100 Books, #40: The Giver

[osprey_archer]

I haven’t seen The Giver movie and don’t really intend to - the poster strongly suggests to me that its producers don’t actually understand the book - but its existence has gotten me thinking about The Giver again, so in that sense I’m rather beholden to it.

One of the things that makes the book so powerful, I think, is that - at least to me, at age twelve - the society it depicts seems very seductive at the start. Everyone has plenty to eat and a pleasant house to live in. All the children are wanted and well-cared for in stable family units, with a whole raft of thoughtful child-care professionals who work hard to discover their natural abilities. Gender roles are clearly quite forgotten: Jonas’s mother is a Judge and his father is a Nurturer (that is, he looks after babies), and no one thinks anything of it.

In many ways, Jonas’s society looks like a better version of our own. It positions the reader differently than many dystopian novels do. Rather than looking down on an obviously flawed society and waiting (im)patiently for the hero to get with the program and start learning life lessons about Freedom, the reader (at least the young reader who is not genre-savvy about how dystopian novels) just like Jonas, starts out charmed by this society and lives, with Jonas, the journey from enchantment to disillusionment.

In a way, the society in The Giver is a totalitarian’s realized vision: not as it looks from the outside, or in hindsight, when the terrible parts are all too clear, but as it looks from the inside, to believers. And it’s easy to see how a vision that seductive can go so horribly wrong. After all, what price isn’t worth paying for a world where all children are loved and wanted and well-fed? It’s easy to see why so many ordinary people would find that dream seductive.

An orderly society where everyone has a place and knows it - not, in The Giver, because of anything as reactionary as right of bloodline, but because everyone has been assigned a place based on their carefully observed merits. Who can argue that their place in society is too low, when they’ve been placed there by their own genes? Everyone is placed, and everyone is efficient, productive, well-behaved, and content.

And in the end, the world will be so orderly that even love and death will lose their terror: they will be organized in neat ritualized boxes, just like everything else. They will be under human control.

***

Also, the memory-transmitting power is just super cool. I mean really, it's like reading except made flesh. The scene where Jonas gets the transmitted sled memory and he's all WHAT IS EVERYTHING is one of my favorite scenes ever.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I agree; I think it's very interesting to start inside the society, from the perspective of someone who is happy--and this gets me thinking that starting from that perspective and then having the person's perspective open up is essentially the journey that a person of privilege takes in our own society. If you don't deviate from the sanctioned state--if you're not a minority, not an immigrant, not gay, etc.--then society can seem fairly jolly. And then gradually your eyes are opened.

I remember liking the various markers of growth in the society in The Giver, and what they taught you: buttoning in the front for self-sufficiency, buttoning in the back for cooperation, etc.

I was really struck by the inclusion of coming to see color--I liked both how Lowry portrayed it, and also just that it was in there. It was provocative and mysterious as a story element, because what does it mean? IIRC, the protag "sees" the apple before he even starts having his first meeting with the Giver (or am I wrong about that)--so does that signal that there's something innate in him, connected to whatever it is that lets him be the one to whom the memories are given? Or is that something that could happen to anyone? What does it signify? That somehow the control has drained color from the world? What metaphor is it, exactly? I muse on that a lot.

I wasn't such a fan of the sessions with the Giver, though I can't remember precisely my objections.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I loved the description of the way they dealt with different stages of child development. They've clearly thought through absolutely everything.

Jonas sees the redness of the apple before he meets the Giver; he also sees color in the faces of the people in the audience during the ceremony when he's selected to be the Receiver. So clearly color is still there, but somehow the society has made it so most people can't see it...

I think there is a metaphor here for the way that society can make people blind to things that ought to be perfectly obvious. And yet it's clearly more than that. It's not just that Jonas doesn't have a word for red: he's literally never seen it before.

I think the implication is that Jonas has a unique inborn ability to receive memories: not only does he start seeing color on his own, but he has light eyes, as does the Giver and the baby Gabriel to whom Jonas gives some memories. He tries to give memories to his sister and a friend (who are dark-eyed, like most of the people in the community), but it doesn't work.

But at the same time, his plan hinges on the fact that people will receive the memories he abandons when he leaves the community. So they must have some ability to do so...

[silverusagi]

I haven’t seen The Giver movie and don’t really intend to - the poster strongly suggests to me that its producers don’t actually understand the book

Yeah, I have no interest in seeing the movie.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It looks like they think the Fiona/Jonas romance is the most important thing in the book, and it's just...not. It's probably one of the least important, in fact: certainly not as important as his relationship with his family or the Giver or even the baby Gabriel.