Joyce Carol Oates Hazards of Time Travel
T ime travel stories are seldom really nigh time or travel, and Joyce Ballad Oates's 46th novel is no exception. Audacious, chilling and darkly playful, her thought experiment nearly belonging and otherness is quick to ignite, but admirably deadening to reveal the total extent of its dystopian proposition.
The action begins in a queasily familiar near-future America where "democracy" is administered by an acronym-loving bureaucracy appointed by the Patriot Party, the only political show in town. Citizens are graded by ST (Skin Tone), and schoolchildren must memorise Science Facts such as "cancer is acquired past negative thoughts" and "the average female IQ is 7.55 points lower than the average male person IQ".
Just in a guild that mistrusts its citizens, loftier IQs are a liability regardless of gender – as the precocious teenager Adriane Stohl discovers when her high schoolhouse valedictorian address leads to charges of Treason Speech and Questioning an Authority. Sentenced to four years of "rehabilitation" in Exile, she is whisked dorsum in fourth dimension by means of a microchip implant and teleportation to awake like a reverse Rip van Winkle in 1959 Wisconsin. The dauntless new/quondam world of twinsets, cumbersome Remington typewriters and the cold state of war could not be more different from the one that has banished her. Or could it?
Anyone writing speculative fiction today runs the run a risk of their nightmare scenario becoming yesterday's news before the volume is published – which may business relationship for Adriane'due south skippy, breathless kickoff-person narration; her dashes, exclamation marks and broken sentences give the novel a slapdash quality. But its imaginative ambition, intellectual brio and propulsive story offer plenty of compensation.
Awkwardly reincarnated as Mary Ellen Enright, a freshman at the fictional University of Wainscotia, Adriane gets painfully hair-rollered by well-meaning room mates, learns the give-and-take "girdle", rediscovers handwriting and attends classes on BF Skinner, whose pronouncement that "a self is only a device for representing a functionally unified arrangement of responses" serves as the book'southward sly epigram.
Unable to forge friendships and suffering from the chronic stress of her double status equally outsider and impostor, Adriane/Mary Ellen falls gauchely and difficult for the charismatic psychology professor Ira Wolfman. Is the expert on learned helplessness a hugger-mugger fellow Exile from the future, every bit she suspects, or something else? Is she trapped in Orwell's 19 Eighty-4, Plath's The Bell Jar, the Wachowskis' The Matrix, or Charlie Brooker'south Blackness Mirror? Or is she simply a human being rat in a "Skinner Box", doomed to printing the same buttons and levers repeatedly in an attempt to "brand sense of the stimuli, to perceive a pattern among randomness"? Most crucially, tin can she always return to her past life in the time to come – and should she? Oates takes bleak bask in keeping the reader guessing, while deftly interrogating the novel's fundamental preoccupation: the voluntary shrinking of the human mind.
The Nordic term Janteloven, coined by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in 1933 to satirise the mentality of pocket-sized-town Denmark, enshrines a pervasive, crowd-generated totalitarianism that forbids anyone to seem, think they are, or actually be better than anybody else. Under Sandemose's rules, extraordinariness, ambition and self-belief are deemed crimes against gild, and as a result, pervasive cocky-censorship and militant mediocrity prevail. Since the brilliant Oates, like the brilliant Adriane, went to university in Wisconsin, one of several midwestern states where Scandinavians settled, it'southward hard not to wonder how much retrospective personal rage fuels her exposé of America's version of Janteloven.
Tall poppy syndrome is a child of commonage green-eyed, the novel suggests; and wherever tall poppies abound, there volition be crowds wielding scythes. Whether the syndrome manifests as a survival machinery in a future America where information technology's "amend to be a safe coward than a sorry hero", or every bit the unrecognised cornerstone of intellectually stunted 1950s academia, Oates'southward message is clear: any society that punishes exceptionalism in the proper name of egalitarianism is a dystopian 1. In positing the existent "hazard" of otherness as exposure to the crushing contempt of a conformist majority, she is highlighting not and so much the boiler of evil as the evil of banality. Equally time-travelling, universally applicable propositions go, mediocre information technology is not.
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