The Grand Inquisitor Scene in Dystopian Literature and Film

Robert Reid

‘The Grand Inquisitor’ (hereafter GI) , the story told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alesha in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is often claimed as a forerunner, if not the inspiration, of such key dystopian works as Zamiatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): ‘If it is true’, observes one commentator, ‘that “the Russian novel did come out of [Gogol’s] Cloak”, it could be said with equal justice that the central thematic statement for twentieth- century dystopian fiction [...] came out of Dostoevski’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”’.1 Another claims more specifically that Mustapha Mond and O’Brien (the respective authority figures in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four) ‘do their work in the shadow of the Grand Inquisitor’.2 The link has been mainly thought of as thematic: the ‘freedom or happiness’ dilemma is fundamental to GI and it is a core concern in many twentieth-century dystopias. It may also be read, to use William Leatherbarrow’s phrase, as ‘a startlingly prescient anticipation’ of the modern totalitarian state and, by extension, nightmarish fictionalizations of such states.3 In this chapter I am concerned with something rather more structurally specific that is common to GI and a large number of dystopian novels and films, namely what Krishan Kumar calls the Grand Inquisitor ‘scene’.4 This is the moment when the ruler of the dystopian state, or his representative, confronts a rebellious subject or dissenter and explains to him or her the rationale behind the apparently unjust and oppressive regime. In more abstract terms the confrontation can be seen as embodying ‘[t]he conflict between freedom of thought and an all- powerful, all-knowing elite’.5 Gary Saul Morson suggests that Zamiatin and Huxley are indebted to GI for the equivalent scenes in their novels,6 which may indeed be so, although, from the frequency with which this scene persists in replicating itself in dystopian works of all kinds - and in many permutations - we might equally conclude that it is a sort of 276 Robert Reid rhetorical precondition for this kind of text, a precondition to which GI also conforms. Arguably, too, it is not the first embodiment of this confrontation: Francis Cornford offers an ingenious parallel with Plato and Socrates: the former being the inquisitor and the latter his prisoner.7 More obviously, though, since Plato’s utopian republic ‘is predicated not on the great mass of mankind’s becoming wise or good, only obedient [...] the Grand Inquisitor stands as Plato’s direct ideological heir’.8 In the context of Russian literature an argument can also be made for regarding Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (1833) as anticipating Dostoevskii’s GI scene in the confrontation between the protagonist Evgenii and the animated statue of Peter the Great, the eponymous Bronze Horseman.9 Most importantly, GI itself is plainly an iteration of the arraignment of Christ before Pilate as well as a heterodox anticipation of the Second Coming,10 and it is this heavy religious freight, combined with its ominous ideological overtones, that has uniquely positioned this text as a key precursor of the classic dystopian works of the twentieth century. Reading GI against its manifold reincarnations as a component of the works of later writers and film-makers casts an intriguing light on how it functions. Moreover, while such a reading may confirm us in our view of it as an archetypal dystopian text, we may also note its unique features and also its formal and thematic limitations in comparison to other works which demonstrate the same binary confrontation. How then does the GI scene manifest itself in dystopian works? I shall begin by looking at what might be termed ‘the big three’ dystopian works - We, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four - novels which have exerted perhaps the strongest influence on subsequent dystopian writers and film directors. Of particular interest is the way these works transform the GI scene either by displacement strategies or by the depiction of technologically advanced techniques of torture and execution. In many dystopias this also goes hand in hand with a deep- rooted pessimism about the future of technologically advanced societies. However, as I go on to point out in my discussion of The Iron Heel (1908), The Bedbug (1929) and Anthem (1938), this pre-occupation with technology does not prevent a wide divergence of opinion among dystopian writers as to its political implications and this in turn colours their presentation of GI scenes. I then move on to consider dystopian works in which the GI scene is presented in unusual contexts or is fragmented or concealed, and also question the extent to which the inclusion of this scene, or some version of it, is a sine qua non for