A Short History of the Utopian Tradition

Utopia

The utopian genre has, perhaps more so than any other genre in this OER textbook, a clear and unambiguous beginning. In 1551, More coined the term, if you recall. No “proto” utopias here (though works containing heavy doses of the utopian impulse certainly pre-date More’s utopia; what is the Garden of Eden after all if not a utopian vision?). In More’s Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, whose surname means “speaker of nonsense,” travels to the land of Utopia and describes it in great detail, his account taking the form of a travelogue. Here we see the beginning of some important tropes: travel to a distant land; survey of the customs and political practices of this distant land; various frameworks and explanations that counterpose the utopian realm to the real; and an ironic stance, almost to the point of self-deprecation.

As you can see from the timeline below, utopias became extremely popular throughout Europe in the century that followed. One of the examples comes from a French writer (Fénelon), and another from an Italian writer (Campanella). Many of these works are considered science fiction or “proto” science fiction.^[1] Like science fiction, utopian works produce powerful estrangements that ask us to question the socio-economic status quo of reality by considering better possibilities. Though utopia is often given a distinct and separate status from science fiction, it would be hard to deny the science fictional quality of most of the texts that fall within this category.

Classically, it makes sense to afford the utopian its own genre; there is a very narrowly drawn strict tradition of utopian texts, all of them in dialogue with each other and focused almost entirely on the explication of a utopian place, dressed with only a minimal narrative glossing, and employing the common motif of a traveler reporting on a far away (but not too far away) realm. The focus is often more political than literary, working in the mode of reportage—the retelling of events as they really were—rather than fiction; as a result, many of the texts in this tradition might strike the modern reader as dry or obtuse.

Consider the example of Edward Bellamy and William Morris, both 19th-century utopian writers in the classical vein. In conversation, the two write some of the last utopian texts before the state dystopia novels of the early 20th century. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) was incredibly popular in the U.S. (where it was first published), so much so that it immediately generated “Bellamy Clubs”—political clubs that sought to nationalize industries. In Looking Backward, a man falls asleep in 1887 to wake up in 2000; he finds the world transformed into a socialist utopia. As a work of science fiction, it ranks poorly, bearing a more striking resemblance to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819-20).

Two years later, William Morris, a British socialist, wrote News From Nowhere (1890) as a direct response to Bellamy’s book; in fact, the protagonist of Morris’ utopia also falls asleep to find himself transported to a utopian future. Unlike Bellamy’s future, which embraces machinery and industrialization, Morris offers a more pastoral view. The final thing the two novels share in common is that, in practice, they have no narrative. Primarily didactic, these “narrative-less” utopias are more treatises on political economy than works of fiction; as the former, they are intriguing to any student of the history of ideas, while as the latter, they can be rather dull. Their tone grave and sincere, Bellamy and Morris simply lack the play and irony found in More’s work.

Yet not all texts in the utopian genre are as dry as those of Morris or Bellamy. There exists a satirical vein of utopian literature that steadfastly critiques the naive excesses of its classical counterpart. Perhaps the quintessential example here is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. During the course of this satirical novel, Lemuel Gulliver travels the world and reports on the various societies he finds. Some critics might be hard-pressed to classify this work as utopian considering it does not portray an ideal society, but the text nonetheless shares some striking similarities that place it in conversation with its more obvious utopian counterparts and draw upon the travelogue or traveler’s tale, but in entirely fantastic ways. Both offer commentary on ideal socio-economic worlds, yet in two different modes. The classical utopian tradition is filled with a “positive” utopian content, while satirical works could be said to possess a more “negative” content—they portray “what not to do,” “how not to be.”