“Utopia” is not a word often associated with the fiction of James Baldwin; indeed, his stories are commonly filled with the dystopian elements of Harlem slums or similar locales of hopelessness. But dystopia engenders dreams of utopia, and “Sonny’s Blues,” a masterwork of desperation, addiction, and redemption, contains within it three paths to utopia – two false, one true.
Sonny, the narrator’s brother, seeks a way out of the dystopia of 1960s Harlem to a place where people can communicate and commune with each other, and thereby be free. He resists the temptation of one false path, religion – which provides, in the forms of Eastern mysticism and evangelical Christianity, a seductive promise of a utopian afterlife, in exchange for acceptance of this flawed world and an abandonment of revolution – only to succumb to the second false path, heroin, which offers a spurious sense of control and communion in exchange for addiction, poverty, and eventual death.
But drawing upon his creative energies, he masters a third, intensely personal path, music, and by shattering the walls of alienation, “at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen” （Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” 141）, he creates an emancipating moment of anticipatory illumination for himself and his audience, a shared space within here-and-now reality that Ernst Bloch calls a “Vorschein” of utopia that can be realized through art, “a countermove against the bad existence,” a revolutionary vision intended not to comfort us into complacency, but to bring that bad existence “to the point of collapse” （Bloch, Utopian Function... 109）.
This paper will explore the theme of utopia in Baldwin’s story, in the Blochian sense of an
immanent,＊ virtual, “not-yet” utopia, always present and accessible through creative imagination. At the same time, the paper will consider that slippery term, utopia, as well as the positives and negatives of utopian longing, the benefits and the potential for destruction to be found in walking the knife-edge path to utopia, what Baldwin refers to in the story as the line between “deep water and drowning” （139）.
Utopian Dreaming
Because of the slipperiness of the meaning of
“utopia,” it seems practical to go into definitions before proceeding on to the story. Typically, when the word is used, it implies a blueprint-like description of an imaginary, perhaps impossible, perfect or near-perfect civilization. But this is far from the only meaning. Even in that implicit definition, the subjectivity involved in envisioning perfection makes one person’s eutopia
（or positive utopia） another’s dystopia （or negative utopia）, or perhaps even anti-utopia （a utopia that criticizes the very idea of eutopia）. Claeys and Sargent lay out some basic, simple definitions that work well as starting points for all these terms. According to them, the basic term “utopia” refers to “a nonexistent society” that is “substantially different from the one in which the author lives” and is meant to be
“recognizably good or bad to the intended reader” （1）.
The default assumption is that the society will be a good one, but when needed, the more specific term for a “positive utopia” is “eutopia”; and when referring to a negative utopia, the term is “dystopia” （1-2）. They define other categories of utopia, but these are the ones which apply to this paper.
Beyond these basics, there are many extended, deeper definitions of the term. Robert Nozick claims that utopia is just barely attainable in reality,
David A. Farnell
Utopias False and True in Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
＊ “Immanent” – in the sense of “inherent within” – is used here as the more proper term, even though its use often includes a sense of the “about to occur” of its homonym “imminent.” In Bloch, both terms often apply at once, but the sacred implications of “immanent”
bring its meaning to the fore.
describing it as a society in which “none of the inhabitants [...] can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in” （299）, while Karl Mannheim defines utopia as something “which transcends reality and which at the same time breaks the bonds of the existing order” （173）, thus putting it always just out of reach, a perpetual revolution that, when achieved, has already fallen short of utopia. The disappointment resulting from falling short may be one reason that so many （though not all） real-world utopian experiments end up failing catastrophically.
In this paper, I will focus primarily on utopia as described by Ernst Bloch in his massive 1400-page work, The Principle of Hope, and in other writings.
Bloch, at once a philosopher, a communist of the old school, and a Christian mystic, is by no means easy to pin down, but what I take from his （beautiful though sometimes impenetrable） explorations of the topic is that utopia – far from being an impossible-to- reach nonexistent land or society, or a future end-of- history we will one day achieve – is a process which is always present in the here-and-now because it is present in the human imagination. This is of course a dreadful oversimplification of a work that Frederic Jameson calls “a vast and disorderly exploration of the manifestations of hope on all levels of reality” （Marxism 120）, but attempting a thorough examination of Bloch in a paper of this scope would be impossible. Still, we can cover the basics.
The key concept for Blochian utopia is the “not- yet,” which he explains as “that which stimulates the wishful element in the expectant emotions always arising from hunger, that which possibly diverts and fatigues us, or which possibly also activates and galvanizes us towards the goal of a better life:
daydreams are formed” （Principle 76 – all italics are Bloch’s）. This not-yet is a dream of the future, and
“The idea of the future as immanent to the present [...] is embodied in [this] guiding concept of Bloch’s philosophy [...]” （Anderson 216）. That is, because we can conceive it, the not-yet is here and now, in the form of creative imagining. Bloch mentions that some of these daydreams are merely diverting, even
“base, dubious, dismal, merely enervating escapist dreams” which may even be “combined with approval and support of the status quo,” such as “the empty promises of a better hereafter.” But his focus is on those other daydreams, the ones that “have sustained men with courage and hope, not by looking away
from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon [...] a forward dawning, into the New” （Principle 76-7）. Elsewhere, he calls this
“a contradicting countermove against the bad existence
（das schlecht Vorhandene）,” and that this subjective, imaginative factor is a crucial complement to the objective revolutionary action needed to improve society （Utopian Function 109）. As Moylan writes of Bloch, “a ‘utopian’ gesture is of no use to anyone but the powers that be if it does not recognize that its hopeful journey begins in refusing the bondage of the present” （274）.
It may sound strange to define “utopia” as “hopes and dreams,” but the vast majority of descriptions of utopia – from Plato’s Republic to the Garden of Eden, from More’s own Utopia to Bacon’s New Atlantis, from French poems about the Land of Cokaygne to hobo songs about the Big Rock Candy Mountain – nearly all are inspiring dreams rather than serious blueprints for the foundation of an actual society. They may well have within them serious, radical proposals, but unlike, say, The Communist Manifesto or Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements, they are essentially fantasies and fictions rather than sober plans. Still, they shake their audience out of complacency, challenge assumptions, and thereby spark a desire for change. That change may not – indeed, almost certainly will not – reach an objective status which we can call “utopia”; instead it likely inspires a desire for smaller, more realistic changes, baby steps in the right direction. But considering the results of the most radical attempts to make utopia real – the Soviet Union, North Korea, Jonestown – baby steps are perhaps better.
False Utopias
As mentioned before, those daydreams and hopes which Bloch calls utopian are those which do not entrap us in escapist fantasy or acceptance of the status quo, but I would like to refine that definition somewhat for this paper. Bloch does not always make clear something which I believe is crucial to the concept of utopia, and that is the idea of community.
A utopia for a single person or even a single family is merely a selfish fantasy, and would be stretching the definition past the breaking point. Utopias have always been concerned with communities which are radically better （or worse, in the case of dystopias） than the ones in which we live. I think that Bloch does include this idea of community, but not always explicitly –
often, it seems to be an unstated assumption in his work.
What I have called “false utopias” in “Sonny’s Blues” are very much what Bloch calls “base, dubious, dismal, merely enervating escapist dreams”: processes or paths which lead into traps, such as lazy fantasizing, fatalistic acceptance of the status quo, or the slow death of addiction. We see all three of these false paths presented in the story, before we see the true path for Sonny. However, I should clarify that by “false utopia”
I do not mean “dystopia.” False utopias merely lead nowhere. Dystopia often serves a utopian function, in that it also spurs to action, through bad dreams rather than good, misery rather than hope. However, one major difference from utopia is that dystopia can be all too real. Heaven-on-earth is nearly impossible to achieve; hell-on-earth is far easier. The real-world Harlem of James Baldwin’s experience, with its poverty, violence, and oppression, certainly qualifies to stand among the ranks of the many, many real-world dystopias, and its miseries have engendered many utopias, false and true.
Also, just as utopia itself is subjective, so is the falsity or truth of that utopia. The false paths are false for Sonny, and the true path is true for him, but perhaps not for all.
Actually, the first partly false, partly true utopia mentioned in the story has no clear connection to Sonny; instead, it is for the high-school boys that the narrator teaches.＊ He describes the trap in which the younger generation finds itself:
These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone. （104）
Their lives are lived in a dystopia, but they have been blinded to that dystopia by the escapist fantasies of Hollywood. And yet the blindness cannot last, and it is in the movie theaters that they dream “vindictively”
– the Hollywood portrayals of mainstream American dreams, a life from which these boys are excluded, begins to inspire rage and revolution. The false path has the potential to become a true one.
This ambiguity arises again with the first of Sonny’s false utopias, religion. The narrator is riding in a taxi with Sonny, taking him home after Sonny’s incarceration and rehabilitation, when he asks, “You still want to go to India?” to which Sonny replies,
“Hell no. This place is Indian enough for me” （111）.
The question refers to Sonny’s boyhood desire to go to India and become a holy man, “sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom” （112）. Sonny’s reply indicates that Harlem already provides more than enough poverty and hardship for anyone seeking wisdom in that way, and also implicitly rejects the idea of individual enlightenment – as we shall see, Sonny is drawn to a communitarian enlightenment, as more befits the concept of utopia. But while Eastern mysticism is the wrong path for Sonny, that does not mean it is a false path for all; while it is often used, like all religions, to reinforce the status quo, it – like all religions – can also be a source for inspiration to revolutionary action.
We also see the treatment of Western religion in the story, in the form of Christianity. All his life Baldwin, who became a born-again preacher in his teens yet later rejected organized religion, had an ambiguous and contentious relationship with Christianity that is amply documented, and it is often an issue with which he struggles in his essays and fiction. In The Fire Next Time, he recalls his conflicted feelings when preaching as his faith crumbled, and we see the way in which religion can function as an impediment to social progress:
[...] when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. [...] as I taught Sunday school, I felt I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. （309）
Many of the stories in Going to Meet the Man feature
＊ And thus, I am not including it in the count of “two false, one true.”
this struggle, such as “The Outing,” which portrays the evangelical-Christian adults as hypocrites who use their religiosity as a way to network, to posture and one-up each other, or to hide their own sins, as with Gabriel, a deacon who physically and – it is implied – sexually abuses his homosexual son, Johnnie （33）.
In “Come out the Wilderness,” Ruth considers the Christianity of her New York relatives:
They, like her father, were earnest churchgoers, though, unlike her father, their religion was strongly mixed with an opportunistic respectability and with ambitions to better society and their own place in it, which her father would have scorned.
Their ambitions vitiated in them what her father called the “true” religion, and what remained of this religion, which was principally vindictiveness, prevented them from understanding anything whatever about those concrete Northern realities that made them at once so obsequious and so venomous. （208）
And yet, her father, he of the “‘true’ religion,” rejects her when she is caught alone with a boy, even though nothing untoward had happened （211）. Her father’s religion divides him from his daughter rather than bringing them together.
But Baldwin often shows a respect for religion even as he criticizes those who use it for base purposes:
I was instructed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit those in prison. I am far indeed from my youth, and from my father’s house, but I have not forgotten these instructions, and I pray upon my soul that I never will. [But] The people who call themselves “born again” today have simply become members of the richest, most exclusive private club in the world, a club that the man from Galilee could not possibly hope – or wish – to enter. （“Open Letter...” 784）.
We see a more subtle, mixed view of Christianity in “Sonny’s Blues.” It first comes up in the letter the narrator receives from Sonny during his period of incarceration and treatment, shortly after the narrator’s daughter has died of polio: “I sure was sorry to hear about little Gracie. I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord’s will be done, but I don’t know it seems to me that trouble is the one thing that never does get stopped and I don’t know what good it does to blame it on the Lord. But maybe it does some good if you believe it” （110）. “The Lord’s will be done” is the American equivalent of the Japanese
phrase, “Shikata ga nai,” （仕方がない）, or “It can’t be helped,” a phrase that can provide comfort but also runs the risk of inducing an attitude of fatalism. Even though Sonny acknowledges the value of the comfort derived from giving God the credit for all good and evil in the world, he rejects that comfort along with its fatalism.
Christianity appears again in the story in the form of a street revival outside the narrator’s home, where Sonny is staying. One man preaches while a woman solicits donations and two other women back up the preacher with “Amens.” Then they all break into a hymn, with only “their voices and their Bibles and a tambourine,” singing of how Christianity has “rescued many a thousand! ” （130） Baldwin writes,
Not a soul under the sound of their voices was hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them. Neither did they especially believe in the holiness of the three sisters and the brother, they knew too much about them, knew where they lived, and how. （130）
This song nevertheless “seemed to soothe a poison out of them,” but while it does bring them a moment of comfort, this comfort is described in individual, not communal, terms, and backward-looking rather than forward. John Reilly describes it as “a familiar moment of communion” （143）, but Baldwin’s words suggest it is at best an ambiguous communion: “the eyes focused on something within [...] they were fleeing back to their first condition” （130-1）. When Sonny comes inside from listening to the song on the street, he remarks of the singer, “‘What a warm voice. [...] But what a terrible song,’” laughing （131）. He acknowledges the benefits of Christianity, but implies that they are not enough, for him at least.
This conversation moves into a conversation between Sonny and his brother about heroin, the closest thing to real, frank communication they have shared so far in their lives. Sonny says, “‘When she was singing before [...] her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes – when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And – and sure. [...]
It makes you feel – in control. Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling’” （132）. Sonny’s frequent pauses indicate his difficulty in expressing himself so openly to his much older brother; Sonny’s addiction is one of
many experiences in their lives that they have not shared, and communication difficulties have always plagued their relationship. As the narrator says, “The seven years’ difference in our ages lay between us like chasm: I wondered if these years would ever operate between us as a bridge” （111）. A chasm of understanding is, indeed, the greatest obstacle to happiness in the story, and is a major recurring theme in Baldwin’s work, but we will return to this later.
The desire to be part of a real community, with understanding and even communion, is what Sonny seems to be seeking when he tries heroin. The narrator remembers the last time he saw Sonny before hearing of his arrest; he finds Sonny living in an apartment with a number of other people, probably addicts, “and he treated these people as though they were his family and I weren’t” （128）. As drug addicts, they share a utopian dream, creating familial bonds;
but the dream is false, as are those bonds. Typically, Sonny and the narrator fight, even though the narrator’s intention had been to heal the rift between them, and Sonny ends up throwing his brother out.
The urge for community and communion is a utopian urge, as is the desire to be “in control,” as to be in control of one’s own destiny is the very definition of freedom. But of course, trying to find those in a heroin-filled needle is the falsest of false utopian paths.
Both community and control are illusions. As addiction takes hold, control turns to slavery; as life becomes centered around the desire for ever-increasing doses of the drug, the addict becomes utterly self-centered, making community impossible.
In the conversation about heroin that Sonny has with the narrator, Sonny tries to describe his addiction in spatial terms, as a place:
“But I can’t forget – where I’ve been. I don’t just mean the physical place I’ve been, I mean where I’ve been. And what I’ve been.”
“Where have you been, Sonny?” I asked.
[...]
“Oh well. I can never tell you. I was all by myself at the bottom of something, stinking and sweating and crying and shaking, and I smelled it, you know? my stink, and I thought I’d die if I couldn’t get away from it and yet, all the same, I knew that everything I was doing was just locking me in with it.” （135-6）
Seeking community, he finds isolation; seeking freedom, he finds imprisonment. These create a
conceptual, virtual, imaginary space – a topos, in Greek.
The apparently good place where Sonny has been was, for a time, a comforting false eutopia, but when he hits bottom, he finds himself in a bad place, a dystopia.
Utopia from Dystopia
But, again, dystopia engenders utopia. Sonny turned to heroin to escape the dystopia of Harlem. When addiction becomes a new dystopia, he rejects it and climbs out of the pit. And the path he follows to do so is music, the true utopian path of this story. Although we usually think of utopia as being presented through the written word, Edward Rothstein writes,
But no other form of expression has been so associated with the utopian dream as music. Music does not, of course, outline utopias such as those of More and Marx; particular sets of social relations are not expressed; there is no literal discussion of money or education or the moral life. But [...]
music creates an autonomous world of sound with its own set of laws and relationships, its own sort of order, its own conception of tension and release.
And in the midst of these abstract orders are encoded visions of utopia and dystopia. （24）
Rothstein is far from the only one who identifies music as a path to utopia, or even as utopia itself. Bloch writes, “Among the arts, music has a very special juice [...]. The utopicum of this expression is the hour of language in music, understood as keenly hearing; is a poesis a se [creation through itself] with passwords allowing entry into the material tone-nature of all that wells up [...]” （Principle 1069-70）. More simply, Ben Anderson states that “Bloch’s explanation of music is grounded upon an understanding of music as anticipation. Bloch argues that music, by virtue of its non-representational qualities, offers privileged access to the ‘not-yet become’” （217）.
Music permeates “Sonny’s Blues,” from the title itself to the aforementioned street-revival gospel to constant spontaneous appearances of music as the narrator moves through Harlem. Near the beginning of the story, one of his students is “whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird” （105）.
As the narrator walks with a heroin addict, an old friend of Sonny’s, they pass a bar where “a juke box was blasting away with something black and bouncy and I half watched the barmaid as she danced her way from the juke box to her place behind the bar. [...]
When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore” （107）. The narrator’s mother tells him that his uncle, a singer and guitarist, died by being run over by a car-full of drunken white men, right before the eyes of the narrator’s father: “Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the car kept a-going and it ain’t stopped till this day” （118）. When Sonny rejects his brother and throws him out of the heroin den, the narrator stops himself from crying by whistling a blues tune （128）.
All of these moments of music are transformative – taking one out of oneself, nourishing a fragile purity in a flawed world, comforting oneself against despair, signaling death and horror with the cacophonous
“music” of a guitar run over by a car – but they are all foreshadowings of the climax of the story, Sonny’s jazz performance. After their conversation about heroin, Sonny invites his brother to come hear him play the piano with a group, the first time Sonny has performed in more than a year. The narrator finds himself in a new world, the jazz club, where for the first time he sees Sonny not as a little brother, but as a leader in his own right, a man recognized and admired by his bandmates and audience. He begins to see that there are more dimensions to his brother than he had ever considered: “[...] it was clear that, for them, I was only Sonny’s brother. Here, I was in Sonny’s world. Or, rather: his kingdom. Here, it was not even a question that his veins bore royal blood” （138）.
As the music begins, in an echo of Roland Barthes’
“Musica Practica” （Barthes 149）, the narrator muses on the nature of music:
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for the same reason.
And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. （139）
Sonny does not, at first, triumph. In fact, he plays
in a way that recalls the death of his uncle, who by panicking failed to get out of the way of the oncoming car. “He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck” （140）. But the narrator listens, and this is crucial, because all through the story his failure to listen to his younger brother has resulted in a “chasm” between them. After the death of their mother years before, the narrator
“played the role of the older brother” （120） and, from this false position – as implied by the phrase “played the role” – asks Sonny about his future plans. Because he has also cast Sonny in the role of child, he does not really listen to Sonny, but attempts to browbeat him into not pursuing his dream of becoming a jazz musician. This failure to listen due to the assumption of false roles causes all their conversations to fail, even the one about heroin that precedes the jazz performance, although that conversation, in which Sonny bares his heart, lays the ground for the narrator to “open within” and truly listen to the music.
Failure to listen is failure to communicate, and thereby failure of community. Communication, and community, is what Sonny has hungered after all through the story, and what has compelled him to follow utopian dreams in search of a better society.
This failure of and hunger for community runs throughout Baldwin’s writings, and it often results, as with Sonny and his brother, from assumptions of false roles in which the humanity of the players is diminished and limited through stereotyping. Later in the same collection, racism is the most obvious case, with Jesse, the sheriff’s deputy in “Going to Meet the Man,” whose racism makes him feel powerful, but also makes him insecure, vicious, sexually dysfunctional,
“emasculated, from an emotional perspective” （Pratt 49）. Because of the role in which he casts himself （and is cast by upbringing and societal expectations）, he cannot see African-Americans as fully human, nor, by limiting himself to little more than being “the White Racist,” can he himself be fully human. The castration of the lynched black man is symbolic of the emotional self-castration of the racist, “self-estrangement, threatening himself and society with impotence and sterility” （Griffith 515）.
Baldwin touches on this again and again in his work, but despite the tragedy of it all, he offers a possibility of hope and progress. “White people in this country
will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this [...] the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed” （Fire Next Time 299-300）; “The black and white confrontation, whether it be hostile [...] or with the intention of forming a common front and creating the foundations of a new society [...] contain[s] the shape of the American future and the only potential of a truly valid American identity” （No Name 470）. He puts it best, perhaps, with sad simplicity in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” the story following “Sonny’s Blues”
in the collection: “For everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken, many lives” （150）.
Baldwin’s utopian dream, then, is of true community, which requires self-knowledge so that we can be fully human – but this also requires seeing others as fully human. To do this, we must have true communication, which requires listening without false assumptions.
That is what the narrator learns to do, in listening to improvisational jazz, a form of music about which he knows very little. Jazz is one of the few truly American art forms, and, not insignificantly, it is a black art form. The narrator has long locked himself into roles: responsible older brother, upwardly mobile math teacher. Out of his element in the jazz club, surrounded by people who don’t know who he is and practically worship his little brother, truly listening for the first time to an alien music created by that brother, the mask which society has placed on his soul falls away and he opens to utopian possibilities:
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and then one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others.
[...] It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. （141-2）
This is a moment of perfection, a release from misery, a communion between audience and musicians – an immanent “not-yet” （yet eternally present in
potentia） utopia. As Reilly points out, it does not blind its participants to reality （145）. The narrator is
“aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky” （Baldwin,
“Sonny’s Blues” 142）. But it is real. It is similar to the Zen Buddhist concept of kenshou （見性）, a moment of illumination, and Sonny, like a boddhisatva （菩薩）, cannot be free until all are. Without realizing, he has followed through on his childhood dream of Indian enlightenment, metaphorically “walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom” （112）.
Compared to the default definition of utopia, the
“blueprint model,” this Blochian immanent conceptual utopia is arguably the truer utopia. When Jameson describes the way that, once capitalism and socialism become practical political realities, Utopian Imagination gives way to Utopian Fancy （using Imagination and Fancy in Coleridge’s sense）, he demonstrates that, once achieved in the real world, utopia is always found lacking, and so ceases to be utopia （Archaeologies 55）.
I believe Jameson also leaves open the implication that second-class citizens, denied the middle-class benefits of a tarnished utopia and forced to live apart from mainstream society in dystopian conditions, may well have a truer grasp of the concept of utopia, in that they may stick with Utopian Imagination rather than Fancy.
The ephemeral, impractical, never-to-be achieved and yet always-accessible utopian dream, a dream that inspires to progressive, revolutionary action rather than entrapping, is the true utopia. It inspires those who are open to it to transform themselves, to become more fully themselves and to see others equally as fully, to accept them and to understand who they are.
More than the education plans, moneyless economic schemes, spartan rules on fashion, and ironically restrictive free-love fantasies that we see in “blueprint”
utopias, the utopian dream as described in Baldwin’s story, by avoiding concrete form, remains true. This is symbolized in the closing sentence of the story, when Sonny sips from the drink his brother has sent him, and then places it on the piano, before playing again, where “it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling” （142）. The “cup of trembling” is a reference to Isaiah 51:22, in which God promises the Jews that their punishment is over, and they will no longer suffer his wrath. The world may wait outside “like a hungry tiger,” but communion,
community, and communication are forever in reach, because the utopian moment is forever immanent.
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