ABSTRACT
America, which was rediscovered by the great navigators long after the terrible cataclysm that isolated it from the world. Plato's version is skilfully transformed, precisely to lend plausibility to the fate of the forgotten continent beyond the final catastrophe and thus to allow the myth of Atlantis to survive on the margins of a history which had until then negated it. For the location of utopias must remain a paradox in space as in time: in their ceaseless drift, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, they often fitted with the discovery of the New World, functioning as imitations of travellers' tales. Added to this was the influence of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of salvation, insofar as Columbus' deed was supposed to represent that of the redeemer, following an assimilation systematically exploited by colonialist ideology. The lost paradise was said to have been rediscovered in America, which explains the naturalist and regressive tendency of some utopias which saw the New World as the sign of a possible return to a new Eden predating the Fall. However this primitive myth, in which the biblical Eden echoed the ancient Arcadia in the way that nostalgia for an archaic Golden Age reflects the fear of collapse, was soon countered by utopia as such, with its prospective vision of a civilized and organized micro-society, where poetic nostalgia gives way to political projects. In relation to the New World, utopia is to myth what the Jesuit 'reductions' are to the myth of the 'good savage': a contradiction in terms, in other words a total inversion of natural meaning, which is truly mythical, by the process of acculturation; for, whether written or put into practice, utopia demands different values. The poetic, naturalist and regressive vision of myth contrasts with the political, culturalist and prospective vision of the place that is called Utopian. The American Eldorado is located at the point where these visions intersect.
