BİZ... SİNDİRELEREK OKUNMASI VE ÜZERİNDE DÜŞÜNÜLMESİ GEREKEN BİR İNCE BİLİMKURGU-ÜTOPYA KİTABI. ZAMYATİN'İ MUTLAKA KEŞFETMELİSİNİZ. YAŞADIĞI DEVİR VE DOKUNDURDUKLARI/İŞARET ETTİKLERİ GÖZÖNÜNE ALINIRSA, KİTAP İNCE AMA KAPSAMI ÇOK AĞIR...
Bakın sanal kitapçıda neler yazıyor ?
% 20 i n d i r i m l i
"Zamyatin'in getirdiği tartışma ise düşünen ve hayal eden insan için özgürlük ve mutluluğun özdeş kavramlar olduğudur. (...) Özgürlük mutsuzluğa gebe olmak zorunda değildir Zamyatin'de. Başkaldırmak, alışılagelmiş olanla mücadele etmek acı verir gerçi, ama "dünü bugün, bugünü de dün olarak yaşamak daha zordur." Zamyatin'in ütopyası kesintisiz bir mücadeledir, bugüne daima yarının gözüyle bakarak, kendi kurduğunu, kurumlaşmaya başladığı andan itibaren yeniden yıkarak sürdürülen bir mücadele. Ütopya, Zamyatin için bir ufuktur, ona sürekli olarak yaklaşılır, ancak varılamaz. "Vardık", teslim olmaktır, gerçek sorular ise "Neden" ve "Peki sonra ne olacak'tır?"
-Bülent Somay / Önsöz-
G. Orwell ve A. Huxley gibi yazarların öncüsü ve esin kaynağı olan Zamyatin, onlardan çok daha önce yazdığı 'Biz' ile totalitarizm tehlikesine işaret ederek, anti-ütopyayı radikal bir eleştiri silahına dönüştürmüştür. Bütünlüklü, bitmiş bir topluma karşı olan Zamyatin "Biz"de böylesi bir toplumun olumsuzluklarını anlatır. 26. yüzyılda geçen romanda insan
doğadan ve kendi "ben"liğinden koparılmış, "Biz"leşerek teknolojiye ve bürokratik devlete teslim olmuştur. Kişisellik yoktur... İnsanların adları değil, numaraları vardır. Saydam, cam duvarların arkasında yaşayan insanların her dakikası devletçe belirlenmekte, denetlenmektedir. Erkek ve dişi numaralar yalnızca, izin belgeleriyle önceden belirlenmiş sevişme saatlerinde birbirlerini ziyaret ettikleri zaman perdeleri indirme hakkına sahiptiler. Zamyatin "gerçek edebiyatın güvenilir ve gayretkeş görevliler tarafından değil, ancak aykırı ve asi ruhlular, çılgınlar ve hayalciler tarafından gerçekleştirilebileceğini" savunarak resmi görüşlere karşı çıkmış, kuşağının en radikal isimlerinden biri olmuştur.
(Arka Kapak)
Türkçe (Orijinal Dili: Rusça)
180 s. -- 13.5 x 19.5 cm
İstanbul, Nisan 1996
ISBN: 975-539-124-X
180 s., Eserin yazıldığı tarih: 1920, Ayrıntı'dan 1. Basım: Kasım 1988, 2. Basım, İngilizce'den çeviri,
O, irdelendiğinde ve "bilindiğinde" o kadar büyük ki ! Daha asırlarca uyarılarını dikkate almak zorunda kalacak insanlık. Belki de beşeriyetin sonuna dek...
Reinterpretations of Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and Zamyatin's We Based on the Conflict Between Liberty and Domination
We, 1984 and Brave New World are three of the most widely interpreted science fiction novels of the twentieth century. They all deal with anti-Utopian futures, each horrible in a completely different way. By examining various critical interpretations of We, 1984 and Brave New World, and by examining the use of certain symbolic imagery in the three texts, we can draw new connections between these formerly unconnected sets of imagery. Wind imagery in We, for example, was previously interpreted to reflect only the inner struggles of the protagonist, D-503. However, if wind is looked upon as a symbol of liberty, instead of as a representation of the struggle within, then it takes on new meaning in terms of the interplay between liberty and domination, a major aspect of these novels.
Zamyatin's We takes place in a world called the One State. In the One State all buildings, tools and machines are made of glass. People are called "numbers" and all live, work and act precisely in unison, to the point that they chew their food together. Their actions are dictated by the Table of Hours, a clock system which dictates precisely what everyone is to do and when. The people are ruled by their leader called the Benefactor, and policed by the Guardians. Their civilization is surrounded by the Green Wall, a wall made of glass outside of which is an untamed green jungle. The protagonist is D-503, a mathematician and builder of the Integral, a gigantic glass space-ship which is being built to go to other planets and spread the joy of the One State there as well. He begins in the happy state of ignorance shared by all other numbers in the One State, but is lead to revolt by the woman, I-330, with whom he falls passionately in love. She leads him to break the rules set by the Table of Hours, and eventually introduces him to the Mephi, a revolutionary organization consisting of rebels and savages who live in the jungle beyond the Green Wall. They plot to take over the Integral and use it as a weapon to destroy the One State. Their plan is thwarted by the Guardians and D-503 is forced, along with the rest of the world's population, to undergo the Great Operation, which destroys the part of the brain which controls passion and imagination, reducing the people to living robots.
Orwell's 1984 takes place on Airstrip One (England) in a vast empire called Oceania, which contains "the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa." There are two other empires, Eurasia and Eastasia; Oceania is always allied with one and at war with the other, although which one mattes little and changes frequently. The social structure of Oceania consists of three levels, the Inner Party, the privileged executives and leaders; the Outer Party, members who perform less important functions and are less privileged; and the Proles, masses of uneducated laborers who constitute the vast majority of the population. The government is divided into four ministries: the Ministry of Peace, which directs the war against Eurasia/Eastasia, the Ministry of Plenty, which is in charge of rationing the limited food supply, the Ministry of Truth, which falsifies old documents to show that the party is always right, and the Ministry of Love, which tortures and executes criminals. The whole system is led by a figure called Big Brother. Although his actual existence is doubtful, he is the center of Oceanic society and is loved by everyone. The book follows the protagonist, Winston Smith, a writer for the Ministry of Truth, as he rebels against the party. He begins with doubts, and by keeping a diary, which is a forbidden activity. He then enters into a long forbidden sexual relationship with a woman named Julia, tries to join an anti-Party underground organization called the Brotherhood, (the actual existence of which is doubtful) and is then caught and taken to the Ministry of Love where he is tortured and spiritually broken by the very man who had acted as his supposed contact for the Brotherhood, O'Brien.
Brave New World takes place in the World State, though the name is seldom used since it is the whole world and has been the whole world for many generations. It is generally called "the world". In the world everyone is perfectly happy in every way. Babies are produced in bottles and conditioned from the moment of conception through puberty to enjoy their future jobs and agree with everything the government says. People come in five types, Alpha through Epsilon, Alphas being intellectuals and Epsilons elevator operators and other such menial laborers. Each higher caste is physically fitter, smarter and taller than the lower ones. The people are kept sensually satisfied with promiscuous sex, "scent organs" and "feelies:" tactile, erotic movies. If, for some reason, an unpleasant situation arises the citizens take soma, a drug with all the pleasant effects of alcohol, but none of the bad effects. The protagonist is John Savage, the child of a Beta woman and an Alpha man who was born, Instead of being decanted from a bottle, when his mother is stranded in a Savage Reservation. In the reservation people still believe in such barbaric ideas as families and Christianity. John is brought out into the world by Bernard Marx, an Alpha who is looked down upon because he is shorter than an Alpha should be. John, horrified by the world he sees, and repelled by his sinful lust for Bernard's female friend Lenina, and her promiscuous willingness to have sex with him, tries to lead a revolution, but the people are too happy to revolt. He then tries to isolate himself from the rest of the world, but is discovered, and after being forced into a sexual orgy by a mob of tourists armed with soma, he hangs himself.
Anti-utopias are usually classified as being satires. 1984 was called a "satirical pamphlet." These books, however, are considered to be different in nature from ordinary satires. "Until our time, irony and unnatural laughter were thought to be the duty of the satirist.... But disgust, the power to make pain sickening, the taste for punishment, exceed irony and laughter in the modern satirist." These sorts of satires were given a classification of their own by literary critic Northrop Frye. His classification is here explained by Irving Howe, another critic who did a great deal of work researching these three novels:
Books like We, 1984, and Brave New World are not really novels... but what [Northrop Frye] calls Menippean satire, a kind of fiction that "...deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes... The Menippian satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.... At its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."
It is necessary to categorize these novels separately from other novels because their significance is purely intellectual, rather than dramatic as in most novels, and must be read and interpreted in a manor suiting their intellectual nature.
The major element connecting these three novels is the fear that the world is being led towards a horrible future, "What they fear is not... that history will suffer a miscarriage; what they fear is that the long-awaited birth will prove to be a monster." Aldous Huxley in his foreword for Brave New World, written in 1846, said: "We have only two alternatives to choose from, militarized totalitarianisms, having their root in the terror of the atomic bomb, and... the destruction of civilization...; or else one supra-natural totalitarianism... developing... into the welfare-tyrrany of Utopia." Such fears were shared by Zamyatin and Orwell; Orwell is said to have "intended 1984 as a warning" , and George Woodcock said that "Both Huxley and Zamyatin see Utopia as a possible, even a probable outcome of twentieth-century technological developments...." Technological is the key word in this phrase, for technology is what they fear will bring about this horrible future. In 1922 Max Eastman, a "prominent defender of the Russian revolution...." said "I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life." , in other words "Not progress denied but progress realized, is the nightmare of the anti-Utopian novel." The fear is much more specific than a general fear of progress. Huxley synthesized the idea: "The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals." Irving Howe said that it was "the fear that progress... is taking us toward a transparent universe in which all the categories are fixed, the problematic has been banished, unhappiness is treason and the gratuitous act beyond imagining." Such a world, one where "one might actually gain a life of security, [and] adjustment..., but only at the cost of their spiritual freedom, that is to say, their humanity...." forms the basis of the three different anti-Utopian futures explored in 1984, Brave New World and We.
As one reads these novels, specific images are repeated, especially in We. Iron is used to describe the Benefactor, the head of this world of domination. Iron is chosen because of its great strength, oppressive weight, and, probably, because chains are made of iron. He is described as having a "slow, cast-iron echoing voice", and "cast-iron hands upon His knees" which "moved with the weight of a hundred tons." Wings are another theme which repeats in the novel. Flight is connected with freedom because it is an expression of independence from everything, even the earth itself. As soon as D-503 begins to revolt he dreams of wings: "All that night I was tormented by wings. I walked about shielding my head with my hands from the wings." The symbol of the resistance group, the Mephi, is "a winged youth with a transparent body and, where the heart should be, a dazzling crimson-glowing coal." At the end, when the Mephi, in a final attempt to overthrow the One State, destroy the Green Wall, the destruction was first revealed by "barely visible quick dots at an incredible height... hoarse, guttural sounds from above- and finally, over our heads- birds. Their sharp, black, piercing, falling triangles filled the sky." and they brought with them "the whistling of wind, the wings, the cawing," all symbols of freedom.
to second half of text
DOCUMENTATION NOTES
Orwell 1949, p. 153
Pritchett 1949, p. 291
Pritchett 1949, pp. 291-192
Howe 1962, p. 307
Howe 1962, p. 307
Howe 1962, p. 303
Huxley 1946, p. 291
Deutscher 1854, p. 500
Woodcock 1972, p. 309
Howe 1962, p. 303
Howe 1962, p. 303
Howe 1962, p. 304
Huxley 1946, p. 290
Howe 1962, p. 304
Howe 1962, p. 296
Zamyatin 1972, p. 143
Zamyatin 1972, p. 212
Zamyatin 1972, p. 213
Zamyatin 1972, p. 124
Zamyatin 1972, p. 158
Zamyatin 1972, p. 218
Bibliography
Howe, Irving. 1962. "The Fiction of Anti-Utopia." The New Republic April 23; excerpted and reprinted in Orwell's 1984, New York: Harcort Brace Joanovich inc., 1982, p. 303. Huxley, Aldous. 1946. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. Huxley, Aldous. 1946. Foreword for his Brave New World; excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 79. Detroit: Gale Research co., 1994, p. 289. Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. New York: The New American Library inc. Pitcher, Edward. 1981. "That Web of Symbols in Zamyatin's We." Exploration 22: 252; excerpted and reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, v. 37. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1991, p. 433. Pritchett, V. S. 1949. "Reviev of 1984." The New Statesman and Nation June 18; excerpted and reprinted in Orwell's 1984, New York: Harcort Brace Joanovich inc., 1982, p. 291. Schorer, Mark. 1949. "An Indignant and Prophetic Novel." The New York Times Book Review June 12; excerpted and reprinted in Orwell's 1984, 1982. New York: Harcort Brace Joanovich inc., p. 294. Symons, Julian. 1949. "George Orwell's Utopia." Critical Occasions; excerpted and reprinted in Orwell's 1984, New York: Harcourt Brace Joanovich inc., p. 303.
Trilling, Lionel. 1949. "Orwell on the Future" Speaking of Literature and Society; excerpted and reprinted in Orwell's 1984. ed. Howe, Irving. 1982. New York: Harcort Brace Joanovich inc., p. 295.
Woodcock, George. 1972. "Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley."
The Viking Press 299; excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism v. 79. Detroit, MI: Gale Research co., 1994, p. 308.
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1972. We.
New York, NY: Avon Books.
By far the most prominent and significant imagery in We is cloud and wind imagery. Edward Pitcher in his "That Web of Symbols in Zamyatin's We" interpreted this imagery to represent the inner state of D-503:
"Following one circle of Zamyatin's web of symbols, we find that sky-cloud images reflect the changes in the character and life of D-503. As he moves from complacent acceptance of the One State, through stages of passionate interest in I-330, to conscious individualism precipitated by sexual jealousy and possessiveness, to subversive action, doubt and hesitation and then back to conformity and un-imagination, we find an analogous movement from calm, blue skies, to lightly clouded skies, to iron-grey clouds, to ever increasing wind and storm, then subsiding of storm and restoration of calm following personal defeat."
Wind, sky and weather, however, are strong symbols of freedom. It is chosen because nothing can change the course of the wind, nothing can rule it. It is not even dependent upon the body, as flight is, for flight requires wings, but wind requires nothing. It is absolutely free, it almost is freedom, and thus the state of the weather can be interpreted as representing the degree of freedom in the world. Thus the wind imagery that way it represents the levels of revolution and freedom in D-503 and his life. In the beginning D-503 describes his sentiments about the sky, and those of his whole world: "But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I love- I am certain I can safely say, we love-only such a sterile, immaculate sky." He spoke of the past as "when the untamed sky had raged from time to time with 'storms.'" His world, a world without cloud or storm, is one of unblemished order, without non-conformity or revolt, where the people are subservient and tame, just as its sky is tame. The clouds only appear as the resistance to the One State grows more active, both inside of D-503 and in the actions of the Mephi. The most significant cloud imagery is in the storm just before the attempted theft of the Integral and the Great Operation. Here the clouds are described with great frequency as being "cast-iron." Here, in their moment of fury, just before freedom will be obliterated forever by the great operation, the clouds are described as Iron; Wind, a representation of freedom, is described as iron, slavery. When, in the end, the people are transformed into living robots by the Great Operation, the skies return to a calm tameness, and, with no rebellion left in the people, it shall never vent its furies again.
These anti-utopian novels deal with worlds ruled by governments whose policy is absolute domination. In order to be successful governments they must keep the people happy, or, at least, satisfied with their lot in life. For this they use the appeals of slavery, which are more than would be immediately apparent for something as harsh as domination. But as well as being the cruel oppressor, domination is all that rules and governs. It is law, rules, precedent, conscience. It is the advisor who tells you the answer to a difficult decision, what is right, what to do. In that way it is the support for all actions, the aide you can fall back on, the leader you can look to. Slavery is everything concrete and real, that which will not change. It is the assurance that when you go to sleep the world does not end and that when you wake up it will still be there exactly as it was the night before. Freedom is a tremendous burden, after all, for if one is free one is responsible for one's ions and must decide them on one's own. Absolute freedom, that is, a world without slavery, is absolute independence, a level of solitude nothing could withstand. A world without dependence would be one in which one is faced every moment of existence with an infinite number of possibilities, a world of madness. Huxley once said that "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses... control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude." By using the appeals of Slavery and the threat of the burdens of Freedom, such a state can be achieved, and that is how it is in these three novels. This is described by Zamyatin through the words of his character D-503 "[The People] longed for someone to tell them... the meaning of happiness, and then to bind them to it with a chain." The Benefactor's reward for doing this was to be the head of a state in which everyone was "joyously bowing his head to the beneficent yoke of the Number of Numbers." Of course, at times the horrors of such domination were realized by those who still held freedom enough to understand there to be horror in domination. D-503 here describes those who had undergone the Great Operation and had the last of their freedom removed from them: " 'People' No, that does not describe them. These are not feet- they are stiff, heavy wheels, moved by some invisible transmission belt. These are not people- they are humanoid tractors." Rebels can always be isolated, defeated or otherwise destroyed, leaving the state of absolute domination that rules the One State, Oceania, and the World State.
In these three worlds, domination is not yet pure enough to dominate simply because it is domination. It relies upon its appeals, and the appeals of the absence of liberty are not strong enough alone. Iron has two other major aspects which help it dominate: physical pleasure and physical pain. Huxley's Brave New World is governed through physical pleasure. The people are always sexually satisfied and fully amused, so they never think to revolt. Huxley said that he chose this method for his world because "Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane..., it is demonstrably inefficient...." Orwell, however, in 1984 used exactly the kind of government Huxley condemned for inefficiency, for in his opinion "men will be coerced not cosseted into soullessness.... That they
will be dehumanized not by sex, massage and private helicopters, but by a marginal life of deprivation, dullness, and fear of pain." In 1984 the Ministry of Love serves as a constant threat of pain, horror and death, and suppresses revolt just as pleasure does in Brave New World. In Zamyatin's We, both are used together to discourage revolt. People are kept happy, productive and sexually satisfied at all times, but, for those who do not remain under control by this, there is the threat of the Gas Bell and the Benefactor's Machine. Thus the government in the One state uses both methods to suppress revolt. Revolution does, however, occur in all three cases. The revolution in We is much larger and more successful than those in Brave New World or 1984 showing that these two methods are more effective when used separately: the constant threat of torture tends to diminish one's contentment, and in a life unused to pain torture is less of a threat.
Orwell is described as one who "...is able to speak seriously and with originality about the nature of reality and the terrors of power." In 1984 Orwell deals with power. Power is similar to domination but not exactly the same, for the control of domination is based on dependency and submission, where as power is simply power and rules through itself. Domination can be used to achieve power, as, indeed, it is in these three novels, especially 1984. In book three of 1984 O'Brien reveals power to be the ultimate motive of the Party's domination:
"The Party seeks power purely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power.... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution, one es the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
This view is obviously corrupt to the point of insanity. Indeed, "1984... is a great examination of Lord Acton's famous apothegm 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'" In this world in which the rulers are omnipotent, they are absolutely corrupt. They achieve their absolute power through Iron, through domination, and specifically pain. O'Brien posed the question directly to Winston while in the Ministry of Love: "'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?' Winston thought. 'By making him suffer.'" The Party's torture based domination is its method of asserting power.
But domination alone is not enough to gain absolute power, for to gain absolute power one must destroy any power the people might theoretically gain and leave them powerless, and thus unable to oppose your rule. But how does one destroy power that has not yet been achieved? One must destroy the means by which it could be achieved, but then how does one stop people from recreating those things? Again, simple, by destroying all memory of them. One cannot simply destroy things, for they still were created, they once existed, they are still remembered and they could be reconstructed. Simple destruction is not enough, one must effectively "undo" the creation of those items. To undo creation one destroys, not just the item itself, but the memory of the item, the knowledge that it ever existed. To achieve that one needs domination and power. Domination to exert your power, and the power to influence the minds and memories of people, to force them to forget, be it through torture or other means, and power to destroy that which you have un-created. This destruction is so effective that it not only un-creates that which those in power wish to destroy, it also limits humanity, for, directly or indirectly, all decisions are based on those which have already been made, and, without the past as a base, any level of intellectual decision is impossible. This limitation of humanity is the only way to assure that the people will never gain any power, and thus that the power of the Party is absolute. "Nothing could be more touching, or more suggestive of what history means to the mind, than the efforts of poor Winston Smith to think about the condition of man without knowledge of what others thought before him...." George Woodcock (below)
wrote: "The stability necessary to maintain society unchanged will mean the elimination of the Idea of freedom and the knowledge of the past...." When he wrote this he was discussing Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, for, power, and the destruction of history, is discussed in that novel as well. We deals exclusively with the conflict between freedom and domination. Power, however, is an important result of any form of domination, for as one commands others, so does one person have power over them. Thus power, as well as domination, power is key in the control of the rulers over their subjects in 1984, Brave New World and We.
These are worlds of extremes and their immoderate nature is exemplified by the extremeness of the imagery in the novels; the sky and flight imagery being the polar opposite of the imagery of iron. These stories are largely about worlds rather than individual people, and the imagery thus is more symbolic of the state of the worlds than of the characters. By considering this imagery as being reflective of the whole world rather than of individual characters, as in most novels, one is able to better understand the significance of this extreme imagery. The author of this paper has devised a general theory of color imagery in literature which is explained in the appendix. The iron and wind imagery in these novels fits into it exactly, as does the discussion of power, and physical pleasure and physical pain. Weather or not you consider this theory in looking at these novels, it is cleat that the imagery is one of the keys to understanding We, 1984 and Brave New World.
