The Dystopian Novel

The dystopian novel has a very short pedigree, emerging at the turn of the twentieth century with H.G. Wells’s novels, The Story of the Days to Come and When the Sleeper Wakes, both published in 1899. In the decades to follow will appear the triumvirate of dystopian novels—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—all uniquely modern in their diagnosis of and prognostications for Western civilization. But more importantly, the dystopian genre is a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon, a symptom of an era undergoing rapid change, and of a world that seemed on the verge of self-annihilation. The threat was not unfounded either, for the cornerstones of the modern experience—mass production, technological acceleration, world war, and totalitarianism—irrevocably changed the nature of society, and established something approximating the World State, as envisioned by Zamyatin and Huxley, through global commerce and communication.

Unlike its progenitor the utopian novel, dystopias illustrate a future world of chaos and madness, often operating under the guise of a rational state. Lacking Renaissance faith in human reason, progress, and man’s capacity to create a world of peace and justice, these novels question human nature and civilization. However, what distinguishes Huxley’s novel from the others is the fact that his own anxiety is not motivated by contemporary totalitarianism, but increasing capitalization and cultures of excess. In his comparison of Brave New World with Nineteen Eighty-Four, social critic Neil Postman wrote:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

While all dystopian novels alert the reader to an irrational future, Huxley did not believe—as Orwell and Zamyatin did—that existing dictatorships, like the Soviet Union, are palpable signs or pathogens of that future. Rather, the ingredients for disaster are already present in capitalized culture. Indeed, the virtues of his World State, “Community, Identity, Stability,” the perversion of which Huxley demonstrates through reproductive technology and behaviorism, are the same for all bureaucracies; democratic governments are no exception. The irony, of course, is that these virtues are meant to ensure productive efficiency and universal well-being. As the character Mustapha Mond explains, the shift from the past state to the future demanded the subordination of knowledge and truth to comfort and happiness, a transition which must, necessarily, suppress individuality. Only in blissful ignorance can the people be ruled.

And yet, how can there be “bliss” without freedom? Can man be made to forget that he is human? These are problems with which all three novelists were primarily concerned, but only Huxley finds the threat developing in our own society and our own efforts to conform to it. Thus, the dehumanization of Brave New World occurs not when freedom and happiness are deprived, but when they are supplied in overabundance. In that regard, capitalism is a powerful instrument.  

Beatrice Webb

On 22 February 1883, Beatrice Webb penned the following entry in her diary: “A conflict has been going on within me. Shall I give myself up to Society, and make it my aim to succeed therein, or shall I only do so as far as duty calls me, keeping my private life much as it has been for the last nine months?” For all her intelligence, will power, assertiveness, and individualism, Beatrice Webb’s early diaries testify to the deep rift that runs through this future reformer’s life. The conflict she alludes to, between a public and a private life, is one of many dilemmas Beatrice faces in the pursuit of a social vocation. Often, it is a choice between reason and instinct, liberal and conservative political orientation, love and duty, dependence and independence. But she does not allow them to constrain her; rather, she seeks compromise. As an adolescent, Beatrice claims to have “shaken off the chains of the beautiful old faith” on her ascent to “something higher.” That higher level, as will become increasingly clear, is the calling to an active life in society.

Though Beatrice Webb was a woman with conflicting interests, what is more startling is her recognition of a choice. Despite her womanhood and the patriarchal norms of Victorian England, which she acknowledges in her diary, Beatrice is aware that she can either submit to the narrow world of the “angel in the house,” or assume the prominent role of a public intellectual. Her inclination towards the latter sphere – controlled predominantly by men – strikes many of her contemporaries as audacious and unbecoming of a woman. Indeed, how many could express the sentiment of the following entry from 15 February 1890, on her conversion to socialism: “I have become a socialist not because I believe it would ameliorate the conditions of the masses (though I think it would do so) but because I believe that only under communal ownership of the means of production can you arrive at the most perfect form of individual development, at the greatest stimulus to individual effort; in other words complete socialism is only consistent with absolute individualism. As such, some day, I shall stand on a barrel and preach it.”

For Beatrice, individualism is all-important in the transition from a monarchy to a socialist democracy. While the removal of sexual inequality was certainly a catalyst of her conversion, it became the vehicle for the more comprehensive cause of lifting the barriers to individual happiness. Whether socialism is even compatible with individual development, Beatrice never has to question. It is a given, and for her, eminently worth fighting for.

The Beat Dilemma

The postwar experience of the mid-twentieth century marked a significant turn in global politics and social and economic culture. As the old order passed away, a new one followed, in which cold war, atomic proliferation, competing forms of modernization, and advanced capitalism prevailed. In the United States – which had now become a global juggernaut – an empowered bourgeoisie revitalized the so-called American Dream, turning its archetypal ideals into realizable goals. The nuclear family, a quaint home life, higher education, financial wealth, consumer freedom – all constituted a hegemonic order that demanded conformity while it marginalized dissidents. Among those on the periphery were Communist sympathizers and ethnic and racial minorities, but also an emerging youth movement united by a deep sense of alienation and dissatisfaction, a state Jack Kerouac trenchantly described as “beat.”

The Beat Generation of the 1950s, a precursor of the volatile counterculture of the following decade, seethed at America’s postwar prosperity and the repressive conditions of containment. It emerged, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in an “affluent, conformist America where the individual seems superfluous, the outsider rages, the dominant culture seems oppressive and hostile.” Unwilling to conform, the Beats – of whom the core members were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—sought their own values and pursued their own vision in jazz clubs, in experimental art, through alcohol, drugs, liberated sexuality, and the ecstasies of Buddhism and Jewish and Christian mysticism. Insofar as it was a struggle against repressive norms, the Beat-life was an on-going quest, a journey to find a new mode of being in the remote corners of human existence. As John Tytell writes, “The Beat Movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American ‘virtues’ of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility.”

That sensibility, enshrined predominantly in literature, first entered the American mainstream with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Published in 1957, this semi-autobiography became a manifesto for the new generation of dispossessed American youths starved for personal freedom. Without plot, or any other literary restraint, On the Road describes the nomadic life of two characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, as they crisscross the American continent over a period of two years (from 1947 to 1949), visiting major cities, having love affairs, working odd jobs, experimenting with drugs, frequenting jazz clubs – and always on the go. “We were all delighted,” the narrator Sal declares, “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, [to] move. And we moved!” The theme of mobility is paramount in the text, but unlike other quest narratives, whose heroes strive towards a defined goal, On the Road is irreducible to any end other than the experience of aimless travel and discovery. For this reason it poses an interpretive dilemma, which seeks to answer the question: is On the Road simply an ode to a narcissistic culture, or does it offer an uncommon solution to societal repression?

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

The ambiguity underlying scientific progress is perhaps no where more creatively expressed than in utopian literature and science-fiction. In both genres, science is depicted variously as: the indispensable element of a perfect society; a field prone to misuse and destructiveness, its product a nightmarish reality; and the conceptual framework of a world—often projected into the future—remarkable not for its moral quality but its metaphysical curiosity. The boundaries between these interpretations are blurred in the dystopian narrative, a hybrid of both genres, of which Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—a tale set in the twenty-sixth century A.D., in the regimented totalitarian society of OneState—is the modern exemplar.

Written in 1921 and published in 1924, We stakes its claim to the modernist tradition of the early twentieth century by virtue of its experimental boldness in form and content, its open-endedness, and self-reflexivity. These aesthetic strategies also reinforce the novel’s negative image of scientific progress, and by extension, underscore Modernism’s reaction to scientific rationality. Thus, We effectively deconstructs the metanarrative of late nineteenth-century Positivism—a total worldview of human society and the natural environment—by casting it in a dystopian world, in which freedom and individuality have been abolished. Nevertheless, though the novel dramatizes Modernist anxiety over scientific rationalism, it does not repudiate science itself; rather, it cautions against the excesses of science and its potentially dangerous relationship with the state.

Smells Like Christmas Spirit

During every Christmas season, I find myself barren of "spirit," though full of other commendable traits, an observation one invariably makes about me at this time, and which my fellow curmudgeons must suffer too, I imagine. Although, as unkind criticism goes, this one makes me feel that I'm doing something right when I receive it.

"To lack Christmas spirit" is a polite euphemism tossed around during the holidays that generally means, "You're being a depressed ass, and no one wants to make Christmas cookies with you." To be entitled to such a description, one has only to reject, criticize, or abstain from any of a variety of holiday norms and obligations, like writing Christmas cards, listening to carols, wearing red and green sweaters with snowflake patterns, shopping for gifts in crowded malls, decorating your entire house with lights and tinsel, and making Christmas cookies.

Adolescents and old men are the usual victims of Christmas spirit deficiency, but iconoclasts of all ages turn their resistance into an art. How does one properly enjoy the Christmas season? One can either mope, grumbling maledictions upon receiving holiday wishes, or make every day a prelude to the grand festival of Saturnalia, in honor of the Western world's pagan origins. The latter, by the way, is a terrific gesture of respect for cultural and religious diversity.

The accusation that one lacks Christmas spirit, often wantonly hurled at so-called curmodgeons, is as incomprehensible to me as the concept of Christmas spirit itself. Does the moral zeitgeist suddenly change after Thanksgiving? Must we all succumb to the cheerful new ether that wafts over us from the North Pole, only to dissipate the day after Christmas? What is so intolerable about this season is not only the cheerfulness that pervades everything; after all, that is only a thin and transparent covering. Rather, it is the cynicism that belies the cheerfulness, and the pressure to conform to it.

If I decry the conversion of Christmas into a commodity, if I criticize the vast orchestration of lights and ornaments in every city and neighborhood, if I cringe at the continuous stream of carols on the radio, and in general, the transient euphoria of holiday cheer, it is not because I am mean-spirited. What was once, in the mists of a pre-Christian past, a season hallowed, has long since been ground into something positively hollow, and I wish it weren't so.

This Christmas cum Saturnalia, resist the urge to call anyone a grinch. It may be undeserved. That poor wight may in fact be gazing into those sacred mists.

Seven Up and the Loss of Innocence

For those unable to play one round of Seven Up without a sense of irony, there is no hope. They have lost their innocence.

The Author's First Line

_______ once told me a story about the time he fell in love.

I remember the story _________ told me about meeting a girl. He told me he had fallen in love with her.

__________ had this single, beautiful memory of falling in love, which he shared with me in a story.