"My world is sight"H. G. Wells¿s anti-utopian imagination in ¿The country of the blind¿

Résumé

This article examines H. G. Wells’s «The Country of the Blind» (1904) as a parable of post-Darwinian man, influenced by Victorian mythography and anthropological models of primitivism. Drawing on utopian, evolutionary and imperialist paradigms, this fin-desiècle tale is an intellectual game or thought experiment with multiple ironic reversals. The macro-structure of this speculative story is a negation of the original proverb about the country of the blind, with echoes of Plato’s Parable of the Cave, as well as a rewriting of the archetypal myth of a remote pastoral eu-topia. By remaining faithful to the conventions of this tradition and sometimes inverting their suggestive symbolism, the early Wells explored the complexities of colonialism and imperialism, and treated them in the ironic mode. Sight and blindness simply reverse definitions of supremacy and subordination, civilization and nature in this Andean anti-utopia (or ironic utopia)