RESISTANCE IN DYSTOPIAN FICTION A Thesis in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Creative Arts by Darren Dillman March 2020 Western Sydney University 1 Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. (signature) 2 Abstract This thesis attempts to answer the fundamental question, "How does resistance function in dystopian fiction?" and considers the value of memory and technology within this context. It also articulates the themes of the research within a creative work, a dystopian novel titled The Department of Retribution. With the rising popularity of dystopian fiction, the findings of this project attempt to provide timely insight into why resistance is essential to the genre and how it can be employed via memory and technology. Within the scope of authoritarian structures and their ideological origins, this thesis examines the methods protagonists of dystopian fiction use to push back against oppressive means of control. It discusses memory and its value to characters who resist the state's official narrative of the past, and it examines the ways in which the pitfalls of humanity's reliance on technology are portrayed in dystopian works. The Department of Retribution takes place in a future United States where hard drugs such as methamphetamine have been legalized, fatal combat sports dominate television, and a fourth branch of government, the Corporate Council, wields dominant power. Seventeen-year-old Emile Winkler longs to avenge his little sister's death at the hands of a meth user, and when he turns eighteen he applies for a murder permit from the Department of Retribution that will allow him to achieve this. Legalized murder, however, has life-altering repercussions, and Emile sets out to discover the motivation behind the system that allows it. The exegetical discourse of technological hope and pessimism re-emerges in the novel as I explore the challenge of integrating androids into society as friends and companions, and the issues of equality that might arise. I also consider future psychological developments such as intra-cranial serotonin implants and a programmable re- prioritisation of thoughts and memories called amelioration that may help sufferers of trauma move on from painful, dominating thought patterns. 3 CONTENTS Introduction 7 Chapter 1 Dystopia and Resistance 17 Militant Pessimism: The Potential for Resistance 20 The Necessity of Resistance 22 The Critical Dystopia 27 The Drastic Contrast 29 The Dystopian Novel as Refutation of Official Propaganda 30 The Alterability of Memory 32 Truth, Knowledge, Hope 36 Chapter 2 The Role of Memory in Dystopian Fiction 40 Contrast: Memory's Value to the Present 44 Memory's Place in the Past/History 46 The Authentic 49 Memory in The Giver 51 Chapter 3 Technological Considerations in Dystopian Fiction 58 The Weaponisation of Technology 67 Ethical Arguments: Technocracy's Distancing from the Garden 68 Robotic Labour and Panopticism 76 Dystopian Fiction Speaks Back to Technological Advancement 79 Conclusion 82 Works Cited 88 The Department of Retribution 91 4 Copyright Declaration The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 5 Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the generous support of Western Sydney University and the staff of the Writing and Research Society Centre. I would like to thank my supervisors, Sara Knox and Matt McGuire, for their tireless efforts of mentoring and encouraging me throughout the research and writing processes. I'm also indebted to the wonderful faculty and staff of the Writing and Research Society Centre, including Melinda Jewell, Suzanne Gapps and Ben Denham. Whenever I ran into problems or faced the most unlikely bare-fanged enigmatic questions, those three magically appeared to help solve or answer them. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to my good-natured and talented graduate colleagues who helped make my time at Western Sydney University a rewarding and enjoyable experience. 6 Introduction Dystopian fiction has proven to be a fertile ground for the study of societal control and totalitarianism, weaving narratives that fascinate readers in a similar vein as prison stories, for in both we find protagonists who struggle, against great odds, to resist a stringent, totalising system of self-denial and institutional power. Although authors deliberately create the fictional dystopias in their works, the founders and planners of real-world governments rarely intend their nations to devolve into dystopian states. Because fictional representations of dystopia are often modelled on existing authoritarian systems, it is necessary to locate the roots of these fictional places. In his work The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism, M. Keith Booker states: [The] treatment of imaginary societies in the best dystopian fiction is always highly relevant more or less directly to specific 'realworld' societies and issues (1994, 19). The best dystopian fiction's representation of existing conflicts and contradictions within society serves as an unequivocal warning to the reader about the future. Dystopian authors caution that without social and legislative revision to a nation or region's present system, a more austere and violent future awaits its citizens. In the same manner, future dystopias often reflect back on the horrific, near lawless roots that gave rise to their socio-political systems. The usual precursor to dystopia is the desired utopia, the term created by Thomas More in 1516 that was Greek ("ou topos") for "no place". More used the term as a pun for the word "eu topos", or "good place". While theorists and scholars of utopia have often disagreed about the definition of utopia, some have proposed specific characteristics for the term that have become respected within the field. Ruth Levitas describes the essence of utopia as "the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively" (2013, xi). In one of the more succinct and commonly accepted definitions of utopia, Lyman Tower Sargent defines it as "a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space" (1994, 9). He notes that the key attribute of utopia is its non-existence (1994, 5), a characteristic that has led scholars to ponder if More, himself, believed utopia to be unrealizable. In fact, scholars of utopian studies widely disagree about the potential realization of utopia and whether or not attempts to achieve utopia ultimately lead to totalitarianism. Sargent also rejects past 7 definitions that claim utopias are perfect, observing that utopian fiction contains very few societies that are perfect from the author's viewpoint (1994, 9). Krishan Kumar distinguishes the "abstractly conceived societies" depicted in works by Plato and other political philosophers from the utopian novel, which "shows the best society not as a normative or prescriptive model but as actually achieved, as already in existence" (1987, 25). Kumar continues: Utopia is a description of the best (or in anti-utopia, the worst) society not as an abstract ideal, and not simply as a satirical foil to the existing society, but as a society in full operation in which we are invited vicariously to participate (1987, 25). The utopian novel, therefore, offers considerable detail of the better society and how it functions. The purposefully detailed structure and function, in conjunction with the invitation "to participate", forms a didactic appeal to the reader, encouraging her to accept the potential of realisable change in her present society. Not only do novels like Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) provide detailed elements of social and political structures, but they also provide explanations of how the societies in the novels came to exist. Somewhere along the way, between the late nineteenth century utopian novels like those of Bellamy and Morris and twentieth century works such as Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (1908), Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the planned utopia devolves into dysfunction, dictatorship, and nightmare. Dystopia, from the Greek "dis topos", or "bad place", dates back in usage to Henry Lewis Younge in 1747, Noel Turner in 1782, and John Stuart Mill in 1868, the latter involving a political proposal. The term was reiterated by Max Patrick in 1952, this time in reference to a literary form, and has come to have a more broadly accepted definition in respect to its representation in literature, thanks to Sargent: [A] non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived (1994, 9). Although no two bad places are the same, the states and/or societies in many of the narratives share similar features: oppressive governments, stringent laws, collectivist ideologies, and worship of the state. 8 It is the goal of this work to examine the manner in which the protagonists of such works fight back, or resist, the rigid controls of government and/or society in their unique worlds, and to construct a creative work (novel) that incorporates a form of this resistance. To this point, the theme of resistance in dystopian fiction has not received sufficient theoretical attention. Prominent critics of dystopian fiction such as Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, and M. Keith Booker frequently allude to resistance without delving into the significant details that constitute what it is, how it works, or why it is significant. Some analysis of the topic occurs in Moylan's text Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (2000), which is particularly informative of this thesis.