HAVANA TIMES – We often take dystopian* novels as grand parables of society as we fear it could become subjected to the rule of a totalitarian state that turns into a constant control machine for private relationships and our consciences.
When we talk about dystopias, our most common reference is George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949. In this novel, the dictatorship achieves perfection in its instruments of control, and the famous Big Brother, the omnipresent supreme leader of Oceania, the new dystopian state, watches over all from the screens. It is an absolute power that creates a new reality that can be erased and rewritten according to the needs of the official ideology.
Dystopian regimes impose happiness by force under a uniform mold of behavior. This is what Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, published in 1932, teaches us. It presents the brave new world that the character Miranda offers in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this new world peace and well-being reign, but humans are manufactured in laboratories, and education is imparted through hypnotic trances where minds listen to slogans being repeated until fixed in memory.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, a novel written in 1984, is set in an uncertain future in Gilead, which was once the United States. Here, a sect of fundamentalist fanatics impose a theocratic police state. Women are only useful for bearing children under the threat of execution or exile.
The societies these novels describe, subjected to total tyrannies seeking to destroy the individual by nullifying their freedoms, are dystopias that don’t remain in the impossi