the fixations of dystopia.
the use of seemingly traumatic or dystopian texts in contemporary US cultural production, and what this fixation reveals about narratives of growth, progress and development in American rhetoric.
“Dystopias…help us to imagine and envisage how the present can change into something very nasty…. [they] interrogate the now and offer warnings and sometimes prophecies about the future; they are often the jeremiads of utopianism. But sometimes they offer glimmers of hope” (Sargisson, 2013)
The dystopian genre is “largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century” (Moylan, 2000). Dystopia is concerned with the unlivable, with playing out our worst fears about society, government, and others, and proving ourselves right – it really would be that horrible. These traumatic narratives, whether post-apocalyptic or pre-dawn realities, whether they resemble our own society or not, dominate bookstores and the box-office; for one reason or another, we are drawn to seeing just how bad it can get. This fixation calls to light a dominant characteristic of the American cultural rhetoric; a revolving guilt and gratitude attached to one’s current position of prominence on the global stage. An oscillation between devoted belief in American exceptionalism, grateful for the supposed might of US history and its continued authority, and a self-reproach attached to traumatic memories of the American role in past tragedies.
Dystopia serves as both a celebration of current times, juxtaposed against a worse, but possible, alternative, and as a warning of the bleak direction that we are headed in. This paradoxical message is what we find so attractive about dystopia narratives – the recognition, both of our solid present and our shaky future. Taking these two modes of cultural perception together, this essay contends that contemporary US dystopian narratives reveal the contradictions of the American exceptionalist rhetoric. These traumatic narratives do so by projecting historical traumas – from slavery and settler colonialism to more recent systemic inequalities – into speculative futures. By exploring the dystopian capacities of a wide range of American fiction, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, this essay suggests that the mythological promise of unbroken progress is a rhetorical ploy so aspirational that it might be considered illusory, and that the ‘growth’ of the nation is inseparable from these recurrent social traumas and violences.
One of the narratives that dystopia helps to unveil is the American commitment to the myth of forward progress. The framework of American exceptionalism serves to reinforce this moral superiority among the people, alongside a neoliberalist progress logic of survival, resilience, and self-reliance, baked into US history. This pervading sense of “cruel optimism”, an attachment to the narrative of survival despite the devastation which warrants it (Berlant, 2011), is a myth of progress of which dystopia seeks to peel back the layers, and expose the traumatic undercurrent.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road paradoxically reinforces and redefines the rhetoric of American progress. It measures progress not as collective development towards a shared goal, but as individual persistence and moral endurance. It is a novel, following two characters on an unnamed road after the collapse of civilisation, that frames survival as forward motion, tying into the exceptionalist belief that goodness, purpose, and moral superiority are to be found nowhere but in moving forward, in constant progress. Toward what end, it is not clear; nor is that the end goal. The belief is simply that in progress, in moving forwards, one must be improving, things must be getting better.
The Road shines a light on the audacity of this myth, by repositioning progress not as motion but as “carrying the fire” (McCarthy, 2006), the father’s ideal of the enduring human spirit, which represents his ethical distinction from the cannibals around him, as well as preserving the father and his son’s commitment to a civilisation beyond savagery and despair. This is a mirror of the American rhetoric; that even when material systems of worth fail, moral superiority is to be found in endurance. The endurance of the father is heroic or stoic, an echo of frontier mythology; an image of a lone figure traversing and surviving hostile landscapes, like Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid (Stoeltje, 1987). The Road transforms apocalypse into a test of character, once again mirroring the American growth narrative that adversity proves moral worth, not indicting systems.
Furthermore, the notion of ‘the road’ itself implies direction, purpose, and progress, yet the journey that our characters are on leads nowhere. The novel substitutes motion for progress, sustaining the illusion of advancement and development even in total civilisational collapse. This feeds the progress myth – though the novel does not imagine an alternative system, or directly question capitalism or governance, it exposes the US frame of survival as victory and progress, and demonstrates the miniaturisation of progress to the scale of the individual, lone figure. The dystopia of this novel reassures, rather than destabilises, offering a fantasy world in which the collapse of systems does not implicate the moral subject, the individual. By doing this, The Road exemplifies how the myth of American exceptionalism and forward progress is preserved, even in a story which appears to depict its end.
Rather than attempting to demonstrate the folly of American exceptionalism by preserving the myth, in The Underground Railroad Colston Whitehead seeks to display the roots of national growth and progress rhetoric and violent and traumatic. Whitehead’s novel demonstrates that American “progress” and “growth” is not merely accompanied by traumas of the past, but is structurally and institutionally dependent on it. By literalising the Underground Railroad, Whitehead transforms historical slavery into a speculative dystopia, exposing the violence and historical trauma which lies at the heart of the US development, growth, and progress rhetoric framework.
In the “South Carolina” chapter, Whitehead presents progress as a something that must be displayed and curated – the seemingly progressive “museum” of “Black uplift” (Whitehead, 2016), which is actually home to medical experimentation and forced sterilisation of the very subjects, Black individuals, whom it purports to be lifting up. Exploring the brutal reality of slavery and the constant threat to Black freedom, even in places which seem to offer liberation, the novel demonstrates how racial violence is reframed as benevolence, how harm is narrated as help. Whitehead exposes how the rhetoric of growth disguises evils like racialised control as humanitarian progress or development. Whitehead’s narrator tells us, “The past is never past.” (Whitehead 2016), and The Underground Railroad shows us how those demons of the past, the historical evils and traumas that the US inflicted on its worldly counterparts, feeds into the growth and establishment of modern systems, as well as the exceptionalist rhetoric.
In the novel, the long railroad stands in for technological progress, and the slavery which surrounds the railroad a symbol of human regression and terror. America’s self-image as a nation of freedom and development is exposed as incoherent, built on an infrastructure which at the same time symbolises national growth while enabling morally regressive domination and the commitment of great terrors on a global stage. Growth, Whitehead shows us, is traumatic, built on trauma, and inseparable from the ghosts of history which propelled America to its privileged position.
In Snow Crash, dystopia no longer revisits historical trauma but instead extrapolates the logic of American exceptionalism into a speculative future, revealing that the culmination of growth, progress, and development rhetoric is not advancement, but social disintegration. In the novel, we see a nation-state replaced by franchises and corporations, where citizenship is rebranded as consumer membership, and law is privatised (Stephenson, 1992). Exceptionalism becomes market fundamentalism (Block, 2014), where progress is measured as acceleration, not improvement. Though inequality deepens and community collapses, information speed, Metaverse advances, and growth in corporate infrastructure convince the people that they are making progress. Growth becomes purely quantitative, not ethical or socially positioned.
Rather than look to the past to expose the anxieties of American exceptionalism, Snow Crash looks ahead to understand the hypocrisy of US narratives of development. It plays out the fear of corporate control and the loss of democratic governance, paying attention to the linguistic and cognitive domination that comes with a “privatised” social experience, governed, literally, by brands and franchises looking to turn a profit. Dominance in Snow Crash is no longer military or territorial, but cultural or semiotic. The “Metaverse” in the story is American-coded, English-dominated, and branded all over by corporations who have a stake in running the country. Stephenson’s dystopia suggests that exceptionalism survives not as national pride, but as cultural saturation and overhaul (Davis, 2014), where American norms become the default global language – this is US power on the global stage, in the speculative future.
Dystopia, in this case, functions as a speculative warning about where American rhetoric may lead us; that the endpoint of these narratives around growth, progress, and development are much more destructive than they may seem from our current position. Unlike Whitehead’s novel, which exposes the traumatic foundations of American growth, Stephenson’s Snow Crash projects its ideological analysis into a speculative future, revealing just how far we may go, or perhaps fall, if we remain committed to the exceptionalist, progress and growth-centric rhetoric which dominates American cultural production. The hyperbolic tone of the novel exposes the absurdity of the neoliberal and exceptionalist logic that it seeks to diagnose, by pushing it beyond plausibility and in doing so, revealing its internal contradictions. Though the US is still pushing the frontier in Snow Crash, this frontier is no longer geographic, as it was in McCarthy’s novel, but technological and economic – expansion is endless, but still empty. Stephenson’s dystopia helps to point out that American narratives of growth and progress survive by continually inventing new frontiers, even as social cohesion collapses around them.
Across US cultural production, the uptake of dystopian and traumatic narratives is not merely a symptom of social pessimism, but an active and critical response to the contradictions embedded in these American rhetorical frames of growth, progress, and development. This essay has argued that dystopia functions both to preserve and expose this myth, ultimately one of American exceptionalism. In The Road, this essay noted how progress is miniaturised to the scale of individual endurance, sustaining the fantasy that moral worth is found in survival itself. In The Underground Railroad, growth is revealed as structurally dependent upon historical and racialised trauma, exposing the violence that underwrites the national narrative of advancement. Finally, this essay noted how Snow Crash demonstrated that rhetoric is projected into a speculative future, one where neoliberal and corporate acceleration culminates in a fragmentation of society, rather than cultural development.
Taken together, these texts demonstrate that the American promise of unbroken, continual progress is less of a historical reality than it is a powerful ideological fiction. Dystopia takes on an important form, as a cultural looking-glass through which this fiction is interrogated, its suppressed histories brought to light, and its future consequences imagined, played out, and shown to be despairing. The fixation on dystopian narratives thus reveals not a rejection of progress, growth, or development, but a profound and substantiated anxiety about the cost at which it has been, and continues to be, achieved.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Block, F., Somers, M. (2014) The Power of Market Fundamentalism, London: Harvard University Press.
Davis, R. (2014) ‘The 21st-century Turn to Culture: American Exceptionalism’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 46(4).
McCarthy, C. (2006) The Road. London: Picador.
Moylan, T. (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. London: Routledge.
Sargisson, L. (2013) ‘Dystopias do matter’, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stephenson, N. (1992) Snow Crash. London: Penguin.
Stoeltje, B. (1987) ‘Making the Frontier: Folklore Process in a Modern Nation’, Western Folklore, 46(4).
Whitehead, C. (2016) The Underground Railroad. London: Fleet.