Not Death But Annihilation Jaccard 2016
Not Death But Annihilation Jaccard 2016
Not Death But Annihilation Jaccard 2016
98 Critical Insights
ideology as its primary focus. There is no such thing as a pure or
final genre. Like languages, genres are fluid, social, and historically
situated. Every literary text comprises a hierarchy of generic
components, some dominant and some minor (Bakhtin 301-331).
Thus, even if Nineteen Eighty-Four’s dominant generic identity is
dystopian, other generic conventions and expectations—other ways
of seeing and thinking about the truths it tells—are necessarily in
play.
I question the tendency to read Nineteen Eighty-Four primarily
as a dystopia by reading the novel from a second generic lens, that
of the English catastrophe novel. This latter form of narrative fiction
depicts the destruction of Britain by a natural disaster, invasion, or
social collapse, and then depicts the struggles of an individual or
group who is forced to navigate the ruins of British—most often
English—society. Unlike dystopias, English catastrophe narratives
shift attention from the universal toward provincial cultural
concerns. Like the dystopia, the English catastrophe narrative
presents opportunities for social critique by contrasting post-
catastrophic societies with their predecessors; its emphasis on the
narrower domains of bourgeois social values and national culture
often leads to conservative reaffirmations of English imperial
ideology. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s simultaneous deployment of both
narrative modes exposes a crucial tension between its critique of a
mechanized, totalitarian modernity on the one hand and its requiem
for the immemorial values—and revolutionary potential—of English
culture on the other.
Before we dive into Orwell’s novel, however, it is important to
understand more about each genre. Crafted to depict and interrogate
large-scale forms of social organization—industrial modernity, for
example, or capitalism—the dystopia foregrounds the ideological
identity of the world built within its pages, necessarily emphasizing
universal concepts such as ‘modern man.’ We can see this in
Orwell’s protagonist, an English everyman named Winston Smith.
In one sense Winston represents a classic dystopian protagonist who
maps a universal loss of individuality and decency in a mechanized
and authoritarian world. Tom Moylan suggests that both utopias
Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest,
a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right
to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different…
And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not
a sign that this was not the natural order of things… Why should
one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral
memory that things had once been different? (60, Orwell’s italics)
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