In this video, we will discuss the nature
of both dystopian and utopian literature,
as well as the role of setting.
You may have heard of a little franchise called
The Hunger Games, or, you may have heard of
other teen series called Divergent or The
Pure Trilogy, or another novel common in freshman
and sophomore classes, Fahrenheit 451.
In one way or another, all of these books
are considered "dystopian".
The idea of dystopia has been around since
the mid-1800s, acting as an opposite to "utopia,"
which we'll get to in a minute.
Interestingly (at least to me), the first
documented use of the word "dystopia" was
in a speech, where John Stuart Mill said about
the Irish land policies, "It is, perhaps,
too complimentary to call them Utopians, they
ought rather to be called dys-topians....
What is commonly called Utopian is something
too good to be practicable; but what they
appear to favour is too bad to be practicable."
If we look at Mill's statement, we get definitions
of both dystopia and utopia.
While utopia is an ideal world that is too
good to be true, a dystopia is just the opposite:
a world that is too bad to be true.
We've already acknowledged that the world
and the people in it are imperfect.
What dystopia does is it takes those imperfections
and amplifies them to the point where they
are what govern society.
In the case of human shortcomings governing
society, what you get is usually centered
around several different factors.
First, and probably most easily corrupted,
is the matter of politics.
Politicians already have a sort of slimy reputation
in our current society, so why shouldn't they
go completely bad?
Look at North Korea, or Germany from 1933
to 1945.
Look at pre-Civil War America, or ethnic cleansing
in the Sudan.
Things go from bad to worse, and from worse
to horrifyingly unimaginable.
Dystopian literature is literature that finds
the line between "worse" and "horrifyingly
unimaginable," and pushes society over the
line as far as possible.
Other factors that authors warp are religion,
economics, family, identity, and the natural
world.
In other words, take what you know about all
of those factors, add as much evil and destruction
as you can imagine, and then you have scratched
the surface of what dystopia portrays and
examines.
In the Middle Ages, chivalry was the ideal,
but the reality was that the knights used
the code of ideals in whatever way suited
them best -- for violence, rape, profit, etc.
In a dystopian work, the society in question
will often focus on a set of ideals, but when
those ideals are in the hands of humans, they
become corrupt, and crumble into something
unrecognizable.
For instance, what could be bad about the
ideas of community, identity, and stability?
Or, what could be the problem with peace,
freedom, and strength?
All of these seem like awesome ideals, but
when examined through a dystopian lens, they
become terrifying realities that enslave mankind.
That's why literature is awesome.
It can take what we think of as desirable,
and show us the dangers.
Literature can turn pleasure into slavery,
and individuality into a crime.
What kinds of places are these?
They are here.
They are where you are sitting right now.
Just as ideals of chivalry from the Middle
Ages leak into our fast-paced modern world,
so too can our technology-driven global society
morph into a future we don't even want to
imagine.
That brings us to setting.
As you read, setting can be both incredibly
important and completely irrelevant.
Setting is important because it makes the
story more real to us -- it gives us a frame
of reference and often acts as a plot-advancing
hindrance or help to the characters we're
reading about.
On the other hand, the purpose of literature
is to act as a universally relatable stand-in
for our own experiences.
The characters make the mistakes so that we
don't have to.
Thus, setting does not matter.
A nuclear bomb can detonate in Dallas as easily
as it can in the lonely Bikini Atoll where
the first nuclear bomb tests occurred in the
1940s and 1950s.
In 1861, a civil war began in the United States.
In 2011, a civil war began in Syria.
Has time taught us anything?
Did the US civil war teach the Syrian civil
war anything?
It doesn't seem so, unless you count more
efficient killing as a lesson.
Whichever dystopian novel you choose to read,
keep in mind that the author's intentions
were for the novel to rise above time and
place to a higher thematic level that we can
all learn from.
Keep in mind, too, that in dystopian literature,
there is always a hero.
What happens to that hero?
How does he or she set him or herself apart?
What victory or failure do they achieve?
What difference do they make?
How do their victories or failures depend
on a moral social code, if morals even exist?
I wish you all the best as you journey into
a world that is completely different from
(and yet so terrifyingly the same as) the
world we live in.
