Character and Dystopia: The Last Men [1° ed.] 0367422751, 9780367422752

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Character and Dystopia

This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia.  Through the lens of the “last man” figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works. Aaron S. Rosenfeld holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University and is Associate Professor of English at Iona College, teaching classes in twentieth-century literature.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family Edited by Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Aesthetic and Philosophical Reflections on Mood Stimmung and Modernity Birgit Breidenbach Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines Alice Wood Queering Modernist Translation The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness Christian Bancroft Modernist Literature and European Identity Birgit Van Puymbroeck Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction Marco Caracciolo Life-Writing, Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Women Writing for Women Ailsa Granne Desire and Time in Modern English Fiction: 1919–2017 Richard Dellamora Character and Dystopia The Last Men Aaron S. Rosenfeld For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com

Character and Dystopia The Last Men Aaron S. Rosenfeld

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Aaron S. Rosenfeld to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42275-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82310-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my father, Herbert B. Rosenfeld 1930–2017

Contents

Acknowledgementsx SECTION I

Background1 1 Introduction: The Last Men in Europe 2 The Character of Dystopia The Language of Despair  32 Realist Dystopia  35 Setting and Character  40 Setting as Character  43 3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Dystopia The Good Place  52 Anti-utopianism and Anti-utopias  57 Dystopian Narrative  61 Dystopian Law  65 Post-apocalypse 66 Future (Im)Perfect  68

3 32

52

SECTION II

De-forming Character79 4 The Last (Hu)Man(ist) Humanism in Crisis  81 Utopian and Dystopian Humanism and Anti-humanism  87

81

viii  Contents Dystopianism, Naturalism, and Modernism  92 Defensive Forms: Humanism, Anti-humanism, and the Dystopian Novel  98 Dystopian Humanism  98 Dystopian Anti-humanism  102 5 Anti-Bildungsroman: Dystopia and the End of Character in Zamyatin, Burgess, and Ishiguro The Novel of De-formation  112 Allegories of Progress  115 Divine Minus: Zamyatin’s Reverse Bildungsroman 119 The Predator’s Progress: Burgess’s Satiric Bildungsroman  125 Crimes Against Posthumanity: Ishiguro’s Bildungsroman Incarnate  133 6 Paranoid Plots: Dystopia and the Fantasy of Centrality in Dostoevsky and Orwell Romantic Paranoia  148 Paranoid Poetics  153 “Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent”  158 Diseased Romanticism: Dostoevsky’s Psychological Dystopia  161 He Loved Big Brother: Orwell and the Fantasy of Persecution  167

112

148

SECTION III

Dystopian Variations179 7 American Anti-pastoral: Running Down a Dream in West and Mamet Dystopian Design  181 What Happens to a Dream Deformed?  184 West’s World: Dystopian Picaresque in West’s A Cool Million 187 Utopian Plots: Dystopian Capitalism in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross 192

181

Contents  ix 8 Romancing the Child: First Teens in Lowry and Butler First Teens  205 New Worlds for Old Desires  208 A Family Affair: Romantic Humanism in Lowry’s The Giver 215 On the Road Again: Anti-romantic Anti-humanism in Butler’s Earthseed 222

205

9 Epilogue: The Dystopian Real Postscript 248

232

Works Cited251 Index265

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors at Twentieth Century Literature for permission to reprint parts of my 2004 article “The Scanty Plot, Orwell, Pynchon and the Poetics of Paranoia.” I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues in the English department at Iona College who read and advised on various parts of this book. In particular, Miles Beckwith, Laura Shea, Namrata Mitra, and Ivy Stabell gave generously of their expertise and time. I owe a special debt to Dean Defino, whose support as chair, colleague, interlocutor, and friend has been of inestimable value in completing this project. I am also especially grateful to my colleague Robert Lacey from the political science department, who in the course of our many years co-teaching a class in the contemporary world as part of Iona College’s honors program has deeply influenced my thinking about a wide range of issues I write about here, from romanticism to technological progress to the politics of reaction, and whose deep knowledge and humanist heart have remained a profound source of inspiration. Special thanks to all of the staff at the Iona College library, and particularly Ed Helmrich, whose tireless assistance in acquiring books and research materials for this project was deeply appreciated, to our graduate assistants in the English department, Amanda Stockla and Lauren Talty, for their help in tracking down sources, and to Aliyah Rodriguez, for her help in preparing the final manuscript. Thank you to Iona College for providing a sabbatical grant during which the majority of this book was written. I would also like to thank Routledge’s readers of the early manuscript who strengthened the project significantly with their astute recommendations. Warm thanks as well to Nicola Cipani and Rebecca Falkoff at New York University for welcoming me to sit in on their graduate seminar on the machine in literature, and to the student members of the class for their valuable insights. I  am grateful to Mark Wiedman and Dana Kirchman for generously allowing me to use their lovely house for a too-brief writing retreat at a crucial point in the project, and to David Krigel, whose enthusiasm in discussing dystopia since our college days has always been a source of inspiration. I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to my mother, Roberta Rosenfeld, for all the obvious reasons but

Acknowledgements  xi also for her unflagging encouragement and interest. And finally, a heartfelt thank you to my wife Wendy for her editing acumen and patience along with so much else, and to my daughters, Molly and Naomi, for bringing such brilliant light to the dystopian darkness.

Section I

Background

1 Introduction The Last Men in Europe

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 279)

The word dystopia has become ubiquitous in our present age of ­anxiety, anger, and upheaval.1 We are squarely within what Jill Lepore calls in the title of her 2017 New Yorker essay “A  Golden Age of Dystopian Fiction.” Riding the New York subway in early 2017, I was surrounded by three people, one reading The Handmaid’s Tale, one reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and one reading It Can’t Happen Here. Dystopias of the past no longer seem like relics of a depressing side genre; suddenly, they seem necessary. Meanwhile, new dystopian fictions have become one of the dominant and most lucrative literary forms for dealing with contemporary experience. If novels today read like science fiction, the speculative dystopias of the past now read like contemporary realism. The present seems finally to have caught up with the future.2 What is dystopia? Is it, as M. Keith Booker calls it in the title of his 1994 work, an impulse? Or is it, as Jameson calls it, a “sermon?”3 Is it a warning in the form of a satire? Is it the nightmare reverse of what Lyman Tower Sargent calls “social dreaming?”4 Is it an empowering experiment in thinking critically about our present in ways that will avert the dystopian disaster? And what makes it so appealing? Is it the thrill that comes with imagining something worse, because, as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it, “however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through?”5 Or is it that dystopia is, in the words of Scott Westerfeld, author of young adult dystopian novels, an “everlasting snow day,” a promise of relief from having to do homework?6 Or, at last, is it just pure, escapist sensation, a vicarious truncheon smack numbing us to our discontents? At different times, it is all of these, but in this work, I take up a neglected aspect of dystopian literature: its status as literature. The traditional spaces of criticism of the dystopian novel are politics, sociology, polemic. But if

4  Background utopia is, as Darko Suvin famously put it, “the socio-­political s­ ub-genre of science fiction,” dystopia grants utopian ruminations a human face— literally, by offering up a character who must live in the no place of utopia rather than just visiting.7 Utopia—often used ­ interchangeably with eutopia, or “good place,” which is how I  use it throughout— is a collective ideal, a world for everyone. Dystopia, in contrast, is a persecutory ideal of suffering that, even when collective, is experienced in the singular.8 The subject of this work is dystopia seen through the lens of character. The urgency of the twentieth century English language dystopian tradition defined by writers such as Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells makes it easy to read through the lens of ideology, where cardboard characters act as billboards for their authors’ views. Alexandra Aldridge, for example, distinguishes between dystopian heroes and the “richly drawn, highly individuated characters found in the novels of, for example, Mann, Gide, Joyce or Lawrence.”9 The form’s didacticism seems to preclude the kind of for-itself characterization we have come to expect from novels. Perhaps this is due as well to the hostility shown toward art in dystopian worlds. Booker identifies “the notion that art is inherently inimical to totalitarian authority” as “one of the energizing beliefs of dystopian fiction.”10 Literature shocks language out of its purely referential context, opening up new meanings and resonances that might upset the stasis of utopia or dystopia. Hence, both, from Plato onwards, tend to systematically exclude literature from their imagined worlds. But it is all too easy to mistake dystopian literature’s worlds without art for artlessly made worlds.11 I propose a more reflexive interchange between dystopia and the realist, character-driven novel. Any full accounting of dystopia must pay heed to precisely those novelistic qualities like character, form, and narration that muddy dystopias’ polemics. Dystopias are indeed novels. And, at least in part, their subject often is novels: they are also about the demise of a language very specifically inherited from the literature of the past for describing and staging the human. The dystopian worlds we inherit are not only depictions of history gone wrong, but of novels gone wrong. Violence done to characters is mirrored by violence done to character— character as formal construct, as a set of assumptions about interiority, autonomy, and agency—as novels have taught us to understand it. Following the cue of critics like Phillip Wegner, I treat dystopia as a type of narrative poetics, as a particularly eschatological form of the novel deeply engaged not only with the political and social debates of its times but also with the aesthetics of the novel as inherited form.12 The predictable deformations of character, setting, and structure that relegate dystopia to the status of genre fiction—even when that genre is as rich as science fiction—tend to obscure dystopia’s investment both in character and novelistic structure as traditionally understood. Thus, while I share

Introduction  5 Wegner’s understanding of dystopia as a form of modernist technology, my emphasis shifts from how these works inscribe future space that retains traces of the past to how they fail to escape from the formal operations that are their source. The dystopias I am interested in here mostly imagine the future in the same way that a slasher film imagines a killer on the loose: not in order to, as Wegner puts it, “re-educate our desire,” or even to warn that there are killers out there in the dark, but rather to stimulate the primal instinct toward preservation, both of a certain brand of self and of the narrative forms that produce and contain it.13 If the novel is the record of an open-ended future in the process of becoming, dystopia, painting a future that has come and gone, startles us into a recognition of how much we rely on the novel’s formulations of time and character to orient ourselves in the world. Dystopia is upsetting precisely because of those aspects of the novel it denies, and then also because of what it substitutes in their place. Plot and character reach a terminal point until there is nothing left to narrate. There is a certainly a guilty pleasure in this. It is the satisfaction of seeing how it all turned out, the thrill of the accident scene. But there is also deeper pleasure in the experience of transcendence of death, not just of the self but of the entire species. The last man who outlives the end of history is an emblem of this fantasy, and the corollary subject of this study.14 The nineteenth century brings no shortage of last men as the loosening hold of Christian teleology opens the door to secular despair. Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel Le Dernier Homme (1806), and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) respond to globalization, industrialization, and Malthusian panic about an overburdened world with visions of a lone survivor wandering an empty earth.15 This negative Adam, instead of midwifing the birth of the new world, serves as designated mourner.16 Grainville’s and Shelley’s last men are without issue, the last human presence in a dying world, rendering Robinson Crusoe-esque fantasies of resourceful individualism moot. Seventy-five years after Shelley, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) foregrounds the ecstatic nature of hopelessness in this formula. In Shiel’s novel, the last survivor of a plague goes on a bender, looting and burning the great cities of the world. It is eschatology porn, the encounter between live man and dead world breeding a sensational exhilaration. I will ravage and riot in my Kingdoms. I will rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass like Sennacherib, and wallow in soft delights like Sardanapalus. I will build me a palace, vast as a city, in which to strut and parade my Monarchy before the Heavens, with stones of pure molten gold, and rough frontispiece of diamond, and cupola of amethyst, and pillars of pearl. For there were many men to the eye: but there was One only, really: and I was he. (n.p.)

6  Background Even loneliness becomes a form of self-stimulation, a perverse, secularized echo of Christian revelation’s motif of being left behind without hope on a ruined world. These works set the tone for mid-century postapocalyptic fantasies of the nuclear age such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), and George Miller’s Mad Max films (1979, 1981, 1985, 2015), while other last man fantasies such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) use the device of a civilizationending plague to offer meditations on loneliness and the vanity of human endeavors.17 But there is another form of last man fantasy that constitutes the main subject of this study: that is, one that does not involve a literal last man but rather is about the last iteration of an older type of human surviving into a new social and political reality that has no place for him or her. This is the last man Orwell invokes in the quotation at the head of this chapter. Dystopian last man shares the basic futility of Shelley’s post-apocalyptic man, stuck in a finished world that can no longer be influenced, only observed. But he also inhabits a world that remains filled with others, where a semblance of civilization continues on unmoored from the aspirations that define his character.18 It is not the end of the world but the end of history; what has ended is not the world but liberalism’s dream of progress and, by extension, the future of the characters who are its bellwethers. The end of liberalism is also the source of Nietzsche’s famous vision of the last man in Thus Spake Zarathustra. However, Nietzsche’s last man is not an object of sympathy but of scorn. Rather than lamenting the last man’s demise, Nietzsche cannot wait to dismiss him from history’s stage. He is “a most contemptible thing,” an exhausted relic who has sacrificed his will on the altar of equality and contentment and who is soon to be supplanted by the Übermensch.19 Mass man in the nineteenth century had already achieved a facsimile of utopian happiness, trading the fierce and dangerous struggle to achieve freedom for avoidance of suffering. In his feebleness, such a man is not the hero of Nietzsche’s story: he is the obstacle that must be overcome, representative of the preference for decadent material comfort over noble exertion. Like Zarathustra, the dystopian last man prefers the struggles of autonomy to utopia’s negation of spirit, and like Nietzsche, he looks to a more vital past as model for the future. Booker reads Nietzsche as influencing dystopia in his rejection of “univocal truths” (7) and his suspicion of science and rationality.20 But Nietzsche is also a patron saint in the reverse sense—the dystopian vision is one in which the will to power, unlinked from traditional moral guardrails, is unleashed in the form of the modern state. The past dystopian last man looks to is not the outward-facing pre-Christian barbarism that Nietzsche holds up as a model of vitality but a nearer imagined past: one in which functioning civilization secured

Introduction  7 an inner, reflective soul, an autonomous self protected from the brute will to power. David Knights and Hugh Willmott put autonomy at the center of the modern liberal humanist tradition.21 This version of autonomy, with roots in classical humanist philosophy and the Enlightenment, has an external vector, realized in political activity, but an internal vector as well, realized in the struggle to define the self as subject in relation to history. While the political subject might be oriented toward the achievement of utopia, the inward-facing subject of dystopia fears becoming the object of completed history. Dystopian heroes do not seek to transform humanity. Rather, they are often nostalgicists, fortifying a vision of the human—free, ethical, particular, a unique body in possession of a spirit— against subjection by inhuman forces of failed nature, the machine, or the indifferent modern state. The dystopian worlds that emerge in the first part of the twentieth century are both continuation and perversion of the utopian fantasy of a world built for man by man.22 They invert the Enlightenment’s human-centered paradise, depicting instead the subjection of humanity to a machine logic that negates the value of the unique individual. The emerging concept of universal, collective destiny directly contrasts with the eighteenth-century sense of national destiny given voice in German romanticism by philosophers like Herder. The suspicion that progress depends on dehumanization—that universal freedom and happiness will require the sacrifice of inefficiencies, including political and moral inefficiencies that were previously portrayed as essential to the human character—becomes the guiding principle of the classic twentieth century anti-utopian dystopias. But alongside the anti-utopian element in works like Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Zamyatin’s We (1920–21), there are also nascent seeds of what Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini call the “open” or “critical” dystopian attitude that fully emerges more concretely in the late 1980’s: while anti-utopia rejects the desire for utopia in general and seeks to preserve the status quo, the latter gestures toward a utopian horizon, seeking, like utopian writing, to achieve the necessary “critical mass” to inspire change.23 Baccolini points out that the classical dystopia locates hope outside the text in its warning function, while the critical dystopia locates hope within the text, in the maintenance of characters’ capacity for choice: “the acceptance of responsibility and accountability, often worked thorough memory and recovery of the past [brings] the past into living relation with the present.”24 The critical dystopia is less an attack on utopianism in general than an attack on particular trends that could, if unaddressed, lead to disaster, but that leave open the possibility of utopian intervention. The sort of dystopian text I am interested in comes in both anti-utopian and critical varieties but is rooted in a defense of what is portrayed as a “human” past in the process of being overwritten by the institutions

8  Background (and the men who represent them) of the future. What links these antiand critical dystopian works together is an anxiety that is not mainly about eradication of the human, as the earlier last man fantasies, but about displacement. Most of the dystopias I  address share a distinct Burkean strain in their implicit desire to preserve imagined organic communities, where rituals that define daily life are a function of custom rather than intent.25 In dystopia, spirit is replaced by machinery, intrinsic value by utilitarian function, metaphysics by positivism, local identity by a diluted, generalized human. The last man’s scope for agency narrows to a vanishing point, his external and internal sovereignty subjugated to the state or corporation. The communities that, in Burke’s view, link society to nature in a continuous relation are severed from nature, leaving the dystopian subject adrift in a society that depends for its legitimacy on dangerous abstract reason. The dystopian reaction takes on different forms at different times, and comes from different sources, right, left, or libertarian. Sometimes the reaction is to an over-rationalized modernity, as in Zamyatin’s We, sometimes to science’s rejection of the spirit, as in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), sometimes to the rise of machine morality, as in A Clockwork Orange (1962), sometimes to collectivism, as in Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), sometimes to religion’s forcible insertion into the political sphere, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and sometimes to its removal from the public sphere, as in Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), sometimes to rampant consumerism, as in Huxley’s Brave New World, sometimes to egalitarianism, as in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), and sometimes to a dehumanizing exercise of political power, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Not only is the category of the human called into question in all of these works, but also the discourses that produce it. Humanism is deeply intertwined with the modes of narration associated with the novel as genre. In its classical sense, humanism embodies a commitment to those great books whose subject is the defining of a uniquely human character and such a character’s political, emotional, and moral possibilities. Ian Watt calls Winston Smith the “last humanist:” “Winston Smith makes. . . [a] . . . sort of stand for the simple intellectual and moral values which, for over two millennia, have had the majority of the literate and the decent on their side.”26 Dystopia is heavily invested in preserving such a figure: its destruction affirms both the value and fragility of a character type and its accompanying virtues that modernity places under stress. The last man is the last man to inhabit a novel, the character past which there are no more stories to tell. Dystopia objectifies this discursive anxiety. The violence done to books that is a repetitive motif in the ­dystopian tradition—their burning, their alteration, their banning—is not just intended to limit the discourse of futurity that produces r­ evolution, but also to limit the discourse of the past. As Burke writes, “people will

Introduction  9 not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”27 If books are, as Stephen Sicari calls them, the “ ‘furniture’ that reminds us of our human background,” they have no place in a dystopian world that insists on the human as a fixed and negated being whose story has already ended.28 Thus, dystopia can also be viewed as a formal response to a formal problem. It is important to distinguish a reflexive dystopian mode from novels which merely take place in dystopian settings. The latter provide an intact future and past. While setting is extreme and character’s impact on setting exaggerated, non-reflexive dystopian novels allow a trajectory of plot familiar in its open-endedness, in its commitment to character development and contingency. Often, this is the case in young adult novels, such as the ones I address in Chapter 8, that emphasize moral choices and the physical heroism of their protagonists in the face of devastating odds. This category welcomes thematic analysis, inviting reflection on what has gone so terribly wrong to place familiar characters under such duress. But most of the novels I am interested in here suffer from a dystopianism that extends to form as well. Not only are they set in diseased worlds, they are also constructed as novels in ways that reflexively mirror the disease they diagnose. The belief that there is an underlying principle or force that connects all perceived negative aspects of our world—whether God, George Soros, or physics—give rise to a narrative structure that is best described as under-determined, in which a single cause is responsible for cascading effects. The disease metastasizes through the work, deforming both character and plot. Jameson notes a utopian narrative strategy he calls “worldreduction,” in which “the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification.”29 The effect of this radical simplification for Jameson is the possibility of envisioning a humanity liberated from the economic, political, and social determinisms of history. The dystopias I am interested in, however, re-posit a singular force to fill the vacuum left by the utopian abstraction of fatalistic force. This is the logic of paranoia. Richard Hofstader, in his famous 1964 Harper’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” suggests the connection between reactionary conspiracy mongering and the dystopian mindset: “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”30 The entire world is under threat. Paranoia amplifies anxiety. A  narrative in which the reader is asked to identify with the victim of what is in essence a massive conspiracy against the human cannot be anything but reactionary. Conspiracies, and the paranoid mindset that indulges them, are simplifications, insisting on the underlying force that is responsible for all variety of manifestations.

10  Background The reflexive dystopian mode, as I conceive it here, is just such a form of simplification. The casual skeptic and the paranoiac are distinguished by the degree of investment in their shared analytical framework and in the extent of their willingness to apply it to a wide range of phenomena. So too, the intensity of commitment to simplification is the defining aspect of the reflexive dystopian mindset. The world shrinks down to a single, all-encompassing struggle even as this struggle expands to cover the entire world of the novel. Most of the texts here share this reductive sensibility. They are not nineteenth-century novels full of the bustling variety of human life, with competing characters, motives, and contingencies that could theoretically compel the plot in myriad directions, depending on which strand the author chooses to pick up. Instead, these texts manifest a force underneath that absorbs all of the motive power available in the their diegetic universes. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes, “[t]here are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters” (164). Distilling Vonnegut’s “forces” down to a single, motivated force, dystopia goes even further in disrupting the supply lines that nourish plot. In this, dystopias are, as Jameson, observes, “monotonously alike.”31 In the classical dystopia the reduced, singular perspective is pushed to an extreme. The world is viewed through a singular lens—there is only one thinking, feeling character, and only one set of forces and outcomes for everyone in the novel. The absence of heterogeneity closes down the text. The world viewed from the singular perspective easily slides into paranoia—it is only a matter of time before the philosopher who stands on a hill gazing down at a world organized around his perspective finds himself in a ditch with the world staring back. As a matter of narrative, the narrowed sight-lines created by this organization of space and subjectivity lead to what Alok Rai calls the “claustral intensity” of dystopian worlds.32 The criticisms of dystopian novels—that they are more ­interested in polemics than in characters, that they deny the resilience and resourcefulness of human beings and their ability to act collectively, and that they are set in flat, monochrome worlds—are all manifestations of this reduction and simplification of sight-lines. One of the most striking absences from many dystopian novels is a social world for the protagonist to inhabit. Hannah Arendt observes that isolation is a key feature of mass man, his “lack of normal social relationships” inviting him to seek company in the mass and to focus his desire in the demagogue.33 The last man of dystopian novels is often a lone man, unable to trust his neighbors, friends, family, or lovers. But just as importantly, the dystopian novel reproduces a world of reduced social possibilities and stunted interactions. The absence of a larger community

Introduction  11 causes the subject to shift between positions of abjection and grandiosity. He is both nothing and everything, the passive object of conspiracies and the last man to understands what is really going on. The traditional novel’s emphasis on social relationships is shunted into the paralytic prison of a lone consciousness without fellow characters who deserve to be in the novel with him. Chapter 8 and 9 explore dystopian poetics’ relationship to a social world more fully, addressing contemporary dystopias that return the subject to a full social world, but here I want to note the deforming effect the negation of the social life has on dystopian novels. The world not good enough for the dystopian protagonist relieves him of any duties to the broader collective, allowing him to indulge his outrage even as the world ossifies into something unlivable. This passivity breeds an aesthetic view of mankind’s destruction: in 1936, Walter Benjamin took note of fascism’s tendency to aestheticize politics. “[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order,” he wrote.34 Even when ostensibly anti-fascist, dystopias revel in the experience of the mind finely tuned to its own suffering and aesthetically intrigued by the suffering of others. In this sense, the dystopias I focus on here, even when progressive in their politics, are most often fundamentally reactionary and nostalgic in their mode of expression. Even when they invoke the possibility of a better world or of averting in the present the disaster that would create such a future, they are defensive in nature. The reader is made to feel horror at the mistreatment of those besieged souls who embody values the reader holds dear. Such a character finds himself alienated both from the environment that obstructs his will-to-autonomy and from his fellows who have sacrificed freedom and agency for benefits ranging from luxury to mere survival. He plays out exaggerated romantic fantasies of singularity—whether the singularity of heroism or of victimhood—that echo idealized visions of the human familiar from a heroic (and, later, anti-heroic) literary past. Nineteenth century concepts of the human echo powerfully through twentieth and twenty-first century dystopian works. Dystopia fully emerges in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as disillusionment with progress sets in. Alongside the Burkean commitment to custom, psychic resistance to change situates the dystopian last man firmly within a tradition of romantic responses to modernity, where authenticity, emotion, and a sense of exaggerated agency are pitted against a de-humanizing, consolidated bureaucratic state.35 Orwell’s original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was “The Last Man in Europe”—his brand of dystopianism, like German and British Romanticism, like Luddism, like nationalism, like William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, like American Pentecostalism, is a Western form of resistance to modernity that pits the vital individual against modernity’s excesses. Depending on the dystopia,

12  Background these excesses may be of utopian aspiration or universalizing reason, of productive efficiency or of social control, of climate control or environmental destruction; what links the various forms together is a recoiling from dehumanizing modernity in which the dream of progress—itself a nineteenth-century formation—is betrayed. It is no coincidence that processes of rational management, observation, and control, corollary to the forces that shape modernity, take on a sinister tincture in dystopia. Gregory Claeys, in his comprehensive reading of the genre, Dystopia: A Natural History (2017), calls attention to the mid-nineteenth century receding of modernity’s promise of collective, generalized improvement, with revolutionary hopes brought to heel both by new despotisms and by the fresh barbarisms that the embrace of science and technology inflicts.36 Dystopian nostalgia for organic cultural life—as I  show in the final chapters of this work, often visible in a nostalgic turn toward f­amily as an avenue of escape from the modern—directly responds to the threats posed by universalizing technology and globalism that challenge ­particularism, whether cultural, national, or tribal. As George Kateb writes, “one of the most pervasive anti-utopian fears is that in utopia, similar people would lead identical lives in the midst of undistinguished surroundings.”37 Similarly, Northrop Frye frames the impulse of texts like those by Orwell and Zamyatin as utopian satire, as a response to a “growing sense that the whole world is destined to the same social fate with no place to hide, and its increasing realization that technology moves toward the control not merely of nature but of the operations of the mind.”38 Modernity itself, Pankaj Mishra argues, threatens the existence of local culture. What he calls “liberal cosmopolitanism,” the creed of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and Kant, has a leveling tendency, giving birth to “a vast, homogenous world market in which human beings are programmed to maximize their self-interest and aspire to the same things, regardless of their difference of cultural background or individual temperament.”39 Contrary to thinkers such as Samuel Huntington who frame modernity in terms of a “clash of civilizations” between those cultures where modernity has taken root and those where it has not, Mishra’s argument is that resistance to modernity is one of modernity’s defining features.40 Mishra thus treats Trumpian ethnonationalism and ISIS as fruit of the same tree. Both follow a tradition of resistance rooted in eighteenthcentury efforts to preserve affiliations of national, sectarian, or parochial identity that salve the disruptions of emergent globalism. National culture becomes associated with a way of life that, in its local, customary quality, resists the leveling effects of modernity while also serving as redoubt for modernity’s dispossessed. The literature of this dynamic is legion. In the late-eighteenth century, it manifested in Germany in the nationalized romanticism of Herder and, across the channel, in poets real and imagined like Sir Walter Scott and Ossian. In the mid-nineteenth

Introduction  13 century, Wagner evoked a racialized mythological German past, while Dostoevsky grasped on to medieval, suffering Christianity as antidote to the modern utopia of the Crystal Palace. Dystopia shares this antimodern, anti-cosmopolitan sentiment. The last man is from somewhere in time and in space, but somewhere that has been erased by technology, as in E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops;” that has been made irrelevant by the triumph of bland consumption, as in Huxley’s Brave New World; or that has been pulverized into a nightmare of grim privation and fake patriotism such as we find in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s original title, “The Last Man in Europe,” underscores the fact that dystopia’s anxiety is as much cultural as individual. The last man is not literally the last human, but the last of a type that expresses a set of ideological and cultural attitudes and practices peculiar to modernity in Europe and the West. Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach” gives voice to the sense of crisis afflicting this type, depicting him stranded on a desolate beach as the tide of faith—faith in religion, yes, but more broadly in progress as something that will serve humanity—retreats “to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.”41 In the twentieth century, Arnold’s sense of a world slipping away metastasizes, the “ignorant armies [that] clash by night” even more destructive, and the complementary comforts of nostalgia and despair even more inviting.42 Arnold, standing on the English cliffs looking toward the European continent, gives us an image specifically of a nation threatened by change originating across the channel. Dystopian nostalgia often implicitly takes the form of a yearning for national identity. Wegner points out that Orwell’s last European man is specifically an Englishman.43 Similarly, Jed Esty in The Shrinking Island describes what he calls the “cultural turn” in British late modernism in the late 1930’s, “by which English intellectuals translated the end of empire into a resurgent concept of national culture.”44 Orwell remains committed to a version of English particularism, even when imagining a quasi-utopian future. English Socialism, for example, will be limited by a national character that is not so malleable. The English love of private, senseless hobbies like stamp collecting and crossword puzzles, combined with a secret affinity for inefficiency and gratuitous discomfort as something necessary to struggle against, protect against both totalitarianism and utopia. It is also important to note that it is “The Last Man in Europe.” Nostalgia tends to betray an indifference to those milling outside its muzzy glow. The freedom of movement, economic self-determination, and sense of cultural centrality the last man presumes as his birthright were never shared equally across gender, race, and culture. The absence of women is a particular problem for science fiction. Joanna Russ’s famous remark, “[t]here are plenty of images of women in science fiction.  .  .  [t]here are hardly any women” underscores this deficit.45 Russ also notes

14  Background the importance of gendered assumptions about physical mobility.46 The simple ability to walk freely on the streets or ramble in solitude in the countryside is an assumption about what a character ought to be doing instead of skulking in corners outside the range of the telescreen. Sarah Lefanu points out that women in science fiction are further made absent by being shoehorned into patriarchal discourses where they are represented as a “pale image of a ‘man,’ if not actually the feared castrating mother”, while Daphne Patai takes Orwell to task for his exclusion of women from his generalizing imagination.47 Patai argues that the absence of agentic female characters and his relentlessly masculinist perspective prevent him from realizing a fully populated world, a failure of political analysis and of aesthetics, so that, “trapped by both his manhood and his misogyny, [Orwell] in the end fails to achieve the resonance of a fully human language.”48 Baccolini similarly associates the closed, classical dystopias with a masculinist perspective resistant to the heterogeneity that opens a space for a wider array of perspectives. Discussing feminist writers of science fiction like Russ, she observes, [o]ne of the contributions of these writers has been to question the masculinist discourses of traditional science fiction. Their novels have contributed to the breakdown of certainties and universalist assumptions about gendered identities: Themes such as the representation of women and their bodies, reproduction and sexuality, and language and its relation to identity, have all been tackled, explored, and reappropriated by these writers in a dialectical engagement with tradition.49 The critical engagement with the dystopian tradition produced as a result of this encounter blurs boundaries of genre and gender, leading to spaces that defy easy categorization. While Orwell “shows no awareness of his androcentric vision,” feminist dystopian writers like Katharine Burdekin in Swastika Night offer possibilities of utopian space within their dystopian worlds.50 This suggests the inadequacy of the hopeless “last man” vision that refuses to acknowledge how gender limits the dystopian imagination. Jane Donawerth shows how feminist dystopias of the 1990’s “make dystopia a place of birth,” resisting closure through the introduction of multiple perspectives and the power of narrative—“story, history, choice”—that maintain a horizon of “political renewal.”51 For a contemporary example of this, Atwood’s recent sequel to her classic dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, breaks open the limiting perspective of last man-ism, providing multiple narrators and multiple possibilities, including possibilities for collective action, that mitigate the singular perspective of a lone male protagonist. The masculinist orientation in

Introduction  15 dystopia’s figuration of “the human” is just one of many causes we have to be skeptical of dystopian efforts to equate the fate of humanity with the fate of a besieged last man.52 One of the key differences between last man dystopias and young adult dystopian fiction is the frequent feminist bent of the latter. The protagonist of young adult dystopian fiction is often a young woman struggling against the strictures of an oppressive system of control that is explicitly or implicitly patriarchal. The historical exclusion of complex, agentic female characters, not only from science fiction but from the broader novel tradition, leaves few focal points for a reflexive female nostalgia. If the last man is an emblem of the displacement and marginalization of a certain kind of masculine identity, feminist dystopian texts, both of the young adult and grown-up varieties, like Russ’s short story “When it Changed” (1972) or Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It (1993), are more likely to include the possibility of other worlds and to focus not on the backward-oriented nostalgia of the last man, but on a forward-oriented first woman figure, for whom a change in the status quo is as likely to be promising as threatening. I take up this type in detail in my discussion of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower in Chapter 8. Dystopia is not just a warning, but a recuperative fantasy, revealing a primal wish along with the fear. Shelley’s last man indulges a deeply gratifying fantasy of romantic solitude. Her book concludes with Verney, the last man, addressing what remains: I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that the elements can assume—I shall read fair augury in the rainbow—menace in the cloud—some lesson or record dear to my heart in everything. Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the everopen eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN. (342) Shelley’s last man is an aristocrat, and his is a fantasy both of an unobstructed view of divine, signifying nature, and of nature’s correspondingly unobstructed view of him. The human world falls apart, revealing a deeper truth that lies beyond, a truth now in the possession of a single privileged soul.53 In the twentieth century, such fantasies of being alone, whether in nature or in the teeming city, became increasingly difficult to come by. The modern dystopia replaces romantic singularity in nature with a version of singularity achieved against the backdrop of the madding, enfeebled crowd. Grandiosity reappears as abjection, the motive force of nature as the malign force of the modern state. The romantic roots of the dystopian last man also surface in dystopia’s resistance to the onset of “mass man,” a formation of modernity

16  Background made possible by universalizing technologies of production, consumption, and cultural dissemination that lead to the bourgeoisification of ever larger segments of the population. José Ortega y Gasset sees in mass man the end of both cultural and individual particularism. Mass man “feel[s] reassured, smugly at ease, to be considered identical with all others;” the death of the desire to achieve perfection, the transformation of men from individual striving creatures to “mere buoys that float on the waves,” undermines the individual as the fundamental unit of liberal society.54 Echoing Nietzsche’s sense of the last man as creature of the herd, Ortega y Gasset’s attack on capitalist conformity dovetails with the threat posed by the late-nineteenth century loss of divine authorization for the individual. This threat is visible in the poem “Hap” (1899) by Thomas Hardy (a work to which I will return later). Hardy’s poem depicts the wish to transcend the masses unmarked for special treatment by fate: If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!” Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. (Norton 844) Hardy laments the absence of an invested deity, even a cruel one. The gods are not vengeful but indifferent (nor even capitalized; that honor is reserved for the avatars of blind chance). If only there were intention, Hardy seems to say, joy would blossom in knowing that one has been singled out, however unjustly, for a bad ending. But the gods of the nineteenth century have given up sporting with mankind and birds have stopped singing to poets. The modern dystopia re-inscribes vanished gods in the even more terrifying form of the totalitarian state apparatus— more efficient because scientific, more brutal because lacking in mercy as only human institutions can be. Realizing what Hardy’s speaker cannot, dystopia indulges a desperate form of paranoia, turning the nightmare

Introduction  17 of indifference into a redemptive fantasy of heroic centrality. And so, as Foucault observes, Judge Schreber comes to substitute for Launcelot in the reconstituted childhood adventure.55 Paranoia, which grotesquely magnifies centrality, is just one of many deformations of character that occur throughout dystopian novels. If traditional novels tend to be about character formation, the novels addressed here work by ironizing, parodying, dismantling, exaggerating, and obstructing familiar means of characterization. Structures of ­ characterization drawn from traditional forms—Bildungsroman, ­picaresque, quest narrative, biography, romance—are subjected to violence both formal and diegetic. Placing under stress the forms and plots associated with the older world by which we recognize the human, dystopia exists simultaneously in two registers, one realistic and one reflexive: disassembly of character is mirrored by disassembly of readers’ expectations of character. The developmental time in which a character grows from a state of ineffectuality to a state of effective agency, the subject of so many narrative works, is negated or reversed. The boundary between interior and exterior, between character and setting, becomes problematic, with settings overly developed to a point where there is no room left for character. While nineteenth-century narratives habitually link personal maturity to national, technological, moral, or spiritual development, many dystopian novels sever this linkage, or reverse its valence to reveal civilization’s regressive impulses. Dystopia’s relationship with prior forms is both critical and nostalgic. Like twentieth-century movements such as modernism, dystopia critiques the inadequacy of old forms for describing the emergent reality, even while clinging to those obsolete forms and attitudes as buttress against the familiar literary subject’s extinction. Most of the dystopian novels I  focus on play out anxiety about progress in explicitly formal as well as thematic terms, making inherited forms the targets of violence, irony, and nostalgia. This reflexive violence manifests through the deforming of narrative antecedents—particularly visible in the reversal of the journey of development, the strengthening of setting in relation to character, and the eradication of contingency. In The Boundaries of Genre, Gary Saul Morson gives a set of counterplots that express the relationship between the anti-utopian anti-novel and the novel, including movement toward recognition of the unavailability of answers; finding the truth but being believed insane; or, as in We, the attempt not to escape from history into utopia, but to return to history.56 Morson’s understanding of the anti-utopia as a counterplot extends to the dystopian novel’s handling of genre. Some, like Orwell and Burgess give us characters recognizable from romance, Bildungsroman, and quest narratives but drop them into formal environments that thwart the developmental trajectories readers are conditioned to expect: rather than escape from confines of family into a wider world, the texts insist on return to the family. Others, like

18  Background Mamet and Houellebecq, explore nostalgia for the narrative forms that would give their characters a fighting chance; still others, such as Ishiguro and Butler, repurpose older forms in ways that ironize the distance we have traveled from the familiar. Throughout, I explore how dystopia reverses plot expectations, drawing attention to the way the dystopian works both deconstruct and affirm the value of the strategies they invert. Dystopia is a subset of utopia, a no place, but it is also a subset of the novel, an inhabited someplace where plausible things happen. The dialogue between dystopia and the broader literary tradition is central to my concern here. I am particularly interested in the shape nineteenthcentury forms like romanticism, bildung, and realism take under the pressure of modernity. If Menippean satire, in which character gives way to the ­representation of ideas, is one of dystopia’s parents, the character-­ centered novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that celebrates the heady particularities of individual, private experience is the other.57 The novel was invented to celebrate the glory and durability of a certain kind of historically situated human. The dystopian last man is, in turn, a defensive embrace of the autonomous, agentic, and dynamic character of the novel. What sorts of poetics, what sort of politics, what sorts of plots and characters, emerge out of dystopia’s premonition of such a figure’s twilight? *** As noted, the works I discuss in this book focus on threats from a variety of sources. Industrialization and the rise of the machine, science, socialism and other forms of collectivism, capitalism, totalitarianism and fascism, globalization, overpopulation, environmental collapse, and religion (or its lack) all take turns as source material. Different eras produce different shadings.58 The works include both open and closed dystopian worlds— those where change is possible and those where it is not—and thus also represent a range of pessimism, from mild to debilitating. On the one end of the spectrum are texts like Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which treats the dystopian world as the seedbed of a new utopia, and on the other are texts by writers like Houellebecq, who masochistically savor the loss of the human.59 Examples of the genre, to the extent that it is a coherent genre, embody contrasting attitudes toward progress and the status of the human, as well as widely divergent styles. What the works I have selected share, however, is a commitment to imaginatively realizing a world that has become (or is in the process of becoming) unlivable for a character type inherited from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century realist novel. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Zamyatin’s We, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934), David Mamet’s play and film Glengarry Glen Ross (1984, 1992), Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and

Introduction  19 the Chinese dystopias of the final chapter like Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) emphasize the lost world of their central figures, contrasting a grim present with a past that, however imperfect, begins to look like utopia in comparison. Together, the texts illustrate the importance of reading dystopia beyond topical setting and point to dystopia’s rich and complex relationship to inherited modes of novelistic discourse. A  mature art form pillages its own past for material. The novel becomes the site of dystopian mourning characterologically, thematically, and formally: characterologically in dystopia’s invocation of various incarnations of the “last man,” thematically in its motifs of the agentic individual squashed by the overweening world-state, and formally in its reflexive ironizing of the generic and genetic material of the novel. Most of the texts in this study, except for those in Chapter 8, look backward because they do not believe there is a future worth looking forward to. Anti-utopian or critical dystopian, their pessimism about the prospects for utopian transformation inspires a form of characterization that mourns the familiar human as something that will not survive in its present form, regardless of whether the future turns out to be dystopian or utopian. Jameson reads Philip K. Dick’s novels as representations of the “death of the subject,” where the human is absorbed into collective forms, and in which autonomy is replaced by a “paralyzed community of the dead and stricken collective.”60 Dick’s pulp realism turns this scenario into novels of individual struggle to retain humanity. Dystopia brings to the forefront such a character’s representative status. By focusing on how these works structure an experience of character, I seek to address dystopia as narrative fiction more systematically than a critical turn toward the politics—and potentials—of dystopia generally allows. Wegner, reading Benjamin, makes a distinction between mourning the closure of the past—“will history ever forgive us for our failures to act when we should or could have?”—and Benjamin’s assertion that the sense of “catastrophic closure” must be recognized as only a fiction that screens the subject from historical responsibility.61 Benjamin’s fiction is an alluring one. I read the texts included here as a means of mourning the future, as attempts to come to terms with an individual feeling of powerlessness in the face of history unchained from human telos. By doing so, I hope to explore the aesthetic appeal of this particular misunderstanding of history. To focus on dystopias as fictions is not to abandon politics; rather, it is to hold that engagement with the real benefits when we attend to the formal, affective, and imaginative experiences that invest the real with value. The three chapters in the section of the book entitled Background lay out the basic premises of the study. Chapter 2 asks What is the difference between dystopian and non-dystopian modes of characterization? The chapter shows how Nineteen Eighty-Four repurposes themes and

20  Background structures from Orwell’s non-dystopian works, examining the continuities and disjunctures between dystopian character and the types of character found in other forms of fiction. By altering the characteristic relation between character and setting the dystopia both critiques and affirms the novel as vehicle for transmitting an inherited idea of the human. Shackling the private interior self to an intransigent, invasive world, the last man dystopia realizes in formal terms the struggle of the novel to imagine a free subject. Chapter  3 locates the book’s themes within a broader context of dys- and utopian criticism and thought, focusing on the question, How has the word “dystopia” been used to describe particular forms within the novel tradition and on a related question, What is the relationship between dystopia and novelistic time? The chapter sketches in the critical heritage, focusing on topics like anti-utopianism, and then takes up the implications of dystopian time, in which the present is projected into the future. Building on Frank Kermode’s insights on the use of apocalyptic time in literature, the chapter analyzes three signatures of future-time— the past tense of the reader, the crisis-time of the character’s present, and the future perfect that looks back on the dystopian world from a more distant future point—to show how the dystopia subverts traditional novelistic expressions of time. The novel, traditionally a mode of exploring open-ended time, is transposed into a register that freezes contingency into a fixed tableau, leaving readers stuck in a retrospective mode of encountering the present. The three chapters in the middle section of this book (De-forming Character) focus on the novelistic structures and figurations upon which dystopia relies. Chapter  4 explores the relationship between the poetics of future fiction, humanism, and last man-ism. The last man is both political stance and narrative device, a convenient platform from which to view anxieties about modernity and its forms. The chapter links the last man motif to anxieties about masculinity, free will, and identity, showing how the embattled dystopian character responds to modern state technologies of bureaucracy, totalitarianism, and surveillance with a fantasy of return. Following critics like Wegner, who emphasizes dystopia’s roots in naturalism, and Stephen Sicari, who explores modernism’s anti-humanist tendencies, I connect the resulting “nostalgic humanism” to a set of formal behaviors that respond not only to the crisis of modernity, but also to a crisis of narration that begins in the late nineteenth century with naturalism and continues into twentieth-century modernism. The chapter presents four versions of humanism—utopian humanism, utopian anti-humanism, dystopian humanism, and dystopian anti-humanism—and includes discussions of representative dystopian works by E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, Gary Shteyngart, and Michel Houellebecq as examples.

Introduction  21 Chapter  5 explores the Bildungsroman as the model for dystopian character development. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go all depend on conventions of the Bildungsroman for plot, theme, and structure, bending these formal figures into new shapes that both mourn the past and gesture toward the obsolescence of its forms. As critics like Franco Moretti and, more recently, Jed Esty have shown, the Bildungsroman formula reflects tensions associated with progress and a new understanding of bourgeois subjectivity. The nineteenth century Bildungsroman’s linkage of individual and national development—where development of the individual substitutes for and runs parallel to the development of the nascent nation state—is severed in these works. Their last men are characters in allegorical freefall: the state has achieved a final form in which individual development becomes impossible, leaving these novels with nothing to do except un-develop their characters back toward the horizon of the primitive. We’s human beings are marooned in a mathematical paradise, where freedom means return to a form of childlike, romantic spontaneity. A Clockwork Orange is a traditional Bildungsroman in its tracing of its anti-hero’s development from untamed child to docile adult, but it disrupts the link between individual development and development of the larger community, its world fixed in a permanent state of dissolution. Never Let Me Go similarly decouples individual development from narratives of progress by focusing on the development toward completion of individuals who are not quite human, who do not count in the calculus of nation. Building on Moretti’s and Esty’s insights, I  explore these three novels as examples of dystopia’s complex ironization of the Bildungsroman’s generic tropes of character. Chapter 6 takes up dystopia’s use of paranoia as a literary structure that resurrects dying tropes of romantic subjectivity. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four deploy paranoia in response to fears that the future will have no use for the private, interior, agentic subject. Paranoia recovers such a subject from the de-romanticizing clutches of both technological and formal modernity, responding to fears of the interpellation of the private, organic self within modern state structures of surveillance and control by offering regression back to a narcissistic psychic state. The grandiosity of the paranoid—the world is out to get me—reasserts centrality within a signifying system. Drawing particularly on the work of David Trotter, I  show how paranoia operates in, on, and through modern dystopian character. I first treat Dostoevsky’s protagonist from the anti-utopian Notes from Underground who shrinks from the utopian promise of the “Crystal Palace” as an early model of paranoid character who exists at the intersection of realism and romanticism. Then, I  take up Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four showing how Orwell’s novel explicitly draws out Dostoevsky’s logic of romantic

22  Background paranoia. Orwell exposes the last man’s roots in paranoid wish fulfillment, where fear of surveillance and mind control is also erotic fantasy. The three chapters of the final section (Dystopian Variations) extend the structural discussion of the previous chapters to look at “last man” narratives that transform familiar narrative and characterological formulae. Chapter  7 examines the relationship between narratives of the “American dream” and dystopia. Taking a cue from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, I argue for a “dystopian design” in American literature, a reflexive tradition that pits the free subject against the narratives of American capitalism. Nathanael West’s A Cool Million and David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, explore the death of the American dream by rereading America’s formative mythologies through a dystopian lens. West poses a surreal America in which representation is replacing the political sphere, an aestheticized politics, that as for Benjamin, ultimately leads to fascism. Mamet, following Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, ironizes the “drummer” as the apotheosis of an American dream of self-making. Like the texts in the earlier chapters, these works deform their narrative antecedents, shrinking agency while concomitantly expanding and rigidifying the external world. Their last men live in an America that has ceased to exist either as setting or as plot. Chapter  8 explores young adult dystopian fiction through works by Lois Lowry and Octavia Butler that respond to coming-of-age character formulae. Engaging with scholarship by Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, Robyn McCallum, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, among others, who draw attention to the tension between YA dystopias’ feminist utopian/critical dystopian aspects and their contradictory traditionalism, I  show how these tensions are worked out through staging the relation between character and family. Lowry’s The Giver Quartet and Butler’s Parable books leave intact the architecture of transcendence familiar from romance, framing it within future settings that intensify the stakes of individual agency. Retaining the possibility of transformation and emphasizing character development, they contrast with static dystopias.62 Both Lowry’s male teen protagonist in The Giver and Butler’s female teen protagonist in the Parable novels engage in a type of the family romance, discovering themselves as world-heroic figures destined to right the wrongs of previous generations. Lowry’s figure trades his family for a better one, while Butler’s transforms the last man into a first teen committed to a project of collective world-building. Finally, in Chapter 9, the epilogue, I discuss dystopias that take contemporary China as their subject and that meld realism with elements from dystopian fictions of the past. In Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009), the last man is one of the last to remember a month the Chinese government appears to have excised from memory, and in Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (2017), the last man is actually one of many excess men caused by China’s one-child policy who desires participation

Introduction  23 in one of the new polyandric families that have become normal. These works are notable for the extent to which dystopian settings are treated in terms familiar from realism, with little of the emphasis on political warning associated with the dystopian tradition. I end by suggesting that this marks a phase in dystopian fiction in which, as Jameson suggests, the future has been absorbed into the present. Wegner’s work is a jumping off place for this study. Wegner calls dystopia “the most significant subgenre to emerge from Great Britain in the last century,” noting that these novels “remain . . . long after the particular circumstances which gave rise to them have faded from memory.”63 Throughout, I am interested in how dystopian novels transcend topical locales and themes. In Imaginary Communities, Wegner contrasts the novel’s focus on temporality with dystopia’s emphasis on space. In this he associates the u/dystopian tradition with romance. As he points out, it is the debate between James and Wells, between interiorized psychology and exteriorized experience, in which character acts as a formal ‘registering apparatus’ that produces an itinerary.64 In Shockwaves of Possibility, Wegner further argues that science fiction (SF), of which he includes dystopia as a part, is a type of realist modernism that engages in the “central modernist formal operation of estrangement.”65 Distinct from high modernist texts, which achieve their effects through “violations of formal expectations,” SF estranges by offering a realistic approach to absent content, or by re-reading the present in such a way as to make it new.66 In Shockwaves, Wegner builds on Jameson’s understanding of realism as a means of “cognitive mapping”—of situating the subject in allegorical space—and on Marc Angenot’s understanding of SF as addressing an “absent referent,” in order to explore the ways SF engages with spatial and cognitive possibilities. These possibilities emerge in the portrayal of new worlds not assimilable by traditional codes. Angenot writes, “[t]he narrative about such a [SF] world . . . requires a conjectural reading. It does not call for the reader to apply the norms, rules, conventions, and so forth of his empirical world, but instead assumes a paradigmatic intelligibility that is both delusive and necessary;” thus, “the first task of the SF critic is to identify precisely the SF ‘world’ as something estranged from the reader’s empirical world and possessing its own rules.”67 I mean to do the opposite here—to read dystopias not as science fiction but as part of the world of the familiar, particularly with respect to character in order to unearth the paradigms that make them intelligible. Thus, while I  pick up on Wegner’s understanding of dystopia as a type of realist modernism that develops out of the crises of the twentieth century, my interest is less in how dystopia radically reconfigures space and ideology than in its invocations of familiar character types from the pre-modernist novel. A second touchstone for my treatment of dystopian poetics is Morson’s work. The dystopias here are what Morson calls “threshold works”— that is, works complicated by being intentionally designed to “exploit

24  Background the resonance between two kinds of reading.”68 We might read them as failed romantic quests, or as critique of the whole idea of the romantic quest undertaken by an autonomous individual; the reader is “encouraged to engage in familiar forms of thinking and then . . . reproached for doing so.”69 Morson associates this method with utopia’s didacticism. Anti-utopia is “a parodic anti-genre” that activates a reader’s utopian assumptions, but then undercuts them, exposing the “ineffectiveness” and “duplicitousness” of utopian devices.70 Morson writes, “[f]or many utopias . . . traditional literature is something to be overcome; for dystopias, it is something to be regained.”71 By the very fact that these works exist as novels the task has already been accomplished; the dystopian insistence on returning to the novel—both as plot device, in which writing from the past holds the key to rebellion, and as formal model—is ultimately an impassioned defense of the novel’s necessity. I return to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four throughout as a paradigmatic example of the genre. Because I focus on the intersection of dystopia and the broader literary tradition, I have generally avoided authors that are considered to be mainly writers of science fiction. This is in no way intended to diminish the quality, and, as Jameson consistently and eloquently argues, the centrality of these writers and their texts to the task of critically imagining the future. I have intentionally selected texts by writers who self-consciously stake a claim to a more general set of literary and characterological concerns even as they temporarily embrace science fiction as the best available form for telling contemporary stories. Similarly, this study gives short shrift to “ambiguous” utopian works with a more feminist or queer orientation, like Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, or the works of writers like James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Shelton), Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany. Lefanu’s outstanding 1988 study, Chinks in the World Machine, examines female character in women’s science fiction, drawing particular attention to how dystopias foreground “the denial of women’s sexual autonomy.”72 As Baccolini argues, these writers, by questioning the stark antimonies of the utopian/dystopian opposition, open new spaces for critique and dreaming.73 Because these writers are less invested in preserving nineteenthcentury man in all his self-mythologizing glory, their richly imagined dystopias, ambiguous utopias, heterotopias, and worlds still becoming lack the reactionary fervor that repeatedly surfaces in the twentieth- and twenty-first century last man dystopia as a matter of plot, form, and character. For a threshold example, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, though one of the most brilliant and prescient of the modern dystopias, lacks the sense of petulant, wounded despair that permeates the last man dystopias of this study. Gilead is what happens when reactionary, theocratic males create institutions that terrorize women. Nor does Atwood’s novel practice the reactionary reductionism that invests the state with the power of a deity and turns plot into a fait accompli. The world of

Introduction  25 A Handmaid’s Tale is a logical extension of multiple chains of cause and effect, where characters claim the power to make choices in an uncertain world. Atwood resists the lure of nostalgia for the world before the fall, since it is that world, as far back as one can look, that gave birth to the dystopian nightmare. The novel, which ends with her heroine, Offred, entering a van, unsure if she is heading to freedom or death, leaves the possibility of freedom very much alive. Gilead is a bounded state, not the whole world, so that there is conceivably an adjacent place to which to escape. Atwood leaves plenty of novelistic space around her characters, as evidenced by her sequel, The Testaments, which picks up the story from other points of view. As with The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam following Oryx and Crake, the story is both continuation and what Jameson calls a parallel narrative, an expansion of the earlier novel’s world to include new perspectives. I also ignore the new wave science fiction writers of the 1960’s and 70’s like J. G. Ballard whose work is often clearly dystopic. Ballard defends science fiction as the main literary tradition of the twentieth century, in its attempt “to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness” (3). While Ballard is clearly invested in issues of representation, his experiments with narrative demand a more radical kind of reading than this study can engage. In a work like Crash, for example, characters, far from being holdovers from the nineteenth-century novel, dissolve and reform before our eyes as collations of psychopathologies. Ballard’s dystopian spaces are not designed to preserve, but to engender a new language with which to narrate the future. He writes in his introduction to the French edition of Crash, “[c]an [the writer], any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting domains within an ample time and space?” (5). His answer is an emphatic no: I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise hypothesis and test them against the facts. (5–6) Ballard’s oeuvre is science fiction of the highest order, but it makes no pretense at reproducing old models of novelistic engagement with the world. Rather than lamenting the end of the subject, Ballard catalogues the “death of affect” with a pornographer’s meticulousness, and along with it the end of the nineteenth century’s interior subject, suggesting that

26  Background identity, agency, privacy, coincidence—the essential elements of novelistic discourse—have taken on radically different shapes in our contemporary world. Dystopia gives us a last man figure both out of time and out of his proper time. Whether defending the status quo, a mythical past, or an as-yet-to-be-realized promise of human potential that is in danger of being foreclosed, the recurrent figure of the last man stands in for both the death of a way of life and a way of narrating this life. Typically, analyses of dystopia emphasize “setting:” What kind of world is this? What does it reveal about our own? But the paranoid, deluded, impassioned, exhausted, sadistic or masochistic characters that inhabit dystopia reflect—and reflect on—romantic, realist, and modernist characters we are accustomed to meeting in literature. Ultimately, my approach to dystopian character grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? What are the sources of such a character? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? And, finally, what is the relation between dystopian character and other forms of literary character? Situating dystopia within a formal literary critical context clarifies the structural, characterological, and narrative transformations dystopian writing exploits. By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, I aim to make a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in novels and other literary works. In the last twenty years there have been a variety of fresh approaches to dystopian literature that build on the work of sociologically oriented critics like Krishan Kumar, historically oriented critics like Mark Hillegas, and more formally oriented critics like Alexandra Aldridge, Ruth Levitas, M. Keith Booker, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Tom Moylan. Some of the most powerful recent criticism continues to come from Jameson and Wegner, both of whom are interested in a larger project of periodization, and particularly in how u/dystopias function in imagining new forms of future space. Meanwhile, feminist critics like Baccolini build on work done in the 1980’s by Marleen S. Barr, whose anthology Future Females examines the role of women in science fiction, and Lefanu, both of whom approach feminist dystopias as examples of how women writers adapt and bend the science fiction genre in order to critique patriarchy. Baccolini’s sense of how these novels disrupt form is crucial to understanding how the dystopian texts here instead resist radical transformation, hunkering down in a defensive stance that seeks to preserve or lament what was rather than to dream of what might be. For an overview of the development of both the literature and the critical field, Claeys’s Dystopia: A Natural History updates Moylan’s nuanced and authoritative account of the development of the genre, its politics, and its criticism in Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), historicizing

Introduction  27 dystopia and situating it within a broad intellectual context, while Parrinder’s Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (2015) contextualizes the movement toward dystopian thinking in terms of the development of science.74 Recent anthologies edited by Booker, Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, and Basu, Broad and Hintz bring together critics who apply postcolonial, eco-feminist, posthumanist and a variety of other contemporary critical frameworks to a broad range of dystopian fictions, ranging from the classic to contemporary young adult novels. Eckart Voigts and Alessandra Boller’s edited collection is a particularly useful exploration of the various kinds of dystopia by theme. Essays in their volume offer a wide range of categorical headings for dystopia, including Degeneration, Biopolitical, Totalitarian, Anti-Humanist, Mechanistic, Violence, Androids, Surrealist, Feminist, Ambiguous, Postcolonial, Graphic, Cyberpunk, Religious, Posthuman, Dystopias of Isolation, Eco-Dystopia, Post-Nuclear, Eugenic, Dystopias of Reproduction, Virtual Reality, Postmodernism, Post-­apocalyptic, Video Games, and Young Adult. Other works adopt a narrower approach, exploring individual themes, such as Peter Marks’s Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film (2015), which focuses on treatments of surveillance in a selection of utopian and dystopian works. Peter Edgerly Firchow’s Modern Utopian fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch (2007) approaches dystopia from a specifically literary-analytical perspective, drawing attention to dystopia’s merging of the utopian and novel traditions. Geographical approaches, such as Jeffrey C. Kinkley’s Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels (2014) and Douwe Fokkema’s Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West (2011) focuses on the intersection of the Chinese u/dystopian tradition with the Western tradition. Meanwhile, journals like Utopian Studies and Science Fiction Studies and journals focused on children’s and young adult literature like The Lion and the Unicorn continue to publish exciting new scholarship on dystopia. These are just a few examples of what is a vast and expanding field of criticism. What this book adds to the body of dystopian scholarship is a systematic focus on character construction across a variety of dystopian texts. I treat dystopia less as a separate genre marked by engagement with questions of how we should live than as traditional novels that wrestle with questions of who we are and what we feel.75 Levitas begins her book on utopia with the observation that “utopia is “not escapist nonsense but a fundamental part of human culture” and later frames utopia in terms of desire: “the essence of utopia seems to be desire . . . for a different, better way of being.”76 Defining utopia this way emphasizes its role as a bridge connecting imagination to practice, and frames its literary productions as only one among the many forms utopian thinking takes, with different forms becoming available under different historical conditions.77

28  Background However, when it comes to dystopia, Levitas’s distinction between a functional and an aesthetic understanding is useful in some ways, but not in others. Unlike utopia, dystopia is a world in which no one actually wants to live. The imagining of such a world may critique present tendencies, offer warning, or, as Moylan argues, spur renewed hope, but it is also a pleasurable activity, albeit a masochistic one. Just as utopia is both desire and wish-fulfillment, a compensatory end in itself, so dystopia is at once warning and nightmare.78 Jameson, who is far more interested in the conditions of utopian realization than in the inert literary dimensions of dystopias, distinguishes “the pleasures of the nightmare” from the gratifications that come with more socially productive, active forms of imagining.79 But aesthetic activity, the desire to indulge an as if and the pleasure that attends upon such an orientation, even in the form of nightmares, is essential to human culture as well. David Sisk in Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopia (1997) argues that dystopia’s aims are closer to those of fiction than are those of utopian literature: “Where utopia appeals to reason, dystopia works on emotion.”80 I  follow this path here. Many thoughts and desires come to fruition in a subjunctive space in which realization is never an option. The desire for sensation, for personal, emotional catharsis, the desire for endings, to give up for a moment the responsibility that comes along with hope—all of these are powerful spurs to dystopian dreaming. In this study, I approach dystopian writing from that angle of criticism where evaluation does not consist in asking whether or not what is written ought to be realized or what steps must be taken in order to avoid such a realization. Rather, I ask What do the shapes of dystopian fiction reveal about the shapes of our thoughts and desires under the stress of modernity?

Notes 1. Merrill Perlman “Dissecting Dystopia,” Columbia Journalism Review, Aug. 29, 2016. [www.cjr.org/language_corner/dystopia_existential_trump_election.php]. 2. There is no shortage of people today who think of America as already having arrived at dystopia. In Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration speech, he continued his campaign theme of a country in crisis, painting a dark portrait of an American hellscape: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.   Either America already was a dystopia, or it became one when Trump was elected. M. Keith Booker notes affinities between the Trump era and Huxley’s Brave New World, particularly in the hyper-consumerism, commodification of individuals, and pop culture propaganda (The Conversation n.p.). 3. “Then You Are Them” n.p.

Introduction  29 4. “Three Faces” 4. 5. “Dystopias Now” n.p. 6. “Breaking Down the ‘System’,” New York Times, Dec. 27, 2010. 7. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 61. 8. Jameson argues utopia and dystopia in fact have little to do with each other: utopia is not a story but a “blueprint” that lacks a subject position, while dystopia is a narrative that happens to a particular subject (Seeds 55–56). 9. Aldridge 33. Along the same lines, Joanna Russ observes in “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction,” “despite superficial similarities to naturalistic (or other) modern fiction, the protagonists of science fiction are always collective, never individual persons” (To Write 51). 10. Booker, The Dystopian Impulse 37. 11. Jeffery Berman calls it a paradox of science fiction: “While it is a speculative literature, it has neglected to speculate about the nature of literature” (164); art is the “forbidden subject” (165). 12. Jameson frames the surge of late-nineteenth-century utopian writing as a response to the pessimism of naturalism (Political Unconscious 193); Wegner extends Jameson’s argument, viewing dystopia as a counter-response to utopia’s rejection of naturalism’s determinism (“Where the Prospective Horizon is Omitted” in Dark Horizons). 13. Shockwaves 59. 14. Noah, one of the earliest versions of this character, is also a type of the “first man”—witness to the destruction of the world, but father of the new world to come and therefore an emblem of hope rather than despair. 15 See discussion of Le Dernier Homme in Alkon’s Origins of Futuristic Fiction for more on the movement from religious to secular models of apocalypse. 16. Wallace Shawn’s play, The Designated Mourner, explores this idea in a set of overlapping monologues that describe the fall of a decadent society to a populist reactionary movement. 17. The third installment of Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome draws on Hoban’s novel. 18. Claeys separates apocalypse from dystopia in the latter’s portrayal of social and political relations (270). 19. Zarathustra n.p. 20. Booker, The Dystopian Impulse 7–8. 21. Knights and Willmott 61. 22. Sargent distinguishes the “utopia of human contrivance” from the bodily utopia, considering it a development from visions of Cockaygne, or Paradise, that are not brought about by men (“Three Faces” 10–11). 23. Moylan, Demand 10. Elsewhere, Moylan observes that even texts that seem to reject utopian forms often hint at a possibility of a better world within the text, via their framing as diaries or found texts. The very existence of these records suggests the dystopian phase has passed and given way to a new, more humane future order (Scraps 158–66). 24. Hope 520–21. 25. Jameson locates a source of the anti-utopian critique in Burke’s anti-revolutionary stance (Seeds 31, 53); See also Claeys (291). 26. “The Last Humanist” in Stansky 113. 27. Reflections 47–48. 28. Sicari 7. 29. Archaelogies 275. See also Wegner, Imaginary Communities 173. 30. Hofstader 82. 31. American Utopia 1.

30  Background 2. Rai 133. 3 33. Totalitarianism 15. 34. “Work of Art” 244. 35. See Castellano, e.g., for Burke’s romanticism. 36. Claeys (2017: 270). See Mishra’s Age of Anger 1–36 for his linking of progress to reactionary movements in the twentieth century. 37. Kateb 62. Carol Pearson (in Barr, Future Females) argues that feminist utopias in particular tend to question structures of family. She quotes Mary Staton’s From the Legend of Biel as emblematic: “The whole object of the family is to repeat itself, to create the future in the image of the past. Consequently, it is a very effective brake on change because it keeps all children within the boundary of a cultural tradition” (66). 38. “Varieties” 26. 39. Mishra 7. 40. Ibid 127. 41. Norton 794. 42. See Kunio Shin’s recent essay on Orwell’s nostalgia, “The Uncanny Golden Country: Late-Modernist Utopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Shin complicates Jed Esty’s characterization of Orwell in A Shrinking Island as regressively nostalgic, arguing that Orwell is critical of a nostalgia that fails to reject the imperialist foundations of British prosperity. For a broader group of perspectives on modernism and nostalgia, see the 2013 anthology edited by Tammy Clewell, Modernism and Nostalgia. 43. Imaginary Communities 183–228. 44. Esty, A Shrinking Island 2. 45. Russ, Image 39. 46. “Recent Feminist Utopias” 78 in Future Females. 47. Lefanu 54. 48. Patai 268. 49. “Gender and Genre” 16. 50. Ibid 19. 51. Donawerth 62. 52. Sargent notes that not until Bellamy in 1888 does a radical reimagining of women’s role in utopia emerge—then, in the twentieth century, excepting Russ and a few others, he calls the eutopia “generally unimaginative regarding women’s position in society” (“An Ambiguous Legacy” 97). 53. Gore Vidal’s Kalki goes even further linking the last man to the presumption of divine singularity. Vidal’s last man, James Kelly, an ex-soldier in the Vietnam war, offering a character who literally sees himself as a god. Kelly claims that he is the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, ushering in the end of the corrupt age of Kali—of which the 1970’s is culmination—and usher in a new Golden Age. To this end, Kelly unleashes a plague that kills off all of humanity except for himself and four others, including his consort Lakshmi with whom he plans to repopulate the world. This version of the last man embodies a fear, certainly, that the planet is headed toward destruction, but also a wish for a singularity unavailable to secularized, mass-cultured man. The god of destruction is no more than a disgruntled ex-soldier. 54. Revolt of the Masses 7. 55. Discipline and Punish 194. 56. Ibid 122–28. 57. Howe identifies Nineteen Eighty-Four as Menippean satire, suggesting that its problems as novel disappear when read in this context (TSC 307).

Introduction  31 58. Jameson and Wegner take a more substantive approach to periodization; e.g. see Wegner’s discussion in Shockwaves of Possibility. 59. See Moylan, Scraps (195–96) for distinction between nihilistic texts that embrace resignation and those that resist. 60. Archaeologies 347. 61. Life Between 3. 62. Basu et al. 5. 63. Wegner (Blackwell), 454. 64. Imaginary Communities 12–13. 65. Ibid 12. See also Paul March-Russell’s discussion of modernism and science fiction. 66. Ibid 13. 67. Angenot 10, 18. 68. Morson 50. 69. Ibid 51. 70. Ibid 138. 71. Ibid 141. 72. Lefanu 71. 73. “Gender and Genre” 16. 74. See also Derek Thiess in Booker (Dystopia) for a useful survey of dystopian criticism (19–53). Parrinder, reviewing Claeys’s book, lauds it for moving the study of dystopia closer to the mainstream, but at the same time suggests that Claeys’s lack of interest in literary analysis hampers the study (361). 75. Claeys’s recent work, for example, focuses on themes and ideas rather than literary form, distinguishing between mere entertainment and the “higher purpose” (269) of dystopian texts. 76. Levitas 1, 181. 77. Ibid 5. 78. See Moran in Hintz and Ostrey 140–41. 79. Seeds 55. 80. Sisk 80. Sisk draws attention to how modern dystopias artificially constrict language as a means of asserting control and, conversely, how language is portrayed “as the primary weapon with which to resist oppression” (2).

2 The Character of Dystopia

I am sentimental about my childhood—not my own particular childhood, but the civilization I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, on its last kick. (Orwell, Coming Up for Air 86–87). ‘What shall it be this time?’ he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. ‘To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?’ ‘To the past,’ said Winston. (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 117)

The Language of Despair Nineteen Eighty-Four’s working title was “The Last Man in Europe,” but, partly at the suggestion of his publisher, Orwell switched the title at the last minute to the date the power of his imagination would make iconic.1 The shift from the characterological to the chronological was not without repercussion. Early reviewers saw the novel as essentially political, as a warning of what might come if good men do not act or as satire of post-war politics.2 Though Irving Howe praised Nineteen Eighty-Four as “remarkable,” he suggested it was not actually a novel at all, as “it does not satisfy those expectations we have come to have with regard to the novel—expectations that are mainly the heritage of nineteenthcentury Romanticism with its stress upon individual consciousness, psychological analysis and the study of intimate relations.”3 Howe sets the tone for an appreciation of Orwell’s achievement that is testimony to Orwell’s prescience, to the clear-sightedness that enabled him to “lay bare the logic of social regression.”4 The novel was not really about the last man in Europe, but about a date forty years in the future when the tendencies of the present would harden into their final form. The trend toward treating Orwell’s work as a moral and diagnostic achievement rather than as a literary one has endured. Christopher

The Character of Dystopia  33 Hitchens calls Nineteen Eighty-Four one of the “seminal ‘Good Bad Books’ of all time,” endorsing the verdict of literary critics like Q. D. Leavis, who wrote, “nature didn’t intend [Orwell] to be a novelist,” and Lionel Trilling, who celebrate Orwell’s virtue rather than his literary genius.5 For Hitchens, it is Orwell’s “power of facing unpleasant facts,” as Orwell himself put it, that is his defining attribute.6 “Orwell” the mythical figure is metonym for a generalized notion of the humane and decent, his main assets as an author, his sincerity, his stubbornness, his sympathy with the suffering of the common man, his freedom from cant.7 Howe justifies Nineteen Eighty-Four’s aesthetic limitations on the grounds of urgency. “The last thing Orwell cared about, the last thing he should have cared about when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four is literature.”8 And there is no doubt Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a response to political realities. Orwell emphasized the novel’s warning aspect, observing “totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”9 This sets the tone for the sort of reading that has made the novel central to the West’s critical self-image. The largely successful, if also largely unwarranted, translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four into a defense of Western liberal democracy against collectivist social experimentation is exemplified by the extent to which, for a time, the novel was absorbed into the secondary curriculum in both England and America. Like other seemingly didactic, plot-driven works, Nineteen Eighty-Four became a book for teenagers. Meanwhile, critics from the left judged the text by its usefulness in the cause of progressive politics. Many found the work’s sense of despair repellent. Gabriel Le Roy, writing in 1950, finds Orwell’s “disbelief in man” toxic. “The decline of culture has gone too far for us to applaud without qualification a book whose effect is to accustom the reader to the idea that collapse is inevitable,” he writes, implying the book is more likely to strengthen despair than stiffen resolve.10 Similarly, in 1955 Isaac Deutscher wrote, [Orwell’s] shriek, amplified by all the ‘mass media’ of our time, has frightened millions of people. But it has not helped them see more clearly the issues with which the world is grappling; it has not advanced their understanding. It has only increased and intensified the waves of panic and hate that run through the world and obfuscate innocent minds.11 Both Le Roy and Deutscher suggest the book is more likely to cause withdrawal than revolution. But, then again, it was not in secondary schools to create revolutionaries; it was there to validate the triumph of the capitalist West—for which a dose of quietism would hardly be unwelcome.12 Despite the novel’s pessimism, other critics from the left recognize Orwell’s hope. In Moylan’s astute reading, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s

34  Background “pessimistic virtuosity” obscures, but does not fully erase the utopian possibilities hinted at, not just in the Newspeak diary written from a future in which language is again intact, but, more importantly, in the text’s warning about the tendencies of the present.13 Despite, or because of, its pessimism the text shocks the reader into an awareness of what must be done to avert such a horrific future. If there is little utopian hope within the diegetic world of the narrative, readers nonetheless may find it outside the narrative, or in the simple fact of the novel’s existence. Moylan is one of the handful of critics who attribute the novel’s power to its qualities as novel rather than to the forcefulness of its polemic. He points out that dystopias, unlike utopias, are much more like novels than philosophical tracts. “It is precisely [the dystopia’s] capacity for narrative that creates the possibility for social critique and utopian anticipation in the dystopian text,” he writes; the dystopia engages with social and philosophical issues by leveraging the pleasure of narrative.14 Alok Rai similarly approaches Orwell as an author of fictions rather than as writer of manifestoes. He writes, For reasons which have, ultimately, to do with the exigencies of international politics, Big Brother and the tyranny of which he is author, instrument, and symbol have been taken to be the primary elements out of which the world of the novel is constructed. Yet the strongest impression which I, at any rate, derive from Nineteen Eighty-Four is that of the helplessness and sense of suffocation of the protagonist, Winston Smith.15 Rai stresses that it is through the character’s eyes that we encounter the world of the novel. Like Moylan and Rai, I am taken up with how politics is refracted by and through fictional form, even within a genre that resists such reading. As his writing of the 1930’s and 1940’s attests, Orwell cared a great deal about literature. His essay “In Defence of the Novel” (1936) laments the novel’s loss of prestige, holding that the form is in mortal danger of being corrupted by mass culture. The “fourpenny novelettes that you see piled up on any cheap stationers counter” are “the decadent offspring of the novel, bearing the same relation to Manon Lescaut and David Copperfield as the lap-dog bears to the wolf” (I:255). Orwell closes the essay with a note of alarm: “I do not believe [the novel] will disappear . . . It is much likelier, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tomb-stones, or the Punch-and-Judy show” (I: 255).16 Nineteen Eighty-Four follows out the “logical consequences” of this fear, imagining the death of the kind of language that makes novels possible. Degenerate mass forms proliferate, while the language itself is systematically disassembled in order to negate original thought. Our sense

The Character of Dystopia  35 of horror at the obliteration of the free, agentic subject is also a sense of horror at the obliteration of the text through which we have come to recognize and identify with such a being. In “Inside the Whale” (1940) Orwell stresses the importance of the novel genre as “a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual” (I:518). But, since 1933, “[t]here have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all” (1:518–19), and the novelist has become an “anachronism, the hangover of a bourgeois age as surely doomed as the hippopotamus” (I:525). In fact, Orwell shares the same expectations that Howe accuses Nineteen Eighty-Four of not satisfying. The violation of those expectations is a large part of what the novel is about. If the text is a warning, it is not only a warning about the rise of totalitarianism, it is also a warning about the peculiar gratifications generated by a “politics of despair,” to use Rai’s phrase, and the stakes of a literature that indulges them.17

Realist Dystopia If Orwell’s earlier work is a guide, the last man in Europe did not arrive suddenly. The acute sense of how power brutalizes and betrays, the selfloathing, the righteous indignation, and most of all the sensitivity to the ways privation destroys personality were with Orwell from his earliest writings, before Hitler’s tanks rolled across Europe and before the outlines of the modern totalitarian state fully emerged. Indeed, Orwell seemed to have been rehearsing Nineteen Eighty-Four his entire career as a novelist. In Coming Up for Air, published ten years before, Orwell explicitly lays out the plot, themes, and motifs that Nineteen Eighty-Four will amplify and extrapolate forward into the future. As the two quotations that head this chapter suggest, both Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four are animated by a sense that the past is slipping away. Like Winston Smith, Coming Up for Air’s protagonist George Bowling is an average middle-class man oppressed by his drab present, overcome with pastoral nostalgia.18 Like Winston, Bowling makes a journey to the golden country of childhood, turning to personal memories as antidote to the forces of militarism, industrialization, globalization, and greed remaking England and the world. Orwell’s anti-utopian nostalgia can also be understood as a democratic suspicion of elites, whether political, managerial, or cultural.19 Ultimately, what Orwell defends is a fantasy of middle-class England in which the decent and dutiful man rather than the dazzling man is the pinnacle of human development. Trilling makes the case that Orwell’s virtue grows out of the fact that he himself is not a genius; Orwell shows what it means to “front[] the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.”20 Orwell’s workmanlike prose reflects this

36  Background modesty. For Orwell, middle class virtues like duty, decency, and loyalty to friends are what is most worth preserving. Middle-class man is not mass man. Orwell’s version of middle-class man retains his particularity, his interior life, and, most importantly, his connection to customs that already hold within themselves the potential for social progress. This attachment to the everyday distinguishes Orwell from his more radical peers on both the right and the left who prefer systems that will improve on the human by fundamentally transforming it. Wells, in his future history novel The Shape of Things to Come, imagines that the world will arrive at utopia only by first passing through a period of dictatorship by technological and scientific elites who will impose rational world government, backed by force, on the reluctant masses. Orwell rejects such a vision, not because it is not sane in theory, but because it is impossible to overcome the forces of reaction.21 He attributes Wells’s error to the fact that Wells was born in an age when the “antithesis between science and reaction” was starker (2:143). Orwell writes, [Wells] could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolized in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still, is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. (2:144) At the same time he gives lip service to Wells’s ideal of world government. Orwell himself resurrects through the lens of nostalgia many of the attitudes he sees standing in the way of progress. This is characteristic of Orwell, and key to his reputation for “decency” and “common sense.” His professions and his sympathies often pull in two different directions, making him seem reasonable rather than ideological, when in fact he is desperate to evade the implications both of what he believes and what he feels. While he may believe in modest political progress, temperamentally he is committed to the past. Bowling embodies this attitude, remembering with fondness the shabbiness of his childhood world. “The drunks . . . puking in the yard behind the George,” he can say with conviction, addressing the reader; “it was a good world to live in. I belong to it, so do you” (36). Coming Up for Air paints Bowling’s boyhood world as a better world than the present or future.22 Orwell here poses a central tension in dystopian literature: while dystopian setting projects forward a critique of present society, dystopian characters, like utopian dreamers, often embody a regressive impulse to preserve and maintain an earlier, more primitive, psychic state. Frank and Fritzie Manuel in their study of utopia in Western thought write, “the act of creating a utopia, or imagining the principles for one, is psychologically a regressive phenomenon” associated with a flight from psychic

The Character of Dystopia  37 crisis.23 Nostalgia imagines development as a process of falling away from the true source. What is mourned is not only the lost world, but the subject’s place within it. The desire for psychic return is visible in the narcissistic wish-fulfillment so crucial to many dystopian texts, where the hero identifies with the entire world, or, as in the paranoid dystopia, with his or her persecutors. Characters do not merely participate in a world; they occupy the paranoiac center, become the point around which the world coheres. In this vein, Bowling’s fretfulness about his weight, his false teeth, his family responsibilities, and dull razor blades is given a vast, external correlative in the run-up to World War II. As he reflects on what the world will look like after the coming war, his personal anxiety ripples outward: The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep and the processions and posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so they really want to puke. It’s all going to happen. (176) Nineteen Eighty-Four “dystopianizes” this mis-en-scène, amplifying Bowling’s premonition into literal setting. The two quotes that begin the chapter reinforce the link between the individual subject and the end of history. For both Bowling and Winston, individual memories are metonyms for a broader political fate. Bowling fears that he is outliving his civilization while Winston, a subject without a history, desires not his own childhood, which brings only memory of privation, but a political past that would authorize the possibility of revolution. One of the hallmarks of dystopia is that it is located in a setting removed in time and space from our own. In Sargent’s taxonomy, dystopia is a “nonexistent society,” allowing for what Darko Suvin refers to in science fiction as “cognitive estrangement,” a form of distancing that, like Brecht’s V effect, jolts the reader into critical awareness of the present.24 As Parrinder expresses this, “[b]y imagining strange worlds we come to see our own conditions of life in a new and potentially revolutionary perspective.”25 Here, an estranged world surfaces in the realistic Air, and what Suvin calls the “empirically verifiable properties” of the author’s world penetrate the alternative world of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the form of broken, semiautobiographical memories of the past.26 But there is an important distinction between the two novels. The setting of Air is not yet fully a world for Bowling, only a place in danger of becoming one. Bowling still remembers a local, personal England. World War II will be the final blow, steamrolling

38  Background local prerogatives. Nineteen Eighty-Four, in contrast is set in a world that has fully coalesced, that, as far as the text indicates, is equally awful for all of its inhabitants. Coming Up for Air holds out a possibility of elsewhere that is missing from Nineteen Eighty-Four, even if that elsewhere is in the past. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s erasure of the past is emblematic of what is perhaps the clearest bright line between a merely lousy place and a dystopia: the death of the possibility of elsewhere. Wegner suggests that this difference is mainly one of endings, that in texts descended from Nineteen Eighty-Four and its ilk, “true closure of history and human potential for action does not occur until the final pages of what remains a fairly conventional linear narrative.”27 But when O’Brien says to Winston, “It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee” (181), Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests an alternative to thinking of it as a novel that simply ends badly: the dystopian conclusion rearranges the action in such a way as to undo what has been done, to negate what has been desired, as if it had been negated all along. Linear narrative and multiple loci of causality are revealed as special effect. Then, the remainder of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not further development, but a reflexive unwinding of plot, back to the moment when character first separated from setting. Throughout, I argue that the dystopian difference is more than a difference of what happens; it is a structural feature of character development, a formal as well as thematic feature present in certain types of texts. The comparison between Coming Up for Air and Nineteen EightyFour shows the relation between realist, psychological drama and dystopia that I will be exploring throughout this work. That is, one of the questions I seek to answer is, what is the formal relationship between a George Bowling and a Winston Smith? If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about political crisis in which character is used to embody the stakes of totalitarianism, Coming Up for Air is really a novel about a mid-life crisis set in a moment of world-crisis. Patai draws attention to two competing but complementary voices in Orwell’s rhetoric—one, the “voice of the people,” and the other, the “voice in the wilderness.”28 The first speaks as everyman for the truths that everyone knows; the second is paranoid and individualistic, the voice of the lone crusader after hidden truths. Patai argues that both are examples of Orwell’s tendency to polarize and exaggerate his narrative rhetoric, but they are also examples of how character becomes the fulcrum between the two worlds, dystopian and real, that occupy Orwell’s imagination. The individual is really a marker for the collective, whether speaking for or against his society. The character Orwell is concerned with is always threatening to explode beyond the boundaries of individual subjectivity and into metaphor. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Orwell’s novel of a struggling young poet who attempts to resist middle class banality, focuses on an earlier life crisis than Coming Up for Air, but the contours are the same. A sensitive man beleaguered by gods of conformity, capital, and sexual repression

The Character of Dystopia  39 is subjected to a cruelly indifferent world, eventually acquiescing to the warping of identity such a world demands. Gordon Comstock, the struggling poet, does not require the presence of world crisis to tell its story of a man crushed by modern life. In Coming Up for Air, Orwell finds in world events a conveniently hypertrophied metaphor for the feelings of obsolescence and abandonment that animate the earlier novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four reverses the metaphor of the earlier novels. Mid-life crisis reappears as world crisis, the pathetic fallacy spread over an entire novel. This is why it is useful to think of dystopia not just as a condition of setting, but also as a condition of character; to consider character as source rather than just effect of the dystopian setting. Conflating private and public fears, Coming Up for Air invokes the affective state that gives dystopia some of its most characteristic forms. In a remarkable passage, Bowling’s shame at his urge to visit the site of his childhood is exaggerated into a paranoid farce that echoes Nineteen Eighty-Four’s sense of a world conspiring against the hero: I actually had a feeling they were after me already. The whole lot of them! All the people who couldn’t understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth should sneak away for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all the mean-minded bastards who could understand only too well, and who’d raise heaven and earth to prevent it. They were all on my track. It was as if a huge army were streaming up the road behind me. I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye. Hilda was in front, of course, with the kids tagging after her, and Mrs. Wheeler driving her forward with a grim, vindictive expression, and Miss Minns rushing along in the rear, with her pince-nez slipping down and a look of distress on her face, like the hen that gets left behind when the others have got hold of the bacon rind. And Sir Herbert Crum and the higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls-Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road and from all other such roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing-machines and concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the soulsavers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but rule your destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope-they were all after me. I could almost hear them shouting: ‘There’s a chap who thinks he’s going to escape! There’s a chap who says he won’t be streamlined. He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him!’ (205–6).

40  Background Here, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the desire to return to the past is thwarted by a ubiquitous network of authorities and informants. The absurdity of Bowling’s exaggeration is telling—not only are Miss Minns and the Nosy Parkers standing in judgment, they lead a parade that includes Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. And, of course, it turns out that escape is impossible. Bowling finds the paradise of his childhood paved, the fishing holes, shops, and houses he remembers fouled by the same type of industrial middle-class development from which he wishes to escape. Coming Up for Air also provides earlier versions of figures that Nineteen Eighty-Four will make central to its horror. There is the sadistic shopkeeper, the prematurely aged prole woman, and the older, educated mentor who turns out to be an ineffectual agent of change. Bowling speaks sarcastically of the “god” of the Hesperides Estates—of which his home on Ellesmere Road is a part—as a “queer sort of god . . . bisexual. . . [t] he top half would be a managing director and the bottom half would be a wife in the family way” (13). In Nineteen Eighty-Four this image will be extrapolated into Big Brother, who with his loving breast and boot stamping on a human face forever is simultaneously enveloping mother and authoritative father, as well as brother. A house stripped of its walls, the result of an errant bomb dropped during a training run, provides a symbol of the profound threat to privacy that will be so central to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The explosion has ripped the wall off the house “as neatly as if someone had done it with a knife,” and the guts of the house are exposed to Bowling’s view, “like looking into a doll’s house” (264). Nineteen Eighty-Four applies this fear of exposure to character. Winston thinks, “they could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable” (171). But this part too will give up its secret. The final exposure of the private self is symbolized in Nineteen Eighty-Four by the bit of coral encased in glass that shatters when Winston is arrested. The coral, “a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud” rolls across the floor. “ ‘How small’ thought Winston, ‘how small it always was’ ” (229). In Coming Up for Air, the symbol of the private self’s inability to maintain its integrity is blown up to the size of a house; in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is the size of a paperweight. Orwell’s dystopian variation on the demise of the human subject turns the self into a tchotchke. The signifying motion of the novel is no longer that of a grand self projecting itself onto setting, but of a setting imposing itself on a diminished self.

Setting and Character What does this mean for the relationship between dystopian character and setting? The novel as modern form begins in the increased status

The Character of Dystopia  41 it grants to inner space. Agency, privacy, and the protection of private property—the birthrights of the bourgeoisie—are taken as irreducible. The subject of the novel is the impact of an external world on characters as they resist, transform, and make uneasy peace with their environments. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, his landmark study of realism in the novel, traces this interiorizing sensibility to Montaigne, whose treatment of himself as the mirror in which the world becomes visible is a crucial moment in the development of modern character. Auerbach calls Montaigne’s Essays the “first work of lay introspection.”29 Auerbach writes of Montaigne, “[i]n him, for the first time, man’s life—the random, personal life as a whole—becomes problematic in the modern sense.”30 We are introduced to an individual subject with freedom to think either with or against the world, whose impressions, thoughts, and feelings signal a wholeness, set in contrast to a notion of man as specialized, mechanical tradesman whose importance is his ability to fulfill a social or industrial function. Interior self takes center stage in the development of the English novel as genre. The rise of the common man as hero, the internalization of the quest romance, the complicating of private, interior life as subject, stage a will to separation between character and setting. No longer bound to play a fixed role in a theological, economic, or political design, the human is liberated to turn inward—to become an observer freed from responsibility for history, freed from allegory, freed from shackles of place, position, and propriety that limit his purview to what is immediately in front of him. The novel form both celebrates and seeks to solve this newfound freedom by situating the individual character amid the contingencies of the real. We, in turn, encounter the real through the lens of the presumptive boundary between interior and exterior, a boundary that divides two distinct, if not altogether discrete, spheres. Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, calls the English novel a record of “the individual apprehension of reality,” drawing attention to the formal realism of the novel, that is, its portrayal of reality as an immediate imitation that mimics both the cause and effect relations of the material world and the mental activities of apprehending it.31 For Watt, the novel’s language is referential and the individual himself—his mode of self-perception, his material concern—is at the center of its formal reality. But the integral individual is complicated by the novel’s mode of representation. Bakhtin argues that the novel simultaneously displaces and fragments the singular perspective of the individual through what he terms the novel’s heteroglossia. The fictional world is bricolage, a mosaic of perspectives, speakers, and attitudes. The refraction and multiplication of voices generated by this cacophony generates a social reality separate from the individuals who perceive it, a reality that materializes by virtue of competing vectors of voice. This social reality of equivalent perspectives is one of the aspects of the traditional novel dystopia excises—the last man has no

42  Background social reality in which he can exist, exaggerating setting as objectified, static formation. David Trotter observes that the nineteenth-century realists work toward the moment when the “the naked self confronts the naked world.”32 Dystopias amplify, rather than alleviate, the tension between character and setting, concretizing the terms of this struggle. The search for a negotiated settlement between the two imagined realms becomes both a diegetic and a formal problem: at the level of plot, a character must struggle and triumph or fail in establishing a stable space within his or her environment; at the level of form, the reader must struggle to determine where character ends and setting begins. Dystopia stages this tension as plot. The individual possesses an interiority that is anomalous and intolerable within the dystopian world, while dystopian setting prevents individuals from moving freely within the world. In the dystopian relation between character and setting exemplified by Orwell, setting is presented as impervious to the actions of character. Nor is there any garden to cultivate outside the setting’s walls. This diminishment in the sphere of agency is countered by expansion in setting’s domain, even to the point where outer penetrates inner world completely. The action of the novel forces the human subject into a position of peripherality; formal structure mirrors this subordination in its rescission of the value we expect will attach to the human subject. Expansion of the domain of setting at the expense of character mimics utopian form. Works like More’s Utopia (1516) are inhabited not so much by agentic characters as by illustrations of rules. They consist largely of one character telling another about a world, or one character telling another what still another told him about a world. Meaningful interaction with setting is limited. There is only the world, and a singular, if refracted, perspective through which we encounter it. Though largely inert, setting absorbs the bulk of the narrative energy, with little attention paid to those who inhabit it. Some utopias include a framing story which allows for the possibility of adventure; perhaps there is an attempt at escape or a love affair, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), or Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), but characters are unable to influence the shape and practices of the world, and therefore of their own holding within it. The utopian shape is pervasive, closed, and final. This is why classic utopias seem so inadequate as novels (and why modernism’s blurring of the boundaries between subjectivity and setting, as I  discuss in Chapter 4, poses its own form of threat to the traditional character dystopia defends). Dystopia “novelizes” utopian form by reinjecting character. Dystopias are like utopias in the power they grant to setting, but remain too attached to a last trace of the human to dispense with it altogether. The human lingers on in the form of the last man subjected to abuse and

The Character of Dystopia  43 humiliation at the hands of setting, a last man in a process of being overpowered by and ultimately absorbed into his environment. It is precisely the privacy and agency privileged by the novel form that the dystopian emplotment of the individual calls into question.

Setting as Character Dystopian setting is character—not only in the sense that the primary concern of dystopia is with the world its subjects inhabit, but in the sense that it allegorizes states of mind. It is as if the dystopian setting is a diseased psychology exploded and projected outward with such force so as to leave the category of character within the novel utterly abandoned, while setting absorbs motives previously attributed to character. Consider Orwell’s 1947 memoir of his school days, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” written after Orwell had already begun writing Nineteen EightyFour. “Joys” comes close to the explicitly sadistic elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Again, virtually all of the elements that will later appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four are present in realistic, though equally nauseating, form. Sadistic guards, homosexual panic/eroticism, surveillance, filth, guilt and shame, language that veils its true intent—the essay h ­ ighlights the dystopian leap of imagination that translates Orwell’s fixations into an entirely different beast in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In “Joys” Orwell speaks to us from the future, having survived the vicious stupidity he details. He writes: All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I  was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude—and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep. (4: 343–44) By locating terror in a past that has been superseded rather than the future that has yet to occur Orwell evades St. Cyprian’s dystopian implications.33 There is no reason to “keep” these laws; they are sadistic distortions, which Orwell’s narrative persona, from the perspective of the future, recognizes as such. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, St. Cyprian’s reappears in a form that cannot be transcended, its laws expanded to the shape of an entire world. Orwell’s recreation of St. Cyprian’s as Airstrip One in Nineteen EightyFour serves two purposes. On the one hand, it allows him to indulge a desire to regress, but on the other, it punishes him for this desire. Despite his cataloguing of the disgusting conditions and the cruelty of both the other children and the school administration, he allows a note of nostalgia

44  Background for the crummy world of the past to slip in: “no one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy” (4:344). It is the same urge for a past, any past, no matter how squalid, that infects Winston, that leads him to the bars of the prole quarters in search of a witness, and that draws him back to visions of his starving mother and sister. The nostalgia is not for his actual youth, but for the feeling of timelessness that accompanied it: And the child thinks of growing old as almost an obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, as far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. (4:367) As in Coming Up for Air, nostalgia turns to self-reproach. “I  think I  should feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!” (369). Nineteen Eighty-Four gives Winston back his childhood in a sense. Regression is desired but forbidden. In an almost too literal Freudian twist, Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with Winston as an infant at Big Brother’s breast while punishing him for having wanted it.34 Other dystopian novels share this projective poetics. Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) tells of a world where order and authority are collapsing. The survivor, a middle-aged woman, becomes responsible for a young orphan, Emily, whom she shepherds into young adulthood. As the outer world becomes more dangerous and chaotic, the narrator finds herself able to retreat into a mystical dimension behind a wall of her house where she accesses “personal” memories of Emily’s childhood and “impersonal” memories of a house that has fallen into disrepair, which she fixes up in her visions. At the end of the novel, the world literally folds up and the walls dissolve, as the narrator leads Emily, Emily’s boyfriend Gerald, and the orphaned children they have adopted through the wall. The narrator watches from the margins for most of the novel. Only at the end as the walls dissolve does she “see the one person I had been looking for all this time” (213)—herself—and the novel reveals that it was her searching psyche that was at the center of the novel all along. Indeed, she refers to Memoirs as “an attempt at autobiography.” The characters materialize competing aspects of her psyche, and the apocalyptic world they inhabit is a barely veiled projection of female experience through multiple life phases. The world of Memoirs is a concrete representation of what it feels like to negotiate the uncertainty and freedom of a hostile world in which roles are undefined and must be created out of the ruins of old assumptions. Like Orwell in Coming Up for Air, Lessing’s The

The Character of Dystopia  45 Summer Before the Dark (1973), written the year before, gives a realistic precursor for the dystopian landscape of Memoirs. Her heroine, Kate Brown, perhaps an echo of Woolf’s Mrs. Brown, is suddenly alone after her husband and her college-age children depart for the summer. She finds herself invisible, no longer noticed by men on the street, without a defined role. Meanwhile, fascist youth culture is on the rise, and there are signs that the world is headed toward catastrophe. Lessing calls her method “inner space fiction:” in Memoirs, the inner world is given spatial dimension, character turned into setting, with setting melting back into character by novel’s end. Wells takes up the tension between character and setting from the other side; instead of using setting to amplify character, he uses characters to amplify setting. In Tono-Bungay, Wells writes a naturalist “condition of England” novel that stages the limitations of a naturalistic world unleavened by the transformative power of human intellect. This overarching subject matter appears as both subject and method. Wells’s depiction of Edwardian London emphasizes the chaotic effects of progress without a plan. The collapse of authority and the disorder of autonomy is given aggregate, spatial form in Wells’s depiction of an urban London in the process of becoming. George describes the city as “something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister” (88). Geoffrey Galt Harpham calls the novel “the extended anatomy of a tumor.”35 The novel’s guiding question is whether or not a shape can be imposed, on lives in the singular or the aggregate. Like the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, individual development and the development of the modern nation-state are presented as mirrors of one another, the dynamism of setting blending into the dynamism of character.36 Lodge writes of Tono-Bungay (which bears a similar relation to Wells’s dystopian writing as Coming Up for Air does to Nineteen Eighty-Four), “the main vehicle of social analysis of the condition of England is not the story or the characters, but the descriptive commentary which, in most novels, we regard as the frame.”37 Developmental experience acts as metaphor for larger forces of progress. The city is a “tumorous growth process” that “bursts all the outlines of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble, comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham” (88). The paragraph ends with a question—“will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis?” (88). Natural forces do not necessarily conduce toward order—like the radioactive quap that causes the merchant ship to fall apart later in the novel, they are more likely entropic, producing disorder. Only by means of ethical reason can man assert control over this process. The form of the work that George Ponderevo (ponder evolution?), standing in for Wells, is writing parallels the confusion of the city.

46  Background George suggests that the traditional novel cannot contain the energies of the modern world. The rules of the novel form are too constraining. He is an engineer, but the desire to record everything makes him “a lax, undisciplined story-teller.” He continues: “I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I  am to get the thing out I  have in mind. And it isn’t a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities” (6). Through George, Wells aligns himself with those who have lost faith in the forms of the past as effective containers for the present. Reproducing Wells’s argument with Henry James about the novel—James argued for artful selection of episodes to provide a “shaping form” for reality, whereas Wells espoused a more inclusive, sloppier naturalistic attempt to render reality—George defends the novel as an attempt not to grasp heightened moments of character, but the essence of an age.38 That the age remains unfinished, like George himself, is a testament to the failure of the mechanistic world described by the naturalist novel. Wells recognizes the limits of naturalism—it is a transitional style, awaiting a new organizing principle to manage the realities that confound George. George looks back fondly on the vanishing world of the great country house as providing just such an order:39 Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone. (13) But while George is nostalgic for the order the country house imposed, but he also understands this nostalgia as something that needs to be overcome if the future is to emerge. His nostalgia is a dead end, the symptom of a pre-modern England that Wells knows cannot survive, and that George would not necessarily want to survive since it is a world in which he has little opportunity. Caught between worlds, George self-identifies as the last man of the old tradition even as understands he is not its heir: [A]ll these museums and libraries that are dotted over London between Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the museum and library movement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure of the gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the first libraries, the first houses of culture; by my rat-like raids into the Bladesover saloon I became, as it were, the last dwindled representative of such a man of letters as Swift. But now these things have escaped out of

The Character of Dystopia  47 the Great House altogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own. (87) The house breaks open and spills its contents—the idea of England as well as George himself—into the city. George first goes to college, then becomes pharmacist’s assistant to his uncle, and later his partner in the manufacture of the patent medicine Tono-Bungay, by which they become rich. The transformation of George into a new man ends with him on a battleship sailing down the Thames, stateless, cynical, morally adrift. The absence of utopian reason to mitigate the formlessness of the mechanistic universe points to an uncertain, potentially dystopic future. Wells had already explored the outcome of George’s failure to grasp a new, rational organizing principle in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). The novel tells the story of Graham, a nervous socialist of the late nineteenth century. George is a naturalist, but Graham begins as a romantic idealist, as his London solicitor describes him, “a man of considerable gifts, but spasmodic, emotional . . . I remember the pamphlet he wrote— a curious production. Wild, whirling stuff” (14). After a manic episode spent feverishly writing the pamphlet, Graham finds himself unable to sleep. He sits by the cliffs at Boscastle contemplating suicide, when a young artist intervenes and brings Graham back to his lodgings. There, Graham slips into a coma, where he remains for the next 203 years. In time, trustees are appointed to care for Graham by his cousin, a London solicitor. The trustees receive a major behest from the artist, who has since become a successful purveyor of commercial posters. It is this trust that determines the future action of the story. The money accumulates, interest compounds, and through the trustees’ shrewd management, the sleeping Graham comes to own more than half of the world. The Sleeper, as Graham is known, has inspired a quasi-religious cult among the downtrodden members of the future world—that is, most—and is worshipped as a combination of King Arthur and Jesus who will someday awaken and lead the people to a better future. The Trustees in turn have evolved into a Council, controlling the world in the name of the Sleeper. They are opposed by Boss Ostrog, a populist demagogue who capitalizes on the hopes surrounding the Sleeper to agitate for revolution. Graham wakes in the year 2100, throwing the world into an uproar. The revolutionists are inspired, giving impetus to the struggle between Ostrog’s forces and those of the Council. This battle for control of the world occupies the remainder of the novel, with the Sleeper ultimately rejecting both the Council and Ostrog to lead the people in a “true” revolution. At the novel’s close, Graham sacrifices himself defending London from the African police brought in by Ostrog to quash the uprising. The London of Tono-Bungay is a precursor to the dystopian twentysecond–century city of When the Sleeper Wakes where the problem of

48  Background chaos has been finally solved. All of London will be covered by buildings that have been connected overhead, providing a roof made from “the vast city structure which had replaced the miscellaneous houses, streets, and open spaces of Victorian London” (50). The molding of the city into a mechanical “hive” signifies technological advance but political and moral decay as the city of the future becomes the setting for a police state. Its leader, Boss Ostrog explains to Graham: “The streets and public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of your time have disappeared” (83). Like London, George Ponderevo begins and ends incomplete in Tono-Bungay, awaiting an organizing principle that will fill in the “gaps” of Wells’s impressionistic “sprawl and flounder” of a narrative. In When the Sleeper Wakes, we see the thing whole: the lost logic of the country house, never challenged by a new social architecture, is realized in the dystopian architecture of a city that chokes off human character. For Wells, character’s failure to impose itself on setting is the structural principle of dystopia. Orwell gives us the perfect emblem of this failure, showing its stakes for novelistic discourse. When Winston is captured in Charrington’s apartment, the mirror repeats back Winston’s words. “We are the dead,” he said. “We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully. “You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them. The voice continues to repeat their statements, adding new words: “Now they can see us,” said Julia. “Now we can see you,” said the voice. “Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another” (227–28). The novel has reached a dialogical impasse. Mirroring Winston’s and Julia’s words perfectly, external setting takes over the function of speech. Until this point, Winston and Julia have preserved a small area of separation. The remainder of the novel consists of O’Brien’s successful attempt to fill Winston’s mind with the thoughts and language of the state. I discuss this scene further in Chapter 7, but here use it in order to show Nineteen Eighty-Four’s peculiar poetics of character, where the categories of character and setting that novels traditionally maintain collapse into one another. What is the appeal of such a diminished character, and what are the stakes—affective and existential—toward which such a character gestures? Orwell, Zamyatin, Huxley, and their successors in the modern dystopian tradition depict their heroes as carriers of vestigial yearnings, as holdouts from a past in which humans were capable of individual agency, distinct

The Character of Dystopia  49 from state and productive apparatuses that sustain them, and in which a rich interiority flourished. Invariably, the kind of dystopia I address portrays a version of the last man who is organic, emotional, anti-bureaucratic, and anti-utilitarian. But if the last man figure is a nightmare of the end of the human presence, it is also a fantasy of transformation. The human is diminished as character but emerges in a vastly more coherent, more powerful, and more complete form projected in giant size onto setting. If a text like Musil’s The Man Without Qualities realizes modernity as hostile to traditional understandings of character through a set of formal practices (e.g., the failure of “plot”), dystopia realizes the failure of character not as technique but as plot and setting.

Notes 1. 4: 448. See letter to F. J. Warburg, Oct. 22, 1948. (All letters and journalism hereafter are cited as volume number of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, Vols. 1–4 [ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus], Boston: Nonpareil, 2000) followed by page. 2. See also Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia 288–89. 3. 1984: Text Sources Criticism [TSC], 321. 4. Howe (TSC), 325. John Atkins, in an early response to Nineteen EightyFour, claimed that the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is “not imagination at all but a painstaking pursuit of existing tendencies to what appear logical conclusions (TSC 252). Lionel Trilling called it “a fantasy of the political future” (295); V. S. Pritchett called the novel a “satirical pamphlet” (291); Julian Symons thanked Orwell for a novel that “deals with the problems of the world rather than the ingrowing pains of individuals” (294). See David Kubal and Keith Alldritt for early attempts to refashion Orwell into a “literary novelist.” 5. Hitchens 177, 174. Orwell’s essay “Good Bad Books” defines G. K. Chesterton’s phrase as “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished” (4:19). For Orwell as paragon of virtue, see Trilling’s essay “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth: Portrait of the Intellectual as a Man of Virtue” in Commentary Mar. 1, 1952. See Patai for a counterargument. 6. Ibid 13. 7. See Rai 10. 8. TSC 322. 9. Letter to Francis A. Henson, June 1949, in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, IV, 502. 10. Le Roy 138. 11. “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty” in TSC, 342. 12. Brown in Norris, 59. In “Examining Orwell: Political and Literary Values in Education,” Brown writes tellingly of how Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm became standard texts in England’s A and O level examinations, arguing that the two novels were used to support a notion of the timeless individual who stands as a common-sense refutation of theory. 13. Moylan, Scraps: 163. 14. Ibid 147. Peter Edgerly Firchow makes a similar point, arguing that utopian writing in the twentieth century reflects the failure of real-life utopias; dystopia fictionalizes utopia, reintroducing staples of the novel such as satire and

50  Background psychology in order to more persuasively demonstrate the shortcomings of utopia achieved. 15. Rai 136. 16. Ibid. Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker (1980) brilliantly imagines just such a fate, with the Punch and Judy shows of “the tell” the society’s main means of communicating their collective story. 17. “George Orwell and the Politics of Despair” is the title of Alok Rai’s study of Orwell as literary artist. See Moylan for more on Orwell’s pessimism. Moylan argues that Orwell’s target was the totalitarian tendencies of Communism and Fascism, rather than utopia in general. The exaggeration of Orwell’s antiutopian tendencies is a direct result of his success in making the future seem so present—it is too easy to see Oceania as the culmination of all utopian tendencies, rather than of the specific perversions of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (Scraps 161–63). As I argue, however, I read Orwell as maintaining contradictory ideas about the idea of a rational utopia. Dystopia allows him to indulge a nostalgia that runs counter to his politics, and at the same time punish himself for his political heresy. 18. For Lower Binfield as an example of “pastoral nostalgia,” see John Wain, “Here Lies Lower Binfield.” See also Pia Marie Ahlback, who argues that Lower Binfield embodies Orwell’s “quest for a different kind of modernity, which would also include a more considerate treatment of nature through a full acknowledgment of the inevitably dystopic back-side of cultural expansion” (100). Patricia Rae argues that rather than being an expression of nostalgia, the novel “assesses it” (149), critically framing Bowling’s nostalgia in such a way so as to highlight the dangers of unreflective nostalgia and point the way toward future social change. 19. See, e.g., Orwell’s essay “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” 4:161. 20. “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth: Portrait of the Intellectual as a Man of Virtue” in Commentary, Mar. 1, 1952 (reprinted in TSC 347). 21. In the essay “Wells, Hitler and the World State” Orwell suggests that Wells’s naïve faith in world government and reason makes him constitutionally incapable of understanding the rise of Hitler (4:139–45). 22. Rae argues that Bowling is “both self-conscious and pragmatic” and retains a “progressive political message” in his ultimate acknowledgment that he cannot return to the past (“No More Fishing” 150). I read his trip to the Golden Country of childhood more pessimistically, as defeat, and Nineteen EightyFour as recuperation of Bowling’s being forced back into the banality of the present. 23. Manuel 27. 24. Suvin, “Poetics” 375. Suvin connects cognitive estrangement specifically to science fiction, distinguishing it from the kind of estrangement generated by myth on the basis that it views norms as “unique, changeable, and therefore subject to cognitive glance” (375). 25. Parrinder, Learning 4. 26. Ibid 377. Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe, a fictional biography of Orwell’s writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is structured around this identification between Orwell and Winston. Glover’s novel reconstructs scenes from Orwell’s day-to-day life that bleed into his depiction of Airstrip One. 27. Between. . ., 69. 28. Patai 10–11. 29. Auerbach 308. 30. Ibid 311.

The Character of Dystopia  51 1. Watt 14–15. 3 32. Modernism 93. 33. In Orwell’s original manuscript the school was called St. Cyprian’s but in the first published editions of the essay the school was called Crossgates (4:330). 34. Memoirs 213. 35. Harpham 50. 36. See Esty and Moretti, discussed in Chapter 6. Significantly, the text includes an artist figure, Ewart, who might easily have served as Kunstleroman protagonist in another novel in another time. Here, he is relegated to the periphery, becoming a commercial hired hand rather than hero with a singular artistic vision. 37. Language of Fiction 218. 38. Edel and Ray 30. 39. Vanishing England, by P.H. Ditchfield, with illustrations by Fred Roe (London: Methuen  & Co., 1910), published the same years as Wells’s novel, sounds the alarm. The book closes, all has not yet disappeared which appeals to the heart and intellect of the educated Englishman. And oftentimes the poor and unlearned appreciate the relics that remain with quite as much keenness as their richer neighbours. A world without beauty is a world without hope. To check vandalism, to stay the hand of the iconoclast and destroyer, to prevent the invasion and conquest of the beauties bequeathed to us by our forefathers by the reckless and ever-engrossing commercial and utilitarian spirit of the age, are some of the objects of our book, which may be useful in helping to preserve some of the links that connect our own times with the England of the past, and in increasing the appreciation of the treasures that remain by the Englishmen of to-day. (n.p.)

3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Dystopia

How has the word “dystopia” been used to describe particular forms? One of the difficulties of this type of study is the sheer amount of material that fits within its purview, and the vast number of discourses this material touches upon. This sketch selectively surveys dystopia’s forms, themes and critical heritage with an eye toward understanding how dystopia’s various strains shape the figures of D-503, Alex the Large, Kathy H., Winston Smith, Shelley “The Machine” Levene, Lauren Oya Olamina, François, and the various other characters that inhabit this study.

The Good Place What is the relationship between utopia and dystopia? Since More, utopia, or “no place,” is used to describe texts that resemble More’s, and is often used indistinguishably from eutopia, or “good place.” This means utopia is commonly at least three things at once—a genre, a desirable state of reality, and a non-existent place to be imagined. Sargent calls this the “three faces” of utopianism: utopian literature, intentional communities, and social theory.1 The first is expressed in imaginative productions, the second in communal life, the third in social theory. Dystopia is thus both a part of the literature of utopia and outside of it; another version of “no place,” but also a genre or sub-genre that opposes the “good place” with an undesirable state of reality and a theorizing of the conditions of possibility for the emergence and continuation of a “bad place.” Generally, whether a work is (e)utopic or dystopic is established through a reading of theme, author’s intent, or, more simply, by way of our own response to the prospect described. But, as Sargent notes, intent is often problematic to determine.2 Northrop Frye gives a simple formula: we know something is a dystopia when we would not want to live in it.3 However, as I hope to underscore in this chapter, from a formal perspective important generic distinctions separate the narratives of dystopia from those of utopia, so that dystopia is not just a matter of imputed motive or subjective response that says “I would not want to live there,” but rather of observable structural characteristics.

When We Talk About Dystopia  53 As a consequence, my concern with the latter two categories is restricted to their direct impact on the first category. While there are good reasons for not separating out a literary work’s relationship to its “real” antecedent— like the relation between Hawthorne’s Blithedale and Brook Farm, or between Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and religious models of telos—my emphasis on the literary construction of character d ­ iminishes the importance of the latter two forms of utopianism. Even though both intentional communities and social theory construct characters— imagined entities to inhabit desired worlds—such characters are constrained by the necessity of functioning within an articulated system of values and practices. Literature bears no such necessary constraints. Frye calls the utopia a function of the “constructive literary imagination” rather than of social thought. Its uses are not in its realization, but in it its “effort at social imagination.”4 As Bellamy observed of his own utopian Looking Backwards, “there was no thought of contriving a house which practical men might live in.”5 The values and practices of a u/dystopian narrative fiction are bound to follow no a priori system and emerge only in concert with their narrative articulation. In this way, analysis of narrative structure constitutes a sphere that draws on real-life analogues and social theory but is ultimately not fully assimilable within either. Though not the first to use the word, John Stuart Mill, in a speech to Parliament in 1868, used “dys-topia” to contrast current government policy with the desire to govern with good intentions.6 Referring to the Government’s Irish land policy, Mill argued, “It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.”7 The transition of the word dystopia from descriptor of a mode of political behavior to a genre is the result of a gradual expansion of its meaning to encompass the formal organization of the political attitude into both practices and narratives, which are then treated as reflections of and commentary on the u/dystopian impulse. Thus, the genres of utopia and dystopia become what Ruth Levitas calls vehicles for the “education of desire.”8 A wealth of criticism adopts this essentially political meaning, linking instances of u/dystopian narrative to social praxis. On the generic side, Northrop Frye gives priority to a line of development proceeding from literary representations. He considers both eutopia and satirical utopia as examples of a larger category of myths concerned with the telos of society.9 The possible ending for the human journey may be good or bad, ending in a utopian or anti-utopian city; or, it may come full circle and end in either pastoral or post-apocalyptic return (for the latter, Frye gives the example of A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which civilization must start again from primitive origins).10 These two orientations constitute the poles, one aesthetic, one practical. In between are critics like Moylan and Wegner, who conceive of dystopia both as a form

54  Background of constructive engagement with utopian dreaming and as an aesthetic event continuous with and responding to imaginary utopias, whether in literature or social theory. Mannheim defines the utopian state of mind as a state oriented toward the future that is “incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs” and, when put into practice, “shatter[s], whether partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.”11 Sargent continues this approach, basing his comprehensive formal taxonomy on an understanding of utopianism as a universal form of “social dreaming” that responds to dissatisfaction by offering visions of escape or transformation. But it is important to note that the utopian impulse is often resistant to the future. Sargent observes that backward facing utopianism can be “quite conservative” in its nostalgia; “[t]he idealization of the Noble Savage, the Golden Age, the Earthly Paradise, and the certainties of tribal life are all ways of rejecting the change which is characteristic of contemporary life.”12 Frye similarly notes the existence of “Luddite pastoralism,” which tries “to break the hold of a way of life which has replaced the perspective of the human body with the perspective of its mechanical extensions, the extensions of transportation and social planning and advertising which are now turning on the body and strangling it as the serpents did Laocoön.”13 In Chapter 4, I look closely at the phenomenon of nostalgic humanism as an animating force in dystopia, but here consider it as indicative of the dystopian ambivalence about the future. Nostalgic humanism is a sentiment that is simultaneously reactionary and liberal in its commitment to a human that was, but also to a human who desires a future realization of rights. The combination of psychologically regressive with politically progressive impulses conditions the modern dystopia. The dystopian perspective from the future simultaneously makes room for indulgence of nostalgia for the way things were and for the wish that there might be an alternative to the terrible future described (and therefore, as Jameson points out, to the past that spawned it). As I show later, the contradictions of this position lead to the paralysis so familiar from dystopian novels—too disillusioned to hope, too invested not to, dystopian plot and character become mired in a static holding position that can travel in neither direction. Sargent defines the formal utopia as a work intended “to describe an imaginary society in some detail.”14 Building on the categorizing work of critics like Levitas and Moylan, Sargent’s taxonomy in “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” includes utopia, eutopia or positive utopia, dystopia or negative utopia, utopian satire, anti-utopia, and critical utopia.15 The negative forms are distinguished by their relation to the reader’s present. Dystopia is a society that the reader is intended to view as “considerably worse than his or her own;” utopian satire is a critique of the reader’s contemporary society; anti-utopia is a criticism

When We Talk About Dystopia  55 of utopianism in general, or a particular version; and the critical utopia is a concept developed by Moylan to describe an emerging genre in the 1960’s and 1970’s that re-oriented traditional utopian blueprints toward more dynamic novels that critiqued the ideological and narrative rigidity of the existing utopian tradition. In his later essay, “In Defense of Utopia,” Sargent adds a version of Moylan and Baccolini’s category of critical dystopia, calling it, “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia.”16 As opposed to the critical utopia, which is a mixed society better than the reader’s own, the critical dystopia is a worse society, even as it suggest the possibility of the better. Distinguishing between the anti-utopia and the dystopia, or the anti-utopian dystopia and the utopian dystopia, Moylan argues that the latter is more than a nostalgic elegy for what has already passed: In the anti-utopian dystopia, the best that can happen is a recognition of the integrity of the individual even when the hegemonic power coercively and ideologically closes in, whereas in the utopian dystopia, a collective resistance is at least acknowledged, and sometimes a full-fledged opposition and even victory is achieved against the apparently impervious, tightly structured system.”17 As noted in Chapter  1, the distinction is frequently hard to maintain, given that dystopian texts of both sorts often appear as diaries or found objects that implicate a future reader. Andrew Milner shrewdly categorizes happy endings on the basis of their internality or externality, that is, according to whether they are consistent with or external to the narratives form and content.18 For example, the hope in Nineteen Eighty-Four is located in the appendix on Newspeak, meaning that hope is outside the narrative form of the novel, but consistent with the content of Orwell’s imaginary future, while Huxley’s Brave New World’s satiric positioning gives hope outside the content, but within the form of the text. The utopia works by sparking hope that things might indeed one day resemble the fantasy, the dystopia by sparking fear.19 The tendency to demarcate utopia from dystopia on the basis of hope, however, obscures the significance of more prominent distinctions that surface at the level of narrative structure, particularly with respect to character development. For example, the open or critical dystopia grants a freedom of movement to both reader and characters to act and dream even when confronted with a possible world that places excessively rigid limits on action. To call a novel “dystopian” signals not necessarily that the world it depicts is beyond repair, but that it is of an awfulness that is

56  Background pervasive rather than localized, and that its awfulness has reached a stage of ripeness that makes such awfulness impossible to dislodge by acts of individual heroism. Moylan writes, “no single policy or practice can be isolated as the root problem, no single aberration can be privileged as the one to be fixed so that life in the enclosed status quo can easily resume.”20 Plots and developmental arcs are in large part determined by the type of u/dystopian text with which we are dealing. We and Nineteen EightyFour are anti-utopian; Never Let Me go is a utopian satire, though, as Parrinder notes, when the protagonist dies, it is technically a tragedy.21 Others, like A Clockwork Orange, and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission are located within a crisis that is about to produce a dystopia; still others, like Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, have both post-apocalyptic aspects and utopian aspects. All give body to the last man (or woman) figure. In post-apocalypse, the last (wo)man’s task is to rebuild, or to lead the way toward an evolution into something new; in the crisis narratives, it is to fight to survive in a world that has withdrawn its support for the kind of human the protagonist aspires to be; in the utopian satires, it is to show how particular sorts of progress will change us irrevocably; in anti-utopia, it is the hero’s job to die out, and by doing so, to inspire the reader to recognition of the threat of the new; in the critical dystopia it is to evoke horror at what we might become and inspire a renewal of dreams for the future. When formal structures are emphasized instead of the potential for social action, it becomes clear that while dystopia shares a teleological orientation with utopia, it departs from utopia in its mode of presentation. As noted in Chapter 1, Jameson usefully disentangles dystopia from utopia on the grounds that the former is a novel while the latter is an attempt to imagine conditions of possibility for social transformation. Where the utopia critiques the present or its hope for the future in terms of a narrated real, often at several removes from direct experience such as in the case of More’s Utopia, dystopia is built around direct, subjective experience of character. As many critics have noted, a world might look utopian until it becomes populated with thinking, feeling, desiring humans. As Kumar puts it, anti-utopia “makes us live utopia.”22 Thus, on a purely formal level, fictional dystopias can be considered anti-utopian in their rejection of utopian narrative modalities, whether or not they are philosophically anti-utopian in their rejection of the concept of utopia. Throughout this book, I use this arsenal of terms to indicate both a political attitude and narrative form. I use utopia (rather than eutopia) to refer to a set of values generally considered to be positive, but also to a generic category of narrative that stems from More’s attempt to imagine a good place within the “no place.” Following Sargent, I use dystopia to signal the larger category of a “bad place” one would not want to live in, but, again, also to indicate a form of narrative. In the following section, I use anti-utopia to invoke texts that critique utopianism, but also,

When We Talk About Dystopia  57 following Morson, to indicate texts that possess a narrative structure that distinguishes them from literary utopias and, as forms of anti-novel, from critical dystopias at the level of plot and character. I use others of Sargent’s categorical terms where the discussion is particularly about generic features that require a distinction because of how they impact narrative.

Anti-utopianism and Anti-utopias Many last man fictions are shaped by anti-utopianism as social-theoretical stance. Anti-utopianism codifies skittishness about Enlightenment reason and the development of globalized, industrial capacity for realizing utopian aspirations into a critique of utopianism in general. The target of the dystopian critique becomes utopian aspiration itself, rather than specific manifestations of it: in this view, it is the utopians, whether left or right, who are source of the world’s ills. Seeds of the anti-utopian response can be found in Burke’s anti-revolutionary politics, and in nineteenthcentury resistance to the machine, which I take up in Chapter 4. But it is in the twentieth century, with its realization of totalitarian systems and the means of enforcing them, that anti-utopianism fully emerges. Sargent links the main strand of twentieth-century anti-utopianism to anticommunism and anti-fascism, responding to both the development of mass man and to disillusionment with communism in the Soviet Union.23 Kateb, defending utopia, divides the anti-utopian argument into three main parts: that getting there would be “too costly or too unreliable;” that maintaining it is likely to lead to oppression; and that its ideals contravene other, more worthy ideals.24 Kateb is responding to utopian critics like Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and its Enemies critiques “utopian engineering,” which he opposes to “piecemeal engineering,” because “the attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship.”25 Anti-utopian sentiment comes most pointedly from the disillusioned left. George Woodcock observed the crisis of faith in progress among intellectuals of the left in the twentieth century. Referring to George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and Arthur Koestler as “five who fear the future,” Woodcock differentiates them from conservative reactionary critics on the ground that these writers still defend “the old radical ideals of equality and freedom.”26 Contrasting ex-utopians, who have lost all faith with anti-utopians, who struggle against the negation of utopian dreams, Woodcock writes: if the ex-Utopian represents modern liberal and radical pessimism reaching its extremity in the rejection of man as we have known him, the anti-Utopian presents a different picture, since he stands as the advocate of the human race against the distortions of progress; man

58  Background is his hero, and man’s defeat by the over-development of social and political organization is his tragedy.27 The belief in free, relatively autonomous individuals remains; the difference is one of process—whether such a goal will be reached through individual heroic action or through collective action—and of assumptions about human’s codependence on their fellow men for a state that allows individuality to flourish. As for Marx, those Woodcock mentions do not see any contradiction between free individuality and socialism; totalitarianism is as likely to be Fascist as communist.28 Then, despite its appropriation by the anti-communist right, it is important to understand Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as an attack from the left. Orwell claimed, “every line I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism” (1:5). However, Wegner notes that post-Stalin, the leftist politics of dystopian writers is paired with “deep skepticism about all projects of radical social change” while Jameson traces the abandonment of utopia in the middle of the century to the fact that “utopia became a synonym for Stalinism.”29 Only in the 1960’s and 1970’s, as Moylan argues, did utopia make a comeback as a viable means of articulating hopes for the future. A second strain of anti-utopianism emerges in the response to capitalism’s contradictory pretensions to utopia. Jameson describes the problem of imagining utopia in late-capitalist America: the “orgiastic visions” that are the opposite of dystopias are the “imaginary reflex of a society divided between the freedoms of the rich and privations of the impotent poor, a late-capitalist society whose insurmountable contradictions confine the imagination to a desperate oscillation between impossible solutions and antithetical futures.”30 In his commentary on Jameson, Darko Suvin describes the “infantilization of adults” via the hyper-commodification of desire in the American utopia as “Disneyfication”.31 However, neither Jameson nor Suvin is anti-utopian in theory—rather, they are critical of capitalism’s tendency to trade on utopianism as a form of ideological assault on modern subjectivity. In Chapter 7, I explore this collision between capitalism and dystopia in works by David Mamet and Nathanael West that critique America’s utopian mythologies. Defenses of utopia by philosophers and critics like Sargent, Kateb, Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, and Jameson emphasize utopia’s importance as a form of social practice. Resisting the argument that utopias are too static or coercive, they instead envision utopia as a dynamic, imaginative process focused on transformation. Mannheim suggests that a world without utopia is more in danger of becoming fixed than the utopian world, because the “disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man becomes no more than a thing.”32 In An American Utopia, Jameson defends an alternative form of utopian practice that depends on the deployment of state power in service of radical forms of freedom.

When We Talk About Dystopia  59 Sargent as well, following Bloch and Kateb, rejects the anti-utopian premise, framing utopianism as a necessary condition of hope. It is counter to quietist pessimism that will tolerate increasingly impoverished versions of the status quo. Sargent writes: We need utopias today, and we need the people who choose to try to live their good life today in experimental communities, because they just may help us find the way forward out of the morass brought about by those ideologues willing to impose their version of the good life on all of us. We must never give up the search for eutopia.33 (15) Sargent’s conception of utopia is dialogical, evolving, and de-centered, rejecting Frye’s definition of utopia as “a final or definitive social ideal” resistant to change.34 Commitment to a provisional and evolving utopia is an important element of the defense of utopia against anti-utopian fears. Parrinder draws a useful distinction between the static classical (More) and the dynamic modern utopia (Wells), or “utopias of perfection” and “utopias of progress,” giving four features of the latter: first, the modern utopia is located in the future rather than adjacent in space (Parrinder embraces “uchronia” as a more accurate designation); second, since it is a result of a rational process of building rather than a community in isolation, it adopts a “planetary perspective”; third, it is enabled by “technological modernity”; and fourth, it views “political society as end in itself.”35 The modern utopia is best seen as an ongoing experiment in social political adjustment rather than a frozen state of final perfection. Utopians like Morris solve the problem of stasis by imagining societies that put a premium on creativity; others, like Wells, see potential for ongoing scientific discovery as a spur to disrupt utopian complacency. From the anti-utopians’ perspective, however, the distinction is less persuasive. One of the foundational fears of the anti-utopians is that utopian society will suffocate further human ingenuity. Utopian critiques from both left and right are skeptical of the human means by which any such global improvements will be implemented. Hillegas identifies Wells as an important catalyst of the modern anti-utopian tradition, seeing many of the anti-utopias of the twentieth century as a reaction to Wells’s forms, images and arguments.36 Wells’s vision of future history, in which establishment of a rational world order will be preceded by enforced submission to the new technocratic state, such as he articulates in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), crystallizes the key utopian concepts that anti-utopias often attack. These include faith in the transformative power of technology, the need for world government, belief in humankind’s adaptability to specialized functions, and the threat of a rational society imposed by force by a deracinated elite.37 This perspective is crucial to

60  Background last man narratives, where man’s flaws are often associated with what makes our species worth preserving. Humanness here is defined by an ineffable spiritual or transcendental immanence that does not derive its value from utility. Man is an end in himself, not a means, his flaws inseparable from his virtues. Catholic humanist theologian Thomas Molnar similarly attacks utopia from a religious standpoint, denouncing it as “far more than a harmless imaginative and intellectual exercise regarding political systems;” for Molnar, utopia assaults free human individuality, the inheritance of Christian humanism.38 Nonetheless, these seemingly opposing arguments do agree that utopia is useful as an idea, a thought experiment to help us visualize change. Moylan reads E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” as the dividing line between simple anti-utopian pessimism and later dystopias which generate dialectical possibilities for imagining a better world than the one the author critiques.39 Writing “against the grain of emergent modernity,” Forster initiates the modern dystopia as flight from an urbanized, machine-made utopia; but, as Moylan further observes, the location of the ironic narrative voice outside the action of the story provides a platform from which to critically view its world, and therefore from which to imagine positive resolutions of these trends.40 Nineteen Eighty-Four’s glossary of Newspeak provides a similar perspective in an otherwise unrelentingly grim narrative. Katherine Broad notes that children’s and young adult dystopian fiction in particular, which I address in Chapter 8, tends to embrace transformative utopianism, showing a “pervasive commitment to social practice.”41 The last man who initiates change in an open-ended, critical dystopian text is a “first man,” a Moses restoring his or her people to their free human origins. And again, as I discuss in Chapter 8, the first man is often a woman, as in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels. As noted in Chapter 1, there is less cause for a woman to be nostalgic for the past, even in the midst of a feminist critique of traditional modes of utopianism. The awful worlds of anti-utopia and critical dystopia resemble each other in depicting the desire to escape from a terrible outcome to history. What distinguishes them, however, is the temporal direction in which escape lies—the critical dystopian imagines escape lies ahead, the antiutopian imagines that it lies behind. The last man is more likely to be anti-utopian in this regard—last man-ism captures the sense of having fallen away from the fullness of the past rather than looking forward to the future. Wells is a good example of the instability of anti-utopia as category. As one who wrote utopias, anti-utopias, and critical dystopias as well as socially realistic novels, Wells shows the utopian, anti-utopian, and critical dystopian impulses as complementary aspects of a broader utopian project, the carrot and the stick that make its realization seem possible. In utopias like A Modern Utopia, characters look forward; in anti-utopias like “A Story of Days to Come,” characters are thwarted in

When We Talk About Dystopia  61 their look backward—escaping the city only to find wild dogs and starvation, they return defeated to the city; in critical dystopias like When the Sleeper Wakes, consolidated power in the hands of a populist is the culprit. Dystopia, in all its faces, is thus best viewed as a critical form, implying a utopian position on the other side. The Enlightenment dream of rational governance finds its negative in Mill’s idea of government by the worst; the eighteenth-century dream of tamed nature finds its negative in stories of epidemics, resource scarcity and ecosystem collapse; the nineteenth-century dream of technological progress finds its negative in stories of man’s sacrifice to the machine.42 In the fictional anti-utopia, the goal of a perfect society, or a perfectly functioning one, has been achieved. Rather than self-interest, the desire to establish a well-regulated collective life is the driving impetus. The result is a systematized, intentional world, where a ruling party or elite has reshaped human nature and relations for its alleged utopian ends. While the initial utopian impulse might have been ostensibly intended to benefit the populace, such as in We or A Brave New World, or intended to oppress them in the name of more efficient political functioning with little regard for the well-being of citizens, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in such a world law, especially as it pertains to the primary premise, is absolute. Characters suffer not from having too great a sphere in which to act, but from having too small of one. Like Frost’s poem, “Design,” which asks, “What but design of darkness to appall?—/ If design govern in a thing so small,” this type of dystopia posits a world fully stage-managed with malign intent (Norton 921). The contingency that gives characters in novels the appearance of freedom has been reduced by assertion of an oppressive logic that accounts for all possible actions, and even thoughts. Howe, referring to anti-utopia, notes the presence of a singular guiding idea (“dramatically simple and historically complex”).43 This, in my view, is dystopia’s most defining structural feature. While it is true that as Moylan says, “no single policy or principle can be isolated,” it is because the single principle—e.g., power for its own sake in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or maximum efficiency in We—has permeated the society so as to be inextricable. The tendency to monomania in works like Nineteen Eighty-Four is a direct result of an over-determined encounter with the fundamental principle infiltrating the text at every level. As a result, dystopian worlds have less contingency than the fictional modes usually linked to realism. Character remains free, but setting disallows the practice of that freedom. Dystopias deny the freedom of the novel’s alternate possibilities.

Dystopian Narrative If as a self-contained literary form the dystopia is relatively new, the prehistory of dystopia suggests that the impulse to imaginatively realize a perfectly awful world is perennial. Claeys notes that dystopic imaginings

62  Background of the “triumph of chaos over order” can be found as early as 1000 BC in the apocalyptic writings of the “Egyptian Prophecies of Nefertiti;” the condition of slavery provides another touchstone, while Christianity provides its own visions of apocalyptic collapse.44 What modern dystopian novels add to these formulae are colorings of urgent or imminent contemporary threats, but also new characters, anchoring them in thoroughly modern, if constantly evolving, perspectives. If utopia necessarily privileges the collective over the individual, dystopia privileges the individual over the collective. Collectivist utopias, from More’s onward, engage in a numbers game where it is assumed that enough of a majority benefits so as to justify coercion exerted on the rest.45 Thus, utopian socialism becomes a favorite target of the antiutopian imagination, spawning fears of a radical, managed equality that will erase all human difference. Aldridge notes that a “common feature [of dystopia] is revulsion from a mechanistic or simple-mindedly manipulative concept of humankind, wherein a society is ordered according to instrumental values and on the assumption that people are potentially as standardized and manageable as their technologies.”46 The Republic of the Future, or Socialism a Reality, written in 1887 by Anna Bowman Todd one year before Bellamy’s far more influential Looking Backwards, describes a future socialist utopia as a gray and depressing place, where, in her one felicitous phrase, citizens “have the look of people who have come to the end of things and who have failed to find it amusing.”47 Casualties of equality include art, passion between the sexes, war (God forbid!), architectural interest, individuality (“the inevitable curtailment of individual aims, individual struggle, individual ambitions, has naturally resulted in producing a featureless type of character”), learning, and religion. Her protagonist cannot leave fast enough: “We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unregenerate. But we are tremendously alive. And so I return with eager joy to take my part in the strife, to be a man, in other words, and not part of a colossal machine.” As political sentiment, this kind of extreme anti-collectivist anti-utopianism is easy to ridicule, but as a formal condition of narrative, anti-utopianism—opposition to utopian modes of narration—is, as we will see with Dostoevsky in Chapter 6, a necessary condition of dystopia. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) an idyllic community is made possible by the imprisonment and torture of a single child. Le Guin reduces the chaotic welter of human experience to a simplified schematic. Her characters have one choice, to accept or not accept the bargain. All of Omelas’s citizens are aware of these terms; indeed, it is the terrible burden of knowing that bestows splendor on the community. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy

When We Talk About Dystopia  63 of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer. (212) The people of Omelas are not “simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians” (209), making their acquiescence to Omelas’s terms both shocking and reasonable. In a purely utilitarian sense Omelas offers a good deal.48 Most consent. But, as the title indicates, not all. Some cannot bear the cruelty of the price of utopia and walk away from the city, heading off alone toward “a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness” (212). These outliers are the ones with whom we wish to identify, the ones we would like to imagine represent our common humanity. And yet, the story asks us to consider the possibility that we are not ones who walk away. The narrator cannot describe where the ones who walk away go, cannot even imagine it, though “they seem to know where they are going” (212). They do not walk away to join us; we stand with the narrator, rationalizing our own version of the bargain (a bargain the developed world has actually made in exchange for something far less than utopia). What is beyond moral compromise is unnarratable. Le Guin reduces the utilitarian syllogism to its simplest expression, pitting an entire society against one innocent child and, in doing so, starkly frames a theme that is central to much dystopian literature—at what cost happiness? What or whom are we willing to give up? In her world, an other is sacrificed so the majority can flourish. Of course, it is also one’s own self—the moral self, the feeling self, the self that stands out for good or for ill from the crowd—that is sacrificed in exchange for the benefits of utopia. If utopian writing is born out of a dream of a better world, dystopia insists on an accounting of the cost of realizing such a dream. Indeed, Le Guin’s text is about the attempt to imagine and narrate utopia rather than a description of a simply imaginary place. She continually addresses the reader, asking us whether or not we believe, adding or subtracting to make it more convincing. By this standard, it is the introduction of the child that enables the world to be narrated at all. “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing” (211) she writes, before introducing the child. It is a story about how to narrate utopia; as it turns out, the answer is to make it dystopia. As an intentional human construction, utopia must be measured not on a cosmic or metaphysical scale but on a human scale, in terms of the suffering it inflicts on the co-inhabitants of the managed world. Dystopia recognizes its inhabitants’ value as unique, subjective

64  Background entities rather than as throwaways in a grand design or as unfortunate victims of pure chance—perhaps their suffering was not necessary and might have been relieved under another set of choices. Literary dystopia tends toward the anti-utilitarian for exactly this reason. There is always someone who suffers, and dystopia is told from the point of view of that one. As many have noted, dystopia is merely utopia inhabited by actual people who are like us. Northrop Frye draws attention to the problem this creates for the reader: “what is a serious utopia to its author, and to many of its readers, could be read as a satire by a reader whose emotional attitudes were different.”49 Utopia would feel like dystopia to anyone who rejected on moral, psychological, or political grounds the utopia’s underlying principle, or who found themselves incapable of effective participation in a brave new world. Claeys emphasizes consent as a dividing line between utopia and dystopian modes, asking to what extent the sacrifice of individual rights to the group is coerced.50 And yet, the voluntary abdication of freedom, the wish to escape the painful burden of unique consciousness, is one of the great dystopian fears that animates works like Brave New World, or Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” (1961). The last man refuses to join with the utopian crowd, insisting on holding himself apart even when his position is by rational calculus absurd. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which I address in Chapter 6, recognizes the desire to resist utopia as an anti-social sickness, but feels compelled to resist anyway. Only thanks to this resistance do we have a character study that stands as one of the masterpieces of modern fiction. According to Howe, ordinary novels indulge a fantasy of romantic individuality, stressing “individual consciousness, psychological analysis and the scrutiny of intimate relations.”51 We become accustomed to following the odd life, the life that stands out.52 The “last man” is the story of Omelas told from the perspective of the child; what matters is not the collective but the child in the basement. Le Guin’s classical, objectifying description of Omelas parodies the narrative distance that allows such a world to exist. Le Guin’s shorthand dystopia is not really a story at all, but a self-consciously anachronistic parable. The perspective of the tortured child, so conspicuously absent from her text, is a function of the modern novel. Concern with the experience of the individual—not just the relative justice or naturalistic detail of the individual’s situation, but its qualia—implicitly offers the character-driven novel as critique of utopian dreaming. The introduction of the individual, subjective perspective becomes the fulcrum which flips utopia to dystopia. As Parrinder elegantly phrases it, “visions of a perfect or much improved society are no less necessary to the imagination for the fact that humanity, within them, must be redefined and redesigned in a way that wholly or partially excludes us.”53 The dystopia, much to our horror, does include us.

When We Talk About Dystopia  65

Dystopian Law Often, the principle that defines dystopia of any type is imbalance in the struggle between the collective and the individual. Either individuals are given too much freedom with respect to others or too little. In the former type, characters live in an unpredictable world of no constraints and must choose either individual survival or to engage in a collective project of rebuilding; in the latter, characters desire freedom from social constraints and must choose between conformity and individuality. If in the former the problem is what we are when released from constraints, in the latter it is with what only some of us are and the rest are willing to go along with. The former gives us post-apocalyptic narratives of civilization’s collapse, while the latter gives us the regimented worlds of Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Huxley’s Brave New World. In this sense, post-apocalyptic dystopia is the negative image of pastoral arcadia. It portrays a Hobbesian state of nature where the absence of explicit law leads not to harmonious relations between humans and nature but to a world of brute force and desperate self-interest. Dystopia’s simplification of the world down to a single principle—e.g., a boot stamping on a human face forever—satirizes the Arcadia whose single governing principle is nature. Thus, it is a double negative—a critique of utopian principles and an inverted mirror image of the happy Arcadia that relies on the single principle of nature for its vision of telos. It is important to note that even Arcadia is not quite free of law: it is the benign law of abundant nature that governs. In those utopias where the law is invisible, law nonetheless persists by being internalized and embodied within a transformed human consciousness (in post-apocalypse, law is the law of human nature subject to no administration). For example, in News from Nowhere, the laws and customs of Nowhere are so well suited to what Morris imagines man’s essential nature to be that they are virtually unnoticeable. Abolishment of private property and compulsory social configurations have made law redundant. Thus, Nowhere has no jails; in the event of a crime, the censure of fellow citizens is enough to encourage reform. Clerical and juridical law, as opposed to “natural” law is represented as a symptom of disease in the body politic, not the cure. As Old Hammond, the protagonist Guest’s guide to the new world, puts it, the new customs “are matters of general assent, which nobody dreams of objecting to, so also we have made no provision for enforcing them; therefore I don’t call them laws.”54 Intentional law has disappeared as set of pre- and proscriptive injunctions, but survives in an internalized form no less rigorous. Dystopia inverts “good law,” representing law as arbitrary, as opposed to our fundamental human instincts. This tension is Freud’s central insight in Civilization and its Discontents, a dystopia in its own right, which Kumar calls “the key antiutopian work of the twentieth century.”55 Freud observes, “it is impossible

66  Background to overlook the extent to which civilization is built on the renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts.”56 For Freud, civilization must inevitably clash with our human desire and the individual journey to self-hood requires that we internalize social prohibitions. This framework, in which the individual’s interests are at odds of those of the collective, models the pessimism of the dystopian formulation. There can be no perfect society; the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Freud ends by reflecting on our future as a species: The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. (104) Freud’s question predicts the proliferation of dystopias in the twentieth century—“control over the forces of nature,” far from suiting us for either Arcadian or utopian harmony, can only ratchet up the forces of repression which threaten to make any utopia feel alien.

Post-apocalypse Jameson uses the term apocalyptic to define a category distinct from both dystopian and anti-utopian texts, noting that it is more religious than political in its lack of a “commitment to disabuse its readership of the political illusions Orwell sought to combat.”57 I  use post-apocalyptic here rather than apocalyptic for precisely this reason: the post-apocalyptic implies, as Teresa Heffernan points out in her excellent study of the postapocalyptic attitude in modern literature, a living on afterwards that inevitably returns to earthbound questions of how to live in the world. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are of a fundamentally different sort than regimented dystopias and anti-utopias, responding not to an abundance of the ordering principle or law but to its abrupt absence.58 Indeed, the post-apocalyptic narrative may be the precursor to the dystopian world, as we see in many YA movies and novels like The Giver, in which the dystopian society is an attempt to rebuild after the world’s destruction, from accident, intention, or neglect. I  use post-apocalyptic specifically because it emphasizes the aftermath of catastrophe. Dystopias set during a period of catastrophe retain all the hallmarks of a traditional

When We Talk About Dystopia  67 novel. While thematically dystopic, these works share the novel’s formal ­architecture—anything can happen, the future is unwritten, and characters are invested with developmental possibility. Heffernan links the post-apocalyptic impulse to the twentieth century’s growing mistrust of conclusive endings and the order they imply, arguing that twentieth-century post-apocalyptic narratives reflect a shift in understanding from a meaningful world to a pointless one.59 Here, she echoes Paul Alkon, who notes the “secularization of apocalypse” in the early nineteenth century, a process of rewriting apocalyptic images in contexts dissociated from their religious origins.60 For example, Byron’s poem “Darkness,” which responded in 1816 to climatic disruption resulting from the eruption of Mt. Tambora, uses religious imagery to describe natural disaster. Similarly, technology, war, and disease all offer secularized possibilities for imagining the end. Distinguishing between the apocalypse and the catastrophe—the former is a revelation that leads to renewal, the latter a final event “bereft of redemption and revelation”— Heffernan argues that the shift from religious teleology to the secular faith in progress that followed from the Enlightenment and then the  industrial revolution leads to a countervailing disillusionment.61 Two competing orientations toward apocalypse grow out of this disillusionment: in one, a  lack of  belief in  meaningful endings  is cause for  anxiety, in the other, this lack leaves open infinite possibilities. And yet these opposed orientations are in fact complementary and mutually dependent: the infinite possibilities of the post-apocalypse are too fearful to comprehend without recourse to an ordering principle, while fear of closure leads to increasingly desperate attempts to postpone the inevitable ending. The post-apocalyptic character lives between two nightmares—between the end of meaning and the end of everything else. The post-apocalyptic setting, with its delight in ruins and expanded sphere of action for the hero, lends itself to especially well to film. The regimented setting, in contrast, is harder to pull off in film. (Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Michael Radford’s 1984 are notable exceptions.) It is therefore often combined with stories that combine dystopia with other genres. In Norman Jewison’s 1975 film Rollerball: the hero, Jonathan E., becomes too popular, threatening to reassert the old values of individuality the game is designed to refute. When Jonathan refuses to retire, the game’s rules are altered to be more and more violent in order to force Jonathan to retire, and eventually, to try, unsuccessfully, to kill him. It is a regimented dystopia combined with the pleasures of a sports movie. Or, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), dystopia is the setting for a noir thriller, as in Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. The post-apocalyptic last man has a primal appeal in film; a small sampling include two movies from 1959, Ranald McDougall’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil and Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, both of which respond to fears of nuclear obliteration with stories of the last people left on earth; Ubaldo

68  Background Ragona’s 1964 Vincent Price vehicle, The Last Man on Earth, based on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, remade again in 1971 as The Omega Man directed by Boris Sagal, and again in 2007 as I Am Legend with Will Smith in the title role and directed by Francis Lawrence. The Mad Max series, stretching over four movies from 1979 to 2015, tells of civilization’s gradual collapse as gasoline runs out. Max wanders the Australian outback; he is a last man as psychologically tormented survivor who cannot let go of the old pain. Regimented and the post-apocalyptic dystopias both offer the pleasure of endings, but appeal in different ways. The first, at its most basic level, is a fantasy of closure. The world has assumed a final shape, relieving both reader and character from the contingencies of becoming. It does not matter what we choose or do not choose; the ending is unavoidable and permanent. The character trajectories thus become movements either toward an affirmation of futility, or toward a reopening of the world to contingency (and sequels!). The latter is an infantile fantasy of complete freedom from rules. Dystopias in this mode often consist of civilizations that have degenerated to the point of complete anarchy, such as we find in pre- and post-apocalyptic scenarios like the Mad Max film sequence. Private force, brute or intellectual, constitutes the only power. The chaotic post-apocalyptic vision, particularly in movies, is more likely to breed a Nietzschean hero, a powerful, posthuman force engaged in a quest to transform the world inhabited by leftover last men. Susan Sontag, speaking of apocalyptic science fiction movies, notes the thrill of imagining release from ethical obligations.62 According to Sontag, we trade the rigors and ambiguities of moral complexity for the pleasure of moral simplification. The breakdown of order opens a field for exciting adventures. Take stuff. Stay alive.

Future (Im)Perfect The original utopia is an imaginary society projected in space not time and exists simultaneously with the society whose failure it exposes. While some dystopias that critique the present are set in space and exist simultaneously with the rest of the world—Nabokov’s Bend Sinister for example—most are set in the future.63 This allows dystopia text to take on speculative themes that go beyond character—not just the fate of a human, but the fate of all humans. The discovery of the future as openended rather than set in teleological stone corresponds to the development of a literature that seeks to explore that future.64 Utopia habitually relies on the traveler through space, time, or dimensions to place cognitive and critical distance between the author’s present and the estranged destination world. Since the subject of dystopia is what it would mean to live in a world rather than simply visit, the dystopia produces estrangement by emphasizing a character who is already present in the dystopian

When We Talk About Dystopia  69 world. He or she remains linked to the past by virtue of having unexpectedly retained some vestige of now-extinct humanity.65 We makes much of this idea of atavism, for example giving D-503 excessively hairy arms that associate him with a primitive past. A dystopia set in another dimension that had no relation to our world could well satirize our world and its ambitions but would possess no warning urgency. Dystopia might be set in the near future, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; or in the far future, as in Zamyatin’s We; or in the future past, where the future is looked back upon from an even further future, as in Jack London’s The Iron Heel; or it might be in a process of becoming out of the present, à la Houellebecq’s Submission; or it might be set in an alternative timeline, as Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Each of these offers its own plot and character possibilities. Here, I want to introduce the concept of relative time as a significant feature that determines the shape and trajectories of dystopian character. Bakhtin offers the chronotope, the intersection of time-space in the novel, as the constitutive element of genre.66 Dystopia’s universalizing gestures express a world state that is uniform, a single place that stands in for all places. By reducing possible places to only one, and by representing history as complete, dystopia denies time-space entirely. Bakhtin’s description of the adventure time of the Greek Romance looks much like dystopia: the world and the individual are finished items, absolutely immobile. In it there is no potential for evolution, for growth, for change. As a result of the action described in the novel, nothing in its world is destroyed, remade, changed or created anew. What we get is a mere affirmation of the identity between what had been at the beginning and what is at the end. Adventure time leaves no trace.67 Characters take their turn on the stage, but when the curtain closes, the world remains the same. It seems odd that the dystopia should come to adopt such an anti-teleological time. Despite its engagement with fears and fantasies of a society’s development in time, dystopia is surprisingly a-temporal in the relationship it poses between character and time-space. One way to understand this phenomenon is as anxious response to the specter of ending that haunts the realist novel. The novel that concerns itself with what might come to be, both at the level of the private individual and of collective life, reflects an idea of history as progressive and linear rather than cyclical. The open-ended future, however, lacks comforting structures of predictable meaning such as are provided by, for example, biblical teleology. Modern character withdraws from the world precisely in order to escape, even if temporarily, the shaping power of public time and space. The struggle to return to meaningless time is both

70  Background a resistance to endings and an acknowledgment of their terrifying power. The dystopian character who lives on despite history having ended is both a rehearsal for death, and a guilty form of self-punishment for ever having had such a wish. In his study of how the apocalyptic tradition enters into the novel, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode addresses the durability of our eschatological fascination. Distinguishing between chronos and kairos, that is, “passing time” and time “charged with a meaning derived from its relationship with the end,” Kermode argues that the novel’s translation of the former to the latter, the re-reading of chronological events within a formal pattern that lends retrospective meaning, re-inscribes apocalypse on a human scale.68 Events that seem to unfold freely in time take on eschatological significance in relation to the End—writ small, the novel’s ending, writ large, a fragment of a larger revelation. Kermode argues that the modern novel simultaneously resists the sense of significant time and embraces it in its attempt “to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it.”69 To portray a reality that is not determined, the novel must mitigate its own tendency to add a tock to the tick, to make concordance out of what has preceded the end. And yet, this must be a losing battle—the text inevitably ends, insisting on the illusion of closure. Echoing Freud, Kermode associates the novel’s “escape from chronicity,” from the time that governs the real, with the child and psychopath.70 Closure, and the meaning it retroactively imposes, is a source of pleasure. My analysis of dystopia turns toward the formal rather than the explicitly political for precisely this reason. Dystopia intensifies the pleasure of endings. The world is treated as unreal, like a book already written; dystopia pages ahead, allowing us to see how it all turned out. In this sense, the dystopian world is no more or no less than a novel, realized as if it were the world in which we move (I discuss in Chapter 5, the tendency of its characters to be paranoid, since they are in fact living inside of a “plot”). As a consequence, the plots of such fictions are easily revealed as occurring outside of time. Winston thought there was freedom. There was no freedom. It is the voice of the future perfect, a launch forward into completed history. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a non-dystopic text that adopts such a voice. Characters are introduced as if their entire history has already happened: “Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire” (10–11). The voice dispenses entirely with the illusion of freedom that governs novelistic negotiation of the tension between chronos and kairos. Characters’ fates are already sealed. Spark’s Edinburgh is not literally a dystopia, but the memoir which contains it is; past, present and future collapse into the bounded time of the

When We Talk About Dystopia  71 novel, the anchorite’s cell where the novel ends a fitting emblem for the prison-house of a text where all possibility has been choked off. At the end of Spark’s novel, we learn that Sandy has become a cloistered nun and changed her name to Sister Helena of the Transfiguration. She has written a book on psychology called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” rendering the novel’s form as its theme. In a closed world, only through such a transfiguration of terms can the possibility of escape, or transcendence, be actuated. Dystopia, then, purposefully fails in this novelistic act of transfiguration. The materials of the world lead to an inevitable conclusion, closed off to the introduction of a spirit or circumstance that would revalue the past. Vonnegut as well sometimes adopts this tense, such as in Slaughterhouse-Five when he writes, “[h]e had just bought the guitar that day. He couldn’t play it yet and, in fact, never learned to play it” (176–77). I propose three distinct time-sites of dystopia. The first belongs to the character, the second to a reader who looks ahead to the dystopian world, and the third, the implied future perspective, looks back on the dystopian world (e.g., Orwell’s Newspeak appendix in Nineteen Eighty-Four). Character-time is the future present, a time that evokes an illusion of freedom, and hope for a teleology in which the human, represented by the protagonist, emerges victorious. This time unfolds sequentially. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston rebels, is caught, and punished. At each stage in the process, Winston believes his fate to be open-ended. He exists as a character in a time in which it seems any number of things might yet happen. If the reader suspects that the text has foreclosed most possibilities for development, Winston moves through time as an ostensibly free subject, or at least an unwitting one, unaware that his sphere of effective agency has been drastically curtailed. Such a time is related through normal sequences of cause and effect experienced by the character as unfinished time until the novel’s resolution. However, the value given to time changes. Time at the individual level is chronos, irrelevant to history’s design. Kermode points to attempts by Sartre and other modernists to portray absolute freedom. The dystopia, perversely, accomplishes this feat, by liberating character from history, though it denies the freedom that ought to come with such a release. Splitting off its main characters from participation in history, dystopia imagines a personal time after history has ended; rather than history continuing on past bracketed individual lives, only individual lives slog on.71 Though time might continue post-dystopia, characters who inhabit the fallen world are barred from participation in significant time that would have made their suffering meaningful. An important variation on future character time is crisis-, or adventure-time not set in the future, but in the present or near present, and utilizing what we might think of as the present tense. While dystopias often push the initiating catastrophe into the past, whether the recent past, as

72  Background in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or a more distant one, as in Zamyatin’s We or Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, others are situated just before or in the midst of the apocalyptic moment. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy gives us a dystopian world prior to the world-ending plague, a post-apocalyptic world just after, and the potential of a rebuilt utopian society afterward (though humans will have to share the new world with the Crakers, a species genetically engineered as a sustainable alternative to humanity). The pleasures of this crisis-time are akin to the pleasures of a traditional novel. Similarly, the “adventure” dystopia, such as in young adult novels like Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series, consists of a typical adventure plot mapped onto a future dystopia. Where there is the potential for forward escape, dystopian features become decorative rather than structural. Individual life returns to a position of historical significance, restoring continuity between the novel’s past, present, and future. Catastrophe-straddling dystopias offer a world rich with both utopian and dystopian possibilities, and a real-time play-by-play of how the future might come to pass. In this, they are more like non-dystopian novels in terms of narrative, with only the looming mass of the future—a future of emptiness or plentitude—to indicate their generic roots. Moylan and Baccolini draw attention to the richness of these critical u/dystopias; in the final chapter, I argue that these works have become co-extensive with contemporary realism. In the second time space, the reader occupies the subject position. Though the text is set in the future, he or she responds to his or her own present as if it were the past.72 Jameson points out that SF, though it takes the future as subject, is structured “not to give us images of the future, but to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present.” The present becomes the past of some other future, revealing history’s operations.73 This generates a paradox in its simultaneous denial and affirmation of freedom in the present. The dystopia takes up the position of the future in order to organize and complete a still unfolding future for the reader. The present, occupied by the reader, then becomes a type of the future, to be interpreted in light of the future’s revelations, in a process that Kermode calls “concordance.” Dystopia portrays the present as a moment of significant time—perhaps the last such moment—such that the decisions made today will be recognized as having been crucial events in the history of the future. By the same token, it is because of events in the reader’s time that such a future exists at all. The dystopia’s warning reaffirms the significance of those who inhabit it. Kermode writes, “It seems to be a condition attached to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one’s own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it.”74 The presumption of importance granted to the reader is part of the appeal of dystopia. This is why Jameson attributes the possibility of a radical consciousness to science fiction—we “become conscious of our present as the past of some unexpected future, rather than as the future of a

When We Talk About Dystopia  73 heroic national past.”75 Even when inducing nostalgia for the past, science fiction breeds a forward looking gaze. A Canticle for Liebowitz is nostalgic for the spirit invoked by religion, but it is the actions of the spirit in the future that will determine humanity’s fate. Dystopia is not what history intended; it is accident, the result of man’s radical freedom to muck up God’s, or nature’s, or progress’s plan. In this way, dystopia upsets triumphalist narratives of becoming, placing the onus to choose wisely squarely on the present. The Young Adult dystopias of Chapter 8 often adopt this perspective, maintaining hope not only in the possibility of transformation in the future, but in the possibility that such a future will be averted by a critically-activated youth. The third time is the time of the implied future perspective that follows on some dystopias, giving a vantage point from which the dystopian period can be reflected upon. This is the future perfect, the time of completed action in the future. The implied future is of no concern in traditional narrative—the happily ever after of fairy tales belongs only to individual characters and is an indication that time continued without change. Though as readers, we may open the book after a period of years and read it differently, the fictive world has ceased to rearrange itself around the actions of its inhabitants. In the implied future of dystopian time, the future maintains collective significance. Often, this time is indicated in the form of a found object, or diary, seen from the perspective of an even further future. This is the time, for example, of the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the introductory material to The Iron Heel (one of the earliest modern dystopias, which is framed as a found account by the wife of the revolutionary whose defeat ushered in a period of brutally oppressive oligarchy), or, more recently, Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments. It might also be a subjunctive time, such as is suggested by the diary of We, or Kathy H.’s journal in Never Let Me Go, a document written in the present that imagines a future reader who may or may not arrive. The articulation of the dystopian present is a message in a bottle that might never reach shore. Perhaps the world has become better, as in Octavia Butler’s Parable books, as a result of a character’s actions. Or, perhaps it has improved for reasons the texts do not address, as in The Iron Heel. The fact that we are reading, that we imaginatively inhabit an even further future beyond the text, paradoxically provides both relief from the relentless closure dystopia invokes and an affirmation of the final fixity of the characters with whom we have been identifying. The future perfect knows the endings of any story it tells, finding its raison in the act of bearing witness, of humanizing. In The Iron Heel, the introduction by a future historian tells us only that it was an inconceivable time, and that the manuscript sheds a humanizing light on history. History tells us that these things were, and biology and psychology tell us why they were; but history and biology and psychology do not

74  Background make these things alive. We accept them as facts, but are left without sympathetic comprehension of them. The sympathy comes to us, however, as we peruse the Everhard Manuscript. We enter into the minds of the actors in that long-ago world-drama, and for the time being their mental processes are our mental processes.76 The distant readers of the future are disconnected from the past, aware of events but not of the human dimension. Here again, we have a defense of the novel. A full understanding of the world requires the very devices that the novel has perfected; it is the novel that establishes experiential continuity between the past and present, which is why its preservation is essential. Kenneth M. Roemer describes literary utopia as “a seeing experience,” as distinct from the idea of utopia as blueprint, or as rational plan for realizing a different world.77 It is this sense of experience that is central to my own framework for analysis in this study. The significance of these generic features for character cannot be overestimated. Dystopia renders a structure of character that is notably different from the typical novel. According to Howe, what is missing is psychological nuance and the suspense that comes with an open-ended world (though, as I  have just argued, this open-endedness is projected backwards into the past, onto the reader’s present). He calls characters who inhabit dystopian novels “grotesques;” anything else would violate the logic of a world designed to eradicate precisely the sort of human psychology found in novels.78 But there is an undeniable pathos within this flatness, in the character’s straining toward something akin to what E. M. Forster describes as a “round” character while in fact developing toward extinction.79 Responding to Sargent’s definition of utopianism, Claeys writes, “we do not normally speak of dystopianism.”80 Sargent includes dreams and nightmares in his definition, but this study poses “dystopianism” as a distinctive set of formal attitudes and behaviors that extend beyond and beneath the topical themes that define dystopian space. More than just an oppositional subcategory of utopianism, dystopianism constitutes a philosophical and aesthetic orientation in its own right. Where utopianism is active, hopeful, and engaged, dystopianism tends toward the static, pessimistic, and paranoid; dystopian passivity invites both writer and reader to gaze on the world with an aestheticizing distance, clarifying setting down into something hard and implacable that can only be observed, not altered. In the next chapter, I follow out a formal genealogy of the dystopian position not grounded in the negation of utopianism, but rather grounded in discourses of humanism and narrative aesthetics endemic to the novel as genre. In the next chapter, I take up the concept of the last man in more detail, identifying its roots in nineteenth- and twentieth-century anxieties about

When We Talk About Dystopia  75 the future of the human, and argue for its importance as a kind of canary in the coal mine that registers the twentieth century’s threat to novelistic character.

Notes 1. “Three Faces” 4. 2. Ibid 12–13. 3. “Varieties” 329. 4. Ibid 330. 5. Roemer 22. 6. Budakov, “Dystopia: An Earlier Eighteenth-Century Use.” The first documented use of the word (misprinted as “dustopia”) is in Lewis Henry Younge’s 1747 poem “Utopia: Apollo’s Golden Days,” about an ill-favored island transformed into utopia by the intervention of the gods. 7. OED Online. 8. Levitas 196. 9. Frye 323. With respect to literary genre, the first use of “dystopia” is generally acknowledged to belong to J. Max Patrick in Glenn Negley’s and Patrick’s 1952 anthology, The Quest for Utopia (1952), where it is used to indicate eutopia’s opposite. Frye brings the two back together. 10. Ibid 342. 11. Mannheim 173. 12. “Utopianism” 583. 13. Frye 346. 14. “Three Faces” 7. 15. Ibid 9. 16. “Defense” 209. Moylan and Baccolini develop the concept of the “open or critical dystopia” to describe the development in the 1980’s and 1990’s of a counterpart to the critical utopias of the 1960’s and 1970’s that resists the stark utopian/anti-utopian antinomies of the earlier dystopian forms. Moylan links it to the resurgence of the right and the strengthening of capitalism in the 1980’s and 1990’s (Scraps, xii). Baccolini usefully links the critical dystopia to gender, associating hybrid forms of u/dystopia with feminist writers, framing these works as a form of resistance to the hierarchizing tendency of genre categorizations (“Gender and Genre” 15). 17. Ibid xiii. 18. “Need it All End in Tears,” in Booker [1987]: 122. 19. As Moylan argues, the latter is a utopian position as well, in that it inspires action, though whether it inspires positive action aimed toward the future or resistance to change seems like a significant distinction. Rob McAlear, focusing on the reader’s experience, argues that both dystopias and anti-utopias deploy fear as a form of rhetorical appeal, persuading the reader to resist the warned about future by working toward social change; the anti-utopia uses fear to persuade the reader to resist any change in the status quo (McAlear 26–27). 20. Scraps, xii. 21. “A Choice of Nightmares” 361. 22. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia 103; Kumar notes the disappearance of utopia post French Revolution for most of nineteenth century, as a result of the transfer of utopian aspiration to flawed reality (39). 23. “Three Faces” 26. See Kumar also who argues that the reaction against utopia is a Christian and conservative response to utopian ideas of the perfectibility of man (Utopia and Anti-Utopia 103).

76  Background 4. Kateb 18. 2 25. Popper 159. 26. “Five Writers Who Feared the Future” n.p. 27. Ibid. 28. See Moylan, Scraps 121–25 for a more detailed discussion of anti-utopianism and the left’s response to Orwell. 29. Wegner, “British Dystopian Novel . . .” 456; Jameson, Archaeologies, xi. 30. American Utopia 93. 31. Dark Horizons 194. The powerlessness of the dystopian subject is the mechanism by which desires are aligned with this hyper-reality. The daydream removes the subject from the world, and re-formulates the subject within a world where individual desires are given free play. 32. Mannheim 236. 33. “Three Faces” 15. 34. “Varieties” 329. 35. Parrinder (Utopian Literature), 4. 36. Kumar disagrees with this assessment (Utopia and Anti-Utopia 5). 37. In Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (2015), Patrick Parrinder historicizes dystopia against the backdrop of developing scientific consciousness and tools like telescopes, microscopes, and eugenics (Utopian Literature and Science 3–4). 38. Molnar 3. Other religious humanist critics like Paul Tillich, while recognizing utopias’ tendency to demand submission to divinely sanctioned ideas, still defend utopia on the grounds that the very act of imagining a better world acts as a necessary antidote to the “mystical annihilation” that characterizes utopian practice (Manuel, Utopian Thought 810). 39. Woodcock contrasts ex-utopians, who have lost all faith, and anti-utopians, who struggle against the negation of utopian dreams. Woodcock writes: if the ex-Utopian represents modern liberal and radical pessimism reaching its extremity in the rejection of man as we have known him, the antiUtopian presents a different picture, since he stands as the advocate of the human race against the distortions of progress; man is his hero, and man’s defeat by the over-development of social and political organization is his tragedy. (“Five Writers Who Fear the Future” n.p.)   Woodcock’s and Moylan’s emphasis on the degree to which the author embraces a position of despair as a generic marker is challenged by Rob McAlear, who focuses on the reader’s experience. McAlear argues that both dystopias and anti-utopias deploy fear as a form of rhetorical appeal, persuading the reader to resist the warned about future by working toward social change; the anti-utopia uses fear to persuade the reader to resist any change in the status quo (McAlear 26–27). 40. Scraps 111. 41. Basu et al. 2. 42. Cf. Claeys 4–5. 43. Moylan notes that Howe’s list anticipates Suvin and Sargent’s further elaborations of generic qualities (Scraps 125). 44. Claeys 4. 45. Ibid 8. 46. Aldridge 65–66.

When We Talk About Dystopia  77 7. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56639, n.p. 4 48. Jameson distinguishes the narrative form of dystopia from the nonnarrative form of utopia (Moylan 141); by this standard, LeGuin’s story is technically a utopia, as it contains only description. 49. “Varieties” 327. 50. 2017:7. This question of utopia at whose expense is central to Claeys’s study which focuses throughout on dystopia’s development as social space. 51. TSC 321. 52. Thomas Hardy’s description of Clym Yeobright in Return of the Native sums up this notion of character: He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had been chaos. That he would be successful in an original way, or that he would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable. The only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in the circumstances amid which he was born. (191–92).   Hardy describes here the precondition of narration. Something must happen to disrupt stasis. Character transcends setting. 53. Parrinder (Utopian Literature), 188. 54. Morris 71. 55. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia 384. 56. Civilization and its Discontents 45–49. 57. Archaeologies 199. 58. Frye treats the planned city as template for utopia (“Varieties” 325); Sargent distinguishes the city utopia, or the utopia of human contrivance, from the body utopia, which is a place of physical gratification, like Cockaygne—he sees the city utopia as a further development, with its source in Plato, of the desire to take control of imagination not just on an individual scale but on a collective scale (“Three Faces” 11). Claeys’s distinction between responses to the “degenerative trends” of the capitalist chaos of commercial society, and the post-French Revolution critique of “the search for imaginary perfection” suggests different roots for post-apocalyptic and urban, intentional dystopias: the first describes a world falling apart, the latter a world that has been assembled, or reassembled, too rigidly (291). 59. Heffernan 6. 60. Alkon 158. 61. Heffernan 6. 62. Sontag 45. 63. Bend Sinister illustrates. Beyond the dumb brutality of populist tyranny, Bend Sinister is barely interested in the politics of Padukgrad. There is a brief description of Paduk’s “Ekwilist” philosophy of elevating the average man, but Nabokov creates a world both too familiar and, seen through his protagonist Krug’s magical eye, too absurd. Though Krug embodies many of the humanist traits familiar from other dystopian novels—fierce individualism, skepticism, disdain for the masses, his singularity exists in his intellectual, perceptual, and emotional vigor. He is not a last man; he always stood out from the mass, and his story is not a defense of humanist virtues, but of the Nabokovian Übermensch who is the dynamic extension of the author’s singular genius. The novel’s core is the story of Krug’s son taken into custody in order to persuade Krug to lend his name to the university reorganization but who is then accidentally killed. A father’s devastation at the crude and pointless murder of his son is far too specific to lend itself to themes like the “fate of the human.” See Nabokov’s introduction to Bend Sinister, xiv.

78  Background 64. See Alkon, Aldridge, and Hillegas, e.g. Alkon traces the development of speculative utopian fiction about the future to Mercier’s L’an 2440 in 1770 (Alkon 4). Aldridge argues that utopias shift to time rather than space in the seventeenth century; Hillegas argues that The Time Machine first introduced a future worse than the present (34). Parrinder associates this mindset particularly with H. G. Wells, who is often considered the father of future science fiction. 65. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon [1872] is an exception; Butler’s is a dystopia in space, rather than time, so adopts the traveler trope. 66. Bakhtin 251. 67. Ibid 110. 68. Kermode, Continuities 47. 69. Ibid 145. 70. Ibid 50. 71. Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers, and the HBO series made from it, situate this attitude in a religious context. When two percent of the world’s population disappears without a trace, those left behind must try to attach meaning many to their loss. Many take it as the Rapture. The novel and show ask, how does one go on living once the teleological journey has ended? 72. This is what Howe suggests in arguing that anti-utopia demands an act of “historical recollection” on the part of the reader; it is the reader who becomes: “The enchanted dream has become a nightmare, but a nightmare projected with such power as to validate the continuing urgency of the dream” (309). 73. Archaeologies 286. 74. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending 94. 75. Jameson on Jameson 60. 76. Iron Heel 1–2. Wells in The Shape of Things to Come and Stapledon employ the device more literally, placing a narrator from the future literally inside the head of someone from the present. See also Jameson, Archaeologies (xii–xiii). 77. Roemer 5. 78. TSC 308. 79. I mean rounded in Forster’s sense in Aspects of the Novel; flat characters are constructed out of “a single idea or quality” while round characters express human complexity. Forster writes, “it is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time”; I am suggesting here a form of tragedy in the striving to escape from two dimensions. 80. Claeys 5.

Section II

De-forming Character

4 The Last (Hu)Man(ist)

We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword puzzle fans. (Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn [2:59])

Humanism in Crisis In his As I  Please column of March  14, 1947, Orwell defends English weights and measures against the metric system. Acknowledging the metric system’s use for scientific purposes, he nonetheless champions the old system, despite its inefficiency, on aesthetic grounds. “The names of the units in the old system are short homely words which lend themselves to vigorous speech. Putting a quart into a pint pot is a good image, which could hardly be expressed in the metric system” (4:306).1 This seems emblematic of Orwell’s cranky humanism. When he defends “intellectual decency” as essential to “the continuation of civilized life,” “decency” is not a metaphysical idea, but an earthbound, often contradictory attitude (4:60). Thus, in The Lion and the Unicorn, he writes that English socialism at its best “will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word” (2:102).2 Progress consists of an incomplete, sometimes brutal world where occasionally the guilty will go free out of a collective attachment to flawed justice administered by flawed people, and the state apparatus will not interfere with the pursuits or the language of the ordinary man. In the wake of World War II, Orwell is skeptical of progress; like Burke, he is reliant on custom as a guarantor of liberty and mistrusts radical reform.3 England remains a family, “but with the wrong members in control” (2:84). Raymond Williams sums up Orwell’s attitude as “[a]ll that is then needed, it seems, is for all the decent members of the family—middle class and working class alike—to

82  De-forming Character get rid of the outdated old fools in charge.”4 If there is to be progress, it will come by resisting a fully rationalized politics rather than by translating ideology into clockwork praxis. While Orwell shares the Enlightenment’s commitment to a humancentered world, he resists the universalizing of abstract reason. “We are a nation of flower-lovers,” Orwell writes, “but also a nation of stampcollectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, dartsplayers, crossword puzzle fans” (2:59). The English character, defined by hobbies and private, unofficial passions, keeps a bit of self safely tucked away like Winston’s coral encased in glass. Though Orwell commits to analysis of the economic and political relations that shape character he also tends to essentialize a putatively organic national character. As a novelist, Orwell’s version of liberal humanism seems to see organized politics not as an extension of the human, but as its enemy. When politics does impinge, it is destructive rather than creative.5 Flight from abstraction grounds Orwell in a nostalgic, romantic tradition of humanism. Tony Davies, in his survey of humanist thought, describes a “English liberal humanist” branch of the broader humanist tradition embodied by novelists like E. M. Forster. This version is, according to Davies, “small-scale, individualist, suspicious of big theories and sweeping solutions,” and prone to value “modest affiliations of friendship and the claims of personal loyalty . . . over the regimented compulsions of system, movement or cause.”6 At its center is a private human who is imposed on by politics of any sort, who puts his faith not in Enlightenment reason but in gut feelings, empirical observations, and common sense. Of course, this is the same humanism Jameson rejects in an often-quoted passage that notes the reactionary tendency of such an ideology: Not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of the type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they “had” individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.7 Regardless of whether or not such a subject ought to exist, in novels it is clear that it does. Sentiments such as Jameson’s become part of the threat that humanist writers sympathetic to the left, like Orwell, presciently dig in against. Orphaned by jack boots on the right and dialectical materialism on the left, Orwell and his last men fight a rear-guard action to preserve a mystified version of the human that retains its allure. Orwell is simultaneous progressive and reactionary, granting human status to those outside the circle of his affiliation—see, for example, “Shooting an Elephant”—but also defensively withdrawing into the

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  83 imagined community of national culture. This tension between a cosmopolitan vision of universal rights and local commitments that inevitably privilege certain groups, individuals, or values over others is not easily reconciled. Orwell’s humanism acts as a mechanism for negotiating these contradictory poles. The human is irrational, flawed, sometimes petty, and wrong-headed. These qualities define an imperfect being who cannot be measured, only evoked by literature and the arts, or by residual sentiment that blurs the ideological boundaries often relied upon by sociology and political philosophy. It is a humanism that insists on a kind of messiness, in which the human must be viewed in action, in shifting, poetic consciousness rather than as fixed quantity. Davies names “the sovereignty of rational consciousness, and the authenticity of individual speech” as the essential elements that cut across humanism’s many varieties.8 This formulation emphasizes humanism’s connection between the worlds inside and outside. Similarly, M. H. Abrams focuses on humanism’s investment in nineteenth-century ideas of human-directed progress, defining humanism as concerned with “thinking and feeling agents who manifest intentions and purposes and have some measure of control over, and thus responsibility for, their own destinies.”9 Philosopher Frederick Olafson concurs, positing the human as requiring both inner life and the means of realizing at least parts of that life in the world. The constitutive features of “being-in-the-world” “range from the form of temporality that involves distinctions among past, present, and future . . . to an ordering of our lives in terms of alternative possibilities and not just causal sequences.”10 As noted in Chapter 1, Knights and Willmott place autonomy at the root of humanist self-definition, as “a way of imbuing the world with a particular meaning (or meanings) that provide a way of orienting ourselves to the social world.”11 What Davies, Abrams, Olafson, and Knights and Willmott call the essential aspects of humanist experience are exactly what dystopia excises. The autonomous subject is forward-facing, but end-of-world-time denies both past and future; the ordering of lives becomes an external function of the state; rationality of consciousness isolates the subject from the world; individual speech is either corrupted, or unintelligible outside the mind (or diary) of the speaker. In dystopia, free, feeling, thinking, and speaking subjects in possession of a rich and dynamic interiority that secures them to a world-still-becoming become an endangered species, a singular, rather than categorical phenomenon. This chapter treats the pressures modernity, both as period and aesthetic, puts on the literary version of humanism as a primary shaping force on dystopia. Much of the dystopian writing in this study traces its ancestry through a moment at the turn of the twentieth century when the old sort of human was being reformulated by modernist aesthetics. In the political sphere, Marx’s deterministic history challenged the view of an unencumbered, thinking, feeling individual living in an open-ended

84  De-forming Character world. In the economic sphere, machine production became the norm, inspiring competing visions of crystal palaces and factory hells. But just as importantly, new aesthetic modes remade the discourse of the human, in what Paul Sheehan calls a process of “complexification” that subjected traditional narratives to “relentless pressure.”12 Both nineteenth-century naturalism and early-twentieth century high modernism tend toward an anti-humanist aesthetic; naturalism restricts free will within a deterministic setting, while the modernisms of T. E. Hulme, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Yeats pursue an aesthetic cleansed of romanticism’s sentimental attachment to human experience.13 In “Humanism and the Religious Attitude” Hulme rejects romanticism because it “confuses both human and divine things, by not clearly separating them . . . introducing in [human relations] the Perfection that properly belongs to the nonhuman.”14 If Eliot and his cohort’s reactionary yearning after cold classicism represents the literary future, Orwell and the dystopians respond by indulging their own reactionary nostalgia for a bourgeois, private individual who is endangered from the political left and the right, and from aesthetic discourses both immediately in front and behind. Then, in order to defend against the anti-humanist poetics of both naturalism and modernism, dystopia’s deformation of the formal codes that produce the modern subject recur to romantic humanist formulations. Olafson frames the nostalgia inherent in modern humanism as “a response to the fact that the achievements in which it takes such pride have been in danger of being lost, destroyed, or simply forgotten.”15 F. T. Marinetti’s Zarathustran exhortation to his countrymen to “murder the moonshine,” to sweep away the culture and sentiment of the past and make way for a new breed of machine/flesh hybrid supermen, exemplifies an extreme version of the new modernist aesthetic in its celebration of the collision of a new “hard” modernity with the “soft” human of ages past. It is both a collision of philosophy and form. Marinetti’s famous phrase, “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” (49) explicitly rejects human form in favor of the machine. In “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine” (1911) Marinetti lays out his program for emancipation of the human from the past: “we must admit that we look for the creation of a nonhuman type in whom moral suffering, goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, sole interrupters of our powerful bodily electricity, will be abolished” (99). For Marinetti, the machine is the measure. Rejecting the feminine, both as object of desire and as creative force, he offers a parthenogenetic fantasy of masculinity. Transformed man has no sentiment, rejects family and bonds of affection, and devotes himself to caring for the machines that increase his power. He is a lover of machines, but also himself literally a machine, a sensation circuit without pity: “friction of the epidermis is finally freed from all provocative mystery” of Amore (100). In the techno-romanticist

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  85 porno-fantasia Mafarka the Futurist, Marinetti imagines just such a being, born out of slaughter, rape, and the violent melding together of man and machine. It is important to observe that the “human” the dystopia preserves is a form of resistance as much as positive ideal. The development of a humanism nostalgic for organic roots is dialectically inseparable from the development of threats to which the human stands in opposition. In 1829, Thomas Carlyle laments the impact of the ferocious forces of production unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. He calls the new age the “Age of Machinery:” “Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one” (n.p.). Carlyle lays out a vision of man in opposition to machinery, reinforcing the sense of a naturalized human corrupted by the invasion of the machine. Old areas of human excellence like philosophy, heroism, and morals are swept aside. The “old modes of exertion,” however inefficient, then become the form of a human defined in opposition to the machine age. The “living artisan” no longer has use as machines usurp the creative power. Man, in all his juicy, inefficient humanity, becomes a soulless machine, means rather than end, universal in the way of a pipe fitting. Later Victorian writers like Ruskin, Arnold, and Morris continue to sound Carlyle’s alarm, while others embrace the machine and its language as a paradigm for enhancing and reinterpreting the human. In “The Human Machine,” Arnold Bennett anticipates posthumanist philosophy’s embrace of prosthetic humanity, proposing that the body is a machine designed to express the soul. The “the art of living” consists of “learning to direct a man’s attention to himself as a whole, considered as a machine, complex and capable of quite extraordinary efficiency, for travelling through this world smoothly, in any desired manner” (n.p.). Bennett is comfortable with the language of the machine, a language that presumes a use for everything.16 But will such a man be capable of the small, inefficient gestures, the hobbies, affections, the “little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love” that Wordsworth claims make up “the best portion of a man’s life” and thereby render him human? Complement to the fear that man will become like clockwork is the fear that the juicy human will end up stranded in a clockwork world, literally, like Chaplin fed into the gears in Modern Times. The antimony between “warm” man and “cold” machinery remains ubiquitous in literary and mass culture through the twentieth century: it is John Henry vs. the steam drill, Chaplin, later Lucy and Ethel, vs. the assembly line, and Neo vs. the Matrix. It is Kirk vs. Spock, Mr. Smith vs.

86  De-forming Character Washington, and Randall McMurphy vs. Nurse Ratched. On a larger scale, it is Joseph K. vs. the law, it is Daniel Blake vs. the National Health Service bureaucracy. Each represents a version of the human coming face to face with the soulless machine, with humans who have become, like Orwell’s pigs at the end of Animal Farm, indistinguishable from the inhuman. The desire to hang on to the romantic human a little longer persists through the twentieth century, with later dystopian texts continuing to fetishize relics of the humanist heritage.17 In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the idea of “the book” takes on a sacred quality. The book is a prosthetic spirit, burned by the authorities who seek to snuff out free-thinking, but ingested and preserved in memory by a secret society who will be ready for the day when the spirit can be uncorked to reanimate a dead world. People literally become the books they carry: “ ‘I am ­Plato’s Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus.’ ‘Hello,’ said Montag.” (177). At the end of the text, the bookkeepers make their way back into the destroyed city to rebuild. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And some day we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them. (189) Like the Renaissance humanists who turned backward to Greek and Roman literature, Bradbury poses the human cultural heritage as constitutive. Books are manuals for both doing and being, the “mirror factory” a library. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has only contempt for such a project. “What do they call it, that which maketh them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguisheth them from the goatherds” (n.p.)—Nietzsche poses man’s destiny as transformation rather than preservation. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss” (n.p.), Zarathustra says.18 Culture puts the brakes on radical transformation, rooting the human in an enduring tradition worthy of valorization (even if certain dimensions, such as political institutions, may require renovation in order to better serve man as he is). Violence done to the human cultural legacy—whether through the onset of mechanical reason or barbarism—is a central feature of dystopian horror. Dystopian last man—bookish, prone to reflection, asserting a fundamental right to interior space, attached to ideals of human dignity and value—seeks not to

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  87 dominate his fellow men but to live among them. Nietzsche is ready to let the last man go to his fate, but Orwell and his fellow dystopian humanists are not, at least not without a final send-off. In The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Frances Fukuyama associates the figure of the last man with the subject of liberalism, inheritor of equal recognition under the triumphant liberal order. Fukuyama recognizes the danger of this proposition, however, asking along with Nietzsche: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a ‘last man’ with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the ‘peace and prosperity’ of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible ‘last men’ not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial ‘first men’ engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?19 Fukuyama answers in the negative. Rejecting Nietzsche’s prediction of heroic transformation, he imagines that the human will survive the end of history without annihilating itself on the altar of ressentiment and Dostoevskian perversity. The dystopian last man fights against both Nietzsche and Fukuyama’s position. He indeed finds a new heroic battle to fight—the battle to stay as he is, not quite perfect, the subject of a liberal order that makes him a little miserable but with the potential for occasional happiness, anchored in a present continuous with past and future, secured equally against anarchic violence and cosseted equality.

Utopian and Dystopian Humanism and Anti-humanism The u/dystopian relationship to humanism can be divided for my purposes into four categories that describe attitudes toward the kind of humanism previously defined: utopian humanism, utopian anti-humanism, dystopian humanism, and dystopian anti-humanism. Though these ­categories partially overlap in practice, they imply distinct outlooks: are

88  De-forming Character our best selves are to be uncovered or created? Will they be found by looking to the past or the future? Does the human condition give cause for hope or no hope? Next, I give brief summaries and examples of each type and later in the chapter, I explore the dystopian categories in greater detail through brief readings of exemplary texts. Utopian humanism describes works that imagine regressive eutopias populated by an older form of the human, embodied in texts like William Morris’s utopia News from Nowhere.20 Morris responds to Edward Bellamy’s utopian Looking Backward with a nostalgic utopian countervision of return to what is essentially the medieval past. While Bellamy saw the future developing out of increasingly efficient production and distribution, Morris, like Ruskin and Carlyle, emphasizes artisanal modes of production. Calling Bellamy’s bureaucratized, consumer-oriented future a “Cockney Paradise,” Morris admires the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the craftsmanship that flourished there and the time’s easier acknowledgement of nature as a source of inspiration. The obsolescence of the craftsman in the face of increasing reliance on mechanical manufacturing processes seemed to Morris to have drained work of its expressive possibilities, to have remade man in the image of a functional machine. Like Marx, Morris believes that to achieve our potential as humans we must be freed from social, political, and economic conditions that obstruct our full development. Samuel Butler’s mixed u/dystopian satire Erewhon depicts a society that rejects all machines, fearing that they will supplant human beings. Utopian humanism also has a critical dystopian form, in which a world antagonistic to humans reaffirms the desire for a world better suited to humans than either the dystopian world or the one we currently occupy. For example, Lowry’s The Giver Quartet, which I  discuss in Chapter 8, explicitly points toward utopian possibilities that are based on recovery of older, communal, family-centered forms of being. Cherie Dimaline’s award-winning The Marrow Thieves literalizes the pillage of Native American culture and white culture’s simultaneous valorization of and indifference to Native American lives. The Native American refugees establish a communal culture connected to nature that contrasts with the white world’s cruel indifference to the human cost of sustaining its lifestyle. This utopian space within an otherwise dystopian novel, like Atwood’s organic cult God’s Gardeners in the second book of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood, proposes an alternative form of unalienated cultural participation. The utopian humanist shares romanticism’s suspicion of the corrupting influence of culture, at least as practiced in capitalist society. Most of the dystopian texts discussed in this book tend to embrace culture as the means by which we recognize the human. The following three categories all maintain an interest in the culture of the past, whether as formation that needs to be transcended because the humanism it expresses is not rational enough (Wells, e.g.), or

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  89 as inheritance that needs to be preserved (Forster, Houellebecq, Shteyngart, e.g.). Utopian anti-humanism (which in some cases might be the equivalent of utopian posthumanism) describes works that imagine utopian space inhabited by a transformed human.21 Distinct from the anti-humanism of the modernists, this version of anti-humanism looks to the future, rather than the past. H. G. Wells’s utopias fit this category. Wells is a humanist in the sense of celebrating human potential, but it is humans as they might be rather than what they are that he celebrates. His humanism is anti-romantic, anti-organic, and willing to dispense with some niceties of democracy and rights on the way to a better future. For these sins, Wells is crucial to the development of twentieth-century anti-utopianism.22 Wells, though he possesses residual nostalgia for the inefficiencies and superstitions that Orwell sees as essential to the human, acknowledges that these qualities are what stands in the way of progress. Wells can lament what has been lost, but understands, as Hillegas observes, that Victorian complacency stands between humankind and the struggle to substitute ethical for evolutionary forces.23 Still, Wells’s anti-humanism is complex. Some critics see him as a soulless technocrat who would happily trade away human foibles for rational efficiency. Hillegas, in contrast, places Wells at the head of the liberal humanist tradition, arguing that he is in fact the originator of the antiutopian humanism traditionally ascribed to Wells’s critics such as Forster, Orwell, and Huxley.24 Hillegas seeks to recuperate Wells from what he feels are unfair attacks by the anti-utopians of the “disillusioned left,” who, Hillegas argues, misread and simplify Wells’s complex attitude toward technology, and consequently make him a target for their attacks on a technologically advanced, but out-of-control “world state.” I agree with Hillegas that Wells’s poetics reflect the need to transcend a fully mechanistic universe, particularly in the application of ethical consciousness. However, distinct from the nostalgic humanism of Morris, Wells believes that human potential requires the development of new rational capacities. In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells describes a future in which reason must first be forcibly imposed on the masses; similarly, A Modern Utopia describes the “samurai” cousins of Plato’s Guardians, a voluntary ruling class responsible for keeping the world functioning smoothly. The humans of the future look back with disdain on humans of the past, accusing them of shirking responsibility for their development by relying on mechanistic ideas like evolution, which leave them “free to obey their own violent little individual motives” (81). The future humans describe prior life: Half the species of life in our planet also, half and more than half of all the things alive, were ugly or obnoxious, inane, miserable, wretched, with elaborate diseases, helplessly ill-adjusted to Nature’s

90  De-forming Character continually fluctuating conditions, when first we took this old Hag, our Mother, in hand. We have, after centuries of struggle, suppressed her nastier fancies, and washed her and combed her and taught her to respect and heed the last child of her wantonings —Man. With Man came Logos, the Word and the Will into our universe, to watch it and fear it, to learn it and cease to fear it, to know it and comprehend it and master it. So that we of Utopia are no longer the beaten and starved children of Nature, but her free and adolescent sons. We have taken over the Old Lady’s Estate. (82–83) Wells’s own dystopias, like When the Sleeper Wakes, are not anti-­utopian. Rather, they are critical of a specific sort of utopianism: that which proceeds from a purely materialist foundation and lacks a developed capacity for ethical reason. Martin Green sums up Wells’s view as “optimism about . . . the powers of contemporary science and technology and philistinism about the more esoteric manifestations of art and religion.”25 Wells’s utopias tend to treat the human cultural inheritance as less crucial than technological enhancements of life. Another version of this category comprises works that have little attachment to humans as they are or were, but sees in the human a potential to become something even more “human.” Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books, which begin in the chaos and terror of a collapsing world, offer a new human-centered religion, the Earthseed creed, that empowers humans to embrace an uncertain future. This newly-invented religion privileges human’s capacity to adapt and transform, and eventually to take to the stars where the human will evolve into still newer forms. Katharine Burdekin’s Proud Man (she is also the author of the more famous feminist, anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night) treats 1930’s England as a dystopia visited by a gender fluid person from the future. England’s inhabitants are “sub-humans,” in contrast to the “humans” of the future. As Daphne Patai points out in her introduction, Burdekin “redeems the word ‘human’ by placing it on a plane far above our current condition.”26 Samuel Delany’s alternative worlds and the idea of the prosthetic, posthuman cyborg described by Donna Haraway also exemplify this attitude. For queer and feminist writers, preservation of the old humanism is far less inviting. Envisioning new forms of the human provides both a means of critique and social dreaming. (This category might be better described as anti-nostalgic rather than anti-humanist, because it celebrates not only the human capacity to alter and create the world, but also, contra Nietzsche, because it insists that such a transformation is the capacity of all.) Dystopian humanism is responsible for most of the works in this study. Dystopian humanism fears the loss of the human subject, either to utopias or to non-utopian worlds that function as if they were dystopias,

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  91 and gives a pessimistic answer to both utopian humanism and utopian anti-humanism. Where the former imagines a return to the human as the ground of utopia and the latter imagines the need for a new sort of human, dystopian humanism insists on the old sort of human while remaining fatalistic about such a human’s prospects. Orwell, Burgess, and Ishiguro exemplify this category, posing a human in danger of being overwritten by science, by capitalism, by the state, or by an excess of reason—all hard forces, like the Übermensch beyond moral restraint, to be wielded against the “soft” humanism of the last men. An early example of this type is Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” which pits warm human against cold machine, vital sensuality against wan abstraction. Moylan reads Forster’s text as seminal, drawing attention to the “romantic humanism and privileged individualism” in Forster’s assertion of an immaterial spirituality that accounts for man’s uniqueness.27 A century later, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, renews Forster’s themes, returning to Forster’s idea of the physical world being replaced by a virtual world and making explicit the link between dystopia and the obsolescence of nineteenth-century forms of subjectivity.28 Dystopian humanism is also visible in texts that simply imagine a world that has choked off the expression of human potential, such as Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million discussed in Chapter 7, both of which treat agentic subjects as conspicuous absence. The fourth category, dystopian anti-humanism, holds that humanity left to its own devices progresses naturally toward decadence.29 This category is the negative of utopian humanism. The dystopian anti-humanist responds by embracing more traditional sources of authority, as Houellebecq, or new forms of authoritarian control that assist in amputation of aspects of the human—free will, sexual choice—that are the cause of our discontent. Houellebecq’s Submission, discussed later in this chapter, is an example of this orientation. Teresa Heffernan argues that in Houellebecq’s conception, humans are “passive victims” of historical forces, without responsibility for their future.30 The extinguishing of personality valorized by T. S. Eliot becomes not only mode of creation but theme. Unlike the dystopian humanist who would seek to reclaim historical agency, Houellebecq’s characters are only along for the ride. His texts are less warning than meditation on the exhaustion of old forms of narrated identity in the late-capitalist, posthuman nation-state, and the increasingly reactionary desperation of the fantasies of transcendence such a state spawns. A text’s attitude toward works of the past, or toward the stylistic orientation of those works, is revealing. The utopian seeks to transcend the cultural past, the dystopian, even the critical dystopian, most often to preserve some aspects of the cultural past—whether out of fear of the utopian future, or out of a belief in humanity’s capacity to move toward a more just world. Thus, books and the cultural heritage surface again and

92  De-forming Character again as motifs in utopias and dystopias, usually representing the collective human inheritance, to be burnt or cherished. Bradbury imagines classic books as the living heart of freedom, while for Marinetti museums are mausoleums, space that needs to be cleared for something new to emerge. Nietzsche views culture as a millstone around man’s neck, whereas Matthew Arnold cautions against the “overvaluing of machinery” that leads to a darkling plane and the snuffing out of the sweetness and light found in “the best that has been thought and said.”31 Ayn Rand proposes an alternative form of anti-collectivist anti-utopian dystopian humanism. Her protagonist, who narrates in the collective form “we,” escapes the socialist “paradise” of the city and discovers a modernist house in the forest stocked with a library. There, he discovers the magic word “I.” “It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house that I saw the word ‘I.’ And when I understood this word, the book fell from my hands, and I wept, I who had never known tears. I wept in deliverance and in pity for all mankind” (114). While Rand embraces culture, she is an outlier, a romantic anti-utopian. The division among categories is not always clear. Huxley may be a humanist, but Brave New World, in its satirizing of the will to misery is both an example of dystopian humanism and dystopian anti-humanism— if John the Savage is the fate of the human, then we are all doomed. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is an anti-humanist critique of what humans at bottom are, but also betrays a dystopian humanist yearning for the grown-up culture that keeps our ugly, primitive selves in check (even if such a culture also produces the war that frames the novel’s initiating plane crash). B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two may be dystopian antihumanism or utopian anti-humanism, depending on how attached one is to free will. Still, dividing the categories in this way allows us to define the poetics of the last man in terms of a textual attitude toward competing models of narrating the human. In the next section I show dystopia’s roots in a humanist character squeezed between utopian objectivity and novelistic subjectivity. In the final section, I  take up the two previous dystopian categories in brief readings, showing how representative texts deal with the humanist legacy.

Dystopianism, Naturalism, and Modernism Like other experimental aesthetics that emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, dystopia confronts not just the world, but also the literary past. Dystopia’s plot and form register the collision between an expansive, private, individual sublime and the materialism of the modern bureaucratic state. But dystopia also registers the collision between competing discursive modes—a nineteenth-century mode in which the autonomous, interior subject is the subject of history, and late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century modes that undermine the human’s central

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  93 status. The dystopian scenario in which the individual is swallowed up by species-level progress or disaster concretizes aesthetic tensions. By the twentieth century, dystopians like Orwell have barricaded themselves within cultural forms that have cracked under the strain of modernity. Nineteenth-century characters reappear in physical settings and/or formal contexts that foreclose the exercise of their humanist prerogatives. Between the universes of romanticism and positivism, realism and naturalism, and against the threat of modernist disintegration, we find the dystopian humanist subject holding on for dear life, occupying increasingly cramped textual space. Dystopian characterization draws on the logic of romanticism in both its attentiveness to singular, subjective experience and its anti-rationalist tendencies. Though humanism and romanticism are often opposed on the grounds of romanticism’s seeking for the transcendent sublime that lies beyond human grasp, they intersect in their assertion of a private right to access the universal. They also share a tendency to nostalgia, to look back on the past, whether personal or cultural, with a sense of having fallen away. English romanticism in particular, via Wordsworth, provides a model. Wordsworth’s introduction to Lyrical Ballads sets out a poetics that emphasizes the ordinary, using situations and language “really used by men.”32 A life unmediated by ornament or scholasticism is no less suited for apprehending the momentous—the human is to be accessed not via the person of technical genius, but via the one who feels deeply.33 Olafson writes, “it is the idiom of everyday life and the framework of understanding we usually call ‘common sense’ that humanism presupposes.”34 I want to argue here that this language and this human are central to what so many dystopias defend. It is what Howe is referring to when he says of Nineteen Eighty-Four, “[a]bout such a world it is impossible to write a novel, if only because the relationships taken for granted in the novel are here suppressed.”35 The utopian solution becomes oppressive precisely because it seeks to erase the ordinary aspects of human life, including language, that, though they might have led to species-level disaster, are also essential characteristics of what is conceived of as a fully human life. Dystopian poetics and themes are reflexively intertwined. Perry Meisel in The Myth of the Modern defines modernism as a defensive reaction against suspicions of its own belatedness, expressing the “desire to seek a place outside of the tradition that enables it; “Reflexive Realism” is the means by which such a battle is fought, the modernist text becoming “a function of the conventions of its own narration.”36 The same can be said of dystopia. Jameson understands the rise in utopian writing at the end of the nineteenth century as response to mechanistic naturalism. Wegner extends Jameson’s insight, arguing that the dystopian writing that follows is in turn a counter-reaction to the excesses of the utopian attempt to escape from naturalism’s mechanical ambit. Wegner notes the tensions

94  De-forming Character that emerge from this clash: “desirous of a radical change of affairs but unable to imagine any mechanisms or agency by which such a change may come about, these dystopias oscillate between the radical openness of Utopia and the asphyxiating closure of naturalism.”37 Writers like Orwell struggle to reconcile autonomy with the deterministic naturalistic universe, their dystopias reflecting the clash between their conception of the autonomous subject and the language available to them. The solidity of naturalism’s setting provides a starting point for potential political transformation, but naturalism’s restricted view of choice also erases the subject who could usher in such a change, or who stands to benefit from it.38 Dystopia operates in the space where the autonomous subject has become a ghost, an intuition lacking a language for its expression. The rise of modern dystopia coincides with both this crisis of faith in the novel of the past and with the emergence of new forms that adapt novelistic character for the present. Heffernan observes that modernists were busy “dismantling the belief in a meaningful end,” and argues that this loss of faith in endings is characteristic of the twentieth-century novel.39 Trotter notes that by the 1920’s, the novel “as traditionally conceived was no longer up to the job: that its imaginary worlds did not, in fact correspond to the way one’s fellows spend their entire lives.”40 Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”  famously opens with the claim,  “[o]n or about December  1910 human character changed” (4). Referring to the “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition that brought Continental modernism to Britain, Woolf gestures toward a larger crisis of a realist tradition no longer capable of describing the present. The line that separates Trotter’s “naked self” from the “naked world” blurs; both categories break down under new pressures of multiplied subjectivity and decaying institutional authority over a stable real. Modernism is the mode of a world rapidly separating from the verities of its past, an encoding of newly liberated energies of intellectual and industrial production and the forms, angles, and sensibilities they spawn. These sensibilities look simultaneously forward and backwards. If on the one hand, the new forms propose a renewed subjectivity fit for modernity, on the other they threaten to blast old forms of subjectivity into oblivion. Or, if, on the one hand, modernism reacts against egalitarian, democratic, or even populist tendencies in romanticism’s embrace of the spontaneous, untutored man of deep feeling, on the other it adopts romanticism’s fascination with the cosmically invested subject in possession of a vastly expanded sphere of expected agency. Woolf’s comment is indicative of both the sense of ending and beginning, of promise and threat, with which dystopia contends. The early years of the twentieth century are marked by the search for a language and structure capable of articulating both the end of something old and the beginning of something as yet unknown. Marinetti’s techno-fascist fantasies of transformation, Ludwig Meidner’s apocalyptic landscapes,

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  95 Wells’s science fiction romances all grapple with a sense of imminent catastrophe. Fire or ice, whimper or bang, the end is nigh as Christian teleology gives way to a new register of secular despair. Kermode argues that the abandonment of religious teleology for a secular narrative strands us in an order without pattern or progress.41 Whether the ending will be the result of accident or human error, the coming apocalypse promises no uncovering of deeper meaning, no revelation, no final valuation of what has come before. The naked shingles of the new century begin to look more and more like a waste land. While World War I may have put a fine point on the sense that European civilization had dead-ended, the language was already in place. Paul Fussell points to Hardy’s funerary themes as anticipating the hopelessness produced by the war.42 In the “Darkling Thrush,” Hardy envisions a world in which the “The land’s sharp features seemed to be/ the Century’s corpse outleant,” an image Eliot reprises in the famous opening lines of his paean to modern paralysis, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:” “Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table” (Complete 3). The only journeys left lead haphazardly through a dying world. Nor is there hope for resurrection. Hardy’s “ancient pulse of germ and birth/ [that h]as shrunken hard and dry” becomes Eliot’s cruel April and waterless desert that signals the end of the cycle of renewal. Hardy and Eliot bracket the war with images of desolation, the consciousness of their poems bearing witness to a pervasive sense of despair. Neither Hardy nor Eliot is a romantic in their despair. Both practice a cooling irony, wary of the romantics’ excess of sentiment. And yet Hardy’s and Eliot’s disillusionment carries an unmistakable, if faint, echo of the excesses of romantic agony—disillusionment being the special property of those who once were illusioned. In fact, it is the very faintness of the echo that is central to the despair—the narrative voices of Hardy and Eliot yearn for an affective bottom their thought-tormented sensibilities will never allow them to reach. The downward transfiguration of despair is only available to those willing to hurl themselves into the intensity of the maelstrom. Hardy and Eliot never fully quiet the rational, ironic voice that deflates despair into a mere misery that one must live with, that keeps them from jumping into the volcano. Dystopia picks up on the high modern sense of futility, a sense that drives Eliot and T. E. Hulme back into the past for succor. But dystopia is also visceral, transfiguring, an antidote to the aloofness of Eliot’s and Hulme’s modernist poetics. The end of history, the end of the subject is more than a metaphor for a condition of anxiety. The metaphor becomes the real, even as the prospect of a meaningful ending leaches out of history. Modernism’s radical expansion in the sphere of the subject, answering naturalism’s expansion in the domain of setting, produces yet another vector for dystopian anxiety—the sense that the physical real no longer

96  De-forming Character grounds the subject. The modernist novels of Woolf, Proust, and Joyce are noteworthy for shifting the relative weight granted to inner and outer worlds. It is what Woolf has in mind when she critiques the Edwardian novelists for laying too much stress “upon the fabric of things:” They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there. To give them their due, they have made that house much better worth living in. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about  people, and only in the second about the houses they live in, that is the wrong way to set about it. (18–19) Woolf works from inside out rather than outside in, claiming that it is character, for example, a random “Mrs. Brown,” that must occupy the organizing center of the novel. Woolf embraces the possibilities for characterization opened up by the shock to form—as a woman, she is less likely to nostalgicize the organizing principles of the past. Male modernists like Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, and Lewis, while embracing modernity’s forms, are more critical of modernity’s effect on character. Louis Menand reminds that in Pound’s modernist credo, “the ‘It’ in ‘Make It New’ is the Old.”43 The modernists’ poetics of fragmentation are intended to mimic the condition of modernity, not to validate it. In this sense, they offer in their own way a nostalgic, dystopian critique of progress, posing the past as the absent alternative to degeneration in the present. High Modernist reaction to mass culture is also a reaction against the rise of mass democracy, as Trotter argues.44 Eliot’s, Pound’s, and Lewis’s modernism is a modernism of aristocrats—a defensive gesture designed to keep culture in the hands of its rightful heirs (for D. H. Lawrence, it is an aristocracy of individuals rather than culture). While Eliot draws heavily on popular as well as high culture for his allusions, the resulting cacophony tells of a world where traditional boundaries have broken down. Modernists translate the threat of blending into a formal vocabulary that stages the corruption of the subject, but also its evacuation as a stable category. For example, Charles Taylor, in his landmark study of modern identity, Sources of the Self, draws attention to modernism’s opposed subjectivist and anti-subjectivist tendencies, where subjectivity is simultaneously expanded, but also objectified, treated phenomenologically rather than ontologically.45 Paul Sheehan uses the term “anthropometric” to describe this tendency—the subject becomes a mechanical recording device, shed of transcendent destiny even as the domain of subjectivity expands under the mapmaker’s hand.46 In this way, literary modernism appears as both critique and threat, a symptom of the very progress it seeks to critically address. Though the relationship between humanism and modernism is often portrayed as antithetical, more recent criticism by Sheehan, Stephen Sicari,

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  97 and Elizabeth Kuhn complicates that relation.47 Much like dystopia itself, modernism’s relationship to humanism has both a “classical” and “critical” reading. The “classical” reading frames modernism’s preference for portrayal of a fragmented, exteriorized subject as anti-humanist. The “critical” reading portrays modernism’s attack on humanist ideals and turn to religion as, in Sicari’s words, an attempt to “fill the void left by their own withering critiques with a constructed entity that might indeed be able to ground our sense of virtue and value.”48 For Sicari, modernist nostalgia is not a way of receding from the present, but an effort of renewal. “Nostalgia for a human past is not wistful and debilitating if it is the only way to remain in contact with our humanity.”49 Kuhn as well identifies the anti-humanist tendency of the high moderns, associating it with a transformative aesthetic rather than nostalgia. She writes, “[a]n alternative anti-humanist modernism dethrones ego, consciousness and interiority with an eye to the furthering of life rather than life’s cancellation; life as a force capable, at its best, of taking the human beyond itself into unthinkable modes of alterity.”50 In her reading, the modernist antihumanism of poets like Yeats is a quest for radical new forms of alterity that move beyond the subjective. Still, however life-affirming this antihumanism might appear, writers like Orwell and his descendants, steeped in the nineteenth-century novel’s portrayal of the individual subject as the living, breathing, feeling center of the novel, cannot help but to resist modernism’s movement away from the subjective. Thus, though a writer like Orwell might share impulses toward high nostalgia, modernism becomes part of the problem politically, thematically, and formally. The over-naturalistic dystopian text reflects the desire to tether the subject to the real, but also the fear of what happens when the naturalistic text restricts the possibility of transcendence. The high modernist text’s nostalgia for the authority of the past, for the restoration of the division between the sacred and the profane such as in Eliot, reflects a deeply human desire for divine logos, but that threatens to impoverish the human if pursued too vigorously. In the struggle for accommodation between interior self and exterior real, the dystopia tends to exaggerate both positions, making them incompatible. On the one hand, dystopia embraces the formal perspectives of the past because they authorize the split between subjective and objective worlds upon which a view of the historical subject depends. On the other, dystopia recognizes the inadequacy of these forms for ensuring the subject’s survival. By shackling the interior self to an inhospitable and inflexible real, dystopia replays modernism’s formal project, letting the inflection falling on setting rather than form. Writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Wells share a sense of the old novel’s obsolescence, but they also resist the new forms of subjectivity modernism proposes. Instead, their texts invoke nostalgia for narrative forms of the past, their characters throwbacks and their texts resistant to the new forms Woolf and Joyce propose for the novel.51 What is left is a

98  De-forming Character romantic desire to transcend that lacks modernism’s textual means of repositioning such a desire along a formal axis. Other writers like Forster try to bridge the divide, developing a distinct dystopian consciousness that replicates this formal struggle.

Defensive Forms: Humanism, Anti-humanism, and the Dystopian Novel Dystopian Humanism As with Wells’s Tono-Bungay and When the Sleeper Wakes in Chapter 2, E. M. Forster expresses the struggle with form in both dystopian and non-dystopian forms. Forster is defensive in his desire for a human who retains a hint of mysterious attachment to the sublime. In turn, Forster defends the novel as an unsystematic form capable of expressing such a character: “[p]rinciples and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here—or if applied, their results must be submitted to re-examination. And who is the re-examiner? Well, I’m afraid it be the human heart.”52 In his condition of England novel Howards End (1910) and his short story “The Machine Stops,” he turns this concern about the novel into plot. Arnold’s “overvaluing of machinery” that accompanies overreliance on “principles and systems” is unhealthy for society as well as the novel. Howards End provides a realistic vehicle for concerns about the fate of the liberal humanist character, exploring the impact of modernity on the condition of England. The forces are technological, economic, and philosophical and include the motor car, the rise of a newly literate lowermiddle class and the new capitalist class that either exploits it or is indifferent to it, and the decline of cultured humanism in the face of economic upheaval. Forster gently satirizes both continental liberalism and homegrown mercantile philistinism in his tale of the entangled fortunes of the Schlegel and Wilcox clans. The fate of England rests on the ability to build a “rainbow bridge” capable of connecting the prose with the passion, the Wilcoxes’ vital but crude energy with the Schlegel’s idealism. Importantly, England’s fate also rests on whether or not such a bridge will extend into the emerging lower middle class represented by the clerk Leonard Bast, connecting them meaningfully to the land and to a sense of national identity. Here, Forster takes up Arnold’s problematic from Culture and Anarchy—the need to give the newly literate classes a stake in culture because, as Terry Eagleton’s observes, “if the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”53 Written alongside Howards End, “The Machine Stops” (1909) picks up similar themes, but without Howards End’s dialectical balancing between classes or aesthetic attitudes. Forster’s critique of urbanization and over-reliance on technology associates him with the anti-modern

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  99 humanism of Carlyle and Morris.54 The world of “The Machine Stops” is the result of a toxic marriage between Wilcoxes and Schlegels, without the tempering effects of Burkean attachment to the literal ground: Wilcoxian energy has produced a mechanical hive that provides for material comforts and protects its residents from a presumably uninhabitable natural world (perhaps also a consequence of Wilcoxian industrialism); Schlegelian idealism has abandoned the world of things for the world of over-mediated ideas. There is no metaphorical bridge to suggest the possibility of interchange, nor farm to provide a potential meeting place for the forces of progress and culture. Forster simply rolls the two classes into each other and imagines an England—and world—that is utterly deracinated, standardized, and landless. People live in individual cells suspended underground in the machine, where all needs are provided for by the machine. The machine stands in between the human and all encounters with the real, the virtual exchange of “ideas” being the main form of connection. The Wych elm with the embedded pig’s teeth in Howards End, symbol of agrarian rootedness, is here replaced by standardized rooms with consoles and screens to mediate and denature immediate experience. The story follows Kuno, who believes it is possible to live outside the machine on the poisoned surface of the earth, and who seeks a visit with his mother Vashti. She reluctantly agrees to visit his cell but finds no interest in the journey outside in an airship. Forster’s narrative voice is tart: “[t]hey were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, ‘No ideas here,’ and hid Greece behind a metal blind” (15). The substitution of ideas for things, of images for the real, has been made possible by technology that has succeeded in easing all struggle. Like the Eloi in Wells’s The Time Machine, humans have physically degenerated into caricatures, though here they are grotesque. Vashti is introduced sitting in her armchair “a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus” (3). When Vashti arrives at Kuno’s room, she sees no purpose in having traveled: “the knobs, the reading-desk with the Book, the temperature, the atmosphere, the illumination—all were exactly the same. And if Kuno himself, flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last, what profit was there in that? She was too wellbred to shake him by the hand” (16). Forster imagines a world where technology has irreparably stunted the “human spirit” that plays such an important role in his novels. Even religion has been absorbed into and made meaningless by the machine. The Book of the Machine— the machine’s manual—has become an object of worship, a fetish no longer understood except as a form of religion. No longer does the word “unnatural” signal violation of human norms—in the machine, to be “unmechanical” is to be a heretic and to risk being cast out by the authorities. The Wilcoxes have become the Schlegels: when the

100  De-forming Character mending apparatus that repairs the machine begins to break down, no one knows any longer how to fix it. The machine eventually breaks and Kuno and his mother are cast out onto the surface. The story ends with Kuno and his mother dying, but Kuno claims to have seen the Homeless on the surface who will continue the species. Kuno’s final words reclaim Vashti’s and his own tragic humanity, framed in terms of the medieval past: “We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Ælfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl” (36). Like Waugh’s “Love Among the Ruins,” which satirizes the welfare state with a story of the future where crime is rewarded and virtue punished, Forster’s story hinges on a critique of collective solutions to the problem of individual humanity. Forster’s values are the conventional heroic values of a more adventurous, more mystical, and more culturally unified age, where all can agree nature and spirit are good, soulless machines are bad, even if those machines have fed and clothed the world’s population. The Wilcoxes may have become Schlegels, but the Schlegel’s have also become Wilcoxes, choosing material ease over heroic quests. In Howards End, Forster’s omniscient narrator (a close relative of the narrative voice in “The Machine Stops”) observes, “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.” (43). Forster is being arch; the very poor are not a fit subject for novels because, presumably, the novel is a middle-class art form, and the poor would require too much tricking up (by poets) or too much sociologizing (by statisticians) to enter into its discourse. In “The Machine Stops,” Forster excises them even more forcefully. The story bulldozes subtle class differences, simplifying setting into stark antinomies of nature/machine, individual/collective, spirit/flesh. The class problem has been solved by the machine—there is only one class. There are no poor, no lower middle class (except perhaps for those who work on the airships and must be in contact with other bodies). All humans have been rolled into a single type that parodies both middle-class philistinism and high culture pretension. It is the fear Forster articulates in Howards End, of materialism untempered by humanism and idealism drained of vitality. The difference is that here, there is no potential for interchange, for a fresh synthesis to emerge out of the encounter, because there is no one left to have such an encounter. The difference between “The Machine Stops” and Howards End then is not necessarily in theme, but in the degree to which each text creates a dynamic, open setting for character. Moylan positions “The Machine Stops” as the dividing line between simple anti-utopian pessimism and later dystopias which generate possibilities for imagining a better world than the one the author critiques. But it is also poised on the dividing line between formal dystopia and traditional fictional narrative. Forster’s

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  101 dystopianism finds expression in an exaggerated conflict between subject and setting. For the majority of “The Machine Stops” characters are either absorbed completely in setting (Vashti and the other machine dwellers) or completely at odds with setting (Kuno). The relation between humanist character and world portrayed by dystopia is openly hostile, such that there is no opportunity for reconciliation and accommodation. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story provides a more recent example of Forster’s dystopian humanism. For Shteyngart, the bookish humanist, believing in the ineffable human spirit, stands as the last man to fall to globalizing materialism. Shteyngart’s protagonist Lenny laments the decline of books and the world that valued them. The form Shteyngart utilizes—the Russian tragicomic tale of grand passion—is counterpoint to the world he describes, a postmodern, posthuman society that no longer has any need for novels. Lenny, 39, works for a company that promises immortality to the very rich. He is in Italy to recruit “High Net Worth Individuals” as customers and falls in love with Eunice Park, a recent college graduate. Lenny models his love affair after Chekhov’s “Three Years,” in which Laptev, an ugly but rich middle-aged man falls in love with and marries the younger Julia who does not love him at first. This is the super sad true love story of the novel’s title, but like Nabokov’s Lolita, it is really a nostalgic love letter to a lost language. Eunice thinks of books as doorsteps (25)—the younger generation is repulsed by their smell. When Eunice moves in with Lenny, he sprays his books with Pine-Sol to keep her from being offended (144). In a poignant moment, Eunice tells Lenny “I’ve never really learned how to read texts . . . just to scan them for info” (277) and, when he laughs at her, she cries.55 Shteyngart’s novel is set in a near future in which the United States has been taken over by the American Restoration Authority, complete with misspelled signs. America is collapsing into a subliterate idiocracy while China is ascendant. Everyone relies on apparats, an advanced smartphone/Google glasses-like device that allows everyone to rate everyone else and stream constant information; meanwhile, individuals’ credit ratings are publicly displayed on poles as they pass. Shteyngart’s novel derives its pathos from its placement of the private human in a techinfested world that thwarts the privacy so essential to the development of the modern novel. Along with its nostalgia for language, as Michiko Kakatani points out in her New York Times review, the text is also nostalgic for the New York City of today, which Shteyngart understands as too precarious to survive the coming onslaught of global authoritarian capitalism.56 The postscript of the text, in which Lenny has lost both his love and his hope for tech-assisted immortality—it turns out the mortality-canceling product his company manufactures is actually toxic—frames the novel as an ironic artifact: “When I wrote these diary entries so many years ago it never occurred to me that any text would ever find a new generation

102  De-forming Character of readers.” Of course, the new readers are the Chinese, gathering up the Western past as collectors. Chinese reviewers celebrate it as “a tribute to literature as it once was” (327), while American reviewers are more taken with Eunice’s non-writer’s voice, a “relief from Lenny’s relentless navel-gazing” (327). The text is a self-conscious version of the “last novel,” drawing our attention to the precarious fate of novelistic discourse. Lenny is a “last man” clinging to an outmoded version of what it means to be human. Information streaming on the apparat “knows every last stinking detail about the world” he says, “whereas . . . books only know the minds of their authors” (78). Of course, this is the novel’s project; not to quantify, but to stage such a human. No longer celebrating the private individual or affirming such an individual by depicting incursions on its turf, Shteyngart looks backward on a dying animal, remembering with a kind of affectionate horror. If it were merely politics, we might still make other choices. Shteyngart is less concerned with warning than with mourning. Dystopian Anti-humanism Houellebecq, in works like The Elementary Particles (1998), Platform (2001), and The Possibility of an Island (2005), is the ultimate version of Benjamin’s alienated man, the connoisseur who takes pleasure in mankind’s destruction, including his own. If Super Sad True Love Story clings to a past iteration of the human, Houellebecq’s Submission bids good riddance. Houellebecq gives us a human so repulsive there is not much for which to mourn in the context of a novel that is, in Heller McAlpin’s words, “too distasteful to be amusing.”57 Houellebecq’s Modern Man, the progeny of free markets, sexual liberation, and individualism, is decadent and adrift in the dying utopia of late capitalism—a world which, like Bernard Marx in Huxley’s Brave New World, he is incapable of enjoying. As in Shteyngart, functioning democratic society is receding, with authoritarianism rushing in to fill the space left by the receding sea of secular, liberal humanist faith. But Shteyngart’s critique of technomaterialism comes from the left while Houellebecq’s critique of secular decadence comes from the right. Houellebecq’s solution to the problem of modernity is to replace ideals of civic progress with retrograde fantasies of illiberal political and cultural organization. The escape Houellebecq proposes turns out to be a different kind of dystopia—a theocratic paradise for men, a hell for everyone else. Houellebecq’s protagonist, François, is a French academic, an expert on the fin de siècle writer Huysmans, whom he seeks to emulate. François’s teaching job at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris III is just enough to keep him in TV dinners and sex with his students. If Shteyngart turns data into pathos, Houellebecq’s style is to make data out of what was previously considered human. François, observes, “Doctoral

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  103 students tend to be exhausting. For them it was all just starting to mean something, and for me, nothing mattered except which Indian dinner I’d microwave (Chicken Biryani? Chicken Tikka Masala? Chicken Rogan Josh?) while I watched the political talk shows on Channel 2” (24). The parenthetical listing of microwave meal choices re-frames possibility as encompassing only the most banal of consumer choices. Houellebecq writes a literature that has abandoned any pretense of there being any free choice worth pursuing. Literature is treated to the same banalizing perspective. Like Shteyngart, Houellebecq’s reference point for character is nostalgia for the literary past: Shteyngart admires the Russians; Houellebecq’s models are the fin de siècle decadents. On the one hand, Houellebecq understands literature in classical terms as a defining frame for the human experience, possessing an ineffable essence: Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is hard to define . . . it can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs. (4–5) On the other hand, however, he has François mock this discourse with a materialist counter-discourse of ironic asides, such as “[m]uch, maybe too much has been written about literature” (4), “[a]cademic study of literature leads basically nowhere” (8), and “literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods” (8). In fact, his teaching job holds no interest for him—teaching is merely a way of trolling for potential sexual partners. Even this barely motivates him. When his ex-girlfriend visits, he muses “I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die” (30). Francois’s malaise, and by extension the malaise of modern man, can be solved neither by a return to religion or a return to culture. It is too late. What is left is a naturalist expression of determined outcomes, written as if it has already happened, the human it expresses no more than “a jumble of organs in slow decomposition . . . life an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean” (78). Not only is there no choice worth pursuing, there is no plot other than a biological one. And, indeed, with the exception of drastic changes in political setting, very little happens in the novel. François goes desultorily about his business while in the background a national election is taking place. With the threat of violence looming in the background and the traditional parties splitting the vote, the top two vote-getters are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and the fictional Mohammed Ben Abbas of the French Muslim Brotherhood. Abbas, a slick modern Islamist politician, is elected

104  De-forming Character in the run-off when the left throws its support behind him, agreeing to defund public education and a host of Islam-friendly reforms to France’s economic and cultural life, including polygamy. François leaves the city and drives south to avoid the chaos and violence spawned by the unfolding election. The novel briefly approaches the post-apocalyptic dystopia when he stops at a deserted gas station on the way out of Paris and finds a murdered cashier and two dead North Africans in the parking lot, one still holding a gun, before going on his way with the sandwich, a nonalcoholic beer and Michelin guide he took from the store. Dead cashiers, sandwiches, it is all the same to him. During his time away from Paris, François attempts to enjoy the landscapes to no avail: “I  sat on the edge of the cliff, trying and failing to lose myself in the landscape” (108). Romanticism is dead. He does, however, find relief from political turmoil by visiting a chapel in Rocamadour and contemplating the chapel’s famous Black Madonna statue, a medieval relic said to perform miracles. The novel’s turning point occurs when François stumbles into a reading of a patriotic poem by Péguy in the church—François finds himself transported by the statue’s austere simplicity. “Moral judgment, individual judgment, individuality itself, were not clear ideas in the mind of Romanesque man, and I felt my own individuality dissolving” (134) he thinks as he sits before the Virgin of Rocamadour. The statue exemplifies Hulme’s “anti-vital” element in the divine: “What this severe statue expressed was not attachment to a homeland, to a country; not some celebration of the soldier’s manly courage; not even a child’s desire for his mother. It was something mysterious, priestly, and royal that surpassed Péguy’s understanding, to say nothing of Huysmans’s” (137). Upon leaving the chapel, however, he feels emptied out, “fully deserted by the spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body” (137). He is too deep into modernity for either literature or sincere spirituality to come to the rescue. François returns to Paris to find his college, now funded by Saudi Arabians, reopened as the Islamic University of Paris Sorbonne. All those not willing to convert to Islam are unceremoniously dismissed. He temporarily flees to the abbey where Huysmans took monastic vows, hoping to follow his footsteps to faith. The prayers that fill the monks with joy leave him feeling excluded, like Hardy’s New Year’s Eve traveler who encounters the thrush, and the smoke detector in his room ruins the sacred atmosphere with the banality of “its little red hostile eye” (179). Unable to recover the feeling of spirituality from the chapel, he returns to Paris and finds himself in a bar where people are “talking in loud voices, mainly about real estate and vacations;” but, he observes, “[i]t gave me no satisfaction to be back among people like myself” (180). When he is offered his old position back and a prestigious editorship if he embraces Islam, François, depressed and abandoned, decides that life as a convert “might actually have more to offer” (242). The novel ends with

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  105 him preparing to take up his old position and his old pursuit of sexual relations with his students: the pay will be higher, and “Muslim women are devoted and submissive” (243). It is hard to sort out exactly what Houellebecq’s targets are. Adam Leith Gollner calls Houellebecq a “polemicist who isn’t discernibly for anything.”58 Adam Gopnik considers him a satirist and the target of the novel the fecklessness of French intellectuals.59 What makes Houellebecq’s work so odd is that it is unclear whether he believes the resolution to be a potential paradise or a different sort of dystopia—whether the text’s satiric energy is directed against the decadent West, or toward the possible solution. Like his modernist predecessors, Houellebecq wishes for earlier forms of spiritual authority. The difference, however, lies in his attitude toward both cause and solution. Whereas the early Eliot links the dystopian-esque present in which spiritual drift has resulted in paralysis, and the post-apocalyptic waste land, where the promise of renewal has died, to abandonment of vigorous Christian ideals and culture, Houellebecq is a naturalist in expressing causality. As Douglas Morrey writes, for Houellebecq “the decline of humanity” is “an evolutionary fatality over which there is little sense in being judgmental.”60 Houellebecq’s flat prose, often criticized for its clumsiness, is the perfect form with which to render a world drained of affect, lending his narrative an aura of inevitability that clashes with the possibility of meaningful political action. It is an aesthetic of retrospective description, the last refuge of those who have given up. François embodies this dissociation, considering himself “as political as a bath towel” (37). Ben Jeffery calls this attitude of ineffectuality “depressive realism,” and associates it with the idea that books—novels actually— are useless; once the “very precious ‘immaterial’ vocabulary we use to talk about what it’s like being human” has been rendered ineffectual by materialism and biological fatalism, there isn’t much left.61 And yet he enacts them by subtracting from them a human who can earnestly defend them. The anti-humanism of the novel is attributable to the absence of any positive pole. Even François’s conversion does not reaffirm the ­transcendental—it only reaffirms his louche materialism, now sanctioned by a theocratic state. If Francois is a model of the spiritual hunger of the West, this hunger is about as deep as his hunger for Chicken Biryani. François’s problem—which is really Houellebecq’s perennial problem, that sexual liberation invites market forces to take over where religion and community left off—is solved. Hardly a spiritual apotheosis, it is merely a relief to discover a system that can supply submissive females to mediocre middle-aged men. Prufrock cannot ask the fateful question; Francois no longer has to bother trying. On one level, the novel is a fantasy of return to a zero-sum masculinity, where men of the official religion possess rights superior to all others. On another, it is a fantasy of potency played out at the national level, a

106  De-forming Character character study of French post-colonial anomie. The subtext is the lengths the elite will go to in order to preserve French relevance. Abbas’s plans to annex Arab states to Europe and, with this expanded power base, to make French the second working language of European institutions is lauded by the French intelligentsia. Never mind that the price is Islamification of French institutions. As a former government spy explains to François, “[f]or these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism” (125). Ben Abbas in a speech argues that the desire to return to religion is deep and crosses sectarian lines. What Jewish, Muslims, and Christian families want is for their “their children’s education to go beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge, to include spiritual instruction in their own traditions” (86). What this means, however—and what Houellebecq does not gloss over, which is how his novel becomes not just political but dystopian—is that certain rights the modern secular cosmopolitan understands as universal will disappear. Women will marry young and be forced to study Home Ec., with only “a small minority studying art or literature. That’s their version of an ideal society” (64), the former spy informs François. Ben Abbas finds plenty of allies for his desire to “restore the centrality, the dignity, of the family as the building block of society” (163). The consequences of this reorientation of rights is far-reaching. Drawing on Christian Distributist doctrine and Pope Pius XI, Ben Abbas argues for dismantling the French welfare state, as welfare properly belongs in the nuclear family. This version of return to the family is not a return to a more individualistic humanism, as the analysis of Young Adult dystopias in Chapter 8 shows, however; it is an embrace of the separation of spheres, between the spiritual, governmental, and earthly planes. Removing the state from the business of caretaking may resemble the humanist urge to de-rationalize, but in this case it is intended to enforce a strict boundary between the spiritual and the ordinary realms: to limit individuals from participation in public life by dismantling the public sphere required by democracy and thereby restricting the autonomy of individuals to shape their own future. Modernity makes strange bedfellows. As Mishra puts it, the desire for “purer, more beautiful and honest existence” animates both right and left.62 For Mishra, D’Annunzio’s short-lived Fiume expedition crystallizes the themes of modernity: “ambiguous emancipation of the human will, the challenges and perils of individuality, the yearning for re-enchantment, flight from boredom, demented utopianism, the politics of direct action, self-surrender to large movements with stringent rules and charismatic leaders, and the cult of redemptive violence.”63 The new dispensation of power takes hold precisely because so many elements of contemporary French society share the sentiments Mishra describes, including lack of commitment to rights that apply across political, religious, and ethnic boundaries.

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  107 This is the core of the novel’s dystopian anti-humanism. Ben Abbas frames the new France in terms familiar to both the anti-modern right and left, as a defense of organicism against bureaucracy. However, in practice, this means replacing rights with universal truths distant from human intervention, much in the fashion of the ostensibly antihumanist modernism of a Hulme. The tension in romantic humanism between the local—the family, the tribe, the village—and the global is typically resolved by rejecting imposition on others of a way of life, by the desire to be left to one’s own culture of hogsheads and pennyweights. While humanism refuses to abstract the individual human from its calculations of virtue, anti-humanism insists on a transcendental standard that invokes not only on an idea of the human, but a practice, violating Mill’s argument that people must have the freedom to pursue future selves according to their own inclinations.64 The text shows the easy slippage from humanist nostalgia to reactionary assertions of transcendentally authorized privilege, enforced by a political organization that makes distinctions among the rights it grants to various constituencies. Houellebecq is neither nostalgic nor utopian; he is dystopian because he adopts the passive position of the dystopian subject, afraid to look either backwards or forwards. Taylor notes modernism’s “counterepiphanic thrust” that liberates objects from “inauthentic meaning” and “the accretions of the instrumental society” (467).65 Like the modernists, Houellebecq shares this desire—the problem is that there is nothing on the other side. The only world he is capable of imagining is one in which he is saved from his own desire to be human by the irresistible force of authority. Like John Donne, who in “Holy Sonnet XIV” begs his God to make an honest man of him— Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. —dystopia will be ushered in not by accident but by humans seeking relief from their own humanity. Like Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, François at the end has won the battle over himself. He finally loves big brother. But unlike for Winston, the self was not so much to lose.

Notes 1. Wegner makes an astute observation in his assessment of Orwell’s N ­ ineteen Eighty-Four: when Charrington substitutes dollars for pounds in giving the price of the glass object that has caught Winston’s eye—“that’d cost you four dollars. I  can remember a time when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds”—he invokes the rise of the United States as global hegemon. “Pounds,” like aesthetic objects, are associated with an “authentically English past,” that is in danger of being wiped away by the mighty dollar. The paperweight will later become associated with Winston’s individual

108  De-forming Character autonomy when he is captured and it shatters, suggesting the novel’s linking of Winston to a crisis of national character (Imaginary Communities 212). 2. G. K. Chesterton carries this idea even further in his own futuristic fantasy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. The future turns out to look very much like the past to Chesterton—only all seems to be settled. Everyone gets along fine with each other until Adam Wayne takes seriously King Auberon Quin’s exhortations to pageantry and parochial pride. He begins a revolution, and Londoners rediscover factionalism and war, a much better state for Chesterton as it makes possible glorious heroic stupidity. 3. Gordon Marsden in History Today observes numerous similarities, including their shared mistrust of their fellow intellectuals, and their belief that over-reliance on reason leads to the belief that “cruel means are justified by abstract ends” (25). 4. George Orwell 23. Williams ascribes to Orwell a failure to properly analyze capitalism as a system. By personalizing and particularizing what is in fact a systemic issue, he falls back into to a “naïve myth” (22) of family, which he criticizes but then restores. Orwell’s failures as a systematic thinker also inform Williams’s critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four. 5. Lionel Trilling sees Nineteen Eighty-Four as symptomatic of the failure of the great humanist project, arguing that the novel makes the point that “utopianism is no longer a living issue” in its recognition that in the state of the future “men will be coerced, not cossetted, into soullessness” (TSC 296). Christopher Norris sees Orwell’s humanism as the problem. Orwell’s “ ‘British ideology’ of naïve, common-sense empiricism” gets in the way of proper structural analysis of ideology. Orwell “represents the confused and self-destructive motives of a humanism finally run aground on its own bankrupt ideology” (Norris 245; cf. 242–62). 6. Davies 40. 7. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” n.p. 8. Davies 60. 9. Language and Methods of Humanism 94. 10. Olafson 62–63. 11. Knights and Willmott 60. 12. Sheehan 181. 13. Davies 48. Davies notes the “revulsion against the human” of modernist poetics, manifesting in an “aesthetic of ‘geometric’ impersonality” (48). 14. See Esty as well on what he calls Eliot’s “antihumanist modernism” (2004, 19). 15. Harvard Review of Philosophy IX 2001, 59. 16. N. Katherine Hayles points out a distinction between the body as machine and the machine incorporated into the body; the latter suggests to cybernetic theorists like Norbert Wiener new forms of networked, distributed subjectivity that extend the human (7–8). 17. See, for example, the films Logan’s Run and Soylent Green and the book, Uglies. The librarian, the wizened keeper of the past, the last man to write or read, is a stock figure in dystopia. 18. See Kuhn, who reads Nietzsche’s anti-humanism as an affirmation of humans’ transformative potential. 19. Last Man. . ., xxii. 20. For Trilling, utopia is fundamentally antithetical to humanism on the grounds that utopianism ultimately destroys the will by destroying necessity and by doing away with humanism’s embrace of the ego as a prerequisite to culture (The Last Decade 159). Others, like Sargent, see in utopia’s desire to perfect the human the deepest expression of a human-centered worldview and view utopia’s loss as potentially devastating to our human future.

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  109 I am sympathetic to both of these arguments, even though they are opposed. I suppose it all depends on what one means by humanism, and from what era one is speaking, or whether one is Tommaso Campanella or Michel Foucault. I am treating humanism in the narrow terms discussed above—as embracing qualities of autonomy, free choice, and organicism that distinguish it from a philosophical commitment to the systematically organized machine-concept, whether the machine is industrial, social, governmental, or prosthetic. 21. Utopian anti-humanism is something of a self-contradiction, since utopia technically grows out of the attempt to solve human problems with human ingenuity, retaining the value of the individual. By anti-humanist I  mean Elizabeth Kuhn’s broad sense of anti-humanism as not necessarily hostile to human life, or Sheehan’s sense, which she quotes, of an orientation that seeks to “locate the human within the ‘human’ ” (4). Posthumanism, as articulated by critics like Hayles, posits additional possibilities for a utopia that neither reproduces the past nor purports to relocate a past version of the human in the future. 22. See Hillegas. “To an extraordinary degree the great anti-utopias are both continuations of the imagination of H. G. Wells and the reaction against it” (5). 23. Ibid 9, 18. 24. Hillegas 5. 25. Ibid 6–7. 26. Patai in Burdekin, xix. 27. Scraps 113. 28. Hayles associates the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject with disembodiment (3). 29. The outlook of the ruling regimes in many dystopias reflects the dystopian anti-humanist attitude. Whether or not to consider a given work dystopian or utopian depends on the perspective one adopts; whether or not to consider it a critical or classic dystopia depends on the extent to which the text poses such a solution as inevitable. Thus, Eliot might be considered a critical dystopian anti-humanist. 30. Heffernan 155. 31. Culture and Anarchy. 32. Lyrical Ballads n.p. 33. Abrams describes a similarly straightforward aesthetic of humanism: The humanist typically addresses himself to texts that are not written in the highly refined and specialized language of the logician or the scientist but in the ordinary language that has been developed over many centuries to express and to deal with the complexities, the ambiguities, the nuances, and the contradictions of the human predicament—the predicament of purposive, fallible, perplexed, and feeling persons, who, for better or worse, act and interact and manifest what Keats called “the fierce dispute/ Between damnation and impassioned clay” (“The Language and Methods of Humanism” 95). 4. Olafson 62. 3 35. TSC 323. 36. Meisel 4, 6. 37. Dark Horizons 173. 38. See my discussion of West in Chapter 7 on the politics of the absent subject, particularly in relation to the points made by Veitch and Blyn.

110  De-forming Character 39. Ibid 8. The rejection of the romantics and turn back to classicism by writers like Eliot and T. E. Hulme poses another sort of dystopian poetics, characterized by an image of modernity as spiritual waste land. 40. Trotter in Levenson 69. 41. See Heffernan 4. 42. Great War 1–7. 43. Menand, “The Pound Error,” New Yorker (June 2, 2008). 44. Modernism’s anti-mimetic “will-to-abstraction” is fundamentally antibourgeois, reflective of, in Trotter’s view, a “visceral distaste for the spectacle of social mobility” (9). 45. Taylor 456. 46. See William V. Spanos’s reading of Bergson for a similar argument: “the interior monologue or “stream-of-consciousness” novelists such as Proust, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and, to a lesser extent, James Joyce, the obsessive effort of the bourgeois to congeal duree and to objectify human consciousness has its essential source in the positivistic principle of utility: the concept of man as “solid citizen” (Spanos 352). 47. Paul Sheehan argues that modernist anti-humanism is a critical stance, its disruptions of narrative ways of “seeking release from the grip of the humanistic discourse of Victorian liberalism” (23). Other critics Stephen Sicari and Elizabeth Kuhn argue that modernist anti-humanism actually offers a generative ethics of repair for the Cartesian divide between mind and body, between affect and action, between conscious being and inanimate objects. Michael Bell draws attention to modernism’s revisions of inherited understandings of humanism’s sense of the sacred, unified subject, observing of the modernists, “to read them as humanistically or antihumanistically . . . is to miss the point since humanism, the necessary human standpoint, is recognized in its groundlessness” (“Metaphysics of Modernism” in Levenson 14). 48. Sicari xiii. 49. Ibid 7. 50. Kuhn 2. 51. Bergonzi 15, 146. John Huntington gives Wells more credit for his ambiguity, arguing that Wells poses the positive and negative qualities of utopia— and his own ambivalence—within a structure of “dialectical play” (142). Even so, to take Wells as an example, traces of modernism’s struggle for a new language are visible. In his reassessment of Wells’s scientific romances, Bernard Bergonzi sees Wells responding to the “disappearance of old and familiar forms:” though he “rather despised art” and was “temperamentally alien to the self-conscious aestheticism of the period,” Bergonzi finds literary interest in Wells’s work during this period, especially in his ability to combine romance and realism in opposition to the trend at that time toward their further separation. In addition to realism and scientific romance, Wells writes in both anti-utopian and utopian modes, working out a set of common themes from multiple time perspectives. The utopian rationalist exists side-by-side with the anti-utopian pessimist, the writer of romances, and the neutral naturalist. Patricia Rae argues Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can be read as a direct attack on modernist poetics. See also my article “The Scanty Plot: Orwell, Pynchon and the Poetics of Paranoia,” from which parts of this introduction are drawn. 52. Aspects 42. 53. Eagleton, “The Rise of English” 25. 54. Scraps 111.

The Last (Hu)Man(ist)  111 55. Rayyan Al-Shawaf notes the novel’s celebration of the possibilities of language. 56. “Love Found Amid Ruins of Empire” n.p. 57. “Don’t Take Submission Lying Down” n.p. 58. New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2015. 59. “The Next Thing” n.p. 60. Morrey 148. 61. Jeffrey 36. 62. Mishra 2. 63. Ibid 25. 64. Taylor 12. 65. Ibid 467.

5 Anti-Bildungsroman Dystopia and the End of Character in Zamyatin, Burgess, and Ishiguro

[T]he unknown is naturally the enemy of man. And Homo Sapiens only then becomes man in the complete sense of the word when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas, and periods. (Zamyatin, We 112) The heresy of an age of reason . . . I see what is right and approve but do what is wrong. No, no, my boy, you must leave it all to us. But be cheerful about it. It will soon be all over. In less than a fortnight now you’ll be a free man. (Burgess, A Clockwork Orange 116) I hope you can appreciate how much we were able to secure for you. Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured. (Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go 260)

The Novel of De-formation Dystopian “last man” often ends up not as a “man” at all, but as an infant. Orwell’s Winston Smith, whose journey leads backward from rebellion to the “loving breast” of Big Brother, is a prototype for this dystopian movement from more to less agency, more to less interiority. The plot begins at the threshold of adulthood: the protagonist, poised to carve out a space to exercise autonomy, challenges authority, but the rigidity of setting ultimately boomerangs him back to a state of infantile dependence. The particulars of this failure to launch pose a set of values in negative space. Understanding dystopian character requires an understanding not just of who characters are, but of who they fail to become, and how. This chapter explores the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, as the model dystopia inverts in order to articulate a journey of un-becoming. Return to, not escape from, family replaces development as the locus of

Anti-Bildungsroman  113 desire. Just as Winston ends Nineteen Eighty-Four with a return to Big Brother’s loving breast, the characters in these novels seek to escape the consequences of adulthood by regressing backward to helplessness. The three texts treated in detail here, Zamyatin’s We, Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, all narrate a passage from child to adult and then again back to child against the backdrop of a diseased setting. In each, the disease reflects Wells’ concern that technological development will outpace ethical and social development. At the same time, the settings reflect their historical moments, supplying a pessimistic antidote to the utopian thinking that characterizes their respective eras. Zamyatin responds to the post-Russian Revolution rise of the Leninist Soviet state in the 1920’s;1 Burgess responds to growing interest in behavioral engineering in the early 1960’s; and Ishiguro responds to the utopianism associated with the explosive growth of medical technology in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.2 In We, technology has reduced man to factory cog, leaving no room for independent will; in A Clockwork Orange, behavioral conditioning has replaced moral choice; and in Never Let Me Go, medical advances have led to a cloned donor class bred to provide organs to a human elite. Differences in setting are striking. The city of We is literally a crystal palace; the city of A Clockwork Orange is a grotty, urban patchwork where gangs of youths roam the streets molesting the innocent; and Never Let Me go is set in the sleepy English countryside, its pastoral setting sharply contrasting with the bleak, clinical morality behind the novel’s premise. And yet the three novels are built on a similar chassis of plot borrowed from the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. In the broadest sense, the Bildungsroman, beginning with Goethe’s 1796 novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, tracks a protagonist’s journey from youth to adulthood during which the hero undergoes a process of cultivation and education that leads to development of an interior self.3 In Lukács’s classic formulation, the genre is the story of “the problematic individual’s journeying toward himself.”4 The protagonist becomes, in Bakhtin’s words, “a self-possessed entity” capable of both agency and interiority—of autonomous action and of a subjectivity that directs and reflects on such action.5 The movement from what Franco Moretti calls “youthful illusions to adult realism” is traced through a series of episodes that contribute to the hero’s store of wisdom.6 At the conclusion of the Bildungsroman, marriage, adulthood, and social position constrain the protagonist’s freedom, but he or she finds Wordsworth’s “abundant recompense” in the expanded inner life laboriously acquired. As Paul Sheehan argues, the Bildungsroman provides a narrative shape for humanist subjectivity in its plotting out of paths for an autonomous subject within an open-ended future.7 The last humanist of the previous chapter struggles to maintain

114  De-forming Character the architecture of the Bildungsroman while the architecture of the dystopian novel seeks to dismantle it. The dystopian novels discussed here explicitly adopt and transform the Bildungsroman’s conventions of character formation. The action is in the thwarting or redirecting of the developmental process. Dystopian settings place rigid limits on characters’ agency. The action of the dystopian Bildungsroman is the depiction in excruciating, episodic detail of the systematic throttling of interiority, making it not a novel of formation but of de-formation. The spiritual, moral, aesthetic, or economic development that defines the Bildungsroman’s journey is replaced by a journey toward cruder states of character(ization). As the quotations at the head of the chapter suggest, all three novels are about education. In We, the protagonist D-503 embodies both a “last man” fantasy and the undoing of character from a state of more to less complexity. Though already grown, D-503 moves from dependence on an all-powerful state to a brief burst of sexual and political freedom before returning once more to the automatism of metaphorical infancy. A Clockwork Orange and Never Let Me Go explicitly take development from adolescent to adult as theme. A Clockwork Orange traces Alex’s passage from unrestrained aggression to mechanically induced docility, back again to violence, and then, finally, in the last act, to the threshold of domesticated adulthood. But even as Alex grows into an adult, his sphere of interiority diminishes. The novel hints that what is unique about him, however disturbingly anti-social, will soon be exchanged for thoughtless middle-class conformity. Never Let Me Go depicts its clone characters literally disassembled. By our standards they are human. They think, feel, and act, negotiating adolescence and early adulthood with grace and sensitivity. But by the standards of their society they are freerange spare parts. While Ishiguro develops character, he subtracts from his novel the possibility of mature adulthood toward which the novel of formation conduces. Interiority literally becomes materialized; their organs are extracted and shared among the undeserving elite, leaving the clones quite literally empty inside. Dystopias explicitly rely on the Bildungsroman’s architecture as structural template, ironizing the genre by deforming it. The destruction of familiar narratives of development adds a reflexive layer of horror, with violations of the Bildungsroman’s norms of character development resurfacing as plot. Dystopian novels of this type offer both an outwardfacing critique of political and social developments—in particular the rise of totalitarian states, advances in technologies of mass production, and increased deployment of invasive techniques of social and physical control—and an inward facing, formal critique of the means by which the modern subject is rendered. That is, the individual that dystopia mourns, and by mourning seeks to re-instantiate, is quite explicitly inherited from the novel.

Anti-Bildungsroman  115

Allegories of Progress Jerome Hamilton Buckley in Seasons of Youth (1974) gives the formal schema of the English Bildungsroman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as follows. A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon his free imagination. His family, especially his father, proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts or flights of fancy, antagonistic to his ambitions, and quite impervious to the new ideas he has gained from unprescribed reading. His first schooling, even if not totally inadequate, may be frustrating insofar as it may suggest options not available to him in his present setting. He therefore, sometimes at quite an early age, leaves the regressive atmosphere of home (and also the relative innocence), to make his way independently in the city (usually London). There, his real “education” begins, not only his preparation for a career, but often—and often more importantly— his direct experience of urban life. The latter involves at least two love affairs or sexual encounters, one debasing, one exalting, and demands that in this respect and others the hero reappraise his values. By the time he has decided, after painful soul-searching, the sort of accommodation to the modern world he can honestly make, he has left his adolescence behind and entered upon his maturity. His initiation complete, he may then visit his old home, to demonstrate by his presence the degree of his success, or the wisdom of his choice.8 These qualities, Buckley readily admits, are an abstraction and an idealization.9 However, they offer a useful précis of the plot points and formal structures that remain visible in the plots of dystopian un-bildung discussed here. The Bildungsroman’s concept of “accommodation to the modern world”—of developing an inner self that can achieve some measure of efficacy and satisfaction—is recognizable in dystopia’s exaggeration of the tension between inner and outer life, or between freedom and happiness. Several other elements of this familiar narrative jump out as essential to dystopian versions, including a father’s hostility, the dabbling in un-prescribed reading, the move from country to city, and love affairs that exalt and debase. Generically, dystopias amplify and undermine these tropes: biological fathers are weakened or effaced and the father reappears as the state; diaries and secret books are publicly exposed; the city is not a place to escape to, but from; and sexual love is treated as criminal offense. Referring to its eighteenth-century iterations, Moretti calls the Bildungsroman the “ ‘symbolic form’ of modernity.”10 Its invention

116  De-forming Character corresponds with Europe’s movement into a new phase of relations between the individual and technology, capitalism, and the state. Moretti writes, “If youth, therefore, achieves its symbolic centrality, and the ‘great narrative’ of the Bildungsroman comes into being, this is because Europe has to attach a meaning not so much to youth as to modernity.”11 The Bildungsroman seeks to contain modernity, resolving modernity’s formlessness by allegorically binding development of the individual to the larger developmental trajectories of the emergent nation-state.12 The boundaries of form provide a horizon for managing individual development, arranging it within objectified, organized narrative time. The Bildungsroman puts the metaphor to work in both directions: if the emergence of the nation is revealed through the individual life, the individual life and the possibilities it holds are also a function of historical development. A text like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship gives bodily shape to a national narrative of becoming, but the national narrative of becoming takes its shape as well from idealized fantasies of self-development. Jed Esty extends Moretti’s observations, drawing attention to how modernist Anglophone iterations of the early twentieth-century Bildungsroman wrestle with the awareness that the modernization associated with empire-building is “never-ending.”13 The genre evolves from an allegorical “device for inscribing European nation-state formation as the end of history” into an anxious re-writing of the link between individual and social history.14 In Esty’s account, the hero of the Bildungsroman, formerly repository of fantasies of national emergence, becomes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century iterations the locus of anxiety about a stalled modernity that will never fully develop. The protagonist’s failure to become allegorizes the failure of fantasies of “national closure” in the face of pressure exerted on national discourses of progress by postcolonial modernity.15 Writers like Conrad, Woolf and Joyce, whose “youthful protagonists  .  .  . conspicuously do not grow up” give this open-endedness aesthetic form by condensing “modernity’s unfinished project . . . into the trope of endless youth.”16 Neither modernity nor its inhabitants become visible in coherent form. The texts here provide a significant variation in on this formula: deformation of the dystopian protagonist does not reflect the fear that progress will stall, but that modernity will become visible and assume a final shape impervious to individual agency.17 Esty’s “unseasonable youth”—a play on Buckley’s title—embody a world failing to become, stalled in an endless cycle of creation and self-destruction. Though its refusal of adulthood may look similar on the surface, the dystopian version stems from the premise that modernity has finally exhausted itself and ceased to transform. When public history has reached a final shape, it is no longer subject to narratives of development; dystopian subjects have no room of their own into which they can grow.

Anti-Bildungsroman  117 The formulation belongs to what I  am calling the dystopian antiBildungsroman. We and Never Let Me Go in particular exemplify the latter case, where progress has “completed” (to use the verb from Never Let Me Go that describes death after the final organ donation). In these novels, the dystopian subject’s development is pitted against the wishedfor development of national or cultural identity. The last man holds on to a developmental narrative, and a set of stakes for that narrative, that have been rendered irrelevant by the end of history. Thematically, the gap dystopia pries open between individual and the world is already present in the Bildungsroman’s treatment of the fraught relationship between private and public life.18 The Bildungsroman’s emphasis on aesthetic and spiritual education is founded on this tension: Lukács speaks of “reconciliation;”19 Buckley speaks of “accommodation;” Moretti sees a movement not necessarily toward successful “synthesis” of public and private but toward “compromise.”20 Esty, referring to Huck Finn, identifies the compromise in the Bildungsroman’s “entwined imperatives of self-cultivation and wealth accumulation, of storing experience in the coffers of the developing personality.”21 The Bildungsroman often represents aesthetic, spiritual education as superior to capitalist instrumental labor. According to Buckley, Wilhelm’s “true apprenticeship . . . is spiritual rather than professional.”22 Through cultivation of an inner life, the hero, having conceded absolute freedom, instead masters the “art of living,” thus gaining access to a form of happiness richer than a complacent sink into vulgar, materialist comfort.23 Interiority expands, compensating the hero for having to assume the restrictive yoke of civilization. As a genre, dystopia is particularly vulnerable to anxiety about the relationship between inner and outer. The rise of the modern bureaucratic state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alters the balance of power between individual and social milieu. Foucault’s image of the panoptic prison, with its emphasis on surveillance and control, is more than a metaphor—it is the technology that creates the modern individual.24 Because dystopia intensifies the power, and just as often the malevolence, of the panoptic gaze, the difficulty of establishing interior space is amplified. All novels depend on the protagonist being differentiated from the herd. A novel where characters merely confirm behavioral and psychological expectations would have no story to tell. Dystopia makes this rupture the predicate of plot. Moylan and Baccolini observe that the “dystopian citizen moves from apparent contentment into an experience of alienation and resistance.”25 But this is only partially true: in novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and We, the narrative action begins because the protagonist has already become differentiated, has slipped off the narrow rails the society has laid down. Winston begins with his forbidden diary; Bernard Marx is shunned for his “unsavory

118  De-forming Character reputation” early in the novel (Brave New World); D-503’s equilibrium is disturbed by the second entry in his diary. Then, the subsequent action is not toward differentiation, but away from it. The texts I  address in this chapter all include some version of this phenomenon. We explicitly runs its plot in reverse, from differentiation to absorption. A Clockwork Orange and Never Let Me Go also trace a process of un-differentiation, though each mask this backward movement by seeming to adopt the forward developmental narrative of the Bildungsroman. In A Clockwork Orange Alex shuttles from rebellion to docility to rebellion and finally back to the undifferentiated ordinariness of everyday adult life. Never Let Me Go moves from a study of sensitive adolescents to the realization of their existence as mere alienated bodies, as commodities whose interiority is not as valuable as their actual interiors. The dystopian anti-Bildungsroman rewrites the Bildungsroman’s phy­ sical space as well. Having nowhere to go constricts the developmental project, choking off the possibility of the journey, or grand tour, as a source of cultivation.26 Hence, the journeys that define the geography of the Bildungsroman—from outskirts to center, from farm to city, from colony to metropole, or from metropole to colony (depending on whether the subject of the Bildungsroman is creole or European-born)— are negated by dystopian totality.27 There is little point in traveling when elsewhere has been obliterated. If only a portion of the world has gone wrong, an elsewhere where things might go right remains intact, reactivating the possibility of the heroic quest. But, when the dystopia is global, action is futile unless the entire world is to be brought down. The three novels here find creative ways of re-imagining travel in a completed, fenced-in world. We reverses the journey of cultivation that leads from country to city and back to country—its journey leads from city to beyond the wall and back to the city. A Clockwork Orange contains the journey within city and suburb ring, translating the Bildungsroman’s spatiality to a claustrophobic world of apartment buildings, besieged suburbs, seedy bars, and reformatories. Never Let Me Go provides a version in miniature of the disillusioning visit to the city, but for the most part keeps its characters sequestered in sterile settings that limit growth, protecting them from the disillusionment associated with the journey to the city. The readings that follow focus on how these three texts both absorb and defy the Bildungsroman’s logic. Reading them in this formal context draws our attention to the central role played by character formation— and de-formation—in defining dystopia’s formal space: if dystopian characters often seem less than complete, pawns rather than fully developed humans, it is because they are a vehicle for showing the failure of the Bildungsroman’s mimetic regime.

Anti-Bildungsroman  119

Divine Minus: Zamyatin’s Reverse Bildungsroman We shows deep skepticism about utopian futures and the cost of achieving them. Alexandra Aldridge attributes Zamyatin’s dystopianism to disappointed revolutionary aspirations. He writes “against what he believed to be the perverse notion permeating Soviet policy, namely that the scientific world view was an end in itself, and that the process of revolution, having hardened into scientistic dogma, had stopped.”28 The urge to turn the clock back to a time before the hardening is both historical and personal. We’s desideratum is not utopia but hope itself. Pointing out that Zamyatin was utopian and remained committed to Bolshevism, Wegner questions We’s status as anti-utopia, instead reading it as potentially utopian in its generation of possible worlds, and thus a precursor to later work by writers like Le Guin, Russ, Delany, and Piercy.29 Claeys points out that, as a critique of Bolshevism, We is less antiutopian than “anti-mechanistic or anti-uniformitarian.”30 Claeys sees We not just as attack on collectivist ideals and tactics, but as critique of the “apolitical idea of hedonism as the philosophy of modernity.”31 The target is Bentham as much as Marx. The Well-Doer’s dictum that “real, algebraic love for humanity must inevitably be inhuman” (199) mirrors the logic of the Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace, in which uniform, utilitarian happiness for the many supersedes individual interests. Dostoevsky’s resistance takes the form of perversity, masochism, irrationality. Zamyatin reverses the valence of his protagonist’s struggle: not to suffer in freedom, but, like Winston Smith, to win the battle over the desire for freedom that prevents him from achieving the accommodation of the Bildungsroman formula. For Zamyatin, as for his ancestor Dostoevsky and his descendant Orwell, the interior individual—vulnerable to suffering, to irrational and self-harming behavior, and to dissatisfaction—is vastly preferable to a mechanized, exteriorized individual who would willingly trade the torment of consciousness for mindless, mass pleasure. In We’s perfect state of the future, mathematical reasoning supplies the state with its justification: “For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, wise line, the wisest of lines!” (4).32 People are not named but numbered, their daily routine regulated by the sacred “Table of Hours.” Guardians, a secret police force, keep the numbers from straying. Surveillance is made easy by the fact that the city is made entirely of glass, echoing Dostoevsky’s suspicion of the rational world of the Crystal Palace. Curtains in the private sleeping rooms might be drawn only during the two private hours allotted each day for the regular sexual trysts provided for in the table of hours, but, as the protagonist D-503 says, even these moments of privacy and freedom violate the United State’s perfection and that “sooner or later we shall somehow find a place in the general formula even for these hours” (13).

120  De-forming Character Like many dystopias, We turns on the antagonism between freedom and happiness. “The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom” (34), D-503 writes in his diary. This is the same dilemma distilled by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground and the Grand Inquisitor sequence of The Brothers Karamazov. Christ offers freedom to choose, but the Inquisitor offers full bellies and a discipline that relieves individuals of the burden of free will. D-503 reminds us throughout the novel that in the United State, the exchange was completed long ago. D-503 is aghast that his ancestors “used to conduct their elections secretly, stealthily like thieves.” In contrast, “we celebrate our election openly, honestly, in daylight. I see them all vote for the Well-Doer. How could it be otherwise since ‘all’ and ‘I’ are one ‘we”? (129). Democracy depends not on unity but on difference; in the United State, difference is actively suppressed in favor of a political organization that suppresses both political and personal agency. Gregory Zilboorg writes in the introduction: “the problem of the creative individual versus the mob is not merely a Russian problem. It is as apparent in a Ford factory as under a Bolshevik dictatorship.”33 Zamyatin’s world of perfect happiness, efficiency, and predictability applies rational principles of management to human behavior—it is Fordism for the organization of individual behavior. The absence of meaningful individual choice applies to sexual reproduction as well. The United State has perfected the science of coupling. Austen and Eliot treat coupling as elaborate social ritual grounded in property relations; in the imperfections of the system we find characters’ tribulations and pathos. In We, coercion has become fully internalized, and the goal of marital efficiency is unchallenged. D-503 writes: Is it not strange to understand gardening, chicken farming, fishery (we have definite knowledge that they were familiar with all these things), and not to be able to reach the last step in this logical scale, namely, production of children—not to be able to discover such things as Maternal and Paternal norms? (14) The individual is a cell in a larger body, to be nourished or disposed of according to its usefulness. The Bildungsroman assumes the possibility of freedom within which to move and a choice of ends that the individual might aspire toward. We, collapsing interior and exterior space into one another, squeezes human possibility into a functional box. D-503 begins the novel as a loyal, fully accommodated subject of the state, a mathematician who works on the Integral, the rocket ship designed to explore the cosmos in order to subjugate alien races to “the grateful yoke of reason.”34 The novel is his diary, begun in response to the Well-Doer’s request that citizens write odes to the greatness of the

Anti-Bildungsroman  121 United State (3), and is intended to be included as cargo on the Integral’s interstellar mission of colonization. (It is not just the nation whose fate is allegorically linked to the protagonist, but the entire cosmos.) Even more telling, the diary initially is not a record of unique interiority, but an expression of the state’s successful colonization of his interiority. He writes, “I  shall try to record only the things I  see, the things I  think, or, to be more exact, the things we think” (4).35 In the Bildungsroman, the diary records the private tribulations of a sensitive soul coming into maturity, and holds a potential critical, revolutionary function. The dystopian transformation is visible in Zamyatin’s framing of the diary as a record of what already is, corresponding to the external rather than internal world. The opening entry in the diary closes with an ironic nod to the Bildungsroman’s mise en scene: “Yet I am ready, or nearly everyone of us is. I am ready” (4). D-503 is indeed “ready;” not for separation but for the collective apotheosis of the Integral’s launch. The next day begins with D-503 swooning to the “mechanical ballet” of the workers, seeing the meaning of their dance “in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-freedom” (6). But when he becomes fascinated with another female number at the daily group march, the plot begins with his swerve into independent selfhood. We’s vector of character development exemplifies the reversal of interiority I  am proposing as a distinctive feature of the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman. As readers trained by the novel of formation, we expect that through a combination of experience, reflection, accident, and ambition the hero will separate from the background and enter the foreground. If the Bildungsroman traces the development toward separation, dystopian iterations make separation not the endpoint but the precondition for the plot to commence. The hero does not gradually emerge from youth into effective agency through cultivation and tempering. Rather, the text moves toward revelation of the hero’s impotence, giving the lie to initial illusions of agency and forcing the hero into the background. The illicit romance at the center of We’s plot is given as a math problem. Unlike the round, soft 0–90—his regular female partner—I-330, his new object of desire, is sharp and angular. The plot structure of competing lovers, as Buckley notes in his schema, is a familiar one. For example, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) force the protagonist to choose between a woman who represents domesticity and convention and another who represents rebellion and sexual excitement. Here, the respective lovers represent exaltation and debasement rather than happiness and freedom. Like Maugham’s Philip Carey, who attempts to rid himself of his obsession with Mildred, D-503 tries desperately to fight his inexplicable attraction.

122  De-forming Character D-503’s attraction is an unknown variable: “in her eyes and . . . and on her brows, there was a strange, irritating X and I was unable to grasp it, to find an arithmetical expression for it” (8). D-503’s inability to solve for X disrupts his accommodation to the world. Uncertainty—including the uncertainty of desire—is unwelcome. D-503 compares his feelings to the square root of negative one, which, when he was introduced to the concept as a child, “grew into me as something strange, foreign terrible; it tortured me; it could not be thought out. It could not be defeated because it was beyond reason” (37).36 The onset of irrational subjectivity—at some points in the novel, represented by his “soul,” at other points by animal passion—makes him unfit for his previous life. Wegner calls this growth the “emergence of [a] new interiority.”37 However, it is perhaps more accurate to view this nascent inner life as a re-birth of something previously suppressed. Early on, we learn that D-503’s hands are hairy— “apelike,” he admits, embarrassed by the “stupid atavism” (9). Once liberated from utopian control, the primitive side grows more powerful as his attraction to I-330 becomes irresistible. Read in reflexive narrative terms, this split is the point at which one genre ends and another begins. We witness the birth of character, the moment when utopia, by acquiring a character, turns into a dystopia. What makes character, what utopia must keep out, is the raw libidinal desire that utopia tamps down. This is Freud’s narrative of the id that must be subjected to the controlling force of the superego, and, at the metapsychological level, the story of civilization. Zamyatin’s utopia is the endpoint of human development, where libidinal desire is perfectly controlled, sublimated into collective rather than individual aims. In the throes of passion, he describes himself as split in two: “[t]here were two selves in me. One, the former D-503, Number D-503; and the other . . . Before, that other used only to show his hairy paws from time to time, but now that whole other self left his shell” (54). This split self re-stages the anxious male modernities of Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, and James.38 Like Lawrence, who diagnoses modern man’s suffering as the result of over-cultivation, D-503 finds himself in the presence of an animal self that civilization keeps caged. And, like Lawrence, the discovery of such a self puts the protagonist crosswise with the world. Or, think of Prufrock, who panics at the sight of women’s arms “in the lamplight downed with light brown hair” (5), a contrast with Prufrock’s own balding, over-refined head. D-503 struggles to tame his new self. Following his first tryst with I-330, he contemplates his outward reflection: “I know surely that ‘he’ with his straight brows is a stranger, that I meet him here for the first time in my life. The real I is not he” (57). With each spark of an inner life that flowers in I-330’s presence, D-503 attempts to argue himself back into the “one truth” of the multiplication tables, where two plus two always equals four and freedom is a foolish fancy (64). But his experience of alienation, sexual anxiety, and resistance to action is

Anti-Bildungsroman  123 crucially different from these modernist avatars. D-503 ultimately succeeds in fending off animal emotion and the consciousness of repression from which modern(ist) human suffering springs. I-330 seduces him in order to recruit him to the resistance. She leads him to the Mephi who live outside the wall, the remnants of those who after the Two Hundred Years’ War resisted being driven inside the city where they would “be saved by force and whipped into happiness” (153). The hairy Mephi are D-503’s kin; holding his hairy hand, I-330 tells him their blood is probably already within him (152). The Mephi’s state of nature represents a more vital experience lost to the “numbers.” Evoking Romantic formulations, the Mephi live in the woods, where they learned “from the trees, beasts, birds, flowers, and sun” (153). The world beyond the wall signifies both return to nature and an implicit critique of Enlightenment reason. Wegner argues that Zamyatin places the world outside the walls in dialectical relation with the world inside the walls, both the over-developed utopian civilization and the under-developed, premodern one equally uninhabitable.39 But the exchange of “numbers” for a more organic form of life, even if savage, nonetheless holds out a hope for change that is missing from the world inside the walls. The world outside is a myth of origin and potential return, while the utopian inside allows no form of movement. Zamyatin stages the purging of interiority as return to Eden. As R-13, the state poet, makes clear, the United State into which D-503 will eventually sink is a return to the garden: It was he, the devil, who led people to transgression, to taste pernicious freedom—he the cunning serpent. And we came along, planted a boot on his head, and . . . squash! Done with him! Paradise again! We returned to the simple-mindedness and innocence of Adam and Eve. No more meddling with good and evil and all that; everything is simple again, heavenly, childishly simple! (59) Man undoes the fall, giving up knowledge and self-awareness. As in “The Machine Stops,” technology that cures human alienation and suffering ends in return to the womb. Happiness of the species is behind and ahead, with a brief period of miserable freedom—human history— sandwiched in between. Ultimately, I-330 entraps D-503 into an attempt to destroy the Integral and move beyond the wall of the city. At the novel’s conclusion, D-503 and I-330 are arrested and tortured. I-330 resists, but D-503 succumbs, willingly undergoing the “great operation” that cures fancy in order to perfect man as a mechanized instrument of pure reason (167). He achieves the absolute happiness of the “divine minus” (171), a delivery from the pain of desire. A  parade of unifs marching gratefully en

124  De-forming Character masse to be lobotomized at the hands of the Well-Doer.40 The novel ends with D-503’s statement “Reason must prevail.” But reason, complete and fully vested in the state, signals defeat of the human. The imposition of reason in completed, monologic form closes the developmental narrative. Emotion, crippled under the yoke of reason, no longer plays a role in defining a human presence that stands out as distinct from the external background. The Bildungsroman typically splits the protagonist off from childhood, then subjects him or her to a tempering education that expands interiority in order to prepare the character for return to the world. The character might be successful and embrace an adult role; or, the character may be forced to give up resistance—what Lukács describes as a “rich and enriching resignation, the crowning of a process of education, a maturity attained by struggle and effort” (133). Or resistance succeeds, but the character dies; or, the character recedes fully from the social milieu, taking up residence inside his or her own skull. D-503’s resistance is not to the world, but to the inner life that has accidentally flowered. His culminating trip to the surgeon to have his fancy removed is a fantasy of return to infantile bliss. As I noted earlier, the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman attacks not just the subject, but the books by which a free subject comes to be known. In We, books are a defensive embankment against the onset of interiority. The texts of this world are explicitly not humanist, but mechanical. D-503 enthusiastically recites titles of important literary works, like “Flowers of Court Sentences,” “Those Who Come Late to Work,” and Stanzas on Sex Hygiene (65). He calls the Official Railroad Guide, preserved from the past, “that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature” (12), a “graphite” precursor to the “diamond” of the tables that now govern their lives. Much as Marlow in Heart of Darkness finds “An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship” in the Russian’s shack and imagines it as antidote to chaos. “The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real” (46); the sacred Tables keep the world beyond the wall at bay.41 The book ends with text—the diary. This is all that is left of D-503’s detour into character, but it is a text whose author has gone away. After the operation, D-503 continues to write: “Is it possible that I ever felt, or imagined I  felt, all this?” He continues, “The handwriting is mine. And what follows is all in my handwriting. Fortunately, only the handwriting” (217). The loss of the past makes way for something new to take its place, but there is no reconciliation of who he was with who he has become. Transformation is complete but continuity of self is broken. Zamyatin critiques the narrative of progress but is also stuck without an alternative. The Bildungsroman is a relic of a world that presumes progress and seeks to accommodate the individual without destroying the

Anti-Bildungsroman  125 world. Zamyatin, like most of the dystopians here, opts for crisis instead of accommodation. Through D-503, Zamyatin asks us to mourn the sacrifice of human unpredictability and emotion to the machine. Morson observes, “the end of We is the end of us.”42 The Bildungsroman provides the structural framework for mourning this loss.

The Predator’s Progress: Burgess’s Satiric Bildungsroman At first read, Alex, the charismatic, anti-social anti-hero of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, seems the opposite of the prototypical dystopian protagonist. Rather than an embattled humanist, Alex begins as a type of the Nietzschean Übermensch, exercising his irrepressible will to power without sympathy or regret. Where the typical dystopian protagonist is tentative, Alex is a self-assured predator; where the typical dystopian protagonist is constrained, squeezed into narrow psychic and physical space, Alex roams the city, overflowing with vitality. Whether in the company of his droogs, tolchocking chellovecks in the yarbles, or alone, slooshying the music of Beethoven, he is ecstatically free. The novel is built around a debate between organic vs. mechanically produced morality. Esty calls attention to Burgess’s complaint that England has passed “from free society to welfare state.”43 Like Burgess’s fellow Catholic, Evelyn Waugh, who in “Love Among the Ruins” (1953) paints a picture of a topsy-turvy future where criminals are fussed over like babies, it is state meddling in the struggle to master sin that most offends. The Chief Guide to Waugh’s Britain of the future neatly satirizes this view: “In the New Britain which we are building there are no criminals . . . There are only the victims of inadequate social services.”44 Waugh’s world is antiseptic, but Burgess imagines a grittier world where the state is shabby and collapsing, and intervenes in individual affairs out of desperation instead of ideology. Burgess’s text occupies an ironic middle ground between Bildungsroman and what I  have been calling the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman. The contours of the Bildungsroman remain visible in satiric form, as the novel’s plot pushes Alex toward accommodation. At first a vicious delinquent, Alex is arrested and subjected to behavioral conditioning that transforms him from violent sociopath into a good “Christian” so physically repelled by violence that he is unable to defend himself. He becomes “a little machine capable only of good” (156)—the opposite of the selfcultivation of the will envisioned in the Bildungsroman. Burgess reverses the expansion of compensatory interiority, allowing a mechanical morality imposed from outside to take over the function of choice. The novel does not end here, however. The plot folds back on itself in the un-bildung movement I have been describing: in the first third of the novel Alex inflicts his freedom on the world; in the middle third, he is incarcerated and “cured;” in the final third the roles of predator and

126  De-forming Character prey reverse. Unable to defend himself because of his treatment, and now unable to seek solace in Beethoven’s music because he associates it with the conditioning of which the music was an incidental part, Alex winds up at the mercy of the world he formerly victimized. Reproducing Buckley’s schema, Alex, now a decent human being, returns home to, in Buckley’s words, “demonstrate by his presence the degree of his success.45 Alex returns to the house of his dad and mum to find his parents sitting at the table with a “bolshy thick veck in his shirt and braces, quite at home brothers, slurping away at the milky chai and munchmunching at his eggiweg and toast” (133). It is the nightmare from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Like Joseph K.’s parents, Alex’s have replaced him. The lodger tells him, “they’ve let me be more like a son to them than a lodger” (134). Alex notes the apartment building has suddenly improved in his absence, with no more sexually explicit graffiti marring the murals of “Dignified Labourers” (133). Inverting the Bildungsroman’s values, Alex returns home a lesser man, with no part to play in his local world; he is “formed” into a weaker, more vulnerable version of his former self. Alex wants to come home, but the only functioning homes in the text are those the state provides, the reformatory and conditioning laboratory. Burgess undermines the idea of home as secure space throughout. Earlier in the novel, Alex and his gang invade the cottage of F. Alexander, which has “HOME” inscribed on its gate, and savagely rape his wife. (Alexander is the subversive writer of a pamphlet entitled “A Clockwork Orange,” which argues against the imposition on humans of “laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation” [22].) Later, after Alex has been cured, he is beaten and dropped off in the suburbs by his former mates who have become policemen, and he stumbles on the cottage again. “Home, home, home, it was home I  was wanting, and it was HOME I came to, brothers” (152). Alexander, not realizing it was Alex who raped his wife, takes him in and introduces him to his fellow subversives who promise to take care of Alex. But they, like the government, have no interest in Alex’s humanity. When Alex asks if he will be restored to what he was, one of Alexander’s co-conspirators dismisses his desire: “A martyr to the cause of liberty. . . . You have your part to play” (164). His new friends lock him in a room with Beethoven’s music. Driven mad with pain, he is ready to “blast off for ever out of this wicked and cruel world” (168), at which point he discovers the window has been left open. “And like it was Fate there was another like malenky booklet with an open window on the cover, and it said ‘Open the window to fresh air, fresh ideas, a new way of living’ ” (168). It is not fate; it is another attempt at mind control through the power of suggestion, this time by critics of conditioning who wish to exploit Alex’s death for their cause. Alex jumps and his state of grace is undone by his literal fall, which knocks him back into his previous condition of cheerful sociopathy. This

Anti-Bildungsroman  127 is how Kubrick’s film version and the original American version of the text ends, with Alex looking forward to resuming the old ultra-violence. But the developmental narrative is complicated by the fact that the text Burgess intended has an additional chapter that fundamentally alters the trajectory. In the extra chapter, Alex, having returned to his previous self, grows bored with ultra-violence, and begins to wish for a more conventional, grown-up life. The chapter ends with “Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate” (191). These are two very different endings. The truncated American version is more like the typical dystopian text. It ends at the beginning—not, as with D-503, in ego-less obedience, but in unadulterated infantile aggression. In the British version, a horrible young man causes suffering to those around him, but eventually joins the adult world he has spent the first half of the novel victimizing—it is D-503’s narrative form the point of view of civilization. Burgess, in his introduction to the 1986 Norton American reissue of the text, suggests that without this coda, the work is a fable, not a novel, since “[t]here is not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character” (viii). The American ending is antiBildungsroman, the British satiric Bildungsroman. Both versions, however, point to the failure of Bildungsroman’s ideal of intentional cultivation. Alex grows up, or he does not, but in neither case is adulthood the outcome of a process of cultivation. Alex develops biologically, not morally. If the British version of A Clockwork Orange is a novel, it is a novel of loss, not gain. As in We, a new, “cured” character emerges. The version ends with Alex’s benediction to the reader, in which he says goodbye to his youthful self and faces the future: “And you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal” (192). Alex’s movement toward normalcy at the end of Burgess’s intended version of the novel makes both plot and moral sense. Alex trades stylish youthful platties for adult clothing, the bombast of Beethoven for the intimacy of Schubert. But Burgess’s preferred version, while more superficially resembling a novel in its movement toward change, nonetheless trades vibrancy for dreariness. The decision to give Alex an adulthood undermines the novel’s fascination with Alex’s amoral charisma. It is for a good reason that the Bildungsroman typically ends with adulthood—there is nothing interesting left to relate. We identify with Alex’s more interesting past self. Alex was the last free man—eventually, he will become simply another George Bowling. Associating aesthetic pleasure with aggression rather than reflection, A Clockwork Orange shows the limits of cultivation, satirizing aesthetic education as a viable source of coherent identity. For example, the prison chaplain instructs Alex to meditate on Christ’s suffering while listening to holy music; so “while the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I viddied

128  De-forming Character myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in” (79). He loves the music because it inspires thoughts of violence. Meanwhile those who speak for progress in the novel speak a dead tongue. When Alex complains about using Beethoven in his aversive conditioning, Dr. Brodsky, says of music “I know nothing about it myself. It’s a useful emotional heightener, that’s all I know” (113). Alex does not need an aesthetic education; he is already an aesthete. What he needs is an ethical education, for which Burgess’s version of aesthetics, contra Schiller, makes no provision.46 Alex’s taste is wholly self-derived, carries with it no socializing force, no class affiliation, and no self-consciousness. Burgess does not associate taste with civilization, but with the kind of radical freedom that Alex puts to such antisocial use: I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I’d viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A  Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha power. (42) The arts and their cultivation are completely separate from civilization building. Moreover, they are given here as independent of class. For Burgess, the arts are personal. Alex is a kind of savant Paterian, turning privately to art to lend the highest qualities to his predations as they pass. Alex’s aesthetic registers the change in his personality, but it does not cause it. Early on Beethoven’s Ninth spurs Alex on to rape two children he has drugged—“the lovely blissful tune all about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven, and then I felt the old tigers leap in me” (46). So, while Alex’s droogs are “less human than he because they do not care much for music” (Condition), Burgess grants aesthetics no effective political or ethical dimension.47 By the end of the novel, Alex’s taste evolves on its own, and he gravitates toward “malenky romantic songs, what they called Lieder, just a goloss and a piano, very quiet and like yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and the trombones and kettledrums” (186). Alex’s move toward adulthood can be attributed neither to cultivation nor to the failed aversive conditioning. He simply grows out of the “senseless violence” that, according to Burgess’s introduction, “is a prerogative of youth” (vii). Rejecting the notion that

Anti-Bildungsroman  129 art is civilized or civilizing, Burgess leaves Alex to develop all on his “oddy-knocky.” Can a language such as Alex’s—or Beethoven’s—exist within the confines of conventional morality?48 Alex is an artist after his own fashion, smashing sacred cows, following his genius for destruction. David Sisk associates Alex’s language with Joyce, calling the novel a “portrait of an artist . . . as a young man.”49 Burgess claims that he “over-endowed” Alex with three qualities: “he rejoices in articulate language and even invents a new form of it (he is far from alexical at this stage); he loves beauty, which he finds in Beethoven’s music above everything; he is aggressive.”50 But Alex must lose his language as a side effect of growing up. When he meets his old friend Pete in the final chapter, who has now taken a wife and dropped the old slang, Pete’s wife says of Alex, “He talks funny, doesn’t he” and asks Pete, “Did you used to talk like that too?” (188). The novel endorses the Bildungsroman’s accommodation of Alex’s language, aestheticism, and aggression: language is partitioned into private and public jurisdictions; the experience of beauty turns contemplative; and aggression is re-directed into the commercial sphere. Despite Burgess’s framing of Alex’s growth as a “revelation of the need to get something done in life—to marry, to beget children, to keep the orange of the world turning in the rookers of Bog, or hands of God, and perhaps even create something—music, say” (viii), the blazing, vital poetry of Alex’s narration, however repugnant its material, suggests in which direction Burgess thinks our humanist sympathies ought to lie. To defend this poetry, the novel must also defend what is morally reprehensible. Alex is more than an anarchic ne’er-do-well—he is a monster. By defending Alex’s freedom, A Clockwork Orange simultaneously mocks and affirms the values that animate the Bildungsroman. Exaggerating the gap between individual and society, A Clockwork Orange amplifies the Bildungsroman’s terms to the point of absurdity, making both freedom and order unpalatable. Though this amplification relies on structures of dystopia, it does so without fully invoking a completed future. Alex’s city—Burgess says it is an amalgam of Manchester, Leningrad, and New York—is full of familiar people and places.51 A few details—such as the Korova Milk Bar where, parodying infancy, the youth drink drug-spiked milk, or the Nadsat slang—suggest that something fundamental has changed, even though the world, caught up in a process of corrosion, does not seem very different from our own. Nor does it seem to be heading toward improvement. Even after he has discovered his desire to mature, Alex sees no possibility of progress. He imagines a conversation with his prospective future son: I would explain to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the vesches I  had done, yes

130  De-forming Character perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world. (190–91) Life will continue on without improvement and Alex will assume his part in the fixed cycles of birth and death. Personal and social history will repeat themselves indefinitely, and the world will remain stuck in chaotic dissolution. Claeys distinguishes A Clockwork Orange from dystopia proper, calling it instead an “inverted utopia,” since there are “no political explanations here, no chronology of deterioration, no prospect of alternatives” (462). I  would argue that the novel is “pre-dystopian”—it describes a world ripe for dystopian solutions, much as Houellebecq does. Delinquency and youth-gang violence seem to be largely accepted features of life; the population is passive and terrified, inviting the strengthening of the police state. What remains of power is concentrated in corrupt institutions, while institutions that might provide a counterweight such as schools and the Church have become weak and ineffectual. Meanwhile, technologies of mind-control are well on their way to being perfected. If the Ludovico treatment does not take hold at this moment in time, there is little reason to think that F. Alexander and his band of rebels— themselves morally suspect, evidenced by their willingness to exploit and torture Alex for their cause, will succeed in their resistance to the state. Why are F. Alexander and his band of aging rebels the only ones outraged enough to take action? Answering the argument of Zamyatin’s United State that ridding man of freedom is the answer to criminality, Burgess argues that individual freedom, even at terrible social cost, is preferable to the mechanized “clockwork orange.” This defense of freedom, coupled with belief in both good and evil and the possibility of redemption, is, as many critics have pointed out, deeply Catholic. Burgess describes the impetus behind the novel: “I  had read somewhere that it would be a good idea to liquidate the criminal impulse through aversion therapy; I was appalled.”52 Alex must be free to choose good or evil. The novel is more concerned with Alex’s individual soul than with the society he inhabits. Alex gives a rousing speech about the state’s intolerance of free will: “is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?” (40). But, closing the speech with the observation “what I  do I  do because I  like to do” (40), he rejects collective action as a means of pursuing justice.53 Similarly, after he has been conditioned, Alex poo-poos F. Alexander’s talk of encroaching totalitarianism, more concerned with whether he will get to slooshy music again, a question of no concern to Alexander

Anti-Bildungsroman  131 (160–61). Alex is a rebel without a cause, concerned with his own free will but no one else’s. This sense of the individual’s isolation from social forces is more than just a thematic abstraction. It plays out at the level of Alex’s concrete relationships with the adult world. The functioning adult world that the adolescent hero of the Bildungsroman is meant to pass into does not exist in this novel. Alex’s parents are useless, and other grown-ups are “starry vecks” ripe for assault, potential alibis who can be bought off with a drink, parole officers, scientists, prison wardens, and government officials for whom Alex is an instrument, and aging, feckless subversives. Even the prison chaplain who defends free will and is appalled by the prospect of the Ludovico treatment is a drunk and a careerist. He relies on Alex for tips about other prisoners because he wants to be “a really great holy chelloveck in the world of Prison Religion, and he wanted a real horrorshow testimonial from the Governor” (81). Alex easily exploits his weakness, feeding him false information in exchange for special privileges. Age is no match for youth. After the novel reverses in the last third, however, the tables turn and age takes its revenge on youth. Alex goes to the library looking for a way to kill himself and meets the professor of crystallography whom he and his droogs beat and humiliated in the opening chapter. The professor and his fellow library patrons attack Alex. “It was old age having a go at youth” (144), Alex observes. This reversal of the Freudian order, where sons are eventually expected to overthrow their fathers, is a characteristic formation of dystopia. Power remains vested in the world-as-it-is, rather than the world-that-has-yet-to-become, even when the world itself remains in chaos. Classic dystopias, as discussed in Chapter 1, tend to project the father’s punitive law onto the state and its institutions, denying sons and daughters the chance to grow. Burgess makes the state weak; Alex’s freedom is not brought to heel by aesthetic education, the state, or the police, but by simple biological maturity. Alex’s developmental narrative reproduces in parodic form the traditional Bildungsroman’s emphasis on aesthetic education as a crucial means by which both self and a dystopian nation come into coherent, complementary being. Aesthetic representation imposes a shape, makes available a coherence that the world taken on its own lacks. This is true even in modernism’s productions: modernism’s jagged, fragmentary aesthetics reflect scepticism about culture’s potential for providing coherent, anchored identity, but at the same time condense this scepticism into character, plot, and a finished aesthetic project.54 Though Alex has much in common with other free spirits defeated like Randall McMurphy or Cool Hand Luke who die at the hands of a coldly punitive police state, the text ostensibly treats Alex’s diminishment as a victory for the forces of civilization. Leaving Alex alive denies the tragedy by which the reader, at least, is compensated for a character’s suffering.55

132  De-forming Character Despite Burgess’s claim that the text is a hopeful portrayal of the human capacity to seek both freedom and the good, it remains oddly depressing. Through Alex, Burgess means to pose a human condition in which the qualities that lead to collective ruin are the same ones that lead to salvation, but the text hints that this formula is just as easily reversed, the glass half empty instead of half full. A Clockwork Orange subjects language to a violent, liberating energy even as the plot exacts revenge on Alex for his aestheticized violence; first by subjecting him to psychological torture that robs him of his humanity, then by turning him loose to be victimized, finally by re-constituting him as an adult who embraces the futility of social transformation. Burgess may claim this as a victory, but it reads suspiciously like Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in which the snuffing out of an artistic soul in order to reveal the bourgeois man beneath is a triumph only in the most ironic sense.56 Alex’s claim that there is “a new like chapter beginning” (191) sounds a lot like Orwell’s shrug of an ending, “Well, once again things were happening in the Comstock family” (248). Alex’s emergence as adult inadvertently acts as a broader critique of the Bildungsroman’s cherished principles. For Burgess, adulthood is not a cultivated state, but a biological destiny, no more escapable than Big Brother. Time exerts a banalizing force on personality, and aesthetic taste, however vaunted an achievement, is essentially worthless in the individual and collective projects of development. Burgess’s text reveals the embittered humanism at the heart of the dystopian project, a masochistic wallowing in torture of the values the texts hold most dear. As we will see in Ishiguro also, aesthetic education stands in for the fading human world even as its worship is ridiculed. Perhaps more so than any other novel in this study, Burgess explicitly connects dystopia to language—like Zamyatin, he provides a new language for the future, though where Zamyatin’s is clean and precise, Burgess’s is brilliantly, sloppily hybrid. Nadsat, the slang used by teens of Alex’s generation in which the story is told, consists of “odd bits of rhyming slang  .  .  . A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration” (114). The language has been tampered with from outside in order to stoke inter-generational conflict and undermine the transmission of values and inter-generational solidarity necessary for effective democracy (much in the way the United States Presidential election of 2016 turned on the corruption of political discourse). Esty blames colonial modernity, for “unsettl[ing] the progressive and stabilizing discourse of national identity by breaking up cherished continuities between a people and its language, territory and polity.”57 Here the threat originates in the Cold War development of an equally powerful counterpart, the Soviet State. England is not threatened by the heterogeneity of its values and ideals as they are reflected back from the colonized world; it is under siege by propaganda specifically intended

Anti-Bildungsroman  133 to undermine its national language. Baccolini and Moylan discuss the role of language in dystopia as a source of counter-narrative, a weapon that must be re-appropriated from authoritarian control. In A Clockwork Orange, there is no such prospect, the language of rebellion having already been tainted by state and corporate interests. Poetry may be bad for democracy, as Plato argued, but it is good for the individual. Alex’s language of rebellion is fundamentally anti-social, providing little hope of social change. If Newspeak is imposed systematically from within in order to prevent independent thought. Burgess’s novel produces a proto-adult who has de-coupled from the social, political word. But it is this very indifference to the life of the collective, that will ensure the emergence of the dystopia Burgess decries. As readers of novels, it is novelistic discourse—what Burgess calls “words spinning through the air like colored balls”—we seek.58 Novelistic language, however inconsequential, embodies cherished humanist values of choice, creativity, and possibility.59 Charles Sumner explicitly links Alex as character to novelistic discourse: “Alex’s fate is tied to that of the novel. In maintaining his individual self despite government attempts to erase it, Alex defends the raw material that Burgess sees as necessary for the survival of fiction.”60 Sumner calls it a battle between anarchy and totalitarianism, but in such a battle there can be no winners. The argument in the text is between a social morality and an individual, aesthetic one. The former gives us language, but the latter gives us the violations that make language come alive even as society dies.

Crimes Against Posthumanity: Ishiguro’s Bildungsroman Incarnate Never Let Me Go asks an interesting question of the Bildungsroman: what if the period of mature, agentic adulthood were subtracted as destination? What good is interiority without the corresponding promise of an active period in which to exercise it? While We and A Clockwork Orange chart diminishing interiority, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go selfconsciously offers nothing but interiority. Since the characters’ lives are circumscribed to exclude mature adulthood, the “cultivation” they undergo at Hailsham, including education in art and literature, leads to an interiority that, though expansive, is futile—the outside world refuses to acknowledge that their interiority—with the exception of their literal internal organs—possesses any value at all. The Bildungsroman presumes that childhood must be exchanged for a life in the world. The protagonist emerges from adolescence tempered, forged by a struggle on two fronts: behind, the allure of the return home; ahead, the abandonment of youthful energy and ideals. Both must be resisted. To lose the former struggle is to end up like D-503. To lose the latter is to end up like Alex. The Bildungsroman hero

134  De-forming Character has many possible successful paths through this struggle. Some, like Maugham’s Philip Carey, enter maturity chastened; others, like Butler’s Ernest Pontifex, successfully escape the ambit of expectation and convention; still others, like Lawrence’s Paul Morel or Wells’s George Ponderevo, remain incomplete, in possession of their powers and on the road, heading toward or away from the city with a story still to write. And, should the hero die before adulthood, the reader experiences it as tragedy, thereby rescuing the life from disposability. Never Let Me Go winnows down the many possible and mutually exclusive choices that animate the developmental narrative—marry this one or that one; take this job or that; fight this war or flee—down to a single imperative. The “completion” the plot moves toward is not the appearance of the full human, possessing both inner and outer life, but simply early death, the end of all choices. Like both We and A Clockwork Orange, Never Let Me Go is a diary addressed to an imagined reader. Kathy H.’s retrospective record of perceptions and memories underscores the private, interior self as subject, whether the setting recognizes such a self or not. Ishiguro is concerned with the question of what constitutes the human and, more particularly, the question of how to narrate it, but his humanism clashes with the closed world he provides to his protagonists.61 Patricia Waugh writes, “At the center of his fiction is the question of feeling; of whether art, in general, and the novel, in particular, can still provide a moral and political ‘sentimental education,’ an education of the heart that is deeper and more resonant than mere consolation.”62 Ishiguro both enacts the classic hallmarks of the novel and thematizes them. Novelistic discourse, with its ambiguities and suggestive digression, is an antidote to the ethical blurring that results from a language specifically designed to exclude human complexity.63 His characters’ struggle for self-definition takes place through the medium of a language of interiority that competes with the scientific language of utility; it is the interior language of the novel itself that is on trial as useful discourse. On the surface, Kathy H.’s story appears to be a conventional coming of age tale, concerned with the minutia of everyday life at the tony Hailsham academy. The narrative covers her triangle of friendships with Tommy and Ruth, her burgeoning sexuality, her post-graduation life, and her developing understanding of herself in the world. The novel’s blandly elegant narration hides the horrifying background against which the story is set: Kathy and her schoolmates are clones, raised and educated to have their organs harvested by their mid-twenties in a series of “donations” that will lead quickly to “completion.” Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their fellow students are hopeless, dying animals with sensitive souls, aware of and ultimately accepting their position, but with no capacity to alter the unfolding of their cruel fate. They resemble human characters in all aspects except their lack of prospective agency. The novel tends toward a

Anti-Bildungsroman  135 kind of high-concept, punning literalism: they are cultivated so that they can someday take their place in the elite. Kathy’s is nearing the end of her time as a carer—that is, one who cares for the “donors” who have begun the sequence of organ donations— after which her own donations will begin. Facing the imminent prospect of transition from carer to donor, she has an “urge to order all these old memories” (37). The resulting text is her attempt to hold on to lost things, to keep near the relationships and memories that have shaped her, even though she has been shaped for a purpose in which such interior refinements are superfluous. The humanist education she has received, with its emphasis on empathy, community, and creativity, has equipped her well for such an elegiac project, but is superfluous to the use for which she is designed. The resulting memoir, as many critics have pointed out, is maddening in its passive acceptance of the gap between capacity and destiny. Shameem Black asks, “Why is it that the characters in the novel fail to stage a rebellion, protest their fate, or move to France” (793)?64 But as Black and others also point out, the novel’s impotent humanism is precisely the point. Ishiguro exposes the myth of art and aesthetic sensitivity as an effective lens for defining humanness, whether from inside the self or outside. The cultivated, interior self is cut off from the social body. Black writes, “looking at art, at least for the bulk of the novel’s regular citizens, appears to cultivate narrow self-interest rather than altruistic obligation.”65 If, as Marc Redfield writes, the Bildungsroman is “a trope for the aspirations of aesthetic humanism,” then the novel’s narrative of un-bildung is a direct assault on the ethical status of art.66 Issues of class haunt the novel. Kathy’s embrace of her special status as a Hailsham student emphasizes the disjunction between aesthetic sensitivity and ethical forms of collective identification. Kathy has been a carer for nearly twelve years, and for the last six has been allowed to choose whom to care for; she chooses other students who went to Hailsham, with whom she shares a special bond: “of course, you choose your own kind” (4). This discordant sense of privilege is part of the novel’s oddness. The students from Hailsham experience no outside world to temper their sense of special status as a coddled class. There can be little doubt that Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, whose youths are chronicled in such loving, sepia detail, are privileged beneficiaries. The novel makes a point of highlighting the snide class resentment directed toward those who hail from this sham enterprise in cultivation by other donors not so fortunate. She recalls a donor from her third year, who was not from a fancy school like Hailsham, but who wanted to hear Kathy talk about her school days in obsessive detail. “What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham. He wanted to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood” (5). In fact, it is their privilege, rather than their intended use, that marks them off most clearly from the mass. And yet,

136  De-forming Character by any human standard outside the frame of the novel they are pathetic victims. The confusion about their status is understandable. When the clones leave school for the communal cottages where they spend the period before donations begin, their time is spent writing, coupling, wandering about and chatting as they wait to be called. Under other circumstances, it would be an idyll, but here it is Limbo.67 Bakhtin observes that the Bildungsroman is concerned with “demolishing the world view of the idyll,” showing “the breakdown of provincial idealism under forces emanating from the capitalist center; he continues, “[t]he positive hero of the idyllic world becomes ridiculous, pitiful, and unnecessary.”68 Just so, upon leaving Hailsham the clones are required to write post-graduate essays as a kind of culminating experience the value of which is unlinked from the dominant world of commercial value. Kathy’s paper on Victorian novels is not preparation for the future—we are never told how these projects are assessed, or why—but an attempt to organize a past that does not even properly belong to her.69 The idyll is calculated as part of the package, a time for their organs to mature, as Kathy and her schoolmates await assumption of their true vocation as donors. Ishiguro’s book haunts because it barely seems to mark the weight of its own premise. Keith McDonald calls it “autobiography drained of its usual depth and acknowledgment of a fuller life outside of the textual boundaries, but fixated instead on what little experience the protagonist holds.”70 The “little”-ness of this experience is reflected in the inconsequentiality of the stories Kathy tells. The trivial specificity of Kathy’s memories parodies a school days novel. Even so, the cloud of tragedy that hangs over the characters’ fate lends insignificant details poignance.71 While the novel’s initial focus on interactions among the students and their relationships with instructors evokes novels such as Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the fates of Kathy and her fellow students will be essentially the same. They are given weight only because of our knowledge of the standardized fate that awaits them.72 If the Bildungsroman differentiates the individual from the mass, here, the inability to do so is the point. The moral code of Hailsham and the clones is refined, tragic, humanistic. The humanity of the clones, so obvious to us, is denied by an offstage, morally corrupt class inhabiting a world we glimpse very little of—a restaurant, an office, a house near the beach. While the inhabitants of these universes appear to share both physical and moral space, the novel insists on a fundamental difference of kind, policing an invisible border between the human and the non-human. Why does Madame visibly recoil at the young clones when she visits the school? Why does Keffers, the caretaker of the Cottages, “stare at you like you were mad” (117) when greeted by the clones, and respond with distant impatience, the way one would respond to a farm animal? (Perhaps the clones have, like farm animals,

Anti-Bildungsroman  137 been engineered to be docile.) And, not unimportantly, the clones are also distinguished as characters from non-clones. All who inhabit the outside world presumably enjoy, along with a monstrous moral obliviousness, the privilege of an unwritten fate. The teachers who play the part of caring adults—the “Guardians”— are complicit in this crime against posthumanity. Assuming the task of cultivation parodied by A Clockwork Orange, they teach the clones art, English, geography, a smattering of basic life skills, and sex education. Meanwhile, through traditions like the Exchanges and the Sales, the teachers subtly inculcate in the clones the understanding that they exist outside the normal world of value. The school has a sequestered economy.73 The clones create “collections,” out of the work they trade with each other in the formal Exchanges, using tokens they receive in return to purchase junk salvaged from outside, none of which has any value outside their community. Once at the cottages, Ruth offers up her collection to Keffers to take to a charity shop, because she does not want to just throw it in the rubbish, having spent so much time and effort curating it. “Keffers rummaged in the bag a bit, he didn’t know what any of it was—why should he?—and he did this laugh and said no shop he knew would want stuff like that” (131). Their cherished possessions, like themselves, only have worth in their alternate, parallel reality. Ishiguro purposefully locates the book in such a reality, with the frontispiece inscription, “England, late 1990’s”—the setting is not permeable to the present, it is a separate, complete-in-itself alternative world. Though some of the teachers seem to have genuine reservations, the colossal abdication of responsibility by adults can only be accounted for by accepting this difference of kind. The clones’ naïve trust in their caretakers is touching. In one particularly poignant scene, Kathy listens to her recording of a schmaltzy ballad, “Never Let Me Go” from a cassette tape purchased at a Sale. She sways, clutching a pillow to her body and pretending it is a baby, when she notices Madame standing at the doorway, sobbing. Kathy feels confused and betrayed by Madame’s failure to intervene. “She was the adult, and she should have said or done something, even if it was just to tell me off. Then I’d have known how to behave” (72). Kathy needs care more than cultivation. Madame’s pity is solipsistic. However genuine, it remains silent, disconnected from the larger moral question of donation to which the clones’ fate is tied. For the clones, the human world exists on the other side of an invisible, but un-crossable divide. They see pictures of this world in magazines, they read classic novels about it by George Eliot, Margaret Drabble, and Thomas Hardy, they watch the television programs that emanate from it and imitate the gestures of characters, but they are fundamentally separate from it. Kathy pages through pornographic magazines looking for her original, thinking that her own sexual urges must be because her original was somehow involved in the sex trade. Ruth aspires to work in

138  De-forming Character an office—“Now that would be a proper place to work” (144) she says, looking at a magazine picture—after learning that Rodney and Chrissie from the Cottages saw a “possible” for her in a modern office on Norfolk. They go so Ruth can see for herself. It is only a fantasy; Ruth and her friends look in the window and are given an awkward wave by the stranger when spotted. The pane of glass symbolizes unbridgeable gap between the clones and the world of adult vocation, in full sight of one another and yet isolated. The cassette tape that gives the novel its title is one of the few other links connecting the two worlds. Kathy’s cassette was lost soon after the scene with Madame. During the trip with Ruth to Norfolk, Kathy and Tommy are left alone, and go in search of a copy in junk stores. Improbably, they find one. “Do you think it could be the same one,” Tommy asks her. “For all I know it might be” she replies, “[b]ut I have to tell you, there might be thousands of these knocking about” (172). In Kathy’s world, copies have value, are no less valuable for not being unique. The cassette lost and found reveals the significance behind the studied banality of the narration. It does not matter that the stories and experiences preserved in the memoir are inconsequential, lacking in interest or originality; the little the clones possess, their experiences and objects, are laden with profound, retrospective meaning. And yet, even as the novel grants the clones the poignancy of small things, it refuses to wrestle with its fundamental question of what qualifies as human, and so leaves a chasm between ethical and aesthetic understandings of the human. Despite their exclusion from the world outside, the clones are invited to embrace the humanist values represented by aesthetic education. At school, they make art, trade it, and compete to have their artwork “selected” for Madame’s Gallery, the purpose of which is mysterious to them. Those who are not creative are made fun of. When young, Tommy is told by Miss  Lucy, art “is important. And not just because it’s evidence. But for your own sake. You’ll get a lot from it, just for yourself” (108). What would be an otherwise clichéd defense of art education is interrupted by the jarring word “evidence.” Tommy, retrospectively attempting to piece together what she meant by it, develops a theory that combines his memories of the Gallery with a rumor that circulates among the clones at the cottage, that if two people are in love they can get a deferral of their donations. He believes the art in the gallery constitutes a record of who you are inside, so that the authorities will be able to determine if you are really in love with your partner, and therefore worthy of being granted a temporary reprieve. This mistaken understanding generates another literalizing pun. Art is evidence of humanity, not in a vague metaphysical sense, but in the sense of a case that must be proven before a judge. Tommy’s interest in a deferral is particularly urgent. He and Ruth were lovers throughout school and after, in part because Ruth feared being

Anti-Bildungsroman  139 left out by Kathy’s special connection to Tommy. When Kathy becomes Ruth’s carer, Ruth admits that she purposefully kept them apart by pursuing Tommy. Ruth is dying and wants Kathy and Tommy to have time together so that she can “[p]ut right what I messed up for you” (232). She gives them Madame’s address, which she has surreptitiously discovered, and encourages them to visit her to ask for the dispensation supposedly granted to lovers. A  year later, Ruth has died and Kathy has become Tommy’s carer following his third donation. Like Florentino and Fermina in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, they finally become lovers at the end of life, enjoying “relaxed, almost idyllic” (237) days under the shadow of Tommy’s imminent completion. Kathy and Tommy decide to seek out Madame and ask for the coveted extension. In the novel’s climactic movement, they confront Madame and Miss Emily, the former headmistress who lives with her, in their shared seaside house in Littlehampton. Kathy sees Madame “now . . . like an intimate, someone much closer to us than anyone new we’d met over recent years” (252). This moment echoes the scene when Madame caught her listening to the song. Kathy desperately needs someone to care about her, to care for her. But all she has is Madame, whose relationship to her is not intimate but formalized and instrumental—much as Kathy’s support for strangers as a carer provided a formalized simulacrum of family. Madame’s response to their request reveals the absurdity of Tommy and Kathy’s wish. “Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?” (254). They made them human, convinced them that they were, but were powerless to give them what humans take for granted, an unknown destination. Miss Emily lays out the moral framework underpinning the text. In a formulaic scene from both utopia and dystopia, the logic of the world is described. Hailsham, now shuttered, was an experiment in humane treatment of the clones. Miss Emily affirms one aspect of Tommy’s theory, that the art was connected to proving what was inside: “Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or, to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all” (260). Tommy’s question in response, “why did you have to prove a thing like that, Miss  Emily? Did someone think we didn’t have souls?” (260) goes to the heart of the premise the novel both satirizes and mourns—that the human is defined by what is inside rather than by usage. It is odd and unpersuasive that there should even be a question whether the clones ought to be considered human. What seems to be the secular world of the novel appears to have embraced the fringe Catholic position that test-tube babies cannot have souls. The clones’ writing, their behavior, their pain all attest to their fundamental claim, even if they have been genetically engineered to be docile. But in drawing a rigid line between the uses of the human and the non-human, regardless of their possession of souls, Ishiguro excludes both clone and

140  De-forming Character non-clone from participation in a moral or ethical universe. It is a plantation mentality—the clones are not given full status as humans in order to justify the uses to which they are put. The south “needed” slaves, just as the rich need organs. The novel reminds us that though slavery has been abolished from the industrial West, the logic that enables it are as enticing today as in the nineteenth century. The contrast between technological sophistication and moral abdication is rooted in the past rather than invented by the future. Tommy’s plaintive question misses the point. The world is far crueler than he imagines. Even a world that acknowledged his soul would not be willing to forego the advantages that denial brings. Miss Emily’s defense is that she and the other teachers and guardians provided a humane life for the clones—“Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured” (261)—rings hollow. That the privilege of education and refinement should be weighed as more valuable than the freedom to possess oneself is a moral position that horrifies. The clones formalized bildung was only incidentally connected to the moral and ethical questions raised by donation. Miss Emily says, “we challenged the entire way the donations programme was being run. Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow up to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being” (261). And yet it is unclear whether she challenged the program’s premise. In sheltering the clones by educating them—as Miss Emily points out, they prefer to call them “students” rather than clones—“we gave you your childhoods . . . You wouldn’t be who you are today if we had not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourself in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for you?” (268). It is an ironic echo of Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” which concludes with the famous lines, “Where ignorance is bliss/ tis folly to be wise” Norton (606–8). Gray’s words speak to those whose inevitable future misery will come in unpredictable form—misery will come, but of what sort? For the clones, their future misery is not a matter of choice or chance; it is only a question of when they will fully understand the import of what they already know. Kathy describes a scene in which one of the teachers decides the clones need to know more about their fate. Miss Lucy, hearing the clones at fifteen discuss what life might be like if they were to become actors, becomes agitated. “It’s time somebody spelt it out” (80) she says: “If you’re going to have decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly” (81). Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re

Anti-Bildungsroman  141 not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. (81) Emphasizing difference rather than similarity (“you’re not even like me”), she is uncomfortable with the clones’ misguided expectation that they are self-determining beings. The gift of a tragic sensibility keeps them from understanding the actual tragedy of their lives. As Black puts it, the novel “indicts humanist art because such art works to keep the students ­unaware of their own inhumanity—it masks their own mechanical condition and serves to prepare them for lives of exploitation” (790). It is a deep irony of the text that the aesthetic markers of humanism are only convincing to those who have been deemed not to be human. It is worth noting the absence of powerful men in the text—the adults are all female, and most of the men besides Tommy are peripheral. The typical dystopian extrapolation of male figures, where fathers turn into Big Brothers, is rejected in favor of a more diffuse “consensually dystopian” power structure in which the blame is distributed throughout the population.74 At the same time, the central premise dominates, shaping the attitudes and interactions that determine the characters’ trajectories. The clones think of Miss  Emily and Madame as having the power to change their fate, but they too are at the mercy of larger social forces embodied in the novel’s premise. Miss Emily asks, “How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away the cure, to go back to the dark days?” (263). The absence of visible authority—male or female—recreates the dystopian environment as an intersubjective production that permeates society. This may be well and good in utopia, but in dystopia it means the clones have no authority to which to appeal. The diffusion of power centers allows the novel world to be both utterly determined but also wide open, if all we cared about were inner life with no regard for its duration or effect. The clones’ lives are superfluous, simply a way of killing time until the organs packaged inside are harvestable. With no adult roles to assume, the clones’ interior development must only be for its own, time-limited, sake. Here, Pater is again ironized; recall the famous lines from his “Conclusion” to the Renaissance: Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in

142  De-forming Character expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.75 The clones’ final pulsations will consist only of pain. Kathy describes Ruth after her second donation, facing imminent death: “It was like she was willing her eyes to see right inside herself, so she could patrol and marshal all the better the separate areas of pain in her body” (236). Tommy’s fear that the fourth donation will not result in completion, but of unattended consciousness, in which “there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off” (279) is the alternative: the nightmare of consciousness without agency, of sensitivity without relief, makes interiority into a burden to shed rather than a treasure to preserve. It is not only the clones whose humanism is impotent. Madame, in her final moments with Kathy, recalls the incident where she walked in on Kathy, tells her what she was thinking at that moment: “I  saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, and more efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain” (272). Madame’s and Miss Emily’s pity is of a helpless sort. At the end of the visit, Madame, clearly affected by the encounter with Kathy and Tommy puts her hand on Kathy’s cheek as she says goodbye. She overcomes her revulsion and leaves it there for a moment. “Poor creatures. I wish I could help you. But now you’re by yourself” (272). The clones have each other, but no world that needs them in their living state. The novel’s deadpan articulation of its horrifying social framework turns the humanist aspirations of the Bildungsroman on its head. It asks an apocalyptic question: can we imagine the value of life where there is no future, only a past, and no one left with whom to share it? Kathy says near the end, “I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them” (286). Is this comfort or torment? If, in the other texts in this chapter, interiority is mourned by asking the reader to experience horror at its de-formation, Ishiguro asks us to experience horror at interiority’s impotence. In place of the Bildungsroman’s development toward a completed human, Ishiguro substitutes development toward a fully incarnated human, where to be “complete” is to be realized as shared organs. The clones are Eloi, those who harvest their organs are Morlocks. Ishiguro has produced a novel in which the “last man” has already died: there are no “humans” at all. *** The dystopian texts in this chapter all show the strain of the effort to fit obsolete narratives of individual, spiritual, and national progress to modernity. If the Bildungsroman poses progress toward identity

Anti-Bildungsroman  143 as a process by which the past enters the future, the dystopian antiBildungsroman rejects this formulation: it is a novel in which the present is closed off from further development, whether individual or collective. In this, it has much in common with the epic. The constitutive features of the epic are, for Bakhtin, its location in the “absolute past,” its source in “national tradition,” and its separation from contemporary reality by “absolute epic distance.”76 Dystopia leaves us with the disconcerting spectacle of the once fluid subject of the novel trapped in completed time, a completed text; national traditions have given way to a global condition and the present of the novels is sealed off from the represented past.77 In the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman represented by these texts, the action of becoming exists only in the past, in the narrated recollections of characters who have ceased, for all intents and purposes, to exist but for their diaries. We encounter character only as we would the epic past, through retrospective recreation. The forcing together of epic and Bildungsroman resists the perpetual open-endedness that modernity invites in its fictions. Instead of a journey to a new place, the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman offers return to an old place; instead of infinite, earthbound progress, dystopia offers a return to Eden, now revealed to be a prison-house; instead of growth into effective adulthood, the dystopia offers backward development to a state of egoless, infantile grace. “Arrested development” takes on a new meaning in the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman—it is not that development is halted, but that it is incarcerated, put under lock and key in a world-prison. The only escape is to reverse the plot. Sargent writes, “if we lose eutopia, if we lose hope, we lose our humanity.”78 The texts in this chapter all attempt to narrate both losses, preserving the form by which we recognize the “human” character in order to deface it. It would not be a stretch to say that the anti-Bildungsroman has replaced the Bildungsroman as a dominant narrative for modernity.79 And yet, even texts of stalled bildung reflect the depth at which the challenge of becoming is embedded as template within our collective narrative psyche. Moretti, quoting Bettelheim compares the Bildungsroman to the fairy tale that “begins with the hero at the mercy of those who think little of him and his abilities, who mistreat him, and even threaten his life.” “This,” Moretti, writes, “is the basic predicament (if not always the starting point) of every protagonist of the English Bildungsroman.”80 The twentieth century gives rise to new models of technology, torture, and totalitarianism that, via the Bildungsroman, amplify the fairy tale premise into dystopia. Modernity’s tools for undoing selves proliferate, exceeding those available for creating selves. We, A Clockwork Orange, and Never Let Me Go gain their narrative energy from disassembling the Bildungsroman’s assumptions about character, progress, and the human capacity for cultivation.

144  De-forming Character

Notes 1. Claeys 342. 2. See Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science. 3. Marc Redfield calls it “one of the quagmires of literary study in which increased rigor leads to increased confusion” (41), noting that if Wilhelm Meister is acknowledged as the prototype, even that novel does not quite fit the category it invented, while Jeffrey Sammons calls it a “phantom genre” (239). See Tobias Boes for a useful discussion of past and current scholarship on the Bildungsroman. 4. Lukács 80. 5. See Esty (2012), 9. 6. Moretti 93. 7. Sheehan 2, 22. 8. Buckley 17–18. 9. Buckley notes that the English Bildungsroman, distinct from its German antecedents, does not necessarily emphasize the self-conscious “quest for self-culture” (13). Buckley acknowledges his description does not quite exist anywhere; still, he argues, the genre is defined by novels that contain most of the principal elements—“childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for vocation and a working philosophy” (18). 10. Moretti 5. 11. Ibid. 12. See Pheng Cheah for discussion of non-European, postcolonial bildung via the Bildungsroman. 13. Esty (2012), 6. Benjamin Kohlmann describes a subset of the genre, what he calls the socialist Bildungsroman, which focuses on internationalism in place of national identity. Such works “repurpose [the formal orderliness of the Bildungsroman] within a socialist framework that placed less stress on individual fulfillment and encouraged skepticism toward the idea of any ‘natural’ developmental trajectory” (170). 14. Ibid 27. 15. Ibid 45. 16. Ibid 2. 17. As Howe writes, novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four are based not so much on the fear “that history will suffer a miscarriage,” but rather that “the longawaited birth will prove to be a monster” (TSC 303). 18. Moretti observes that the “conflict between self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization” (15) pushes politics to the margins in order to clear space for the more significant narrative of developing interiority, where the protagonist of the Bildungsroman must simultaneously enter the world and set up a space separate from it. 19. Lukács 132. 20. Moretti 9. 21. Esty 8–9. 22. Buckley 11. 23. Moretti 36. Tom Perrin defines a category he calls the “middlebrow novel of aesthetic education” which provides “an outlet for legitimate complaints about the hypocrisy of conventional values and also maintain[s] the irresistible appeal of belonging to mainstream society, an attraction that modernism is seen to repress” (384). 24. The surveillance enabled by the panopticon—its one-sided speculation—creates a model of power in which the individual is now the subject of a science,

Anti-Bildungsroman  145 specifically a science of production, in which he can be slotted to maximum advantage. Foucault locates this new status of the individual not only in the penal subject, but in all institutional subjects, whether in education, the military, or the factory; Humanity is the respectable name given to this economy and to its meticulous calculations (92). Discipline concentrates on the detail; it is a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and knowledge (194) through its ability to know them publicly. 25. Baccolini and Moylan 5. 26. Introducing her collection on the eighteenth and nineteenth century Grand Tour, Lisa Colletta writes, “A  tour of the continent was seen as the ideal means of imparting culture, taste, knowledge, self-assurance, and polished manners (ix). 27. See Benedict Anderson’s “Creole Pioneers” chapter in Imagined Communities for more on the colonial Bildungsroman’s itinerary. 28. Aldridge 32. 29. Imaginary Communities 149–50. 30. Claeys 340. 31. Ibid 342. 32. Claeys observes that Zamyatin drew heavily on Wells (339–442), who was more optimistic about technology. 33. We xv. 34. This is irony according to Peter Rudy: “to any sensible person, the implication that that backward country [the Soviet Union] could ever build a successful interplanetary rocket was ludicrous” (We viii). 35. Lessing uses a similar formulation to very different effect in Memoirs of a Survivor; see Chapter  2. The novel begins, “We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others” (1). For Lessing, the “we” does not signal absorption of the individual by the mass, but a grasping at forms of knowledge and experience that link individuals together in communities. 36. See discussion of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man’s personification of math as a personal tormentor in Chapter 6. D-503 is tormented by uncertainty in the same way the Underground Man is tormented by mathematic certainty. Zamyatin ironically flips Dostoevsky’s critique of math in order to make a similar point: D-503’s terror of uncertainty is a function of his amputated spirit, while the Underground Man’s melodramatic refusal of twice two is a function of the absurd lengths one must go to keep spirit alive in a mathematical world. Meanwhile, Orwell’s Winston Smith sees twice two equals four as antidote to a purely subjective reality open to manipulation by the state. 37. Imaginary Communities 155. 38. See Marshik and Pease. 39. Ibid 163. 40. Zamyatin leaves open a small window of possible development. O-330, carrying D-503’s forbidden child, escapes beyond the wall. While this suggests an open-ended universe, where change may yet occur, the nascent rebellion beyond the Green Wall has no philosophy, and will find itself, too, in due time, stuck on the horns of the freedom vs. happiness dilemma. We are right back where we started. 41. Booker associates Zamyatin’s critique with Adorno and Horkheimer’s later attack on the culture industry—the mass production of culture numbs the populace, preventing individual challenge to the state—but more particularly to the “insipid pro-regime works of the early Soviet years” (36). 42. Morson 142. 43. Esty, A Shrinking Island 1. 44. Waugh 188.

146  De-forming Character 5. Buckley 18. 4 46. See Gail Kathleen Hart’s argument that Burgess undermines Schiller’s classicist aesthetics that link art to the development of “balanced humanity” (148). 47. Condition. 48. Claeys observes, “The artist is a rebel who defies control through his work” (255). 49. Sisk 76. 50. Condition n.p. 51. Ibid. 52. See Claeys 462; this defense of freedom, coupled with belief in both good and evil and the possibility of redemption, is, as many critics have pointed out, deeply Catholic. Burgess describes the impetus behind the novel: “I had read somewhere that it would be a good idea to liquidate the criminal impulse through aversion therapy; I was appalled” (“Condition” n.p). 53. Charles Sumner reads this statement of Alex as the credo of a freedom fighter. This gives Alex too much credit. Alex is not a political thinker, he is a cheeky adolescent, easily sliding into the role of “little Alex” the poor victim when he is not raping children and punching out the elderly. The word “little” distances Alex from his actions. Elsewhere, Alex refers to himself as “Alex the Large.” P. R. Deltoid, his “Post-Corrective Adviser” uses “Little Alex” sarcastically; Alex uses the adjective when referring with contempt to his friends; the police use it, and his jailers use it along with his number, calling him “Little 6655321.” When Pete runs into him he says “It’s little Alex, isn’t it.” Claeys writes, I think more accurately, “[t]he ‘ultra-violent’outlook is simply a hatred of middle-class domesticity, of youth for age, of meaninglessness for conventionality and respectability, of arrant hedonism for humdrum workaday enslavement. Besides, Alex is violent just because he likes it” (462–63). 54. Esty (2012), 7. 55. Moretti 118–19. Moretti calls this the “Waterloo paradox.” “The unhappy ending lets the reader keep believing in the professed principles of legitimacy, since no ‘higher’ values have been offered in their stead” (127). 56. According to the egregious blurb on the back of the Houghton Mifflin edition, Orwell’s novel is a “poignant and ultimately hopeful look at class and society [that] pays tribute to the stubborn virtues of ordinary people who keep the aspidistra flying.” See my further discussion in Chapter 5. 57. Esty (2012), 6. 58. Condition n.p. 59. Sumner 49. 60. Ibid. 61. Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis in their introduction to their edited volume on Ishiguro identify him “primarily as a novelist in the mould of classic writers of the humanist tradition” (1). 62. Waugh 20 (in Groes). 63. Liani Lochner similarly draws attention to Ishiguro’s critique of scientific discourse’s tendency to normalize what would otherwise be unthinkable. 64. Black 793. 65. Ibid 794. 66. Redfield 39. 67. They are quite literally like Dante’s poets and philosophers who had the misfortune to precede Christ through no fault of their own: For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire. (Canto 4: 40–42.)

Anti-Bildungsroman  147 8. Dialogic Imagination 234–35. 6 69. See Mark Eatough’s formulation; he notes how the novel severs vocation from cultivation (n.p). 70. McDonald 78. 71. See Moretti (vii), for discussion of the importance of episodic detail. 72. Lukács distinguishes the Bildungsroman from the novel of disillusionment noting that its protagonist’s world cannot be “self-dependent” (132): “individual characters are closely linked together by this community of destiny, whereas in the novel of disillusionment the parallelism of their lives had only to enhance their loneliness” (134). Here, it is ironic—the clones have each other, but their destiny is sharply different from those who their organs will serve. Though connected to each other, they are walled off from participation in the community that has made the rules. 73. Black points out that the exchanges teach them they are involved in an “economy of circulation rather than extraction” (76). 74. Claeys 484. 75. Renaissance 198. 76. Bakhtin 13. 77. See Alkon 13–16, who deals at length with the relationship between future fiction and epic through the lens of Bakhtin. 78. “Defense” 12. 79. David L. Vanderwerken sees inversion of the narrative of formation in the anti-Bildungsroman of Elie Wiesel’s Night; Esty notes the pervasiveness of the character who will not or cannot grow up in texts from Melville’s Billy Budd to Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. 80. Moretti 186.

6 Paranoid Plots Dystopia and the Fantasy of Centrality in Dostoevsky and Orwell1

[Schreber] himself was ‘the only real man left alive’, and the few human shapes that he still saw—the doctor, the attendants, the other patients— he explained as being ‘miracled up, cursorily improvised men’. (Freud, Three Case Histories 111).

Romantic Paranoia Judge Schreber’s claim to be “the only real man left alive” is emblematic of the paranoiac’s efforts to assert a special, persecuted status on behalf of his humanity. But the claim is also symbolic of a romantic consciousness that expresses itself in terms of intense singularity, of separation from the everyday “din of towns and cities,” from routine, from deadening conventions. Like the paranoiac, the romantic seeks reconciliation with a transcendent beyond, whether that beyond exists in nature, in disorienting experience, or in imagination. Both the paranoiac and the romantic imagine a special relationship to signs, registering what a less sensitive, less acute observer, has missed. Like Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey,” the paranoiac sees “into the life of things.” The previous chapter demonstrated the formal and thematic debts that classical dystopian modes of characterization owe to the Bildungsroman. This chapter explores a related debt: the dystopia’s debt to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century models of romantic subjectivity. Wordsworth’s vision in his “Intimations of Immortality” ode of the child born “trailing clouds of glory” is one refraction of this sensibility; Schiller’s striving for an integrative wholeness that connects the individual to the sublime through aesthetic experience, mentioned previously in the context of the Bildungsroman, is another; the intensity and singularity of the romantic lyrical voice still another.2 In a general sense, the qualities that define romantic subjectivity—individualism, affective intensity, imagination, solitude, the striving for repair via the return to emotion, organic nature, or aesthetic experience—shape a sense of identity not accessed through mundane social forms but through private communion with an imagined sublime. In combination with Romanticism’s rejection

Paranoid Plots  149 of Enlightenment reason in favor of the emotional, ecstatic, and visionary we encounter a subject defined not by social position or use but by expansive interior space set in relation to cosmic force.3 It is no accident that Bildungsroman of the previous chapter emerges alongside the romantic sensibility. Romanticism’s attention to subjective experience activates narratives of resistance and accommodation essential to the Bildungsroman’s pitting of individual subjectivity against outer demands. The Bildungsroman’s journey of self-realization requires that a protagonist become aware of all the ways in which identity might escape the net cast by the material world. In the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman, privacy, the seedbed of individuality, is demolished. The protagonist is fully incorporated within the social body, drained of interiority, the spark of individual genius extinguished. In this negation, dystopia shares a root with other forms that depict the romantic subject under duress. Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a telling example. Bartleby, a timid copyist, goes to work for the narrator, a complacent Wall Street lawyer, and is placed at a desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall, and the light came down from far above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small opening in a dome. (110–11) Wordsworth’s sublime “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns” is obscured by the buildings. Even the former view of the grimy backyards is blocked by new construction. Only a tiny light makes its way down the shaft. Bartleby’s job hand-lettering copies is machine drudgery allowing for neither craft nor originality. “I  cannot credit that the mettlesome poet, Byron, would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document” (111), the narrator says. Eventually, Bartleby concurs with Byron, stubbornly refusing when asked to check his work. His resistance, expressed in the phrase, “I  would prefer not to,” is a last, timid gasp of human agency, negative resistance rather than positive revolt. Refusing to do any more work or to explain himself, he squats in the narrator’s law office, haunting him like a bad conscience. Eventually, he is removed to the city jail where he dies alone, curled up and wasted at the foot of the prison wall. The story’s coda reveals that Bartleby once worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. The narrator speculates that Bartleby’s despair grew out of over-exposure to messages of hope unreceived: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?” Bartleby

150  De-forming Character himself is a dead letter: a human reduced to the script that constitutes the narrator’s story, a message that has failed to hit home. However, the story does offer a faint glimmer of hope: Melville’s “dead letter” is now in our hands, and we have an opportunity to be morally receptive to Bartleby’s human claims. Melville’s iconic character exemplifies the fate of the romantic soul in modernity, the expansive spirit ground down to a nubbin. Bartleby—who may not even be able to read—lives in a world of dead letters unaspirated by spirit. In this, he is the perfect emblem of an instrumental age. He is a disposable, mechanical part, with no interiority to relate, whose value to the external world is defined solely by utility. The narrator’s closing sigh, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity,” explicitly links Bartleby’s fate to our own. Melville’s “last man” is a fast-fading ghost, severed from the reader by his opacity, denied full emergence as a character by his frustrating failure to act or express his interior life. Like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, who, it turns out, is not really an artist at all, but rather a man who “couldn’t find a food which [he] enjoyed,” Bartleby represents the human in terms of what is missing rather than what is present. In the twentieth century, the problem of what to do with romantic subjectivity preoccupies modernist writers. Some, like Lawrence, seek to recover what Eugene Stelzig calls, “the Wordsworthian sense of cosmic connectedness.”4 Others, like Eliot, reject romanticism’s emphasis on individual “personality,” even while drawing on romanticism’s deep well of affect in order to invoke the pathos of a world in which God and the attendant promise of transcendence is, in J. Hillis Miller’s word, “unavailable.”5 Still others, like Woolf and Joyce, translate romanticism’s expansive interiority into a fragmentary stream of consciousness that nonetheless gestures toward a distant sublime and the promise of integration and connection. Dystopia’s answer to this problem is to make concrete the terms of romantic alienation and reconciliation, rendering in literal terms of plot and setting what modernists render as theme and formal condition. Just as dystopia in the twentieth century understands the Bildungsroman at its back as no longer an adequate form for the rendering of character, the classic dystopias of the thirties and forties, exemplified by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four resist modernism’s formal means of mourning such a character. Though modernist in neither theme nor style, dystopian plots depend on assassination of the coherent, agentic, private character inherited from the previous century, and modified perhaps beyond recognition in the first decades of the twentieth century. Orwell brings to the forefront the paranoia that underlies such a plot. Not least among Nineteen Eighty-Four’s prescient aspects is its articulation of a paranoia that is at once dismal and thrilling. The malevolent gaze of a jealous and punitive god gains secular coordinates in the modern state. Just as Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s subject stands alone at the

Paranoid Plots  151 center of a network of signs, occupying the privileged position of solitary reader—imagine the traveler who stands on a hill and gazes out at the utopian, rational city—paranoia inverts the vector of agency so that the paranoid stands in the middle while the world gazes back. The two grandiose positions are complementary. The paranoiac occupies a privileged relationship to the text of the world as the lone reader of signs and as the sign read by the world. The grandiosity of the paranoiac who says the world is out to get me reasserts the centrality of the subject within a signifying system. Turning passivity into grandiosity, paranoia is a reparative discourse that re-authorizes the autonomous subject, granting renewed access to the ecstatic dis- and re-embodiment that is the promise of the sublime. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Jameson all make paranoia central to their theories, posing it as a peril of the decentered, suspicious modern subject in search of a master-narrative. Works published in the past twenty years on literary paranoia by critics such as Kenneth Paradis, Timothy Melley, Patrick O’Donnell, David Trotter, Thomas Pfau, and John Farrell share this sense of paranoia as reparative discourse. O’Donnell and Melley associate paranoia specifically with the American experience, including the cold war, the Kennedy assassination, and the rise of the multinational corporation under late capitalism. Richard Hofstader’s classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics sets the tone for this approach, with Pynchon’s creative paranoia often held up as its literary avatar. Both O’Donnell and Melley link paranoia to the preservation of earlier forms of subjectivity and focus on paranoia as a culturally produced and culturally authorized narrative technology. For O’Donnell it is a “narrative work or operation that articulates the ‘individual’s’ relation to the symbolic order,” while for Melley it is a “complex and self-defeating [attempt] to preserve a familiar concept of subjectivity.”6 But if America in the postwar period perfected paranoia as a privileged technology of knowing, à la Hofstader, paranoia is hardly a postwar invention. Each generation faces specific challenges in re-instantiating an individual subject in danger of being displaced. These critics locate the crisis at the intersection of different discourses. While Melley locates it at the intersection of older structures of authority and the postwar boom and O’Donnell locates it at the intersection of history and postmodern identity, Paradis locates it at the intersection of modern masculinity and evolving concepts of gender, Pfau locates it at the intersection of Enlightenment and romantic discourses, Trotter locates it at the intersection between industrial capitalism and the new knowledge economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Farrell locates it at the point where Enlightenment models of the subject take over from theological models. All theorize paranoia as a textual, ontological, and epistemological practice that pits a reading subject against newly emergent, culturally authoritative models of narrating the subject.

152  De-forming Character Because paranoia is a method of reading, many of these critics also point out the limitations of the search for paranoia. To look for it is, tautologically, to enact it, and therefore to find it. With this caution in mind, this chapter’s argument is situated against an extended moment of crisis, the long bleeding out of Romanticism over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later in the chapter I amplify the notion of paranoia as textual practice, but first, I want to underscore the close formal resemblance between paranoia and romantic subjectivity. David Swanson outlines seven characteristic attitudes of paranoia: projective thinking, hostility, suspiciousness, centrality, delusions, fear of loss of autonomy, and grandiosity.7 Swanson’s list clarifies paranoia as a set of potential formal behaviors and highlights the extent to which they represent a difference of degree rather than of kind. Each element has an analogue in the attitudes of romantic subjectivity. Familiar figures such as the pathetic fallacy, intensity of affect and imagination, the search for esoteric meanings, the privileging of solitude, visionary experience, bildung, and the desire for union with cosmic forces take on a pathological form. Wordsworth grants nature “ample power/ to chasten and subdue,” calling it “the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/ of all my moral being.” Repeating such a formulation, the paranoiac replaces nature’s patient benignity with motivated malevolence. Wordsworth’s nature “pass[es] even into [his] purer mind;” the paranoid reframes this “passing into” as colonization, and the external sublime as more warden than guardian. Modernist paranoia responds to collapsing narratives of romantic subjectivity at the thematic level by solving the problem of indifference. If romanticism’s emotional poetics are already, as Pfau argues, an attempt to stabilize, repair, and secure the discourse of the subject against Enlightenment discourses of “intention, causation, memory, rhetorical, moral, and aesthetic purity [that] have become increasingly unreliable,” and paranoia a formal performance of this need, later iterations of paranoia engage in reparative poetics as well.8 Paranoia is not the disease, but the cure, a structure of thinking that attempts to solve the problem of an evacuated interior disconnected from transcendental meaning, and from romanticism’s ways of talking about it. If romanticism is a strategic language that seeks to ameliorate the epistemological crises and cultural upheavals of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, paranoia preserves romanticism against subsequent threats. Recall Hardy’s poem “Hap” (1899) from the Chapter 1. Hardy returns again and again to the gods’ lack of personal interest as the wellspring of tragedy. Hardy’s problem is that he is not paranoid. Like Bartleby, or Prufrock, to whom the mermaids will not sing, Hardy lacks the interior energy to engage in delusions of reference. Orwell recapitulates this anxiety about intention and the place of the subject in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Winston asks Julia if she remembers “that thrush that sang to us,

Paranoid Plots  153 that first day, at the edge of the wood,” she replies, “[h]e wasn’t singing to us. He was singing to please himself” (147). Like Hardy’s darkling thrush or Prufrock’s sea-girls, the bird sings of something Winston and Julia cannot see and that is indifferent to their existence. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour share the exacerbated antagonism between character and setting so crucial to dystopian and paranoid poetics. Both are built around the relentless persecution of their protagonists. It is not that the protagonists are being persecuted. Perhaps they are, perhaps not; the important thing is that they feel they are being persecuted, deriving their sense of self— and, I argue, an acute gratification—from this persecution. Their investment in persecution separates them from the hero of the quest romance. Though similarly “chosen,” the traditional hero does not experience the trials in their path as motivated obstructions. By attributing motive to the fictive real, the paranoid hero claims a status as worthy adversary to the vengeful god that Hardy cannot quite conjure. My readings of Dostoevsky and Orwell in this chapter show paranoia operating in, on, and through modern character. I first follow out a thread of paranoia that links Romanticism to Modernism. Next, I treat Dostoevsky’s protagonist from the anti-utopian Notes from Underground as an early model of the paranoid character “type” coughed up by an enfeebled romanticism. Shrinking from the de-personalized utopian promise of the “Crystal Palace,” Dostoevsky’s hero goes to great lengths in order to imagine that his persecution is motivated. Finally, I  show how Orwell explicitly draws out Dostoevsky’s logic of romantic paranoia. As in the previous chapter on the Bildungsroman, my broader argument is that dystopia maps collisions between formal modes of expressing subjectivity. Dystopia in general, and Dostoevsky and Orwell in particular, reflexively deploy strategies of characterization that simultaneously preserve and attack older modes of subjectivity, rendering traces of the original formations in pathologized forms native to paranoia.

Paranoid Poetics A world does not have to be persecutory police state of surveillance and constricted freedoms for paranoia to be present. As I argued in C ­ hapter 1, a structural logic of reduction defines paranoid textuality. David Trotter, referring to Conrad’s Lord Jim, calls the paranoid text a “world suddenly emptied of mere contingencies.”9 In the paranoid text, everything happens for a reason. The paranoid dystopia, with the exaggerated power it grants to setting and the diminished sphere of agency it grants to characters has no room for “accidents.” Rejecting the ambiguities and uncertainties of the novel form, paranoid structure enforces a strict rigidity on narrative. The absence of contingency drastically shrinks the twin illusion—autonomous character and indifferent setting—out of which

154  De-forming Character novels are constructed. As already mentioned, O’Brien says to Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s climactic interrogation scene, “It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee” (181). Much as the paranoid turns a complex, ambiguous reality into a sensible world organized around persecution, so the dystopian novel reconfigures novel structure as an environment hostile to the autonomous subject. Paranoia’s investment in hidden knowledge reclaims value from the mimetic economies traditionally governing identity. Focusing on modernist paranoia, Trotter reads paranoia both as a project of preservation and as a project of creation. As early twentieth-century economic processes of professionalization broke down traditional designations of “rank and station” that previously bestowed stable identity, the emergent professional class turned to imputations of expertise rather than visible markers to legitimize its status.10 Producing and reading signs attesting to hidden charisma demarcated this class from those whose status signage was more concrete and literal. The result was a “psychopathology of expertise.”11 Upwardly mobile classes struggled to reproduce professional identities in the realm of symbolic capital rather than, say, in the brick-and-mortar of a store and its inventory. Trotter argues the paranoid modernism of writers like Hulme, Conrad, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford was an anxious response to the new commercial paradigm governing the cultural production of value. Professionalism’s emphasis on ordering the mess of details that constitute the world gave them both a subject—“professional identities under extreme pressure”—and professional anxiety of their own.12 Pfau approaches romantic paranoia as a “historically specific mood of social cognition” visible in early romanticism’s formal productions. In response to the “affective and epistemological bewilderment of the late eighteenth century, the “reading process shifts from one of distraction to one of detection.”13 For Pfau, romantic emotion embodies and stages a longing for closure, a longing formulated not in philosophical, but aesthetic, emotional terms that provide transcendental grounding for the subject. Pfau names romantic paranoia as one of three “moods” of romanticism (the others are trauma and melancholy). All establish a self-consciously evaluative relationship to the experiential world. As an “intelligential operation concerned with ascertaining its own cause,” romantic paranoia is an attempt at reverse engineering causality. This backward facing analysis, with its attempt to explain what has already happened, is the essence of the defensive paranoid project.14 While Trotter looks to characters and authors, and Pfau to the literary work and its rhetoric, Farrell looks to a larger epistemological pattern in the discourses of Western culture. Farrell calls paranoia “the central imaginative impulse in American Literature since World War II,” arguing that paranoid characters, defined by their “grandiosity, suspicion and

Paranoid Plots  155 persecution” trace their heritage all the way back to the dawn of the seventeenth century and Don Quixote.15 He frames paranoia as the temptation to assert agency by denying it. The paranoiac, identifying with idealized perfection, needs someone or something to blame when the real fails to live up to the ideal. Since “[the paranoiac’s] tenuous grasp on the actual can only be sustained by means of a self-aggrandizing persecutory delusion,” the paranoiac sacrifices his/her claim to agency.16 At the same time, by naming this failure, the paranoiac asserts a revised form of agency. Tracing a path through the “theological, sociological, psychological and mechanistic schemes of explanation” of Luther, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Rousseau, Farrell finds a continuity of paranoid thought in modernity’s re-positing of agency as the power to explain. If, as O’Donnell, Melley, Trotter, Farrell, and Pfau argue, paranoid reading is always conducted under the shadow of discursive disruption, what distinguishes it from normal interpretive practice might not be the “moves” themselves but the intensity with which they are deployed. The paranoiac’s mistake is not to read the signs, but to be overinvested in them, to read as if he enjoys a special relationship with them. For the paranoiac, unpacking secret messages not only reveals hidden truth, it also reveals a message that belongs to the paranoid. Fox Mulder’s search for the truth “out there” is not paranoid because he imagines a hidden order, but because he imagines that unraveling it will lead him to the sister whose loss is the initiating trauma of his belief. The paranoid reader’s investment in and relationship to the paranoid premise ultimately determines the behavior’s pathological status. In other words, it may be that what distinguishes paranoia from a reasonable suspiciousness is ultimately not whether the threat is real, but the kind of gratification the paranoid takes in imagining it. Farrell’s analysis, like Pfau’s, and to a lesser extent, Trotter’s, underscores paranoia as a disease of interpretation, a pathology of reference. The action of the paranoid, powerless to face his enemy directly in the arena—because his enemy is so vast, or because he is so weak—consists of rationalizing the inability to act. The replacement of action with obsessive sign-reading and the replacement of reference to a world outside with reference to a world inside are two of paranoia’s formal traces. Consider that literature as formal expression is always paranoid to a certain extent, requiring that we approach signs with an eye toward determining design. To read is to imagine intentionality, as Stanley Fish famously argues.17 The cognitive malfunction that lies at the heart of paranoia is in a perception of connectedness that is inseparable from that which governs fiction. In books, things happen for a reason: paranoia is the act of reading the world as if it were a book. And, moreover, a bad book. The paranoiac, insisting on disproportionate correspondence between signs and things, refuses the looser signification of metaphor for unambiguous certainty. Salomon Resnik calls

156  De-forming Character attention to the paranoid’s confusion about how fictions work, calling it a “lack of the capacity to metaphorize correctly and to symbolize experience.”18 This failure of metaphor suggests a failure of separation between signifier and signified. The reduction of the world to a provisionally stable signifying system and the absorption of all information into the system are the paranoid’s solution to the problem of otherness. Signs in the paranoid dystopia are not overdetermined, but underdetermined: there is only one reason why anything happens, and that reason is inseparable from the paranoiac’s investment. Freud associates hysteria with art, obsessional neurosis with religion, and paranoia with philosophy, calling the paranoiac delusion “a caricature of a philosophical system.”19 Paradis applies Freud’s image of the philosopher as paranoid to individual character, calling paranoia “a parodic image of the autonomous rational individual to which modernity aspires.”20 It is the “parodic” aspect that is crucial: delusions of reference are merely the flip side of obsessive suspicion within a closed, intentional universe. Romantic and modernist writers deploy reading-as-action in different ways. For the romantic, the text to be read is the book of nature, a replacement for the bible, but nonetheless still a book. Emerson, for example, writes: A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause. (n.p.) Or, consider Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their narrow convent room,” which closes with an image of agreeable incarceration in poetic language: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me, In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground. (Norton 551) Ironizing the “scantiness” of the sonnet form, Wordsworth suggests that, far from being a prison, it is, like a convent room, a relief from the crowded outside world. Wordsworth is finally alone with his text. The “we” of the first line of the stanza becomes “me” in the second line; reading and writing are, finally, solitary acts. Wordsworth, like Shelley’s Verney, claims the privilege of entering alone into the “scanty plot” while the paranoid is condemned to it.

Paranoid Plots  157 For the modernist hero, signs constitute both setting and subject. The modernist hero is first reduced to readable sign, then re-produced through an act of reading. The book Mrs. Dalloway conjures a character out of the words between the covers. At the end of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Peter sees Clarissa returning to her party: What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. (194) We and Peter are in the same boat, readers of surface manifestations, in search of a self that exists beyond the sign. Mrs. Dalloway, her married name, is a stable sign locating her within the social order. The unstable Clarissa, in contrast, escapes, appearing only in flashes behind the bars of language and becoming visible only to the attentive reader. The paranoid reads, but also has an investment in being the passive object of reading. Eliot’s “Prufrock” crystallizes this problem: “And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,/ When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,/ Then how should I begin” Prufrock is both reader and read, paralyzed by anxiety about how his object of desire will see him. He fears being fixed but he also craves it—it is only in the fixing of a reader’s eye that he escapes from his hesitations and revisions. Prufrock’s love song is not the carpe diem of Donne or Marvell, in which the poet is sure of what he wants and will say anything to get it. The replacement of intuition that leads to action with rationalization of the inability to act distends interior space into something unmanageable. Much of Eliot’s early work elaborates the displacement of action into thought. The speakers are not characters who act but characters who articulate an inability to act. Prufrock is no John the Baptist; the speaker in “Gerontion” was not at the hot gates. If paranoia as character trait predates modernity, modernity’s technologies of expressing interior life provide paranoia with ample room to expand. Modernist paranoia is also gendered. Trotter observes in Schreber and the influential modernist critic and poet T. E. Hulme an “obstinacy in their striving for structure” that is based in the desire to overcome so-called “feminine” social mimesis with a “will-to-abstraction.”21 The modernist flight from vulgar mimesis and the “mess” of the real is a symbolic performance of masculinity, where potency in the commercial and cultural marketplace is signaled by skill in producing and reading signs.22 This obsession with a “signed” masculinity has much to tell us about paranoia’s expression in modernism. The homosexual etiology that Freud associates with paranoia—expressed in Three Case Histories as I love him, I hate him, he hates me—becomes a defensive narrative model

158  De-forming Character for staging identity.23 Resistance to homosexual desire surfaces leads to projection and reaction formation. Masculine identity and identifications are both embraced and defended against, reproducing the pattern of male homosociality articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in which “male homosocial bonds . . . concentrate[] . . . fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and explosive violence” that are in turn “fully structured by the logic of paranoia.”24 Trotter finds both a structural and thematic preoccupation with paranoia in texts like Ford’s The Good Soldier, where he discerns “a criss-cross pattern which relates feelings of grandeur to feelings of persecution;” Dowell “will only ever know himself through betrayal.”25 The man without qualities measures himself against the man in full, his emptiness expanding to fill a space equivalent to that of his self-proclaimed nemesis. The “last man” figure is masculinist, reactionary, persecuted. Meanwhile, as text, dystopias are not high modernist but middlebrow, engaged, mimetic. If mimesis makes them feminine, their paranoid plots furiously assert a desperate, besieged masculinity in response.

“Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent” Paranoia’s emergence with such force in the early twentieth century is also grounded in the physical and demographic changes wrought by industrialization and mass production, and their impact on discursive practice. The exodus from rural to urban spaces in the late nineteenth century gives paranoia its setting. In “Winter Notes Upon Summer Impressions,” Dostoevsky writes of the city: “You sense the terrifying power which has brought these countless people from all the corners of the earth together into a single herd; you acknowledge the titanic concept; you understand that here something has been achieved, that here is a victory, a triumph. You begin to feel afraid.”26 Similarly, Georg Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” associates the city with new forms of subjectivity. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of his life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation.27 The city provides a counterpoint to romantic desire for solitude in nature. At the same time, the city takes up the signifying force once granted to nature, throwing up phantasmagoric apparitions of crowd, fog, and light suggestive of the deep mysteries formerly sought for in nature. The relocation of romanticism to the city opens up a new palette of negative romantic

Paranoid Plots  159 emotions. Jostled and abused by the crowd, Dostoevsky’s tormented outsiders feel with an ecstatic intensity. Like the flaneur, they are both a part of the crowd and apart from it. These two poles, immersion and resistance, take on a new meaning in the city, where the promise of immersion is so much nearer, the need for differentiation so much more urgent. Paranoia is a predictable response to the re-inscribing of romantic desire in urban space, an understandable response to the curious eyes of the crowd. Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” is an explicit example of this paranoid logic of the city. The narrator observes the passers-by, classifying them on the basis of clues in their demeanor and clothing. The urban throng calls into question the individual’s sense of uniqueness and importance while providing a pretext for fears that one is being watched. The romantic rambler who sought outward in nature takes on an involuted, defensive stance, locked up in Prufrock’s “streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent.” The city’s infrastructure and bureaucracy reflect a flawed model of the social order—not man in absolute relationship with fictive nature, but man forced into an “unnatural” relationship with the oppressive artificiality of man-made structures. Simmel notes a paradox: cities simultaneously enforce “minute precision,” which leads to “a structure of the highest impersonality” but, with their intense stimulation, also promote “a highly personal subjectivity.”28 The result is a jarring loose of narrative voice from stable subject/object divisions. Writers like Poe and Baudelaire, romantic poets of urban space, capture a heady mix of disorientation and possibility that is inseparable from mania. The city is not just scene of the text but also metaphor for a more pervasive discursive shift. The migration of romantic attitudes to the city, and their preservation in an urban environment, is an essential feature of both We and A Clockwork Orange from the previous chapter; D-503 might as well be Baudelaire in his encounter with I-330; A Clockwork Orange’s juxtaposition of images of seedy urban decay with Beethoven is a schematic map of Alex’s psyche. Tyrus Miller, in his study of late modernism, describes the aesthetic pressures exerted by the new type of frenzied and defensive urban subjectivity. Following Simmel, Miller identifies the city as a concentrated emblem of impersonal forces of social, political, and financial control with the power to modify the consciousness of the city dweller.29 Along with modifications in consciousness come modifications in aesthetics. For Miller, early modernism’s “aesthetics of formal mastery,” a response to the pressure on artists to maintain authenticity and autonomy against the tide of social and technological change, begins to lose its potency in the years following the war.30 Miller writes: An unprecedented rationalization of social life in Europe and the United States, the subordination of previously distinct spheres to

160  De-forming Character impersonal or collective aims, the systematic and active organization of society by the state, a process greatly intensified by the need to mobilize human and material resources for the war and again by the economic crisis of 1929, was experienced by many artists as an encroachment on their authenticity and autonomy, a devaluation of their individual experience.31 The city is emblem of this unsettling, but the body also becomes a site where it is inscribed. By the 1930’s, in response to “growing skepticism about modernist sensibility and craft as means of managing the turbulent forces of the day,” writers “developed a repertoire of means for unsettling the signs of formal craft that testified to the modernist writer’s discursive mastery.”32 Some of these tools were destructive. For example, Miller describes late modernist poetics’ emphasis on “the fragility and permeability of the human body and its uneasy fit within the spaces around it;” the disruptive body under siege is metaphor for “subjectivity ‘at play’ in the face of its own extinction.”33 Orwell turns this aesthetic subtext into text, realizing the attack on bodies and the shutting down of “play” as paranoid plot. The evacuation of Winston as subject is given bodily form in recurring motifs of bodily filth and foul smells that assault the senses, such as the smell of “boiled cabbage and old rag mats” (1) permeating the apartment blocks. Evacuation of bowels, of bile, etc. is a recurring motif throughout. The body, instead of being a site of play, turns into a source of disgust. Paranoia stabilizes the subject, but the cost is the choking off the jouissance of signification. This is the underdetermination I wrote of previously: a multiplicity of signs is reduced to a poverty of meaning, in which all signs point back to the threat to the paranoid. If, as Trotter argues, modernists deploy paranoia offensively as both a consequence of and strategy for assimilating the symbolic economy, Orwell’s paranoia is largely defensive. The subject is not the empty man who creates himself through paranoia, as with Dowell, but the man whose fullness has been drained by the very strategies used in modernist conjuring. Meisel argues that the modernist novel is a form of materialized memory, an effort to retroactively produce a ground that will authorize the subject. According to Meisel, both romanticism and modernism enact a “retroactive production of lost primacy by means of evidence belatedly gathered to signify the presence of its absence.”34 But there is a substantive difference in exactly how the “presence of absence” is signified. In the romantic text, it appears through a shift in perception; in modernism through a shift in the signifying status of the text itself, which relocates the sublime not in the world but in the textual object. The embattled romantic subject is a convenient placeholder, making available a set of familiar tropes that highlight the opposition between “organic” and rationalized man. The reactionary strain in dystopia

Paranoid Plots  161 emphasizes preservation of an earlier, putatively more organic age, before modernism began drawing attention to the subject’s tenuous foothold in history as discourse. What modernism takes as a formal condition, the collapse of stable reference, Orwell’s dystopia translates into plot, giving material form to the anxiety of the modern. Focusing both on reading signs and being the sign that is read, the paranoid dystopia offers a character that bridges romantic idealism with what Frank Kermode calls the “formal desperation” of the Joyce/Proust/Kafka/Musil brand of Modernism.35 In the reading of Dostoevsky that follows, Notes emerges as a precursor to twentieth-century dystopias, sharing with Orwell’s putative “warning” a paranoid psychology, a structure, and a set of motifs.

Diseased Romanticism: Dostoevsky’s Psychological Dystopia Morson identifies Notes as “the most important source of the modern dystopia” in its provision of a thematic, characterological, and narratological template for the paranoid dystopia.36 Philosophically, the text is a rejection of the rational utopianism of Chernyshevsky’s polemical novel, What Is To Be Done? Joseph Frank reads the interlocutor whom the text addresses as a follower of Chernyshevsky, “the normal man, the man of action,” and the Underground’s Man rant in the first part as defense of a “moral-emotive sensibility” against the materialist determinism and reason of the 1860’s; the second part, meanwhile, parodies the SocialRomanticism of the 1840’s.37 The interaction of these two parodies is key to understanding the text: both rely on expression of the desire for “protecting the autonomy of the personality,” in the first part against materialist reason, in the second part against romantic vanity that insists on recognition.38 Dostoevsky’s dilemma is that of the dystopian subject for whom remaining autonomous is a source of pain. The Underground Man anticipates dystopia’s secret embrace of masochism as the key to remaining human. The figure of the Crystal Palace, which Chernyshevsky borrowed from the 1851 London Great Exhibition and uses to represent the glorious, rational future becomes in Notes the symbol of oppression by the “statistical figures and scientifico-economic formulas” (21) of utilitarian progress that threaten to calculate the human out of existence. The Underground Man complains that when science eventually uncovers all the laws of nature, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar or, better, still, some well-meaning publications will appear like the present-day encyclopaedic dictionaries, in

162  De-forming Character which everything will be precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world. (Translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky; 24) This is the scene of We. Science predicts the final triumph over contingency, the emergence of all possible phenomena as a complete system, mathematical and inescapable, and the human subject fixed as a point on a graph. In utopia, everything is known; the aggregate, with its smoothly plotted curves, replaces the individual at the center of history. Dostoevsky identifies the logic that will lead to such a world, a logic the Underground Man can complain about but is powerless to avert. If the plot of the classic anti-utopia consists of the destruction of an “accidental” human, Notes leaves its last man intact, marooned in a hostile world. While Chernyshevsky provides the pretext, and the philosophy of the 1860’s and the social romanticism of the 1840’s provides the setting, the character of the Underground Man must also be read in the context of the shifting sands of novelistic character in the mid-nineteenth century. Frank draws attention to Dostoevsky’s mix of philosophy with social realism.39 The gap between idealizations of the “beautiful and lofty” and the petty, mean reality of a clerk in mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg is a central tension of the text. Romanticism sets a worldly standard against which the world cannot but fall short. Hulme writes, “the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. It’s effect on you is that of a drug.”40 The brilliant light of romanticism, the light which promises to illuminate the divine mysteries, ends by illuminating dissatisfaction. Richard Pevear, in the introduction to his translation of Notes (with Larissa Volokhonsky), sees the Underground Man’s ranting as parody of the literary romanticism of Byron, Pushkin and Lermontov, and the philosophical romanticism of Rousseau and Schiller. For the Underground Man, romanticism is the target of savage burlesque because it causes so much pain. But, even as he looks back to romanticism to escape from the present, he cannot do so without treating the urge as itself a form of humiliation. Echoing Morson’s identification of Notes as an anti-novel, and dystopia in general as an anti-genre, Pevear calls it an “antibook” (viii, ix). Like so many dystopias, Notes is told in diary form, reducing our frame of reference to monologue. Even so, Pevear observes, the single speaker is “not a monolithic personality, but an inner plurality in constant motion” (xix). The text organizes this personality by reversing the temporal sequence—the philosophy of the first part is the outcome of the events related in the second part. The backward-facing text performs the retrospective justification Pfau associates with the paranoid mood and Kermode associates with apocalyptic systems. The text constitutes a closed loop of rationalized causality, where all actions are read within the framework of the destination. Despite the narrator’s claim to embrace

Paranoid Plots  163 mimetic mess—“I  will not introduce any order or system. Whatever I recall, I will write down” (40)—there is indeed a domineering order. All incidents are incorporated into the design of Underground Man’s romantic aspirations that have been thwarted by vulgar materialism and reason. This is the essence of textual paranoia—if plot is always in some sense a rationalization of theme, the paranoid text cannot sustain the illusion that it is otherwise. The narrower the theme, the more plot must cohere to the idée fixe that dominates the novel. If all Bartleby can muster is wan preference, the Underground Man, under similar pressures, boils with interior life. The narrator begins, “I am a sick man. . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts” (3). For the next 130 pages he fulminates, sprays invective, justifies, and contradicts, filling the page with his unrestrained interior. Dostoevsky’s characteristically thought-tormented characters enact what Alex de Jonge calls the “ontological unease” characteristic of the nineteenth century.41 The plunge into “intensity” is an attempt to find wholeness not in timeless structures of order and truth but in the individual’s capacity for repairing a newly fragmented sense of place through emotion, through a sensation of supreme presence. The subject is a thing that needs “fixing,” both in the sense of repair and stabilization.42 The Underground Man’s turn inward—away from the sphere of civic duty and public morality, and toward the development of a coherent subjectivity—is tied up in this need to recover a sense of wholeness no longer available in cultural institutions. Like Wordsworth, who, in Marjorie Levinson’s influential reading of “Tintern Abbey” manufactures a nature purified of political and social taint to serve as refuge from the messy political and social world that produced the Terror, the Underground Man also withdraws into an idealized fantasy of escape. Just as Wordsworth’s fantasy of a nature “that never did betray/ The heart that loved her” promises spiritual restoration, the Underground Man’s retreat into anxiety clears a space for sublimity. The city’s heightened sensation provides the raw material for Dostoevsky’s obsessive cataloguing of the varieties of humiliation available in such a milieu. Where Wordsworth seeks tranquility, Dostoevsky finds a negative form of transcendence in the urban sturm und drang of intensified consciousness, not a rising up but a sinking down. Rather than compensating for cultural disintegration by internalizing the ideals of culture and re-articulating them as personal ideals as in the Bildungsroman template, the Underground Man solves the problem of disintegration by masochistically embracing his “sickness” of disordered consciousness.43 The Underground Man defends a man’s “right to wish for himself even what is stupidest of all” (31). In a world of mandatory happiness, the choice of suffering—or to take pleasure in suffering— would be the one thing that is volitional. The Underground Man prefers perversity to rationally calculated happiness, “[f]or if wanting gets in

164  De-forming Character complete cahoots with reason, then essentially we shall be reasoning and not wanting” (27).44 To choose suffering for its own sake is to express independent will liberated from determining exigencies, even from the seemingly inescapable desire to seek pleasure rather than pain. The need to hold emotion separate, as transcendental ground, follows the developmental path of romantic consciousness as response to Enlightenment rationalism outlined by Pfau. The substitution of emotion for reason authorizes the Underground Man to assert a grandiosity that would otherwise be unavailable. It is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one’s position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of decisions taken forever and repentances coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strange pleasure I was talking about consists. (12) Masochistic pride in sickness allows him to shuttle back and forth between feelings of grandiosity and ego-impoverishment, between over-sufficiency and insufficiency. “How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” (16), he asks. Humiliation recuperates excessive pride, and excessive pride makes humiliation lofty. Both positions—lack of self-respect because he should, as an “intelligent man,” have more, and a self-conscious valorization of the perspicuity and disinterest that enables him to see his own abasement—show the over-valuation of the self that is characteristic of paranoia. The Underground Man simultaneously laments and takes “sensual” pleasure in self-inflicted pain, concluding, “[a]t least one can occasionally whip oneself, and, after all, that livens things up a bit. It may be retrograde, but still it’s better than nothing” (35). This is the secret of the dystopian texts that follow: to suffer in singularity is a fear, but it is also a profoundly gratifying wish, a source of intoxicating pleasure. The Underground Man’s paranoia manifests in delusions of persecution. After an officer unceremoniously moves him from his spot in a billiard parlor in order to pass by in Part II, he becomes obsessed with the officer for two years, eventually plotting an elaborate, petty revenge that goes unnoticed by the officer. The erotic desire that animates his obsession is palpable. He writes a letter challenging the officer to a duel: The letter was composed in such a way that if the officer had even the slightest notion of the “beautiful and lofty,” he could not fail to come running to me, to throw himself on my neck and offer me his friendship. And that would be so nice! What a life we would have,

Paranoid Plots  165 what a life! He would protect me with his dignity. I would ennoble him with my development and, well. (51) Class and erotic anxieties blend together in the complex and overdetermined intersection between paranoia, masculinity, and class articulated by both Trotter and Sedgwick. The Underground Man craves recognition of his status, fantasizing all the while about marriage to the officer. The Underground Man, acutely aware of subtle class differences in his interactions with Zverkov and his friends, pays inordinate attention to signifiers that reveal status, and in turn uses language as a means of demonstrating his worth. He sees the officer as both an enemy and potential patron. Paranoia, with its mixture of projective identification, intensified vulnerability, and hyper-sensitivity to signs, provides a structure that allows him to indulge both attributions. It is not only powerful humans to whom the Underground Man attributes malign motive. He imagines himself victimized by mathematical reason itself. The recurring figure of twice two, with its irrefutable, indifferent logic, becomes the emblem of the Underground Man’s persecution. Chafing at the logic of twice two, he writes: “Eh, gentlemen, what sort of will of one’s own can there be if it comes to tables and arithmetic, and the only thing going is two times two is four” (31). He calls the equation “the beginning of death” (33). But what is critical for Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is that the attack also be personal: “Two times two is four—why, in my opinion, it’s sheer impudence, sirs. Two times two is four has a cocky look; it stands across your path, arms akimbo, and spits” (34). Science is unassailable. How can one dispute the evidence found in strata of rock? The Underground Man’s delusional construction of personified persecutors presents him with something more tangible— Hardy’s absent vengeful god—to struggle against. That these enemies are “miracled up” rather than real is not the point. They function just the same, providing the Underground Man with an excuse for his powerlessness, for his inability to act as agent within his own plot. Figure and ground reverse. Passivity triumphs over activity, the negative over the positive pole of character, pointing the way toward later modernist displacements of the subject. The discursive tensions Dostoevsky’s romantic realism allegorizes become even more acute in modernism. The Underground Man is precursor to Trotter’s type of the modernist hero, Dowell in Ford’s The Good Soldier, who can only define himself against. We see as well foreshadowing of Trotter’s other Modernist avatar, Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” in the Underground Man’s argument that “an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure—primarily a limited being” (5). Pleasure in suffering depends on the embrace of

166  De-forming Character futility, on “the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall, that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there was no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person” (8). With the possibility of change or growth foreclosed, there is nowhere to go but inward. Dostoevsky adopts the paranoid perspective of the view from outside, like so many of Edward Hopper’s city paintings. We, along with the Underground Man himself, look in on a tumultuous, alienated inner life that substitutes for the sublime. Or again, consider Eliot’s Prufrock, who fears being humiliated in the eyes of the women (“How his hair is growing thin”), and debased by his own desires (“Do I dare to eat a peach?”). The sea-girls will not sing to a modern(ist) hero; their indifference is only overheard. “Prufrock” ends where Notes does not, with the failure of the inner world to keep out the voices that call the subject to action in the world. “Human voices wake us and we drown,” Eliot writes, and Prufrock is ejected from the timeless chambers of the sea onto the beach.45 The narrator of Notes, by remaining conscious in the underground womb to which he has returned, preserves the ecstatic centrality and presence that is lost to Prufrock. The Underground Man writes, “[t]he final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia!” (37). The answer is to remain conscious even after the plot is complete. Dostoevsky foreshadows not only the character of modernism, but also the pervasive sense of futility that runs through classic dystopian texts. There is something almost Calvinist in the Underground Man’s sense of the human condition, both in his denial of works as a path to salvation and in his understanding of his psychological state as evidence of election. The Underground Man’s consciousness of the beautiful and lofty is the mark of a chosen soul. He observes, “this was all in me not as if by chance, but as if it had to be so” (7). Then, the “human” thing to do is to seek reassurance of selection by reading the signs. The Underground Man writes, “the whole human enterprise seems indeed to consist in man’s proving to himself every moment that he is a man and not a sprig” (31). The romantic dystopian hero inherits a world indifferent to his actions, where action is centered on the search for “proof of humanity.” The will-to-paranoia of Notes sets the stage for twentieth-century dystopian narratives of persecution. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell projects the story of the lone romantic dreamer trapped in a fixed, hostile world into the future, widening the schism between utopian dream and practice. Like Dostoevsky, Orwell expresses romantic character in terms of paranoia. The paranoia that animates Notes takes on material form in the world of Oceania. Replacing Dostoevsky’s indifferent Crystal Palace and Hardy’s God, the brutal and omnipotent modern state really is out to eradicate the human. The problem is no longer the need to gain

Paranoid Plots  167 separation from a distant prospect of rationalized progress, but to wriggle free from its realized effects. Nineteen Eighty-Four signals a new phase in the battle for romantic subjectivity. Orwell adopts Dostoevsky’s strategy of romantic character shoehorned into realist setting but defends the objective rather than subjective world as the ground of the subject. If Dostoevsky turns to intensified affect in order to resist Enlightenment reason, Orwell, whose philosophical sympathies lie more firmly with the Enlightenment, produces a character whose romantic intensity and sense of singularity is directed toward the preservation of reason. In the next section, I  read Orwell’s masterpiece as an ambivalent attempt at recovery and preservation of Dostoevsky’s anti-modern character but also as a fantasy of persecution: Dostoevsky’s pleasure in suffering is also the principle at the heart of Ninety Eighty-Four.

He Loved Big Brother: Orwell and the Fantasy of Persecution Nineteen Eighty-Four makes visible the paranoid strain in modernism articulated by Trotter and Tyrus Miller, allegorizing the anxieties that shape late modernist fiction. The climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four appears to be the scene in Room 101, where Winston is introduced to his greatest fear, the rats. “Do it to Julia!” he cries (190), proving that love is no match for torture, and that the perfected totalitarian state is capable of erasing the last vestiges of human decency. But returning to the scene in which Winston and Julia stand in front of a picture on the wall of his hideaway immediately before their capture and hear their words reflected back to them by the hidden loudspeakers, we see a climax of a more reflexive sort. While the annihilation of Winston the character has yet to come, here we see the annihilation of Orwell’s novel. A text that once included a developing plot and multiple voices contending with one another collapses into monologicity. It is both a moment of supreme romantic transcendence and of intense paranoia. Paranoia’s insistence on reading into a random, indifferent world a motivated, coherent narrative; its claim of grandiosity for the object of persecution; its reduction of the world to a stable binary in which all signs take their meaning through their relation to the paranoiac are explicitly rendered as the condition of Orwell’s fictive real. Paranoia becomes, in effect, the poetic principle governing Nineteen Eighty-Four. The pathetic fallacy is made literal: Winston’s thoughts really do appear in the world, are indistinguishable from it. The rest of the novel is taken up with an interrogation in which one party already knows the answers, and in which the ultimate confession is a fait accompli. O’Brien says, “We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves” (170). If Winston begins as a familiar

168  De-forming Character character, the autonomous individual hero of a quest romance, he ends as environmental fixture. Paranoia’s rigid narrative architecture stabilizes character by reducing a multiplicity of signs to a paucity of meaning. The paranoid is frozen in someone else’s text, the prison-house of language made into a home. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four formally as a novel and Orwell as a novelist clarifies the pressures modernity and modernism exert on novelistic character in the 1930’s. “Inside the Whale,” Orwell’s review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer from eight years before, shows Orwell explicitly connecting political to discursive threats. He critiques the culture of arid formalist excess in which technical experimentation takes precedence over engagement: “In ‘cultured circles,’ art-for-art’s-saking extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. Literature was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject-matter was the unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of taste” (1:508). Orwell fears that modernism’s aesthetic of withdrawal from the public sphere has made the novel obsolete. Most striking is his sense of writers like Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Lawrence having neglected a historical sense of purpose in their writing. He writes of them: “Our eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, the subconscious, to the solar plexus—to everywhere except the places where things are actually happening” (I:508). Orwell describes the Joyce/ Eliot modernists as “temperamentally hostile to the notion of ‘progress’; it is felt that progress not only doesn’t happen, but ought not to happen” (I:507). Orwell accuses the following generation of Communist-affiliated writers in the 1930’s—“Auden, Spender & Co.”—of a similar avoidance, of hiding behind idealized abstractions.46 Though they reintegrate politics, blindly adhering to “the ill-defined thing called Communism” (I:512), they move “no nearer the masses.” “The typical literary man ceases to be a cultured expatriate with a leaning towards the church and becomes an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning towards Communism” (1:510). Both are insulated from direct encounter with the realities of political life. Even Henry Miller, whom Orwell consistently praises, is guilty of writing from “inside the whale,” which is Orwell’s phrase for the “final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility” that comes with giving up on the world (1:521). Despite Miller’s courage in engaging with the “thingas-it-is,” he remains for Orwell a “completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses” (I:527). Despite his critique of the modernists and their successors, it is important to underscore Orwell’s admiration for Joyce and Eliot, particularly for their technical innovation. If Orwell is deeply suspicious of modernism’s flight from the world, he is also attracted to modernist poetics as

Paranoid Plots  169 an antidote to mass-produced banality. Of Joyce he said, “Joyce is so interesting I can’t stop talking about him once I start” (1:128). Orwell grouped both Joyce and Eliot among “the writers I care most about and never grow tired of” (2:24). He was ambivalent about their emphasis on technique. In “Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,” he calls Joyce, for example, “a technician and very little else, about as near to being a ‘pure’ artist as any writer can be” (2:124).47 And yet, he explicitly uses the rhetoric of paranoia when describing Joyce’s talent: “When you read certain passages in  Ulysses  you feel that Joyce’s mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never heard your name, that there is some world outside time and space in which you and he are together” (I:495 [ital. mine]). Similarly, with Miller, he describes the feeling of reading “somebody [who] has chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the realpolitik of the inner mind into the open” (I:497). Orwell’s personal stake is unavoidable. As writers, Joyce and Eliot and, in Orwell’s moment, Miller, cast long shadows. Orwell grants their texts the power to see inside and expose the private mind. And not just any private mind—his own. He can neither ignore nor defeat modernist poetics. It is an embattled position Orwell occupies. The aesthetic conundrum he faces—how to produce an engaged modernist novel that balances the Enlightenment rationalism of twice two with the romantic “impregnable heart”—leaves him juggling an array of textual styles, but it also gives him a subject, the death of the novel. In “Inside the Whale” he writes of “the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape” (1:527). Orwell himself cannot produce this new shape. What he can do is self-harm, enacting violence on both the no longer vital textual relics of an older shape and the newer shapes of critique. In this way, Nineteen Eighty-Four fights on two fronts in the war for the novel, satirizing the obsolete humanism of the novel tradition, but also the futility of the modernist critique. Winston embodies Orwell’s desire to hold the middle against the forces of vulgarity from below and condescension from above. Nineteen Eighty-Four allegorizes its own discomfort with modernism’s abstract, anti-mimetic poetics by turning the separation of language from political reality into plot.48 In what form is this plot expressed? Orwell called Nineteen EightyFour a “fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel” (4:329–30). Wegner argues that Orwell’s naturalism reproduces in formal terms the end of historical possibility he takes as his subject.49 Patricia Rae goes so far as to argue that the character of Charrington in Nineteen EightyFour represents Eliot, and hence Orwell’s disillusionment with modernist poetics, specifically the embrace of purely aesthetic appeal and the positing of history as a thing largely unrecoverable.50 Orwell’s desire for an engaged politics of writing, along with his commitment to an empirically knowable real, drives him to a version of naturalism in which the

170  De-forming Character subject is revealed as a function of external, objective forces. But while the objectivity of naturalism gives Orwell a line of defense against Trotter’s modernist will-to-abstraction, it threatens the agency to which he is also committed. Pitting naturalism’s objectivity against the intensity of inner life, he grants motive to the objective conditions that thwart the flowering of such a life. In contrast to Dostoevsky’s linking of agency to irrational whim, Orwell ties agency to the individual’s capacity for recognizing solid, irrefutable facts. Winston writes in his diary: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows” (55). It is the same equation that Dostoevsky’s Underground Man rails against as tyrannical because it denies the irrational, romantic soul of man. For Orwell, the formula twice two is salvation, the irrefutable indicator of an objective, knowable real that can be apprehended by the individual. Throughout his essays, memoirs, and other novels we see Orwell struggling to define a subject both connected to a knowable, objective world and in possession of subjective authority. In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell conceives of debased language as that which is imposed from “outside” rather than being generated from “inside” the subject’s own perceptions. Echoing Schreber, who writes of “miracled birds” that repeat “ ‘meaningless phrases that they have learnt by heart’ and that have been ‘crammed into them,’ ” Orwell writes “[ready-made phrases] will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself:” the answer is “to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around” (4:135).51 Authority over language requires an external real against which language can be measured. O’Brien describes the logic of the Party in tautological terms: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” (175). Metaphor expires. Like the moment in Charrington’s shop, this tautology—what Alok Rai calls a “vacuous circularity”—devastates not only any movement toward dialogue, but also the very notion of a literary language that progresses toward elusive (or allusive) objects.52 Nineteen Eighty-Four directs its sadism emphatically at literary language. Syme explains to Winston, “Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be” (37). Winston is caught between the degenerate popular literature that Orwell so despises, embodied in the mechanical popular culture produced by the Party, and an aesthetic of pure language that has no connection to the world, embodied in the Inner Party’s language games. It is no accident that the novel is punctuated by a variety of spurious or compromised texts that emanate from

Paranoid Plots  171 the state. The versificator produces popular songs for the proles; history is written and rewritten according to Party dictates; and Goldstein’s subversive manual is a trap produced by O’Brien. The goal of Newspeak is literally to make critical thought impossible. A language of the self is only accessible via the past, but the past is in danger of being altered to fit the present. Nostalgia for the past in this case is also nostalgia for a language that can narrate a subject independent of the state.53 Wegner draws attention to Orwell’s fear in Nineteen Eighty-Four that “the displacement of  .  .  . older local expressions of authentic cultural practice by a new form of global mass cultural production” will destroy the capacity for critical cognition that, Wegner argues, Orwell associates specifically with European modernity.54 What Wegner calls the “bureaucratization of cultural production” not only robs Winston of a meaningful orientation toward nation, but also of the capacity for a language with which to express an individual perspective.55 When the propaganda machines tout increases in shoe production or announce that the army is winning the war against Eurasia, singular perceptions become meaningless. “Reality is not external,” O’Brien says (165); nor does it exist “in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; [it exists] only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal” (165). This view has more in common with the Marxist, postmodern critique of language as a cultural formation, in which language is written by culture, not authors. Indeed, “[n]o book is produced individually,” according to O’Brien (174). The blaring propaganda in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the antithesis of individual presence. Language migrates from speakers to loudspeakers. The private language of memory is also under assault. While the public past has been successfully overwritten by the authorities, as in the case of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, the destruction of reality means also the destruction of individual memory as authoritative ground for the subject. Although Winston manages to remember fragments of his personal history in dreams, such as the “dark, close-smelling room” (107) where he last saw his mother and heard his sister’s “feeble wail” (109) as he fled with the stolen chocolate, even these will be subject to replacement. “You suffer from a defective memory” (163), O’Brien tells him in the interrogation scene. His private memories will be replaced by love for Big Brother. Though Winston seeks the past through the antiques in the junk shop, through his encounter with the old man in the bar, or through historical records, they suggest only the extent to which the past, and the language for representing it, has been effectively colonized. The old man in the bar possesses nothing but a “rubbish heap of details” (62) that are of no use to Winston. The failure of memory clears space for a forward identification that retains the transcendentalized quality of the backward identifications of

172  De-forming Character romanticism. The subject remains central, grandiose, fully recognized by “powerfuller” forces. As Trotter demonstrates, the paranoid self recognizes itself through contact with an outside force that would eradicate it, the borders of self visible in the outline cast by the surrounding army of threats. Just as Winston scrutinizes the textual evidence in search of a real, the state turns the same paranoid intensity of reading back on him. O’Brien knows when Winston has had rebellious thoughts, is able to predict what he will say and what he fears. Winston is a fully legible text, existing literally as in a book. This brings us again to Tyrus Miller’s point about the fragility of late modernist bodies. For Miller, this fragility allegorizes anxieties about the subject’s survival. Miller argues that making the body absurd is a crucial move of late modernism, preparing “the literary ground for the anthropological ‘endgame’ Beckett would betray to the world in the 1950s—the theatricalized gestures of the Western subject, rehearsing its final abdication.”56 Orwell uses the disruptive, alienated body to represent the impossibility of return. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud lists three qualities by which civilization is known—“beauty, order, and cleanliness”—each implicating the unrestrained body as a thing to be eradicated.57 For Freud, the perennial tensions of civilization arise from this necessary sublimation of the body in the interest of community. Unlike the antiseptic world of Huxley’s Brave New World where filth is confined to the reservation, filth permeates Airstrip One. Oily Victory gin, crumbling cigarettes, and incessant shortages become material coefficients for obstructed desire, an external analogue for the rotting body exposed by torture. Even the institutional cleanliness of the holding cell—“high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain”—is violated by Parson’s violent defecation. The body continuously invades the world, reappearing as abomination, just as terrorproducing as the state apparatus. Nineteen Eighty-Four represents the externalized body as incontinent and out of control, reconfiguring lost presence as abomination. In psychological readings, Winston’s capitulation is typically read as a return to his lost mother, but in this light, we can read his return to Big Brother not as a return to the oceanic maternal, but as embrace of the paternal law.58 Winston’s return to the bosom is a movement toward rather than away from law. The final rapprochement reverses Freud’s logic of paranoia, “I love him, I hate him, he hates me.” Instead, Winston moves from a feeling that he is the object of hostile surveillance and control to an active struggle against Big Brother and finally to an embrace: He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O Cruel, needless misunderstanding. O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast. Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his

Paranoid Plots  173 nose. But it was all right, everything was all right. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. (197) The “enormous face” signals that the sight line belongs to the suckling infant; Big Brother is also lover, the moustache an unmistakable suggestion of pubic hair, as well as brother, and father whose law Winston embraces. This parody of reconciliation constitutes a psychological/ emotional redemption: what was Winston is vacated in favor of identification with Big Brother’s accusing gaze, ego sacrificed to super-ego in order that Winston should be complete again. Terry Eagleton writes, “For some Romantic artists, what is left of God is simply the yearning to be at one with him.”59 The paranoiac clings desperately to this yearning for authority. If the old version of God is unavailable, the paranoiac manufactures a new version in its place. At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston enters into communion with the sublime that has eluded him. Fulfilling Schreber’s fantasy of identification with God, Winston merges with the source of persecution. Even in defeat, what Lawrence Kramer calls romanticism’s dialectic of transcendence is fulfilled in the movement from ego to evacuation to replenishment, though replenishment comes at the cost of the autonomous self.60 The nostalgic quest is fulfilled in the discovery of past fathers. Unable to ignore the crisis of indifference to which Hardy responds, in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell uses paranoia to indulge Romanticism’s fantasies of reference, its intensity of affect, and its version of the solitary self seeking harmony with nature’s grand design. Like the Bildungsroman journey of the previous chapter, which also involves trading in one family for another, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a story of fall and then return to a true home in the transcendental. Romanticism’s dialectical movement toward reconciliation provides a narrative structure for the quest for transcendental grounding. But rather than tethering the subject to a transcendental authorization that exists prior to the contingent, speaking subject, paranoid subjectivity is anchored in the law itself. The structure is similar to Freud’s family romance in which real parents are traded for idealized ones. Orwell offers a perverse switch—the romantic subject’s true home is not before the law, but within a “higher” law.61 To adopt Derrida’s punning formula in response to Kafka’s “Before the Law” parable, the paranoiac rejects the rearward state of being prior to the law for a state of being in the presence of the law. At the end of the novel, Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Café. He is literally inside-out—the “chest-nut,” the heart, surrounds Winston, he does not surround it. This the fulfillment of O’Brien’s earlier prophecy: “Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity” (187). Winston is invited to look back at himself from the position of a projected, omnipotent superego. There is nothing left

174  De-forming Character inside. Admitting defeat in the will to recovery, Orwell chronicles the dying throes of a romantic presence in the novel. But Ninety EightyFour’s final perspective is not that of the victim; it is the perspective of the executioner. *** Nineteen Eighty-Four exposes the narcissistic wish fulfillment that lies at the heart of paranoid fantasy. Winston embodies a “last man” fantasy, a wish for a privileged relationship to signs. Like the Underground Man for Dostoevsky, Winston is Orwell’s alter ego, a simultaneously grandiose and abject display of Orwell’s own political and philosophical commitments, punished for the heresies of his creator. This simultaneous decentering and valorization of subjectivity echoes and critiques the Modernist project. When Winston wonders if he is “alone in the possession of a memory” (41), he asserts the narrative necessity of the dystopian novel: that the protagonist can see the world from outside the discourse that shapes everyone else. Winston, though intellectually retracing the steps of the Cartesian cogito and the enlightenment idea of a knowable world, is ultimately a romantic, filled with nostalgia and a sense of his own specialness, searching for signs that affirm his existence. Orwell exchanges romantic solitude for a paranoid singularity that indulges both sides of the equation: a world of fully rationalized signs that allows for closure and a romantic subject conjured and preserved through the violence done to it. For all its critiquing of the present, Nineteen Eighty-Four defends the past against an even worse future. The “spirit of Man” is Winston’s answer to O’Brien’s question, “what is it, this principle that will defeat us?” (179). For Orwell, that spirit is clearly not enough, but its loss is nonetheless felt as acutely painful. Raymond Williams criticizes him for not attaching revolutionary potential to the proletariat (though Winston does). Like Howe, Williams is uncomfortable with Orwell’s underestimation of the human condition: “Winston Smith is not like a man at all—in consciousness, in relationships, in the capacity for love and protection and endurance and loyalty.”62 Salman Rushdie notes this same quality of having given up, and its effect on style. Orwell has a “notion of the ordinary man as victim, and therefore of passivity as the literary stance closest to that of the ordinary man. He is using this type of logic as a means of building a path back to the womb, into the whale and away from the thunder of war. This looks very like the plan of a man who has given up the struggle.”63 And yet, it seems to me Orwell’s value as a writer lies in exactly this confrontation with the failure of his own cherished romantic mystifications. By the very act of writing, Orwell does not give up. There is no path backward or forward, only a shrinking patch of ground on which the subject makes his exhausted stand. As politics, it is surely inadequate, but as a study in character, it is heartbreaking. Some may find in

Paranoid Plots  175 Orwell’s articulation of this condition the motivation to fight on, others to retreat. Wegner notes that Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell’s attempt to forget history itself.64 Winston becomes the symbol of modern man’s desire to refuse the crushing responsibility of historical action. No longer a human with the capacity to change, or to incite change, Winston has found a timeless place outside of developmental history. The antagonism between the exigencies of circumstance and the extravagance of the heart is one of the novel genre’s Ur-plots. By exaggerating external restraints and diminishing the effectiveness of the individual, paranoia offers a distended parody of this plot. Just as it dismantles its protagonist, the dystopia also dismantles the genre to which it initially seems to belong. Instead of construction of character, we get revulsion at character. The dystopia leaves us with the disconcerting spectacle of the modern character imprisoned in what is essentially an epical setting—the fluid subject trapped in completed time, becoming not a human but part of a perfect text. In this way, Nineteen Eighty-Four registers the crisis of signification occasioned by the collision of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century romanticism with early twentieth-century modernism. The paranoid poetics of the novel make this crisis visible—a poetics that, as I  discussed in Chapter  5, partakes of modernism’s anxieties about the fragmentary subject while resisting modernism’s formal strategies of portraying this fragmentation. The paranoid text embodies the desire to remain anchored in a stable, objective real where political progress is still possible. In Orwell’s formulation, paranoia provides an answer to modernist destabilization, translating the intensity and singularity of romantic affect into airtight narratives of persecution. The paranoia of the novel is a symptom of the contact zone where the coherent romantic subject who would have signs disappear into immanence to reveal the “true subject” is stranded in a modernist world made up of scattered textual fragments. Paranoia reassembles those fragments, shoring them against the ruins of the novel.

Notes 1. Parts of this chapter are revised from an essay published in Twentieth Century Literature in 2004. 2. Anne Janowitz writes “Though apparent in poetry since its origin, the singular lyrical voice came, in the romantic period, to be both centralized in the hierarchy of poetic genres, and taken as the voice of the political subject, the citizen, and hence, the human” (12). 3. Northrop Frye writes, “In Romanticism the main direction for the quest of identity tends increasingly to be downward and inward, toward a hidden basis or ground of identity between man and nature” (Frye 33). 4. Stelzig 93. Stelzig goes on to note Lawrence’s attraction to “affective participation in the life of nature as a spiritual force beyond the mere physical or material reality.” Lawrence is “keenly attuned to the idea of living in a

176  De-forming Character mysterious universe beyond the reach of the reductive powers of rational or rationalizing explanation.” 5. In Poets of Reality, Miller identifies the pathos that attends “man’s inescapable exclusion from absolute experience” as “the chief subject matter of Eliot’s early poetry” (136). 6. O’Donnell 14; Melley 23. 7. Swanson 8. 8. Pfau 2. 9. Trotter, Paranoid Modernism 161. 10. Ibid 22, 83. 11. Ibid 8. 12. Ibid 7. Allison Pease echoes Trotter’s linking of modernist poetics to resistance to mass culture from the perspective of consumption: “If the crude and vulgar are defined by their dulled consumptive practices as a result of mass culture, then the refined, indeed the morally superior, are given shape through a keen receptivity and organized response to the conflicting impulses of genuine art” (Modernisms 204). 13. Pfau 144. 14. Ibid 12, 19. 15. Ibid 3. 16. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity 16. 17. See Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 18. Resnick 24. 19. Totem and Taboo 92. Peter Knight, in his discussion of the connectedness of seemingly random events in DeLillo’s Underworld, draws attention to paranoia’s capacity for making coherent narratives. He notes that “taken individually, many of these connections are perhaps no more than the thematic construction of a well-composed work of fiction” (829) and draws attention to the fact that novels already privilege a kind of “connectedness” in reading. 20. Paradis 23. 21. Trotter, Paranoid Modernism 5. 22. Trotter writes of modernism, “mimesis is not so much an end in itself as an occasion for the triumph of poesis” (Trotter, Paranoid Modernism 73). He characterizes paranoia as an objection to mess and maps mess on to mimesis. 23. Three Case Histories 139–40. 24. Sedgwick 162. 25. Trotter, Paranoid Modernism 216, 212. 26. Quoted in de Jonge 53. 27. Simmel in Sennett 47. 28. Ibid, 51. 29. Miller 39. 30. Ibid 18. 31. Miller 33. 32. Ibid 20, 19. 33. Ibid 63–64. 34. Myth 229. 35. Kermode, Continuities 10. 36. Morson 130. 37. Frank 322–33, 333. See also Jane Barstow on the relationship to Chernyshevsky. 38. Ibid 338. 39. Ibid 346.

Paranoid Plots  177 40. “Romanticism and Classicism” n.p. Hulme predicts a return to classicism, growing out of what he sees as the ultimate failure of romanticism as it seeks its transcendent “beyond.” Dostoevsky distinguishes more earthbound Russian romantics from the “translunary” (46) European variety. Russian romantics preserve the beautiful and the lofty without “los[ing] sight of the useful, practical goal (some nice little government apartment, a little pension, a little decoration or two)” (46), thus denying the possibility of radical transcendence. 41. De Jonge 4–5. De Jonge gives an earlier version of Pfau’s formula, posing Romanticism as having three elements: “an account of cultural disintegration and the pressures upon the individual; the escape into intensity; proposals for a solution” (51). See also Lonny Harrison’s recent, Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self (2016). 42. See, for example, Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology 73. 43. Northrop Frye points out in his Anatomy of Criticism, romantic agony has a “tendency to transmute pain and terror into a form of pleasure” (60). 44. See Pevear xxi. 45. See my article “Bodies of Water: Un-Writing the Mother in Whitman and Eliot” (Literary Imagination for a reading of this as birth scene. 46. Rushdie, in “Outside the Whale,” accuses Orwell of this same retreat from politics; Rushdie thus reads Nineteen Eighty-Four as a form of escapism. 47. Eliot’s later work did not inspire the same admiration. In 1942, he writes, “there is very little in Eliot’s later work that makes any deep impression on me” (3: 236). Rae traces Orwell’s complicated relationship to Eliot more fully. 48. Other critics have noted this as well. Keith Alldritt argues that Orwell is a failed symbolist, returning to “allegorical fable and utopia  .  .  . forms that were more resistant to the strong influences of Joyce, Proust, and D. H. Lawrence” (4). According to Alldritt, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a “projection and a criticism of the tendencies of the specifically literary orthodoxy of the time,” with O’Brien a “caricature of certain symbolist attitudes” (158–59). 49. Wegner, Imaginary Communities 189. 50. For Rae, the glass paperweight in the novel represents the deception of modernism: the image that appears at first as a “metaphysical conceit” and to hold out the possibility of salvation is in fact “impotent,” subject to breakage (211). 51. Freud, Three Case Histories 111. 52. Rai 161. 53. See Baccolini and Moylan, Dark Horizons. “The conflict of the text turns on the control of language” (5); they argue that critical dystopian possibilities depend on the existence of a counter-discourse to challenge the hegemonic discourse of the dystopian state. This contrasts with the singular discourse of the u/eutopia. 54. Imaginary 211, 213. 55. Ibid 211. 56. Miller 64. 57. See Civilization and its Discontents; “it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built on the renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts” (45–49). 58. Several critics develop readings that pose Nineteen Eighty-Four as Oedipal journey. Zwerdling argues that Orwell “reconceptualiz[es] political life” (107) within the post-Freudian context of social pathology explored by Fromm and Arendt. The “incomprehensible violence of childhood fantasy

178  De-forming Character meshed all too well with the bizarre and frightening reality of the modern police state,” Zwerdling writes of Orwell (93), indicating the extent to which he grasped how totalitarian regimes reproduce the “politics of family life” (94–95). Similarly, Murray Sperber suggests that the paranoia of the novel is Orwell’s response to “the irrational demands of the parental world” (218), and Marcus Smith sees Winston as a character “clearly and carefully developed along familiar oedipal lines” (423). For a comprehensive psychological approach, see Richard I. Smyer. 59. Eagleton 96. 60. I am adopting Lawrence Kramer’s dialectic here; for Kramer, the poet is born out of the imaginative overcoming of nature; here, the self enters into the sublime by borrowing “nature’s”—in this case, Big Brother’s—power of negation. 61. As Freud notes, the paranoid’s “delusions of observation” are “justified,” since it is the paranoid’s identification with the ego-ideal that enables him to, in effect, watch himself (Collected Papers 118). 62. Williams, George Orwell 77–82. 63. Rushdie n.p. Wegner (Imaginary Communities) distinguishes between passive and committed intellectuals in the novel—Syme represents the first type, O’Brien the second. O’Brien’s capacity for critical thought and political commitment only make him dangerous (223). 64. Wegner, Imaginary Communities 228.

Section III

Dystopian Variations

7 American Anti-pastoral Running Down a Dream in West and Mamet

‘America,’ he said, ‘is the land of opportunity. She takes care of the honest and industrious and never fails them as long as they are both. This is not a matter of opinion, it is one of faith. On the day Americans stop believing it, on that day America will be lost.’ (West, A Cool Million 13) I swear . . . it’s not a world of men . . . it’s not a world of men, Machine . . . it’s a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders . . . what it is, it’s a fucked-up world . . . there’s no adventure to it. (Pause.) Dying breed. Yes it is. (Pause.) We are the members of a dying breed. That’s . . . that’s . . . that’s why we have to stick together. (Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross 105)

Dystopian Design The previous section explored some of the formal and thematic figures by which dystopian character is expressed. Chapter 4 showed how images of the “last man” respond to a perceived threat to humanist values; Chapter 5 showed how We, A Clockwork Orange, and Never Let Me Go reflexively register the strain on a Bildungsroman form no longer capable of containing modernity; and Chapter 6 showed how the paranoia that blossoms in Dostoevsky and Orwell pathologizes narratives of transcendence familiar from the nineteenth century. In the final three chapters, I address dystopia through a narrower lens, rooting it in specific national and generic traditions. This chapter focuses on the American utopian tradition; Chapter  8 looks at Young Adult dystopias; and the final chapter looks at recent dystopias from or about today’s China. Despite their lack of futuristic settings, this chapter treats Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) and David Mamet’s play and screenplay Glengarry Glen Ross (1984, 1992) as forms of dystopia. Neither is a traditional dystopia: neither achieves its dystopian coloring by means of a cataclysmic break from the past and displacement in time and/or space

182  Dystopian Variations (though West ends his text with the emergence of an actual fascist dystopia); nor does either narrate the protocols of its imagined world. West’s novel is embittered social satire, and Mamet’s drama is a stylized realism that owes debts to the American theatrical tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. And yet something in each invites the dystopian label. These texts share with dystopia its style of articulating character with setting, strengthening the latter at the expense of the former. West and Mamet are haunted by America’s utopian aspirations and concomitant disappointments. The quotations at the head of this chapter, separated by fifty years, trace an arc of disillusionment. West’s words come from the mouth of the ex-president and soon-to-be fascist leader Nathan “Shagpoke” Whipple and hint that the patriotic creed of American exceptionalism was always a bit of scam. Mamet’s words are spoken by the sleazy Ricky Roma in order to win his fellow salesman Shelley “the Machine” Levene’s trust so that he can con him out of his commissions. Both quotations are actually about how utopian forms of rhetoric— the rhetoric of the American dream and the rhetoric of nostalgia, one pointing forward the other backward—become complicit in the creation of dystopia. West and Mamet operate within and against an American narrative tradition steeped in a paradoxical form of utopianism. On the one hand, America is a land of individualism, resistant to collectivizing utopian schemes.1 But, on the other, utopia is deeply ingrained in America’s founding. In his introduction to America as Utopia (1981), Kenneth M. Roemer calls American history “a history of potential eutopias and dystopias” and observes that “[t]o know America, we must have knowledge of America as utopia.”2 America is perhaps unique in its embrace of utopia not as a mechanism to repair a broken civilization, but as the initial condition of that civilization’s existence. John Winthrop’s founding vision of the new world as a “city upon a hill,” a radical experiment in self-governance to be watched and judged by a skeptical world, underscores the sense of America as a model society. In his landmark study The Machine in the Garden Leo Marx points out that if Europeans thought of the new world as a potential return to Eden, early settlers also saw the new land as “hideous wilderness” requiring the taming hand of man.3 America’s utopian promise is both divinely ordained and a product of human design, the secular organizing principles of utopia retaining the power of religious fantasy.4 Kurt Anderson, in his recent book surveying American’s propensity to believe in fantasy, Fantasyland, notes that the collision of Protestantism belief with Enlightenment reason produces a national character in America prone to both skepticism and credulity, individualistic in its pursuit of truth and eager to bring that truth to market. Hence, Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith (Harold Bloom calls Mormonism the “American Religion”) is for Anderson a quintessential

American Anti-pastoral  183 American utopian, inventing a new creed out of whole cloth, acquiring disciples, and living the dream. America’s combining of “epic individualism with extreme religion” gives an energy to fantasy productions that makes them more likely to be realized.5 Simultaneously naïve and cynical, the American relationship to utopia is above all practical—a belief that with the right combination of conviction and elbow grease utopia is indeed achievable. Krishan Kumar writes, “[e]verything about America has inspired, and continues to inspire, utopianism. It is big; it is open; it is democratic. Above all, it is new.”6 From Mormons to Essalen, American history is shot through with utopian exemplars, intentional communities of escape designed to insulate themselves from and thereby rectify the extant wrongs of the human social condition. By the early nineteenth century, explicitly utopian communities were sprouting like toadstools, combining Fourierist principles of egalitarianism and agrarianism with a spiritual sense of connection to the land. Communities in the mid-nineteenth century like Oneida and Brook Farm, which Hawthorne parodies in his thematically anti-utopian novel The Blithedale Romance, rose up out of the reformist fervors of the Second Great Awakening.7 These communities promised both escape from the rampaging materialism reshaping American life and fulfillment of the dream of a self-made life in nature unencumbered by impersonal historical forces. Indeed, America tends toward fantasies of escape, whether from class structure or respectability. The heroes that populate the American landscape are often those who recede from the mainstream—Natty Bumpo, rebels, cowboys. On the other side, Lowell, Massachusetts and other planned company towns were intricately calibrated machines designed to harmonize human relations with the new machines of production.8 Today, work campuses like the Googleplex in Mountain View integrate work and play in a seamless, totalized flow, while other intentional communities like mega-malls, Celebration, and The Villages represent an attempt to restructure modern life to harmonize the individual not with modern strategies of production but with those of consumption, à la Brave New World. Still other utopian spaces, like small town America, are imaginary, utopian only when viewed through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia. But from the roar of Hawthorne’s train interrupting the country idyll to Henry Adams’s encounter with the electric dynamo, which contains intimations of both terror and the sublime, American utopia and dystopia have always been intertwined. Like Hawthorne in Blithedale, West and Mamet are anti-utopian; utopia is the last refuge of reactionary scoundrels like Whipple. Both parody nostalgic pastoralism and its narratives as well as narratives of progress and development. For West, the pastoral past is a site of toxic innocence and the future a site of rampant corruption and cheap simulations. For Mamet, utopian narratives are a cynical ploy. His salesmen peddle plots of land with names like Glengarry Highlands,

184  Dystopian Variations evoking both a golden country of pastoral autonomy and the modern planned community. But the plots are literally empty, mere screens on which their customers project their inchoate fantasies. Marx reads the vibrancy of the pastoral tradition in America in the nineteenth century as reflective of “the urge to withdraw from civilization’s growing power and complexity.”9 He argues that America’s dominant narratives embody what he calls “pastoral design,” an encoding of the collision between machine future and agrarian past. The “machine” interrupts the pastoral but it is also the source of an alternative utopian fantasy based on the productive power of machines and the rational organization of labor, resources, and ultimately modern consciousness itself. Thomas Jefferson, who saw the prospect of utopia in the moral conditioning exerted by organized agrarian life, also saw the machine as having a role in rural paradise.10 The machine would free up labor and expand man’s reach into hitherto unknown realms, enabling a middle landscape that was at once in touch with nature and civilized, both Eden and utopia. For Marx, pastoral design is the language that connects these two utopias. It is where a rural, agrarian Eden carved out of the pristine wild meets the brute force of anti-utopian nature or is encroached upon by the rationalized, technologized utopia.11 To Marx’s idea of pastoral design, this chapter adds the idea of “dystopian design,” a skeptical, anti-utopian, and reflexive tradition arising out of colliding narratives of pastoralism and progress. The American quasidystopias of West and Mamet are resistant to fantasies of escape into nature and of a Fordist future, to change both from above and below, like the founders in mortal dread of both the aristocracy and the masses. Both the agrarian utopia and the techno-utopia raise the possibility of unitary authoritarianism. Democracy’s messy polyvalence invites fantasies of strongman efficiency. The plantation, quite literally a dystopia for the slaves on whose labor it depends, and the corporation, controlling inhabitants of the modern city with its infiltration of technology into private, inner space both lead to the same place—both end up in dystopian monologicity where a singular idea or force swallows up all other motives and possibilities.12 America’s utopian models—the settlement, the plantation, Levittown—contain equal parts of coercion alongside their promises of paradise achieved, inspiring critical dystopian imaginings. George Washington becomes Simon Legree, Henry Ford becomes Eldon Tyrell. In the American narrative imagination, for every Whitman, there is a Hawthorne, for every Skinner, a Vonnegut, for every Celebration, a Stepford.

What Happens to a Dream Deformed? Dystopian design in West’s and Mamet’s works deforms narratives of the American dream in predictable ways, including reversal of the journey of development, the strengthening of setting in relation to character,

American Anti-pastoral  185 and the eradication of contingency. The dystopian design of West’s and Mamet’s texts is most visible in their texts’ rejection of hope for progress, either in terms of the development of individual characters or in terms of the worlds they inhabit. While West does allow “development” toward a regressive form of populist fascism, neither author leaves any doubt about its characters’ lack of agency in shaping a progressive future. The two works were written at quite different moments in the longer trajectory of American mythology: West, following writers like Jack London and Upton Sinclair who reacted against the destructive force of capitalism, takes up the narrative of self-making during the Great Depression, treating the dream narrative in this phase of disillusionment as an object for broad satire.13 Mamet sets the narrative in a moment of capitalist ascendancy, in the “greed is good” Reagan years when capitalism’s momentum rewrote self-making, at whatever cost, as moral imperative. Despite the ideological shift of the intervening fifty years, the texts share a resilient cynicism about the relationship between American dream and reality. The narratives of the dream, predicated on the agentic subject “hustling” his way to the Promised Land, connect figures as disparate as Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, Gatsby, and Augie March.14 The American dream in its Horatio Alger-esque narrative incarnation presents a young man with nothing but gumption and self-discipline who has a series of picaresque adventures through which he gradually ascends the social ladder from the streets to the respectable middle class.15 For example, in Ragged Dick, Dick is an orphan who “wastes” what little money he earns shining shoes to go to the theater. Given a suit by a wealthy man who hires him to keep his son company on a day in the city, Dick makes the most of it. He learns to eschew the vaudeville shows, educates himself with the help of his more intellectual but less physically vital friend Fosdick, and scrabbles his way up the ladder of success. Eventually, after saving the son of gentleman when the boy falls off the ferry, Dick gains a coveted position with the gentleman as a clerk. Dick begins as vagabond, as excess, but by virtue of his industriousness becomes a living embodiment of the dynamism and egalitarianism of American capitalism. His successful journey renews faith in the terms of the dream while at the same time legitimizing those who already possess the dream by providing evidence that success is bestowed upon the deserving. Structurally, the narrative places an agentic character in an unfinished setting. It presumes an American landscape unencumbered by history, open to re-shaping by the hand and sweat of the energetic individual.16 West recognizes this story as a narrative technology, as a machine for the production of American identity, and throws a spanner in the works. His modern-day Candide, Lemuel Pitkin, mortgages his family cow to the local banker and heads off to the city to make enough money to save his mother’s house from foreclosure. West manifests the dream’s disassembly on Lem’s body. Taken advantage of by everyone he meets, Lem

186  Dystopian Variations loses various body parts to the unscrupulous characters he meets on his way, including his teeth and his scalp, though he does manage to hang on to his faith in the American dream. Meanwhile, the narrative setting moves toward fascist populism, much as Sinclair Lewis predicts in his dystopian novel of the following year, It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis’s narrator observes in that novel that, by the mid-1930’s, “the Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone out of the American tradition it had dominated.”17 Structurally, A Cool Million’s dystopianism lies in the diminished sphere of agency it offers its protagonist, a diminishment all the more profound because it is set against the aspirational American narrative of opportunity and self-sufficiency. West’s America is pastiche, a mash-up of pulp Americana, Chestertonian satire, and surrealistic action come to life.18 Pursuit of the American dream organizes West’s caricatures into a national plot—literally, a plot against America—that emerges into full coherence with the culminating fascist takeover. Fifty years later, Mamet shows Alger’s dream vision pushed to its conclusion. A land of opportunity is a land of brutal competition. Capitalism by its nature privileges the dynamism of individuals in competition rather than stable, centralized organization. But the commitment to individual liberty comes at great psychic cost. Tocqueville observes that though Americans are the “freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords . . . there is a cloud habitually upon their brow.” He traces this perpetual anxiety, this “restless[ness] in the midst of abundance,” to American’s belief that every man of energy and imagination has a fair shot at the prize.19 This open field, where each man is putatively granted the power to achieve his personal utopia, is both epitome of the American dream and its undoing. Tocqueville continues: “The same equality that allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes renders all the citizens less able to realize them; it circumscribes their powers on every side while it gives freer hopes to their desires.”20 Intensification of desires is matched by intensification of the competition to achieve those desires. Picking up on Tocqueville’s cue, Mamet transforms the Alger rags-toriches tale into a story of predatory capitalism without respite. Mamet’s America is a prison-house of utopian dreams, his salesmen lured into a never-ending cycle of transactional violence by their belief in the very same dream of a big score they sell to their marks. His source text is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Mamet de-romanticizes the “drummer” as apotheosis of an American dream of self-making. Reading Mamet’s play as a dystopian retelling of Miller’s archetypal elegy for the American dream exposes how narrow the gap is between dystopian/fantasy settings and the everyday real, highlighting the deformations of agency and plot structure that mark dystopia as distinct from other forms of storytelling.

American Anti-pastoral  187 West’s and Mamet’s texts are what Morson calls threshold texts, situated between dystopia’s literalized versions of the “last man” theme and realist iterations, in which “last man-ness” is psychological, metaphorized rather than materialized. Both represent their central figures as threatened by a new world choking off the old virtues. If in Europe, the “last man” is a nineteenth-century liberal humanist rooted in place and culture, the American version is on the move and on the make amid a nightmare of collapsing economic opportunity. In America, the last man is not the one who resists utopia; he is the one who refuses to be disillusioned, who cannot let go of false utopian aspirations even in the face of a real that refuses to comply. A Cool Million and Glengarry Glen Ross “dystopianize” both the ethos of self-making and the pastoral yearning that shape American dreams. More importantly, they treat the stories Americans tell themselves about utopia as the very source of the dystopian nightmare. The American dream is the enforcement mechanism of dystopic space, the illusion that prevents the free play of subjectivity. “Utopia serves as the mere lure and bait for (hope being after all also the principle of the cruelest confidence games and of hucksterism as a fine art),” Jameson observes; if America is dystopic, it is the narratives themselves that serve as its police.21

West’s World: Dystopian Picaresque in West’s A Cool Million W. H. Auden opens his essay on Nathanael West with the label that so often attaches to writers of dystopias: “West is not, strictly speaking, a novelist.”22 The novel form, according to Auden, requires the writer “attempt an accurate description of the social scene or of the subjective life of the mind.” A Cool Million takes place in a landscape that exists as a kind of stage set for individual episodes with little of realism’s attempts to fill in the world. It is as if the world disassembles with the close of each episode, painted flats spun about to make new shapes as the next scene is set. Since his work lacks a conscience, West, according to Auden, does not even qualify as a satirist. There is an odd inertness about the moral universe of West’s texts—outrage is tempered by a kind of exhausted objectivity. Moral rot is presented in uninflected form, as unsurprising as anything else that might happen. Auden calls this condition “West’s disease:” “a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires,” and which thereby subverts the possibilities for choice and action that Auden sees as indispensable to the novel.23 Auden observes that West’s novels all end with an escape from the conscious ego. The final excision of agency makes literal the underlying dystopian presumption of West’s plots: that the individual is helpless to alter both his condition and the world that causes it.

188  Dystopian Variations West’s writing is often described as apocalyptic, but that implies that the world he describes is collapsing. At least formally, the dystopianism of A Cool Million runs in the other direction. It is not a world in the process of collapse, but a world in the process of assembling, squeezing out the last bits of air that a character might breathe. West’s hero is a refugee from Alger’s novels of optimism who finds himself in a naturalistic world, viewed, as Jonathan Veitch and Robin Blyn argue, through a surrealistic lens. But unlike the fable or parable that it resembles, A Cool Million is about what is narratively absent from it. In this, it is a version of anti-novel. The work is deeply aware of its narrative antecedents, subverting the motion and plot of Alger’s triumphalist rags-to-riches tales as it rewrites the picaresque in un-free space. West builds an entire dystopian-esque world around mass culture’s crude opposition between innocence and cynicism, linking American optimism to a susceptibility to demagoguery and, ultimately, fascism. By refusing to let the categories interpenetrate, which would produce something more akin to realism, West draws our attention to the emerging power of mass culture narratives and the poverty of the world they create. What is missing from such a reductive structure is space for a complex human to live in agentic relation to the world. Veitch in his study of West’s engagement with the politics of the 1930’s, argues that West’s political commitments are filtered through aesthetic commitments that position his text against more explicitly political literature of his era. Veitch, along with critics like Blyn and Frank Conesa, shows West’s use of surrealist and dada techniques as a way of disrupting ready-made bourgeois narratives—not in order to resist or recede from political engagement, but as a means of undermining the narrative machinery deployed in the preservation of capitalism.24 According to Veitch, West, unlike his neo-naturalist contemporaries, saw reality not via direct experience, but as a tissue of texts. The reality of his novels is “thoroughly and inescapably coded or written;” it is a “literature composed almost entirely of clichés.”25 Thematizing the marshalling of these disassembled parts in service of capitalism’s narratives, this textual history is A Cool Million’s real setting. The various characters who make cameos, from noble widow to conman to pickpocket to lousy poet to Native American to agents of the Third International, have all wandered in from pulp Americana. Lem, said to be descended from revolutionary war heroes, embodies an American archetype, the humble country boy on a journey to make good. Shagpoke Whipple, the ex-president and bank president, is Calvin Coolidge, an ostensibly simple and abstemious Yankee who gives a patriotic speech each day when he lowers his flag.26 Clichés overwhelm any gesture toward the real, even as they create a real of their own in which characters have become cogs in the narrative machinery.

American Anti-pastoral  189 Like Wu Fong’s brothel, or Lem’s house reassembled in the store window of the unscrupulous interior designer who is responsible for the foreclosure, lived spaces are transformed into consumed spaces, into spectacle.27 Performances abound, from the elaborate con games Lem stumbles into both as grifter and mark, to political rallies, to the “Chamber of American Horrors,” a bit of leftist agitprop that retells the American story as a series of atrocities, beginning with “The Pageant of America or A Curse in Columbus,” and ending with a skit in which two millionaires laugh over the fleecing of widows and orphans (123–26). The crudeness of these reductions makes the development of a complex American character impossible.28 Even as West’s novel highlights the pageant’s grotesquerie, however, his own novel remains self-consciously bound by its limitations. Though West’s deadpan is often comic, the random and wanton brutality of the novel exemplifies the violence directed toward the human so often seen in dystopian writing. West takes naturalism’s rejection of novelistic niceties to an extreme. From the novel’s earliest chapters, when Lem, like Ragged Dick, takes on a bully in defense of an innocent young girl, West thwarts readers’ expectations of a world with moral boundaries. Lem, like Dick, triumphs initially, but when he falls for the bully’s fake handshake trick, he is squeezed unconscious and in a jarringly extreme conclusion to the episode, the girl, Betty, is raped. We learn in the next chapter that Betty was also raped when she was twelve by the bully’s father after being rescued from the fire in which her family perished. This detail adds nothing—it is a moment of purely gratuitous sadism inflicted on both Betty and the reader, signaling that neither the world of the novel nor its narrative is bound by conventional limits on cruelty. West makes the reader complicit in callousness. When the disfigured Lem ends up the butt of comedians jokes in a vaudeville burlesque, the text reflexively enacts its own moral condition—we are invited to be entertained by misfortune no less than the audience that treats Lem’s suffering as a source of laughter. Finally, after being recruited as a dupe in support of Whipple’s National Revolutionary Party, at the text’s climax Lem is shot dead onstage by an agent of the anti-fascist international socialist conspiracy just as he is about to read a speech written by Whipple to stir the crowd in the theater to riot. West’s commitment to a subject that can, as Matthew Roberts argues, develop alternative desires outside of pre-fabricated bourgeois libidinal economies, hits a dead end.29 West’s novel produces a plot that has literally nowhere to go because, by the end, it lacks a human subject. Veitch also reads West in the context of the aesthetic debates of the period. The rediscovery of folkways in the 1930’s offered a dangerous form of consumerist nostalgia, a packaged, ersatz history disconnected from progressive aspirations.30 Meanwhile, writers like Steinbeck responded to the Depression with a pastoralism that threatened to

190  Dystopian Variations romanticize a putatively organic past. For West, this romanticization was a prescription for homegrown fascism.31 The decorator Asa Goldstein’s redesign of Wu Fong’s brothel as an Americana museum; meanwhile, when Whipple’s bank fails he falls back on staples of angry nativism, blaming international business and Jewish bankers, Wall Street and the Communists. His audiences are thrilled when he is introduced at a rally as “no nigger-lover, he don’t give a damn for Jewish culture, and he knows the fine Italian hand of the Pope when he sees it” (128). Whipple’s brand of down-home folk patriotism turns out to be the seed of the dystopia that emerges by the novel’s end. The yearning for simplicity as a response to modernity’s challenges is a yearning for a reduced, homogenized, and ultimately authoritarian world. West obliges. Thomas Peyser shows how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American writers wrestled with globalization. He identifies in both realism and utopia a response to “the emergence of a global culture haunted by nostalgia for secure national identities, which is to say for identities that a large number of people had talked themselves into believing were the ones guaranteed by their birth in a particular nation.”32 The fictional nature of these narratives of belonging makes them no less powerful. The American dream in the 1930’s was inextricably linked to securing America’s exceptionalism against the ever-nearing world outside. West identifies the reactionary withdrawal that animated Coolidge’s rhetoric of preserving America against outsiders. The fascist remaking of America that ends the novel is a materialization in the political sphere of the myth of self-making—national identity is forged through the competitive eradication of the weak, and the American mythology of fair play and opportunity is really an invitation for the exercise of amoral power. Collective national identity secures itself by suppressing destabilizing heterogeneity, offering in place of the democratic creed one based in fantasies of violence and American exceptionalism. The old fantasy of America as a dialogic, democratic space is replaced by a new fantasy of a pseudoutopian America in which the masses take coherent but dangerous shape. The new fascist mythology that ends the text is neither pastoral nostalgia, as in Cather’s My Ántonia, nor a utopia of the middle landscape, à la Jefferson; nor is it a celebration of the gorgeous technological force of the growing city and its multitudes, à la Sandburg’s “Chicago” or Hart Crane’s The Bridge: it is a brutish and vulgar romanticization of national destiny. In the Bildungsroman, it is not only the self that is made, but the nation; here, the nation is made via the unmaking of selves. A Cool Million ends with Lem absorbed into propagandistic display that has become the new national language. “Through his martyrdom, the National Revolutionary Party triumphed and by that triumph this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism, and International Capitalism. Through the National Revolution its people were purged of alien diseases and America again became American” (142). In the new

American Anti-pastoral  191 language of nationalism, America regains its identity by extinguishing the cosmopolitan threat of otherness. Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here takes up this theme with a more realistic depiction of a descent into a version of fascism that combines Hitler’s Nazism with home-grown strains of populism. Perry Meisel, in his introduction to the novel, notes Lewis’s depiction of “social life as a tissue of dialects.”33 Lewis’s dystopian vision is born out of the reduction of American cacophony into a single, state-enforced dialect, which, like the language of Nineteen Eighty-Four, allows no room for the agentic exercise of speech. Like Melville’s Billy Budd, Lem trades his earthly existence for the relative permanence of song and legend. But where for Melville the transcendentalized Billy becomes part of competing discourses, from news accounts to sailor songs, Lem’s meaning is clear and undisputed: he is symbolic incarnation of a new America, his personal suffering prelude to the emergence of an American monologue that has finally succeeded in silencing its disparate voices. West’s text describes less a set of choices that lead to one possible future than a future that will arise precisely because there are no real choices to make. America may be in Whipple’s words a “young country,” “rough and unsettled” (42–43) but, like everything else Whipple says, this quotation is not quite what it seems. America is unfinished, but only because the machine has yet to be perfected. By the end of the novel, what seem to be random disconnected horrors are linked together in an ineluctable progress toward fascism. Veitch argues that West makes Lem a machine in order to resist sentimentalized notions of the organic human, then breaks him as a means of exposing capitalism’s destructive force. Lem is a machine dismantled by capitalism, a vehicle for West’s critique of mass culture’s disassembly of the real so that it can be replaced by a simulacrum.34 However, turning to dystopia as model opens an alternative avenue for understanding Lem’s evolution. Instead of seeing him as a broken machine, he is better viewed as an upgraded machine. Progressing from human to prosthetic human to narrative fiction, he sheds those aspects of character that can gum up capitalism’s, and the novel’s, narrative works, and is eventually is absorbed fully into the machine setting. He becomes pure narrative fiction, a streamlined mechanism deployed in the interests of the new fascism. In the text’s dénouement we learn that Lem lives on: the fascists have won and his birthday is now a national holiday, the “Martyrdom in the Bijou Theater” celebrated in song and legend. Lem is a machine that has ceased to function as a human being, but functions beautifully as symbol. Earlier Whipple counsels Lem to be skeptical of those who call John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford thieves, telling him to “strive to make it your story” (13). At the end of the novel, it is still Rockefeller’s and Ford’s story, but Lem has been retrofitted to function within it. Reading A Cool Million as a dystopia shows the formal continuities between it and more traditional dystopias of the other chapters.

192  Dystopian Variations West’s purposeful deforming of narrative antecedents adds a layer of self-reflexivity to West’s “novel” that places it in critical relation not only to America’s political, social, and ideological landscape, but also to the narrative forms such a landscape supports. The distance Lem wanders geographically in the text is less important than the distance the text strays from the mechanics of the American dream narrative. Lem’s vector from country to city to martyrdom reverses the frontier narrative that produces a self-sufficient hero standing in for a selfsufficient America. The journey ends with Lem reconstituted, like his former house, within an ideological landscape that has no use for his subjective individuality. Rather than traveling toward himself as in those great works of picaresque American literature like Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kerouac’s On the Road, Lem travels toward absorption in a new American mythology in which he ceases to exist as a subjective, interior individual. This disappearance of the subject, paralleling Winston’s trajectory in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is central to dystopian form. To treat Lem as a novelistic character means recognizing the journey of unbecoming as a form of character development in its own right. The emptying out of the real so that it can be replaced by a text directly associates West with the reflexive dystopian modes discussed in previous chapters. West sacrifices the man to the disassembling machine of his novel. Just as it is the fate of the last man in dystopia to eventually cede his humanity—his agency, his choice, his interiority—to Hardy’s “powerfuller” forces, West’s novel cedes free subjectivity to plot mechanics. In true dystopian faction, character becomes the victim of a plot.

Utopian Plots: Dystopian Capitalism in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross responds to the narrative of the American dream with a curdled counter-vision. The Bildungsroman often represents aesthetic, spiritual education as superior to capitalist instrumental labor.35 Mamet’s world is purely mercantile, populated entirely with sellers and marks—you are one or the other. Though the text of the play establishes no systemic link between the microcosm of the sales office and larger social formations, and though in contrast to the paranoid dystopia of Orwell the setting is indifferent, the text depicts a claustrophobic world that feels dystopian in its stripped-down cruelty. While early- and mid-century naturalist dramatists like Eugene O’Neill are capable of the same claustrophobic effects, in O’Neill, et al., the diegetic world offstage still brings its judgments and obligations to bear on character. In Mamet, the offstage world barely exists at all. It is not a future tyranny that has produced this world but the logic of free-market capitalism itself, of markets liberated from morals.

American Anti-pastoral  193 At the center of Mamet’s drama is the quintessentially American figure of the salesman.36 Wandering apostle of America’s mercantile creed, dallying with farmer’s daughters and falling in love with local librarians, he is existential hero creating his destiny from the raw materials of the commercial landscape. But for all his centrality to the American myth of self-making, he is also a liminal figure, on the margins of polite society, stranded between the respectable and the louche. Notably, Mamet focuses on the salesman at home rather than the road—but home is the home office, where he is surrounded by colleagues in a fully masculine environment. Lacking alternative, non-commercial “scripts” of male behavior, as John Basourakas observes, the play’s dance of homosocial brutality is unleavened by any form of private relations founded on empathy. The absence of such scripts intensifies the dystopian effect, drawing our attention to the rigidity of the scripts the characters must perform.37 As I show in the next chapter, the desire to recreate or return to family is a crucial aspect of the dystopian attitude. The family, unlike the state, cares for its members, is caught up in life cycles of nurturing and development that imply the possibility of change, of futures still unwritten. The almost complete absence of familial relations in Glengarry Glen Ross highlights what is missing from this world. When Shelley visits the struggling homeowner on his sales call in the movie, the visit is a stark reminder of the divide that separates the worlds. Shelley desperately tries to connect. He notices fishing rods in the vestibule and tries to start a conversation about fishing. The man says his wife is at a PTA meeting and he cannot talk, but Shelley continues his pitch anyway. With increasing exasperation, the man finally tells Shelley, “I have no business which I wish to transact.” This excludes himself from the entirety of Shelley’s world, which is about transacting business. Shelley is an alien infestation: “my wife filled in a form and we have been plagued for the past year.” The man lives in the world of squares, of struggling families, of PTA meetings and coupon-clipping. But this other world of mundane struggle and nearer horizons is hinted at as potentially more rewarding than the one Shelley inhabits. Written at the height of the Reagan era, Glengarry Glen Ross updates Death of a Salesman for a more brutal and cynical age where in Gordon Gekko’s words “Greed is good” and the money man is a new version of the American frontier hero. The 1992 movie directed by James Foley from Mamet’s screenplay underscores the dystopian aspect. The setting shifts from Chicago to Brooklyn, but it hardly matters. The movie’s locations are confined spaces—a phone booth, a restaurant, a restroom, the office floor, a stationary automobile—and the pallet is murky blue and black. The rain that pours down for the first half of the movie at the edges of the frame further isolates the lit spaces. The elevated subway train the camera lingers on suggests the possibility of a world outside this ambit. But, like the parked cherry red BMW 850i the camera pans

194  Dystopian Variations over as it sweeps from restaurant to sales office, the possibility of escape is only a taunt. While some critics saw the movie’s oppressive cinematography as a failure to open up the play on the screen, the constricted visuals effectively underscore the completeness of Mamet’s world.38 The action takes place in a parallel dimension to our own, where the rules are slightly more rigid, the lives slightly more circumscribed, the screw tightened a few more notches. Though it may not be the future, it is a new, more rigid space resistant to revision. Stanley Kauffman of the New Republic wrote in his review of the movie, “Mamet achieved the work about the fake-smiling drudges of the business world that, some thirty-five years earlier, Arthur Miller had been groping for. Mamet’s salesmen don’t literally die. They don’t need to. A worse death has already begun.”39 Mamet translates Miller’s requiem for the dream into a savage exposé of the dream’s ugly roots in winner-take-all capitalism. Like many dystopias, Mamet achieves his effects by subtracting and deforming his predecessors. It is not necessarily the dream itself he attacks. Rather, it the dream as expressed in Miller’s tragic, romantic context that Mamet re-works into dystopian shape. The difference between the two works crystallizes the difference between realist drama and dystopia. Miller laments the loss of historical memory, the replacement of the human with more efficient systems of production, and the yearning for an authentic past. But if Willy’s tragedy is more than personal—the tragedy of America’s promise betrayed by the rush for the quick buck, by the susceptibility to valuing appearance over substance—it is also uniquely his own. Miller’s play is concerned with individuals in possession of a unique narrative and a soul worth attending to. Mamet, in contrast, gives us only types: his characters are described only as “men in their early forties” and “men in their fifties” (11). They are not individuals but incarnations of a social system that has no use for the human. Miller defines tragedy as the struggle of “the individual attempting to gain his ‘rightful’ position in his society.” Such a struggle is ultimately humanistic, evincing “the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity;” but, as Miller observes, this requires the “possibility of victory.”40 For Mamet, there is only temporary survival or obliteration. Where the character of Willy encourages us to both critique and mourn, for Mamet, the living death of his characters allows space for neither form of catharsis. Mamet’s characters’ trajectories do not carry them toward an apotheosis in which they transcend what they were in being or in understanding. Rather, they move toward affirmation of the status quo. There is none of Miller’s nobility, only the sad spectacle of men tearing each other apart in pursuit of a big score. The incompatibility of capitalism with preservation of human ties is key to Miller’s critique. Willy begs Howard for his job, reminding Howard that he was there when Howard’s father, Willy’s former boss, brought

American Anti-pastoral  195 him in as a baby; indeed, Willy points out, he approved the name. The world has changed, Willy laments, has become less personal: “There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it. Today, it’s all cut and dried, and there’s no chance for bringing friendship to bear—or personality. You see what I mean? They don’t know me any more” (61). Willie’s appeal to both a personal and a collective past falls on deaf ears, because, as Howard has already said, “you got to admit, business is business” (60). The tape recorder Howard shows off to Willy is emblematic of this sense of history as something to be left in the dust. Howard brags about how the device will replace all his old hobbies, and free him from the tyranny of time. “[Y]ou get yourself a Coke and sit yourself down, throw the switch, and there’s Jack Benny’s program in the middle of the night!” (58). An organic relation to time is replaced by an artificial one. But to what end? The recordings Howard play for Willy consists of family banalities, ending with him asking his wife to say something and her saying “I  can’t think of anything” (56). Like Mamet’s Glengarry Highlands, the tape recorder is an empty placeholder for capitalist desire. When Howard denies Willy’s plea and leaves him alone in the office, Willy accidentally touches the recorder, panicking when he hears the disembodied voice of Howard’s son again reciting the capitals. Willy is at the mercy of the recording. The commercial forces he once sought to harness for his own benefit are incarnated in the machine that is more interesting to Howard than Willy’s future. The past becomes a reproducible and discardable commodity, drained of significance, and the present becomes an empty rehearsal for the future. The salesman’s endless cycle of desire and fulfillment floats free of historical attachments. Each new day promises resolution of a closed narrative loop, for which the past is irrelevant. New products replace discarded ones, and memory is shown to be incompatible with capitalism. In the American utopia, everything is available for consumption at the touch of a button, but there is nothing worth holding on to. As Christopher Bigby points out in his Penguin introduction, the backdrop of Miller’s disillusionment with the American dream is the Depression. Willy’s “big year” was in 1928, the year before the crash (62). Miller seems to imply that the myths that have shaped Willy’s character and behavior, though perhaps always suspect, belong to a golden age of belief that has passed. Willie is on the verge of his tragic recognition, that capitalism is an adversarial relationship and that he has become a supplicant; not the seller, but the buyer of dreams, the victim of the great con that America can be domesticated via capitalism. But Willie continues to hold fast to the belief that he has failed the dream, rather than the other way around. Willy has wasted his life in pursuit of a “phony dream.” Bigby writes, “He judges himself by standards rooted in social myths rather than human necessities.” He has lost his children, betrayed his wife, and failed to succeed by his own misplaced standard. But the larger

196  Dystopian Variations tragedy that hangs over the play is the loss of belief in American utopian space, as Willy’s boosterism of the dream drifts farther and farther from the reality. Raised to measure themselves against Willy’s idealized America, Biff and Happy fantasize about pre-industrial paradise. Happy complains about the new commercial regime: “I want to just rip my clothes off in the middle of the store and outbox that goddam merchandise manager. I mean I can outbox, outrun, and outlift anybody in that store, and I have to take orders from those common, petty sons-of-bitches till I  can’t stand it any more” (12). Happy’s nostalgia for a more virile, physical world, a staple of reactionary movements from D’Annunzio to Trump, is counterpoint to the new world of bloodless machinery, impersonal commerce, and commodity fetishism. Chafing against an adult world that does not care for them, Happy retreats into a fantasy of starting a family business with Biff where “[t]here’d be the old honor, and comradeship, and if you wanted to go off for a swim or somethin’—well, you’d do it! Without some smart cooky gettin’ up ahead of you!” (47). Bernard is a “smart cooky” and Howard a soulless machine operator. They are capitalism’s new men, stewards of an emerging mercantile dispensation of efficiency that has no use for sentiment. Eventually, Willie’s nostalgia turns reactionary as he complains about increased competition—there are just too many people. “That’s what’s ruining this country! Population is getting out of control. The competition is maddening! Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side . . . How can they whip cheese” (7). For a character who has often been read, despite the conspicuous absence of markers, as Jewish and who has his roots in Miller’s own ethnic experience, Willy’s outburst is telling. His dream, once an expansive vision of opportunity for the energetic man, becomes narrow and exclusionary. Like Whipple, he turns his frustration against those on the outside allying himself with an America identity that has already betrayed him. The distance between Miller and Mamet is the distance between traditional literary form and dystopia. Miller gives us a world with other live possibilities; Willy’s world is not yet fully given over to dystopia— there is still room for Willy to contemplate opting out, and we are constantly aware of Willy’s capacity for agency. He is haunted by the ghost of his older brother, Ben, who set out to make his fortune in Alaska, and embodies the road not taken. Miller’s play genuinely seems to long for a more just, humane world, capable of tenderness, mercy, and memory. Mamet allows no such possibility to penetrate the suffocating regime of capitalist competition. This is what there is; accept it or starve. The past no longer exists as something to yearn for; there is only an endless present, where the past is repurposed, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in order to support maintenance of the system. Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation argues that in the 1970’s, the frontier myth that had been damaged seemingly irreparably by Vietnam

American Anti-pastoral  197 and economic stagnation, was resurrected, both as national fantasy and as policy by Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy.41 In the political sphere, Reagan’s cowboy persona became a rallying point for a renewed commitment to military spending and tough talk to adversaries like the Soviet Union, while in the economic sphere Reagan’s deregulation recreated the economy as a brutal, lawless frontier.42 The return of an American utopia would be grounded in an exorcism of the soft progressivism of the Carter years; macho capitalism, embodied in Gekko’s creed, became economic patriotism. Mamet’s hyper-masculine figures parody Reagan’s frontier bluster, talking tough and envisioning themselves as a dying breed of adventurers (though here the only “Indians” are the Patels, deadbeats who thwart the salesman by never buying anything). Mamet replaces the lawless physical violence of the American frontier myth with verbal violence. His characters negotiate the anxious terrain between bullying and being the patsy in a world in which there are only two options. Alec Baldwin’s Blake, a new character written exclusively for the movie, visits from the main office of Mitch & Murray and berates the salesman in the guise of a motivational speech: “one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line which is dotted! You hear me, you fucking faggots?” You are either closing, or a feminized “faggot.” The rules of the sales contest—first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is “you’re fired”—lay out the logic: there are winners, also-rans, and everyone else is a loser. If the American dream suggests individuals in charge of their own destinies, pursuing their unique visions of happiness, Blake makes clear the only terms that matter: You see this watch? You see this watch? . . . That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see, pal, that’s who I am. And you’re nothing. Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you, go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here? Close. You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit? You don’t like it, leave. I can go out there tonight with the materials you got, make myself fifteen thousand dollars. What could be less utopian than a view of life as an endless series of competitive transactions, where pleasure comes from domination? Blake’s logic is similar to the logic of the Party and Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the reverse of utopia is the “boot stamping on a human face—forever” (277). Instead of this desire being realized by the state, here it is diffused at the individual level. Every man is in competition with every other man, the amphetamine high of power is the only thing staving off annihilation.

198  Dystopian Variations Even between the salesman, jungle logic prevails. Moss tries to convince Aaronow to rob the office, and then tells him that he will have to take the consequences if he chooses to not participate. “And why is that,” Aaronow asks. “Because you listened,” Moss replies (46). You’re either seller or mark. The salesman’s job is to maneuver his prey into a position of powerlessness, to foreclose the open-ended dialogue that comes from empathic, dialogic encounter. If you are selling, you are winning; if you are listening, you are losing. Mamet reduces the variety and freedom of human interactions to the organizing principle of domination. Meanwhile, traditional institutions like law are impotent in the face of capitalism’s aggressive, masculinist brutality. Roma snaps dismissively at the detective who has come to investigate the theft, “I’m doing business” (91). Business is the principle around which the world coalesces. When at the end of the play, Roma says to Williamson, “My stuff is mine, whatever he gets for himself, I’m talking half. You put me in with him” (107), it is the play’s “do it to Julia” moment. Roma is not coerced, and he never did care for Levene, but we arrive at the same lesson: that human decency is no match for the mechanics of dystopia. Mamet’s salesmen already understand the dream as a come-on. If Willy Loman is a tragic figure, betrayed by the romance of capitalism, Mamet’s salesmen are complicit in capitalism’s violence. Roma, the slick salesman wraps his pitch to the hapless Lingk in the language of transcending self-imposed limitations. He is not selling anything in particular—he is selling an idealized version of choice, a container for vague, unfulfilled aspirations.43 Stocks, bonds, objects of art, real estate. Now: what are they? (Pause.) An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps. To lose money? Perhaps. “indulge” and “learn” about ourselves? Perhaps. So fucking what? What isn’t? They’re an opportunity. That’s all. They’re an event. A guy comes up to you, you make a call, you send in a brochure, it doesn’t matter, “They’re these properties I’d like for you to see.” What does it mean? What you want it to mean? (50) In fact, the only real worth of the land is that it is for sale. In Mamet’s world, utopia does not belong to Enlightenment statesman, it belongs to hustlers with an eye out for the main chance. Willy wants to be liked, but for Mamet’s salesmen, being liked is beside the point. They seek only conquest. Levene’s monologue about the Nyborg sale is framed in the language of domination. I locked on them. All on them, nothing on me. All my thoughts are on them. I’m holding the last thought that I  spoke. “Now is the time.” They signed, Ricky. It was great. It was fucking great. It was

American Anti-pastoral  199 like they wilted all at once. No gesture . . . nothing. Like together. They, I swear to God, they both kind of imperceptibly slumped. And he reaches and takes the pen and signs, he passes it to her, she signs. It was so fucking solemn. (74) Levene’s victory bestows magical powers and is celebrated with sacred ritual. “I’m beaming at them. I point back in the living room, back to the sideboard. (Pause.) I didn’t even fucking know there was a sideboard there!! He goes back, he brings us a drink. Little shot glasses. A pattern in ‘em. And we toast. In silence” (74).44 Part of what is so disturbing in Shelley’s account of his short-lived triumph is that it is not enough to simply win. The pleasure comes from making the mark complicit. As Jonathan Cullick points out, to listen is to be feminized, powerless.45 When Levene thinks he has made the sale he becomes the master, turning on the office manager Williamson and bullying him. Soon enough, though, Williamson will turn the tables, humiliating Shelley. He tells him the Nyborg’s are insane and “just like talking to salesmen” (105). Shelley got suckered by someone else’s con. The nostalgia of Mamet’s play is also firmly grounded in a reactionary masculinist perspective, in which a certain form of agonistic male experience is treated as primary. If this is world is one sort of dystopia for men, it is a dystopia of a completely different sort for women, one in which they barely have even the right to exist. Literary dystopias often portray blandly homogenous societies in which entire populations have sunk into cowed passivity. Mamet’s hyper-masculine world is the inverse; essentially without women, masculine aggression sublimated into commercial transactions has become the homogenous principle.46 Women are homemakers or harridans, but only referred to indirectly. The cast of the play is entirely male; the only women who actually appear in the movie are the silent coat check girl and a photograph of Levene’s daughter on his desk. Even in their role as homemakers they are dismissed. Mrs. Nyborg’s crumb cake is from the store (72), implying her shortcomings as a homemaker. However, women retain one source of power, the necessity of cosigning the contracts. Lingk’s wife, despite being a great cook according to Roma, is the one implicitly responsible for taking away his manhood: “I  don’t have the power. I  said it” (92), he plaintively states to Roma when Roma tries to convince him not to tear up the contract Roma pressured him into signing. The toxic masculinity of the play responds to a profound fear of women’s power. Mamet’s purified homosociality recalls Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, where the Nazis won WWII and in a world 600 years in the future women are kept in pens for breeding purposes but otherwise are treated as sub-human. Burdekin approaches this from the perspective of critique. With Mamet, the critique is vitiated by his pleasure in the heightened senses that accompany the infliction of

200  Dystopian Variations cruelty.47 Pushing the feminine off the stage, Mamet enjoys the masochistic revel in diminished dystopian space. The displacement of men and their prerogatives plays out generationally as well. The salesman in their forties will soon become broken-down salesman in their fifties. In the struggle for survival. Roma is the slick young(er) buck, Levene the old guard desperate to prove that he can still close like the old days. Like Willy, Levene pleads with his boss to remember what he was once capable of. He is not begging forbearance in honor of a sepia-tinted fantasy of the past—he is himself too immersed in the logic of sales—but for an opportunity to show that he is the same powerful man he was. When Levene says, “I’m . . . I’m . . . don’t look at the board, look at me, Shelley Levene” (22) he does not mean that “attention must be paid” to his humanity. Rather, he is claiming the right to go back out on the battlefield armed with good leads because he is still capable of closing, because he is the “machine” of his nickname. Levene associates the “old ways” with the power to close. “That’s what I’m saying. The old ways . . . convert the motherfucker. . . sell him. . . sell him. . . make him sign the check” (72). When Levene accuses Williamson, the office manager, of being someone who does not understand the road, he insults Williamson’s manhood by calling him a secretary: “Cold calling, fella. Door to door. But you don’t know. You don’t know. You never heard of a streak. You never heard of ‘marshaling your sales force. . . .’ What are you, you’re a secretary, John. Fuck you” (77). Levene yearns for his own more virile youth, not a Golden Age. His nostalgia is not for a prior human self, but for the days when he was a more effective machine for extracting money. Levene’s pathos, like Willy’s or Lem’s, stems from his refusal to be disillusioned. The machine did not disrupt the garden; in Mamet’s reading, the garden fantasy is a production of the machine. Like West’s Lemuel Pitkin, Mamet’s salesmen are imprisoned in a dream, their frantic, clipped dialogue teetering on the edge of panic. The characters are selling up until the end, trying to stay one-step ahead of the self-awareness that would reveal the depressing contours of their world. At the end, Mamet’s characters have achieved no higher level of self-awareness, no development of their characters. As Levene tells Williamson, “A man’s his job” (75). Sitting in the office, they wait for new “leads” to arrive, ready to resume their vocation of fleecing the gullible rubes who dream of making a killing in real estate. The play ends where it began, with selling. Aaronow, the sad sack, says, “Oh, God, I hate this job,” while Roma heads back to the Chinese restaurant next door to await a new victim. In the movie version, Aaronow picks up the phone and resignedly goes into his pitch, while the song “Blue Skies”—“nothing but blue skies, from now on”—plays and closing credits roll. Despite their misery, the dream of “blue skies” keeps the salesmen hammering away, manufacturing the storyline to which they themselves have fallen victim.

American Anti-pastoral  201 Glengarry Glen Ross is anti-utopian in a different way than we have seen. Mamet avoids the “cognitive estrangement” Suvin associates with science fiction’s critical function, and instead engages in “refamiliarization:” dystopian elements are hidden behind what is essentially a realist narrative of trauma. Mamet is not giving a warning of what might come to pass, nor a critique of the present displaced into an imaginary world. His boiler room real estate office exists in the here and now, both an actual place and allegory for life under capitalism. We recognize the terms under which we live as horrific, without dystopia’s cushioning recourse to a future in which such a world does not come to pass. If Miller is an ex-utopian, lamenting the fate of the dream, Mamet harbors no residual utopian hopes. When Roma says to Lingk, “[a] hell exists on earth. Yes. I won’t live in it” (47) he is selling a false promise of escape from the American dystopia. The absence of a viable utopian practice is taken for granted. Utopia is not a political fiction but a marketing fiction, a tool for the exploitation of desire. Jefferson’s middle ground, where capitalism meets country life, was always destined to become a shopping mall; utopia survives as a story told by desperate salesman to shell-shocked dupes. To tell this story, Mamet constructs a diminished world formed around a single principle—“Always be closing.” In the zero-sum world of steroidal capitalism, every interaction, every scene, crashes against the outer limit of transactional closure defined by the sales call. *** West’s and Mamet’s texts reveal the fault line between dystopian forms and more familiar American literary forms of romanticism, realism, and naturalism. What traditional forms share is a horizon of possibility that is lacking from West and Mamet. If the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is an elaboration of the boot of state “stamping on a human face forever” (277), the rigidity of West’s and Mamet’s worlds is no less strikingly under-determined. Both writers thwart autonomous, shaping action, fortifying setting against the individual. This thwarting is not the same as that experienced by Gatsby, who becomes a tragic figure due to the majestic strength of his own impossible dreams. West and Mamet’s characters have no heroic interiority to hurl against the intractable world. The characters are thwarted in their task of self-assertion by a principle of oppression diffused throughout the texts themselves. The dystopian impulse manifests in the movement toward what I have been referring to as formal violence—toward the undoing of structures of character and plot that constitute the textual means by which the human recognizes itself. West’s and Mamet’s characters are not done in because that is what happened to them, but because the world and the text that contains it are designed in such a way as to make the selves the characters

202  Dystopian Variations seek to become impossible to achieve. No matter what the characters choose, the end must always be the same; the people they meet are extensions of the persecutory principle around which the text coalesces. For West, the principle is the inverted plot mechanics of the Alger dream narrative. In Alger, virtue will always rise to the top; in West, virtue will always be punished. Mamet’s drama is organized around a law of the capitalist jungle no less oppressive and no less far-reaching than the law of Big Brother. Both texts act as machines, dispensing with the novelistic illusion of the contingent human as they progress toward their inevitable conclusions. In place of character they produce tooled parts to be incorporated into the mechanics of the dystopian plot.

Notes 1. Northrop Frye notes that in the United States the “combination of an antiutopian attitude toward centralized planning and a utopian attitude toward the economic process naturally creates some inconsistencies” (“Varieties” 328). 2. Roemer 14. 3. Marx 43. 4. For example, see Joel Nydhal (in Roemer 237–53) for a view of American utopias’ roots in a millenarian religious tradition. 5. Anderson 11. Richard Slotkin identifies a progressive and a populist tradition in American mythography. The progressive tradition uses myth to “buttress the ideological assumptions and political aims of a corporate economy and managerial politics” while the populist tradition values decentralization, as in the small farmer or business owner (22–23). Each tradition has its own vision of utopia. The former dreams of a well-run modern state, the latter of a fantasy of small-town life. One is the fantasy of Lewis’s hero Doremus Jessup, the other of his villain Shad Ledue. Other writers reverse the valence. Lewis fears the populist common man, West the ruling classes. 6. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia 69. 7. See Maren Lockwood for discussion of impact of religion on communities like Oneida. 8. See Hardy Reece, Company Towns, The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy Basic 2010; Green’s subtitle captures the dual nature of these new modes of living. 9. Machine 9. 10. Marx 116. 11. Marx observes of the Virgilian pastoral, the ideal pasture lies between two borders, one that separates it from Rome, the other separating it from the “violent uncertainties of nature” (22). 12. See Maria Varsam in Dark Horizons on slavery as model for dystopia (203–24). 13. Spencer 13. 14. Daniel Walker Howe in Making the American Self examines the deep-rooted tradition of self-construction, particularly “the right to decide what kind of person one wishes to be and also the right to fulfill one’s own potential” (9). He attributes the distinctiveness of this American understanding of the self to the meeting of Protestant belief that the self was wanting and the Enlightenment belief in the self’s perfectibility (260).

American Anti-pastoral  203 5. See Carl Bode’s Penguin edition introduction. 1 16. In other such tales, the vector is geographical, carrying the protagonist from country to city, bringing rural excess under the sway of new paradigms of production. And in still other cases, the vector is reversed. In the famous phrase attributed to Horace Greeley, “Go west, young man,” the boy is enjoined to leave the city where his labor is wasted and head toward uncharted terrain where he is needed. 17. It Can’t Happen Here 101. 18. According to Blyn, up to a fifth of the novel is a direct lift from Alger (115). 19. Tocqueville 430, 431. 20. Ibid 432. 21. Archaeologies 3. 22. Auden 238. 23. Ibid 238, 241. 24. Conesa n.p. Conesa points out that West links fascism to the American dream mythology—the American dream, challenged by the Depression, can only be redeemed by ultranationalist, fascist myth-making. 25. Veitch xviii 21, 57. 26. Glenn Altschuler in his review of David Greenberg’s 2007 biography of Coolidge, calls Coolidge “a transitional figure who used 20th-century methods to promote 19th-century values—and 19th-century nostrums to calm the anxieties and displacements of an urban, industrial society” (Feb. 11, 2007 Baltimore Sun). 27. See Rita Barnard The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance for discussion of the transition to a consumer-oriented economy in the 1930’s. 28. See Veitch for story of screenplay. . . 29. Roberts n.p. See Blyn 133. 30. Veitch 89. 31. Ibid xiii–iv. As Veitch puts it, West suspected Ma Joad and her innocence “of incipient fascist tendencies” xiii. 32. Peyser 19. 33. It Can’t Happen Here 8. See also Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) for a version of the turn to fascism situated several years later. 34. Veitch 100–1. Blyn, building on Veitch, argues that Lem’s prosthetic humanity also serves a more directly engaged political purpose—by evacuating the possibility of a revolutionary subject West criticizes both capitalism’s production of a mechanized, as opposed to human, subject and the left for its proposition that progress can occur in the absence of such a subject. Blyn writes, “The conundrum of A Cool Million . . . is that in following in the footsteps of the left, in performing a Marxist critique of ideology and the violence of liberal capitalism, it creates a subject incapable of responding against it” (123). 35. See Buckley, 11. 36. See Miller, Death of a Salesman xxiv–xxv. 37. Basourakas writes, “these men have been rendered impotent by the rigidity of the male scripts that they subscribe to, the androcentric world view that they value and that validates their sense of a masculine identity, and thus they do not have the will, the inclination, or the language, to critique and/or to reconstruct alternative scripts of appropriate male behavior” (90). 38. Desson Howe in his Washington Post review of the play (Oct. 2, 1992) sees the movie’s claustrophobia as a problem of direction. Foley “creates the

204  Dystopian Variations (presumably) unwanted effect of a soundstage. There is no evidence of life outside the immediate world of the movie.” 39. Kauffman 31. 40. “Tragedy and the Common Man” n.p. 41. Slotkin 643–44. 42. Slotkin emphasizes the importance of what he calls the American myth of regeneration through violence—“the redemption of the American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or ‘natural’ state” (12). 43. Jonathan S. Cullick sees Mitch and Murray as a “signifier for impersonal power” (26). 44. See Matthew C. Roudané for notion of “business as sacrament” (42). 45. Cullick 31. 46. Andrea Greenbaum observes, “The exclusion of women  .  .  . implies that what is frequently associated as “feminine” values—compassion, nurturance, empathy—are threatening to the men’s business ethos” (n.p.). 47. It is telling that Mamet compares the experience of theatre to the hunt. The “usual state of the civilized being” is ruminative, requiring “dampening of the predatory instinct;” theatre returns us to a primitive form of excitation (Theatre 18).

8 Romancing the Child First Teens in Lowry and Butler

What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong? (Lois Lowry, The Giver 90) Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3, RSV)

First Teens This chapter looks at some underlying structural motifs of one of the most vibrant current genres, the young adult (YA) dystopia. Despite YA dystopias’ crossover readership, there is a difference between books about young adults and books for young adults. What, besides the difficulty of the prose, separates Never Let Me Go, for example, from The Hunger Games? The bleakness of the dystopian vision that accepts that the fate of humanity is subjection—or of its anti-utopian counterpart, that rejects the possibility of a significantly improved adulthood for humankind—seems excessively harsh for young people who have not yet had an opportunity to develop the deep pessimism that informs the dystopian fantasy. YA dystopias run the gamut from post-apocalyptic fantasies, such as Nnedi Okorafur’s Who Fears Death (2010) or Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), to critiques of the intersection of capitalism and technology, such as M. T. Anderson’s Feed (2003) or Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), to popular post-post-apocalyptic fantasy series that imagine overly-regimented authoritarian worlds made to compensate for the human failings that led humanity to the brink, like Uglies (2005–2007), Hunger Games (2008–2010), Matched (2010–2012), Delirium (2011–2013), or Divergent (2011–2013). The last man is here often a teen girl, not enfeebled but in the process of discovering an inner power that allows her to challenge the seemingly insuperable force of the world she inhabits. Sarah Hentges calls these “girl on fire” books,

206  Dystopian Variations and Sarah Day, Miranda Green-Barteet, and Amy Montz note that these young women are “agents of change,” liminal figures that, like feminist u/dystopias, are “caught in between and on the brink of multiple states simultaneously.”1 The challenge these young women pose to the ruling order is not just their resistance, but also their potential for refiguring the distribution of power within familiar structures of patriarchy. Rather than providing a mournful reminder of what we have lost, YA dystopian works tend to look forward, most often celebrating humans not on the way out but on the way back. Its protagonists are not last men and women, but first teens tasked with bringing their worlds back to life. In order to do so, the attributes that accompany pre-adulthood—­ spontaneity, creativity, empathy, irrational passions—must be given freer rein even as utopia is also located in the developmental future where the teen will take on the obligations of adulthood. The new world that is to be born will resemble the world of childhood the developmental narrative is anxious to leave behind, but the teen will inhabit the new world with all the potency of adulthood. This ambivalence, as I  have been arguing throughout, is central to dystopian poetics. On the one hand, dystopia embodies the desire to move forward into the future, but on the other, to remain safely in the past. YA dystopias are thus critical in their insistence on alternatives to dystopian pessimism, but also frequently anti-utopian in their rejection of hyper-rationalized enlightenment fantasies of utopian order. The YA dystopia reframes this ambivalence within a developmental narrative that is one-part Bildungsroman, another part adventure romance. Perhaps the most salient characteristic of these dystopias is the way in which adolescent protagonists simultaneously shrink from and desire entrée into an adult world outside the boundaries of family. The dystopias treated in this study thus far replace organic families with inorganic “machines” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, We, Glengarry Glen Ross), hollow out the family as buttress against social collapse (A Clockwork Orange), or treat yearning for family as an ultimately impotent form of nostalgia (A Cool Million, Never Let Me Go). The explicit centrality of actual family is a crucial differentiator of YA dystopias. Family reemerges as the functional unit worth saving, as the utopian counterargument to dystopian regimentation. In contrast to the cold, rationalized u/dystopian world or to the brutal and anarchic post-apocalyptic world, the family is a place of warmth, safety, and nourishment. At the same time, though, family must be transcended. As I  already discussed in relation to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston’s identification with Big Brother constitutes an iteration of the family romance. In YA dystopia, the family romance plays out as a fairy tale in which the child discovers that he or she is really a prince or princess responsible for saving the world. Parents of the heroes are long-suffering victims, and it is up to the young protagonist to “rescue” them along with the world. If these

Romancing the Child  207 parental figures have a sin, it is not that they themselves are responsible for the state of the world but that they are ineffectual in challenging it. Suvin distinguishes the fairy-tale from naturalistic science fiction on the grounds that in the fairy tale, “the world is oriented positively toward the protagonist.”2 Dystopia, like tragedy, imagines a world negatively disposed toward the hero even while maintaining the veneer of naturalism; the YA dystopia invests the world with features of the psychological landscape that equip it to serve grandiose fantasies of restoration and transformation. The dystopias of this chapter offer a version of character whose context is the coming of age tropes that shape past novels.3 The struggle to fit in, the need to establish autonomy and competence, queasiness at the onrushing world of maturity, and the growing gap between generations arising from the increased pace of technological change all become the thematic material of the YA dystopia. While exterior events condition the shape and degree of dystopian fantasies, it is equally important to recognize the characterological, thematic, and formal links between The Chocolate War and The Hunger Games, The Outsiders and Uglies. In YA dystopias, characters from traditional coming of age novels are given new powers and inserted into more extreme environments where they fight against the dehumanizing tendencies of over-rigid or failed states. This chapter focuses on Lois Lowry’s The Giver Quartet and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books. The first novels of both series are early models of the YA dystopian genre, bridging the concerns of mid-century YA novels with the concerns of the recent bumper crop of dystopias. The first is a prototypical YA dystopia; the second is arguably not a YA novel at all, as it is too bleak and too violent and ultimately finds its meaning outside the heroine’s development. Even so, these works show the impact of the developmental Bildungsroman narrative on the dystopian and post-apocalyptic traditions.4 Moreover, Butler’s novel is particularly germane for how it complicates the return-to-family narrative, revealing underlying structural dynamics of the coming-of-age story. While these books lack some of the direct-to-screen pyrotechnics of the most recent YA dystopias, they establish structures and themes, and most importantly, a relationship to childhood and family, that continue to influence the genre. This chapter argues that the ambivalent desire to both overcome and return to family becomes a vehicle for acting out the dystopian dialectic of resistance and regression. Lowry’s and Butler’s texts exemplify the ambivalence of the dystopian coming of age narrative as it seeks to shape the future and preserve the psychic past. The novels allegorize the developmental narrative, but at the same time express a fundamentally conservative, impulse in their defense of family. Both invoke the desire for collective life that Russ associates with “communal, quasitribal” societies.5 However, they filter this Rousseauian fantasy through an acknowledgment of the need for Burkean hierarchies, based on

208  Dystopian Variations voluntary kinship, that secure the community against the dangers of too much individuality.

New Worlds for Old Desires6 In their introduction to their collection, Contemporary Dystopian Fictions for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, Balaka Basu, Katharine R. Broad, and Hintz identify education and escape as the twin poles of YA dystopian fiction. The didactic side “teach[es] serious lessons” about the present; the escapist side offers “pleasurable retreat” from problems that might otherwise be overwhelming.7 In adult dystopias, the education/escape dialectic appears as warning/mourning, theoretically enticing the reader to move from mourning to action. In YA novels, the same movement applies, replicating the developmental narrative by bringing the reader from escapism to engagement. As I have argued throughout, emphasis on the destination term is often over-emphasized. Practical education produces feelings of competence and social value, but the loss of childhood forms of pleasure is felt acutely, is a heavy price to pay. This ambivalence is inseparable from YA dystopian politics. Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum argue that the transformative utopianism in many young adult dystopias reflects modern children’s literature’s “pervasive commitment to social practice,” inspired specifically by a series of major political events in the late 1980’s and 1990’s that included the end of the cold war and subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf war, and the end of South African apartheid.8 In Bradford et al.’s account, these events moved concern with world issues and social justice to the forefront of young people’s consciousness, creating a market for a literature that went beyond the coming-of-age stories typical of young adult literature. This broadened scope led to the explosion in socially conscious dystopias that began appearing in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s and 2000’s issues like climate change, overpopulation, famine, genetic engineering, and the rise of the Internet spoke urgently to a youth audience caught up in a moment of profound and perhaps unprecedented upheaval, in which individual survival seemed irrevocably tied to the global. This argument—that dystopian literature is a fundamentally topical response to world events—parallels the broader argument about dystopia that this study’s formal focus seeks to complicate. In the case of dystopias for young people, the argument might be framed in the reverse—politics, ecological crisis, and authoritarian regimes are only the most recent ways of embodying the monsters that have haunted the adolescent psyche since the post-WWII development of youth culture. The development of adolescent anxiety as genre corresponds with modernity’s disruption of stable narratives of progress that previously structured the passage into adulthood and with modern adolescence’s emergence as a prolonged

Romancing the Child  209 phase. The childhood-industrial complex reifies youth not just as passing stage to be gotten through efficiently, but as an identity in its own right, to be curated, marketed to, and mastered. The increased status granted to youth culture leads to the emergence of a neo-romanticism that simultaneously looks back on the child and forward through the child’s eyes. Adolescence in the twenty-first century has become freighted in ways that specifically invite dystopian formulations. It is no accident that YA dystopian literature exploded in the 2010’s alongside the development of social media that amplified anxiety across a range of adolescent experience, from fears for the planet’s future to fears of pervasive surveillance. Writing of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Simon Willmetts notes the passage from an Orwellian nightmare of disrupted autonomy to a new kind of attack in which the sovereign, stable, and autonomous subject of liberalism is replaced by an “ephemeral and fragile” neoliberal subject discovering and rediscovering itself within the logic of consumption.9 For adolescents, this self-discovery is particularly challenging. Identity becomes a matter of taste: not a destination, but a mode of performance that requires laborious maintenance. In such a paradigm, adolescent identity assumes both a fluidity and a significance that make its navigation particularly intense. For the young, traditional pressures on identity are freighted by the need for a public balancing act conducted via multiple social media platforms, codes, and networks. Orwell’s private self turns public. Analogous to the anxiety that accompanies modern man’s growing sense of responsibility for his own destiny while under his neighbors’ gaze—expressed, for example, in Eliot’s Prufrock, who finds even the smallest decision too momentous—modern adolescence breeds its own anxiously critical brand of self-consciousness. These conditions supply YA dystopia with some of its characteristic formations, even as its themes remain grounded in the coming of age drama. Anderson’s Feed builds a world around marketing piped directly into the brains of youth-consumers. And yet, Anderson’s novel is ultimately about the difficult passage into ethical maturity. Anderson’s hero Titus and his peers linger in the chambers of a virtual sea, plugged into the consciousness-consuming feed. Titus develops a relationship with a girl whose feed malfunctions. As she dies, he struggles to confront difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, and responsibility that the feed is designed to alleviate. The feed is in one sense material, a technology that in the intervening years we have come close to perfecting, but in another sense a metaphor for childhood, both what it grants and what it denies.10 Carrie Hintz writes that the significant feature differentiating YA from general dystopias is that former addresses “political action . . . within the developmental narrative of adolescence.”11 Presumably, this conflation is meant to help adolescent readers cope with difficult political and social ideas within a context they can

210  Dystopian Variations understand: their own narrative of development. Good citizenship within the ideal society (or in opposition to the dystopian society) is figured as a process of both achieving the autonomy of adulthood and keeping the clarity of vision held by a child.12 It is important to recognize that the child’s “clarity of vision” is itself a wishful romantic conceit, a platform for critique grounded in a vision of the child as possessor of magical insight untainted by custom. If YA dystopias crystallize the failure of the adult world, the solution is not a better-thought through utopia, but a return to the unaffected spontaneity and innate sense of justice associated with children and adolescents. Of course, the struggle between innocence and experience is the problem of the Bildungsroman as well, here translated for a slightly younger audience whose concern is not necessarily the negotiation of adult roles but separation from childhood and its cost. The quest for individuality in the YA dystopia has roots in romantic tropes of intensified affect, the desire for transcendence, and extra-institutional authorization for the self, all associated with childhood. But the institutions that govern political life are tools for grown-ups; the first teen of these novels is the one seeks to usher in a new world that preserves the desires of childhood in an adult setting. This makes these works both more and less political. They are more political in that they imagine actual possibilities, a politics that is subject to intervention by people of good will; they are less political, in their tendency to fold revolutionary potential into individual identity. Numerous critics have pointed out that, like the Bildungsroman, they are novels of assimilation rather than transformation. In this sense, many YA dystopias have little investment in radical social change. As Basu, et al. note, young adult dystopias are often ultimately conservative, embracing traditional social roles and family formations even as they seem to challenge the authority of patriarchy and/or the modern neo-liberal capitalist state. Katherine R. Broad asks, “to what extent does this wish for the safe and stable [family] risk eclipsing the transformative potential of both adolescent rebellion and dystopian literature to imagine other worlds?”13 The ambivalent desire for return to the family is a check on the development of truly transformative structures. Traditionalism extends to plot structure. The horizons of YA dystopias are not fixed—characters have wide spheres of agency, and the novels attribute significance to individual actions. The young protagonists of these novels are not exhausted, clinging weakly on to life—their energy is boundless. But because they are adolescents, their relationship to the past, a relationship so central to the other dystopias I have been discussing, is profoundly different. Since the child does not occupy a position of power or privilege in relation to the available resources of the world, there is little of the reactionary cultural humanism of the other texts.

Romancing the Child  211 Books are sometimes window dressing, but they are not presented with the same reverence as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for example. For example, in Uglies it is the collection of preserved magazines that inspires the librarian figure’s protective impulses. Institutions are similarly treated as arbitrary and therefore potentially changeable with the application of a little bit of force, a little bit of logic, a little bit of compassion. YA dystopias’ open-endedness is itself a form of conservatism. Bradford et al. argue that many YA dystopias replicate neo-liberal faith in the individual as the essential unit of political life, and the sole bearer of responsibility. They write, “Western social ideologies condition subjects to value freedom, innovation, self-realisation, and self-expression;” by privileging the striving for “subjective agency,” the YA dystopia acts as only a partial critique of neo-liberalism and capitalism.14 By refusing to decenter the subject, the novels fail to acknowledge the limitations of individual formulations of identity. Tension between the individual and the society is not to be answered by adjustment in the relative weight given each, but by return to an individual who is not necessarily responsible for making a world that others can live in. Even works like Lowry’s that stress the value of affiliation frame it in terms of the individual’s role as rescuer or underminer of the community. This framework underscores the potency of individuality, taking it away in order that it can be seized back. As a result of the fixation on identity and the developmental narrative, YA dystopias, instead of ending with further constriction of the sphere of character, move toward a larger sphere of effective agency for their protagonists. Rejecting the fatalism of their adult counterparts, YA dystopias leave their worlds open, elevating the stakes of the developmental journey by creating a world that allegorizes the adolescent quest for both autonomy and connection. Like Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the pathetic fallacy returns via settings that fuse external political events to adolescent psychological states. Real problems, such as authoritarian governments, climate change, and the potential for nuclear disaster are in one sense the subject of these texts; in another sense, the subject remains adolescence and its struggles as the texts amplify and project the developmental narrative onto a troubled landscape. The setting for YA dystopias thus become qualitatively different from dystopia as a space for exploring endings. The setting is adventurespace, a set of obstacles that allegorically stand-in for real-world issues, as in Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Dimaline projects the theft of land and culture from America’s indigenous peoples onto the future and articulates it via an adventure. Dimaline imagines a world of ecological collapse where the bone marrow of Native Americans—forcibly extracted at the cost of their lives—is necessary to supply the dreams that keep white America alive. The Native Americans flee into the woods for their lives and must live alone and suspicious lest they be

212  Dystopian Variations taken. At the end of the novel, the main characters discover that the force that can short circuit the machine that steals marrow is the ability to dream in a native language. This dose of enchantment is typical. Political and/or ecological problems are solved not through substantive engagement with the world, but through metaphor literalized as magic. The magic allegorizes real-world solutions, in this case the preservation of Native American culture and the embrace of heterogeneity, lending to resistance a potency not available in the physical world. Dreams blow up the machine; in other novels, empathy allows physical sight at a distance, or an unprecedented warrior charisma starts a revolution. Like the other dystopias in this study YA dystopias realize anxiety as naturalistic setting, but they realize hope as well in their characters and the powers they possess. The settings of YA dystopian worlds are often the result of some kind of disaster brought on by adult mismanagement—war, famine, disease— that spawns a post-post-apocalyptic dystopian state in its wake. For example, in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series, Panem arises out of what appears to be a combination of catastrophic war and famine. The world of The Giver is a response to overpopulation, starvation, and war. In Panem, the administrators’ intention is more malign, while in The Giver, it is ostensibly benign, but both involve the imposition of artificial structures designed to control the messy, self-destructive tendencies of humans. As the quotation at the head of the chapter indicates, choice is the culprit. Left to our own devices, we choose badly. The parallels with childhood and adolescence are clear: the dystopian regime exaggerates the parental function of protection. The dystopia is the consequence of choice, which, in the back story of many of these worlds, has led to the apocalypse the pseudo-utopia is designed to counteract. In the managed societies of the future, as Hintz points out, it is often the adolescent who pays the price for adults’ comfort.15 (Le Guin’s dystopian fable discussed earlier, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” makes this explicit: a tortured child is the literal price of utopia.) Generational tension arises from the suspicion that the world is organized to minimize children’s freedom and influence. YA dystopias often frame the perennial political problem of inherited rules as generational, echoing the anti-utopian position that is suspicious of the dynamic utopia. Rules established by past generations are set in stone, leaving the adolescent no room to exercise his or her own preferences or judgment. Even if the rules were good or necessary, their inability to accommodate alteration bars the younger generation from a developmental narrative that includes the eventual assumption of effective adulthood. The struggle in the YA dystopia is thus not against rules per se; it is about the child and adolescent frustration of never being allowed to make them. The right of the child is not to freedom, but to a developmental narrative of his or her own. The question is not necessarily what the rules are but who gets to make them.

Romancing the Child  213 The squelching of choice manifests in the familiar trope of the assignment of roles. Jonathan Alexander and Rebecca Black link this motif to the rise of high-stakes testing combined with an increasing scarcity of resources that heighten the stakes of early assessments. The desperate need to belong in society, to succeed monetarily, coupled with the fear of being mis-tracked, of being Slytherin rather than Gryffindor, dominates young people’s emotional worlds in the new zero-sum capitalist game. Upon reaching maturity, adolescents are locked into a future from which there is no recourse. By realizing this tendency of distributed capitalism in the concentrated form of the state, young people are given a clear enemy to struggle against. However, one side-effect of this narrative structure is that young people’s general sense of powerlessness is framed as temporary, and the reader is invited to identify with a powerful figure able to alter the inherited world. There is a difference in how identification works in adult vs. YA dystopias. In dystopias targeted at a young adult market, identification is positive, educative, inspiring. In the pessimistic dystopias I have been discussing, the task of character is to survive just long enough to gain our sympathy before finally winking out. Then, identification with the protagonist becomes a source of discomfort, shame, or disgust, like Marlow encountering the native Africans in Heart of Darkness. Adult dystopias negate choice, or offload it to entities beyond the control of the character—think of D-503’s capitulation in We, or Offred’s climb into the van in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—but the YA version puts choice squarely in the hands of characters. Setting is more potent than the traditional novel, but not so potent as to overwhelm the hero or heroine. Dystopia is not the inevitable and final result of history, it is a time-limited phase, containing the possibility of a time when new dispensations of power become available. In the latter part of the twentieth century, man-made crises like potential nuclear annihilation, overpopulation, and environmental degradation make child saviors especially appealing figures in their promise of a do-over. Indeed, the robust adult audience for YA dystopias suggests the power of this desire.16 The child or adolescent, not yet fully part of the adult world, embodies hope for return to a simpler and more humane form of life that runs counter to calculating, systematized adult solutions. At the same time, this nostalgia tends to affirm the present, by projecting the concept of escape backward and inward, into family and memory where it can have little impact on the future. In this sense, YA dystopias, however critical, are not utopian in any developed sense. They emphasize escape; or, when they emphasize reconstruction, reforms are left vague and unarticulated, a ghostly counterpart to the narrative of the character’s personal development that makes a future possible. This is certainly the case in Lowry’s series. Where Huxley’s acceptance of the intractability of the bargain of civilization

214  Dystopian Variations is tragic, these works, like fairy tales, sidestep what happens after. They are less interested in solving the problem of communities. Why would they be? They are concerned with an earlier stage, the formation of individual identities, which only later will be available for aggregation into a community. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, despite being nominally targeted at adults, is thus a paradigmatic example of an adolescent dystopia. The word missing from her dystopia, discovered by her heroine at the end, is EGO—Rand rejects the social constraints that make life in communities possible, or has little interest in exploring the limits of constraint. As a novel, this is almost a parody, realizing the narrative of coming-into-self as a subject of world-significance. The adolescent hero restores the world that should have been had adult tendencies to impose systems—whether egalitarian or authoritarian, or as in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, both— been adequately contained. The appeal of this fantasy is undeniable. The child or adolescent who saves the world is obviously a youthful fantasy of potency, resonating both with Christian and romantic valorizations of innocence, but it is also an adult fantasy. Eric Tribunella associates the increased visibility of novels that take childhood trauma as their theme in the twentieth century with mid-century nostalgia for the “sacred child,” a vicarious response to a moment when “the bodies of living children became increasingly problematized as the site of violence.”17 Along with this nostalgia, he identifies a twentieth-century narrative of adulthood as “melancholic,” arrived at through a transformative experience of loss that interpellates the adolescent subject within a pre-existing adult world.18 Seen in this light, YA dystopia become a form of trauma narrative that invites adult identification, the child becoming a screen upon which adult desires are projected.19 Perry Nodelman points out that projection is a common feature of the adult reaction to children’s literature. YA texts address a divided reader, speaking simultaneously to the emerging adult and the disappearing child within the adolescent reader. The adolescent is introduced to adult modes of mourning childhood’s end, while the emerging adult is invited to fortify what remains of childhood. For full-fledged adults, the text mourns childhood’s end while resurrecting a vision of the child with the world still ahead. The utopias these adolescent characters hint at remain just over the horizon—like the protagonist’s maturity a fuzzy and indistinct thing always on the cusp of emergence. Perhaps, as in Tribunella’s theory, the yearning is to become an adult who can be nostalgic for childhood; like the romantic, Wordsworthian model of emotions recollected in tranquility, the child-hero seeks to re-discover childhood from the perspective of having lost it. Throughout, this book has argued that dystopia employs a truncated journey of development, embodying fears that the world will reach a final state past which growth is impossible. In Lowry, the state is allegory for adulthood and foreclosure of the potential for becoming, while in

Romancing the Child  215 Butler, the failed state is allegory for the need to discipline adult violence, greed, and selfishness that have caused the world to suffocate potential. Defending simultaneously against the threat posed by childhood ineffectuality and against adulthood, both texts foreground the “stuck betweenness” characteristic of dystopian poetics. Through a heroic effort we see a re-opening of the space for development, followed by hesitation at the threshold as the characters seek to recapitulate older forms of communal life. In The Giver, the u/dystopian community at the beginning is a place from which to escape into an unknown outside world. In later books, other, more utopian communities appear, but as havens rather than seeds of transformation. The universalizing vector of political life is abandoned for the comforts of the parochial. Sower is more complicated. In Sower, the new collective is the product of a singular, charismatic vision, which, though not a patriarchal one, requires the same fealty to a founding narrative. Wegner argues that Butler unequivocally rejects “enclave politics,” showing the destruction of Olamina’s original private community in the first book, and the utopian community she founds at the end of Sower in the second book. However, this seems more ambiguous to me—the text is often about proselytizing, and in that sense is a fascinating study of the development of a cult. Only to the extent that we embrace Olamina’s ideology can we cheer her decision to seek life elsewhere for her disciples.20 By the end of Parable of the Talents, she is Moses, left behind as her tribe go forth to claim the Promised Land. It is not the birth of a new humanity we are witnessing, but the birth of a new Chosen People, built on the family plan. The Giver is anti-utopian; Parable, though explicitly anti-anti-utopian, acknowledges alongside the necessity of utopian dreaming its tendency to be a live possibility for only a small subset of the human population.

A Family Affair: Romantic Humanism in Lowry’s The Giver The Giver Quartet offers four tales all set in a post-apocalyptic world that has reconstituted itself according to various plans in distinct, isolated communities, some utopian, some post-apocalyptic primitive. Each work places a child in a hostile family environment and moves toward the reuniting of the child with their “true” family, who require the intervention of the child to survive. In all four books, the desire for family, whether organic or assembled, plays a determinative role in shaping action and theme. Bradford, et. al. see Lowry’s communities as “more conservative than transformative” both in their centering of family as the source of potential transformation and in their suggestion that such a transformation depends on gifted individuals, while others, like Kenneth Kidd, place more emphasis on the possibilities generated by a return to community

216  Dystopian Variations and public ways of defining the self.21 I read this debate as reflective of dystopian ambivalence about the passage between private childhood and public adulthood—the strength of both desires manifests in the amplified allegory of the dystopian world. The opening novel of the series, The Giver, takes place in a planned community, where the exchange of freedom for contentment is the goal of an ostensibly benign administration. The absence of the irrational, unconditional compassion associated with family leads to the protagonist’s desire to escape with a toddler who is about to be “released” or euthanized because he does not conform to the milestone schedule the community enforces for newborns. In the second book, Gathering Blue, the obstacle is a corrupt administration overseeing a post-apocalyptic society that enslaves children in order to exploit their genius. A  child is orphaned and creates a new family with other cast-offs before being reunited with her blind father who was cast out when she was an infant. In the third book, Messenger, a community is threatened by animate nature’s hostility and by a magical, tempter figure who incites people to exchange their virtues for selfish, materialistic ends. One of the children from Gathering Blue has become part of an amalgamated family with the father from the previous book and must save his community of outcasts from the gathering darkness through self-sacrifice. In the final book, Son, the birthmother of the infant who is rescued in The Giver escapes the original dystopian society that separates children from their biological mothers and overcomes a series of obstacles and tests, including the tempter from the previous novel, to be reunited with her son. Each scenario, even the last, which focuses on the mother and child reunion, represents an aspect of the struggle toward maturity. In The Giver, the quest is for autonomy; in Gathering Blue, the quest is to reconnect with the past; in Messenger, the quest is to leave family to become a significant member of the community; and in Son, the quest is for the reinstatement of the organic bond between a mother and her child. Read through the lens of Freud’s family romance, these narratives act as persistent fantasies of noble birth at precisely the moment when the child is testing the waters of autonomy. Those playing the part of parents are found to be lacking and must be overcome on the way to reuniting with the “real” family. Freud notes the nostalgia of the family romance: in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone.22

Romancing the Child  217 Such a structure is well-suited to adolescent ambivalence about entering into adulthood. The magical child discovers he or she possesses special powers or abilities that obligate him or her to leave the family behind in order to save the world, but the world must be saved in order to make it safe again for families. The “acting” family orients the child forward toward adulthood; the true family is the desideratum of the YA dystopia, implying a possibility of repossessing an authentic childhood that has been stolen. In The Giver, family is opposed by a rationalized, fully intentional society. The “Community” in The Giver, like Huxley’s, is engineered down to the smallest detail in order to restrict people’s ability to make choices, since it was the exercise of autonomy and the inevitable struggles over difference that led the past world to the brink of destruction. As in so many dystopias, books, emblem of the power of free thought, are banned. In order to prevent conflict, all difference has been smoothed over, including, via genetic manipulation, the ability to see colors. Full sexual maturity is impossible, as “the stirrings” (35) are controlled with a pill which citizens begin taking at puberty. Children are not born into families but assigned to them after being gestated by “birthmothers” and spending a year in communal post-natal development. Marriages are sexless, companionate alliances, partners selected for compatibility in performing social functions like child-rearing. This top-down form of social engineering is founded on the assumption that individuals are not capable of self-governance. Like Plato and Wells, utopia is coerced, a matter of rules imposed for the populace’s own good but which restrict freedom to engage in activities traditionally associated with the human. It is one thing to ban supersize sodas in the interest of public health—a version of the crystal palace Dostoevsky’s Underground Man finds so offensive—but quite another to ban love and sex. To the extent that one believes that humanity left to its own devices will destroy itself and is in need of correction by a rational, scientific elite, such a world is at least arguably utopic. However, if humans are to survive in a form recognizable to those occupying the romantic humanist past or present, such a world’s general application of rules is wholly inadequate. Milestones divide childhood into functional units. The Giver follows Jonas, a “twelve” about to be assigned his role in the community. Rather than being assigned one of the typical jobs, like pilot or fish hatchery attendant, Jonas is given the role of Receiver of Memory. The Receiver is the repository for the collective memory of the human past, a sort of Google Drive where the subjective, collective history of the species is uploaded and preserved. The memories would cause pain if allowed to circulate freely; so, through a mechanism the text does not address, they are stored in the mind of a single community member who holds them in trust, thereby relieving the rest of the community of the burden of

218  Dystopian Variations historical memory. Jonas is chosen because he is thought to have the ability to “see beyond,” which is the ability to see at a distance, and, unlike most of the others, he is able to see colors despite his engineering. In this, he is a last boy, possessing the atavistic human qualities that society has eradicated. The Community is built on “Sameness”—everyone follows a rigid set of rules that govern social and personal behavior. Mechanisms of social control filter down from planners to “families.” People ritually apologize to each other and to the community for the smallest infractions. Dinner conversation around the “family” table consists of the sharing of negative emotions, exorcising them in talking-cure fashion by bringing them to the surface. Precise language is taught from a young age to militate against possible misunderstanding. Words like “love” are considered too vague and potentially confusing. When Jonas asks his parents if they love him, his mother corrects him, chastising him for using an obsolete word that has become “almost meaningless:” “You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me?’ The answer is ‘Yes,’ ” his mother said. “Or,” his father suggested, “ ‘Do you take pride in my accomplishments?’ And the answer is wholeheartedly ‘Yes.’ ” (117) Unlike the government of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which destroys language in order to prevent thinking, here the aim is to “perfect” language by making it purely functional. This leaves no room for the kinds of overdeterminations found in literary language. Nor does it allow for private holdings of any sort—memory is capital that must be eradicated to prevent accumulation of privately held identity. Excess meaning threatens the fully stabilized economy that depends on full use of all resources, with no value accumulating in private hands. The novel’s rejection of this attempt to formulate harmony is antiutopian. We are accustomed to thinking of the capacity to emotion-share and use precise language as noble goals of liberal education, but here these goals are parodied, presented in exaggerated form as a threat to the human. Even though the technologies of control in the Community are, as in Brave New World, engineered into the population to ensure there is no dissent, they are nonetheless portrayed as invasive. In her study of the emergence of discourses of the posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles quotes C. B. MacPherson’s definition of the essence of the liberal humanist subject as “freedom from the wills of others;” Hayles identifies the line between human and posthuman as the moment when the two cannot be separated.23 The alteration of the human through genetic manipulation is one of the great twentieth-century themes of dystopian literature, combining the fear of invasive technology and eugenics

Romancing the Child  219 with a fear of intellectual elites. In YA dystopias that emphasize biological or social engineering, the existence of a latent special power is often the explanation for the child’s sense of not fitting in. The special power is a quality that has been edited out of the social genome, but that the hero or heroine retains as an atavism. Perhaps the quality is courage, or the ability to have multiple talents instead of just one; or, perhaps it is, as in Brave New World, a critical disposition. The possessor of such a quality is an anomaly, able to perceive the flaws in society by virtue of their status as outsider, and to challenge the society by virtue of their special talent. In Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, the division between human and machine is amplified further by making magic a metaphor for what distinguishes the human from the manufactured posthuman. The last teen or group of teens is associated with a “spirit” that cannot be replicated by mechanical or cybernetic means. Jonas encounters the past and prepares for the future through a familiar narrative of selection followed by molding via a mentor figure. As Jonas is trained as the Receiver, he experiences memories of the past. But as the Giver transfers to Jonas memories of the past via engineered magic, Jonas begins to question his world. Why should people not be allowed to see colors? Why should they not be able to choose their jobs? “It’s safer,” the Giver explains. Jonas is left with feelings of unease, marking his development of an individuality no longer suited to the herd. He begins to look at his groupmates with frustration—“They were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his was taking on” (91)— and tries to hint to them of the world he is seeing. Jonas’s developing interiority is isolating. He is the only one to experience this differentiation, the only one in the community to develop toward autonomy, and therefore the only one to feel what would otherwise be considered a normal adolescent sentiment. Like Nineteen Eighty-Four or We, where the protagonist is singled out for abuse because of his anomalous interiority, here the protagonist is singled out for heroism. Kidd calls it a novel of “education of the senses,” linking it with the Bildungsroman tradition discussed in Chapter  5.24 As in the Bildungsroman, aesthetic education is linked to morality, though morality has become moot for members of the Community. Jonas is exposed to experiences from the collective past that are both pleasant and painful. It is through these experiences that he is expected to acquire the wisdom that will allow him to perform his adult advisory function in the community (even though the community rarely consults the Giver). Once Jonas has absorbed the memories from the Giver, he becomes a version of the last man/first man, the only possessor of complex subjectivity and the only one rooted in a past. In the 1972 movie Silent Running, an orbiting spaceship preserves the last plants from earth for which there is no more room. The astronaut/botanist Freeman Lowell is ordered to blow up the plants since there will never again be space for them on earth. He rebels

220  Dystopian Variations by killing the crew and stealing the spaceship, heading for deep space with his precious cargo. The past is given concrete form and the last man is the last to recognize the value of, and to be in possession of, this inheritance. Government bureaucrats, as for so many reactionary conspiracy mongers, are the enemy, suppressors of man’s nobler attachments in the name of smooth functioning administrative machinery. Here, the inconvenient cargo is collective memory, for which people no longer have use or desire. As noted in the opening to this chapter, emphasis on the protagonist’s individuality is part of what prevents YA dystopias from engaging fully in political critique. When it is only one who suffers, the reader is expected to identify with and evaluate the desires of the one as righteous. The protagonist earns the reader’s support by being exceptional rather than by being representative. In the third book in The Giver tetralogy, The Messenger, the hero Matty gives his life in order to renew the world. He is the fisher king, or Jesus, whose martyrdom ushers in a new redemptive age. If the earlier dystopias in this study often function effectively as bitter medicine for the narcissism of adolescence, the YA novel leans heavily on that narcissism as the source of its appeal. The justification of centrality becomes the task of the text—the special protagonist is right. The movement from victim to savior replicates a fantasy of carrying outward into the world the structure of infantile narcissism, rather than tempering or mitigating such a structure as the condition of entering adult society. The Giver explicitly foregrounds the tension between Jonas’s burgeoning interiority and his sense of belonging in a family. While he knows his parents are not his biological parents, he nonetheless sees them as his family, and believes in their capacity to care for him. Jonas’s father is a Nurturer—if nothing else, jobs in the future, with the exception of birthmother, are gender neutral—suggesting a capacity for empathy that the text later undercuts. He even brings home one of his charges, Gabriel, who is having trouble meeting his first-year milestones, giving him extra nurturing since Gabriel is in danger of being “released.” But when the Giver enlightens Jonas as to the meaning of release by showing a video recording of his father euthanizing the smaller of a set of twins, Jonas is stunned. Until this point, Jonas has believed that “release” means sending someone to a different community. When he discovers that his father is able to kill an innocent child with the same bland cheerfulness that Jonas has interpreted as compassion, Jonas rejects him as a parent. His father’s shirking of individual responsibility—“No one heard that little twin cry either! No one but my father” (140)—reveals that his father is fundamentally different from what Jonas conceives of as properly human. Jonas’s father is an automaton, a machine in a mask with whom Jonas can no longer identify. Again, we encounter a deep childhood fear, that parents are imposters, but also, within the family romance a narrative, a wish, freeing the child to expand worldward.

Romancing the Child  221 Jonas realizes that his fellow citizens are all hobbled by the same lack of affect. He thinks about his friend Fiona whose job it will be to release the elderly and wonders how she will feel when she finds out what it means to release. “Feelings are not part of the life she’s learned” (141), the Giver replies. Authentic community requires both memory and emotion. When Gabriel is scheduled for release for failing to reach the necessary milestones, Jonas becomes Gabriel’s protector, taking on the parental role his own parents are morally incapable of performing. This too is a child’s fantasy of supersession, of becoming a better version of the parents who have failed to maintain their perfection. Despite this emphasis on the hero’s journey, The Giver is not fully individualistic in its orientation. Significantly, as Kidd argues, aesthetic education is framed as a collective, rather than individual act. In his reading, The Giver ultimately proposes that “[t]he privatization of pain/wisdom does not a legitimate culture make,” thus “dismantl[ing] the very pedagogical scene that is so seductive in the novel.”25 Freemen Lowell has no desire to return, but Jonas still has an obligation to rescue using his newfound wisdom. This structure replays a central romantic trope of YA dystopias—that the sink into the self is a pre-requisite for returning back to the world. The popularity of YA dystopias no doubt draws on its endorsement of the capacity to be both singular and moral, selfish and altruistic at the same time. The Giver tells Jonas, “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared” (142). Jonas yearns for a collective based not on ant-hill functioning, but on feeling. Yet, when Jonas learns the nature of the community, he first wants simply to escape. “ ‘Giver’ Jonas suggested, ‘you and I don’t need to care about the rest of them,’ ” but then quickly realizes “[o]f course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything” (144).26 Two forms of community are opposed—one based on function, where bedrooms are called “sleeping rooms” and so on, and one based on the qualities Lowry identifies with the family, dependent on shared sense memories. The Giver gives a romantic framework to maturity, writing desirable adulthood not as the deformation or tempering of childhood, but as an extension of childhood values into the public sphere.27 The Giver admits the power of affiliation, but, as in Burke’s metaphor, it is affiliation mediated by the “personal” structures of family, its traditions, habits, ties, and commitments, rather than by the abstract utilitarian calculus of the state. This insistence on maintaining the perspective of the child separates such a text from the adult dystopia. As we have seen throughout, the dystopian world thwarts development. The difference here is not that the dystopia provides an alternative to the future; rather, it provides an alternative to the past. When children are assigned a vocation at the Ceremony of Twelve, the leader of the community ritually intones, “Thank you for your childhood” (50). Childhood, conducted under the auspices

222  Dystopian Variations of the community for the sole purpose of maintaining the community’s stability, has indeed been gifted away. It is not the need to redirect public history but the quest to reclaim childhood as a personal holding that is the real source of action. At the end, Jonas has fled with Gabriel and, close to perishing in the wilderness beyond the Community, spots a house with “red, blue, and yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families created and kept memories, where they celebrated love” (165). The house mirrors a Christmas memory transferred to him earlier by the Giver. Jonas imagines that they are waiting for him and the baby as he sleds down toward the scene. He and Gabriel will be reborn in a new family, one capable of love and memory. The urge to travel forward in order to go backward, to recover the past rather than create the future, preserves a horizon of possibility that is the difference between the anti-utopian and the critical utopian text. Young adult dystopias remind us that it is not necessarily the renovation of a public world but the preservation of a private one that is at the narrative center of dystopia. The child does not wish to become a mature adult, but to be reassured that some vestige of childhood can be preserved on the other side of the chasm. The preservation of childhood is also the preservation of the possibility of development—like Prufrock’s famous line, it is a commitment to the premise that “there will be time . . . for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions,/ Before the taking of a toast and tea.” Adulthood is terrifying—best to linger a while longer in the chambers of the sea. In the next section, I  examine Butler’s Earthseed as an extension of this ambivalence into the actual realm of adulthood. The novels share the YA dystopian genre’s deployment of a transformative protagonist. At the same time, however, Butler questions some of the virtues that emerge as important in The Giver—while moral and ethical non-conformity, willingness to take on risk, and family intimacy are critical, empathy and memory are refigured in ways that complicate the humanist legacy, and suggest the need for the utopian anti-humanist category discussed in Chapter 4.

On the Road Again: Anti-romantic Anti-humanism in Butler’s Earthseed The Giver’s artificial community corresponds with the built dystopian environments that are at the heart of the anti-utopian critique. This study has barely touched on another form of dystopian environment, the postapocalyptic landscape. As I  argued in the opening chapters, the postapocalyptic environment is of a fundamentally different order. Rather than being oppressed by too much structure, post-apocalyptic character is oppressed by too much freedom. Without community, without laws that secure passage, the most mundane narrative possibilities—food, shelter,

Romancing the Child  223 the getting from one place to another—become fraught. If the thrill of the structured dystopia is in the vicarious return to an infantile state of suspension where development is impossible, in the post-apocalyptic world, it is in the quest to re-institute the very laws that the dystopian exaggeration makes intolerable. The structured dystopia makes adults into infants; the post-apocalyptic world makes infants into premature adults, forced to fend for themselves in a hostile world. Returning to Heffernan’s notion of post-apocalypse as response to the decay of telos, the post-apocalyptic narrative must either create new forms of telos or recuperate older forms if it is to assume the shape of a novel. The desire to create stories that stop time from dissipating forward into chaos is paired with an opposite desire to preserve the possibility of a future. Too much plot leads to endings, not enough and the ties that bind loosen, leaving schizoid impressionism in place of narrative. Ending moves to the front of the text; the plot that follows refuses to countenance that the text has already concluded. The will to preserve narrative against the threat of both closure and dissipation breaks character free of the larger telos of development that is the substrate underpinning so many of the dystopian texts this study has already examined. Character is freed from both personal and collective history, development exchanged merely for continuation. In post-apocalyptic novels, family frequently becomes the surviving form of order. In Paul Auster’s post-apocalyptic In the Country of Last Things, where the wind threatens to sweep people away, “families bound together by ropes and chains  .  .  . ballast one another” (3). The modern state’s gradual usurpation of the prerogatives and functions of family, in everything from hunting and gathering to protection to mating, is unwound in the post-apocalyptic world, the return to the primitive reinvesting the family as the fundamental unit of survival. The structured utopia replaces bonds of kinship with loyalty to the state. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, children inform on their parents, and, as we see in the next chapter, the new Chinese dystopias return repeatedly to the motif of children betraying their parents. In a world without law, bonds of kinship are the only safe harbor. The post-apocalyptic dystopian family is threatened not by usurpation, but eradication. Two movements become possible—to escape back into family units, or to extend family outward, expanding the zone of safety by creating new bonds that bind individuals into larger collectives. The extent to which either is possible is the extent to which hope survives. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road embodies this dynamic in distilled form. McCarthy’s adapts the quintessentially American narrative of the open road. Dystopian elements are present in works like Kerouac’s On the Road and the movie Easy Rider but they are subsumed by the mechanics of plot and character development. Nor is The Road far from the lurid apocalyptic imagery of McCarthy’s novel of

224  Dystopian Variations westward expansion, Blood Meridian. However, The Road brings the dystopian element to the fore. It is a series of vignettes involving a father and son that take place on a road to nowhere in a dying world. Catastrophic environmental damage, the cause of which is never articulated, has destroyed the planet’s ability to sustain life. McCarthy rewrites the familiar chronotope of the road, stripping it of possibility. The survivors, those who have not given in to despair, straggle onward. Groups are to be avoided as they are too dangerous, likely to be cannibals or organized armies. The father and son speak about what they see, share cans of food, and argue about whether to help strangers. McCarthy’s set-up disentangles time from space. The road traverses distance, but time has ceased to flow, pooling into episodes that stave off contemplation of an end that has already occurred. The novel offers a study in inertia in the place of plot. The boy’s mother has committed suicide. The father plows on, not out of hope but because there is nothing else to do. Parenting is reduced to its simplest essence: stay alive, transmit hope. The book is both depressing in its bleakness and reassuring in its depiction of the durability of the parental instinct. In McCarthy’s remaindered future, tenderness does not need hope. McCarthy’s last man retraces the journeys of his predecessors out of habit, and yet his fierce commitment to continuing onward testifies to the power of the road plot. Even in the absence of a destination, a road, any road, to anywhere, suffices to produce startling moments of sympathy. Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books resist the finality of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic frame by retrofitting the novel of development to a setting that maintains both the thrills of post-apocalypticism and a horizon of post-post-apocalyptic regeneration. The apocalypse is not really an apocalypse—it is an example of what Gregory Claeys calls a degenerative dystopia, the result of gradual degradation of the public sphere that leads to the emergence of a fully lawless, merciless world. The first novel, Parable of the Sower, preserves the concept of an earthly destination; by the follow-up novel Parable of the Talents, though, it is clear the real destination can no longer be a place on earth. Where McCarthy’s novel is about what it means to be a parent, Butler’s is about what it means to be a child without parents in a world that adults have fouled beyond repair. The dystopic setting of Earthseed, similar to the world of The Giver, becomes an occasion for a developmental narrative of exaggerated stakes, in which reconstruction of family becomes the key to unlocking the future. But whereas The Giver requires that the collective present be undone in order to recover a private, familial past, Sower is about the need to establish collectives beyond the parochial family. Moylan reads it as ultimately an “overtly collective narrative of political development” that draws on “slave narratives, feminist fiction, survivalist adventure,

Romancing the Child  225 and New Age theology.”28 Baccolini calls the novel a parable about the “limits of self-defense,” associating it also with the slave narrative and the story of Frederick Douglass.29 For both, Olamina’s development of a counter-discourse is a form of empowerment that leads to genuine utopian possibility. The counter-discourse takes the inevitability of change as its central pillar; in this, it is unlike many of the dystopias discussed in this study that look backward to a pre-crisis mode of life. Wegner, building on Judith Butler’s, Jameson’s and Alain Badiou’s observations about “struggles for new forms of kinship” that resist nostalgicizing normative family structures, sees in Butler an affirmation of the possibility of utopian practices based on alternative and consensual forms of kinship.30 Family transforms from a private, anti-political site of nostalgia to, in reconstituted, elective form, the source of a new politics of affiliation grounded not in biology but in shared ideological commitments. Lauren Oya Olamina rebirths humanity not through her body, but through her radical re-writing of the horizon of human possibility. Sower begins in 2024, in Robledo, a suburb twenty miles from Los Angeles, where Olamina lives with her father, a Reverend and community college teacher, her stepmother, and her brothers. Her community has a wall around it to protect residents from the world outside. Poverty, drug addiction, and random violence by roving gangs have turned the Los Angeles area, and presumably large sections of the United States, into isolated communities, each subsisting and defending itself the best it can from the chaos on the outside. Most services, including the electric grid and communications have failed; police and fire departments have been privatized, administrative structures have crumbled, and education has become mostly informal. There is no particular cataclysm that has occasioned this crisis of order. Gas shortages, economic inequality, drug addiction, and water shortages due to climate change are the proximal causes of the slip backward, but there is also a crisis of collective ambition. People hunker down without resources or will to engage in thinking about the future. Butler tells of the origin of the novel in an interview: “I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country” (Sower 337). Were her dystopia set in one of the many places without reliable infrastructure and authorities not beholden to a rule of law, it would be simply realism. The understanding of dystopia as a form of realism is a topic I will take up more fully in the final chapter. Here, I note again just how little imagination is necessary to translate the present into a dystopian future. The Earthseed novels describe precisely the crisis of the utopian impulse feared by Sargent and others, in which the decay of social dreaming has led to the loss of all hope. The discourse of politics has become fatally

226  Dystopian Variations degraded. No one votes, and Donner, the candidate who is eventually elected, runs on a platform of nostalgia. Donner is a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into the future. He’s nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half century-long line of American Presidents makes people feel the that the country, the culture that they grew up with is still there—that we’ll get through these bad times and get back to normal. (56) The novel underscores the link between decay of the political instinct and the inability to imagine a future. Olamina specifically criticizes the nostalgic impulse of adults facing sudden change: Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague, so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back. (57) One of Donner’s campaign promises is the cancellation of the space program, which has landed astronauts on Mars. For Olamina, the space program “could be our future” (20), but her father, a climate change denier before it was fashionable, calls it “bread and circuses” (20), too wasteful in troubled times. The old guard has lost the ability to dream altogether. The novel begins with Olamina wanting to please her father on his birthday, but also with seeds of rebellion. She thinks of his God as “a big kid playing with toys” (16). Olamina, rejecting both her father’s religion and his political cynicism, develops her Earthseed counter-discourse not as a response to powerful official discourses of state or tradition, but in response to the lack of an existing discourse capable of imagining a future. She rejects her father’s god as a child-god. Her god of change is the subject of a set of writings and aphorisms she calls Earthseed: The Books of the Living. Believing that it is human destiny to one day colonize the stars and evolve and adapt to become something new, she does not seek to preserve the culture of the past, nor is she attached to recovering the old ways of being human. Butler has written a dystopia in which the failure of the utopian impulse is cause, not effect, and in this sense the novel is fiercely anti-anti-utopian, showing the stakes of the failure of the utopian discourse. By choosing to orient herself toward the future, Olamina adopts a radical position.

Romancing the Child  227 The novel’s anti-anti-utopianism is also, however, a form of antiromantic anti-humanism. Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian vision de-romanticizes the human with an extreme deterministic form of naturalism. Butler de-romanticizes the human by insisting on the return of infinite possibilities that for realization depend on liberation from the past. Olamina is certainly humanist in the sense of imagining humans in charge of their own destiny. However, the plot’s heroic adventure narrative, in which her competence and commitment to her autodidactic creed is tested by a series of obstacles and adventures, points ultimately not homeward but toward a human that has yet to exist, and for whom the traditions of the past are restrictive tethers rather than a foundation on which to build. Olamina is already super-human in some ways, although her special talents hinder rather than aid her survival. She suffers from hyperempathy, a condition that causes her “to feel what I see others feeling or what I  believe they feel” (12). As a result, she is paralyzed with pain when she defends herself, making her condition potentially crippling. In The Giver’s plot, feeling is replaced with reason—people are not human enough—but here, Olamina begins as too human, the tendency to empathy what must be overcome if she is to survive. She becomes an autodidact, studying books on survival and wildlife, practical skills like soap making and log cabin building, in anticipation of a time when she can lead a rebuilding. Despite her father’s admonishment that she is scaring people, she begins teaching the young survival skills even before the fall of the community. The rejection of older models of education is indicative of the novel’s anti-humanist, or posthumanist bent. It is not about the transmittal of a tradition but the invention of one. Olamina’s “Earthseed” poetry is unaffected by the tradition, her understanding of morality and responsibility evolving to address the unforgiving world in which she finds herself. When the community is finally overrun halfway through the novel by pyro addicts, users of a synthetic drug that attracts them to fire, Olamina and two other survivors from her community take to California’s freeways, populated during the day with straggling migrants and dangerous predators. They begin collecting stragglers—beyond the survival plot, much of the action involves decisions about who to approach, who to include, and how to keep them, an emphasis that continues in Talents. After the catastrophe, survivors choose between remaining to reunite with missing family, or joining together to escape northward. Olamina decides to travel as a man, and to act the part of a couple with another black woman who survives the massacre, accompanied by another friend from the now defunct community. “We can be a black couple and their white friend. If Harry can get a reasonable tan, maybe we can claim him as a cousin” (172). Gender and traditional family are disassembled and reassembled according to need rather than custom or biology.

228  Dystopian Variations Similarly, old moral codes are dismissed. Olamina bristles when Harry questions whether they should include in their band one who has stolen peaches. She responds, “I mean to survive” (172). She speaks to the thief: “I’m inexperienced,” I admitted. “But I can learn. You’re going to be one of my teachers.” “One?” she said. “Who have you got but me?” “Everyone.” She looked scornful. “No one.” “Everyone who’s surviving out here knows things that I need to know,” I  said. “I’ll watch them, I’ll listen to them, I’ll learn from them. If I don’t, I’ll be killed. And like I said, I intend to survive.” (173) The existential crisis for humanity Butler depicts cannot be addressed by retreating into traditional structures, of education, family, or politics. As the novel progresses, and throughout the second novel, Olamina becomes increasingly akin to a cult leader, a Roger Chillingsworth, rigid and unsentimental in her fierce pursuit of her vision. Wegner, reading through Jameson, sees the novel’s turn toward what looks like religious commitment as suggestive of the need to invest public life with transcendental commitments as a means of catalyzing the necessary commitment for progress, but it is also possible to read Olamina’s development as a version of the anti-humanism espoused by Hulme and Eliot, in which commitment to transcending the merely human leads away from the earthbound consolations of sentiment.31 In Talents, Olamina describes Earthseed’s essential purpose as “to force us to become more than we might ever become without it” (393). I  read the emphasis here, as in Wells, as in Hulme, as being on the word “force.” The latter half of the novel follows Olamina’s trials as she leads her band northward. The action is wrapped up in fundamental developmental questions—whether or not to trust strangers, how to deal with the sudden responsibilities for others, and, finally, how to begin establishing a secure space for those she has included in her “family.” Her group, including Bankole, an older man with whom she has begun a relationship, travel to a property in Oregon where Bankole’s sister lives (however, she is murdered before they arrive), and establish a quasi-utopian commune, Acorn, that follows precepts laid down by Olamina. The stakes of these developmental motifs are amplified and given grandeur by the harshness of the setting. She is not just following the Bildungsroman’s path, carving out a space where she can be an adult: she literally sees herself as the hope for the world’s future. Baccolini points out the importance in critical dystopias of “recollection” that escapes from personal nostalgia and creates “a culture of memory” that leads from individual to collective, but it is striking the

Romancing the Child  229 extent to which Sower is about the necessity of leaving behind inherited cultural memory for the unknown.32 The narrative of Sower ends with a short ceremony for those who were lost, with new oak trees planted, followed by the biblical parable of the sower that gives the novel its title. In Talents, the text ends with Olamina contemplating the spaceships filled with Earthseed disciples taking off for the stars, followed by the parable that gives the work its title. In another text, the placement of these biblical parables would signal the text’s continuity with the past, but here, they signal an act of usurpation. These biblical texts about what thrives and what falls by the wayside in a cruel world are gravestones marking an earth that is no longer home for what humankind will become. Butler’s Earthseed books are like a reverse image of A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which monasteries preserve humankind’s scientific heritage against the post-apocalyptic chaos. Both works end with humans heading for a new home in the stars, but where Miller’s novel sends the Albertian Order of Saint Liebowitz into space to preserve a pre-apocalyptic humanity, Butler sends forth the Earthseed spaceships in Talents so that humans can literally begin the journey to becoming something else. Those who board the spaceships are “young adults leaving the nest” and, among the stars, “some will survive and change and thrive and some will suffer and die” (405). While it is true that the spaceships carry books and memories with them—“the shuttles should sag under such a load” (406)—ultimately, it will be the ability to adapt and leave the past behind that will determine survival. Far more important than the cargo of earth treasures is the shared experience of those on board. Collective memory is not secured by books, but by the everyday tasks of feeding, caretaking and nurturing that humans choose. As noted, while Butler’s novels do share some of the qualities that distinguish YA novels, such as a transformative heroine, an open-ended, utopian horizon, and a fundamental conviction of the individual’s power to change the world, they are not quite YA—they are too brutal, too naturalistic. Part of what makes the Earthseed novels so interesting is their embrace of a grandiose hope that is opposite and equal to the monstrousness of the setting. Fittingly, this positions them directly between the utopianism of children’s books, and the bleak realism of adult novels. If, as Perry Nodelman observes, children’s books teach children how to be adults, childlike books aimed at adults teach adults how to be children.33 Butler seems to be writing both at once, a book that reminds adults of the necessity of fantasy while at the same time inducting adolescent readers into the fallen adult world. The child needs the efficacy of the adult, but the adult just as powerfully needs the imagination of the child. The Earthseed books thus travel in two directions at once, toward fantasy and toward realism. According to Hintz and Elaine Ostrey, utopian frameworks are romantic in their turn toward the child as the source of hope, but they also limit the child’s possible impact: they write, “the

230  Dystopian Variations child holds the key to personal and social change . . . but the image of the perpetually innocent child removes it from the complexities of development and the responsibility to understand the world.”34 These attitudes are not necessarily contradictory though; they inscribe a complementary double movement, where the child as innocent turns back the clock on the ending so that the child as change-agent can re-start the future. The lone child in the wild is bracketed by two families, a biological one that signifies the failures of the past, and an elective one that signifies the utopian possibility of the future. Butler’s Earthseed works are utopian anti-romantic anti-humanism because they seek solace neither in the child’s innocence nor in the adult’s recollection of the child. Instead, they point toward a developmental synthesis of adult and child. The normal pathways to maturity—education, institutions, biological family—are shown to be inadequate, while the other option, remaining a child, means death. Becoming more human requires that the child leave home and travel beyond without returning. The “true” human, what Sheehan calls the as yet to be discovered “human in the ‘human,’ ” lies in the future, not the past.35 The Bildungsroman structure, as well as the dystopian anti-Bildungsroman structure explored in Chapter 5 is tossed out, replaced with a structure in which the world is dismantled and then reconstructed rather than the hero. Sower ends with Olamina saying, “[w]e’ve got work to do” (328). Like so many novels before, from Candide to Orwell’s ironic end to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, where “once again things were happening in the Comstock family” (248), the ending involves a reorientation of expectations and a resetting of the narrative cursor back at a beginning. The desire to maintain the prospect of development is fundamental to the novel as genre—here Butler insists that the process of growing up, like the novel genre that contains it, never properly ends.

Notes 1. Day et al. 7, 9. 2. “Poetics” 377. 3. Voigts and Boller identify a Darwinist type of dystopian hero, in which the protagonist is endowed for survival (418–19). 4. Hentges, reading through Moylan, sees Butler’s Parable novels as a model for YA dystopian texts because of their questioning of attitudes that condition our understanding of social roles (34), though she argues they are too realistic (too much sex and rape) to fully be considered YA. 5. “Recent” 73. 6. I am paraphrasing the song “Left and Leaving” by John K. Samson/The Weakerthans, where the line is “new words for old desires.” 7. Basu et al. 5. 8. Bradford et al. 2. 9. Willmetts 277.

Romancing the Child  231 10. Amy Billone suggests a modern impulse to recede into dream worlds, as in Alice in Wonderland, as a means of both escaping the troubled present and dreaming a new future. 11. “Monica Hughes” 254. 12. Ibid 263. 13. Broad 121. 14. Bradford et al. 29. 15. Hintz 256. 16. See Hentges 5. 17. Tribunella 127, 130. 18. Ibid xiv. 19. See Nodelman’s chapter Children’s Literature as Genre 134–244. 20. Ibid 210. 21. Bradford et al. 110; Kidd. 22. Gay, “A Freud Reader” 300. 23. Hayles 3. 24. Kidd 143. 25. Ibid 144. 26. Kidd stresses the importance of sharing trauma as the desirable outcome of education: “The privatization of pain/wisdom does not a legitimate culture make”(144). 27. This is a conservative, Burkean notion of family as model for political life. Burke writes, “working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives . . . In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars” (Reflections 48). 28. Scraps 237, 223. 29. “Genre and Gender” 25. 30. Between. . ., 204 In place of traditional family structures, Butler offers what Wegner refers to as “radical new forms of elective kinship” (213–14). 31. Between Two Worlds 213. Moylan argues that by Talents, it stops being utopian critique and becomes a “New age discourse nuanced with an ethos of survivalism rather than a materialist spirituality based in political praxis” (244). 32. “Persistence” 521. 33. Nodelman 141. 34. Hintz and Ostrey 6. 35. Sheehan 20; See also Kuhn 4.

9 Epilogue The Dystopian Real

I don’t have anyone to talk to. I feel like there are fewer and fewer people like us . . . There are so few of us left that life hardly seems worth living anymore. (Chan Koonchung, The Fat Years 13)

This book began with a scene of turning back to classic Anglophone dystopias that warn about the fate of Western liberal democracy. Part of the compulsion is no doubt diagnostic, the need to search for a cause that led to this present moment. There is reassurance in believing that our current anxieties were foreseen, that we struggle not with new monsters but old. But there is also something deeply discomfiting in recognizing that the future was predictable, that there is something dangerous about our collective social life that is unlikely to change—otherwise, how could writers like Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and Sinclair Lewis have been so prescient? Another part of it, I suspect, is the urge to see our anxiety reflected, to find solace in the company of characters whose experience provides a clarified template for assimilating our unfolding present. The warring impulses toward comfort and agitation remind me of the primitive magical thinking that drives some to obsess over the prospect of disaster—as if by imagining it, by saying it out loud, it is less likely to actually come to pass. As a form of reading, it seems to me that dystopias are particularly invested in offering the average reader—of which I consider myself one—a pleasure in endings that is profoundly escapist. Kurt Anderson points out that so many contemporary iterations of the Fantasy-Industrial Complex, from virtual gaming to live action role playing, to military cos-play invite us to enjoy the illusion of shaping a character’s narrative.1 The novel, however, has no joystick. It offers only identification with a character over whom we have no control. Putting ourselves fully in an author’s hands, we submit to a higher power, become like children riding in the backseat of our parents’ car dreamily watching the world pass outside the window. Dystopia takes this nostalgic mode one step further: not only do we experience a lack of control over the text, we vicariously

Epilogue  233 identify with a character who is him- or herself defined by submission to a higher authority, doubling the nearly forgotten pleasure of simple spectating. This is why attempts to read the dystopian tradition in terms of its contribution to political thought seem insufficient to me. Dystopian novels are also experiments in dismissing questions of politics entirely. What point is there to politics if all is doomed? Abandonment of obligations to others may not be a prescription for living a decent, ethical life, but for several hours, it can be an exquisite relief. For the length of a book, we experience Jameson’s world-reduction, the utopian space of liberation from the political, social, and economic forces that determine the real.2 But resistance to the political does not have to be a form of quietism; it is also a gathering of strength, a chance to revisit commitments that lose no force for their irrationality. And what do we return to the world with when we close the book? Like Homer, who in the Iliad teaches us what it means to be a living, feeling, and sometimes dying human at the far reaches of experience, dystopia teaches us to understand our psychological limits. At the end of history, what shape will affect assume? In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick brilliantly gives one answer to this question, positing that in a world where the line between human and technology has become blurred the ability to display empathy toward robotic pets will become a status symbol. In Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, based loosely on Dick’s book, the rebel replicant Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, gives his famous climactic monologue that emphasizes another aspect of what it means to be human. As Roy dies, he tells his hunter, Deckard, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”3 Roy, despite being a machine, has arrived at qualia, at awareness of the fragility, majesty, and ultimate un-transferability of the singular moment of conscious being. As Roy’s built-in machine clock expires, a dove flies upward into the rainy dystopian night, suggesting that he has acquired a soul. The android teaches the human what it feels like to be a feeling, perceiving being in a world that has abandoned the social and cultural structures that lend coherence to such awareness. The future is a stage set on which to play out difficult questions of who we are now, and who we might yet be. The last man puts a limit on the forward progress of the human past, obscuring our ability to envision new possibilities. But if there is any hope of overcoming such limitations of vision, it will require first coming to terms with what we think we once were. The challenge for the twenty-first-century dystopia is to continue to reflect on what it means to be human in a world where human presence both inside and outside the novel is increasingly unstable, and to do it in a language that looks both forward and backward. I return again to

234  Dystopian Variations Burke’s dictum quoted in Chapter 1: “people will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” Dystopias are as much about making a connection to the past as to the future. Their terrifying visions of the future are also visions of a world without a past, of the human untethered from living discourses of value that prevent memory from ossifying into a toxic nostalgia. In this sense, pointing out which of a particular dystopia’s predictions have come true and which have not is to miss  the point. The predictions that have remained consistent across the genre are characterological rather than material. In the industrialized world, the modern human is shadowed by a sense of compromised autonomy, by a tendency to slip into nostalgia for an organic past or into fatalistic pessimism about the potential for individual action, by a nagging dissatisfaction with the fruits of consumer society, and by the feeling that modern society is often antithetical to the interpersonal and irrational commitments that give life meaning. None of these are to say modernity is not preferable; only that the emotional challenge of the present is to find a way forward without succumbing to nostalgic dreams of a utopian past or to fantasies of last man-ism that insist on the lonely grandiosity of the singular perspective. I recently attended a screening of Soylent Green where the eminent professor Frances Fukuyama observed that the movie’s Malthusian nightmare of privation had largely failed to come to pass. An audience member spoke up, saying that he had been doing disaster relief work in developing countries, and that, in fact, the scenes he witnessed looked quite a bit like the overcrowded, crumbling world of Soylent Green. This question of perspective is a critical one. From the perspective of the developed world, the dystopian problem might be Huxleyan glut or corporate overreach, but from the perspective of those that have yet to fully reap the fruits of modernity, the problem might be neoliberal utopia itself; from the perspective of the former Soviet satellite states, corruption; from India and many parts of Asia, the rapid growth of an impoverished working class; from the perspective of present-day Australia, burning as I write, ecological collapse. Fear for the future becomes dystopian when you cannot change the scene in front of you, when you fail in even being able to imagine a different world populated by humans like you. Earlier, I argued that the dystopian last man was the last character to inhabit a novel: the dystopias in the previous pages underscore in the negative novels’ generic dependence on construction of a rich social environment as a requirement of realism. Even stream-of-consciousness novels like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer that take place “inside the whale” of a single head cannot escape the impact of the community of others, present and remembered, who leave their impressions on the mind that thinks. Jameson talks about “world-reduction” as a means of imagining human possibilities outside of historical determinisms—the particular genius of these reflexive last man dystopias is that they imagine a

Epilogue  235 human not outside the net of determinisms, but outside the net of human contingencies. The dystopias discussed here are all inhabited by what I have been calling “deformed” characters. In the pessimistic dystopias, character is prevented from developing; in dystopias set in adventure space, character is blown up to grand proportions. In both types, the human at the center of the novel is deformed at least in part through the removal of a functioning social sphere. Neither the last man nor the first man, woman, or teen is granted a sphere of relations that anchor them in a full social context. Available relations are all bounded and regulated: a single lover or friend, a doomed cohort of futureless organ donors, neighbors of whom one must be suspicious, fellow inmates of boiler room hell—the significant dystopian formation is the limitation on complex and dynamic social relations. Willy Loman has sons, a boss, a wife, a mistress and his relationship with each of them reveals different aspects of his character; the salesmen of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross have no such variety. This limitation in turn affects the kinds of stories traditional dystopian novels can tell. In contrast with the novels of Le Guin, Delaney, Russ, Piercy, and others that provide full social worlds and in this sense more resemble complete novels estranged in space and time, these dystopias allow no world for lovers to aspire toward, no world where clones can mature into full adults, no world where the exertions of the present can secure a spot in an inhabited future. The formal consequences of the absence of a social world is far-reaching. Protagonists interact with a frozen, monologic setting rather than with a dynamic social environment that provides different angles from which to view character or that can force new strategies of encounter. Dystopia can only go so far in depicting what appears to be the real when the real is reduced to the singular perspective of a last man. The futurity of dystopia is another feature that typically limits its ability to engage in novelistic discourse. To inhabit the future realigns our relationship to the present. Jameson argues that the future perfect tense of dystopia allows us to engage critically with our present. Unlike a historical novel, to inhabit the future as a reader is to look back on the contingencies of the present as a sensible design. But read slightly differently, the post-teleological perspective, where contingency is traded for epical distance, also invites an aestheticizing perspective that is both alluring and dangerous in its shift of identification from characters to types. The Up series of films which revisits a group of British school children every seven years from the age of seven onward in order to track their progress through life produces a similar effect. The original intent of the series was to show the determining effects of class on British life, but the infinite contingencies of life generated all sorts of additional narratives along the way. From the perspective of the future, the past inevitably seems like prologue, obscuring the fact that any future would produce the same retrospective illusion of causality. Watching the movies back-to-back—the

236  Dystopian Variations participants are now 63—is a jarring mixture of life and art, perhaps different than watching the films in real time every seven years. Watched at once, characters’ childhoods seem to exist simultaneously with their future, actual real life trapped inside a text. Freedom is revealed as fiction. The question what will happen next is replaced by what has already happened? The reader’s position accordingly shifts from one who identifies and roots for individuals to a more distanced aesthetic perspective, that of one who merely observes the shape these lives have taken. It requires an act of will, resistance to the text of the films, to imagine that the chains of causality were not inevitable. Dystopias set in the future—as opposed to ones constructed out of new worlds, or futures so far removed from the causalities of the present so as to appear to retain traces of infinite possibility—risk undermining our understanding of freedom, even as they teach us the stakes of our decisions. When dystopia seeps into the present, we—perversely—gain back our freedom as readers, even as we lost the amplification of stakes that makes dystopia so compelling. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) is a template for Nineteen Eighty-Four’s last section but for its setting in a roughly contemporaneous present world. Rubashov appears to us as a character, where Winston appears as type, as our fate rather than our present. Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, We, Parable of the Sower, were all written about a future that had not yet arrived. For a new group of dystopias, however, the dystopian past reappears in the present tense. These new works, though they include elements from the dystopian literature of the past, such as technologies of surveillance, authoritarian brutality, and mind-control, are set in the future but only barely so. How much like our present, we say of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Houellebecq’s Submission, or even the before of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Fredric Jameson observes in his review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, “all fiction approaches science fiction, as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous actuality.”4 Time collapses in on itself. The asymptotic approach of dystopian fiction and reality means that dystopias now resemble the traditional novel more closely than ever before, and the traditional novel now often resembles dystopia. If we think of modern dystopianism from its onset in the early twentieth century as a form of wounded humanism, this merging of dystopianism and realism seems inevitable. The realist novel celebrated the autonomous subject, showing the limits of agency, and asked us to recognize such a subject by defining its boundary. Dystopia at its core has always been an intensified version of this experience, the walls thicker, the boundaries more stringently defined, the stakes higher. Dystopia extended the realist novel into the future, showing us the teleological stakes of human choices. The genre’s warning aspect was grounded in

Epilogue  237 the conviction that dystopia was not a foregone conclusion—whether because the technology was insufficient or because there were yet enough people of good will to stave it off. Today, with the technology of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World nearly here, what could these older dystopias possibly warn us about? Genetic manipulation, surveillance, propaganda, the “mind-reading” of advertising algorithms, populations cowed by selective enforcement of laws, a depressingly large number of enthusiastic participants in the daily talk radio equivalent of two-minutes hate are all part of everyday life, no longer something that shocks because we have become gradually numbed to them. New dystopias that take the contemporary Chinese experience as their subject offer an interesting counterpoint to the prior dystopian tradition, both in their depiction of social relationships and in their relationship to the future. The new China’s commitment to cutting edge technologies of social control turns dystopian tropes of surveillance, mind-control, and paranoia into simply part of the landscape of the real. What is new in these novels is a gradual alteration of expectations, a treatment of these developments as no longer surprising. Jameson calls the loss of the past Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “most haunting aspect,” but in these novels, as in postmodernism, the past has grown too hazy to even mourn properly.5 This is literally the plot of Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, a mystery about the search for a lost month that all but a few seem to have completely forgotten. In February of 2011, the world is rocked by a second massive financial crisis, and China emerges from the rubble into a “Golden Age of Ascendancy.” Two years later, people are happy, and Beijing is defined by patriotic consumption: “everybody’s shopping— stimulating domestic demand and contributing to society” (17). But no one remembers how this new China came about. Only a small handful of “Nonforgetters” (133) recall the traumatic events that followed the crisis. The story follows three middle-aged protagonists. Lao Chen is a successful Taiwanese writer who has moved to Beijing, Fang Caodi is a jack of all trades, and Little Xi, the speaker of the quotation at the head of the chapter, is a former restaurant owner and dissident. As a young adult, Little Xi was assigned to a job as a provincial administrative law clerk but resigned because she was unwilling to participate in the brutal executions of prisoners resulting from the Party’s 1983 “Decision on Severely Cracking Down on Criminal Activity.” Lao Chen has not been able to write since the crisis, but notices that everyone seems to be happy, while he himself, despite his writer’s block, feels “so spiritually and materially satisfied that I began to experience an overwhelming feeling of good fortune such as I had never had before” (33). When he reconnects with his old friend Little Xi, he falls in love with her, but she soon disappears, endangered by her son Wei Guo, who has joined a hard-right-wing faction of the Party. Wei Guo wants to commit his mother to a mental

238  Dystopian Variations hospital because she is “the one uncertain element in the completion of my project” (74). As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, parents must fear their own children. When Lao Chen’s old friend Fang Caodi contacts him to ask his help in tracking down the missing month, Lao at first refuses to believe him. Lao defends the new order to himself, wondering if “90% freedom” is not enough, especially when the “price of maintaining a firm commitment to the truth is too great” (145). People want “to lay down the heavy burden of history” (145), he muses; even if Fang is right, why should it matter? Gradually, however, after looking in bookstores and on the Internet and finding chunks of political and cultural history missing, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and novels by dissident writers, he begins to suspect both that Fang might be right and that the loss of history might be consequential after all. When Little Xi disappears, he and Fang go in search of her following clues she has left on the Internet. Eventually they track her down at a religious commune, the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground—hearkening back to Butler’s invocation of Christ’s parable of the sower—whose land is threatened with seizure for development by the State. After some bureaucratic maneuvering with local officials who do not want to be embarrassed by mass demonstrations, the commune is allowed to remain on its land, and the three of them return to Beijing. There, they kidnap He Dongsheng, a party official who is a distant cousin of Lao Chen and interrogate him about the missing month. The playful adaptation of the Western dystopian tradition is clear throughout. Wei Guo writes in his diary, “today this diary has to be written down as a historical record” (64). Like Winston, he is recording the last gasp of freedom, but he is on the other side. The climactic interrogation of He Dongsheng replays O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, but again the roles reverse. Here it is the government official who is put in a chair and made to answer for his heresy. The dynamic of the individual arguing against the state is inverted. Just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston convinces the reader, if not O’Brien, that he is in the right, here He makes a persuasive case for the new China as authoritarian paradise. When He lays out the logic of the new China in the interrogation scene, his interlocutors are unable to come up with a better system. The case for the individual comes up short.6 In the novel, Lao meets Zhuang Zhizhong, editor of a literary and political journal that has fallen in line with the government and been brought back to prominence. The journal publishes a list of principles that define the new China: One party democratic dictatorship; the rule of law with stability as the most important element; an authoritarian government that governs for the people; a state controlled market economy;

Epilogue  239 fair competition guaranteed by state-owned enterprises; scientific development with unique Chinese characteristics; a self-centered harmonious foreign policy; a multi-ethnic republic ruled by one sovereign ethnic group of Han Chinese; post-Westernism and Post-universalism as the nation’s chief worldviews; the restoration of Chinese national culture as the world’s unrivaled leader. (128–29) These seemingly internally contradictory principles—one-party democracy, authoritarianism for the people, fair competition and state-run enterprises, nationalized science—are reminiscent of slogans like War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery. And yet, they are not expressions of metaphysics, but of an actual governing philosophy. Julia Lovell in the introduction points out the text’s grounding in a “a status quo that has delivered economic choice without political liberties” (ix). The new China dream, like the American dream of Chapter 6, is an unforgiving juggernaut and the enthusiastic complicity of the populace in this strategy one of the darker observations of the text. As He Dongsheng says, “All you have to do is recognize China as your friendly older brother and everything can be easily accomplished” (265). He outlines the five steps the Party took after the crisis: they forced domestic spending by converting savings to vouchers, repealed regulations, reinforced property rights to pacify the peasantry, cracked down on corruption, and instituted price controls. The combination of these measures, along with a commitment to developing a model for China’s future that did not replicate Western democracy, but instead depended on “Chinese-style fascist dictatorship made up of a combination of collective nationalism, populism, statism, and Chinese traditionalism” (272), along with ecstasy in the water supply, brings the population into line. This mix of ideology depends on a populace with no commitments to either ideology or custom. Whatever traditions are left are revised and repurposed, absorbed, managed, or contained by the state, none with the power to resist alteration should the Party deem it necessary. The Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground survives only because of bureaucratic paranoia, an awfully thin peg on which to hang hope for humanity. It is a postmodern state, a de-historicized patchwork manipulated to achieve maximum effect, with no ethical dimension that might chasten and subdue the pursuit of utilitarian, or perhaps later, even worse, non-utilitarian aims. The most disturbing aspect of the text is its articulation of the fragility of private memory, and the political effects of losing the past to postmodern pliability. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, personal recollection

240  Dystopian Variations is juxtaposed against official state memory. Fang is desperate to find a community that shares his memories of the starvation and violence that followed the financial crisis, paving the way for consolidation of state power. The ones who remember are “the abnormal ones” (122), who are addicted to drugs or take corticosteroids for asthma that prevent the ecstasy from working. But for everyone else, the sense of discontinuity has become normalized, the effect not only of the ecstasy but of a succession of movements and government propaganda accompanied by purges of the repositories of public memory purges that bury the evidence of the past. Memory survives only as nostalgia. Those who were former zealots of the cultural revolution are now nostalgic for the days of Mao, Little Xi’s generation is nostalgic for the liberalizing Cultural Enlightenment of the 1980’s, where she was “baptized in the tide of Enlightenment values such as Reason, Liberty, Democracy, Truth, and Human Rights” (208), and her son’s generation is nostalgic for the authoritarian past. Wei Guo writes in his diary, “university students today are all lacking in courage and the killing spirit. They’ve all been overinfluenced by society’s general mood of love. They’ve all been feminized and sissified and have lost the lofty male spirit of machismo” (71). All of these forms of nostalgia stand in the way of a future that depends on forgetting the past. Even the neoreactionary fascist right wing of Wei Guo, nostalgic for the tactics of a Hitler, is an obstacle to China’s progress and eventually runs afoul of the police for their excess. Meanwhile, the liberal faction of pro-Western intellectuals is nearly defunct, coopted by the state, “the market for their ideas dried up” (274). Lao Chen embodies this transformation. He is no longer interested in writing about the past—he now only wants to write stories about China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. “I  didn’t believe the new generation of Chinese readers wanted to read about all the wounds and scars of the last fifty years” (90). Those who cling to the past, whichever past, are irrelevant to China’s future, last men digging in their heels against the utopian future, embodied in the rampant development that sweeps villages aside. The dovetailing of interests between populace and authoritarian state is a crucial feature of modern politics, in the West as well. Nineteen Eighty-Four gives short shrift to the benefits bestowed by the miserable world of Oceania, but “Big Brothers,” rather obviously, are the solution, not the problem. Orwell’s picture of privation is the end game of a regime holding on to power despite its failure, the “boot stamping on a human face forever” not motivation but method. In Chan’s novel, the state considers itself utopian. The trace amounts of ecstasy injected into the water supply make everyone happy, without the more invasive conditioning and genetic manipulation of Brave New World. As the translator Michael Duke points out in the afterword, the China of the novel is not a dystopia, but a successful “Leviathan-like Leninist party-state” (295), with a future as yet unwritten.

Epilogue  241 Jeffrey Kinkley, in his study of Chinese dystopian historical fiction, argues that Chinese dystopias tend to reject Western iterations of humanism and the stark antinomies of individual vs. society and freedom vs. order that are its corollaries. Instead, they seek to imagine better, or worse, forms of collectivism.7 Douwe Fokkema also notes the difference between the Western utopian tradition and Chinese examples, giving two explanations: first, that Chinese utopian thinking, rooted in Confucianism, is concerned with virtue, which can only be addressed by contrast and thus utopian speculation is embedded in broader framework of narrative that included other themes; and second, the “Chinese tendency to think in terms of integration rather than separation,” tends to mitigate unvitiated expressions of the utopian impulse.8 As a result Chinese dystopias are less interested than Western dystopias in descriptions of the political and administrative state. This opens up room, however, for character to take center stage as a formation separate from setting. Absent the individualistic focus of the Western dystopian tradition, works like Chan’s represent a category of dystopia that, while drawing deeply from the well of dystopian themes and motifs, avoid the structural deformities that characterize many of the works I have discussed throughout. The characters are normal-sized and the world is recognizably populated with people and things. Even as the society described bends toward a monologic principle, with power focused in a single source, characters retain a sphere of autonomy. Then, while Chan’s novel is strikingly similar in theme, plot, and character trajectory to many of the dystopias discussed here, it is closer to realism, not necessarily in terms of its technology but in terms of its non-reductiveness, its inclusion of multiple characters, motivations, and forces shaping the dystopian near-future. As future becomes present, the category of dystopia breaks down, is absorbed into a traditional novel form that no longer strains against the antimonies generated by the clash between nostalgia and speculation. The new novels are not estranged enough to qualify as science fiction nor restrictive enough, as plot or form, to invoke dystopian closure. They are intertextual without being reflexive; their plots reproduce classical dystopian figures and motifs in the present tense while their themes reach beyond teleology to capture the human predicaments of an open-ended now. Another example, Ma Jian’s China Dream, follows Ma Daode, a mid-level party official recently appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, an agency tasked with “promoting the great China Dream that will replace all private dreams” (2). Ma fantasizes about inventing a neural implant called the “China Dream Device” that will clean away all private memories. He is the model of a corrupt official, taking bribes, managing multiple mistresses, and jockeying for position with his rivals. Meanwhile, however, “bottled up memories of his youth have begun to escape” (2), tormenting him with visions of the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, including his betrayal of his parents and their subsequent

242  Dystopian Variations suicide. The text is firmly anchored in the present, as Daode and his fellow bureaucrats seek to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream of National Rejuvenation,” the latest attempt to begin a fresh chapter of history by erasing the past from national memory. Even the proposed microchip is hardly a distant possibility, as real-life contemporary China is currently exploring various avenues of mind control and emotional surveillance.9 Ma’s novel savagely parodies political nostalgia with his conflation of past dreams of revolutionary glory and their recurrence under a different name in the present—but at the same time displays a yearning for a lost ethic of freedom, privacy, and the connections of community. The architectural dystopia of the Hao Jinfang’s 2016 Hugo award winning novella Folding Beijing takes on overcrowding and class as central motifs, but it too is about the desire for durable affiliations that transcend use. The overcrowded city of Beijing is divided into three class zones that are folded, by means of ground that flips 180 degrees and retracting buildings, into the same space. Residents, and the physical city itself of First Space, Second Space, and Third Space take turns being awake over a 48-hour period. First Space, a spacious, modern city filled with five million of the elite, enjoys 24 hours; then, the people are put to sleep in specialized pods as the city literally flips over so Second and Third Space can take their turns. Second Space, with 25  million people, is allotted 16 hours, after which its tall buildings fold up. First Space then unfolds, with fifty million workers allotted only eight hours, just enough time for them to perform their city maintenance functions. Travel between the spaces is dangerous, the classes kept rigorously apart. As a policeman explains later in the text, the organization of the city is a response to the Phillips Curve, which tracks the relationship between inflation and unemployment and automation. As the cost of labor goes up and the cost of machinery goes down, at some point, it’ll be cheaper to use machines than people. With the increase in productivity, the GDP goes up, but so does unemployment. What do you do? Enact policies to protect the workers? Better welfare? . . . The best way is to reduce the time a certain portion of the population spends living, and then find ways to keep them busy. Do you get it? Right, shove them into the night. There’s another advantage to this approach: The effects of inflation almost can’t be felt at the bottom of the social pyramid. Those who can get loans and afford the interest spend all the money you print. The GDP goes up, but the cost of basic necessities does not. And most of the people won’t even be aware of it. (n.p.) The solution is the stratification of people into classes that can be managed by a central authority. Responding directly to the problems of

Epilogue  243 contemporary Chinese economic expansion, Hao’s novella brilliantly follows the dystopian pattern of realizing as concrete, physical setting the central ideological premise of the world. The story follows Lao Dao, a Third Space waste processor, who discovers a message from a student from Second Space offering a large sum of money to carry a message to a woman in First Space with whom the student has fallen in love. Lao Dao cares for a little girl he has rescued and wants to send her to kindergarten, which comes at a prohibitive cost for waste workers. He decides to undertake the risk of moving between spaces, first sneaking into Second Space to meet the student, and then into First Space to deliver the message. In First Space he is captured by a sympathetic policeman, who brings him to a banquet where he hears officials discussing replacing the waste workers of Third Space with automation. Lao Dao hears the officials hinting at an even more draconian solution for excess people—once the workers serve no function at all, what is to keep them from being disposed of, like the waste from First and Second Spaces they process? Part of the problem is the division between elites who make the decisions, and the uneducated populace that understands neither the technology nor the economics, defusing any possibility of participation in collective action. When Lao Dao hears the officials talking about automation, he does not understand the implications, though he is adept at reading the emotional subtext: Lao Dao understood vaguely that what they were talking about had to do with him, but he wasn’t sure whether it was good news or bad. Wu Wen’s expression shifted through confusion, annoyance, and then resignation. Lao Dao suddenly felt some sympathy for him: He had his moments of weakness, as well. (n.p.) Understanding and sympathy do not co-exist in the same people. Realizing the fears of the twentieth-century anti-utopians and utopians alike, sympathy is marginalized in favor of production and consumption. The disenfranchisement of the majority can only work if the engines of production keep churning out not only goods but people: a comfort-saturated, ethically ignorant upper class, and an ineffectual, fatalistic lower class. Lao Dao succeeds in completing his mission and returns safely to Third Space, and the novella ends with him dreaming of sending his daughter to school: Although he was injured, he hadn’t been caught and managed to bring back money. He didn’t know how long it would take Tangtang to learn to dance and sing, and become an elegant young lady. He checked the time. It was time to go to work. (n.p.)

244  Dystopian Variations It is a happy ending, but also a bitter irony—dreams take time to fulfill, but the dreams of the workers are made impossible to fulfill by their reduced schedule. Meanwhile, Tangtang might run out of time altogether if the workers of Third Space are deemed useless. Anxieties about the end of the human are filtered through a literalized portrayal of obsolescence of the majority. The humans of First Space enjoy the material comforts promised by modernity, but lack the ethical awareness that Lao Dao, with his commitment to his adopted daughter, displays without hesitation. Hao presents the dilemma of modern China in terms that would be recognizable to any nineteenth-century utopian as the ideological linchpin of modernity. The complete human, capable of both practical efficiency and a sense of ethical obligations, remains the unfulfilled promise of modernity. The novel An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King, a Taiwanese-born and raised author who moved to America at sixteen, exemplifies this opposition between family and state values. The novel imagines a nearfuture China where the demographic distortions resulting from the onechild policy has led to new sexual and family mores. The solution to the surplus of males is to allow multiple husbands to marry one woman, who is courted through an elaborate, organized system of matchmakers, dowries, and customs organized by class and regulated by the state. The novel is little concerned with painting a portrait of an unconscionable political system, however. While the text criticizes the repressive environment and parodies the callousness and hypocrisy of the bureaucratic class, its real subject is the lives of those who have no choice but to live in this world. In the best tradition of science fiction, the characters are recognizable even if their dilemmas are not. Part of what makes this book especially exciting is its emphasis on difference. Its sympathetic presentation of neuroatypical characters, both from their own perspective and from the perspective of others, expands our sense of the human rather than diminishing it. Similarly, its story of a troubled three- and potentially four-person marriage wrestles with issues of sexuality that typically are excluded from monogamous heteronormative family dramas. Science fiction here, as in Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia The Dispossessed, allows enough displacement to reveal social relations in a new light, but does so within the confines of a dystopian setting that evokes the more closed, grounded worlds of Orwell, Huxley, and their successors. The four main characters in the novel each bring distinct desires to the novel’s marriage plot. Each must make their own compromises to survive psychologically, emotionally, financially, and sexually in a world where marriage and private life has been radically configured. Wei-guo, who has lived responsibly in the possibility of one-day obtaining a share in a partner, is selected by May-ling’s husbands, the brothers Hann and Xiong-xin (who goes by XX), as a potential third spouse to join their family, which includes the two-year-old BeiBei. Both husbands have

Epilogue  245 well-paying jobs—Hann is an accountant and XX is a security consultant— but their family’s proposal to Wei-guo is complicated by the fact that Hann, who is the loving father of BeiBei, is actually gay and XX is on the autistic spectrum. May-ling is unable to have traditional sexual relations with either of her partners, and the family lives in constant fear of being found out as neither the “Willfully Sterile” nor “Lost Boys” are permitted to be part of a family and have children. BeiBei may also be on the spectrum, and all three are terrified for his future. Hann is devoted to their family, but May-ling is attracted to Wei-guo and frustrated by Hann’s inability to return her love. XX, who is repelled by sex and the commotion of family life, wants to leave the family to clear more room for Wei-guo, who is able to nurture and discipline the difficult BeiBei with empathy and understanding. Much of the novel follows May-Ling’s shifting emotions as she wrestles with the prospect of having a new husband join their family, one with the potential to be a real husband in ways the other two cannot. Intertwined with its stories of interpersonal dynamics within the family setting is a dystopian plot of state power brought to bear on the private individual. Wei-guo is the leader of a group who participate in elaborate mock battles specifically designed to occupy excess bachelor males. When the state demands Wei-guo submit a list of team members who might be mental health risks, he refuses to cooperate. As retribution, state security forces murder his squad during one of their mock battles. Wei-guo barely escapes and seeks shelter with a sect of nuns who tend Mao’s shrine. Meanwhile, Hann’s homosexuality is exposed and he is taken into custody, where he is pressured to admit his orientation in scenes reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Winston’s whose attraction to O’Brien draws him into O’Brien’s clutches, Hann finds himself pressured to confess by an interrogator who like him is homosexual: “The cruelty and intimidation of ear-chipping are child’s play compared to this psychological warfare, this fake seduction, this betrayal disguised as concern from one of his own kind” (323). The homoerotic subtext of Orwell’s novel, suppressed in favor of political metaphor, is returned to the forefront. The novel returns throughout to the intersection of private psychology and social and political space. Private psychology creates vulnerabilities; private motivations lead to meaningful action. XX, devoted to his brother and increasingly to Wei-guo, blackmails the state by threatening to expose the massacre of Wei-guo’s squad. By manipulating security systems and hacking computers, he succeeds in arranging the freedom of both Hann and Wei-guo, who is being pursued by the secret police since escaping the massacre. The family remains intact and officially adds Weiguo as the third husband. At the end of the novel, Wei-guo reflects on his good fortune. His life is “rich with love, with possibility, with everything that truly matters  .  .  . I am of consequence to her, to two extraordinary men” (396). Temporarily at least, the private family, reconfigured

246  Dystopian Variations though it may be, maintains its boundaries against the state, is posed, albeit romantically, as a haven from history. On the one hand, the idealization of family and the removal of it from the political sphere is of a piece with the novels of the previous chapter. On the other, though, what has been attained here is not a fantasy of endless love but of mutual obligations. The action of the novel is centered around family and the everyday dynamics of the labor in which family is grounded: the feeding, cleaning, caring for a child, the pleasures and discomforts of proximity. Cutting against the shrunken perspective of the novels that it echoes, each character possesses a unique arc, so that the reader is offered a choice of identifications. State power is incompletely realized—much as the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World would actually be if populated by people whose psychological complexity provided for different outcomes, even within a totalitarian system. The maintenance of difference breaks the “claustral intensity” toward which the dystopia tends.10 Then, while Hann’s interrogator can mock him as O’Brien mocks Winston, stating “only an idiot and a highly desperate one would believe that self-determination is still possible” (321), the commitment of all four members to their strangely constituted family gives them an effective platform for opposition to a state that, unlike Big Brother’s Oceania, maintains out of necessity a commitment to appearances, if not ethics. With so much still to do, King dispenses with nostalgia for the past altogether. She depicts the new family structures warmly, and those who willingly live under them with sympathy. The characters resist the world they live in not because things were ever better, but because they find the costs too great. They are not out to overthrow the system but to survive it, working in, around, and through the bargains, some chosen, some inflicted, that have shaped their everyday lives. In dystopian realism, things happen somewhere, to somebody, rather than “no place,” to everybody. *** One does not need to be a fascist to delight in dystopian destruction. Through the constant barrage of mirror reflections thrown up by modern technology, man has come to recognize himself as an image. Man the iconoclast affirms himself through violence directed at his avatars. The hope of earlier dystopias is that those aspects of character that make us resistant to the twin threats of tyranny and despair would withstand modernity’s threats; their fear is that character would not be able to overcome modernity’s anti-human tendencies. The dystopias discussed in this chapter reframe the experience of characters within the forms of the traditional humanist novel. If dystopia asks us to consider the fate of character by exposing old characters to new settings, these works embrace the challenge of imagining new characters to populate their dream cities. These are not reduced worlds that hinge on the replacement of an

Epilogue  247 overdetermined real with an under-determined one; what makes these new dystopian novels like our present is that they depict full worlds, replete with characters, institutions, and motivations that have not hardened into the stagnant and monolithic dystopian vision. What is striking about these works is the extent to which the tropes the classic dystopians like Orwell, Wells, and Huxley rely on for their visions have been almost completely absorbed and transformed into realism. The last man-ism of these novels is modest, portraying u/dystopia from many perspectives, not just a grandiose, singular one. Though these works clearly seem like dystopias, and not even particularly critical ones—the alternatives to utopian space are enclaves of family or commune that might temporarily escape inundation by the tide of dystopian progress but cannot stem or transform it—the question is not how to avoid the future, but what to do with it now that it has (nearly) arrived. Dystopian tropes of lost memory, technological surveillance, and humans made into a means rather than an end are given complete social settings, viewed not through science fiction’s disorienting, estranging lens, but as if they were Dickens’s teeming streets of nineteenth-century London or Paris. While the setting might appear dystopian, the form of these novels is pure realist novel, un-melodramatically secure in the presumption that the novel and the humanist aspirations and human characters that fill it will continue to limp along regardless of what future arrives. The moment of formal crisis has passed—the humanist discourse seems to have lost its defensive sense of entitlement, to have made peace with its minority status and to have again taken up comfortable residence in its ancestral home, the novel. I have argued throughout that the warning function of dystopian novels is balanced by a descriptive function. Perhaps though, warning and description are interwoven expressions of the same anxiety about the fragility of the human. The former believes that something can yet be done, the latter prepares for a world where it cannot. One is oriented toward the future, the other is elegiac, oriented toward remembrance, but both are almost always to some degree present. Dystopia in the twenty-first century seems to me impossible to read with the urgency the warning thesis invites. The warnings of the twentieth-century dystopian tradition were pipe dreams, no doubt overestimating the power of the word even as the novels themselves underestimated the resilience of the humanist yearnings at the core of their plots. Environmental degradation, corporate oligarchy, the surveillance state, technological infiltration of the human, and the new authoritarianism no longer seem like problems that can be averted. They are here. To ascribe a warning function to many contemporary dystopias feels quaint—they are only warnings in the same sense that a traditional novel warns us that life is fleeting, that meaning must be wrested at great effort from the morass of experience, and that character is a thing to be cherished. With hope neither in the text nor outside of it, the antidote to

248  Dystopian Variations despair in these works is not in the sense that things could be different but in the re-embrace of an individual who can never fully be subjugated to the state. These texts are not blueprints for creating a better future, nor templates for resistance, nor utopian provocations. What they are is more familiar: they are affirmations of character, and the affiliations characters imply, as a site of possibility and as something worth holding on to. Jameson’s and Wegner’s periodizing work, and Moylan’s tracing of the genre’s development show the malleability of the dystopian impulse in the face of historical circumstances. Perhaps we are seeing the birth of a new phase, in which the dystopia settles into the present not because the utopian impulse has sputtered, but because it has shifted away from grand collective narratives of world-making and toward more modest and local forms of dreaming and preservation. It is our own gardens that must be tended—where the sparks of hope must be kept alive and where the monsters that were once content to prowl the far reaches of imagination must be held at bay.11 The absence of a utopian horizon signals a phase of the dystopian imagination that is neither anti-utopian nor critical dystopian in its emphasis on the present-ness of the dystopian threat. Suvin defines SF as literature that “does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in which kind of world?: And why such a man in such a kind of world?”12 But these works ask no such questions. Which man? Us. In which kind of world? Ours. Why? Because we have no other. It is then up to us to re-learn how to be present within it.

Postscript When I  began writing this book in the Spring of 2018, the global rise of authoritarianism made dystopias like Nineteen Eighty-Four seem disturbingly relevant, and it felt important to link this anxiety to a longer narrative history. However, in the months since I  began, the locus of dystopian angst has shifted: the Covid-19 pandemic that shut down the United States in March of 2020 has liberated both authoritarian and apocalyptic tendencies (as I write this in the Spring of 2020, it is hard to know which tense to use). The fervid attempts to rewrite the recent past, the naked appeals to nationalism coupled with the demonization of a foreign enemy, the attempts to leverage the crisis to consolidate political power are all too familiar from both history and fiction. The intersection of plague and fiction is certainly a fertile terrain. Plague is both cause and effect, condition and metaphor, of society’s failure. Its narratives, going back to Shelley, lend themselves to both postapocalyptic and authoritarian readings. The plague destroys civilization as in The Last Man or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, but it also empowers forces of containment that point in the opposite direction, toward regimented forms of dystopia that choke off “the human” with too much law. Comparing medical to military metaphors of disease,

Epilogue  249 Sontag fears the medical model “not only provides a persuasive justification for authoritarian rule but implicitly suggests the necessity of statesponsored repression and violence (the equivalent of surgical removal or chemical control of the offending or ‘unhealthy’ parts of the body politic).”13 Jill Lepore more recently observes of José Saramago’s Blindness, “[a]s historical parable, Blindness indicts the twentieth-century authoritarian state: the institutionalization of the vulnerable, the ruthlessness of military rulers.”14 And yet, Saramago’s novel also evokes a counter-fear, the collapse of humane customs in the face of apocalyptic chaos. The victims of the plague, locked up together, claw and abuse each other for advantage. Saramago brilliantly shows the two sides of the dystopian dialectic of order and chaos—chaos democratizes the ability to inflict suffering that the forces of order jealously guard as their own. Plague might be the perfect dystopian metaphor. Balanced between superego and id, it invites us to look in both directions at once. We identify with a last human haunted by the specter of two kinds of catastrophic ending: by the fear of winding up either too far within or too far outside of the social order. This is Camus’s subject in his surprisingly optimistic novel The Plague. Against the plague’s blind predation and against those tendencies toward exploitation and despair that crises liberate, the residents of Oran steadfastly confront the absurdity of suffering with feats of heroic self-sacrifice and sympathy, and with an equally heroic philosophical resistance to the loneliness of an indifferent universe. “There are more things to admire in men then to despise” (268), Camus’s narrator, Rieux, thinks to himself at the end, writing down his experience of the plague as a memorial to human resilience. Insisting on producing a narrative even where narration seems superfluous, Rieux’s response—both to the plague as biological fact and to the Nazi occupation it unavoidably evokes—reminds us that the language of novels is a form of resistance to both chaos and authoritarianism. At least temporarily, de-humanization is kept at bay. Plague will no doubt be an increasingly fertile topos for the next generation of dystopian writers but the struggle to hang on to the human—and the tools of that fight, novels, and their characters—will surely remain.

Notes 1. Fantasyland. 2. Archaeologies 275. 3. “Blade Runner.” 4. “Then You are Them” n.p. 5. Archaeologies 200. 6. As Julia Lovell points out in the preface, even Chan Koonchung himself is ambivalent about the new China, both fascinated and nervous about its utopian aspirations (xviii–xix). 7. Kinkley 198.

250  Dystopian Variations 8. Fokkema 192–93. See also Zhang. 9. See, for example, James Leibold’s New York Times editorial “Mind Control in China has a Very Long History,” (Nov. 20, 2018); Anna Mitchell and Larry Daimond’s essay in The Atlantic, “China’s Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone.” (Feb. 2, 2018); and James Fuller’s article in The Telegraph, “’Mind-Reading’ Tech Being Used to Monitor Chinese Workers’ Emotions” (Apr. 30, 2018). 10. Rai 133; see Chapter 1. 11. In his essay reviewing Ian Davidson’s Voltaire in Exile for the New Yorker, “Voltaire’s Garden,” Adam Gopnik underscores Voltaire’s turn from Deism to liberal meliorism; Candide is not a call to quietism then, Gopnik observes, but the beginning of a phase of activism for Voltaire (n.p.). 12. Metamorphoses 7. 13. Aids and Its Metaphors 91. 14. “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About” n.p.

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Index

Abrams, M. H. 83, 109n33 Adams, Henry 183 Aldridge, Alexandra 4, 26, 62, 78n64, 119 Alger, Horatio 185 – 6, 188, 202, 203n18 Alkon, Paul 29n15, 66, 78n64, 147n77 Alphaville 67 An Excess Male 244 – 6 Anderson, Benedict 145n27 Angenot, Marc 23, 31n67 Anthem 8, 214 Anti-Bildungsroman 121, 125, 127, 143, 147n79, 230; interiority 124, 149; and national identity 117 – 18 Anti-humanism/t: and anti-nostalgic 90; anti-romantic 227 – 8, 230; utopian and dystopian 89, 91 – 2, 109n21, 222; Eliot 109n29; Houellebecq 105, 107, 110n47; modernism 20, 97, 110n47; and naturalism 84; Nietzsche 108n18; see also humanism/t Anti-novel 17, 57, 162, 188 Anti-utopia/nism: American 183 – 4; anti-anti-utopianism 226 – 7; anti-collectivism 12, 62, 92; vs. critical 7, 19, 75n16, 75n19; criticism of 20, 29n25, 57 – 61,76n39; 248; Dostoevsky 21, 153, 162; vs. dystopia 53 – 6, 65 – 6, 248; “Machine Stops” 100; Mamet 201; Morson 17, 24; nostalgia 35; Wells 89 – 90, 109n22, 110n51; in We 119; and YA literature 205 – 6, 212, 215, 222; see also critical dystopia

Apocalypse: Kermode 70; vs. degenerative dystopia 224, 29n18; and pseudo-utopia 212; secularization 66 – 7, 95; see also post-apocalypse Arcadia 65 – 6 Arnold, Matthew 13, 85, 92, 98 Arts and Crafts movement 11 Aspects of the Novel 78n79 Atwood, Margaret: and agency 213; crisis-time 72 – 3; humanism 88; last man-ism 14, 24 – 5; and the real 232, 236; religion 8 Auden, W. H. 168, 187 Auerbach, Erich 41 Baccolini, Raffaella: feminism 14, 24, 26 – 7, 225 – 6; rebellion 117; “open” or critical dystopias 7, 55, 72, 75n16; language 133, 177n53; see also Moylan Bakhtin, M. M. 41, 69, 113, 136, 143 Ballard J. G. 25 Bartleby the Scrivener 149 – 50, 152, 163 Baudelaire, Charles 159 Bellamy, Edward 30n52, 53, 62, 88 Bennett, Arnold 85 Bend Sinister 8, 68, 77n63, 214 Benjamin, Walter 11, 19, 22, 102 Bildungsroman: and aesthetic education 117, 192, 219; A Clockwork Orange 125, 127, 129, 131; Dostoevsky, 163, and dystopian character, 17, 21, 114 – 18, 143, 144n18, 148 – 50, 173, 230; as genre 112 – 13, 144n3, 144n9, 147n72, 181; and the nation-state 21, 45, 116, 144n13,

266 Index 190; Never Let Me Go 133, 142, 135 – 6; and YA literature 206 – 7, 210, 228; We 119 – 21, 124 – 5; see anti-Bildungsroman Billy Budd 147n79, 191 Blade Runner 67, 233 Blindness 249 Blithedale Romance, The 183 Blood Meridian 224 Booker, M. Keith 3, 4, 6, 28n2, 145n41 Bradbury, Ray 86, 92, 211 Brave New World: consumption 61, 183, dissent 64, 117 – 18, 218 – 19, 246; genetic manipulation 240; technological development 236 – 7 Brazil 67 Brothers Karamazov, The 120 Buckley, Jerome Hamilton 115 – 17, 121, 126, 144n9 Burdekin, Katharine 14, 72, 90, 199 Burgess, Anthony: behavioral engineering 113, 125, 130 – 1, 146n52; Bildungsroman 21, 125 – 33; character 17, 18; humanism 91 Burke, Edmund 8, 29n25, 57, 81, 234; Burkean 8, 11, 99, 207; family 221, 231n27 Butler, Octavia: anti-humanism 228 – 9; coming-of-age 22, 207, 215, 229 – 30; first woman 8, 22, 60; and family 215, 222, 224 – 5; relationship to future 73, 226 – 7; and religion 90, 228 – 9, 238; and utopianism 18, 56, 226 Butler, Samuel 42, 78n65, 88 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 67, 149, 162, 170 Canticle for Leibowitz, A 6, 53, 73, 229 Camus, Albert 249 Candide 185, 230, 250n11 Carlyle, Thomas 85, 88, 99 Cather, Willa 190 Chan, Koonchung 19, 22, 232, 237, 249n6 Chekov, Anton 101 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 161 – 2 Chesterton, G. K. 108n2 China Dream 241 – 2 Chocolate War, The 207 Claeys, Gregory: A Clockwork Orange 146n53; degenerative

dystopia, 224; genre history 12, 26, 29n18, 61, 64, 74, 77n58; inverted utopia 130; sociological approach 31n74, 31n75, 77n50; We 119, 145n32 Clockwork Orange, A: Aesthetic education 127, 132, 137; Behavioral conditioning 8, 113; Bildungsroman 21, 114, 118, 125 – 33, 143, 181; diary 134; interiority, loss of 18, 133; social collapse 56, 113, 130, 159, 206, 208; see also Burgess Collectivism 8, 18, 241 Conrad, Joseph 116, 153 – 4 Cool Million, A: as dystopia 22, 181, 186 – 7, 190 – 1; formal properties 91, 187 – 8, 203n34; nostalgia 206; see also West Crash 25 Crisis (literature of): crisis-time (crisis narrative) 20, 56, 71 – 2; contemporary 28n2, 237, 239 – 40, 248; of narration 20, 94, 151 – 2, 173, 175, 247; political and economic 208, 225, 228, 237; progress, faith in 13, 57; of subject 13, 37, 108n1 151, 160, 173; world crisis 38 – 39 Critical dystopia: American 184; Baccolini 228; feminism and 14, 22; and genre 19, 56 – 7, 60, 91 248; and humanism 88, 109n29; Moylan and Baccolini 7 – 8, 55, 72, 75n16, 177n53; YA 213; see also Baccolini Sargent, Lyman Tower 55, 57; Wells 60 – 1 Crystal Palace: and the city 84, 113; utilitarianism 119; and utopia 13, 21, 153, 161, 166, 217 Culture and Anarchy 98 “Darkness” 67 Darkness at Noon 236 Davies, Tony 82 – 3, 108n13 Delany, Samuel R. 24, 90, 119 Delirium 205 Designated Mourner, The 29n16 Deutscher, Isaac 33 Dick, Philip K. 19, 69, 233 Dimaline, Cherie 88, 205, 211, 219 Divergent 205 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 233 Donne, John 107, 157

Index  267 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: anti-utopianism 62, 64; and the city 158 – 9; Crystal Palace 13, 119, 162, 217; freedom vs. happiness 120; math 145n36, 165, 170; paranoia 21, 153, 165 – 7, 181; romanticism 163, 177n40; see also Notes from Underground Dover Beach 13 Eagleton, Terry 98, 173 Earth Abides 6 Earthseed 90, 207, 222, 224 – 30; see also Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents Easy Rider 223 Elementary Particles, The 102 Enlightenment: American 182, 198, 202n14; Cultural Enlightenment 240; humanism 7, 82; paranoia 152; reason 57, 61, 123, 149, 164, 167, 169; and romanticism 149, 151, 167, 174; secularism 67; YA literature 206 Epic 143, 175, 235 Erewhon 42, 78n65, 88 Esty, Jed: Bildungsroman 21, 51n36, 116 – 7, 147n79; anti-humanism 108n14, national identity 13, 125, 132; nostalgia 30n42. Eutopia 4, 52 – 4, 56, 59, 143; in America 182; and critical dystopia 55, 177n53; regressive eutopia 30n52, 88; see also utopia Fahrenheit 451 86, 211 Family Romance see Freud Farrell, John 151, 154 – 5 Fat Years, The 19, 22, 237; see also Chan Koonchung Feed 205, 209 “Folding Beijing” 242 Forster, E. M.: anti-utopianism 7, 60; dystopian humanism 13, 20, 82, 89, 91, 98 – 101; character 74, 78n79 Foucault, Michel 17, 109n20, 117, 145n24, 151 Ford, Ford Madox 154, 158, 165 Frank Kermode 20, 70 – 2, 95, 161 – 2 Freud, Sigmund 44, 70, 122, 131, 173; Civilization and its Discontents, 65 – 6, 172, 177n57; and family romance 173, 216; and paranoia 156 – 7, 172, 178n61; and politics 177n58; Three Case Histories 148

Frost, Robert Frye, Northrop 12, 52 – 4, 59, 64, 202n1; and romanticism 175n3, 177n43 Fussell, Paul 95 Fukuyama, Frances 87, 234 Gathering Blue 216 Gide, Andre 4 Giver, The: artificial community 212, 215, 219, 222; family 216 – 17, 220 – 2, 224; nostalgia 18; post-apocalypse 66, 215; Quartet 22, 88, 207, 215; romance 22; see also Lowry Goethe 113, 116 Glengarry Glen Ross: American dream 192 – 3; anti-utopianism 201; as dystopia 18, 22, 181, 187; family 206, 235; humanism 91; see also Mamet Golding, William 92 Good Soldier, The 158, 165 Grainville, Jean-Baptiste Cousin de 5 Gray, Thomas 140 Handmaid’s Tale, The 3, 8, 14, 24,73, 213 Hao, Jinfang 242 – 4 Haraway, Donna 90 Hardy, Thomas 77n52, 137, 165 – 6, 173; “Hap” 16, 152 – 3, 192; “Darkling Thrush” 95, 104 “Harrison Bergeron” 64 Hawthorne, Nathanael 53, 183 – 4 Hayles, N. Katherine 108n16, 109n21, 109n28, 218; see also posthumanism He, She, and It 15, 25 Heart of Darkness 124, 213 Heffernan, Teresa 66 – 7, 91, 94, 223 Herder, Johann Gottfried 7, 12 Herland 42 Hillegas, Mark 26, 59, 78n64, 89, 109n22 Hitchens, Christopher 33 Hitler 35, 39, 40, 50n21, 191, 240 Hoban, Russell 6, 29n17, 50n16 Hofstader, Richard 9, 151 Houellebecq, Michel: anti-humanism 18, 20, 89, 91, 102, 227; crisis-time 56, 69, 130, 236; nostalgia for literary past 18, 103; religion 8, 105 – 7 Howards End 98 – 100

268 Index Howe, Irving 30n57; on anti-utopia 61, 64, 74, 78n72; on Nineteen Eighty-Four 32 – 3, 35, 93, 144n17 Hulme, T. E.: anti-humanism 104, 107, 228; anti-romanticism 84, 110n39, 162, 177n40; nostalgia 95; modernism 154, 157 Human Machine, The 85 Humanism/t: aesthetics of 74, 82 – 4, 93, 109n33, 123, 146n51, 246 – 7; Bildungsroman 113, 124, Burgess 125, 129, 132 – 3; Butler 222, 227; Christian humanism 60, 76n38; dystopian 90 – 2, 98 – 102, 236; and individualism 7, 106 – 7, 241; Ishiguro 134 – 5, 136, 138, 141 – 2; liberal humanism 102, 108n5, 109n28, 110n47, 187, 218; and modernism 96 – 7; Miller 194; Nabokov 77n63; and nostalgia 8, 20, 54, 84 – 7, 102, 107, 181; Orwell 81 – 3, 169; romantic humanism 84, 86, 91, 107, 217; and utopian/ism 88, 108, 108n20; Wells 89; see also anti-humanism Hunger Games, The 72, 205, 207, 212 Huxley, Aldous: anti-utopia 55, 57, 101, 213, 217; consumerism 28n2, 102, 234; dystopian tradition 4, 7, 8, 13, 65, 232; Freud 172; humanism 48, 89, 92; narrative forms 97, 222, 247 I Am Legend 6, 68 Invisible Man 192 Iron Heel, The 69, 73 – 4 Ishiguro: aesthetic education 132, 134 – 5; alternate timelines 137; humanism 139, 146n61; interiority 114, 142; nostalgia 18; science 91, 113 It Can’t Happen Here 3, 186, 191 James, Henry 23, 46 Jameson, Fredric: America 187; anti-utopia 29n25; apocalypticism 66; humanism 82; kinship 225, 228; and narrative 3, 19, 25, 56, 77; paranoia 151; periodization 26, 29n12, 31n58, 93, 248; relationship to 54, 235 – 7; science fiction 24, 72; utopia as social practice 28, 29n8, 58; world-reduction 9 – 10, 233 – 4

Jefferson, Thomas 184, 190, 201 Joyce, James 4, 96 – 7, 116, 122, 161, 168 – 9; Portrait . . . 129, 150, 161; stream of consciousness 110n46, 150 Judge Schreber 17, 148 Kafka, Franz 126, 150, 161, 173 Kateb, George 12, 57 – 9 Kermode, Frank 20, 70 – 2, 95, 161 – 2 Kerouac, Jack 192, 223 King, Maggie Shen 22, 244 – 6 Koestler, Arthur 57, 236 Kumar, Krishan 26, 56, 65, 75n22, 75n23, 183 Last man: Bildungsroman 112, 114, 117, 142; and books 86, 101, 108n17; character 8, 10 – 11, 18 – 20, 74, 92; dangers of 233, 235; in Europe 13, 32, 35; as fantasy 15, 22, 30n53, 49, 173 – 4, 234; formulae 22, 26; gender 14 – 15, 24, 158; humanism 181, 187; interiority 150, 192; Nabokov 77n63; Nietzsche 6, 16, 86 – 7; nineteenth century 5; nostalgia 20, 22, 26, 46, 86, 101 – 2, 220; post-apocalyptic 67 – 8, 224; and social setting 41 – 3, 162, 235, 247; utopia, as resistance to 57, 60, 64; YA 205, 219 Last Man on Earth, The 68 Last Man, The (Shelley) 5, 248 Last Man in Europe, The (novel) 50n26 Last man-ism 14, 20, 60, 234, 247 Lawrence, D. H.: modernism 4, 84, 96, 122, 150, 154, 168; Bildungsroman 121, 134; nature 175n4 Le Dernier Homme 5 Le Guin, Ursula K. 62 – 4, 119, 212, 235, 244 Lefanu, Sarah 14, 24, 26 Lessing, Doris 44 – 5, 145n35, 211 Levitas, Ruth 26 – 8, 53 – 4 Lewis, Wyndham 84, 96, 154 Lewis, Sinclair 186, 191, 202n5, 232 Logan’s Run 108n17 London, Jack 69, 185 Looking Backwards 53, 62 Lord of the Flies 92 Love Among the Ruins 100, 125

Index  269 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” 95, 105, 122, 159, 166; adolescence 209, 222; paranoia 152 – 3, 157 Lowry, Lois: coming-of-age 22, 213 – 4, 207; family 88, 215, 221; and the individual 211 Luddism 11 Lukács, Georg 113, 117, 124, 147n72 Lyrical Ballads 93 Ma, Jian 241 Machine in the Garden, The 22, 182 Machine Stops, The 7, 13, 60, 91, 98 – 101, 123 Mad Max 6, 29n17, 68 MaddAddam 25, 72, 88, 236; see also Atwood Mafarka The Futurist 85 Mamet, David: American dream 22, 58, 182 – 6, 200; as dystopia 181, 192 – 3, 200 – 202; masculinity 193, 197 – 200, 204n47; Miller 194 – 6; nostalgia 18; realism 91, 181 – 2, 235; threshold text 187 Man of the Crowd, The 159 Man Without Qualities, The 49 Mandel, Emily St. John 248 Mannheim, Karl 54, 58 Piercy, Marge 15, 24, 119, 135 Marinetti, F. T. 84 – 5, 92, 94 Marrow Thieves, The 88, 205, 211, 219 Marx, Karl 58, 83, 88, 119, 171; Marxism 190 Marx, Leo 22,182, 184, 202n11 Matheson, Richard 6, 68 Maugham, W. Somerset 121, 134 McCarthy, Cormac 223 – 4 Meisel, Perry 93, 160, 191 Melley, Timothy 151, 155 Melville, Herman 147n79, 149 – 50, 191 Memoirs of a Survivor 44 – 5, 145n35, 211 Menippean Satire 18, 30n57 Messenger 216, 220 Metamorphosis 126 Mill, John Stuart 53, 61, 107 Miller, Arthur 22, 182, 186, 194 – 6, 201 Miller, Henry 168 – 9, 234 Miller, Tyrus 159 – 60, 167, 172 Miller, Walter 6, 53

Mishra, Pankaj 12, 106 Modernism/ist: anti-humanist 20, 84, 89, 97, 105, 107, 108n13, 108n14, 110n47; Bildungsroman 116, 131; character 23, 26, 42, 71, 83, 122, 165 – 6; late modernism 13, 159 – 60, 172; mass culture 144n23, 176n12; and mimesis 110n44, 158, 170, 176n22; narrative form 5, 17, 42, 92 – 8, 110n51, 161; nostalgia 30n42, 177n50; and paranoia 153 – 4, 157, 167 – 9, 174 – 5; realist modernism and SF 23; and romanticism 150, 156. Montaigne 41 More, Thomas 42, 52, 56, 59, 62 Moretti, Franco 21, 113, 115 – 17, 143, 144n18, 146n55 Morris, William 11, 42, 59, 65, 85, 88 – 9, 99 Morson, Gary Saul: anti-novel 17, 57; Notes from Underground 161 – 2; threshold works 23 – 4, 187; We 125 Moylan, Tom: Critical dystopia (w/ Baccolini) 7, 28, 29n23, 55 – 6, 72, 75n16, 75n19; critical utopia 58; genre and form 26, 53 – 4, 61, 72, 76n39, 76n43, 117, 248; language 133, 177n53; Nineteen Eighty-Four 33 – 4, 50n17; “The Machine Stops” 60, 91, 100; Parable of the Sower 224, 231n31; see also Baccolini “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 94 Musil, Peter 49, 161, 165 Nabokov, Vladimir 8, 68, 77n63, 101, 214 nationalism 11 – 12, 36, 191, 230, 248 Never Let Me Go: alternative timelines 69; Bildungsroman 21, 114, 117 – 8, 133 – 4, 143, 181; diary 73, 134; science 8; setting 113; utopian satire 56; YA comparison 205 – 6; see also Ishiguro News from Nowhere 42, 65, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 16, 68, 86 – 7, 90, 92, 125 Nineteen Eighty-Four: authoritarianism 8, 108n5, 248; Coming Up for Air 37 – 40, 44 – 5; contingency, lack of 61, 201; and A Cool Million 192; family 108n4, 206, 223, 238; and The Fat Years 238 – 40, 245 – 6; and genre 13,

270 Index 24, 30n57, 56, 65; and The Giver 218 – 19; and Glengarry Glen Ross 196 – 7; and It Can’t Happen Here 191; and national identity 107n1, 171; as novel 32 – 5, 48, 93, 117, 177n46, 177n48, 192; “The Last Man in Europe” 11, 32, 50n26; modernist poetics 110n51, 150, 167 – 9, 172; Newspeak 55, 60, 71, 170, 218; nostalgia 30n42, 50n22; as oedipal drama 113, 177n58; paranoia 9, 21, 152 – 4, 166 – 7, 173 – 5; and realism 19, 236 – 7; reception 49n4, 49n12, 58; and Submission 107; “Such, Such Were the Joys” 43 – 5; and time 69, 71 – 3, 144n17; see also Orwell Nostalgia: American 183, 189, 200; anti-nostalgia 90; Atwood 25; Butler and 226, 229; family 12, 206, 213 – 4, 216, 225, 246; formal 17 – 18, 97, 232, 241 – 2; humanism 7, 20, 54, 82, 84 – 5; for language 101, 103, 171; national identity 13, 190; Orwell 30n42, 35 – 7, 43 – 4 50n17, 50n18; reactionary 11, 13, 84, 107, 190, 196, 199, 234; and romanticism 93, 173 – 4; Wells 46; and science fiction 73; utopia 55, 88 – 9; and gender 15, 60, 96 Notes from Underground 21, 64, 120, 153, 161 – 2, 166 O’Donnell, Patrick 151, 155 Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College 140 Of Human Bondage 122 Olafson, Frederick 83 – 4, 93 Omega Man, The 68 On the Beach 67 On the Road 192, 223 “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The” 62, 212 O’Neill, Eugene 182, 192 Orwell, George: Animal Farm 49n12, 86; anti-utopianism 50n17, 57 – 8, 76n28; and authoritarian politics 50n21, 66, 240, 245; and Bildungsroman 17, 112, 119, 132; and character 20, 42, 48; and children 238; Coming Up for Air 32, 35 – 40, 44, 45; critical reception 33, 49n4, 49n5, 108n4, 177n48; and dystopian tradition 4, 8, 12,

17, 24, 55, 65, 69, 232, 244, 247; and globalization, resistance to 107n1, 171; and humanism 81 – 4, 86 – 91, 108n5; Keep the Aspidistra Flying 38, 132, 146n56, 230; and the last man 6, 11, 13, 32, 50n26; “The Lion and the Unicorn” 27, 81; and modernism, resistance to 97, 110n51, 150, 168 – 9, 172, 177n47; and modernity 93, 145n36, 161; and naturalism 94, 169 – 70; and nostalgia 30n42, 50n18, 89; and the novel 32 – 5, 97; “Orwellian” 209; and paranoia 21 – 2, 150 – 3, 160 – 1, 166 – 7, 173 – 5, 181, 192; and politics, retreat from 177n46, 177n58; “Shooting an Elephant” 82; “Such, Such Were the Joys” 43, 51n33; and time 71; and gender 14 Oryx and Crake 25 Outsiders, The 207 Parable of the Sower: first woman 15; crisis 225; orientation toward the future 229, 236; utopianism 18, 56, 215, 224; see also Butler Parable of the Talents 56, 215, 224, 227 – 9, 231n31; see also Butler Paradis, Kenneth 151, 156 Paranoia: and the city 158 – 9; and character 26, 37, 70, 153, 172; Dostoevsky 161 – 7; logic of 9 – 10, 150 – 2; as literary structure 16 – 17, 21 – 22, 74, 150 – 7, 167 – 8, 176n19; and masculinity 157 – 8; and modern China 237, 239; and modernism 152 – 4, 157, 160 – 1, 175, 176n22; Orwell 38, 169, 178n58; romantic 148, 153, 154, 181; setting 39, 192; surveillance 22, 172, 178n61; wish-fulfillment 22, 173 – 4 “Paranoid Style in American Politics, The” 9, 151 Parrinder, Patrick 27, 31n74, 37, 56, 64; and science 76n37; Wells 59, 78n64 Patai, Daphne 14, 38, 90 Pater, Walter 141 Pfau, Thomas 151, 152, 154 – 5, 162, 164 Piercy, Marge 15, 24, 119, 235 Plague, The 249

Index  271 Platform 102 Plot Against America, The 203n33 Popper, Karl 57 Possibility of an Island, The 102 Post-apocalypse: and end of civilization 50n16, 53, 104 – 5; and family 223; and pastoral 65; post-post-apocalypse 205, 212; and rebuilding 6, 56, 72, 224, 229; vs. regimented dystopias 66 – 8, 77n58, 215, 222 – 3; and YA literature 205 – 7, 212, 215 – 6 Posthuman/ist/ity 27, 85, 89 – 90, 109n21, 218 – 9; Butler 227; Houellebecq 91; Ishiguro 137; Shteyngart 101; Nietzsche 68 Poe, Edgar Allan 159 Pound, Ezra 84, 96, 168 Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The 136 Proud Man 90 Proust, Marcel 96,161 Purple Cloud, The 5 Ragged Dick 185, 189 Rai, Alok 10, 34, 35, 170 Rand, Ayn 8, 82, 214 Reagan, Ronald 185, 193, 197 Ready Player One 205 reflexive dystopian mode 9, 10, 192 Republic of the Future, or Socialism a Reality, The 62 Renaissance, The 141 Riddley Walker 6, 50n16 Robinson, Kim Stanley 3, 5 Rollerball 68 Romantic/ism: American 186, 190, 194, 201; anti-romanticism 89, 104, 110n39; 221, 227, 230; anti-utopianism 92; and Bildungsroman 18, 21; in children’s literature 209 – 10, 214; and character 18, 21, 26, 32; Dostoevsky 161 – 7; humanism 82, 84, 86, 91, 93, 107, 217; and modernism 94 – 5, 98, 156, 158; national destiny 7, 11 – 12; nature 123, 148; Orwell 167 – 74; and paranoia 21, 151 – 5, 159 – 61, 174 – 5; quest narratives 24, 175n3; singularity 11, 15, 64; spontaneity 21, 88; subjectivity 149 – 50, 175n2, 175n3, 177n40, 177n41, 177n43; YA literature 217, 221, 229 Roth, Philip 203n33

Rushdie, Salman 174, 177n46 Ruskin, John 85, 88 Russ, Joanna 13 – 15, 24, 29n9, 30n52, 119, 207, 235 Sandburg, Carl 190 Saramago, José 249 Sargent, Lyman Tower: social dreaming 3, 108n20; genre 26, 29n22, 37, 52 – 9, 74, 76n43, 77n58; gender 30n52, 143, 225 Schiller, Friedrich 128, 148, 162 Schreber, Daniel Paul 17, 157, 170 Science Fiction 23, 72, 248 SF see Science Fiction Shaw, George Bernard 57 Shawn, Wallace 29n16 Shelley, Mary 5, 15, 150, 156, 248 Sheehan, Paul 84, 96, 109n21, 110n47, 113, 230 Shiel, M. P. 5 Shteyngart, Gary 20, 89, 91, 101 – 3, 209, 236 Silent Running 219 Simmel, Georg 158 – 9 Skinner, B. F. 92, 184 Slaughterhouse-Five 10, 71 Smith, Adam 12 Son 216 Sons and Lovers 121 Sontag, Susan 68, 249 Soviet Union 57, 145n34, 197, 208 Soylent Green 108n17, 234 Spark, Muriel 70, 71, 136 Spender, Stephen 168 Stalin/ism 39, 40, 58 Station Eleven 248 Stewart, George R. 6 Submission: anti-humanism 91, 102; and realism 18, 56, 69, 236; and religion 8; see also Houellebecq Summer Before the Dark 45 Super Sad True Love Story 91, 101 – 2, 209, 236; see also Shteyngart Suvin, Darko: cognitive estrangement 37, 50n24; Disneyfication 58; science fiction 4, 201, 207, 248 Swastika Night 14, 72, 90, 199 Testaments, The 14, 25, 73 Threshold works see Morson Thus Spake Zarathustra see Zarathustra Taylor, Charles 96, 107

272 Index Tillich, Paul 76n38 “Tintern Abbey” 85, 113, 148 – 9, 152, 163 Tiptree Jr., James (Alice Bradley Shelton) 24 Tocqueville, Alexis de 186 Todd, Anna Bowman 62 Tono-Bungay see Wells Trilling, Lionel 33, 35, 49n4, 108n5, n20 Tropic of Cancer 168, 234 Trotter, David: paranoia 21, 151, 153 – 8, 160, 165, 167, 172; realism 42, 94; high modernism as reaction 96, 110n44, 170, 176n12, 176n22 Uchronia 59 Uglies 108n17, 205, 207, 211 Utopia/nism: American 181 – 4, 186 – 7, 190, 195 – 6, 202n5; anti-humanist 108n20, 109n21, 109n29; capitalism 102, 197 – 8, 201, 202n1; in Chinese literature 240 – 1, 243 – 4, 247 – 8, 249n6; coerced 36, 61, 63 – 6, 76n38, 108n5, 217; critical utopia 29n23, 54, 55, 75n16, 222; critique of 57 – 60, 65, 76n39, 106, 234; Crystal Palace 13, 21, 153; desire for 7, 27, 53 – 5, 59, 74, 226; and dystopia, comparison to 4, 18 – 19, 24, 28, 29n8, 63 – 4, 74, 107, 109n29, 122, 141; as escape 17, 54 106, 183, 201; excess of order 47, 151, 161 – 2; feminist 14, 22, 24, 30n37, 30n52; as genre 20, 29n22, 52, 54, 72, 74, 110n51, 130; narrative properties of 9, 24, 34, 42, 139, 177n48, n53, 233; and humanism 20, 60 – 1, 88 – 93, 108n5; kinship 223, 225; location 68, 77n58, 78n64, 123; loss of individuality in 6, 12, 62, 153; More’s Utopia 42, 52, 59; naturalism 29n19, 94; realization of 7, 49n14, 53, 58 – 9, 75n19, 75n22, 75n23, 166; satirical utopia 12, 53 – 4, 56; static vs. dynamic 4, 58 – 9, 212; Soviet 50n17, 113, 119; transformative 59 – 60, 208, 215, 222, 229; and Wells 36, 59 – 60, 89 – 90, 110n51; YA 206,

208, 210, 212 – 15, 229 – 30; see also anti-utopia/nism and arcadia Utilitarianism 8, 51n39, 63, 221, 239; anti-utilitarianism 49, 64, 239; Crystal Palace 119, 161 Veitch, Jonathan 188 – 9, 191, 203n31 Voltaire 12, 250n11 Vonnegut, Kurt 10, 64, 71, 184 Wagner, Richard 13 Walden Two 92 Watt, Ian 8, 41 Waugh, Evelyn 100, 125 We 17, 133, 134, 236; anti-mechanistic 113, 119, 162, 206; anti-utopia 56, 65; Bildungsroman 114, 117 – 18, 121 – 2, 125, 127, 143, 181; city 113, 159; critical dystopia 7; diary 73; excess of order 8, 21, 119 – 20; literature 124; interiority 213, 219, 236; setting 69; see also Zamyatin Wegner, Phillip: kinship 215, 225, 228, 231n30; and historical action 19, 175, 178n63; narrative poetics 4 – 5, 38, 53, 175; national identity 13, 107n1, 171; naturalism 20, 29n12, 93, 169; periodization 26, 31n58, 58, 248; realist modernism 23; We 119, 122 – 3 Wells, H. G.: anti-humanism/t 88 – 90; and anti-utopianism 57, 59, 60, 109n22, 110n51; character vs. setting 4, 23, 45 – 8; coercive world government 36, 50n21, 59, 217, 228;Modern Utopia, A 60, 89; and the novel 97, 247; Shape of Things to Come, The 36, 59, 59n76, 78, 89; “Story of Days to Come, A” 60; Time Machine, The 99, 78n64; science fiction 78n64, 95; technology 99, 113, 145n32; Tono-Bungay 45 – 8, 98; When the Sleeper Wakes 47 – 8, 61, 90, 98 West, Nathanael: absent subject 91, 109n38, 187 – 9; American dream 22, 58, 182 – 6, 190 – 2, 200; capitalism 202n5, 203n34; fascism 182, 185, 190, 203n24, 203n31; mass culture 188, 191; as realism 181, 187, 201 – 2

Index  273 Westerfeld, Scott 3 “When it Changed” 15 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 113, 116 – 7, 144n3 Williams, Raymond 81, 108n4, 174 Williams, Tennessee 182 Willmott, Hugh 7, 83 Woodcock, George 57, 58, 76n39 Wordsworth, William “Tintern Abbey” 85, 113, 148 – 9, 152, 163; Intimations Ode 149; Lyrical Ballads 93; “Nuns fret not. . .”156; romantic subjectivity 150, 152, 214

Year of the Flood, The 88; see also Atwood Zamyatin, Yevgeny: Bildungsroman 21, 113, 124 – 5; Bolshevism 113, 119, 145n41; critical dystopia 7, 135n40; excess of order 8, 65, 120, 122, 145; future 69, 72; interiority 119, 121, 123; language 132; nostalgia 48; utopian satire 12; and Wells 145n32 Zarathustra 6, 84, 86; see also Nietzsche