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.