Sunday, April 28, 2013

A Real Dystopia

I'm currently reading the scariest dystopian story I've ever read (and I've read a lot): The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. It won this year's Pulitzer Prize, and it was about North Korea, so I thought I'd give it a go. I knew nothing about North Korea.

Korean children during the Great Famine

The book is fiction, but the story is true enough: that's what makes it so frightening. The novel follows Jun Do (think: John Doe), meant to be a North Korean everyman. We follow his journey from Dickensian orphanage, to surviving the Great Famine in the 1990s (in which millions perished), to his time as a Korean-English interpreter — he ends up at a surreal Texas barbecue with a senator — to, finally, a stint as Kim Jong Il's right-hand man. And since this is one of the worst dictatorships in the world, be assured that with each identity Jun Do assumes, he suffers in new and horrible ways. I had to skim the bit where the tattoo on his chest is sliced off with a boxcutter. (It does happen offscreen; it's still cringeworthy.)

As improbable as this plot sounds, in a land as completely upside down as North Korea, it seems plausible that all this could happen to one man. And Johnson researched the heck out of that strange country, including traveling to Pyongyang, the capital. (I'd like to know how he pulled that trick off without ending up in a gulag.) The details are made up, but the story is not an invention.

Lockstep love for the Dear Leader


Well, what is a "dystopia," anyway? Why do we always think of it as fiction? We think about books like the Hunger Games and Fahrenheit 451 as cautionary tales, as warnings that we in western democracies better keep an eye on our scurrilous leaders, else we'll have a President Snow forcing our children to fight each other to the death. But there are societies right now that are just as bad — worse — than these imaginary dictatorships. I'd rather live in the world of 1984 than in Johnson's North Korea. Both have their Big Brother, but you don't have rampant starvation and frozen gulag hellholes in 1984.  

"Dystopia" literally means "bad place." In fiction, a dystopia is usually a utopia where something's gone wrong. Some leader got it in their noggin that they could create a perfect society where everyone would be happy — if only everyone would obey. Usually the government in charge of this "perfection" has become incredibly repressive: you have to control every aspect of a place if you want your ideology to be pure and true for every citizen. Otherwise your plan becomes sullied by other people's ideas.

I've been drawn to dystopian fiction for a long time, and had the pleasure of reading Orwell's 1984 again this year. The Orphan Master's Son owes a lot to that book, which might be considered the first dystopian novel. Orwell was thinking about the Soviet Union, so it's not a surprise that the North Korea of Johnson's novel would so strongly mirror Orwell's fictional world: what is it about communism that lends itself so readily to dystopia?

It's not like capitalism is without its flaws. I also read The Grapes of Wrath this year, and I just finished Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a nonfiction book which documents life in a slum in India — as the author says, much of the slum's structure is a result of global market capitalism. But the grimmest pictures painted by capitalism's critics just can't match the world depicted in The Orphan Master's Son. Whatever our society's flaws — and we have so many — we are not like that. Thank goodness we are not like that.


Your turn: have you read a fiction book that has affected (or even changed) your views of economic or political systems? What was it, and how did it shape you?




11 comments:

  1. Years ago, I read Crime and Punishment, which didn't fill me with confidence about Czarist Russia. More recently, I've read the two Hilary Mantel novels about Henry VIII's minister, Thomas Cromwell. They provide an extremely interesting window into a society that's a recognizable, but still somewhat alien, predecessor of the modern West.

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    1. Mantel's Thomas Cromwell certainly is the ultimate politician. I wonder how he would manage a system even thornier than Henry VIII's court — our own inept Congress. Good examples!

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  2. This intrigues me...I really think I should read this.

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    1. I recommend it. If you do, please stop by and let me know what you think!

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  3. The one that always come to mind for me is V for Vendetta, the novelized version. Even though the book was written after the film and not very good at that, it paints a very ugly picture of England in the future. I think the worst part was reading about the priest who had a thing for very young girls.

    Communist nations seem to take center stage for dystopian works because they become very closed to society. They allow nothing in and nothing out. And when a Communist nation falls, there's a lot of interesting things found out about what was going on. I find Nazi Germany just as intriguing or monarchies from way back in the day. The fact that the populous suffers just so a few can have numerous servants and anything they desire is appalling to a society like the U.S. where we have so many liberties, one of which is our voice in government.

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    1. "The fact that the populous suffers just so a few can have numerous servants and anything they desire is appalling..." It's especially ironic that a so-called "communist" country would have a leadership that does this, since it flies in the face of communist ideology — but it's exactly what ends up happening, doesn't it? Kim Jong Il routinely imbibed a cognac that cost $630 a bottle in Korea — while all around him people were literally starving in the streets. One bottle of cognac would have kept a North Korean family alive for a year. It's insane what power does to people.

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    2. Indeed. I only wonder which way the timeline went: did they have pure ideologies in the beginning, which were corrupted by power? Or were they crooked to start with, and grabbed a popular ideology to get what they wanted? Either seems plausible.

      Jerks, either way. >:(

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    3. When I was in grad school, I had to take a class on literary theory and it basically dealt with all sorts of ideologies from deconstructionism to newer forms of literary theory. In it, we read some of Marx's works and discussed what he promoted and what point he was making with his ideologies. Basically, what it boiled down to, is that these were ONLY ideas of Marx's, ones that he knew couldn't properly be implemented in a governmental structure. But guess what? The less than astute crazies who got it into their heads that, yeah, this could be a new utopia went and tried to implement what Marx wrote about. And, of course, we have evidence of what Marx knew and understood all those many years ago. Communism and many forms of socialism don't really work, because there will always be those whose heads swell and think they know better than the populous.

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  4. Very interesting and distressing subject at the same time!

    The only dystopian book I've read has been The Hunger Games. I found the premise to be disturbing (probably the point the author was trying to make!) but it almost turned me off completely. Somehow, I managed to plow through (mostly because I liked the heroine) and got hooked when "the games" started. I can't say I love this genre, though, I don't like this pessimistic big evil government view of the future much, though it can be really "hooky" (is this a word?) Anyway, some dystopian films I've enjoyed that come to mind are "I am Legend" and "The Planet of the Apes" (Charlton Heston version).

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    1. LOVE Planet of the Apes. I didn't see I Am Legend, but read the book and HaTeD it! But its ending is totally different from the film version. And the ending was dark, dark, dark (bookwise). I actually saw a number of parallels between Hunger Games and Orphan Master, but I expect that's not so much that one influenced the other as that ideologically-founded tyrannies follow a predictable course.

      I have no idea why I love dystopian so much. Sometimes our loves/likes are a mystery to our own selves.

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    2. I read that "I am Legend" (novel) has had several versions, including the Will Smith film I saw. I guess the novel contributed to the birth of both the zombie/horror AND the sci-fi/post-apocalyptic genres (according to Wikipedia anyway).

      What did you think of the Planet of the Apes remake with Mark Wahlberg?

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