WE discussion thread 3: From Record 21 up to Record 30

[Traveller]

Oh, the bittersweet agonies of love...

[Traveller]

..and of course, here we see what the One-state truly is like, with its gas-chambers and operating theaters and its Gestapo.
Third Reich, anyone?

[Nataliya]

There are bits and pieces throughout this book - and this segment in particular - that bring to mind the (in)famous quote by Stephen Hawking that philosophy is dead since it hasn't kept up with science. Zamyatin can say to that - been there, done that, got a T-shirt. He presents such a world where Hawkins' claim is reality - and of course, like a writer, a creator of imaginary universes that challenge your worldview , lets you decide if it is indeed so.

D-503-unsettled and shattered by everything new to him - emotions, love, lust, jealousy, doubt, imagination and rebellion - frantically and desperately tries to cling to the familiar and comfortable. To him it's rationality, numbers, stability. And yet with every page you can feel him crack under the strain, no matter how he tries to justify it to himself.

"And second: in her, in I-330, I'm afraid to lose maybe the only key to the solution of all the unknowns (the wardrobe incident, my temporary death, etc). And now I feel obligated to solve them, even just as the author if this journal, not even to mention that overall the unknown is simply organically hostile to humans, and Homo sapiens is only fully human when his grammar is completely free of question marks and instead only has exclamation points, commas and periods."

It's so painful for him to realize that the uniform happiness and surface unity of his state may in fact not be true no matter how comfortable and content he used to feel in that conviction - but still he views such discord as abomination, deviation from the norm, maybe evil (had he fully realized the concept of evil). Indoctrination and brainwashing - powerful, indeed.

"Perhaps I'm no longer a phagocyte, calmly devouring microbes (with bluish temples and freckled): perhaps I'm actually a microbe and perhaps there are thousands of them among us, still pretending - like me - to be phagocytes..."

The exhilarating and almost surreal to him visit beyond the Green Wall is written to resemble a hallucination, a drunken dream which in the morning you're not sure was real. With the foundations of his worldview teetering under the cracks that his discoveries made, he even becomes human for a bit, feeling and offering compassion to pregnant O who otherwise is destined for removal from this 'perfect' world that she dares to defy.
For a brief moment, he's no longer a cog in the wheel but an individual, an integer.

"This was incredibly strange, intoxicating: I felt myself above all others; I was I, separate, the world, I stopped being a summand I used to be and became one, a unit, an integer."

And finally, one of my favorite quotes, quite controversial for the times:

'Then how do you want the final revolution? There is no final revolution, revolutions are infinite. The final one is for children: children are afraid of infinity, and it's necessary for children to sleep peacefully at night...'

[Traveller]

Hmm, and to add to the above, this is what I found from a book about Russia by the notorious Orlando Figes.

Well you'll remember that in the book, the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement, is given central importance. This mirrors an apparent fascination that the early Russian communists had with industrial and mechanical efficiency.

Now, according to Figes, the Bolsheviks were particularly influenced by the theories of the American engineer F. W. Taylor, who used 'time and motion' studies to divide and automate the labour tasks of industry.
Check this out! :O

"Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism. Its premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole manufacturing process accorded with his view of the Russian working class. He saw Taylorism's 'scientific' methods as a means of discipline that could remould the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines. All this was of a piece with the modernist belief in the power of machines to transform man and the universe.
One can see it in the Futurists' idealization of technology; in the fascination with machines which pervades the films of Eisenstein and Vertov; in the exaltation of factory production in left-wing art; and in the industrialism of the Constructivists. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylor and of another great American industrialist, Henry Ford...

Figes goes on to describe the experiments of an engineer named Gastev, who, as head of the institute of labor, envisaged the mechanization of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of industrial production to the thinking patterns of human beings.

...in 1920, Gastev carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance, by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' - a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian (and Czech) verb 'to work': rabotat'. Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought bio-mechanization would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed, he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a Utopia where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' identified by ciphers such as 'A, B, C, or 325, 075, o, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controller. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'.
There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer'.

Sound familiar? I thought Zamyatin made it all up!!

Figes goes on to say:

This was the Soviet paradise Zamyatin satirized in his novel We, which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the Benefactor.

[Saski]

I love it!

[Allen]

Traveller wrote: "Hmm, and to add to the above, this is what I found from a book about Russia by the notorious Orlando Figes.

Well you'll remember that in the book, the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, one o..."

Awesome find! Indeed it's a "mechanized collectivism" in We's world. Still, with all the mechanism and numbers, I find it intriguing we know very little about the great Integral, and at this point I began to doubt it was a spaceship in the sense of reaching other planets. But, I swallowed and accepted just to see where the story led.

On a mathematical aside... D-503's references to square root of minus one disappeared around this section I think. Rather enjoyed the reference. Then I thought maybe the author left it because he found an answer? To explain, no real number exists to answer what's the square root of minus one. But mathematicians needed a number to explain certain behaviors in equations, so they made it up, literally. It's "i" - the imaginary number. So, i squared equals minus one.

Now, as Nataliya pointed out, with D-503's angst (obsession?) over I-330:

"To him it's rationality, numbers, stability. And yet with every page you can feel him crack under the strain, no matter how he tries to justify it to himself."

He refers to wanting to find a solution, and while, yes, it's painful for him to realize his world's not all rational, it's almost unbearable to the reader as he suffers under the obvious answer:

I-330 is the "i" - the imaginary number that answers the equation of the city, his world. (Definitely think the author chose her designation for that symbolic purpose.)

The turning point does seem to be the visit outside the wall: "This was incredibly strange, intoxicating: I felt myself above all others; I was I, separate, the world, I stopped being a summand I used to be and became one, a unit, an integer."

But then, he isn't really is he? He's bound to I-330 now, mind and newfound soul. He's become a complex number in mathematics ... "An imaginary number bi can be added to a real number a to form a complex number of the form a + bi, where a and b are called, respectively, the real part and the imaginary part of the complex number." - Wikipedia

Reading too much into it? Maybe. But it's still pretty cool.

[Traveller]

Allen wrote: "I-330 is the "i" - the imaginary number that answers the equation of the city, his world. .."

Hey, great catch! I see where the I fits in, but what about the 330?

And now I'm thinking there must be some significance to the D-503....

[Allen]

Traveller wrote: "Allen wrote: "I-330 is the "i" - the imaginary number that answers the equation of the city, his world. .."

Hey, great catch! I see where the I fits in, but what about the 330?

And now I'm think..."

Can't figure it out, if there is one. I just geeked out over the square root of minus one stuff! Number theory is at least a couple decades behind me now :)

[Allen]

Nataliya wrote: "And finally, one of my favorite quotes, quite controversial for the times:
'Then how do you want the final revolution? There is no final revolution, revolutions are infinite. The final one is for children: children are afraid of infinity, and it's necessary for children to sleep peacefully at night...'"

Nice. Went back and found it, although prefer your translation over mine. So, controversial in that people of that era should not want for revolution? That with the state there should be no need for revolution?

[Nataliya]

Allen wrote: "Nice. Went back and found it, although prefer your translation over mine. So, controversial in that people of that era should not want for revolution? That with the state there should be no need for revolution?"

The Great October Socialist Revolution should have been the final one. After all, why more revolutions when the proletariat has won? Suggesting that 'revolutions are infinite' robs the Bolshevik's one of its significance as the crown jewel of all revolutions, making it just one of many, and the government it installed just as susceptible to being toppled as the ones before it.

Oh, and thanks! That translation is just mine :)

[Traveller]

I vote for Nataliya as translator! Start taking your laptop and Russian books with you on night duty and hope the mama's keep their babies in so you can write!

[Nataliya]

I love these discussions - with all my wonderful friends being able to see and find absolutely amazing and unexpected things in the books I thought I knew. Thongs that not only enrich my experience of those books but also give me a new angle to look at them.

Traveller wrote: "Well you'll remember that in the book, the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement, is given central importance. This mirrors an apparent fascination that the early Russian communists had with industrial and mechanical efficiency.

Now, according to Figes, the Bolsheviks were particularly influenced by the theories of the American engineer F. W. Taylor, who used 'time and motion' studies to divide and automate the labour tasks of industry."

Trav, that is unbelievable. This theory is so strange and yet was actually applied? That makes Zamyatin's book not just the flight of extrapolative fantasy but a very real warning about things that actually had a chance of becoming reality. That is quite terrifying.

Allen wrote: "I-330 is the "i" - the imaginary number that answers the equation of the city, his world. (Definitely think the author chose her designation for that symbolic purpose.)"

Math has always been my weaker subject (something about its clear rationality that did not sit well with my overexcited brain), and I have never thought of looking at I-330's 'name' this way. This is so in tone with the mathematical approach our character takes throughout the book, and it brings such significance not just to her name but to her character as a whole. This is truly an amazing observation.

Traveller wrote: "I vote for Nataliya as translator! Start taking your laptop and Russian books with you on night duty and hope the mama's keep their babies in so you can write!"

Awwww, thanks, Trav!