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    11 views18 pages

    Utopia 7

    Uploaded by

    Alexandru Plesu
    utopia

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    of 18
    Krishan Kumar Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century ‘The Form of Utopia to break out of the coterie of intellectuals and Tat STRENGTH of utopia has always lin in its appeal to ordinary people. Socialisin needed licerary form. Various other forms ~ utopian social is religion,” and the socialist utopia wes to be theory; millenarianism, the experimental commoni- its bible. From the 1880s to the early years of ty~can fora time substitute forthe literary ueopis; ghe ewentieth century a striking seice of works, but if languishes for too Tong, so too does utopia, “The question of utopia inthe twentieth century therefore turns on the fate of the literary utopia, Recall what happened in the nineteenth century. I opened wich the blaze of the French Revolution, and the idea that humans were now able to con struct the good society not just inthe ai but on the «ground, in real societies with real people, Writers such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and Comte claborated schemes forthe pesfection of humanity. Social scence was to provide the theoretical tools forthe construction of the new world; socialism was to be its practical form, ‘What room in allthis was there for utopia? In | the writing of the socialists, especially the Marxists, utopia was consigned to the dusthin of history, as the wih-aiinene of ages that could ony dream | ofthe good society. Now nineteenth-centuryscience| nineteenth-century technology, and the power of the common people were delivering up what could only exist in the imagination of former times, “Ido noc write cook-books forthe kitchens of the fuure,” was Marx’ erushing vipaste to requests that he provide a detailed porteait of the future Communist society. In the face ofthis, the literary utopia went into abeyance. A form of writing that had flourished throughout Europe in the wake of Thomas More's Ugpia (516), reaching something ofa climax in the eighteenth century virewaly disappeared in the first half of the nineteenth century. Utopian social| theory and the experimental utopian community {| notte terary utopia, became all he rape (A Gen fr Bury Hoe obstinate refisal of socialism to realize itsetin ny Pogo ‘oan cous ecm tes might well have spelled the end of che whole Thedbr Mato osense > Oa acd ledthe renaissance of the literary utopia. Despite wiPt-cunos sear Ovson tom Fela rope ony the strictures of its founders, later socialists became — = Snly too well aware of the need to provide "speak- yin Meals lal saci erate 'epictures’ of the socialist future if socialism were Astian economist Thaodor—evelyDous, ‘mostly of a socialist character, renewed the literary ‘utopia and kept alive the hope of a socialist futuee Key among these was the utopia Looking Backward (888) by the American Edward Bellamy The enormous success of Bellamy’s book both showed ‘he appeal of this kind of thinking and stimulated a large number of works by way of imitation, eriti- cism, or refutation. Among these were Theodor Herezka’s Freeland (1890), William Morris's News _from Nowbere (1890) ~ an indignant retort to Bel: lamy’s version of socialism ~and H. G. Wells's A ‘Modern Utopia (1905). Together chese ensured that ‘ot just the socialist vision but the literary form of ‘weopia would be carried into the twentieth century ‘What makes the literary utopia superior to ‘other ways of promoting the good society? Why ‘were Bellamy’ Looking Bacbwand and Morvs's News from Nowhere, whose theoretical pretensions are ‘modest by comparison with Marx's Capital or even the Gommunire Manifesto, nevertheless infinitely ‘mote successful than those works in turning men and women toward socialism? There are the obvious attractions of astory over abstract analysis. But Bertrand de Jouvenel makes the additional poine that utopia allows us to make a more honest test of theory than do merely abstract formulations, how- ever profound. The utopian mode of persuasion is “co paine pleasing pictures of daily life,” such that we are impelled to wane to make the world that is thus portrayed. He considers this feacure to be so essen tial to utopian writing that he is prepared to argue that “the designation of ‘Utopia’ should be denied to any exposition ofa ‘New Model’ of Society which. is bereft of pictures concerning daily life.” But this ‘mode is not merely concerned with persuasion, it is also a method of analysis. Unlike the abstract the- ‘oretician, who asks us to accept as it were on trust ‘hat the desirable consequences will follow from the application of the relevant cheoretical principles ~ that happiness will, indeed, follow upon the “expro- priation of the expropriators,” for instance ~ the ‘utopian writer is under an obligation to present a fully developed and detailed picture of the happy: world that is expected to result from the application. of particular principles, We see people at work and at play at home and in the public spaces of society, in their personal and in theie politcal lives. We ‘experience, through involvement with characters and events, as well as through the description of the scenes and settings of everyday life, a“good day" in the new society: We can therefore judge of both the plausibility and the desirability of the ife so presented Does Bellamy’s form of socialism attract 4 OF Mois? Which mae ely al she findancia at ofthe step tee oy | 3nd dscontents of modern sociey? While oe? | end this may come dows .. rome down oamaterah ee | ment, both Bellamy and Mortis in their very way of | which to judge the likely outcome of this socialist pute andthe exencco wich ae na Ieisthese quale of he teary upc make ihe benchnak forte fresh Sach However inland orignal thcohec agg ofthe cheavist might be, unesshe ee hee itinthe mind othe eaderby preening a pe form of portrait ofalwving orn xe thatthe vison a the oot or eure se il lose its force We remember Belly seasne and Wells words when the dearohahe oon have become hany or bumed Tey ney ar upon the same storehouse of gene ideas thei manner of representing them s nae oer ee ee German Social Democrat Party se net Los Backwardoc A Modern Unpa “The seis rue ofthe othe face of wap, che antiutopia No theory aftotlaiontny 10 conscientious warning of stent hub or the technological heat has stamped icon rhe "wentieth century imagination a has Naan igh foot Brave New World As nich oop, ant aopia needs the icerary imagination fo pre Clim ts mesage. Here, coo, the anetceath etary points the way The revival of ee leary wtp vas accompanied by a powerful esigee of is alter go, the djtopia or tute, Richard Jetferessapocalype Afr London 88) was lowed by several ant: wopis commenting rally on the utopian hopes of Bllany Mocs, aad other Prominent among these were lntiee Donnellys Caesar's Coluann (1890), Bugene Richter's Pictures of «4 Socialitic Future (1893), and Jack London's The Aron Heel (1907). At the same time there was a fresh ‘outpouring of the Gothic imagination that fed the modem antiatopa some nts endacing ache types, in sch works as Reber Lois Steven Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wides The Prof Doris Grey C094) LG Wels The nd of Doctor Morse id, a Bath Stoker's Dracula (1897), “The contest of wrpia and an-vtopia was undoubtedly good forthe heatefbory, Response ellowed challenge beconng ese a fresh challenge that demanded further response. \Nor was this simply a question of utopia's being matched by antisutopia. Since one man’s weopia could be another man’s nightmare, che pattern of challenge and response could take place within the utopian tradition itself Looking Backward pro- voked News from Nowhere, which in turn provoked A Modern Utopia? W hat George Orwell called “the chain of utopias” was serengthened with every addicion of alink, whether this took strictly a botopian or an anti-utopian form, ‘The nineteenth-century story is important not simply because these works ofits last years set the terms for much of the ewentieth-century debate of future possibilities. Ie also establishes the pattern of utopia and anti-utopia, and the conditions for their ‘mutual flourishing, Uropia and anti-utopia support cach other; they are two sides of the same literary genre. They gnin sustenance from each other's energy and power. The one paints the future in glowing tones; the other colors ie black. But the imagination. ‘of whole societies and the techniques of representing, ‘them in all their particularities are features that they share in common. Both dealin perfected societies, the only difference being whether they attach a plus ‘ora minus sign, The fate of utopia in the twentieth century turns partly on the extent to which this dialectic of utopia and anti-utopia continues. Wells: Utopia and Anti-Utopia Inthis dialectic, H. G. Wellsis critical. He stcadles the late nineteenth-cencury evival of utopia and its apparent demise inthe frst half ofthe ewentieth century As one of the inventors of science fiction {a gente that increasingly absorbed utopia, a worl famous writer, anda thinker and publicist who Played some part in the founding of both the League ‘of Nations and the United Nations, he can justly claim to be not ust the witness but one of the prin- ‘ipal contributors tothe evolving story of the hopes anc Fears of twentieth-eentury Western society Quixorically bue resolutely, Wells swam against the tide. Though a socials, in his early years he ‘efused to side with such fellow socialists as Bel lumy and Morris in picturing mankind's fucuce in flowing terms. Quite to the contrary he occupied Himself with providing devastating critiques of Socialist visions and hopes, their faith in science 4d the proletariat. In his ist major work, The ime Machine (893), he porcrayed afotue society cp tch the lass war has led toa grotesque parody wre ncialsin, In a sense the Morlocks, the under- ‘World cenders ofthe machines, do rule, in that they terrorize and prey on the effete upper-world aristoc- racy ofthe Eloi. Bue these brutalized barbaric cann bals, the lineal descendants ofthe proletariat of ol, can in no way be seen asthe eartiers ofa higher Form of civilization. Leaving this world, the time traveler journeys farther into the future, until finally he witnesses the death of the planet, as the sun dlls and darkness covers the earth, This is a fiting finale toa tae that has poured scorn on all hopes of foture happiness ~ for, we are told, the time traveler “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of ‘Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back ‘upon and desteoy its makers in the end.” Others of Wells's stories of these times sound- ced the same note of somber warning. The liland (of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897) ‘questioned the hope placed in science and the scientists, with theie depiction of scientists as per- verted and power-mad intellectuals who put science to cruel and inhuman ends. Tbe War of the Worlds (0898) and The First Men in the Moon (2901) also warned against the hypertrophy of the merely ratio- nal and scientific. The Martians of the first and the Selenites of the second are all beain and no feeling, and the consequence is power without compassion and efficiency without purpose Buc already in these later stories the utopian ‘Wels is emerging from his anti-utopian shadow ‘The scientist Cavor admires the way Selenite science and technology have abolished waste and want, along with war and political strife. ‘The Mar- ‘dans, che author of Tbe War of the Worlds speculates, may be showing humankind the image of its own fueure, in which it accomplishes "the suppression of the animat side of the organism by the intelli gence." In the resistance to the Martians has arisen “the conception of the commonveal of mankind,” the common unity of the human race chat must at some time ~ as Wells was larer to hold ~ find expres- sion in the World State. The tone of these novels is still critical and minatory, Neither the Martians nor the Selenites can be true utopian exemplars, But ‘Wells is clearly feeling his way toward the utopian conception that was to dominate his later writing ‘This burst upon the world in the form first of an exercise in social prophecy, Anticipations (1901) and later, in more formal utopian mode, in A Modern Utopia (1905). The latter delineated the main features of the Wellsian utopia: a World State founded upon science and under the benevolent ditection of scientists Ie isa socialise world because for Wells, science and socialism were two A Dysopien Viton HG. Wee on int the future The Time Machine: inthe yea Anivention 0,000,000 tha wotking lass. The vaveler sides of the same coin: “just as science aims at a comimon organized body of knowledge, to which allits servants coneribuce, and in which they share, 0 Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social order which every man serves and by which every man benefits.” But che informing spisit is clearly science, and A Modern Utopia contains one of Wells’ most celebrated paeans to science: Tha plein message physical science has forthe world at large is this, that were our political and socal and moral devices only as well contrived to their ands asa lino ‘p8 machine, an antiseptic operating plat, or an electic tram-car, there neod now at the presont moment be Po appreciable til inthe world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fea, and the anxiety thet now makes human ile so doubtful in its valve For the rest of his long life, in novels and tenets, Wells ticelessly propagated ths vision of a World State guided by the scientific outlook. The pattern ofthe stories was usually the same: a natur- al or man-made eatastrophe desteoys the old omer onearth, allowing those who remain painflly to put together the structures ofa lasting new world order In Men Like Gods (1923), it isthe civilization of another planet that easthlings are ditected to a the mopian model; in The Shape of Things to Come (4933), its eacth itself that goes through a series of eaaclysmic convulsions resulting finally in the establishment of the Would State Inthe real world of politics, Wells puc his hopes fist in the League of Nations, asthe germ of the World Stae, Ite abject fiture in che 1930 dd noe prevent him from contributing, in the lat years of his life, co the work thar led to the founding of another incipient world state, the United Nations. It isa remarkable Story of dedication to the utopian ideal. If utopia remained alive inthe fust half ofthe ewentieth cen- {wos it dd so largely through the powerful presence of. G. Wells, Dystopian Times? ‘Wells was one reason why anti-utopia didnot over: helms utopia, as many have thoughe it did, andl as the way of the world seemed to suggest was the only Possible outcome I is true thatthe utopian Wells shoved increasingly against the temper ofthe times, st asin his earlier anti-utopian phase he stood our iA the mood of socialist optinism. For literary Welty and humanists in paciculas, World tT the rise of Fascism, the descent of Soviet “ommunism into Stalinism, the failure of Western capitalism in che 19308: al ehese were mocking commentaries on ueopian hopes. The more fting responses seemed tobe the crushing indictment of industrial civilization in the works of DH Lawrence, the icy pessimism of TS, Eioe’s The Waste Land (1922), and the flight from the modera in the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Fang Pound, So far as utopia ieselfwas concemed, the dominant mood and mode seemed eo be unequivo- cally dystopian. Tewas not the Wellsian utopia bon in thefts half ofthe century the anti utopia thar seemed to capture the public imagination, We read the fate of utopia in cis period through such power- {al and influential ani-utopias as Evgenii Zamavies We (aga), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (033), and George Orwells Nineteon Eighty-four (4949), But we should remember two things. Fst, as Zamiatin himself pointed out in some sparkling essays on Wells, ie was Wells himself who supplied many of the themes and suggested many of the fea- tures ofthe ewentieth-century anti-topia! Zami atin own anti-utopia, We, with its autocratic world state ruled by the Benefactor and his Guardians, is clearly indebted to Wells ‘A Story ofthe Days to Come” (899) and When the Steeper Wakes (2899) Huxley's Brave New World similanty draws on the raed hierarchy ofthe Selenite civilization of The Eirt Men in the Moon; and Orwell considered Wells's influence to be so pervasive in the arly ewentieth century that it would cestainly not have surprised him to be told that the ground-plan of Nineteen Eighty four can be found in a numberof early Wells stoves, notably When the Sleeper Wakes, ‘The second point is that even when Wells was the target rather than the inspiration of the antiutopia, it clearly implied that he was worth attacking, that his influence was indeed thought to beso dominating as well as pernicious that the anti-utopian writer fele the need to answer him E.M, Forster's anti-utopian fable, “When the Machine Stops" r909), an account of a dehuman ized machine civilization based on a world state, was described by its author as “a countesblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells.” For Huxley it was clear that Wells was the enemy Brave New World he said, was “a novel about the future on the horror of the Wellsian utopia and a revole against ic Orwell too inveighed against Wells's influence, ruclly speaking in The Road to Wigan Pier 1037) of “the by now familiar Wellsian utopia, aptly cariea- tuted in Brave New World, the paradise of lice fat men." During World War TE he went 50 faras to see Hitlers National Socialist state asthe perverted but clearly recognizable offspring of Wells's scien- tific utopia; and in Nineteen Bighty-four he complet ced the case against Wells by presenting his own nightmare vision of the world-state ~ a picture no Jess powerful and frightening for owing many of its key images and ideas to Wells's own earlier novels ‘As with the nineteenth century, we see the importance of the dialogue between utopia and anti-utopia, even if the dialogue becomes on occa- sion an unseemly shouting match, Utopia survived, even in such unpropitious circumstances, partly because it became the object of a fierce struggle. As before, utopia and anti-utopia sustained each other. Moreover, the anti-utopia does not emerge out of nothing, It draws its energies, to a good extent, fcom the stsength of utopia. Its possible that ‘utopia could thrive without the stimulus of anti ‘utopia, but itis impossible for the anti-utopia to do so on its own. Its life-blood is its utopian antago: nist The force of Huxley’ and Orwells anti-utopias is che measure of the continuing vitality of ucopia ‘The evidence, partly from the very presence and urgency of these anti-utopias, is that utopia ‘maintained a strong showing in the first half of the twentieth century, and that inthis Wells’ con. tribution was critical. This suggests that we should reconsider the traditional view that utopia died in che twenticth century, that it simply could not stand up to the battering that it received from the ‘enormities of twentieth-century history? We read, the history of utopia in the frst half of the twenti- eth cencury too much through the prism of Brave [Nesw World and Nineteen Eighty-four. This chimes well with the received view ofthe shock adminis- tered to Western ideas of progcess and reason by the horrors of the trench warfare of World War I, the Nazi attempt at genocide, the purges and gulags of Stalinist Russia, the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima, Unquestionably these provided rich fael for the anticutopia. But so too did the con- tinuing presence of the utopia, in both literary and nonliterary forms. Utopian writing has always turned as much on the utopian tradition itselfas on the events of the always non-utopian world. In the first half of the twentieth century, che anti-utopia confronted and drew sustenance from its tradition alother face, the utopia, Utopia for Dystopian Times ‘The predominance of the themes and images of anti-utopia in the standard accounts of twentieth: century developments hides and suppresses many other features that are apparent as soon as they are eee ee. teste has, Meume cond wea renembei Bp vthen dese oee round-the-clock surveillance, and the corruptions” ‘arian state. In that sense the anti-utopian images of A Modern Utopia ot The Shape of Things to Come, Bat wy have we got acne ee Gacden Ci nk Lod Waghes Bese and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City? Why have we | Ce re Se arr earn ethene rae oa ates eure paltalpsicarabeeiarear prin hanetorg ee eee es Caprese inthe utopian mode, hough inser teacher anos echoved che eveyone Theneer Howards indeed deed hapa Belin’ Latig Ractwor/aod arcloseae Sa ore ven ijof cher poncurs of made designee indes Sea tacoma eee Sees ne ween oe of Campane iy oft ra wih ws dep fie ea eee eau poioue a deanna? Ge epee ocean towards Core Cito omar Gee Le Corbusier's La Ville Radieuse (1935). All renounced the entry with song delet aha eee naan ane cence cna. os Cees ‘was to be found in another quarter: the “science eae earn ar eee printer ta tmaticana 8 JBS Halos, Lancelot Hegben (ones pene eae es ee ene Scere ern Aare papier epee eeipeeey realization of mankind's age-old dreams of freedom, Scie ome ere Been ese “the very mention ofthe future suggests his” — in imagining the dizzying heights to which science could raise mankind. Haldane’s far-reaching projec- tion of world transformed by the applications of science was in its turn outbid by J.D. Bernals dar- ling The World, the Flesh and the Devil 2s) the ‘most sparkling and provocative ofthe products of the science and society movement. In this work Bernal confronted “the three enemies of the Rario- ‘nal Soul” and sought to rout them once and for all with science. Physics would tame "the massive, tuninclligent forces of nature", biology would cure the problems ofthe human body; and psychology would control man’s “desires and fears, his imagi, nation and stupidities” But this modese prospectus ives litle clue tothe lengths to which Bernal was Prepared to put the scientific imagination, Physics enables mankind to colonize the planets and to {urn the stars into “efficient heat engines" biology enables humans co ge rid of their inefficient bodies and to experiment with forms of life such as “dual or multiple organisms,” leading eventually toa complete “demtaterialization” and spiritualizaion of humanity in which the human intelligence takes

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