Sensorial and Intellectual Signs in Brave New World
Utopian and Dystopian Environments

Environment plays a very important role in utopian and dystopian texts. A room, a flat, a house, some buildings or a whole city, each landscape,etc... are one of the main axis in these novels because they lump together, and at the same time they put face to face, two universes. The setting works in tandem with a particular character, the visitor or traveller, and from this joining we´ll always find a subtext that dreges up the poetic side of our intellectual and material frontiers. Consequently, we could say that in this poetic subtext we need to indentify the microgroove which containes the key to the problem. Seemingly, these authors re-examine the ways of life, but beyond this standard, I think that they re-examine the ways of seeing. They don´t want we just see, but how and where to see.

These writers aren´t strolling along them because this is an effect of  this particular visual thought.   Environmental dynamism make blots on this narrative type and this is what camouflages the writer´s skill in the textual level. In fact, this skill is a static feature of these texts because the writer doesn´t drop this productive frontier. They´re clever with their eyes, by means of perception and perspective, but they´re able to metamorphose their own spatio-temporal concepts into frontiers. Apart from this,
it allows to the writer to make transcultural connections in between two systems, two cultures and two realities, by a journey motif , but its irregularity lends great charm to this particular discourse because if we isolate both spaces, the consequential fragmentation will minimize their aesthetic links.

Regarding ways of life, I agree with William Boelhower, when he stated that this text type " turns geography into an axiological exercise, space in ethics", because these writers detach deliberately  their characters out of their imperative or own environmental conditions, and this provokes a constant evaluation of these ethic frontiers. But, at this point, I would add that if readers want to evaluate the qualitative nature of these ethic/spatial juxtapositions, they´ll need to pay attention to the intersection in between characters and settings because we will find in these frontiers the amalgamation of this poetic form.

It wasn´t entirely a matter of chance that the city was " the ideal locus of  the architect Utopus " in  Thomas More´s Utopia because, according to Raymond Trousson ," the first utopian writer was a greek town planner called Hipodamo." Obviously, this text continues what Boelhower called " a
set of procedural competences for registering the new status of the objects in particular and of the human-built environment in general ", but in More´s case the readability of these spaces has guided following writers through the notion of frontier. These writers have explored the limits and beyond,
but their  " aesthetic homogeneity " is not divergent but diversified.

Even though Boelhower uses utopian genre to explain the " avant-garde autobiography ", I think it is very profitable to pay attention to his explanation of the narrative mechanism because the difference in between these text types is just a question of motif. In the avant-garde case, the text  first absorbs the utopian model and then destroys it, by formalizing the motif of return, and " narratio gives way to the function of descriptio, because  the protagonist´s voyage simply traces two unintegrated spatial models of the urbs : one an antispatial model, the city of Prometheus , of techné ; the other a model space, the city of Orpheus , of poesis."

In utopian and dystopian texts, I think that narratio and descriptio work in tandem. In this sense ,    Boelhower´s  classification of these spaces can help us  in order to have a general cross reference to identify these frontiers when we read these text types.

List copyrighted © 1988 Boelhower

Boelhower, W.: "The avant-garde autobiography" in Poyatos, F. ed. Literary Antropology. John Benjamins : Amsterdam/Philadelphia,1988:273-303.

Trousson,R: Historia de la Literatura Utópica.Península, Barcelona,1995 : 75-80.

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Last Updated : 05/19/99