The City’s Portrait in Its Utopics

Abstract

In order to bring its textual and imaginary spaces into play utopic fiction allows two basic modes of discourse — narrative and description. The first is more immediately adapted for the diachronic and discursive manifestation of events, things, and beings. These appear as accidents, or notable incidents, and they are placed successively in a narrative syntagm of events. The listener becomes aware of them as he waits in expectation as they “come to be” in discourse. Narrative is discovery in the form of speech, which announces it, and of listening, which gathers it up. Even if these events have always been known, narrative is of the type of discourse that all that passes through it, in speech, is new. This is admitting, of course, that its discursive development, seized, as it were, in the very dynamics of its utterance, is brought about through a play between “showing” and “concealing.” What is said rises up from the listener’s unawareness at the moment it is said. This utterance was already “there,” “unsaid,” existent but unknown: such is the power of the illusion spun by referential reality. What has been shown by narrative discourse is something revealed but forever remaining partly in shadow. Narrative includes a hidden side whose nature consists always in presenting itself as the reversal of reality, its fatal correlative.