Wesker and Utopia in the Sixties

Wesker and Utopia in the Sixties HEINZ ZIMMERMANN Arnold Wesker's fIrst period of writing for the tbeatre, which closes with the play The Friends (1970), falls in the era of the legendary renewal of English drama in the late fIfties and sixties. The social situation to which this drama responded has been repeatedly analysed. I Samuel Beckett's existentialist confrontation with the loss of all metaphysical meaning, and the impossibility of continuing to live with this truth, fInds a less cerebral and more emotional equivalent in John Osborne's dramatic revolt, which on the surface is aimed at an English, political and social situation devoid ofperspectives and ideals. The Labour Party's unimaginative and pragmatic policy of reforms, its integration into the establishment once it had taken over the government, and its sacrifIce of socialist ideals for the practical realization of the Welfare State - as well as the latter's bureaucratic excesses - generated not only a highly dissatisfIed New Left, but also the New Drama. Osborne's subjective way of coping with the problem of the Welfare State, by identifying it with the myth of the devouring mother' (in Look Back in Anger), points to the cause of the dilemma - the loss ofbelief in a utopian ideal and the consequent loss of meaning: "!fthe big bang does come, and we alJ get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you.,,3 Parallel to the anti-utopian novels of the time by Anthony Burgess or William Golding, Harold Pinter's ambiguous dramatic idiom of his Birthday Party presents the sufferings of the individual crushed by a society which enforces conformity and a state which smothers him with care. Pinter thus refers to the main reason for post-war hostility to utopia. Utopia was accused of having furnished the model for totalitarian states like Hitler's Third Reich or Stalin's communist system, with their disastrous consequences. K.R. Popper condemns the designers of "closed" utopian societies as enemies of the pluralist democratic "open" society4 Literary utopias between More and Bellamy, it is true, nourished the 186 HEINZ ZIMMERMANN hope that universal happiness could he achieved by perfect planning and order. But it is nevertheless a fallacy to take the possible decay which lies in this for the very essence of utopia.5 Its dangerous potential has moreover been denounced even from the utopian point of view itself, since writers like George Orwell drew horror visions of a society whose memhers are incapacitated by an order which manipulates them like objects. These negative images, however, do not necessarily intend a refutation of utopia altogether. They can even - as in the case of Orwell's works - dialectically allude to another utopia'" The utopian vision is thus preserved in the negative. Sociologists even hold the opinion that the utopian intention realizes itself most precisely not in the positive determination of what it wants, but in the statement of what it does not want.7 In this situation, where positive, constructive utopian designs seem no longer possible,8 where even socialists join in the general criticism of the vision calling it a chimera! Arnold Wesker advocates a revival of the utopian ideal.10 He is convinced that it could show a way out ofa general dilemma, that it could be a means of retrieving hope and enthusiasm. At a time when Beckett's metaphysical despair leaves no hope for any action in the sense of fundamental change, Wesker announces that the belief in the utopian ideal can provide, if not a metaphysical, then at least a worldly meaning and order. What gives him the confidence to revive this conception? First, he takes advantage of the chameleon-like nature of the term "utopia" itself. According to Plato and More, to Cabet and Saint-Simon, rules, bureaucracy and obedience triumph in the ideal state in which equality comes before freedom. But from the time of its first descriptions, this idea of utopia has provoked' an opposed Arcadian vision11 The latter is propagated by authors like Aristophanes, Rahelais, Swift, Owen, and Fourier, who prefer the individual to the...