New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media [1 ed.] 1527555399, 9781527555396

Table of contents :
T ABLE OF CONTENTS
I
SOCIETAL DYSTOPIA OLD AND NEW
II
ARTICULATING THE (PoST)ApOCALYPSE
INDEX

Citation preview

New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media

New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media Edited by

Saija Isomaa, Jyrki Korpua and Jouni Teittinen

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media Edited by Saija Isomaa, Jyrki Korpua and Jouni Teittinen Layout and cover design: Jari Kakela Cover image source: pixabay.com This book first published 2020 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 ID 2020 by Saija Isomaa, Jyrki K01J1ua, Jouni Teittinen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or othelWise, without the prior pennission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10),1-5275-5539-9 ISBN (13), 978-1-5275-5539-6

T ABLE

OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... Vll Introduction: Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction Saija Isomaa, Jyrki Korpua & Jouni Teittinen ................................ 1X

I Societal Dystopia Old and New I.

From Anxiety to Hatred: Negative Emotions in Classical Dystopias Saija Isomaa .................................................................................... .3

2.

Pain and Suffering in Classical Dystopian Fiction: Case Orwell Sari Kivist6 ..................................................................................... 27

3.

From Gilead to Eusistocratia: The Dialogue Between Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Novel The Handmaids Tale and Johanna Sinisalo's The Core of the Sun Hanna Samola ............................................................................... .45

4.

"Make Britain Great Again." (Critical) Political Dystopia in Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta Jyrki Korpua ................................................................................... 65

5.

Challenging Secularity: Spiritual and Religious Undertones in Young Adult Dystopias Kaisa Kaukiainen ........................................................................... 85

6.

An Ever-Compromised Utopia: Virtual Reality in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge Esko Suoranta ............................................................................... 10 I

VI

Table of Contents

11 Articulating the (Post)Apocalypse 7.

This Future Past: Parsing Post-apocalyptic Temporality with Cormac McCartliy's The Road Jouni Teittinen ............................................................................... 121

8.

Folds around the End: Open and Closed Temporalities in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam-trilogy Mikko Mantyniemi ........................................................................ 139

9.

Constructing a Dystopian Game World: Gothic Monstrosities in the Digital Role-playing Game F aUout 3 Sari Piittinen ................................................................................ 161

10. The Dream and the Nightmare of Artificial Intelligence: Individual and Collective Responsibility for the Future in the Television Series Battlestar Galactica and Caprica Essi Vatilo ..................................................................................... 185 11. Outlaws of the Nature: Humanity as a Destructive Species in Richard Adams's Watership Down and Other Animal Dystopias Maria Laakso ................................................................................ 20 1 12. Colonized Environments: The Weird Ecology of Iohanna Sinisalo's Birdbrain Juha Raipola & Toni Lahtinen ...................................................... 227

Contributors ............................................................................................. 243 Index ........................................................................................................ 245

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 9 1 A hostile Super Mutant is shooting at the PC. 9 2 Carol describes the process ofbecorning a Ghoul in the game dialogue. 9 3 Vance describes his role in leading the Family in the game dialogue.

INTRODUCTION: NAVIGATING THE MANY FORMS OF DYSTOPIAN FICTION

SAIJA ISOMAA, JYRKI KORPUA, AND JOUNI TEITTINEN

In their introduction to Dark Horizons in 2003, Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (2003, 1) state that dystopias portray fictional worlds that are "worse than the ones we live in". Today, one may hesitate before accepting this comparison without qualification due to some recent developments that seem to bring past and even contemporary dystopias much closer to reality. The most obvious is anthropogenic climate change, which poses a fundamental threat to all life on Earth. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel

of Climate Change (lPCC) gave our civilization twelve years to correct our way of living or else face the dire consequences outlined in its report (http://www.ipcc.chireport/srl5/. 8 October 2018). Later reports by the United Nations and lPCC have been equally alarming, warnnig us of mass species extinction and global warming (see UN Report 2019; lPCC 2019). Already, the changing climatic situation is making itself felt via extreme weather conditions and globally increased aridity tha~ in turn, brings about consequences such as a longer and more severe forest fire season. Recently,

the exceptionally destructive bushfires in Australia in 2019-2020 showed the devastating effects such phenomena may have not only on humans but also on wildlife, pushing some endangered species closer to extinction. In addition, our societies are changing, and not always for the better. China, for example, is building a social credit system in which high technology and more traditional fOlTIlS of official records are used to monitor and judge every move a citizen makes, ultimately aiming at

"letting the trustworthy roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step" (Carney 2018). According to Xin Dai (2018), China is the first state to adopt reputation mechanisms such as blacklisting, rating, and scoring, which were previously used by private sector players to tackle governance and regulatory problems in social and economic realms. Thus China is taking a step from being a reputation

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

society towards a reputation state. If successful, by the end of 2020 China will have become "the world's first digital dictatorship", where technologies such as mobile apps and a network of 200 million CCTV cameras equipped with facial recognition, body scarming, and geo-tracking constantly survey

the behaviour of all lA billion citizens, that is, about twenty per cent of the world's population (see Camey 2018). The smart city of Guiyang (with an urban population of over three million) had its surveillance system installed already in 2017, and it took seven minutes for the security authorities to find BBC's John Sudworth when he was allowed to test the system (see the BBC's reportage from 25 December 2017, https:llwww.youtube.com/ watch?v~pNf4-d6fDoY).

The development in China is an extreme example of how dystopian visions of constant surveillance and the loss of privacy are being actualized

in our world, but it makes clear that the geme's worry about a statecontrolled future has not been groundless. Recently, especially after the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency in January 2017, dystopian fiction has gained unprecedented attention in popular culture. The interest in dystopias seems to signal both a widespread political uncertainty and the geme's ability to observe and criticize power relations. The publisher of Orwell's classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Penguin USA, reported in January 2017 that there had been a 9,500 per cent increase in the sales of the book, and the publisher had ordered a print of 75,000 new copies to meet the demand (Freytas-Tamura 2017). Shortly afterwards, MargaretAtwood's feminist dystopia The Handmaids Tale (1985) rose to the top of Amazon's bestseller list and ended up as being the most read fiction book of 2017 (https:llwww.amazon.com/article/this-year-in-books?ref~SIN_ TY17 _V _2, retrieved 8 October 2018). It can even be claimed that Atwood's novel - or the character of the handmaid - has become a symbol for political resistance against abuses of power, its position reinforced with the novel's award-winning television adaptation of the same name by Bruce Miller and the international political resistance group named Handmaid Coalition,

which claims to combat inequality under the slogan "Fight to keep fiction from becoming reality" (handmaidcoalition.org, 8 October 2018). The Handmaid Coalition has organized or inspired silent demonstrations of

people dressed as handmaids around the world. The sequel of Atwood's novel, The Testaments (2019), won the 2019 Booker Prize for fiction along with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other. If dystopian fiction - in one of its many functions - is a canary in the coalmine, as Baccolini and

Moylan (2003, 2-3) have suggested, then many have noted its existence and started monitoring its condition.

Introduction

Xl

Recent developments in dystopian fiction Recent years have witnessed a rise in climate fiction, young adult (YA) dystopias, and dystopian graphic novels, digital games, and films, to name

a few burgeoning genres and forms that belong to the widening field of dystopian fiction as we understand the term in this book. What began as more or less satiric mappings of undesirable societies and futures in the secular literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have become a multitude of intertwined genre traditions that combine with each other and different genres and forms across media. In this volume, we understand dystopian fiction as an umbrella telTIl; it gathers together thematically close genres that often intertwine in individual works of fiction, whatever the medium. As we see it, dystopian fiction accommodates the different historical phases of the genre of dystopia, dystopian narratives of apocalypse, and post-apocalypse,l much of so-called climate fiction (envisaging the future course of climate change partly in tandem with environmental sciences)} and those subgenres of these categories that are addressed to some specific target audience and are

moulded accordingly (e.g. YA dystopia). This broad understanding of the concept of "dystopian fiction" is contrary to what M. Keith Booker and 1 Post-apocalyptic fictions, defined as narratives of a world changed by some global cataclysm, need not in fact always be overtly dystopian, but may portray ostensibly idyllic back-to-nature scenarios or ideologically laden and usually masculinist fantasies of sillvival (intermixed with flat-out dystopian elements). "While the postapocalypse is thus arguably not delimited within the generic category of dystopia, in the main it falls under it. Previously, Claire B. Curtis (2010, 7) has distinguished between dystopian and utopian post-apocalyptic fiction, the latter using the destruction of the world to "usher in a new and potentially better one". 2 Sylvia Mayer (2014, 24) has proposed a useful and intuitive division of climate (change) fiction, or cli-fi, into "narratives of catastrophe" and "narratives of anticipation". In the latter category, which includes titles like Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012), "Large-scale catastrophe is envisioned, if at all, only as a possibility, usually signaled by the representation of weather anomalies and their socio-economic consequences that indicate the impact of global wanning" (Mayer 2014,26). While these modes may mix, for example through flashbacks or multiple temporal frames, it is the explicitly catastrophic climate change narratives that most aptly fall within the category of dystopia. The geme of climate fiction is often also taken to include narratives dealing with the geo-engineering of alien planets (e.g. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, 1992 1996), or decidedly weird fiction (e.g. IeffVanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, 2014), all of which mayor may not be dystopian in character.

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

Anne-Marie Thomas have suggested in The Science Fiction Handbook (2009), which has separate chapters on dystopian science fiction and apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. By our broad use of the term, we wish to emphasize the thematic COllllectedness and overlapping of these historical gemes in our current culture to better understand the field they constitute. 3 Even if the gemes might originally have been responses to either societal or environmental concerns, they typically imagine negative futures for humankind. Each focuses on some specific aspect of the undesirable future world, be it an apocalyptic chain of events leading to a great catastrophe, the struggle to survive and rebuild in a post-catastrophe world, or the condition of people living in totalitarian states that have usually been created as a response to a wide-scale catastrophe, such as a world war or a nuclear disaster. Genre theories that underlie different approaches to dystopia have not been widely discussed in dystopian studies, but we wish to briefly justify our descriptive approach to the gemes in this introduction, as it may seem alien to some. Our understanding of dystopian fiction is shaped by historical genre theory, which perceives genres as traditions of works that resemble each other in specific respects (see Kinds of Literature by Alastair Fowler, 1982). This theory does not assume a genre has an essence that remains the same through changes over time and place, and which can be expressed in a single definition. The "family resemblance" typical of works in a genre is based on the "generic repertoire" of that genre, that is, its historically widening pool of optional features from which each work in the genre (or the author) selects elements for its purposes. 4 As genres change over time, they cannot be defined in essentialist telTIlS, but their historical stages can be described. This anti-essentialist approach is both theoretically strong and practical in cross-cultural analysis, especially because it allows genres to change over time, adapt to different cultures and media, and combine with other genres in individual works. As we see it, this is what has been happening 3 Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Angela Krewani have used the term apocalypse as an umbrella term in their edited volume The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World (2015), but we prefer the term dystopian fiction, as we think it better communicates what ties the genres together: their lllldesirability, or anti-utopian nature. 4 In practice, this means that works in the same genre need not share a set of specific, "definitive" features (or more technically, necessary and sufficient conditions) to qualify as belonging to the genre as in essentialist definitions. Works in a genre do not share an essence, but resemble each other in certain respects.

Introduction

Xl11

with dystopian fiction from the very beginning, and it is also why there is such a wide variety and numerous traditions of dystopian fiction in different literatnres and cultnres. An important benefit of the approach is its inclusiveness: by not privileging geme definitions that are based on the characteristics of the gemes in some of the dominating literatures, the variety of different cultural versions of dystopian fiction is made visible, appreciated, and included. However, two remarks should be made. Firstly, as each Western literature and culture tends to have its own tradition of dystopian gemes, we will not go into a detailed discussion of these fOlms in some specific culture in this short introduction; rather, we focus on general phenomena and trends that are likely to occur in many. Secondly, our choice of geme theory is to be contrasted with previous studies in the field that tend to suggest essentialist definitions, as well as those prominent definitions of dystopia and utopia that include contextual criteria for the geme. For instance, Darko Suvin (1979, 49) includes a criterion concerning the relationship between the imagined world and the author's community in his definition of utopia. According to Suvin (ibid.), "[u]topia is the verbal construction of a particular quasihuman community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organised according to a more perfect principle than in the author 's community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis". Lyman Tower Sargent (1994, 9) defines the basic concepts from eutopia to critical dystopia with reference to authorial intention; for instance, a dystopia or negative utopia is "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". Our approach suggests that such contextual knowledge is not necessary for an audience to identify some representation as a dystopia or utopia on the basis of its textual (or audiovisual) features and to analyse it sensitively. Rather, claims concerning authorial intention (or rather realized intention, if any) or a work's relation to its contexts may result from such an analysis. In an influential account, Tom Moylan (building on Sargent [1994] and others) suggests that the term "dystopia" be reserved for those narratives that despite the grim scenario (or rather through it) uphold some explicit or implicit form of utopian hope - belief in the possibility of radical societal transfOlmation - while the fictions whose thorough pessimism allows for no such hope ought properly be called anti-utopian. Thus, according to Moylan (2000, 147), dystopias "negotiate tbe social terrain of Utopia and Anti-Utopia", drawing their critical political potential from

XlV

Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

how these tensions are reflected on by the reader in her present society. While Sargen!'s and Moylan's analyses are apt and the consequent notion of critical dystopia is in many ways useful, we choose to posit utopia and dystopia as the governing gemes, and consider their different variations as either subgerues or historical stages typical of some - but not necessarily all - literatures. 5 This follows from historical geme theory, which counsels the perception of similarities and continuities within traditions instead of an emphasis of dissimilarities. Having originated in literature, dystopian fiction has turned out to be very flexible; it is capable of entering various forms across the media, as dystopian films, TV series, digital games, and graphic novels testify. Dystopian fiction has also been mixed with other gemes that are not dystopian by definition - such as alternative histories and Gothic, horror, survival, and disaster fiction - and in this way penetrated into new areas within each medium. As a result, dystopian features can nowadays be found almost anywhere in the field of art, literature, and cultural production generally. Considering the world in which we live and the scenarios for the future offered by science, it is not surprising that dystopian fiction continues to be written, read, and examined.

Genres of the Anthropocene Portrayals of oppressive societies and apocalyptic catastrophes can be

found in the Bible and even earlier literature, endowing the imagery with cultural familiarity. Nevertheless, the modem dystopian gemes have emerged and developed mostly since the end of the nineteenth century, 5 There is also the aspect of cultural differences at play. Not all literatures are equally conveniently described with concepts that are created on the basis of historical dystopias in certain major literatures. For instance, in Firmish literature the dystopian genres emerged properly only in the 1990s, and critical utopias typical of the English-speaking world of the 1960s and 1970s cannot be found without considerable effort in that literature. To allow variation, more general terms are used. In the frame of historical genre theory, "manifestation of the utopian imagination within the dystopias form" (Moylan 2000, 195) might refer to generic mixtures in which the utopian repertoire modulates works of dystopia, or even to works that are dominated by the genre of dystopia but still leave room for hope of a better society, and hopefulness itself not necessarily sufficient to invoke the genre of utopia. However, despite theoretical and terminological differences vis-a-vis previous studies, the genre phenomena under discussion remain roughly the same.

Introduction

xv

and they express and encapsulate visions, fears, and risks typical of our time, often stemming from the development of science and technology. For instance, dystopian states typically use high technology to govern their citizens, while ecological catastrophes typical of apocalypses, postapocalypses, and climate fiction are usually caused in part by human technology. In this sense, dystopian fiction can be considered a category of stories that are critical of the consequences of science and technology. It thus constitutes a reaction against the master narrative of the Enlightenment that considers science, technology, and education as the means for creating a better future for humankind (see, e.g. Stock 2013,115-117). In dystopian fiction, science and technology often serve or produce undesirable or morally dubious, sometimes destructive, purposes and consequences. As such, dystopian fictions can be understood also as gemes of the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch that is characterized by largescale human effects on the planet; it has been widely discussed since the beginning of the twenty-first century (see, e.g. Correia et a1. 2018). According to Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (2000, 17-18), the Anthropocene refers to the epoch "in which humans have become the single most potent force in shaping terrestrial and marine ecology, global geology, and the atmosphere". Alan Mikhail (2016) notes that many researchers suggest the end of the eighteenth century as the beginning of the epoch, but other timings have also been discussed. 6 The growing human impact is related to the intertwined development of science and technology during the last few centuries, which has ultimately given us the capacity to destroy the planet for the first time in human history. The genres of dystopian fiction have developed during the suggested Anthropocene epoch, and they tend to focus on imagining the negative effects of human technology and science on human societies and the environment, thus discussing the dangers of technology and the human impact on the ecology of the Earth in the realm of fiction. Climate fiction in particular is closely tied to the climatological research that fuels the discussion on the Anthropocene. However, despite its links with scientific and societal discussions of technology, ecology, and the Anthropocene, dystopian fiction is still fiction that draws on various cultural sources and creates literary worlds of its own. This is why the genres should be analysed also on their own 6 Mikhail (2016) points out that especially the years 1610 and 1964 have been discussed as the beginning of the period, the fonner marking the year after which atmospheric CO2 levels have increased, and the latter marking the year when radioactive markers from the 1945 nuclear bombs were first measmed in tree rings, marine sediments, and soils across the globe.

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

telTIlS and as literary and audio-visual traditions, and not just in connection with, for instance, discussions of ecology and technology. Observed as such, some trends can be pointed out. Some very popular twentiethand twenty-first-century book and/or film series such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games have all used conventions of dystopia in their portrayal of bad or worsening societies and rebellion against them, making the story type familiar to contemporary audiences 7 One side-effect of the growing popularity of dystopian fiction is that it seems to have gained cultural independence from its thematically, narratologically, and historically close cOllllection with science fiction and become recognizable in its O\Vll right, without reference to sci-fi or speculative fiction as a necessary interpretative frame. 8 This has to do also with the fact that diverse, ancient gemes - from religious apocalypse to utopia - come together in contemporary dystopian fiction. Another tendency in dystopian fiction seems to be its growing entertainment value (see, e.g. Baxter, Grubisic, & Lee 2014, 7-10; Morrissey 2013, 189). The early classical dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell were hardly intended as being primarily - or even secondarily - entertaining. By contrast, commercialized movies and digital games that employ dystopian conventions in their worldbuilding are usually expected to offer enjoyable experiences for the consumer. Whereas classical dystopias tend to crush the rebellion that is the focus of interest in those works, contemporary dystopian fiction seems to prefer survival stories that offer glimpses of hope to the audiences. 9 The possibility of In The Lord a/the Rings, Dark Lord Sauron's objective is to rule all of Middleearth with his dark and dominating powers. It is for the protagonists representing "the free peoples of Middle-earth" to oppose this. In Star Wars episodes I VI, the emerging empire ruled by Emperor Palpatine, aka Darth Sidious, is a totalitarian dystopia against which the Jedi rebel. In the Harry Potter series, the emerging society ruled by Voldemort is a racist and totalitarian one, and Panem in The Hunger Games is also obviously a bad totalitarian society based on violence and suppression. All of these dystopian regimes are defeated at least temporarily in the works. 8 This is reflected in the fact that many so-called literary authors, such as Atwood or Ernily St. JOM Mandel (whose Station Eleven won the Arthm C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction in 2015), are averse to associating their dystopian speculations with science fiction. 9 Yet it is obvious that any rigid categorization within dystopian fiction is probably incorrect, as already in the "first" classical dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), there is a smvival story of the lUllawfully pregnant 0-90, who evidently succeeds in escaping from the One State. By contrast, Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011) 7

Introduction

XVll

surviving a dystopian world is important in digital games, where part of the motivation to keep playing derives from the possibility of at least having a chance of surviving, if not changing the world for the better (see and cf. Markocki 2016, 123). However, there are dystopian games, such as Bioshock Infinite (2013, Irrational Games), where the protagonist dies at the end. In contemporary mass-market films, dystopian features are commonly combined with elements from survival and disaster films, creating apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic worlds or totalitarian societies as milieus for action.

Societal dystopias New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media gathers together chapters that revisit dystopian classics from new perspectives or offer new readings of less researched works. Although the majority of the chapters investigate literature as a medium for dystopian visions, this book also illuminates aspects of contemporary dystopian fiction in television, graphic novels, and digital games. The first six chapters of this book focus on analysing portrayals of dystopian societies. To better appreciate the historical variation in the geme, it is worth briefly outlining the path before introducing the ways in which societal dystopias are approached in this volume. Despite its centrality, societal dystopia is not the oldest of the dystopian genres, with modem apocalyptic fiction winning the title by dating back to the beginning of nineteenth century. IQ The first societal dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel Mbl (We) , was published only in 1924 as an English translation. Naturally, there were works that anticipated the geme but did not yet give fmm to its repertoire as we nowadays know it. One such work is The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells, in which a depiction of the dystopian society of morlocks and eloi is embedded in a time-travel narrative. The society in which the servant class of morlocks has developed to be more intelligent than their masters and started to take advantage of the situation is identifiably a dystopian one, but it is not a full-blown classical

offers no hope of surviving the end of the world, but shows how it can be faced in a dignified manner. 10 We refer here to apocalyptic fictions such as Le Demier Homme (1805) by JeanBaptiste Fran~ois Xavier Cousin de Grainville and The Last Man (1826) by Mary

Shelley.

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

dystopia that focuses on portraying a totalitarian society and a rebellion against it. Similarly, when exploring later depictions of bad societies in fiction, it is worth noting that sometimes such a portrayal is embedded in another narrative and does not constitute the main focus of the work. The portrayed society itself may also differ from the model offered by the tradition of classical (and critical) dystopias.l1 Apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction - which typically focus on depicting either apocalyptic catastrophes or post-apocalyptic struggles for survival - may especially portray communities and societies that are dystopian, even if not in the classical marmer. The proximity of the gemes that we refer to collectively as dystopian fiction also shows in the way in which many classical or critical dystopias are actually framed in relation to the apocalypse: the bad society is created to better survive apocalyptic events such as a severely polluted environment, large-scale war, or climate change. For instance, the society of Gilead in MargaretAtwood's The Handmaids Tale (1985) arises as an effort to cope in the chaos of a more or less collapsing ecosystem and a raging war with a neighbouring state. Even the World State in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) was created after the Nine Years' War and the great Economic Collapse, when the only two options available were destruction or World Control, the latter bringing about the World State. It might be fair to note here that sometimes in literary history, apocalypses have been represented as giving rise also to utopian societies, as in Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a volcanic eruption and its afiemmth erases men and leads to the creation of a flourishing society of women. Even so, tying a catastrophe together with an undesirable society is unsurprisingly the more common tendency. New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media commences by taking a fresh look at some of the geme's classic and newly canonized works, including both prose fiction and comics. For a reader not thoroughly familiar with the coordinates of the tradition of dystopias, the six chapters of Section One also serve as a useful introduction to some of the geme's constitutive dynamics: totalitarian state versus the struggling individual (discussed by all chapters save Suoranta); varieties of oppressive strategies from direct physical violence (in particular the chapters by Kivistb liOn the concept of critical dystopia, see for instance Moylan 2000,194 195. The concept is often used to distinguish the pessimistic classical dystopias from later, more optimistic or critical variations of the geme. As we see it in this introduction, "critical" dystopias belong to the genre of societal dystopia as one of its historical variations or sub genres, so there is no need to refer to the types as separate traditions of literature.

Introduction

X1X

and Korpua) to more covert ideological, emotional, and psychological coercion (in particular the chapters by Isomaa and Suoranla); tbe real-life political and societal conditions underlying tbe dystopian scenarios (tbe chapters by Korpua and Samola); and tbe protagonists' negative emotions (tbe chapter by Isomaa) and various strategies of resistance (in particular the chapters by Kaukiainen, Samola, and Suoranla). Typically, societal dystopias focus on portraying characters that rebel against society, and this classical story type still gives fmm to even the most recent works of the geme. A lot has been written about tbe classics of dystopia, but there is still room for new explorations. Saija Isomaa examines emotions in classical dystopias, suggesting that despite the received view of science fiction and dystopian fiction as being intellectually oriented genres, emotions play a central role in dystopias and merit an exploration in their own right. Isomaa first explores the collective cultures of emotions in We by Zamyatin, Brave New World by Huxley, and Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell and claims that these emotion cultures are designed to maintain the status quo, with each novel focusing on characters that do not confmm to it. She proceeds to examine character emotions that are mainly negative, varying from anxiety to hatred, and suggests that they reveal the shortcomings of tbe particular society. Isomaa suggests that since emotions play a pivotal role in the genre, they should be discussed in the descriptions of the genre. Sari Kivist6 also starts from the experiences of characters in a dystopian society by exploring pain and suffering in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Kivistb notes that dystopian societies are based on injustice and gravely violated individual freedom, making it impossible for an individual to live a morally right life. This leads to innocent suffering that is not tbe consequence of moral failures or a punishment for sins. Rather, suffering is deprived of its personal content and made a social and political issue, and even a central goal of the political powers. Kivist6 analyses the famous torture scene in Room 101 as a spectacle of power: causing pain to others means absolute power over them, and the extreme pain of torture serves as a means to remind Winston Smith of the absolute power and control of the Party over the individual. KivislO suggests that the life of Winston Smith is still ethically significant, even if he cannot change the society or even properly fight for an etbicallife against tbe collective evil. According to her, acknowledging the negative sides of life and uprooting hollow fantasies is part of Orwell's negative poetics.

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

From feminist dystopias to utopian possibilities Surprisingly many ofthose works that depict bad societies are written in the tradition that began with Zamyatin, as also the chapters in Section One of this book exemplify. Hanna Samola shows in her chapter how Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has served as a generic model for the reno\Vlled Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo, who has written a feminist dystopia of her O\vn, Auringonydin (2013, The Core of the Sun). Samola's chapter also opens up a view of how dystopian gemes migrate between literatures. Interestingly, dystopia was an international geme from the very beginning, the geme classics belonging to different literatures. In his chapter, Jyrki Korpua discusses how the crisis of English identity in tbe 1970s and 1980s is illustrated in two English political dystopian graphic novels, Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. Both graphic novels feature a dystopian society ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship. Sarnola and Korpua note the analysed works' connections to today's political climate, the rise of nationalism, and neoconservatism. Kaisa Kaukiainen's chapter discusses YA dystopias, and her analysis shows that this tradition is also closely connected to that of classical dystopia via, for example, the thematics of dictatorial surveillance and violent societal hierarchy. In fact, the link between YA fiction and tbe tradition of dystopia comes naturally, and doubtlessly accounts in part for the young geme's booming success: by portraying weak or absent families and parents, systems of rigid authority, and a challenging environment that requires individuals to struggle and create alliances to survive, dystopian fiction offers an interesting arena for treating topics central to YA literature, such as individual identity, human and societal relations, and the meaning of life. The model of living offered by the previous generation is typically not satisfactory and fit for life in an apocalyptic, dystopian world; the young generation has to find its own patb, usually by rebelling against tbe authoritarian system and creating a new social order of its 0'Wll. Unsurprisingly, dystopian works often portray a group of people tied together tbrough bonds of solidarity, friendship, or love in order to face tbe undesirable conditions. Such small communities are the space or shelter where humanity - or the renmants thereof - can be renewed even in the bleakest of times. Indeed, Kaukiainen notes tbat YA dystopias generally feature happier endings than their classical counterparts, and she further argues that whereas classical dystopias usually carry an anti-religious sensibility, YA dystopias often have a distinct spiritual or post-secular undertone alongside the more visible criticism of institutionalized and

Introduction

XXI

dogmatic forms of belief. This trend also carries over to post-apocalyptic dystopias: we might mention as prominent examples Jean Hegland's popular Into the Forest (1996, fi1matized in 2015), where the two protagonists, free of civilization's shackles, eventually seem to achieve a near-mystical connection with nature; and Memory of Water (2012) by Emmi Itaranta, which taps into the imagery of East Asian wisdom and Zen. The idea of a close relationship between utopian and dystopian visions is commonplace in research, and it is repeated in many forms. Dystopias are utopias gone wrong, or utopias for only some, or they aim at the same purpose as utopias - that is, to make their audiences critically evaluate and perhaps improve their own societies. Even in the bleakest dystopias there is often a place of survival to be found for some people for some time, sometimes even pellllanently, as when the illegally pregnant 0-90 in Zamyatin's We manages to escape the One State to live with the savages. Utopian hope seems to be a phoenix, incinerated in the flames of the apocalypse time and again only to arise anew from the ashes - in Into the Forest, it is literally tlie burning of the protagonists' home tliat finally sets them free - forever believing in the possibility of a new beginning. The dystopian dichotomies of fear and hope, and risk and possibility, seem to pervade many works in which some other geme takes precedence. Esko Suoranta's chapter on Thomas Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), which innovatively brings the tradition of dystopian studies to bear on Pynchon, makes for an important reminder that a narrative need not wear its utopian or dystopian heart on its sleeve. The chapter focuses on the novel 's depiction of virtual reality as a space of possibility for both sinister and utopian trajectories. While Pynchon's novel has mainly been discussed as dystopian, with tlie emphasis placed on its cyberpunk sensibility and tlie usurping of tlie virtual world by corporate capitalism, Suoranta shows how the possibility of utopian escape and multivocal meaning-making refuses to be quenched. As in the real-life technological trajectories we currently witness, utopia and dystopia often figure as potentialities or virtualities that may also shift with the perspective and ideology adopted. As Suoranta notes, "[ s]uch fiction shows that tlie contemporary world is in fact characterized by competing tendencies with botli dystopian and utopian overtones", the complexity of which is sometimes better brought home by interpretatively ambiguous works a la Bleeding Edge tlian by (in Suoranta's words) "imagin[ing] what tlie world after the deluge might look like". This is not to say, of course, tliat postapocalyptic visions could not also provide vital and varied perspectives on the world, and it is to tliese that we now turn.

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Post-apocalypse, or rebooting civilization In accord with this voI-LUlle's broad understanding of dystopian fiction, Section Two delves into different depictions of post-apocalyptic worlds. The post-apocalyptic setting, which has featured in literature since the early nineteenth century and gained prominence after the horrors of the Second World War, is going through another, notably long renaissance this century. 12 It has indeed become one of the major post-millennium trends in both fiction and its academic study.13 While the genre often overlaps with dystopia (apocalypses may, after all, occasion new [mms of totalitarian reign), its frequent narratives of barren wastelands and last-man survivors also provide something like a counter-image to the highly organized and often technologically advanced societies we encounter in the classics of societal dystopia. Gary K. Wolfe (2011, 104) has argued that stories portraying the end of the world are convenient for exploring two favourite themes in science fiction: the relationship of humanity to its environment, and the impact of technology on human behaviour. Normally, sci-fi discusses the latter theme by introducing new technologies to the world (what Darko Suvin refers to as "novum"), but post-apocalyptic stories take the contrary approach of removing even the technology familiar to us. This also makes possible a creative treatment of humanity's relationship to its environment. However, fiction has also increasingly started to portray more primitive, postapocalyptic totalitarian societies that attempt to dominate the survivors in a world of scarce resources, as in ltaranta's Memory of Water (2012), bringing the genres of societal dystopia and post-apocalypse closer to each other and merging their features in a new way. 12 As the most visible extra-literary developments responsible for the genre's recent popularity, Hyong-jilll Moon (2014, 9) lists "the terrorist attack of the Twin Towers on September 11, the outbreaks of lethal viruses and epidemics such as SARS and H1N1 virus, the reClllTence of mega-scale natural disasters due to climate change, and a prolonged recession in the capitalist economy". One should not, however, overlook the role of the market in boosting lucrative trends. 13 Apocalypse is usually illlderstood in popular culture as "the end of the world", but theoretically this not the case. Originally, the theological term "apocalyptic" comes from the Greek apokidypsis meaning ''unveiling'', "disclosme" , or ''revelation'' (McGrath 2011,444). In popular apocalyptic fiction, the apocalypse is seen usually as the destruction of "our world". Complete destruction of the old order and the (possible) construction of a new order is typical of contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction (Seed 2003, 82).

Introduction

XXlll

The concepts of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction are sometimes used rather loosely in research. For instance, The LastMan (1826) by Mary Shelley has been named the first novel in both genres, even if it lacks a prominent convention of post-apocalyptic stories: the survival of some of humankind. l4 Taken literally, the two tenns seem to suggest a simple distinction between stories that focus on portraying a major catastrophe and the events leading to it, and stories that focus on portraying postcatastrophe conditions and events. 15 A more historical approach taking into account the often more varied narrative trajectories of (post-)apocalyptic fiction has managed to make more detailed distinctions between the traditions and their variations. It has been noted that whereas apocalypses focus on catastrophes, many post-apocalyptic stories actually portray survival and new beginnings, the apocalyptic catastrophe destroying the organized society and creating a state of nature that calls for the creation of a new social contract (see, e.g. Curtis 2010,1-2). Still, a simple dichotomy between pre- and post-catastrophe stories does not cover the variety of this kind of fiction, as a number of works offer a broader palette of events before, during, and after the apocalyptic catastrophe. 16 Such works may combine the gemes creatively, or create altogether new types of work. The popularity and versatility of dystopian fiction guarantees that new types and combinations keep emerging. Depictions of major catastrophes that wipe out most of humankind are naturally far older than the tradition of modem apocalyptic or postapocalyptic fiction dating back to the nineteenth century. For instance, the Bible's story of Noab is actually an apocalyptic story with glimpses of the post-apocalyptic condition. It is a version of the widely distributed flood myth that originated in Mesopotamia. This myth has been rewritten in many ways also in modern apocalyptic and climate fiction, since a rise in 14 For instance, M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas (2009, 53) mention this novel as being usually considered the first post-apocalyptic science fiction tale. This is probably due to its portrayal of deserted cities and other post-apocalyptic scenes. For Elena Gomel (1995, 343), it is the first apocalyptic novel. Considering the work's focus on events leading to the destruction of humankind, the latter interpretation is more convincing. Nota bene: Le Dernier Homme by Jean-Baptiste Fran~ois Xavier Cousin de Grainville was published already in 1805. 15 This is basically the standard textbook distinction between the genres. See, for instance, the glossary in Booker and Thomas's The Science Fiction Handbook,

2009,321 322 (apocalyptic fiction) and 328 (post-apocalyptic fiction). 16 Recent examples include Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming (2009) and Ernily SI. Mandel's Statian Eleven (2014).

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

sea level is one ofthe concrete consequences of climate change, actualising

the flood myth and its cultural underpinnings.17 The post-apocalyptic world in Noah's story differs from most modern post-apocalyptic fiction in that it is allegedly a better world, purified - at least momentarily - of evil by God and not characterized by desperate struggles for survival. In the religious myth, those who survive are worthy and chosen to survive to construct a better world. In our contemporary thinking, this kind of teleology and optimism is severely challenged, belief in divine providence having long lost its previous appeal. However, it should be noted that even in modem post-apocalyptic fiction, portrayals of the end of the world as we know it may have utopian overtones. Gary K. Wolfe (see 2011, 103) claims that the end of the world may also be perceived as an arena for portraying "heroic action" and

the "true values" of individual effort and courage in starting the world over from the ashes. Despite the different ways of evaluating the end of the world and its aftermath, Wolfe (ibid., 106) claims that end-of-theworld narratives usually have five major stages of action: 1) undergoing

the cataclysmic event; 2) travelling through the resulting desolation; 3) settling down and starting a new community; 4) encountering the newly

antagonistic nature; and 5) waging a frnal battle to decide the new world's prevailing values. According to him, this fOlTIlUla can be used creatively,

for instance by skipping some of the parts or by expanding some stage of action to fill almost the whole story, but it still captures the essence of the

story type. Another way to approach the post-apocalypse as a narrative geme is to concentrate on the ways in which the post-apocalyptic world is structured in relation to its pre-apocalyptic counterpart, the latter very often

approximating the world roughly contemporary to the presumed reader. Wolfe (see ibid., 103 ff.) has claimed that it is typical for post-disaster stories to defamiliarize familiar environments but keep the geographical references verisimilar enough for comparison, even enabling the reader to trace the places on current maps of, for example, North America, the

contrast making visible the devastation brought by the disaster. The past may also live on in the memories of characters who survived the cataclysm, their memories being another device for contrasting the past and the postdisaster present.

On the connection between the flood myth and contemporary climate fiction, see Trexler 2015: 82 ff. Trexler prefers to use his own term, "anthropocene fiction".

17

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xxv

Articulating the post-apocalypse In this volume, Jouni Teittinen and Mikko Mantyniemi explore notable contemporary post-apocalypses, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013), especially its first installment Oryx and Crake (2003). These two works have become standard reference points in post-apocalypse studies, and they feature centrally both thematic and structural elements representative of much of the geme. Such thematic foci include, as Teittinen notes in his chapter, "kin and other, humanity and animality, memory and forgetting, and language and sociality", and in Atwood's case, we might add the pointed emphasis on (and questioning of) reckless teclmological development and the abuse of non-human nature. In their very different ways, both McCarthy and Atwood also pose the question of a new post-apocalyptic beginning - even if they do not wholly withhold hope, they do ration it strictly. As regards their form, the The Road and Oryx and Crake are set to a large extent around travelling - as Petter Skull (2019, 82) has noted, the genre as a whole makes frequent use of the Bakhtinian chronotope of the road - and around the tensioned differential between the pre- and postapocalyptic worlds. It is the latter topic that serves as the main focus for Mantyniemi and Teittinen. In his chapter, "This future past: Parsing postapocalyptic temporality with Cormac McCarthy's The Road", Teittinen focuses on the temporality of the future anterior ("what will have been"), typical of post-apocalyptic fictions, with a particular emphasis on how The Road prompts us to imagine a cancelled future. Mikko Mantyniemi's chapter, "Folds around the end: Open and closed temporalities in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy", likewise engages the folded structure of (post-)apocalyptic temporality, this time primarily via the narratological notion of analepsis. Together, the chapters' complementary perspectives of narrative theory (Mantyniemi) and a more general, partly philosophical approach (Teittinen) produce a nuanced understanding of post-apocalyptic temporality. Dystopian worlds are a trend also in digital games, and scenarios from global pollution to totalitarian regimes have been worked into interactive game worlds 18 Despite their popularity, dystopian games have not been

18 What is specific about the digital game as a medimn is the user's ability to interact with the game world, sometimes even influence the whole of it, and decide how it develops, provided that game developers have made it possible in the game mechanics. See Markocki 2016,122 123,125,128.

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widely discussed within games studies. In her chapter, Sari Piittinen contributes to this field of study by analysing how tbe repertoire of tbe Gothic contributes to the creation of the dystopian game world in Fallout 3 (Betbesda Game Studios 2008). Fallout 3 is a post-apocalyptic action roleplaying game that is set in tbe year 2277 (on an alternative time line), two hundred years after a nuclear war has turned the world into an anarchist chaos. Piittinen shows how the game makes use of monsters such as mutants and Gothic villain-heroes also for cultural and political commentary. The treatment of the game's Ghouls can even be interpreted as a commentary on the othering and unjust treatment of minorities existing in our world, the creatures being not only producers of terror but themselves victims. Ethical questions also concern the player's choices vis-a-vis how she reacts to monsters and monstrosity, and in general to the game's devastated milieu: unlike with literary dystopias, in the dystopian game world the player has to ponder first-hand what avenues of action the changed situation offers, including moral decisions. From the standpoint of gemes, Piittinen's chapter adds yet another genre - tbe Gothic - to the long list of historical kinds tbat merge with and colour the modem dystopian gemes and anchor them to the previous traditions of fiction. In Fallout 3, the post-apocalypse is the dominant geme; it uses the generic repertoire of the Gothic creatively for its 0\Vll purposes, reinvigorating itself in the process.

Threatened environments and collective responsibility Whereas the first three chapters in Section Two largely focus on tbe dynamics of constructing a post-apocalyptic dystopia in the works analysed, the three remaining chapters shift the emphasis further towards specific thematics connected with the apocalypse and post-apocalypse. As previously suggested, a work may use the repertoire of a geme to a different extent, the most elusive uses producing a colouration of the geme in a work that is dominated by some otber geme. Gemes typically co-occur with each other in a work so that one is more dominant than the other(s), and the chapters in this section focus on works not customarily categorized as predominantly post-apocalyptic but still obviously use some of its conventions for their purposes. Instead of focusing on detailed geme analyses, the chapters discuss the kinds of problems and perspectives that the post-apocalypse poses. Essi Vatilo's contribution to the volume concerns the question of collective responsibility in tbe television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-

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XXV11

2009) and its prequel Caprica (2009-2010). The utopian aspirations of Caprica's world turn apocalyptically sour when the combined technologies of artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality get out of control; the fmmer series deals with this aftemmth, including the guilt, regret, and blame for the destruction of most of human civilization. Vatilo's chapter also resonates with Suoranta's analysis of the dystopian and utopian valences of virtual reality, which not only catalyses Caprica's apocalyptic disaster but also very literally sets the stage for humanity's darker side - from drugs to virtual human sacrifice - already in tlie preceding technological "utopia" (much like HBO's recent hit series Westworld). In any case, what Vatilo's analysis prompts us to consider is "a new way of thinking about responsibility", a demand exceedingly topical in tlie current technologically, enviromnentally, and politically complex context. The dire consequences of current actions are sometimes impossible to exactly gauge beforehand - fundamentally insidious threats rather than principle calculable risks (see Van Wyck 2005) - and it is impossible to lay the blame on anyone individual's door. Agency and thus responsibility is collective and distributed in a complex - which is not to say equal- marmer. Like Hanna Samola's chapter in Section One, the co-authored contribution by Juha Raipola and Toni Lahtinen concerns the Finnish autlior Johanna Sinisalo. While Samola's chapter touches tangentially on the relation to nature - The Core of the Sun features tlie growing and eating of chillies as an act of rebellion against the technocratic regime - in Birdbrain this relation takes centre stage, as its two protagonists set out on a trek into Tasmania's wilderness. Through an incisive reading of the novel's multiple intertexts (reminiscent of Sarnola's approach), Raipola and Lahtinen highlight the intertwined colonializations of people and nature, as well as the paradoxically consumerist fantasies of escaping civilization. Ultimately, the novel, whose uncarmy developments reveal its dominant geme to be the Finnish Weird, grows into "a dystopian allegory about the troubled relationship between human and non-human nature", demonstrating yet another way in which certain gemes seem to gravitate towards dystopian ones. The discussion of human and non-human agents is one angle tliat unites tlie frnal chapters of Section Two. Maria Laakso's chapter approaches tales about animals, particularly Richard Adams's Watership Down (1972), as post-apocalyptic dystopias. As is often the case with post-apocalyptic narratives, in chosen nonallegorical animal dystopias, human greed and selfishness are to blame for the destruction, but the issue is given new weight by the defamilizaring perspective of the animals. As we now live through the Earth's sixth mass

XXV111

Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

extinction event, this time occasioned by humanity, there may be more worlds about to end than we can fathom. The two final chapters, by Laakso and Raipola and Lahtinen, may raise the objection that they are too set in the present (or even the past, as in Laakso's older animal narratives) to qualify as dystopias, which is typically defined as futurally speculative fiction. 19 In the frame of historical genre theory, these objections are not valid, since a work need not use all features of the generic repertoire to belong to the geme. In the context of ecological disaster, it should also be noted that if the future as we (presume to) know it is indeed "already ruined" by climatic processes now underway, and we thus inhabit a sort of epistemic and existential, increasingly fragile bubble, the understanding of dystopia as a future state of affairs becomes more ambiguous. As Raipola and Lahtinen note, it is "our uncomfortable role [ ... ] to live witbin the unfathomable presence of environmental disaster". While one of the most salient ways of attempting to face this presence this disastrous present - is paradoxically to imagine its future, it is equally the case that we may use narratives of present disasters in order to think about their future course. With the slow violence of climate change, its slow apocalypse, tbe actual and the supposedly speculative are not always easily discernable (McMurry 1996; Nixon 2013). The allegoricity of Birdbrain also reflects this. \¥bile the final chapters vary in their main focus, each raises decisively the question of ethics and responsibility, as well as the challenge of encountering the non-human other. In Vatilo's chapter, we face the problem of collective responsibility for the coming disaster, before and after the fact, as well as the (failed) challenge of co-existence with a non-organic other. In Raipola and Lahtinen's chapter, the uncarmy other that rouses the doomed appetite for appropriation is the (fantasy of) non-human nature itself; but it is also, beyond allegory, the actual environment that calls for recognition and responsibility. In Laakso's chapter, we are privy to a heterodox perspective on familiar narratives that makes us re-think the extent of their Instead of defining a set of essential genre features that a work has to exemplify in order to belong to the genre (as in essentialist genre theories), we prefer a more flexible, anti-essentialist but historical understanding according to which genres are historical families of works that resemble each other but do not necessarily have any feature that is shared by each and every work in the genre. This means that a work may belong to the genre of dystopia even if the story is not set in the future, provided that it has some other features typical of the genre. This leaves room for creativity and historical change that are typical of fiction. About this Wittgensteinian understanding of genres, see Fowler 1982. 19

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XXIX

easily trivialized disaster, their proper ethical weight; the challenge of the encounter is here placed first and foremost with the reader.

Sibylline fictions? Dystopian fiction is a curious phenomenon in the history of literature. Drawing inspiration from religious eschatologies and utopias but adding a critical, secular, and often pessimistic edge, these modem stories of societal and environmental horror increasingly affect our thinking of the future and our perception of the world around us. Some ofthe stories - such as zombie apocalypses - might be categorized as pure fantasy or perhaps allegory, but especially those visions that are written in accordance with real-life developments and scientific scenarios demand a different response. The time of utopias seems to be over for now, and the accompanying belief in our ability to control our destiny with tlie help of science and technology has been forcefully called into question. Notwithstanding their merits, it seems that science and technology are also the central means for creating totalitarian hi-tech societies and bringing about environmental change and post-catastrophe worlds, dystopian fiction making this very clear through its detailed, experiential imaginings of undesirable future worlds. Considering the central role that the grim future visions have in current popular culture, fiction seems to be regaining some of its power to affect its audiences in these momentous matters, however individual readers, spectators, or garners decide to interpret the various dystopian scenarios they meet. Extrapolating the future is seldom successful, and fiction remains fiction, however convincing its scenarios may seem for some. Nevertheless, the very act of speculating about the future seems appealing for many, and dystopian fiction excels in this area of thought. As mentioned earlier, Raffaella Baccolini's and Tom Moylan's metaphor of dystopia as a canary in the coal mine emphasizes its warning function. In the same vein, dystopian fiction could also be compared to the mythical characters of Cassandra and Cumaean Sibyl, whose prophecies were truthful but hardly believed by anyone around them. Even so, and perhaps fittingly, a more ordinary figure in the popular discussion on the severity of global threats is doubtlessly the boy who cried wolf. "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" the poster for tlie horror movie Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper) asks dramatically. The fortlicoming years and decades will again show where tlie flames of dystopia will flare up, in what form, and who will survive. And

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Navigating the Many Forms of Dystopian Fiction

then, if the faraway spectres of real-world dystopia do reach our doorstep, we might also ask, what semblance of us - of lives and values cradled in

the relative comfort of this good 01' world - will be left in the survivors. The question will not only be who survives, but what in them survives, and

whatthen. What next. What now?

Post Scriptum This introduction is written in the midst of the dystopian COVID-2019 pandemia which threatens the world and is a disastrous challenge for our

lives, health care systems and global economy.

Acknowledgements Most of the chapters are based on presentations that were given in the academic track "Fantastic Visions From Faerie To Dystopia" in the Fil1llcon 2016 conference, held on 2-3 July 2016 at the University of Tampere, Finland. We would like to thank our keynote speaker Prof. Raffaella Baccolini, the organizers ofthe conference, The Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (pinfar), as well as Kone Foundation, which made the academic track and this publication possible by offering funds for the research project Darkening future visions: Dystopian jiction in contemporary Finnish literature (2015-2019), led by Saija Isomaa.

Works Cited Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. 2003. "Introduction. Dystopia and Histories." In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baccolini & Tom Moylan (eds). New York & London: Routledge, 1-12. Baxter, Gisele M., Brett Iosef Grubisic, and Tara Lee. 2014. "Introduction." In Blast corrupt, dismantle, erase: Contemporary North American dystopian literature, Gisele M. Baxter, Brett IosefGrubisic, & Tara Lee

(eds). Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 7-22. Booker, M. Keith and Anne-Marie Thomas. 2009. The Science Fiction Handbook. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Correia, RicardoA., Zeynep C. H. Correia,Ana C. M. Malhado, and Richard J. Ladle. 2018. "Pivotal 20th century contributions to the development of the Anthropocene concept: Overview and implications." Current Science, Vo!. 115, No. 10, 1871-1875. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoerrner. 2000. "The' Anthropocene. '" Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000), 17-18. Curtis, Claire B. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: We 'Il Not Go Home Again. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Dai, Xin. 2018. "Toward a Reputation State: The Social Credit System Proj eet of China." 10 June 20 18. Available at SSRN: https:llssm.comlabstract~3193577 or http://dx.doi.orgll0.2139/ssm.3193577.Retrieved20 January 2020. Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Freytas-Tarnura, Kimiko de. 2017. "George Orwell's '1984' Is Suddenly a Best-Seller." The New York Times 25 January 2018. https:llwww. nytimes.coml20 17/0 1125IbooksIl984-george-orwell-donald-trump. html, np. Retrieved 8 October 2018. Gomel, Elena. 1995. "Mystery, Apocalypse and Utopia: The Case of the Ontological Detective Story." Science Fiction Studies, Vo!. 22, No. 3, 343-356. IPCC 2019. "Global Warming of 1.5° C." Special Report. https:llwww.ipcc. chhttps:llwww.ipcc.ch/srl5I1srl5/.np. retrieved 28 January 2020. Markocki, Milozs. 2016. "Creating Utopian or Dystopian Worlds in Digital Games." In More after More: Essays Commemorating the Five-hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More:S Utopia, Ksenia Olkusz, Michal Klosinski, & Krzysztof M. Maj (eds). Krak6w: Facta Ficta Research Centre, 118-133. Mayer, Sylvia. 2014. "Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation." In The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture, Sylvia Mayer & Alexa Weik von Mossner (eds). Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter GmbH. McGrath, Alister E. 2011. Christian Theology. An Introduction. 5th Edition. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. McMurry, Andrew. 1996. "The Slow Apocalypse: A Gradualistic Theory of The World's Demise." Poslmodem Culture, Vo16. No 3, np. Mikliail, Alan. 2016. "Enlightenment Anthropocene." Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vo!. 49, Issue 2, 211-231. Moon, Hyong-jun. 2014. The Post-Apocalyptic Turn: A Study of Contemporary Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Narrative.

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Dissertation. The University ofWisconsin-Milwaukee.

Morrissey, Thomas J. 2013. "Parables for the Postmodern, Post-9!1l, and Posthuman World. Carrie Ryan's Forest of Hands and Teeth Books, M. T. Anderson's Feed, and Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox." In Contemporary Dystopian Fictionfor Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, & Carrie Hintz (eds). New York: Routledge, 189-202. Moylan, Tom 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ritzenhoff, Karen A. and Krewani, Angela (eds). 2015. The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World. Lanharn: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian Studies 5.1., 1-38. Seed, David. 2003. "Cyberpunk and Dystopia: Pat Cadigan's Networks." In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baccolini & Tom Moylan (eds). New York: Routledge, 69-90. Skull, Petter. 2019. End of the World as We Know It: Theoretical Perspectives on Apocalyptic Science Fiction. Turku, Finland: Abo Akademi University Press.

Stock, Adarn. 2013. "Dystopia as Post-Enlightenment Critique in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four." In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, Fatima Vieira (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 115-129. Trexler, Adarn. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions. The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. UN Report 2019. "Nature's Dangerous Decline 'Unprecedented ' ; Species Extinction Rate Accelerating." United Nations. 6 May 2019. https:!! www.un.org!sustainabledevelopmentiblog!20 19!0 5!nature-declineunprecedented-report!, np, retrieved 28 January 2020. Van Wyck, Peter C. 2005. Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown: Wesleyan.

I SOCIETAL DYSTOPIA OLD AND NEW

1. FROM ANXIETY TO HATRED: NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN CLASSICAL DYSTOPIAS

SAIJA ISOMAA

The old civilizations claimed that they were fOlmded on love or justice. GillS is fOlmded upon hatred. In om world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. (George Orwell, Nineteen EightyFour)

Science fiction and its subtype dystopian fiction have been perceived as somewhat intellectual genres that call for analytic thinking and catalyse critical perceptions of society and its political and ideological tendencies. For instance, in his renowned Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), Tom Moylan suggests that "sf indulges the reader's pleasure in discovering and thinking through the logic and consequences of an imagined world", and continues "the pleasure includes the satisfying work of analytic thinking as a reader engages with the premises and puzzles of an intellectually demanding text" (ibid. xvi-xvii). Moylan thus emphasizes the intellectual pleasures of the literary form. To take another example, Erika Gottlieb suggests in her study Dystopian Fiction East and West that "[i]f there is a moment of catharsis implied in the protagonist's predicament, it is there only for the reader who has finished the narrative, and it is contained in an insight more of the nature of the cerebral recognition accompanying political satire than the emotional catharsis of tragedy" (2001, 32). Even if Gottlieb discusses some of the emotional aspects of dystopian fiction, she seems to end up fore grounding what she calls the "cerebral" - that is, the intellectual. There is no need to contest the basic understanding of science fiction's intellectual orientation or pleasures, because many of the works are obviously engaged in social analysis and discussion, and they also issue warnings concerning undesirable social and political tendencies (see Gottlieb 2001, 4; Baccolini & Moylan 2003, 2-3). Furthermore, there are no good grounds to draw an exclusive distinction between emotion and reason, because emotions imply a judgement on the value or significance

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of the object of emotion (see e.g. Nussbaum 2001 , 27-31). What can and should be reappraised in scholarly discussion is the role of emotions in dystopias. After all, en route to the alleged "intellectual pleasure", a reader of a dystopia has to process nauseating depictions of a reality that is in most cases worse than the world in which we live. Portrayals of violence, torture, murder, fear, betrayal, dissatisfaction, insecurity, powerlessness, and sexual servitude abound in the geme, inviting the reader to experience and come to telTIlS with the distressing experiences and negative feelings of the characters. This aspect of dystopian fiction - its dwelling on mostly negative emotions - can be seen as being implied in Gottlieb's idea of "cerebral catharsis", even if she does not delve into it. Interpreted in this way, the negativity of emotions encourages the reader to look for pleasure on the intellectual plane, as empathetic reading is not emotionally rewarding. Emotions can be approached and defined in various ways. Even if I Call1lot go into the details of emotion research in this chapter, I will use some general ideas adopted from the sociological understanding of emotions. In the following, I will apply the terms emotion and feeling interchangeably. My approach is socio-cultural in that while I do not deny emotions as having a biological basis, I will emphasise their social and cultural structure. In short, I take human communities to have emotion cultures that their members learn in socialization, and which guide them in understanding, expressing and displaying emotions in a culturally appropriate marmer. Expressive gestures such as facial expressions, bodily displays, and instrumental actions play a role in understanding interaction. Emotions become moral when they are aroused in reference to moral codes - that is, cultural codes that have evaluative content. This implies that when an individual violates a cultural code, others may respond with anger, rage, hostility, or annoyance and the like, and the individual herself may experience various sorts of fear or sadness. More complex moral emotions emerge as combinations of basic emotions (see Peterson 2007, 114-118; Stets & Turner 2007, 556-557). Even if this description remains cursory, it nevertheless makes visible phenomena and processes that are relevant for understanding emotion cultures also in the fictional societies of classical dystopias. I will only briefly touch upon the question of the emotional effects of the stories on the audiences, however rhetorically purposeful their emotional designs seem to be. This chapter is based on the assumption that emotions in dystopias merit examination in their 0\Vll right. To argue for the centrality of emotions in

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dystopias, I will examine their portrayal and role in three classical dystopias, Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We (1924, hereafter W), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932, hereafter BNW) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, hereafter NE).' I suggest that in each novel, emotions are foregrounded in many ways, as the dystopian states are portrayed as repressing or rejecting subjective feelings altogether while creating and cultivating a collective culture of emotion to maintain the status quo. In the novels, various technologies, pedagogies, institutions, drugs, and even torture are employed to create, manipulate, and control emotions on the individual and social level. Not surprisingly in this scenario, forbidden individual emotions and desires - varying from erotic love to Zamyatin's 0-90's desire to be a mother - are an incentive for the main characters to grow critical of the confOlmist state and engage in rebellious action against it. In the novels, banishing the rebels from the community, executing them publicly as a warning for others, erasing their personal feelings by way of lobotomy, and conditioning them through torture are viable ways to suppress rebellion. In what follows, I will discuss three main claims: first, the novels under study portray societies that have specific nOlmative emotion cultures designed to maintain the status quo; second, each novel focuses on characters that do not conform to these emotion cultures; and third, most emotions of the characters can be considered negative or ugly. Since these features can be found in three key works in the geme, they can be considered to belong to the geme conventions of classical dystopia. 2 I suggest that since emotions play a pivotal role in many classical dystopias, they ought to be incorporated into the description of the genre.

1 I will consider these works from the perspective of a geme scholar, hence I will not delve into the details of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell scholarship. 2 To be more specific, I consider the features part of the generic repertoire of the classical dystopia. My approach to genres is historical and anti-essentialist, following the theory presented by Alastair Fowler in Kinds of Literature (1982). Since genres change over time, they cannot be defined, but their historical states can be described. Furthermore, according to this theory, genres are llllderstood as having generic repertoires, or repertoires of optional features from which a \VTiter picks up features to create a work in the genre. Some features are more popillar than others. This can be taken into accOlUlt by using expressions such as typically, often, sometimes, etc. I have explored the philosophical basis and practice of this theory in Isomaa 20 I o.

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Collective emotions and indoctrination in classical dystopias Previous studies on classical dystopias have outlined typical story components and conventions that occur in many works of the geme. Briefly, classical dystopias typically portray a protagonist who begins to question the totalitarian society in which he lives; becomes rebellious in thought, speech, and action; is hunted by the state; and finally loses his attributes, from social position to individual identity. Meeting and becoming infatuated with a rebellious woman sometimes motivates the rebellion. This basic story type is a general description that characterizes some works better than others, but it still helps to identify works that belong to the geme. Even if the genre has changed over time, postc1assical dystopias also usually retain the element of rebellion against the social system, however it is configured in each work. Despite the centrality of the manipulation of emotions on the individual and communal level in many classical dystopias, there are relatively scarce references to emotions in the descriptions and definitions of the geme. Even if a selection of aesthetic emotions has been discussed since Aristotle's Poetics, the extensive study of literature and emotions has been ongoing for only a few decades, with many previous theories sidestepping the serious study of literary emotions. In the 1950s and 1960s, the New Critics famously warned against the affective fallacy, or evaluating a literary work on the basis of its emotional effects. In the 1970s and 1980s, feeling was somewhat marginalized in cultural-historical analysis and semiotic analysis, as it was in the poststructuralist theories of language in the 1980s and early 1990s (see Ngai 2005, 24, 42, 332 ff). Patrick Colm Hogan (2011, 15) remarks that modem literary theory has been more interested in psychoanalysis than in cognitive or neuroscience, as a result of which the concepts of desire and pleasure (instead of emotions proper) have dominated studies on story structure. He also notes that classical narratology is based on linguistic models that have little to say about emotion, and only postclassical narratology has begun to explore the field (ibid.) The negligence of emotions also appears in literary geme theory, which has little to say about emotions in gemes. Since the 1990s, however, the affective turn in social and cultural sciences has paved the way for the return of affects and emotions to scholarly discussion. Emotions seem to be entering also dystopian studies; for instance, Christina Lehnen (2016, 43) has argued that character emotions have a role in generating the warning

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function typical of dystopias, which is a plausible idea. I am inclined to think that examining dystopian fiction from the perspective of emotions and affects is not just a fashionable move in the field - it is well justified considering the centrality of emotions in dystopian fiction. That emotions are central in the three novels is evident from the fact that, in each novel, the totalitarian society justifies itself by claiming to guarantee the happiness of its citizens in contrast to past societies, which promoted personal freedom and thus allegedly furthered emotional suffering. In Zamyatin's We, D-503 uses the Judeo-Christian paradise myth to contrast the totalitarian state with past democratic societies. The paradisiac state of "happiness without freedom" before the Pall is comparable to life in the State, led by a God-like totalitarian leader and characterized by obedient citizens, whereas "freedom without happiness" sums up the human condition after the Fall and in societal orders based on the doctrine of personal freedom (W, 59). The leaders in Huxley's and Orwell's novels also use a similar contrast to justify the social order, with social stability equalling happiness in Brave New World (259-260) and freedomless happiness being better for "the great bulk of mankind" in Nineteen Eighty-Four (268). In emotion studies, happiness as a category can be classified in many ways, from a state of feeling to a basic emotion, but it is in every case connected to positive emotions or emotional states, rather than negative ones. 3 \¥hat, then, is this "freedomless happiness" like, and how should an ideal citizen feel in the totalitarian state? I argue that each of the three novels portrays a society that has a distinctive, normative emotion culture derived from the official ideology and created by those in power to maintain the social structure. The emotion culture is based on the ideas, nonns, and values underlying the state and, in a sense, obviously materializes them: a loyal and trustworthy citizen has internalized them, which is why she responds with appropriate feelings, actions, and even instincts to the different phenomena around her. Different forms of coercion, such as social condemnation and even the threat of violence, serve as punishment for those who deviate from the nOlTIl. An extreme example of this kind of society is offered in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Winston Smith is overly self-conscious of his bodily gestures and facial expressions, as they may reveal a thoughtcrime or result in his committing afacecrime. 3 I refer here to the basic distinction between positive and negative emotions, valence (the attractiveness or lUlpleasantness) of emotion being the most flUldamental and the most frequently used dimension in grouping emotions (see Thamm 2007, 20

21 ).

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Needless to say, this llOlmative system of feeling is portrayed critically in the novels, as they depict it from the standpoint of those who do not fit in. Zamyatin's We portrays an overly rationalist society that nevertheless cherishes and nurtures idealized patriotic emotions. At the beginning of the novel, D-503 exemplifies the preferred mindse!. He is an obedient member of the United State, embracing the ideal of non-freedom and marvelling at the mathematical beauty and order of the universe and the reality around him, epitomized in the "square hannony" of the cityscape and uniform behaviour of the people. In history, the city had engaged in the devastating Two Hundred Years' War against the land. The subsequent invention of petroleum food and the promulgation of Lex Sexualis were attempts to tackle the two major challenges, hunger and love, which caused unnecessary tragedies and threatened the mathematical order of things. In the present of the story, the citizens follow a collective timetable that controls their every move - from compulsory walks to eating times - with the exception of two free hours per day. Their sexual life and reproduction are state-controlled, ethics and music are based on mathematics, and the Guardians and their leader called the Well-Doer maintain order. Collective identity is promoted, and those who violate the norms are publicly executed. Additionally, the state intends to subjugate new planets under its rule by sending the spaceship Integral to bring "mathematically faultless happiness" to the savages still living in freedom. In short, having erased creativity and personality, the state functions in a marmer as orderly as a massive machine or mathematical function. I argue that collective emotions are central also in Huxley's Brave New World. The state manipulates the emotions of the citizens for its 0\Vll purposes, namely to maintain social stability and make people like their "unescapable social destiny" (BNW, 6, 17). More specifically, the state creates a set of collective emotions for each social caste to maintain the state morally, economically, and socially. Furthennore, it uses manipulative techniques such as hypnotherapy and conditioning to ensure that each individual feels and behaves as demanded. Emotional engineering is essential in maintaining the social structure, and its many methods are touched upon in the story. For instance, violent passions are purged once a month with the Violent Passions Surrogate, a treatment that enables the experience of murderous rage and fear without any undesirable consequences. If undesired urges and feelings arise, the soma drug efficiently banishes negative emotions and helps keep the status quo, with individual stability being the basis for social stability. The citizens usually dose themselves with soma when needed, carrying their phials or tablets

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with them at all times. However, the police may also spray vaporized soma over rioting crowds, as happens after John tries to cut off the distribution of soma to a lower-caste group. Collective nOlTIlS concerning sexuality and familial ties also serve to maintain the social structure. The state machinery serves comparable emotional purposes also in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the Party uses emotions as a tool. Winston Smith realizes that the Party considers the sex impulse dangerous: it creates a world outside the Party's control and lovemaking spends energy that could be used for political activity, also making people too content to care about trivial matters. The Party's policy of sexual puritanism, propagated also to the young at school and in the Youth Movement, induces hysteria that can be sublimated into war-fever and leader-worship. In Julia's words, "[a]ll this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour" (NE, 137). This is why sexuality has been uglified: "The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it" (NE, 69). Close bonds between family members are similarly threatening, which is why the Party turns children against their parents and encourages them to spy on their elders, turning the children into an extension of the Thought Police (NE, 137-138). Smith recalls things being very different only two generations ago, when people - also his parents - were governed by private loyalties, devoted to each other and not "to a party or a country or an idea". At present, by contrast, only the proletarians remain in that condition. (NE, 169-170) An imaginary book attributed to Emmanuel Goldstein elaborates on the Party's strategies of emotional manipulation. The Party has chosen to present itself to the people in the guise of Big Brother, because it is easier to feel love, fear, and reverence towards an individual than an organization (NE, 214). Referring to the leader as an older male sibling is an attempt to appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty (NE, 222). A Party member should not have private emotions. Instead, she is supposed to live in a "continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party" (NE, 217). Since this kind oflife is naturally umewarding, the discontent is "turned outwards and dissipated" by devices such as the Two Minutes Hate (NE, 217). The orthodox way of thinking, feeling, and acting is taught to the Party members early on, the mental training crystallized in the principles of crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, which prevent people from thinking and acting in an unorthodox manner (NE, 217-218). The aforementioned descriptions suggest that each of the dystopian states claims to bring happiness to humankind, and many of their

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technologies and institutions serve this purpose. However, the execution is lacking because the system is based on erasing individual personality and freedom of choice. There are always some people who carmot fit in and suffer from the coercive policy of the state.

Rebellions of emotions Classical dystopias have always featured protagonists that do not conform to the totalitarian ideology, but nistead grow critical of it and start acting on their beliefs. This focus on rebellion is a way of opening up a critical view on the portrayed society, as the motives of the rebels have to be laid bare to make them understandable for the reader. This also means that the reader gets to see the society from the perspective of those who suffer from the system. I suggest that the emotions of the characters play a central role in communicating this critical view to the reader, because they convey vital infOlmation on what is wrong with the society and for what the rebels are fighting. An analysis shows that the conflict between the establishment and the rebellious character is also a conflict of emotions. F or instance, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is not comfortable in the community and cannot wholeheartedly join in its ceremonies such as the Two Minutes Hate. In We, 0-90 cannot conform to her childless role in the society because of her strong desire to be a mother, and the conflict of duties between her 0\Vll wishes and the demands of society is settled by her choice to rebel. The exploration of a character's feelings is one way of reading the internal clashes of the imagined society. It reveals that the rebels of classical dystopias experience various feelings, many of which can be described as negative or ugly. The distinction between the positive and negative - or pleasant and unpleasant, wanted and unwanted - nature of emotions, or their valence, is the most fundamental and the most frequently used dimension in grouping emotions (see Tharnm 2007, 20-21). In social psychology, the main prototypes of negative emotions are fear, anger, and sadness, each accommodating several subclusters, from panic to hostility and hopelessness (Shaver et al. 2001, 27).' Sianne Ngai has created a helpful

4 Shaver et al. (2001, 27) offer the following categorization with Anger accommodates exasperation and frustration; anger, rage, wrath, hostility, ferocity, bitterness, hate, loathing, scorn, spite, dislike, and resentment; disgust, revulsion, and contempt; envy

subgroupings: outrage, fury, vengefulness, and jealousy;

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approach to studying negative feelings in literature and other media in

Ugly Feelings (2005). Ngai proposes a three-level model of emotions in which she distinguishes between the feelings of characters, the feelings of the audience, and the overall tone of the work. Ngai is interested in minor and generally unprestigious negative feelings such as paranoia, anxiety, irritation, and envy, also described by her as amoral, non-cathartic,

nasty, fiat, and ongoing (ibid. 6-7). These ugly, negative feelings have not traditionally been included in "aesthetic emotions," but Ngai attempts to expand and tranSfOlTIl the category by exploring their existence and

functioning in literature and culture. She suggests that the ugly feelings she analyses are politically ambiguous, less intentional and object- or goaldirected than the grander, more prestigious, and canonical philosophical emotions, such as anger, which are traditionally associated with political

action. Nevertlieless, the ugly feelings, ensuing from "the politically charged predicament of suspended agency" and thus bringing together politics and aesthetics, are powerful in diagnosing situations, especially

those of blocked or thwarted action (ibid. 2-3, 10-12,26-27). In contrast to works that evoke sympatliy and otlier moral feelings, the works tliat Ngai studies - such as Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) or The Confidence-Man (1857) - may make sympatlietic or empathetic character identification difficult, even impossible, for a reader (see ibid. 32-33, 5051). I find Ngai's basic concepts fruitful also in the analysis of dystopias. It is evident that "ugly feelings" play a central role in the works, the whole geme inclining towards negative, unwanted emotions that evoke pain or displeasure both in the characters and the audience. 5 In the novels, negative and torment. Sadness includes agony, suffering, hurt, and anguish; depression, despair, hopelessness, gloom, ghunness, sadness, unhappiness, grief, sorrow, woe, misery, and melancholy; dismay, disappointment, and displeasme; alienation, isolation, neglect, loneliness, rejection, homesickness, defeat, dejection, insecmity, embarrassment, hmniliation, and insult; and pity and sympathy. Fear encompasses alann, shock, fear, fright, horror, terror, panic, hysteria, and mortification; and anxiety, nervousness, tenseness, uneasiness, apprehension, worry, distress, and dread. 5 Ngai (2005, 11 12) mentions aspects that justify her analysis of certain feelings as negative. Firstly, they are dysphoric or experientially negative, evoking pain and displeasure. Secondly, they are "semantically" negative, saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values, and thirdly, they are "syntactically" negative, repulsive rather than attractive, calling for phobic strivings "away from" rather than towards. The agonistic ugly emotions also have algorithmic or operational negativity because they involve processes of aversion, exclusion, and negation.

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feelings often precede rebellious action, the latter being an attempt to change the conditions that lead to emotional suffering. The three novels under study differ in how the development of the rebels is portrayed and what their emotions are like. Even if there is an element of awakening to political action in each story, Orwell's Winston Smith and Huxley's Bemard Marx and John deviate from the social norm from the very beginning of the story, their mindset and emotions having been in conflict with the demands of the regime for a longer period of time. Zamyatin's D-503 and 0-90 begin as obedient citizens but get involved in rebellious action over the course of events, harbouring a forbidden desire or awakening that grows little by little. Smith and D-503 also return to the establishment, even if their counter-conversions are forced rather than deliberate.

Emotional awakening in Zamyatin's We The story of awakening to subversive awareness and action in Zamyatin's We was preceded in Russian literature by the revolutionary novel. A prominent novel of revolution in Russian literature, Maxim Gorky's Mother (1906), had already idealized the proletarian revolution by depicting how a suffering proletarian mother and factory worker, Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, is awakened and empowered by the revolutionary action of her son. 6 Zarnyatin not only adopts the subject matter - rebellion against unjust society - of this thematic geme, but also transforms its conventions for his purposes, giving birth to the new genre of classical dystopia. For instance, the realist setting of the revolutionary novel is turned into an imagined, hi-tech future society in an act of diegetic transposition that serves the function of cognitive estrangement. The optimism and idealism typical of revolutionary novels is abandoned. Interestingly, the one thing that Zarnyatin's D-503 begins to long for when his personal emotions start to emerge - the love of his 0\Vll mother - is foregrounded in Gorky's novel, creating a further link between the novels. Even if D-503's political awakening offers a model for later classical dystopias, his development has distinctive features. He differs from many other characters in his inability to understand human emotions, including his own. This enhances his position as an unreliable narrator whose narration is filtered through his ideologically indoctrinated mind and complicated by 6

On the geme, see Freeborn 1982.

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the retrospective, progressive process of diary \Vfiting. The novel catches him when a period of crisis is beginning in his life - when his scientific mind is challenged with aspects of humanity that have previously been suppressed for ideological reasons. This explains why there is the potential for a story of an ideological and emotional conversion, of a return to a fuller humanity in which the individuality of a person is restored and cherished. The narrowly rationalist idea of man that characterizes the ideology of the totalitarian state is challenged with an idea of man that embraces the instinctual and irrational, as exemplified by art, erotic desire, love, and parenthood. The narrative communicates the confusion and disorientation this causes in D-503. His rebellious period is brief, characterized by confusion, haziness, and half-heartedness. It is difficult for him to give up the received views of the society. He believes - in accordance with the state ideology - that his new emotions are a symptom of a disease, and he seeks medical help. Diagnosing individual feelings as illness is a standard interpretation in a fictional society that also considers creative processes, such as artistic inspiration, "an extinct form of epilepsy" (W, 17), and replacing deep-rooted beliefs proves to verge on the impossible. Emotions - or their narrO\vness - play a major role in D-503 's characterization. His perception and thinking of both the world and himself take place in the narrow frames of reason, mathematical logic, and the success of the state, and many other aspects of humanity - such as imagination, desire, and personal love - appear to him as illogical, alien, or threatening, like an atavistic echo from tlie bestial past of the humankind. His existence as a narrowly intellectual subject whose dominant emotions are collective and patriotic is the result of his upbringing and indoctrination by the state. It is only his involvement witli tlie rebels that arouses in him a deep longing to be loved as a person by another person, epitomized by his wish to experience tlie unconditional love of his mother (W, 201-202). However, this emotional awakening is short-lived, because his newly found "soul" is removed by lobotomy. The operation leaves him with facts and a manipulated mindset, making him feel thoroughly cured, healthy, and happy. His last diary entry expresses his hope and conviction that the state suppresses the rebellion so that reason continues its rule. In comparison to idealist or realist revolutionary novels, the development of science and technology has endowed the future totalitarian state with a previously unseen power over individuals because even genuine freedom of choice can be manipulated and erased by medical means. D-503 's emotional unavailability links him to characters tliat Ngai analyses in her exploration of negative feelings. Discussing irritation,

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N gai comments on affective gaps, illegible characters, and dysphoric feelings, as well as other fOlTIlS of emotional negativity. She pays attention to characters that are emotionally hard to read, whose psychological motivations are withheld, and whose reactions in different situations are somehow inadequate. For instance, in Nella Larson's novel Quicksand (1928), the response of Helga - the main character - to a racist act is inadequate: instead of feeling anger towards the white man who spits into the drinking water in the "black car" of a segregated train, she responds with irritation to the smells of food and smoke and feels a stinging thirst. Deploying Philip Fisher's ideas of sympathy and volunteered passion, Ngai argues that both of these reader's positions are denied in Larson's novel: the reader can neither feel with Helga nor supply the passions she should be feeling but is not. The inadequacy of Helga's reaction makes the reader respond to Helga with irritation, rather than feeling anger towards the white man (Ngai 2005,185-189,207-208).7 Likewise, D-503's emotions strike the reader as strange. Yet D-503 's distance to the reader seems to alter in the story. Emotionally strange at the beginning, he becomes easier to read when his received ideology is shaken and shattered in the middle of the story. When dreaming of a mother of his own, he probably comes the closest to the audience's beliefs and is even sympathetic. However, the distance returns at the end when he disinterestedly watches the torture of his fmmer beloved, 1-330. His reactions are emotionally inadequate to the point that, as in the case of Larson's Helga, the reader is likely to turn against him. The novel invites the reader to side with the rebels who are abandoned by the umeliable D-503 and destroyed by the state. It is typical for classical dystopias to portray fictional communities whose collective emotions and the ensuing values and nonns clash with those of the contemporary reader's community. By contrast, the values and emotions of the rebels resemble the latter in some respects, making it convenient for the reader to sympathize or even empathize with the rebels. In We, parental love is fore grounded as a rebellious feeling, as it occurs not only in D-503's dream of being loved by his mother but also in 0-90's desperate desire to be a mother despite being ten centimetres too short to be allowed to reproduce. Later classical dystopias also portray communities that lack traditional family structures and the emotions that ensue as a According to Ngai (2005, 207 208), there is a reason for Nella Larson to create this kind of main character: the novel attempts to distance itself from the tradition of mulatta fiction and cultural imperatives concerning artforms by racialized subjects and the portrayal of politically adequate and efficacious feelings.

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result. FurthemlOre, they use the emotions of characters as a device in the critical representation of the community. In a sense, the true rebels of Zamyatin's We are the two women, I-330 and 0-90, who hold out on their mission. In comparison to I-330, 0-90 is portrayed as weak, feminine, and emotional, her range of emotions varying - rather unorthodoxly for the society - from love to possessiveness and jealousy. 0-90's choice to have D-503 's child is grounded in her emotions, her longing to have a child weighing more in her action than the Maternal NOlm that disqualifies her as a mother. However, it is she who actually manages to achieve her personal goal and escape the clutches of the totalitarian state. The novel, then, suggests that if there is a future for mankind outside the State, 0-90 will be one of its progenitors, a role fitting for a misfit who epitomizes a different set of values.

bnproper emotions in Huxley's Brave New World Brave New World by Aldous Huxley differs from the other two dystopias in that the state exerts power over individuals not so much through institutions of violence as through indoctrination and eugenics. The importance of the two is emphasized in that the novel begins with the exposition of the dystopian society's reproduction techniques and indoctrination programmes, with the main characters - such as Bernard Marx and Johnintroduced only later in the story. The emotions of the main characters are foregrounded in their representation. The state has gone to extremes to guarantee positive feelings for the citizens, but it has failed with Bernard Marx, a sleeplearning specialist who introduces John - an outsider - to the society. Marx is characterized by negative emotions from the very beginning, and he is repeatedly portrayed as looking angry and having violent thoughts about hurting those around him. Despite belonging to the elite caste, he feels himself to be an outsider because his short stature makes others mock him. He responds by acting like an outsider, which worsens his position and increases his sense ofloneliness and detachment (BNW, 75-76). Courting Lenina Crowne and hosting John improves his mood and position in the society for a short time, but his antisocial behaviour finally leads to his banishm ent. The emotions of Marx are worth closer examination, because they open up a critical point of view to the society. Marx suffers from various

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ugly feelings, one of them being "bitter envy" of men like Henry Foster and Benito Hoover, whose position and authority in the society is taken for granted by everyone, including themselves (BNW, 75-76). Sianne Ngai (2005, 128-129) notes that envy is the only agonistic emotion that is categorized as having a perceived inequality as its object. However, unlike anger, it is not culturally recognized as a valid response to social disparities. Even if it has a critical capacity in recognizing institutionalized fonns of inequality, it has been moralized and uglified, and it is shameful for those who experience it (see ibid.). This applies also to MalX, whose weak position as a physically inadequate alpha plus male has its roots in the mistakes that were apparently made in the treatment of his embryo in the Hatchery. Due to the artificial reproduction system, there is little physical variation within the castes, and conditioning has made the community associate physical size with social superiority and to treat physical defects with contempt and hostility. He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion. Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him painfully of this physical inadequacy. "I am I, and wish I wasn't"; his self-consciousness was acute and stressing. Each time he fmmd himself looking on the level, instead of dmvnward, into a Delta's face, he felt hmniliated. Would the creature treat him with the respect due to his caste? The question hallllted him. Not without reason. For Ganunas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnopredic prejudice in favour of size was universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he made proposals, the practical joking of his equals among the men. The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, selfconsciously on his dignity. How bitterly he envied men like Hemy Foster and Benito Hoover! (BNW, 75 76)

Since Marx cannot help his unequal social position, he is exposed to negative feelings such as loneliness, irritation, envy, and isolation; he suffers from a chronic fear of being slighted. In sociological telTIls, he seems to be suffering from identity non-verification, in which he is unsuccessful in getting others to confilTIl his 0\Vll views of himself and therefore experiences negative feelings like anger (see Stets and Trettevik 2014,42). Once again in the geme, the emotions ofa character function as a

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critical device in portraying the society. The attempt to create a society free of pain and suffering has not succeeded in guaranteeing a happy existence even for the entirety of the most privileged class. Negative emotions signal to the reader that despite the facade of perfection, the society is not ideal. In Brave New World, a critical view of the state is further developed in the character John, whose collision with the conditioned people around him is also a conflict of moral emotions. John grew up in the Savage Reservation with his mother as a rejected member of that community, reading the complete works of Shakespeare and espousing the culture of emotions represented in them. \¥hen he enters the World State in the year 632 after Ford, his values, feelings, and attitudes are anachronistic, representing those of an earlier historical era: they are in radical conflict with the extremely consumerist and confOlmist society, which lacks all forms of individuality. John acts on his moral beliefs, for instance by trying to court Lenina romantically after becoming infatuated with her and by showing his deep grief at the deathbed of his mother, only managing to end up in conflicts of morality with the people around him. Also, the ugly feeling of jealousy tortures him. He feels poisoned by the civilization, and escapes to the solitude of nature, only to be harassed by curious crowds and finally, having betrayed his own ideals, killing himself. Whereas Bemard Marx's negative emotions do not prevent him from living in the society, John's conflict is so deep that he ends his own life. Happiness in the World State is based on erasing elements that may cause emotional distress, as the Controller makes clear in a discussion with John. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go "Wrong, there's soma. "Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!' He laughed. "Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!" (BNW, 259 260)

To be happy on these terms, authenticity has to be replaced with castespecific behaviour and thinking that are created with the means of technology and science. As in classical dystopias more generally, liberty and "happiness" (or stability) are the opposites that cannot coexist in a

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society, and the horrible state has chosen the latter on everyone's behalf and uses force to maintain it. Individual emotion is a fonn of individuality par excellence, and erasing romantic love and families is a way to fight against it. Whereas Zamyatin's dystopia suppresses most emotions and Orwell's institutionalizes hatred for its purposes, Huxley's World State engineers social castes and their emotions for its purposes in an assembly line as if constructing automobiles with different body styles and engine choices, as is suitable for a state worshipping Henry Ford. Rebellion is not even possible for the lower castes due to their hampered cognitive capacities, and the complexity of the state machinery makes uprisings difficult or impossible. Therefore, it is not surprising that the dissident characters do not succeed in their rebellion.

Conflicts of freedom and obligation in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four "We shall crush you do\Vll to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary hlUllan feeling." (NE, 262)

When discussing Zamyatin's We, I contrasted the genre of classical dystopia with the novel of revolution that seems to serve as one of its progenitors in literary history. Some other literary conventions, such as the theme of conflicting duties, are also noteworthy as a literary context and point of comparison to the geme. In the theme of conflicting duties, a character is caught up in a conflict between collective welfare and individual freedom, in other words duty and inclination, both of which may be considered moral obligations (see Cohen 2002,34-40). This scenario has occurred in various gemes, from tragic romances and novels of adultery to sentimental novels. In the variation typical of classical dystopias, it is not the family (which is non-existent) or close connnunity that places demands on the character, but first and foremost the ruthless government that uses science, technology, and law enforcement to produce pliant subjects and punish the disobedient. This means that in the geme, the collective demands have risen to a new level of officiality and obligation, and they are promoted in the name of collective happiness. However, some of the rebellious characters are also very persistent in insisting on personal freedom. In classical dystopias, the rebellious characters usually end up not only suffering as in the

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sentimental novel, but are also more or less destroyed, their personalities altered and loyalties broken, because the state overpowers them easily. For this reason, dystopias are also grimmer reading for the audience. The creation of an empathetic reader community typical of the sentimental novel is complicated by the traumatizing and painful experiences of the protagonists: feeling with the character is uncomfortable. Of the three novels analysed in this chapter, Orwell's Nineteen EightyFour develops the scenario of conflicting duties the fullest. Oceania is the most ruthless of the three imagined totalitarian states in its demand for total obedience. It is epitomized in the concept of thoughtcrime, which expands the area of state control to include the inner life of the citizens. What is more, Oceania demands that the citizens cease believing in their 0\Vll observations and conceptions of the world and accept as truths the obviously false claims - such as 2+2~5 - that the state propagates. Winston Smith, for his part, is exceptionally persistent in believing in his 0\Vll sense perceptions and evaluations of the world, and he is reluctant to replace them with the flawed doctrines of the Party. This is partly because Smith remembers the past, when things were different, so is able to make comparisons between the past and the present Throughout the novel, the bleak present is contrasted with memories of the distant past that also come to Smith as flashes in his dreams. Even ifhe recalls sad events and conflicts in his childhood, the memories of past privacy, love, and friendship make him view the present as filled with fear, hatred, and pain, lacking dignity of emotion and deep and complex sorrows (NE, 31). In Smith's eyes, no emotion is pure in the current society; they are all mixed up "with fear and hatred" (NE, 130). However, lacking reliable documents, he still doubts his own capacity to remember the past correctly, which contributes to historical truth becoming an obsession for him. As is typical of early dystopias, also Winston Smith ultimately fails in his rebellion, finally ending up as a hatmless, docile alcoholic who loves Big Brother. At the end of the novel, the totalitarian state has shown its ultimate ownership of him by planting in him new emotions that are contrary to his previous ones, a convention that later occurs also, for instance, in Suzarme Collins's trilogy The Hunger Games (2008-2010) in the story of Peeta. This is achieved through torture that makes the "heretics" allegedly surrender to the Party "of their own will" (NE, 261). However, in reality the conflict between individual freedom and societal demands is resolved for the benefit of the latter. The conflict between Winston Smith and the demands of the regime is also a conflict of emotions. This is emphasized in the narration, which pays extensive attention to emotions and different bodily sensations, such

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as the somatic protests in Smith's bones, skin, and stomach, revealing his affective stance to different phenomena. The novel has a third-person narrator, but Smith is the constant foealizer whose feelings imprint the narration throughout the novel, letting the reader experience the society from his mostly distrusting and anxious perspective. The foregrounding of emotions is evident already in the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which has an important role in exposing the fictional world to the reader and creating a frame for understanding the rest of the story. Even a brief examination reveals that the chapter is imbued with direct and indirect depictions of Smith's negative feelings towards his sUlTOlUldings, varying from cautiousness to shame and hysteria. There is relatively little action in the chapter, as it portrays Smith walking home, looking out of a window and taking some refreshments, engaging in the risky and rebellious act of writing a diary, falling into memories and then hearing a knock at his door. However, the chapter is thick with emotions and bodily affects. Experienced from Smith's perspective, the urban landscape with police patrols, Big Brother posters, constantly monitoring telescreens, and massive ministry buildings has an aura of hostility surrounding it, suited to inciting anxiety and paranoia. His near-traumatized, anxious state of mind is revealed to the reader as Smith is depicted writing a diary entry, one of his thoughtcrimes. In the relative safety of his alcove, he feels first "a sense of complete helplessness", but then starts writing "in sheer panic", and he is "only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down". He is writing about his previous experience of watching a distressing war film in which helpless children and other civilians are ruthlessly killed by soldiers while spectators cheer on the events (NE, 11-12). He sinks finther into his memories that are, unsurprisingly, also deeply affective and distressing. The memory that follows concerns the daily Two Minutes Hate in which the inhabitants of Oceania express their collective, uncontrollable hatred toward traitors such as Emmanuel Goldstein, a previous party leader who turned to counter-revolutionary activities and became the "Enemy of the People". The collective hatred is so strong that it also engulfs the unenthusiastic participants, filling them with rage and violent urges and revealing the structures of emotion underlying the nation that are directed at new targets when necessary: The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people

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like an electric cmrent, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming hmatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, lUldirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. (NE, 18)

Smith transfers his hatred to a beautiful woman - later revealed to be Julia - sitting in front of him. Smith hallucinates raping, torturing, and finally killing her in his frenzy, later realizing that his emotions arose from her presumed unattainability (NE, 19). After the murderous rage, the Two Minutes Hate ends in totally different emotions, as the picture of the Big Brother emerges on the screen and the participants begin a delirious hymn to his majesty, thus reaffirming their collective loyalty and love to the ruler. Winston Smith carmot help joining in, even if his real emotions are accidentally revealed in a micro-expression on his face, an improper facial expression being a "facecrime" (NE, 66). In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of"B-BL .. B-B!" always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds dming which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing

happened

if, indeed, it did happen. (NE, 20)

During the rage, Smith is deeply conflicted and his emotions are painfully mixed, negative emotions such as alann, disgust, fear, and rage clashing with each other and his loyalty shifting from Big Brother to Emmanuel Goldstein. This mess of manipulated, ugly emotions leaves him exhausted and distressed. In the collective frenzy, feigned feelings turn into real ones, which threatens individual autonomy. The Party makes use of emotional contagion in which emotions are passed from one person to another, sometimes without them even noticing. The memory of the Two Minutes Hate shows the monstrosity ofthe collective emotions that the Party creates and fosters in its ceremonies. The emotions also reveal some of the values and norms underlying the Party, as the nurtured emotions are obviously moral, rising as they do as a response to violations of collective nOlTIls. Smith's relationship with Julia brings positive feelings such as love and hope to Smith's life, but they are short-lived, as both Smith and Julia are caught by the Thought Police and end up in the cells and torture chambers of the Ministry of Love. Early in the novel, Smith notes that a person's worst enemy is his "O\vn nervous system" (NE, 67), and the statement

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proves to be right in the torture charn bers, where people are reduced to "whimpering, groveling, weeping" (NE, 261) in the violent interrogations. The descriptions of the many forms of torture in the miinstry are designed to be nauseating and disgusting to the audience. They detail the concrete acts and effects of cruel violence: from breaking fingers with a kick to the effects of electric shocks, beatings, and starvation, in addition to the mental effects that tbe foreknowledge of pain has on a sadistically tortured person. The avoidance of pain is a natural instinct, which makes torture, and even the threat of it, a powerful means of governing people. Descriptions of repulsive stenches, bodily fluids oozing from violated bodies, and sounds of pain and suffering contribute to the overall effect of disgust that are created by social taboos and inhibitions (see Ngai 2005, 333). Winston Smith's final "love" for Big Brother is produced tbrough torture and is tbe desired result in tbe eyes of the Party, yet it is all made repulsive for tbe reader via the evocation of disgust. In the context of Smith's life story, his love of Big Brother is tbe ultimate sign of how deeply his personality has been violated and altered by the ruthless state.

Conclusion: Negative emotions in classical and postclassical dystopias I hope to have shown that emotions play such a central role in key classical dystopias that the geme cannot be considered as solely intellectual; it is also emotionally charged. Yet it is also evident that the unfortunate fates of the protagonists, as well as their negative experiences and emotions, may make empathic reading emotionally umewarding - even painful - which may encourage the reader to adopt an intellectual stance toward the story. Post-classical dystopias challenge the negativity of classical dystopias by introducing more hopeful endings that alter their emotional atmosphere. Many YA dystopias in particular, such as The Hunger Games trilogy by Collins, portray a successful uprising against the state, but they also make more room through the story for positive emotions connected to love and friendship, often letting them challenge and even conquer the negative, dystopian emotions especially towards the end of the story. In such novels, the positive emotions balance the emotional valence of the work and make empathic reading more rewarding. However, it should be noted that in The Hunger Games trilogy, the characters pay a heavy emotional price for their participation in the rebellion, basically becoming veterans of a civil war with PTSD-like symptoms and only slowly recovering from their traumatic

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experiences. By contras~ the Hany Potter series (1997-2007) by J.K. Rowling forgoes portraying such an emotional aftermath and skips directly to portraying the future family life of the young rebels in the epilogue. 8 Interestingly for the argument of this paper, it is the positive emotion oflove that ultimately conquers Voldemort, also revealing the idealist overtone of the Harry Potter series. In the three classical dystopias discussed in this paper, nonnative emotion culture is used to maintain the social structure, and the uprising against the state is also a rebellion of emotions: the rebels are typically unable to feel as the emotion culture requires, and their rebellion usually has both emotional motivations and goals. The similarities between the key novels in the geme give reason to consider the relative negativity of characters' emotions and the state's strict emotion culture as geme conventions of early dystopias. I suggested earlier that D-503 comes closest to the reader when his received rationalist ideology is shaken and shattered through contact with the rebels. Actually, it seems that the emotions whose realization the rebels fight for in the novels are those that have been and still are widely accepted in modem Western societies, such as romantic, erotic, and familial love. Moreover, the emotions seem to be moral in that they are connected to certain nonns and values, and it also shows in the novels. The rebels seem to support personal freedom of choice, which is among the most central values of Western culture. It might even be claimed that the values and emotions that the rebels fight for come close to the dominating Western ones, as represented for instance by the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which guarantees each individual rights such as freedom of thought (article 18); the right to life, security, and liberty (article 3); and freedom to marry and found a family (article 16). The rebels' relation to Western and twentieth-century values or culture is also suggested in the novels in several ways. For instance, 1-330 awakens strange feelings in D-503 by playing twentieth-century classical music and trying to seduce him in a house museum from approximately the same era. Huxley's John has learned to feel by reading Shakespeare, and Smith's memories of the past culture were created in his youth in the 1940s and 1950s. Even if the novels do not openly criticize the portrayed totalitarian 8 I perceive the Harry Potter series to be a member of the YA dystopia genre, because it uses the repertoire of the genre. Harry, Ron, and Hennione are fighting against the racist Voldemort and the deatheaters that manage to infiltrate even the :Ministry of Magic, their fight becoming a rebellion against the evil regime. Yet it is obvious that there are also other genres - from fantasy to myth - involved in the mixture.

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society, the reader is posited on the side of the rebels also via the narrative vie\vpoint, which enhances the critical perception of the totalitarian state. Siding with the ruthless totalitarian state is made rhetorically and emotionally difficult for tlie reader. It can be concluded that the classical dystopia is an intellectual and affective geme that makes use of the characters' emotions as well as Western values and moral emotions in creating affective representations of bad societies. Instead of grand aesthetic emotions and their catharsis, works in the geme may portray negative, ugly emotions - even disgust and leave them unpurified in order to make the reader cope witli them by herself, thus having a stronger effect on her.

Works Cited Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. 2003. "Introduction. Dystopia and Histories." In Dark Horizons. Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds). New York & London: Routledge, 1-12. Cohen, Margaret. 2002: The Sentimental Education o/the NoveL Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds o/Literature: An Introduction to the Theory o/Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Freeborn, Richard. 1982: The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pastemak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gottlieb, Erika. 2001. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe o/Terror and Trial. McGill: Queen's University Press. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2011. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structures 0/ Stories. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World (BNW) London: Chatton & Windus. [somaa, Saija. 2010. "Genre Theory after the Linguistic Turn: An Antiessentialist, Henneneutic Approach to Literary Gemes." In Pirjo Lyytikilinen, Minna Maijala, and Tintti Klapuri (eds.), Genre and Interpretation. Helsinki: University of Helsinki, pp. 122-139. Lehnen, Christina. 2016. Defining Dystopia: A Genre Between the Circle and The Hunger Games. A Functional Approach to Fiction. BadenBaden: Tectum Verlag.

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Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orwell, George. 195911948. Nineteen Eighty-Four. (NE) London: Seeker & Warburg. Peterson, Gretchen. 2007. Cultural Theory and Emotions. In Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (eds). New York: Springer, 114-134. Shaver, Phillip, Judith Schwartz, Donald Kirson, and Gary O'Connor. 2001. "Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach". In Emotions in Social Psychology. Essential Readings, W Gerrod Parrot! (ed.). Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 26-56. Stets, Jan E. and Ryan Trettevik. 2014. "Emotions in Identity Theory". In Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, Volume II, Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (eds). Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York and London: Springer, 33-50. Thamm, Robert A. 2007. The Classification of Emotions. In Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (eds). New York: Springer, 11-37. Zamyatin, Yevgeny (Eugene Zarniatin). 195211924. We. (W) Translated and with a foreword by Gregory Zilboorg. New York: E.P. Dutton. https:!! mises-media.s3 .amazonaws.com/We_ 2. pdf?file= l&type=document,

retrieved 7 November 2018.

2. PAIN AND SUFFERING IN CLASSICAL DYSTOPIAN FICTION: CASE ORWELL

SARI

KrVISTO

In this chapter, I will argue that pain and suffering are constitutive to the totalitarian society that is at the core of some central pieces of classical dystopian fiction. The dystopian society violates individual freedom through ritualized violence, systematized injustice, and the negation of privacy, and each of these violations causes suffering and oppresses the individual in the totalitarian system in its own way.l Injustice is a crucial feature in dystopian worlds characterized by a strong contrast between socially sanctioned laws and the illegal consequences that these laws or self-evident dictates produce. This contrast means that individuals are always by necessity unable to live a just life even if they obey social rules. Suffering does not follow crimes, moral failures, or sins as punishment; instead, the world is fimdamentally unjust and good people suffer for no particular reason. In dystopian fiction, the fundamentally religious question about the suffering of innocents familiar from theodicy discussions is not existential or cosmic by nature; it is always political: the socio-political machine is responsible for the cruelties that are supported by its distorted communal ethics. 2 This violence is made even worse when justified by appealing to the benefits it produces for the fimctioning and goals of the society. I will illustrate this condition of the dystopian world by focusing on the role of pain and suffering in Orwell's classic work Nineteen Eighty-Four (hereafter NE). The totalitarian world of the novel is in many ways based on suffering individuals who are unable to live their own lives in privacy 1 In drawing this three-part classification, I am indebted to Erika Gottlieb's seminal work on dystopian fiction; see Gottlieb 2001. For classical dystopian fiction, see also Kurnar 1987. 2 For discussions of the od icy in philosophy and literature, see Kivist6 & Pihlstr6m 2016.

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and who are obliged to submit themselves to the centralized monitoring and violence of the state leadership. Suffering is deprived of its personal content and made a social and political issue - even a central goal of the political powers. The society systematically exercises violence that leads to individual suffering. One of the most horrifying passages in the novel is the famous torture scene that takes place in Room 101 at the Ministry of Love. I will examine this particular passage in detail in order to see how pain and suffering are related to the issues of individual freedom and power, and how human expression reaches the limits of language in that room. Although there are some studies on the importance of the body and its various discomforts in utopian or dystopian literatures (see Jacobs 2007), pain remains an understudied issue in Orwell's work despite its obvious centrality to his dystopian vision. Furthermore, I will argue that the concept of pain holds crucial value in Orwell's poetics of disillusiomnent in general.

Ritual violence The main plot of Orwell's novel is familiar to everyone interested in dystopian fiction. Winston Smith is an ordinary fellow who works for the Ministry of Truth, which takes care of official communication, civic education, and history-building in Oceania. The Ministry of Peace is concerned with war, and the Ministry of Love maintains law and order. The architecture of the administrative buildings reflects their hostile character; in the Ministry of Love there are no windows at all. The origin of law remains hidden to the citizens, whose private rooms are, by contrast, under constant surveillance. Other coercive social structures include the Party, which represents an official state religion, and Big Brother, who is a divine, transcendent figure who sees everyone but is seen by no one. The main priest of this state religion is O'Brien, who leads the practical activities of the Party and is also responsible for holding the famous trial at the end of the novel. Further afflictions are caused by the constant war. As Harmah Arendt claims in her work on totalitarianism, the rise of totalitarian societies is often based on long-term violence and wars in which the masses have lost their stability, sense of traditions, and mutual connections. This loss is then filled with a sense of belonging that is offered by the new social system and its holistic ideology; the leader of the new ideology is ready to destroy the smallest signs of the previous traditions and their institutions. Orwell's novel describes what happens when someone starts to rebel against the overwhelming forces surrounding him. Winston Smith begins

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to search for historical and mathematical truths, denying the official "facts" fabricated by the Party. He makes a serious effort to gain self-knowledge, control his 0\Vll mind, and forge an existence that is not detelTIlined by the Party but by himself alone. He looks back at his past and attempts to keep a secret diary. But the desolate ending of the novel does not bring any change in his life; on the contrary, the society crushes without exception anyone who refuses to obey its rules or fails to show loyalty to the system. Being accused of a thought crime, Winston is bound to suffer severe torture that makes him lose himself and love Big Brother. As a consequence, he no longer questions the untruths of society. The famous torture scene illustrates that it is impossible to receive any justice in the dystopian world, since the decision of the court is a priori negative, suffering is inevitable, and the sentence is cruel. It is important to note that in the world Orwell creates, physical punishment is not simply used to deter people from crime or disobedience. Pain is caused for its 0\Vll sake, in order to cause pain, and it has punitive functions that manifest and affirm the state's power over the body of the individual. The violence often takes the fOlTIl of spectacular ritual offerings. Dystopian societies function in many ways like primitive state religions with certain ritual practices (Gottlieb 2001, 11). Reno Girard has analysed the scapegoat ritual in relation to the paradigmatic innocent suffering in the Book of Job and to the way Job was treated by his friends and the surrounding society (see Girard 1987).3 A similar ritual of human sacrifice can be traced in Orwell's work. The Orwellian society uses the emotive power of primitive state religion to put its coercive ideology into practice. Especially powerful is the recurring ritual of the Two Minutes Hate, which gives a common enemy to all through its obvious scapegoat mechanism and theatrical trials. People are sho\Vll an image of the Jewish Emmanuel Goldstein, who is given an emphatically scapegoat-like appearance: a goatee beard, the face of a sheep, and a sheep-like voice. At the climax of the Two Minutes Hate, Goldstein's image becomes that of an actual bleating sheep. This strongly emotional arousal of hate provides a sort of catharsis to the population: In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and

do\Vll in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to 3 The following sections dealing with religious ritual violence are partly based on my previous discussion on Orwell, theodicy, and the Book of Job in Kivist6 & Pihlstr6m 2016, Ch. 5. Here we argue that Orwell's society is founded on a kind of secular theodicy.

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dro-wn the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-baired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. [ ... ] The dark-baired girl behind Winston had begun crying out "Swine! Swine! Swine!" and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and fhmg it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bOlUlced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the nmg of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. (NE 15)

Another clear indication of mystical ecstasy is discerned at the moment of Hate when the sandy-haired woman appeals to her saviour and falls into prayer. Along with the rhythmic clamour of boots, clapping hands, and uncontrollable shouts, the crowd distinguishes itself from the victim and tears him apart from the community; at the same time the community itself gains unity and harmony. Girard (1987, 28) would call this process a collective trance in which the community is carried away with their hate and violence, making them incapable of seeing the truth, obeying justice, or understanding their own actions. The community is strengthened while everyone joins the cursing and in moments of overwhelming emotion sings a hymn or chants to the majesty of Big Brother. In the novel, this state is called "an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drO\vning of consciousness" (NE 17). Girard would see that by doing this, they are not only filling a social but also a religious function. Public executions by hanging are another form of perfOlmative ceremony carried out both in Orwell's novel and Zamyatin's We, another classic of dystopian fiction (see Gottlieb 2001, 56-64); such executions were of course also a commonplace in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Syme, one of the characters in Orwell's novel, describes the aesthetic experience after a hanging and how the victim's kicking legs and blue, protruding tongue impressed him most: "It was a good hanging," said Syme reminiscently. "I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me." (NE 43)

The function of such scenes is to bring individual human suffering to the forefront of the narrative and emphasize Orwell's criticism of the

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control of the social body over the individual. 4 The society has destroyed the possibility of the existence of a true community that could share the experience of the suffering individual. Empathy, social bonds, and shared experiences have been replaced by violent rituals and a hostile individualism that focuses only on the individual's own survival. As noted above, totalitarian systems rely on the loyalty of people who have lost their private bonds, personal relationships, and connections to the world (see Gottlieb 2001, 11-12; Arendt 2004, 421). The Orwellian regime intentionally breaks down links between relatives and friends; it appeals to people who have no private loyalties and who thus find solace and a sense of belonging in obedience to the state religion and its ideologies. Orwell discusses the concept of loyalty briefly in his novel, saying that only two generations earlier, people were governed by unquestioned private loyalties and individual relationships, but now men were hardened inside. As Gottlieb (2001, 12) has noted, in Orwell's novel even the children are taught to spy on their family members and denounce their parents (which, of course, is something that really happened, e.g., in the Staliinst USSR). Such ritualized violence is an efficient way of depriving human beings of their individuality and humanity, and it follows the logic of totalitarian societies in which, according to Arendt (2004, 607), the concept of emnity is replaced by that of conspiracy, meaning that every tangible event is interpreted as signifying some secret intent; for her, this is one indication of the circumstances in which thought is emancipated from experience and reality. In addition to offering moments of spectacular entertainment to the citizens, pain and suffering are also keenly related to the general principle of Oceania that denies individuals their freedom of expression. Totalitarian societies assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything and individual experience can add nothing to the consistent system of ideological thinking. This also means that the totalitarian society does not allow individuals to verbalize their own experiences. The unethical aspect of this policy is especially palpable in such deeply personal experiences as physical pain or suffering, which would need special and nuanced language in order to be shareable.' While trying to capture the individual In Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead we find a very similar scene of corporal punishment that is performed by flogging. As Gary Rosenshield (2017, 91) notes, some of the executioners act as if self-conscious artists who demonstrate their skills in applying the strokes and enjoy their sense of mastery over their victims. 5 The shareability of pain has been a traditional issue in pain studies in general. Elaine Scarry's seminal work The Body in Pain (1985) and David Morris's The

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ethical aspect of suffering, the nurse Margo McCaffery has defined pain as "whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever the experiencing person says it does" (qt. in Fifield 2015, 118). Virginia Woolf, for her part, famously wrote in her "On Being Ill": "Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other [ ... ] so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out" (Woolf 1926,34; qt. also in Fifield 2015, 119). Woolfhere describes the difficulty of expressing pain that is so personal and inexpressible, it is almost impossible to deliver the feeling to others. In Woolf's view, illness words (when fOlmed) in particular contain a mystic quality, and there seems to be something hidden under their surface meaning. Woolf claims that one has to create new language and unusual (primitive, sensual, and even obscene) expressions in order to reach the authentic experience of pain and illness, but this is something that is strictly forbidden in Orwell 's dystopian world. While every concept is expressed by one word only, it is impossible to think forbidden thoughts or articulate such personal feelings as pain, since the language has been purged of unnecessary or ambiguous words that would be required for personal expressions. Thus, the linguistic vacuum created in Oceania resembles the inherent quality of pain: it does not have its 0\Vll vocabulary. Pain thus also becomes a crucial metaphor for the dystopian world in which the acts of violence remove words and destroy language, causing both pain and silence. Totalitarian societies like Oceania do not allow self-expression or self-understanding, and hence individuals are unable to articulate their suffering. The telescreen even makes Winston forget what he was thinking or intending to say. External forces also have other profound and harmful effects on individual consciousness. Winston ultimately realizes that his greatest fear is solipsism, not only in the sense that he cannot surpass his own limits or communicate his private experiences, thoughts, or emotions to anyone else, but also in that he does not have direct access to reality, since the past and the external reality do not exist anywhere but only in Culture of Pain (1991) have identified culturally determined and intersubjective ways of expressing and sharing pain and suffering through language and literature. Scarry famously defines extreme physical pain as an experience that leads the sufferer to a pre-linguistic state, whereas Morris stresses that the experience of pain is decisively shaped by specific hlUllan cultures. The topic was also crucial to Wittgenstein's reflections on private experience and its expressibility; for him, pain was a central test case on this issue.

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the mind that itself is controllable. "The only evidence is inside my own mind", he says, "and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories" (NE 127). This fear about the non-existence of any objective reference point is later confumed to Winston by O'Brien, who states: "Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal." (NE 200) Reality is "inside the skull" not in the sense of solipsism in which the individual mind would define reality, but in the sense of collective solipsism in which the mind (and how it defines reality) is fully controlled not by the person himself but by the Party (see Bloom 2004, 94). The individual consciousness completely depends on the social consciousness and its constructs.

The totality of pain Pain is a central totalizing force in Orwell's dystopian society, where the body in pain is frequently manifest. Even though pain resists verbalization and human efforts to produce meaning, the word "pain" appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four dozens of times (69 times in a singular form and in 11 other occasions) and seems to be a key component of human existence. Pain is caused, for example, by Winston's cough and the compulsory physical exercise that "sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks" (NE 32). At times, Winston's heart stirs painfully, and he hears yells of pain. When he and Iulia are arrested by the Party, he feels Iulia's pain when she is punched and cannot breathe. The novel uses a rich variety of sensory words that refer to the spatial and temporal qualities of pain.6 Winston also frequently mentions the dull chronic pain in his stomach, which is presumably caused by both constant hunger and fear. Many times he says that he is unable to think of anything else than the pain in his belly, which underlines that the physical pain and suffering caused by the dystopian society are deliberately supported by the Party, since intense physical pain and the aching body keep human beings' thoughts under control without any external pressure. The word "painful" is also used in connection 6 Researchers have distinguished between different verbal descriptors of pain that include evaluative (such as unbearable or intense), sensory (such as pulsing, flashing, or cutting), and affective terms (such as suffocating or vicious). See, e.g.,

Gustafson 2005, 221 223.

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with memory and awareness. Pain and suffering include here physical, cognitive, and emotional or mental components - pain is something that is at the same time a physical feeling and a mental experience, and these two aspects cannot be separated in the novel. The body in pain becomes so dominating that it is impossible to flee; it seems to hold Winston in one place and fill the whole universe so that he cannot feel or perceive anything else or think punishable tboughts. Winston describes his fear and pain already before the torture scene with these tenns, emphasizing the disempowering effects of bodily pain: It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's O\Vll body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. (NE 85)

In several passages, Winston is incapable of thinking about anything else than his aching body as it repeatedly disturbs his tboughts and forces him to focus on his bodily condition alone. \¥bile in prison, he has only six thoughts, and one of them is tbe pain in his belly. This condition deprives him of his subjectivity and human agency - he is no longer the ruler of his own body or thoughts. As Virginia Woolf (1926,41) puts it in her essay on illness, in health intelligence domineers over the senses, but in illness the power is taken by incomprehensibility. For example, when Winston is arrested and waiting for his final trial, he imagines whether he could diminish Iulia's pain by doubling his own, but he already knows that this idea is born on an intellectual level out of some kind of social responsibility. Winston knows that in practice he could not save Julia, since his own pain was so imperious that tbe only thing he could wish for was that nothing would increase it: One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. (NE 192)

For Elaine Scarry (1985, 4), pain is sometbing that distances the sufferer from other human beings botb linguistically and physically, since tbe body

Pain and Suffering in Classical Dystopian Fiction

35

becomes so magisterial in pain that it does not allow the sufferer to focus on anything else. At the same time, pain destroys the conventional registers of language, leaving only sighs and inarticulate sounds: "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." As Virginia Woolf also notes, pain is not something constructed by the subject, it just is. Pain is something that exists outside language, it is difficult to express, and it exceeds all "normal" experiences that are more easily articulated. On the other hand, it is something that everyone has experienced and therefore it is in principle shareable. While literature usually tries to overcome the distance between pain's singularity and its linguistic expression,1 Orwell's novel emphasizes the difficulty of sharing the experience of pain, and it does even more. Pain's characteristic singularity is deliberately used by the Party to create isolation and draw a radical separation between individuals and their realities, thereby aiming to destroy the individual's relationships with his or her surroundings. Interestingly, one of the occasions when Winston is in pain is when he is writing his diary: For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hilll the inkpot through the window [ ... ] to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. (NE 54) Winston's almost poetic agony suggests that he is not used to expressing his thoughts in writing - even his attempts cause severe mental and physical symptoms. In this agonizing moment, he is in pain from trying to suppress an unpleasant memory (if it is a real personal memory) about a prostitute that reappears in his mind. He tries to capture it in writing, Although Scarry stresses the inexpressibility of pain (and how it defies representation in language), several researchers "Writing after her have noted that literature is in fact full of such representations that experiment with the expressive possibilities of pain and examine its embeddedness in social structures (rather than focusing exclusively on its obliterating power). It has also become common to draw attention to the positive aspects of pain (such as its protective function, warning of some danger). For two book-length studies of (physical) pain across literary genres (but not dystopian fiction) and some key works, see Mintz 2013; Rosenshield 2017.

7

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even though the memory is repulsive. He describes how in his dream the old prostitute opened her mouth to reveal nothing except "a cavernous blackness". The pain related to writing here is significant, since it also discloses one central way of violating individual freedom in the dystopian society, namely the tendency to deny people their own life and privacy. The destruction ofthe individual's private world with its memories is one of the crucial characteristics of OrweU's totalitarian dictatorship. Paradoxically, this primitive condition is related to the advancement of technology that enables constant surveillance. Winston has to keep his diary away from the telescreen, and technology is used for disseminating propaganda and monitoring individuals (and their countenance, since a mere anxious or incredulous look could be a punishable facecrime, the recommended look being an expression of quiet optimism). Sexuality and consorting with prostitutes are also forbidden, since such liaisons might create illegal and uncontrollable loyalties between human beings. In practice, there are no private corners for any kind of intimacy, and Winston assumes that the only few cubic centimetres of privacy are inside one's skull, without noticing that even this is owned by the Party. This lack of privacy is a recurring feature in dystopian novels. In Zamyatin's We, people are locked up in a glass cage, whereas in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, all social relations are so distantthat a married couple cannot name a single memorable event during their long marriage. In Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, women's sexuality also serves the theocratic society. In yet another famous classic dystopian novel, Huxley's Brave New World, all citizens are forced into public sociability and happiness. Huxley's dystopia cherishes such hypnotic slogans as "Everybody's happy nowadays" and "Everyone belongs to everyone else", which underlines that pain and suffering have been abolished from a society that is focused on hedonistic pleasure and consumption. Pain and suffering are central to Huxley's work precisely because they are systematically suppressed in order to reach the stability of lUliversal compulsory happiness. Pain is driven away from the whole populace by soma, a drug that turns all evil into unreality and pain into a delusion. This absence of pain serves the stability ofthe society, since pain would be politically dangerous by allowing people to realize their individuality. Individual stability serves social stability. One of the deviant main characters, Bemard, imagines what is would be like to be subjected to some pain or persecution without soma and left with one's inner resources only. Individual pain and diseases are alluring, because they are parts of the past world when there were still sovereign individuals and everybody had "the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind" (187). In

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37

a world that does not contain pain, there is no use for religious worship or consolation to mitigate suffering, and no place for tragic feelings either. Since all excruciating passions and conflicts have been removed from the stable utopian living, Huxley's characters would laugh at Othella Cas they laugh at Ramea and Juiiet), failing to understand the tragic in life. The world is dystopian precisely because people there fail to recognize their 0\Vll suffering, that they are victims of an oppressive world of compulsory pleasure and happiness. Pain even becomes a fascinating horror, since it is so rare. Huxley's novel argues that endless isolating pain existed only in pre-modem societies, when there were individuals who were still capable of feeling strongly. Orwell takes this inghtmare again one step further by suggesting through O'Brien that old hedonistic utopias are useless and the progress in the new world is progress towards more pain.

Pain, presence, and power The famous torture scene in Orwell's novel foregrounds one crucial aspect of pain in dystopian fiction, namely that causing pain to others means absolute power over them. The feeling of pain as such already entails the feeling of dimiinshed agency and of being acted upon, but the dystopian world enforces this feeling of objectification by describing its extreme fOlTIlS. Scarry has examined the structures of torture that connect pain with the spectacle of power Csee Scarry 1985,3-37, et passim).8 She claims that although torture often involves interrogation (as it does in Orwell's work), this is not usually the main motive for violence; rather, cruelty and physical force aim to expand and present power, since the increase in pain also increases the power of the torturer and makes the tortured person betray himself and repeat the words of the torturer. The person in power thus doubles his words as they are repeated by the prisoner. Torture not only destroys language, but also monopolizes it, which is crucially important to Orwell's dystopia. In the torture room, Winston suffers unbearable pain and is offered nothing in compensation. O'Brien claims that some reward might wait for Winston in the future, but such a reward is hard to see. Like in theodicies that try to justify innocent suffering by appealing to some future benefits, O'Brien also argues that individual offerings serve 10ng-telTIl goals, and all Scarry characterizes torture, for example, in terms of interrogation, world dissolution, and transformation; all these elements are manifest in Orwell's work.

8

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men can do is passively undergo their suffering and hope for some meaning in their filthy lives in the years to come: You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. (NE 143)

The Jobian theme of innocent suffering is palpable when Winston is openly compared to Job and O'Brien is associated with God, who lets Job suffer only in order to show his power: Winston is made to suffer only in order to show him that he has no control over his o'Wlllife and that he must give all control over it to the Party. O'Brien's words refer to the Book of Job when he describes Winston's filthy appearance (Winston himself also notes that "he had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth", cf. Job 9.31): "Look at the condition you are in! [ ... ] Look at this filthy grime all over

your oody. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? [ ... ] You are rotting away [ ... ] You are falling to pieces. "What are you? A bag of

filth." (NE 218 219) The only thing that Winston can actually hope for here is that the pain would end, and he cannot integrate it into any broader picture. Pain here means that Winston is nailed to the present and cannot escape it, not even in his thoughts or dreams. One of the violent features of pain is its quality of inescapability; the present and the suffering are impossible to flee. 9 The power of the painful present also has other unethical aspects, since the present is the only thing that matters in Oceania. Although O'Brien refers to future prospects in his interrogation, the scene is exclusively tied to the present through pain. Torture makes Winston submit his will to the powers of the Party, which has taken total control of him, and thus he also submits himself to the powers of the present: "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right" (NE 127). 9 ef. Levinas's thinking in which the presence of suffering is crucial for one's being in the world. The suffering individual is forced to acknowledge that one cannot escape the particularity of oneself or the world's effects on oneself. On Levinas's thoughts about suffering and presence, see Anderson 2016, esp. 57 60.

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Orwell also describes here the individual's effort to face his inner truth and be true to himself in a world where everything is untrue. Winston is not only searching for the facts of history; he is also confronting his own inner truth along the narrative and finds it in Room 101 in particular, when unbearable physical pain and fear lay bare his shame and reveal the unflattering reality of humanity to him. The worst thing that one can imagine in the world is the unpleasant truth about oneself, and this is illustrated in the way Winston learns in Room 101 that self-interest and self-preservation are stronger in humans than anything else, including love, since ultimately all one cares about is oneself. Winston the individual also looks into mirrors, and what he sees reflected is the figure of naked truth: "A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself." (NE 218) Here Orwell powerfully condemns his protagonist, whose real self turns out to be mere selfishness and filth when his faith and his frail humanist ethos fail (see Reilly 1986, 276, 292).w Self-preservation becomes more powerful than love when Winston utters his famous line, "Do it to Iulia!" and tells his torturers to tear her face off and to strip her to the bones. Orwell seems to conclude that there is no shared solidarity or humanity in the world and no central, inner, or autonomous self to be found in any individual. Orwell's descriptions of extreme bodily suffering are analogous to some other torture scenes in literature. One of the most memorable classical illustrations of extreme pain is Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" (1919), which describes the idea of suffering as a denial of meaning. In the short story, there is no underlying transcendent structure or firm foundation that would disclose itself in the existing world and give meaning to suffering, and the appeal to the necessity of evil is a human illusion. Kafka's short story describes how the state affilTIls its power in its own eyes through capital punishment that has nothing to do with crime; it is merely about the punishers and their power (Rosenshield 2017,98). "In the Penal Colony" is also relevant in considering the nature of overwhelming suffering that is not merely experienced by the convicted; this suffering surpasses all linguistic expressions so that the sensations caused by pain cannot be processed by the victims at all. They do not have the energy even to scream. Iennifer L. Geddes (2015, 403) suggests with reference to Levinas that suffering is here experienced as "the destruction of language and the impossibility of meaning", and as something that both "disturbs

10

Reilly (1986, 276, 292) calls Winston the prime target of Orwell's attack.

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order" and is "this disturbance itself'. Geddes notes that Kafka's short story illustrates the furthest distance between suffering and understanding in the levinasian sense. It is a mere passive undergoing and involves no agency; extreme suffering is soul-destroying and leads to the inability to process the sensations that are forced upon the victim. A more recent work written in the same register, but based on actual historical events, is the journalist Henri Alleg's La Question (1958), which describes his experiences during the Algerian war (Fifield 2015, 120-121). Alleg belonged to the Communist party, and when arrested he was tortured in a brutal way in order to uncover the networks of his political activism. His documentary novel is an attempt to give expression to his experiences during the arrest: It is now more than three months since I was arrested. I have survived so much pain and so many humiliations during this time that I would not bring

myself to talk once again of those days and nights of agony if I did not believe that it would serve a purpose, and that by making the truth known I might do a little towards bringing about a cease-fire and peace. (Alleg 2006, 34)

In Alleg 's work, the pain caused by the torture is connected to the destruction of meaning in his life. It clearly represents an experience that escapes all meaning and has no vocabulary or language of its 0'Wll. In order to verbalize the events, the narrator has recourse, for example, to analogies and metaphoric language Cl felt as if a savage beast had torn the flesh from my body"; ibid., 45). He describes suffering as an experience of radical disorder and difference; pain is difference (see ibid.). To return to Orwell, it appears that ultimately pain is preferable to comfort in the novel, since it also uses pain as a test of truthfulness. It seems that if something does not cause pain, it may not be real, and the fear and pain that Winston is forced to experience in Room 101 is more real to him than anything else in the world. This stresses the reality of suffering against, for example, theodicist attempts to claim that suffering is in some sense less than real or merely illusionary. Furthennore, readers are able to see into Winston's inner self only after the torture scene, when it becomes possible to enter directly into the inner system of his body and his heart, which Winston refers to many times - his heart bumps, bangs, thunders, leaps, turns over, bounds violently, stirs painfully, and turns to ice. The notion that there is no place for any autonomous self in Oceania is illustrated in those passages where pain reveals Winston is in fact empty inside. For example, during physical exercise Winston suffers from a violent cough that empties his lungs completely (he suspects that his worst

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enemy is his 0\Vll nervous system and inner tension), and after ninety hours of work his body appears translucent. \¥hen he raises his hand, he can almost see light through it. Light is of course an ominous sign and the most salient feature of his prison, where the lights were never turned off and the corridor leading to Room 101 was full of "glorious, golden light". In fact, light in this sense serves as an ironic signal of the transcendent powers of Big Brother. While prophets often receive lightning flashes of divine truth and vision, in Winston's cell the lightning flashes are ironically blinding and caused by electric shocks. Here Onvell also stresses that there is no inner side in the human body where humanity could hide; everything is transparent and exposed to others. When the prostitute Winston mentions in his notebook opens her mouth, there is nothing except blackness. The theme of emptiness culminates in the torture scene during which o 'Brien declares that after treatment, Winston will be hollow and dead inside: "We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves". O'Brien is depicted here as an onmiscient doctor, teacher, and priest who is "anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish". He states that good comes via evil and calls torture an educative process that includes the painful purgatorial steps of learning, understanding, and acceptance, through which Winston will finally become a true party member. O'Brien declares that Winston suffers from a defective memory, and although he was clinging to his disease under the impression that it was a virtue, he was "fortunately curable". \¥hen O'Brien's needle touches Winston's mm, Winston senses healing warmth: "Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at 0 'Brien. [ ... ] He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain." (NE 202) The cruelty of God here is explained and justified through its good ends, just like in the discourses of theodicy. The survival of the collective is all that matters, whereas individual suffering and evidence of it do not count. ll Individuals can always be replaced by others, and the only thing that matters is the continuity of the social truth.

11 While pain is described as having an educative and purgative value here, we could argue that in the dystopian world, pain is caused merely for its 0\Vll sake, in order to cause pain. Thus, Q'Brien ultimately seems to disdain theodicies, and the existence of suffering requires no further explanation.

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Conclusion In this brief essay, I have argued that Orwell's dystopian world is grounded on distorted ethics and individual suffering. The dystopian society intentionally maintains individual suffering as a significant cornerstone of its power. Winston's suffering in its striking individuality is ruthlessly neglected by the totalitarian (and ironically pseudo-theodicist) world in which he lives. He is denied the possibility of expressing his suffering, which would help him exceed the dominance of his body and make his experience shareable with others. Torture and Newspeak work together to prevent all meaning-making processes and social engagements that would support individual agency in Oceania. The society rests on deeply unethical practices, and Winston's life becomes ethically significant when he starts to fight against the system, even though he cannot change it. Ethical life becomes possible precisely because there is evil in the world, and it begins at the very moment when an individual starts to resist it. Dystopian fiction thus stresses the importance of the ethical life at the same time as it expresses worries about the possibility of ethical actions. For Winston, there is no real opportunity or freedom to fight for an ethical life against the collective evil, since individual actions do not have much impact on the dystopian world. However, this does not diminish the value of the human effort to try to fight for an ethical life and individual freedom. Although all the pain and suffering is pointless and cruel, Orwell also uses pain to emphasize the truthfulness of his negative poetics. His novel maximizes pain as the core of the dystopian world and evokes physical squalor and extreme sensations to stress the importance of acknowledging the negative sides of life. The poetics of truthfulness requires negativity, not in the sense oftending towards silence and non-communication or focusing on language as failure, but in the sense of a certain uprooting of hollow fantasies. The firewater gin that Winston gulps down like medicine contains a clear reference to the bitter medical potion offered by satirists: it is an unsweetened but salubrious drink that tastes bad and burns the stomach, but it is healthy for the patient since it shows him the bitter truth of things (see KivislO 2009, 33-36). Orwell does not seem to share the conception that a man's life is sincere if it is sound, pure, and whole. Rather, he seems to suggest that we must seriously consider the possibility that wounds may not be turned into wisdom and life may be completely random and without purpose. At the same time, the novel shows how the possibility of ethics dies only with the last man.

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Works Cited Alleg, Henri. 2006. The Question. Translated by John Calder. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press. Anderson, Ingrid L. 2016. Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust: Making Ethics "First Philosophy" in Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein. London: Routledge. Arendt, Hannah. 2004/1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Bloom, Harold. 2004 (ed.). George Orwell's 1984. New York: Chelsea House.

Fifield, Peter. 2015. "The Body, Pain and Violence." In The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, David Hillman & Ulrika Maude (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 116-131. Geddes, Jennifer L. 2015. "Violence and Vulnerability: Kafka and Levinas on Suffering." Literature and Theology, Vo!. 29, No. 4: 400-414. Girard, Reno. 1987. Job, the Victim of His People (La Route antique des hommes pervers, 1985). Translated by Yvonne Freccero. London: The Athlone Press. Gottlieb, Erika. 2001. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Gustafson, Don. 2005. "Categorizing Pain." In Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, Murat Aydede (ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press, 219-241. Huxley, Aldous. 196811932. Brave New World. Harmondswor1h: Penguin Books. Jacobs, Naomi. 2007. "Dissent, Assent, and the Body in Nineteen EightyFour." Utopian Studies 18:1: 3-20. Kivisto, Sari. 2009. Medical Analogy in Latin Satire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kivistb, Sari, and Sami Pihlstrbm. 2016. Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kumar, Krishan. 1987. Utopia & Anti-utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mintz, Susannah B. 2013. Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body. London: Bloomsbury. Morris, David B. 1991. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Orwell, George. 1972/1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (NE). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Reilly, Patrick. 1986. George Orwell: The Age:S Adversary. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rosenshield, Gary. 2017. Physical Pain and Justice: Greek Tragedy and the Russian Novel. Lanham: Lexington Books. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking o/the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1926. "On Being Ill." The New Criterion, Vo!. 4, No. 1: 32-45.

3. FROM GILEAD TO EUSISTOCRATIA:

THE

DIALOGUE BETWEEN MARGARET ATWOOD'S

DYSTOPIAN NOVEL THE HANDMAID 's TALE AND JOHANNA SINISALO'S THE CORE OF THE SUN

HANNA SAMOLA

Dystopian fiction is a popular genre in twenty-first-century Finnish literature. One of the most established authors of this genre is Iohanna Sinisalo. whose novel The Core of the Sun (2016, Auringon ydin 2013, hereafter CoS) depicts the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland, where the citizens, especially women, are under strict surveillance. The novel combines elements of dystopian and speculative fiction, alternative history, satire, fairy tales, and even shamanistic poetry. This novel has been connected to Margaret Atwood's influential feminist dystopia The Handmaids Tale (1985, hereafter HT) by critics and by the publisher of the English-language edition. Both novels focus on women's suffering in a totalitarian and propagandist society where women cannot make their own decisions concerning their bodies and sexuality. In both the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland and the Republic of Gilead, women have no rights to private property or to choose their education and profession. In Eusistocratia, women are allowed to take classes in nursing and domestic

work but are prohibited from engaging in all other scientific and intellectual activities. This kind of limitation on literacy and infonnation also occurs in Gilead, where all the Handmaids are prohibited from reading and writing, and their education is limited to propagandist classes in the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center. In this chapter. I will analyse the ways in which Atwood's canonical dystopia The Handmaids Tale is in a dialogical relationship with Sinisalo's The Core of the Sun. I use David Fishelov's (2010) ideas of the dialogues that great books inspire, and the canon fonnation that is based on intertextual dialogues. The Handmaids Tale and The Core of the Sun have

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been read as feminist dystopias by critics and scholars, and they share a number of other features as well, including narrative techniques, intertexts, plot details, and character positions. I argue that Sinisalo's novel, set in twenty-fIrst-century Finland - or, to be more precise, the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland - transforms Atwood's novel and the genre of feminist dystopia in various ways, resulting in a feminist dystopia that satirizes neoconservative views on gender. One of the elements that connects these novels is a romance plot with fairy tale references. Heterosexual romance is a common motif in the Western dystopian tradition, one that often fuels the rebellion of the protagonist, but both Atwood and Sinisalo comment on this romance plot with their ambivalent and ironic depictions of a heterosexual love that stifles women's willingness to protest against the regime. A central topic in feminist dystopias is reproduction and fertility (Mohr 2005, 36-37). In the totalitarian societies often depicted in feminist dystopias, women are forced to give birth to children. These children are the property of a state that controls their upbringing. In Gilead, all fertile women are forced to serve as Handmaids for high-ranking Commanders and their wives, since the majority of the population of Gilead are sterile due to pollution and radioactivity. In the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland, all women are divided according to their appearance and behaviour into two groups called the e10is and morlocks - a reference to the dystopian science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells. Men are divided into maskos or minus men. The division of women is a result of the selective breeding practiced from the beginning of the twentieth century. The elois represent stereotypical femininity with their blond hair, curvy bodies, and docile character, while the morlocks are androgynous, intelligent, and independent. The state encourages reproduction among the elois, while some of the morlocks are sterilized. The categorization of women on the grounds of their fertility and sexual behaviour is one of the major themes connecting Sinisalo's novel to Atwood's The Handmaids Tale. The female protagonist and one of the narrators of Sinisalo's novel, VeraIVarma, has the feminine appearance of an eloi but identifies as a morlock. Her sister, MiraIMarma, is depicted as a stereotypical eloi. Their Eusistocratian names, Vanna and Manna, were given to them when they moved from Spain to the Eusistocratian Republic of Finland after their parents had died. The renaming of women is a practice used also in Gilead, where all the Handmaids are assigned names derived from the Commander who O\VllS them. The depersonalizing female names in Gilead and Eusistocratia categorize women on the grounds of their O\Vller, who is either a Commander or the state.

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I argue that the similarities between Atwood's and Sinisalo's novels reveal the ways in which The Core of the Sun tailors The Handmaids Tale to ironically comment on contemporary Finnish discussions on gender and sexuality by drawing a parallel between family policies in theocratic Gilead and conservative Eusistocratia. David Fishelov (1997,654) uses the term "generic model" in his essay on literary gemes and emphasizes the importance of tailoring the model for different purposes. Although there are plenty of similarities between two works, the latter work is always a novelty - it changes and tailors both its model and the whole genre to which it contributes. Fishelov (2010, 46) argues that a great book opens several different dialogues in the fOlms of reviews, adaptations, interviews, and parodies. These all have an impact on the canon fOlmation of a geme, since the status of a single work in the canon is partly determined by other works that refer to it or that participate in a dialogue with it (Fishelov 1993, 51). When comparing and analysing Sinisalo's and Atwood's novels, I also discuss the canon fOlmation of the dystopian geme and Atwood's work as one ofthe great works ofthe dystopian tradition. With its dialogical relation to Atwood's novel, The Core of the Sun also participates in the canon of feminist dystopia. By tailoring The Handmaids Tale with Finnish milieus and references to the culture and history of Finland, Sinisalo domesticates the geme of feminist dystopia into the context of Fillllish literature. Johanna Sinisalo is a versatile writer who uses intertexts from different gemes to create complex generic combinations. Her oeuvre has been connected to the genres of New Weird or Fininsh Weird (Sinisalo 2014; Roine & Sarnola 2018), satire (Sinisalo 2017, 200), and allegory (Lyytikainen 2015). Sinisalo has herself actively discussed her own works as examples of Finnish Weird, a northern subgeme of New Weird that combines elements of realism and the unnatural as well as other gemes (Sinisalo 2014, 3-4; Roine & Samola 2018). Sinisalo's latest novels have features typical of dystopian fiction. The Blood of Angels (201412011) is a story about the disappearance of bees, which would be a disaster for the whole ecosystem, and Birdbrain (201012008) is an allegorical story of a journey into anthropogenic darkness. The Core of the Sun has been marketed as a dystopian novel in the publisher's texts, and the geme of dystopian fiction has been mentioned also in critiques the novel has received. On the dustcover of the Englishlanguage edition published in 2016, Sinisalo's novel is characterized as "a captivating and witty speculative satire of a Handmaid's Tale-esque welfare state where women are either breeders or outcasts". This is one of the paratextual signs of the hypertextual connection between the novels

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(Genette 1982, 8). Sinisalo's novel has been connected to Atwood's novel also in critiques (Karila 2013; Zutter 2016).

The journey of The Handmaid's Tale to the centre of the canon The Handmaids Tale and its totalitarian Gilead have become canonical in the genre tradition of dystopian fiction and a classic of feminist dystopia that has inspired novels, other works of art, research, and public debate. These dialogues have also taken the fOlTIlS of interviews and audiovisual

adaptations, a recent example of which is the television series The Handmaids Tale produced by Hulu and HBO (2017-). Adaptations and re-writings are forms of genuine dialogues in Fishelov's (2010) terms. According to Fishelov (2010, 73), genuine dialogues require comprehensive re-writing instead of local allusions. I argue that Sinisalo's

novel is an example of a genuine dialogue with its extensive usage of similar characters, settings, plot details, and intertexts as found inAtwood's novel.

Atwood's novel revised the dystopian genre by adding new elements and highlighting features that have been present but were relegated to the background in earlier dystopias. The question of gender and sexuality is

crucial in the early dystopian fiction ofYevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Burdekin, and George Orwell, but Atwood's novel concentrates on these questions by depicting a state where suppression and segregation are based on sex and gender. Making a woman the protagonist of a

dystopian novel was a novelty in the mid-1980s. Even though women wrote and published dystopian fiction prior to that time, the typical protagonist of a dystopian novel was male until Atwood's innovative work. Atwood's novel was something new and transgressive in the dystopian tradition.

After publication, The Handmaids Tale received both praise and criticism. Mary McCarthy (1986) states in her The New York Times review that Atwood's novel does not present a forceful future scenario, and thus it is not as effective a warning as previous classical dystopias. She writes

that The Handmaids Tale "has no satiric bite" peculiar to Brave New World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and The Clockwork Orange (1963). Marilyn Gardner (1986) in The Christian Science Monitor calls Oifred "a sappy stand-in for Winston Smith", and Gilead strikes her as "a coloring book version of Oceania" (Gardner 1986). Many other critics were more positive in their comments. Joyce Johnson compares Atwood's

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novel to Nineteen Eighty-Four, but does not find flaws: "Just as the world of Orwell's 1984 gripped our imaginations, so will the world of Atwood's handmaid. She has succeeded in finding a voice for her heroine that is direct, artless, utterly convincing." (Johnson 1986) Despite the mixed reception, Atwood's novel has become a dystopian classic. The story of Offred has not lost its power. Many newspapers and magazines have published interviews in which Atwood connnents on the continuous popularity of The Handmaids Tale, and its themes remain topical today as people feel themselves uncertain and threatened because of unpredictable political leaders and environmental problems. After Donald Trump's election as the President of the United States, The H andmaids Tale became the best seller on Amazon (Andrews 2017). Many readers have found similarities between the depiction of the fundamentalist and theocratic Republic of Gilead and the conservative, misogynist, and nationalist ideologies of Trurnp. In 2017, HBO and Hulu launched a popular and award-winning television series based on Atwood's novel. In the following seasons, released in 2018 and 2019, the episodes continue Offred's story from the point at which it ends in Atwood's novel. In 2019, Atwood published the novel The Testaments, which narrates the history and future of Gilead through multiple female characters who represent the different strata of Gileadean society. It seems that The Handmaids Tale is just as relevant today as it was in the mid-1980s. Previously, The Handmaids Tale had been translated into more than forty languages and made into a fihn (1990), ballet (2013), theatre play (2015), and opera (2000). These adaptations and discussions around Atwood's novel indicate that it is one of the great works of the dystopian tradition.

The Handmaid's Tale and The Core of the Sun as feminist dystopias The plots of Atwood's and Sinisalo's novels reveal some remarkable developments have occurred in the United States and Finland that have turned them into conservative and misogynist surveillance societies. Eusistocratia and Gilead have sprung up as a result of the revolutionary ideas of a small group that has succeeded in spreading propaganda and seizing power. Both men and women suffer in these hierarchical societies, but their power structure is patriarchal. As is the case in both Atwood's and Sinisalo's novels, women have been divided into groups by their fertility

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or other bodily or mental qualities, and women also control each other. Apart from the Commanders and their wives, males and females in Gilead have been separated from one another and cannot speak or touch each other outside controlled rituals. In many feminist dystopias, women are silenced and enclosed in a place that calls to mind a prison or a concentration camp. In Atwood's novel, Handmaids are imprisoned in the Education Center and in the houses of Commanders, while Iezebels are imprisoned in a brothel that was fOlmerly a hotel. In Eusistocratia, women are imprisoned in their homes and ruled over by their patronizing husbands. The violence depicted in The Handmaids Tale is performed not only by men but by women as welL The Handmaids are forced to take part in "particicutions" - a portmanteau of the words "participation" and "execution"- where they tear convicted men to pieces. The Aunts support the violent system of Gilead by educating Handmaids and punishing men and women who are accused of gender treachery, abortion, or other crimes. Supama Banerjee (2014, 66) states that, through the Aunts and Serena Joy -the wife of the Commander to whom Offred, the protagonist, is assignedthe isolationist ideology of cultural feminism and the gender essentialism of the religious Right are ironized and criticized. The extrapolation of Rightist views on family politics reveals how patriarchal organizations domesticate women and limit their life, resulting in the oppression of both men and women (ibid., 68-69). According to Dunja M. Mohr (2005, 234), the historical background of The Handmaids Tale is the rise of neoconservatism and the Christian Fundamentalism in US in the 1980s. Like The Handmaids Tale, The Core of the Sun is a reaction to the rise of neoconservatism and nationalism. It satirizes family policy that supports only traditional nuclear families and the reproduction of citizens by birth while trying to prevent population growth through immigration. Both novels take part in a discussion on the backlash against feminism and gender equality. Atwood's novel depicts the backlash against women's rights in the early 1980s (Neuman 2006, 858), and Sinisalo satirizes neomasculinist views on femininity and masculinity. An inspiration for Sinisalo's novel has been the writings of Finnish male activists who have commented on sexual policy during the twenty-first century (Sinisalo 2017, 199). One of the ideas of these male activists, who include Henry Laasanen and Timo Hfumikainen, is the equality of the sexes has led to frustration among men. In his blog texts and book titled Naisten seksuaalinen valta (2008, The Sexual Power of Women), Laasanen argues that women have an excessive sexual power in Finnish society as a result of feminist propaganda. According to him, women manipulate men into

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relationships to benefit from the property of their husbands. At the same time, independent women are willing to have sex only with masculine alpha males, while a large amount of beta males are left without a female partner (Laasanen 2010). Laasanen claims that this imbalance results in depression and suicidal behaviour among men (Laasanen 2012). Sinisalo exaggerates this presumed imbalance for satirical purposes. By naming normative males maskos, Sinisalo alludes to masculinist activists who have stood in opposition to feminism. She presents elois as women whose main goal is to find a husband, guarantee a decent sexual life for their partners, give birth to children, and take care of the family and home as housewives. The elois' education consists of classes on domestic work, obeying their husbands, and nursing babies. The guidelines given in the guidebook fragments embedded in the novel are in line with the thesis of Laasanen's book Naisten seksuaalinen valta. Coral Ann Howells (1996, 131) argues that Atwood criticizes not only the New Right and its puritan inheritance, but also North American radical feminism from the 1960s onwards and its simplified slogans. Atwood's irony and satire are complex and multilayered, and one cannot always tell their target. Erika Gottlieb mentions that Gilead's attitude towards women is "a reversal and a grotesque backlash to what reactionary forces must have seen as the extremes offeminism" (Gottlieb 2001, 111). Atwood's Offred is not a radical feminist like her mother and her friend Moira were. Instead, in her diary entries, she memorializes her relationship with her beloved Luke, who did not accept the feminist ideas of Offred's mother and with whom Offred was happy to live in a heterosexual and even slightly chauvinistic relationship. After the state closed women's bank accounts, Luke tries to calm his wife in a way that Offred finds patronizing. Hush, he said. [... ] You know I'll always take care of you. I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. (HT, 175) Offred is family-centred and heterosexual - and in this she is not in opposition to Gileadean ideology. She does not participate in the marches that are organized to oppose the new regime (HT, 176), and she listens to Luke's words when he suggests she does not protest. Four men offer Offred their help: her husband, Luke, who tries to organize an escape from Gilead before Offted is captured; the Commander, who allows her to read books in his office during their Scrabble nights; a doctor, who is willing to break the rules and conceive a child with Offred but who is neglected by her (HT, 70-71); and the Commander's chauffeur, Nick, with whom Offred begins a secret affair. In the end, Nick places

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Oifred into the back of a black van that will possibly take her to Canada and thus to freedom. The open ending of the novel does not reveal whether

she really ends up in Canada or is betrayed. These male helpers recall the fairy tale figures who offer their help to the protagonist, but in the dystopian frame, one carmot tell if they are helpers or betrayers.

Madonna Miner (1991, 164) has analysed the romance plot in The Handmaids Tale and noticed that the fairy tale-like romances between Oifred and the men - specifically Luke, the Commander, and Nick - are all based on patronizing dominances. Abigail Rine concurs with Miner and

suggests that all the interactions between men and women in Gilead are based on power inequality, and that Offred's relationship with Nick is a "masquerade, an illusion, a lapse into a familiar fairy-tale plot" (Rine 2013,

67). Men as helpers of female characters is a plot device worked out further

by Sinisalo. In The Core of the Sun, Jare, a young farmhand, has the same role as the Commander, Luke, and Nick: he is a lover and a helper. Like the Commander who gives Oifred books to read, Jare supplies books on botany and biology to Vera, who is not allowed to read scientific texts. Jare becomes Vera's lover and she finds heterosexual pleasure with him.

This is one of the plot details in Sinisalo's novel that has its equivalent in Atwood's noveL After falling in love with Nick, Offred loses interest in the underground Mayday movement that stands in opposition to the puritanical regime of Gilead. She wants to stay where Nick is, and she

is no longer willing to escape beyond the Gileadean borders. "The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape from the border to freedom. I

want to be here, with Nick, where I can get at him." (HT, 283) Similarly, after experiencing sexual desire in her relationship with Jare, Vera almost accepts the Eusistocratian regime, which guarantees a sufficient sexual life for the maskos: "I've started to realize why there's so much fuss about the

whole thing. Why it's such a central part of adult life that going without it could be considered a violation of human rights." (CoS, 231) Vera's love affair with Jare, a relationship that has a parallel inAtwood's depiction of Offred and Nick, can be interpreted as a liberating affair in which Vera finds her 0\Vll sexuality. However, ifread against Offted's story, the cliched depictions of Vera and Jare's love-making turn into a parodic romance narrative. Miner (1991) disagrees with interpretations that stress

the liberating power of Offred's heterosexual love affair by revealing the similarities between Commander Fred, Luke, and Nick, who all patronize women and to whom Offred submits. Miner (1991, 163-164) argues that the

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depictions oflove follow the conventions ofthe romantic Harlequin novels, fairy tales, and women's magazines, thus repeating the old formulas in which a woman submits to masculine power. As a narrator, Sinisalo's Vera! Vanna uses similar language and metaphors as Offred when describing her love affair. The romance plot is parodied also in an excerpt from a fictive Femigirl magazine's "Love Story" (CoS, 6G--61) and in Mira'sIManna's dreams of a romantic love affair, narrated by her sister. By parodically transfOlming the romance plot typical of fairy tales and Harlequin novels, Atwood and Sinisalo also comment on the motif of the heterosexual love affair that is common to many classical Western dystopias.

Alternative histories of reproduction Reproduction is one ofthe major themes of dystopian fiction. It is presented already in Zamyatin's We (1920) and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937). In the former, people may have children only with the partner the state assigns them. In the latter, women of the Hitler state are thought to be inferior to men and their only purpose is to give birth to new soldiers. The control of the female body is a central theme already in the early dystopias, but in the subgenre of feminist dystopia, this kind of control has been foregrounded as a means of totalitarian rule. Nationalism and the control of the female body go often hand in hand in dystopian societies in which women must give birth to new citizens and soldiers for the state. In Gilead, fertility among citizens has declined due to pollution and radioactivity. Handmaids who do not get pregnant are sent to colonies to clean up toxic waste. In Eusistocratia, women cannot decide on their reproduction; maskos determine the size of the family. Contraception is allowed only for health reasons. In Atwood's novel, Aunts educate Handmaids at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center with behavioural methods. Similar methods are used in the training of the elois in Eusistocratia. All the elois are educated at the National Institute of Home Economics, where propagandist instructional films are included in the curriculum. Aunts punish disobedient Handmaids with electric stun guns used for stunning cattle, and Handmaids carry a cattle brand tattoo on their ankles (HT, 266). The Handmaids' tattoos and names reveal their O\vner - a Handmaid O\vned by Commander Fred is named Offred. Similarly, all the elois in Eusistocratian Finland are owned by their husbands. Men are instructed to treat their wives like dogs or

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domestic animals in order to train them to behave properly. An excerpt from the fictive book "An EIoi in the House: Advice for a Hatmonious Family Life" (National Publishing, 2008) gives instructions for husbands. The key to training an eloi to be a wife is to be methodical, consistent, clear, and patient.

Obedience should be a natural characteristic of an eloi. There may, however, be tremendous variation in inherited characteristics from one individual to the next. An eloi can't always tell right from the \VTong; she bases her behavior on associations and whims. (CoS, 135)

Sterilization is a means of punishment for rebellious behaviour in both Gilead and Eusistocratia. In Gilead, women who are sent to work as prostitutes at Jezebel's, the state-O\vned brothel, are all sterilized. In Eusistocratia, Morlock women are sterilized in order to prevent their genes being transmitted to the wider population. In a fictive encyclopaedia chapter, morlocks are said to be born sterile, but according to a morlock friend of Vera, this sterility is due to a medical operation, not biology. Both Iezebels and morlocks are aberrations from the nOlmative meek and domesticated women demanded by the state. One of the themes peculiar to Sinisalo's novel is eugenics. The development of the eugenic policy in Finland is part of the thought experiment ofthe novel, and thus its science fictional element. This thought experiment separates Sinisalo's novel from Atwood's, but it has forerunners in earlier dystopias, the most famous example of which is Huxley's Brave New World and its depiction of standardized humans developed on an assembly line. The text chapters included in Sinisalo's novel reveal that the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland developed experiments on the selective breeding of humans from the 1930s onwards. The state modelled its experiments on those done with silver foxes by the Russian scientist Dimitry Belyayev. The historical background for the depiction of selective breeding is the eugenics and sterilization policy of early twentieth-century Europe. Most of the sterilized people were women, and Angela Franks (2004,181) describes eugenics as a means of controlling the female body and sexuality that is justified as a benefit to the community. In the Nordic countries, eugenics have been a part of developing affluent societies (ibid., 180). In Finland, the sterilization law took effect in 1935 (Mattila 1999, 22), and compulsory sterilizations and castrations ended in 1970 with the new legislative act

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(ibid.). An article publislied in the Finnisli magazine Kotiliesi (Hearth and Home) in April 1935 is included as a sliglitly altered version in Sinisalo's novel. The writer of the article justifies the enactment of the sterilization

law. Society no longer rids itself of weak individuals by means of a natural instinct for self-preservation, demanding that the weak make way for the strong. The preservation of om species thus must be ensmed by other means, the nearest at hand being the prevention of the birth of weak

individuals. (CoS, 224) An excerpt from a fictive book "A Short History of the Domestication of Women", published in 1997 by the National Publishing, explains the historical background of the separation of the female population. This document clarifies how the increased violence perfOlmed by dispossessed and frustrated men in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was

partly due to women neglecting their duty to offer sexual pleasure to men. The period between 1820 and 1880 is a shameful mark on the history of the Finnish people and its social system, and a strong warning to us. It showed us that ordinary, respectable young men can be completely corrupted when their basic rights are neglected. Marriage and the position of natural dominance and regular enjoyment of sexual intercomse so important to a man's personal well-being that marriage provides are fundamental rights that the state should have granted and protected for the good of society instead of allowing deviant behaviors to foment to the point of acts of

murder. (CoS, 154) In Gilead, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs are prohibited because they may complicate pregnancy. Similar legislation is enacted in Eusistocratia, where the prohibition law - a historical law that was in effect from 19191932 - has been expanded to include all narcotics that are dangerous to a pregnant woman's welfare, including cigarettes and chillies. The only ways to manipulate the brain's chemical balance are "physical exercise, regular sexual intercourse, and the satisfaction of serving as the head of a

household - or, for the weaker sex, the joys of motherhood" (CoS, 157). Both novels parody academic discourse that tries to explain human

behaviour and the structure of societies. The final chapter of Atwood's novel, "The Historical Notes on The Handmaid's Tale", is written in the form of a transcript of the proceedings of the Symposium on Gileadean Studies (HT, 311). Professor James Piexoto makes fim of Oifred's

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education (HT, 318) and of naming the story "The Handmaid's Tale" with the vulgar connotation of the word "tail" (HT, 313). Piexoto's sexist jokes and the ridiculing of Gileadean practices - "The Nature Walk and Outdoor Period-Costume Sing-Song have been rescheduled" (HT, 311) - reveal that academics mock the tragic history of Gilead. The last words of both novels are the words of male scientists who aim at explaining either the structure of the Sun as in The Core of the Sun or the structure ofOffred's story. In Sinisalo's novel, excerpts from "The Short History of the Domestication of Women" are written in a style that aims to be objective and scientific, drawing parallels between the domestication of silver foxes and that of women. The juvenilization or paedophorrnisrn associated with the domestication of women is biologically a straightforward and one might even say inevitable process. Juvenilization is nature's way of retreating from the evolutionary dead end that women's excess of independence and autonomy was leading to. (CoS, 238)

This scholarly book validates the eugenic process by referring to evolutionary biology, explaining the significance of the difference between men and women. The book states that child-like features are the female's tool in competition for males because they arouse a feeling of protectiveness. The women's need for protection is emphasized in both Gilead and Eusistocratia. Women are to be protected from their 0\Vll sexual needs that do not COnfOlTIl to the morals of the state, and from hypothetical sexual violence. Women are made guilty for the violence they encounter they either behave too seductively and thus attract rapists as the Gileadean regime declares, or they do not meet the requirements for being an obedient and feminine woman. However, the protective state turns out to be the major threat for the female citizens.

Little Red Riding Hood as a common intertext The palimpsestic relationship that binds The Handmaids Tale to The Core of The Sun is not limited to these two novels. Both novels are rich in references to and citations from other texts, from the Bible to fairy tales and from shamanistic poetry to early twentieth-century advertisements. Sinisalo's novel reveals its connection to Atwood's novel by using the same hypotext, the fairy tale of "Little Red Riding Hood".

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All the Handmaids are dressed in a red-hooded cloaks with white headdresses covering their faces. They are allowed to walk only the proscribed paths to the grocery stores or to the rituals in which they are ordered to participate. The rules and limitations they must obey are justified as a fmm of protection. According to Gileadean propaganda, women were

raped and assaulted constantly before the new regime began to control sexuality. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: don't open yom door to a stranger, even ifhe says he is the police. Make him slide his ID lUlder the door. Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. (HT, 34) This kind of protection from potential sexual violence is one of the fairy tale elements of Atwood's novel. Prohibitions given to a young woman

dressed in red are familiar from the fairy tale of "Little Red Riding Hood" (1697) by Charles Perrault and "Little Red Cap" (1812) by the Brothers Grimm. "Little Red Riding Hood" is often read as a symbolic story of sexual violence (Zipes 1983, 1; Zipes 2006, 28, 39). On her journey to her grandmother's house in the middle of the forest, Red Riding Hood is seduced by a hungry and smooth-talking wolf who, in Grimm's version, entices the girl to pick beautiful flowers growing in the woods. Symbolic and concrete paths and flowers are recurring images in Atwood's and Sinisalo's novels. The women of Gilead and Eusistocratia are compelled to

follow regulated tracks and to be meek and obedient. At the very beginning of Atwood's novel is a chapter depicting Oifred's journey to the grocery store from the Commander's house. Offred walks on the dusty pink runner of the hallway in the Commander's house. The hallway as well as the way to the grocery store recall the path in the forest Little Red Riding Hood has to walk. The forest flowers of the fairy tale have equivalents in Atwood's novel in the form of glass flowers. Offred sees herself as a parody of a fairy tale figure in red clothing. Like a path through the forest, like a carpet of royalty, it shows me the way. [ ... ] At the end of the hallway, above the front door, is a fanlight of colomed glass: flowers, red and blue. There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go do"Wll the stairs, rolUld, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale

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figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is

the same as danger. (HT, 18 19) Little Red Riding Hood is a part of the larger fairy tale intertext that both Atwood and Sinisalo use in their novels. Sharon Wilson (2008,98) suggests that Atwood uses fairy tale elements in almost all her works. By using fairy tale intertexts, Atwood can discuss questions of sexuality and power in patriarchal societies. Fairy tale intertexts are a crucial part of Sinisalo's oeuvre as well: Not Before Sundown retells the Finnish fairy tales of Pes si and Illusia (1944) by Yrjo Kokko and "Vuorenpeikko ja paimentytto" (1933, "The Mountain King and a Shepherd girl)" by Anni Swan. In The Core a/the Sun, Vera's sister MiraIMarma is described as a girl who is both fond of red clothing and flowers, and afraid of wolves. The story of Pikku Punanna (Little Redianoa)l, a revision of the Red Riding Hood plot by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, is included in the novel (CoS, 41-42). This embedded fairy tale is an explicit sign of the connection between "Little Red Riding Hood" and Sinisalo's novel as well as of the connection to Atwood's parodical and tragic version of the story. In the Eusistocratian version of the tale, Little Redianna walks in a forest and meets a wolf, who is a prince in disguise. The prince asks Rediarma to marry him, but Redianna rejects the proposition because she is ordered to bring food to her sick grandmother and not to stray from the path. The lesson of the story is, however, that Redianna should have listened to the prince in the wolf costume, because a young woman who does not obey a m an is sentenced to be a spinster. The warning for women presented by Eusistocratia differs from that of Gilead. In Eusistocratian Finland, sexuality and femininity are foregrounded, not suppressed. The sexualization of children's and young adults' culture is one of the targets of satire in the novel. Girls' magazines give sex advice to young readers, and elois are encouraged to behave in an openly sexual way, to seduce men in order to find a husband already at a young age. In the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, Red Riding Hood is enchanted by the flowers growing in the forest. She begins to pick them, and the wolf has the opportunity to run to her grandmother's house. Both The Handmaids Tale and The Core of the Sun play with the symbolism that 1 Hanna-Riikka Roine and Hanna Samola discuss the Red Riding Hood intertext more thoroughly in the article "Johanna Sinisalo and the New Weird: Gemes and Myths" published in Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World,

edited by Dale Knickerbocker (2018).

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flowering plants carry in Western culture. In her narration, Offred mentions flowers - red tulips, black-eyed Susans, and lilies - several times. She watches Serena Joy cutting seed pods from dead tulips and associates this with sterilizing women. Spring has now been undergone. The tulips have had their moment and are done, shedding their petals one by one, like teeth. One day I came upon Serena Joy, kneeling on a cushion in the garden, her cane beside her on the grass. She was snipping off the seed pods with a pair of shears. [... ] Was it the arthritis, creeping up? Or some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, conunitted on the swelling genitalia of the flowers? The fruiting body. To cut off the seed pods is supposed to make the bulb store energy. Saint Serena, on her knees, doing penance. (HT, 161) In Sinisalo's novel, the flowers of chilli plants have a similar symbolic significance. One of the Gaians, Valtteri, inseminates the chilli plants in a secret greenhouse. Chilli is associated with female genitals throughout the novel, and in this scene, the human manipulation of the chilli flower is associated with sexual violence and castration, both being forms of violence on women in Eusistocratia. He takes out the tweezers and carefully pries open the sepals and petals and plucks them off. He looks at the flower through the magnifying glass now and then to make sure his work is precise. Then he removes the stamen. It looks to me like the forcible rape of the flower. I say so. Valtteri laughs. "More like a castration. It leaves only the female sex organ, the pistil, behind. Now let's find a daddy for this baby." (CoS, 236)

If we read Offred as a Red Riding Hood figure, we have several wolves who tempt her to leave the path: Nick offers her a way out of Gilead, the Commander asks her to play Scrabble and visit his office outside rituals, and the gynaecologist suggests copulation to Offred. The path is a central symbol in both novels. All the Handmaids must walk along the given path in pairs, not looking to their sides. The stairway of the Commander's house is a path Offred should follow but she deviates from it by stepping into the Commander's office. Vera deviates from the path by rebelling against the Eusistocratian legislation. She wears an eloi's disguise in order to hide her gender and thus she indulges in gender fraud. By disguising her gender, she behaves like a wolf who wears the clothing of the grandmother in the story of "Little Red Riding Hood". Fairy tale references emphasize the romance plot of novels by connecting them to a geme that often depicts romances or sexual threats and fears. If the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" represents

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a man, one can interpret that Vera and Offred are both in danger in their heterosexual affairs with men who promise to help them but whose vows may be traps.

Conclusion Johanna Sinisalo's novel The Core of the Sun has several points of resemblance with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale, including common intertexts and similarities in narration, plot, and character positions. The Core of the Sun is, however, an individual and innovative work with its depictions of eugenic policy and its setting in a Finnish city. By changing the New England setting to Tampere, Sinisalo uses the method of geographic transposition. The historical background of Gilead's fundamental theocracy - the puritan New England of the seventeenth century - has turned into the Nordic history of eugenics and racial purity in Sinisalo's novel. The number of similarities between the novels indicates that the dialogue between them is genuine in Fishelov's telTIls, since Sinisalo has rewritten comprehensively many elements of Atwood's novel. Reading The Core of the Sun through The Handmaids Tale affects the interpretation of many of the plot elements of Sinisalo's novel. One of the elements combining these novels is irony and the ambiguous relation to feminism and gender politics. The heterosexual affairs of Olfred and Vera bring out different aspects of their attitudes towards sexuality and rebellion against the sexual nOlTIlS of the society. A heterosexual relationship with a rebellious partner is one of the classical themes of Western dystopias. However, after falling in love with a male partner, Offred and Vera even adopt some of the nOlTIlative attitudes of their surroundings. Eventually, their relationships with male lovers may help them to escape from the totalitarian states, but the love affairs are not so simple. Vera's narration in The Core of the Sun ends with the patronizing words of Jare: "'Yes, she's all right again now,' Jare says, and squeezes my hand. 'The little lady's just a bit nervous. She's not used to flying.'" (CoS, 302) If read through Olfred's story, the cliched depictions of Vera's and Jare's love-making turn into a parodic romance narrative. Miner (1991) states that Atwood's romance plot repeats the old formulas in which a woman submits to masculine power, although both Sinisalo and Atwood ironically point out the patronizing tendencies of everyday life. The romance plot also comments on the dystopian plot element that has

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continued from Zamyatin to this day. In many classical Western dystopias, love is the key to the protagonists' rebellion, but it can also suppress the willingness to protest One of the differences between The Core of the Sun and The Handmaids Tale is their temporal structure. The Handmaids Tale is set in the near future, and the "Historical Notes" at the end of the novel are dated 2195. As for The Core of the Sun, the most futuristic time depicted is only four years ahead from the time of its publication, in 2017. More than a futuristic scenario, The Core of the Sun is an alternative history of Finland. The past is presented in text fragments from books published in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1990s. In Offred's story, the past is recalled by the narrator, who in her narration moves repeatedly back and forth in time. The fragmentation of her story is partly due to the fact explained in the epilogue named "Historical Notes" - Professor Piexoto organized the recordings of Offred for the purposes of an academic conference. The frnal chapters of both novels are narrated by men. The last chapter ofSinisalo's novel is afictive excerpt ofa Swedish astronomer's description of the dark matter-smashing core of the sun, which is hidden under a thin photosphere (CoS, 303). The ending of the novel refers to a chilli variety, named "The Core ofthe Sun", cultivated by Vera and her friends. This chilli gives supernatural powers to those who eat it: such individuals are able to rebel against the authorities with the help of this mind-expanding drug. Atwood's novel ends similarly with the speculations of a male professor as to whether Offred was able to begin a new life outside the Gileadean regime. Both Offred and Vera are at the ends of their story put into vehicles that are supposed to carry them to freedom - Vera in an aeroplane and Offred in a van, but the endings ofthese novels remain open: their arrival at the new destination is not narrated.

Works cited Andrews, Travis M. 2017. "Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' is the latest dystopian novel to top bestseller list." The Washington Post, 7 February 2017. https:llwww.washingtonpost.com/news/moming-mixi wp120 17/02/07/margaret-atwoods-the-handmaids- tale- is- the-newestdystopian -novel-to-top-bestseller-listsl?utm_ term~. aabOc5 886 84a, retrieved 14 May 2017.

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Atwood, Margaret. 1996/1985. The Handmaids Tale (HT). London: Vintage Books. Atwood, Margaret. 2012. "Haunted by The Handmaid' Tale." The Guardian, 20 January 2012. https:llwww.theguardian.com/books/2012/ jan/20Ihandmaids-tale-margaret-atwood, retrieved 12 May 2017. Atwood, Margaret. 2017. "Margaret Atwood on What The Handmaid's Tale Means in the Age of Trump." The New York Times, 10 March 2017. https:llwww.nytimes.comI201 7/0311 Olhooks/review/margaret-atwoodhandmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html?J~O, retrieved 12 May 2017. Banerjee, Suparna. 2014. Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley andMargaretAtwood Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Barbe Hammer, Stephanie. 1990. "The World as It will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaids Tale." Modern Language Studies. Vo!. 20, No. 2 (Spring 1990): 39-49. Fishelov, David. 1993. Metaphors ofGenre : The Role ofAnalogies in Genre Theory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fishelov, David. 1997. "Literary genres - alive and kicking: The productivity of a literary concepts." Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire. Tome 75 fasc. 3, 1997. Langues et litt6ratures modernes Modeme taal- en letterkunde: 653-663. Fishelov, David. 2010. Dialogues with Great Books: The Dynamics of Canon Formation. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Franks, Angela. 2004. Margaret Sanger s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility. Jefferson: McFarland. Gardner, Marilyn. 2016. "The Handmaid's Tale: Atwood's Tale of Future Shock - Feminist Style." The Christian Science Monitor, 24 February 1986. Genette, Gerard. 199711982. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Charma Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln & London: University ofN ebraska Press. Gottlieb, Erika. 2001. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal, Kingston, London & Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Howells, Coral Ann. 1996. "Margaret Atwood." Macmillan Modern Novelists. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Macmillan. Johnson, Joyce. 1986. "Margaret Atwood's Brave New World." The Washington Post, 2 February 1986. https:llwww.washingtonpost.com/ archivel entertainment/booksl19 8 6/02/02/margaret-atwoods-brave-

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new-world/46b8aOdO-4f3e-4d8c-9fae-33c394b7cf2ll?utm term~. cOab9c307fSd, retrieved 14 May 2017. Karila, Jubani. 2013. "Joharma Sniisalon romaani hehkuu synkasti ja tehokkaasti." Helsingin Sanomat, IS October 2013. http://www.hs.fi/ kulttuurilkirja-arvostelulart-2000002681 OS3 .html, retrieved 14 May 2017. Laasanen, Henry. 2010. "Tasoluokitteluteorioiden anatomiaa." Uuden Suomen blogi, 10 August 2010. http://henrylaasanen.pubeenvuoro. uusisuomi.fiJ39724-tasoluokitteluteorioiden-anatomiaa, retrieved 12 May 2017. Laasanen, Hemy. 2012. "Huonorotuinen ja puhumaton suomalainen mies perhesurmien takana?" Uuden Suomen Pubeenvuoro, IS January 2012. http://hemylaasanen.pubeenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/94 21S- huonorotunienja-puhumaton-suomalainen-mies-perhesurmien-takana, retrieved 13 May 2017. Lyytikainen, Pirjo. 2015. "Realismia fantasia ja allegorian maisemissa. Erich Auerbach, 'Helvetin' realismi ja Iohanna Sinisalon Lil1llunaivot." Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakauslehti Avain 11201S: 11-29. Mattila, Markku. 1999: Kansamme parhaaksi. Rotuhygienia Suomessa vuoden 1935 sterilointilakiin asti. Helsinki: Suomen Historiallnien Seura. McCarthy, Mary. 1986. "Breeder, Wives and Unwomen." New York Times Book Reviews. 9 February 1986: 1, 3S. http://www.nytimes.com/ books/00/03126/specials/mccarthy-atwood.html, retrieved 11 May 2017. Miner, Madonne. 1991. "'Trust me' : Readnig the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." Twentieth Century Literature, Vo!. 37, No 2 (Summer, 1991): 148-168. Mohr, Dunja M. 200S. Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1. Jefferson: McFarland& Company, Inc. Neuman, Shirley. 2006: '''Just a Backlash": Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and the Handmaid's Tale." University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 7S, Number 3, Summer 2006, 8S4-868. Potts, Rober!. 2003. "Light in Wilderness." The Guardian, 26 April 2003 .https :llwww.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/26Ifiction. margaretatwood, retrieved 13 May 2017. Rine, Abigai!. 2013. Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women:S Fiction. London, New Delhi, New York & Sydney: Bloomsbnry.

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Roine, Hanna-Riikka and Hanna Samo1a. 2018: "Johanna Sinisa10 and the New Weird: Gemes and Myths." In Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from Beyond the Anglophone Universe, Dale Knickerbocker (ed.). Illinois: University of Illinois press: 183-201. Sinisa10, Johanna. 2014. Rare Exports: Finnish Weird. Helsinki: Helsinki Science Fiction Society. Sinisa10, Johanna. 201612013. The Core of the SW1 (CoS). Translated by Lo1a Rogers. New York: Black Cat. Sinisa10, Johanna. 2017. "Alistus, toiseus, kapinallisuus! Vallankayton ja vastarinnan mekanismit dystopiateksteissa." J outsen - Svanen: 189201. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History ofLiterary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wi1son, Sharon R. 2008. "Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning in Recent Texts." In Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, Stephen Benson (ed.). Detroit: Wayne State University Press: 98120. Zipes, Jack. 1983. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. London: Heinemarm. Zipes, Jack. 2006: Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York and London: Routledge. Zutter, Natalie. 2016: "Replacing Handmaids with E10is: The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisa10." Tor.com, 4 January 2016. http://www.tor. com120 1610 1/04/book -reviews-the-core-of-the-sun-j ohanna-sinisa101, retrieved 14 May 2017.

4. "MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN." (CRITICAL) POLITICAL DYSTOPIA IN BRYAN TALBOT'S THE ADVENTURES OF LUTHERARKWRlGHT ANDALANMOORE'S VFOR VENDETTA

]YRKI KORPUA

This chapter discusses the crisis of national identity and portrayal of political dystopia in two central English' graphic novels from the 1970s and 1980s, Bryan Talbot's The Adventures 0/ Luther Arkwright Cas a series in 1978-1989, hereafter LA) andAlan Moore's V/or Vendetta Coriginally 1982-1983, as a book in 1988-1989, illustrated by David Lloyd and Tony Weare, hereafter VfV). Both texts are read here as critical commentaries of their contemporary cultural contexts. I argue that both graphic novels display some of the generic qualities of political dystopia and function as warnings against nationalistic tendencies. The twentieth century was an era of dystopias, plaintive nostalgia, and crises of national identity. In the West, the interwar period from 1918 to 1939 saw the rise of fascism and the fear oftotalitarianism in Europe and the US, but anxiety did not end with the Second World War. For example, in the USA, the post-war era, especially the 1950s, is remembered for anti-communist movements such as McCarthyism, which resulted in hate campaigns, witchhunts, and exaggerated accusations. In some ways, conservative politics still rule the country. Today, the problems of political extremism, such as violence, hate campaigns, and even totalitarianism, ethnic cleansing, and mass murders, are still with us. In this era of mass media and social media, these phenomena are perhaps even more vividly perceived than ever before. In a way, we live (once again) in an era of dystopian narrative. 2 1 It should be noted that even though the graphic novels, focusing on crisis of "English national identity", are English and the artists are English they still discuss Great Britain and British culture also as a larger entirety. For example in V for Vendetta, where the motto of the fascist regime is to make "Britain great again". 2 On the rise of dystopian narrative, see Moylan 2000; Baccolini & Moylan 2003,

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The concept of dystopia has proven hard to fully explain. As Claeys and Sargeant (2017, 3-4) point out, a dystopia is sometimes conceived of as a "bad" or "worse" place, but the problem concerns its logical relativity:

worse than what or worse for whom? Claeys and Sargeant (ibid.) propose a description of dystopia as a "utopia that has gone wrong, or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society". This is quite precise

when examining the worlds that The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and V for Vendetta portray. They both depict places that are "worse" for most contemporary readers than our O\Vll subjective experience of this world. Still, the worlds portrayed may be seen as utopias for certain segments of the (fictive) society: for example, the fimdamentalist Christians in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and the neo-Nazis in V for Vendetta. In Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), Tom Moylan developed the concept of the critical dystopia. Critical dystopias, Moylan (2000, 198199) argues, "burrow within the dystopian tradition", but do so only "in order to bring utopian and dystopian tendencies to bear on their expose of the present moment". Moylan sees critical dystopias as a development of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but a foretaste could be felt in both The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright and Vfor Vendetta. Moylan (ibid.) explains that critical dystopias "linger in the terrors of the present even as they exemplify what is needed to tranSfOlTIl it". In the same manner, both The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and V for Vendetta are firmly rooted in their contemporary present, as we will see later on. In addition, Lyman Tower Sargent defines dystopia as "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" (Sargent 1994, 9). This definition fits, for the most part, the worldviews of both graphic novels

analysed here. But only for the most part, since Bryan Talbot andAlan Moore, although writing of dystopian "worse societies", were also very critical ofthe political atmosphere of their period. Both novels are critical and political, as

critical utopias and dystopias tend to be (see Moylan 2018). Although usually visioning a futuristic or achronic period, dystopian narratives are products of

the present context. In her psychoanalytical study on the subject, Loewenstein (2017,3-5) notes that dystopian narratives are "a wake-up call designed to shake us out of our complacency and compel us to look at, and acknowledge, a certain dangerous or even disastrous direction that our society is taking".

Both graphic novels analysed here could be read as such wake-up calls. 1 2; Kumar 2013 , 19 20.

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For decades, graphic novels have portrayed political extremism and possible dystopian pasts, presents, and futures. 3 Many works have focused on commenting on these social and political elements and aspects. Therefore, it is important to note how graphic novels and comics are used - and could be used - as a medium for dystopian fiction. This chapter focuses on two central English examples of politically engaged graphic novels, Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alan Moore's Vfor Vendetta. Both portray political dystopias that comment on the contemporary political environment. These works were chosen due to their central position in the literary history of English graphic novels and also because they engage with political dystopia in a way which suits the spectrum of the volume at hand. In Dystopia: A Natural History, Gregory Claeys (2016, 8) divides dystopias into three main fonns: the political dystopia, the environmental dystopia, and the technical dystopia. Claeys associates the totalitarian political dystopia with "the failure of utopian aspirations" and notes that this is precisely the fonn that has received the greatest historical attention (ibid.). That seems to be accurate, since the most critically acclaimed works of the genre, such as Zamyatin's We (1924), Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), focus on the mode of (totalitarian) political dystopia. The texts studied in this chapter are inspired by their contemporary political and cultural context. They comment on the crisis of national identity and thus fimction as warnings against possible futures. In the 1970s and 1980s, the local populist and conservative political atmosphere made Talbot write his science fiction graphic novel The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alan Moore introduce his dystopian ambiguous "superhero" story V for Vendetta. Both works illustrate the "Crisis of English Identity" (see di Liddo 2009, 102), which becomes apparent after the Second World War. Both graphic novels present a dystopian society ruled by a totalitarian

3

For example, Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius' The Incal (1981 1989), Enki

Bilal's The Nikopol Trilogy (1980 1992), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1986 1987), Katsuhiro Otomo'sAkira (1982 1990), Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World! (1998 2008), Naoki Urasawa's Twentieth Century Boys (1999 2007), Hajirne Isayama's Attack on Titan (2009 ), and the satirical post-apocalyptic dystopia of the Judge Dredd comics (1977 ). This dystopian sub-genre has been echoed also by mainstream comics, such as Marvel Comics' X-Men series "Days of Future Past"

(1981) and "The Age of Apocalypse" (1995 1996), both set in an alternate reality, and DC Comics' Elseworlds stories (1989 ).

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dictatorship. The political tone of the novels is grim. The worlds are ruled by fear; the persecution of Othemess is recurring, and the state exercises authoritarian control over individuals. In both graphic novels, the ruling regimes use nationalist symbols and religious and nationalistic rhetoric to

indicate their power. The protagonists object to the totalitarian government. In addition, because of their oppositional actions, nationalist symbols are

destroyed in the process; deliberately in V for Vendetta and by accident in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. The process is quite anarchic, since when the symbols are destroyed, no new symbols are given to substitute

them. Being political dystopias, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and V for Vendetta also refer to religious rhetoric and discourse and allude to fundamental religious movements. This simultaneously fundamentally political and religious tone could be associated with Claeys' thoughts on political religions (see Claeys 2016, 243-244). Claeys combines his ideas with Iameson's (1983, 275) arguments on dictatorships embodying secular and/or political religions, which Claeys (2016, 243) calls "quasi-religious fanaticism". This seems to be the case in both graphic novels, where quasireligious fanaticism is used as a tool to dominate and control those who are subordinate to the goverrnnent. Emilo Gentile sees political religion as "the sacralization of a political system founded on an unchallengeable monopoly of power, ideological monism, and the obligatory and unconditional subordination ofthe individual and the collectivity to its code

of commandments" (Gentile 2006, xv). This is quite an accurate description of the political religious dystopia portrayed in both The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Vfor Vendetta. This chapter therefore illuminates and analyses, first, the overall political tone of the novels; second, the crisis of national identity and how this is illustrated in the chosen graphic novels; and third, the destruction of national symbols in the novels, as well as their religious and nationalistic rhetoric, and the marmer in which they are associated with the crisis of

national identity.

Political tone of the novels Both The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and V for Vendetta are futuristic dystopias. V for Vendetta depicts a dystopian near future, where Britain is under the rule of the authoritarian, totalitarian fascist party Norsefire,

which came to power in the aftermath of a global nuclear war. The

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narrative focuses on the protagonist, V, an anarchist and terrorist with possibly supernatural powers, and his fight against the oppressive fascist government. V has two primary goals. The first is to achieve his personal vendetta by murdering all persons responsible for his 0\Vll fate - and at the same time kill everyone who might know V's identity. The second goal, more importantly, is to liberate the country from the regime. The central storyline in The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright depicts an achronic dystopian future where the English Civil War of the seventeenth century has been prolonged for centuries. The regime is Christian, authoritarian, and fundamentalist, and it is led by Lord Protector Cromwell, a descendent of the original Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1653 until his death in 1658. The political tone of V for Vendetta was inspired by 1980s England and Great Britain: a region diminished, embittered, and isolated by the global economic crisis that was trying to cope with the collapse of its fonnerly widespread and powerful Empire. At the same time, Britain was swept by new waves of class conflicts and xenophobia. Alan Moore explains in an interview that, in V for Vendetta, his aim was to take the "two extremes of the human political spectrum", fascism and anarchism, "and set them against each other [ ... ] just to see what works" (MacDonald 2005). Although the novel possibly ends with the overthrow of the fascist government, it still concludes on an ultimately uncertain tone: we do not know what happens next. Both V for Vendetta and The Adventures of Luther Arkwright portray a society ruled by an authoritarian and/or totalitarian government. Authoritarianism is a fonn of government characterized by strong central power and limited personal and public freedoms, "the form of dictatorships familiar to the past" (Shorten 2012, 47), whereas totalitarianism could be seen as a more modem invention (see Gleason 1995; Shorten 2012). Then again, totalitarianism could also be considered the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. It is a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, and it is therefore linked to the dictatorship of a single party that exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life (see Gleason 1995, 3-5, 15-17; Shorten 2012, 50). Some researchers, for example Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, maintain that totalitarianism is linked "to the process of "mass legitimation" that (alongside modem technology) separated totalitarian regimes from traditional authoritarianism" (Shorten 2012, 74; see Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965, 10-11). European totalitarianism also inspired works

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of fiction. Abbot Gleason sees that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced on the one hand by real-life totalitarianism, and on the other hand by Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (Gleason 2012,4, 83), anotber novel clearly attached to the rise of modern totalitarianism in tbe early twentieth century. The regime in V for Vendetta is a totalitarian single party government that uses modern technology to monitor its citizens and forbids nearly all freedoms. For example, in addition to restricting freedom of speech, it prohibits music, theatre, literature, and movies. In The Adventures of Luther Arbvright, the regime is an authoritarian, theocratic dictatorship more closely linked to past dictatorships tban to modem twentieth-century totalitarianism. England is ruled by a theocratic government led by Lord Protector Cromwell, a descendent of Oliver Crornwell, who is viewed as the ideological progenitor. Theocracy is a form of government in which a religious institution rules the county. In the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell himself considered tbe Commonwealth to be a republic, but later historians have seen it as a theocratic dictatorship. Cromwell's radical actions as a dictator were driven by his passion for "godly" refmmation. His political speeches, like the speeches given by his successor in The Adventures of Luther Arbvright, are full of biblical references (on Cromwell's rule, see Morri1l2004). The governmental form in The Adventures of Luther Arbvright might be seen also as a theonomy, which is a fmm of government where the society is ruled by Christian "divine law", whereas theocracy is a "Godcentered form of government" (see Jones 2013, 209). One example of theonomy is therefore a government ruled by authoritarian, fundamentalist Christianity. Altbough tbeonomy originally refers to the Biblical past, in fiction it can be seen as a possible fmm of futuristic dystopian society, as is evident in MargaretAtwood's The Handmaids Tale (1985). The theonomic government ruled by Lord Protector Cromwell in The Adventures ofLuther Arbvright is quite different from the one in Atwood's novel because there is a constant power struggle. Cromwell's rule is challenged by a monarchist rebellion and England is devastated by perpetual civil war. Nevertheless, the Lord Protector's mode of government is theonomic: it is authoritarian, fundamentalist, and Christian. The persecution of Othemess is central in both stories. In The Adventures ofLuther Arbvright, tbe government has pledged to destroy all royalist and Catholic opposition. The regime is in an endless war with "nonbelievers". In V for Vendetta, the totalitarian regime is racis~ xenophobic, and homophobic. The fascist Norsefire party has armihilated all tbe people

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perceived as "coloured", "gay", or "artists" in their concentration and death camps. The assumption of the party is that the Nordic race, which supposedly includes the English (or "British"), is white, heterosexual, obedient, and unartistic. Individual liberty is an unnecessary luxury, as Adam Susan, tbe leader of the party, explains in his philosophy of totalitarianism and anti-freedom. This is a philosophy typical of dystopian narratives. Susan explains it as such: I believe in strength. I believe in lUlity. And if that strength, that unity of purpose, demands a uniformity of thought, word and deed then so be it. I will not hear talk of freedom. I will not hear talk of individual liberty. They

are luxuries. I do not believe in luxuries. The war put paid to luxury. The war put paid to freedom. The only freedom left to my people is the freedom to starve. The freedom to die. The freedom to live in a world of chaos. Should I allow them that freedom? I think not. I think not. Do I reserve for myself the freedom I deny to others? I do not. I sit here with my cage and I am but a servant. I, who am master of all I see. I see desolation. I see ashes. I have so very much. I have so very little. (VfV, 37 38)

The crisis of English identity The basis for the political tone of both novels is the crisis of English identity, which emerged in the country after the Second World War. From the seventeentb to the twentietb century, the British Empire, with its central government in England, was a dominant colonial and imperial power in the world. From the nineteenth to tbe early twentietb century, it was the foremost global power. For example, in the early twentieth century, the British Empire included more than one fifth of both the world's population and tbe Earth's total land area (see, e.g. Brendon 2008). Immediately after the Second World War, when the term itself was first employed, tbe British Empire was considered one of the world's superpowers alongside the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Nevertbeless, tbis all ended quite rapidly. After the first decade of post-war politics, tbe Suez crisis of1956, and a period of decolonisation, Great Britain lost its dominant role in global politics. Even so, it should be added that although English political power and the British Empire declined, English and British culture rose in the 1960s as a new global cultural power ruled by a phenomenon called, among other things, "counterculture", the "spirit of the underground", and the "British invasion"; it was youth culture expressed in pop and rock music, underground movies, literature, and fashion. The comics and

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graphic novels of the 1970s and 1980s can be seen as a continuation of this tradition. Still, in the 1960s and later, British politics and social life was still clinging on to elements of nostalgia, nationalistic conservative rhetoric, and emerging populist neo-Christian movements. Jed Esty, for example,

calls Britain "a shrinking island" in his study (2003), which tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and the decline of the British Empire

in literary culture starting from the 1930s and discusses the change in the whole cultural identity of England and Britain from the 1950s onwards (see Jesty 2003). This culturally "shrinking island" is what di Liddo (2009, 102) calls the crisis of English identity behind the creation of V for Vendetta, and it is also the background of my other source novel, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. In Great Britain, the period from 1979 to 1990 is known as the "Thatcher era". The country was ruled by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the "Iron Lady", and her politics of Thatcherism, which is associated with conservative religious morality. Stuart Hall argues that Thatcherisrn was an ideological project promoting "authoritarian populism" and praising "Victorian values" (Hall 1983, 56, 84). Di Liddo (2009, 24) comments that V for Vendetta raises the issue of gender and explores it with reference to "Thatcher's repressive, homophobic politics". Another important reminder of the Thatcher years, di Liddo argues, is "social decay" (ibid). Maggie Gray (2010, 31-32) sees V for Vendetta as shaped by the political context of early Thatcherism, participating in the debates of British left-wing politics and the anarchist movement, as well as by AIan Moore's O\Vll anti-fascist activism. This is certainly so, and it almost seems that we carmot fully understand the graphic novel without knowing the political context ofl980s Britain. Inspired by Thatcherism, V for Vendetta's position as a contemporary political dystopia is well acknowledged. Markus Oppolzer (2013, 103) summarises this, writing that "[m]ost critics agree that [V for Vendetta] represents a dystopian science fiction novel in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984 or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, using a futuristic setting to comment on contemporary events, specifically Britain under Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s". Alan Moore portrays "an England in which society has turned sharply towards fascism: the result is a dystopian time without hope in which the persecution of minorities is enforced with extreme prejudice" (Camey 2006, np). Carney also remarks that Moore 's V for Vendetta is

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a satire, pointed towards "the repressive intolerance enshrined by [ ... ] Thatcher" and causing England to "veer toward fascism" (ibid.). As a work of the graphic novel and comic book genre, V for Vendetta is an atypical "costumed superhero comic", as the main character here - who "commits outrageous crimes and tries to destroy the totalitarian government [ ... ] dissolves the dichotomy of hero and villain" (Oppolzer 2013, 103-104). Moore's style of dystopian graphic novel is a quite new and different approach to the genre. Of the two works analysed here, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright was created before the Thatcher era started, but it is clearly affected by the crisis of English identity. Historically speaking, Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, although not that well known outside its geme, is a ground-breaking and extremely influential graphic novel. Nowadays it is "largely recognized as the first true British graphic novel published" (Sorensen 2005, 50). Although Talbot did not gain the same level of connnercial mainstream success in the US as many of his British contemporaries, such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, his influence is profound. Talbot's blend of atmospheric moodiness, politics, philosophy, and science fiction narrative prompted author Warren Ellis to describe the book as "probably the single most influential graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date" (Mazur & Darmer 2017, 73). The crisis of English identity in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is conveyed by a nostalgic undertone. The novel looks at history with warm emotions. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (2014, 206) emphasizes this nostalgia. Chattopadhyay discusses the graphic novel as belonging to the geme of British steampunk, "usually based in London", and imbuing "the far future with Victorian sentimentality" (ibid.). Kiehlbauch (2015, 90) sees Talbot's graphic novel as "perhaps the first example of a steampunk literary work that incorporates [ ... ] visual images". She summarises the series as "adventures of an albino secret agent who travels to parallel worlds such as a puritanical alternative Britain where Cromwell won the Civil War [ ... ] a land of Armstrong-Siddley Vibro Beamer weapons, Rolls Royce motor carriages and a populous living in squalor and wearing fashions that haven't moved forwards in centuries" (ibid.). Bryan Talbot's The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta are both situated in alternative milieus, different eras of history, and even parallel worlds, but they comment on our contemporary society and culture, especially in the context of 1970s and 1980s Britain and the crisis of English cultural identity. Both the totalitarian neo-Cromwellian

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England in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and the fascistic and post-apocalyptic, post nuclear-war future in V for Vendetta are political dystopias that act as critical connnentaries of the English 1970s and 1980s worldview, but these novels can also be read as cautionary examples for today's society. Both dystopian graphic novels are also interested in how

they are rooted in the "real" history and milieus of England. As such, they are prime examples of graphic novels that evoke past, present, and future, and comment on all of these aspects.

Order versus chaos, anarchy versus totalitarianism, and the destruction of national symbols In both The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright and Vfor Vendetta, the attention of the reader is directed to the main characters fighting against their current

govermnents. In The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, the situation is not so simple, since there are many parallel worlds and timelines, but the main

struggle happens in the parallel world where Luther Arkwright fights the neo-Cromwellian regime.

In The Adventures of Luther Arkwright the eponymous protagonist is a messianic hero who can travel between different parallel worlds. This

ability seems to be unique inside the story world. Luther Arkwright and his loyal companion, Rose Wylde, a powerful telepath, both work for the rulers of a parallel world called "Zero-Zero" (PARA 00.00.00), who are - or try to be -protectors of order. Their stable and peaceful parallel world has developed extremely advanced technology. Inhabitants of ZeroZero, and primarily their AI "hypercomputer" W.O.T.A.N, monitor other parallel worlds trying to locate the influence of their "evil" counterforces, the so-called Disruptors. In the series, the Disruptors -a force of Chaos-

try to use a mythical doomsday device called Firefrost to destroy the whole multiverse, including all parallel worlds. Although there is an enOlTIlOUS number of parallel worlds in the series, Zero-Zero is mostly

concerned with the parallel world 00.72.87, where the English Civil War has been indefinitely prolonged because of the Disruptors. There, as the followers of Lord Protector Cromwell rule England and the British Isles with totalitarian control and the puritan faith, the main mission for Luther Arkwright is to destabilize the Cromwellian regime, locate Firefrost, and save the rnultiverse. In V for Vendetta, V, the protagonist, is an anarchist revolutionary who is hiding from the forces of Norsefire, a fascist dictatorship. The character

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of V is in fact unknowingly "created" by tbe dystopian ruling party. Tlie reader does not know his exact background, but he has been an inmate at Larkhill Resettlement Camp, a concentration camp for political prisoners, homosexuals, and people of different ethnic or religious backgrounds. At Larkhill, the prisoners are subjected to medical experiments, which only "the man in room five" survives. This sole survivor, now possessing supernatural pliysical and mental skills -altbougli we do not know liis precondition - escapes the camp and becomes V (the lllllnber five in Roman numerals), a vigilante freedom figliter. In the series, V is sho\Vll wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Guy Fawkes (1570-1605) is an actualliistorical character, a famous Catliolic terrorist from tbe Gunpowder Plot, a plan to blow up tlie House of Lords during State Opening of Englisli Parliament on 5" November 1605. Fawkes was later caught and executed. Since at least the eighteenth century, tbe memory of this incident has been celebrated on Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night (see Hutton 2001). In the graphic novel, V not only wears a Guy Fawkes mask; he also blows up the Houses of Parliament and other important places of power. He becomes the fulfiller of Fawkes's legacy. V also recites the famous English folk verse: "Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot" (VfV, 14). In actual history, altbough tbe Gunpowder Plot failed, it had a profound impact on English political culture (Lewis 2008, 154). The plot is nowadays associated with Guy Fawkes, "the trigger man" and terrorist bomber, and historical accounts are particularly interested in his significance, although Fawkes was not tbe leader of the plot: that was Robert Catesby. Still, tbe image of Fawkes has become a major icon in modem British political culture (Lewis 2008, 155-158). Moore in V for Vendetta in fact turned Fawkes into an anarchist icon that he is today. The allusion to Guy Fawkes and the Guy Fawkes mask tbat V wears is the greatest cultural effect that V for Vendetta has produced. Nowadays, protesters of different causes wear the same kind of Guy Fawkes mask as V does in tbe graphic novel. The most famous example of protestors or anarchists using Guy Fawkes masks is Anonymous, an anarchist Internet "hacktivist" group, but the masks have become a symbol of popular revolution also on occasions like the 2012-2013 protests against Egypt's President Mohamed Mursi and tbe Occupy Wall Street Movement in the US, which began in 2011 (see Moore 2012). In the graphic novel, V symbolises a threat to tbe dystopian regime. Guy Fawkes - as a national symbol- is the paragon ofterrorism against the government in English folklore and even in contemporary culture.

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Meltzer (1973, 96) discusses how dystopian narratives use linguistic elements and rhetoric related to national symbols (ibid., 113) and focus on their "prevalence" (ibid., 111). Famous examples of such national symbols are, for example, the Statue of Liberty in tbe United States of America and the Palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben in England. The Statue of Liberty, for example, has itself become a symbol of liberty. The statue, a national icon, resembles what WaIter Benjamin identifies as a "dialectical image", "an image that functions like a montage in which objects are made part-objects by their relation to a larger simulacrum of wholeness" (Berlant 1991, 24; see Benjamin 2005, 160-169). This kind of national (or nationalistic) symbol is, of course, a major target for enemies and terrorists. For example, we can consider the 9111 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. One purpose oftbe attacks was to strike directly at the national (and capitalistic) symbols of the West and more precisely the United States of America. New York itself, with its World Trade Center, Empire State Building, and Statue of Liberty, is a symbol of the American Dream and is full of national symbolism. George Douglas writes how tbe whole "skyline of New York is a monument, an outward symbol of an aggressive and once confident people" (Douglas 2004, 2). In The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, tbe protagonist is not directly responsible for destroying national symbols, but his actions and participation results in the destruction of the Crystal Palace and the Bayeux Tapestry, both important English symbols. Of course, the original Crystal Palace, a massive cast-iron and plate-glass structure built in London's Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, was actually destroyed on 30 November 1936 in a fire. In The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright, tbe Crystal Palace stays intact (in many parallel worlds) until it is destroyed in an anachronic future by a fire started by the Disruptors in an attempt to kill Luther Arkwright. The same fire also destroys tbe Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered cloth nearly seventy metres long that was made in the eleventh century. It depicts tbe Norman conquest of England by William the Conqueror. In The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright, the Bayeux Tapestry has been loaned by the French government to be exhibited at the Crystal Palace. 4

In the real world, the Bayeux Tapestry remained in France for 950 years, but on January 2018 it was announced that President Ernrnanuel Macron wouldloan the Bayeux Tapestry to the UKto be exhibited at the British Museum (The Times). 4

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In both graphic novels, the dystopian governments are shown to possess symbols of Old Rule and Old England: for example, Westminster's ritual buildings, tbe Old Bailey's "Central Criminal Court of England and Wales" with its Lady Justice statue in V for Vendetta, and Crystal Palace and Westminster Abbey in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright These national symbols create the effect that even dystopias are rooted in local history, symbolism, and milieus. For the ruling government, this in fact symbolises nationalistic, utopian power. As we should know, regimes can use utopian values of nationalism for their 0\Vll purposes (see Harsanyi & Kennedy 1994,149-179). In V for Vendetta (14), V begins by destroying tbe Houses of Parliament and the Palace of Westminster. Later (VfV, 184-186), he destroys more contemporary places of power, such as the Jordan Tower and the Old Post Office Tower, where the totalitarian government's intelligence agencies "The Eye" and "The Ear", which concentrate on monitoring the people, keep their offices. At the end of the story, even though V dies before truly fulfilling his goal, his protege Evey Hammond takes on the last great terrorist act against the places of power and national symbols of the totalitarian government. The final episode of Vfor Vendetta (262-263) ends as Evey Hammond detonates a massive number of explosives and blows up the whole of Downing Street. In the graphic novel, this is a symbolic act of anarchist terrorism, leading systematically to the destruction of the totalitarian govenament and (presumably) ending the dystopian rule.

Nationalistic and religions rhetoric Elements of religious and political dystopia, altbough portrayed in different ways, are still intermingled in both The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright and V for Vendetta. In this regard, it is interesting to see, firstly, how religion is portrayed in dystopian society, and secondly, how political symbols are used. On closer inspection, these elements are somewhat unified. In V for Vendetta, religion is portrayed mostly tbrough tbe character of Bishop Anthony Lilliman, the voice of the Party in the Church. Lilliman is a paedophile who earlier worked at Larkhill concentration camp. His murder in the series is part of V's personal vendetta, although it is also connected to V's larger scale fight for freedom. The ruling party's symbolism, such as their motto "Strength tbrough unity, Purity through faith", or the salute "England prevails," contains

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religious undertones. In addition, the totalitarian party's supercomputer "Fate", and its public broadcaster, "The Voice of Fate" -like the various Norsefire agencies, such as "The Head", "The Eye", "The Finger", "The Nose", and "The Ear" -use strong metaphorical language typical of religions. Norsefire's propaganda and politics in general is fundamentalist and devoted to the worship of England and its glorious "fate" as the survivor of the nuclear war. Adam Susan, the leader of Norsefire, uses rhetoric common to both religious extremists and populist fascist parties. On a few occasions, firstperson narration and monologues explains Adam Susan's philosophy. The first of these monologues is the most revealing. First Susan explains his position and background as the ruler of the survivors and a fascist and racist leader of the English -so-called Nordic- race: My name is Adam Susan. I am the Leader. Leader of the Lost, Ruler of the Ruins. I am a man, like any other man. I lead the cmmtry that I love out of the wilderness of the twentieth century. I believe in survival. In the destiny of the Nordic race. I believe in fascism. Oh yes, I am a fascist. "What of it? Fascism ... A word. A word whose meaning has been lost in the bleating of the weak and the treacherous. (V£V, 37)

As mentioned earlier, Adam Susan cannot pelTIlit his citizens any freedom. It is an unneeded luxury, he thinks. Susan in V for Vendetta sees himself as a watchman who defends his people from the "world of chaos". He thinks that his totalitarian regime and fascist party protects the people from destruction, devastation, and anarchy. In this way, he is in the opposite position to the character V, who is a source of anarchy and the selfproclaimed liberator of the people. In The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, the Lord Protector uses nationalistic and fundamentally religious rhetoric. We can see the Lord Protector giving furious religiously persuasive speeches to his puritan audience. For example, headdresses his followers "as good soldiers of Christ [ ... ] [who] must put on the whole armour of God. The helinet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the belt of truth, the boots of the gospel, the sword of the spirit, the holy word of God and especially the shield of faith" (LA, Issue 5, 17). The Lord Protector calls his enemies "forces of darkness" and followers of Satan (ibid.). Then again, he does not share the same ascetic philosophy as Adam Susan in V for Vendetta. Adam Susan lives an austere life, saying that he does not "reserve for myself the freedom I deny to others" (VfV, 232). By contrast, the Lord Protector is

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visually portrayed molesting, raping, and killing young women, who are true "royalist virgins", "stripped, scrubbed clean, de-Ioused and bound" for his pleasure (LA, Issue 4, 9-10). Meltzer (1973, 96) notes that in dystopian narrative, the fundamental method of creating confusion is linguistic. This is evident, for example, in the confusion of concepts like "good" and "evil" in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where "Freedom is Slavery", "War is Peace", and "Ignorance is Strength" (Orwell 2003/1949, 26). Both the Lord Protector's puritanical dystopia in The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright and Norsefire's fascist dystopian party in V for Vendetta are ruled by authoritarian dictatorships that use tenns familiar to religious fundamentalism and the extreme right, such as "unity", "faith", "unifonnity", and even "fate".

Conclusion: Make Britain great again! In V for Vendetta, the leader Adam Susan tries to save his country from chaos. In an interesting quote from the very beginning ofthe graphic novel, we can hear tones that are extremely relevant even for today's politics. The Voice of Fate armounces the following: In a speech today, Mr. Adrian Karel, party minister for industry, stated that Britain's industrial prospects are brighter than at any time since the last war. Mr. Karel went on to say that it is the duty of every man in this cmmtry to seize the initiative and make Britain great again'. (VfV, 10, emphasis mine)

"Make Britain great again" was originally used as a slogan by the British conservative party in a1950s election. Later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan introduced the phrase "Make America Great Again" as his presidential campaign slogan. The same phrase was used in speeches by Bill Clinton in his 1992 presidential campaign, although not as an official motto. Most recently and famously, Donald Trump used "Make America Great Again" as the campaign motto for his 2016 presidential campaign. We can assume that, by "make Britain great again", Alan Moore's politically engaged graphic novel refers to the conservative rhetoric used by both the Conservative Party in the 1950s and President Reagan in the contemporary 1980s politics. Reagan was a close political "souhnate" of Prime Minister Thatcher at the time (see Cooper 2012), and Moore's graphic novel is directed against Thatcher's politics.

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The Adventures of Luther Arkwright portrays a complex science fiction world with many parallel realities, but the text itself is mainly concerned

with a futuristic steampunk setting, where the English Civil War has dragged on for centuries. It is explained to the reader that behind tbe social system of this world are the Disruptors, the "evil" forces of chaos. A vicious theocratic government has created a dystopian world resembling the now popular religious-political dystopias, such as the TV series version

of Margaret Atwood's Handmaids Tale (2017-). Religious rhetoric and totalitarian rule create elements of dystopia, but most important is the invalidation of English identity, which is portrayed behind tbe scenes. The prolonged civil war has obstructed all possibilities for the creation of tbe British Empire and created an England that is ruled by chaos, dispersion, and discord. Vfor Vendetta was clearly written as a response the 1980s conservative politics that ruled England at tbe time. The world of tbe novel is dystopian from start to finish. Even at the end of tbe novel, after V's death and tbe destruction of DO\Vlling Street by Evey Hammond, there is only a minute

hope fora better future. There is no clear sign of cultural and political refOlTIl or revolution. V, the protagonist, brings anarchic judgement and destruction to the totalitarian government ruling the nation, but the ultimate tone of the novel is still pessimistic and dystopian. Written in the context

of the 1980s, tbe text seems to ask whether tbere could possibly be a better tomorrow for a country that voted for Margaret Thatcher as their prime minister. This is left for tbe reader to judge. In conclusion, these graphic novels are very firmly bound to their national context and publishing period ofthe 1970s and 1980s by portraying and illustrating tbe crisis of English identity. At the same time, both novels discuss the less particular themes of dystopia and unwanted possible futures, which are perhaps even more vividly perceived in our contemporary

society. Botb graphic novels speak of possible - yet undesirable and dystopian - political and social developments. Therefore, the novels are

extremely up to date, especially V for Vendetta. Its realistic portrayal of a possible fascist dictatorship is painfully current. The contemporary era of xenophobia, recurring financial crisis, racism, terrorism, and migrant crises makes tbe novel topical. In the era of global mass media, we are painfully aware of events where civilians are wiped out, for example in Darfur, Rwanda, and Myanmar. It should be added that tbe West is no stranger to such persecutions. The dystopian novels act like a kind of an alarm bell for

the reader. "This should not be allowed", the novels cry out.

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Works cited Baccolini, Rafaella and Tom Moylan (eds). 2003. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. London & New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Waller. 2005. Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Volume II: Modernity. Edited by Peter Osbome. London & New York: Routledge. Berlant, Lauren. 1991. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthome, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Brendon, Piers. 2008. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997. New York: KnopfDoubleday Publishing Group. Carney, Sean. 2006. "The Tides of History: Alan Moore's Historiographic Vision." ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Vo!. 2, No. 2. . np. retrieved 5 April 2018. Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2014. "Science Fictionality." In Architecture & Planning in Times of Scarcity: Reclaiming the Possibility ofMaking, Deljana Iossifova (ed.). Manchester: Softgrid,206-212. Claeys, Gregory and Lyman Tower Sargen!. 2017. "Introduction." In The Utopia Reacier, Gregory Claeys & Lyman Tower Sargent (eds). Second Edition. New York: New York University Press, 1-16. Claeys, Gregory. 2016. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cooper, lames. 2012. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: A Very Political Special Relationship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Iackson: University Press of Mississippi. Douglas, George H. 2004. Skyscrapers: A Social History of the Very Tall Building in America. Iefferson: McFarland. Esty, led. 2004. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Friedrich, Carl Ioachim and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. 1965. Totalitarian Dictatorship andAutocracy. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Geisler, Michael E. 2005. "Introduction: What Are National Symbolsand What Do They Do to Us?" In National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative, Michael E. Geisler (ed.). Middlebury: University Press of New England, x-xlii.

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Gentile, Emilio. 2006. Politics as Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gleason,Abbot!. 1995. Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gray, Maggie. 2010. "'A fistful of dead roses ... ' Comics as cultural resistance: Alan Moore and David Lloyd's Vfor Vendetta." Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Volume 1, Issue 1: 31-49. Green, Matthew J. A. 2013. "Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition." In Alan Moore and Gothic Tradition, Matthew J. A. Green (ed.). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 3-20. Hall, Stuar!. 1983. Politics of Thatcherism. Edited by Stuart Hall and Jacques Martin. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. Harsanyi, Nicolae and Michael D. Kennedy.1994. "Between Utopia and Dystopia: The Labilities of Nationalism in Eastern Europe." In Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies, 11ichael D. Kennedy (ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 149179. Hutton, Ronald. 2001. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 1983. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York and London: Routledge. Jones, David W. 2013An Introduction to Biblical Ethics. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group. Kiehlbauch, Solange. 201S. "Man and Machine in the World of Steam: The Emergence of Steampunk as a Cultural Phenomenon." The Forum: Journal of History, Volume 7, Issue 1: 81-104. Kumar, Krishan. 2013. "Utopia's Shadow." In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, Fatima Vieira (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 19-22. Lewis, Call. 2008. "A is for Anarchy, V is for Vendetta: Images of Guy Fawkes and the Creation of Postmodern Anarchism." Anarchist Studies,

Volume 16, Issue 2: IS4-172. Loewenstein, Era A. 2017. "Dystopian Narratives: Encounters with the Perverse Sadomasochistic Universe." Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Volume 37, Issue 1: 3-1S. MacDonald, Heidi. 200S. "A for Alan, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore Interview." The Beat 1 Nov 200S, np. Mazur, Man and Alexander Darmer. 2017. "The International Graphic Novel." In The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, S8-79.

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Meltzer, Donald. 1973. Sexual States ofMind London: Kamac. Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. 198811982-83. V for Vendetta (VfV). New York: DC Comics Inc. Moore, Alan. 2012. "Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous." BBC News , 2 March 2012. http://www.bbc.com/news/ technology-16968689, np, retrieved 5 April 2018. Morrill, John. 2004. "Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658)." In OxfordDictionary ofNational Biography, Stephen Leslie (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, np. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.retrieved20March2019. Moylan, Tom. 2000: Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. New York: Avalon Publishing. Oppolzer, Markus. 2013. "Gotbic liminality in V for Vendetta." In Alan Moore and Gothic Tradition, Matthew J. A. Green (ed.). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 103-120. Orwell, George. 200311949. 1984. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Palade, Brindusa. 2001. "The Romanian Utopia: The Role of tbe Intelligentsia in the Communist Implementation of a New Human Paradigm." In The Philosophy of Utopia, Barbara Goodwin (ed.). London & New York: Routledge, 107-115. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian Studies 5 (1) 1994: 1-37. Shorten, Richard. 2012. Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sorensen, Lita. 2005. The Library of Graphic Novelists: Bryan TaTbot. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. Talbot, Bryan. 1993. "Arkeologiaa." In Bryan Talbot: Luther Arkwrightin seikkailut (The Adventures of Luther Arkwright). Translated by Toni Jerrman. Helsinki: FBH, np. Talbot, Bryan. 200811978-89. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (LA). Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics. Thorpe, Dave. 1993. "Naky Albionin maasta." In Bryan Talbot: Luther Arkwrightin seikkailut (The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright). Translated by Toni Jerrman. Helsinki: FBH, np. The Times. 2018. "Bayeux Tapestry to be displayed in Britain." 17 January 2018. https:llwww.tbetimes.co.ukleditionlnewslbritain-to-get-bayeuxtapestry-as-macron-agrees-Ioan-nSbrflnjx>, retrieved 5 April 2018. Wegner, Philip E. 2010. "Alan Moore, 'Secondary Literacy', and tbe Modernism of the Graphic Novel." Image TexT: Interdisciplinary Comic

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Studies: Volume 5, No. 3: np. http://www.english.ufi.eduJimagetextl archives/v5 _ 3/wegner, retrieved 5 April 2018. Wolf-Meyer, Matthew.2003. "The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference." The Joumal a/Popular Culture, Volume 36, Issue 3: 497-517.

5. CHALLENGING SECULARITY: SPIRITUAL AND RELIGIOUS UNDERTONES IN YOUNG ADULT DYSTOPIAS

KAISA KAUKIAINEN

Dystopian novels and their film adaptations aimed at young adults (YA) are currently extremely popular. especially in the Western world. There are many explanations for the popularity of the geme among youths; ever since 9/11, future visions have grO\vn darker, and the vast, ever-present amount of accessible information brings global threats closer, making them more tangible. Dystopias turn these fears into vivid narratives that imagine and speculate on what the fears of the future could be (e.g. Basu et a1. 2013, 13; Booker 2013, 4-5). While focusing primarily on depicting undesirable aspects of future societies, dystopian descriptions aimed at youths tend to be primarily action oriented. Although they contain political messages by emphasizing individual agency, they deal less with the more profound aspects of human life, such as spirituality or religiousness. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how YA dystopias, despite tlieir apparent secular worldview, nevertheless draw on certain values that can be traced back to religious traditions, which the novels confine to the category of spirituality. This feature links tlie subgenre closely with pastsecular thinking, in which religiousness and spirituality can be seen as strong influences in the background of contemporary novels, even when their presence is not explicitly obvious (Le Fustec 2015; McClure 2007). Instead of direct descriptions of religions of any kind, the influence of religious traditions is embedded in social structures, the choices of the characters in critical situations, and the general understanding of what is fundamentally right or wrong. In this chapter I concentrate on American YA novels, mainly because they represent the majority of popular contemporary YA dystopias, and their movie and TV adaptations are responsible for the success of the geme. Another reason for focusing on strictly American examples is that they

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reflect a rather homogenous worldview based on democratic values such as altruism, tolerance, and equality. Interestingly, these values are most notably represented through descriptions of rebellion, which is a central feature in YA dystopias. According to sociologist Robert N. Bellab's American civil religion theory, public rhetoric in the US is its own fonn of religiousness, which is shown especially in beliefs, symbols, and rituals concerning the American lifestyle. Tlie idea originated in tlie 1970s, but it still slieds liglit on tbe background and existence of certain values in American YA dystopias. The basis of the civil religion is in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, although it deliberately avoids references to anyone religion. However, the "God" beliind tbis rlietoric is entwined witli tlie Western notion of God. Tlie biblical trope of tbe "City upon a Hill" lias provided a key liistorical perspective ever since the arrival of the Puritans on the continent. America is seen as the Promised Land, and the justification for the existence of American society is founded on biblical tradition. Americans are seen as the chosen people, whose manifest destiny is to set an example to other peoples. They have a universal, God-given mission to spread the message of democracy. According to tbis rlietoric, tlie ideals of liberty and freedom of speech differentiate Americans from all other nations. Essential symbols include tlie US flag and "sacred texts", sucli as tlie Constitution and tbe Declaration of Independence. Ritual ceremonies include, for instance, the presidential inauguration and tbe singing of tbe national antliem (Bellah 1970, 168-169; also Taylor 2007, 447-448; 527). Tlie civil religion tbeory is a useful tool in observing American YA dystopian literature, because the novels so strongly stress what is worth protecting in our contemporary world - the same things are emphasized in American public rhetoric. However, attitudes towards religion are ambivalent in YA dystopias. I have distinguished two categories. Firs~ tbere are novels that exhibit future visions with a clear continuum from the world in which we now live, and tlie past (our contemporary world) is still lucid in memory. In tliese descriptions, religion is often a remnant of a lost civilisation, something tliat no longer lias any true value. If it still exists, it is like a weak liabit without any depth. 1 It is nearly always "otliers" wlio practice it. In Susan 1 Apocalypses that describe the world falling apart belong to this category, as there is a visible contradiction between the normality of the lost world and the "abnormality" of the story's present. Novel series such as Michael Grant's Gone (2008 2013), Mike Mullin's Ash/all (2011 2014), James Dashner's The Maze Runner (2009 2016), and Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave (2013 2016) are to a great extent descriptions of reminiscences of the past, "better" world the dystopian

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Beth Pfeffer's Last Survivors series (2006-2013), apocalyptic events occur after the moon is struck by a meteorite, altering its orbit - this causes floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions on Earth. The second novel of the series, The Dead and the Gone (2008), exceptionally represents a religious protagonist, the 16-year-oldAlex. Unlike most YA dystopian characters, he finds consolation and comfort from both his Catholic faitb and his church. In the eyes of other characters, however, Alex is old-fashioned, patronising, and stubborn. His religiousness is like a weird habit that others tolerate but find armoying and incomprehensible. Alex's conviction also prevents him from making the correct and sensible choices suitable for the changed circumstances of the world. This is a good example of how religion is often seen in YA dystopias: it is tolerated so long as practicing it does not hann others, but if religiosity is used to limit autonomy, it becomes a liability. The second distinctive category includes novels where the past has become either partially or totally forgotten. The history oftbe new society is its O\vn, without an extension to life before. References to religion are only symbolic. Veronica Roth's Divergent series (2011-2013) presents a society where people are divided into factions according to their characteristics. They have no recollection of anything prior to this system, and religion is never mentioned. 2 Tris, the protagonist, discovers that she does not fit into any of the pre-arranged categories. Divergent's story is built around Tris' remarkable individuality, which challenges the doctrinal order of her society. Generally speaking, her community can be compared to an oppressive congregation that is displeased to see its members going astray. Anotber important novel series tbat falls into the latter category regarding its representation of religion is Suzalllle Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy (hereafter HG) (The Hunger Games [2008], Catching Fire [2009], and Mocking/ay [2010]). Despite its lack of direct descriptions of religion, it contains vast amounts of symbolism that can be interpreted as religious. In this chapter, I pay most attention to HG, because the trilogy is an apt representative of tbe whole subgenre and it (supported by highly successful film adaptations) has been the most influential book series in the field of recent YA dystopias, at least in the Western world. 3 HG is a atmosphere is created as much from what has been lost as from the present intolerable circumstances. 2 Instead, there is "a caste system", which does associate with existing religions

(Hinduism). 3 The second category comprises novels that describe a completely new world. They often feature a peculiar societal order that in the light of the missing history is taken as a norm. The stories are gathered arOlmd the protagonist's realization that there

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successful combination of classic dystopian themes, for instance inequality, propaganda, and surveillance (Voigts & Boller 2015, 413). There are numerous studies concerning HG, many of them concentrating on gender roles or race (e.g. Dubrofsky & Ryalls 2014; Broad 2013). Much of the appeal ofHG is the narrator-protagonist character Katniss - a young, brave yet humble, self-sacrificing girl who seems to fight the rules of her chaotic world by herself. I will first illustrate the similarities between rebellion and religiousness, and then explain why I think that postsecularism is a suitable frame through which to observe YA dystopias. I clarify my claim with my detailed analysis of HG and other texts. I also observe how spirituality is often expressed through individuality in dystopian texts.

The long roots of rebellion A classic theme in dystopian literature is totalitarianism. The ruling governments in dystopias resemble theocratic states where laws are doctrines and total obedience is expected. A famous example of an actual theocracy in dystopias is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids Tale (1985), in which conservative Christians rule the future United States. 4 There is variety in the scope of control in dystopias, but in general the governments function in the same way as institutionalized churches do, be it by denying religion completely, or by presenting their 0\Vll doctrines. According to Erika Gottlieb, "dystopian society functions as a primitive state religion that practices the ritual of human sacrifice", and she describes dystopian regimes as resembling "[b jarbaric state religion[ s]" (Gottlieb 2001, 10-11). The dystopian classics - George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (Mbl, 1924) - all portray "state-religions". Classic dystopias take a more critical stance in relation to religion than contemporary YA dystopias. They often satirize the "false gods" of their contemporary societies (e.g. mass media in Fahrenheit 451 and consumerism in Brave New World). is something wrong with the system. Examples of these are, in addition to HG and Roth's Divergent series, Lois Lo\Vfy's The Giver quartet (1993 2012), Kiera Cass's Selection (2009 2012), Ally Condie's Matched (2010 2012), and Lauren Oliver's Delirium (2011 2013). 4 The Handmaid's Tale has found new success through its new TV adaptation (2017) onHBO.

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Even though YA dystopias exploit themes similar to those of the classics, they also differ from them in their generally much happier endings. \Vhereas the rebellions of Winston, Montag, Bernard, and D-503 never succeed in subverting the government, totalitarian regimes

in YA dystopias always tend to be overthrown. The outcome might not be exactly what the protagonists wanted, but at least the evil that used to rule is gone. This has much to do with hope, which is a common notion in YA dystopias: "in the case of young adult dystopian text, one carmot in fact do without at least a glimmer of hope" (Von Mossner 2013, 70; see also Voigts and Boller 2015, 413; Basu et a1. 2013, 2). Hope is related to a commonly used term, critical dystopia (Baccolini & Moylan 2003, 7), which refers to dystopian descriptions that contain attempts to build a new,

better life rather than dwelling on misery. Most often that occurs through rebellion. This rebellion against the violent dystopian regime is a central feature in the dystopian tradition, and it has also been fully adopted in YA dystopias. In the shadow of strict doctrinal totalitarian regimes, the resistance movements act as dissident, clandestine sects. They stand for the

values of democracy described by Bellah as being among the major ideals of contemporary American society.

The rebellion in YA dystopias represents the virtues seen as worth pursuing in our contemporary world. The harsh actions of the rebels are

justified - they are doing God's work. The wrongdoers are expendable, as they have deliberately made the wrong choice. This explains why violence is so unproblematically approved. When the protagonists of YA dystopias find out that there is a resistance movement, they are first delighted to realize that they are not alone with their doubts about the ruling forces. However, underlining the exceptional characters of the protagonists, they soon begin to disagree with the movement and start questioning its goals. It is important to note that the protagonists do not question the values behind the resistance, only people's motives that distort these values. This

is clearly visible in HG - Katniss feels constant distrust towards the rebels. There is a similar plotline in Divergent, when Tris realizes that the first resistance movement she encounters (of the factionless people, who have been treated as outcasts) does not maintain true values, but rather just wants to be in charge. Later, she is extremely happy to discover a movement that opposes the functioning of her "test lab city", but soon realizes she has

entered a Nazi group emphasising genetic purity, which she feels is equally bad. Tris makes individual choices that are not necessarily approved of by

her family and friends, but what her "inner guidebook" (conscience?) tells her to make. Like Katniss, she is willing to sacrifice herself to save her

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loved ones. Heroes or heroines are thus defined by the sacrifices - potential or actual - they are willing to make. Such decisions are deeply rooted in religious imagery. Dystopian narratives reflect the flaws in our current world - they deal with themes such as global politics, environmental issues, social structures, ethics, and, for instance, the expectations and effects of gender roles. They

give a platform to deal with difficult themes on an allegorical level (see also Basu et al. 2013, 4-5). Differing from classic dystopias, YA dystopian novels typically relegate the aforementioned themes to subordinate, more entertaining aspects of the narrative - the love story of a teenage protagonist

surrounded by a great deal of impressive action (easily adaptable to the manuscript of a blockbuster movie). YA dystopias do not merely mirror our current society, but dystopian novels in general replicate fmms familiar from previous texts. These are "high concept narratives" that combine elements from older texts in order to make them easily recognizable to readers (ibid., 20). The collision of adult and adolescent worlds is a continuous theme in

YA dystopias and an often-noted juxtaposition. Dystopias stress this everpresent gap by depictions of the adult order collapsing. For teenagers under pressure from their parents and teachers, dystopian descriptions of shattering the system can be satisfying. It is up to the youngsters to survive in altered circumstances where the adult order has proven to be untenable

(e.g. Basu et al. 2013, 4). Noting the antithesis of the adult and adolescent worlds, any kind of organized congregation or religious community in the

YA dystopia often represents the adult world - a world with regulations and control that should be avoided.

Postsecularism: A key to understanding YA dystopias Erica Gottlieb has noted that "[ d]ystopian fiction is a post-Christian genre" (Gottlieb 2001, 3). This is a secular view: if dystopia in its clearest form is something that has left Christiainty behind, and any depiction of it can be seen as criticism that works towards either exposing religion's faults or burying the remains of any traces of organized religion, YA fiction has

left this secular tendency behind. Ostensibly, the question of religion has been dealt with, but a completely different approach is raising its head. This is quite subtle; at first glance religion seems to be totally missing

from most YA dystopian novels. Explicit portrayals of religion are still in accord with the classics: obsolete customs, isolated communities,

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suppressive rules, and mad preachers - there is nothing positive or in any way forward-looking. The implicit religious elements, on the other hand, contribute to building recognizable - albeit fractional - undertones into the narratives. In dystopian worlds, where the most prominent structures of the society are distorted, these less noticeable features are left untouched and unquestioned. Dystopias seemingly shatter the values of the society by displaying an inversion of what is considered acceptable in the contemporary world. In fact, these portrayals do the opposite - by showing the worst of humankind, they underline the importance of universal moral values - altruism, tolerance, and equality. These values are strongly intertwined in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Without strict doctrines, but also by abandoning a comprehensively secularist worldview, postsecular theory is a frame into which YA dystopias fit well. Postsecular texts are not considered to contain clear religious elements; they rather have partial manifestations mixing religious and secular aspects in various combinations (McClure 2007, 3-5). According to McClure (2007, 5), religiousness is shown in current literature in multiple unorthodox fOlTIlS, and no single interpretation of a doctrine is accepted so "that larger claims for anyone tradition's universal reach, absolute accuracy, and authority are denied". In other words, while God is not necessarily mentioned, God is present in everyday life in small ways - in social structures, and in an overall understanding of right and wrong. "Gods appear, but not God" (ibid., 4). Scholar Amy Hungerford calls this the "[r]eligious valence of American literature" (Hungerford 2010, xiii). Rather than talking about religiousness with its relatedness to the doctrinal and abstract notion of God, postsecular texts tend to emphasize spirituality, which is considered to be a more comprehensive tenn to describe the embodied search for transcendence. \Vhereas "religious" refers to the recognition of divine immanence, spirituality does not seek to separate one's physical presence and transcendence. Northrop Frye (1990, 119) describes spirituality as "the highest intensity of consciousness" that "does not run away from its physical basis or cut off its physical roots". Le Fustec (2015, 8) summarizes this by saying that "spirituality probably remains the best word to designate the concrete character of the contemporary quest for transcendence". The spiritual aspect in YA dystopias is the journey of the protagonists towards finding something better - this search functions on both concrete and metaphorical levels. Individuality is strongly emphasized as a sole source of an inner - even private - process of growing up as a person. Giordan and Pace (2012, 2) suggest that "[a]lthough 'counting on oneself' is a fragile support to make important choices, it nevertheless

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offers to the subject the opportunity of having an extremely flexible system of meanings, capable of adapting quickly to the ever new biographic and social situations in a world that changes at increasing speed." YA dystopias point out that the only way to adjust to dystopian surroundings is to rely on one's individuality, when every attempt to cling to old customs is doomed

to fail. Institutionalized religion thus represents stagnation, blindness in relation to altered conditions, and an inability to change. Spirituality, which does not necessarily require a community, offers an attractive alternative to traditional religiousness.

Spirituality blurs the boundaries between the self and divinity, and provides an opportunity for the transcendent to be found from within. YA dystopias often use a first-person narrator and the present tense as narrative devices to bring the events closer, and thus give the reader an opportunity to identify with the protagonist. However, at the same time this limits knowledge concerning the surrounding world to just one individual perspective. Many novels are even presented in the fmm of a diary (e.g. Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries [2009, 2010] and Susan Beth Pfeffer 's Life as We Knew It [2006]), thus focusing on the thoughts of the protagonists, to stress the importance of an individual approach. Consequently, it is notable that many YA dystopias contain a sweeping characterization of their young protagonists. Their fears, hopes, and

desires are explicitly portrayed, and the hopelessness of the dystopian surroundings is expressed through their characters. Since these feelings

and thoughts are so thoroughly explained, their importance regarding the plots and events in the novels is significant. The inner monologues of the protagonists centre on a constant struggle with the self - there is a continuing pressure to be good and worthy. How are goodness and worthiness defined then? This is where the universal values step into the picture. The protagonist finds the answers to crucial questions and difficult situations through inner contemplation. In a sense, there is "an inner guidebook", a built-in storage that echoes the traditional values that

can be traced back to a Judaeo-Christian heritage and the principles of the Enlightenment. The goal is to find the correct solutions and in doing so to achieve peace of mind, which resembles not only contentment originating

from living by the teachings of the Bible, but a spiritual enlightenment. This spiritual "finding the answers" is a story of inner growth (also a coming-of-age story for adolescents) - a trial after which the protagonist finds hislher 0\Vll path and chooses to do what is right, even if it is not the most appealing choice. On the contrary, this choice often contains an aspect of sacrifice. FurthemlOre, despite how different their surrounding worlds

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are or how much these worlds seemingly differ from our contemporary Western society, the protagonists in the novels seem to find consistently similar moral "codes" to guide them. Divergent's Tris continuously wants to fit into different groups - this longing to belong to sometbing creates a contradiction with her strong, inner urge to make the right choices. She has to repeatedly betray those she wants to be with to pursue the greater cause of saving them. Her individual decisions and her willingness to be part of a group are in a constant conflict. Finally, her individuality wins the battle she ends up sacrificing herself for others. Like civil religion (and postsecularism), YA dystopias do not emphasize any particular form of religiousness. Ratber, they embed a long legacy of set values that fOlTIlS a bedrock of what is considered just and acceptable. The core values originating from the universal virtues of altruism, equality, and tolerance are freedom of choice, freedom of movement, and freedom of speech. Restrictions in these areas are a common theme in dystopian geme. It is these values that the Americans embrace with a religious fury, and YA dystopias simply replicate and mirror this same attitude.

Individuality and sacrifice as paths to spiritual growth As I have already noted before, HG is a model example of a contemporary dystopian novel addressed to young readers. Alongside many classic dystopian themes, it has brought the focus even more towards celebrating individuality as a desired feature. The scene ofHG is a post-apocalyptic North America ruled by Panem, a totalitarian government based in the Capitol. Katniss lives in one of its twelve oppressed, poor districts. HG repeats a dystopian tradition of cruel survival games. Its "Hunger Games" derives from the gladiatorial combat of the Roman Empire and bears a resemblance to reality TV shows. 5 The games are the armual punishment for the people of the oppressed districts, and they function as a constant reminder of who is in charge. Each year, everyone between the ages of twelve and eighteen is obliged to participate in "the reaping", a humiliating, lottery-like selection ceremony. Two 5 Suzanne Collins has said in many interviews that she got the idea for the book from reality TV shows (see Trierweiler Hudson 2017). However, there are earlier examples of similar settings in the dystopian geme, too - for instance Battle Royale (1999) by Koshu Takami and Stephen King's The Running Man (1982, \Vfitten llllder the pseudonym Richard Bachman).

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"tributes" -one girl and one boy from each of the twelve districts- are chosen to fight to death in an arena, and there can only be one winner. The most significant event in HG is the reaping - it is notable that Katniss herself does not get chosen -her sister Prim does. Katniss sacrifices her O\Vll freedom, and in this way, immediately proves her uniqueness by volunteering to take Prim's place in a game where her chances of survival are nearly non-existent. Katniss does something that has never been done before. It is the 74th Hunger Games, and nobody remembers anyone ever before having volunteered to take the place of a family member. In richer districts, where joining the games is an honour, and their tributes, the "Careers", have been trained for the task throughout their young lives, it is not uncommon to volunteer for someone weaker - but the motives for doing so are entirely different from those ofKatniss. Despite the lack of visible religiousness or spirituality in HG, Katniss has been sometimes seen as a Messiah figure (see Simpson 2012).6 It is true that HG can be interpreted in many ways through the Bible (see Hand 2015). Unexpectedly volunteering to die instead of her sister is the ultimate Christ-like act. Katniss continues to sacrifice herself(see Stewart 2013), and she can be found in settings with biblical undertones, for example, when she is grieving for her loved ones - she covers her friend Rue's dead body with flowers. Primarily, her act is an attempt to respect Rue's memory, and it arises directly from Katniss's 0\Vll sorrow and hopelessness. Scattering flowers over Rue's corpse is her intuitive attempt to perform a funeral, to say a farewell to her friend, and it is most of all an attempt to remind the viewers of the humanity of the tributes - they are more than pa\Vlls on the game board. Each of Katniss 's sacrifices is also a rebellious act against the Capitol, whether or not she means it to be so. Her ultimate aim is to keep the people closest to her safe: "All I was doing was trying to keep Peeta and myself alive. Any act of rebellion was purely coincidental" (Catching Fire, 18). In the second novel of the trilogy, Catching Fire, Katniss tries to live up to President Snow's demands, but her touching, spontaneous speech in Rue's home district ignites a rebellious reaction in her audience. She is also unaware of a media trick her dress plays when it bursts into flames in front of the audience and turns her into a Mockingjay, a bird that becomes a symbol of the resistance. Although Katinss is at the centre and the prime 6 Peeta has even been seen as a Christ figure: he is willing to die for his loved one, gives her bread, and spends three days in a cave before he "emerges" alive and well (see Moring 2012). However, these reviews seem to be mostly Christian \Vfitings to ensme the suitability ofHG for young readers and moviegoers.

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mover of the events, things seem to happen without her will or intention. Despite her acts of sacrifice, Katniss is not a Christ figure in the biblical sense. She is, after all, a fighter whose ultimate inspiration for rebellion lies in revenge - she wants, with her O\Vll hands, to kill Panem's President Snow, who has caused so much hardship to her and her family. This vindictive desire in no way follows Christ's path - there is definitely no "turning the other cheek". In addition to the events she causes, Katniss's character encompasses different religiously charged roles. She is a keeper of numerous lost traditions, lives off nature, and masters the skills forgotten by others. She is an embodied memory of the lost world; for instance, she sings an old, forbidden, and nearly forgotten rebel song she learned from her father. It is important to note that she has these abilities because she has broken the law all her life by sneaking outside the fence in her district into tbe woods. Katniss' predilection for doing this (again) rebellious act comes from her own family's traditions - from her skilful father and her herbalist mother. The Capitol has lost connection with nature and any natural way of living. The strict oppression of the other districts has also estranged it from nature. Spatial boundaries are typically very vague in dystopias. Voigts and Boller note that allegorically, Panem describes the split between the West and tbe developing world. The Capitol can be seen as tbe powerful centre (the West), which exploits the marginalized peripheries (developing countries) and shows "tbe detrimental effects of globalisation" (Voigts & Boller 2015, 413). One can assume that the overall population of Panem is very low, so there should be immense amounts of untouched nature. Nonetheless, people live in their o\Vlllittle prisons, some of which are more heavily guarded than others. Katniss is unique in her relationship with nature. There is a temptation to interpret her as having an almost Wiccan connection with the wilderness, even ifher relationship with nature is never expressed in spiritual telTIlS. She does feel a sense of relief being out in the wild, but her emotions are never described as being in any way spiritual, let alone religious. Even though she enjoys being in the forest, there is always a practical angle to her being there; she needs to provide food for those closest to her. At the beginning of the story, Katniss only wants to protect her "inner circle", her family and friends: "Prim ... Rue ... aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice?" (Catching Fire, 88) As her worldview widens, there is a constant battle of interests: her priority still lies in guarding her family, but in the course of the events she has to make choices to include others in her inner circle, and finally she

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has to include her whole society. This shows an interesting contradiction with individuality - it is the other people who matter and are the igniting force of her rebellion. Yet the actions leading to communal welfare are based on Katniss's individual, often revolutionary decisions. She is aware of the risks she is taking and accepts that she might die in her attempts to correct things. When she decides to kill the rebels' President Coin instead of the defeated President Snow, she is not afraid of the consequences. Ironically, Katniss punishes Coin for wanting revenge (for planning to put the children of the Capitol through the Hunger Games in turn) and seems to realize that vengeance also fuelled her all along. Katniss is finally ready to sacrifice herself for the common good. However, she does not consider herself a heroine. She feels tbe burden of being a human with human flaws, and in this sense she can be seen as a messianic figure: If I can't kill myself in this room, I will take the first opportunity outside of it to finish the job. They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself [ ... ] Because something is significantly \\'fong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to settle its differences. (Mockingjay, 271)

This is the closest thing to transcendence in YA dystopias - the ultimate sacrifice is to give your o'Wlllife in order to secure the well-being of others and by doing so, to achieve peace of mind. The afterlife is never discussed, and dying only symbolizes tbe end of everything; tbe highest prize is saving those one loves, and often the whole community. Witb all the expectations, allegories, and symbolism loaded upon Katniss, it is clear that the narrative has two different levels: one of a teenage girl's fast-paced adventure and another of a heavily symbolic character who is a saviour, fire starter, nurturer, and martyr. According to Sonya Sawyer Fritz (204, 50), who observes "rebellious girlhood" in YA dystopias, Katniss is a combination of cynicism and femininity (see also Broad 2013, 126). Roberta Seelinger Trites (2014, 25) sees the HG trilogy as a serious anti-war warning that does not offer a happy ending, even though it ostensibly has one. Feminist readings ofHG have objected to the ending of the trilogy: by marrying Peeta and having his children, Katniss fails to live up to expectations of her as an independent, rebellious figure. Instead, she settles for a conventional, heterosexual, nuclear family model (Broad 2013,125). It is true tbat HG does not try to present Katniss

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as a superhero who remains untouched by the obstacles she faces. On the

contrary, by the end of the trilogy Katniss is mentally disoriented and unstable. She adjusts to a traditional gender role and even agrees to have children, because her extreme individuality has left her broken - family, cornrnunality, and reaching out to others provide her with her only chance

to heaL

Conclusions Salvation in the Christian context emphasizes salvation sola fide (by faith alone). According to this doctrine, it is impossible to gain redemption through individual actions. This is contradictory to YA fiction's emphasis on individuality. The purpose of the resistance movements is to change the society to correspond with liberal values that are considered to make the

world automatically a better place. Lnstead of the promise of salvation in the afterlife, the movements seek to achieve the prize in this life, with faith

being directed towards meeting earthly rather than unearthly goals. There is a fundamental quest for a paradise on Earth. By emphasising individuality, YA dystopias condemn blind faith - whether it is to an ideology, a way of life, or God. With the constant demand for alertness, they suggest that surrendering to any "imagined" higher power or trusting in its ability to

protect could prove fatal. It would be an exaggeration to argue that all YA dystopias deliberately share similar political, sociological, philosophical, and religious themes with HG, but many do, as most themes are so strongly intertwined in the logic of the dystopian adventures (see also Voigts & Boller 2015, 413). As a pioneer that closely mirrors current world problems, HG reflects the hopes and fears of adolescents in an appealing way that carmot be ignored in other stories either. With their extended possibilities of imagination, dystopian novels have the ability to go to extremes. They exist in a realm between fundamental binaries - hope and despair, love and hate, morality and immorality,

spiritual growth and stagnation, good and evil, and paradise and hell. They show the worst and the most violent things imaginable, but also reveal the best possible in their utopian dreaming. However, many YA dystopias end in a situation where the building of a new society is only starting. There is the promise of living up to the values of altruism, equality, and tolerance, but yet there is also a realistic tone suggesting that achieving these virtues

is a difficult task that might faiL

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It is possible to find religious "currents" in YA dystopias, but it would be more accurate to call them spiritual rather than religious. Nevertheless,

their debt to religious traditions is evident Probably unintentionally, the narratives repeat religious themes in the same way they exploit other structures of our contemporary world. Religion in its traditional sense is rarely present in YA dystopian descriptions - or at least religion does not provoke considerable feelings. Its close sibling, spirituality, has thus taken on an important role by replacing conventional religiousness, and it makes

itself visible in narratives glorifying individuality as tlie highest virtue. This tendency corresponds with postsecular thinking, which stresses a new form of religiousness, namely individual choice and personal spiritual quests.

Works Cited Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. 2003. "Introduction: Dystopia and Histories." In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baccolini & Tom Moylan (eds). New York! London: Routledge, 1-12. Basu, Balaka, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz (eds). 2013. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York & London: Routledge. Bellah, Robert N. 1970. Civil Religion in America. Beyond Belief Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper & Row. Booker, M. Keith (ed.). 2013. Dystopia. University of Arkansas, Ipswich, Massachusetts: Salern Press.

Bradbury, Ray. 1953. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. Broad, Katherine R. 2013. '''The Dandelion in tlie Spring': Utopia as Romance in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy." In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, & Carrie Hintz (eds). New York and London: Routledge, 117-130. Claeys, Gregory. 2013. "Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia." In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, Fatima Vieira (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 14-18. Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic. Collins, Suzanne. 2009. Catching Fire. New York: Scholastic.

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Collins, Suzanne. 2010. Mocking/ay. New York: Scholastic. Dubrofsky, Rachel E. and Emily D. Ryalls 2014. "The Hunger Games:

Performing Not-performing to Authenticate Femininity and Whiteness." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31:5: 395-409. Hand, Karl. 2015. "Come Now, Let us Treason Together: Conversion and

Revolutionary Consciousness in Luke 22: 35-38 and The Hunger Games Trilogy." Literature and Theology, August 12, 29:3: 348-365. Huxley, Aldous. 195011932. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus. Montz, Amy L., MirandaA. Green-Bartee!, and Sara K. Day (eds). 2014. Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Burlington: Routledge. Fritz, Sonya Sawyer. 2014. "Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scot! Westerfeld, and Moira Young." In Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, Amy L. Montz, MirandaA. Green-Barteet, & SaraK. Day (eds). Burlington: Routledge, 35-51. Frye, Northrop. 2008/1990. Words with Power: "Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature ". Edited by Michael Dolzani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Giordan, Giuseppe and Enzo Pace. 2012. Mapping Religion and Spirituality in a Postsecular World. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Gottlieb, Erika. 2001. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Hungerford, Amy. 2010. Poslmodern Belief American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Le Fustec, Claude. 2015. Northrop Frye and American Fiction. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press. McClure, John A. 2007. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens and London: Uinversity of Georgia Press.

Moring, Mark. 2012. "Christ in the Hunger Games." Christianity Today, 56:8: 86. Orwell, George. 1969/1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pfeffer, Susan Beth. 2008. The Dead and the Gone. New York: Harcourt. Roth, Veronica. 2011. Divergent. New York: Harper Collins. Simpson, Amy. 2012. " Jesus in The Hunger Games." Christianity Today, 56:3: np.

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Stewart, Susan Louise. 2013. "Dystopian Sacrifice, Scapegoats, and Neal Shusterman's Unwind." In Contemporary Dystopian Fictionfor Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, Balaka Basu, Katherine R Broad, & Carrie Hintz (eds). New York and London: Routledge, 159-173. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press. Trierweiler Hudson, Harma. 2017. "Q&A; with Hunger Games autbor Suzanne Collins." Interview. Scholastic.com. https:llwww.scholastic. comiteachersiarticlesiteaching-contentiqa-hunger-games-authorsuzarme-collins/, np, retrieved 10 November 2018.

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. 2014. "'Some Walks You Have to Take Alone': Ideology, Intertextuality, and the Fall of tbe Empire in The Hunger Games Trilogy." In The Politics ofPane m: Challenging Genres, Sean P. Connors (ed.). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 15-27. Weik Von Mossner, Alexa. 2013. "Hope in Dark Times: Climate Change and the World Risk Society in Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017." In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, Balaka Basu, Katherine R Broad, & Carrie Hintz (eds). New York and London: Routledge, 69-84. Vieira, Fatima (ed.). 2013. Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Voigts, Eckart andAlessandraBoller (eds). 2015. Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics - New Tendencies - Model Interpretations. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 199311924. We. Translated by Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin Books.

6. AN EVER-COMPROMISED UTOPIA: VIRTUAL REALITY IN THOMAS PYNCHON'S BLEEDING EDGE

ESKO SUORANTA

Dystopian writing is currently often invoked to describe the strange features of the Western political and social climate, explicate the fabula of a post-truth era, and explain the cruel irrationalities of our global polis. For instance, MargaretAtwood's classic The Handmaid's Tale, Jack Womack's underrated Random Acts of Senseless "Violence, and the canonical works of Orwe11 and Huxley (not to mention popular young adult fiction, like Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games) seem to crowd colunms, blogs, and tweets (see, e.g. Alter 2017 or Hogan 2017). While such novels are often mentioned owing to their prescient or close analysis of future dystopian conditions that resemble our O\vn, another avenue of approach is also available to study such conditions. Adapting the idiom of dystopia to novels that do not immediately register or are not marketed as dystopian fiction yields results that uncover the tendencies of our time, which can lead to outcomes characterized as dystopian. Rather than imagine what the world after the deluge might look like, some works of contemporary fiction present dystopian trends and latent phenomena in today's Western culture. Such fiction shows that the contemporary world is in fact characterized by competing tendencies with both dystopian and utopian overtones. Bleeding Edge (2013, hereafter BE), the latest novel to date by Thomas Pynchon, is typical of the author's work: it is complex, extremely wellresearched, and ambiguous. Rather than a portrayal of a future dystopian society, it is a near-historical, postmodern sleuth story. Despite such a categorization. analysing Bleeding Edge with the toolkit of dystopia studies sheds light on Pynchon's attitude towards technological development and the opposing forces of democratization and coercion within it. My claim is that Pynchon uses fictional virtual reality to highlight the dystopian and utopian potentials of the Internet in the 201Os. For Pynchon. the virtual is able to challenge some of the dystopian tendencies inherent in the late capitalist world system of commercialization and control.

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In portraying the (mis)adventures of Maxine Tamow, a de-certified fraud-examiner and mother of two, Bleeding Edge investigates real and imagined conspiracies around the transformation of the Internet into Web 2.0 as well as events surrounding the terror attacks of September 11, 200!. In my analysis ofthe novel, I focus on Pynchon's depiction of DeepArcher, a kind of proto-virtual reality, tlie bleeding edge teclinology oftlie novel's early twenty-first century.' In tlie course oftlie novel, wliicli spans tlie spring of2001 to the spring of 2002 and is set mostly in New York, tlie virtual world of DeepArclier goes through a series of developments not unlike many real-world software projects. It starts out as the venture oftwo developers, Jason and Lucas. It is intended to offer a virtual escape and departure for an exclusive in-the-know user base as a utopian online haven. As it showcases technical illllovations in interconnectedness, mutability, and anonymization, DeepArcher soon becomes compromised as powers bent on control and commodification realize its significance. A backdoor is installed to allow unauthorized access and all sorts of consumerist attempts emerge to capitalize on its uniqueness. Because of the breach and the monetary potential for selling the source code to the highest bidder, Jason and Lucas face a dilemma. Selling out would make them very rich indeed, but then their utopia would be out of tlieir control and most likely turned into sometliing otlier than they envisioned. At the same time, they cannot keep the commodifying forces out of tlie system. Finally, tliey decide to relinquisli control and release the source code, thus placing the struggle over DeepArcher's control into the hands of its users, who all are bestowed with the power to change it to their liking by manipulating the code. Pynclion has been dubbed many tliings. Re lias often been termed the paragon postmodem novelist, for his works are treasure troves of ontological uncertainties, cognitive mappings, and intertextual elements, to name just a few features often associated with postmodern fiction. Darko Suvin (1991, 359) locates liim "on tlie margins of SF and 'liigli lit''' and sees him as a precursor to cyberpunk authors like William Gibson. Furthermore, Pynchon's works have been called "historiographic metafiction" and "metafictional romance" (McRale 2012, 124), instances of encyclopaedic Meinppean satire (Cowart 2012,90), and even examples of "the maximalist 1 Bleeding edge teclmology is teclmology at its most advanced but experimental stage. It carries the risk of unreliability and unforeseen consequences. Pynchon takes the phrase metaphorically, of course, with the virtual and real bleeding at their edges into one another throughout the novel.

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novel" (Ercolino 2014, xi, emphasis original). Such interpretive approaches often collide. For Amy J. Elias (2012,124), Pynchon's notion of "polyvocal history" advocates "paranoia as a fmm of cognitive mapping" where "a notion of history as 'event' leads him to construct history as sublime or 'subjunctive' history". To chart the utopian and dystopian waters of Bleeding Edge, I follow Keith M. Booker's articulation of the distinction between classical dystopia and critical dystopia. The fmmer "focuses on critique of whatever social or political practices are examined in the text", while the latter critiques "certain negative practices or institutions" but still "retains a strong utopian dimension, emphasizing that there are alternatives to the dystopian conditions being portrayed" (Booker 2013, 7). For Tom Moylan, classical dystopias are "not anti-utopian", that is, they do not "refuse the possibility of radical social transformation". However, their emphasis is not on alternatives to dystopian conditions, but on "projecting the nightmare society" as a means to obliquely conjure up utopian values (Moylan 2000, 133). This understanding of dystopia is finther supplemented by Raffaella Baccolini's observation that "critical dystopias reject the conservative dystopian tendency to settle for the anti-utopian closure invited by the historical situation by setting up 'open endings' that resist closure and maintain 'the utopian impulse within the work' [ ... ] 'by rejecting the traditional subjugation of the individual at the end of the novel, the critical dystopia opens a space of contestation and opposition'" ("Gender and Genre" 18; qt. in Moylan 2000,189, emphasis original).' Such an lUlderstanding of critical dystopia as harbouring a utopian strain and resisting reduction and single-truth closure helps bring out nuances in Bleeding Edge that have been overlooked by accounts where the novel and its view of technology have been cast in a straightforwardly dystopian light3 I argue against Siege!'s (2016) interpretation of Pynchon's take on the virtual as being just another reahn of capitalist and governmental schemes of control. Pynchon does engage the cyberpunk

Note on ellipses: Authorial omissions are marked as "[ ... ]", while Pynchon's stylized ellipses are marked" ... " to distinguish the two. 3 See Siegel (2016), discussed at length below, but also Cowart (2013, np.) who sees the novel as "[ending up] merely validating the etymology of Utopia ('no place')" when "commercial interests begin turning up" in the virtual reality of DeepArcher. See also Collado-Rodriguez (2016, 240) for whom "people are trapped by new and sophisticated bleeding-edge teclmologies that [... ] offer a false and enslaving refuge against the terrors of the physical world".

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discourse between utopian escape and dystopian anxiety that arises from

the collation of the virtual and the real and presents postmodem challenges to the cognitive mapping it engenders, but the way DeepArcher develops in the novel does not lead to dystopian outcomes. Rather than signalling a mere warning against the role of technology in society, Pynchon proposes that the democratization of those technologies can defer oppression and

give purchase to polyvocal meaning-making in the contemporary world of online and oflline difference. Thus, Bleeding Edge is no straightforward dystopia, and Pynchon's commitment to a polyvocal understanding of history and his depiction of the continuous struggle over transfOlmative technology reveals the utopian impulse within the novel.

Lost in cyberspace: Utopian escape or dystopian disenfranchisement? As noted by Suvin (1991 , 359), Pynchon straddles genre and literary fiction, being a mainstream favourite for science fiction readers and scholars alike,

especially due to Gravity:S Rainbow (1973). Several of his novels engage with questions of science and technology and, as Inger H. Dalsgaard (2012, 158) notes, "combine an exploration of limits of narrative structure with

thematic approaches and (implicit) social commentary and critique", which could also be applied to many key works of science fiction. It is thus not surprising that Bleeding Edge finds important intertexts in cyberpunk fiction, especially due to its poetics of virtual space. One of the central innovations in cyberpunk is its way of narrating infOlmation networks in spatial tellllS so that a network of computers becomes another urban space, simultaneously an inner and outer space where the body does

not constrain the mind by spatiality or sensory ability. While such an image of cyberspace continues to infollll imaginations and designs of virtual realities, the spatial constraints are very much still in place. What Pynchon does with DeepArcher in Bleeding Edge is to engage the cyberspace motif to describe a low-latency, c1unky experience of using computers at the turn of the millennium. To give the era some context, 2001 was the year Windows XP was launched and 2002 saw the release of Final Fantasy XI Online. The fact that Pynchon has done his homework is clearly evident in his description of DeepArcher's origins, which references fairly specific items of IT history, especially when describing the anonymization

technology behind the system:

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DeepArcher's roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Fillllish technology from the penet.fi days [that] pass[es] data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it's been, immediately, forever. (BE, 78) Against this historical, material, and, in a sense, realistic background, a stark contrast emerges when DeepArcher is depicted in action: [T]here is no main page, no music score, only a sOlmd ambience, [ ... ] and the smoothly cross-da\Vlling image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, [ ... ] flar[es] beyond the basic videogame bro\Vll of the time into the full color spectrum of very early morning, polygons finely smoothed to all but continuous curves, the rendering, modeling, and shadows, blending and blur, handled elegantly, even with ... could you call it genius? [ ... ] A framed lucid dream, it approaches, and \Vfaps Maxine, and strangely without panic she submits. (BE 75)

This passage captures the novelty and sublimity of highly advanced computer technology, especially when its level of advancement can be seen

in the system's graphic representation. The technical jargon of polygons and rendering draws attention to the building blocks of immersive virtual spaces, but the last sentence hints at the transcendent feature of online worlds, that is, their all-encompassing, dream-like nature that is very easy to accept and enter.

The name DeepArcher puns on "departure" (BE 36) which implies the utopian potential of online worlds of solace. On the other hand, its

depiction as a virtual space with cyberpunk techniques harks back to dystopian imaginings of disembodied and disenfranchised online minds. The cyberpunk features come to the fore during Maxine's excursion into the virtual. Here Pynchon starts to collate the narration of online events into those offiine, with online fictional space behaving in exactly the same way his offiine fictional spaces do: The signs say DEEPARCHER LOUNGE. [ ... ] "Nice to meet you, Maxine. Going to be with us for a while?" "Don't knOw. "Who told you my name?" "Go ahead, explore around, use the Clisor, click anywhere you like." If it's a travel cOllllection that Maxine is supposed to be making, she keeps missing it. "Departure" keeps being postponed. [ ... ] "It's all right," dialogue boxes assure her, "it's part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost." (BE 75 76)

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And later outside DeepArcher but at another part of the deep web: 4 A brieftapdance on the keyboard and they're in. [ ... ] The ghosts here are more visible. Strata of tobacco smoke bang lUlstirred in the windowless space. Scope wizards attend radar displays. Virtual underlings pass in and out with clipboards and coffee. The officer on duty, a bird colonel, regards them as if about to ask for a password. (BE 242)

In the former passage, Maxine's foealization, the dialogue fmm, and the deictic marker "here" have us read what is supposed to be a 2001 computing experience in the same way as an encounter in cyberspace or the tangible world. In the latter, a wealth of real-world detail merged with the fantastic is used to describe what is essentially an online databank. In fact, Jason Siegel notes a difference between Bleeding Edge and Neuromancer (1984), the epitome of cyberpunk novels. For him, Neuromancer separates the real world and virtual reality despite challenging "the ontological primacy" of "meatspace", while Bleeding Edge finds that they are becoming inseparable, that "meatspace is cyberspace" (Siegel 2016, 10). This collation results in confusion and a feeling of dread, which leads to Maxine getting lost in an unmappable and possibly hostile environment: "She's lost. There is no map. It isn't like being lost in any of the romantic tourist destinations back in meatspace. Serendipities here are unlikely to be in the cards, only a feeling she recognizes from dreams, a sense of something not necessarily pleasant just about to happen." (BE 77) According to the analysis of Darko Suvin (1991, 358), "a viable thisworldly, collective and public, utopianism simply is not within the horizon of the cyberpunk structure of feeling". Even the oft evoked mirrorshades, a symbol of cool rebellion, signal only "a minor degree of effective withdrawal and a large degree of psychological illusion of withdrawal in the wearer" rather than providing an escape from the dystopian societies of cyberpunk fiction (ibid.). It would then seem that the escapist promise of cyberspace would stand in the way of concrete action towards creating utopia. Maxine's experiences, however, give rise to a (sensible) paranoid reaction to the technological sublime she faces as she gets lost in cyberspace, not a feeling of removed and hollow coolness. Furthermore, the ontological collapse of meatspace and cyberspace plus the direct reference to Maxine being lost without a map connect her Without going into too many details of Internet architecture, it is worthwhile to note that DeepArcher is situated in what is called the deep web, that is, the part of the web that is not indexed by search engines. 4

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experience with Brian McHale's and Fredric Jameson's analyses of the effect of late capitalist postmodemity on subjects. McHale summarizes Jameson's notion of the postmodem condition as a challenge to cognitive mapping, that is, to "the postmodem subject's capacity to know where, literally and figuratively, she or he is located in the space oflate capitalism" (McHale 2012,109). In this way, the anti-utopianism detectable in cyberpunk fiction is joined with a postmodem sense of confusion that in turn leads to Maxine's feelings of anxiety. Jameson (1991, 38) suggests that paranoid fiction could offer a partial answer to the problem of cognitive mapping, which is "a degraded attempt - through the figuration of advanced technology - to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system" that has emerged in cyberpunk fiction. Pynchon, of course, is a long-time believer in the power of paranoia for trying to understand some of the contemporary world's complexity. Maxine, like Oedipa Maas in The Crying a/Lot 49, is very much a specimen of the paranoid sensibility, venturing as far as saying "paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much" (BE 11). The ontological collapse also has effects on Maxine's experience in meatspace. Later in the novel, the virtual seems to creep into the everyday as Maxine sees DeepArcher phenomena around her on the streets of New York, which denotes "ontological confusion about the difference between real life and virtual reality" (SiegeI2016, 13): Increasingly she's finding it harder to tell the real NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis ... as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her each time farther into the virtual world. Certainly lUlforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face. (BE 429) This confused feeling when facing the effects of the virtual on the material world echoes the rocket in Gravity:S Rainbow, which according to Joseph Tabbi (1995, 75) "provides a sublime uplift as text, a disembodied web of infOlmation that floats above nature's gravity and belies its potential for causing real, material destruction" (emphasis original). In the case of DeepArcher, destruction might look rather different than in Gravity:S Rainbow, but like "the belief that we can substitute for nature an image of our o\Vll complexity" brought on by the rocket, the virtual inspires a similar "new kind of dread and anxiety in the presence of vast technological systems" (ibid.).

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The anti-utopianism resonating from Bleeding Edge's cyberpunk intertexts, the challenges virtuality creates for cognitive mapping, and its totalizing effect that harbours the potential for destruction all seem to point to interpretations that would locate the novel in a more or less dystopian geme without much hopeful utopianism. The concepts of postmodem and cyberpunk fiction clearly influence Bleeding Edge and have us anticipate a story that allegorically warns against the dystopian situation it depicts or, alternatively, leads to confusion over the possibility of even semipelTIlanent values. As the case is one ofPynchon's, however, there is more to the story than is evident on the surface.

Bleeding Edge as a critical dystopia with a utopian strain So where, then, is DeepArcher's and Bleeding Edge's utopian impulse so as to justify its interpretation as a critical dystopia? So far in my analysis, virtual reality has appeared more like another facet of postmodem late capitalism and its dystopian elements; it is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. The utopian impulse could be located in Justin and Lucas's original vision of DeepArcher as a "grand-scale motel for the afflicted, a destination reachable only by virtual midnight express", a combination of "a California that had never existed, safe, sunny all the time" and a place "a little darker, where it rains a lot and great silences sweep like wind, holding inside them the forces of destruction" (BE 74). Furthermore, the connections Maxine makes between meatspace and cyberspace offer a more complete view of DeepArcher as a utopian project in constant danger. Thus, the way Pynchon resolves the conflicts between the safe and sunny solace and the forces of destruction brings out another level of his virtual utopianisrn . Maxine, on a nightly motorboat excursion, observes the Island of Meadows, a nature reserve next to the defunct Fresh Kills landfill, and connects DeepArcher and the projects to commodify the virtual reality to similar tendencies relating to actual landscapes and real estate in New York: The little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to lUlexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still do\Vll

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there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their o-wn far-from-selfless ends. (BE 167)

The real New York stands for virtual reality and vice versa, tlie landfill a negative of New York City, the island a stand-in for DeepArcher, both virgin lands to be cultivated and colonized. They could both be a refuge or sanctuary, untouched landscapes with the potential for choice, safe from trespassers and indexers with reductionist agendas - and thus with utopian potential. This pristine virtual utopia becomes compromised when DeepArcher is penetrated through a backdoor and the powers of tlie market are let loose: She can't help but noticing this time how different the place is. What was once a train depot is now a Jetsons-era spaceport with all wacky angles, jagged towers in the distance, lenticular enclosures up on stilts, saucer traffic coming and going up in the neon sky. Yuppifed duty-free shops, some for offshore brands she doesn't recognize even the font they're \\'fitten in. Advertising everywhere. On walls, on the clothing and skins of crowd extras, as pop-ups out of the Invisible and into yom face. (BE 354) The dystopian late capitalist impulses appear as futuristic excess and seeming complexity at the service of tlie market. The wealth of brands might not be specifically recognizable, but its very brandedness and commercial nature is immediately obvious. The alternate world of escape and solace that held a utopian potential due to its untouched nature is reduced to closure, as a single-purpose, single-truth dystopian system. Siegel sees this moment as pivotal in DeepArcher's development. He reads it as proof that the virtual world "represents tlie way in which late capitalism has neutralized the Internet's potential to increase freedom" (Siegel 2016, 18). For him, the backdoor "opens the floodgates and allows anyone to access the site", but this is not "a democratizing turn of events [ ... ] it defeats the purpose of tlie online refuge and violates the spirit in which it was conceived" (ibid., 19). This interpretation is problematic for two reasons. First, the teleological view of DeepArcher grants primacy to the original spirit behind its creation, which is in focus in the novel's descriptions of its refuge and solace. However, the guardians of this spirit, that is, its creators Justin and Lucas, have re-evaluated their initial plans, as becomes clear in Lucas's reply to Maxine's queries about the effect of tlie backdoor: "Downside of being proprietary, always guarantees a backdoor sooner or later. [ ... ] We're good,

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fact we were never comfortable witb that old model anyway" (BE 356). To be sure, their vision may have been subverted, but the authors have in fact moved on and confess that maybe the original vision was not the best of all possible virtual worlds. Second and more importantly, DeepArcher ultimately becomes something else entirely than a mere escapist fantasy. In order to unpack its development, we should understand how resistance works in a critical dystopia. Baccolini and Moylan outline tbe strategy of resistance to dystopian conditions as follows: "the process of taking control over the means of language, representation, memory, and interpellation is a crucial weapon and strategy in moving dystopian resistance from an initial consciousness to an action that leads to a climactic event that attempts to change the society" (Baccolini & Moylan 2003, 6). As such, Bleeding Edge can be seen as engaging in self-reflexive "gerue blurring" that critical dystopias (and Pynchon's novels, one might add) take part in to "expand [their] creative potential for critical expression" and to recognize "the importance of difference, multiplicity, and complexity" in order to build up "resistance to a hegemonic ideology" (ibid., 7-8). The multiple means of language, representation, memory, and interpellation are exactly what are at stake in the utopianldystopian struggle surrounding DeepArcher. Who gets to dictate tbe overall meaning and significance of the virtual and what will tbey make of it? Just as the utopian image of the Island of Meadows suggests open-endedness, possibility, and choice, the late capitalist space mall signals reduction, a single-purpose choice, in the sense of consumer choice only. Baccolini and Moylan's strategy of taking over the means of meaningmaking could appear as a fruitful approach to the threat to Justin and Lucas's utopian haven, since all they would need is a climactic event, a revolution of sorts to seize the means of ideological production. Pynchon clearly sees the importance of meaning-making, but the strategy of resistance his characters opt for is different. Rather than seize control of the means of representation in a virtual revolution against capital, Justin and Lucas relinquish control over their creation and DeepArcher is released as open source. Siegel interprets this move as further proof that Justin and Lucas's utopian project fails and that Pynchon is showing virtuality as a tool for late capitalist drives and control by governments and corporations. According to him, releasing DeepArcher as open source is what makes it "commercialized, gentrified, yuppified, and opened up to global consumer capitalism" (Siegel 2016, 19). Certainly, (virtual) society might not be changed as such as Baccolini and Moylan would have it, nor does

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DeepArcher regain its status as a place of solace for the chosen few, and the dystopian late capitalist forces are not thwarted once and for all. Nevertheless, Siegel's view seems to hinge on a misreading of chapter 33 of the novel (an excerpt from which is given above), where it is in fact the penetration via the backdoor of the system that has brought on the commodification of the place, not the subsequent choice to release the code as open source. Further on in this chapter, having seen the effects of the backdoor that have accumulated over a period of weeks since September 11, Maxine converses with Lucas within DeepArcher. She learns that the release as open source has just occurred. In this way, it could not have brought on the complete transformation of the virtual world into a virtual mall. DeepArcher goes through three separate stages of development in the course of the novel. It starts out as an oasis of supposed solace, then becomes a commercialized travesty of its former self, before finally turning into an open-ended virtual reality that resists closure. The implications of this final move are revealed much later than at the moment when Lucas informs Maxine that they have "li]ust sent the tarball out" (BE 356), and it becomes clear that the late capitalist virtual dystopia has been transformed into something new: Since it went open SOlU-ce and welcomed in half the planet, none of them who they say they are, [ ... ] anybody is likely to be wandering arOlmd the site, herds of tourist-idle, cop-curious, the end of life below the spiders as we've kno\Vll it, ROM hackers, homebrewers, RPG heretics, continually lUnvriting and ovenvriting, disallowing, deprecating, newly defining an ever-growing inventory of contributions to graphics, instructions, encryption, escape ... the word is out, and it seems they've been waiting for years, such is the what's called pent-up demand. Maxine is able to settle in among the throngs, invisible and at ease. (BE 426) The list of various new DeepArcher users and their activities indicates that the virtual reality has become a playground for online makers of meaning rather than a tug-of-war between the forces of commodification and surveillance. In the open source world, there is no centre of dystopian or capitalist power to dictate the rules or purpose for DeepArcher, and meaning-making becomes a decentralized effort of a multitude of users. Even Maxine's feelings of anxiety have dissipated and she becomes another contributor to the multitudinous totality of DeepArcher. This brings into focus one of the ambiguities of the novel's title, as the bleeding edge technology of DeepArcher becomes, in a sense, stabilized. Harbouring potential for both transformative innovation and destruction through

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unreliability, its ultimate significance lies not in commercial applications or technological inventiveness, but rather in the fact that DeepArcher becomes a platfOlTIl for a multitude of voices and avenues of continuous creation. The stabilization of the edge's bleeding is not closure, but openness for new takes on the utopianldystopian potentials inherent in potentially transfOlmative technology. As their O\Vll means of representation, memory, and interpellation have been compromised by dystopian late capitalist impulses, Lucas and Justin choose to disseminate their already tenuous power entirely to the online masses. They let go of their O\Vll utopian project, a move that seems to remain as the only way to serve their ideals of freedom, escape, and departure. An example of this can be seen in Zigotisopolis, a virtual city within DeepArcher created by Maxine's children Ziggy and Otis. It is "a version of NYC as it was before 11 September 2001 [ ... ] their more merciful [ ... ] not-yet-corrupted screenscape" in which the boys are "at home already" (BE 428-429). Even if the utopia is not achieved as Lucas and Justin originally wanted to see it, the utopian potential is salvaged. Going open source leads to a myriad of ways for a plurality of people to craft meaning in and with DeepArcher, not to a closed, totalitarian system of consumerist value exchange populated only by advertisers, consumers, and surveillance.

Engineering the twenty-first century It seems to me that in Bleeding Edge, the climactic event that would effect change in society does not really occur. Even September 11 merely reinforces the paranoid sensibilities in Pynchon's characters, and the changes that are brought on by the attacks do not lead to a brighter tomorrow. This is in line with the observation that Pynchon has, after Gravity:S Rainbow, replaced "the overwhehning dread of the one great unimaginable event [ ... ] with a series of distractions, minor shocks, and endless stimulations of consumer desire" (Tabbi 1995, 76). The novel defers conclusion and closure, especially as DeepArcher's opening seems like an anti-climax, and the conspiracies around it, including the World Trade Center attacks, are not fully uncovered either despite Maxine's investigations. DeepArcher's pristine nature is partially restored when its code is released, the playing field becomes levelled, and the power over representation is relocated and disseminated. In this way, DeepArcher (and

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our contemporary Internet) appears as a machine to create meaning by a multitude of voices, which fits Pynchon's view of polyvocal history. The virtual thus remains ripe for resistance against dystopian impulses, even if the utopian potential might never see complete fulfilment or even stability. The utopia remains ever compromised, but as such, non-finite and kept open to the possibility of change. In telTIlS ofMaxine's observations on the commonalities of the Island of Meadows and DeepArcher, it is interesting to note that her prophetic vision of them succumbing to developers does not come true in either case. DeepArcher is not reduced to a commercial online property and, just as in the novel, to this day the actual Island of Meadows remains a patch of preserved marshland next to Staten Island and the defimct Fresh Kills landfill. Finally, the novel's ending may court controversial interpretations. Just as at the beginning of the novel, Maxine is about to see her children to school, but this time, they go on their own. Siegel (2016, 23) interprets the ending as one of heightened fear, since physical danger has been accompanied with virtual threats. An alternative reading would suggest that Maxine and her children Ziggy and Otis are thus compared to Justin and Lucas and their brainchild, DeepArcher. Maxine remembers her sons' home in the virtual: [S]he flashes back to not so long ago do\Vll in DeepArcher, down in their virtual hometo\Vll of Zigotisopolis, both of them standing just like this, folded in just this precarious light, ready to step out into their peaceable city, still safe from the spiders and bots that one day too soon will be coming for it, to claim-jmnp it in the name of the indexed world. (BE 476) While the threat of the reductionist forces is there in the virtual world, like the threat of actual predators is present in the actual world, Maxine gives in to the maturation of her children and lets go of her need for control. By doing so, a more democratic, independent, and meaningful existence is possible for Maxine's biological progeny and Justin and Lucas's virtual progeny. Of course, the world has not become any less dangerous to Ziggy and Otis - quite the contrary - but all the different warinngs and revelations about her world lead Maxine to realize the value of choosing freedom over security. Again, the bleeding edge keeps bleeding, still with risks arising from its unpredictability, but at the same time open to the creation of meaning, resisting closure. linportantly, Ziggy and Otis are early adopters of technologies like DeepArcher, not only as passive users, but as active makers of meaning and negotiators of representation, as their collaborative virtual home

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Zigotisopolis shows. They are the makers of polyvocal history, one that is increasingly often written in code and exists primarily in the virtual. Their millennial technological fluency gives them an edge in the ongoing negotiation over online control and agency. Where Siegel (2016, 23) finds a partial solution to the "posthuman condition" of Bleeding Edge in the way several relationships are resolved in positive ways (Maxine's ex-husband is reunited with his family, two hacker characters move in together, and an estranged mother patches things up with her daughter), this partial solution must be supplemented by Pynchon's take on the struggles surrounding DeepArcher. Not only is familial collectivity needed to create units that resist the dystopian impulses of commercialization and control, but democratic meaning-making is necessary as an arena of enacting that resistance. It seems that, to Pynchon, the place to find such meaningmaking might be the virtual. Analysing Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Inger H. Dalsgaard (2012, 162) sees the "engineering of the rocket [as] a story about the engineering of the kind of postwar world we have inhabited since 1945". In Bleeding Edge, Pynchon performs a similar operation as regards the post-91l1 world through the engineering of DeepArcher. His choice to bring the struggle between utopian and dystopian powers into an ongoing state reminds his readers that the Internet, or any other aspect of our technocultural society, is not a fixed entity with a singular destiny. Rather, he draws our attention

to the idea that Baccolini and Moylan (2003, 5) also articulate in their depiction of the importance of the constant renegotiation of meaning: "The material force of the economy and the state apparatus controls the social order and keeps it running; but discursive power, exercised in the reproduction of meaning and the interpellation of subjects, is a complementary and necessary force". \¥bile Pynchon seems pessimistic about dismantling or overthrowing state and capital, he puts his faith in the possibility of freedom and democracy through successful meaningmaking. As Tabbi (1995, 77) points out, even if radical freedom eludes his characters, it is of continuing concern to Pynchon. Where then to situate Bleeding Edge with regards to the terminology of dystopia studies? One option could be Suvin's fallible dystopia, which arises out of "both the shock of Post-Fordism and its imaginative mastering" (Suvin 2003, 196). He detects in some science fiction texts a dystopian society of textual action, either as directly extrapolative or more subtly analogous versions of the \¥fiter's reality. In a fallible dystopia, the world is "resistible and changeable, by our hero/ine, often with great difficulty" (ibid.). Such characterizations could be applied to Bleeding Edge, but

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a fuller picture might emerge by borrowing Lyman Tower Sargen!'s conclusion arising from his notion offlawed eutopia. Despite being flawed, eutopia must be committed to "knowing that it is not perfect [ ... ] because [ ... ] we have tbe opportunity [ ... ] of landing tbere and tben setting off after anotber" (Sargent 2003, 230). This casts Pynchon, somewhat surprisingly, in relation to Isaac Asimov, whom Jari K1lkeHl (2016,222) sees as an autbor who "creates a world tbat [ ... ] can never reach [ ... ] a [ ... ] lasting utopian state" and that "can, and must, constantly adjust its course on an endless journey toward utopia". While Kakela makes it very clear that Asimov does not write in the critical mode, and that Pynchon certainly is no Asimov, the apparent incompleteness in the struggle toward utopia is something the two autbors share. Where Asimov "steers [ ... ] away from open-ended plurality of critical utopia" (Kakel1l 2016, 219), plurality is exactly what Pynchon seems to suggest as the only possible course for the flawed eutopian project Sargent describes. Asimov's universe progresses at the hands of his galactic engineers without regard to its constituents and "irons out all difference" (ibid.), while Pynchon comes to the fore as a social critic who attempts to contain the multitudes of societal life, finding possibilities in that very difference. In this sense, Pynchon's dynamics in Bleeding Edge might not adhere to Suvin's or Sargen!'s terminology. To me, through tbe application of tbe vernacular of critical dystopia, the novel might be best characterized as an ever-compromised utopia, in which the difficulty of change, of maintaining plurality, is great and demands the sacrifice of control without the guarantee that a dystopian project is defeated or a utopian one reached. 5 Its utopianism is not in the vein of the no place, but rather very much anchored in the here and now of contemporary society, resulting in its ever-compromised nature. Despite these complications and the relinquishing of centralized control, Pynchon seems to imply that what is important to maintain is the possibility of freedom so as not to halt the progression from one flawed utopia to another. 5 "While the study of a single novel is not enough to show that "ever-compromised utopia" is on par with terms like "critical dystopia" or "classical dystopia", it might open an avenue of approach to other works similar to Bleeding Edge that are not necessarily categorized into the dystopian or utopian gemes. Novels benefiting from a similar analysis would include William Gibson's contemporary Bigend Trilogy (2003 2010), in which characters are not invested in overthrowing the oppressive structures of their world, but still manage to find forms of resistance and agency within them (for more on power and agency in the Bigend Trilogy, see Suoranta

2014).

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Conclusion While Bleeding Edge IS not straightforwardly representative of contemporary dystopian fiction as such, analysing it with the tools of critical dystopia and related concepts offers a fuller understanding of its approach to virtual reality and, by extension, to technological development in the post-91l1 world. From this approach, it becomes clear that Pynchon's themes of paranoia, polyvocal history, and highly referential intertextuality gain a new area of application in the near-historical account of Bleeding Edge. Like with the rocket in Gravity :s Rainbow or the founding moments of the American republic in Mason and Dixon, Pynchon has turned his authorial gaze onto another historical watershed after which everything is and is not different. Invoking science fictional images of cyberspace, Pynchon brings forth both the possibility of utopian escape and dystopian disconnectedness inherent in humankind's attempts to broaden its experiential horizon into the virtual. He makes clear the transfOlmative nature of even fairly lowtech computer environments when they are brought into the everyday life of unsuspecting users. The virtual is appropriately accompanied by feelings of dread as well as excitement. This leads to considerations of postmodern challenges to cognitive mapping that are already considerable due to the undecipherable nature of late capitalist reality and are then further complicated with the virtual where nothing may be what it seems. Maxine's attempts to navigate this transformed reality lead her to make connections between the actual and virtual worlds as flip sides of one another. As the Island of Meadows passage shows, late capitalist projects to index, reduce, and commodify are similar online and offline. DeepArcher's turn towards the excessively commercial after the installation of the backdoor signals the tenacity of late capitalist development to relegate everything novel and utopian to a subservient position. However, the means of language, representation, memory, and interpellation as keys of resistance to dystopian forces are sho\Vll to be able to act as a sort of reset in a commercialized system. In Bleeding Edge, this does not occur as an overtlrrow of the material conditions that make late capitalism possible, but as a democratization of the means of meaning-making. By letting go of control, Justin and Lucas are able to maintain the utopian potential of their project, even if they lose the possibility ofinfiuencing its end result or protecting some original vision. As the final consequences of DeepArcher's open source move are not revealed and the crisis brought on by September 11 is left umesolved,

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Bleeding Edge ends on an ambiguous note. The world, virtual or otherwise, does not become free of danger or reductionist agendas, but the struggle of meaning-making goes on, as Ziggy and Otis are set free to venture to the

scary world outside their home, however reluctantly, by Maxine. Bleeding Edge might not unproblematically appear as either Suvin's fallible dystopia or Sargen!'s flawed utopia, but the utopian project ofpolyvocal history-inthe-making appears ever-compromised and subject to change.

Works Cited Alter, Alexandra. 2017. "Boom Times for the New Dystopians." New York Times, March 30. https:llwww.nytirnes.comI2017/03/30fbooksfboomtirnes-for-the-new-dystopians.html, retrieved 26 April 2017. Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. 2003. "Introduction: Dystopia and Histories." In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baccolini & Tom Moylan (eds). New York: Routledge, 1-12. Booker, M. Keith. 2013. "On Dystopia." In Dystopia, M Keith Booker (ed.). Ipswich: Salem Press, 1-15. Collado-Rodrfguez, Francisco. 2016. "Intertextuality, Trauma, and the Posthuman in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57 (3): 229-241. Cowart, David. 2012. "Pynchon in Literary History." In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Hemmn, & Brian McHale (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 8396. Cowart, David. 2013. '''Down on the Barroom Floor of History': Pynchon's Bleeding Edge." Postmodern Culture, 24 (1): np, retrieved 28 April 2017. doi: 10.1353/pmc.2013.0060 Dalsgaard, Inger H. 2012. "Science and Technology." In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, & Brian McHale (eds). Cambridge University Press, 156-167. Elias, Amy J. 2012. "History." In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, & Brian McHale (eds). Cambridge University Press, 123-135. Ercolino, Stefano. 2014. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon:S Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolanos 2666. New York & London: Bloomsbury. Gibson, William. 1995. Neuromancer. London: Voyager.

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Hogan, Ron. 2017. '''There's Too Much Reality': On Jack Womaek's Random Acts of Senseless Violence." Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 February: np https:lllareviewofbooks.org/artic1e/theres-too-muehreality-on-jack-womacks-random-acts-of-senseless-violence/, retrieved

26 April 2017. Jameson, Fredrie. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London & New York: Verso. KakeHl, Jari. 2016. "The Cowboy Politics of an Enlightened Future: History, Expansionism, and Guardianship in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction". PhD thesis, University of Helsinki. MeHale, Brian. 2012. "Pynehon's Postmodernism." In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Lue Hemmll, & Brian MeHale (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 97111. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press. Pynehon, Thomas. 2013. Bleeding Edge. London: Jonathan Cape. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2003. "The Problem of the 'Flawed Utopia.'"

In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baeeolini & Tom Moylan (eds). New York: Routledge, 225231. Siegel, Jason. 2016. "Meatspace is Cyberspaee: The Pynehonian Posthuman in Bleeding Edge." Orbit: A Journal ofAmerican Literature 4 (2): 1-27. Suoranta, Esko. 2014. "Agents or Pawns? Power Relations in William Gibson's Bigend Trilogy." Fafoir - Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 1 (1): 19-31. Suvin, Darko.1991. "On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF." In Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, Larry MeCaffery (ed.). Durham & London: Duke University Press, 349-365. Suvin, Darko. 2003. "Theses on Dystopia 2001." In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baeeolini & Tom Moylan (eds). New York: Routledge, 187-201. Tabbi, Joseph. 1995. Postmodem Sublime: Technology and American WritingfromMailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca & London: Comell University Press.

11 ARTICULATING THE (PoST)ApOCALYPSE

7. THIS FUTURE PAST: PARSING POST-APOCALYPTIC TEMPORALITY WITH CORMAC MCCARTHY'S THE ROAD

JOUNI TEITTINEN

Post-apocalyptic narratives have fundamentally to do with time. This remark is in a sense trivial, since the events described tend to take place in the future of their writing and the presumed readership, and so engage in temporal speculation; and as the moniker already implies, the postapocalypse presents a world after a decisive disaster, instantly evoking comparison with a before. However, as with utopian, dystopian, or generally science fictional literature, these elements tend to be seen as a means to other ends: post-apocalyptic narratives are often perceived (aside from the plain thrill of it) as either cautionary narratives or as "thought experiments" concerning topics such as human nature, the perseverance of hope, or just generally the sad lot of man, the temporally speculative elements serving to contribute the requisite "laboratory conditions". To claim that the postapocalyptic narratives' temporal speculation is itself much the point, or that it sets the stage for a meditation on time, is to say something more - yet not all that much. What narrative would not set such a stage? And what time is this, again? Claire Colebrook (2014, 199) suggests one answer, noting that the "vogue" for so-called post-apocalyptic fiction "seems to indicate that we are now feeling (if not thinking) a new relation between the human species and time", specifically an experience of humanity as a "mode of organism that will one day have had its time". Granting that the linkage of time, the human species, and the post-apocalypse seems exceptionally topical (think "Anthropocene"l), I will here take one step back and ask 1 The scientific-cmn-cultural notion of the "Anthropocene" was introduced to the current discourse by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoerrner (2000) as a specifically geological rnoniker to characterize our eJXlch (and is thus a proJXlsed successor to

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after what is it, in the post-apocalyptic context, to will have had one's time. To this end, what the chapter perfOlTIlS is less a taxonomy than a preliminary ethology of post-apocalyptic temporality, a case-study into its workings in the notable specimen ofCormac McCarthy's The Road (2006, hereafter TR). McCarthy's novel engages many topics and themes pertinent to the larger post-apocalyptic genre (such as kin and other, humanity and animality, memory and forgetting, language and sociality), often threading them together through the master thematics of temporality. In my view, this makes The Road in some ways a paradigmatic (although not always representative) post-apocalyptic novel, and insight into its workings may well illuminate some of the questions pivotal to post-apocalyptic works more generally. While the voluminous academic literature on The Road has repeatedly remarked on temporal issues raised by the text (the milieu of mental and material remnants on the one hand, the suffocating lack of future on the other), what calls for closer attention is the mutual intertwining of these past and future horizons (following the lead of Thomas Carlson's (2007) suggestive reading), as well as their relation to the position of the reader in the temporal schema of the future anterior that defines postapocalyptic narratives. While I bring into my interpretation elements that appear throughout The Road, I am not primarily interested in the novel's narrative trajectory (on which there exists plenty of good analysis), but rather the post-apocalyptic situation as it presents itself in the text. The main setting of my reading thus consists of three scenes, three ruins, as interconnected passages into the temporal problematics opened up by the novel. That ruined structures have been a recurring post-apocalyptic motif ever since the geme's inauguration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (incidentally a period in which European culture witnessed a general surge of interest in ruins) is no doubt explained and specified by the character of the apocalyptic event. However, it should also be noted that the notion of the ruin in itself is connected with issues close to post-apocalyptic temporality, harbouring as it does "a time of retentions, protentions and disruptions, one that situates the post-glacial Holocene). It has since been taken up to underline, in more general and often apocalyptic terms, the massive influence of hmnans on ecosystems and the climate. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) has famously claimed that the notion of the Anthropocene, by lUldoing the insulation of human history from the history of the Earth, has fundamentally reconfigmed how we lUlderstand nature, history, and temporality. For an in-depth introduction to how the Anthropocene figmes in literature, see Vermeulen 2020. 2 As an indication, MLA International Bibliography lists 130 titles (11 May 2018).

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the individual in an environment of competing and commingled tenses" (Viney 2014, 25). In the first section of this article ("Gas station"), I will sketch out the bifurcated temporal situation of The Road, which I take to apply more generally to post-apocalyptic narratives of similar near-future devastation. In the second section ("Home"), I focus more specifically on how The Road construes the post-apocalyptic world's relation to its past, while in the third section ("The Library"), the focus is on the significance of the future and futurity conveyed. The issue of futurity, the heart of the text at hand, concerns both the compromised future of the post-apocalyptic world and the cancelled future ofthe fictive pre-apocalypse, as well as the relation of post-apocalyptic speculation with the future of us, the readers.3 While I do not here attempt a systematic account of the latter aspect, it has been my intention throughout not to let it fall under the radar.

Gas station The Road narrates the journey of two Ullllamed protagonists, a man and his young son, as they try to survive against the weather, hunger, and the scattered remains of humanity in a United States stripped of nearly all life by a sudden, urmarned event. Ash clouds blot out the sun. The protagonists head south towards the sea to escape winter, and they eventually reach a dead shore that offers little solace. The man grows increasingly weak and finally dies. At the conclusion of the novel, the boy is taken in by a family of supposedly good people, but - given the general scheme of things - any sense of relief or redemption is all but unambiguous. The following scene, early on in the novel, offers a representative description of the man scavenging in an abandoned building, and it so serves to establish the basic contours of The Road's post-apocalyptic temporality. Since this temporality connects intimately with readerly immersion and the mood evoked, I quote at length (as with all of my key scenes): 3 The term "pre-apocalyptic" is sometimes used to refer to narratives where the focus is on the events that precede the apocalypse more or less immediately and are already overshadowed by it. By contrast, I will use the term to describe in general the state of the world "before" the apocalypse, irrespective of whether such an apocalypse necessarily occurs, including the reality contemporary to the presumed reader. The notion thus emphasizes the differential symmetry between the pre- and the post-apocalyptic, folded as they are arOlmd (the thought of) the apocalyptic event. If the notion is somewhat problematic, that is part of its purpose.

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They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the plUllpS. The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumOf, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking armmd the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cash register. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linolemn was stained and cmling from the leaking roof. He

crossed to the desk and stooo there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the munber of his father's house in that long ago. The boy watched him. "What are you doing? he said. (TR, 4 5) This paratactic and somewhat inventorial narration is typical of The Road. On one level, it relates to the man's appraising eye as he estimates his surroundings item by item for danger or profit. However, the style of narration also invokes the fragmented nature of the post-apocalyptic world, and here the central factor becomes the milieu's contrast with the world before its ruination. What the quoted scene presents are objects that should be connected, should take their place in the functional economy of what we understand as a gas station (itself a standard item in the cultural imagery of being on the road), but that do not. This is epitomized by the phone, also recalling the theme of communication pivotal for the novel, which is literally out of order: in the fOImer world, it took its place in a mesh of relations formed not only by objects and people but also a shared sense of meaningful acts, like that of calling one's parents, and this order is no longer there. (The man later recalls how "he would look up his family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world." (TR, 194)) While the scene thus presents both items that are materially ruined and that seem more or less whole or applicable, the core issue is that their world has stopped whirring: seen through the radical divide between the pre- and the post-apocalypse, everything that is left is ruins, whether salvage or debris. In his analysis on ruins and ruined objects, William Viney (2014, 12) notes that items falluig out of use do not simply lose their relation to "use-time" but occupy a "state of abeyance", and the sense of this now everlasting dormancy evoked by The Road's ruins is only bolstered by the image of intact windows and gas pumps, a phone waiting on the table. Thomas Carlson (2007, 52 and passim.) writes at length of the world's "suspension" effected by The Road

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The man's perspective on the world is split between the post- and the pre-apocalyptic, precariously tethered to the pre-apocalyptic horizons of expectation and meaning-making (see e.g. Hellyer 2012, 47). What is also clear, however, is that the pre-apocalyptic view of the post-apocalyptic reality is likewise a matter of how that reality is perceived and recognized by tbe novel's "pre-apocalyptic" readers.' As Eva Horn (2014, 11-12) has noted, as has Kevin Keamey (2012, 163) specifically in connection with The Road, the temporal relation between a post-apocalyptic narrative and its presumed readership can be expressed by way of the grammatical tense of the future anterior (also called the future perfect): what will have been. The post-apocalyptic narrative is not only positioned in the future, but the reader is also encouraged to reflect on the past of that future narrative, that is, to relate to her actual life-world and its near future as a thing of the past. This double movement, constituting what Horn (2014, 11) calls tbe post-apocalyptic standpoint, recalls familiar characterizations of futural narratives in general, such as the one offered by Fredric Jameson. Jameson (2005,286) argues that besides giving us "'images' of the future", science fiction puts into place a "complex temporal structure" that works to "defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our 0\Vll present". I would only add that the claim of future scenarios as casting our present "in the fmm of some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered" (ibid., 288) applies all the more strongly when we are dealing specifically with post-apocalyptic scenarios. This is not only because in the post-apocalyptic scenario (of the sort I'm concerned with here), "our world" is more decisively telTIlinated than in most other futural fictions, but also because the post-apocalyptic world is not so much an autonomous realm as based on that very posthurnousness. In the context of The Road, tbis is vividly captured by Thomas Carlson: newspapers, billboards, and advertisements; money and markets and stores; telephones and their books; cars and trains and their now pointless, empty routes: everything seems like a message or a means of exchange In practice, readers of cmu-se possess widely differing experiences, approaches, and cultural and personal backgrmUlds, conceivably in themselves (in some sense) "post-apocalyptic". The extra-narrative employment of "pre-apocalyptic", like my undiscriminating use of "we" and "us", in part depends on a conscious demarcation along the lines of what Adeline Iohns-Putra (2016, 520) calls "the privileged, globalized, educated, virtually networked classes of the world so often described as ' us"'. This is notto say that the questions here addressed (notto speak of the novel itself) would lose their relevance outside such an ingroup, but they should perhaps be in part rearticulated.

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and connection now shorn of sender and purpose, bereft of any recipient or destination, but nonetheless present in its inoperative, but still visible, possibility. Goods and values, plans and projects, hopes and promises all still appear their intentions and means, tokens and aims persist but in light of their now withdrawn possibility, in the faihrre of the world, and of the interplay behveen memory and expectation, that sustained them. (Carlson 2007, 57)

Prompted by his phenomenological perspective, Carlson notes (without further developing) the necessary relation of memory and expectation as well as its undoing in the two-way disjunction between the pre- and the post-apocalypse: post-apocalyptic remains, conceived as messages, not only seem to lack a recipient but also a sender. For now, however, the most relevant insight is the two-tiered observation that we make sense of the material world by instilling its items with intent and purpose; and that when these various purposes definitively come to nothing, their material loci do not stop signifying but carry on as ruined signs and as signs of ruin. As Carlson (2007, 57) notes, the pre-apocalyptic world is present in the novel mainly "through the negative image or trace" (see also, e.g. Masters 2012, 116; Johns-Putra 2016, 526-527). The post-apocalyptic novel thus prompts the reader to reflect not only on her world as past, but specifically on its remaining traces, the signs of its passing. It is precisely through these traces that the perspective of the reader becomes intertwined with that of The Road's adult protagonist; while the characters ' projected psychology obviously cannot be conflated with the reader's point of view, the man's perspective on what is lost becomes affectively inseparable from how the reader gauges the significance of things (and their future absence) in her contemporary reality. In this significant sense, the pre-apocalyptic "long ago" that the man attempts to contact is also right here, inhabited by us the readers.

Home Whereas Jameson's observation (quoted above) on the temporality of science fiction emphasizes the distance between the narrated future world and the world contemporary to its readers, the post-apocalyptic narrative often simultaneously calls that distance into question. As Paul Ricoeur (2006, 39) notes when writing on memory and recognition, the necessary otherness of that which is remembered is not a homogeneous category; it has degrees ranging from familiarity "in the enjoyment of the past revived" to the feeling of strangeness or Freudian Unheimlichkeit. What gives the

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work of memory amongst The Road's post-apocalyptic ruins its distinctive colour is the marked instability of these poles. The past world is recognized simultaneously as present (this is tlie same world, only devastated) and as fundamentally absent (this devastated world is no longer tlie same); it is in turns too close and altogether disO\vned, refusing to stay "back there where it was" (ibid.), which Ricoeur (quoting Edward Casey) deems the median degree of nmemonic distance between overt familiarity and uncarmy otherness. These questions become particularly tangible when The Road's protagonists enter the man's childhood home, "an old frame house with chimneys and gables and a stone wall" with many of the clapboards stripped for fuel (TR, 24). With some likelihood, this is the house whose past the man attempted to dial. They slipped out of their backpacks and left them on the terrace and kicked their way through the trash on the porch and pushed into the kitchen. The boy held on to his hand. All much as he'd remembered it. The rooms empty. In the small room off the diningroom there was a bare iron cot, a metal foldingtable. The same castiron coal grate in the small fireplace. The pine paneling was gone from the walls leaving just the furring strips. He stood there. He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago. This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the waste of the yard. A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didn't. (TR, 25 26)

Reminiscent of Carlson's language of messages and traces, William Viney (2014, 11) notes that while ruined or exhausted objects should not simplistically be "treated like a text", the blanks, gaps, and fissures they exhibit call for corresponding "acts of reading and interpretation". Throughout his study on waste and ruins, Viney puts special emphasis on the narrative drive to chart the ruined items ' past course and identity, to "supplement" their gaps with an "absent backstory" (ibid., 12). In this scene, the focalized narration is already working on the absences, inconspicuously relocating the robbed pine panelling and adding the longgone tacks and stockings to tlie remaining pinholes, finally re-peopling tlie ruined habitation with scenes of childhood. \¥hat the man's reverie offers, underscored by the shift from "he" to "we", is a picture of the life that is lacking in the post-apocalyptic ruins. The issue of narrative connects

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naturally to that of recognition, since to recognize the past in what is present (without doing away with their distance) is already to begin negotiating their separation in something like a narrative, in this case nostalgic. However, the separation is soon emphatically reasserted: This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against this wall. In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's irnaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be. He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through the roof Gray as his heart (TR, 26 27)

While we might on first thought consider the ruined home a thing of the past, a temporal residue juxtaposed with the protagonists' lived present, it seems more apt to turn the tables: it is the man who momentarily inhabits the past, claimed by memories, while the environment in its ruined materiality resists this anachrony. It is not a stretch to see the house's exposed interior as reflecting an analogous crumbling of the nostalgic impulse, and likewise the disappeared "childhood things" can be taken to include not only the material miscellanea but more generally all those things, persons, events, and memories bearing the scent of that bygone childhood. In a sense, this closing of the scene presents an analogy of The Road's larger thematic, since the massive disjunction between the man's memories of the lost world and his present experience can be seen as analogous to a structure in ruin: the post-apocalyptic event cracks open the psychic no less than the material interiors. A more complex questioning of the narrative reflex that threads the two worlds together is provided in the scene by the boy's point of view. The past is not merely a passive vista for the man's contemplation, construction material for that absent backstory, but framed through the child as an invisible force laying claim on his father. "Claiming" here implies a demand on not only the man's attention, but his situation and identity: "we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters" as against "We should go, Papa" (TR, 25-26; emphasis added). [fthe boy is afraid, as we can surmise from the plea to leave, it is not only of possible dangers but of the lost past projecting its invisible shapes, the omnipresent world of remains and memories that he has no access to but his father struggles to let go of ("Yes, the man said. But he didn't." (TR, 26)). Indeed, on another occasion the man muses that to the boy he must seem like "an alien", "A being from a planet that no longer existed" (TR, 163). From this perspective, the above scene strips dO\vn to its bare essentials the topos of ghosts not uncommon in post-apocalyptic fiction.

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Although The Road's child protagonist can be seen to function as a receptacle for the man's fragile theological allegories (a position which Grace Hellyer (2012, 57-59) argues the boy eventually overcomes) as well as the embodiment of those virtues we deem most valuable, the possibility of his post-apocalyptic perspective also haunts our pre-apocalyptic frames of representation. The boy does not relate to the ruins primarily in the mode of loss, through the negative traces that Carlson so vividly elaborates, since for the boy there never was a world unruined. This resonates with the words of a blind beggar, going by the biblical name of Ely, that the protagonists chance upon on the road: "People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there" (TR, 179). As residents of that planet no longer existing, we the readers should not find it hard to place ourselves amongst the shapes claiming the man as their own, making a claim on the memory of the future. However, if in The Road's reality that tomorrow has definitively arrived ("There is no later. This is later." (TR, 46)), nothing is less certain than that it does, or will, recall us. Cast in the perspective of the future anterior, Ely's dark quip applies the epistemic disjunction in both directions: predictions are disjoined from the actual future, but another (or is it the same?) wideinng gash begins to separate the pre-apocalyptic past from the possibility of remembering. On occasion, this absence of past is articulated by the man himself, as if struggling to rid himself of what in his consciousness remains preapocalyptic: "Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like?" (TR, 55) On the other hand, the past is also beatified, as when the man recalls a night on the beach with his wife such that "if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different" (TR, 234), or when he remembers an evening out rowing with his uncle as "the day to shape the days upon" (TR, 12). These stances are only seemingly contradictory. If it is often the case that a thing's loss only confers more value on it, lights up an idealized image in the dark of an actual absence, this must be all the more so with the loss of a world. Idealization and loss together invite denial, not to speak of trauma and repression. 5 The man himself frames the issue simply as one of survival in the present, warning the boy of treacherous dreams "of some world that

For readings of The Road drawing from tramna theory, see Caruth 2008, Rambo 2008, Wicks 2014, Kaplan 2015. I focus on the relation of post-apocalyptic fiction and the future anterior to the issue of tramna in Teittinen 2020. 5

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never was or of some world that never will be" (TR, 202). I will argue, however, that if there are many ways to parse the curious retroactive nihilism, they all ultimately connect to a sense that the past (along with the present) has lost its future.

The Library The Road's most emblematic scene regarding the disappeared future takes place in a destroyed library. The setting is particularly fitting, since libraries (like museums) are in the modem era "heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own sunnnit"; they embody the fantastic will to accumulate the knowledge of all times and places to a place "that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages" (Foucault 1986, 26). Moreover, worth and value are made collectively and upheld by more or less shared systems of signification, including a language and literature, and the destroyed books can be seen as reflecting the loss of this cultural horizon. The Road is here, again, exemplary of a relatively common theme within post-apocalyptic fiction. 6 McCarthy first gives us an everyday preapocalyptic scene for the reader to identify with ("Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers [ .. .]" (TR, 199)) before shifting to the post-apocalyptic devastation of such items: Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in the thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and 6 Many post-apocalyptic works centrally concern the destruction and partial smvival of various cultural archives, and I contend although I cannot here demonstrate that books and libraries often function as the paradigmatic fonn of such archives and thus as symbols of (pre-apocalyptic) civilization. Books have been used to imply, to take a few examples, nostalgia and veneration for such civilization (as in Richard Jefferies's After London, 1885), the need to let go of antiquated knowledge (George R. Stewart's Earth Abides, 1949), the auto-destructive bent of human curiosity (Walter M. Miller, Jr. 's A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960), or, as one illiterate character puts it, "a little prayer against annihilation" (Marcel Theroux's Far North, 2009). Whatever post-apocalyptic leitmotifs ruined or salvaged books conjme, and however total or partial their demise, post-apocalyptic books and libraries often bring into focus the material fragility of knowledge and even the prospect of thorough archival destruction. For some philosophical implications of a "catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity" (Derrida 1984, 28), see Derrida 1984.

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thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light. (TR, 199, emphasis added)

The key sentences, in my reading, are in italics. Assuming that the fmmer of the two is elliptical and so reads "He' d not have thought the value of the smallest thing [was] predicated on a world to come", there are two ways to parse its meaning: as a specific claim that because the world as a foundation is destroyed, all things have lost their value in the way of the blackened books; or as an observation, brought to light by the catastrophe, that in general the value of everything hinges on the future.' Since the novel repeatedly frames the post-apocalyptic situation in terms of the world's end, the fmmer and stronger formulation seems apt, but the general insight is fundamental in evoking this aspect of apocalypse as revelation: the realization of just how heavy the future weighs on the sense and value of the present. The passage directly resonates with Reinhart Koselleck's notions of "space of experience" and "horizon of expectation". \¥bile Koselleck (2004, 257) notes that "'experience' and 'expectation' are merely formal categories, for what is experienced and what is expected at anyone time carmot be deduced from the categories themselves", they are not in fact completely empty: specifically, the notion of "expectation" presupposes a certain relation to the future, and consequently the sort of future that one could expect something of. While the expectation of nothing much may still fmmally be an expectation, in experiential telTIlS we might ask if the very category starts to crumble when there is no "world to come". In any case, the space of present experience is significantly altered by the narrowing (if not the disappearing) of the horizon of expectation. David A. Collings (2014, 19) puts it succinctly: "The future is never just for the people of the future; without thatfoture, what we do now loses its force. Without a future, there is no present and not much of a past." (Emphasis in original; see also Morson 1994, 53) More specifically, we can draw on the observation of Jacques Derrida (1998, 18) that the mere possibility of storing knowledge An alternative reading, which takes the sentence as grammatically complete, would construe the "value of the smallest thing" as predicating (in the sense of to affinn or declare) the onward coming of the world. While this makes good sense, in that the continuity of the world (phenomenologically speaking) depends on things retaining their value, it also makes for implausibly tangled syntax.

7

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for posterity - as well as its specific forms - fundamentally changes the way we experience the world. From this angle, The Road's destroyed library also implies a fundamental change in the familiar, archive-oriented structure of modem experience. The present, this present, carries a fundamental urge to be imagined as a recorded past of some future. In The Road's words, it is not only the books themselves but the material and virtual space they occupy that constitutes - both depends on and upholds - an expectation. The expression "world to come" itself allows for two complementary readings. It either refers to the world that keeps on coming, is still to come in its relatively familiar ways, or else there is a world to come that is emphatically another, discontinuous. \¥bile the fmmer reading, stressing continuity, might seem more natural, the latter 's openly religious connotation (in terms of "kingdom to come") is well in line with the man's precariously religious sensibility (and may gain some weight from the archaic meaning of "predication" as preaching) (cf. Hellyer 2012, 52; Rambo 2008, 101). The umesolved ambiguity in "world to come" in any case urges us to combine the religious with the lay reading: the ostensibly secular idea that there is something like a future - let us call it futurity that defines the value of the present and by implication the past, weighing our choices and values from its perspective of perpetual future anterior, is in itself a metaphysical stance reminiscent of eschatology. Like the secular and the religious, the continuous and disjunctive also combine here, since what we anticipate as the future continuously re-constitutes itself as the present, but also harbours a futurity which is always yet to come and as such is never possessed by predictions. 8 In short, what calls for redemption in the post-apocalyptic world, besides the material conditions for living, is precisely a sense of future and more specifically a sense of futurity. I further contend that, in the post-apocalyptic setting, that model for the future largely lies in the past, even though that past has now paradoxically lost its future. Accordingly, 8 This relates, without being equivalent, to how Jacques Derrida (e. g. 1998,68) takes up the distinction between the two French words for the future, le futur and l'avenir. Richard Klein (2008, 174 175) explicates Derrida's distinction with reference to future anterior: "The futur is what is anticipatable, knowable in advance; foreseeable, predictable knO"Wll with the confidence that ordinarily attends our knowledge of things past. The future anterior is the way we normally represent the future to ourselves, as if we could see it as having already happened. [ ... ] But we can distinguish that foreseeable futur, says Derrida, in French, from the avenir, it venir, that which is to come, which comes to us from somewhere else, a place we don't know or can't foresee." See also Martinon 2007, "Introduction".

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the nostalgia at play in The Road is not only for the world as it was but, more fundamentally, for tbe sense of a future inhabiting tbat world; not its actualized, post-apocalyptic future but the still virtual, pre-apocalyptic futurity. This is, finally, the lost fount of meaning: the world once had a future, something to keep open tbat "space which [ ... ] was itself an expectation" (TR, 199). A similar sentiment can be found in tbe childhood chamber already visited (with its "nights in tbeir tbousands to dream tbe dreams of a child's imaginings" (TR, 26)), in its way also a heterotopic and idealized space, set apart and shielded. As we now again approximate the novel's pre-apocalyptic past to our present reality, we can understand The Road's nostalgia as directed towards the sense of futurity still (supposedly) inhabiting our world. Hence tbe reader is placed, tlrrough the novel's temporal dynamics, in a position to feel nostalgia for or mourn her still present relation with the future - a relation that we are simultaneously prompted by the novel to imagine as lost. In a thoroughly ironic constellation of tenses, the reader comes to feel nostalgia for a world in which it was still possible or meaningful to speculate not only on utopias but on scenarios ("worlds rich or fearful") of dystopia and the post-apocalypse. But further, if this "future nostalgia" has tbe effect of making the reader reflect on the apparent openness of her world, the postapocalyptic scenario may simultaneously point her towards the realization that that openness is at best contingent, perhaps even illusory, and in any case dependent on tbe temporal perspective adopted (in the long run, after all, extinction and oblivion are guaranteed). That the world that eventually was to come about failed to "offer" itself to "the child's imaginings" may be taken, then, not only as a remark on the unimaginability of the devastation (which The Road in fact attempts to imagine) but as a more fundamental decree on the unknowability of tbe future, the sovereignty of futurity (see Kearney 2012, 175). We circle back to Ely's words: while "People were always getting ready for tomorrow [ ... ] Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them" (TR, 179). If The Road arguably ends on the side of hope, through tbe figure of the boy "standing there in tbe road looking back at him [the man] from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle" (TR, 293), tbis hope is perhaps ultimately not for us. Time is again spread out in space, as with the gas station phone the man used to dial "his father's house in that long ago" (TR., 4-5), and the impossibility of catching up with tbe future mirrors the earlier failure to dial the past. The boy in the road looks at the man, at us, as a figure both of limitless possibility and of our limits of possibility; a nostalgic figure of our past possibilities, the future we used to

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have, but also a figure of the indifference of time, unavoidably oblivious to the experience of our loss.9

Conclusion The intra-narrative situation of the post-apocalypse, here exemplified by Connac McCarthy's The Road, characteristically puts pressure on the relations of past, present, and future. These relations are further complicated by the partly extra-narrative issue of the post-apocalyptic fiction being situated, as it were, in the speculative future of the reader. Such narratives thus have notable potential to activate complex questions regarding the intertwined temporalities of our existence, including (through the post-apocalyptic perspective of the future anterior) our future past. While this chapter has, via The Road, focused on the more abstract end, such questions do not drift around regardless of a cultural, historical, and political context, and should be further connected to current issues to gauge the full speculative value of post-apocalyptic narratives for our time. These connections are of course often effected, if not thoroughly articulated, by the fictions themselves. I have here attempted to elaborate on some of the issues connected to the multifaceted question of futurity, which I take to encompass nostalgia for the world that still had a future (had it not?) as well as other issues of remembrance reflected through the lens of the future anterior. The Road, for one, makes it tangible that our ethical concern for the future not only relates to the generations to come but also to upholding the significance of the present. It is not only that the mind in search of meaning flits between what previously were the supposedly safe grounds of tradition and futurity, or memory and hope, neither now offering a place to land. The situation is more complicated: there is a chiasmatic relationship within the temporal structure of signification, since the meanings and values of post-apocalyptic reality clearly depend on those of the past world, but that world and its values are in turn cast in a corrosive light by the disappearing future. This crisis, intimately connected to the temporality of the future anterior (since what presently is is not independent of what, from a future perspective, will have been), constitutes in my reading the fundamental existential situation of McCarthy's novel. \¥bile the interdependence of 9 For accOlUlts of the figme of the child in post-apocalyptic narratives, including McCartby's novel and its movie adaptation, see Olson 2015 and Sheldon 2016.

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past and future meaning is in no way unique to post-apocalyptic narratives or realities, The Road frames it strikingly by displaying the consequences of its failure in the threatened groundlessness of meaning (Carlson's (2007, 54) "suspension of world"). In this way, the post-apocalyptic narrative can be seen to radicalize the archetypal longing for an open future - even for that youthful sense of no roads yet taken - to present an extreme scenario that we can also, perhaps, employ in reflecting on these temporal dilemmas in disparate contexts. To come back to Ricoeur's phenomenology of memory (after Edward Casey), we tend to "recognize as being the same the present memory and the first impression" which serves as that memory's referent, so that memory seems to constitute a paradoxical "presence ofthe absent" (Ricoeur 2006, 39). This speaks to the basic post-apocalyptic predicament, each remnant of the past world cueing what Ricoeur calls the "small miracle of recognition": to "coat with presence the othemess of that which is over and gone" (ibid.). From the reader's pre-apocalyptic point of view, on the other hand, the corresponding "small miracle" is the post-apocalyptic narrative's potential to coat with othemess that which is just now supposedly present. Mirrored through post-apocalyptic optics, the pre-apocalyptic world is both blooming and always already withering. We may ask, then, to what extent is the ironic distance we so easily (and perhaps necessarily) maintain to these speculative worlds premised on a refusal of our future absence? Or, to flip the question, is the suspension of disbelief just as much a suspension of denial? Perhaps there is no line to draw. The reader's pre-apocalyptic world becomes marked not only by the speculative possibility of its end but also the latter's eventual necessity, whether tomorrow or in the far reaches of time, of which the merely contingent speculation bears something like a metonymic reminder. "He went through the bureaus and the closets. A smnrner dress on a wire banger. Nothing." (TR, 85)

Works Cited Carlson, Thomas A. 2007. "With the World at Heart: Reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road with Augustine and Heidegger." Religion & Literature, 39.3: 47-71. Caruth, Cathy. 2008. "After the End: A Response." Studies in the Literary Imagination, 41.2: 121-129.

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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." CriticalInquiry, 3S: 197-222. Colebrook, Claire. 2014. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, VoL 1. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press with Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. Collings, David A. 2014. Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press with Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F Stoermer. 2000. "The' Anthiopocene. '" IGBP Newsletter, 41: 17-18. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. "No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)." Diacritics, 14.2: 20-31. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1986. "Of Otber Spaces." Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, 16.1: 22-27. Hellyer, Grace. 2012. "Spring Has Lost its Scent: Allegory, Ruination, and Suicidal Melancholia in The Road" In Slyles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, JulianMurphet & Mark Steven (eds). London & New York: Continuum, 4S-62. Horn, Eva. 2014. Zukunft als Katastrophe. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH. Jameson, Fredric. 200S. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London & New York: Verso. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2016. '''My Job is to Take Care of You': Climate Change, Humanity, and Cormac McCartby's The Road" MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 62.3: S19-S40. Kaplan, E. Ann. 201S. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kearney, Kevin. 2012. "Cormac McCartby's The Road and the Frontier of the Human." Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 23.2: 160-178. Klein, Richard. 2013. "Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables." Diacritics, 38.1: 173-179. Masters, Joshua I. 2012. "Metalinguistic Discourse in the Contemporary Apocalyptic Novel." Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 23.2: 113118. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2007. On Futurity: Malabou, Naney and Derrida. Hampshire & New York: Palgrave MacMillan. McCarthy, Cormac. 2010. The Road London: Picador. Morson, Gary Saul. 1994. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Olson, Debbie (ed.). 2015. The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema. Lexington Books: London. Rambo, Shelly 1.. 2008. "Beyond Redemption? Reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road After the End of the World." Studies in the Literary Imagination, 41.2: 99-120. Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blarney & David PellaueI. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sheldon, Rebekah. 2016. The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe. Minneapolis: The University of Mninesota Press. Teittinen, Jouni. 2020. "Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Future Anterior." In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, Colin Davis & Hanna Meretoja (eds.). London: Routledge, 349-359. Vermeulen, PieteI. 2020. Literature and the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Wicks, Amanda. 2014. "The linagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory Through Twentieth-Century Post-Apocalyptic Literature and Film." Baton Rouge, Louisiana: LSU Doctoral Dissertations 557.

8. FOLDS AROUND THE END: OPEN AND CLOSED TEMPORALITIES IN MARGARET ATWOOD'S M4DDADDAM-TRILOGY

MIKKO MANTYNIEMI

In this chapter, I analyze the different temporalities represented in Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic novels Oryx and Crake (2003, hereafter OaC), The Year of the Flood (2009, hereafter YoF), and MaddAddam (2013, hereafter MA), which togetlier form the MaddAddam trilogy. While literary and cultural studies have placed more emphasis on the temporal structures of both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives

(see Heffeman 2008; Snyder 2011; Sorensen 2014; Cristofaro 2018; Skult 2019), the multitude of different temporal structures and the ways in which (post-)apocalyptic narratives employ and construct time require more theoretical discussion and analytical tools. This stems from the fact that apocalyptic narratives often explicitly thematize time either in the form of an individual's experience of time, or as a thought experiment about the possible future of humanity. Another source of potential confusion when talking about apocalyptic narratives is the diversity of definitions of the

term "apocalypse".l Apocalyptic literature can refer to tlie Old Testament Hebrew prophesies or to the Revelation of St John in the Bible, or it can refer to artistic elements depicting the end of the world (Zamora 1989, 15). In a broader sense, apocalypse can refer to a worldview in which a person believes that events described in the Revelation of St John are events that have either already occurred or will occur in the near future (Martin 2012,

342-343). Apocalyptic narrative is usually characterized by a progressive plot that moves from crisis and tribulation to salvation in the end, resulting in a

utopian state that vindicates all the evils in the world (Zamora 1989, 1-3; 1 The word "apocalypse" itself comes from the ancient Greek word apokitlypsis, meaning "to lUlcover, reveal, lifting the veil".

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O'Leary 1998). This movement of time is towards a better future that "will make sense of all that has come before it" (Heffeman 2008, 4). The future of this world holds the truth about the past, and is the reason why events that take place in this world actually happen. The apocalypse, then, can be understood as one of the basic sense-making narratives in the JudeoChristian tradition and Western culture. Apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery can also be used to give importance to any story or news, and as a result, in contemporary culture apocalypse can refer to "any catastrophe of such a scale that it seems to put this world injeopardy" (Collins 1997, 1). However, when talking about the apocalypse in the contemporary era, it is also inevitable to talk about the post-apocalypse. If the apocalypse is governed by the utopian drive towards a better future or by the looming threat of a global disaster, the post-apocalypse can be seen through the failing of modernism's grand narratives of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century, and as such, the collapse of the apocalyptic promise. Teresa Heffeman (2008,11) notes: "Apocalypse, as a story of renewal and redemption is displaced by the post-apocalypse, where the catastrophe has happened but there is no resurrection, no revelation". If the apocalypse is concerned with the last days of the world, then post-apocalyptic narratives "sidestep a full engagement with the finality of the apocalyptic and rewrite apocalyptic time as the occasion for the production of new stories" (Sorensen 2014, 562). Post-apocalyptic narratives often reflect upon what happens after the catastrophic event has changed the world as we know it, or what comes after the "end". According to Leif Sorensen (ibid.), postapocalyptic narratives typically have two narrative closures, either a "return to nOlma1cy" or the "post-apocalyptic new normal".2 Hyong-jun Moon (2014, 5-6) notes that "both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives are primarily concerned with the theme of subverting the existing order" and the old world is "reversed into that of 'civilization under the control of nature'''. The subversion and reversal of the existing social order is often a major theme or motif in (post-)apocalyptic narratives (Berger 1999, 7), but in this chapter my aim is to analyse the differences between the temporal narrative structures presented in a single novel, Oryx and Crake, and their relation to a broader body of work, in this case the MaddAddam trilogy. My aim is to broaden the discussion about (post-)apocalyptic temporalities through models of folded temporalities in a narrative. Folds Sorensen (2014, 562) notes that in the return to normalcy, "events transpire that reveal the seeming apocalypse to be a reversible event", and in the post-apocalyptic new normal, "no return is possible because the apocalypse initiates a new mode of being to which hmnanity must adapt".

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in time and the world have been introduced before (e.g. Deleuze 1993). Michel Serres' ideas about folded temporality form part of the basis for this chapter, as "Serres sets his concept [of the fold] in opposition to Kanfs description of time as a continuous straight line" and "far-distant moments can be brought into close proximity with one another" (Williams 2017, 1). Here, the fold serves as a metaphor for time and temporality in narratives. Because of the limited space here, I am focusing only on the intratextual temporal relations in narratives, but folds can also be used to describe the referential nature of fictional narratives to the actual world (see Westphal 2011; Ameel 2019). The fold, then, represents the intertwined temporal relations in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives. In structuralist narrative theory, the theory of time representation comes from G6rard Genette's (1980/1972; see also de Toro 2011) seminal work on literary temporal orders, in which, following the Russian formalists' distinction betweenfabula andsujet, Genette writes about "relations between the time of tlie story and the (pseudo-) time of narrative" (1980/1972, 35) in order, duration, andfrequency. Genette uses the concept of anachronies to "compare the order in which events or temporal sections are arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession these same events or temporal segments have in the story" (ibid.). This arrangement states that there is a "first narrative" in relation to which anachronies are defined (ibid., 48), or that there is a '''now'' time in the narrative, compared to which other events are either in the past, or future. \¥bile Genette's theories about time representation in narratives have been contested (see e.g. Currie 2007), tliey do offer a model to map out different temporalities in narratives using a variety of models. This chapter pays special attention to Genette's concept of analepsis, or flashback, while prolepsis, or flashforward, receives less attention due to space limitations. As folds represent a metaphor for the temporal structure in narratives, analepsis provides a theoretical tool to discuss how past events can be represented in narratives, but also how those past events create a kind of synchrony with later events. I have chosen to focus on analepsis since post-apocalyptic narratives place more emphasis on the past events in the fictional world. If apocalyptic narratives can be described as a movement towards the end of time, post-apocalyptic narratives are more interested in the world after the end in relation to the world before the end. As James Berger (1999, 6) writes, tliis relation between events on both sides of the apocalyptic catastrophe creates a "time loop" in which every "action before the apocalypse is simultaneously an action after the apocalypse". I agree with Berger on the double temporality of the post-apocalypse, but I do not share his view that actions in the pre-

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apocalyptic space-time are actions in the post-apocalyptic space-time. The double temporality is closer to Tzvetan Todorov's (1966, 44) double time of detective fiction, where detective novels contain the duality ofthe crime and the investigation. In this way, temporalities before and after the apocalypse are not synchronously connected, but they are, in fact, folded together.

Closing the fold in Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is one of the best known postapocalyptic novels of the last few decades. 3 As the first book of the MaddAddam trilogy, Oryx and Crake focuses on its main character, Jimmy, and his part in the apocalypse. The novel begins in the post-apocalyptic world, where Snowman, as Iimmy calls himself at this point in time, believes himself to be the last human survivor in the world. He lives in the trees as the world has been taken over by the genetically modified animals. Snowman wakes before dawn. [ ... ] Out of habit he looks at his watch stainless-steel case, bmnished alumimun band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hOill. It causes a jolt of terror to nUl through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is. (OaC, 3)

The intertextual relations in the novel cover the Western apocalyptic tradition as well as Robinson Crusoe (Hicks 2016, 27-28), as Jimmy is forced to live in solitude in a world he cannot control. The old world he knew has been wiped out by a plague, leaving SnowmanlJimmy as the caretaker of a bioengineered hybrid-species, the Crakers. The relation between SnowmanlJimmy and the Crakers is not balanced, though, as the Crakers are designed to survive in the new world and Jimmy is in no way a survival expert. Sooner or later he can count on it they'll seek him out where he sits wrapped in his decaying sheet, hugging his shins and sucking on his mango, in lUlder the shade of the trees because of the plUlishing SlUl. For the 3 Atwood's novels have attracted attention both from the reading audience and academic research. For example, Petter ShIlt (2019,7) names Oryx and Crake as "a perfect example" of a post-postrnodern novel that combines "old-school science fiction and Atwood's postrnodem, feminist views". For more research on Oryx and Crake , see Katherine V Snyder 2011, Berthold Schoene 2013 and Heather J. Hicks 2016.

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children thick-skilllled, resistant to ultraviolet he's a creature of dimness,

of the dusk. (OaC, 6) The innocent Crakers end up taking care of SnowmanlJimmy, who carmot move freely on the ground or gather food. In the end, the Crakers bring him food like smoked fish, as SnowmanlJimmy is confined to living in a tree. The relationship between SnowmanlJimmy and the Crakers can be seen as an example of the reversal of nature-civilization (Moon 2014, 7), in which the old order of the world is literally turned upside down. Even with all of his knowledge of the old world, Jimmy is powerless in the new world that is intended for the Crakers. The novel, and the whole trilogy, constructs multiple temporalities and reconstructions of past events. On the surface level, the post-apocalyptic time is presented in the novel as the "now moment" in the narrative, or "the first narrative" (Genette 1980, 48), which is the reference point to all other periods of time. Genette's theory about the narrative temporality presupposes that events in the storyworld exist before the narration, or as Alfonso de Toro (2011, 111) puts it: "[t]he writer acts similar to the composer who has a group of sounds available from which he makes a selection and combines them in a certain way". Anachronies are, then, only a rearrangement of story elements on the narrative level. More importantly, for an effect to be an analepsis, it needs, as de Toro (2011, 120) puts it: "temporal transfer by a narrator or a character of a story segment p of a story sequence P from the past to the present leading to the constitution of two time levels, where TL [time level] II is always subordinated to TL [". While de Toro does later on make a distinction between "mentioned and executed analepsis/prolepsis" (ibid., 124), he does not explore this division further besides dividing it between how a character can mention a previous/ future event or how a narrator can account for said event. Raphael Baroni examines analepsis in visual media and states that: The ontological status [of Genette's anachronies] seems intuitively consistent, and on a functional plane, their usefulness for narrative interpretation is obviously relevant. But if we dig deeper into their original definitions by Tomashevsky and Genette, and if we look more precisely at how they have been adapted to visual media, we come to realize that they appear either vague or, at the very least, as an oversimplification of a more complex issue. (Baroni 2016, 312)

Baroni provides two categories for analepsis: "Dramatized analepsis and flashbacks are synonyms because each involves an enactment of the past, that is, a shift from one space-time to another", while undramatized

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analepsis "refers to the past events but does not enact a shift from one space-

time to another" (Baroni 2016, 312, emphasis original). While Baroni's article focuses on the visual media of comics and movies, his critique of

Genette's anachronies holds true for literature as well. The past of tlie fictional world can be evoked or constructed either by a clear deictic shift in narration or by a memory shared by another character. The problematic nature of constructing different temporalities in narrative demands more precise analytic tools. 4 In his conclusion, Baroni notes that "while undrarnatized analepses can play a fundamental role for narrative interpretation, they don't produce an immersion into the past, and consequently, the storyworld is perceived by

the audience as if it was following the natural order of chronology" (Baroni 2016, 325). While the distinction between undramatized and dramatized analepsis is helpful, it falls a little short, as he adds tliat "any isolated evocation of the past using past perfect or present perfect tenses can be considered an undramatized analepsis" (ibid.). Post-apocalyptic narratives, through the explicit thematization of time, demonstrate how previous models of analepsis, or flashbacks, in narrative theory do not explain all evocations of the past. Post-apocalyptic narratives regularly juxtapose,

interpolate, or fold at least two different worlds on top of each other. Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy is a good example of this, because even its pre-apocalyptic world is clearly situated in tlie future of tlie actual world, or "a dystopian hyperbole of our present" (Schoene 2013, 98). The fictional world of tlie novel is strictly divided between different corporations and tlieir walled compounds, and people living outside in tlie "pleebs". From tlie very beginning of Oryx and Crake, these two worlds - tlie pre-apocalyptic hyper-capitalist world and the desolated post-apocalyptic world - are folded on top of each other as readers are introduced to SnowmanlJimmy: He's stashed some mangoes there, knotted in a plastic bag, and a can of Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages, and a precious half-bottle of Scotch no, more like a third and a chocolate flavoured energy bar scrounged from a trailer park [ ... ] He can't bring himself to eat it yet: it might be the last one he'll ever find. (OaC, 4)

The world in which SnowmaniJimmy lives is radically separated from tlie past. Iimmy and the world's past is constantly present in the novel, from

For more on the problematic nature of time in literature, see Ursula Heise 1997, Mark Currie 2007, 2013, and Bertrand Westpha12011.

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excessive capitalist brand names like "BlyssPluss" and "ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins" (OaC, 7) to more concrete memories: "Oh, nice abs/ comes the whisper, interrupting him. Honey, just lie back. Who is it? Some tart he once bought. Revision, professional sex-skills expert. [ ... ] He hates these echoes. Saints used to hear them, crazed lice-infested helTIlits in their caves and deserts." (OaC, 11) These echoes are not, however, just empty echoes of saints in the novel, since they actively create the fictional world and the past of that world. Instead of only folding the post-apocalyptic time with pre-apocalyptic time, the novel also folds them with the world of the reader by invoking relatable objects like the bottle of whiskey, energy bar, and trailer park These kinds of folds in a narrative text where the fictional past of the world is foregrounded by fictional companies and objects, and conjoined with objects from the actual world of the reader are heightened points where readers can reflect on the speculative world and its relation to the actual world. Merja Polvinen (2012) and Harma-Riikka Roine (2016) have argued that immersion in speculative fiction should not be considered just as "an attempt to maintain a mimetic illusion or as a case of pleasant absorption" but should be seen as "a fOlTIl of active participation" (ibid., 107; see also Skull 2019, 5). While the opening of Oryx and Crake does not enact a past moment in time, it does evoke it and provide readers with the first information about the fictional world's past. These kinds of undramatized evocations are soon followed by dramatized analepsis: "Once upon a time, Snowman wasn't Snowman. Instead he was Iimmy. He'd been a good boy then. Jimmy's earliest complete memory was of a huge bonfire." (OaC, 15) Soon after the beginning of the novel, the narrative is divided into two parts: the pre-apocalyptic narrative follows the life of Jimmy before he became Snowman and the post-apocalyptic narrative follows SnowmanlJimmy's ordeals in the new world. The preapocalyptic timeline traces Jimmy's childhood and how he met Glenn, or Crake as he is known through the novel. Jimmy, through his unbelievably vivid memories, serves as a way for the reader to learn about the fictional world of the novel and its history: They probably would have gone back to interactives and state-sponsored snuff, and pom [... ] but that was the smnmer the gen-mod coffee wars got lUlderway, so they watched those instead. [... ] But there was Happicuppa coverage, it seemed, wherever you turned. There were protests and demonstrations; [ ... ] There hadn't been anything like it since the first decade of the century. Crake said it was history in the making. [ ... ] Union docbvorkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload

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The imbalance of the narrative weight between the pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic sequences is stark, as relatively little happens in the postapocalyptic timeline (Hicks 2016, 27). While the pre-apocalyptic time recounts the events of Iimmy's life, the post-apocalyptic time is far more slow-paced. It is not until halfway through the novel that SnowmanlJimmy starts his journey towards the Paradice dome to find more supplies. Despite the different lengths in story time, these two timelines fmm a synchrony by juxtaposing similar actions or places in close proximity to each other in the narration. As the most explicit example of synchrony between these two timelines, the pIe-apocalyptic time line also takes Iimmy to the Paradice dome, by Crake's invitation. It is in the Paradice dome that Crake has created the new hybrid species, the Crakers, and it is from there that SnowmaniJimmy leads the Crakers to the seashore in the end of the novel, where the novel begins. The story of SnowmanlJimmy is, thus, also the story of the Crakers. The division between pre- and post-apocalyptic storylines is somewhat similar to Tzvetan Todorov's (1966) definition ofthe dual temporality of the whodunit in detective fiction. 5 For Todorov, the whodunit consists of two stories: "the story ofthe crime and the story ofthe investigation" (ibid., 44). Todorov compares these two stories and notes how nothing really happens in the story of the investigation: "The first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens in the second? Not much. The characters of this second story, the story ofthe investigation, do not act, they learn. Nothing can happen to them." (ibid.) The recreation ofthe past from a later point in time does bear a resemblance to the temporal structure in postapocalyptic narratives, as events leading up to the apocalyptic catastrophe are recollected from a later point in time. 6 However, in Oryx and Crake it is the reader rather than a detective who has to piece the events together. 5 Todorov (1966) compares two genres within detective fiction: the whodunit and the thriller. Whereas the whcxlunit is marked by a retrospection, in the thriller "[p]rospection takes the place of retrospection" (ibid., 47). Tcxlorov also posits a third genre between these two, the suspense novel that "keeps the mystery of the whodunit and also the two stories but it refuses to reduce the second to a simple detection of the truth" (ibid. , 50). 6 Mark Currie (2007, 88) notes that the double time of the whodlUlit is "the very structure of narrative explanation in general, whether it operates in fiction or in science. [ ... ] The detective and the historian share this structure of moving forwards by knowing the past."

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Before analysing the folded temporalities of the two timelines further, I will focus on another analepsis presented in the novel, that of Oryx's story. Oryx is first presented as one of the ghosts haunting SnowmaniJimmy in the post-apocalyptic time, along with other women from his past: "A woman's voice says caressingly in his ear: Nice bunsf It isn't Oryx, it's some other woman. Oryx is no longer very talkative." (OaC, 11) Later in the novel, Oryx works for Crake in the Paradice project with the Crakers and becomes a lover to both Crake and Iimmy. Before that, however, Oryx follows the narrative in both timelines, as Iimmy sees her on some porn site when he is young. In this sixth chapter of the novel - each chapter is divided into titled subchapters - SnowmaniJimmy recounts the story of Oryx as she tells it to him. While this section of the novel creates a kind of double-analepsis where Snowman remembers a time when Oryx told him her story, the section is also a clear example of how the temporalities of the novel are never really confused. The created temporal effects may be jarring at points - as if mimicking the gene-splicing or digital editing in the novel, where anyone "could splice together whatever they wanted" (OaC, 187) - but they are never really incoherent or unintelligible. The reader is never really lost in different temporalities or confused about the relations between different temporalities. The order of events in the narration resembles what David Herman (2002, 212) calls the polychronic style of narration, or "narratives that order events in a fuzzy or indetelTIlinate way". While the reader can assert that Oryx told her story to Jimmy after they met and before the apocalypse, the exact order of events is not revealed. This, in turn, causes possible overlaps in interpretation, as one reader can place the events in a different temporal order than another. Therefore, analepses, and anachronies in general, are more than just a rearrangement of story segments on the narrative level; they guide the interpretation and world-building of the novels as well. Both analepsis and prolepsis affect the interpretation of what has been read and what still remains to be read. Even if the reader could place the analeptic scene into a certain position in the chronology of events, the narration of those events still affects the reading of "present time". I will return to this double fold, or multidirectional fold, later in this chapter. I! is clear by now that it is possible to talk about folded temporalities on two different levels. Firstly, there is the microlevel analepsis that I discussed earlier, in which the narration folds different temporalities in the fictional world on top of each other, either by referencing the past, evoking the past, or through a dramatized shift in the space-time of the narrative.

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The second level of narration is the macrolevel, which in Oryx and Crake revolves around the Paradice dome. As SnowmanlJimmy travels through the post-apocalyptic world, the folds around his and pre-apocalyptic Iimmy's travels become ever more explicit: He's out of breath and sweating too much by the time he reaches the RejoovenEsense CornpOlUld curtain wall [ ... ] Then he continues on, across the moat, past the sentry boxes where the CorpSeCorps armed guards once stood and the glassed-in cubicles where they'd monitored the surveillance equipment, then past the rampart watchtower with the steel door standing forever open, now where he'd once have been ordered to present his thumbprint and the iris of his eye. (OaC, 227) The back of his neck prickles again. "Why does he have the feeling that it's his O"Wll house be's broken into? His O\Vll house from twenty-five years ago, hirnselfthe missing child. (OaC, 233) Jirnrny spent his first night in RejoovenEsense at the VIP guest hotel. .. ] He could see the Paradice dome, an immense half-circle in the distance, floodlit from below, but he didn't yet know what it was. He thought it was a

skating rink. (OaC, 291) The RejoovenEsense Compound and the Faradice dome, then, represent the final convergence point for both temporal storylines. As Crnke hires Jimmy to work for him in the Paradice dome, Iimmy meets Oryx for the first time, and he is introduced to the Crakers, the new hybrid species meant to inherit the earth. The inevitability of the apocalypse is heightened at the end of the novel when both timelines are placed in the same spatial coordinates. While Jimmy is enjoying "lunch at one of the five-star Rejoov restaurants" (OaC, 292), Snowman is fighting for his survival in the compound, trying to evade the hunting pigoons. The apocalypse in the novel is finally revealed to be Crake's plan, a virus planted in BlyssPluss Pills, Crnke's miracle drug that would protect the user from sexually transmitted diseases while prolonging life and improving libido: the death of the human race is the result of an inexhaustible desire for youth and sex. For Jimmy, however, the end of the world is not an end. This is partly because Crake had immunized him against the virus, so Jimmy could look after the Crakers, but also because for him the break in history happens earlier: [Crake] had his other ann arOlmd Oryx, who seemed to be asleep; her face was against Crake's chest, her long pink-ribboned braid hung do"Wll her

back.

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As Jirnrny watched, frozen with disbelief, Crake let Oryx fall backwards, over his left ann. He looked at Jimmy, a direct look, unsmiling. "I'm counting on you," he said. Then slit her throat. Jirnmy shot him. (OaC, 328 329) Here are Oryx and Crake, what's left of them. They've been vulturized, they're scattered here and there, small and large bones mingled and in disarray, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. (OaC., 335) He's stuck in time past, the wet sand is rising. He's sinking do\Vll. (OaC, 338)

After the murder of his lover, Jimmy's fate is sealed along with the Crakers in the dome. As the world around him is burning, all he can do is watch it on TV and wait for it to end. After the novel's summary on how the world ended, and as Snowman leads the Crakers from the dome to the seashore, the flashbacks catch up with the beginning of the narrative. Analepses are a constant part of the novel, as they construct the world before the apocalypse and its characters. They intertwine the two worlds separated by the near extinction of the human race, juxtaposing the worlds before and after the apocalypse. While SnowmanlJimmy is stuck in his own temporal loop that revolves around the end of the world, and, more importantly, the death of Oryx and his 0\Vll failure to grasp the situation, the time around him seems to inch slowly forward. Hints of the continuation of time around SnowmaniJimmy are given through his journey, as he sees smoke rising from the beach where he left and then hears a voice on the radio. These, however, do not really affect Jimmy, as his story seems to end where it began, on the beach, his wristwatch showing "a blank face" (OaC, 3, 374) just as he sees other people once again. Iimmy's double journey can be read as a representation of personal trauma, as Katherine Snyder (2011, 475) has noted: "Snowman retraces his steps to the place that marked the beginning of the end for humankind as a whole and for him as an individual". Post-apocalyptic narratives and post-apocalyptic doubled temporality have been discussed through trauma theory (see Berger 1999; Heffernan 2008, 2015), and while the closed psyche of SnowmaniJimmy does offer a model for a closed temporality, there is more for the narrative theory to study in these kinds of narratives.

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The unfolding post-apocalyptic temporality in The Year of the Flood and MaddAdtktm Oryx and Crake, the first novel in the trilogy, is followed by The Year of the Flood, which is not exactly a sequel to the events of the first novel but, as Fredric Jameson (2009) would term it, "a parallel narrative" (see also Schoene 2013). The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam form a more conventional sequel relation, as the third book continues the story of survivors, Toby being the main character. Therefore, I have chosen to analyse the two latter books together and in relation to Oryx and Crake in this chapter. Jimmy is replaced as the main character by Toby and Ren, both members of a religious group called the God's Gardeners - though both have had to leave the group at one point. Whereas chapters in Oryx and Crake are temporally vague, like Mango, Flotsam, and Voice, chapters in The Year of the Flood carry clear temporal markers, like Toby, Year Twenty-Five, The Year of the Flood, and Creation Day Year Five. The years in the chapter names are linked to the Gardeners' calendar, where the apocalypse happens in the year 25. Both Toby and Ren survive the apocalypse that Crake set in motion; Ren because she was sealed in a safe room in a brothel, and Toby because she moved to a spa complex that provided her cover and safety. In the novel, the narrative shifts between these two characters, as both of them recount their lives leading up to the apocalypse, or the Waterless Flood, as the Gardeners call it. Both Ren and Toby's lives are intertwined with Iimmy and Crake's, as Ren is Iimmy's former classmate and girlfriend, and Toby finds out that the Gardeners are helping Crake to unleash the Waterless Flood. The story of the second novel follows a different path from Oryx and Crake. Where the first novel re-enforced the cyclical temporality of the post-apocalypse by Snowman's and Jimmy's simultaneous journeys towards the same end, the second novel is about survivors grouping up and finding other survivors. In this sense, the second and the third book of the trilogy follow a more conventional post-apocalyptic plotline, where a group of people band together and fight for survival in a new and hostile post-apocalyptic world. The books are about rebuilding the society after destruction, whereas the first novel, Oryx and Crake, is more closely concerned with the image of the apocalyptic time. The Year of the Flood is reminiscent of Oryx and Crake in its overall structure, as relatively little happens at first in the post-apocalyptic time when compared to the pIe-apocalyptic time. There is, however, a clear difference between the progression of these two novels. The Year of the

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Flood introduces both Ren and Toby in isolated situations, Toby even more so as she has to defend herself against the wildlife in the post-apocalyptic world: "Three huge pigs are nosing around the swimming pool [ ... ] They'll dig under at night and root up her garden in no time flat, and tliat will be the end of her long-term food supply." (YoF, 18) While Toby's tribulations are described in the same manner as Iimmy's descent into madness, she is better off from the start because the Gardeners were preparing for the end. As tlie Gardeners are preparing for the apocalypse, tliey prepare supply deposits for the post-apocalyptic world, or Ararats - another intertextual reference to tlie Biblical story of Noah. Through this kind of preparation, Toby is able to survive in the post-apocalypse through traditional means. The isolation of the two main characters in The Year of the Flood does resemble the closed temporal fold of the previous novel. Unlike Snowman! Jimmy, botli Toby and Ren are physically constrained to a single location at the beginning of the novel, so their travel is only through memories in time and not tlirough space. The apocalyptic temporality starts to unfold in tlie novel when Amanda, a fmmer God's Gardener and Ren's friend, contacts Ren and starts a journey from Ohio to where Ren is located. Very soon after Ren and Amanda are reunited, other survivors are introduced in the narrative as well. As the narrative progresses, both Ren and Toby find a small Gardeners' community. The difference between temporalities in the two latter books can be partly described through various individual temporalities. Oryx and Crake consist of only Iimmy's time, which is why the two timelines are more synchronized, as there are no other narrative or temporal lines to reference or reflect. The novel utilizes tlie Last Man trope of (post-)apocalyptic narratives, where the world is "filled with the sublime ruins of civilization" (Ransom 2014, 329). Jimmy walks through the ruins of the old world, recounting his - and the world's - past at each step. This juxtaposition of two worlds is a rather typical convention in post-apocalyptic narratives, but often post-apocalyptic narratives offer a way to defeat the apocalyptic disturbance (Schoene 2013, 562), as the following two novels in tlie trilogy do. In The Year of the Flood, and especially in MaddAddam, the reader is introduced to the community of Gardeners who have survived the Waterless Flood: "There are still people, Toby thinks. Alive. Maybe one of tliem is Zeb." (YoF, 350) Zeb is the polar opposite of SnowmanlJimmy, as he is a more traditional post-apocalyptic hero who has taught survival skills to tlie Gardeners, whereas Iimmy barely survives in the post-apocalyptic world.

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He'd just blo\Vll in from one of his mysterious comier missions; he looked battered, and his black leather jacket was ripped. Urban Bloodshed Limitation was one of the subjects he taught the Gardener kids, but he didn't always practice it. (MA,32) Okay, warning: this is gross. I took some of Chuck. Hacked it off with the pocketknife, kind of sawed it. Chuck had a fold-up waterproof jacket, so I wrapped it in that. Not much to eat up there in the Barrens, we all knew that, we'd had the Bearlift emITse. (MA, 70)

In the latter passage, Zeb tells Toby how he survived in the arctic wasteland before the apocalypse. He is a resourceful man, a practical survivor who knows how to live both in the wilderness and in the urban jungle. Eventually Ren and Toby re-join Zeb and the other survivors. SnowrnanlJimrny is also reintroduced to the story as Toby is screening the surroundings of the spa complex: "at the far end of the field a strange procession appeared. It seemed to consist entirely of naked people, though one man walking at the front had clothes on, and some sort of red hat" (YoF, 164). At the end of the second novel, all the different plotlines start to intertwine as Iimmy and Crake are introduced in the backstories of both Ren and Toby. Neither Ren nor Toby fall into the madness that has consumed Jimmy, and both of them hunt the criminals who have kidnapped Amanda, Ren's friend. The climax of the novel takes place on the beach where they see Jimmy ready to attack them: "Then suddenly there's a fourth person in the clearing - a naked man, but not one of the green-eyed beautiful ones. This one is emaciated and scabby." (YoF, 418) In the end, Toby and Ren free Amanda and take Jimmy and the Crakers back to their small community of survivors. The solitude of the Last Man, the closed temporal fold, is replaced by a communal time with a possibility of creating "the post-apocalyptic new normal" (Schoene 2013, 562). This becomes an even clearer theme in MaddAddam, as the scientists in the community - who were part of the project to create the Crakers - bring forth reproduction between humans and the Crakers: "The mating cycle is genetic, obviously, says Zunzuncito, [ ... ] leading to the polysexual acts" (YoF, 139); "Is it disapproval or extreme lust? Toby wonders. With some men it's hard to tell the difference." (YoF, 140) The focus on the Crakers' reproduction and human sexual relations calls attention to how apocalyptic narratives threaten the "reproductive future" (Sorensen 2014, 567). The apocalypse, as such, is not really about the end of the world, or time, but of anthropocentric time and/or human history. The end of the world is rarely the end of Earth, or even the end

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of animals and plants. More often the end of the world is about the fear of human extinction. Although a small community provides the means to survive, it is reproduction that guarantees the continuation of human time. In MaddAddam, the reproductive future is both guaranteed and questioned, as the human females are made pregnant by the Crakers. The biological future of the new hybrid species is unknown, as nobody really knows what kinds of attributes the children will have. While the biological future of humanity might be unknown, other human traits are passed on to the Crakers, an obvious one being writing and storytelling. As noted before, Toby assumes Jimmy's place as the one who tells stories about the past to the Crakers. In MaddAddam, the reader is not presented with the past of Toby anymore, but the past of Zeb, as he tells his story to Toby, who in turn relates it to the Crakers: "Today I will tell you the story of Zeb and the Fuck. As you have asked me to do." (MA, 163-164) The change in narration highlights the difference between the narrative situation and the relation of the events to the overall narrative. Unlike in Oryx and Crake, substantially more time is given to the events in the post-apocalyptic world. Descriptions of the community and the plot that has Toby and others pitted against the criminals that escaped after their capture at the end of the second novel advance the story forward. At this point, most of the events are happening in the post-apocalyptic time and the analepsis to the pre-apocalyptic world serves as an exposition and background for events about which the readers already know. 7 Questions about the future have surpassed questions about the past, or about what has happened. Time in the narrative is again ticking forward, not only because of expectations and uncertainties of the future, but because the plot of the novel revolves around a violent showdown between the survivors and the criminals. The final battle takes place at the Paradice dome, completing the temporal loop for Jimmy, as he dies in the battle. The symbolic and ceremonial death reinforces the movement from the pre-apocalyptic spacetime, and from the inescapable fold of Snowman, to a new, unfolding temporality. This formal or structural unfolding and progression to unfolding temporality is evident also in the Crakers and in their role in the stories of the past. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy is forced to come up with the past For more on the expositional mode, see e.g. Meir Sternberg 1978 and David HelTIlan 2009. For an in-depth analysis on prolepsis and its relation to Genette's anachronies and contemporary literature, see Mark Currie 2007.

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for them: "The Children ofOryx, the Children ofCrake, He'd had to think of something. Get your story straight, keep it simple." (OaC, 98) In The Year of the Flood, Toby takes Jimmy's place as the orator of the past. The reversal of the social order in Oryx and Crake, where the Crakers actually take care of SnowmanlJimmy since he is not equipped to survive in the new post-apocalyptic world, comes full circle at the end of the third book. A young Craker, Blackbeard, takes up the role of both storyteller and historian, as he writes do\Vll the last moments of Zeb and Toby: Now this is the Book that Toby made when she lived among us. See, I am showing you. She made these words on a page, and a page is made of paper. [ ... ] And she showed me, Blackbeard, how to make such words, on a page, with a pen, when I was little. (MA, 387) I am putting on the red hat ofSnowman-the-Jirnrny. [ ... ] One day Zeb went on a jomney to the south. He went there because when he was out hunting for deer, he saw a tall smoke. [ ... ] And we waited a long time, but Zeb did not return. [ ... ] Then [Toby] became thinner and thinner, and shnmken; and after several months, she told us that she had a wasting sickness that was eating parts of her away, inside her body. (MA, 388 389)

The symbolic status of storytelling transports the Crakers from a mythic pre-history where they could only listen and learn the stories by heart, into historical time, where they have taken the role of telling and writing down events. In this way, the post-apocalyptic time is folded around humanity, because the future of humanity is described through the Crakers. The MaddAddam trilogy takes the basic post-apocalyptic tropes of "loneliness and the utopian hope for company (human and animal), [and] the existence of a posthuman race exerting its hegemony" (Ransom 2014, 316) and turns them into a commentary about the act of storytelling and sense-making through that action. The novels critique the modernist notion of History and how every sequence of events between two events can always be narrated differently: How long had it taken him to piece her together from the slivers of her he'd gathered and hoarded so carefully? There was Crake's story about her, and Jirnrny's story about her as well, a more romantic version; and then there was her own story about herself, which was different from both, and not very romantic at all. (OaC, 114)

The trilogy does not provide an authoritative depiction of the end, or even a direction for the future. Even though Zeb is presumed dead, there

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is no definitive answer to his faith, or what the rising smoke - another reoccurring theme from the end of Oryx and Crake - signals in the fictive world. Presumably there are other survivors in the world, but the narrative ends before that can be confilTIled. In this way, the individual novels, and the trilogy as a whole, defy the apocalyptic ending and its power to give meaning to history. There are no guarantees that Crake's vision of the new world is ever achieved - or that of the Gardeners' for that matter. The MaddAddam trilogy is part of the contemporary post-apocalyptic trend that "questions the traditional apocalyptic paradigm", as Diletta de Cristofaro (2018,243) writes in her article about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004). Cristofaro sees a "double-bind" in contemporary post-apocalyptic novels, which stems from the inescapable nature of the apocalyptic paradigm: "the anti-apocalyptic end of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction still serves as a site of revelation: that of the truth about apocalyptic logic, its pervasiveness and dystopian potential" (ibid., 254). It may be impossible to escape the revelatory nature of the apocalypse altogether; after all, everything from language and art to science is intertwined with time and sense making and is future- and goal-oriented. The next moment always carries within it the burden of explaining previous events. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic time, then, might be misleading concepts, as they are both temporal structures that are designed to make sense oftime and its end - be it a utopian fulfilment, historical continuation, or the total extinction of the human race and the end of anthropocentric time. They are all responses to history in some way and all narrative endings somehow emulate the end of history, as narrative temporalities and tensions are brought to an end. Even the MaddAddam trilogy, in its critique of the apocalyptic understanding of time ends in the act of writing down history. Most - if not all - plotlines and tension are solved. Events are described from afar, and time between these events has lost its meaning, as Blackbeard writes events down after the final battle with the Painballers. Time is distant, descriptive, and not fully lived. Even the hazy temporalities of Oryx and Crake form a coherent narrative, or as Mark Currie (2007, 93) notes on the contemporary novel's experimental use of time: "it would be safer to claim that the active efforts of a reader in the reconstruction of a time line function to reinforce linear causality". In this sense, both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives construct a clear temporality through folding different narrative temporalities together.

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Conclusion Post-apocalyptic narratives like Atwood's trilogy bring out the problems with theoretical tools for multitemporal narratives. In this chapter, I proposed the use of folded temporalities and analepsis in understanding post-apocalyptic narratives, even though both of these concepts need to be elaborated further. The largest complication with analepsis is that a shift from one narrative space-time to another not only provides more information for the reader about the background of the characters and the world; it also affects the narrative as a whole. As the reader is confronted with new infOlmation about the past, it affects what the reader has already learned but also guides their interpretation. So, when Toby recalls the story of Zeb to the Crakers - which resembles Baroni's undramatized analepsis - it affects what the reader knows about Zeb, but also helps her understand the following shift to Zeb's youth - or Baroni's dramatized analepsis. While Raphael Baroni's categorization of analepsis is useful, it does not answer all questions about evoking the past in narratives. Are dreams, hallucinations, and product and brand names part of a llOlmal recounting of events in the narrative? If they are, do they all fall under the category of undramatized analepsis? The answers to these questions are not straightforward enough to be produced here. Partly this is due to the curious temporality so often associated with post-apocalyptic narratives. MaddAddam, the final book in the trilogy, is perhaps the closest to a classical post-apocalyptic narrative, in that the narrative is placed in a strange temporal position between the past, or the pre-apocalyptic world, and the future. As the end of the world is in a way still continuing in the post-apocalyptic narrative, every flashback to the pre-apocalyptic world also carries implications for the future of the narrative. In MaddAddam, this kind of double temporal relation can be seen in the stories about Zeb's past, from which the reader learns more about Zeb, the world, and the God's Gardeners, but they also point towards the future events, like the final battle with the Painballers, the faith of Adam One, and Toby's role in the narrative. This kind of multidirectional temporal relation also casts doubt on the assumption, put forward by Genette, that a narrative has a referencelevel temporality to which all other temporalities are subordinate. While the post-apocalyptic timeline in Oryx and Crake is a later point in a narrative, it does not automatically mean that a later point would be the reference level or Genette's first narrative. In the latter books, especially in MaddAddam, the post-apocalyptic time has a forward momentum of its O\vn, and the past is more clearly subordinate to it in a fmm of expositional mode; it

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is a source of important, but not crucial infmmation for the narrative. By contrast, in Oryx and Crake, the past, present, and future are folded more dynamically together. The fold is an apt metaphor here because a fold does not have a specific shape. A folded temporality can affect events in both ways, as the past is recounted in the present; it also affects the future events in the narrative progression. Evocation or enactment of the past is not just a recollection of a memory, but a reconstruction of a past event from a present moment while anticipating the future. It is this kind of double temporal movement that gives post-apocalyptic narratives - and possibly other narrative traditions as well - their folded temporal structure. \¥bile this structure does not negate fully the traditional apocalyptic paradigm of historical progression, it does bend time differently by creating a certain kind of shape for time. Like many other contemporary post-apocalyptic novels (Cristofaro 2018), Atwood's novels address and critique the traditional apocalyptic narrative fmm in which a utopian new world is achieved through the end of time. This critique is foregrounded by the use of several "double" temporalities. Whereas in Oryx and Crake Jimmy's journeys in the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds mirror each other, MaddAddam folds the end of the world - using the virus pandemic - to the beginning of history, as the Crakers shift from listeners of a mythical oral tradition to active producers of stories, and finally to authors of history. The MaddAddam trilogy is full of different temporalities intertwining and clashing with each other. To open these temporalities, and to demonstrate another way of describing these post-apocalyptic double temporalities, I have used the concept of folded temporality. This model of narrative times not only offers a way to differentiate between open and closed temporalities in post-apocalyptic narratives, but also provides a means to study these different temporal doublings. It is this interplay between different worlds and temporalities, or space-times, which proves that (post-)apocalyptic narratives still have more to offer to literary and narrative theory.

Works Cited Atwood, Margare!. 2003. Oryx and Crake (OaC). New York: Anchor Books. Atwood, Margare!. 2009. The Year a/the Flood (YoF). New York: Anchor Books.

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Atwood, Margaret. 2013. MaddAddam (MA). New York: Anchor Books. Ameel, Lieven. 2019. '''A Geo-Ontological Thump' - Ontological Instability and tlie Folding city in Mikko Rimminen's Early Prose." In Spatiality in Postinodern Finnish Literature, Kristina Malmio & Kaisa Kurikka (eds). London: Pal grave Macmillan, 211-230. Baroni, Raphael. 2016. "Dramatized Analepsis and Fadnigs in Verbal Narratives." Narrative. 24:3: 311-329. Berger, James. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Cristofaro, Diletta de. 2018. '''Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina': Cloud Atlas and the anti-apocalyptic critical temporalities of the contemporary postapocalyptic novel." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 59:2: 243-257. Currie, Mark. 2007. About Time: Narrative, Fiction, and the Philosophy of Time. Edniburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Continuum. Genette, G6rard. 1980/1972. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Comell University Press. Heffeman, Teresa. 2008. Post-apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postinodernism, and the Twentieth-century NoveL Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Heffeman, Teresa. 2015. "The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary: Science, Fiction, and tlie Death Drive." English Studies in Africa. 58:2: 6679. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narration. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Hicks, Heather J. 2016. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. "Then You Are Them." London Review of Books: 31:17. Martin, Dale. 2012. New Testament History and Literature. The Open Yale Courses Series. New Have: Yale University Press.

O'Leary, Stephen. 1998. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennia I Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Polvinen, Merja. 2012. "Being Played: Mimesis, Fictionality and Emotional Engagement." In Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation, Saija Isornaa, Sari Kivistb, Pirjo Lyytikainen,

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Sanna Nyqvis~ Merja Polvinen, & Riikka Rossi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 93-112. Quinby, Lee. 1994. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Geneological Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ransom, Amy. 2014. "The First Last Man: Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier homme." Science Fiction Studies. 41:2: 314-340. Roine, Harma-Riikka. 2016. Imaginative, Immersive and Interactive Engagements: The rhetoric of worldbuilding in contemporary speculative jiction. PhD thesis, University of Tampere. Schoene, Bertliold. 2014. "Gettuig World Going in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake." The Senses and Society. 8: 1: 96-105. Skull, Petter. 2019. The End of the World as We Know It: Theoretical Perspectives on Apocalyptic Science Fiction. PhD thesis, Abo Akademi University. Snyder, Katlierine. 2011. "'Time to Go': The Post-Apocalyptic and tlie Post-Traumatic ui Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake." Studies in the Novel. 43:4: 470-489. Sorensen, Leif. 2014. "Agauist the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead's Zone One." Contemporary Literature. 55:3: 559591. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1966. The Poetics of Prose. Hoboken: WileyBlackwell. Toro, Alfonso de. 2011. "Time Structure in the Contemporary Novel." In Time: Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader, Jan Christoph Meister & Wilhelm Schemus (eds). Berlin: De Gruyter, 109-143. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert Tally. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Dylan. 2017. "Michel Serres and the Literary Value of Folded Time: A Reading of Innovative Temporalities lain Sinc1air's White Chappell Scarlet Tracings and J. G. Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company." EriefEncounters. 1:1: 1-15. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. 1989. Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary u.s. and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9. CONSTRUCTING A DYSTOPIAN GAME WORLD: GOTHIC MONSTROSITIES IN THE DIGITAL ROLE-PLAYING GAME FALLOUT

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In popular culture, the Gothic is often linked to stories of vampires and haunted castles or specific types of visual art, architecture, music, and fashion. However, it can also function as a complex mode of storytelling that produces emotionally ambivalent, simultaneously attractive and repulsive texts (punter 1996, 190). This is arguably also tbe case with portrayals of dystopian, undesirable societies that continue to intrigue audiences. Gothic and dystopian fictions bear many similarities, since both can produce cultural and political commentary and criticism by deploying elements of horror. Specifically, this is often achieved by presenting monstrosities that are horrific or unexpectedly sympathetic. For both Gotbic and dystopian story worlds, tbey are one aspect that highlights the unjust and undesirable conditions that are typical to these worlds. The potential of monstrosity as a resource for storytelling is also present in digital games, some of which involve Gothic and dystopian influences and aim to produce ambivalent feelings and interpretations. Rather than belonging to a specific geme of games - since gemes in the context of games are based on gameplay aspects - monstrosity is recognizable in a game's narrative aspects, although the narrative is typically linked to action. A good example of a story world with Gothic and dystopian monstrosities is to be found in the post-apocalyptic action role-playing game Fallout 3 (Betbesda Game Studios 2008). The main Fallout series comprises five games, and it is complimented by three spin-off games. Fallout 3 was tbe first 3D game in the series that allowed play from a first-person perspective. Focusing on a world destroyed by a nuclear war, the Fallout game world is filled with monstrosities. Typically, these are a consequence of errors in human judgement, and through them the game gives us narrative fragments

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of the pIe-war world in which the actions of a tyrannical government led to the current desolation. In this chapter, I aim to investigate how Gothic monstrosities feature in Fallout 3, as well as the manner in which they contribute to constructing a dystopian game world. They are here conceptualized as objects of the player's action in the game that motivate the player's actions, for instance, to right wrongs in the narrative, whether that involves defeating them or becoming allied with them. Due to this complexity, I choose to use the term monstrosity instead of monster in this case study; the game characters have monstrous qualities, but their perception as monsters by players is open and fluid. This focus is an interesting one because although monstrosities have been employed in games in complex ways and are central to play experiences, they have only recently begun to attract more academic attention. While there has been some previous work on Gothic dystopias (Cartwright 2005), dystopia in games (Farca 2018; Markocki 2016; Aldred & Greenspan 2011; Grey 2009), monstrosities in games (Sve1ch 2013; Taylor 2006), and the Gothic in games (Krzywinska 2013; Krzywinska 2015; Taylor 2009), the present study hopes to bring new research-based knowledge on how monstrosity is a core element in the Gothic and dystopian in the participatory worlds of games. This study will thus shed light on how Gothic monstrosities function and produce particular reactions to and interpretations of games. I argue they are a key aspect of a dystopian game world. In addition to the rules and mechanics, spatial design, interface, and all the details that go into designing a game, Gothic monstrosities - in their many fmms - are a crucial resource that helps to construct an undesirable but intriguing world. A similar view has also been suggested by Taylor (2006, 30) who argues that horror video games rely on them in the construction of play, space, and narrative in games. Although Fallout 3, for example, is not categorically a horror game, it employs these kinds of characters in a similar way: without their presence, the player would have little to defeat, to engage with, and to explore. I approach Gothic monstrosities in Fallout 3 by drawing on Gothic theory (e.g. Bloom 2010; Cavallaro 2002; Cooper 2010; Crow 2009; Punter 1980; Smith 2013; Spooner 2006) to guide a close reading of the game discourse. In this way, I aim to provide an interpretative analysis of a dystopian game world. As is typical in game studies, in my close reading of the game, I oscillate between immersion in and objectification of the experience of the game to identify aspects of its design that support the play experience (Bizzocchi & Tanenbaum 2012, 396). What this means in

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practice is that an initial analysis of the game was conducted in repeated immersive plays of the game, during which data - notes, screenshots, and a few gameplay videos - were collected. The key data consist of conversations with non-player characters (referred to as NPCs hereafter) and messages left in the game world by NPCs (or from another perspective, the game designer) for the player to read. These data were then coded based on criteria derived from Gothic theory. Dystopian theory also provided me a lens through which to examine specifically the dystopian setting of the game and the ways in which monstrosities contribute to its construction. When it comes to defrnitions of dystopia, Prakash, Tilley, and Gordin (2010) argue that rather than being the opposite of a utopia, a dystopia is a utopia that has either gone wrong or is a utopia only for a specific part of society. In other words, for those characters that benefit from the regime, the world is utopian rather than dystopian. Moreover, Sargent (2013, 12) describes dystopia as a consequence of human mistakes, but also notes that dystopias can communicate a potential for change. This is the role that the player character (referred to as PC hereafter) is often given in games: to offer a glimmer of hope for a better future.

Investigating digital games, the Gothic, and dystopia After some disagreements on the relationship between rules and narrative in the early days of game studies, several game scholars have since come to perceive the rules, mechanics, and story as a unified whole and approach games as playable texts (Carr 2009) that can be subjected to a close reading. This approach has provided opportunities for scholars to study particular niche aspects of games. An example that is particularly relevant in the light ofthe present study is Krzywinska's (2015) theorization of what constitutes Gothic coordinates in games. According to her, these include a "false", helpless hero with limited agency, the mise-en-scene of haunted, uncarmy spaces, and the "representation, production and simulation" of psychologically affective emotional states (e.g. paralysis, claustrophobia, vertigo, alienation, estrangement, dread, discomfort, and disorientation). Other defining aspects of the Gothic include the style of representation, encompassing both aesthetic choices and the rationale behind organizing the delivery of a story, as well as the overall reasons behind the use of the Gothic in games. Monstrosity, however, is not highlighted by Krzywinska as a Gothic coordinate, although it is typically what the player must face in these types of games.

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In line with Krzywinska (2015), the Gothic in this study is perceived as something that is represented and produced in several ways that complement each other and produce "Gothicity" in games. However, the focus on the games is narrower here due to the primary interest in narrative. Moreover, games with Gothic and dystopian elements often also draw on horror, but do not necessarily belong to the category of "horror games". Thus, rather than as categories of games, the Gothic, dystopia, and horror are here treated as milieus that encompass character design, narrative, atmosphere, and iconography (Krzywinska, 2015, 61) that influence what the player does and how the player interprets the game world, but are not necessarily reflected in the gameplay genre of the game (such as role-playing game, puzzle, or strategy game). Although the focus here is on the Gothic and dystopia, they are closely linked to the horror milieu. Specifically, the relationship between the Gothic and horror is challenging to conceptualize, and it is discussed further in the following subsection. Compared to dystopian stories, in games the experience of a dystopian narrative is a more complex one, because the player actively participates in the dystopia. In this respect, the present study can increase our understanding of the impact of Gothic, dystopian, and monstrous narrative elements in a medium where the player must invest a non-trivial effort to traverse the text (Aarseth 1997,1) and participate in bringing the text into existence, no matter if this requires only simple movements or the mastery of complex strategies. During gameplay, players are not only observers, but agents who experience pleasure and satisfaction from taking meaningful action and seeing the results of their choices in the game (Murray 1997). In gaming, Gothic monstrosities and dystopian worlds thus become objects and arenas of player action. As Farca (2018, 16) suggests, video game dystopias can warn about the negative trends of the empirical world and, by retaining a notion of hope for change, allow the exploration of emancipatory routes and examples of effecting social change. Regardless of the fact whether the player is there to experience the dystopia as a helpless individual, to challenge it, or to revel in it, thus turning it into a kind of a utopia, the player's role is always an active and participatory one. This chapter is structured as follows. I will first discuss how Gothic monstrosities are conceptualized here. This is followed by an explication of why F aUout 3 in particular is a fruitful choice for this study. After this follows the analysis of the different Gothic monstrosities featured in F aUout 3 - the ecodystopian beasts, Ghouls, Super Mutants, and Gothic villain-heroes.

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Gothic monstrosity Different fOlTIlS of monstrosity are one persistent feature of Gothic fiction (Smith 2013, 4; Cavallaro 2002, 8), although it is not always clear what the difference is bet\veen Gothic and general monstrosities: after all, they all aim to produce fear and discomfort. Cohen's (1996,4) conceptualization of monsters paints them as "the embodiment of a certain cultural moment" who tend to reappear in a shifted form; they elude categorization as disturbing hybrids and caution against the dangers of crossing intellectual, geographic, or sexual borders. Monstrosity, according to Cohen, is typically about cultural, political, racial, economic, or sexual difference: the simultaneously attractive and repulsive Other demands we re-evaluate existing cultural assumptions. This theorization of monsters underlines their complexity and situatedness in specific cultural contexts and is also fruitful for understanding digital game monsters as such cultural embodiments. Since monsters are typically employed as sources of horror, one way to approach them is to examine how horror tales have been compared to Gothic fiction - although "horror" and "Gothic" are often used interchangeably (Bloom 2012, 211). For example, Bloom (ibid., 222) argues that, unlike Gothic tales, "the horror tale proper refuses rational explanation, appealing to a level of visceral response beyond conscious interpretation"; even science becomes fantastic. It follows from this that Gothic tales are ones which feature elements that are logically explainable or become so during the narration. According to such a view, Gothic monstrosities are those whose origins or presence can be rationally explained in the context of their narrative world. One way of accomplishing this is to include their origin or birth story in the tale, as is done for the doppelganger in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and the creature in Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), for example. While this view does not apply to the Gothic generally - particularly to Gothic tales that are also horror tales - for the purposes of this study, it is fruitful. This is because the world of Fallout 3, almost without exception, specifically strives to explain and justify the presence of its monstrosities. The links between the Gothic and the dystopian arguably become visible through monstrosity. Cartwright effectively explores the dynamic between dystopia and the Gothic when she argues for the centrality of the human body to Gothic dystopian stories (which here refers to stories that employ key elements from both traditions):

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The Gothic convention at work in Dystopian texts is the destruction and reshaping of human bodies, the bhrrring of their boundaries and the destabilising of their psyche. The Gothic body is one which has been fragmented in the emITse of the Dystopian narrative, broken apart in the search for hidden monsters, to be reformed in new and frightening shapes. Gothic bodies suffer the fragmentation of alienation, as they are named as other and become horrific in the process. (Cartwright 2005, 207)

Thus, monstrosity in the Gothic and the dystopian often concerns the physical and psychological transformation of the human body, which results in othering people. Cartwright's argument that the body is Gothic while the narrative is dystopian also brings some clarity to understanding the relationship between the two, in particular to understanding Gothic monstrosities as an aspect of dystopias. This is because Gothic bodies appear to have as much to contribute to dystopian narratives as the ones that are changed by or alienated in the often unjust and tyrannical dystopia. Conversely, dystopian worlds also provide a logical home for these bodies. However, what constitutes a Gothic body depends on what is considered physically the norm in each narrative world, and in contrast, what is violently revolted against as abject; unclean, disorderly, or antisocial (Cavallaro 2002, 199). For example, the fundamentalist Christians in Wyndham's The Chrysalids (1955) kill, sterilize, or banish people who are born with defects or mutations, as they practice eugenics. Here, being born with six toes is enough for one to become hunted and excluded. In other novels, our perceived "normalcy" becomes othered: due to the widespread infertility in Atwood's The Handmaids Tale (1985), women who can still reproduce are enslaved to become breeding machines to re-establish order in a situation where the reproductive capacity appears to be a game of luck. The infertile women are transformed by their lost ability to have children, which results in punishment for those women who still can. Arguably, both bodies become Gothic through these experiences, even monstrous by transforming reproduction into a nightmarish process, thereby demanding we re-evaluate our assumptions of gender and sexuality. The definition of a Gothic body is thus highly contextual, and at times it is not just the body that is concretely transformed, but also the societal perception of it. Moreover, other concepts dealing with discomforting physicality - such as the grotesque with its deformed bodies that violate the border between humans and animals (Cavallaro 2002, 190) - are not sufficient alone to account for these bodies, as they are merely one representation of it. One final aspect to note is that as dystopian tales

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may also be built on, for example, the horrors of societal control; Gothic bodies are not a necessary aspect for the stories of this genre, although they are a typical one. Finally, it is important to bear in mind that monsters are not merely something to fear and destroy. In digital games, monsters are often seen as enemies that the player defeats, as sho'Wll, for example, in Sve1ch's (2013) analysis of controlling non-human and defeatable monstrosity in video games. Taking a somewhat different perspective in this analysis, I investigate monstrosity that is not to be defeated and that is very much human. This kind of understanding comes close to the one also discussed by Taylor (2006, 24), who notes the complexities of monstrosities in games. She argues that stereotypical game design schemas "lack the ability to present and accommodate monsters and the Other because these fall outside the simple role of enemy or opponent". In her view (ibid., 25), spaces in horror games become more horrific through the personalization and humanization of enemy characters. This understanding begins to widen the concept of monstrosity in games, while nevertheless still emphasizing them as enemies. However, Taylor (ibid., 29) also remarks that sometimes video games show the human side of monsters, which upsets the fundamental structure of PC, NPC, and opponent. This means that monsters are not always clearly the opponents, but, for instance, something to avoid. In line with Taylor, I wish to posit here that monstrosity in games like Fallout 3 should be seen as ambiguous; it is something that may challenge our expectations and not necessarily be antithetical to humanity, but instead be linked to it in different ways. This is the case, for instance, in games that Taylor (ibid., 26-27) highlights as ones in which the boundaries of humanity, good and evil, and men and women are fragmented through the embodiment of monsters: Resident Evil (Capcom 1996), Fatal Frame (Tecmo 2001), and Silent Hill (Konami 1999). Consequently, Gothic monstrosities need to be understood here in a multi-dimensional way.

Fallout 3 as a dystopian game world F aUout 3 is an interesting choice for a close analysis because it features a variety of monstrosities that the player can respond to in a variety of ways. This is made possible by the overall narrative of the world, which provides the backdrop for their existence: the game's events take place in the radiated, post-apocalyptic east coast of the United States in an alternative timeline, two hundred years after a nuclear war. For a contemporary player,

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the game takes place simultaneously in the future and in the past, since it is year 2277 and some technological inventions that do not exist in our world are featured, but socio-culturally this alternate reality is stuck in the 1940s and 1950s before nuclear bombs destroyed the surface of the world. Thus, the narrative also draws on the geme of alternate history (as well as a science fiction milieu). This becomes evident in the music, style, war propaganda, and promoted ideologies to be discovered in the ruins of the game world. Many famous buildings of the Washington D.e. area have become part of the past, since they exist in ruins in the "now" of the game's timeline. With its alternative timeline and transformed familiar locations, the world of F aUout 3 allows the emergence of familiar monstrosities, since the culture, geography, and biology are recognizable to us. It also employs distancing methods from Gothic and dystopian fictions, which stretch contemporary sources of concern to the extremes and place them in contexts that are temporally and spatially different from the author's present (Sargisson 2013, 40). While dystopias typically depict a nightmarish future, Gothic terrors are relegated to the past, allowing us to "indulge our passion for pleasurable tyrannies while safe in the knowledge of our present enlightemnent" (Spooner 2006, 19). With its retro-futuristic setting, Fallout 3 does both of these things. Dystopian worlds are often seen as ones in which helpless subjects are under a tyrannical rule. For instance, Gottlieb (2001, 3) argues that the dystopia portrays damnation as represented by "an unjust society, a degraded mob ruled by a power-crazed elite". However, while it is implied that Fallout 3's Wasteland might one day be taken over by the tyrannical rule of the Enclave - a military force that claims to represent the govennnent - the game world is specifically anarchist. In line with this, Olkusz (2016, 91) notes the rise of dystopian narratives in which power structures are disintegrated, the military and police become destabilized, and consequently social hierarchies crash and new micro-scale power structures emerge. This is the case in Fallout 3, too, where, consequently, the game offers the player the role of a wanderer who experiences micronarratives spread out through the chaotic world. Because of the radiation in the afiemmth of nuclear war and the socio-political disintegration of the game world, Fallout 3 provides fertile ground for birthing Gothic monstrosities who, in turn, produce dystopia. Interestingly, in Fallout 3 the player can also play as either hero or villain, and can therefore choose his or her version ofutopialdystopia.

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Gothic monstrosities in Fallout 3 In the following, the game discourse is subjected to a close reading. With the help of selected sections of the game, I describe and discuss features of the game as concretely as possible (Femandez-Vara 2015, 209) instead of cataloguing and evaluating the entire design of the game. In practice, I focused my data collection on those sections and elements of the game that were arguably Gothic, and the analysis and selection of examples for the analysis were based on insights gained during said data collection. As part of the close reading of the game, the analysis involved my repeated play in which Fallout 3 was completed twice, once playing as a "hero" and once as a "villain". This was necessary, because the different playstyles revealed new narrative elements, and the player was bound to respond to some monstrosities in different ways when playing either as a hero or as a villain. The notes collected from the game were organized based on how narration was communicated in the game: these included character-based narration, which mainly consisted of conversations with NPCs; indexical storytelling (Fermindez-Vara 2011), which refers to signs left in the game world for the player to interpret, such as blood stains and skeletons; and indices with narration, which included, for instance, computer terminals with journal entries or holotapes with recorded messages. In addition to notes, screenshots were collected ofthe different monsters and monstrosities. Approaching the game in this way allowed a close examination ofthem and their origins in the game, since it encompassed different means of communicating narration in the game. The monstrosities were finally analysed through a dystopian lens, which also included considering their gameplay aspects. This was considered important because the way in which the player can respond to them has a lot of influence on how they are interpreted: as enemies, threats, or allies. I will show how monstrosity in Fallout 3 manifests as three main types. The first category concerns ecodystopian beasts: non-human monsters that are immediately horrific in appearance and behaviour. This category includes "controllable" video game monstrosities (cf. Sve1ch 2013) that nevertheless have an ambiguous appearance and origin. The second category discusses the character types of Super Mutants and Ghouls as the heirs of Frankenstein's creahrre. Both character types are human in origin, but have undergone a severe physical transfOlmation, and in the case of the Super Mutants, also a psychological one. There are differences between the two character types, but due to their similarities they are

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grouped together in the analysis. These characters illustrate transformed human bodies, which are central to Gothic dystopian stories (Cartwright 2005). The third category is constituted by Gothic villain-heroes: these are misguided, morally dubious human characters whose rnotivations are still understandable. They represent sympathetic villains from Gothic fiction and especially vampire tales.

Beasts as defeatable enemies One particular type of monstrosity in the game consists of beasts, which are wild and non-human creatures. The beasts in Fallout 3 are an example of a source of horror that is frequently employed in digital games. This is arguably influenced by the fact that killing non-human monsters is not considered as morally questionable as killing people (Sve1ch 2013, 198). By employing such foes in games, game designers may hope to avoid moral panics and moral criticism, something that digital games have experienced since Exidy's Death Race in 1976 (Kocurek 2012). The beasts in F aUout 3 include mutated animals and insects that are familiar in appearance but horrifically altered by radiation, resulting in them becoming larger in size or appearing zombie-like with patchy fur and pieces of flesh peeking through. This makes them uncarmy, or unheimlich (Freud 1985, 339-376), producing a sense of weirdness through a "collusion of familiarity and strangeness" (Cavallaro 2002, 4). Their difference from known animals also makes them difficult to categorize, making their transfOlmation monstrous (Cohen 1996, 6). Beasts are concretely constructed in the game as a combination of a horrifying appearance and sound, their simulated action of chasing and attacking the PC after becoming alert to his or her presence, and the game's interface marking them as hostile. Their main fimctions typically are to make the world more dangerous and hostile and to reflect the corrupted state of nature. Of the monstrosities discussed here, beasts are the most distant from the Gothic tradition, which favours representations of human and quasihuman terrors; the most famous Gothic classics, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe 1794) or The Monk (Lewis 1796), do not feature such beasts as a key source of horror. Therefore, the beasts are not unequivocally Gothic. However, in addition to their uncanny appearance, their ambivalent

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role as survivors and victims of humanity's actions gives them a Gothic flair and firmly roots them in the game world's dystopia. Typical of video game monsters, the beasts in Fallout 3 are defeatable targets of the player's agency (Sve1ch 2013, 194-195). Their rules are defined: their behavioural patterns are predictable and their weaknesses and strengths can be analysed, which means that the more experienced and knowledgeable players become, the more efficiently they can defeat the beasts. For instance, one ofthe more uniquely horrific creatures in the game is the Deathclaw, whose name is based on its large claws and often lethal leaping attacks. To new players they are frightening and challenging foes, and avoiding conflict with them is wise early on. However, the Deathclaw's leap attack is rendered nearly useless if the player manages to cripple the beast, causing it to limp slowly forward. This means that although the beasts in the game appear horrific, because of their defeatable aspect eventually even the toughest of them become easy opponents and lose their intimidating factor. Sve1ch (ibid., 195) argues that the defeatability of monsters has resulted in a major shift in the conceptualization of monstrosity: "the logic of infOlmatic control has now colonized even the things we fear". In games, they typically do not remain mysteries; rather everything about them can be known and therefore they can be controlled. This is in stark contrast, for example, to horror film monsters whose health is not attributed a numerical value that can be lowered with attacks. In a narrative sense, the beasts are products of a dystopian landscape, since they have been transformed by radiation that has corrupted nearly all of nature. Their existence is the result of human mistakes, and it is arguably ecodystopian. As Otto (2012, 5) argues, ecodystopian, nightmarish worlds "assert a warning regarding what we do to the environment today". The greatest warning that Fallout 3 and its beasts send out is that global nuclear war corrupts and destroys all irreversibly and without discrimination. From a Gothic vie\vpoint, beasts are the result of the most tyrannical actions possible by humans - those that endanger the purity of nature. By being a source of anxiety to both the NPCs of the game world and the PC, beasts are not only the products of dystopia, but they also contribute to the dystopian world as wild, violent creatures that cannot be reasoned with. However, to challenge the anthropocentrism of the dystopia, the beasts of Fallout 3 also speak of nature's ability to adapt to a dystopian setting. To them, transfOlmation also means survival.

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Super Mutants and Ghouls as a Frankensteinian monstrosity A recurring aspect of monstrosity in both Gothic and dystopian fiction is its ability to present discomforting questions about humanity. A famous example is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), a fundamentally Gothic tale, which also guides us towards another specific type of monstrosity in the game. The novel 's creature is brought to life by an obsessive scientist. He is physically monstrous with supernatural strength and likely supernatural intelligence. At the same time, he is psychologically human. Because of his physical monstrosity, he becomes a victim of prejudice: humans, including his creator, are disgusted by him and shun him, despite his initial kindness and generosity. Thanks to his complexity, Frankenstein's creature is bound to elicit sympatby and empathy (Spooner 2006, 70). On a more general level, in the Gothic sense, tbe novel thematically discusses the transgressions of humanity's borders and obsessive, mad, unethical science. Such themes are also common in dystopian fiction, such as Huxley's Brave New World (1932), in which embryos are conditioned to become suitable for their pre-decided futures; Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1986), which employs androids to discuss humanity; and more recently Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), in which human clones are produced only to become organ donors. Here, the monstrosity ofthe Frankensteinian kind refers to quasi-human NPCs in the game, the Super Mutants and Ghouls. The similarities that tbey share with Frankenstein's creature bring them close to the Gothic tradition, although they also differ from him in individual ways. The fundamental feature that Super Mutants and Ghouls share is their human origin. Super Mutants are the result of unethical scientific experiments conducted by the government to create super soldiers. Ghouls have transfOlmed because of radiation, but the high radiation levels are also the result of human actionsthe use of nuclear bombs. Super Mutants and Ghouls are thus botb victims of the failure of human moral judgement. As victims of such injustice and as representatives of humanity's transgressions, they are specifically Gothic monsters: this they do by presenting questions of where to assign blame for monstrosity (punter 1980, 255) and at what point humans have been transfOlmed - or transgressed - to the extent that they can no longer be considered human.

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Figure 9-1. A hostile Super Mutant is shooting at the Pc. With only two exceptions in Fallout 3, Super Mutants are immediately hostile, physically monstrous enemies to the PC and all human NPCs. Thus, their function is primarily that of enemies. As depicted in Figure 9-1, they are muscular and large, they have yellowish green skin, and their faces are permanently stuck in a sneering expression. Their speech is slow and loud consisting of simple vocabulary and, since they are typically immediately hostile, players are not able to converse or reason with them. They also represent a lack of individuality that is prevalent in dystopian novels (Cartwright 2005, 207): almost all of them are nameless, have an identical appearance, and are physically androgynous. Thus, the average Super Mutant is approached more like a beast than a complex Gothic character by players. However, these preconceptions are challenged when they meet Fawkes, one of the only two Super Mutants in the game that are not aggressive and have retained their human intelligence. It can be no coincidence that when the PC first meets Fawkes, he is locked inside a test chamber and cannot be immediately attacked by accident. Instead, a dialogue screen pops up inviting players to speak with him. The function of Fawkes is not to be an enemy, but an unexpected ally. Fawkes pleads with the PC to release him from the test chamber in which he has been locked by other Super Mutants for being different. In return, he offers to help the PC. His intelligence gained through self-study as well as his isolation

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and pleading with the PC resemble greatly Frankenstein's creature, and thus underline the Gothicity of this character. Once released, Fawkes can accompany the PC in the game world, but only if the PC is kuown as a "good" character throughout the wasteland. Hence, it is suggested that the only reason why NPCs in human settlements do not attack him is that they trust the PC based on his/her previous good actions. Without the PC's help, Fawkes would be treated as a monster, despite the fact that he is friendly and intelligent.

Figure 9-2. Carol describes the process of becoming a Ghoul in the game dialogue.

What specifically connects Ghouls to the Frankensteinian tradition is their uncanny physical appearance of being simultaneously dead and alive: resulting from exposure to radiation, their bodies are deteriorating and their skin and hair has largely fallen off. With their rotten bodies, Ghouls do not look as though they could functionally be alive, but still are, and this transgression is one of the reasons why they are so repulsive. As Freud (1985, 364) argues, the uncanny is experienced in its "highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the retum of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts". We can see something of ourselves in Ghouls because they behave and talk like humans, but because they appear undead, this results in rejection. They also live much longer than ordinary humans, even for centuries. Unlike Super Mutants, however, Ghouls are fully psychologically human, and can be just as peaceful, violent, or complex as

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ordinary human NPCs in the game. Thus, their function is similar to human NPCs - they can be allies, enemies, quest givers, or business partners - but this is coloured by their status as othered outcasts. Figure 9 2 shows one of the friendly Ghouls in the game, Carol, describing the physical process of becoming a Ghoul through dialogue. Carol later remarks that while some could accept their new situation, others went crazy. It follows that the game also features Feral Ghouls, those who went insane and lost their human aspects and are thus violent and incapable of speech. Feral Ghouls appear more skeletal than regular Ghouls and could be considered the zombies of the game world. Some human NPCs believe that all Ghouls eventually turn into Feral Ghouls, but there is no evidence of this being a fact in Fallout 3. Another similarity that the Super Mutants and Ghouls share with Frankenstein's creature is their asexual means of reproduction. The Frankenstein tale represents a male attempt to create life without female participation. The creature needs Frankenstein's help to have a female companion, and the reason for Frankenstein's refusal to finish creating the female mate is the realization that if the creature observed and learned how to repeat the procedure, future monsters might follow (Cooper 2010, 68). In Fallout 3, Super Mutants have turned this nightmare scenario into action by overrunning the Vault in which their creation took place, and they are now kidnapping humans to create more of their 0\Vll kind. In this way, although they are asexual, they have found a means to reproduce. Ghouls are also unable to reproduce by sexual means, but unlike Super Mutants, Ghouls do not attempt to increase their numbers. Instead, "ghoulification" takes place by accident or chance. In the context of Super Mutants, the concept of biodystopias becomes of interest when it refers to "works that dramatise the implementation and ramifications of the widespread and frequently unethical use of biotechnologies" (Ferreira 2013, 49). Their creation and the way Super Mutants have broken free, destroyed their creators, and become a menace to struggling human societies represents this kind ofbiodystopia, rejecting the idea that humanity could or should be improved by such means. As revealed by the remaining telTIlinal entries from researchers, the experiments on humans that were to become Super Mutants were conducted under secrecy, without pelTIlission from the subjects, and they were physically and psychologically invasive and unbearably painfuL Because of the great strain on the body during the transfolTIlation, Super Mutants lose any memories of their past human selves. They are only one example of the government's scientific experiments in the Fallout 3 universe that aimed to alter the biology of living creatures by unethical means; the various

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experiments were widespread and horrific. Super Mutants therefore also

highlight the role of the evil monster state in dystopia (Cartwright 2005, 181; Gottlieb 2001, 11). Unlike Super Mutants, Ghouls are psychologically human and have memories from their lives prior to the physical transfOlmatioll. However, there is evidence that despite this, they experience a loss of identity when

they become excluded from human communities. Ghouls are often no longer able to continue their work, for example, as scientists or hairdressers,

and those who were attractive before are now a source of disgust to most people they encounter. What Ghouls could do and be prior to the transfOlmation become memories of the past. Hence, it could be argued that both Ghouls and Super Mutants experience a loss of their previous "human" identities, Ghouls by losing their place in human societies and Super Mutants by forgetting it. It could be argued that this kind of psychological impact is horrifying specifically in the Gothic sense, since

these NPCs have either become unjustly trapped in bodies that do not allow them to express themselves and experience life the way they remember, or

they have altogether forgotten their sense of self. Ghouls come to expect cruelty from humans and some of them address

the PC with extremely aggressive language, expecting the PC to be similarly prejudiced. Players that take on a villainous role can help one of the Ghouls, Roy Phillips, to lead an attack to massacre an entire human community as revenge for not allowing Ghouls to live with them. However, not all Ghouls in the game have become hostile towards humans - some are cautiously friendly, others melancholic, some purely business-like - but the aspect of hostility as a fmm of defence - and even offence - is certainly present, and Ghouls are always aware of their physical deformities. This experience of othemess is one of the aspects that make Ghouls Gothic characters; it is also deeply experienced by Frankenstein's creature.

Gothic villain-heroes as charismatic leaders The third type of monstrosity in the game world is the villain-hero. A Gothic villain-hero can be characterized as a creature with a powerful

intellect who suffers from the Romantic agony of knowing that the cursed world should be something else, and "could be driven to misguided, cruel deeds, trying to set the world right, or to avenge a sense of outrage or

betrayal" (Crow 2009, 9). Heathcliffin Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, represents such a conflicted character, as does Coppola's

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(1992) film version of Stoker's (1897) famous vampire, Count Dracula. With specific reference to the vampire figure, Punter (1980, 119,127) has described the Gothic villain-hero as "elegant, well dressed, a master of seduction, a cynic, a person exempt from prevailing socio-moral codes" who also symbolizes injustice. Hence, when we are looking at the vampire as a form of Gothic monstrosity, we see human bodies that are connected to death and images of death; charismatic and intriguing individuals who are outcasts, not necessarily by choice or (initially) by any fault of their own; and individuals whose situation has turned them bitter, hostile, and dangerous. Thus, vampires are ambiguous beings and this ambiguity, I argue, can be extended to describe the situation of the Gothic villains of Fallout 3, who can consequently be perceived as shifted reappearances of the vampire. In Fallout 3, villain-heroes can be identified in complex and charismatic community leaders who have dubious morals, but whose motivations are understandable. These villain-heroes are initially constructed as enemies by other NPCs, but if players speak to them personally, they may be able to sympathise with them. One such character is Vance, the leader of a gang called the Family. The gang members are outcasts with cannibalistic tendencies, but Vance teaches them the way of the vampire to control their "hunger". Vance perceives himself as a heroic teacher of misunderstood outcasts, which becomes apparent in his several lines of dialogue, such as

Figure 9-3. Vance describes his role in leading the Family in the game dialogue.

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the one depicted in Figure 9 3. He believes that vampirism would make the Family less monstrous in the eyes of outsiders. Simultaneously, Vance is very suspicious of outsiders and does not trust their judgement. A telTIlinal entry reveals that he has secretive plans for the nearby settlement of Arefu, and it is implied that he is planning to secure the inhabitants as a source of blood. Vance's methods and aims sound strange and misguided, yet Vance is portrayed as intelligent and sympathetic towards outcasts, which shows in his dialogue where he describes his followers as misunderstood and argues his points using a wider vocabulary than the average NPc. He believes that what he is doing is right. His actions are the result of a disappointment with human society to the extent that he divorces himself from humanity and instead refers to outsiders as "humans". Vance resembles a classic Gothic villain-hero: in his own morally dubious way, he is trying to right a \¥fong. However, the members of the gang must follow Vance's rules on vampirism and learn laws that they must be able to recite when asked. New members spend time in isolation, according to Vance to meditate, but arguably to be brainwashed. This aspect makes Vance appear tyrarmical. As such, Vance bears a similarity to tyrannical leaders of micro-dystopias (Olkusz 2016, 96): his own aberrations and obsessions have guided the fOlmation of the Family. In practice, however, players can learn from dialogue with other members of the Family that they are rather free to do as they please; one of them appears to openly disrespect Vance's teachings, and Vance allows the newest recruit, ran, to leave after deciding to do so. Vance offers these gang members a safe place and a society to belong to, which in an apocalyptic setting is often enough (Olkusz 2016, 97). To some gang members, his teachings are something to endure to be able to remain in the gang, but it is ultimately worth it for the safety that the community provides. Moreover, the gang members retain their individuality, unlike in many microdystopias. The fact that members can leave also goes against the tradition of tyrannical leaders under whose control safe places that protect people from external threats also become traps (ibid., 92). Consequently, while Vance is a Gothic villain-hero in the position of a leader in a dystopian world, for the members of the Family his gang appears utopian and Vance a strange but open-minded leader. To the settlers of Arefu, however, the Family is a threat unless the PC negotiates a peace treaty between them. The formation of the Family is arguably morally dubious. Vance has specifically targeted individuals who are disempowered outcasts, although he represents his actions as charitable. When players meet complex Gothic

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characters such as Vance, they may question if negotiating with them is the right thing to do and whether they can be trusted. This hesitation and discomfort is because of Vance switching between being a sympathetic leader and a vampiric monster. In line with this argument, Cartwright (2005, 181) remarks on the power of subtle monstrosity in which those without an overtly monstrous appearance are the threatening individuals of a dystopia, and argues that moving back and forth between monstrosity and humanity is particularly frightening.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to explore the different types of Gothic monstrosities in the post-apocalyptic game world of Fallout 3, and to examine how they contribute to the construction of a dystopia. It can be argued that beasts as non-human, defeatable monstrosities in the game contribute to such constructions as threats to humans and ecodystopian victims of human actions that have nevertheless come to thrive in transfOlmed nature. The Frankensteinian monstrosities, the Super Mutants and Ghouls, are also threats to humanity: Super Mutants threaten humans with violence and Ghouls constitute a threat of irrevocable physical transfOlmation. They are beings that are unique to the Fallout universe as products of nuclear war and unethical scientific experiments by the game world's tyrarmical government. Thus, biologically, technologically, and socially, the context of the dystopian game world has allowed for these human and beast-like characters to become transfOlmed into something else. The Gothic villain-heroes of the game also contribute to constructing a dystopia by being threats to outsiders, yet they believe they have been forced into this position by the rejection of an unjust society. However, in an anarchist dystopian world, the society at large is also powerless to stop the Gothic villain-heroes as leader figures from establishing their own communities in which they can offer precious safety to their followers, typically troubled individuals. Gothic monstrosities in games therefore appear to include those that the player expects to defeat on an individual basis and those whose monstrosity players must assess. Monstrosities contribute to the Gothic and dystopian traditions of providing cultural and political commentary and criticism with portrayals of specific injustices. For instance, the analysis shows how their othering in Fallout 3 impacts these minorities on an individual basis and can even have societal consequences when specific members become bitter or

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vengeful. The way the Ghouls in particular are treated in the game world can be interpreted as commentary on the othering and unjust treatment of minorities in our world who become ostracized targets of prejudice. However, as we have seen in the analysis, they can also be both victims and producers of terror. Since Gothic and dystopian fiction have a long tradition of employing monstrosities in complex ways, this investigation shows that drawing on these narrative traditions provides the analyst with a fruitful viewpoint to identify those aspects that make them ambiguous, discomforting, and culturally reflective in games. In the context of games, a finding of specific interest is that monstrosities can be more than mere enemies or opponents. In the future, it would be interesting to specifically study the different ways in which players are afforded to respond to them in games, since, I argue, they are not always targets of violence and can instead sometimes be negotiated with or even become allies. With respect to previous research on monstrosities in games, arguments that gameplay and narrative are linked are complemented here, since encountering different types of them results in different types of action. The player's role in the dystopian game also fOlTIlS an interesting question for future studies: is the PC there to survive, to defeat dystopian oppressors, or to help construct a dystopia, becoming monstrous themselves? Taking into consideration what the player can do would thus provide an interesting angle for investigating dystopian games. Consequently, this chapter sheds more light on the ways in which in contemporary culture, dystopian theories are fruitful in the investigation of digital games and often have links to the Gothic tradition. To game designers, Gothic monstrosities in dystopian narratives provide a rich resource that can be employed in complex ways to construct meaningful story settings in which players do their best to either save the world or watch it burn.

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Maturin, Charles Robert. 1968/1820. Melmoth the Wanderer. London: Oxford University Press. Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press. Olkusz, Ksenia. 2016. "Micro-Dystopias as Socio-Political Constructs in Post-Apocalyptic Narratives." In More After More: Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More:S Utopia, Ksenia Olkusz, Michal Klosiilski, & KrzysztofM. Maj (eds), Krak6w: Facta Ficta Research Centre, 90-100. Otto, Eric. 2012. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Prakash, Gyan, Helen Tilley, and Michael D. Gordin. 2010. Utopia/ Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman. Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vo/. 2, the Modem Gothic. London: Longrnan. Radcliffe, Ann Ward. 2009/1794. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Auckland: Floating Press. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2013. "Do Dystopias Matter?" In Dystopia(N) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, Fatima Vieira(ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 10-12. Sargisson, Lucy. 2013. "Dystopias do Matter." In Dystopia(N) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, Fitima Vieira (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 40-41. Shelley, Mary. 201311818. Frankenstein. London: Alina Classics Limited. Smith, Andrew. 2013. Gothic Literature. Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Spooner, Catherine. 2006. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 200811886. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Waiheke Island: Floating Press. Stoker, Bram. 200111897. Dracula. London: Electric Book Company. Sve1ch, Jaroslav. 2013. "Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games." In Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader, Marina Levina & Diem-My T. Bui (eds). New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 193-208.

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Taylor, Laurie N. 2009. "Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming." In Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion a/Fear and Play, Bernard Perron (ed.). Jefferson: McFarland. Taylor, Laurie N. 2006. "Not of Woman Born: Monstrous Interfaces and Monstrosity in Video Games." PhD thesis, University of Florida. Tecmo. 2001. FalalFrame. Japan: Tecmo. Wyndharn, John. 200811955. The Chrysalids. London: Penguin.

10. THE DREAM AND THE NIGHTMARE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE FUTURE IN THE TELEVISION SERIES BATTLESTAR GALACTlCA AND CAPRlCA

ESSI VATILO

Science fiction is rife with stories of artificial intelligence (AI) that comes seeking vengeance on its creators, but few of these stories address the question of responsibility for creating AI in the first place or the consequences it has, be it vengeance or something else. The television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009, hereafter BSG, developed by Ron D. Moore)l and its short-lived prequel Caprica (2009-2010, hereafter C, created by Ron D. Moore and Remi Aubuchon)' are an exception to this trend: the two series highlight humanity as responsible for creating AI and thereby responsible for all the ensuing consequences, both good and bad. Battlestar Galactica invites viewers to consider the failure of responsibility as it presents human civilization destroyed by "humanity's children", the robotic and humanoidAIs known as Cylons. The prequel, Caprica. focuses on the early development of the Cylons and juxtaposes the good intentions of their creators with the subsequent destruction of human civilization. These series are often described as exploring humanity's relationship with technology by addressing the dangers of scientific hubris and technology's value, use, and role in politics, economics, and the military (see, e.g. Jowett 2008, 64-65; Achouche 2017, 1). Nevertheless, the role of responsibility 1 This reirnagined version is loosely based on the 1970s cult show of the same name. It opens with a two-part miniseries followed by a fOill-season run. There are also two television movies and a series ofwebisodes to fill in backstory, but neither these nor the original series will be addressed in this chapter. 2 Caprica was cancelled after just one season.

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in relation to these questions is rarely discussed despite being addressed in the series directly in dialogue and indirectly in the juxtapositions of intentions, causes, consequences, and actions. The two shows demonstrate

the importance of responsibility for the future by showing its failure both within the dystopian society of Battlestar Galactica and the relatively utopian society of Caprica, with both contexts offering a unique set of challenges for responsibility. From the start of Battlestar Galactica, collective responsibility is established as the moral framework for both series and as an integral ingredient in preventing negative consequences. However, characters are also shown routinely failing to take tliis kind of responsibility in tlie middle of messy reality. The focus here is not on responsibility as legal accountability, but in the sense of being responsible for the consequences of one's actions or taking responsibility to safeguard the future. As philosopher Franyois Raffoul (2010, 11-12) points out, tliis places the emphasis on the future, and the consequences, which need to be considered, can be unforeseeable. Future-oriented responsibility can also be based on care

rather than autliorship (ibid.), so that guardianship over the future and tlie prevention of harm become more relevant than the identification of culprits

or punishment for past wrongdoings. Similarly, Battlestar Galactica and Caprica ask how and why humanity failed to predict and prevent disaster rather than who to blame and punish. In otlier words, what comes in the way of taking responsibility for the future? Responsibility for the Cylons is presented as belonging to all humans, not just particular individuals, thus emphasizing collective responsibility. The Cylons are described as "humanity's children", "created by man" and

as our responsibility (BSG, M.01) witliout specifying who is included or to what degree. While Caprica reveals more details about the origins of the Cylons and identifies responsible individuals, it still supports the collective aspect by showing the creation of the Cylons as the culmination of various intentional and unintentional developmental paths where corporate interests, government projects, consumer behaviour, and personal feelings

intersect. The creation of tlie Cylons is thus tlie result of both individual and collective action with cumulative and ultimately apocalyptic consequences. This complexity of contributing factors, with accumulating and uncertain consequences and the extended time frame of those consequences, leads

to uncharted territory within the ethics of responsibility (see Ionas 1984; Dupuy 2007). Battlestar Galactica's thought experiment tackles precisely this territory in a way that is not limited to the ethics of creating AI; it addresses future-oriented responsibility through its discussion of AI.

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A crucial difference between responsibility in the real world and a fictional world is that a narrative fixes causes and consequences in place and establishes connections between them. This reduces the complexity and unpredictability of events and highlights certain aspects over others. While the result is a simplification, it provides an opportunity to explore responsibility in a highly technological society without being riddled with the paralysing effect of uncertainty about a multitude of possible consequences. Philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2007, 239-240) argues that responsibility concerning emergent technologies is often reduced to cost-benefit analyses in which there is an underlying assumption that uncertainty could be countered by acquiring sufficient data in order to make an informed decision. The problem is, according to Dupuy (ibid., 240), that with cumulative, unprecedented development, the question is not one of epistemic uncertainty, but of ontological indetelTIlinacy. The future consequences are simply unknowable and, therefore, it is impossible to weigh up the pros and cons and calculate the morally correct course of action with a minimum of negative consequences in the future before a course of action is chosen. As a result, a debate about the likelihoods can overshadow a more nuanced, ethical discussion. In the fictional universe of Battlestar Galactica, the consequences of artificial intelligence are confined to one potential catastrophic scenario, which allows a retrospective view that identifies causes in the light of consequences rather than the reverse. I will begin by considering the influence of utopian dreaming in Caprica on the reluctance to consider the possible negative consequences of developing AI. The dreams, both individual and collective, are more connected to the present social context ofthe dreamer than to a vision of the future, and therefore, possible 10ng-telTIl consequences are also overlooked. In the second part, I will focus on Battlestar Galactica and the effect an ongoing apocalypse and the materialisation of negative consequences has on responsibility. The dystopian nightmare makes it impossible to ignore the negative consequences and shifts the focus on the past and, therefore, on blame. Within this context, the trauma of the catastrophe becomes an obstacle for responsibility.

Responsibility and utopian dreaming The society of Caprica (the planet that gives the show its name) IS a playground of utopian and dystopian impulses. The pilot opens with the text "58 years before the fall" (C, 1.01), therefore framing the events of

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Caprica as leading up to the destruction of human civilization 58 years later at the beginning of Battlestar Galactica. Thus, Capric an society is doomed from the start, as all tbe hopes placed in the Cylons will lead to an apocalypse. In contrast to critical dystopia's bleak society that contains a glimmer of hope (Baccolini & Moylan 2003, 7), the affluent Caprican society, while dreaming of better things, is about to destroy itself in tbe process. This apocalyptic sense of doom makes Caprica an interesting version of a critical utopia - a society that is in some ways better than contemporary society, but one that also contains serious problems (Sargent 1994, 9). Caprican society is an extrapolation of contemporary American society with better technology and more equality, but it is also riddled with terrorism, racism, and religious strife. It shows both the potential and the threats of new technology. The techno-utopia of a full sensory virtual world, computer sheets, and domestic robots holds the potential to "make life easier" (BSG, M.OI), but it can also be seen as a cause for alienation, moral corruption, and, ultimately, destruction. Thus, Caprica contains an "awareness of tbe limitations of the utopian tradition" (Moylan 2014, 10), but curiously it preserves the utopian dream only for the characters. The awareness of the impending apocalypse denies the viewers a hopeful resolution within the narrative, as the "critical mass required to make the necessary explosive reaction" (ibid., emphasis in the original) leads to destruction rather than a positive revolution. The characters, on the other hand, hold on to hope, and tbe Cylons are an integral part in tbat dream for a brighter future. In fact, this persistent hope can be seen as one of the factors leading to disaster. The Cylons are created as an answer to both utopian and dystopian elements of Caprican society, as the society can appear equally hopeful or nightmarish depending on the perspective of particular characters. Thus, Caprica not only preserves "recognizable and dynamic alternatives" CMoylan 2014, 10), but shows how these alternatives appear from tbe opposite perspective. The Cylons are first and foremost a project of utopian dreaming, but one that stems from the vastly different worldviews of their two main creators. For Daniel Graystone, the CEO of Graystone Industries, who develops the Cylons' mechanical body, tbe world is full of potential and tbe Cylons are a capitalist dream to make a good world even better. By contrast, his teenage daughter Zoe, who creates an artificial, independent duplicate of herself in a virtual enviromnent - essentially the first Cylon consciousness - sees the world around her in more dystopian telTIlS and hopes tbat her avatar programme will change everything CC, L01). In short, the Cylons are a site of conflicting hopes, dreams, and plans not

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just for their creators, but also for a number of other characters. They are equally seen as a source of profit and salvation, they are weapons and a free workforce, and they are a way to immortality and resurrection. The dreams that surround the Cylons are all centred on their expected benefits to society, but the possibility of any unintended consequences in the future is completely ignored. When technological development puts the fate of humanity and the planet on the line, philosopher Hans Ionas (1984, x) arguess that there is a need "to give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss" so as to safeguard the future. However, only the "prophecy of bliss" is present in Daniel's excitement over "creating another race that will walk beside us", or in his vision of the Cylon as "a tireless worker who won't need to be paid, it won't retire or get sick. It won't have rights or objections or complaints." (C, 1.06) He even fails to see tbe inherent incompatibility of his visions, seeing the Cylons both as sentient beings, as equals, and as simple tools to be used. The contrast is highlighted by the presence of virtual Zoe hiding inside a robot, a fully aware sentience being treated as a tool- her reactions to Daniel's words are portrayed both in the robot's body language and in Zoe's facial expressions as the camera alternates between the two manifestations. Daniel's vague and idealistic projections seem to be oriented towards the future but are in fact a means to an end in the present. They are a sales pitch to the board of directors and, therefore, cannot include "prophecies of doom". According to Dupuy (2007, 238-9), there is little room for critical discussion with emergent technologies because the risk of being left behind in tbe technological race in the present outweighs the potential risks in the future. Caprica invites viewers to weigh up the corporate concern for profits and staying ahead of competitors with the unintended consequences the viewers know will come to pass. In addition to focusing on the benefits, Daniel also refuses to acknowledge any existent problems caused by the technology he develops. In his techno-utopia, technology is always benign and neutral. He firmly denies that the holoband, which allows access to virtual reality, could be harmful to tbe moral development of teenagers (C, 1.03-04), and in separating teclmology from its use, he absolves himself. He knows that technology takes on a life of its own once created, but he seems to suggest that any unintended consequences are out of his hands. \¥hen he sees the seedy underside of the virtual world, he comments: "\¥hen I created the holoband, tbis isn't exactly what I had in mind" (C, 1.01). In hindsight, he perhaps should have anticipated such consequences, unlike the Cylon rebellion, and therefore, worked to prevent them, even if he

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could not have predicted them for certain. Dupuy and Grinbaum (2004, 459) argue that there is an impossible demand to anticipate the future in future-oriented responsibility, and yet there is an obligation to do just that to safeguard the future. According to Marion Smiley (2014, 2), this follows from the type of responsibility in question: taking responsibility for remedying or preventing hatm requires one to imagine a future that one then works towards. So, when Daniel fails to imagine what is at stake with his inventions, it demonstrates his unwillingness or inability to consider negative consequences. It also underlines the difficulty of predicting the future and the need to do so nonetheless, as well as the need to think of responsibility beyond personal accountability. Daniel's utopian bias is thus coupled with not just a disregard but a rejection of dystopian possibilities both in the present and in the future. Dystopian possibilities are pushed aside and everyday obligations in the present take precedence as they yield immediate benefits and sanctions that are easier to perceive and predict. In the present, Daniel needs to complete a govenarnent contract for 100,000 military robots on a tight schedule to keep the company profitable. Daniel is, therefore, more of a mad capitalist than a mad scientist (Achouche 2017, 6). He is motivated by capitalist interests, but perhaps also trapped by the capitalist structures around him, which allow him little room to consider ethical questions. On a personal level, he is driven by a parental need to save his daughter by giving virtual Zoe a physical body. His fatherly concern is still seamlessly coupled with an awareness of the market potential of virtual resurrection, and indeed Graystone Industries starts preparing the avatar programme, which creates virtual copies of people, for public launch. As Daniel says, no one's motivations are pure or simple (C, 1.14), and his immediate personal, business, and visionary goals exist simultaneously even when they conflict, but they also take precedence over the future. Daniel Gilbert (2006), a professor of psychology, argues that humans are better at responding to threats that are intentional, immediate, and have direct personal impacts, and this makes humans ill-equipped to respond to unintentional, slow, and impersonal threats. Caprica pits the immediate threats of losing a project, company, and daughter against the delayed destruction of civilization. Thus, Daniel fulfils his responsibility as a businessman to keep the company profitable and as a father to save his daughter (although he breaks the law in order to do both), but these come at the cost of safeguarding the future. Like Daniel, Zoe's motives for creating the Cylons are multifaceted and more concerned with the present. Her actions can be seen as teenage

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rebellion, but equally as a response to the moral corruption rillllling rampant in the virtual world. The threat, here, is not technology, but as Mehdi Achouche (2017,4-5) argues, the slow disintegration of society and the increasing decadence enabled by the virtual world, which is seen to have a corrupting moral influence in the real world of Caprica. It is this disintegration and decadence that Zoe aims to change with her avatar programme. Her plans are never revealed, as she dies in a suicide bombing 12 minutes into the pilot episode, which leaves both her copy and the audience in a state of uncertainty as to her intentions - a key ingredient in responsibility. James H. Thrall (2015, 176) connects Caprica to "a moment of fOlmative transition that resembles adolescence's tentative steps toward adulthood, as fatal decisions are made". This creates a parallel between humanity as a teenager faltering with new technology and an actual teenager taking risks creating that technology. Thus, Zoe's project could be seen simply as teenage - and by extension human - thoughtlessness, but on the other hand Zoe is also portrayed as an independen~ extremely smart, and socially aware teenager, and her project as very deliberate rather than thoughtless. She may start in defiance to outdo her father and later be influenced by her conversion to a fundamentalist religion with a penchant for terrorism, but Zoe's plan transcends both of these influences, as demonstrated by both original and virtual Zoe's reluctance to let anyone exploit her programme. She does not set out to create a techno-utopia or artificial intelligence for its own sake, but rather to respond to the specific problems of her social reality that she hopes to fix. \¥here Daniel's faith in a bright future results in a failure to consider the consequences of his work, Zoe's focus on the moral and emotional emptiness she sees in the world has the same effect. In trying to find a solution to a current problem, the dream of a better future is present as an absence of that problem. Therefore, her actions align with Marion Smiley's future-oriented responsibility in the sense of trying to remedy a problem in the present to make a better future, but Zoe fails to consider the future consequences of the remedy. Until her death, she also fulfils her parental responsibility by taking care of and guiding virtual Zoe. After her death, virtual Zoe takes on the responsibility for her 0\Vll future, and thus the new technology begins to detelTIline the terms of its 0\Vll existence. Despite her independence, virtual Zoe follows original Zoe's plans even though she does not know what that may entail. Surrounded by uncertainty, she works on hunches and guesses that lead her to protect herself and the avatar programme from Daniel and other characters who would use both to their 0\Vll ends. Thus, there is a future-oriented aspect in her actions in trying to

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prevent the programme being used for particular purposes, namely in the service of capitalism and religious fundamentalism.

Through Daniel and Zoe, Caprica explores individual responsibility for creating artificial intelligence, but it also shows that responsibility for creating the Cylons is not reducible to the actions of these two characters. The series also explores collective responsibility and demonstrates the role of the general public as well as political, corporate, and social structures in

the creation of the Cylons. Here collective responsibility is understood as belonging to groups in a way that is not simply distributable to individuals and also as not mutually exclusive with individual responsibility (Smiley 2010, 172, 194). Daniel and Zoe can be seen as individuals responsible for the existence of the Cylons, but while Zoe might be a lone genius, Daniel has a company full of people working on the Cylons, not to mention the influence possessed by the shareholders and the board of directors. Furthermore, the general public also has a role as both passive bystanders and active consumers, and these roles can be linked to utopian dreaming just like Daniel's and Zoe's actions. According to the series creator, Ron D. Moore , Caprica depicts "a society that's running out of control with a wild-

eyed glint in its eye" (Frankel 2009). In other words, the society at large is as infatuated with new technology as Daniel and Zoe, and through buying and using it, the society contributes to the existence of the technology that

leads to the Cylons. The development of the Cylons is part of normal corporate and political practices. The government contract for military robots is public knowledge,

as is the development of artificial intelligence by Graystone Industries and other companies. Neither seems to spark a public reaction of any significance. Government officials and elected representatives commission

these autonomous robots, while the masses who elected them stand idly by. In contrast to the lack of debate concerning the robots, the holoband is a topic of late-night talk shows and it arouses concerns about its effect on

morality (C, 1.03-04). This seems to suggest that since the Cylons are not yet present, they do not trigger the same kind of response as the holoband, which is already a part of everyday life. However, this concern does not translate into significant action, and it has no impact on the popularity of

the holoband and the virtual world. Despite the concerns, the holoband is a normalized part of life, and the same happens with the Cylons. They are accepted surprisingly quickly and without reservation, and they enter the public sphere not just as soldiers but as workers and servants. Public opinion sways dramatically in their favour when Daniel uses them to

prevent a terrorist attack (C, 1.18). With both the virtual world and the

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Cylons, the frame of reference in the public mind seems to occupy a short time span, and 10ng-telTIl consequences are once again overlooked. There is no concern about the future consequences of virtual reality, only its effect in the moment causes concern. The actions of the masses as consumers and holoband users also contribute to the emergence of artificial intelligence in two ways. The virtual world provides both the incentive and the platform for the Cylon consciousness. Hence, the popularity of the virtual world ensures its continued development, and the morally dubious behaviour of pleasureseeking consumers is a central motivation for Zoe in creating the avatar programme. The virtual world is a place where people can engage in debauchery, violence, murder, and human sacrifice without legal consequences, although the virtual consequences of being banned from a game can seem as real as real-world consequences. Collective responsibility is especially manifest in consumer behaviour. \¥bile as citizens the masses simply let development take its course, the collective use of the virtual world has an effect that is not distributable to individuals. Furthermore, the actions of any individuals do not appear to be consequential, but collectively their impact becomes significant. By contrasting these individual and collective levels in light of the eventual destruction of human civilization, Caprica builds connections between causes and consequences for the viewers that may be invisible for the characters. The characters lack the 10ng-telTIl perspective, and the blindness to cumulative consequences is shown to lead to disaster.

Responsibility and dystopian nightmare Where Caprica is full of utopian dreaming, Battlestar Galactica by comparison is a dystopian nightmare after the fall of human civilization at the hands of the Cylons. Within this critical dystopia, humans fight for survival from a lack of resources and from the Cylons, but they also cling to the hope of a new beginning. They hope to reach a mythical planet called Earth, where they could find refuge with a long-lost human colony. Consequently, the humans are not only escaping the Cylons and the nuclear holocaust on their planets - the consequences of their collective actions but also the need to change. Wiping the slate clean and starting over would allow them to escape the knowledge and responsibility of having brought themselves to the brink of extinction by creating the Cylons. However, the post-apocalyptic setting serves as a constant reminder of the consequences

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of creating the Cylons, or rather of failing to take responsibility for the future in order to avoid the dystopian nightmare. I would like to suggest that the post-apocalyptic setting is a form of world-reduction where "the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists [ ... ] is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification" (Jameson 1975, 223). In Battlestar Galactica, the world-reduction does not happen in relation to the real world but within the fictional world. In the texts Fredric Jarneson discusses, aspects of the real world are stripped away to produce an imaginary society different in its historical and material condition, but in Battlestar Galactica the reduction is the result of a catastrophic event within the fictional universe that leaves society out of sync as the material conditions that fOlmed the society change suddenly and radically. Although this apocalyptic reduction is very different from Jameson's fOlTIlUlation, the effect is similar: the reduction works to bring thematic aspects into focus, including the theme of responsibility. At a very concrete level, the superfluous concerns of Caprica that distract from responsibility are stripped away in Battlestar Galactica, leaving the survivors with only the bare minimum to survive. In very concrete telTIlS, human civilization is reduced from twelve inhabited planets to a few dozen spaceships, from billions of citizens to roughly 50,000 survivors with only those resources that were on the ships at the time of the attacks. The catastrophe reduces the number of distractions that compete with taking responsibility and, at the same time, the reduction itself is central to the question of responsibility, as it is the manifestation of the negative consequence of human actions. Thus, responsibility becomes ever present both within the story and for the audience. For the characters, the constant threat of the Cylons and life in the spaceship fleet make the consequences of creating the Cylons unavoidable. For the audience, worldreduction simplifies the complexities of causes and consequences and offers a new perspective on responsibility. As such, world-reduction is not merely escapism from the complexities of modern life or a utopian impulse, as Gib Prettyman (2014, 61) interprets Jarneson, but in this case, simplification enables engagement with the complexities of responsibility. In Battlestar Galactica, responsibility for the future consequences of actions is viewed from the perspective of actualized - rather than hypothetical - consequences that form the post-apocalyptic setting. Here attention is directed to the past, but the responsibility examined is still future-oriented. In other words, it is an exploration of a failure to take future-oriented responsibility, but approached from a point when the consequences of this failure have already materialized. This perspective is

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two-fold - there is the perspective of both a healed society and a broken society. At the beginning of the series, more than forty years have passed since the first Cylon rebellion that devastated human civilization. From the comfort and distance of a healed society, Commander William Adama, a veteran of the first war and the connnander of the spaceship Galactica, calls for humans to acknowledge their responsibility for creating the Cylons and their failure to care for them after having created them (BSG, M.O 1). However, as the nightmare ofthat first catastrophe has faded and the threat is gone, there is nothing at stake anymore in telTIlS of responsibility and, therefore, the issue is theoretical for the characters. By contrast, the audience knows a second war is looming, which makes Adama's words portentous and weighted with dramatic irony. However, in the aftermath of the second war, any wisdom gained from the previous experience seems to disintegrate. The even more dire consequences give humans new cause to evaluate their past, but due to the trauma of the events, the characters easily slip into blaming the Cylons or each other rather than acknowledging their collective responsibility as Adama proposes before the attacks. The actualized hann makes the question of responsibility more manageable by eliminating the uncertainty concerning consequences that haunts future-oriented responsibility. Before the consequences manifest, development is a double-edged sword that is both good and bad at the same time (Dupuy 2007, 241). In Caprica, there is no way of knowing what kind of an impact the Cylons will have on human life, and so speculation can lean towards utopia rather than dystopia. By contrast, in Battlestar Galactica, this duality is eliminated in telTIlS of the catastrophic consequences, but it remains for the technology. The portrayal of the Cylons as both friends and foes throughout the series eliminates the possibility of placing the blame solely on technology and absolving humans. Although the characters can no longer deny the catastrophic consequences, they are still unwilling to accept responsibility for either the creation or what happened after. The urge to understand how the nightmare became a reality competes with an urge to run away and hope that the problem will resolve itself. However, there is no escape from the consequences or the Cylons. Every time the survivors think they are safe or uncover a new clue to finding Earth, the Cylons are not far behind. Their reappearance upholds the dystopian scenario, but it also indicates that humanity cannot move on without accepting and addressing their responsibility. The post-apocalyptic setting emphasizes responsibility as care or the prevention of halTIl, where authorship becomes irrelevant since those with the responsibility to care did not create the need for it. This aspect is

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also close to parental responsibility and it could be said that in Battlestar Galactica, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it is not the creation of artificial life that leads to catastrophe but a failure to care for it, either by treating it as a tool or slave or by rejecting it. Consequently, what prevents the resolution of the conflict is the continued animosity towards the Cylons. After the first Cylon war, the research and development of AI was banned as a preventive measure in order avoid another conflict. However, as this happens after the consequences manifest, it is based on experience, which makes it different in nature to taking responsibility for unknowable consequences. These preventive measures happen once the war is over in the lull between the storms, but their significance fades as time passes. As Lorna Jowett (2008, 67) points out, Gaius Ballar, the designated scientist of the series, sees the restrictions on science as a hindrance to social improvement and happily ignores the fact that science also created the Cylons. His attitudes are nearly identical to Daniel's, and he is able to disregard negative consequences to a much greater magnitude than Daniel. In the aftermath of the second war, responsibility for the future needs to give way to more pressing and immediate consequences. In the middle of the catastrophe, care for the future turns into a wish that the threat of the Cylons would simply disappear, which leads humans to even contemplate genocide (BSG, 3.07). However, destruction is just another form of escape that would allow humans to avoid addressing the full consequences of their actions. Battlestar Galactica mostly presents humanity's collective responsibility, but there is also one exception. Gaius Baltar, the genius scientist, unknowingly allows the Cylons access to the defence mainframe, and thereby enables the success of the Cylon attack. He is, therefore, the only human directly accountable for the apocalypse. Vladimir Lifschutz (2017, 6) draws a connection between Baltar's betrayal and Daniel's creation of the Cylons, and interprets both as acts of love, although Baltar can equally be seen acting out of lust and self-interest rather than love for a woman. Baltar's motivations, like Daniel's, are complex, but in contrast to Daniel, he sees the negative consequences of his actions materialize very quickly. This results in overwhelming guilt, which becomes the embodiment of humanity's emotional trauma that leaves them ill-equipped to tackle responsibility. Despite the post-apocalyptic setting concretizing the consequences, and by extension the responsibility for the Cylons, scarcity and emotional shock lead to denial about humanity's role in creating this situation. As a result, the caretaking only extends to addressing the symptoms rather than the root causes. The day-to-day concerns of

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the post-apocalyptic reality - water, food, sabotage, escape - need to be addressed, but the deeper questions of responsibility are pushed aside. In addition to, or because of, being the embodiment of humanity's guilt, Baltar also becomes a scapegoat. After the failure to settle on New Caprica, the responsibility and legal accountability for all the misery experienced on the planet and the Cylon occupation is laid at Baltar's door in order to relieve everyone else of them, and Baltar is charged with treason. As Lee Adama puts it at Baltar's trial: "And we're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one man [Baltar] and then flush him out the airlock, and hope that just gets rid of it all. So that we could live with ourselves". (BSG, 3.20) In other words, in such catastrophic circumstances the uncomfortable emotions of guilt, shame, and responsibility are preferably transferred onto someone else as the trauma is too great to bear. Briohny Doyle (2015, 107) argues that tbe post-apocalyptic setting is "a site of critique and creative possibility", but instead Battlestar Galactica demonstrates a tendency to hold on to the old and tbe familiar, rather than engaging with the new situation creatively. The magnitude of the trauma and responsibility causes the survivors to focus on fixing a broken system rather than reinventing it. They forgo what Tristan D. Tamplin (2008, 134-135, 14G--141) sees as an opportunity provided by the catastrophic consequences to re-evaluate their choices and learn to do better, and instead they exercise their right to make more bad choices that are based on short-term hope over a more realistic, 10ng-telTIl assessment of their situation. In other words, they address the consequences only to the extent they are forced to by circumstances while yearning for the possibility tbat everything could return to the way it was, even though tbe earlier circumstances caused the catastrophe in the first place. On the other hand, the reduced circumstances combined with the wish to hold on to established social structures and practices leads to creative solutions, even when those practices are not reinvented. After the attacks, the survivors try to re-establish society and its political apparatus as before, but this requires a certain amount of improvisation, as the material reality has changed fundamentally. As Lee Adama frustratedly describes tbeir existence a few years after the attacks: We make our own laws now, Oill own justice. And we've been pretty creative at finding ways to let people off the hook for everything from theft to murder. And we've had to be because .. because we're not a civilization anymore. We're a gang. And we're on the nul. And we have to fight to survive. We have to break rules, we have to bend laws. We have to

improvise. (BSG, 3.20)

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Even the unwillingness to change requires adaptation, where certain rules need to be bent and broken in order to hold on to an imitation of the way things used to be. However, this reluctance to change is also something that leaves humanity stuck in the dystopian nightinare. Without embracing the creative possibilities of the post-apocalyptic reality, humanity is stuck in a situation where social structures and material circumstances are in discord. Battlestar Galactica resists humanity's every attempt to escape their responsibility, which could suggest that humanity will not find its happy ending until it accepts responsibility and perhaps discovers a new way of thinking about responsibility in the modem context. However, the final resolution and the discovery of a habitable planet happen by accident (or by divine guidance) rather tban as a result of any epiphany. Doyle (2015, 100) argues that apocalypses tend to culminate in a revelation, whereas the "[p] ostapocalypse makes no effort to produce a total vision in which events lead coherently to their catastrophic climax". Indeed, Battlestar Galactica is not about the salvation of the enlightened and select few - even Gaius Baltar with all his faults and sins is allowed into "heaven" at the end. Instead, tbe post-apocalyptic setting provides a context where the renmants of humanity "negotiate the terms of their survival" (ibid., 101) and which challenges established ethical positions. Therefore, the exploration of responsibility becomes more important than finding a solution to tbe problem. It takes time for the survivors to let go of the pre-apocalyptic reality and to begin to find creative ways to exist in the fleet. So, perhaps it is the acceptance of their new reality that gains them access to heaven rather than the acceptance of their responsibility for the Cylons. After all, tbe Cylons have grown up and are no longer in need of a parent.

Conclusion Gerry Canavan (2014, 13) speculates tbat "tbe true fantasy of apocalypse then is not so much that we will be destroyed but that something might intervene in time toforce us to change" (emphasis in the original). Similarly, the (threat of) destruction brought by tbe Cylons is a way to create a space to play out and test ethical questions, including individual and collective responsibility for technological development. Caprica shows that tbe possibility of an apocalypse is not enough to induce a change, but the post-apocalyptic setting of Battlestar Galactica also leaves the survivors clinging to familiar patterns of behaviour. In the first case, responsibility for the future is neglected while in the second, it reverts to blame rather

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than taking charge of correcting past mistakes and finding ways to make better choices in and for tbe future. The catastrophe sets tbe stakes high for responsibility and invites the viewers to consider motives and actions on both the individual and collective levels against this background. The interplay of utopian and dystopian impulses in both shows allows for a plurality of viewpoints that resists offering clear and simple solutions. Responsibility is shown to falter in the face of both utopian distractions and dystopian challenges. Only the beginning of Battlestar Galactica provides a context where responsibility for what should have been done can be viewed objectively from a safe temporal distance after tbe first Cylon rebellion and just before the second war. In other words, an earnest call for collective responsibility seems to be possible only in hindsight when artificial intelligence is the cause for neither hope nor fear, when there is nothing at stake. By contras~ when responsibility is needed the most, people fail to consider responsibility for the consequences that would allow them to prevent or alleviate the catastrophe.

Works Cited Achouche, Mehdi. 2017. "Caprica, l'utopisme technologique et le 'cyborg spirituel"'. TV/Series, 11/2017: 1-15. https:lljoumals.openedition.org/ tvseries/2073, retrieved 12 November 2018. Battlestar Galactica. 2003-2009. Developed by Ronald D. Moore. United States of America: David Eick Productions, NEC & Universal. Canavan, Gerry. 2014. "Introduction: If This Goes on." In Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson (eds), Green Planets. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1-21. Caprica. 2009-2010. Developed by Ronald D. Moore and RemiAubuchon. United States of America: David Eick Productions & Universal. Doyle, Briohny. 2015. "The postapocalyptic imagination." Thesis Eleven 131: 99-113. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2007. "Some Pitfalls in tbe Philosophical Foundations ofNanoetbics." Journal a/Medicine and Philosophy 32: 237-261. Frankel, Daniel. 2009. "'Caprica' Aims for Broader Demo." Variety, 15 January 2009: np. http://variety.coml2009/tv/features/caprica-aims-forbroader-demo-1117998604, retrieved 28 April 2018. Gilbert, Daniel. 2006. "If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming." Los Angeles Times, 2 July 2017. http://artic1es.latimes.comI2006/juV02/ opinion/op-gilbert2, retrieved 28 April 2018.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1975. "World-reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative." Science Fiction Studies 2: 221-230. Jonas, Hans. 1984. Imperative ofResponsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age. Translated by Hans Jonas witb the collaboration of David Herr. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jowett. Loma. 2008. "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know? Negotiating Stereotypes of Science." In Tiffany Potter & C. W. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York: Continuum, 64-75. Lifschutz, Vladimir. 2017. "Caprica, l'esquisse d'un avenir sans lendemain." TV/Series, 1112017: 1-15. https:lljoumals.openedition.org/ tvseries/2073, retrieved 12 November 2018. Moylan, Tom. 201411986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Edited by Raffaella Baccolini. Oxford: Peter Lang. Prettyman, Gib. 2014. "Daoism, Ecology and World Reduction in Le Guin's Utopian Fictions." In Green Planets, Gerry Canavan & Kim Stanley Robinson (eds). Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 56-76. Raffoul, Franyois. 2010. The Origins of Responsibility. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. "The three faces of utopianism revisited." Utopian Studies 5: 1-37. Smiley, Marion. 2010. "From Moral Agency to Collective Wrongs: Rethinking Collective Moral Responsibility." Journal of Law and Policy 19.1: 171-202. Smiley, Marion. 2014. "Future-Looking Collective Responsibility: A Preliminary Analysis." Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38: 1-11. Tamplin, Tristan D. 2008. "Knowing we're Frakked: Democracy and Bad Decisions." In Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, Josef Steiff & Tristan D. Trarnplni (eds). Chicago: Open Court, 129-141. Thrall, James H. 2015. "What the frak, Frankenstein! Teenagers, gods, and postcolonial monsters on Caprica." Extrapolation 56: 169-193.

11. OUTLAWS OF THE NATURE: HUMANITY AS A DESTRUCTIVE SPECIES IN RICHARD ADAMs's WATERSHIP DOWN AND OTHER ANIMAL DYSTOPIAS

MARIA LAAKSO

In recent years, Western media audiences have seen more images and heard

more stories of refugee journeys than ever before. The rising awareness of imminent environmental disasters has raised serious concerns about future environmental crises, such as climatic migration and the depletion of natural resources. For these reasons, it is unsurprising that contemporary young adult literature in Western cultures has taken quite a dystopian turn (Nikolajeva 2010; Hintz & Ostry 2009). Contemporary young adult dystopias often represent the so-called post-disaster survival story, which concentrates on depicting life after an environmental (or other) disaster. This story mode is frequently based on the quest structure: young characters are looking for a better place to live (Hammer 2010). The post-disaster survival story is not a new geme, and it has been quite popular among young readers for a long time. This is because animal

fantasy has been using this story model since Rudyard Kipling's classic The Jungle Book (1893). In Kipling's story "The Wliite Seal", an unusually brave white seal leads his community to a new world, away from the cruel

and evil seal hunters. The story seems to include all the elements that will later become the basic material of the ecological animal fantasy: the threat of humans, a brave leader, and an epic search for a new home. Although

animal fantasy (as the name implies) has often been read against the generic models offairy tales, fables, and fantasy fiction (see, e.g. Hogan 2009), the genres of dystopia and post-apocalypse are important models too. Not all animal fantasy works include dystopian tendencies, but those that do could be called "animal dystopias", as Christina Battista does, for example, in her

article "Ecofantasy and Animal Dystopia in Richard Adams's Watership Down" (2016). In this article, Battista (2016, 163) analyses Adams's Watership Down (1972, hereafter WS), an inherently dystopian novel that

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depicts the fallacies and life-threatening impact of modernization in the natural world. By shifting the conventional point of view from a human perspective to an animal perspective, the novel's dystopian settings direct the critique towards the destructive capacities of contemporary world orders. Connecting animal narratives with the literary tradition of dystopia might at first sound odd, since all the paradigmatic texts of the dystopian tradition - like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1923) or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) - depict the experiences of human characters. However, dystopian fiction and animal narratives have a long, shared history. In his The Animal Fable in Science Fiction andFantasy (2010), Bruce Shaw gives a comprehensive presentation of the many intersections between animal narratives and dystopian speculative/science fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Shaw (2010, 50-53), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and H. G. Wells' The Island ofDoctor Moreau (1896) are good examples of early dystopian science fiction that philosophically examines the narrow gap separating humanity from "animality" or nOllhumanity. Both novels respond to the dramatic changes in society caused by the Industrial Revolution and the conflict between religion and science. In the twentieth century, many writers of dystopia or speculative fiction used narratives about animal characters to respond to the two world wars, the fears caused by the Cold War, or the problems with totalitarian systems. George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is the most famous dystopian satire of the century to utilize an animal theme. Several works from the end of the twentieth century prove that animals are an indelible part of the dystopian geme. For example, Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation (1997) and Will Self's Great Apes (1997) question the limits of humanity and human society through the permeable borderlines between human and animal. In what follows, I will define "animal dystopia" somewhat differently. In using the term, I refer to works that depict the narrated dystopian world from an animal's point of view. According to this definition, works like Animal Farm and Great Apes are not primarily animal dystopias but rather dystopias that utilize animal characters in an allegoric way to criticize human conditions. Rather, animal dystopias focalize through the animal characters to show the consequences of human action from the side of the non-human world of animals. I will discuss this geme definition later in more detail, but it must be noted here already that this definition is dependent on the interpretational frame used with the analysed texts. Gemes in general are constructed; they group together texts defined by certain conventions that

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guide scholars as well as readers, but which also change over time. Gemes are not stable, but are rather part of the ongoing cultural negotiation of values, identities, and truths (Lehnen 2016, 16). Many literary works also allow allegorical as well as other interpretational approaches. A particular generic frame for interpretation affects the reading. By choosing the animal dystopia as a generic frame for my reading in this chapter, I also test the impacts this will have on the way I read the texts. In my chapter, I will concentrate mainly on the aforementioned novel, Watership Down. I will also study three other similar animal dystopias: Colin Darm's The Animals a/Farthing Wood (1981, hereafter AFW), Aeron Clement's The Cold Moons (1987, hereafter CM), and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone (1999, hereafter WB). These novels can be perceived as dystopian eco-novels long before the flourishing of the post-apocalyptic, ecocritical young adult literature of today. Each novel depicts the lifethreatening consequences of human actions and the destructive capacities of human societies from the perspective of an animal. The animals are marginalized innocents: they are unable to stop the modernization of the human world leading to ecological disaster for the animals (Battista 2012). All of these novels depict the destruction of the entire animal society, which forces the animals to escape and to try to find a safe place to live. All four novels are post-disaster survival stories, where the traditional lifestyle of the animals disappears and they must survive under the altered circumstances where the threat of humans creates constant fear and danger. These novels can be considered to be aimed at a crossover audience of adults and young people - some even for children - even though the primary audience at the time of publishing may not have been adolescents. Animal narratives often appeal to crossover audiences, since the main characters are animals and are therefore not represented mainly by their age (see also Copeland 2003). Gowdy's novel is perhaps an exception, since unlike the other novels it describes the sexuality of animal characters very openly. Compared to the others, it is also quite hopeless, even nihilistic. Animal studies and critical posthumanist theory already have a long history in the critical study of animal representation in fiction. I will utilize some concepts from these theoretical fields, but my main interest lies not only in the representation of animals, but also in the representation of humans. Of course, these representations are closely connected, but what I find fascinating about these animal dystopias and their narration is the lack of direct reference to human experience and knowledge. I will call this narrative exclusion of humans "defamiliarization", whereby the familiar actions and values of humans are made unfamiliar to us by a radical change

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of perspective (see also Shaw 2010,10). In my chapter, I will discuss the animal dystopia as a geme and take a closer look at the representation and narration of humans and the rhetorical and ethical effects defamiliarization can have as a narrative strategy.

Animal narratives and animal dystopia My main focus in this chapter is on Watership Down by Richard Adams, but I also examine some of the novel's many literary heirs. Adams's novel interests me most, since it can be considered the prototype of the modern epic 1 animal story that often seems to be dystopian in nature. The novel is so fOlUldational that often a new animal novel is described as "the Watership Down of X", with the X replaced with whatever animal is featured in the new novel (Hogan 2009, 177). In and of itself, Watership Down is a rich and complex novel, but in this chapter, I also wish to discuss the modem animal dystopia geme in general. That is why I will compare Watership Down with the three other modern animal dystopias mentioned above. Barbara Gowdy is Canadian, but the other authors are British2 The animal dystopia novels I have chosen are part of a long tradition of anthropomorphic animal narratives. John Simons discusses anthropomorphism in literature in his Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (2002, 119), and he divides anthropomorphism in literature into three types: the fable (like Aesop's fables), where the role of the actual animals is almost irrelevant since fables are moral stories explaining human behaviour; trivial anthropomorphism, which treats animals as people but does not seek to use this strategy to point out any moral or teach any example; and strong anthropomorphism, which deals with animals as if they were people in order to show how the non-human experience differs from the human, or to explore the extent to which humans and non-humans are different (Simons 2002, 119-120). 1 KeIllleth F. Kitchell (1986) has classified Richard Adams's Watership Down as an epic. As Kitchell notes, the novel has obvious parallels with the ancient epics, with some of them as explicit intertextual borrowings and others hidden in similarities in atmosphere and tone. 2 Many other examples could have been included in my data. For example, Erin HlUlter's (collective pseudonym) very popular juvenile animal fantasy series from the 2000s could be interesting to read in the context of animal survival stories and the narrative mechanisms of defamiliarizing hmnans. Unfortunately, the limits of the chapter do not allow the use of wider material.

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Here, I classify my material as belonging to the third category of strong anthropomorphism. The animality of the animal characters in these novels is by no means irrelevant or trivial. Unlike classic animal narratives such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) or Animal Farm, they are not only social satires or critical allegories of the human world; they try to reach the actual experience of the animals and anthropomorphize their representation in order to achieve a certain emotional response. Accurately rendering the animal's experience is impossible, however. As Simons (2002, 16) notes, anthropomorphic representation (however benevolent the intention of the anthropomorphic narrative) always leads to the obliteration of the nonhuman experience and its replacement by the human experience. In this way, the anthropomorphic representation of animals seems to be inevitably connected with the anthropocentric worldview 3 On the other hand, to portray non-humans as if they were humans brings them into a discursive realm in which it becomes possible to create at least an illusion that their experience can be reproduced (ibid.). This can have important effects on the rhetoric of the text. As Simons (ibid., 39) remarks, anthropomorphism is also perhaps the most powerful, important, and multifaceted representational tool to counter specie sist thinking. The representational anthropomorphism of animal characters in my research material is above all empathic. The human resemblance of animal characters has a certain purpose - to make the reader recognize the similarities between the animals and humans and therefore question if humans have the right to destroy entire animal communities in the pursuit of their ends. Of course, similar kinds of narrative experiments in adopting the narrative stance of an animal were made long before Adams. One of the most famous animal stories of all time in this sense is AIm Sewell's novel Black Beauty (1877), which tells the story of a tortured carriage horse. The novel is often described as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of horses" (Hogan 2009,3). Uncle Toms' Cabin (1852) revealed the personhood of slaves (see Copeland 2003, 288), and Black Beauty harnesses the genre of slave narrative to further the Victorian animal protection movement. Adarns's novel was published in the early 1970s, a decade that saw the rise of the animal rights movement (Oswald 1994; Hogan 2009, 2). Many critics have noticed that the 1970s was a time of big changes in the geme of animal fables. The animal rights movement - along with other liberation movements of the decade (e.g. feminism) - brought new political themes 3 I lUlderstand anthropocentrism here as interpreting or regarding world in terms of hlllllan values and experiences (cf. Moore 2008, 5).

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to literature, and within the geme of animal narratives this meant new environmental ethics (Oswald 1994; Hogan 2009, 2). These environmental themes are strong in Watership Down. The novel is a story about rabbits escaping humans, who are about to poison all the rabbits and destroy their warren. At the beginning of the novel, the community is warned of the approaching disaster by a clairvoyant rabbit. Only a few rabbits believe the prophetic warning and flee with the upright and brave Hazel, who becomes their leader. Later, the escaped rabbits hear that the prophecy has been fulfilled and their beloved warren has been cruelly destroyed by humans. Colin Dann's The Animals a/Farthing Wood is the opening part of an animal dystopia series (I concentrate only on the first novel of the series). In the novel, a group of animals are forced to leave the woods they call home because humans destroy it. The mixed bunch of forest animals travel across the English countryside in order to find a new home somewhere where no humans would ever come. Dann's book is also knO\vn as a popular TV series. Aeron Clement's The Cold Moons is very much like Watership Down as well. It recounts the story of a group of badgers on an exodus towards the promised land of Elysia, where they will live safe from humans. Again, the story begins with the apocalyptic mass destruction of an animal society, and again humans are to blame. Clement's badger story was inspired by reality. In the early 1970s, the British goverrnnent, which was erroneously convinced that outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis were due to diseased badgers, ordered a cull of the country's badger population with cyanide gas. Clement gives a summary of newspaper articles and government documents to provide a background to his fictional animal story. The most recently published novel in my material, Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone, is a story about a family of African elephants. Evil human poachers cruelly kill most of the peace-loving elephants. The novel's protagonist is an elephant called Mud, who is blessed with visionary powers and can occasionally see into the future. Mud becomes the leader of the family when it abandons its old home and goes ni search of the legendary "Safe Place" where poachers never come and the family can live happily ever after. Of this group of novels, Watership Down is the most well-knO\vn, and it has often garnered critical attention. The novel has often been seen as a social commentary or allegory (see, e.g. Sainsbury 2013, 114).4 In the course of the search for a new warren, the rabbits encounter different kinds This can also be a consequence of the literary critic's anthropocentrism. As Naama Harel (201Oa, 54) has noted, non-hmnan animals are often not considered to be interesting or significant enough to stand as the subjects of literary works. Consequently, animals are often used for human issues in allegoric readings. 4

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of societies. First, they come to a supposed utopia, where the rabbits are nurtured and fed by the local fmmer. However, the newcomers come to realize that this strange warren is a trap, as the fatmer has set snares all around the area. Later in the book, the group finds Efrafra, a warren run under the iron fist of the Chief Rabbit. These different rabbit warrens in the novel can be seen as different versions of human government. The first warren could be considered socialist and the latter represents a totalitarian regime. The new utopian society these rabbits establish represents a democracy, as it has a popular leader who makes decisions based upon the will of the group. However, in my chapter I wish to argue that Watership Down cannot be said to be all about humans in the guise of rabbits: it has a broader cultural and generic background than just being an animal allegory. As Christine Battista (2016,158) has noted, Watership Down must also be read as one of the first modem "green" novels; it creates an ecological awareness through reliance on the point of view of the rabbits. Lisa Sainsbury (2013, 114) has also noted that it is inaccurate to suggest that "stripping away the rabbit skin of Adam's rabbit characters reveals no more than boy scouts in a journey of survival, bonding and discovery". Although the novel allows for the possibility of an allegorical reading, I claim that by "de familiarizing" human life and values, the novel enables us to evaluate the modem world in a new light - from the point of view of an animal. This perspective shows us the dystopian and dark side of urbanization, industrialization, and technological development. This kind of composition has since become one of the most common rhetorical strategies when subordinating animal narratives to the service of green ideology. Animal narratives are often labelled animal fantasy. Watership Down, The White Bone, The ColdMoons, and The Animals a/Farthing Woodhave some features of fantasy fiction, because they create a secondary world that is different from our empirical reality where animals cannot reason and talk. Nevertheless, I think calling them fantasy is a misnomer. The major distinction is that these four novels make a great effort to depict the animals as representatives oftheir species. Each ofthese novels has its 0\Vll aesthetic, which is clearly strongly influenced by environmentalism and the new ecological awareness of the 1970s. The animal characters are represented in their natural environment and the narrators use much time and energy to describe and explain the life and natural behaviour of the animals they portray. Even in the marketing of three of these works - Watership Down, The Cold Moons, and The White Bone - it was often highlighted that the author had studied the biology of these animals carefully.

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It seems to be an important part of the tacit agreement between the author and the reader that the animals depicted in these narratives behave as much as possible like real animals. Adams constantly refers to RM. Lockley's classic study The Private Life of the Rabbit in Watership Down to legitimize the way he makes his rabbits behave. Even in the novel's narration, Lockley is constantly referred to, like in tlie beginning of tlie twenty-second chapter: "Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss". (WD, 169) In this example, tlie aim of the almost educational narration seems to be to express the similarity between humans and rabbits. Still, the realistic depiction of rabbits is important to the narrator, and therefore the narrator borrows authority from Lockley. A similar kind of aspiration is common to all tlie novels in my research material. The Animals of Farthing Wood is aimed at a slightly younger audience, and perhaps for this reason it takes slightly more liberties in representing tlie animals. Regardless, all the novels aim at referentiality to the natural world. As a genre label, the animal dystopia offers us tlie opportunity to read these novels from within a different thematic frame that differs from an allegorical or animal fantasy approach. Dystopias show us terrible and unpleasant worlds, conditions, and societies, and they criticize the current trends and flaws in contemporary society (Baccolini & Moylan 2003, 2-5; Mohr 2005, 2S). This is the case with Watership Down, Cold Moons, The White Bone, and The Animals of Farthing Wood, because they all show us how the main characters lose their homes, most of their loved ones, and their community; they end up being refugees in an urbanized or modernized world terrorized by humans. How should dystopia be defined? Dystopia is a literary phenomenon of the twentieth century, and the geme is often set in opposition to an older genre: utopia. For example, M Keith Booker (1994, 3) defines dystopia as literature that positions itself in opposition to utopian thought and warns against the potential negative results of arrant utopianism. Booker's definition covers important aspects of dystopian fiction. It is a good definition for classical dystopian literature (about classical dystopia, see, e.g. Moylan 2000, 121). Contemporary dystopian fiction, however, seems to be a more open geme that often borrows from other literary traditions. Many theorists (see Bradford et a1. 200S) have noted dystopian features may appear in texts that would more generally be considered to represent broader gemes, and geme hybrids are common in modem dystopian fiction. \¥hen it comes to modem dystopias, the most problematic aspect

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of Booker's definition is its apparent exclusion of the apocalypse or postapocalypse from the umbrella term of "dystopian literature", even though the use of eschatological archetypes - like the end of the world or postapocalypse motifs - seems to be very common in modern dystopian fiction. Here, I understand dystopia as a broad and diverse tradition. A broad defrnition of dystopia would be that it refers to negative visions of humanity generally and it also includes secular variations of the apocalypse. This broad definition refers to very different forms of political, social, and even natural oppression and suffering. As Gregory Clayes (2013, 16) notes, these visions may emanate from the domination of humanity by machines, monsters, or alien species; from the imposition of certain nOlTIlS derived from scientific and technological developments; or from environmental catastrophe. Animal dystopias do not fit into Booker's definition, since the cause of the deteriorating and terrifying world conditions depicted in these narratives is not be caused by "arrant utopianism" but rather by the recklessness, extravagance, and irresponsibility of humankind. In my research material, the suffering inhabitants of the dystopian worlds are animals, not humans. Theories or definitions of dystopia almost always concentrate on human experiences and suffering. This is obviously a consequence of the research material, which naturally creates the geme definitions. Definitions of dystopia are often based on a select few paradigmatic texts (Lehnen 2016, 16). Animal narratives are not usually researched in connection to dystopia. This kind of thinking also shows the underlying repression in most cultural discourses. Literary criticism is deeply anthropocentric and even speciesist5 by nature. Researchers take for granted that the subject is always human (see Wolfe 2014, 1). However, as Cary Wolfe notes in his Animal Rites (2014, 1-4), in light of recent studies in cognitive science, ethology, and other fields, it seems that there is no longer a justification to assume that theoretical, ethical, and political subjectivity is automatically defined by the species distinction between humans and other animals. The four novels I am examining challenge institutionalized speciesism (see Wolfe 2014, 7) by trying to focalize through the (imagined) animal experience instead of the established human one. The ethos ofthese four novels is against an anthropocentric worldview, and thus I think it reasonable to interpret them as dystopian narratives even 5 Speciesism is one of the central terms when discussing the relations between hmnan and non-hmnan animals. The term refers to the idea that hmnans are inherently superior to members of any other species and are therefore entitled to discriminate against other species (Harel 20 lOb, 111 112).

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though human suffering (subconsciously connected to the genre) does not lie at the heart of the stories. These novels borrow especially from the gemes of apocalypse and post-apocalypse, which I understand as subgenres of dystopian fiction. Apocalyptic narratives concentrate on the apocalypse, the end of the world. Even though eschatological religious narratives depict the end of human history, outside of the eschatological religious texts narrative apocalypses hardly ever portray the complete end of the whole world. In modem apocalyptic narratives, the apocalypse is more likely understood as synonymous with catastrophe (Heffeman 2008, 6). A post-apocalypse then refers to stories that depict life after the apocalypse or great catastrophe. As a geme, the post-apocalypse depicts the survival of humans after some cataclysm. In practice, these two gemes often intelTIlix, since the narrativity of the apocalypse is weak. Post-apocalypses often begin their story from the apocalypse and only then move to the survival of the remaining humans.

Naturally, Watership Down, The White Bone, The Cold Moons, and The Animals a/Farthing Wood do not portray human survival but the survival of non-human animals. Still, they all narrate a story that begins with an apocalypse. In all cases, this apocalypse does not mean end of the world, but rather (in the modern sense of apocalyptic fiction) a great catastrophe that leads to the death of many innocent and unsuspecting animals. It is important to note that the great catastrophe is not a catastrophe from the perspective of human characters, but from the point of view of the animals. Here, scale is important. From the perspective of an animal society, the destruction of a meadow means the end of life as the animals know it. This kind of scale variation points the reader to the destructive abilities of the human species. In The Cold Moons, this catastrophe happens when humans destroy a badger colony. The horrendous consequences of this attack are focalized through a badger called Buckwheat: "There were twenty-three of his neighbours lying on that once peaceful earth, twenty-three friends, who would not be joining him on the sunset journey. Twenty-three torn and mutilated bodies, of which he recognized most by name". (CM, 73) Buckwheat's horror at the dead bodies of his companions depicts the horror of the wanton murder of which humans are capable. Knowing the names of the dead is important, because the pile of dead badgers seems to suddenly erase the subjectivity and individuality of the victims. This kind of horror caused by the sudden randomness of death is actually very common in (post-)apocalyptic fiction. Zombie narratives - a

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common post-apocalyptic subgeme - is an interesting baseline. In zombie narratives, the subjectivity and individuality of the characters is always thematically important The zombie apocalypse shatters the ordinary world order and the individuality of human beings is in danger of disappearing. Anyone - regardless of class, age, race, or gender - can suddenly meet a violent death or become part of the faceless horde of zombies (see, e.g. Cirucci 2013, 23). Thematically, animal dystopias are an interesting variant of this fear of losing individuality, because subjectivity is often denied to non-human animals in the predominant Western culture. Animals are treated as representatives of the anti-human and therefore also of anti-subjectivity. The above excerpt from Clement's novel proves that apocalyptic animal dystopias question this dominant composition. The death of the badgers is terrifying to Buckwheat because such butchery in "unnatural"; it is outside the ordinary world order of the badgers. Even though the badgers in the novel are used to individuals dying from accidents or old age, the random killing of their kind at the hand of unfamiliar others - humans - erases the individuality of each death and is therefore terrifying. In animal dystopias, humans become the cruel and monstrous others whose only goal from the animal's point of view is to kill them and destroy their homes. The post-apocalypse draws from the eschatological tradition, but newer post-apocalypses differ greatly from religious texts. For example, in the New Testament's "Book of Revelation", the apocalypse leads to a new situation in which the ruined world is replaced by a new one, which is divinely designed and meant for the chosen few. Instead, as Briohny Doyle (2015, 101) points out, the modern post-apocalypse is not a teleological end-point, but is "positioned as transitional and haunted by memories of the pre-catastrophe world". Life does not begin again from zero; the lost world remains in the minds of the survivors. This constant sense of grief over the lost world order also belongs to the genre of dystopia in general. This kind of longing for the bygone age is important in animal dystopias, which are often very nostalgic. In Watership Down, the rabbits constantly remember the cosy life in the warren before the arrival of the human intruders: The holes and tunnels of an old warren become smooth, reassming and comfortable with use. There are no snags or rough corners. Every length smells of rabbits of that great, indestructible flood of Rabbitry in which each one is carried along, sure-footed and safe. The heavy work has all been done by countless great-grandmothers and their mates. All the faults have been put right and everything in use is of proved value. The rain

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drains easily and even the wind of mid-winter call1lot penetrate the deeper

burrows. (WD, 77) The nostalgic memory of the lost lifestyle portrays the idyllic life of rabbits before the arrival of humans and the collapse of society. The endless continuum of rabbit generations creates a comforting sense of neverending harmony that strongly contrasts with the present, where the few survivors are forced to live without the protective watmth of the warren. The apocalyptic catastrophe caused by humans does not only mean death but also the end of the well-organized animal society. At the heart of the post-apocalyptic narrative lies a story of survival in a ruined and destroyed world, one without the comforts of the fmmer society. This is also true in the four animal fables in my data. In this sense, Watership Down and its

peers can be considered (post-)apocalyptic dystopias.

Anthropomorphic animals In typical animal narratives, the narrated animals are to a greater or lesser degree anthropomorphized. Even in "realistic" stories, animals usually enter into such a close emotional relationship with human beings that they

will invariably be described in metaphors suggesting human thought and behaviour. Often the protagonists are humanized to such an extent that they can talk and reason like human beings. The representation of animals in literature always raises complex moral issues, many of which revolve around the problems posed by anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is often regarded as unscientific, sentimental, and heretical among scholars in the West (Moore 2008, 15). The way in which people conceive of anthropomorphism is intimately connected to the way in which they perceive their relationship with nature, and Western cultures tend to see themselves as distinct from the natural world. Western thinking is anthropocentric and founded upon the notion of human dominance over nature. Anthropomorphic thinking is also often considered uncivilized and mostly appropriate for children. On the other hand, anthropomorphic thinking penetrates the armour of human thinking: it enables us to understand life different from our own, and it is in this way closely related to challenging the anthropocentric worldview. Theorists of cognitive literary criticism have many times argued that the minds of others are always beyond our reach (e.g. Palmer 2004, 11). The problem is even more obvious when we think about the minds or

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experiences of non-human animals. Thomas Nagel, in his classic essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974, 438), argues that it is impossible to gain access to the experience of another species, a fundamentally alien fmm of life. The anthropomorphic representation of animals is therefore always more or less imaginary. In my material, there are many interesting ways of trying to imagine the non-human experience. For example, Watership Down and The White Bone both modify the language their characters use by creating neologisms the authors think these animals might need if they had their own language. Adams's rabbits use the word elil, meaning all the enemies of rabbits foxes, stoats, weasels, cats, owls, men, and so on - and Gowdy's elephants use the tenn musht, which means an ammal period of heightened sexual and aggressive activity among bull elephants. Both novels even offer a glossary to the human reader, where animal vocabulary is translated into human words. This modification of language constantly reminds the reader of her humanity (as well as the author's humanity), but paradoxically it simultaneously strengthens the enjoyable illusion of the authenticity of the animal experience. At the same time as the language of the animals is modified, the animal characters in these novels are made to follow the empirical facts we humans have about the animal kingdom. I think the aesthetics of the whole geme of animal dystopias involves a constant balancing between these two extremes. Although these narratives want to represent animals as they are, they need anthropomorphism as a literary device to increase the reader's ecological awareness. Anthropomorphism seems to be a rhetorical tool to advocate for animal rights. The modified language is one way to anthropomorphically "humanize" the animal characters. This humanizing could be compared with the sentimental tradition of literature. The sentimental novel often humanizes characters that society has denied humanity. When we consider the anthropomorphism in my data, we could say that all the characters are sentimentally anthropomorphized, and the four animal dystopias I examine in this chapter are openly emotional, fervent, and even soppy; they well fit the definition of sentimental literature, which often represents its characters as suffering and weak in order to raise the reader's sympathy towards them. This is very clear in the animal dystopia, which aims at the reader's sympathy toward animals suffering in a world dominated by humans. By sympathy here, I mean an emotion that enables the sympathizer to recognize the common "humanity" of someone or something nmmally constructed as different and causes sympathetic identification in the reader

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(cf. Parris 2003). By evoking sympathetic identification, the stories lead the reader to recognize the suffering that human cruelty causes. In these novels, the anthropomorphism is a rhetorical tool to raise sympathy for the animals.

Defamiliarized humans and interspecific inversions At every level of communication - vocabulary, grammar, or discourse - the way we talk about animals shapes the way we think about and experience them. Such linguistic devices as, for example, collective nouns and the use of the pronoun "it", erase the uniqueness, subjectivity, and gender of animals, instead presenting them as lifeless objects (cf. Wolfe 2014, 209; Ratelle 2015, 107). The latent ideology behind language makes speciesism part of our common-sense thinking. This moral concern is a good starting point to examine animal representation in different kinds of texts. There is only one problem: in this framework of thought, we seem to presume that the representation of humans is a somehow fixed and solid way of representation, while the representation of animals becomes automatically classified as "the other". In many animal stories, however, this is not the case. How then are humans represented in these novels? A recurring idea is the great danger posed to the animals by humankind, so humans play a major role. For the most part this role is a detrimental one. Of all the creatures in the novels' fictional worlds, humans alone break certain rules that the rest of nature follows, and so humans are represented as outlaws. Humans are the only creatures that kill on a whim, whereas other species kill out of necessity. In this section, I concentrate on the deJamiliarization of human characters. The concept of defamiliarization originally comes from Russian formalism. Victor Shklovsky's original ideas about the telTIl refer to the artfulness of objects. To Shklovsky, defamiliarization is an artistic technique that makes familiar objects unfamiliar to us (Shaw 2010,10-11). When we talk about the representation of animals - or humans in this case - we need to move on from this definition. Here, I borrow a definition from Brnce Shaw (ibid., 11), who writes: In the animal fable and its offshoots, hmnan failings are described afresh through the experiences of non-human characters. It is a form of

defamiliarization to attribute almost-hmnan vie-wpoints to animals and by so doing to present social issues that is, moral issues in different ways.

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In this instance, Shaw is considering animal allegories. He picks examples like Orwell's Animal Farm or Mikhail Bulgakov's first novel The Heart of a Dog (1925). Botli are good examples of the use of defamiliarization to show human culture from a new angle. I claim that a similar kind of mechanism is used in animal dystopias, even though they are not allegories of human society. Instead, they offer readers a new view of the modern lifestyle of human beings. From the animals' perspective, human life and ordinary everyday human actions (like building) are defamiliarized to tlie stage where they suddenly seem to be horrifying and incomprehensible crimes against non-human animals. The following excerpt from The Animals of Farthing Wood is a good example: All day the bulldozers crashed forward on their path of destruction. Shrubs, yOlUlg trees and lUldergrmvth fell before the cruel onslaught of the monsters' greedy steel jaws. Old trees, stately and dignified with age, were mercilessly machined do"Wll by vicious saws. Yard by yard the forest fell back before the hlUllan despoilers. (AFW, 41)

From the animals' perspective, the excavators become monsters with steel teeth and saws are personified as being vicious. Human actions in the forest therefore become defamiliarized when narrated through the animals' experience. As Christine Battista (2016, 158) notes, animal dystopias reveal the many assaults non-human animals must face in world that has become "blatantly anthropocentric". Narratives about anthropomorphized animals - especially those with an ecological message - often employ inversion as a rhetorical tool to represent animals as humans and humans as animals. For example, animals usually are represented in literature as part of the surrounding landscape, objects ofthe human gaze, but the composition is often turned upside dO\vn in animal dystopias: humans are constantly watched by animals and treated like non-subjective beings. Naama Harel (2010b, 111-112) proposes that within fiction and religious texts there are commonly two possible alternatives to the speciesist reality that sets humans in a superior position. The first is interspecific hannony or utopia, where all species live as equals. This utopian or paradise-like vision is familiar, for example, from several religious texts that depict the peaceful garden milieu where tlie lion and the lamb lie next to each other. The second is the inversion of species power relations, which Harel calls interspecific inversion. The latter is very common in satirical or dystopian fiction; either animals are represented as morally or intellectually superior to humans (like the Houyhnhrns in Gulliver:S Travels) or animals seize

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power and humans are metamorphosed into animals (like the chimpanzees in the Planet a/the Apes novel (1963) and first movie (1968); Hare12010b, 115-116). In animal dystopias, interspecific inversion is constantly used, but not in the sense that animals usurp power from humans. Rather the inversion concerns the narration, where it is used to defamiliarize the human world and tberefore challenge the speciesist world order. The language is often consciously modulated to be less speciesist, particularly by using proper nouns for animals and giving them personalities. At the same time, humans might be represented as being more animal-like by all the narrative or linguistic devices usually used to represent animals. The extract below is an example from The White Bone. Poachers attack an elephant family and kill all they can, before using a chainsaw to cut tbe tusks off the dead elephants: A horrific wail starts up. Mud [an elephant] has never before seen or heard a chainsaw but she knows that this is the smmd of one. The hlUllan that

cradles it is racing in Mud's direction. By now her bad leg cannot take her weight, and she runs along the shore at a suicidally slow pace. The human, however, is not chasing her. She stops and looks arOlllld. Guided by the human, the saw slices off the front of She-Demands' head in the time it would take Mud to bite through a stick, and yet everything seems to have slowed do"Wll, and so the slicing is maliciously prolonged. "Monster!" Mud trumpets, for this is the real atrocity. "Monster!" (\VB, 88) This very emotional scene is narrated from an omniscient point of view, but the narrator is careful not to open the minds of the human characters even a little. The narration is focalized through an elephant called Mud, and tbe readers get no information on the feelings or motivations of the humans represented here as cruel murderers. None of these human characters have names, genders, or personalities. They are represented as we usually represent animals - through their actions and appearance; instead, the readers receive a lot of infOlmation about the way an elephant experiences the scene. In this extract, we also see another narrative device often used in animal dystopias when representing humans and defamiliarizing their actions. The narrator uses free indirect speech to show how unnatural it is that the saw slices off tbe magnificent head of an adult elephant so rapidly. The human act is here sho\Vll to be unnatural. The comparison of biting through a stick comes from animal knowledge. The other novels use this kind of animalized comparison or metaphor in order to show the humans'

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unnaturalness and destructive capacity. In this sense, machines and roads seem to be common motifs. In Watership Down, for example, a road seems from the point of view of Hazel - a rabbit - to be a "river - black, smooth and straight between its banks" (WD, 58). When Hazel moves closer, he vocalizes the recurrent theme in the novel's representation of humans: "that's not natural" (WD, 58). Animal fantasy is always sketching a line between the two extremes of natural and unnatural. Because many animal stories have such a strong ideological message of treating animals better, one might think that their goal is to break the limits between the cultural construction of animal and human as opposite extremes. Indeed, many animal stories certainly do this by representing animals as human-like. Still, at the same time these same narratives strengthen this polarization by representing humans as outlaws of nature. Interestingly, animals that are somehow connected to humans are represented as evil, unnatural, and corrupted in some narratives. They become unaccepted liminal creatures between two opposites of life: animal and human. The following example is from Watership Down. Several dangerous days into their journey, the rabbits find another warren. They are delighted to find that the rabbits there are friendly and incredibly big and healthy. They are even more excited to find that a nearby fanner puts out vegetables for the rabbits and kills most of the rabbits' predators, making life quite safe and comfortable. However, these healthy rabbits behave very strangely. They do things rabbits have never done. They sing, create poetry, and draw pictures. They seem to have many similarities with humans. Bit by bit these strange rabbits start to scare the protagonists. Finally, the refugee rabbits find out that the farmer protects these rabbits only so that he can snare them for his 0\Vll selfish aims. These strange rabbits have made an agreement with humans. They live happily as long as they let people hunt them. This unnaturalness terrifies Hazel, and he escapes with his group as soon as possible 6 6 Interestingly, a similar kind of motif can be found in Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), where a group of animal's revolt and take over a fann for themselves. The new system of law and order on this fann aims to make sure all animals are equal and all animals stay animal-like. Animals have their seven commandments the first of them is "Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy". At the end of the novel, the pigs the hateful leaders of animals have broken all the commandments and transformed themselves into humans. As I stated before, Orwell's fairy tale is of course allegorical, but interestingly it also utilizes the strict line between humans and animals.

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Humans as outlaws of nature Another interesting method of denaturalizing humans in ecological fiction is basing animal narratives on the laws a/nature or the law a/the jungle. These phrases can refer to many things, such as the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest or physical laws like gravity. They can also be used to oppose the man-made law of society, and thus they can function as standards by which to criticize man-made law. The laws of nature in this sense are laws whose content is detelTIlined by nature itself and is therefore universal. In the context of animal narratives, the phrase is used quite similarly. Humans constantly break the laws of nature and that is why they are represented as being outside nature. This can be done in many ways. In my short text example from The White Bone, we saw that humans with all their fine technology can be sho\Vll as breakers of the physical laws of nature. The laws of nature can also exist in a more abstract way, as a set of rules and principles that all animals follow by instinct, but which are unknown to humans. The motif of the laws of nature is best known from the classic animal tale, Kipling's The Jungle Book. Three ofKipling's stories in this book revolve around the adventures ofMowgli, an abandoned human child who is raised by wolves in the jungles of India. For Kipling, the jungle is not a place of wilderness but instead a space of law and order where the principles of gentlemanly behaviour are to be cherished. In Kipling's vision of the law of the jungle, killing is allowed, but only when necessary. The law also includes one strict prohibition: never kill a man. This rule shows explicitly that human are not included in the law, it is only the rest of nature that must follow it. The laws of nature can also be an implicit moral construction behind the fictional world inhabited by animals. In the animal dystopias in my research material, it is humans alone who break certain rules that the rest of nature follows, and so humans are represented as outlaws. Humans kill at a whim rather than out of necessity. They decimate populations rather than kill a few at a time. In building up their own habitats, they destroy the very living space that other animals need to survive. Watership Down is a good example. After the men kill most of the rabbits and bulldoze their original warren to make room for a housing development, the rabbits try to guess what motivated the humans to do this terrible thing. The same kind of horror caused by the sudden randomness of death arises here. One of the rabbits suggests that the men destroyed the warren because the rabbits had been raiding a nearby garden. Another rabbit tells him that it was not the reason: "It was just because we were in

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their way. They killed us to suit themselves." (WD, 165) Another rabbit continues: There's terrible evil in the world [ ... ] It comes from men. All other elil [enemies] do what they have to do and Frith [the silll-god] moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals. (\VD, 159)

Later, another rabbit concludes: "Animals don't behave like men. [ .. ] If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don't sit dO\vn and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality". (WD, 247) The word "animality" -replacing "humanity"- summarizes something important about the discursive principles of the ecologically aware animal dystopia. In these novels, animals are humanized and humans are dehumanized. In this way, human life is critically defamiliarized. The Animals of Farthing Wood is partly an exception to the harsh condenmation of humans. In this novel, the animal characters are travelling towards a nature reserve, which is often imagined during the narrative to be a place where humans actually want to shelter and help wild animals. The animals know quite a lot about human culture and they are aware that not all people are bad. As Toad says, "There is a certain breed of human called a Naturalist, who, unlike most ordinary humans, spends his time learning about, and caring for animals and plants" (AFW, 30). This nature reserve seems to be an earthly paradise where lambs, lions, and humans can live side by side (cf. Harel 201 Ob, 111). In contrast to other evil humans, environmentalists are constantly represented as inhumanly good. During their travels, the animals happen to see one of these human heroes. They decide to show themselves to him, just to make him happy. Also in Watership Down, we find a scene where a little girl saves one of the rabbit characters. The novels thus declare that humans are not irredeemably bad. They are a step apart from the rest of nature, and they do have a tremendous power to destroy, but they can also step in and help in ways that no other creature in nature can.

Less cultivated humans In animal dystopias, human characters are often not only denaturalized as I suggested in the previous section, but also uncultivated. As we know in Western thinking, humanity is normally associated to civilization, culture,

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and rationality, whereas animals are associated with nature, wildness, and instinctiveness. In animal studies, scholars have repeatedly noted that the borders between species are drawn based on the assumption that humans have a higher degree of autonomy, intelligence, and rationality than animals (Cavalieri 2001, 76; Nayar 2014, 95). Animal dystopias seem to challenge this assumption by humanizing animals and dehumanizing humans. The technique of inversion is also used to invert the cultivation nOlmally associated with humans. One aspect of this lack of culture is language, which has already been discussed above. There is an additional aspect that might be considered: in most animal dystopias (as well as in other animal narratives), animals share a common language, a kind of lingua franea. For example, in Watership Down, rabbits can speak with birds, mice, and so on. The only species left out ofthis common understanding is humans. Another method of representing humans in an unfavourable light when it comes to culture is to give the animal characters very advanced cultures, religions, mythologies, and histories, and to leave the human characters without any of these concepts. For example, in The White Bone, the elephants have a very old and fine culture and religion, whereas the humans are represented as wild, unpredictable, irrational, and bloodthirsty beasts who attack the peaceful elephants for no reason. One of the most important strategies for cultivating animal characters in these novels is quite an extraordinary one. These novels do not make animals dress in clothes or live in houses, but they give the animal characters a very advanced culture. A good example is the central motif of the action in all of these novels. Their stories are all versions of the exodus myth, the search for a promised land of plenty, security, and freedom. Like the Israelites on the way to Canaan, the animals in these novels wander to find tbe place where they can be safe and happy, the Promised Land. Like the epic march ofthe Israelites, the journey of tbe animals is full of victory and defeat, struggle, and the constant fear of failure. These animals also have their golden calf moments. In every novel, there is a moment of temptation to give up tbe tiresome travelling through tbe hostile and unfamiliar landscape and to stop too early to stay in some comfortable place. For example, in The Animals of Farthing Wood, some mice and moles grow tired and want to stop at the nearest comfortable place. Two days later, they find out that this sunny meadow is a horrible trap, as it is a home of the dreadful butcherbird. Just like a punishinent for their lack of faitb, the offSpring of these animals are killed and they have to continue tbe epIc Journey.

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I think it is worth noting that these animals are humanized precisely by the exodus myth. This might be a subconscious choice by the authors, but I think it rather implies that by their incredible escape, these animals have deserved their sanctuary from humans. Just as the biblical exodus is a kind of redemption myth, these animal narratives also present their characters as having earned their freedom and right to their 0\Vll way of life. Here, the four novels also connect to the tradition of post-apocalyptic literature. In the history of both religious and secular usage, the apocalypse is always linked to utopianism, to the emergence of a better world of revelation and disclosure (Heffeman 2008, 6). The post-apocalypse differs from other dystopias because it often also includes - at least implicitly utopian tendencies. All the novels examined include a hope for a utopia - a promised land of plenty, security, and freedom in the form of an earthly paradise. It is either a place free of human beings or a place where the animals are protected by people.

Conclusion Watership Down can be read as one of the first modem "green" novels aiming to offer alternatives to the speciesist worldview. Equally, it can be read as an attempt to challenge the anthropocentric worldview. In this chapter, I have shown that by defamiliarizing human life and values, the novel enables readers to evaluate the modern world in a new light, from the point of view of animals. From the animals ' perspective, the human actions and the modern human-ruled world create a terrifying dystopian environment where nonhuman lives are constantly threatened. By reading the four animal novels within the generic frame of animal dystopia, I have consciously abandoned an allegorical (and therefore inevitably anthropocentric) reading and concentrated on the depicted suffering of the animal characters and the rhetoric choices in focalization that lead readers to empathize with the animals. The four animal dystopias I have analysed use the very same methods; they humanize animals and dehumanize humans to depict humans as outlaws of nature. This interspeciesist inversion works as a strong rhetorical tool in order to show that humans can actually be seen as a threatening, invasive species that ruins the world for non-human animals. As I argued above, all four novels represent not the tradition of classical dystopian fiction, but rather that of modem dystopian fiction, which is open

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to geme blending and geme hybrids. The novels in my research material especially utilize the post-apocalyptic tradition when narrating the great catastrophe the animals face. Even though tlie great catastrophes are not huge from a human perspective, they toy with the idea of scale. Action that from a human perspective may be insignificant might mean the end of an entire animal community. The catastrophes in all four novels are caused by humans, who, blinded by their anthropocentric worldview, seem to have no idea of the suffering they have wrought. What follows is a survival journey or quest, a theme now common in post-apocalyptic young adult dystopias. An interesting feature of tliis group of four novels is that only tlie most recent is about exotic animals. Is this because of the nationalities of the authors? Or does it reflect changes in society and environmental ideology, which is increasingly interested in tlie ecosystem as a global structure? All of these ainmal stories (except for Gowdy's novel) are set in a very similar landscape, the rural British countryside, which is slowly disappearing because of urbanization. The sadness in the face of relentless modernization is often explicitly expressed in Watership Down, although the narrator concentrates mainly on foealizing through the rabbits. The little asides the narrator makes within his narration of the main plot give a hint of his nostalgic thoughts: "tlie sheep were long gone, and the tractors had ploughed great expanses for wheat and barley" (WD, 268-269). This sad and fading human pastoral milieu combined with the strong and lively animal survival stories and the primitive worldview of myths, legends, and prophesies means that the chatm of these novels does not only lie in their ecological message. Christopher Pawling (1984) has interpreted Watership Down as a vein of nostalgia for traditional patterns of the English way of life. Pawling contends that Watership Down reworks the traditions of the pastoral war narrative and archetypal quest narrative to become "more than just a reworking of timeless myth"'; it is, in fact, a novel that is "addressing a specific cultural milieu at a specific moment in time" (ibid., 233). I think this is true in all of tlie novels examined. They allow us to see the modem technological and industrial world in a new, fresh, and disturbing way from the vantage point of animals. They return us to the mythic while at the same time acknowledging tliat this mythic realm has been lost in our technological age. This is why the ecological animal dystopia does not exist only to prove tliat animals are just like us. It also comforts us that there still exists something animal-like in us. Animal dystopias allow us a transcendent escape, a crossing over from civilization to a comforting wildness.

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Harel, Naama. 2010b. "Post-Speciesist Utopias and Dystopias." Interdisciplinary Humanities 27:2: 111-20. Heffeman, Teresa. 2008. Post-apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Poslmodernism, and the Twentieth-century Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hintz, Carrie and Elaine Ostry. 2003. "Introduction." In Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, Carrie Hintz & Elaine Ostry (eds). New York: Routledge. Hogan, Walter. 2009. Animals in Young Adult Fiction. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.

Kitchell, Kennetb. 1986. "The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Adams's Watership Down." Classical and Modern Literature, 7 (Fall 1986): 13-30. Lehnen, Christine. 2016. Defining Dystopia: A Genre Between the Circle and the Hunger Games: A Functional Approach to Fiction. Marburg: Tectum Verlag. Mohr, Dunja M. 2005. Words Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. London: McFarland & Company. Moore, Bryan L. 2008. Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Print. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. "What is it like to be a bat?" The Philosophical Review. 84:2: 435-450. Nayar, Prarnod K. 2014. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nikolajeva, Maria. 2010. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. New York & London: Routledge. Oswald, Lori 10. 1994. Environmental and the Animal Rights Ethics in Children s Realistic Animal Novels of Twentieth Century North America. Oregon: University of Oregon. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Parris, Brandy. 2003. "Difficult Sympathy in the Reconstruction-Era Animal Stories of Our Young Folks." Childrens literature. 2003:31: 25-50. Pawling, Cristopher. 1984. Popular Fiction and Social Change. London: Macmillan. Ratelle, Amy. 2015. Animality and Children s Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Sainsbury, Lisa. 2013. Ethics in British Childrens Literature. Unexamined Life. London & New York: Bloomsbury. Simons, John. 2002. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. New York: Palgrave. Wolfe, Cary Mitchell. 2014. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

12. COLONIZED ENVIRONMENTS: THE WEIRD ECOLOGY OF JOHANNA SINISALO'S BIRDBRAIN

JURA RAIPOLA

&

TON! LAHTINENl

Since the publication of her debut novel Ennen paivanlaskua ei voi (2000, translated as Not before Sundown in 2003 and as Troll- A Love Story for the US market in 2004), Iohanna Sinisalo has been regarded as one the most prominent Finnish authors of speculative fiction. The book gained her the prestigious Finlandia Prize for the year's best novel, establishing her status in the Finnish literary field. She also won the lames Tiptree If. Award "for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore our understanding of gender". Well-received both in the literary mainstream and among sci-fi fandom, the novel also introduced Sinisalo's idiosyncratic writing style to the public. Combining elements from science fiction, fantasy, horror, myths, folklore, and "mundane" realistic fiction, Sinisalo's writing typically avoids geme boundaries and often involves some sort of epistemic and ontological uncertainty about the status of the fictional world. For Sinisalo (2011), the preferred generic term for this kind of crossgeme writing is suomikumma, the "Finnish Weird". Besides herself, she sees several of her contemporary speculative fiction writers as representatives the geme, which, in her definition, involves blurring geme boundaries, conjoining elements from different genres, and the allowing the "unbridled flight of imagination". Inspired by the term "New Weird", which came into use in the early 2000s, and the older "weird" fiction of authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Finnish Weird can be approached both as a geme and a broad marketing category for Finnish speculative fiction. Wliile Sinisalo herself has established Fnniish Weird as a general geographical "brand" of fiction similar to Nordic Noir, her own novels can also be seen in relation to the Anglophone tradition of weird writing (see Roine & Samola 2018).

1

Toni Lahtinen's work on this chapter was supported by Academy of Finland.

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As a genre that is situated at the intersection of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and surrealism, weird fiction can be generally thought of as liminal or hybrid literature both in its fmm and subject matter. In recent years, writers associated with the New Weird - such as IeffVanderMeer, M. John Harrison, and China Mi6ville - have been hailed for their genre-blending fiction, and they have initiated a renewed interest in the widely neglected tradition of weird writing. This kind ofinc1ination towards "genre blurring" has also been noted in the genre of critical dystopia, where self-reflexive borrowing from other genres is received as an attempt to expand the creative potential for critical expression (Baccolini & Moylan 2003, 7). One of the apparent reasons for the topical success of the New Weird genre seems to be its anti-anthropocentric tendency, which resonates remarkably well with questions relating to the current planetary-scale ecological crisis. This issue is at the heart of Sinisalo's works as well, as the human relationship with the natural world is one the central themes running through her oeuvre. From an ecocritical point of view, perhaps the most intriguing novel by Sinisalo is Birdbrain (2010, hereafter B). Although the novel cannot be formally labelled a critical dystopia set in a future society, it can be fruitfully examined as a dystopian allegory about the environmental crisis. Like her debut work, Birdbrain has gained some international interest: The Guardian (11 December 2010) selected this "wilderness thriller" as one of the best novels of 2010. Besides the rising popularity of Finnish Weird, this philosophical depiction of a violent encounter with wild nature is an example of the author's fascination with narratives of survival, which have gained new popularity in recent years (see Sinisalo 2004). In this chapter, we examine the intertextuallayers of the novel in connection to the tradition of Western wilderness literature that often deals with the colonization of natural environments. Our focus is on the geme of the New Weird and its relationship with the global environment: we look at how the novel employs elements from earlier literary traditions and adapts them to handle current ecological issues.

Hell in the bushes Birdbrain is a story about two lovers who, bored with the Western lifestyle, decide to seek an extreme nature experience in the wilderness of Tasmania and New Zealand. They head to a bushwalking track located in an area ominously called "Down Under". Although the plot is quite simple, Birdbrain has rich intertextual layers that tie the novel to the Western

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tradition of wilderness literature. Sinisalo uses allusions to Dante's Divine Comedy (1308-1320) and quotes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) to imbue realism with ambiguity and turn tlie tale of two trekkers into a dystopian allegory about the troubled relationship between human and non-human nature. After Birdbrain was published, Sinisalo published a collection of short stories, Salattuja Voimia. Gpas valoisille ja pimeille poluille (2012, Hidden Forces: A Guide to Light and Dark Paths), inspired by tlie author's passion for trekking. Among a variety of different gemes, the collection includes an autobiographical short story about a fire in the Tasmanian wilderness, an early version of Birdbrain. As the unoriginal name of the story "Divine Comedy: Inferno" already reveals, Dante's allegory serves as a subtext. The narration is paced with quotes from Dante's epic poem, starting with the most well-known verses about losing one's way in the journey of life ("In the midway of this our mortal life, I I found me in a gloomy wood, astray"). In Birdbrain, quotes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness have replaced extracts from Dante's poetry, but the novel repeats the same kind of structural pattern - in fact, The Divine Comedy is also a subtext for Heart ofDarkness. Selected quotes from Conrad's novel instruct the reader to approach the novel as an allegory about a humankind that has lost its way. However, the short story "Divine Comedy: Inferno" lacks tlie supernatural element that gives Birdbrain its weird twist. Instead of using Dante's opening verses about losing one's direction, Birdbrain starts with a quote from "The Raven" (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe. Using Poe instead of Conrad reminds the reader about the genre of novel, the New Weird. In Poe's narrative poem, a demonic bird visits a tOlmented man and refuses to leave him. Birdbrain picks up its motto from the seventeenth stanza, where the helpless narrator demands tlie bird to return to tlie underworld ("Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door! I Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door! I Quotli the Raven 'Nevermore'."). With this quote, the sinister and supernatural atmosphere and tone of Poe's poem are transferred to Sinisalo's story as well. The raven, as a symbol of death and dark forces, anticipates the appearance of the malicious Kea bird, a weirded synecdoche of wild nature that sets the wilderness on fire at the end of the novel. The journey to hell starts in the icy wilderness of Finnish Lapland, where the protagonists meet and fall in love. Jyrki works as a bartender in a hotel Heidi visits as an employee of a dubious public relations finn, one which has been covering up an oil spill in the Baltic Sea. The tourist

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industry has colonized Lapland over the past forty years, but until the end of the twentieth century, Finnish literatine portrayed Lapland as an exotic wilderness with magical, disorientating, and often dangerous undertones. In fact, Veli-Pekka Lehtola (1997, 138-139) uses Comad's depiction of the colonization of Africa as an analogue for the early literature depicting northern Finland: the geographical journey to the wilderness is also a psychological process where the protagonist eventually faces hisJhers O\Vll repressed self. In Birdbrain, however, Lapland no longer offers an opportunity to face the unknO\vn inner or outer nature, since the wilderness has been turned into a tourist trap. In this camivalized setting, the couple meets in a drunken haze and soon starts to dream about experiencing a journey into wild and unspoiled nature. The couple's Comadian journey into the heart of Tasmania is deeply rooted in the Western literary tradition and Romanticism, as wild nature signifies the opposite of industrial civilization; it is a place where the alienated individual can seek a more authentic self (see Short 1991, 10). This Romantic idea of wilderness and the sensation of the sublime also offers the basis for modern hiking cultine. As Greg Drennig (2013, 556) has noted, a feeling of risk or danger is still present, even if the search for the sublime has been weakened in its intensity. The sublime experiences of outdoor recreation and the redefinition of the wilderness are not always linked to one's mortality, but they connect bodily risk to authenticity as an antidote against the modem conditions. However, Drennig notes that hiking culture is a privileged assertion of leisure, as it is often urban and white Westerners who have the opportunity to travel around the world with expensive gear. In Birdbrain, the lovers who try to escape modern civilization end up colonizing a protected nature area. With its weird depiction of the wilderness, Sinisalo's novel offers an ecologically motivated update to the Romantic idea of the sublime. China Mi6ville (2009, 511) has described weird fiction as the literature of "radicalized sublime backwash", where the numinous penetrates the boundary of the quotidian. Rather than keeping the sublime at a safe distance, weird fiction allows it to saturate the everyday in all its horrorinducing and awe-inspiring imposingness. This seems to hold true for Birdbrain as well. In contrast to the traditional Romantic notions of the wilderness, where the mountains and forests are clearly separate from human society, Birdbrain introduces an uncanny entanglement between human culture and the non-human environment. Sinisalo's allegory cleverly attaches its ecological themes to the hiker's ethic of "leave no trace". This set of ethics promotes conservation in

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the outdoors. It aims to change the environment as little as possible and requires hikers to bring along essential gear that allows them to prepare food, take shelter, and dispose of waste (Drennig 2013, 558). In the novel, the two lovers intrude on a highly sensitive ecosystem that begins to react to the minor changes in the environment that the trekkers carelessly cause. The turning point of the novel alludes to Genesis: after an argument, the frustrated Heidi throws a used tampon to the wilderness. This symbolic and sexualized act of rebellion triggers an ecological catastrophe in Tasmania and awakens the dark and supernatural forces of the wilderness. As the environment starts to turn against the intruders, Jyrki and Heidi's recreational experience in the DO\vn Under turns into a nightmare. Pirjo Lyytikainen (2015, 17-18) notes that as the journey proceeds, the natural environment starts to transform into a metaphorical space of purgatory. The poetic and romantic qualities of the surrounding nature disappear and the trekking trip develops into a struggle for survival. The sublime beauty of nature vanishes and the narration turns into a grotesque depiction of mud, waste, and faeces. Lyytikainen also makes an interesting observation about the couple's attempts to survive: the struggle resembles reality TV programmes where survival is the name of the game. Indeed, in Western literature, wild nature and the wilderness have been represented as both heaven and hell. Before Romanticism created the idea of the wilderness as a sacred place to be contrasted with the profanity of human contact, it was perceived as an untamed and uncultivated place beyond human control, a place of awe, even a place abandoned by God. According to Short (1991, 8), the clearest literary image of the wilderness as a place to fear is Robinson Crusoe, a man marooned in a lonely wild spot. In her essay "The Purgatory of Objectivity" (2004), Sinisalo discusses the Crusoe myth in her favourite books, Friday, or, The Other Island (1967) by Michel Tournier and Life of Pi by Yarm Martel (2001). Sinisalo defines Robinsonades as follows: The basic composition of Robinsonades is simple. A man, who is dependent on infrastructures, is separated from the social and technological systems that he upholds and that uphold him. Although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe includes various elements other than the antics on the deserted island, it has become knO\Vll precisely for its detailed depiction of survival: how the protagonist is first miraculously saved and how he then starts, almost as if obliged by the miracle, to build a way of life that is as close as possible to the one he has just been separated from. (Sinisalo 2004, 91 92, translated byToni Lahtinen)

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Sinisalo's definition of the Robinsonade can easily be applied to Birdbrain as well. For example, the depiction of the journey includes numerous detailed descriptions of trekking in extremely demanding natinal surroundings. Similarly, Defoe's novel is mostly a depiction of the concrete little tasks and duties of everyday life on the deserted island. According to Watt's (1957, 72-75) classic analysis, these details attracted readers in England after the distribution of the work had developed fast in British society and changed many daily routines - perhaps a similar explanation

for the popularity of different survival television shows can be found. However, in Sinisalo's novel, the depiction of ecosystems disturbed with industrial products and waste are also part of the larger allegory about global environmental problems. Unlike Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Birdbrain does not celebrate human mastery over natural resources. A different kind of hierarchy is manifested through tbe allusions to Conrad's novel: they problematize humanity's tendency to project itself outside and above ecology and nature.

Colonized spaces One of the defining characteristics of Birdbrain is the story's weirdness. Although much of the plot advances as a rather straightforward wilderness survival narrative, tbe story gradually builds towards a twist that challenges the perceived realism of the depicted events. The development is already foreshadowed by the novel's title, which constructs a clear-cut analogy

between human behaviour and avian psychology. In tbe wilderness, the initially metaphoric similarity between the two begins to gain increasingly unsettling undertones as the perceived differences between the human protagonists and the non-human environment start to disappear. Eventually, a dark undercurrent of human behaviour is brought to the fore

as the supposed rationality of tbe protagonists disappears. While the weird component of the story is less pronounced than in many of Sinisalo's other works, ultimately, the genre designation of Finnish Weird certainly fits tbe novel.

Interestingly, the emergence of Finnish Weird parallels a larger cultinal interest in the weird at tbe begiinnng of the twenty-first century. One of the most pervasive triggering factors for this newly gained interest in the weird seems to be the way that our current environmental knowledge evades common sense and our phenomenological experience of the world. Weird fiction, from its Lovecraftian beginnings, has been notably well attuned

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to topical scientific issues and their unnerving impact upon human life. In H. P. Lovecraft's vision, weird tales were crafted to reveal the "cosmic indifference" of a universe expanded inconceivably in time and space. Following Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2016, 182-183), the Old Weird could thus be defined as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stories that challenged anthropocentrism "by thematising the insufficiency of science and human reason to comprehend the universe." In the New Weird, this sort of anti-anthropocentric tendency is still present, but often in a more pervasive and intimate fmm - in today's weird fiction, ambiguous border zones, grotesque hybridity, and boundary-crossing monsters are not only sources of fear, but also something to be investigated and even embraced. While the Old Weird was invested in exploring the epistemological dread and existential angst evoked by a broadened view of the universe, the New Weird seems to be a particularly well-suited form to tackle the strange and horrifying philosophical underpinnings of enviromnental change on a planetary level. In ecocritical theory, the geological concept of the Anthropocene has been widely adopted as a shorthand for a range of ecological issues that are truly global in their scale. While the concept in its strictest empirical definition suggests humanity's distinct and irreversible impact upon the global environment, it also can be understood more broadly as a marker of the period when general awareness of this impact is rising sharply. Such ecological awareness has some decisively weird implications. For instance, Timothy Morton (2016, 6-8) notes how the Anthropocene brings human history and geological time together in a strange loop, making the natural and the cultural collapse back into each other in a "weirdly weird", twisted looping form. Such remarks and theoretizations have led to a fmmation of an increasingly explicit link between recent weird fiction and ecocritical theory. Morton and VanderMeer, for example, have started a dialogue on how theory and fiction might work together to address the weirdness of the contemporary ecological situation (see Hageman 2016). In Birdbrain, the protagonists' journey into the wilderness also represents an investigation of the human relationship with the planet, or at least its paradigmatic fmm in contemporary Western culture. From this synecdochical perspective, the main characters function as an image of humanity en masse, as a collective agent responsible for the global ecological crisis. Interestingly, rather than confronting environmental questions directly through its own narrative, the novel employs Conrad's Heart a/Darkness as a medium to tackle contemporary ecological issues. During the journey of the couple, Heidi reads the book and starts an inner

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dialogue with Comad. With this allusive narrative technique, Conrad's anthropomorphic description of the heart of Africa starts to blend with Sinisalo's depiction of Tasmanian wilderness: At some point I started to know that Joseph Conrad Book of by heart. It whispers to me. r wonder whether the stillness on the face of immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that big thing that eau/dn 't talk and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? (B, 17) And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowfol land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenehrous andpassionate soul. (E, 30)

While the African landscape of Heart of Darkness might be read as a mere anthropocentric symbol for the deterioration of the human psyche (McCarthy 2009, 643), in Birdbrain, the cited anthropomorphic passages are clearly set in an environmental context. The inclusion of such fragments from Coruad's novel allows Birdbrain to develop an unnerving image of human, animal, and vegetal viewpoints all blending together. To a mind shaped by modernity, this is one of the most bewildering qualities of the Anthropocene: the Earth ceases to function as a mere background for human activity and becomes an actor in its own right. In Sinisalo's novel, this is illustrated by the Tasmanian wilderness, which, with its human features and qualities such as a face and body, gives rise to an uncarmy sense of confusion between the human and non-human world. The theme is developed further by a parallel between the representation of colonialist discourse in Heart of Darkness and human colonization of the biosphere in Birdbrain. Jyrki, the male protagonist, is an unknowing kindred spirit of Comad's Kurtz, an exemplary imperialist and "an emissary of pity, and science, and progress" (Conrad 1971,25). Like Kurtz, Jyrki is a Janus-faced figure, who is both interested in the well-being ofthe planet yet invested in destroying it at the same time. \¥bile he believes himself to be a particularly eco-conscious traveller, his narration continuously illustrates modernity's vision of human subjects dominating natural objects. He is an obsessive explorer on a maniacal quest to find "pristine" wilderness on a planet where no location remains untouched by human activity, and his calculating pursuit to master the wilderness clearly parallels the genocidal

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colonial history of Tasmania. He is ultimately driven by the romantic idea of experiencing nature in its original, raw fmm, and while lamenting about ecological damage caused by other people, he fails to see himself as part of the problem. Although he is concerned about the carbon footprint of flying, he is also willing to do so to combat his middle-class boredom. Together with Heidi, they are a privileged white couple headed into the heart of the wilderness simply for their 0\Vll entertainment. The initial Arctic setting of the Finnish ski resort of Levi provides an ironic twist to the explorer motif - whereas the exploration narratives of the Romantics and early weird writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft were characteristically set in the Arctic or Antarctica (see Carro1l2016, 69), in Birdbrain the polar region is portrayed as a fully commercialized space with hotels full of drunken businessmen. Otherwise, Jyrki epitomizes the imperialist scientific ethos and colonial spirit of an explorer. \¥bile he does not have a scientific interest in mapping the unmapped - he is, in another irony, a mere tourist of an already conquered land, after all - his narrative segments are voiced in a marmer that constantly objectifies the actions of both the environment and even his partner, Heidi. For Jyrki, Heidi appears as one more creature to be tamed, and in the original Finnish, he even refers to her with the impersonal pronoun "it". In Jyrki's rationalist, colonizing mindset, Heidi is a naIve city girl prone to irrationally anthropomorphizing the environment. For her, Tasmania is an enormous magical creature that treats us whatever way it wants. She probably imagines we're like two dogged inquisitive ants trekking across Tasmania's belly. We trip over its body hair, get stuck in its pores and try not to disturb its sleep. And because we're walking along Tasmania's thin, sensitive skin, there's always the possibility that at some moment, after some tossing and turning, the creature will wake up once and for all. Then a hand will appear above us, so huge and fast that we won't even register it until just before it violently descends with a crashing, crushing thump. (B, 198) By parodying Heidi's Conradian description of the wilderness, Jyrki seeks to strip nahue down to mere physical traits and scientific facts. With this kind of modem mindset, he commodifies nature into an aesthetic object to be enjoyed without affecting it or being affected by it materially. However, the ultimate irony lies in the fact that in the Anthropocene epoch, we are becoming increasingly aware that no kind of "natural" state of the environment exists, nor has it ever existed. Human beings - like other material entities - are entangled in a hugely complex ecological system

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where every material body continuously produces impacts on the others. In such an ecological network, humans are not the only beings endowed with the ability to affect "nature", and they are never at a safe distance from other entities and their impacts upon us. This is also the premise for Birdbrain's conclusive and partly unexplainable disaster. Like Kurtz, who is on a quest to "to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him" (Conrad 1971, 61) but ultimately fails to impose his will on the wilderness, Jyrki is unable to keep himself at a safe distance from the enviromnent's menacmg agency.

Kea: A bird of doom Following the themes and the structure of Heart of Darkness, Sinisalo's novel is not only a depiction of colonialism but also of the unconscious impulses of the human mind. In this sense, there seems to be a certain kind of symbolic role attached to botli of the protagonists. Whereas Jyrki represents the supposedly rational mind of a colonizer, Heidi falls victim to an unconscious desire to destroy and vandalize her immediate environment. The journey into the wilderness thus exposes a certain kind of ecological death drive, humanity's uncontrollable tendency to contaminate and pollute the non-human world. This unconscious inclination is disclosed by an aesthetic fonn that closely resembles what Siobhan Carroll (2016) calls tlie ecological uncanny. Referencing Timothy Morton, Carroll sees the Freudian notion of the uncarmy as a useful lens via which to process the "return of our repressed awareness of humanity's implication in the natural world" (ibid., 67-68). The ecological uncanny goes against the traditional representation of nature by exposing the human in the natural and vice versa. As such, it is a particular aesthetic expression of the Anthropocene where a conception of nature as the realm outside society becomes difficult or even impossible. According to Carroll, this aesthetic principle is routinely deployed in tlie New Weird, where urban landscapes are often entangled with natural elsewheres and hybrid creatures challenge the human-animal boundary. With a reference to Heart a/Darkness, she also notes how fictive explorers typically function as vanguards of civilization and thus as useful vectors for the uncanny. However, in line with several other scholars, it might be sensible to question Carroll's psychoanalytic notion of "repressed" ecological awareness. Although weirdness is often confiated with the Freudian concept

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of the uncanny or unheimlich, there seems to be a definite discrepancy between these two notions of strange experiences. According to Mark Fisher (2016,5-6,45), for example, the uncanny is about the strange within the familiar, and as such, it involves processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside. The weird, by contrast, brings to the familiar something which nonnally lies beyond it - it allows us to see the inside from the outside. The weird involves a specific sensation of wrongness, a marked presence of "that which does not belong" (ibid., 6). Weird entities, objects, or monsters are strange in the sense that they make one feel as if they should not exist. Similarly, China Mi6ville (2008, 112-113) argues that the weird is not the return of anything repressed, but rather an eruption of the utterly unknown or unthinkable. Consequently, in his tenns, the weird is ab canny rather than uncanny. In the context of the weird ecology oftheAnthropocene, our new awareness of ecological intimacy with the non-human world is thus not the return of any "forgotten" environmental knowledge but rather an unprecedented encounter with new modes of thinking. In Birdbrain, this kind of weird sensibility is first evoked by several references to the kea - a parrot species living in New Zealand. As the narration progresses non-clrronologically with alternating segments from New Zealand and Tasmania, the alpine parrot also gets involved in the events in Tasmania, where the species does not naturally occur. A park ranger has warned the couple not to feed the keas, since they keep getting too many carbohydrates from visiting tourists. Throughout the plot, more information about the parrots is introduced through other travellers and pseudo-quotations from a fictional magazine. Because the birds keep eating leftovers, they do not bother to seek any other food sources and start to suffer from behavioural disorders. Typically, they start to destroy human property: they are knO\vn, for example, to tear apart tents and even entire cars. By building an analogue between these arrogant but smart birds and human beings, Sinisalo's novel starts to deconstruct the dichotomy between the human and non-human: The kea is an extremely inquisitive bird a trait that is clearly a key factor in the smvival of the species and can even solve complicated problems with relative ease. When it encOlUlters an lUlfamiliar object, the kea will normally examine it carefully, often breaking it to pieces. This behavioral pattern becomes more common when food is in greater supply, meaning that the bird's energy is not spent searching for its daily nomishment. CB, 109) The disturbed behaviour of the birds is analogous to human behaviour, and as the plot progresses, the similarities between the two species start to

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appear increasingly obvious. Each of the species descriptions adds more unsettling characteristics to the bird, and in the last one, keas are even depicted as a carnivorous species prone to recreational violence against the local sheep population. The description also illustrates a disturbing entanglement of different species: according to one of the theories presented in the novel, the kea not only tears huge wounds in the skin of the sheep, but also deliberately transfers Clostridium bacteria from the soil into the wounds to cause blood poisoning. As the narrative continuously meditates upon the questions of invasive species and the human impact on ecosystems, keas function as a symbolic double to the human species and its destructive tendencies. Dark and malevolent forces encountered in the wilderness are not limited to keas, however. In the shadowy environment where unconscious desires run amok, even the forest itself gains strange and predatory aspects. In Iyrki's dialogue, eucalyptus trees are depicted as sort of suicide bombers, which strive for ecological Lebensraum by their own flammability: These trees are full of flammable sap. Beneath this flaky tinder there's a thick layer of bark protecting the tree growing inside. The eucalyptus is a predator plant, a killer plant. It has adapted to fire, so much so that every now and then it needs to be burnt in order to germinate. But, at the same time, its own flammability makes it kind of suicide bomber. It's clearing room for itself. When the forest burns do"Wll, the eucalyptus and only the eucalyptus will grow back again, with no competition whatsoever. CB, 56)

Similar lamentations about different species colonizing the ecosystem abound in Birdbrain. Overall, the wilderness of the novel is depicted as open to outside influence and as such, it appears far from an "untouched", pristine environment. Through human impact, the ecosystem has been infested with narcissistic forces, pests, and invasive species, which loom in the forest masquerading as "natural" parts of the environment supposedly unaffected by human activity. As the wilderness functions as a synecdoche for the global environment, the situation also reflects the general condition of the entire biosphere in the Anthropocene. The weird turning point in Birdbrain is when Heidi secretly sabotages the other travellers' equipment in a full traveller's hut. Frustrated with the noisy trekkers, she heads out of the hut and opens their rucksacks, imitating the behaviour of "keas, those mean, intelligent birds" (B, 107). In her selfdescription, Heidi already resembles a bird with a beak, wings, and claws. The same kind of analogous relationship between species is reiterated in a mysterious subplot depicting Heidi's brother: as the plot progresses,

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segments depicting his inexplicable vandalism in an urban environment start to coincide with descriptions of the kea's disturbed habits. In the final segments of the novel, the opening quote with Poe's ominous raven reveals its final relevance. As Jyrki and Heidi lose their way in Tasmania, their actions invoke the malicious bird from the underworld. Parallel with the cruel actions of Heidi's brother, who sets a random homeless person on fire, the forest is mysteriously set on fire. The novel ends with an apocalyptic vision of a burning world and the wilderness enclosing the human species within its 0\Vll destructive forces: The sound isn't dissimilar from that of the tide. It's surprisingly similar, in fact; growling, shoving the world out of its way, filling your eardrums with its terrifying roar. It's a beast that'll devom everything in its path. It'll close the sky. Just like that. You'll see it happen right before your eyes. In a flash. It'll close the earth. It'll chmn out a suffocating darkness and suck the oxygen from the air in heaving gulps. It's a world that was begging to be set alight. And at that moment I catch sight of something I should never have seen. The horror! The horror! (E , 213)

The narrator quotes the most famous lines (The horror! The horror!) from Heart of Darkness to underline the colonialist undertone of the story. At the end of Comad's novel, Kurtz, almost in a state of epiphany, utters these famous words as a judgement on humanity and European imperialism (see Carroll 2016, 71). Similarly, Birdbrain offers a particularly bleak vision of the human species' self-destructive tendencies. The novel depicts an entirely colonized planet where all human actions are intimately connected with global ecological consequences.

Conclusion Johanna Sinisalo's Birdbrain is a book of colonization, where the boundaries between the colonizers and the colonized ultimately become blurred. A simple yet strange survival tale on its surface level, the novel is a weird dystopian allegory of our increasingly harrowing awareness of the human impact upon the planet. With Finland and the "Down Under" alternating as its central narrative locations, Birdbrain is effectively a story told on the global scale. As a depiction of the Anthropocene epoch, it

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exposes the inconvenient truth we should all already know by now: humans have infected the entire planet with their presence, and the horror of this fact is now colonizing our O\Vll consciousness. Ubiquitous human impacts cannot be reversed or denied, and their eventually disastrous consequences upon the life-sustaining ecological systems now manifest everywhere. With constant explicit references to Comad's Heart of Darkness and other dark subtexts, the novel further hammers home its central message:

in the current world, nothing is original. Using the semiosphere as an analogue of the biosphere, the dystopian Birdbrain thus illustrates how past and present human activities collide in the present ecological crisis. In this kind of already colonized cultural and material world, we are never

at a safe distance from the environment. At the heart of the Anthropocene darkness, the human and the non-human are intimately connected, and our uncomfortable role is to live within the unfathomable presence of environmental disaster.

Works Cited Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. 2003. "Introduction." In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Torn Moylan & Raffaella Baccolini (eds). New York: Routledge, 1-12. Carroll, Siobhan. 2016. "The Terror and the Terroir: The Ecological Uncanny in New Weird Exploration Narratives." Paradoxa 28: 6789. Conrad, Ioseph. 197111902. Heart of Darkness. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton. Drennig, Greg. 2013. "Taking a Hike and Hucking the Stout: The Troublesome Legacy of the Sublime in Outdoor Recreation." Culture Unbozmd, Volume 5, 2013: 551-568. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books. Hageman, Andrew. 2016. "A Conversation between Timothy Morton & IeffVanderMeer." Paradoxa 28: 41-66. Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Winchester & Washington: Zero Books. Lehtola, Veli-Pekka. 1997. Rajamaan identiteetti. Lappilaisuuden rakentuminen 1920- ja 1930-luvun kiljallisuudessa. Helsinki: SKS. Lyytikainen, Pirjo. 2015. "Realismia fantasian ja allegorian maisemissa. Erich Auerbach, Helvetin realismi ja Iohanna Sinisalon Linnunaivot."

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McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. 2009. "A Choice of Nigh1mares': The Ecology of Heart of Darkness." Modem Fiction Studies 55(3): 620-648. Mi6ville, China. 2008. "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire. Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?" Collapse, Volume 4, 2008: 105-128. Mi6ville, China. 2009. "Weird Fiction." In the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts, & Sherryl Vint (eds). New York: Routledge, 510-516. Sinisalo, Johanna. 2004. "Objektiivisuuden kiirastuli". InAantaja vimmaa. Kirjoituksia 50-vuotiaasta Keltaisesta kirjastosta, Hannu Harju (ed.). Helsinki: Tannni, 91-99. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Sinisalo, Johanna. 2010. Birdbrain (B). Translated by David Hackston. London & Chicago: Peter Owen. Sinisalo, Johanna. 2011. "Weird and proud of it." http://www. booksfromfinland.fiI2011/09/weird-and-proud-of-it!, retrieved 12 October 2018. Sinisalo, Johanna. 2012. Salattuja voimia. Gpas valoisille ja pimeille poluille. Helsinki: Teos. Roine, Hanna-Riikka and Hanna Samola 2018. "Johanna Sinisalo: The Geme and the New Weird." In Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction/rom Around the World, Dale Knickerbocker (ed.). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 183-201. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2016. "The New Weird." In New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, Ken Gelder (ed.). London: Palgrave & Macmillan, 177-200.

CONTRIBUTORS University Lecturer, PhD, Finnish Literature, Tampere

SAIJA IsoMAA:

University KAISA KAUKIAINEN: PhD Researcher, MA, Department of Philosophy, History and Art, University of Helsinki

SARI KIVIST6: Professor of Comparative Literature, Tampere University JYRKI KORPUA:

University Teacher, PhD, Comparative Literature, University

of Turku 1v1ARIA LAAKSO:

Postdoctoral Researcher, PhD, Finnish Literature, Tarnpere

University TON! LAHTINEN: Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Academy of Finland), PhD, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University 11rKKO

1.1ANTYNIEMI:

PhD Researcher, MA, Comparative Literature,

Tampere University. SARI PIITIlNEN: Postdoctoral Researcher, PhD, Department of Language and Connnunication Studies, University of JyvaskyHi

JURA MIPOLA:

Postdoctoral Researcher, PhD, Faculty of Social Sciences,

Tampere University HANNA SAMOLA: Postdoctoral Researcher, PhD, Finnish Literature, Tarnpere University ESKO SUORANTA: PhD Researcher, MA, Department of Languages, University of Helsinki JOUNI TEITIlNEN: University Teacher, MA, Comparative Literature, University ofTurku

Ess] VATILO: PhD Researcher, MA, English Philology, Tampere University

INDEX The 5th Wave 86 Adams, Richard xxvii,201, 204205,208,213,223224 The Adventures ofLuther Arkwright, xx,65 70,7274,7680,83 After London 130 Akira 67 Alleg, Henri 40,43 Amsterdam, Steven xxiii The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy 202 AnimalFann 202,205,215,217 Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation 204, 225 Animal Rites 209,225 The Animals ofFarthing Wood 203, 206208,210,215,219220,223 The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World xii, xxxii Arendt, Hannah 28,31,43 Aristotle 6 Ashfall 86 Asimov, Isaac 115, 118 Attack on Titan 67 At\.vood, Margaret x, xvi, xviii, xx,xx~36,45 58,60 64, 70,80,88,101,139,142, 144,156 159,166,180 Aubuchon, Remi 185,199 Auringon ydin xx,45 Baccolini, Raffaella ix x, xxix xxx, xxxii, 3, 24, 65,81,89, 98,103,110,114,117 118, 188,200,208,228,240

Bachman, Richard 93 Banerjee, Suprana 50, 62 Baroni, Raphae1 143 144, 156, 158 Bartleby, the Scrivener 11 Battista, Christina 201, 203,207,215,223 Battle Royale 93 Battlestar Galactica xxvi, 185 188,193 200 Bellah, Rober! N. 86,89,98 Berger, James 140 141,149,158 The Bible xiv, xxiii, 56, 92,94,99,139 Bigendtrilogy 115,118 Bilal, Enki 67 Bioshock Infinite xvii Birdbrain xxvii, xxviii, 47, 227 230,232 241 Black Beauty 205 Bleeding Edge xxi,101 104,106, 108,110,112,114 118 The Blaad afAngels 47 Bloom, Clive 33,43,162,165,181 TheBodyinPain 31,44 Boller, Alessandra 88 89,95,97, 100 Booker, M. Keith xi, xxiii, xxx, 85, 98,103,117,208209,223 Book ofIob 29,38 Book of Revelation (Revelation ofStJohn) 211 Bradbury, Ray 36,67,72,88,98 Brave New World xviii xix, 5, 7 8, 15, 17, 24, 36, 43, 48, 54, 62, 67, 72, 88, 99, 172, 182, 202 Bronte, Emily 176,181

246 Brzezinski, ZbigniewK. 69,81 Bu1gakov, Mikhai1 215 Burdekin, Katherine 48, 53 Canavan, Gerry 198 200 A Canticle/or Leibowitz 130 Caprica xxvii, 185 195,197 200 Carbon Diaries 92, 100 Carlsoll, Thomas 122, 124 127, 129, 135 Carney, Sean ix x, 72, 81 Carroll, Siobhan 235 236, 239 240 Casey, Edward 127, 135 Cass, Kiera 88 Catching Fire 87,94 95,98 Catesby, Robert 75 Cavallaro, Dani 162, 165 166, 170,181 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 122, 136 Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva 73, 81 The Chrysalids 166, 184 C1ayes, Gregory 209,223 Clernent,Aeron 203,206,211,223 Clinton, Bill 79 The Clockwork Orange 48 CloudAtlas 155,158 Cohen, Jeffrey J 165, 170, 181 The Cold Moons 203, 206 208,210,223 Colebrook, C1aire 121,136 Collado-Rodriquez, Francisco 103, 117 Collings, DavidA 131,136 Collins, Suzanne 19,22, 87,93,98101,140 Condie, Ally 88 The Confidence-Man 11 Conrad, Joseph 229 230, 232234,236,239240 Copeland, Marion 203,205,223 Coppola, Francis Ford 176, 181

Index The Core a/the Sun xx, xxvii, 45, 47,4950,52,56,58,6061 , 64 Crornwell,Oliver 69 70,73 74, 83 Crutzen, Paul J. xv, xxxi, 121, 136 The Crying ofLot 49 107 The Culture a/Pain 32,43 Currie, Mark 141, 144, 146, 153, 155, 158 Curtis, Claire B. xi, xxiii, xxxi Dai, Xin ix, xxxi Dalsgaard, Inger H. 104, 114,117 118 Darrn, Colin 203,206,223 Dante 229 Dark Horizons ix, xxx, xxxii, 24,81,98,117 118,240 Darrieussecq, Marie 202 Dashner, James 86 The Dead and the Gone 87, 99 Defoe, Daniel 231 232,241 de Grainville, Jean-Baptiste Fran