Dystopias are us
Dystopias seem especially relevant at the current moment. As Junot Diaz writes in the editor’s note to the latest issue of The Boston…
Dystopias seem especially relevant at the current moment. As Junot Diaz writes in the editor’s note to the latest issue of The Boston Review (Fall 2017), which takes as its theme “global dystopias,” dystopian fiction — or stories that present a world or community at its most undesirable — “it is precisely in dark times that the dystopian — as genre, as a narrative strategy — is most useful.”
His point is that dystopian fiction — or art more generally — takes what we instinctively or intuitively sense about our times (whenever that might be) and presses it to its extremes. It is what we know about our failings, but writ far larger than we can imagine, which therefore points both as a warning toward where we might be headed, while giving us a sense of how we can prevent the dystopian from becoming reality.
I think of 1984, which George Orwell wrote at a time of bureaucratic expansion, both in the East and the West. His Oceania is, after all, a western nation, though it is overcome by a version of English socialism that betrays its democratic promise by devolving into a soul-grinding bureaucratic inertia. Great Britain was still reeling from the damage from World War II, while the United States was ascendant — but entering a phase from which we have yet to emerge, that of the technocracy, of the organization man and mass corporatism.
Chris Hedges in a 2010 essay describes Orwell’s vision as a future “dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control,” and one that grows from another dystopian vision — that of Aldous Huxley. Huxley, Hedges writes, saw us being “entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression.” Think Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and the endless access our phones and watches and tables allow us, and not just for Work or pleasure but as access points for corporate and government information miners. We’ve increasingly become nothing more than digital profiles, collections of information, of demographics and likes, that corporations use to create marketable diversions, that can be carved up and bought and sold and spied upon.
Hedges argues that we are moving from Huxley to Orwell, that as thinks spin out of control, as the economy falters, we will turn to a strongman to allay our fears and hatreds. He writes this in late 2010, five years before Donald Trump announced his presidential run and six years before this carnival barker’s campaign of fear anger and hatred collided with an outdated and dysfunctional electoral system, voter purges and suppression, and surprisingly weak Democratic campaign to win election with a minority of the popular vote.
Trump is both a buffoon and an immensely dangerous figure. He is inarticulate and simplistic, which allows him to be pretty much anything his supporters need him to be. He is raging id — I don’t remember where I read this phrase, but I admit it is not original in my part — and speaks to the fear and loathing of a population beset by deindustrialization and hopelessness, often expressed in vile racist language. They feel left behind, with some justification, and they see even the most modest of gains by minority groups — blacks and Latinos, in particular — as a threat to their own tenuous positions and limited power.
This has been true throughout our history, and it hasn’t changed. Trump is both insider and outsider, power-broker and con man. He is part of the monied elite, the aristocracy, but maintains his sense of outer-borough resentment of Manhattan/DC “nobles.” This resentment is his chief political attraction. He is just as pissed off as the rest of the mostly white middle- and working-classes that helped propel him to office, and — I think this is key — he has created the impression that he can do some about their anger. He’s got money, answers to no one, speaks his mind — all of which is nonsense, of course. It is all show, all part of the character he’s been honing since The Art of the Deal was published (perhaps before) and burnished on He Apprentice. He’s a reality TV star who has turned his name into a marketing tool. It’s all a game.
Nevertheless, he now commands the most powerful government apparatus and military in the world, and is bolstered by a shockingly committed group of supporters. His approval rating is about 33 percent, but that one-third of the population is composed of mostly true believers, and there is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.
I don’t want to imply that we’re on the precipice of fascism or totalitarianism — Hedges, whom I’ve always liked, does tend toward hyperbole even as he does present a strong analysis of our cultural failings. I also don’t want to imply that Trumpism is something wholly outside or history. Rather, it burst forth from an American soil seeded over the last five decades by an increasingly superficial politics, one in which a venal racist/imperialist can run (and win) by playing the role of amiable grand dad; where a Democrat can run against everything his party had formerly stood for while proclaiming to “feel our pain”; where “hope and change” is offered and which we hen take to mean whatever it is we most want to hear.
But back to Diaz. “If, as Fredric Jameson has argued, utopia functions as ‘a critical and diagnostic instrument,’ then dystopia, utopia’s’ ‘negative cousin,’ is similarly equipped, only more so,” he writes.
In assembling this special issue, we were drawn not so much to pursuing the classic “bad places” of times past (“a boot stamping on a human face — forever”) but the corpus that Tom Moylan has identified as critical dystopias. As per Lyman Tower Sargent, a nonexistent society that readers view “as worse than contemporary society but that normally incudes (sic)at least one eutopian (sic) enclave or holds out hope that the dystopian be overcome.” Most significantly, critical dystopias, in Moylan’s formulation, point to causes rather than merely describe symptoms. Their highest function is to “map, warn and hope.”
The piece that struck me, that demanded a response, was a brilliant short story by Charlie Jane Anders. I first read Anders as part of my research into comic book culture in preparation for teaching a section on comics to a freshman composition class. Her piece, “Supergirls Gone Wild,” which originally ran in Mother Jones, reads as a manifesto for altering the way women are portrayed in comics, something that has changed over the last 10 years. The essay generally elicits two responses — male students with a long-time allegiance to superheroes tend to become combative and defensive, as if they are being attacked, while female students and less invested male students (and those with feminist bents) tend to agree and use it as a basis for a shift in their perspectives on he genre.
Anders, who is transgender, imagines a world in which society seeks to enforce a strict gender duopoly, using new (and frightening) technologies to force integration on those who for whatever reason to not feel that they fit in. The main protagonist is Rachel, a woman born as a man who has been captured by a. corporate-government joint entire and who is to be subjected to a sort of Frankenstein-meets-gender-reassignment procedure. I don’t want to say too much about the story’s particulars — I encourage everyone to read it — except to say that the story’s logic derives from the particular moment in which we find ourselves. The control is extreme, of course, but founded in reality — forced clitoridectomies are not uncommon around the world, along with arranged marriages, bans on homosexuality, etc. In the United States, transgender recruits are being barred from military service, and state governments refuse to recognize even the existence of he trans community (see the North Carolina bathroom bill and Chris Christie’s veto of legislation that would have allowed transgender New Jerseyans to revise their birth certificates to reflect their true genders). The abortion debate is, on some level, also is about the control of women’s bodies, as well, and the continuing opposition to marriage equality is rooted in a similar control of an individual’s biology.
In “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” Anders unmasks the emotional violence that these efforts impose on the transgender community, by reconstituting them in their most extreme form within a dystopian future that seems both impossible and too close to the truth to ignore. The emotional and intellectual core or the efforts to restrict that led to a boycott of North Carolina is a mix of revulsion and hate that stem from a fear of those we do not understand. The bathroom bill — and the veto of the birth certificate change — is not about protecting society, as Anders makes clear, but about enforcing a narrow view of gender, and more broadly is part of an assault in personal liberty, creativity, and sexuality. Rachel, in the story, has through most of her life to remove the cultural shackles that limit her human potential. She has fought to write her own narrative and refused to accept the one imposed on her from the outside.
This, on some level, is what all of us must do, to cast off some level of expectations and forge our own path. We move beyond parental expectations, let’s say, and become whole people. For many — because of social mores and even government/corporate rules governing race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, etc. — this mission is more difficult.
Anders’ story reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” an often misunderstood story that satirizes the corporate mindset, one that devalues creativity and individuality except when it can be marketed. The tale often is read as a libertarian fable — which I think ignores the deeper critique implied by Vonnegut, who was a political progressive, a believer in equality and a critic of social control. Harrison is weighed down by social controls and technologies designed to create an extreme equality. He rebels, as Rachel does, and we, the readers, ultimately question the push toward an enforced sameness. It’s not the equality that is being critiqued, but the control.
The situation in Anders’ story — and in The Handmaid’s Tale, the X-Men comics, etc. — is a bit clearer, but no less extreme. And it should point us toward a better understanding of stands the dangers we face should we choose to continue to allow fear to direct our politics and culture.