The Expulsion of the Poets

Abstract

In Olaf Stapledon’s work (as we saw in the last chapter), light and darkness are both part of our human destiny. Utopia, or ‘near-utopia’, is no more than a passing phase in our journey towards a cosmic enlightenment that also reveals the inevitability of species extinction. Stapledon’s sense of the tragedy and ultimate futility of the universe, and of our presence in it, has its scientific basis in Darwinian evolution and modern astrophysics. At the same time, its underlying rationale is as much poetic as scientific. Stapledon, as H.G. Wells admonished him in response to Star Maker, was ‘trying to get a formula for the whole universe’, and such a ‘formula’ necessarily inhabits the sphere of the eschatological sublime; however logical in construction, its account of universal beginnings and endings is calculated to elicit the emotions of wonder and terror.² In a utopian context such emotions are necessarily unsettling, and in a utopia modelled on Plato’s Republic, they might well lead to Stapledon’s expulsion.

‘Would you like some day, Montag, to read Plato’s Republic?’

‘Of course!’

‘I am Plato’s Republic.’

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)¹