From the Shadow of the Past to the Projection of the Future: Social Crisis and Literary Fiction

As a narrative structuring the social experience of the last two centuries, modernity shows signs of no longer responding to what was its fundamental challenge: defining a convergent course, capable of integrating all diversity in the same timeline and in a culturally unified space. Despite globalisation, the ecumena is fragmenting, less as a direct result of postcolonial dynamics than of a revitalisation of identity that transcends them and finds in the narratives of heritage an anchor and a link that connects space and time. In this sense, I will consider in this contribution two dystopian projections, which, despite coming from authors with little in common, converge in some aspects that I consider relevant. In Submission, by Michel Houellbecq, a future is projected in which the other becomes dominant, producing an effect of inversion of what we might call the order of conversion and assimilation proposed by modernity. On the other hand, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian narrative is built around the collapse of modernity caused, in the last analysis, by the exponentiation of the claim to identity. In both cases it is religion that imposes itself, which means that in these dystopias a transcendent understanding of the social order (re)emerges to negate the modern (rational) grounding of that same order.