Lost Worlds and the Revenge of Realism

Utopian romances describing “lost” races established in a hollow Earth or isolated in inaccessible valleys abounded in the US around the turn of the last century. These tales generally feature a team of explorers from the outside world who come into a stagnant society in which immense riches accumulate and where archaic rituals coexist with advanced technology and disturb the equilibrium of that ambiguous utopia, a utopia engendered by anachronism, especially in the form of the mixing of epochs. 20 romances belonging to this tradition (first prefigured in Frank Cowan’s Revi-Lona, 1879) are examined in the essay, which assesses the recurring thematic concerns of these fictions as expressive of the image that the “man in the street” had of “conspicuous consumption” (à la Veblen) American millionaires realized it at the fin du siécle. The lost-race utopist thus transposes into fiction the values of the “leisure class” and his ambivalent bourgeois admiration for its standards of “pecuniary beauty.” Separated from the rest of society by his style of life, the millionaire becomes a legendary being, stereotypes of whom radically contradict past ideals of democratic austerity, frugal and egalitarian, which the Founding Fathers of the American Republic espoused. The lost-race utopist hyperbolically envisions the prodigality, the extravagance, the accumulation of heteroclite riches of the “leisure class,” but combines them with the old ideologies of the Frontier and of the pioneers, ideologies rescuscitated by the dream-possibilities opened in the Klondike at a moment when opportunities for becoming rich were in actuality disappearing. Such a sequestered utopia as these writers conceive of has no value as a model: the object of covetousness, it is accessible only to a few elect. It therefore testifies to the privitization of utopia, imaged (and as it were, allegorized) by the emblem of an internal sun shining at the center of the Earth, and likewise expressed in the way the imaginary lost race organizes power around an authoritarian figure (king, arch-priest, princess). The entire form of the implosive system is constructed from the paradox of a “contemporary antiquity,” from utopia privatized desire and as commodity, and from fetishized power. These tales for the most part end in the disintegration of the lost world, partly as a result of an internal disintegration, partly as a result of the intervention of the hero(s) from the “real” America. To paraphrase William Morris, it can he said that the lost-race utopia is “a Vanderbilt paradise dreamt by a Cockney.” (MA)

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Possible world · Realism · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction