Anti-utopian Mood, Liminality, and Literature. Irma Ratiani
of antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat”, reaching the heights of “economic collision”, made it possible for the “productive forces to revolt against the rule of manufacturers” (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/anti_duhring.pdf). In such case, Marxism believed that proletariat, by the means of revolution, would gain power, class difference would demolish, public property would be replaced by public property and the collectivist way of life would prevail over individualism.
Europe obsessed by the idea of freedom and scientific progress played an important role in the success of utopian genre. Many works were created full by the influence of utopian ideals: Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”, William Henry Hudson’s “A Crystal Age”, Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward”, Theodor Hertzka’s “Freeland: A Social Anticipation”, William Morris’ “News from Nowhere”, Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, Herbert George ←21 | 22→Wells’ “Expectation” and “A Modern Utopia”. These utopias were the innovatory assimilation of traditional utopia.
It is obvious that neither Marx, nor Engels and their followers saw their doctrine as a utopian mysticism: utopia seemed to be an illusion, whereas their ideas looked like a project that could have worked. As Andrei Valitski noted wittily, “Thomas More’s utopia would have the same characteristics even if the author had called it a ‘Comic sketch’ ” (Lanin 1993: 15). The title was of secondary importance, but what mattered most was the essence of the doctrine itself. In any case, utopia was the unity of the diversity of world outline, deliberate way of thinking, offering a new social perspective and innovative vision for humanity. It was clear that utopia, armed with the idea of equality, dismantling deconstruction of state structure, brotherhood, unity, freedom, collective way of life, and scientific progress, from the mechanism of protection from an unwanted reality, became an active project equipped with a reformative function and exactly with this status approached the 20th century. The only feasible project of utopia was Socialism, and it was Socialism that became the first realized utopia, established in Russia by Bolshevik Revolution. And it fully demonstrated the totalitarian nature of the “Idyll”, implemented in “Good time” and “Good place”.
What was the world intellectual opinion? Where was the energy found to fight against it? How did humanity confront the fear of utopia and then the fact of utopia?
Anti-utopia became the main obstacle for utopia, and it happened far before the Bolshevik Revolution.
1.2. Utopia and Anti-Utopia– from Ambivalent Unity to Conceptual Determination
Anti-utopia, negative utopia, utopia in a negative context – the intrigue lies in the term itself and gives evidence about the ambiguity of the concept. It is obvious, that the development of anti-utopia as a concept and genre has close ties with utopia: Whereas utopia is a dream about an ideal society, anti-utopia confronts any societal structure, which exists in order to achieve utopian harmony. To put it in other words, anti-utopia contains utopia, despite the clash and struggle between them. N. Berdyaev writes:
Utopias play an important role in history. They define the nature of humans. An Individual wounded and encircled by the wickedness of the universe, has the desire to live in a perfect and harmonious society or at least dream about such a place. But the problem that arises is the realization of such Utopia…Utopias are being created in a disfigured way. The main characteristic of Utopia is unity. Utopia tries to avoid breaking ←22 | 23→up and it should try to achieve unity. Therefore, Utopia is always totalitarian in the existing world order and thus totalitarianism is always utopian. (Berdyaev 1995: 353–354)
How much does imagination correspond to reality? To what extent is a utopian idea compatible with human nature and character? Is it possible to achieve idyll in the world? Is the realized ideal order the one that humans were striving for?
Among the problems the intellectual thought faced on the way of achieving utopia were at first fear and then bitterness: this charming, elevated dream with time turned into an organized dictatorship and a realized nightmare, a brutal misunderstanding that deprived humans of such a vital thing as freedom. “Extra-temporal Golden Age” encoded in the myth of Cronos transformed first into Plato’s static order in his “Ideal State”, then evolved into More’s and Campanella’s organizational dictate and Bacon’s scientific pragmatism, later – conceptually reconciled with Social utopists’ ideas of collectivism, Marxist concept of all equality and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and, finally, the Socialist symbiosis model was realized in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Bolshevism became the first realized utopia and it fully revealed the total discrepancy between the ideal and the reality: “Earthly Idyll” was characterized by negative activities – bloodshed, casualties and tragedy.
In this realm of realized utopia, the intellectual thought facing the threat of the loss of individualism and forced collective happiness began to search for an alternative. The only conceptual alternative to utopia seemed to be anti-utopia. Anti-utopia rose as a phoenix from the ruins of revolution and became a fearsome factor for utopia, the logical offspring of history, whose main aim was to abolish the myth of utopia.
I no doubt share the idea that the scholar develops above about the general mission of anti-utopia; however, I cannot agree with the chronological evolution of the definition. Anti-utopia as a genre appeared in the 20th century, but it emerged earlier, is stretched across a great time span and shows an interesting paradigm of development.
Anti-utopia from the very beginning formed ties with utopia and, before confronting it as a counter-genre, they together had a difficult way of development. Starting from Hesiod’s ‘Golden Age’, moving on to the ‘Iron Age’, with its pain and tragedy, Republic by Plato, followed the sarcastic comedies by Aristophanes, the utopian ideas suggested by More, Campanella and Bacon were opposed by Machiavelli, Hobbs, Mandeville and Swift. Anti-utopia did not form as a counter-positional system suddenly that could clearly see the illusory nature of utopia.
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The resistance between utopia and anti-utopia can be seen on the example of Cronus. Cronus, at the same time, shares the comic symbiosis of positive and negative, where positive (great reign, Golden Age and secured life) is the direct result of the negative (castration of his father, eating his own children) and vice versa – negative is the inevitable background of the positive. From the myth of Cronus to the scientific utopia of Wells, ambivalence became the main characteristic of the relation between utopia and anti-utopia: The dualistic structure is shared not only by common moralistic formula of utopia – “realistic society”/“ideal society”, but also with the model of the ideal society itself – “ideal order”/“the sinful nature of humans”. This irrelevance can be noticed in Plato’s Republic posing a great dilemma for the philosopher, who was fascinated by the process of search for an ideal structure. This was an opposition that caused the separation of model of ideal world from the real one in Christian world outline. It was also the reason why all the main characters in utopian works are in struggle with the brutal elements, so to say a quarrel against the remnants of reality.
It is noteworthy that the inter-structural dualism of utopia logically transforms into perceptual dualism. The understanding of utopian text or perception is as ambivalent as the material itself. As the eminent Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye notes in “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (1965), even if the text seems a serious utopia for the author, for some readers it may appear to be just a satirical application. So the utopian text, with its internal struggle, makes it possible to perceive it from an oppositional standpoint. The ambivalent relationship between utopian and contra-utopian texts, where the border is rather slim, what makes it difficult to establish the superior one, is exactly depicted in the satiric works of the ancient era, which are a synthesis of positive and negative elements. If we conditionally name positive as utopian and negative – anti-utopian, we can deduce that satire was the unity of the struggle between utopian and anti-utopian motifs. The aesthetic and ethic projection of satire of the ancient era meant to show a better alternative on the background of bad and unacceptable by the means