DOI 10.

1515/arcadia-2012-0030 Arcadia 2012; 47(2): 500–503

Fokkema, Douwe: Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. 448 pp.

Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West went into print just as the
news of Douwe Fokkema’s death reached the public. It is thus incumbent on the
reviewer to place the volume, however cursorily, in the larger context of its
author’s extraordinary career. Douwe Fokkema was a towering figure in the field
of Comparative Literature – an exemplary scholar who committed his life’s work
to putting the discipline on a sound theoretical footing and to broadening its
horizon beyond the limitations of the traditional Western canon. Trained as a
sinologist at the University of Leyden and at Berkeley, Fokkema also worked in
Beijing for the diplomatic service of the Netherlands during the turbulent years of
the Cultural Revolution. One need not be a psychologist to conclude that the latter
experience fed into his life-long interest in the conjunctions between literary
imagination and political practice, an issue which was central to his very first
scholarly monograph1 and that is also at the heart of Perfect Worlds.
This is a bold and ambitious book. Fokkema aims to provide a conceptual
framework capacious enough to encompass all manifestations of utopian litera-
ture, regardless of their cultural provenance. Such literature, he explains at the
outset, has its roots in an anthropological universal: “the desire for a better
world.” (15) In order for this universal drive to take the shape of literary utopian-
ism, certain historical conditions are required which Fokkema specifies in the first
two of the hypotheses which guide his inquiry: (1) literary utopias emerge during
moments of cultural crisis, such as the early modern period in Europe or in China
during the nineteenth century, and (2) they are premised on a secular outlook, as
most religions reconcile people with their lives as they are and thus stymie the
impulse to radically restructure society. Fokkema furthermore argues that (3) the
shift from “eutopian” to dystopian literature occurs primarily as a response to
actual attempts at social engineering, which historically were, of course, often
inspired by utopian ideas. Finally, he claims (4) that the utopian literatures of
China and the West have developed in opposite directions: Western utopianism
has slowly moved away from its early affinities to political and economic theory
and increasingly focused on the immaterial aspects of human welfare, and espe-
cially from the twentieth century onwards it has often sought inspiration from the
East in this regard (Fokkema examines James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, Hesse’s Das
Glasperlenspiel, Huxley’s Island, and Houellebecq’s La possibilité d’un îsle to

1 Douwe Fokkema, Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence 1956–60 (The Hague: Mouton,
1965).

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 Reviews 501

illustrate this point). In China, on the other hand, literary utopianism was closely
linked to the Confucian tradition and consequently emphasized individual virtue
and self-cultivation more than anything else. This began to change only under the
influence of modern Western thought, particularly after the frontal assault on
Chinese traditionalism mounted by the May Fourth Movement, which advocated a
pragmatic materialism and looked to Darwin and Marx for its theoretical founda-
tions.
Fokkema makes no effort to lay out and defend these claims in any systematic
fashion. Rather, they provide him with a set of fixed points as he navigates what
is by all measures a vast textual expanse. He covers Chinese, Dutch, English,
French, German, Italian, and Russian literature, discussing both the classical
texts of the utopian tradition, beginning with More’s Utopia, and a whole host of
more recondite texts, for example Hendrik Smeek’s Description of the Mighty
Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708) or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Fokke-
ma’s criteria for inclusion are at times unclear. Why, one is tempted to ask, is
there no mention of Doni’s I Mondi (1552), Schnabel’s Insel Felsenburg, or Trol-
lope’s The Fixed Period, whereas Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde or Brecht’s
Der gute Mensch von Sezuan are treated at some length – and only to arrive at the
conclusion that they cannot really be characterized as utopian after all? Yet a
certain eclecticism is unavoidable given the scope of Fokkema’s effort. For me, at
least, it was often precisely the sections where he strayed from the avowed subject
of the book which turned out to be the most informative and enjoyable, for
example the chapters on China as a focal point of European utopian fantasies
and, conversely, on Chinese occidentalism from the Taiping rebellion to the May
Fourth Movement; or the chapter which traces the debate about nihilism in mid-
nineteenth century Russia from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons through Cherny-
shevsky’s What Is to Be Done? to Dostoevsky’s Devils and Notes from the Under-
ground.
A reviewer who were to give a thorough assessment of the scholarly merit of
Perfect Worlds would have to match Fokkema’s fluency in all the literary tradi-
tions covered in the book – and there are not many scholars alive today for whom
it would not be presumptuous to make such a claim. Nevertheless, I shall venture
to sketch briefly what appear to me the two most salient objections to its project.
Despite Fokkema’s strenuous efforts to fold European utopianism and expres-
sions of the “desire for a better world” in classical Chinese literature into a single
generic category, it seems that the differences between these two traditions
ultimately outweigh the similarities. Fokkema sets up Tao Yuanming’s “Story of
Peach Blossom Spring,” composed in the 5th century C.E., as the Chinese equiva-
lent to More’s Utopia – i.e., as a literary prototype which established the basic
parameters for subsequent utopian writing within the respective tradition. And

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502 Reviews

yet, this story barely meets his own criteria for utopian literature: its lyrical
description of a harmonious agrarian community that has escaped the tyranny of
the Qin emperor by retreating into a hidden valley does not include any “details
about the political and economic aspects of society” (15) which allow it to flourish
as it does. It is less a secular blueprint for the reorganization of society than a
quasi-religious allegory illustrating the Daoist ideal of a reclusive life, and it
probably has more in common with the genres of the bucolic idyll and the fairy
tale from which Fokkema seeks to distinguish utopian writing at the outset of his
study. To his credit, he does not dissimulate any of these difficulties, and in
working through them he provides a stimulating account of the cultural differ-
ences between China and the West. Still, this does beg the question what is to be
gained by slapping the same label on two literary traditions that are so notably
different, and whether a stronger emphasis on their distinctiveness would not
have allowed for an even more fine-grained understanding of those actual pro-
cesses of cross-cultural literary reception which Fokkema describes so rivetingly,
for example in Shen Congwen’s riffing on Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Travels in China
(1928) or Lao She’s adoption of the conventions of Western utopian literature in
his satirical novel Cat Country (1933).
A second, closely related objection concerns Fokkema’s concept of secular-
ization, which throughout the book remains quite vague, and whose application
to Chinese culture appears questionable. That the rise of Western utopianism is
closely linked to secularization is a claim few scholars will dispute. It was the new
forms of “self-sufficient humanism,”2 as Charles Taylor calls them, growing out of
the Reformation, which for the first time in European history made it plausible to
believe that people could permanently improve social conditions through the
application of rational principles to the problem of political and economic order.
To posit this phenomenon as analogous to Confucianism, as Fokkema does,
merely on the grounds that the latter, too, emphasizes human flourishing in this
world and eschews any form of supernaturalism, amounts, I contend, to missing
precisely those features of Western secularism that made it such an explosive
historical force. In contrast to the latter, the Confucian ideal of moral self-cultiva-
tion is closely linked to a view of government in which the good ruler is supposed
to allow things to take their natural course, rather than using the power of the
state to forcefully impose order on society – and in this regard, Confucianism is
really not so far removed from the Daoist ideal of “wu wei” (or “non-action”). (If
there is a tradition in China which advocates a more activist view of state power,
it would be neither Daoism nor Confucianism, but rather Legalism, which like the

2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006): 18.

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 Reviews 503

latter arose during the Warring States period and subsequently became the
official doctrine of the Qin empire – a tradition, however, of which Perfect Worlds
makes no mention.) Thus the contrast which Fokkema constructs between a
supposedly otherworldly, non-interventionist Daoism, on the one hand, and a
“secular” and politically engaged Confucianism, on the other, is problematic
precisely under the one aspect which is most relevant for his argument. Both
Daoism and Confucianism are rather distrustful of attempts to improve society on
the basis of rational insight by individually acting subjects – a stance far removed
from the voluntarist mindset that gave rise to Western utopianism.3
Such objections must, however, not detract from the remarkable scholarly
achievement which this book constitutes. Perfect Worlds is a treasure trove of
literary history, and whatever it may lack in conceptual rigor is more than
compensated for by the sheer amount of information it conveys. It is difficult to
imagine a reader who will not come away from it with a wealth of new insights.

Dr. Hannes Bergthaller: Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures,

National Chung-Hsing University, 250 Kuokuang Road, 40227 Taichung, Taiwan
(Republic of China), E-Mail: hbergthaller@dragon.nchu.edu.tw

3 My perspective on this problematic – which is, I must point out, that of a non-specialist – is
informed by the views of the sinologists Hans-Georg Moeller and Hans-Rudolf Kantor. Any
misunderstandings are, of course, entirely my own.

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Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS
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