Contre-utopie et utopie dans Méridien zéro de Mourareau

Abstract

Mourareau’s novel Méridien zéro (2020) depicts a counter-utopia in coexistence with an emblematic collective utopia: Tahiti and her enchanted islands. In the first part of the novel, the wanderings of the two protagonists, Rose and Bleu, project the reader into the near future of a world falling apart. The « social Eurocraties » have been unable to prevent civilizational collapse and Europe is crumbling. Through a somewhat unconventional lens and line of argument, the author bolsters the indictment first made by the earliest Polynesian writers to prosecute, in the court of capital-H History, the notions of progress advanced by Western societies. It is indeed Western civilization and the failure of its ideologies that are displayed here in a context of general decadence. It is thus toward Tahiti and her islands that the characters turn to change their lives, but the capitalistic logics that reign there since the Centre d’Expérimentation du Pacifique—a nuclear testing center—and the acculturation that has resulted from colonization on political, economic and religious levels render the island an uninteresting space for them. The island of Raroia will perhaps provide them with the new civilizational paradigm to which they aspire.