Utopia, Comedy and Latin American Utopianism: Is This Really the End?

Summary

An underlying theme of this study has been the longstanding correlation between comedy, satire and the utopian dreams of humankind throughout the history of European culture. Whether in its original ritualistic form or the subsequent dramatic and novelistic varieties, comedy has always encoded the deep human desire for a bountiful and idyllic existence. There have been changes, of course, in what the desire symbolised and the way in which it has been represented. In classical times the utopian impulse of Greek and Roman comedies symbolised a culturally and historically specific concept of the Arcadian dream: the desire for a return to a Golden Age made by the gods. This is a feature also found in the satirical and idyllic poetry of the period, which, according to Elliott, offers further proof of the primitive roots that comedy, satire and utopianism continued to share (Elliott, Shape of Utopia, p. 5). From the Renaissance onwards, comedy's utopian drive accordingly comes to reflect the humanist belief in a future vision of perfection made by human hands, of which the first expression is Thomas More's satirical work Utopia (1515).

The articulation of the utopian impulse has continually been reshaped to express this changing notion of the utopian vision and to correspond to the beliefs, customs and concepts of identity of different historical ages. Aristophanic comic drama, for example, often closes the resolution stage with the protagonist's apotheosis into the pantheon of the gods, while less than two hundred years later comic writers like Menander and later Terence had begun to dramatise the same phase in the more humble and realistic form with which we are now familiar: the marriage and social resolution formula. This formula, too, has been subject to a process of radical and subtle transformation throughout its modern history. Finally, the advent of new cultural media precipitated a rearticulation of the utopian impulse. As we have seen, when the novel appropriated the comic structure (or vice versa) the utopian emphasis shifted from a social resolution to an individualistic one of identity acquisition, which more accurately reflected the concerns of the Enlightenment and an incipient bourgeois ideology to which the rise of the novel is intrinsically germane.