The Riddle of Cruelty and the Anti-Fascist Dystopia: Orwell, Burdekin, Ballard

• In Event: Utopias/Dystopias: More to Orwell to Fukuyama

Abstract

This essay engages George Orwell as an analyst of fascism, first reading his work alongside his anti-fascist contemporaries and later in relation to twenty-first century critics of fascism, especially the dystopian writer J.G. Ballard. That Orwell was a practitioner of anti-fascism is clear: he enlisted with the POUM to fight against Franco’s Nationalists in Spain – in his own words, to kill fascists – and in the lead-up to the Second World War called for vigilance against homegrown fascism in England. But Orwell’s intellectual engagement with fascism is more difficult to appropriate. Though he was never one to theorize systematically, Orwell’s account of fascism is elusive even by his standards, despite his claim that, “We cannot struggle against Fascism unless we are willing to understand it.” Orwell famously complained in a 1944 essay that the meaning of fascism had been obscured by its wide use as an epithet, a complaint echoed in many recent commentaries that decry as hyperbolic or imprecise the use of ‘fascist’ to describe the twenty-first century far-right.

But Orwell’s own rendering of fascism fares little better, registering more as a swirl of connotations having to do with violence and reactionary politics – cruelty, nationalism, militarism, anti-working class sentiment, and such. It is on the first of these terms, which Orwell lists first among the synonyms conveying the “emotional significance” of fascism, that my essay focuses. Orwell had cautioned in 1937, in The Road to Wigan Pier, that it is “worse than useless to write Fascism off as ‘mass sadism’,” and yet Orwell himself characterized Fascists as, essentially, violent bullies. And despite suggesting in 1943 that the “dragon” of fascism “is almost certainly slain” he would in years to come dwell on “cruelty as an end in itself” as a typing feature of totalitarianism. This is given most dramatic expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party inquisitor O’Brien gleefully catalogues the virtues of cruelty, torture, and pain. He describes Oceania as “the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias the old reformers imagined’: a dystopia of sadism.

Orwell’s critics have found this note unconvincing, both politically and psychologically. Most influentially, Isaac Deutchser attacked the “mysticism of cruelty” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, arguing that the novel’s preoccupation with the “disembodied sadism” of the Party undercut Orwell’s warning. But Deutscher goes too far in alleging that Orwell located “sadistic power-hunger” in human nature. Orwell himself contended more than once, contra James Burnham, that the will to dominate was rare and distinctly unnatural, and that its twentieth century manifestations required historical and psychological, not metaphysical, explanation. Orwell himself only scratched the surface of such an explanation, but his contemporaries – anti-fascist novelists like Katharine Burdekin and Freudo-Marxists like Reich, Fromm, and Adorno – took seriously the proposition that understanding fascism required a psychopathology of fascism.

The final section of the essay brings these lenses to bear on J.G. Ballard’s final novel, 2006’s Kingdom Come. Ballard’s near-future dystopia examined the “ugly suburban fascism” of the twenty-first century a decade before Brexit, Trump, and the New Right. Drawing together the anti-fascist elements in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the more programmatically anti-fascist texts by Burdekin and Ballard, we arrive at an account of the anti-fascist dystopia as a unique subset of dystopian writings, one which departs both topologically and politically from the anti-utopian satires concerned with the sterility of a painless world and instead dwell on futures where cruelty and violence reign supreme. As they depict fascism, its central political techniques and institutions are geared toward aestheticizing and eroticizing violence, such that the public realm is saturated with cruelty. Anti-fascist dystopias need not impute the impulse toward cruelty to human nature, but they warn that it nonetheless provides a persistent resource for reactionary politics which strip away the experience of solidarity and substitute the perverse pleasures of domination.

Author

• Matthew Benjamin Cole, Binghamton University (SUNY)