The waterless flood, the plague created by Crake to decimate the human population, left in its place not a vacuum, but a world filled with life. This can be related back to the moral implications of the waterless flood, which I discussed in my previous post. While the end of human life is inevitably a source of fear for even the most righteous of human beings, what follows may be an improvement upon human society.
The survival of Toby was dependent entirely on human lust and vanity, qualities absent from the Crakers. By using the products associated with the commercialization of these aspects of human life, she is symbolically creating life and beauty from human baseness. Toby, a former God’s Gardener, is holed up in AnooYoo, a spa frequented by aging upper class women such as Lucerne. AnooYoo can be seen as symptomatic of the vanity and greed present in pre-flood society. Concerns about aging and beauty, no doubt fed by the availability of child pornography and the total commercialization of sex, was fed back into the system of corporations, contributing to more greed and wealth imbalance. In AnooYoo, Toby is living off of the food she stored according to the Gardener beliefs as well as the fruit-and-vegetable scented skin products the spa had sold. There is an undeniable irony to Toby gaining sustenance from avocado body butter and lemon meringue facials, the kind of beauty products that have become defunct in the post-flood world. Toby is turning these symbols of vanity, so indicative of the greed of the pre-flood world, into something useful.
The pigoons, genetically altered pigs containing human organs and brain tissue, have developed a basic culture and even some form of religion, providing an example of the beauty that has arisen from human cruelty. In Oryx and Crake, the pigoons serve as Jimmy’s awakening to the brutality of the world. Jimmy hears his father’s coworkers at OrganInc Farms, the creators of the pigoons, make jokes about eating their hybrid creations: “This would upset Jimmy; he was confused about who should be allowed to eat what. He didn’t want to eat a pigoon, because he thought of the pigoons as creatures much like himself” (Oryx and Crake, 24). Jimmy’s identification with the pigoons and concern about eating them is mirrored in MaddAddam, where it is revealed that the animals are much more intelligent than originally assumed. A group of pigoons converge on the cobb-house, where the human and Craker survivors are living. The pigoons carry with them the body of a dead piglet, covered in flowers and foliage. This indicates that the pigoons have advanced enough to have funeral rites, a sign of religion or at least a kind of culture. The pigoons, while the result of human experimentation on the bodies of other animals, have developed their own society, one which may inherit the earth.
Ultimately, the earth seems to be in the hands of the Crakers, who have adopted human inventions and traditions into their own culture. Unlike their human predecessors, the Crakers have the potential to live on the earth in harmony with its other creatures. In MaddAddam, we learn that the Crakers are capable of writing. Toby frets that this will spell the end of the Craker’s idyll: “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?” (MaddAddam 204). Toby’s fears seem to be unfounded. For one thing, the Crakers have exceeded the expectations of their creator. They have formed a religion, centered around the mythical Oryx and Crake, and have assimilated human concepts into it, such as Toby’s explanation of Fuck. It seems likely that the Crakers will do the same with writing, make use of it in the context of what they know about the world.
The Crakers also have abilities that are not found in humanity, namely the ability to communicate with the pigoons. When the pigoons come to the human survivors and request help with protecting themselves from the painballers, they have to communicate through the Crakers. The humans seem to be out of the loop of communication, which could pose a problem considering the level of culture the pigoons have formed. This poses the question of whether humanity is compatible with this new, post-waterless-flood, earth. The flood, in both Jimmy’s mystical explanation and reality, was a result of human greed, vanity, and chaos. While the human survivors have done their part to rid the world of the remnants of their vanity, it remains to be seen whether they are willing to learn from the mistakes of pre-flood human society. If they are not, the fantastic beauty of the post-flood world, with its pig-societies and vegan, free-loving humanoid occupants, would be better off without them.
