Utopia and Anti-utopia in "The Country of the Blind" by H.G.Wells

The Country of the Blind
Power Point Presentation (5-7 min.)

• Código:14968
• Asignatura: "Recursos, Categorías y Géneros y su Proyección en la Literatura Inglesa"
• Tipo: Optativa de 3º de Filología Inglesa
• Curso:2010-2011
• Semestre: 1

Now, I’m going to talk about two fundamental concepts, indispensable to understand H.G.Wells’ story: Utopia and Anti-Utopia.

1. UTOPIA

First of all, Utopia is a non-existing ideal world which provides us a model of society based on human desire for the material and spiritual perfection.

In the text, you can identify a series of characteristic elements of Utopian description. One of the most relevant of them is the isolation or the remoteness of its setting.

These are the examples, you can find in a long description of the landscape in the beginning of the story. I highlighted the words, basically adjectives, such as mysterious, cut off, unknown, hidden, far, hazy with distance, shut-in, lost, etc., through which the author expresses effectively the remoteness of the place, always in relation to our world and not as a totally fantastic place.

Another interesting characteristic element of the described Utopia we can identify in the beginning of the story is the infernal description of the itinerary, preceding the celestial description of the Utopia as you can see in the examples below. Before the arrival at the utopian place, the mountaineers must pass some dangerous places such as frightful gorges, an icy pass, etc, where they find boiling water and the floating dying fish.

The following bucolid depiction of Utopia presents a contrast to the previous infernal description. These description which I picked up here automatically evoke us (readers) an association to an Utopian image, inspired by the Biblical Garden of Eden.

Utopia is also described as an auto-sufficient society, in which people are satisfied with a very simple life style,as you see in the highlighted words.

Moreover, the cleanness and the social order are additional aspects of Utopian description. Here, I picked up some direct references to these aspects.

Other characteristic aspects of Utopia that I’d like to mention are the rigorous modalities by which everything is strictly controlled and supervised: all the social activities are almost time-tabled as you can see in the examples below. Every and each member of the utopian society must act as a group, following to the "whole" and not as a different, independent individual.

Therefore, if there appears anyone like the protagonist Nunez, different from the others and non-conformist to the given community, he/she will be considered as an inferior-human being, who must teached by the society to improve his/her personality.

2. ANTI-UTOPIA

Anti-Utopia is a concept opposing to Utopia, which provides us an anti-social model resulted from aggravation of human negative qualities. By means of this concept, the author intends to encourage the readers not to adapt that type of life represented by the Anti-Utopia.

In the text, we can identify the emergence of Anti-Utopian element in the end of the first page. The anti-utopian element in this text is, obviously,
the blindness, which destroys the perfection of the Utopian society, in which the protagonist pretends to be a King.

Because of this anti-utopian element -the blindness-, Nunez, the protagonist (the only person who poses the sight), is considered as an imperfect strange creature, in contrast to the blind people in this isolated community, where the disability of blindness and its modified behavior are believed to be normal. As a result, the initial vision of Nunez of the Utopia turns into an Anti-Utopia.

The following is the graphical explanation of the notion which I´ve just explained. The Utopian place turns into an Anti-Utopia, because the shadow of the blindness lay across the whole society. Then the intention of Nunez to be the King of blinds is refused because the sight is considered as a disadvantage in the Country of the Blind.

3. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the Utopia for an isolated group of people [the blind people] turns into an Anti-utopia for a strange, different, and non-conformist individual person [Nunez].

@. Irony

• Verbal Irony:What happens in the story is totally opposing to the old proverb "in the Country of the Blind, One-eyed Man is the King."
• Situational Irony: When it is not a verbal irony
  • Situational Irony of point of view: Discrepancy between different perception of the reality. In the dialogue between Nunez and one of the elders of the blind villedge, the wise man says "What is the blind?"
  • Cosmic Irony: This is a type of situational irony, related only to the plot of the story, which ends in a tragedic death of the character, who was "moraly blind" at first but, in the end of the story, realizes the real value of the sight.
  • Structural Irony: When the narrator is so naive or ignorant that readers cannot trust in its narration (unreliable narrator).
  • Socratic Irony: This is a dialogical method used by Socrates who feigns to be ignorant listener and asks questions in order to reveal the truth.