New Materialism reflects how everything
surrounding humans influences us, with everything being an agent and groups of
agents forming an assemblage or environment. Jane Bennett asks her readers to
deconstruct the binary of nature and human to understand these relationships.
In dystopian fiction most authors write in an environment that will offer an
environment that is both familiar and unfamiliar to the reader. Nature serves
its own purpose in most of these books, often functioning as a symbol of
freedom.
In each of these dystopian books
we see or feel the effects of these objects. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, we
see the effects of both nature and the environment upon the man. One object that
has a great effect on him is a Coke can that reminds him of how things used
to be. It brings him joy and he lets the boy drink it to let him know what once
existed, almost as an affirmation for the boy to trust the ways of the past.
With nature, we notice a lack of wildlife that leads to a culture of
cannibalism as humans turn on themselves for meat.
In Ready Player One, I previously
mentioned in the last blog about Wades mirror and how it does nothing, yet it
reminds him of his health and breaks his illusion of a false reality. It allows
him to reengage himself with reality while otherwise completely escaping
reality. We also see the environment he grows up in, the stacks, as an extreme
case of poverty and overpopulation. It paints perfectly how society lost
sympathy for lower social classes in this society. Stacks fall daily or weekly
with people losing their lives and nobody cares. Similarly, in Parable of the
Sower, we see gated communities contribute to an environment that isolates the
lower social classes. This ultimately builds up angst and forms a revolution.
A non-novel dystopia is Wall-E, a
movie by Disney that follows a little robot and his adventure to space. In this
we see a world that has been ravaged and eliminated our familiar idea of
nature, leaving a trash filled world rid of all forms of life. The presence of
one cockroach ultimately shifts the entire narrative of the film, nature has come
back. It leads him to a newer robot, one from space sent to find signs of life
on Earth for humans to return. Fast forward to the sight of humans themselves:
they are morbidly obese and being pampered to death by robots. Every object in
this ship ultimately aids in the comforting and pampering of the humans and
subdues them. The humans can’t think or move for themselves and rely on
additional things to help them live. This assemblage made humans to comfortable
and led them to devolve and lose their agency. The captain is alerted that life
is back on Earth, and the humans can escape the ship and return to the planet.
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In many of these dystopias, I
mentioned that feeling of familiarity. We have virtual reality from Ready
Player One, gated communities from Parable of the Sower, the commercialism from
Wall-E, and well a Coke can like The Road. However, each one spins these
objects and environments to make them equally foreign to us, a world where each
has gone too far forward or been eradicated. This weird nostalgia formed around
things present in our modern lives help to create a dystopian environment that
feels all too possible and familiar to us.
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