Brave Real World
HAVANA TIMES – We often take dystopian* novels as grand parables of society as we fear it could become subjected to the rule of a totalitarian state that turns into a constant control machine for private relationships and our consciences.
When we talk about dystopias, our most common reference is George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949. In this novel, the dictatorship achieves perfection in its instruments of control, and the famous Big Brother, the omnipresent supreme leader of Oceania, the new dystopian state, watches over all from the screens. It is an absolute power that creates a new reality that can be erased and rewritten according to the needs of the official ideology.
Dystopian regimes impose happiness by force under a uniform mold of behavior. This is what Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, published in 1932, teaches us. It presents the brave new world that the character Miranda offers in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this new world peace and well-being reign, but humans are manufactured in laboratories, and education is imparted through hypnotic trances where minds listen to slogans being repeated until fixed in memory.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, a novel written in 1984, is set in an uncertain future in Gilead, which was once the United States. Here, a sect of fundamentalist fanatics impose a theocratic police state. Women are only useful for bearing children under the threat of execution or exile.
The societies these novels describe, subjected to total tyrannies seeking to destroy the individual by nullifying their freedoms, are dystopias that don’t remain in the impossibility of fiction. Far from functioning solely as parables of what we reject as a future way of life, they were possible in the last century, the century of great totalitarian models, and continue to be possible in the twenty-first century, where threats against democracy multiply, even where its institutions seem the strongest.
The archetypal totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, as described by Frank Dikötter in his book Dictators, can be seen as real dystopias: they were based on a single party and, to function as relentless power machines, dependent on a supreme and infallible leader, their omnipresent figure carefully cultivated. This includes those that emerged from Western Europe itself, in countries where liberal democracies were in a state of decay, such as Hitler or Mussolini, to those that were the result of revolutionary cataclysms and wars, like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-sung, who became resurrected emperors surrounded by a mythological aura.
In imagined and real dystopias, the sole leader becomes an omnipresent figure in the lives of citizens. His image, permanently displayed, becomes deified through propaganda apparatuses that strive daily to keep alive what totalitarian marketing has called the cult of personality.
Perhaps no other recent dystopian novel brings us closer to current reality and places us in the realm of what has already been seen and lived than The Prophet’s Song by Paul Lynch, winner of the Booker Prize in England last year.
It doesn’t happen in some distant time or in a mythological country but in real Ireland, in the present. A totalitarian party comes to power, decrees the suspension of guarantees, and under a state of exception unleashes a repressive wave that leads opponents and dissidents to prisons, shoots demonstrators, sows terror in homes, and disappearances multiply. This sparks a state of rebellion, and civil war breaks out.
It is a flawlessly crafted novel, written in dark tones that never neglect the tension, which grows as we progress in learning the fate of the central character, Eilish Stack, a mother who sees her world destroyed under the weight of the relentless political persecution carried out by the secret police, her husband Larry’s imprisonment, the bombing of her house, the death of her children, the escape across the border to England with thousands of others seeking refuge, in the hands of human traffickers.
Everything seems unheard of because it happens in a country where until the day before, democratic rules, constitutional guarantees, courts of justice, independent media —all those factors of daily life we take for granted— were functioning. But what if a new government suddenly appears that denies all of this? There has been a coup, or worse, that government has been freely elected by the citizens themselves.
Dystopia, as we are seeing, can become an everyday story. It’s not just that we fear it could happen. It has happened, it is happening. Many of us have lived it firsthand. It is the possible dystopia, the real dystopia. The dystopia that is at our doorstep. It is the angel with the flaming sword expelling you from the democratic paradise.
*Relating to a very bad or unfair society in which there is a lot of suffering, especially an imaginary society in the future, or to the description of such a society.