surveillance in fiction

This page highlights fiction about surveillance, from ETA Hoffmann and Herman Melville to Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond.

It covers -

• who is who
• anonymity
• surveillance
• and paranoia

The coverage is eclectic and not all-inclusive; many of the academic studies noted below include detailed bibliographies. It is complemented by the discussion of literature regarding identity and identity crime.

    who is who?

As Gilbert & Sullivan lamented in HMS Pinafore (1878) "things are seldom what they seem: skim milk masquerades as cream". There's an extensive critical literature about questions of identity, dissimulation and observation in Western poetry and prose.

For anxiety about status and false identity see much of the work of the underappreciated ETA Hoffmann and heirs such as Dumas (The Count of Monte Christo) or Hawthorne, notably in The Scarlet Letter, who explore the tension between 'is' and 'seem' in public identity.

    anonymity

The hero in Robert Musil's superb The Man Without Qualities suffers from having too little identity in the last years of the Hapsburgs, a society in which all social relations seem to take on the shrillness and uncertainty of the internet. Ralph Ellison's 1952 Invisible Man (dispatched in a tart review by Irving Howe) agonises that lack of identity subjects the author - and the reader - to manipulation by more powerful forces.

HG Wells' cruder 1897 novella The Invisible Man features arson, disappearing cats, murder, dreams of domination and an angry mob after immersion in the fin-de-siecle anonymiser brings out the worst in the anti-hero.

There are highlights in The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave 2003) edited by Robert Griffin.

    surveillance

For omnipresent surveillance the benchmark is probably George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although Animal Farm presents a more convincing picture of social relations - online or off. Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg 1980) considers Eric Blair's assumption of someone else's name and - with less success - personality. Two important but less influential works are Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita and Evgeni Zamyatin's We.

There's a fashionable introduction in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge: MIT Press 2002) edited by Thomas Levin & Peter Weibel and in Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder: Westview 1992), discussed in the Privacy guide on this site.

For SF see Brian Aldiss's brisk and refreshingly iconoclastic Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Gollancz 1986) and Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke Uni Press 1993). David Brin's Earth (New York: Bantam 1990) is a "no-privacy" dystopia of pervasive surveillance (and abuse) sometime next century.

    and paranoia

Timothy Melly's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2000), highlighted later in this profile, brings together David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1951), Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) and Charles Reich's The Greening of America (1970) in an exploration of "agency panic" - anxiety over the way bureaucracies, data processing and communication systems have reduced "human autonomy and uniqueness".

For angst among the liberal intelligentsia about manipulation see Frances Stonor Saunders' ungenerous Who Paid The Piper: The CIA & The Cultural Cold War (London: Granta 1999).




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