glass buildings shining with lights
I remember I was on the floor hugging her legs, kissing her knees. And I was begging, "Now, right now, this minute . . ."
The sharp teeth, the sharp mocking triangle of her brows. She leaned over and undid my badge, not saying a word.
"Yes! Yes, darling . . . darling." I started throwing my yuny off. But she, still without saying a word, brought the watch in my badge right up to my eyes. In five minutes it would be 22:30.
That put a chill on me. I knew what it meant to show yourself on the street after 22:30. All my madness seemed to be blown away from me all of a sudden. I was me again. One thing was clear: I hated her, I hated her, I hated her!
Without saying good-bye or looking back, I rushed out the room. Pinning my badge back on as I ran down the steps (taking the emergency stairs for fear of running into somebody in the elevator), I ran out onto the empty avenue.
Nothing was out of place -- the usual simple, customary, normal scene: glass buildings shining with lights, pale glass sky, the greenish quiet night. But underneath this quiet cool glass something wild, crimson, and hairy was silently rushing along. And I was racing along, fighting for breath, trying not to be late.
Suddenly I felt that the badge I'd stuck back on so hastily was coming off -- it came off, and clattered as it hit the glass sidewalk. I bent over to retrieve it, and in the momentary silence I heard someone's footsteps behind me. I turned.
Something small and bent was rounding the corner, or at least that's how it seemed to me at the time.
I took off as fast as I could and heard nothing but the wind rushing past my ears. At the entrance I stopped: The clock showed one minute remaining before 22:30. I listened hard -- no-one back there. Stupid . . . I'd imagined the whole thing. Effect of the poison.
That night was torture. The bed under me rose and fell and rose again -- sailing along a sinusoid. I kept repeating to myself: "At night the Number's duty is to sleep. This is just as much an obligation as work during the day. It is required so that one can work during the day. Not to sleep at night is unlawful." And still I could not, I just could not.
I'm done for. I'm in no condition to fulfill my obligations to OneState. I . . .
(Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (written 1920), end of Record 10. Translation by Clarence Brown, 1993.)
*
And the energy for all those lights? Well, it comes from the Accumulator Tower, an enormously high tower. An accumulator is an energy storage device. Maybe Zamyatin got his idea, visually speaking, from the very tall hydraulic accumulators that were built in the mid-19th century, e.g. Grimsby Dock Tower. But his Accumulator Tower works by "sucking electricity" from the clouds (defusing electrical storms), and presumably storing it to power the city. When Zamyatin was writing We, electric lights in buildings were still a relative novelty. (To give one example, in 1919 only 6% of UK homes were connected to an electricity source.)
The Accumulator Tower has a secondary function, too. At the top it has a bell which strikes the hours of the day (Record 2). As demonstrated in this extract, the hours determine all the activity of OneState's inhabitants.
The Accumulator Tower is visually prominent and is also prominent in the novel, in poetic cityscapes and in views from the air. (I'm seeing it like the Burj Khalifa over downtown Dubai.)
Symbolically you could say that it represents OneState's single Benefactor and also the unity of "We", the people who are numbers.
But in its singleness it also seems strangely vulnerable. It is the obvious target of a revolution. Topple the Accumulator Tower, and OneState would instantly cease to function.
It never happens in We. But the implication is clear: states, even OneState, are mortal, and they can be toppled.
*
D-503 is, almost throughout the book, a true believer in OneState. His obsession with I-330 makes him do crazy things that contradict his beliefs, but have his beliefs actually changed? Yes, but the signs are subtle. D-503 himself doesn't consciously articulate the changes, he continues to think spasmodically in the received forms that have become automatic to him, and he cannot frame arguments against his former beliefs (e.g. when challenged by the Benefactor -- quoted below).
*
A few months ago I found a copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We in a local book-swap and I seized on it. It was the Clarence Brown translation of 1993, based on the Russian edition of 1988. [Alas, my copy doesn't include Brown's Introduction, but I found about half of it here by doing a Look Inside.]
Because, yes, We had finally been published in Russian in Russia, half a century after its author's death. You can only read snippets of Brown's translation online, but you can read the whole of We in the form that the world first saw it: Gregory Zilboorg's translation, published in New York in 1924. It isn't as lively or accurate as Clarence Brown's, but it's a decent translation, as well as a piece of history in its own right. It isn't the book George Orwell read, though: he wasn't able to track down a copy, so he read the French translation instead. In his 1946 review, he surmised that Aldous Huxley must have read We before embarking on Brave New World (1932). Huxley's novel is set in the World State, Zamyatin's in "the United State" (as Zilboorg calls it; Brown calls it "OneState"; Mirra Ginsburg and Natasha Randall "the One State"). Anyway Huxley said he hadn't read We, and I believe him. But both he and Zamyatin were kicking back at H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia (1905) -- as was E.M. Forster in his astonishing story "The Machine Stops" (1909). Perhaps just as significant, Huxley was reacting against Henry Ford's production line and Zamyatin against Frederick Winslow Taylor's ideas of "scientific management" (time and motion, etc. Taylorism was very popular in Lenin's circle).
[You can also read Mirra Ginsburg's fine 1972 translation, here: https://libcom.org/article/we-yevgeny-zamyatin , along with its very useful Introduction (placed at the end)]
*
One thing I don't understand, though. This passage in Record 32:
(Zilboorg's translation:)
“Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count on three, or say three and a half hours. …”
I see before me, over a draught, my hand with the counter and the logarithmic dial at the figure 15.
“Fifteen tons. But you’d better take … yes, better take a thousand.”
I said that because I know that tomorrow. … I noticed that my hands and the dial began to tremble.
“A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week! No, more than a week!”
“Well, nobody knows. …”I do know....
(Brown's translation:)
"So what do you say? How much fuel shall we take on for the engines? If you count three, or say, three and a half hours . . ."Before me, in three-dimensional projection on the diagram, I see my hand, which is holding a calculator, the logarithmic dial of which points to the number 15."Fifteen tons. No, better make that . . . Yes, make it 100 . . ."This is because I do after all know that tomorrow . . .And out of the corner of my eye I see my hand, the one holding the dial, begin almost imperceptibly to tremble."A hundred? But why such a lot? That's enough for a week. What am I saying? For much longer than a week!""There's no telling . . . who knows?" I know.
*
Actually, there's plenty more I don't understand. Both Zilboorg and Brown talk of irrational numbers (Record 8), evidently meaning imaginary numbers; not the square root of 2, but the square root of -1. That must represent Zamyatin's own usage, I suppose.
It was true that D-503's horror at imaginary numbers is reminiscent of how the Pythagoreans are said to have reacted to the discovery of irrational numbers. This is traditionally attributed to Hippasus of Metapontum. The proof attributed to him is elegant and can be understood even by a non-mathematician like me; it's in Wikipedia's entry on "Irrational Number".
I'm calling the square root of -1 an imaginary number because that's what Descartes called it. I suppose you'd have to be a historian of mathematics, specifically Russian mathematics, to know what terms Zamyatin would have used. Could the name of his revolutionary heroine, I-330 (I for short), allude to i (the imaginary unit, i.e. the square root of -1)? Did he know Descartes' term "imaginary" and thus linked the square root of -1 with the human imagination, the thing that OneState realizes it must excise? (While on this subject, Zilboorg translates the latter as "fancy", not one of his best decisions).
[When I was at school c. 1970, we called it j. I gather this is an acceptable alternative, but normally it's used only in contexts where i already has a different meaning, e.g. current in electrical engineering.]
*
I did some online tutoring this past summer; the book I taught was Lois Lowry's The Giver, a justly celebrated YA novel in which twelve-year-old Jonas gradually realizes that the utopian community he has grown up in is a dystopia in which the price of a safe, predictable existence is eugenics and the absence of meaningful choice or deep emotion.
[Jonas] smiled as he watched the newchild plant one small foot carefully before the other, grinning with glee at his own steps as he tried them out.
"I want to get to sleep early tonight," Father said. "Tomorrow's a busy day for me. The twins are being born to- morrow, and the test results show that they're identical."
"One for here, one for Elsewhere," Lily chanted. "One for here, one for Else — "
"Do you actually take it Elsewhere, Father?" Jonas asked.
"No, I just have to make the selection. I weigh them, hand the larger over to a Nurturer who's standing by, waiting, and then I get the smaller one all cleaned up and comfy. Then I perform a small Ceremony of Release and — " He glanced down, grinning at Gabriel. "Then I wave bye- bye," he said, in the special sweet voice he used when he spoke to the newchild. He waved his hand in the familiar gesture.
Gabriel giggled and waved bye-bye back to him. "And somebody else comes to get him? Somebody from Elsewhere?"
"That's right, Jonas-bonus."
Jonas rolled his eyes in embarrassment that his father had used the silly pet name.
It's interesting to see The Giver and We adopting similar solutions to similar technical issues. Jonas grows up in "the community", a Stepford Wives sort of place surrounded by empty and wild nature. We are told that there are other communities, but the novel leaves them shadowy: we don't clearly grasp how much they interact with each other, what transport links exist, or what layer of government presides over them all. To all intents and purposes, the "community" that we see is the dystopia. Likewise in We, though there are very fleeting hints that other cities and other accumulator towers exist*, D-503 takes no interest in them. OneState as we come to know it is a single city state, population 10 million, surrounded by wild and trackless nature, its monolithic Benefactor presiding over everything. Both novels in fact adopt the point of view of a single protagonist in a single place; the superficial benefits and the underlying horrors are local. Yet both novels want to imply that the dystopia in question is universal, hence the vague hints of other communities, other cities...
(It's powerful and affecting, but it's very different from a colonial or post-colonial world in which some places enjoy most of the benefits while other places cope with most of the horrors.)
*
[* E.g. "living in cities that were cut off from one another by all the tangled green stuff" (Record 3), "our Accumulator Towers" (Record 25). In Record 5, D-503 tells us that after the 200-Years War, only 0.2 of the world's population survived, and he repeats this figure later in the same paragraph as "two tenths" (Ginsburg). Brown's translation says "zero point two tenths", which contradicts his earlier "0.2". That's one reason I don't feel quite confident of what Zamyatin intended here. The other is that the overall tone of the paragraph, e.g. its histrionic claim of the earth being cleansed of a thousand years of filth, seems to suggest that only a comparatively tiny fraction of the human population survived (0.2 per cent, perhaps). But if we accept 0.2 at face value, i.e. as a fifth... well the world population in 1920 was about 1800 million, so its reduction to a fifth would still leave a world population of 360 million. But the population of D-503's city is only ten million. So this passage, too, seems to imply the existence of other cities.]
*
It all began, I suppose, with Plato's Republic. Just put the philosophers in charge (i.e. what we would call scientists), and they can design a better society. Even this early, the blatant authoritarianism and indifference to personal freedoms is a disquieting factor, but after all, this was only in a hypothetical world, where the philosopher's temptation to over-control could be safely indulged because no-one was actually oppressed by it. Sir Thomas More imagined a fictional Utopia, but already his lively curiosity suggested that such a society might not ever exist and might not be altogether utopian if it did. Johnson in Rasselas considered the pursuit of utopias entirely vain. But then -- with the industrial revolution, for instance -- utopias started to leave the study and emerge in the real world. They were admired, of course, but they were monstrous too.
Dystopian literature can be interpreted in a soft way; here is how bad things might get if technology is in the wrong hands, or is used to further a coercive agenda.
Or it can be interpreted in a hard way: technology itself is the issue; it invariably has a cost, is intrinsically controlling and always generates dystopias; dystopian literature is thus a way of talking about the conditions we already live under.
*
For science, both in its experimental and its applied form, likes a clean slate. It wants to control the conditions, and free will is like a dirty stain in the test tube that will ruin everything. So Plato and Wells, for example, were perfectly fine about placing rather severe limits on freedom in their utopias.
"... A true algebraic love of mankind will inevitably be inhuman, and the inevitable sign of the truth is its cruelty. Just as the inevitable sign of of fire is that it burns. Can you show me a fire that does not burn? Well? Prove it! Put up an argument!"
How could I argue? How could I dispute what were (formerly) my own thoughts?
(from Record 36, in which D-503 converses with the Benefactor.)
*
OneState is a dystopia, but Zamyatin himself was a utopian. Probably Zamyatin, a former naval engineer in love with mathematics, wasn't at all opposed to technology in itself. He was perhaps anticipating a post-modern view of science as revolutionary. The error of OneState is to see science as completed, and thus as justifying a system of totalitarian social control to match its fixed beliefs.
Well, no, I need to rephrase that. OneState, and D-503, do admittedly see science as continuing to progress. In their first conversation he says rather sharply to I-330: "Science is going forward, and it's clear that, maybe not right away, but in fifty or a hundred years . . ." (Record 2) After all, D-503 is himself the builder of the INTEGRAL, now readying its first flight (Record 1). And what about that remarkable recent invention, the musicometer (Record 4)? And, in the course of the novel, the great medical advance: how to remove the imagination (Records 15, 26, 31)?
But what we're seeing here is choreographed science, a science that proceeds dutifully along paths that have already been laid out; for instance, to make noses more alike. These new advances will not contradict existing science; to D-503 it's axiomatic that "OneState Science cannot make a mistake" (Record 3). The INTEGRAL program will head off into space not to learn anything new but to spread its own gospel and to subjugate the inhabitants of other worlds. The musicometer is remarkable only for its banality. And the great medical advance, if universally imposed, would eliminate the source of all further speculation. (But in fact this would condemn OneState itself to slow extinction; its scientific paradigm would be secure from internal questioning, but not to incursion from beyond its borders.)
[On Zamyatin's anticipation of postmodernist ideas of science, see Tony Burns, "Zamyatin's We and Postmodernism", Utopian Studies Vol. 11, No. 1 (2000), pp. 66-90.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25702458 ]
[On why Zamyatin should not be seen as rejecting utopianism per se, see Phillip E. Wegner, "On Zamyatin's We: A Critical Map of Utopia's 'Possible Worlds'", Utopian Studies Vol. 4, No. 2 (1993), pp. 94-116.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20719963 ]
[On the mathematics of OneState and its enemies, see Brett Cooke's fascinating and wide-ranging "Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin's We":
https://www.academia.edu/843898/Ancient_and_Modern_Mathematics_in_Zamyatins_We
(Apparently this is a chapter in a larger book, but I can't find any more details). ]
Labels: Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Lois Lowry, Yevgeny Zamyatin
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