Utopian Philosophy and Its Reciprocity in The Island
"Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it,
already there."
Utopia, is the idealized "no place" or "nowhere" first described by Thomas More. In Huxley's writing, the first time we come across the manifestation of perfection when Will encounters the two children of the island, describing their pure appearance:
Will looked from one child to the other. How beautiful they were, and how faultless, how extraordinarily elegant! Like two little thoroughbreds.
Like many other utopian literary examples, idealization is sustained by the basic principles that have been established. These are presented to our outsider character Will Farnaby shortly after he arrives:
"It merely states the underlying principles. Read about those first... You'll have a better understanding of what was actually done if you start by knowing what had to be done—what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what's what."
We also observe traces of More's vision of utopia through the necessity of isolation; as Huxley's Island is a forbidden territory, secluded from external impacts much like the ditches that separate More's utopian land from the motherland.
"All things, to all things perfectly indifferent, perfectly work together in discord for a Good beyond good, for a Being more timeless in transience, more eternal in its dwindling than God there in heaven."
According to Barbara Goodwin, utopianism is concerned with 'the good life' and puts forward the happiness of man. From the principles of the Pala Island:
Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being. We can be virtuous without knowing who in fact we are. The beings who are merely good are not Good Beings; they are just pillars of society.
As Frederic Jameson wrote in The Desire Called Utopia, "The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality..."
Besides, utopianism functions as a purpose, criteria, an alternative paradigm. Unlike the liberal approach, the utopian does not try to justify or legitimize the existing. Because utopianism, in essence, is nothing but a critique of the existing social structure. (B. Goodwin) From the beginning of the book, alongside the explicit criticism of the current social structure (such as questioning the social concept of belief);
Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words—people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history—sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders.
We also come across many examples of more subtle denouncements of social behaviour. To illustrate, with the intent of consoling Will, the little islander girl Mary he encounters asks:
"Remember what happened when you were a little boy," Mary Sarojini was saying. "What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?" She had taken him in her arms, had said, "My poor baby, my poor little baby." "She did that?" The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. "But that's awful! That's the way to rub it in. 'My poor baby,' " she repeated derisively, "it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you'd never forget it."
In the book, there also seems to be a continuing criticism questioning strength and its relationship with honesty. The locals appear to have adapted an understanding of facing pain and being true to oneself in order to overcome it:
"But will it be the right kind of strength? Or will it be the strength of armor, the strength of shut-offness, the strength of being absorbed in your work and your ideas and not caring a damn for anything else?"
We observe this especially whenever Will confronts physical or emotional pain; in the beginning of his time on the island, he seems to be dishonest in allowing himself to accept the pain:
'The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.'
'He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.'
The doctors response to these kinds of reactions demonstrate the difference between the understanding of the outer world and the utopian island;
"When you laugh like that," he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, "your face becomes curiously ugly."
...as we see in his description of Will's face after he sees his insincere laugh while expressing uneasy thoughts on his father's drinking.
"On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it's rather beautiful. Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make those noises?"
But as our character spends more time on the island, it can be suggested that he becomes more truthful about his pain: "I'm feeling miserable," he answered without opening his eyes. There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy— only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth. "I'm feeling miserable."
In this last part, it can even be said that the writer's description of Will's expression becomes more similar to the way he has been describing the expressions of Mary, who is a good representation of the utopian social ideals.
i.e. There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer.
In a way, utopia defines a fictionalized, or in other words, designed "good" built environment. Thus, this allows us to consider all designed activity as a utopian fiction. For instance, architecture itself fictionalizes living as the art of organization of space. In a way, architectural revolutions generated the necessity of redesigning the human life. This leads to the significance of the spatial description within the literary utopian fiction, and the island provides this not only by the depictions of built spaces but also the landscape itself:
They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.
Utopia, is the idealized "no place" or "nowhere" first described by Thomas More. In Huxley's writing, the first time we come across the manifestation of perfection when Will encounters the two children of the island, describing their pure appearance:
Will looked from one child to the other. How beautiful they were, and how faultless, how extraordinarily elegant! Like two little thoroughbreds.
Like many other utopian literary examples, idealization is sustained by the basic principles that have been established. These are presented to our outsider character Will Farnaby shortly after he arrives:
"It merely states the underlying principles. Read about those first... You'll have a better understanding of what was actually done if you start by knowing what had to be done—what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what's what."
We also observe traces of More's vision of utopia through the necessity of isolation; as Huxley's Island is a forbidden territory, secluded from external impacts much like the ditches that separate More's utopian land from the motherland.
"All things, to all things perfectly indifferent, perfectly work together in discord for a Good beyond good, for a Being more timeless in transience, more eternal in its dwindling than God there in heaven."
According to Barbara Goodwin, utopianism is concerned with 'the good life' and puts forward the happiness of man. From the principles of the Pala Island:
Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being. We can be virtuous without knowing who in fact we are. The beings who are merely good are not Good Beings; they are just pillars of society.
As Frederic Jameson wrote in The Desire Called Utopia, "The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality..."
Besides, utopianism functions as a purpose, criteria, an alternative paradigm. Unlike the liberal approach, the utopian does not try to justify or legitimize the existing. Because utopianism, in essence, is nothing but a critique of the existing social structure. (B. Goodwin) From the beginning of the book, alongside the explicit criticism of the current social structure (such as questioning the social concept of belief);
Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words—people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history—sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders.
We also come across many examples of more subtle denouncements of social behaviour. To illustrate, with the intent of consoling Will, the little islander girl Mary he encounters asks:
"Remember what happened when you were a little boy," Mary Sarojini was saying. "What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?" She had taken him in her arms, had said, "My poor baby, my poor little baby." "She did that?" The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. "But that's awful! That's the way to rub it in. 'My poor baby,' " she repeated derisively, "it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you'd never forget it."
In the book, there also seems to be a continuing criticism questioning strength and its relationship with honesty. The locals appear to have adapted an understanding of facing pain and being true to oneself in order to overcome it:
"But will it be the right kind of strength? Or will it be the strength of armor, the strength of shut-offness, the strength of being absorbed in your work and your ideas and not caring a damn for anything else?"
We observe this especially whenever Will confronts physical or emotional pain; in the beginning of his time on the island, he seems to be dishonest in allowing himself to accept the pain:
'The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.'
'He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.'
The doctors response to these kinds of reactions demonstrate the difference between the understanding of the outer world and the utopian island;
"When you laugh like that," he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, "your face becomes curiously ugly."
...as we see in his description of Will's face after he sees his insincere laugh while expressing uneasy thoughts on his father's drinking.
"On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it's rather beautiful. Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make those noises?"
But as our character spends more time on the island, it can be suggested that he becomes more truthful about his pain: "I'm feeling miserable," he answered without opening his eyes. There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy— only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth. "I'm feeling miserable."
In this last part, it can even be said that the writer's description of Will's expression becomes more similar to the way he has been describing the expressions of Mary, who is a good representation of the utopian social ideals.
i.e. There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer.
In a way, utopia defines a fictionalized, or in other words, designed "good" built environment. Thus, this allows us to consider all designed activity as a utopian fiction. For instance, architecture itself fictionalizes living as the art of organization of space. In a way, architectural revolutions generated the necessity of redesigning the human life. This leads to the significance of the spatial description within the literary utopian fiction, and the island provides this not only by the depictions of built spaces but also the landscape itself:
They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.
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