Dystopia and utopia in Vogt's Weapon Shop and Ellison's Repent Harlequin

Vogt, Ellison and Arendt

The idea of a utopian society, a perfect Eden, has been a recurring theme in human literature, philosophy, religion, and commentary almost from the beginning of civilization. This recurrent theme is no accident: most cultures have, as a basis for their creation mythos, a utopian view of either the pre-human world or the post-human world. Sociological, this is a functionalist approach that serves to "validate, support, and imprint the norms of a give, specific moral order" and to authorize its moral code "as a construct beyond criticism and human emendation" (Campbell and Fairchild 221).

In opposition, a dystopia, becomes part of the anti-heroic paradigm in that all the benefits of an overall utopian society are almost backwards. What was good, now seems evil, what was light, dark. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt, in Ideology and Terror: A New Form of Government, sees one of the maxims of the 20th century to be a dissolution into dystopia. Totalitarian governments or organizations, themselves dystopian in nature, are certainly not new, they were commented upon by Plato and others in the Ancient World. However, according to Arendt, it is the explosion of totalitarian dystopia that so characterizes modernity -- almost as if the evolution of democracy and the idea of utopia must, to exist, have a dystopian element (Arendt). This dichotomy is uniquely expressed in literature, in particular with the stories The Weapon Shop and Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man.

In Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man, author Harlan Ellison gives us a non-linear approach to a dystopian future in which time is strictly regulated by the government. If one is late, for instance, it is a crime and severely punished. Time is seen as so valuable, that the punishment of tardiness is given in direct proportion to the "amount of time" wasted by the infraction. The ultimate consequence, though, is if one is punished so many times that one "runs out of time" and is therefore "turned off." The major characters in the novel, the timekeeper, or the "Ticktock Man," representing the government; and "Harlequin," representing not just the archetypal comic characterization, but rebellion, are continually at odds (Ellison).

In The Weapon Shop, what appears to be dystopian reality is, in effect, a group of individuals that are anti-dystopian. The organizers of the Weapon Shop are, in fact, heroic beings who are working against the totalitarian status quo and the "hero," a demure businessman named Fara who was initially loyal to the government (Empress) until he discovers that the very government to whom he was loyal was the source behind his troubles (Van Vogt).