Usually someone gives me an Amazon gift card around the
holidays, and annually I use that as justification for the delivery of a bunch
of books I might not otherwise have purchased—and, of course, I always way exceed
the gift card’s value in doing so. Among this season’s haul is a nice Norton
trade paperback (not pictured here) reprint of Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, his other futuristic dystopia, written and
published at about the same time as his more famous A Clockwork Orange, and which dwells upon some of that book’s same
themes of whether human goodness is innate or not, and what, if any, kind of
government or social order can foster the best sort of behavior in people.
Since the book is readily available, and summaries of it abound
online, I won’t detail its plot overly much, but it’s generally about a social
transition that occurs in England during an unspecified future era, and the
things that happen to a few closely connected characters during that period.
The world is somewhat Orwellian, with a fair amount of Newspeak-style
short-word jargon, but it’s not ruled by quite the same sort of repressive
totalitarianism as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ingsoc
regime. Instead, as the story opens, England is part of a multinational state
called the “Enspun” (Newspeak for the English Speaking Union), which in turn is
part of a world order that also includes the “Ruspun” (Russian-speaking,
naturally), and its government and society is in what is described as a
“liberal” phase. More on these phases later, but contemporary American
Teabaggers and moral majoritarians would eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch
and dinner. Because the excesses of far-future liberalism, according to
Burgess’s future-world, include: Forced Abortion! One-Child-Only Policy!
Self-Sterilization! No Religion at All! The Intermixing of the Races! and, most
obnoxious of all, Glorified Homosexuality!
Burgess was a comic novelist primarily—even A Clockwork Orange with all its horror
is frequently laugh-out-loud funny—and his wit is baked thoroughly into the
cake of his writing style, his word choices and multi-lingual jokes and
seriously enormous vocabulary (who ever actually says “eleemosynary" several times in a single book, really?),
his unexpected and sometimes weird metaphors, and jokes that are drawn out over
long sections of the novel. For example, a secondary character’s odd verbal tic—he
peppers his speech constantly with the phrase “do you see”—comes back
eventually as the highlight of a stupidly funny scene well after one has
probably forgotten all about it. So The
Wanting Seed is super-funny fairly often, but…but…
But it’s also chockfull of homophobia and racism, do you
see. I’m not generally one to
criticize dead writers and their work based on these things when they and it
are of a period in history a lot different than now, and when the work is not primarily all about those issues.
Also, I know that social change in England and America on issues like race and
homosexuality has happened more rapidly in recent decades than it did during
most of the twentieth century. I get it that everyone who has ever written
fiction tends to have been a creature of his or her own era. For example, I
strenuously disagree with a lot of other readers and writers in the spec fic
genres who think that we ought to jettison H.P. Lovecraft and ignore his
influence on the genres because he was a typical man of his culture—a
turn-of-the-20th century New England white man freighted with tons of
racist prejudices and patrician class biases. Unattractive? Sure as hell it is.
But he didn’t write Mein Kampf. He
may have been insensitive to and fearful of and uncharitable toward the Other
but he wasn’t on an explicit mission to oppress people and didn’t actively work
at promoting a hate-agenda with his work. One might think the same about
Burgess, a man of his time, certainly not on a hate-crusade. Yet I winced and was annoyed
every single time, while reading The
Wanting Seed, when I encountered a stereotypical or straight-up mythical
characterization of gay men and every time I encountered a reference to the
non-English “races” and their attributes.
And they are legion:
This novel is hung heavy with the preposterous conception
that a majority of straight men (they in the yoke of population-control
“liberalism”) will actively feign homosexuality in order to secure career
advancement, and that to feign such an (obviously) undesirable condition, one
must simper and caper and lisp and have their balls cut off and otherwise
cultivate faux-“effeminate”
characteristics, and such references dot this tale almost from cover to cover,
fading out only toward the end (when society has changed blessedly back to
hetero-normal). Also, there eventually comes into being a brutal security
force, crewed entirely by homo men, with a mandate to oppress the breeding
straights, and which resembles somewhat the thuggery of Alex and his droogs in Clockwork (I must admit that this development
appealed to me rather more than a little bit after chapters of homo-cliché…but
still). But this is purely a satire, right? A joke, right? Maybe. More on that
in a minute.
It’s also larded through with race business. Asians are
small-boned and high-pitched in voice. Africans are huge, frightening. One of
them, a Nigerian, has such a large mouth that it beggars the imagination that
he is able to pronounce properly the sounds of English (he also seems endowed
with a supernatural number of teeth). One woman is an “orchestra” of races,
indecipherable as to her whole complex lineage. Again and again it is commented
upon when non-white people appear, as if they are anomalous even in this future
society of the Enspun which is supposedly past having such worries. Never is a
non-white man mentioned without also mentioning some supposedly intimidating or
unflattering characteristic of his appearance or behavior. It’s a multi-racial
world with a lot of white people worrying overly much about mixing it up, and
the reader is reminded of this all the time and by an uncritical narrative
voice. However far in the future this England is, it’s still the ideal social
norm to be white, rather patrician, and more than a bit scared.
Oh wait, how about sexism? From cover to cover, it’s this
novel’s stock in trade, perhaps even more so than homophobia and racism. In the
far-flung future of the Enspun, even when having babies is state-discouraged
and literally illegal if you’ve had one already (even one that died young),
women still don’t seem to have any reason to exist at all other than for reproduction.
There is not anywhere in The Wanting Seed, a novel replete with incidental characters, a single occurrence of a professional woman other than a servant nor any sort of
woman not in the thrall of an undesirable man and his broken-down jalopy of a social
order. Which is just plain bizarre given the rest of this story’s trappings. I
could embrace this more readily as the reader if the author didn’t seem to be
tacitly in alliance with that social order.
Burgess proposed an idea of cyclical social/political
history. It’s indicated in A Clockwork
Orange, but elucidated more fully in The
Wanting Seed. Basically, the organization of human affairs turns again and
again from a “Pelagian” phase to an “Augustinian” phase, with a tumultuous
transitional period in between. The names for the phases refer to the
theologians Pelagius and Augustine. To very crudely summarize it, Pelagius
believed that humans are basically decent and can be prodded toward good works
and ultimate spiritual redemption, free of the Original Sin. Augustine, on the
other hand, subscribed to the concept of Original Sin and pretty much assumed that
humans had no chance at all short of redemption by way of submission to the
Christian faith’s most doctrinaire doctrine. In the novel, Burgess’s protagonist
calls these phases, in Newspeak fashion, the Pelphase and the Gusphase, with a transitional
Interphase. As the story get under way, we gradually learn that the Pelphase is
ending and a violent Interphase is beginning. What’s striking about these
developments is that they appear to have little at all to do with the specific actions
of the government of the time. Indeed, the Prime Minister, in one scene, lazes
about in bed ignoring attempts at soothing from his “catamite,” oblivious to
and helpless against the turning of the historical wheel that is happening
around him. The protagonist explains to his social studies students early in
the novel that the actions of parties and parliaments had eventually come to be
irrelevant over the ages because the affairs of people just somehow naturally
cycle from Pelphase to Interphase to Gusphase, and do so with a consistency
that can be seen again and again in the historical record.
This book is comedic and satirical, but it feels as if its
author’s views on things like race, gender and sexuality have passed almost unfiltered
into it, because the comedy and satire seems never aimed inward at those biases. Though
he indicates a calm and unworried supposition that the transition from Pelphase
(liberal) to Gusphase (conservative) and back again, over and over, is the
normal order of things, his own authorial alliance seems clearly with the Gusphase
and its return to traditional roles for women (breeding stock), non-white races
(scary, undesirable) and gays (outlawed). But why does this bug me more in
Burgess’s book than it would if I’d encountered it in something written a
half-century or more before it (like Lovecraft) or even from someone else from
Burgess’s own time period who didn't delve into spec fic? I think it's because that he chose a couple of times to write science fiction in
an era when he should have been more
progressive. And also because he was in fact a real intellectual, world-traveled,
an internationalist, and should have somehow just been too modern to have been
so reactionary about social change. It’s almost like the reason that I don’t
cut any slack for Orson Scott Card. Though in the case of Card, there is much
less excuse: he is a currently living, producing writer who is also actively
promulgating a crazy-ass view of things for political reasons. It's maybe
because Burgess is a bit too recent, and that’s probably not a rational reason,
but there it is anyway. But it does somehow feel
different when Burgess refers to the weird and frightful attributes of the
various races (the non-English people) than when Lovecraft gives the cat in
“The Rats in the Walls” the name “Nigger Man” or when Card openly calls for the
toppling of the United States government should gay marriage become legal (even
while he continues to milk the gay-ass Enderverse for all its worth).
Since the course of real-world history seems always, in fits
and starts, to be toward greater tolerance, inclusiveness and equality among
various peoples, I think it gets under my skin when science fiction writers are
so aggressively not progressive, and
it bugs me more the closer they are to being my contemporaries. I can deal better
with Lovecraft’s bigotries because his work is most of century in the past and
it was never principally about being
a bigot. I cannot deal with Card
because he is currently working and is actively and deliberately a bigot.
Burgess is somewhere in between. He came of age before the Second World War,
but he saw the world from a position of great privilege after it—even living
for a while in a motorhome on the Continent as a tax exile from Britain because
he was so well-to-do and didn’t like paying his taxes. Because he was such a
good stylist of a prose that can be so much fun to read, I wish that I could
read The Wanting Seed without all these
annoyances that repeatedly made me trip and stall during my hours with this
book.
In fairness, it's true that some of these things can easily be spotted in other British spec fic of the period, particularly in regards to the assumption that the English are the most accomplished race of people ever (a bias that white Americans inherited and still cultivate aggressively even now). For example, in J.G. Ballard's The Wind From Nowhere, we learn that the ever-accelerating titular wind is blowing to the ground all the shoddy cities and hovels of most of the rest of the world at a point where it has only reached the level of a nuisance in stoutly-built London.
But, really?
Extra teeth? A mouth so large, do you see.
But, on the other side of the ledger, The Wanting Seed does fairly pillory war and all the frauds surrounding
it with some very funny comedy and satire. Later in the book, as the world passes
out of the Interphase and into the Gusphase, a professional army is raised, its
function: war. But the world has known no war in generations, England has no
real infrastructure for it, and no particular enemy to fight, (shades of 1984 where it remains unclear whether
Oceania’s perpetual enemies even actually exist). So the War Department—now not
even a department of government but rather a private contractor—creates the illusion
of such, shanghaiing people into the army, duping them with mock campaigns,
noises of battle literally blasted over loudspeakers from record players. It’s
all a scam to create corpses for the processed food industry and to provide a
useful lie to sedate the public. As a character very cannily observes,
perpetual war is perpetually popular so long as it has no impact on day-to-day
civilian life. “Civilians love war,” it is noted, so long as they can continue
to be civilians during it. It sounds very, very familiar and timely.
