MELVILLE AND THE TRADITION OF PRIMITIVE UTOPIA

摘要

complex, the most multi-dimensional, with the most tangled intel lectual history. Those ideographs of society redeemed from the Fall and purified of the ills of the real world, which we call utopias, themselves divide dramatically into two types?what Lewis Mum ford has called utopias of reconstruction and utopias of escape.1 The tradition of the reconstructive utopia begins with Plato's Republic and Laws and includes most of the works that constitute the literary cum-philosophical genre: More's Utopia, Campanula's City of the Sun, Andreae's Christianopolis, Cabet's Voyage to Icaria, Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' several technocratic futures, and B. F. Skinner's Waiden Two, along with a host of less significant progeny. What unites these fictive projections?as well as numerous political blueprints, such as those of Robert Owen, Fourier and Comte?is a stress on social organiza tion and behavior control. Rational planning is the keynote, with the inevitable result that the imaginary citizens of these imaginary societies appear manipulated, regimented, and fungible?quite ra tional, but rather robotic. The model of the reconstructive utopia I have elsewhere defined as civilization-only-more-so: that is, as a systematic intensification of the restraints upon which all actual soci eties rest.2 The model of the escapist utopia, paradoxically, represents the other extreme: a primitivist rejection of the entangling restraints of civilization. That the same generic term should denote both models is a source of no little confusion. R. W. Chambers, for instance, com