you can feel good about resistance without actually resisting anything

May 22, 2021 9:30 AM

Matthew Salesses writes about dystopian novels and catharsis for Catapult.
posted by eotvos (15 comments total)

Catharsis is a state of rest, not a state of action.
It made me wonder whether reading dystopian novels (or watching dystopian films) ever made me feel like I should start a revolution....
What do I have to resist? The story is giving me exactly what I want. Rarely do I read a novel in which the empire, as it were, strikes back.
When the system wins, however, I do feel inspired to resist.

posted by otherchaz at 10:09 AM on May 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

The novel that Salesses uses for their example, The Vegetarian, is not a dystopia novel at all. Not in the way that is talked about at the beginning with Hunger Games and others like that. It's a strange sort of side-shift in the entire piece.
posted by hippybear at 10:19 AM on May 22, 2021

That seems to completely miss the point, hippybear. The endemic cruelty in The Vegetarian is dystopian, as well as contemporary and realist. It certainly isn’t Fun! the way The Hunger Games turns out to be, but the claim that a Fun! story smothers our actual action is interesting and plausible. Bad coping strategy, or near-enemy, or such.

I am wondering now if the YA dystopias are inspiring to readers who are young enough and gumption-traps for more experienced people.
posted by clew at 10:37 AM on May 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't think it misses the point at all. The author started out talking about a specific genre of novel and then shifts to hold up an example of something entirely NOT in that genre.

There are novels full of dystopian cruelty all over the place. That doesn't make them dystopia novels.

I understand entirely the author's point, and it's an interesting one worth contemplating. But the point would have been better made, IMO, with a different example, one that fit within the genre that the essay began with talking about.
posted by hippybear at 10:55 AM on May 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

The two biggest examples of dystopia novels that come to mind for me are 1984 and Brave New World, both of which have unsuccessful protagonists and end with the system winning. There surely have to be others which also could have been held up to examine. Likewise, in the movie category, Brazil is a great example of the system winning.

It just seemed a strange shift to me, is all.
posted by hippybear at 10:58 AM on May 22, 2021 [7 favorites]

But those are all old novels - does anything like that get published as “YA” now? Or has the current genre diverted and defanged its effective criticism?
posted by clew at 11:08 AM on May 22, 2021

"'We' is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre. It takes the modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens' lives should be controlled with mathematical precision based on the system of industrial efficiency created by Frederick Winslow Taylor."

Highly recommend this for dystopian novel fans.
posted by clavdivs at 12:21 PM on May 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

you are not understanding the limits of your agency on the world.

I read that at face value, until I remembered that's the required qualification for being the protagonist in dystopian fiction. Well played.
posted by otherchaz at 12:22 PM on May 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

From the article:

"The similarities provide us with more understanding of our dystopia—but do they provide us with more motivation to resist it? It seems to me that this must be a goal for the writer of a dystopia, that one reason to represent the horrors of our world in fiction is to encourage one’s readers to resist those horrors in real life."

Coincidentally, I re-read Ursula K Le Guin's essay "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be" this past week, which has much to say on the tails side of dystopia's heads: utopia. If we say dystopian fiction must inspire us to resist, the corollary is of course that the utopian must inspire us to strive towards. However, as Le Guin points out, somebody's utopia is quite often someone else's dystopia:

"After all, California was not empty when the Anglos came. Despite the efforts of the missionaries, it was still the most heavily populated region in North America.

"What the Whites perceived as a wilderness to be 'tamed' was in fact better known to human beings than it has ever been since: known and named. Every hill, every valley, creek, canyon, gulch, gully, draw, point, cliff, bluff, beach, bend, good-sized boulder, and tree of any character had its name, its place in the order of things. An order was perceived, of which the invaders were entirely ignorant. Each of those names named, not a goal, not a place to get to, but a place where one is: a center of the world. There were centers of the world all over California. One of them is a bluff on the Klamath River. Its name was Katimin. The bluff is still there, but it has no name, and the center of the world is not there. The six directions can meet only in lived time, in the place people call home, the seventh direction, the center.

"But we leave home, shouting Avanti! and Westward Ho!, driven by our godlike reason, which chafes at the limited, intractable, unreasonable present, and yearns to free itself from the fetters of the past."

Freeing themselves from their past while erasing someone else's. Utopia and Dystopia. "Living in a dystopia," says Salesses, "Americans read a lot of dystopian novels." They write a lot of dystopian stories, too, both fiction and nonfiction. Any American who reads or watches the news sees millions of fellow citizens and non-citizens living in a dystopia, and the system is winning — as Salesses sees it, we should all be motivated to resist.

However, his essay is not about dystopia exactly — it's about worldbuilding as invocation. He brings up rule breaking as a way to illuminate the rules themselves — a negative image, so to speak, which the reader constructs. I am reminded of petroglyphs where a reverse of the artist's hand is delineated by a splash of paint and so we seem to see a hand there. Or even a Yin-Yang symbol, except Dystopia and Utopia aren't the two halves. Le Guin again:

"Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot.

"Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal."

Yin — the "Cold" mentioned in Le Guin's title. To use these Yin/Yang, Cold/Hot dualities, a Hunger Games Dystopia fight and a Golden State Utopia could both be thought of as Hot. They are not opposite sides of the same coin — it's all one coin. A Yang coin. Strength versus strength. Aggression versus aggression. Heat versus heat. And after a hot, orgasmic catharsis? Lethargy, and little motivation to put up a fight in the real world. You've already "won." Of course the whole notion of Winning and Losing is defined by the Winning. Second place is first place loser, as the saying goes.

Resistance doesn't have to mean Winning, necessarily. It doesn't even need to be fighting back — at least not in the Katniss sense.

Le Guin again:

"To attain the constant, to end in order, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold."

Now that makes for an interesting starting point for worldbuilding. If Yang has set the rules, yin can break those rules and teach us something. Not about winning and losing, per se — about redefining the game. Or even pointing out that the game doesn't really exist, and therefore the rules can be dispensed with without playing.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:03 PM on May 22, 2021 [15 favorites]

Le Guin’s Lavinia, possibly. ("Freeing themselves from their past while erasing someone else's. ", to be sure.)
posted by clew at 3:10 PM on May 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I recently read T. J. Klune's The House In The Cerulean Sea, which is set in a dystopia. Then I re-read it, because it's awesome. It's like a template for how to behave humanely in a dystopian environment.

Resistance to oppression doesn't just mean violent overthrow or futile martyrdom. Resistance can consist of rejecting the dystopian values that are foisted upon you, supporting the people who are being trod upon, and facing the world with love and humanity even when it's met with hatred and cruelty.

I'd venture to say that without that foundation of caring and compassion, whatever results from violent overthrow will be as bad or worse as the dystopia it's contending against. And resisting dystopias isn't a matter of putting a hardy band of heroes together, it's a matter of constant, courageous, unceasing refusal to allow that compassion and kindness to wither.
posted by MrVisible at 7:06 PM on May 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

This was thought-provoking, thanks for posting! I wished it was a bit longer-- by the end, I was totally ready to continue following the author through his chain of thought, but didn't feel like I quite had enough yet to fully understand what he was saying as it stood.
posted by dusty potato at 7:40 PM on May 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

The problem is always to find a path between complacency and despair.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:05 PM on May 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Three Californias trilogy comes to mind: two outright dystopias and one so-called utopia that rivals Le Guin's The Dispossessed in its ambiguity.
posted by y2karl at 5:03 AM on May 23, 2021

The problem is always to find a path between complacency and despair.

Extremely well-said.
posted by Gadarene at 9:05 AM on May 23, 2021