Utopia, Universopolis, Macondo

Abstract

UTOPIA means a desirable, well-designed place that is no place. Yet, whether in myth or in geography, it has always been associated with some place. Even Atlantis, lost civilization described by Plato in two of his dialogues (Timaeus, Critias) was said to have been somewhere to west of Strait of Gibraltar. And Plato's own hypothetical Republic, of course, has recognizable Athenian and Spartan components. The idea of Utopia interests contemporary Latin Americans, among other reasons, because several Utopias have been situated in regions or mythical continents in vicinity of South America. Thomas More's island was discovered by an imaginary traveler who claimed to have accompanied Amerigo Vespucci. Daniel Defoe's scenario for Robinson Crusoe was based directly on four year-experience of a Scottish sailor marooned on one of Juan Fernandez Islands, four hundred miles off coast of Chile. Tommaso Campanella's City of Sun was on a high hill over a plain located exactly at Equator. Francis Bacon in New Atlantis refers to the great Atlantis that you call America and compares it to ancient Peru and Mexico. Fifteen centuries earlier, Lucius Annaeus Seneca had revived Atlantis myth in a passage of his drama Medea. Seneca called new world of his fantasy Ultima Thule, which would become title of a series of essays that Alfonso Reyes wrote from 1920 to 1941. In first and longest of them (El presagio de America) Reyes reminds us