In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [28]
The edges of the maps—out of our sight, beyond the known world—were also where the writers of early utopias set their tales. During the Middle Ages, utopias were not devised much, since the perfect society had been postponed to the life after death or until after the millennium or the second coming; as the 1930s Wobbly folk song put it, “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.” There was a no-place called The Land of Cockaigne, where the walls were made of pies and the shingles of cakes, sex was unrestricted, and laziness and gluttony were available to all; but although a paradise of sorts, it was—officially at any rate—a fools’ paradise.
However, once the Renaissance and then the early modern age got going, utopia made a comeback. Like Plato’s seminal Atlantis and the Avalon of Arthurian romances, these utopias were typically located on islands to be found just out of reach of the real maps, like the utopia in the book of that name by Thomas More. Even the deserted island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest contains a utopia: the Golden Age society described by the kindly character Gonzalo, where no one has to work, where all are free and equal by decree of the king—a slight contradiction there—and where there is no crime or war. (The dystopia latent in The Tempest is the very same physical location viewed through the eyes of Caliban, its original inhabitant.) In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the utopias are comic and satirical, but they are similarly located on islands, each of which is provided with a realistic-looking map by the fictional wandering and tale-telling sailor, Lemuel Gulliver—in the tradition of an earlier sea captain and an earlier map, those in More’s Utopia.
But then real mapping filled in previously “undiscovered” areas of the ocean, thus ruling out islands and driving utopia-dystopia further into the unknown. First it went underground, to the traditional location of under-the-hill fairylands and worlds of the dead and the kinds of mountain-king dwarfs we find in Tolkien and in the folklore he drew on. (The underworld is also the unknown realm of choice for various concocted nineteenth-century gnome-lands and fairylands, that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice among them.) Such cavern sagas as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Age and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth were placed in vast hollows beneath the Earth’s crust, replete with surviving prehistoric beasts and giant ferns.
But then, once the Earth’s structure had been more fully described by geologists, ustopia moved to unexplored hinterlands, where we find H. Rider Haggard’s lost city of Kôr in his novel She, or the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, or H. G. Wells’s “Country of the Blind.” But these locations also became too thoroughly mapped, and ustopia had to relocate again.
For a while the other planets in the solar system were possibilities, though Mars and Venus and the Moon had to be given up once we knew what was actually on them, such as no intelligent life. The final move was to an outer space far beyond our system, or to a parallel universe, or to a past so long ago that all traces of it have been obliterated; or to the future, also an unknown.
In the previous chapter, “Burning Bushes,” I suggested that the literary offspring of theology, such as angels and devils, moved to outer space because we no longer believed in their doctrinal underpinnings sufficiently to make these creatures plausible in realistic narratives set on Earth. But maybe this emigration was also caused by a real estate problem. We filled the unknown spaces with us—with ourselves, and our names and roads and maps. We tidied up, we gentrified, we put in streetlights; so the rowdy and uncontrollable bohemians of the imagination—always dwellers in the penumbras—had to move on.
Maps are not only about space, they’re also about time: maps are frozen journeys. They may be journeys from the past: places we’ve been, or whose history