Anti-Utopia

Reinterpretations of Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and Zamyatin's We Based on the Conflict Between Liberty and Domination

We, 1984 and Brave New World are three of the most widely interpreted science fiction novels of the twentieth century. They all deal with anti-Utopian futures, each horrible in a completely different way. By examining various critical interpretations of We, 1984 and Brave New World, and by examining the use of certain symbolic imagery in the three texts, we can draw new connections between these formerly unconnected sets of imagery. Wind imagery in We, for example, was previously interpreted to reflect only the inner struggles of the protagonist, D-503. However, if wind is looked upon as a symbol of liberty, instead of as a representation of the struggle within, then it takes on new meaning in terms of the interplay between liberty and domination, a major aspect of these novels.

Zamyatin's We takes place in a world called the One State. In the One State all buildings, tools and machines are made of glass. People are called "numbers" and all live, work and act precisely in unison, to the point that they chew their food together. Their actions are dictated by the Table of Hours, a clock system which dictates precisely what everyone is to do and when. The people are ruled by a leader called the Benefactor and policed by the Guardians. Their civilization is surrounded by the Green Wall, a wall made of glass outside of which is an untamed green jungle. The protagonist is D-503, a mathematician and builder of the Integral, a gigantic glass space-ship which is being built to go to other planets and spread the joy of the One State there as well. He begins in the happy state of ignorance shared by all other numbers in the One State, but is led to revolt by the woman, I-330, with whom he falls passionately in love. She leads him to break the rules set by the Table of Hours, and eventually introduces him to the Mephi, a revolutionary organization consisting of rebels and savages who live in the jungle beyond the Green Wall. They plot to take over the Integral and use it as a weapon to destroy the One State. Their plan is thwarted by the Guardians and D-503 is forced, along with the rest of the world's population, to undergo the Great Operation, which destroys the part of the brain which controls passion and imagination, reducing the people to living robots.

Orwell's 1984 takes place on Airstrip One (England) in a vast empire called Oceania, which contains "the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa." There are two other empires, Eurasia and Eastasia; Oceania is always allied with one and at war with the other, although which one matters little and changes frequently. The social structure of Oceania consists of three levels: the Inner Party, the privileged executives and leaders; the Outer Party, members who perform less important functions and are less privileged; and the Proles, masses of uneducated laborers who constitute the vast majority of the population. The government is divided into four ministries: the Ministry of Peace, which directs the war against Eurasia/Eastasia, the Ministry of Plenty, which is in charge of rationing the limited food supply, the Ministry of Truth, which falsifies old documents to show that the party is always right, and the Ministry of Love, which tortures and executes criminals. The whole system is led by a figure called Big Brother. Although his actual existence is doubtful, he is the center of Oceanic society and is loved by everyone. The book follows the protagonist, Winston Smith, a writer for the Ministry of Truth, as he rebels against the party. He begins with doubts, and by keeping a diary, which is a forbidden activity. He then enters into a long forbidden sexual relationship with a woman named Julia, tries to join an anti-Party underground organization called the Brotherhood (the actual existence of which is doubtful), and is then caught and taken to the Ministry of Love where he is tortured and spiritually broken by the very man who had acted as his supposed contact for the Brotherhood, O'Brien.

Brave New World takes place in the World State, though the name is seldom used since it is the whole world and has been the whole world for many generations. It is generally called "the world". In the world everyone is perfectly happy in every way. Babies are produced in bottles and conditioned from the moment of conception through puberty to enjoy their future jobs and agree with everything the government says. People come in five types, Alpha through Epsilon, Alphas being intellectuals and Epsilons elevator operators and other such menial laborers. Each higher caste is physically fitter, smarter and taller than the lower ones. The people are kept sensually satisfied with promiscuous sex, "scent organs" and "feelies": tactile, erotic movies. If, for some reason, an unpleasant situation arises the citizens take soma, a drug with all the pleasant effects of alcohol, but none of the bad effects. The protagonist is John Savage, the child of a Beta woman and an Alpha man who was born, instead of being decanted from a bottle, when his mother is stranded in a Savage Reservation. In the reservation people still believe in such barbaric ideas as families and Christianity. John is brought out into the world by Bernard Marx, an Alpha who is looked down upon because he is shorter than an Alpha should be. John, horrified by the world he sees, and repelled by his sinful lust for Bernard's female friend Lenina and her promiscuous willingness to have sex with him, tries to lead a revolution, but the people are too happy to revolt. He then tries to isolate himself from the rest of the world, but is discovered, and after being forced into a sexual orgy by a mob of tourists armed with soma, he hangs himself.

Anti-utopias are usually classified as being satires. 1984 was called a "satirical pamphlet." These books, however, are considered to be different in nature from ordinary satires. "Until our time, irony and unnatural laughter were thought to be the duty of the satirist.... But disgust, the power to make pain sickening, the taste for punishment, exceed irony and laughter in the modern satirist." These sorts of satires were given a classification of their own by literary critic Northrop Frye. His classification is here explained by Irving Howe, another critic who did a great deal of work researching these three novels:

Books like We, 1984, and Brave New World are not really novels... but what [Northrop Frye] calls Menippean satire, a kind of fiction that "...deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes... The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.... At its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."

It is necessary to categorize these novels separately from other novels because their significance is purely intellectual, rather than dramatic as in most novels, and must be read and interpreted in a manner suiting their intellectual nature.

The major element connecting these three novels is the fear that the world is being led towards a horrible future: "What they fear is not... that history will suffer a miscarriage; what they fear is that the long-awaited birth will prove to be a monster." Aldous Huxley in his foreword for Brave New World, written in 1846, said: "We have only two alternatives to choose from, militarized totalitarianisms, having their root in the terror of the atomic bomb, and... the destruction of civilization...; or else one supra-natural totalitarianism... developing... into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia." Such fears were shared by Zamyatin and Orwell; Orwell is said to have "intended 1984 as a warning," and George Woodcock said that "Both Huxley and Zamyatin see Utopia as a possible, even a probable outcome of twentieth-century technological developments...." Technological is the key word in this phrase, for technology is what they fear will bring about this horrible future. In 1922 Max Eastman, a "prominent defender of the Russian revolution...." said "I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life." In other words, "Not progress denied but progress realized, is the nightmare of the anti-Utopian novel." The fear is much more specific than a general fear of progress. Huxley synthesized the idea: "The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals." Irving Howe said that it was "the fear that progress... is taking us toward a transparent universe in which all the categories are fixed, the problematic has been banished, unhappiness is treason and the gratuitous act beyond imagining." Such a world, one where "one might actually gain a life of security, [and] adjustment..., but only at the cost of their spiritual freedom, that is to say, their humanity...." forms the basis of the three different anti-Utopian futures explored in 1984, Brave New World and We.

As one reads these novels, specific images are repeated, especially in We. Iron is used to describe the Benefactor, the head of this world of domination. Iron is chosen because of its great strength, oppressive weight, and, probably, because chains are made of iron. He is described as having a "slow, cast-iron echoing voice", and "cast-iron hands upon His knees" which "moved with the weight of a hundred tons." Wings are another theme which repeats in the novel. Flight is connected with freedom because it is an expression of independence from everything, even the earth itself. As soon as D-503 begins to revolt he dreams of wings: "All that night I was tormented by wings. I walked about shielding my head with my hands from the wings." The symbol of the resistance group, the Mephi, is "a winged youth with a transparent body and, where the heart should be, a dazzling crimson-glowing coal." At the end, when the Mephi, in a final attempt to overthrow the One State, destroy the Green Wall, the destruction was first revealed by "barely visible quick dots at an incredible height... hoarse, guttural sounds from above- and finally, over our heads- birds. Their sharp, black, piercing, falling triangles filled the sky." And they brought with them "the whistling of wind, the wings, the cawing," all symbols of freedom.