LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Sample Student Final Exams 2011 Essay 1

Ashley Rhodes

7/7/2011

She Called Out a Warning

        We are all disciplined in some ways as a child. Parents usually tell children to not make the same mistake again or they will be punished. Children are not only punished for their mistakes by their parents but also nature. For example, I can remember the spots in my grandparent’s yard that I wouldn’t dare cross because of the stickers. There was also a time when my sister and I caught the worst cold for playing in the rain. These repercussions are still remembered and we all try to avoid their cause, but does that mean we should be afraid to try them again? Our future is always predicted negatively because we feel it is our consequence for our current actions in the present. This literature course compelled this insight because our texts explain the consequences of our current reality by using low tech; actual reality scenarios. Low tech realities are characterized on the website as being repeated shifts from tech and progress to organic and nostalgia. They are usually illustrated as rough, intimate, messy, and very real.

        The short story “Chocco” paints a perfect cause and effect picture for the reader by using a low tech reality. The tribe lives only on what is provided by nature. They believe the machine people caused humanity to suffer and lose all control of what is important in order to survive on earth. The machine people were the cause and the tribe people are the effect which leaves the memory keepers as the sedative. Memory keepers keep the tribe in effect mode by teaching them how destructive the machine people were.

Indeed, we must learn from them what must be avoided, not what must be done.

I found “Chocco” to be a utopian environment because they seem to live in a low tech society that focuses mainly on survival not superficiality. The tribal people are content without social status because they all work together in a unit that accompanies their survival. The freedom to choose a lifestyle is irrelevant because they know each job is necessary for the whole tribe to live on. I believe that being told what you should do for a living is demanding in our society, but if you look close it is primarily driven by what can make you more money, which in this case the tribe does not possess or use. The absence of money in “Chocco” made it seem utopian and low tech because for some people money is the root of all evil and usually in low tech societies money is useless because there is nothing to purchase. Overall the tribe’s survival depends on their low tech reality that strengthens the more they learn about the machine people’s mistakes.

And so our ancestors survived, and left us their tested commandments for survival: restrain our numbers, limit our consumption, remember that the spiritual is the measure and meaning of all things.

Another text that possesses a low tech reality is “House of Bone”. The only difference between “Chocco” is that “House of Bones” is relating to the past not the future. They are similar stories because they recognize a better more efficient place in time than our own we are living in today. There also seems to be an indication of what needs to be left alone in our environment. Our cultural needs today could not be met in these societies because they are satisfied by simplicity in both stories. The traveler, Pumangiup recognizes how important it is to live a conditioned life without propaganda. The homo sapiens live in a natural environment that fits their needs accordingly. The low tech society keeps them coiled in a community that is very devoted to one another. He notices this and doesn’t mind living his life in the past.

They have a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, that will go on working for thousands more.

        Most low tech societies focus on their environmental needs rather than their technological ones. Although when these two needs become intertwined, the low tech society starts to slowly disappear and transform into a high tech society. I found this connection in the two short stories “Drapes and Folds” and “The Onion and I”. Both stories try to hold on to their low tech society by remembering the famous quote, “The Good Ole Days”. In “The Onion and I” there seems to be a transition that is difficult for the characters other than the mother. The father has the most difficult time because he must force himself to accept the high tech society and forget the low tech society. Physically providing for his family was vanishing into virtual reality.

A worker’s body, a body that liked to bend to the earth, to dig, to hoe, to pause for a moment and look around, smelling whatever might be on an afternoon breeze, predict the weather.   – with no stimulus but the simulations made of dots and our memories.   

Remembering back to a simpler time and place comforts the father because he is able to revisit a real memory that is not clouded with simulations. The same concept applies to Peal in “Drapes and Folds”, because she wishes her friend Diana could remember their low tech society that was transcended by the high tech virtual reality. Diana’s memory is destroyed by the high tech realm that surrounds them both. Pearl seems to be one of the only people who remember the past, and that alone gives her an afflicted view on the current time she is living in. Pearl was comforted by Diana reminiscing with her stories, but since her memory faded she feels alone in a world that she cannot relate to anymore.

With just one sweep, they’d filled her head with revisionist pseudo-history and robbed us of the past we’d shared. But I kept talking, as if words could give us back what we had lost.

American society is moving towards this high tech society represented in “The Onion and I” and “Drapes and Folds”. The societies mentioned in “Chocco” and “The House of Bones”, are hard to imagine today because we are so consumed with technology and virtual reality. Our escapes from reality are usually entertained by technology or some mode of it. The simple way of life is still existing but barely holding on because we feel that a high tech society is a simple way of living. Josh Hughey, in his 2009 final exam, stated that these texts can make us feel nostalgic toward the warmth of simpler times or it can remind us of how far we’ve advanced both culturally and technologically. I agree with his insight on how much we have advanced, because there will most likely come a time when we will need to understand the blueprints of our technology in order to use them effectively. I feel the texts past the midterm have portrayed the “what if” factors that haunt us every day in our society. I believe nature will discipline us according to how we treat it. If our society wants to advance technologically we mustn’t forget four main necessities of life which include oxygen, water, food, shelter. Without these humanity will cease to exist and technology along with it. I feel hopeful for our future, but remain skeptical on our current efforts. This course has enlightened me on how important it is to acknowledge literature as a vessel into the future. We have encountered positive and negative futures and pasts, but most importantly we have delved into the minds of people who are concerned and curious about what is to come for our species and humanity as a whole.

In the end, we will never understand fully how we are so lucky as to live here now, We must simply be thankful.