Destroying the utopian desire
(Excerpt)
On the difference between dystopian and anti-utopian texts:
The novel 1984 by George Orwell is probably the most famous anti-utopian text. Written in 1948, it is a nightmarish tale of life under a totalitarian regime, which clearly parallels Stalin’s reign over the USSR. It is not Communism itself that Orwell skewers in 1984, but the inevitable totalitarianism that arises out of Communism, which Orwell blamed on the fact that “socialist doctrine is often peculiarly attractive to people with dictatorial ambitions” (Bound 140). Wegner asserts that Orwell’s novel can be “read not only as a denunciation of the horrors of Stalinist Soviet Union, but as a more general attack on the misguided efforts of intellectuals and political activists…to transform society in some fundamental way” (“Utopia”). Essentially, the goal of 1984 is to present a terrifying cautionary tale, not only by showing hypothetical evils, but also by paralleling the abominations of a contemporary state which has fallen victim to a utopian ideology.
However, while anti-utopian texts like 1984 and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin are brashly critical of utopian thinking at the surface level, both Jameson and Wegner assert that they still contain an ulterior utopian urge. Jameson calls We, for example, “a true anti-Utopia in which the Utopian impulse is still at work” (202). Wegner agrees that “We offers a rich schema of different Utopian ‘possible worlds,’ and even maintains an open-ended Utopian horizon in its intimations of the ‘world’ of the ‘infinite revolution’”; he also notes that “Huxley’s Brave New World contains hints of a Utopian primitivism” (“Utopia”). While 1984 is bleaker than either We or Brave New World, it still includes utopian conservatism: the belief that a better, if not ideal, world can only be found in the past. This is exemplified when Winston, the novel’s protagonist, “nostalgically looks back toward the vanished moment of Orwell’s own youth, a moment that not coincidentally also coincided with the high point of British global power” (Wegner).
This utopian undercurrent occurs because the protagonists in dystopian novels are inevitably revolutionaries, rebels, or at least, malcontents, presenting a counter-ideology against the governmental authority’s current and abused utopian ideology. This is obviously how the sub-genre got its name, but it really comes down to one utopian ideal replacing another. An explicit demonstration of this occurs in Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem, which brutally attacks collectivism and socialism in order to make room for Rand’s personal egoist philosophy. In Anthem, as in many other dystopias, particularly in the early twentieth century, communism or socialism is the false utopian ideology set up by the author to be criticized, leaving some form of capitalism, democracy, or individualism to offer a better utopia to replace it. Of course, this is not the ideological framework for all dystopias. Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, for example, attacks capitalism and machine-driven economy in favor of a more egalitarian state.
The Philosopher-King, on the other hand, refuses to succumb to the draw of the utopian impulse, by presenting a counter-ideology that is equally as problematic as the false utopia it is criticizing. The novel achieves this in three essential steps. First, it presents a clear dystopian setting, strongly influenced by other dystopian texts, and exhibits the ideology of the administration, which is the false utopia, set up to be criticized. Second, it introduces a revolutionary faction, led by the protagonist, Porter Davies. While The Philosopher-King’s rebels are influenced by those from other dystopian texts, it also draws comparisons to real-world cults. Finally, the novel parallels the ideology of the administration with Porter’s own beliefs, undermining any real hope for a positive replacement utopia.
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