The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism

The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism

Book by M. Keith Booker; Greenwood Press, 1994. 202 pgs.

Introduction: Utopia, Dystopia, and Social Critique

On the outskirts of the once-sleepy hamlet of Orlando, Florida, lies the vast Disneyworld theme park, a marvel of technology and efficiency that ostensibly serves as a major modern embodiment of the kinds of utopian dreams that have inspired visionary thinkers throughout the history of Western civilization. In one area of the park lies a fairyland of castles and cartoons (appropriately called the Magic Kingdom) where childhood fantasies come to life. In another area lies the Epcot Center segment of the park, dramatizing in more adult fashion the potential of technology to build a better tomorrow. Still another area of the park takes visitors behind the scenes of Disney Studios to see movie magic at work firsthand. As a whole, Disneyworld is a dazzling combination of magic and machinery, the double nature of which mirrors the nature of the utopian project itself, which takes its inspiration from both fantasy and technology.

The worldwide proliferation of theme parks in recent decades demonstrates the allure of the kinds of utopian fantasies represented by Disneyworld and similar parks. Part of this allure is pure escapism, of course, and Disneyworld clearly represents both the negative image of utopian dreaming as escape from reality and the positive image of utopian thought as the practical Aristotelian entelechy of the ideal Platonic potential that already lies in reality. Indeed, the park has a multifaceted significance that illustrates the complexity of the utopian project as a whole. Disneyworld is an impressive display of human imaginative and technological capability in which visitors to the park themselves contribute to this utopian atmosphere, coming from around -1-

the globe to gather for relaxation and enjoyment in an idealized mood of peace and harmony. One is struck not only by the technological marvels of the park itself, but also by the smoothness and efficiency with which the entire operation is run, allowing massive crowds to flow from one attraction to the next with clockwork precision. Yet one could also find a sinister hint of dystopia in the ease with which these docile crowds mill antlike about the park under the watchful eyes of uniformed overseers-even if those uniforms disguise the overseers as loveable cartoon creatures. Indeed, dystopian films like Westworld and Futureworld derive directly from this dark side of Disney, dealing with the fear of domination of humanity by its machines by depicting fictional theme parks in which technology runs amok. 1

Jean Baudrillard argues of Disneyworld's precursor Disneyland that such parks represent a negative escapism that is specifically designed to divert attention from social problems in the "real" world. Proclaiming the "hyperreality" of modern American society, Baudrillard sees a carefully gauged attempt to set Disneyland off as a fantasyland separate from the surrounding reality. But to Baudrillard, this separation is pure ruse:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. ( 172 )

Baudrillard has a point, though it is also true that parks like Disneyland or Disneyworld do not present themselves as being entirely apart from reality. While blatantly calling attention to their own fictionality, such parks openly advertise themselves as the projection of a potential that is inherent in existing reality. In particular, they openly present themselves as the apotheosis of consumer capitalism. Many of the attractions in Disneyworld have explicit corporate sponsorship and purvey themes that glorify corporate America. Visitors are even given the option of trading in their legal currency for special "Disney Dollars" bearing pictures of characters like Mickey Mouse so that the expenditure of money in the park can itself participate in the fantasy effect-the buying of goods becomes a mere simulation of the buying of goods, and spending money becomes a game. Indeed, the park is a locus of conspicuous consumption, as -2-

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visitors frantically purchase useless items like hats bearing plastic mouse ears, then wear those items around the park to announce their participation in the Disney economy. 2 The docility with which visitors conform to such conventions is frightening, and perhaps the most sinister aspect of the park is the way its many millions of visitors succumb so meekly to being herded about the park like cattle (or inmates), buying what they are supposed to buy, seeing what they are supposed to see, and spending countless hours standing in queues waiting for the privilege of doing so. Disneyworld is both the idealization of the American dream and the ideal carceral society of consumer capitalism.

Among other things, the doubleness of Disneyworld indicates the simple fact that what one person considers an ideal dream might to another person seem a nightmare. It also indicates why so many modern thinkers have become suspicious of utopian thought, fearing that such visions can ultimately work only to the advantage of the status quo. Still, utopian visions of ideal alternatives have long formed an important part of criticisms of contemporary society. In an influential study Karl Mannheim considers "utopia" precisely that complex of energies that work for change in society, as opposed to "ideology," which he considers (following the Marxist tradition of ideology as false consciousness) as the complex of energies acting to preserve and support the existing order of things. And later Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson still maintain that a utopian notion of a desirable alternative future is necessary to empower meaningful political action in the present. Jameson thus notes that in our contemporary social climate "[t]he Utopian idea . . . keeps alive th 22222u208w e possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is" ( Marxism111). Elsewhere, Jameson emphasizes the importance of utopian impulses both to bourgeois society and to Marxist critiques of that society:

all class consciousness--or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes--is in its very nature Utopian. ( Political289)

Of course, Jameson's statements of the power and ubiquity of utopianism are made partially out of his embattled recognition of the extreme suspicion toward utopian impulses shown by many modern thinkers, who have equated utopian ideals with nostalgia, conservatism, and a desire to escape from the contingency of history. Jameson sees dystopian thought as less politically responsible or -3-

effective than utopian thought, but these thinkers see just the reverse. As Gary Saul Morson puts it, "Whereas utopias describe an escape from history, these anti-utopias describe an escape, or attempted escape, to history, which is to say, to the world of contingency, conflict, and uncertainty" ( 128 ). Indeed, despite the strongly utopian orientation of Marxism, Marxist critics from the very beginning have consistently attempted to distance themselves from the more naive versions of utopian thought. The Ur-text of this project is Socialism: From Utopia to Science, where Friedrich Engels contrasts the "scientific" approach of Marxism with the unscientific approaches of previous schools like the French utopian socialists.

Marx himself consistently argued that his vision of the coming ideal socialist society was not a utopian dream. Instead, he attempted to show that the seeds of this society were already beginning to grow within capitalist society. For Marx socialism was not a fantasy but an inevitable reality, and he attempted to demonstrate through a scientific analysis of capitalist society that Communism was the natural, even necessary result of the historical evolution of capitalism. However, it is not at all clear that the distinction between socialism and utopianism is as sharp as Marx and Engels would indicate. Utopian visions go back at least as far as the attempts to envision ideal societies in ancient Greek works like Plato Laws and Republic, but in their modern formulation such visions are largely an Enlightenment phenomenon, an extension of the Enlightenment belief that the judicious application of reason and rationality could result in the essentially unlimited improvement of human society. 3 In short, modern utopianism is closely related to the kind of faith in science and rationality that Marx and Engels themselves show. Despite their critical stance toward the bourgeois ideology that is so closely involved with Enlightenment thought, Marx and Engels retain numerous echoes of the Enlightenment worldview in their philosophy. 4

Marx and Engels, of course, are not alone among modern thinkers in placing a great deal of faith in scientific thinking. Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading contemporary theorists of "modernity," has suggested that the idea of being "modern" as we know it began only with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. In particular, the new science opened exciting new possibilities and inspired a belief in "the infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment" ( "Modernity"4). This faith in the potential of science to build an increasingly better world clearly has much in common with the aspirations of utopian thinkers. On the other hand, the drive for scientific progress described by Habermas is clearly at odds with the stability usually -4-

associated with idealized visions of utopia. Moreover, as Scholes and Rabkin point out, much utopian thought is clearly related to an atavistic desire to return to what is perceived as an earlier better time in history or in one's own life (perhaps the idealized world of childhood). Forward-looking science and backward-looking utopia, then, are uneasy bedfellows:

In the twentieth century our world is shaped by science. It is only reasonable then that our atavistic urges to escape must deal with science. But science and atavism are enemies. Science allows no retreating in time, and insists on contemplating the consequences of actions. In our time the utopian impulse has been largely replaced by dystopian projections of disastrous current trends. ( Scholes and Rabkin174) 5

Science has played a major role in the history of utopian thinking and in the modern turn from utopia to dystopia. 6 Thomas More, in the work that gave the genre of utopian fiction its name, includes "natural science" among the pursuits that bring moral and cultural improvement to the citizens of his ideal society. And while More's notion of "science" may differ somewhat from our modern one, science has been linked to utopian thinking since the very beginnings of modern science in the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of the new science, was quick to see its potential for revolutionizing human life, and his partially completed New Atlantis remains one of the most optimistic imaginative projections of the beneficial impacts that science and technology might have on human society. The society Bacon depicts reaps numerous practical benefits from the application of advanced technologies, but perhaps even more important is the sense of purpose and direction that scientific thinking gives to his idealized society. Anticipating Habermas on the drive for innovation that informs modernity, Bacon New Atlantis is a society that revels in the joy of scientific inquiry, a world whose raison d'etre is the discovery and invention of the new.

On the other hand, utopian thinking is quite ancient, dating back thousands of years before the rise of Enlightenment science. 7 Moreover, there has historically been a great deal of suspicion of science and technology in utopian literature. Plato Republic, one of the earliest utopian works still widely read in modern times, proclaims the value of the development of specialized skills and divisions of labor in ways that are clearly forerunners of modern technology. But Plato later Laws, another exploration of an ideal vision of society, warns that the innovations brought about by technological -5

advancement might potentially be disruptive and upsetting. Similarly, even during the triumphant rise of science to cultural hegemony in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, writers like Jonathan Swift were already warning of the potential dangers (especially spiritual) of an overreliance on scientific and technological methods of thought and problem solving.

By the nineteenth century many of the technological achievements predicted by early scientists like Bacon were being realized, but many of these achievements already offered hints that science would not have an entirely emancipatory effect on humanity. Most obviously, the technological advances made possible by the evolution of science contributed to an industrial revolution in Western Europe that made worldwide imperialism a practical reality even as it proved to be anything but liberating for the masses of exploited European workers who suddenly found themselves harnessed to machines in the service of industry. These technological advances well illustrated Bacon's dictum that "knowledge is power" by providing concrete demonstrations of the amazing capabilities of the human mind to understand, dominate, and control nature-but these same advances were dominating and controlling people as well. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century scientific discoveries like the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Darwin's theory of evolution were suggesting strict limits on the Enlightenment notion of unlimited progress and of the boundless power of the human mind to overcome all obstacles set before it. By the end of the century science and technology had become symbols not only of human capability, but of human weakness and limitation, a situation of which Henry Adams standing with almost religious awe before the huge dynamos in the Gallery of Machines in the Paris Exposition of 1900 can stand as representative. 8 Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century utopian visions showed a powerful ambivalence toward science and technology. For example, mechanization plays an important role in the industrial efficiency of the socialistic utopia of Edward Bellamy Looking Backward ( 1888), but in Samuel Butler Erewhon ( 1872) machines have been banished altogether because of their tendency to tyrannize the men who made them.

Given the growing skepticism toward the utopian promise of science in the late nineteenth century, it is not surprising that many twentieth-century neoMarxist thinkers have not shared Marx's faith in the coming socialist paradise. Especially in the critical theory of Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, this suspicion of the inevitability of socialism takes the form of a suspicion of the Enlightenment itself. In The Dialectic ofEnlightenment -6-

Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno argue that in the Enlightenment reason is conscripted in the interest of power and that as a result Enlightenment reason is ultimately enslaving, rather than liberating to humanity: "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men" ( 4 ). This position leads Horkheimer and Adorno seriously to question the legitimacy of rational arguments, including their own. As a result, their critique becomes not so much a rational analysis of the Enlightenment as an intentionally contradictory performance that dramatizes the contradictions that are inherent, in their view, to rational arguments as a whole. 9 As Albrecht Wellmer notes, this suspicion of Enlightenment rationality also causes Adorno to look away from rational argument in search of a locus of genuine reason, finding a potential for such a locus in art:

through the configuration of its elements the work of art reveals the irrational and false character of existing reality and, at the same time, by way of its aesthetic synthesis, it prefigures an order of reconciliation. ( Wellmer48)

Both Adorno's suspicion of rationality and his privileging of art indicate the important influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on his work. Indeed, Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole represents an important founding moment in the modern turn to skepticism and dystopian thinking. Nietzsche rails against the self-seriousness and the unflagging demand for final truths that he sees as characteristic of science, calling instead for a "gay" science that would be enriching, rather than impoverishing, that would maintain an appreciation for the strangeness of the world without demanding that all things be explained and understood in rational ways. Anticipating many of the works of dystopian fiction, Nietzsche strikes out against the growing mechanization of life brought about by the epistemological imperialism of science, deriding science as a new form of religion, worshipping

the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the powers of the spirits of nature recognized and employed in the service of a higher egotism; it believes that it can correct the world by knowledge, guide life by science, and actually confine the individual within a limited sphere of solvable problems. ( Birth109) -7-

Elsewhere, Nietzsche argues that science and Christianity are more alike than different, since both involve an overarching and fundamental drive toward truth:

It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science-and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and antimetaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that truth is divine. ( Genealogy588, Nietzsche's emphases)

The most life-denying drive, says Nietzsche, is the drive toward univocal truth that categorizes both science and religion, a drive that can also be equated to a quest for mastery and dominance of the kind that makes totalitarian regimes possible. For Nietzsche both science and religion impose simplistic interpretations on an infinitely complex world, confining the individual within a "limited sphere" that shuts out alternative possibilities. One of Nietzsche's privileged means of avoiding such confinement is, of course, art; here he anticipates Martin Heidegger, who likewise sees art (especially poetry) as the weapon of choice in this battle against dehumanizing technology, arguing that

essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. . . . The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes. ( 35 )

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger turn to art as an alternative to science. It is thus not surprising that this Nietzschean suspicion of science and rationality can also be found in much of the radically experimental art of the early twentieth century. Indeed, Habermas identifies Nietzsche, with his radical challenge to the authority of the past, as the central philosophical influence on aesthetic modernity, noting that "he is the first to develop the concepts of aesthetic modernity even before the avant-garde consciousness actually materialized in the literature, painting and music of the 20th century. . . . The anarchical intention of the Surrealists to explode the continuum of history is already effective in Nietzsche" ( "Entwinement" 25).

Nietzsche's late-nineteenth-century challenge to the authority of the past also has much in common with the project of Sigmund Freud,  -8-

who himself in many ways exemplifies the twentieth-century turn from utopian optimism to dystopian skepticism. 10 Freud's work is centrally inspired by the scientific impulses of the Enlightenment, but it is also very much of its time, converting the early Enlightenment faith in the power of reason to a severe doubt that reason will ever prevail in human affairs. At the same time, Freud's pessimism about the future is anything but a call for a return to the past, despite the fact that his own researches so often centered on antiquity. Indeed, his call for a subversive challenge to the authority of the past resembles Nietzsche's in many ways:

Freud shares the retrospective impulse of Romanticism, without, however, sharing its nostalgia; the past, for him, is condemned as permanency, burden, neurosis. His standing as a rationalist equally depends on this hatred of the past. . . . The past is not simply dead weight to be cast off by enlightened minds, but active and engaged, threatening to master the present. ( Rieff187)

As his career proceeds, Freud seems to become more and more pessimistic about the ability of human society to move beyond the limitations of the past.

By the time of Civilization and Its Discontents ( 1930) he produces a skeptical description of human society that resonates with the works of dystopian fiction in many ways. Here Freud enumerates a number of strategies through which individuals seek happiness in the modern world ( 26 - 32 ). He suggests that these quests for happiness, driven by the pleasure principle, are an integral part of being human, and as human beings we have no choice but to pursue such strategies. On the other hand, Freud emphasizes that the exigencies of life in the real world are such that this "programme of becoming happy . . . cannot be fulfilled" ( 32 ). He then suggests three reasons why human happiness is impossible. The first two of these reasons-"the superior power of nature and the feebleness of our own bodies"-are things that we can ultimately do very little about, despite advances in technology that have made certain inroads into the human ability to oppose the fundamental hostility of nature. But the third of these reasons-"the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state, and society"-would seem to be a difficulty of human making, and therefore one that should be surmountable by human effort ( 36 ).

However, in the bulk of Civilization and Its Discontents Freud argues that the reform of social institutions and conventions cannot in fact lead to human happiness, because civilization is by its very nature  -9-

antagonistic to certain basic human impulses and therefore fundamentally a source not of happiness, but of unhappiness. What civilization does provide is security, and Freud's comments on the way strong leaders function as a sort of a social "superego"-made at a time when figures like Stalin and Hitler were just beginning their rise to power-take on a frightening intonation. Freud's comments elsewhere (in works like Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) on group psychology and the "herd instinct" are even more suggestive of the coming wave of twentieth-century totalitarianism, a phenomenon that provides the basis for many dystopian fictions. 11

From Totem and Taboo ( 1913) through Group Psychology ( 1921) and Civilization and Its Discontents and on to Moses and Monotheism ( 1939), Freud remained concerned with social and political issues. And most of Freud's meditations on society have a distinctively pessimistic tone informed by the conviction that social order is fundamentally inimical to individual desire. Freud's various comments on the inherent conflict between the desires of individuals and the demands of society suggest that human sexual desire arises from natural instinctive impulses and that the orderly conduct of civilization requires that these impulses be repressed, then sublimated into socially productive areas like politics, science, or art. For Freud, the whole point to civilization (and particularly to government) is to limit individual liberty. But he suggests that primitivism or anarchy would be even worse, so there can be no ideal society, and any attempt to establish one is likely to do more harm than good. Indeed, in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud specifically addresses (and dismisses) the utopian energies informing both Soviet and American society. Actually, he rather haughtily avoids comment on the American case, because "I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods." Instead, he merely suggests that American civilization has been damaged by a conformist impulse informed by what he describes as the "psychological poverty of groups" ( 70 ).

Freud's critique of Soviet Communism is more explicit. In particular, he suggests that the communal energies of Soviet society are generated more through hatred of the bourgeois than through love of their own ideals. Indeed, he damningly compares the "persecution of the bourgeois" in the Soviet Union directly to the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, then links both to a fundamental phenomenon of Western civilization that he refers to as "the narcissism of minor differences." For Freud, the human instinct for aggression typically finds its outlet in the identification of scapegoats (like Jews or the bourgeoisie) who are in fact only marginally different from the -10

official norm. This kind of scapegoating frequently occurs in dystopian fiction, whose governments typically enforce their intolerance of difference through persecution of specified marginal groups. But for Freud this phenomenon is not so much an aberration associated with specific totalitarian regimes as a founding premise of civilization itself. He argues that one can always "bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness" ( 68 ). Freud specifically links this tendency to focus aggression on a clearly identified Other with modern totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, but he traces the tendency back to the beginnings of Christianity:

When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. ( 69 )

Indeed, for Freud (as for Nietzsche) it is probably religion that represents the single most oppressive force in civilization, though Freud would no doubt see Soviet Communism as a reinscription of religion rather than as a denial of it. Even in works like The Future of an Illusion ( 1928), ostensibly inspired by an evolutionist faith in the possibility of a more rational future, Freud's polemic against religion is powerful and at times bitter. He leaves no room for doubt that he sees religious belief not only as misguided, but as potentially sinister and seriously damaging to human life. As a scientist Freud condemns religion because it is irrational and false; as a sociologist he sees religion as a central tool of the forces of repression (and oppression) in society. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud thus clearly implicates religion among the forces that make modern civilization directly inimical to human happiness and to the fulfillment of human desire. For Freud the need for religious belief arises directly from the infant's sense of helplessness and longing for a strong and protective father figure, but it is also this longing that endows totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Stalin with a sort of erotic fascination. Moreover, the dystopian governments of fiction and the totalitarian governments of modern reality generally depend on precisely the sort of mass-delusion that Freud associates with religion as an attempt to gain a "protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality" ( 30 ). Finally, Freud attributes to religion precisely the sort of monologic demand for conformity that typically informs dystopian regimes. He -11-

notes that religion (despite the traditional Christian emphasis on free will) systematically deprives its adherents of choice and

imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. . . . At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. ( 34 )

Meanwhile, whether it be through religion or other means, for Freud the powers that be in society derive most of that power through the repression of sexual desires, and the frequent focus on sexuality in dystopian fictions can be at least partially attributed to Freud's influence. But for both Freud and dystopian governments, sexuality functions as a central focus for repressive energies largely because it is also a potential source of powerful subversive energies. This insight especially informs the work of neo-Freudians like Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown who follow Freud in figuring sexuality as a central locus of social oppression, but who emphasize the inverse side of this figuration. These thinkers see sexuality as a potential source of inherently transgressive energies and regard the attainment of sexual liberation as an important step toward a more general freedom from social and political repression. And there is a decidedly utopian orientation to many of these arguments, as when Marcuse finds in Freud's work the basis for a sort of socialist utopia along the lines of Fourier's vision of an ideal society founded on the cooperative application of libidinal energies to the greater social good. On the other hand, Michel Foucault has more recently argued that this kind of harnessing of sexual energies is precisely what official authority already does as a matter of course. Contrary to what he calls the Freudian "repressive hypothesis," Foucault suggests that modern society seeks not to repress or even to extirpate sexuality, but instead to administer sexuality and turn sexual energies to its own advantage. In short, sexuality does not necessarily stand in direct opposition to official power and may in fact stand in direct support of it: "Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another" ( History48).

For Foucault, sexuality is not so much a matter of natural instinctive impulses as of socially and discursively conditioned responses. He describes sexuality as "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power" ( History103). In particular, sexuality functions as a focal point for an entire array of practices through which modern society has attempted to constitute the individual as a -12

subject of administrative control. Psychoanalysis itself is one of these practices, and Foucault especially argues that the psychoanalytic project of categorizing certain sexual practices as normal and others as deviant contributes to general strategies for the manipulation of individual behavior in modern society. Thus society does not seek to eliminate even "deviant" or marginal sexual behaviors; on the contrary it is in the interest of society to assure that such behaviors continue in order to provide negative models against which to define proper conduct.

Foucault is not alone among modern social and cultural critics in seeing a complicity between psychoanalysis and oppressive practices in modern society. For example, Freudian psychoanalysis is singled out by Adorno as one of the central culprits in the Enlightenment destruction of true individualism, a destruction disguised by the bourgeois myth of the strong, autonomous individual. For Adorno, "unenlightened enlightenment plays into the hands of bourgeois disillusion" ( Minima60). In particular, Adorno notes the conventional tendency to see a connection between

the development of psychology and the rise of the bourgeois individual, both in Antiquity and since the Renaissance. This ought not to obscure the contrary tendency also common to psychology and the bourgeois class, and which today has developed to the point of excluding all others: the suppression and dissolution of the very individual in whose service knowledge was related back to its subject . . . The principle of human domination, in becoming absolute, has turned its point against man as the absolute object, and psychology has collaborated in sharpening that point. ( 63 )

In particular, Adorno indicts modern depth-psychology as participating in a general cultural separation between people and experience, routinizing and banalizing individual experience and converting individuals into mere examples of standardized case histories ( 65 ).

Despite Adorno's notorious pessimism, his turn to art as an alternative to Enlightenment science and rationality suggests that he still harbors certain utopian urges, even if he believes that utopian goals will not naturally evolve from the progress of history but only through some radical rupture in the existing order. Meanwhile, Terry Eagleton charges that the modernist art so important to Adorno is a "sphere largely disconnected from the major social forces of a given power-structure," and therefore concludes that Adorno displays a "bad" escapist utopianism ( Ideology407). But, in point of fact,

utopianism and literature are closely aligned. Utopian visions are in a fundamental sense literary in character; they have most commonly arisen within the realm of literature, and they are informed (like literature) by fictionalized visions that empower alternative modes of thought. From More's sixteenth-century text that gave utopianism its name, through nineteenth-century visions like Bellamy Looking Backward, to more recent works like Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed ( 1974) and Ernest Callenbach Ecotopia ( 1975) literary texts have served as an important source of inspiration for utopian thinking. And, far from being escapist and disconnected from reality, these texts tend to participate in reality in an active and productive way. More's book was written at a time of great social and political change and turmoil; it attempted to intervene in its contemporary historical moment by indicating desirable directions that these changes might take. Bellamy's text participated in his own political activism and served as an inspiration for his Nationalist Party. And the texts of recent writers like Le Guin and Callenbach arise directly from the leftist political activism of the sixties and early seventies.

Utopianism by its very nature tends to bespeak a certain social and political optimism, but Adorno's utopianism is colored by a final pessimism that the rupture he envisions will actually occur, perhaps aligning his version of utopianism with R. N. Berki's definition of utopia as an "ideal that is incapable of realization . . . not reality but the mere fruit of imagination" (221). Adorno's pessimism is no doubt related to his thoroughgoing rejection of Enlightenment rationality, a rejection that tends to inform the work of many of his poststructuralist heirs. On the other hand, critics like Jameson and Eagleton show that a certain amount of utopian energy survives in contemporary Marxist thought. Habermas, Adorno's Frankfurt School successor, seeks to recover (in what Eagleton labels a "good" utopian move) what was valuable in the Enlightenment and to restore the sense that a better future can in fact derive logically and dialectically from the present. In many ways, then, Adorno anticipates not so much Habermas as the questioning of history as a smooth, narrative progression that informs the work of later poststructuralist thinkers like Foucault. But Foucault is even more skeptical than Adorno of utopian visions-for Foucault ideal goals are not only incapable of realization in practice, but impossible in principle. In a sense, Foucault reverses Pope to argue that whatever is is wrong, and he sees his role as a radical opponent of the "system," regardless of what system that might be.

Importantly, Foucault continually argues the need to oppose the existing order of society, but he refuses to propose an alternative order -14-

as the goal of this opposition. For Foucault (showing a clear Nietzschean influence), "to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system" ( Language230). This stance would appear to be an a priori rejection of utopianism. However, as Allan Megill notes, Foucault's rejection of the status quo makes of continual change a sort of alternative utopian model with no final "vision of happiness or liberation. . . . Foucault thus opts for a peculiar brand of permanent revolution-permanent because it seeks to realize no image of an ideal society" ( 197 -98). Clearly, though, Foucault's oppositional stance goes well beyond Jameson's suggestion that modern utopian thought functions as "a stubborn negation of all that is"; even the most critical utopian thought inherently includes the positing of alternatives in a way that Foucault refuses to endorse. Foucault's emphasis on continual change arises from an intense sense of cultural crisis that might be termed "dystopian" more rightly than utopian, embodying a fundamental suspicion of any and all idealized visions of society. 12

Indeed, much of the history of recent utopian thought can be read as a gradual shift from utopian to dystopian emphases, while utopian thought itself has come more and more to be seen as escapist or even reactionary. However, as the Disneyworld example shows, utopian and dystopian visions are not necessarily diametrical opposites. Not only is one man's utopia another man's dystopia, but utopian visions of an ideal society often inherently suggest a criticism of the current order of things as nonideal, while dystopian warnings of the dangers of "bad" utopias still allow for the possibility of "good" utopias, especially since dystopian societies are generally more or less thinly veiled refigurations of a situation that already exists in reality. Moreover, dystopian critiques of existing systems would be pointless unless a better system appeared conceivable. One might, in fact, see dystopian and utopian visions not as fundamentally opposed but as very much part of the same project. For example, Jameson, acknowledging Mannheim's opposition of ideology and utopia, goes on to argue that a Marxist critical practice should involve both a "negative hermeneutic" involving traditional ideological analysis and a "positive hermeneutic" involving the exploration of utopian impulses ( Political 296).

One might restate Jameson's dual Marxist hermeneutic as an argument for the value of both dystopian and utopian thought in social criticism, and much modern criticism does have a great deal in common with both dystopian and utopian thought. But if there has been a general drift toward emphasis on the dystopian pole in recent theory and criticism, such a trend seems even more clear in twentieth- -15

century fictional depictions of alternative societies. Thus, in a study first published in 1962, Chad Walsh notes, "The reader looking for current utopias is likely to find them bumbling and unconvincing. But if he wants expertly-presented nightmares, he can choose among a greater variety of horrors than Dante on his pilgrimage though the nine circles of hell" ( 15 ). ¹³ Trends in literature and in social criticism are, of course, not unrelated. As Mark Hillegas notes, the modern turn to literary visions of "the future as nightmare" is "one of the most revealing indexes to the anxieties of our age" ( 3 ). Indeed, the modern suspicion toward utopian thought comes about largely because of an intense skepticism that such dreams can ever be realized, or because of what Judith Shklar calls the modern "decline of political faith." In his history of the genre of utopian fiction, Robert C. Elliott thus notes that developments in the twentieth century have led to widespread skepticism toward the possibility of utopia:

To believe in utopia one must believe that through the exercise of their reason men can control and in major ways alter for the better their social environment. . . . To believe in utopia one must have faith of a kind that our history has made nearly inaccessible. This is one major form of the crisis of faith under which Western culture reels. ( 87 )

In the imagination of the modern skeptic, in short, it is much easier to visualize nightmares than dreams of the future, and in support of this point Elliott points toward the "anti-utopian" vision of George Orwell's 1984 ( 1949). Orwell himself provides support for this point, having one character in 1984 describe the fictional society of Oceania as "the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined" ( 1984220).

In addition, Elliott notes that many modern thinkers have been worried not that utopia cannot be realized, but that it can. Acknowledging the turn to dystopian visions in modern literary depictions of imaginary societies, Elliott diagnoses a suspicion of utopian concepts themselves: "Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of being able to achieve it but because we fear it. Utopia itself (in a special sense of the term) has become the enemy" ( 89 ). In support of this thesis, Elliott adduces Aldous Huxley Brave New World ( 1932) and Yevgeny Zamyatin We ( 1924), which he refers to as "negative utopias"-societies in which utopian dreams of the "old reformers" have been realized, only to turn out to be nightmares. Indeed, numerous works of modern literature have been suspicious not only of the possibility of utopia, but of its very desirability, equating

conventional utopias with paralysis and stagnation. For example, in the recent Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ( 1985) Japanese writer Haruki Murakami describes a seemingly utopian society, though it is a society that exists only in the mind of his protagonist. It is a society without death or violence or inequality. But it is also a world of unchanging sameness where "the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope" (334). In the same way, a character in Alexander Zinoviev The Yawning Heights ( 1976) argues that utopias are logical contradictions because the positive characteristics they entail cannot exist in reality without their negative opposites (532).

Zinoviev's book arises directly from his own experiences as a member of the Soviet intelligentsia, while Murakami's book is informed by a number of sophisticated contemporary technological concepts (especially from computer science). But their common suggestion that the utopian fulfillment of all desire leads to a dehumanizing stagnation is a motif that runs throughout modern literature. One thinks, for example, of Wallace Stevens, who in poems like "Sunday Morning" rejects the very notion of an eternal paradise and opts instead for the real, physical world, with all its imperfection, flux, and mortality. This attitude is also nicely expressed by the narrator of Salman Rushdie Grimus ( 1975), who visits an imaginary island mountain where all of the inhabitants are immortal, but finds immediate hints that this island is anything but a paradise. The narrator, however, welcomes imperfection: "If Calf Mountain was not perfect (and it was no Utopia), then what matter? Perfection was a curse, a stultifying finality" ( 104 ).

While there have been specific cases of localized resurgences in utopian literature (especially among feminist writers and other leftist writers inspired by the political activism of the 1960s), twentiethcentury literature has generally envisioned utopia as either impossible or undesirable. Powered by the horrors of two world wars, the grisly excesses of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and the specter of global nuclear holocaust, "negative" texts like We, Brave New World, and 1984 have been far more prominent in modern literature than the positive utopias of earlier centuries. Even genres like science fiction, initially informed (especially in America) largely by optimistic visions of the possibilities inherent in technological progress, have taken a dystopian turn in recent years with works (like the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and others) that show an

attitude toward future technology that is ambivalent at best. And, in what may be even more indicative of a widespread pessimism, recent decades have seen the rise of a dystopian mood in popular culture as a whole. Many dystopian fictions have inspired popular films, with Stanley Kubrick version of A Clockwork Orange being perhaps the best example of a group that also includes film versions of books like 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale and films like A Boy and His Dog and Rollerball, based on short stories. Dystopian visions have in general constituted a popular and important modern film genre, including films as various as Fritz Lang seminal Metropolis, Woody Allen comic Sleeper, Terry Gilliam Brazil, the Mad Max movies, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the Arnold Schwartzenegger vehicle Running Man, and George Lucas THX 1138.

As one would expect, this growing wave of dystopian visions has generated a certain amount of critical attention, and numerous individual fictions and films-from the classics of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell on up to the most contemporary of works-have been prominently discussed by critics in recent years. Several book-length studies have focused on both utopian and dystopian fiction during the last decade or so. Among the more notable of these studies are Morson The Boundaries of Genre ( 1981), which is distinguished by its sophisticated attention to questions of genre theory raised by utopian and dystopian fiction, and Krishan Kumar Utopia and AntiUtopia in Modern Times ( 1987), which is especially good in its delineation of the historical backgrounds of certain specific works. A recent study by Dragan Klaic ( 1991) is also good in the scope of its coverage of utopian and dystopian visions in modern drama. Numerous essay collections have also been published on utopian and dystopian fiction, of which the one edited by Rabkin, Greenberg, and Olander is particularly useful. Curiously enough, though, there seem to have been no book-length studies devoted exclusively to dystopian fiction since Hillegas 1967 book, which itself was somewhat limited in scope by its insistence on relating all of the dystopian works discussed directly to the work of H. G. Wells.

This study is intended to rectify this absence by presenting a detailed and reasonably comprehensive study of dystopian fiction, organized by certain specific key ideas and perceptions about the genre. For example, I maintain an awareness of certain special literary issues raised by dystopian fiction, including the relationship of the genre to the tradition of utopian fiction that precedes it and to literary movements like modernist and postmodernist that surround it. But first and foremost, I wish to underscore the role of dystopian fiction as social criticism. In particular, I emphasize throughout this study

that the treatment of imaginary societies in the best dystopian fiction is always highly relevant more or less directly to specific "realworld" societies and issues. As Andrew Ross usefully puts it, utopianism is based on a critique of the "deficiencies of the present," while dystopian thinking relies on a critique of perceived "deficiencies in the future" ( 143 ). Indeed, dystopian fictions are typically set in places or times far distant from the author's own, but it is usually clear that the real referents of dystopian fictions are generally quite concrete and near-at-hand. We is set in an undisclosed location a thousand years in the future, but it is very much about certain ominous trends that Zamyatin sensed in the postrevolutionary society of Soviet Russia. Brave New World takes place in a far future England, but its satire is directed at excesses that were already brewing in Huxley's contemporary world. And 1984's prediction of a future totalitarian state gains its energy largely from its echoes of the Stalinist and fascist states of Orwell's own present and recent past.

The principal technique of dystopian fiction is defamiliarization: by focusing their critiques of society on spatially or temporally distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable. This exploration of alternative perspectives obviously recalls the technique of defamiliarization that the Russian Formalists saw as the literary technique par excellence and as constitutive of the difference between literary and nonliterary discourse, but it even more directly recalls the alienation effect of Bertolt Brecht in the way it denies this difference and links the emergence of new perspectives on literary themes to specific social and political issues in the real world. In this sense, dystopian fiction also resembles science fiction, a genre with which it is often associated. One recalls, for example, Darko Suvin's useful emphasis on "cognitive estrangement" as the central strategy of science fiction ( Metamorphoses3-15). ¹⁴ Clearly there is a great deal of overlap between dystopian fiction and science fiction, and many texts belong to both categories. But in general dystopian fiction differs from science fiction in the specificity of its attention to social and political critique. In this sense, dystopian fiction is more like the projects of social and cultural critics like Nietzsche, Freud, Bakhtin, Adorno, Foucault, Habermas, and many others. Indeed, a major thrust of this study is the exploration of dialogues between dystopian fiction and the work of such critics.

To bring more sharply into focus the close connection between dystopian fiction and contemporary political reality, I have organized this study principally according to social and political, rather than

literary criteria. In particular, I work on the assumption that the modern turn to dystopian fiction is largely attributable to perceived inadequacies in existing social and political systems. From one point of view, these systems in the twentieth century have been largely organized according to one of two basic strategies: bourgeois capitalism (exemplified by the United States) and Communism (exemplified by the Soviet Union). In retrospect, the bourgeois societies seem to have been more successful, and certainly more durable, but both kinds of societies have proved susceptible to serious abuse. The nightmarish specters of Nazi Germany (which might be described as bourgeois society run amok) and Stalinist Russia (which might be described as Communism run amok) provide haunting reminders of the potentially disastrous consequences of unchallenged authority under any system. These real-world dystopias, with their millions of real human victims, also lend a poignancy and an urgency to the warnings of dystopian fiction. On the other hand, the many fundamental similarities between the regimes of Hitler and Stalin suggest that the real political dichotomy in the twentieth century societies is between totalitarianism and democracy, where "democracy" implies the individual liberty (real or illusory) presumed in conventional bourgeois societies. Many dystopian fictions, meanwhile, suggest that even these "democratic" societies can have their nightmarish sides.

In order to relate the literary history of dystopian fiction more closely to the social and political history of the modern world, the dystopian fictions discussed in this study have been grouped primarily according to whether their social critiques seem aimed principally at bourgeois societies or at totalitarian ones. 15 I have also arranged these texts in roughly chronological order in order to trace the historical development of the genre in conjunction with historical developments in the world at large. I begin with a detailed discussion of Zamyatin We, a postrevolutionary Russian text that almost uncannily foresees the coming totalitarian abuses of Stalinism. In the second chapter I focus on Huxley Brave New World, a text I read primarily as a warning against runaway capitalism and as an anticipation of coming developments in Western consumer society. Next I look at Orwell 1984, which I discuss principally as a commentary on Stalinism (and to some extent on fascism)--or as a look back after the fact at many of the same abuses warned against by Zamyatin more than a quarter of a century earlier. Together, these three novels are the great defining texts of the genre of dystopian fiction, both in the vividness of their engagement with real-world social and political issues, and in the scope of their critique of the

societies on which they focus. The issues explored by these three texts can be grouped roughly under the six rubrics of science and technology, religion, sexuality, literature and culture, language, and history. For purposes of parallelism and comparison, I discuss each of these issues in turn in these first three chapters. -20-

Perhaps because of the inherent plurality of bourgeois society itself, there is no single post-World War II dystopian critique of bourgeois society that is roughly analogous to 1984. In the fourth chapter, then, I discuss a number of bourgeois dystopias that have roughly the same relationship to Brave New World that 1984 does to We, in terms of both literary influence and historical context. In particular, I treat a number of post-World War II American dystopian fictions, including texts by B. F. Skinner ( Walden Two), Sinclair Lewis ( It Can't Happen Here), Kurt Vonnegut ( Player Piano), Gore Vidal ( Messiah), and Ray Bradbury ( Fahrenheit 451).

In the fifth chapter I look at a number of recent Russian texts that aim dystopian critiques directly at the totalitarian excesses of the Soviet system in Russia. Writing from perspectives of two or three decades after the death of Stalin, these texts differ from historical predecessors like 1984 in their post-Stalinist point of view, though they tend to suggest that the legacy of Stalin still haunted the Soviet Union as late as the mid-1980s. These texts also differ from their literary predecessors in their use of distinctively postmodernist textual strategies, typically taking comic and parodic stances despite the seriousness of the issues with which they deal. These texts include Boris and Arkady Strugatsky Roadside Picnic and The Ugly Swans, Andrei Sinyavksy The Makepeace Experiment, Vassily Aksyonov The Burn and The Island of Crimea, and Vladimir Voinovich Moscow 2042. I follow with a discussion of a number of Western postmodernist dystopian fictions, including Samuel R. Delany Triton, a number of texts by William Gibson, Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale, and Thomas Pynchon Vineland. 16 These texts demonstrate the effectiveness of dystopian fiction within the context of postmodernist techniques and attitudes.

Together, the six chapters that follow provide an introduction to the plots, scenarios, and concerns of many of the major dystopian fictions of the twentieth century. In addition, these discussions indicate the close kinship between the social criticism contained in dystopian fiction and that carried out by important modern social and cultural critics from Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud to Bakhtin, Adorno, and Foucault. Finally, the arrangement of these chapters should help to elucidate the relationship between dystopian fiction and developments in modern history, as well as suggesting a general shape

to the literary evolution of the genre of dystopian fiction during the past century.

NOTES