The Sun State and Its Shadow: on the Condition of Utopian Writing

THE SUN STATE AND ITS SHADOW: ON THE CONDITION OF UTOPIAN WRITING

ANTHONY STEPHENS

THE ANNUAL LECTURE delivered to The Australian Academy of the Humanities at its Fifteenth Annual General Meeting at Canberra on 18 May 1984

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 If there is no decrease in the volume of new writing about utopias, it is undeniably the case that literary utopias, in the sense of fictional creations of an ideal state, incorporating positive beliefs of the author, have largely ceased to be written with any confidence.. The twentieth century has produced excellent anti-utopias or dystopias and many novels of a type loosely called utopian have recently been published, particularly in the area of feminist writing. The work ofJoanna Russ, Marge Piercy and Ursula K. LeGuin is, among them, rightly cited and admired. The feminist utopia may lay claim to being tried out now and having been neglected before. But here too, a certain unease may be detected. Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed has, for the most part, the atmosphere and many of the attributes of a typical dystopia. The two rival societies of Urras and Anarres, for all their schematic quality, tend to blur; their discontents seemingly infect one another. Feminist utopias in general also seem bedevilled by the nineteenth century conundrums of translation into practice. Neither acknowledging nor dismissing these, the feminist utopian novel tends to edge off into forced propaganda on the one hand and into the patterns of the conventional, 'male' dystopia on the other. These patterns are not numerous or varied and they are endlessly reproduced in the middle range of science fiction, where a standard plot is that of the subversion of a malignant dystopian system, usually owing much to Wells, Huxley and Orwell. Quite fashionable at the moment are negative societies shaped by the twin pressures of over-population and over-mechanisation, and latterly we have as a new variant the medical dystopia in which an elite of elderly immortals uses the rest of humanity as an organ bank to ensure a constant supply of the necessary spare parts. In science fiction that is strongly oriented towards the uncritical consumer these evil states are put up mainly to be overthrown. Orwell's Winston Smith, surely one of the archetypal losers of 'serious' Western fiction, finds himself, in the science-fiction pot-boiler, rapidly promoted to galactic hero; his friend Julia merges into Princess Laia of Star Wars, and the result of shattering the power of the technocratic elite or alien oppressor is usually nothing more startling than a return to the moral and emotional values of Middle America or - more rarely - Middle Britain. While there is a great deal of anti-utopian fiction being written, in it there is a sore lack of imagination, as opposed to technological innovation. In the fiction that still has truck with positive utopian models, there is a tentativeness, adiscomfort, which may well fall short of mauoaise joi, but which should certainly make us cautious of applying the label 'utopian' to any projection of a society not recognisably that of the Eastern Bloc, the Western Bloc or something in between.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 In most serious writing about utopias there is an evident defensiveness. The first sentence of an antholosy of original utopian writings from the early seventies reads: 'Scorn is still the standard attitude toward utopia." This is echoed by the beginning of the first essay in a three volume collection of some fifty-five substantial pieces which appeared in German in 1982: 'Utopian thinking enjoys little credit in contemporary philo~ophy'.~The author attributes much of this in the German and Eastern European contexts to the persistent effects of Marx' and Engels' hostility towards their fellow utopians and the stigma of being 'unscientific', which utopian thinking has borne since their attacks.3 But even among philosophers and critics who take their Marx and Engels with more than a pinch of salt, the uneasiness, sometimes contempt towards utopianism is widespread. and thus much of the most recent writing about utopias has an apologetic cast. Whereas once utopian writing set out to persuade the reader of the excellence of a particular recipe for an ideal commonwealth, the utopian scholar of today often seems impelled to persuade the reader that the subject is worth discussion at all. This is a very curious thing. For why should utopianism need an apology? The best utopias and dystopias are emancipatory writings, written against inequality and oppression. Since Thomas More prefaced his utopian model with an indictment of the chaotic state of England at the beginning of the sixteenth century, utopias have set themsclvcs against identifiable evils in the author's own society and the most thorough-going of modern utopian philosophers, Ernst Bloch, has based the whole of his exhaustive analysis on the principle of hope for a better, more humane society in the real future.' The urgency of this hope should not be lightly passed over. It is surely significant that the over-use of Utopie, utopisch, to signify almost anything preferable to the present state of affairs, in recent writing from both East and West Germany, shadows, so to speak, the anguish of being the most publicised theatre of the arms-race. Christa Wolf's Kassandra,

' David W. Plath ed., Aware of Utopia, Urbana 1971, p.7. I should like to acknowledge at the outset the detailed and helpful criticisms of Michael Totley of the Department of English, University of Adelaide. Peter J. Brcnner, Aspekte and Probleme der neueren Utopiediskussion in der Philosophic, in : Wilhelm Vofikamp ed., Utopicforschung: imerdiszipliniire Studien z eizeitlichen Utopie, 3 vols., Stuttgan 1982, (abbreviation: Utopieforschung 1 etc), "01. 1, p.11 Ibid., p.12: 'Diese utopiekritischc Wendung bei Marx and Engcls prSgt nachhallig den gegcnwirtigen Diskussionsstand; sie ist verantwortlich fur den antiutopischen Affckt, der sich in dcr offiziellen marxistischen Theorie des Ostens und in ihrcn westlichcn Adaptationen findet: Das Problem stellt sich dem nicht mehr, dem die realc historische EinlOsung der utopischen Intcntionen griefbar geworden zu sein scheint'. For illuminating information on East German attitudes to utopian writing see: Horst Heidtmann, Utopischphantastische Literatur in der DDR, Munich 1982, pp.I371T., 168f, 186ff. Cf. Brenner, op. cit., p.18-22.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 published in 1983, and her own volume of commentary on the novel are a case in point. But, even within this context, the doubt and the defensiveness persist, and so, in choosing a title for these considerations, I have tried to suggest that we might see the malaise of utopian writing as a shadow, in one metaphorical sense or another, attached to the clarity of positive utopian models. Thc shadow of utopia is thus, in a sense, its ambivalences. And if utopian writing itself, by virtue of its urge to re-use and re-combine the same few elements over and over again, can be fairly described as a sweat-shop of overworked metaphors, so 1 should like to give the following thoughts something of a utopian cachet by overworking the metaphor of the shadow. Its meaning might be made up, in the first instance, of those elements which make utopia at times so hard to bear. Beyond that, I would like to take the shadow metaphor in a specifically literary sense as well, namely to denote the rather obscure dimension of the fictionality of utopias. Utopian writing is, in a very real and obvious sense, the world of d&u, of motifs, patterns, attitudes which are transmitted and imitated from writer to writer throughout the centuries - the effect that has led to one critic's dismissal of utopian writing as one vast set of footnotes to Plato's Rep~blic.~On the other hand, utopian writing has its own well-documented history, its phases of expansionism and retreat, its shifts of emphasis, its early delight in elaborate political draughtsmanship and its latter day reluctance to depict an organised stat as other than a nightmare, There have been phases when Utopians legislated with gusto for all individuals, present and future, with a sublime disregard for individuality; one can also date the beginning of a phase where the utopian impulse in literature increasingly narrows its scope till it encompasses only a momentary, individual ~piphany.~It is possible that the feminist utopias of today represent a new willingness to generalise positive models, a reversal of the tendency to narrow the scope of the utopian vision that began within European Romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On this, I think it is wise to suspend judgement, but certainly the potential is given for another change within the historical framework of utopian writing. Any beginning for an essay such as this has to be arbitrary, and, rather than begin with Thomas More, I shall instead take one of his successors, who wrote about a century later, namely Fra Tommaso Campanella and his work written first in Italian in 1602, entitled La Citt; delSole. It was first published in Germany in the author's own Latin version in 1623 as Civilas Soiis. I have chosen Campanella because he lends himself well to brinzing out clearly the duality and contradiction inherent in positive utopias as a genre. Cannpanella was a

' Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare, New York 1962, p.40. Cf. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Utopie 'Kunstwerk'. Das Beispiel von Friedrich Schlegels Rede iber die Mytholqie, in: Utopieforschung 3, p.303ff.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 Dominican monk and a revolutionary who spent almost half of his seventy- one years in prison, and indeed composed his utopia there after being condemned to life imprisonment in 1602 for his part in an abortive attempt to overthrow Spanish rule in Calabria. Initially a rebel against both Church and State, he nonetheless began, from about 1606 onwards, to write on the necessity of the Pope's assuming world political supremacy and later modified this to a two-stage design in which it was God's will that Spain should first acquire world sovereignty, in order then to relinquish it in favour of the Pope. Despite this, Campanella's name is inscribed among the fathers of the Russian Revolution on an obelisk in Red Square.' La Citfi del Sole is a city formed on the pattern of geometric utopias with seven circular walls to represent the seven planets. But as well it is a state, whose armies may engage in conquest and which may have its dependent satellites. It has a heirarchy chosen on the basis of individual merit alone, and male and female roles are merged in all vocations as far as possible. The state rests on the twin principles of the abolition of private property and the abolition of the family. The whole city is laid out as a giant educational machine. In the tradition of the Pansophists-'all of the sciences are pictured on all of the walls'.a Education for all children is equal and comprehensive. The youth is exposed to the whole gamut of possible vocations as part of their schooling and is observed to find out which vocation each shows most inclination for. Moreover, work is limited for all to four hours a day and the dignity of labour is firmly enshrined in the system. 'The more laborious and utilitarian tasks, like those of the blacksmith and mason, are the more praiseworthy, and no one shuns them'.9 So the Sun State has, even to modern eyes, a great deal in its favour, if one contrasts it with, say, the two-tier utopia designed by Leonardo da Vinci, of which F. and F. Manuel write in their comprehensive study: 'There would literally be two layers of existence: the nobles on the elevated platform in the sun, and the common people down below with the canals, sewers and carts . . . if the city were so constructed that carriers and workmen were relegated to the world underneath and the upper level was one vast area for free movement on foot by patricians, then the beauty of the superior pans would not be poi led'.'^ But society in the Sun State was nothing if not homogenous. If we look at the distribution of power, then we find the ruler was both prince and priest and called the Metafisico. Under him were three chief ministries, called Pon, Sin and Mor: 'that is to say Power, Wisdom and Love . . . Power has charge

Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Oxford 1979, p.268. Tommaso Campanella, La Citth del Sole: Dialogo Poetico, translated with introduction and notes by Daniel J. Donno, Berkcly, Los Angeles, London, 1981, p.33. Ibid., p.81. In Manuel, op. cit., p.170. 42

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 of war and peace and of military affairs . . . Wisdom has charge of all the sciences [and] . . . has but one book in which all the sciences are treated . . . Love has charge of breeding and sees to the coupling of males and females who will produce healthy offspring'." If one cannot help thinking of Orwell's Minipax, Minitru and Miniluv, then this is not altogether inapposite, for under Campanella's three ministries conformity in daily life is rigidly enforced. But the work is not without an awareness of the dangers of this. In his passage on the dignity of manual labour, Campanella is at pains to point out that: 'in the division of labour no one is assigned to things that are destructive to his individuality but rather to things that preserve it'.I2 There is, therefore, a clear concept of individuality and an awareness of what can threaten it. One of the obvious threats is the Sun State's eugenic programme, some salient features of which appear in the following description: On the appointed evening, the boys and girls prepare their beds and go to bed where the matron and senior direct them. Nor may they have intercourse until they have completely digested their food and have said their prayers. There are fine statues of illustrious men that the women gaze upon. Then both male and female go to a window to pray to the God of Heaven for good issue. They sleep in separate neighbouringcells until they are to have intercourse. At the proper time the matron goes around and opens the cell doors. The exact hour when this must he done is determined by the Astrologer and the Physician who always endeavour to choose a time when Mercury and Venus are oriental to the Sun in a benefic house and are seen by Jupiter, Saturn and Mars with benefic aspect.I3 Astrology and physical characteristics dominate the eugenic programme to the exclusion of personality: 'fat girls are matched with thin men9-and vice versa-as Campanella says: 'so as to avoid extremes in their offspring'." The priests and those who are 'much given to speculation tend to be deficient in animal spirits and fail to bestow their intellectual powers upon their progeny because they are always thinking ofother matters. . . As a consequence, they take care to mate with energetic, spirited, handsome w~men'.'~ Once more Campanella's text shows an awareness of the depersonalising effects of all of this for, as a compensation, a kind of platonic courtship is permitted in the Sun State between eugenically mismatched individuals, as long as it stops short of procreation: 'If a man becomes enamoured of a woman, he may speak and jest with her, send her verses, and make emblems out of flowers or branches for her. But if his having intercourse with her is deemed undesirable by reason of the offspring that might result, it will by no means

" Campanella, op. cit., p.33. l2 Ibid., p.81. The Italian text reads: '. . .tanto pi& che nella nativiti loro si vede I'inclinazione, e tra loro, per lo compartimento delle fatiche, nullo viene a participar fatica destruttiva dell'individuo, ma solo conservativa'. ' Ibid., p.55. " Ihid. IS Ibid., p.57. 43

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 be permitted unless she is already pregnant or ~terile'.'~If our sensitivity is conditioned by the twentieth century dystopias ofzamiatin, Huxley and Orwell, or indeed by a passing acquaintance with eugenic programmes in Nazi Germany, then the dualism of the Sun State and its shadows is all too apparent. The utopian mind is essentially an ordering one, bent, as Zygmunt Bauman says, on 'the substitution of a human-made and human-desired order for the natural and it is almost a cliche of scholarly writing on utopias that the same urge to symmetry that produces seven circular walls within each other, as a symbolic reflection of the order of the heavens, also produces an ideal of citizens of all precisely the same size as the result of carefully planned and guided copulations, and enforces on the people of the Sun State a relentlessly communal existence in dormitories and on a strict six-monthly rotation. While Campanella sees these principles of order and symmetry as sanctioned in moral and religious terms, he cannot help but be uneasy about his Sun State even as he creates it and this uneasiness is betrayed by the text itself. For the shadow is darkest at those places where the text lapses into simple inconsistency. As if wishing to be one up on Thomas More, whose Utopia notoriously did include slavery, Campanella says quite unambiguously of his Solarians: 'They keep no slaves, since they are sufficient unto themselves and more'.'"ut further on in the text we find that this is not quite the whole truth: 'Slaves and aliens are not permitted to corrupt the manners of the city; thus those captured in war are sold, or they are put to digging ditches or performing other fatiguing tasks outside the city, where four squadrons of soldiers are regularly dispatched to supervise them and watch over the territory'.I9 Since the Sun State is not averse to a bit of good healthy imperialism vis-a-vis its neighbours, the size of the slave-labour force on the city fringe might well be considerable. Now, any number of contemporary novels of science fiction use precisely the scenario of a revolt by such a slave population, commonly depicted as attractively feral humans, against a technologically superior elite of rulers who are often both more and less than human. At the least, the fact that Campanella's slave workers have to be kept under guard as they perform their labour in the fields marks a weak point in the whole system. But where things get really sinister is when we start to look at the legal system of Campanella's utopia, in particular at its punishments. Indeed, if one had to find a small corner for original endeavour in the already vastly overcrowded playground of utopian scholarship, then the ways in which utopias punish their wayward members would be a fascinating and revealing topic. By this I do not primarily mean instances such as Winston Smith and his ordeal in Room 101, but rather the mechanisms of punishment in the classical, positive utopias. As with the issue of slavery, CampaneUa initially approaches the question of l6 Ibid., p.63. " Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism. The Active Utopia, London 1976, p.29. ' Campanella, op. cit., p.63. Ibid., p.83.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 crime and punishment with great assurance: 'Now since theft, murder, rape, incest, adultery . . . do not exist among them, their offences may only derive from ingratitude or malice, as when some person among them refuses to help another, or from lying, which they abhor more than the plague. Those that are guilty of these charges are punished by banishment from the common table or from intercourse with the opposite sex and are deprived of certain honours until the judge thinks they have been sufficiently punished'.20 Punishments that consist of temporary exclusion from the community are entirely appropriate to the benign rule of the enlightened Metafisico, of whom it is said: 'But our Sun . . . would never be cruel or wicked or tyrannical, because he knows so much'.21 A little further on, however, we find that there are male and female elders who have a supervisory role in the communal dwellings and 'who have authority to administer beatings (or have them administered by others) to anyone who is negligent or dis~bedient'.~~Flogging is also practised in the armed forces. Nor does it stop at that: 'Anyone who has disobeyed orders is given a club and placed in an enclosure containing wild beasts. If he succeeds in overcoming the lions and bears - almost an impossibility - he is restored to favour'.23 In civil life, we find, the lex lalionis applies in cases of serious bodily injury: 'an eye for an eye, a nose for an nose - if the injury involved premeditation'." Just as the Solarian's first principle of international law is compressed by Campanella into the pithy sentence: 'If the enemy will not bow to reason, war follows', so the ultima ratio of their judicial system is the death penalty. As the text blandly reveals, homicide is punished by death, as is persistent sodomy after other deterrents have proven ineffective. Still more bizarre is the dictum: 'It is a capital offense for women to use cosmetics . . . or to wear high heels and gowns with trains to cover the heels'.25 While this maybe dismissed as the personal quirk of an author who passed most of his life in monasteries and prisons, the way in which the death penalty is carried out must be taken seriously, since it is dictated by precisely the same logic of utopian symmetry as pervades the whole structure of the state: 'Since there are no executioners, there can be no execution unless the people take part in it, either by stoning or by burning the condemned man, allowing him in the latter case to have gunpowder so as to hasten his dying'.26 So the perfectly integrated community becomes, at need, a community of executioners, and if we have a feeling of &jd-uv. here, then it may well be because we have read newspaper reports of the rationale of the execution of two students on

Ibid., p.41. " Ibid., p.45. " Ibid., p.49. " Ibid., p.77. " Ibid., p.97. 25 Ibid., p.61. 26 Ibid., p.99.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 the campus of the University of Tripoli which was represented by official spokesmen as the enactment of the will of the whole student body, so that the outside world was in fact meant to understand the hangings as a kind of community execution.'' Now, an illusion of this kind may provoke immediate accusations of ahistoricism and pleas to consider punishments in the world of 1602, which Campanella cannot help reflecting, whereas Colonel Khadafy's Student Revolutionary Committee is all too plainly a twentieth century phenomenon, and so on. But it is a fact of utopias that almost the same scenarios recur again and again with scant respect for historical shifts, and Khadafy's profession that he has placed all power directly in the hands of the masses has many antecedents in the mainstream utopian tradition. Beyond this, Campanella's text shows again and again that its author has a very clear concept of humane behaviour, and this concept is perfectly applicable and intelligible today. We do not have to go so far as to treat Campanella as if he were a writer of this century. We need only apply the criteria of internal consistency to his text to have the issues of slavery, warfare and punishment single themselves out in any attentive reading. Thus the Sun State could be said to be accompanied, throughout the text which establishes it, by its shadow in the form of its own complete dystopia, and it requires only a shift of perspective, a reversal of emphasis, to see the negative side as dominant, the shadow as the substance. There is no lack of twentieth century dystopias that do this, using many of the same elements as Campanella includes in his model. One might see this as stemming from the fact that the tradition of utopian writing is, perhaps to an even greater extent than other literary traditions, a parasite on itself, on its own past: reducing the most varied historical realities to much the same set of fictional simplifications, while their values may swing between the extremes of hope and admiration on the one hand, and fear and revulsion on the other. It is a commonplace of definitions of utopias that they negate a given social reality by offering a preferable alternative as fiction. But I think there is a too ready assumption that they do this in the name of an aggregate of humanistic ideals which is somehow inherent in the form - unless one turns the form on its head to make a dystopia, an act of violence which in turn only makes the cry of protest louder. But such an aggregate may itself be a fiction. Norbert

'' Cf. The Guardian Weekly, April 29, 1984: 'Libya's Students Stoke Fervor with Campus Executions' by Bob Woodward, reprinted from the Washington Post: 'The next day, according to officials and witnesses, gallows were constructed, one next to a 10-by-20-foot portrait of Khadafy at the entrance to the university, and then the two students, in their twenties, were brought out before thousands in the student body and publically hanged in a revolutionary spectacle . . . At the Student Revolutionary Committee Office . . . one student said, "The people have the right to try anyone at any time when they feel someone is out of order, against the revolution"'.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 Elias! recent analysis of Thomas More's Utopia administers a salutary corrective in this regard by pointing out how specific is the basis of More's protest in contemporary English social conditions and how narrowly defined is the target of More's main attack.28Zygmunt Bauman generalises the point in an equally pertinent manner: 'Utopias, therefore, help to lay bare and make conspicuous the major divisions of interest within a society; . . . by exposing their link to the predicament of various groups, utopias reveal also their class-committed nature . . Bauman is in the main concerned with non-literary utopias, that is: those in which the fictional element is mainly a convenience for offering a platform of social improvement. Hence he deals in the coherent interests of large groups and not with personal eccentricities. But there are no such restraints on utopias in literature, which may be entirely dominated by the personal preoccupations of.the author, -irrespective of any representative value.. A German critic, Michael Winter, has analysed de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in terms of eighteenth century utopian writing and demonstrated its almost complete conformity of patterning and structure.30 De Sade has reproduced the pattern of the totally organised gratification of human wants. It is just that he has reversed the values of the structure in a way quite different from the dystopias of today. For while the common pattern of dystopias is to open a perspective onto a more humane world beyond the evil system, be this only through nostalgia or a conventional love story, in de Sade's world the system is that of human nature itself as he sees it, and there is no perspective that can be opened onto an alternative world, since the only world is human. De Sade thus achieves a dislocation of the utopian model from the set of human values to which it is conventionally attached, and couples it to his own vision of human nature as totally predatory, expressing itself completely in the endlessly repeated orgasm over the subjugated victim. De Sade's work shows that the linking of the utopian structure to a core of humane values is conventional rather than necessary. There is no safeguard in the utopian patterns that human values will be preserved. Hitler's accession to power produced a sprinkling of Nazi utopias, showing the blissful state of the Reich in various future projection^.^'

Norbert Elias, Thomas Moms' Staatskritik. Mit ~berlegun~enzur Bcstimmung des Begriffs Utopie, in: Utopieforschung 2, especially pp.1 12-1 17 and 137-145. 29 Bauman, op. cit., p.15. 30 Michael Winter, Don Quijote und Frankenstein. Utopie als Utopiekritik: Zur Gcnese dcr negative" Utopie, in: Utopieforschung 3, pp. 101-106. 31 Cf. Jost Hermand, Ein Volk von Osterlich Auferstehenden. Zukunftsvisionen aus dem ersten Jahr des Drittcn Retches, in: Hikrud GnGg ed., Literarische Utopie- Entwiirfe, Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp.266-276. Hermand gives a survey of such Nazi utopias as Georg Richter's Reichslas 1975 or Schmid's Im Jahrc 2000 im Drillen Reich. His contention that such writings should not he designated utopias because they embody fascistic thinking and preach a 'regression into the archaic' seems, in the light of the history and psychology of European utopianism, almost as zany as some of the examples hc quotes. 47

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 The most common criticisms of utopian writing are that utopias are in the main both static and unrealistic. But I think a further significant criticism could well be that they are deceptive in terms of the values they communicate. The orthodox, positive utopias set out to sell their worlds to the reader as wholly desirable, but in doing so they all too often block off any dimension of self- criticism in the text, particularly where they are fully self-consistent. One must be, in a sense, grateful for Campanella's inconsistencies as they do open the way to an appreciation of the dystopian sub-text in his Cilia delSole. It has been pointed out that this quality is also present in H.G. Wells' A Modem Utopia and the writings of Marge Picrcy. Examples as extreme as de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom are unlikely to convert any reader who does not already share the author's enthusiasms, but it is rather the works of the middle ground, the mainstream of positive utopias that may well be pushing a highly specific and partisan line under the guise ofan aggregate humanism. Ifwe now look briefly at the two main criticisms made over and over of utopias in general, then we shall take first the reproach that they are in the main static. Utopian societies in fiction are not utterly devoid of history. The perfect state is frequently represented as having come about as a result of violent change, or having been founded to offer a living contradiction to barbarous neighbours. But by and large these do not convince the reader that they have any real potential to evolve or mutate. Rather they have their own total conservatism. This is well brought out in a delightful passage from Zamiatin's We, first published in 1929. The hero, D-503. finds his mild uneasiness with the system and his strong attraction to the lovely 1-330 has brought him into contact with a group called the 'Mcphis' who are bent on subversion. This shocks him profoundly and he shouts: 'Ti is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are planning is a revolution? Absurd, because a revolution is impossible! Because our-I speak for myself and for you-our revolution was the last one. No other revolution may occur. Everybody knows that'. 1-330 answers him: 'My dear, you are a mathematician, are you not? More than that a philosopher mathematician? Well then. name the last number'. 'What is. . . I. . . I cannot understand, which last?'The last one, the highest, the larscst'. 'But 1-330, that's absurd! Since the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a last one?Xnd why then do you think there is a last revolution. . . their number is infinite. . . We may forset that someday. Of course, we shall certainly forget it when we grow old. , . Then we shall inevitably fall like autumn leaves from the trees, like you the day after. . .'32 In a very real sense, the utopian imagination is caught out again and again defending its implicit status as author of the last conceivable revolution, a position which history makes untenable as a matter of course. The earliest utopias already show an awareness of the problem. Both More and Campanella

32 Eugene Zamiatin, We, translated and with a foreword by Greeory Zilboorg, New York 1952, p.l62f.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 arc careful to open their states to some extent to the outsidc world, if only by a system of spies reporting on innovation abroad so that the utopian states may import any new practices or technolosics that seem to have positive advantages, and Bacon's New Atlantis is well nigh obsessed with scientific innovation. But what is universally lacking is any element of what might be called creative anarchy in the sphere of human relations. The total openness to technical innovations on the one hand and the inflexibility in human relations on the other is a weakness of the classical utopias just as it is of middle-range science fiction today, which rarely gets into trouble with the gadgetry, but can only substitute for the organised inhumanity of the slave state or the prison planet the return to a homely, Norman-Rockwell-style banality. This is not to say that the best science fiction does the same, and one could point to positive exceptions such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which imaginatively breaks with sexual stereotypes, creating a race of 'aliens' from whom human readers might well have something to learn. The criticism that utopias are unrealistic seems rather more used in slanging matches among utopians than for attacks from outsidc the tribe. The most famous and influential of such attacks is that of Engds in his essay entitled 'The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science', where he says of the likes of Fourier and Saint-Simon: 'These new social systems were from the outset condemned to remain utopias; the more they were worked out in detail, the more they became dissipated in pure fantasy'.33This view was not shared by the utopian socialists themselves. Writing of his own system in 1820, Saint- Simon said that, apart from all its other advantages, it was the'necessary result of the course of civilisation for seven or eight centuries' and that it was 'in no sense to pi an'.^^ That Utopia should become virtually a term of abuse among the utopian thinkers themselves in the early nineteenth century bears on the vexed question of the status of utopias as fictions, which I should now like to pursue. If we go back to Thomas More, then three things are clear about the conception of his work: firstly, that the positive mode! of the state is in part a Renaissance jeu d'esprit, an intellectual game in a well-established tradition of such pastimes; secondly, that the preface More wrote after the sketch of the ideal state attacks concrete social abuses ofMore's own time; thirdly, that More does not expect any real mediation to occur between vision and reality. The work concludes with the sentence: 'But I readily admit that there are very many features in the Utopian commonwealth which it is easier for me to wish for

33 Friedrich En@, Die Entwicklung des Socialismus van der Utopie zur Wissensctiaft, in: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engcls, Wcrkc, Institut fiir Marxismus- Leninismus beim ZK der SED, Berlin 1962, vol. 19, p.194: 'Dicse neuen sozialen Sysieme waren von vornherein zur Utopie verdammt; je weiier sic in ihren Einzdhciten ausgcarbeitei wurdcn, desto mchr muBten sie in mine Phamastcrei "erlauf~"'. " Claude Henri dc Saint-Simon, CEuvrcs, vol. 2, Paris 1869, p.63.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 in our countries than to have any hope of seeing reali~ed'.~~Whilst the rather sketchy fictional element of More's utopia is firmly in the service of ideas, the fictional status of utopia does not if itself produce tensions, its value for the author and his contemporaries does not depend on the likelihood or otherwise of its becoming reality. If More's Utopia permits a more esoteric reading as a parable on the folly of counselling princes then this seems, neither for contemporary readers nor in the centuries of the work's most vital reception, to have troubled its status as fiction.36 Campanella makes even less pretence of creating a believable fiction than More, and indeed wrote his utopia in the wake of the failure of his revolutionary activity and at a time when, condemned to life imprisonment, he could scarcely look to any implementation of his ideas. Accordingly, La Cilti del Sole contains not the slightest indication as to how the social structure of the Sun State might relate to that of the author's own society, except in terms of static opposition-let alone begin to evolve within it. The early utopias see their fictional quality as absolute and unproblematical, and this is symboliscd by their spatial isolation from Western Europe. Situated in some exotic and remote corner of the world, they are unlikely ever to initiate political interaction with the countries of Europe, and thus their fictional quality is under no pressure to shift in the direction of a programme for practical social change. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this state of affairs changes significantly. The more the remoter parts of the world are explored and become known, the less they lend themselves to harbouring mythical, ideal commonwealths. The spatial isolation of utopia on some distant island no longer seems an adequate representation of the disjunction between the ideal society and the author's real social context, and with the publication in 1770 of Mercier's novel L'an 2440 there begins a trend to cast both utopias and dystopias as temporal projections-a trend which has since become and remained dominant. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck sees in this shift a significant change in the criteria applied to utopias, since the depiction of a future state of the author's own society commits the work to a set of linear projections from the shared experience of author and reader, which in turn depend on judgements as to probability and pra~ticability.~'Whilst Campanella could with one stroke of the pen replace the whole system of hereditary nobility with a society in which families of any kind simply do not exist, Mercier's novel and its myriad successors must tailor their fictions according to a criterion of feasibility. They must be able to make processes ofchange credible, where the early utopias simply posited oppositions. Obviously, this shift would not have come about without radical alteration in the ways in which European society viewed its own potential for change, initially in terms of the Enlightenment's doctrine of slow perfectibility and then, after 1789, in the perspective of the French Revolution. Thus by

'' St. Thomas More, Utopia, edited with introduction and notes by Edward Sunz, S.J., New Haven and London, 1964, p.152. 36 Cf. Manucl, op. cit., pp.144-H9, 'The Later Fortune of Utopia'. 37 Reinhan Kosellcck, Die Verzciilichung der Utopic, in: Utopieforsch~ing3, pp.3-5.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 the early nineteenth century the questions: can this model be realised? how can it be realised? are in the forefront of all utopian thinking and make the condition of utopian fiction very much one of rational consensus between reader and author. The result is a division within utopian writing itself, according to whether the criteria of feasibility and rational consensus are accepted or not. If they are, then we get programmes for social reform which appeal to historical necessity and are more or less devoid of fictional interest. If they are not , then utopian writing may take leave of the tradition of devising model states altogether and transpose the utopian impulse into purely aesthetic values, as happens in the German novel from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.38 But this is onlv half the oroblem of fictionalitv in utooian literature. For if the utopias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took precious little trouble to make their fictions believable, utopian fiction of the eighteenth century tended instead to make utopian ideas subservient to literary interest. German novelists of the eighteenth century, in particular, saw as a problem the apparent incompatibility between the preaching stance of the utopian philosopher and the production of literary interest within the novel.39 So the question arose: what can happen in utopia to keep the readers on the edge of their seats? What changes can' one ring in a utopian society to create a gripping plot in terms of reader expectations? Solving this problem seems to have forced the utopian novel into various kinds of sophistication which it might have preferred to avoid. In the case of the German novelist of the Enlightenment, Christoph Martin Wieland, the solution comes in the form of an ironic play of multiple perspectives. In France, the novel by the Abbe Prevost entitled Le Philosophe Anglois on Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland of 1739 is the first in the utopian tradition to be explicitly written to show the failure of utopian comm~nities.~The main characters, who are sophisticated Europeans, end up rejecting the emotional poverty of life in a society free of all conflict and passion. Increasingly in the eighteenth century, fictional texts explore the problem that, as we saw, is already implicit in Campanella's utopia, "even if it receives no analysis there, namely the degree to which the institutions of any utopia pose a threat to the self-realisation of the individual. As the concept of self-realisation achieves more and more prominence in the eighteenth century, fictional utopias take on more and more problematic forms. There is a growing reluctance to think in terms of whole states. Rather the utopian models are explored in more modest and restricted settings, as for example the household of M. de Wolmar in the fourth part of Rousseau's novel La NouudleHe7oise. While Rousseau sketches with loving

38 Cf. Ludwig Stockinger, Aspekte and Probleme der neuren Utopiediskussion in der deuischen Literaturwissenschaft, in: Utopieforschung 1, p. 130ff. s9 Cf. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Zum Erzahlproblem des utopischen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert, in: Gestaltungs-geschichteand Gesellsachaftsgeschichte,Helmut Kreuzer ed., Stutt~an1969, S.94ff. " Cf. Winter, op. cit., p.90-94.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 detail the vignette of a domestic utopia, his main characters cannot help but find the utopian atmosphere somewhat oppressive and the author himself allows the awareness to come through that any utopia contained within the framework of actual contemporary society and extrapolating from its premises can only represent a choice of evil^.^' Perhaps I can sum up best the problem of the fictionality of utopias as it emerges towards the end of the eighteenth century as follows: the challenge of making a utopian fiction into successful literature is not the same as ensuring that a programme for social reform in the utopian mode is going to outpace its competitors in the race whose prize is the seal of historical necessity. Both challenges can only be met by the exercise of the creative imagination, but it becomes apparent that in each case this takes place with different premises and goals. When arguing the preeminence of their 'scientific' extrapolations, Marx and Engels pointed up the tension in utopianism between fantasy and fiction. Let us take as an example the following quote from The German Ideology: As long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, critise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or criti~.'~ This is clearly fantasy, and as such hds its place within the author's scheme of things, its own force within his whole argument. But is it good fiction? Is it in any sense the possible basis for good fiction? I think not. For the point of literary fiction is not to be defensible as an intellectual hypothesis, hut to be believable within the literary convention as a slice of simulated human experience. Now this, as I have said, is something that scarcely worried More or Campanella, as they simply adopted the model of the philosophical dialogue

' Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Hkloise, Michel Launay ed., Paris 1967, Quairisme Panic, Lettre X, p.345f., where the description of the utopia of M. de Wolmar's domestic arrangements is interrupted by such reflections as: 'La servitude est si peu naturelle & l'homme, qu'elle ne saurait exister sans quelque m6contentcmem . . . A la subordination des infericurs se joint la concorde entre les 6gaux; et cette panic dc l'administration domestique n'est pas la moins difiicile . . .' 42 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, op. cit., vol. 3, p.3: ' . . . solange die Menschen sich in der naturwiichsigen Gesellschaft befinden, solange also die Spdtung zwischen dem besonderen und gemeinsamen Interesse existien . . . ' etc. Cf. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge 1968, p.230 IT.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 as a minimal and highly schematic fictional form. But it did worry novelists of the eighteenth century and after as they took on the challenge of fleshing out schematic models of utopia with more or less believable characters, evocative descriptions, enthralling plots and so on. In the nineteenth century this fictional dimension faded into irrelevance for those utopian writers intent on pushing plans for action, recipes for concrete social change. But it remained a problem for novelists and is still very much one today. Ifwe are given to reading science fiction for oleasure and in ouantitv., , then we know that the answer to the question posed already by utopian fiction in the eighteenth century, namely: what plots are viable in a utopian framework? still seems to be: very few indeed. Moreover the dreariness of much science fiction shows that the further problem of embedding one's utopia or anti-utopia in a simulated reality that will hold a reader who is not prepared to put up with a theoretical disquisition remains quite intractable. Now, the success of Orwell's 1984 shows that he must have solved this brilliantly. And yet, re-reading the novel again for the first time after twenty- odd years, I could not help being struck by what a crude piece of literary craftsmanship it is, if we compare it, say, with Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Anthony Burgess published in 1978 a work entitled 1985, the first part of which can best be described as a demolition job on Orwell's novel and the second part of which is Burgess' own pastiche of an English dystopia. While most of Burgess' criticisms of Orwell seemed to me to hit the mark and very much confirmed my own reaction to Orwell revisited, it is equally my impression that Burgess' own dystopia of a Britain ruled haphazardly, if oppressively, by the omnipotent Trades Union Council is feeble in every respect in comparison with Orwell's. But among all his strictures, Burgess is very helpful in identifying the mainspring of Orwell's success: Orwell was good at things like working-class kitchens, nice cups of tea so strong as to be mahogany coloured, the latest murder in the News ofthe World, fish and chips, stopped up drains. He got the feel of 1948 all right. Physical grittiness. Weariness and ~rivation. . . The meat ration was down to a couole of slices of fatty corned beef. One egg a month and the egg was usually bad. I seem to remember you could get cabbages easily enough. Boiled cabbage was a redolent staple of the British diet. You couldn't get cigarettes. Razor blades had disappeared from the market. I remember a short story that began, 'It was the fifty-fourth day of the new razor blade'- . . . You saw the effects of German bombing everywhere, with London pride and loosestrife growing brilliantly in the craters. It's all in Or~ell.'~ In a sense the smell of boiled cabbage is to 1984 what Proust's madeleine is to A la Recherche du temps perdu. It is emblematic of the fiction which gives life in a literary sense to a model of totalitarianism whose intellectual shakiness and improbabilities a critic like Burgess can all too easily demonstrate. Its absence is what makes so many dystopias of contemporary science fiction synthetic and one-dimensional. Thus, this fictional dimension is in a way the necessary

' Anthony Burgess, 1985, London 1979, p.34.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 shadow of utopia if it is to be effective as literature in the modern context. In literary terms at least, no matter how impeccable the sociology of a utopia or dystopia may be, without the accompanying shadow of a credible fiction, which may draw its strength from the unrelieved banality of common experience, the schematic model is likely to be rejected by today's literary consumers as plain boring. I hope that by cruelly, perhaps sadistically, exploiting the metaphor of the shadow I have shown something of the predicament of contemporary utopian writing. Any Sun State, taken as literature rather than edifying theory, is today faced with the problems of a shadow that it does not want and a shadow it needs. The shadow it does not want is, as I have shown with Campanella, the presence of a dystopia ready-made within any utopian model, once the readers become sensitive to the incompatibility between what any positive utopia exacts in the way of conformity and consistency and the concept of individual self- realisation from which our own society shows no signs of moving away. Since Rousseau, the problem ltas forced itself into the foreground of literary utopian writing. That it cannot be solved produces the state of affairs in which dystopias have become the most ready and dominant literary form. The shadow that utopian fiction needs to attach it to the ground of common experience seems to be something quite independent of the coherence or probability of the utopian or anti-utopian construct, but something which this cannot do without if it is to remain interesting, let alone entertaining. Perhaps we need a moratorium on dull dystopias, to give the genre a chance to revitalise itself. Ploughing through the deserts of not-quite-successful utopian fiction, it is very hard to believe that Thomas More began his Utopia, in one sense at least, as an exercise in wit. The tragedy of utopian writing of the last two centuries is that the price one must pay for being witty on the subject is to write nonsense. I therefore close with an excerpt from my favourite piece of utopian nonsense, namely Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism. Perceiving that the rift between rampant individualism on the one hand and the regimentation of any utopian system on the other is total, Wilde cheerfully pretends that it docs not exist, Aware of the increasing difficulty utopias have in establishing their credibility as fiction, Wilde gives up and revels in the incredible: The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody . . . Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to individualism . . . The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution . . . If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it . . . But 1 confess that many of the socialistic views I have come across seem to me tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86 compulsion are out of the question. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine."

" Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, introduction by Hesketh Pearson, London 1930, p.257ff. and p.261.

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 13, 1984-86