‘The Words I Speak Are Too Big For My Mouth’*: Karin Boye’s Kallocain

When I think I’ve read everything dystopian, particularly from the genre’s early 20th century heyday, another gem appears on my radar. Karin Boye’s Kallocain joins the ranks of Brave New World and 1984 in its depiction of an authoritarian superstate. We know the formula; we may even scoff at such a reality coming to pass, but we can easily lose our hard-earned freedoms if we don’t remain vigilant.

Kallocain opens, much like 1984, with the protagonist, Leo Kall, initiating a diary. The State is at war – or, rather, a form of cold war – with a neighbouring superpower. Leo is a prisoner of this enemy state, and his diary becomes a record of events prior to his capture, as well as the narrative’s main thrust.

Leo recounts an earlier time back in his home state. Dystopian protagonists are typically downtrodden average Joes, but Leo defies this archetype: he is a government chemist, a high-ranking member of the apparatus, and part of the problem. Leo is on the cusp of a major scientific breakthrough: Kallocain’, a form of truth serum. Psychoactive drugs had been in use prior to Kallocain’s publication in 1940, but there had always been doubts as to their efficacy. Leo’s wonder drug, however, activates instantly and is one hundred percent effective. His first test subject – a man who looks the part, plays the game, and salutes the flag– capitulates instantly under Kallocain’s influence. Unable to restrain himself, the man speaks out against the State and the climate of fear it perpetuates.

This isn’t drug-induced hyperbole on the part of the test subject; there is perfect justification for the man’s fears. The State is indeed all-powerful and oppressive and demands outright allegiance from its populace. Furthermore, the development of Kallocain will aggravate the political climate. Following a successful trial period, the authorities decree that all subjects must submit to the Kallocain test. Failure to comply will automatically designate them enemies of the State.

Even behind closed doors, families are subject to intrusion and must keep up appearances: Leo fears speaking openly before the au pair lest she be an informer;But Leo knows that everyone will fail the test. Being insufficiently gung-ho will count against them, as will any minor character failing. ‘The essential principle of totalitarianism’, Christopher Hitchens writes, ‘is to make laws that are impossible to obey. The resulting tyranny is even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous in the detection of error”.** Ultimately, Leo realises his work will be counter-productive and regrets putting it in motion: “We can’t have two-thirds of the population doing penal labour”. Indeed, by the time the testing is complete, there will be no one left to run the State!

Boye perfectly captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of a society under constant surveillance. The State is on a mission to root out subversive elements – real, perceived or fabricated. As such, people travel in silence on the Tube and keep to themselves in communal areas. Even behind closed doors, families are subject to intrusion and must keep up appearances: Leo fears speaking openly before the au pair lest she be an informer; furthermore, ‘police eye’ and ‘ear’ devices watch and listen constantly for hints of sedition. “(H)ow should thoughts and feelings be the private concern of the individual?” Leo recites. “Does not the whole fellow soldier belong to the State?… The State is everything, the individual nothing.” To make matters worse, the mass production of Kallocain will sweep away the last vestiges of human privacy and spell the full erasure of the individual, for once injected, subjects’ thoughts are no longer their own.

Leo ultimately betrays Linda and uses his serum on her to extract the truth. He convinces himself that his actions are justified and will primarily expose his wife’s involvement in an underground resistance movement.Couples and their children can live together, but the State makes it impossible for them to confide in one another. Propaganda sows division at every turn: ‘NO ONE CAN BE CERTAIN! THE PERSON CLOSEST TO YOU MAY BE A TRAITOR’. Healthy relationships are non-existent in such households. Family members have no common ground besides a shared distrust of one another and a sense of hopelessness about the future.

Unsurprisingly, the birth rate is in decline. Because who in their right mind would want to ‘get it on’ with government officials listening in around the clock? Sex is now an excruciating chore. What 1984’s Winston Smith terms a “duty to the Party”, Leo similarly describes as a “ritual … where the two of us (are) nothing but solemnly inspired and conscientious performers … in the sight of the State”. In both fictions, the authorities object to subjects copulating outside of their jurisdiction. In each case, the State strictly forbids private love affairs and insists upon loyalty to itself.

To make matters thornier on the marital front, Leo suspects his wife, Linda, of having an affair with his new superior, Rissen. Leo ultimately betrays Linda and uses his serum on her to extract the truth. He convinces himself that his actions are justified and will primarily expose his wife’s involvement in an underground resistance movement. Indeed, it does. But this item is secondary in Leo’s mind. When he learns there was no infidelity, he feels the weight of his deceit and allows Linda to go free.

Unlike Winston Smith, who puts on a good show but inwardly detests the regime, Leo, despite his misgivings, is an active contributor to the State’s brutal agenda. It is hard, therefore, to root for him as a protagonist. He makes mistake after mistake, plays repeatedly into the regime’s hands, and sacrifices innocent people in the process.

Unfortunately, Leo’s Damascene moment comes too late. By the time he realises the error of his ways, Rissen is dead.But Leo is acting out of self-preservation. In an early chapter, an apparatchik scrutinises a woman at a party on account of her reserved manner. Leo then makes a bold speech in her defence but promptly receives censure for it and an order to make a public apology.

Following this initial brush with danger, Leo shifts to Party-pleasing mode, switches to right-think, and parrots government slogans as if they’re his own. Afraid to appear ambivalent himself, he preaches vociferously and, instead of toeing the line like Winston Smith, overplays his part and actively champions the State’s every doctrine. This overzealousness extends to his work and renders him one of the State’s worst collaborators. Boye herself saw the rise of fascism firsthand and felt compelled to give a Sieg Heil salute during an election rally at the Berlin Sportpalast – not out of any special allegiance to the Nazi regime, but because it was the safe thing to do.

But Rissen sees through Leo’s performance: “You seem to have an unusually solid conscience … Or are you merely pretending?”. Leo’s detestation of Rissen is ill-founded, aping that of Iago for Othello. Rissen is a mild-mannered and agreeable colleague who quietly harbours reservations about the Kallocain project and the State’s agenda. But this holds no water with Leo. Instead of embracing Rissen as an ally, Leo sees him as a threat and turns to more unsavoury characters who would do him actual harm.

Despite his best efforts at skin-saving, Leo’s fears intensify as the action progresses. The more recognition he receives from those in positions of influence, the more insecure he feels; the more power he attains, the more it repulses him. And just as Rik Deckard never explicitly took his own Voigt-Kampf test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Leo, ever the hypocrite, is reluctant to end up under his own Kallocain needle.

The much-vaunted 1984 overshadowed Kallocain – Orwell’s work being the yardstick, seemingly, by which to measure all works of dystopian fiction. In a last-ditch attempt to protect himself, Leo makes Rissen a scapegoat and denounces him as a sleeper agent for the resistance. But much like the character Hugo in Sartre’s Crime Passionnel, Leo’s motives are inchoate: is he eliminating his chief for the greater good of his movement or because he might have cuckolded him? Unfortunately, Leo’s Damascene moment comes too late. By the time he realises the error of his ways, Rissen is dead. He has needlessly sent a good man to his death and sacrificed a potential ally.

Upon publication, despite the subject matter and genre being relatively avant-garde, critical reception for Kallocain was largely positive, praising its vision and psychological introspection. But Kallocain is nowhere near as prolific in high street bookshops as its peers Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaid’s Tale, to name but a few. Kallocain is criminally unsung and easily holds its own alongside these great titles.

The much-vaunted 1984 overshadowed Kallocain – Orwell’s work being the yardstick, seemingly, by which to measure all works of dystopian fiction. But 1984 burst onto the scene eight years after Kallocain’s publication and emulated many of its ideas. Just as 1984’s O’Brien says, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness”, the mantra of Kallocain’s resistance movement is: “When we meet in the world outside, we’ll recognise each other”. Again, when O’Brien remarks that “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake”, Leo chimes with, “(D)on’t imagine that … the State should exist for our sake instead of us for the sake of the State”. Also, the all-seeing, all-hearing Orwellian ‘telescreens’, disarmable only by those at the top of the food chain, are eerily akin to the police eyes and ears of Boye’s work. Just as 1984 features a ‘Two Minutes Hate’, Kallocain has an ‘apology hour’. And in both, there are hints of underground resistance movements that may or may not be legitimate but which nevertheless inspire hope.

Works like Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1952) also owe Kallocain a debt of gratitude. Both novels utilise precogs (telepaths) to foresee and prevent crime before it can take place. So, too, in Kallocain, Leo intends to use his drug to expose active as well as potential traitors, dubbing it “a discovery that may make it possible to show reprehensible inner division, even if division has not yet become a crime in the eyes of the law”. Kallocain’s contaminated, gas-filled city – the suspected base of the resistance – calls to mind The Hunger Games’ District 13, and both rebel movements communicate via a strange system of musical notes.

Kallocain is a well-crafted nightmare and deserves greater recognition. Thankfully, it is growing in popularity and appearing more in bookshops. Much like Kay Dick’s equally overlooked dystopian gem, They (1977), which has enjoyed a reprint of late, so too does Boye’s work deserve its place among the other great masterworks of the genre.


Kallocain is published by Penguin.
*From Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies (1943).

**From Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great (2007).