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Over the Green Wall
Oct. 11th, 2023 03:31 pmEvery now and again the politics book club decides to read some fiction, and this time we decided to read a Russian sci-fi classic I had never heard of, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
We was written in 1921 and as far as I can tell is the first entry in the sci-fi subgenre of far-future dystopias, predating such classics as Brave New World and 1984. Frankly, knowing that Orwell read and apparently loved We seems to retroactively dim the luster of 1984 a little bit, as they are in many ways very similar, so I must revise my estimation of Orwell’s imaginative faculties downward a little bit.
We is the personal diary of the mathematician D-503, a chief engineer of a glass spaceship called the Integral, who begins keeping his diary with the intent of putting it on the spaceship to explain the wonders of life under the One State to the aliens that the One State intends to use the Integral to conquer. It’s unclear to me if the aliens actually exist or if the One State just figures they probably exist, but that’s not really the point. The point is that D-503 is a model One State cipher, until he isn’t.
By “a model One State cipher” I mean that D-503 is an absolutely insufferable STEMlord with not only not an ounce of poetry in his soul, but also almost no capacity to think thoughts in any way other than mathematically, which he is convinced–and, sadly, so is the rest of his civilization–that this constitutes having reached some sort of “higher” capacity for thought rather than just having a very, very narrow field of aptitude. The One State has sealed itself off entirely from the natural world by means of a big green glass wall whose electric-fence-like extension goes so far into the air that even birds can’t fly over the city. Even the food is synthetic. While we’re a hundred years out from the specific events and discourses in revolutionary Russia that Zamyatin was apparently parodying here, it’s interesting to me, as an American a hundred years later, that if you let your Communism go down the path of elevating Taylorism and rationality and technological progress over everything else you seem to end up with something that looks suspiciously like the hideous Apple Store, Soylent-drinking future that today’s worst Silicon Valley technobros are working to bring into being.
Things begin to go tits-up for D-503 shortly after he begins keeping his diary. In traditional Western literature fashion the disrupting influence here is that he falls in love with a hot lady. Part of me is rolling my eyes at this so hard they are falling out of my head–I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in my life where I didn’t carry a certain amount of disdain for literature’s most shopworn trick of elevating heterosexual-romantic love to the highest moral and societal good by relentlessly finding ways to portray it as some sort of oppressed scrappy underdog–but that is not really the point. The point is that D-503, having developed this immediate and morbid fascination with the mysterious rebel I-330, finds all his comfortably conformist thinking utterly upended, and proceeds to torch basically his entire life and all his prior quiet State-approved relationships, blundering his way into the outer edges of a rebellion that he doesn’t know anything about and can’t quite decide if he supports or not (he’s far too confused). The plot, however, is not really the point; the point is the portrait of a man losing his entire sense of self through the harrowing process of discovering he has a self, when he had previously been a content little cog in the machine; the point is the little rebellions and dramas of the people around him that he’s never been able to really concern himself with (including his ex-girlfriend, O, who seems to have had a quietly rebellious streak all along that D kind of blows off as weak-mindedness in a classically misogynistic way); the point is the increasingly absurd bad rhetoric and cheap tricks and self-serving logic of the One State and its “unanimously elected” Benefactor (anyone who votes against the Benefactor is clearly nuts and their votes shouldn’t be counted, you see). The high point of the worldbuilding, to me, was the discussion of the state department for poetry, which gives us the funniest, most painfully bad doggerel I have read in a hot minute, as well as teasing me with the possibilities of “the immortal tragedy He Who Was Late for Work.”
The language is really fun, which I’m assuming means the original language was also really fun, because I do not have the grounding in Russian to do anything other than assume that Natasha Randall was chosen as translator here because she’s good at her job. But it does a good job of both being very descriptive and making D-503 sound like he’s absolutely, grade A insane at all times, always being impaled on people’s javelin-like eyelashes and being afraid of the square root of -1 and letting his sentences trail off into ellipses. Truly a unique reading experience. I’m sure the book club will have a lot to say about modernism and technofuturism and stuff but for right now I just wish I had enough brainpower to write the tragic poem He Who Was Late for Work.
We was written in 1921 and as far as I can tell is the first entry in the sci-fi subgenre of far-future dystopias, predating such classics as Brave New World and 1984. Frankly, knowing that Orwell read and apparently loved We seems to retroactively dim the luster of 1984 a little bit, as they are in many ways very similar, so I must revise my estimation of Orwell’s imaginative faculties downward a little bit.
We is the personal diary of the mathematician D-503, a chief engineer of a glass spaceship called the Integral, who begins keeping his diary with the intent of putting it on the spaceship to explain the wonders of life under the One State to the aliens that the One State intends to use the Integral to conquer. It’s unclear to me if the aliens actually exist or if the One State just figures they probably exist, but that’s not really the point. The point is that D-503 is a model One State cipher, until he isn’t.
By “a model One State cipher” I mean that D-503 is an absolutely insufferable STEMlord with not only not an ounce of poetry in his soul, but also almost no capacity to think thoughts in any way other than mathematically, which he is convinced–and, sadly, so is the rest of his civilization–that this constitutes having reached some sort of “higher” capacity for thought rather than just having a very, very narrow field of aptitude. The One State has sealed itself off entirely from the natural world by means of a big green glass wall whose electric-fence-like extension goes so far into the air that even birds can’t fly over the city. Even the food is synthetic. While we’re a hundred years out from the specific events and discourses in revolutionary Russia that Zamyatin was apparently parodying here, it’s interesting to me, as an American a hundred years later, that if you let your Communism go down the path of elevating Taylorism and rationality and technological progress over everything else you seem to end up with something that looks suspiciously like the hideous Apple Store, Soylent-drinking future that today’s worst Silicon Valley technobros are working to bring into being.
Things begin to go tits-up for D-503 shortly after he begins keeping his diary. In traditional Western literature fashion the disrupting influence here is that he falls in love with a hot lady. Part of me is rolling my eyes at this so hard they are falling out of my head–I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in my life where I didn’t carry a certain amount of disdain for literature’s most shopworn trick of elevating heterosexual-romantic love to the highest moral and societal good by relentlessly finding ways to portray it as some sort of oppressed scrappy underdog–but that is not really the point. The point is that D-503, having developed this immediate and morbid fascination with the mysterious rebel I-330, finds all his comfortably conformist thinking utterly upended, and proceeds to torch basically his entire life and all his prior quiet State-approved relationships, blundering his way into the outer edges of a rebellion that he doesn’t know anything about and can’t quite decide if he supports or not (he’s far too confused). The plot, however, is not really the point; the point is the portrait of a man losing his entire sense of self through the harrowing process of discovering he has a self, when he had previously been a content little cog in the machine; the point is the little rebellions and dramas of the people around him that he’s never been able to really concern himself with (including his ex-girlfriend, O, who seems to have had a quietly rebellious streak all along that D kind of blows off as weak-mindedness in a classically misogynistic way); the point is the increasingly absurd bad rhetoric and cheap tricks and self-serving logic of the One State and its “unanimously elected” Benefactor (anyone who votes against the Benefactor is clearly nuts and their votes shouldn’t be counted, you see). The high point of the worldbuilding, to me, was the discussion of the state department for poetry, which gives us the funniest, most painfully bad doggerel I have read in a hot minute, as well as teasing me with the possibilities of “the immortal tragedy He Who Was Late for Work.”
The language is really fun, which I’m assuming means the original language was also really fun, because I do not have the grounding in Russian to do anything other than assume that Natasha Randall was chosen as translator here because she’s good at her job. But it does a good job of both being very descriptive and making D-503 sound like he’s absolutely, grade A insane at all times, always being impaled on people’s javelin-like eyelashes and being afraid of the square root of -1 and letting his sentences trail off into ellipses. Truly a unique reading experience. I’m sure the book club will have a lot to say about modernism and technofuturism and stuff but for right now I just wish I had enough brainpower to write the tragic poem He Who Was Late for Work.