utopia

snell

This humdrum Arcadia had always been known, in fact it was regarded as
the home of Pelasgus, the earliest man. But the Arcadia which the name suggests to
the minds of most of us to-day is a different one; it is the land of shepherds and
shepherdesses, the land of poetry and love, and its discoverer is Virgil.
Thus Virgil needed a new home for his herdsmen, a land far distant from the
sordid realities of the present. Because, too, pastoral poetry did not mean to him
what it had meant to Theocritus, he needed a far-away land overlaid with the golden
haze of unreality.
In Virgil's Arcadia the currents of myth and empirical reality flow one
into another; gods and modern men stage meetings in a manner which would have
been repugnant to Greek poetry. In actual fact this half-way land is neither mythical
nor empirical; to the Roman Virgil and his Roman public, Apollo and Pan convey
even less of their divinity, as objects of genuine faith, than they had to Theocritus and
his Hellenistic audience. Arcadia is not an area on the map, either; even the person of
Gallus appears misty and unreal, which has not, of course, prevented the scholars
from trying to penetrate through the mist and identify the historical Gallus.
The air of unreality which hangs over Virgil's poems is thus explained by the fact
that he seeks to approximate the world of Theocritus and that of myth, and that
therefore he manipulates the traditional mythology with a greater licence than would
have been possible for a Greek.

Virgil, in a certain sense, set about

reversing this order of events, and in fact he finally wound up restoring the grand
form of the epic. The Eclogues contain the first indications of his role which was to

exalt the realistic writing which served as his point of departure, viz. the idylls of
Theocritus, by suffusing it with elements of myth. Myth and reality are thus once
more joined together, albeit in a manner never before witnessed in Greece.
The familiar and self-sufficient world of the
simple shepherd is rendered in a myth which, though evidently sprung from a folktale,
is for all that no less real than the myths which tell of heroes and heroic deeds.
Once Virgil had placed his shepherds in
Arcadia, it seems, it was but a short step to blend the bucolic with the mythical. This
transition was, of course, facilitated by the fact that Theocritus himself had used the
figure of Daphnis in both capacities.
In Theocritus, as in Virgil, the shepherds are less concerned with their flocks than
they are interested in poetry and love. In both writers, therefore, they are gifted with
passion and intellect, but in different ways. Theocritus' herdsmen, notwithstanding
their pastoral status, often prove to be urban intellectuals in disguise. Virgil's
shepherds, on the other hand--and it is charming to follow the steady progress from
eclogue to eclogue--become increasingly more delicate and sensitive: they become
Arcadian shepherds.
The
simplicity is more ideal than fact, and so his shepherds, in spite of all realism, remain
fairly remote from the true life in the fields. But this remoteness is as it should be, for
a genuine summons back to nature would silence the whole of pastoral poetry; as it
turned out, that is exactly what happened in a later age. Above all, these shepherds
are not really taken seriously. Zanimljivo je uoiti da, no ovo ne impicira da Vergiliju nedostaje
kvaliteta, bukolike pripadaju niskom registru to se danas moe rei za naunu fantastiku
(naravno, postmodernizam je skoro u potpunosti, za bolje ili za gore, razruio mogunost da se
savremenom delu pristupi kao visokom ili da je za drugo delo mogue automatski iskljuiti
diskusiju na osnovi da pripada anrovskoj prozi, no stigma i dalje opstaje i bilo bi zamiljivo
videti kako e budua kritika itati dela fantastike i naune fantastike).
Furthermore, while endowing the

herdsmen with good manners and delicate feelings, he also makes them more
serious-minded. But their seriousness differs from that of a Eumaeus; they have no
strength to stand up for their genuine interests, nor do they ever clash with one
another in open conflict. They are no more conversant with the true elemental
passions than the heroes of the Aeneid were to be. And it is significant that in those
ages when Arcadian poetry was in fashion, and when courtly manners were the
order of the day, the Aeneid has always been more highly favoured than the Iliad or
the Odyssey.
Virgil's Arcadia is ruled by tender feeling. His herdsmen lack the crudeness of the
peasant life as well as the oversophistication of the city. In their rural idyll the
peaceful calm of the leisurely evening hours stands out more clearly than the labour
for their daily bread, the cool shade is more real than the harshness of the elements,
and the soft turf by the brook plays a larger role than the wild mountain crags. The
herdsmen spend more time playing the pipe and singing their tunes than in the
production of milk and cheese.
Virgil has ceased to see anything but what
is important to him: tenderness and warmth and delicacy of feeling. Arcadia knows
no reckoning in numbers, no precise reasoning of any kind. There is only feeling,
which suffuses everything with its glow; not a fierce or passionate feeling: even love
is but a delicate desire, gentle and sad.
Thus, for the first time in Western literature,
the poem becomes a 'thing of beauty', existing only for itself and in itself.
In effect, Virgil's relation to the world is lyric; it impels him to seek out that which is
dear to him, that to which his delicate senses may respond. But he does not find this
in the realities surrounding him, where Sappho, for instance, had found it. He now
looks for it in an area beyond the harsh facts of experience, either because the world
has become too cruel and impious a place, or, which is the same thing in reverse,
because his expectations in spiritual matters have increased. He looks for it in
Arcadia; and even the heroic world of the Aeneid, with its fulfilment of the desire for

order and meaning, bears the stamp of an Arcadian idyll.

This Arcadian
consolation is also an escape from life, an escape into the realm of feeling and pathos.
The sensibilities of the poet Gallus are so vulnerable that he is desperately afflicted
by the contradiction between his own wistful hopes and the fate which befalls him.
He expects his soulful longings to be met with an equal warmth and affection, and
this hope is indeed realized in the dreamland of Arcadia, despite the lack of that
idyllic bliss which is the shepherd's due.
Now everything that we have so far remarked
about Virgil's Arcadian world may be summed up by saying that Virgil developed
these three basic modes which the early lyric had ascribed to the soul, and
interpreted them afresh. Under Virgil's hands, the spontaneity of the soul becomes
the swirling tide of the dream, the creative flux of poetic fancy. The feeling which
transcends the individual and forges a link between many men becomes Virgil's
longing for peace and his love for his country through which even the beasts and the
trees and the mountains are welcomed as fellow-creatures. And finally, the
dissonance and depth of the emotions unfold into the conscious suffering of the
sensitive man, his awareness that his tender and vulnerable soul lies at the mercy of a
harsh and cruel world.
His Arcadia is
set half-way between myth and reality; it is also a no-man's land between two ages,
an earthly beyond, a land of the soul yearning for its distant home in the past.
However, in his
-301later years Virgil avoided the regions discovered by him. For in his later poems he
acquired a temper of severe manly restraint which led him to draw closer to the
classical Greek expressions of feeling and thought; but many a trace of his earlier
sensibility remained.

Thus the ancient gods are, so to speak, reduced to the form of sigla: they are deprived
of their primeval mysterious power, and all that is left to them is an ideality which no
longer springs from religious awe but from literary erudition. They have taken on a
Utopian quality, embodying the spiritual truths which are not to be found in this
world. A similar change in the thinking concerning the gods is indicated in many
examples of the classicistic painting and sculpture which flourished in Attica at the
time of Virgil. We do not know enough about the Greek literature of this epoch to be
able to tell to what extent Virgil was indebted to it in his allegorization of the gods.
But what was at least as important was this, that for the Romans the gods and the
myths of the Greeks had never been real. They adopted them as part of their cultural
heritage from Greek literature and art, and they
Y2
-307found in them the world of the spirit which the Greeks had discovered. Among the
Romans, therefore, these figures are emphasized chiefly for whatever meaning they
may hold for the life of man; they are allegories in the real sense of the word, for they
signify something entirely different from what they had originally meant. They are
like loan-words taken into another language, which are called upon to translate a
strange legacy for the benefit of the heirs and their thoughts and feelings, if such a
thing is possible in matters of the mind. The gods become allegories at the very
moment when Greek literature gives birth to a literature of the world.
Arcadia was a land of symbols, far distant from the quarrels and the acrimony of the
present. In this land the antique pagan world was permitted to live on without injury
to anybody's feelings. Arcadia was so remote that it was no more in danger of
clashing with the See of Rome or with the Holy Roman Empire than it had run afoul
of the Imperiurn Romanum of Augustus. Only when Europe began to be dissatisfied
with the goods handed down to her, and when she took thought upon her own
spiritual substance, did Arcadia run into trouble. But that was also the time when the
genuine Greece was restored to her rightful place.
com. to scifi Dystopias that leave no room for hope do in fact fail in their mission.

Their true vocation is to make man realize that, since it is impossible for him
to build an ideal society, then he must be committed to the construction of
a better one.

The genre of utopia,

created unwittingly by Sir Thomas More when he published Utopia in 1516,
died when idealism perished, a victim to twentieth-century pessimism and
cynicism. It is the contention of this chapter that utopia has not disappeared;
it has merely mutated, within the field of sf, into something very different
from the classic utopia.
Almost all these novels
had utopian elements, she concluded, but none of them were actual utopias:
although many of those novels offered critiques of the contemporary world,
none of them offered the necessary coherent account of a superior and desirable
alternative in the future. Modern sf thus had no utopias to offer,
but only tantalizing fragments in the utopian tradition.1
However, one can
use the same evidence to suggest something quite different: if almost all the
novels had utopian elements, this is a demonstration of the profound way in
which utopianism has permeated sf. These tantalizing fragments are what
help make sf not only an important part of the utopian genre, but a part
which is moving that genre in very new directions.
We need to understand what science fiction is reacting against. In the
numerous versions of the classic utopia in the centuries succeeding Thomas
Mores Utopia (1516), we have a traveller, perhaps with a small number of
companions, who lands on a remote island or undiscovered continent; in
more recent versions this is another planet, or the future. He (it is almost
invariably he) is welcomed by the locals, who are usually eager to show off
their society to him. Very soon he meets an older man, who will spend much

of the rest of the book lecturing to him about the delights of this society.
Sometimes the visitor will respond by pointing out the contrasts between the
institutions of this ideal society and those of his own home; in most cases,
however, readers will be left to pick these out themselves.
The framework of these ideal societies developed over the years. Mores
utopian society, not accidentally, is like a Benedictine monastery, although
with both men and women and without the celibacy. All his utopians wear
monastic habits, and eat and work together communally; all work for the
common good; all watch each other closely for signs of disobedience
More
was a Catholic; he believed that original sin had to be restrained by strict
laws. By the later nineteenth century, however, most utopias offered varieties
of socialism. For the followers of nineteenth-century utopianists such
as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, men were not inherently wicked; they
were naturally good, and that goodness would show through once the distorting
effects introduced by capitalism were removed.
Whether the utopia was Catholic, Protestant or socialist, however, its
distinguishing characteristics were remarkably similar. Communal activities
within small village-style communities were crucial. Most utopias eliminated
money and private property, thus at one stroke removing greed, theft, jealousy
and most causes of civil strife. Reason and good will would be sufficient
to provide peace and harmony within the community; utopian writers were
almost unanimous in eliminating the parasitic occupation of lawyer, and
from the nineteenth century onwards it was common to regard priests as
little better than lawyers: both groups claimed to bring reconciliation and
peace, but in fact promoted disinformation, disharmony and self-interest.
In the twentieth century, such utopian visions were attacked from two directions:
by those who argue that in reality many such utopias would turn out
to be dystopias, that is, oppressive societies, either because of the tyranny
of the perfect system over the will of the individual, or because of the difficulty

of stopping individuals or elites from imposing authority over the

majority, or, indeed, over minorities. Critics of utopia usually assume that
the author is producing a risibly impractical blueprint for a future society
rather than (in most cases) a trenchant critique of contemporary institutions
in fictional form. But such criticism is made easier by associating utopianism
with socialism and communism, and thus with the Soviet bloc; and
most sf writers have concluded that capitalism, for all its flaws, offers more
The classic sf objections to utopia are expressed by Arthur C. Clarke in
two of his most famous novels: Childhoods End (1953) and The City and the
Stars (1956). In both he describes a classic utopia, and then shows it as fatally
flawed. In the apocalyptic ending of Childhoods End, Earth is destroyed,
along with most of its population, but the energy thus unleashed is used by
the psychically gifted children of men to become pure Mind. In the course of
the novel Clarke expounds one of the most detailed and attractive utopian
futures to be found in the whole of the sf genre. But it is a dead end: there
is boredom; there is the virtual end of creative art.5 The utopian end in the
novel is not the creation of an ideal society on Earth, but humanity rising
from its cradle on Earth, evolving into something else. In The City and the
Stars the inhabitants of Diaspar (Paradise) were, perhaps, as contented as
any race the world had known, and after their fashion they were happy;6
there is no disease, no crime, no poverty, no conflict, no material want, and
the inhabitants have an almost magical ability to control their environment
Yet the protagonist Alvin, and Clarke, regard their existence as futile:7
apparently because it is mans destiny to be curious and to learn more about
(that is, dominate) the world around him. That this is possibly a culturally
specific notion is not acknowledged: nor is it recognized that it does not
necessarily suit the psychologies of the vast majority of those in Diaspar,
who have been conditioned to accept their situation even more effectively
than Clarke and his contemporaries have been conditioned to accept theirs.
Alvin breaks apart this utopia, by forcing it out of its isolation; the future,

it is implied, will be in outward expansion and the winning of the stars: the
true destiny of Mankind.
It is not just the idea of perfection which the sf writer objects to: it
is the feeling that the utopian writer is aiming for a largely static society.
The other objection to the classic utopia as a form rests on purely literary
grounds. Most classic utopias fall far short of the standards expected of
a novelist. Characterization is often non-existent: the protagonists merely
fulfil their necessary roles, as visitor-listener, as utopian-lecturer or as token
female. Large amounts of the utopian novel can be taken up with what sf
writers have called info-dump, where one character painstakingly explains
the details of his world. The plot development is perfunctory: once the visitor
has arrived, he is shown or merely told about one aspect of the society
after another. By definition, there is no conflict in utopia; for a writer in
popular fiction, brought up to believe that conflict is the essence of a plot,
this is a problem. An achieved utopia may offer no fictional excitement; but
the perpetual and unending struggle for a better world offers plenty of plot
opportunities.
On the one hand, sf writers are hostile towards utopia; on the other
hand, we find the editor John W. Campbell writing to Eric Frank Russell
that The one thing that science-fictioneers have in common is a genuine
and deep desire to create a better world.9 There is no contradiction
there. A better world is not the same as an ideal world. A better world
could be achieved by science but also through the presentation of alternate possibilities. Most
of those alternate possibilities are about technological rather than political
revolution: the construction of constitutions and political arrangements, the
staple of classic utopia, have little appeal for most sf writers
As in the classic utopia, there is no private property, and no money.
The economy operates by individuals exchanging services with each other;
laying an ob (obligation) on someone: A doing a service for B, so that B
would have to kill the ob by doing a service for A. Cooperation between

equals and the denial of anyones right to hold authority over another are
the two main principles of Gand society
Once utopia had been achieved,
what then? Utopia in the classic sense of the absence of want, injustice,
inequality and conflict, will have its own problems. One is the excess of
leisure in a post-industrial society: is there any way of dealing with that
apart from some modern equivalent of bread and circuses?
The traditional utopia takes limited resources
as a given; nowadays, in post-scarcity futures such as those of Iain
M. Bankss Culture series, that need not be taken for granted. The traditional
utopia takes the human condition as a given, and hopes to make
the human fit into utopia by legislation and education; the modern form
of utopia regards a more perfect society to be the result of evolution and
technology.
What kind of society
might emerge if all thoughts were open to all and perfect harmony and understanding
the goal of utopian writers since More could be achieved?
Some questions are still with us. What could be achieved if medical and
biological science made improvements to the human body: eliminating disease,
or creating something approaching immortality? What about possible
changes in the human body, to be brought about by cyborgization (the mingling
of human and machine/computer)? When one imagines such changes,
it is possible to think of just as many dystopian outcomes as utopian ones.
Universal telepathy might bring mental harmony; it might bring political
control and the end of privacy. Immortality might extend the human propensity
for growth and development; it might bring boredom, mental instability
or dangerous over-population.
The unasked but essential question in most utopian novels what is the
meaning of life? or what is the destiny of man? is a question raised

by almost no one these days apart from theologians and sf writers. It is

the ultimate, unanswerable, question.
Utopia: the word and the concept
The study of the concept of utopia can certainly not be reduced to the history
of the word coined by Thomas More in 1516 to baptize the island
described in his book. However, a careful consideration of the circumstances
in which the word was generated can lead us to a better understanding
of what More meant by the word as well as of the new meanings it has
acquired since then.
It must be remembered that in 1516 the word utopia was a neologism.
Neologisms correspond to the need to name what is new. By revealing the
changes that the shared values of a given group undergo, the study of neologisms
provides us not only with a dynamic portrait of a particular society
over the ages but also with a representation of that society in a given period.
There are basically three kinds of neologisms: they may be new words
created to name new concepts or to synthesize pre-existing ones (lexical
neolo gisms); they may be pre-existing words used in a new cultural context
(semantic neologisms); or they may be variations of other words (derivation
neologisms).
Utopia, as a neologism, is an interesting case: it began its life as a lexical
neologism, but over the centuries, after the process of deneologization,
its meaning changed many times, and it has been adopted by authors and
researchers from different fields of study, with divergent interests and conflicting aims. Its history
can be seen as a collection of moments when a clear
semantic renewal of the word occurred. The word utopia has itself often
been used as the root for the formation of new words. These include words
such as eutopia, dystopia, anti-utopia, alotopia, euchronia, heterotopia, ecotopia
and hyperutopia, which are, in fact, derivation neologisms. And with
the creation of every new associated word the concept of utopia took on a
more precise meaning. It is important, thus, to distinguish the original meaning

attributed to the word by Thomas More from the different meanings

that various epochs and currents of thought have accredited to it.
The problem is that the first meaning of utopia is by no means obvious.
More used the word both to name the unknown island described by the
Portuguese sailor Raphael Hythloday, and as a title for his book. This situation
resulted in the emergence of two different meanings of utopia, which
became clearer as the process of deneologization occurred. In fact, though
the word utopia came into being to allude to imaginary paradisiacal places,
it has also been used to refer to a particular kind of narrative, which became
known as utopian literature. This was a new literary form, and its novelty
certainly justifi ed the need for a neologism.
It is interesting to note that before coining the word utopia, More used
another one to name his imaginary island: Nusquama. Nusquam is the
Latin word for nowhere, in no place, on no occasion, and so if More
had published his book with that title, and if he had called his imagined
island Nusquama, he would simply be denying the possibility of the existence
of such a place. But More wanted to convey a new idea, a new feeling
that would give voice to the new currents of thought that were then arising
in Europe. Mores idea of utopia is, in fact, the product of the Renaissance,
a period when the ancient world (namely Greece and Rome) was considered
the peak of mankinds intellectual achievement, and taken as a model
by Europeans; but it was also the result of a humanist logic, based on the
discovery that the human being did not exist simply to accept his or her
fate, but to use reason in order to build the future. Out of the ruins of the
medieval social order, a confidence in the human beings capacity emerged
not yet a cap acity to reach a state of human perfection (which would be
impossible within a Christian worldview, as the idea of the Fall still persisted),
but at least an ability to arrange society differently in order to ensure
peace. This broadening of mental horizons was certainly influenced by the
unprecedented expansion of geographical horizons. More wrote his Utopia
inspired by the letters in which Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus

and Angelo Poliziano described the discovery of new worlds and new peoples;
geographical expansion inevitably implied the discovery of the Other .
And More used the emerging awareness of otherness to legitimize the invention
of other spaces, with other people and different forms of organization. 2
This, too, was new, and required a new word. In order to create his neologism,
More resorted to two Greek words ouk (that means not and was
reduced to u ) and topos (place), to which he added the suffi x ia, indicating a
place. Etymologically, utopia is thus a place which is a non-place, simultaneously
constituted by a movement of affi rmation and denial.
More created a tension that has persisted over time and has
been the basis for the perennial duality of meaning of utopia as the place
that is simultaneously a non-place (utopia) and a good place (eutopia). This
tension is further stressed by the self-description provided by Utopia in the
poem: Utopia, the isolated place (where no one goes because it is a nonplace)
is also the place where we will not fi nd sketches but plans that have
been put into practice. As Utopia and Eutopia are pronounced in precisely
the same way, this tension can never be eliminated. Again, this is an aspect
which is completely new, and which justifi es the need for a neologism. We
are, in fact, very far away from Nusquama.
Utopia: the concept and the word
In the above mentioned poem, the island of Utopia points out its affi liation
to Platos city; the quality of this attachment is clearly defi ned: both Plato
and More imagined alternative ways of organizing society. What is common
to both authors, then, is the fact that they resorted to fi ction to discuss other
options. They differed, however, in the way they presented that fi ction; and
it could not have been otherwise, as More created the word utopia because
he needed to designate something new, which included the narrative scheme
he invented. In spite of that, the word is used nowadays to refer to texts
that were written before Mores time, as well as to allude to a tradition
of thought that is founded on the consideration, by means of fantasy, of

alternative solutions to reality. This is in fact an odd situation: normally,

neologisms are used to designate new phenomena. Still, utopia seems to be
of an anamnestic nature (i.e., the word refers to a kind of pre-history of the
concept); this situation can easily be understood, as More did not work on
a tabula rasa , but on a tradition of thought that goes back to ancient Greece
and is nourished by the myth of the Golden Age, among other mythical and
religious archetypes, and traverses the Middle Ages, having been infl uenced
by the promise of a happy afterlife, as well as by the myth of Cockaygne (a
land of plenty). It is thus certain that although he invented the word utopia,
More did not invent utopianism, which has at its core the desire for a better
life; but he certainly changed the way this desire was to be expressed. In fact,
More made a connection between the classic and the Christian traditions,
and added to it a new conception of the role individuals are to play during
their lifetime.
Apart from this aspiration to better life, Mores concept of utopia therefore
differs from all the previous crystallizations of the utopian desire; these
can in fact be seen as pre-fi gurations of utopia, as they lack the tension
between the affi rmation of a possibility and the negation of its fulfi lment.
Although they are part of the background of the concept of utopia, Platos
Republic , and St Augustines The City of God differ from Mores Utopia , as
Plato does not go beyond mere speculation about the best organization of a
city, and St Augustine projects his ideal into the afterlife (thus creating not a
utopia but an alotopia ).
The concept of utopia is no doubt an attribute of modern thought, and
one of its most visible consequences. Having at its origin a paradox that
does not really require to be solved (caused by the tension described above),
from the very beginning of its history it showed a facility for acquiring new
meanings, for serving new interests, and for crystallizing into new formats.
Because of its dispersion into several directions, it has sometimes become so
close to other literary genres or currents of thought that it has risked losing
its own identity. Its diffuse nature has been at the basis of debate among

researchers in the fi eld of Utopian Studies, who have found it diffi cult to
reach a consensual defi nition of the concept.
Historically, the concept of utopia has been defi ned with regard to one
of four characteristics: 3 (1) the content of the imagined society (i.e., the
identifi cation of that society with the idea of good place, a notion that
should be discarded since it is based on a subjective conception of what is
or is not desirable, and envisages utopia as being essentially in opposition
to the prevailing ideology); (2) the literary form into which the utopian
imagin ation has been crystallized (which is a very limiting way of defi ning
utopia, since it excludes a considerable number of texts that are clearly
utopian in perspective but that do not rigorously comply with the narrative
model established by More); (3) the function of utopia (i.e., the impact that
it causes on its reader, urging him to take action (a defi nition that should
be rejected as it takes into account political utopia only); (4) the desire for
a better life, caused by a feeling of discontentment towards the society one
lives in (utopia is then seen as a matter of attitude). This latter characteristic
is no doubt the most important one, as it allows for the inclusion within the
framework of utopia of a wide range of texts informed by what Ernst Bloch
considered to be the principal energy of utopia: hope. Utopia is then to be
seen as a matter of attitude, as a kind of reaction to an undesirable present
and an aspiration to overcome all diffi culties by the imagination of possible
alternatives. 4
Utopia as a literary genre
By opting for a more inclusive defi nition of utopia, we are not disregarding
the merits and particulars of utopia as a literary genre, but recognizing the
literary form as just one of the possible manifestations of utopian thought. 5
More established the basis for the steady development of a literary tradition
which fl ourished particularly in England, Italy, France and the United States,
and which relies on a more or less rigid narrative structure: it normally pictures
the journey (by sea, land or air) of a man or woman to an unknown

place (an island, a country or a continent); once there, the utopian traveller
is usually offered a guided tour of the society, and given an explanation of
its social, political, economic and religious organization; this journey typically
implies the return of the utopian traveller to his or her own country,
in order to be able to take back the message that there are alternative and
better ways of organizing society. 6 Although the idea of utopia should not be
confused with the idea of perfection, one of its most recognizable traits is its
speculative discourse on a non-existent social organization which is better
than the real society. 7 Another characteristic is that it is human-centred, not
relying on chance or on the intervention of external, divine forces in order
to impose order on society. Utopian societies are built by human beings and
are meant for them. And it is because utopists very often distrust individuals
capacity to live together, that we very frequently fi nd a rigid set of laws
at the heart of utopian societies rules that force the individuals to repress
their unreliable and unstable nature and put on a more convenient social
cloak.
In order to create the new literary genre, More used the conventions of
travel literature and adapted them to his aims. Over the centuries, utopia
as a literary genre has been infl uenced by similar genres, such as the novel,
the journal and science fi ction. In fact, it became so close to the latter genre
that it has been often confused with it. At the advent of science fi ction, it
was not diffi cult to distinguish it from literary utopia, as the former made
a clear investment in the imagination of a fantastic world brought about
by scientifi c and technological progress, taking us on a journey to faraway
planets, while the latter stayed focused on the description of the alternative
ways of organizing the imagined societies. Still, in recent decades, science fi ction
has been permeated by social concerns, displaying a clear commitment to politics; this situation
has given rise to endless debates on the links that
bind the two literary genres: researchers in the fi eld of Utopian Studies have
claimed that science fi ction is subordinate to utopia, as the latter was born
fi rst, whereas those who have devoted their study time to science fi ction

maintain that utopia is but a socio-political sub-genre.

One of the main features of utopia as a literary genre is its relationship

with reality. Utopists depart from the observation of the society they live
in, note down the aspects that need to be changed and imagine a place
where those problems have been solved. Quite often, the imagined society
is the opposite of the real one, a kind of inverted image of it. It should not
be taken, though, as a feeble echo of the real world; utopias are by essence
dynamic, and in spite of the fact that they are born out of a given set of circumstances,
their scope of action is not limited to a criticism of the present;
indeed, utopias put forward projective ideas that are to be adopted by future
audiences, which may cause real changes.
The fact that the utopian traveller departs from a real place, visits an
imagined place and goes back home, situates utopia at the boundary
between reality and fi ction. This fi ction is in fact important, not as an end
in itself, but as a privileged means to convey a potentially subversive message,
but in such a way that the utopist cannot be criticized. In this sense,
utopia, as a literary genre, is part of clandestine literature. Anchored in a
real society, the utopist puts forward plausible alternatives, basing them
on meticulous analysis and evaluation of different cultures. But although
literary utopias are serious in their intent, they may well incorporate amusing
and entertaining moments, provided they do not smother the didactic
discourse. Utopia is, in fact, a game, and implies the celebration of a
kind of pact between the utopist and the reader: the utopist addresses
the reader to tell him about a society that does not exist, and the reader
acts as if he believes the author, even if he is aware of the non-existence
of such a society. Still, the readers notion of reality cannot be pushed too
far as otherwise he will refuse to act as if he believed the author. In fact,
the fi ction cannot defy logic, and the passage from the real to the fi ctional
world has to be gradual. This passage can be softened by the introduction,

into the imagined world, of objects and structures that already exist in the
real world, but which now have a different or even opposite function. Out
of this situation, satire is inevitably born, as conspicuous criticism of the
real societys fl aws is part of the nature of the genre. When satire is not
confi ned to real society, and is aimed at the imagined society, when the
satirical tone becomes dominant and supersedes pedagogy, satire ceases to
be a means and becomes an end and we are then pushed out of the realm
of utopian literature.
The projection of the utopian wishes into the future implied a change
in the very nature of utopia and thus a derivation neologism was born.
From eu/utopia, the good/non-place, we move to euchronia, the good place
in the future. The birth of euchronia was due to a change of mentality,
presided over by the optimistic worldview that prevailed in Europe in the
Enlightenment.
By projecting the ideal society in the future, the
utopian discourse enunciated a logic of causalities that presupposed that
certain actions (namely those of a political nature) might afford the changes
that were necessary in order to make the imagined society come true. In this
way, utopias became dynamic, and promoted the idea that man had a role
to fulfil.
Although intellectually linked to French optimism, the British idea of
progress has a story of its own, and is deeply rooted in British intellectual
thought. We can fi nd these roots, with some variants, in the writings of men
such as Shaftesbury, Locke and Hume. And it was certainly this optimism
that Pope and Swift criticized at the beginning of the British eighteenth century,
giving way to a whole set of satirical utopias that made the reader
disregard the idea of a perfect future. Indeed, the aim of these texts was to
satirize the present through the criticism of an imagined society, and the
result of this situation was that the constructive, positive spirit that should
preside in utopian texts was in fact lost. It is true that in the utopias of the

British Enlightenment we can still fi nd a few examples of the Renaissance

aim of suggesting serious alternatives to real society. 9 However, with very
few exceptions, these utopias were still based on the idea that only law
would ensure social order, thus conveying a negative vision of man; in fact,
it can be said that the prevailing tone of the eighteenth-century utopia was
satirical, and so more destructive than constructive
If utopia
is about hope, and satirical utopia is about distrust, anti-utopia is clearly
about total disbelief. In fact, in the anti-utopias of the eighteenth century,
it was the utopian spirit itself which was ridiculed; their only aim was to
denounce the irrelevance and inconsistency of utopian dreaming and the
ruin of society it might entail.
As in the case of utopia, the concept of dystopia preceded
the invention of the word.
Dystopias that leave no room for hope do in fact fail in their mission.
Their true vocation is to make man realize that, since it is impossible for him
to build an ideal society, then he must be committed to the construction of
a better one.