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

Abstract

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 Flood (2009)--offers a particular and explicit challenge to its readers' sense of temporal distance separating fictional mise-en-scene from contemporary real world. Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into 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 imaginative effects of dystopian literary speculations depend precisely on their readers' recognition of a potential social realism in fictional worlds portrayed therein. These cautionary tales of future work by evoking an uncanny sense of 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 present (see Suvin 71; see also Appleton, Howells, and Mohr). In order to grasp caution offered by tale, we must see imagined future in our actual present and also recognize difference between now and future-as-imagined. Thus, reader of such fiction must sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to fictionality of 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 political, socio-economical, technological, and climatological givens of our present moment. In 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 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 dire effects of rising sea levels and droughts associated with global warming are accepted by a younger generation that mocks nostalgic longings of their parents and grandparents for a long ago golden age. The futurist setting of 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, way we live now. Readers of Oryx and Crake are not alone in their temporally uncertain, or doubled, relation to novel's dystopian mise-en-scene. For Atwood's protagonist--born Jimmy but introduced to 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 socio-economic disparities and biotechnological threats of his past, a past in which he was still Jimmy and a past that stands as 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 sole survivor of a global pandemic that has extinguished 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 globe. The same mad scientist (Jimmy's best friend Crake) who masterminded 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 earth. …