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eden complex arrghhh end of the year paper time... waited up for spk to say hey to me at the end of the day and prob will leave the system on for him, please say something tonight, I know you are having fun but I miss you too, seeing as DTE likes to bill me for $0.00 this month. No, I have no idea why...and I have called like a good little girl and begged them to bill me something but they just won't. I guess it will all either rain down on my head or I won't ever get electric bills here, either way... anyway, I will leave you with my sci-fi end of term paper. I edited the old one that was up here yesterday, but there aren't much changes. I cannot incorporate all the changes my prof wants me to into the SF one so I am praying that he cuts me some slack. hell, the big prof did impose the stupid 900 word cut off, not me. I am ok with brevity but if he wants me to explore all these things, he needs to give us more space. AMEN. it is 886 words already, no more space to argue shit!! will attach a note though telling him that I tried, he is cute and nice so I think I might garner that A...at least I hope so. so please pray that both are well recieved and that I can get As in everything. will edit them in the morning...one more final to go! Eden Complex and Dystopian Works Rabkin�s Eden Complex (Lecture, 1/21/03) plays a very important part within dystopian works because it serves to reinforce the status quo by emphasizing its demise as the loss of Eden, despite the reality being post-Edenic, to a place where reason and knowledge must toil to create or regain Paradise. The concepts of Eden and Paradise vary within each work, but the overarching structure of seeing change as a threat to the status quo forces the some of the characters to code their reality as Edenic and the loss of it as the Fall. I will use We, The Time Machine, and A Canticle for Leibowitz, in order to show how these dystopian works all follow this same general pattern. Each work opens with a certain status quo that some of the characters see as Edenic. In We, R-13, D-503, and the One State tout the inner world of reason as Eden because of its lack of freedom, (We, 61, 62, 180). This contradicts Zamyatin�s explicit signification of the outer world as Eden because, although the outer world is a garden (We, 154,155), the inner world is the Eden of leisure where nobody needs to think independently of the State, hence the Operation (We, 180). In contrast, the characters, as voiced through I-330, know that the outer world commands the hard labor of reason for survival and revolution (We, 157). A similar conflict occurs in the In The Time Machine where the future appears to be Eden, due to more garden imagery (The Time Machine 38, 43), but in actuality the protagonist sees the modern world as Eden because the future is merely a deterioration of mankind�s ingenuity (The Time Machine, 50). Something similar occurs again in A Canticle for Leibowitz where Abbot Zerchi refers to Earth as a failed Eden for mankind, and sees the star ships as mankind�s only hope (A Canticle for Leibowitz, 287, 332). Then within each piece, something threatens the status quo that some of the characters see as Edenic. Usually these threats involve the nature v. science dichotomy. One example is Wells where the threat begins when the Time Traveler begins his experiments and goes against the natural order of time to discover the future of mankind (The Time Machine, 34). The threat within We is the rebels who seek to overthrow the scientific rules of life and return to the natural way (We, 154,155). Miller�s main threat begins at the end of the novel when science through destruction threatens the natural state of religion (A Canticle for Leibowitz, 260). Thus, each threat deals with the same basic dichotomy. Some characters also see the new world resulting from each threat as a place for reason to toil in hopes to regain what they see as Paradise at the start of the work. In A Canticle for Leibowitz, Zerchi explicitly sees the new worlds as �non-Edens� and knows that he casts Joshua out into the world to slave to preserve religion (A Canticle for Leibowitz, 287, 292). Although Zerchi has no faith that Joshua will ever be able to fully recreate the current world, now a failed Eden, he does hope that with much hard work the new colonies can preserve the faith, which is his plan for a future Paradise, similar to the starting status quo (A Canticle for Leibowitz, 291). In We, both the rebels and the One State accept that the new world, if freed from the yoke of reason, would be one of toil to merely survive (We, 164). Thus, the One State offers complete happiness and a return to Eden via the Operation that eliminates the imagination (We, 180). By undergoing the Operation, the One State guarantees the individual their form of Paradise, because they will not need to labor mentally, which restores but also improves the One State because now they have a captive population (We, 61, 180). In The Time Machine the Time Traveler knows that he needs to use mental labor in order to regain his machine and escape (The Time Machine, 95). Without reason to guide him, the protagonist would be lost to the Morlocks within the garden-like world of mankind�s deterioration (The Time Machine, 78). Thus, he also regains the Paradise, as compared to the life of his descendants, of the modern world by using reason, via causing a forest fire, and physical strength or hard work to wrest the machine from the Morlocks (The Time Machine, 89, 90). Therefore, within each of the dystopic works that I have analyzed, We, The Time Machine, and A Canticle for Leibowitz, a pattern emerges where the some of the characters see the status quo at the start of the novel as Edenic and any threat to it as a loss of Paradise. As the story of Eden suggests, these threatened Falls push the characters to work hard in order to avoid losing Paradise. Through the dint of hard work, these characters manage to improve or maintain the status quo, thus reinforcing it. Although each dystopic novel differs in its ideas about what represents Eden and what constitutes Paradise, each work uses this basic pattern to emphasize the greatness of the present and the fears of the unknown future.
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