“Zero Time” and the Apocalypse: Postnatural Survival in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

Abstract

Staging the environment and emplotting human, animal or ?humanimal' identities in fiction rely heavily on gaps and tensions that foster readerly negotiations of meaning. The result of these negotiations, the literary experience of alterity, constitutes the hermeneutic basis for EnvironMentality. By arguing for a fluid but subject-based concept of environmental thinking, I challenge ideas of homogeneity - particularly regard to the concepts of ?nature', ?culture' and the ?animal'. Such a valorisation of difference, however, has been criticised by Greg Garrard, who associates it a tendency in ecocritical research to keep [...] sealed off safely in hermetic scarequotes, and to shun any mention of ?human nature' in general (2010c: 224). I think that my discussion so far has provided some arguments why a careful consideration of allegedly universal concepts such as ?nature' and ?human nature' may result in the use of scarequotes; however, I find Garrard's claim that in some novels we come to terms Darwinism in the forms most useful to us (225) to be an interesting challenge.Thus, I am interested in the question of how a stance on literature can benefit the idea of EnvironMentality. By criticising the association of Darwinism with biological determinism and rightwing ideologies (224), Garrard suggests a reading practice that takes into account ways of reading both our various cultures and our shared human nature, and he does so in order to liberate the humanities from the baleful myopia of extreme social constructionism (240; emphasis added). Both the intricacies of postcolonial perspectives on ecocriticism and the necessity to envision literary truth through uncertainties rather than scientific facts suggest that this study ultimately cannot accept the Darwinian Garrard proposes. Nevertheless, I think it worthwhile to consider how novels negotiate the idea of human and animal embeddedness in a natural environment, and processes of evolution, hybridisation, and transformation. Understood this way, a Darwinian that suggests a shared nature can indeed be said to bring together the elements discussed in previous chapters when it allows for a ?naturalcultural' reading of ?humanimal' experiences. Ultimately, such a reading will interrogate the distinction between science and art, and notions of ?real' and ?fake', as this chapter will show, and it will offer a valuable perspective on the dichotomies it destabilises. Therefore, it will not assume that a viewpoint provides any certainties; on the contrary, this stance will add moments of ambiguity and flux. The environment for a reading that thus radically questions the dividing lines between nature and culture is a ?postnaturaT one (on this concept, see Curry 2008; McKibben [1989] 2006). In scrutinising narrative engagements a postnatural world, I will in this chapter further explore interpretive negotiations of environmental experience: of highly fictionalised environments, of the question of identity in a postnatural world, and of the condition of what Umberto Eco calls ?hyperreality' (Eco 1990; see also Phillips 2003: 20-4).By including science in literary discourse and thus rendering it a motif of representation, fiction provides an important commentary on the role of science in the context of environmental crises and the crisis of the imagination. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, it situates ?the human' in this naturalcultural context of those who live in the timescape of the technopresent, as Haraway calls it (2008: 135).1 As these neologisms suggest, such fiction will engage once more the violent hierarchies of dualistic thinking. I will argue that Atwood's dystopias Oryx and Crake2 and The Year of the Flood3 present the vision of a postnatural world where dualist thinking has dissolved - but, since the novels are clearly dystopian, they formulate an obvious critique of this state. …