The Hunger Games: Report from a Phenomenon

By all accounts, Suzanne Collins’s series “The Hunger Games” has been the mass-cultural event of the year. The statistics are suitably enormous, the tickets to the movie as scarce as potable water in the Arena, where the majority of the book’s action takes place. Fandango has announced that the advanced ticket sales for the premiere this weekend are on track to be the largest ever for a non-sequel. Collins is the top-selling Kindle author ever, and “The Hunger Games” has been sublimed into rarefied air alongside Twilight and Harry Potter. In an age where the book is more often a subject of eulogy than praise, what does “The Hunger Games” have to tell us about how and why we read today? Risking the liquidation of whatever small amounts of cultural capital I may have accumulated, I resolved to find out.

One perennial explanation for the rise of the novel, a category to which “The Hunger Games” nominally belongs, as the most popular literary mode is that we read to meet people like us. We live in a circumscribed time and place, and are constrained in all kinds of ways from fully exploring the human landscape around us. Books allow us to transcend those limitations, but also reassure us that people everywhere are basically the same; our group of friends would make fine material for a novel, if only we could have the time and insight to write. Books that take place in an undisclosed future, like “The Hunger Games,” have the advantage of mapping difference and continuity chronologically, a maneuver that is especially effective at highlighting similarity and difference.

A brief summary of the as-yet-uninitiated: “The Hunger Games” is set in a future authoritarian dystopia where children are pitted against each other in a fight to the death. These dystopian Olympics are staged every year as a way for the Capitol (situated where the Rockies are now—who knew!), imagined as a decadent dictatorship, to subdue the Districts, provinces that have been crushed in a revolt and have to furnish tribute as continual acknowledgment of their political abjectness. Male and female young adults are selected from each of the twelve districts and fight each other to the death, with the last survivor declared the victor. The protagonist is Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers for the Games so her sister will not be conscripted. Deft use of a bow and arrow, multiple accounts of how to grill a rabbit, and many awkward romantic scenes ensue.

“The Hunger Games” has received criticism for its depiction of the fatal harm its child protagonists do to one another and the way in which the adolescent body is subjected to increasing amounts of trauma. The appeal of imaginary violence is perennial, but the appeal of “The Hunger Games” lies elsewhere: not in what the children do to each other, but rather in the way the novel so perfectly matches our moment of spectacle. Every Hunger Games book sold is actually a reminder of the extraordinary evolution away from the sufficiency of the book.  Books are read in private as a way to be alone in an enriched and sociable way. They are also discrete units, portable but sufficient. They thus function very much like the Arena, a zone where we can roam freely but under rules and constraints dictated by the “Gamemakers” or author. We meet characters, get to know them, and grow to love or mistrust them. We feel that there are stakes to these encounters, and the narrative insinuates that it is all very significant and will be revealed at the end.

But “The Hunger Games” operates according to a different understanding of what constitutes a literary text; it is almost unfathomably open-ended. In a New York Times article entitled “How ‘Hunger Games’ Built Up Must-See Fever,” Brooks Barnes discusses the tremendous role that technology played In marketing the novel: “a phased, year-long digital effort… near constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games, and live Yahoo streaming.” Of course, the book has always been a consumer product situated within a larger economic climate, but with “The Hunger Games” something different has occurred; the evolution away from the book as an autonomous entity bounded by two covers. It no longer makes sense to discuss the book apart from the movie or the interactive site where you can create a profile that makes you a character.

In some ways, we are protected by a book’s boundedness; “The Hunger Games” is phenomenon without end. The book’s greatest achievement is not only furthering this evolution, but also thematizing its peril and potential. “The Hunger Games” are streamed live, and, in a contemporary take on post-modern self-consciousness, are aware of themselves as televised characters in a reality television show. Many of the most likeable characters in the book—the interview hosts and make-up personnel—are those connected with the televising of the Games, and rightly so. The book, like the characters in it, is worried how it will do on the big screen. Why read The Hunger Games when you can play in them?

Ari R. Hoffman ’10 is a Ph.D. candidate in English. His column appears on alternate Fridays.