“Utopian Fantasy Not Dead”

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31407, 28 June 1967, Page 9

“Utopian Fantasy Not Dead”

“The utopian fantasy is by no means dead,” said Professor J. C. Garrett in the last of his three Macmillan-Brown lectures on “Literary Utopias of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in the University Hall on Monday evening. His final address was on the “Dilemmas of Twentieth-Cen-tury Utopias.” The aspiration for a better existence was an unquenchable thirst, Professor Garrett said. For this reason utopian writing would receive a continuing stimulus.

There was an immense ' variety of enticing possibili- [ ties laid out before twentiethcentury man. Utopian and anti-utopian writing had been stimulated by those possibilities. For the utopist, this had been an age of anxiety. Stampleton in 1930 had provided the high-water mark of evolutionary utopias when he had shown man wanted a utopia for creatures like himself, or he would reject it in his imagination. Evolutionary utopias provided the dilemma that man wanted evolutionary advance but did not want it to go too far, so bug-eyed monsters had disappeared from serious utopian writing. H. G. Wells had shown the response of the utopian imagination to science and technology. He had been a utopian writer who had started a whole school of antiutopian writers. His worlds had been preoccupied with physical comfort, standardisation, control, and organisation. His men had been treated like things or digits, and had inhabited the perfect prison. In reaction to this, Evelyn Waugh had been revolted by the prospect of scientists tampering with human lives and liberty. E. M. Forster, Tillyard, and Rex Warner had also written against the scientific state. In “Brave New World” Aldous Huxley had deliberately written against Wells, said Professor Garrett Huxley’s main theme had been the degradation of the body and mind of man in utopia. Huxley had been representative of

twentieth - century thought where the ideal of human equality had disappeared as a concession to biological reality. Once utopia had been made for man—but now man was being made for utopia. George Orwell had owed much to Huxley in “1984,” but Orwell had been unwilling to concede that the utopia could provide perfection in anything, even in physical comfort. The desire for changeless stability had an equally strong counter-desire for instability. Professor Garrett said Orwell had bden a novelist, not a satirist like Huxley. He had been interested in the human beings actually living in utopia. “1984” had indicated a growth towards fear of utopia itself. The dilemmas of the

utopists had arisen when they were compelled to look closely at the inhabitants of utopia. What were first dilemmas became human and moral problems.

These dilemmas had forced utopists to adopt more and more elements of the novel form to describe conditions in their utopias. Now, utopias were presented as real societies with characters as credible as those in any novel. This had added immensely to the pleasure of the reader. The Canterbury University Council yesterday afternoon congratulated Professor Garrett on the quality of his Macmillan-Brown lectures. Mr D. W. Bain said they were a notable contribution to scholarship in the highest traditions of the series.