Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood by Sebastian Mitchell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood by Sebastian Mitchell Rick Cousins Making the Best of All Possible Worlds. Sebastian Mitchell. Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood. Bloomsbury, 2020. 215 pp. $156.95 hc. The attractions of living in a perfect world seem obvious, yet utopias are often invoked as cautionary tales of the “be careful what you wish for” variety. In Utopia and Its Discontents, Sebastian Mitchell tasks himself with discovering what all this wishing is about and what it leads to, through what he terms “a transhistorical study” spanning two and a half millennia (6). If “Utopianism often suggests a hopelessly impractical scheme or set of measures,” it may be because the very idea of utopia contains a central paradox (1). In a perfect world, there would be no need to imagine a perfect world; by extension, any perfect worlds we construct in response to the imperfections of the world we live in are bound to have imperfections of their own. As far as Mitchell is concerned, these imperfections are the inevitable by-product of reflections on society that have been distorted by less-than-perfect self-reflection: “utopian authors invariably constructed ideal states in their own image” (144). Utopias tend not to be “you-topias” but “me-topias”: casual travellers to any of these fabled lands would be well-advised to familiarize themselves with the author of the guide book and plan their trip by reading between the lines. This is precisely what Mitchell has done in Utopia and Its Discontents, by sidestepping the proselytizing and polemics in the fictionally perfect worlds he surveys. Instead, he continually sounds the refrain that any utopia is just as much a private aesthetic statement as it is a public political program. The degree to which the beautiful, the useful, and the good are equated in the eyes of the creator of a utopian scheme is the key to understanding whether its overall goals tend more towards making better citizens or merely making [End Page 489] better-controlled ones. Regardless of the form of governance chosen for an imagined earthly paradise, “the aesthetic is the central means of utopian expression” (5). Although Mitchell successfully reconciles divergent schools of thought concerning the role of aesthetics in utopias, in his view their creators have generally adopted Platonic ideals of form. Where they differ is in their acceptance of the restrictions Plato places on artistic expression, as put forth in the Republic (c.375 BCE) and the Symposium (c.385–370 BCE). As a student of fictional ideal states, Mitchell is honor-bound to conclude that Plato has little to offer any utopian writer who sees a place for art and artists in the grand scheme of things. “The shadow of Plato’s condemnation of aesthetic social function” has certainly spread far and wide across social theory, but it is also worth remembering that Plato’s own writings have a decidedly creative component (22). Constructed as extended dialogical romans à these, they leave ample room for speculation as to which voice in the dialogue is meant to be the definitive one. Utopia is always by necessity a dialogue, a discussion between what is and what might be, an impressionistic exercise in contrasts whose distinguishing features often emerge in the empty space of what is not explicitly spelled out. Before coming to grips with Plato, Mitchell spells out the central discontent that readers encounter when looking for easy solutions from speculative worlds: “A literalist definition of ‘utopia’ . . . does not exist” (1). The corollary to this is no less important for understanding how utopias work: if utopia cannot be taken literally, how literally can we take what a fictional character says about it? This question concerning the reliability of literary characters’ accounts of the utopias they visit lies at the heart of one of Mitchell’s most striking insights. No matter how detailed or compelling a portrait of an imagined polis may be, the reader is under no obligation to take it at face value: indeed, speculations about better worlds often come across as jokes told to shock the reader out of a complacent acceptance of the status quo. Utopianism as a tool for...