In order to show clearly how approaching a cultural phenomenon such as utopian literature as an ideal type differs from previous work, which often approaches literary genres by listing recurring features, describing developmental interrelatedness, or defining it by contrast to other literary genres, I am going to survey existing definitions and observations.
Lyman Tower Sargent’s strategy to define utopia is classificatory. As a first step to approach the phenomenon, he introduced the “Three Faces of Utopianism”109, utopian literature, utopian thought or philosophy, and utopian intentional communities or social experiments. He defines all three strands of utopia in broad terms in the following way:
Utopias are generally oppositional, reflecting at the minimum frustration with things as they are and the desire for a better life. Many utopias remain little more than expression of such frustrations while others directly challenge the current state of affairs with proposals for how it should be changed.110
Sargent admits that even though the term utopia was invented by Thomas More, earlier texts exist which exhibit the same oppositional expression of a desire for a better life and an improved society, among them passages in the Hebrew Bible. Sargent engages with the difficulty of defining utopia, which he says is a task “frequently ignored by scholars in the field”.111 This is a tendency in much material about utopia and the Bible, too. Steven Schweitzer and Roland Boer112 are exceptions to the tendency of not engaging with a definition of utopia before applying the concept.
Manuel & Manuel, Sargent writes, “make the unfortunate statement that they do not need to define utopia; they know one when they see one.”113 As will be seen below, in section 2.5, Manuel & Manuel actually offer many statements that one can engage with when attempting to pinpoint key features of the genre:
109 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.”
110 Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations,” in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: New York Public Library, 2000).
111 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 2.
112 Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles; Boer, Novel Histories.
113 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 2.
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utopias are often produced in times of social change, they are often produced in non-dominant classes, and they are most often written artefacts.
Sargent defines utopia as follows: “Utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space.”114 An important and frequently cited definition of literary utopias comes from Darko Suvin and is deemed the most useful for this thesis as it is the one most closely resembling what I will call the ideal type of utopia:
Utopia is the verbal construction of a quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on the estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.115
Schweitzer embarks from Suvin’s definition and Sargent’s categorisation utopian literature, philosophy, and practice. While drawing on Sargent’s and Suvin’s work myself, in the present chapter I am going to suggest a way in which one can draw on the work of these authorities without essentialising the open-ended phenomenon of utopia. Literary utopias are still being produced, so definitions must remain flexible to accommodate the newest additions to the canon.
Some confusion exists about the definitions of anti-utopia and dystopia. I generally agree with Sargent in defining dystopia as follows:
A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of that contemporary society.116
As I am going to detail in chapter 5, while this definition can be useful as an introductory statement, it does not accommodate the problem that arises when utopias are displaced in time or attempted to be enforced against a community’s will. A well-intended utopia, as Carol Farley Kessler points out,117 can appear as a dystopia in later times. Hence, I agree with Margaret Atwood, that utopias
114 Ibid., 9.
115 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 49.
116 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 9.
117 Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia with Selected Writings (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 45.
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often contain latent dystopias.118 Anti-utopias, as opposed to dystopias, critique utopianism itself.119
A definitive framework to differentiate between common traits of utopia as opposed to science fiction has been approached by Suvin and Sargent as well. In Sargent’s classification of genres and subgenres, science fiction is a subgenre of utopia, because “utopias are clearly the primary root.”120 Sargent himself admits that defining boundaries of genres is problematic, but that “without boundaries, we do not have a subject.”121 The approach to difficulties with definition outlined below will help to remedy this shortcoming of artificially drawn boundaries.
Suvin differentiates between utopia and science fiction by saying that utopia is a fiction that deals with improved socio-political circumstances, whereas science fiction’s key feature is a changed biology122– this might be a different planet, significantly changed environmental circumstances on earth, or alien life-forms.
Utopia and science fiction have in common that they juxtapose a significantly changed imaginary world to the world the reader experiences. A helpful approach to defining what might be considered a science fiction text is Suvin’s concept of the “novum”, which is a definitive trait of science fiction. In short, the “novum” is the key feature that exists in the imagined science fiction world, which makes the fictional environment different from the reader’s empirical environment.123 The “novum” is a more sophisticated and flexible approach to science fiction than stating that science fiction must feature as yet unavailable technology. The idea of the “novum” is a useful definitive framework when approaching science fiction literature.
However, as Margaret Atwood discusses in the introduction to In Other Worlds, defining science fiction – and by extension literary genres in general – may be a superfluous exercise, because the only person likely to agree with a
118 Atwood, In Other Worlds, 66.
119 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 9. I engage with this distinction again in 6.1.3 and 6.1.4.
120 Ibid., 11.
121 Sargent, “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations,” 12.
122 Suvin, “Theses on Dystopia 2001,” 188.
123 Suvin, Defined by a Hollow. The idea of the “novum” as a definitive feature of science fiction is discussed in chapter 3 of Suvin’s book.
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given definition is its author. Atwood refers to a review by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which Le Guin says that Atwood would prefer if her work were not “shove[d…]
into the literary ghetto”, and that a definition of science fiction as “‘fiction in which things happen that are not possible today’” is “arbitrarily restrictive”.124 In the following I propose to approach a cultural phenomenon, such as a literary genre, by constructing an ideal type. This is deemed especially useful for the undertaking of attempting to discuss a biblical passage informed by the concept of utopia.