(Insert Dystopian Dystopia Here)

Posted on by under Humanities, School

Hello.

So, it’s been a while since my last post and things are… different, to say the least. There’s an ongoing global pandemic. Schools and businesses are shut down except for “essential work”. People are protesting because they want haircuts. In short, it’s a mess.

In fact, you might even compare it to a dystopia, which is precisely what we did in our most recent project.

Well, actually, before we did that, we did an assignment where we broke into small groups and designed our own utopias. Parker and I pitched a world with no problems, lots of snacks, a muppet government, and a beautiful flag that I made in all of five minutes.


Aside from highlighting my graphic design skills, this assignment allowed us an insight into everyone’s idea of a “perfect” world. That the answers varied greatly, and that most people designed fairly outlandish fantasy worlds, both speak to the fact that a perfect world cannot really exist. It’s difficult to even seriously conceptualize what a real life utopia would look like.

It’s a lot easier to picture a real life dystopia, since we’re essentially living in one, but in order to answer our driving question – how do literary dystopias help us understand what is happening now – we also had to dive into some not-so-real-life dystopias. We were given a list of four novels to choose from: George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Max Brooks’ World War Z.

I chose to read Station Eleven, which follows the impact of a flu pandemic on the lives of several characters at different points in time. Aside from being about a flu pandemic, the novel is set in Canada, and unlike many dystopias, a portion of it takes place in the present day. All of this made the story feel very grounded in reality, but it also meant that reading it hit pretty close to home.

The similarities to current events did make it easier to pick topics when we had to write paragraphs connecting the events of the book to the present day, although I initially misunderstood the assignment and just wrote a paragraph analyzing the use of multiple narrators throughout the book. On my second try, I talked about people intentionally breaking social distancing restrictions, and even directly protesting against them.

Who's telling the story? Why do you think the author chose this narrator? Station Eleven is an interesting story in that the perspective changes from chapter to chapter, jumping between Jeevan, Kirsten, Arthur, Miranda, Clark, and in some cases – as in the chapter that is just a list of things people can’t do post-collapse – the perspective seems to be purely that of the omniscient narrator. Certain sections, such as the ongoing interview with Kirsten, or the chapter of letters that Arthur wrote, are also epistolary. Despite this, I think that the main character is Kirsten, and that by telling the stories of other characters who have had an impact on her life, we the reader gain a deeper understanding of her story; in some cases, one that she herself doesn’t even have. I think that this is a good writing tool for a story like Station Eleven where the reader isn’t instantly familiar with the world that the story takes place in, and may need to be directly communicated information that would be implicit knowledge for the characters. I think that the author has chosen to focus on Kirsten’s story because she is both a character who can remember things from before and after the collapse, as any reader who imagined themselves having to go through the collapse would be, and a character who is constantly asking questions and trying to learn about the world, which the reader would be doing as well, and in this way can act as an audience surrogate while still being a character who is familiar with the world around her.
A significant amount of part five of Station Eleven focuses around Jeevan and Frank’s attempt to quarantine themselves away from the virus. There are many things in this chapter that are relevant to current events; Jeevan talks about getting fixated on missing small things, such as espresso, the brothers watch the news almost constantly for the first few days but eventually stop because it’s too stressful, and when describing their reaction to strangers knocking on the door, it’s stated that they “[don’t] trust anyone who [isn’t] them”. There is one thing is this section of the book that struck me as different than our current situation, however. As they shelter in place, Jeevan and Frank watch people attempt to leave the city en masse, with traffic eventually getting so gridlocked that they must get out of their cars and walk. It seemed strange to me that these people would not also be quarantining or self isolating, like in the current pandemic, especially with the virus in the book being somewhat localized to Toronto once it is brought over to North America, and possibly able to be contained there. However, I reasoned that it is likely that in Station Eleven people are being killed too quickly for effective restrictions to be set, with the survivors left to their own devices. While some, like Jeevan and Frank, might be in quarantine, others have taken to the streets in a panic. This is not unlike the way that people today have gathered in cities such as Denver, Colorado, to protest the government restrictions. While it is not exactly the same scenario, it’s still a large group of people gathering during a pandemic, with no regards for how being in a large group of people may affect their own safety or others, trying to find an easy way out of the situation they’re in when one doesn’t exist, and essentially making the situation worse. While this may not have been the most direct connection between this section of the book and life during a pandemic, it stuck out to me to see an example of people doing what we would now consider all the wrong things.

After reading and discussing our books, it was time to tackle our main assignment: creating a presentation that actually answered the driving question. My group decided to use animation throughout our presentation to make it more engaging. We also decided to talk about The Maze Runner in an effort to broaden our definition of “literary dystopia”. Station Eleven is only one example of a dystopian novel, and one that’s incredibly close to our specific situation. Bringing in another example of dystopian literature helped ensure our answer was applicable to dystopian fiction at large, not just the book we had read.

We also wanted to have a specific focus on the neurological effects of the pandemic, and social distancing.

With these things in mind, we created a thesis – literary dystopias can help us process what is happening in the world by using an extreme or allegorical set of events that we can compare to our own situation, but they cannot account for the specific circumstances and neurological effects people will face in a mass crisis – , pitched our idea, spent a few days doing research, and put together our animation.

Although school is very weird right now, I enjoyed doing this project. However, I feel I could have written a clearer thesis that better answered the question, since I mostly looked into just “how can (or can’t) literary dystopias help us in the current situation” rather than how they specifically help us understand it.

I also really enjoyed reading Station Eleven, and I’m interested in rereading it once the pandemic is over and seeing if the experience is different. Until then, I’m planning on leaning more into escapism with some non-dystopian fiction.

Toodles.

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