Demarcating Dystopia

Phillip E. Wegner, University of Florida

pwegner(at)ufl.edu

Abstract: This essay explores the question of how we might more effectively demarcate some bounds for the term dystopia. I initially approached this question through the formulation of a number of Theses on Dystopias. Underlying them is the New Critical axiom that dystopia, as with any other complex verbal performance, is irreducible to a paraphrase, or a set of ideas about how social life should or should not be lived. To reduce it in this manner is to sunder its content from the form by which that content is conveyed. My first thesis reads in part, “Dystopia is a noun, not an adjective.” Dystopia is a literary practice and hence there are no real-world dystopias – except as a matter of opinion, the ideological judgement of a society, community, or other such collective as a “bad place.” Moreover, when understood as a literary mode, dystopia can be further specified as a form of science fiction, or what Darko Suvin defines as “cognitive estrangement.” A further consequence of this specification is the need to draw distinctions between science fictional dystopias and realisms, satire, and fantasy. For example, the apocalypse of post-apocalyptic fiction, as in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), is a form of fantasy, a wish-fulfillment. One of the consequences of approaching dystopia as a specific literary practice, mode, and genre this is more careful attention to the formal properties of individual texts. I conclude by illustrating the implications of such a reading practice by looking at the differences between the endings of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Michael Radford’s 1984 film adaptation. These differences, which are matters of form, are significant and have importance for how we read and teach the education of desire at work in any individual dystopia.