What does it mean to be a "they"?

They: Kay Dick

Kay Dick’s They (1977) was out of print until McNally Editions reissued it. What’s surprising about this is that K.Dick was the first woman director at a respected publishing house at the age of 26, worked as a reporter, and wrote several novels, and this one won an award (the South East Arts literature prize). She also lived with a female partner for twenty-two years. Surprising also because as well as those markers of prestige, she’s an excellent author, and this is a speculative, dystopian novel, the sort of novel that has all the signs of being beloved through the ages. An old copy was rediscovered by a literary agent in a charity (thrift) shop in 2020, and now it can be loved again.

For a dystopian novel, it’s quite beautiful and cozy. K. Dick’s prose is beautifully modernist, a masterclass in creating unease, and how to tell a story without an excess of description or word. There’s a narrator, whose name and gender are never revealed. Characters enter and exit. It begins with a idyllic description of a lovely home, as someone gives the narrator a tour. There’s an artist, Jess, working to create paintings that embody each color, every imaginable hue of that color. The setting is beautiful, somewhere vaguely English and near the coast, the characters have picnics and set tables for tea sometimes.

Something feels…off. The narrator’s books go missing, one at time. You have the feeling that’s something is menacing the residents of this beautiful world. The narrator is often afraid for their dog, and keeps the dog close. People who live with children watch those children closely. The characters occasionally talk about “they” and “them”, mobs that act on behalf of an unknown authoritarian force. Jess, the artist, insists on finishing her last work. After it is completed, she is taken by them…and blinded. The work is blazing white, like looking into the sun and feeling blinded, as Jess knew what her fate would be in this world. Owning books, writing letters, creating music or art are all curtailed. The consequences of these vary, and the punishment fits the crime. A poet’s hand is burned away. If you resist or run, the punishment becomes more severe. To plant a garden, gift a flower, enjoy a meal, live alone, or even to communicate beyond the merely functional is suspect. To have emotions and thoughts of your own puts you at risk.

“The grief towers for those who refuse to deny. Love is unsocial, inadmissible, contagious…[It] admits communication. Grief for lost love is the worse offence, indictable. It suggests love has value, understanding, generosity, happiness” (p 94).

Gradually, Dick impresses upon the reader that the restrictions go beyond the creation of art, and apply to all forms of self-expression and identity. In this world, art can never be shared, yet the artists fight to create simply to give life to their art, risking maiming of life, limb, and memory to do so. The revelation of the erosion of self-expression and identity are gradual as authoritarian forces erode of those rights in reality. That Dick does not reveal gender or sexuality, which are in many ways, forms of self-expression, adds to the feel of repression. The mobs are even more “they” and “them”, faceless, genderless, ageless, and seemingly their goal is to turn the core characters as free of identity as “them”. Dick never reveals anything about them beyond their actions against the core group of individuals that are under their watchful eyes. That core group that the narrator interacts with is large, each day or week it seems to be a different cast of characters, a different set of transgressions, and different punishments and levels of sufferings. This at times can be confusing, although effective in showing the gradual wearing down of individual identities, in everyone gradually becoming a they regardless of how long they gently resist. Outside of this, it’s a beautifully written little book, minimalist, menacing, and one I fear might be prescient.