Zamiatin’s novel ‘We’ is a novel of ideas. It fails to move us on a human level. Discuss

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 The concept of ‘idea’

3 What is ‘human’?

4 Happiness and Freedom

5 Utopian Perfection

6 Beauty

7 Religion and the Idea of Soul and Imagination

8 Depersonalization and Dehumanization

9 We – a novel of absurdities?

10 Conclusion

11 Bibliography

1 Introduction

Like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamjatin’s novel We (1924) shows a picture of a supposedly perfect world. This essay is the attempt to investigate the inherent images presented in We. Two basic premises will guide us through our discussion:

1. Zamyatin’s novel We is a novel of ideas.
2. It fails to move us on a human level.

Therefore we begin to scrutinize the nature of the terms ‘idea’ and ‘human’, and continue to look at selected notions and images in detail. As all concepts we will touch upon are quite ‘slippery’, I offer one or two definitions that could fit into the literary context of We. They will usually serve as the bedrock for our elaboration.

It is important to mention that I decided to approach the novel from a slightly philosophical rather than a pure literary or linguistic angle. This perspective allows us to go far beyond the ideas presented in We. It should also be noted that my views expressed in this seminar paper are based on my first and second readings of We. A third or fourth ‘exploration’ would probably produce completely different readings.

To stimulate follow-up analyses, I start every chapter with a brief sound quotation – either taken from the novel itself or from secondary literature. I hope to provide an interesting, comprehensible, and entertaining tour through the literary world of Zamyatin’s masterpiece We.

2 The concept of ‘idea’

‘We is a novel of ideas which takes up the Dostoevskian debate

on the nature of freedom, happiness and humanity.’

(Milne 1998, 96).

Every piece of literature can be regarded as a set of ideas. Philosophical and truth-seeking issues like the three mentioned above are, admittedly, hard to find on first reading of Zamyatin’s novel because we are confronted with a load of confusing and bizarre images we cannot categorize or make sense of. After thorough reflection, however, it can be assumed that the world presented by Zamyatin must be based on a set of ideas that is worth classifying. But what do we understand by the notion ‘idea’?

When we use the concept of idea, we mean, in a general sense, an image in our mind. The OED takes it further and suggests that an idea is ‘any product of mental apprehension or activity, existing in the mind as an object of knowledge or thought; an item of knowledge or belief; a thought, conception, notion; a way of thinking’ or even ‘a conception to which [by now] no reality corresponds; something merely imagined or fancied’.

As We is a futuristic novel with fairytale-like features, the last definition would be the most appropriate one for our investigation because Zamyatin’s images are often far from realistic: ‘In a flash I’m somewhere up in the air and beneath me are heads, heads, heads, mouths wide open and screaming, hands shooting up and down’ (151).

A short glance at the table of contents (or records) should suffice to assume that We must to some extent be a bizarre novel. The reason for this deduction is quite simple. Zamyatin links ideas in a chapter that normally do not go together in a single sentence. In linguistic terms, I would speak about the incompatibility of lexical items, such as A Sunny Night (record 34), Swollen Ice (21) or Savage with Barometer (4). On the other hand, some chapter headlines sound very inviting and arouse curiosity. These include, in my view, The World Exists (record 26), Galileo’s Mistake (30), History’s Greatest Catastrophe (25), The Final Number (30) or Threads on the Face (29) – the latter being quite absurd if we take it literally. But what about chapter headings like Henbane and Lily of the Valley (record 7), Iams and Trochees (9) or Infusorians (37)? As these are very specific terms and used only in rather limited contexts, they leave the reader in obscurity (unless the reader takes the effort and looks them up). At this point we can presume that incompatibility, intriguery and obscurity are three main features of Zamyatin’s novel.

Another idea that is striking about We is the narrative. D-503, the constructor of the spaceship INTEGRAL who is, at the same time, the narrator writes ‘for [his] ancestors or for people like [his] wild remote ancestors.’ (24). This approach seems to be unique in literature because a potential readership does not exist: a text that remains unread is no text. Of course, we may argue that parents are ancestors from the perspective of their children, and therefore literature written for past generations would not be something unusual, but ancestor is ‘usually said of those more remote than a grandfather’ (OED). So Zamyatin’s idea is to create a totally different way of storytelling: an account designed for forebears – by breaking the laws of nature and time, and rendering this novel utopian (or dystopian, as we will see later). We as readers should therefore imagine living in the past because for D we are ancient people. Thus, all the ideas we will deal with must be seen from D’s view, from a future perspective.

The problem we are faced with is how to classify the ideas. I propose that the concepts presented by Zamyatin go in two directions:

1. Ideas that are realistic or partly consistent with our reality.
2. Ideas that are absurd or beyond human understanding, and therefore unrealistic.

Although portrayed in quite a satirical and mocking manner, I consider the depiction of the ‘ancients’, of our contemporary world, as realistic. D-503 describes, for example, our elections as ‘disorderly, unorganized’ (132) and he remarks that we do not notice ‘how completely idiotic [our] literature and poetry [is]’ (66). A partial consistency with tendencies in our society can be observed when it comes to describing the so-called depersonalization and dehumanization in We – aspects I will elaborate on later.

The ideas of the second category have no room for reality because they are absurd. ‘If something is absurd, one cannot accept it rationally. To believe it takes an act of commitment’ (Thompson, 35). In other words, when dealing with We the reader should be willing to tolerate these ideas although they cannot be grasped by human reason or by applying scientific laws: ‘The whole world was divided up into separate, distinct, independent pieces, and each of them, falling headlong, would stop for a second and hang in the air in front of me – then evaporate without a trace.’ (199) When we read sentences like this, we are led into temporary confusion. But that is what utopian literature is all about. It generates unexpected pictures in our mind.

In conclusion we can say that Zamyatin’s We, undoubtedly, has the attribute of being a novel of ideas. They cover, as we will see, a wide scope – ranging from beauty and perfection, from mathematics to infinity, from religion to happiness. But there are also a number of ideas that are contradictory to our understanding; they are bizarre, absurd, illogical. Nevertheless, they are worth exploring as these ideas take up a considerable part in Zamyatin’s We.

One question, however, remains to be answered: Can the novel ‘elevate’ us on a human level? In order to find a satisfactory response to this question, we must find ideas that go hand in hand with our perception, experience and knowledge of the world. In short, we must find ideas that are ‘human’. The next chapter will deal with this subject-matter.

3 What is ‘human’?

Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall. (91)

Without digressing too much into the (fascinating) depths of anthropology and philosophy, we should ask ourselves: what do we understand by ‘human’?

Apart from the fact that humans have a ‘superior mental development, [the] power of articulate speech, and upright posture’, the OED defines the term as follows: ‘Belonging or relative to humans, relating to or characteristic of activities, relationships, etc., which are observable in mankind, as distinguished from

(a) the lower animals;

(b) machinery or the mechanical element;

(c) mere objects or events’.

Judging from the fantastical world presented, we are probably apt to conclude that We is a non-human novel. Although they look like human beings, the people (or Numbers) in OneState are to some extent different from their ancestors: they completely lack imagination, they are supposed to be devoid of dreams, there are no permanent relationships, and the family as an institution and basic element of civilization does not exist. The mechanization of society, and consequently of its people, is one of the main distinguishing feature of OneState. Daily life has become mere routine. By performing one and the same action at the same time every day, the Numbers act like machines. And machines lack the property of being human.

However, D’s hairy, horrible, ape-like hands remind him of his ancestors and make him aware of the fact that he must be a human being, although he hesitates to admit mortality: ‘Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo … No, that isn’t what I mean.’ (180). Furthermore, he ridicules his physique: ‘The way the human body is built, it’s just as stupid as those “apartments” …’ (28).

The concept of ‘human’ should, in my opinion, also include binaries like joy and suffering, life and death, health and disease, strength and weakness. On a warm sunny day D-503 thinks: ‘On a day like today you forget about your weaknesses, your uncertainties, your illnesses …’ (45) So D recognizes that humans – and he is one – are naturally flawed. They have needs and desires, they experience pain and passion, they lament, give and need consolation. In Zamyatin’s We, is there none of that? There is.

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