John Lanchester’s The Wall

Dystopian Variations on the Literary Theme of Utopia

Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between utopia and dystopia in a recent British novel that deals with Brexit as an unnamed theme, albeit some of its preconditions can be easily identified in the fear of immigration generating the defensive device to which the title of the novel (The Wall, by John Lanchester, 2019) refers. Starting from Louis Marin’s semiotic analysis (Utopiques) of More’s Utopia, and recognizing in the paradoxical and imaginatively productive interplay between history and fiction a tool to evaluate the recent novel as a different kind of dystopia, the article develops several trajectories in the text (historically, linguistically, theatrically) that converge in conceptual and narrative blurring of the borders conventionally structured between the literary genres.