Framing Catastrophe: The Problem of Ending in Dystopian Fiction

Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is the most famous of all English language dystopias. And we all know how it ends: ‘But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother’. Reminding us exactly where we have arrived at, the novel then reads, in most subsequent editions as in the first: ‘THE END’. Little wonder that Raymond Williams should have read it as ‘desperate because … on such a construction the exile could not win, and … there was no hope at all’; and its author as ‘a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor’. It was a judgement he would amend, but never revise. So the last of his many readings continued to deplore “the terrifying irrationalism of the climax of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’”. Fredric Jameson’s work on science fiction and Utopia shares a similarly longstanding animus towards both novel and author. Both Williams and Jameson had grasped the central political dilemma of dystopian fiction: if its serious purpose is in its warning, then the more grimly inexorable the fictive world becomes, so the less effective it will be as a call to resistance.