ART AND LITERATURE
287
Utopian Socialists in France, Germany, England, and America, to system–
atic schemes of an envisioned future such as those composed by St. Simon,
Fourier, and Comte, to the less specified but no less grandiose Marxist
anticipations of a reborn, reconstituted, and revolutionized society, in
which pre-history had come to an end and human history would really
and truly begin, the nineteenth century was a fertile seedbed for Utopian
divinations and their complements-in philosophy, in social theory, in var–
ious narrative and fictional forms-many of them often running together
in works of singular generic variety, and occasionally of singular oddity as
well.
I shall take the present opportuni ty to refer to a few particular varia–
tions upon the utopian imagination that were composed toward the end of
the last century and then to comment very briefly on a minute fraction of
what has been happening so far at the end of ours, which happens as well
to coincide with the end of the second millennium of the present era.
To my mind one of the more enduring and interesting of these utopi–
an representations is William Morris's
News from Nowhere.
This work was
itself a counter-vision and was brought forth, as utopias often are, by some–
one else's fantasy of the future-in this instance the American writer
Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward 2000--1887,
which was published in
1888, and became at once an extremely popular and much-discussed, imi–
tated, continued, reviled and refuted cultural article. Bellamy's projection
of Boston in the year 2000 focused upon a society managed by state social–
ism, one that was fully industrialized and meticulously routinized from
"the cradle to the grave," everyone between the ages of twenty-one and
forty-five being compulsory members of the "Industrial Army." "The
nation was organized as the one great business corporation in which all
other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place
of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly...." Cash
money has given way to universal credit cards, and piped-in Muzak fills the
general air. The nation state has been replaced by a world state, and Boston
figures largely as an instantiation of what is taking place throughout.
Morris was both vexed and slightly horrified by what he called "this
cockneyfied paradise." Following the impetus of his recoiling from
Bellamy's vision he began to wri te and publish the
Chapters from a Utopian
Romaltce
that ultimately became
News from Nowhere,
which was published
in book form in 1891. Morris's utopia has been
e~tensively
commented
upon, and my remarks do not aspire to comprehensive or superseding
interpretation. But a number of the more notable and engrossing consid–
erations entailed by this narrative are to be found precisely in its
problematicalities-in its cross-currents, contradictions, dubieties, uncer–
tainties, and inconcl usiveness, and in its peculiari ties of tone. Such
irregularities and disjunctures form part of the work's abiding interest and
