A Theme And Fear In Dystopian Fiction Essay, Research Paper
In the Dystopian
fiction of Huxley and Orwell, language is a central function in their critique
of utopias: societies formed in subservience to ideology. As ideas have been
seen to usurp reality, then language is seen to overcome thought. Thus
Dystopian fiction also articulates a very contemporary fear (which developed
into Postmodernism) that language, although the very core structure of
perception, is ? in the last analysis ? without absolute foundation. Once
language is manipulated, then reality becomes fluid too: language, as the route
to a dictatorship of consciousness, shows that he who controls the word,
controls the world. Dystopian fiction takes this pairing of language and
society in their controlled, Utopian forms, and uses it not only to question
the consequences of ideological idealism, but to posit an even more worrying
possibility about ?real? society. Crucial to the
concept of the Dystopian novel is the anti-hero. Both Orwell and Huxley are
careful to make their protagonists misfits. The physical weakness of Bernard is
a direct analogue for the insipid, aging body of Winston. Both are given to
solitary, socially marginalised (and hence secretive) pursuits. Bernard is
treated with mistrust because he does not participate in the liberated sexual
play. In the more sinister society of Oceania, Winston?s solitary pursuits are
even more dangerous, such as when he slips out to walk among the Proles. Both
feel the need to throw themselves into communal activities for the sake of
appearances: Bernard?s hollow community Sing is parallel to Winston at the
Two-Minutes Hate.This dislocation
is not accidental: it acts as a way for the insanity of the Utopia to be
defined, and a lost reality or veracity to be evoked. Both Orwell and Huxley
create confidantes for their anti-heroes (Watson and Julia) who partially
validate their dissent. It is also interesting that both writers introduce an
element of objectifying externality via ?The Book? and the critique of John the
savage. However, both these are victim to a certain level of ambiguity: it
becomes unclear whether the Brotherhood is real or a double-layered fiction of
Miniluv, and the self-abnegating, solitary stoicism of John can hardly be
endorsed as a viable alternative to the World State.? Both novels are closed with a fairly long passage of explication
by authority figures (O?Brien and Mustapha Mond) who help to contextualise and
finally validate the suspicions of the anti-heroes, and yet paradoxically
underline their futility. These novels
construct a world where everybody believes a fiction, and the anti-heroes are
isolated figures who still hold tentatively to a sense of reality. Hence,
O?Brien tells Winston ?if you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your
kind is extinct?[1], whilst
Bernard ?suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate.?[2]
The fictions of the World State and Oceania are propagated by language, and
thus a lost veracity (of truth, of words, of communication) is entwined with a
receding humanity.Orwell is
particularly skilled at evoking this sense of loss, through the frequent dreams
of Winston, the motif of the photograph ? the ?momentous slip of paper?[3]
which could bring down the Party ? and the fragments of old English rhymes. Brave New World, achieves the same
effect in rather more general terms; particularly through the contrast between
the World State and the Savage Reservation. Huxley paints the challenging
sacrifice that has been made:Stability isn?t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being
contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of
the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by
passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. (Brave New World, p.202)In stark terms,
human emotion has been abolished and murder of an individual becomes a lesser
crime than social unorthodoxy. The effect is more shocking to the reader than
it is to Bernard, who is still heavily conditioned. Nevertheless, in passages
such as that when Bernard hovers above the English channel, or the extended
montage sequence of Chapter III, which intersperses Bernard?s weary cynicism
with exultant history, a more elegiac feel is captured.? As mentioned
above, his forsaken humanity is clearly related to a perceived lack in
language. Nineteen Eighty-Four
contains the symbol of Winston trying to reconstruct the Cockney rhyme ?Oranges
and Lemons.? This striving calls to mind Watson?s frustration as he struggles
to articulate something his society has removed. In contrast to the ?pure? uses
of language is set the dominant paradigm of state propaganda. Under Big
Brother?s rule every liberty is taken to twist language. This means not only
straightforward lies and fabrications, which is the purpose of the Ministry of
Truth, but anodyne mass-production culture and the reversal of meanings
encapsulated in the Party slogans. These patterns are also found in Brave New World, which has a meaningless
state motto, degraded propagandist culture (as created by Watson and
exemplified by the largely non-linguistic ?feelies?) and an entire series of
mindless hypnopaedic mantras and ?Fordisms.? Bernard?s ironic distaste at the
evident hollowness of conditioned truisms is mirrored by Winston?s admission
that propaganda abolishes facts until ?everything faded away into a
shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become
uncertain.?[4]The edifices of
conditioning and Orwell?s Newspeak point to an even more terrifying reality
that welds together language and society. Language is used as a tool which
actually creates reality; an extreme culmination of 20th Century
propoganda into a complete system of social control. As the Director of the
Hatchery notes of the hypnopaedic methods: ?at last the child?s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the
suggestions is the child?s mind. And
not the child?s mind only. The adult?s mind too?all these suggestions are our suggestions?Suggestions from the
State.?[5]
This is exactly the same proposition as that made by O?Brien, as he revels in
the unrivalled power of state espionage, propaganda and Newspeak orthodoxy: ?we control life, Winston, at all its levels.
You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be
outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature.
Men are infinitely malleable.?[6]Naturally, there are a range of social
control methods. The World State has soma, Oceania has the Thought Police. The
World State endorses free sexual love with no attachment, Oceania aims to
abolish the orgasm and eradicate love (two poles of thought on how to control
the introverted male/female sex relation.) Both subsume the family in the
community. Oceania fights perpetual wars whilst the denizens of the World State
play endless games of centrifugal bumble-puppy. Both suppress real science
despite a gloss of progress, whilst work is reduced to mere sinecure.? However, language control represents the subtlest
of all these methods, and their inevitable culmination. The suppression of
pre-Utopian culture and the creation of propaganda departments is one step. Yet
the ultimate goal, resting on the assumption that language is the base of
perception, is to use language to control thought without any need for
coercion. Coercion is pointless when dissent is no longer a viable mode of
thought. To ignore the role of language in these novels is to make the same
mistake as Julia does when she states that Big Brother cannot get inside you.
It is this very dictatorship of the interior, as O?Brien notes, that
differentiates these Dystopias from their historical forebears.This is where
conditioning and Newspeak play their roles as arbiters of reality. Doublethink
does this by distorting the logical structure of language, so that the
contradiction between two statements is ignored, facilitated by the technique
of Crimestop. Orwell points out the symbiosis between thought and language
through the invention of Newspeak, a language which purges all unnecessary vocabulary
and creates inverted neologisms (eg.Ministry of Plenty) in order to frustrate
any instinctive grasp of language. The eventual aim is to make dissenting
thought quite literally impossible to articulate. This theory is carefully laid
out in Orwell?s appendix on the principles of Newspeak. By cleansing language
into a reductive and mechanical system, the same process would cleanse thought
into an ideologically controlled process; a flight from individual identity
into subservience to the Party. Whereas the
process of language control embodied in Newspeak is only partially, it is fully
realised in Brave New World. Although
the World State does
no less sinister. The eugenic global caste system is the foundation of their
society, and the caste-members are reconciled to their situation with
hypnopaedic control. Crimestop ? the suppression of dissent ? has a distant
relation in the automatic recital of soothing sleep-learnt mantras. These
mantras ensure social cohesion by reinforcing the caste hierarchy and the
sexual liberty ethos, as well as being the lynchpins on which acceptance of
soma consumption, passion surrogates and contraception revolve. The mantras are
linguistic markers for a deeper language/thought interface that signals a
complete regulation of the mind. As Mond points out, the lower castes are
trapped in bottles of existence, and it is language-control that has forged the
glass.Both Dystopias
also engage with the Idealist theory that reality cannot exist independent of
perception, and thus take the principles of language control one step further.
A cornerstone of Oceania?s politics is that the past is mutable. The Ministry
of Truth ensures that every written document is altered in accordance with
Party wishes, whilst the Thought Police prevent the keeping of personal written
records and the possession of cultural material dating from the days before
Ingsoc. A similar process is seen in Brave
New World, partially by a historical ?campaign against the Past?, partially
by keeping all old literature suppressed. History, as a rule, is not taught,
simply because there is no point; the Wold State exists in a Utopian present
moment: ?We don?t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.?[7]Carried by the
Thinkpol maxim that the present is controlled by the past, it becomes apparent
that the very fabric of reality is being manipulated. With all thoughts and all
reference-points (be they ideologically-suspect ideas, history, failures of the
State etc.) under state control, then reality becomes mutable itself. O?Brien
outlines the collective solipsism that lies at the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four?s false
consciousness, and interrogates Winston until he comes to accept as truth the
equation 2+2=5:Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he
could imagine, the arguments which proved his own non-existence; but they were
nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, ?You do not
exist?, contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind
shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O?Brien
would demolish him. (Ninteen Eighty-Four,
p.272)Although less
explicitly, Huxley also creates a similar sense of false reality, even allowing
one character to speak the line ?pain?s a delusion?[8],
presumably another hypnopaedic. Although not going to the lengths of Orwell,
Huxley?s Dystopia is conditioned so there is the barest hint of free-will, and
certain concepts ? liberty, love, parenthood ? have been erased just as
effectively as in Newspeak. Particularly among the lower castes, the ideas have
simply ceased to exist in their old forms, as shown by the fact that
Shakespeare can no longer be understood. This is brought home by the way the
words ?mother? and ?father? have been transformed into obscene and scatological
slang. Language and thought have been moulded in the same crucible of
conditioning: the words still exist, but their 20th Century meanings
have been ripped from them, as well as all means to express the old senses.The use of
Shakespeare in Brave New World shows
us that literature is totemic in these Dystopian novels. The literature of the
past is systematically purged in both Oceania and the World State, and replaced
by a safer form of propaganda culture. In Nineteen
Eighty-Four a section of Minitrue is dedicated to translating the classics
into ideologically-distorted Newspeak versions. The plight of the propagandist
Watson and the dilemma of the unintelligible Othello in Brave New World
have already been mentioned. ?The Book? written by Goldstein is a tangible and
tactile link with the literature of the past, an icon of subversion simply
because it is an object in the old style. Why is literature treated by these
writers as such an important concern?Firstly, art in
its traditional role mediates between life and representation, and thus
literature threatens the stability of that relationship (the control of which
is at the heart of both states.) Literature represents a kind of independence,
particularly in Brave New World, a
method of subversion. Reading is a solitary activity, and as represented by
John the savage, it also opens up an alternative existence of striving, passion
and idealism. Huxley expounds exactly why the passion of literature must be
sacrificed to the contentment of Utopia, and Mond?s analysis could equally be
applied to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Reading is not communal, and it might introduce subversive ideals into the
sanitised climate of Oceania. As such, literature can be associated with any
dissenting voices against the stasis of ?post-humanity.? Both as an independent
mode of language, and one traditionally linked with dissent and idealism,
Winston?s prime act of defiance is to write a diary and reclaim language and
memory for the individual. Watson represents a similar longing to make the word
more than a brute instrument of social control.Yet literature
is important for another reason. It is considered to be the freest form of
linguistic expression, and as such the pinnacle of a whole range of culture:
journalism, history, popular songs and so forth. Dystopia?s twin programs of
propaganda and suppression mark a recognition of other discourses that might
challenge the establishment. As both dystopias rest their stability heavily on
control of discourse ? manipulation of thought through language, Newspeak,
Conditioning ? these dissenting discourses must be quashed. The electroshock
conditioning in Brave New World
represent an attempt to suppress discourses of truth and beauty as symbolised
by the book and the rose. Newspeak is an attempt to destroy the ability to form
any discourse other than one ideologically acceptable to IngSoc; to abolish figurative language in favour of functional. The
anti-heroes represent human embodiments of alternative discourses, and as such
they too are either removed from society, or forced to submit.This foreshadows
the Postmodern spectre of discourse ?truth effects.? In these Dystopian novels,
the writers show what can happen when a society controls language: it, in turn,
controls discourse, thought and ultimately reality. Both Orwell and Huxley,
through use of external verification, show us that Winston and Bernard have the
true perception of reality, even though they must pay the price for their
inability to reject truth. Yet the question is raised as to how far the
discourse hypothesis can be taken? The Dystopian novels do not remove a
stabilising narrative authority, but nevertheless they root the ideologies of
their Dystopias in contemporary modes of thought. IngSoc is clearly seen to be
a corruption of Socialism. The future of eugenics was a live issue in the
pre-Nazi era when Brave New World was
written. Orwell and Huxley silently pose the Postmodernist question and a
warning to the future: if language controls reality, how do we know our
discourse is valid? Are we also unwitting victim of various unacknowledged
modes of thought control? Are the World State and Oceania logical extensions of
1940?s societies? The writers of Dystopian fiction paint a bleak extreme to
question to the present.This is
ultimately the meaning and the argument behind Dystopian fiction?s treatment of
language. The lost veracity of language points to a lost meaning and a lost
freedom in human society. The control of language by the hypothetical states
allow their controlled discourses to contain freedom, thought, dissent, history
and even material reality itself. In an era of ideological extremes – Fascism
and Communism ? the dilemma was powerfully relevant. Resting on the assumption
that the structure of language has a direct effect on the structure of thought,
Dystopian fiction is a critique of the dangers involved in ideology, where the
ideas ?dangerously fluid and malleable as they are ? overcome the human
element. Black can become white, freedom can become slavery. By rooting their
novels in contemporary issues, they also approach the frightening semiotic
question about discourse and truth, image and reality, and leave us wondering whether,
as O?Brien puts it, sanity really is statistical. [1] Nineteen Eighty-Four,
p.282 [2] Brave New World, p.60 [3] Nineteen Eighty-Four,
p.161 [4] Ibid. p.44 [5] Brave New World, p.25 [6] Nineteen Eighty-Four,
p.282 [7] Brave New World, p.205 [8] Ibid. p.229