The Duck of Minerva

Fun and Grisly Holiday Reading

by Charli Carpenter

23 December 2010, 0509 EST

I finally finished the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy. (I was not expecting that ending, though in hindsight I’m not sure why.)

For those of you unfamiliar with the dystopian premise: the United States is gone. Its successor nation, Panem, consists of an opulent, entertainment-obsessed capital somewhere in the Rockies and thirteen impoverished districts in which inhabitants farm, mine and manufacture. The Districts are kept in line partly through a Tribute system (developed after an uprising 70 years ago in which the thirteenth district was exterminated): every year a boy and girl are chosen by lottery to fight in an elaborate reality TV show for the entertainment of the Capitol. The winner and his or her family receive a life of ease; the losers die horrible deaths in the arena while all of Panem watches.

So far, not a terribly sophisticated plot, but that’s just the first few pages. What’s interesting are the industries surrounding the games: the audience can bet on the winner, there is a system for providing assistance to the favorites, an elaborate set of strategies for currying favor, and each contender works closely with a team of fixers whose professional success is based not only whether their tributes live or die but on how well they can serve the overall goal of entertaining the masses in order to uphold the fragile, fearsome stability of the system. And then there are relationships among the tributes themselves, who can form alliances and develop friendships even though only one of them will survive. And that’s before things turn “political.”

The books, which are currently being turned into mega-films by Liongate deal not just with survival under impossible conditions (for a taste, check out this fan-made video by an actress who hopes for a chance at the coveted role of Katniss). More profoundly, they are about repression and inequality, the socio-political-military-entertainment-industrial-consumer complexes that sustain them, and the continuum of resistance mechanisms by which people along a continuum of core to periphery inch toward revolution. (There’s a lot more to work with here than Collins develops in the books; I hope the screenwriters will make the most of these subtexts.)

The series is pitched as “young adult fiction” in the genre of the Twilight series, although why this is true – whereas Orson Scott Card’s novels, for example, are generally understood as adult fiction – somewhat escapes me (perhaps the sci-fi pedagogy experts on this blog can explain this). The Hunger Games seems far more sophisticated than Twilight (when my daughter was reading it this summer, the adjective she used to describe the book was “complicated.”) Like Card’s Treason, Wyrms, Ender or the Homecoming series’ the characters in The Hunger Games trilogy are young adults, of course, but they are facing very adult situations and more importantly, they are treated as adults by the adult characters and the author in every way that matters. The books are just as brutal (as Entertainment Weekly put it “let’s see the makers of the movie version try to get a PG-13 on this baby”) and – yes – just as complicated as anything cooked up by Card.

In fact, one of the most interesting themes in The Hunger Games is captured pretty well by one of my favorite quotes from Card:

“Sometimes it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”

Or rather, if you wear too many contradictory identities for too long, it’s very hard to know who you actually are or what you prefer. So Suzanne Collins’ novels are at their root a commentary on the ways in which our subjectivity is mediated by the performances in which we participate – which are constituted by various types of media – to the extent that our various identities are de-stablized by the act of pretending, until ultimately distinguishing the real from the unreal becomes an exercise in blind trust among those we choose as companions. In such contexts, the meaning of political agency shifts significantly and reasserts itself in surprising ways.

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

2 Comments

  1. dnexon
    dnexon on 23 December 2010 at 23.52 EST

    Nice post, despite whatever I noted in my misfire of a comment over on LGM. The YA designation question is interesting, and I couldn't tell you offhand. I'll ask around. Maybe a reader knows?  
       
    FWIW, the book doesn't strike me as more brutal than a lot of other YA genre fiction; what it shares with that designation is the age of the protagonists and of the perspective. I will say that, despite the amount of dreck, there's been some very exciting work in YA fantasy (and, to a lesser extent, SF) over the last few decades that outclasses a lot of comparable adult genre fiction.    
       
    Anyway, the reasons I've assigned the Hunger Games are multifold:    
       
    – It provides a nice compare/contrast with Julian Comstock as exemplars of contemporary post-apocalyptic imagination, both in terms of the nature of the background crisis (resources and climate, as opposed to nuclear) and the future political imaginary (particularly viz. issues of class and exploitation);    
    – It provides a nice compare/contrast with Player of Games on questions of games/”games” and subjectivity; and    
    – It raises some very difficult themes about audience and voyeurism.

  2. bryan.alexander@gmail.com
    bryan.alexander@gmail.com on 24 December 2010 at 16.33 EST

    I think the Twilight comparisons are because of the protagonists' age and gender.  Plus simple marketing.  I've only read the first few chapters of Hunger 1, but it's way beyond Twilight so far, both in terms of style and worldview (dystopia).