New Insider content since my last post here – Marlon Byrd contract reaction (hint: not positive) and my NL Rookie of the Year ballot, plus the offseason buyer’s guide for relievers.
I’ve long been a fan of the subgenre of dystopian novels, stories set in an alternate reality or in the distant future in an anti-utopian state, nearly always under a totalitarian regime that has quashed all individual liberty. The two most famous novels in the dystopian oeuvre, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 sit at 74th and 58th, respectively, on my ranking of my top 102 novels of all time, while Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a novel of social commentary in a dystopian setting, is 32nd, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is 96th. It turns out that most novels in this realm owe a direct or indirect debt to the novel I just read, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 work We
We is set in the bleakest dystopia I’ve encountered, a world several hundred years in the future where people have numbers but not names, where cities are enclaves separated from all forms of nature by a “Green Wall,” and where all buildings are made of glass so that there is no privacy from the state Guardians. All personal activities are prescribed by mandated calendar, including sex, which occurs at set times of day and for which a person obtains a partner by submitting a pink ticket as a formal request. All physical activities, including but not limited to work, follow Taylor’s principles of maximizing efficiency. Food is petroleum-based, and the Guardians view smoking and drinking as crimes against the state. Math is ascendant over all, rationalism taken to the edge of its extreme, as emotions are dismissed as atavistic tendencies that should already be extinct.
The narrator, D-503, is a drone in the hive but an important one as he’s the designer of a spaceship called the Integral that will take this “perfect” society out into space – until he’s targeted by the rebellious woman I-330, who openly smokes and drinks while provoking an emotional response in him, Pleasantville-style, that leads him to tentatively consider a rebellion of his own. D-503 struggles to deal with these new emotions, with this seeming infidelity to his somewhat regular lover O-90 (who is deemed too short to bear a child under the state’s eugenics rules), and with the emergence of vivid dreams that he thinks are a sign of creeping insanity. I-330 eventually introduces him to a world of drones who are plotting against the state, forcing him to choose between compliance and sedition.
We shares the terrorizing power of Huxley’s and Orwell’s works through its vision of egalitarianism gone horribly awry, Harrison Bergeron-style, under the thumb of an omniscient government apparatus that has removed all personal choice and liberty from its subjects. Zamyatin enhances that fear by putting the narration into the hands of his protagonist, pushing the reader into his mind to experience his emotional/rational struggle firsthand. The technique has its greatest effect when D-503 is confused by this inner conflict and begins to render dialogue in fragments, forcing the reader to interpolate or complete sentences, bringing the confusion off the page into the reader’s mind. Reading a dystopian novel creates an involuntary barrier between the reader and the characters in the book because the situation in the story is often unrecognizable to us; Zamyatin’s trick of mimicking the confusion in D-503’s brain allows the feeling to slip through the barrier and affect the reader the same way that Orwell sowed fear in the reader’s mind with the rats in room 101.
Zamyatin and Orwell were specifically attacking Soviet-style totalitarianism, a topic that has lost some relevance in the twenty years since nearly all of those regimes fell or adapted by embracing economic liberty without political liberty. I’m less afraid of a technocratic, rationalist dictatorship than I am of a theocracy, as we live in a country that can’t accept evolution or climate change but is still fighting to restrict access to birth control or to ban same-sex marriage (which, all moral arguments aside, is about as anti-libertarian a policy as I can imagine). I imagine there are plenty of readers out there who’d take the opposite view, that rationalist-athiest totalitarianism is a greater likelihood or threat to our personal liberty, and for them We might be a more powerful allegory.
While Zamyatin’s tactic of eschewing character names for numbers dehumanizes the characters, it also makes reading the book more difficult than it needs to be; keeping the characters straight isn’t that hard, since Zamyatin doesn’t reuse letters and he reserves vowels for females and consonants for males, but I found the lack of actual names disorienting as I read. We is otherwise a very quick read with strong narrative greed, as it’s unclear what direction D-503 will take and his confusion rapidly becomes yours as you read. Zamyatin’s ending is ambiguous as well, although I believe I-330 foreshadows his intent with some of her earlier statements about revolutions and the mathematical nature of infinity. Given that the Soviet regime didn’t fall for another 70 years, a neater, pat ending would have felt too optimistic. It’s essential reading for fans of the dystopian genre given its influence, but also a tremendous lesson in building emotion in a reader even when your story itself revolves around its absence.