Huxley, Bradbury, then Atwood: Dystopian fiction is a reality
Op-Ed by Taleen El Gharib, Staff Writer
January 20th, 2021
Fiction does not always remain fiction. After all, life reproduces the arts, does it not?
It may seem quite farfetched, but the issues posed today have been thoroughly and uncoincidentally discussed many years prior to their occurrence.
Although some may find comfort in enjoying a good book every once in a while, flipping through the pages that thoroughly describe the harrowing events of the 21st century becomes quite eerie and unsettling. Novels we once thought came from the vast world of imagination and the deepest levels of the human’s unkempt mind are actually reflecting our reality.
Yet, the solution seems to be easy. If the novels written many years ago posed a problem, chances are they also included a potential solution that we may also eventually consider. However, with the interplay of disruptive elements such as politics, capitalism, globalization, and the slow but seemingly inevitable loss of touch with humanity, it may seem impossible to recreate the happy endings found in our favorite novels.
It goes beyond Twain predicting the internet in 1898, Orwell foreseeing the creation of the helicopter in 1949, and Verne’s journey that may as well have inspired the 1959 moon landing back when his novel was written in 1865—dreams of the greatest figures in English and American literature. One often indulges in literature as a form of escape, only to be met with their own dreadful reality. Parallels are so easily drawn between the world that exists in pages and the world we live in today. It is the fact that people were so consumed with its fiction that they did not consider the possibility of it foreshadowing their future.
This paper will touch on the works of Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury, and most importantly, analyze the relevance of Margaret Atwood’s writing today.
Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”: The similarities and what they mean
These are two very similar, yet vastly different books that expose the same theme of dystopia. Each book redefines true happiness, although it differs from what we know it to be. It is not euphoria, not a moment of serenity, not time with a loved one, not the smell of a home-cooked meal. Their definitions seem quite strange yet are so easily understood.
To Huxley, it was a medically administered surge of dopamine, a “feel good” drug. To Bradbury, it was a world in which no man was better than the other, “every man the image of every other” (talk about extreme communism).
Bradbury questions the role of mass media, and how it has become people’s source of happiness; it is a distraction from reality and a bid to further isolate people from their humanity.
Very much like “Fahrenheit 451”, children no longer seek the world of literature as they are transitioning away from intellectuality. Their parents distract them with a variety of technologies, from iPads to television to gaming consoles that will later on dominate their lives as they grow older. Soon, childhood will become a mere phase in which children become preoccupied and disconnected—a phase in which they were meant to gradually learn emotional intelligence is being replaced with distractions.
Today, the novel raises the following question: do we control technology, or does it control us? Note that “Fahrenheit 451” was written in the 1950s, a time in which simple devices such as radios, automatic washing machines, sewing machines, and televisions were still new inventions. Bradbury foresaw a future in which those machines would dominate our day-to-day lives as a result of technological development and mass media.
An altered definition of happiness surfaced when technology gradually became more and more essential and present in daily life. Right now, in the midst of a pandemic, it is impossible to function without any form of technology, especially with the shift towards online learning and remote work. This year has resulted in a permanent integration of technology into people’s lives, even more than it already was.
Both Huxley and Bradbury wrote about dehumanization at the hands of technological development for the ultimate goal of eradicating unhappiness.
However, nowadays, is it even possible to define happiness? What is a utopian society? Clearly not what we are currently living in.
Both “Brave New World” and “Fahrenheit 451” mention futuristic societies that strip away citizens’ human emotion, human interaction is made obsolete, and one’s free will is destroyed. As the leading writers of their time for being such imaginative minds, we are forced to question how they were able to foresee such nightmarish outcomes of science and technology.
Science has dangerously progressed beyond its capacity. Although scientific developments continue to provide the world with many benefits, the lack of regulation has driven the world into a brick wall.
Today’s society is accurately mimicking the events of dystopian fiction:
- The worldwide war on drugs: “feel good” drug use has increased by 30% between 2009 and 2018. This is mainly due to the inability to cope with political, social, or economic crises. As well, a higher increase in drug use is expected post-2020.
- Mass surveillance: Big Brother has surpassed electronic surveillance methods such as security cameras. We are being surveilled in the comfort of our own homes, by devices that are always found in the palms of our hands—smartphones—far beyond Bradbury’s expectations.
- Consumer culture: Let’s not forget that the response of the former president of the United Stated, George Bush, after the 9/11 attack encouraged what Boston University’ Andrew Bacevich called a “credit-fueled consumer binge”—or in other words, more shopping.
- Authoritarian regimes have made a comeback: the pandemic has facilitated the revival of authoritarianism. This is due to major shifts in power that encourage finding comfort in subjugation, which began when there started being a gradual increase in mistrust among people. Why is media referred to as “the media”, as though it were this independent entity? As trust is shifted from media to a much more powerful entity, people are surrendering themselves to a supposedly “trustworthy” authority. For one to seek freedom and a democracy, one must seek factuality. However, as soon as people have surrendered themselves to those in power and no longer have media in their field of vision, authoritarianism takes advantage of the growing “us vs. them” mentality.
The shift towards dystopian fiction is happening right before our eyes. Some people have started accepting this and have chosen to comply with it, and this is a result of the increasing comfort in subjugation.
Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”: a possible future or an existing reality?
*Note that this section is based on Atwood’s novel published in 1985, and not the television series. Events in the series are greatly exaggerated and are much more violent.
In a society with dangerously low fertility rates, the United States is replaced by the Republic of Gilead, a Christian totalitarian and fundamentalist state in which fertile women are assigned to elite families to bear their children. Those women are stripped of their identity and become property of the rich.
Although some might think that Atwood so brilliantly came up with this very imaginative plot, an interview that was conducted with her in 2019 proved otherwise, as she revealed what her inspiration was for her novel. Atwood insisted that “the terrifying events of the novel all have their precedents in some of the darkest chapters in world history”.
In the interview, she showed many real newspaper clippings she collected over many years as inspiration for “The Handmaid’s Tale”.
She explained: ‘Women were forced to have babies.’ This is an article about Ceaușescu and Romania. He passed laws that said that each woman had to have four babies. They had to take pregnancy tests once a month and if they weren’t pregnant, they had to give a valid reason as to why that was not the case. ‘The latest sicko Red ruling was announced by cold-blooded Romanian president Nicolas [sic] Ceaușescu, who wants women to have more babies so the country would get richer.’ It was this policy that led to an excess of children ending up in Romanian orphanages, which then became a scandal around the world because of their inhumane conditions.
Atwood did not forge a plot by using her imagination, but rather integrated a collection of real article snippets from newspapers at the time in order to put our reality into words. Everything in “The Handmaid’s Tale” was an alarming truth.
Unlike older figures in literature, Atwood reported events of the real world. They were no longer predictions, but rather harsh realities. Although it might be difficult to believe, there has been an alarming increase in infertility rates over the last 60 years or so (around the 1960s, the “Decade of Development”). The Office for National Statistics published a report in 2019 comparing the live births per thousand for the population of the UK in 1947 (20.5) and in 2018 (11.1), and there is a notable decrease. There has also been a growing need to treat male fertility (12.4% in 2004 to 21.3% in 2017). This proves that the reasons behind decreasing fertility rates are not only social, but biological as well.
Atwood’s initial concern was Ronald Reagan’s election in 1981, which inspired her feminist perspective, since his presidency restored conservatism and the realignment with religious political organizations. Yet, the 2016 presidential elections revived the fear of the violation of women’s rights. Atwood’s Republic of Gilead was a religious dystopic vision—a theocracy. Donald Trump’s election as president brought back Christian conservatism and the concern regarding Roe v. Wade only grew.
The control of reproduction and child distribution (or rather, forcible family separation) resurged, similar to Adolf Hitler’s practices during the second World War, where up to 400,000 ‘Aryan’-looking children were stolen from their families. Donald Trump also supported forced separation through his crackdown on immigration policies.
In retrospect, “The Handmaid’s Tale” was no warning, but a wakeup call. It is proof that history will continue to repeat itself, and that our own free will is not worth the paper it’s printed on.