Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction E-Book
Annika Gonnermann
Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Mannheimer Beiträge zur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction focuses on the relationship between literary dystopia, network power and neoliberalism, explaining why rebellion against a dystopian system is absent in so many contemporary dystopian novels. Also, this book helps readers understand modern power mechanisms and shows ways how to overcome them in our own daily lives.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 777
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Annika Gonnermann
Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Tübingen
Umschlagabbildung by Franziska Oetinger, FENEBERG Design GmbH
© 2021 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de • [email protected]
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.
E-Book-Produktion: pagina GmbH, Tübingen
ISSN 0175-3169
Print-ISBN 978-3-8233-8459-5
ePub-ISBN 978-3-8233-0255-1
Inhalt
Thank You
The PhD road is long and winding and cannot be travelled alone. Many people have contributed to this project in many different ways and I would like to thank all of them. My sincerest thanks go to
… my supervisor Prof. Dr. Caroline Lusin, without whom I would never have embarked on let alone finished this journey; thank you for all the support, the kind words of encouragement whenever I needed them, the perfect work environment at the University of Mannheim and all your time and energy. I’m very proud to have been part of this team!
… my parents Peter and Brigitte Gonnermann, my brother David Gonnermann and my family, who encouraged me to choose this path and who have supported me through all these years of study.
… Christian Christiani, for being there always.
… Laura Winter, for all the hours of discussions we had about the right path to finishing our respective PhD projects.
… Lisa Schwander, Sina Schuhmaier, Stefan Benz and Stefan Danter for being on this journey with me.
… my colleagues at the Department of English Literature at the University of Mannheim: Prof. Dr. Christine Schwanecke for agreeing to co-supervise my project and Dr. Stefan Glomb for the intellectual input. A big thank you also goes to Barbara Magin, Anika Conrad and Dr. Philip Griffiths for their help and support.
… my friends Lucy Thompson, Laura Winter, Anna Lobmüller, Lena Geugjes, Johanne Hintze and Jonas Hock for proofreading hundreds of pages.
… to all the research assistants (Hiwis) in the English department, Michèle Benker, Annika Röckle, Jasmin Schnell, Marnie Hensler, Ruxandra Teodorescu, Antonia Hahn, Lea Exner, Alisa Dörr, Corina Santacruz, Filiz Altinkilic and Hanna Hellmuth for all the hours they spent in front of the photocopying machine for me.
… the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) for their support in the form of (research) scholarships.
… the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften and the VG Wort.
… Franziska Oetinger from FENEBERG Design GmbH for the wonderful cover design.
… Claudia Brendel from the University of Mannheim for helping me with the official requirements for finishing a PhD.
… Kathrin Heyng and her colleagues from Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG for their support during the publication process.
… and Dr. Susanna Layh and Prof. Dr. Gregory Claeys for their support and guidance.
“We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles.”
Karl Marx quoted in Jaeggi, Critique173
“The False, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better.”
Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models288
I.Introduction: Dystopia Today
If you are not already a little interested and open-minded with regard to social and political questions, and a little exercised in self-examination, you will find neither interest nor pleasure here. (H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, A Note to the Reader8)
In January 2017, George Orwell’s nearly 70-year-old classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) rose once again to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list (cf. Alter; also Kakutani). While this fact in itself is not surprising, since Orwell’s master piece “must be among the most widely read books in the history of the world“ (Gleason and Nussbaum 1) and has always had a stable readership, the timing is startling. Prompted by statements about ‘alternative facts’ uttered by Kellyanne Conway, spokeswoman to the 45th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, dystopia rose back into the spotlight, having been rediscovered by authors, filmmakers, and the general public apparently as a reading aid to decipher and make sense of our current socio-cultural reality.1 Other dystopias were also ‘rediscovered’ as analytical tool for a social diagnosis of our time. The 2017 series adaption of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), for instance, immediately received positive critical attention (including an Emmy win) for its blunt and terrifying description of religious devotion gone astray, with its visuals (red gown and supersize white bonnet) immediately adopted by the #Metoo movement and the defenders of abortion rights for women in both the United States and abroad. Fittingly, in the very same year, novels by Orwell, Atwood, and Erik Larson were distributed free of charge by an anonymous philanthropist as a means of education and “fight[ing] back” (Kean). While dystopia has always enjoyed a canonical place among Western literature and a loyal reader base, it is now firmly back on the agenda for literature, the media, and the public.
According to Darko Suvin’s ‘radically less perfect principle,’ dystopia is defined as
the construction of a particular community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships between people are organized according to a radically less perfect principle than in the author’s community; this construction is based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis. (reformulated based on “Theses” 188f., emphasis in the original)
These literary and radically less perfect communities always appear at the “great whirlpool periods of history“ (Suvin, Metamorphoses7)2 and react to “explicit or immanent socio-political defects” of the present (cf. Zeißler 9). Keith M. Booker agrees, stating that “the modern turn to dystopian fiction is largely attributable to perceived inadequacies in existing social and political systems” (Impulse20). Dystopia’s function, then, can be adequately described as formulating a warning “that if certain social trends go unchecked, the future will exhibit certain specific undesirable qualities” (Zaki 244; cf. also Tuzinski 88). It offers a “diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and – most importantly – a mapping of possible alternatives” (Suvin, Metamorphoses12).
As has been argued, classical dystopian fiction has recently attracted more interest from readers and scholars alike, as “[i]n this fake news, post-truth era, books like #TheHandmaidsTale, 1984 [sic!]3 and Brave New World have been our guiding lights” as @PenguinUKBooks tweeted (my emphasis). Yet although Orwell’s, Huxley’s, and Zamyatin’s satires on the current political tendencies of their times offer timeless lessons about totalitarianism, human rights, and the vindication thereof, it seems startling that an 21st century audience should try to make sense of their 21st century reality with the help of novels written over half a century ago, i.e. which are the “product[s] of the terrors of the twentieth century” (Moylan, Scraps xi). Since dystopias are always children of their time, their historical socio-political background must be considered. The dystopian novels written in the 1940s and 50s deal with fears and anxieties characteristic of post-war societies, influenced by the experience of state totalitarianism: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, “provid[es] some of the best known images and ideas of post-World War II Western culture” (Booker and Thomas 193; cf. also Atchison and Shames 36). Likewise, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1920) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) can be read as historic documents produced by a specific zeitgeist: while the former is “very much about certain ominous trends that Zamyatin sensed in the postrevolutionary society of Soviet Russia” (Booker, Impulse19), the latter is “directed at excesses that were already brewing in Huxley’s contemporary world” (ibid.). They warn and educate their contemporaries about what they have identified as problematic. Classical dystopian fiction is defined by its focus on state totalitarianism and the dangers associated with that: surveillance, oppression, torture, and human rights violations.
Therefore, the celebration of classical dystopian fiction as a subversive and revolutionary genre is startling, since these classical texts have long lost the ability to really shock anyone in the 21st century (despite the renewed interest in Big Brother et al.). As Guardian journalist Damien Walter observes
Dystopian visions used to present dire warnings of futures to come, now they seem more like pale reflections of reality. Today dystopia is just another category of light entertainment, a marketing niche for ebooks which even has its own channel on Netflix. Is this because we no longer have anything to fear? Or have our dystopian nightmares simply become reality? (“Reality TV”)
Concluding with the horrifying observation that “there are thousands of content consumers quite happy with Big Brother,” Walter’s article hits a nerve. People apparently love Big Brother. Moreover, they have turned Orwell’s sinister symbol of constant surveillance and oppression into a source of entertainment. Named after Orwell’s omnipresent dictator, the TV series Big Brother caused serious international outrage upon its first broadcast in the late 1990s (cf. Meier; cf. also Kammerer 104). Today, the series has a stable place in the repertoire of light TV entertainment and airs worldwide. Usually featuring a group of (celebrity) participants locked into a house for a certain amount of time, the series and the eponymous Big Brother narrator-figure invite audiences to 24/7 access into the life of the candidates (cf. R.J. Thompson and S. Allen), thus perverting the original intention of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This paradoxical interpretation of Orwell’s classic (celebrated base for resistance and, simultaneously, inspiration for the commercial exploitation of the audience’s voyeuristic potential) destabilizes the entire genre’s claim to represent an innovative source of critique about contemporary society.
Our familiarity with Big Brother, and the resulting weakening of the warning effect arise from the wearing out of genre materials due to the many uniform dystopias written and read ever since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, We, and Brave New World, which have served as templates and models other writers structured their radically less perfect societies on. Concomitantly, Christopher Ferns criticises the dystopian genre for its repetitiveness (cf. 130), while Ursula Heise laments the loss of topicality since these “visions of the future serve mostly to reconfirm well-established views of the present” (“Matter”). The result is that the genre has become standardised and that current bestsellers are “far from unsettling their readers” (ibid.). As Joanna Russ explains,
when writers work in the same genre, i.e. use the same big scenes or ‘gimmicks’ or ‘elements’ or ‘ideas’ or ‘worlds’ (similar locales and kinds of plots lead to similar high points), they are using the same fantasy. Once used in art, once brought to light as it were, the effect of the fantasy begins to wane, and the scene embodying it begins to wear out. (“Wearing” 47)
One could therefore get the impression that dystopian fiction has neglected one of the “commonplaces of the history of art” (ibid.), namely “that art changes when society changes” (ibid.). Readers, especially those interested in the dialogue between literature and culture expect the former to tackle and illuminate pressing social and political issues. Not only since the so-called ethical turn in the 1990s, literature should again “engage[…] earnestly with real-world problems” (cf. Gibbons). Yet, the literary production of dystopias seems to have declined that wish: the great majority of works – besides Cyberpunk4 and the Critical Eutopia/Dystopia as a progressive version of classical dystopian fiction – has missed the opportunity to adapt to the reality of the 21st century. As a consequence of our familiarity with popular tropes of science fiction, “these visions of the ‘new world’ no longer shock us, they do not strike our sensibilities” (Galtseva and Rodnyanskaya 294).5 By now, we have grown accustomed to Big Brother’s observing gaze – or as Jessica Winter pointedly maintains, “we are become Big Brother” (“Happens”).
Yet it is not only illogical to celebrate classical dystopian fiction as a “fruitful, constructive form of resistance” as it is currently done by booksellers, readers, and critics alike (cf. Kean) despite the apparent uniformity of the genre, but also dangerous. Literary scholars like Tom Moylan criticise, for instance, classical dystopian writing for its oversimplification of the current socio-economic and political reality:
The critical logic of the classical dystopia is […] a simplifying one. It doesn’t matter that an economic regime drives the society; it doesn’t matter that a cultural regime of interpellation shapes and directs the people; for social evil to be named, and resisted, is nothing but the modern state in and of itself. Even as late as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the state-run fire company that burns books and executes readers is foregrounded, not the processes of the reification and commodification that characterize the controlled society of Bradbury’s America. (“Moment” 136)
Moylan thus accuses dystopian fiction of having long ignored relevant processes of social, economic, and political dimensions, while having barked up the wrong ‘state’ tree. For him, criticism of state has been misguided for it ignores the basic living conditions in the West and around the globe. Similarly, Christine Lehnen comments on the changed reality in her survey Defining Dystopia (2015) and claims that at least in the West, “[t]otalitarian regimes have become so rare that it is surprising to find them so often in the new ‘young adult dystopian literature,’ particularly because it is read […] by young people who were born after 1990 and have never had any experience let alone contact […] with totalitarian governments” (131). Lehnen is right to identify the obvious paradox here: although totalitarian governments have largely disappeared from the socio-cultural reality of Western readers, they are still to be found at the centre of Western dystopian writing.6 In this respect, Zygmunt Bauman diagnoses the shortcomings of this type of dystopian fiction as follows:
We are naturally inclined to spy out in the contemporary arrangements of power a new and improved rendition of old and basically unchanged panoptical techniques. We tend to overlook the fact that the majority of the population has no longer either the need or the chance to be dragged through the drilling fields of yore. (Globalization49)
Having identified the wrong point of attack, i.e. dystopia’s continued focus on state structures and totalitarianism, Bauman continues to accuse dystopia of complicity.7 He insists that not posing the right questions, i.e. not addressing the most urgent issues, results in an escapist attitude legitimising the status quo: “not asking certain questions is pregnant with more dangers than failing to answer the questions already on the official agenda, [since] asking the wrong kind of questions all too often helps to avert eyes from the truly important issues” (ibid. 5; cf. also Schmeink, Biopunk67). In this respect, the classical dystopian genre is doing its audience a great disservice, since a great deal of dystopian fiction can be accused of “not asking certain questions.” Young adult dystopias like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008) are enormously successful yet ignore the fact that the basis for dystopian fiction has changed. Big Brother and his alternative facts are no longer a source of fear or warning.8 On the contrary: “[w]e have met Big Brother, and he is us” (Grossman). This leads Ulf Abraham to conclude that “these works of fiction seem rather old-fashioned and out-of-date. One could get the impression that dystopia – in itself the predecessor of historical [e]utopia – is already outdated” (125, own translation; cf. also Haufschild and Hanenberger 51).
The prevailing mood in both Western academic and public discourse seems to suggest that the continued interest of classical dystopian fiction – with its focus on political entities – is anachronistic for totalitarianism has disappeared from the socio-cultural reality of most Western readers. In fact, neoliberalism and globalisation have been gnawing away at the power and influence of Western nation states for decades.9 Many sociologists, political scientists, and journalists have analysed the descent of the nation-state, tracing its loss of influence and attributing the decline of nation states to an ever more powerful economic system fashioned according to the imperatives originated within neoliberal capitalism.10 For David Held (“Regulating Globalization,” 2000), the reconfiguration of national and international politics has started with the emergence of supranational structures and globalisation (cf. 396). He diagnoses that the “fate of peoples are determined increasingly by complex processes that stretch across […] borders” (ibid. 395). Reluctant to speak of the decline of nation states, Held asserts that while globalisation transforms the nature of national power, states remain powerful players of international standing.
King and Kendall offer a moderate opinion on this topic, stating that although the modern Western state has lost its power monopoly, it will also maintain its relevance:
Globalization, for example, with the growth of worldwide financial integration in finance, currency, capital and other markets, and the virtually instantaneous movement of huge private funds between territories, threatens domestic and popular democratic power. Multilateral and international governance regimes, and the rise of social, cultural and legal issues around human rights and ecology especially, also raise questions about, if not actually the demise of the nation state, then certainly the severe attenuation of its authority. (239)
Yet, others disagree: Ulrich Seeber argues that “economic globalization makes national structures increasingly superfluous” (“Nation” 56), while Anderson and Cavanagh embellish their opinion on the perceived decline of the nation state with impressive examples: “General Motors is now bigger than Denmark; DaimlerChrysler is bigger than Poland; Royal Dutch/Shell is bigger than Venezuela; IBM is bigger than Singapore; and Sony is bigger than Pakistan” (3), concluding that “[t]he 1999 sales of each of the top five corporations (General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, and DaimlerChrysler) are bigger than the GDP’s of 182 countries” (ibid.). The picture Anderson and Cavanagh paint is likely to be even more drastic today. After all, the world of 1999 had not yet seen the rise of global giants like Facebook, Google, and Co., today’s most prominent global and financial players, continuing to replace the power of states (cf. Grosser).11 To summarise, independent of political opinion or perspective, scholars agree that nation states “weakened by networks of money, power and information” (Ben-Refa’el and Sternberg 13) inevitably give way to global movements beyond their influence – the results being that “the life conditions of most citizens are deteriorating” (ibid.).12 As Darko Suvin diagnoses, “[w]e have gone through – the globe is still going through – a change of Leviathans that rule and subsume us” (“Reflections” 52). These new Leviathans (a term Suvin borrows from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan from 1651) are a “corporate capital substitute” (ibid. 58), global actors in a network of financial and economic ties, which have challenged the state’s monopoly of power – in real life and in dystopian literature.
This analysis aims to identify precisely this shift, from state totalitarianism to free market capitalism, in the focus and the agenda of the dystopian genre. It concentrates on five dystopian texts in particular which have reacted to Suvin’s new Leviathans, put them at the hearts of their dystopian realities, and thus have attempted to update the dystopian genre accordingly. These contemporary texts (all published after the year 2000) are especially progressive and subversive and push the boundaries established by classical dystopian fiction: Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013), Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015), M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).13 Next to the fact that all of these novels do no longer feature a traditional state and its representatives as antagonist but concentrate on free market capitalism as the source and origin of the dystopian world, they also surprise readers with the violation of further genre hallmarks. Noteworthy is the absence of rebels in all these novels, meaning that these texts omit the traditional subplot of resistance: rebellion against a dystopian system is either non-existent or side-lined to the margins of the narrative and thus into ineffectiveness. Furthermore, despite their differences in terms of genre, target audience, style and length, these five novels can be placed on a continuum which nicely shows the progress which has been made within the genre and how far dystopian fiction has deviated from the traditional core as exemplified by Nineteen Eighty-Four et al. To do so, the analysis will start with the novel closest to the typical dystopian schema (Eggers’ The Circle) and conclude with the novel which has trodden almost entirely new paths (Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go).
The initial impetus that has prompted this project was to offer an analysis of the effects the absence of rebels has on these narratives; to investigate the text-internal and cultural potential the changes listed above have on dystopian fiction; and to explore the complex relationship between the genre of dystopia and the formulation of criticism and alternatives. I will argue that by delving into the absence of rebels and dissidents, and thus by shrinking away from applying a simplistic black and white pattern of good and bad, these texts force readers to leave the well-trodden (analytical) paths of classical dystopian fiction and thereby try to rejuvenate the genre. Furthermore, written in the context of the latent Fukuyamaist notion of the ‘End of History’ and Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism,’ they do not offer ready-made intradiegetic alternative worlds and solutions (as classical dystopian fiction does), but urge readers to explore the possible alternatives to the dystopian world presented to them on their own. Moreover, they map out the contradictions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and thereby voice a critique based on ecological and ethical implications, highlighting the system’s destructive consequences for the planet and its human population. Ultimately, they modify and change the paradigms of the genre on a content level to be a more accurate reflection of the 21st century than the reflections of Orwell or Huxley – despite their timeless character – could ever be.
Very few researchers have yet paid attention to this new kind of dystopian fiction. The focus of critical research still lies on the reproduction of knowledge about classical dystopian fiction rather than examining the radical modifications of the genre. In general, most researchers limit their corpora of research to works of fiction produced before the year 2000. In his comprehensive work Die anti-utopische Tradition (2001). Stephan Meyer recapitulates the motif of the rebel and its defining quality for dystopian fiction by looking at novels published before the 1950s, thereby ignoring a vast proportion of the canon. Equally extensive but equally limited (in this case, to fiction written before 1980) is M. Keith Booker’s survey Dystopian Literature (1994). Moreover, Booker states that “[v]irtually any literary work that contains an element of social or political criticism” (3) can be classified as dystopian, including works like James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). His anthology thus deteriorates into a rather oversimplified account of the genre, lacking a clearly defined scholarly access to dystopian fiction. Also restricted to the classics and descriptive rather than analytical is Julia Hachtel’s Die Entwicklung des Genres Antiutopie (2007), which pays attention to Huxley’s Brave New World and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, among others. While David Stock (Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought, 2019) focuses on the intriguing history of dystopia and critique, he reduces his approach to books written half a century ago, with Katharine Burdekin’s (alias Murray Burdekin’s) Swastika Night (1940) as his most recent object of study. David Lorenzo uses dystopian classics to reflect critically on political beliefs and ways of life in his Cities at the End of the World (2014), yet equally limits his area of research to classical dystopian fiction. While the encyclopaedic surveys by Mark Bould (The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 2010), Gregory Claeys (The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, 2010), M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas (The Science Fiction Handbook, 2009) or Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, 2003) offer a thorough introduction to the classics of the genre, they focus on the canon, providing an introductory basis for those starting out in the field of research on utopian fiction.
Eckart Voigts-Virchow and Alessandra Boller are one step ahead. They include contemporary dystopian fiction in their study Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse – Classics – New Tendencies – Model Interpretations (2015) such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. However, they blur the generic definitions of post-apocalyptic fiction and dystopia too much when they refer to Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic nightmare The Road (2006) as ‘post-apocalyptic dystopia.’ The same is true for Worlds Gone Awry. Essays on Dystopian Fiction (2018) edited by Han, Triplett, and Anthony. While both Alessandra Boller in Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Dystopian Times (2018) and Elena Zeißler in Dunkle Welten (2008) have correctly identified the need for a new classification of dystopian fiction by advocating a focus on newer works of dystopian fiction such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) or even post-colonial dystopias such as Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow (1992), the latter’s structuralist approach remains unconvincing. Zeißler’s classification system differentiates, for instance, between feminist and postmodern dystopias, thereby ignoring the fact that these two categories might be applied at the same time. Christine Lehnen (Defining Dystopia, 2015) also attempts to redefine the genre. Having identified the generic boundaries as being too narrow and arguing for a re-negotiation of the genre characteristics, she opts to build her reader-oriented classification on the premise whether the didactic appeal is fully recognized by the audience – a rather broad and uncritical classification since almost any literature can be described as ‘offering a warning’ ever since Horaz defined its general function as ‘prodesse et delectare.’
Enlightening, however, is the collection of essays published by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan in Dark Horizons (2003). They critically engage with new developments of the genre outside the paradigm of state criticism. Tom Moylan is one of the first scholars to describe a paradigmatic change in dystopian fiction. His essay “State, Agency, and Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling” (2003) should serve as a rudimentary basis for the current project; it describes the transition from a state-focused critique to criticism focused on neoliberal capitalism, globalisation, and network-thinking, which shape the society at the beginning of the 21st century – tendencies progressive dystopian fiction undoubtedly reacts to. Also, Moyan’s work on the ‘critical utopia’ has undoubtedly influenced the ideas presented in this book.
While research usually focuses purely on the content of dystopian writing, the meta-analysis of forms of critique has thus far largely escaped scholarly attention. This is the reason why the following thesis has a second aim (besides offering an explanation for the absent rebels and tracing the change from state totalitarianism to free market capitalism dystopia): it will analyse the prevailing modes of formulating critique within dystopian fiction in general. The basis for this differentiation is to be found in Rahel Jaeggi’s Kritik von Lebensformen (2014; Critique of Forms of Life, trans. 2018), a philosophical enquiry into what constitutes ‘the good life.’ Her terminology offers the subtle nuances necessary for categorising the process of voicing critique and is thus perfectly suited for a detailed look at how dystopian fiction approaches the socio-cultural reality of the 21st century. Moreover, tracing the use of Jaeggi’s ‘external criticism’ and ‘immanent criticism’ in classical dystopian fiction and contemporary dystopian fiction respectively, this analysis will draw attention to a genealogical change in the formulation of critique within the dystopian canon. Connecting Jaeggi’s ‘immanent criticism’ and David Grewal’s ‘network power’ (Network Power, 2008), this analysis will examine the nature of power – a hallmark of dystopian writing – within free market capitalism. I will treat the dialectics between perceived freedom and actual freedom (‘voluntariness’) as a yardstick for deciphering oppression within seemingly free neoliberal societies, and offer an explanation for how and where coercion originates in systems that lack a Machiavellian centre of power.
After the introduction of both the etymology and history of dystopian fiction in “The Dystopian Genre,” the chapter “Context, Criticism, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life (2014)” will link classical dystopian fiction with ‘external criticism’ and demonstrate how this model is well suited to criticise structures like totalitarianism. In a second step, the analysis will juxtapose the tradition of classical dystopian writing to the texts produced at the beginning of the 21st century, ending with the observation that ‘external criticism’ is replaced by ‘immanent criticism’ within certain novels. By elaborating on the observation that the socio-cultural reality of the 21st century has changed dramatically (key developments include globalisation, neoliberal capitalism, and the resulting decline of the nation state), this analysis shall demonstrate how the construction and literary focus of selected contemporary dystopias published since the year 2000 has changed accordingly. Having set the necessary analytical parameters, the project will continue with the theoretical section which begins with the analysis of the five dystopian novels in question. By analysing the dystopian novels by Dave Eggers, Margaret Atwood, M.T. Anderson, David Mitchell, and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book aims to provide a critical approach to recent dystopian fiction that transcends its traditional genre boundaries. Afterwards, this study will conclude with a re-contextualisation of contemporary dystopian fiction within the wider framework of the utopian genre, introducing the terminology of ‘blueprint dystopias’ versus ‘iconoclastic dystopias,’ before discussing the eutopian potential within the dystopias defined by their absent rebels.
II.The Dystopian Genre
In order to comprehend the changes and generic modifications this work will examine, it is vital to understand the dystopian genre, its terminologies, as well as its complex history and intertextual relationships. This chapter will therefore provide a short introduction to dystopian fiction and a brief overview of the most important topics and themes, forms and functions of the dystopian genre before attempting to clarify the confusion associated with the terms ‘utopia,’ ‘eutopia,’ and ‘dystopia.’ The chapter “Context, Criticism, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life (2014)” will then conclude this section by introducing Rahel Jaeggi’s taxonomy of criticism, which provides the theoretical backbone necessary to structure not only the brief introduction to the three canonical novels by Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin but also the more extensive analysis of contemporary dystopian writing.
1.Genre, Etymology, and Definition of Utopian, Eutopian, and Dystopian Fiction
[T]here must be a link between the forms of literature and the ways in which, to quote Erich Auerbach, ‘we try to give some kind of order and design to the past, the present and the future.’ (Kermode 93)
Ever since Aristotle dichotomised literature into tragedy and comedy, literary studies have faced the challenge of generic analysis (cf. K. Williams 137). Even though genres are merely an artificial, constructed set of conventions and based on random categorisation, they and their boundaries are “obviously important,” as Zymner puts it crudely (7, own translation). In a similar manner, Darko Suvin argues
(1) that no field of studies and rational inquiry can be investigated unless and until it is at least roughly delimited; (2) that there exist literary genres, as socioaesthetic and not metaphysical entities; (3) that these entities have an inner life and logic of their own, which do not exclude but on the contrary presuppose a dialectical permeability to themes, attitudes, and paradigms from other literary genres, science, philosophy, and everyday socioeconomic life; (Metamorphoses16)
In an equal manner, Fredric Jameson goes on to define genres as “essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (quoted in Moylan, Impossible30). This social contract Jameson introduces has more than only one side to it: “like all genre fiction” (Russ, “Wearing” 46), dystopia is subject to certain rules and regulations, meaning that it “is a compromise” (ibid.) between generic conventions, reader expectations, and the writers’ urge to create something new. Properties of genres are, according to Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll, “elements of cultural memory and as such belong to the common knowledge of societies, which individuals acquire through socialization and culturalization” (17), meaning that readers have a fine sense for genre literature and concomitant elements. These conventions may not be underestimated since they “steer the reading process” (Wesseling quoted in ibid.) and therefore the expectations of readers.
Of course, one must always keep in mind that genres are contingent constructs, that is, cognitive maps based on artificial categories created by literary scholars. However, as Richard Taylor states, “[w]ith a clear understanding of existing categories a student of literature is better able to recognise essential characteristics and place individual works in relation to others of the same kind” (40).1 Emphasising the “essential characteristics” of genres, this quote presupposes a normative understanding of genres. Yet, scholars should be aware that there can never be a ‘right’ or ‘truthful’ definition of any genre, since genres are always the product of cultural discussion (cf. Zymner 10). Every new addition to an existing genre stimulates a dialectical process of renegotiating genre boundaries. As Suvin maintains, “[l]iterary genres exist in historically precise and curious ecological units, interacting and intermixing, imitating and cannibalizing each other” (Metamorphoses21). Genres are therefore to be understood as abstract organisms that adapt to their environments and are subject to change, re-evaluation, and modification with every new work of fiction that is added to an existing canon (cf. Abraham 43). The canon must therefore offer “durable frames of reference [to] accommodate change: the variations in plot, characterisation or setting in each imitation inflect the audiences’ generic expectations by introducing new elements or transgressing old ones” (Maltby quoted in K. Williams 137f.), yet stay true to a more abstract generic core.
Utopian writing is born at the crossroads of various genres: it is related, first and foremost, to both Science Fiction and post-apocalyptic writing, exchanging stock features, character constellations, as well as themes and symbols and thereby increasing the difficulty to differentiate between the genres.2 To achieve maximum precision in the analysis of current dystopian fiction, it is vital to initiate this project with an exploration of the factors that distinguish the three genres, before clarifying the generic convention surrounding the concepts ‘utopia,’ ‘eutopia,’ and ‘dystopia.’ This necessary but difficult categorisation provides the basis for a nuanced investigation into the agenda of contemporary dystopian fiction.
With his observations that dystopias appear “often in connection with science fictional and/or apocalyptic scenarios” (79), Rüdiger Heinze hints at the great generic confusion surrounding utopia’s relationship to science fiction – a nexus Darko Suvin captured under the term ‘literature of cognitive estrangement.’ Often dismissed as trivial and unserious literature, Suvin explores in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction the ways in which science fiction is “capable of achieving profound and probing insights into the principal dilemmas of political life” (Paik 1). He differentiates between naturalistic and estranged fiction, extending from the “ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness” (Suvin, Metamorphoses4). Consequently, he groups together those genres working within the mode of estrangement (a device similar to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt) calling it “an organon […] for exploring the novum” (cf. ibid. ix). This is where utopia, “both an independent aunt and a dependent daughter of sf” (Suvin, “Theses” 188; cf. also Paik 3), comes together with science fiction. Both provide “a shocking and distancing mirror above the all too familiar reality” (Suvin, Metamorphoses54). At the same time, science fiction and utopia are as fully “opposed to supernatural or metaphysical estrangement as [they are] to naturalism or empiricism” (ibid. 7), thereby erecting a barrier to other genres such as the Fantastic and the Gothic. Furthermore, both, utopia and science fiction, are interested in the present although they are set in the future (cf. Gold quoted in Amis 64).
As close as utopian writing is to its “niece and mother” science fiction, so undoubted is its kinship to another future-oriented genre, namely post-apocalyptic fiction (cf. Schoßböck 61; also Berger 9). Dystopia has much in common with post-apocalyptic fiction since both adapt, shape, and express fears and anxieties and “put forward a total critique of any existing social order” (Berger 7). Yet, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives mainly focus on the “imagination of disaster” (Sontag quoted in Booker and Thomas 53); or to be more precise, natural and man-made phenomena that bring mankind to the brink of extinction. Eckart Voigts talks about the disclosing quality of (post-)apocalyptic fiction, hinting at the original meaning of the Greek word ‘ἀποκαλύπτω’ (‘apokalypto,’ meaning ‘to uncover,’ cf. “Introduction” 5; cf. also Ketterer 5). Just like the biblical Book of Revelation, commonly referred to as ‘The Apocalypse,’ post-apocalyptic fiction often indulges in portrayals of Ulrich Beck’s ‘icons of destruction,’ “[n]uclear disaster, genetic engineering and ecological catastrophe” (Beck quoted in Lindner 374). Widely thought to have originated with Mary Shelley’s bleak last man standing narrative The Last Man (1826), post-apocalyptic fiction has particularly flourished in the nuclear age and after (atomic) pollution threatened the environment.3 Despite having been already declared dead, post-apocalyptic fiction still appeals to audiences around the world (cf. Mousoutzanis 461; cf. also Horn 12ff.) – especially on screen: while post-apocalyptic novels are again found on international best-seller lists (e.g. Emily St. Mandel’s Station Eleven, 2015; Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, 2000; or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, 2007), it is first and foremost TV-series like The Walking Dead, (2010–), blockbuster movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004, directed by Roland Emmerich) or I am Legend (2008, directed by Francis Lawrence) and computer games such as The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013) or – most recently – Cyberpunk 2077(CD Projekt RED, 2020) that fascinate millions of fans.
Striking, however, is that most post-apocalyptic fiction – other than dystopian fiction, for instance – does not work directly within the mode of extrapolating from the present. As Susanna Layh observes, most end time narratives from the late 20th century do not establish clearly identifiable causal-logical links between the pre- and post-apocalyptic society, but rather rely on general themes such as diseases and pandemic viruses as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes, flooding, or meteoric impacts (cf. 181). Thereby they ignore the search for explanations how the present could possibly turn into this future and thereby force the reader to direct her attention away from the search for causality towards the diagnosis of human relationships after the catastrophe (ibid.; see also Schoßböck 65, 85–96).4
Despite their difference in interest and objective, post-apocalypticfiction and dystopias are often mixed up and mistaken for each other, especially in the context of mainstream media. Even Margaret Atwood, acclaimed author of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, conflates the two genres: in an interview, she once said “[a]ll dystopias are telling you is to make sure you’ve got a lot of canned goods and a gun” (Interview with Higgins), thereby falsely attributing some sort of eschatological quality to dystopian fiction. Kunkel tries to formulate the differences between the two genres by hinting at the nature of the future described: on the one hand, “[t]he end of the world or apocalypse typically brings about the collapse of order; dystopia, on the other hand, envisions a sinister perfection of order. […] dystopia is a nightmare of authoritarian or totalitarian rule, while the end of the world is a nightmare of anarchy” (“Dystopia” 90, emphasis in the original). He thus correctly identifies the nature of “order” in the two respective societies as the defining element.
Although most people seem to have an intuitive understanding about the relational characteristics of eutopian and dystopian writing, these concepts are notoriously difficult to pin down in practice. This is due to two reasons in particular: their linguistic status as neologisms, and their generic co-dependency. In order to approach a reliable definition of dystopia, it is advisable to begin by analysing the etymological connection between eutopia and dystopia, starting with the former: ‘utopia’ has entered the English language as a book title, namely Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516. Originally used as a word play with the Greek language and its English pronunciation, i.e. between ‘ou-topos’ (no place) and ‘eu-topos’ (good place; cf. Seeber, Selbstkritik55),5 the word has migrated from one individual work to denominate the entire genre (cf. Assheuer 45; also Weber 5).6 Since its beginnings, utopia has commonly been used within literary studies to denote the description of an ideal society fashioned according to the views and opinions of its author.7 By contrast, dystopia is a much younger term. It was first documented in 1868, when John Stuart Mill used the term in a speech to the House of Commons (cf. Shiau). Its morphological structure, “dys” meaning “bad, abnormal, and diseased” (Vieira 16), and “topos” meaning place, yet is like Thomas More’s original neologism.
While the term utopia/eutopia has generally been accepted as proper terminology, scholars still debate about the appropriate denomination of its darker twin: numerous terms compete its supreme use within literary studies. Interestingly, these terms still use the neologism ‘utopia’ as their root (cf. Vieira 3). Konrad Tuzinski offers his readers a collection of the following terms, ‘pessimistic utopia,’ ‘apocalyptic utopia,’ ‘inverted utopia,’ or ‘Groteskutopie,’ before eventually settling for the term ‘devolutionary utopia’ himself (cf. 6f.); Peter Fitting records the use of ‘negative utopia’ as well as ‘anti-utopia’ (cf. “Short History” 126), while Elena Zeißler summarises the last 50 years of dystopian research and confusion of terminology by gathering even more possible terms – among them ‘Gegenutopie,’ ‘Mätopie,’ or ‘Cacotopia’ (cf. 15).8 Yet, Zeißler, eventually, settles for the term ‘dystopia,’ thereby following an emerging consensus within utopian scholarship. ‘Dystopia’ is not only recognised by a majority of readers and researchers alike but also “denotes a broader concept, allowing criticism of utopia, but also [deals] directly […] with contemporary social evils and posits thus an independent term far less linked with utopia/eutopia” (Mohr, Worlds28f.) – an advantage that other concepts lack for they are morphologically too close to the original neologism.
Increasingly, ‘dystopia’ has become the standard term. This consensus is reflected in the research by the most influential dystopian scholars, who all settle on the term, when attempting to define the genre boundaries. In Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), Tom Moylan defines dystopia according to its alignment to “militant pessimism [and] resigned pessimism,” whereas anti-utopia is defined by “despair” (157). However, he is careful not to give the impression of constructing a binary opposition between utopia and anti-utopia. Moylan argues for a continuum which stretches between the two poles – with dystopia being the “literary form that works between these historical antinomies and draws on the textual qualities of both subgenres” (ibid. 147, emphasis in the original). Whereas Moylan defines ‘dystopia’ as a hybrid structure, Lyman Tower Sargent reserves the term for a clear category of works. In “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), he writes that ‘positive utopia’ is defined as “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 considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (9), whereas ‘dystopia’ is defined as “a non-existent society […] intended [to be viewed] as considerably worse” (ibid.). Rejecting the idea of perfection as a definitional category because “there are in fact very few eutopians that present societies that the author believes to be perfect” (ibid.), he claims that the defining characteristic for his categories ‘eutopia,’ ‘dystopia,’ ‘utopian satire,’ ‘anti-utopia,’ and ‘critical utopia’ is authorial intention – while being aware that one can never be absolutely sure about it – and diminishes the readers’ role in assessing the text.9
Although both Moylan and Sargent offer convincing definitions for both ‘eutopia’ and ‘dystopia,’ this analysis follows the hands-on definitions offered by Darko Suvin, who constructs a taxonomy based on his ‘radically different’ principle. He defines utopia as “the construction of a particular community where socio-political institutions, norms, and individual relationships between people are organized according to a radically different principle than in the author’s community” (Suvin, “Theses” 188, my emphasis), thereby reserving ‘utopia’ as a categorial denominator that includes both eutopian and dystopian writing. He then goes on to differentiate between ‘eutopia,’ “organized according to a radically more perfect principle than in the author’s community” and ‘dystopia,’ “organized according to a radically less perfect principle” (ibid. 189). Yet again, the category of dystopia can be subdivided into ‘anti-utopia,’ a form that is “explicitly designed to refute a currently proposed eutopia” (ibid.), formulating a counter statement concerning utopias, and ‘simple dystopia,’ a more “straightforward dystopia, that is, one which is not also an anti-utopia” (ibid.). Suvin thus bases his taxonomy of dystopias on the question whether they explicitly attack eutopian fiction or not, thereby providing the most suitable theoretical framework for this project.
2.The History of Dystopian Fiction
The Golden Age is the most unlikely of all the dreams that have been, but for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the peoples will not live and cannot die. (Dostoevsky, A Raw Youth501)
Utopian fiction is a highly self-reflexive genre aware of its rich, dense tradition, its canonised conventions, and its modes of production and reception. To understand this genre, it is imperative to comprehend its intrageneric connections, relations and criticism as well as its long tradition reaching back to the very roots of Western philosophical thought, both in the form of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian spiritual writings (cf. Han, Triplett, and Anthony, “Introduction” 3).1 It permeates “a sense of [its] own specific tradition [i. e.] by the writer’s consciousness of what has gone before” (Ferns 16f.). Yet, as Bernd Schulte-Middelich asserts, not only authors are expected to be versed in the canonised conventions of the genre but readers are subject to the same high demands (cf. 40): utopian writing expects its audience to be well read in the tradition and history of both subforms, eutopia and dystopia. In order to fully grasp the rich allusions and ongoing intertextual debate about the nature of the radically different community, to borrow Suvin’s words once more, readers are advised to start their research at the beginning of the tradition (cf. Villgradter and Krey 353f.). Dating back to 380–370BC, Plato’s Politeia, a philosophical tractate written in the form of a Socratic dialogue, is one of the first fictional texts dedicated to the description of an ideal society that should secure a peaceful and perfected co-existence of all citizens of the state (cf. Pfister and Lindner 17; also Ferrari and T. Griffith xxiii.)2 This society is governed by so called ‘Guardians,’ an “enlightened elite of specially trained, philosophically minded thinkers” (Booker and Thomas 75) tasked to watch over the strict moral and conduct rules introduced to foster a radically more perfect society: “there is no end to suffering […] for the human race, unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or the people who are now called kings and rulers become, in the truest and most complete sense of the word, philosophers” (Politeia 175). Offering thoughts on the distribution of wealth, the institutionalisation of freedom, and the avoidance of oppression, Plato’s Politeia has been classified both as a work of moral and political philosophy (cf. Ferrari and T. Griffith xxiii), which continues to inspire political philosophy, ethics, and of course, utopian writing to this day.
Despite its roots in ancient Greece, eutopia’s modern formulations constitute “an extension of the Enlightenment belief that the judicious application of reason and rationality could result in the essentially unlimited improvement of human society” (Booker, Impulse4).3 Thomas More’s already mentioned fictional travel report Utopia (clearly written in the tradition of Plato’s Politeia, cf. Booker and Thomas 75) is thus usually considered to be the origin of eutopian writing. Reviving the tradition at the beginning of the 16th century, Thomas More invents the character Raphael Hythloday (i.e. speaker of nonsense) to describe an ideal state system, lecturing his intra- and extradiegetic audience on the ideal construction of a given society in terms of governance of citizens, distribution of wealth, or warfare (a badly hidden critique of England’s society in the 16th century; cf. Assheuer 45).4 Some ideas still resonate with contemporary readers, for instance More’s revolutionary claim that everyone should be provisioned with basic supplies, foreshadowing the current discourse about social welfare and benefits: “where all things be common to every man, it is not to be doubted that any man shall lack any thing necessary for his private uses, so that the common store, houses and barns, be sufficiently stored” (Utopia119). Moreover, his plea to introduce proto-communism in the rudimentary form of “equal and just distribution of things” can rightfully be seen as revolutionary for his times (cf. Grace 186f.; also Bruce xxi), challenging Christian doctrines and monarchy itself, and still attracts considerable attention within contemporary debates about the introduction of a universal basic income.
Yet, despite their origin as eutopias, both texts, Plato’s Politeia and More’s Utopia introduce a rather restrictive system of governance, annihilating individual preferences and imposing restrictions on nearly every aspect of human life, such as working and leisure time, marriage and even eugenics in order to secure a peaceful and functioning co-existence of all citizens (cf. Utopia89f.). Plato, for instance, writes that “the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible” (quoted in Petzold 333). Passages like these of course scare off 21st-century readers because they read like an instruction of livestock breeding and are hard to stomach for an audience familiar with the atrocities committed in the 20th century. The reason these texts are still being read is only because of the “historical-space-time of [the] text’s inception” (Suvin, “Theses” 189, emphasis in the original), granting them a certain benefit of doubt: although they have (partially) aged badly, they are still recognisably intended as explorations of radically more perfect communities and have inspired generations of writers to follow their example.5
Nowadays, More’s Utopia is recognised as the starting point of the development of various imaginary state descriptions, which have approached the phenomenology of the perfect city/state/community in their own respective ways, tainted by socio-cultural developments of their time of origin (cf. Weber 5; also Murphy, “Eutopia” 478). Customarily thought to be the most immediate reaction towards More’s work is Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) (cf. Pfister and Lindner 15). Regarded as a worthwhile addition to the canon, the unfinished text by the founding father of empirical science is characterised by a scientific approach to social and political problems and the imagination of “new sciences and technologies yet to become reality” (Mohr, “Eco-Dystopia” 283). It has been called “one of the most optimistic imaginative projections of the beneficial impacts that science and technology might have on human society” (Booker, Impulse5) because of its undivided focus on ethics and technology changing life for the better (cf. Murphy, “Eutopia” 479). “Bacon projects a highly specialized, unequal but affluent and efficient social order” (R. Williams 99; cf. Erzgräber, Utopie14) into his eutopia set on an isolated island reminiscent of Arcadia. His city is governed by a benign king, Solamona, who “was wholly bent to make his kingdom and people happy” (New Atlantis 165). Favouring the arts and sciences, the king founded the island’s first university:
Ye shall understand (my dear friends) that amongst the excellent acts of that king, one above all hath the pre-eminence. It was the erection and institution of an Order or Society which we call ‘Salomon’s House’; the noblest foundation (as we think) that ever was upon the earth; and the lanthorn of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the Works and Creatures of God. (ibid. 167)
Envisioning the structure and ideals of a modern university, Bacon celebrates the future as a world based on rationale and scientific discovery, devoted to the improvement of life. His fragment closes with a list of benefits science can provide, promising the production of “[a]rtificial minerals and cements” and “new foods,” but also “[t]ransplanting of one species into another,” and even the “prolongation of life” itself (ibid. 185f.). Again, passages like these show how close eutopia can be to dystopia – in this example, to nightmarish genetic experiments that exhibit an almost Frankensteinian dimension.
Yet this uncritical belief in the positive results of the application of scientific logic starts to crumble when the “maelstrom of the nineteenth century would dramatically transform speculative fiction” (Hammond, Cold War4). The end of the 19th century witnesses the ideological and literary deconstruction of eutopia as a concept (cf. Murphy, “Eutopia” 479).6 What is usually referred to as ‘dystopian turn’ denominates the slow process of ‘replacing’ eutopian with dystopian writing, that is a switch in popularity. While influential eutopias were, of course, still being written during that time – Edward Bellamy’s futuristic time travel tale Looking Backward: 2000–1887(1888) must be mentioned here – it is the 19th century that witnesses the rise of what Tom Moylan calls “literary utopia’s shadow”: dystopia “emerged as a literary form in its own right in the early 1900s“ (Scraps xi). In Erewhon (1872) for instance, – an anagram of “nowhere” and intertextual reference to More’s Utopia – Samuel Butler warns that “not all [e]utopias can be trusted” (Houston). His novel criticises the use of technology and banishes machines “altogether because of their tendency to tyrannize the men who made them” (Booker, Impulse6). Oscillating between an eutopian and dystopian mode, the anonymously published novel criticises Victorian society, the Church, and Darwinian theories of evolution (cf. Hug 55). Yet, the rise of dystopia is connected to two other names: H.G. Wells and his belief in social improvement and the satires thereof by E.M. Forster (cf. Seeber, “Handeln” 190). In fact, Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) depicts the fate of a degenerate human race living underground in isolation, entirely dependent on an omnipotent, God-like machine that runs the entire planet (cf. N. Wilkinson and Voigts 90):
By [Vasthi’s] side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter – one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. […] Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands […] Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured ‘O Machine! O Machine!’ and raise the volume to her lips. (“Machine” 8f.)
Criticising the “homogenisation of culture and elimination of personal freedom in totalitarian systems” (N. Wilkinson and Voigts 91), Forster’s text predicts a degenerative state humans find themselves in once they have transferred their agency to machines, thereby introducing topics that are to define the dystopian genre in the coming decades. In fact, Forster’s legacy has been stressed by various scholars. Acknowledging his pioneer work, Tom Moylan asserts that “Forster wrote against the grain of an emergent modernity” (Scraps 111; cf. also Zeißler 33) and based on Forster’s critical evaluation of humanity’s use of technology and detachedness of humans from nature, Graham J. Murphy claims that Forster’s short story “has the strongest claim to being dystopia’s originary text” (“Dystopia” 473). In short, with the dawn of the 20th century, it is the genre of eutopia that continues to lose “popularity and political efficacy” (Murphy, “Eutopia” 481) to its darker twin.
While Forster remains a pioneer of the genre, dystopia’s success story is associated with the names of three other writers: George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose respective texts have been identified as the ‘high priests’ of dystopian fiction.7 To this day, these titles are “still inseparably connected to the term dystopia” (Boller 3). Moreover, Tom Moylan argues that
as the socialist state or the consumer society claimed to have achieved [e]utopia, the more radical critique that the genre is capable of escaped into the mountains of negativity and re-emerged as the dystopia, the narrative that images a society worse than the existing one. In the great narrative works of Zamyatin (We), Huxley (Brave New World), Orwell (1984) [sic!], and others, [e]utopian figures of hope were transmuted into an attack on present social systems which claim to be already existing [e]utopias. (Impossible8f.)
Once dystopia had been established as a literary form, it “took its place in the narrative catalogue of the West and developed in several forms throughout the rest of the century” (Baccolini and Moylan, “Introduction” 1
