Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in the China and the West by Douwe Fokkema (review)

Published just before his death in 2011, Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West stands as a prodigious testament to Douwe Fokkema’s linguistic and literary erudition, one that spanned a distinguished career of over four decades. Fokkema was a pioneer in comparative studies of Chinese and Western culture, and his work paved a way for subsequent scholars to continue researching Chinese literature in transcultural perspective. Fokkema’s book, an exhaustive study of utopian narratives from Chinese and Western sources, in its own way performs the global utopian impulse that underlies the work of literary comparison.

Fokkema states that utopian narratives stem from a “desire for a better world,” one that “is an anthropological constant” (165). In his introduction, he lays out several theses that guide the numerous case studies which follow: (1) Times of felt crisis tend to produce an increase in utopian imaginings and their expression in literary discourse, (2) utopian imaginations are prevalent in secular cultures that have decentered the role of revelatory religion, (3) dystopian narratives (as opposed to what he calls “eutopian” ones) arise in periods of political/social engineering and the attempted (but nearly universally flawed) realization of utopian principles, and (4) Chinese visions of utopia have had a different cultural character from Western ones in that they tend to look not toward the future, but back nostalgically to an exalted past (19–22). His structural claims are somewhat general as he himself admits (399), and not surprising given the boundless array and variety of materials he looks at, and the tendency to find a utopian (or dystopian) narrative just about everywhere.

The book prominently consists of readings of such classic utopian (or dystopian) authors as Thomas More, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and lesser-known ones like Lao She, Wang Shuo, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among many, many others. The impressive range of materials under consideration is undergirded by his expertise in at least five languages. The reader will find the immense cultural variety of texts examined to be eye-opening and stimulating, and Fokkema’s own relish in bringing out connections between such disparate literary traditions springs forth from the page. The extensive breadth can also be seen as possibly its greatest setback—in covering so many texts in one book, many of the seventeen chapters consist of much plot summary and not always an attempt at an immanent analysis that may challenge or complicate his larger theses. His work thus constitutes a great starting place for research—however, those seeking more in-depth analysis of individual works will need to branch out to more specialized studies.

Fokkema’s obvious captivation with the idea of utopian fiction as a global genre goes hand in hand with an aversion to the realization of such utopian ideals into political actuality. Utopian yearning and expression is a natural, human response to crisis, but for Fokkema most utopias should stay comfortably in art, lest they wreak havoc in the real world. He argues that attempts to realize utopia are more or less doomed to failure because of their negation of individual freedom and the impossibility of attaining human perfection, not exactly unfamiliar ideas to those of us brought up on the anticommunist side of the cold war. More insidiously, precisely because utopias feature politically attractive ideas, they are frequently successful in the revolutionary seizure of power, one that for Fokkema almost inevitably leads to the new regime’s persecution and purging of its most ideal members in a pragmatic attempt to secure authority (253). The degree of utopias’ beauty and grandeur thus seems to be in inverse proportion to the terror they will unleash if made into reality. Better they were left in novels and not in political speeches.

While Fokkema for the most part exercises critical and objective restraint, his withering scorn for leftist ideas, and in particular for Marxism (which he dismisses as being an...