Anti-utopian Mood, Liminality, and Literature. Irma Ratiani
“foreign land”, people everywhere obey the beguilements of the world – war, rivalry, hypocrisy and greediness. This sad fact cannot be eliminated either by the rivalry between parties, which is described in detail in Part I of the book, or the educated monarch, with whom the author sympathizes in Part II, or the republican governance described in Part III. In the last part of the book, frustrated by human actions, Swift turns back to the past, the patriarchal system, but this is not the traditional patriarchal society. Swift’s dream is ironical skepticism, ugly skepticism, which is equal to the primitive existence of mankind, where savage people obey horses and feel quite well. Some critics argue that the Land of Houyhnhnms is the imagined ←30 | 31→utopia of Swift, stating that the work permeated with anti-utopian attitude is still reduced to utopian illusion. However, I believe that this assumption is wrong: It is the Land of Houyhnhnms that ends Swift’s illusions (if he had any illusions) about humanism, equality and the real implantation of unity. The tragic split between Swift’s creative individualism and the norms underpinned in the society is visible. At the end of the book Swift openly castigates the utopists:
Thus, gentle reader, I have given thee a faithful history of my travels for sixteen years and above seven months: wherein I have not been so studious of ornament as of truth. I could, perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact, in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform, and not to amuse thee.
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In Swift’s work, not only the destruction of utopian ideals and the sarcastic revealing of human flaws is interesting for us, but also the European reality and the critique of scientific progress.
In Part III of “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift actively confronts the scientific utopism suggested by Francis Bacon and the theoretic scientific attitude developed by Bacon’s followers. Swift laughs bitterly at the scholars on the Island of Laputa, who, according to him, are engaged in totally useless and vain researches. Unlike other utopist thinkers, for Swift the rapidly developing science is not a positive future perspective, but an end, a fearful tendency, which pushes humans toward slavery.
“Gulliver’s Travels” by Swift finally revealed the breaking of the ambivalent integrity of utopia and anti-utopia and showed that anti-utopia strove to become a separate form of genre.
1.3. The Philosophical and Literary Predecessors of Anti-Utopian Genre
In the works of the 18th and 19th centuries, it became clear that among the intellectual circles, to put it mildly, show their distrust of utopian doctrines. This distrust can be defined as the emerging deep skepticism toward the growing social and industrial revolutions, global doubt and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” can be seen as the fist, serious expression of this concern.
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”, as seen in the title of the book demonstrates its connection with the archetype of Prometheus and Faust. Like Prometheus and Faust, Frankenstein sacrifices his soul for the sake of understanding hidden knowledge and, therefore, significantly violates the ethics ←31 | 32→and norms of human behavior. The devaluation of human characteristics and traditions causes nemesis: Frankenstein creates a monster, which destroys not only Frankenstein himself, but those who are dear to him.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a conservative remises of the mythological prototype; he is the contemporary Prometheus, and he is the modern scientist obsessed by modernist ideas, not a simple reincarnation of an old alchemic. The young Frankenstein greedily masters the medieval occult traditions; however, he combines them with the modern scientific theories and methods. In other words, the old meets the new, myth integrates with industrial epoch. But who stands behind the curtains? A scientist and a monster. The one and the other is an artificial mixture of old and new, a synthetic symbiosis, which justifies the society’s mechanic concept about humans, obsessed by scientific development.
Frankenstein’s monster clearly expresses not only the concern, but also the fear toward the mechanic image of humans. Mary Shelley’s monster is a realization of the delirious opinions expressed in the mechanistic philosophy of Bacon and other social utopists, a prophetic accomplishment.
But who created the monster? Frankenstein, a genius scientist, obsessed with ambition and who through sacrilege appropriated God’s creative function. Myth destroyed the boundaries of reality, so the utopian dream was accomplished as a real project. And what was the result? Chaos and despair; utopian promise about the perfection of man became a nightmare. The disappointment with utopian hopes clearly identified anti-utopian tendencies. The work by Mary Shelley gave rise to the fundamental theme in literary anti-utopia: Submitted to the mystical power to reveal and determine the human control, which often suppresses and destroys every bit of humanism.
The anti-utopian pathos seen in “Frankenstein” deepened in the philosophical and literary thinking of the first half of the 19th century. The object of attack now became not only the idea of scientific progress, but the newly evolved ideas of democracy, liberalism and socialism, which fed and nourished the utopian doctrines. The problem of initial significance was not only the violence and terror created by means of contemporary achievements, but also the loss of individualism in the space of “collective” and “universal”. The deep projection of this danger which mankind was facing became particularly important in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Søren Aabye Kierkegaard.
In the doctrines of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, an aggression toward positivism and mechanical thought can be seen, the issue of the ability of free action and creative will alongside with the problem of losing individual thinking was raised. The new philosophical movement, which was later, called ←32 | 33→“Philosophy of Will”, confronted not only the classical understanding of philosophy, but also the philosophical tendencies of positivism. Unlike the utopist-optimist attitudes of contemporaneity, a general feeling of pessimism, a deep skepticism toward reality occurs. The main aim of the leaders of the “Philosophy of Will” was to change the idea of outer-determination with that of self-determination, or the traditional and rational outlook on the relation of “Self and the World”, which transforms into the position of in-look, based on the primacies of feeling and perception. The projection of inner and from within inside puts the individual aspects of the self forward, settles the condition during which a human is not content with the existing, reinforced and original reproduction of the world and concentrates on his individual possibility and realization of his/her perspectives.
Arthur Schopenhauer in his major work “The World as Will and Representation” (1819) persuasively implements the main statute of the new philosophical movement: “The world is my idea”. In Schopenhauer’s doctrine, the universe is not only the object of a person’s cognition, but also his perception, with all its forms – time, space and objects. Science, believes Schopenhauer, which was so highly praised by the social-utopists, cannot claim the understanding of knowledgeable object: Science of any type obeys “base will” and is within the framework of cognitive universe. Special scientists are unable to break-through this framework. Therefore, how can we understand the secrets of the universe? As the only way of dealing with this problem, Schopenhauer sees the transition from “Kingdom of Cognition” to “Kingdom of Will” or paying attention from outer world toward the “Self”, subject, which has the self-conscious. To put it in other words, universe cannot be understood through humans, but humans through the cognition of universe. As modern Georgian philosopher and the historic of philosophy, Tamaz Buachidze notes: “Human for Schopenhauer is the micro-scheme whose understanding will help us to solve the riddle connected with the macrocosm – the universe” (Buachidze 1986: 24). The individual has the will which according to Schopenhauer does not obey the “base will”, or the logic, reasonable it blindly and unconsciously strives for existence, toward life. Everything strives and seeks for existence, to the organic, life – and then toward the strengthening of it, states Schopenhauer. But the blind inertia of Will, meaningless aspiration gives a pessimistic