|
| |
Imagining the Ideal: Utopia in Western Literature and Tradition
From: The New York Public Library
| By:
Holland GossRoland Schaer |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Since the beginning of recorded history people have envisioned utopias or ideal societies. These worlds were placed in an afterlife, a past or future time period or an unexplored territory. These utopias were explored in an exhibition at The New York Public Library from October 14, 2000, to January 27, 2001, entitled "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," organized in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Curators from both libraries provided an overview of the utopian imagination in western religion, literature, art and society through the 17th century. |
 he notion of an ideal society, one organized in ways that guarantee the felicity of its members, has been a staple element in human experience through all of recorded history. The details of this society--where and when it exists, how one gets to it, how it is governed, who lives in it, the ramifications of its existence--can, and do, vary radically, producing the broadest possible set of answers to the question of what constitutes the ideal. Although the history of utopias proper begins with Thomas More's famous work, Utopia, of 1516, ideal societies have been a part of human imagination since the beginning of recorded history. |
The Golden Age and the Garden of Eden
The Golden Age and the Garden of Eden are among the earliest ideal worlds in the Western tradition.
They were believed to represent the first states of humankind, when people lived close to their gods and were free from need. The myth of the Golden Age, which is part of the Greco-Roman tradition, stated that people live in the iron age of hard work and hunger, while the "golden race" of the past neither suffered nor aged, and lived in an abundant natural world in which labor was unknown and peace and justice reigned. |
In the Garden of Eden, as described in the Old Testament, Adam and Eve lived in a bountiful garden of pleasure and innocence. Unlike the Golden Age, which was lost through the passage of time, the Garden of Eden (also called Paradise) was lost when Adam and Eve were expelled for disobeying their God. For many centuries, it was believed that the Garden of Eden was located on earth, prompting numerous searches for this lost Earthly Paradise. |
Although both traditions located these ideal worlds in the past, they also provided for their return: in the Greco-Roman tradition, humankind would eventually cycle back to the Golden Age; in the Jewish tradition, the coming of the messiah will usher in a world free of suffering; and in Christian belief, the second coming of Christ will restore Paradise on earth. |
Apocalypse and Millenarianism
The Jewish and Christian traditions both offer believers visions of a world wiped clean of evil.
In addition to a Paradise situated in the past, at the beginning of time, these traditions present glimpses of a radiant future. In the Jewish tradition, this is the future promised by God to the just after a long exile. This future will be one of extraordinary joy and justice, a time when, as Isaiah prophesies, "the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken" (Isaiah 25: 8). |
In the Christian tradition, Isaiah's prophecy of the end of time is expressed anew in the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of Saint John. According to John, a kingdom ruled by Jesus Christ will be established on earth, providing a thousand years of prosperity and joy during which the just will undergo resurrection. Then, after a new assault by Satan, will come the time of the second resurrection, described in John's vision as the coming of the holy city, Celestial Jerusalem. Those who take John's pronouncements literally are known as millenarians; many of them, even to this day, have tried to calculate the exact time of the arrival of the new kingdom. |
The Well-ordered City
Within the classical and medieval tradition may be found numerous philosophical and political treatises on the perfectly ordered city and the ideal government.
Among the most important authors of such works was Plato, whose Republic (360 B.C.E.) is the oldest surviving European attempt to create an ideal society. After Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Giles of Rome, among others, added their perspectives to the discussion of the ideal city and the best form of government. The cities described in these works often imitated the organization of the cosmos, including a strict hierarchical order believed to be inspired by divine will and written into nature's plan. This emphasis on order and law, in which each thing had its place, guaranteed concord and served as a unifying base for the city. This desire for a unified social body became an essential aspect of much subsequent utopian thought. |
Additional speculation about ideal societies can be found in medieval literature and imagination. Many of these creations, such as the Land of Cockaigne, address the immediate concerns of the societies that imagined them, answering the need for food, comfort, health, pleasure, and safety. In Cockaigne, an ideal world found in several medieval European legends, cooked chickens fell from the sky, fruit on the trees was always ripe for picking, rivers flowed with wine, and no one labored or toiled. |
Thomas More's <I>Utopia</I> (1516)
When Thomas More published Utopia in 1516, he founded a new genre of writing, located at the intersection of literature, politics, and philosophy.
The novelty of More's work lay in its placing the ideal society here on earth, as a result of the work of human beings. The natural environment was not idealized as it had been in earlier legends. The inhabitants of the kingdom of Utopia were just like More's audience. They had not benefited from any particular divine grace; rather, they were able to exorcise evil and vice from their world by constructing an alternative social organization. |
Utopia is in the form of a dialogue, between More and Raphael Hythlodaeus, a fictional traveler and companion to Amerigo Vespucci. Hythlodaeus has explored several islands in the New World, and has returned to England to recount his discoveries. In the first book, More severely criticized the England of his day. In the second book, however, he turned to Hythlodaeus's description of the institutions, lifestyle, and history of the happy inhabitants of the island of Utopia. |
Ideal Cities of the Renaissance
During the Renaissance, substantial consideration was given to redefining the architecture and design of the ideal city.
The city itself became a work of art, and theories of proportion and planning drew heavily from the rediscovered architects of Antiquity, especially Vitruvius (first century B.C.E.). This intellectual movement emphasized civic architecture in particular; its proponents considered the city to be both an architectural construction and a social organization. Ideally, it would be an organic whole in which harmonious proportions reigned over all. |
Only rarely were these cites actually constructed, with their building primarily confined to military endeavors and the creation of fortified towns. The most famous of these projects was Palma Nova, a fortified, polygonal town built in 1593 by the Senate of Venice. |
The Invention of the New World
Since their first encounter with the Americas, Europeans had projected the hopes and dreams of their utopian imagination onto these lands.
The Americas were believed to be the earthly location of almost all of the ideal and exotic places of myth and legend: a preserved Golden Age, the Earthly Paradise, the place where spiritual prophecies would be realized, a rediscovered Atlantis, and a fertile ground for religious missionaries. The Americas did indeed play all these roles in the minds of the newcomers as they gradually evolved from a previously unknown place into a concrete landmass, a true New World for Europeans. |
The people encountered by the explorers were depicted and described in a variety of ways. Some regarded them as pre-Christian innocents, blessed people living in an Earthly Paradise. More frequently, they were viewed as semi-human cannibals who should be eliminated so that Europeans could profit more fully from the land. The Age of Exploration was fraught with contradictions and contrasts as the Europeans struggled to fit the Americas and the people there into their understanding of history, geography, faith, and, ultimately, themselves. |
Foundations
After the publication of More's Utopia, the utopian literary genre blossomed. These early works were often political treatises presented in the form of fiction,
either to give life to the regime they described or to keep the censors at bay. Many persistent themes of utopian thought may be found in these works, including the abolition of private property, universal education (and, correspondingly, the placing of a high priority on intelligence), strict laws governing everyday life, selective breeding, and imaginative political alternatives to monarchy and aristocracy. |
Many early utopian ideas were also tried out in the Americas, which European explorers and philosophers saw as a blank slate onto which they could project their experiments. Drawing from political theory, Christian belief, and an admiration for the orderliness and wealth of many of the towns and cities of the native populations, Europeans both proposed and established communities whose plans and governments reflected their ideals. These attempts to set up communities would be followed, in later centuries, by attempts to establish utopia, or the ideal society, on a much larger scale. |
Quests and Voyages
Utopian literature often centers around travel, offering a tale of an arduous journey that culminates in the discovery of an ideal otherworld.
This theme has its roots in the ancient and medieval literary traditions of heroic romances, quests, and pilgrimages, in particular those that led to the most sacred of earthly cities, Jerusalem. Many of these worldly journeys and pilgrimages were metaphors for the journey through life to the afterlife. Just as one had to undergo a difficult pilgrimage or quest to attain access to a sacred place, one also had to pass through hardship and death to achieve a peaceful afterlife. Many of the narratives of these travels, whether real or legendary, contained descriptions of exotic peoples and places in the East, fueling the imagination of later writers and explorers and encouraging speculation about the existence of radically different, if not always ideal, societies. |
While More situated his island kingdom off the coast of South America, later utopias have been located just about everywhere imaginable, and much utopian fiction includes a narrative of a journey that ends in an ideal place. Many utopias have been placed on islands, because they provide a world unto themselves, cut off from the rest of existence. Some travelers in utopian fiction have delved into the center of the earth, others have gone to the moon, and still others have described the "Terra Australis," the lands at the southernmost point of the earth. Fanciful flying machines were often necessary to traverse the space that separates utopia from our own world. In the seventeenth century, a new form of utopian narrative appeared in which travel through time resulted in the discovery of an ideal society that did not exist in the present.
images: |
This story was derived from the exhibition "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," a collaboration between The New York Public Library and the Bibliothéque nationale de France and on view at The New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, from October 14, 2000-January 27, 2001. Materials were displayed from the collections of both libraries and selected other institutions. Copyright 2001 The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. All rights reserved. |
|
| |
