Setting terms: Lyman Tower Sargent (who I met in Australia last December) and Gregory Claeys offer some definitions in their book, The Utopia Reader (NYU Press, 1999):
| Quote: |
| *Utopianism–social dreaming *Utopia–a nonexistent society described in detail and normally located in time and space *Eutopia or positive utopia–a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which the reader lived *Dystopia or negative utopia–a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived *Utopian satire–a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of the existing society *Anti-utopia–a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia *Critical utopia–a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve, and which takes a critical view of the utopian genre (pp. 1-2) |
Now, their definitions are good ones, but not, I think, the only ones, and sometimes not the best ones for the kind of literature I’m into. Like, for a paper I got published a few months ago, I examined real-life utopias in Herman Melville’s first two novels, Typee and Omoo. These were Polynesian utopias: the Taipi Valley in the Marquesas Islands (a utopia about to be invaded and destroyed), Tahiti (a utopia dying from contact with the modern world), and Hawaii (an already-fallen utopia). Melville fictionalized them a bit, but they were essentially real.
Then there is the utopia in the paper I’m working on now, in James Baldwin’s masterpiece short story, "Sonny’s Blues." It’s an ephemeral utopia, a moment of communion among the people listening the to the title character play jazz, when they escape from the dystopia that is mid-century Harlem (and, for black people, pre-civil-rights America as a whole) and enter, only for a moment, an imaginary space where race no longer matters, where being the older brother or the younger brother no longer matters, where people who simply could not articulate their truths or listen to each other can finally understand each other. It is a society only in the loosest definition, and it exists only in the space of shared understanding.
Some little points which readers may or may not know: In Greek, "u topos" means "no place." Thomas More, writer of the essay/book Utopia, coined the word as the name of his fictional land, which reads very much like an early-twentieth-century SF story–no plot, just description of a society. But "eu topos" sounds the same and means "good place." "Dystopia" of course means "bad place," and is a more recent coinage.
I’ll try to provide some examples of genre books/stories that fit into the categories above, or which break the categories, but that is for another day. I need to write a quiz right now.