Artless Utopia?

ALL LITERATURE IS UTOPIAN in that fictive worlds are literally ou topos, i.e., no place. Implicitly or explicitly, literature is almost always a criticism of life because imagined reality is inevitably comparable to sensibly perceived reality. Actions can scarcely be compared without an implicit judgment. It is a rare author who does not mean his tale “to point a moral.” Utopian literature, as a genre, is a blatantly moralistic mode that has always been associated with philosophical discourse. Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and B. F. Skinner—a mixed group—have all written utopias. Novelists, however, have tended to write negative utopias, nightmarish visions of totalitarian society; Aldous Huxley, Eugene Zamyatin, and George Orwell are the obvious examples. The philosophers’ dreams seem closely related to the novelists’ nightmares. Is it, as Robert C. Elliott suggests, a case of corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best men is the worst), or is it that utopian thought is always tainted by the thinker’s desire to wrest men to his will?

Elliott offers no answer, which is not a surprise, since he did not set out to write a treatise in political theory. He is by no means unaware of moral and ethical dimensions, but he is chiefly concerned with literary form. Although he begins with a reference to Friedrich Engels, it is only to show that even Marx’s collaborator responded to the tropes and figurative subtleties of utopian thought.

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