The Beauty of the Death of Humanity

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.

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

Madam and Eve not Adam and Eve

Throughout YOTF, I could not help but notice Ren’s fascination with, and maybe even love for, Amanda, and from thinking about this, I realized that neither of Atwood’s novels (so far) have included queer relationships. In O&C, Jimmy is woman-hungry, going from woman to woman without any real regard to their feelings, aside from Oryx. The Crakers participate in a 4-men/1-woman “orgy,” but with that ritual being ingrained into them by Crake/Glenn, one can debate that their relationships are not relationships at all. In YOTF, the Gardeners have both single and married members, but those in relationships are in heterosexual ones. (Yes, “straight” relationships could contain queer members in them, but there does not seem to be any evidence to support this claim.) The only relationship, queer one that is, that stands out to me is Ren and Amanda.

Though one hopes Ren’s love to be reciprocated, her adoration for Amanda, for the most part, seems to be one-sided, as even Ren knows that Amanda does not tend to show emotion. In the final scene of YOTF, when Ren and Toby rescue Amanda from the two painballers, Amanda starts crying hysterically, which really threw me off. As Ren says, “it takes more than a lot to make Amanda cry” (420). When they both reunite after the Flood, Amanda tells her, “I knew you weren’t dead…You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well,” (323) and that felt like Amanda letting herself show emotion for someone she cares deeply for.

When Ren finds out that Amanda is dating Jimmy, though in the novel she emphasizes her heart being broken by Jimmy, my ~queer heart~ believes that she is also distressed over Amanda dating someone else. I think the combined turmoil of having your best friend, whom you have a crush on, dating the first boy you ever fell in love with, who also broke your heart, must be tough. When Ren explains her sadness, she says that “It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.” (301)

I could not help but think of Jimmy’s perspective from O&C, where a major part of the novel was him whining about Oryx, and so reading Ren’s relationship issues, being from a female’s perspective, was a sort of breath of fresh air. Whereas Jimmy’s problems were rooted in a white savior complex where he needed to rescue the damsel in distress, while also exploiting and mistreating the other damsels he encounters along the way, Ren’s dilemma is very relatable, as a young, queer woman living in a patriarchal society, one that exploits a young woman’s sexuality and uses violence as a means of entertainment and personal gain, just as the Pleeblands do.

It is also interesting how different Ren and Amanda are, and even Ren recognizes it. Throughout the novel, Ren is seen as fragile, by Jimmy, Toby, and even herself. She lays her heart out, not holding back with her emotions, making herself vulnerable to her peers and to the reader. Seeing as Ren is one of the two main narrators, we get a much clearer insight into her life than we do with Amanda, who we have only seen through Jimmy and Ren’s lenses so far. Ren’s inner turmoil with her relationships with others leads her to Scales and Tails, where she feels comfortable in her body and her sexuality, while Amanda, who knows how to use her body in previous trades for drugs, uses art to express herself after departing from the God’s Gardeners. When Ren is trapped in Scales and Tails after the Flood, she creates her own reality, one with Amanda “smart and strong…smiling…[and] singing” (284).

Traditional Femininity in The Year of The Flood

In order to identify the themes embodied in Atwood’s work, the reader must examine the women she chooses as spokespeople, and the company they keep. Each voice serves a distinct purpose in representing the role of woman within Atwood’s dystopian world, and by extension, our own. Though each is her own complex and fully-realized character, Toby, Ren and Lucerne can all be broken down into familiar female archetypes. These archetypes illustrate the dichotomy Atwood chooses to establish between traditional values of femininity and the necessity of survival.

The principle voice in ‘The Year of the Flood’ is that of quick-thinking, practical, survivalist Toby.  Her narrative is the least colored by emotion, and seemingly the most reliable. Toby’s account is told in third person, effectively making everything that happens to her a statement of fact within the reality of the novel. This allows the character of Toby a degree of power that the other narrator, Ren, never commands: the reader can always rely on Toby-centered chapters to ground them in “facts” about the setting and characters. The semi-omniscient narrator that shows the world through Toby’s eyes assures the reader that her perspective is the most valid.

If Toby’s viewpoint is more legitimate – why? The factor that sets Toby apart from Ren, or for that matter, the other significant female characters is a lack of traditional femininity. She has no stereotypical feminine traits: little concern for her appearance, an absence of maternal characteristics (unable to bear children, also), very little sexuality, and no interest in romance whatsoever. The first we learn of Toby is her traditionally masculine name. She is described as being “kind of scrawny” and “flat as a board, back and front”. Once out on the street, Toby barters away her physical femininity: first her long hair, then her fertility. She is uncomfortable with the feminine aspects that Gardener culture demands of her – when she arrives at Edencliff, her hair is short, and in order to fit in, she is told she must grow it out.  This “smiling, bossy sanctimoniousness”, according to Toby, is “a little too pervasive” in Edencliff, “especially among female members of the sect”. Toby is unwilling to take on Pilar’s mantle as Eve Six. The reasons for this are vague, (“To be a full-fledged Eve… it would be hypocritical!”, she says when confronted) but could easily be ascribed to Toby’s unwillingness to fully give herself to the feminine role of matron and caregiver. She is often described as ‘hard’, ‘tough’, and ‘dry’ while other women are ‘soft’ or ‘squashy’, or at worst, “wet”. The last example is perhaps the most significant: Nuala is mocked as being the “wet witch” for her emotional vulnerability, but there is also a definite allusion to female sexual biology, something Toby, the “dry witch” is uninterested in. Toby’s rejection of all qualities assumed to be feminine, including sexuality, passionate displays of emotion, and romantic love, is seen as a sign of her strength and her independence.

Ren, on the other hand, is like a damsel in distress. If not for her sexual experience, she could be a textbook example of the ingénue. She needs perpetual rescue – most literally from her imprisonment in Scales, but also from her mother, from the Gardeners, from the streets. Ren’s age at the time of the Waterless Flood is never revealed, so it’s easy to see her as a little girl throughout the novel, even though she is surely as old as Toby was at the earliest point in her story (when we witness her bury her father in secret, with such calculated maturity). She easily develops attachments to people, even though they are often shown to be unworthy of her regard – she resents her mother for forcing her into the Gardener life because she misses her biological father, but when they are reunited it is clear that he was neglectful all along. She adores Mordis, her pimp (despite his ominous name!). And she worships Amanda, so often her rescuer. Ren is highly romantic, and is devoted (romantically, if not physically) to a single man (and a single woman: Amanda) for her entire adult life. When she speaks of Jimmy, her affection is an obsession, hurting her deeply and causing her more acute unhappiness than her traumatic childhood, her dysfunctional family and the impending apocalypse combined. While Toby never sees sex as a source of happiness or fulfillment, Ren enjoys her own sexuality, and is comfortable working at Scales. She is proud of her body and her ability to attract men. At one point she describes her own body as “Chickin’-lickin’ good”. Ren is loveable and sympathetic, but by her own admission, she is lost without stronger characters to guide her. And within Atwood’s world, it is her femininity that makes her vulnerable.

Then there is Lucerne. While she is not a narrator, her character is a recurrent and inescapable condemnation of traditional femininity. Helpless as her daughter may be, at least Ren is sympathetic – Lucerne is an object of scorn. And she is every feminine stereotype rolled into one. Blonde, buxom, violently emotional, deeply in love. A “bitch”. A “slut”, called so even by her own daughter. She is materialistic, she fixates on her appearance and she cares about what others think of her. She is smitten with Zeb’s uber-masculinity, and she is possessive of him, and jealous. When we briefly see her perspective, it is through the purple prose of her memory, turning her first tryst with Zeb into a cheap paperback romance, full of sunsets and rose petals.  Perhaps even her role as a mother is condemnation enough: there are several mothers in the book, and all of them are directly responsible for heartbreak in their children’s lives. It is easy to dislike Lucerne, especially in Ren’s account, but it certainly seems like she gets the short end of the stick throughout the novel. It is her willingness to love that makes her weak; her belief in an ideal world very unlike the one in which she lives. It is undeniable that Lucerne is trapped in an abusive relationship, and yet she is always portrayed as the guilty party. It is her fault for falling for Zeb in the first place, and her fault for crying and allowing herself to be hurt. When she finally chooses liberation, it is to the scorn and derision of everyone she knows. It is not just that her femininity makes her weak and unlikeable: it makes her guilty.

‘The Year of the Flood’ seems to have a negative, even hostile attitude towards traits associated with traditional femininity, equating them with weakness and the inability to survive. Toby’s sterile practicality is promoted as a more mature and substantial alternative.

The Archetypal Flood in the MaddAddam Trilogy

In both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, mythology plays an important role. While the paganism of the Crakers, who deify Oryx and Crake, seems at odds with the God’s Gardeners’ monotheism, both groups can be linked by their belief in the waterless flood, an archetype that serves as an apocalypse for one group and an origin myth for another.

The flood, while a myth of end times for the God’s Gardeners, is for many cultures a myth that divides the past from the present. Some variation of this myth is present in the Mesopotamian, Hindu, Norse, Mesoamerican, and Greek cultures, as well as the bible. In Greek mythology, a flood sent by Zeus wiped out an early race of humans who the god viewed as being too militaristic. Only two people, Deucalion and Pyrrha, were left to repopulate the earth by making humans out of stones. This myth has relevance in the world of the MaddAddam trilogy.

In spite of Crake’s attempts to remove religion from the Crakers, they develop a form of paganism in which the key deities are Crake, their creator and spiritual father, and Oryx, the archetypal earth mother. Jimmy acts as a hierophant or religious leader, transforming the truth of what has happened into the stories that form the Crakers’ mythology. Jimmy describes to the Crakers the plague that killed most of humanity in aquatic terms: “Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so Crake took the Chaos, and he poured it away” (Atwood 103). It is this pouring away that leaves the Crakers to repopulate the earth, just as the mythological flood left Deucalion and Pyrrha. And, like the flood in that myth, the flood Snowman describes in Oryx and Crake was sent by the gods. Jimmy accepts that the flood/plague was artificially created, but seems to justify the loss of lives, even blaming it on a chaotic human society where meat eating is rampant. Jimmy’s explanation of the flood relates to the prediction of the God’s Gardeners.

To the God’s Gardeners, the waterless flood is a prediction of the apocalypse, though not one without human survivors. The God’s Gardeners view the waterless flood as a repetition of the biblical flood, and like Noah (as well as Deucalion and Pyrrha), they have been forewarned. The God’s Gardeners belief in their own exceptionalism is in line with Jimmy’s explanation of the fall as being caused by the chaos of human lives, specifically the over-consumption of meat. The God’s Gardeners stock ararats, named for the mountain on which Noah’s ark supposedly landed, which they believe will allow them to survive the waterless flood. As we have seen, the “flood” was sent by Crake, a onetime ally of the God’s Gardeners. This link leaves us with more questions than answers. Did the Gardeners learn of the flood by the one who would cause it, or are they merely playing off of a mythological archetype? Did Jimmy know of the God’s Gardeners prediction, or is the language he uses to discuss the past with the Crakers just a coincidence? As the timelines of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood begin to converge, these questions may get their answers.

Ren and Jimmy’s mirrored love lives.

In Oryx and Crake Jimmy has an infatuation with Oryx and a love for her that he was incapable of achieving with any other female in his life.  Even the brief sightings of her before he really knew her became significant to him.  The image of her as a young girl in the porn video became engrained in his mind.  This is very different from how Jimmy saw Ren.  In O&C Ren seems to be an afterthought.

When Jimmy realizes that Crake has formed a relationship, of whatever form of a relationship he is capable of, with Oryx we see a shift in his friendship with Crake.  Even though Crake is his best friend and that is the only friend he can truly confide in, jealousy and anger brews within Jimmy.  And this can be seen in the scene where Jimmy kills Crake.  All the negative feelings about Crake stemmed from his love for Oryx and whatever delusional relationship they seemed to have.  When Oryx tells Jimmy that what she and Crake have is not as important and not as special, we see Jimmy feel better about himself and his relationship with Oryx.  This shows an unspoken tension between Crake and Jimmy.

In The Year of the Flood we learn more about Ren’s background and how her and Jimmy’s lives crossed paths.  After leaving the Gardeners, Ren goes to high school in HelthWyzer and meets Jimmy.  Their friendship grows into a more physical connection and Ren quickly falls in love with him.  Her mind is almost consumed by Jimmy and her love for him.  She is also convinced that she loves him back and that they have this bond up until she realizes that he is incapable of commitment.

Ren’s love for Jimmy, mirrors his love for Oryx.  What started as a mere infatuation grew into a powerful and influential love.  Just like how Jimmy’s love for Oryx affected his friendship with Crake, Ren’s love for Jimmy affected her friendship with Amanda.  When she finds out that Jimmy is Amanda’s new boyfriend, she quickly becomes distant.  What was meant to be a joyous reunion, turned into a quick and abrupt goodbye.  After that, Ren feels jealousy and resentment toward Amanda who is her best friend.  However her love for Jimmy has blinded her into distancing herself from her best friend.  Similar to how Jimmy felt joy when he thought Crake’s relationship with Oryx was insignificant, Ren feels joy when she learns that Amanda and Jimmy are not longer together.  This too, shows the unspoken tension between Ren and Amanda.

This makes me wonder how the book will end and if Ren’s relationship with Amanda will end on a sour note like Crake and Jimmy’s.

 

Politics and Power of Physicians

Atwood explores the troubling extent to which physicians are involved in people’s lives. Although doctors are supposed to inform their patients in various options they can take in a neutral manner, they often contaminate it with their own personal opinions, or extend ones from the state or larger power. 

One example where we see physician-patient relations failing is with Toby’s mother. She “came down with a  strange illness”, despite leading a healthy, careful lifestyle. When she tries to address this problem, “no doctor could give her a diagnosis, though many tests were done by the HelthWyzer Corp clinics” (22). Immediately, the reader suspects the HelthWyzer Corp (HWC) of sabotaging Toby’s mother. We are not surprised by this because Crake reveals the past evils that HWC has carried out. Even if we didn’t know about these activities, the fact that she left her health in the hands of one clinic, of one entity is problematic. Leaving decisions about major health issues to one doctor is dangerous. This issue is supported by, Gina Kolata, a medical journalist who wrote “Smart Patient” through The New York Times. In it, she explains how to minimize risk to your health. One significant way is to seek a second opinion concerning a major medical issue or decision. Often, physicians will provide different diagnosis’ and remedies. She examines a case study to support this disparity; in it, there were professionals who examined a blood sample, and 80% of the opinions provided were in disagreement. (You can buy her ebook here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Smart-Patient-Mistakes-Health-ebook/dp/B00MI19CIA) So seeing only one physician really isn’t wise (get it? HelthWyzer). Although seeking a second, even third opinion would be best, it is not easy for many people to do, as it can be costly and time consuming.

Another issue is that some physicians may advocate certain courses of action as the better choice for a patient, even though a patient may feel so otherwise. Roberts focuses on how counselors and doctors disapprove when women/couples decide against selective abortion. They use arguments such as giving better chance of survival to other fertilized eggs, or to not allowing “defective” ones to suffer a life from some disability. Although these are choices that are for a woman to decide on, these procedures are recommend/pushed onto them. Toby’s mother continued getting sick despite taking HelthWyzer supplements- yet the way that Toby described it makes it seem as if her mother was suspicious of the treatment as well. 

The physicians are also forced to provide genetic screening, and this pressure is placed onto women as well to be a responsible parent (Roberts). This is an extension of the state looking down on ‘defective’ individuals, and avoiding focusing on social problems. One way we can see this is how everyone in the compounds are worried about getting sick or appearing like a pleeb, although they really have no information about them. Compounders speak about pleebs like they are pariahs- there is nothing actually wrong with them. The disconnect and injustice is just not addressed.

One way the state and physicians impose beliefs onto parents is when sex is assigned to a baby. For many intersex youth, a sex must be given to them within the first day, even though the parents are unsure. Even if it’s not required in that time period, parents are often pressured to assign one to conform to social expectation. Germany recently allowed third gender to appear on birth certificates- this allows time for parents (but mainly the child) to decide what sex they are (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/01/242366812/germany-offers-third-gender-option-on-birth-certificates). Australia allows for people to have a gender “X” on passports. These societal expectations are often enforced under the guise of medical science (which Somerville examines).

Amanda Payne’s Vulture Sculptures: Art as Social Commentary

The Year of the Flood returns to a character from Oryx and Crake, or rather, introduces her appropriately for the first time. Echoing our discussion last week on the influence of Jimmy’s narration, we meet Amanda in Oryx and Crake as Jimmy’s artist girlfriend. Both she and her art are belittled. The way she sees in images is described as a “tribute to [Jimmy’s] talents” (244). Jimmy sexualizes her body and “tries to sound interested” in her mind (247). However, in The Year of the Flood, we get a very different characterization of Amanda. We learn more about her past, her family, and her art. We begin to understand her more fully and how she contributes to the God’s Gardeners.

Amanda’s art projects take on a number of names, including the Vulture Sculptures and The Living Word. The idea consists of creating letters and words out of cow bones, fish guts, toxic-spill-killed birds, toilets from building demolition sites—essentially, dead objects, killed by humans in some way, either micro or macro. Amanda then invites these parts to be either eaten by vultures or covered in insects as this process is filmed from above. In her eyes, this process brings these objects back to life. She is highlighting the ability of the natural world and natural processes of life to make use of decaying, dead, or seemingly useless and unwanted materials. In a way, it does not matter what word she chooses to write out with the materials. The vultures and insects will always tear it apart or cover it up just the same. If we take language to be a marker of civilization and civilized society, a system of signifiers, what does this say about the hierarchy between the natural and constructed world? These pieces are great examples of ecofeminist art.

What also fascinates Amanda about these projects is the way things are able to move and grow and then disappear. We learn that this fascination is tied to her identity as a, likely illegal, refugee from Texas. Beyond her art providing a way for her to feel both visible and invisible, I think there is also a connection to migrant and refugee bodies. Migration is often a risky and dangerous process in which people die. Bodies are found on the border, in bodies of water, and perhaps there is something comforting about returning to the earth and to the world through vulturizing. I hope we can share our thoughts on what Atwood is trying to say either about Amanda or about nature/civilization, ecofeminism, migration, or beyond through these art pieces.

Oryx as a Deconstruction of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”

Disclaimer: Even though I think it’s a convenient term to use, I feel like tropes are a highly misused and over applied concept used to inaccurately dissect fiction.

When I first read Oryx and Crake in high school, something about the character of Oryx bothered me – something about how shallowly fleshed out she is, something that I couldn’t exactly articulate. She just seemed, in spite of her vague troubled past, too perfect, with two men wildly in love with her and an ability to innately form bonds with all living beings. This time, in my reread, I had pinned it down – Oryx reads like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, one of the most aggravating (and misogynistic) fictional tropes.

A “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (hereafter shortened to MPDG) was a concept originated by Nathan Rabin to refer to Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown for a 2007 review (which I read in the print edition of the AV Club). Since then, the term has caught on fire, but I’ll rely on TVTropes.org to do the explaining for those who haven’t heard of it:

Have no fear, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is here to give new meaning to the male hero’s life! She’s stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness and a tendency towards petty crime), often with a touch of wild hair dye. She’s inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live freely and love madly.

While Rabin eventually abandoned the term, the damage has been done and you will see any character with vaguely Zooey Deschanel-esque traits being hit with the term. You will have to agree, that the term fits pretty well for Oryx – the only traits we definitively know are how hot she is (something Jimmy/Snowman can’t seem to let us forget), her idiosyncratic speech patterns and behaviors, and how she teaches two men, a jaded sex addict and an impossibly aloof scientist, to love.

Since MPDGs are more plot device than human, they lack depth. Although we only really get a look at Oryx’s depths from Jimmy’s flawed narration, it’s clear that she’s been through a lot. Throughout Oryx and Crake, we get hints at a darker backstory for Oryx presented from Jimmy’s perspective – being trafficked from a young age, living in a man’s locked garage. Still, at least outwardly, she seems to act like these hardships have not influenced her, to the point where Jimmy is frustrated with her serene nature: “Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to bring it up?” (143). Oryx’s behavior compels Jimmy and provokes him, unlike all of these other women he has dated – all of these women tried to change and understand him, while he is trying to change and understand her. However, unlike Jimmy, Oryx never truly displays her emotions, making her seem impossibly calm in the face of some terrible stuff. To the men in her life, and the uninformed reader (look at some frustrated readers and you will see what I’m talking about), this transforms her into a two-dimensional archetype.

Oryx is a character that has lived her whole life learning how to please men, whether it is sexually, financially, or for some general form of companionship. For her, in the context of her relationship with Jimmy, that means obliging him in his beliefs that he’s a savior: “Sometimes he suspected [Oryx] of improvising, just to humour him; sometimes he felt that her entire past – everything she’d told him – was his own invention” (316). This is a moment of lucidity from someone who has otherwise projected a life’s worth of insecurities onto a person. To maintain her relationship with Jimmy, who has spent pretty much his whole life feeling like he’s destined to protect this one woman, she needs to maintain this illusion. Jimmy wants to feel like he’s right about the state of Oryx’s life, that she’s the same person in the porn movies he watched as a child, that she needs to be saved by him. In short, Oryx is trying to be a MPDG – it is this mystery that motivates him to care about her. It’s not sure why Oryx might need Jimmy’s interest – it might be a part of her role as Crake’s employee.

Although as a reader we don’t really get to see it, much of the same goes on with Crake and Oryx – Oryx is shown to have a true admiration of Crake’s scientific genius. However, this could very well be out of this same sense of obligation – when Crake is talking about his hiring process for Oryx, he says: “She was delighted to accept. It was triple the pay she’d been getting, with a lot of perks; but also she said the work intrigued her. I have to say she’s a devoted employee” (310). Although Crake is convinced Oryx is truly fascinated in his work, she is in no position to deny Crake’s request for her to work with him – she is a prostitute in the pleeblands who has spent most of her life in poverty. Crake is a narcissist with confidence in his own skills, so he could easily just be misinterpreting her skills of self-preservation (in how she fulfills his sexual and emotional needs for the sake of a well-paid, comfortable job) as genuine interest. To do so gives Crake some feeling of meaning in his life – he has never felt this sense of affection for another person, and she plays an instrumental role in bringing his evil plans to life. While she might not necessarily be his sole reason for living, she certainly motivates him.

To the reader, Oryx is more than a MPDG – she is someone who’s learned to cope with a world that Jimmy and Crake know nothing about, one where it is essential to be interested in the men in her life and unconditionally support their interests no matter how demented they may be. Neither of these men see that, though – they see a beautiful (yet strange and whimsical) girl, one whose love has some transformative power. Since the novel is presented from the men’s views, Oryx is shown to be an incomprehensible character whose motivations are hazy. Oryx has essentially become a plot device in other men’s lives because it’s easier and more profitable (both in terms of fulfillment and monetarily) than assuming victimhood at the hands of these men. This can be agitating, because as readers we want to see “powerful,” interesting female characters, ones who stand up to the men in their lives when they do disgusting things, but there is power in the way that Oryx has controlled her narrative.

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