Dystopia, Toynbee, Foma

I took a break from writing my novel this evening and watched Children of Men with Clive Owen. I knew only a little about it going in, and won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it, but there was some stuff I kept thinking about that I can discuss without the need to type "spoiler alert" in big red letters at the top of the post.

The film is set in the near future, and the premise is that humans across the globe have discovered that they can no longer have babies. The last one born was nearly 20 years before the events of the film take place.

This is not an entirely new premise. There may not be any entirely new premises left. Very early into the film, however, I started asking questions of myself and the storytellers for which there were no satisfactory answers.

Because without new premises, what remains of the craft of storytelling is where you take your characters, what has happened to them and the world on the basis of the premise and what your ultimate statement will be. There is still an awful lot of ground to cover in these explorations.

It seems so easy for us to envision our futures as taking place within one ruined husk of society or another. We cannot have children. We cannot dwell on the surface of the planet. We cannot survive for one reason or another. From there the storyteller allows us to believe that the logical response of mankind is chaos and brutality. Whether this is actually our nature or not is not really the point of this post.

Within these dystopian futures there seem to be only two possible outcomes: through the struggles of our main characters, they (or society) find redemption and signal a new dawning of hope; or in spite of the actions of the characters, the world goes on down the path the setup has shown us, and hope is extinguished. It is the former we are most likely to encounter.

Why is it that we are so willing to believe simultaneously in some inevitable savagery of our own kind, and in the same breath must be reassured of our nobility. Does this make us optimists or pessimists? Why do our storytellers gaze into the future and come back with tales of how society has fallen apart in one way or another? Are they attempting to warn us, or are they merely reflecting what they see around them, what they see inside themselves?

I think of a Ray Bradbury story I read in high school, about a man who built a time machine. "The Toynbee Convector" is the name of the story. The man came back from 100 years in the future to report about the wonderful utopia he had discovered. He told people the nature of the utopia, and how we had achieved such grace. He showed them pictures of rebuilt cities and clean water and harmony, and the world "ran to meet and make that future." As the tale unfolds, Bradbury reveals that the time traveller never went anywhere at all, but merely looked around at his society and saw despair and ennui everywhere and decided that humanity could do better. He concocted all sorts of beautiful lies to tell his contemporaries, to spur them into making something better.

Bradbury's point seems to be that lying to ourselves is largely what life is. And that while we are lying, we might as well weave something of beauty. I think he means all of us, but certainly he must mean at least those of us who choose to tell one another stories.

Kurt Vonnegut made a name for the beautiful, harmless lies we tell each other to make one another feel better. He called them foma. I do not understand why this is not in common parlance.

Vonnegut ended up writing about a lot of the same stuff over and over again. Within his tales of despair in his post-Breakfast of Champions work was always a message that we were all going to be okay once we learned how to form communities again. He kept telling us about these things over and over again because we would not hear him. In his stories, even when the Earth was doomed, we were still all going to be okay. We would help one another through.

Storytellers will tell their stories. They can only tell the stories they have inside them. Those are the rules. From time to time, though, it might be beneficial to ask ourselves why we are telling the story we have chosen. What it is we want to say when the tale is boiled out and only our message remains?

I am certainly not advocating an endless parade of happy endings and sunshine and singing. Anyone who knows me would never accuse me of making that point, and I understand that conflict is essential to storytelling. I am rarely accused of being an optimist. I am more often accused of being the opposite, but deep inside I think of a phrase used to describe Mr. Vonnegut: "a bitter-coated sugar pill." This is a label I could wear with pride.

None of the stories I am currently writing have what would be considered a "happy ending." But I hope that there is something about redemption nestled in there somewhere. I hope that they will reflect some of the things that I believe when they are placed into the hands of a reader. I also hope to provide them with entertainment.