PRAGMATIC PESSIMISM IN DYSTOPIAN FICTION: TO PARADISE BY HANYA YANAGIHARA
PRAGMATIC PESSIMISM IN DYSTOPIAN FICTION: TO PARADISE BY HANYA YANAGIHARA

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary writing about contagion spans pandemic and outbreak narratives, pandemic and dystopian fiction. For all the calamities they embed in their plots, most literary works that have intersecting features of these genres gesture towards a horizon of hope through containment of diseases, a second chance for human species, or at the very least, they function as a warning for the readers to avert anthropogenic disasters by showcasing worst case scenarios. Hanya Yanagihara’s triptych third novel To Paradise is set across three centuries in three New Yorks. The third section, “Zone Eight” reworks all these conventions by withholding resolutions and redemptions. It intersects with various genres but defies many of their conventions. Read through pragmatic pessimism, the third section of the novel converts the generic quality of optimism into a realistic, bleak outlook but converges it with resilience. Characters still form relationships, take care of one another, and create meaning in their lives, but it features an ethic of maintenance rather than salvation. Clear-eyed endurance is presented as the rational choice, since when the characters transgress, they merely repeat personal mistakes on an individual level and collective mistakes on a societal level.

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