Review of European Studies; Vol. 7, No. 11; 2015 ISSN 1918-7173 E-ISSN 1918-7181 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education
Critical Review on the Idea of Dystopia Ruzbeh Babaee1, Hardev Kaur A/P Jujar Singh1, Zhang Zhicheng1 & Zhang Haiqing1 1.
Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia
Correspondence: Ruzbeh Babaee, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia. Tel: 60-142-340-937. E-mail: ruzbeh_babaei@upm.edu.my Received: May 8, 2015
Accepted: June 18, 2015
doi:10.5539/res.v7n11p64
Online Published: June 26, 2015
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/res.v7n11p64
Abstract The purpose of this review is firstly to show the formation of dystopia that finds its roots in utopia. Then, the foundation of dystopian fiction from the perspectives of such critics as Chad Walsh, Tom Moylan, Mark R. Hillegas, and Erika Gottlieb, among some others, is investigated. Finally, we briefly reveal the standing of Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don DeLillo, among many other dystopian writers, in depiction of dystopian societies. This study also attempts to explain how works of these three writers were revolutionary in their challenging of the new values that led to the degradation of human dignity. Keywords: Dystopia, Utopia, Technology, Huxley, Vonnegut, DeLillo 1. From Utopia to Dystopia For the present study, it is important to show that the dystopian literature emerging in the twentieth century was rooted in a utopian vision that invests in our imagination that seeks to create an ideal and perfect world. (Note 1) Utopia as an organized concept encourages everybody to investigate the norms of organization and to discover ideal systems through which human lives could be made better. It is not easy to consider all of the utopian works and thinking informing the genre today, but utopia began with the myth of Eden. The first utopian thought refers back to Plato whose Republic is considered one of the pioneering utopian works (Russell 2005). Plato, in Republic, describes a model for an ideal world; however, it was not until the 1500s, when the term utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More in his work of the same name that illustrates a fictional society on a remote island in 1516. More was the first to think of a true utopia by setting up what Fátima Vieira (2010) sees as a “tension between the affirmation of a possibility and the negation of its fulfilment” (p. 6). Although a pleasing goal, utopia has never existed. More, in his Utopia, which means ‘No Place’, shows that utopia is an impractical ideal world as well as a medium to satirize the writer’s society. More sets his utopian world on an isolated island, but makes it contemporary with his own time. He depicts a society in which individual possession is revoked, education is for all, men and women are considered equally, and there are no limitations on religious practice. For More, according to David Harvey (2000), “Utopia is an artificially created island, which functions as an isolated, coherently organized, and largely closed space economy” (p. 160). He continues that utopia “becomes with More’s initiative, a fertile means to explore and express a vast range of competing ideas about social relationships, moral orderings, political-economic systems, and the like” (p. 161). David Sisk (1997) also believes that utopian literature Explores [the] perfectibility of human society through hypothetical advancements in technology, philosophy, and social structures, resulting in perfect or near-perfect communities located in distant lands or in the future. (p. 2) He observes that utopian writers usually create patterns of perfect and organized societies, and present fleeing as a fancy of the imagination. However, at the outset of the eighteenth century, many thinkers and writers recognised the impossibility of utopian thinking, and then a wave of anti-utopianism emerged in literature. Anti-utopian works reject the utopian desire as an unrealistic and impossible quest for an ideal future; however, they also feared that such claims could have devastating effects on the population. According to Peter Fitting (2010), anti-utopianism is “explicitly or implicitly a defence of the status quo” (p. 141). For instance, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, an anti-utopian novel, supports the real world and condemns looking for a better world. According to Vieira (2010), early anti-utopian novels “denounce the irrelevance and inconsistency of utopian dreaming and the ruin of society
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