Melissa Hodgkins

2015 July 9

Oryx and Crake: Dystopian Speculative Fiction

Much of this seminar has been devoted to the question of genre. How do you recognize a piece of utopian or dystopian literature, what are the hallmarks or the necessary conventions that must be present within the piece to classify it as one or the other? Ultimately, what I have discovered is that works of literary fiction often defy or complicate simple classification, stirring debate amongst scholars and writers alike as to how a work should be classified. This is not an effort to elude a discussion on genre, but rather an effort to more fully explore the complex nature of the question of genre specifically as it relates to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

It is quite easy to see the reason why Oryx and Crake defies critical classification. As Valeria Mosca claims in her essay entitled “Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood,” critics including “Shuli Barzilai, among others, [have] devoted much attention to this issue. . . . she has also pointed out how Atwood’s novel draws on elements from science fiction, the Bildungsroman, quest romances, survivor stories and revenge tragedies” (38).  While it may be possible to evaluate Oryx and Crake through any of these multiple genres one must wonder where to begin to affix a label to and evaluate Atwood’s fiction. In order to best address this question it may be relevant to consider Margaret Atwood’s perspective.

In her article entitled “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake In Context” Margaret Atwood relates that there is “a distinction between science fiction proper. . . . for me, this label denotes books with things in them we can't yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never meet, and places we can't go and speculative fiction, which employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on Planet Earth” (513). The question then remains why is speculative fiction relevant to a course that studies utopias and dystopias? The answer to that question lies within Atwood’s explanation of the genesis of Oryx and Crake. The goal of fiction, the starting place of every narrative, is to ask what if and then set forth predictions that propose answers to that haunting question, according to Atwood. “The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue on the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope?” (286).

While Atwood does not classify Oryx and Crake as a classic dystopia she does acknowledge the narrative's reliance on dystopian themes. These dystopian themes and the slippery slope of a near but distant future, a future that may well be built upon utopian ideals, ideals that have the potential to run amuck, are contributing factors for the value in studying Atwood’s speculative fiction through the lens of dystopic discourse. As Valeria Mosca states “The “road we’re on” includes genetic manipulation, pollution, exploitation of natural resources, and abuse of non-human animals” (39).

“Sigmund Freud defined the uncanny as something that evokes a feeling of familiarity and yet, at the same time, comes across as strange, frightening and ultimately incomprehensible” (40). Such a definition of the uncanny can easily be applied to the fiction of Oryx and Crake, while the setting seems both familiar and distant; it no doubt remains close enough to current consciousness that the dystopian features of the work invoke feelings of fear. Katherine Snyder in her article entitled “Time to Go: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” describes the feeling of “cognitive dissonance” as the result of a “potential social realism”:

Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current socio-cultural, political or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions. […] These cautionary tales of the  future  work  by  evoking  an  uncanny  sense  of  the  simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of these brave new worlds. (470).

          These familiar developments are at the heart of the dystopian themes within Atwood’s narrative. Atwood herself agrees with this assessment: “I would argue that it is not a classic dystopia. Though it has obvious dystopian elements, we don't really get an overview of the structure of the society in it… We just see its central characters living their lives within small corners of that society, much as we live ours” (Atwood 517).

          Much of what we see in Oryx and Crake resembles, on a larger scale, the scientific and economic trends of our own world. At the center of this dystopian world is a corporate power structure that both fuels scientific inquiry and controls and manipulates the environment and all the people that inhabit it. Therefore, science is conflated with the power of the evil corporation; scientific discovery is no longer checked by the ethical standards valued in our society, but is replaced by a privatized entity that uses science as a means to control, manipulate, and collect larger and larger profits. These corporations have the power to dismantle or cripple any resemblance of democracy fueled by the privatization of many former public entities, such as police agencies, instead using corporations like the CorpSeCorps to act as extensions of corporate power.

          The corporations within this society hold so much power that they are able to essentially segregate themselves from those who are not within the scientific and/or corporate world, as well as protecting their precious secrets from one another, by founding compounds for employees and their families. These compounds provide a physical separation between those on the inside and those on the outside. This separation almost mimics the natural isolation convention within utopian fiction, but instead is artificial and void of idyllic meaning. The connotation is much like that of segregation in the American South’s not-so-distant past in which white Americans and black Americans were divided and separated amongst most aspects of public life. In this scenario, the undesirables are those individuals living outside the compounds in areas referred to as “pleeblands”. These areas outside the compounds and the individuals who inhabit them are regarded so deplorably that it is common for compounders to “pillage and trash them and, when necessary, use them as the setting for their hazardous scientific experiments” (Mosca 40-41).

          And yet what remains perhaps the most frightening element of this world is bioengineering and the manipulation of species. The book is filled with a menagerie of hybrid creatures designed by scientists in order to fulfill human needs. There are rakunks, a cross between raccoons and skunks “an after-hours hobby on the part of one of the OrganInc biolabs hotshots” (Atwood 51) which “thanks to the raccoons’ clean smell combined with the skunks’ placid temperament, rakunks serve well as pets (Mosca 41). While this hybrid species seems relatively harmless the danger lurks in the possibilities such as wolvogs who work as police dogs for the CorpSeCorps, liobams (combination of lions and lambs) that serve as a religious symbol, but most notably are the pigoons.

          Pigoons are hybrid creatures of complex origin. What is known is that they are pig hybrids that are used to grow perfect human organs. These creatures share DNA with humans are therefore are the most frightening to discuss in terms of ethics, origin, and use. Ultimately, they are used as a food source. Jimmy’s father is a leading scientist at OrganInc Farms where pigoons are manufactured and the corporation worked hard to put people at ease about the source of their food. They set about “to set the queasy at ease, it was claimed that none of the defunct pigoons ended up as bacon and sausages: no one would want to eat an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of their own” (Atwood 23-24).   Jimmy and his mother both serve as voices critical of the genetic manipulation, voices of reason that go unheard in a world where the corporation is best served by profits and less interested in human and animal interests.

          The dystopian world of Oryx and Crake is about crossing fine lines. Lines that Crake crosses without impunity, planning the destruction of humanity by plague and replacing them with the Crakers, simple-minded green-eyed human hybrids that come to worship him as a god. Crake takes bioengineering to another level, seeking destruction of humanity and wanting to replace imperfection with genetically engineered “people”. This is the dystopia of Margaret Atwood: speculative fiction in which technology and science within the grasp of our time and our society is imagined as a force that crosses the line between ethically sound scientific inquiry and dangerously out of control science that is controlled by corporate greed and largely lacking ethical restriction. This is the uncanny, a world that closely resembles ours and is able to strike a fear within our imagination.

Oryx and Crake may not be classic dystopian fiction, but it contains concerns and themes of dystopian fiction. Atwood’s story baffles and confounds critics in terms of genre classification and yet this conflation of genres, specifically speculative fiction and dystopian fiction, provide a lens for understanding and appreciating the complexities and anxieties of the “what if” that comes with an unknowable and uncertain future.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Random House, 2003. 3-374. Print.

Atwood, Margaret. "The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake In Context." PMLA 119.3 (2004): 513-17. JSTOR. Web. 7 July 2015.

Mosca, Valeria. "Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood." Altre Modernita 9 (2013): 38-52. Web. 7 July 2015.

Snyder, Katherine V. "Time to Go: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake." Studies in the Novel 43.4 (2011): 470-89. JSTOR. Web. 7 July 2015.