In Four
Voyages, published in 1507, Amerigo Vespucci reported that, on one of his
voyages to the New World, he had left 24 men at a fort on Cape Frio. One of
those men, Raphael Hythloday, set out from Cape Frio on a journey south through
various curious and unknown countries, until he reached an island separated
from the mainland by a man-made canal. This island was a realm called Utopia,
after its founder, King Utopus. Raphael spent some time in a country that
seemed to him most excellent in its organisation, until, after a few years, he
reluctantly decided it was time to return to Europe. There, in July 1515 in
Antwerp, he was introduced by the noted scholar Peter Giles to a visiting Englishman
who was taking a break from a diplomatic mission. This Englishman, Thomas More,
spent time talking with Raphael about his journeys and afterwards wrote it up
in a book he called Utopia.
There had been perfect places before, of
course. Heaven was the most widely known, the aspiration towards which all
Christians (which at the time was assumed to mean all Europeans) yearned. But
there were more secular versions, places like Hy Brasil or the Land of
Cockaigne, places in which rivers flowed with wine, in which meats and fine
food hung plentifully from the trees. A version of Cockaigne became the Big
Rock Candy Mountain, known to American hoboes of the Great Depression. They
were places of sensual pleasure and repletion, lands marked out by being the
diametric opposite of the hard life of famine and disease that was the daily
lot of those who dreamed of these places. And they knew they were dreams, they
knew they were forever out of reach, that was part of the attraction.
What marked Utopia out from these fantasies
of plenty was that it could be reached, and reached in two ways. Reached
physically: there was a long, arduous but supposedly practicable journey that
could get you from here to there. It was a journey beyond the abilities and
wishes of most people, but the idea was established that perfection did not
exist only in dreams or upon death, but here in the everyday world we all
inhabited. And it could be reached structurally: this perfection was not the
province of god or of fairies or some supernatural inversion of the natural
world, this perfection was achieved by rational men. If a safe, secure, happy
existence could be achieved by sensible human organisation in Utopia, then
sensible, rational men could achieve the same here.
Thomas More had been born in a time of war,
and had been raised amid the fears and disruptions caused by that war. When he
was seven years old he was part of the crowd watching as the new king, Henry
VII, rode into London fresh from his victory at Bosworth. At that point, within
his short lifetime, two Kings of England had died violent deaths. For More,
therefore, perfection was always equated with order. After the disorder of war,
the order of peace was desirable; and within any society, order was what
brought happiness. He went to his death because Henry VIII’s repudiation of the
Catholic Church was, to More, a repudiation of the natural and proper order of
society. Unsurprisingly, therefore, More’s perfect society was an ordered
society, modelled at least in part on monastical life.
Utopia was, to this extent at least, a
flexible thing, its character ever changing. As the religious conflicts of the
16th and 17th centuries began to change in character around the middle of the
17th century, becoming more political, so utopias became political. There were,
of course, fictional political utopias, as in Oceana by James Harrington, but more and more works of overt
political philosophy were taking on a utopian aspect, from Thomas Floyd’s The Picture of a Perfit Commonwealth to
Gerard Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom in
a Platform. The dominant form that utopian writing would now take was
political, influencing in particular those writers calling for radical or
revolutionary change, from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx.
By this time, fiction was becoming less
studiedly utopian. Utopias shifted away from unexplored corners of our own
world to the moon (The Man in the Moone
by Francis Godwin), to a parallel Earth accessible at the poles (The Blazing World by Margaret
Cavendish), into a future in which the Jews have recognised the true nature of
Christ thus signalling the Second Coming (Nova
Solyma by Samuel Gott). But inevitably the nature of these other locations,
or the means of getting there, became more interesting to both writer and
reader than the utopian situation found on arrival. As the Abbé
Raguet observed in 1702, utopias are inherently static because having achieved
perfection there is no change either possible or desirable, and hence utopias
are boring. Utopias would, of course, continue to be written throughout the 18th
and 19th centuries and well into the 20th century, but few writers solved the
problem of boredom. Indeed, most of these utopias were polemical in nature,
advocating for a particular cause, and these writers weren’t particularly
interested in solving the problem of boredom since they felt that the cause was
of more than sufficient interest for anyone.
***
But almost as soon as there were utopias
heralding the achievement of rational humanity, there were anti-utopias that
celebrated irrationality. One of the earliest of these anti-utopias, and
therefore a work that can be said to provide a template for the form, was Mundus Alter et Idem (Another World and Yet the Same) by
Bishop Joseph Hall. Published in 1605, it took its protagonist through the
grotesque lands of Terra Australis: Crapulia, a land of gross physical
indulgence; Viraginia, ruled by unruly women; Moronia, where the institutions
of the Catholic Church are imitated; and Lavernia, a land of thieves.
More’s original Utopia had been intended, at least in part, as satire, but in fact
the form was not well suited to satire. An ideal society can be held us as a
contrast to the disorder of quotidian existence, but it is not so easy to shape
it into a weapon attacking that disorder. To that end, the absurd and grotesque
caricature of the anti-utopia is a far more effective mode for satire. Thus the
great satires of the 18th century, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest
Proposal”, were anti-utopian in character.
Utopias continued to be written, of course,
usually to advocate for some particular ideal. For instance, the rise of
feminist and suffragist movements towards the end of the 19th century produced
a rash of stories about female-run societies that were invariable utopian in
character, such as Legions of the Dawn
by “Allan Reeth” and Herland by
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Similarly, the varieties of socialist thought that
arose during the latter part of the 19th century each produced their own
notions of utopia, from William Morris’s bucolic News from Nowhere to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a work that was so successful that it spawned
hundreds of Bellamy Clubs to discuss the utopian ideas it contained. But though
forward looking in their aspirations, these were all old fashioned in their
approach, and despite the few that have survived (Gilman, Morris, Bellamy) the
vast majority of the utopias written at this time sank without trace. Meanwhile
anti-utopias continued to be deployed satirically, though their excess
grotesquerie tended to detach them from reality and from their utopian
wellspring.
***
It wasn’t until the early years of the 20th
century that utopian fiction was given a new lease of life. In fact there were
two changes that happened just a few years apart, one was a reinvention of
straightforward utopian fiction, and the other was a remaking of the
anti-utopia into something very different, the dystopia. Both these changes
stem, I think, from an encounter with the modern, both the literary modernism
of Henry James and Virginia Woolf and their confreres, and the technological
modernism that wrought devastating changes upon war and politics.
I should point out that if the reinvention of
utopia seems to come largely from literary modernism, it was not without an
acute awareness of the effects of war and politics on the modern world. And if
the emergence of the dystopia seems to emerge out of the horrors of warfare and
totalitarianism, the influence of literary modernism can still be traced
through its course.
Let me first and briefly look at the emergence
of the modern utopia, before turning to spend a little longer considering the
creation of the dystopia.
The horrors of the First World War, the
mechanised warfare he had already partly foreseen in “The Land Ironclads” and The War in the Air, and the rise of
totalitarianism, all fed into the mix from which any future utopia must grow.
But again and again throughout the rest of his career Wells would return to the
image of utopia as process rather than achievement. It was there in fiction
such as The Shape of Things to Come
as much as it was in his non-fiction, such as his advocacy for the League of
Nations.
More importantly, all subsequent utopian
fictions, up to and including more ambiguous works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, reflect the idea that utopia is
not a final achievement, but a process of trial and error, a striving towards a
goal that is forever retreating from us.
***
But although utopia was reinvigorated by this
new sense of movement, by the notion that utopia was not an unchanging monolith
about which all the author could ever do was provide a guided tour, but rather
something fluid and changeable into which plot and story could be woven, utopia
in the 20th century was still overshadowed by its upstart twin, the dystopia.
If dystopia emerged from the horror of modern
war and the threat of totalitarianism, then we first have to consider its
absence.
The first modern war was the American Civil
War, which saw mass slaughter on an industrial scale. In one day at Antietam,
more Americans were killed in battle than in all future wars up to and
including D-Day combined. There was trench warfare, there were battling
ironclads, there was the precursor of the machine gun; yet the Civil War
produced no dystopian fiction. Why this might be is not altogether clear, but
my feeling is that America was not philosophically prepared for the patterns of
thought that produced dystopias. What underlies most dystopias is the idea of
an authoritarian body – the state, the military, a corporation – conspiring to
rob the individual of rights, of identity or of worth. But in America at the
time of the Civil War transcendentalism still held sway, a philosophy that
proclaimed the inherent goodness of people and of nature, and that the
institution could not long stand in majesty over the self-reliance of the
individual. The popular response to the Civil War, therefore, was largely
sentimental: shock at the scale of the slaughter, mourning for the individuals
lost, a rash of ghost stories in which those individuals returned. But though
the war was seen as an aberration in the natural goodness of the world, there
was no perception of the state as a giant machine crushing the individual.
Five years after the end of the Civil War
another war in Europe produced another shock to the system. The Franco-Prussian
War, and the events of the Paris Commune that followed it, changed the world
order. The unification of Germany under the imperial rule of Prussia ushered a
new military power onto the world stage, threatening the existing Great Powers
of Britain, France and Russia that had maintained the peace in Europe since the
defeat of Napoleon. And the German Kaiser was portrayed as exactly the sort of
autocrat whose inhuman monstrosity spelled doom for the individual. Allied
propaganda during the First World War, which showed German soldiers bayonetting
babies, for instance, made Germany out to be the soul-crushing military machine
typically found in dystopias. Yet, again, there were no dystopias.
This case is actually more subtle and more
interesting than the American Civil War, because what German unification did
result in was a mass of invasion stories, typified by George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking. Such stories
remained immensely popular right up to the First World War (When William Came by Saki appeared in
November 1913). And their popularity was not confined to Britain; variations on
the invasion story appeared in France, America (where the threat was sometimes
of British invasion), and even in Germany. Such stories are not strictly
speaking dystopias, though they might be considered precursors to dystopias, or
at least to that branch of dystopia in which Hitler won the Second World War.
What they are, rather, is propaganda, a sustained call for increased military
spending, for compulsory military service, for rearmament, or for any other
plan the author might have to increase readiness for a war that would in time
come to seem inevitable. As such they play a small but not insignificant part
in the arms race that characterised the years leading up to the First World
War.
Such invasion stories fed directly into both
science fiction and spy fiction; The War
of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and The
Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers both emerged from and in response
to the invasion story. Their part in the development of the dystopia is less
immediate and less overt.
Two further events were needed for the emergence
of the dystopia: the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
The First World War destroyed faith in a
way that the American Civil War did not. Yes, there was an explosion in
spiritualism immediately after the war, a hunger for contact with the dead, but
this was not a spiritual renewal. Every family in Britain, France, Germany and
much of the rest of Europe had been directly affected by the war. So many men
were killed that the old social order could not be restored. The First World
War put women into the workforce, and gave them the vote; it ended the power of
the landed gentry, since there was no longer the workforce available to sustain
their estates; it generated discontent with the political system that had
resulted in the war, and hence gave rise other political forces, notably
fascism and communism. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman
Empires brought disorder and unrest to Central Europe and the Middle East,
storing up conflicts that would not be long in emerging. In the immediate
aftermath of the war there was an economic boom that made the 1920s into a
decade-long party; but the economic consequences of the war festered long and
resulted in the collapse of the 1930s.
The First World War was not an aberration
in the natural world order, it was an evil, a moral, political and social
wrong, and someone had to be to blame. Everyone laid the blame on a different
group: Jews or bankers, governments or the people, aristocrats or hidden
conspiracies. How the blame was apportioned didn’t matter, what mattered was
that people were now able to think in terms of powerful secretive cabals
running the world according to some hidden agenda, while you and I and everyone
else was simply a cog in their machine. When you remember that this image found
direct expression in such dystopian films as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis it is clear that somewhere in
the aftermath of the war and the revolution the impression had arisen that the
worth of the working man had been devalued by those in power. They had been fed
into the machine of war, and now they were being fed into the machine of
industry.
Anti-utopias had used grotesque images to
poke fun at the world, but now the world itself had become grotesque and it was
not fun any more. The response, perhaps the only possible response, was to
transform the anti-utopia into a form that reflected the sense of helplessness
in the face of the horrors unleashed by the modern world.
***
The second and more immediate trigger of
dystopias was the Russian Revolution, out of which emerged the first
significant dystopia: We by Yevgeny Zamiatin.
The Revolution was itself a response to the chaos of the First World War, but
the nobility of its stated aims, equality for all, was belied by its use of
civil war and terror. Moreover, it did not take long before it was apparent
that equality was to be achieved not by elevating the individual, but by
crushing individuality into a dull uniformity. This is reflected in Zamiatin’s
novel, in which the protagonist, a number not a name, is subjected to constant
state surveillance, and when the power of love generates some individuality in
him it is forcibly removed by the greater power of the state.
That We
was the model for all future dystopias is almost literally the case. When the
manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West, one
of the first reviews of the book was written by George Orwell. And he, of
course, re-used the plot of We in his
own dystopian novel about the power of the state to crush the individual, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Echoes of We resurface also in the great American dystopia
of the same period, One by David
Karp.
The all-powerful state was not necessarily
communist, of course. Another version of the soul-crushing faceless state is
encountered, for instance, in Franz Kafka’s The
Trial, which perhaps stands as a hybrid between dystopia and absurdist
anti-utopia. Nevertheless, the all-powerful and dehumanising state,
characterised in Orwell’s terms as a boot stamping on a human face forever, did
tend to reflect a fear of and antipathy towards communism in many of the dystopias
from the middle years of the 20th century. Later, in the same way that utopian
fiction came to serve as a platform for particular ideas and movements, so
dystopias were adapted for specific causes, the feminist dystopia of Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for
instance. Even so, the model adopted by these later dystopias is recogniseably
the same one we have found in We and Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I tend to
identify them as part of the same branch of dystopia.
In contrast there is another branch of
dystopian literature that started to appear a little later. The Soviet Union
established a totalitarian regime of the left, one that Western governments ,
particularly after the Second World War, viewed with alarm. It was a world
order that, if it got its way, would be all-encompassing and leave the
individual no way out of its Kafkaesque coils. So this branch of dystopia
tended to emphasise the helplessness of the individual in the face of the
all-powerful institution. But for a while the more successful totalitarian
regimes in Europe were on the right: the fascists in Italy, the Nazis in
Germany, the falangists in Spain. And since the atrocities of Nazi Germany in
particular were more quickly and more widely known than the Gulags of the
Soviet Union, this generated its own form of dystopian fiction.
The earliest of these fascist dystopias
appeared even before the Second World War, perhaps the most notable of them
being Swastika Night by Katherine
Burdekin (originally published as by Murray Constantine). While Western
governments had identified the Soviet Union as an enemy state from the moment
of its inception, those same governments were still trying to appease Nazi
Germany, despite Germany’s aggression, Hitler’s violent rhetoric and his overt anti-semitic
attacks. In common with a number of other anti-fascist dystopias that appeared
in the late-1930s, however, Swastika
Night argued that Nazi Germany could not be normalised by taking Hitler at
his word when he spoke of a thousand-year Reich. This dystopian state is shown
to be ruthless, violent, vile in its treatment of women and minorities, but it
is also shown to be crumbling from within due to its own contradictions.
Some of the communist dystopias and their
ilk, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and
The Handmaid’s Tale, include
suggestions that the regime within the body of the novel has subsequently
collapsed. But that collapse happens outside the timespan covered by the novel;
within that focus the regime is invariably monolithic, unchallenged and unchallengeable.
The stories tell us about the tragedy of the individual caught within this
trap; and the stories are invariably tragedies, for the individual there is no
escape. The fascist dystopias, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on the
fragility of the state, and though the individual caught up in it may go
through torments, there is always the prospect of redemption, renewal, escape.
In the main what we take away from this
branch of dystopian literature is how easily the Second World War might have
turned out otherwise, or (in “Weinachtsabend” or in Farthing by Jo Walton) how readily British politicians would have
accepted Nazi rule. But no matter how cruel and authoritarian the regime might
be, it is patently not the monolith we encounter in the communist dystopias.
And where there is fragility there is an opportunity for the hero, who is often
portrayed as that symbol of integrity a detective, as in Farthing, SS-GB by Len
Deighton, or Fatherland by Robert
Harris, to uncover the secret that could bring down the whole regime, or at
least rescue one person from the horrors.
***
What I am proposing, therefore, is that
since dystopia emerged early in the 20th century as a counter-argument to
utopia, two main strands of dystopian literature have developed. There are,
undoubtedly, other individual dystopias that do not fit fully or easily into
either of these patterns, but for now I think that the two strands I have
identified are dominant.
In the one that I have characterised as
“communist dystopia” the focus is upon the tragedy of the helpless individual
in the face of an all-powerful entity. This entity may be, and usually is, a
government, though it could as easily be a corporation, as in The Circle by Dave Eggers. Generally,
though not always, there is no way out for the individual, to be an individual
is to be a victim in the face of what the modern world has wrought.
The other strand, which I have
characterised as “fascist dystopia”, offers the hope of heroism, the chance of
escape, because what we see here is that the institution is never as
all-powerful as it pretends to be. The very brutality of the regime is liable
to be exaggerated simply because it is disguising a fatal flaw, as for instance
in Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood, and
those who survive the brutality, or find a way to circumvent it, may also find
a way to exploit the weakness. Inevitably, as dystopian scenarios have been
adopted for Young Adult fiction such as The
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, it is this strand of dystopia that has
been chosen, because it allows the focus to be not on the horrors of the regime
but on the heroism of those who find a way to subvert or escape it. Where, in
communist dystopias, to be an individual is to be hopeless, in fascist
dystopias, and particularly in the YA variants on the theme, to be an
individual is to represent hope.
