Apocalypse Anonymous Exploring Our Addiction to Dystopian Literature
Transcriber: Phuong Anh Lai
Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to this meeting
of Apocalypse Anonymous -
the world’s first and largest support club
for addicts of dystopian literature.
My name is Jennifer,
and for the past 18 years,
I’ve struggled with an incurable love
for fictional depictions of doomsday.
I’m hooked on Huxley, addicted to Atwood,
constantly craving Cormac McCarthy.
If you’ve followed the trends of popular
literature for the past few years,
chances are you’re just as familiar
with these names as I am.
Since the genre first began to coalesce
at around the turn of the 20th century,
the book market has become truly saturated
with versions of these books.
Just think of the massive popularity
of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ or ’The Road’,
or even more notorious examples
in the world of YA pulp fiction
like the Divergent Series
or ‘The Hunger Games’.
There’s no denying that we really have
a voracious appetite for Armageddon.
In fact, if you’re ever feeling
a little bit nihilistic,
here’s what you can do:
Head down to our local Blackwell’s,
go to the speculative fiction section,
pick up some books,
flip through some pages,
and you can see the world end
in a hundred different ways,
from war to disease to nuclear holocaust.
But all this begs the question:
Why exactly are we so drawn to this genre?
There’s no need to point out to you,
I’m sure, that right now,
we’re living through a period of mass
chaos and curtailed civil liberties
that itself feels
like it’s ripped out of a page
of some horrible dystopian novel.
So surely right now we need
something light and warm.
We need something that’s going to fill us
with hope and buoy up our spirits.
Surely we need the opposite
of dystopia, right?
Well, maybe not.
Because what I’m hopefully
going to be showing you today
is why our collective hunger for dystopian
literature could be a good thing.
Because as it turns out,
a broken view of the world
might be the clearest,
and reading about dysfunctional societies
may help us build a better one.
But then again,
there’s something terribly wrong
with the last sentence I just said.
I said the words ‘reading
about dysfunctional societies’
as if ours is perfectly normal,
as if the prospect of dysfunction
is something that only exists
within the pages of books.
And that’s a really common misconception,
because when we hear the word ‘dystopia’,
nine times out of 10,
it’s followed by the word ‘novel’
or the word ‘literature’
or the word ‘fiction’.
And don’t get me wrong -
I’m totally guilty of this.
In fact, it happens
in the title of my talk.
My point is we hear the word ‘dystopia’
used in conjunction
with works of fiction so often
that we’ve come to think of it
as automatically synonymous
with make-believe.
But that assumption is just
as dangerous as it is untrue.
Take a look at this slide.
Sorry, I know - this probably takes
most of you right back to GCSE.
‘Doublethink’ is a term
from Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.
It’s a tool used by
the fascist government, Ingsoc,
to get its citizens to blindly accept
whatever ridiculous propaganda
they choose to feed them.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is one of the most
widely studied classroom texts
in the world,
and with all due respect
to my high-school English teachers,
it’s also an objectively terrible choice
for a classroom novel.
Why?
Well, because when you learn
this book in a classroom setting,
you learn to hold it at this cool,
intellectual distance.
It becomes a great work
about ‘some place over there’,
a bleak but distant concept that you don’t
ever really have to contemplate
in any form more tangible
than an exam paper or an essay prompt.
Doublethink becomes, like the pages
of a book, two-dimensional.
Scary? Sure.
But too abstract and extreme
ever to be real.
And then something like this
happens on the news.
[Removed due to copyright reasons]
That’s Kellyanne Conway,
the senior counsellor
to President Trump from 2017 to 2020.
Now, as you might know,
that little clip we just watched
became one of the most widely circulated
internet memes of the year.
Pictures, posts, tweets all appeared,
slamming the seeming absurdity
of Ms Conway’s language.
But maybe you too picked up
on a literary echo behind those words:
‘alternative facts’,
‘contradicting beliefs’.
Sean Spicer did not lie;
accepting both beliefs at once.
And this trend of disturbing
real-world literary parallels continues.
Take a look at this particularly gory
quote from ‘The Hunger Games’.
[THEIR WORLD]
[“Gloss lets Wiress slide to the ground,]
[her throat slit open
in a bright red smile.]
And now watch this clip from ‘Survivor’.
[Removed due to copyright reasons
Find more information at CBS]
Read this extract from Kazuo Ishiguro’s
fantastic novel ‘Never Let Me Go’,
which is about children
cloned to be organ donors.
[THEIR WORLD]
[“Your lives are set out for you.]
And then compare it with this headline
from June last year.
[OUR WORLD]
[Embryo experiments take ‘baby steps’
toward growing human organs in livestock]
Now, I wonder:
If I remove those labels
at the top of the page,
how many of us would be able to tell
which world is ours
and which one is make-believe?
So the next time you hear
the word ‘dystopia’,
the question I want you
to ask yourself isn’t, ‘Is this fiction?’
Instead, it’s this:
Why do these circumstances only horrify us
when they’re presented to us as fiction?
Why do the things we encounter
every single day in ordinary life -
the things we joke about
on the internet, that we watch on TV,
that we dismiss, accept as normal -
why does putting them
inside the pages of a book
make them feel perversely
more real and more terrifying?
Last year, I read this novel
by Naomi Alderman called ‘The Power’.
Some of you might have heard of it.
It’s based on this almost farcical premise
about a world where women suddenly
develop the ability to electrocute men.
As you can imagine, it goes pretty
rapidly downhill from there.
It’s used to impose
matriarchic oppression,
to force men into unwanted relationships
and so on and so forth.
And I read it as a bit of outlandish fun,
until I stumbled upon this interview
with the author, Alderman,
where she points out that nothing
ever happens to a man in the book
that’s not already happening
to a woman in our world today.
The truth is, dystopian fiction
is a diagnosis.
The same way that a doctor
might take an X-ray,
authors like Collins,
like Alderman, like Ishiguro,
they take an aspect of our world
and they exaggerate it
to extreme proportions,
they zoom in on it.
And only through
these means, in this medium,
can we realise that we’re ill.
And dystopian fiction
isn’t just a diagnosis;
it’s also a prognosis, a prediction
of which way the disease will turn next.
They let us see what would happen
in 10, 50, 10,000 years’ time
if we let our current problems
spiral out of control.
In this way, we can kind of think of them
as experiments in miniature,
like those bacterial agar dishes
that scientists use to observe
accelerated processes of evolution.
We take this artificial,
fertile medium, like literature,
we input the conditions
of our current society,
with all of its problems,
its flaws and prejudices,
and we watch them grow into
something monstrous, something distorted.
I talked before
about how dystopian fiction
can help us identify
the symptoms of an ailing society.
Well, if those are the symptoms,
then this is the forecast
of the disease’s development.
And if we’re smart, we’ll use them
to prevent as well as predict.
Let’s not pull an Orwell here.
Let’s not use these books as
instruction manuals instead of warnings.
The prophecies they lay out
haven’t come true yet.
And that’s the important part:
Whether or not they will come true
is completely up to us.
So far, I’ve talked
about this genre of book
as a kind of interesting
thought experiment,
something with hypothetical value.
But there’s an abundance of evidence
that it actually shapes our actions
in the real world as well.
Huffington Post found in a study
that consumption of dystopian narratives
makes people more inclined
to radical political action,
makes them more sympathetic
to dissenting views,
even more than watching
real footage from actual protests.
And in fact, we don’t need to confine
ourselves to the laboratory setting.
Think about how two years ago,
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ became
an international protest symbol,
with women all over the world
donning scarlet cloaks and white hoods
to protest abortion rights.
The fact is, these books
give us the courage to act,
and they also give us
something else as well.
Dystopian fiction,
with all of its grimness,
its death and destruction -
dystopian fiction
can actually give us hope.
The hope of humanity
emerging from the rubble.
The hope of brave citizens
rising up against unjust governance.
The hope of salvage despite ruin.
And that brings me to the last book
I want to mention today,
which is Emily St. John Mandel’s
‘Station Eleven’.
And that’s a particularly apt book
for these times, I think,
because Station Eleven’s world
is one that ends in plague.
A mysterious disease starts in Georgia,
countries predictably turn on each other
as it spreads across the globe,
and we end up with civilisation
in smoking ruins
as societal order breaks down.
But all that happens
before the book’s main plot even begins.
Because ‘Station Eleven’
isn’t a book about destruction;
‘Station Eleven’ is a book about rebirth.
We see vegetable gardens
flourishing in reclaimed parking lots.
We see little villages
springing up in abandoned airports.
We see performances of Shakespeare
held amongst the beams
of fallen skyscrapers.
And that’s important
because there are those among us,
who I’m sure are more cynical readers,
who want to point out that the endings
to books are hardly ever realistic.
There’s no way that one man
can cure the plague
or overthrow the tyranny
or avert Armageddon.
But what ‘Station Eleven’ shows us
is that dystopian literature
isn’t all about unrealistic promises
of total salvation.
It’s about salvation despite ruin.
It’s about beauty
in the wake of devastation.
And it’s about remembering
that if we’re in dark days,
as dark as the ones
we’re living through right now,
Ii’s because we haven’t yet
reached the final page.
So hi, everyone, my name is Jennifer,
and welcome back to this meeting
of Apocalypse Anonymous.
I regret to inform you
that today will actually be the last time
we gather as an association.
Because as it turns out,
our love of dystopian literature
isn’t an addiction we need to be cured of.
It’s the cure itself.
It’s a tool that helps us
parse through the present
and predict the future,
and it’s a call to arms inspiring us
to take action to shape a better world.
Dystopia, perversely, can be the tool
that leads us back to utopia.
Thank you.