FUTURE WORDS: LANGUAGE AND THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL

Author(s): Gorman L. Beauchamp

Source: Style , Fall 1974, Vol. 8, No. 3, Politics and Style (Fall 1974), pp. 462-476
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42945221

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 Gorman Beauchamp

FUTURE WORDS:

LANGUAGE AND THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL

Near the end of the last cen

tury Oscar Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Soc
map of the world that does not include Utopia is not w
glancing at. . . . Progress is the realization of Utopias.
cades later Aldous Huxley affixed as epigraph to Brave
the words of the Russian philosopher Berdyaev: "Les u
réalisibles. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-êtr
nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle òu les intellectuels e
cultivée rêveront aux moyens d'éviter les utopies et de
une société non utopique, moins 'parfaite' et plus libre.
the faith expressed by Wilde- reflecting a tradition stretc
Plato to Wells- and the fear expressed by Berdyaev fell th
of ominous historical events that turned the Utopians'
the dystopians' nightmare. As visions of systematical
and regimented societies threatened to become realitie
to be transformed into fact, chiliastic hope gave way to c
anxiety; so that, in Chad Walsh's words, 'if alert reade
down with Bellamy's Looking Backward or Wells's A Modern
Utopia ," today they "seem more likely to meditate upon Huxley's
Brave New World or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The causes
of this shift in attitude, a symptomatic event in our intellectual
history, cannot be recounted here, but the conclusion to which it
leads has been put succinctly by Eugene Goodheart:

Indeed, insofar as utopianism expresses the view that the present

limitations of social and personal life are not ultimate and are subject
to rational change, it can be a liberating view-utopia's permanent
contribution to political and social life. . . . However, utopianism

462 STYl.E: Vol. VIII, Fall 1974. No. 3

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LANGU A GE AND THE D Y STOPI AN NO VEL 463

becomes problematic, indeed pernicious, when it enter

realm with ambitions to transform the political a
according to an idea.2

Dystopian fiction has sounded the direst warn

such ambition, and has done so using the Utopians' favorite
technique: the projection of a fictive but prophetic future. Thus,
while the purpose of the dystopian writer differs diametrically
from that of the Utopian, he faces the same artistic challenge, to
create an imaginary world both vivid enough to convince us of the
validity of his thesis yet consistent with his ideological premises. In
the former respect, most Utopian fiction fails: no matter how
persuasive the abstract arguments for, nor how noble the purpose
of, these societies, not many of us could be convinced to take up
residence in the Republic or Bensalem or Waiden Two. They are
too drab, too boring- failures, artistically, to convince. The best
dystopian fiction is, in this regard, much superior.
But for all their artistic superiority, most dystopian fantasies
share with Utopian ones a failure of imagination in creating a
"future language": a language, that is, reflecting the specific reality
of the projected future. Arthur Koestler, in an amusingly jaundiced
essay entitled "The Boredom of Fantasy," has complained that
despite their galactic gadding-about, the interplanetary voyagers of
science fiction remain remarkably like the boys next door. "Tom
Corbett, Space Cadet, behaves on the third planet of Orion
exactly the way he does in a drug store in Minnesota. . . . The
Milky Way has become simply an extension of Main Street." More
specifically, Koestler notes, sci-fi futurites are utterly lacking in
linguistic inventiveness: they "speak a kind of cosmic R.A.F. slang
(it ought to be called, evidently, 'cosmilingo')" and they "swear
'By space,' 'By the seven rings of Saturn,' or 'By the gas-pits of
Venus'."3 Such facile concessions to futurity aside, their language
is indistinguishable from our own, and thus anachronistic. In
like manner, the problem of creating an imaginatively viable
language, one that embodies the sweeping changes in human
experience posited by their fantasies, presents the same challenge
to dystopian satirists, and seldom is it met successfully.
As an example of this failure, let me pose Brave New World ,
in most other respects a brilliantly inventive novel. Huxley's

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 464 GORMAN BEA UCH AMP

society is placed about six hundred

the distance that separates us from
babies are produced in bottles, wher
immediately, where total promiscuit
mental and physical conditioning app
all this society's divergence from our
the properest twentieth century En
and technological changes projected
no effect on their language. We k
innovation constantly modifies our language, and with ever-
increasing rapidity.'* Yet there is no attempt to imitate such
linguistic changes-or, to be more precise, to create a convincing
illusion of such changes- in this brave new world.
Huxley does, however, touch upon, albeit briefly and rather
obliquely, the central dystopian criticism of Utopia's effect on
language: that in constricting the range of permissible ideas to an
orthodox few, Utopian societies would deliberately delimit and
debase the medium of ideas, words. Thus Helmholtz Watson, a
heterodox lecturer at the proto-Skinnerian College of Emotional
Engineering, is made to complain that the skill he seeks to teach
has become superfluous in a society where nothing of any sig-
nificance remains to be said:

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through

anything. You read and you're pierced. That's the one thing 1 try to
teach my students- how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the
use of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the
latest improvements in scent organs? Besides, can you make words
really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays-when you're
writing about that sort of thing? Can you really say something about
nothing?5

Two problems, then, confront the dystopian novelist with

regard to language: to convey the stultifying effect that the rigidly
controlled society would have on how its citizens think and speak,
and to create an imaginatively valid language reflecting the specific
social and technological realities of the projected future. Both
Orwell in 1984 and Eugene Zamiatin in We manage, where most
other dystopian novelists fail, to solve these problems successfully,
although in quite different ways.^ The different tacks they take, and

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LANGUAGE AND THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL 465

the different artistic effects produced, are a

different fears about the future each embodies in his fiction. As
George Woodcock has noted, each dystopian writer stresses "the
particular aspects of the trends toward Utopia that seem to him
most dangerous."

Zamiatin was by profession an engineer; an observation of the tendency

towards industrial regimentation during the 1920's gave him the idea
of a world where statistics, and the mathematical outlook associated
with them, become the dominant force in shaping both the outlook of
the rulers and the character of the society they establish- a crystalline,
higher-mathematical order where men become merely the figures in a
gigantic equation. . . . Orwell, on the other hand, was an observant and
passionate student of political affairs, and saw the danger of the future
in the ruthless elimination of opposition by means of police dictator-
ship and by an extension of the deliberate falsification of history and
language which has already begun in modern totalitarian states; thus,
1984 is dominated less by technological . . . factors than by the
possibility of man's being turned into a mindless robot by predomi-
nantly cultural and political means.7

The language of Orwell's Oceania, consequently, is shaped primarily

by the political exigencies of a fascioid superstate, while the
language of Zamiatin 's United State reflects primarily the mathe-
matical order of a completely technologized society.
By the language of Oceania, I do not mean the language
actually spoken by the characters in the novel- for they, like
Huxley's, carry on their ordinary conversations in a récognizably
contemporary idiom- but the language the state is deliberately
evolving, the language the Oceanians of the future will use, New-
speak. For Orwell, employing a strategy relatively rare among
utopian/dystopian writers, sets his story in an immediate future,
granting himself only the minimum time necessary to allow his
nightmare world plausibly to develop out of the present: so that
we encounter the first generation of Oceanians, whose language is
but beginning to take the form the state will finally impose. This
plan is spelled out for us in the opening sentences of the novel's
appendix, "The Principles of Ňewspeak":

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised
to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the

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 466 GORMAN BEAUCHAMP

year 1984 there was not as ye

means of communication, e
articles in the Times were wr
which could only be carried o
Newspeak would have Anal
English, as we should call it
ground steadily, all Party mem
grammatical constructions m
The version in use in 1984,
Editions of the Newspeak d
contained many superfluous w
due to be suppressed later.8

Orwell , thus provides himse

convincingly demonstrate
ultimately have on languag
obviating the difficulties of
that would render rebellio
speak is to do just that. "Do
Syme to Winston Smith, t
aim of Newspeak is to narro
will make thoughtcrime lit
no words in which to expres
as we understand it now.
needing to think. Orthodo
Newspeak had already h
obviously Winston's own th
By setting the novel in th
still used for ordinary dis
formulated and emerging
that the novel of the futu
that future.
Perhaps because Newspeak is presented abstractly rather than
dramatically- that is, characters talk about it rather than in it-
critics, most of them of the Jamesian show-don't-tell persuasion,
have largely slighted its function in the novel;9 yet Orwell clearly
meant Newspeak to serve as a synecdoche for the totalitarian
superstructure of his dystopian state: the violence done language
signals the violence done the whole range of human emotions and
experience that language expresses. "We're destroying words,"

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LANGUAGE AND THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL 467

Syme again explains, "scores of them, hund

day. We're cutting the language down to the
such as honor, justice, morality, democracy,
ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in
covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves
round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were
contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping
themselves around the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were
contained in the single word oldthink" (p. 251). As with language,
so with all other aspects of life in Oceania:

In our world there will be no emotion except fear, rage, triumph and
self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy-everything. ... We
have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and
man, and between man and woman. ... In the future there will be no
wives and no friends. . . . The sex instinct will be eradicated. ... We
shall abolish the orgasm. . . . There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to
the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There
will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.
There will be no art, no literature, no science. . . . There will be no
curiosity, no employment of the process of life. (p. 220)

This litany of negation- recited by the Grand Inquisitorial figure,

O'Brien- represents all Orwell's fears of what awaits us at the end
of the path to utopia, for he is presenting in extremis a feature
common to such societies, from Plato's on: uniformism. Utopians
tend to assume that there is one, and only one, right method of
doing everything and consequently that all other alternatives must
be rigorously excluded, by whatever methods the society has at its
disposal. The result of this logic is, as one historian of the subject
puts it, that "Utopian men are uniform creatures with identical
wants and reactions and deprived of emotions and passions, for
these would be the expressions of individuality. This uniformity is
reflected in every aspect of Utopian life, from the clothes to the
time-table, from moral behaviour to intellectual interests."1® The
intent of utopias is, of course, benevolent, but the techniques are
totalitarian. And what Orwell feared was the application of these
techniques not by a More (bad as that might be) but by a
Machiavelli- as seems historically the more likely prospect. In 1984
the controls and conditioning that were to ensure the good life of

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468 GORMAN BEA UCH AMP

utopia are perverted to pres

of the Party.
Newspeak, then, is the lingu
employed for life-denying
adumbrated by Plato, who, i
outlines to be followed by t
the limits beyond which the
that is, were to be strictly cen
cannot obey shall not practi
But where Plato merely pros
render them literally impos
possible to follow a heretical
that it was heretical; beyond
nonexistent" (p. 252). Even
language have been simplifie
tradition, richness, so that it
so dear to Utopian hearts: "all
the comparisons of all adjec
goodest (pp. 248-49). Wells's
employ a "not too imagin
vengeance in Oceania, wher
speech issue from the laryn
centers at all" (p. 254).
If the major features of N
lation into the future of Uto
another important feature in
historical tendency already
and of whose increasing int
his death he has proved a pr
meaning of words and the con
This phenomenon, which he
the three slogans of Ingsoc
Ignorance Is Strength. Life
all too precisely. Any White
afford an embarrassment of
correspondent's account of h

The corruption of language . . .

fog from the Vietnam war som

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LANGU A GE AND THE D YSTOPIAN NO VEL 469

the most well known was the explanation for the lev
during the 1968 Tet offensive. It had to be destroyed
officer told reporters, in order to save it. Indeed
Vietnam has been experiencing the systematic ap
salvation techniques for years. "This," wrote former
William R. Corson, "is the language of madness."1 2

The language of madness, to be sure; but what if

the language in this way is itself mad? Then the
mad distortion of reality, but the accurate ref
reality. Herbert Marcuse has made just this point about the
relation of language to reality:

The word communicates daily the society to its members . . . [but] the
word can all but lose its transcendent meaning- and tends to do so the
more society approaches the stage of total control over the universe of
discourse. ... I refer again to the use of Orwellian language as normal
means of communication. The rule of this language over the minds and
bodies of men is more than outright brainwashing, more than the
systematic application of lies as a means of manipulation. In a sense,
this language is correct; it expresses ... the omnipresent contradictions
which permeate this society. Under the regime it has given itself,
striving for peace is indeed waging war.13

In Oceania, once Newspeak is perfected, once society exer-

cises total control over the universe of discourse, the identification
of reality with language will be complete: reality will be what the
Party says it is. O'Brien, when he is torturing Winston into
submission, declares the law of gravity to be nonsense: "If I
wished I could float off this floor like a soap bubble." Winston
initially rejects the idea, but "pushed the thought under instantly.
The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other,
outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things
happen. But how could there be such a world?" (p. 229) How
indeed? Total control of language allows total control of reality:
this is the aim, and the achievement, of Newspeak.
Ever sensitive to the consequences of perverting words for
totalitarian ends, Orwell succeeds in creating the sense of a language
that mirrors perfectly his vision of a nightmare future where such
ends have triumphed: a mindless discourse appropriate to his
mind-destroying dystopia. While politically chilling, this achieve-

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470 GORMAN BEAUCHAMP

ment is artistically admirabl

because more dramatically in
fiction, is the future language
of We. Where, as we saw, Orw
aspects of dystopia, Zamiat
technological forces propellin
human robots.

These citizens of his satiric United State exist only as inte-

gers in a huge social equation; they have no names, only numbers-
indeed, they are called Numbers. Sealed off from the natural
world in a glass covered city, they function as interchangeable
parts of a vast human machine, regulated by the Table of Hours.
"Every morning," explains Number D-503, the novel's protagonist,

with six-wheeled precision, at the very same hour, at the very same
minute, we wake up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour,
millions like one, we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish
it. United in a single body with a million hands, at the very same second,
designated by the Tables, we carry our spoons to our mouths; at the
same second we all go out to walk, go to the auditorium, to the halls
for Taylor exercises, and then to bed. (p. 1 3)1 4

This mechanized precision represents a reductio ad absurdum of

the quest for efficiency that characterizes both utopias generally
and modern industrialization specifically, an efficiency that both
systems (fused in We) equate with rationality. Here Zamiatin has
anticipated by more than three decades the conclusion of Jacques
Ellul who, in his massive study of the effects of technology on
man's social life, argues that "in technique ... a rational process
is present which tends to bring mechanics to bear on all that is
spontaneous or irrational. This rationality, best exemplified in
systematization, division of labor, production norms, and the like,
involves two distinct phases: first, the use of 'discourse' in every
operation; this excludes spontaneity and personal creativity.
Second, there is the reduction of method to its logical dimension
alone. Every intervention of technique is, in effect, a reduction of
facts, forces, phenomena, means, and instruments to the scheme
of logic."1 ^ While We dramatizes this rationalistic reduction of
every aspect of life to its single "logical" dimension, the language

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LANGU A GE AND THE DYSTOPIAN NO VEL 4 71

in particular reflects the results: emotions are expressed in

equations, feelings are formulated in syllogisms, reactions are
reduced to mathematics. When, for example, D-503 wants to say
that a certain female Number, 0-90, talks before she thinks, his
technologese renders his complaint thus: 'The speed per second
of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of
her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of
her thoughts- at any rate not the reverse" (p. 9). Initially comic,
this manner of describing a familiar type indicates the depersonali-
zation inherent in the society; the metaphor of a machine out of
sync denies to 0-90 her humanity- rather in the manner of a
computer programmer turned social reformer who, quoted in the
New York Times, characterized a former associate as "being
reduced to an eight cycle infinite loop with look up table."
D-503's first encounter with the beautiful and mysterious
Number 1-330 elicits an irritated, but appropriately mathematical,
response: "The woman had a disagreeable effect on me, like an
irrational component in an equation you cannot eliminate" (p. 10).
He will, in fact, fall in love with this "disagreeable" woman, the
tempting Eve who lures him out of Utopian orthodoxy and into
the sin of self-conscious individualism.1" But love, he knows, is
irrational (not to mention forbidden by the state) and, after
spending a night with 1-330, he struggles to bring some rational
order out of the chaos of his sensations: "Of course it is clear that
in order to establish the true meaning of a function one must
establish its limit. It is also clear tfiat yesterday's 'dissolution in
the universe' taken to its limit is death. For death is exactly the
most complete dissolution of self in the universe. Hence: L=f(d),
love is the function of death" (p. 1 27). Such a conclusion would
leave a healthy Number no alternative but to reject the fatal
blandishments of love- as D-503 tries to do; but "The horror of it
isthat even now, when I have integrated the logical function, when
it becomes evident that the function contains death hidden within
it, still I long for it with my lips, my arms, my heart, with every
millimeter . . ." (p. 127). D-503 is obviously no longer a healthy
Number.

His "sickness" is, of course, a novelist's necessity, for, as

Irving Howe has pointed out, the dystopian writer must "posit a

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472 GORMAN BEA UCHAMP

'flaw' in the perfection of t

possibility and particulars of
D-503's falling in love, the "
for Zamiatin the problem of
to express, in his purely ra
that the language was never meant to express. He solves the
problem convincingly by finding within the mechanical-mathe-
matical matrix of this anti-human discourse metaphors to convey
D-503's humanly irrational rebellion.
Foremost among these metaphors is the negative or irrational
number. As D-503 comes to realize that he is not a rational
mechanism, but a man of flesh and blood, of passions and desires
that transcend reason, he recalls an event from his schooldays when
the teaching machine first introduced him to irrational numbers: "I
remember I wept and banged the table with my fist and cried,
'I do not want that square root of minus one; take that square root
of minus one away ! ' This irrational root grew into me as something
strange, foreign, terrible; it tortured me; it could not be thought
out. It could not be defeated because it was beyond reason" (p. 37).
Because mathematics must include the irrational number to
complete itself as a system, Zamiatin can express analogically a
truth about human nature in terms of this symbol: no explanation
of man that excludes the irrational is complete. "We are men,"
Alberto Moravia has affirmed, "not automata; we eat meat, not
ideas; we drink wine, not syllogisms, we make love to people of the
opposite sex, not to dialectics."18 D-503 intends this sort of pro-
test against his society's rationalistic reductionism, but, lacking a
rhetoric that allows for the passionate affirmation of instinctive
human desires, he must forge a formulation of his rebellion from
the enemy's own technological terminology.
In this effort he is abetted by 1-330 who offers a series of
arguments against utopia, all analogues to the sciences. Chemistry,
for instance, provides a parallel to the psychic truncation effected
by the United State. Beyond the glass wall lives a race of "savages,"
the antithesis of the denatured Numbers within it. They represent,
1-330 explains, "the half we have lost. H2 and O, two halves, but
in order to get water- H20, creeks, seas, waterfalls, storms- these
two halves must be united" (p. 152). The stasis characteristic of

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LANGUAGE AND THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL 473

utopias is similarly attacked through a metap

'There are two forces in the world, entrop
leads to blessed quietude, to happy equilibr
destruction of equilibrium, to torturingly pe
(pp. 153-54). Energy, she contends, repres
death. ^ "Don't you as a mathematician," sh
"know that only differences- only differences
thermic contrasts make for life?" (p. 163).
reinforced mathematically:

My dear, you are a mathematician, are you not

philosopher mathematician? Well, then, name the l
What is ... I cannot understand, which last?
The last one, the highest, the largest.
But 1-330, that's absurd! Since the number of nu
how can there be a last one?
And why then do you think there is a last revolution. . . . their
number is infinite. (p. 162)

"Homo sapiens," declares D-503 in o

bursts (throughout the novel he vacil
orthodoxy), "only becomes man in t
word, when his punctuation include
exclamation points, commas and per
the United State is the abolition of the q
tic language should allow for no doubt
be clear, unambiguous, final. Even th
employed to celebrate "the wisdom an
the multiplication table":

Two times two-eternal lovers;

Inseparable in passion four. . . .
Most flaming lovers in the world,
Eternally welded, two times two.
(p. 63)

Zamiatin has, then, created an illusion of language that reflects the

particular reality of his mechanized, mathematicized future; yet
one that allows for the expression of "the flaw in the perfection
of the perfect." The very metaphors of rebellion are forced out of

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 474 GORMAN BEAUCHAMP

a discourse intended to deny the possibility of rebellion. No

writer has so satisfactorily attained that delicate balance of
dramatizing the fate of language in dystopia while maintaining its
potential for conveying the conflicts without which there could
be no novel.
Orwell and Zamiatin have, then, each in his own way, met
the artistic challenge posed at the outset of this paper: that is, to
provide a convincing illusion of linguistic change that reflects the
political/techno logical realities of their nightmare futures. Perhaps
no more need be said, in this regard, about them as artists; but
what about them as social prophets, a role history may, lamentably,
thrust upon them? However the future unfolds, language will
change to reflect its realities, and if these realities were to approxi-
mate the dystopian's fearful- and fearsome- fantasies, then the
fate of language might already have been forecast: suffocation
through an Orwellian Newspeak or stagnation through a Zamiatin-
esque technologese- or perhaps transmogrification through some
as-yet-unimagined combination of the two. In such an eventuality,
novels like theirs would constitute crimethink or, worse yet, simply
would not compute.

NOTES

From Utopia to Nightmare (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 1 1.

On this phenomenon, see George Woodcock, "Utopias in Negative," Sewanee
Review, 64(1965), 81-97; Eugene Weber, "The Anti-utopia of the Twentieth
Century," South Atlantic Quarterly, 58( 1959), 441-47; and Irving Howe, "The
Fiction of Antiutopia," in The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1970), pp. 66-74.
2
"Utopia and the Irony of History," in Culture and the Radical
Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1973), p. 103.
3
The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays (London: Collins, 1955),
pp. 147, 143.

See, for example, Thomas H. Long, 'Tek-nol'o-ji and Its Effect on Lan-
guage," Space Digest (March, 1969), pp. 87-89; and W. Earl Britton, "Some
Effects of Science and Technology Upon Our Language," College Composition
and Communication (December, 1970), pp. 342-46.

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LANGU A GE AND THE D Y STOPI AN NO VEL 4 75

^ Brave New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p

Perhaps the most linguistically innovative novel of

Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange , narrated by its tee
protagonist in an argot called nadsat , which is composed (a
the book explains) of "odd bits of rhyming slang. A bit of g
But most of its roots are Slav." (Stanley Edgar Hyman's afte
American paperback editions-which incidentally Burgess em
approved of because of the glossary Hyman included- explai
nature and function of nadsat .) Despite the dazzling tour de
brings off, 1 have not included A Clockwork Orange in my
several reasons. First, nadsat is primarily a parody of the ex
ephemerality of teenage slang: the older generation of this
understand it, but, even more significantly, Alex (the narra
cannot himself understand the equally exclusive slang of the "ri
of twelve year olds. After two years in prison, Alex finds n
obsolete. Second, and concomitantly, nadsat reflects the soc
realities of the society (which is but vaguely sketched) only i
it demonstrates the alienation of the young from the old-an
from the young- and thus indicates the fragmented, uncohesi
slightly futuristic world. Nadsat, that is, reflects the powe
negatively, as one "unofficial" discourse in an increasing
society. The language of the official power elite, on the other
of language Orwell and Zamiatin limn for us-concerns Burg
at all. Finally, despite its dystopic elements, A Clockwor
really a full-fledged dystopian novel, perhaps not even a "p
though to explain why (if an explanation be needed) lies bey
of this note.

^"Utopias in Negative," 91-92.

o

George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1961). Page references
to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

Two exceptions are Lawrence Brander, George Orwell (London:

Longmans, Green, 1954), pp. 200-04; and Robert A. Lee, Orwell's Ficti
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame U. Press, 1969), pp. 153-55.

diarie Louise Berneri .Journey Through Utopia (New York: Schocken,

1971), pp. 4-5. Cf. Raymond Ruyer, LVtopie et les Utopies (Paris: Pres
Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 44.

^ ^ Anticipations (London: Chapman and Hall, 1901), p. 1 18.

^Dale Minor, The Information War (New York: Hawthorne Book

1970), p. 81.

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 4 76 GORMAN BEA UCHAMP

1^
Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 109.

^Eugene Zamiatin, We , trans. Gregory Zilboorg (New York: Dutton,

1959). Page references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

^The Technological Society , trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage

Books, 1964), pp. 78-79.

On Zamiatin's use of this myth, see Richard A. Gregg, "Two Adams

and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, The Bible, and We," Slavic Review ,
24(1965), 680-87; and Gorman Beauchamp, "Of Man's Last Disobedience:
The Myth of the Fall in Zamiatin's We and Orwell's 1984 ," Comparative
Literature Studies, 10(1973), 285-301.

^"The Fiction of Antiutopia," p. 73.

18
Man As an End , trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1965), p. 28.
19
For the importance of this metaphor in Zamiatin's thought, see his
essay "On Literature, Revolution and Entropy," in Patricia Blake and Max
Hayward, eds. Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1962), pp. 12-19; and Judith Garson, "The Idea of Freedom in the
Work of Yevgeni Zamiatin," in Andrew Cordier, ed., Columbia Essays on
International Affairs (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1968), pp. 1-24.

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