EricS.Rabkin,DepartmentofEnglishLanguageand.doc

Rabkin Simon/Fantasy and Utopia p.  PAGE 14 Copyright ? 2002 Eric S. Rabkin Carl P. Simon Eric S. Rabkin, Department of English Language and Literature, Carl P. Simon, Departments of Mathematics, Economics, Public Policy,  Director, Center for Center of the Study of Complex Systems University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 USA Fantasy and Utopia Utopias are public fantasies: The Republic, Christianopolis, Shangri-La, these are the far-off or not-yet neighborhoods of intimate, shared desire. J. B. Post’s Atlas of Fantasy collects maps of places like Utopia (Thomas More’s genre-naming pun on the English homophony of the Greek ou-topos, no-place, and eu-topos, good-place), to put in our hands realms that never were. Why do we care about them? The endpapers of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth map in punning detail the salient locations in the wish-fulfilling “Lands Beyond.” Beyond what? We learn from the title of Chapter 2: “Beyond Expectations” (15). We never expect utopia to happen. It is always an ideal, be it a glorious ideal, a Shining City on a Hill, eutopia, or a fearsome ideal, a horrid Brave New World, dystopia. And sometimes it is both, and, in two senses, terrific. Still, because we never truly expect it, in our level-headed moods we chide utopians. One of the main definitions of “utopia” in The Oxford English Dictionary is “An impossibly ideal scheme, especially for social improvement.” The realms of the impossible, of course, are the realms of fantasy: “a supposition resting on no solid grounds; a whimsical or visionary notion or speculation. Now more emphatically contemptuous than fancy” (OED). As we hold fantasy in contempt, we hold utopia, and all “utopian schemes,” in contempt. The relentlessly level-headed, like Thomas Babington Macaulay, trivialize utopia, as in his essay “On Lord Bacon” (1837): “An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.” And yet, for most of us, at one time or another, utopia m