Writers on utopia and anti-utopia
( Marina
Spiazzi, Marina Tavella, Only Connect, Maps, Zanichelli, 2000, p. M147)
The birth of the
modern utopia coincided with the break-up of the unified Christian world. Thomas
More's Utopia (1516) Tommaso
Campanella's City of the Sun (1602, and
Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1626) emerged out of the religious
turmoil which led eventually to a secularized world, opening up new forms and
objects for utopia. In much the same way the European voyages of exploration
and discovery were literally discovering a New,
World, which was bound to stir the utopian imagination.
More's Utopia
was a fiction showing the best society not as a normative model or a
satirical foil to that existing, but as a society actually achieved in which
the reader was invited to partecipate. This work was
based on the concept of communism where the community property served a more
general scheme of communal living involving the prohibition of money, common
military training, common education, common habitation
and dining.
In the 18th century the form of satire held together both negative
or anti-utopian, and positive or utopian elements. It criticized, through ridicule and invective, its own times, while
pointing to alternative and better ways of living. The greatest work of this
kind was Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) where there
seemed to be distinct utopian features in Lilliput
and Brobdingnag; while the society of the impeccably
rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, appeared almost a
formal utopia. For most of 19th-century writers and thinkers,
utopia was the thing of the future, prepared by the most powerful and
progressive tendencies of modern times: democracy, science,
socialism. The renewal of utopia stimulated also its counter-force,
anti-utopia. It was the decade of the 1890s that produced the most popular
works of this tradition: Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
and Wilde's The Picture oJ-Doria7t Gray (1891, which
articulated fears of invincible powers, nameless subconscious forces.
In the eyes of
20th-century intellectuals industrial society seemed to have overreached itself
and was preparing its own destruction, as it is reflected in Yeats' poems. America and the Soviet
Union inspired the hopes and designs of utopian experiments, but
they could inspire anti-utopia as well. Huxley's Brave New World (1932) drew
largely upon American practices for its picture of a negative future world,
sunk in consumerism.
Orwell's Animal
Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) were the precise and
passionate expression of the writer's bitter feelings about the failure of a
socialist utopia in the Soviet Union. However
in these novels utopia and anti-utopia flow into and out of each other in
intricate patterns of affirmation mixed with bleak pessimism.
The1950s proclaimed
"the end of ideology"; in the new utopian conception science and
technology played a major role to which fears about nuclear war were the
persistent anti-utopian undercurrent. Horror of the present and fear of the
future came to writers such as William Golding who, in Lord of the Flies (1954),
expressed his view of the thinness of the protective civilized layer keeping
man from barbarism and the brutal annihilation of his kind.