Anti-utopia and Dystopia

1. Anti-utopia and Dystopia George Orwell and Anthony Burgess

2. Utopia(n) • Gk. ‘outopia’ (no place), with a pun on ‘eutopia’ (good place) • Description of a perfect and desirable society • Plato, The Republic (c360BC) • St Augustine, The City of God (413-27) • Thomas More, Utopia (1516) • Can be serious, satirical, visionary • ‘Science fiction’ (Gray)

3. Definition of Anti-utopia • Usually treated as synonyms, but: • Anti-utopia: appears or intended to be utopian but flawed (counter-utopia) • Dystopia: does not intend to be utopian • ‘an unpleasant imaginary world, the opposite of utopia’ (Gray)

4. General features • Description of an undesirable society • Set in the future • Criticism of current society • Extremely bad life conditions • In broader terms it signifies the fact that certain fields of experience are not accessible with the use of traditional realist prose writing. Usually it represents a form of allegory or parable and may contain moral implications. (Bényei)

5. Context in English Fiction • World War II, fear of invasion, fight against Fascism • Group of Christian writers at Oxford university: JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams. • The war and the fight against Fascism is represented in apocalyptic terms: a metaphysical fight between Good and Evil. • Examples: Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve (1945), Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961), Alan Burns, Europe After the Rain (1965), Kingsley Amis, Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980).

6. Context in English Fiction (cont) • Fear of nuclear holocaust (“holocaust” also: “nuclear catastrophe” in English) • First examples: Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (1949), John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955), John Bowen, After the Rain (1958). • Flourishing after 1960: Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (1969) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), JG Ballard, The Drowned World (1962), Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (1969), Martin Amis, London Fields (1989)

7. Context in English Fiction (cont) • fear of a uniform society/mass culture (by the cultural elite) • identity crisis: the end of innocence; the breaking up of old ties in English society; mutual distrust of people lost in a faceless crowd. • Example: Evelyn Waugh, Love among the Ruins (1953)

8. Context in English Fiction (cont) • fear of erosion of personal autonomy in a totalitarian/bureaucratic society. • question: dictatorship of anti-intellectual mass culture, or boring egalitarianism of a welfare society. • both meet in the symbol of the television. • a symbol of consumer society in which the main value is purchasing and possessing consumer items. • TV screens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948).

9. Context in English Fiction (cont) • The same dilemma in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962) • There is no ideology to rebel against. The people are kept in a constant inertia by the indifference of a consumerist world. • Alex’s gang represents violence: • they revolt against state dictatorship • their violent acts are exploited by the state so that the people who are living in fear stay indoors and spend their evenings watching TV.

11. George Orwell • Eric Blair (1903-1950) • ‘Orwellian’ • propaganda, • misinformation, • manipulation, • state control

12. Nineteen Eighty-Four • ‘The Last Man in Europe’ • 1980, 1982, 1984 • Big Brother is watching you! • Thought Police • Doublethink • War is Peace! • Two minutes’ hate • …

13. Conventional reading?

14. Conventional reading • allegoric tale of an individual’s fight against a totalitarian state power • in Eastern Europe: a criticism of communist dictatorship, was banned from circulation (samizdat)

15. Conventional reading (cont) • conflict between “common sense” v. “ideology” • the reasonable inner world of the individual v. the unreasonable invasion on this private world by the totalitarian state machinery (TV screens, ‘Big Brother is watching you!’). • the first is valuable and the second is seen as destroying this value. (In this sense the book is central to the English tradition of novel writing, which is the voice of common sense • voice of democracy ------------ political oppression • voice of fair play ------------ dictatorship • voice of reasonableness ------------- critical theories.) • a defence of liberal humanism against dictatorship

16. Other readings?

17. Other readings • fear of totalitarian bureaucracy and propaganda (propagandist at the BBC) • fear of the rise of a leftist intelligentsia • post-nuclear holocaust world • uniformity of the “lean years” after the war (concrete blocks, shortage of resources, food rationing) • ideological indifference after the war (Julia) • cold war (England is ‘Airstrip One’: a US military base)

18. Other readings (cont) • rather than an examination of liberal humanism, Orwell’s book is an examination of the English novel as a depository of liberal humanism (Bényei) • 1. The deconstruction of the novel • 2. The construction of the novel

19. The deconstruction of the novel • Orwell’s book is not a “proper” novel, because: • it is an allegory as opposed to a realist narrative (in English literary studies the “novel” is a much narrower term) • the English novel is the basic discourse about the construction and expression of the self: exactly that is impossible in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four

20. The deconstruction of the novel (cont) • However, the concept of the “novel” is present in the book at several levels: • title: Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Novel • first sentence • the “novels” made by novel-writing machines • Winston’s journal • the narrative voice – which does present a coherent, novel-like narrative

21. Novels written by machines • cannot be novels: • no chronology because there is no past: the past is constantly re-written,people live in a constant present tense. • no subjectivity is involved in the creation of these novels

22. Winston’s journal • a record of his attempts to construct a self and articulate his experience according to the criteria and assumptions of a novelistic discourse: • chronology, cause and effect, interaction between self and other, proposition and defence of a “reasonable” ideology or set of beliefs or value sets • cannot be a novel because none of these assumptions can be realised

23. Narrative voice • the only story that can be narrated is the story of Winston’s attempts to create a narrative – the journal • (but the journal itself is not a proper novel)

24. Winston’s journal • It’s an anti-novel: • it’s incoherent • it cannot follow any tradition or any example • it only serves therapeutic purposes • because Winston is ill (and he uses writing for therapy) the text he is producing is ill: it is truncated, mad, incomplete, incomprehensible

25. Winston’s journal (cont) • as opposed to the novels written by machines, which exclude subjectivity, Winston’s diary contains nothing but subjectivity. • two extreme models of the anti-novel. • why? • the real novel is created in the space where subjectivity and the public sphere (I and not-I) meet and meaningfully interact with each other

26. The deconstruction of the novel • Orwell’s novel cannot be regarded as a real novel: • Winston is not a representative of common sense and reasonable set of values. • His voice is not the voice of the common sense. • The novel is not about an individual (representing liberal humanism) fighting against the soulless tyranny of an oppressive power.

27. The construction of the novel • The discourse and main assumptions of the English novel are based on dialectic opposites: • appearance versus reality • ideology versus common sense • In which it proposes or represents the latter. (This is both the strength and the weakness of the “ideology” of the English novel tradition.)

28. The construction of the novel • In this sense the true opponent of the state dictatorship is not Winston but the temperate narrative voice, the construction of which is based on a belief in common sense and objective reality. • The narrative voice cannot be exploited by either Winston or the state tyranny.

29. Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) • John Anthony Burgess Wilson: John Wilson > Anthony Burgess • Catholic background • Music, languages • Manchester University • War service: RA Medical Corps, Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the Ministry of Education • Schoolteacher (Oxfordshire), colonial service (Singapore, Brunei)