Beyond its ecofeminist critique, the Maddaddam trilogy is about language and storytelling (not that these are mutually exclusive concepts). Atwood constantly plays with narrators and narratives within books as well as across books. The stories themselves are about characters and groups of characters (e.g. Snowman to the Crakers, the God’s Gardeners, the Maddaddamites) that are defined by the way in which they interpret the world around them and share their beliefs, a basic form of storytelling. I think that our group’s decision to make a children’s book about the Crakers and their origins is thus a natural one. A children’s book follows the passing on of writing from Toby to Blackbeard at the end of Maddaddam. We imagine that this book would be created a few generations after Blackbeard as a way for Crakers, Craker-human hybrids, and/or humans to explain their origins to their children as well as tell cautionary tales or important lessons.
Each person in our group was responsible for a character to write a story about. I wrote about Snowman/Jimmy, in particular his role in relation to the Crakers. The process raised a lot of questions about what aspects of the story to distort. For instance, I chose to sugarcoat the relationship between Jimmy, Crake, and Oryx and describe them as best friends because this is how the Crakers would have liked to think about them. The story is titled “Snowman’s Sacrifice” because Jimmy/Snowman is portrayed as an endlessly benevolent character, constantly making sacrifices for the Crakers. We know from the book that his feelings towards the Crakers are far more complicated and even negative, but once again the Crakers perceive him to be an intermediary between themselves and Crake and Oryx. His relaying of the words of Crake and Oryx as well as his decision to “look” after the Crakers becomes an act of good will. This process of blurring or even warping the plot felt similar to what Atwood does throughout the novel, particularly in “The Story So Far” section in which Atwood summarizes previous books or the way the narrative changes depending on different focalizers. In many ways, I found this project to be an exercise in focalizing and understanding the function of stories in collective culture. It reminds me of my favorite line from The Year of the Flood, “We’re sitting around the fire…The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too…” How we understand characters differs depending on where the light shines and who it shines for and I think the Atwood meant this line to be about storytelling, especially as its around a fire like people telling campfire stories. I also wanted to note that for the most part our group wrote our stories separately and it was interesting to see motifs emerge across them. Specifically, we all used the “clearing of the chaos”/the flood as a turning point or temporal marker. Events and ideas became defined as pre-chaos and post-chaos for all the characters.
The trilogy ends with Blackbeard picking up language and I think that if we follow this trajectory, it is not unlikely that generations after him would create books for the purpose of explaining ways of living to their children, especially given the way the Crakers seem to want an explanation for everything. This was the other challenging part about the project- imagining what the future for Crakers/humans. Some questions that we grappled with were what would society look like after the mating of Crakers and humans? Would there be a fine line between Crakers and humans? Would a hierarchy emerge? What technologies would this new society develop? What symbols would they know? We did not jump to any assumptions to this questions, but rather picked up from where the books left off. Even if these stories became dated to new generations of Crakers, there is something about fairy tales and fables that preserves the past and is even otherworldly/othertimely.
Mostly, I really enjoy the different directions that our class took this project in and the variety of digital forms that these three books will now take on. In particular, I am really excited to see how folks constructed a calendar and conceptualized Craker-time because I can see many overlaps with our project and how we defined time (pre-chaos/post-chaos, visually through phases of the moon) and ideas about what does time mean given the Craker lifespan. I feel like this project has been a really tangible way of seeing how creative works lend themselves to one another and build a body of work and knowledge.
Suggested Reading List
Corr, Charles A. “Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega-Journal of Death and Dying 48.4 (2004): 337-363.
I was wondering how to discuss death and violence within my story and decided after reading this article that these topics raise important questions for children to grapple with. Especially with the shorter lifespan, I assume Craker kids will need to become familiar with death, so I chose to address it pretty explicitly.
On the function of children’s literature.
