dystopian literature

I’m often asked what my favourite book is, or to list my ten favourite books.  I like so many books that I think a list of one hundred wouldn’t be enough, and worse yet, putting them in a list would imply that I liked book one more than book one hundred even though book twenty-seven is really better than both.  Maybe one of these days I will actually make this list.  In the meantime, you can be certain the books I write about here definitely belong on it, especially this month’s books.  I especially love them because they all fall into one of my favourite categories of writing: dystopian literature.

Even though I could count off a handful of dystopian novels when I set out to write, I had no concise, formulated definition.  According to the American Heritage Dictionary, dystopia is “an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.”  If it weren’t for that caveat about imaginary, I would have assumed dystopia a synonym for the reality of the better part of our world.  Before I looked it up in the dictionary, I had a narrower view of dystopian literature.  Now I realize that a great number of books I previously hadn’t considered to fit the bill are quite at home in this category, which may help to explain why I like them so much.

For me, the crème de la crème of dystopia is George Orwell’s novel 1984.  Even if people don’t recognize the title, it is likely they have encountered the idea of Big Brother (at least in the form of a ridiculous unreality show on television).   Modern references to 1984 seem to focus on the technological aspects of the tyrannical regime controlling the world of protagonist Winston Smith. But Orwell was more concerned with the ideological aspects of a society.  Big Brother wasn’t the result of a capacity to intrude into the everyday lives of citizens.  Rather, the intrusion was precipitated by an ideological shift toward Socialism, which Orwell paralleled to Nazi Fascism and Soviet Communism.  

The imaginary state of the novel is Oceania, one of three superpowers, which encompasses England, the USA, Australia, southern Africa, and a few other regions.  Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, an arm of the government whose purpose is to rewrite history and language, or in other words, to lie.  By exercising such control, the government manages to manipulate its citizens’ worldview and get rid of Truth altogether.  For those who don’t succumb to the propaganda, there is always the Ministry of Love who enforce belief in the lies of the Ministry of Truth.  Conformity is perpetuated through fear, intimidation, and wonderfully exciting events like the Two Minutes Hate demonstrations, where the more recalcitrant individuals are tortured until their devotion to Big Brother, the iconic leader of Oceana, is assured.  Winston manages to escape the Thought Police (gendarmes from the Ministry of Love) for some time, and through this lens we see how horrific a government can be when its citizens cede their rights for security.

Even though I rank Orwell at the top, a critic would probably place him beneath Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World was penned sixteen years earlier.  I rather enjoyed the letter at the end of the recent edition in which Huxley thanks Orwell for a copy of 1984 (which it took him over a decade to get around to reading) and trumpets the superiority of his own novel’s view of dystopia as being a more accurate prognostication of current and future reality.  In Brave New World, fear and intimidation are nearly nowhere to be found.  Instead, society is controlled through sex and drugs.  A primitive form of genetic engineering helps to organize society into five hierarchical groups with labor at the bottom, kept nice, dumb and docile, and the intelligentsia at the top or Alpha level.  Even the Alpha’s seem beholden to a system of manipulation so insidiously intertwined into the social fabric that the elite is as subject as the commoner to its rule.  Huxley leaves room for a tribal culture existing where a young man, John the Savage, becomes a foil to a culture devoid of art, literature and reason.  While I found Orwell more resonate with my own angst, Brave New World’s themes seem to leap from the pages and find themselves a familiar home in 2008.

In both 1984 and Brave New World, religion seems silent or has been replaced by another agent (Big Brother and Henry Ford respectively), but in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it is religion that is the architect of dystopia.  Though it is never quite clear, a crisis preceded this society’s subjugation in which women begin to have difficulty successfully carrying a pregnancy to term.  While the previous novels turned the whole world upside down, Atwood only takes a small portion of North America for the Republic of Gilead.  Gilead is controlled by a militarized religious authority who blames the impropriety of the past for the problems of the present.  They tightly control sex, clothing, and the relationships between men and women to keep social order.  Women are particularly degraded in this society, and parallels between modern issues and imaginary ones are not hard to draw. Perhaps my favourite idea gleaned from this novel is the disparity between “freedom of” and “freedom from” and how the former must be defended against the latter. 

Though I run short of space, I can’t fail to mention Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a young adult novel whose dystopia appears a Utopia at first, until its protagonist, Jonas, becomes the Receiver of Memory and discovers the price of tranquility is a loss of humanity.  Though more optimistic at the end than the previous novels, it expounds the deprivation theme of dystopia better than many of the adult novels I encounter in this genre.  One word of warning, you might cry at the end.

I intended to entice you with several other titles, like Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, but I’m afraid you’ll just have to track me down in person to hear about them.  The feature all these books have in common besides my love for them is a challenge to our own worldview and the never-ending attempts to subjugate us to “deprivation, oppression and terror.”

Next Month: Can someone who loves literature really be promoting a teenage angst vampire love story?

David Hutchison is the proprietor of the Book Tavern, located at 1026 Broad Street. David is best known for his unique ability to match the perfect book to a customer’s personality and being a veritable walking encyclopedia of literary works.

a request of conversation

the hobo who wears socks on his hands
and shouts bible verses on Sundays
he
he could tell me he loves me

the angry little balding man
who cleans my laundry with a sadistic smile
he
he could tell me he loves me

the red headed child who steals
people’s parking tickets
she
she could tell me she loves me

the group of Chinese tourists who drive by
every other month on mopeds
they
they could tell me they love me

the old man who lives a floor above me
and beats his dog with a cane
he
he could tell me he loves me

but

Chuck can’t tell me why I never finish a crossword puzzle
Mr. Goldman can’t tell me what constellation my freckles make
Carol Anne can’t tell me why I wear a certain perfume
Chan and Lee can’t tell me how I choose between a bath or shower
and Ol’ Saw can’t tell me the difference between my laughs

just
just tell me I’m a bad speller
tell me that I have Ursa Major on my arm
tell me that I only own two; one to feel pretty, the other beautiful
tell me I bathe when I’m lazy and shower to wake up
I just need you to tell me
snort, cover nose and mouth, silent , and a giggle

tell me that
just
tell me that

Marian May Kaufman is a senior at Davidson Fine Arts. Her passion for living emanates from her smile, her writing and her stage acting. Wrapping her talents and dreams into one, she plans to pursue writing as a career.

c.s. lewis

“It’s very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out, wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling.”

C.S. Lewis wrote a great many filthy tales committing truth to his readers through talking lions, pencil pushing demons and reluctant space travelers. Many readers have journeyed through Narnia and enjoyed The Screwtape Letters. Fewer have stood at the center of an epic battle between good and evil with Elwin Ransom (a character modeled after Tolkien) in The Space Trilogy. Even less have ridden a bus to the outskirts of Heaven and spoken with the Solid Ones in The Great Divorce. And for a great time, nearly none had heard of Glome and the beautiful Princess Istra and her equally ugly sister Orual. Today we journey to Glome.

Till We Have Faces presents a reconstruction of the myth of Psyche and Cupid. Told through the eyes of Psyche’s sister Maia, the book is her complaint against the gods. Lewis removes the story from Greece and places it in the barbarian northern lands of Glome. Psyche and Maia become Istra and Orual. Aphrodite is transformed into Ungit, a brutish and ugly goddess who demands sacrifice. Those familiar with Apuleius’ version of the legend will find little amiss, merely the story as it should be.

Christian mythology and allegory saturate Lewis’ writings (Aslan, the Great and Terrible Lion of Narnia is an obvious Christ figure), yet Faces contains no direct allusion to Christianity. Perhaps because so few understood the telling, it was ill received upon publication. The controversy soon quieted and the book fell into obscurity. I first noticed its revival about 15 years ago and found it one of the best novels of the 20th century. Freed from the constraints of man’s predisposition to Christianity, Lewis explores man’s chief struggle with the gods.

Each reading of the book is equally powerful for me. I find no end to the completeness which Lewis crafts each of his writings, but especially here, where it seems each paragraph contains a penetrating idea. Despite its depth, like all his books, it is intimately accessible. It is possible to simply read the story, but impossible to escape the very real questions Orual asks. Are the gods just? Are they fair? (Be forewarned that there are spoilers ahead…)

The tale very nearly begins with the birth of Istra, and rushes head long to her being sacrificed to Ungit, or rather, Ungit’s son, the Shadowbrute. Orual, practically Istra’s mother, though forbidden to attend the sacrifice, secretes off to collect her bones for a proper burial. As a bereaved “mother,” she begins her complaint with what the gods take from us. As she nears the Mountain where the sacrifice occurred, she is overcome with a strange gladness. “Why should your heart not dance?” the countryside cries out to her. She reminds the reader, ” The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony.”

She finds no bones, only an empty chain. Soon she finds Istra herself, unharmed, happy and claiming to live in the house of a god, the very god appointed to consume her. Instead a consummation has occurred and Istra is wedded to the god. Orual is devastated. Her beautiful Psyche taken from her, she cannot reclaim her and the loss is seconded. Worse, the house of the god cannot be seen by any but Istra. Is she mad? Or can mortal eyes not perceive eternal houses?

Orual is challenged by belief. “Was I believing in her invisible palace? … Up in the Mountain … anything was possible. No door could be kept shut. Yes, that was it; not plain belief, but infinite misgiving – the whole world (Psyche with it) slipping out of my hands.” Our illusion of control stripped away by a power outage or a market collapse or a terrorist - the whole world slipping out of our hands.

We answer with her voice: “That’s why I say no difference whether you’re fair or foul. That there should be gods at all, there’s our misery and bitter wrong. There’s no room for you and us in the same world. You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t thrive. We want to be our own.” Our accusation becomes our answer. Self-centeredness is exposed in the complaint, “It is not just.” Orual and her sisters are educated by a Greek slave, the Fox. After delivering her complaint, she meets with him in the Shadowlands and asks “Are not the gods just?” to which he replies, “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”

I beg the gods spare me justice for this review; if I have failed to entice you, to lure you into an affair with this novel, show me mercy.

Next month: From the fetid floral language of Faulkner to the brevity and wit of O’Connor, this native of the north and current resident of the southwest is truly a southern writer. While his work may be familiar to many today thanks to a celebrity endorsement, many would only know the least of his novels thanks to a film.

David Hutchison is the proprietor of the Book Tavern, located at 1026 Broad Street. David is best known for his unique ability to match the perfect book to a customer’s personality and being a veritable walking encyclopedia of literary works.