Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that
riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable
carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings
coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other,
without hating each other to death? As a matter of fact, they
do hate each other, but they are not equal to their hatred.
And it is this mediocrity, this impotence, that saves society,
that assures its continuance, its stability. Occasionally some
shock occurs by which our instincts profit; but afterward we
go on looking each other in the face as if nothing had happened,
cohabiting without too obviously tearing each other
to shreds. Order is restored, a ferocious calm as dreadful,
ultimately, as the frenzy that had interrupted it.
Yet I marvel still more that some of us, society being
what it is, have ventured to conceive another one altogether-a
different society. What can be the cause of so
much naivete, or of so much inanity? If the question is
normal enough, even ordinary, the curiosity that led me to
ask it, on the other hand, has the excuse of being morbid.
Seeking new evidence, and just as I despaired of finding
anything of the kind, it occurred to me to consult utopian
literature, to steep myself in its "masterpieces," to wallow
in them. There, to my great delight, I sated my pentitential
longings, my appetite for mortification. To spend months
recording the dreams of a better future, of an "ideal" society,
devouring the unreadable-what a windfall! I hasten to add
that this tedious literature has much to teach, and that time
spent frequenting it is not entirely wasted. From the start,
one discerns in it the (fruitful or calamitous) role taken, in
the genesis of events, not by happiness but by the idea of
happiness, an idea that explains-the Age of Iron being
coextensive with history-why each epoch so eagerly invokes
the Age of Gold. Suppose we put an end to such
speculations: total stagnation would ensue. For we act only
under the fascination of the impossible: which is to say that
a society incapable of generating-and of dedicating itself
to-a utopia is threatened with sclerosis and collapse. Wisdom-fascinated
by nothing-recommends an existing, a
given happiness, which man rejects, and by this very rejection
becomes a historical animal, that is, a devotee of imagined happiness.
"A new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and
the first earth were passed away," we read in Revelations.
Cross out "heaven," just keep the "new earth," and you
have the secret and the recipe of all utopian systems; for
greater precision, perhaps you should put "city" for "earth";
but that is only a detail; what counts is the prospect of a
new advent, the fever of an essential expectation-a debased,
modernized Parousia from which arise those systems
so dear to the disinherited. Poverty is in fact the utopianist's
great auxiliary, it is the matter he works in, the substance
on which he feeds his thoughts, the providence of his obsessions.
Without poverty he would be empty; but poverty
occupies him, allures or embarrasses him, depending on
whether he is poor or rich; from another point of view,
poverty cannot do without him-it needs this theoretician,
this adept of the future, especially since poverty itself, that
endless meditation on the likelihood of escaping its own
present, would hardly endure its dreariness without the obsession
of another earth. Can you doubt it? If so, it is because
you have not tasted utter indigence. Do so and you will see
that the more destitute you are, the more time and energy
you will spend in reforming everything, in thinking-in
other words, in vain. I have in mind not only institutions,
human creations: those of course you will condemn straight
off and without appeal; but objects, all objects, however
insignificant. Unable to accept them as they are, you will
want to impose your laws and your whims upon them, to
function at their expense as legislator or as tyrant; you will
even want to intervene in the life of elements in order to
modify their physiognomy, their structure. Air annoys you:
let it be transformed! And stone as well. And the same for
the vegetal world, the same for man. Down past the foundations
of being, down to the strata of chaos, descend, install
yourself there! When you haven't a penny in your pocket,
you strive, you dream, how extravagantly you labor to possess
All, and as long as the frenzy lasts, you do possess that
All, you equal God, though no one realizes it, not even
God, not even you. The delirium of the poor is the generator
of events, the source of history: a throng of hysterics who
want another world, here and now. It is they who inspire
utopias, it is for them that utopias are written. But utopia,
let us remember, means nowhere.
And where would these cities be that evil never touches,
in which labor is blessed and death is never feared? There
one is constrained to a felicity of geometric idylls, of adjusted
ecstasies, of a thousand disgusting wonders necessarily
offered by the spectacle of a perfect world, a fabricated
world. In ludicrous detail, Campanella tells us about the
Solarians exempt from "gout, rheumatism, catarrh, sciatica,
colic, hydropsy flatus . . . . " Everything abounds in the City
of the Sun "because each man is eager to distinguish himself
in what he does. The leader who presides over each thing
is called: King . . . . Women and men, divided into bands, go
about their work without ever infringing the orders of their
kings, and without ever appearing fatigued, as we do. They
regard their leaders as fathers or as older brothers." We
shall recognize the same twaddle in other works of the genre,
particularly in those of a Cabet, a Fourier, or a Morris, all
lacking in that touch of rancor so necessary to literary works,
and not only those.
To conceive a true utopia, to sketch, with conviction, the
structure of an ideal society, requires a certain dose of ingenuousness,
even of stupidity, which, being too evident,
ultimately exasperates the reader. The only readable utopias
are the false ones, the ones that, written in a spirit of entertainment
or misanthropy, prefigure or recall Gulliver's
Travels, that Bible of the disabused, quintessence of nonchimerical
visions, a utopia without hope. By his sarcasms,
Swift undeceived a genre to the point of destroying it.
