On Worldbuilding and the Question of Resistance

Do novels in which their protagonists overthrow the system actually encourage resistance in their readers? This is a question I have been wondering for a while.

Living in a dystopia, Americans read a lot of dystopian novels. One of the most popular structures for dystopian resistance can be found in The Hunger Games or Divergent. One person who is different stands up reluctantly to who they think is in power, only to discover that this power is larger than they had thought, which means they have to go on in future books to fight the entire system.

It’s a satisfying structure because the protagonist has to fight progressively larger manifestations of the same core problem. It is also satisfying because these novels rely a lot on worldbuilding, and the world becomes progressively larger while the core remains the same.

In other words, the challenge and pleasure for the writer of a dystopian novel (or series of novels) is not in coming up with a new plot, but in coming up with a new system—or, rather, a new representation of the system we are already in.

This is because the gradual unveiling of the full scope of a fictional dystopia is also a tool used to reveal the scope of our own dystopia. In the last four years, for example, novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable books have been considered more and more prescient and relevant. Many readers express the idea that reading these dystopias can teach us about our own lives.

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

For a while, I tried to provoke resistance by writing reaction pieces after school shootings or police shootings or other manifestations of our dystopia made the news. It felt good when people shared these stories on social media. It felt like I was helping to change things. But then essentially the same thing would happen again. I would write essentially the same response. This happened over and over.

It started to feel like I was waiting for the next tragedy to come, like I was a part of the cycle. Instead of changing anything, or anyone, what I offered was catharsis, a place to put one’s feelings before the next horrible act. (This was before Trump’s strategy of overloading the news so that no one tragedy could demand attention.)

Catharsis is a state of rest, not a state of action.

It made me wonder whether reading dystopian novels (or watching dystopian films) ever made me feel like I should start a revolution.

Catharsis is a state of rest, not a state of action.  

The problem may be, at least for me, that I find a lot of satisfaction in witnessing a character’s revolt—and satisfaction is where desire ends, not where it begins.

What I am talking about is not the character’s experience, but the reader’s. (In fact, I feel a lot more satisfaction than is usually described on the page, since these books are often bloody.) The more I submit to my satisfaction, the less I practice resistance as a reader. What do I have to resist? The story is giving me exactly what I want. Rarely do I read a novel in which the empire, as it were, strikes back.

When the system wins, however, I do feel inspired to resist. This is what happens in Han Kang’s Man Booker International Prize-winner The Vegetarian.

Kang’s strategy is brilliant. The vegetarian, her protagonist, is almost never the perspective character. This means that in order to connect with the protagonist and her resistance, we must constantly resist the perspective we are forced into.

Let me summarize, because the structure is important. The novel is in thirds. In each third, the perspective character becomes more sympathetic, so that readers have to practice more active resistance as they go. The first third is told from the first-person perspective of the vegetarian’s husband, a misogynist who punishes his wife (CW: including by raping her) for her belief that she can control what she eats. Because it is in first-person, readers inhabit this monstrous I and must resist the first-person position.

The second third is told from the third-person perspective of the vegetarian’s brother-in-law, an experimental artist. At first, this perspective seems far more comfortable, until the artist becomes obsessed with the vegetarian and takes advantage of her fragile mental state (after her husband’s abuse) to manipulate her into having sex with him in a pornographic art video.

The final third is told from the first-person perspective of the vegetarian’s sister (now separated from the artist), the person who loves the vegetarian best. She tries to take care of her sister, but the vegetarian has been so traumatized that she no longer wants to eat anything at all. In fact, she wants to become a tree. In order to keep the vegetarian alive, her sister has to commit her, but in the ward, the staff sticks tubes down the vegetarian’s throat in violent detail to force her to feed.

Even good intentions must be resisted. Even when the vegetarian has lost her mind, even though her perspective is hardly ever on the page, all we do the entire novel is imagine (and reenact) her resistance.

The solution is clearly not to write more evil narrators, but there is something to be learned here. The perspective characters in The Vegetarian do not establish the vegetarian’s resistance, but our own. What they do establish is what a dystopia establishes: the rules of how power operates and is reinforced. This is what we mean by worldbuilding.

This kind of worldbuilding is done through the negotiation of power between characters who enforce the rules and characters who resist. In a craft talk given at the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, author Lesley Nneka Arimah calls the resistors “rule-breakers.” Rule-breakers, she explains, can serve to establish what the rules even are.

Rule-breakers, she explains, can serve to establish what the rules even are.

Arimah wants to address the challenge of worldbuilding without long passages of description or explanation. When a rule-breaker breaks her world’s rules, the world tries to reestablish those rules, which in turn clarifies what they are, for the audience (and shows that the world is already broken).

Arimah uses her story “Who Will Greet You at Home” (which I teach often) as an example. Her protagonist is a poor woman who wants to build a baby out of soft and delicate material, which she can’t afford, so she uses hair. This rule-breaking reveals that: (a) in this world, babies are made, not born from the womb, (b) only the rich can afford to raise soft and delicate babies, and (c) hair babies are forbidden. We soon see why: hair babies eat people.

It’s a great story, and a great talk, the implications of which may be even more troubling than a hair baby. What Arimah’s talk suggests—not about a character’s experience, but a reader’s—is that a rule-breaker’s resistance to the social and cultural norms in a story actually establishes those norms for the story’s readers. The rule-breaker doesn’t ask readers to resist the system; her resistance asks readers to build the rules of that system in their own minds.

When you read The Hunger Games, you can feel good about resistance without actually resisting anything. As Katniss destroys her world, you, dear reader, bring that world to life.

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