A Little History of Literature (29 page)

Who else can one think of who would write so elaborately about waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross a street? It is, of course, exactly what is happening in Clarissa's head, and momentarily that of her neighbour (there are ‘streams’ of consciousness). Note how the narrative line jumps here and there, following the movements of a mind in motion. Is Clarissa thinking in words, in images, or something that blends the two? What is the interplay between memory (things that happened twenty years ago) and the moment's sense impressions (the booming of Big Ben)?

Not much ever ‘happens’ in Woolf's narratives. That's not the point. Mrs Dalloway's big event is nothing special – just another party with dull politicians. The novel
To the Lighthouse
(1927), her greatest work, centres on a family (clearly the Stephen family, in the author's girlhood) enjoying their summer holiday at the coast. They plan a trip by boat to a lighthouse. It never quite takes place. Her last novel,
Between the Acts
(1941), is, as the title suggests, about waiting for something to start.

That final novel was written in the early months of the Second World War. The next ‘act’ Woolf thought, could well be disaster for her and her husband (they had no children). It was feared in spring 1941 that Germany, which had overrun France with no difficulty, could soon invade and conquer Britain. The Woolfs – he was Jewish, both were left-wing – were prominent on the Gestapo death
lists and both had prudently made suicide plans. Virginia, who had recently suffered a crippling nervous breakdown and feared permanent madness, went to a river near where they were living in Sussex, loaded her coat pockets with stones, and drowned herself on 28 March 1941.

England would survive to produce, as a nation, more literature. Its greatest woman novelist of the modernist period would not.

CHAPTER
30

Brave New Worlds

U
TOPIAS AND
D
YSTOPIAS

‘Utopia’ is an Ancient Greek word meaning, literally, ‘good place’. If you had used it in conversation with, say, Sophocles or Homer, however, they might well have looked at you oddly. The word was invented by an Englishman, Sir Thomas More, in the sixteenth century as the title of a story that pictured a world in which everything was perfect. The fact that More had his head chopped off a few years later for questioning Henry VIII's marriage arrangements suggests that the England he was living in was something less than perfect.

Literature has the godlike ability, simply using the faculty of the imagination, to create whole worlds. It's helpful to think of putting those worlds on a line, with ‘realism’ at one end and ‘fantasy’ at the other. The closer a literary world is to the author's, the more ‘realistic’ the work of literature is.
Pride and Prejudice
depicts a world which, it's safe to presume, was very like the one in which Jane Austen lived and wrote.
Conan the Barbarian
envisages a world that is entirely different from the seedy 1930s Texas backwater where the author Robert E. Howard fantasised
his superhero, and the ‘Cimmeria’ where Conan performs his superheroics.

Utopias tend, like
Conan
, to cluster at the ‘fantasy’ end of the line for the very good reason that there has never yet been a perfect society or anything approaching one. Some writers think we are progressing, however gradually, towards that perfection. Their utopias are ‘prophetic’. A good example is H.G. Wells's
The Shape of Things to Come
(1933). Wells believed that the extraordinary leaps forward in technology that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw would bring about ‘technotopia’. A lot of science fiction has been written on that theme.

Others think we are moving away from realising a better world than the one in which we now live. In the nineteenth century there was a yearning for a romanticised medievalism which had been lost to urbanisation and the Industrial Revolution. These back-to-simplicity utopias are nostalgic. One of the most famous, and influential, was
Looking Backward
(1887) by Edward Bellamy. A short-lived American ‘People's Party’ founded itself on Bellamy's principles.

Whether looking backwards or forwards, all societies have a grand vision of what is, was, or will be their ‘good place’. In ancient Greece, Plato's
Republic
imagined a perfect city in which everything would be rationally arranged with ‘philosopher kings’, like Plato himself, in charge. In societies where Judaeo-Christianity is dominant, images of biblical Eden (in the past) and Heaven (in the future) tend to inspire and colour literature's utopian visions. In ancient Rome it was ‘Elysium’ (that is, the ‘Elysian fields’ – a perfect natural world). In Muslim societies, Paradise. For the Vikings, it was Valhalla, a home of great heroes, celebrating their feats in battle. Communism believed, following Marx, that there would come, in the distant future, what he called the ‘withering away of the state’ and a condition of perfect social equality among men.

These belief systems have all, in their different ways, inspired authors to create imaginary worlds – humanity's ‘happy ending’. But the big problem with literary utopias (and More's is no exception) is that they tend to be yawn-inducingly dull. Literature is most readable
when it adopts a critical, sceptical or downright quarrelsome position. What is called the ‘dystopian’ view of things makes for livelier reading, and more provocative thinking about past, present and future societies. The point can be made by looking at some of the more famous literary dystopias which, if you haven't read them yet, are certainly worth seeking out.

Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
has a teasing title. It's the temperature at which printed paper spontaneously bursts into flame (a metaphor, you might think, for literature itself ). Bradbury wrote it in 1953. He was inspired to do so by the arrival of television as a mass medium. As Bradbury saw it, TV's rise was the death of the book.

Bradbury thought this was a very bad thing. Books, he believed, made people think. They were stimulating. The television set did the opposite. It was a narcotic. And, sinisterly, television made possible a power over the population that no dictator had previously enjoyed – a ‘soft tyranny’. Universal mind control.

The hero of
Fahrenheit 451
is a ‘fireman’ whose job is not to put out fires but to burn any surviving books. (Bradbury was clearly inspired by the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s.) While at work the hero casually picks up a book from a bonfire he has been sent out to start and becomes thereafter, a reader and a rebel. He ends a refugee in the woods, where a likeminded community memorise great works of literature and become themselves living books. Their flame will burn on – perhaps.

What is fascinating about
Fahrenheit 451
is that like other great dystopian literature it is both right and wrong. Bradbury's pessimism about TV is plainly wrong-headed. TV has enriched, not impoverished, culture. Bradbury's dystopian alarm is one of many illustrations of the mixed feelings that society always has about new technologies. The computer, for example, has revolutionised contemporary life, for the better most of us would say. But in dystopian fantasy films like
The Terminator
, the computer ‘Skynet’ is visualised as mankind's mortal enemy. Cavemen doubtless felt the same about fire. ‘Good servant, bad master’, as the proverb puts it.

But Bradbury is 100 per cent right in his analysis of how the most effective modern tyranny works. It doesn't have to chop off heads with a guillotine, or exterminate (‘purge’) whole classes of people, as did Stalin and Hitler. It can work, just as well, by thought control.

The title of this chapter – ‘Brave New Worlds’ – echoes Miranda's exclamation when she sees Ferdinand and his young companions in Shakespeare's
The Tempest
. Miranda has been brought up on an island where the only other human being is her aged father. When she sees handsome young men, of noble character, like Ferdinand, she jumps to the conclusion that in the outside world everyone is handsome, young and noble. If only.

Aldous Huxley took Miranda's ‘brave new world’ as the title of his dystopia, which, although published in 1932, remains much read today. The narrative is set 2,000 years hence. According to the calendar of that time it is ‘AF632’: AF stands for ‘After Ford’ and, simultaneously, ‘After Freud’. What if human beings could be mass-produced in the same way that Henry Ford mass-produced his Model T automobiles – by assembly line? The psychiatrist Sigmund Freud argued that most human neurosis originated in emotional conflicts in the family – what if the nuclear family could be replaced? Huxley came up with the idea of ‘ectogenesis’: babies in bottles, produced in ‘hatcheries’ (factories), like Model T cars, needing no parents other than a team of white-coated laboratory technicians.

The result is a perfectly stable society, every member belonging to their assigned upper or lower class and the whole population kept artificially happy with a mass-distributed tranquilliser (‘soma’). There is no politics. No war. No religion. No disease. No hunger. No poverty. No unemployment (Huxley, remember, was writing in the Great Depression of the 1930s). And, above all, no books or literature.

Brave New World
creates the vision of a utopia, but not one that most of us would want to live in, comfortable as it is. Enter John Savage (the name recalls Rousseau's ‘noble savage’) who has been brought up on an American Indian reservation with only a copy
of Shakespeare's plays to read. This new world is not for him. He rebels, and is destroyed. The brave new world goes on as ‘happily’ as before. It doesn't need noble savages or Shakespeare.

As with Bradbury, Huxley is both right and wrong in his predictions. There is no likelihood, if one looks at human history, that
Brave New World
's stable world-state could ever happen. It's way off the fantasy end of the scale. But Huxley's forecast that biological intervention could transform society in worrying ways is amazingly prophetic. The human genome map, IVF (it means, literally, fertilising ‘in glass’), and other new biotechnologies make the ‘babies in bottles’ scenario entirely plausible. It is now quite within human reach to ‘make’ humans, as Huxley predicted humans one day would. What brave new world will humankind make with that power?

The most argued-over dystopia of the last fifty years is Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale
. It was published in 1985 when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. He was in power, some thought, because of crucial support from the ‘religious right’ – Christian fundamentalists. This is the starting point for Atwood's feminist-futurist dystopia.

The Handmaid's Tale
is set in a post-nuclear-war late twentieth-century. Fundamentalist Christians have taken over the United States which they have renamed the Republic of Gilead. African Americans (‘Children of Ham’) have been disposed of. Women are again in their subordinate place. At the same time, male and female fertility has declined disastrously. The few women who can bear children are designated ‘handmaids’ – breeders, at the disposal of men. Gileadian handmaids have no rights, no social life and are given the chattel-name ‘Of[their owner]’. The heroine is Offred (‘property of Fred’). She was captured with her husband and child trying to escape to liberal Canada (a small chauvinism: Atwood is Canadian). Offred is allocated to a powerful male called ‘the Commander’. The novel ends with Offred seeming to make her escape from captivity, although it is written so that we cannot be entirely sure that she will succeed.

It's easy to pooh-pooh Atwood's grim prophecy. From 2009
there has been a ‘son of Ham’ in the White House and you would be brave or stupid to dare to call Michelle Obama (or Hillary Clinton, come to that) her husband's ‘handmaid’. But parts of Atwood's dystopia ring very true – the recurrent attempts of religious pressure groups in America to control the reproductive rights of women, for instance. Those rights were largely won by the feminist movement which began to assert itself by Atwood's own generation, in the mid-1960s. The question raised by Atwood is as relevant today as it was a quarter of a century ago, and for that reason her novel still resonates.