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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 20^th 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. (Impossible 8f.)

      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). Authors and directors from all over the globe such as Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, William Gibson, Ridley Scott, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Don De Lillo, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Octavia E. Butler – to mention only the most prominent names –, continued to develop and enhance the dystopian genre, whose boundaries and conventions had been established back in the 1940s and 1950s (cf. Schmeink, “Cyberpunk” 223), moulding new sub-genres of dystopia, such as Cyberpunk8 or the ‘critical utopia’9 and thus developing the genre further.

      From the 1960s to the present, dystopias have enjoyed an unbroken and “remarkable popularity” (Voigts, “Introduction” 1):10 Murphy states that “there can be little doubt that the dystopia thrived in the twentieth century and continues to show its health in the new millennium” (“Dystopia” 477),11 while Fredric Jameson asserts that “ours is a time when Anti-Utopia reigns supreme“ (quoted in Moylan, Scraps 139).12 Old classics and newly written Young Adult novels (YA) conquer the world’s best seller lists.13 As Kunkel writes, “[e]very other month seems to bring the publication of at least one new so-called literary novel on dystopian or apocalyptic themes and the release of at least one similarly themed movie” (“Dystopia” 90). While Rüdiger Heinze states that “dystopian visions in general have […] never gone out of fashion” (79), their boom is nevertheless remarkable. Christopher Ferns compares our obsession with dystopias to the interest of the Renaissance in eutopia: “dystopian fantasy has become in the modern era almost a myth in its own right […] and as such it continues to flourish” (15), while Jan Hollm states that the contemporary “description of post-apocalyptic horrors and the destruction of humankind are clearly linked to the catastrophe-inducing way of life in industrialised, globalised society at the beginning of the 21^st century” (381). What makes dystopia so fascinating is its ability to capture cultural anxieties and voice them in literary terms, so that it acts as a mouthpiece and tool of diagnosis and critique for social, political and economic developments.

      3. Context, Criticism, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life (2014)

      To measure the life ‘as it is’ by a life ‘as it might or should be’ is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity. The urge to transcend is nearest to a universal, and arguably the least destructible, attribute of human existence. (Bauman, “Utopia with No Topos” 11)

      Critique, in the words of Tom Boland, is an integral part of what defines human beings; he writes that critique is “part of our cultural history, a tradition which constitutes us as thinkers” (Spectacle 1). Dystopia partakes in this long-standing tradition since it can be classified first and foremost as a literary expression of criticism.1 The novels dedicated to the socio-cultural analysis of the status quo serve as a “mouthpiece for social critique” (N. Wilkinson and Voigts 95), meaning that they criticise socio-political developments of their time of origin and are in turn shaped by political, economic, religious and ethical discourses of their respective contexts. Yet, while these novels are eager to paint the future in the bleakest colours possible, they are equally careful to establish causal-logical references linking back to their authors’ respective reality (cf. Sargent 27).2 As Terry Eagleton claims, they are “really devices for embarrassing the present” (“Utopias”).3 Each futuristic nightmare is thus in fact a moral enquiry into the state of affairs of the present, highlighting the weaknesses of the socio-cultural reality via extrapolation. This technique has been analysed by Darko Suvin, who frames it under the concept of ‘cognitive estrangement’ (cf. Metamorphoses 4ff.). This approach is best summarised as “a reflecting of but also on reality,” which forces readers to adopt an estranged perspective on the familiar. It constitutes a form of cognitive analysis that tends “toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author’s environment” (ibid. 10). As Christopher Ferns claims,

      dystopian fiction posits a society which – however outlandish – is clearly extrapolated from that which exists. […] [T]he dystopian writer presents the nightmare future as a possible destination of present society, as if dystopia were no more than a logical conclusion derived from the premises of the existing order, and implies that it might very well come about unless something is done to stop it. (107)

      Fundamentally, dystopias exhibit a mirroring quality, reflecting the devolutionary tendencies of their time (cf. Tuzinski 32).4 Suvin goes one step further still and declares that “there is little point in discussing utopias as separate entity, if their basic humanistic, this-worldly, historically alternative aspect is not stressed and adopted as one of their differentiae genericae” (Metamorphoses 42, emphasis in the original). Utopian writing – as an exercise in fictional sociology – then always has a clear connection to the present, although it is mostly set in the future (cf. Bauman, Freedom 89).5

      Formulating criticism, however, is only one of two functions dystopian narratives usually exhibit. When Han, Triplett, and Anthony argue “that some aspect of critique is at least implicit within all types of dystopian works” (“Introduction” 4), it is vital to remember that these books are never a neutral inquiry into the states of things, but actually burdened with normative standards circling around the question of the good life. It is therefore imperative “to recognise the partiality of theoretical and political positions” (Pinder 257) to be found in dystopian writing. Dystopias are always defined by their didactic warning function;6 both Christine Lehnen and David Lorenzo even consider the warning effect a prescriptive feature of their genre definitions; dystopias are narratives that “serve as warnings regarding the future of contemporary society” (Lorenzo 6), and “can be seen as the epitome of literature in its role as social criticism” (Booker, Literature 3). They are the product of vigilant social analysts constructed as a warning, a “prophetic vehicle, the canary in a cage, for writers with an ethical and political concern” (Baccolini and Moylan, “Introduction” 2). Referring back to the “sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the iron cages portrayed in the realm of [e]utopia’s underside (ibid.),7 dystopian fiction is always meant as a normative criticism of the socio-cultural and historical characteristics of the time of its own origins. Yet, while many critics take this circumstance for granted, no study has yet attempted to classify the use of criticism in dystopian fiction. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the construction of critique in these novels as such an analysis would allow the reader insights into the hidden agenda of a given text. Without a thorough examination of the criticism employed, the warning function of dystopian СКАЧАТЬ