2 posts tagged “blogoriphic”

I grew up on the Star Wars films and, somewhere in the middle of adolescence, graduated to George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. As a teacher, I have enjoyed teaching Fahrenheit 451. Dystopic literature can indict a social structure and an individual as they tango away from individual liberation and toward the concrete corridor of collective narratives gone cold. Usula K. Le Guin sites Yevgeny Zamyatin's We as, "the best single work of science fiction yet written." George Orwell and Aldous Huxley both celebrate We as their primary inspiration. While We works as a critique of oppressors attempts to invoke  absolute devotion and  narrow logic in the control of large groups, it fails as a story. Zamyatin's failure is, ironically, the result of characters who do not crackle with the kind of round, juicy individuality that he seems to long for.

We reads as a series of diary entries, kind of like a blog on vodka and a slow. Recognizing that it was written in 1922, it still brims with a romanticism that seems tired. Remember, this was a year before Edna St. Vincent Millay and T.S. Elliot shocked the world with fresh poetry. Hemingway would publish In Our Time in 1925. My point is, the writing world was alive and there was little room for the pretentious flitting between experimentation and stale artifice that slog from Zamyatin's yawning Edison.  Pages gasp with an asthmatic desperation. At the strongest moments, I  comic book characters peek around imagination's restless corners, never human beings. In fact, an ambitious graphic novelist might be able to revive Zamyatin's work.

Zamyatin's cardboard characters, especially his protagonist and narrator D-503, never lift from the ground that they are  attempting to rise above. We is of important academic interest if you are attempting to understand the nature of Soviet oppression or the history of dystopic literature. As a work of narrative art, however, it lacks the very thing it fights so hard to defend.