Framing catastrophe: the problem of ending in dystopian fiction.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Milner, Andrew
• Published date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Milner, Andrew

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most famous of all English-language dystopias. (1) And we all know how it ends: 'But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother'. Reminding us exactly where we have arrived at, the novel then reads, in most subsequent editions as in the first: 'THE END'. (2) Little wonder that Raymond Williams should have read it as 'desperate because ... on such a construction the exile could not win, and ... there was no hope at all'; and its author as 'a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor'. (3) It was a judgement he would amend, but never revise. So the last of his many readings continued to deplore 'the terrifying irrationalism of the climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four'. (4) Fredric Jameson's work on science fiction and Utopia shares a similarly longstanding animus towards both novel and author. So he writes that:

the force of the text ... springs from a conviction about human nature itself, whose corruptions and lust for power are inevitable, and not to be remedied by new social measures or programs, nor by heightened consciousness of impending dangers. (5) Both Williams and Jameson had grasped the central political dilemma of dystopian fiction: if its serious purpose is in its warning, then the more grimly inexorable the fictive world becomes, so the less effective it will be as a call to resistance. As Douglas Adams' Vogons were inclined to repeat: 'Resistance is useless!' (6) Or as Engels had it: 'Freedom is the recognition of necessity'. (7) In short, there is no point resisting the inevitable. Hence, Williams' judgement that 'in the very absoluteness of the fiction', it becomes 'an imaginative submission to ... inevitability' (8); or Jameson's, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is not so much a critical dystopia as an 'anti-Utopia ... informed by a central passion to denounce and to warn against Utopian programs in the political realm'. (9)

There is no doubt that Orwell's later writings had express political purposes, but these are hardly as Jameson has them. 'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936,' Orwell insisted in 1946, 'has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism'. (10) Jameson sidesteps the question of Orwell's peculiar politics--his combination of anti-Fascism, neo-Trotskyism and libertarian socialism--by dismissing all reference to the '"if this goes on" principle' in Nineteen Eighty-Four as 'mere biographical affirmation'. (11) But when Orwell invited his American trade union readers to read the novel in precisely these terms, he surely provided a gloss, not simply to his own beliefs, but to the text's intended political effects. 'I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,' he had explained to the United Auto Workers, 'but ... that ... it could arrive ... totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph'. (12) Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, at least in part, as exactly that inspiration for political resistance Williams and Jameson insist it cannot be. Their judgement is sustained, moreover, by a surprising lack of interest in the novel's more formal literary properties. Williams writes as if the novel were written wholly within the conventions of literary realism, which it most definitely is not: witness the lengthy extracts from Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. (13) Worse still, Jameson virtually reduces it to its American reception as the paradigmatic 'Cold War dystopia', uncritically repeating the dominant American reading of both author and text as 'at one with contemporary ... anti-socialisms'. (14) More importantly for my purposes, however, neither seems to register that the novel does not end at 'THE END', but continues, in my edition for over fourteen more pages, in the first for over thirteen. (15)

Nineteen Eighty-Four actually ends at the conclusion to the appendix on Newspeak, with: 'It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050'. (16) In content, these lines add little, but their form is redolent with meaning. For, as Margaret Atwood observes of the whole appendix, it:

is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of 1984 is over. (17) This must be right: the appendix is internal to the novel, neither an author's nor a scholarly editor's account of how the fiction works, but rather a part of the fiction, a fictional commentary on fictional events. And, although Atwood fails to notice this, it is anticipated within the main body of the text, by a footnote in the first chapter, which assures us, again in standard English, in the third person, in the past tense, that 'Newspeak was the official language of Oceania'. (18) Atwood uses a similar device in The Handmaid's Tale, the first of her two dystopian science fiction novels, which concludes with an extract from the proceedings of a 'Symposium on Gileadean Studies', written in some utopian future set long after the collapse of the Republic of Gilead. (19) Moreover, she readily admits that Nineteen Eighty-Four provided her with a 'direct model' for this. (20) If she is to be believed, then both Orwell's Appendix and her 'Historical Notes' work as framing devices, with which to blunt the force of dystopian inevitability.

Science Fiction as a Generic Context for Nineteen Eighty-Four

There are good reasons to take Atwood seriously, not least her science fiction novels, though the later Oryx and Crake (21) clearly owes less to Orwell in particular than to mainstream science fiction in general. But it might be more productive to pursue not so much the matter of her critical credentials as that of Orwell's intellectual contexts. Let me begin by noting how science fiction, or at least something very close to it, provided Orwell with a generic context and related set of intertexts. Literary criticism tends to resist such identification between Orwell and science fiction: he is a 'great writer', after all, not some second-rate Trekkie. In 1943, however, when he began work on what was still entitled The Last Man in Europe, he had not known he was a great writer: none of his books had sold particularly well nor received much in the way of critical acclaim. But he had known about science fiction; not the term perhaps, still rarely used outside the United States, but certainly 'that kind of book', as he had written to Gleb Struve of Yevgeny Zamyatin's My. (22)

The authors of that kind of book included, for Orwell, not only Zamyatin, but also H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Karel Capek. Add in Mary Shelley and Jules Verne and one would have something close to a canon of European, as distinct from American, science fiction writing. Canons aside, however, we may still ask, what exactly were Orwell's interests in this European tradition of utopian and dystopian future fictions? Zamyatin is by common consent one of the most important figures in early 20th-century Russian science fiction: Darko Suvin describes him as, along with Capek, 'the most significant world SF writer between the World Wars'. (23) He was certainly not appreciated as such, however, in Orwell's England. Zamyatin's dystopian novel My had been written in Russia and in Russian in 1920 to 1921. But it was not published in the original language until 1952, and then only in the United States: first publication in Russia came as late as 1988. The book had become available in English, however, in an American--but not British--translation, as We, in 1924, and in French translation, as Nous autres, in 1929. (24) Orwell had 'not heard of' it until 1944, when he first read Struve's 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature. (25) Unable to obtain the American translation, then still unavailable in England, Orwell acquired a copy of Nous autres 'several' years later, which he promptly reviewed for Tribune, advising its readers that: 'This is a book to look out for when an English version appears'. (26) In 1946, he wrote approvingly of the novel in his famous essay on Burnham; in 1948, he offered to review a proposed English translation, which unfortunately failed to eventuate, for the Times Literary Supplement; and in 1949, he urged it on Fred Warburg, who had published Animal Farm in 1945 and would shortly publish Nineteen Eighty-Four itself. (27)

If Zamyatin was effectively unknown in England, Wells by contrast was clearly the leading English science fiction writer of the day, although like Orwell he remained unfamiliar with the term: as with Verne in English translation, Wells' novels were marketed as 'scientific romance'. (28) His utopian fictions included A Modern Utopia, The Dream, Men Like Gods and The Shape of Things to Come. (29) This last, which predicted and argued for the creation of a technocratic 'World State', became the best known English literary utopia of the 1930s. The 1936 film version, Things to Come, directed by W. Cameron Menzies with a screenplay co-authored by Wells, occupied an equally prominent position in British science fiction cinema. Orwell could be fulsome in retrospective praise for Wells:

The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed ... Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience ... to discover H.G. Wells ... here was this wonderful man who ... knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined. (30) But his work had become increasingly irrelevant to the 20th century, Orwell continued: 'A crude book like The Iron Heel ... is a truer prophecy ... than ... The Shape of Things to Come'. (31)...