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Margaret Atwood, 'The Year of the Flood'

2010; Vanderbilt University; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15695/amqst.v7i2.187

1553-4316

John J. Morrell,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

More explicitly than her other novels, Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (2009) is a book about radicalism and resistance in the Americas.The Year of the Flood returns to the dystopian future of Oryx and Crake (2003), significantly expanding the scope of that earlier novel.A "simultanequel," narrated from multiple points of view, The Year of the Flood expands the story of Oryx and Crake, offering a more thorough set of critical perspectives on capitalism and collapse.Taken together, these two novels constitute a "critical dystopia," insofar as they operate, in Tom Moylan's terms, "inside the ambient zone of anti-utopian pessimism with new textual tricks," exposing the "horror of the present moment." 1 Atwood's novel plays these tricks, among other ways, by appropriating the phonetic shorthand of text messages with an enthusiasm that borders on the obnoxious, until one remembers that she's actually toned down the language of the internet at the same time as she has made it more clever, filling it with puns.Entering this ambient zone of anti-utopian pessimism, Atwood knows that she is writing in a genre with a long genealogy, and the dystopian world of these two novels reads something like a tribute album, with explicit allusions to Orwell and Huxley, spiced with references to Soylent Green (1973) and Dr. Strangelove (1964).Atwood also draws heavily upon the Bible and Blake, and her more canonical literary allusions argue for the inclusion of speculative fiction alongside the ranks of high literature, if that argument still needs to be made in the 21 st century.Finally, Atwood's own interest in dystopia is longstanding; although she won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, she is perhaps more famous for her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale.Though they arguably participate in the same genre, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood offer something different than The Handmaid's Tale -they present a broader socioeconomic and technological critique of contemporary society.Atwood's novels are world-historical in their scope, but American in their focus.She imagines a future in which corporations have privatized the last vestiges of the public sphere, strangling and then replacing the government as it withers away.It is a dystopia extrapolated from Naomi Klein's description of disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine (2007).As a form of sociological thought-experiment, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood amplify certain characteristics of contemporary society in order to achieve the descriptive insights such manipulation produces --Atwood writes in her acknowledgements that "The Year of the Flood is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact." 2 In this sense her novels operate as a form of scenario-thinking and as an important warning.Atwood warns against bioterrorism, internet terrorism, and corrupt corporate security agencies.Indeed, her novels tackle such relevant and timely scenarios that judge Richard Posner has weighed in with his opinion on the risk of a bioterrorist catastrophe like the one she describes. 3Through the landscape she constructs, Atwood also offers prescient commentary on consumer desire, corporate advertising, food production, income disparity, health care, education, and climate change.According to Moylan, critical dystopias "adopt a militant stance that is informed and empowered by a utopian horizon that appears in the text-or at least shimmers just beyond its pages." 4 In The Year of