Against Utopia: Fantasies of Emancipation in Ana Teresa Torres's Nocturama (2006)

Through its dual allegorical structure, Ana Teresa Torres's novel Nocturama (2006) negotiates the antagonisms between two conflicting ideologies at work in contemporary Venezuela. The novel is narrated by ‘Aspern’, a pseudo-intellectual who tells crude versions of Venezuelan Independence and Bolivarian Socialism in tandem. Aspern's foundational fable, which parodies the figure of Simón Bolívar, explores the demands of a primitive community in search of a collective political identity that, in turn, promises emancipation. Meanwhile, Aspern's accounts of the twenty-first century, as experienced by amnesiac Ulises, detail the restrictions to civil liberties upon the empowerment of the popular classes. Fleeing from encroached collectivity, Ulises escapes into a world of consumerism and privacy governed by marketisation. Theoretically, these narratives of common identity and individualism are at odds. Yet Torres's interweaving of the allegories in Nocturama prevents them to be understood separately. Read together, both stories emerge from Utopian visions that promise to their adherents absolute freedom upon their realisation. Rather than engender emancipation, however, Utopian thought as an ideological blueprint creates dystopian conditions. Against the notion that Utopian thought will liberate an oppressed society, Nocturama suggests that the recourse to Utopianism in ideology ultimately results in segregation and discontent.