A golden age for dystopian fiction analysis

In a June New Yorker, Jill Lepore reviewed this summers dystopias [A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction: What to make of our new literature of radical pessimism]. The article gives an overview of a smattering of dystopias published this summer, but it also theorizes what the surge of dystopias since World War II reveals about America. I love the scope of her review and the intriguing riskiness of her polemic. But Id offer a different hypothesis as to why were currently more interested in dystopias than we are in utopias.

Broadly speaking, she locates our current preference for dystopias in our political pessimism, childishness, and apathy. Dystopia initially stole the show from utopia because we were so disillusioned by the atrocity of the second world war. After the war, after the death camps, after the bomb, she notes, dystopian fiction thrived, like a weed that favors shade. She cites the critic Chad Walsh, who noted in 1962, A decreasing percentage of the imaginary worlds are utopias. An increasing percentage are nightmares.

Since then, dystopia took its initial turn for the worse when it was overtaken by Y.A. [young adult] authors. Dystopianism turns out to have a natural affinity with American adolescence, writes Lepore. Sure, teenagers long to break free from the totalitarian rule of parents: makes sense theyd like stories of rising up against an ill-conceived state. This natural migration, she thinks, has rendered the whole genre pouty and hostile.

Her ultimate conclusion is that our preference for dystopias, in combination with the genres recent turn towards the childish, has not only hollowed out the genre but actually rendered it dangerous to our political climate. The final paragraph of her article:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; its become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesnt ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesnt call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. [] A story about ruin can be beautiful. Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed.

Again, I love a good polemic. But Lepores argument has two main weaknesses: 1] Id contend that our preference for dystopia to utopia is not political, and 2] dystopias are an increasingly powerful, not blunted, political tool.

1. Heres the reason we read dystopias instead of utopias: UTOPIAS ARE BORING. SO, SO, SO BORING.

When I prepared my course on utopias and dystopias, I searched mightily for a utopia that would not cause mass revolt among my students. I finally settled on The Utopia Reader, edited by Gregory Claeys. Claeys samples from across the board, but in select passages. By using this anthology, I thought, at least my students would read only 15 pages of Platos Republic, or thirty pages of Mores Utopia. At the university level, I wouldve taught the full texts. I hear you screaming, How on earth can you purport to teach a course on utopia without having your students read THOMAS MORE?! But I knew that high-school students would have my head were they weighed down with such texts. Even the incredibly bright and wildly motivated AP students I taught at Harvard-Westlake.

And they did call for my head, even after reading only the excerpts included in Claeys anthology. But boy did they love Y: The Last Man, Brave New World, and The Handmaids Tale.

Heres why we prefer dystopias to utopias: nothing can happen in a narrative about a perfect political world. True utopias read more like political science then they do like fiction: lengthy descriptions of laws, the system of power, urban infrastructure and architecture. In Eden, theres no drama, no narrative arc until Eve and Satan show up to destroy paradise. Its not that were more pessimistic; its just that we want to read fiction with a climax, drama, and tension.,

2] DYSTOPIA DOESNT ASK US TO CHANGE THE WORLD? HOGWASH. ESPECIALLY NOW.

I find this part of Lepores final conclusions almost laughable:

[Dystopia] cannot imagine a better future, and it doesnt ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesnt call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.

Tell me one single person who comes away from Nineteen Eighty-Four and thinks, Whelp. I guess thats just the way that things are going to be. Love ya, Big Brother. No! This is insulting to fiction readers. To think that the most creative, imaginative readers the ones who, yeah, maybe want to escape from this world for a second but who on the whole read fiction with the sole purpose of imagining alternative realities cannot imagine otherwise is just nutso.

Id also argue that the entire PURPOSE of dystopia, on the authors side, is to ask its readers to make a better future, to the contrary of what Lepore asserts its authors ask, and to call for courage. I would kill to hear Margaret Atwoods response to Lepore suggesting that The Handmaids Tale is a call for resignation and despair rather than change.

In fact, the optimistic call for change that I contend is the very reason to write or read a dystopia happens to be most prevalent in the young-adult dystopia that Lepore critiques. Last year, a student read Nineteen Eighty-Four on my recommendation, as shed liked a number of young-adult dystopias. She came to class shocked that Wilson Smith ultimately succumbed to Big Brother. That simply didnt happen in the dystopias that she read. In a young-adult dystopia, Wilson would have toppled OBrien, changed the world, and lived happily ever after with Julia. Maybe thats overly optimistic I was happy to see the students world enriched by an infinite number of ways for a dystopia to end but that classic end to a Y.A. dystopia is certainly a call for courage, and for change not an invitation to wallow in shared despair.