Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Eight

Arcadian Utopias

Dejah Thoris upbraids and implores the Tharks of Barsoom:

"Why, oh, why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows. Must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you! A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victims of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. You hate each other as you hate all else except yourselves. Come back to the ways of our common ancestors, come back to the light of kindliness and fellowship. The way is open to you, you will find the hands of the red men stretched out to aid you. Together we may do still more to regenerate our dying planet. The granddaughter of the greatest and mightiest of the red jeddaks has asked you. Will you come?" (A Princess of Mars, Nelson-Doubleday, 1970, pp. 52-53)

This passage is as clear and succinct as any in illustrating Edgar Rice Burroughs' conservatism. It seems to me, though, that his views were not reactionary so much as a uniquely Burkean/American version of conservatism. This version might not be easily portable except perhaps into the Lost Worlds of the imagination. Maybe fictional conservative utopias are possible after all.

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In this blog, I have made distinctions and emphasized dichotomies:

• Progressive vs. conservative
• High culture vs. low or folk culture
• Science fiction vs. fantasy and weird fiction
• Utopia vs. Dystopia
• The intellectual-elite vs. the popular

These distinctions don't always hold up very well. They are, after all, attempts to impose an architecture upon things that are wholly natural and organic. Science fiction author Jack Williamson (1908-2006) made distinctions, too. He considered the dystopian tradition older than the utopian. He found the origins of Dystopia in the ancient, G_d- or gods-centered, Egyptian/Hebraic past. Utopia, on the other hand, is from Greek humanism, still ancient, but more derived, and in our age more prevalent.

There are more distinctions to make. Here is an important one I think, from Utopian Fantasy: A Study of English Utopian Fiction Since the End of the Nineteenth Century by Richard Gerber (McGraw-Hill, 1973):

In a sense every utopia is scientific. [. . .] All the same, though most utopias show signs of scientific detachment, it is well to distinguish between scientific and arcadian utopias. For in the arcadian utopia the scientific method, the thought applied to the building of utopia, is used to abolish every kind of scientifically rigid construction within utopia. Anarchy and a sublimated state of nature are proclaimed. [. . .] Both myths are significant, but the scientific clockwork utopia possesses a higher degree of reality, embodying modern man’s real hopes and fears. The arcadian Utopia nowadays has hardly any other function than reactionary wish-fulfillment [. . .]. (pp. 46-48)

It's clear that Mr. Gerber is coming at things from the left, but his point is a good one: that in the genre of Utopia, there is a distinction to be made between the scientific (and progressive) type versus the arcadian (and conservative, or as he calls it "reactionary") type. If there is such a distinction, then a seeming contradiction--Edgar Rice Burroughs as a conservative utopian--becomes instead a possibility. You might boil it down this way:

Scientific Utopia vs. Arcadian Utopia (or the Utopia of Escape)

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Science Fiction, Dystopia, and Apocalypse vs. Science Fantasy and Lost Worlds

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H.G. Wells vs. H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs

So where does that leave weird fiction, the catchall category that filled the pages of Weird Tales? Well, I think a little falls on one side and a little on the other. I'm kind of surprised at how this is turning out . . .

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Here is another paper hidden behind a paywall, "The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America" by Marianne Sommer (2009). Only the abstract appears on the Internet at no cost:

The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)--the creator of Tarzan--and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. [. . .] Osborn and Burroughs engaged in "interesting experiment[s] in the mental laboratory which we call imagination" when they made different races, sexes, and national types compete in prehistoric struggles for existence. The laboratory setups were to reveal natural hierarchies, but they were also intended to transform the reader/viewer. The verbal and visual reconstructions of lost worlds served Burroughs's and Osborn's conservatism: the true American/Anglo-Saxon type had to be preserved, if not recovered.

Again, the drift of the paper seems towards emphasizing Burroughs' conservatism except that now there appear to be elements of social Darwinism and racial theory thrown into the mix. But this leads to another important point, and it's in regards to the utopian/science-fictional/science-fantasy hero versus his dystopian/weird-fictional counterpart . . .

To be continued . . .

Thuvia, Maid of Mars & The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Nelson-Doubleday, 1972), with cover art by Frank Frazetta. What you can't see is a banth on the back cover, a multi-legged lion-creature that threatens John Carter but doesn't seem to bother very much his pink princess. I guess we have all seen this proud and haughty look on the face of a real-life woman.

A Barsoomian city looms large in the background. One distinction I haven't made yet is that Dystopia and the scientific Utopia would seem strictly urban phenomena: the perfectly orderly society--good or bad--requires mass living, urban density, urbanized order. Has anyone ever written a rural Dystopia? Is such a thing even possible? If Richard Gerber is right, then an arcadian Utopia is a possibility, and I guess the Mars novels might fall into that category. But do Tharks inhabit Dystopia? I sense that they don't. Their society is simply primitive, too primitive to reach the level of development needed for a perfectly orderly, perfectly controlled, and perfectly awful dystopian society.

A long time ago, I had a book called The Intellectual Versus the City by Morton Gabriel White and Lucia White. I never read this book, but the title is intriguing. You would think that the intellectual would favor the city. Intellectuals certainly do today. At some point, though, there must have been a flip, but I don't know when or why that would have been. Anyway, characters in dystopian stories often seek to escape from the city and into nature. It happens in THX 1138 (1971) and Logan's Run (1976). In We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) and The World Outside by Robert Silverberg (1971), a green and natural world surrounds the dystopian city. These seem to me examples of the divide between the scientific Utopia (aka Dystopia) and the arcadian Utopia, which might as well be called by a different name.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley