ESC: English Studies in Canada

D R E A M S O F F R E E D O M : ID E O L O G Y A N D N A R R A T IV E S T R U C T U R E IN T H E U T O P IA N F IC T IO N S O F M A R G E P I E R C Y A N D U R S U L A L E G U IN C H R IS F E R N S Mount Saint Vincent University -Lhe term “utopia,” of course, notoriously embodies a pun: Sir Thomas More’s coinage is deliberately ambiguous in its derivation. Its root may be taken either as ou-topos — “no place,” or eu-topos — “ the good place.” Al­ most by definition, therefore, utopia is both a good place, an ideal society, yet at the same time one which does not exist. In utopian fiction this is normally reflected in its location, almost invariably remote or well-insulated from the real world to which it proposes an alternative. More and Bacon place their ideal societies on islands; Campanella’s City of the Sun is rendered impreg­ nable by its sevenfold walls (on which are inscribed the sum total of human knowledge — the city itself is a form of book), while more recent authors have set their utopias in the future, on other planets, or both. Only the scope of utopia has changed with the passage of time: where early utopias were conceived of as isolated bastions of sanity in the midst of a world of chaos and unreason, their more recent counterparts have become all-embracing, the Wellsian world state being a case in point. And while there are exceptions to this rule (such as Huxley’s Island), the overall trend appears to be towards utopian fictions where the ideal society, instead of cutting itself off from the real world, seeks rather to replace it. In Marge Piercy’s feminist utopia, Woman on the Edge of Time, the forces of sexism and technocracy have been marginalized to the arctic regions and outer space, while in Ursula LeGuin’s anarchist vision, The Dispossessed, utopia and the real world are twin planets, circling one another in mutual suspicion and hostility. Yet if the term “ utopia” is rooted in a pun, it might equally be argued that the term “utopian fiction” is founded on a tautology: it is a fiction concerning that which is already, by definition, fictional. Utopia itself is a fictional con­ struct, and utopian fiction might therefore be seen as, in a sense, doubly fictional — a fiction about a prior imaginative or intellectual projection. In the current climate of postmodernist fictional experiment, where fiction seeks to expose and explore its own fictionality, this might be seen as a point in its favour — one might even expect utopian fiction to be enjoying a modest vogue. Yet such has hardly been the case: indeed, in some ways utopian fiction English Studies in Canada, xiv, 4, December 1988 can be seen as representing the antithesis of postmodernist experiment, for instead of exposing its own fictionality, it strives rather to conceal its doubly fictional nature. While the framing devices of utopian narrative may seem fantastic enough — dream, vision, magical translation to an alternate reality — the utopian writer’s approach to that reality, to a world that cannot and does not exist, is often characterized by what, in another context, might appear to be dogged realism. Utopian fiction remains for the most part obstinately non-self-referential, and one finds little trace of the elements of irony, joke, or play so integral to More’s original conception. Humour is, in general, a com­ modity in short supply in utopia. Utopian writers themselves have recognized some of the problems inherent in the genre. A certain lack of credibility, for example, is seen by some as inevitable. As H. G. Wells suggests: There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are...