A popular witticism holds that bookstores will soon be carrying dystopian fiction in the “current events” section as our contemporary reality comes increasingly to resemble and surpass the bleakest imaginings of bygone speculative writers. But, to be fair, dystopias have always been a commentary on the present- they’re always set in the day just after tomorrow, assuming things don’t change today.
And so, dystopian novels are always partisan in the sense that they always have an opposition in mind: the Communists, eugenicists, censors, radical Islam, evangelical Christianity, nationalists, the liberal left, the fascist right. If these guys get power, we’re screwed. If they continue in power, we’re screwed. By implication, if we get power, liberty and human flourishing are assured, I suppose. To a great extent, the success of these books depends on how plausible we find their suggestions about today’s villians.
Which is perhaps why Kay Dick’s novella They: a Sequence of Unease is so damn scary; I’ve been reading at quite a clip lately and this one threw me for a loop. Because the author tells us almost nothing about who her villians, the eponymous “they,” are or why they’re doing the terrible things they are. It feels more like we’re thrust into a world where brutality has become so commonplace it no longer bothers to anounce or justify itself. It just is.
The novella is really a series of interlocking stories set in Sussex on the South East English coast. Our narrator lives there amongst friends and neighbors, largely of an artistic bent, and many of whom appear once in the book and never again. Characters come and go; their names are unimportant and their identities are interchangeable. It is never clear what gender we might ascribe to the first-person narrator, and Dick preferred a genderless, bisexual voice that mirrored her own self-identity.
Identity hardly matters in this world, aside from being a source of trouble. A popular topic of whispered conversation among this little community are “they”: they’ve “taken another book last night”; they’ve come for “the books at Oxford now”; they’ve taken a painter to be blinded; if they find out the narrator writes letters, “they would amputate your hands and cut out your tongue;” when they came for a poet friend, they held her hand in a fire for eight minutes (one of those details you don’t forget); they did it solely because she resisted. It’s not just books and art that arouses their ire; high emotions will do it. They seem to resent all personal commitment and expressions of individuality. They’re plural because they always come in groups, and they’re always unannounced.
But, who are they? No one feels compelled to explain any of that, aside from a guess that they number over a million now. They’re clearly not a government militia; they don’t seem to have a state mandate. They don’t represent any ideology or way of thinking. In her Paris Review appreciation of the book, Lucy Scholes refers to them as “Philistines.” And they seem like an angry mob, yet eventually, it is revealed they have the abilty to take people away for psychological damage/reprogramming in large grey buildings. But, why? Simply because they resent non-conformity and expressions of individual identity? No higher purpose is ever revealed. We know them mainly by their hatreds.
There’s a creeping sense of terror about all of this, along with a dreamlike bafflement. Reading the stories is a bit like tumbling down a mountain and trying desperately to grab onto something, anything. I was reminded more of the Twilight Zone than 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. The oneiric tone seems intended to reveal less about our politics than it does about ourselves. “They” come from somewhere inside the human soul; they are us. We can’t root them out.
What the novella does so effectively is to depict the censorious impulse as an attack on selfhood for its own sake. They don’t need a reason, and they can’t be reasoned with.
And it seems that quite often, when we attempt to defend free expression and speech rights, in the real world, we try to meet unreasonable people halfway by conceding that the process of allowing all ideas, no matter how repulsive, to be aired is messy; but it will result in the truth winning out. Let us all express ourselves, please, and the ends, it is hoped, will justify the means in a free marketplace of ideas. The problem is we also need to concede that societies have often invested heavily in the worst ideas in the marketplace: the sugared lies, knee-jerk bigotries, the multiform manias and hysterias. It doesn’t always work out. I think Isaiah Berlin’s key insight (in a life spent making them) was that our values can be absolutely true and still come into irreconciliable conflicts, such that we cannot but do damage to one by fully honoring another. In other words, the results will always be messy and somewhat tragic, and we do ourselves no favors in denying that.
But, of course, it might be the wrong approach to constantly put advocates of free expression on the stand to defend their position in the first place. We tend to forget that the impulse to silence other people, to tell them how to live, and what to think, and how to express themselves is, in itself, morally represensible, an attack on the unique unrepeatability of the individual self. It’s as violent as trying to remove another person’s face. We all have moments of wishing others would just shut-up! What the novella seems to do is take that impulse, unexplained and unjustified, to its terrible conclusion. What if the mob simply refuses to let others live their lives? And maybe the impulse really is as simple as some people not being able to cotton to the fact of other people thinking, acting, speaking, or living in ways of which they do not personally approve, and not therefore giving them veto power over it.
Ironically enough, when They appeared in 1977, no one tried to ban or burn it; they did the worse thing and ignored it. The stories were an anomaly in Kay Dick’s work, which tended to be about creative people in happier circumstances. She lived a literary and artistic life and produced this singular masterpiece that is anomalous in dystopian fiction as well. It only recently reemerged from oblivion.
But, I think anyone whose obeyed the strange and unsocial compulsion to create things in a largely indifferent world has dealt with some form of “they,” usually speaking from deep inside their own mind, telling the creator to just please shut up! Creation can seem so futile as to be an act of madness. What’s scarier is how “they” can get to us and silence us before any expression ever takes place.
And so, what are YOU creating, pondering, playing, watching, reading, or expressing this weekend?
