Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's Solaris korrigert

Abstract

“Post-apocalyptic fiction has been moved to our current affairs section”—this announcement was allegedly first observed outside a Massachusetts bookstore in mid-November 2016, and has since made its way around the internet as a much-quoted meme. And it is true that post-apocalyptic and dystopian elements have become dominant factors in current fiction. In this article, I discuss “the dystopic” in contemporary fiction and relate it to the increasing current interest in apocalyptic scenarios and motifs. The inherent allegorical and didactical aspects of dystopian fiction have long been criticized for making this particular kind of literature either one-dimensional and moralistic, on the one hand, or purely entertaining and escapist, on the other, particularly with regard to the booming industry of young adult literature.However, there is plenty of evidence of creative and original poetic explorations of scenarios, languages, and worldviews in contemporary dystopic fiction and poetry, and one of the most experimental and influential Scandinavian examples of this is Øyvind Rimbereid's 2004 collection of poetry, Solaris korrigert (Solaris Corrected). The title poem, a thirty-five-page-long narrative science fiction poem, describes life in the year 2480, in a future society owned, regulated, and controlled by what seems to be a privatized corporation. The poem is written in a language specifically created for—we assume—this poem, simulating a future amalgamated language containing elements from (amongst others) Norwegian, English, German, Old Norse, Dutch, and Rimbereid's own spoken Stavanger dialect. The poem can obviously be read as a portrayal of a dystopian future society, a collapsing civilization in a post-industrial society sitting on top of defunct and scrapped oil installations on the coast of the North Sea.This article argues that Rimbereid's poem not only belongs to a current wave of contemporary dystopic fiction, but also should be seen as an example of a particularly creative piece of political poetry, fitting the description of critical dystopia. This points at a version of dystopic fiction that not only depicts a world worse than our own, but that also contains possible utopian elements. This is in line with the established conception of this poem (Lindholm 2008; Auklend 2010; Norheim 2012) and means that the poem does not only imagine and describe a catastrophic future for us to draw potentially allegoric and didactic wisdom from (as is the default for dystopic narratives), but also carries with it a more specific imperative for its readers, namely, that of hope, and along with this, assigns the role of instigator of insurgence to imagination, critical creativity, and to poetry itself. In this article, I attempt to pinpoint the location of these fragments of hope by proposing a reading of the poem where its ominous, downward-bound, apocalyptic ending—where the protagonist seems to be uploaded to the Solaris, an artificial world residing on the bottom of the North Sea—is seen as accommodating a revolutionary gesture.We are living in dystopic times, we hear. A time where dystopia is not only a literary genre or a sub-category of utopia. Rather, it is now “being mobilized as a signifier for our times,” Tom Moylan suggested in a 2018 essay (2018, 1), and since then, the tendency has intensified due to increasing political rifts and polarizations, but also (at the time of writing) due to the global outbreak of an infectious disease with possibly unforeseeable consequences—and collective fear.It is not hard, we understand, to come up with reasons why so many writers and filmmakers at the beginning of the twenty-first century have fantasized about the apocalyptic, about the end of the world as we know it, about a world rid of civilization and modern, democratic societies—or why they have conjured up scenarios of calamity, chaos, and government that has gone wrong or morphed into brutal, authoritarian forms. If we think of literature in terms of mimesis, possible reasons for this tendency are obvious: fiction relates to, comments on, and mimics both the world we live in and the state of it. Dystopia has been called the narrative of late modernity (Auklend 2010), and we are currently, as Jill Lepore stated in a (much commented upon) New Yorker piece in 2017, living in “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction.” We could add that, with dystopian studies being one of the fastest-growing branches of literary criticism, particularly in the field of young adult literature, we are also living in a golden age for dystopian studies. In Scandinavian literature, dystopia seems to be the number one export, with international successes like Maja Lunde's The History of Bees (2015; the first volume in Lunde's “climate trilogy”), Johannes Anyuru's They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears (2017), and Caspar Colling Nielsen's The Danish Civil War 2018–2024 (2014)—the former leading the way for a wave of dystopian “climate fiction,” and the latter describing possible future results of our own time's political polarization, anti-elitism, and distrust in politicians.And it would seem logical to connect this upturn in dystopian fiction to a corresponding historical economic and political downturn: after decades of booming economies and giant technological leaps, our once optimistic and progress-oriented views of the world have been turned inside out: “Dystopias follow utopias like thunder follows lightning” (Lepore 2017). We could also apply a wider historical perspective, and, as Moylan observes in his analysis of the “dystopian turn” of the twentieth century: Dystopian narrative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century. A hundred years of exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, depression, debt, and the steady weakening of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided more than enough fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. (Moylan 2000, xi)Peter Seyferth has also linked the evolution of the utopian genre in the twentieth century to the aftermath of the 1968 rebellions, with its hopes of systemic change: “As we know, these hopes have been crushed in the rise of neo-liberalism,” and we are now in what he calls the “gloomy fifth phase . . . , a critical dystopia” (Seyferth 2018, 2). And looking at it, with ongoing political crises, climate changes, rapid increases in social and economic differences, public spheres haunted by polarization and aggression and all kinds of fake news, our own time not only provides “fertile ground” for dystopian thinking—it even beckons direct comparison to grim dystopian fiction.However, one should perhaps tread carefully when including the idea of dystopia into the discussion of contemporary politics. One thing is the danger of actually losing the grip on reality, confusing facts with fiction—which, in these times of conspiracy theories, strategic disinformation, and troll factories, unfortunately is not as unusual as one would wish. On the other hand, the definition of and meaningful use of terms like “post-apocalyptic” and “dystopia” are at stake. Do we actually run the risk, by overusing terms like “apocalyptic” and “dystopia,” not just of exaggerating or inflating these terms, but also of mirroring back on our everyday lives the visions of horror and fear? Is it possible that we, by overusing the dystopic, by bringing the idea of the dystopic into our own very real world, are actually making things worse? Or could it be that our notion of “the dystopic” needs to be adjusted, corrected, and seen as more of a revolutionary and potentially hopeful genre?Moylan has recently raised concerns like these about the overuse or misuse of the term “dystopia.” He sees the tendency to use “dystopia” as a way of describing the current bleak state of the world as “ideological appropriation of dystopia” (Moylan 2018, 1). From his point of view, this tends to produce a pessimistic “moral panic” rather than “provoking the prophetic awakening of which dystopian narrative is capable” (2). To Moylan, dystopia is intrinsically linked to a will to make a change for something better, and thus it is always the carrier of hope in one form or another. Dystopia, we must remember, is a subcategory of utopia. Critical dystopia—a term originally coined by Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) and developed further by Moylan—should thus be seen as a genre expressing “the insurgent hope of the utopian impulse” (Moylan 2018, 3). This is not only the hope that our real-world societies will avoid ending up as nightmarish versions from fictional worlds, but a hope of developing what Moylan calls “actual utopian alternatives”—a rebellious impulse, so to speak, that “endeavour[s] to find traces, scraps, and sometimes horizons of utopian possibility” (Moylan 2000, 276).This way, Moylan opposes another important theorist of both the critical potential of literature and of dystopic literature, namely, Fredric Jameson. To Jameson, dystopia is the non-flexible cousin of the revolutionary utopia—which always carries with it a potential for and a (possible) promise of change. Dystopia, on the other hand, is seen as everything that can go wrong if we do not proceed with care. Jameson sees dystopia as a conservative genre, and uses the classical dystopian novels of the twentieth century as examples—Huxley, Orwell, Lem, and other representatives of classical dystopic literature become images of a future brought on by humanity making all the wrong decisions; they are warnings. Dystopias, according to Jameson, represent rather than challenge ideologies. And whereas the former are static, alienating representations of late capitalism, all true utopian mechanisms “conform to Marx's political program in Capital” (Jameson 1994, 58), and thus only the utopian imagination is capable of grasping “some far future of human history the rest of us are not in a position to anticipate” (74).Jameson's critique of dystopia could, of course, be made into criticism of contemporary dystopian fiction: images of totalitarian societies of militarism and all sorts of control regimes can function as a veil masking harsh political realities, which in comparison do not look that bad. Moylan, on the other side, sees dystopia as a mode of thinking that expands the room of the utopian. Critical dystopia—as opposed to “classical dystopia” of the twentieth century—leaves open a space of possibility and of change. In the following discussion, we shall keep this distinction in mind, but also try to put it to the test: How explicit do we need these fragments of hope to be?In 2004, a collection of poems was published that has come to be seen as the dystopian moment in Scandinavian poetry, and it was said to have “contributed to remove the ban on imagination . . . in contemporary Norwegian literature” (Lindholm 2008, 367)—namely, Solaris korrigert by Øyvind Rimbereid. It contains nine poems, of which the title poem has drawn the most attention, and has been characterized as “perhaps the most original work of fiction in Norway so far this century” (Andersen 2018, 44). Solaris korrigert soon made it into several (semi-official) versions of a Norwegian literary canon,1 was adapted for the stage, and was rewritten as a libretto. Before long, it became the object of critical study in a number of ways—with a focus on its linguistic creativity and multilingualism (Refsum 2010; Stegane 2012), its version of dystopia (Auklend 2010; Norheim 2012), its status as radical poetic innovation (Swedenmark 2014), its attempt as “future topographical poetry” (Norheim 2014; Vassenden 2015; Andersen 2020), its “cosmopolitanism” (Andersen 2018), its contribution to a renewed interest in the long poem (Madsen 2015; Mønster 2014), and its eco-poetic portrayal of a post-industrial, future “No-Oil Norway” (Ritson 2018; Andersen 2019).The thirty-five pages and more than 800-lines-long narrative science fiction poem describes life in a future society in the year 2480, regulated and controlled by a central business administration. It is a place where the inhabitants work very little, where manual labor is taken care of by robots or by non-inhabitants, and the outcasts are named “drifters” by the protagonist of the poem. The nameless protagonist is a thirty-eight-year-old robotics engineer who controls a small cohort of 123 robots that carry out installments and maintenance work on the seabed outside the western coast of (what used to be) Norway, near “siddy Stavgersand”—a name suggesting that the cities Stavanger and Sandnes have merged. The main narrative of the long poem introduces us to the lyrical I—the “aig” (a pronoun combining the the English “I” and the Norwegian “eg,” with a supposed pronunciation close to the former). The “aig” in turn describes his life-world, its layout and structure, his everyday life and his thoughts, feelings, and dreams, as it all unfolds in the year of 2480.The poem follows a narrative structure that is both straightforward and complex. As the account of the future world unfolds, we are given bits and pieces of information of the future world, and we follow the “aig” from the first introduction until, in the final lines, he dissolves and/or disappears from his physical state. However, we are left with a number of possible interpretations of both how this future world is really organized and how we should understand the poem's ending. There is no definite way of pinpointing the exact time line of the poem or whether the opening statement is made from the same time and/or place as the rest of the poem. Most readings of the poem do not comment upon how the poem's time line is organized, or they see it as a mostly linear narrative (or succession of tableaus)—ending either with the death of the “aig” (Norheim 2012) or with the arrival at the Solaris (Ritson 2018). Either way, the narrative is seen as describing a one-way journey into an unavoidable catastrophe of sorts.The most spectacular feature of the poem is obviously its language. With bits and pieces of a number of written, spoken, and imagined languages, and its main grammatical structure a blend of Norwegian and English, Rimbereid creates a future language for the post-industrial North Sea coast population. The language contains elements reminiscent of the Norwegian-English hybrid language that was used in the early days of the North Sea oil industry, as documented both by Norwegian linguists (Myking 1998) and in fiction (Johnsgaard 1996), but seems to have evolved far from either starting point. We do not, however, know whether this is the official language of the protagonist's society, or whether it is a written or a spoken language,2 or whether there are any sociolinguistic distinctions in place. All we know is that this language exists on these thirty-five pages, in this poem that tends to confuse readers by its sheer linguistic unfamiliarity—but also fascinates by its conceptual familiarity with other fictitious dystopian languages.3 The opening lines are both compelling and confronting: WAT vul aig bliom du ku kreip fradin vorld til uss?SKEIMFULL, aig trur, vendu kommen vid diner imagoovfr oren tiim, tecn, airlife,all diner apocalyptsen skreik-mare. OR din beauti draum! NEwi er. NE diner ideo! DERaig lefr, i 14.6, wi arbeidenonli vid oren nanofingren,dei er oren total novledg, wi arbeidenso litl, 30 minutes a dag. AIG seer anminer fingren, part af organic 14.6,men veike, dei er som seagrass . . . SO ku aig begg din vorldbegynning, start ussup igen? KU det! SKEIMFULL aig er. SO watvul du bliom wi ku kreip frauss til deg?(Rimbereid 2004, 9–10)4The first of the long poem's forty-two parts has a particular significance for the poem's narrative plot, as it is unclear both why it is italicized5 and to whom the “aig” is actually addressing his questions. The “du”—you—can be read as “us”: readers here and now. As H. O. Andersen notes, the opening address mimics the exordium of classical rhetoric,6 in which “the speaker addresses the audience to show his ethos and win their attention and trust” (Andersen 2020, 147). As we shall see, there are good reasons for this strategy—he needs us to trust him.The “aig” reaches out with a question concerning our understanding of him, and of his world—“what would I become, if you could crawl from your world to us?” The “aig” anticipates the response: “Shameful, I think.” Why? Because the presuppositions of the “you” collide with the reality of the world of the “aig.” The world of the “aig,” in the year 2480, does not correspond with the images or fantasies that “you”—meaning the reader from the past, us—may have of the future: “all diner apocalyptsen / skreik- / mare. OR din beauti draum! NE / wi er. NE diner ideo!” Translated and interpreted, this would read something like this: “we” are not your images of the future, neither dystopic (“apocalyptsen skreikmare”) nor utopic (“beauti draum”). Then the “aig” counters with a more prosaic, realistic version of everyday life in 14.6, the society/unit/community/company he is a part of: “DER / aig lefr, i 14.6, wi arbeiden / onli vid oren nanofingren, / dei er oren total novledg, wi arbeiden / so litl, 30 minutes a dag.”7The poem opens by first challenging the reader's expectations and then by giving an account of its own world. The “aig” of the poem challenges the idea of the dystopian or utopian by insisting on the integrity of his universe and its own realism. We could see this as a way of confronting the reader with the element of non-commitment and escapism that has always been a threat to the political potential of modern science fiction and dystopian literature. But here, we are told, our conventional fantasies about the future do not apply. On the other hand, we are presented with a rather unfamiliar description of everyday life, where we are given little reference as to what “14.6” represents, what “nanofingren” refers to, or why the aig's fingers are weak “like seagrass.” The last part of the address is a direct call for action—“start uss / upp igen,” but even this imperative is difficult to respond to: How do we do that? By imagining a different future? By sketching a different version, a new utopia or dystopia? In the last lines of the opening address, the tables have suddenly been turned: What if we, the past, were to have the gaze of the future world upon us? Would the “SKEIMFULL” of the future be mirrored in something completely different, or does the potential for shamefulness also reside in our own world?Rimbereid, in his opening lines, has created and introduced both a dystopian universe and a device to make this universe reflect upon itself. It sets itself up to be a dystopian universe that is about the other at the same time that it very much is about us, while confronting us with the way the dystopian mechanism works—it is a self-conscious piece of dystopian fiction. In fact, the opening address of the poem functions much like a magic mirror: we see ourselves, we recognize something that is no longer ourselves but nevertheless we cannot help but identify with it. This first part of the long poem carries a particular significance, then, as it both sets the tone and puts us as readers on the spot, thus also giving us a clue to how we could deal with the title's allusion to two dystopian masterpieces—Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris (1961) and Andrei Tarkovsky's film adaptation Solaris (1972): the unknown is always a mirror and a canvas for us to project our images upon, but it may also be an entity of its own, impossible for us to understand and outside the realm of the intelligible.However, the opening address is—with one possible exception—the only part of the poem that explicitly confronts the reader in this fashion. As the reader continues, they quickly realize that even though the introduction questions both the reader and their expectations, the rest of the poem's narrative follows a more traditional trajectory. The “aig” here is transformed from a gatekeeper to a narrator—who presents his own world to us as he reflects upon it. He wonders about the organization and history of the world he lives in, about the different life-forms and their status, and he worries about the future and about his girlfriend SHIRI, who is a photographer and artist, and not as well adapted to life as he is in this highly regulated, technical-instrumental society. He wonders about the workings of his world; of his relations to the robots he controls; to the shining, organic grease that somehow connects them to us; of the different life-forms inhabiting his world; of the ruling classes and hierarchies of society; of the technological development and progress; and sometimes he thinks or dreams of the possibility of escaping—suggesting that he (or his subconscious) does see his own world and its highly regulated society as something of a prison. As we get closer to the end of the poem, we also realize that it is, as unclear plans to migrate parts of his society to a virtual world called “SOLARIS” unfold. They—or their minds—are to be stored in the “seifa botten” of the disused Ekofisk-oilwells in the North Sea. The whole enterprise is coordinated by the owner of the society (and/or) company, “Mrs. Chan”: “HU skrib til uss, extatic / ‘DEN er den nyast og best mirror- / vorld, den nyast og mest healthy af all!’” (Rimbereid 2004, 35).8Rimbereid's account of life in the year of 2480 does—as already shown and suggested—reference and bear recemblance to other futuristic literary scenarios. Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440: Rêve s'il en fut jamais (1770) is often seen as the first historical instance of “time travel,” and Rimbereid's dating of the Solaris poem to 2480 can be seen as both a homage and a mark of distinct difference. First of all, the scene is set 40 years after the future date in Mercier's novel, and second of all, the narrative in Solaris korrigert never suggests that what we are dealing with in this poem is a dream of the future (as Mercier announces in the work's title). Thirdly, Rimbereid's Solaris-poem presents itself less like the didactical “guidebook to the future” that Mercier's L'An 2440 has been called (Darnton 1996, 120)—it seems to function more like a dystopian “mirror-vorld.” But, as we remember from the opening lines, the world in which the “aig” lives corresponds neither to our preconceptions of a dystopian “skreikmare” nor to any utopian notions of an ideal society, a “beauti draum.” Rather, it is the world the “aig” inhabits, with all its flaws.Dreams, however, are parts of the protagonist's strategies for reflecting upon his own life and imagining alternative scenarios. As observed by Wintervold (2014), Rimbereid's poetry is, in general, characterized by an extraordinary number of questions and question marks. As we have seen in the opening address, these facilitate confrontations. But they also characterize the “aig,” as he, to a large degree, uses them to interpret and question his surroundings and the regulations and restrictions of his own life-world. He concludes about his “robot-arbeidern” that they are resting in their own selves and are ignorant about each other: “DEI veit ne om / kverodder. DEI veit / ne om deirs total systemarbeid, / deirs kooperationen. / DEI onli veit om seg self / og veit det onli i deirs intern, lukka feedback- / imago, ergo onli / som robotexistensen” (Rimbereid 2004, 10).9 Comparing this enclosed “robotexistensen” to inter-human exchange, he asks: “MEN oren eigen vorld? / ER den ogso inli intern?” (11).10 This is not only our protagonist's questioning of the world, but also his attempt to make effective distinctions between different cognitive universes.The human being is, he concludes, something categorically different from the machine. What separates the human from the machine is first of all self-consciousness. The robots do not know their own place in the world—they do not even know that the world exists; they do not register their own presence in the world, “for all onli intern i dei er” (Rimbereid 2004, 18). The human consciousness is, however, all too aware of its own existence and its place in it: FOR aig veit existen af world.VER kommen den novledg fra?DEN kommen fra oren skinn.SKINN smerts og skinn gloden.SKINN drags uss out af oren self og mot odder humans. ROBOTS er ne skild outfra odder, dei haf ne blivt born.NE skild fra skinn!DEI haf ne smerts og ne hunger.OG difor ne novledg?(Rimbereid 2004, 18–9)11This section concludes, characteristically, with a question signifying the protagonist's openness to the fact that his line of reasoning may not be the end-all answer to the question of machine existence and self-awareness. Is it possible that even robots may acknowledge individual differences and recognize pain and hunger, despite not having bodies and advanced sensory apparatus connected to a central nervous system? Here, we must understand “SKINN” as a metaphor for the body, in line with the Old Norse “skinn” and English “skin.” The question mark indicates that this human, bio-centrist way of thinking may prove to be ready for some kind of revision, should the status of “human” change. This may also be seen to correspond to an observation made by H. O. Andersen (2020, 160), that the “nano-fingren” of the opening address in fact can only be identified as the fingers of his robots—and thus that the human “aig” is far more tightly interwoven with his machine serfs than he is willing to concede. The “aig,” however, returns to his original point of view in the next short section, categorically stating that “ROBOTS treng ne draumar”12 (Rimbereid 2004, 19). This negative expression of needs on behalf of the machines may, however, be seen as corresponding to the aig's own use of dreams and speculative thoughts. These are his nightly insomniac fantasies:SOMTIIMS ven aig ne svefndrauma kan, Aig draumen ein simpl, silly draum.SO er den: AIG imago meg selflefa innside ein astroidevid hundre odder humans,reisen vekk fra Systm Sol, ne meir moons.FOR all tiimonli fara out. VUL det einsammei uss da fersvinna?NE point ou naa out til,ne point ou gaa back til.NE lengt meir.SOM gudar vul wi da lefa,draumande om allcrying ovfr ne./KOMMEN du vid meg?(Rimbereid 2004, 19–20)13His sleeping dreams are replaced by a waking dream, that is, a fantasy of flying off into space inside an asteroid. He is not alone, however, as he tries to escape “det einsamma / i uss,” our (human) loneliness. The fleeing humans are described as god-like in their goalless flight, freed from teleology and achievement: “NE lengt meir,” no more longing.Here, Rimbereid touches upon a central motif in one of the most famous dystopic poems in Scandinavian literature, namely, Harry Martinson's 1953 Aniara, the tragic story of the spaceship Aniara, escaping wars and destruction on a dying Planet Earth, bound for Mars, but damaged in a meteorite storm and stuck on a helpless course into deep space. An entire spaceship full of refugees, a self-contained society, with no hope of ever reaching anything, and with only their dreams—and a number of recorded memories of their former world—as consolation. As the “aig” of Rimbereid's poem imagines himself on a flight away from Planet Earth, escaping a seemingly closed and controlled world—the reference to Aniara both suggests a flight to freedom but also creates associations of imminent, uncontrollable disaster.Although the many questions and question marks feature in all of Rimbereid's books, they serve a special purpose in Solaris korrigert. In the same fashion as elsewhere in Rimbereid's work, the questions seem to work as hermeneutic devices, instigating reflection. But in this specific poem, they also have the power to punch holes through the wall between the “aig” and the reader. In the above cited passus, the “aig” posits the question “KOMMEN du vid meg?”14 seemingly directed to the reader. On the other hand, the “du” of this apostrophe could also be the protagonist's girlfriend, Shiri—although there are no other places where she is addressed or where she appears as part of any direct discourse in the poem.The society in Rimbereid's future post-oil economy Norway is organized into “organics”—numbered and regulated and access-controlled. “Organic” could here be understood as “organization” or even “corporation”—two concepts with similar etymologies; both are organic or bodily metaphors for abstract structures. We cannot know for certain, but the society seems to be hierarchically structured, at least, the narrator at one point suggests that the organic numbered 1.1 is some sort of ideal. The “aig” resides in “organic 14.6,” owned by private capital interest and run by a Mrs. Chan, who may or may not be one or several persons—the name “Mrs. Chan” indicates that East Asian markets have taken over ownership of the post-industrial Norwegian coast areas previously so rich in oil and gas. A mysterious class of shadows has special influence and powers: DEI bevegen seg onli blant kverodder, tenkande onlii deirs egne tank. PUST onlii eigen pust. DEI er novledg-humans, vid staerkar pow enn all areal-og materie-eigare. DEIRS powar unbegrensat, dei seis.(Rimbereid 2004, 23–24)15The shadows are the architects of the society, of the structure of the “organics”—and they can be seen as politicians, technocrats, or corporate leaders. They are leading abstract lives, away from both labor and hands-on administration of the society—and they have more power than anyone owning property or material objects. At the other end of the spectrum of life-forms, we find the “drifters”—lawless creatures without formal citizenship: “DEI som lefr unspecific. DEI haf ne seifa / systm umkring seg” (Rimbereid 2004, 14).16 The “drifters” can only get casual labor, at best, doing “robot-arbeid”17 or even begging, and have no legal protection. The