#188 Thoughts can be punished: Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye

Can hope exist in a scientific city of total suspicion?

This episode is a look at Kallocain, the final novel by the Swedish poet and and writer Karin Boye, which was published in 1940. Although little known and not available in English until 1966, this bleak book should be recognised more widely as a key example of 20th century dystopian fiction. Set in a repressive state inspired by Boye's visits to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Kallocain focuses on a powerful truth drug, with the potential to help the state lay siege to our most private thoughts - and to stamp out that last bastion of freedom.

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.

Transcript

Can hope exist in a scientific city of total suspicion?

Long before George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), another novel depicted repressive totalitarian states locked in struggle, saturated in total surveillance and immersed in a corrosive atmosphere of mutual suspicion. The strong similarities must be coincidental, however, because the earlier book was published in Swedish and not translated into English until 1966.

Kallocain (1940) was written by the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye (1900 - 1941). Her only work of science fiction, it is a gloomy dystopia influenced by her visits to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Hailed by one contemporary critic as “a significant and lasting work of art”, it would be Boye’s last, as she died a year after its publication in the spring of 1941.

Like Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night (1937) before it, Kallocain is a landmark in the history of dystopian fiction by women. It follows Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) in the great chain of 20th century dystopian novels. Profoundly shaped by its specific political and historical context, it is a statement by a troubled writer on the necessity of life and hope in the face of pervasive terror.
 

Better oppression through chemistry

At some point in the future, the so-called World State has control over a large portion of the Earth. While almost all culture and history have been obliterated, there are hints that the old world was ruined by a devastating war and the extensive use of chemical weapons. The World State is governed by a bleak, oppressive regime. People are not considered individuals, merely cells in the great organism of the State. This is a militarised society, in which each person refers to others as “Fellow Soldier”, and everyone must participate in military drills. There is almost no freedom of movement, of association, or of communication. Even in the home, domestic helpers double as spies, monitoring the actions of every family unit. Surveillance cameras and microphones are everywhere.

Leo Kall is a chemist working in Chemistry City No. 4, a World State settlement dedicated to his field. Devoted to the World State, he is excited to make a major breakthrough - a powerful truth serum he calls Kallocain. His elation is dented when Rissen, a superior whom Leo suspects of having an affair with his wife Linda, is assigned to evaluate the research project. Later, both men become embroiled with the World State’s immensely powerful police ministry, which sees Kallocain’s potential to destroy the last possible site of resistance against the State - the free thought of the individual.

Personal and political
 
 Born in Gothenburg in 1900, Boye initially came to prominence as a poet, publishing her first collection in 1922. Six years later, she visited the Soviet Union for a three week study tour, which according to translator David McDuff “seems to have consisted mainly in a drab pilgrimage between various state institutions, factories and collective farms.” Her first novel appeared in 1931. At around the same time, she began to undergo psychoanalysis, in part to come to terms with her homosexuality. This took her to Berlin, where in 1932 and 1933 she witnessed the rise of Nazism firsthand.
 
 By the time Boye began work on Kallocain in the autumn of 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in a non-aggression pact in the early stages of World War II. In that conflict, Sweden was neutral. Boye and other Swedish writers had to tread carefully, as censors were watchful for any material that could trigger a German invasion. McDuff writes that Kallocain’s “mechanised, dehumanised landscape is a composite, bearing the traits of both Nazi and Soviet society.”
 
Boye ended her own life in the spring of 1941, just a few months before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. These two repressive states, combined into the inspiration for Boye’s World State, became engaged in total war which ended with the destruction of Hitler’s Germany in 1945.

The State is everything…
 
Introducing the first English translation of the novel in 1966, Richard B. Vowles wrote:

“The usual dystopian conditions prevail in the World State. The state is everything, the individual is nothing [...] The focal character occupies a position of ambiguity and indecision between the old and new. He is sufficiently sensitive to observe and report change, but he is numb and impotent. Ultimately he is assimilated or destroyed by the new order of society.”

As Vowles go on to note, however, there are distinctive elements to Kallocain. One is the particular nature of the repression it depicts, which in some ways seems even more pervasive and total than in Orwell’s Airstrip One. While rooted in the Nazi and Soviet systems, the culture of mutual suspicion, informing, and denunciations anticipates the grimly paranoid atmosphere that was fomented by the Stasi in East Germany.
 
The depiction of the state as the agent of oppression is, as Vowles notes, typical of this era of dystopian fiction. Today, it is increasingly private corporations which appear to want to know everything about our lives.

…the individual is nothing

Early on in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is stated that “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” Leo Kall’s development of his truth serum - the most clearly science fictional element in the novel - becomes a weapon which the World State can use to threaten even this small bastion of freedom. Again, this makes the atmosphere in Kallocain even more sinister, even as the novel lacks any overt scenes of violence. Kall’s initial delight at what his drug is capable of demonstrates his seemingly unshakeable support for the regime.
 
Early in the novel, Kall - whose name means “cold” in Swedish - makes a speech at a public event which causes him to be reprimanded by the authorities. He is forced to apologise on the radio: “I committed a serious error [...] affected with a false compassion, of a kind that results from sympathy with the individual, and a false heroism…” Again, it is striking that some of today’s antisocial billionaires have inverted the logic of the World State, pushing a “war on empathy”, an atmosphere of absolute individual selfishness, an abolition of any notion of solidarity or community.

A lost dystopia?

Kallocain makes for an interesting comparison with Swastika Night (1937), an earlier dystopia written by Katharine Burdekin using the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Burdekin’s novel is much more explicit, violent, despairing, and bleak than Kallocain - and in some ways arguably more effective. Swastika Night is explicitly about Nazism, a fierce statement of anti-fascism that was possible in pre-war Britain, and not so in neutral Sweden in 1940.

Kallocain is little-known in the English speaking world, in part due to its relatively late translation from Swedish. Another reason may be that, as Vowles put it, “ideology and police violence, while they exist, fall outside the perimeter of [Boye’s] fiction.” Steeped in ideology and violence, and arriving in the anxious post-war period, Orwell’s novel was well placed to make an indelible impact. While its plot and characterisation leave something to be desired, Kallocain is nevertheless a fascinating entry in the dystopian canon.