ABSTRACT
During and immediately following the Second World War, dystopian fiction was used as a vehicle to explore how the contemporary world might appear through a historical lens. Texts examined here attempt to address the inter-relationship of history and world politics, often through psychological and psychoanalytic insight. In the novel Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye, the relationship between individual and totalitarian state is depicted as essentially following the libidinal logic of psychoanalysis. In Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1940), the Oedipal triangle is fundamental to unlocking much of the seductive appeal of fascism for the novel’s protagonist, and memory is a key site for patriotic resistance to it. The plot of Storm Jameson’s Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942) features an operation to remove the memories (and thereby wipe out collective identity) of peasants in an occupied unnamed country resembling Czechoslovakia. Language and the haptic experience of everyday objects are presented as central to both folk memory and identity formation in infants. Finally, Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) tries to move away from political and public solutions to the problems of the twentieth century, turning social and political questions into private issues of spiritual renewal and personal relationships. Although he turns away from historical processes, his engagement with the intellectual history of evolutionary theory highlights the shortcomings of such a manoeuvre for dealing with world politics.
