Political Manipulations in Anthony Burgess’ Dystopias Čerina, Vedrana Master's thesis / Diplomski rad 2011 Degree Grantor / Ustanova koja je dodijelila akademski / stručni stupanj: Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences / Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Filozofski fakultet Permanent link / Trajna poveznica:https://urn.nsk.hr/urn:nbn:hr:142:763919 Rights / Prava:In copyright / Zaštićeno autorskim pravom. Download date / Datum preuzimanja:2023-03-04 Repository / Repozitorij: FFOS-repository - Repository of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Osijek Sveučilište J. J. Strossmayera u Osijeku Filozofski fakultet Diplomski studij filozofije i engleskog jezika i književnosti, nastavnički smjer Vedrana Čerina Political Manipulations in Anthony Burgess’ Dystopias Diplomski rad Doc. Dr. Sc. Berislav Berić Osijek, 2011 Summary Although the dystopian thought has been present in the literary tradition of the Western civilization for over two thousand years, not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the dystopian literature become recognized as a significant cultural force. The horrors brought about by the developments of the first half of the twentieth century have additionally reinforced the dystopian perspective on the humankind’s potential and have led to the recognition of the dystopian literature as a separate literary genre. The authors of the dystopian fiction challenge the optimism contained in the utopian thought and critically examine the political and social practices of the real-world societies, undertaking thus the role of social critics. In A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess focuses on the shortcomings of the present-day society, in order to investigate the nature of the relationship between the individual and the society. Insights into this subject matter provided by some of the most influential social critics of the modern times, such as F. Nietzsche, S. Freud, and M. Foucault, only reinforce Burgess’ own findings: the society is fundamentally hostile to the individual, since it will resort to any means necessary in order to ensure a predictable and controlled functioning of the societal life. In order to ensure that the citizens will make only those choices that coincide with the common good, the society employs mechanisms of mind manipulation intended to deprive the citizens of their free will. In this collision between the individual and the society, Burgess stands in defence of the individual. Key words: dystopian literature, social criticism, animosity between the individual and society, free will, mind manipulation 2 Table of contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 4 1. Dystopian literature as a form of social criticism .....................................................................14 2. The issues of the contemporary society addressed in Burgess’ dystopias ................................18 3. The notion of cyclical history.................................................................................................. 25 4. Societal marginalization of the individuals who differ from the official norm ........................30 5. The animosity of societal mechanisms towards the individual.................................................40 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 51 Works cited....................................................................................................................................54 3 Introduction We owe the word utopia to Sir Thomas More, who coined it in 1516. More used the term to name a fictional island with an ideal political system depicted in his book Libellus uere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festiuus de optimo reip. stat, deque noua Insula Vtopia (Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia), which came to be known simply as Utopia. While the word utopia is generally interpreted as outopos (οὐ + τόπος; not + place), denoting a non-existent place, More actually combined two words that in Greek sound alike, outopos and eutopos. In the poem ‘Six Lines on the Island of Utopia’, More refers to Utopia as Eutopia, a place where all is well (εὖ + τόπος; good, well + place), using the play of words to suggest that a perfect place with an ideal society is nowhere to be found. Because of More’s pun on the two meanings, outopos and eutopos, scholars cannot agree whether literary utopia should be defined as depicting a non-existent place, or a non-existent ideal place. Written in Latin, the book was soon translated into German (1524), Italian (1548), French (1550), English (1551), and Dutch (1553). Subsequently, the word utopia entered Western languages and became a standard usage. Sir Thomas More coined the word utopia and wrote the novel from which the entire genre would develop. Nevertheless, he was hardly the first one to envision a prospect of a society more desirable than the existing one, and to describe it in a form of a literary work. The concept of utopia and its representations in literature have been present for over two thousand years and can easily be found throughout the entire literary tradition of the Western culture, starting from the ancient Greece. Most commonly recognized as the first and the most important utopian writing of the classical world is Plato’s Republic (Politeia), written around 380 BC, a typical Platonic dialogue belonging to his early-to-middle period. In this dialogue, through a set of questions put forward by Socrates, Plato aspires to determine the nature of a just man and the workings of an ideal society. He uses the city-state (polis) as a large-scale picture of the soul. The ideal society described by Plato consists of three classes, each corresponding to one of the three fundamental elements of the soul. These classes are the philosopher-kings (wisdom), the warriors (courage), and the producers (moderation). All individuals in this well-reigned city-state are to be fitted into the profession that suits them the best: the philosopher-king is to create just 4 laws, the warriors are to make sure the laws are carried out, and producers are to provide for the society’s basic needs. As a result, everyone is supposed to be happy and the society is supposed be just. With The Republic, Plato set a pattern which has been followed by succeeding utopian writers to the present day. In fact, there is a lot of Plato in More’s work as well, which can, for the most part, be attributed to More’s close friendship with the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, a central figure of Northern humanism. Humanists were inspired by philosophers and writers of the ancient Greece and Rome and called for the revival of that tradition. Influenced by Humanists’ ideals, Sir Thomas More too turned to Plato in search of inspiration, primarily referencing Plato’s Republic and Laws in Utopia. In this respect, More’s Utopia is both the product of More’s and the Greek civilization. The society that More describes in his Utopia is authoritarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal, with stern laws and ruthless punishments for those who disobey it. Such society can hardly seem like a perfect one for a twenty-first century reader. Nevertheless, the society of Utopia provides a much better life for its citizens than More’s society did. In Utopia no one is rich or poor, everyone is working and sharing equally, living simply and happily, with their demands reduced to minimum. For these reasons, to a sixteenth century reader Utopia did seem like a paradise. Today best known as one of the major representatives of the literary utopia, Utopia is far from being a one-dimensional reading, offering a single interpretation. On the contrary, as Lyman Tower Sargent points out, various interpreters have assigned Utopia ‘radically different positions, from traditional Roman Catholicism to British imperialism to Marxism’ (22). Sargent’s explanation for this is that Utopia only seems to be straightforward on the surface, but in fact is quite satirical when interpreted correctly. According to him, the generations of readers have failed to recognize its complexity by not reading Utopia in Latin. The original Utopia has many puns in Latin, starting with the narrator’s name, Raphael Hythlodaeus. His first name means ‘healer from God’, while his last name means ‘speaker of non-sense’, which makes it difficult for the reader to decide whether the narrator is to be trusted or not. In a similar manner, Sargent continues, the names Utopia, Anydrus, Amaurotum, and Ademus are satirical as they 5 denote the island that is nowhere, the city that is a phantom, the river that has no water, and a ruler that has no people (23). Although Politeia and Utopia are both written in the form of a dialogue, they differ greatly in many respects. While More’s society is based on egalitarianism, in Plato’s society egalitarianism exists only within the clear-cut classes into which the society is divided. More’s family structures are quite traditional, with the household as the smallest social unit. In contrast, Plato advocates abolition of the family, proposing that all women should be shared by all the men, and that all children should be raised by the whole community. The discrepancy between how Plato and More envisioned an ideal society is consistent throughout the genre. The variety found among the literary works classified as utopian goes to such an extent that defining the genre of literary utopia becomes a very difficult task indeed. The diversity in question can be attributed to the fact that a utopian work is always a response to a specific historical setting. An ideal society is always imagined in relation to the existing one, primarily its ills and injustices. Accordingly, utopias are shaped specifically at times of crisis when political or social changes are called for. For example, Plato wrote Politeia as a reaction to the disastrous state of legislation and the decline of the traditional moral values in the old Greek polis, which was conditioned by the long years of Peloponnesian wars. Plato’s disappointment was primarily induced by the injustice inflicted on Socrates, the man whom Plato regarded as the most just man of his time; Socrates’ death sentence had led Plato to pose the question of how life in polis could be changed for the better. More’s Utopia, written during quite a tumultuous times as well, was an expression of More’s discontent with the tensions and the corruption that pervaded the society of the early sixteenth century England. As utopia represents a political and social alternative to the existing society of the author’s own time, utopias inevitably differ from one another depending on aspects such as the historical circumstances within which a literary work is created, as well as the author’s own position within these circumstances, that is, his/her social status and personal inclinations. One has to bear in mind that while all utopian authors strive to attain the same end, to propose what constitutes an ideal society, utopian visions still differ from one another in as to what the postulated perfection is. L. T. Sargent comments on this diversity as follows: 6 Utopias have been written from every conceivable position: There are socialist, capitalist, monarchical, democratic, anarchist, ecological, feminist, patriarchal, egalitarian, hierarchical, racialist, left-wing, right-wing, reformist, free love, nuclear family, extended family, gay, lesbian, and many more utopias, and all these types were published between 1516 and middle of the 20th century, before diversity really took hold. (21) However, what all these different works have in common is that they reflect the key issues of the period in which their authors lived. As Sargent notes, while most of these issues are recurrent – law and order, religious belief and practice, economic relations, authority, upbringing and education – their magnitude varies depending on the period in which utopias were written (21). The lack of distinction between utopia as a literary genre and utopianism as a general category also makes the genre difficult to define. The idea of utopianism is in its common usage often assigned with derogatory connotations. In the common everyday usage, utopianism is related with something imaginary, illusionary, impossible and idealistic. Even the dictionaries often succumb to such common usage and define utopianism as ‘a strong belief that everything can be perfect, often in a way that does not seem to be realistic or practical’ (Oxford Dictionary 7th edition). Contrary to such common usage of the term, utopian scholars see utopia as a legitimate means of articulating humankind’s omnipresent and everlasting aspiration for a better world. For that reason, Sargent defines utopianism as ‘social dreaming’ (5). Within this broad category of utopianism one can differentiate between literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory.1 According to the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Motifs, it is generally accepted among scholars that three major characteristics distinguish utopia from other literary forms: ‘a utopia is fictional, it deals with a specific unit of society, and its basic theme is the political framework of that unit. Utopias vary in the degree of attention paid to each of these characteristics, but the work that does not pay some attention to all three is probably peripheral to the genre’ (2: 1351). Regarding the purpose of utopian fiction, Sargent distinguishes at least six of them: ‘it can be a 1 L. T. Sargent provides a further explication of these terms: utopian practice refers to intentional communities or communes; utopian social theory includes: using utopia as a means of analysis, exploring utopia in relation to ideology as in work of Karl Mannheim, using utopia to explain social change as in work of Ernst Bloch, exploring the role of utopianism in colonialism and post-colonialism, as well as in the debate on globalization and anti globalization, and so on, p. 7 7 mere fantasy, it can be a description of a desirable or undesirable place, an extrapolation, a warning, an alternative to the present, or a model to be achieved’ (8). The greatest disagreement in defining the literary utopia stems from More’s pun on the meanings outopos (non-existent place) and eutopos (non-existent good place). As a result, two fundamentally different definitions of literary utopia are used by the contemporary scholars. The first definition is provided by Darko Suvin: Utopia is the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where socio- political institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis. (qtd. in Sargent 6) Suvin perceives utopia strictly as eutopos, as does another prominent contemporary utopian scholar, Krishan Kumar. Tom Moylan reports that Kumar, in Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1988), limits the term to a literary genre of fictional depictions of perfect societies exclusively (129). The second definition is provided by L. T. Sargent: A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space. In standard usage utopia is used both as defined here and as an equivalent for eutopia or non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a considerably better than the society in which that reader lived. (6) Sargent sees utopia as a broader category, as outopos, with two possible modes: eutopia as the result of envisioning the humankind’s future with hope and dystopia as the result of envisioning the humankind’s future with fear (8). The word dystopia (Greek: δυσ + τόπος; bad, ill + place) denotes a non-existent bad place. The imaginative dystopian society, which according to Karl Meyer, ‘serves only as a lens through which every barbarity of our age is magnified’ (qtd. in The Dictionary of Literary Terms and Motifs 1: 421), has also been referred to as futopia (future and futile) by K. Meyer, cacotopia (κακόs + τόπος; bad + place) by Lewis Mumford, negative utopia by Erich Fromm, or, by many, simply anti-utopia. However, the commonly accepted term for scholarly uses became dystopia. 8 According to The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, the word was coined in 1868 by John Stuart Mill, who used it in a speech given before the British House of Commons (2: 607). Literary dystopia is defined in relation to utopia; hence, depending on whether utopia is understood as eutopos or outopos, dystopia is to be understood as either a separate genre or a subgenre of utopia. Given that in contemporary literature dystopia is not only a genre separate from utopia, but also the dominant of the two genres, Suvin’s definition will be accepted for the purpose of this paper, as it allows for understanding dystopia as utopia’s equal counterpart. Therefore, the term utopia will be used from this point on as denoting eutopos. A feature undoubtedly common to all utopias is that they describe an ideal society, one of fulfilment of humankind’s hopes and undisturbed happiness. Such works include a firm faith in humankind’s abilities, as well as certain optimism that people can better themselves and that a perfect society ultimately can be accomplished. Since this type of optimism is characteristic for the Age of the Enlightenment, M. Keith Booker concludes that in its modern formulation utopia is often seen as an Enlightenment related phenomenon (Literature 34). The Enlightenment movement was intended to enable the humankind to take its destiny into its own hands. Kant saw the Enlightenment as ‘man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’ (An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? 1). This intended liberation of humankind was based upon a strong confidence in reason and science. The new science brought about new possibilities and encouraged belief in the infinite advancement of knowledge and progress towards both social and moral improvement. Science was believed to have the potential needed to build a better world. Booker notes that the rise of science in the Age of Enlightenment led to an explosion in utopian thought as well (Literature 5). The meta-narrative produced by the Enlightenment movement, that would function as an authority discourse, was the dogma of the humankind’s continuous emancipation. The dogma in question goes perfectly hand in hand with the notion of utopia, which relies on the premise that continuing improvement of humankind is possible and that it will eventually lead to acquiring perfection. The idea of humankind’s continuous betterment, which can be found at the very foundation of both the Enlightenment movement and the utopian thought, was based upon history being perceived as a teleological, unitary process. However, it is precisely such understanding of history that became subjected to 9