Uni-verses: the Other and the Almost in Dystopian Worlds.

Abstract

The trend to compose everything to unity, and to define only one sort of order, seems to describe this very Age. And yet, to reflect in a counter-factual way, thanks to the question raised by Erri de Luca, on what could be "the opposite of One", allows us to set up a visionary game and an exercise in sociological imagination, associating each answer with as many dystopian literary uni-verses, in order to unravel the ambiguities of our lives. The opposite of One, of any kind of Regime, is the Other, the Exception, as proposed by Stefano Benni in "Baol", when the rebellion against the violence of conformism passes through a laugh out of the chorus. But the opposite of wholeness is also the “Almost”, the “Anymore”, or the “Not Yet”, as expressed by Margareth Atwood in "The Handmaid’s Tale", when the imposition of obligatory masculine and feminine careers stigmatizes biographical insufficiencies and any possible freedom of choice. Finally, the opposite of One is “the Other”, anyone who has to be confined beyond the perimeter of citizenship and defined as an outlier, just a stateless traveler among mutually hostile worlds, as in the extraordinary specular Apocalypse created by Ursula Le Guin in “The Dispossessed”. Three grotesque dystopias, but not so extraneous to our real life, if you think about it.