Disappearances of Utopia

Ever since Thomas More coined both the term that named a genre and the punning equivalent for the term, “Utopia” (“no-place,” with the pun “eu-topia,” good or pleasing place) has been much vexed by definitional disputes. Is the utopian impulse—or “social dreaming,” as one scholar terms utopia in its broadest sense—universal to human culture, and thus essential for understandings of humanness?¹ Should utopian texts be primarily analyzed sociologically, or aesthetically, or psychologically? Are positive utopias still being imagined and narrated? Of course, in the twentieth century, conceptions of utopia were complicated both by “the horrors of total war, of genocide and totalitarianism” and by the great dystopian fictions of Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of We [1924]), Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.² Recently, scholars within the multidisciplinary field of utopian studies have argued that current formulations of utopia often suffer from excessive openness or closure: utopia is either presented as a significant ingredient of any cultural phenomenon or text a writer wishes to discuss or is declared to be finished in some way, usually linked with utopia’s ongoing vexed connection to the idea of perfection and with an oft-assumed blurring of “utopia” and totalitarianism.³ Thus Lyman Tower Sargent, whose distinguished scholarship in utopian studies is punctuated by several important definitional essays, urges that “[u]topia should be considered an ‘essentially contested concept,’ or a concept about which there is fundamental disagreement, which should signal that a writer must carefully stipulate how the concept is being used rather than assume that others will understand without further explanation.”⁴

Peter Edgerly Firchow’s Modern Utopian Fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch reveals a complex relationship with these definitional dilemmas and with the relation of such dilemmas to disagreements about the nature of utopia. In Modern Utopian Fictions, Firchow, whose previous works include book-length studies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, takes as his subject matter utopian and dystopian works by six British authors written in the literary-historical modern period of about 1890 to 1960: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895); George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1906); Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ape and Essence (1948), and Island (1962); George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); and Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1958).

Firchow situates his main claim—that a specifically literary analysis of utopian narratives is more effective than sociological analyses in bringing out any utopian text’s conceptions of “utopia”—within an explanation of three touchstones for his approach.⁵ The first is that the utopian imagination is inherently hybrid: Firchow figures it as the intersection of the literary imagination and the sociological—especially the political—imagination (xi). Any understanding of utopia in relation to literary genre, he implies, must assume hybridity. Firchow is not inclined to admit that there is such a thing as a definite genre of utopian literature and suggests that even when “definable and predictable characteristics” of utopia are identified (10), it is best to think of the genre as “flow[ing] easily into other literary genres” (11).

Firchow argues, secondly, that a constant feature of utopian and dystopian narratives is an “experimental” quality: “The question posed is, ultimately, always the same, though it may look superficially different, namely, given certain social conditions, how would human beings react, change, develop?” (10). Always informing the experiment are a text’s approach to “the two essential questions [of] . . . (1) what constitutes the good life? (ethics); and (2) what is human nature really like? (biology and/or psychology)” (8). He comments that positive utopian narratives tend to assess the good life in terms of quantities of happiness for quantities of humans, while dystopian fictions, in contrast, tend to use a measure that emphasizes intensity, depth, or quality of experience, often with a focus on individual experience...