Maggie Wrobleski – Feminism & Technology: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Final Reflection: Identity in Hierarchy

“The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumor for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.” – The Year of the Flood

What made the MaddAddam trilogy so gripping, I feel, is the width of the world. All three books present different slices of pre- and post-apocalyptic human experiences – life through the eyes of Snowman, Ren, and Toby, finally splitting to examine the role of the storyteller in history and fiction alike at the tail end of MaddAddam. The books and their narrative structures lend themselves so easily to being reimagined by another perspective, and that is what propelled me through my part in “Today is the Day of the Flood.”

I started off planning what to do as a final project with vague ideas about retelling the mythology of good, kind Oryx and Crake, the benevolent invented deities, and ended up instead crafting a day in the life of a CorpSeCorpsman. Such is the richness of the text; there are so many avenues left unexplored in the narrative, so many stories untold or demanding more telling. The CorpSeCorps looms over Oryx & Crake, obviously vanishing in the wake of the Waterless Flood. But while the world is still spinning, the Corps maintains its iron grip on the populaces of the Compounds and the pleebs alike. Jimmy, before he’s Snowman, lives in constant fear of Corps interrogations about his runaway rebel mother from the time she vanishes into adulthood. But aside from these appearances, the Corps is largely an invisible force that seems to rule by word of mouth more than force of hand in Oryx & Crake. We as readers don’t know who the Corpsmen were before they were Corpsmen, where they come from, or what their lives are like, and those unanswered questions led me to my character, the junior Corpsman Echo-Minus.

The main theme that led me in my writing was the fact that Jimmy, despite his lack of prized scientific genius, never considers the Corps as a career option. Therefore, I could safely assume that enlisting in the CorpSeCorps is not something a child of the Compounds does. Jimmy is unhappy about ending up at Martha Graham and unhappy with his subsequent jobs until he’s recruited by Crake, but that place for him at Martha Graham still exists, and that’s a luxury he has no awareness of. So who becomes a Corpsman? That question took my story out to the pleebs and I began to explore the concepts of choice and identity and how that translates into social classes in an oppressive dystopian society. Echo-Minus leaves his life, his family, and – most importantly – his name behind in the pleebs he grew up in, desperate for upward social mobility and willing to do anything to grasp at it. He repeatedly has to convince himself that he’s in a better place now in comparison to where he was before to justify sacrificing his identity. He has to keep telling himself he made the right choice, but the fact I wanted to emphasize is that he never had a choice, not a real one. Choosing the Corps over a gang or a religious faction was not a “real” choice, but simply the best one available to him due to the strict social hierarchy that exists over him. Snowman reflects on intellectual hierarchies in the Compounds, while Ren and Toby describe their lives outside those walls and the much harsher hierarchies imposed on them. All these characters are forced into corners and forced to make less than ideal choices: Snowman finds his way back to Crake out of desperation for purpose, Toby ends up with the Gardeners for her own self-preservation after losing her parents and spiraling into worse and worse states, and Ren is abandoned by Lucerne and forced to support herself with sex work. (It’s important to note that she chooses sex work and it’s not a negative reflection on her to do so; however, it’s telling that SeksMart offered the best benefits out of any available profession, and Ren’s decision is motivated by money and less than ideal circumstances: “I wasn’t likely to get anything better without a degree.”)

In the same way, Echo-Minus becomes one with the oppressive system that rules his life and, instead of blaming the system, he blames the product of it: the pleebs themselves. He doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the whole picture. He can only see what’s in front of him, and of course a life in the pleebs is infused with desperation and full of dead ends. Thus, he gives up his identity. I found the idea of Corpsmen being given designated identities that change as they move up the ranks both within the realm of possibility and relevant to the themes of my route in the game – it’s an insidious means of dehumanization. If most Corpsmen come from the pleebs, as I let myself assume, then the Corps would likely be very interested in removing them from their previous lives. Taking one’s name is taking one’s identity, and considering the MaddAddam books are full of people using false names or changing their names along with their situations, I think the Corps designations fit right in thematically. I used the NATO phonetic alphabet, both because it’s an international code and therefore ubiquitous and already associated with government usage, and because the NATO letters carry their own meanings when used in the International Code of Signals. I chose “Echo” solely because of Echo-Minus’s fixation on his past, how it lingers with him and keeps “echoing” in his internal monologue, but “Uniform” and “Kilo,” Echo-Minus’s Corpsman coworkers, were names chosen by their International Code of Signals meanings; “Uniform,” as a single-flag signal, means “You are running into danger,” and “Kilo” means “I wish to communicate with you.” In the story, Kilo-Minus imparts bits of information and Uniform’s absence is Echo-Minus’s first signal that something is amiss in-story. The suffixes of plus and minus were my own idea and impart their own hierarchies: plus at the top, with no suffix being neutral, and minus indicating junior status of some variety. Echo-Minus is supposed to be new to the Corps and Kilo-Minus is likely under observation for the way she talks. Uniform’s in good standing, but not the best.

For a choice-based game, Echo-Minus’s route in “Today is the Day of the Flood” is devoid of actual choice to reflect the fact that his own life is devoid of choice as well. My goal was to trick the reader into assuming they’re making choices, but really, each option leads straight to the next. The order can be played with, somewhat, but only in slight and insignificant ways – for example, what order Echo-Minus does his tasks before leaving for the pleebs. He can’t avoid eventually checking his messages at work, nor can he avoid catching Crake’s plague and dying in the Scales and Tails riot. It was funny, but when I set out writing, my sense of empathy for Echo-Minus was limited; he chose to be part of the Corps, I figured. He sold his soul into this oppressive police force in an effort to get ahead, to save himself at the expense of others. But the more I wrote and the more I thought about him and his life, the more empathy I had. He grew his own dimensions as I wrote through him; I felt his frustration, his feeling of futility, his subconscious knowledge that he was making the wrong choices, his suppressed guilt for abandoning his family, the damage dealt to him psychologically by his father’s death. He made an impossible choice, and no matter what he may have done, there would have been negative side effects. My route ends with Echo-Minus’s death in the pleebs, despite his desperation to not die in the pleebs, but the real tragedy is that he can’t remember his real name. He beat his real name out of his mind, and at that last critical moment as he fights to die as himself, not as “Echo-Minus,” he fails. The entire story is wrapped up in this identity crisis, exacerbated by the external world but fought internally. Echo-Minus depersonalized himself (and the people of the pleebs) to separate himself from his past and his family, but in that process of depersonalization, he lost everything that made him human. This is how the Corps operates. They prey on people desperate for a way out, and merely trap them in a different way.

SOURCES/EXTRA READING

A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison (1973) [.pdf], otherwise known as “the Stanford Prison Experiment,” a famous study about tensions between the imprisoned and their imprisoners. Most significant to Echo-Minus’s story was how the students designated as “guards” in the study felt they had to prove their authority through violence and other oppressive tactics; similarly, he truly feels a need to prove himself as different from other pleeblanders to distance himself from them and their lifestyle.

Sheckels, Theodore F. The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent (available in part via Google Books). The chapter about The Year of the Flood contains some analysis of the role of the Corps and contemplates how much power they really hold, as well as asserting that relatively little is known about them, which made me feel better about making things up.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Margaret Atwood’s Tale.” The New York Review (available online). Joyce Carol Oates, another contemporary female novelist, covers a majority of Atwood’s writing in this analysis, but about halfway through she discusses Oryx & Crake exclusively. I liked getting the perspective of a fellow writer.

Who Tells Your Story?

(This post can be considered a follow-up to my previous post about the narrative structure of Oryx & Crake, expanded to include such structures in The Year of the Flood and the first 200 pages or so of MaddAddam.)

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy can easily be interpreted as a reflection on the practice of storytelling itself, conveying both its own dystopian plot threads and ruminations about the process of writing. Why do we tell stories? How do we tell them? And, perhaps most importantly, who gets to tell them, and how does that affect the story itself?

Oryx & Crake is narrated solely by Snowman (or Snowman-the-Jimmy, if you prefer), varying only in its temporal spaces. In the past and in the present alike, we linger with Snowman and his third-person perspective, relying on him to convey the events he witnessed, limited by the knowledge he has. But subsequent books in the trilogy reveal that, at least for the end of Oryx & Crake, Snowman is feverish and delusional, a fact more obscured in his narration, because naturally it is. Delusion tends to conceal itself from those suffering from it. The Year of the Flood moves more dynamically, both in terms of perspective and in its shifting, overlapping timelines. Ren’s first-person perspective as well as Toby’s third-person perspective shifts from the years before the Waterless Flood to the years after, marked only by the calendar of the God’s Gardeners. The Year of the Flood has a third, distinct narrative perspective in it as well – the sermons of Adam One and the Gardener hymns, which serve as an uninterrupted timeline, only ever going forward, building to the fateful twenty-fifth, eponymous year. MaddAddam’s narrative breaks down into further splinters even though, thus far, only Toby narrates. But Toby’s third-person narration is interrupted by sections of dialogue and sections of Toby hearing a story herself, with the novel taking on another layer to become a story telling the story of someone else telling a story.

The Crakers have always been fascinated by the creation myths imparted to them from Snowman. Snowman himself only began telling stories out of desperation; there was simply no other way to communicate with the Crakers, who couldn’t understand the apocalyptic scenes they encountered outside of the Paradice dome. But Snowman admits he built Crake into a deity out of spite for his dead friend, realizing too late that doing so would only create more questions to be answered. Snowman unwittingly created the rituals of religion amidst the Crakers, who, despite being programmed against recognizing it as religion, regardless adopt it as such. Everything the Crakers cannot understand must become a story, and we see how quickly this lens for the world becomes warped, especially in MaddAddam.

The novel opens with “The Story So Far,” a prologue told in an omnipotent third person without a clear narrator; the prologue’s narrator knows too much about the various twists and turns of the prior two books to be any of the named characters. This is a familiar way to tell a story uncolored by a narrator’s bias – but in a story about stories, we must consider who is supposed to be conveying this summary to us. It is unusual for the third book of a trilogy to deliver exposition in such a direct way, reminiscent of a television episode beginning with a “previously on…” montage. Can we trust this prologue, particularly the facts it designates as more important than others? Can we trust this interpretation of the text if it differs from our own?

MaddAddam proceeds with dialogue alone – no quotation marks, no dialogue tags indicating who is speaking, no context, and no interruption, even as the speaker addresses others. We learn that Toby has taken Snowman’s place as prophet, telling the Crakers their memorized myths for the same reason Snowman did: desperation, and lack of options. What else could she have done? The novel makes it clear that myths are the only way to communicate with the Crakers. Subsequent sections are dedicated to stories about Zeb, and later about Adam One, told first by Toby in myth structure, and then by Zeb in a manner more easily accepted as the “truth.” But even that truth is colored by Zeb’s narration and his own bias, and, as we move along in the text, Toby’s opinions of the stories. It’s almost like watching a story being translated into different languages: varying inflections, varying structures, varying truths. What, MaddAddam questions, is the truth, really? Is the truth only what we want to hear? Is the truth limited by our capacity to understand it? Is the truth only circumstance?

What the MaddAddam trilogy stresses above all else is that stories are necessary to survive. However we may tell them and whatever we may tell them about, we will always tell the stories of ourselves and those around us; of those we have loved and lost, or hated and left behind; of the familiar and the safe; and of what we can never understand.

-Maggie Wrobleski

The Imperfect Narrator

“The Crake they’re praising is his fabrication.” – Oryx & Crake, part 5, “Fish”

Despite being told in a third-person perspective, Oryx & Crake nonetheless takes on Snowman as its narrator. He is the one who imparts the story across its intersecting timelines: from his childhood, when his name was Jimmy and Crake was merely his classmate and best friend; then ahead into the post-apocalyptic future, a world destroyed by Crake himself; and, in more limited bursts, Snowman’s relationship with Oryx, almost in a world and timeframe of their own, floating adrift from the main events of the story. Snowman’s role as a storyteller is not limited to the novel’s narrative, however. He is a prophet among the Crakers, the only one who can communicate with their revered deities Oryx and Crake, the only one who has seen them and can tell their stories. The quote above describes how Snowman’s storytelling has distorted the truth in-universe – despite his own muddled opinion of Crake, he allows for the man’s deification. He claims it’s out of defiance, but what matters is the end result. Crake died to ascend to godhood in the ruins of the world.

This begs the question: can we, the readers, trust Snowman’s narrative? Can we take him at his word? Is he a reliable narrator as a literary device, despite the fact that he’s demonstrated himself to be an unreliable narrator within the context of the story?

For my part, I didn’t find any reason to distrust Snowman’s version of events while reading the novel. Only upon reconsideration did I wonder about the relative truth of the text, and even now, I’m reluctant to label Snowman as unreliable. For one, if we can’t trust Snowman, Oryx & Crake is left without a narrator. But more importantly, the novel and its narration present Snowman to us as trustworthy. His narration lacks ornate prose and wordy descriptions; the novel’s opening lines are plain and to-the-point. Snowman carries a distinct sense of self-depreciation that removes the fear of embellishment; he looks down upon himself and seems aware of his own failings and willing to admit them. Furthermore, he is by leaps and bounds the most empathetic character in the text, aside from perhaps Oryx, in her all-too-brief moments present in the text. But even when counting Oryx, Snowman easily matches her in empathy, and lacks any amount of complicity in Crake’s eventual destructive plans, a distinction that sets him apart from Oryx – even if we never know just how much Oryx knew about the impending end of the world.

That lack of knowledge and clear absence of omnipotence is one of the strongest reasons I trust Snowman as a narrator. There is so much he does not know, so much left ambiguous. Snowman never fully understands Crake’s motivations or Oryx’s psyche, and that fact is painfully reflected in the narrative. Both characters feel distant from Snowman and the reader alike, and Snowman readily admits there is much he doesn’t understand. It feels genuine, the lack of answers the text offers when its timelines finally converge. We the readers are left overwhelmed by the end of the world, just the same as everyone else. Oryx remains a specter, like how Snowman imagines her, only bits and pieces of her story known. Crake remains a reclusive mad genius, behaving in ways that only make sense to the man himself. And Snowman, from the first page to the last, is the only man who can piece together their intertwined stories: imperfectly, but as best as he can.

-Maggie Wrobleski