{"id":388,"date":"2019-09-29T13:59:59","date_gmt":"2019-09-29T11:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/?p=388"},"modified":"2022-07-18T23:03:38","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T21:03:38","slug":"the-dystopian-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/?p=388","title":{"rendered":"The Dystopian Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lige s\u00e5 l\u00e6nge jeg kan huske har det v\u00e6ret almindeligt at n\u00e6vne Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> og Huxleys Brave New World<\/em> i samme s\u00e6tning. De to store dystopiske romaner fra det tyvende \u00e5rhundrede. De to store undtagelser fra reglen om at science fiction ikke er v\u00e6rd at besk\u00e6ftige sig med (og som derfor, til min irritation, ofte blev givet skudsm\u00e5let ikke rigtig<\/em> science fiction!). I essayet The Dystopian Imagination<\/em>, trykt i samlingen Our Culture, What’s Left of It <\/em>graver Theodore Dalrymple (selv en v\u00e6rdig arvtager til Orwell i mine \u00f8jne) i en lighed mellem de to b\u00f8ger:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In both dystopias, people find themselves cut off from the past as a matter of deliberate policy. The revolution that brought about the Brave New World, says Mustapha Mond, was “accompanied by a campaign against the Past” – the closing of museums (as in the Taliban’s Afghanistan), the banning of old books. In <\/em>1984 “the past has been abolished.” “History has stopped. Nothing exists except as an endless present in which the Party is always right.”<\/em>
\n        Such dystopian engineering is at work in my own country. By the deliberate decision of pedagogues, hundreds of thousands of children now leave school without knowing a single historical fact about their own country. The historical principles that museums have traditionally used to display art have given way to ahistorical thematic displays – portraits of women from a jumble of eras, say. A meaningless glass box now sits on a pediment in London’s Trafalgar Square as a “corrective” to the historical associations of that famous urban space. A population is being deliberately created with no sense of history.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dalrymple skrev disse ord i 2001, og hvor meget v\u00e6rre er det dog ikke blevet siden! Nu synes alle begivenheder i b\u00e5de n\u00e6r og fjern fortid at skulle omdefineres efter moderne moralbegreber. Den grassatg\u00e5ende politiske korrektheds \u00f8del\u00e6ggende effekt p\u00e5 civilisation og menneskelighed er sv\u00e6r at overvurdere. Dalrymple forts\u00e6tter med at p\u00e5pege en interessant lighed mellem de to v\u00e6rker, som jeg ikke selv havde lagt m\u00e6rke til:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For both Huxley and Orwell, one man symbolized resistance to the dehumanizing disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare. In both writers, he stands for the highest pinnacle of human self-understanding, without which human life loses its depth and its possibility of transcendence. In <\/em>Brave New World, possessing an old volume of Shakespeare that has mysteriously survived protects a man from the enfeebling effects of a purely hedonistic life. […] And when Winston Smith wakes in <\/em>1984 from a dream about a time before the Revolution, when people were still human, a single word rises to his lips, for reasons that he does not understand: Shakespeare.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dalrymple afslutter med en selvoplevet anekdote, der st\u00e5r for mig som noget af det mest rystende og tankev\u00e6kkende jeg l\u00e6nge har l\u00e6st:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This scene takes me back to Pyongyang. I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People’s Study House – all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata – when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, “Do you speak English?”<\/em>
        An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean an a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, “Down with Big Brother!”
         “Yes,” I replied.<\/em>
         “I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life.”<\/em>
        It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.<\/em>
         Orwell and Huxley had the imagination to understand why – unlike me, who had to go to Pyongyang to find out.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lige s\u00e5 l\u00e6nge jeg kan huske har det v\u00e6ret almindeligt at n\u00e6vne Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four og Huxleys Brave New World i samme s\u00e6tning. De to store dystopiske romaner fra det tyvende \u00e5rhundrede. De to store undtagelser fra reglen om at science fiction ikke er v\u00e6rd at besk\u00e6ftige sig med (og som derfor, til min irritation, … <\/p>\n

L\u00e6s videre “The Dystopian Imagination”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,28,57,23],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aldous-huxley","tag-george-orwell","tag-theodore-dalrymple","tag-william-shakespeare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1037,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}