Further the Discourse on a scholarly article - Essay Example

One things that needs to be noted is that a preponderance of a sense of time and clocks in the modern day dystopias like We and Brave New World allows the writers to emboss out the essential dichotomy between chronological regimentation and the human spirit, while at the same time eking out a scope for some kind of hope, by placing these dystopias in a far away future. The crux of Macey’s argument is timeless in the sense that right from the genesis of scientific progress to this day, an essential aspect of the human affair with technology has been a deep seated yearning to make the essential social and human processes predictable and feasibly manageable by making them subservient to the constraints of time (Lloyd 206).

No doubt, what could be a more relevant symbol of this scientific fetish for regimentation and homogenization of the human existence than the very tool used to mark and measure time, that is the clock. So, in a larger literary context, in Zamyatin’s We, the One State, resorts to distorting and manipulating the innate fluidity and unpredictability of human existence, by making it subservient to the time bound targets and objectives, thereby marring any scope for originality or dissent. Going by the affiliated advancements with regards to time keeping, Huxley goes even a step further, where the larger human existence in a societal context is bound to a Fordian assembly line predictability and control, right from the birth to the death.

There is no denying the fact that in these modern days dystopia’s, the resorting of the writers to a register, plot and dialogue that accentuates a sense of time and control actually brings out the essential symbolic nature of the clock that is an instrument of regimentation, control, predictability, conformity, subservience, monotony, homogenization, and spiritual and emotional desiccation. Throughout his article Macey delves on this innate character of the literary device called clock exploited by the literary luminaries like Pope and Swift to more modern day dystopia weavers like Zamyatin and Huxley.

A clock oriented contriving of the modern day dystopias like We and Brave New World serves one other important purpose, which is to allow the writers to transcend beyond the immediate frustration and murkiness of the circumstances, so, as to make way for a sense of hope and rejuvenation that could be feasible in some future time. Certainly, people do not read literature to end up realizing the pervasiveness and if possible the invincibility of nihilism. To hope is the basic instinct of the human nature.

No writer could avoid evincing signs of hope in one’s work, no matter how pessimistic and cynical one may try to be at a conscious level. Hence, the resorting of the modern dystopia writers such as Zamyatin and Huxley to subscribe to a typical chronological mode by placing their One State or the World State at some time in the far away future in a way allows them to afford much