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Dystopian Impulse in Modern Lit
Dystopian Impulse in Modern Lit
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Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution
101m .I. Pierce
M. Keith Booker
(; reenwond Press
W,·stport, Conneclicut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Booker, M. Keith.
The dystopian impulse in modem literature : fiction as social
criticism I M. Keith Booker.
p. cm.-{Contributions to the study of science fiction and
fantasy, ISSN 0193~875 ; no. 58)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0--313-29092-X
I. Fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Science
fiction-History and criticism. 3. Dystopias in literature.
4. Utopias in literature. 5. Totalitarianism and literature.
6. Literature and society. I. Title. II. Series.
PN3503.B619 1994
809.3'9372-dc20 93-40174
~-
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
hiformatiun Standards Orgnnizauon (ZJ9.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 ~ 4 J 2
For Dubravka, Adam, and Milja
Contents
Dystopia 47
after Stalin 69
193
Introduction: Utopia, Dystopia,
and Social Critique
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all
of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to
conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal
omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as
imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in
fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer
real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (172)
effective than utopian thought, but these thinkers see just the reverse.
As Gary Saul Morson puts it, "Whereas utopias describe an escape
from history, these anti-utopias describe an escape, or attempted
escape, to history, which is to say, to the world of contingency,
conflict, and uncertainty" (128). Indeed, despite the strongly utopian
orientation of Marxism, Marxist critics from the very beginning have
consistently attempted to distance themselves from the more naive
versions of utopian thought. The Ur-text of this project is Socialism:
From Utopia to Science, where Friedrich Engels contrasts the
"scientific" approach of Marxism with the unscientific approaches of
previous schools like the French utopian socialists.
Marx himself consistently argued that his vision of the coming
ideal socialist society was not a utopian dream. Instead, he attempted
to show that the seeds of this society were already beginning to grow
within capitalist society. For Marx socialism was not a fantasy but an
inevitable reality, and he attempted to demonstrate through a
scientific analysis of capitalist society that Communism was the
natural, even necessary result of the historical evolution of capitalism.
However, it is not at all clear that the distinction between socialism
and utopianism is as sharp as Marx and Engels would indicate.
Utopian visions go back at least as far as the attempts to envision ideal
societies in ancient Greek works like Plato's Laws and Republic, but
in their modern formulation such visions are largely an Enlightenment
phenomenon, an extension of the Enlightenment belief that the
judicious application of reason and rationality could result in the
essentially unlimited improvement of human society.f In short,
modern utopianism is closely related to the kind of faith in science
and rationality that Marx and Engels themselves show. Despite their
critical stance toward the bourgeois ideology that is so closely involved
with Enlightenment thought, Marx and Engels retain numerous echoes
of the Enlightenment worldview in their philosophy.f
Marx and Engels, of course, are not alone among modern thinkers
in placing a great deal of faith in scientific thinking. Jiirgen
Habermas, one of the leading contemporary theorists of "modernity,"
has suggested that the idea of being "modern" as we know it began
only with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. In
particular, the new science opened exciting new possibilities and
inspired a belief in "the infinite progress of knowledge and in the
infinite advance towards social and moral betterment" ("Modernity" 4).
This faith in the potential of science to build an increasingly better
world clearly has much in common with the aspirations of utopian
thinkers. On the other hand, the drive for scientific progress
described by l labermns is clearly at odds with the stability usually
Introduction 5
through the configuration of its elements the work of art reveals the
irrational and false character of existing reality and, at the same time,
by way of its aesthetic synthesis, it prefigures an order of
reconciliation. (Wellmer 48)
the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the powers of the spirits of
nature recognized and employed in the service of a higher egotism; it
believes that it can correct the world by knowledge, guide life by
science, and actually confine the individual within a limited sphere of
solvable problems. (Birth 109)
8 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men
as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on
the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it
became the inevitable consequence. (69)
societies on which they focus. The issues explored by these three texts
can be grouped roughly under the six rubrics of science and
technology, religion, sexuality, literature and culture, language, and
history. For purposes of parallelism and comparison, I discuss each of
these issues in turn in these first three chapters.
Perhaps because of the inherent plurality of bourgeois society
itself, there is no single post-World War II dystopian critique of
bourgeois society that is roughly analogous to 1984. In the fourth
chapter, then, I discuss a number of bourgeois dystopias that have
roughly the same relationship to Brave New World that 1984 does to
We, in terms of both literary influence and historical context. In
particular, I treat a number of post- World War II American dystopian
fictions, including texts by B. F. Skinner (Walden Two), Sinclair Lewis
(It Can't Happen Here), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano), Gore Vidal
(Messiah), and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451).
In the fifth chapter I look at a number of recent Russian texts that
aim dystopian critiques directly at the totalitarian excesses of the
Soviet system in Russia. Writing from perspectives of two or three
decades after the death of Stalin, these texts differ from historical
predecessors like 1984 in their post-Stalinist point of view, though
they tend to suggest that the legacy of Stalin still haunted the Soviet
Union as late as the mid-1980s. These texts also differ from their
literary predecessors in their use of distinctively postmodernist textual
strategies, typically taking comic and parodic stances despite the
seriousness of the issues with which they deal. These texts include
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic and The Ugly Swans,
Andrei Sinyavksy's The Makepeace Experiment, Vassily Aksyonov's
The Bum and The Island 0/ Crimea, and Vladimir Voinovich's
Moscow 2042. I follow with a discussion of a number of Western
post modernist dystopian fictions, including Samuel R. Delany's Triton,
a number of texts by William Gibson, Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale, and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland.l6 These texts
demonstrate the effectiveness of dystopian fiction within the context
of postmodernist techniques and attitudes.
Together, the six chapters that follow provide an introduction to
the plots, scenarios, and concerns of many of the major dystopian
fictions of the twentieth century. In addition, these discussions
indicate the close kinship between the social criticism contained in
dystopian fiction and that carried out by important modern social and
cultural critics from Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud to Bakhtin, Adorno,
and Foucault. Finally, the arrangement of these chapters should help
to elucidate the relationship between dystopian fiction and
developments in modern history, as well as suggesting a general shape
22 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
NOTES
11. See Beauchamp ("Of Man's") for a discussion of both 1984 and
We in terms of Freud's comments on the erotic displacement involved
in loyalty to figures of authority.
12. In the preface to The Order of Things Foucault specifically
criticizes the notion of utopia as characterized by homogeneity,
suggesting as an alternative his own notion of the "heterotopia," which
he sees as being characterized by the juxtaposition of disparate and
incongruous elements (xviii).
13. Walsh's study is largely a narrative of the turn from utopian to
dystopian thought in the past century, though he ends by insisting on
the importance (and possibility) of keeping utopian thought alive.
14. Suvin specifically links this technique to the alienation effect of
Brecht.
15. This strategy necessitates the exclusion of some important
dystopian fictions, including certain modernist works that seem to be
aimed less toward critiques of a given kind of political system than do
most dystopian texts, either because they include elements of critique
of different systems or because they are more concerned with the
general philosophical concerns of modernity. This group of texts
includes works by E. M. Forster ("The Machine Stops"), Karel Capek
(R.U.R. and War With the Newts), Vladimir Nabokov (Invitation to a
Beheading and Bend Sinister), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork
Orange), and Samuel Beckett (The Lost Ones).
16. Atwood's text participates in a recent turn toward dystopian
thinking in feminist fiction, though a full discussion of that trend is
beyond the scope of this study. Important feminist texts significantly
informed by dystopian energies include Ursula K. Le Guin's The
Dispossessed, Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue, Joanna Russ's The
Female Man, and Marge Piercy'S Woman on the Edge of Time and He,
She, and It.
1
calculated effort to win the extremely useful 0-503 over to the side
of the rebellion.l! Still, We does seem to suggest a positive
subversive potential in sexuality in the way the sexual relationship
with 1-330 leads 0-503 to experience a genuinely humanizing
emotion. And when the revolution does break out, sexual rebellion
plays an important role in the apocalyptic breakdown in administrative
control that ensues. As a stunned 0-503 walks through the
tumultuous city, he sees "male and female numbers copulating
shamelessly-without even dropping the shades, without coupons, at
midday" (219). Indeed, the book ends with the revolution still in
progress, its final outcome still in doubt.P
Zamyatin figures sexuality in We as a locus of irrational energies
that are ultimately beyond the control of the One State, despite its best
efforts. Art and culture (especially poetry) function similarly. Early
in the book, for example, we learn that music in the One State is
composed according to strictly rational mathematical principles,
devoid of all inspiration or feeling. It is produced by a machine called
a "musicometer," as 0-503 learns in one of the many lectures that he
and his fellow citizens are required to attend. This machine allows
one to produce music simply by turning its handle, skipping the
element of individual inspiration associated with art and music by the
ansients (17).
Poetry in the One State is still written by humans, but by specially
trained State poets who construct their compositions for purely
didactic purposes according to Taylor's principles of effective
industrial management. These poems are intended not for private
reading and meditation, but for performance at the various public
spectacles that are periodically held to reinforce the power of the One
State and its Benefactor. The One State has "harnessed the once wild
element of poetry. Today, poetry is no longer the idle, impudent
whistling of a nightingale; poetry is civic service, poetry is useful"
(68). Indeed, the One State has great respect for the power of poetry,
comparing its attempts to harness poetry to its high-tech ability to
generate electricity from the power of ocean waves: "We have
extracted electricity from the amorous whisper of the waves; we have
transformed the savage, foam-spitting beast into a domestic animal"
(68).13
This figuration, however, is highly complex. For one thing, the
ocean is too powerful truly to be tamed; the One State has merely
learned to make use of certain marginal aspects of the ocean's power.
Poetry, too, may ultimately be beyond total state control, as is
indicated by the way 0-503's rationalistic language becomes infected
with poetic figures and images whenever he begins to write about
36 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
Crazy clouds, now heavier, now lighter. There were no longer any
boundaries between sky and earth; everything was flying, melting,
falling-nothing to get hold of. No more houses. The glass walls
dissolved in the fog like salt crystals in water. From the street, the
dark figures inside the houses were like particles suspended in a milky
nightmare solution. (70)
rejection of the past and the desire to freeze history in the present that
informs many dystopian societies.
The models of history as continual revolution espoused by both
Foucault and Zamyatin clearly run counter to the utopian history of
traditional Marxism. The historical vision of Zamyatin's We
particularly suggests that the Communist appeal to a coming future
paradise might ultimately be used merely as a justification for the
status quo, a prediction that was to come all too true in the Stalinist
years. On the other hand, the historical visions of both Foucault and
Zamyatin in many ways recall bourgeois society, with its continual
emphasis on change and innovation. However, there is a considerable
difference between genuine revolution and mere renovation, and both
Foucault and Zamyatin are ultimately antibourgeois thinkers. Indeed,
if the work of radically oppositional thinkers like Foucault and
Zamyatin highlights potential flaws in the Communist vision of
history, it points toward possible problems in bourgeois society as well.
These problems, of course, have been directly addressed in bourgeois
dystopian fictions like Huxley's Brave New World, which indicates that
the privileging of change in capitalist society may in fact merely be a
superficial disguise for a deep-seated resistance to real historical
progression. Together totalitarian dystopias like We and bourgeois
dystopias like Brave New World suggest the complexity and difficulty
of the major problems of modern society, which clearly cannot be
solved by a simple appeal to either of the two principal social and
political alternatives that have emerged in the modern world.
NOTES
1. There were, however, other satires that warned against the abuse
of science during this period, notably including Mikhail Bulgakov's
The Fatal Eggs (1925) and Heart of a Dog. However, publication of
the latter (written in 1925) was suppressed in the Soviet Union.
2. On the role of Taylor in We, see Beauchamp ("Man") and Rhodes.
Zamyatin's use of Taylor prefigures Huxley's use of Ford in Brave
New World, which suggests the sinister possibilities of an arrant
capitalism. However, the American Taylor was also greatly admired
by Lenin, who saw Taylor's work as a model for his project of
industrialization in the Soviet Union. Stanley Aronowitz notes that
Alexandra Kollontai and her "workers' opposition" fought against
Lenin's introduction of Taylorist systems of factory management on
the basis of the authoritarian management practices required by those
systems (207).
Zamyatin's We 45
At about the same time that Zamyatin was writing We to warn against
a possible dystopian turn in Russian Communism, the specter of
fascism was already beginning to raise its head in Weimar Germany.
The resulting social and political chaos in Germany during the 1920s
produced a number of dystopian warnings in that society as well. For
example, much of the work of Bertolt Brecht is informed by an
attempt to delineate Communist utopian alternatives to the bourgeois
nightmare that would eventually lead to fascism in Germany, but
(especially in his early work) Brecht also often depicts bourgeois
society itself in dystopian terms. This tendency is probably shown
most clearly in the libretto to the opera The Rise and Fall of the City
of Mahogonny, In this opera a group of fugitives found a potentially
utopian community (based on complete individual liberty) somewhere
in the American West, but the fundamentally capitalist inclinations of
the settlers lead to disastrous consequences. Despite the American
setting, the real referents of the play are Weimar Germany and
capitalism in general: "Mahogonny is Germany. Mahogonny is the
world of capitalism" (Ewen 197). Meanwhile, many of Brecht's later
works (e.g., Roundheads and Peakheads and The Resistible Rise of
Arturo Vi) are specifically directed at the Nazi regime in Germany,
depicting Hitler's rule in clearly dystopian tones.
The dystopian flavor of Brecht's early drama participates both in
the sense of cultural crisis that informed modernist literature and in
the more widespread sense of economic and political crisis that led to
48 The Dystopian Impulse in Modem Literature
sight and sound, but of touch and smell as well. This industry is
administered by various "Bureaux of Propaganda," whose techniques
are developed in a "College of Emotional Engineering.v" The
products of this culture industry are devoid of any real content that
might lead to analysis or thought. Books are almost nonexistent,
because reading is a largely individual activity that is difficult to
control and because books take too long to read, creating the danger
of an extended exposure that might lead to thought and meanwhile
diverting readers from more economically "productive" activities in
this ultra-capitalist society. After all, "[y]ou can't consume much if
you sit still and read books" (37).
The culture of Huxley's capitalist dystopia is designed to suppress
emotion and stimulate consumption, strongly anticipating what Fredric
Jameson has called the "waning of affect" in postmodern culture, a
general loss in the emotional power of art that Jameson associates with
the arrant commodification of images in late consumer capitalism
(Post modernism 10-16). Huxley emphasizes the degraded condition
of mass culture in Brave New World by opposing that culture directly
to the "high art" of Western tradition. In particular, John the Savage,
whose rearing on a Savage Reservation largely exempts him from the
strict interpellation of the "civilized" world, is a great reader and
admirer of Shakespeare, who has been officially banned by the World
Controllers. As Mond explains to John, it has been necessary to ban
Shakespeare because his works (especially the tragedies) evoke the
kind of strong passions that the World Government, in the interest of
"happiness," seeks to suppress. According to Mond, his society has
decided to do without high art in the interest of stability, substituted
a banal popular culture that prevents, rather than encourages troubling
thoughts (169).
But Huxley'S contrast between the high art of Shakespeare and the
banality of popular cultural products like these "feelies" is far from
simplistic. Popular culture may aid in the interpellation of subjects
into the positions demanded by official authority, but John the Savage
has been just as thoroughly interpellated by the works of Shakespeare.
John's expectations from and reactions to the experiences he
encounters are almost entirely conditioned by his reading of literature.
Huxley's world is a far different stage than Shakespeare's, though, and
John's Shakespearean processing of the stimuli he receives is entirely
inappropriate. Shakespeare's plays may be infinitely richer than the
insipid feelies produced by the culture industry of the World
Government, but John still lacks the powers of abstraction and
analysis to be able properly to apply what he has learned from
Shakespeare to conditions in the real world, or creatively to constitute
Huxley's Brave New World 59
Marx the feeling that there is something within him that is not being
expressed in the jingles he writes (54).
As a professional writer, Watson has a great facility with language,
but he himself is a product of this emotion-damping society, and even
he finds himself unable to inject emotional content into his
compositions. He senses the power of words, noting that "[w]ords can
be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything.
You read and you're pierced" (54). But in this society, free of any
strong feeling, he has nothing to write about except banalities. Unlike
Orwell's Party Huxley's World Government need not control language
directly because they have created an environment in which there is
nothing subversive to express, regardless of the extent of one's
linguistic dexterity.
Especially when set against John's frequent quotations from
Shakespeare, popular "poetry" like that written by Huxley's Watson is
clearly devoid of any real emotional force, as can be seen from the
words of the song that tops the hit list during the action of the book:
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma:
Hug me, honey, struggly bunny;
Love's as good as soma. (127)
Such songs provide the only linguistic currency available to the
citizens of this society, and this empty expression of "love" mirrors the
vacuity of the emotions experienced by these citizens.
But if Lenina can only quote this popular song in her attempts to
seduce John the Savage, John himself has words of considerable
emotional power with which to respond. Unfortunately, he has little
control or understanding either of his language or of his emotions.
John's violent rejection of Lenina is to a large extent triggered by his
own conditioning via the element of sex nausea that runs through
much of Shakespeare's work. As a child John had experienced
considerable jealousy at the sexual relationship between his mother
Linda and her lover Pope, jealousy to which he was only able to give
voice after reading Hamlet. Placing Linda in the role of Gertrude and
seeing Pope as Claudius, John develops a strong disgust with them
both, inspired by the power of Shakespeare's words (10 I).
Armed with the words of Shakespeare, John is able to give shape
to his vague feelings of anger and revulsion, able to experience
powerful feelings to which Lenina, with her relatively pallid linguistic
resources, has no access. But the feelings triggered in John by
Shakespeare's words are vicious and ugly. They lead to pain for both
himself and Lenina; indeed, they contribute mightily to his eventual
turn to masochistic self -flagellation and then suicide. The words of
Huxley's Brave New World 61
Shakespeare may help John to formulate certain emotions, but they are
of little use to him in dealing positively with reality. John is able to
find in Shakespeare a prefabricated battery of verbal responses to
specific situations, but by taking those responses out of their original
context he robs them of most of their original power. The richness
and multiplicity of meaning that is the true power of Shakespearean
language is largely lost in John's quotations, which are generally
inadequate and inappropriate to the situations in which he uses them.
John has been just as brainwashed by Shakespeare as Lenina has been
by her popular culture; both his linguistic and emotional resources are
in fact just as limited as hers.
John attempts to find in Shakespeare a "natural" alternative to
Huxley's highly culturated England, yet Shakespeare himself has often
figured in the modern imagination as the epitome of English culture.
Granted, Shakespeare functions as a golden image of past culture as
opposed to the degraded modern culture of Brave New World, but it
is at least arguable whether the society of Elizabethan England, with
its squalor, starvation, and brutality, was at all preferable to that of
Huxley's dystopia." Moreover, critics have extensively debated
whether Shakespeare's work is informed by energies that run counter
to the official structures of power in Elizabethan society or whether
it does not in fact work fully in complicity with the official power of
its day. Stephen Greenblatt has recently proposed in works like
Shakespearean Negotiations an extremely attractive explanation for
Shakespeare's highly complex and seemingly paradoxical relationship
to Elizabethan authority, arguing that authority and power in
Elizabethan society were themselves informed by complex and
paradoxical energies and that Shakespeare's work absorbs this quality
from its surrounding social and political context. An important
implication of Greenblatt's argument is that Shakespeare's work is not
special (as John the Savage would have it) primarily because it escapes
its social context, ascending into the realm of universal human
experience and fundamental human emotions. On the contrary, it is
special precisely because it is so intensely embedded in its social and
historical context and because it absorbs such powerful energies from
that context.
It is also relevant that Shakespeare's historical context included the
early English colonization of North America, and numerous critics
have demonstrated in recent years that plays like The Tempest are
directly informed by the discourse of English imperialism in the
Americas. Huxley overtly calls attention to the relationship between
his book and The Tempest by taking his title from that play. The
passage Huxley quotes is already ironic in Shakespeare's play,
62 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
proclaims Lenina Crowne as she pops yet another dose of soma. "I
take a gramme and only am" (80). Similarly, the physician Dr. Shaw
admits later in the book that constant soma holidays may have certain
side effects that will lead to a shortening of life, but that the escape
from time associated with these soma trips provides a sort of counter
to mortality. "Soma may make you lose a few years in time," he
explains. "But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can
give you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our
ancestors used to call eternity" (I 18).
This disengagement from time assures that the populace will be
unable to formulate any notions of genuine political change that might
threaten the existing system-and of course Shaw quickly points out
that no one can be allowed to take soma-holidays when they are
needed for important work. As part of this project the system does all
it can to remove any reminders of historicity or temporality from
everyday life. Old objects of any kind are strictly forbidden-even old
people. Through the use of drugs, hormones, and even the transfusion
of young blood people are kept as young-looking as possible, and all
physical signs of aging are effaced (43). Presumably, this attempt to
hide the aging process is part of the efforts of Huxley's Controllers to
keep their citizens happy; but it is also clearly an effort to escape from
time and from any suggestion of historical change. Through the
elimination of the physical effects of aging, other changes can be
minimized as well, keeping individuals as constant as possible
throughout their lives (43). In short, the lucky citizens of this future
society stay forever young-up until their sudden (and usually
premature) deaths.'! Walter Benjamin has argued that a telling
symptom of the depreciation of individual human experience in the
modern world is that death has "declined in omnipresence and
vividness" so that "dying has been pushed further and further out of
the perceptual world of the living" (93-4). Huxley's dystopia vividly
enacts this process. The lack of aging prevents the usual reminders of
approaching death, and death itself is devalued as an insignificant
event, the passing of individuals being of no consequence in a world
where it is only the community as a whole that counts. Indeed, an
important part of the conditioning process undergone by all children
in this society has to do with the elimination of any sense that
individual deaths are tragic or even meaningful.
The denial of the past and of time itself by the dystopian society
of Brave New World strikingly matches Habermas's description of
aesthetic modernity. This rejection of the past has been associated by
Habermas and others with the philosophy of Nietzsche, but in essays
like "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History" Nietzsche
66 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
NOTES
caught up in the mass hysteria (16). At the end, the incendiary focus
on Goldstein shifts to a calming focus on Big Brother, and the frenzy
of hatred turns to a frenzy of devotion and loyalty the religious echoes
of which are unmistakable. At the end of one such session, a woman
runs toward the screen and proclaims Big Brother her personal savior
(17).
This scapegoating of Goldstein directly echoes the demonization
of Leon Trotsky in Stalinist Russia, but it also recalls Freud's
comments on the "narcissism of minor differences," and particularly
on the Christian roots of the tendency to unify the majority in a given
society through hatred of a designated Other. Foucault has also noted,
in works like Madness and Civilization, this traditional identification
of marginal groups against which mainstream society can define itself.
And, like Freud, he also suggests the participation of the Church in
this movement. In fact, Foucault, who so often reverses Freud's
conclusions in surprising and creative ways, seems largely to agree
with Freud on the complicity of Christianity in this scapegoating
phenomenon, though for Foucault the phenomenon occurs for social
reasons rather than as a result of human nature. In The Use 0/
Pleasure Foucault continually figures moral choice among the ancient
Greeks as a matter of the internal relationship of the subject with
itself. Thus sexuality becomes not the domain of unrestrained passion,
but a means of demonstrating, through the exercise of moderation and
restraint, that one's passions are in fact under control. For Foucault
the essentially internal nature of this struggle makes mastery an ethical
and aesthetic concept for the ancient Greeks, as opposed to
Christianity, where the introduction of Satan leads to a new
conception of mastery as defeat of an external enemy. But for
Foucault there are obvious political implications in this Christian
emphasis on mastery of the Other. In Christianity itself it leads to an
oppressive code-oriented morality based on strict rules of prohibition
of certain activities, rules which act to limit and constrain the
creativity of the process of self-constitution. And in Western society
in general, the notion that personal mastery is to be gained through
domination not of oneself, but of the Other, clearly contributes to the
kinds of ideologies of domination typically enacted in dystopian
fictions.
In 1984, for example, the Party demands a strict religiouslike
devotion from its faithful members. But it is perhaps in its treatment
of its enemies that the Party echoes the medieval Church most
ominously. Not only does the Party focus hatred on official enemies
like Goldstein as a means of securing fraternity among the faithful,
but it also focuses considerable energies and resources on the
Orwell's 1984 73
treatment of those who stray from the fold. The Party enforces its
ideology with all the zeal of the medieval Inquisition, but with a
considerably more sophisticated understanding of psychology and
power. They are perfectly willing to use physical tortures that can
rival anything imagined by Torquemada, but they rely primary on
psychological tortures, and even these are administered under a veil of
secrecy that works far differently from the spectacular public
punishments inflicted by the medieval Church as a warning to
potential opponents. Party official O'Brien thus explains to the
incarcerated Smith late in the book that the torture chambers of the
ironically named Ministry of Love differ from the public tortures of
the medieval Inquisition in that the Ministry does its work in secret,
giving their victims no chance to become martyrs (209)7
O'Brien goes on to note that the Russian Communists were
somewhat more sophisticated than the Inquisitors, attempting to
prevent martyrdom by breaking the spirits of their victims through
torture and humiliation before their public trials and by obtaining
detailed false confessions to any number of heinous crimes. But
Orwell's Party goes beyond even Stalin. For one thing, in Oceania
there are no public trials or punishments for Party members who go
astray, and thus no opportunities for martyrdom. For another, the
techniques of the Ministry of Love are designed not only to extract
confessions, but to make the prisoners themselves believe those
confessions and honestly repent. These techniques are designed not so
much to inflict punishment as to elicit loyalty; the goal of the Ministry
of Love is to convert its prisoners and to release them into society to
function once again as loyal Party members. In this sense the Party
once again echoes the traditional functioning of the Church, but in
Orwell's dystopia this conversion motif takes a dark turn. Unlike
repentant Christians who can still be welcomed fully back into the
fold, once rehabilitated Party members have proven their new
orthodoxy for a time (and thus demonstrated the Party's ability to
make them loyal subjects) they are likely to be arrested and executed
without warning. Orwell's Party is thus considerably more ruthless in
its theory than the medieval Church, though not necessarily in its
practice-victims of the Inquisition were often urged to repent and
confess before being burned at the stake. And the Party's insistence
that members must repent of their own free will rather than being
coerced clearly echoes the Christian tradition; the Party, like the
('hristian God, wants not just to be obeyed but to be obeyed willingly
and worshipfully.
Interestingly, the movement described by O'Brien from the
Inquisition to Orwell's Party is precisely the movement from medieval
74 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
NOTES
thus to recharge his spirits, to remind himself that the present has
progressed far beyond the past days of Edison: "It was a vote of
confidence from the past, he thought-where the past admitted how
humble and shoddy it had been, where one could look from the old to
the new and see that mankind really had come a long way" (6). But
this . progress is purely technological, and when Paul views a
photograph of the shop's workers from the days of Edison, he is
reminded of the relative spiritual impoverishment of the present; he
sees- in their faces a strength, a determination, and a spirit that he
himself has lost (7),
The book's title image reinforces this same sort of nostalgia for a
simpler past that was still somewhat mechanized. A player piano is
precisely a machine designed to perform work that would normally be
performed by a human, and its perforated rolls are analogous to the
punched tapes that program the lathe once operated by Rudy Hertz.
Yet player pianos are typically regarded in the popular consciousness
not as warnings of the growing danger that mechanization will render
humans obsolete but as Quaint reminders of a simpler past. Hertz
himself seems fascinated by the player piano in the bar that he
frequents, though his description of the machine to Proteus carries
ominous undertones: "Makes you feel kind of creepy, don't it, Doctor,
watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost
sitting there playing his heart out" (28).
Vonnegut's appeal to a time of more limited technology as an
alternative to his dystopia is probably more realistic than would be a
similar appeal to raw nature. On the other hand, Player Piano
ultimately suggests that the development of technology may in fact be
inherent in human nature. Late in the book a group of Luddite-like
subversives (who recruit Proteus as their titular leader) violently revolt
against the system; though the revolt fails in most of the country, the
revolutionaries do manage to take control of Ilium, where they begin
to smash every machine in sight. Yet by the book's end these same
subversives are already beginning to repair the machines, simply to
give themselves something interesting to do. This ending indicates
that, even had the revolution succeeded, the progressive
industrialization that brought it about would simply have been
repeated. And the book as a whole suggests that the oppressed
citizenry of America brought about their own predicament. As
Thomas Wymer puts it, "Vonnegut goes beyond a simple attack on
technology by suggesting that the real tragedy is that man has defined
himself in a way that makes him replaceable by machines, that man
has defined his own value as he defines the value of an object" (44),
The Bourgeois Dystopia 105
The computer stores not dead labor but dead knowledge. It replaces
not the arms and muscles of the worker but his or her mental
functions of memory and calculation, among others. It stands against
the living worker, to continue the Marxist analogy, like his or her
alien essence, dominating the work process. The reversal of priorities
Marx saw in the factory whereby the dead (machines) dominate the
living (workers) is extended by the computer to the realm of
knowledge. (166)
Montag asks what she watched, she says "Programs," and when he asks
which programs, she says "Some of the best ever" (52).11
The entire culture of this society seems designed precisely to numb
the minds of the populace and to prevent them from experiencing any
real thought or feeling, much in the mode of Brave New World. Jack
Zipes summarizes Bradbury's goal:
peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine when he isn't
making veiled references to certain commercial products that every
worshipper absolutely needs" (88).
This commercialization of Christ functions for Bradbury as an
image of the spiritual sterility of his dystopian America. The Bible
itself has been banned in this bookless society, and when Montag joins
a group of rebels who oppose the burning of books by memorizing
entire texts he himself is assigned to memorize the Book of
Ecclesiastes. Bradbury's dystopian society is destroyed in a massive
nuclear war that is pictured in the book as a sort of cleansing that
brings the potential of new birth. Indeed, this nuclear holocaust
clearly figures as an image of the Christian apocalypse, with a new
society (to be led by Montag and the book-people) arising from the
ashes of the old as a sort of literate New Jerusalem. The book ends as
Montag and his new friends trudge back from their exile in the
wilderness toward the devastated city, with Montag recalling to
himself a passage from the Book of Revelations. Bradbury's vision of
a "salvation" that will require the destruction of most of humanity
parallels Christian projections of the future quite closely, but it is
certainly a questionable solution to the problems he saw in his
contemporary America. Fahrenheit 451, apparently inadvertently,
thus echoes a number of dystopian texts in the suggestion that
religion, by focusing its energies on the promise of some better future
(whether it be heaven or the New Jerusalem), may worsen, rather than
improve conditions in the present.
Even Bradbury is not entirely optimistic about the prospects for
a New Jerusalem at the end of his book. For one thing, the history of
Bradbury's dystopian America has been rewritten much in the manner
of 1984, and most of the populace in the book believe that things have
pretty much always been the way they are. For example, the official
history books of this society claim that fire departments have always
been organized for the burning of books, attributing the formation of
the first book-burning fire department in America to Benjamin
Franklin in 1790 (37). As a result, most of the survivors of the
nuclear holocaust might be expected to attempt to rebuild a society
much like the one that was just destroyed. After all, the death and
rebirth myth that provides a structural model for Bradbury's plot itself
implies a cyclic history, and the rebel Granger suggests at the book's
close that the rise of civilization phoenix like from its own ashes is
unlikely to result in any improvement over the disasters of the past
unless people can somehow learn from their past mistakes:
112 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've
got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly
thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for
a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it
around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn
funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few
more people that remember every generation. (177)
NOTES
the future in order to divert attention from the misery of the present,
thereby using a utopian vision of coming change paradoxically to
support the status quo. Writers in the Soviet Union could not openly
attack this Stalinist utopianism during Stalin's reign, of course, but
such utopianism has become a prominent target for Russian writers of
dystopian fiction in recent years. Many recent Soviet dystopian
fictions can in fact be taken as a direct assault on official Soviet
projections of a coming paradise, and particularly of the technological
utopianism that informed the official ideology of the Soviet regime
throughout its existence. Many of the works of the Strugatskys and of
Sinyavsky can be read in this way. However, rather than launch
simplistic satirical assaults on Soviet utopianism, these writers
interrogate utopianism in complex ways, maintaining an unstable and
double-voiced attitude that identifies them as postmodernist works.
The science fiction novels of the Strugatsky brothers show a
consistent skepticism toward technological utopianism. Much of the
Strugatskys' satire is aimed specifically at the West (as in their
somewhat Huxleyan depiction of bourgeois decadence in the 1965
dystopian novel The Final Circle 0/ Paradise), and none of their work
overtly criticizes the Soviet system. As a result, they managed to
publish most of their works (and to have long and successful careers)
in the Soviet Union despite producing complex and ambiguous
fantastic novels that go well beyond the apotheosis of science and
scientism that informs most Soviet science fiction. Indeed, the
Strugatskys deliver a number of telling (if subtle) blows against the
official Soviet ideology with their dystopian questioning of science
and technology as unequivocally positive forces for progress. Almost
all of the Strugatsky brothers' books feature scientists or engineers as
prominent characters. For example, virtually all of the important
characters in Definitely Maybe (1984) are prominent scientists or
engineers; one is even a Nobel laureate. But though the "heroes" of
this book are scientists, Definitely Maybe is a far cry from the Soviet
tradition of apotheosis of scientists and their work. Instead, Definitely
Maybe is a highly skeptical inquiry into the limitations of scientific
progress." In the book astrophysicist Dmitri Alekseevich Malinov and
several of his colleagues find themselves suddenly besieged by an
array of strange events that seem designed to prevent them from
continuing their scientific research. At first they suspect interference
by an advanced alien civiJization, but eventually they conclude that
their work is being impeded not by alien intelligences but by the
nature of the universe itself. Citing the well-known law of the
conservation of matter and energy as a particular case, mathematician
and Nobel laureate Philip Pavlovich Vecherovsky proposes that the
The Contemporary Communist Dystopia 119
"These are objects for which we have found uses. We use them, but
almost certainly not the way the visitors use them. I am positive that
in the vast majority of cases we are hammering nails with
microscopes .... Let's call this group of objects beneficial. It can be
said that mankind has benefitted from them in some degree, even
though it should never be forgotten that in our Euclidean world every
stick has two ends." (Roadside Picnic 106)
"So every government is forced to use ... one foot to step on the
brakes and the other to step on the gas. Like a racing car driver on a
curve. The brakes keep you from losing control and the gas keeps you
from losing speed, so that some demagogic champion of progress
doesn't shove you out of the driver's seat." (24)
Meanwhile, the citizens of the town have lost all faith that the
future will bring anything new, believing that "there's no future
anymore, it's merged with the present, and now you can't tell the
difference" (22). Banev sees the history of this town (and perhaps of
122 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
of The Ugly Swans occurs only in a single isolated city; the rest of the
country (to which most of the adult residents of the town flee) remains
firmly in the hands of Mr. President and his cronies. And Banev, who
seems briefly to emerge from his characteristic cynicism to welcome
the coming new world, ends the book on a note of skepticism. "All
this is fine," he says, "but I'd better not forget to go back" (234).
Sinyavsky's The Makepeace Experiment (1963) resembles the
Strugatskys' works in its use of the fantastic and particularly in its
parody of the official Soviet apotheosis of scientific progress. Like
the Strugatskys, however, Sinyavsky does not pose a simple alternative
to Soviet technologism. Rather than effect a Dostoevskian privileging
of the irrational, Sinyavsky's book instead suggests that the ostensibly
rational, scientific ideology of Stalinism veiled a fundamentally
irrational, even absurd system. Here the establishment of an ostensible
utopia in the provincial Soviet town of Lyubimov in fact leads to dire
dystopian consequences for the town and its populace. As the book
begins, Lyubimov is ruled by the Town Party Committee and its
Secretary, Comrade Tishchenko. Then, in the midst of the annual
May Day Parade, Tishchenko experiences a sort of demonic possession
that causes him to abdicate in favor of Leonard Makepeace, the town's
leading bicycle mechanic.f After a series of surreal scenes in which
Tishchenko vainly tries to resist the strange forces that have overcome
him, Makepeace's power is established and the townspeople greet his
coming rule enthusiastically, proclaiming their desire to see him
declared the new tsar. But the loyalties of the crowd seem somewhat
confused. Despite this call for a return to the tsarist past, they
simultaneously proclaim their hope that the mechanic Makepeace will
be able to bring technological improvements, greeting him with an
orthodox Stalinist cry: "Long live technical and scientific progress
throughout the world" (38).
Technological progress continues to function at the heart of
Makepeace's rhetoric as his reign proceeds. Thus, though Makepeace
ostensibly supplants Communist rule in Lyubimov, it is clear that he
functions largely as a parody of certain Soviet rulers and of their
apotheosis of progress. Manya Harari thus describes him as "a man of
peace like Khrushchev. an illusionist like Stalin, a tormented
rationalist like Lenin" (8). Moreover, the mixture shown by the
citizenry of Lyubimov of a nostalgic longing for the tsarist past with
a belief in the scientific promise of the Communist future is typical
of the entire text of The Makepeace Experiment. The book seems
designed more than anything else to suggest that the Soviet regime has
not in fact escaped the ideology of the past and that its rhetoric of
science and rationality conceals a deep-seated lack of reason and logic.
124 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
energies go into that area as well. One military assault after another
is launched by Moscow against the upstart regime in Lyubimov, but
Makepeace repels them all handily with his hypnotic powers. In the
end, however, technology seems to triumph over trickery-remote
controlled tanks are able to take the city, as such tanks have no drivers
within the limited range of Makepeace's hypnotic powers. On the
other hand, religion wins as well-the local peasantry retain their
religious faith, and in the end we see the priest Father Ignatius
ministering to a quintessential provincial Russian flock in a parish that
is "the poorest imaginable, so tucked away in the wilds that the ancient
church might have been standing at the end of the world" (I85).
Ultimately, the perspectives of science and of religion/mysticism
are so complexly and dialogically intertwined in The Makepeace
Experiment that it is difficult to separate them. The book may
function principally as a critique of Soviet technological utopianism,
but it stops far short of granting an unqualified endorsement to the
spiritualism of the traditional Russian peasant. One of the reasons that
Makepeace turns more to magic than to science in running Lyubimov
is that the townspeople actually seem to prefer it that way. When a
group of peasant-supplicants from outlying villages come into town to
ask Makepeace for help in averting the violent outbreaks of lightning
that seem suddenly to be plaguing the area, he offers to build for them
a lightning conductor. They decline, however, suggesting that they
could build such a device for themselves. What they want is not
science, but magic, and when he suggests that there is no longer a
place for spells and miracles in the new scientific age, they respond
that Father Ignatius is in fact quite capable of such magic and that the
good priest has "only to hold a service for the sun or rain to be turned
on according to need" (155).
If Sinyavsky's suggestion of magical forces behind the supposedly
scientific reign of Makepeace particularly recalls the attempts of Stalin
to endow his rule with a mystical aura, one can also take the
suggestion of an ongoing religious tradition among the Russian
populace as an explanation for Stalin's adoption of such a strategy.
True progress in Stalin's Soviet Union (and in Sinyavsky's Lyubimov)
was impeded not only by wrong-headed leaders, but also by the
stubborn superstitions of a populace that was not genuinely ready to
accept the new. Samson is indeed a sort of representative of
traditional Russian religious energies, but he is not merely a religious
voice. As Michel Aucouturier puts it, Samson is "a vehicle of cultural
tradition and a cluster of historical 'voices" (5).
Politically, Samson is not a force for spiritual progress as opposed
to material progress. Instead, he represents a return to the tsarist past.
The Contemporary Communist Dystopia 127
But this past carries resonances of tsarist oppression that make it far
from an ideal source of inspiration for political progress. Because of
the presumably radical break with the past effected by the 1917
Russian Revolution, Sinyavsky's invocation of an inspiration from the
past might be read as making Makepeace an anti-Soviet figure. But
one could also read Makepeace's inability to transcend the tsarist past
as a suggestion that Stalin and the other Soviet leaders themselves
failed to go beyond the centuries of oppression that the Revolution
had supposedly ended. That Samson inspires and to some extent
controls both Makepeace and Savely can be taken as an indication of
the way the Soviet leadership never really broke free of the values of
the past, despite their rhetoric of scientific progress. But it can also
be taken as a suggestion of the stubborn power of old ways of thinking
in the minds of the Russian people, a power that consistently
undermined the attempts of the Soviet regime to bring scientific and
technological progress to their backward country.
The postmodern ambivalence that informs The Makepeace
Experiment is even more pronounced in Aksyonov's The Island 0/
Crimea, which ostensibly suggests Western capitalism as a utopian
alternative to the dreariness of Soviet Communism. The premise of
The Island 0/ Crimea-a sort of "what if" alternative history-is that
the Crimea is not a peninsula, but an island, and that its separation
from the mainland has allowed the defeated forces of the White Army
to retreat there after the Russian Civil War and to maintain their
political independence from the Soviet Union. The island of Crimea
is a sort of bourgeois utopia where an ethnically and culturally diverse
populace live in an atmosphere of abundance and permissiveness. It
is also a haven for political diversity in which literally dozens of
political parties represent a wide variety of ideologies, all of which are
tolerated in the island's democratic society.
Aksyonov, in short, constructs his own alternative utopian vision
to counter the official Soviet one. The fictional Crimean society is
clearly presented as an image of what Russia might have been had the
October Revolution never occurred and had the bourgeois reforms of
the Kerensky government been allowed to develop and reach fruition.
In particular, the emphasis on carefree sensual pleasure in Aksyonov's
Crimea is reminiscent of Bakhtin's discussions of the medieval
carnival in Rabelais and His World, discussions that themselves have
a clear utopian tone.6 The Crimean island society consists of a richly
heteroglossic mixture of different races, cultures, and languages, all
of which is informed by a "carnival atmosphere: glamorous
international living; glossy, self-indulgent sexual adventure; artistry;
western consumerism; and general frolic" (Matich 644).
128 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
Reformed Church," which "always instills its flock with the belief that
the truly righteous man is the one who fulfills his production
assignments, observes production discipline, obeys the authorities, and
displays constant uncompromising vigilance to all signs of alien
ideology" (224-25). But Voinovich's satire extends well beyond
Stalinist Russia, suggesting that any regime whose rule is accepted
unquestioningly will tend to become oppressive. Within the Russian
context of Moscow 2042 the conflation of Christianity and
Communism echoes The Makepeace Experiment by suggesting that the
failure of Soviet Communism may have occurred partially because the
Soviets lost sight of the supposedly scientific orientation of
Communism, making it into an alternative religion, merely another
opiate of the masses. It also suggests that Communism in the Soviet
Union may have been undermined by the persistent underlying
presence of religious feelings among the populace, and particularly by
the continued underground strength of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Like Sinyavsky, Voinovich offers this strength as at least one
reason why the Communist system was never really able to win the
hearts and minds of the Russian people. Moscow 2042 suggests that
the Soviet system is rotten to the core, lacking any real support. Near
the end of the book the Communist Moscowrep thus falls with a
suddenness that makes Voinovich seem prescient in the light of the
actual events of 1991. But the Communist system of 2042 is replaced
by an even more abominable system headed by the megalomaniacal
Sim Simych Karnavalov, who proclaims himself tsar and institutes a
religious dictatorship in which all persons are required to convert to
the "true Russian Orthodox faith" and to study only the Bible and the
writings of Karnavalov himself'.l'' In short, nothing has really
changed, a situation symbolized by the fact that a prominent statue of
the Genialissimo on horseback (which itself had been created by
replacing former rider Yuri Dolguruky on the same mount) is
modified by replacing the figure of the Genialissimo with that of
Kama valov. 17
Moscow 2042 pays a great deal of attention to art and culture as
well, particularly to censorship of artistic production under the Soviet
system. Perhaps Voinovich's most vivid satire of the Culture Industry
in the Communist society of Moscow 2042 occurs when Kartsev tours
the Communist Writers' Union, where all of the society's writers work
in a sort of factory for the production of literature. Here the writers
are housed in a single building, where literature can be manufactured
like any other goods, giving writers the same status as other workers
and making art a commodity in the mode of the productions of
The Contemporary Communist Dystopia 135
NOTES
derives from the political activism of the 1960s and early 1970s in
America. "Moons," with their peripheral status as satellites, thus
function as emblems of marginality, and the privileging of moons over
planets in Delany's book clearly suggests a call for acceptance of
marginal, as opposed to official, ideologies and life styles in our own
society. What little we see of civilization on Delany's Earth clearly has
much in common with the societies of dystopian fiction. Citizens of
Earth tend to get "hauled off for resocialization" for even the slightest
deviation from the norm, and when protagonist Bron Helstrom visits
Earth only to be inexplicably arrested and brutally interrogated for
reasons he never learns (72).
Tethys, meanwhile, is in many ways the antithesis of Earth, and
thus of dystopia. Citizens of Tethys never have to choose between
freedom and security-the society is rich, and all citizens can be
confident that their basic needs will be met. Moreover, all taxation is
voluntary, with citizens paying only for those services they actually
use. As opposed to the monologic authoritarian regimes of dystopian
fiction, the government of Tethys is extremely pluralistic. There are
literally dozens of political parties, all of which share in governing the
town-all candidates for office are automatically elected, with each
citizen being governed by the candidate for whom he or she votes.
Sexual freedom is particularly emphasized in Tethys. The society
recognizes that individual sexual preferences can vary widely, and all
behavior is openly tolerated as long as it is consensual. Plurality is
again the keynote. As one social worker explains to a confused
teenager, the basic philosophy of Tethys is that "anything, to the
exclusion of everything else, is a perversion" (304, Delany's emphasis).
Thus, not only do the citizens of Tethys tend to engage in a wide
range of sexual activities with a variety of partners, but the society
recognizes "forty or fifty" basic genders, and both surgical and
psychological techniques are available to allow individuals to move
freely from one sexual orientation to another according to their
current preference. Meanwhile, there are perhaps a hundred different
religions and a diverse assortment of cultural activities.
In short, the government and society of Tethys are informed by
tolerance in precisely the same areas where dystopian governments
typically concentrate their oppressive energies. And for those who
want even more freedom, the city even includes an "unlicensed sector"
where there are essentially no official rules whatsoever. Tethys is a
"politically low-volatile society" which can afford to tolerate any
number of aberrant behaviors because it is specifically designed to be
virtually impervious to transgression (148). Recalling Ivan
Knrumazov's declaration that anything is allowed in a world without
144 The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature
By the end of the story these negative associations lead the narrator to
disavow utopian fantasies altogether. Reminded by the proprietor of
a newsstand of the "human near-dystopia we live in," he acknowledges
his agreement that our society has problems, but adds that perfection
(i.e., the complete realization of utopian dreams) would be even worse
(35).
This final statement is a classic dystopian move. As Andrew Ross
points out, however, Gibson's story draws its energy from "a contrast
between the rough, savvy realism of contemporary SF's fondness for
technological dystopias and the wide-eyed idealism of the thirties pulp
romance of utopian things to come" (102). The story is thus
emblematic of the mixture of utopian and dystopian energies that
informs all of Gibson's work. Indeed, the story is representative of
many of the aspects of cyberpunk fiction in general, so much so that
Bruce Sterling selected it as the lead story in his cyberpunk
anthology /manifesto Mirrorshades (1986). Gibson's later novels
Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive
(1988) continue this distinctive cyberpunk utopian/dystopian mixture.
In Gibson'S future, advanced technology (especially computer
technology) makes possible the realization of a number of traditional
human dreams, even including immortality. At the same time, these
dreams are realized at a price: immortality achieved via computer may
be bought at the price of a process of dehumanization that converts
Western Postmodernist Dystopias 149
She couldn't move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked
straight into her brain, myoelectric interface. The fragile-looking
polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system
handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. (Burning Chrome 122).
have a dark tone that strongly recalls the Two Minutes Hate of 1984.
One such ceremony is the "Salvaging," the name of which carries hints
of Christian salvation of those who have strayed, but which is in
reality nothing more than a public hanging of groups of subversives,
who serve as a focus (it la Emmanuel Goldstein) for mass hatred. This
hatred surfaces most violently in the ritual of "Particicution," a chilling
reinscription of medieval public executions in which groups of women
servants act not as spectators but as executioners; they are whipped to
a frenzy by incendiary rhetoric, then turned loose on some
transgressor against society and encouraged savagely to beat the victim
to death, thus gaining their full complicity in the enforcement of the
rules of the State. Even "sinners" who are not publicly executed still
have their bodies put on public display, hanging for days from hooks
set in a wall as an abject reminder of the fate that awaits such sinners.
The Handmaid's Tale clearly bears out the arguments of many recent
feminist critics concerning the masculine bias of language, especially
written language. Indeed, men in Gilead maintain an especially strong
control over written language, and women are generally forbidden
either to read or write. Atwood directly relates this motif to
psychoanalysis; one of the mottoes of the center where the handmaids
are trained is "Pen Is Envy" (241).
Women in this society have limited access to spoken language as
well. Expected mechanically to occupy predetermined roles without
deviation, they are also expected to speak in mechanical and
predetermined ways. Thus when "Offred" meets her shopping partner
"Of'glen," the two respond to each other in thoroughly determined
ways, speaking only in cliches like "Blessed be the fruit" and "Praise
be." But, as is usually the case in dystopian fiction, language functions
Western Postmadernist Dystopias 169
I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the
leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the
first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these
facts has any connection with the others.
These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself. (140)
NOTES