If a certain degree of tension and ambiguity can be seen as inherent in the utopian model as such, it is also clear that much of the complex and contradictory character of the utopian fictions of the Renaissance is a direct reflection of the ideological ferment of the period in which they were written. Indeed, the intellectual exercise of projecting a more desirable alternative to the society of the day often has the effect of highlighting precisely those aspects of Renaissance thinking that are most ambivalent and fraught with contradiction. In an era where new and potentially revolutionary ideas co-exist with a powerful commitment to tradition, the utopian vision, offering the promise of stability while at the same time implying the desirability of change, almost inevitably exposes gaps and disjunctures—the points where conflicting impulses become impossible to reconcile.
That not only the utopian dream of order as such, but also the characteristic narrative paradigm associated with it should survive into the modern era raises a number of issues with regard to the relation between ideology and form. While the endurance of the utopian impulse itself requires little explanation—so long as society remains imperfect, more perfect alternatives will always have an appeal—the persistence of so many specific features of the Renaissance utopia, in terms both of content and form, is less easy to account for. Obviously, there is the question of direct influence to consider: in many cases later writers are clearly aware of, and respond to the example of their predecessors; nevertheless, as we shall see, that example is one which becomes increasingly problematic with the passage of time.
To begin with, it is clear that the writer of utopian fiction at the close of the nineteenth century (which sees the first major flowering of utopian fiction since the Renaissance) is faced with a radically different relationship between text and context. That dramatic changes in the nature of society are likely to dictate changes in the nature of the alternatives envisaged to it goes without saying: a utopia designed to resolve problems of scarcity in a pre-industrial economy will clearly differ radically from one which addresses issues arising from the contradictions of industrial capitalism and the organizational needs of a mass society. What also changes, however, is the nature of the connection between the writer’s society and the utopian
alternatives proposed. For example, when Campanella’s Genoese mariner remarks that the past hundred years had seen more history than the preceding four thousand, the implications of his statement had not yet become fully apparent. While to a modern eye it might seem singularly prescient, indicative of an awareness that a process of far-reaching historical change had now begun, in a Renaissance context it might equally be taken as suggesting that history was now hastening to its end—towards a final state of millennial perfection, of which the City of the Sun is an emblem. By the close of the nineteenth century, however, the notion of progress—of history as a process of continuous advance, with change as the norm, rather than the exception—had become commonplace. Writing in 1890, Sidney Webb (whose thinking clearly influenced Wells, notwithstanding his subsequent break with the Fabians) declared:
… we can no longer think of the future society as an unchanging state. The social ideal from being statical has become dynamic. The necessity of constant growth and development of the social organism has become axiomatic. [p.5]
Given such assumptions, much that in a Renaissance context seemed relatively fixed (social institutions, the relation of human society to nature) now appears provisional, susceptible to modification by human agency.
The largely speculative premise of the Renaissance utopia—that human beings, by the unaided use of their powers of reason, might create a more perfect society—begins to seem increasingly plausible. As the evidence mounts that changes once envisaged solely in a utopian context are capable of being embodied in reality, the assumption that social engineering is not only desirable, but practicable becomes more and more widely accepted.
The manifest influence of utopian ideas during such historic conflicts as the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, or the French Revolution clearly demonstrates the practical impact of notions once seen as largely hypothetical. Change, in other words, is no longer a dream, but a real possibility, and the increasingly widespread belief in the feasibility of creating, if not an ideal, at any rate a better society obviously affects the ways in which utopian fiction is both imagined and read. If the establishment of a better society is seen as possible, even likely, then the concept of a still more perfect society becomes that much more plausible.
In addition, the plausibility of the content of utopian fiction is further enhanced by the fact that accompanying developments in science and technology give substance to another aspect of the utopian dream: that of humanity gaining control over nature. By 1888, when Bellamy’s Looking Backward was first published, many of the wishful imaginings of Campanella and Bacon had already become realities, with dramatic
advances in hygiene, medicine, long-range transport and communications, and even ‘some degrees of flying in the air’ (Bacon, p.731). Far from being confined to a research institute such as the House of Salomon, with only minimal effect on the surrounding society, invention becomes instrumental in the process of societal change, which in turn lends a very different resonance to its depiction in a utopian context. In portraying technology as central to the creation of their utopian societies, writers such as Bellamy and Wells are in essence only reflecting the realities of their own world. Not only technological advance, but its impact are depicted with a degree of concreteness wholly lacking in the utopias of Campanella and Bacon: in contrast to their rather abstract formulations, even the most futuristic aspects of Bellamy’s and Wells’s utopias (the underground network of pneumatic tubes in Looking Backward, the genetic engineering of Men Like Gods) are presented in detail, and as integral to the functioning of utopian society as a whole.
Yet while it might therefore seem reasonable to conclude that one effect of the passage of time is to render utopian fiction more plausible, in other respects the radically different historical circumstances render the writing of such fiction more, rather than less problematic. As Kumar suggests, where the Renaissance utopia embodied an essentially static ideal—a society where change was not merely unnecessary, but an actual threat—
those of the modern era ‘had perforce to be open-ended, to a degree never before attempted or thought necessary. They had to accommodate the requirement for ceaseless innovation and growth, individual and social’
(Utopia, pp.47–8). This necessity, however, creates some undeniable formal problems. As Wells was among the first to acknowledge, in order to portray a society in which change is integral, rather than representing a threat of degeneration, it becomes necessary to incorporate a much greater element of process—to dramatize what happens in such a society, as opposed to merely describing its outlines. Such an essentially novelistic approach, utilizing the techniques of a genre evolved to represent precisely such a changing society, might seem the obvious solution, yet it is not without its own difficulties—for if the development of both new technologies and new forms of political organization serve to render the actual content of utopian literature more plausible, in other respects its fictionality becomes more transparent. With the end of the age of exploration, the space into which earlier writers were able to project their utopias disappears. The unknown becomes known; the possible is colonized by the actual: in the end, imperfect reality fills all the territory on the map where utopian perfection could once be imagined. Forced to look elsewhere for a locale, writers of utopias turn increasingly to the space provided by the extension of temporal, rather than geographical horizons. As the old, finite
time-frame in which history was conceived of as a matter of a few thousand years, bounded by the creation at one end and the millennium at the other, gives way to the far vaster perspectives afforded by evolutionary theory, the future becomes a new terra incognita into which utopia can be projected.
This has certain attendant drawbacks, however: while the emergent genre of science fiction takes full advantage of the imaginative perspectives provided by this larger future, (not to mention the corresponding extension of spatial horizons to which speculation as to the feasibility of space travel gives rise), utopian fiction seems less successful at exploiting the creative possibilities that arise. The exuberance with which Wells uses the techniques of representational realism to lend a veneer of plausibility to such futuristic fantasies as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds is notably lacking in both his own utopian fictions and those of most of his contemporaries. In part, this may be attributable to the constraints imposed by the more earnest, even didactic intent which utopian fiction evinces;
yet this is not the only factor. What is also clear is the extent to which even the most radical fictional experiments (such as Wells’s own A Modern Utopia) remain tied to the characteristic narrative paradigm of the Renaissance utopia—that of the traveller’s tale, in which the visitor explores the more perfect society, and then reports back on the wonders he has seen. Indeed, while it has become something of a critical commonplace that temporal, rather than geographical displacement becomes the norm,1it is curious how many modern utopias, from Gilman’s Herland to Huxley’s Island, in fact retain the traditional premise of a utopian society isolated from, but contemporaneous with the writer’s own: even Wells, a pioneer of futuristic fiction in works such as The Time Machine and The War in the Air, chooses for the most part to locate his utopias in worlds parallel to, rather than chronologically separated from his own.
None the less, what does emerge at this period is a recognizable variant of the old form—a narrative in which the traditional voyage to utopia is replaced by the process of going to sleep and reawakening in a utopian future. Used by both Bellamy and Morris in their utopias, not to mention Wells, in his far-from-utopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), what Peter Beilharz refers to as ‘the Rip Van Winkle genre typically associated with the term [utopia]’ (p.x)2 soon becomes a narrative device sufficiently familiar as to become an object of parody—witness Stephen Leacock’s Afternoons in Utopia (1932), which begins:
… let us reproduce the familiar scene of the long sleep and the arrival of the awakened sleeper in dear old Utopia. We will introduce, however, the slight, but novel, innovation of supposing that the
narrator in this case arrives with—and not, as usually depicted, without—his brains. [p.3]
In a modern context, however, the adequacy of this narrative paradigm, whether modified or not, seems open to doubt. At least part of the Renaissance utopia’s narrative fascination, as we have seen, lay in its capacity to exploit the conventions of a narrative model that was factual and documentary in origin. At the same time that More, Campanella, and Bacon were writing, there were also actual travellers’ accounts from the southern hemisphere, allowing the writer of utopias to play with the notion (as More does most teasingly) that the ideal society might actually exist.
This is not to say that any but the most literal-minded reader believed it really did exist: the point is that the possibility remained intriguingly plausible. In the case of fictions set in the future, however, in a parallel universe (Men Like Gods), or ‘out beyond Sirius’ (A Modern Utopia, p.12), the fantasy is unequivocal, thereby bringing into play a rather different set of interpretive conventions. Whereas the actual utopian societies outlined may seem more plausible, more susceptible to practical realization, the narrative form in which they are represented becomes self-evidently fantastic. As a result, the fruitful ambiguity which pervades both the content and the form of the Renaissance utopia gives way, in a modern context, to a certain sense of generic discontinuity, rooted in what Morson describes as ‘the double encoding of utopias as both fiction and non-fiction, literature and nonliterature’ (p.93). Where More’s manipulation of the conventions of a purportedly factual narrative mode is well suited to his apparent ambivalence of intent, the fantastic narrative mechanisms of the utopias of Bellamy and Wells seem rather less in keeping with the evident seriousness of their sociopolitical prescriptions. The result is often a certain confusion as to how such hybrid fictions are meant to be read. As Morson suggests, problems arise when
the … set of instructions, which characterizes the text as not a fiction or not ‘just literature’, is delayed and the reader consequently led astray. It is not surprising, then, that readers of utopias often feel exploited as well as perplexed. That feeling may be the result not so much of having been led to read a literary work that turned out to be bad as having been led to read one that turned out—or did it?—
to be no literary work at all. Belatedly discovering that the literary and fictional contracts had hidden clauses, readers may feel themselves to be victims of literary fraud. [p.93]
Such problems, of course, stem in part from the changing nature of fiction’s interpretive conventions. In an era when fiction is dominated by the norms of high realism and naturalism, by what Fredric Jameson
describes as ‘the threefold imperatives of authorial depersonalization, unity of point of view, and restriction to scenic representation’ (Political Unconscious, p.104), the formal heterogeneity and tendentiousness of utopian fiction is always liable to appear anomalous. And while Jameson argues that the re-emergence of genres such as the utopian is symptomatic of a reaction against the stifling constraints imposed by such realism’s celebration of the merely existing, it is nevertheless the case that writers of utopias seem uneasily aware of the extent to which their fictions fail to secure the consistent suspension of disbelief at which realist fiction aims.
Both Bellamy and Wells, for example, while preserving the central features of the traditional narrative paradigm, seek to supplement its by now somewhat limited attractions by the incorporation of more ‘novelistic’
elements: individual characterization, for example, or plot features such as a love interest. Such window dressing, however, scarcely resolves the underlying narrative problem.
Not the least of the difficulties that arises from the use of novelistic elements is an essential incompatibility between utopian narrative and the conventions of a genre which had evolved primarily to register the complex texture of existing reality. As Morson argues:
The interpretive conventions of utopias are radically different from those of novels—a difference which, as we shall see, reflects the two genres’ antithetical philosophical assumptions. First, in the novel, unlike the utopia, the narrative is to be taken as representing a plausible sequence of events (i.e., as designed to be ‘realistic’).
Second, in a novel, the statements, actions, and beliefs of any principal character (or the narrator) are to be understood as a reflection of his or her personality, and of the biographical events and social milieu that have shaped it. An important corollary for our discussion of utopias follows from this second interpretive convention. The sort of unqualified, absolute truths about morality and society that constantly occur in utopias have no place in novels.
[p.77]
While novels are by no means invariably free of didactic intent, that intent normally presupposes some common assumptions on the part of both writer and reader as to both the nature of reality and the validity of the value system informing it; where alternative assumptions have to be spelled out, as is the case in most traditional utopian narratives, an unavoidable tension arises between the utopian and novelistic elements in the text.
Thus, while characters in a novel may utter ‘unqualified, absolute truths about morality and society’ they remain utterances made in a particular context. As Morson goes on to suggest:
In novels, but not in utopias, each truth is someone’s truth, qualified by what might be called an ‘irony of origins’—that is, by our knowledge that it reflects a particular person’s (or character’s) experience and a given set of personal and contextual circumstances.
They are consequently understood to be partial—that is, both limited and biased—even if we (or the author) are inclined to share that partiality. [p.77]
Yet it is precisely this awareness that the traditional utopian narrative seeks to discourage: whereas the partial, limited awareness of the inhabitants of existing society may be the target of utopian critique—as is the case in the utopias of both Bellamy and Wells—the underlying assumption is that in the more perfect society such limitations have largely vanished, enabling the utopians to see the truth as it is.
Given the difficulties associated with the reproduction in a modern context of the Renaissance utopia’s narrative paradigm, its persistence raises a number of questions. To begin with, the survival of a generic structure rooted in very different historical circumstances should alert us to the possibility that, for all its shortcomings in a modern narrative context, it nevertheless continues to embody some ideological message of enduring relevance. Are there, in other words, any parallels between the differing historical situations which might encourage a specific narrative formulation of utopian alternatives? Equally, the continued evasion by writers such as Bellamy and Wells of the issue of utopia’s origins (accompanied once again by an often extravagant compensatory elaboration of metaphors of transition), poses a further question: how far is the characteristic psychological pattern of the Renaissance utopia, in which a recurrent element is the reconstitution of the maternal security of the womb under a system of patriarchal control, inherent in the traditional paradigm? If, as we have seen, the very process of exploration and discovery is bound up with primal fantasies of the recovery of Eden, is the traveller’s tale itself not likely to lend itself particularly easily to the embodiment of this dream?
Finally, given the contradictions inherent in the content of Renaissance and modern utopia alike, it must be asked whether, paradoxically, the problematic aspect of its form, its inscription of conflicting impulses in an unresolved tension, is not also a source of its lasting appeal.
Yet if a detailed examination of more modern articulations of the utopian dream may help to account for the resilience of the traditional narrative format, it should likewise be borne in mind that the continuing use of a specific narrative form is liable to have ideological consequences in terms of content. As Macherey argues, the relationship between ideology and narrative is by no means a simple one of cause and effect: the form
also has its effect on the narrative’s ideological implications. How far a form
also has its effect on the narrative’s ideological implications. How far a form