The cut hides spoilers, ya'll.
I don't read much fiction, let alone juvenile fiction. But a friend of mine suggested I read The Giver by Lois Lowry. She told me she couldn't stop thinking about it after reading it, adding that although it was a children's story its themes were more adult. I was intrigued, so I started it last month and finished it last week.
She said that if I did read it, she would be interested in hearing my thoughts on it. My thoughts aren't as well formed as I hoped they'd be, so I thought I'd see if I can ramble my way to more coherence.
The Giver is a work of speculative fiction set in a future society in which the family structure has been replaced with a parent-child matching system. There's a very unethical but weirdly benign form of thought control and totalitarianism in place, which involves removing, as much as possible, all painful realities from experience. Weather is controlled so that it's never inclement. The scramble for resources has been replaced with a system of assigned roles in the economy, matching labor to laborers based on personality traits. Rigid social conventions and standards of etiquette keep conflicts at bay. Expression is limited by an obsession with "precision of language," so that only what is generally accepted and concretely apparent makes it into conversation. Even human sight is controlled so that color is imperceptible--and thus its emotional power wiped from the equation. Finally, through some unexplained system (the novel doesn't reveal if it's magic or technology, but presumably the latter), memories are sequestered, removed from the consciousness of the population and under the control of one keeper, simply known as The Receiver. The Receiver, at the same time, is the only one in the society who fully understands what is going on, having the full benefit of his own memory and a warehouse (figuratively speaking) of other people's memories.
Near the end of his life, The Receiver needed to train a new Receiver to take his place. He selects the main character, Jonas, to be the next one. The Receiver thus changes his name to The Giver and passes his former name/title to Jonas.
As the new Receiver, Jonas finds the reality he discovers very unsettling and decides not to return all of the sequestered memories to society and escape from society before any consequences of his actions catch up with him. At the end of the novel, having just escaped, he is out of food and beginning to starve and freeze to death.
The novel offers no clues as to how the society arrived where it has. What fanatical ideology was applied, and what kind of force was used to take it to such an extreme? Cui bono remains a mystery. Was it collectivization gone awry, taking centralized planning and utopian ideals to the point of dystopia? Or was it an unfettered market economy that allowed the most intimate and minute aspects of human experience to be coopted and privatized by the highest bidder? Perhaps that doesn't matter. I'm reminded of something Michael Hogan wrote:The question we should ask ourselves is this: What combination of policies would lead to a better quality of life for the citizens of the individual countries, instead of power accumulating in the hands of multi-national corporations, degradation of the environment, denigration of the citizenry, and the waging of incessant war financed by the largest military state on the planet? No single ideology can answer this question, for the simple reason that ideology is driven by an abstract agenda--not by the dynamic realities of people's actual lives, the lands where they grow their food, the air they breathe and the water they drink.
When reality is made to adapt to ideology--and not vice versa--a considerable degree of societal control is needed to keep it intact. Perhaps the ideology that produced Lowry's world is irrelevant, and what should interest the reader is what maintains the totalitarianism that it produced.
Lowry's world features an interesting hybrid of the forms of thought control explored in other dystopic fiction, compared here by Neil Postman:What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy....In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us .
In Lowry's world censorship seems to happen upstream from the question of what people will read. Experience and memory are so well contained that damaging literature would be outside the knowledge or imagination of any author. Anything that slips through the cracks is buried in pleasantries.
I can't think of anything very analogous in existing society. Even in North Korea people have enough exposure to their Japanese, Chinese, and other neighbors that they suspect their world isn't as good as it's purported to be and the rest of the world isn't as bad. They see through the propaganda.
The obsession with precision of language has some real-world parallels, though. In Lowry's world, nebulous ideas expressed in necessarily nebulous terms are shunned. It means that questioning and probing conversations are all but impossible. You can only speak of what is definite, and what is definite is the information that has been spoon-fed to you.
In the real world, in this society, we hinder expression and/or an audience for expression by our insistence that much of what we hear comes from "experts" on a topic--usually people who have gone through a structured academic program germane to the topic. The irony is that we often want these experts to tell us what we already know, think, or think we know. We want sound bites that can be understood as quickly as they're spoken. Returning to the subject of North Korea, if you want to put someone on the air who demonizes North Korea for its nuclear ambitions, that's good. That makes sense. People grasp it immediately. But if you put someone on the air who wants to point out that the U.S. was the first nation to introduce nuclear weapons to the peninsula and seriously consider using them there--and that the U.S. is furthermore the only nation to have actually used atomic weapons in warfare anywhere--then you've obviously made a mistake. That doesn't square with our Manichean conceptions of international politics, and it will take more than a sound bit to explain.
I might rewrite and send my friend my thoughts so far, and maybe in the conversation that ensues more will form.
Incidentally, The Giver is being adapted into a movie, so perhaps the film version will illuminate aspects of the story that didn't strike me in the first pass through it.
She said that if I did read it, she would be interested in hearing my thoughts on it. My thoughts aren't as well formed as I hoped they'd be, so I thought I'd see if I can ramble my way to more coherence.
The Giver is a work of speculative fiction set in a future society in which the family structure has been replaced with a parent-child matching system. There's a very unethical but weirdly benign form of thought control and totalitarianism in place, which involves removing, as much as possible, all painful realities from experience. Weather is controlled so that it's never inclement. The scramble for resources has been replaced with a system of assigned roles in the economy, matching labor to laborers based on personality traits. Rigid social conventions and standards of etiquette keep conflicts at bay. Expression is limited by an obsession with "precision of language," so that only what is generally accepted and concretely apparent makes it into conversation. Even human sight is controlled so that color is imperceptible--and thus its emotional power wiped from the equation. Finally, through some unexplained system (the novel doesn't reveal if it's magic or technology, but presumably the latter), memories are sequestered, removed from the consciousness of the population and under the control of one keeper, simply known as The Receiver. The Receiver, at the same time, is the only one in the society who fully understands what is going on, having the full benefit of his own memory and a warehouse (figuratively speaking) of other people's memories.
Near the end of his life, The Receiver needed to train a new Receiver to take his place. He selects the main character, Jonas, to be the next one. The Receiver thus changes his name to The Giver and passes his former name/title to Jonas.
As the new Receiver, Jonas finds the reality he discovers very unsettling and decides not to return all of the sequestered memories to society and escape from society before any consequences of his actions catch up with him. At the end of the novel, having just escaped, he is out of food and beginning to starve and freeze to death.
The novel offers no clues as to how the society arrived where it has. What fanatical ideology was applied, and what kind of force was used to take it to such an extreme? Cui bono remains a mystery. Was it collectivization gone awry, taking centralized planning and utopian ideals to the point of dystopia? Or was it an unfettered market economy that allowed the most intimate and minute aspects of human experience to be coopted and privatized by the highest bidder? Perhaps that doesn't matter. I'm reminded of something Michael Hogan wrote:The question we should ask ourselves is this: What combination of policies would lead to a better quality of life for the citizens of the individual countries, instead of power accumulating in the hands of multi-national corporations, degradation of the environment, denigration of the citizenry, and the waging of incessant war financed by the largest military state on the planet? No single ideology can answer this question, for the simple reason that ideology is driven by an abstract agenda--not by the dynamic realities of people's actual lives, the lands where they grow their food, the air they breathe and the water they drink.
When reality is made to adapt to ideology--and not vice versa--a considerable degree of societal control is needed to keep it intact. Perhaps the ideology that produced Lowry's world is irrelevant, and what should interest the reader is what maintains the totalitarianism that it produced.
Lowry's world features an interesting hybrid of the forms of thought control explored in other dystopic fiction, compared here by Neil Postman:What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy....In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us .
In Lowry's world censorship seems to happen upstream from the question of what people will read. Experience and memory are so well contained that damaging literature would be outside the knowledge or imagination of any author. Anything that slips through the cracks is buried in pleasantries.
I can't think of anything very analogous in existing society. Even in North Korea people have enough exposure to their Japanese, Chinese, and other neighbors that they suspect their world isn't as good as it's purported to be and the rest of the world isn't as bad. They see through the propaganda.
The obsession with precision of language has some real-world parallels, though. In Lowry's world, nebulous ideas expressed in necessarily nebulous terms are shunned. It means that questioning and probing conversations are all but impossible. You can only speak of what is definite, and what is definite is the information that has been spoon-fed to you.
In the real world, in this society, we hinder expression and/or an audience for expression by our insistence that much of what we hear comes from "experts" on a topic--usually people who have gone through a structured academic program germane to the topic. The irony is that we often want these experts to tell us what we already know, think, or think we know. We want sound bites that can be understood as quickly as they're spoken. Returning to the subject of North Korea, if you want to put someone on the air who demonizes North Korea for its nuclear ambitions, that's good. That makes sense. People grasp it immediately. But if you put someone on the air who wants to point out that the U.S. was the first nation to introduce nuclear weapons to the peninsula and seriously consider using them there--and that the U.S. is furthermore the only nation to have actually used atomic weapons in warfare anywhere--then you've obviously made a mistake. That doesn't square with our Manichean conceptions of international politics, and it will take more than a sound bit to explain.
I might rewrite and send my friend my thoughts so far, and maybe in the conversation that ensues more will form.
Incidentally, The Giver is being adapted into a movie, so perhaps the film version will illuminate aspects of the story that didn't strike me in the first pass through it.