Orbis Litterarum (l980), 35, 193-205

Adventures in a Strange Paradise - Utopia in “Nicolai Klimii lter subterraneum”* James F. Jones, Jr., Washington University, St. Louis

Ludvig Holberg’s Niels KIim provides an example of a text in which a therne common to eighteenth-century Europe - the utopian vision - intersects with a literary convention common to Western letters - the descent to the world below through a cave. Originally written in Latin in order that it be read throughout Europe, the book contains several aspects characteristic of the Zeitgeist of eighteenth-century philosophical and literary thought while, at the same time, its treatment of the utopian theme may well point to a possible standard by which the synoptic depictions of utopia may be distinguished from those belonging to the much larger number of more traditional utopian texts written in a century that was to a great degree obsessed with the notion of creating a perfect society.

For A. T. Ferguson Nemini tamen ob incredulitatem dicam scribam; nam fateor, eundem mihi ipsi ante susceptum hoc iter, fuisse scrupulum: splendidas esse fabulaij et meras credebam nugas, quae a nautis narrabantur.’

Within the traditions of Western letters, caves represent portals t o widely varying constructs of the literary imagination. For the ancients caves were entrances to the netherworld, to that mythological realm inhabited by demons and spirits, and little changes when this primal netherworld evolves, as in Dante’s cosmic poem, into medieval eschatology. By the time Don Quixote emerges from “la cueva de Montesinos,” however, there has been a striking modification: when asked by Sancho and the cousin what he had seen in Hell, Don Quixote replies categorically that it was not Hell at all but the most beautiful vista one could possibly imagine.2 What this famous character finds on his particular descent differs radically from the experiences of his literary predecessors, and to a n even greater degree, the same thing may likewise be said of Don Quixote’s fictional successor in descending to the world below through a cave - Niels Klim in Ludvig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter subterraneum (first edition published in 1741).

0105-75 10/80/030 193-13 $02.50/0 01980 Munksgaard, Copenhagen

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Niels comes upon a huge cavern not far from Bergen. Struck by peculiar sounds emanating from its mouth (a commonplace trait of caves in literature), he wishes to investigate. Less fortunate than Don Quixote whose guide-rope remained fast and with no Virgil to lead him, Niels has himself lowered into the cave. His rope snaps, and he finds himself hurtling down into the abyss. Much to his surprise, he realizes that he is now somehow floating about in an interstellar firmament, and he soon goes into orbit around what appears to be a planet. Then a griffin flies by, coming close to observe what sort of new moon this might be. Niels tries in vain to dissuade the griffin from attacking by showing the creature his recently conferred university diploma. Totally unimpressed by such trappings of academic prominence, the griffin attacks, Niels harpoons the creature, and the two fall through the sky to the planet Nazar. Niels climbs up into a tree, but this act unfortunately gets him in dire straits with the local inhabitants who are trees since the one into which he climbs turns out to be the constable’s wife.’ Finally Niels is taken to the capital city of the Potuan empire. This character’s descent to the world below through a cave and his subsequent adventures serve as a frame for one of the many utopian depictions to come out of that eighteenth century unequivocally labelled by Raymond Ruyer “le sikcle classique de l’utopie” in Western c ~ l t u r e . ~ It will be the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that the Potuan utopia of Niels Him, on a casual reading, contains several themes that belong to the philosophical Zeitgeist of eighteenth-century Europe and that, on closer analysis, the repercussions of the major character’s experiences in the utopia may well point to a possible standard by which the synoptic treatments of the utopian topos may be distinguished from those which were, in Professor Manuel’s turn of phrase, nothing but “make-believe embarkations for Cy t her a. ”’

* * *

From a formal point of view, eighteenth-century utopias share, with little regard for the language in which they came to be written, certain repeated characteristics: they are generally situated in some fantastic locale (excepting noticeably the Clarens settlement in La Nouvelle Hklo’ise which is in the Swiss countryside), the description of the utopian environment is textually relayed to the reader by a traveller “come from afar,” as the English utopian works of the century are wont to say, who has witnessed the environment at first hand, and - what is perhaps most significant - the utopia calls into question the basic

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premises upon which we normally judge “reality.” Niels Klim fulfills all three requirements to the letter. The utopia of the Potuan empire is located in a fantastic milieu: a vast, subterranean world replete with a firmament, planets, continents, living creatures, and the like. Niels is our customarily found traveller “come from afar”: the text we read is an autobiographical account of his journey and his reaction to what he finds. And the significance of what he does find on his trip must be interpreted in the same manner in which we look upon the two Persians’ comments on French society in Les Lettres persanes or Gulliver’s reactions to the various societies he comes upon in Swift’s novel. Social commentary is 1:he order of the day, as it were.

Present throughout the six chapters dealing with the Potuan empire in Niels Klim are many themes: common to eighteenth-century literature, the most noteworthy of which is the ubiquitous principle of relativity. Although perhaps less recognized here by critics of European cultural history than in the works of a Voltaire, a Swift, or ,a Montesquieu, this prevalent theme in Holberg’s tale plays a crucial r81e and does so from the outset. Niels is imprisoned for his indiscretion concerning the constable’s wife. His first reaction is ridicule:

Solas ibi relictus, cunctis, quae acciderant, ad animum revocatis, ridebam stultitiam huius gcntis; nam visa mihi est potius histrioniam egisse, quam iustitiam exercuisse, omniaque, quae videram, gestus, ornatus, modus procedendi etc. ludicris spectaculis ac pantomimorum scenis quam gravi Themidos tribunali apparebant digniora (pp. 24-25). [Being left there alone, pondering over in my mind all that had taken place, I had to laugh at the stupidity of this people; for it seemed to me that they were acting in some play rather than rendering justice, and all that I had seen, their gestures, their dress, their manner of proceeding at court, seemed to me more suited for some ludicrous spectacle and for the play- acting of the stage than it was for an austere tribunal of the law.]

Niels goes on to congr.atulate himself on the superiority of the Europeans to everyone else. Yet, once he begins to understand the Potuan language, he quickly changes his to13 hasty conclusions, and he learns that everything is relative. The judge deliberately acts and speaks slowly in order to have adequate time to hand down a just verdict; in the end Niels is found innocent since he was completely ignorant of the law of the land and is invited home with the constable and his wife. The intent is clear, and the procedure functioning throughout this one episode is representative of what takes place in the several chapters of Niels Klim that deal with the Potuan utopia. Niels is at first struck by the differences between the Potuan manner of doing things and European custom. As events progress, his perspective is rudely altered, and he

196 James F. Jones

comments most enthusiastically about what he sees. Niels is usually prompt to note, at the outset, the ridiculous nature of whatever Potuan trait he happens to be discussing at that precise moment. When his scorn evolves into admiration, however, he fails to do the reverse directly - to ridicule European mores. Ultimately it is not necessary that Niels do so: having the same intentions as a Montesquieu or a Swift, Holberg generally does not make direct criticism too blatant. Nonetheless, and indeed at times more subtly, the criticism is just as biting.

The Potuans, furthermore, accept Niels quite readily. He is not the object of scorn or gawking curiosity-seekers merely because he is different:

Ambulavimus absque impediment0 ac, quod maxime mirabar, sine ullo incolarum accursu; aliter ac apud nos fieri solet, ubi ad omne, quod insolitum est, catervatim advolant homines, ut curiosos pascant osculos (p. 31). [We walked around without being bothered and, what was particularly astonishing, without being jostled by the inhabitants; and that is quite different from what happens in our countries where people flock in droves to see anything out of the ordinary in order to satiate their curiosity.]

This tolerant acceptance of the extraordinary, human Niels by Potu’s arboreal inhabitants reflects a significant theme being underscored in this work, and there are numerous echos of the same insistence in Gulliver’s Travels, in Voltaire’s contes - L’Ingknu, for example - and in Les Lettres persanes. The attitude of the Potuans toward Niels is much that of many of the intellectual proponents of a humane, philosophically and ethically based tolerance, a tolerance that points directly to a major tenent of the eighteenth-century Zeitgeist - natural law.6

It is not insignificant that Holberg employs the notion of an institution for the insane in a mordacious way to promote another principle which appealed to many Augustans and philosophes and which is found in most eighteenth- century utopian depictions. Niels reports seeing a tree being consigned to the local asylum. What transpires is worth citing, despite its length, for reasons which will be apparent:

Quarenti damnationis causam respondetur, eundem publice de qualitatibus ac essentia Dei disputasse; id quod prohibitum in his terris, ubi curiosae ciusmodi disputationes temerariae adeo ac stolidae censentur, ut in compositae mentis creaturas cadere nequeant. Solitum est igitur subtiles hos disputatores, tanquam insanas.. . in ergastula publica compingere, donec delirare cessant (p. 37). [When I asked what the cause of such a sentence was, I was informed that he had argued in public about the qualities and the nature of God; this is prohibited

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in these lands where such curious disputes are thought so rash and so stupid that any creature of sound mind could not possibly fall into them. Therefore it is customary for these subtle debators to be confined to the public house like the insane until they stop raving.]

While it is true that, on the most obvious level, Holberg himself was undoubtedly referring to recent topics of concern in his native Denmark, from a more encompassing perspective, his satire of the often ridiculous religious disputes of the age closely matches that found in any number of eighteenth- century works, and one thematic and stylistic parallel is surely to be found in Voltaire’s Zadig. Wherever it appears, the essence of the problem is always the same - to what end are all these metaphysical-philosophical disquisitions on the nature of God? The question is not answered in Holberg’s novel. Those who wrangle over it, however, are summarily dismissed into an asylum.

All these explanaticm of the jurisprudent and religious customs of the Potuan empire effect much praise from the astonished Niels. Things are dealt with in more humane, reasonable manners than in the world above the ground. This theme, moreover, is nowhere made more prominent than in the fourth chapter of Niels Klim, “Aula Principis Potuani” [“The Court of the Potuan Ruler”] and the sevenrh, “De Politia” YOn the State”], two chapters which have much to say about the government of this utopia. The general attitude toward authoritative power is symbolically underscored in this passage:

Viso Principe, in genua mox procubui. At ad adorationem hanc stupebant circumstantes, et cum causam, cur genua flecterem, roganti Principi indicassem, surgere me iussit, dicens, talem cultum soli Numini deberi; addit porro, sola obedientia, labore ;IC industria hic favorem Principis obtineri (p. 46). [Seeing the Ruler, I immediately fell to my knees. Those who were in attendance there were astonished at this act of adoration, and when I told the Ruler, who had asked me what I was doing, the reason I had knelt, he ordered me to stand up, saying that such reverence ought to be shown only to God; he went on to explain that obedience, work, and industriousness alone could win his favor.]

It follows that monarchal rule was far from abolished in this utopia. The king is wise, understanding. and compassionate. The weight of government upon the people appears slight. Divine Right may have ended in the eighteenth century, the clichk goes, but Enlightened Despotism took its place. Niels Klim points to the transition, and in this case the ruler is more enlightened than despotic.

In addition, Niels finds that the most beneficent law is the one preserving

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equality among the Potuans. N o one is superior or inferior by dint of one’s birth. Indeed, being titled is looked upon as a sure indication of vileness and degradation. Virtue and merit alone count. Everyone obeys the law. Each tree, no matter how lowly, has a practical function to perform in the state. Females suckle their own young two decades before the first book of the Emile would give this very idea prominence throughout Europe. The young prince is portrayed as being tutored from the age of five on the art of governing well, learning his lessons from a compendium of precepts entitled Clavum Reipublicae [The Key to Government]. The underground kingdom is pictured as being remarkably uncluttered by the problems that beset the world above. Everything exists in a “natural” state, every citizen is loyal, every ruler just and compassionate. Discord is conspicuously absent.

* * *

If this brief sketch of the characteristic aspects of the Potuan utopia found in Niels Klim were all that might be said for the work, we should be tempted to regard it as a curiosity-piece, another literary attempt to portray a society built upon principles higher than those of societies in the “real” world, an idea which attracted not a few utopian authors of varying degrees of talent and prestige in the eighteenth century. The utopian frame, then, would serve primarily as a springboard for social criticism on Holberg’s part; more to the point, in Niels Klim we are also in an eighteenth-century sequel to the Verkehrte Welt - Potu is utop-ia reversed - about which Curtius wrote in his classic study of the Latin Middle Ages and, furthermore, as Curtius found to be true in the Carmina Burana and in the poetry of ThCophile de Viau, the topsy-turvy world upside- down in Niels Klim does in itself emphatically imply a condemnation and a censorship of the times.7 On these grounds Holberg’s novel would fit thematically into a category of interesting, albeit not overly original, texts along with Pietro Chiari’s L’Uomo d‘un altro mondo (1768), Wieland’s Agathodamon (1799), Gilbert’s Histoire de Calkjava (1700), Berington’s Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca (1737), and a plethora of other utopian depictions of the age once virtually forgotten, critically speaking, but now receiving some measure of scholarly attention. This, we would argue, is not the case.

The one trait common to the eighteenth-century utopias that were nothing more than “make-believe embarkations for Cythera” is that they were largely

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pedestrian and superficial. In a word, they were static visions. An author would attempt to describe the optimal. A character would visit a faraway land or receive a mysterious document containing information. The character would relate the blissful life, and the work would end. If we look more closely at some of the more problematic aspects of utopia, we might be able to delineate some characteristic that would separate the fanciful, superficial eighteenth-century depictions of the optimal condition from those of a more profound and more lasting significance. Clues appear in several of the most celebrated works of the century. In Voltaire’s Candide, the hero and his companion stumble upon the legendary El Dorado (chapters 17-18) where everything is “for the best,” while in Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas (both works published in 1759), Rasselas lives in the Happy Valiey, surrounded by the most idyllic environment imaginable and serenaded all day with songs that deal with how wonderful life is there (chapters 1-4). When Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes up the theme two years later with the most popular fictional work of the century, La Nouvelle Hkloi’se, the Clarens utopia will be designed solely as a cloistered milieu, prottxted from the nefarious customs outside the gates and offering the perfect existence to all who are fortunate enough to reside there.* These three works alone point conclusively to one critical truth about utopia: the fictional characters cannot in the end withstand the degree of perfection that engulfs them. Candide leaves El Dorado because he must find Mademoiselle Cunegonde, his contemporary flees the Happy Valley because i t is just too pristine, and. the fabled Julie adopts a life of total quiescence, falls ill from an accident, and eventually dies. In short, there is an egregious lack of chemical balance between the dynamism of the character and the stasis of the utopian milieu, and it is our contention that this textual realization may serve to differentiate the superficial utopias of the eighteenth century - the “embarkations to Cythera” - from those of more profound significance.’

It follows, accordingly, that the word utopia may indeed signify optimal, but it also implies immutable. Rigidity and fixity permeate every aspect of life in the Potuan kingdom of NieZs Him. The inhabitants are always sober, solemn, and moderate except at the theatre where they may be joyous and unrestrained: “Id quod animadvertens hospes; per totum, ait, hunc Principatum seria ac nugae per vices nos partiuntur” @. 31) [“This is what my host, perceiving my curiosity, said, ‘Throughout the entire kingdom we customarily divide our time between serious matters and amusing diversions”’]. As far as religious matters are concerned, one is free to do what one pleases, at least on the surface.

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Everyone must subscribe to a general statement of deistic belief, similar in form to the Apostles Creed. However,

Prohibitum hic est . . . in libros sacros commentari. Et, si quis disputare audeat de essentia et attributis Dei, de spirituum et animarum qualitatibus . . . in nosoco- mium urbis publicum truditur . . . tantum illi, qui palam impugnant religionem legibus sancitam ut pacis publicae turbatores puniuntur (p. 60). [It is prohibited to comment upon the sacred books. And if anyone dares to argue about the nature and attributes of God, about the qualities of spirits or souls, that person is confined to an asylum.. . as for those who publicly impugn the sacred religion, established by law, they are looked on as disturbers of the public peace.]

This singularly important facet of utopian life - the state religion complete with creed to which all must by law subscribe - will function prominently in one of the most celebrated utopian treatises of the age, Rousseau’s Contrat social (1762). In the eighth chapter of that work, “De la Religion civile,” Rousseau proposes a “profession de foi purement civile dont il appartient au souverain de fixer les articles, non pas prtcistment comme dogmes de religion, mais comme sentiments de sociabilitk sans lesquels il est impossible d’Etre bon citoyen ni sujet fid&le.”’O In Rousseau’s treatment of this issue, it should be recalled, the penalty for not conforming is death.

Finally, concerning the jurisprudent and governmental system of law that controls the lives of the inhabitants of the Potuan kingdom, we find that same immutable rigidity that characterizes the religion of the state and the fact that the inhabitants may laugh only at prescribed intervals and in prescribed places:

In legem semel latam ac publica auctoritate sancitam prohibitum est sub poena capitis commentari, adeo ut in rebus politicis restrictior sit libertas quam in sacris. Causam huius instituti hanc afferunt: si quis in religione aut rebus fidei aberret, suo solo periculo errat: at si quis leges publice sancitas in dubium vocet, aut interpretationibus suis in alium sensum detorquere moliatur, societatem turbat (p. 74). [It is prohibited under penalty of death to make comments on any law once it has been passed and sanctioned by public authority, to the end that one has less liberty in political matters than in religious ones. The Potuans offer the following explanation for this custom: if one goes astray in religious matters or in other matters of faith, one does so at his own risk: but one who calls into question publicly sanctioned laws or one who seeks to destroy these laws with other interpretations is an enemy to society.]

There is no more concise statement in the work than this to prove that the logical extension of utopia must be the adoption of stasis in all aspects of utopian life. This idea is foreshadowed at an early moment in Niels Klim when Niels remarks that the Potuans are totally unconcerned with anything that

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might alter the status quo: “Nam incolae huius planetae novitatis parum avidi solida tantum sectantur” (p. 31) [“For the inhabitants of this planet have little taste for anything novel and wish to pursue only matters of a n established nature”]. What exists does so absolutely and with utter finality.

In the end Niels becomes more and more impatient with the increasing tedium of his existence and soon grows restless. He asks permission to journey outside the confines of the Potuan empire. He does so in the longest of all the chapters of this novel (chapter nine).’’ Niels, on his return, is heralded a national hero, and then he makes the one fatal mistake which no utopia will possibly tolerate - he seeks to change the immutable course of things in the utopia itself:

At cum in vili adco occupatione canescere nimis dururn atque acerbum mihi esset, desperatum istud, quod itermiseram, resumo consilium, reformationem aliquam in rebus politicis meditatus, quo novo aliquo cornmento et reipublicae inservirem et propio rneo comrnodo simul prospicerem (p. 143). [But when I realized that it would be exceedingly hard and repulsive to grow old in such a degrading occupation, I took up once again in desperation that plan I had had to stop working on before, that reform in political matters that I had been thinking about for some time, and thus proposing something new I thought I would both serve the public good and further my own position at the same time.]

What Niels sought to do in the Potuan kingdom concerns a theme striking in its relevance to one of the great issues of our own time. The Potuans’ theory of equality extended most specifically to the equality of the sexes, a revolutionary notion indeed given the pervading attitudes of some of the eighteenth-century philosophers toward women. Women held positions of high prominence in the Potuan empire, and, in point of fact, the judge who heard the case of Niels’s molesting the constable’s wife was, much t o his initial astonishment, a female tree. In a flamboyant and divisive speech, Niels proposes to exclude women from high office, and he introduces legislation to that effect. From a perspective exterior to the theme being developed, it must be noted here that Holberg’s textual use of his fictional character as authorial voice undergoes a t this juncture a telling modification. Niels’s actions are, for the century, so radical, so controversial that author and fictional persona separate, and the resulting shift in the novel is marked by the creation of textual distance between the two, another striking dissimilarity between Niels Klirn and other literary works of this genre. Niels is in the end brought before the Senate, condemned for having made a seditious proposition that threatens the welfare of the state, and is sentenced to banishment in the firmament for suggesting

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such a dangerous notion. He had endeavored to change that which must be by definition unalterable - the status quo - and in so doing had broken that dictum held to be most rudimentary to life in the Potuan kingdom and for that matter in every utopia: the existing, supposedly optimal order of things is absolutely inviolable. Niels is banished. Plato likewise understood centuries before that those who would disturb the immutable order of utopia must be banished at the outset if the utopia is to exist at all - poets are to be excluded from the Republic.” The ultimate paradox about utopian writing stems from the simple truth that the freedom to dream of other things that an author allows himself in creating a utopia in the first place is never allowed in profound, synoptic, multi-tiered utopian depictions those individuals within a utopia who choose to do the same.

When, more than one hundred years later, another author will return to the use of the cave as a literary topos, Jules Verne in the Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), his hero’s point of departure will have changed from a cavern near Bergen to a cave at the bottom of an extinct volcano in Iceland. This time the fictional character will discover seas, prehistoric men and artifacts, and dinosaurs. Axel will find nothing of the subterranean world that Niels comes upon after descending into the cave near Bergen any more than Niels had seen Don Quixote’s lovely vision, witnessed the torments of the damned with Dante and Virgil, or heard Evander’s descriptions of Cacus’s cave along with Aenius and his companions. That fact underscores the formal significance of Holberg’s novel: a literary topos common to the eighteenth century - the depiction of utopia - here intersects with a literary convention common to Western letters - the descent to the world below through a cave - and, as Jung has written, the purpose of the descent is to demonstrate that only in the realm of danger can the hero find what he terms “the treasure hard to attain.”13 From the point of view of European cultural history, it is not in the least insignificant that Holberg chose to join the thematics of utopia with the convention of the journey below, and, more to the issue, that he chose to d o so in Latin, which he considered the universally accepted language of European civilization. As for the “treasure hard to attain,” it is perhaps to be found here in Niels’s understanding of utopia’s ultimate consequences and in our perception of why Niels had to leave Potu just as Candide left El Dorado, Rasselas his Happy Valley, and as the poet was banished from the Republic. In another of those understatements from his memoirs, Holberg seems to have been more than just casually aware of what he had tried to accomplish: “A fisherman must bait his

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hook to the taste of the little fishes if he expects to catch them; and in like manner philosophers of the greatest note have from time to time conveyed instruction through the medium of apologues and entertaining tales.”14

NOTES

* A draft of this essay was presented at the 1978 meeting of the American Association

1. “I cannot take issue with anyone for not believing what I am writing here, however; for I must confess that before undertaking this journey I had some doubts myself as to whether these stories related by travellers were anything more than fanciful accounts and trifling diversions.” Ludvig von Holberg, Nicolai Klimii Iter subterraneum (Havniae: Sumptibus Societatis Ad Promovendas Litteras Danicas Conditae, 1866), p. 178. All subsequent references to this work, now referred to as Niefs Klim, will be included in the text of the essay following the appropriate citation. The English translations of the eighteenth-century Latin will be ours.

2. “‘infierno le Ilamiisl!’ dijo don Quijote. ‘Pues no le 1larnt.i~ ansi, porque no lo merece, como luego vertis . . . y cuando menos lo pensaba, sin saber c6mo ni c6mo no, despertC dC1 y me hallt en la mitad del mas bello, ameno y deleitoso prado que puede criar la naturaleza ni imaginar la mas discreta imaginacih humana.”’ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martin de Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1968), pp. 701-702.

3. Cyrano, it should be remembered, was more fortunate. Falling from the lunar atmosphere, he lands on a tree that turns out to be none other than the Tree of Life which, of course, saves him: “Par bonheur, ce lieu-18 Ctait . . . le paradis terrestre, et l’arbre sur lequel je tombai se trouva justement 1’Arbre de vie.” Cyrano de Bergerac, Les Etats ct empires de la lune, in L’Autre Monde (Grenoble: Roissard, 19671, I, 28.

4. Raymond Ruyer, L’Utopie et les utopies (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 187.

5 . Frank E. Manuel, “Sketch for a Natural History of Paradise,” Dedalus, C1, No. 1 (l972), 121. To our knowledge there has been no previous, systematic attempt to situate Niels Him thr:matically in the mainstream of European cultural history and to study the relationship of the ropos of utopia in the work to other utopian depictions of the age. For the most thorough and most readily available introduction to the author, see F. J. Billeskov Jansen, Ludvig Holberg (New York: Twayne, 1974); concerning the rapport between Holberg’s dramatic Ceuvre and those French dramatists who had an influence on him, the reader is referred to professor Jansen’s two articles “Ludvig Holberg and Some French Thinkers,” Scandinavian Studie.c, eds. Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Erik J. Friis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), pp. 153-169 and “Le Style litttraire de Holberg dans ses rapports avec les modtles europtens de l’auteur,” Langue et littiratwe, VI, 293-294; for the critical fortunes of Niels Kfim, see the third chapter

for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Chicago.

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

of Paul Victor Rubow’s Reflexioner over dansk og fremmed litteratur, nye kritiske studier (Knbenhavn: E. Munksgaard, 1942). There have been three English translations of Nicolai Klimii Iter subterraneum (1742, 1828, 1845); the first has been used as the basis for an edition brought out in 1960, edited by James I. McNab, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Since the English rendering of the original Latin reproduced in this edition might seem stilted today and since the version was not always faithful to the Latin, the citations employed in the text of this essay have been retranslated and included herein. Holberg’s memoirs include a few comments, phrased in his customarily understated manner, concerning Niels Klim. a text that fits at one and the same time formally into the “fantastic voyage” category of similar accounts and thematically into the utopian sub-genre quite common to its age: “ . . . the book contains only a few harmless jokes and a sort of system of morality seasoned with a little pleasantry.” Ludvig Holberg, Memoirs, ed. Stewart E. Fraser (Leiden: Brill, 1970), p. 167. Voltaire’s numerous tongue-in-cheek statements in the correspondence that his contes were nothing but “boutades” and “rogatons” closely parallel Holberg’s that Niels Klim “contains only a few harmless jokes. ” Montesquieu’s celebrated definition of “loi naturelle” seems to be mirrored in the Potuans’ actions: recasting Saint Luke’s words, Montesquieu described the “loi de la lumitre naturelle qui veut que nous fassions B autrui ce que nous voudrions qu’on nous fit” (De PEsprit des lois. X, 3). “Der Rahmen des antiken Adynaton dient der Zeitriige und Zeitklage. Aus der Reihung von impossibilia erwachst der topos Verkehrte Welt.” Ernst Robert Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern und Miinchen, Franke Verlag, 1961), p. 106. See James F. Jones, Jr., “La Nouvelle Hdo‘ise”: Rousseau and Utopia (Genkve: Droz, 1978), especially chapter four. This fact would seem to corroborate Raymond Trousson’s conclusions in his article “L’Utopie en procks au sikcle des Lumikres” which appeared in the Festschrift Essays on the Age of Enlightenment in Honor of Ira 0. Wade, ed. Jean Macary (Gentve: Droz, 1977). Professor Trousson observed from his studies of PrCvost, Swift, Mandeville, and Tiphaigne de La Roche that human scepticism could not be reconciled with the adoption of an utterly utopian social structure. See especially pp. 324 ff. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social (Paris: Editions Garnier Frtres, 1962),

It is this chapter where Swift’s influence is to be most conspicuously found. Niels travels all over the planet Nazar, coming upon societies of varying types and trees of differing customs and manners. In each case the society has particular characteristics commented upon in a journal that Niels keeps. The societies are compared by him both to the Potuan kingdom whence he set forth and the European civilization he knew best. Professor Jeanne K. Welcher has included Niels Klim in her series of eighteenth-century imitations of Gulliver’s Travels published by Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. We have learned from Professor Welcher that the last volume of the series, Gulliveriana VZI, will contain a bibliography of critical studies on the imitative works. The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968),

p. 334.

Adventures in a Strange Paradise 205

Book 111, 398 a-b, p. 76; see also Book X, 605 b (pp. 288-289). 13. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon

14. Memoirs, p. 169. Books, 1953), pp. 320-322.

James F. Jones, Jr. Born 1947. Ph.D. Associate Professor of Romance Languages, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Has published La NouveIle Hkloise: Rousseau and Utopia (1978) and several articles on 18th century literature and the narrative technique of Giovanni Verga.