British vs. American Dystopia

The other day, a friend asked me about British writers and their fascination with dystopia. She referenced a scene in the television show Sherlock, which included an observation on CCTV cameras. That thought having been sparked (one might blame the framing of the question), a slew of synapses started firing, recalling works from Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four to Lord of the Flies to A Clockwork Orange to V For Vendetta. These British works seem to come at a rate disproportionately greater than the dystopian output from American literature. Why?

The simple answer is that the Brits have more personal experience with dystopian hellscapes. The aforementioned surveillance cameras, the long history of British intelligence networks. There's the still barely-fresh memory of the dismantling of the Empire; all of that power--minus all but the ceremonial glory--turning inward, now bitter for what once was.

Then there's the way that British government seems to act so smoothly on matters of national security as to make our own post-9/11 measures seem like a Keystone Cops production. Americans will hyperventilate for a bit about the newest piece of Homeland Security meddling until the energy escapes our systems and we find another shiny object to focus on (seriously, though, when was the last time you heard anyone wring their hands about the full body scanners?). But the Brits, with that Keep Calm, Carry On ethos, prefer to stew in grim fascination with the creeping menace.

Maybe there's a vestigial American libertarianism at work: we understand government to be a blundering, inefficient thing. It might be a cumbersome, better-door-than-a-window type obstruction for many of us, but we're not exactly worried about a well-oiled Big Brother, are we? Only a misguided, paranoia-mongering ideologue could believe in an incompetent government that is also somehow all-powerful. But in Britain--where "socialism" is not so scary a word--they have a different relationship with government and, if asked to think about it, might nod their heads and say "yeah, I could see that happening" before shuffling on with their lives. This is the psychological aspect of it; the bit that, it seems to me, is the most decisive between American and British attitudes toward dystopia. 

See, the Brits have a greater comfort with grim subject matter and a more natural skill for dark, observational humor. Not that there aren't plenty of American artists who excel in these fields, but the subjects tend to play better with British general audiences than they do with American ones, so you get more of it over there (see Bill Hicks' success in Britain). British culture was incubated over thousands of years on a relatively small island, where there are few places to hide from the near-constant rain. The only attitude that survives something like that is: "well, what can you do?" The Brits, then have less qualms with fatalism, a concept that is anathema to most Americans. Indeed, the philosophy of fatalism--the lack of individual agency--almost rebuts the American Dream. The attempt by American culture to embrace a British-view of the dystopic has two potential outcomes:

1. (Not so likely, in my opinion) The rejection of some near-sacred American values, precipitating the collapse of moral, civic, and economic society. One must clap to keep Tinker Bell alive.
2. (Much more likely) We just won't buy it. A co-worker has commented to me that she could never enjoy dystopian works because she cannot fathom that a society would be allowed to degrade that far, that efficiently. Such a force would naturally be fought against, or crumble under its own weight, or any number of other factors that would keep a Big Brother from being so imposing.

As a dystopic tale gets moving, the Brits roll with the punches and more readily accept the premise. Americans must wonder "how was this allowed to happen?" And American stories often like to provide the answers (think on the V For Vendetta film adaptation, with its more explicit telling of the rise of neo-conservatism fascism, something Alan Moore preferred to leave to implication). I attempted similar explanations in Nos Populus, before I realized that the exposition was getting out of hand. Americans want the background, but that background takes up precious time that can better used on the story itself, a problem even the specifics-demanding reader will concede. We prefer a dystopia that shows us something more familiar.

You've probably seen this comic, outlining the differences between Orwell's fears as he explained them in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's fears, as laid out in Brave New World. They're arguments I've covered before. And I must agree, however strong my love of Orwell, that BNW is the superior dystopia. One of BNW's most intriguing conceits is the character of John the Savage, an outsider who can observe all the shallow and materialistic horror of the World State that the reader might. A British writer, authoring a classic of the genre, depicting a surviving mode of thought that rejects all the assumptions of a terrible future. It's almost enough to upend this theory of mine, if not for the fact that things don't end well for John; death is preferable to the loss of freedom and dignity--at least there's some agency in that. And interestingly, Huxley spent the last 25 years of his life living in California, attempting to attain U.S. citizenship. I'm speculating, but it seems likely that Huxley felt more at home among a less fatalistic bunch.

One can point to other exceptions. Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (which was no small influence on a teenaged-me; Lewis is still one of my favorites) is a lesser-revered work among the dystopias, largely for the aforementioned problems of exposition. Lewis does his due diligence in transforming his contemporary American polity from the New Deal to the total takeover of the Huey Long-esque Buzz Windrip. No far-flung, sci-fi speculation in this one. As with much of Lewis' work, ICHH gets most of its mileage out of broad caricatures of middle-American nastiness, a farcical formula that works for a while, but quickly starts to hit too close to home, begging on the last nerve of the reader. And while ICHH is a thorough and convincing narrative of demagoguery, one has to want to believe in the possibilities, as I did in those nauseating Patriot Act days. It should be no surprise that the book experienced a significant revival during the Bush II Administration.

The Handmaid's Tale nearly fits, too. However, 1), Margaret Atwood is Canadian and, culturally speaking, Canada has nearly as much in common with the U.K. as it does with the U.S. And 2), Handmaid is mostly notable for its feminist take on the dystopic, an angle that at times seems more relevant than what most of the rest of the genre has to offer (the stream-of-consciousness crutch notwithstanding).

The Hunger Games seems to fit the bill. But how much of it's monstrous success is owed to the fact that Katniss Everdeen is exactly what Americans want to see in that situation, or imagine themselves being: an able and eventually-willing freedom fighter. A little bit of pathos goes a long way. Though, as I've explained before, I still have not read the third book, so I'm ready to take another hit to my theory should the book end poorly enough.

I may have to concede the point on Fahrenheit 451, pending a re-reading. However, it's not like we can't accuse Bradbury of just being a crotchety old man. 

As for my own work (just for comparison; my work has not earned mention alongside these others), Nos Populus started out as a dystopia of sorts--the idea first sprouted after reading It Can't Happen Here. But those elements were ratcheted back over the drafts, as I focused more on the building of a potential dystopian society and the struggle against that construction. Some of this was because of the verisimilitude I had striven to set up; Nos Populus takes place in something of a separate time-line from our real world, but the line only split a few years ago and it remains recognizable to us. I hope. There was only so much--logically and narratively-speaking--that I could allow President Ward to do while suspending the reader's disbelief. And I had included a fair amount of exposition as it was. So we get a despot who's only a fraction as powerful as he was originally conceived, but perhaps all the more terrifying because of it--we recognize Ward.

And perhaps some of it was also my American brain getting in the way, never allowing me to slip too far into bleak paranoia and cynicism. To recognize, at the very least, that I needed readers not to throw down the book in disgust. When my friends/editors commented that the book was rather bleak, I took it as a badge of honor (no pandering crowd-pleaser, me). And yet I still found myself fixing that where I could, attempting to balance plausibility with palatability.

And it's the plausible and the palatable that mark the difference. The Brits have a different sense of the plausible when it comes to government overreach (if that phrase means anything within the dystopic realm). So, too, their stronger palate for grim fatalism, which allows for a less diluted--or alternately less labored--realization of the dystopian state. With these elements working together, their dystopic myths can stretch and grow in ways that American literature won't equal. Not that we're interested in trying to.