Utopia e (Des)encanto em Vivre à Madère de Jacques Chardonne

Abstract

If, as Jacques Chardonne claims, “l’éden, le paradis perdu, l’âge d’or, le bonheur, c’est une singulière idée chez les hommes”, my aim is to uncover and understand in what way the utopian idea of Eden or of perfection may be found in the work by Jacques Chardonne entitled Vivre à Madère and published in Paris in 1953. Is it possible that the island, in this case Madeira, may come close to the utopian idea of ‘ideal place’, in the wake of Thomas More or, on the contrary, is it the case that the protagonist, when visiting the island, will be confronted with an experience of disenchantment? It is the aim of this paper to reflect upon theses issues while seeking, on the one hand, to place them within a literary perspective in terms of the relation between Utopia and Travel and, on the other, endeavour to establish a link to other areas of knowledge, namely Philosophy, via the way the narrator questions life itself.

Keywords

• Travel
• Fiction
• Real
• Knowledge