In paid subscriberland, I write a Dyzma’s Larder post about the patron saint whose feast day it is today: St. Kateri Tekakwitha. And on Sunday, I will re-serialize fresher versions of Escape From Starshire, including new chapter segments. You don’t wanna miss that!
Housekeeping
First: a warm welcome to all the awesome new subscribers who’ve made their way here! Thank you all for bringing Timeless up to over 200 subscribers! I don’t usually make a big fuss about numbers, but I know it’s important in the digital age. And that quantitative as numbers might be, all of you are living, breathing human beings.
So again: my deepest thanks!
I have also created a few new article sections here at Timeless. Three in particular:
Substack Reviews are a separate category: that’ll make it easy for you to find the others!
Feuilleton Friday should have had its own section from the beginning; that has now been rectified.
Really enjoyed the post I made about Tolkien a while ago. But it is very nerdy! So while it will be a small category, every now and then I’ll have fun and write a fantasy world deep dive. Look for those essays under the section Weathertop’s Palantir.
And now, without further ado: time to review a most underrated dystopian novel that belongs right next to your weatherworn copy of 1984, Brave New World and We. Those tired of me talking about evil Marxists will enjoy this one: for while it does not exclude Soviet totalitarianism, Kallocain is the most successful dystopian novel (artistically speaking) influenced by Nazi Germany.
Part 1: Who Was Karin Boye?
If Kallocain is obscure relative to 1984, its author, Karin Boye, is even more obscure. No doubt the feminists will screech about patriarchy. But it’s not like Ayn Rand, the other great female dystopian, is rendered to obscurity because of her vagina (or Margaret Atwood for that matter): on the contrary, I suspect her haters most probably wish they could dismiss Rand by virtue of something as LCD1 as genitalia. Feminists are pro-woman…as long as women are 100% subservient to their ideological dictates. But I digress.
I would argue that Boye is obscure because Scandinavian literature is obscure in keeping with the biased wishes of Anglosphere literati who, deep down, are offended by the national and supranational regionalism Scandinavia represents. (as well as Greater Slavia and, to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean and Iberia) The same discomfort that led Selma Lagerlöf’s fans (like H.G. Wells, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf) to do nothing to promote her name in the Anglosphere. Anglo antagonism toward the Nobel Prize’s understandable and justifiable Nordic bias blinds us to the fact that Scandinavian literature is full of marvelous treats. While the mountains and fjords of Norway hold the most such treats as far as prose is concerned, Sweden has its fair share as well. And let us not forget that it was a Norwegian author and Nobel Prize Laureate, Knut Hamsun, who first created modernist literature. (insofar as credit can be given for something like that)
With modernists like Hamsun in mind, it is not surprising that a Scandinavian author would pen a dystopia. Henrik Ibsen had already hinted at a latent dystopian instinct in his wonderful play, An Enemy of the People. (My personal favorite) But by a different metric, it is equally surprising that they would pen dystopias. Anyone who has had experiences in Scandinavian countries has no doubt learned that Scandinavians are extreme conformists. Much as I admire many different things about the Nordic countries, as a poet I particularly don’t like their hypocrisy around ultimate Nordic nonconformist Edith Södergran. In her time she was rejected by Nordic society with a vengeance. And now Swedish feminists claim to love her. If they could go back in time and get to know her, they would run for the hills faster than Irish monks fleeing a Viking raid. And any one of them who says otherwise is a liar.
What Nordic conformity tells us about Boye is that she, too, must have been different; though maybe not at Södergran’s unsurpassable Nietzschean level. Born in Gothenburg, Boye came from a wealthy family and, in some respects, followed the conventional life path of a wealthy family member who became a teacher. During her time at Uppsala University, she became a socialist and an “antifascist” in the Marxist sense. (Which, for those who don’t know history, doesn’t strictly mean they hate fascists but is a buzzword used to affirm their Marxism) An ideological position she retained until her tour of the Soviet Union in 1928 where, like Andre Gide, Boye’s illusions were destroyed. (A fact her English language Wikipedia page conveniently leaves out)
Boye married a member of her Uppsala intellectual circle but later divorced after “becoming” lesbian. (Or pursuing what she’d really felt the whole time: I’ll let readers pick whatever explanation their biases prefer to dictate) Her second “wife,” Margot Hanel, was a German she’d met in Berlin in the early 1930s. Already fluent in the language, German issues became closer to home for Boye through her relationship with Hanel. During this time, Boye also gained a reputation as a poet. Some, like her translator, have called her Sweden’s best woman poet.
Initially, in keeping with her “antifascism,” Boye found individualism in literature repugnant, especially when from a man. She saw Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain as a particularly guilty culprit. That didn’t stop her from translating it, however, while also translating socialist realism novels popular at the time in the Soviet Union.
At some point, however, Boye underwent a change: in tandem, perhaps, with the psychiatric help she sought to help make sense of her homosexual inclinations. By the time Kallocain came out in 1940 - published, like Orwell’s 1984, around the end of the author’s life - the plight of the individual had become a front-and-center theme. The introduction to my copy of Kallocain by translator David McDuff - best known for his translations of Russian literature - recollects how Boye would have to do the Sieg Heil when visiting Germany in the early days of the regime “with seeming fascination.”
Not the positive kind of fascination, I reckon: a conscientious person in such a position - especially an outsider - would, no doubt, think a lot about their place in society as an individual. And watch how it blends into collective nothingness. Only later would we recognize mass formation psychosis at work. Though not referred to by name, Kallocain does accommodate mass formation psychosis to a small degree.
Boye, herself, would ultimately choose nothingness - in a manner of speaking - when she committed suicide in 1941 in an open field. How she did away with herself and why remains unclear to this day, but Hanel also killed herself not long after. A fellow novelist, Peter Weiss, whom Boye knew and who was writing about anti-Nazi dissidents - a list on which he included Boye since even with Sweden’s neutrality writing Kallocain at that time was a dangerous act - speculated that the author of Kallocain wished to fuse with the masses (very Scandinavian) but whose deeper desire was death and annihilation.
I can see this being true. For Kallocain itself is a novel of liquidation and annihilation. A characteristic that anticipates O’Brien spectacularly.
Part 2: The World of Kallocain
As an artistic work, Kallocain not only possesses all the requisites for inclusion in the dystopian genre; it shares the same level of quality as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Kallocain, without a doubt, belongs next to these novels in their exalted place.
Subtitled ‘A novel of the 21st century,’ Kallocain is the result of an author who, along with her unique experiences, not only understands the ramifications of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor but has read both We and Brave New World and taken them to heart. If the Anglosphere is right about Aldous Huxley being ignorant of We’s existence and Dubravka Ugrešić is wrong about him having plagiarized Zamyatin, then Boye is the first dystopian author to be a serious, conscious student of dystopian literature. Making Kallocain an important watershed moment in the genre’s development. In my opinion, Kallocain is also the moment when the dystopian genre is free of the influence of H.G. Wells and can stand on its own.
Kallocain is a true child of Zamyatin in that it continues exploration of the potentiality of a single, domineering state: but whereas the inhabitants of We lived under the control of OneState, the inhabitants of the world of Kallocain live in the World State. (Not much of a difference, I know; except that the World State only claims to be the state of the entire world) Devotion to this World State is stronger than in the quasi-Wellsian OneState where the possibility of living a life comparable to Brave New World exists, albeit in limited quantities. (This perhaps being why Ugrešić thought Huxley was a plagiarist) But the light at the end of the tunnel that is Zamyatin’s desire for individuality is already projecting a dimmer twinkle.
On one hand, Kallocain is not Metropolis; the underbelly of the paradisal state of the 1927 film is not filled with nameless humans functioning as ubiquitous tools. Kallocain itself functions as insurance in this respect. But while it’s never very clear if OneState can do without D-503 in the functional sense - obedience and loyalty are the most important; Zamyatin, it seems, did not want to grant Lenin the benefit of the doubt in terms of ‘worker propaganda’ - the World State, more hybridic than OneState, demands what Hilaire Belloc called “the servile state.” Only Belloc didn’t mean for his essay to be interpreted as a warning: but neither, incidentally, did Boye. Kallocain isn’t a warning: it is a statement of fact.
Boye’s protagonist - Leo Kall, chemist, fiercely loyal to the World State and inventor of the truth serum Kallocain2 - is able to venerate the state with an emotion that is both sincere and questionably sincere to those of us who love freedom and cannot imagine such sycophancy. (Kall’s name does mean “cold”) For all of 1984’s widespread appeal, it is easier and more desirable to fit into Kall’s body than Winston’s. (Assisted by the fact that he has a wife) At least Kall has a job that one can easily talk oneself into believing is meaningful. Such is the allure of science.
Here we see the influence of the Third Reich at play: assuming we aren’t an untermensch or “class enemy,” most of us without a doubt would prefer a cozy job at Volkswagen or IG Farben than working in a Soviet commune or even a Soviet bureaucracy. Nazism’s3 usefulness as an influence upon dystopian literature is at its strongest here: 1930’s Germany had more in common as a society with the United States of today than the barely industrialized Soviet Union of 1918. There is also less of an interest in class divisions here: Germans, after all, were the ubermensch irrespective of whether they were rich or poor, men or women, 1930’s Reich Germans or Volksdeutscher. But Boye, curiously, does make use of the Soviet division of labor by cities: Kall’s hometown is Chemistry City 4, an entire city devoted to chemistry and all its requisite industry. The Soviet Union also functioned as such: Dnipropetrovsk, for instance (today in Ukraine) was entirely devoted to space industry and was a closed city for that reason. Even China, today, is characteristically like that.4
Unlike Winston, Kall has a wife - Linda. A character Boye used to release some of her own inner conflict with the world and the times she lived in. But in the World State, people cannot talk privately; like the telescreen in 1984, all private homes are bugged to where they are no longer private. Kallocain, like 1984, is very interested in the invasion of privacy and the “liberation” of humanity from the need for secrets and private concerns. For Zamyatin, OneState was simple: construct glass buildings in which people can see what everyone’s doing, and that’s that. Zamyatin, like his Bolshevik overlords, was shrewd enough to understand that some “solutions” were simple and didn’t require worldbuilding complexity. For his part, Huxley is less concerned with privacy as a need; perhaps the superficiality of people’s lives is such that privacy becomes redundant. It is with Boye, however, that the dystopian need to destroy personal privacy - and destroy the individual in the process - is revealed as one of the most important concerns of dystopia.
It was still possible - as indicated by We - to eke out moments of privacy in the Soviet Union, challenging as that may have been for many people. It was, after all, a huge country with a lot of wilderness: even one as relatively naive on these matters as John Steinbeck, in his Russian Journal, noticed an emotional distinction between the atmosphere of Moscow and that of rural Ukraine and Georgia. Britain is much smaller, but even Orwell allows Winston and Julia to find some privacy, if only temporarily and through a complicated series of logistics. (We also don’t get a sense at all of how life is lived in Airstrip One in the countryside, a deviation on both Boye and Orwell’s part from one of Zamyatin’s core aims)
But successful as the Soviets were at liquidating privacy for a lot of people, Hitler took it to another level. Be it the Hitlerjugend for children or the rallies for adult Germans, Hitler kept a tight lid on German society even as he placed it at the height of a hierarchy. And with the help of IBM, Hitler had the means to learn who everyone was, what they did and what ethnic background they had. The World State, in keeping with this difference, is more technologically conscious than the other dystopias: Kall, for instance, has to go on the radio and apologize for a misdeed early on in the novel. An act reminiscent of the Soviet show trials, to be sure, but done through the technology Hitler saw as needing to be controlled.
The last thing to note about the World State is that it isn’t really a state of the world. There are other political entities outside of its control. Boye, in this sense, not only foresaw Orwell’s scenario with Oceania being at war with Eurasia and then Eastasia; but the use of all-encompassing terms through which the populace is duped into granting authority to those who do not have it. The most obvious one in the West today is the European Union: an entity that has been blatantly destroying national distinctions to engineer a new human soul, “The European.” Not all parts of Europe are part of the European Union. And the worldview of the EU has nothing to do with the thousands of years of Western and Christian tradition that have defined Europe for ages. But the term “European” now refers to a lukewarm, nationless individual with a passport from an EU country, an absence of history and its legacy and a left-wing political ideology, rather than someone who is an inhabitant of, and/or indigenous to, the continent of Europe irrespective of his or her beliefs and political allegiances.
It is like the American Protestant tendency to use the term “Christian” to mean Christians minus Roman Catholics, but in the opposite direction: rather than exclude, it includes everyone and everything. Even that which came before and has nothing otherwise to do with the present meaning. It is a conquest not only of people, but ideas. Along with entire legacies.
Conclusion
Due to a lack of time, I decided to split my post on Kallocain into two parts. For Part 2 - no date as of yet - I will delve deeper into what Boye gives the dystopian genre.
Low or lowest common denominator
Kallocain the truth serum is the one obvious link to H.G. Wells. Just as War With The Worlds rendered alien invasions as scientific - as The Time Machine did with time travel and The Invisible Man did with invisibility - Kallocain does the same with the concept of truth serum and truth-coercing in general. This makes Kallocain the missing link between Wells and O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984.
I stress the difference here between Hitler and Italian fascism because Mussolini didn’t desire a World State, among other less relevant differences. Mussolini, in fact, did not believe fascism was something that could be exported: in a macabre way, he was right. In general I always make that difference because objectively speaking, they genuinely were different. Communist dictatorships, however - with the one exception of Yugoslavia - have not been able to make themselves distinct in terms of the terror and tyranny Marxism brings to the world.
In China, the city of Yiwu creates 2/3rds of the world’s Christmas decorations.
Glad there are 200 of us now, Felix.