False Divinity: Mythic Sovereignty and the Afterlife of Olympus in Dystopian Fiction

This paper examines how modern dystopian fiction reworks mythic sovereignty through what I term "false divinity": the narrative condition in which rule presents itself as inevitable while remaining insulated from accountability. Bringing Theogony into dialogue with Nineteen Eighty-Four, I argue that dystopian fiction does not merely inherit mythic imagery but reproduces mythic structures of legitimation at the level of narrative form. In Hesiod, Zeus secures supremacy through violent succession before authority becomes retrospectively justified. Orwell's Oceania reproduces this same logic in secular form: power establishes itself prior to legitimacy and subsequently naturalizes its own permanence through ritual repetition, restricted knowledge, and recursive narrative closure. Drawing on political theory and structural accounts of myth, particularly Claude Lévi-Strauss and Walter Benjamin, this paper treats myth not as timeless belief but as a relational structure through which domination becomes narratively stabilized. Rather than functioning solely as political warning, dystopian fiction reveals how modern systems of governance mythologize themselves by transforming contingent authority into apparent inevitability. Ultimately, the paper argues that dystopia preserves myth not through gods or cosmology, but through narrative structures that render sovereignty unquestionable.