Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France: Utopia and its Afterlives by Daniel Sipe (review)

In undertaking his sweeping but detailed study of utopia in nineteenth-century France, Daniel Sipe has successfully clarified two distinct but related issues. The first is the lingering ‘afterlife’ of the early modern and enlightenment literary utopia, whose ironyladen dream images and carefully staged fictitiousness continue to inform the utopian production of nineteenth-century visual artists and writers. The second is the gradual transformation of a newly historicized utopianism from alternative and optimal (even inevitable) mode of social organization to a hubristic and impersonal system of ‘pleasurable ordering’, the goal of which is not individual and communal emancipation but the ceaseless satisfaction of desire. These two processes emerge in French society after 1789, when all seemed possible amidst the ruins of an old world swept away. Chateaubriand’s Atala, for example, both evokes and then attempts to efface the literary utopia as formulated by Thomas More and Diderot, recognizing that utopian isolation is no longer viable in the scientific and historical reality of the nineteenth century. This increasing historical consciousness is perhaps best glimpsed in Hugo’s Fonction d’un poète, which sees the great man of nineteenth-century letters exhorting his fellow artists to reject facile aestheticism in order to become ‘l’homme des utopies’ (p. 54), embracing a role of both prophet and proselytizer for the coming future. The uchronic promise of a real perfected social order allowed the utopia to become something more than an ironic critique of present society, proposing instead a set of quasi-scientific speculations upon social organization. The utopian socialists Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Étienne Cabet are perhaps the best-known exponents of this kind of utopianism. Yet the persistence of the utopian afterlife is revealed in Sipe’s analysis of Cabet’s most famous work, Voyage en Icarie, which is superbly reread not simply as the reality-based utopian proposition it is often taken to be but as a complicated negotiation of both imaginative literary practice and rationalistic social science. The literary character and productive focus of utopian socialism is eventually lampooned and rejected by an array of writers and visual artists from J. J Grandville to Baudelaire, who see in the elaborate, bureaucratic, and isolationist structures of Icarie and the Phalanstère little more than vapid, consumerist panaceas to an age obsessed with the utilitarian gratification of pleasure. The shattered dreams and broken promises of post-1848 French society helped confirm the disfigured but persistent afterlife of the literary utopia, whose bountiful promise and moral harmony were refigured as a commodity guaranteeing pleasurable satisfaction. The dystopian transformation of utopia from ironic critique to perfect social order and eventually to efficient system of pleasure delivery culminates in the female automata stories of Charles Barbara and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Here the utopian thinker becomes nothing more than the ‘technician’ of desire (p. 193), whose goal of democratized and organized pleasure serves to pave the way for the drab, functional societies of both the real and fictional dystopias of the twentieth century. Sipe’s study is a fascinating and welcome enquiry into both the attractions and pitfalls of utopian speculation, and will prove an indispensible aid to understanding the artistic and political cultures of nineteenth-century France.