Article on Dystopian Structures
Openning grafs of an article for Crossings.
If we take seriously Lacan's notion of the symbolic order, that which puts a screen over the Real, and Kaja Silverman's the idea that all narratives are about apocalypse, then it makes sense to study the ways in which we represent dystopia to ourselves. Apocalyptic writings have long been temporal paradoxes: John of Patmos's Revelation is just one example of the genre which writes present dystopian scenes as future apocalypses. Verbal tense issues aside, "time" in apocalyptic literature--and thus in dystopian literature-- tends to lack the linnear nature, the causality we traditionally use to order events in history. Dystopian literature, as a generic hybrid of science fiction and the literature of social criticism, uses this tradition of temporal tinkering as the main rhetorical technique in its warnings. Memory, nostaligia, and narrative order in dystopian fiction form the exigency upon which the rest of the argument of the text rests. Nowhere is this phenomenon used so efficiently as in LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Haruki Murikami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Atwood's most recent dystopia, Oryx and Crake.
Peter Brooks describes the nature of narrative as an "arabesque," a squiggle representing turns and twists that prevent the story from ending prematurely. As Dino Felluga explains, "Brooks argues that we are driven to read because of our drive to find meaningful, bounded, totalizing order to the chaos of life; however, that drive for order is most fulfilling after the detours or dilations that we associate with plot. If the order of closure comes too soon, it can feel like a short-circuit, as if we were cheated somehow" ("Modules on Brooks: On Narrative Desire"). Borrowing from the Formalists, Brooks distinguishes between szujet and fabula, story (as the events happened in a linear time), and discourse, (events as they are retold). The difference is important for Brooks: discourse is the artistic, rhetorical method by which we attempt to make sense of our past. In Kenneth Burke's terms, narrative is the symbolic action that gives us "equipment for living;" in his opening pages of Rhetoric of Motives, Burke describes how writing about killing a person, is really "killing the principle which that person represents." Narrative, writing, for Brooks and Burke (and, to an extent, Freud), is not only theraputic, but is a necessary part of human existence. It is what defines us as human, as Burke notes in his "Definition of (hu)Man". Smbolic action is how we not only communicate and re-present reality to ourselves--is not "mere rhetoric"--but is the fundamental action of humanity. Literature of all types is aware of that fact and dystopian literature makes explicit to its readers the possible impact of the narratives we create for each other. Dystopian literature is as much about the possibilities of narrative as it is an exercise in didactic writing.
LeGuin's "ambiguous utopia", Murakami's dreamworld/real world split, and Atwood's schizophrenic narrator take out many of the neat divisions the first dystopian novels (We, 1984,Fahrenheit 451> depended on. Instead, the novels create a different binary than Dystopia/Utopia; each of these novels split time into a "before dystopic event" and "after dystopic event," alternating their chapters between the two times until the "before" meets up with the moment of the "after" the novel begins with. Structurally, the story is divided in halves, and invites contrast between the times. As the heroes' consciousness shifts in each time, the audience is given certain insights, many of which remain unexplained until the two halves meet up. This is not Brooks's squiggly line; the timelines are broken to the reader, and simple causality is denied.
There are many fictions dealing with trauma that make such rhetorical moves. This particular rhetorical move depends upon what Brooks calls "narrative desire"--the tensions a reader and teller experience as the story is transformed to discourse. The desire for knowledge about the trauma, to put it "into words," to tame the real with the symbolic order, drives these novels. Even the 9/11 commission report uses such a structure; instead of including the "after," however, we are asked to supply that on our own. Still, the report fills in our desire to make the traumatic events of that day meet up with our current experience, and despite its dry writing, the report sold millions of copies. The desire to narrate and the desire for narrative--to enter into symbolic action--is the lynchpin of many discourses, fiction and nonfiction.
What makes dystopian literature special, then? Why does 1984 still evoke such a strong response, despite the change of context? Why does Big Brother haunt our collective consciousnesses? Why is there a strong desire among academics to separate dystopian fiction from the ghettoized genre of scifi?
