Four Paradigms of Utopian Fiction: the Exemplar of Atomism.

Abstract

The criticism utopian fiction has focused on the issues of position, politics, or purpose. These approaches have yielded systems of categorizing utopias that are dichotomous or unidimensional. Thus, the varieties of utopian writing have been categorized on the basis of such descriptions as escape versus reconstruction, authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian, the degree of centralization, or the positions of upward, outward, and inward. While these categories raise helpful questions, the central question of how a utopia is organized goes unanswered. To redress this shortcoming of the criticism of utopian writing is the central purpose of this study. The approach here is to use four paradigms as categories within which to range utopian fiction. These paradigms are drawn from the four main languages of social theory and the metaphors that serve to organize each of the four. These four languages are: atomism, voluntarism, structural-functionalism, and symbolic interactionism. The metaphor that undergirds each of these languages forms its central organizing principle by suggesting what each language assumes society to be like. Atomism, then, underst and s society as being like the interaction of atoms. Voluntarism takes as its underlying metaphor will or the act of the will. The controlling metaphor of structural-functionalism is the body. The metaphor of symbolic interactionism is metaphor itself. It is hoped that by reviewing and quoting extensively from social theorists concerned with the various competing languages of societal analysis that the student of utopian fiction can underst and and use the four paradigms drawn from this literature on social theory. The method of analyzing utopian fiction used in this study is based on the language of symbolic interactionism. In brief, paradigms are seen to comprehend both models of and models for reality. This distinction parallels that which Kenneth Burke makes in noting the difference between planning a picnic and going on a picnic: it is the difference between an analysis or a description and a program. This study follows Burke by employing the ratios of his pentad in a dramatistic reading of two utopian novels in order to find the locus of motivation, particularly with respect to the shift from analysis to program. Exemplary of such a shift is the movement from Book I to Book II in Sir Thomas More's Utopia. This study attempts to demonstrate the utility of categorizing utopian fiction on the basis of the four proposed paradigms by showing that the utopias Walden Two by B. F. Skinner and Glaserne Bienen by Ernst Junger are exemplars of the atomistic paradigm. Owing to the comparative approach brought to these two utopias, however, it was necessary to supplement the findings of this dramatistic reading with a dialogical method drawn from the work of M. M. Bakhtin. The dialogical method of Bakhtin was altered slightly in order to accommodate the distinction made in Junger's novel between automatons and sentient beings, a distinction ultimately found wanting in Skinner's Walden Two. This study concludes by suggesting areas of further research needed to demonstrate that the three remaining paradigms also find exemplars in the canon of utopian fiction.