• From Mann to García Márquez: The sick novels
  • Dean R. Koontz, the writer who hit the future

It is as if the world knows that something bad is going to happen to it and that is why it is looking for stories that anticipate the worst. Unbreathable tyrannies, environmental crises and famines, uncontrolled artificial intelligence and diseases, of course . These are not new topics in our culture, but the eyes with which we see them in the days of the coronavirus are different.

"The plague, for example, has served man as a representation of the monstrous in its clearest form. The virus is the monster that we do not see, it is Freud's disturbing strangeness . It is the purest metaphor of atavistic fear."

The speaker is Antonio Ballesteros, professor of Philology at UNED, specialist in Gothic literature, in doubles, in Daniel Defoe and Mary Shelley and also in literary plagues. Before the coronavirus settled in Europe, Ballesteros was already working on a popular book devoted to pandemics in literature.

"The first plague of literature was that of the Atrahasis Poem , by Kasap-Aya, in Babylon, in 1646 BC. There is already the classic approach: disease is the punishment of the gods to the society that transgresses their norms . It is the same subject that we see in the Plagues of Yaveh , in the Iliad , in Oedipus Rex , in Thucydides, in Decameron , in King Lear ... ".

The history of pests changed when scientific knowledge allowed us to have a more realistic idea of ​​the disease. "There is a very nice text by Dom Augustin Calmet that tries to understand an epidemic of vampirism based on God's relationship with his faithful. He tries it but in the end he accepts that this explanation doesn't work."

Was vampirism a plague? "Yes. Even the Pope at that time had to refer to that epidemic," explains Ballesteros. "Vampirism is transmitted. Nosferatu means 'he who bears the disease' . And the myth of Dracula is clearly linked to the fear of syphilis of his time. In fact, with AIDS many vampiric fictions reappeared. Rousseau wrote that he did not there is only one culture in the world without vampirism. "

Ballesteros' idea is that, based on illustration and scientific progress, "each representation of the plague reflects the sign of each era, represents its horror." An example that is not obvious: Michael Ende's Never Ending Story is also a pest book. The nothingness that Atreyu and Bastian are fighting is a disease that represents fear of the most abstract of horrors: forgetfulness, depression, indifference ... Nothingness.

Another example and another complementary theme: José Saramago's essay on blindness speaks, above all, of the vain attempt of society and its bureaucracy to face horror and its uselessness. "Many times the literature of anticipation is seen as a morbid interest of the readers. I do not think so. I think what drives them is the desire to disenchant the monster, to exorcise fear , Ballesteros ends.

Man is bad

Sara Martín Alegre, professor at the University of Barcelona, ​​takes over from Ballesteros: "I would say that much of the dystopian fiction of the 21st century is either political (generally the one found in youth fiction such as The Hunger Games ) or related with a viral plague, which may be political too, only that the political consequences stem from the plague. I mean any zombie story, from Max Brooks' World War Z novel to The Walking Dead series. In the case of the youth novel there is a certain hope of regeneration while in the other fictional times rather not. I also think that all these stories, which usually come from the United States, are a kind of general rehearsal of the end of American power . Something like ' since we are going to sink like all empires, the whole planet is going to sink. '"

Why would you say that gender has served humanity? "In two ways. One, imagine what a borderline situation would be like and thus feel more comforted in the real world we live in. Two, confirm the impression, intuition or belief that the human being is at bottom evil since dystopias bring out The worst of us. It is for this reason that I personally avoid them what I can (although I have taught in class and written about The Hunger Games .) I think there is an excess of dystopias for interested reasons: they are stories that tend to depress us and this makes us more docile . Utopias, on the other hand, can incite us to claim a better world. I take this opportunity to claim my preferred utopia, which is the civilization simply called Culture in the science fiction novels by Iain M. Banks, Scottish author who passed away in 2013. "

System and hyperbole

So is the genre of catastrophic anticipation politically conservative? " Francoism censored HG Welles, but he censored realistic novels, not science fiction ones . It is a genre of admonition and prevention through a hyperbole of negative traits," explains Mariano Martín, translator and university professor in Brussels. "Almost everything is now called dystopia, but strict dystopia goes to the system as a whole. Dystopia always works the same: there are some dissidents who rise up against the system, fight, are crushed and the reader receives the message that fight now because later it will be late . There are anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-anarchist, anti-ecologist dystopias ... Are there anti-capitalist dystopias? It is a subject that is debated. I think not because I think capitalism is not systematic enough. "

"Throughout Europe, utopian fiction, which was the name that science fiction received, had a good reputation until the 1950s. What happened then? That the pulp novel came from the United States and the genre received a reputation for bad literature quality, and also that the communist parties, which had a lot of cultural influence, despised any futuristic fiction. Of course. The only possible vision of the future was Stalin's . "

Complaint novel

We can only talk about the eve of our pandemic. "In my opinion, the crisis of 2008 and especially after movements derived from it such as the 15M or Occupy Wall Street , led to a very socio-politically aware writing of dystopias in Spain, some magnificent as those of Rosa Montero, Guillem Martínez or Ekaitz Ortega "explains Fernando Moreno Serrano, professor at the Complutense University. "They focused on reflecting the direct consequences of keeping some rulers away from the problems of the population who make decisions aimed more at defending their status quo than at citizenship. In other countries, such as the United States, this trend was joined by the success of great writers who displayed enormously imaginative and pessimistic societies, with strong and revolutionary figures, such as Anne Leckie or Kameron Hurley, among many others. In addition, more leading figures with a conscience of loyalty and community awareness appeared who faced dehumanized governments. "

"Dystopia has marked like no other genre the transition between a modernity that believed in systems, explanations, absolute models and a more suspicious postmodernity , less willing to believe that a system can be definitive, that it no longer swallows models that do not depend on the circumstances and the people on whom it depends. We could say that it has nuanced the modern utopian project and has taken away part of its arrogance. Less British Empire as a great model of civilization and more daily work of people in institutions. They make us understand that most of the disasters that we face - even in many of the natives, such as this pandemic that we are experiencing now - the last person responsible for the greatest suffering is a non-solidarity society, some rulers not willing to face the most powerful powers. selfish for the sake of their governed. Eliminate divine, magical, random reasons to return their responsibility to the correct functioning of institutions and the behavior of citizens themselves. In this sense, we can see a great difference between dystopian reactions to this pandemic, such as those of the United States, Great Britain, or some European countries, against the most civic utopian ones, such as the Mediterranean ... Some have read utopias as quite the opposite: the demonstration that human beings must compete fiercely among ourselves, but I doubt that these people would have been different without dystopian narrative . "

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