verbava все записи автора David W. Sisk – Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias

The dystopian writer is, perhaps, the most disillusioned reader within the utopian tradition.

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Instead of ignoring the realities of human experience, dystopian writers rub their reader's noses in them "by taking us on a journey through hell, in all its vivid particulars. It makes us live utopia, as an experience so painful and nightmarish that we lose all desire for it".

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Real goodness requires freedom to choose between good and evil. Burgess presents this problem to us in stark terms, forcing us to understand that choice, not goodness, is the essential quality of freedom. Burgess reminds us that freedom is a terrifying ideal, which demands that individuals must be able to choose evil as readily as good.

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Dystopian writers rely on a didacticism of fear by playing on readers's apprehensions--including fears of political repression, encroachments on personal liberties, and threats to physical security. It is much more effective to capitalize on a reader's existing fears (rational or otherwise) than intellectually to persuade that same reader of a utopian scheme's practicality. While both utopian and dystopian fiction work toward a didactic purpose, dystopia's lessons are more readily taught because they are more limited and more easily achieved. A successful utopia, by definition, must offer answers for society's problems: a successful dystopia need only identify those problems and extrapolate one of them to monstrous proportions.

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A game that one cannot lose is no longer a game: the possibility of loss must remain, and as that possibility increases, the thrill of victory increases as well.

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A dystopian society that comes about through violence and rapid upheaval tends to fall after a relatively short lifespan (as we see in Nineteen Eighty-four and The Handmaid's Tale). Societies that have gradually developed into fullblown dystopias over long periods of gradual social engineering, such as Brave New World, require greater changes over longer periods in order to reverse them.

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While Hoban's novel frankly insists that we question our conception of what "civilization" means, Riddley's argument is neither antiscientific nor antitechnological. Instead, he points to the split between moral evolution and technological innovation as the mistake that ultimately brought on the apocalyptic 1 Big 1. Humanity has separated itself from the natural world of which we are only a constituent part. If we could again find a degree of union with the natural world, then we would gain the power to control our technological advancement, which would no longer be a blind imperative drive in itself. The absence of moral maturity is the root of all evil, not technology.

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Dystopia consistently stresses the need for vagueness--the ambiguity of freely choosing among multiple possibilities--as being superior to utopia's smug certainty, from which ambiguity and personal initiative have been carefully eliminated.

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Dystopian concerns over manipulating thought through language are never fantastic. Conscious attempts to control language in order to limit and direct thought, and especially to stifle dissent, are social realities even in so-called enlightened Western democracies. One way or another, all of the techniques used to control language in the fictions discussed here have been, and continue to be, used by various governments and power groups.


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Language is a tool that can cut both ways, but it cannot cut at all unless knowingly wielded. Implicitly, dystopia asks us to confront our roles in relation to current social ills, and it insists that we either take responsibility for addressing such problems or resign ourselves to suffering the consequences.

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By centering attention on language, dystopian fiction refuses to permit the easy escape of simply dismissing repressive measures as "abuse of the language" (the stakes are far higher than clarity or euphony when someone speaks of "ethnic cleansing," for example). Instead, dystopia demands that we look beyond even the most egregious statements and confront their speakers and, beyond them, the beliefs being espoused.

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The dystopia repeatedly tries to expose trends and events in our contemporary world that would have to develop unchecked for years in order to bear such monstrous fruit. The power to prevent these grim societies, dystopia argues, lies within our abilities if we will take the trouble to recognize the threats and act to neutralize them. This message is fundamentally a hopeful one, a point that is often lost in the misery associated with dystopia. As the twentieth century accelerates toward its end, dystopian fiction remains the strongest literary advocate for the freedom of the individual will through creative and unconstrained language.

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As long as power groups continue trying to control the populace through our language, we will continue to find our most valuable tool for resistance in that same language. Dystopia refuses to follow the easy path of utopian literature and trade our freedom away for security and empty happiness. Like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll Through the Looking Glass, we must come to understand that the struggle for mastery of the world boils down to mastery over the word. Dystopia forces us to confront the fact that if we fail to protect our thoughts, others will take advantage of our laxity and use our own language to enslave us--"What's it going to be then, eh?" Painful though dystopian fiction may be, its message continues to sound a clear note of warning: we must claim mastery over the word. Nothing more is necessary to protect our freedom from the Grand Inquisitors who are always with us; but as dystopia also starkly promises us, nothing less will do.

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