Abstract
This chapter interrogates Margaret Atwood’s double-vision of biotechnology’s future in Oryx and Crake. Atwood’s dystopian vision of corporate biotech stems from a neoliberal ordering of species similar to the organic image of Darwin’s tree of life. Biotech companies employ this arboreal model of upward, outward expansion, and pure individuation to justify patenting new species and to help manage consumers’ bodies. Atwood, however, uses the figure of hybrid-species to radically disrupt the dystopia of what I call “corporate domesticity.” For Atwood, evolution can no longer be read as a process of species divergence, but, instead, must account for prosthetic webs of lateral-gene-transfer and interspecies kinship. Echoing the microbiological work of Lynn Margulis, Atwood posits a symbiogenetic model of evolution that resists the commodification of species. In so doing, however, Atwood posits a post-apocalyptic event that complicates the novel’s genre and uncomfortably blends discourses of evolution, revolution, and genocide.
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- 1.
In his essay “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood,” Gerry Canavan points out that Snowman goes on to conclude that the colonizers probably broke these directives: “They would have been told to … dress for dinner, refrain from raping the natives … He bets they didn’t refrain, though. Nine times out of ten” (2012: 141). For Canavan, this signals the “exhaustion of the frontier myth” for Snowman who must “navigate his new terrain” without a prescriptive “model of history” (141).
- 2.
Symbiogenesis is based on the theory that the internal components that make eukaryotic cells, including the mitochondria, were formed by the endosymbiosis (or body merger) of prokaryotic cells. For Margulis and others, symbiogenesis has larger implications: “Long-term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change is called ‘symbiogenesis.’ These mergers, long-term biological fusions beginning as symbiosis, are the engine of species evolution” (2002: 12).
- 3.
Illustratively, as Gulliver’s continues his tour through the “Grand Academy,” he is introduced to political experiments in democratization and meritocracy that, at least in retrospect, appear less-than-ridiculous. To Gulliver, these political scientists appear “wholly out of their senses” because they are
proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon score of their judgement, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit…; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people: of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them; with many other impossible chimeras. (1960: 148)
Regardless of Swift’s purported anti-progressive politics, satirizing the value of a “public good” as such, necessarily introduces an element of ambivalence into this satire. Gulliver’s knee-jerk cynicism about projects of democratization is, after all, just as ridiculous as the political scientists’ lofty liberalism.
- 4.
As the head of the President’s Council of Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, Kass acquired the nickname “the president’s philosopher.” His views not only helped justify George W. Bush’s 2001 decision to constrain stem cell research, but Kass also broadly represents a “culture of life” discourse about biotechnology, which draws on both evolutionary and religious models of human exception. Kass is also a prominent member of the American Enterprise Institute, one of several think tanks that has worked to bring “family values” neoconservatives and “free market” neoliberals into a coalition aimed against state-run welfare programs.
- 5.
In this context, it is worth considering the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) April 2008 announcement offering a one-million-dollar cash prize to the first researchers “to produce and bring to market in vivo meat” (2008). Arguably, ChickieNobs would not meet PETA’s strict “in vivo” requirement, but they would meet PETA’s larger goal of biotechnologically eliminating “animal suffering” from the production and consumption of meat products. Or, as one of the ChickieNob scientists puts it, “the animal-welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain” (2004: 203). To be successful, cultured meat, for PETA, must resemble slaughtered meat along three telling dimensions: it must be regulated like slaughtered meat, and therefore receive a “Passing Grade” for complying with all United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations from a PETA Judging Panel (2008); it must aesthetically mimic slaughtered meat so that a “Focus Group” finds “the entrant’s product …. indistinguishable from real chicken flesh”; and, lastly, the “in vivo” product must sell like slaughtered meat by meeting the “Commercial Sales Minimum at a Comparable Market Price.” In other words, cultured meat must effectively reproduce the culture and economy of meat-eating. Implicitly, these criteria deem the prevention of animal suffering feasible only so long as “meat-addicted” humans do not also suffer from symptoms of withdrawal. Suffering, therefore, operates as a quality of resemblance that makes animal life similar enough to human life to arouse an ethical response, but also dissimilar enough to justify the treatment of animal suffering as if it is less-than human suffering. While PETA openly laments the fact that “many people continue to refuse to kick their meat addictions,” it is still “willing to help [these people] gain access to flesh that doesn’t cause suffering” (2008). By trying to technologically bypass the contest between human addiction and animal suffering and by, therefore, foregoing a confrontation with the underlying social consequences of the humans-animal divide, PETA tacitly naturalizes and legitimizes humans’ insatiable craving for animal meat. Furthermore, the contest figures biotech as a biopolitical tool for expanding and reproducing the very same entrenched systems of taste, addiction, and profit already in place.
- 6.
Significantly, Atwood foregrounds the importance of domestic roles in the compounds by refusing to mention Jimmy’s mother’s and father’s names. The one mention of Jimmy’s mother’s name, “Sharon,” is spoken by Jimmy’s father’s mistress and future wife, Ramona.
- 7.
Presumably, Crake believes the Americans simply disguise their production of Asian-branded executions behind an array of fake authentic orientalist stereotypes. While this is certainly plausible, it would confound his faith in the supposed authenticity of American-style executions.
- 8.
In her book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle traces the online emergence of similarly “transgressive” fraternal subcultures, including 4chan’s /b/ and /pol/ image boards, which are “massively influential and creative forum[s] known for pranks, memes and images that ‘cannot be unseen’” (2017). Nagle charts how this irreverent brotherhood of “nerds”—who self-deprecatingly identify as “beta” males—have both influenced and been shaped by an amalgam of libertarian, white supremacist, and misogynist ideologies that congeal into the so-called alt right. According to Nagle, “one of the things that linked the often nihilistic and ironic chan culture to a wider culture of the alt-right orbit was their opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., and its encroachment into their freewheeling world of anonymity and tech” (2017). Tellingly, one of the organizing symbols for many of these groups is the “red pill,” which is a reference to the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix. In that film, the protagonist, Neo, is offered two pills: a blue pill that will return him to the comfortable but artificial reality of the matrix, and a red pill that will awaken him from the fake world to confront a much harsher reality. Interestingly, in this formulation, the social world is nothing more than a sinister simulation and the red pill allows you to experience a form of apocalyptic revelation.
- 9.
Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin have had a well-known public debate about the definition of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy. In a 2009 review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, LeGuin objected to Atwood’s “arbitrarily restrictive definition” of science fiction as “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today.” LeGuin argued that Atwood’s hair-splitting was “designed to protect her novels from being relegated” to the “literary-ghetto” of science fiction. Atwood, in response, devotes most of the introduction to her non-fiction book In Other Worlds to rebutting the implication that she is a “genre-traitor.” For Atwood, the question might be reformulated this way: “Is Nineteen Eighty-Four as much ‘science fiction’ as The Martian Chronicles?” Perhaps so, but Atwood is interested in highlighting the differences between these two traditions of writing, whatever they might be called. Atwood concludes “In short, what Le Guin means by ‘science fiction’ is what I mean by ‘speculative fiction,’ and what she means by ‘fantasy’ would include some of what I mean by ‘science fiction’” (2012). Of course, this is massively complicated by Atwood’s evocation of “ustopia” in the very next chapter, which is a blurring of the Utopian or “no place”—already an echo of the “not possible today” definition of science fiction—and the Dystopian, which Atwood finds to always contain Utopian elements or dreams (2012).
- 10.
There is, perhaps, an eerie parallel between critical dystopia’s flexible incorporation of other genres and the flexible modes of incorporation many dystopian systems of governance use to forestall change.
- 11.
In Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Evan Calder Williams argues that “Apocalypse is the coming-apart of the rules of the game … [and] we become post-apocalyptic when we accept the present as rubbish, as undead, and as under attack” (2011: Introduction). In other words, apocalypse is way of seeing the radical potential of a future already emerging behind the deadening rules of the dystopian present.
- 12.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Crakers do represent a break from the social hierarchies of corporate domesticity, apart from Crake’s own assertions. For instance, when a female Craker is ovulating, it is “obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen,” a trait “filched from baboons, with a contribution from the…chromosphores of the octopus” (2004: 164). She then has sex with multiple male Crakers whose desire is exclusively stimulated by the “blue tissue and pheromones released by” the female. The male Crakers’ “penises turn bright blue” and they offer a floral tribute to the ovulating female. She chooses four bouquets and “the female and her quartet find a secluded spot and go at it until the woman becomes pregnant and her blue coloring fades.” For the males not chosen “sexual ardour … dissipates immediately.” In this arrangement, “it no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child may be, since there’s no property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war.” Unlike the patriarchal, father-son inheritance of “corporate domesticity,” the Crakers abandon the paranoia of paternity and all of its domestic imprisonments. Likewise, homosexuality is freely exercised because “sex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing … Now it’s more like … a free-spirited romp” (165). Ultimately, “there [is] nothing for these people to inherit,” Crake explains, because “there [are] no family trees” (305, my emphasis).
- 13.
Some of the unnamed technicians in the Paradice lab are members of the Extinctathon group, as is Oryx, but it is unclear if any of them are also from the pleeblands.
- 14.
There is even some reason to believe that Oryx anticipates Crake’s apocalyptic plan. Talking to Jimmy, she requests: “If Crake isn’t here, if he goes away somewhere, and if I’m not here either, I want you to take care of the Crakers.”
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Johnston, J.O. (2019). Animal-Human Hybrids: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. In: Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0_3
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