Good Bad Books: Our Love Affair with Dystopia
Inaugural Professorial Lecture, delivered 11th March 2025 at the University of Birmingham. Video here.
In preparing for this lecture, I stalled for a long time over what to speak about. The thought that I’d have 45 minutes entirely to myself, during which I could address any topic of my preference, raised so many possibilities that—a bit like when you’re scrolling through Netflix and can’t choose what to watch—the options quickly became incapacitating. I mean this as a form of self-criticism, acknowledging that my career, looked at retrospectively, seems like a spree through topics without any unifying rationale. There’s a clue in my choice of A-Levels, taken impossibly long ago in the year 2000: English Literature (predictably enough), and Chemistry and Mathematics—subjects chosen not for their galvanizing dissimilarity, or on the grounds that they might be mutually illuminating, but because I just couldn’t make up my mind. And since then, through the years of being a student and then an academic at civic universities, I’ve had the good fortune to make a living from not making up my mind. A lot of it has come down to luck. Some of it is due to boredom: I tend to get fidgety when I stay still for too long. But the main part of it comes from just wanting to follow my nose—and from being excited by not quite knowing where, in the end, I’m going.
The writers on whom I’ve tended to work—George Orwell, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis—didn’t know how to make up their minds either. And I find chronic non-specialists like them so fascinating in part because I find myself increasingly professionally unspecialized. This is a condition of the modern university, which requires many of its academic employees to split their attention between teaching, research, and administrative work of various kinds. My research began in questions to do with utopian thinking: that is, in a concern with the possibly impossible idea of a perfect or at least radically improved society. And when I got my first permanent job, at Nottingham, I had an opportunity to set up a specialist teaching option on dystopian fiction: that is, novels (and some films) concerned with what Susan Sontag, writing about disaster stories, has called ‘primitive gratifications’ or ‘the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering’; or with what the novelist Maggie Gee, in her dystopian novel The Ice People (1998), depicts as the illusory ‘imagined future of shared freedom. A beach, sanddunes, small feet running’.[1]
At least two of the students who took that module are here in the room right now, and they’ll surely remember that one of the things we spoke about was what the word ‘dystopia’ itself means (or can be thought to mean). Taking the largest possible view, Margaret Atwood calls utopias societies better than ours and dystopias societies worse than ours.[2] Etymologically speaking, dystopia is a term invented in response to the coined word utopia used by Sir Thomas More for his highly influential text of the same name in 1516. Playing with the Ancient Greek words for ‘no’ (ou) and ‘place’ (topos), Thomas More threw some Latin into the cake mix and came out with ‘utopia’: meaning ‘no place’. A utopia, though, tends to be thought of not just as a ‘no place’, but also as a good place, which comes from the fact that the Ancient Greek words for ‘no’ and for ‘good’ sound very similar.
Utopias, on this reading, are no places carrying some implication of goodness, which has led to many centuries’ worth of debate about whether utopias are good places which do not yet exist or good places which don’t exist because they can never exist. My colleague Sebastian Mitchell reminds us in his book Utopia and its Discontents (2020) that Thomas More ‘would also have been aware of the shifting and contradictory significance of the authentic Greek terms’ behind the word ‘utopia’: as Sebastian continues, ‘the noun “atopia” suggests strangeness, oddness, absurdity, eccentricity; and the associated term “atopos” can refer to a paradoxical state of affairs’, the word utopia ‘obliquely allud[ing] to its own contradictory nature.’[3] Utopias are no places and good places all at once, this playful ambiguity embodying linguistically the ambivalence that Thomas More’s book Utopia itself embodies as a text, and as an account of a supposedly ideal or desirable society.
Already we’ve got a complex situation on our hands, with absence and presence packed into what seems like such an innocent pair of words. Adding yet more complexity is the fact that the later term dystopia plays with many of the ambiguities that give the earlier word utopia its flavour. Both terms evoke the sense of words like ‘topic’ and ‘topical’ to mean ‘related to or concerned with place’ (such as when we speak of a topical or local anaesthetic). The dys- prefix makes us think of words like dystrophy, dysphasia, and dysfunctional, these terms conveying the idea of something that doesn’t work in the way it can or should. Dystopias, then, are ‘bad places’: sites or communities or locations or worlds or even planets that aren’t doing what they might otherwise be doing. We sometimes use the word ‘dystopia’ to mean any such bad place, but now I want to limit things to the stricter sense of a literary dystopia—to books like the ones announced in the blurb for this event: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), and Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993). These are texts that have meant and that still mean something to me.
I’ve come to think that literary dystopias, and filmic dystopias, too, are stories about bullies—the vain and the proud, who are precisely the kind of people depicted in P. D. James’s The Children of Men:
the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty.[4]
Our world seems increasingly to be filled with such individuals: insecure people in powerful positions who desire to be considered authoritative, expressing their self-disgust through cruelty. The ‘petty bureaucrats of tyranny’ are everywhere in dystopias, too, not least because as a storyteller it’s often more interesting to focus on the people just next to the seat of power, rather than on the powerful centre itself. Whatever the newspapers might say, the real villain of Orwell’s novel is not Big Brother but O’Brien—a man described in the text itself as a priest, parent, and teacher. He is, and I owe this point to my colleagues in Orwell studies, the minotaur at the centre of the labyrinth.[5]
Much though I was tempted to make it one, this isn’t a lecture about Orwell in disguise, nor is it a lecture about how deeply connected to each other most texts in the literary dystopian tradition can be. For instance, I’m not going to talk about the fact that Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four at least in response to Huxley, who taught Orwell briefly at Eton and who thought he predicted the future correctly and Orwell wrongly. I’m not going to talk about the fact that Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale partially in response to Orwell, though I do want to discuss the appendix to Atwood’s novel (which was clearly inspired by the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four). I’m not going to talk about how P. D. James packs any number of discreet references to Huxley’s Brave New World into her dystopia, The Children of Men, nor how one of her novel’s most gruesome sequences (a mass suicide) takes place in Southwold in Sussex—the setting for much of Orwell’s little-known novel A Clergyman’s Daughter and indeed the place his parents retired to after the First World War. Butler’s Parable of the Sower shows us where Orwell’s influence or legacy is inapplicable: this is a novel about the looming death of the planet—a novel that avoids Orwell’s shadow and goes to places he didn’t and couldn’t.
Which brings me to the subject of what I am going to be talking about this evening: the enjoyment of these stories, which I’ve called ‘good bad books’—i.e. books about ‘bad’ places that are ‘good’ because they’re written well, or because they have some aesthetic or stylistic interest. Having said a moment ago that this isn’t a lecture about Orwell in disguise, I now have to confess that it is a lecture about Orwell in disguise, because I’m borrowing this term from his 1945 essay of the same name, which in turn borrowed it from the writer G. K. Chesterton. Orwell defines a ‘good bad book’ as ‘the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.’[6] His examples are things like the Sherlock Holmes stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I don’t mean the term in quite this sense, but rather as a way to signal a strange effect of pleasure dystopias seem to produce: Sontag’s ‘primitive gratifications’.
Maybe it would be more accurate to call it a thrill—the kick or buzz of horror, the satisfaction taken in being scared by someone or something who knows how to scare you. Writing during the Cold War, in 1956, the philosopher Bertrand Russell claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘is a gruesome book’ whose readers ‘rather enjoyed the frisson [or shudder] that its horrors gave them’.[7] And we’ve continued to enjoy that shudder, that surge of excitement, ever since, not only in reading Nineteen Eighty-Four—which has never been out of print—but in reading dystopias written everywhere. Aldous Huxley called it a ‘magnetic centre of attraction’: the pain of ‘fascinating horror’.[8]
We might be tempted to attribute this fascination with the awful to the Aristotelian theory of catharsis: the process of purging, through aesthetic experience, strong feelings such as fear, anxiety, and sadness. Yet this may not be a good way to think about the matter. For instance, the psychologist Paul Bloom has suggested that the pleasure of horror and tragedy ‘can’t be explained as some sort of blissful afterglow’, not least because the theory of catharsis, as a theory, has a contentious basis (or even lack of basis) in scientific fact. ‘It is just not true’, Bloom writes in relation to horror movies, ‘that emotional experiences have a purging effect. To take a much-studied case, watching a violent movie doesn’t put one in a relaxed and pacifistic state of mind—it arouses the viewer. People don’t leave horror movies feeling mellow and safe; they don’t walk out of tragedies feeling giddy. The typical result of feeling bad’, he adds, ‘is feeling worse, not feeling better.’[9]
On this view, the pleasure to be taken in dystopias isn’t a purgative process—we don’t enjoy them because, in the awfulness of the scenarios they depict, they allow us to get rid of some negative feeling. Whatever kinds of enjoyment they do provide might, in the end, be less to do with the pleasure to be taken in their textual intricacies and difficulties (or what the theorist Roland Barthes might have called their ‘writerliness’). Counter-intuitively, it might have more to do with the possibility that dystopias don’t, or can’t on their own, achieve the job of overcoming bad places we are often too quick to assign to them. Literary dystopias describe bad places very well indeed. Quite how effectively they challenge bad places—in the real world, at any rate—is debatable.
I used to joke with students, and still sometimes do, that the genre of literary dystopia is wildly unsuccessful. If the goal of dystopias is to warn us about bad futures then the very fact that dystopias continue to be written points to their ineffectiveness in getting us to listen to them. J. G. Ballard sometimes used the metaphor of a road sign to describe his dystopian novels, comparing them to warnings of ‘danger ahead’ without wanting to make them into proscriptive sanctions. Octavia Butler described the unfinished sequence of novels beginning with Parable of the Sower as a set of ‘cautionary tales’:
I have never written about a world I want to see develop […]. I despair about the way we human beings injure ourselves and lay waste to the environment. The stupid things we do—we’ve always done them and chances are we always will, that’s the kind of animals we are. This leaves me with the feeling that the kind of world I would like and that makes sense to me is not possible with the material we’ve got to work with.[10]
Butler’s doubting perspective is extended by Gloria Steinem, who writes: ‘If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it’s one written in the past that has already begun to come true.’[11]
Parable of the Sower is unsettling because its post-apocalyptic story tells of a future that seems already to have happened, a future uncannily like its past. Set initially in a gated community near Los Angeles, where wildfires and the ensuing destruction of districts and neighbourhoods due to fire damage and civil unrest is commonplace, Butler’s novel is a story that has social segregation and polarization at its heart. First published in 1993, it may as well have appeared yesterday:
Saturday, February 22, 2025
We ran into a pack of feral dogs today. We went to the hills today for target practice—me, my father, Joanne Garfield, her cousin and boyfriend Harold—Harry—Baiter, my boyfriend Curtis Talcott, his brother Michael, Aura Moss and her brother Peter. Our other adult Guardian was Joanne’s father, Jay. He’s a good guy and a good shot. Dad likes to work with him, although sometimes there are problems. The Garfields and the Baiters are white, and the rest of us are black. That can be dangerous these days. On the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful, people stared, but they let us alone. Our neighborhood is too small for us to play those kinds of games.[12]
This is not the future of Orwell’s Big Brother, Newspeak, and the Thought Police. It’s a world of bullies: an America in which society has collapsed, the President is a tyrant, patriarchy is triumphant, and slavery not far behind. One of the ‘games’ that Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, identifies is power, and the ability to inflict suffering. ‘But’, she asks, ‘if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?’[13]Burdened with a superhuman ability to feel other people’s pain, a form of hyper-empathy, Lauren is the voice of conscience in a dystopian landscape that merely takes the social trends of the early 1990s to their logical, brutal end-point.
Maybe it’s that the future’s badness continues to outstrip itself, requiring an unending stream of increasingly nightmarish dystopian texts to be written about it. Or maybe it’s because we’ve become addicted to distress—because we can’t get enough of the bad feelings dystopias elicit in us. Or maybe, as my friend Kat Whitehouse recently quipped, it’s because our worst fears about the future are coming true and dystopias help us to prepare for whatever comes next. To go back to Paul Bloom, we might think that the aesthetic experience of what he calls ‘worst-case scenarios’ serve as ‘useful practice for bad times, exercising our psyches for when life goes to hell.’[14]
These are certainly possibilities. As Lauren in Parable of the Sower puts it (writing about a very different kind of text): ‘I’m trying to learn whatever I can that might help me survive out there. I think we should all study books like these.’[15] Dystopias can help us more accurately to diagnose a wealth of social, political, and ecological problems, yet they can also make a virtuoso performance of diagnosis itself, turning identification into a kind of reward for something we know is missing, or about to disappear. It might seem strange to think that dystopias can soothe their readers when so much of what they depict is so upsetting. Perhaps they speak to a need to have our worst fears confirmed. I’ve called this a ‘love affair’ because love, as the old saying goes, is blind—or, if you’d prefer a more accommodating version of the same idea, because love dulls (or can dull) judgement, as Shakespeare well knew. ‘Love is blind’, says Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, ‘and lovers cannot see | The pretty follies that themselves commit’.[16] Our love affair with literary dystopias can stop us from knowing the ‘pretty follies’, the errors, that we ourselves commit in enjoying them.
I need to be careful in speaking of ‘our’ love affair with dystopias, because as Claire Dederer points out, the collective ‘our’—the ‘we’—of an assumed community of like-minded readers is at best reductive and at worst coercive:
Who is this ‘we’ that’s always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe.[17]
Lest I should be accused of believing that I know how everyone else does or should think, let me say that I believe I don’t, and know I don’t. But surely there is a tincture of universality in the global popularity of dystopias? When I say ‘our’ love affair I mean to evoke an enjoyment of literary dystopias that worldwide sales figures seem at some level to bear out. It seems possible to me to speak of a love affair with dystopias that exceeds any one reader or reading community precisely because the genre appears never to have been more successful, more or less everywhere.
Huxley knew this very well, and may even have intended his most famous dystopia, Brave New World, as a commentary on an earlier version of it. The citizens of Huxley’s World State are cheered into compliance by a consumer culture that prioritizes hedonism, and through a technology of nighttime ‘suggestion’, hypnopaedia, that teaches people in their sleep to think the ‘right’ thoughts. Underpinning these strategies of power is a more basic method of control by genetic determination, which orders the World State’s population into hierarchical categories of fitness and intelligence. And should those avenues fail, there’s always the option of mowing down people with machine guns. Yet Huxley felt that violence wasn’t necessary to subdue a population. As he put it in a famous letter to Orwell, sent on the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, ‘the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.’[18]
The servitude that so many people love in Brave New World, and that J. G. Ballard knew precisely how to articulate years later, is the serfdom of pleasure: the World State is a society built on pleasure, whether it’s the pleasure of playing sport (which so many citizens do), or the pleasure of endless casual sex, or taking drugs, or cinema, rebranded in Huxley’s imagined future as the ‘feelies’: films that include their viewers sensuously in the (usually erotic) experiences they depict. No wonder no one wants to break out of the mould. This is the libidinal future of capitalism run riot: a world in which, as the World State Controller Mustapha Mond puts it, ‘people are happy; they get what they want, and […] never want what they can’t get’.[19]
Brave New World is a comic satire on scientific utopianism, occupying an ambiguous space in which technological progress is rejected and endorsed. Yet it’s also a book about what enjoyment means in a rigidly controlled universe. The novel’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, is like most dystopian protagonists someone who knows that something is wrong with the world. In his case, what’s wrong is that he wants to enjoy more than the system is willing to let him enjoy. He should just get on with it and play his electro-magnetic golf, take his drugs, enjoy sexy films, and be quiet. But what he really wants to do is to have an aesthetic experience of nature: to look at stormy waves and ‘the pale face of the moon’ and to feel like an individual, ‘not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body.’[20] What Bernard cannot know, and doesn’t know, is that in yearning to have this kind of aesthetic experience he’s seeking out cliché.
His desire is entirely unoriginal in its predictability. It may differ from the state-sanctioned experiences mandated by the system he serves, but this doesn’t make up for the fact of its unoriginality. The stability of the World State has been secured by eliminating ‘high art’ (Mozart, Michaelangelo, and the like), which elicits complicating passions. A world of simpler pleasures has intervened. And in making this move, Brave New World implicates its readers in its satire. If its readers can enjoy the novel itself—Huxley’s novel, that is—then the reductive simplicity and stability of the World State has not yet triumphed in the real world in which they do their reading (in our world). In experiencing this thrill of difference, Huxley’s readers announce their own belonging to a kind of social ‘body’: the body of readers who have all had this knowingly enjoyable response to the text. Brave New World appeals because, unlike the title of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935), we know it hasn’t happened here (yet).[21]
One reason why we enjoy good books about bad places is because it’s possible—as everyone here in this room will know—to write well about horrible things: to appreciate the good presentation of bad things, to enjoy the artistically accomplished portrayal of evil, or vice, or dishonesty, or cruelty, and so forth. Literary dystopias are a form of writing in which the skilful depiction of pain, at large and small scales, creates enjoyment, as their sales figures imply. Another way to think about this is to consider how far dystopian texts resist the pain they portray. We can think about this in relation to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel about the end of many things as we know them.
The book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in a superstate called Oceania, in which the United Kingdom, now called Airstrip One, still exists. Living in a bombed-out, depleted London, Winston’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth is to make state-sponsored lies by rewriting history—what is known as ‘bringing the past up to date’. He enjoys this work, often losing himself in it ‘as in the depths of a mathematical problem’; and this, we’re told, is the ‘greatest pleasure’ in Winston’s life, which is otherwise so full of oppression. Surveillance devices known as telescreens keep watch over everything Winston does, and maybe also over everything he thinks, too. The Thought Police lie in wait for anyone who slips through the net. It’s a world built on falsehood. And over it all presides Big Brother, who, in another muddying of truth and untruth, may or may not exist.
How might Nineteen Eighty-Four resist the pain it depicts? Well, through the very fact of being a novel. Literature in the sense we know it is not permitted to exist in Oceania. Classic texts of the past—by Shakespeare, Kipling, Milton, and Chaucer—have been rewritten in the official language of Newspeak. The euphemistic and ironic term for these ‘corrected’ volumes is ‘definitive texts’. What little reading material there is in Oceania includes tabloid newspapers, state-approved works of socio-political and historical analysis, and pornography, which is churned out by machine. Winston finds a way to cut through all this when he discovers an old junk shop from which he purchases a cream-papered diary. To own such an object means death: should it be discovered in his possession, as it surely will be, he’ll be whisked off to the Ministry of Love to be tortured into ideological obedience. One way to resist compliance in this dystopia is to be creative, and this is precisely what the diary enables Winston to be. It lets him write, which is always a resonant thing for any character in a dystopia to do (or want to do). Writing in his diary enables Winston to express himself, to voice the thoughts and feelings that his masters want him not only to suppress, but also to be incapable of experiencing.
When Margaret Atwood wrote her own version of this scenario in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), she twisted the knife. In Atwood’s imagined future America, Gilead, women are forbidden to write, which is why her protagonist, Offred, tells her story through speech, recording it across thirty cassette tapes which are then eventually discovered and transcribed. The text in which this discovery is announced is the Appendix, ‘Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale’, which concludes Atwood’s novel and stands as an example of what Liam Knight, in his recent PhD thesis on the same subject, has called ‘endotextuality’: a form of text-within-a-text that has some bearing on the main text it appends.[22]The premise of this endotext, a supplementary fictional text within the larger work of The Handmaid’s Tale itself, is that the story we read in Atwood’s novel is not written but transcribed oral testimony: the spoken remnant of Offred’s life.
Many years later, an academic conference has been convened—the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, no less—during which Offred’s account is examined by the fictional Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, Director of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Archives, from the University of Cambridge. In reading the Professor’s account, we learn that the very name ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a title assigned to the text by another male academic, Professor Wade, ‘partly in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer’ but also to pun ‘on the archaic vulgar signification of the word tail’ (a term used to reduce women to sex objects).[23] It very quickly becomes evident that the priority of these scholars in dealing with Offred’s story of suffering and neglect is not to learn more about the lived reality of her life, but to indulge in a certain kind of scholarly performance.
Like James’s The Children of Men, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a beautifully written novel with much to enjoy in its stylish unfolding. It’s a style that continually works to hide itself as a style—a technique of first-person narration that conceals how Offred’s confessional story is imagined, and that part of what the novel does in imagining it is to brush the sand over its own footsteps. Yet the ‘Historical Notes’, which close the book (and which readers sometimes skip, not knowing how important they are), raise the very uncomfortable thought that among Atwood’s targets is the very thing I’m doing right now, here in this room, this evening: putting my thoughts about Offred’s story in place of her story, allowing my professional representation of her life to stand in for her own traumatic documenting of it. No amount of explanation of this can ever get round the basic need to allow herself to speak for herself. The best thing for me to do would be just to shut up. If you haven’t already, go read the book—and while you’re at it, go read P. D. James, go read Octavia Butler.
Atwood was writing back against Orwell in doing all this, partially in homage and partially in critique: Offred’s foregrounded role in The Handmaid’s Tale overcomes the way Orwell underdevelops Winston Smith’s lover, Julia, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Atwood thereby anticipates Julia’s front-and-centre positioning in the rewritten versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four which have appeared recently, in Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood and Sandra Newman’s Julia, both from 2023. Atwood was concerned, just as Orwell was, by the threat posed to individual freedom and creativity by totalitarian control—the kind of thing described by Orwell, in his essay ‘Culture and Democracy’ (1941), as follows:
Literature as we know it is inseparable from the sanctity of the individual, and therefore is absolutely incompatible with the totalitarian way of life. And what is true of literature is true of nearly everything that we classify under the heading of culture. One must conclude therefore that though our democracy is bound to change […] all that we mean by culture is inextricably bound up with democratic values. The destruction of democracy would mean not simply the loss of certain advantages and the acquisition of certain others, but an actual end to civilization as we know it. We must defend ourselves against that as we should defend ourselves against an invasion from Mars, because we can hardly imagine an alternative.[24]
We might note the insinuation of the work of H. G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds (1898), at the end of this passage, and reflect, therefore, on the degree to which Orwell’s imagination was haunted by the presence of Wells—who was such an important influence on Orwell’s writing. The sanctity of the individual is precisely what is so often at stake in Wells’s books, not least his book A Modern Utopia (1905), and it’s central, of course, to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston writes in his diary because he wants to feel connected to the remnant of humanity the diary represents. He writes in his diary because he wants to feel alive.
Everything in Oceania is turned against this desire. To feel alive—really to feel alive, rather than merely to live in the ways Oceania’s rulers demand—is to betray Big Brother. And so all things enabling people to feel alive have been tracked down and destroyed, or altered beyond recognition. Those things which have not yet been found, such as Winston’s diary and the glass paperweight he buys on another trip to the junk shop, are either soon to be discovered or already compromised by being available in the first place: to purchase them is to activate the inevitable process of their discovery and, in time, their destruction.
The one thing that can’t be ‘found’, in this sense, and therefore the one thing that stands as a viable alternative to unsympathetic authoritarian power, is Nineteen Eighty-Four itself—the novel, the actual, real-world novel in which Winston’s story is told—whose textured, nuanced, symbol-laden, and imaginatively humane contours oppose everything that Oceania and its rulers represent. The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is the answer to the problem it diagnoses, the medicine to its own ailment. Because reading Nineteen Eighty-Four means engaging in a process of sympathetic identification with other people, the characters in its story, the novel enacts a process outlawed in the story world it describes. There aren’t any novels to read in Oceania: they’ve all been destroyed or rewritten. The novel depicting this world without novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, is therefore all the more precious as an instance of what we stand to lose in a ‘totalitarian way of life’.
Or, at least, so one very seductive argument about Orwell’s novel runs. The idea that Nineteen Eighty-Four resists the pain it depicts by being novelistic, by being a novel, is a fascinating one, though I admit what I find fascinating about it is less the claim itself and more the desire it seems to convey: the desire for there to be some way to stop the global slide into totalitarianism that Orwell feared so deeply, and which once again we have to deal with today. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a good bad book not only because it depicts the badness well, but because it appears to smuggle into the depiction—into the processes of narrative representation which form its materiality, its literariness—a kind of saving or utopian goodness. And I choose that word, utopian, on purpose.
Orwell’s novel might be interpreted as itself a utopian answer to the dystopian scenario it imagines, but in my view it can only ever be ambivalently or ambiguously so. The pleasure to be taken in reading Nineteen Eighty-Four might be the pleasure of knowing that the very act of reading about Winston’s Smith awful experiences enacts a process perennially under threat in his world. But I suspect that the truer pleasure is the pleasure to be taken in knowing that thisidea, the idea that a novel might in some way be the solution to the problem it articulates, is a consoling fantasy. Then again, the consoling fantasy might be the consoling fantasy. On and on we go, into a hall of mirrors of competing possibilities, and on and on we go, into a realm of potentially endless self-contradictions—all of them pointing to the greater enjoyment in complexity that Orwell’s novel provides.
There may be more than a whiff of modernism in these textual complications—and by this I mean that even a text like Nineteen Eighty-Four borrows more freely than might seem probable, at first glance, from the modernist tradition associated with writers like T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound.[25] Another dystopia that falls into this same bracket is P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), a text depicting a time after the sudden end of human fertility, when ‘all pleasures of the mind and senses’ seem to be ‘no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against [humanity’s] ruin.’[26] Set in 2021, The Children of Men is now basically unreadable without the Covid-19 pandemic in mind; reading this novel now, we have the peculiar experience of reading a novel about the future from a perspective only just beyond that future. The pleasure to be taken in James’s novel, therefore, is at one level the pleasure of an informed retrospect, the satisfaction of being part of the future anticipated by a text looking ahead to a moment it couldn’t and didn’t know. Another kind of pleasure to be had in reading this book is the pleasure of recognizing allusion. This is another dystopia with a diary-writing protagonist: Theo Faron, who doesn’t live in a totalitarian police state, but who nevertheless uses his journal, as does Winston Smith, ‘to impose order and purpose on the shapelessness of existence.’[27] It’s a novel about the comfort of culture, or more precisely about the assumption (and the illusion) of culture being able to comfort a world in which the future has lost all meaning.
* * *
Tidying my garage recently I discovered a folder containing my A-Level English coursework, the title of which was: ‘Why is it always raining in Utopia?’ I remember being given the question by one of my English teachers. The less said about my adolescent answers to it the better, I think, but it remains a good question, precisely because it points to the dystopian presence coiled inside the utopian imagination. Utopias are imagined societies, fictional good places into which writers project some fantasy or dream of betterment, growth, or perfection. Utopias can be constructive fantasies, ways of pointing to something unlikely or impossible in order to help us find the road towards a better way of doing or being. Utopias can also be destructive illusions, ways of thinking irresponsibly or deceptively about an issue in order to pull the wool over someone’s eyes. It depends, to some extent, on perspective.
Dystopias are the opposites of utopia, the flip side to the utopian coin. If utopias evoke radically better societies, dystopias bring us face to face with nightmares; utopias tend towards happiness, or euphoria, whereas dystopias tend towards suffering, or dysphoria. Both are modes of satire, but they achieve their satire through different means: utopias are satirical because they show us the gap between what our societies are like and what, ideally, they could be; dystopias are satirical because they show us how far our societies can fall, and the dark places to which political idealism can lead. Dystopias show us what people do, as Octavia Butler puts it, when ‘they have the power to make others even more miserable’, when they have become convinced that ‘the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.’[28]
This hasn’t been an overtly political lecture. If I’ve had a political point to make this evening it’s been a vague and indirect one, which is simply that literature matters as part of our lives. I’m preaching to the choir here—most of the people in this room no doubt share this conviction. If you don’t share it, if it sounds like a smug piece of liberal humanism, then I’d encourage you to think about it the next time you reach for a book to sustain you in some way, or when you affirm the value of reading, or when, without notice, a much-loved bookshop on a high street or a public library disappears. The good bad books I’ve discussed are concerned with larger problems: the fate of the individual, the insidiousness of pleasure culture, the destructions of patriarchy, and even the end of the planet as we know it. They’re small books about big things. The messages they send are, to employ an overused word, ‘urgent’ ones. Yet our love affair with dystopia indulges the very value that the dystopias themselves so frequently imagine the end of: the enjoyment of literature, the finding of some value in learning about imagined others.
[1] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 214, 215; Maggie Gee, The Ice People (1998; London: Telegram, 2008), p. 38.
[2] Margaret Atwood, Burning Questions (2022; London: Vintage, 2023), p. 255.
[3] Sebastian Mitchell, Utopia and its Discontents: Plato to Atwood (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), p. 1.
[4] P. D. James, The Children of Men (1992; London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 180.
[5] See Selina-Marie Scholz and Geoff Rodoreda, ‘The Labyrinths of Nineteen Eighty-Four’, George Orwell Studies, 8.1 (2023), pp. 77-92.
[6] George Orwell, Essays, introd. Bernard Crick (1994; London: Penguin, 2000), p. 318.
[7] Bertrand Russell, ‘Symptoms of George Orwell’s 1984’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Détente or Destruction, 1955-57, vol. 29 (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 157-64, at p. 160.
[8] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), introd. John Sutherland (London: Everyman, 2013), p. 227.
[9] Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: Why we like what we like (2010; London: Vintage, 2011), p. 192. My thanks to John Turner and Emily Fennell for directing me to this book.
[10] Octavia E. Butler, The Last Interview and Other Conversations, introd. Samuel R. Delany (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2023), pp. 98-9.
[11] Steinem’s comment appears as a blurb on the back cover of the Headline imprint of Butler’s Parable of the Sower.https://earlybirdbooks.com/gloria-steinem-on-octavia-butler
[12] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993; London: Headline, 2019), p. 33.
[13] Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 108.
[14] Bloom, How Pleasure Works, pp. 193-4.
[15] Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 53.
[16] https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/read/
[17] Claire Dederer, Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People? (2023; London: Sceptre, 2024), p. 18.
[18] Aldous Huxley, Letters, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), pp. 604-5.
[19] Huxley, Brave New World, p. 194.
[20] Huxley, Brave New World, p. 78.
[21] In reading out this sentence in the lecture itself, I mistakenly said Upton Sinclair here instead of Sinclair Lewis. Apologies.
[22] Liam Knight, ‘On Endotextuality: Literary Dystopias, Texts-within-Texts, and Post-Truth’, PhD Thesis (University of Birmingham, 2024).
[23] Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), introd. Valerie Martin (London: Everyman, 2006), p. 337.
[24] George Orwell, The Complete Works—Vol. 13: All Propaganda is Lies, 1941-1942, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), p. 78.
[25] See Patricia Rae, ‘Mr. Charrington’s Junk Shop: T. S. Eliot and Modernist Poetics in Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 43.2 (Summer 1997), pp. 196-220 and ‘Surveillance and the “Poetics of Silence”: Late Modernist Imagism in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’, in Mark Levene (ed.), Political Fiction (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2015), pp. 132-52.
[26] James, The Children of Men, p. 13.
[27] James, The Children of Men, p. 46.
[28] Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 135.