Dystopia(n) Matters

Dystopia(n) Matters:
On the Page, on Screen, on Stage

Edited by

Fátima Vieira
 Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage,
Edited by Fátima Vieira

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Copyright © 2013 by Fátima Vieira and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4743-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4743-8

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Fátima Vieira

Part I: Dystopia Matters

Do Dystopias Matter? ................................................................................ 10

Lyman Tower Sargent

Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia............................................... 14

Gregory Claeys

Utopia’s Shadow ....................................................................................... 19

Krishan Kumar

Dystopia, Utopia and Sancho Panza .......................................................... 23

Laurence Davis

Why Dystopia Matters ............................................................................... 28

Vita Fortunati

Dystopia Is You ......................................................................................... 37

Pere Gallardo

Dystopias Do Matter.................................................................................. 40
Lucy Sargisson

Step into the Story… ................................................................................. 42

Tom Moylan

Living in Dystopia ..................................................................................... 44

Raffaella Baccolini
vi Table of Contents

Darkness and Light .................................................................................... 46

Vincent Geoghegan

Biodystopias Matter: Signposts of Future Evolution ................................. 49

Aline Ferreira

Anti-communist Dystopias: Fulfilled Desire, Unreality, Gothic Carnival.... 54

Artur Blaim

On Desertification and the Redemptive Powers of Language:

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road .................................................................. 58
Antonis Balasopoulos

Utopia, Dystopia and Satire: Ambiguity and Paradox ............................... 64

Ana Cláudia Ribeiro Romano

Dystopia and Global Utopias: A Necessary Step Towards

a Better World?.......................................................................................... 69
Lucian M. Ashworth

Dystopia Matters: A Brief Personal Testimony by Jim Arnold

about Living in Dystopia and the Present Position .................................... 72
Jim Arnold

Thoughts on Dystopia, from New Lanark ................................................. 75

Lorna Davidson

Intermezzo

Hell upon a Hill: Reflections on Anti-utopia and Dystopia ....................... 80

Artur Blaim

Part II – Dystopian Matters

Dystopia on the Page

“Words that are lost”: Obsolete Language in Dystopian Fiction ............... 96

Julie Millward
 Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage vii

Dystopia as Post-Enlightenment Critique in George Orwell’s

Nineteen Eighty-Four .............................................................................. 115
Adam Stock

Totalitarianism as Liberal Nightmare: The (Post-)Politics of Nineteen

Eighty-Four ............................................................................................. 130
Sofia Sampaio

On the Margin of Dystopia: Notes on the Introduction to Stanislaw

Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub ........................................................ 155
Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk

Clashing Tones, Harmonising Concepts: Utopian and Anti-utopian

Motifs in Stanislaw Lem’s Writings ........................................................ 164
Zuzanna Gawrońska

Sacrifice Matters: Dystopia through Dysfunctional Scapegoats –

A Girardian Reading of J.G. Ballard’s Crash .......................................... 175
Daniel Cojocaru

Denouncing Social Utopia from Within: The Case of Dystopia

in Romanian Literature during the Communist Regime .......................... 186
Georgeta Moarcăs

Dystopia on Screen

Dystopianising the Dystopian: Piotr Szulkin’s Film Tetralogy ............... 202

Ludmiła Gruszewska Blaim

“Comparisons Are Odious”, or Exploring the New Herland

in Juliusz Machulski’s Sexmission........................................................... 217
Marta Komsta

Between a Fairy Tale and a Cautionary Tale: Juliusz Machulski’s

Kingsajz ................................................................................................... 232
Katarzyna Pisarska

Dystopian Loop in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome ............................. 250

Justyna Galant
viii Table of Contents

Equilibrium: Dystopia-on-Drugs or Inverted Cockaigne? ....................... 261

Sofia de Melo Araújo

“Nothing ever ends”: Ending Dystopian History in Watchmen ............... 270

Miguel Ramalhete Gomes

Dystopia on Stage

A Negative Utopia? Adorno on Beckett’s Endgame ............................... 282

Ian Fraser

The Dramatisation of Futureless Worlds: Caryl Churchill’s Ecological

Dystopias ................................................................................................. 294
Siân Adiseshiah

Theatrical Utopia in Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat

and in Its Turkish Adaptation .................................................................. 306
Hande Tekdemir
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Parts of the following essays have appeared previously in Imperfect

Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, ed. A. Blaim,
L. Gruszewska-Blaim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011:

“Comparisons are Odious”, or exploring the New Herland in Juliusz

Machulski's Sexmission, by Marta Komsta

Dystopian Loop in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, by Justyna Galant

Between a Fairy Tale and a Cautionary Tale: Juliusz Machulski’s Kingsajz,

by Katarzyna Pisarska.
 INTRODUCTION

FÁTIMA VIEIRA

Dystopias do matter
In 2005 I edited, along with Marinela Freitas, a book entitled Utopia
Matters (Porto, Editora UP, Perspective Series). The book was divided
into two parts: the first was composed of statements by reputed scholars
from the field of utopian studies, who explained why utopias really matter.
The second part of the book, which in fact corresponded to its subtitle,
dealt with “utopian matters” and was in turn divided into three parts:
Theory, Politics, and Literature and the Arts.
This new book published by Cambridge Scholars replicates the
structure of the book of 2005, but it now gravitates around a topic which
one would expect to find at the other end of utopia. However, as is made
clear by all the texts included in the first part of the volume, there are more
affinities binding utopia and dystopia together, with regard to their aims
and objectives, than differences setting them apart.
As in 2005, the contributors to the first part of this volume are reputed
scholars who were asked to make a statement explaining why dystopia
matters; they were given complete freedom as to the way they would deal
with the topic – the only exception was the limit of the number of words.
Some chose to address the issue by attempting to offer a definition of
dystopia, to trace its history and its kinship with utopia; others resorted to
dystopian texts to exemplify the relevance of their perspective; and a third
group presented very personal testimonies on their discovery of dystopia
and on their disappointment with regard to the way it has invaded the
political dimension of many countries in the world. In any case, the links
between utopia and dystopia were described as if they were almost
correlative in their function: to begin with, “every utopia contains
dystopia” (Ribeiro); rather than being the negation of utopia, dystopia may
paradoxically be its essence (Claeys); dystopia can well be seen as the
“shadow of utopia” as it emerged in the wake of the latter (Kumar); or we
can think of it as the alter ego of utopia, always “pull[ing] its dreamy
companion back to earth” (Davis).
2 Introduction

In one way or another, the need for dystopia is recognised by all the
contributors. In fact, if “the name of this world is dystopia” (Moylan), we
need it not only because it is a way of “exorcis[ing] one’s ghosts”
(Gallardo), but also because it “reminds us that our dystopia could get
worse” (Sargent), because it makes us think (Sargisson), because it is “a
form of resistance in and for our times” (Baccolini), because it may well
be “a necessary step towards a better world” (Ashworth).
The final idea, then, is that dystopia is as needed as utopia; in spite of
the “overwhelmingly individualistic focus of many dystopias” (Balasopoulos)
– as happens in fact with many utopias – despite our awareness of “[h]ow
difficult it is to make utopian progress” (Arnold), human beings will
always find “ways of coping with (…) dystopia” (Blaim), as there will
always be a “tiny element of hope (…) glimmering, that the forces of
dystopia will inspire in some part of humanity” (Davidson). Dystopia is no
doubt relevant if we think of it as a “concerted, strategic and practically
oriented reflection on a future” (Ferreira). This is, in the end, the way we
are bound to live: “fearing for the worst, hoping for the best, with a
perennial oscillation between ‘if’ and ‘but’” (Geoghegan), and cautiously
proceeding in the construction of our future.

The concept of dystopia

As I mention above, when I invited the contributors to the first part of the
volume to write a statement on the importance of dystopia, I did not know
exactly what to expect: it was an open invitation, and, as such, all sorts of
perspectives would be welcome. The idea was that the importance of the
volume would derive precisely from that variety of views. After I received
the different contributions I realised, however, that adding to this variety,
the volume actually benefitted from the presentation of different
definitions of the concept of dystopia which, when put together, form a
sort of well-informed forum that will no doubt prove to be useful to all
who may be interested in the topic. This certainly justifies that we revisit
the contributions where such definitions are offered.
After he has reminded us that the current prevailing concept of critical
dystopia suggests that the possibility of utopia exists within some
dystopias, Lyman Sargent stands for the idea that “dystopias are
jeremiads”, because they are often similar, in their approach, to the “early
Puritan sermons in New England” which “accus[ed] the people of
backsliding, of losing the confidence of God (…[and went]) into great
detail about the specific ways that the peoples (…[had]) erred”. The
dystopia, Sargent contends, “mostly without the religious element, does
 Fátima Vieira 3

the same thing, although often implicitly. The dystopia is presented as

what has happened as a result of human behaviour, of people messing up”.
Gregory Claeys adds to the discussion by describing the three variants
of dystopianism: the first variant perceives “the pursuit of the secular
millennium” (i.e., secular perfectibility) as “the greatest tragedy of
modernity”; the second variant somehow “perverts” the idea of the first, as
it aims to implicitly contradict the overhasty association of utopianism
with totalitarianism and thus “preserves some form of the concept of
‘utopia’ for positive contemporary applications”. The third variant may
best be described as a function of the way it presents “negative visions of
humanity generally, and secular variations on the Apocalypse”. As Claeys
points out, in spite of the diversity of traditions encompassed by
dystopianism – which prevents us from seeing it as a mere “mirror image
of utopia” – there are a few constants which rely on an antithetical
relationship: “if utopia embodies ordered freedom, dystopia embodies
unfreedom”; “just as the Garden of Eden and Heaven remain prototypes of
utopia, so hell performs the same role for dystopia”; if in “the democratic
utopia” one makes “the right decisions and create[s] free and affluent
society”, in dystopia one is “deprived of these benefits”. Claeys ends his
essay by contending that “totalitarian dystopia of our times” should not be
seen as an inversion of utopia or anti-utopia but, rather, as a
“misinterpretation of utopia itself”, for it departs from the idea that utopia
embodies a quest for a “perfect” society which is not accessible to human
beings.
Krishan Kumar traces the genealogy of dystopia, stressing the idea that
it “emerged in the wake of utopia”. According to Kumar, “[T]he earliest
forms [of utopia] seem to have been satires on the rationalist and scientific
utopias of More and Bacon”. The reason why “it is mainly in the twentieth
century that dystopia truly comes into its own”, Kumar explains, is that its
targets, right from the beginning, have been the “‘grand narratives’ of
modernity” – “reason and revolution, science and socialism, the idea of
progress and the faith in the future” – and “most of these elements (…)
only really spread on a significant scale in the latter part of the nineteenth
century”. Kumar further underlines the partial picture of the future that any
dystopia implies, insofar as it “pick[s] out the most distinctive and novel
features” of each time and “present[s] them in the form of an imaginatively
realised society”.
Laurence Davis propounds a perspective of dystopia which departs
from a redefinition of utopia itself. Davis points out that one of the
problems with the traditional definitions of utopia is the “insistence that all
utopias necessarily abstract from or break with history in a transcendent
4 Introduction

perfectionist fashion”. By resorting to examples which derive from his

study of “an alternative minority utopian tradition” with a “distinctively
anarchistic or libertarian socialist character”, Davies argues for the
relevance of a “clear analytical distinction between transcendent and
grounded utopias”, explaining that the latter “help to shape existing
practices by converting the given confines of the here and now into an
open horizon of possibilities”. According to Davies, dystopia combines
“satire on existing society with a parodic inversion of transcendent or
controlling utopian aspirations”. Its main target, then, is not utopianism as
such but that particular kind of utopianism which is not concerned with its
historical fulfilment. As Davis concludes, “[D]ystopia serves not to
highlight the futility and folly of all utopian aspirations, but to remind us
of its historically and biographically rooted origins and limits”.
Vita Fortunati contributes to the discussion by concentrating on an
analysis of the utopian potentialities of the critical dystopia. Fortunati
examines this concept with regard to feminist dystopianism and, more
specifically, to the dystopian work of Ursula Le Guin and emphasises the
way it relies on a revision of the utopian paradigm. As Fortunati evinces,
behind this sort of dystopianism there is a defence of the utopian spirit, not
a wish to annihilate it. Feminist critical dystopias such as Le Guin’s
clearly subvert the way canonical utopias were constructed, demand a
more active role on the part of the reader and suggest alternatives rather
than prescribe blueprints. They provide us with the idea that ours is a
journey which needs to be constantly re-planned, and which will never
hopefully reach an end. The critical dystopia, Fortunati insists, “prefigure[s]
a horizon of hope”, “showing the reader a road that must start in the
present, a dialectic that must begin from now-here”.
From the analysis of the contributions to the first part of the volume,
one easily concludes that utopia and dystopia are both needed. As Sargent
rightly points out, dystopia is needed because it presents us a gloomy
future we have definitely to avoid, but it really only works when it is
assisted by its counterpart, eutopia, which “remind[s] us that better, while
difficult, is possible”.

Intermezzo
“Hell upon a Hill” is a well-informed and intelligent reflection by Artur
Blaim on the concepts of anti-utopia and dystopia, which suitably bridges
the first and the second parts of the volume and thus constitutes a
convenient intermezzo.
 Fátima Vieira 5

Blaim presents an historical perspective on the various attempts made

by different scholars, since the 1970s, to define these concepts and ends up
by putting forward the suggestion that we should see anti-utopia as a
“certain function, or to adapt a more radical position – use of the dystopian
texts, and not as a literary genre”. He further rightly notes that most of the
times anti-utopianism fights not against utopian thought and attitudes as
such but against a particular utopian view or project, with the intention of
favouring a competing one.
The introduction, in the theoretical framework of this volume, of the
concept of anti-utopia, and the refinement of the way it differs from
dystopia, is no doubt important for the second part of the volume, where
anti-utopia is often if not exactly conflated with dystopia, at least clearly
set in the background of the described scenes.

Dystopian Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage

The second part of the volume is divided into three sections, each
composed of essays examining the way dystopian views and discourses
have pervaded contemporary literature, film and theatre, respectively.
The first section – “Dystopia on the Page” – offers an analysis of some
of the best-known canonical dystopian and critical dystopian novels from a
variety of perspectives. Julie Millward deals with language issues in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Swastika Night and Facial Justice; Adam Stock
offers a reading of George Orwell’s dystopia as post-Enlightenment critique,
whereas Sofia Sampaio provides us with a reassessment of the novel as a
fictional construction of totalitarianism, thus releasing it from the common
ideological framework in which it is normally inscribed.
The next two essays examine the writings of the Polish author
Stanislaw Lem: Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk focuses on the introduction
to Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, interpreting it in terms of utopian/dystopian
convention, while Zuzanna Gawrońska looks at “The 13th Voyage”,
Return from the Stars and Eden in an attempt to reconstruct “the
conceptual frame and ideas forming a consistent system of utopian and
anti-utopian thought emerging from Lem’s writings”.
The section closes with Daniel Cojocaru’s essay, who applies René
Girard’s theory of religion to J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novella Crash to
evince the thesis that “[e]utopia cannot be created through violence”.
Georgeta Moarcăs, in turn, examines three dystopian novels published
during the Romanian communist regime – The Black Church, Farewell,
Europe! and The Second Messenger – in order to offer relevant
conclusions on the connections between ideology, utopia and literature.
6 Introduction

The section “Dystopia on Screen” is composed of six essays, three on

Polish films and three on American films, which, when put together,
provide us with an interesting framework for reflection on Polish and
American dystopianism. The section opens with an essay by Ludmiła
Gruszewska Blaim, who examines the reception of Pietr Szulkin’s film
tetralogy (1979-1986) and evinces how it has changed over the years –
ranging from a critique of the communist regime to “philosophical,
genological or comparative studies discussing Szulkin’s films in terms of
‘asocial ficion’ (…) or as a part of the Western tradition of anti-utopia and
dystopia”. The two other essays rely on the consideration of two comedies
by Polish film director Juliusz Machulsky. Marta Komsta’s essay focuses
on the SF comedy Sexmission (1984) and demonstrates that the film –
which presents a dystopian futuristic view of a sex role-reversal society –
can be seen as Machulsky’s dystopian commentary on Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s novel Herland. Katarzyna Pisarska’s essay, in turn, examines the
way Machulski criticised the Polish communist system in Kingsajz (1987)
by parodically representing it as “Szuflandia”, a dystopian country of
gnomes.
Justyna Galant’s essay examines David Cronemberg’s Videodrome and
offers an interpretation of the “absolute lack of logic which characterises
the actions of both the major proponents of new realities”, thus pointing to
the film director’s intention of showing that our society is in such a terrible
need for a “philosophy” that it is contented with half-baked utopian plans.
Sofia de Melo Araújo concentrates on Equilibrium, by film director Kurt
Wimmer, and compares it with Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four to conclude that in the film hope still glimmers at
the end of the dystopian tunnel. Finally, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes
compares Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen
(1986-1987) to its eponymous filmic adaptation directed by Zack Snyder
in 2009. Ramalhete Gomes examines both the novel and the film within
the framework of the concept of “critical dystopia” and explores questions
of “historical transience” in the two objects.
The last section – “Dystopia on Stage” – is composed of three essays
which focus on dystopian interpretations of plays by Samuel Beckett,
Caryl Churchill and Mark Ravenhill. In his essay, Ian Fraser subscribes to
Adorno’s reading of Beckett’s Endgame and underlines its relevance to the
understanding of the play, stressing, to the effect, the importance of
Adorno’s concept of “negative utopia”. Siân Adiseshiah examines Caryl
Churchill’s plays The Skriker and Far Away, showing how the narrative of
the former, although it ends in a dystopian mode, is pervaded with utopian
glimpses, whereas in the latter there is no going back from the dystopian
 Fátima Vieira 7

apocalyptic ending. At last, Hande Tekdemir examines the way the epic
cycle of sixteen short plays Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, by Mark
Ravenhill, has been staged in Turkey by theatre director Murat Daltaban
and how this has contributed to the creation of a new language which
posits what Tekdemir calls a “theatrical utopia”.

* * *

What seems evident from an attentive reading of the essays compiled in

this volume is that if Dystopia has in fact invaded most forms of
contemporary discourse, its sibling, Utopia, has not been eradicated from
the scene. In one way or another, all the essays confirm the operability of
the concept of “critical dystopia” and show that the tension between utopia
and dystopia is instrumental to our cautious, conscious and tentative
construction of the future.
 PART I

DYSTOPIA MATTERS
 DO DYSTOPIAS MATTER?

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

I must admit that I have always been more interested in good places
(eutopias) than bad places (dystopias). I have been told that that was
because I could not deal with the “real world”, and my response has
always been “Who wants to?” Given our real world, who needs dystopias?
At the same time, while I have always been attracted to the pleasure-
oriented Cockaigne version of the eutopia, I have always thought of
eutopia as a statement about desirable change rather than escape, perhaps
because too many colleagues, friends and students who tried to escape into
the drug culture (“Reality is for those who can’t do drugs” was a slogan of
the times) sank into that culture and either never resurfaced or resurfaced
damaged. Thus, dystopia has for me always had a strong connection to the
“reality” I wanted to avoid, a “reality” that to me needed eutopia to change
it.
At the same time, doing the bibliographic work that I do, it has always
been clear that the dystopia has been the dominant form of utopianism
since around World War I. Some of this is simply because, as Arthur C.
Clarke once said on a panel I was on, the dystopia is more interesting to
write since it gives the writer an almost automatic entry to conflict that can
drive a story. But also with World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, the
various revolutions both successful and suppressed, the struggles against
colonialism that only succeeded after very high costs were paid, racism,
sexism, homophobia, etc., etc., the twentieth century has quite correctly
been called the dystopian century, and the twenty-first century does not
look much better, although as I write Egyptians are in the streets hoping to
topple a dictator just as their neighbours had done in Tunisia. But the
problem is what to do after the dictatorship and its supportive apparatus
go, and that is where we need eutopia. What can dystopia contribute?
To answer that question, I need to go back to the beginning. When
Thomas More coined the word “utopia” he also played on the word
“eutopia”, and no place became the non-existent good place. As far as we
currently know the word “dystopia” or “bad place” was coined in 1747,
 Lyman Tower Sargent 11

and although it was used from time to time, it did not catch on until well
into the twentieth century.1 Since then utopia has included both eutopia,
unfortunately spelled “utopia”, and dystopia.
Of course, the concepts utopia and dystopia are not that simple. The
terms “critical utopia” introduced by Tom Moylan and “critical dystopia”
later introduced by Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (see Moylan, 1986 and
2000; and Baccolini, 2000) mix the two together. The “critical dystopia”
in particular suggests that the possibility of eutopia exists within some
dystopias, but the problem is how to actualise the eutopia and get rid of the
dystopia. Neither the standard dystopia, where some hero or heroine is
needed, nor the “critical dystopia”, where no such change takes place, is
reassuring on this problem.
One of the first utopias I ever read, I and many others thought of as a
dystopia, while the author and many others were quite clear that it was a
eutopia. That book was B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), and even
though I read it negatively, I had to admit that Skinner saw it positively,
and he said so many times. As a result, it is clear from both internal and
external evidence together with the fact that a number of people decided to
establish intentional communities modelled on Skinner’s vision as
expressed in the book that a book could be both a eutopia and a dystopia
depending on the reader (on Walden Two communities, see Kuhlman).
A similar issue is seen in some of the novels of Aldous Huxley. Brave
New World (1932) is explicitly an extrapolation into the future of trends
that he saw in his present, trends that he said in a “Foreword” written in
1946 and in Brave New World Revisited (1957) were coming to fruition
even faster than he had expected. Between these two books, Huxley had
written that he believed that he should have given the Savage another,
better option, and, of course, later Huxley spelled out a positive vision in
Island (1962) that has many features in common with Brave New World.
But Island is clearly a eutopia rather than a dystopia. Thus, Brave New
World was a warning, the 1946 “Foreword” and Brave New World
Revisited are statements that the world depicted in Brave New World is
fast approaching, and Island at least suggests that a better alternative might
be possible, although its ending implies that Huxley was not very
optimistic that “the people” would change their ways.
But of course it is not quite that simple. When I read Walden Two I had
never heard the word “eutopia” and had no real knowledge of the utopian
tradition in its various manifestations. I thought Walden Two would be a
terrible place to live, and others thought it would be a good place to live,
so good that they tried to create it. To really complicate matters I also
disliked one aspect of Island, the manipulation of people who were “little
12 Do Dystopias Matter?

Hitlers” or “little Stalins”, whom the society identifies as potentially

dangerous. It worried me that it gave the society too much power, and I
argued about it with a friend who had no problem with this aspect of
Island.
This led me to think about how to read both eutopias and dystopias,
and in discussing F.L. Polak’s The Image of the Future in “The Three
Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), I noted that one weakness in the
book was that Polak missed the positive message of dystopias. My
approach at that time was extremely simplistic, but I have repeated
versions of the same point from time to time, most recently in my
Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (2010).
My argument is that many dystopias are jeremiads. Most of the Old
Testament prophets have a quite similar approach, but the form, which
was one of the standard forms of the early Puritan sermons in New
England (see Bercovitch, 1978), has been named after Jeremiah.
Essentially the jeremiad accuses the people of backsliding, of losing the
confidence of God, and goes into great detail about the specific ways that
the people have erred. It then goes on, again sometimes in great detail, to
say that God will punish the people for their past, present and future sins.
But then, and usually only briefly, it says that if the people change their
ways, they will not be punished and could even be rewarded.
I contend that the dystopia, mostly without the religious element, does
the same thing, although often only implicitly. The dystopia is presented
as what has happened as a result of human behaviour, of people messing
up, as, in the Old Testament version, sin. And given the resurgence of
Christian dystopianism, the Old Testament version is still relevant. But the
message is also quite clearly, it does not have to be like this. And to me
this is the important point. People can change for the better, although,
remembering Huxley’s Island, they may not. This is the message that
needs to get through in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as, of course, in every
other country. Still, it appears that just as writing a eutopia may be harder
than writing a dystopia, creating and maintaining a eutopia is harder than
creating and maintaining a dystopia. Thus, the “reality” is no more
encouraging than the literature. We need the dystopia to remind us that our
dystopia could get worse, but we need the eutopia even more to remind us
that better, while difficult, is possible.

Note
1
On the history of the word, see Budakov, 2010.
 Lyman Tower Sargent 13

Works cited
Baccolini, Raffaella (2000), “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical
Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia
Butler”, in Marleen S. Barr (ed.), Future Females, the Next
Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction
Criticism, Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 13-34.
Bercovitch, Sacvan (1978), The American Jeremiad, Madison, U of
Wisconsin P.
Budakov, V[esselin] M. (2010), “Dystopia: An Earlier Eighteenth-Century
Use”, Notes and Queries, vol. 57, nr. 1, March, pp. 86-8.
Kuhlmann, Hilke (2005). Living Walden Two: B.F. Skinner’s Behaviorist
Utopia and Experimental Communities, Urbana, U of Illinois P.
Moylan, Tom (1986), Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the
Utopian Imagination, London, Methuen.
—. [Thomas Patrick] (2000), Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction,
Utopia, Dystopia, Boulder, CO, Westview.
Polak, Fred[erick] L[odewijk] (1961), The Image of the Future:
Enlightening the Past, Orientating the Present, Forecasting the
Future, trans. Elise Boulding, 2 vols., Leyden, The Netherlands, A.W.
Sythoff/New York, Oceana Pub. [Originally published as De Toekomst
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The Netherlands, W. de Haan, 1955.]
Sargent, Lyman Tower (1994), “The Three Faces of Utopianism
Revisited”, Utopian Studies, vol. 5, nr. 1, pp. 1-37.
—. (2010), Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Eng., Oxford
UP.
 THREE VARIANTS ON THE CONCEPT
OF DYSTOPIA

GREGORY CLAEYS

What kind of concept is “dystopia”,1 and how does it differ from that of
“utopia”? Dystopia is popularly supposed to be an inverted, mirror,
negative version of utopia. Unlike “utopia”, however, in the first instance,
“dystopia” is evidently a much younger concept, dating only from the late
nineteenth century, and one moreover not linked to a single text or
discernable tradition. Prima facie, of course, there is no difficulty viewing
these concepts as synchronised or symmetrical: if “utopia” entails the
depiction of any kind of idealised society regarded as superior to the
present by its author, “dystopia” implies its negation, or any kind of
society regarded as inferior by its author. The problems commence when
we acknowledge that utopianism is not a purely literary tradition and that
“utopia” may be defined in a number of other ways. Indeed while we may
generally concede that the common language definition of utopia describes
any variety of “ideal” society, the term itself only becomes historically and
analytically interesting when we refine this definition. In particular, when
we associate “utopia” with the tradition established by Thomas More’s
famous text of 1516, we are presented with a variety of interesting
questions which have a bearing upon the definition of any negation or
inversion of the concept.
The tradition associated with Thomas More, then, may be described in
terms of an adherence to a communal regime in which private property
generally is restricted and public life is given priority over individualism.
Such a definition is clearly problematic: it does not purport to describe all
the texts written in imitation of More, in particular, and it acknowledges
that the road to Utopia in More’s own account is paved with unclear
intentions at best. But it does take into account the fact that utopianism,
taken more broadly, clearly does consist of three facets: a literary tradition,
an ideology or ideologies, and a tradition of communal living and
organisation. The question, then, is what bearing a more refined definition
of utopia of this type has for the definition of dystopia and whether it
 Gregory Claeys 15

renders the latter concept distinctly asymmetrical: that is, not usually a
mirror negative image of utopia at all.
But there are problems even with the idea of dystopia as the negative
of “ideal” societies. Clearly just as one person’s freedom fighter is
another’s terrorist, one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. Dystopia, in
other words, rather than being the negation of utopia, paradoxically may
be its essence. Any privileging of the communal over the individual will
for some have dystopian overtones. Writ large, in this view, utopia is the
predecessor of totalitarianism, particularly of the Marxist type; such was
the essence of the enormously influential Talmon-Popper line of the late
1940s and 1950s, which, though it has nineteenth-century roots, notably in
the work of Gustave Le Bon, is today most often associated with Norman
Cohn’s classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium. (Lately John Gray
has notably taken up this particular cudgel.) In this interpretation modern
utopianism is quintessentially an extension of the millenarian thrust of the
Judaeo-Christian tradition. History possesses a particular telos, which is
some form of salvation, and culminates in some variation of its secular
realisation. In socialism, this consists essentially in the recapturing and/or
realisation of some form of social essence, or primeval sociability. For
Marx this was early on described in Ludwig Feuerbach’s concept of
species-being, which was repackaged as a plea for “human emancipation”
or “universal emancipation”. Utopianism, in other words, is secular
perfectibility. (One of many paradoxes here, of course, is that as we have
seen Marx did not view himself as a utopian – and in this sense he was
correct: he was not a utopian but a perfectibilist.) Realising the essence of
the communal involves the suppression of the individual: the family and
private life are sacrificed to or subsumed under the greater identity of the
society, state, party and/or nation. Students of twentieth-century history, in
particular, will have little difficulty assembling a teleological construction
of dystopia in which the origins of modern totalitarianism lie in something
like the vision described by Thomas More (whether the latter approved of
this or not of course remains contentious). Despite Marx and Engels’s own
famously caustic comments on “utopian” socialism, many Marxists have
lent credence to this intellectual chronology, without of course intending
such portrayals to show the social and economic system described in a
negative light. Utopia is here not dystopia, because the demands it makes
respecting the suppression of individuality are justified by the ends
achieved in terms of a more just, fair and equal society. To its opponents,
however, such a view eventuated in Stalinism in all its manifold forms, in
the hyper-politicisation of individual and social relations, in the privileging
of conformity over dissent, in leader-worship as a quasi-religious
16 Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia

observance, in systems of surveillance which superseded any such efforts

previously, and in the Spartan militarisation of society generally. In the
most extreme expression of this view, all forms of socialism and social
democracy are guilty of these sins. But for some, of course, these effects
were not to be identified with socialism as such but only its perverted
Marxist form.
The first definition of dystopia, then, we might term the “identity”
definition. In it we see the pursuit of the secular millennium as the greatest
tragedy of modernity. A second definition of dystopia will term the latter a
perversion of the former, rather than acknowledging any essential identity
between the two. This involves a defence of the utopian principle which
might be mounted from several directions, including the response that the
society portrayed by Thomas More was relatively free and vastly more
democratic than most in contemporary Europe and lacked most of those
elements we associate with modern totalitarianism. This preserves some
form of the concept of “utopia” for positive contemporary application. A
third definition will uncouple “dystopia” from the Morean tradition
generally and yoke it instead to negative visions of humanity generally and
secular variations on the Apocalypse. These may emanate from various
forms of social and political oppression; from the domination of humanity
by machines, monsters, or alien species; from the imposition of norms
derived from specific scientific and technological developments, such as
eugenics or robotics; or from environmental catastrophe.
Dystopia, then, is a broad and diverse tradition. Within the context of
the European intellectual tradition we may recognise the portrayal of hell
and Satanic rebellion as the most important original paradigm underpinning
these ideas. The monstrous, too, notably in the modern Frankenstein tale,
remains a constant trope in such visions. Seen from this perspective the
two characteristic twentieth-century literary dystopias, Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, belong to
different subdivisions of the wider definition of dystopia. (From the
viewpoint of their ruling elites, of course, both represent utopias in the
positive sense.) This wider definition is linked to the “identity” definition
at a variety of levels; most essentially, it describes an act of hubris
(political, scientific or other) which produces catastrophically negative
consequences where more modest aims might have prevailed. (Sometimes
this can be directly evoked; thus Mary Shelley’s monster is in some
respects a response to her father William Godwin’s philosophy; sometimes
it may be viewed as more indirect, or symbolic, as where the existence of
the monstrous is seen as an essentially psychological description of
humanity’s complex nature – as portrayed, for instance, in Dr Jekyll and
 Gregory Claeys 17

Mr Hyde.) Thus building machines, even robots, with useful functions

might be applauded, where the attempt to create life as such is attended
with deeply negative results.
What also links these three definitions is their description of societies
where human volition has been superseded or eroded by an authoritative
imposition of control from outside – from the leader, party, alien race and
so on. In this sense dystopia is antithetical to the idea of popular control, or
democracy, in particular. The mass have lost control over even the most
rudimentary aspects of their own destinies; they are putty in the hands of
fate. It is difficult to resist seeing theocratic authoritarianism (either real or
imaginary) as the paradigm of such a context; if utopia embodies ordered
freedom, dystopia embodies unfreedom and exposure to the constantly
capricious rule of a supremely powerful force, which may be human,
natural, superhuman or utterly artificial. Try as we may to separate the
definition of utopia from the domain of religion, we are here again brought
inexorably back to this starting point of explaining the meaning of the
concept of dystopia. For just as the Garden of Eden and Heaven remain
prototypes of utopia, so hell performs the same role for dystopia.2 And
both motifs remain a constant, indeed central rather than peripheral, aspect
of human experience. From this perspective dystopia is quintessentially a
post-political or anti-political (perhaps ante-political, naturalistic) state.
Modern politics, we suppose, is intended to give us deliberative and
executive authority or collective control over our conditions of life; in
dystopia we are merely pawns in the hands of others. In the democratic
utopia we collectively make the right decisions and create a free and
affluent society (or so it is popularly supposed). In its antithesis, we are
deprived of these benefits.
One final observation. It may be fruitful to view the dominant,
totalitarian dystopia of our times as a misinterpretation of utopia itself,
though the perfectibility view is such an important misreading that it
almost overpowers every other interpretation and indeed has become a
crucial variant upon utopianism. Utopia is often defined as the portrayal of
the “perfect” society. In the Morean tradition, utopia does not portray this
“perfection”: crime, warfare and folly still exist. Perfectibility is an
essentially theological conception, inherited from the mythological pre-
history of the Morean tradition. It is not a concept suitable to describing
human beings or human societies: the quest for immortality, if forestalled
by formaldehyde, remains fruitless. The quest for utopia when seen in
terms of perfectibility demands a quasi-millenarian spiritual rebirth or
return to original purity, a state of grace or absence of sin, often during the
revolutionary process, in which human nature is remade, ostensibly
18 Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia

permanently for the better. A racial, ethnic, national, class or ideological

purity is supposedly attained during this process which demarcates the
new human nature, “Soviet Man”, the “Real Khmer” or whatever, from the
old. But as we know too well, this all-too-temporary surge in virtue is
always succeeded by a lapse backwards, by moral failings which become
inevitable insofar as the ideal aimed at is impossible to attain in the first
place. In this variation of the Noble Savage ideal, the romanticised
proletariat and peasantry prove rather more savage than noble. The
totalitarian dystopia, then, is not an inversion of utopia or anti-utopia but a
misinterpretation of the concept of utopia which mistakes the earthly for
the divine. This gives us a good sense of how far the concept of utopia
remained entwined with religious consciousness through the last century,
as well as of the persistence of the millenarian impulse.

Notes
1
This essay builds upon arguments presented in my (2010) “The Origins of
Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell”, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge UP, pp. 107-34; and my (2011)
Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea, Thames and Hudson.
2
If the Garden of Eden is the key model for the original Western, Judaeo-Christian
utopian tradition, expulsion from it would possibly imply that subsequent human
life is itself “dystopian”.
 UTOPIA’S SHADOW

KRISHAN KUMAR

Dystopia is not so much the opposite of utopia as its shadow. It emerged in

the wake of utopia and has followed it ever since. So close are the genres
that it is not always clear what is a utopia and what a dystopia. William
Morris thought that Edward Bellamy’s utopia, Looking Backward, was a
dystopian nightmare, at least from his point of view; American college
students of the 1950s and 1960s found Aldous Huxley’s dystopia Brave
New World, with its easy availability of sex and drugs, a distinct utopia.
Authors are not always fully in control of their material. Given that
Huxley later wrote a utopia, Island, that employed many of the techniques
of Brave New World – including the use of drugs – given that Huxley
himself seems to have taken to the lifestyle of southern California that
originally provided the inspiration of Brave New World, who is to say that
Huxley wasn’t secretly drawn to the world that he attempted to satirise in
his dystopia? Perhaps the students were right to discern the utopian
elements in Brave New World.
As a response and a riposte to utopia, dystopia was of course a later
genre. The earliest forms seem to have been satires on the rationalist and
scientific utopias of More and Bacon. Of these Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
was the most powerful and influential. Similar in style and substance was
Voltaire’s Candide, a satire on the Enlightenment’s utopian creed of
progress. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is another agreeable example of an
attack on the Victorian faith in science and technology. From the earliest
days therefore the targets of the dystopia have been some of the most
cherished shibboleths, what others have called the “grand narratives”, of
modernity: reason and revolution, science and socialism, the idea of
progress and the faith in the future.
Since most of these elements of modernity only really spread on a
significant scale in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it is not
surprising that it is mainly in the twentieth century that dystopia truly
comes into its own. Here we get the classic examples of the genre:
Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
20 Utopia’s Shadow

Four. All three were responses, direct or indirect, to the utopias of science
and socialism that were best expressed in the many utopias written by
H.G. Wells in these years, from A Modern Utopia to The Shape of Things
to Come.
It is an interesting question to ask, Which of these dystopias most
appeal today? Which seem to have been the most prescient, in the sense of
most being in tune with contemporary realities? Zamyatin’s We is the most
stylish, from a literary point of view: spare and piercing, making effective
uses of some of the devices of literary modernism. He certainly anticipates
much of the analysis of totalitarianism that we find in Nineteen Eighty-
Four and even – in the sexual arrangements, for instance – some of the
elements of Brave New World. But Zamyatin’s terse and elliptical way of
presenting his material makes it difficult to assess it in political and
sociological terms. What we get is an evocation of mood, a sense of power
and terror which is extraordinarily effective but which leaves as it were the
“machinery” of the society largely unexplored. Hence it is difficult to say
how far the state of the world today matches up to the society of We.
Certainly we might agree that terror and power remain persistent realities
in the world; in that sense Zamyatin may be said to have given us a
timeless glimpse of an enduring feature of modernity. But it remains
largely in the metaphorical mode; its lack of detail makes comparisons
with the more concrete features of today’s world difficult.
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four abounds in detail; that has always been
one of its great strengths and one of the sources of its continuing appeal.
Everyone remembers the clock that strikes thirteen; the absence of the
small luxuries of life, such as toiletries; the rituals of tea-making in the
room above the antique shop in the proles’ quarter where Winston and
Julia have their romantic trysts. Nineteen-Eighty Four, Orwell seems to
want to remind us again and again, is a novel, not a political tract. It has
many echoes of some of his earlier novels, such as Coming Up for Air.
This is one reason why it is wrong to abbreviate the title of the novel to
1984, as if it is a date. As a date, 1984 is irrelevant to the novel; it simply
reverses the last two digits of the actual date – 1948 – when Orwell wrote
the novel. To concentrate on the date is to treat the work as prophecy, and
this is something that Orwell was at pains to deny. His book was, he said,
a warning, not a prophecy. It was meant say: something like this could
happen, and it might if we don’t do something to stop it. To dismiss
Orwell’s vision because, by 1984 or thereabouts, what he said might
happen did not happen (or did it?) is to miss the point of Orwell’s analysis
of what he regarded as some powerful tendencies in modern society: some