Content area
Full Text
My article compares the narrative attributes of classic early modern literary utopias (by More, Bacon and Campanella) to the shape they take in well-known 20th century literary dystopias (by Orwell, Huxley and Zamyatin). On a formal level, I conclude that only a minor difference separates the two: the awakening of a critical/narrative subject completely reconfigures a formerly static and utopian space of collective happiness into a narrative, historical, dystopian space of individual struggle.
I mean, I ask you: what evil genius invented the alarm clock? No other creature but man could concoct a device that interrupts, on a daily basis, their only natural state of happiness. No doubt, the evil genius' evil twin contributed the snooze button.
- Millennium, Season 2, Episode 22
Introduction
During the five centuries of its existence, ever since Thomas More inaugurated the term in 1516, the concept of utopia has gone through many transformations. Its initial meaning or essence, that of a good non-place, has been irrevocably contaminated with many historical connotations, and primarily with the fear of totalitarianism - with the perspective of a totalised form of a realised dystopia, and the perspective of a really existing bad place - which today seems to haunt utopia every time one happens to think about it. As for literary utopias, Fredric Jameson seems to be convinced that nobody writes or imagines them any longer,1 or at least not in the early modern vein of describing some fully fleshed-out vision of a better socio-economic system and, with any luck, proposing a thoroughly articulated programme for its realisation in the here-and-now. It is of course granted that we live in different times, determined and perceived by a thoroughly different kind of (historical) consciousness (which I will return to in a moment), which is no longer attuned to the static and all-encompassing nature of the early modern utopian form. It is quite evident that, starting with the twentieth century, dystopia rather than utopia has been the dominant literary form, but this is not to say that the literary dystopia does not contain a clear-cut utopian impulse. In the following, it is my intention to show that the utopian aspirations of the early modern form, encompassing and static as they are, are preserved in...