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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Having previously written about anti-utopianism, I wanted to write about its analogue, dystopianism. If modern literature tends not to feature utopian themes of the kind promulgated by William Morris then it similarly seems not to feature dystopian themes of the kind familiar from Huxley and Orwell, even if many of the predictions made in those novels are increasingly being fulfilled.
The nearest example of a dystopian writer is JG Ballard. Ballard's work tends to depict artificial communities existing in a society characterised by alienation and anomie, where violence becomes the only means of release from this paralysing conformity. " While Ballard's fiction has become increasingly 'realistic,' it's not difficult to see how this would relate to novels like Brave New World. Nontheless, it's difficult to see Ballard as the heir of a politically engaged aspect of science fiction, not least due to the zeal with which his characters reach towards the dystopian future. The violence within novels from Crash to Super Cannes serves as both a rebellion against society and as an integral component of it, while the violence itself is both an innate psychopathology and a product of modern society. As Ballard puts it, "I’m frightened that the possibilities of a genuine dystopia may be much more appealing than any utopian project that people can come up with." To take the example of Millennium People, rebellion ("an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.") is both a rejection of society and a product of it, as much as sexual tourism ("thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better"). The difference from previous Ballard novels lies in the inherent absurdity of a middle-class revolution; "we're trying to rescue them from heaven.. I want to be brainwashed." Not only this, but the novel suggests that any such rebellion is effectively assimilated, as with Kay Churchill becoming a TV presenter; "far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country's civic traditions."
The question in Ballard's novels has always been whether the suburbanisation of the soul simply creates frustrations (the "new vices" referred to) that lead to a release of primitive impulses (a model that would be congruent with Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents. In Super Cannes, Ballard notes that "Homo Sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites... these criminal activities have helped them rediscover themselves. An atropied moral sensibility is alive agin.") or whether it actively creates an entirely modern form of psychopathy "the old morality belonged to a cruder stage of human development... since they couldn't rely on self control they needed ethical taboos." The question is this; are the violent executives in the novel, as Penrose suggests, really no different from figures like Gilles De Rais? One of the hallmarks of Ballard's surrealist approach to the novel is that these events are seen via a number of distorting mirrors. The perspective continually shifts, leaving the answers to those questions unclear. For example, Penrose comments that "she's a rebel, but she doesn't realise that Eden Olympia is the biggest rebellion of all," when he has previously been at pains to portray Eden Olympia as a form of social evolution; "perverse behaviours were once potentially dangerous. Societies weren't strong enough to allow them to flourish." In this, Ballard's surrealism is particularly adept; by distorting the events through the eyes of a multiple overlapping statements and perspectives the reader is exposed to the same form of disorientation as the characters. The most obvious device for this is his customary device of a heavily biased narrator, where we are invited to determine whether his own psychopathy is any different to that promoted by Penrose.
Another example worth considering is Michel Houellebecq, whose shares with Ballard an idea of how the consumer society and the sexual revolution alike have commoditised emotion. To Houellebecq alienation is not a lifestyle; it is something determined by the fragmentation of social being; "just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation." Atomised features a discussion of Brave New World as a utopian novel based on the ideas advanced in Julian Huxley's 1931 What Dare I Think?:"Everyone says that Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that's hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against ageing, the leisure society. This is precisely the world we have tried - and so far failed - to create."
Atomised itself is certainly an utopian novel advancing extropian ideas that rather recall HG Wells. However, his more recent novel The Possibility of an Island is much closer to the dystopian tradition, aligning it to apocalytic novels like those of Wyndham and the early Ballard. Houellebecq assumes a series of environmental catastrophes leading to the destruction of society, but differs from earlier novels by applauding the demise of the human species allowing as it does for the rise of a genetically modified race as a replacement. The Elohminite movement depicted in the novel itself rests upon a number of internal contradictions, particularly in the way it depends on a consumer society that turns youth into a commodity that can be indefinitely preserved only for this expectation to be inevitably disappointed. Its force depends entirely on what it opposes, just as Daniel's career depends on the sensibilities it deliberately provokes and outrages; "if the fluidification of forms of behaviour required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalogue of restrained conduct, it was perfectly suited to a celebration of the will and ego". The consequence of this ambiguity is that the new species of neohumans find themselves leaving the calm of their habitations and exploring a post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by savage humans for whom the collapse of civilisation has been total and complete. The neohumans are both revolted by these creatures (the culture of the mind being impossible in a society locked into struggles for existence) while remaining unsatisfied by their own lack of will and consequent stagnation. As a species they achieve nothing and their lack of suffering effectively leaves them as an evolutionary dead-end.
In this sense, Houellebecq's novel follows in the line of Margaret Atwood's (whose The Handmaid's Tale is the closest modern novel written in the vein of Orwell and Huxley) Oryx and Crake where a society based around social inequality and gates communities falls victim to a genetically engineered plague that allows for the rise of a new species that lacks the worst traits of humanity (though in both cases, it is suggested that the posthumans are far from being what is intended, with Houellebecq's species walking out onto the ruined earth in search of what is left of their ancestors). it would be perfectly possible to read Oryx and Crake as a dystopian text where Crake, a Faust-figure like Nemo, Moreau or Frankenstein, pursues dangerous technologies without thought for the consequences, unintended (such as the Craker's development of symbolic thought and religion) or otherwise (the success of the engineered virus). On the other hand, most dystopian novels, including Brave New World, 1984 and We deal with the suppression of biological imperatives rather than their alteration. But comparisons with other Atwood novels suggest otherwise. Surfacing is full of similar dystopian theories concerning an American invasion of Canada for its oil reserves, and sees its protagonist retreat from civilisation into nature (feeling a guilt at being human and expressing a desire for humanity to disappear); similarly, throughout Oryx and Crake mankind is viewed as an aggressive species that consumes resources indiscriminately (essentially, as Easter Island writ large); the Crakers represent a similar retreat to nature, allowing Crake to take on the mantle of an almost heroic figure instead. Oryx and Crake's overall depiction is more ambiguous than Surfacing since the damage is largely done by environmentalist characters rather than corporate strategy.
posted by Richard 7:41 pm
