ON  DYSTOPIAS

"Utopia is essentially in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what should be"

Theodor A. Adorno [1964] from “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernest Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing”, in Ernest Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. London and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988.  

1  NARRATIVE

T1:          “I saw everything: the unalterably straight streets, the sparkling glass of the sidewalks, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the squared harmony of our gray-blue ranks.” [7]

T2:          “We get to use the blinds only on Sex Day. Otherwise we live in broad daylight inside these walls that seem to have been fashioned out of bright air, always on view.” [19]  

T3:          “Taylor and Maclaurin, wholesome, quadrangular, and weighty as Pythagoras’s pants; mournful melodies of a wavering, diminishing movement, the alternating bright beats of the pauses according to the lines of Frauenhofer—the spectral analysis of the planet… What magnificence! What unalterable regularity!” [19] 

Q1:          How does the city of OneState anticipate the lines of future developments in town-planning and social engineering? 

Q2:          To what ends does the narrative co-opt the history of scientific thought into its critique? Are they plausibly argued? 

Q3:          What is the significance of Taylorism to the ideas treated in the novel?  

T3:          “Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness.” [61] 

T4:          “‘You are perfect, you are the equal of the machine, the path to 100 percent happiness is free.’” [172] 

Q4:          Relate the worship of the machine to modern movements in the arts such as Futurism, and to political movements such as Fascism and Nazism.  

Q5:          How can we relate Zamyatin’s interest in technology to the movement known as Russian Constructivism? 

T5:          “If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.” [126-27]  

Q6:          In what sense would nonsense have proved of special value? 

T6:          “And everybody has to go mad, and as soon as possible! That is crucial.” [152] 

Q7:          What is the antidotal quality of madness in this context? 

2  RESISTANCE

 T1:          “‘Tell me the final number?’

                ‘…. Since the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final one?’

                ‘And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one…. You see that only differences, differences of temperature, only contrasts in degrees of heat, only that makes for life?’” [167-68]  

 Q1:          Is this a valid analogy?

3  NARRATOR

 T1:          “I simply can’t make jokes—the default value of every joke is a lie.” [14]  

Q1:          What does that suggest about the narrator? 

T2:          “(but … why am I writing about this, and where do these strange feelings come from? Because, really, there isn’t any icebreaker that could break through this life of ours, this extremely transparent and permanent crystal).” [115] 

T3:          “…I’m not writing for myself but for you, you unknown ones that I love and pity. For you, who are still trudging somewhere in distant centuries, down below.” [131]  

T4:          “I’ve got to write it down so that you, my unknown readers, can make full study of the history of my illness…” [140] 

T5:          “…I no longer have the strength to destroy this painful piece of myself, which might turn out to be the piece I value most.” [160] 

T6:          “I reproduce this … because you, my unknown readers, might find here something that justifies me….” [166] 

Q2:          How does one relate the various motives for writing provided for his narrator by the novelist?  

Q3:          Can you think of other ways of narrating the “novel”? What are the gains and disadvantages of the first-person narration?

4  GENDER

T1:          “this woman was just as irritating to me as an irrational term that accidentally creeps into your equation and can’t be factored out.” [10] 

T2:          “That woman annoys me, repels me—almost scares me. But for that reason I said: ‘Yes’.” [26] 

T3:          “Somewhere a long ways off through the fog you could hear the sun singing, everything was supple, pearly, golden, pink, red. The whole world was one immense woman and we were in her very womb, we hadn’t yet been born, we were joyously ripening.” [71] 

T4:          “The lances of her lashes move apart to let me pass inside…” [147] 

Q1:          How close is this to cliché?

Q2:          If the woman is so compelling and resourceful, why does she fail?  

Q3:          How does the sexual get mixed with the cognitive

5  IRONY/PARADOX

FREEDOM 

T1:          “Freedom and criminality are … indissolubly linked” [36]

T2:          “Those two in Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else.” [61] 

T3:          “Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall.” [91]

LEADER 

T4:          “the heavy skillful hand of the Benefactor.” [15]  

T5:          “A true algebraic love of mankind will inevitably be human, and the inevitable sign of the truth is its cruelty.” [202]  

Q1:          How does the narrator envisage the resolution of his paradoxes? Do you find them plausible? 

6  THE SELF

T1:          “Tomorrow is the day for the annual election of the Benefactor… It goes without saying that this has no resemblance to the disorderly, unorganized elections in ancient times … they couldn’t even tell before the election how it would come out. To establish a state on the basis of absolutely unpredictable randomness, blindly—could there be anything more idiotic?” [132]  

T2:          “I can’t stand people looking at my hands. They’re hairy, shaggy, some kind of stupid throwback.” [9] 

T3:          “‘You’re in bad shape. It looks like you’re developing a soul.’” [86]  

T4:          “Slowly she lifted my hand up into the light, my shaggy hand, which I so detested.” [157]  

T5:          “They were naked and went off into the forest. There they learned from the trees, animals, birds, flowers, sun. They grew coats of fur over their bodies, but beneath the fur they kept their hot red blood. You had it worse. You grew numbers all over your body, numbers crawled about on you like lice.” [158] 

T6:          “‘Extirpate the imagination. Surgery’s the only answer…’” [88]  

T7:          “I feel myself. But it’s only the eye with a lash in it, the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn’t seem to exist. So it’s clear, isn’t it? Self-consciousness is just a disease.” [124]  

T8:          “‘The imagination is centered in a wretched little brain node in the region of the pons Varolii. Expose this node to three doses of X rays, and you are cured of imagination.’” [172]  

Q1:          What are the risks entailed in the systematic use of irony and paradox? 

Q2:          Why is the imagination under attack? 

7  HETEROTOPIA

Zamyatin, We

                “‘… take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun, and there’s a blue electric spark in the tubing, and—there—the shadow of an aero just flashed by. But only on the surface, only for a second. But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer—everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world that we peer into with such curiosity, like children—… The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you: the sun, the wash from the aero’s propeller, and your trembling lips… And you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever. Let there be only once a barely noticeable wrinkle on somebody’s face, and it’s in you forever; once you heard a drop fall in silence—and you hear it right now.’” [87] 

Q1:          How does this represent an attempt to talk about the soul? In what sense could it be called an heterotopic space?