Amy L. Sasser

6 July 2013

Will it Blend?

Oryx & Crake as a Genre-busting Exemplar Novel

          Blendtec is a small company that makes a great product.  Their viral “Will it Blend?” marketing campaign can be seen all over the internet, advertising the power of their blenders as they pulverize everything from Super Glue to iPads to cell phones to a plastic Halloween skeleton to a pool cue and more.  Each item is blended to a fine powder, proving that the answer to the question is invariably yes.  Such is the case with Oryx & Crake.  This novel expertly combines utopian / dystopian conventions with several other genres to build a literature of ideas that breaks down the barriers between categories and serves to enlighten readers in the process.

          The story begins with a vignette of Snowman waking up and looking at his watch only to realize that no one really knows what time it is.  We see Snowman in medias res, in the middle of the action, but quickly note the absence of other people.  Wildlife and nature are abundant and described in detail, giving the first scenes a post-apocalyptic feel.  We quickly begin to wonder what catastrophic event has left Snowman stranded here, sleeping in a tree.  As we continue, the idea of a world left after some cataclysmic event is broadened and expanded through settings and the narrative arch.  The flashbacks Snowman has to when he was Jimmy speak to a previously near-perfect world that now no longer exists.  Moving through the narrative, we find flooded and ruined remnants of cities, towers out in the ocean that presumably used to be skyscrapers.  As Snowman finds no other humans to share with, we see episodes of him trying to remember words, phrases, snippets of popular songs, all lost to a time before the now of the novel.  While some of our other utopian texts for this class have had cataclysmic events such as the earthquake in Herland which cut the island off from all outside influence or interaction, none of the others we’ve examined have had so final and damaging a blow as in Oryx & Crake.

Further reading through the book delves into its most likely comparison genres:  science fiction and speculative fiction.  Near the beginning of the novel, we learn that Snowman is here among “the children” who may or may not be quite human.  The “crakers,” we later discover have been engineered by Crake and do not have the normal human functions or capacities.  They have been bred to not believe in or search for a god figure, yet they begin to idolize Crake and, to a certain extent, even Snowman, before the novel ends.  This contradiction between the intended creation and the actual result is where the line between science and speculative fiction is drawn.  Our society today is experimenting with cloning, gene therapy, and DNA sequencing or restructuring; the book speculates as to where that might lead.  Atwood doesn’t shy away from informing her readers that this sort of experimentation might come to a not-so-stellar end, giving many examples from the crakers themselves to the new wildlife that inhabits Snowman’s world.  Far from the selective eugenics of Herland and Anthem, the world of Oryx & Crake has seen what happens when gene splicing has gone too far.  From green glowing bunny rabbits to strange hybrid beasts (pigoons, wolvogs, rakunks, chickie nobs, and more), these creatures were supposed to be encompassing the best of each animals traits while breeding out the bad, but the end result usually leaves something to be desired.  These uber-scientific creations fly in the face of natural selection, and make science—and man manipulating science—the god of the story.

Religion and deification, while often the basis for attempted utopias historically, seem to be less prevalent as a genre of novel.  While Herland can almost be viewed as a theo-fiction due to the women’s clear and reasoned theological ideal of their goddess and her place in their lives.  Snowman’s world barely mentions any sort of diety or deification other than the reverence and awe the crakers feel toward Oryx and Crake, and to a lesser extent, toward Snowman himself.  Ecotopia does not have a particular deity that the people mainly worship; rather, their reverence of nature, particularly the trees, borders on theistic.  Theo-fiction as a genre is thus very limited in the works we’ve examined for this class; however, a religious ideal has often been shown to be the catalyst for the founding of many intentional communities.

Oryx & Crake can stand more fully as a novel than any of our other texts.  One of the main reasons for this is simply in the way it is presented to the reader.  This work has dialog, interaction between characters, many points of view, and tells the story in a non-chronological, flashback-filled way.  Thomas More’s Utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia are all written as a sort of chronological journal of events from the viewpoint of one character.  All three try to incorporate other viewpoints, but only from the journal-writer’s recollection of things said or done by the other characters.  Although most of what we see in Oryx & Crake is from Snowman’s perspective, the story is told by an omniscient third person.  Atwood expertly carves out the path for Snowman, giving her reader cause to both love and hate him on this journey.  Additionally, characters on the periphery get much more attention with this approach as opposed to the epistolary style of the journal-based books.  Though all of the books had some sort of conflict, Snowman’s conflict (and Jimmy’s conflicts before the epidemic) are more relatable and recognizable.  They are told matter-of-factly as events that occurred; in the journal-style, someone is always trying to put the best spin on it or save face.  Additionally, the plot of the former books is merely a visit to (or retelling of a visit to) a new and different way of life or location.  Oryx & Crake, on the other hand, deals with matters of life and death, how Snowman will survive and what he must do to ensure his survival continues beyond today alone. 

When it comes to novel qualities, utopian/dystopian themes, science fiction, speculative fiction, and post-apocalyptic storytelling, Oryx & Crake mixes these various topics with ease and creates a pleasant and sometimes frightening walk through a different world.  The main question, however, has been answered unequivocally.  Will it blend?  Yes, it will.