Violence and Dystopia Violence and Dystopia: Mimesis and Sacrifice in Contemporary Western Dystopian Narratives By Daniel Cojocaru Violence and Dystopia: Mimesis and Sacrifice in Contemporary Western Dystopian Narratives By Daniel Cojocaru This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Cojocaru All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7613-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7613-1 For my daughter, and in loving memory of my father (1949 – 1991) TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction 1.1 Modern Dystopia ............................................................................. 1 1.2 René Girard’s Mimetic Theory ...................................................... 10 1.2.1 Imitative Desire ..................................................................... 10 1.2.2 Violence and the Sacred ........................................................ 16 1.2.3 Girard and the Bible .............................................................. 20 1.2.4 Criticism of the Girardian Paradigm ..................................... 29 1.3 Violence and Dystopia ................................................................... 35 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 40 Scarifices 2.1 J.G. Ballard’s Crash – Revolutionary Millenarianism by Car ....... 40 2.1.1 TV-violence and Car Culture as Mediators of Reality .......... 42 2.1.2 The Crash: Breaking Through the Isolation of the Car ......... 46 2.1.3 The Wounds Do Not Heal: Holes in the Baudrillardian Simulation ...................................................................................... 48 2.1.4 The Scarifice – Sacrifice by Car ........................................... 52 2.2 Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Rant, and Brad Anderson’s The Machinist ................................................................................. 68 2.2.1 Palincest in Fight Club .......................................................... 68 2.2.2 Rant ....................................................................................... 82 2.2.3 The Machinist ........................................................................ 93 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 98 Atrocity 3.1. Iain Sinclair ................................................................................... 99 3.1.1 Structuring the Unstructurable ............................................. 99 3.1.2 Downriver I ........................................................................ 107 3.1.3 Rodinsky’s Room ................................................................. 115 3.1.4 Downriver II ........................................................................ 124 3.1.5 Sinclair’s Aura ..................................................................... 139 3.1.6 Scapegoating The Widow ................................................... 141 viii Violence and Dystopia 3.2. Peter Ackroyd ............................................................................. 144 3.2.1 Hawksmoor ......................................................................... 148 3.2.2 Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem .................................. 151 3.2.3 London: The Biography ....................................................... 154 Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 159 Crovvds 4.1 J. G. Ballard ................................................................................. 160 4.1.1 High-Rise ............................................................................. 160 4.1.2 Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come ...................................................................... 167 4.2 Stewart Home .............................................................................. 184 4.2.1 Come Before Christ and Murder Love ................................ 191 4.2.2 Defiant Pose, Red London and Blow Job ............................ 196 4.3 David Peace ................................................................................. 207 4.3.1 The Red Riding Quartet ...................................................... 207 4.3.2 The Miners’ Strike of 1984/85 ............................................ 214 4.3.3 Battling to the End ............................................................... 217 4.3.4 GB84 ................................................................................... 220 4.3.5 A Note on Hope in the Red Riding Quartet ......................... 233 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 238 Violentropy 5.1 Radon Daughters ......................................................................... 238 5.2 Margaret Atwood ......................................................................... 252 5.2.1 The Handmaid’s Tale .......................................................... 252 5.2.2 Oryx and Crake ................................................................... 264 5.3 Will Self ....................................................................................... 281 5.3.1 Girardian Themes in Will Self’s Fiction ............................. 281 5.3.2 The Book of Dave ................................................................ 295 Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 305 Conclusion Bibliography ............................................................................................ 309 Index ........................................................................................................ 327 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing the doctoral thesis upon which the present monograph is based was more often than not a rather solitary activity. Thus the support of the following people, groups and institutions has been even more important for the completion of this project. I am first of all grateful to my supervisor Professor Valentine Cunningham for his guidance, constructive criticism and encouragement throughout. Furthermore I am thankful for the professional and moral support of Professor Allen Reddick, Professor Ian Campbell and Professor Jon Pahl. Throughout the years I have also appreciated the intellectual stimulus and friendly atmosphere at the annual Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R). Thanks are also due to the Scatcherd European Scholarship and the Swiss National Science Foundation for their generous funding, without which this project would not have been possible. Furthermore I would like to thank Professor William A. Johnsen, Professor Matthew Feldman and Alan N. Shapiro for their kind and favourable endorsements of this monograph. I am thankful to my Oxford housemates Peter Eckley, Dr. Joel Harrison, Dr. Andrew Kerr, Hugh Pattenden and Dr. Nathan Rose, and to Dr. Stefan Fisher-Høyrem for patiently engaging with my work and for being inspiring partners in conversation both sacred and profane. I am also grateful to the Oxford Graduate Christian Union and St Aldates “postgrads” for offering invaluable spaces for discussion, friendship and most of all for providing safe shelter from the sometimes stormy seas of academia. My thanks extend to Dr. Joel Harrison, Dr. Stefan Fisher Høyrem, Denise Gray, Stefan Degen and Lukas Wälli for giving their time to reading parts of a draft of my thesis and for their instructive comments and suggestions. Finally, I would also like to express my appreciation to my family for their continuing love and support. A special word of thanks goes to my wonderful wife Stephanie for her love throughout the years and for her patient generosity towards my academic pursuits. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 Modern Dystopia Lyman Tower Sargent, a leading theorist in utopian studies, has remarked that the twentieth century deserves its reputation as the dystopian century.1 The modern dystopia as a literary genre, “depicting places worse than the ones we live in”2, with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) as a foundational text, has continually been fuelled by the human catastrophes of the century: “twenty-five million dead in the name of Nazism, one hundred million in that of communism”, the killing fields of Cambodia and major economic depressions, to name just a few. In the genre of dystopia these catastrophes are perceived as the result of its older enemy brother: utopia. While the latter term has, ever since its inception in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), captured the human striving for the perfect society – the eutopia: “good place” – it also carries in its name the impossibility of ever reaching this good place – outopia: literally: “not place.” Utopia is thus strictly speaking ambiguous: it describes the non-existing place that can be better or worse than the existing society, but it has more commonly been identified with eutopia.