WE by Eugene Zamiatin
To a certain extent all literature is about “disaffection,” a sense that one is fatally separated from one’s community. After all, books are written by solitary authors, scribbling away on desert islands, hoping their 80,000-word SOS notes will some day be stuffed into bottles and floated towards an unseen audience.
But in “genre” fiction (sci fi, crime, horror) the division between individual and community is even more pronounced, more obviously central to the work.
In the Russian sci fi classic WE, by Eugene Zamiatin, the conflict between the individual and a larger society is expressed in the two-letter title. The “We” is a lovingly-repressive “United State.” There are millions of inhabitants within the United State, but they aren’t really individuals, they are more like microbes, tiny insignificant organisms that make up a single large body. There is no room for individualism in this society. Walls are transparent, every hour is strictly regulated and everyone chews each bite of petroleum-based food fifty times before swallowing. Occasionally, the doctrine of self-negation is expressed in ancient religious terms: “resignation is a virtue, and pride a vice; that ‘We’ is from God, ‘I’ from the devil.”
The protagonist, and first-person narrator of WE, is D-503. He is a male “number” whose work function is to build a rocket ship called The Integral, which will carry the message of sublime submission to other, more primitive worlds. As The Integral nears completion, D-503 writes a journal that will be part of the rocket’s inspirational payload. The novel is comprised of those journal entries.
D-503’s problem is his poet’s soul. In his journal, he regularly re-purposes work-imagery to describe a burgeoning internal struggle. At one point, he is an over-heated machine, whose bearings are about to fail; he tries to save the mechanism with the cool water of logic, but that remedy just turns to steam and evaporates. D-503 can’t stop his mind wandering like that, when it should be exclusively focused on the task at hand. He dreams that an ordinary chair comes to life and walks like a horse across the room to climb into bed with him. He imagines falling through the surface of a mirror into a completely different reality.
Of course, The United State thinks such “fancy” is a dangerous disease and devises an X-ray treatment to excise it from peoples’ brains.
D-503 is a complex little microbe. In a way, he is like modern readers who, presumably, value intellectual freedom. D-503 notices little things, like a teardrop stain on a piece of paper, or the dimple on O-90’s wrist, and is emotionally overwhelmed. On the other hand, he is strangely unmoved by a workplace slaughter, when The Integral test fires its engines. “At the time of the first explosion, about a dozen loafing Numbers from the docks stood near the main tube—and nothing was left of them save a few crumbs and a little soot.”
D-503 also has a violent sexual fascination with I-330, the female Number who leads a rebellious cabal against “The Well-Doer.” D-503 isn’t a romanticized tiny cog in a big machine, and he isn’t just a flawed character; he is an inconvenient set member. If you advocate freedom for all, you have to include dangerously selfish intellectual weaklings like D-503.
He is both hero and villain.
WE was first published in 1924, and it’s easy to see specific criticism of totalitarian Russian society, with its uniforms and badges, pre-determined elections, and outrageous formal expressions of love for an oppressive leader. But there are also obvious threads running from WE through George Orwell’s 1984, to the illogic of our present political discourse, where dissent is no longer tolerated. My Facebook account is currently plugged with video clips assuring me that the only true “free thinkers” in our society are those people who blindly worship ultra-right-wing, anti-woke content producers.
Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of limiting “free speech” to whatever agrees with their leaders’ talking points. But, to my mind, the “right” is most Orwellian in the subversion of language. To re-purpose focused hatred as “free thinking” is, of course, ridiculous. Unfortunately, many members of our present science-fiction world think it’s perfectly acceptable.
At a certain point in the novel, the word “we” refers to the rebel group, rather than the state. The rebels want to take over The Integral and use it as a weapon to reunite Numbers within The United State with their primitive doppelgangers, a race living in the wilderness, outside thick glass barriers.
That seems like a reasonable goal, but the rebels aren’t uniformly good people. I-330 has clearly been sexually manipulating D-503, just to gain control of The Integral, and she callously proposes using the rocket’s thrusters to vaporize potential pursuers.
For a while, WE seems like a template for Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, where the revolutionaries are just as bad as the leaders they depose. That ends up not being the case, however. The rebels aren’t greedy for power, they just aren’t very good at sedition, probably because they have grown up chewing each bite of food fifty times.
The real heroes of the book are un-named characters who spontaneously disobey in response to acts of cruelty. Several individuals intervene when others are being unfairly harassed by the “Guardians,” and they riot as a group against a horde of zombie-Numbers trying to marshal them into auditoriums to be lobotomized. Thousands vote against the automatic re-election of the Well-Doer, and some manage to blow up a section of the glass wall.
There’s no specific act of treachery that derails the rebellion; The United State prevails because of a heavy inertia that is difficult to overcome. D-503 was in a position to change the outcome but he was ultimately too self-absorbed, wallowing in his own poetic confusion.
“Hope” for a better world still exists but, typical of dystopian novels, only in wilderness areas outside the shiny glass walls.
But in “genre” fiction (sci fi, crime, horror) the division between individual and community is even more pronounced, more obviously central to the work.
In the Russian sci fi classic WE, by Eugene Zamiatin, the conflict between the individual and a larger society is expressed in the two-letter title. The “We” is a lovingly-repressive “United State.” There are millions of inhabitants within the United State, but they aren’t really individuals, they are more like microbes, tiny insignificant organisms that make up a single large body. There is no room for individualism in this society. Walls are transparent, every hour is strictly regulated and everyone chews each bite of petroleum-based food fifty times before swallowing. Occasionally, the doctrine of self-negation is expressed in ancient religious terms: “resignation is a virtue, and pride a vice; that ‘We’ is from God, ‘I’ from the devil.”
The protagonist, and first-person narrator of WE, is D-503. He is a male “number” whose work function is to build a rocket ship called The Integral, which will carry the message of sublime submission to other, more primitive worlds. As The Integral nears completion, D-503 writes a journal that will be part of the rocket’s inspirational payload. The novel is comprised of those journal entries.
D-503’s problem is his poet’s soul. In his journal, he regularly re-purposes work-imagery to describe a burgeoning internal struggle. At one point, he is an over-heated machine, whose bearings are about to fail; he tries to save the mechanism with the cool water of logic, but that remedy just turns to steam and evaporates. D-503 can’t stop his mind wandering like that, when it should be exclusively focused on the task at hand. He dreams that an ordinary chair comes to life and walks like a horse across the room to climb into bed with him. He imagines falling through the surface of a mirror into a completely different reality.
Of course, The United State thinks such “fancy” is a dangerous disease and devises an X-ray treatment to excise it from peoples’ brains.
D-503 is a complex little microbe. In a way, he is like modern readers who, presumably, value intellectual freedom. D-503 notices little things, like a teardrop stain on a piece of paper, or the dimple on O-90’s wrist, and is emotionally overwhelmed. On the other hand, he is strangely unmoved by a workplace slaughter, when The Integral test fires its engines. “At the time of the first explosion, about a dozen loafing Numbers from the docks stood near the main tube—and nothing was left of them save a few crumbs and a little soot.”
D-503 also has a violent sexual fascination with I-330, the female Number who leads a rebellious cabal against “The Well-Doer.” D-503 isn’t a romanticized tiny cog in a big machine, and he isn’t just a flawed character; he is an inconvenient set member. If you advocate freedom for all, you have to include dangerously selfish intellectual weaklings like D-503.
He is both hero and villain.
WE was first published in 1924, and it’s easy to see specific criticism of totalitarian Russian society, with its uniforms and badges, pre-determined elections, and outrageous formal expressions of love for an oppressive leader. But there are also obvious threads running from WE through George Orwell’s 1984, to the illogic of our present political discourse, where dissent is no longer tolerated. My Facebook account is currently plugged with video clips assuring me that the only true “free thinkers” in our society are those people who blindly worship ultra-right-wing, anti-woke content producers.
Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of limiting “free speech” to whatever agrees with their leaders’ talking points. But, to my mind, the “right” is most Orwellian in the subversion of language. To re-purpose focused hatred as “free thinking” is, of course, ridiculous. Unfortunately, many members of our present science-fiction world think it’s perfectly acceptable.
At a certain point in the novel, the word “we” refers to the rebel group, rather than the state. The rebels want to take over The Integral and use it as a weapon to reunite Numbers within The United State with their primitive doppelgangers, a race living in the wilderness, outside thick glass barriers.
That seems like a reasonable goal, but the rebels aren’t uniformly good people. I-330 has clearly been sexually manipulating D-503, just to gain control of The Integral, and she callously proposes using the rocket’s thrusters to vaporize potential pursuers.
For a while, WE seems like a template for Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, where the revolutionaries are just as bad as the leaders they depose. That ends up not being the case, however. The rebels aren’t greedy for power, they just aren’t very good at sedition, probably because they have grown up chewing each bite of food fifty times.
The real heroes of the book are un-named characters who spontaneously disobey in response to acts of cruelty. Several individuals intervene when others are being unfairly harassed by the “Guardians,” and they riot as a group against a horde of zombie-Numbers trying to marshal them into auditoriums to be lobotomized. Thousands vote against the automatic re-election of the Well-Doer, and some manage to blow up a section of the glass wall.
There’s no specific act of treachery that derails the rebellion; The United State prevails because of a heavy inertia that is difficult to overcome. D-503 was in a position to change the outcome but he was ultimately too self-absorbed, wallowing in his own poetic confusion.
“Hope” for a better world still exists but, typical of dystopian novels, only in wilderness areas outside the shiny glass walls.
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