The Utopia Project

Ambiguous Utopias

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50 years of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

Johannesburg Review of Books, 19 December 2024.

“But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias…” — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, comes in at 2000 entries and 700 pages—a tribute to the deep human urge to make up other worlds (and draw maps of them). 

Paging through, you might recognise names from childhood: Middle-Earth, Earthsea and Narnia are there. So are Kôr, Lilliput and the Island of the Roc. Jurassic Park and Hogwarts were added in the second edition.

Then there are worlds encountered later in life: Gabriel García Marquez’s jungle village Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its plagues of amnesia and butterflies. The Pacific island of Gondal, dreamed up by the Brontë sisters. Many islands of course: an island is the most available model, the starter pack, for dreaming up a distant, self-contained elsewhere. Utopia and Erewhon are there; so are Atlantis and Azania, Lotus-Eaters Island and Caliban’s Island (see Prospero’s Island).

‘We agreed that our approach would have to be carefully balanced between the practical and the fantastic’, Manguel writes in the foreword:

We would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler, using only the information provided in the original source, with no ‘inventions’ on our part.

The straight-faced approach suits the genre of utopia. The defining characteristic of a literary utopia (writes Gregory Claeys) is ‘its nonexistence combined with a topos—a location in time and space—to give it verisimilitude’ (that is, the semblance of being real). This sets it apart from more free-floating visions of paradise, nirvana and the Golden Age. The better places of myth and religion tend to occupy another plane of existence; utopias have a more worldly address.

So where on earth to locate a utopia? Where to place the non-place?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarres

Show Me the Place

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Show Me the Place

Searching for utopia.

We were on our way to Pondicherry in a Hindustan Ambassador, one of those classic 1950s-looking cars you see all through India. But this one had been modified, he said, so that it ran on recycled ayurvedic massage oil. He was taking me to a microbrewery in town, as if to show that this place had everything from back home and more.

Sometimes I wondered if Zuckman was stretching the truth a little. He was such an evangelist for this part of the world. He was older than me but looked more youthful; he glowed with a zealous optimism that I associated more with the corporate sector. But so far everything he’d said — about being a Sanskrit scholar, about leaving Muizenberg to come and run his software company from Auroville — had checked out…

An extract from Show Me the Place about a visit to the ‘living laboratory’ (residents don’t like the term utopia) of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Sunday Times online, 30 April 2024. Pagecast interview with Mila de Villiers.

Earlier in this piece, I describe coming across a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed in the (beautiful) Auroville Library. A science fictional utopia embedded in a real attempt at living differently – this became a kind of touchstone. It seemed like an emblem of how imaginary and actual experiments with better worlds have always nestled within, always co-existed and co-created each other. How the literary and political imagination have always depended on one other for showing that things have not always been as they are (and so could one day be otherwise again).

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