Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction

Thomas Horan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319706757
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book assesses key works of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, including Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, to demonstrate that the major authors of this genre locate empathy and morality in eroticism. Taken together, these books delineate a subset of politically conscious speculative literature, which can be understood collectively as projected political fiction. While Thomas Horan addresses problematic aspects of this subgenre, particularly sexist and racist stereotypes, he also highlights how some of these texts locate social responsibility in queer and other non-heteronormative sexual relationships. In these novels, even when the illicit relationship itself is truncated, sexual desire fosters hope and community.

© The Author(s) 2018

Thomas HoranDesire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian FictionPalgrave Studies in Utopianismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70675-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Thomas Horan¹

(1)

The Citadel, Charleston, SC, USA

End Abstract

In her excellent study Dystopian Fiction East and West, Erika Gottlieb (2001) asserts that twentieth-century dystopian fiction is partially defined by a terrible and irrevocable finality: “It is one of the most conspicuous features of […] dystopian fiction that once we allow the totalitarian state to come to power, there will be no way back” (p. 4). I argue instead that the major authors of twentieth-century dystopian fiction present sexual desire as an aspect of the self that can never be fully appropriated and therefore as a potential force for moral regeneration from within the totalitarian state. In a cross-section of twentieth-century dystopian novels, a sexual relationship gradually engenders revolutionary notions of social and personal responsibility. Though these sexual liaisons are frequently ill fated, they show that sexual desire has a propulsive ability to promote positive change even when both the sexual relationship and the resistance it elicits are curtailed. In this subgenre of speculative literature, sex works as a portal through which the citizen at the center of the dystopian world glimpses the idea of both political liberation and a transcendent human dignity.

To better denote how sexuality works in the particular type of dystopian fiction with which I am concerned, I have coined the term “projected political fiction,” which refers to speculative dystopian literature that is primarily political in focus. As Gordon Browning (1970) notes, authors of dystopian literature frequently project a political system or philosophy with which they disagree into a futuristic story:

The author is, in one way or another, commenting on the nature of his own society by taking what he considers the most significant aspects of that society and projecting them into an imaginary environment. This projection reflects the author’s dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, but not to the extent that it is a prophecy of doom or a warning that we must brace ourselves for a certain disaster. It is instead a warning accompanied by faith or at least a hope that the situation will be improved if man will only accomplish a certain series of necessary reforms. (p. 18)

Setting their stories in the future allows writers of projected political fiction to explore immediate political concerns on a grand scale. These stories not only reach forward through the uncertain darkness to cast an image of what may lie ahead but also widen the scope of that image to encompass all aspects of cultural, political, and economic life.

In light of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the USA, projected political fiction is ever more relevant to our daily lives. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, the subgenre seemed past its heyday. Dystopian fiction remained popular and vibrant but, as Gregory Claeys (2017) observes, its “political content” had “diminished” since the 1990s (p. 489). Its focus shifted to technological and environmental concerns. Dystopian novels were increasingly written for a young-adult audience and paid less attention to political philosophy. Amid the entrenched partisan divisions determining Western government policy, political concerns and their relevance to cultural and scientific anxieties have retuned to the forefront of dystopian literature. Recent novels such as Omar El Akkad’s American War and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, along with increased sales of and renewed interest in classic dystopias such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, indicate a remerging interest in the thematic and stylistic innovations of the projected political fiction of the twentieth century.

Dozens of projected political fictions have been written since the 1890s, but my analysis focuses chronologically on the seven most influential works of this genre from the twentieth century: Jack London’s Iron Heel (1908), Yevneny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). These particular books are foundational because they guided and shaped the development of this subgenre of dystopian fiction, changing forever the climate of Western political thought. Through these writings, words and phrases such as “Big Brother,” “Brave New Worldian, Doublethink,” and “Orwellian,” along with the concepts underlying them, became part of our common vocabulary.

These texts also exemplify the bias of Western political thought. The comparative paucity of acclaimed dystopian literature by nonwhite authors largely reflects the racism of the canon itself. Many nonwhite people did not have to imagine a political dystopia; institutional racism forced them to live in one. Fortunately, since the 1970s more dystopian literature by nonwhite novelists has been published and studied. Due to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia, most women and members of LGBTQ communities have undoubtedly felt at times that they face systems that are at best inequitable and at worst totalitarian. The same is undoubtedly true of non-Christians, particularly Jews, Muslims, and atheists. Given that my analysis includes three novels by women, at least one of whom was lesbian, I address concerns such as feminism and LGBTQ rights that are beyond my personal experience. These issues are as contested as they are crucial. As Sarah Webster Goodwin and Libby Falk Jones (1990) remind us, “One woman’s utopia is another’s nightmare; feminism itself takes on a range of meanings” (p. ix).

This ambiguity is manifest in the texts themselves. For example, while—like many critics—I read The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist novel, in her essay “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context,” Atwood (2004) herself does not couch her first dystopia in these terms:

I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view—the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things. (p. 516)

Rather than situating her first dystopia in relation to the work of other feminists, Atwood puts The Handmaid’s Tale in dialogue with Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life—in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale” (p. 516). Moreover, while I draw upon feminist analyses of Swastika Night, I investigate the potential that the novel vests in gay desir e.

Lyman Tower Sargent and Lucy Sargisson (2014) observe that classic dystopias testify to the liberating power of sex: “classic dystopias tend to suggest that sex is more powerful than the state” (p. 305), but they also concede the apparent limitations of this power: “Sex can take us a long way, but it cannot take us where we want to go” (p. 317). I argue that these novelists emphasize the enduring ethical value of sexual desire, which correctly orients us toward “where we want to go,” even when the novel concludes before the journey toward utopia has begun.

Authors of projected political fiction have frequently been linked in the past, but mainly through the question of their influence on each other. Zamyatin not only read London’s novels but also translated London’s work into Russian. Orwell, who read and favorably reviewed The Iron Heel before beginning Nineteen Eighty-Four, admired London’s critical perspective on what would ultimately be called fascism. He suspected that Brave New World was inspired by We. In a review of We which appeared in Tribune on January 4, 1946, Orwell (1946/1968d) writes: “The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it” (p. 72). According to Jerome Meckier (2011), Huxley would later deny having read We, both to Drieu La Rochelle and to Zamyatin himself in 1932 (p. 229). Others have pointed out intriguing similarities between We and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For instance, In Meckier’s opinion, “Orwell’s borrowings resurrected Zamyatin’s novel” (2011, p. 229). Atwood has acknowledged her debt to Orwell; and, as I discuss in Chap. 5, there is circumstantial evidence, though no conclusive proof, that Orwell may have been influenced by Sw as ti ka N ig h t.

I make a different kind of comparison by exploring how sexual desire provides an opening out of the rigid structure of totalitarianism in the work of all of these authors. Drawing on the ideas of various cultural and literary theorists, I discuss how the methodology developed by these intellectuals helps illuminate the ethical concerns embedded in dystopian narratives. Indeed, projected political fictions often anticipate concepts subsequently explored by prominent theorists, as William Steinhoff (1975) notes in his analysis of the thematic similarities between Orwell and Hannah Arendt: “Hannah Arendt shows beautifully how the essence of totalitarianism is its unlimited and consistent logic, and it is remarkable how Orwell anticipated her detailed analysis of the destruction of the human person and the manner in which ideology may turn into insanity” (p. 209). M. Keith Booker (1994) perceptively argues that writers of dystopian literature and theorists frequently respond to one another in their writings, forming a kind of interdisciplinary discourse community: “In this sense, dystopian fiction is more like the projects of social critics like Nietzche, Freud , Bakhtin, Adorno, Foucault, Habermas, and many others” (p. 19).

Despite the informal dialogues between authors of twentieth-century dystopian narratives and political theorists, projected political fictions are, even now, occasionally referred to as science fiction, since there is a tendency to refer to any narrative set in the future as such. Booker points out that there is no definitive way to differentiate dystopian literature from science fiction; the two genres are not mutually exclusive: “Clearly there is a great deal of overlap between dystopian 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” (1994, p. 19). As Booker observes, it is the author’s emphasis on political and social satire that distinguishes dystopian literature from classic science fiction. Like Booker, Claeys (2011) defines dystopian fiction in a way that succinctly differentiates it even from science fiction with dystopian or utopian features:

The term is used here in the broad sense of portraying feasible negative visions of social and political development, cast principally in fictional form. By ‘feasible’ we imply that no extraordinary or utterly unrealistic features dominate the narrative. Much of the domain of science fiction is thus excluded from this definition. (p. 109)

Projected political fiction is perhaps best understood as a form of soft science fiction with minimal science content.

Beyond placing the political ahead of the scientific, what defines projected political fiction as its own subgenre of dystopian literature ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Sexualized Proletariat in Jack London’s The Iron Heel
• 3. Redemptive Atavism in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We
• 4. The Sexual Life of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• 5. Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, a Gay Romance
• 6. Distortions of Queer Desire in Ayn Rand’s Anthem
• 7. Desire and Empathy in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
• 8. Ludic Perversions and Enduring Communities in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter