Oryx and Crake

Literature has been known to portray the lives of people of the period of genesis of the particular piece of literary work. At some times it can also foretell things as in the case with the speculative fiction. Speculative fiction are imaginary stories that are based on actual happenings of the earth. Those events could either have happened in the past or might have likelihoods of happening in the future. Margaret Atwood is one of the most prominent contemporary writers who writes stories about the future that could warn people about the impending disasters if he continues to destroy nature in order for him to live an easier and comfortable life. Oryx and Crake is one of her recent novels, which is the first book of the Maddaddam trilogy, that prophecies about the tragic events because of the misuse of genetic engineering. She, through this novel, tries to caution humanity and advice it to mend its ways so as to preserve itself and also the nature.

The outset of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2004) presents the global annihilation of the whole human race, with the survival of only one human and some “dehumanized” humans created by a young scientist. Then the pre-apocalyptic world of the novel is depicted through recollections of that survived human – a globalized community dominated by multinational corporations whose thirst for profit seems inexhaustible, thus employ several scientists to invent new technological products to bring in more returns for them. These scientists manipulate reality by engendering lab-made creatures that are produced via bioengineering. Besides their fabrication of “hyper-reality,” the mass media perpetually provoke various desires in people by advertizing the products of those scientists, so that more revenue could be obtained for those corporations and their power could be upheld. Everything seems to be available by the means of technology in this illusive, consuming world manipulated by scientists and mass media. The writers of this article present a Baudrillardian reading of Atwood’s speculative fiction to illustrate how the “simulation” of reality by scientists and media at the service of capitalists might bring about the extinction of humankind – presented by Atwood as the probable end of a world ruled by capitalism.

This monograph presents a psychoanalytical assessment of technoscience. The first four chapters provide a short introduction into the psychoanalysis of technoscience, its basic concepts and methods, as developed Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Lacan. In subsequent chapters, this approach is fleshed out with the help of case histories (palaeoanthropology, classical conditioning and virology). Psychoanalysis reveals that, rather than by disinterested curiosity, technoscience is driven by desire, resistance and the will to control. Moreover, the focus is on primal scenes, such as Dubois’ quixotic quest for the missing link and Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex. In addition, psychoanalysis opts for triangulation: understanding technoscientific research by comparing it to “different scenes”: to genres of the imagination, notably novels, so that, in this volume, the discovery of a Homo erectus skull by Dubois is compared to missing link novels by Jules Verne and Jack London (dating from the same period), Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex is compared with B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two and virology as a research field is considered through the lens of viral fiction.


Psychoanalysis of Technoscience: Symbolisation and Imagination
Author: Hub Zwart (2018)
Series: Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue.
LIT Verlag. Berlin/Münster/Zürich: ISBN 978-3-643-91050-9.
Series / Reihe: Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue /
Philosophie und Psychologie im Dialog

This paper aims to problematise the recent resurgence of literary dystopian narratives in Anglophone literatures, suggesting that such narratives must be read through a perspective that considers the centrality of the dystopian body as a transhuman entity. From the arguments raised by the discussions of transhumanism and posthumanism, the impact of scientific development in the construction of desire, and of the role of theological thought in postmodernity, the goal is to discuss how these ideas appear and are presented in Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

One of the main pillars of posthuman and transhuman thought is the use of technology as a means to ameliorate human life by helping overcome the flaws and limitations of the biological body. The effect of such trends has been central to the development of contemporary, third-turn dystopian novels in English, published in the past thirty or so years. However, one important aspect of such narratives is also their list of transgressive characteristics, distancing them from their modern, second-turn counterparts. The following article aims to discuss how transgressive the ideas of dystopia and transhumanism that form Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy are, essentially discussing whatever lies at the core of the human condition.

Usually read as an example of contemporary dystopian (or speculative) fiction, the tensions of posthuman/transhuman philosophies and those of the contemporary notion of the-apocalyptic novels can be, in fact, understood as an attempt to undermine and, also, problematise what the posthuman projects of technological capitalism intend and how it can be possible (if at all) to develop an understanding of a posthuman Anthropocene through the creation of the Crakers, bioengineered hominids created to repopulate the planet after the pandemic known as The Waterless Flood.

This paper discusses the notion of food as a humanising factor in the posthuman world of Margaret Atwood's trilogy Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam. Within the postapocalyptic backdrop of the narrative, the remaining humans are posthumans that display nostalgia to "real" food. As Lee Rozelle proposes, the apocalypse instigated by Crake "prompts the readers to think about questions that not only have an impact on the future but also concernmany people today: What happens to customary human qualities associated with the Western post­industrial state in a world with housing and energy shortages, starvation and drought?" (n.p.). The friction of a need for an essentialist, core, "humanness" within the posthumanism in Atwood's trilogy is explored by looking at how food is discussed in these novels and how the prestige of "real" food plays into sensations of nostalgia to a perceived lost humanity.

"A response to the discourse around the novel 'Oryx and Crake', addressing the false opposition between science and the humanities and considering the importance of apocalyptic discourse during the contemporary environmental crisis. Caveat: this paper was written with limited time and resources. It does not have the benefit of a full survey of ecocritical thought, and thus critiques only those trends deemed most divisive and harmful."

The Anthropocene challenges the humanities to find means of representing and analysing our fossil-fueled practices that have spread industrial particulates over the entire globe, changed the climate, and reshaped landscapes into a “new nature.” In this essay, I propose the “dark pastoral” as an analytical trope, examining two framing texts from the Anthropocene: Goethe’s landmark 1797 pastoral German epic, Hermann and Dorothea, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the first installment of her MaddAddam trilogy which ends with a surprisingly pastoral flourish. At the early phases of the Anthropocene (as it is defined by Paul Crutzen, at least), Goethe creates an epic pastoral whose materiality points darkly towards the impending modernity of capitalism. Atwood’s, postapocalyptic versions of a damaged yet rejuvenating Earth directly dramatise the Anthropocene’s destruction while ending with a “new” pastoral that relies on an almost total obliteration of humanity: these are dark pastoral visions.

“Here, at the End: Contemporary North American Ecocritical Dystopian Fiction” argues that a distinct speculative subgenre has arisen within current dystopian fiction—one that contains some properties comparable to the “critical dystopia” identified by Tom Moylan and others as having emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, but with considerations unique to the present moment. In a sense, this new subgeneric permutation, which I am calling the “ecocritical dystopia,” is an extension of that earlier form. Yet thanks to its attention to the environmental, it also reminds us that dystopian literature is perhaps always, at its root, concerned with changes to the environment and subsequent changes to society. This last aspect is the process highlighted by ecocritical dystopianism, which articulates its near-future alterations through the use of real-world place known in some way to the reader as different from the completely fictionalized settings common to some other sf work, such as with off-world narratives or even locations with fictive names that do not correspond to the geographical and instead resonate with the issues of the times. With its emphasis on environmentally-changed places, the ecocritical dystopia lessens our sense of cognitive estrangement, which means that the near-future crises of a narrative are brought into focus much more closely as issues that already affect the present. The conclusion is that problems encountered now will be magnified in the future as our sense of places is physically altered through changes to ecology, weather, climate, biomes, etc. Human society, always environmentally entangled to some degree, will also be affected. Ecocritical dystopianism therefore imparts a sense of urgency with its narratives, which bring the abstractions of something like anthropogenic climate change down to the more-focused local or even regional perspective. My study’s intervention through delineating and investigating this contemporary dystopian subgenre insists that, in this time of the Anthropocene, we are actively and aggressively driving changes to our future that will dramatically alter coastlines, living spaces, agricultural processes, and freshwater sources, as well as displace millions of people and further the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction. But this study also demonstrates that ecocritical dystopianism has been in development nearly since the inception of the critical dystopia, with potential analytical applications prior to both. To examine the recent emergence of this new dystopian movement, this dissertation analyzes the complex generic resonances of Octavia Butler’s Parable books (Parable of the Sower, 1993; Parable of the Talents, 1998), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the Flood, 2009; MaddAddam, 2013), and Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), with references to other texts emerging in the subgenre as concerns about the dystopian now become increasingly vocal. Through their ecologically-focused, placed-based imaginings, the ecocritical dystopias, though set in the near future, underscore that our present moment is already in crisis, and that we, too, are connected to its narratives.

Ecological catastrophe and global climate change are the new faces of science run amok, yet we look to the sciences for a quick solution to the very problem of rampant technological development. The disciplinary humanities bemoan this even as they slide into presumed obsolescence in the face of the ascendant so-called STEM disciplines, foreclosing a necessary alliance.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake provides compelling vision of this crisis as well as its effect on the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.  This paper engages with the novel and the critical discourse surrounding it, as well as Derrida’s work on eschatology, using Heideggar’s concept of Ge-stell and Lacanian notions of the unassimilable to examine the problematics of relying upon the prevailing metaphysical constellation that governs the development and application of technology, and challenging divided state of academia.

ABSTRACT The outset of Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” (2004) presents the global annihilation of the whole human race, with the survival of only one human and some “dehumanized” humans created by a young scientist. Then the pre-apocalyptic world of the novel is depicted through recollections of that survived human – a globalized community dominated by multinational corporations whose thirst for profit seems inexhaustible, thus employ several scientists to invent new technological products to bring in more returns for them. These scientists manipulate reality by engendering lab-made creatures that are produced via bioengineering. Besides their fabrication of “hyper-reality,” the mass media perpetually provoke various desires in people by advertizing the products of those scientists, so that more revenue could be obtained for those corporations and their power could be upheld. Everything seems to be available by the means of technology in this illusive, consuming world manipulated by scientists and mass media. The writers of this article present a Baudrillardian reading of Atwood’s speculative fiction to illustrate how the “simulation” of reality by scientists and media at the service of capitalists might bring about the extinction of humankind – presented by Atwood as the probable end of a world ruled by capitalism.

Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is a complex, multi-faceted performance of border-crossing as seen in, to name a few instances: its blurring of genres (leading to Atwood’s neologism, “ustopia” along with her combined use of elements of satire, the Gothic, quest and Last Man narratives); its often humorous representation of transgenic species blending (leading to “snats,” “rakunks,” “ChickieNobs,” “Pigoons,” and the “Crakers”); and its ambiguous use of first- and third-person voices. Despite this evident interest in blurring and transgressing, however, the focalizers and storytellers often display a surprising tendency towards worldviews of human exceptionalism and a preference for maintaining the divides between human and “animal,” Culture and Nature, “real” and artifice. For example, in response to Crake questioning the boundary between “are they real or fake,” Jimmy wonders “[w]hy is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed?” while his response to the vegan-approved ChickieNobs is of seeing a “nightmare,” something that “went too far” (2003 235, 242, 238). Similarly, despite the outward expression of species equality in Adam One’s sermons lie surprising instances of human exceptionalism, as when he proclaims that all humans are closely related to primates while also asserting that all of humanity’s unwanted traits, “our appetites, our desires, our more uncontrollable emotions – all are Primate!” (2009 62). From this perspective, every impulse that should be controlled by the rational mind is labelled as other-than-human; as such, Adam One’s designation between the impulsive-as-“Primate” and the rational-as-“Human” is strikingly, and shockingly (considering the source), similar to Descartes’s theory of the animal automaton: a being which responds to stimuli simply out of impulse and not out of rational, conscious response (Descartes 61). Thus, despite the (arguably) good intentions of the narrators of the trilogy’s first two novels, they remain staunchly entrenched within humanist worldviews of human exceptionalism and speciesism, beliefs which perpetuate species categories as well as the racial and sexual violence which such categories claim to “justify” (cf. Derrida, Adams). 
This desire to maintain divisions – in the context of a human world that has collapsed out from under them – is voiced by the focalizers, storytellers, and preachers of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood (and, to a lesser extent, Toby in MaddAddam); these speakers give narrative priority and privilege to human exceptionalism, over the worldviews of interconnectivity and inter-species subjectivity as performed or espoused by marginalized figures such as Oryx and the Crakers. How can this sit squarely with a literary project that is so overwhelmingly indebted to the concept and depiction of boundary transgression and category blurring? The answer may be found in Atwood’s own explanation of the origins of Oryx and Crake: the storyline appeared to her while she was in Australia, bird-watching and exploring the caves where “Aboriginal people had lived continuously, in harmony with their environment, for tens of thousands of years” (Atwood, qtd. in Mendelsohn, n.pag.). Clearly, the birding experience and the crake itself became overt influences on the novel title and characters. However, this paper investigates the covert ways in which Indigenous theories of “living in harmony with one’s environment,” and the nonhuman beings within it, influence the form and function of discourse and storying in the trilogy. To do so, the paper proposes a “red reading” of the MaddAddam trilogy, what Scott Andrews defines as “an interpretation of a non-native text from a native perspective” that “destabilize[s], among other things, the dominant culture’s confidence in representations of itself” (Andrews i, iii). Combining the Anishinaabe* philosophy of Mino-Bimaadiziwin (“the way of the good life”) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of double-voiced discourse and dialogism, the paper argues that Atwood’s use of internal focalization, discourse, and narrative voice dramatizes an ontological and epistemological shift – from human exceptionalism and distinct boundaries to interspecies intersubjectivity and interconnectivity – leading to the depiction and demonstration of a more harmonious, and therefore, robust, just, and hopefully long-lasting inter-species community by the trilogy’s end. This is to say, it is not just what the narrators say about transgressing boundaries of human and animal, culture and nature, real and fake, but who says it, how, and to whom. These seemingly straight-forward questions and prepositions – of subject and object, speaker and audience – are complicated by an Anishinaabe “red reading,” which teaches non-Anishinaabe readers how to reconceptualize the boundaries between the speaker and the storyteller, between who/what gets to participate in society as “we” currently understand it, and what society may look like when Euro-American concepts of species categories make space for other ways of knowing and being. 

*The Anishinaabe is one of several First Nations tribes whose traditional territory encompasses Toronto, where Atwood has spent much of her life.

––––

Works Cited

Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat. 2010. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 

Andrews, Scott. “Red Readings: Decolonization through Native-centric Responses to Non-Native Film and Literature.” Transmotion. Vol. 4, No. 1 (2018): i-vii. 

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. 2003. London: Virago Press, 2012. 

––. The Year of the Flood. 2009. London: Virago Press, 2011. 

––. MaddAddam. London: Bloomsbery, 2013. 

Derrida, Jacques. “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Who Comes After the Subject? Eduardo Cavada, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. New York: Routledge, 1991. 96-119.

Descartes, René. “From the Letters of 1646 and 1649.” The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, eds. New York: Berg, 2007. 59-62.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “After the Fall.” Rev. Of Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. New York Review of Books. 3 July 2002. Web. Accessed 2 October 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/07/03/after-the-fall

Barbara Hill Rigney has described the project of Margaret Atwood’s fiction as “a moral issue. …it is the responsibility of the writer/artist not only to describe her world, but also to criticise it, to bear witness to its failures, and, finally, to prescribe corrective measures – perhaps even to redeem” (1). The moral responsibility of the author is evident in Atwood’s speculative fiction trilogy, in which the author’s known concern for the environment and wildlife conservation provides the impetus to the trilogy’s biological catastrophe. Though Atwood describes herself as a “pessimistic pantheist,” nevertheless, her post-apocalyptic story-world is not without hope (Atwood, para. 3). Indeed, Atwood describes her speculative America – initially overwhelmed with environmental crises, mass extinctions, rampant poverty and greed, social anarchy, and political corruption before a human-designed global pandemic wipes out most of the human species – as an “ustopia” (utopia and dystopia, together). The utopian hope is embodied within the genetically modified Crakers, human-animal-plant hybrids who live in harmony with their post-apocalyptic environment.

Much has been made about the Crakers themselves – whether they are “quasi-humans,” or “transgenic monsters” with “primitive brains,” or “noble savages” (Atwood 2013, 91; Howells 163, 171; Jameson, para. 5). Zhange Ni provides an insightful reading of Atwood’s “radical hope” postulated in the pagan theology of Flood and the nascent mythology of the Crakers in MaddAddam. This paper extends Ni’s reading to argue that the characters of the Crakers and the narrative structure of MaddAddam dramatize Atwood’s search for the “third thing,” a productive and harmonious hybrid alternative to the false binary of innocent passivity and violent activity (Gibson, 26). This “third thing” is essentially a recognition of the power of personal responsibility to enact positive change and it is so prevalent in Atwood’s work as to become a narrative structuring device, leading to her characteristic blurred binaries. MaddAddam specifically addresses and blurs the entrenched human-animal binary, which is conventionally linked to human exceptionalism, animal rights abuses, and environmental degradation. Through a combined theoretical approach, using Euro-American philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway alongside Anishinaabe philosophers like Lawrence Gross, Basil Johnston, and Edward Benton-Banai, this paper reads MaddAddam’s narrative structure, pantheistic mythology, and characters as an “ustopian” critique of North America’s current failures, and a prescription of specifically post-humanist and post-anthropocentric “corrective measures.” Ignoring this advice, the novel warns, invites an inevitable dystopian future, or a utopia, but one devoid of humans.

In hypermodern society, food has become a source of endemic discontent. Many food products are seen as ‘tainted’; literally, figuratively or both. A psychoanalytic approach, I will argue, may help us to come to terms with our alimentary predicaments. What I envision is a ‘depth ethics’ (the moral equivalent of a ‘depth psychology’) focussing on some of the latent tensions, conflicts and ambiguities at work in the current food debate. First, I will outline some promising leads provided by two prominent psychoanalytic authors, namely Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Subsequently, I will elucidate why our chronic dependency on high-tech food production apparently fails to meet consumer needs, focussing on some scenarios of escape, such as anorexia, cultured meat and ersatz food. And I will use ‘genres of the imagination’ (novels and art works) to flesh out how food consumption has become a podium for enacting cultural symptoms, moral outcries, provocative identities and practices of the Self. Notably, I will discuss a story by Franz Kafka, a painting by Pablo Picasso and a food novel by Margaret Atwood.

Envisioning futures populated by a handful of post-human beings, Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake and Michael Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time – set in the last era of the Earth – both depict worlds where socio-cultural structures have collapsed, and human heritage is almost entirely forgotten, substantially altering experience and (relations to) language. In Atwood’s novel, the protagonist Snowman is purportedly the last human left. With his flourishing language yet waning figure slowly consumed by starvation, he stands in contrast with the Crakers, the genetically engineered new hum-animal hybrid species intended to inherit the planet, provided with an abundance of nourishment, but scarce linguistic capacities. In Moorcock’s saga, on the other hand, posthumanity seems to result from “natural” evolution: the novel’s immortal entities possess limitless powers of creation and a flair for rhetoric, though their language, rather superficial, sometimes borders on the nonsensical. Their decadent lifestyle and complete lack of morals are repulsive to the Victorian time-traveller Amelia, the female protagonist who attempts to bring order into what she perceives as chaos by teaching the meaning of ‘virtue’ to one of the post-humans. Both relics of the past, Amelia and Snowman display a sense of superiority concerning the posthuman Others, and are rather unwilling to consider the potential outdatedness of their views and values. This paper argues that by contrasting human characters with posthuman ones, by displacing the human as the ultimate point of reference, and showing modes of existence and language use that are radically different but by no means inferior, the novels critique both anthropocentrism and (phal)logocentrism. Thus, they may be read as participating in a shift from a poststructuralist epistemology towards a critical posthumanist ontology – from a focus on subjectivity and language-as-worldmaker to a posthuman existence emphasizing embodied experience.

Depuis le début des années 1950, alors que se développent la cybernétique et la génétique, l'information sous toutes ses formes représente une valeur marchande grandissante, et un pouvoir accru à ceux qui en maîtrisent le flux. Or, ce pouvoir nouveau entraîne immanquablement un contre-pouvoir : le (bio)hacker, qui, dans la fiction, se retrouve parfois au centre de schémas narratifs tout à fait similaires à ceux des savants fous post-1945. Deux oeuvres de fiction scientifique canadiennes-anglaises des années 2000 sont exemplaires à cet égard: la série télévisée ReGenesis et le roman Oryx and Crake.

This project follows the path blazed by such scholars as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma), Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene First Nation), Vine Deloria Jr. (Oglala Sioux), Lawrence Gross (White Earth Chippewa), Kwes Kwentin (Musqueam), Audra Simpson (Mohawk), Inés Talamantez (Mescalero Apache), and Zoe Todd (Red River Métis/Otipemisiwak), who have all argued for the value in using Indigenous epistemologies as critical theories in a largely non-Indigenous academic context. Following their research and their practice, my project uses the Anishinaabe epistemology of Mino-Bimaadiziwin, or “the good life,” to read Margaret Atwood’s speculative “ustopian” (dystopia / utopia) novel, MaddAddam. While scholars have approached the novel, as well as the trilogy as a whole, in terms of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, feminism, and trauma narratives, few (if any) have addressed the novel in terms of Indigenous ways of seeing and being part of an interconnected and interdependent world. Some readers may question the relevance of Indigenous studies in this novel due, perhaps, to the near-absence of non-white characters in the trilogy; others may question the relevance of Margaret Atwood to the conversation of Indigenous studies in light of the criticisms brought against her fiction and non-fiction for their (stereotypical or appropriative) representation (or lack thereof) of Indigenous people and cultures and due to her participation in debates regarding the supposed claims of Native identity made by Canadian authors.
Nevertheless, this paper argues that reading MaddAddam in terms of Mino-Bimaadiziwin highlights the epistemological significance of the novel’s inventive use of discontinuous narrative, polyphony, and ambiguous endings, as well as the non-anthropomorphic use of non-human voices and discourse, both of which are illustrative of the novel’s determined turn towards a non-anthropocentric and non-speciesist post-apocalyptic society. While these points share commonalities with the theories raised in post-structuralism and posthumanism, reading the novel in terms of Anishinaabe epistemologies not only illuminates the critical value of these ways of seeing the world, but highlights the ways in which non-Indigenous philosophies like post-structuralism and post-humanism are indebted to those marginalized fields of theory which preceded them, often by centuries. As such, this project has three goals: to provide an in-depth narratological analysis of one of Atwood’s most popular novels; in doing so, to offer an alternative theoretical approach to the novel which includes Native epistemologies; and thus, to do the valuable and necessary work of ontological and social decolonization by challenging the commonly accepted wisdom of who produces theory and to whom it is applied.

Margaret Atwood states that “we are all telling stories to ourselves all the time, if it's only the story of our own life … memory evolved not to remind us of the past but to help us prepare for the future.” Indeed, stories, autobiographical or not, are widely considered to be fundamental in shaping our own identities (for example, moral, cultural, and/or national) and interpersonal relationships, as well as in shaping how we interact as a society. As David Eagleman suggests, in his review of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story-Telling Animal, “stories serve the biological function of encouraging pro-social behavior.”

Autobiographical stories and story-telling are at the heart of Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy. As Atwood, Eagleman, and Gottschall suggest, these stories and the ways they are told are intrinsically linked to the different ethics and morals within the three novels. Through Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, this presentation will explore the link between story-telling, narrative structure, and metafiction on the one hand and social ethics and individual morals on the other. Specifically, this presentation will closely analyse the relationship between the dissolution of culture, individual subjectivity, morality, language and narrative structure and the significance of reconstructing this dissolution via a genetically modified, morally “pre-programmed” posthuman narrator, resulting in a post-apocalyptic, posthumanist and, arguably, post-speciesist ethics.

مارگارت آتوود نویسنده ی مشهور کانادایی بر این باور است که در روزگار معاصر قدرت منحصراً دردست دولت نیست، بلکه به اشکال متفاوت و از سوی نهادهای اجتماعی مختلف از جمله شرکت های بزرگ اقتصادی اعمال می شود. یکی از دغدغه های او به تصویردرآوردن نقش اساسی پیشرفت های علمی در جهت تقویت قدرت آن شرکت ها و در نتیجه تشدید جنبه های زیان بار نظام سرمایه داری است. این دغدغه ی او تا حدی شبیه دیدگاه لوئی آلتوسر در باره ی ایدئولوژی آموزشی است که اگر به شکل صحیح هدایت نشود، صرفا به نردبان ترقی سرمایه داران بدل خواهد شد. آلتوسر معتقد است که وقتی علم به ابزاری در دست سودجویان تبدیل می شود، تاثیرات زیان باری خواهد داشت که یکی از آنها تشدید اختلاف طبقاتی است. آتوود در دو رمان آریکس و کریک (2004) و سال سیل (2010) چگونگی اعمال قدرت شرکت های بزرگ و پیامدهای منفی پیشرفت های علمی به علت کارگزاری دانشمندان در این شرکت ها برای تبدیل کردن آنها به ابر قدرت های اقتصادی را هنرمندانه به تصویر در می آورد و پلشتی ها و کژی های حاصل از این امر را به وضوح نشان می دهد.

Bu çalışmada, iklim kurgu türünün önde gelen eserleri arasında gösterilen Margaret Atwood’un önemli üçlemesinin ilk romanı Antilop ve Flurya (Oryx and Crake) (2003), ekoeleştirel yaklaşım çerçevesinde incelenecek olup ekolojik dengeyi oluşturan unsurların insan eliyle nasıl bir yıkıma dönüştüğü, bu yıkımda insan-doğa ikileminin varoluşsal mücadelesi ve bu mücadele sonucunda meydana gelen çatışmalar iklim kurgudaki insan-doğa ilişkisine ışık tutmak amacıyla ele alınacaktır.

Through narratological analyses of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, this project challenges the ingrained epistemologies and ontologies of humanism and anthropocentrism and offers a zoecentric alternative: the “individual” is always-already hybrid. Beginning with a post-structural and post-humanist theoretical framework, Part I explores how Atwood constructs hybrid Bildungsromans in Crake and Flood by aligning narratively significant moments of inter-species interaction with substantial shifts of the binary narrative structure. Both novels end, however, on unresolved binary options. Part II introduces Anishinaabe epistemologies and ontologies of interconnectivity, using the philosophy of mino-bimaadiziwin alongside aspects of Anishinaabemowin and narrative forms, in order to conduct an Indigenous-centric reading of MaddAddam. I argue that the trilogy both depicts and performs a zoecentric epistemological/ontological shift in the development of the characters, the narrative structure, and the trilogy as a whole, forming a homology with contemporary theoretical, biological, and genetic understandings of individuals and species today as inherent multiplicities.

In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, the apocalypse is brought about by the character Crake, who devises and unleashes a virus to wipe out human life. Far from a typical mad-scientist villain who abandons reason and turns against his own society, however, Crake exists in a social milieu that encourages the “mad” prizing of knowledge at the expense of feeling and the routine degradation and oppression of other humans. Drawing on the affect theory of Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I analyze Crake as an exemplary denizen of the “happiness dystopia” that is his society. I argue that Crake’s disanthropic attitude is not recognized by other characters because the scientific and socioeconomic systems are perpetuated by a disaffected response to suffering. Crake does not appear mad, as even his genocidal endgame conforms to the affective logic of his society, effectively camouflaging his methods and motives from detection.

NB: This article “Reasonably Insane: Affect and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” originally appeared in Emerging Scholars. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 226 (Autumn 2015): 18-33, and is not available except through institutional access or purchase of the issue from Canadian Literature's website (as linked above).