Universal Language and Universal Prose: Eugene Jolas, H. G. Wells, and the Languages of Modernist Utopianism

Focusing on H. G. Wells and Eugene Jolas, this article provides an account of how interwar plans for an international language linked literary experimentalism with utopian political ambitions. Following the First World War, efforts to establish an international or universal language such as Esperanto enjoyed the height of their popularity. Advocates for universal languages homed in on literature as an ideal testing ground for the refinement and propagation of their languages, while writers like Wells and Jolas responded by considering how literature might inaugurate a new idiom that corrected the defects of Esperanto and other artificial languages. Reading Wells’s The Bulpington of Blup (1933) as a satire of the avant-garde experiments in Jolas’s transition, I consider how Wells’s and Jolas’s differing utopian ambitions led them to value different kinds of literary experiments with language. By returning to international language debates of the interwar period, before the arrival of global English was a certainty, the article recovers an unfamiliar history of the utopian character of interwar literature. Linguistic utopians like Wells and Jolas imagined a direct path between literary and social form because they believed the social forms of the coming global utopia stood to benefit from the correct literary refinements and fusions of language.