6.08 Gardens of Imagination: Narrative Utopias

Utopia Unjoined

I told you last week that I was really into gaming, specifically roleplay gaming. I wasn’t on my own of course. As one might expect there were a group of us, six or 12 or 18 of us, depending upon what afternoon and what game we played. And such a variety of games! We played role playing games like Chivalry and Sorcery, Traveler, Empire of the Petal Throne, Bunnies and Burrows, the Morrow Project, Jorune,  the Call of Cthulhu, and even Metamorphosis Alpha. Occasionally, we would move over to board games like Diplomacy, Kingmaker, Civilization, Terrible Swift Sword, or Circus Maximus. Yes, it was a gaming nerds Paradise.

I don’t remember now how we fit school and family into our endless afternoons, late evenings, and until-dawn game sessions. There was a lot of pizza, a lot of cookies and cake, and a lot of Jolt cola: “All the sugar and twice the caffeine!” Ah, that was living!

I’m sure, at one level, this is my nostalgic recollection of a gaming Utopia, but that did not stop us from imagining something better still. We knew, in our insecure hearts of hearts., that we understood the world at some level better than everyone else, the confidence of 15-year-old temperaments, and so it was no wonder that we imagined our ultimate Utopia as a gaming retreat, a place where some of us might live and others could visit and stay whenever they wanted, for as long as they wanted.

We even had some rudimentary designs planned. We knew for instance, that the Utopia would have to be remote, a place of isolation, somewhere far away from the shallow civilization that we looked down upon, and it was to be luxurious as well, a place of late Renaissance splendor, a mansion with secret passages, state of the art gaming dens, and enormous entertainment centers for movies and music.  Yes, of course, we had no idea at all how we would ever find or fund such a thing. but that matters little when it comes to Utopia. We only knew that if there was any justice in the world, it would somehow work itself out.

Each of us could be spared the dull life of work and common thinkers, the banality of negotium, not that we understood such a phrase, only that for us our Think Tank Palace, our Emporium of the Imagination, would one day be ours. And, weirdly, pouring from its windows would be the music of the Alan Parsons Project, Styx, the B-52’s, Rachmaninoff, and Al Jarreau. 

Funny how today I can still imagine it, the need for it, all the details of the special rooms we would create. God, we were idiots.  What would be the equivalent of such a fantasy today? a lottery winning? some bank account in the Cayman Islands? Yes, funny, that every fantasy we seem to build depends upon money and retreat, the thing which society produces and paradoxically the demand to escape that society. 

Is this the way of all utopias? 

One of my favorite books as a kid was from the inimitable Dr. Seuss, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. You might know of it: “Where they never have troubles! At least, very few.” But our little hero, after fighting his way to the utopia finds that the door is locked and that he cannot enter. And that, that my dear listener, heralds the start of my cynicism about all things utopia, and my later love for Poe and Kafka and Dostoevski, Conrad and Achebe, Eliot and Dante, and the inevitable conclusion to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books.

Maybe you’re the same way, looking on utopia fiction as impossibly idealistic. We give it a hard pass in our reading of it, unless it’s something like Brave New World which is dystopia pretending to be utopia. But don’t worry–we’re not alone. It may be the rarity of utopia fiction that marks our distaste for it. In fact, outside of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, can you name even three novels that are about utopias that aren’t secretly awful places? 

–Didn’t think so.–

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I want to live in my little garden world, or at least think more about it.

 

Utopia and Dystopia as Fantasy

Now it’s not that I don’t take utopia seriously; actually, I see it as one of the most significant uses of imagination, and imagination is one of the most essential ingredients (if not the only one) to the articulation of art.

But to be vividly clear: Utopia is a conception belonging to the realm of fantasy. It is fantasy in that we can never in this mortal space of flesh and one-off cheeseburgers believe that we will ever achieve it. Utopia is an ideal; it is not the probable end of a five-year strategic plan of tractor pulls or mortgage reductions; it is the ambition, perhaps the compass direction to aim for, but it’s far on the other side of the Solla Sollew door, defended by a reality as clever as the Key-Slapping Slippard that Dr. Seuss names. 

And so, we must ask, what is the use of thinking about the impossible? Doesn’t it become like so much philosophy, an enormous exercise in navel-gazing and other armchair, hair-splitting, ivory tower nonsense? (Um, my chair here at the microphone has arms. . . .Hmm.)

I think the answer comes when we uncover, we reveal our thinking about them. Set up before us as sincere illustrations of what we can achieve, they become lasting motivations for us to realize. They augment speeches with words like “I have a dream” or metaphors like “shining city on a hill,” values like “freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear,” or even–perish the thought–”life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In all of these the United States created images of the world where we might be fully realized, fully satisfied. Now, now, I know some of you are thinking, “Oh, well, yeah, but . . . “

And that’s the point, isn’t it, that “but”? We might optimistically say that we are moving there by increments or even that we are going in the wrong direction, perhaps drastically wrong. I’m not going to argue any of that here. My point is that the utopia, the fantasy narrative, gave us our compass direction for that judgment. How do you know we’re going in the right or wrong direction if we have not defined the direction?

But the second part of that sincere utopia—or at least politically sincere utopia, so far as politics might be sincere—the second part is that we do not expect to ever fully realize it. You and I both know that in our lifetimes at the least a fully aware and compassionate world of equality and love are unlikely to manifest themselves. With over 8 billion people on the planet, that will just take too much convincing and rethinking about quality of life measurements. We could take the United Nations approach and set target goals for reducing the worst violations of our utopic direction, and then reset them a few dozen more times. We could work on building a space for our own neighborhood block which satisfies it, but then we run into the problem of keeping our world open for new neighbor variables or closing it and suffering the petty politics of HOAs, the housing association nightmares which plague those who can afford the fees.  

Okay, so let’s go Buddhist and just work on ourselves. And let’s face it, we ask a great deal of others when we are truly our own life-long projects. In most of these Eastern traditions, the goal is not to build a social utopia but to mentally and emotionally abandon our attachments to the world and its . . . um, worldliness. 

To make sure you get my drift, here, let me point out what the word utopia actually means. “Topia” means place, and “Eu” (e-u) my good etymologists may already know means “good” (compared to “dystopia” where the dys- means bad). But what many may not realize is the “Eu” that we expect the “U” in utopia to mean also represents its sound alike “oo” (oo-topia). And “oo literally means “none” or “no”. Therefore the utopia means the good place which is simultaneously no place at all. 

So the sincere utopia has its values and its limits: it positively sets us up for a moral or ethical compass, but it also denies us absolutely the expectation that it will be achieved. It motivates us for action, but we will never see the end result of our action. Gee, it’s almost like human perfection is an eternal project. (And it is this conclusion which itself motivates others to different philosophies, something we’ll touch on in just a bit.) But to go back to our navel-gazing accusation, here at least utopia, like good philosophy, motivates our actual behavior and change.  

But there are kinds of utopias out there–and by this I don’t mean visions of the perfect future: for those there are as many different world visions as there are authors of them. No, in thinking of “categories” or types of utopia, there are others beside this earnest sincere ambition utopia.

One we can call the “thought puzzle.” Rather than laying out a vision in sincere interest that we seek, the thought puzzle utopia is forwarded for the very business of our examining it and arguing its merits. Not this is the vision, but why should or shouldn’t this be the vision? In this case, the utopia author isn’t sincere in the vision so much as she might be sincere in the dialogue which must result, the thought puzzle it proposes. At its best, it helps us clarify that compass more powerfully than simply ask us to subscribe to it because we heard about it in a Democratic nomination speech or local chautauqua tent. We must reason and intuit our way through its problems. 

Authors of these utopias understand the problems of the sincere vision and sidestep these by setting aside the expectation we will live it. Instead they pose questions by the assembly of the ideal vision, asking if all the virtues we supposedly subscribe to, perhaps, are in fact virtuous, or if they can exist together in the same universe. 

Consider Dostoevsky’s Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov we recently looked at. Ivan looks at a sincere utopia that his younger brother Aloysha has subscribed to, that of the Christian promise of eternal paradise, of a Second Coming which will bring reconciliation and peace. Ivan does not subscribe to this vision. And so Dostoevsky, our author, has turned the Christian promise utopia into a thought puzzle, asking us alongside Ivan and Aloysha to weigh the costs of that paradise. He pits our Suffering Child motif against final Forgiveness. Ivan indirectly suggests that for the utopia to be realized we must all lose our memories of injustice and pain upon the innocent, and this is a price he refuses to pay.

William James and Ursula K. Le Guin will take this same scenario and change it still a bit more, perhaps, posing utopia as an explicit trade-off: you can have Ideals 1, 2, and 3, but you can’t have Ideal 4 and have to accept Pain #2. Not true utopias at all then, but perhaps a third category that we can call the “Thorny Utopia,” and suddenly we’re channeling the 1988 song by the aptly-named band, Poison.

Like the Thought Puzzle Utopia, the Thorny Utopia is created for dialogue, for confronting our contradictions and hypocrisies, but here it makes little pretense at all that a perfect world is possible, only one where everyone can seem to be accepting, a compromise where all are equally happy and perhaps unhappy. I could place Lois Lowry’s The Giver here; it’s not a terrible world, just one devoid of memory, color, and much individual passion. And we can see already that this is just a slim step from dystopia.

If I were to propose a fourth kind of utopia, it would be the False Utopia. Here the author proposes a world which is seemingly perfect, but is so broken that its flaws are quickly understood by readers as unforgivable. This is the thorny rose where the blooms are mirage. Today these kinds of utopias are so numerous that they are difficult to keep track of: Huxley’s Brave New World is here, I think, when its opening speech boasts about the emotionless laboratory creation of humanity; they call it a Hatchery. We also find similar patterns in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go where much of the novel is the seemingly perfect world of a private boarding school, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, depicting a grotesque traditional male fantasy of submissive and servile women. But I am also thinking of Sly Stallone in Demolition Man where society has become so pureed that it cannot imagine the violence literally beneath its feet, let alone Wesley Snipes.

So I’ve marked out four categories of utopia, and we can argue about where the lines are drawn and all, but I’m more interested in their functions, their purposes as narrative form, for us: how we are expected to find meaning from them. 

• In the first, the Sincere Utopia, we are asked to subscribe or reject the vision. But the creation of this vision is not meant to be challenged.
• In the second two, the Thought Puzzle and the Thorny Utopias, we have them specifically to challenge, to dig at and explore so as to better clarify our moral or ethical visions. 
• And finally, I’ve identified the False Utopia, which is merely a mirage for dystopia, not really a utopia at all. We are never meant to embrace any part of it. It never suggests what we must idealize, but acts as a warning for turning in that wrong direction. 

And while we can and should talk about dystopias, too, I’m going to save that discussion today, mostly because it is another magnitude of size larger, that its purposes are somewhat different, and that it is so popular, our current stories so saturated with them, that I worry we’ll get a bit distracted by that popularity. 

And finally, I should point out that others have categorized our utopias by form, as well, but these largely fall into the way we encounter them: a stranger wanders in to discover one, or a citizen lives within one, or it’s a utopia, but only in this small community, not the society at large.

In all cases, though, we have utopia as fantasy, something beyond achievability, bordering even on the unbelievable. Perhaps this is one reason that utopias have not proven so popular; another is that Sincere Utopias, especially in fiction, have little in the way of conflict or story to motivate us. Narrative depends upon conflict, does it not, at least in our popular idea of it, and conflict means “a problem,” which a utopia cannot have. Even Dr. Seuss understood that!

So Plato, so Edward Bellamy, so Francis Bacon and H G Wells, what did Seuss understand that you did not?

 

The Utopia Tradition

So, we have left with us Sincere Utopias and those which operate as a kind of philosophical project, not escapist but actually demanding we examine and challenge them, these Thoughtful and Thorny Utopias.

I’ll point out here that traditionally for narrative, for fiction, these philosophical utopia stories are almost always written as allegory. 

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What We Got Wrong

And, sidebar, speaking of allegory, this is an awkwardly good place to point out that I may have miscommunicated in my discussion of allegory in the last episode, In Defense of Fantasy. I was talking about how many fantasy writers deny that their novels are allegorical, and that they are correct to say so in that not every aspect of their work is a one-to-one correspondence to our contemporary society. But that implies that allegorical novels have only one interpretation and that we have to somehow “find the one answer” to what the book is an allegory of. I did not mean to imply any such thing. Allegorical fiction–and there’s a ton of it starting back in our own childhoods with a lot of fairy tales–has characters and events representing abstract ideas or political scenes or whatever–but there are still many meanings most stories can have allegorically, not just one. Allegories are fairly open-ended, even when an author writes intentionally for them to have a single representation. Most writers of fantasy are not writing to have their worlds work so directly as allegory.  And thank you, Erin Palmer, for the catch! I appreciate you!

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But as I was saying, utopia fantasy works a little differently from what we just corrected. Utopias work with the conception that they are parallels to our contemporary world, as points of comparison. The Lord of the Rings is a great fantasy story, but it is not an allegory or utopia. We can find comparisons and themes to learn from, but only in a more abstract sense. If you want to find the sound of bombs from The Blitz against London in the drums of Kazadh-dum, be my guest.

Our first key writer of utopia fiction is the man who invented the word, Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia. More was tired of European inequities and corruption, of the oppression of people who sought justice. His protagonist traveler, Raphael Hythloday, wanders through Europe and talks to the author More about the poor conditions. He poses the question, to create a better society should we hope to create something like Plato’s suggestion of “philosopher kings” from the existing stock of nobles and their greed, or would we be better to start from scratch?

In the second part of the book, Raphael finds himself living for some years on an island near the New World where a perfect society, Utopia, exists. It is a world that lives by moderation and reason, where labor and wealth are equally enjoyed and there is no ownership of property. Families are the center-pieces of local governance, though still patriarchal to be sure. 

As I said, there isn’t much of a plot, more an explication with some early dialogue of philosophical musings. But More’s work would become the foundation for later utopias, implying a communitarian–if not a fully communist–idealism. 

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward from 1888 also finds a more socialist solution to capitalism. Caught in the industrial revolution, we see many writers contending with the inequities that resulted. In Bellamy’s case, a man falls asleep and awakes in the futuristic year of 2000 where the United States has set aside all the nonsense of capitalism and exploitation–such accuracy!–social class has been eliminated, workers are united to produce for the industrial progress a country expects, and the large government benevolently provides for everyone’s needs fairly and equitably. Oh, and the retirement age is 45. Very cool. Importantly, Bellamy’s novel was a best-seller in its day, and has been kind of a starting point for many progressive thinkers afterwards who subscribed to much of its vision.

Around the same time, fantasist William Morris (he who also launched the heroic fantasy tradition I talked about last time), wrote News from Nowhere in 1891. Morris was good enough to have his time-traveling protagonist wake up in future London. But otherwise the concept is largely the same, though the government role is eliminated along with most industrial concepts and humankind has embraced a more agrarian pastoral future bliss. In particular, Morris wrote the book to answer questions many had about how socialism might work, In other words, the allegorical parallels and outright answers were addressed openly in this future society, sincerely forwarded. 

It isn’t long, of course, before later writers try their hands at utopic fiction. Charlotte Perkins Gilman–you may have read her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”–Gilman wrote Herland in 1915 which addresses gender discrimination, imagining a society of women who can produce asexually and are therefore freed to accomplish other purposes, a society free of war and exploitation. H. G. Wells in 1923 wrote Men Like Gods where humankind had to be literally transported to another universe in order to find a world free of war and disease. Huxley, thirty years after Brave New World, wrote Island, where people live in a combination of Eastern philosophy, environmentalism, and helpful psychotic drugs. In the 1940s psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote Walden II which honestly and earnestly proposes that we can be happy and efficient if only we are socially engineered by benevolent scientists. There are still more, of course–Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, each writing in the 1600s–and dozens afterwards

And while there are dozens more, I wonder that these books aren’t sticking with us so much, and when they do, it’s because we disagree with their prescriptions. Compelling humanity back to agrarianism has not worked well for the countries which have forcibly tried it; and you can keep your conformity ideals out of my face, Skinner. Didn’t you even read Brave New World and 1984? I like to think that today’s writers of utopia, fantasists, are a bit more savvy about their creations. Le Guin called her novel, The Dispossessed, an “ambiguous utopia,” and we’ll have to look harder later at what she means there. 

And then there’s my guy, Tom Moylan, a scholar in utopias–what a cool job that must be! Moylan falls in line closely with some of my earlier categories of utopia, but he goes further, and it’s time to move from the utopia history to utopia as narrative.

 

Utopia as Thought Experiment

For Moylan, most utopias today are what he calls “critical utopias,” and they kind of combine what I was saying earlier about Thought Puzzles and Thorny Utopias. His critical utopias give up any pretense of being a blueprint for a future–which would end up pretty static and boring after a while, anyway. It’s an unrealistic expectation and arresting human struggle is itself a bit problematic. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t keep working towards them, advocating for social transformation to improve the human condition.

And so we now write utopias to that end, perhaps since the 1970s or so, perhaps since around, I don’t know, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” written in 1973. Or even Marge Piercy’s amazing novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, from 1976. Justice is still key for Moylan’s critical utopias, but they recognize that there are flaws and differences which are still worked on. Rather than prescribe via blueprint, the critical utopias, thoughtful, puzzling, and thorny, resist any certain answers. The goals are for us to see the inconsistencies, not to pretend there are none. 

What do such stories do? They challenge us as readers, they won’t let us read as escapism, they resist our setting them down to forgetfulness, they argue against our complacency, push against our unquestioned ideologies, stir us from our lazy thinking that now, today, is the best way to live. They are utopias with nuance, complexity; they change beneath our questions, shift from our interrogation, demanding we change our process of thinking about what the future holds for us.

As readers, we become actively engaged in reading utopia. The story talks to us, understanding who we are and what we must be thinking, and then demands us to justify ourselves. And it does so by offering us the cognitive dissonance, this disruption to our habits of thinking dully. It offers a world which is not our own, often very much unlike ours. And we are like Raphael Hytholoday or some other traveler waking up to the new space, asking questions. In utopia, we can do it freely because we need not worry about looking silly or being prosecuted for our critiques. 

It is the fantasy world which makes us comfortable enough to ask questions, and in so doing to ask questions of our own lives that we might not otherwise ask. It’s an imaginative safe space, but don’t take that as a harmless one; the safe space of imagination is a temporary haven, a kind of garden for contemplation, for what are otherwise important and even dangerous questions. The questions we ask in our utopias stay with us when we leave–we carry them with us, back to our daily living. We may even dare ask them here, too.

Of course, utopia fiction can fail, and it very often does, which is why we so rarely talk about it or read it. First, and most often, readers disengage. We start saying, “Well, yes, but. . . “ and then look at all the exceptions and differences we find when we “wake up” (hmmph) from our future dreams. The worst of all defensive reactions is what we call the “It was only a story” response, dismissing fiction and its role as irrelevant to the real world, a response that seems more and more common. If we’re not careful, we find ourselves in an ethical dilemma when reading, and so we almost literally “walk away” and by doing this avoid the existential angst and responsibility we are called to confront, a rather privileged behavior. (A little foreshadowing there…)

Or we just numb ourselves, normalize the discompassionate response, the passive acceptance of injustice as somehow unavoidable or necessary. We can hear these responses with “There will always be (insert problem here),” or “But what about. . . ?”  In these areas, Skinner might have been right: we have been socialized to respond in this way. And I’ll risk saying, too, that a lot of our social media posting can be exactly this, too. “Well, I re-posted that quote I found to show that I’m on the right side of this; what else do you want?” We used to call this slacktivism, and now it’s more virtue signaling, but it can operate as a defensive screen against that engagement.

Another difficult response to the thoughtful or thorny utopia is a quick misreading of it, the argument that “Well, I guess that means that we can never have a perfect world” followed by a shrug of the shoulders. This creates its own kind of passiveness or apathy, a kind of nihilism which trusts nothing at all as a moral compass. 

 

From Otium Gardens to Action

But let’s not pretend that this imaginative space of utopia has produced no change, either. Bellamy’s Looking Backward was so popular it inspired real political action, including the creation of Nationalist Clubs which worked to realize it. Between Bellamy and Morris, the early 1900s progressive movement found fire and traction. And at least two communities were formed attempted to replicate Skinner’s troubling Walden II. 

And my guess, too, is that Le Guin in writing “Omelas” has anticipated the potential failures of readers to engage. She has long known what is at stake in her positions and politics. And, as we may well know–especially if you have already read the story–this one works hard on readers. 

And we’ve set the stage now for looking at the story in depth. If you have yet to read it, I encourage you to take 10 minutes to do so before our next episodes. It’s under copyright, so I won’t be reading it aloud, though I will give a less than satisfying summary.

We’ve set the stage for it.

• We know it as a utopian work of fantasy, a critical utopia, a thorny one, and that it will demand we engage it on this level, as a philosophical challenge to our current way of living.
• We know the traditions it is founded upon, and we know how to understand fantasy as a genre, alerted not to its tropes but to its variations on these tropes.
• We know, too, that I have framed an otium-negotium binary for us, one related to gardens and to privilege. That hovering in the background are pastoral poets, Seneca’s philosophy, and escapist pastimes. Somehow you must be expecting these to become essential to understanding the story.
• We’ve set up the Suffering Child motif and seen that its role in James and Dostoevski will influence our thinking of Le Guin.
• And I’ve suggested that the artist for Le Guin has a critical role, one of high responsibility, and that failing that role may be an act of treason.

Phew. So, as we prepare to go in, let me end with the words of a utopian master.

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind

Some come from ahead and some come from behind

But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready, you see.

Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

 

Outro

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Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

Bartles, Jason A. “Navigating Uncertainty: The Ambiguous Utopias of Le Guin, Gorodischer, and Jemisin.” Utopian Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, Mar. 2022, pp. 107–26. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0107.

Khanna, Lee Cullen,. “Beyond Omelas: Utopia and Gender.” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 48–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719025.