Inspired by our podcast episode that included a discussion of A Clockwork Orange, I had been contemplating reading some Anthony Burgess lately – perhaps Earthly Powers, his satire of the papacy? Appropriate. Timely.
But then I caught this piece in First Things on Burgess’ futuristic dystopian novel The Wanting Seed, and was intrigued.
I checked the book out from the library and read it several weeks ago. It’s taken me this long to figure out what to say about it. I intended to write about it in conjunction with Mania since both books carry a dystopian feel, but decided that would end up diminishing, rather than enhancing, what I might have to say about each book.
First, though – a note about the writing of the novel. In 1959, Burgess received a diagnosis of a terminal brain tumor and told he had no more than a year to live. He had been building a career as a writer, but not of novels. On receiving the diagnosis, he decided he had a duty to provide for his wife after his death – so he wrote five novels in the space of less than a year, including this one and A Clockwork Orange (which he apparently wrote in three weeks.)
(Burgess outlived his wife.)
What is “the wanting seed?” It is, quite simply, the seed of human life, generally, and more specifically, the generative drive. These seeds – these male and female gametes and the bodies that bear them – are repressed in the future described in this book, their existence and power denied. The “wanting” is an absence. It is a yearning, at times unconscious.
It’s a bit of a mess of a book, but that struck me as all right because it describes a mess of a world. At some point in the future (of course), the Western world, at least, has determined to take dramatic action against overpopulation. Couples who produce more than one child are punished, babies and children are allowed to die if not outright killed, and homosexuality is elevated as an ideal and homosexuals – or those who pretend to be (this is a plot point) are professionally and socially rewarded.
In addition, human corpses are recycled as fertilizer, as we discover at the beginning, when we meet Beatrice-Joanna Foxe, handing over her son’s corpse to the Ministry of Agriculture (Phosphorus Reclamation Department).
Think of this in national terms, in global terms. One mouth less to feed. On more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth. In a sense, you know, Mrs. Foxe, you’ll be getting your son back again.
Beatrice is married to Tristam – who will be our main character – but is having an affair with Tristam’s brother, who in turn, is publicly affecting homosexuality for the sake of his career. Tristam is a teacher in a boy’s school, and he spends a great deal of time articulating his grand theory of history, which involves epochs swinging between a “Pelagian” period in which institutions trust humans to be good and an “Augustinian” period in which, obviously, the framework is the opposite. The transition period between the two epochs – which is the setting of the novel – is always violent, dark chaos.
We spend the rest of the novel following both Beatrice and Tristam as they journey through this landscape – separately. Beatrice discovers she is pregnant again and escapes north to stay with her sister, which then leads Tristam to seek her, traveling through a population which on one hand, is starving because of crop failures and other shortages – and engaging in cannibalism as a result (I rarely put down books because I’m unable to read on – but I had to a few times here) – but as time goes on, as government collapses, is also rediscovering the good fruit of human freedom in creation, art and yes, vigorous, generative, heterosexual sex.
It’s a satire of course – a satire of authority, of government, of societies when they’ve tried to dispose of religion. It’s a satire of the lengths authority will go to keep populations under control and maintain power.
Tristam spends some time in prison, and then ends up in the army – and here’s the sharpest critique of all in a book that’s full of them.
We follow Tristam during his time in military, being marched to and fro, put on a boat and shipped…somewhere, he knows not where. The company finally lands and are marched on shore, having been told that the enemy awaits. A fellow soldier is convinced they are just in Ireland (they are).
“But, sir,’ said Tristram, ‘surely we have to know what we’re involved in. We’re told that there’s a war on. Some of the men, sir, refuse to believe it. I’m inclined to agree with them, sir.”
“Indeed?” said Lieutenant-Colonel Williams coldly. “Well, be enlightened, Foxe. There is fighting, so there must be war. There is not perhaps a war in the ancient sense, but war and fighting are, I should have supposed, in the organized sense, in the sense of armies being involved, as good as synonymous.”
“But, sir,”
“I hadn’t finished, Foxe, had I? As far as these two questions of who and why are concerned, those are- and you must take it from me apodictically – no business of soldiers. The enemy is the enemy. The enemy is the people we’re fighting. We must leave it to our rulers to decide which particular body of people that shall be. It’s nothing to do with you or with me or with Private Snooks or Lancejack Dogsbody. Is that quite clear?”
“But, sir.”
“Why are we fighting? We’re fighting because we’re soldiers. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? For what cause are we fighting? Simple again. We’re fighting to protect our country and, in a wider sense, the whole of the English-Speaking Union. From whom? No concern of ours. Where? Wherever we’re sent. Now, Foxe, I trust all this is perfectly clear.”
“Well, sir, what I..”
“It’s very wrong of you, Foxe, to disturb the men by starting them thinking and making them ask questions.”
They arrive at a base, and then are led to what they are told is a battle. And yes, there is a battle indeed, and there is killing, but what Foxe comes to understand is that it is not a real war – unless you say that a government’s war against is own people is a war (which it is). No, the whole thing is a fabricated exercise into which the designated lower orders of humanity have been conscripted so they might be dispensed with in a thoroughly noble way.
Tristam somehow escapes the slaughter and finds a way out of the artificial war zone and back to the city, where he cleans and rests up, and then goes to confront the powers that be about what he has discovered.
The major was unperturbed. He stroked his nose in slow rhythm. “Despite its name,” he said, ‘the War Department is not really a branch of government at all. It’s a corporation. The term “War Department” is merely a link with the past, A corporation with a charter. The charter comes up for renewal every three years, I think it is. I don’t think there’s any likelihood of its not being renewed. You see, what other way is there of keeping the population down? The birth-rate rose phenomenally last year and it’s still rising. Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong in that. Contraception is cruel and unnatural: everybody has a right to be born. But, similarly, everybody’s got to die sooner or later. Our age-groups for call-up will get progressively older – as far, of course, as the healthy and mentally normal sections of the population are concerned; the trash can go shortly after puberty. Everybody must die, and history seems to show (you’re a historian, so you’ll agree with me here), history seems to show that the soldier’s death is the best death. Facing fearful odds, as the poet says. Ashes of his fathers, temples of his gods, and so on. I don’t think you’d find anybody against the present system. The War Department is a bit like prostitution: it cleanses the community. If we didn’t exist, a great deal of nastiness would bubble up in the State. We’re the mother-of-pearl, you see. The ruffians, the perverts, the death-wishers: you don’t want those in the civil community. So long as there’s an army there’ll never be a police state, no more greyboys or rubber truncheons or thumbscrews or rifle squads at inconveniently early hours. The final problems of the body politic have been solved. Now we have a free state -order without organization, which means order without violence. A safe and spacious community. A clean house full of happy people. But every house, of course, has to have a drainage system We’re that.”
In the end, Tristam and Beatrice reunite. Their point of union is within sight of the sea, which throughout the novel has been Beatrice’s beacon, her anchor of meaning and hope. She does not articulate the exact content of her hope, simply absorbing the reality of the vast uncontrollable body teeming with life and the place of the origin of life. It’s a mantra she repeats:
‘Sea,’ whispered Beatrice-Joanna, ‘teach us all sense.’ She stood by the promenade rails, the gurgling woolly rosy twins belabouring each other softly in their perambulator. There it stretched all before her, endowed with delirium, panther-skin, mantle pierced with thousands upon thousands of the sun’s idols, hydra absolute, drunk with its own blue flesh, biting its scintillating tail in a tumult like silence. ‘Sea, sea, sea.’
Any dystopian fiction written by a perceptive author – an Orwell, a Huxley, a Burgess – is an expression of whatever that author sees as the potential seeds of destruction in human nature and his own time. Not being a scholar of such fiction, it does seem to me, however, from the few works that I’ve read that common among them is the conviction that any darkness in the future of humanity grows from, of course, authoritarian impulses.
Dystopia arrives when language and information are controlled when the powers that be – government, corporate, technological, ideological – settle upon a narrative, organize life to support that narrative, punish those who question the narrative and in fact construct a whole framework of meaning and action, artificial and independent of The Real. We suspect this, we may even know this, but nothing will happen, nothing will change until we deeply understand that the war into which we have been conscripted is a war against each other. Against ourselves.
Also integral to the dystopian suspicion is the fear of Genesis 2:23: At last! – we don’t even need to say more. That recognition and union and all of its fruit? In dystopia, that is the most feared force of all, so of course, the love between man and woman must be diminished, demeaned, sex purposefully sundered from both love and babies, drained of its power to nurture life between man and woman as well as from them – left, as it were, wanting.