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The post-apocalyptic turn: A study of contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) are the first and second novels in an as-yet-unfinished trilogy. The two works share a complex structure in which scenes from different moments in the future follow one another. A post-apocalyptic narrative line is intertwined with one that depicts events from a nearer future, all of them leading up to an environmental catastrophe of huge proportions. The nearest scenario is one of extreme genetic manipulation, in which the boundaries between species are blatantly crossed. Biopolitics strictly controls the environment and those who inhabit it; identities can be bought, and only some of them grant access to the Compounds – the only safe areas left after open spaces have become radioactive. In the meantime, all kinds of technological and genetic enhancements to human capabilities are being employed, some of them resulting in the creation of para-human populations. An environmental catastrophe follows, and both books feature last-man-on-earth narratives. Whether – or, more appropriately, how – the apocalyptic destruction is linked to an attempt to cross the boundary of the human is the issue this essay addresses. The first section deals with more classical interpretations of Atwood’s fiction as a cautionary tale about current environmental policies, whereas a new hypothesis is made in the second section, a post-humanist reading of Atwood's novels. Philosophical support will be provided by Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the fine line between animals and humans and Cary Wolfe’s theory of posthumanism.

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Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

Atwood comments that her MaddAddam trilogy is neither apocalyptic nor utopian. Nor is the Waterless Flood, the central catastrophic event around which the various narratives of the trilogy cohere, an ecological catastrophe, but, instead, is the consequence of an act of bioterrorism meant to forestall such a possibility. Nonetheless, it is argued, following Laurence Coupe’s mythic schema, that Atwood’s trilogy can be understood in an alternative sense of apocalypse, that of revelation, an imaginative exploration of possibilities rather than the end of all possibilities that a literalist interpretation of this key biblical myth entails. The study uses Coupe’s mythic schema to analyse some of the biblical myths that Atwood employs in her trilogy and builds on Watkins’s distinction between monologic, pessimistic and tragic male apocalyptic fiction and dialogic, optimistic and comic female apocalyptic fiction. It shows how the polyphonic structure of the whole trilogy transcends the apparent pessimistic conten...

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Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of h...

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Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction

Removing the binaries between humanity and nature: The female perception through science fiction utopias

Any fictional text, however realistic, portrays a world that is not real. But speculative fiction--as Margaret Atwood designates her futurist, dystopian novels, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009)--offers a particular and explicit challenge to its readers' sense of the temporal distance separating the fictional mise-en-scene from the contemporary real world. Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions. In Atwood's words, speculative fictions explore "the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational," which is something that "'novels' as usually defined cannot do" (In Other Worlds 62). Yet the imaginative effects of dystopian literary speculations depend precisely on their readers' recognition of a potential social realism in the fictional worlds portrayed therein. These cautionary tales of the future work by evoking an uncanny sense of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of these brave new worlds. The future as imagined in dystopian speculative fiction must be simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, both like and not-like the present (see Suvin 71; see also Appleton, Howells, and Mohr). In order to grasp the caution offered by the tale, we must see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognize the difference between now and the future-as-imagined. Thus, the reader of such fiction must sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to the fictionality of the world portrayed and to its potential as our own world's future. In Atwood's Oryx and Crake, for example, we find a near-future world that both approximates and projects forward from the political, socio-economical, technological, and climatological givens of our present moment. In the near future as imagined by Atwood, elites work and play in manicured gated communities, while everyone else is relegated to dangerous urban jungles known as pleeblands; biotech corporations command their own secret police forces such as the CorpSeCorps (short for Corporation Security Corps, but also, more grimly, Corpse Corps); genetically engineered life forms are trademarked and marketed for medical purposes and lifestyle enhancement; and the dire effects of rising sea levels and droughts associated with global warming are accepted by a younger generation that mocks the nostalgic longings of their parents and grandparents for a long ago golden age. The futurist setting of the novel suggests that we are at risk of coming to such a pass, though some readers may feel that this is already substantially, if not literally, the way we live now. Readers of Oryx and Crake are not alone in their temporally uncertain, or doubled, relation to the novel's dystopian mise-en-scene. For Atwood's protagonist--born "Jimmy" but introduced to the reader as "Snowman"--the futurist dystopia sketched above is already a memory. Oryx and Crake opens with Snowman awakening to a bleak, post-apocalyptic world that makes the socio-economic disparities and biotechnological threats of his past, a past in which he was still "Jimmy" and a past that stands as the reader's possibly inevitable future, look rosy by comparison. We don't immediately understand what has happened to Snowman's world, or when, but as we continue to read, we apprehend that Snowman believes himself to be the sole survivor of a global pandemic that has extinguished the rest of humanity. Gradually, we learn of Snowman's largely unwitting, yet also willfully unknowing, complicity in a scheme by which a bioengineered super virus was disseminated across the globe. The same mad scientist (Jimmy's best friend Crake) who masterminded the pandemic also bio-engineered a small tribe of genetically "improved" trans-humans, primitive but gentle replacements for humanity, who have been left under Snowman's care to inherit the earth. …

Katherine V. Snyder

Papers

"Time to go": The Post-apocalyptic and The Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake