Critical Survey

In this issue of Critical Survey scholars from both Britain and North America analyse representations of dystopia in literature and film. In the keynote article, Patrick Parrinder offers an examination of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, contexualising it within the tradition of dystopian romance – which, he argues, saw a last flowering in the late nineteenth century. In a thought-provoking discussion Parrinder covers a range of utopian/dystopian narrative strategies and a selection of novels including The Time Machine, The coming Race and A Crystal Age.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here: a society cannot be truly dystopian if travellers can come and go freely. Anti-utopias and 'satirical utopias' - that is, societies considered perfect by their advocates but not by the implied reader - must be well-regulated enough to prevent the possible disruption caused by a visitor. There is no exit at all from the classic twentieth-century dystopias, which end either in an actual death, like that of the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World (1932), or in a spiritual death like Winston Smith's in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Any glimmers of hope that the protagonist may have felt are quickly destroyed.

Observation plays an increasingly significant role in twentieth-century society as a means of regulation. In this regulatory function, observation manifests itself in the ubiquitous CCTV, traffic cameras and other surveillance techniques used to monitor and record the activities of ordinary citizens. One of the more alarming recent manifestations of the potential for all-pervasive surveillance is the announcement of the development of an urban surveillance system by the United States military, which 'would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city,' and which could potentially be used by governments on their own citizens. The dramatic increase of surveillance in the twentieth-century has also been matched by an increase of voyeuristic entertainment, exemplified by the Orwellian titled television game show Big Brother. The entertainment value of voyeuristic surveillance has arguably rendered individuals more …accepting of regulatory surveillance in their personal lives. This trend towards increasing surveillance coupled with a citizenry inured to a constant invasion of its privacy has formed the basis for a number of twentieth-century dystopian novels and films, such as George Orwell's 1984 (1949), George Lucas's THX-1138 (1971), Stephen King's The Running Man (1982), Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium (2002) and the Warchowski brothers' Matrix trilogy (1999-2003). The widely acknowledged forerunner of these works, however, was a novel, We, written in 1921 by the Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) straddles various genres typically shunted off into the category 'science fiction' or 'speculative fiction'. Partly a dystopia, partly an apocalyptic text, and partly, in her own words, 'an attempt at autobiography,' the novel is difficult to classify. Indeed, the novel sparked disappointment and confusion upon its initial publication in 1974, with critics taking Lessing to task for exchanging the realist rigor of her earlier works for vague mysticism, and for producing a confusing work that alienated the reader. In fact, to call it a novel at all is something of a contradiction. Speculative fictions do not address the new; they address the future - the 'proleptic analepse of future history,' in the words of Bernard Duyfhuizen. And yet in the twentieth century we have embraced a number of future histories - from Zamiatin's We (1924) to Orwell's 1984 (1948) to Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1963) to the experimental postmodern fictions of J. G. Ballard - as landmark novels. At the simplest level, these texts offer a critique of how we live and who we are now. Though they may not exactly be novels in the technical generic sense, we recognize that they speak in and to the present, if not of it.

In 1909, E. M. Forster published his only work of science fiction, the dystopian fable, 'The Machine Stops'. The story portrays a futuristic world-state that exists underground, and in which the inhabitants lead separate lives united only by the Machine, a gigantic technological network that supplies all the citizens' needs. The narrative focuses upon Kuno, who disobeys the Machine and ventures aboveground, and his estranged mother, Vashti. Taking as its cue David Ayers' recent discussion of A Passage to India (1924), the following analysis argues that the reconciliation between Vashti and Kuno, once the Machine has stopped, describes a transgressive notion of love that is also related to the need for imagination within an otherwise rationalised existence. In other words, while the social setting of Forster's story is dystopian, the narrative retains a residual utopian element.

One of most striking aspects of literature written during the Cold War is the prevalence of dystopian and/or anti-utopian works. As the prefixes of both terms imply, the genres that attempt to discredit utopias have generally been perceived in opposition to their model texts, i.e., utopias posit an ideal society, whereas dystopias posit a terrible society resulting from specific utopian premises. Although numerous contemporary critics have explained the relationship between utopia and dystopia in terms that transcend such straightforward divisions, the dystopian fiction of the Cold War suggests that there is still some utility in considering (though not adopting) the more simplistic definition, both because utopian language generally contains a simple good/bad logical dichotomy and because the culture and politics of both the Soviet Union and the United States during this period frequently relied on such simple binary utopian sentiment. In my view, the prevalence of dystopian and anti-utopian sentiment in Russian and American fiction is a parodic-satirical response intended to subvert the rampant utopian mindsets of both the superpowers during the Cold War. The authors of the works examined here do not support either side in this ideological struggle, but rather attempt to invalidate the conflict's overarching logical context.

It is my intention here to explore the fictional and non-fictional texts that may have informed (or are at least isomorphic to) the sentiments articulated in this seminal dystopian film. The film centres on the struggles of protagonist Sam Lowry (Jonathon Pryce), a cog in the impersonal machinery of the bureaucracy that governs Brazil's society who desires anonymity within consensus reality, but in his dreams is a winged warrior fighting noble battles with symbolic adversaries. Sam finds he is increasingly unable to successfully reconcile or differentiate these paradoxical existences as they begin to bleed into one another throughout the film.

In the summer of 1996, director Peter Weir and his location managers visited a small town on Florida's Gulf Coast to scout locations for their new film, The Truman Show, the tale of a young man, Truman Burbank, who literally (and unwittingly) lives inside a television program. Everything Truman knows or has known in his entire life - friends, family, even the town in which he lives or the sky he sees at night - has been fabricated solely to perpetuate Truman's ignorance about the fact that billions worldwide view his existence daily. The screenwriter, Andrew Niccol (whose eye for visionary architecture had inspired him to shoot much of his own film, Gattaca, in Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Community Center the previous year), had planned to use Manhattan as the setting for this new film. Weir, however, felt, the story might benefit from a more unknown, 'idealized' location, and the crew finally settled on Seaside, an experiment in 'neotraditionalist' community design. The result of this decision provided the world with its first 'big-screen' exposure to a New Urbanist community.

A Lifetime after Cavafy ALEXIS LYKIARD

Ancestral Haunt by Glen Cavaliero Syrena by Maria Jastrzebska Behind the Lines by Vernon Scannell Marking Time by R.V. Bailey JENNY SWANN

Notes on contributors