Author Archives: Dan Chira

Andrei Simuţ
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andrei.simut@gmail.com

 

 

Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games

 

 

Abstract: In this article I shall focus especially on the dialectic between the dystopian city and the post-apocalyptic landscape, on the means of transgressing the imposed boundaries (social, biological, and religious) as they are staged in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, The Year of the Flood and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. I shall also compare it with the dystopian turn in the contemporary imagination, both visible in a large amount of dystopian movies and in popular novels such as Hunger Games or Divergent trilogies.

Keywords: Heterotopia of Deviation; Survival; Pastoral; Dystopian Boundaries; Transgression; Geocriticism.

 

Any observer of the contemporary trends in film and literature can notice that we are witnessing a striking revival of the dystopian imagination, which discloses a certain concern with the ongoing crisis of the present/future order of things (the spreading of the policies of surveillance, the widening gap between social strata, the environmental problem), a concern manifested both by the intellectuals, artists or filmmakers, and by the public.[1] To put it differently, the age of divisions, inequalities and depression proves highly inspirational for dystopias. The temptation to transgress these imposed boundaries fuels their narratives. The last six years has revived the dystopian (sub) genre both in science fiction mainstream production, but also in canonical literature and popular novels. Novels such as The Giver, Hunger Games, and Divergent have all already turned into successful movies. The allegorical dimension is present in all these examples which tend to formulate “inverted analogies” with present aspects of the social realm. Fredric Jameson has considered allegory to be a feature of postmodern paradigm, a displacement of the Modernist aesthetic of the Symbol (Jameson, 1991, 115), although, in my opinion, the postmodern dominant has ended, and this return of the dystopian imaginary in all forms of the cultural production is also a proof for this change.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (completed in 2013) is also significant, since it implies a conceptual tension between dystopia, anti-utopian criticism, apocalyptic and eco-utopian promise. The Year of the Flood (2009) operates a shift of perspective when compared with the first novel of the trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), and I shall examine the significant differences. All these recent dystopias seem to suggest the idea that certain aspects of our reality and social system resemble more and more to the dystopian fears. Even though Divergent and Hunger Games trilogies are set in the far future, they tend to refer precisely to the present realities and employ the allegorical form. Atwood’s novels, more complex both in their subject matter and in their discourse, are increasingly ambiguous in their formulated dilemmas. The overt criticism of the scientific utopia in Oryx and Crake and its dire dystopian consequences acquire new meanings in The Year of The Flood, where the apocalyptic dimension restores hope especially with the story of God’s Gardeners, told from the perspective of two feminine narrators, Toby and Ren. The end of the human race (the dissolution of its human features and the literal extinction of the human species through the pandemic) is rendered almost as a necessary event by Jimmy’s narration and Glenn (alias Crake)’s ideas. Those two characters are almost absent in the Year of the Flood, where their cynical approach towards the ends of man is compensated by Adam One’s messianic and pacifist eco-pedagogy, restoring the biblical hermeneutic.

 

Dystopian boundaries and transgressions

 

These recent dystopias can be fruitfully analysed with a few important concepts formulated by geocriticism (from Lefebre to Westphal), since they stage complex relationships between imposed boundaries and the (im)/possibility of their transgression, and because every transgressed boundary triggers virtually limitless consequences upon their characters and their fictional world (this is especially the case with Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy). In fact, dystopian fiction has always been inspired by this tension between polis and nature, between the space of individual freedom and the space of control, between striated, homogenous space and “smooth” space (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms). The proliferation of these dystopian scenarios signals an increased awareness of the fact that the smooth space finds itself threatened by the striated space of control (Westphal, 2011, 40).

MaddAddam trilogy stages a complex system of transgressions: spatial (Compounds and pleeblands vs the margins), temporal (the advanced techno-scientific elite vs the technophobic Gardeners, before and after the “Waterless Flood”- pre-apocalyptic dystopian world vs post-apocalyptic landscape), biologic (human vs sub-human vs post-human; genetic engineered species vs natural ones). In stylistic terms, the first two novels of the trilogy stage a dialogue between the pre-apocalyptic dystopian world set in the near future and the post-apocalyptic world when humanity has been extinguished by the virus devised by Crake, and the author manages to convey this sharp contrast using the character’s memories and flashbacks: Jimmy and Toby through free indirect discourse and Ren through first person narrative. The post-apocalyptic present is rendered through the present tense verbs, thus acquiring a filmic immediacy and strangeness, and the lost world in past tense, being subject to various retrospectives and subjective versions.

In terms of spatial representation of the pre-apocalyptic world, Atwood’s trilogy can be termed as heterotopia, since it perfectly fits the well-known Foucaultian description: it is a “kind of effectively enacted utopia in which all the real sites are simultaneously represented, contested, inverted”, being at the same time “absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect” (Foucault, 1986, 22-27). Our present-day scientific developments and realities are present, may be recognized, but at the same time their description renders them uncanny. Atwood has underscored the difference between her fictions (the concept is “speculative fiction”) and the typical science fictional novel, and emphasizing in her afterword to MaddAddam that:

 

it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory (Atwood, 2013)

 

The same can be stated about the organization of the social system and its reflection in the space geography of the novels. ”The pre-plague life” is dominated by a techno-scientific elite inhabiting the Compounds, a sort of gated communities, fortified Corporations where the access is strictly controlled and the territory outside the walls, the chaotic “Exfernal world” of the pleeblands, under the strict surveillance of the CorpSe Corps. At the periphery of this corporatist metropolis lies an undefined territory of ruined, abandoned buildings where the Gardeners camp and hide, transforming it into an alternative chain of “rooftop gardens”, into a nomadic, smooth space, permanently threatened by the intrusions of the polis, represented by CorpSe Corps agents. The Year of the Flood is the story of this transformation of a smooth space into a striated one, a conquest which is almost complete when the virus wipes out all the boundaries, restoring its archetypal smoothness and nomadism (Westphal, 2011, 40).

 

Heterotopies of deviation

 

One perfect example of a “heterotopy of deviation” (Foucault’s term for rest homes, psychiatric hospitals or prisons, the place for those who deviate from the norm) is, in Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the Painball Arena, very similar to the Arena where the “hunger games” take place in Suzanne Collins’ novel, both descriptions suggesting a space where punishment and death are ritualised. Both authors describe an enclosed forest, where the individuals (condemned criminals-Atwood; selected tributes-Collins) fight each other for life, until the others are killed, a place where survival becomes almost impossible. Those who manage to return from the Painball arena suffer a mutation that expurgates them from the human realm. The complex tableau of transgressions present in Oryx and Crake is completed with a new type, which crosses the human features and regresses to the sub-human. This is just one instance of the wide spectrum of extreme deviations present in Atwood’s trilogy and is resumed by Toby in a phrase that synthesizes the main process that governs her fictional-dystopian world: “you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d forget there ever were any lines” (Atwood 2009, 118). The “long term Painballers” are those who refuse to get out when their term ends, and this category illustrates the most extreme primitivism, the sub-human condition (cannibalism becomes a common practice).

This regression into a sub-human state is present in Hunger Games: Katniss is terrified by when she remembers a similar case of a tribute who went savage after winning the competition and who fed on his victims (Collins, 2008, 173). Even though Hunger Games emphasizes the limitless capacity of the Capitol to invent new rules and the impossibility to predict them, there is however an apparent limit to this transgressivity and that is cannibalism, but Katniss fears that the longer they stay in the Arena, the more susceptible the competitors become to such practices. At the centre of the novel there is a contradiction between the author’s intention in showing the reader the most extreme effects this mass media experiment has on its subjects (whether is about the competitor or the spectators) and the desire to maintain the novel’s protagonist as the main recipient for humanistic ideals (freedom, kindness, generosity). This becomes one of the major deficiencies of the plot: although the possibilities seem limitless regarding the situations the hero has to face in this arena where only one tribute has to survive, the author has only a few options in order to keep the profile of her character and also keep the main rule of the Hunger Games (“the real sport of the Hunger Games is watching the tributes kill one another”), and that is to eliminate all the other competitors through other means except Katniss direct action. A good example in this sense is when, isolated in a tree, she is surrounded by the most cruel competitors, the Career Tributes, led by Cato (who has a similar savage profile with Atwood’s Blanco) and she tears down on a swarm of mutated bees (the tracker jackers) eliminating a few other tributes and thus managing to escape.

In Oryx and Crake the narrative perspective belonged to Jimmy/ Snowman, who was the perfect vantage point for observing the extinction of humanity since he as the companion to the scientist who devised it, namely Glenn, alias Crake. In The Year of the Flood, the narrative point of view changes, shifting between two feminine characters, Toby and Ren, and being more intimate, secluded and marginal, observing the events from a more distanced perspective, the distance from the centre (the Paradice Dome where the new virus and the new race are conceived) and the margins (AnooYoo Spa, Scales and Tails and the Edencliff Rooftop Garden where Toby and Ren are usually located) increases. The author must keep Toby and Ren’s vantage point of view, as witness to the apocalyptic events, the same privileged perspective that Jimmy the Snowman had in Oryx and Crake. The new emphasis in The Year of the Flood is on the periphery: Toby, Ren and The Gardeners are all marginal, victims (Ren or Toby) of the system and/or a nascent alternative to the hegemonic order (The Gardeners). Oryx and Crake was the account of an imploding centre both thematically (the virus was devised by the most powerful corporation) and narrative (no other character challenged Jimmy’s version of the main events; from his perspective, the whole Crake’s apocalyptic plan was meant to seek revenge for his secret affair with Oryx, in order to leave Jimmy as the sole survivor). The Year of the Flood is conceived as a narrative account of the periphery, alternativity, margins and it is significant for this new paradigm in the dystopian narrative, along with Hunger Games, Divergent and also a few dystopian films (The Snowpiercer, Elysium, In Time): these narratives choose their protagonist from the lower social strata, adopting a marginal point of view towards the social system described. The hero’s journey starts from these “deviant”, excluded margins, towards the oppressive centre of the authority. The classic dystopias of the twentieth century (We, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World) selected their main character from the upper social strata, close to the top of the hierarchy, and the journey towards freedom was from the centre towards the periphery. Margaret Atwood’s earlier novels have been frequently scrutinized regarding their thematic concerns with the margins and the problem of the boundaries, Alice Palumbo’s essay is the best example (Palumbo, 2009). The feminine narrators/characters in The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam resemble the style of the classic Handmaid’s Tale, but the recent novels have a more complex narrative combination between Toby’s free indirect discourse and Ren’s diary.

 

The vantage point of the narrator

 

Atwood manages to maintain this privileged perspective necessary both for an apocalyptic novel and for a dystopia in The Year of the Flood through these characters: Toby and Ren are nomads, condemned to restlessness and continuous movement through the social layers, and forced to numerous transgressions. Atwood places them at the right spots in order to observe the entire dystopian geography with its zones and divisions by creating a threatening antagonist who pursues Toby throughout the last two novels, namely Blanco, a “long-term Painballer”. This character has a precise narrative function, adding dynamism to the plot: through Blanco we are conveyed a precise image of the practices employed by the overwhelming and sinister force of control, suggestively called CorpSe Corps. Blanco best exemplifies how humanity has regressed to a sub-human condition (a serial killer who runs a food chain, SecretBurgers), when violence has become common practice, and the most abominable crimes are tolerated. Because of Blanco, Toby is forced to leave her job at Secret Burgers and seek refuge at the God’s Gardeners, a green religious sect that rescues “the deviants” from the absurd norms imposed by the Corporations, and also the excluded.

Because of the same sinister character, Toby is forced to leave the Gardeners and radically change her identity, having her fingerprints and voiceprint replaced with surrogates by a Chinese doctor, opting for another radical transgression: she becomes a totally new being, with a different name (Tobiatha), in order to be accepted for a job at the one of the Compounds. The spatial transgression of an unsurpassable boundary between a gated community (where the destiny of humanity is shaped) and the rest of the territory (where chaos prevails) literally means for Toby embracing the post-human condition. In fact, both Toby and Ren have the biographies of permanent nomads (the same goes for Adam One, Zeb and the other Gardeners), and this permanent mobility triggered by the most extreme insecurity is not dissipated after the Event (“The Waterless Flood”), when Blanco and other Painballers survive and force Toby out of her static sheltered condition. She becomes the typical post-apocalyptic wanderer through a space of the pastoral, which has eluded all types of spatial boundaries, leaving only the proof of the monstrous transgressions: from human to post-human, and from nature to bio-engineered species. All the characters left alive (Jimmy’s illusion that he is the last man ends at the end of Oryx and Crake) are forced to enter the new space of wilderness and of the unknown forces and external obstacles. Here Atwood fully revives one of the main thematic concerns of her fiction and essays, namely survival, also a central experience for the entire Canadian literature (Ridout, 2009, 35). In MaddAddam trilogy, the obstacles are no longer internalised, “the life plan” of the characters becomes blurred and uncertain, and the dull existence in an everyday urban environment is elevated to a nearly heroic story of survival.

 

Nature transformed: heterotopias and heterochonies

 

One of the most important focus of the new dystopias is the space of complete surveillance, where no alternatives of evasion seem to be left for the protagonists. Hunger Games describes a simpler spatial organisation, and more centralised than in MaddAddam trilogy, which reflects both the fourth and the fifth heterotopic principle described by Foucault: at the centre there is the Capitol, the place of the ultimate power of control over the rest of the territory, divided into the Twelve districts, surrounded by natural obstacles (mountains) and artificially maintained in a state of primitivism and poverty. Hunger Games reflects the openness of the heterotopia to the heterochronies: the Capitol and the districts seem to belong to different slices of time, separated by decades of evolution/devolution. This gap between the advanced technology of the centre and the regression of the rebellious margins is present in The Year of the Flood, but in a different manner: the Gardeners programmatically avoid any use of the technological devices, continuing a neo-Luddite technophobic tradition. For them, any technological device becomes the synonym for surveillance and consequently oppression, exclusion and anonymous death by accident (they repeatedly invoke such outcomes for their members, for those who have undisclosed the policies of their corporations, the ironic word is “corpicide”). One of their most important teaching regards their exclusive reliance on memory, on an oral culture and a regression towards the apocalyptic time of the early Christianity:

 

Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. (…) The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing. (Atwood, 2009, 7)

 

Their avoidance of the written word alludes to the well-known dystopian tradition and suggest that under the guise of Corporations the worst totalitarian practices have returned:

 

As for writing, it was dangerous, said the Adams and the Eves, because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you (Atwood, 2009, 7).

 

The Gardeners have even adopted a medieval style of clothing (compared to medieval monks) and openly rejected all “the shimmering things” of consumerism, including phones and their cameras. Their iconophobia is simply resumed as “if you can see it, it can see you!”, an ironic allusion to the Orwellian tradition. The pervasiveness of technology cannot be easily overcome, since none of the Gardeners seem to be immune to its fascination: Ren longs for the camera phones, and Toby finds a laptop in Adam One’s room (later the author discloses the purpose of this: organised bioresistance through hacking).

In Hunger Games, the heterochrony is a structural principle: Capitol seems the analogous image of the present, depicting a society of whose main functions are regulated by the necessities of spectacle and consumerism, while the Twelve Districts are artificially kept in an older version of the mode of production, close to the nineteenth century industrialism: Katniss’ District 12 are coal miners who fight with starvation, poor health, and are forced to recourse to hunting and fishing, which are pre-agrarian modes of survival (this is why Katniss survives in the arena). Later, already selected as a tribute, and with an uncertain fate, Katniss will find out about the other District’s occupations (District 11 – agriculture, 4 – fishing, 3 – factories): the total isolation of the districts from one another is emphasized and their utter dependence on Capitol’s whims and new rules. The scarcity of food in her District and fight for day-to-day survival are summed up by Katniss in front of a typical feast at the Capitol, her first meal upon arrival:

 

I try to imagine assembling this meal myself back home. Chickens are too expensive, but I could make do with a wild turkey. I’d need to shoot a second turkey to trade for an orange. Goat’s milk would have to substitute for cream. We can grow peas in the garden. I’d have to get wild onions from the woods. I don’t recognize the grain; our own tessera ration cooks down to an unattractive brown mush. Fancy rolls would mean another trade with the baker, perhaps for two or three squirrels. (Collins, 2009, 79)

 

At first glance both Atwood and Collins seem to continue the long dystopian tradition, whose main characters are experiencing the most idyllic communion with nature and whose only protection from the totalitarian intrusion is to be found in the pastoral, seeking refuge in the wilderness (Katniss) or avoiding the consumerist entrapment (the Gardeners produce their own food and resources). Yet both authors break with this tradition. The heterotopic space of the Arena is the place where the authority (CorpSe Corps –MaddAddam; Capitol – Hunger Games) manages to generate a perfect simulacrum of nature, replicating its species through mutations (a main concern for both authors). In this respect the bees play a crucial role in both novels. In Hunger Games, Katniss manages to break her entrapment with a help of a new species of mutated bees, the tracker jackers, created in the laboratory by the Capitol and strategically placed near every District to maintain the imprisonment of its citizens, and their isolation (they provoke death, hallucinations, madness and they hunt down those who destroy their nests- the idea of hallucinations turning to madness could have been more fruitfully explored). Atwood offers a more disturbing version of the nature transformed into a limitless space of surveillance: the “Exfernal powers” devise a new species of cyborg bees, able to track down every deviance from the norm. Another crucial example of nature turned to simulacrum from the Arena in Hunger Games are the poisonous berries that imitate the real ones, another means to eliminate the other competitors, and to emphasize Katniss revolt against the final changing of rules, when the Capitol demands only one winner, and the romance between Katniss and Peeta is in full bloom (Collins, 2008, 200). However, at the end of the first volume of Hunger Games Katniss witnesses the most disturbing mutation of all, the other tributes seemingly transformed into animals/monsters:

 

in that moment I realize what else unsettled me about the mutts. The green eyes glowering at me are unlike any dog or wolf, any canine I’ve ever seen. They are unmistakably human. And that revelation has barely registered when I notice the collar with the number 1 inlaid with jewels and the whole horrible thing hits me. (Collins, 2008, 405).                                  

This unusual hypothesis can be read either as referring to the fictional world of the novel or to the present of the reader. The tributes turned into vengeful animals is a metaphor for the transformation underwent by all the competitors and the viewers of the Hunger Games. It can be an allegory to the brainwashing process that is analogous with the one in the present, the spectacle of violence and hatred in current mass media.  It can also stand as proof that the dystopian experiment of the Capitol has succeeded over its subjects.

 

Apocalyptic alternatives and eco-utopian promises

 

Not only the story in The Year of the Flood is complementary to that in Oryx and Crake, but also its dystopian description of the pre-plague life which opens to an alternative, that represented by the God’s Gardeners, an alternative which is both pastoral and apocalyptic. The contrast is present in the post-apocalyptic world between the pastoral (nature restored) and the anti-utopian aspect of Crake’s new humanoid species, and between the pastoral and the menacing presence of the savage Painball survivors, who can threaten the whole system of values that Snowman has conceived for the Children of Crake (they lack the notion of evil and cannot grasp the differences with the humans around them), especially in MaddAddam.

Ren and Toby share the same important apocalyptic desire with Jimmy and the Gardeners: the apocalyptic end of humanity becomes a compensatory projection, as the first type of reaction to a world where barbarism and unbridled scientific progress have definitely mingled, where nature has been completely destroyed (all species gone extinct), and the splicing of genes had generated infinite mutations. One of Toby’s reflections sums up the entire set of analogies with the present:

 

By the time she’d moved to college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall (…) everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people begun to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We’re using up the earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky. Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. (Atwood, 2009, 285)

 

The Gardeners, “the fugitives from reality”, led by the messianic figure of Adam One, create the most important heteropia in the novel, the alternative to the “striated space” of the Corpse Corps, a nomad, smooth space in a permanent reconfiguration at the margins of the dystopian corporatist city. If it were to use a Deleuzian term, it could be said that The Gardeners have a rhizomic, alternative type of organisation, in contrast to the State apparatus, opposing both the hierarchical and the totalitarian mode exemplified by the rest of the society described by Atwood. This is the reason why they succeed in generating the collapse of the main hegemonic network, replacing it with an alternative one, endlessly generating alternatives. The main Gardener group is challenged itself by a nascent alternative to the movement gravitating around the messianic and the pacifist Adam One: his brother Zeb decides to take direct action and put into practice his brother’s apocalyptic teachings, in a more literal sense, employing the destructive power of science towards the artefacts of civilization.

 

Conclusions

 

The Gardeners are Atwood’s complex and memorable synthesis between a contemporary extreme version of ecologism and the apocalyptic messianic tradition of early Christians. Towards the end of The Year of the Flood this singular mixture becomes strikingly evident. Adam One’s sermons open each new chapter, and Atwood brilliantly illustrates the progression of his messages from a pacifist, non-violent and still humanistic vision towards a millenarian version, resembling John of Patmos, but in a much more radical version:

 

Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be taken up and rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished, it is the Human Species. (Atwood, 2009, 508)

 

The chaotic tribulation preceding the final demise of civilization and the extinction of mankind are interpreted as signs for the final Judgment on contemporary Man, according to the biblical hermeneutic. Adam One’s quoting Isaiah 34 is of great significance in this sense, showing civilization in ruins and replaced by man’s fellow creatures (Atwood, 2009, 443). The principle of hope for a new heaven on Earth, in the absence of man’s destructive actions is also present:

 

How privileged we are to witness these first precious moments of Rebirth! How much clearer the air is now that man-made pollution has ceased! (…) Does not the Dove symbolize Grace, the all-forgiving, the all-accepting? (443)

 

The atheist, post-humanist Glenn/Crake receives in The Year of the Flood a religious response, and his mundane extinction of humanity is interpreted as a divine punishment by Adam One, who reverses man’s singularity in a forgiving nature:

 

All creatures know that some must die/ That all the rest may take and eat/ Sooner or later, all transform/ Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat./ But Man alone seeks Vengefulness/ And writes his abstract laws on stone/ For this false Justice he has made,/ He tortures limb and crushes bone. (Atwood, 2009, 511).

                

                

Bibliography

 

Atwood, Margaret, The Year of the Flood, London, Virago Press, 2011.

Atwood, Margaret, MaddAddam, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake, New York, Doubleday, 2003.

Bouson Brooke J, “It’s Game over Forever”. Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Margaret Atwood, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, Yale, 2009.

Collins, Suzanne, The Hunger Games, London, Scholastic Ltd, 2008

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, 16 (1): 22-7, 1986.

Hetherington, Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity. Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London & New York, Routledge, 1997

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991.

Palumbo M. Alice, “On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Margaret Atwood, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, Yale, 2009.

Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces, Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

 

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Note

Andrei Simuţ
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andrei.simut@gmail.com

 

 

Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games

 

 

Abstract: In this article I shall focus especially on the dialectic between the dystopian city and the post-apocalyptic landscape, on the means of transgressing the imposed boundaries (social, biological, and religious) as they are staged in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, The Year of the Flood and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. I shall also compare it with the dystopian turn in the contemporary imagination, both visible in a large amount of dystopian movies and in popular novels such as Hunger Games or Divergent trilogies.

Keywords: Heterotopia of Deviation; Survival; Pastoral; Dystopian Boundaries; Transgression; Geocriticism.

 

Any observer of the contemporary trends in film and literature can notice that we are witnessing a striking revival of the dystopian imagination, which discloses a certain concern with the ongoing crisis of the present/future order of things (the spreading of the policies of surveillance, the widening gap between social strata, the environmental problem), a concern manifested both by the intellectuals, artists or filmmakers, and by the public.[1] To put it differently, the age of divisions, inequalities and depression proves highly inspirational for dystopias. The temptation to transgress these imposed boundaries fuels their narratives. The last six years has revived the dystopian (sub) genre both in science fiction mainstream production, but also in canonical literature and popular novels. Novels such as The Giver, Hunger Games, and Divergent have all already turned into successful movies. The allegorical dimension is present in all these examples which tend to formulate “inverted analogies” with present aspects of the social realm. Fredric Jameson has considered allegory to be a feature of postmodern paradigm, a displacement of the Modernist aesthetic of the Symbol (Jameson, 1991, 115), although, in my opinion, the postmodern dominant has ended, and this return of the dystopian imaginary in all forms of the cultural production is also a proof for this change.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (completed in 2013) is also significant, since it implies a conceptual tension between dystopia, anti-utopian criticism, apocalyptic and eco-utopian promise. The Year of the Flood (2009) operates a shift of perspective when compared with the first novel of the trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), and I shall examine the significant differences. All these recent dystopias seem to suggest the idea that certain aspects of our reality and social system resemble more and more to the dystopian fears. Even though Divergent and Hunger Games trilogies are set in the far future, they tend to refer precisely to the present realities and employ the allegorical form. Atwood’s novels, more complex both in their subject matter and in their discourse, are increasingly ambiguous in their formulated dilemmas. The overt criticism of the scientific utopia in Oryx and Crake and its dire dystopian consequences acquire new meanings in The Year of The Flood, where the apocalyptic dimension restores hope especially with the story of God’s Gardeners, told from the perspective of two feminine narrators, Toby and Ren. The end of the human race (the dissolution of its human features and the literal extinction of the human species through the pandemic) is rendered almost as a necessary event by Jimmy’s narration and Glenn (alias Crake)’s ideas. Those two characters are almost absent in the Year of the Flood, where their cynical approach towards the ends of man is compensated by Adam One’s messianic and pacifist eco-pedagogy, restoring the biblical hermeneutic.

 

Dystopian boundaries and transgressions

 

These recent dystopias can be fruitfully analysed with a few important concepts formulated by geocriticism (from Lefebre to Westphal), since they stage complex relationships between imposed boundaries and the (im)/possibility of their transgression, and because every transgressed boundary triggers virtually limitless consequences upon their characters and their fictional world (this is especially the case with Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy). In fact, dystopian fiction has always been inspired by this tension between polis and nature, between the space of individual freedom and the space of control, between striated, homogenous space and “smooth” space (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms). The proliferation of these dystopian scenarios signals an increased awareness of the fact that the smooth space finds itself threatened by the striated space of control (Westphal, 2011, 40).

MaddAddam trilogy stages a complex system of transgressions: spatial (Compounds and pleeblands vs the margins), temporal (the advanced techno-scientific elite vs the technophobic Gardeners, before and after the “Waterless Flood”- pre-apocalyptic dystopian world vs post-apocalyptic landscape), biologic (human vs sub-human vs post-human; genetic engineered species vs natural ones). In stylistic terms, the first two novels of the trilogy stage a dialogue between the pre-apocalyptic dystopian world set in the near future and the post-apocalyptic world when humanity has been extinguished by the virus devised by Crake, and the author manages to convey this sharp contrast using the character’s memories and flashbacks: Jimmy and Toby through free indirect discourse and Ren through first person narrative. The post-apocalyptic present is rendered through the present tense verbs, thus acquiring a filmic immediacy and strangeness, and the lost world in past tense, being subject to various retrospectives and subjective versions.

In terms of spatial representation of the pre-apocalyptic world, Atwood’s trilogy can be termed as heterotopia, since it perfectly fits the well-known Foucaultian description: it is a “kind of effectively enacted utopia in which all the real sites are simultaneously represented, contested, inverted”, being at the same time “absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect” (Foucault, 1986, 22-27). Our present-day scientific developments and realities are present, may be recognized, but at the same time their description renders them uncanny. Atwood has underscored the difference between her fictions (the concept is “speculative fiction”) and the typical science fictional novel, and emphasizing in her afterword to MaddAddam that:

 

it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory (Atwood, 2013)

 

The same can be stated about the organization of the social system and its reflection in the space geography of the novels. ”The pre-plague life” is dominated by a techno-scientific elite inhabiting the Compounds, a sort of gated communities, fortified Corporations where the access is strictly controlled and the territory outside the walls, the chaotic “Exfernal world” of the pleeblands, under the strict surveillance of the CorpSe Corps. At the periphery of this corporatist metropolis lies an undefined territory of ruined, abandoned buildings where the Gardeners camp and hide, transforming it into an alternative chain of “rooftop gardens”, into a nomadic, smooth space, permanently threatened by the intrusions of the polis, represented by CorpSe Corps agents. The Year of the Flood is the story of this transformation of a smooth space into a striated one, a conquest which is almost complete when the virus wipes out all the boundaries, restoring its archetypal smoothness and nomadism (Westphal, 2011, 40).

 

Heterotopies of deviation

 

One perfect example of a “heterotopy of deviation” (Foucault’s term for rest homes, psychiatric hospitals or prisons, the place for those who deviate from the norm) is, in Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the Painball Arena, very similar to the Arena where the “hunger games” take place in Suzanne Collins’ novel, both descriptions suggesting a space where punishment and death are ritualised. Both authors describe an enclosed forest, where the individuals (condemned criminals-Atwood; selected tributes-Collins) fight each other for life, until the others are killed, a place where survival becomes almost impossible. Those who manage to return from the Painball arena suffer a mutation that expurgates them from the human realm. The complex tableau of transgressions present in Oryx and Crake is completed with a new type, which crosses the human features and regresses to the sub-human. This is just one instance of the wide spectrum of extreme deviations present in Atwood’s trilogy and is resumed by Toby in a phrase that synthesizes the main process that governs her fictional-dystopian world: “you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d forget there ever were any lines” (Atwood 2009, 118). The “long term Painballers” are those who refuse to get out when their term ends, and this category illustrates the most extreme primitivism, the sub-human condition (cannibalism becomes a common practice).

This regression into a sub-human state is present in Hunger Games: Katniss is terrified by when she remembers a similar case of a tribute who went savage after winning the competition and who fed on his victims (Collins, 2008, 173). Even though Hunger Games emphasizes the limitless capacity of the Capitol to invent new rules and the impossibility to predict them, there is however an apparent limit to this transgressivity and that is cannibalism, but Katniss fears that the longer they stay in the Arena, the more susceptible the competitors become to such practices. At the centre of the novel there is a contradiction between the author’s intention in showing the reader the most extreme effects this mass media experiment has on its subjects (whether is about the competitor or the spectators) and the desire to maintain the novel’s protagonist as the main recipient for humanistic ideals (freedom, kindness, generosity). This becomes one of the major deficiencies of the plot: although the possibilities seem limitless regarding the situations the hero has to face in this arena where only one tribute has to survive, the author has only a few options in order to keep the profile of her character and also keep the main rule of the Hunger Games (“the real sport of the Hunger Games is watching the tributes kill one another”), and that is to eliminate all the other competitors through other means except Katniss direct action. A good example in this sense is when, isolated in a tree, she is surrounded by the most cruel competitors, the Career Tributes, led by Cato (who has a similar savage profile with Atwood’s Blanco) and she tears down on a swarm of mutated bees (the tracker jackers) eliminating a few other tributes and thus managing to escape.

In Oryx and Crake the narrative perspective belonged to Jimmy/ Snowman, who was the perfect vantage point for observing the extinction of humanity since he as the companion to the scientist who devised it, namely Glenn, alias Crake. In The Year of the Flood, the narrative point of view changes, shifting between two feminine characters, Toby and Ren, and being more intimate, secluded and marginal, observing the events from a more distanced perspective, the distance from the centre (the Paradice Dome where the new virus and the new race are conceived) and the margins (AnooYoo Spa, Scales and Tails and the Edencliff Rooftop Garden where Toby and Ren are usually located) increases. The author must keep Toby and Ren’s vantage point of view, as witness to the apocalyptic events, the same privileged perspective that Jimmy the Snowman had in Oryx and Crake. The new emphasis in The Year of the Flood is on the periphery: Toby, Ren and The Gardeners are all marginal, victims (Ren or Toby) of the system and/or a nascent alternative to the hegemonic order (The Gardeners). Oryx and Crake was the account of an imploding centre both thematically (the virus was devised by the most powerful corporation) and narrative (no other character challenged Jimmy’s version of the main events; from his perspective, the whole Crake’s apocalyptic plan was meant to seek revenge for his secret affair with Oryx, in order to leave Jimmy as the sole survivor). The Year of the Flood is conceived as a narrative account of the periphery, alternativity, margins and it is significant for this new paradigm in the dystopian narrative, along with Hunger Games, Divergent and also a few dystopian films (The Snowpiercer, Elysium, In Time): these narratives choose their protagonist from the lower social strata, adopting a marginal point of view towards the social system described. The hero’s journey starts from these “deviant”, excluded margins, towards the oppressive centre of the authority. The classic dystopias of the twentieth century (We, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World) selected their main character from the upper social strata, close to the top of the hierarchy, and the journey towards freedom was from the centre towards the periphery. Margaret Atwood’s earlier novels have been frequently scrutinized regarding their thematic concerns with the margins and the problem of the boundaries, Alice Palumbo’s essay is the best example (Palumbo, 2009). The feminine narrators/characters in The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam resemble the style of the classic Handmaid’s Tale, but the recent novels have a more complex narrative combination between Toby’s free indirect discourse and Ren’s diary.

 

The vantage point of the narrator

 

Atwood manages to maintain this privileged perspective necessary both for an apocalyptic novel and for a dystopia in The Year of the Flood through these characters: Toby and Ren are nomads, condemned to restlessness and continuous movement through the social layers, and forced to numerous transgressions. Atwood places them at the right spots in order to observe the entire dystopian geography with its zones and divisions by creating a threatening antagonist who pursues Toby throughout the last two novels, namely Blanco, a “long-term Painballer”. This character has a precise narrative function, adding dynamism to the plot: through Blanco we are conveyed a precise image of the practices employed by the overwhelming and sinister force of control, suggestively called CorpSe Corps. Blanco best exemplifies how humanity has regressed to a sub-human condition (a serial killer who runs a food chain, SecretBurgers), when violence has become common practice, and the most abominable crimes are tolerated. Because of Blanco, Toby is forced to leave her job at Secret Burgers and seek refuge at the God’s Gardeners, a green religious sect that rescues “the deviants” from the absurd norms imposed by the Corporations, and also the excluded.

Because of the same sinister character, Toby is forced to leave the Gardeners and radically change her identity, having her fingerprints and voiceprint replaced with surrogates by a Chinese doctor, opting for another radical transgression: she becomes a totally new being, with a different name (Tobiatha), in order to be accepted for a job at the one of the Compounds. The spatial transgression of an unsurpassable boundary between a gated community (where the destiny of humanity is shaped) and the rest of the territory (where chaos prevails) literally means for Toby embracing the post-human condition. In fact, both Toby and Ren have the biographies of permanent nomads (the same goes for Adam One, Zeb and the other Gardeners), and this permanent mobility triggered by the most extreme insecurity is not dissipated after the Event (“The Waterless Flood”), when Blanco and other Painballers survive and force Toby out of her static sheltered condition. She becomes the typical post-apocalyptic wanderer through a space of the pastoral, which has eluded all types of spatial boundaries, leaving only the proof of the monstrous transgressions: from human to post-human, and from nature to bio-engineered species. All the characters left alive (Jimmy’s illusion that he is the last man ends at the end of Oryx and Crake) are forced to enter the new space of wilderness and of the unknown forces and external obstacles. Here Atwood fully revives one of the main thematic concerns of her fiction and essays, namely survival, also a central experience for the entire Canadian literature (Ridout, 2009, 35). In MaddAddam trilogy, the obstacles are no longer internalised, “the life plan” of the characters becomes blurred and uncertain, and the dull existence in an everyday urban environment is elevated to a nearly heroic story of survival.

 

Nature transformed: heterotopias and heterochonies

 

One of the most important focus of the new dystopias is the space of complete surveillance, where no alternatives of evasion seem to be left for the protagonists. Hunger Games describes a simpler spatial organisation, and more centralised than in MaddAddam trilogy, which reflects both the fourth and the fifth heterotopic principle described by Foucault: at the centre there is the Capitol, the place of the ultimate power of control over the rest of the territory, divided into the Twelve districts, surrounded by natural obstacles (mountains) and artificially maintained in a state of primitivism and poverty. Hunger Games reflects the openness of the heterotopia to the heterochronies: the Capitol and the districts seem to belong to different slices of time, separated by decades of evolution/devolution. This gap between the advanced technology of the centre and the regression of the rebellious margins is present in The Year of the Flood, but in a different manner: the Gardeners programmatically avoid any use of the technological devices, continuing a neo-Luddite technophobic tradition. For them, any technological device becomes the synonym for surveillance and consequently oppression, exclusion and anonymous death by accident (they repeatedly invoke such outcomes for their members, for those who have undisclosed the policies of their corporations, the ironic word is “corpicide”). One of their most important teaching regards their exclusive reliance on memory, on an oral culture and a regression towards the apocalyptic time of the early Christianity:

 

Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. (…) The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing. (Atwood, 2009, 7)

 

Their avoidance of the written word alludes to the well-known dystopian tradition and suggest that under the guise of Corporations the worst totalitarian practices have returned:

 

As for writing, it was dangerous, said the Adams and the Eves, because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you (Atwood, 2009, 7).

 

The Gardeners have even adopted a medieval style of clothing (compared to medieval monks) and openly rejected all “the shimmering things” of consumerism, including phones and their cameras. Their iconophobia is simply resumed as “if you can see it, it can see you!”, an ironic allusion to the Orwellian tradition. The pervasiveness of technology cannot be easily overcome, since none of the Gardeners seem to be immune to its fascination: Ren longs for the camera phones, and Toby finds a laptop in Adam One’s room (later the author discloses the purpose of this: organised bioresistance through hacking).

In Hunger Games, the heterochrony is a structural principle: Capitol seems the analogous image of the present, depicting a society of whose main functions are regulated by the necessities of spectacle and consumerism, while the Twelve Districts are artificially kept in an older version of the mode of production, close to the nineteenth century industrialism: Katniss’ District 12 are coal miners who fight with starvation, poor health, and are forced to recourse to hunting and fishing, which are pre-agrarian modes of survival (this is why Katniss survives in the arena). Later, already selected as a tribute, and with an uncertain fate, Katniss will find out about the other District’s occupations (District 11 – agriculture, 4 – fishing, 3 – factories): the total isolation of the districts from one another is emphasized and their utter dependence on Capitol’s whims and new rules. The scarcity of food in her District and fight for day-to-day survival are summed up by Katniss in front of a typical feast at the Capitol, her first meal upon arrival:

 

I try to imagine assembling this meal myself back home. Chickens are too expensive, but I could make do with a wild turkey. I’d need to shoot a second turkey to trade for an orange. Goat’s milk would have to substitute for cream. We can grow peas in the garden. I’d have to get wild onions from the woods. I don’t recognize the grain; our own tessera ration cooks down to an unattractive brown mush. Fancy rolls would mean another trade with the baker, perhaps for two or three squirrels. (Collins, 2009, 79)

 

At first glance both Atwood and Collins seem to continue the long dystopian tradition, whose main characters are experiencing the most idyllic communion with nature and whose only protection from the totalitarian intrusion is to be found in the pastoral, seeking refuge in the wilderness (Katniss) or avoiding the consumerist entrapment (the Gardeners produce their own food and resources). Yet both authors break with this tradition. The heterotopic space of the Arena is the place where the authority (CorpSe Corps –MaddAddam; Capitol – Hunger Games) manages to generate a perfect simulacrum of nature, replicating its species through mutations (a main concern for both authors). In this respect the bees play a crucial role in both novels. In Hunger Games, Katniss manages to break her entrapment with a help of a new species of mutated bees, the tracker jackers, created in the laboratory by the Capitol and strategically placed near every District to maintain the imprisonment of its citizens, and their isolation (they provoke death, hallucinations, madness and they hunt down those who destroy their nests- the idea of hallucinations turning to madness could have been more fruitfully explored). Atwood offers a more disturbing version of the nature transformed into a limitless space of surveillance: the “Exfernal powers” devise a new species of cyborg bees, able to track down every deviance from the norm. Another crucial example of nature turned to simulacrum from the Arena in Hunger Games are the poisonous berries that imitate the real ones, another means to eliminate the other competitors, and to emphasize Katniss revolt against the final changing of rules, when the Capitol demands only one winner, and the romance between Katniss and Peeta is in full bloom (Collins, 2008, 200). However, at the end of the first volume of Hunger Games Katniss witnesses the most disturbing mutation of all, the other tributes seemingly transformed into animals/monsters:

 

in that moment I realize what else unsettled me about the mutts. The green eyes glowering at me are unlike any dog or wolf, any canine I’ve ever seen. They are unmistakably human. And that revelation has barely registered when I notice the collar with the number 1 inlaid with jewels and the whole horrible thing hits me. (Collins, 2008, 405).                                  

This unusual hypothesis can be read either as referring to the fictional world of the novel or to the present of the reader. The tributes turned into vengeful animals is a metaphor for the transformation underwent by all the competitors and the viewers of the Hunger Games. It can be an allegory to the brainwashing process that is analogous with the one in the present, the spectacle of violence and hatred in current mass media.  It can also stand as proof that the dystopian experiment of the Capitol has succeeded over its subjects.

 

Apocalyptic alternatives and eco-utopian promises

 

Not only the story in The Year of the Flood is complementary to that in Oryx and Crake, but also its dystopian description of the pre-plague life which opens to an alternative, that represented by the God’s Gardeners, an alternative which is both pastoral and apocalyptic. The contrast is present in the post-apocalyptic world between the pastoral (nature restored) and the anti-utopian aspect of Crake’s new humanoid species, and between the pastoral and the menacing presence of the savage Painball survivors, who can threaten the whole system of values that Snowman has conceived for the Children of Crake (they lack the notion of evil and cannot grasp the differences with the humans around them), especially in MaddAddam.

Ren and Toby share the same important apocalyptic desire with Jimmy and the Gardeners: the apocalyptic end of humanity becomes a compensatory projection, as the first type of reaction to a world where barbarism and unbridled scientific progress have definitely mingled, where nature has been completely destroyed (all species gone extinct), and the splicing of genes had generated infinite mutations. One of Toby’s reflections sums up the entire set of analogies with the present:

 

By the time she’d moved to college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall (…) everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people begun to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We’re using up the earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky. Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. (Atwood, 2009, 285)

 

The Gardeners, “the fugitives from reality”, led by the messianic figure of Adam One, create the most important heteropia in the novel, the alternative to the “striated space” of the Corpse Corps, a nomad, smooth space in a permanent reconfiguration at the margins of the dystopian corporatist city. If it were to use a Deleuzian term, it could be said that The Gardeners have a rhizomic, alternative type of organisation, in contrast to the State apparatus, opposing both the hierarchical and the totalitarian mode exemplified by the rest of the society described by Atwood. This is the reason why they succeed in generating the collapse of the main hegemonic network, replacing it with an alternative one, endlessly generating alternatives. The main Gardener group is challenged itself by a nascent alternative to the movement gravitating around the messianic and the pacifist Adam One: his brother Zeb decides to take direct action and put into practice his brother’s apocalyptic teachings, in a more literal sense, employing the destructive power of science towards the artefacts of civilization.

 

Conclusions

 

The Gardeners are Atwood’s complex and memorable synthesis between a contemporary extreme version of ecologism and the apocalyptic messianic tradition of early Christians. Towards the end of The Year of the Flood this singular mixture becomes strikingly evident. Adam One’s sermons open each new chapter, and Atwood brilliantly illustrates the progression of his messages from a pacifist, non-violent and still humanistic vision towards a millenarian version, resembling John of Patmos, but in a much more radical version:

 

Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be taken up and rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished, it is the Human Species. (Atwood, 2009, 508)

 

The chaotic tribulation preceding the final demise of civilization and the extinction of mankind are interpreted as signs for the final Judgment on contemporary Man, according to the biblical hermeneutic. Adam One’s quoting Isaiah 34 is of great significance in this sense, showing civilization in ruins and replaced by man’s fellow creatures (Atwood, 2009, 443). The principle of hope for a new heaven on Earth, in the absence of man’s destructive actions is also present:

 

How privileged we are to witness these first precious moments of Rebirth! How much clearer the air is now that man-made pollution has ceased! (…) Does not the Dove symbolize Grace, the all-forgiving, the all-accepting? (443)

 

The atheist, post-humanist Glenn/Crake receives in The Year of the Flood a religious response, and his mundane extinction of humanity is interpreted as a divine punishment by Adam One, who reverses man’s singularity in a forgiving nature:

 

All creatures know that some must die/ That all the rest may take and eat/ Sooner or later, all transform/ Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat./ But Man alone seeks Vengefulness/ And writes his abstract laws on stone/ For this false Justice he has made,/ He tortures limb and crushes bone. (Atwood, 2009, 511).

                

                

Bibliography

 

Atwood, Margaret, The Year of the Flood, London, Virago Press, 2011.

Atwood, Margaret, MaddAddam, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake, New York, Doubleday, 2003.

Bouson Brooke J, “It’s Game over Forever”. Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Margaret Atwood, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, Yale, 2009.

Collins, Suzanne, The Hunger Games, London, Scholastic Ltd, 2008

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, 16 (1): 22-7, 1986.

Hetherington, Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity. Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London & New York, Routledge, 1997

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991.

Palumbo M. Alice, “On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Margaret Atwood, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, Yale, 2009.

Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces, Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

 

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Note

Olga Ştefan
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
olg.stefan@gmail.com

 

 

Nostalgia and Fetish Amongst the Remains of the World

in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

 

 

Abstract: The present paper deals with attitudes of nostalgia and fetishistic appropriation of objects in the context of post-apocalyptic landscapes, as described in Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. We speak of ‘apocalyptic landscapes’ referring to catastrophes revolving around extinction and abandonment, following the contemporary, ecologist myth of the endangered landscape.

Keywords: Apocalypse; Ruin; Fetish; Collection; Objects; Commodity; Margaret Atwood; Space; Dystopia.

 

 

In a letter to Witold vin Hulewicz, quoted by Giorgio Agamben in his essay on “Marx: or The Universal Exposition,” Rai­ner Maria Rilke deploys the gapping atti­tude in approaching significant things: “E­ven for our grandparents, a house, a well, a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more inti­mate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life… A house, in the Amer­ican sense, an American apple or a grape­vine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers… Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to still have known such things.”[1]

This quote is relevant when read in parallel with post-apocalyptic contemporary fiction. Here, places find themselves in a void of significance, resolved by a final e­vent that, as Gerry Canavan writes in his paper concerning Margaret Atwood’s dysto­pian novels, “seems to have the capacity to shake the foundations of the system and jumpstart a history that now seems com­pletely moribund.”[2] Apocalypse becomes the only possible “happy” ending to capitalism, to the values of a system that altered the human species to its most despicable version, one that must surely be updated.

When we speak of “apocalyptic land­scapes” we refer to catastrophes revolving around extinction and abandonment. The myth of the endangered landscape, experi­enced as apocalyptic and post-catastrophic concerns contemporary literature from the perspective of addressing a subtle political content that positions humans in relation to their environment. In Oryx and Crake, Mar­garet Atwood explores these themes in a close, engaged manner: she composes this landscape of the end of the world while ap­proaching the tropes of consumerism and the failure of feeling in the context of a hy­per-commodified society. Not only is she interested in the potential future of a world ending, but she also explores the feelings and attitudes of the remnants. The world inhibited by these “last humans” – Jimmy, Toby and Ren – is a world in ruins. They are exiled in a landscape of loss and soli­tude, exploring the realms of destruction while building a sense of nostalgia for what was lost: an otherwise despicable society, marked by an increasing, deplorable sense of possession. In this respect, even the for­merly most despised commodities become objects of introspection and longing. We find ourselves in the unsettling presence of an unfinished world: a world that is to be appropriated in a fetishistic manner, cher­ished not because of what it used to repre­sent, but for the fact that it still is, constant, map-able, as if capable of rebirth. Giorgio Agamben underlined the importance that this aesthetics of the unfinished played in the context of modern art: fragmentarism is a stylistic instrument that plays a part in rethinking landscapes. The fragments re­place the destructed structure of the whole in the same logic of the fetish, where an object substitutes the absence of what is truly desired. Fetish and nostalgia are conn­ected by their manner of investing objects with uses other than their practical ones. I use these two concepts in order to discuss the attitude towards objects left behind in the context of post-apocalyptic narratives written from the point of view of a sole survivor. De-contextualized, un-inhibited, en­tire cities and their whole sceneries be­come subjects to nostalgia (for a world that was and shall nev­er come again), while the abandoned proof of a once sustained existence enters the fet­ish­istic regime, being involved in the mental process of substituting the whole with a part.

 “The fetish confronts us with the par­adox of an unattainable object that satisfies a human need precisely through it being unattainable. Insofar as it is a presence, the fetish object is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, im­material and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed”[3] writes Gior­gio Agamben, and we are inclined to see this type of attitude in Atwood’s novels, where Jimmy’s explorations of abandoned former Compounds are not only an action necessary for survival, but also a nostalgic exploration of a lost world, with its facticus, its artificial objects that are now useful for their reliquary potential. The first chapter in Oryx and Crake introduces Jimmy who, out of a useless habit, considering the context of the world having turned to a zero hour, “looks at his watch- stainless case, bur­nished aluminium band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman.”[4] The gesture is merely sym­bolic: “It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.”[5] Having lost its practical usage, the watch becomes an object of fetish, “both symbol of something and its negation.”[6]

The chapters following Jimmy’s trajec­tory through teenage describe him as a potential collector of lost words. He clings to dictionary terms that were useless and outdated in the manner a collector clings to objects that, having lost their very contexts, involve a feeling of the uncanny.  His post-apocalyptic fetishism mirrors his collection of words because “what the collector seeks in the object is something absolutely impal­pable to the noncollector, who only uses or possesses the object, just as the fetish does not coincide any way with the object in this material aspect.”[7] Jimmy invests the relics of the past with the capacity of evoking everything that has been lost. He is equally satisfied by all the objects that present the characteristics of having survived the “plague,” just as he did. They, as much as he does, negotiate the values of absence and substitution: exhausting the meaning of this “nothing” they attempt to replace.

Margaret Atwood’s depictions of a world inhabited and observed by its “last humans” is an attempt of mapping land­scapes of both hope, for a potential natural revival, and guilt, from the perspective of having the nature altered to the final, dra­matic consequences of its destruction. Jimmy witnesses not only the dusk of the human race, but the dawn of a new race, artificially created by his best friend, Crake, not long before the mass destruction biological weap­on killed almost the entire population of the Globe. The Crakers are humanoids of ex­quisite beauty and proverbial innocence, designed to perfect the flaws that lead to the human race’s ultimate destruction. They, however, inhabit the world of this now ex­tinct species and act like archaeologists in respect to the remains of their “ancestors”. For them, Jimmy is an alien, curious version of themselves, but also a teacher, watching and taking care of them with a mix of “envy” and false “nostalgia”[8]: false, because they embody the childhood he longed for and never actually experi­enced, considering the fact that it took place in a time when nature had already been compro­mised. The children, the prototypes of the new species appropriate the world as if new and pure. They too explore the remains of society, but their attitude is one of mere in­nocence. “They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hup­cap, a piano-key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A BlyssPluss container, empty, a Chickie Nobs Bucket O’Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.”[9] These objects have obviously lost their context and their utility: the “children” see them as the gifts of an absent God and cherish them as such. Jimmy sees in them as objects of mourning, “things from before,” the products of a special type of nostalgia, where “nostalgia is memory with the pain removed. The pain is today. We shed tears for the landscape we find no longer what it was, what we thought it was, or what we hoped it would be.”[10] Jimmy finds himself in the position of longing for a world he knew: the imposing efforts of civilization, concretized in architecture of the lost world meet a prominent process of destruction. He struggles to “hang on to words” (the odd, the rare, the dissolving words of past dictionaries) as a result of his need to make sense of the past.

 

he could keep a diary. Set down his impressions. There must be lots of pa­per lying around, in unburned interior spaces that are still leak-free, and pens and pencils; he’s seen them on his scavenging forays but he’s never both­ered taking any. He could emulate the captains of ships, in olden times – the ship going down in a storm, the captain in his cabin, doomed but in­trepid, fil­ling in the logbook. There were movies like that. Or castaways on desert islands, keeping their journals day by tedious day. Lists of supplies, notations on the weather, small actions performed – the sewing on of a button, the devouring of a clam. He too is a castaway of sorts. He could make lists. It could give his life some structure. But even a casta­way assumes a future reader, someone who’ll come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman can make no such as­sump­tions: he’ll have no future reader, be­cause the Crakers can’t read. Any read­er he can possibly imagine is in the past.”[11]

 

This fragment specifically depicts Jim­my’s relation to the world: he feels like a new Robinson, lacking the optimism of rediscovering the lost values of humanity. He is no more than an observer, no longer feeling at home, haunted by memories he can no longer make sense of.

As we saw in our paper regarding loca­tion and dislocation in modern dystopias,[12] once the space one sees as “home” is emp­tied of those very attributes that built its significance as such, it is, instead, invested with the potential of becoming a “bad place,” thus, a dystopian one. This place, destroyed by catastrophe, is not only bad or maladjusted to the subject’s expectations of comfort and security, it also becomes the depositary of unsettling phantasms that threaten to become parts of reality. Both destructive and horrifying, the images of a defamiliarized place give birth to specu­lative questions concerning the dystopian path such a present might, eventually, fol­low, while consequently triggering a nos­talgic perspective on the author’s present, transformed, in the context of his narrative, into a remote and desired past. Moreover, since the 20^th century’s imaginary is to be held responsible for spatializing time, one may also comment on a transfer of phobias from their temporal register to a spatial approach. We thus have ruin and decay be­coming part of the urban day to day devel­opment. Last human narratives document and interpret the ruins of civilization, while maintaining a tense relationship between the signifiers of this world and the language used in order to make sense of it. In other words, the surviving characters’ need to de­scribe a place no longer seen through col­lective, human eyes, a place lacking the re­ceptors of its potential descriptions, ques­tions the need for telling a story, per se, but also the manner in which a landscape that exists for one person solely may be distorted by sentimentality. Oryx and Crake empha­sizes this inner tension between the rein­vented nature, altered and corrupted for the benefits of a hyper-consumerist society that reached its final potential and has doomed itself to self-destruction and the memory of an idyllic nature, inhabiting nostalgic fan­ta­sies of the extreme ecologists. There is, however, a vanitas vanitatum feeling that grows on the structure of Jimmy’s story, who depicts an obvious contrast between the obscene reality of the world before, built around symbols of abjection and jouissance, and the sterile, depressing landscape of the new beginning. The heart-breaking scenes questioning the validity of decontextualized objects in the reliquary hypostases they pos­sess once the world has ended, while action rapidly moves to a past ignorant to the dan­gers already planting their seeds in its in­fer­tile ground maintains this effort of mapping a type of elegiac nostalgia. Jimmy mourns the loss of his world amongst the ruins of civilization. He recalls familiar landscapes that, to the reader, evoke dystopian spaces rather than luminous utopias. This incongru­ence, however, contributes to the feeling of alienation Atwood attempts to reflect through­out her novel. “When Jimmy was really little they’d lived in a Cape Cod–style frame house in one of the Modules” we read and envisage an aseptic environment that auto­matically assumes a more dangerous spatial reality, a world already destroyed due to greed and destructive efforts of so-called progress. The Compounds are closed soci­eties, citadels preserving an already extinct lifestyle, hyperreal cities where everything is a reproduction of a lost model, glorifying the realm of the simulacra, in Baudrillardian terms. “The furniture in it was called repro­duction. Jimmy was quite old before he realized what this word meant – that for each reproduction item, there was supposed to be an original somewhere. Or there had been once. Or something. The house, the pool, the furniture – all belonged to the OrganInc Compound, where the top people lived.”[13] . In the world-before, landscapes had been compromised: there were se­clud­ed, elitist Compounds and Pleeblands: “end­less billboards and neon signs and stretches of buildings, tall and short; endless dingy-looking streets, countless vehicles of all kinds, some of them with clouds of smoke coming out the back; thousands of people, hurrying, cheering, rioting,” places “outside the OrganInc walls and gates and search­lights” where public security was faulty and “things were unpredictable.” These places are invested with attributes of bad, dysto­pi­an spaces. We have discussed in the afore mention study on dystopian space the fact that an important number of studies con­cern­ing recent geographies focused on the subject of the post World War II massive building boom specifically reacted to the in­creasing speed of emergence of such place­less places, describing the psychological effects their impersonality might have had upon their inhabitants. Edward Relph placed these spaces under the umbrella-term of placelessness, and we see in Atwood’s nov­el a similar development as concerning the artificially created, septic environments and the former cities. Relph de­scribed the relationship new American landscapes imply, suggesting that “placelessness is not only a psychological condition but also a political phenomenon” whose effects “are not only individual or collective alienation but also may be the diminishment of political en­gage­ment and efficacy” because “land­scapes – shared spaces, recognizable bound­a­ries, identifiable landmarks, common sites of remembrance – help to establish relation­ships between people.”[14] In these contexts of space-creation, nostalgia comes as a key concept in investing places with a type of inherited meaning. Compounds and Pleeb­lands are built on a basically amnesic struc­ture. “Other companies, other countries, var­i­ous factions and plotters. There was too much hardware around, said Jimmy’s father. Too much hardware, too much software, too many hostile bioforms, too many weapons of every kind. And too much envy and fan­aticism and bad faith. Long ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes had lived in castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the ramparts so you could pour hot pitch on your enemies, said Jimmy’s father, and the Compounds were the same idea. Castles were for keep­ing you and your buddies nice and safe in­side, and for keeping everybody else out­side.”[15] These urban settings reflect the ter­ror of living in a lobotomized society, place­lessness being a central quality in dystopian spaces. It is the ultimate proof that memory and meaningful relationships have been can­celled in order to favour uniformity and the dissolution of all individual features.

Throughout Jimmy’s recollections of the world before the plague, Atwood depicts a constant apprehension before the change in the status of space. This cry for a self-destructing world is, in my opinion, similar to Rainer Maria Rilke’s pessimistic view over the loss of significance things and possessions were con­fronted with. The overall view of the novel is that this de­structured society was already doomed to destruction. Jimmy’s survival is seen as abnormal accident, an event that should not have occurred, but also a chance to revival the language of a creative lost species. Jimmy is, after all, described as a man of words, a reader, a poet, an abomination in itself. His survival is, perhaps, an ironic reminder of those elegiac cries of castaways that fill the world literature. There have been researchers who mirrored Atwood’s dystopia and the old English ruins, but I believe this perspective to be an over inter­pretation. What I do find of doubtless rel­e­vance is the manner in which the per­spec­tive of a last human involves in depicting the last things. The situation is different from that we explored in analysing Paul Auster’s Country of Last Things because there is no struggle in recovering the re­mains of the past. Jimmy, as opposed to Auster’s Anna Blume, collects memories, deconstructs them and, then, he lets go of them. Everything lasts in a state of decom­position, everything is simultaneous and al­ready lost.

The ecologist underlayer in Atwood’s novel, however, further explored in its se­quel, The Year of the Flood, claims that there is hope beneath destruction and that nature prevails over the dystopian urban landscapes of ruin and abandon.

 

 

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Notes

Olga Ştefan
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
olg.stefan@gmail.com

 

 

Nostalgia and Fetish Amongst the Remains of the World

in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

 

 

Abstract: The present paper deals with attitudes of nostalgia and fetishistic appropriation of objects in the context of post-apocalyptic landscapes, as described in Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. We speak of ‘apocalyptic landscapes’ referring to catastrophes revolving around extinction and abandonment, following the contemporary, ecologist myth of the endangered landscape.

Keywords: Apocalypse; Ruin; Fetish; Collection; Objects; Commodity; Margaret Atwood; Space; Dystopia.

 

 

In a letter to Witold vin Hulewicz, quoted by Giorgio Agamben in his essay on “Marx: or The Universal Exposition,” Rai­ner Maria Rilke deploys the gapping atti­tude in approaching significant things: “E­ven for our grandparents, a house, a well, a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more inti­mate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life… A house, in the Amer­ican sense, an American apple or a grape­vine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers… Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to still have known such things.”[1]

This quote is relevant when read in parallel with post-apocalyptic contemporary fiction. Here, places find themselves in a void of significance, resolved by a final e­vent that, as Gerry Canavan writes in his paper concerning Margaret Atwood’s dysto­pian novels, “seems to have the capacity to shake the foundations of the system and jumpstart a history that now seems com­pletely moribund.”[2] Apocalypse becomes the only possible “happy” ending to capitalism, to the values of a system that altered the human species to its most despicable version, one that must surely be updated.

When we speak of “apocalyptic land­scapes” we refer to catastrophes revolving around extinction and abandonment. The myth of the endangered landscape, experi­enced as apocalyptic and post-catastrophic concerns contemporary literature from the perspective of addressing a subtle political content that positions humans in relation to their environment. In Oryx and Crake, Mar­garet Atwood explores these themes in a close, engaged manner: she composes this landscape of the end of the world while ap­proaching the tropes of consumerism and the failure of feeling in the context of a hy­per-commodified society. Not only is she interested in the potential future of a world ending, but she also explores the feelings and attitudes of the remnants. The world inhibited by these “last humans” – Jimmy, Toby and Ren – is a world in ruins. They are exiled in a landscape of loss and soli­tude, exploring the realms of destruction while building a sense of nostalgia for what was lost: an otherwise despicable society, marked by an increasing, deplorable sense of possession. In this respect, even the for­merly most despised commodities become objects of introspection and longing. We find ourselves in the unsettling presence of an unfinished world: a world that is to be appropriated in a fetishistic manner, cher­ished not because of what it used to repre­sent, but for the fact that it still is, constant, map-able, as if capable of rebirth. Giorgio Agamben underlined the importance that this aesthetics of the unfinished played in the context of modern art: fragmentarism is a stylistic instrument that plays a part in rethinking landscapes. The fragments re­place the destructed structure of the whole in the same logic of the fetish, where an object substitutes the absence of what is truly desired. Fetish and nostalgia are conn­ected by their manner of investing objects with uses other than their practical ones. I use these two concepts in order to discuss the attitude towards objects left behind in the context of post-apocalyptic narratives written from the point of view of a sole survivor. De-contextualized, un-inhibited, en­tire cities and their whole sceneries be­come subjects to nostalgia (for a world that was and shall nev­er come again), while the abandoned proof of a once sustained existence enters the fet­ish­istic regime, being involved in the mental process of substituting the whole with a part.

 “The fetish confronts us with the par­adox of an unattainable object that satisfies a human need precisely through it being unattainable. Insofar as it is a presence, the fetish object is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, im­material and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed”[3] writes Gior­gio Agamben, and we are inclined to see this type of attitude in Atwood’s novels, where Jimmy’s explorations of abandoned former Compounds are not only an action necessary for survival, but also a nostalgic exploration of a lost world, with its facticus, its artificial objects that are now useful for their reliquary potential. The first chapter in Oryx and Crake introduces Jimmy who, out of a useless habit, considering the context of the world having turned to a zero hour, “looks at his watch- stainless case, bur­nished aluminium band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman.”[4] The gesture is merely sym­bolic: “It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.”[5] Having lost its practical usage, the watch becomes an object of fetish, “both symbol of something and its negation.”[6]

The chapters following Jimmy’s trajec­tory through teenage describe him as a potential collector of lost words. He clings to dictionary terms that were useless and outdated in the manner a collector clings to objects that, having lost their very contexts, involve a feeling of the uncanny.  His post-apocalyptic fetishism mirrors his collection of words because “what the collector seeks in the object is something absolutely impal­pable to the noncollector, who only uses or possesses the object, just as the fetish does not coincide any way with the object in this material aspect.”[7] Jimmy invests the relics of the past with the capacity of evoking everything that has been lost. He is equally satisfied by all the objects that present the characteristics of having survived the “plague,” just as he did. They, as much as he does, negotiate the values of absence and substitution: exhausting the meaning of this “nothing” they attempt to replace.

Margaret Atwood’s depictions of a world inhabited and observed by its “last humans” is an attempt of mapping land­scapes of both hope, for a potential natural revival, and guilt, from the perspective of having the nature altered to the final, dra­matic consequences of its destruction. Jimmy witnesses not only the dusk of the human race, but the dawn of a new race, artificially created by his best friend, Crake, not long before the mass destruction biological weap­on killed almost the entire population of the Globe. The Crakers are humanoids of ex­quisite beauty and proverbial innocence, designed to perfect the flaws that lead to the human race’s ultimate destruction. They, however, inhabit the world of this now ex­tinct species and act like archaeologists in respect to the remains of their “ancestors”. For them, Jimmy is an alien, curious version of themselves, but also a teacher, watching and taking care of them with a mix of “envy” and false “nostalgia”[8]: false, because they embody the childhood he longed for and never actually experi­enced, considering the fact that it took place in a time when nature had already been compro­mised. The children, the prototypes of the new species appropriate the world as if new and pure. They too explore the remains of society, but their attitude is one of mere in­nocence. “They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hup­cap, a piano-key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A BlyssPluss container, empty, a Chickie Nobs Bucket O’Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.”[9] These objects have obviously lost their context and their utility: the “children” see them as the gifts of an absent God and cherish them as such. Jimmy sees in them as objects of mourning, “things from before,” the products of a special type of nostalgia, where “nostalgia is memory with the pain removed. The pain is today. We shed tears for the landscape we find no longer what it was, what we thought it was, or what we hoped it would be.”[10] Jimmy finds himself in the position of longing for a world he knew: the imposing efforts of civilization, concretized in architecture of the lost world meet a prominent process of destruction. He struggles to “hang on to words” (the odd, the rare, the dissolving words of past dictionaries) as a result of his need to make sense of the past.

 

he could keep a diary. Set down his impressions. There must be lots of pa­per lying around, in unburned interior spaces that are still leak-free, and pens and pencils; he’s seen them on his scavenging forays but he’s never both­ered taking any. He could emulate the captains of ships, in olden times – the ship going down in a storm, the captain in his cabin, doomed but in­trepid, fil­ling in the logbook. There were movies like that. Or castaways on desert islands, keeping their journals day by tedious day. Lists of supplies, notations on the weather, small actions performed – the sewing on of a button, the devouring of a clam. He too is a castaway of sorts. He could make lists. It could give his life some structure. But even a casta­way assumes a future reader, someone who’ll come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman can make no such as­sump­tions: he’ll have no future reader, be­cause the Crakers can’t read. Any read­er he can possibly imagine is in the past.”[11]

 

This fragment specifically depicts Jim­my’s relation to the world: he feels like a new Robinson, lacking the optimism of rediscovering the lost values of humanity. He is no more than an observer, no longer feeling at home, haunted by memories he can no longer make sense of.

As we saw in our paper regarding loca­tion and dislocation in modern dystopias,[12] once the space one sees as “home” is emp­tied of those very attributes that built its significance as such, it is, instead, invested with the potential of becoming a “bad place,” thus, a dystopian one. This place, destroyed by catastrophe, is not only bad or maladjusted to the subject’s expectations of comfort and security, it also becomes the depositary of unsettling phantasms that threaten to become parts of reality. Both destructive and horrifying, the images of a defamiliarized place give birth to specu­lative questions concerning the dystopian path such a present might, eventually, fol­low, while consequently triggering a nos­talgic perspective on the author’s present, transformed, in the context of his narrative, into a remote and desired past. Moreover, since the 20^th century’s imaginary is to be held responsible for spatializing time, one may also comment on a transfer of phobias from their temporal register to a spatial approach. We thus have ruin and decay be­coming part of the urban day to day devel­opment. Last human narratives document and interpret the ruins of civilization, while maintaining a tense relationship between the signifiers of this world and the language used in order to make sense of it. In other words, the surviving characters’ need to de­scribe a place no longer seen through col­lective, human eyes, a place lacking the re­ceptors of its potential descriptions, ques­tions the need for telling a story, per se, but also the manner in which a landscape that exists for one person solely may be distorted by sentimentality. Oryx and Crake empha­sizes this inner tension between the rein­vented nature, altered and corrupted for the benefits of a hyper-consumerist society that reached its final potential and has doomed itself to self-destruction and the memory of an idyllic nature, inhabiting nostalgic fan­ta­sies of the extreme ecologists. There is, however, a vanitas vanitatum feeling that grows on the structure of Jimmy’s story, who depicts an obvious contrast between the obscene reality of the world before, built around symbols of abjection and jouissance, and the sterile, depressing landscape of the new beginning. The heart-breaking scenes questioning the validity of decontextualized objects in the reliquary hypostases they pos­sess once the world has ended, while action rapidly moves to a past ignorant to the dan­gers already planting their seeds in its in­fer­tile ground maintains this effort of mapping a type of elegiac nostalgia. Jimmy mourns the loss of his world amongst the ruins of civilization. He recalls familiar landscapes that, to the reader, evoke dystopian spaces rather than luminous utopias. This incongru­ence, however, contributes to the feeling of alienation Atwood attempts to reflect through­out her novel. “When Jimmy was really little they’d lived in a Cape Cod–style frame house in one of the Modules” we read and envisage an aseptic environment that auto­matically assumes a more dangerous spatial reality, a world already destroyed due to greed and destructive efforts of so-called progress. The Compounds are closed soci­eties, citadels preserving an already extinct lifestyle, hyperreal cities where everything is a reproduction of a lost model, glorifying the realm of the simulacra, in Baudrillardian terms. “The furniture in it was called repro­duction. Jimmy was quite old before he realized what this word meant – that for each reproduction item, there was supposed to be an original somewhere. Or there had been once. Or something. The house, the pool, the furniture – all belonged to the OrganInc Compound, where the top people lived.”[13] . In the world-before, landscapes had been compromised: there were se­clud­ed, elitist Compounds and Pleeblands: “end­less billboards and neon signs and stretches of buildings, tall and short; endless dingy-looking streets, countless vehicles of all kinds, some of them with clouds of smoke coming out the back; thousands of people, hurrying, cheering, rioting,” places “outside the OrganInc walls and gates and search­lights” where public security was faulty and “things were unpredictable.” These places are invested with attributes of bad, dysto­pi­an spaces. We have discussed in the afore mention study on dystopian space the fact that an important number of studies con­cern­ing recent geographies focused on the subject of the post World War II massive building boom specifically reacted to the in­creasing speed of emergence of such place­less places, describing the psychological effects their impersonality might have had upon their inhabitants. Edward Relph placed these spaces under the umbrella-term of placelessness, and we see in Atwood’s nov­el a similar development as concerning the artificially created, septic environments and the former cities. Relph de­scribed the relationship new American landscapes imply, suggesting that “placelessness is not only a psychological condition but also a political phenomenon” whose effects “are not only individual or collective alienation but also may be the diminishment of political en­gage­ment and efficacy” because “land­scapes – shared spaces, recognizable bound­a­ries, identifiable landmarks, common sites of remembrance – help to establish relation­ships between people.”[14] In these contexts of space-creation, nostalgia comes as a key concept in investing places with a type of inherited meaning. Compounds and Pleeb­lands are built on a basically amnesic struc­ture. “Other companies, other countries, var­i­ous factions and plotters. There was too much hardware around, said Jimmy’s father. Too much hardware, too much software, too many hostile bioforms, too many weapons of every kind. And too much envy and fan­aticism and bad faith. Long ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes had lived in castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the ramparts so you could pour hot pitch on your enemies, said Jimmy’s father, and the Compounds were the same idea. Castles were for keep­ing you and your buddies nice and safe in­side, and for keeping everybody else out­side.”[15] These urban settings reflect the ter­ror of living in a lobotomized society, place­lessness being a central quality in dystopian spaces. It is the ultimate proof that memory and meaningful relationships have been can­celled in order to favour uniformity and the dissolution of all individual features.

Throughout Jimmy’s recollections of the world before the plague, Atwood depicts a constant apprehension before the change in the status of space. This cry for a self-destructing world is, in my opinion, similar to Rainer Maria Rilke’s pessimistic view over the loss of significance things and possessions were con­fronted with. The overall view of the novel is that this de­structured society was already doomed to destruction. Jimmy’s survival is seen as abnormal accident, an event that should not have occurred, but also a chance to revival the language of a creative lost species. Jimmy is, after all, described as a man of words, a reader, a poet, an abomination in itself. His survival is, perhaps, an ironic reminder of those elegiac cries of castaways that fill the world literature. There have been researchers who mirrored Atwood’s dystopia and the old English ruins, but I believe this perspective to be an over inter­pretation. What I do find of doubtless rel­e­vance is the manner in which the per­spec­tive of a last human involves in depicting the last things. The situation is different from that we explored in analysing Paul Auster’s Country of Last Things because there is no struggle in recovering the re­mains of the past. Jimmy, as opposed to Auster’s Anna Blume, collects memories, deconstructs them and, then, he lets go of them. Everything lasts in a state of decom­position, everything is simultaneous and al­ready lost.

The ecologist underlayer in Atwood’s novel, however, further explored in its se­quel, The Year of the Flood, claims that there is hope beneath destruction and that nature prevails over the dystopian urban landscapes of ruin and abandon.

 

 

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Notes

Ştefan Borbély
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
stefan.borbely@gmail.com

 

 

Utopian Schooling

 

 

Abstract: Clive Harber said that “all too often the hallmarks of conventional schooling are authoritarianism, boredom, irrelevance, frustration and alienation. Authoritarian schools are schools that reproduce and perpetuate not only the socio-economic and political inequalities of the surrounding society, but also the violent relationships that often go with them.” In Talleyrand’s words: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The paper analyzes several negative perceptions associated with conventional schooling and a few alternative or utopian projects meant to improve education. The text starts from the assumption that a few forms of schooling today (see École 42, inParis, for instance) resemble what yesterday was called utopia. It is also true that practical school regulators do not like utopias…

Keywords: Schooling; Education; Utopia; Dalton Schools; Waldorf Schools; Quentin Skinner; Henry David Thoreau; Walden.

 

 

Historically speaking, utopian schooling has paralleled classical, class- and teacher-centered education, but it has benefited from a lower attention than formal instruction. It is so because formal schooling has always been associated with power and its more or less direct means of social dissemination, while alternative, utopian, innovative education relies on discrepancy, anarchy, individualism and, eventually, freedom. Another difference relies on the willingness whether to accept the child as he or she is, that is, as an innocent, special, autonomous and growing human being, or to only perceive him as an unaccomplished adult. Seminal psychohistorian Lloyd deMause (Foundation of Psychohistory; History of Childhood, etc.) has said that there have been epochs which acknowledged the existence of children, perceiving them as different from their parents, and other epochs or cultural perspectives which denied such difference, considering that the child is nothing but an adult-to-be, without any further specification. Great men of history shared this belief, alongside a vast cohort of parents whose only interest was to get rid of their noisy creatures and to yoke them by silence and discipline. Talleyrand, for instance, considered that “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” According to the fathers of the French Revolution, the main aim of schooling is to train the child “for an occupation useful to the general public.”[1] The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, a British Utilitarian institution founded in 1811 proclaimed that the goal of schooling is “to discipline the infant poor to good and orderly habits,”[2] while in early modern France the schooling program explicitly formulated the task “to Christianize and to tame the children of the poor.”[3]  

Mary Jo Maines says that huge efforts were made in early modern Europeto “confiscate” education from particulars and concede it to the State, which became a formidable machine of human standardization and equalitarianism, and the fierce enemy of everyone who dared to be atypical. Due to this process, a subtle, socially approved equation built a paradoxical resemblance between school, prison and army, as their primary aim was to “tame” and discipline the subjects. The already quoted author remarked “the close connection between the particular development of the state in Germany, its military and fiscal concerns, and the development of the school system.” To achieve this, a new institution was founded, the Lehrseminarien, to the benefit of the future teachers and educators, who were such endowed with the certainties of an organized and centralized training. Mary Jo Maines remarks: “The Lehrseminarien, made obligatory for all male teachers in 1836, were designed to teach their pupils not to think independently, but to analyze new information in a safe context, to integrate it into the ordained system of values.”[4]

According to Pierre Bourdieu and his followers, the main aim of the state concerning education is to build a “cultural capital” and control it. Discipline and punish – as Foucault said. Accordingly, the classroom was organized in such a way as to express power – as well as obedience and humiliation. The French school laws of the 1830s made no exception in structuring the classroom as a ritual of receiving and obeying power. “In full view of the pupils – Mary Jo Maines summarizes the idea – [was] an image of Christ and a bust of the king, bearing the inscription Domine, Salvuum Fac Regum. The teacher’s desk was supposed to be mounted on a high platform to facilitate surveillance of the entire class.”[5] The future communist regimes repeated the pattern, hanging Lenin’s, Stalin’s and other communist leaders’ portraits in each classroom. So was the case ofRomania: I grew up having Nicolae Ceauşescu’s portrait above the front desk, whatever the place was, a school classroom or a university seminary room.

Hannah Arendt concluded that education “by its very nature cannot forgo either authority or tradition.”[6] Its very substance means staying conservative, which adds a paradox, fairly visible in every school reform of the 19^th and the 20^th centuries: the best school reformers were the conservatives. Liberal schooling was either inefficient or directly marginal and utopian. Coming to pupils, one had to choose between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural, multi-sided “little monster” (gently tamed in his awfully long Émile) and the 19^th-century stiff and implacable school planners, who considered that the only role of education was to reduce the “monster” to a plausible and well-disciplined citizen. Which, we may say, can be socially useful, but it is quite boring and one-sided for the subjects involved, because it suppresses any joy, creativity or playing. Within the mass psychoses of the 19^th century (only the 20^th century had more sophisticated maladies than the previous one) school started to be associated with hierarchical anxieties, the fear generated by the urge to achieve and neurosis. Thomas Hodskin was right in saying in the 1820s: “Men had better be without education than be educated by their rules; for the education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his pray, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.”[7] 

Toward the end of the 19^th century, two of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Mediations, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Schopenhauer as Educator, dealt with education. Let’s start with the second one. Schopenhauer as Educator traces a sharp distinction between the cautious, conservative form of schooling and the formative one. The former focuses on anti-biological and anti-life techniques of pedagogical mortification, while the latter on the educator seen as a “liberator.” Mortifying educators – Nietzsche asserts – have as their goals to suppress the spontaneity of the pupils, and to mould them into valid, functional and social tools. The other word for “mortification” is discipline; each state or political power loves disciplined subjects and hates those who disobey. On the contrary, the educator who “liberates” unleashes the complex energies inside their pupils and urges them to feel that they are actually not monomaniac, but pluralistic individuals, prone to ever-generating alternative roles within a provocative and diverse environment. By the midst of the 20^th century, Herbert Marcuse had denounced the alienation of the “one-dimensional” man, referred to as “square” by Norman Mailer in his formidable The White Negro. Let’s quote, for the moment, Nietzsche: “Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralyzed; your educators can be only your liberators.”[8]

Nietzsche’s previously published Untimely Mediation, entitled On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, names three ways of culturally and scholarly manipulating historicity: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical way of living and perceiving the past. Either we talk about the monuments opposed to the constructions of the present, or we mention the “antiquarian” perception of history, based on the uncritical assumption that what belongs to the past is necessarily better or more valuable than what we have in our present, both the “monumental” and the “antiquarian” forms of history suffocate the time being by continuously stuffing it with “dead” substances driven from the past. This is the perception that proclaims that our ancestors and the “dead people” who preceded us were by definition better and superior than us; it also says that the events of the past were necessarily greater than those given to us now, and that the past functions as an “almost-impossible-to-reach-now” standard, which makes us feel dwarfed and miserable. School – Nietzsche suggests – is the principal herald of such discrepancy. The past functions here as an overpowering educator, one that has got all the privileges and answers and, of course, the blessing of the disciplinary state it serves.

School tends to “over-saturate” the present with the past, Nietzsche says. As an institution belonging mainly to the “antiquarian” form of depositing and transmitting knowledge, “it knows how to preserve life, not how to engender it; it always undervalues that which is becoming, because it has no instinct for divining it.” Let’s quote him again, extensively: “The over-saturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and  dangerous to life in five respects: such an excess creates that contrast between inner and  outer which we have just discussed, and thereby weakens the personality; it leads an age to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree than any other age; it disrupts the instincts of a people, and hinders the individual no less than the whole in the attainment of maturity; it implants the belief, harmful at any time, in the old age of mankind, the belief that one is a latecomer and epigone; it leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism: in this mood, however, it develops more and more a prudent practical egoism through which the forces of life are paralyzed and at last destroyed.”[9]

Barely a century later, Clive Harber said that “all too often the hallmarks of conventional schooling are authoritarianism, boredom, irrelevance, frustration and alienation. Authoritarian schools are […] schools that reproduce and perpetuate not only the socio-economic and political inequalities of the surrounding society, but also the violent relationships that often go with them.”[10] Charles Handy – quoted by Clive Harber on the 28^th page of his provocative pamphlet – is a Professor of Business Organizations, specialized in seeing society and economy in terms of “organizational models.” Well, when analyzing the “model of organizational style specific to the British secondary school” system, he concluded that it resembled to a prison. We may remember that in the relatively recent remake of a classical movie, St. Trinian’s (2007, starring Rupert Everett, Talulah Riley, Gemma Arterton, etc.; directors: Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson), the Minister of Education played by Colin Firth used to be the headmaster of the national prison system, being shifted to the new assignment because of his former hardline “training.” Clive Harbor’s chapter titles are directly illuminating; let’s quote some: Authoritarian Schooling; School and Violence; Schooling as Terrorism; Schooling can make you ill; Schooling and learning to hate ‘the other’; Learning to Kill. He also concludes: “Historically, a key purpose for the creation of mass systems of formal schooling in industrializing countries was control and surveillance and preparation for subordinate roles in the workplace and wider society. This is why schooling was based on authoritarian modes of organization.”[11]

 You might remember the famous conveyor belt scene from the Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie (1982; director: Alan Parker; screenplay by Roger Waters), which accompanied the song Another Brick in the Wall. Four sets of images succeed one another. Being traumatized at school by a dictator type professor because he was writing poems during class, the protagonist named Pink sees a train carrying depersonalized, faceless humans, in a way similar to what the Nazis had done when transporting the Jews to the concentration camps, and after that the Another Brick in the Wall song scene comes, showing a totalitarian, dictatorial school, where pupils are deprived of their identity (they all finish by wearing grotesque masks), made to march and to fill standardized, colorless boxes, before finally falling into a huge, expressionist meat grinder, which transforms them into the docile “plaster” desired by the system. A fourth set of images suggest the coming countercultural revolt: the pupils rise against oppression, smashing their desks, the class furniture and everything else related to the “prison.”

It becomes easily understandable why the utopian schooling constantly challenged the traditional one, offering their fans the sense of self- and collective fulfillment they were not able to find elsewhere. In Democracy and Education (1916), John Dewey insisted on the necessity of “creative education,” starting from the Hegelian assumption that the role of the education is to construct the future, by ensuring an ever-increasing social continuity. In Hegel’s famous evolutionary model, history and civilization can be compared to an ever-growing spiral. Accordingly, the creative, rational minds make the spiral larger and larger, which means that the very essence of humanity is not so much conservation as progress. School is, in Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a conservative institution, and one cannot expect to be reformed from within. As a consequence, those who dare to contradict inertia by breaking the rules become essential to the system, especially because they carry out the negativity and revolt which are the key attitudes of any reformation.

Paulo Freire, one of the leading figures of the contemporary school emancipation, said in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1990) that the difference between traditional and innovative schooling lies in the role assigned to the teacher. The traditional system, which reproduces the formula of power, is teacher-centered, while the new way is pupil-centered, the shift being not at all easy to perform, because what is essential in this equation is not pedagogy, but the mechanism of power behind it. The role of the school is generally decided from beyond, functioning as a system of social and political persuasion which cannot be easily dismantled. Add to this the narcissistic, mirror syndrome. A good society – regulators say – is the society whose education functions smoothly. That is: any dysfunctional education mirrors back to the system which harbors it.  This is the motif – Paulo Freire says – that cautious societies love teacher-centered systems: “The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are the mere objects.”[12] Moreover, “the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the student.”[13] It is almost impossible to step further without saying that there is a certain Marxist spice in all these and other similar considerations. I have already quoted Gayatri Spivak who said that the essence of education lies in sharing or not what is “subaltern.” Similar to her, in Paulo Freire’s view, pedagogy is a “revolutionary initiative from below.”

The most common argument related to the urge that traditional schooling must be dismantled asserts that it has lost its contact with everyday life. Schools have impenetrable walls, and so have convents. Nietzsche said that the European educator and philosopher are the direct offspring of the priest, because they preach “pure” knowledge, devoid of reality, and are extremely reluctant to acknowledge what is really going on around them. The strongest myth of the European philosophical way of life is Kant: he never left Königsberg, and was so precise and ritualized even with his leisure walks that the locals could fix their watches after his daily apparitions. Another myth is that of the “learning province” (Goethe, Hesse, etc.): a fully ritualized enclosure full of smart high achievers, whose main anxiety is to keep disturbances and history outside the crystal fences of their construction. Again, Nietzsche was the pioneering figure who denounced apprentice mystification. The seemingly identitarian obsession of Classical Greece was Socrates, he said; that is, the man who separated intellect from nature (physis), telling their compatriots that thinking is more important than living. That is why you cannot see a Greek responsible person “sub tegmine fagi”: everyone stays within  the walls and is concerned with dialectics.

There are two types of utopian schooling. The first is specific to utopias and dystopias: the free and marvelous breeding of emancipated and perpetually happy children, who do not think that schooling is a burden, but a source of joy and self-realization. The second type is the practical one, directly challenging reality and its constituent system: Maria Montessori’s Casa dei bambini (1907, Rome), the Swiss Adolph Ferrière’s anti-book-based schooling, Jean-Ovide Decroly’s “project work” or Helen Parkhurst’s famous “Dalton Plan Schools,” launched in New York in 1914 after Parkhurst had spent a few months in Italy as Maria Montessori’s assistant. Several traits were shared by all these experiments, aside from the fact that they were not simple intellectual projections.

The first is plurality, starting from the assumption that children have pluralistic perceptions and even multiple personalities, due to their pluralistic role-playing. A child, Jean-Ovide Decroly said, cannot be contained into a single garment, and he cannot focus with the same attention on all the subjects taught in class. A class is an entity governed by diversity, not by uniformity; accordingly, some children can be attracted by the abstract and fascinating world of logarithms, but others might be completely opaque to such a fascinating topic, being interested in alternative disciplines like geography, humanities and even art. Decroly’s “project work” system proposed pluralistic “centers of interest,” built around flexible timing units, which is a second characteristic of this type of innovative education. Generally speaking, time is an exquisite tool for social and personal manipulation. Before reaching the calendar, time is politics. Dictators were fond of timing: those who control time control power. Caesar, for instance, launched a new calendar, the Catholic Church repeated the gesture in 1582 (that is: after the Reformation) and so did the French Revolution. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the frightening Miss Ratched controls time behind the glass windows of her seemingly impenetrable booth, stopping, slowing down or hurrying the clock whenever needed. Sectioning time into pre-determined, one-hour units in school, Decroly considered, is a means of exerting despotism over students by limiting their curiosity and pleasure. To challenge time anxiety, he conceived flexible, “natural” timings for different activities, inviting pupils to “take their time,” to feel that school timing was something else than impersonal rigidity and handcuffing.

Utopian schools have been, generally speaking, experimental teaching units. In her seminal Education on The Dalton Plan (1922), Helen Parkhurst stipulated that “broadly speaking the old type of school may be said to stand for culture, while the modern type of schools stand for experience.”[14] Making school an enjoyable and playful activity was the Daltonists’ main concern. No bells, no rigid timetables, no interruptions, but flexible time units, allowing pupils to concentrate on their experiments as long as they wanted to. Personal interests are twofold in a child, Helen Parkhurst concluded: the “strong” subjects highly challenge his interest, while the “weak” ones make him vegetate. No prejudice or punishment for that, nevertheless, because experiment relies on energy, whose captions are the things and forms existing around us, which invite us to accomplish plenitude. Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s ideas lie behind this invitation to roundness, plasticity and fulfillment; I do not wish to assert that Ms. Parkhurst directly read those philosophers, but merely that their ideas were “in the air,” accessible to everyone.

Focusing on energy means that we have to leave aside Locke’s idea about the allegedly initial “tabula rasa” of conscience, which is to be filled with knowledge and experience during a person’s biological evolution. On the contrary, energy is something deep, like Jung’s archetypes, which predetermines the individual, making him part of an archaic, cosmic “mould.” It is encapsulated in each person from birth, being liberated through education, experiment and – a new word from the mythical ages – initiation. Actually, there is no such thing as energy conceived as a single, unifying entity. There are series of energies, in a pluralistic world marked by discrepancy and difference. Rudolf Steiner, the father of anthroposophy, published his The Education of the Child in 1907, insisting that education should be conceived as a spiritual activity, not as a process of simply gaining knowledge through listening and memorization. The new tools of schooling are intuition, inspiration and imagination. Building up a developmental scheme for the child, structured in three successive steps (sensorial perception, imagination, judgment), Steiner insisted on the fact that “judgment” is reached through sensorial implication and imagination. When launching the firstWaldorfSchool in 1919, pupils were not ranked according to their grades and to their already accomplished results, but were grouped on criteria based on their temperament (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic). In a way which resembled the archaic understanding of the Indian castes, Waldorf teachers asserted that each temperament has its own particular way of attaining spiritual plenitude. Schooling was conducted by the free and playful principles of diversity, which eliminated the frustration derived from the will to level and standardize every subject.

Henry David Thoreau’s biggest dissatisfaction rose from his belief that birth had thrown him into a “dull society.” “I have lived some thirty years on this planet – he bitterly remarks in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) -, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything.”[15] For the great majority of people, life is not liberty but “serfdom,” Thoreau sighed: they have become “serfs of the soil,” serfs of the commerce and, generally speaking, the serfs of their desire to be accepted by the others, to gain fortune and esteem. As such – Thoreau suggested – life around him resembled to a frantic track-and-field competition, which separated the victors from those who ran behind, and generated a huge amount of negativity and despair: “The mass of man lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…”[16] 

The author did not go “to the desperate country” but to the woods, building a cabin by Walden Pond, Mass., on the remote shore of a wonderful lake, “a mile away from any neighbour,” where he spent two years and two months in a relative complete reclusion. His aim was to attain purity, simplicity and innocence in contact by directly sharing the energies and rhythms of nature.[17] Thoreau’s inspiration came from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essays, Nature, published in 1836. Anticipating Nietzsche, Emerson denounced in the first lines of his text the inhibitive passion for the past his generation had: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.”[18] Schools and everyday people teach us categories and words, how to label things and how to structure them into systems. But “words – Emerson wrote – are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish us.” The same is valid for society as a whole, which offers us nothing more than “degradations.” The only solution is Nature, together with its unity and subtle mystery, conceived by Emerson as a “plantation of God.” Nature is twofold, material and spiritual, and so is our existence. By searching the material layers of the universe we acquire a “degraded” knowledge indicating that there is something beyond it. In order to reach above, we need a secondary, spiritual knowledge, based on symbols, on a special feeling of Platonic “beauty” and on receptive innocence: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eyes and the heart of the child.”[19]

B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) is a re-written, almost classical utopia, based on a generally admitted composition stereotype of many utopias, namely the travel or the visit. It can be found in different forms through all times, from the sailing to the unknown waters to the shipwreck or the immersion into an unknown cave. Thomas Morus’s Utopia is such a visit: the sailor Raphael Hythloday travels to the “New World” and tells the author about the marvellous isle he visited there. In Skinner’s novel, several academics (one of them is sharply sceptical) visit a utopian community run by one of their former colleagues, T. E. Frazier. Apart from what they expected when recalling the hippies and their filthy abandonment, the rooms and social venues in Walden Two are glamorous, the inhabitants are elegantly – but not lavishly – dressed and clean. The community is ruled by the Board of the Planners (three men, three women), which structure members into four functional branches: planners, managers, scientists and workers. Although free, they are not democratic in choosing careers. Rulers are not elected, but named, in order to avoid inappropriate or wrong nominations. There is no leisure class and no resentment or frustration, because what is negative has been removed from the community: “The main thing is, we encourage our people to view every habit or custom with an eye to possible improvement. A constant experimental attitude toward everything – that’s all we need.”[20]

By carefully planning the “cultural engineering” of the community, the rulers avoid letting it become a typically regressive, “mythical” hippy society. “Our point of view here – the host Frazier says – isn’t atavistic. […] We avoid the temptation to return to primitive modes of farming and industry.”[21] Propriety is not formally forbidden, but it is considered simply unnecessary by the members. They pay with labour credits for being there, but nobody complains: work is another word for pleasure: “We simply avoid uncreative and uninteresting work.”[22]

Childrearing and education are specific chapters in Walden Two, and are carefully planned. Infants are kept undressed in warm, community “cubicles,” with nothing around them but diapers. It might seem odd to a visitor to see the naked kids strolling around in collective “aquariums,” but the Waldensiens consider that “clothing and blankets keep the babies from exercising,”[23] and are therefore discarded. Maternal love is replaced by radiant and sincere collective tenderness, because everyone can come into the cubicles and play with the children. When growing up, kids are taught “techniques of learning,” which first of all mean practical teaching. For instance, pupils learn biology in the garden or in the woods, and anatomy in the slaughterhouse. Unnecessary, abstract knowledge is discarded, and so are the millions and millions of volumes of world literature, reduced by the planners to an “essential library.” Teaching is non-political: “Keep out of politics and away of government, except for practical and temporary purposes.”[24] Teenagers marry early and procreate immediately after their wedding, because of a thorough and minute procreation planning concerned to find the perfect match for partners. In other to avoid mistakes, the future mothers and fathers contact the Manager of Marriages, who checks their records and charts in order to identify their aptitudes. If their records do not fit (because of intellectual discrepancy, for instance, but there are also tens of similar reasons), they are advised to give up or to postpone marriage until a most suitable partner is found.

Three special characteristics of Walden Two education resonate with several ideas we have already touched upon in different sections of this paper. The community functions as an open-minded society, which says that it is opened to the surrounding world and to modernity. “Utopias usually spring from a rejection of modern life,” Frazier asserts.[25] This is not the case with Walden Two, where children are shown the big cities, technology or leisure, but they simply feel not attracted by them. On the other hand, the community does not provide or require any religious training. If they want to, the parents can teach the children about God, but it is not compulsory. Anyhow, we could imagine that God has a different representation in Walden Two than our Almighty Father from the Bible: He does not punish, does not reprimand and does not exert anxiety, functioning, wherever He shows up, somehow like a tender and soft-handed brother. Sin is unknown in Walden Two, where the Genesis is an optional, generally neglected subject to read. Another underrated school topic is history, which is “honoured in Walden Two only as entertainment.”[26] The ancestor-generated anxiety does not function in the community.

Remember, in order to sense the contrast, what Talleyrand said about education: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The already quoted Stanley Aronowitz (Against Schooling. For an Education That Matters, 2008) is a master of alternative, utopian schooling, being directly involved in several non-conventional teaching institutions. His book provides details concerning a special experimental school, Park East High, opened in the basement of a Catholic Church located not far from Harlem, in New York City in the fall of 1970. The school started with no principal, and recruited its staff outside the restrictions imposed by the teachers’ union. Its aim was to provide a free, enjoyable and creative education, which meant that “classroom practice was more than supplemented by extensive use of the vast resources of the city.”[27] For instance, biology classes moved out toCentral Park. You might guess how the experiment concluded: with the arrival of a conventional principal…

 

 

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Notes

Ştefan Borbély
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
stefan.borbely@gmail.com

 

 

Utopian Schooling

 

 

Abstract: Clive Harber said that “all too often the hallmarks of conventional schooling are authoritarianism, boredom, irrelevance, frustration and alienation. Authoritarian schools are schools that reproduce and perpetuate not only the socio-economic and political inequalities of the surrounding society, but also the violent relationships that often go with them.” In Talleyrand’s words: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The paper analyzes several negative perceptions associated with conventional schooling and a few alternative or utopian projects meant to improve education. The text starts from the assumption that a few forms of schooling today (see École 42, inParis, for instance) resemble what yesterday was called utopia. It is also true that practical school regulators do not like utopias…

Keywords: Schooling; Education; Utopia; Dalton Schools; Waldorf Schools; Quentin Skinner; Henry David Thoreau; Walden.

 

 

Historically speaking, utopian schooling has paralleled classical, class- and teacher-centered education, but it has benefited from a lower attention than formal instruction. It is so because formal schooling has always been associated with power and its more or less direct means of social dissemination, while alternative, utopian, innovative education relies on discrepancy, anarchy, individualism and, eventually, freedom. Another difference relies on the willingness whether to accept the child as he or she is, that is, as an innocent, special, autonomous and growing human being, or to only perceive him as an unaccomplished adult. Seminal psychohistorian Lloyd deMause (Foundation of Psychohistory; History of Childhood, etc.) has said that there have been epochs which acknowledged the existence of children, perceiving them as different from their parents, and other epochs or cultural perspectives which denied such difference, considering that the child is nothing but an adult-to-be, without any further specification. Great men of history shared this belief, alongside a vast cohort of parents whose only interest was to get rid of their noisy creatures and to yoke them by silence and discipline. Talleyrand, for instance, considered that “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” According to the fathers of the French Revolution, the main aim of schooling is to train the child “for an occupation useful to the general public.”[1] The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, a British Utilitarian institution founded in 1811 proclaimed that the goal of schooling is “to discipline the infant poor to good and orderly habits,”[2] while in early modern France the schooling program explicitly formulated the task “to Christianize and to tame the children of the poor.”[3]  

Mary Jo Maines says that huge efforts were made in early modern Europeto “confiscate” education from particulars and concede it to the State, which became a formidable machine of human standardization and equalitarianism, and the fierce enemy of everyone who dared to be atypical. Due to this process, a subtle, socially approved equation built a paradoxical resemblance between school, prison and army, as their primary aim was to “tame” and discipline the subjects. The already quoted author remarked “the close connection between the particular development of the state in Germany, its military and fiscal concerns, and the development of the school system.” To achieve this, a new institution was founded, the Lehrseminarien, to the benefit of the future teachers and educators, who were such endowed with the certainties of an organized and centralized training. Mary Jo Maines remarks: “The Lehrseminarien, made obligatory for all male teachers in 1836, were designed to teach their pupils not to think independently, but to analyze new information in a safe context, to integrate it into the ordained system of values.”[4]

According to Pierre Bourdieu and his followers, the main aim of the state concerning education is to build a “cultural capital” and control it. Discipline and punish – as Foucault said. Accordingly, the classroom was organized in such a way as to express power – as well as obedience and humiliation. The French school laws of the 1830s made no exception in structuring the classroom as a ritual of receiving and obeying power. “In full view of the pupils – Mary Jo Maines summarizes the idea – [was] an image of Christ and a bust of the king, bearing the inscription Domine, Salvuum Fac Regum. The teacher’s desk was supposed to be mounted on a high platform to facilitate surveillance of the entire class.”[5] The future communist regimes repeated the pattern, hanging Lenin’s, Stalin’s and other communist leaders’ portraits in each classroom. So was the case ofRomania: I grew up having Nicolae Ceauşescu’s portrait above the front desk, whatever the place was, a school classroom or a university seminary room.

Hannah Arendt concluded that education “by its very nature cannot forgo either authority or tradition.”[6] Its very substance means staying conservative, which adds a paradox, fairly visible in every school reform of the 19^th and the 20^th centuries: the best school reformers were the conservatives. Liberal schooling was either inefficient or directly marginal and utopian. Coming to pupils, one had to choose between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural, multi-sided “little monster” (gently tamed in his awfully long Émile) and the 19^th-century stiff and implacable school planners, who considered that the only role of education was to reduce the “monster” to a plausible and well-disciplined citizen. Which, we may say, can be socially useful, but it is quite boring and one-sided for the subjects involved, because it suppresses any joy, creativity or playing. Within the mass psychoses of the 19^th century (only the 20^th century had more sophisticated maladies than the previous one) school started to be associated with hierarchical anxieties, the fear generated by the urge to achieve and neurosis. Thomas Hodskin was right in saying in the 1820s: “Men had better be without education than be educated by their rules; for the education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his pray, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.”[7] 

Toward the end of the 19^th century, two of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Mediations, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Schopenhauer as Educator, dealt with education. Let’s start with the second one. Schopenhauer as Educator traces a sharp distinction between the cautious, conservative form of schooling and the formative one. The former focuses on anti-biological and anti-life techniques of pedagogical mortification, while the latter on the educator seen as a “liberator.” Mortifying educators – Nietzsche asserts – have as their goals to suppress the spontaneity of the pupils, and to mould them into valid, functional and social tools. The other word for “mortification” is discipline; each state or political power loves disciplined subjects and hates those who disobey. On the contrary, the educator who “liberates” unleashes the complex energies inside their pupils and urges them to feel that they are actually not monomaniac, but pluralistic individuals, prone to ever-generating alternative roles within a provocative and diverse environment. By the midst of the 20^th century, Herbert Marcuse had denounced the alienation of the “one-dimensional” man, referred to as “square” by Norman Mailer in his formidable The White Negro. Let’s quote, for the moment, Nietzsche: “Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralyzed; your educators can be only your liberators.”[8]

Nietzsche’s previously published Untimely Mediation, entitled On thhose philosophers, but merely that their ideas were “in the air,” accessible to everyone.

Focusing on energy means that we have to leave aside Locke’s idea about the allegedly initial “tabula rasa” of conscience, which is to be filled with knowledge and experience during a person’s biological evolution. On the contrary, energy is something deep, like Jung’s archetypes, which predetermines the individual, making him part of an archaic, cosmic “mould.” It is encapsulated in each person from birth, being liberated through education, experiment and – a new word from the mythical ages – initiation. Actually, there is no such thing as energy conceived as a single, unifying entity. There are series of energies, in a pluralistic world marked by discrepancy and difference. Rudolf Steiner, the father of anthroposophy, published his The Education of the Child in 1907, insisting that education should be conceived as a spiritual activity, not as a process of simply gaining knowledge through listening and memorization. The new tools of schooling are intuition, inspiration and imagination. Building up a developmental scheme for the child, structured in three successive steps (sensorial perception, imagination, judgment), Steiner insisted on the fact that “judgment” is reached through sensorial implication and imagination. When launching the firstWaldorfSchool in 1919, pupils were not ranked according to their grades and to their already accomplished results, but were grouped on criteria based on their temperament (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic). In a way which resembled the archaic understanding of the Indian castes, Waldorf teachers asserted that each temperament has its own particular way of attaining spiritual plenitude. Schooling was conducted by the free and playful principles of diversity, which eliminated the frustration derived from the will to level and standardize every subject.

Henry David Thoreau’s biggest dissatisfaction rose from his belief that birth had thrown him into a “dull society.” “I have lived some thirty years on this planet – he bitterly remarks in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) -, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything.”[15] For the great majority of people, life is not liberty but “serfdom,” Thoreau sighed: they have become “serfs of the soil,” serfs of the commerce and, generally speaking, the serfs of their desire to be accepted by the others, to gain fortune and esteem. As such – Thoreau suggested – life around him resembled to a frantic track-and-field competition, which separated the victors from those who ran behind, and generated a huge amount of negativity and despair: “The mass of man lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…”[16] 

The author did not go “to the desperate country” but to the woods, building a cabin by Walden Pond, Mass., on the remote shore of a wonderful lake, “a mile away from any neighbour,” where he spent two years and two months in a relative complete reclusion. His aim was to attain purity, simplicity and innocence in contact by directly sharing the energies and rhythms of nature.[17] Thoreau’s inspiration came from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essays, Nature, published in 1836. Anticipating Nietzsche, Emerson denounced in the first lines of his text the inhibitive passion for the past his generation had: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.”[18] Schools and everyday people teach us categories and words, how to label things and how to structure them into systems. But “words – Emerson wrote – are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish us.” The same is valid for society as a whole, which offers us nothing more than “degradations.” The only solution is Nature, together with its unity and subtle mystery, conceived by Emerson as a “plantation of God.” Nature is twofold, material and spiritual, and so is our existence. By searching the material layers of the universe we acquire a “degraded” knowledge indicating that there is something beyond it. In order to reach above, we need a secondary, spiritual knowledge, based on symbols, on a special feeling of Platonic “beauty” and on receptive innocence: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eyes and the heart of the child.”[19]

B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) is a re-written, almost classical utopia, based on a generally admitted composition stereotype of many utopias, namely the travel or the visit. It can be found in different forms through all times, from the sailing to the unknown waters to the shipwreck or the immersion into an unknown cave. Thomas Morus’s Utopia is such a visit: the sailor Raphael Hythloday travels to the “New World” and tells the author about the marvellous isle he visited there. In Skinner’s novel, several academics (one of them is sharply sceptical) visit a utopian community run by one of their former colleagues, T. E. Frazier. Apart from what they expected when recalling the hippies and their filthy abandonment, the rooms and social venues in Walden Two are glamorous, the inhabitants are elegantly – but not lavishly – dressed and clean. The community is ruled by the Board of the Planners (three men, three women), which structure members into four functional branches: planners, managers, scientists and workers. Although free, they are not democratic in choosing careers. Rulers are not elected, but named, in order to avoid inappropriate or wrong nominations. There is no leisure class and no resentment or frustration, because what is negative has been removed from the community: “The main thing is, we encourage our people to view every habit or custom with an eye to possible improvement. A constant experimental attitude toward everything – that’s all we need.”[20]

By carefully planning the “cultural engineering” of the community, the rulers avoid letting it become a typically regressive, “mythical” hippy society. “Our point of view here – the host Frazier says – isn’t atavistic. […] We avoid the temptation to return to primitive modes of farming and industry.”[21] Propriety is not formally forbidden, but it is considered simply unnecessary by the members. They pay with labour credits for being there, but nobody complains: work is another word for pleasure: “We simply avoid uncreative and uninteresting work.”[22]

Childrearing and education are specific chapters in Walden Two, and are carefully planned. Infants are kept undressed in warm, community “cubicles,” with nothing around them but diapers. It might seem odd to a visitor to see the naked kids strolling around in collective “aquariums,” but the Waldensiens consider that “clothing and blankets keep the babies from exercising,”[23] and are therefore discarded. Maternal love is replaced by radiant and sincere collective tenderness, because everyone can come into the cubicles and play with the children. When growing up, kids are taught “techniques of learning,” which first of all mean practical teaching. For instance, pupils learn biology in the garden or in the woods, and anatomy in the slaughterhouse. Unnecessary, abstract knowledge is discarded, and so are the millions and millions of volumes of world literature, reduced by the planners to an “essential library.” Teaching is non-political: “Keep out of politics and away of government, except for practical and temporary purposes.”[24] Teenagers marry early and procreate immediately after their wedding, because of a thorough and minute procreation planning concerned to find the perfect match for partners. In other to avoid mistakes, the future mothers and fathers contact the Manager of Marriages, who checks their records and charts in order to identify their aptitudes. If their records do not fit (because of intellectual discrepancy, for instance, but there are also tens of similar reasons), they are advised to give up or to postpone marriage until a most suitable partner is found.

Three special characteristics of Walden Two education resonate with several ideas we have already touched upon in different sections of this paper. The community functions as an open-minded society, which says that it is opened to the surrounding world and to modernity. “Utopias usually spring from a rejection of modern life,” Frazier asserts.[25] This is not the case with Walden Two, where children are shown the big cities, technology or leisure, but they simply feel not attracted by them. On the other hand, the community does not provide or require any religious training. If they want to, the parents can teach the children about God, but it is not compulsory. Anyhow, we could imagine that God has a different representation in Walden Two than our Almighty Father from the Bible: He does not punish, does not reprimand and does not exert anxiety, functioning, wherever He shows up, somehow like a tender and soft-handed brother. Sin is unknown in Walden Two, where the Genesis is an optional, generally neglected subject to read. Another underrated school topic is history, which is “honoured in Walden Two only as entertainment.”[26] The ancestor-generated anxiety does not function in the community.

Remember, in order to sense the contrast, what Talleyrand said about education: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The already quoted Stanley Aronowitz (Against Schooling. For an Education That Matters, 2008) is a master of alternative, utopian schooling, being directly involved in several non-conventional teaching institutions. His book provides details concerning a special experimental school, Park East High, opened in the basement of a Catholic Church located not far from Harlem, in New York City in the fall of 1970. The school started with no principal, and recruited its staff outside the restrictions imposed by the teachers’ union. Its aim was to provide a free, enjoyable and creative education, which meant that “classroom practice was more than supplemented by extensive use of the vast resources of the city.”[27] For instance, biology classes moved out toCentral Park. You might guess how the experiment concluded: with the arrival of a conventional principal…

 

 

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Natio