To Inform You, Not to Amuse You

Jacquelyn Suter

At the recent World Economic Forum at Davos – the world’s largest gathering of economic
experts who ponder extreme scenarios and drink a lot of expresso – an unexpected person was
in attendance: Margaret Atwood, one of the world’s finest contemporary writers.

As these experts mulled economic implications of scenarios such as diminishing oil reserves,
food and water supplies, and environmental catastrophes, I wondered if any of these participants
had read Atwood’s work. For all the economists’ theoretical musings, Atwood had already
fleshed out in fiction what these end-games would look and feel like. Maybe she was there to put
finger to wind for her future themes.

Dystopia is the name for this type of writing. Set in a future time when civil society has broken
down because of manmade disaster or crippling political repression, dystopian fiction is a
projected exaggeration of what we may already glimpse or sense in our contemporary society.
Aldous Huxley said this type of fiction “can interest us only if its prophecies might come true.”

Fictional societies of extreme socio-political repression had already been described in two well-
known classics, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948).
Huxley said about the fictive world he created: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in
which the all-powerful…control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because
they loved their servitude.” As Atwood said in one of her first dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s
Tale (1986), “from a distance it looks like peace.”

In Huxley and Orwell, the societies are bleak and unforgiving. Hope is absent. Here’s the last
lines of 1984: “…the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big
Brother.”
For all that we now understand about potential environmental disaster since Huxley and Orwell
wrote, one would think that dystopian works would get irremediably more bleak and hopeless.
But in some of the best, most recent of these novels, this is surprisingly not the case.

Let’s track this idea first in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. "I would like to believe this is a story
I’m telling…I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a
better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an
ending…and real life will come after it," says the lead character, Offred – a story set in a
totalitarian theocracy which overthrew the US government after a series of catastrophes. Here,
people are segregated into strict hierarchy, and the only role for women is to breed.

Offred does escape, however, to write this story we now read, but we don’t know whether she
was recaptured. Ending in ambiguity, we can inscribe ‘hope’ if we wish -- her above quote would
certainly lead us in that direction. Powerfully written, The Handmaid’s Tale is prelude to two
subsequent Atwood dystopias.

“The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment…and the doctrine of unintended
consequences is in full spate.” This is a quote from Atwood’s next dystopia, Oryx and Crake
(2003), but it can apply equally to Atwood’s most recent fiction, The Year of the Flood (2009).
With these two novels, we now enter a world where bioengineered life forms have run amok:
luminous green rabbits and gene-spliced animals such as wolvogs – killer wolves that wag their
tails invitingly like affectionate dogs.

The characters’ day job? Finding edible food in an environment where all social contract has
broken down and the world as we know it doesn’t exist. Their side job? Poignantly, “getting time
over with” in a world where there is no time. And how did events like this come to pass?
Innocently enough, of course, trying to create a ‘better’ world and alleviate human suffering by
tinkering with our ancient, messy primate brains – eliminating, among other things, inconvenient
emotions like love. But however unconvincing, familiar human emotions would still seem to
spring eternal.

Towards the end of Oryx and Crake as the main character, Snowman, awakes one morning
perched for protection in his favorite tree, he notices the sunrise beyond ruined towers in the
distance. “Rapture,” he thinks, “after everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so
beautiful? Because it is.”

Similarly, the ending of The Year of the Flood, inclines toward humaneness in the form of
empathy for captured killers, flying in the face of all survivalist common sense. Snowman –
appearing as a character in this novel too – hears the faint music he has periodically perceived in
Oryx and Crake: “Listen to the music….You can’t kill the music…You can’t!”

Margaret Atwood is not the only contemporary author to write disquieting dystopian fiction.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a classic of that genre as well. Its narrative follows similar
contours as Atwood’s: relentless survival in a world devastated beyond all recognition. As in so
much of McCarthy’s work, there’s at least one character in each novel who is a moral compass.
In The Road, that would be the small boy who wanders the wasteland with his hopeless father
who says to his son, “you have to carry this fire inside you.” At the end of The Road, the father
dies, but the reader is left to understand that the son will be cared for by another family who also
‘carries the fire.’ This ‘fire’ is hope.

In The Year of the Flood, the leader of God’s Gardeners, a cult-like group who strive to maintain
respect for life amidst all the chaos, recites all the names of those people and entities who have
destroyed the earth for wealth and power and asks that we do the hardest thing – forgive them.
But against the nightmare scenarios these two authors have taken pains to create, what are we to
make of expressions of hope and forgiveness? Are we to unquestioningly accept their
appearance as a deus-ex-machina of sorts, or should we cast a critical mind toward this?

Timing matters. To forgive at a point when there’s no other reasonable course of action is easy.
However, to forgive when impending devastation can still be reversed is something else –
especially when ‘naming’ will allow one to see clearly the way to rectification. The same for hope
– it’s only a viable sentiment when there’s a realistic wedge from which it can emerge and change
the future course of events.

In The Road, The Year of the Flood, and Oryx and Crake there appears to be no chance to
change the course of catastrophe – worldwide damage has already been irreversibly done. If
dystopian fiction is ‘to inform us, not to amuse us,’ hope would seem to be tragically misplaced
and forgiveness outrageous or…the very last noble sentiment of doomed humanity.

In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred voices what many might feel about destruction resulting
from inappropriate use of wealth and power: “Who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.
Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”

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