Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction. Annika Gonnermann

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СКАЧАТЬ in existing social and political systems” (Impulse 20). 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, Metamorphoses 12).

      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 21^st century audience should try to make sense of their 21^st 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, Impulse 19), 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 21^st 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 21^st 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 СКАЧАТЬ