Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial by Erika Gottlieb (review)

354 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Wilson=s is an entertaining and funny account of the often hapless efforts of people in the English-speaking world to predict and control the future. He playfully offers advice to would-be prophets on how best to make their predictions while avoiding the humiliation and ridicule when events prove them wrong. Behind all of this is a more serious understanding of and sympathy for writers about the future whose purpose is >to project dangerous and disturbing elements of our own time into the future, so that we may prevent that future from happening. The cry of warning becomes a call for action, and the call for action becomes an act of hope.= The hope that the world may become a better place. (MARSHA AILEEN HEWITT) Erika Gottlieb. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial McGill-Queen=s University Press. x, 324. $75.00, $29.95 Considering the importance and popularity of dystopian fiction with ordinary readers and in academic curricula in the humanities, the publication of Erika Gottlieb=s book is long overdue, and its appearance has filled an enormous gap in critical literature. Most valuable to Gottlieb=s analysis is her comparative perspective, which brings together some major writers from England, the USA, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. From a strictly literary-historical point of view, dystopia can be described as the reverse of utopia, a term which came to denote the rise of totalitarian movements and oppressive political systems. If utopia implies some sort of social paradise, dystopia is synonymous with hell. Yet dystopian fiction does not lend itself to easy explanation; its difficulty arises from the complexity of its matrix which amalgamates, as it were, a variety of narrative strategies ranging from satire and social and politically committed prose to utopian literature, science fiction, fantasy, and the absurd. It is placed at the intersection of all these generic paradigms, and with its futurological mind-set remains on the fringe of science fiction and as part of speculative literature. Gottlieb understands and seems to be sensitive to the hybrid nature of dystopia and takes into account all its syntactic components. Her comments on tragedy vs utopia/dystopia strike to the very core of the specificity of both utopia and dystopia and point to their close affinity in a much more convincing manner than other comparisons. Equally stimulating are those parts of the book which successfully xxxxxx conceptualize some constituent attributes of dystopian content, such as justice/injustice, the totalitarian state, a new state religion devoid of God and the role of ideology as its substitute, and the problem of law and lawlessness, attributes which constitute the very substance of the genre. Finally, the analysis of dystopia is contextualized with references to such writers as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Gogol; and is conducted humanities 355 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 against a broad political background. Gottlieb=s study is divided into three major parts: >Dystopia West,= >Dystopia East: The Soviet Union 1920sB1950s,= and >Dystopia East: The Soviet Bloc 1950sB1980s,= and contains thirteen chapters and a conclusion. This structure is somewhat problematic. It comes as a surprise to see Evgeny Zamyatin placed together with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in part 1 under the heading >Dystopia West.= If the division >East-West= meant to juxtapose writers from Eastern or Central Europe with those from the West, Zamyatin can hardly be discussed within the boundaries of Western literature. The author does not even discuss Zamyatin=s influence on Huxley or Orwell. Most probably this inconsistency is the result of the excessive politicization of the genre, the tendency to define it according to political events in the Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Gottlieb=s exclusive concentration on the type of dystopia generated by terror organized and sanctioned by the totalitarian state is defective in two ways. First, it entirely ignores dystopic fiction which is concerned with the omnipotent role of science and technology in modern society, West or East. The absence of even a short scrutiny of Karel...