Synthesis: A Myriad Roads to Utopia Roads to Utopia B. Bagchi

Utopia ‘The dream of a just society which seems to haunt the human imagination ineradicably and in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of heaven or the classless society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once existed in the past and from which we have degenerated.’ George Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’ (1944)

This Course: Utopian Fictions We have read five texts, written in Britain, the United States, and India. Our time-span has been 1516 to We have looked at three texts by men, and two by women. We have examined utopia like More’s, with heavy debts to Christian and Classical utopia. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have looked at Dick’s futuristic, noirish world grounded in science fiction and crime fiction.

Axes of Analysis Historical Philosophical Social and Political Literary: the most important in this course But one cannot discuss the literary handling of utopian fiction without discussing the other three elements.

Some important analysts of utopian thought and writing Ernst Bloch Krishan Kumar Ruth Levitas Fredric Jameson

Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope ( ). Written in German. Written in the United States. Latest English translation by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, MIT Press, Three volumes, 1600 pages. Sees emancipatory potential in a huge array of phenomena. Paradoxical. Bloch is a Marxist thinker.

Ernst Bloch Sees this principle of hope as the utopian impulse. Originally intended to call his work Dreams of a Better Life. Analyzes day-dreams, fashion, advertising, display, fairy tales, travel, film, theater, jokes, social and political utopias, (technological, architectural, and geographical utopias), quests for world peace and a life of leisure, “wishful Images of the Fulfilled Moment,” including morality, music, images of death, religion,, and the highest good.

Krishan Kumar Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1987) An engaging, rigorous analysis of Western utopian writing. Takes the strong position that utopia is NOT universal, that it is NOT a natural propensity of the human mind (contra Bloch), that it is NOT a resonance or mode (contra my position in this course!). Argues that the Classical and Christian heritage together give birth to utopian thought and writing. Superb analysis of the most important works in the Western tradition of utopian writing. Argues that in 20 th -century writing, utopia and anti-utopia/ dystopia are mutually dependent, complementary forms.

Ruth Levitas See, for example, her ‘The Elusive Idea of Utopia’, History of the Human Sciences 2003 (16; 1), Argues that utopia SHOULD be seen as a flexible form. Argues that we need to recognize that some utopia are set in the future, others are not. Some may hark back to the past, some may simply be set somewhere else in our world. Sees utopia as socially, materially grounded articulations of desire. Whether and to what extent utopia are realizable within the realms of possibility, including political possibility, depends on the specific context.

Fredric Jameson Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire for Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso: 2005) There is no alternative to utopia, especially for critical political thinking. Examines science fiction to trace utopian impulses. Finds utopia such as Bellamy’s Looking Backwards or Morris’s News from Nowhere relatively uninteresting. Instead, Ursula le Guin, GB Shaw, Philip Dick and other dystopian and utopian science fiction writers illuminate such issues as the radical dialectic of Self and Other, in other times, in other worlds.

Memory, the Past, and Utopia Dreamtimes and songlines. Utopia as golden age set in the past, capturable in the present: in indigenous communities’ myths, stories, rituals, practices, which propose an alternative to a mechanistic, late capitalist universe. Australia, Canada, the US…

Environment, Utopia, and Dystopia As we have said, the single most haunting and strong utopian/ dystopian topos today. The rain forest and the Poles, replanting and conserving the green. Utopias of sustainable development. Green utopia, which bring to mind topoi from the past, such as the garden, the hortus conclusus, the pastoral greens of matriarchal pre-agricultural surplus imagined times.

Things to be Aware of The chronology and historical events of the time, for each utopian text. The problem of how to distribute needs and resources that each text addresses. Patterns of desire and hope in the texts. Who is/ must be excluded/ punished/ marginalized in the texts? Another way of asking: in order for the power structure in these utopia to be sustained, who must stay on top, who must be written out?

Things to be Aware of Temporality: are the utopia all set in the future? (No: some are simply elsewhere in the world, others are dreams without reference to time) Spatiality: geographies are crucial to utopia.

Utopia, Wislawa Szymborska Utopia Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet. The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial. The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It. The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista: the Valley of Obviously. If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Utopia, Wislawa Szymborska Echoes stir unsummoned and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds. On the right a cave where Meaning lies. On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction. Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface. Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley. Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things. For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches turn without exception to the sea. As if all you can do here is leave and plunge, never to return, into the depths. Into unfathomable life.