Popularized in the 20^th century, the dystopian science-fiction genre experienced a wave of growth as fear was catalyzed by technology, war, and violence. In a collaborative project completed by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Literature+ group, the Big Brot(her)s attempted to reconcile both history and publication by constructing a timeline that tracked dystopian novels, their themes, and their ties to history (e.g. the Cold War, the Great Depression … etc). Next, five key novels were examined using data mining tools to better understand the language within the novel—what is present in the text and what isn’t? The results culminated in a Create Your Own Adventure (CYOA) component which utilized key words and phrases from the text analysis to form an experimental game adventure. In essence, the timeline and text analysis tools offer an objective approach to scrutinizing literary corpora. Rather than examining the plethora of novels in the project collection, this report will focus on dissecting the results collected in the project’s individual treatment of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

For the purpose of providing historical background, We was composed by Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1921 during great national upheaval in Russia. Early 20^th century Russia was characterized by dissent over the authority of the tsars who held autocratic legitimacy. The Revolution of 1905 was marked by police killings of hundreds of protestors in Winter Palace, an event nicknamed “Bloody Sunday”. The Bolsheviks, led by V.I. Lenin, consolidated power and led the vanguard to overthrow the tsar. Despite some autocratic reconciliation, World War I inspired a wave of patriotism that culminated in the Communist Revolution and ended the tsarist rule in 1917. Ultimately in 1922, Russia was renamed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Subsequently, Lenin governed on the principle of Marxism-Leninism which centralized power in the hands of the party elite. A few of these pivotal events are recorded and mapped as an integral part of the timeline, which focuses on understanding the historical context of select dystopian novels.

In the first part of the project, the Big Brot(her)s designed an individual timeline which plotted twenty-five diverse dystopian novels and their corresponding world history events. In the case of We, the events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Creation of the USSR are shown in Figure 1. Mapping a novel’s historical relevance grants not only convenient visualization, but also an examination of climate, public opinion, authorial intent. Similarly, the timeline facilitates the understanding of how one major event may affect another—in effect leading to the chain of events that inspire the novel. World War I for example was marked by a surge of patriotism by the Russian people who suffered from the wartime economy and blamed Tsar Nicholas II. As a result, the fall of the tsarist autocracy is reflected in the Russian Revolution of 1917 that follows not much later. Thus the social climate and reverberations of WWI influenced the rise of the Bolsheviks. Hence the timeline itself serves as a visual Wikipedia that adopts a cause and effect purpose of understanding. Despite Yevgeny Zamyatin’s former allegiance as an Old Bolshevik, his distaste for the Communist Party became known as communism gained traction through political repression and use of force. We was published in 1921 before the creation of the USSR. In essence, the timeline works effectively to document how the rise of dystopian novels reacts to political and social change.

Figure 1: Tiki-Toki Timeline of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Likewise, the project focused on outlining the themes of each of the novel and its progression throughout the 20^th century. We contains topics such as Omnipresent Government Surveillance, Totalitarian Oppression, Controlled/Monitored Sexuality, Paranoia, Individual Versus Collective, Social Prioritization of Control and Efficiency Over Human Nature, and A Rebellious Group Existing Outside and In Opposition to the Dominant Civilization. Due to its dissident nature, it was censored by the Soviet board as a libelous work of Soviet society. The “dystopian themes” tag contributes to understanding the timeline as a whole—how can we relate political oppression to the themes of the novels? How do these themes change as we move along the timeline? How do subjects, settings, and topics evolve as history is tied to these topics? The answer is reflected in the diversity of themes and anxieties that each novel depicts, whether vis-à-vis the construction of a feminist utopia or an envisioned collectivized society.

Of the twenty-five novels, the second phase of the project included further study of five texts using AntConc as a data mining platform. The intent was to comprehensively study the language of the text itself and how it is used to present certain themes or interesting elements of the novel. Overall, AntConc is a powerful open-source concordance tool used for aggregate analysis of one or more corpora in which textual data is uploaded and “Search terms” are applied. After uploading the text of We, a concordance of the nation word ‘One State’, or “state*” (* denotes a wild card) was input and generated 98 hits. Meanwhile, the state leader, the “Welldoer” only resulted in 46 hits. The interest in “state*” in relation to “Welldoer” is significant because of how the “Party State” was established in Russia during 1922. In comparison, the Russian political party was in fact more important than the state as the critical institutions were placed on the hierarchy of members—with the General Secretary and Politburo being the most important. Interestingly, the novel’s extreme notion of the community in the novel has no exception even when applied to the national leader. The motif of the novel to place the community over one’s self is best exemplified in D-503’s speech about how the torture is “use[d] for a higher purpose: to guard the security of the United State—in other words, the happiness of millions” (Zamyatin 77). This tenet foreshadowed and truly encapsulated the reign of the post-Lenin Communist Party State, which despite its original attempt to work for the good of everyone, led to totalitarian rule and oppression. What originally began as an aim to eliminate social classes consequently resulted in Stalin’s gulags, or prison work camps for dissidents in the 1930s who resisted Stalin’s idea of a “command economy”. Thus, We may actually be seen as a critical prediction of Russian communism. This dehumanization of the individual exhibits Dr. Faustroll’s notion of the loss of the soul, and how “the soul, that most ephemeral element of cities, is the first element to be surrendered to the attraction of the void . . . ” (Cauter 16). Thus, We may be understood as a text which illustrates the radical notion of the ‘state’ and how it serves as a premonition for the later historical implications of Stalinism.

Likewise, the plot of We contains much dialogue about the Green Wall, a structure which separates the city-state from the outside world. In the AntConc concordance, the word “wall*” generated 133 hits and is one of the most frequent words in the text. The wall as a fortification against the outside environment essentially functions as a means of building a cellular city which Lieven de Cauter calls a “capsular civilization”. Describing the barrier as a structure of exclusion, Cauter simply states how there is “no mall without a wall” (49). This refusal to modernize in relation to the outside world may also be tied to the novel’s connection to World War I and the notion of the “Slavophile”, where Russian pride is characterized by shunning the outside world. The insular nature of the state is another form of a fundamentalism, where people turn to totalitarian regression as a form of fundamentalism. In essence, “this is a fanatical rejection of modernity as a whole and the fulfillment of the Utopia of a nonexistent past” (107). The reaction against the acceleration of the outside world very much exemplified the 1900s debate between Slavophile vs. Westernizer. Consequently, examining particularly persistent words throughout the text forced the project to examine why and how these topics manifest in relation to history. More obviously, the ubiquity of paranoia and government surveillance is indeed represented in this aspect of the text results.

Furthermore, AntConc is capable of compiling a Word List with information on ranking, frequency, and word variations. The top word list of We (listed in Figure 3) featured words such as “eyes”, “You”, “Izzy”, “Yes”, “felt”, “glass”, “hand”, “face”, “time”, “blue”, “hands”, “head”, and “lips”. The sensory nature of the list itself is intriguing. Despite the harsh rule and control of the Machine, the narrator appears to possess a surprising degree of emotional agency through the recurrence of words such as “felt”. However, these seemingly “sentimental” words also reveal conflicting attitudes. In Figure 2, the word “eyes” is shown to be used very differently in two examples. The first sentence is used to express the lurking watchfulness of neighbor’s eyes while the second affectionately describes how “Her blue eyes were closed”. Thus, “eyes” contradictorily strips the character of intimacy in one sense, but provides personal intimacy in another. This paradoxical nature highlights the problematic nature of the surveillance topos by subverting the notion of beauty and love that may come from the expression of one’s body parts. Thus, the theme of Social Prioritization of Control and Efficiency Over Human Nature is best displayed in this regard. Many of these words (“hands”, “eyes”, and “face”) also implies a focus on the human body and physical contact. In many sentences, these physical qualities express a connection between two characters. Depicting another person’s heavy hands, blue eyes, or porcelain face establishes a pleasing intimacy that reminds readers of the still existing human qualities of the novel. As a result, this provides a more complex reading as the novel advocates for the reader’s sympathy by forcing the audience to acknowledge the characters’ desire for human connection.

Figure 2: Concordance of “eyes”

          The last tool used in AntConc is the N-grams tool, which generates common phrases that can be adjusted to different results. Running the N-gram of three word phrases in We presented the most interesting results out of the different combinations of words. The N-gram produced phrases such as “I did not” or “I could not” in Figure 3. “I had to” or “in order to” were also indicative of the novel’s dystopian features. This collection of phrases demonstrates how often the novel’s characters are constantly limited and constantly pressured to practice generic behaviors. This stifling of physical and conversational freedom illustrates a climate of constant surveillance, where the ability to achieve real privacy is virtually impossible. In effect, these “I could not” statements themselves illuminate the narrative of the characters in the novel. And as a result, the consistency of these restrictive phrases underscores the pervasive consciousness of the character’s own inability.

Figure 3: Word List Figure 4: N-grams (3 words)

Another component of the text analysis involved the group’s use of the TopicModelingTool. This tool takes a corpus and creates a number of topics with words assigned to that topic. We yielded striking results in the second topic shown in Figure 5:

izzy head don long state great face yesterday happiness tomorrow love hour place wanted open blood children find sat live operation utah twelve days pain

Figure 5: Topic Modeling results of We

At a first glance, it is curious to note how “happiness” and “love” appear in the same topic as “blood”, “Operation”, and “pain”. Why are they juxtaposed? And why is “yesterday” also frequently listed with “tomorrow”? The makeup of lists themselves is indicative of the consistency of words within the text, which leads the project to question why certain words appear with others. Due to the time restraint however, the TopicModelingTool acted as a meaningful side-tool that organized how the text was understood. In the last part of the project, these words, phrases, and themes were taken to supplement the project’s text adventure game, which inhabits a first person player sequence.

Overall, the collaborative intent of the Big Brot(her)s project was to provide a holistic understanding of a handful of works within the dystopian genre. Despite its small scale, the project examined the effects of human industry and contemporary warfare upon the collective psyche by tying novels to historical backlash. Ultimately, it is through this distant lens that enabled the project to extract and examine the themes which mirrored these anxieties. Moreover, by text analyzing and determining the novels’ trends and language, the project illustrated how authors convey this climate of fear as expressed in the CYOA game. In the project’s conclusion, it became clear how this three-step approach enabled an ideally comprehensive understanding of the dystopian novel within the tumultuousness of the 20^th century.

Works Cited

Cauter, Lieven de, The Capsular Civilization : on the city in the age of fear /  Rotterdam:

NAi Publishers; New York: Available in North, South and Central America through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, c2004. 

Zami͡atin, Evgeniĭ Ivanovich,     We /    New York :   Modern Library,   2006.