At one point in the classic movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr asks: “What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What have they got that I ain’t got?” The answer, for Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, is “courage.” We ask, albeit less poetically: “What puts the dys in dystopia?” And we answer: a denial of biology.
Literary dystopias have this in common: They are imagined societies in which the deepest demands of human nature are either subverted, perverted, or simply made unattainable. Not that it is necessarily bad to say “no!” to human nature. When it comes to certain inclinations, such as violence or extreme selfishness, there is much to be said for defying the promptings of biology. But when society presses too hard in ways that go counter to natural needs, the result can be painfully unnatural, which is to say, dystopian.
What are some exemplary dystopias? Foremost for many readers are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. The towering influence of these works stems not only from their imaginative and artistic qualities, but also from the powerful theme that all dystopian literature shares: the horror of a society that runs roughshod over our instincts, forcing people to be, literally, inhuman.
In Huxley’s world, sex has been separated from reproduction: The former takes place quickly, easily, and without commitment or emotional involvement; the latter, in gigantic, highly technological hatcheries wherein embryos are created and fertilized, and babies are “born.” The horror of this society is so great that an outsider, John the Savage, eventually kills his lover and hangs himself in a frenzy over its lack of poetry, insensitivity to love, and indifference to death.
No outlet here for anything approaching a normal biological urge; in fact, the use of the words “father” and “mother” is cause for scandal. The human need for affection is denied, and with it, much of human nature itself. The Director of Hatcheries describes any “emotional” and “long-drawn” interactions with the opposite sex as “indecorous,” his lack of interest in romance contrasting with the novel’s title, which was inspired by the rapturous words of Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, after she falls head-over-heels, humanly in love: “Oh brave new world, that has such people in’t!”
It is precisely this exultant, hormonally charged intoxication that is anathema in Huxley’s Brave New World, where there are no parents to love children, or sons and daughters to return the sentiment. Indeed, there is no genuine love at all. In what many might perceive as a positive departure from human nature, sexual jealousy is also abolished, since “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Yet love, sex, and jealousy are primal aspects of the human psyche; to deny them is to deny our biological selves.
Think, next, of George Orwell’s 1984. What comes to mind is mostly “Big Brother,” “newspeak,” and “thought control,” as well as linguistic incongruities and the terrifying consequences of resistance. As a paradigm for statewide dehumanization, the Party’s combination of brainwashing and ferocity is consummately successful. But perhaps most inhuman, and therefore most disturbing, about the state of Oceania is its routine undermining of social interactions. No wonder the hero, Winston Smith, is most sympathetic during his futile attempts to establish personal connections with a fellow human being.
Through the Party’s obsession with “chastity and political orthodoxy,” 1984 is almost a textbook account of how to organize Homo sapiens in ways that contradict their most basic biological needs. Not just sexual desire, but even genetic continuity is placed at risk. The prospect of staying alive through time via future generations is the motivation underlying sex, love, and indeed everything in the organic world. Accordingly, Orwell’s dystopia recognizes the biologically induced terror of genetic erasure. The Party’s preferred response to opponents is simple elimination: “Your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.” That is precisely what genes -- experts as they are in self-perpetuation -- do not want.
Social destruction in this antibiological dystopia includes even the elimination of basic sociality. Intrinsically a group-living ape, our species shudders at the prospect of being alone. The horror of the friendlessness experienced by Winston Smith -- “You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades” -- is more deep-seated than simple longing. It is an expression of the elemental importance of social life itself. And, true to form, what should be the strongest of all social units, the family, is attacked the most severely. Big Brother’s spies destroy the integrity of family, such that “it was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children.” To have one’s own genes turn against one’s self: Is there any greater potential perversion of the biological world?
In justifying this nightmare society, Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People are immensely malleable, more so, in all likelihood, than any other species. But infinitely? Absolutely not. And it is precisely such asserted distortions of biological reality that make 1984, as with Brave New World before it, so deeply troublesome.
Denial of love, of genuine sex (which is to say, difficult, but also gratifying), of reproductive opportunity, of individuality are all denials of our organic humanness. One of the most powerful such representations comes from the early Soviet-era dissident writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin, in his brilliant, chilling We. Life in Zamyatin’s One State, orchestrated by the Great Benefactor, is carried on by numbers, not individuals. There are no primitive passions, no instincts; everything is designed with mathematical precision. Nature -- which is both feared and hated -- has been banished behind the Green Wall, which, as the narrator, D-503, explains, enables man to be no longer “a savage.” Although they are expected to repress their nature with glass, barriers, and laws, a small band of resisters experiences an inexplicable but altogether human deficit of reason. D-503 even falls in love, finding within himself a living, breathing, hormonally responsive individual who yearns for basic biological satisfaction.
Much as the One State may demand that people believe in the “great, divinely bounding wisdom” of barriers in general, and the Green Wall in particular, we are soon made aware of the horror of isolating natural, human tendencies. D-503 sees, through the barrier separating his own sanitized, inhuman society from the messy world of organic nature, “the blunt snout of some beast star(ing) dully, mistily” at him, whereupon he is left with a not-so-surprising insight about the Green Wall: Outside is more real, more whole, more natural, than in. Contemplating the beast on the other side, he asks himself, and the reader, whether “he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?” The answer is clear: of course.
The “numbers” who inhabit the One State are “compelled” to be content -- or, at least, pleased -- with their “mathematically infallible happiness.” As with Brave New World and 1984, such happiness is supposed to come in large part from rational, logical, precise state control over sex and reproduction. The descent from We to Brave New World and 1984 is clear: Zamyatin described a system designed to regulate sex through “child-breeding,” as akin to “poultry-breeding or fish-breeding,” all in an attempt to keep reproduction from occurring “as often and as much as anyone might wish ... like animals.” Of course, the One State ignores a fundamental flaw in its glorious, über-scientific plan: The “numbers” are, in fact, human beings. And also animals.
Just as people in normal life often encounter various mementos mori (reminders of one’s eventual death), mementos animalum pop up unavoidably in the One State and in D-503’s psyche; no wonder “even in our time the wild, apelike echo still occasionally rises from somewhere below, from some shaggy depth.” It is that shaggy depth that especially interests us, even as it disconcerts D-503. Our hero ends up feeling -- to his surprise, but not the reader’s -- lust, love, and even sexual jealousy, even though the One State proclaims a “Lex Sexualis” in which “each number has a right to any other number, as to a sexual commodity.” D-503’s animal nature insists on being a sexy, selfish individual, not just a number in a vast, logically structured, marvelously efficient insect colony.
Since people are mammals, not colonial insects, it is dystopian in the extreme to squeeze human beings into a beehive or an anthill. One way to deal with such deformation of human needs is to suffer; witness We. Another is to laugh. Which brings us to Antz, an animated movie that begins with a hilarious scene in which Z, a troubled ant, is speaking (in the voice of Woody Allen) to a therapist about his feelings of “insignificance.” The therapist approves enthusiastically: “Being an ant is being able to say, ‘Hey -- I’m meaningless, you’re meaningless. ... Let’s be the best superorganism we can be!’” The reality is that the best superorganism a human being can be is a terrible superorganism indeed -- or at least a terribly unhappy human being, one whose enforced “we” is unlikely ever to be reconciled with the biological “me.”
Despite the inherently depressing plot lines of most dystopias, they persist in their fundamental popularity. The Handmaid’s Tale, a modern feminist classic by Margaret Atwood, warns of a future in which “love is not the point.” And neither, of course, is motherhood or child rearing. Ironically, the novel was intended as a criticism of evolutionary thinking, which Atwood interprets as oppressing women by enshrining reproduction as their sole biological and cultural “role.” Notwithstanding her distrust of sociobiology, it is Atwood’s paradoxically acute grasp of evolutionary realities -- especially the centrality of reproduction -- that makes The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as her most recent work, Oryx and Crake, such a powerful dystopian story.
Part of human biology is, surprisingly for some, a yearning for culture. Although it might seem that biology and culture are antithetical, a capacity for culture is in fact one of humanity’s most firmly established biological traits. It is thus notable that most literary dystopias include a suppression of the arts and humanities generally, and of literature in particular. Women are forbidden to read in The Handmaid’s Tale; literature is disdained in Brave New World; language is cynically perverted in 1984; and the humanities don’t even exist in the world of We. In one of the best-known imagined dystopias, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the job of “firemen” is to set fires, not put them out -- specifically, to burn books, and the cultural life they contain.
Just as Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world in which cheap, artificial entertainment substitutes for the “real thing,” the phenomenally popular movie The Matrix describes a vision that is even more nightmarish: a computer-generated cyberworld in which human beings, deceived as to their true situation, believe that they are living genuine lives. But they aren’t. Most are victimized by a vast network of machines, their bodies preyed upon while their minds wander, misled, in a virtual “matrix” in which strings of code give the illusion that protein gruel is really champagne and steak. By contrast, DNA, our own, genuinely biological code, gives us actual champagne and steak -- pleasuring our taste buds while fueling our organic metabolism. The Matrix, a prime example of a life-denying, biology-perverting dystopia, envisions a world that is literally drained of its physicality.
Perhaps one reason The Matrix (at least, the first episode) is so resonant is that organic genuineness has become less accessible to us all. “The ordinary city-dweller,” wrote philosopher Susanne Langer, “knows nothing of the earth’s productivity. He does not know the sunrise and rarely notices when the sun sets ... His realities are the motors that run elevators, subway trains, and cars. ... Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more.”
Humanity, according to T.S. Eliot, cannot stand too much reality. He had a point, but another, deeper reality is that humanity cannot stand too much unreality. Yet, as Langer suggested more than a half-century ago (long before the ubiquity of computers), unreality is precisely what modern humans have been getting in increasing amounts, as people “experience” their lives vicariously via movies and spectator sports, and do business and even “communicate” by electronic signals.
Plato’s allegory of the cave suggested that people perceive merely a simulacrum of reality, shadows thrown upon a cave’s wall, artifice and deception instead of reality. The image still resonates, notably in the work of the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago, whose novel The Cave creates yet another dark, haunting, dystopian vision of the growing artificiality and sterility of modern life. In it, a small family is forced to migrate into a vast, arid, life-denying complex, called the “Center” -- a “matrix” of sorts. At the end, the reader encounters the cave of the book’s title and Plato’s allegory, complete with mummies, chains, a wall, and evidence of fire.
Saramago’s dystopic message? It comes directly from Plato’s Republic, also used as an epigraph by Saramago: “What a strange scene you describe and what strange prisoners. They are just like us.” It should occasion no surprise that 21st-century audiences -- increasingly deprived of their genuine matrix -- have resonated with the theme of Saramago’s novel, as well as with the warnings of We, Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, and, more recently, The Matrix. In one of Brave New World’s more memorable lines, the Controller asks John (and presumably also the reader): “So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Savage?” Once again, the answer to this simple question is clear: The stubborn savage living within each of us feels desperately out of place when we become, as A.E. Housman put it, “a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.”
“Something there is,” wrote Robert Frost, “that doesn’t love a wall.” Something there also is, within each of us, that hates any hint of a wall between our innermost biological selves and the lives we may be forced to lead. When people are expected, or even imagined, to be thus separated from their biology -- from themselves, in the deepest sense -- dystopia follows.
Nanelle R. Barash is a member of the class of 2007 at Swarthmore College. David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Their book, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: Biology for the Bookish, will be published early next year by Bantam Books.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 15, Page B10