Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
vontributions
Number 58
(; reenwond
W,stport,
Press
Conneclicut
London
Contents
25
47
69
91
115
Postscript:
Dystopias
Literature
Works Cited
and Dystopia
141
173
179
193
Introduction
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
Introduction
Enlightenment
Horkheimer
and Adorno argue that in the
Enlightenment reason is conscripted in the interest of power and that
as a result Enlightenment reason is ultimately enslaving, rather than
liberating to humanity: "What men want to learn from nature is how
to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men" (4). This
position leads Horkheimer and Adorno seriously to question the
legitimacy of rational arguments, including their own. As a result,
their critique becomes not so much a rational analysis of the
Enlightenment as an intentionally contradictory performance that
dramatizes the contradictions that are inherent, in their view, to
rational arguments as a whole.P As Albrecht Wellmer notes, this
suspicion of Enlightenment rationality also causes Adorno to look
away from rational argument in search of a locus of genuine reason,
finding a potential for such a locus in art:
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)
Both Adorno's suspicion of rationality and his privileging of art
indicate the important influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on his work.
Indeed, Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole represents an important
founding moment in the modern turn to skepticism and dystopian
thinking.
Nietzsche rails against the self-seriousness and the
unflagging demand for final truths that he sees as characteristic of
science, calling instead for a "gay" science that would be enriching,
rather than impoverishing, that would maintain an appreciation for the
strangeness of the world without demanding that all things be
explained and understood in rational ways. Anticipating many of the
works of dystopian fiction, Nietzsche strikes out against the growing
mechanization
of life brought about by the epistemological
imperialism of science, deriding science as a new form of religion,
worshipping
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)
Introduction
10
antagornsnc
to certain basic human impulses and therefore
fundamentally a source not of happiness, but of unhappiness. What
civilization does provide is security, and Freud's comments on the way
strong leaders function as a sort of a social "superego"-made at a time
when figures like Stalin and Hitler were just beginning their rise to
power-take on a frightening intonation. Freud's comments elsewhere
(in works like Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) on group
psychology and the "herd instinct" are even more suggestive of the
coming wave of twentieth-century totalitarianism, a phenomenon that
provides the basis for many dystopian fictlons.U
From Totem and Taboo (1913) through Group Psychology (1921)
and Civilization and Its Discontents and on to Moses and Monotheism
(1939), Freud remained concerned with social and political issues.
And most of Freud's meditations on society have a distinctively
pessimistic tone informed by the conviction that social order is
fundamentally
inimical to individual desire.
Freud's various
comments on the inherent conflict between the desires of individuals
and the demands of society suggest that human sexual desire arises
from natural instinctive impulses and that the orderly conduct of
civilization requires that these impulses be repressed, then sublimated
into socially productive areas like politics, science, or art. For Freud,
the whole point to civilization (and particularly to government) is to
limit individual liberty. But he suggests that primitivism or anarchy
would be even worse, so there can be no ideal society, and any attempt
to establish one is likely to do more harm than good. Indeed, in
Civilization and Its Discontents Freud specifically addresses (and
dismisses) the utopian energies informing both Soviet and American
society.
Actually, he rather haughtily avoids comment on the
American case, because "I do not wish to give an impression of
wanting myself to employ American methods." Instead, he merely
suggests that American civilization has been damaged by a conformist
impulse informed by what he describes as the "psychological poverty
of groups" (70).
Freud's critique of Soviet Communism is more explicit.
In
particular, he suggests that the communal energies of Soviet society
are generated more through hatred of the bourgeois than through love
of their own ideals. Indeed, he damningly compares the "persecution
of the bourgeois" in the Soviet Union directly to the persecution of the
Jews in Nazi Germany, then links both to a fundamental phenomenon
of Western civilization that he refers to as "the narcissism of minor
differences." For Freud, the human instinct for aggression typically
finds its outlet in the identification of scapegoats (like Jews or the
bourgeoisie) who are in fact only marginally different from the
Introduction
II
official norm.
This kind of scapegoating frequently occurs in
dystopian fiction, whose governments typically enforce their
intolerance of difference through persecution of specified marginal
groups. But for Freud this phenomenon is not so much an aberration
associated with specific totalitarian regimes as a founding premise of
civilization itself. He argues that one can always "bind together a
considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other
people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness"
(68). Freud specifically links this tendency to focus aggression on a
clearly identified Other with modern totalitarian regimes in Nazi
Germany and in the Soviet Union, but he traces the tendency back to
the beginnings of Christianity:
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)
Indeed, for Freud (as for Nietzsche) it is probably religion that
represents the single most oppressive force in civilization, though
Freud would no doubt see Soviet Communism as a reinscription of
religion rather than as a denial of it. Even in works like The Future
0/ an Illusion (I 928), ostensibly inspired by an evolutionist faith in the
possibility of a more rational future, Freud's polemic against religion
is powerful and at times bitter. He leaves no room for doubt that he
sees religious belief not only as misguided, but as potentially sinister
and seriously damaging to human life. As a scientist Freud condemns
religion because it is irrational and false; as a sociologist he sees
religion as a central tool of the forces of repression (and oppression)
in society. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud thus clearly
implicates religion among the forces that make modern civilization
directly inimical to human happiness and to the fulfillment of human
desire. For Freud the need for religious belief arises directly from the
infant's sense of helplessness and longing for a strong and protective
father figure, but it is also this longing that endows totalitarian leaders
like Hitler and Stalin with a sort of erotic fascination. Moreover, the
dystopian governments of fiction and the totalitarian governments of
modern reality generally depend on precisely the sort of mass-delusion
that Freud associates with religion as an attempt to gain a "protection
against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality" (30).
Finally, Freud attributes to religion precisely the sort of monologic
demand for conformity that typically informs dystopian regimes. He
12
Introduction
13
14
Introduction
15
16
Introduction
17
18
Introduction
19
20
Introduction
21
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
Introduction
23
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
Zamyatin's We: Anticipating
Stalin
26
Zamyatin's We
27
28
Zamyatin's We
29
30
Zamyatin's We
31
32
Zamyatin's We
33
34
Zamyatin's We
35
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
36
poetry-much
as it does when he attempts to relate his sexual
encounters with 1-330. Moreover, even if poetry (or the ocean) could
truly be tamed, the reduction of a savage beast into a domestic animal
suggests an element of taming in which something has clearly been
lost. But if this project seems to suppress the imaginative energies
traditionally associated with poetry, then so much the better, at least
from the point of view of the One State. Creativity is the great enemy
of the One State, which eventually even goes to the extent of requiring
all citizens to submit to a surgical procedure for removal of the
imagination.
In a parody of the pressure exerted on Zamyatin and his fellow
writers in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia to produce usefully didactic
works in the service of the revolution, the unimaginative official poets
of the One State are encouraged to produce such memorable works as
Red Flowers 0/ Court Sentences, He Who Was Late to Work, and
Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene. These works recall the figuration of
modern popular culture as mind-numbing in the important essay "On
the Culture Industry" in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic 0/
Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno see modern popular culture
as produced and disseminated by a massive Culture Industry whose
goal is to numb the minds of the populace with a constant flow of
banalities and thereby render them incapable of the kinds of critical
abstraction required to mount a meaningful challenge to the official
ideologies of modern society. For Horkheimer and Adorno, popular
culture entertains and enthralls, subtly imposing mass conformity at
the expense of any real aesthetic content, meanwhile stimulating its
audience to consume not only its own products, but those of its
advertisers.
But the popular culture of Zamyatin's One State also quite clearly
represents a more specific comic slap at some of the more insipid
pro regime works of the early Soviet years, and Zamyatin again draws
his material from actual developments in his contemporary context.
Much of the literature of postrevolutionary Russia was every bit as
ludicrous as the works cited by Zamyatin. A 1918 poem by Alexander
Gastev (entitled "The Factory-Hooters") indicates the nature of this
literature in ways that are particularly suggestive for Zamyatin's book:
When the factory-hooters sound in the workers' district of a morning,
this is no summons to slavery. It is the song of the future. Once upon
a time we all worked in dismal workshops and started our work at
different times in the morning. But now each morning at eight o'clock
the hooters call to a whole million of us. Now we all begin together
at the identical minute. A whole million of us take our hammers at
Zamyatin's We
37
38
Zamyatin's We
39
40
The Dystopian
Impulse
in Modern
Literature
Zamyatin's We
41
42
Zamyatin's We
43
44
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
46
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
Huxley's
49
50
Huxley's
51
spiritual contamination
of civilization by beating himself with a whip,
and then finally by hanging himself.
The treatment of religion in Huxley's descriptions
of the Savage
Reservations
in Brave New World could be taken as a commentary
on
the decay and perversion of Christianity
in a world that has lost touch
with authentic Christian values. But Huxley's book also suggests that
the sadomasochistic
tendencies of his Indians have always been a part
of Christianity,
a point that is easily seen in the typical Christian
emphasis on depictions of the torture and execution of Christ, in the
famed suffering of Christian martyrs, and in the sometimes graphic
Christian visualizations
of the torments to be suffered by sinners in
hell.
World Controller Mustapha Mond explains to John the Savage late
in Brave New World why Christianity
has been outlawed
in the
civilized world and why the Bible has been banned as a pornographic
book. Religion, Mond explains, is intended to provide solace for the
woeful state of life on earth. Faced with a miserable earthly existence
in this world, the faithful can take comfort in the belief that there is
a better world to follow. But in the society that Mond rules, worldly
happiness
and comfort
are everything,
and so religion becomes
superfluous.
Moreover,
religion becomes potentially
subversive
because its very existence suggests inadequacies
and shortcomings
in
the physical
world: "God isn't compatible
with machinery
and
scientific medicine and universal happiness.
You must make your
choice.
Our civilization
has chosen machinery
and medicine and
happiness" (180). In a reversal of the traditional Christian notion that
human suffering arises as a direct result of free will (the choice of
Adam and Eve having been freely made), this society has opted to
forfeit free will in favor of universal happiness.i
But religious echoes still sound in the atheistic dystopia projected
in Brave New World. Huxley depicts a future England that is not
religious in the conventional
sense but that has made of physical
pleasure and comfort a new materialist
religion.
In this society
capitalism
has run amuck; increased
production
and increased
consumption are revered with a quasi-religious
devotion. This society
literally worships Ford, its great progenitor,
and he functions in the
popular imagination very much as a god. For example, the calendar
is dated not beginning with Christ (A.D.), but with Ford (A.F.). And
the linguistic stock of this society is filled with expressions carried
over from earlier days in which "god" is replaced by "Ford"-a popular
expression of contentment
is "Ford's in his flivver; all's well with the
world" (32).
52
Huxley's
53
54
55
56
57
58
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
59
60
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
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,
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63
64
65
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
NOTES
1. On the other hand, Huxley's later Island, a more positive utopian
vision than Brave New World, depicts drugs known as the "Moksha
medicine" that lead to mystical enlightenment and spiritual growth.
As Clark points out, Island was (not surprisingly) a sort of "Bible" of
the sixties drug culture (112).
2. One might compare the suggestion by Dostoevsky's Grand
Inquisitor that humanity wants not freedom, but happiness.
Beauchamp argues that Zamyatin's Benefactor, Orwell's Big Brother,
and Huxley's World Controllers are all incarnations of Dostoevsky's
Grand Inquisitor ("Of Man's" 287).
3. The term "oceanic feeling," as Freud notes, actually comes from
Romain Rolland. Freud himself predictably attributes this desire for
merger to a desire to recover an infantile fantasy of fusion between
the ego and the outside world (Civilization 16).
4. One might compare here George Lucas's dystopian film THX
1138, which obviously owes a great deal to Brave New World. In the
society of Lucas's film all citizens arc legally required to remain on
67
3
Orwell's 1984: The Totalitarian
Dystopia after Stalin
70
The Dystopian
Impulse
in Modern Literature
Orwell's
1984
71
72
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).
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
Orwell's
1984
75
76
Orwell's
1984
77
78
Orwell's
79
1984
80
The Dystopian
Impulse
in Modern
Literature
Orwell's 1984
81
82
Orwell's
1984
83
84
Orwell's
1984
85
86
Orwell's 1984
87
88
Orwell's
1984
89
4
The Bourgeois Dystopia after
World War II
92
93
94
95
96
The Dystopian
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98
99
100
101
audience.
Such symptoms are, in fact, results of the Industrial
Revolution that had already been diagnosed nearly a century earlier
by Marx and Engels.
But the Marx-Engels
critique
of
industrialization is primarily focused on production and on the
dehumanizing conditions to which workers were exposed in the
attempts of nineteenth-century factories to turn out larger and larger
quantities of goods. Vonnegut (anticipating contemporary Marxist
critics like Fredric Jameson) moves this critique into the realm of
consumer capitalism, recognizing that modern technology has made
production so efficient that humans are more and more becoming
necessary not as workers who produce goods, but as consumers who
buy them. Moreover, Vonnegut extends the Marxist analysis of the
Industrial Revolution, suggesting that the technological developments
depicted in Player Piano are part of a Second Industrial Revolution:
whereas in the original Industrial Revolution human muscle was
replaced by machines, in this new Industrial Revolution routine
human thought is replaced by machines.'
In addition, the book
suggests that a Third Industrial Revolution may be just around the
corner, in which even the most sophisticated intellectual work would
be done by machines, making human beings obsolete altogether.
If Player Piano thus recalls a number of sophisticated analyses of
modern culture and society, it includes less sophisticated elements as
well. In particular, the book seems to romanticize labor, depicting
even work on a factory assembly line as spiritually fulfilling without
paying attention to the fact that much of such work is degrading,
mind-numbing, and anything but inspirational. Indeed, rather than
contrast his ultratechnological dystopia with some romantic primitivist
vision of nature, Vonnegut presents as an alternative not a time
without machines, but a time when machines still required human
operators to do their work. A principal image of the replacement of
human workers by machines involves the story of Rudy Hertz, a
gifted lathe operator whose movements are recorded on tape so that
the machines can be programmed to function as if under his control
but without his presence, resulting in a dehumanization that Vonnegut
evokes with a string of sentimental cliches: "The tape was the essence
distilled from the smail, polite man with the big hands and black
fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if
everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who
adored a collie for want of children" (9-10).
Hertz is depicted more as an artist than as a factory worker,
consistent with the central player piano metaphor-after all, player
pianos represent a replacement of human artistic performance by
mechanization.
Indeed, a player piano is not far from the
102
103
104
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),
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106
107
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:
Bradbury wants to get at the roots of American conformity and
immediately points a finger at the complicity of state and industry for
using technology to produce television programs, gambling sports
games, amusement parks, and advertising to block self -ref'lection and
blank out the potential for alternative ways of living which do not
conform to fixed national standards. (185)
The popular culture of Fahrenheit 451 is effective not only at numbing
the minds of its audience, but at positioning that audience through
techniques of interpellation. For example, one of Mildred's favorite
shows is an interactive one in which she is allowed to playa part. But
this potentially promising opportunity for creativity is dulled by the
fact that Mildred is limited to reading prescripted responses ("I think
that's fine!", "I sure do!") that do little except indicate her agreement
with what is being said in the program. In short, these programs are
designed merely to extract the audience's agreement with the official
ideology of the programs while creating the illusion that the audience
themselves have a part in determining that ideology.
This illusion recalls Marxist arguments
(like Pecheux's
"Munchausen effect" or Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony")
that it is typical of bourgeois society (in contrast to the violent
coercion often practiced in totalitarian societies) to maintain its power
by subtle manipulation of the citizenry to obtain their "voluntary"
cooperation.
But Bradbury himself seems to suffer from the
"Munchausen effect," emphasizing throughout Fahrenheit 451 the
voluntary participation of the populace in the oppressive policies of
the government. Granted, a few marginal characters (like the old
woman burned with her books) suffer violent persecution, but they do
so with the full agreement of the vast majority of the populace, the
antiintellectualism of which is such that they think it entirely fitting
and proper that books should burn, even if their owners must burn
with them. Bradbury's book as a whole seems to endorse the claim of
Faber (an ex-English professor whom Montag consults after he
himself begins to rebel) that the problem is not really with the system,
but with the people:
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109
110
III
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
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)
Granger's conclusion is ultimately a hopeful one, but like much of
Bradbury's book it appears rather questionable. Learning from the
past, especially the distant past, requires more than individual
memory, and Bradbury's individualist approach fails to account for
the ability of those in power to distort official history, even though his
own book-like many dystopian fictions-describes
this ability quite
well.
NOTES
I. Dystopian fictions like Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Le
Guin's The Lathe of Heaven were written at least partially to illustrate
the dark aspects of Skinner's behaviorist vision.
2. Skinner's attitude here strikingly recalls that attributed by Marx
and Engels to nineteenth-century
utopian socialists like Fourier, St.
Simon, and Owen in The Communist Manifesto: "They reject all
political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain
their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments
necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave
the way for the new social gospel" (111).
3. Roemer argues that Skinner includes the parallels between
Walden Two and Christianity as "blatant attempts to make his
arguments seem acceptable," though Roemer acknowledges that this
comparison with God goes too far and may alienate Christian readers
(141).
4. Marcuse's book deals with many of the same aspects of modern
society as many dystopian fictions. It was published in 1964, more
than ten years after Player Piano. However, many of the ideas
expressed in One Dimensional Man have their roots in work of
Marcuse and other Frankfurt School thinkers that goes back to the
early 1940s.
5. The naming of this computer is indicative of Vonnegut's
sometimes wistfully comic satire, deriving from a combination of
ENIAC (the first large-scale computer) and Ipecac (a common emetic),
113
5
Postmodernism with a Russian
Accent: The Contemporary
Communist Dystopia
IJ6
117
118
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
119
120
121
122
123
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 Contemporary-Communist
Dystopia
125
126
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.
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
129
130
131
132
133
Frankensteinian
experiments have, for example, succeeded in
producing a superbeing ("Supey") who is both physically and
intellectually superior to normal humans. "Supey" has astonishing
talents in fields ranging from athletics to mathematics to music to
literature, but of course outstanding individuals run directly counter
to the collectivist ideology of the Moscowrep. The powerful Editorial
Commission thus decrees that Supey should not be allowed to
reproduce, but instead be castrated and then maintained as a one-ofa-kind freak for display in a museum (323-25). Meanwhile, Komarov
(in an echo of Freud's Eros and Thanatos) has discovered that human
life arises from a mixture of two "plasmas," one representing life, the
other death. Moreover, he has developed a technique for separating
the two, so that a person may gain immortality by drinking from the
life plasma. But (of course) this treatment is available only to top
Communist officials, like Komarov and the Genialissimo himself
(327-28).15
Religion is also an important motif in Moscow 2042. Voinovich
continues the links between Communism and Christianity suggested
by We, but this time it is the Russian Orthodox Church that is labeled
as an ideological bedfellow of Communism.
When Voinovich's
Kartsev first lands at the Moscow airport in the year 2042, he notes
that the front of the terminal is decorated with the portraits of the
future society's five great heroes, including the expected Communist
figures of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, in addition to the "Genialissimo,"
the Big Brother-like titular leader of the society. But the fifth portrait
is of Jesus Christ. "We worship him," explains Father Starsky, major
general in the religious service, "not as any son of God but as the first
communist, a great predecessor of our Genialissimo, of whom Christ
once rightly observed, 'But those who will come after me will be
stronger than I!'" (127).
Starsky, of course, gets the quote wrong, confusing Christ with
John the Baptist and the Genialissimo with Christ, but this confusion
is typical of the Stalinesque revisionary history of the Moscowrep, in
which virtually all important accomplishments of the past are
attributed to the Genialissimo, Indeed, Starsky appears to believe that
the Bible itself was written by the Genialissimo. This use of Christ as
a revolutionary figure echoes Zamyatin, but also recalls Zamyatin's
argument that Christ remains such a figure only so long as he is a
suppressed
outsider.
Voinovich conflates Communism
and
Christianity throughout Moscow 2042 in a motif that clearly recalls the
quasireligious resonances of Soviet Communism, especially during the
rule of Stalin. The power of the Communist bureaucracy is thus
largely reinforced by the educational programs of the "Communist
134
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
135
136
137
138
NOTES
I. I explore this notion at length in Vargas L10sa Among the
Postmodernists. Note, however, my contention there that whether a
text is modernist or postmodernist is very much a matter of reading
strategies and expectations, not simply an inherent characteristic of
the text.
2. Superficially, at least, Aksyonov's work particularly resembles
that of Thomas Pynchon, as Ellendea Proffer has noted (131).
3. The title itself conveys some of this skepticism, though it should
be pointed out that this title was adopted for the English translation.
The original Russian title translates roughly as A Billion Years Be/ore
the End 0/ the World.
4. The title arises from a theory that the aliens had merely stopped
on earth for a roadside picnic in the midst of their interstellar travels,
with the items left in the Zone merely representing the detritus of that
casual stop.
S. In the Russian original, the protagonist is named Lenya
Tikhomirov.
The English translator of the book has chosen to
translate the name in order to pick up some of its symbolic resonances.
I have followed his practice here.
6. Morson and Emerson discuss the utopian orientation of Bakhtin's
figuration of the carnival in the Rabelais book and note that this
orientation conflicts with the anti-utopian bias of most of Bakhtin's
work. They therefore treat Rabelais and His World as a sort of
aberration in Bakhtin's career, even though that book has been central
to much of the Western appropriation of Bakhtin's work.
7. The motif of the KGB "sex spy" appears frequently in
Aksyonov's work. In The Burn the two young hookers Klara and
Tamara participate in numerous scenes of illicit sexuality, but turn out
to be KGB informers. And the Soviet authorities of Say Cheese! keep
tabs on photographer Maxim Ogorodnikov by employing the woman
Violetta to establish a sexual relationship with him, though he in fact
turns the tables by using that relationship to help him escape from
Moscow to the West early in the book.
8. Kartsev's comment recalls Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, a hilarious
comic reinscription of Orwell's 1984 that nonetheless conveys in its
depiction of a dystopian London much of the horror and squalor of
Orwell's Oceania. Gilliam's dystopia differs from Orwell'S most
strikingly in that Brazil's totalitarian government is a massively
inefficient bureaucracy rather than a coldly efficient machine.
139
The Bedbug.
10. Such developments
are predicted
earlier in the book by a
Communist enthusiast whom Kartsev meets in ] 982 prior to his trip
into the future (] 06).
II. Among other things, Moscow 2042 is a parody of Lion
Feuchtwanger's nonfiction Moscow 1937, a highly sympathetic account
of Feuchtwanger's
visit to Moscow during the worst of the Stalinist
Terror.
Feuchtwanger's
main point is that, while conditions may be
less than ideal in the Soviet Union in 1937, there is a tremendous sense
of movement
toward a better future.
Voinovich's
suggestion that
things have in fact gotten worse by 2042 counters the Soviet myth of
progress that informs Feuchtwanger's
book.
12. Dalos employs a similar motif in 1985, calling attention to the
Swiftian tradition of such satire by referring to a project for collection
and marketing of human excrement as a "modest proposal" (72).
13. This suggestion that bureaucratic
entanglements
crippled the
Soviet scientific establishment
plays a major role in The Yawning
Heights, where it takes on a special force from Zinoviev's own years
of experience at Moscow University and the Institute of Philosophy of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
14. Voinovich
satirizes this same Soviet project
in his earlier
Pretender to the Throne as well (252-5). For a summary of the Soviet
scientific controversies
over the possibility of creating a new Soviet
man, see Joravsky (296- 310).
15. This motif closely recalls Rushdie's Grimus, in which elixirs of
life and death are recovered
from an advanced alien society, the
former of which bestows immortality.
Voinovich's use of the motif
may also echo the immortality
research of Russian scientist lIya
Mechnikov,
work that most certainly influenced
Karel Capek's play
The Makropulos Secret. However, that Komarov is eventually killed
by his own death plasma even more directly recalls the fate of Soviet
biologist A. A. Bogdanov, who was killed in the process of his own
immortality
experiments.
16. Karnavalov
is directly
figured
as a parody
of Tolstoy.
However,
Voinovich
has an additional
agenda: Karnavalov
also
functions as a parody of the messianic pretensions of Solzhenitsyn, and
his presence
in Moscow 2042 participates
in a feud between
Solzhenitsyn and more liberal Russian emigre writers like Voinovich,
Sinyavsky, and Akyscnov.
140
142
143
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
145
146
147
148
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
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
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.
Atwood emphasizes the lack of a true spiritual basis for the
religiosity of Gilead in a number of ways, as when "Offred" describes
the "Soul Scrolls" shop, where one can order (for a fee) by telephone
anyone
of five prefabricated prayers.
These prayers are then
produced by machines, much like those which produce poetry and
music in the dystopian societies of Zamyatin and Orwell: "There are
no people inside the building; the machines run by themselves" (216).
This shop serves as a fairly obvious symbol of the mechanical,
dehumanized, and spiritually bankrupt nature of religion in Gilead,
but this suggestion is made all the more powerful because of the way
it closely parallels certain highly automated and commercialized
religious activities (like dial-a-prayer telephone lines) that already
exist in 1980s America.
Indeed, while Atwood's book is a little vague about the
mechanisms by which the theocracy of Gilead actually managed to
supplant the United States government, her vision does gain a great
deal of energy from the fact that the seeds of her dystopia clearly do
exist in the contemporary efforts of the American religious right to
enforce its beliefs through political power. Of course, an element of
religious fundamentalism has always been present in American
culture. Indeed, the numerous parallels between the practices of the
Republic of Gilead and those of the medieval Inquisition suggest that
the oppressive religious energies that inform Atwood's dystopia have
been present in Western civilization for centuries. That a resurgence
of these energies like that embodied in the Republic of Gilead could
occur thus bespeaks an inability of Western society to learn the lessons
of history. Indeed, the regime in Gilead, like so many dystopian
regimes, works hard to prevent its subjects from learning such lessons,
167
168
Western Postmadernist
Dystopias
169
170
NOTES
Western Postmodernist
Dystopias
171
174
175
176
177
Works Cited
180
Works Cited
181
182
Works Cited
183
184
Works Cited
185
186
Works Cited
187
188
Works Cited
189
'Vonnegut's
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In No Place Else: Explorations in
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Shklar, Judith.
After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith.
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"By Underground
to Crystal Palace: The Dystopian
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Andrei.
(Abram Tertz).
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and Joseph D. Olander.
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Striedter, Yurij. "Three Postrevolutionary
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Ed. John
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New Haven, Connecticut:
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Strugatsky,
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Definitely Maybe: A
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Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Macmillan,
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Strugatsky,
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
The Final Circle of
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Strugatsky,
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
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Strugatsky,
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
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Alice Stone Nakhimovsky
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Segal, Howard
Technological
P.
190
The Dystopian
Impulse
in Modern
Literature
Works Cited
191
Index
194
The Dystopian
Impulse
in Modern
Literature
195
Index
111-12,116,133,151,
166-67,175
Hitler, Adolph, 10-11, 20, 47,
69, 88, 95, 97, 153
Hollinger, Veronica, 147
Holquist, Michael, 32, 86
Horkheimer, Max, 6, 7, 2930,32,36,63
Hoy, David Couzens, 46 n.16
Hughes, David Y., 109, 112
n.8
Huxley, Aldous, 16, 18-20,
32,43-44, 44 n.2, 47-66,
66 n.l , 70, 75, 87-88, 9395,97,108,110,153
Huyssen, Andreas, 174
Jackson, Robert Louis, 26, 45
n.4
Jameson, Fredric, 3, 14-15,
58,101,109-10,151,176
Joravsky, David, 45 n.5
Juraga, Dubravka, 89 n.6
Kadrey, Richard, 152
Kearney, Richard, 175
Ketterer, David, 167
Klaic, Dragan, 18
Koestler, Arthur, 70-71
Kuhn, Thomas, 41-42
Kumar, Krishan, 18,22 n.7,
49,67 n.12,,89 nn.1, 2
language 15,21,35,37-40,
59-62, 70t80-82, 84-86,
128,131-32,167-169
Leary, Timothy, 150
Leatherbarrow, W. J., 45 n.7
Le Guin, Ursula K., 23 n.16,
112 n.1
Lewis, Sinclair, 21, 69, 98-99,
102, 106, 129
London, Jack, 48, 70, 74
Loseff, Lev, 25
Malak, Amin, 171 n.l0
Mannheim, Karl, 3, 15
Marcuse, Herbert, 12, 99, 112
n.4
Marx, Karl, 4, 6, 21, 27, 40,
50,52,60,62,
79, 101,
105, 116, 133, 165, 171
n.ll
marxism 3-4, 14, 22 n.4, 25,
27,40,44,62,71,99,
101,105,107,117,132
Matich, Olga, 127, 130
Matter, William, 53, 59
McCaffery, Larry, 152
McCarthy, Patrick A., 45 n.4
McHale, Brian, 140 n.22
Megill, Allan, 15
Meyers, Walter E., 81
modernism, 13, 18, 47, 87,
no, ll5-16, 174
More, Sir Thomas, 5, 14
Morson, Gary Saul, 4, 18,
117,138 n.6, 148, 174
Moylan, Tom, 144-45
Murakami, Haruki, 17
music, 8, 35, 42, 133, 159-60,
166
Nabokov , Vladimir, 23 n.15
Negley, Glenn, 92
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7-9, 11,
19,21,22 n.IO, 43, 65-66,
82-83, 86-88
Olander, Joseph, 18
Olsen, Lance, 147
Orwell, George, 16, 18-20,
32,43, 52,60,64,67
n.7,
69-89,91,94-96,
102,
116, 129-30, 132, 135,
1400.18,153,156-159,
196
The Dystopian
166-67
Philmus, Robert M., 89 n.9
Piercy, Marge, 23 n.16
poetry, 8, 35-38,60, 161, 166
popular culture, 18, 36, 55,
57-59,61,106-10,130,
137,154,157-162,173174,177
Poster, Mark, 105
postmodernism, 18,21,58,
110,115-118,129-30,
137,141-42,146-47,151,
155,160,174-75
Proffer, Ellendea, 138 n.2
Pynchon, Thomas, 21, 137,
138 nn.l, 2,142,149,
152-162,170 nn.3, 7
Rabkin, Eric S., 5, 18
religion, 7-8, 11-12,21,30,
32, 37, 50-52, 71,93-94,
98-99, 103, 106, Ill, 126,
133-34, 141, 162, 166,
171 nn.9, II
Rhodes, Carolyn H., 44 n.2
Rieff, Philip, 9
Roemer, Kenneth M., 92, 112
n.3
Rosenshie1d, Gary, 38
Ross, Andrew, 19, 148, 15051
Rushdie, Salman, 17, 139 n.15
Russ, Joanna, 23 n.l6
Sapir, Edward, 81
Scholes, Robert, 5
Schwartz, Sanford, 82
science, 4-8,10,13,17,19,
21,25,27-30,37,41-42,
45 n.5, 48-50,70,71,81,
91-92,94,97,103,110,
118-120,122-126,
130,
Impulse
in Modern
Literature
Index
Thomson, Boris, 27, 37, 45
n.5
Ulph, Owen, 45 n.11
Veblen, Thorsten, 100
Vidal, Gore, 21, 105-6
Voinovich, Vladimir, 21, 115,
117,130-37, I39n. 14,
140 n.19
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 21, 99105,112 n.5, 109-10
Walsh, Chad, 16, 23 n.13
war, 21, 26, 76, 88, 91, 100,
106, Ill, 127, 144, 148
Warrick, Patricia, 45 n.4
197
Weinberger, Jerry, 22 n.3
Weldon, Fay, 71
Wellmer, Albrecht, 7
Williams, Raymond, 105, 113
n.l0
Woolf, Virginia, 62, 67 n.9
Wymer, Thomas L., 104
Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 16, 1820, 25-48, 53, 55, 62, 6970,75,94,97,102,117,
122, 133, 153, 166, 168,
170 n.6
Zinoviev , Alexander, 17,
115-16,139 n. 13, 176
Zipes, Jack, 107-8