# 20 = Volume 7, Part 1 = March 1980
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BOOKS IN REVIEW
Winter on Utopia
Michael Winter. Compendium Utopiarum: Typologie und Bibliographie literarischer
Utopien. Erster Teilband: Von der Antike bis zur deutschen Frühaufklärung. Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1978. 287p. DM 150-
This massive undertaking of a two-volume reference work on literary utopias clearly
owes its very life to Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope and to the debates about social
alternatives which were fueled by the student movement of the 1960s and which, at least in
West Germany, were strongly influenced by Bloch's heretical Marxism. At first sight, the
heavy oversize volume with its numerous indices and appendices, its charts, tables, and
illustrations seems to belong with what Bloch used to characterize as the cold stream of
intellectual life. Utopia academicized! The ever powerful human drive beyond the present
toward a better future catalogued, classified, and typologized, made manageable and
controllable for the specialist scholar. And yet, although Winter's elaborate listings and
typologies may indeed call forth a flood of meager and irrelevant publications on this or
that aspect of utopian literature, one cannot but pay respect to the scope of Winter's
project and to the energy a single author has invested in such a thoroughly dystopian
labor.
The book calls for a description. The present folio-size volume deals with the whole
body of European utopian literature from classical antiquity to the early German
enlightenment; volume two, which has yet to be published, will then carry the reader from
the mid-18th century to the present. The book is divided into four sections. The
introductory section contains a substantial essay on the relationship between utopia as
fiction and utopia as a program for political action. This essay, which outlines the
conceptual framework of the whole project, is followed by explanatory notes and a guide to
use of the typological chronological title bibliography which comprises the core of the
present volume. This second section contains 153 consecutively numbered and
chronologically arranged bibliographical entries beginning with Lycurgus, Aristophanes,
Plato, Aristotle, and Iambulus, moving on to the Christian-chiliastic texts of the Middle
Ages, to the classical utopias of the Renaissance and the Reformation, More, Miintzer, and
Giordano Bruno, to Campanella's Civitas Solis, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and
the numerous French utopias of the 17th century (among them Fontenelle, Du Quesne,
Fénélon), and ending with Defoe and Swift, Marivaux and Montesquieu, and finally with the
major German example of a utopian novel in the 18th century, Johann Gottfried Schnabel's Insel
Felsenburg (1731-43). Included are both fictional and non-fictional literary genres
ranging from philosophical essay, pamphlet, treatise, report, dialogue, and letter to
comedy, travelogue, satire, and different forms of the novel.
Winter does not claim comprehensiveness for his bibliography. Since the very notion of
literary utopia is still ill-defined, in terms of content as well as of genre and form,
comprehensiveness would indeed be an illusory goal. It is nevertheless one of the great
merits of this bibliography to have brought to light a rich body of utopian texts which
were buried in European libraries-some of them rediscoveries, others entirely new
discoveries. And to compensate for the lack of comprehensiveness, Winter has tried to
construct a typology of literary genres into which any later discoveries or simple
oversights could be fitted.
In each individual entry the bibliographical information is followed by a usually
extensive commentary. The commentary begins with relatively substantial content summaries
of the text in question taken from literary dictionaries (especially Kindlers
Literaturlexikon) or from specialized studies of utopian literature (Begley, Dupont,
Gibson, et al.). Whenever called for, Winter's subsequent remarks give additional
biographical and content information; but the main purpose of his commentary is to
elucidate the social, cultural, and literary context of a work and then to define it
generically and typologically. Multiple cross-references enable the reader to develop an
understanding of the various groups and sub-groups of utopian literature, of influences,
history of reception, and the development of specific sub-genres. The commentary closes
with selected bibliographical references to relevant secondary literature.
Section 3 contains a resume of Winter's typological constructs, which may be studied
profitably before looking up any individual entry in section 2. Winter offers four major
categories for charting the body of utopian literature, fully aware that his construct can
only provide a basis for further discussion and research. First he divides utopian
literature into different genres of fictional and non-fictional texts according to their
content. Then he distinguishes the various utopian models according to property structure
and forms of domination. A third graph charts the different forms of literary presentation
(e.g. pamphlet, treatise, letter, various forms of the novel, comedy), and the fourth one
attempts to distinguish three broad groups of utopias in terms of their political
intention: conservatism, reformism, and revolution. A final chronological table of all the
listed texts then characterizes each according to the four basic categories and, under a
fifth rubric, provides historical and social "background" information in
abbreviated form. This chronological-typological table thus synthesizes the individual
bilbiographical entries of section 2 with Winter's typological charts in section 3.
Section 3 concludes with a bibliographical appendix containing relevant secondary sources
(bibliographies, monographs, collections of texts, etc.).
The fourth and final section contains five indices. Besides the usual author, title,
and subject index and a list of abbreviations, there is an index of names which includes
printers, publishers, translators, critics, and scholars, thus providing an additional
useful entry to this reference work.
No question about it: this compendium is a gold mine of information and it offers
manifold challenges to the informed reader. One problem, of course, is the attempt to
integrate essentially synchronic genre classifications with diachronic historical
descriptions. The material covered is so overwhelmingly large that Winter's (to my mind)
excessive concern with typology may confuse rather than enlighten. I would suggest that
while the broad classifications and categories are useful and help us understand various
important aspects of utopian literature, the fine screen imposed on the materials by the
genealogical charts is on occasion unnecessarily confusing, if not abstract and
meaningless. The attempt, for example, to classify literary forms according to length and
then to ascribe a specific content to a short form as opposed to a long form (chart 3)
runs aground simply because the same subject matter may indeed appear in both the long and
the short form. Further-more, genre distinctions between, e.g., the short forms
"Traktat" and "Essay" on one hand and "Abhandlung" on the
other are dubious at best.
To give yet another example: in the case of typology 4 (political intention) one can
easily accept Winter's distinction into conservative, reformist, and revolutionary
utopias. But the subdivisions that follow become meaningless when Winter ascribes to each
of these categories an aristocratic and an aristocratic-bourgeois standpoint, and where
both reformism and revolution can additionally appear in bourgeois form. Here the lack of
history makes the typological screen utterly meaningless; one is reminded that historical
and cultural processes are not that easily presented in diagram form.
It is to Winter's credit, however, that history is amply present in the commentaries on
individual utopias, which are all interpreted as responding to their specific historical,
cultural, and social context. Winter himself suggests (pp. 227 ff.) that the typologies
are most helpful when the literature is related to historical developments. It is indeed
important to know that the major impulses for post-medieval utopian literature come out of
early capitalist developments in England, the Reformation, the English civil war, the
absolutism of Louis XIV, and the bourgeois enlightenment. In terms of literary
presentation and genre, the bibliography reveals a major shift in the mid-17th century.
Heretofore dominant forms such as philosophical dialogue, descriptive report, and treatise
are increasingly replaced by fictional genres such as the novel of action or the
travelogue. Descriptive utopias lose ground to utopias presented as biographies of
individuals (e.g., Winter argues for "hidden elements" of Puritan utopianism
even in Robinson Crusoe). Winter is certainly correct in suggesting that this
shift towards individualistic perspective and personal adventure is connected with the
historical emancipation of the merchant bourgeoisie, and, I would add, with the rise of
the novel as the dominant literary genre of the European bourgeoisie in general.
Another interesting result of Winter's work is that--contrary to a commonly accepted
notion--utopian models based on private property by far outnumber those characterized by
communist structures, and monarchic forms of government outweigh anarchic and
democratic-republican forms. Of course, this observation does not imply that private
property utopias are necessarily any less revolutionary than communist ones. In the age of
early capitalism and bourgeois emancipation the insistence on private property and
constitutional monarchy as forms of political organization were certainly revolutionary.
One last critical point concems Michael Winter's own intellectual and political
position, as it is revealed in the introductory essay and in the Preface. There may be a
point in categorizing More and Müntzer as opposing, if complementary, representatives of
two qualitatively different forms of utopia--utopia as fiction vs. utopia as a program for
political action. In particular, utopian literature usually blocks out the question of how
best to get to the ideal society, whereas the activist, the revolutionary, struggles in an
immediate way to transform reality. But it is impermissible to assert that the writer of
utopian fiction is more realistic than the activist, since he supposedly knows that power
is power and that radical social change will never come (see p. xviii, left column). Here
the May 1968 slogan "l'imagination au pouvoir" ("power to the
imagination") with its utopian potential and the Blochian "principle of
hope" have been all but abandoned, and Winter comes dangerously close to antiutopian
resignation or indeed to that pragmatic bourgeois idiocy which equates utopian thought
with unrealistic fantasies and crackbrain daydreaming.
Similarly, the Preface makes the untenable claim that "Western"
civilization--in its visions of happiness as well as in its prophecies of doom--never paid
heed to its utopias, but rather followed objective historical necessity (den
historischen Sachzwängen). This is the language of a technocrat, not of a utopian.
And when Winter goes on to characterize anarchist thought as aimless and negative, denying
its relationship to genuine utopian thought, he not only contradicts his later
commentaries and typologies, in which anarchist utopias figure significantly (about 20 out
of the total of 153), but runs the risk of providing a political justification for the
West German government's equation of anarchism with terrorism (as in the Baader-Meinhof
affair) and the subsequent calculated incrimination of the whole West German left as
anarchist. Or could this possibly be Winter using a kind of Brechtian cunning, a disguise
to counter political pressure?
Nonetheless, precisely because the 1970s are such a strong depressant to utopian
thought and action, Winter's work may contribute to keeping the utopian flame alive. The
power and energy of concrete utopia in the Blochian sense need to be reaffirmed and lived,
not curtailed or abandoned.
--Andreas Huyssen
Lasky's Utopianism
Melvin J. Lasky. Utopia and Revolution. On the Origins of a Metaphor or Some Illustrations
of the Problem of Political Temperament and Intellectual Climate and How Ideas, Ideals,
and Ideologies Have Been Historically Related. Chicago & London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1976. viii + 726 p. $10.95.
Melvin Lasky's leisurely pace and abundant quotation in Utopia and Revolution will
not appeal to every reader. He pursues no strikingly original theses and uses no
particularly novel methods of historical analysis, and too often this lengthy book seems
on the point of becoming an anthology of well-chosen passages from major, minor, and
forgotten ideologues. At times his failure to identify the author of a passage in the text
can be aggravating. But Utopia and Revolution is well worth staying with.
The subtitle should alert the reader to the intent of Lasky's expansive volume. He
argues--and these 700 pages are meant to document--the supremacy of ideas, words,
metaphors, symbols, and rhetoric in the study of comparative ideologies. Perhaps his
success in demonstrating their importance might be taken as one of the book's major
achievements, for, without being explicitly anti-Marxist, Lasky has persuasively examined
"early modern" revolutions in an extensive analysis which is almost exclusively
intellectual and which is also determinedly dialectic. Though certainly Marx would not
disagree with Lasky's belief in the power of metaphor, economic and social factors do not
significantly enter Lasky's discussions, and Marx himself is treated as part of the early
modern cycle of ideological thought.
Lasky's own metaphor for this cycle illustrates part of the heritage of the book's
chrestomathic method and the author's analytical approach. The "great chain of human
hope" activates the "action dreaming" of utopian longing and the familiar
imagery of revolutionary commitment. In fact, "revolution" itself is one of
these metaphors, a master metaphor, "the great metaphor, repeated endlessly over
three centuries, [which] never fails to take on the verbal magic of traditional
incantations" (p. 14 1). Borrowed from astronomy, "revolution" originally
signified a return to a point, a restoration of the past, a correction of a present which
had deviated from the true path. Lasky exploits the meaning of this metaphorical
imperative often, for example, in explaining the absence of utopianism in American
revolutionary thought as the result of an emphasis upon the restoration of the freedoms of
Englishmen, or in discussing the "mystical unity" of "revolutionary
metaphysics and ideology" in the writings of Franz Fanon.
Lasky over and over makes his point that the "symbology," vocabulary, and
grammar of ideology and politics are remarkably limited, yet incredibly resilient and
powerful. Nevertheless, the ideas, the words, and the rhetorical strategies-though not in
themselves sufficient to account for large social movements-are persistently the key to
understanding the dialectical cycle of utopia and revolution. Utopias, "written out
of both hope" for the future and "despair" over the betrayal of ideal
values in the present, need revolutions to bring about the changes envisioned in their
blueprints and models. Indignation is transformed into the fire (or fever)
of commitment which results in the whirlwind (or lightning, storm, explosion,
earthquake) of change. But, then, the success of the revolution means the
petrifaction of ideology into dogmatism, leading to arbitrary order, authoritarianism, and
heresy from the doctrine of the now established former revolutionaries. The
"heretic's true cause" develops into a new utopian ideal, and the cycle
continues to repeat itself, as predictably as do "the circles of time and the very
progression of the heavens" (p. 243). Given this cyclical nature of ideological
development, history must be the account of inevitable failures and tragedies; and often
the historian's tone is one of "sadness," an attitude somewhere between hope and
horror. For example, Lasky in several of his many epigrammatic moments: "Thus does
political wisdom subvert humane reason, and in tragic turn become subverted itself"
(p. 160). "The history of revolutions appears to circle around a gaping and
omnivorous dustbin" (p. 280). Such judgments are scattered throughout Utopia and
Revolution; one more quotation-from his discussion of "the ideological aspect of
Maoism--may serve to illustrate the ambivalent and dialectical character of the cycle:
It is traditional doctrine, made up of the essential links in the great chain of human
hope: utopia and revolution. Like all ideologies of the past, be they of higher or lower
orders, it carries within itself the seeds of its own dissent and diversion. As a
manifesto of practical government, it produces social crises and contradictions; as a
religious dogma, it entangles itself in fallacies and heresies; as a secular faith, it
faces the inevitable trials of human disillusionment. (p. 148)
Shelley's line from Prometheus Unbound fits this sense of cyclical history
perfectly: "the melancholy ruins of cancelled cycles."
However inevitable the collapse of idealism and the horror of violence in the
"agitated
chronicles" of utopia and revolution, Lasky sees value and purpose in his "great
chain of human hope." What disturbs him more than the disenchantment, intolerance,
and irrationality involved in such cycles are the 20th-century departures from them. These,
he believes, began with Marx, for whom the means had become the end: "revolution
itself was utopia" (p. 31 et passim). It is on this note of "post-ideological
sadness" that Lasky concludes his study: "Guiltless and without conscience, they
[contemporary revolutionary ideologues] embrace an anonymous future in the name of
invented but undisclosed values. The sweet dream has become inviolate dogma. The
revolution remains their utopia" (p. 602). On the other hand, however, variations of
the cycle may be peaceful. One of Lasky's subtheses is that the nonrevolutionary nature of
the Glorious Revolution of 1688 "subverted " and influenced political ideology
in England for three centuries (pp. 432-33). Writ large in the national character are the
"sobriety, prudence, caution, and care" which form "a deep English
antipathy to the exhibitionism of the theatrical personality, and to its habit of public
overstatement" and "ideological dramatics" (p. 537).
In this sampling of Utopia and Revolution, I have made Lasky sound more
conservative and melancholic than he is, and his book more theoretical and thesis-oriented
than it is. His lively discussions spend much less time hammering away at cycles than they
do in examining such figures as Marchamont Nedham, "literally the first
'revolutionary' ideologue" (p. 248), and Henry Redhead Yorke, whose "utopian
artistry" "amounted to a rare and extraordinary ideological configuration,
almost unrivaled in its range of revolutionary imagery and ethico-rhetorical richness till
the age of Marx and the apocalyptic Left" (p. 556). His sympathy for and often
enthusiastic appreciation of such minor writers create both the volume's bulkiness and its
interest. For pages the reader may forget the cyclical tragedies of history and the
"omnivorous dustbin" and enjoy the vigorous thinking of Lasky's cast of
ideologues. And an epic cast it is. Drawing mainly from Puritan England, Revolutionary
France, and the Age of Marx, Lasky ranges widely among ideologues, subordinating
millenarists and novelists in a preference for the more purely political thinkers. Yet his
interest and emphasis remain primarily upon the imaginative "vision" of utopian
inspiration and revolutionary fervor. Content for the most part to allow the patterns of
history to emerge from his display of well-chosen texts, Lasky lets his organization of
chapters and passages nudge the reader gently toward the critical reasonableness and
tolerance that constitute the wisdom of many years' reading.
--Donald Watson
Aldous Huxley Revisited
Donald Watt, ed. Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage. London
& Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. 493 + xxiv p. $28.50.-
"Tragedy is the farce that involves our sympathies, farce, the tragedy that
happens to outsiders." That statement, from Ape and Essence ( 1948), defines
Huxley's main limitation as a novelist. By and large, he looks upon human tragedy from the
outside, or at a distance, without aspiring to render its phenomenal realities with the
kind of substantiality and balance that make for true comedy. And on those rare occasions
when he does try to engage the reader's sympathies (as, perhaps, in the death of John the
Savage at the end of Brave New World [1932]), the effect is not tragical but
melodramatic. Huxley is in his element writing satiric farces: tragedy and comedy are
outside the range of his fundamentally Puritan consciousness. A strident moralist (like
his grandfather), he is quite capable of vividly caricaturing the carnal "ape"
in Man, and especially in woman; but the human "essence," the more or less
disembodied transcendental that he is forever gesturing towards, forever recedes
ethereally beyond his novelistic horizon (and is, perhaps, never more elusive than when he
attempts to approach it, as in Island [1962]).
All this amounts to saying that Huxley's position as a writer remains insecure. The
Critical Heritage volume devoted to him will not make it any less so. The contemporary
reviews that, in accordance with series' policy, take up most of the book are not
particularly violent in their praise or condemnation; and from them--as the editor himself
points out--no consensus explicitly emerges as to Huxley's novelistic worth. On the other
hand, that he should leave even highly perceptive and intelligent readers so singularly
uninspired raises grave doubts about the profundity of his thinking and hence about the
perdurability of his reputation.
A case could, of course, be made for Huxley's importance as an experimenter with
novelistic form; but that possibility receives only passing editorial mention. Nor is
there much else in Watt's book that will further anyone's understanding of Huxley. The
reviews, though competently selected, are (as I have already hinted) negligible. Moreover,
in reprinting these, Watt has more often than not omitted the reviewers' plot summaries,
which, by their various emphases, might have provided data for sociological investigation.
Watt has been resourceful and conscientious in including material other than reviews of
Huxley's books, most notably a symposium on Huxley in the August 1955 London Magazine.
But again, the main interest these essayistic snippets hold pertains to their authors
(Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson, John Wain, and others), not to their common subject. The same
can be said for the excerpts by Orwell--though in this instance thanks primarily to the
fact that Watt has chosen to suppress from Orwell's review of Zamiatin the detailed
discussion of Huxley's putative debt to We. In short, Aldous Huxley: The
Critical Heritage is one of those imperfectly useless books that library journals
usually refer to as "indispensable,."
--Robert M. Philmus
Unselective Excerpts
Dedria Bryfonski, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of
Today's Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, and Other Creative Writers. Volume
10 in the series. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1979. Cumulative Indexes to Authors and
Critics in Volumes 1-10; viii + 613 p. S48.00-
Of the approximately 150 writers listed, this volume adds one SF author, Philip K.
Dick, to the approximately 20 or so treated in previous volumes (20 out of about 1000) and
carries only two--Bradbury and Brunner--over from earlier entries. Most of the criticism
on Dick is taken from popular periodicals, a few of which are primarily literary, such as
TLS and Best Sellers; but the majority of which are cultural, e.g. The
Nation, the New Republic, the New Statesman, etc. While some of the
criticisms of Bradbury and Brunner are drawn from sources specifically devoted to SF, all
of them are at least three years old, of limited range and uneven quality. It's difficult
to see what value these critical snippets have or what function they serve. Although
students might find them useful for cribbing, the critical selections give little or no
indication as to the methods or aims of contemporary literary criticism. The series is
clearly designed for libraries rather than individual purchase and to enable readers to
get the gist of an author's work and current reputation before (or as a substitute for)
going to the original critical articles. If the series has any value at all, this seems to
be it.
--Charles Elkins
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