The Chronotope in the Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq’s Dystopian Novel Utopia

A study of the history of Western dystopian fiction in the twentieth-century reveals that it is the product of a long process of economic, and social transformations resulting from the political crises Europe witnessed in the first half of that century. Dystopian narrative, is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century being a century of exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, depression, debt, and the steady depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided more than enough fertile ground for this fictive lower side of the  utopian narrative. Consequently, the dystopian genre is* determined by the political and social reality of that time, and characterized by a powerful sense of mistrust and insecurity toward the future as well as a mistrust of the utopian genre.
   In the light of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives recounting stories of manipulation and dehumanization of human beings by destructive societies, this paper explores metaphors of time-space as a distinct feature of the apocalyptic dystopian world of Ahmad Khalid Tawfik’s novel Utopia (2008). Belonging to negative utopian or dystopian fiction, the novel represents a dystopia indicating a demarcation between “two peoples”, namely, the people of the city of Utopia and the Others residing in Shubra, Cairo, in the year 2023, respectively.  Guided by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, this study attempts to reveal the generic and socio-political significance of this novel, as well as the nature of the characters. The paper also attempts an application of Yuri Lotman’s model of the semiosphere and the related conception of boundary as metaphorical space that is “the res and the condition for the development of culture” to Utopia (Lotman The Semiosphere 125) .As such, the argument is that the representation of a heterogeneous space, and the fusion of time and space are valid concerns of Tawfiq’s Utopia that perform both the semiotic , and epistemological functions of shaping the narrative, and rendering it semantically significant by highlighting certain world-views.