Utopia and Reality

Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds

Simon Spiegel,Andrea Reiter,Marcy Goldberg

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786835260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

Since publication of Thomas More's Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

1 Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent

Lyman Tower Sargent and Simon Spiegel

In the world of utopian studies, Lyman Tower Sargent is an eminent figure. For anyone studying utopian literature, it is simply impossible not to encounter one of the many books or articles that he has written or edited. It is safe to say that no one has a more comprehensive grasp of the field of utopian literature. To this day, Sargent’s bibliography of British and American utopian literature, which was first published in 1979 and is now available as a free online database, remains an invaluable resource for research.¹

The two terms ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ are normally thought of as distinctly different. Utopia designates a non-place, and thus seems almost by definition to be not of this world, not part of our shared reality. Would you agree that utopia and reality appear to be antithetical?

Actually, I disagree. Someone once said that all utopias begin with disappointment: the disappointment with reality. What utopias – or rather utopians – are disappointed with is the world in which they are living. This is, so to speak, the first stage of almost any utopia. The second stage is to get anywhere near the depicted utopia, and to achieve this, reality has to change. So utopia and reality are, in fact, intimately connected. One important aspect is that, while some utopias are very idiosyncratic and feature odd ideas, most people who write utopias are identifying real issues. The connection between utopias and the very reality their creators live in has always been obvious to me.

If disappointment is the trigger of any utopia, would you say that criticism is an essential part of utopianism?

Most utopias will feature some sort of criticism. This is true if we go back to the very beginning of the genre, to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).² People often forget that the description of the island of Utopia only constitutes the second book. Large sections of the first book deal with the situation in England; especially with the practices of greedy sheep-owning landlords, who are enclosing land that formerly belonged to the commons. The farmers who now have no land are forced into criminality. The character of Hythloday argues that harsher laws will have no effect as long as the farmers’ situation is not improved. The criticism is not always as direct as this, sometimes it is more implicit, but it is always a part of any utopia.

You said the second stage is to approach utopia. Are utopias normally meant as a call to action or as a political programme?

That depends very much on the individual text or writer. For example, after decades or even centuries of scholarship, we still have no idea what More had in mind when he wrote his Utopia. It is probably fair to say that at least the later More would not have liked to live on the island described in his book. But whether the younger More thought there was any hope for change is something we do not know. You have to remember that in the first book of Utopia, the characters of More and Hythloday discuss whether an educated and knowledgeable person like Hythloday should seek a job as an adviser to a king. Hythloday very forcefully disputes this. He sees no point in doing so, since no king would actually listen to his advice. The real More, on the other hand, took a government job and ultimately became Lord High Chancellor under Henry VIII. But unless something is discovered that has been well hidden until now, no one will ever know whether he thought he could effect change.

But on a more general note, most utopians want to have some effect on society.

A lot of them do, but I do not want to stress this point too much. For centuries, novelists have written utopias, and they did so for a variety of reasons. We often have no idea what they intended. For example, toward the end of his life, Aldous Huxley, who is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), wrote a utopia called Island (1962).³ Did he think he could bring about change by writing this novel? We simply do not know. I think, historically, many writers hoped that there would be a possibility to induce change. But then you also have the phenomenon of novelists who wrote one utopian story as part of making a living writing novels, and we often have no clue what they had in mind. In addition, many writers hesitate when it comes to assigning a clear political message to their work – although there are exceptions. The best modern example of this is probably the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. He calls himself a utopian, and he explicitly wants his work to have an effect. But Robinson certainly is an outlier in this regard. And he is anything but naive. He does not want his readers to implement the society he describes in the Mars trilogy (1993–1996) or in his novel New York 2140 (2017).⁴

Are there examples of writers who actually wanted to have their utopias implemented as described?

While there certainly is the odd example of this, most utopian authors do not think that people are immediately going to adopt everything they write. They would probably be horrified if that happened. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) is historically one of the most obvious examples of a utopia that had a direct effect.⁵ In his novel, Bellamy describes the city of Boston in the year 2000. The principle of competition has been abandoned and the state is the sole owner of industry – a system that Bellamy, who shied away from the term ‘socialism’, called nationalism. The book was a huge success and led to the formation of more than 150 nationalist clubs across the US. But Bellamy himself was completely surprised by the success of his novel, and he later gave different accounts of why he wrote it. And when he did try to put it into effect, he did not follow his descriptions in complete detail. He also reacted to criticism and wrote several short stories where he dealt with specific aspects of his original concept and, finally, the much lesser known novel Equality, in which he revised some of his earlier ideas.⁶ But even then, he did not expect people to follow him to the last letter.

So, Looking Backward would be an example of utopian literature that had a real effect?

The most lasting effect in reaction to this form of ‘nationalism’ was the municipalisation of public utilities. It was a way of staving off full nationalisation, by doing it on a municipal level. I think that most of the effects of utopias are of that order. Another example is Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), which focuses on environmental issues.⁷ The environmental movement did of course start well before that, but Callenbach’s book, together with many other utopias on environmentalism, helped to raise the awareness that there are issues we have to deal with. And while there are still many unsolved problems in this area, environmentalism today is so embedded in our culture that we do not think any more of the effect Ecotopia originally had. But it made a big splash when it came out, and it changed some people’s minds. They got involved, started movements, and so on. It was not the one book that caused the movement, but it contributed significantly to it. Obviously, all criticism of capitalism is of the same order.

Is this how utopias ideally work – by giving birth to social movements?

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, because social movements sometimes also give rise to utopias. I do not think that there are many examples where a utopia directly gave rise to a social movement. Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement would be a rare exception here. Howard was a stenographer in London in the late nineteenth century and published a book called Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1898.⁸ This book grew out of his reading of Bellamy, among other things, and advocated a new type of city that was meant to serve as an antidote against metropolises like London, which Howard abhorred. Comparatively small cities with big belts of green between different areas would function as more or less autonomous units. Howard’s book was extremely influential. In the course of a few years, the garden city movement turned into a worldwide phenomenon. There are garden cities in the UK, the US and in Australia. And even today, city planners still follow ideas originally developed by Howard. None of these places are ideal, of course; they all have problems. But that does not mean they are not good places to live. In many cases, they are better than the surrounding communities. This is an example of a social movement that can be directly traced back to one utopian text, but this is certainly not the norm.

Garden Cities of To-morrow and Looking Backward are two examples of very influential utopias. The latter was even a bestseller. What made these books so successful?

I have to confess that I find Looking Backward rather boring. But Bellamy was already an established novelist when he wrote it, and the general reading is that he embedded a sentimental novel in a utopia, and sentimental novels were all the rage at the time. But interestingly enough, the first edition did not sell very well. For the second edition, he made significant revisions, and this was the version that sold. Of course, we are unable to tell for sure why one book is successful and another is not, but I think in the case of Looking Backward, one important element is that Bellamy created a real character with his protagonist Julian West. West’s confusion, and the scenes where he thinks back to the old Boston and the time he was still wealthy, did stick with people. And then there is the image of him sitting on a coach with other people pulling it or falling off. This chapter was so popular that it was even made into a separate publication.

The image of the coach is a striking symbol for a system in which an elite profits, while everybody else toils for this small group. It is the system Bellamy and his reader lived in. Would it be an exaggeration to say that the depiction of a bad present is actually more important for a utopia to be successful than the proposed alternative?

I think this is mostly true for the classic utopias. Here, the starting point is always the author’s reality. And if the readers do not connect to this, if they do not accept that things are bad and should be improved, there is little chance that they will follow the story further. My colleague Raffaela Baccolini has said that dystopias begin in the dystopia, whereas utopias generally begin before the utopia. And this was very true traditionally, until the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers have fairly often started in the utopia. You see this in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, and more generally in the utopias published since the 1960s.

That is the type that Tom Moylan, in his study Demand the Impossible, calls ‘critical utopia’.⁹

If we look at the history of the genre, we can see a development from the Renaissance utopias in the tradition of More to temporal utopias, where the utopian place is situated in the future instead of a remote location like an island. This is also the point where futuristic inventions, which we associate with science fiction today, come into play. Before that, most utopias featured a thoroughly organised hierarchical state that often tended towards the totalitarian. This only began to change toward the end of the nineteenth century; Bellamy’s Looking Backward is probably the last important example of this classic model. It is then followed by the dystopia, which, at its core, criticises one of the tenets of the classic model: the complete submission of the individual under the dictate of the state. The next stage is then indeed what Moylan calls critical utopia. These are novels that have given up on the idea of a completely controllable good place. Instead, they mix elements of positive utopias and dystopias and problematise the very idea of utopia. But they always do this against the background of a larger utopian impulse. They still believe that things can and should be improved. In his book, Moylan looks at four science fiction novels from the 1970s, and I think his concept is useful to describe this stage in the genre’s development. But I am a bit hesitant to use the term ‘critical utopia’, since I feel it has been overused in recent years.

Your short description of the development of utopian literature conforms to what can be called the standard history of the genre, which most scholars agree on. Does this mean that the classic utopia is dead and that no texts that follow this model are produced anymore?

No. Historians of the genre – of any genre – tend to focus on those examples that play with established tropes and transform them. This is not surprising, since these are often the most interesting texts. But besides the works that move the genre forward, the avant-garde so to speak, there are always many examples that do not adopt the changes, but stick to old, even outdated forms. The same is true for utopias. The classic Morean model is still alive today. Thanks to the revolution in self-publishing, the output may even have increased. But most of them are obscure texts that no one ever reads. No one but me, unfortunately [laughs]. I said earlier that Looking Backward was the last classic utopia. But this is only true in terms of reception, and not when we look at production. Research has focused on books like William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) or H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), both immediate successors to Bellamy, which modified the classic model in crucial ways.¹⁰ Apart from these outstanding books, many classic utopias have been written since then, but no one took notice of them.

It seems that utopian writers – in the twentieth century, anyway – tend not to like being called utopians. In many utopian texts we encounter phrases like, ‘This is not a utopia, this is serious’.

Robinson has no problem being called a utopian; neither did Le Guin. But in general, utopia does indeed have a bad name. I have always argued that the put-down of utopia comes from the fact that some people will be unhappy with the changes that utopia might bring, so they prefer to damn it. And it turns out that calling it ‘utopian’ is a way to do this. Recently though, things seem to have changed. The word has become much more popular, and I get the impression that at least some people understand the concept better than they used to. But of course, many still believe that we will end up in a dystopia.

In terms of (fiction) film, a common argument is that positive utopias do not work, and that only dystopias permit exciting storytelling. What do you, as an expert in utopian literature, think about this?

Let me first say that during my career in utopian studies, I have very consciously steered clear of writing about film. If a book gets turned into a film, I make a corresponding note in my bibliography, but that is about it. Literature and film are two very different media, and I have always felt that I lacked the proper tools for working with films. I simply do not know how to read them. That said, I do not see why you could not make a utopian film. Many years ago, I was on a panel with the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, and he said that utopias are boring because they lack an exciting plot, because nothing happens. I answered that this merely showed a lack of imagination on the part of the screenwriter or the director. Telling an eminent writer like Clarke that he was lacking in imagination was, of course, the act of a rather naive young man, but I still consider it to be essentially true. Utopias do not have to be boring, because human life is still going to continue. For example, in News from Nowhere somebody gets killed, and the society has to figure out how to respond. That is not ‘nothing’ happening. It seems to me tha...