In one of the fundamental elements of Greek tragedy, each individual is born into a specific role {moira or allotted portion) in a well-structured so- ciety. But through hubris or pride, individuals break through the bound- aries containing them. These are the heroes and heroines, larger-than life figures who are unwilling to be limited to the normal, the acceptable, who challenge the given, the "way things are." Because of who they are and what they do, they are fated to meet their nemesis and are punished for their ef- frontery, their challenge to the established order. Utopians and the Utopias they create, on paper and in practice, are like these heroes and heroines. They challenge the normal and proclaim that people do not have to live lives of "quiet desperation." They say that life can be richly fulfilling, if only enough people insist that poverty, disease, and degradation are not the portion allotted to human beings.
230 • Lyman Tower Sargent
Utopians say that challenging the gods or the power structures is essen- tial. In Genesis 2:9, Eve sets the human race free from the animal-like exis- tence that God had prepared for her and Adam by recognizing that "the knowledge of good and evil" is essential to being human. Eve is the first rebel and the first creator of a flawed Utopia. God clearly overreacts and harshly punishes Adam, Eve, and the serpent for the heinous crime of dis- obedience, thus setting the stage for all the eutopias to come. God con- demns women to pain in childbirth and subservience to their husbands and men to labor and death (Genesis 3:16-19). Clearly, many Utopias are concerned with overcoming the curse of the Fall and hark back to the Gar- den of Eden. Others insist that eutopia can be created within the bound- aries set by God's punishment or contend that some aspect of the punishment, such as subservience to men, can be overcome.
We must commit eutopia knowing that it is not perfect and that, like the ideal polls in Plato's Republic, it contains within it the seeds of its own de- struction. We must commit eutopia again and again because each time we do we have the opportunity, as Oscar Wilde put it, of landing there and then setting off after another. Wilde concludes that "progress is the realiza- tion of Utopias" (27), and while we believe in progress much less than in Wilde's day, not believing in the possibility of betterment, however flawed, condemns us to live in someone else's vision of a better life, perhaps one forced on us. As a result, denying eutopia ensures that we live in dystopia. Notes I. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 9. 10. 11.
On critical dystopia, see Baccolini, Moylan, Scraps; on critical Utopia, see Moylan, Demand. For my definitions of the standard types of Utopia, see Sargent, "Three Faces" 9. See also Sargent, "Eutopias and Dystopias."
See, for example, Sargent, "A Note on the Other Side" and "Three Faces." See, for example, Popper.
See Sargent "Authority and Utopia" and "Three Faces."
On "Omelas," see the essays in the special issue of Utopian Studies 2.1-2 (1991).
In a letter to the author of 30 January 2001 Le Guin wrote that the change was uninten- tional and that she did not know if it came from a corrupt text, her typing error, or a type- setting error.
On Le Guin and Dostoevsky, see Knapp and Tschachler. See Sargent, Extremism in America.
See, for example, Stillman.
On fictions of this sort, see Bentham.
Works Cited
Baccolini, Raffaella. "Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler." Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and
Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Lanham: Rowman,
2000.13-34.
Bentham, Jeremy. "The Theory of Fictions." Bentham's Theory of Fictions. Ed. C. K. Ogden. Pater- son: Littleneld, 1959.
The Problem of the "Flawed Utopia" 231
Davis, J. C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700. Cam- bridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: Harper, 1962.
James, William. "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." The Works of William James. Vol. 6. Ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. 141-62.
Knapp, Shoshona." 'The Morality of Creation.' Dostoevsky and William James in Le Guin's 'Ome- las.'" journal of Narrative Technique 15.1 (1985): 75-81.
Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a Theme by William James)." The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper, 1975.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London: Methuen, 1986.
. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 4th ed. rev. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962. Sargent, Lyman Tower. "Authority and Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought." Polity 14.4
(1982): 565-84.
. British and American Utopian Literature, 1516—1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliog-
raphy. New York: Garland, 1988.
. "Eutopias and Dystopias in Science Fiction: 1950-75." America as Utopia. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin, 1981. 347-66.
—. "A Note on the Other Side of Human Nature in the Utopian Novel." Political Theory 3.1(1975): 88-97. ."The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian Studies 5 A (1994): 1-37.
, ed. Extremism in America: A Reader. New York: New York UP, 1995. ill 1948
, ed. Extremi
Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. New York: Macmillan, 1948.
Stillman, Peter. "The Limits to Behaviorism: A Critique of B. F. Skinner's Social and Political Thought." American Political Science Review, 69.1 (1975): 202-13.
Tschachler, Heinz. "Forgetting Dostoevsky; or, The Political Unconscious of Ursula K. Le Guin."
Utopian Studies2.l-2 (1991): 63-76.
CONCLUSION