The Cozy Book Corner No. 12: Dystopian Fiction and Its Current Relevance, Part I

Welcome to my Monday 

bookish feature!

In each weekly post, I explore 

my thoughts on several 

book-related topics.

The disastrous, pernicious effects of the 2016 election results are being felt by everyone in this country, although some refuse to acknowledge them as being, in fact, just that: pernicious. 

Donald J. Trump, who so obviously and thoroughly used to enjoy telling his reality show participants, "You're fired!" (yes, the glee was evident on his face) is now the president of this great country. From "The Apprentice" and "Celebrity Apprentice" to the White House....how insane is that?! However, Trump has always shown his true colors. He's a classic narcissist who loves power and control. Now, unfortunately, he has it. Totally. I say "totally" because it's very evident that few in the GOP are opposing him. Perhaps, and hopefully, that situation will soon change, especially if solid proof emerges of Trump's ties with Putin. 

Unbelievably, this country is now being led by a man who has a personality disorder, a man who tolerates no opposition, a man who attacks the media simply because they are reporting the truth about his own "fake news", his own "alternative facts".

I am totally amazed that these things are happening in these United States of America. 

In the wake of the sweeping chaos created by "The Trump Tsunami", I've discovered that the popularity of dystopian novels such as Brave New World and 1984 has soared. Indeed, this has been pointed out in several articles on the Web, such as the one by Madeline Raynor at EW, published on January 31, 2017. In this article, titled "Classic dystopian novels' popularity surges in Trump's America", Raynor names the novels that are selling out on Amazon, as a result of the madness we're seeing coming from the White House.

The Number One spot is held by George Orwell's 1984. While this novel is a satirical look at socialist, and not fascist, totalitarianism, the main theme is that "Big Brother is watching you", and thus, one cannot express one's views freely. This is a salient feature of all dictatorships, be they of the Left or the Right. Views opposing those of the reigning regime are stifled, silenced. 

We have certainly seen the stifling of opposition by the Trump administration, and very recently, too. Respected journalistic entities such as CNN and "The New York Times" were recently banned by Trump sycophant Sean Spicer from an informal White House briefing, known as a "gaggle". Trump considers CNN and "The New York Times", as well as other so-called "liberal" (translation: objective) news media, to be purveyors of "fake news", for the simple reason that they criticize his policies. In his paranoid egotism however, he perceives them as merely being personally  "antagonistic" toward him. Conservative news media were, however, invited to attend the briefing, precisely because they support his policies, whether or not they are unfair and cruel. This points to a stifling of opposing views, and an endorsement of those views that line up with the Trump administration's take on reality. 

The second book mentioned in the Raynor article is It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, which I have just purchased from Amazon. The Goodreads synopsis reads, in part, as follows: "A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press. Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today’s news."

From the quote above, it seems chillingly evident that Lewis actually wrote a prophetic novel, as his main character bears a frightening, and very close resemblance, to Donald Trump. Indeed, one reviewer on Goodreads, Michael Finocchiaro, pointed out, in his review of Lewis's novel, that " all the bookshops there had Roth's The Plot Against America and It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis." (He's referring to bookstores in London.) You can check out his entire review in the link below.

What strikes me the most about the Goodreads synopsis is this part of the quote: "....with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press." This sounds too similar to Trump's agenda for comfort. While Trump has not concentrated his so-called "reforms" on sex, the other parts of this quote do indeed sound eerily like some of his campaign promises. He, too, wants to get rid of "welfare cheats", as well as "crime" (in the person of illegal immigrants), and "a liberal press." Bingo! Lewis must have had a crystal ball hidden somewhere in his closet.

Here's another incredibly prescient, highly relevant quote, this one directly from Lewis's novel: "I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.”

I got chills up my spine as I read this. It sounds remarkably like Trump's attacks on the American press. The tone of paranoia and even contempt is very much the same. This is truly amazing, as this novel was first published in 1935. Yet, here we are, in 2017, seeing it become a reality!

In third place on Raynor's list is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1932, this novel envisions a world in which there are no nations, but a World State in which everyone is "happy", due to the use of drugs, brainwashing, and genetic engineering. The year in which the events in the novel take place is 2540 AD. I don't think, however, that such a dire situation would actually become a reality in this country, at least, with Trump at the helm. He's just too much of a nationalist for this scenario to actually become real. Future presidents, though, could bring us closer to this horrible future. But at present, perhaps this book doesn't represent much of a prophetic warning to Americans.

In fourth place in Raynor's article is The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Ashwood. In this novel, which I have been wanting to read for some time now, there's a totalitarian state that actually assigns certain fertile women -- known as "handmaids" to certain men, for the express purpose of having children with them, as fertility rates are very low in this future society.

Although the above scenario sounds like a nightmare, as sex is totally divorced from love and family, and engaged in only as "a duty to humanity", I really don't see this as ever happening in this country, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. First of all, something would have to cause fertility rates to fall. Then, the whole structure of our society would have to be drastically modified in order to force fertile women to have sex with men they neither love nor wish to commit to. What kind of something could have such an effect on world fertility rates? Besides, we Americans have always been averse to theocracies such as the one depicted in this novel. Surely our constitution would ensure that this type of government never took hold here. Right? Right? On the other hand, I don't know.... The Alt-Right now seems to have come into its own, alarmingly enough. And Christian Fundamentalism is unfortunately pretty much aligned with the extreme right-wing values of this group, as well as those of the Tea Party. So one does have to wonder.....

Of the four novels mentioned above, I think the one that most closely predicts, and mirrors, our present situation is It Can't Happen Here. In light of current events, this title is also most ironic, because, sadly, it IS happening here. Raynor even references a Salon article by Malcolm Harris, published on September 29, 2015, and titled, "It really can happen here: The novel that foreshadowed Trump's authoritarian appeal". There's a very telling quote from this article in Raynor's own. In it, Harris states: “With his careful mix of plainspoken honesty and reactionary delusion, Trump is following an old rhetorical playbook, one defined and employed successfully in the 1936 presidential campaign of Senator Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip.” Indeed!

There's another dystopian novel I'd like to point out, although perhaps it doesn't completely mimic what's currently going on in the chaotic tangle that is the Trump White House. It's Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. In this incredibly powerful novel, which I've read and reviewed (I have not read the ones mentioned above), books are completely forbidden, in the interests of keeping the masses happy and numbed to anything that would create dissension. There are firemen in the book, but their task, instead of saving lives, is that of rooting out hidden book collections, for the purpose of burning them.

Given Trump's penchant for attacking those who disagree with him, who knows but that this might actually happen in the not-so-distant future, except not quite in the way envisioned by Bradbury. In fact, this unbalanced man might go as far as to seize total control of the Internet, as well as of all publications, whether magazines, newspapers, printed books, and ebooks. It sounds like a totally nightmarish scenario, but we thought someone like Trump would only remain a fictional character in a novel written back in the 1930s by one Sinclair Lewis.....

As this is a topic of high current relevance, I will have to continue exploring it in a subsequent post next week. I hope to bring up more dystopian novels that contain totalitarian elements, and thus, are currently MUST READS.

Online Links

Madeline Raynor Article:EW

Malcolm Harris Article: Salon

Michael Finocchiaro Review

What are your thoughts 

on this topic?

Please leave a comment

and let me know!

Book Review: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Hardcover, Special Edition, 227 pages
Harper Voyager, March 28, 2013
(first published 1953)
Classics, Dystopian Fiction, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction

Book Synopsis:

The terrifyingly prophetic novel of a post-literate future.
.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.

The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.

Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock. 

  

My Review

Ray Bradbury’s books make for immediate, mesmerizing, entirely compulsive reading. His prose is electrifying in its use of poetic metaphor and dramatic syntax. In his novels, the reader is instantly plunged into an alien culture, or a terrifying future, and is not really released even after the last page is turned.

I had been postponing reading this novel for years. I am, after all, a confirmed bibliophile. Reading a novel with a plot involving the burning of books would, I kept telling myself, be too traumatic for me.

I finally decided to wade in.

Need I say that I only put the book down when I absolutely had to, when reality intruded? The novel carried me along on its relentless wave of narrative. Of course, I tried not to picture the books burning as I read, but Bradbury wouldn’t let me. Not when he was describing them as living creatures, dying, their pigeon wings flapping…. The fact that I managed to endure this at all is a real tribute to the greatness of his writing.

The characters are indelibly imprinted on my brain. The most compelling, of course, is the protagonist, Montag. Equally compelling are Faber, who is obviously Montag’s alter ego, and the numinous Clarisse. She is the one who first awakens Montag to the futility of denying his own soul, the stirrings of thought and penetrating questions that reading invariably arouses. The most tragic character is Beatty, who struggles hard against his love of books, in his work as chief fireman. This struggle culminates in a final, ironic conflagration. Montag’s wife, Mildred, is to be pitied, since she is unable to acknowledge her emptiness, her consuming loneliness. She pushes away the power and beauty to be found in books. She refuses to come out of denial, preferring ‘the family’, a banal cast of characters she endlessly watches in the living room ‘wall-to-wall TV’, in order to anesthetize the deepest longings of her soul.

As I read, I became aware of a deeper sense of discomfort, underneath that elicited by the burning of books. Due to my own life experiences, I, along with this disturbed society, had been unconsciously longing for a world in which no one would ever get his or her feelings hurt – a world where everyone’s rights would be respected, especially those of minorities.

Bradbury gave me a sobering look at such a world, and it was absolutely terrifying. It was “American Idol” gone wild, a world in which people no longer thought, felt, or even communicated on a soul level with other human beings. Instead, they spent all their time being ‘happy’, through mindless, ongoing entertainment.

I realized that I didn’t want to live in such a world; it would mean the total annihilation of what makes us most deeply human – the ability to dream, to wonder, to ponder the deep truths of life.

Books and the questions they raise are incompatible with living in a world where nobody would offend anyone else. Books disturb, probe, anger and challenge. Books are flawed at times, due to their authors’ all-too-human penchant for furthering their own pet theories, however twisted they might seem to a reader. Books can make us squirm, for they can force us to face the unwanted realities we try to bury.

There is still a part of me that thinks that books such as Hitler's Mein Kampf should be burned, or at least, allowed to expire by going, and staying, out of print. The Marquis de Sade also comes to mind as an author of books with a markedly offensive subject matter. Then there’s Anais Nin, the notorious 20th-century writer of erotica. Although her prose is absolutely brilliant (I have read excerpts from her books), the subject matter of her books is prurient in the extreme. One of her books even chronicles the incestuous relationship she had with her father…

The problem is, where do you draw the line? Who decides which books merit extinction?

I don’t have a final, satisfactory answer.

And so I am left feeling restless and slightly depressed, although I’m glad to have read this novel, nevertheless. It has caused me to ponder what I really and truly believe regarding the banning of books, and their potentially harmful influences.

Yet another uncomfortable element of the plot is Montag’s desperate, evil act toward the end of the novel. I suppose it is inevitable, however. It is indeed immoral, but then, so is the entire, nihilistic society he is a part of. It is the desperate act of a man who has turned on a symbol of that society, and so, turned on himself, in a sense, in order to be reborn as a new man, a man who thinks and feels, even if doing so causes him some measure of unhappiness. This act could, itself, be considered a harmful influence on a reader, since Montag evades punishment. Yet, as an act of rebellion, of a misplaced sort of justice, it is totally fitting. Therein lies “the treason of the artist”, as Ursula K. LeGuin puts it. For the artist makes meaning out of pain, suffering, and tragedy. Furthermore, this is also part of the value to be found in books.

The symbol of rebirth is ubiquitous in the novel. At one point, the myth of the Phoenix is mentioned. Ironically, civilization is being reborn out of the very fire it has used to destroy the very objects that had given it meaning – books.

By the end of the novel, groups of people have quietly begun the reconstruction, the return to reading. It is a movement that is slowly gathering momentum. Civilization, suggests Bradbury, as Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz was to affirm years later, is constantly rising from the ashes of every Dark Age in order to reinvent itself.

So I know that I will be re-reading this book sometime in the near future, as I intend to do with Miller’s. Both are books that apparently dwell on despair, only to end with a feeling of hope.

Bradbury has once again sparked my imagination and tickled my intellect. He also refuses to let me forget his incredible take on a future that may or may not turn out to become all too real, even in the digital age.

About The Author
 

(From Goodreads)

Ray Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.

His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state.

Other Bradbury works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies.

  

Mr. Bradbury passed away on June 5, 2012.

Online Links

Wikipedia

Website

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