By Tim Ryan
During the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, two conceptions dominated popular templates for a dystopian future. First came Brave New World in 1932. In Aldous Huxley’s vision, authorities rule via rigid social hierarchies and the numbing effects of the hallucinogenic “Soma” drug. Challenge nothing, don’t worry, be happy.
Then George Orwell’s 1984 appeared in 1948. This dark contrast to Huxley’s Instead of a superficially soporific vision of the future where people are consumers conditioned to give up their freedom of choice, Orwell depicted the grim future as one of an all-seeing technological totalitarianism removing choice, monitoring every move and “thought crime,” and controlling every person’s life minutely. Orwell’s vivid image of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face forever” horrifically contrasts with the beatific smiles of the Somatized masses.
A growing contemporary conclusion is that our present combines elements of both Huxley and Orwell’s dystopias. The commodification, monetization, and lowering the bar on public debate and entertainment has continued for years, and the microchip created a revolution in surveillance and information-gathering that suddenly renders 2024 much more like 1984. Even your house is spying on you.
Looking at this confluence, however, there’s a third novel we believe should join these two, as a prophetic and even more visionary way to think about the current reality we inhabit. And paradoxically, unlike Orwell and Huxley who were free to write dystopian critiques in the West, the author hails from one of the most severely repressive hermetic Cold War regime in Eastern Europe: Albania. Ismael Kadare managed to write the astonishing The Palace of Dreams in the 1970s and get it published in 1981, critiquing the surveillance state he found himself trapped in then—and now speaking pointedly to the different ones we find ourselves in today.
After two millennia of maintaining an identity and singular language across half a dozen empires, World War II ended in Albania with the descending of the Iron Curtain – or in Albania’s case a steel wall. Enver Hoxha emerged as the dominant national leader, becoming Prime Minister in 1944, subsequently instituting a Stalinist-style dictatorship complete with a paranoid personality cult and a surveillance system to rival the STASI of East Germany. He wrapped the government in an isolated concept of Albanian nationhood not unlike the Kim dynasty and juche philosophy of North Korea.
Ismael Kadare survived this Borgesian labyrinth and ultimately published his scathing attack on the crazy-mirror surveillance state during the most repressive Communist regime in Eastern Europe. How did he do it? And why does his obscure, clearly anti-communist novel set in a fantastical sultanate reflect in so many ways a stunning portrait of our Internet-mediated world today?
Set during an Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century (true to the title the sense of place is both specific and mildly fantastical) the Tabir Sarrail, the titular Palace of Dreams, is an opaque, convoluted bureaucracy devoted to collecting, sorting, and interpreting people’s dreams from across the realm. Everyone is obligated to submit their dreams on a daily basis to collectors who roam the countryside and then deliver the dreams to the Palace.
The Palace’s vast bureaucracy is simultaneously archaic and technocratic, with three levels – the Selectors, the Interpreters and the final decision is held by the Office of the Master Dream, through which the key dreams are forwarded to the Sultan for his review and his selective and mysterious action. Collectors deliver the dreams and Selectors are the first review stage; they’re not sure exactly why they’re picking dreams to pass on to the Interpreters, but they fulfill their role. The Interpreters with their higher level of expertise interpret the dreams and pass on only those they consider most significant – by whatever arbitrary or opaque criteria they learn over time – to the Master Dream office. When the Sultan is presented with a prophetic dream pointing to the kingdom’s destiny, mystifying but often repressive policy decisions roll downhill from the Palace, impacting everyone.
The protagonist, Mark-Alem, is a young social striver from a prominent Albanian clan in the Ottoman Empire, selected by his uncle, the Foreign Minister, to become a Selector. He eventually rises in this Kafkaesque labyrinth and finds his own dream seemingly predicting and possibly influencing a bloody conflict between the Palace and his own family.
From this brief description it’s clear how the novel functions as a critique of a totalitarian society intent on prying into the most intimate ideas and desires of people’s private existence – and using them for repression, punishment, or reward. But beyond this intrusion, the opaque and ambiguous nature of the selection and interpretation of these dreams renders people eternally clueless as to what their lives mean to the State – and what it may mean for their everyday existence. When the Sultan makes his final selections and implements policies based on those dreams – is an insurrection brewing? – no one has any idea whose dream is being acted on or the rationale for it. Even if people wanted to censor their speech or their daily actions in an act of self-preservation, they have no way of knowing what their dreams may reveal. Their actions and speech may run afoul of some interpretation of a dream. And how are they supposed to control their dreams in the first place?
The Palace of Dreams can be seen and was certainly intended as a cautionary tale of arbitrary state repression and the cult-of-personality in its first expression, proximate to the time of the Ottoman Empire and the geographic space of Albania. In other words, it was a warning against what the contemporary reader would associate with 1984-style totalitarianism. Yet the novel also expands beyond the frame of a localized critique of communism and into a quest for understanding ourselves in society through the projection of our own introspection – and how those deepest thoughts and desires now increasingly contain us in a world both of and not of our making.
Kadare’s vivid and highly particular chronicle of this bureaucracy, Albania, and the Palace which consumes the streams of people’s most personal lives, expands into a broad human understanding and connection to the deepest emotions we harbor in our dreams. Thus, even while navigating through the isolated and complicated cultural countryside of The Palace of Dreams’s and Albania’s geography, the fundamental core of the story is at once both particular and universal.
Here This is where Kadare himself, seemingly isolated in a paranoid, straitjacketed backwater of ancient empires with a language sharing some elements with those of the rest of Europe but still uniquely its own, demonstrates how the universalities of the particulars in his world propel his narrative and the byzantine nature of both the Hoxha regime and Albanian culture and history. The recognition of that appeal resulted in Western praise for the novel through its international distribution and because of an ironic turn of fate on a bureaucratic rule, it escaped the Albanian censors in its first iteration. By the time the authorities caught on, 20,000 copies had already been sold. This afforded Kadare protection and because the novel was popular with the public, the government was in the ironic position of simultaneously attacking him and begrudgingly acknowledging their native son. Like Mark-Alem he was part of an effort that attacked the regime yet somehow found protection by navigating its twisting corridors. And as the country turned its uber-nationalist Albanian-Way-of-Communism face to the world here was a home-grown genius embraced by the West who was also distinctly Albanian. His very existence on the “periphery” was what helped project him in the Hoxha nation-building project. And the genius of The Palace of Dreams’ apprehension of the real socio-economic medium of control under which we now live propels him into the center of our consideration and places him in the company of Huxley and Orwell.
Reading The Palace of Dreams today, and what takes it beyond the human struggle for freedom against a totalitarian state, is how the particulars of “collection” in Palace of Dreams mirror our contemporary interconnected existence through the Internet. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other globe-spanning enterprises have essentially created a surveillance enterprise that displays, begs, plumbs, projects, exposes, acts out, humiliates, bullies, doxes, exonerates, and celebrates all of our innermost thoughts any time we’re online in ways eerily resembling the Tabir Sarrail.
Who are the Selectors and Interpreters? Us.
We’re now faced with the paradox of the Internet as a two-way telescreen to our Surveillance States. The universal yearnings inside each of us that is so intensely private (our dreams) that we like to think that no one can access that experience – that’s what the Tabir Sarrail, and the Thought Police and Ministry of Love in 1984 violate. That primal hidden space we harbor is the last alcove against the overwhelming powers of the State and Big Tech.
A key element of control in authoritarian systems is complicity. In 1984 that violently coerced “complicity” produces in the individual a paranoid fortress of the mind. In Brave New World it’s the pointless and unengaged boredom of people who don’t care. Today, in an eerie echo of the violation of the citizens of Kadare’s novel, rather than having our dreams stolen from us, we are openly complicit in sharing them. What sounds reminiscent of the naïve and hopeful days of the nascent World Wide Web’s rhetoric has now evolved into a world of Selectors willingly giving over our hopes, dreams, hates, and dreads to another level of Selectors (now almost entirely non-human algorithms) and Interpreters, ultimately fed into multiple opaque Tabir Sarrails. And many of us are complicit Interpreters ourselves.
The Tabir Sarrails of today aren’t simply the solitary purview of an Office of Master Dreams or a Sultan brooding alone in a Palace. They’re every nation-state with a cyber security apparatus and every corporation with an advertisement that appears on our screens, be they in our pockets or elsewhere. The corporations also have the harvesting down. Advertisers constantly tempt or manufacture our desires. Before bed do we scroll down through used cars for sale and weight loss programs, then dream about crashing that new car or being shamed for not losing those ten pounds? In a reinforcing feedback loop our dreams are being manipulated back to us and decisions and options flattened out by algorithms. The Offices of the Master Dream exist everywhere–from the halls of the NSA to the offices of tech billionaire robber-barons. Are they creating a society any more rational than Kadare’s fictional despot? Ultimately, to return to the universality of The Palace of Dreams’ encompassing mechanisms, as opposed to the Sultan’s lone role, the intersection between nation-state and corporate power is directly in the service and structure of global capitalism – state-run surveillance plus capital that helps create and then feed and direct the “collection of dreams” and aids the State in keeping tabs on what its citizens are thinking. In the novel the Sultan’s dream manipulation serves three functions – first, as a mechanism of state policy; second as a social control feedback loop; and third, linking into social control, as an economic prod to consumption. Perhaps the Sultan also believes this feedback loop can be a form of mind-control. Perhaps how his decisions impact people also affect their dreams. Ultimately unknowable but not unlike advertising.
Extrapolating from our (rapidly) evolving present, perhaps today’s most sophisticated and frightening Office of the Master Dream’s manifestation exists in China. Public panopticon surveillance technology combined with pervasive social media monitoring and exploding AI tracking software such as that deployed during the COVID pandemic gives Chinese authorities unprecedented access, power, motive, and capacity to make the model of the Palace of Dreams closer to reality than other fictional dystopias. The 1948 Revolution and Maoism that followed took the “1984” approach, followed by the turn toward “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” in Deng Xiaoping’s phrase. Unlike Brave New World, however, the Chinese government’s popular vision of a capitalist future was an engaged albeit highly-directed citizenry. The genius of the Chinese model, similar to our relationship to the Internet world-wide, is both manufacturing dreams and spurring the pursuit of “acceptable” dreams within that system. Even if our dreams are “selected/interpreted,” we are rewarded or punished through the expression of those “dreams” that encourage conformity to Capital’s – and the State’s – agendas. The Middle Kingdom has found a way to operationalize the Sultan’s ultimate dream.
“…[it was] decreed that no dream, not even one dreamed in the remotest part of the Empire on the most ordinary day by the most godforsaken creature, must fail to be examined by the Tabir Sarrail.”
Today, it’s: “Alexa, download the audiobook of The Palace of Dreams” as Alexa and her other-named sisters and brothers collect our dreams, idol thoughts, conversations, rebukes, arguments, intimacies, our fundamental aspirations and despairs, the currents and details of our daily and nightly lives from every corner of the earth 24/7. Mark-Alem, lost in the Kafka-like ambiguities and complications of the Palace, losing his identity, unsure whether he’s just a tool or his dream has actually impacted society and his family, mirrors our own ambiguous relationship with and actions on the Internet. Curiously, out of this particularistic geographic vision rooted in what is thought of as the literary “periphery” comes a central literary metaphor for our time.
With technology and AI software we are able to do today what Hoxha had to employ the whole Albanian population to do, and through his Sultan-like personality cult, manifest a crude social control. The act of being observed changes behavior – and/or knowing/thinking you’re being observed. We’re all complicit in Alexa’s surveillance states now. And to the extent the Internet immobilizes us, isolates us, puts in front of television-like (but far more engaging) screens we’re willingly fueling both futures – repressive and hapless – through our own Palaces of Dreams. 