument that developed at table one day between a jesting scof fer who was accustomed to play the fool and an irascible friar. The fool, says Hythloday, having delivered himself of some sharp gibes at the venality of monks, and finding his railing well received, made an equally sharp thrust at the friar, to the delight of  the assembled company. The friar, “being thus touched on the quick and hit on the gall (tali perfusus aceto) so fret, so fumed, and chafed at it, and was in such a rage, that he could not refrain himself  from chiding, scolding, railing, and reviling. He called the fellow ribald, villain, javel, backbiter, slanderer, and the child of perdition, citing therewith terrible threatenings out of Holy Scripture. Then the jesting scof fer began to play the scof fer indeed, and verily he was good at that …” The climax of  the row came when the friar threatened to invoke the curse of  Elisha against the fool and to excommunicate him. With that, Cardinal Morton intervened, says Hythloday, to end the grotesque little episode. Hythloday apologizes twice for telling this story; and although it has some slight relevance to Hythloday’s major theme and a burlesque-show quality of humor about it, it is not immediately apparent why More includes it. Certain elements in the scene, however—the spiraling invective, the character of contest and performance, of  f lyting, and the threat of a fatal curse—these are the primitive stuf f  from which formal satire developed: the underwood of satire, Dryden called it.xlvii But in addition to genetic sanctions, More had excellent literary precedent. The scene is modeled on Horace’s Satires 1.7, which consists largely of a contest in scurrility between a witty half-Greek trader and a “foul and venomous” Roman. (It is also very like the wit-contest in Satires 1.5 [“The Journey to Brundisium”] between Sarmentus the jester and the buf foon Messius Cicirrus, which so delighted the distinguished characters in the poem—Horace himself, Maecenas, and Virgil.) A marginal note to the Latin text of  Utopia calls attention to More’s use of  the phrase perfusus aceto from Horace’s satire, and thus makes explicit the relation between the two scenes. Horace’s poem ends

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with a pun, More’s episode with the discomfiture of  the foolish friar. His satire is the sharper. Immediately before this scene Hythloday had been engaged (he tells “More” and “Giles”) in a more serious contest with a lawyer at Cardinal Morton’s table. The lawyer praised the rigors of  English justice which loads twenty thieves at a time on one gallows. Hythloday, radically disagreeing, attacked the severity of  the punishment and the social conditions which drive men to theft. A single passage from this dialogue-within-a-dialogue is enough to establish Hythloday’s superb talent as satirist. He speaks: There is another [necessary cause of stealing], which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone. What is that? quoth the cardinal. Forsooth, my lord, quoth I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of  the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of  their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the weal-public, leave no ground for tillage. They enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep-house.xlviii

Here are characteristic devices of  the satirist, dazzlingly exploited: the beast fable compressed into the grotesque metaphor of  the voracious sheep; the reality-destroying language which metamorphoses gentlemen and abbots into earthquakes, and a church into a sheep barn; the irony coldly encompassing the passion of  the scene. Few satirists of any time could improve on this. Hythloday is expert in his role, which means, of course, that More is expert in his. It does not mean that More’s satire and his values are identical with those of  the character he created. The interesting and delicate critical question throughout Utopia is to determine where possible the relation between the two. To what degree does Thomas More share in the negative criticism of  Raphael Hythloday and in the standards of excellence (part B of 

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Hythloday’s satire) which from time to time he voices? The problem seems to be simplified by the fact that More is himself a character—a real character in a real garden—in the dialogue; he argues with Hythloday, agrees with many things he says, disagrees with others, and in general conducts himself in such a way that we inevitably tend to identify “More” with More, the sentiments uttered by “More” in the dialogue in the garden with those actually held by the emissary from London. “For, when, in any dialogue,” writes R.W. Chambers, “More speaks in his own person, he means what he says. Although he gives the other side a fair innings, he leaves us in no doubt as to his own mind.”xlix A great many critics have agreed with Chambers. It is a dangerous assumption. More dealt habitually in irony: Beatus Rhenanus once characterized him as “every inch pure jest,”l and no one in life knew quite how to take him. “But ye use … to loke so sadly when ye mene merely,” More has a friend say in a dialogue, “that many times men doubte whyther ye speke in sporte, when ye mene good ernest.”li To assume that he could not be similarly mercurial in Utopia is unreasonable. Lucian and Horace, appearing as characters in their own dialogues, sometimes come croppers themselves, end up as butts of  their own satire. More’s capacities are similar. I see no way of resolving the cruxes in Utopia which have caused so much controversy except by avoiding a priori judgments and listening to the voices as they speak. In the governing fiction of  Utopia “More” is much taken with his new friend whose eloquence is remarkably persuasive; but on two major matters they disagree, and in book I they argue their respective positions. The points at issue are, first, “More’s” conviction that it is the duty of a philosopher like Hythloday to take service in a prince’s court so that his wise counsel may benefit the commonwealth; and, second, Hythloday’s contention that “where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal-public may justly be governed and prosperously f lourish”—in short, his argument for communism. Neither argument is conclusive in book 1, but for dif ferent reasons. The Dialogue of  Counsel (as J.H. Hexter calls it) is inconclusive because opponents, arguments, and rhetoric are evenly matched.lii In many formal satires the interlocutor is a mere mechanism, set up to launch opinions for the satirist to shoot down. Not so here. “More” invokes Platonic

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doctrine as he urges upon Hythloday his duty to join the court of a king. Hythloday responds by creating hypothetical examples showing the folly of a moral man’s attempting to inf luence the immoral counsels which prevail at European courts. But, says “More,” a sense of decorum is necessary: counsel tempered to the possibilities available, the ability to take a part in the play actually in hand. “You must not forsake the ship in a tempest because you cannot rule and keep down the winds … you must with a crafty wile and a subtle train study and endeavour yourself, as much as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily and handsomely for the purpose; and that which you cannot turn to good, so to order it that it be not very bad. For it is not possible for all things to be well unless all men were good, which I think will not be yet this good many years.” Against the realism of  this, which urges the moral man to work for the limited good possible in a wicked world, Hythloday poses his intransigent idealism: “if  I would speak such things that be true I must needs speak such things; but as for to speak false things, whether that be a philosopher’s part or no I cannot tell, truly it is not my part.” The satirist has always maintained that he must blurt out the truth, whatever the cost.liii Both arguments are coherent, eloquent, persuasive; they meet headon, as they were to meet 150 years later in the confrontation of  Alceste and Philinte in Moliere’s Misanthrope; as they were to meet 450 years later, with total “relevance,” in countless confrontations over the grave political-moral issues of  the 1960s. History provides no certain conclusion to the dialogue. From the text of  Utopia itself it is impossible to say who “wins” in the Dialogue of  Counsel. Not long after writing it, More took service with Henry VIII; possibly he composed the argument as a move in a complex political game; or perhaps we had better think of it, with David Bevington, as a dialogue of  More’s mind with itself.liv In any case, More’s action in life has no necessary bearing on the debate conducted so brilliantly in the hypothetical realm of  his book. The argument over communism is inconclusive in book 1 for a dif ferent reason. Hythloday claims the authority of  Plato when he says that only if all things are held in common can a justly governed and prosperous commonwealth be established. “More” disagrees and in four bare sentences advances the classical objections to communism: it destroys initiative,

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encourages dependence on others and hence sloth, is conducive to sedition, bloodshed, and the destruction of authority. But, responds Hythloday (in the perennially ef fective gambit of utopian fiction), you have not seen Utopia! If you had lived there for five years as I did, “you would grant that you never saw people well ordered but only there.” A good deal of  book 2 is, in ef fect, an answer to “More’s” objections; and in this sense the dialogue continues, to be concluded only at the end of  the tale. Throughout book 1 Raphael Hythloday’s concentration is on those things which, in Erasmus’ words, cause commonwealths to be less well of f  than they should be; this is consistent with his role as satirist. He exposes evil, bares the sources of corruption, as in his Juvenalian outburst against “that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of its native country,” who may enclose thousands of acres of  land, forcing the husbandmen and their families out onto the road, into beggary, theft, thence to the gallows. Hythloday attacks fiercely, but as he opens up one social problem after another he suggests remedies, balancing of f  the negative criticism with positive suggestion. On the enclosure question he exhorts to action: “Cast out these pernicious abominations; make a law that they which plucked down farms and towns of  husbandry shall re-edify them … Suf fer not these rich men to buy up all to engross and forestall, and with their monopoly to keep the market alone as please them. Let … husbandry and tillage be restored … .” In the argument with the lawyer over the treatment of  thieves (“What can they then else do but steal, and then justly pardy be hanged?”), he recommends for England the ways of  the Polylerites, which he describes in detail. Within one frame of reference these are the positives—the norms—of  Hythloday the satirist; and as they seem convincing to “Cardinal Morton,” we have good reason to believe that Thomas More approves. Hythloday realizes, however, that these positives, important as they may be in the circumstances of  the moment, are mere palliatives. In his view, as long as private property exists it will be impossible to remove from “among the most and best part of men the heavy and inevitable burden of poverty and wretchedness.” To be sure, mitigating laws can be passed, and he lists a number of possibilities; but this would be only to “botch up for a time” a desperately sick body; no cure is possible “whiles every man is

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master of  his own to himself.” Hythloday is no man for half measures; his true positive, the standard to which he is passionately committed, is that of  full cure. The necessary condition of cure in his view is community of property. “More,” we know, f latly disagrees, and the burden of proof is left to Hythloday. Book 2 is the statement of  his case. The statement is largely expository and, until the very end, notably undramatic (an unhappy characteristic of most comparable statements, obligatory in subsequent literary utopias). Book 2 is still satiric, as we shall see, but it is as though the normal proportions of satire were here reversed, with part B—the positives—in preponderance. Hythloday makes some pretense of  being objective in his discussion of  the institutions of  Utopia (“we have taken upon us to shew and declare their laws and ordinances, and not to defend them”), but his enthusiasm overwhelms objectivity. Only occasionally does he express any reservation, as when he remarks that the Utopians seem almost too much inclined to the opinions of  those who place the felicity of man in pleasure (but then “pleasure” is scrupulously and favorably defined), or as when he and his fellows laugh at the custom according to which a Utopian wooer and his lady see each other naked before marriage. Although Hythloday finds this a “fond and foolish” practice, the arguments advanced by the Utopians (as reported by Hythloday) are most persuasive, so that the thrust of  the rhetoric in the passage favors the custom, while Hythloday condemns it. This is a clear point at which the norms of  the work itself are not in accord with Hythloday’s standards. His disclaimer works as a double ironic shield for Thomas More: “I am not Hythloday, and besides he is against it; he says so.” Still, Utopia argues for the practice.lv Except for this, however, Hythloday’s tale is of a realm that he finds ideal, where laws, customs, and institutions are designed to foster the good, and to suppress the wickedness, in man. Utopians are not perfect people, but their commonwealth is rationally conducted so that in nearly every point of comparison the Utopian achievement is a reproach to the nations of  Europe. Chambers’s comment is worth repeating: “The underlying thought of  Utopia always is, With nothing save Reason to guide them, the Utopians do this; and yet we Christian Englishmen, we Christian Europeans …! ” In

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this sense the very presentation of  Utopian life has a satiric function in so far as it points up the discrepancy between what is and what ought to be. Hythloday has so much explanation to get through in book 2 that the expository tone necessarily dominates his discourse. Still, that preoccupation does not force him to abandon his role as overt satirist. At times, while discussing the way of  life of  the Utopians he thinks of  Europe and becomes hortatory, as though preaching to an audience rather than addressing “More” or “Giles.” What shall I say, he asks, of misers who hide their gold? “And whiles they take care lest they shall lose it, do lose it indeed. For what is it else, when they hide it in the ground, taking it both from their own use and perchance from all other men’s also? And yet thou, when thou hast hid thy treasure, as one out of all care hoppest for joy” (et tu tamen abstruso thesauro, uelut animi iam securus, laetitia gestis). We are not to think here of  “More” or “Giles” dancing in delight after digging his gold into the ground; the shift in person is to the indefinite “thou” (tu) of an audience “out there.” Passages like these have the feel of medieval complaint, although in the sudden shift of person and the moralistic utterance they are completely in character with many Roman satires: some of  Persius’, for example, or Horace’s Satires 2. 3, 11. 122 f f. which is on exactly the same theme. Hythloday sounds another variation on the satirist’s tone when he speaks of  the extraordinary learning of  the Utopians who, without having heard of  the Greeks, knew all that the Greeks knew of music, logic, and mathematics. “But,” he adds, “as they in all things be almost equal to our old ancient clerks, so our new logicians in subtle inventions have far passed and gone beyond them. For they have not devised one of all those rules of restrictions, amplifications, and suppositions, very wittily invented in the small logicals which here our children in every place do learn.” The voice is suddenly that of  the ingénu, of  Gulliver speaking two hundred years before his time, but with this dif ference: Gulliver would believe what he said, whereas Hythloday is ironic. He can use the technique lightly, as above, or with a bitter, driving, daring intensity. He is explaining that the Utopians do not enter into treaties with their neighbors because treaties are often broken in their part of  the world. It is not so in Europe, says Hythloday: “especially in these parts

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where the faith and religion of  Christ reigneth, the majesty of  leagues is everywhere esteemed holy and inviolable, partly through the justice and goodness of princes, and partly at the reverence and motion of  the head bishops. Which, like as they make no promise themselves but they do very religiously perform the same, so they exhort all princes in any wise to abide by their promises, and them that refuse … they compel thereto. And surely they think well that it might seem a very reproachful thing if, in the leagues of  them which by a peculiar name be called faithful, faith should have no place.” Again, the echoes set up in one’s ears are from a later traveler to Utopia, whose praise of  things European withers what it touches. Gulliver’s predecessor, Hythloday, is using with exemplary skill the ancient rhetorical trick of  blame-by-praise. As Alexander Pope puts it: “A vile encomium doubly ridicules.” This is superb; but the account of  Utopia is enlivened only intermittently by such f lashes—or by sudden bits of internal dialogue, so characteristic of  Roman satire, like that between the mother and child on the sumptuous dress of  the visiting Anemolians. The Utopians seem to be a fairly sober lot, although they are delighted with the works of  Lucian that Hythloday has brought with him, and (like More) they take much pleasure in fools. Their sense of  the satiric is more likely to be expressed in concrete than in verbal ways: they fetter their bondsmen with chains of gold, creating thus an image of  the world. At the end of his discourse, Hythloday marshals his forces for summary and justification. Pulling together the major themes, he turns to “More” with a powerful and eloquent defense of  the Utopian commonwealth (“which alone of good right may take upon it the name”) and of communism (“though no man have anything, yet every man is rich”). From this he moves into outraged criticism of  the ways of  the world in Europe: the pampering of useless gentlemen, “as they call them,” in savage contrast to the inhuman treatment of  “plowmen, colliers, labourers, carters, ironsmiths, and carpenters, without whom no commonwealth can continue”; the codification of injustice into law, which is used to mulct the poor. “Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do f lourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities

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under the name and title of  the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of  losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of  the poor for as little money as may be.” Christ counseled that all things be held in common, and the whole world would have come long ago to the laws of  the Utopians were it not for that “one only beast, the princess and mother of all mischief, Pride.” Hythloday’s tone at the end of  his tale is that of prophet or hero—his final variation on the scale of  tones available to the satirist. It would be idle to look for a source; many satirists and many writers of complaint have sounded the same trumpet: Juvenal, Saint Jerome, Piers Plowman, great medieval preachers like the Dominican John Bromyard.lvi But the heroic note is not the last note sounded. A final paragraph remains, bracketing Hythloday’s peroration, winding up the debate on communism, reasserting by its very form the relation of  Utopia to Roman satire—and, indeed, to a whole body of  literature which distinguishes between exoteric and esoteric teaching. Nothing could be more deft than the way “More” excuses himself  to the reader for not having voiced his objections to some of  the Utopian laws: Hythloday was tired after his long discourse, and, besides, it was not certain he could abide opposition. Before leading his friend into supper, “More” contents himself with praising the Utopian institutions and Hythloday’s account of  them; and in enigmatic comment he admits that while he can not agree with all that has been said, there are many things “in the Utopian weal-public which in our cities I may rather wish for than hope for.” “More” leaves with us, however, a statement of  the reservations which he withheld from Hythloday—reservations about certain laws and institutions of  Utopia founded, in his view, “of no good reason” (the Latin perquam absurde is considerably stronger). Among these are their methods of waging war and their religious customs, but chief ly in his mind is “the principal foundation of all their ordinances,” the “community of  their life and living without any occupying of money.” “More” makes clear the grounds of  his objection: by doing away with money, “the true ornaments [uera … ornamenta] and honours, as the common opinion is, of a commonwealth, utterly be overthrown and destroyed.” What, in “More’s” view,

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are the true ornaments and honors of a commonwealth? They are “nobility, magnificence, worship (splendor), honour, and majesty.” Of course we smile: while this might conceivably be Francis Bacon of  The New Atlantis speaking, it cannot possibly be Thomas More, whose heretical opinions about magnificence are notorious.lvii This is “More,” a persona he has created for complex purposes of  his own—a persona who suddenly adopts the values held dear by “common opinion”: the opinion which believes that nobility, magnificence, and the rest are the true ornaments of a commonwealth. But, as Father Surtz admirably says, “the whole purpose of  Utopia has been to prove that these are not the qualities which should distinguish a commonwealth.”lviii Unless the whole satiric thrust of  Utopia has failed for us (as the thrust of  Hythloday’s discourse has apparently failed for “More”), we must recognize that at this point “More” becomes a gull. The formal situation here is like that sometimes found in Roman satire. “More” is precisely in the case of  “Horace” (Satires 2.3), who, after listening in silence to Damasippus’ long Stoic discourse on the theme, Everyone save the wise man is mad, loses his temper at the end, thus neatly placing himself outside the category of  the sane. “Horace,” like “More,” is undercut by his creator.lix The ef fect of  this in Utopia is complex. In book 1 “More” advanced cogent reasons for opposing the principle of communism advocated by Hythloday. Book 2, though it covers a good deal of ground, is fundamentally an answer to “More’s” objections: Hythloday’s peroration points this up. “More” remains unconvinced, but the reasons he gives, perquam absurde, make no sense. His disclaimer is in ef fect nullified by the comically inef fective way he misses the point.lx Where does this leave us? It leaves Hythloday riding high, his arguments unanswered, his eloquence ringing in our ears. Perhaps we have been deafened a bit—or frightened. Jerome Busleyden wrote that the commonwealth of  Utopia was not only an object of reverence to all nations and “one for all generations to tell of,” but also “an object of  fear to many.” And what of  Thomas More, that man whose imagination pushed at the limits of  the licit, and who wore a hair shirt? I think it very doubtful that we can ever know what he, in his many conf licting roles of philosopher, moralist, religious polemicist, man of great af fairs—what this man “really”

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believed about communism.lxi Of  Thomas More, author of  Utopia, we can speak with confidence. The idea attracted him strongly. If  by nothing else, he makes this plain in the way that, at the climactic point of  the dialogue, he deliberately and unmistakably makes nonsense of  “More’s” disclaimer. The best evidence, of course, is in what he gives to Raphael Hythloday: the powerful criticism rooted in the realities of  England; then the moral fervor and the compelling force of  his eloquence as he argues for the institutions which make Utopia the best of all commonwealths. In a technical sense, “More’s” early objections to communism are never met—how could they be? Hythloday simply points to Utopia and says, Look, it works! But we quickly forget the f limsiness of  this “proof,” if we have ever noticed it, as we are swept along by the passion of a man telling of  the vision he has seen. Utopia argues for the ideal of communism by the best test available: More has given to Raphael Hythloday all the good lines.lxii Thus the shape of  Utopia is finished of f, enigmatically but firmly, in the terms Hythloday provides. This reading of  the work of course conf licts with the interpretations of  Chambers, Father Surtz, and others in certain important respects; but it need not conf lict with that fundamental interpretation of  theirs cited at the beginning of  this essay: “When a SixteenthCentury Catholic depicts a pagan state founded on Reason and Philosophy, he is not depicting his ultimate ideal.” It depends on the focus of interest. If we are more concerned with the historical Thomas More, his beliefs, his values, than we are with Utopia as a thing in itself, then unquestionably we must posit a norm from outside—one barely hinted at in the work. Two standards can be derived from within Utopia itself. The first is on the level of reform within existing institutions: laws to enforce the rebuilding of devasted farms and towns, the restriction of monopoly, provision of work for the idle, limitations on the power of  the rich and the wealth of  the king, and so forth. The second and higher standard is the ideal of  the work itself, so to speak: Utopia, the model commonwealth, the only one worthy of  the name. But if we go outside the Utopia for Thomas More’s ideal, we must think of one far higher yet. Father Surtz cites the appropriate passage. For More, the ultimate ideal would be “the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of  heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2).

CHAPTER 3

Swift’s Utopias

Swift once characterized Sir Thomas More as “a person of  the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced.” Perhaps he had to admire so highly before he could bring himself  to imitate, the unexampled probity af fording a kind of  license. More’s Utopia was a source to which Swift went repeatedly when he was writing Gulliver’s Travels. But if  Swift’s attitude toward the author of Utopia is one of unqualified admiration, his attitude toward the idea of utopia itself is less easily stipulated. It is true that he had the utopian temperament and an itch toward utopian solutions. He once wished that he could write a utopia for heaven, and on occasion, as in the Project for the Advancement of  Religion and the Reformation of  Manners (1709), he was willing to have a go at earth: Among all the schemes of fered to the public in this projecting age, I have observed, with some displeasure, that there have never been any for the improvement of religion and morals: which, besides the piety of  the design from the consequences of such a reformation in a future life, would be the best natural means for advancing the public felicity of  the state, as well as the present happiness of every individual. For, as much as faith and morality are declined among us, I am altogether confident, they might, in a short time, and with no very great trouble, be raised to as high a perfection as numbers are capable of receiving. Indeed, the method is so easy and obvious …

The apparatus for bringing “this great end” about is so repressive, the society envisaged so mean, that readers have been tempted to absolve Swift by invoking an irony that this time is not there. Admittedly, it shakes one to see Swift arguing calmly the advantages of  hypocrisy, recommending that censors rewrite the literature of  the past, advocating the nominal Christianity which, in The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, written at about the same time, he contemptuously exposes—all this and a good deal more in the interests of raising to new heights the levels of public felicity and private

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happiness. But no discernable self-mockery undercuts this authoritarian project: this is what Nicolas Berdyaev calls folie raisonnante, the utopian temperament at work unchecked, allowing the great end to sanction the most objectionable means. In another early essay (Contests and Dissensions … in Athens and Rome, 1701), Swift gravely considers, before rejecting as beyond human power, the most utopian of all possibilities: “Yet some physicians have thought, that if it were practicable to keep the several humours of  the body in an exact equal ballance of each with its opposite, it might be immortal; and so perhaps would be a political body, if  the ballance of power could be always held exactly even. But I doubt, this is as almost impossible in the practice as the other.” If  Swift was a natural utopian, however, he was also a natural skeptic, the seemingly contrary dispositions complementing and controlling each other superbly. Understanding how a man might speculatively prefer the constitution of  “an Utopia of  his own” over that of  his native country, he argues that “the dangers of innovation, the corruptions of mankind, and the frequent impossibility of reducing ideas to practice” would be likely to induce the speculator to join heartily in preserving the present order of  things (Examiner, no. 29). Inevitably, Swift’s satire finds a target in the utopian impulse itself, in this central disposition of  his own character. A passing jibe in The Mechanical Operation of  the Spirit equates utopian commonwealths with other objects of  fanatic devotion such as the philosopher’s stone and ef forts to square the circle; and in Gulliver’s Travels utopianizing in a dozen forms is submitted to the most pitiless scrutiny. Like certain undiscriminating weapons today, the satire sometimes levels far more than its ostensible target, to the puzzlement of  Swift’s readers. This is not, however, what causes the puzzle in Swift’s first published allusion to utopia. The moral geography of  the Ode to Sir William Temple locates virtue in “utopian ground”; Temple is exhorted to go search it out. What ironies, if any, play around this notion, I find it impossible to say. The great test of  Swift’s utopian preoccupations is, of course, Gulliver’s Travels, that salute across the centuries, R.W. Chambers called it, to Thomas More. Both More and Swift lived, as John Traugott says, with utopias in the back of  their heads.lxiii Utopias being the uncertain things they are, however,

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neither man’s vision could have been entirely clear, even to himself. Perhaps because they were unsure of  topography and design (how wide was the river Anyder?), they sent their famous voyagers, Raphael Hythloday and Lemuel Gulliver, to look. Gulliver is a splendid observer, bemused though he is by much of what he sees. No traveler has ever had more experience of utopian modes of  life than he. He explores not one but many utopias, some of  these in such depth that he can report on utopias within utopias, as though he were following the idea back as far as he could trace it. His exploration is conducted from the most various physical, psychological, and moral vantage points, each perspective opening up new and unexpected aspects of  the object of  his scrutiny. By the time he comes to write his memoirs, Gulliver is a true authority, as sure of where he stands and what his experience means to him as is Raphael Hythloday, his great prototype. The question is, of course, what Gulliver’s experience meant to Jonathan Swift. For all his journeying, the most perfect utopia Gulliver writes of is England (unless, that is, one happens to be a horse), his own dear native country. This is the land that he celebrates, sitting in a chair perched on top of a cabinet almost at a level with the king’s face, as he discourses with his Majesty of  Brobdingnag. Gulliver describes a fertile island kingdom governed by a remarkable Parliament. The House of  Peers is composed of men of ancient lineage and noble blood who have been prepared from childhood by the most careful education to assume their responsibilities as counsellors, legislators, judges—as faithful champions of prince and country. These lords are “the ornament and bulwark of  the kingdom, worthy followers of  their most renowned ancestors, whose honour had been the reward of  their virtue, from which their posterity were never once known to degenerate.” Associated with these noble men are bishops, holy persons, Gulliver explains, in whose trust is the care of religion; they are spiritual fathers of  the people, selected by virtue of  the sanctity of  their lives and the depth of  their erudition. The House of  Commons is made up of worthy gentlemen “freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities, and love of  their country, to represent the wisdom of  the whole nation.” Venerable sages preside over courts of  law, their function to protect the innocent and punish the guilty.

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For five audiences, each of several hours’ duration, Gulliver expounds the glories of  this England, this Utopia—this true no-place that has its being, as the king quickly discovers, only in the back of  Gulliver’s head. A society approaching Gulliver’s vision may once have existed, however: “I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable,” says the king, but corruptions have blurred and blotted and erased those lines. Instead of  the virtuous society of  Gulliver’s account, which might have been the product of  that original, the king finds only an infestation of odious vermin: an appalling degeneration. Gulliver delivers his fulsome description of utopian England while he is a sojourner in a land that is itself a utopia—a utopia of an entirely dif ferent order, however, from that of  Gulliver’s creation. Judith Shklar’s recent comment on Brobdingnag seems to me badly misleading: Among the utopias that do not owe anything to classical antiquity at least one deserves mention here: the utopia of pure condemnation. Of  this genre Swift is the unchallenged master … The king of  Brobdingnag, the city of giants, of supermen, that is, notes, after he hears Gulliver’s account of  European civilization, that its natives must be “the most pernicious Race of  little odious Vermin that Nature ever suf fered to crawl upon the Surface of  the Earth.” A comparison of  his utopian supra-human kingdom with those of  Europe could yield no other conclusion.lxiv

Brobdingnag is supra-human only in physical size, not in moral stature or political achievement; it is not an ideal, in the sense of perfect, state—by no means as ideal, for example, as the England Gulliver has pictured. (Nor, for that matter, is More’s Utopia ideal in that sense—Utopia, where adultery is punished by enslavement and recalcitrant slaves are killed like wild beasts.) Brobdingnag has criminals and beggars, people of mean motives and lascivious dispositions; in the past it has been plagued with “the same disease to which the whole race of mankind is subject; the nobility often contending for power, the people for liberty, and the King for absolute dominion.” Brobdingnag has progressed, however; the civil wars arising from these contentions have been brought to an end, and the government now rests securely in the equilibrium of  the three estates. The situation represented here, as a number of scholars have pointed out, is Swift’s version of  the mixed state associated with the classical republicans, a theory of government

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(often confusingly called “Gothic”) going back to Polybius. Swift was thoroughly familiar with the long and complex history of  this mode of government. He is explicit about it in his Contests and Dissensions … in Athens and Rome, and throughout his life he remained convinced that it was the form of government best suited to accommodate and contain the disruptive forces arising from man’s corrupt nature. Thus Brobdingnag does not represent a “supra-human” kingdom in the moral and political sphere, utterly beyond man’s possible achievement, any more than Thomas More’s picture of  Utopia represents “an ideal pattern that invited contemplation and judgment but did not entail any other activity,” as Professor Shklar maintains.lxv Instead of existing as objects of pure contemplation, the institutions of  Utopia and Brobdingnag constitute the positive terms of severe satiric analyses of contemporary society. In both cases the satire is a call to action—sometimes specific political action. What else can Hythloday’s outbursts on enclosure mean? Or the giant King’s savage comments on, say, a mercenary standing army? The institutions of  these “ideal” societies sanction the negative assaults and invite emulation. And if, like “More” at the end of  Utopia, one finds many things in these societies that one may rather hope for than expect to see realized, still that hope is the justification of  the satire. Even Gulliver comes to see the function of  these norms. After his travels, after he has lived the good life with the horses, he allows that the Brobdingnagians are the least corrupted of  Yahoos. England, he says, would do well to emulate their wise maxims in morality and government. In that sense alone Brobdingnag is an ideal society: it represents an ideal to be aimed at, a utopia with practical meaning for man. In chapter 4 of  the “Voyage to Lilliput” Gulliver announces that he has almost ready for the press a full account of  the Lilliputian empire, its history, its laws and institutions, its f lora and fauna, and other curious and useful matters. It is our loss that the book was never published. Nevertheless, in chapter 6 Gulliver anticipates some of  the material of  the projected work: he outlines for us the original utopian institutions of  Lilliput. These institutions are notably highminded (the laws reward good behavior as well as punish bad; society values good morals over great abilities, etc.); they are rigid (education is strictly regulated on class lines; discipline is

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severe), authoritarian (the death sentence is freely pronounced, for ingratitude and fraud, as well as crimes against the state), traditional (they are closely related to those in Plato, More, and others). The institutions are also abstract, presented in a bare, almost tabular form, in contrast to the embodiment of good qualities in the people and practices of  Brobdingnag: a blueprint of principles as opposed to the enactment of wise and humane behavior. Still, they are principles that appealed to the eighteenth century: the Earl of  Orrery found the Lilliputian institutions an improvement on those of  Lycurgus, and, with due allowance for exaggeration, Swift probably approved them himself. The content of  the utopian laws is less interesting, however, than the progeny the laws produced—a society, we recall, that reserves its honors for those who hold out longest in leaping and creeping. This shocking discrepancy between principles and practice has disturbed many readers: Sir Charles Firth speaks of a “curious contradiction,” Professors Case and Quintana of inconsistency. But the contradiction is demonstrative. Swift had always had an ideal of order, absolute and unchanging, as in the most fixed of utopias; but everywhere he looked he saw degeneration and corruption as central facts of  life: the purity of primitive Christianity degenerating into the institutionalized idiocies of  Peter and Jack; the heroes and demigods of  the Roman senate degenerating into the knot of peddlars and pickpockets who made up an assembly closer to home. States are rarely ruined, wrote Swift in Sentiments of a Church of  England Man (1708), “by any defect in their institution, but generally by the corruption of manners, against which the best institution is no long security.” Thus there is no real contradiction in the treatment of  Lilliput, a utopia that has lost its war with time. Given the degenerate nature of man, even the most ideal institutions will produce the corruption of  the court at Belfaborac. We may find some comfort in observing, however, that at about the time when rope dancing was being introduced into Lilliput by the grandfather of  the reigning emperor, the civil wars of  Brobdingnag were being brought to an end by the grandfather of  the king to whom Gulliver talked. The course of  history, apparently, is not entirely one way. In one part of  the Academy of  Lagado Gulliver encounters a reeking experimenter who for years has been trying to reduce human excrement

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to its original food; across the hall he witnesses the operation of a machine that enables an illiterate man to write books in philosophy by turning a crank (William Burroughs’s cut-up, fold-in technique of composition owes something to the academy); but in the school of political projectors Gulliver is saddened to find a group of professors who are out of  their minds: These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of  their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of  teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of  their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimaeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive …

Principles held to be mad in Lagado must represent sanity to us. The proposals of  the visionary professors are actually almost the same (the language is very similar) as the standards by which the king of  Brobdingnag condemns the viciousness of  English ways. What the king believes in and Gulliver here dismisses as impossibly utopian serves again as the positive term of  the satirical attack. This normative theme is complicated by the fact that the entire Academy of  Lagado—that progenitor of negative utopias without number—is itself a “utopian” project, staf fed by men like the universal artist who for thirty years has devoted all his thoughts to the “improvement of  human life.” The only inconvenience is, as Gulliver records, that no grass or corn grows in the fields and women rebel at the splendidly utopian ef fort to make the correspondence theory of  language really work. Against the vision of  the utopian imagination run mad, Swift shows us Lord Munodi, marooned on his splendid estate in the waste of  Balnibarbi, content “to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did in every part of  life without innovation.” Gulliver’s own utopianizing bent finds its freest expression as he speculates on how he would live had he been born a struldbrugg: he would have gathered his brother immortals about him so that they might teach the usefulness of virtue and oppose the inroads of corruption as it steals into the world. So powerful would their inf luence be that they might expect

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to “prevent the continual degeneracy of  human nature”—a utopian ambition of staggering magnitude. Gulliver’s disillusion is in proportion, as he learns the rules of  the hideous game of immortality. Thus Gulliver’s experiences on his third voyage subject him to a good many manifestations of  the utopian spirit: the misapplication of  the intellect in a restive search for the good of man; the retreat to an ideal past where the old forms survive precariously amid compulsive experiment; the “insane” projects of political speculators which accord with the policies and values institutionalized in Brobdingnag; the pleasing vision of immortality become nightmare. After such experience, what hope? Among the Houyhnhnms Gulliver experiences utopia in all its purity and all its power. It is exceptionally pure, a pastoral utopia of great simplicity and asceticism, established on an economic base, as A.L. Morton says, roughly that of  the Neolithic age. The Houyhnhnms have no clothing, do not know the use of metals; they have no words for law or government; they have no history. They lead lives of rational benevolence and ef fortless virtue, enlivened by their interest in poetry and athletics. The experience of a mode of  life wholly rational, virtuous, beautiful is overwhelming for Gulliver; he embraces it with all his capacity, and he rejects his own kind forever. Gulliver has found the ideal for which his travels have prepared him. It is, of course, a curious ideal, and it is most perplexing to try to determine what the ideal is ideal in respect to. Are we to take it that Gulliver’s murderous crew marooned him in a utopia that has the kind of meaning for man that, say, More’s Utopia has, with its concrete suggestions of reform, its model commonwealth not altogether beyond the capacity of man to achieve? Or are we to take it as Socrates tells us to take the Republic: I understand, said Glaucon: you mean this commonwealth we have been founding in the realm of discourse; for I think it exists nowhere on this earth. No, I replied; but perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and, seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part.

This, comments Northrop Frye, “is not a dream to be realized in practice; it is an informing power in the mind.”lxvi Whether any given utopia is to be

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thought of as realizable for man or not depends upon the degree of ideality of  the utopia and upon what one thinks of man’s capacities for good and evil. A function of  the utopia is to put the question: what is man? and what can he become? Professor Ronald S. Crane demonstrated how concretely that question was in Swift’s mind when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels.lxvii Swift’s point of reference was the ancient definition of man that had become a cliché in the textbooks of  logic of  the seventeenth century. As the Dutch logician Burgersdyck expresses it: “Man feels, a Plant not: but a Horse also feels, and likewise other Beasts. Divide we therefore Animate Corporeal Feeling Substance into Rational and Irrational. Here therefore are we to stand, since it appears that every, and only Man is Rational.” Or, as a great many others say it less painfully: Homo est animal rationale. Swift tests the definition in a thoroughly characteristic way, breaking it down into its constituent parts, submitting each part to intense pressure. “I … demand the liberty,” he once wrote, “of putting the case as strongly as I please.” His superb literalizing imagination loads the phrase animal rationale with as much meaning as it will bear. For the term animal he presents the quintessential representative of  the class—as Crane shows, the representative used repeatedly by logicians to point up the contrast between animal and homo: the horse, the brute characterized by the facultas hinniendi. What horses, in Swift’s hands, they are! For the term rationale he presents reason pure and uncorrupted, a faculty that does not allow of opinions or disputes, but leads immediately to certitude. By this faculty the Houyhnhnms are wholly governed and from this faculty derives the unembattled moral tenor of  their lives. Here, in an unscrupulously concrete representation, is the animal rationale, with each whinny refuting the logicians’ definition of man. A good many alternate definitions are of fered in Gulliver’s Travels, all strikingly similar to each other, all supported by an appalling amount of evidence. The good King of  Brobdingnag defines man as an odious vermin. The Houyhnhnms define him as a Yahoo endowed with enough reason to make him more vicious, more dangerous, more contemptible than the brutes of  their own land. Gulliver’s definition is in complete accord: “When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or human race

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in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition, only a little more civilized, and qualified with the gift of speech, but making no other use of reason than to improve and multiply those vices whereof  their brethren in this country had only the share that nature allotted to them.” Even the Yahoos add their own inarticulate definition when a blackhaired female nearly rapes the hapless Gulliver. To say that Gulliver’s Travels as a whole defines man in these absolute terms, however, would be an oversimplification. Clearly it makes a black joke of  homo est animal rationale; but at the same time it subverts the alternate formula, man is a Yahoo, by presenting concrete evidence about man that the formula cannot accommodate. Glumdalclitch, the giant king, Don Pedro de Mendez, even the long-suf fering Mrs. Lemuel Gulliver—these people are not vermin, they are not filthy brutes, they do not use their reason only to multiply their vices. On the contrary, by their actions, by the quality of  their lives, the saving remnant calls into question the adequacy of  the several definitions which degrade man below the level of  beasts. Despite the multiplication of such definitions in Gulliver’s Travels, the work itself makes the definition of man problematic. “I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it should only be rationis capax.” Thus Swift’s own definition, written just after he had finished the Travels, in the famous letter to Pope. The treatise unmistakably makes its point: man is certainly not animal rationale in the sense conveyed by the portrayal of  the Houyhnhnms. But then not even “Dutch Burgersdyck” (the name Pope would give to a horse, incidentally, in Dunciad 4) would have supposed he is. Swift is attacking the persistent fallacy which holds that because man is a rational animal, his “real essence,” to use Locke’s terminology, is to be found in the quality dif ferentiating him from other animals: the fallacy that says, man is, essentially, that identifying quality—the fallacy demonstrated by Westminster’s Dr. Busby (again in Dunciad 4): Since man from beast by words is known, Words are man’s province, words we teach alone.

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Instead, Swift maintains, man is an animal possessed of  the faculty of reason; he is rationis capax—capable of rational behavior (as with the king of  Brobdingnag or Don Pedro), but also capable of using reason for the most vicious ends. The probability is overwhelming, Swift knew, that man will use it in the latter way. Swift’s conviction derives from another element in his definition: the belief, given by his religion, confirmed by his experience, testified to by the whole body of  his work, that man has a corrupt nature. Reason is a noble faculty in itself, but exercised in the service of a corrupt will it produces the most disastrous consequences. We are taught “by the tritest maxim in the world,” wrote Swift in the Apology to A Tale of a Tub, “that Religion being the best of  things, its corruptions are likely to be the worst.” The same principle applies to reason, as Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master warned: “he dreaded lest the corruption of  that faculty might be worse than brutality itself.” Corruptio optimi pessima—no theme is more persistent in Swift’s career; it derives its peculiar force from his conviction that man—rationis capax—is a fallen and corrupt creature. Intimations appear in his work, however (as in Gulliver’s experience of  the past in Glubbdubdrib), that by some dispensation a few men may achieve a qualified virtue, a few societies may attain some measure of grandeur and felicity.lxviii They are objects of wonder, running counter, as they do, to a life based on degeneration; victories over the corruption of  the world are bound to be rare, precarious, and shortlived. Lilliput stands as a paradigm case: despite its ideal institutions, the nation has become infamously corrupt because of  “the degenerate nature of man.”lxix Swift’s definition of man measures the degree to which the moral utopia of  Houyhnhnmland is available as a model to human beings, in the sense that More’s Utopia is available. To be sure, Houyhnhnmland has a good many features in common with other utopian communities. The Houyhnhnms have fairly standard utopian ideas about property, for example—all creatures, they feel, are entitled to their share in the produce of  the earth. They have as keen an interest in eugenics as have the citizens of  the Republic or of  Campanella’s City of  the Sun: the Solarians mate large beautiful women with large aggressive men, lean women with fat men, and so on; the Houyhnhnms mate, within a rigidly limited color range, rugged females with comely males, so as to produce the most valued racial

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characteristics. They practice strict monogamy and strict birth control. When any family has more than the requisite number of children, it follows the custom of  More’s Utopians and passes the excess onto a family deficient in progeny. In these respects and in others Houyhnhnmland resembles the best-known ideal communities—above all, of course, in the fact that it is a “good place.” It is precisely the special character of its goodness, however, that sets Houyhnhnmland markedly apart from other nations of its kind. Most utopias recognize the power of evil in man, even when they do not accept a doctrine of  his total corruption. Robert Burton, working out the “Utopia of mine own” in the Anatomy of  Melancholy, writes: “If it were possible, I would have such priests as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers as should love their neighbors as themselves, temperate and modest physicians …” But, says Burton, “we converse here with men, not with gods,” and proceeds to elaborate a set of sternly repressive regulations.lxx Although many utopias are less rigid than Burton’s, their method is the same: in order to achieve the good life, they rely upon education, upon carefully worked out laws strictly enforced, upon institutions conceived in such a way as to encourage man’s potentialities for good and to mitigate his potentialities for evil. Nearly always, that is, a parameter in the problem of designing a utopia is the knowledge that man can be very wicked indeed. The Houyhnhnms, who cannot conceive of what is evil in a rational creature, who find it unnecessary to struggle to achieve virtue, have not the human curse to cope with. Their utopia is given, like the Golden Age; it is not created in terms applicable to the human condition. To be sure, there is a principle of corruption in Houyhnhnmland—the Yahoos are the very embodiment of corruption—but they embody the corruption completely. The Yahoos cannot taint the Houyhnhnms, to whom they are neither threat nor temptation. Without an internal source of degeneration, and with the assumption that no more Englishmen violate their seclusion, the utopia of  the Houyhnhnms will presumably endure forever. The distance between this ideal and the reality of man as Swift knew him is quite unbridgeable. Gulliver tries, and ends up, back in England, talking to horses. Perhaps it was from the stable that Gulliver wrote to Captain Sympson, complaining of  those readers of  his travels who hinted that “the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of 

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Utopia.” In a sense they have even less existence: the Houyhnhnms (if not the Yahoos) are a good deal more remote from man and his possibilities than are the people of  More’s imaginary land—more remote even than inhabitants of  the Republic, the only commonwealth, Socrates warned, in whose politics the enlightened man can ever take part. But the Houyhnhnms have no politics. Both Raphael Hythloday and Gulliver long to live in the lands they have discovered. By the ironic twist at the end of  Utopia More indicates that, for his voyager, he would approve—and Peter Giles thinks that Hythloday may be on his way back to the place he loves. Utopia is a long way from Houyhnhnmland, however; and Swift, whose moral realism Ricardo Quintana celebrated years ago, had little use for Gulliver’s aspirations. The purity of  the horses is preternatural—ideal in some sense, surely, but not as a model for man. Despite his own utopian predispositions, Swift was not of  the Houyhnhnm party; he was not a designer of ideal societies which require the wholesale remaking of man. As a satirist willing to bring his own folie raisonnante to the test of  his own ridicule, he could not be that type of utopian. In a way, Swift was a Popperian before Professor Popper, shunning the grandiose social blueprint, cutting away at gross and corrigble evils; hence the predominance of satire in his most utopian work. No, Swift was not of  the Houyhnhnm party: a utopian without illusions, he hoped that man could live in Brobdingnag.

CHAPTER 4

Hawthorne and Utopia: The Blithedale Romance

Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance is, of course, not a utopia in any strict sense; it does not belong to the genre at the center of which are works like More’s Utopia, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris’s News From Nowhere. On the other hand, The Blithedale Romance is related in the most interesting way to actual utopian experiments in history—Brook Farm, specifically— and it dramatizes certain problematic questions about utopia that have had major consequences for the twentieth century. Thus the relationship of  Blithedale to the generic problems with which we are concerned has seemed to me significant enough to justify a close look at Hawthorne’s romance. Miles Coverdale projects the romance of  Blithedale into the future one summer day, as he and Hollingsworth lift stones into place to repair a wall. In a century or two, he says to his silent companion, Zenobia, Priscilla, Hollingsworth, and he will be mythic characters; legends will have grown up about them, and they will figure heroically in an epic poem. But to Hollingsworth feckless speculations like these are infuriating; the utopian project at Blithedale is, in his view, a wretched, insubstantial scheme, impossible of realization and worthless if possible. “It has given you a theme for poetry,” he growls at Coverdale. “Let that content you.” It is a question whether Hawthorne’s experience at Brook Farm brought him more, although he boasted, according to Emerson, of  having lived in the utopian community during its heroic age. He was there, on his own explanation, to find a way of supporting a wife, but he was there against the grain. A shy, solitary man, Hawthorne was always cool to reform movements, always skeptical of  the possibility of progress. Still, impelled by whatever unaccountable enthusiasm, he left Boston for Brook Farm in April 1841 and arrived (like his fictional counterpart at Blithedale) in a snowstorm: “Here I am in a polar Paradise!” he wrote to his fiancée Sophia

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Peabody. He labored manfully, though with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm, in the “gold-mine”—that is, the manure pile—and in the fields; and, predictably, he became disaf fected. The proposed union between intellectual and manual labor turned out to be less natural than had been hoped. Brook Farm proved, said Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia’s bluestocking sister, that “gentlemen, if  they will work as many hours as boors, will succeed even better in cultivating a farm.” Hawthorne was more interested in the harsher lesson on the other side of  the coin: “a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dungheap, or in a furrow of  the field, just as well as in a pile of money.” Hawthorne left Brook Farm before the end of  the year; what it was he sought there he had not found. But he had been given a theme for poetry. True, Hawthorne denied it, claiming that he had from Brook Farm not a theme but a theater where the creatures of  his imagination could play out their “phantasmagorical antics.” It was no part of  his purpose, he said, to deal in his fiction with his former associates of  the socialist community or to make any judgment with respect to socialism itself. Brook Farm of fered itself as the setting for his romance because it was the closest analogue he could find to the poetic and fairy precincts, shadowed and obscure, so abundantly available to Old World romancers, so lamentably lacking in the sunshine of  America. He chose Brook Farm because, in a special sense, it was unreal. His own experience there had been unreal even at the time he was living it. “It already looks like a dream behind me,” he writes to Sophia Peabody during a fortnight’s vacation from the rigors of  farm work. His life at Brook Farm is, he says, an “unnatural … and therefore an unreal one.” Ten years later the experience has been transmuted into the most romantic episode of  his career: “essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact—and thus of fering an available foothold between fiction and reality.” In short, an American setting for romance. Critics argue that the American genius for fiction has expressed itself most characteristically and most brilliantly in the romance, with its infusion of  the mysterious, rather than in the novel proper, with its sturdy grounding in the actual, the solid, the real. Given Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, we would be churlish to complain. Many readers of  The Blithedale Romance have wished, however, that in this instance the allurements of  the

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mysterious had given way in Hawthorne’s mind to a concern for the actual; we would gladly trade veiled ladies and handsome villains with false teeth and snake-headed canes for a Flemish portrait of  Brook Farm. Admittedly, the book has aroused a good deal of speculation about whether it is in fact a roman à clef, and some members of  Brook Farm felt that Hawthorne’s portrayal had done them injustice; but in truth so little of  the actuality of  Brook Farm appears in the work that, as Henry James said, the complaining brethren had more reason to feel slighted than misrepresented. Hawthorne’s refusal as an artist to confront the political and psychological issues posed by Brook Farm is one of a series of evasions that make The Blithedale Romance tantalizing, slippery, finally unsatisfactory as a work of art. His choice of  the setting at Brook Farm necessarily entailed legitimate expectations from readers. This is a matter of  history and fact, not of  literary device. Brook Farm was famous even in its failure; interest was high in the social theory by which it had operated and in the great personalities who had been attracted to it. When The Blithedale Romance appeared (five years after the final break-up of  the Association), many people concluded immediately that Zenobia’s character was modelled upon that of  Margaret Fuller, whose close association with Brook Farm (although she was not a member) was widely known. Miss Fuller’s tragic death—like Zenobia’s, by drowning—two years before Blithedale’s publication was a significant link in the identification and revived interest in Brook Farm itself. Most important, Hawthorne had been there—a witness and a participant in an episode that was real in American history, if not in his own imagination. Given these special circumstances, the setting of  his book created its own demands; it cried out for detailed, novelistic treatment: for description and solidity of specification and judgment as the novelist appropriately renders these. But Hawthorne evaded such claims by his choice of  form, which precluded, he said, “the actual events of real lives,” as well as a moral or political judgment of socialism. He wanted it both ways at once—the romance of  Brook Farm without the commitment that evaluation would have entailed. The evasion provoked some readers to indignation. Would he have refused judgment similarly if  his setting had been a picturesque slave plantation? demanded George Eliot.lxxi

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Despite Hawthorne’s disclaimers, judgment of  the utopian experiment at Blithedale does of course emanate from the book—not, however, the kind of judgment that comes from intense scrutiny of  the workings of  the community: its hopes, tensions, follies, achievements, failures. We see almost nothing of  this. Judgment comes instead from scattered comments, mostly unfavorable, of  two or three principal characters and from the pervading tone of  the work, which is imparted by the narrator, by Miles Coverdale, minor poet, voyeur extraordinaire, assiduous parrot of  Hawthorne’s journals, dubious spokesman for his creator. Coverdale’s relations with Blithedale are most complex. One is never sure, for example, why he made the initial plunge: why he puf fed out the final whif f of cigar smoke and left his bachelor rooms in Boston—the fire burning in the grate, the closet stocked with champagne and claret—to sally out, as he puts it, “into the heart of  the pitiless snowstorm, in quest of a better life.” The gesture is generous, idealistic, self-revealing, and Coverdale hastens to clothe himself in irony. He speaks with mock grandiloquence of  his own “heroism,” of  “the mighty hearts” of  his companions and himself, which barely had throbbing room in the narrow streets of  Boston, of  their task: “the reformation of  the world.” The mannered hyperbole belittles both the speaker and the enterprise on which he is launched. It is a consistent tone. From the beginning Miles Coverdale has doubts about the legitimacy of  the Blithedale venture. His first meeting with Zenobia, that magnificent woman, throws everything else out of  focus: her mere presence at Blithedale, her insistent reality, caused the Arcadian enterprise to seem a sham. Occasionally Coverdale takes a positive stance, as in his fine climactic scene with Hollingsworth where he speaks fervently of  “this fair system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now beginning to f lourish so hopefully around us. How beautiful it is, and, as far as we can yet see, how practicable!” But more characteristically Coverdale laughs aloud in mocking recognition of  the ridiculousness of  their utopian scheme. Like Hawthorne with Brook Farm, Coverdale can doubt the reality of  the whole experience. A few days away from the farm and it all comes to seem “dream work and enchantment” to him. The lofty aims and fine assurances of  the first few days have evaporated; what remains in his mind is the deadening reality of  hard work.

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In his most ambitious moments of assessment, years after the experience, Coverdale makes explicit the duality of  his feeling toward Blithedale. The enterprise was folly, he muses, but admirable folly. It was a vision, impossible of achievement but worthy to be followed. It was generous, but fully as absurd as generous. Coverdale had toyed with utopia and seen it fail; and like a middle-aged American of  the 1960s, looking back on a rash plunge into political experience in the thirties, he is proud that he once had the idealism to be misled. Coverdale’s ambivalence toward Blithedale is a favorable judgment compared to other evaluations. Hollingsworth is contemptuous of  the project from the beginning, seeing it as a miserably frivolous thing compared to his own scheme for reforming criminals. Zenobia at first takes something of  Coverdale’s tone as she plays with self-conscious irony on the notion that they are reconstituting Paradise. But at the end, after her fortune is presumed gone and Hollingsworth has thrust her aside for Priscilla, her condemnation is bitter: “I am weary of  this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery, in our ef fort to establish the one true system.” Even Westervelt adds his variation on the theme as he ridicules the inhabitants of  this latter-day Forest of  Arden. Thus every major character in the book (except Priscilla) contributes to the notion that life at Blithedale is mock-life, artificial, insubstantial. As in the masquerade scene, everything is “put on” for the pastoral occasion; and the pastoral is the most studiedly artificial of genres. Miles Coverdale, who confesses to having a decided tendency toward the actual, finds himself getting so far out of reckoning with the real that he has to leave Blithedale to get his moorings once more. For reality Coverdale goes to Boston. An odd twist shows here. The very quality of  life which made Brook Farm available to Hawthorne as the setting for his romance constitutes, in the mouths of  his characters, a criticism of  the socialist experiment at Blithedale. This critique may be summed up by citing Coverdale’s harsh comment on the manner Zenobia chose for her death: her drowning had “some tint of  the Arcadian af fectation that had been visible enough in all our lives, for a few months past.”

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Here, singly and in sum, is judgment in plenty on Blithedale; and no voice is raised in opposition. Is it Hawthorne’s judgment? Given the operative conventions of  fiction, of course it is not. Furthermore, many of  the negative criticisms have the most dubious bearing on the utopian experiment. Any remark of  Westervelt, for example, can be immediately dismissed because he is the devil, or a very near relative. Hollingsworth is a monomaniac, incapable of seeing beyond his own incredible scheme for criminal rehabilitation; his opinions of  Blithedale lack cogency in proportion as he lacks balance. Zenobia’s denunciation of  the “mock-life” of  Blithedale tells heavily against the community, but as criticism it is not earned by the experience depicted in the book. Zenobia is sick to death, not of  the socialist experiment, but of  the perversity of a New England blacksmith who could choose the debile and childlike Priscilla over her own opulent self. Psychologically plausible as it is, Zenobia’s outburst reveals far more of  her own sickness than any of  Blithedale’s. “Take the moral of  Zenobia’s history,” writes George Eliot, “and you will find that Socialism is apparently made responsible for consequences which it utterly condemned.” George Eliot overstates, but in a way that the economy of  the book abets. Miles Coverdale is the only character in the romance whose judgment of  Blithedale bears directly and with relevance on the kind of experience Hawthorne had lived at Brook Farm. Coverdale is ambivalent, as we have seen, proud at one moment to be on the point of progress as it thrusts out into chaos, shrewdly skeptical the next as (like Friedrich Engels) he ref lects on the anomalous position of a utopian community forced to compete for livelihood with the world it has rejected. This is practical criticism, however, not moral judgment. A condition of moral judgment— if it is to carry weight—is that we have full confidence in the judge; in his character and sensitivity as well as his wisdom, in his human sympathy. Coverdale is not a man to inspire such confidence. True, his frank characterization of himself allows his charm and intelligence to come through; and his very frankness in revealing his own failures of character predisposes us to sympathy toward him. This is one of a number of seductive consequences following upon our being exposed to a sustained “inside view” narrative. But sympathy falters when Coverdale tells us of  the “cold tendency” which makes him pry into other people’s passions—a tendency, he says, that has helped unhumanize

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his heart. He shows us himself in a series of scenes as a compulsive Peeping Tom (he even dreams of peeping); we see him being sadistically cruel to Priscilla, malevolent to Zenobia, bitterly revengeful toward Hollingsworth. What are we to make of a man who, looking back over the avowed emptiness of  his life, searches his mind for a cause worth dying for and finds one, in these terms: “If  Kossuth … would pitch the battlefield of  Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conf lict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.” Somewhere Coverdale refers to the “customary levity” of  his speech; the phrase characterizes precisely the tone of  his moral life. He is not one—Hawthorne will not let him be one—whose judgment of  the utopian experiment at Blithedale can command assent. Thus, although there are many judgments of  Blithedale in the book, none of  them—singly or in combination—can be said to represent Hawthorne’s own final and reliable judgment; in this sense his disclaimer in the preface is justified. One must feel that this is a major weakness of  the work—the weakness that Henry James was touching upon, I think, when, with his eye upon opportunities lost, he complained that Hawthorne was not a satirist. “There is no satire whatever in the Romance,” he lamented; “the quality is almost conspicuous by its absence.”lxxii This is not entirely accurate. Zenobia sometimes functions as a satirist; she spins a fine satirical fantasy on Coverdale turned country bumpkin, for example—the fantasy a sharp critique of  the sentimentality of  Blithedale values. Westervelt, that implausible villain, draws a deft satirical portrait of  Hollingsworth and is so overcome with delight at his accomplishment that he bursts into metallic laughter, disclosing thereby the brilliant sham of  his dental arrangements. Even Miles Coverdale demonstrates an occasional feeling for the tone of satire, as when he decides (mistakenly) that Hollingsworth is, after all, a philanthropic man—“not that steel engine of  the devil’s contrivance, a philanthropist!” All this is quite incidental though and does not af fect the validity of  James’s point. What is wanted at the heart of  the book is the stringency of  the satiric view. The dif ficulty is bound up in the conception of  Miles Coverdale, a narrator whose self-protecting irony enables him to avoid taking a rigorous

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stand on anything. The most common rhetorical pattern in Coverdale’s musings throughout the book consists in a statement of judgment or conclusion—this followed immediately by a new sentence beginning with “But … ,” which retracts or qualifies or blurs what has just been stated. Coverdale is the classically uncommitted man; he could hardly have been a satirist any more than he could have been a single-minded utopian. The Blithedale Romance puts a critical problem very like that encountered in More’s Utopia and in Gulliver’s Travels: what is the relation between the author of  the work and the character the author created to tell of utopia? If we look at The Blithedale Romance with a post-Jamesian eye, it is possible to think of  Miles Coverdale as an “unreliable narrator,” in Wayne Booth’s terms, with Hawthorne standing in a critically ironic relation to him. Hawthorne, after all, is the one who makes Coverdale display himself as a deplorably inadequate human being. “I have made but a poor and dim figure in my own narrative,” Coverdale writes at the end. At times, Hawthorne seems to be laughing at his alter ego. In the grotesque voyeur scene in Boston, for example, Coverdale has been caught out by Westervelt and Zenobia as he peeps into their window across the street. Zenobia, hurling a glance of scorn, drops a window curtain between them. The speed with which Coverdale rationalizes his outrageous behavior can be nothing short of comic: “I had a keen, revengeful sense of  the insult inf licted by Zenobia’s scornful recognition, and more particularly by her letting down the curtain; as if such were the proper barrier to be interposed between a character like hers and a perceptive faculty like mine.” The play on words here is amusing and pointed (Coverdale is consistently proud of  his delicate intuitions but relies overmuch on his excellent eyesight); it reinforces our momentary sense that Hawthorne may be mocking his narrator, and for a moment we feel we are in a work like Mary McCarthy’s Oasis, where Coverdale would be perfectly at home. When we look for further evidence of  this kind, however, evidence developed at all systematically, we of course do not find it. So little ironic remove is there between Hawthorne and Coverdale that we are forced to think of  the play on “perceptive faculty” as either unintentional or an isolated, and therefore incoherent, f lash of wit. If  Hawthorne deliberately created Coverdale as an unreliable narrator (and in some sense he

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unquestionably did so create him), he provided almost no clues by which the reader could redress the unreliability.lxxiii He is no more a satirist with respect to Coverdale than Coverdale is a satirist with respect to the utopia he left. Neither Blithedale nor the man who tells of  Blithedale is finally placed in the moral (which is to say, the fictive) structure of  the book. This is a limitation sanctioned only superficially by the form Hawthorne chose; the true limitation, we must feel, is in the romancer, not the romance. A radical incoherence exists at the heart of  The Blithedale Romance: the Veiled Lady-Fauntleroy-Westervelt business has no meaningful relationship with the thematic interests of  the work, nor do these interests reveal themselves in notable harmony. It occurs to me that the harmony was available, implicit in the experience described, but that Hawthorne failed finally to achieve it because, like Coverdale, he remained a witness and refused the role of judge. Or, if  this is overstated, at least Hawthorne refused to push his judgment to a point at which he would have been able to unify the ideological materials with which he worked. Of course certain morals are drawn in the clearest terms. Zenobia is a figure straight out of  homiletic literature, out of  Juvenal, say, or The Vanity of  Human Wishes. All that makes her the superb woman she is—her vitality, her intelligence, her radiant sexuality—all that sets her apart as a figure of  heroic drama, conspires to her ruin. She is what she is because she lives “out of  the beaten track”; and it is this, she says, drawing her own bitter moral, that pulls the universe down upon her. Hollingsworth’s career is even more clearly an exemplum; the analysis of  his character is relentless as we are made to see into what makes this gifted man move, as we watch him, impelled by noble motives, become dehumanized under the pressure of  the idée fixe that rules him. Men like Hollingsworth, remarks Coverdale, are not motivated so much as incorporated by their single principle. “And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.” As self-consecrated high priests, they will sacrifice whatever is most precious before their idol, in whose features they see only benignity and love. Hollingsworth’s own soul is doomed to be corrupted, Coverdale sees, by the overweening

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purpose which had grown out of what was noblest in him. The shape of  the corruption is delineated by Zenobia as at the end she sees the man she has loved for what he is. “Are you a man? No; but a monster! A cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism!” Hawthorne’s theme is as old as Aristotle—the same one we saw in Swift: corruptio optimi pessima. Blithedale itself might have been encompassed by the same moral referents had Hawthorne chosen to show us, in concrete terms, the community recapitulating in large the progress of its most powerful member. The theme is broached, as a matter of  fact, although in fairly abstract terms. We know that the community of  Blithedale originates out of  the most generous motives, that it is dedicated to the loftiest aims, and that it falls victim to corruption generated out of its own virtues. Blithedale failed, and deserved to fail, says Coverdale in retrospect, because it lapsed into Fourierism. (Three years after Hawthorne left Brook Farm, the members announced of ficially that they gave unqualified assent to the principles of  Fourier and proposed to organize themselves into a “perfect Phalanx,” with, presumably, the total systematization of  life in the interests of happiness that implied.) Coverdale’s remark recalls an earlier scene. During his convalescence at Blithedale he read widely in Fourier, ploughing through the eccentric volumes because he recognized an analogy between Fourier’s system and their own, opposed as their respective principles might be. Coverdale explains parts of  Fourier’s system to Hollingsworth and translates some of  the more egregious passages for his benefit. They take particular delight in Fourier’s famous prophecy that in the fullness of progress the ocean shall be transformed into lemonade. Both men are contemptuous of  Fourier’s principles and his grandiose plans: he has, says Coverdale, “searched out and discovered the whole counsel of  the Almighty, in respect to mankind, past, present, and for exactly seventy thousand years to come by the mere force of  his individual intellect!” Hollingsworth is outraged that Fourier should choose man’s selfishness as the motive force for his system. “To seize upon and foster whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial and abominable corruptions have cankered into our nature, to be the ef ficient instruments of  his infernal regeneration!” The devil himself could contrive no worse. “And his consummated Paradise, as he pictures it, would be worthy of  the agency which he counts upon for establishing it.”

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How remarkable Hawthorne’s prescience is!—his sensitivity to the signals that issues of  the future send out before them. Here we have two men, members of a utopian community, discussing the corruption of  the utopian principle, seeing that in the absolutism of  Fourier’s vision, however humane and nonrestrictive it may seem, lies the potentiality of a utopian hell. Coverdale’s reference to the awful truth in Pilgrim’s Progress— “from the very gate of  heaven there is a by-way to the pit” —is made with Hollingsworth in mind; but its application in this context is exact. Hawthorne is on the verge of one of  the twentieth century’s most compulsive themes, the fear of utopia. He touches on issues which were to be worked out fully by Dostoevski (in The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov), Zamyatin, Huxley, Neil Gunn (in the neglected Green Isle of  the Great Deep)—issues which are central to the crisis in ideology of our day. Corruptio optimi pessima sums it up well enough. Remarkable as Hawthorne’s insight is, however, we must not claim for him too much. The discussion of utopianism is brief and abstract. In only the most casual way is it made to bear on Blithedale: the community fell into Fourierism, says Coverdale years after the event, and deservedly failed. We are not allowed to see that failure: how it was and what it meant. Coverdale’s remark has a factual bearing only; it is not the statement of a novelist.lxxiv In his fine essay on The Blithedale Romance Irving Howe speaks of  the temptation to write about the book it might have been rather than the book it is.lxxv I am conscious of  having succumbed to that temptation— an arrogant procedure perhaps, but not entirely gratuitous. Hawthorne chose to write a romance, which in this instance entailed “phantasmagoric antics,” “Sybilline attributes,” satanic stigmata. Such materials, with their vague intimations of allegorical significance, could not have been of great interest even to a receptive nineteenth-century audience; they are of no possible interest today. Hawthorne also chose his setting, which for historical reasons was bound to be interesting and to generate its own demands; perhaps inadvertently he found himself in the dilemma of  the historical novelist, where “background” takes on independent life and moves to the fore, disrupting the normal relation of  figure to ground. In any event, his setting could be successfully rendered only in proportion as he was willing

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to introduce “reality” into its presentation—the kind of reality that Miles Coverdale discovers in a picture in a Boston saloon, and rejects. Coverdale, we recall, once toyed with the fancy that he might figure as a hero in the future epic poem celebrating Blithedale. A poet himself, it would never have occurred to him that he might write that poem. Zenobia, who sees the whole af fair as a tragedy, accuses him of  trivializing it, of  turning it into a ballad. When she suggests a moral for his poem, he wants to soften it. The ballad, one fears, will be sentimental. Hawthorne’s situation once again runs parallel to that of  the poet he created. He was by no means the man by conviction or temperament to write the epic of  Brook Farm. Nor was he prepared to write a novel (to say nothing of a satirical novel) grounded in range and depth in his own experience of  the attempt to establish a utopia; to do this would have required that he commit himself, that he judge what he had lived in a way that he was unwilling to undertake. His choice of romance as the form to incorporate his material gave him at least superficial justification for evading these issues. The aesthetic choice was at the same time a moral choice. It is impossible not to wish that he had chosen dif ferently.

CHAPTER 5

The Fear of  Utopia

“ ‘Utopia,’ ” a writer in Encounter announced a few years ago, “has become a bad word.” As if  to prove his point, the bad word was worked hard when in the summer of 1961 the Soviet Union published a statement of  the new program by which it proposed to bring communism to the Russian people within this generation. Scores of  Western writers used the term “utopian” to belabor Mr. Khrushchev’s vision, not only as something remote and unattainable—Le Monde’s story carried the sardonic headline “La Promesse de l’age d’or”—but as something evil. Utopia, as we have seen, has always in some sense been related to satire, and Marx used the word as a bludgeon; but the generally unpleasant associations investing the term today are relatively new. Although one would need a very large computer to plot in detail the course of  “utopia’s” fall from grace, the evidence of  literature is adequate to provide an outline of  the descent. By and large usage has been faithful to Thomas More’s punning coinage: the play on the Greek ou topos: no place, and eu topos: good place. The two senses—the one associated with escape into the timeless fantasies of  the imagination, the other with the ef fort to construct models of  the ideal society, whether in fiction or otherwise— are inextricably bound up in our use of  the term today. But if  More coined the word, he was by no means the first to give form to man’s longing for a good society. Behind utopia lies the myth of  the Golden Age. We might say that the technological abundance of  Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is an analogue of  the rivers of wine in the Land of  Cockaigne. The dif ference of course is that the rivers of wine represent longing; the free goods in the warehouses of  Bellamy’s Boston—or of  the Moscow of 1990—represent possibility. By the nineteenth century Western man’s fantastically successful command over Nature by means of science and his

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faith in the inevitability of progress made it seem that utopia—the good society, the good life for man—was a necessary consequence of present historical processes. The presses groaned under the weight of projects. “We were all a little mad that winter,” wrote Emerson, recalling the year 1840. “Not a man of us that did not have a plan for some new Utopia in his pocket.” Despite harrowing anxieties which underlay much of the speculation, life seemed to move inexorably toward a new Golden Age. Consider H.G. Wells. After the cosmic gloom of some of  the early romances, he issued a f lood of utopian speculations founded on the assumption shared by leaders of  the Soviet Union and most social scientists: by analyzing scientifically the processes of  the present, man can bring the conditions of  the future within the range of  his knowledge, so that he can control the form of  that future. The Shape of  Things to Come can be known, and altered for the better. Wells’s optimism burgeoned out of control, and history, in revenge, has made him seem a pathetic figure. His last book, written in 1945, was called Mind at the End of  Its Tether. Here in a sad little postscript to his life he commits the bulk of  his work to the laboratory sink: “The attempt to trace a pattern of any sort is absolutely futile,” he writes. It is a bitter irony and a measure of the appalling distance that separates Wells’s world from our own that his despairing recognition of  futility of fers the only hope available to a good many Western intellectuals today. If we could see the shape of  things to come, say some existentialists, we would cut our throats. Only our historical ignorance prevents total despair; because the future is impenetrable, writes Gabriel Marcel, we can still place a wager on it and so keep going. As for utopia, it is a bad word. The simplest historical comparison is devastating in its clarity and implication. For John Milton, utopia was a “… grave and noble invention which the … sublimest wits in sundry ages, Plato … and our two famous countreymen [Thomas More and Francis Bacon], chose, I may not say as a field, but as a mighty Continent wherein to display the largenesse of  their spirits by teaching this our world better and exacter things, then were yet known, or us’d …”lxxvi Two hundred and fifty years later Anatole France could write: “Without the utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked; … utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better world.” But today,

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instead of  fictional renderings of  these heady statements of confidence, we have Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and science-fiction visions of  the horrors that await us if we survive. Of course the reason for this radical shift is painfully obvious: to have faith in the possibility of utopia, one must believe in progress; but one looks back at our two great wars, our mass bombings, our attempts at genocide—our collective plunge into barbarism; one hears the Geiger counters of  the world clicking away—and it is next to impossible for a rational man to believe in progress. To believe in utopia one must believe that through the exercise of  their reason men can control and in major ways alter for the better their social environment; but few men outside some of  the Communist countries any longer have faith in the power of reason to bring about desired political ends of  large magnitude. To believe in utopia one must have faith of a kind that our history has made nearly inaccessible. This is one major form of  the crisis of  faith under which Western culture reels.lxxvii There are, however, China, the Soviet Union, and those Marxists whose allegiance to the vision has remained unshaken by events of  the last thirty-five years. A.L. Morton, a historian of utopian fiction, claims that the belief which has lain at the roots of all utopian writing of  the past—the belief in the capacity and the splendid future of mankind—has already been vindicated in Russia. Utopia has in fact been realized there—this written in the year 1952, the year before Stalin’s death. One man’s utopia is another man’s—particularly a disillusioned man’s—nightmare; and unquestionably the gravest blow to our conviction that, by a sweeping reconstitution of  his society, man can create a good world for himself, has come from the experience of  the Soviet Union itself. Some sense of  the limitless possibilities that experience once held out for a whole generation comes through what André Gide writes after the disillusionment of  his stay in Russia: “Who can ever say what the Soviet Union had been for me? Far more than the country of my choice, an example and an inspiration, it represented what I had always dreamed of  but no longer dared hope —it was something toward which all my longing was directed—it was a land where I imagined Utopia was in process of  becoming reality … I was ready to throw myself with all my heart into the contract, as it were, into which I had entered with the Soviet Union in the name of

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all suf fering mankind. I felt myself so much committed that failure was not to be contemplated.”lxxviii But Gide himself and Koestler, Richard Wright, Camus, Auden, Spender, and countless others had to contemplate the failure, had to recognize it, had agonizingly to come to terms with it. The god had failed, and the story of  his failure is a polygraph of  the death of utopian faith in our time. “The tragedy of our generation,” says Camus, “is to have seen a false hope.” In a way this record of disillusionment and despair (sketchily suggested here) accounts for the fact that we have almost no utopian literature today. Conceivably this may change. The utopian spirit is once again manifest in certain elements of  the generation after Camus—in primitivistic form with the hippies and their cohorts, in militant form among the students. Utopia has its philosophers: Herbert Marcuse (his recent An Essay on Liberation explicitly repudiates the Marxian injunction against utopian speculation), Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, to speak only of  the United States. But thus far it remains true that in literature, which so often breaks new paths into possibility for philosophers and politicians to follow, the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination. Instead, we have utopias in negative—scores of  them—which, with their selective distortion of  the utopian impulse, satirize, caricature, call into question the idea of  the utopia itself. Whereas for Bellamy or William Morris present society was the evil to be transcended, and the image of  the desirable life was projected into the future, in the negative utopia it is the life of  the future, created in response to man’s longing for happiness on earth, that is the evil. Utopia is a bad word today not because despair of  being able to achieve it but because we fear it. Utopia itself (in a special sense of  the term) has become the enemy. Nobody has written more cogently on this theme than has Nicolas Berdyaev, whose views were given unexpected currency when Huxley appropriated a passage from Slavery and Freedom as the epigraph for Brave New World:

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Utopias seem very much more realizable than we had formerly supposed. And now we find ourselves facing a question which is painful in a new kind of way: How to avoid their actual realization? … Utopias are realizable. Life moves toward a utopia. And perhaps a new age is beginning, an age in which the intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of methods of avoiding utopia and of returning to a society that is nonutopian, that is less “perfect” and more free.

Clearly Berdyaev is using the word “utopia” in a very dif ferent sense from that of  More or Cabet or William Morris; and in his usage is implied a theory about the essential nature of utopia. The theme engaged Berdyaev in book after book. Just before his death, for example, he wrote, movingly, that utopian thought is profoundly inherent in human nature: man, wounded by the evil of  the world, inevitably evokes an image of a perfect, harmonious social order where he will be happy. And utopias are realizable; the Bolsheviks are utopians, possessed by the idea of a perfect society. But it is a condition of  bringing utopias to pass that they shall be deformed in the process. Man lives in a fragmented world, says Berdyaev, and dreams of an integrated world. This is the essence of utopia: that it is destined to surmount the fragmentation of  the world and bring wholeness, intégralité. But in that very process human freedom is destroyed. None of  the classical utopias have made room for freedom, writes Berdyaev elsewhere: the “aristocratic idealistic communism” of  Plato’s Republic, the prototype of utopias, is, he says, a “thorough-going tyranny, a denial of all freedom and of  the value of personality.” Similarly, Thomas More, Campanella, Cabet, and others all fail to provide for individual freedom. In sum, for Berdyaev, “utopia is always totalitarian, and totalitarianism, in the conditions of our world, is always utopian.”lxxix Berdyaev’s passion and his point of view were unquestionably shaped by his bitter experience of  the Soviet Union, but I suspect that an even more important inf luence was operative: behind all his work looms the prophetic figure of  Dostoevski, with whom Berdyaev carried on a dialogue across time all his life. Of  the greatest importance to him is the profound and enigmatic legend of  the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. We recall the scene that Ivan Karamazov conjures up for Alyosha: the prison cell in sixteenth-century Seville; the appalling monologue that the ninety-year-old Inquisitor hurls at the Prisoner, at Christ, who has returned

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to earth and been thrust into jail by the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor accuses Christ of a ghastly failure: He foolishly imposed upon man the intolerable burden of  freedom, instead of  taking freedom from man and giving him in its place bread and happiness. Christ rejected the three great powers of fered by Satan—miracle, mystery, and authority—which alone could have held men in happy subjection. But the Church, says the old Inquisitor, has now corrected Christ’s work; it has assumed the three great powers, and men will gladly lay down their freedom in exchange for the reign of peace and happiness that will ensue. Man longs for unity in one unanimous and harmonious ant hill; the Church, out of its love for feeble humanity, wielding the powers that Christ rejected, and ruling according to a noble lie, will be in a position to plan the universal happiness of man. Not quite all will be happy, however; a few, an elite, those who rule and guard the mystery, will suf fer; for they will have taken upon themselves the curse of  the knowledge of good and evil. But these are a few only; all the rest will be happy in the wholeness of unfreedom. Here, comments Berdyaev, is utopia, the product of  the “euclidian mind” (a phrase Dostoevski himself often used) which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man, whatever the cost. The myth of  the future utopian state projected by the Grand Inquisitor constitutes a text on which the major negative utopias of our time—Eugene Zamyatin’s We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—are imaginative glosses. Zamyatin, an engineer and mathematician, one of  Russia’s most brilliant young revolutionary writers, composed We in 1920 as a satire on forces which were distorting the revolution for which he had struggled.lxxx The book first appeared in the United States, translated from the Russian manuscript, in 1924; it was subsequently translated into French and Czech and then back into Russian for European circulation, but it has never been published in the Soviet Union—all this a melancholy preview of  the Pasternak–Dr. Zhivago af fair and the cases of  Daniel and Sinyavski, and most recently, Solzhenitsyn. Zamyatin’s novel dramatizes the United State, as it is called, created by the euclidian mind one thousand years from now. Because the book is not well known (it has not been published in England and, in 1967, the

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British Museum had no copy of  the English translation), I shall reproduce a few passages which convey some sense of  the issues involved. We is D-503’s journal; it opens with a quotation from the State newspaper (this is not yesterday’s Pravda, but the contemporaneity of  the situation is so striking that one must struggle to avoid oversimple identifications): “In another hundred and twenty days the building of  the Integral [a gigantic rocket-ship] will be completed. The great historic hour is near, when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of  the universe. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of  the United State. A still more glorious task is before you: the integration of  the indefinite equation of  the Cosmos by the use of  the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of  freedom. If  they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy …. “Long live the United State! Long live the Numbers! Long live the Well-Doer!!!”

After copying this statement from the newspaper, D-503 begins his journal: I feel my cheeks burn as I write this. To integrate the colossal, universal equation! To unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a tangent—to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines! I, D-503, the builder of  the Integral, I am only one of  the many mathematicians of  the United State. My pen, which is accustomed to figures, is unable to express the march and rhythm of consonance; therefore I shall try to record only the things I see, the things I think, or, to be more exact, the things we think.

D-503 calls his book We in celebration of  the “victory of all over one, of  the sum over the individual.” He has spoken of  the mathematically perfect happy life. How does one reduce happiness to mathematics? Naturally, having conquered hunger (that is, algebraically speaking, having achieved the total of  bodily welfare), the United State directed its attack against the second ruler of  the world, against love. At last this element also was conquered, that is, organized and put into a mathematical formula. It is already three hundred years since our great historic Lex Sexualis was promulgated: “A Number may obtain a license to use any other Number as a sexual product.”

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CHAPTER 5 The rest is only a matter of  technique. You are carefully examined in the laboratory of  the Sexual Department where they find the content of  the sexual hormones in your blood, and they accordingly make out for you a Table of sexual days. Then you file an application to enjoy the services of  Number so and so, or Numbers so and so. You get for that purpose a checkbook (pink). That is all. It is clear that under such circumstances there is no reason for envy or jealousy. The denominator of  the fraction of  happiness is reduced to zero and the whole fraction is converted into a magnificent infiniteness … Hence you see how the great power of  logic purifies everything it happens to touch. Oh, if only you unknown readers can conceive this divine power! If you will only learn to follow it to the end!

Similarly, ethics has been rationalized to a point where its problems are resolved by adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Beauty, we learn, is a function of unfreedom. The dance of  life in the United State is beautiful, D-503 writes in his journal, “because it is an unfree movement. Because the deep meaning of  the dance is contained in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-freedom.” And the end toward which the United State inevitably tends—the utopia of  this utopia—is that in which time and history are frozen, the state in which nothing happens. The euclidianism of  the United State is graphically symbolized in its architecture: rectilinear glass buildings, glistening glass pavements laid out in straight lines, square harmonies endlessly repeated—a Bauhaus world gone mad, mirroring the perfect abstractness of an almost perfect life. Rebels in this brilliantly grotesque perversion of utopia adopt as their emblem √–1, thus aligning themselves with the struggle of  Dostoevski’s Underground Man against the hegemony of  two times two is four. Let me pull these themes together by quoting one more passage. D-503’s friend, R-13, a poet, describes a poem he is writing for the Integral: You see, it is the ancient legend of paradise …. That legend referred to us of  today, did it not? Yes. Only think of it, think of it a moment! There were two in paradise and the choice was of fered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice …. They, fools that they were, chose freedom. Naturally, for centuries afterward they longed for fetters, for the fetters of yore …. And only we found a way to regain happiness …. No, listen, follow me! The ancient god and we, side by side at the same table! Yes, we helped god to defeat the devil definitely and finally. It was he, the devil, who led people to transgression, to taste pernicious freedom—he, the cunning serpent. And we came along, planted a boot on his head,

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and … squash! Done with him! Paradise again! We returned to the simple-mindedness and innocence of  Adam and Eve. No more meddling with good and evil and all that; everything is simple again, heavenly, childishly simple! The Well-Doer, the Machine, the Cube, the giant Gas Bell, the Guardians—all these are good. All this is magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty, crystalline, pure. For all this preserves our non-freedom, that is our happiness … Well, in short, these are the highlights of my little paradise poem. What do you think of it?

R-13’ s paradise is that of  Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor, who appears in We as the Well-Doer, a Socrates-like, bald-headed man before whom D-503 is summoned at the climax of  the work. The Well-Doer tells D-503 that the “real, algebraic love for humanity must inevitably be inhuman”; and D-503, together with nearly all the citizens of  the United State, ultimately finds his true paradise in a lobotomy, an operation that does away with the atavistic—that is the human—urges that unreasonably have troubled them and marred the glassy surface of  their state. Zamyatin, a rigorous satirist, a highly gifted stylist—his style enacting the mechanical rhythms of  the future state—pushes utopia to this conclusion. Given the premises of  the Grand Inquisitor, here are the results. The themes are there, shockingly clear, rendered as a novelist renders them— through the felt experience of characters struggling to become human. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Mustapha Mond, the Controller, is another incarnation of  the Grand Inquisitor, unhappy himself, dedicated to the happiness of  the Epsilons, the Deltas, the Betas, and most of  the Alphas. Other people’s happiness, he acknowledges, is a hard master; he is one who guards the mystery. The state in this New World has taken on the three great powers rejected by Christ: it provides the bread—and soma and the feelies and electro-magnetic golf; and it provides the mystery, the mechanically-induced epiphany of  the Solidarity Service ritual. Above all it provides happiness and stability for the truly innocent children of  the new paradise—with their institutionalized sex play and their compulsory promiscuity—to whom the knowledge of good and evil is forbidden. The bottles in which they are born enclose them forever. Again, as in Zamyatin’s We, the climax of  the book comes in a confrontation of  the disaf fected in utopia with the Grand Inquisitor figure. Mustapha Mond explains to the Savage:

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CHAPTER 5 “The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well of f ; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Which you go and chuck out of  the window in the name of  liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!” He laughed. “Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is!”

The Controller admits the losses entailed by happiness and stability. Great art has been lost, science has been muzzled; truth is a victim and God. But as Mustapha Mond says: “You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen … happiness.” Against this the Savage shouts his plea: “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.” “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” “Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence. “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The tone of  Huxley’s book is sometimes f lippant, sometimes cynical; but he has respected the complexity of  the issues—issues that are a transliteration of  those enunciated with daemonic prescience by Dostoevski. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four both fits and does not fit into the pattern. It does not fit because utopia has traditionally been concerned with happiness and the good life. There is nothing of  this in Nineteen EightyFour, which is a true anti-utopia, a dystopia. As Philip Rahv has pointed out, the shadow of  the Grand Inquisitor is powerfully present. In the climactic sequence Winston Smith lies on the torture table in the Ministry of  Love. O’Brien, the Inquisitor whom Winston significantly does not know whether to love or hate, interrogates him about the Party’s relation

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to power. “Now tell me why we cling to power,” he asks Winston. “What is our motive? … Go on speak.” Winston knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of  the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of  the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.

Orwell’s turn of  the screw is deadly: the sentiments of  the Grand Inquisitor of  Dostoevski’s legend come from the lips of a man under torture; and as he proceeds to utter those sentiments in response to O’Brien’s question, the new Inquisitor pulls the lever which sends hideous pain coursing through Winston’s body. O’Brien contemptuously dismisses the old apologia for totalitarianism. The end of  the Party’s power, he says, is not man’s happiness, not that of  the stupid utopias of  the past—the end of power is power—the power to stamp on the human face forever. Horrifying as the impact of  Nineteen Eighty-Four is, I think it misses by denying the enormous complexity and subtlety of  the issues raised by Dostoevski. Totalitarianism of  the Nineteen Eighty-Four brand poses its own gross dangers, of which we cannot help being aware. But the dangers are gross and so identifiable; O’Brien’s world, at least at the stage depicted, makes no pretense of  being utopian. Whereas the Party of  Nineteen EightyFour plans to abolish the orgasm as part of its assault on human happiness, Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor—and here is the source of his appeal—truly believes in bringing happiness to man, even in forcing him to be happy. He loves man, genuinely, deeply; he has sacrificed—his God, his own happiness—for man’s sake. “Know,” he says to Christ, “that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts … and I too was striving to stand among thy elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting to ‘make up the number.’ But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of  those who have corrected thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of  the humble.”

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As I read Dostoevski and Zamyatin and Huxley, there sounds at the back of my mind a refrain: Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming”: The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

The fear of utopia arises in good part out of a situation which may be characterized by a twist on Yeats’s lines—the situation in which the best are full of passionate intensity. It is the best who, out of  their love for suf fering humanity and their desire to bring man happiness, may try to impose a euclidian order on the world and find themselves forced into the choice which seems to be ineluctable: the choice between freedom and happiness. Zamyatin and Huxley have dramatized what they take to be the necessary consequence of  the choice. Utopia, in their sense, leads to decanted babies and soma or to lobotomy. Thus the two great mock-utopias of  the twentieth century contribute their variation on the theme that shadows utopia: corruptio optimi pessima. From Thomas More and William Morris to this: it is a mighty fall. Inevitably “utopia” has become a bad word; but the question whether or not the fall is irretrievable may still be open. In 1946 Aldous Huxley wrote a preface to Brave New World in which he again explicitly equates utopia with insanity, with horror, with tyranny; but then an odd thing happens. “If  I were now to rewrite the book,” says Huxley, “I would of fer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of  his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity—a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of  the Reservation.” Huxley proceeds to characterize this hypothetical community: its Henry-Georgian economics, its Kropotkinesque politics, its Buddhist religion. The Savage, he says, would be allowed to learn at first hand “about the nature of a society composed of  freely co-operating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity” before he was “transported to Utopia.” At this point the terminological tangle becomes almost hopeless.lxxxi Clearly Huxley, writing in 1946, could no longer call his hypothetical new society—the third alternative he envisages for the Savage—utopian; the word had been contaminated by history

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and, in good part, by his own usage. But the thing itself—that for which the word once stood—was still there: the ineradicable human impulse to imagine the terms in which a better life might be led. It survived even the loss of its name. Fifteen years later Huxley once more reversed himself on “utopia”; he spoke of  his last novel, Island, as Brave New World in reverse and characterized it as a “utopian fantasy,” using the term this time in its old and honorific sense. Perhaps this marks the first step in “utopia’s” redemption, for if  the word is to be redeemed it will have to be by someone who, like Huxley, has faced the issues posed by Dostoevski. It will have to be by someone who has followed utopia into the abyss which yawns behind the Grand Inquisitor’s vision, and who has then clambered out on the other side. Both he and utopia will have been changed in the process; out of  the hard-won understanding there may come new faith in human possibility. We will never again be able to create imaginative utopias with the easy confidence of  the nineteenth century; the terror to which the eschatological vision applied to human af fairs has led in our time forecloses that possibility. At the same time we cannot allow the fear of utopia to inhibit completely the “utopian” imagination, which as Berdyaev says, is profoundly part of  human nature. Without goals (even if  limited goals), without an image of  the good life before us, we f lounder. If we must in some sense believe in utopia still, we must do so on the condition that we face the Grand Inquisitor in all his power. It is not a confrontation to be lightly dared.

CHAPTER 6

Aesthetics of  Utopia

The title page identifies Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) as a novel. Most reviewers, accepting the designation without question, proceeded to belabor the book accordingly: despite its interesting ideas, one of  the worst novels ever written, Frank Kermode decided; and William Barrett, outraged, accused Huxley of abandoning the novelist’s task altogether in order to make propaganda. The indignation of other writers who took this line rose in proportion as they resisted the free love and drugs of utopian Pala. Wayne Booth, however, made a start at sorting out the literary issues.lxxxii Although it calls itself a novel, Island actually belongs, he said, to another, non-Leavisonian “great tradition,” along with Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, Rasselas, Erewhon—works which use fictional devices to provoke thought. Booth avowed his interest in Island, although he felt unable to pronounce an aesthetic judgment, the criteria for this “nameless and tricky genre” not yet having been worked out. He issued a cordial invitation to critics to do the working. Northrop Frye and Richard Gerber had already made notable incursions into the field. Gerber’s Utopian Fantasy (1955), although ostensibly concerned with English utopian fiction from 1900 to 1955, is in fact a wideranging and acute study of most of  the interesting generic problems. The last third of  the book, called “Aesthetic Concretion,” deals with precisely the issues that must be clarified if  the simple confusions which bedevilled reviewers of  Island are to be avoided; and if  I disagree with Gerber’s conclusions, I want to record my admiration for his work. Gerber sensibly distinguishes between “evolutionary utopias” (fantastic visions of  the future based upon a doctrine of evolutionary progress; e.g., Olaf  Stapledon’s Last and First Men) and utopias of social reconstruction. These last he divides into two categories: the scientific, which places

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emphasis on the material conditions of society (New Atlantis, Looking Backward), and the arcadian, which emphasizes personal freedom (News from Nowhere, W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age). Each of  these modes is characterized by its own philosophical and stylistic problems and possibilities; but according to Gerber, they all share, together with the negative utopia, in a common teleological destiny. “The development towards the novel is part of  the logical evolution of  the myth-creating utopian imagination, which impatiently proceeds from the general idea to ever greater actualization”; utopian fiction “slowly assumes the shape of a novel.” It must of course be a novel of ideas; but this is less a problem than it once was, for, says Gerber, in our day utopia is problematic, full of social and moral conf licts, its characters diversified and individualized, no longer cyphers in a homogeneous mass. Thus, important constituents of  the novel are now available to the utopian writer. If utopian fiction can never quite achieve the kind of imaginative reality available to the realistic novelist, still, Gerber insists, the literary success of  the utopia will depend upon how closely it approximates that reality.lxxxiii These observations clearly apply to the negative utopia more readily (although, as we shall see, still imperfectly) than to the old-fashioned, straightforward, nearly extinct depiction of an ideal society; and in fact Gerber selects Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four as the greater literary successes of  the utopian form. The cards are stacked, however; Gerber sets up his aesthetic criteria in such a way as to preclude the possibility of  literary excellence for the positive utopia. This is gratuitously harsh on an honorable, if unnovelistic, mode of  fiction. Utopian society systematically attempts to eliminate social conf lict, accident, tragedy—precisely those elements which make for the fictional development Gerber celebrates. Marxists dream of a time when the state shall have withered away and man will have moved from the realm of necessity to that of  freedom. Once the triumph of socialism has inaugurated this happy time there will be a change, they recognize, in the character of  literature. Georg Lukács, for example, writes: “The decisive distinction between socialism and all previous societies is that socialism aims to eliminate the antagonistic character of social contradictions. Literature has the immensely important task of describing this process, of exploring the

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problems thrown up by it …. If, however, the elimination of  this antagonistic character is seen as something immediately realizable, rather than as a process, both the antagonism and the contradiction, the motor of all development, will disappear from the reality to be depicted.” Under socialism, says Lukács, “critical realism … will wither away.”lxxxiv Projections into this cloudless future sometimes have their comic side. A story is told that at a writers’ conference in Moscow in the early 1930s André Malraux caused consternation by rising to ask, “What happens in a classless society when a streetcar runs over a beautiful girl?” Gorky was hauled out of a sick-bed to deliver the answer, arrived at after long debate: in a planned and classless society, a streetcar would not run over a beautiful girl.lxxxv Years before, Etienne Cabet’s Icarians had come to similar conclusions; they had a law decreeing that there should be no accidents to pedestrians, whether caused by horses, vehicles, or anything whatever. Under the new dispensation which eliminates conf lict from society, the angularities of  human character upon which the novel so much depends would inevitably be softened; diversity and eccentricity would tend to give way to homogeneity, humors to milder modulations on a temperate standard. This implies, of course, a very considerable melioration in the condition of men’s lives; Brook Farm being what it was, Hawthorne had no such transformations to contend with in The Blithedale Romance. However, the narrator of  Robert Graves’s Seven Days in New Crete (1949) complains that the people of  New Crete (a utopian community of  the future), handsome and happy as they are, lack character. There are no congenital idiots or drunks among them, he admits, but the place and the people lack salt. In Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi, the narrator asserts that for authors in the past “the important ingredients of a personality were deviation, abnormality and originality—often to the point of pathology—whereas we of  today only speak of personalities when we meet with men who are beyond all originalities and peculiarities and who have succeeded in achieving the most perfect possible self-identification with the general.”lxxxvi A society whose values are ref lected in this kind of personality tends toward complete stasis. This has always been a problem for utopian writers, who have felt obliged to introduce conf lict into their tales if  they were to move at all. The usual device has been to import it from without:

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conf lict, introspection, suf fering, “character”—such as they are—usually arrive in Utopia with the visitor from outside. Lord Carisdale, in Etienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840), brings his sentimental entanglement with Miss Henrietta with him from England; Julian West’s agonies in Looking Backward are his heritage from the nineteenth century; earthlings bring epidemics, both biological and moral, to Wells’s utopia in Men Like Gods; B.F. Skinner’s Frazier has personality problems because he was not born in Walden Two; Huxley’s Pala is overcome by the barbaric world surrounding it. Utopia as such provides little opportunity for the progression by opposition we are accustomed to in literature and in life. When a killing occurs in Utopia—as in News from Nowhere—the violence is used, not as a structural element to provide necessary disequilibrium, but to demonstrate that even in arcadia men are still dashed about by their passions. Such events are very rare, though: utopia, in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terms, is, if not “cold,” at least a “cool” society, almost unimaginable to us who live in societies superheated by progress. Thus the more ideal the society depicted, the more unavailable will be the materials out of which novelists and writers of romance traditionally fashion their work. Insofar as the utopia is a fictional mode it obviously has many and interesting relations with the novel form, but it should not be thought of as somehow struggling to assimilate itself  to that form. Ideally, at its loftiest and most pure, the utopia aspires to (if it has never reached) the condition of  the idyll as Schiller describes it—that mode of poetry which would lead man, not back to Arcadia, but forward to Elysium, to a state of society in which man would be at peace with himself and the external world. The character of  the idyll, says Schiller, is that it reconciles perfectly “all opposition between actuality and the ideal, which has supplied material for satirical or elegiac poetry.” Its dominant tone would be calm, the calm that follows accomplishment and is accompanied by the feeling of an infinite power.lxxxvii Writers in the nineteenth century, particularly in France, attempted this assured and celebratory style with almost uniformly dreary results. A few, however—most notably William Morris—qualified the celebratory with infusions of  the satiric. Their works (as suggested in the first essay of  this book) are structurally like the formal verse satire, with the proportions

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of positive and negative elements reversed; or they are like heroic poems of  the seventeenth century which fitfully maintain a balance between panegyric and satire—between praise of virtue and the virtuous and sharp condemnation of virtue’s enemies. In the twentieth century, however, the utopian balance—celebration of  the achieved good place, on the one hand; exposure of  the bad, on the other—has been disturbed, as it has proved nearly impossible to imagine the conditions which call for the celebratory style. Huxley attempts it—courageously, I think—in Island, with what success we shall consider in the next essay. The fictional conventions of  the utopia are far more stereotyped than are those of  the novel. Consider Gulliver’s Travels. In each of  the four books the central character embarks on a voyage, lands alone in a strange country, makes contact with the inhabitants, learns about the customs and institutions of  their land, makes certain comparisons with Europe, returns home. This is the prescriptive pattern of  the genre. It admits, of course, of a good deal of variation, particularly in the journey (whether in space or time) into and out of utopia, and it may be dressed up with love stories, strange adventures, complications of various kinds; but the central element—the exposition of utopian life—is notoriously invariant. The archetypal gambit is More’s at the end of  book 1 of  Utopia: Therefore, gentle Master Raphael, quoth I, I pray you describe unto us the island. And study not to be short, but declare largely in order their grounds, their rivers, their cities, their people, their manners, their ordinances, their laws, and, to be short, all things that you shall think us desirous to know. And you shall think us desirous to know whatsoever we know not yet.

Hythloday obliges at length, his discourse broken in only the most minimal way by queries or interjections from his auditors. Again, “Tell me how the magistrates are chosen,” demands the Grand Master of  the Knights Hospitalers of  his guest, the Genoese sea captain, in Campanella’s City of  the Sun; and the captain responds appropriately. Almost two hundred and fifty years later: “Allons, Dinaros … expliquez à milord les merveilles qui sont une énigme pour lui; exposez-lui les principes de notre organisation sociale et politique; … milord ne sera pas le seul qui vous entendra avec plaisir.”lxxxviii

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The pleasure palls, however, under this relentlessly mechanical approach to the necessary expository problem. Whereas Plato’s dialogue in the Republic is a process of exploration and intellectual discovery, the creator of a fictional utopia presents us with a thing made—a new thing that must be explained. The technical problem has baf f led even the best writers. William Morris, for example, clearly recognizes that old Hammond’s long discourse in the middle of  News from Nowhere is painfully wooden. It deals with the prescriptive materials: the customs, the mode of  life, the politics (“we have none”) of  the new society and how these came about. The account of  “How the Change Came” ref lects Morris’s own shattering experience of  “Bloody Sunday” in Trafalgar Square (1887); but although his passion invigorates Hammond’s discourse, the old man is allowed to go on far too long. In an attempt to break up this section, Morris shifts without warning from the normal question-and-answer expository mode—“I asked … He answered …”—to a dialogue form like that Diderot uses in the Supplement to Bougainville’s “Voyage” (1796). The dialogue is static, however, and to alter the format of  the page temporarily is not enough to lighten the heavy expository load. Splendid work that it is, News from Nowhere is irretrievably swaybacked, overborne by old Hammond’s garrulity. Still, the dif ficulty with this section of  Morris’s book is quantitative rather than substantive, for at the heart of any literary utopia there must be detailed, serious discussion of political and sociological matters. This seems to be inescapable and constitutes a major dif ference from the novel. F.R. Leavis is surely right to insist on the “elementary distinction to be made between the discussion of problems and ideas, and what we find in the great novelists.”lxxxix The novelist’s art is to metamorphose ideas into the idiosyncratic experience of complex human beings. For reasons advanced throughout this chapter, the utopian writer has rarely been able to accomplish this translation. Instead of incarnating the good life dramatically, novelistically, the characters of utopia discuss it. In part, this is a consequence of  the fact that the fictional utopia is a bastard form, answering to the claims of a number of disciplines. It purports to present a more or less detailed picture of a society significantly better than that in which the writer lives. The nature of  the enterprise inevitably elicits from the reader a series of questions: is the society depicted just? does it answer to legitimate

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human needs? would it work? would we like to live there? is the writer’s criticism of  his own society well taken? Because they are subject to the laws of politics, morality, sociology, economics, and various other fields, the issues to which these questions and dozens like them apply require discursive treatment. They belong to a reality foreign to that enacted in a novel. They are not literary issues, nor can the work which elicits and tries to answer questions about them be judged in terms applicable to the work of  Henry James. Most writers of  fictional utopias have had far more interest in, and commitment to, the social-political aspects of  their work than to the fiction, which they have considered largely instrumental—a means, not available to the philosopher to “strike, pierce [and] possess the sight of  the soul,” as Sidney puts it in the Apology for Poetry. “But even in the most excellent determination of goodness,” asks Sidney, “what philosopher’s counsel can so readily direct … a whole commonwealth, as the way of  Sir Thomas More’s Utopia?” Still, if  the poet has more force in teaching than the philosopher or historian, as Sidney maintains, utopian writers have in general lacked not only high poetic talent but even respect for the poet’s art. Most have used the rather shoddy feigned images that came readily to them, content if  the hackneyed presentation of a love af fair would serve as bait while the social moral did its work. A world removed from Sidney’s lofty vision, Edward Bellamy writes impatiently of  his fable as sugar-coating designed to make his doctrine palatable. William Dean Howells wondered whether Bellamy’s ethics would keep his aesthetics in remembrance.xc It seems highly unlikely that they will; but there can be no doubt that Bellamy’s aesthetics—that is, the elements of romance in his work—contributed heavily to the immense popular success of  Looking Backward. This is a tribute to the raw power of  fiction: the standards of  the genre have not been high. The relationship between the fictionality of utopias and the social ideas their authors want to express is likely to be fairly complex. Because the social dogmas and critiques are often radical and sometimes dangerous, the unreality of  the fiction may be insisted upon as protection to the author: the word Utopia means “no place”; Hythloday means “purveyor of nonsense”; and it is all only make-believe after all. More’s position with respect to Utopian doctrines is, as a result of  the cleverly manipulated

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fiction, highly ambiguous, which, given his political situation, was prudent. On the other hand, the fictionality of utopia is sometimes an embarrassment, particularly to nineteenth-century writers who are agonizingly convinced that the societies they have constructed in their heads are viable in the real world. They depict the imaginary society as graphically as possible, but then are afraid that the fictionality of  the presentation may lead to dismissal of  their ideas as unreal. The final section of  Voyage en Icarie drops the fiction altogether; it is written in the first person by Cabet himself under the heading “Explications de l’auteur.—Doctrine communitaire” and consists of a simple schematic resumé of  the principles which have been enunciated at interminable length in Icaria. The book ends, not with the sentimental transports of  Lord Carisdale, who has been forgotten, but with direct, urgent exhortation: reader, take these ideas seriously! Or again, Louis Sébastien Mercier in L’An 2440 (1771) maintains, in his own person, a running footnote commentary on his text, pointing morals, lecturing his readers, making constant references to af fairs of  his own day—centuries removed, of course, from the time of  his romance. Mercier attempts by his subtextual intrusion to anchor his fiction in reality. For these writers the fiction is a double-edged tool—a means to make the dream of utopia palpable, as Cabet says in his preface, but one which at the same time works against itself. It has not always been clear exactly what the utopian writer’s responsibility is to his fiction. Some sections of  Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, for example, are straight essays critical of  English customs and beliefs. They lie alongside the fiction, only the most minimal gesture having been made toward their incorporation; they are to be read in their right as essays, not necessarily as integral parts of a fictional structure. Butler, of course, was perfectly aware of  this and apologetic: “Erewhon was not an organized whole,” he wrote in the preface to the revised edition; “there was hardly any story and little attempt to give life and individuality to the characters.” Still, the fact remains, to which Butler points: Erewhon Revisited is structurally more of a piece than Erewhon, but Erewhon is the better reading of  the two. As these remarks indicate, Butler was concerned with problems of genre, although it cannot be said that he pushed hard at their solution. H.G. Wells was characteristically more energetic. His technical observations, and

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the experiments he undertakes, in A Modern Utopia (1905) are extremely interesting, even if, as he recognized, he did not make the aesthetic breakthrough he had hoped for. The formal premises of  A Modern Utopia entail a distinction between Wells the author (who writes the first and last chapters of  the work in italics) and an insistent Voice, issuing from a man looking remarkably like Wells, whom we are to imagine sitting at a table on stage, reading aloud from a manuscript about utopias. Behind the owner of  the Voice (whom we might call “Wells”) is a movie screen on which images intermittently appear. “Wells” we are to imagine as an actor in the film and a commentator on the action—in general, a philosophical guide. A Modern Utopia is an account of  his adventures—alternately ratiocinative and physical—among utopian ideas and places. (The complexity of  this situation—its use of  film and commentator—may have suggested to Huxley the idea for the structure of  Ape and Essence.) The result is a hybrid form, part fiction—the adventures of  “Wells” and his companion the botanist in Utopia—and part essay—the discursive explorations of  “Wells” at his lecture table. “A Note to the Reader” (a preface to the prefatory chapter) explains how H.G. Wells, the author, arrived at this unusual form. In the course of presenting as lucid and entertaining a picture of  Utopia as possible, he wanted to make a number of observations on economic and sociological matters. He rejected the form of  the argumentative essay as too rigid. Similarly, he rejected straight narrative because it was inhospitable to the discussion of ideas. He considered making the work a “discussion novel” in the manner of  Peacock’s development of  the philosophical dialogue; but that entailed unacceptable complications among the characters. He experimented with a form resembling that of  Boswell’s Life of  Johnson, a play between monologue and commentator. Finally Wells settled on what he calls the “shot-silk texture” of  his alternating fictional narrative and philosophical discussion—this last complete with footnote references to Hillquit’s History of Socialism in the United States and an article in Mind. His technique is a sophisticated variant of  the method Butler used in Erewhon. Wells felt that the new form was the best he could find for the rather special purpose he had in mind. A bold, and in many ways an ef fective, conception, the boldness did not always carry over into execution. For example, Wells allowed the narrative sections of  the work to be hampered

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by a clumsy entanglement with the subjunctive mood: all the adventures in Utopia are governed by the “Suppose that such-and-such were the case” of  “Wells,” the owner of  the Voice. When in the first chapter “Wells” and the botanist (it is generically significant that he has no name) are translated in an instant from the Alps in Europe to the Alps in Utopia, the language fails to af firm the translation: “We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from the sky”—the subjunctive mood instead of  “scarcely noted” and “had gone from the sky.” Again, on the heels of one of  the essay-sections, this: “After we have paid for our lunch in the little inn that corresponds to Wassen, the botanist and I would no doubt spend the rest of  the forenoon in … discussion”—not, “we spent” the rest of  the forenoon … Shortly thereafter the indicative mood takes over as the action is dramatized; but then again, and throughout, the subjunctive reasserts itself. (The cinema, which we are to think of as depicting the narrative sections, has developed subtle techniques for projecting the subjunctive mood: did Wells have these in mind?) It is as though Wells felt dependent on the subjunctive as mediator between the essayist Voice and the narrative adventure, as though he were not willing to commit himself completely to the fictional reality of  Utopia—as though Utopia were a hypothesis rather than a place. This is surprising because in some sections of  the book Wells is wonderfully assured in his use of  fantasy. At one point the botanist delivers himself of  his opinions on race: “ ‘But you would not like,’ he cried in horror, ‘your daughter to marry a Chinaman or a negro!’ ” The response of  “Wells” could not be more free: “It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost find it in my heart to spite the botanist by creating a modern Desdemona and her lover sooty black to the lips, there before our eyes.” But this same assurance does not extend to the ontological status of  Utopia; Wells holds back from giving it full imaginative reality. For all his ingenuity Wells felt that the “conf licting form” he had devised could not finally dissolve the incompatibility of  the materials he was working with: the large generalities of  the ideas, the insistent specificity of  the characters. When he focused on one element, the other grew vague and indistinct. This, he concluded, was a limiting condition of  the genre:

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There must always be a certain ef fect of  hardness and thinness about Utopian speculations … That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalized people. In almost every Utopia—except, perhaps, Morris’s “News from Nowhere”—one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy, beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever … This burthens us with an incurable ef fect of unreality.

“Wells,” whose remarks these are, sees nothing to be done about it, nor, presumably, does his progenitor. “It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted.” If  the writer of utopia could translate the ideas of  his fiction into the experience of  his characters, as the novelist does, then it would seem that he could escape from the thinness of which Wells complains. Clearly he can show human beings living in what he takes to be utopian conditions; but it appears to be almost impossible for him to create characters of any dimension who enact the constitutive ideas of utopia. He cannot make them interesting. Perhaps partly to avoid this dilemma Mary McCarthy, in The Oasis (1949), shifts her emphasis full on to character; that is, instead of showing in detail the problems of  founding a utopian community and the principles by which it operates, she takes its establishment largely for granted (it is surprisingly successful, given the predilections of the author), then turns her cold eye on the New York intellectuals who make it up. The concentration on character and type makes for splendid satire—no question of dullness here—but thrusts the idea of utopia, whether positively or negatively conceived, well into the background. Further dif ficulties, inherent in the form, prevent the utopia from achieving the kind of reality we know in the novel. Among them is the ancient and notorious problem of depicting the good. As a knowledgeable authority of our day, J.R.R. Tolkien, says in The Hobbit, “It is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about and not much to listen to.” Untested goodness, unthreatened happiness are hard to make dramatic, and the longueurs of  heaven have baf f led the greatest writers. Thus utopias often seek to identify themselves negatively—“by contraries,” as Gonzalo says in The Tempest—by dwelling on the vices and miseries they do not have, like angels contemplating the gridirons of  hell. Swift’s explanation, in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub, of 

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the popularity of satire over panegyric is to the point: “For the materials of panegyric being very few in number, have been long since exhausted. For, as health is but one thing, and has been always the same, whereas diseases are by thousands, besides new and daily additions; so, all the virtues that have been ever in mankind, are to be counted upon a few fingers, but his follies and vices are innumerable, and time adds hourly to the heap.” Utopia is a healthy society, its description soon exhausted; and happy families are all alike. In News from Nowhere old Hammond regrets that the youngsters of  his day have little interest in the history of  the past. “The last harvest, the last baby, the last knot of carving in the market place, is history enough for them.” Splendid material for arcadian experience but quite intractable for the novel as we know it. Some of  the contradictions in Robert Graves’s Seven Days in New Crete (1949; the American edition is called Watch the North Wind Rise) may well develop from Graves’s restiveness under the formal and experiential limitations of utopia. New Crete has a good many straight utopian characteristics; that is, Graves presents in a favorable light most of  the social, political, and religious arrangements of  this society, visited in a dream of  the future by Edward Venn-Thomas, a twentieth-century poet. Civilization has long before proved itself a catastrophe. New Cretans, in a planned regression to a pre-Trojan War state of culture, worship the White Goddess, practice magic, hold all necessities in common, and enjoy a notably undemocratic social system: they play their established roles in hierarchically ordered estates or classes modelled on (and containing some of  the ambiguities of ) Plato’s Republic. Otherwise, however, they share with William Morris’s Englishmen a contemptuous dislike for science and technology and a complementary passion for individually crafted objects: “nothing without the hand of  love” is with them a religious principle.xci New Cretans have been careful to preserve from the past no information on philosophy, advanced mathematics, physics, or chemistry; they retain no machinery more complicated than the pulley or lathe. Instead of industrialism, they have pageantry and ritual—in short, a society that in most respects Graves could be expected to approve. The narrator, however, finds life in New Crete “a little too good to be true.” When Quant, a poet, admits that utopian existence is too easy to allow for the sterner satisfactions of

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more rugged eras, Venn-Thomas speaks favorably of  Bernard Mandeville’s principle that vice is necessary for the proper operation of a commonwealth. A bit of vice unquestionably makes Graves’s narrative task easier. He has the Goddess arbitrarily introduce evil into utopia in the form of sexual lust. The results are satisfactorily lurid: conf lict, murder, even a couple fornicating on the victim’s grave. Graves may have been led to these devices because he had trouble moving in the rarefied air of utopia; by injecting a more earthy atmosphere he kept the fiction going, but at the expense of  the utopian premise. Similarly, in The Coming Race (1871) Bulwer-Lytton found it dif ficult to make much of  the lives of  the Vril-ya, of whom all that could be said is, “they were born, they were happy, they died.” Despite the superior felicity of  their existence, the narrator concludes that any intelligent man from earth would die of ennui among them; and had it not been for the fantastic elements of  his fiction, it is hard to see what would have spared Bulwer-Lytton’s readers a similar fate. W.H. Hudson’s protagonist Smith in A Crystal Age (1906) finds the happiness of  the forest people a cruel trap when he learns that sexual love has been transcended into universal love; the prospect of a life of  “chill moonlight felicity” appalls him as, with one part of  his mind, it may have appalled his creator who believed in the creative function of passion and strife. In any event Smith longs for the power to shatter the idyllic world into which he has been introduced; he wants to repeople the land with the struggling, starving millions of  the nineteenth century so that love, real love, may blossom once more. Writers of  the most diverse commitments have agreed on the dreary paradox that a life containing an overplus of good must be stupefyingly boring. It is pleasant to contemplate James Boswell, busy in Elysium, bringing Dr. Johnson and Bertolt Brecht together for discussion of  this theme which is common to Rasselas and The Rise and Fall of  the City of  Mahagonny. Such unlikely agreements may arise, however, less from the substantive merits of  the case than from the fact that except at the most primitive level we lack a language and conventions for depicting man in a happy state. Schiller calls for an idyll in which humanity is shown to be reconciled with itself, in the individual as well as in the whole of society. Poets have sometimes been able to express the first condition, but not the

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second. “Who can describe … the happiness of  the Troglodytes?” asks Montesquieu’s Usbek. A great many have tried, but we still wait for an answer. Our imagination of  the good life is as barren as our imagination of  the bad is rich. Negative utopias, which deal with a version of  the bad life, clearly of fer the greater scope to fictional treatments approaching the novelistic, although in fundamental ways Zamyatin’s We and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) are as far removed from the novel proper as are News from Nowhere and Island. The novel traditionally focuses on human character, in all its substantiality and dimension, as it manifests itself in society. Negative utopias depict a society in which human character can hardly be said to exist at all. “Surely it is clear that individual self-consciousness is only a disease,” says Zamyatin’s D-503. The idea of  the self as a unique and inviolable entity is an anachronism in the worlds of  We and Nineteen Eighty-Four, a crime; to eradicate it is society’s most compelling aim. I-330’s claim that man is like a novel whose end we do not know images perfectly her subversive function in the United State. The characters of  We are interesting, as characters, precisely to the degree that they retain certain atavistic qualities which throw them into conf lict with the orthodoxy of  their world. It is a nice paradox that D-503’s hairy hands symbolize to him his connection with the beast, but to us a quality that almost makes him human. Thus negative utopias are best thought of, not as novels, but as belonging to that tricky genre of which Wayne Booth speaks in his review of  Island—the genre to which Northrop Frye has given the name Menippean satire or anatomy, after Robert Burton’s exemplary work.xcii Frye’s discrimination has been remarkably fruitful for criticism: the anatomy, he says, deals less with people as such than with characters acting as mouthpieces of ideas or mental attitudes. Writers in this genre make no attempt to create naturalistic human beings; their characters are stylized, mechanical, f lat. The expectations we bring to the Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Candide, Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy are very dif ferent from those we bring to Emma or Sons and Lovers: it is pointless to require of  Brave New World that it try to be what they are. The normative utopia has a relationship to the novel precisely like that of  the anatomy; that is, instead of  the “pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus,

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virtuosi, [and] enthusiasts” who people Menippean satire (a list to which we can add Zamyatin’s Numbers and their progeny), utopia has its legislators, wise men, priests, workers, lovers, who exist as characters only to enact an allegory of  the good life. We are as misguided to expect “roundness” and complexity in the characterization of  Huxley’s Dr. MacPhail in Island as in that of  the numbers in We. But whereas Zamyatin has been able to create stylized characters—and a literary style—marvelously appropriate to the world he created, no model of comparable authority exists for depiction of  the good life. In addition to the generic dif ficulties discussed above, utopia suf fers under another handicap: it is not a subject likely to attract gifted writers who feel passionately about literature, if  for no other reason than that the status of  literature in utopia is, at best, certain to be problematic.xciii Presumably the same substantive problems which have plagued writers trying to imagine what utopia would be like will face those who try, once utopian conditions are established, to create their own literature. Edward Bellamy, hearty in his confidence that literature will f lourish in utopia, faces the issue in Looking Backward: the romancer, he says, will have to construct his tales without benefit of  the social texture given by “contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low”; he will not be able to draw on motives of  “social pride and ambition, the desire of  being richer or the fear of  being poorer”; there will be no “sordid anxieties of any sort for one’s self or others.” Deprived of all this, the writer will, it is true, have available to him “love galore,” but love unfretted by artificial social barriers. To create great literature in these conditions, says Bellamy’s spokesman, Julian West, is like making bricks without straw, a ref lection with which writers of pre-utopian times would surely agree. Bellamy’s romancer Berrian somehow succeeded: Julian West stayed up all night entranced, reading his Penthesilia; but Berrian’s achievement we must take on faith. In the same way we must take on faith the prophecy of  Charles Fourier that by the time the earth has three billion inhabitants organized into phalansteries, there will normally be thirty-seven million poets living who are the equal of  Homer and the same number of writers of comedy as good as Molière. These are estimates, Fourier admits.xciv

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B.F. Skinner, less manic, is still optimistic about the place of  literature in utopia. Frazier, discussing the matter in Walden Two, admits that in a society imposing fewer frustrations than we now know, the character of  literature may change: “I daresay a few first-rate sonnets would have remained unwritten had the lady yielded”; but when the necessities of  life are easily obtained, he anticipates a great welling up of artistic interest. “We shall never produce so satisfying a world that there will be no place for art.” Although Frazier’s prediction is not unreasonable, many writers are unable to share his cheer. Like heroism, great art may prove incompatible with the conditions of a stable and happy society. Eighteenth-century writers mourned the passing of  the epic, but not the “barbaric” conditions which made the epic possible. Novelists—perhaps even painters—contemplating the putative state of  their art under utopian conditions, face a similar dilemma. The narrator of  Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race finds the portraits of  the Vril-ya painted seven thousand years ago much superior to those of  the last three thousand years; as features in the paintings appeared more serene, ref lecting the increasing serenity of  Vril-ya society, the art of  the painter became tame and monotonous. As to literature, the Vril-ya have only an insipid poetry of description; because they no longer experience the passions which motivated the great poetry of  the past, the Vril-ya have no subject.xcv Not all writers, of course, find a prospective dilution of  literature insupportable. The only character in News from Nowhere who bemoans the loss of vitality in the novel under the new utopian conditions is Ellen’s grandfather, the old grumbler who has a hearty dislike of  heaven. Ellen puts him straight. Perhaps books were well enough in the past, she says, when they could palliate the miseries of people’s lives; but there is no place for them today. “When will you understand that after all it is the world we live in which interests us; the world of which we are a part, and which we can never love too much? Look!” she says, laying her hands on the shoulders of  the two lovers, “look! these are our books in these days!” Of  the 274,000 books that Robert Graves’s New Cretans found had been written on Shakespeare, they kept only 2, which they digested into three pages. In the same spirit they tossed away all of  Shakespeare’s work but what they considered the best: thirty pages in all.

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Paper feeds on paper And on the blood of men. Engrave the durable On plates of gold and silver, Lest memory of it wavers … Cretans, have done with paper And with parchment, its dour brother.

Poetry, to be sure, is encouraged in New Crete, and magical poetry, with power to blister a victim’s cheek, enthusiastically practiced; but almost nothing written is kept, nor is it worth being kept. The ordered and serene life of  New Crete is incompatible with the thrilling intensities of passion experienced by men in more turbulent days and fixed in their poetry. Quant, a New Cretan poet who knows about these matters, realizes, sadly, that the time has passed when true poetry can be written in his language. Graves’s insistence on the theme shows clearly that it is of genuine concern to him. It probably accounts for some of  his ambivalence toward the utopia he has created—an ambivalence ref lected in the narrator’s spasmodic attempts to assess the gains and losses associated with a life unmarked by poverty and crime. For example, the worship of  the goddess is the indispensible stabilizing force in New Crete. Venn-Thomas, the narrator, is horrified that the annual fertility rites include ritual murder and cannibalism; on the other hand, however, so awful is this sacrifice that New Cretans take no other human life whatever, even in war. Venn-Thomas makes the inevitable comparison: “I thought of  the strewn corpses on Monte Cassino, where I had been almost the only unwounded survivor of my company; and of  the f lying-bomb raid on London, when I had held a sack open for an air-raid warden to shovel the bloody fragments of a child into it.” A certain halfwittedness in respect to religion, Venn-Thomas decides, is indispensable to the good life, but he is perfectly willing to choose such half-wittedness over the whole-wittedness demanded by the American Century. (“Nor did Russia appeal to me in the least; the regime was anti-poetic.”) Still, there is the decline of poetry in New Crete, and Venn-Thomas is as romantic a poet as is Graves, his creator. At the end, and with unmistakable relish, Venn-Thomas, swelled with a divine af f latus, prophesies the rising of  the

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north wind in New Crete and a harvest of misery which will once more make possible the ecstasies of worship and of  true poetry. Brave New World, as might be expected, puts the issue of art and utopia with unpleasant clarity. Of course, says the Controller, Othello is better than the feelies; but social instability is a necessary condition of writing Othello, and the happiness of  the new society cannot accommodate instability. “You’ve got to choose between happiness and … high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.” Nobody would have suf fered more acutely from the loss of  high art than Aldous Huxley, yet when in Island he comes to describe happiness among the inhabitants of  Utopia—a very dif ferent order of experience from happiness in the Brave New World—he presides over the demise of significant literature with savage zeal. Again the issue is starkly put: “Dualism …. Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.” This is an aphorism from the notebook of  the Old Raja containing the principles on which the Utopia of  Pala is founded. Farnaby, the visiting journalist, pushes the implications to their limit: “if one’s to believe your Old Raja literature is incompatible … with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration, and unnecessary guilt.” This formulation, more extravagant even than that in Brave New World, represents the thrust of  Huxley’s thinking shortly before his death. That he should have thought life more important than literature is surely not surprising. One thinks of  Keats: poetry is “not so fine a thing as philosophy—For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth.” But that Huxley should allow literature to be rejected in such violent terms is a measure of  his despair.xcvi “Never mind,” says Farnaby, grinning ferociously, “after Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you’ll undoubtedly have a Golden Age of  literature and theology.” The conclusion is precisely that of  Graves’s book, the point of view reversed. Pala’s supreme art, Farnaby is told, one which can be practiced by anybody, is the art of adequately experiencing the world. It is a familiar theme: in Socrates’ terms, the superiority of experience over the representation of

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experience; in other terms, real gratification over the substitute gratification of which Freud spoke. “Nous ne voulons que du réel,” say the utopians of  Restif de la Bretonne’s Mégapatagonia, as out of  hand they condemn painting, drama, and poetry.xcvii “These are our books,” cries Ellen in News from Nowhere, embracing the lovers; she echoes the Mégapatagonians: “nos tableaux, ce sont nos beaux Hommes, nos belles Femmes que nous voyons tous les jours.” Ever since Socrates, in the Republic, recommended crowning the mimetic artist with fillets of wool and escorting him to another city, the theme has echoed in utopian literature. Moreover, utopia’s reality is not that with which our writers are engaged. If  the triumph of  the artist is, as Lionel Trilling has said, to shape the material of pain we all share, utopia tries to eradicate that pain. Its function is to lower the temperature of  the culture, to reduce the amount of  “history” in it; for history, we know, is equivalent to pain. Four hundred years ago Campanella’s Captain, in The City of  the Sun, could exult: “Oh if you only knew what they say from their astrology … concerning the coming age and the fact that our age has more history in it in a hundred years than the whole world in the preceding 4,000 years ….” But that was in another country, and today utopia (where it is still the subject of  the literary imagination) desperately seeks less history out of  fear of  the age to come—and that means, necessarily, less literature. To the degree that a literary artist helps bring about the conditions of utopia, he contributes to the death—or at least to the severe debilitation—of  his art. It is a genuine dilemma.xcviii Paul Valéry points out that H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, who brilliantly depict the technology of  the future, make no attempt to imagine its art.xcix As the Nautilus cruises at the bottom of  the sea, Captain Nemo plays Bach, not the work of electronic composers. Certain writers attracted to utopia, however, have tried to visualize Valéry’s “yet unknown kind of aesthetics”—in ef fect, like Julian West but with utterly dif ferent results, they have read Penthesilia by Berrian, Edward Bellamy’s novelist of  the future. Their rejection of  the utopian enterprise is a critique of utopian art.

CHAPTER 7

Anti-Anti-Utopia: Walden Two and Island

Against the optimistic utopias of  the nineteenth century, Erewhon stands eccentric and interesting, modern in its alienation, its rejection of  the dominant mystique of  the age. “Do not machines eat as it were by mannery?” Today, almost overwhelmed in the f lood of  black visions of  the future, two positive utopias, alienated from alienation, ask questions of our time as urgent as those of  Butler. B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) and Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) are daring ventures, full against the dominant imagination of  the twentieth century. Perhaps only one as contemptuous of  history as Skinner or one as desperately conscious of  history as Huxley could have made the plunge. In any event, Walden Two and Island are our utopias, the two post-modern visions of  the good place that speak most cogently against despair. Inevitably, Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor hovers over both. Skinner, an eminent behavioral psychologist turned writer of  fiction, deliberately evokes the Grand Inquisitor topos by his delineation of  T.E. Frazier, also a behavioral psychologist, the guiding genius of  the fictional community called Walden Two. The community has the traditional utopian aim: the happiness of its members, the achievement of  the Good Life. Unembarrassed by philosophical complexities, Frazier has no doubts about what the good life consists of: health, a minimum of unpleasant labor, the chance to exercise talents and abilities, full opportunity to develop intimate and satisfying personal relationships, plenty of relaxation and rest. To this unquestionably attractive goal Frazier adds another constituent: freedom from the responsibility of planning and making choices. Most people, he says, are content with day-to-day happiness as long as they are assured that they will be decently provided for. The theme is familiar; Frazier’s “most people” are the millions of  Dostoevski’s legend. Walden

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Two has also its complementary elite, the highly intelligent few attracted by power, challenged by complex problems and distant goals—those who guard the mystery: “What remains to be done?” [Frazier] said, his eyes f lashing. “Well, what do you say to the design of personalities? Would that interest you? The control of  temperament? Give me the specifications, and I’ll give you the man! What do you say to the control of motivation, building the interests which will make man most productive and most successful? Does that seem to you fantastic? Yet some of  the techniques are available, and more can be worked out experimentally. Think of  the possibilities! A society in which there is no failure, no boredom, no duplication of ef fort! … Let us control the lives of our children and see what we can make of  them.”

The priesthood of  Walden Two will be as powerful as that of  the legend. Frazier is no more in doubt about the means of achieving the good life than about its ends. All that is required is intelligence together with what he loosely calls the experimental method, and the systematic application of well-known principles of  behavioral engineering. If one wants a good society, he argues, one must answer two questions. One must discover what constitutes the best behavior of  the individual from the point of view of  the group concerned. Then one must determine how to induce the individual to behave in the desired way. These are experimental questions in process of  being answered at Walden Two. Human engineering in this utopia starts with babies, all of whom are brought up communally under controlled conditions which preclude frustration, anxiety, fear. Gradually obstacles and annoyances are introduced into the babies’ experience; they learn progressively how to cope with these unpleasant experiences so that what appears to be a slightly fiendish torture of children is in fact a method insuring that they will develop extraordinary tolerance for the frustrations they are bound to encounter in later life. Possibilities, the Planners claim, are boundless: destructive and wasteful emotions can be trained out of children, their self-control enhanced, the chances that they will be unhappy immeasurably lessened. All this—Walden Two’s ethical training—is accomplished by the age of six. Adults too can be conditioned to socially desirable behavior. Frazier explains: “if it’s in our power to create any of  the situations which a person

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likes or to remove any situation he doesn’t like, we can control his behavior. When he behaves as we want him to behave, we simply create a situation he likes, or remove one he doesn’t like. As a result, the probability that he will behave that way again goes up, which is what we want. Technically it’s called ‘positive reinforcement.’ ” The great power of  the method lies in the fact that there is no restraint and no reason for revolt. “By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes.” In short, the aim of  Walden Two is to bring about the state of af fairs H.G. Wells dreamed of: “every man doing as it pleases him, and none pleased to do evil.” Does the system work? Look, says Frazier expansively, with all the self-confidence of a man who fears no contradiction, look how happy they are.c Systematic conditioning of  human beings is of course incompatible with the doctrine of  human freedom, as Frazier’s interlocutors observe. On this issue Frazier is as forthright as the Grand Inquisitor or Mustapha Mond. He denies that freedom exists at all. He has to deny it, for if man is free, then a technology of  human behavior is impossible. As Dr. Johnson says, “The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation.” Frazier admits (as does Skinner elsewhere) that he cannot prove the nonexistence of  freedom, but his science demands the assumption: “You can’t have a science about a subject matter which hops capriciously about.”ci The justification for the controls of  Walden Two is that all men are conditioned by their environment, normally in a random, haphazard, wasteful way. As Frazier says repeatedly, there is no virtue in accident. If personal freedom is an illusion and the control of  behavior inevitable, it is far better that control be exercised rationally in the interests of social well-being, than that it fall into the hands of charlatans and demagogues. Furthermore Walden Two eschews the use of  force and punishment; it is “free,” that is, of  those restraints, and in that sense is “the freest place in the world.” The members of  Walden Two feel free—a result of  their conditioning—no matter how rigidly controlled they are. They do what they want to do, but, says Frazier, “we see to it that they will want to do precisely the things which are best for themselves and the community.” Like Christians who act in accordance with God’s plan, “their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.” All this is so close to Ivan Karamazov’s legend that it can hardly be accidental. “Today,”

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says the Grand Inquisitor to Christ in the long monologue, “people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing.” In other ways too Skinner brings Frazier and Walden Two within the orbit of  Dostoevski’s theme. One of man’s greatest longings, says the old Inquisitor, is to be united in the universal harmony of an anthill. Skinner accepts the challenge of  the image and allows Professor Augustine Castle, Frazier’s antagonist in the fiction, to use it (“Walden Two is a marvel of ef ficient coordination—as ef ficient as an anthill”) in his contemptuous characterization of  the community. And like the Grand Inquisitor, Frazier has no compunction about being the God of  God: “I like to play God,” he says; and he judges his own creation of  Walden Two an improvement in some respects over the work of  Genesis. As for his motivation, it is that of  the Inquisitor: “These are my children, Burris …. I love them.” Still, these are not, one must recognize, the same children that the Grand Inquisitor loves: Skinner has carefully rejected certain elements of  the legend. Part of  the behavioral design at Walden Two insures that the Planners receive no adulation, no marks of  honor or gratitude or special esteem, quite in contrast to the reverential awe accorded the Guardians of  Ivan Karamazov’s tale. And while Frazier may be identified with the unhappy elite of  the legend, his unhappiness comes not from taking on the curse of  the knowledge of good and evil, but because he is a product of  twentieth-century society at large; Frazier was not born in Walden Two. His successors, the Planners of  the future, not being so handicapped, will presumably not suf fer his disability. All will be happy, even those who rule, in that blessed day. Skinner handles these thematic intricacies with considerable skill, inviting the identification with the Grand Inquisitor, accepting some of  the consequences of  the identification, rejecting others, and positively revelling in the bathos involved. It is unnerving to recognize that “mystery,” one of  the three great powers with which Satan tempted Christ in the wilderness, is reduced by Skinner to a lollipop hung around the neck of a child. But then Frazier speaks of  Jesus as a behavioral engineer and says of  love, in a moment of  high seriousness, that it is another name for

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positive reinforcement. Presumably Skinner thinks the shock value of such identifications compensates for their vulgarity. Humanist critics of  Walden Two have been so dismayed by Skinner’s vision of  the good life and so enraged by his evident contempt for their values and their disciplines that they have belabored him with every handle in the book, whatever its legitimacy as a weapon. Frazier says many outrageous things and so from another point of view does his antagonist, Professor Castle; but no matter who the speaker and what the circumstance, any opinion uttered is likely to be charged against Skinner himself. The temptation is admittedly strong in Frazier’s case; most of  the time he unquestionably expresses Skinner’s own views, sometimes in language straight out of  Skinner’s textbooks. And Skinner’s attempt to identify himself (Burrhus Frederick Skinner) with Professor Burris, the pallid narrator of  the tale for whose soul Frazier struggles, is an engagingly inef fectual bit of  behavioral engineering. But critics are irresponsible not to recognize that Skinner is aware of  Frazier’s messianic ambitions and that formally, at least, he puts ironic distance between himself and some of  Frazier’s most egregious pronouncements. This is a mild matter at times, as when Frazier, in a fit of enthusiasm, declaims: “The one thing that I would cry from every housetop is this: the good life is waiting for us—here and now!” Burris comments dryly: “I almost fancied I heard a Salvation Army drum throbbing in the distance.” It is of considerable consequence, however, that Skinner portrays Frazier as a man driven by a desire to play God. Twice Skinner associates Frazier with the devil; and the scene in which Frazier takes Burris high on a hill to a rock formation called the Throne, where Frazier can overlook what he has created, sets unmistakable countercurrents to work: “It must be a great satisfaction,” I said finally. “A world of your own making.” “Yes,” he said. “I look upon my work and, behold, it is good ….” I ref lected that his beard made him look a little like Christ. Then, with a shock, I saw that he had assumed the position of crucifixion. I was extraordinarily ill at ease … for all I knew, the man beside me might be going mad. “Just so you don’t think you’re God,” I said hesitantly …. “There’s a curious similarity,” he said.

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Without making excessive claims for the passage, one recognizes a genuine attempt to convey complexity; in ideological analyses of  the book it should be respected.cii Skinner is perfectly aware of  the equivocal nature of  these matters. In the following passage he allows Frazier to utter sentiments revealing his arrogant ignorance of major political and philosophical issues, his tyrannical ambitions, his grotesque pride: “Dictatorship and freedom—predestination and free will,” Frazier continued. “What are these but pseudo-questions of  linguistic origin? When we ask what Man can make of  Man, we don’t mean the same thing by ‘Man’ in both instances. We mean to ask what a few men can make of mankind. And that’s the all-absorbing question of  the twentieth century. What kind of world can we build—those of us who understand the science of  behavior?” “Then Castle was right. You’re a dictator, after all.” “No more than God. Or rather less so.”

Burris’s response—“You’re a dictator, after all”—sets distance between author and character. It is designed to reassure us: Skinner could not approve Frazier’s sentiments. And possibly he does not. But at the end of  the book any distance between him and Frazier is ef fectively dissolved by Burris’s conversion. Burris leaves Walden Two headed back for his job at the university; but only a few hours’ exposure to life outside Utopia is enough to nauseate him. He returns to Walden Two on foot, a pilgrim. Not without apprehensions, however: “I glanced fearfully upward toward the Throne. There was no one there …. Frazier was not in his heaven. All was right with the world.” These are the last lines in the book. We are to share Burris’s relief: Frazier is not really a dictator, which means somehow, that all is well. How risky it is! Whether Frazier is on the Throne or not, his ideas will continue to reign at Walden Two. Human beings will be treated according to the assumption (an assumption not capable of proof ) that individual freedom does not exist, and they will be conditioned in such a way as to insure the accuracy of  the assumption. Clearly, however, even if man is not free, there are degrees of nonfreedom; Frazier proposes to foster the illusion of  freedom while actually increasing nonfreedom. Given his system, everything

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will depend upon the character of  the conditioners (and those who condition them): if  they are decent, humane men, possibly the good life will burgeon at Walden Two; if  they are demagogues and tyrants, against whom Frazier warns, the potentialities of development have been fully mapped in the life as well as the literature of  the twentieth century. The implication to be drawn from the last paragraph of  Walden Two is that, had Frazier been on the Throne, Walden Two would have developed into a tyranny. Skinner seems not to recognize what a near thing it was. In Aldous Huxley’s Island, Will Farnaby, cynical journalist shipwrecked on the shores of  Utopia, visits a Palanese couple for lunch. Shanta is breastfeeding her baby. Vijaya, the father, caresses the baby’s back, then brings a large parrot into contact with the infant’s body, moving the feathers gently back and forth on the brown skin. “Polly’s a good bird,” he canted. “Polly’s a very good bird.” “Such a good bird,” Shanta whispered, taking up the refrain. “Such a good bird.” Vijaya explains to Farnaby that as a result of  this training the Palanese get on beautifully with the local fauna—and, since appropriate modifications are made in the formula—with each other. The technique was picked up, Vijaya explains, over a hundred years ago from a tribe in New Guinea that believed in love and, unlike Christians and Buddhists, had invented a practical way of assuring that its people did, in fact, love one another: “Stroke the baby while you’re feeding him; it doubles his pleasure. Then, while he’s sucking and being caressed, introduce him to the animal or person you want him to love. Rub his body against theirs; let there be a warm physical contact between child and love object. At the same time repeat some word like ‘good.’ At first he’ll understand only your tone of voice. Later on, when he learns to speak, he’ll get the full meaning. Food plus caress plus contact plus ‘good’ equals love. And love equals pleasure, love equals satisfaction.” “Pure Pavlov” [, said Farnaby]. “But Pavlov purely for a good purpose. Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion. Whereas you prefer to use Pavlov for brainwashing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals, and tycoons.”

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Vijaya’s argument is precisely that of  Frazier in Walden Two: the techniques of  behavioral engineering are known and used constantly, most of  the time by unscrupulous persons for evil ends. In a rational society they would be used systematically for good ends: as they are in Walden Two, as they are on Pala—as they were in the original Utopia itself: “for they use with very great endeavour and diligence to put into the heads of  their children, whiles they be yet tender and pliant, good opinions and profitable for the conservation of  their weal-public. Which, when they be once rooted in children, do remain with them all their life after and be wondrous profitable for the defence and maintenance of  the state of  the commonwealth ….” Still, it is impossible to read of conditioned love in Pala without being aware of  the ghastly possibilities; one remembers the Deltas being conditioned to hate f lowers in the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms of  the Brave New World, and one remembers the hypnopaedic techniques (“I’m really awfully glad that I’m a Beta”) which guarantee that the mind is precisely what has been implanted by the State. Other writers may have plunged more deeply into these grotesqueries than Huxley; they may have been more apocalyptic, more “novelistic” than he; but Huxley’s is unquestionably the authoritative literary image of conditioned happiness and its horrors. How disconcerting then—but how logical, after all—to find in Island, Huxley’s last despairing stab at showing what a good life might be in our time, some of  the same conditioning methods (much less systematically applied, of course) that he had made notorious in Brave New World. The issue comes up repeatedly in Island. Twenty percent of  the population anywhere, Huxley claims, is highly suggestible, to the point where they are easy prey of propagandists. On Pala these potential somnambulists are identified as children; they are hypnotized and given special training so that they will not be hypnotizable later by enemies of  liberty—the tyrant’s technique used for socially benign ends. Again, a major characteristic of  the religious and sensual life of  Pala is the use of a psychedelic drug whose ef fect is to induce an experience of self-transcendence akin to that of  the mystics. This is a far cry from the soma of  Brave New World or the drugs often encountered in the early utopias;ciii Huxley’s tone is reverential as he describes the moksha-medicine and its uses. Doctor MacPhail in Island

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expresses Huxley’s sentiments when he argues that the medicine connects the individual mind with Mind. The experience of  the drug, he says, is like that of music, but incomparably more important: “the experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed.” Psychedelic drugs are an essential element in Huxley’s imagination of  the good life; he seeks to accommodate this mechanical operation of  the spirit into his search for the modalities of a free society. That he is groping for incompatibles, that he commends social practices that violate his earnest and repeatedly-expressed commitment to individual freedom, need not surprise us. Huxley was caught up in what Whitehead forty years ago, in Science and the Modern World, identified as a radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought. With one part of our minds we embrace a “scientific” view of man according to which man’s total behavior is determined by prior causation. With another part of our minds—in our practical, everyday political lives—we insist that man is self-determined, autonomous, that he is free. The success of  the behaviorists in treating man as a machine makes increasingly credible the postulate that man’s freedom is a fiction. On the other hand, we know by our own most authentic experience the reality of existential choice. Put in these terms, the two positions are incompatible and, as Whitehead and many others have noted, modern thought is enfeebled thereby. Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, once claimed that he would be willing to be turned into a kind of clock, and wound up every morning, on condition that some great power would always make him think what is true and do what is right. He was not at all interested in the freedom to be wrong. Aldous Huxley sometimes writes in similar terms: “If only all of us … could be ef fectively filled, during our sleep, with love and compassion for all!” A man willing to be filled in this way is likely to entertain ideas about filling others. That men can be so filled—so conditioned—Huxley, of course, had not the slightest doubt. He criticized B.F. Skinner’s technical work, not because in denying man’s freedom Skinner proceeded from a false assumption, but because the work centered too narrowly on behavior and ignored biological dif ferences in human beings. Huxley makes this point in several essays and again (without mentioning Skinner) in Island, where Doctor MacPhail is contemptuous of  both the

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Freudian and the behaviorist schools of psychology. An inference to be drawn is that if  the Pavlovians would incorporate biochemical sophistication into their discipline, their ability to control behavior would be unlimited. Huxley’s experiments with drugs toward the end of  his life convinced him that, as he said, the pill is mightier than sword or pen; the dictatorships of  the future, he predicted, will use the pill to bring men happiness—no less real experientially for being chemically induced—and to deprive them of  their freedom. On the other hand, if pharmacology is a threat to freedom, it can also be used to heighten vigor and increase intelligence, man’s greatest bulwarks against tyranny. By appropriate biochemical methods, says Huxley, “we can transform [adults and children] into superior individuals.”civ In this mood Huxley plays God in a way he normally deplores, “filling” others for their own good—his tone indistinguishable from that of  Skinner at this most manic, the problem of  freedom forgotten. The opposing position in Huxley’s dialogue with himself is put most forcibly by the Savage of  Brave New World, who, like Dostoevski’s Underground Man, opts for misery, pain, suf fering in order to prove that he is not the keys of a piano—not the slave of a meretricious happiness. The Savage does not, however, speak for Aldous Huxley who, while ordinarily holding freedom to be a supreme value, rejects the exaggerated terms in which the dilemma is put in Brave New World. In most of  his writing Huxley makes the elementary distinction between a systematic conditioning imposed scientifically on the individual citizen in a closed society (as in Brave New World) and the kind of conditioning to which every man is subject by virtue of  having been born into a particular society at a particular time. The dif ference is that, although every man is a prisoner of  his culture, he can, by an extraordinary act of will, escape from that prison into freedom of a kind—a manifest impossibility in the closed society. Huxley speaks of  the great paradox of  human life: “It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness; but in order to make full use of  this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of  the conditioning which developed it.” When he writes specifically of  the ancient metaphysical problem of  freedom of  the will, Huxley equivocates. One can see this most clearly in

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the essay on Pascal. Huxley argues that most philosophical positions are no more than rationalizations of prevailing psychological moods. “Even the doctrines of  ‘fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,’ for all the elaborateness of  their form, are in substance only expression of emotional and physiological states. One feels free or one feels conditioned. Both feelings are equally facts of experience ….” The question of  truth or falsity simply does not arise. Our grandparents, says Huxley, had to have things one way or the other—the world according to science or the world according to art –and they suf fered excruciatingly thereby. We need not take so tragic a view of  things. Given the state of our knowledge, one world view (the scientific as opposed to the mystical, for example) cannot be truer than another; philosophical consistency therefore (except in logic and epistemology) no longer has merit. In this way Huxley comes to terms with the radical inconsistency in modern thought that exercised Whitehead. As with the contradictory theories of  light with which physicists have had to come to terms, this solution, at the level of abstract thought, does not solve; but as an exercise of negative capability the equivocation allowed Huxley to live with a contradiction that cut at the heart of  his engagement with man and society. Island ref lects his equivocation. Pala will be destroyed, predicts the Savonarolan Mr. Bahu, because it is too perfect—because it is successfully designed “to make every man, woman, and child on this enchanting island as perfectly free and happy as it’s possible to be.” Of course, not even on Pala are perfect happiness and perfect freedom possible. Mortality inevitably shadows happiness: people die on Pala, not of poverty or war or preventible disease—they die, in Michael Harrington’s phrase, of death, which gives mortality a peculiar poignancy. Similarly, one cannot speak of a society as perfectly free which systematically uses hypnotism on children to alter character structure. It is possible to debate endlessly the degree of deprivation of individual freedom involved in Pavlovian methods of child raising and the dangers of  tyrannical control entailed by the socially sanctioned use of psychedelic drugs. Still, Mr. Bahu’s praise of  Pala, like Huxley’s intent in depicting Palanese society, was confined to the realm of  the possible. That a society devoted to freedom of  the individual should use in the service of its ends some of  the techniques of unfreedom involves

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a contradiction obvious to the point of  banality. The contradiction may, however, be necessary. Walden Two and Island take the precarious state of  twentieth-century Western society largely for granted; they were constructed, that is, with no sense that they had to be justified, like so many utopias, by spelling out in detail the wickedness and folly of our age. Both authors recognize that the time is late for such specification and that the telling might prove tedious as well as redundant. An ancient Irish apocalyptic tale foretells an age of doom characterized, in part, by the fact that every man shall have his own satirist. That time has surely come upon us; every man—and every child—is engaged in satire today. Walden Two and Island are fresh and interesting in that, although casting a negative light on our society, they are not Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four writ again. When they portray utopia—battered word!—they mean it. Walden Two makes some point of not being satirical at all. According to Frazier the Planners deliberately refrain from ridiculing the stupidities of  the world outside, almost as though the target were too easy. Still, the traditional motivation for utopia is present: “Our civilization is running away like a frightened horse,” says Frazier, recommending that we abandon it. At every point throughout the development of our knowledge of  Walden Two a contrast with the inferior world we know is either stated or implied, as when Steve Jamnik and Mary Grove, working-class visitors to Utopia, compare the richly satisfying married life they could have there with the dreary prospect awaiting them outside: a couple of rooms somewhere across the tracks, where the Irish kids clobber the Jews. The most ef fective episode of  this kind is at the end. Burris and Professor Castle are at the railroad station awaiting transportation home. Castle’s imperceptive criticisms of  Walden Two bring Burris’s musings about the place into focus. Suddenly Burris finds himself ducking out on his tiresome colleague for a walk in the neighborhood of  the station: I emerged into a blighted area in which rows of decaying stores had been converted into squalid living quarters. Dirty children played in dirty streets, tired and unkempt women leaned on window sills, hopeless men stood about in sullen groups. But I drew no comparison with Walden Two. The contrast was too massive to fit into

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the delicate play of  forces in my mind. Walden Two had nothing in common with the human devastation about me now. It was absurd to ask which life one would choose, if  these were the alternatives.

A headline in a newspaper catches his attention: DIGNITY OF MAN BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS THEME

The president of  Burris’s university has been delivering a recent version of  his standard speech, replete with every cliché in the repertoire of  bankrupt humanism. The empty phrases represent to Burris the fecklessness, the futility, of education in a society lost beyond redemption. They trigger his decision to return to the hope of  Walden Two. The scene is modeled after Looking Backward, after the nightmare return of  Julian West to the Boston of  his birth. West finds the degradation and misery of  the 1880s an absolute inferno after the antiseptic af f luence of  the year 2000. In what has become a standard gambit of utopian fiction, he reads a newspaper crawling with stories of war, strikes, unemployment, robbery, murder, and he sees with fresh eyes how industrialism has brutalized the urban poor. Bellamy pushes his rhetoric hard in this climactic episode, the most powerful scene in the book. Skinner’s handling of  the return of  Burris is more restrained, but has something of  the same ef fect. Given the context, Skinner has only (while disavowing any intent of comparison) to provide a brief glimpse of a major failure of our society, to print a couple of phrases from the baccalaureate address—“restoring the dignity of  the human soul”—for the satirical point to be made. Still, Walden Two contains very little overt satire. Professor Augustine Castle is a butt, his pomposities designed to discredit academic philosophy in general; and Frazier himself is caught out in his own arrogance once or twice. But this is minor. The ugly truths about society that, in fiction of  this kind, satire would normally expose are simply taken for granted in Walden Two. On the third page, Steve Rogers, just back from the war, says almost casually to Professor Burris: “there are a lot of  things about the way we are living now that are completely insane ….” That is what lies behind the book.

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Aldous Huxley tested the idea of utopia more thoroughly than any other literary man of our day. Brave New World is utopia in caricature, a satire on the idea of utopia and our distortions of it. It is the classic warning of  the abyss that lies at the end of our simplistic search for happiness. Ape and Essence (1948) is Huxley’s dystopia, his Nineteen Eighty-Four, a hideous picture of  the United States after the next nuclear war. The book is an unrecognized parent of currently popular black humor, its ferocious satire relieved occasionally by grotesque f lashes of comedy. Island, Huxley’s last book, reverses the negative progress, presenting itself as an image of sanity and health, the island of  Pala as an oasis of  humanity in a wilderness of monkeys. The three works, poignant ref lections of  Huxley’s deepest concerns, form a unit. In Ape and Essence a conversation between Dr. Poole and Belial’s ArchVicar identifies the sources of  Belial’s triumph in the twentieth century: “And then,” says Dr. Poole …. “He [Belial] persuaded each side to take only the worst the other had to of fer. So the East takes Western nationalism, Western armaments, Western movies and Western Marxism; the West takes Eastern despotism, Eastern superstitions and Eastern indif ference to individual life. In a word, He saw to it that mankind should make the worst of  both worlds.” “Just think if  they’d made the best!” squeaks the Arch-Vicar. “Eastern mysticism making sure that Western science should be properly used; the Eastern art of  living refining Western energy; Western individualism tempering Eastern totalitarianism.” He shakes his head in pious horror. “Why, it would have been the kingdom of  heaven.”cv

As so often in Huxley, the positive is defined in words uttered by the devil. Here the Arch-Vicar provides the ideological outline of  Island, which is Huxley’s major ef fort to work out in detail the normative element, the standard, of  his satire—in some sense (although his standards changed), all his satire, from the beginning. Among other things, Island is the “third alternative” that Huxley once contemplated if  he should ever rewrite Brave New World: the society of  “freely co-operating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity” that he considered allowing the Savage to experience before being transported to “Utopia.” In 1946, when Huxley broached the possibility of  the third alternative, the word “utopia” was still equivalent

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in his mind to hell, although he was obviously thinking of  the terms in which an imaginary good place might be described. Pala is that place, just as it is the secular kingdom of  heaven of which Belial speaks with horror. Although the emphasis is strongly on the normative in Island—on the institutions and beliefs and relationships that constitute Good Being on the island of  Pala—the book inevitably contains some of  Huxley’s characteristic negative orientation. He sets up familiar targets for satiric treatment once more: Calvinism, for example, or styles in American consumer taste as exemplified in a Sears Roebuck catalog: “Soft Platform Wedgies in Wide Widths.” The most interesting use of satire in Island, however, is as a test of  Palanese values. Positive utopias have in their purity often been highly vulnerable to satire and irony. Huxley deliberately makes Farnaby, his central character, a satirist of sorts. Farnaby is a disillusioned journalist with a “f layed smile,” a true Huxley–Graham Greene type, forever on the verge of nausea. Confronted by Pala’s extraordinary combination of Western science and Eastern concern for human and spiritual values, Farnaby reacts true to his kind: he is the man who won’t take yes for an answer. In the scene referred to earlier where Shanta is suckling her baby, Farnaby sits down beside the pair and begins stroking the child’s body. “This is another man,” Shanta whispered. “A good man, baby. A good man.” “How I wish it were true!” he said with a rueful little laugh. “Here and now it is true.” And bending down again over the child, “He’s a good man,” she repeated. “A good good man.” He looked at her blissful, secretly smiling face, he felt the smoothness and warmth of  the child’s tiny body against his fingertips. Good, good, good …. He too might have known this goodness—but only if  his life had been completely dif ferent from what in fact, in senseless and disgusting fact, it was. So never take yes for an answer, even when, as now, yes is self-evident. He looked again with eyes deliberately attuned to another wave length of value, and saw the caricature of a Memling altarpiece. “Madonna with Child, Dog, Pavlov and Casual Acquaintance.”

Pala’s values stand sturdily, however, against Farnaby’s ironic probing; and most of  the time his ridicule looks cheap against them. The tendency in these scenes is for the values to remain undisturbed but for the ridicule to redound onto Farnaby’s head, just as in ancient times it was believed that

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an unjust curse or an unjust satire would redound onto the head of  him who uttered it. Ridicule, many writers of  the eighteenth century thought, is a test of  truth. Huxley applies the test, although in carefully controlled doses; by incorporating hostile attitudes into his utopia, and assimilating them, to some degree he disarms them. This homeopathic use of satire in the literature of utopia is ef fective. Most literary utopias, as we know, are not mere objects of contemplation, ideal and remote; but no more are they detailed blueprints for action. They are heuristic devices, models of  the kind of society the authors think viable. Writers are likely to present enough details about how their respective societies function in matters economic, political, educational, and the like, so as to give some air of verisimilitude to their creations; but each is likely to concentrate on dif ferent matters, and details are less important than principles, less important than style and feel and tone. Walden Two and Island come together in interesting ways in a few details; both insist, for example (like many utopias before them), on the relaxation of  family ties. But Skinner is relatively thorough on the economic structure of  Walden Two and casual about education, whereas Huxley is most cavalier about economics, serious and interesting on education. These matters aside, however, the big dif ference is in the feel of  the two societies. Skinner makes a good deal of  the authoritarian character of  Walden Two, whose members entertain no nonsense about democracy. This is the totally planned society, structured so that a self-perpetuating elite shapes to their specifications the inhabitants of  the world they control. To be sure, some of  the methods of conditioning described seem ludicrously incommensurate with the claims made for them. It is the claims (and Frazier’s compulsive anti-humanism) rather more than the techniques of  teaching children self-control, or the methods used to decide that married couples should have separate rooms, that have given Walden Two its reputation as the devil’s handbook. But the work must be taken in its own terms, and perhaps the reputation is justified. The inquiring Burris finds that the arts f lourish at Walden Two, that the people have the illusion of  freedom, that they seem relaxed and content. To a good many readers they also seem a little like zombies. Unless, like D.H. Lawrence, we are willing to accept the price exacted by the Grand Inquisitor along with the gifts he of fers, we are

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unlikely to find Walden Two a notably good place. No matter how much he loves his children, Frazier has a whif f of  brimstone about him, and the ironic distance between him at his worst and his creator Skinner is finally illusory. In a recent essay Skinner writes enviously about the assurance of  the technology that went into designing the atomic bomb: “When we can design small social interactions and, possibly, whole cultures with the confidence we bring to physical technology, the question of value will not be raised.”cvi That has about it the genuine ring of  the final solution. Against the authoritarianism and singlemindedness of  Walden Two, where everything turns in on the idea of  behavioral engineering, Island presents a notably open and f lexible society, a model in some respects like that envisioned for a utopian future by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which appropriate elements of  both “cold” and “hot” societies are integrated.cvii Island’s eclecticism is precisely what makes it interesting, its synthesis of ideas and modes of  thought from East and West: Tantrik Buddhism and electrical generators, the arcadian tradition and the technological. In certain ways Island has af finities with News from Nowhere, particularly in its concern with the enrichment of sensual experience. Palanese religion, for example, contains a strong aesthetic element, giving a tone to life on the island utterly foreign to Walden Two (or to the Boston of  Looking Backward, with which Walden Two has af finities), but quite in harmony with the rhythms of  life that Morris dreamed of in his green and pleasant (and irreligious) land. The dif ficulty with the book is largely one of style. In Island Huxley abandons his normal critical relationship to society and tries to will a new orientation—this time to a society he has created, one which embodies processes and goals that he values. The morally admirable ef fort is artistically disastrous. Huxley has no command of  the celebratory style. The passages in the book which feel genuinely written are those dealing with Farnaby’s past—return trips to Huxley’s familiar hells; but when he tries to articulate the peculiar virtues of  Palanese life he staggers between bathos and the inf lated rhetoric of  those who, without great poetic gifts, try to communicate the inef fable. As with many utopias, one has to distinguish between social and literary importance: Island may well have the one; it certainly does not have the other.

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Walden Two and Pala have in common one major goal: within the limitations of the human condition, the happiness of their people. One can forgive these societies and their authors a good deal simply because they dare countenance so wildly anachronistic an aim. Twentieth-century literature can no more stomach happiness as an end in life than it can accommodate a hero. Dostoevski’s Underground Man became an anti-hero at the moment he armed himself with misery against the principle of positive reinforcement and spat upon happiness as the potential subverter of his freedom. Lionel Trilling has shown how well our literature has absorbed the lesson.cviii By now, however, the pleasures of misery must be nearly exhausted, and it is refreshing to have two books that speak for happiness in the teeth of prescriptive despair. Our pleasure is mitigated, admittedly, by the terms in which Skinner, at least, speaks. The f light from freedom is one of  the major themes of our time; and one can understand the tremendous appeal that the Grand Inquisitor exerts. Walden Two of fers some of the benefits of allegiance to his cause. There is no denying their attractiveness. If it were not so, the dilemma would have no power to move us. But whereas the Grand Inquisitor demands a great act of abnegation from those who would be of  his party, Skinner of fers us a lollipop. The bathos, deliberately sought, ref lects back onto Skinner and measures the society he creates. Huxley (despite didactic mynah birds and an utterly intolerable Palanese version of  the Oedipus story) respects the magnitude of  the issues involved in the utopian enterprise. Pala’s people suf fer, and storm troopers take over at the end; but the Palanese have created a society in which it is not a profanation to be happy. In 1935, John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks named Bellamy’s Looking Backward as second only to Das Kapital in the inf luence it had exerted on the world in the preceding fifty years. Three years earlier, however, Brave New World had been published and Looking Backward was already dead. The social ef fect of  Brave New World was enormous—perhaps greater than Huxley intended—as it satirized not only the dehumanizing tendencies already present in our culture, but the very possibility of constructing a humane alternative to the appalling future awaiting us. Brave New World ef fectively satirized utopia out of existence. Thirty years later Huxley wrote Island. His extraordinary achievement is to have made the old utopian goal—the centrally human goal—thinkable once more.

APPENDIX – JOANNA RUSS

Untitled Review (1971)

Originally published in College English 33, No. 3 (Dec., 1971): 368–71. Copyright 1971 by the National Council of  Teachers of  English. Reprinted with permission. Science fiction is receiving more academic attention than it used to, a species of  kindness that may turn out to be the equivalent of  being nibbled to death by ducks. For reasons nobody seems to understand, voyages to the moon fascinate academicians, as does anything written before 1800, or satire, or Utopian fiction—in short, anything that avoids the fecundity and speculative wildness of  twentieth-century science fiction. It is probably a question of what’s manageable, but unfortunately voyages to the moon tend to be the oldest (often the dullest) kind of science fiction, and Utopian romances are not only secondary in the contemporary oeuvre, they are relatively unimportant. Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of  Utopia is a scattered collection of pleasant, modest, clearly written essays, none of which treats its subject with any complexity. There is much in the book that is just, much that turns into truism if you look at it twice, and not really enough to tie the essays together into one volume. Much is stated without being explored or fully described; much is mentioned or proposed without being done. For example, Elliott twice brings up a rather important topic—what’s the relation of  the teller of  these tales to the author, of  More to “More” (in More’s Utopia), or Coverdale to Hawthorne (Blithedale Romance)? What did More think of communism, for example? One must, says Elliott, avoid “a priori judgments and listen … to the voices as they speak”; but if one does, he concludes:

116

APPENDIX – JOANNA RUSS I think it very doubtful that we can ever know what he, in his many conf licting roles of philosopher, moralist, religious polemicist, man of great af fairs—what this man “really” believed about communism. Of Thomas More, author of Utopia, we can speak with confidence. The idea attracted him strongly … Utopia argues for the ideal of communism by the best test available: More has given to Raphael Hythloday all the good lines. Thus the shape of  Utopia is finished of f, enigmatically but firmly … (pp. 35–6)

But in the middle of  this, the relation of  “More” to More gets lost. Throughout, Elliott promises more than he delivers. There is, for example, the connection between satire and Utopia, which Elliott calls genetic, but which seems to me to be somewhat forced; there is the topic of  the distribution of negative and positive elements in Utopian fiction which is never explored at length or much used as an analytical tool; there is the question of why satires and Utopias are so often framed by “an encounter between a satirist and an adversary” (p. 19) which is not answered; there is the fascinating suggestion that the proper mode of  Utopian fiction is lyric (“the idyll as Schiller describes it”—p. 80), an idea which unfortunately remains unelaborated and unexplored. In short, there are scattered insights all through (like Elliott’s definition of  “anti-Utopia,” the modern nightmare of  the bad place which is bad because it is somebody else’s ghastly Utopia, typically the Grand Inquisitor’s). But the insights are not bound into any coherent theory, nor does most of  the book go beyond descriptive detail. The last three studies, “The Fear of  Utopia,” “Aesthetics of  Utopia,” and “Anti-Anti-Utopia” do constitute more of a connected argument, as well as marking the historical change from “longing” to “possibility”—a lovely distinction Elliott mentions only once (p. 63) and promptly drops forever. “The Fear of  Utopia” centers on the fear of progress (due to a perceived incompatibility between freedom and happiness); “Anti-Anti-Utopia” deals with the contemporary reaction against this fear in favor of  happy un-freedom; and “Aesthetics of  Utopia” deals largely with the aesthetic f laws of  Utopian fiction, which Elliott suspects are inherent in the genre. All the above are adequate and what one might call minimally intelligent, but I don’t find in them anything out of  the commonplace—perhaps the penalty of ignoring modern science fiction, or R.D. Laing, or Wittgenstein, or critics like Samuel Delanycix (criticism of modern science

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fiction is squirreled away in ghetto periodicals, like so much else about the genre). In connection with Hawthorne, Elliott picks up “idea-as-hero” (“ ‘ background’ takes on independent life”—p. 61), connecting it with the historical novel but ignoring its vast importance for science fiction—the variety of ways in which modern science fiction handles this problem might be prescriptive for Utopian fiction. As in science fiction, the technical problem of exposition takes up the bulk of  the book, “the central element” as Elliott calls it, one which has “baf f led even the best writers” (p. 82). Elliott seems to waver between perceiving Utopian fiction as sui generis, not to be judged by the same standards as other fiction (pp. 82–3), and the view that this is precisely what’s wrong with it—it’s a “bastard form,” it’s inescapably thin (pp. 82, 87), it cannot tolerate fully-developed characters (pp. 87, 90) and so on. There is also “the ancient and notorious problem of depicting the good” (p. 87). “Health” says Elliott, quoting Swift, “is but one thing and has been always the same” (p. 88). Whether the good is in itself  “stupefyingly boring” (p. 89) or whether “we lack … conventions for depicting man in a happy state” (p. 89), Utopian fiction seems to be committed to dullness. Moreover, it may be possible (this ties in with “Fear of  Utopia”) that “happiness … cannot accommodate instability” (p. 94) and that Utopia is incompatible with art, an incompatibility that retroactively blights Utopian fiction (to be fair, Elliott doesn’t say this). I’m afraid I find the discussion rather routine. Certainly the aesthetics of didactic romance will dif fer from those of  literature with more commitment to mimesis and—as in science fiction, which is also a didactic and non-mimetic kind of romance (at least by intention)—the intellectual/ moral content must function aesthetically.cx But it’s not nearly enough just to say that Utopian fiction is a bastard form and therefore dif ficult. I also think it’s a mistake to conceive of  the aesthetic problem as one of expressing lyric matter in narrative-dramatic form. Brecht and Shaw have both dealt with the problem of  the aesthetics of didacticism. Non-Utopian science fiction seems to be developing all sorts of ways of dealing with lyric (or “static” material), which Utopian novelists might well imitate. After all, Finding Out is itself a process, and perception is an act. Samuel Delany believes that in modern fiction the center of narrative interest has switched from the passions to the perceptions;cxi if  this is true, it might well rescue

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Utopian fiction. And it’s possible to see the irruption of  the lyric mode into prose narrative as typical of what has been called the post-realistic novel. Talking of  Utopian fiction (or science fiction) inevitably involves one in all sorts of extra-literary speculations. It seems to me that Elliott’s extraliterary armory is pretty meager and that his discussion of  freedom vs. happiness (“The Fear of  Utopia” and “Anti-Anti-Utopia”) suf fers thereby. Only at the very end does the last essay attain to considerable complexity. “Huxley,” says Elliott, “has no command of  the celebratory style” (p. 113, italics mine); “the Palanese have created a society in which it is not a profanation to be happy” (p. 114, italics mine). Elliott seizes in both those significant words more complication than he ever allows himself in his explicit discussion of  the issues. Again: “But whereas the Grand Inquisitor demands a great act of abnegation from those who would be of  his party, Skinner of fers us a lollipop” (p. 114, italics mine). Happy unfreedom as an act of abnegation seems to me an extraordinary insight into what is really going on under our fallacious reasoning about happiness vs. freedom. On the other hand, in the body of  the essay Elliott seems to accept without much demur the idea that freedom always leads to unhappiness, that happiness is substance, not process, that harmony does not admit of idiosyncrasy, that equilibrium is always static and never dynamic. These are not only routine; they’re wrong. When existentialists start writing Utopias, when perception is commonly seen as a dynamic process (and so on and so on) we can step out of  Elliott’s double-bind without trouble— double-binds (as R.D. Laing says) can’t be solved in their own terms; one can only get out of  the terms. I suppose the book is a good introduction to Utopian fiction, and it claims neither to be a history of  the genre nor a treatment of  the ideologies of various Utopian novels. It is a mine of scattered questions and bibliographical references (e.g. Zamyatin’s We) which Elliott has not only read but appreciated. “Rebels in this brilliantly grotesque perversion of utopia adopt as their emblem √–1,” he says (p. 70). But much is unoriginal and much of  the analysis has been surpassed elsewhere, sometimes in very unlikely places. I find it Not Enough, as Ivan the Terrible said after the boyars had their heads chopped of f ; he had something nicer in mind: more boyars’ heads. More boyars’ heads follow.

Notes

Introduction i ii iii iv v vi vii viii

A brief  biographical sketch of  Elliott can be found online at . Also see the collection, “Satire Special Number.” For more on the impact of  Marcuse’s presence on the San Diego campus, see the wonderful documentary, Herbert’s Hippopotamus, now available online at . See Wegner, “Horizons,” as well as the discussion of my essay in Moylan, Scraps 89–95. Moylan describes the compositional history of  The Female Man in Demand 57. Moylan discusses Russ’s short story in Scraps 9–15. See Bakhtin, Rabelais. See Christopher Norris’s appreciative review, “Robert C. Elliott and the Literary Persona.” For further discussion of  Thompson’s concept, borrowed from Miguel Abensour, of  the “education of desire,” see Levitas, The Concept Ch. 5, and Moylan, Scraps 84–9. In what follows, I fully concur with Moylan’s claim that the great bibliographer and founding editor of  Utopian Studies, Lyman Tower Sargent, makes “a central contribution in the development of utopian studies as a distinct intellectual project” in his establishment of a set of  terminological guidelines for research in the field. Moylan further notes that Sargent “makes the pathbreaking point—one too often and disastrously ignored—that the term anti-utopia (as distinct from dystopia) ‘should be reserved for that large class of works, both fictional and expository, which are directed against Utopia and utopian thought’.” Scraps 72. Needless to say, Elliott writes before Sargent’s stabilization of  the terminology, and hence uses anti-utopia and dystopia interchangeably, while consistently referring to what Sargent defines as dystopias as negative utopias. In the following pages, I deploy the terms in Sargent’s sense, while noting Elliott’s usages in the parentheses that follow.

120 Notes ix x xi xii xiii xiv

I discuss Jameson’s dif ferent uses of  the Greimasian square in some detail in “Greimas avec Lacan,” a revised version reprinted in Wegner, Periodizing Jameson. For a discussion of  the convergence of  this formulation in Fitting and Moylan’s work, see Moylan, Scraps 303, fn. 16. Also see Moylan’s later comments on cyberpunk in “Global Economy.” I touch on this periodization of science fiction in my essay, “Jameson’s Modernisms,” and develop it more extensively in the opening chapter of my forthcoming Ralahine collection, Ontologies of  the Possible. I discuss these particular passages and Marin’s study more generally in Imaginary Communities Ch. 2. I discuss The Shawshank Redemption in “Learning to Live in History,” also to be reprinted in Ontologies of  the Possible.

Chapter 1 The Works and Days, in Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of  Michigan Press, 1959), pp. 31–33. xvi See Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), pp. 40–41. xvii The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952), pp. 217–22. xviii “Of  Justice,” The Philosophical Works, ed. T.H. Green and T.H. Grose (Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964), 4:179 f f. xix Of  Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962), pp. 377–82. xx “Cronosolon,” in Works, trans. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 4:113 f f.; cf. “Saturnalian Letters,” 4:120 f f. xxi The Voyage of  Bran, trans. Kuno Meyer (London: David Nutt, 1895), p. 32. xxii In Thomas More, Utopia, ed. J.H. Lupton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), p. 315. xxiii “Saturnalia,” Works, 4:111. xxiv The Myth of  the Eternal Return, trans. W.R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 35; Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Harvill Press, 1960), p. 30. xv

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Translated by E.K. Chambers in The Medieval Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), 1:294. xxvi R.S. Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), pp. 151 f f. xxvii See Chambers, Medieval Stage, 1:320. xxviii Group Psychology and the Analysis of  the Ego, in Standard Ed., ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 18:131. xxix Aislinge MeicConglinne: The Vision of  MacConglinne, trans. Kuno Meyer (London: David Nutt, 1892), p. 84. xxx The Irish Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), p. 77. xxxi Gesta Grayorum is reprinted in John Nichols, The Progresses, and Public Processions, of  Queen Elizabeth, 4 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1788–1821), 2:1–74. On the af fair, see James Spedding, An Account of  the Life and Times of  Francis Bacon (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1878), 1: 137–57. xxxii Erwin Panofsky, “Father Time,” Studies in Ideology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 73. For a detailed study of  Saturn in the literary and pictoral traditions, see R. Kilbansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964). xxxiii In The Fall of  Princes, see bk. 1, 11. 1815–17, 2614, 3492; bk. 7, 11. 1153–1334. In Assembly of  Gods, see sts. 40–41, 11. 279–87. xxxiv Drant’s poem is reprinted in Appendix A of  John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 301–2. xxxv Trans. Jack Lindsay, in Complete Plays of  Aristophanes, ed. Moses Hadas (New York: Bantam Books, 1962), p. 438. xxv

Chapter 2 xxxvi Introduction to Utopia (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1945), p. 81. xxxvii Raymond W. Chambers, Thomas More (London: J. Cape, 1935), p. 128. xxxviii “Interpretations of  Utopia,” Catholic Historical Review 38(1952): 168 and n. 52. xxxix Praise of  Wisdom, pp. 91, 77–78, 247, 11. xl Praise of  Pleasure, p. 181. xli Praise of  Pleasure, p. 193. xlii Cf. A.R. Heiserman, “Satire in the Utopia,” PMLA 78(1963): 163–74.

122 Notes xliii

xliv

xlv xlvi

xlvii

xlviii xlix

Epistle 519 in the Epistles of  Erasmus, trans. Francis M. Nichols (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 2:503; Utopia, ed. J.H. Lupton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), p. 315. I have used the Lupton edition for both the Latin text and the ancillary material published with Utopia. For the English text of  Utopia itself  I use the modernized spelling version of  the Ralph Robynson translation (originally published 1551) issued by Everyman Library, 1951. Since this essay was written, the Yale Utopia has appeared (1965), edited by Father Surtz and J.H. Hexter; it contains the Latin text, a translation based on that of  G.C. Richards (1923), introductions, full apparatus, and notes. The translation, edited by Father Surtz, is also available in a Yale paperback (1964). “The Structural Design of  the Formal Verse Satire,” PQ 21(1942): 368–74. Cf. A. Cartault: “Les satires morales d’Horace contiennent une partie de destruction et une partie de construction; en d’autres termes une partie satirique et une partie proprement morale. Ce sont deux faces de la meme oeuvre, mais elles sont étroitement soudées entre elles; on peut les distingeur, non les séparer.” Etude sur les Satires d’Horace (Paris: F. Alcan, 1899), p. 347. Translation by C.R. Thompson in his The Translations of  Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, N.Y. [Binghamton, N.Y.: The Vail-Ballou Press], 1940), pp. 24–25. For a study of  the conventional apologia, see Lucius R. Shero, “The Satirist’s Apologia,” Classical Studies, series no. 2, University of  Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, no. 15 (Madison, 1922), pp. 148–67. More’s letter is in St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, trans. Elizabeth F. Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 40, 42, 55–61. Erasmus’s letter is Epistle 337 in Opus Epistolarium Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen and others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58), 2:90–114. For Saint Jerome, see Select Letters, trans. F.A. Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), letters 22, p. 32; 40; 52, p. 17. Good discussions of  Jerome as satirist are in John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 15 f f.; David S. Wiesen, St. Jerome as a Satirist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964). “Essay on Satire,” Works, ed. Scott, Saintsbury (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1882–93), 13:47. For discussion of  the primitive materials out of which literary satire grew, see Robert C. Elliott, The Power of  Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), chaps. 1, 2, and pp. 158–59. Marx quoted the passage in Capital: see the translation of  the 3d edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), p. 791 n. More, p. 155.

Notes

123

Thomas More, Latin Epigrams, trans. Leicester Bradner and Charles A. Lynch (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1953), p. 126. More suppressed this characterization (which appears in the letter prefacing the Epigrams) in the 3d edition of 1520; see Epigrams, p. xvi. li “A Dialogue Concernynge Heresyes,” English Works, ed. William Rastell (London: Cawod, Waly & Tottell, 1557), p. 127. lii More’s Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 99–138. liii Cf. Horace, Satires, 2. 1. 1. 59; Persius, Satires, 1. 1. 120; Juvenal, Satires, 1. 11. 30, 79. liv “The Dialogue in Utopia,” SP 58 (1961): 495–509. lv The Utopia is a textbook on the use of irony as protective device. “Utopia” (“nowhere”), “Hythloday” (“purveyor of nonsense”)—many of  the place names bearing comparable significance act as formal disclaimers encompassing the harsh truths told in the work. More’s second letter to Peter Giles (Yale Utopia, p. 251) points this up. In “A Dialogue Concernynge Heresyes,” More mocks some of  these devices while elaborately using them: “More” is discussing problems of  heresy with the messenger from a friend. The messenger insists that what he says is not his opinion but what he has heard others say. But “More” forgets: “And first wher ye say. Nay quod he where thei say. Well quod I, so be it, where they say. For here euer my tong trippeth.” English Works, ed. Rastell, p. 124. lvi See G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), pp. 300 f f. lvii It might also be Robert Burton who, in the person of  Democritus Junior, criticizes Plato for taking away “all splendour and magnificence” from his ideal community. Burton intends the criticism seriously. Anatomy of  Melancholy (London: T. Tegg, 1845), pp. 58–59. lviii Praise of  Pleasure, p. 183. Erasmus, in the wickedly witty “Julius exclusus,” has Peter the Apostle identify the “ornaments” of  the Church as faith, holy doctrine, contempt of  the world; Pope Julius sternly corrects Saint Peter: the “true ornaments” (vera ornamenta) are palaces, gold, servants—everything associated with royal magnificence. The ironies parallel each other exactly. lix Cf. Horace, Satires, 2. 7. More would have known the same technique in Lucian. He translated The Cynic, for example, in which “Lycinus” (a transparent cover name for Lucian) ridicules a Cynic and ends up badly worsted in debate. (The point is not af fected by the fact that Lucian’s authorship of  The Cynic is in question.) lx Marie Delcourt, in her edition of  L’Utopie (Paris: E. Droz, 1936), p. 207n, says that as a precaution, “More désavoue sa propre création,” although “on ne l

124 Notes

lxi lxii

sent … aucune conviction réelle.” A plain disavowal would have been simple; as it is, it turns back on itself. Technically, one might add, “More’s” dubieties stand about the Utopians’ methods of warfare, religious practices, and other laws; his disclaimer is absurd, that is, only in its application to communism. For a discussion of  his relevant expressions of opinion outside Utopia, see Surtz, Praise of  Pleasure, pp. 184–90. Cf. Russell A. Ames, Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), who says that it should be no more necessary to prove that Hythloday speaks for More than to prove that the King of  Brobdingnag speaks for Swift. “In general … no satirist will persuasively present at length major views with which he disagrees” (p. 37n).

Chapter 3 lxiii Chambers, Thomas More, p. 365; Traugott, “A Voyage to Nowhere with Thomas More and Jonathan Swift,” Sewanee Review 69 (1961): 534–65. lxiv “The Political Theory of  Utopia,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mif f lin, 1966), p. 106. lxv For the contrary view of  Erasmus see Utopia, Lupton edition, p. 169. In the sixteenth century Don Vasco de Quiroga successfully established two hospitalvillages in Mexico on the principles of  More’s Utopia. As M. Bataillon says of  the venture, “Utopia did not enter here as a gratuitous fantasy, to materialize a fair dream of an artist … but as the only possible cure for a tragic situation.” See Silvio Zavala, Sir Thomas More in New Spain (London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1955), p. 12. lxvi “Varieties of  Literary Utopias,” Utopias and Utopian Thought, p. 34. lxvii “The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of  Ideas,” in Reason and the Imagination, ed. J.A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 231–53. It is interesting to compare this theme in Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde, which strongly inf luenced Swift. lxviii Writing of  the remarkable piety of early Christians (in “Concerning that Universal Hatred, Which Prevails Against the Clergy”), Swift once admitted that a long time ago monks lived austere and virtuous lives “in caves and cells, in desert places. But when public edifices were erected and endowed, they began gradually to degenerate into idleness, ignorance, avarice, ambition, and luxury, after the usual fate of all human institutions.”

125

Notes lxix

lxx

One or two comments in Gulliver’s Travels tend to qualify Swift’s usual insistence on the theme of man’s degeneration. Gulliver’s criticism of  the Brobdingnagian moralist (the author of  the “little old treatise”) who repines at the degeneration of nature and the “small abortive births” of  the present is probably to be taken straightforwardly; Swift, that is, makes the moralist (and to some degree the theme) seem silly. Again, Gulliver brags that had he been born a struldbrugg, the example of  his and his companions’ lives “would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of  human nature so justly complained of in all ages.” Anything “justly complained of in all ages” in Gulliver’s mouth is suspect; the theme of degeneracy is not exempt. Anatomy of  Melancholy, pp. 56–63. The epigraph to Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis (New York: Random House, 1949), a satirical fiction about a utopian colony, is a passage from Rousseau’s Confessions: “In fact, it must be confessed that, both in this world and the next, the wicked are always a source of considerable embarrassment.”

Chapter 4 lxxi lxxii lxxiii

lxxiv

lxxv

Review article in Westminster Review 58(1852): 318–21. For identification of authorship, see James D. Rust, “George Eliot on The Blithedale Romance,” Boston Public Quarterly 7(1955): 207–15. Hawthorne (London: Macmillan and Company: 1879), p. 88; cf. p. 137. The alternative is to conclude with Frederick C. Crews, “A New Reading of  The Blithedale Romance,” American Literature 29(May 1957): 147–70, that the book is constructed with the fiendish ingenuity of a Nabokov novel. The interpretation, interesting as it is, does not hold up. The Blithedale Romance is a mine of rich themes that Hawthorne opens but does not work out. The relationship of  Zenobia to Priscilla never comes clear, but it implies everything James was to develop fully in the Chancellor-Tarrant relation in The Bostonians. See Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), p. 19. “Hawthorne—Pastoral and Politics,” New Republic (5 September 1955), p. 19; the essay is included in Howe’s Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957).

126 Notes

Chapter 5 “An Apology,” Works, ed. F.A. Patterson and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 294–295. lxxvii For full documentation, see Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of  Political Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). lxxviii In The God That Failed, ed. R.H.S. Crossman (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 180. lxxix See Royaume de l’esprit et royaume de César, trans. From Russian by Philippe Sabant (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1951), pp. 165–166; The Destiny of  Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 211 f f.; Dostoevsky, trans. D. Attwater (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 191 f f. lxxx We, trans. Gregory Zilboorg (New York: Dutton, 1959). lxxxi For discussion of  the tangle, see George Kateb, Utopia and its Enemies (New York: Free Press of  Glencoe, 1963), esp. pp. 20, 235; Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (New York: Harper, 1962); Frederik L. Polak, The Image of  the Future, trans. E. Boulding (Leyden: A.W. Sythof f and New York: Oceana Publications, 1961), 2. 21f f.; Glenn R. Negley and J. Max Patrick, Quest for Utopia (New York: H. Schuman, 1952), pp. 1–22, 574–83. lxxvi

Chapter 6 lxxxii Kermode, Partisan Review 29 (1962): 472–73; Barrett, Atlantic Monthly 209 (April 1962): 155–56; Booth, Yale Review, n.s. 51 (1962): 630–32. lxxxiii Utopian Fantasy (London: Routledge & Paul, 1955), pp. 112–22. lxxxiv Georg Lukács, The Meaning of  Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), pp. 120, 114–15. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, who suggests “the historical possibility of conditions in which the aesthetic could become a gesellschaftliche Productivkraft and as such could lead to the ‘end’ of art through its realization.” An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 45.

Notes

127

lxxxv Michael Harrington tells the anecdote in Cacotopias and Utopias, the record of a conversation he had with W.H. Ferry and Frank L. Keegan (Center for the Study of  Democratic Institutions, 1965), p. 21. lxxxvi Originally published as Das Glasperlenspiel (1943); trans. Mervyn Savill (New York: F. Ungar, 1957), pp. 14–15. lxxxvii “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. and ed. Julius A. Elias (New York: F. Ungar, 1966), pp. 145–54. lxxxviii Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, 2d ed. (Paris: J. Mallet, 1842), p. 34. lxxxix The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 7. xc Preface to Bellamy’s The Blindman’s World (Boston: Houghton Mif f lin, 1898), p. xiii. xci What is utopian for writers like Morris, W.D. Howells (A Traveller from Altruria [1894]), W.H. Hudson, and Graves would be anathema to Cabet, Bellamy, Wells, and many others. Wells loathed the “toil may be made a joy” principle of  Ruskin and Morris, the folly of rich men playing at life, he said. To him, bodily labor is a curse, as Hawthorne learned at Brook Farm; the machine can remove it. See A Modern Utopia, chap. 3, pt. 6. xcii Anatomy of  Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 308– 12; see Irving Howe, “The Fiction of  Anti-Utopia,” New Republic (23 April 1962), pp. 15–16. xciii On this theme, see Robert L. Stilwell, “Literature and Utopia: B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two,” Western Humanities Review 18 (1964): 331–41. xciv Charles Fourier, Théorie des quatres mouvements; Oeuvres completes, 6 vols. (Paris: Librarie sociétaire, 1841–45), 1:117; quoted in Frank Manuel, The Prophets of  Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 237. xcv The situation of  the Vril-ya is like that of  the writers in André Maurois’s mockutopia, A Voyage to the Island of  the Articoles (1928), who are so pampered that they desert their wives in order to have something to write about. xcvi Huxley’s experiments with drugs contributed to his devaluation of  the arts: “To a person [under the inf luence of mescalin] whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of  the most sovereign indif ference.” Art, he says, is only for beginners, or for those resolute dead-enders who are content with the symbol rather than the thing symbolized, with the recipe rather than the actual dinner. The Doors of  Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 29. xcvii La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, ou Le Dédale français (Leipsick [Paris], 1781), 3:503–504.

128 Notes xcviii Dennis Gabor thinks the dilemma largely responsible for what he rashly speaks of as a new trahison des clercs—“the hostility of many artists to the future.” Inventing the Future (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), pp. 16, 168–69. xcix “Our Destiny and Literature,” in History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews: vol. 10 of  Collected Works, ed. Jackson Mathews (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 181–82.

Chapter 7 c

Donald C. Williams is outraged at Skinner’s use of  this bit of  behavioral engineering (“The Social Scientist as Philosopher and King,” Philosophical Review 58 [1949]; 348); but it is a device, perfectly appropriate to the genre, that has been exploited since Raphael Hythloday proved his case by pointing to the happiness of  the Utopians. Skinner tries to use the same device, however, in a debate. He quotes a number of  hostile reviews of  Walden Two, then says: “One would scarcely guess that the authors are talking about a world … where … people are truly happy, secure, productive, creative, and forward-looking.” This kind of reification outside the fictional frame is comically illegitimate as a way of arguing. For Skinner’s remarks, see Carl R. Rogers and B.F. Skinner, “Some Issues Concerning the Control of  Human Behavior,” Science 124 (1956): 1059. ci In Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), Skinner says that order is a working assumption of  his scientific enterprise “which must be adopted at the very start. We cannot apply the methods of science to a subject matter which is assumed to move about capriciously … we must assume that behavior is lawful and determined” (p. 6). cii Even writers as sophisticated as Joseph Wood Krutch lose perspective in discussing Walden Two. Krutch writes of  Frazier as though he were a selfactuating person who finds himself compelled to make a significant confession, i.e., that he likes power. The only one who can compel Frazier to do anything is Skinner, the author; and the confession is there for a purpose. See Krutch, The Measure of  Man (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 60. ciii For example, in La Terre australe connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny the hermaphroditic inhabitants of  Australia eat a “fruit of repose” which banishes melancholy and makes the blood dance in the veins.

129

Notes civ cv cvi cvii

cviii

“Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds,” Collected Essays (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 336 f f. I want to thank Dr. Robert Lynch of  La Jolla for enlightening discussion of  the ideas of  his close friend Aldous Huxley. Ape and Essence (New York: Harper, 1948), p. 184. “The Design of  Cultures,” in H. Hoagland and R.W. Burhoe, eds, Evolution and Man’s Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 135. The Scope of  Anthropology, trans. Sherry O. Paul and Robert A. Paul (London: Cape, 1967), pp. 46–50. Primitive societies are cold in respect to historical temperature; they are static, their structure crystalline, designed to endure. Hot societies derive their extraordinary culture-producing energies from dif ferentiations between castes and classes, between exploiter and exploited. “The Fate of  Pleasure,” in Beyond Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 57–87.

Appendix cix

cx

cxi

See, for example “About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words” in Extrapolation (newsletter of  the Conference on Science Fiction of  the MLA) ed. Thomas Clareson, College of  Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, May 1969, Vol. X, No. 2. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Since reprinted in Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of  Science Fiction, revised edition (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 1–16.] I am indebted to Alexei Panshin, science fiction novelist and author of Heinlein in Dimension (Advent Press, Chicago, 1967), the first full-dress study of any writer in the field. See his series of  theoretical essays printed in Galaxy monthly during 1971. Samuel Delany, in conversation.

Index

Abbey of  Thélème  19 see also Gargantua and Pantagruel Abensour, Miguel  119 fn. vii Again, Dangerous Visions (Ellison) xv Ames, Russell A.  124 fn. lxii An 2440, Le (Mercier) 84 anatomy  xxii, 90 Anatomy of  Melancholy (Burton)  48, 90, 123 fn. lvii animal rationale 45–6 anthropology  xi, xv, xvi, 12 see also Lévi-Strauss, Claude; cold and hot societies; myth; Rattray, R.S. anti-utopia  xix, xx, xxi, xxiv, xxviii, 119 fn. viii Elliott’s use of dystopia as synonym for  xxi, xxv, 72, 116, 119 fn. vii see also critical utopia; dystopia and negative utopia; satire; utopia Ape and Essence (Huxley)  xxiv, xxv, 85, 110 see also Brave New World; Huxley, Aldous; Island Apo ceremony  12, 13 see also carnival; Cronia; Feast of  Fools; festival of  the Sacaea; Kalends; Lord of  Misrule; Saturnalia apologia  25, 47, 73, 83, 122 fn. xlvi Arcadia  9, 54, 55, 78, 80, 88, 113 see also Cockaigne, land of; earthly paradise; Fortune Isle; Golden Age; Happy Otherworld; Isles of  the Blest

Archaeologies of  the Future ( Jameson)  xiv, xxiii–xxiv Archilochos xi Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, The (Swift)  37 Aristophanes 18 Aristotle 60 Ashanti 12–13 Auden, W.H.  66 Augustine 24 Bach, Johann Sebastian  95 Bacon, Francis  9, 15–16, 35, 64, 121 fn. xxi see also New Atlantis, The Bakhtin, Mikhail  xvi, 119 fn. v Barrett, William  77 Barth, John  90 Bataillon, Marcel  124 fn. lxv Bauhaus 70 Beard, Charles  114 behavioral engineering  xxiii, 25, 41, 97–102, 104, 105, 106, 113, 128 fn. c, fn. ci see also conditioning behaviorism  97, 105, 106 Bellamy, Edward  19, 51, 63, 66, 83, 91, 95, 109, 114, 127 fn. xci Berdyaev, Nicolas  38, 66–7, 68, 75 Bergerac, Cyrano de  124 fn. lxvii Bevington, David  29 Bewley, Marius  125 fn. lxxiv “Big Rock Candy Mountain”  7 Blake, William  19

132 Index Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne) xviii, 51–62, 79, 115, 125 fn. lxxiv Boas, George  120 fn. xvi Bolsheviks 67 Booth, Wayne  58, 77, 90 Boston  51, 54, 55, 58, 62, 63, 109, 113 Bostonians, The ( James)  125 fn. lxxiv Boswell, James  85, 89 Boulding, Kenneth  2 Brave New World (Huxley)  xix, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 66, 68, 71–2, 74, 75, 78, 90, 94, 104, 106, 108, 110, 114 see also Ape and Essence; Huxley, Aldous; Island Brecht, Bertolt  89, 117 British Museum  69 Bromyard, John  34 Brook Farm  51–3, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 79, 127 fn. xci see also Blithedale Romance, The; Hawthorne, Nathaniel Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevski) xix, 60, 67–8, 81, 99, 100 see also Grand Inquisitor, The Brown, Norman O.  66 Buddhism  74, 103, 113 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward  89, 92 Burgersdyck, Franco Petri  45, 46 Burgess, Anthony  90 Burroughs, William  43 Burton, Robert  48, 90, 123 fn. lvii Busleyden, Jerome  9, 24, 35 Butler, Samuel  84, 85, 97 see also Erewhon; Erewhon Revisited Cabet, Etienne  67, 79, 80, 84, 127 fn. xci Campanella, Tommaso  47, 67, 81, 95 Camus, Albert  66 Candide (Voltaire)  77, 90

carnival  xvi, 13 see also Apo ceremony; Cronia; Feast of  Fools; festival of  the Sacaea; Kalends; Lord of  Misrule; Saturnalia Cartault, Auguste  122 fn. xliv Chambers, E.K.  11 Chambers, Raymond W.  21, 28, 31, 36, 38 Chaucer, Geof frey  17 China  65, 85 Christ  33, 34, 48, 67–8, 71, 73, 100, 101 Christianity  8, 15, 21–2, 24, 31, 37, 42, 99, 103, 124 fn. lxviii City of  God, The (Augustine) 24 City of  the Sun (Campanella)  47, 81, 95 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess) 90 Cockaigne, land of  6–8, 14–16, 63 see also Arcadia; Cockaigne, land of; Fortune Isle; Golden Age; Happy Otherworld; Isles of  the Blest Cohn, Norman  9 cold and hot societies  xxiii, 80, 113, 129 fn. cvii see also Lévi-Strauss, Claude Coming Race, The (Bulwer-Lytton) 89, 92 communism  19, 22, 23, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35–6, 63, 67, 123–4 fn. lx “Concerning that Universal Hatred, Which Prevails Against the Clergy” (Swift)  124 fn. lxviii conditioning  72, 98–9, 102, 104–7, 112 see also behavioral engineering Contests and Dissensions … in Athens and Rome (Swift)  38, 41 corruptio optimi pessima  2, 47, 60, 61, 74 corruption  2, 19–20, 30, 38, 40–3, 45, 47–8, 59–61, 74

Index Crane, Ronald S.  45 Crews, Frederick C.  125 fn. lxxiii critical utopia  xv, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 120 fn. x see also anti-utopia; dystopia and negative utopia; satire; utopia Croiset, Maurice  8 Cronia  10, 13 see also Apo ceremony; carnival; Feast of  Fools; festival of  the Sacaea; Kalends; Lord of  Misrule; Saturnalia Cronus see Saturn Crystal Age, A (Hudson)  78, 89 cyberpunk  xxvi, 120 fn. xi Daniel, Yuli  68 Découverte australe par un homme-volant, ou Le Dédale français, La (Restif de la Bretonne)  95 Defined by a Hollow (Suvin) xiii Delany, Samuel  xiv, xxv, xvi, xxvii, 116, 117, 129 cix Delcourt, Marie  123–4 fn. lx Demand the Impossible (Moylan)  xxv, xxvi, 119 fn. iv Devils, The (Dostoevski)  61 Dewey, John  114 dialectics  xi, xv, xvii, xix, xxiii, xiv, xxv, xxviii “Dialogue Concernynge Heresyes, A” (More)  123 fn. lv Dick, Philip K.  xi Diderot, Denis  82 Dispossessed, The (Le Guin)  xiv Donner, H.W.  21 Doors of  Perception, The (Huxley) 127 fn. xcvi Dorp, Martin  25 Dostoevski, Fyodor  xviii–xx, xxii–xxiii, 6, 61, 67–8, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 97, 99–100, 106, 114

133 see also Brothers Karamazov, The; Grand Inquisitor, The; Underground Man Drant, Thomas  17 drugs  77, 104–5, 106, 107, 127 fn. xcvi, 129 fn. civ Dryden, John  26 Dunciad, The (Pope) 46 dystopia and negative utopia  xix, xxi, xxiv, 1, 2, 43, 66, 68, 74, 78, 90, 110, 119 fn. viii Elliott’s use of as synonym for antiutopia  xxi, xxv, 72, 110, 119 fn. vii see also anti-utopia; critical utopia; utopia earthly paradise  5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 16, 20, 51, 55, 60, 70–1 see also Arcadia; Cockaigne, land of; Fortune Isle; Golden Age; Happy Otherworld; Isles of  the Blest Eliade, Mircea  10 Eliot, George  53, 56, 125 fn. lxxi Elliott, Robert C.  xi, xiii–xxviii, 115–18, 119 fn. i, fn. vi, viii see also Literary Persona, The; Power of  Satire, The; Shape of  Utopia, The Ellison, Harlan  xv Emerson, Ralph Waldo  51, 64 Emma (Austen)  90 Engels, Friedrich  5, 56 England  xviii, 13, 17, 21, 26–7, 30–1, 36, 39–41, 43, 48, 68, 80, 84, 88 epic poem  14, 51, 62, 92 Erasmus  24, 25, 30, 123 fn. lviii, 124 fn. lxv Erewhon (Butler)  77, 84, 85, 97 Erewhon Revisited (Butler)  84 Essay on Liberation, An (Marcuse)  xiv, 66, 126 fn. lxxxiv euclidianism  68, 70, 74 existentialism  64, 105, 118

134 Index Fables of  Agression ( Jameson) xiv Feast of  Fools  11–12, 13 see also Apo ceremony; carnival; Cronia; festival of  the Sacaea; Kalends; Lord of  Misrule; Saturnalia Female Man, The (Russ)  xiv, xv, 119 fn. iv festival of  the Sacaea  13 see also Apo ceremony; carnival; Cronia; Feast of  Fools; Kalends; Lord of  Misrule; Saturnalia Firth, Charles  42 Fitting, Peter  xv, xxv–xxviii, 120 fn. x Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Marcuse)  xiv Flower, Robin  15 Foigny, Gabriel de  128 fn. ciii folklore  6, 8, 14 Fortunate Isle  5 see also Arcadia; Cockaigne, land of; earthly paradise; Golden Age; Happy Otherworld; Isles of  the Blest Fourier, Charles  5, 60–1, 91 Fourierism 60–1 France  13, 80 France, Anatole  64 freedom  6, 11, 12, 18, 67–8, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 78, 97, 99–100, 102, 105–7, 112, 114, 116, 118 see also good life, the; happiness; unhappiness Freud, Sigmund  13, 95 Frye, Northrop  xxii, 19, 44, 77, 90

Gide, André  65, 66 Giles, Peter  24, 27, 32, 49, 123 fn. lv Giles Goat-Boy (Barth)  90 God That Failed, The (Crossman)  126 fn. lxxviii Golden Age  xvi–xvii, xx–xxi, 2, 5–10, 13–14, 16–18, 20, 48, 63–4, 94 see also Arcadia; Cockaigne, land of; earthly paradise; Fortune Isle; Happy Otherworld; Isles of  the Blest good life, the  xix, 2, 5, 8, 41, 48, 64, 72, 75, 82, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105 see also freedom; happiness; unhappiness Goodman, Paul  66 Gorky, Maxime  79 Grand Inquisitor, The  xviii, xix, xxii, xxiii, 67–8, 71, 72, 73, 75, 97, 99–100, 112, 114, 116, 118 see also Brothers Karamazov, The; Dostoevski, Fyodor Graves, Robert  79, 88–9, 92–4, 127 fn. xci Grazia, Sebastian de  8 Greece, ancient  xvi, 6, 7, 13, 26, 32 Greene, Graham  111 Greimas, A.J.  xix–xxi, xxiv, 129 fn. ix Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)  xvii–xviii, 20, 33, 37–49, 58, 77, 81, 125 fn. lxix see also Swift, Jonathan Gunn, Neil  61

Gabor, Dennis  128 fn. xcviii Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais)  19, 90 see also Abbey of  Thélème Gerber, Richard  77–8 Gesta Grayorum (Bacon) 16

happiness  xix, xxiv, xxv, 18, 37, 38, 60, 66, 68, 69–74, 87, 89, 90, 94, 97, 100, 104, 106, 107, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 128 fn. c see also freedom; good life, the; unhappiness

135

Index Happy Otherworld  5, 9 see also Arcadia; Cockaigne, land of; earthly paradise; Fortune Isle; Golden Age; Isles of  the Blest Harrington, Michael  107, 127 fn. lxxxv Hawthorne, Nathaniel  xviii, 51–62, 79, 115, 117, 125 fn. lxxiv, 127 fn. xci see also Blithedale Romance, The Henry VIII  29 Herbert’s Hippopotamus ( Juutilainen)  119 fn. ii Hesiod  5–9, 16 Hesse, Hermann  79 Hillquit, Morris  85 hippies  2, 66 historical novel  61, 117 History of  Socialism in the United States (Hilquit) 85 Hobbit, The (Tolkien)  87 Homer 91 Horace  10, 14, 19, 24, 25, 26, 28, 32, 35, 122 fn. xliv hot societies see cold and hot societies Howe, Irving  61, 127 fn. xcii Howells, William Dean  83, 127 fn. xci Hudson, W.H.  78, 89, 127 fn. xci human condition  48, 114 humanism  23, 101, 109, 112 Hume, David  8 Huxley, Aldous  xix, xxii, xxiii–xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 61, 66, 68, 71–2, 74–5, 77, 80, 81, 85, 91, 94, 97, 103–7, 110–14, 118, 127 fn. xcvi, 129 fn. civ see also Ape and Essence; Brave New World; Island Huxley, Thomas Henry  105 idyll  80, 89, 116 imagination  xviii, xxii, xxiii, xxvi, 2, 15, 16, 22, 35, 43, 45, 52, 53, 63, 66, 75, 78, 90, 95, 97, 105

interdisciplinarity  xv, 118 Ireland  xvi, 9, 14–15, 108 irony  15, 23, 28, 31, 37, 38, 49, 54–5, 57, 58, 64, 101, 111, 123 fn lv, fn. lviii Island (Huxley)  xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 75, 77, 81, 90, 91, 94, 97, 103–5, 105–6, 107, 108, 110–11, 112, 113–14 see also Ape and Essence; Brave New World; Huxley, Aldous Isles of  the Blest  5, 9, 16 see also Arcadia; Cockaigne, land of; earthly paradise; Fortune Isle; Golden Age; Happy Otherworld James, Henry  53, 57, 58, 83, 125 fn. lxxiv Jameson, Fredric  xiv–xv, xix, xxi–xxiii, 120, fn. ix, fn. xii see also Archaeologies of  the Future; Fables of  Agression; “Third World Literature” Jerome, St.  25, 34, 122 fn. xlvi Johnson, Samuel  22–3, 89, 99 see also Life of  Johnson, The; Rasselas Juvenal  19, 24, 25, 26, 30, 34, 59 Kalends 13 see also Apo ceremony; carnival; Cronia; Feast of  Fools; festival of  the Sacaea; Lord of  Misrule; Saturnalia Kapital, Das (Marx)  114, 122 fn. xlviii Kateb, George  126 fn. lxxxi Keats, John  94 Kermode, Frank  xxii, 77 Khrushchev, Nikita  63 Koestler, Arthur  5, 66 Krutch, Joseph Wood  128 fn. cii Laing, R.D.  xvii, 116, 118 Last and First Men (Stapledon)  77

136 Index Lawrence, D.H.  112 Le Guin, Ursula K.  xiv–xv, xxv–xxvi Leavis, F.R.  77, 82 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  xxi, xxiii, 80, 113, 129 fn. cvii Levitas, Ruth  119 fn. vii Life of  Johnson, The (Boswell)  85 Literary Persona, The (Elliott)  xvii, 119 fn. vi Locke, John  46 Looking Backward (Bellamy)  19, 51, 63, 78, 80, 83, 91, 109, 113, 114 Lord of  Misrule  13 see also Apo ceremony; carnival; Cronia; Feast of  Fools; festival of  the Sacaea; Kalends; Saturnalia love  39, 48, 59, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 88, 89, 91, 92, 100, 103, 104, 105, 113 Lovejoy, Arthur O.  120 fn. xvi Lucian  8, 10–11, 25, 28, 33, 123 fn. lix Lukács, Georg  xix–xxi, 78–9 Lycurgus 42 Lydgate, John  17 Lynch, Robert  129 fn. civ Magister Ludi (Hesse)  79 Mailer, Norman  66 Malraux, André  79 Mandeville, Bernard  89 Mannheim, Karl  2 Manuel, Frank  124 fn. lxiv, 127 fn. xciv Marcel, Gabriel  64 Marcuse, Herbert  xiii–xiv, 66, 119 fn. ii, 126 fn. lxxxiv Marin, Louis  xiii, xiv, xxi, xxvi, 120 fn. xiii see also Utopiques Marx, Karl  63, 122 fn. xlviii see also Kapital, Das; Marxism Marxism  xiii, xiv, 23, 65, 66, 78, 110 Marxism and Form ( Jameson) xiv

Maurois, André  127 fn. xcv McCarthy, Joseph  xi McCarthy, Mary  58, 87, 125 fn. lxx Mechanical Operation of  the Spirit, The (Swift) 38 Men Like Gods (Wells)  80 Menippean satire  90–1 Mercier, Louis Sébastien  84 Milton, John  64 Mind at the End of  Its Tether (Wells)  64 Misanthrope (Moliere) 29 Moby Dick (Melville)  52 mock-epic 14–15 mock-utopia  74, 127 fn. xcv mockery  xvii, 11–12, 14, 15, 20, 38, 54, 55, 56, 58, 74, 123 fn. lv, 127 fn. xcv Modern Utopia, A (Wells)  85, 127 fn. xci modernism  xix, xx, xxvi, 120 fn. xii Moliere, 29, 91 Montesquieu 90 More, Thomas  xvii, xix, 14, 19, 21, 23–36, 37, 38, 42, 49, 63, 64, 67, 74, 115–16, 122 fn. xlvi, 123 fn. l, fn. lv, fn. lix, 124 fn. lxii character in Utopia  xvii, 19, 25–9, 32–5, 41, 115–16, 123 fn. lv see also Utopia Morris, William  14, 51, 66, 67, 74, 80, 82, 87, 88, 113, 127 fn. xci see also News From Nowhere Morton, A.L.  7, 44, 65 Moscow  63, 79 Moylan, Tom  xv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 119 fn. iii, fn. iv, fn. vii, fn. viii, 120 fn. x, fn. xi myth  xix, xxi, 5, 7–9, 10, 14, 16, 20, 51, 63, 68, 78 Nabokov, Vladimir  125 fn. lxxiii Nazis 21 Nebula Award  xv

137

Index negative capability  107 negative utopia see dystopia and negative utopia Negley, Glenn R.  126 fn. lxxxi Neolithic age  44 New Atlantis, The (Bacon)  9, 16, 35, 78 New Left  xiii, 2, 66 New Wave science fiction  xxvi, xxvii News From Nowhere (Morris)  51, 78, 80, 82, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 113 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell)  xix, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxix, 65, 72–3, 78, 90, 108, 110 Norris, Christopher  119 fn. vi novel  xx, xxii, xxv, xxvii, 52, 53, 61, 62, 71, 77, 78–83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 104, 117–18 see also anatomy; historical novel; romance Oasis, The (McCarthy)  58, 87, 125 fn. lxx Ode to Sir William Temple (Swift) 38 Oedipus  xxiv, 114 Orwell, George  xix, xxix, 65, 72, 73 see also Nineteen Eighty-Four Othello (Shakespeare) 94 Owst, G.R.  123 fn. lvi panegyric  81, 88 Panofsky, Erwin  16, 121 fn. xxxii Panshin, Alexei  129 fn. cx paradise see earthly paradise paraliterature  xvii, xxviii parody  6, 15 Pascal, Blaise  106 Pasternak, Boris  68 pastoral  44, 55 Patrick, J. Max  126 fn. lxxxi Pavlovianism  103, 104, 106, 107, 111 Peabody, Elizabeth  52 Peabody, Sophia  51–2

Peacock, Thomas Love  85 Persius  24, 25, 26, 32 Peter, John  122 fn. xlvi Philmus, Robert M.  xxvii Piercy, Marge  xiv, xxvi Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 61 Plato  7, 8, 18, 22, 29, 42, 64, 67, 82, 88, 123 fn. lvii Polak, Frederick L.  126 fn. lxxxi Polybius 41 Pope, Alexander  14, 25, 33, 46 Popper, Karl  49 postmodernism  xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 97 Power of  Satire, The (Elliott)  xv–xvi, xvii, 122 fn. xlvii Praise of  Folly (Erasmus) 25 Praise of  Pleasure, The (Surtz)  21, 23, 124 fn. lxi Praise of  Wisdom, The (Surtz)  21, 22, 23 primitive  xvi, 13, 15, 26, 42, 66, 69, 74, 89, 122 fn. xlvii, 129 fn. cvii Project for the Advancement of  Religion and the Reformation of  Manners (Swift) 37 psychedelic drugs see drugs Pursuit of  the Millennium, The (Cohn) 9 Quintana, Ricardo  42, 49 Quiroga, Don Vasco de  124 fn. lxv Rabelais, François  15, 19 see also Gargantua and Pantagruel Rahv, Philip  72 Randolph, Mary Claire  25 Rasselas ( Johnson)  77, 89 rationis capax 46–7 Rattray, R.S.  12 Republic, The (Plato)  7, 18, 22, 44, 47, 49, 67, 82, 88, 95 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas Edme  95 Rhenanus, Beatus  28

138 Index Rise and Fall of  the City of  Mahagonny, The (Brecht)  89 Robinson, Kim Stanley  xi, xiv Robynson, Ralph  120 fn. xliii Rogers, Carl R.  128 fn. c Roman Catholicism  21–2, 23, 36 see also Christianity Roman satire  25, 32–5 see also satire romance  xviii, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62, 64, 80, 83, 84, 91, 115, 117 see also novel Rome, ancient  9–11, 13, 16, 19, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 41–2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  125 fn. lxx Ruskin, John  127 fn. xci Russ, Joanna  xiv–xv, xxvi–xxviii, 119 fn. iv see also Female Man, The; “When It Changed” Russia  63, 65, 68, 93 see also Soviet Union Rust, James D.  125 fn. lxxi Sargent, Lyman Tower  119 fn. viii satire  xi, xv–xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxv, 1, 5–7, 11–20, 23–35, 38, 41, 43, 49, 57–9, 62–3, 66, 68, 71, 80–1, 87–8, 90–1, 108–12, 114, 115–16, 122 fn. xliv, fn. xlvii, 124 fn. lxii see also mockery; parody; Roman satire; Saturnalia; utopia Saturn-Cronus  8, 10, 14, 16–17, 20, 121 fn. xxxii Saturnalia, festival of  xvi, xvii, xxi, 8, 10–11, 13–16, 20 see also Apo ceremony; carnival; Cronia; Feast of  Fools; festival of  the Sacaea; Kalends; Lord of  Misrule Satyricon (Petronius)  90

Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne)  52 Schiller, Friedrich  80, 89, 116 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead) 105 science fiction  xviii, xxvi, xxvii–xxviii, 65, 115, 116–18, 120 fn. xii “Second Coming, The” (Yeats)  74 Sentiments of a Church of  England Man (Swift) 42 Seven Days in Crete (Graves)  79, 88–9, 92–4 Shakespeare, William  2, 15, 92 see also Othello; Tempest, The Shape of  Utopia, The (Elliott) argument of  xv–xxvi critical utopia and  xv, xxv–xxvi criticism of  xxvi–xxviii, 115–18 inf luence of  xi, xiii–xv see also Elliott, Robert C.; Literary Persona, The; Power of  the Satire, The Shaw, George Bernard  117 Shawshank Redemption, The (Darabont)  xxviii, 120 fn. xiv Shero, Lucius R.  122 fn. xlvi Shklar, Judith  40, 41, 126 fn. lxxvii Sidney, Philip  83 Sinyavski, Andrei  68 Skinner, B.F.  xxiii, 80, 92, 97, 99, 100–3, 105–6, 109, 112–14, 118, 128 fn. c; fn. ci; fn. cii see also behaviorism; Walden Two socialism  21, 52, 53, 55, 56, 78–9 Socrates  44, 49, 71, 94–5 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr  68 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)  90 Soviet Union  63, 64, 65, 67, 68 see also Russia Spedding, James  121 fn. xxxi Spender, Stephen  66 Stalin, Joseph  65

139

Index Stapledon, Olaf  77 Stilwell, Robert  127 fn. xci subjunctive 86 Supplement to Bougainville’s “Voyage” (Diderot) 82 Surtz, Edward L.  21–3, 35, 36, 122 fn. xliii, 124 fn. lxi Suvin, Darko  xiii, xviii Swift, Jonathan  xvii, 20, 37–49, 60, 87, 117, 124 fn. lxii, fn. lxvii, fn. lxviii, 125 fn. lxix. see also Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, The; “Concerning that Universal Hatred, Which Prevails Against the Clergy;” Contests and Dissensions … in Athens and Rome; Gulliver’s Travels; Ode to Sir William Temple; Mechanical Operation of  the Spirit, The; Project for the Advancement of  Religion and the Reformation of  Manners; Sentiments of a Church of  England Man; Tale of a Tub, A Tale of a Tub, A (Swift)  47, 87–8 Tasso, Torquato  14 Teleclides 6 Tempest, The (Shakespeare)  1, 87 Terre australe connue, La (Foigny) 128 fn. ciii Theory of  the Novel (Lukács)  xix, xx “Third-World Literature in the Era of  Multinational Capitalism” ( Jameson) xiv Thompson, E.P.  xviii, 119 fn. vii Tolkien, J.R.R.  87 totalitarianism  67, 73, 110 Traugott, John  38 Traveller from Altruria, A (Howells)  127 fn. xci

Trilling, Lionel  xxii, 6, 95, 114 Triton (Delany)  xiv Underground Man  6, 70, 106, 114 unhappiness  43, 71–2, 98, 100, 118 see also freedom; good life, the; happiness University of  California, San Diego (UCSD)  xi, xiii–xiv, 119 fn. ii utopia aesthetics of  xxii, 77–95 crisis of  xviii–xix, 63–75 genetic relationship to satire  xv–xvii, 1, 5–6, 14–20 More’s coinage of  63 reinvention of  xiv–xv, xxi–xxv, 97–114, 117–18 see also anti-utopia; critical utopia; dystopia and negative utopia; mock utopia; satire; Utopia (More) Utopia (More)  xvii, 9, 19–20, 21–36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 47, 49, 51, 58, 81, 83, 104, 115, 116, 122 fn. xliii, 123 fn. lv, 124 fn. lxi, fn. lxii, fn. lxv Utopian Fantasy (Gerber) 77–8 Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (Marin)  xiii, xxi, xxvi, 120 fn. xiii Valéry, Paul  95 Verne, Jules  95 Vision of  MacConglinne, The 14–15 Voyage en Icarie (Cabet)  80, 81, 84 Voyage to the Island of  the Articoles, A (Maurois)  127 fn. xcv Walden Two (Skinner)  xxiii, xxiv, 80, 92, 97–103, 104, 108–9, 112–14, 128 fn. c, fn. cii see also behaviorial engineering; behaviorism

140 Index Walsh, Chad  126 fn. lxxxi Watch the North Wind Rise (Graves)  see Seven Days in Crete We (Zamyatin)  xix, 68–71, 90–1, 118 Weeks, Edward  114 Wells, H.G.  64, 80, 84–7, 95, 99, 127 fn. xci see also Mind at the End of  Its Tether; Modern Utopia, A “When It Changed” (Russ)  xv, 119 fn. iv Whitehead, Alfred North  105, 107

Wiesen, David S.  122 fn. xlvi Williams, Donald C.  128 fn. c Wittgenstein, Ludwig  xvii, 116 Women on the Edge of  Time (Piercy) xiv Wright, Richard  66 Yeats, William Butler  74 Zamyatin, Eugene  xix, 18, 61, 68, 71, 74, 90–1, 118 see also We Zavala, Silvio  124 fn. lxv

Ralahine Utopian Studies Ralahine Utopian Studies is the publishing project of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, and the Department of Intercultural Studies in Translation, Languages and Culture, University of Bologna at Forlì. The series editors aim to publish scholarship that addresses the theory and practice of utopianism (including Anglophone, continental European, and indigenous and postcolonial traditions, and contemporary and historical periods). Publications (in English and other European languages) will include original monographs and essay collections (including theoretical, textual, and ethnographic/institutional research), English language translations of utopian scholarship in other national languages, reprints of classic scholarly works that are out of print, and annotated editions of original utopian literary and other texts (including translations). While the editors seek work that engages with the current scholarship and debates in the field of utopian studies, they will not privilege any particular critical or theoretical orientation. They welcome submissions by established or emerging scholars working within or outside the academy. Given the multi-lingual and inter-disciplinary remit of the University of Limerick and the University of Bologna at Forlì, they especially welcome comparative studies in any disciplinary or trans-disciplinary framework. Those interested in contributing to the series are invited to submit a detailed project outline to Professor Raffaella Baccolini at Department of Intercultural Studies in Translation, Languages and Culture, University of Bologna at Forlì, Forlì, Italy or to Professor Tom Moylan, Dr Michael J. Griffin, Dr Michael G. Kelly or Dr Joachim Fischer at the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland. E-mail queries can be sent to [email protected]. Series editors: Raffaella Baccolini (University of Bologna at Forlì) Joachim Fischer (University of Limerick) Michael J. Griffin (University of Limerick) Michael G. Kelly (University of Limerick) Tom Moylan (University of Limerick) Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick http://www.ul.ie/ralahinecentre/

Volume 1

Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (eds): Utopia Method Vision. The Use Value of Social Dreaming. 343 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-912-8

Volume 2

Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (eds): Exploring the Utopian Impulse. Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice. 434 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-913-5

Volume 3

Ruth Levitas: The Concept of Utopia. (Ralahine Classic) 280 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-366-8

Volume 4

Vincent Geoghegan: Utopianism and Marxism. (Ralahine Classic) 189 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03910-137-5

Volume 5

Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor: The Politics of Utopia. A Study in Theory and Practice. (Ralahine Classic) 341 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-080-3

Volume 6

Darko Suvin: Defined by a Hollow. Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology. (Ralahine Reader) 616 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-403-0

Volume 7

Andrew Milner (ed.): Tenses of Imagination. Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia. (Ralahine Reader) 253 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-826-7

Volume 8

Nathaniel Coleman (ed.): Imagining and Making the World. Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia. 393 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0120-6

Volume 9

Henry Near: Where Community Happens. The Kibbutz and the Philosophy of Communalism. 256 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0133-6

Volume 10 Robert C. Elliott: The Shape of Utopia. Studies in a Literary Genre. Edited with an Introduction by Phillip E. Wegner. (Ralahine Classic) 170 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0772-7 Volume 11 Michael E. Gardiner: Weak Messianism. Essays in Everyday Utopianism. 284 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0716-1 Volume 12 Matthew Beaumont: The Spectre of Utopia. Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle. 319 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343--0725-3