The Utopia Reader is a timely and provocative collection of utopia

Transcription

1 ELIZABETH MCCUTCHEON Moreana Vol. 39, (December 2002), Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds., The Utopia Reader. New York University P, 1999, xiv pp., ISBN (soft cover), $ Elizabeth McCutcheon Department of English University of Hawaii, Manoa Honolulu, HI 96822, USA The Utopia Reader is a timely and provocative collection of utopia texts that are drawn, for the most part, from "the Anglo-American utopian tradition" (xi). The collection is a generous one. Many of the selections are from fictional utopias, but others were written as blueprints or constitutions for what are now referred to as intentional commumtjes. In a short but essential introductory chapter, which serves as a preface to the texts that follow and explains their parameters, Claeys and Sargent offer inclusive and elastic definitions of their terms, including utopia, utopianism, and variations of the utopian genre (eutopia, dystopia, utopia satire, anti-utopia, and critical utopia). For them, "social dreaming" (1) is the beginning and the heart of utopianism or the utopian impulse: "that need to dream of a better life, even when we are reasonably content" (2). Subsequently they identify two different utopian traditions, both well represented in this anthology. On the one hand, there are what they call "utopias of sensual gratification," on the other, "utopias of human contrivance" (2). In other words, some aspects of the utopian impulse are mythicdreams of an earthly paradise, arcadia, or golden age, where life is simple and desires are satisfied without any effort on the part of human beings. Cockaigne-where ripe fruit and roasted fowl simply drop into one's open mouth-is viewed as a later development, since gratification occurs in this life rather than in a mythic past or millennia! future. On the other hand, many utopias depend upon human effort and are unimaginable apart from human control. Plato's Republic is an early instance, More's Utopia the crucial text, which gave birth to the utopia as a recognizable literary form or genre. In practice, these divisions are rarely absolute, however, and the insistence upon social order and control may itself be a manifestation

2 174 Moreana Vol. 39, (December 2002) ELIZABETH MCCUTCHEON of social (and/or psychological) dreaming and desire. Perhaps this accounts for the otherwise rather odd choice of a photograph from Brueghel's land of cockaigne for the cover design--odd since so many utopias are urban constructs, as the editors point out (3 ), and are based on total human control of the environment. Besides giving an "overview of the history of utopianism" (xi), Claeys and Sargent have a more specific goal in mind; they hope to show the "four main historical stages in the evolution of the utopia tradition" (3) as it flowed from More's Utopia. They begin with the religious radicalism of early modem Europe, which they see as anticipating nineteenth century socialism. An overlapping strand had its origin in the voyages of discovery that began in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and stimulated questions about the nature of human nature and social order. They identify a third tradition with the scientific discoveries and technological developments from the seventeenth century on, seen as predecessors to twentieth-century science fiction and the modem dystopia. Fourthly they speak about those "aspirations for much greater social equality" that arose in France and North America in the later eighteenth century and were followed by an ideal of centralized state socialism, although smallscale communitarianism has continued to attract participants (3). Obviously this is a too-rapid paraphrase of developments that are more complex and less straightforward than any survey could convey; More's utopia itself was early used as a blue-print for actual communities as well as a fictional construct, for example. In any case, the editors have helpfully supplied readers with multiple examples of the various forms that utopias have taken and that give some sense of the preoccupations of different periods. All but the introductory chapter follow a chronological sequence that illustrates aspects of the multiple and disparate ways in which utopias and utopianism have evolved. The second chapter, selections of texts preceding More's, is naturally the most eclectic and disparate; there are sections devoted to the golden age, earthly paradises, the Elysian fields, the middle ages (with Eden and the land of Prester John), the lawgivers (Solon and Lycurgus), utopias and utopian satires (Plato's Republic and Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae), the

3 THE UTOPIA READER Moreana Vol. 39, (December 2002), 175 Hebrew prophets, Hellenistic utopias, saturnalia, the millennium, monasticism, and finally cockaigne- all in 71 pages. Many of these selections are very brief, but the editors give a good bit of space to Plato and Plutarch on Lycurgus (and Sparta), and the Plutarch is especially interesting. The next five chapters cover one century apiece, from the sixteenth to the twentieth, beginning with selections from More's Utopia and ending with excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Day before the Revolution." More's text obviously occupies what the editors themselves call "the pivotal point in the creation of British utopianism and the beginning of the formal genre of utopian literature" (77). I am troubled by the very limited selection they make, however-less than Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick included in their mid-twentieth century anthology: The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies (New York: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1952). Although Negley and Patrick provided only a condensed and modernized version of book 2 of the Utopia, based on Robinson's 1551 translation, they did condense the whole ofbook 2, including the open-ended and ambiguous conclusion. And their fairly extensive introduction prints important excerpts from book 1, notably Hythloday's attack on the way that thieves were punished in England, with the famous passage on the country's man-eating sheep and the plight of the poor husbandmen who were losing their homes and livelihood (Negley and Patrick, ). By contrast, The Utopia Reader contains excerpts from the descriptive part of book 2 only, so that readers unfamiliar with More's Utopia will have no sense at all of the larger structure of the work, or that the work is a dialogue, with a complicated but complementary relation between book 1, where the problems of sixteen-century Western Europe are analyzed and argued over, and book 2, where Raphael Hythloday, a traveller and philosopher who claims to have been in Utopia, describes and often defends it as if it were the best of all commonwealths- although the reporter, a version of Thomas More, disagrees. This means that readers are given too little sense of the many elements that constitute the form and structure of More's Utopia and that recurs in so many later utopian narratives.

4 176 Moreana Vol. 39, (December 2002) ELIZABETH MCC UTCHEON The sixteenth century is otherwise a lean period for utopiasthere are just two brief excerpts by French writers (Rabelais and Montaigne ). The next two centuries show rapid growth--chapters four and five contain seven selections each, with a wide range of authors, forms, and approaches. But the nineteenth century emerges as the "utopian" one, reflected in the number of selections and the length of the chapter, which comes close to one third of the book (pages ), and can be roughly divided into two large parts. The first part, which begins with codes of behavior from, or the covenants of, actual communal societies (the Shakers, Amana, and Oneida), includes selections from the writings of many socialist thinkers (Charles Fourier, Albert Brisbane, Charles Henri de Saint-Simon, John Adolphus Etzler, Robert Owen, Etienne Cabet, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels), societies that influenced social reform and/or the establishment of other communities. The second part of the chapter features utopian fictions of various sorts, and includes selections from Samuel Butler's utopian satire; Looking Backward: , the allimportant eutopia by Edward Bellamy; William Morris's News from Nowhere; Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column; and William Dean Howells' A Traveler from Altruria. Since many of the writers in this latter group were themselves actively involved in reform movements, this chapter is a particularly rich one from a political science perspective. By contrast with nineteenth century utopianism, utopian thought in the twentieth century is much less optimistic and more ambiguous. Although the editors point to a number of positive utopias written early in the century (notably by H. G. Wells), and to the existence of contemporary positive ones, many that we probably remember best are either dystopian (like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) or ambiguous, if not critical-and here I think of the works of Ursula Le Guin. The editors keep a more or less oscillating balance between the two types, starting with selections from Wells' A Modern Utopia and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Her/and before moving on to excerpts for Yevgeny Zamiatin's We, Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. Huxley's conclusion, that "the

5 THE UTOPIA READER Moreana Vol. 39, (December 2002), 177 nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner" (363) is implicitly questioned by the next selection, from Olaf Stapledon's Darkness and Light, which takes a more optimistic view of human evolution, imaging a society of useful social order that is at once "super-modern" and medieval, having harnessed technology for productive social purposes. Next come two long (perhaps too long) selections from the writings of the behavioral psychologist, B. F. Skinner, whose Walden Two and "Walden Two Revisited" describe a society that has effected a radical change in human nature through the application of behaviorism for productive social ends. The subsequent selection is about the principles of Newspeak from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, a dystopia that revisits the whole question of freedom and order, along with the manipulation of human nature. Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution" brings the anthology to a close on a powerfully ambiguous note, a reminder, if we need one, of just how complex human beings are and how a eutopia may be or become dystopian. Apart from their introductory chapter, the editors of The Utopia Reader have been very sparing in their commentary, and I wish that they had said more about the authors and/or the works; there are times when more information on context would have been helpful. I also have questions about the particular edition of a text they chose to print, particularly for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works. For example, the selections from Thomas More are taken from Henry Morley's Ideal Commonwealths ( 1885, revised in 1901 ), which is not an authoritative edition by today's standards. Moreover, it is impossible to tell what edition and translation Morley used for the Utopia; at least I cannot find any indication in my copy of the 1901 edition. This matters: any translation is also an interpretation, as the Renaissance knew and we have rediscovered; are we, then, reading a mid-sixteenth-century translation (and thus interpretation) of More, a late seventeenth-century translation, or an even later one? Similarly, the excerpt from Bacon's New Atlantis is from an edition of Bacon's

6 178 Moreana Vol. 39, (December 2002) ELIZABETH MCCUTCHEON works published in 1824 (again, not an authoritative edition), and no edition at all is listed for the passage from Shakespeare's Tempest. These caveats aside, The Utopia Reader is a comprehensive and thoughtful collection of selections from utopian and quasi-utopian texts. By contrast with a second anthology of utopian texts published in the same year, The Faber Book of Utopias, edited by John Carey (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), The Utopia Reader pays more attention to conceptual and political issues, and many of the selections are more substantial, usefully spanning the entire Anglo-American tradition while reaching back to the classical period and including selections from major French and German utopias. Besides wellknown texts from past and present, readers will find less familiar ones, like Margaret Cavendish's The Inventory of Judgements Commonwealth. While diverse, the selections also encourage comparisons and contacts between one utopia and another and between utopian constructs of different eras; and they highlight recurrent issues about the nature of nature, the nature of human nature and behavior, the purpose of society, and social structure and order, while exploring such topics as work and leisure, education, sex, marriage, death, health and disease, war and peace, attitudes towards the land, domestic and foreign policy, language, religion, technology, and freedom versus order. In short, The Utopia Reader is an excellent introduction to the vast field of utopianism-a field wide enough to include utopian fictions, critiques and satires of societies as they exist, theoretical models and blueprints for different, hopefully better societies that set out to correct the aberrations of the writers' own, and of actual communities or communal groups. To include examples of all these in one volume is no easy task, and Claeys and Sargent's The Utopia Reader should have a wide readership.