Complicity in Dystopian Fiction

by | Culture

Culture

The Most Dangerous Character in Dystopian Fiction Isn’t Always the Villain.

 

We have always loved the villain. We named our collective nightmares after them — Big Brother, O’Brien, the Commander, President Snow — as if the danger lived in one face, one man, one ideology handed down from above like weather. We built our dystopias around them. We dressed them in black. We gave them the best speeches.

It was the wrong address all along.

The architecture of every great dystopia rests not on the villain at the top but on the millions at the base who look the other way, file the paperwork, follow the procedure, perform the required enthusiasm, and tell themselves — in the warm and perfectly ordinary privacy of their own skulls — that they have no real choice. That everyone does it. That the system was here before them and will be here after. That they are not the ones who built it. That they are not, in any meaningful sense, responsible.

That word — complicity — is not a judgment. It is a diagnosis. It is the answer to the question every great dystopian novel is actually asking, which is not: who is the monster? The question is: how did this become normal?

Hannah Arendt sat in a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961 watching Adolf Eichmann — the architect of the transport logistics for the Holocaust — and expected a monster. What she found, as David Bromwich writes in Literary Hub, was something far more disturbing: a stammering, sniffling middle-class bureaucrat, a joiner looking for advancement within a system, a man of utter and depthless ordinariness. She called it the banality of evil. It was the most unsettling phrase of the twentieth century, and the reason it unsettled us so deeply was that it did not describe a monster. It described a colleague. A neighbor. A citizen who had a job to do and did it well. Dystopian fiction, at its most honest, has always been writing about that man. That neighbor. That citizen. That us.

Winston Smith’s Greatest Pleasure

George Orwell understood complicity from the inside. He had worked for the BBC during World War II producing programming he knew to be, in his own words, propaganda — morally justified, perhaps, but propaganda nonetheless. He was, as his biographer D.J. Taylor observed, a propagandist for a regime at war with another regime. He wore the uniform of the thing he despised in order to survive within it. When he wrote Winston Smith’s job description at the Ministry of Truth, he was not inventing a horror. He was transposing one.

Winston Smith does not merely exist within Oceania. He sustains it. His daily work — the careful, skilled, meticulous rewriting of historical records to match the Party’s current position — is described by Orwell with pointed irony: Winston’s “greatest pleasure in life was his work,” and he was so accomplished at it that “on occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of The Times leading articles.” He erases men from photographs. He eliminates the evidence of promises that were broken. He is the mechanism by which the past dissolves and the present becomes the only truth that has ever existed. And he is, at the novel’s opening, quite good at it — quite content in the rhythm of it — while simultaneously harboring a hatred of the Party so pure it has become the only real thing left in him.

This is the novel’s most uncomfortable premise, buried beneath the surveillance apparatus and the torture chamber and the doublethink: that Winston is not a prisoner who happens to work for his captors. He is a functionary who happens, privately and at great personal risk, to disagree with his employers. The distinction matters. The Ministry of Truth does not run on Big Brother’s will alone. It runs on Winston’s skilled hands. It runs on the labor of thousands of Winstons, all of whom know exactly what they are doing and do it with professional pride nonetheless.

Complicity in 1984 is not stupidity. It is not cowardice, exactly, though it requires a particular arrangement of the self that cowardice alone cannot account for. It is the organizational logic of a system that has made itself indispensable — that has embedded itself in the daily rhythms of survival so completely that resistance is not refused so much as it is simply not conceivable in the morning, at the desk, with the work waiting.

The Butler Who Called It Dignity

If Winston Smith is complicity as labor, Stevens — the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day — is complicity as identity. Stevens is not, strictly speaking, a dystopian character. But Ishiguro’s novel is indispensable to any serious discussion of how ordinary people sustain catastrophic systems, and the Newcastle University research blog essay “Complicity and What Fiction Can Tell Us About It” names him directly: Stevens, the butler who dedicated his professional life to Lord Darlington — a man who conspired with Nazis in the inter-war years in a sincere effort to maintain good relations between Britain and Germany — is a case study in the way that dignity, loyalty, and professional devotion can serve as the moral anesthesia that makes complicity not just possible but admirable.

Stevens did not choose fascism. He chose his employer. He chose, with the full force of his character, the principle that a great butler does not question the judgment of a great man — that his role is to serve, not to evaluate, not to resist, and certainly not to import his own political opinions into the sacred neutrality of professional function. It is dignity he calls it, this willingness to wear his professionalism like a suit that cannot be removed even when the world outside is on fire. It is the most beautiful word Ishiguro chose for the most devastating concept. Because what Stevens cannot finally say — what the novel forces him to approach and retreat from across its entire length, until the scene at the pier in Weymouth where the evening light catches the water and something in him acknowledges, for a moment, what he has done with his one life — is that dignity was the name he gave to cowardice. That service was the name he gave to abdication. That the greatest butler in England served one of the century’s worst causes because he had made his excellence the meaning of his existence, and to question the cause would have required questioning the excellence, and the excellence was all he had.

As the eNotes analysis of the novel puts it with precise economy: Stevens cannot claim the dignity of making his own choices, having instead trusted Lord Darlington’s judgment without question. The tragedy is not that he was deceived. The tragedy is that he chose not to look.

What Power Does to Survival

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale contains the most sustained literary examination of female complicity in the dystopian canon, and it is The Testaments that finally gives us the inside of it. Aunt Lydia — the cattle-prod-wielding indoctrinator of the Red Centre, the woman whose voice inhabits Offred’s skull long after the walls of the centre have receded — was, before Gilead, a judge. A family court judge, in fact. A woman who had spent her professional life defending women’s interests within a legal framework, who understood exactly what rights were being dismantled as the Sons of Jacob took power, and who stood in a stadium and watched other educated professional women be shot and then, when the choice arrived, chose survival. Chose the cattle prod. Chose the title of Aunt and the narrow corridor of power it provided over the alternative, which was the Colonies, which was death.

The scholarly essay “Women’s Complicity, Resistance, and Moral Agency” observes that Atwood’s two novels complicate the simple binary of victim and perpetrator: Aunt Lydia is simultaneously victim, survivor, enforcer, and — in The Testaments — clandestine saboteur. Her complicity is neither simple nor stable. It is the product of a specific calculation made under extreme duress, the terms of which are captured in the Historical Notes to The Handmaid’s Tale with devastating concision: “when power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.”

That sentence is the architecture of every authoritarian state that has ever existed. Power does not recruit its enforcers from among the already cruel. It recruits them from among the already desperate. The Aunts were made from women who had no other choices — or who believed, in the specific extremity of their moment, that they had no other choices — and who chose the instrument of oppression over its object. Atwood does not forgive this. But she refuses to simplify it. The SparkNotes analysis of Aunt Lydia notes, accurately, that by placing a woman in such a violent enforcing role, Atwood is arguing that women can be and are complicit in perpetuating dangerous patriarchal ideas and oppressing other women. The system of Gilead does not merely oppress women. It conscripts them into their own oppression. And it does so by offering them the only thing more seductive than freedom: a small, cold, contingent, entirely provisional share of the power to survive.

The Character Who Is Asked to See Herself

In my novel One Grain of Sand, the first book of the Shards of a Shattered Sky trilogy, the character Parlonne inhabits the dystopian world of 2096 with the fluency of a woman who has never had to think about it. She is not a villain. She is not a rebel. She is not a victim in any way she has been trained to recognize. She is something the genre rarely puts at its center: a citizen who functions. Who participates. Whose daily life is threaded through the machinery of a broken future with the comfortable ease of someone who has learned, over a lifetime, not to pull on that particular thread.

What her arc requires — what the trilogy is, at its heart, about — is the confrontation between that comfortable fluency and what her dead sister’s eyes would make of it. Parlisse, murdered, becomes the mirror Parlonne cannot look away from. And what the mirror shows is not wickedness. It shows participation. It shows the ten thousand small cooperations, the reflexive compliances, the frictionless adjustments to the system’s demands, that constitute a life lived inside a dystopia without ever quite acknowledging that the dystopia is real. Parlonne is not the villain of the story I am telling. She is something more interesting than that, and more difficult: she is the citizen the dystopia was designed to produce. Her arc is not a fall. It is a waking.

The EU-funded COMPLIT research project, which examined the role of language in structures of complicity in literary testimonies of totalitarianism, identified what it called “mimetic participation” — the participation of criticism in the criticized. The way a society produces citizens who embody its values so thoroughly that even their discomfort with those values is expressed in the language the values provide. Parlonne does not have the words for what is wrong with her world, yet. That is where the story begins.

Why the Genre Keeps Coming Back to This

The scholar who produced the dissertation “Dystopian Fiction as Liberatory Practice” at Georgia Southern University identified complicity as one of nine structural “symptoms” of dystopian fiction — not a theme among themes but a load-bearing element of the genre’s architecture. This is exactly right. Dystopian fiction keeps returning to complicity not because it is a morally convenient subject but because it is the subject that closes the distance between the reader and the fiction. The villain keeps us comfortable. The villain is not us. The villain is the one who chose this, who built it, who wanted it. But the complicit citizen — the functionary, the bystander, the beneficiary, the person who goes along because going along is easier and the system was here before they arrived and will be here after they leave — that person is harder to dismiss.

The scholarly journal article “Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale”, published in Studies in Canadian Literature, argues that dystopian fiction’s great contribution to political thought is not its imagined futures but its present-tense diagnoses — its insistence that the structures it depicts are not predictions but extensions of conditions that already exist. The complicity it anatomizes is not a future moral failure. It is a description of how ordinary people relate to ordinary power, extended to its logical conclusion.

The Newcastle University research essay on complicity and fiction puts the point with elegant precision: “A central premise of my work is the notion that complicity often inheres in the stories that we tell ourselves and others: narrative carries ideological baggage with it, but this tends to remain unseen, and it is often as a result of these blind spots in representation that complicity occurs.” In other words: we are complicit not when we choose evil but when we choose the story that makes evil invisible. When we tell ourselves that the Ministry of Truth is just a job. That the great man deserves our absolute loyalty. That the cattle prod is the price of survival and the price of survival is reasonable. That we had no real choice. That everyone does it. That the system was here before us and will be here after.

These are the stories that dystopian fiction is designed to interrupt. Not by terrifying us with the monster. By holding up the mirror and showing us the citizen.

The villain is not the most dangerous character in a dystopia.

The most dangerous character is the one who is reading this.

 

 

 

A Final Word

Complicity’s not necessarily a character flaw. That is the point every great dystopian novel is trying to make, and the point we most resist receiving. It’s more a structural condition — the predictable output of systems that have been carefully designed to make participation easier than refusal, to make looking away less costly than looking, to make the ordinary maintenance of an ordinary life indistinguishable from the quiet perpetuation of the catastrophic. The villain did not build this system alone. They never do. They built it with the material of ordinary people living ordinary lives and making ordinary choices, each one defensible in isolation, each one contributing to the aggregate of a world that has gone very badly wrong.

This is why dystopian fiction matters; mic drop. Not because it warns us about the tyrant we might someday face; but because it asks us to examine the citizen we already are. And because the only honest response to that examination is not fear, not despair, but the hard, slow, unglamorous work of noticing — of refusing the story that makes the invisible visible, of pulling on the thread we have been trained not to pull, of asking the question the system was designed to prevent us from forming. The characters who do that work in fiction — who wake up, who look, who see — are rarely the heroes we were promised. They are, most of the time, people very much like the rest of us: ordinary, imperfect, complicit until the moment they weren’t.

 

 

 

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