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Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

2012; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2012.676914

1545-5866

Gerry Canavan,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The most common alternative version is "It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," and the most common misattribution is to Slavoj Žižek. This mode of thinking is likewise at the core of the time-travel logic Slavoj Žižek has recently embraced as a political response to ecological crisis: "We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny—and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act that will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past" (151). Note the "c" replacing the "s" in "Paradice," suggesting a relationship to gambling or to random chance, which replaces the more traditional notion of an ordered divine plan. In a send-up of trends in twenty-first century corporate branding, most of the companies and products we encounter in Atwood's novel have names with similarly modified or outright silly spellings—HelthWyzer, RejoovenEsence, ANooYoo, etc. The implication of the novel is that Crake has secretly been working on his virus for nearly his entire life, originally testing it on his own mother in retribution for her betrayal of his father; the symptoms of the world-ending supervirus match quite closely the symptoms of the unknown infection that killed her. The Year of the Flood explores these same events from the perspective of minor characters from the first book, among them two of Jimmy's former girlfriends, Amanda and Brenda/Ren; accordingly, Jimmy and Crake become background characters in that book, appearing only here and there in unexpected ways. By its conclusion, The Year of the Flood has brought us only about a chapter past the cliffhanger that ended the first book—only to abruptly end on another cliffhanger, which still waits to be resolved by Atwood's promised third and final book in the series. The words "zero hour" recur, 374 pages later, as the second-to-last sentence of the novel, now signifying the instant in which a momentous decision must finally be made—mirroring in macrocosm an existentialist dialectic between radical freedom and radical nihilism that recurs throughout the novel. Texas "dried up and blew away" (244); at one point a reference is made to Harvard, "back before it got drowned" (173). Snowman's interlocutor here is his memory of Oryx, a key character who provides the other half of the novel's title. Oryx is another of Crake's employees, hired because of her physical resemblance to the face of an exploited young girl he and Jimmy once saw while watching child pornography on the Internet. (She is initially presented as if she were, in fact, the same person, though by the end of the novel this seems highly dubious.) She, like Crake, has taken a new name based upon a now-extinct animal. While I do not speak much about Oryx in this article, she is in fact a crucial part of Atwood's critique of contemporary civilization—physically embodying a critique of misogyny and patriarchy that deeply informs both Crake's plan to remake civilization and encourages us take his solution seriously. As H. Louise Davis has noted, this aspect of the novel's critique is key to its ecofeminist politics: "Ecofeminism should not simply be about defining or detailing the parallel oppressions of women and nature! Ecofeminism should also aim to provide the reader of both theory and fiction with the language and the tools necessary to effectively perceive and question those patriarchal structures that recklessly limit, oppress, and violate both human beings and their natural/cultural environments" (92–93). It should be noted that Crake's development of the Crakers appears to draw on a Romantic notion of the natural world as stable and harmonious, which is no longer current in ecological science. On this point, see Dana Phillips's The Truth of Ecology or John Kricher's The Balance of Nature. This alteration takes on a rather more disturbing valence when seen through the eyes of female protagonists Ren and Toby in The Year of the Flood. When the Crakers encounter unmodified human women, they read the women as being sexually available ("smelling blue") at all times, and appear as if they might sexually assault them (409–412). The scene is quite ambiguous, and can be read both as an attack on Crake and as a validation of his genomic/pheromonic solution to the problem of rape. Such an act of closure has a long tradition in utopian thought, dating back to King Utopus's foundational digging of the trench that first turned Utopia into an island; see Archaeologies of the Future 204. Snowman chooses his new moniker precisely in spite of this rule, as the very word "Snowman" has no referent in the Crakers' hot, beach climate. Even their version of religious practice, such as it is, is intensely ecologically minded: "After a thing has been used, it must be given back to its place of origin" (363). There are no cathedrals in Craker religion, no waste. In the Bushmen communities which Lee studied, 35% of the population did not work at all; the remaining 65% worked only 36% of the time. The "work week" in this area averaged two hours a day (21). Indeed, Crake believes that the current instance of technological civilization is the only possible version in Earth's entire history: "Because all the available surface metals have already been mined … without which, no iron age, no bronze age, no age of steel, and all the rest of it. There's metals farther down, but the advanced technology we need for extracting those would have been obliterated" (223). A second industrial revolution is by this logic impossible. Little wonder to find the title for Williams's academic blog reimagining a classic Marxist slogan: the site is not "Socialism or Barbarism," but "Socialism and/or Barbarism.". In Terry Gilliam's apocalyptic Twelve Monkeys (1995)—which shares with Oryx and Crake an epidemic deliberately released by a deep ecologist in the name of preserving life on Earth—the architect of the release of the virus likewise frames his doomsday vision in these terms: I think, Dr. Railly, you've given your virus a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the pollution of land, sea, and air, the rape of the environment. In this context, isn't it obvious that "Chicken Little" represents the sane vision and that Homo sapiens' motto, "Let's go shopping!" is the cry of the true lunatic? One must think here of what Jameson calls "the grandest of all the ruptures effectuated by the Utopian Imagination: namely, the thought of abolishing money and private property" (229). Indeed, Crake's brief appearances in The Year of the Flood implicitly suggest he has deliberately left enough humans alive to force this very confrontation, in a sense giving the human race its second chance after all. If we take this implication, the result transforms Crake from the world's deepest cynic into an idealist (of a sort) after all. This idea is quite close to what Tom Moylan has developed in his work on the critical utopia and the critical dystopia, the latter of which the Oryx and Crake series perhaps stands as the paradigmatic example. The best-known version of this quote comes via Walter Benjamin in his essay "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death": "[There is] plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us" (Franz Kafka, conversation with Max Brod, cited in Benjamin 116). This synthesis is groped for throughout Year of the Flood, and is explicitly evoked near the novel's end: "Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?" (358). Among the changes they make, it must be noted, is to become vegetarians (19) and to wear eco-friendly clothes whose dyes turn their skin blue (209), as well as to live in a Garden led by a man who calls himself Adam—all features that link the separatist Utopia of The Year of the Flood to the Craker Utopia of Oryx and Crake. We also find, late in the second novel, that a splinter group of God's Gardeners helped Crake design and plan the Crakers, further uniting the two groups (412). I want to thank Greg Garrad for challenging me on this point, particularly in bringing to my attention the fact that Atwood was accompanied on her book tour for Year of the Flood by a gospel choir singing the Gardeners' hymns. Garrard suggests that the book may, in fact, be a serious attempt to create a Darwinist ecological religion—making the novel quite literally a Bible for the world to come after all. I concede the possibility that this was Atwood's intent, but my feeling remains that the book is most satisfying when read as a broadly satirical statement of the problem rather than a (frankly naïve) solution proposed in earnest. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGerry Canavan Gerry Canavan has just completed his dissertation on British and American science fiction of the twentieth century. He is the co-editor of special issues of American Literature and Polygraph and is currently editing an anthology titled Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction with Kim Stanley Robinson. In Fall 2012, he will join the English Department at Marquette University.