We will continue our discussion of We

 

3-2 Tuesday

 

Today’s topic

We will continue our discussion of We.

 

Course management

Your SF definitions (part 2) assignment is due by 5pm tomorrow!

 

Following up on the Great Operation

One reason why the end of novel is so haunting, at least for me, is that the Operation raises a question: would real-world authorities do something like that if they could—ostensibly for reasons of security and/or efficiency because so many atrocities can be made to seem rhetorically reasonable by dressing them up ideologically? Maybe a better question is: do existing sociopolitical structures already engage in something like the Great Operation if we understand the Operation allegorically? How are our capacities for imagination—for thinking outside of the given sociocultural box that is in place to preserve an existing socioeconomic hierarchy—manipulated and/or suppressed?

Start-of-class discussion

1.  Borenstein on We and the logic of synecdoche. Contributions?

2.  Book covers: what aspect of the novel does each book cover attempt to capture?

 

 

Introductory quotes

 

“Zamyatin became convinced that technological progress alone–when it is divorced from moral and spiritual progress–not only does not lead to the improvement of human nature, but threatens to crowd out that which is human in human beings.” — a critic of the novel

 

“Real literature only happens when it is written not by dutiful and well-meaning functionaries, but by madmen, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics.” – Zamyatin’s writerly credo

We in the 20^th and 21^st century: discussion

 

We has a strong legacy: all modern dystopias emerge from its pages.

We is a key work in the world SF megatext, but it also still resonates with us.

 

How has We been reimagined? What echoes of it do we see in SF works that followed?

 

 

We poses one of the great questions of modern literature: freedom or happiness?

 

We raises the question of whether humanity needs “benevolent” overlord or dictator or manager.

The “panopticon” (the “all-seeing”)

 

Who has heard of this?

 

 

 

Thinkers with whom the panopticon is associated: Jeremy Bentham, Michel Foucault. We live in an SF world, which is not a completely positive thing!

Darko Suvin’s reading of the novel

 

We is a work that Suvin celebrates. The novel “extrapolates the repressive potentials of every strong state and technocratic setup, including the socialist ones.” It is “a sarcastic critique against utopian prescriptions.”

 

Zamyatin brought to Russian SF the realization “that the new utopian world cannot be a static changeless paradise of a new religion, albeit a religion of steel, mathematics, and interplanetary flights: the materialist utopia must subject itself to a constant scrutiny by the light of its own principles.”

 

Zamyatin systematically and sensitively subjects the deformities of the system “to the experimental examination and hyperbolic magnification of SF.” In doing so, he makes it possible to identify and cope with the deformities.

 

The defeat in the novel is “not the defeat of the novel itself, but an exasperated shocking of the reader into thought and action.”

 

What aspects of Suvin’s reading of We might be useful to you as you finalize your analyses for the defining SF (part 2) assignment?

One note on Zamyatin’s style: humor and wordplay

 

Zamyatin was a playful writer.

Russian verb utopit’sya (“to drown”) and “utopia.”

 

Zamyatin also engages in a lot of sound play: in Note 10 where the sound of the Russian phrase i snova sholk, sholk is partly echoed in the English “and again, silk, silk.”

 

One more example: the familial “triangle” of D-503, O-90, and R-13: ROD.

 

We is a difficult novel to translate!

Biblical allusions and echoes in the novel

 

D-503 and I-330 could be understood as Adam and Eve with S-4711 (ssssss!) as the serpent.

 

Executions serve as a kind of religious sacrifice.

 

There is also the “Hourly Tablet” that regulates the day: Zamyatin uses the Russian phrase Chasovoi skrizhal’ here, and the word skrizhal’ originally referred to the stone tablets upon which Jehovah is said to have written the ten commandments given to Moses.

Some allusions to literature, political and otherwise

 

The “Guardians”: Plato uses this word in his description of a well-run state.

 

In the fifth note, Zamyatin refers to a “living, beautiful square,” which is almost certainly an allusion to Edwin Abbot’s famous 1884 work Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

We could also mention here Zamyatin’s repeated use of the phrase “Da, da” or “Da, da, da”— which is Russian for “yes, yes, yes” and is used over two dozen times in the novel, but the repetition of the word also hints at the artistic movement that came to be called Dadaism.

 

 

 

Symbolic use of mathematical concepts

 

There is a lot that could be done here if you have the background in math to do so!

 

Other stylistic notes

 

Critics have written about Zamyatin’s careful use of color.

 

They’ve also written about repetitions of key phrases: for example, the word Integral, sometimes rendered as INTEGRAL, is repeated more than fifty times in the novel. Another word here is “transparent.”

 

Critics have also looked a repetition of imagery: for example, bees (and buzzing sounds).

The overall stylistic take-away

 

We is a deeply symbolic novel with intense wordplay and interwoven imagery. Enough comes through in translation that it still affects us powerfully.

 

It is one of those literary works (or films) that seems to require us to respond to it in some way: intellectually, practically, or even artistically (if we have artistic talents and interests).

Two final words

 

1.  Is We a SF dystopia or is it, as one critic has argued, “an internal drama of a conflicted modern man”? Or is it both simultaneously? Are these really mutually exclusive readings?

 

2.  The irony of We is that it is written at the very start of the Soviet project—a project that will quickly become associated with science and technology and become itself a kind of SF tale—and it questions at the outset both the feasibility and reasonability of the project. But its scope is not limited to the Soviet realm.

 

   

End-of-class discussion

 

UKLG, “Stalinism in the Soul.” Contributions?

Previewing Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts

-  This is also a well-crafted, symbolic work, and we’ll talk some about the symbolism.

-  It’s also very fun to read (while being deadly serious).

-  Like We, it is perhaps (much) more relevant for us today than it was back when it was written, and we’ll talk about that prophetic angle.

Your homework is on the week-by-week syllabus, but… finish reading Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts by Thursday’s class and take the Canvas quiz on it.