Character and Dystopia

The Last Men

Aaron S. Rosenfeld

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000173192
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Letteratura
• Sous-sujet: Critica letteraria

This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West's A Cool Million, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry's The Giver, Michel Houellebecq's Submission, Chan Koonchung's The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King's An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia's politics, this book's approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.

Section II
De-forming Character

4 The Last (Hu)Man(ist)

We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword puzzle fans.

(Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn [2:59])

Humanism in Crisis

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

While Orwell shares the Enlightenment’s commitment to a human-centered world, he resists the universalizing of abstract reason. “We are a nation of flower-lovers,” Orwell writes, “but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword puzzle fans” (2:59). The English character, defined by hobbies and private, unofficial passions, keeps a bit of self safely tucked away like Winston’s coral encased in glass. Though Orwell commits to analysis of the economic and political relations that shape character he also tends to essentialize a putatively organic national character. As a novelist, Orwell’s version of liberal humanism seems to see organized politics not as an extension of the human, but as its enemy. When politics does impinge, it is destructive rather than creative.⁵

Flight from abstraction grounds Orwell in a nostalgic, romantic tradition of humanism. Tony Davies, in his survey of humanist thought, describes a “English liberal humanist” branch of the broader humanist tradition embodied by novelists like E. M. Forster. This version is, according to Davies, “small-scale, individualist, suspicious of big theories and sweeping solutions,” and prone to value “modest affiliations of friendship and the claims of personal loyalty … over the regimented compulsions of system, movement or cause.”⁶ At its center is a private human who is imposed on by politics of any sort, who puts his faith not in Enlightenment reason but in gut feelings, empirical observations, and common sense. Of course, this is the same humanism Jameson rejects in an often-quoted passage that notes the reactionary tendency of such an ideology:

Not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of the type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they “had” individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.⁷

Regardless of whether or not such a subject ought to exist, in novels it is clear that it does. Sentiments such as Jameson’s become part of the threat that humanist writers sympathetic to the left, like Orwell, presciently dig in against. Orphaned by jack boots on the right and dialectical materialism on the left, Orwell and his last men fight a rear-guard action to preserve a mystified version of the human that retains its allure.

Orwell is simultaneous progressive and reactionary, granting human status to those outside the circle of his affiliation—see, for example, “Shooting an Elephant”—but also defensively withdrawing into the imagined community of national culture. This tension between a cosmopolitan vision of universal rights and local commitments that inevitably privilege certain groups, individuals, or values over others is not easily reconciled. Orwell’s humanism acts as a mechanism for negotiating these contradictory poles. The human is irrational, flawed, sometimes petty, and wrong-headed. These qualities define an imperfect being who cannot be measured, only evoked by literature and the arts, or by residual sentiment that blurs the ideological boundaries often relied upon by sociology and political philosophy. It is a humanism that insists on a kind of messiness, in which the human must be viewed in action, in shifting, poetic consciousness rather than as fixed quantity.

Davies names “the sovereignty of rational consciousness, and the authenticity of individual speech” as the essential elements that cut across humanism’s many varieties.⁸ This formulation emphasizes humanism’s connection between the worlds inside and outside. Similarly, M. H. Abrams focuses on humanism’s investment in nineteenth-century ideas of human-directed progress, defining humanism as concerned with “thinking and feeling agents who manifest intentions and purposes and have some measure of control over, and thus responsibility for, their own destinies.”⁹ Philosopher Frederick Olafson concurs, positing the human as requiring both inner life and the means of realizing at least parts of that life in the world. The constitutive features of “being-in-the-world” “range from the form of temporality that involves distinctions among past, present, and future … to an ordering of our lives in terms of alternative possibilities and not just causal sequences.”¹⁰ As noted in Chapter 1, Knights and Willmott place autonomy at the root of humanist self-definition, as “a way of imbuing the world with a particular meaning (or meanings) that provide a way of orienting ourselves to the social world.”¹¹ What Davies, Abrams, Olafson, and Knights and Willmott call the essential aspects of humanist experience are exactly what dystopia excises. The autonomous subject is forward-facing, but end-of-world-time denies both past and future; the ordering of lives becomes an external function of the state; rationality of consciousness isolates the subject from the world; individual speech is either corrupted, or unintelligible outside the mind (or diary) of the speaker. In dystopia, free, feeling, thinking, and speaking subjects in possession of a rich and dynamic interiority that secures them to a world-still-becoming become an endangered species, a singular, rather than categorical phenomenon.

This chapter treats the pressures modernity, both as period and aesthetic, puts on the literary version of humanism as a primary shaping force on dystopia. Much of the dystopian writing in this study traces its ancestry through a moment at the turn of the twentieth century when the old sort of human was being reformulated by modernist aesthetics. In the political sphere, Marx’s deterministic history challenged the view of an unencumbered, thinking, feeling individual living in an open-ended world. In the economic sphere, machine production became the norm, inspiring competing visions of crystal palaces and factory hells. But just as importantly, new aesthetic modes remade the discourse of the human, in what Paul Sheehan calls a process of “complexification” that subjected traditional narratives to “relentless pressure.”¹² Both nineteenth-century naturalism and early-twentieth century high modernism tend toward an anti-humanist aesthetic; naturalism restricts free will within a deterministic setting, while the modernisms of T. E. Hulme, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Yeats pursue an aesthetic cleansed of romanticism’s sentimental attachment to human experience.¹³ In “Humanism and the Religious Attitude” Hulme rejects romanticism because it “confuses both human and divine things, by not clearly separating them … introducing in [human relations] the Perfection that properly belongs to the non-human.”¹⁴ If Eliot and his cohort’s reactionary yearning after cold classicism represents the literary future, Orwell and the dystopians respond by indulging their own reactionary nostalgia for a bourgeois, private individual who is endangered from the political left and the right, and from aesthetic discourses both immediately in front and behind. Then, in order to defend against the anti-humanist poetics of both naturalism and modernism, dystopia’s deformation of the formal codes that produce the modern subject recur to romantic humanist formulations.

Olafson frames the nostalgia inherent in modern humanism as “a response to the fact that the achievements in which it takes such pride have been in danger of being lost, destroyed, or simply forgotten.”¹⁵ F. T. Marinetti’s Zarathustran exhortation to his countrymen to “murder the moonshine,” to sweep away the culture and sentiment of the past and make way for a new breed of machine/flesh hybrid supermen, exemplifies an extreme version of the new modernist aesthetic in its celebration of the collision of a new “hard” modernity with the “soft” human of ages past. It is both a collision of philosophy and form. Marinetti’s famous phrase, “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot … is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” (49) explicitly rejects human form in favor of the machine. In “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine” (1911) Marinetti lays out his program for emancipation of the human from the past: “we must admit that we look for the creation of a nonhuman type in whom moral suffering, goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, sole interrupters of our powerful bodily electricity, will be abolished” (99). For Marinetti, the machine is the measure. Rejecting the feminine, both as object of desire and as creative force, he offers a parthenogenetic fantasy of masculinity. Transformed man has no sentiment, rejects family and bonds of affection, and devotes himself to caring for the machines that increase his power. He is a lover of machines, but also himself literally a machine, a sensation circuit without pity: “friction of the epidermis is finally freed from all provocative mystery” of Amore (100). In the techno-romanticist porno-fantasia Mafarka the Futurist, Marinetti imagines just such a being, born out of slaughter, rape, and the violent melding together of man and machine.

It is important to observe that the “human” the dystopia preserves is a form of resistance as much as positive ideal. The development of a humanism nostalgic for organic roots is dialectically inseparable from the development of threats to...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Section I Background
• Section II De-forming Character
• Section III Dystopian Variations
• Works Cited
• Index