Theodor Adorno Meets Dystopian Literature by Patricia McManus (review)

Reviewed by: Theodor Adorno Meets Dystopian Literatureby Patricia McManus Miguel Sebastián-Martín Theodor Adorno Meets Dystopian Literature. Patricia McManus. Critical Theory and Dystopia. Manchester UP, 2022. 211 pp. £81 hc. Patricia McManus's recent monograph is well positioned to become a reference work in future studies of literary dystopias, if not dystopias generally. Using the critical apparatus of Theodor Adorno's theory while engaging with the works of dys/utopian scholars such as Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, and Gregory Claeys, McManus retells the history of the subgenre as a changing whole, with a careful eye on the shaping and reshaping of its defining forms and themes. Thus, this is a monograph that invites readers to reconsider questions of estrangement and familiarity, commitment and critique, in a way that historicizes those abstract dialectics essential to the dystopian subgenre. Repurposing Adorno's understanding of commitment in art, and recontextualizing it in a Suvinian view of sf, McManus proposes to think about dystopias and their novain terms of their negative commitment, a concept that orients the monograph's textual analyses and historical theorizations. Overall, Critical Theory and Dystopiais a volume that offers a cautiously partial (but no less thought-provoking) reconceptualization of the subgenre, and a reinterpretation of some of its classic texts alongside more recent, less studied ones. If there is one objection to be raised about the book, that would be the overgeneralized nature of its title, since rather than "critical theory and dystopia," this is, more specifically, an Adornian approach to dystopian literature that evidently echoes (but barely discusses) other critical theorists and other dystopian media. This minor qualification, however, is not meant to imply that McManus's monograph would be any less interesting to anyone oriented towards any broader, related fields—if anything, the overgeneralization of the title should be taken as an invitation to keep building with the book's conceptual toolkit. In terms of structure, the book starts with an introduction that proposes and a chapter that illustrates McManus's concept of negative commitment, and the subsequent four chapters proceed to historicize the forms taken by dystopias across their history. As McManus claims, this is above all "a book about form … not only about the forms dystopia may take—the various shapes of tyranny, coercion, subjugation and suffering—but also about the forms of the things lost to tyranny, things that are frequently not even named but the absence of which motivates the misery of what is there: autonomy, freedom, equality, difference, hope" (7). In this sense, McManus's idea of thinking about the genre's negative commitment—"a commitment to the present which cannot be figured" (12)—is a way to "work with form-in-history, form moving historically" (10). Otherwise, for McManus "the literary history which treats dystopia in terms End Page 114of ideas is in danger of mistaking as normative what the fictions worry over" (11); in other words, rather than defining the genre by the presence of certain historically determined themes or ideas (at the risk of obscuring their historicity), the proposal here is to define dystopias essentially by the absence(s) around which their speculation revolves—around a negative commitment to what is missing in the dystopian world, to what the dystopia seems to lack and want in relation to the historical epoch that it implies. And this is the theoretical proposal that McManus applies, in her first chapter, to E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909), Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants(1952), and Leni Zumas's Red Clocks(2018), a selection that illustrates "Negative Commitment at Work"—the chapter title—as well as anticipates the three epochal milestones of the book's historical narrative. The second chapter, focused entirely on George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four(1949) as a paradigmatic classic dystopia, inaugurates the rest of the book. McManus's reading of the novel strives to take the text from under the shadow of an author who tends to overdetermine interpretations. As McManus puts it, Orwell's novel "is not so much a text read at all as one agreed with" (74), even though it is a novel with...