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Imagining the worst but hoping for the best:
The Cautionary Tale of Science without Ethics exemplified in
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Pernille Sommer Zacho Lützen, 20070086
MA Thesis
MA Thesis supervisor: Peter Mortensen
Degree Program: English
Submission date: 1 March 2013
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Table of content
Page
1. Introduction
4
1.1. Thesis statement
3
1.2. Method
5
2. The cautionary tale
2.1. Jonathan Swift’s Gullivers travels, Book 3 chapters I-IV (1726)
7
8
2.1.1. Summary of the novel
8
2.1.2. The social context
9
2.2. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
11
2.2.1. The social context
11
2.2.2. Brief summary of the novel
11
2.3. H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
12
2.3.1. The social context
12
2.3.2. Summary of the novel
14
2.4. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
14
2.4.1. The social context
15
2.4.2. Brief summary of the novel
15
3. Margaret Atwood’s Social Context
17
3.1. The Manhattan Project
18
3.2. Margaret Atwood, a very short introduction
19
3.3. American society
20
3.4. Selling Sickness
21
3.5. Edward O. Wilson and The Future of Life
22
3.6. Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge: The importance of literature
3.7. The Literary medium
4. Analysis of Oryx and Crake
24
25
4.1. The narration
27
4.2. The world of Oryx and Crake
27
4.3. Jimmy
28
4.3.1. Jimmy’s father
32
4.3.2. Jimmy’s mother, Sharon
34
4.3.3. Ramona, Jimmy’s stepmother
35
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4.4. Crake (Glenn)
4.4.1. Crake’s father
37
39
4.5. The animals
40
4.6. The universities
42
4.6.1. Watson and Crick
44
4.6.2. The Watson-Crick Institute
45
4.6.3. Martha Graham
46
4.6.4. The Martha Graham Academy
47
4.7. Beauty and aging
48
4.8. Life after the university
49
4.9. Crake’s project
51
4.9.1. The concept of the Paradice project
52
4.9.2. Crake’s aesthetics
56
4.9.3. Inventing a mythology for the Crakers
57
4.10 Snowman
4.10.1 Snowman’s inefficiency
5. The importance of literature
59
61
64
5.1. Nature
67
5.2. Critical reception
69
5.3. Pro or con science?
72
6. Conclusion
74
7. Works cited
75
8. Abstract
79
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1.
Introduction
Ever since the 1800s when the natural sciences became organized and professionalized and
entered the educational system, they have gained momentum: Great discoveries were made
and it seemed that technological advance, scientific discoveries and the knowledge it carried
were only limited by the sky. What it potentially entailed was the promise of a better and
longer life. But is that really desirable and do we want it at any cost?
Some authors were concerned with this exact problem and as a consequence science,
technology and the possible consequences of advancement have been depicted in and
presented as fiction. Literature has explored the effects of science in the context of society in
order to alert against possible dangers and the most well written and thought through novels
have become literary landmarks and have helped to guide society handling the ethical
questions that arise in the wake of some scientific advancements.
The premise of scientific work, as opposed to art, is that it builds on what advances came
before; it is ‘chained to the course of progress’ (Weber 115): ‘Every scientific “fulfillment”
raises new “questions”; it asks to be “surpassed” and outdated’ (Weber 116). As technology
progresses and scientific discoveries have become more and more meticulous and detailed we
are now able to prolong life, create new life in the laboratory and even clone existing life. The
ethical discussion therefore becomes more and more important. By imagining the worst we
may prevent it from happening: ’We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.
Perhaps, by imagining mad scientists and then letting them do their worst within the
boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane’ (Atwood In Other Worlds
211).
1.1 Thesis statement
The objective of the present dissertation is the analysis of the Canadian author Margaret
Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) and relate it to its social context. This analysis will
include a further assessment and interpretation of how Atwood uses Oryx and Crake (2003)
as a platform for discussing the possible consequences of the potentially economically
dependent and ethically uncontrolled natural sciences. This analysis will also include an
evaluation of the literary form Atwood has chosen, as well of an assessment of her intended
use of canonized literature.
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Oryx and Crake takes place in a dystopian future where almost the entire human race has
been eliminated and replaced by a new, genetically designed and engineered human race, the
so-called Children of Crake. These Crakers were designed by Crake, a young and ingenious
scientist, who also planned and orchestrated the elimination of the old human race. Left to
guide these new human beings in the aftermath of the destruction of the old race is
Jimmy/Snowman, the childhood friend of Crake.
Coral Ann Howells describes Oryx and Crake as a ‘satire against mankind’ (169) a dystopia,
‘a survival narrative’ (170) and a ‘fable for our time’ (173), and Atwood herself describes
Oryx and Crake as ‘an adventure romance – that is, the hero goes on a quest – coupled with a
Menippean satire, the literary form that deals in intellectual obsession’ (In Context 517).
A cautionary tale, Oryx and Crake serves as a contribution to the bioethical debate: how far
can we allow science to go? What part do we want science to play in our present society and
in the future? What kind of world do we want to live in in the future?
1.2 Method
As Margaret Atwood is, apart from being a prolific writer, literary critic and social
commentator, also an avid reader, who ever since childhood has read and loved canonized
fiction, her own works - Oryx and Crake in particular - often show traits of intertextuality.
Among the most important are four novels I will include in my analysis of Oryx and Crake
since Atwood alludes very clearly to then in the book. Each novel a success in its own time,
they have become milestones in literary history and are still prominent in the current
bioethical debate.
The first part of the paper will therefore present an introduction to some of the main literary
works that Atwood clearly builds on and alludes to:
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Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818)
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H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
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This section will introduce these individual novels with a short summary, a brief outline of the
social context and what the author reacted to or against. This first section will be opened by a
brief introduction to the cautionary tale.
These canonized literary novels, which Atwood builds on were all socio-critical of their own
contemporary society, reactions to a social context and often they treat more than one topic.
The focus of the present work will be on the potential dangers of the effects of applied
science: its socially estranging effects; the dangers in uncontrolled use of technology; the
unlimited freedom of the scientist and the possible consequences of uncontrolled scientific
experiments taken to the extreme, as they were envisioned in these chosen novels. My focus,
when including these novels in my analysis, will therefore be mainly on the functions science
plays in the novels.
Presenting the inspirational literary works serves as a platform for- and a literary introduction
to my analysis of Oryx and Crake. This section will mainly be introductory, further analysis
of the novels will be included in the main part of the paper: the analysis of Oryx and Crake.
As the other authors reacted to their own contemporary societies and their tendencies, so also
Atwood reacted to her own. I shall therefore attempt to demonstrate a bridge from the review
of the four novels to the analysis of Margaret Atwood’s futuristic novel. This bridge will
provide an introduction to the present social tendencies which she has built her futuristic
society on. What I have chosen to include are: the Manhattan project, Atwood’s skepticism
towards the American society, the marketing of medications in the US, the division between
the natural sciences and the humanities, and a concern for the rapid extinction of animals and
the consequent destruction of ecospheres. The bridge will also include a short introduction to
Margaret Atwood.
This analysis will subsequently be offered in the part following these introductions. It will be
based both on my own analysis of Oryx and Crake, peer reviews and literary articles,
interviews with Margaret Atwood as well as on her own articles concerning the novels
introduced in the first section of this paper.
The analysis of Oryx and Crake will be presented through a review and assessment of the
different thematic areas of the novel, including characterizations of main characters,
Jimmy/Snowman, Crake, and Jimmy’s parents. Other themes, mentioned in a nonchronological order, include the pre-plague society - the world Jimmy and Crake grow up in-,
the universities that Jimmy and Crake attend, the Children of Crake, the heart of the novel –
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where Atwood’s voice is seen most clearly -,and the allusions to the four novels reviewed in
the introductory part of the paper.
Following the analysis is an assessment of the most important aspects of Oryx and Crake
relating to the thesis statement of the present dissertation. These include a discussion of the
importance of literature, nature, some critical reception of the novel and whether Margaret
Atwood is pro or con science.
Lastly follows the conclusion.
2. The cautionary tale
The different focuses and approaches of the natural sciences and the humanities, what Glover
calls ‘the complicated position of humans as products of both nature and culture’ (50), have
been a source for disagreement ever since the natural sciences gained momentum and
established a firm and serious platform to stand upon both in the educational system (Moon
42) and in society in general. This dispute has lived through several stages, but never without
conflict. As science and technology progress and advance within fields that can physically
alter biological life the urge for a moral supervisor becomes more and more urgent. Quoting
Max Weber, Campbell argues (344) that this regulation cannot come from within the ranks of
the natural sciences but has to come from the humanities: ‘Natural science gives us an answer
to the question of what we must do to master life technically. It leaves quite aside, or assumes
for its purposes, whether we should and do wish to master life technically and whether it
ultimately makes sense to do so’ (Weber 122).
Throughout the period of science’s gain on society, authors have aired their views through
what has later been works labeled as ‘science fiction’ and some of these works have become
literary milestones and helped alter the general public opinion of science. The most prominent
example of this is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein first published in 1818.
What these authors tried to do was pose an answer to various questions in an indirect way:
how far can we take science? Where is the limit of unethical conduct? Which role do we want
science to play in our society, and what could the possible consequences be of a development
in the opposite direction?
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By approaching such questions through fiction these authors have made a strong contribution
to the general debate on which part ethics should and must play in the natural sciences.
In Oryx and Crake, Snowman teaches the Crakes that a picture can represent a real thing:
‘Not real can tell us about real.’(O&C 118) In the same fashion well-written fiction can teach
us about the future with its positive and negative consequences by imagining it (Howells
173). According to Martha Montello, futuristic novels can become ‘a form of moral
laboratory’ (8) where authors can present us with possible futures based on the present day
society. Such novels can present social changes fully integrated and at their extreme, thus
showing the consequences for those living with them; ‘they can explore the consequences of
new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them as fully operational’; ‘they
can explore … the limits of what it means to be human…’ (Atwood Aliens 1).
In a time when science is producing results that are straining the limits of human imagination
the cautionary tale becomes more and more important (Atwood Alien 2). The well-written
novel can become a guideline of sorts, helping us to make the right ethical decisions when
faced with new technological advances and applied science. In her article ‘Biotechnology and
the Fear of Frankenstein’ Courtney Campbell argues that disputes on biotechnology are
rooted in conflicting cultural values and worldviews. She claims that fiction can help the
different parties understand those differences: ‘We need, at the very least, complementary
education in the kinds of worldviews that are brought to bear in this discussion. In so doing, I
would … contend that these worldviews are commonly communicated through stories,
narratives, and mythologies’ (343).
Science fiction is the literary form that concerns itself with ‘the possibilities and social
implications of scientific and technological change’ and is therefore best suited as a ‘dramatic
mirror for bioethics’ (Rabkin 138)
2.1 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Book 3 chapters I-IV (1726)
Swift commented satirically on science in several of his published works, but never more
fiercely than in book III of Gulliver’s Travels (Cartwright 105). The main focus and use of
this novel will therefore be on the third book of Gulliver’s Travels.
2.1.1.Summary of the novel
After having abandoned the ship on which he originally set out from England for a mere
canoe, Gulliver reaches an island after five days at sea in a canoe. The island he has reached it
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that of Bilnabarbi, overshadowed by the floating island of Laputa. Gulliver is invited to visit
Laputa and he soon discovers that the island is inhabited by strange and highly intelligent
people with short attention spans and an obsession for mathematics and music. Their houses
are poorly built and their wives are unfaithful, but this does not seem to matter to the
otherwise constantly worried Laputians, who are too consumed in their studies to notice.
Before leaving the island, Gulliver visits the Grand Academy of Lagado, an academy where
scientists, so-called ‘projectors’, are conducting experiments that strike Gulliver as
completely ridiculous and without benefit for the human race. (Swift 195-237)
2.1.2 The social context
When Swift wrote and published Gulliver’s Travels, science, as we refer to in our time, was
still in its infancy so even if posterity clearly read the novel as a satirical work of literature,
Swift’s contemporaries read the book as something else:’ in early eighteenth-century terms,
the book was a “bite” – a tall tale presented as the straight-faced truth in order to sucker the
listener into believing it…’ (Atwood In Other Worlds196). One of the reasons why
contemporary readers did not see the criticism of e.g. the scientist could have been that
science was still practiced in solitude away from the public eye, as Lenoble states: ‘the
Church continued to be a powerful enemy and the man in the street indifferent’ (181).
The 17th century, however, saw the emergence of a new and more modern approach to the
natural sciences. New methods of research were applied and established ideas, dating back to
the old Greek philosophers, were overthrown (Lenoble 179-80). The distinction between arts,
as humanities, and science was only just emerging and even this transition from the ancient
learning –the so called Ancients - to the more modern approach –the so called Moderns - was
still at such an early stage that you had to be what Patey calls an “attentive observer of
seventeenth-century thought” (810-14).
Jonathan Swift was such an observer, as Gulliver’s Travels clearly states (Patey 814) and
readings of Gulliver’s Travels in regards to his astrological predictions have shown that Swift
was not ignorant as to the laws of physics (Cartwright 110-1). It is therefore not a criticism
based on ignorance, but one founded on worry for the future.
‘Nature is written in mathematical language,’ Galileo states in Saggiatore in 1623 and
changed scientific approach ever since (Lenoble 186). Letting the Laputians apply
mathematical or musical understanding to everything is thus clearly a reference to Galileo.
The intellectual endeavor is favored above anything practical even in situations where the
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opposite would be more favorable. The absurdity of the Laputians’ approach to life and its
consequences thus become obvious when applied to practical matters and the result is one of
badly structured houses, badly tailored clothes and a messy political system (Cartwright 112).
The various ‘projectors’ Gulliver meets at the grand Academy of Lagado make numerous
experiments that seem pointless to Gulliver (Swift 223-227). However, these experiments:
capturing sunlight through cucumbers and preserving it for a darker time (Swift 223-4),
turning human excrement into food (Swift 224), turning ice into gunpowder (Swift 224),
making thread of spider webs (Swift 225), blowing air into the anus of dogs to relieve them of
illness (Swift 226), etc. are based on actual experiments (Cartwright 111), even if Swift has
exaggerated them for the sake of entertainment.
What Swift reacted against, then, is not, as it would seem at a first glance, science in itself, but
more the application of a scientific method where it does not make sense and when the
approach becomes too stringent, especially in the field of language (Cartwright 111), Swift’s
own field: Reducing words to the thing they symbolize and concluding that it is better to cart
the actual things around, as the Laputians do, is outright ridiculous (Swift 230-31). The main
object of Swift’s attack then was the Royal Society, founded in 1662 and based on the vision
of Francis Bacon: ‘the emphasis on experimentation, the open communication of results
nationally and internationally, and the search for useful application of natural knowledge’
(Cartwright 71). ‘In its largest sense, then, Swift’s satire on contemporary canons of
explanation is grounded in a suspicion that Modern method is not really so new after all, and
hence that Modern divisions between science and art - between the realms of progress and
tradition - are finally ill-grounded’ (Patey 817).
The very clear language and the fantastical and inventive universe of the novel was appealing
to young readers and the complexity that hides beneath the seemingly simple surface (Foot 9)
also engaged a more sophisticated audience. Thus, when Gulliver’s Travels was published, it
was an instant success ranging from the nursery to the halls of power in the English
Parliament (Foot 8). It has remained a classic and favored novel ever since its publication.
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2.2 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818)
2.2.1 The social context
The early 18 hundreds was a period of turmoil. Not only were the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars still fresh within memory, but the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution
which changed society profoundly and the groundbreaking discoveries of the natural sciences
added to the general feeling of transformation (Stripling 17-18).
It was a period of great scientific discovery. Galvani made groundbreaking discoveries in
electricity, in medicine, great inventions were made e.g. the first small pox vaccinations were
administered in 1796, opening up to a new kind of medical treatment; surgery was
transformed in 1800 when a chemist discovered the anesthetic qualities of nitrous oxide. And
with the Industrial revolution came great technological advances (Stripling 17-18). The sky
was the limit and the future seemed to belonged to technology and science.
2.2.2 Brief summary of the novel
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus is the cautionary tale of the obsessed and goal
oriented scientist, blind to the possible consequences of his own actions. The main story, set
within another narration, is that of Victor Frankenstein, a gifted young man with a great
interest in science. Victor grows up in a rich and caring family in Geneva. Shortly before his
leaving home to attend the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, Victor’s beloved mother
dies, and the grief stricken Victor becomes determined to master death. Isolated and tunnelversioned, Victor builds a creature out of body parts from dead convicts. After succeeding in
restoring his creature to life, a horror stuck Victor leaves his newly born creation in the hope
that it will not be able to survive. Once out of isolation, Victor is shocked by what he has
created. The creation Victor has abandoned does not die. After some time it is re-united with
its creator, and after being rejected once again, it kills Victor’s loved ones. In the end,
Frankenstein dies on the North Pole, accompanied by his creation. (Shelley 5-191).
Shelley based her novel partly on her own experiences. She became motherless at a young age
and none of her children survived childhood. It was due to the shortcomings of the medicine
of her time her mother died; three of her four children did not survive infancy and the one
child who did died from malaria at the age of three. Not only medically but also socially, the
status of children was appalling. Children were often neglected and died due to indifference
from both parents and wet nurses (Stripling 13-15). The way Victor handles his Creation is
therefore a direct reference to the general attitude towards children in Shelley’s time, and one
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of Victor Frankenstein’s great crimes is not only creating his monster, but also the rejection of
what he has created. Fathering his “child”, but not taking on him the responsibility of raising
and loving it, therefore has dire consequences not only to Victor, but also to those he loves.
The extremities of Frankenstein’s ambitions and accomplishments were exaggerated and
taken so far beyond the limit of what was possible that even though experiments in electricity
had been made, making the muscles of dead frogs move by exposing them to electrical shock
(Stripling 17), there is no doubt that the contemporary audience saw Frankenstein’s project as
one of pure fiction, not even remotely possible (Van der Laan 298) .
However, this does not dim the main objective of the story: the process of the tunnel-visioned
scientist following his ambitions and scientific curiosity without considering the costs or
consequences (Van der Laan, 2010). What is important is how science is used and to what
end. Even though Victor’s intentions are good, he ends up enclosed in his project and is
blinded by the prospects of fame and scientific progress (Stripling 22), and during the course
of the story of Frankenstein the reader is reminded that the proverbial road to Hell is paved
with good intentions (Van der Laan 301). Good intentions, however, do not compensate for
lack of responsibility or ethical reflections.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has often been credited as the first real novel of science fiction
(Van der Laan 298), and its social and literary impact and message cannot be underestimated.
Not only was it a popular novel in Mary Shelley’s time (Cartwright 139), but with the birth of
the cinema in the 20th century, Frankenstein took on an entirely new existence, epitomizing
the mad scientist in a new form very distant from its original. Ever popular, the character of
Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created have appeared in close to 100 cinematic
adaptations (Haynes 435). However distant from the original, even Frankenstein’s new form
stayed true to the original message: without an ethical consciousness, scientific approaches
are potentially dangerous: ‘…, the name Frankenstein has by now become “a cultural short for
science out of control” and “the experiment-gone-wrong” (pp. 463-464)’ (Van der Laan 302).
2.3 H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
2.3.1.The social context
The Island of Dr. Moreau was published in 1896, 78 years after Frankenstein. In the
intermediate years the progress made within the natural sciences was colossal. Victorian
society had produced astonishing achievements and Victorian scientist had changed the role
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science played in society. Science had gone from being an amateurish undertaking done in the
privacy of the homes of those who could afford it, either by own means or those of a patron,
to becoming a professional undertaking in academic laboratories (Gowan 166).
The most influential scientist of this period was Charles Darwin, whose discoveries and
evolutionary theories attracted great attention, both negative and positive (Atwood In Other
Worlds 156).
The particular scientific colossus who bestrides the period between 1830 and
1914 is unarguably Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection, first
announced in On the Origin of Species in 1859 although mostly formulated
some two decades earlier, is widely perceived to have had revolutionary
consequences not just for science and religion but for virtually every aspect of
nineteenth-century experience (Gowan 172-3).
Darwin, who was a nuch withdrawn and shy man (Gowan 175), was defended fiercely by his
colleague Thomas Huxley, who ‘gain[ed] notoriety as Charles Darwin’s self-styled ‘bulldog’
during the evolutionary controversies of the 1860s’ (Gowan 165).
Huxley was a revolutionary within his own field, biology, (Gowan 165) to the extent that
coining the term ‘biology’ is attributed to him (Moon 42). Huxley believed that the natural
sciences should be taught at every level of the educational system and helped to change the
system to become more like we know it today, including improving the scientific method and
approach to reach it (Moon 42). ‘Huxley, at the beginning of the 1880s, had belligerently
discarded long-established “school and university traditions” in asserting that “for the purpose
of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an
exclusively literary education” (Gowan 166).
In Huxley’s view, ‘it was the application of various scientific procedures to the practices of
industry and transportation that had facilitated the economic dynamics by which nineteenthcentury society had been transformed’ (Gowan 165). The Victorian era was an age of science
and progress.
Wells was himself a man of science. In his youth he studied under Thomas Huxley, but due to
an injury he could not follow his intended career path and became a writer instead (Atwood In
Other Words 152).Wells wrote his novel from a journalistic point of view, making the
narration an eye witness account to heighten the sense of realism (Atwood In Other
Words155).
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2.3.1 Summary of the novel
Prendick, an English scientist, is shipwrecked and ends up on a small island inhabited by two
Englishmen, the local wildlife and some strange creatures, referred to as Beast Men. Dr.
Moreau, the leader of the island, is recognized by Prendick as a former scientist who was
rejected by the English scientific society for conducting unethical experiments on animals. To
Prendick’s horror Dr. Moreau has continued his experiments, vivisection, on the island, and
the Beasts Men are the living proof here of. These have been domesticized in order for their
human behavior to overpower their animal nature. But as the vivisecting cruelties continue,
Dr. Moreau is killed by one of his experiments and the rest of the Beast Men kill the Doctor’s
assistant. Prendick’s is spared and he goes to live with the Beast Men who gradually turn
more and more away from their domesticized behavior. Prendick manages to escape the
island and once back in London he turns away from human company and lives in solitude
(Wells 1-131).
Wells was a Darwinist which The Island of Dr. Moreau obviously shows: ‘Gone was the God
who spoke the world into being in seven days and made man out of clay; in his place stood
millions of years of evolutionary change and a family tree that included primates. … The
devouring femme fatale that became so iconic in the 1880s and 1890s owes a lot to Darwin.
So does the imagery and cosmogony of the Island of Dr. Moreau’ (Atwood In Other Worlds
156).
The animals that the Doctor creates are born in pain; the pain, however, is not inflicted on the
birth-giver, but on the beings born. Moreau began his experiments in England, but was
banished because of the horrible nature of his experiments. Following his drive to conduct his
tests he travelled to the far regions of the empire to an isolated island, setting up his new
surgery in the middle of a wilderness. But even if this untamed nature seems violent and
unwelcoming the true monster is the doctor and his scientific research (Carpi, 2011). ‘What
drives him on? His sin is the sin of pride, combined with a cold ‘intellectual passion.’ He
wants to know everything. He wishes to discover the secrets of life. His ambition is to be God
the Creator’ (Atwood In Other Worlds 160).
‘It’s from this blend – the grotesque and the ‘natural’ – that Wells took his cue.
An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters
– dragons, gorgons, hydras – keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have
been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian
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England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science’(Atwood In
Other Worlds 154-5).
2.4 Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
2.4.1 The social context
Huxley began writing Brave New World in 1921(Firchow 304), but did not complete the
novel until Autumn 1931(Woiak 107). Brave New World was published in 1932, then, the real
world had changed considerably during that interval, the western world was facing the Great
Depression, several nations had abandoned democracy and had turned towards totalitarianism
in various forms after having gone through the hard post-war times. Science, however
advanced since late 18-hundreds, had still not found its place in society and many great
discoveries were still in the future. Political stances would prove to be very crucial.
Eugenics was one of the hot topics of the time, taking on many forms, and Aldous Huxley
himself was not only the brother of one of the foremost scientist in the field, Julian Huxley, he
also believed in the supremacy of the intelligent himself (Woiak 106, 108-9). ‘Huxley further
serves as an example of how intellectuals from all points on the political spectrum—not just
conservatives or fascists—were drawn to eugenics as a progressive, technocratic means of
improving the health and fitness of populations’ (Woiak 110).
As Swift and Wells before him, Huxley observed and commented on his own time through
the medium of the cautionary tale wrapped in the form of satire and an extreme setting with
the consequences of scientific and technological advances taken to the extreme (Woika 1078). Unlike previously mentioned authors, however, Huxley took his vision of a future resting
entirely on technology to an almost logical extreme (Firchow 301-2).
"Whether we like it or not," Aldous Huxley remarked in Literature and Science,
his last completed work, "Ours is the Age of Science." … He denounced our
Age for worshipping the golden calf of mass production and for imposing as the
whole truth the most systematic body of half-truths ever assembled. Something
needed to be done, it was clear (Firchow 315).
Born into a family of scientists, Aldous Huxley assumed himself to be destined for a career in
biology, but due to an eye infection he became almost blind and resolved himself to becoming
an author and a journalist (Woiak 106-7; Firchow 301). But even if Huxley had to abandon
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his dream of becoming a researcher, his interest in science never vanished, and some of his
work is regarded as science treatises (Firchow 301).
So Huxley used this understanding of both science and story-telling and tried to educate his
audience as to the possible consequences of uncontrolled science in the hands of very few and
provoking his readers to regard the growing influence technology had on the everyday life of
ordinary people (Woiak 108).
A scientifically well informed man, Aldous Huxley was at par with developments made in the
various scientific branches. Especially in biology and psychology progress had been made
that divided the waters. Biology was on the verge of discovering the secrets of life and ‘even
beginning to think of creating it’ (Firchow 310), and in the field of psychology Pavlov had
posted the theory that ‘so-called voluntary behavior was-or at least could be made into-merely
another form of conditioned behavior’ (Firchow 309-10).
The American psychologist J. B. Watson even claimed that infants brought up in the right
environment and exposed to specific stimuli could be trained to become ‘any type of
specialist I select’ (Firchow 310-11).
Huxley has clearly built this theory into Brave New World, most obviously in ‘the opening
scene of chapter two, in which a group of infants is conditioned by means of sirens and alarm
bells (plus a mild electric shock), is closely modeled on one of Watson's best-known neoPavlovian experiments’ (Firchow 311).
2.4.1 Brief summary of the novel
The novel is set in a distant future, where Henry Ford is god, wars are no longer fought and
countries no longer exist, children are no longer born by women, but bred in a hatchery and
conditioned to a specific place within the very strict caste system of a country called Utopia.
Throughout their life these citizens are controlled both physically and mentally through
constant mind control and Soma, a tranquilizing drug. Bernard Marx, a highly intelligent
member of one of the higher casts, visits a Savage Reservation in Mexico, outside of Utopia,
where he meets Linda, a former member of Utopia. She has a son, John the Savage, and after
learning that John’s father is one of the highest cast members of Utopia, Bernard is granted
permission to bring both Linda and John back to Utopia. Linda seems happy to be back, but
John neither understands nor accepts Utopia. When Linda dies John goes crazy and tries to
make the Utopians rebel against their system. The resistance is beaten down and Bernard is
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exiled on Iceland. John withdraws from the other Utopians and tries to live in solitude, but the
constant swarm of sightseers makes John commit suicide in despair (Huxley 1-229).
During the process of writing Brave New World, Huxley visited America, and he was
appalled by the mass consumerism and group-mentality he witnessed, which appeared
unparalleled in Europe (Atwood In Other Worlds190): ‘Americans “can live out their lives,”
he said in 1927 after a tour of the country, “without once being solitary, without once making
a serious mental effort, without once being out of sight or sound of some ready-made
distraction” (Woiak 113).
These experiences are clearly woven into the fabric of Brave New World as an important part
of the society depicted in the novel and demonstrated in one of the main concerns of one of its
protagonists, Bernard Marx. It is this discovery, that there seems to be no room for reform and
that everyone is satisfied with this notion, which sets off the action of the novel. The price
paid for establishing Utopia becomes apparent when John the Savage comments on this
perfect society: ‘… in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning …
John is the only character in the book who has a real body, but he knows it through pain, not
through pleasure. ‘Nothing costs enough here’, he says of the perfumed new world where he’s
been brought as an ‘experiment’ (Atwood In Other Worlds 191).
As both Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau before it, Brave New World, like its
almost contemporary novel Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, has left its mark on the
public consciousness and has added to the vocabulary of highly negatively charged words
associated with science gone wrong (Firchow 301). As with the terms ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Big
Brother’, ‘Brave New World’ as an expression connotes ill warning and calls for an ethic
reflection into which every subject it is describing.
3. Margaret Atwood’s Social Context
What all the hitherto reviewed novels have in common is their reaction to their own
contemporary society and its relation to the natural sciences, politically, socially and
financially. Another common feature is the author’s understanding of science: none of them
was ignorant rather the contrary, they had a broad knowledge of what they individually
criticized. And this may be one of the reasons why they have each become literary landmarks,
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popular already within their own time. As they reacted to their own context so also Atwood
takes inspiration from the world she grew up in, lives in and observes with great concern.
3.1 The Manhattan Project
Much has changed since Brave New World was published in 1932, not only within the field of
science. The Second World War not only presented the world with some of the worst
atrocities towards fellow human beings, but it also showed how scientific progress can be
used in the worst possible way: to destroy and kill. A race between Nazi-Germany and the
United States for an all destroying weapon to end the war produced an atomic bomb
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people
cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture
the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his
duty and to impress him takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now, I am
become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way
or another (Pontin 10).
There is doubt as to whether Oppenheimer has romanticized this event or not, but the fact
remains that he produced two bombs which were both dropped in Japan, effectively ending
the war. He never regretted participating in the Manhattan Project and held the firm belief that
‘whatever could be discovered or done would be discovered and done. “It is a profound and
necessary truth,” he told a Canadian audience in 1962, “that the deep things in science are not
found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them” (Pontin
10). During the process in Los Alamos the Danish scientist Niels Bohr visited the site with the
sole purpose of talking to Robert Oppenheimer (Bird 32): ‘It was easy to see the effect Bohr
had on Oppenheimer. "He knew Bohr from way back and they were pretty close personally,"
said Weisskopf. "Bohr was the one who really discussed these political and ethical problems
with Oppenheimer, and probably that was the time"— early 1944 "when he began to think
seriously about it" (Bird 33).
The voice of reason thus came from within their own ranks and not from the government who
felt threatened by Bohr’s all too humane intentions of sharing the recipe for the bomb with the
Russians (Bird 33). ‘In Bohr's mind, the atomic bomb was already a fact—and control over
this menace to humanity required "a new approach to the problem of international
relationship...." (Bird 33).
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What the Manhattan Project showed us is that given the right drive and monetary funding
science and technology can deliver devastating results. As scientific research and technology
advance, the urge for an ethic regulator becomes more and more apparent.
The war took away whatever was left of the cultural innocence, and where e.g. science and
progress were earlier considered in a positive way, ‘the application of science in World War II
cast a long shadow over postwar culture and society. Particularly in the shape of the
mushroom cloud, technology and science were seen not as liberators of humanity, but as the
tools of the oppressors; not instruments of understanding, but the instruments of death’
(Cartwright 247).
Science in our time has become a social factor of prime importance. It is to
science that the emerging nations look for their rapid economic advancement,
and the developed countries for economic stability. Hence, it is no wonder that
the interval between scientific discoveries and their practical applications grows
steadily less, and that pressure is constantly being put upon scientists to bring
their labors to bear on the needs of mankind (Taton xxii).
3.2 Margaret Atwood, a very short introduction
Margaret Atwood, like Aldous Huxley, grew up in a household dominated by science. Her
father was a zoologist, when she was growing up her family lived in the Northern woods of
Canada most of the year (Atwood In Other Worlds 15). Her brother became a
neurophysiologist and had it not been for the way things turned out, Margaret Atwood would
have become a scientist herself (Gussow E1). ‘Atwood grew up among biologists; the ‘boys
at the lab’ mentioned in the novel’s acknowledgements are the students and postdocs who
worked with her father at a forest-insect research station in Northern Quebec’ (Louët 163).
Just as Huxley did, Atwood keeps herself up to date with popular science and has always had
what Gussow calls ‘a compulsive interest in the wonders – and the blunders – of scientific
invention’ (E1). Apart a ‘a lifelong observance of, and interest, in science’ (Louët 163) ,
Margaret Atwood is and always has been a very prolific reader of fiction as well. In the
basement of her childhood household were bookshelves filled with classic fiction, and here a
young Margaret first met some of her favorite novels: ‘So in the cellar I read – when I was
supposed to be doing my homework – not only all the Wells stories but also many another
weird tale: Gulliver’s Travels, … and Frankenstein, …, and George Orwell of course, and
Brave New World, … and more…’ (Atwood In Context 514).
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Margaret Atwood has, as has already been established, a wide knowledge in the natural
sciences and one of the premises she set herself when writing Oryx and Crake was: ”You
have to be able to back everything up by facts”, Atwood said emphatically. “I have a big,
brown box in the cellar that is constantly being filled, except that I am collecting [these
materials] even while I am writing” (Richler 1). Observing the scientific and technological
possibilities of the world we live in today, Atwood thus built Oryx and Crake on what already
exists and then took it to its natural extreme. And this is what to Atwood separates science
fiction from what she labels speculative fiction: speculative fiction describes the future that
actually might happen whereas science fiction could not (Atwood In Other Worlds 6).
Atwood explains that ‘speculative fiction is “this planet” …”it doesn’t use things we don’t
already have or are not already developing.” An explanation she substantiates with the
comment: “Had I written it 20 years ago, I would have called it science fiction, but now it’s
speculative fiction, believe me” (Gussow E1).
‘”There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Atwood says, “not physically or spiritually or
emotionally,” (Richler 1) in an interview explaining the fundamental idea behind Oryx and
Crake. What we do will eventually catch up with us, entailing both logical and unforeseen
consequences. ‘…Oryx and Crake is a cautionary tale about humanity swept down river on a
raft’ Atwood states in her interview with Mel Gussow (E1).
3.3 American society
Being Canadian, she is especially conscious and critical of the American society: In a both
politically and economically interconnected world, as the one we live in today, a major player,
such as the United States, is a trendsetter and a forerunner of change, and any social
tendencies within the US are destined to spread to, at the very minimum, the rest of the
western world. How the US treats its scientists and scientific and technological advances is
therefore of utmost importance.
Setting the trend for the rest of the world, America increasingly encourages its scientists to
follow commercialized research:
Atwood says she feels particularly strongly about the loss of independence of
scientists, citing the suppression of negative data by corporate sponsors. ”If you
get results that are contrary to what you want to market, the temptation to
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suppress those results is very strong,” she says. Such competing interests are
becoming increasingly common as governments across the world encourage
more and more scientists to become involved in commercial enterprises. (Louët
163)
In her article ‘Home and Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction’, Eleonora Rao states
that: ‘It is perhaps useful to stress that in Oryx and Crake there is no single mention of
Canada. Atwood’s most recent novel to date is suggestive of a thinking and feeling beyond
the nation’ (112). Even though Rao is not entirely correct - Atwood alludes to Canada once:
‘Crake had also located Uncle Pete’s stash of high-grade Vancouver skunkweed…’ - she does
have a point. The problem Atwood’s novel addresses is concerned with the entire planet and
not only America or Canada. Climate change affects all of us. And even if the novel is set in
America and has its base in American society as it is today the consequences are not confined
to the North American continent. However, Atwood has still chosen to set the novel in the US
and this is not without significance.
3.4 Selling Sickness
One of Atwood’s greatest concerns lies in the sales of pharmaceuticals. America is very
strongly represented in Oryx and Crake not only as the world in which Jimmy and Crake live,
but also as the country most likely to turn into of the worst possible future: what makes
Crake’s Paradice Project possible, the distribution of the BlissPluss Pill, is the immense
power of the pharmaceutical industry. In Oryx and Crake not only do the Compounds market
medication for curing various diseases, they also invent and distribute them via innocent
products, such as vitamin pills (O&C 248-9). As with every other aspect of the novel, this is
exaggerated compared to reality, but the forewarnings of this already exists in the US. The
marketing laws are the most lax in the world, shared only with New Zealand, allowing for the
drug companies to advertise their products freely: ‘a loosening of advertising regulations in
the late 1990s in the US has delivered an unprecedented onslaught of drug marketing targeted
at ordinary people, who now watch an average of ten or more of these advertisements every
day’ (Maynihan xvi). In Oryx and Crake the pharmaceutical companies are producing their
own viruses. There is little to suggest that reality today has yet reached such a level,
fabricating physical diseases. However, the industry is already creating sickness where there
is none, marketing mental conditions that barely exist. A good example is the rise of Social
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anxiety disorder in the US. Applying a clever marketing strategy GSK, GlaxoSmithKlein a
global health company, re-launched the antidepressant drug Paxil in 1999 as the wonder drug
for the newly coined ailment social anxiety disorder, a disorder they themselves had helped
invent. ‘In little more than a year Paxil’s manufacturer GSK took a little-known and once
considered rare psychiatric condition and helped transform it into a major epidemic called
social anxiety disorder – claimed at one point by the company to affect one in eight
American’s’ (Moynihan 120).
The disorder had been eased into the American public, not by way of ordinary commercials,
but through awareness campaigns substantiated by celebrities stating that they suffered from
the diseases too and having being helped by Paxil. As a result Paxil sales boomed and
overtook Prozac as the highest selling antidepressant on the American market (Moynihan
119-138). PR-stunts such as this are mimicked in Oryx and Crake via Jimmy. The only proper
use for literature in the novel is for marketing, and Jimmy is so good at describing why the
various products are must haves that he convinces himself, despite the fact that he knows he is
being conned: ‘He ought to have known it was a scam – he’d put together the ads for it [a
follicle-regrowth course] - but they were such good ads he’d convinced even himself’ (O&C
296).
Atwood is not only creating paranoia among the American citizens and forcing them to go
against the physical human nature by consuming large amounts of pharmaceuticals they do
not need. She is also very concerned with how nature in general is treated.
3.5 Edward O. Wilson and The Future of Life
Environment and the way it affects the protagonist are a central to most of Atwood’s works
(Couturier-Storey 2), but nowhere is it more obvious than in Oryx and Crake and in its
companion novel The Year of the Flood (2009). As mentioned, Margaret Atwood grew up in
the Canadian Northern woods and her close connection to and consciousness of nature has
remained with her throughout her adult life. Oryx and Crake took its off set during a private
visit to Australia with the objective to ‘bird’ - to observe and identify birds in their natural
surroundings. There she witnessed a rare Australian bird, the red-necked Crake. ‘And then I
saw the shape of a book. There was the book shining in the distance, as a goal’ (Gussow E1).
And so she set out to writing a dystopian satire set in the future of human kind in a drastically
altered biosphere, partly ‘written on a ship in the Arctic where she saw first-hand the melting
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of the glaciers … and she has declared that global warming, over-irrigation, contaminated
groundwater, and animal extinctions are the axioms upon which she built the novel’ (Glover
52).
In an interview concerning Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood has suggested to her readers
Edward O. Wilson’s book The Future of Life, a non-fiction work warning against the
extinction of animal races and the human exploitation of nature, which serves as a background
for her novel (Hengen 73).
The famous American biologist was concerned with the evident climate changes that were
and are still taking place. The Future of Life (2002) is a warning to what direction we were,
and are, heading in, and a reminder that there is still time to stop the descent down the
catastrophic path human kind is leading Earth: ‘In short, Earth has lost its ability to
regenerate— unless global consumption is reduced, or global production is increased, or both’
(Wilson 27). The connection between Wilson’s warning and Atwood’s novel is most obvious
in the following excerpt:
What, after all, in the long term does it mean to be human? We have traveled
this far; we will go on. As to the rest of life, they continue, we should be able to
immerse fertilized eggs and clonable tissues of endangered species in liquid
nitrogen and use them later to rebuild the destroyed ecosystems. Even that may
not be necessary: in time entirely new species and ecosystems, better suited to
human needs than the old ones, can be created by genetic engineering. Homo
sapiens might choose to redesign itself along the way, the better to live in a new
biological order of our own making. … And to redesign the human genotype
better to fit a ruined biosphere is the stuff of science horror fiction. Let us leave
it there, in the realm of imagination (Wilson 129-130).
But Atwood took this imagined future and built her novel around this horrific suggestion: that
humanity may need to create not only new animal species, but also to reinvent its own species
anew in order to survive the climate changes.
According to Wilson it was science and technology that generated the momentum of planetary
destruction, and it is also to science and technology we shall look for our salvation. Only this
time ‘combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out’
(Wilson 23). The solution lies in ethics.
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But it was not only the dystopian idea of genetically engineered animals and human beings
that led Atwood to write her novel. It was her intent to give to the reader ‘a blueprint of what
you don’t want to happen’ (Louët 163) in order for the audience to make enough changes in
the world now rather than later. Becoming more environmentally aware is more urgent now
than it has ever been. By presenting us with a cautionary tale of the worst futuristic version of
the way we as human beings treat nature at present her hope was, and is, that we wake up and
change direction while there is still time. And not only at a personal level: ‘Environmentalism
is still widely viewed, especially in the United States, as a special-interest lobby. Its
proponents, in this blinkered view, flutter their hands over pollution and threatened species,
exaggerate their case, and press for industrial restraint and the protection of wild places, even
at the cost of economic development and jobs’ (Wilson 39).
3.6 Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge: The importance of literature
Wilson is not only concerned with the balance of the biosphere, but also with the debate
concerning the balance between the natural sciences and literature. This debate is as old as the
natural sciences and can roughly be divided into three stages.
During the first stage, after the natural sciences had entered the educational system in the
1800s, and between 1868 and 1883 an important debate ran; centered on education and what
young men ought to study. The two opposing forces in this debate were Thomas Huxley and
Matthew Arnold. Huxley held the position that science was the only way to reach the truth,
whereas Arnold, a poet and a critic, believed that only literature could give insight into human
nature (Cartwright 270-4). The natural sciences were gaining momentum during these years
and were effectively eliminating religion as a defining political factor. Concerned humanists,
such as Arnold, fought for a consistent position for the humanities within the educational
system and the ‘solution was a demarcation: science to explain the natural world and the
humanities to inform and nourish our moral life and to satisfy our spiritual yearnings’
(Cartwright 275). The university system was divided into faculties and the tension between
these different approaches to education intensified.
The second stage of the debate began in the late 1950s. when C. P. Snow gave his famous
Rede lecture in 1959 with the title ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. A
written version of the lecture was published the same year and became a huge success. Snow
seemed to have verbalized what everybody thought: that the sciences and literature had
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become too separated and were hardly communicating anymore, simply not understanding
each other’s fields. Science was portrayed as progressive and modern with the intent to
improve things. In stark contrast hereto stood literature which according to Snow was
backwards-looking proud of its ignorance of science. The literary critic F. R. Leavis
responded with a counter attack, feeling outraged that Snow would consider the sciences
superior to the humanities (Cartwright 276-7).
In the third stage, biologist Edward O. Wilson has been concerned with gapping the bridge
between the sciences and the arts since the 1970s publishing two books, one in 1975 and one
in 1984, on the subject of uniting the two faculties. In 1998 his most famous book on the
subject, Consilience, was published, fully expressing ‘his most deeply thought-out vision for
the future dialogue between the arts and sciences’ (Cartwright 297). He coined his approach
“Consilience” which according to the online dictionary of Merriam-Webster is defined: ‘the
linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a
comprehensive theory’. As Cartwright points out ‘the key for Wilson is to place the
humanities and the sciences on a common foundation’ (Cartwright 299) and not to build a
new hierarchy. Wilson suggests that ‘the arts serve to stimulate and model reality and pass on
social learning’ (Cartwright 300), but contests that literary theory is inadequate and needs a
better model to work from: gene-culture co-evolution, thus receiving much criticism for
reducing literature to biology. This, however, was never Wilson’s intent, but simply a
suggestion to a working hypothesis that could help tie the humanities and the natural sciences
closer together (Cartwright 298-300). This importance in a unity of knowledge is very
apparent in Margaret Atwood’s novel and at the core what is wrong in the world or Oryx and
Crake, as will be discussed further below.
3.7 The Literary Medium
Atwood has chosen to depict her bleak vision of the future through a utopian setting with
dystopian strong undercurrents to make her fable clearer, much as Aldous Huxley did in
Brave New World.
‘The purely moral type is a serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other
words a Utopia’ (Frye 310). As Frye describes, the utopian style is very simple in its form,
depicting a fictional society at its extreme best. Its literary opposite is the dystopia, a society
portrayed at its extreme worst. After the Second World War the utopian form has become
almost extinct, leaving authors and the audience stripped of its former naivety and hopes for a
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simpler and better future. Increasingly, the dystopian vision of the future has therefore
become more dominant.
However, dystopia is not a new literary form and can be found in e.g. Gulliver’s Travels,
Book Three, according the Carter Kaplan (201): The dystopian form often portrays ‘future
states based on brutality, dictatorship or totalitarianism.’(Kaplan 201), and the way Swift
portrays the dictatorship of both the King and the Academy fits perfectly into Kaplan’s
description.
Kaplan further states that the dystopia can also concern itself with ‘the conflict between
common sense and ignorance’ (Kaplan 206). A dystopia therefore does not have to be
portrayed as a totalitarian system, as that of Nineteen Eighty Four, but can be found disguised
in what at first glance resembles a utopia: In Margaret Atwood’s view, the two extremes,
dystopia and utopia, are two sides of the same coin: a utopia holds a potential dystopia within
itself, as indeed the actual original, Thomas Moore’s Utopia, did. What is perfection for some
may be the opposite for others. For this double form, Atwood has coined the term ‘ustopia’,
combining the two words (Atwood In Other Worlds 66). ‘In this novel Atwood is especially
interested in asking where the boundaries lie between utopia and dystopia (Glover 50). ‘The
setting of the novel, therefore, highlights the darker side of utopia and the ambiguous nature
of dystopia’ (Glover 54).
‘What is immutable? What endures? What is essential about being human? Where does the
essential core of identity lie? Does it derive from nature or nurture, from our environment or
genetics?’ (Montello 8).
These are some of the questions that authors of science fiction have tried to answer. These
questions have been attacked and addressed through different literary modes and fictional
tales that deal with them count amongst others the utopia, the dystopia, satire and Menippean
satire. All of these literary forms are represented in Oryx and Crake and the following
analysis will examine how Atwood uses all of them and why, all the while drawing parallels
to the four above mentioned classic novels.
Atwood opens Oryx and Crake with two epigraphs, one of which is from Gulliver’s Travels,
stating that her desire was to inform rather than amuse the reader. However, Oryx and Crake
does both, even if the future depicted is bleak and not very comforting. ‘… Her fiction has
always been informative but not dogmatic and has managed to combine harmoniously the
“desire to inform” and the “desire to amuse”, to use Swiftian terms’ (Couturier-Storey 1). As
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stated previously, Margaret Atwood alludes to a variety of different classic novels in Oryx
and Crake linking it with canonized science fiction novels on the same topic: a concern with
ethically uncontrolled technological and scientific advancements.
Atwood draws on at least the four novels mentioned in the introductory part of this paper, and
by doing so she creates a platform of understanding for the reader from which to interpret the
novel. As Couturier-Storey and Storey note in their article Ecological disaster, literature and
eternal vigilance in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the introductory epigrams, one from
Gulliver’s Travels, invite the reader ‘from the very beginning of the novel, to read Oryx and
Crake as an allegory…’ (1). So even if Atwood has set her novel in a very familiar and
recognizable scenery in a very near future, the novel is not meant to be literary realism.
Beneath the identifiable surface the novel hides a structure that draws on allegory and
Menippean satire, and which builds on recognizable references from canonized fiction.
Another literary form often applied in cautionary tales is the satire. Satire is, according to
Northrop Frye, a flexible form combining fantasy and morality, the blend of which may vary
highly, the literary fairy tale at the extreme end of fantasy (310). ‘Satire locates conceptual
confusion and intellectual mythology in the present and provides diagnosis’, according to
Kaplan (200).
And like the work of her renowned predecessor, Atwood’s books are unmistakably satirical, a
tone found everywhere in the Oryx and Crake series, from her world’s transparently
illegitimate and utterly irrational institutions to her scientists’ cartoonishly irresponsible
experiments. Crake’s totalizing genetic determinism (and accompanying quick-fix solution) is
just another part of the joke’ (Canavan 152).
4. Analysis of Oryx and Crake
4.1 The narration
The novel is a third person narrative, seen through the eyes and the mind of Snowman, who
is, it seems, the last surviving human being. The story unfolds on two levels which appear in a
miscellaneous order in what Eleonora Rao observes is ’two dimensions of time (a before and
after [the red plague])’ (108) ; on the first level, framing the novel, is Snowman’s story
narrated always in the present tense. This story takes place in the novel’s real time and what
will happen next is unknown both to the reader and the narrator. The timespan of Snowman’s
story is approximately a week from the first encounter to the end of the novel, where he meets
other surviving humans.
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On the second level is Snowman’s memory of his time as Jimmy, recounted in the past tense.
Even though Jimmy’s life is essentially narrated chronologically, we are only told what seems
to be relevant to Snowman’s understanding of the defining event of the novel: a pandemic
referred to as “The Red Plague” (O&C 379). This plague has killed the entire human
population on earth, Jimmy being the exception, bestowed and burdened with the task of
taking care of a new human race: the Crakers. So Snowman muses over his former life as
Jimmy, trying to make sense of the events leading up to the Red Plague. By recapping his life
before the plague, he tries to sum up and understand his own role in the event, at the same
time lamenting the loss of his life’s love, Oryx. This account is entirely based on Snowman’s
memory, and he therefore becomes the all-knowing narrator, even if he never fully grasps the
past events, not even in retrospect.
‘As a liminal figure [Snowman] is in a state of suspended time; when the novel opens and
ends it is “zero hour” (Rao 110). Zero hour signifies both the end of civilization and a return
to pre-historic times when Homo sapiens lived on the savannah: ‘The reference to time, and
its loss, coming immediately after such images of desolation, suggests the end of civilization’
(Glover 56). But zero hour also indicates the starting point of something new: When
Snowman discovers in the end of the novel that he is not the only surviving human being
(O&C 431-2) his confrontation with them can either result in his killing them to protect the
Crakers, his befriending the other human beings or him starting a new life with them. Atwood
does not reveal which of these paths Snowman chooses, leaving the end open for the reader’s
own conclusion.
4.2 The world of Oryx and Crake
The world of Oryx and Crake is not described explicitly, what information we receive are
fragments collected from Snowman’s memories of Jimmy’s life and even this information is
based on what Jimmy has seen on TV or found on the internet. Since both of these mass
media were most likely censured we are given only the most basic details about the world in
which they live.
Then, what we do know is that countries still exist: Jimmy and Crake talk about the Paradice
project, and Crake explains how the BlissPluss Pill will be ‘the must-have pill, in every
country, in every society in the world’ (O&C 348); and cities are mentioned when the plague
breaks out: ‘Taiwan, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia, Bombay, Paris, Berlin. The pleeblands west of
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Chicago’ (O&C 379), and that governments no longer play any important part in these
countries:
Or they’d watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current-affairs show about world
political leaders. Crake said that with digital genalteration you couldn’t tell
whether any of these generals and whatnot existed any more, and if they did,
whether they actually said what you’d heard. Anyway they were toppled and
replaced with such rapidity that it hardly mattered (O&C 94).
The world is run by big Compounds, multi-billion international corporations whivh are
mainly producing and selling products that enhance physical beauty, prolong life and
eliminate signs of aging. In charge of inventing new products are various scientists, among
them both Jimmy’s father and Crake’s deceased father. These scientists and their families live
within massive private compounds and as Eleonora Rao notes, ‘in Oryx and Crake to be “at
home” implies living within a policed enclosure’ (109). Since both their fathers are highly
skilled scientist, Jimmy and Crake grow up within these secure walls. The security is very
tight, growing even tighter within Jimmy’s lifetime, and this creates a culture of its own.
Society in general is as a consequence divided into two sectors: the elite consisting of skilled
scientists who live in closed and highly guarded compounds run by international concerns,
and the rest of the world, where people live in cities outside the various compounds, called the
pleeblands (O&C 31) and who form the major part of the consumer portion of society.
Jimmy spends his entire pre-plague life within the protective walls of various compounds:
while his son was a small child Jimmy’s father worked for OrganInc Farms, and then he was
headhunted for the HelthWyzer Compound. After graduation from university Jimmy works
for AnooYoo and after that Crake hires him to work for ReJoovenEssense, which is the
biggest and richest of all the Compounds (O&C 264). Jimmy thus never leaves the secure
world of the Compounds. Even his four measly years at Martha Graham were within a
Compound albeit an underprivileged one.
In The Future of Life Edward O. Wilson offers his vision of the future in 2100, and in regard
to living standards he writes:
People in 2100 are better fed and educated than in 2000, but the great majority is
in the developing world and remains poor even by the standards of
industrialized countries a century before. On a planet destined to remain
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overpopulated well into the twenty-second century, elite rich countries remain in
conflict with resentful poor countries (76).
The parallel to the world of Oryx and Crake is obvious. One man’s utopia is another man’s
dystopia, and where the scientists live in a utopian Compound the rest of the world lives in
what seems to be a dystopia: In stark contrast to the glamorous and secure world of the
Compounds is the Pleeblands, the world outside the Compound walls. ‘The pleeblands was
said to have become ultra-hazardous for those who didn’t know their way around out there,
and the CorpSeCorps security at the Compound gates was tighter than ever’ (O&C 295). As a
result many of the scientist’s children grow up, like Jimmy, without ever leaving the
Compounds. ‘Jimmy had never been to the city. He’d only seen it on TV. … Compound
people didn’t go to the cities unless they had to, and then never alone’ (O&C 31).
‘Accepted wisdom in the Compounds said that nothing of interest went on in the pleeblands,
apart from buying and selling: there was no life of the mind’ (O&C 231). This means that in
the world of Oryx and Crake there are only upper and the lower classes: there is nothing in
between which means that the middleclass has been eliminated. America has always been
proud of being a classless society, consisting more or less only of a middleclass, but during
the last decades the group of poor people in the US has grown in size and the wealthy have
increased their wealth. The process towards the extreme social structure of Oryx and Crake
has thus already been initiated.
After Crake is hired by ReJoovenEssense he is given free passes to enter the pleeblands, a
license only granted few inhabitants in the Compunds (O&C 337). Crake takes Jimmy on his
first visit to the pleeblands, and during their visit they are heavily protected, driving in a car
with an armed driver and protected by body guards (O&C 338). The pleeblands are very
different from the secure society within the Compounds, but ‘the pleebland inhabitants didn’t
look like the mental deficients the Compounders were fond of depicting, or most of them
didn’t’ (O&C 339). Jimmy is especially struck by the ‘asymmetries, deformities: the faces
were a far cry from the regularity of the Compounds. There were even bad teeth’ (O&C 339).
The pleeblands are also more polluted; more crowded and more ethnically varied (O&C 3389).
The contrast between the secure Compounds and the unsafe pleeblands alludes to the divided
world of Brave New World. The world depicted in that novel, the division between Utopia
and the rest of the world; the privileged and the savages is a clear parallel in Oryx and Crake.
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Like the Compounders and the Laputans from Gulliver’s Travels the inhabitants of Utopia
need a permission granted from the highest Director to travel to the Reservation (Huxley 82)
The reservation is secured by electrical fences making the security between Utopia and the
reservations very high, just as it is in Oryx and Crake, underlining the division between the
two societies, making transition between the two almost impossible (Huxley 87).
Huxley undoubtedly drew his inspiration from the real-world division between the Western
world and the third-world countries, a division that has only grown since his time and which
Atwood unquestionably also had in mind when writing Oryx and Crake.
Jimmy’s mother complains that this level of security and constant surveillance makes her feel
like a prisoner (O&C 60) and as well as complaining that their phones and emails are under
observation, but Jimmy’s father writes it off as paranoia (O&C 61).
The Compounds mimic American society in the 1950s, alluding to the childhood memories of
the employees within the Compound in order to produce a feeling of security and homeliness,
but again Jimmy’s mother is skeptical and calls it fake: ‘Jimmy’s mother said it was all
artificial, it was just a theme park and you could never bring the old ways back’ (O&C 31).
Holding on to the past in this manner reflects the general longing to hold on to status quo and
not accept change and face real life. Jimmy’s father, though, feels at home within the
Compounds and explains to Jimmy that they are all much more secure within the wall rather
than on the outside. ‘Outside the OrganInc walls and gates and searchlights, things were
unpredictable’ (O&C 31), Jimmy’s father explains. He compares the idea of the compounds to
ancient use of castles: ‘Castles were for keeping you and your buddies nice and safe inside,
and for keeping everybody else outside’ (O&C 32). This explanation makes the child ask: “So
are we kings and dukes? asked Jimmy. “Oh absolutely, said his father, laughing” (O&C 32),
and no doubt they are. As Glover notes: ‘scientists have become placed in a position of
privilege, insulated from the realities of normal life’ (53). This artificial and utopian culture
with its instructed alienation towards the outside world eliminates the possible drive for social
justice on behalf of those who have less. This point is the exact same as George Orwell makes
in Nineteen Eighty Four when he introduces one of the party slogans in: ‘Ignorance is
Strength’ (6).
The high schools teach Life-Skill classes to prepare the compound children for adult life, but
none of the students takes what they are taught seriously. Banking, book-keeping, using a
microwave, filing applications for a job, ‘family hereditary research’, ‘negotiating your own
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marriage-and-divorce contracts’, use of condoms, and ‘wise genetic matchmaking’ were on
the curriculum in the Life-Skill classes (O&C 47).
But even if the kids did pay attention the numbers revealed in the Corps’ demographic reports
show that there is no positive chance for survival (O&C 347). So the Life-Skill lessons,
however useless they are, are truly a waste of time, the modern equivalent of the American
duck-and-cover school program from the early 1950s. Only this time the children are not
aware of the danger they are in.
The world is run by the Compounds, which are in need of skilled scientist to develop new
products. Working within the natural sciences is therefore crucial for personal success: those
who have no skills within that field have no future. As a result a lot of the boys at Jimmy’s
age are drug addicts or alcoholics (O&C 66).
The action of Oryx and Crake revolves around three protagonists: Jimmy, who becomes
Snowman, Crake, who was once Glenn, and Oryx, whose real name is never mentioned. Oryx
plays an important part in Jimmy’s life and a larger portion of the novel is dedicated to her
Asian past as a child prostitute. Since Oryx plays no part in the aspects of Oryx and Crake
which are the foci of this paper, Oryx will only be included peripherally in the analysis of the
novel.
As mentioned the story is told through Snowman’s recounts of Jimmy’s life which makes
Jimmy/Snowman the protagonist of the novel.
4.3 Jimmy
Jimmy’s character is the counterweight to Crake who is a scientist with a very methodical,
cynical and unemotional approach to life. Jimmy, on the other hand, is controlled by his
emptions and his physical needs. His approach to life involves an endless number of
compromises which makes his life very complicated.
Jimmy is an outsider in the world of his Compound: he has no sense for numbers and the
natural sciences and feels much more comfortable with words and literature. As a boy and a
young man Jimmy collected words, especially old and forgotten words, but now, as
Snowman, these words begin to disappear and he cannot seem to hold on to them anymore
(O&C 43). This general loss of words is a loss of identity, the identity he had when he was
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Jimmy and which he built his life on. ‘Hang on to the words, he tells himself. The odd words,
the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re
gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never
been’ (O&C 78). Jimmy collects words for his own amusement: he finds no other personal
satisfying outlet for them than seducing women (Rao 110).
That words have indeed lost their power and status is presented very visibly in the way
Atwood with cynicism places the works of William Shakespeare within Oryx and Crake.
Jimmy experiences Shakespeare for the first time on an internet show called At Home with
Anna K.: Anna reads a passage from Macbeth out loud while sitting on the toilet. Crake is
instantly bored, but Jimmy is enthralled (O&C 97), not by the toilet visit but by the words. He
encounters Shakespeare again at the Martha Graham Academy, this time set up as a theatre
play. Again, it is not without sarcasm that Atwood lets Jimmy remark that Anna K. did ‘a
more convincing job of Lady Macbeth while sitting in her toilet (O&C 219). At Martha
Graham, where the arts are supposed to be prominent and revered even Shakespeare is
reduced to ridiculous performances in small classes with low status (O&C 219).
Jimmy knows that words can carry more weight than is acknowledged at first encounter, and
so he looks for meaning in statements and names. Yet his attempts at finding a meaning
mostly fall short; simply because he is depreciated as a too curious child who seeks a deeper
meaning where there is none: when Crake e.g. explains that his father named him Glenn after
a famous pianist, Jimmy wants to know why:
“Then what was the point?” “Of what?” “Of you name. The two n’s.” “Jimmy, Jimmy”, said
Crake. “Not everything has a point” (O&C 81).
And when Jimmy wants to know what Oryx thought in the picture he showed her of her as a
child on the HottTotts site, she avoids further explanation by simply stating that she was not
thinking anything, that there is no further meaning to find in her eye, that Jimmy is searching
for something that is not there:
‘You think I was thinking, she said, Oh Jimmy! You always think everyone is thinking.
Maybe I wasn’t thinking anything’ (O&C 105).
After graduating from Martha Graham, Jimmy is hired to do ads for various beauty products
produced by AnooYoo, a minor Compound. This line of work is what a degree from Martha
Graham will get you: marketing. At AnooYoo Jimmy is isolated (O&C 292) and feels
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depressed with his life: ‘Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the
moment, it wasn’t him’ (O&C 296).
After being confronted by his mother’s execution by CorpSeCorps men, even words, sex and
alcohol cannot fill up the inner void he feels. His life has no meaning and he feels he has been
squandering it away, wasting his time: ‘Too many things were coming back to him, too much
of what he’d lost, or – sadder – had never had in the first place. All that wasted time and he
didn’t even know who’d wasted it … Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded’
(O&C 305; 307).
At that time, Crake approaches Jimmy with a job offer for a high profile job at
ReeJoovenEssense, the largest and richest of all the Compounds (O&C 349). And Jimmy is
relieved to see Crake again: ‘Let me in, said Crake, and Jimmy did, because right then Crake
was about the only person he wanted to see’ (O&C 336).
4.3.1 Jimmy’s father
Jimmy does not recall his father as clearly as he does his mother: he seems only to be a
presence without face or other recognizable features. ‘His father is a sort of pastiche’ (O&C
56) similar to a cartoon adult, remembered mostly as individual body parts. He remains
nameless throughout the novel and Snowman seems generally to relate to him with the
distancing “father”, rather than the more familiar “dad” or “daddy”.
As a child, Jimmy cut off some of his hair and burned it. Jimmy’s mother was not amused,
but his father laugheded when Jimmy explained that the whole thing had been an experiment
(O&C 18). As long as the burning of his hair is done in the name of science, it does not matter
to Jimmy’s father that his so could have injured himself or burned the house down.
Success is defined by how important you are to the big corporations and this importance is
measured by how much profit you can generate. Early on Jimmy’s father explains that there
are two kinds of people: numbers persons and words persons (O&C 28). Being successful is
most likely achieved if you are a numbers person. ‘Jimmy already knew that he himself was
not a numbers person’ (O&C 29). ‘There was never any standard; or there was one, but it was
so cloudy and immense that nobody could see it, especially not Jimmy. Nothing he could
achieve would ever be the right idea, or enough. By OrganInc’s math-and-chem-and-appliedbio yardstick he must have seen seemed dull and normal’ (O&C 57).
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The thing with which Snowman most associates his father, then, is the disappointment: his
father’s disappointment that Jimmy did not live up to his father’s expectations. Apart from not
being a numbers person, Jimmy was also not very practical, another disappointment to
Jimmy’s father: ‘His father was always giving him tools, trying to make him more practical.
In his father’s opinion Jimmy couldn’t screw in a light bulb’ (O&C 41); ‘… a gift that would
not be a gift but some tool or intelligence enhancing game or other hidden demand that he
measure up. But measure up to what?’ (O&C 56)
At OrganInc Farms, as in all of the other Compounds, there are a lot of numbers persons:
Jimmy’s father himself is one of them, moreover, he is one of the best within his field of
expertize, genography, where he had already showed great potential as a post-grad (O&C 25).
During Jimmy’s childhood, his father heads a very elaborate and prestigious project for
OrganInc Farms with the aim of creating a breed of pigs that can produce organs for humans.
When Jimmy is ten years old his father is head-hunted by another Compound, NooSkin for a
much higher position (O&C 59). ‘Jimmy’s father spent more and more time at work, but
talked about it less and less’ (O&C 62). During the time at NooSkin the arguments between
Jimmy’s parents really take off, and Jimmy’s mother finally ends their relationship abruptly
by taking off.
4.3.2 Jimmy’s mother, Sharon
Jimmy’s mother is a defining force in Jimmy’s life. She is the only parent whose name we are
told: ‘Sharon was Jimmy’s mother’ (O&C 28). Even if she never seems to be present, the
relationship between her and Jimmy is very central to Jimmy’s character. Jimmy has a very
clear picture of her in his mind, even after becoming Snowman: Sharon might have been
happy at a time in her life, but Snowman only recollects her as a depressed in an absent state
of mind (O&C 35). When thinking about her, Snowman doubts if she loved Jimmy, or rather
concludes that she must have, due to the natural maternal bond (O&C 69).
Their bond is certainly not very strong and heavily influenced by Sharon’s depressed state of
mind. On the occasions when she tries to bond with Jimmy she quickly becomes discouraged
and gives up (O&C 24). Jimmy turns to amusing her in an attempt to make her smile and
laugh (O&C 35-36), but as he grows older making her even more sad becomes an alternative
to cheering her up. The result often is that Jimmy himself becomes just as unhappy as her:
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‘He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at
these moments he scarcely knew which was which’ (O&C 37).
When Jimmy was still a child Dolores, their live-in Phillippina, arranged and celebrated his
birthday. (O&C 56) At that time Sharon was still working for OrganInc Farms as a
microbiologist collaborating with Jimmy’s father on the Pigoon project (O&C 33). But after
Jimmy’s mother stopped going to work, Dolores was sent away and the celebrations stopped.
Birthdays weren’t a happy occasion after that and make out yet another childhood trauma for
Jimmy.
Both parents seem to be indifferent about Jimmy, e. g. forgetting his birthdays and never
really caring enough to remember the following year (O&C 56). Both parents are too
occupied with either work or a moral hangover to notice Jimmy. ‘Leave Daddy alone, said his
mother. Daddy is thinking. That’s what they pay him for. He doesn’t have time for you right
now’ (O&C 22).
In his teens Jimmy makes fun of his parents while at school. Imitating the arguments of his
parents he names his characters Evil-Dad and Righteous-Mom giving himself an outlet for his
frustrations regarding their indifference towards him (O&C 68).
Sharon spends a lot of her time in remorse about the state of the world and her part in it and
the only outlet of her frustrations is yelling at Jimmy’s father, who still works for the
Compound doing what Sharon thinks is ethically challenging work.
When Jimmy’s parents were younger and both working, they had shared their ideals:
[Sharon:] ‘Don’t you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do?
Making life better for people – not just people with money. You used to be so … you had
ideals, then. “Sure,” said Jimmy’s father in a tired voice.” I’ve still got them. I just can’t
afford them anymore.”
As a consequence of them drifting apart Jimmy’s mother runs away when Jimmy is still in his
teens. All she leaves behind is a note (O&C 69).
As mentioned above, the wives of the scientist on Laputa are confined to the island and can
only leave with a special permission from the king, a permission that is very hard to obtain,
since only few of the women who have left Laputa have returned. Since the island floats in
the sky, leaving without permission is very difficult. This level of security is clearly reflected
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in the approach to safety in the different compounds in Oryx and Crake: When Jimmy’s
mother elopes she must have carefully planned the escape for months.
Much is done to prevent industrial leaks at the Compound, and since Sharon has had access to
confidential information regarding projects under development, both Jimmy and his father are
being questioned thoroughly on their knowledge regarding her disappearance. ‘His father was
rattled, you could tell; he was scared… Then he’d been debriefed, elsewhere, for quite a long
time ‘(O&C 72).
‘His mother was just a mother, Jimmy told the CorpSeCorps man. She did what mothers did.
She smoked a lot’ (O&C 72) Jimmy tells them.
After his mother’s desertion, Jimmy is kept under surveillance by the CorpSeCorps men who
obviously hope that he may reveal her whereabouts. They keep visiting him even after Sharon
has ceased being a threat to them long after her knowledge has become outdated. They keep
hunting her down to eliminate her simply because she escaped the Compound and joined an
opposing protest organization.
Jimmy gets a glimpse of her through the media the year he graduates high school, protesting
the capitalistic products of the Compounds and what they entail: ‘There in the shouting
crowd, clutching a sign that read A Happicup Is A Crappi Cup, with a green bandana over her
nose and mouth, was – wasn’t it – his vanished mother’ (O&C 212).
Years later, when Jimmy is at AnooYoo, the CorpSeCorps men visit him again, this time to
show him the death of his mother: ‘Then came what looked like a routine execution. … Pan to
close-up: the woman was looking right at him right out of the frame: a blue-eyed look, direct,
defiant, patient, wounded. But no tears. Then the sound came suddenly up. Goodbye.
Remember Killer. I love you. Don’t let me down’ (O&C 303).
How not to let her down and what she expects of him, Jimmy does not know, just as he did
not know what was expected of him when he was a child.
4.3.3 Ramona, Jimmy’s stepmother
Jimmy’s father has an assistant, Ramona, whom he brought with him from OrganInc Farms.
Some time after Sharon vanishes, Jimmy’s father initiates a relationship with Ramona, who in
time becomes a part of the household.
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Jimmy likes her, but thinks she talks funny: ‘She wasn’t stupid, said Jimmy’s dad, she just
didn’t want to put her neuron power into long sentences. There were a lot of people like that
at OrganInc, and not all of them were women. It was because they were numbers people, not
word people, said Jimmy’s father’ (O&C 28).
Ramona tries to bond with Jimmy but although he seems to like her he repels her advances
(O&C 76): Jimmy misses his real mother (O&C 77), and he is a teenager with exploding
hormones who feels physically attracted to Ramona: ‘Sometimes she would watch DVD
movies with him, sitting beside him on the couch, making them a bowl of popcorn first,
pouring melted butter substitute onto it with greasy fingers she’d lick during the scary parts
while Jimmy tried not to look at her breasts’(O&C 76).
While Jimmy attends the HelthWyzer high school Jimmy’s father and Ramona are wed.
Jimmy pretends to be happy for them, but he ‘got as drunk as it took’ (O&C 206) to be able to
pretend. He feels that he is about to become excluded from his own family, replaced by a new
and better baby with all the right abilities in numbers. ‘Any minute now Ramona would be
planning a baby, a more satisfactory baby than Jimmy had ever been to anybody’ (O&C 206).
The wedding between Jimmy’s father and Ramona makes her officially his stepmother and
she plays the part with enthusiasm, it seems (O&C 206). Still Jimmy keeps rejecting her, and
as she ages he finds her increasingly pathetic. When he moves away she keeps inviting him
home for the holidays, but he does not want to go, severing the family ties himself (O&C
293).
Jimmy carts his pain around him from the loss of his mother for the remainder of the novel,
even if he tries to deny it to himself. Both her mental absence and her physical abandonment
have scarred him deeply: When he sees his mother among the demonstrators in the gen-mod
coffee wars his reaction is one of affection and resentment: ‘Love jolted through him, abrupt
and painful, followed by anger’ (O&C 212). Even after becoming Snowman the loss of his
mother haunts him: ‘In the small hot room he dreams; again, it’s his mother. No, he never
dreams about his mother, only about her absence’ (O&C 325).
All in all, Jimmy sees himself as the black sheep of his family: not a numbers person or very
practical, never measuring up to the unspoken standards of his parents and society. He suffers
from the loss of an absent mother and the lack of approval from his disappointed father. These
agonies become defining factors for Jimmy, miseries of which he never lets go.
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4.4 Crake (Glenn)
Jimmy first meets Crake, then Glenn (O&C 80), when he moves to the HelthWyzer
Compound with his mother and stepfather (O&C 80), whom he referres to as Uncle Pete.
Jimmy is ordered to show his new classmate around the high school (O&C 82) and so begins
their friendship, building slowly from there. Glenn’s parents have both been headhunted for
positions at the Compound (O&C 81).
Glenn’s father named Glenn after a famous Canadian musician: ‘Why did it have two n’s
instead of the usual spelling? “My dad liked music,” was Crake’s explanation, once Jimmy
got around to asking him about it, which had taken a while. “He named me after a dead
pianist, some boy genius with two n’s”’ (O&C 80).
The famous dead pianist is the Canadian Glenn Gould, a cultural icon with whom Crake
shares some characteristics: ‘Crake and Gould share more than a name: both are (like
Atwood) animal lovers and, in an interview in Maclean's in 2003 (Bethune), Atwood
surmised that Gould, like Crake, suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a variant of autism that
seems to be characteristic of many creative high achievers’ (Elliott 824).
Jimmy and Glenn play a lot of online games, one of which requires usernames picked from a
list of extinct animals. Glenn picks Crake, an Australian bird, and Jimmy picked Thickney,
another bird (O&C 93). After this “Glenn” vanishes and is replaced by Crake: ‘Snowman has
trouble thinking about Crake as Glenn, so thoroughly has Crake’s later persona blotted out his
earlier one … there was never any real Glenn, Glenn was only a disguise … He was always
just Crake, pure and simple’ (O&C81).
Crake is different from the other kids at Jimmy’s high school, not because of his physical
appearance, which is quite average (O&C 82), but because of his calm and cool composure.
‘Your friend is intellectually honorable, Jimmy’s mother would say. He doesn’t lie to himself’
(O&C 79). And maybe that is exactly what makes him different from his peers. This calmness
attracts respect not only from other students by from teachers as well (O&C 86). However, it
also makes people anxious: ‘Crake was very smart – even in the world of HelthWyzer High,
with its overstock of borderline geniuses and polymaths; he had no trouble floating at the top
of the list’ (O&C 87); ‘He exuded potential, but potential for what? Nobody knew and so
people were weary of him’ (O&C 86).
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According to Jimmy’s mother, Crake was always ‘more like an adult, [ …] in fact more adult
than a lot of adults. You could have an objective conversation with him, a conversation in
which events and hypotheses were followed through to their logical conclusion’ (O&C 80).
Despite constant acknowledgments, Crake stays calm and unimpressed, never gloating or
proud (O&C 207). Always composed, Crake ‘lives in a world of ideas,’ according to Oryx
(O&C 368).
Crake’s relationship with girls attracts Jimmy’s interest. This is one field where Crake seems
to have no successes (O&C 226). Jimmy himself is highly active in this field, and feels
superior to Crake only in this area. However, when Jimmy does eventually notice affectionate
emotions in Crake, it is towards the woman he himself has fallen in love with: Oryx. And
Crake loves Oryx, Jimmy does not doubt it (O&C 364; 368).
Physical display of emotions is barely described. Even when his mother dies, Crake appears
unaffected; simply describing her death to Jimmy as if it were an experiment he was
conducting (O&C 207-8). Crake’s mother seems to have been absent both physically and
mentally anyway: to an extent that Jimmy is not certain if she even remembered her own
son’s name (O&C 101).
4.4.1 Crake’s Father
Crake’s father was a top researcher within the HelthWyzer system (O&C 214).
Crake’s father has died prior to Crake moving to HelthWyzer with his mother and Uncle Pete.
Crake is never very informative about the subject, but when Jimmy’s mother is executed
Crake tells Jimmy about his father. Crake’s father was in a car accident in the pleeblands,
allegedly he had problems and killed himself, but Crake does not believe it. ‘He had his head
in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot’ (O&C 215)
which seemed to be his only mistake. Crake’s father found out that the Compound he was
working for was producing not only medication to cure illness, but it was also creating viruses
to secure a market for their medical products. But not only that: the viruses they created were
lingering, to secure a higher income. Crake’s father had shared this secret with his wife and
his best friend, Uncle Pete, in confidence not calculating with them turning against him. Crake
is not sure if they killed him or if it was the CorpSeCorps, but the fact remains that they knew
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and Crake’s father died, because he wanted to do the right thing and expose the misdeed
(O&C 248-9), much like Jimmy’s mother.
So like Jimmy, Crake loses his mother when the boys are still at high school. But Crake has
also lost his father before coming to HelthWyzer . Where Jimmy breaks under the emotional
strain of losing his absent mother and carries it with him throughout his life, Crake seems
indifferent. His approach is much more rational and detached even cynical. He is living with
the knowledge that his mother and Uncle Pete possibly killed his father over money and
prestige, but he does not seem to care.
Both Jimmy’s and Crake’s fathers respectively had ambitions when they were still young to
help the poor through their inventions and scientific discoveries. Jimmy’s father succumbs to
the promise of wealth and status and Crake’s father was killed when he tried to blow the
whistle on his company. Greed took over on both occasions.
When Uncle Pete dies, Crake shows as little affection as when his mother died: ‘Crake’s next
news was that Uncle Pete had died suddenly. Some virus … were you there? asked Jimmy. In
a manner of speaking, said Crake’ (O&C 297). After the plague has begun and Jimmy has
shot Crake, Jimmy tries to come to terms with what has occurred and why. In this process he
even questions whether Crake’s mother and Uncle Pete were part of Crake’s elaborate plan:
‘How long had he been planning this? Could it be that Uncle Pete, and possibly even Crake’s
own mother, had been trial runs? (O&C 400). Not only does it seem plausible, Crake’s
reactions to the two deaths, very observant as if conducting an experiment, indicate just that:
that they were test runs for a pandemic virus.
Experimenting and creating new diseases and new life is central in the science utopia of Oryx
and Crake. Everything is allowed and there seems to be no moral or ethical boundaries.
4.5 The animals
The spliced animals in Oryx and Crake are an obvious allusion to Dr. Moreau’s vivisection,
pairing two different animals to create something new. Unlike Dr. Moreau’s method, though,
the animals do not suffer the same physical pain that the beast men do on the island.
In the Atwood universe, after genetic modification has become a simple procedure, one
sideline project after the other appeared. The rakunks are such a hobby project, created by one
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of Jimmy’s father’s colleagues, who fashiones the new animal breed simply because he is able
to: ‘…create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guy doing it; it made you feel like God’
(O&C 57). Another more unfortunate pastime project is the snat, an animal that is part rat part
snake: ‘… rats with big green scaly tails and rattlesnake fangs’ (O&C263). The authorities
assert that all the snats have been killed, but Snowman is not sure about this when he walks
through the ruins of the post-human world (O&C 263).
Some projects, like the Pigoon project, are originally intended for the benefit of human kind.
The pigoons are designed to carry extra organs for harvest, consequently they are larger than
normal pigs (O&C 29). It is seen both as a cheaper alternative to other and much more
expensive ways: ‘The pigoon organs could be customized … It was much cheaper than
getting yourself cloned for spare parts - … - or keeping a for-harvest child or two stashed
away in some illegal baby orchard’ (O&C 27).
Since they can be customized to the individual recipient the pigoons carry human cells. The
thought of eating them is therefore initially revolting to people, and OrganInc Farms males a
promise that the animals will not be used for food. Gradually though, this reluctance to eat
these animals vanishes and the OrganInc Farm canteen serves increasingly more and more
pork (O&C 27).
This response pattern is repetitive in the world of Oryx and Crake: when Jimmy is introduced
to the ChickieNobs he is appalled and horror-struck. The animals lack physical resemblance
to real chickens, cultivated as single parts, breast and drums, rather than as an entire body.
Especially the lack of a head scares Jimmy (O&C 238). In the real world fake meat such as
this produced in vitro would be labeled ‘victimless meat (McHugh 183)’, meat that solves
both a food shortage problem and which is ‘more humane than conventional meat’ in that it
does not require any killing of the animal in the traditional sense (McHugh 187). But in the
world of Oryx and Crake where the ethical concern is ignored, ChickieNobs are simply
invented in order to make a higher profit with less manufacturing expenses.
The mere thought of eating ChickieNobs is disgusting to Jimmy: when eating at the dining
hall after visiting the ChickieNob laboratory, Jimmy does not want to eat any chicken (O&C
244). But before long, after they have been introduced to the market, ChickieNobs become a
natural part of Jimmy’s diet; he serves them to Amanda and her roommates (O&C 284); he
eats them while working late at AnooYoo (O&C 292); one of his lovers brings him
‘…Nubbins and fries, she knew what he liked…’(O&C 335); when Crake visits Jimmy at
AnooYoo, his apartment is ‘…knee-deep in … empty Nubbins containers…’(O&C 337). If
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Jimmy is not physically confronted with the atrocities of the production methods of his food
he forgets and they become irrelevant: Out of sight, out of mind.
Designing animals is not only used for medical purposes or for food products, but also for e.g.
security. The CorpSeCorps Corporation at one point commissions an animal from the
Watson-Crick Institute; to be used for a more reliable security system than an electronic
device from the and the result is the wolvog (O&C 241). They resemble family dogs in looks
and opening behavior, but are intelligent, ferocious and aggressive. They lure in their prey by
behaving friendly and welcoming, and once they are within range they attack (O&C 125-6).
When introducing this project to Jimmy, Crake states that they will not be able to escape
captivity since they will be kept within high security compounds. Jimmy, however, is worried
about an ethical barrier having been crossed and what the possible consequences might be
(O&C 242). After the outbreak of the Red Plague the wolvogs escape their habitats and roam
around killing other animals (O&C 125), a quite predictable outcome.
Another animal designed for a specific purpose is the bobkitten. It is designed both ‘to
eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent songbird population’ (O&C 193),
and to control the escaped glowing rabbits who had multiplied so dramatically that they have
become a pest (O&C 192). ‘Even in Snowman’s boyhood there were luminous green rabbits,
though they weren’t this big and they hadn’t yet slipped their cages and bred with the wild
population, and become a nuisance’ (O&C 110).
Why the luminous rabbits were developed in the first plave is not mentioned, but as they have
apparently existed at least since Jimmy’s childhood it is possibly a vanity project made,
simply because it was possible. This issue with released rabbits breeding out of control is not
an imagined scenario, but refers to a historical event. In 1859 several English born Tasmanian
farmers released imported, domesticated rabbits into the wild in order to populate the area
with game for hunting. The freed rabbits reproduced at such a rate that ‘by 1950 those initial
24 rabbits had become 600 million’ (Crisp 36).
As in the case of the real life rabbit pest, the humans in Oryx and Crake to solve the problem
by introducing a predator into the ecosystem of the rabbits. The bobkittens do fulfill their
purpose and put an end to the explosive spread of both feral cats and glowing rabbits, but they
end up becoming a pest in the pleeblands themselves: ‘small dogs went missing from
backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled’ (O&C 193).
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The wolvogs are intelligent and adaptable to a changing environment, as is the case with other
genetically designed animals. The pigoons are dangerous and smart and become a threat to
Jimmy. Once the most dangerous animal in the world, human beings represented by Jimmy,
are reduced to nothing more than an easy prey.
4.6 The universities
The two universities Jimmy and Crake attend are very different from each other, each
focusing on different branches within the university system as we know it today: where, as the
name implies, the Watson-Crick Institute is concerned with the natural sciences, the Martha
Graham Academy has its focus on the Humanities, or what is left of them. This division is
already sharply drawn within the university world as we know it today, but Atwood has taken
this separation a step further and physically divided the two faculties entirely. In the world of
Oryx and Crake this means a further segregation of the elite, the so-called numbers persons,
and the rest of the population, people who are either words persons, like Jimmy, or who
simply do not excel at the natural sciences or anything else.
Instead of the students applying for the universities, in Oryx and Crake the universities bid for
the graduating high school seniors at a student auction. The students who have high scores in
the natural science classes are most attractive and get auctioned off fastest. Being at the top of
his class Crake goes at a high price, sold off to the Watson-Crick Institute (O&C 203).
Jimmy, on the other hand, is, as has already been established, not a numbers person and is
therefore not interesting to any of the prestigious universities. He also suspects that his
mother’s status as an outlaw has reflected badly on him and strained his level of appeal to the
various universities (O&C 204, 214).
Having grown up in high-end compounds and being the son of a top scientist, Jimmy is
expected to be good at numbers and being good at words instead is equal to being a failure.
Had he been from the pleeblands he might have been successful, at least in Pleebland terms
(O&C 204), but being a numbers person or good at natural science is the key to success in the
world of Oryx and Crake.
‘Welcome to Martha Graham, son, said the president with a smile fake as a vitaminsupplement salesman’s’ (O&C 205) signifying the level to which the Humanities have fallen.
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Margaret Atwood chose to name these two universities after people who had a profound
impact on the 20th century in their respective and very different fields:
4.6.1 Watson and Crick
James D. Watson and Francis Crick collaborated on discovering and explaining the structure
of the DNA, the so-called Double Helix, which won them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine in 1962 (Judson 78). The two men came from different backgrounds, Crick from
chemistry and biology, and Watson had once studied ornithology. Both scientist were highly
ambitious and ‘shared a certain wanderlust, an indifference to boundaries’(Wright 131).
As it is with other great scientific discoveries, there was a competition to reach the goal first
and in the case of mapping the DNA string, Watson and Crick were up against the chemist
Linus Pauling. Where Watson in retrospect saw the Nobel Prize at the end of such a landmark
discovery, Crick remembers their drive for success differently: ‘My impression was that we
were just, you know, mad keen to solve the problem’ (Wright 131). This is the drive and
tunnel-vision that many non-scientists fear: do these experts even stop and consider the
consequences of their discovery?
Crake’s character carries several references to Watson and Crick:
The connection between Watson’s former ornithological studies and Glenn’s self-chosen
alias, Crake (O&C 93) does not seem coincidental, but builds a stronger bond between
Crake’s genius and the elitist position of the university: After Crake graduates, he is
headhunted by the largest Compound, ReJoovenEssense, and he is given carte blanche to
execute his Paradice project, no questions asked (O&C 357).
In the same way that both Crick and Watson were obdurate atheists (Judson 80), so also is
Crake a firm nonbeliever. The term ‘agnosticism’ was coined in 1869 by Thomas Huxley to
express his doubts and questioning stand towards religion (Gowan 166). Crake’s belief that
“God is a cluster of neurons” (O&C 186) is a clear paraphrase of Francis Crick’s statement:
‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and you ambitions, your sense of personal
identity are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their
associated molecules. As Lewis Caroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a
pack of neurons” (Crick 3).
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4.6.2The Watson-Crick Institute
In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley has Victor attend The University of Ingolstadt, which ‘was
renowned at the time as a center for science.’(Brian Aldiss quoted in Van der Laan 299) thus
placing him at the epicenter of scientific studies. In the same fashion, Atwood lets Crake
become a student at the Watson-Crick Institute, which, in the world of Oryx and Crake, is the
most prestigious university for the hard-sciences.
‘…the name of the campus becomes an ironic warning of how scientific knowledge can be
abused, as the Watson-Crick Institute is solely concerned with transforming and reshaping the
building blocks of life’ (Glover 53).
As mentioned previously, Atwood describes Oryx and Crake as partly a Menippean satire ´the
literary form that deals with intellectual obsession’. She elaborates by comparing it to
Gulliver’s Travels: ’The Laputa or floating island portion of Gulliver’s Travels is one of
these. So are the Watson-Crick Institute Chapters of Oryx and Crake’ (In Context 517). The
way Jimmy experiences the Watson-Crick Institute is therefore very similar to the experience
Gulliver has when visiting the Academy of Lagado: ‘Although I cannot say that I was illtreated in this island, yet I must confess I thought myself too much neglected, not without
some degree of contempt. For neither Prince nor people appear to be curious in any part of
knowledge, except mathematics and music, wherein I was far their inferior, and upon that
account very little regarded’ (Swift 217).
Gulliver does not enjoy his stay at Laputa, since he cannot communicate with its inhabitants
due to their superiority in intelligence, and like Gulliver, Jimmy feels unaccepted at WatsonCrick. Everything at the institute is at an intellectual level, and a very high one: ‘Jimmy was
becoming annoyed by Crake’s way of introducing him – “This is Jimmy, the neurotypical” –
but he knew better than to show it. Still, it seemed to be like calling him a Cro-Magnon or
something. Next step they’d be putting him in a cage, feeding him bananas, and poking him
with electroprods’ (O&C 239).
Jimmy tries to communicate with some of the female students, but since his main form of
communication with women was flirtation he was instantly rejected, and given ‘surprised
stares’ (O&C 239). They do not speak his language, so to say, and are not interested in what
he has to offer them. Like the Laputians they are not interested in anything other than their
own field.
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Where the students at the Martha Graham Academy, as will be explored further, seem to have
a relatively large amount of freedom, things are very strict at the Watson-Crick Institute.
under no kind of supervision. Here the students are expected to focus solely on their education
and experiments. ‘Pair-bonding at this stage is not encouraged, said Crake, sounding like a
guidebook. We’re supposed to be focusing on our work’ (O&C 243).
4.6.3 Martha Graham
According to Cartwright Edward O. Wilson ‘suggests that mankind is the “poetic species” in
that both science and art use metaphor and analogy to comprehend the world, science
focusing on the external world and art the realm of experience and self-consciousness’ (297).
Choosing Martha Graham as name-giver to the humanistic university, Margaret Atwood has
thus made a very conscious choice:
Martha Graham (1894 – 1991) was a 20th century dancer and choreographer whose impact on
modern dance has been credited with being fully at par with the impact Freud, Einstein and
Picasso had on their respective fields of expertise (Meglin 1). This makes her the creative and
artistic counterpart to Watson and Crick’s scientific accomplishments. Her field is entirely
physical, fully reliant on the body as a tool and not only “a vessel for the brain” – a term to
which one could crudely reduce the scientist’s use of the body. Working with the human body
as a medium for artistic expression means hard physical practice and living life to the fullest,
drawing on the experiences that the tragedies and joys of life bring:‘The instrument through
which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived: the human body. It
is the instrument by which all primaries of experience are made manifest. It holds in its
memory all matters of life and death and love’ (Russo 41).
Using the body as “an expressive instrument” (Janson 84), Graham collaborated both with
both famous fashion designers (Calvin Klein and Donna Karan amongst others), composers
(e.g. Samuel Barber and William Schuman), actor/director John Houseman (Janson 85), and
she taught her craft to several Hollywood actors, Kirk Douglas, Liza Minnelli and Madonna
amongst others (Janson 84).
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4.6.4 The Martha Graham Academy
Where Crake resembles the name givers of his university, Jimmy is the opposite of Martha
Graham.
Graham’s philosophy was that life is lived through your body.
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by
practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the
same…. Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the
paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so
great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete
frustration. There are daily small deaths (Russo 2).
Feeling your body and physically living your life is not what Jimmy does. Even though
Snowman reminisces that he once worked out and took care of his body (O&C 12), the
general impression he gives through his flashbacks is mostly that Jimmy spent his youth in
front of a computer, smoking weed (O&C 99). As he grew older he started drinking and
smoking (O&C337), and his physical exercise amounted to having sex with various women
(O&C 294).
In a world where social success is based on the individual capability to create a product that
will produce a direct economic return, the Humanities have been reduced to a mere trashcan
for those who do not possess such abilities. The institutes seem to be self-funded, and as a
result the Martha Graham Academy has become a self-funded institution, and since
humanistic achievements do not directly spawn the same amount of finances as the more
practically oriented natural science achievements do, the result is a rundown and neglected
university, which no one takes seriously, not even its own teachers or students.
Before visiting Crake at the Watson-Crick Institute, Jimmy has to hand in some assignments:
‘He could have bought them off the Net, of course – Martha Graham was notoriously lax
about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there – but he’d taken a position on
that. He’d write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed…’ (O&C 229).
Original content at the Martha Graham Academy is treated with irrelevance and it differs
extremely from the Watson-Crick Institute also in that respect, where original content or
projects will result in an economic cast-off for the investors. The students of Watson-Crick
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earn their academy a lot of money and in return their campus is incredibly luxuriant in every
way as opposed to the Martha Graham Academy. But the students are oblivious to the state of
luxury they are offered: ‘It’s food, said Crake indifferently when Jimmy enviously asks Crake
how the food is’ (O&C 236).
Unlike Watson and Crick, whose legacy has never faded, Martha Graham has, in the world of
Oryx and Crake, receded into oblivion and is remembered only as the name-giver of the
university and its mascot statue in front of the institute, both of which are ridiculed and treated
with disdain and disrespect: ‘The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old
dance goddess of the twentieth century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in her day.
There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building… Retro feminist
shit, was the general student opinion’ (O&C 218).
Regularly this statue is vandalized by the students, who though seem to defend it on the
simple grounds that their parents think of Martha Graham as a bad role model, based solely
on the statue, depicting a semi-nude Graham decapitating a man (O&C 218-19).
4.7 Beauty and aging
Beauty and aging are a very central aspects in the world in which Jimmy and Crake grow up
in. Crake does not seem to be affected by such superficial values, but Jimmy is a true product
of his environment. This becomes most apparent in his view on women.
Before Jimmy’s mother elopes and Ramona is still only Jimmy’s father’s assistant, Jimmy
does not notice the physical signs of her aging. He is still only a child and getting older is yet
just a theoretical concept to him. As he himself becomes older, though, and Ramona becomes
his stepmother, Jimmy starts noting her physical maturing:
‘Ramona’s push-up-bra breast tops were freckled from too much sun … and anyway he found
Ramona’s new matronly air repellent. She was getting little creases on either side of her
mouth, despite the collagen injections; her biological clock was ticking, as she was fond of
pointing out’ (O&C 205).
As Jimmy watches a visual recording of his lost mother’s execution, his first reaction is to
notice the signs of aging: ‘Jimmy was shocked by how old she’d become: her skin was lined,
her mouth withered (O&C 304).
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Amanda, Jimmy’s university girlfriend, is likewise also evaluated with basis in such
parameters and even if she is still young and physically fit her face shows minor signs of
aging, and Jimmy notices: ‘She had a very fine ass too, and the tits were real, but – and he’d
noticed this early – she was a little flinty around the eyes’ (O&C 286).
His own physique does not escape his criticism: ‘His hair was getting sparser around the
temples, despite the six-week AnooYoo follicle-regrowth course he’d done’ (O&C 296). In
the post-plague world, where mere survival should be Snowman’s main concern, he is still
focused on how he appears: ‘He looks down at his body with dismay: the grimy, but-bitten
skin, the salt-and-pepper tuffs of hair, the thickening yellow toenails’ (O&C 11).
Even months after the plague, when physical beauty, appearance and physical age have
ceased to be important Snowman’s vanity is still intact: ‘He can’t resist the mirrors in the
places he breaks into, he sneaks a peek at himself every chance he has. Increasingly it’s a
shock … he looks twenty years older than he is’ (O&C 271). Living near the physically
beautiful and perfect Crakers enhances this vanity, even though physical beauty is irrelevant
to them. ‘Compared to them he’s just too weird; they make him feel deformed’ (O&C 47-48).
One of Jimmy’s weaknesses is a constant insecurity, which results in need for validation from
people around him: ‘Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it
was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him’ (O&C 83). All the way
through his various school attendances, elementary, high school and university, Jimmy seeks
out the role of class clown, living off the cheers and laughter he receives in return (O&C 61;
68; 230). In high school Jimmy even stoops to rummaging through drawers and diaries: ‘Of
course it was his own name he’d be searching for, although he hadn’t always liked what he’d
found’ (O&C 270).
Jimmy’s narcissism is also very clear in his relationship to his various lovers. When still in his
teens, Jimmy experiences romantic love of the unrequited kind, and as he grows older love
becomes more and more equivalent with sex. After falling in love with Wakulla Price who
does not love him back, Jimmy goes from one girl to the next using them mainly for physical
pleasure (O&C 84). ‘You know I love you. You’re the only one. She isn’t the first woman
he’s ever said that to. He shouldn’t have used it so much earlier in his life, he shouldn’t have
treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women’ (O&C 132).
Jimmy only true love is Oryx; the aim of every girl he has had a relationship to prior of her
has been sex. To him sex is as important an aspect of his life as alcohol: it occupies, satisfies
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and pleases the body in a very direct way with no room for misinterpretation. Jimmy wallows
in self-pity and obsesses over his vanished mother and his incapability to measure up to his
father’s expectations.
‘After his indiscriminate adolescence he’d preferred sad women, delicate and breakable,
women who’d been messed up and who needed him … A grateful woman would go the extra
mile’ (O&C 115). Reflecting himself in these women and letting them love him physically
and emotionally becomes Jimmy’s narcissistic craving using his broken childhood and his
constant sadness as a ruse to lure them in. ‘Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks
Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went
without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it’ (O&C 82).
He’d discovered that he projected a form of melancholy attractive to a certain
kind of woman, the semi-artistic, wise-wounded kind in large supply at Martha
Graham. … They had a few scars of their own, they were working on healing.
At first Jimmy would rush to their aid… But soon the process would reverse,
and Jimmy would switch from bandager to bandagee. … “I’m a lost cause,” he
would tell them. “I’m emotionally dyslexic” (O&C 222-3).
These women eventually become tired of his lack of seriousness and his self-indulgence.
Jimmy tries to gain more respect and insists on being called Jim (O&C 196), but since no one
can take him seriously, not even himself, his name remaines Jimmy. He turns to older,
married women who seem to find his not-growing-up refreshing. Thus he does not need to
grow up or become more responsible (O&C 295): he simply changes his surroundings. ‘He no
longer thought of these women as girlfriends: now they were lovers. – married women; prove
they were still young, get even, wounded, lonely … He was merely a pastime for them, as
they were for him, though for them there was more at stake’ (O&C 294).
4.8 Life after the university
After graduating from Martha Graham Jimmy does not get a job (O&C 283), but has to rely
on his then-girlfriend, Amanda. Landing a job with a degree from Martha Graham was, it
seems, not easy, since the subjects taught there are as archaic and superfluous as ‘studying
Latin, or book-binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to
anything…’ (O&C 219). Amanda, herself a graduate from Martha Graham, is a sculpture
artist, whose trademark projects are the so-called vulture sculptures: arranging dead animal
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parts into big four letter words in an open field, leaving them to the vultures who transform
the words by picking the bones (O&C 287). Even though Amanda is a successful artist who
protests society, she is dependent on funding, and since the only wealthy people are the ones
who are in the medical business, she lives indirectly off the products she herself despises. Her
art would be inconceivable without killing animals and flying in helicopters to take pictures of
the decomposing sculptures, so even if she feels superior to Jimmy, she is not: When Jimmy
is finally offered work; she despises him for taking it, even if they need the money, since he
will be working for a pharmaceutical Compound, AnooYoo, which has apparently driven one
of Amanda’s friends to suicide (O&C 289-90): ‘Amanda wasn’t impressed; you’re going to
work where? was her comment’ (O&C 290).
Amanda lives with two unemployed male artistes who dislike Jimmy. Like Amanda, they
come from the Pleeblands and ‘considered themselves superior to the privileged, weakspined, degenerated offspring of the Compounds, such as Jimmy’ (O&C 284).
These artists are all hot air. They have a clear theory on why humanity is doomed, but have no
solution as to how it can be mended or at least how to control the damage already done.
Sitting in an ivory tower they condemn the society they live in while still making use of its
products, as Jimmy points out when they talk about how they dislike the products
manufactured by the huge corporations: ‘Like your computers? murmured Jimmy. The ones
you do your art on?’ (O&C 285)
4.9 Crake’s project
Crake graduates from Watson-Crick ahead of schedule and is hired by ReJoovenEssense
(O&C 296), the biggest Compound of them all (O&C 264). So impressive is Crake that he is
given carte blanche to work on a secret project of his own design (O&C 297). A lot of money
is invested in his project, and the product will be launched worldwide and is expected to earn
his company a huge profit (O&C 347-8).
Crake states that ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man (O&C 346)’ quoting Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Man, written shortly after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels (Atwood In Other
Worlds 209):
‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac’d on
this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much
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knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s side’ (Cartwright
103-4).
God created, according to Pope and the general understanding of his time, every living being
with a varying degree of perfection. Every being was created to fill in a certain station in the
world, with human beings at ‘a higher rung in the ladder of creation’ (Cartwright 103).
Animals were thus not created for man’s benefit, but ‘to connect the chain of being and fill his
world’ (Cartwright 103). Furthermore, according to Cartwright, ‘Pope draws upon notions
commonly encountered in eighteenth-century thought, such as the great chain of being, the
principles of plentitude, and the idea that this world was the best of all worlds’ (101). Since
the world in Oryx and Crake does not acknowledge this chain or the principles of plentitude
the result is that this world is not the best of all worlds to anyone. Crake’s quote therefore
refers to his conclusion that mankind is out of place when toying with the creation of new
animals and using them for his sole benefit. Studying mankind for Crake then becomes a
study in what to improve.
In studying mankind, Crake has not only establishes which psychological and hormonally
controlled mechanisms will lead human beings to their own doom, he has also exposes how
they will take the surrounding ecosystem with them:
‘Those were definitive times, said Crake (O&C 353)’ about the time when he and Jimmy start
playing the online game Extinctathon at the age of 14, the game in which Glenn becomes
Crake. The game presents the participants with information on an extinct animal species and it
is then the task of the player to guess the name of the specific animal. Crake excels at it have
made him realize how many animals have become extinct due to the actions of human kind.
In the face of an ongoing mass extinction event that shows no sign of slowing or
abetting, Crake’s intervention becomes the other side of the logic of the
Anthropocene, the proposed name for the geological epoch marked by the
largely unintended and mostly negative consequences of human civilization.
Here, a humanity that has become the dominant agent of extinction on the planet
accepts the mantle of global responsibility that has been thrust upon it—and
decides to finally stop the insanity by extincting itself (Canavan 151).
When watching the gen-mod coffee wars, Crake remarks that the Happicuppa people should
be killed because ‘… they’re nuking the cloud forests to plant this stuff.’ And when Jimmy
asks, if Crake is taking sides, he simply replies that ‘there aren’t any sides, as such.’ (O&C
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210) What Crake reacts against is the stupidity and greed of capitalism and consumerism that
makes human kind destroy its own eco system, making it impossible in the long run to
survive. As it is the case with the extinct animals and as many people fear is the case in the
real world today.
Another central online game the teenage boys play is Blood and Roses, a game where human
atrocities compete with human achievements (O&C 89-91). Each player represents a side and
the contestants then try to win by trading achievements for atrocities and vice versa. Each
achievement and atrocity has a value based on either trade value or numbers of persons killed
and the player who has gathered most achievements when the time was up has won. ‘That was
the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other
trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland’
(O&C 91).
Man does create beautiful and impressing things, but they do not outweigh the atrocities and
the mass murders that man afflicts on his peers. And the saddest realization is that no matter
which player wins the world is in ruins.
Where Jimmy is a romantic soul, rejoicing in the proof of human imagination, ‘Crake had no
very high opinion of human ingenuity, despite the large amount of it he himself possessed
‘(O&C 114), and so the human atrocities clearly outweigh the achievements, in Crake’s
opinion. ‘One cannot help but wonder, after playing Blood & Roses, if the human history that
has been wiped out by the apocalypse is actually worthy of being mourned at all’
(Canavan144).
Leeloo, the protagonist of Luc Besson’s movie The Fifth Element (1997) reaches this same
conclusion at the climax of the movie. Being the extraterrestrial that can save the planet earth
from destruction she hesitates, because she is not sure if humanity has deserved to survive.
When familiarizing herself with the planet and the history of human beings she learns about
the horrors and massacres committed towards fellow human beings. ‘What’s the use of saving
life when I see what you do with it?’
What convinces her in the end to save the earth is love: human love and what it entails.
In Oryx and Crake, however, there is no such love to save the human race. Selfish behavior
and physical love dominate the novel, and the only real love we see is Jimmy’s love for his
pet rakunk, Killer (O&C 58). And even if love had been a prominent and dominating part of
Crake’s life, he would not have attributed it vital importance: ‘Falling in love, although it
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resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced
delusional state, according to him’ (O&C 227). Without love there is no hope for humanity,
neither according to the statistics (O&C 347) nor according to the moral judgment.
The internet is one of the major pastimes of the boys: ‘Jimmy and Crake essentially spend
their formative years stoned, sitting in front of computers exploring three major subjects: sex,
political dissidence, and video games’ (Couturier-Storey 9).
When they weren’t playing games they’d surf the net…. They’d watched open
heart surgery in live time, or else the Noodie News…or they’d watch animal
snuff sites (93)… or they’d watch hedsoff.com (94)… Shortcircut.com,
brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best (95)…There was an
assisted-suicide site too – nitee-nite.com it was called (95) …Or they’d watch
the Queek Geek Show (97) …Or they’d watch porn shows. There were a lot of
those. (97)… Tart of the Day, Super swallowers (102-103).
The content of the pages they watch are taken to an extreme, since the demands of the viewers
are becoming more and more extreme. And Jimmy himself has all the symptoms: ‘There was
a staged media event [in the gen-mod coffee wars], boring because there was no violence …’
(O&C 211).
However, Jimmy does not remain as unaffected as Crake: Snowman remembers with dismay
how Crake used to find the assisted suicides that the boys watched online in their teens
amusing. To Crake the logic was simple: ‘it showed flair to know when you’d had enough’
(O&C 96). Suicide, then, is not the easy way out, but simply a sign of acknowledgment of the
impending doom.
And if the doomed do not realize themselves that they were condemned, it is perfectly
acceptable to assist them: ‘… Crake said once, would you kill someone you loved to spare
them pain? …’ (O&C 375).
When Jimmy visits Crake at Watson-Crick, he learns that Crake has recurring nightmares
which he does not remember the following day. Crake screams in his sleep, dreaming no
doubt about the future the world is headed for (O&C 255), since Snowman in retrospect
realizes how important these nightly reactions are. According to friends, James Watson ‘when
doing science at his best, deployed a kind of intuitive brilliance … “Jim dreams his science”’
(Judson 79), and the link to Crake’s nightmares about the future is noticeable. It is in his
dreams that Crake envisions the future of human kind.
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What must have set Crake off, then, on his mission to repopulate the world with a new type of
human beings is the realization that sooner or later we will die by our own hand. If he were to
succeed in destroying human kind before time he might be able to do some damage control in
regards to the remaining animal species and plant life. His dreams and his realization that
human kind is exterminating all other life on the planet at a fast pace, and his condemnation
of the violent and bloody history of the human species sum up why Crake decides to save the
world and the way society is constructed. His alienation of the mind and entire focus on the
physical body make it possible for him to execute his vision. The drive for physical beauty
and eternal youth destroys humanity; a refusal to accept change and a longing to maintain the
status quo.
In order for the plan to work effectively he needs to eliminate as many people as possible:
‘Let’s suppose for the sake of argument, said crake one evening, that civilization as we know
it gets destroyed. … Once flattened it could never be rebuild. … All it takes, said crake, is the
elimination of one generation of anything. Break the link between one generation and the
next and it’s game over forever’ (O&C 261-2).
‘Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say… I
listened, thought Jimmy, but I didn’t hear’ (O&C 398).
Jayne Glover concludes that society is endowed with the type of scientist it deserves: ‘Indeed,
in this novel it is in many ways the environment in which the scientist Crake lives that
triggers his desire to create a group of genetically modified people in a postmodern remaking
of the Frankenstein story’ (51-2). Crake is simply nothing more than a product of his own
environment.
4.9.1 The concept of the Paradice project
Working with what he claims is immortality; the so-called Paradice project is Crake’s life’s
work (O&C 355-6). Since the competition is extremely hard, the project is top secret. Not
even the investors are fully aware of all the details of the project – Crake is allegedly afraid
that they will boast about it and thus reveal the project to their rivals (O&C 357). All the
information they are given is that the project will enable people to design their own children
in any way they themselves see fit.
The project has two central stages: the BlissPluss Pill and the Children of Crake.
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Having studied the history of mankind, most likely through the online games he played as a
teenager, Crake designs The BlissPluss Pill to eliminate the problems that humanity is faced
with: war, misplaced sexual energy, contagious diseases, and overpopulation (O&C 345).
What the pill is intended to do is prolong youth, protect from sexually transmitted diseases,
provide libido, all at the same time (O&C 346). All of these effects are exactly what the
population wants and needless to say the pill becomes a massive success.
What Crake does not reveal to the public is that, since his project also depends on a break in
the population growth the Pill also includes an instantaneous sterilizing effect on both sexes
(O&C 347). And, we find out in the end, death.
According to Edward O. Wilson’s proposed vision of the future: ‘No matter how
sophisticated our science and technology, advanced our culture, or powerful our robotic
auxiliaries, Homo sapiens remains in 2100 a relatively unchanged biological species. Therein
lies our strength, and our weakness’ (Wilson 76).
4.9.2 Crake’s aesthetics
The the new breed of human beings Crake has thought up is endowed with a lot of features
that will guarantee their survival in a drastically changed climate drawing on various features
from different kinds of animals:
They give off an odor of citrus, a built in repellent to ward off mosquitoes and other insects
(O&C 117), they grow rapidly, reaching maturity at the age of seven, thus not wasting too
much time reaching a reproductive age (O&C 356). They are programmed to die when they
reach the age of thirty, eliminating old age. And since they are not familiar with the concept
of death they do not fear it. In Crake’s logic this gives the Crakers the feeling of immortality,
allowing them to live in the moment rather than dreading the future. Their immune system is
highly advanced, reducing the dangers of succumbing to contagious diseases (O&C 357),
their skin is UV-resistant (O&C 358) in order to survive the rays from the sun, they are able
to digest their own excrement (O&C 188), thus solving the food shortage problem that the
human race have been faced with time and time again.
In Gulliver’s Travels, one of the projecters Gulliver visits at the Academy of Lagado works
on a project ‘to reduce human excrement to its original food…’ (Swift 224).
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Even though Crake gives Jimmy a reasonable and meaningful account of why he has chosen
to implement in the Crakers the ability to re-digest their food, Jimmy remarks ‘However you
look at it, he’d said, what it boiled down to was eating you own shit’. Crake’s reply was
simply that ‘any objections to the process were purely aesthetic’, seeing the world purely from
a practical point of view. ‘That was the point, Jimmy had said. Crake had said that if so it was
a bad one’ (O&C 188).
What have been eliminated in the process are the destructive features that have caused human
kind so many problems. Gone is now racism, hierarchy, territorialism, families, marriages and
divorces (O&C 358-9).
Apart from these very practical features, Crake also eliminates beards, being irritated by
shaving himself (O&C 9). He has also given them his own green eyes, for the sole reason of
aesthetics (O&C 362). Both men and women are incredibly good looking: ‘They look like
retouched fashion photos, or ads for a high-priced workout program’ (O&C 115).
Two of Frankenstein’s most fatal mistakes when bringing his creation to life were a) to reject
the monster; and b) to create it without the participation of a woman (Cartwright 146).
Eliminating the female aspect of creating life is simply too unnatural.
Blinded by his ambition and driven by his goal, Victor Frankenstein instantly regretted his
project after seeing the monstrous result, but Crake is not the mad scientist, doing his
experiments with full control of his senses and with a clear objective. Everything is fully
orchestrated and deliberate, callously calculated. Crake is fully aware of what he is doing and
even takes Frankenstein’s project to its full potential ‘Frankenstein even wanted to create “a
new species” (Frankenstein, p. 73)’(Van der Laan 300) .
Unlike Victor Frankenstein, Crake takes full responsibility for his creations and he even
engages Oryx to take care of the children. In addition to this Snowman names her the mother
of all animals, when inventing a mythology for the Crakers, deifying her and connecting her
with the female Crakers (O&C 110). The experiment to replace humankind with a new and
more adaptable version is also not done in secrecy or solitude, but done with the full
knowledge of his coworkers and, to some extent, his employers.
Despite its horrible physical exterior and his extreme emotional and physical strength, Shelley
make the creation more human and lovable than its creator, Victor Frankenstein, whose lack
of commitment and cowardice has dire consequences (Stripling 21). In Oryx and Crake,
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however, neither scientist nor creations are particularly negatively described. The real monster
of the novel is mankind.
4.9.3 Inventing a mythology for the Crakers
There were aspects that Crake could not eliminate from the human embryos that created the
platform for the creation of the Crakers (O&C 356). Dreaming and singing are innate and
cannot be removed from the human core. Such, it seems, is also the case with narration and
the need to create a mythos (O&C 411). A deep felt need of knowledge about origins is
neither erased entirely, and even though Crake claims that such a need has been ‘edited out’ in
the Crakers, Oryx tells him, that it has not: the Crakers have asked who made them (O&C
366).
The Crakers are crated entirely in the laboratory though they themselves will never know,
having lived inside an artificially created habitat with one-way mirrors (O&C 355). Apart
from Snowman, they have only ever met Oryx, who has taught them botany and zoology in
order for them to have a chance of survival in a real environment. Oryx presented herself to
the Crakes naked in order not to appear too distinctive from them for the Crakers to reject her
(O&C 362-3). They know that they were made by Crake, but apart from the name of their
creator they have no knowledge of him (O&C 366).
Being an ex-advertisement writer, Jimmy has always been good at lying, and answering the
questions of various kinds is not challenging enough to outweigh neither his boredom nor his
loneliness. The Crakers’ naivety (O&C 407) presents Snowman with the prospect of
inventing the most fantastical explanations, but although he is annoyed with their simplicity
he cannot bring himself to take advantage of their innocence. Instead he keeps his stories
consistent (O&C 110) and performs his tales as they expect them of him, as he does on pages
118-9 when they ask him to tell them about their genesis.
In his construction of the Crakers, Crake tried to remove the part of the brain that invents
deities, but found that removing too much created either zombies or psychopaths (O&C 186).
As the Crakers become more and more settled into their new environment and into the
freedom that has followed from this move, they are not satisfied with simple stories, they
want a mythology, a creed to follow. And Snowman creates one for them (O&C 120), partly
in spite of Crake, who hated all kinds of deifications: ‘The Crake they’re praising is his
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fabrication not unmixed with spite: Crake was against the notion of God, or of gods of any
kind and would be disgusted by the spectacle of his own gradual deification’ (O&C 119).
And for his own amusement, Snowman makes the dogma as imaginative as possible, to
punish Crake posthumously by making it as anti-scientific as possible: ‘Crake was never born,
says Snowman. He came down out of the sky, like thunder … maybe he’ll endow Crake with
horns and wings of fire, and allow him a tail for good measure’ (O&C 120-1).
‘What’s his life worth anyway, and who cares?’ (O&C 125); a question Snowman asks
himself more than once throughout his narration. His life does not make sense without anyone
to reinforce it, without any human being he can mirror himself in to know what he himself is
worth and what his purpose in life is: ‘But he doesn’t know which it is, bigger or smaller,
because there’s nobody to measure himself by. He’s lost in the fog. No benchmarks’ (O&C
279).
Snowman feels sorry for himself, being reduced to a prophet for an old friend who deceived
him, creating a dogma for the Crakers, enabling them to realize their adoration of both Crake
and Oryx. As was the case before the plague, Snowman craves a narcissistic
acknowledgement from his surroundings. The simple Crakers are not able to satisfy this need,
and the result is that Snowman does not know how to feel about himself. He is envious of
Crake and Oryx who receive all of the Crakers’ affection and adoration (O&C 191). However,
Snowman does not see that he himself has become an important part of the Craker
mythology:
Crake envisioned Jimmy taking care of the Crakers, but instead he has become a prophet,
inventing and narrating the mythology that the Crakers are requesting of him (O&C 412). As
he presents himself to them he chooses to tell them that he has ‘come in the place of Oryx and
Crake’ (O&C 407), thus already writing himself into their not yet created mythos from the
beginning. So self-doubting is Snowman that he cannot see his own importance without
physical evidence, and it does not become apparent to him until he returns from his journey to
find the Children of Crake praising him in effigy. He cannot connect with them in any other
way than through his stories, and as they cannot provide him with mental stimulation he
writes them off entirely: ‘He feels excluded… Oh Snowman, how may we be of help to you?
... Forget it, he would say. There’s no way they can help him, not really’ (O&C 123).
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4.10 Snowman
Completely superfluous and without consequence in the world before the plague, Jimmy – as
Snowman – fulfills an important duty which Crake himself never could: he possesses enough
empathy to be able to help the Crakers find their place in the world. Crake himself admits to
not having enough patience to raise his “children” himself, and his scientists would do no
better (O&C 376). The only thing they are good at is envisioning the project and creating the
physical life. Crake never engages with the Crakers, employing Oryx to teach them about
their nature and their surroundings and he forces Jimmy to take care of them after his own
death. Jimmy promises both Crake and Oryx to take care of the Crakers (O&C 378), and even
if he could have easily left them to die in the Paradice dome, Snowman has enough ethical
sense not to abandon his responsibility (O&C 408).
The moment where Jimmy introduces himself to the Crakers is the moment he ceases to be
Jimmy and becomes Snowman (O&C 406). Consequently this moment becomes a significant
moment in the novel, the point of no return for both Jimmy and the Crakers. By renaming
himself he hopes he will forget the past and be able to live in the moment, cutting off the guilt
he feels when remembering what has happened (O&C 407).
But changing his name does not make Snowman forget, and he is left with his memories and a
terrible sense of responsibility for what has happened. Being best friends with the creator of
the Crakers, Jimmy was involved in the final steps of what led to the plague, and Snowman
now tries to live with the burden of knowledge, trying to make up by guiding the Crakers into
the world.
Jimmy choses the name Snowman in spite of Crake’s rule ‘that no names could be chosen for
which a physical equivalent … could not be demonstrated’ (O&C 8). The initial explanation
Snowman gives of what his new name represents is that it signifies the legendary Abominable
Snowman:
‘The Abominable Snowman – existing and not existing, flickering at the edge of blizzards,
apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumors and through its
backward-pointing footprints’ (O&C 8). However, as he follows the path into the heart of
darkness, back into Jimmy’s past Snowman himself questions the real meaning of his adopted
alias. The frightening, strong and legendary quality he had hoped to obtain by becoming
Snowman may have been all a lie he has told himself:
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‘Maybe he’s not the Abominable Snowman after all. Maybe he’s the other kind of snowman,
the grinning dope … maybe that’s the real him, the last Homo sapiens – a white illusion of a
man, here today, gone tomorrow’ (O&C 263). As Couturier-Storey notes: ‘allegorically
speaking, it is the reader who will determine if Snowman will melt or not, if humanity will
survive or not. By using snow as a tool for her message, Atwood further reinforces the sense
of emergence’ (13).
Snowman is the last surviving human being just as Lionel in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man:
In the early 18 hundreds the story of the Last Man was very popular and also Mary Shelley
made her contribution, simply titled The Last Man, published in 1826. In Shelley’s novel,
humankind is destroyed by the Plague and only one man, Lionel Verney, survives. The
devastation of humanity does not occur over night, but happens gradually. The Plague is the
main culprit, but also the climate changes have their influence on the destruction of mankind.
The deaths are relatively fast and painless, but leave in the survivors a great amount of pain
and suffering. Lionel not only suffers the loss of the people he loves, but also the death of
what humankind has achieved in culture, art, music and literature (Tonn, 2009).
But unlike Lionel, Snowman does not set out to find others. Where Lionel lost his loved ones
gradually, Jimmy loses his love, Oryx, unexpectedly when Crake suddenly kills her. Jimmy
has lost touch with the rest of the world a long time ago, so being the last surviving human
being is not that much of a loss for him. The only loss that matters is the loss of Oryx. He
seems to have given up on the thought of finding other survivors, and settles on his task of
taking care of the Crakers.
He suffers from the same loss of culture as Lionel and especially the loss of language is
significant to Snowman.
Writing a farewell note or an explanation makes no sense to Snowman, as opposed to Lionel
from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: who is there to find it and read his narrative? Snowman
considers keeping a diary, but discards the though since it would require an effort from him
and he does not fool himself that he has an audience. The narrative would only be left to the
Crakers and they cannot read (O&C 45-46). ‘To whom it may concern, Jimmy had written, in
ballpoint rather than printout … he must still have had hope… As Crake once had said,
Jimmy was a romantic optimist’ (O&C 403-4).
Upon entering the dome he once led the Crakers out of, also known as Paradice, Snowman
finds Jimmy’s attempt at writing a farewell note. Finding the note untouched, Snowman
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realizes that there will never be another audience than himself, and he therefore ‘crumples the
sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It’s the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles’ (O&C
404).
Even if Snowman does not know what he could have done to change the course of events, he
knows he is guilty of not reacting. He simply let events run their course, drifting along with
the stream even if he felt they were wrong.
‘I didn’t do it on purpose, he says, in the sniveling child’s voice he reverts to in this mood.
‘Things happened, I had no idea, it was out of my control! What could I have done? Just
someone, anyone, listen to me please!’ What a bad performance, Even he isn’t convinced by
it. But now he’s weeping again’ (O&C 50-51).
From a young age Jimmy displays a keen sense of when something is ethically unacceptable,
but he asks no questions and quickly accepts things when there seems to be a general
consensus of acceptability. This is exemplified by a childhood memory of animals being
burned which is still very vivid in Snowman’s mind:
When Jimmy was only five or six years old his father took him to see a huge bonfire of
animals. The animals had been infected by a virus in order to sabotage whatever project they
were a part of (O&C 17-22). Jimmy is horrified by seeing the bodies of the animals burn, and
even if his father tells him, that ‘they were like steaks and sausages, only they still had their
skins on’(O&C 20), Jimmy is still shocked by the vision of the heads and the eyes looking at
him: ‘Steaks didn’t have heads. The heads made a difference: he thought he could see the
animals looking at him reproachfully out of their burning eyes’ (O&C 20).
Although he is only a child, Jimmy feels that he could have done something to avoid the
animals being burned: ‘In some way all of this – the bonfire, the charred smell, but most of all
the lit-up, suffering animals – was his fault, because he’d done nothing to rescue them. All the
same time he found the bonfire a beautiful sight’ (O&C 20).
This sense follows Jimmy through his life, but he only observes and never acts on it:
When Crake and Jimmy browse the internet for pornography they come upon a page called
HottTotts, a site that exhibits sex tourists in foreign countries in sexual acts with minors: ‘…
for the first time he’d felt that what they’d been doing was wrong’ (O&C 104). But he does
not protest, and the boys keep visiting the site.
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So Jimmy turns a blind eye: ’He remembered himself as carefree, earlier, in his youth. …
turning a blind eye. Now he had found himself wincing away…’ (O&C 306). As Sharon
Wilson notes, ‘Jimmy has built a life in which he turns a “blind eye” (p.260) to whatever he
doesn’t want to see’ (187). Sharon Wilson explains further that ‘symbolic blindness seems to
be a necessary beginning for the partly parodied quest the narrator of each Atwood novel
pursues, and regaining some vision and moving as far as possible out of the objectifying Gaze
seem necessary for survival’ (187). Jimmy, too, goes on a quest, hiking through the postplague world back in time to ground zero where the Crakers were born; Crake and Oryx died
and with them the rest of human kind. Jimmy faces up to reality after having embraced his
new status as responsible for the Crakers and after there is no more alcohol left for him to
numb his mind.
4.10.1 Snowman’s inefficiency
‘Snowman, Snowman, he said, get a life’ (O&C 13).
At his father’s wedding Jimmy wallows in self-pity wishing for more than he could possibly
want: ‘he wanted to be himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient’ (O&C 206).
‘Happy Birthday, Jimmy. May All Your Dreams Come True’ the birthday cards from his
father say ironically predicting Jimmy’s future (O&C 399). His wish is granted; after the
plague Jimmy becomes alone, on his own, very unique and self-created as Snowman. The
self-sufficiency, however, is not as pronounced as are the other wishes.
Even though Jimmy changes his name to Snowman in the hope that it entails new character
traits, Snowman is still essentially Jimmy. And Jimmy was never very practical, focused or
efficient. Faced with a habitat in which he has no knowledge of how to survive in, Snowman
is very disordered and incompetent in all his efforts at life as a man of nature.
The natural habitat of the Crakers is as alien to Snowman as the island is to Prendick in The
Island of Dr. Moreau; wild, hostile and dangerous. Both Prendick and Snowman struggle to
survive in the inhospitable surroundings and both are useless when it comes to practical work:
Thus his hysteria, his lassitude, his moping, his ineffectual attempts at fair play,
and his lack of common sense – he can’t figure out how to make a raft because
he’s never done ‘any carpentry or suchlike work’ in his life, and when he does
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manage to patch something together, he’s situated it too far from the sea and it
falls apart when he’s dragging it (Atwood In Other Worlds 153).
Snowman’s handiwork skills are equally poor: ‘In the first week, when he’d had more energy,
he’d made himself a lean-to, using fallen branches and a roll of duct tape and a plastic tarp
he’d found in the trunk of a smashed-up car (O&C 41). Building his shelter on ground-level
turns out to be a disaster not only because various insects pester him, but also because he
becomes an all-too-easy prey for the different genetically modified carnivorous animals at
large.
After the death of Dr. Moreau, Prendick goes to live with the beast-men at their habitat. The
beasts were made by physically merging two kinds of animals through surgery in order to
create a new kind of man (Bowen 318). The beasts were domesticized and humanized
through laws, but with the passing of time the beasts revert increasingly to their animal
origins. They become a physical threat to Prendick who decides to escape the island in order
to save his life.
Snowman finds himself in a similar situation, though with the difference that the Crakers
were based on human beings and not animals. Were they to respond more to their origin they
would not be a threat to Snowman. Or would they?
He is wasteful: he loses a knife (O&C 41), he throws away his spraygun when he runs out of
ammunition for it, instead of keeping it should he happen to find more (O&C 43), he decides
to drive away the dogs that seek him out for company (O&C 126), he had a map once,
directing him to a location with fruit trees, but he lost it during a storm (O&C 176).
Without such tools surviving becomes increasingly difficult, and at the very point where the
novel begins, Snowman is practically on the verge of starving. Without the weekly fish the
Crakers give him he only has a few left canned foods left from scavenging various empty
houses. Snowman does not know how to adapt to his new surroundings, never having had to
make an effort of doing so in his earlier life. So looking for natural foods is out of the
question, since he is simply not knowledgeably equipped to do so, and killing an animal is
also not a possibility, since this would be against the beliefs of the Crakers. All animals are
sacred and may nor be killed (O&C 110;116), and even though the Crakers are neither
premeditated for violence not killing, Snowman does not want to risk angering them by
violating their laws (O&C 177).
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Snowman did not have any common sense when first scouring for things, all he gathered was
booze and canned food, both of which he soon ran out of. He needs soap (O&C 50), but never
remembers to find some; he needs a flashlight (O&C 124), but never seems to focus on
retrieving one.
He blames himself for having wasted his time (O&C 47), for not having grown with the task
and adjusted to his new habitat. He ponders asking the children among the Crakers for help
and guidance in finding berries, but he never acts on this (O&C 176). He also thinks about
how to build a fire on his platform in his tree, but never goes further than that (O&C 123).
In the midst of starving to death and trying to handle the extreme climate, Snowman also
muses on how to better occupy his mind and time: Whittling a flute (O&C 127), or a chess
game (O&C 44) a thought which he quickly abandons since he does not have a knife- He
could, as earlier mentioned, keep a diary (O&C 45), but since Snowman does not know how
to perform without an audience this never amounts to anything. He longs for literature and
something to study(O&C 175), but he never acts on this either.
When finally confronted with near starvation (O&C 175; 179), Snowman decides to handle
the situation not by adapting to his new surroundings but by travelling back to the
ReJoovenEssense Compound, back into the heart of darkness. Instead of living off the foods
he would be able to find in his immediate environment, such as insects, roots and berries,
Snowman will rather risk the dangers of walking the distance to the Compound in the chance
of finding canned goods and booze. He is not desperate enough to stoop to the level of eating
bugs (O&C 178) although it would quite possibly be healthier for him than eating the foods
he is familiar with. Dreaming of canned foods and liquor (O&C 179), the comfort of the
familiar and the mind numbing drives Snowman towards the dome and away from his new,
unwanted home with the new and unfamiliar Crakers.
Before the plague, Jimmy spent a lot of his time anesthetizing his mind and body by drinking
alcohol. This is the only way of coping with his life Jimmy knows and Snowman continues
this habit, trying to escape the harsh reality he is facing. ‘… for the first month and a half,
after he was fairly sure it was safe to relax his vigilance, he got pissed out of his mind every
night. (O&C 123).
Instead of searching for food and the above mentioned necessary tools, Snowman puts a lot of
time and energy into finding alcohol. ‘He’s certain he has explored every likely site within a
day’s out-and-back radius of this tree’ (O&C 125). When all the possible sources of real
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booze have been exhausted Snowmansimply sets the bar lower: ‘He’d done cough medicine,
shaving lotion, rubbing alcohol; out behind the tree he’d accumulated an impressive dump of
empty bottles’ (O&C 124). ‘This was not a wise or a mature thing for him to have done,
granted, but of what use are wisdom and maturity to him now?’ (O&C 123), Snowman
concludes, trying to justify his actions to himself in retrospect.
This newfound and involuntary sobriety brings Jimmy’s past back into Snowman’s
consciousness forcing him to think about what has happened. The painful unfolding of past
events and the recognition of his own part in them makes Snowman crave alcohol even more.
‘I am not my childhood, Snowman says out loud. He hates those replays’ (O&C 77). But he
cannot escape such reruns from Jimmy’s past. Therefore, even faced with starvation, booze
remains his prime target: ’First things first: he locates the liquor cabinet in the dining room
and goes through It quickly …’ (O&C 267). The past and his passive role in the course of
events are simply too unpleasant for him to face while sober.
5. The importance of literature
‘The novel addresses the author’s fears of a future in which modern science and politics will
not look into the possible disastrous consequences of their own productions on ecology
because of the absence of any literary influence to counter the phenomenon. … The survival
of literature and the survival of our world are intertwined’ (Courturier-Storey 3)
Satire is often used in the specific form of the Menippean satire and according to Kaplan, the
roots of dystopia are found in the Menippean satire (201), which links these two literary
forms. ‘At its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world
in terms of a single intellectual pattern’ (Frye 310). This literary form treats mental attitudes
rather than individuals, abstract ideas and theories rather than specifics and the Menippean
satire thus ‘presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent’ (Frye 309). Kaplan
substantiates this by stating that ‘the primary foci of Menippean satire … are not despots or
corrupt statesmen, but rather schoolmen and academies’ (201).
According to Northrop Frye, ‘the short form of the Menippean satire is usually a dialogue or
colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of character’ (310).
In Oryx and Crake Atwood has addressed the problem of the divide between the sciences and
the humanities by portraying the two faculties allegorically through her protagonists Crake
and Jimmy. The characters therefore appear flat and without any development throughout the
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novel. The only character development is Jimmy’s transformation into Snowman, where he –
for the first time – assumes some form of responsibility. However, even this progress is
limited. ‘The novel comes as a warning against the directions our society is taking and the
choices it is making in relation to ecology. In this regard, literature is used as a tool to warn
the readers against possibly fatal deviations’ (Courturier-Storey 2).
Crake, representing the natural sciences, is the very efficient and brilliant scientist who
masters whatever he sets his mind to, and is well versed even in literature, able to quote Byron
in a conversation, even if he dismisses literature and art as not worthwhile. Crake sees the
world from a very observant and crude angle. He is well argued and judicious and plans years
ahead when working on a project.
Jimmy is the exact opposite, signifying the humanities and arts, with no understanding
outside his own field and deeply inefficient even within his own. He is clumsy and selfdoubting and feels victimized by the context of his youth and is wrapped up so deeply in this
misery that it makes him incapable of altering his life to the better. Society is not in his favor
and dismisses his humanist skills as archaic and befitting mostly for leisure activity. However,
no one seems to have protested to this turn of events and Jimmy simply follows the lead of
society, never objecting, only wallowing in self-pity. He knows that by not reacting he is just
as guilty of what has happened to society as his inaction has assisted Crake in realizing his
project.
Jimmy feels run over by Crake’s arguments and the effectiveness with which he delivers
them. Crake even quotes Byron – something that seems quite improper to Jimmy, ‘Crake
should stick to science and leave poor Byron alone’ (O&C 196). The fact that Crake
apparently understands both the ground that the humanities cover and at the same time is an
undisputed expert in his own scientific field frightens Jimmy, who does not understand much
more than collecting words and dating women, the latter with only relative success. The fact
that Crake is intimately familiar with Jimmy’s field and still rejects it as a waste of time
intimidates Jimmy who cannot counter any of Crake’s arguments.
In Crake’s view human kind is doomed due to our instincts: ‘He’s one of the few species that
doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources’ (O&C 139). And Jimmy’s best
response is simply ‘Well, it sucks’.
‘How much misery,’ Crake states at one time: ‘As a species we’re pathetic in that way:
imperfectly monogamous’ (O&C 195). Crake thinks out loud that to eliminate the sexual
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behavior of human beings would eliminate the endless misery. Jimmy argues that abolishing
misery would cripple art to which Crake sees no loss. Jimmy struggles to convince not only
Crake, but also himself. None of his arguments: that art is what remains when civilizations
die; that art carries meaning, seem to have any impact: Crake counters him with the statement
that archeologists also dig out ‘gnawed bones and old bricks and ossified shit’ (O&C 197).
Crake claims to have nothing against art, but dismisses it as nothing more than an amplifier
for getting laid, and female artists are simply biologically confused.
Jimmy’s inefficiency and inability to measure up to Crake helps describe the death of
humanity. His post-modern and Freudian approach to life enable him to progress, whereas the
natural sciences seem to improve every day.
‘Allegorically speaking, literature, heart of the humanities, can be equated with ethics. …
Protecting the Humanities comes to equate protecting humanity’ (Couturier-Storey 6).
In the pre-plague society portrayed in Oryx and Crake, not only is science favored by society;
the humanities have lost their value entirely. But even if a society such as this at first glance
would seem a pure utopia to the science-minded, there is nothing pure about it: science in
Oryx and Crake is only interesting and relevant if it results in a direct economic return: ‘One
of the key themes of the novel is the corrupting influence of commerce on science. When
business interests dominate ‘you enter a skewed universe where science can no longer operate
as science,’ Atwood says. The book takes this to extremes’ (Louët 163). Since the humanities
have no influence there is no regulating factor, and the innovation and imagination of science
and technology is taken to its logical extreme.
However, ‘Crake fail[s] to see what the Arts reflected was deeply human and could not be
done without. The Humanities have to do with what it is to be human in essence’ (CouturierStorey 7).
5.1 Nature
The estrangement from nature is at the core of the Oryx and Crake. It is downplayed and
never directly approached but always present. The climate is mentioned as something
dangerous, something to survive and even if it is beautiful at times, there is always a deadly
undercurrent especially at the beginning of the novel: ‘On the eastern horizon there’s a
grayish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow’ (O&C 3).
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As mentioned, the Zero hour displayed on Snowman’s broken watch symbolizes the end of
civilization and the return to pre-historic times. ‘The association of Jimmy with pre-civilized
man, living amongst scenes of apocalyptic devastation, suggests that he has been reduced to
what we see as a travesty of civilization’ (Glover 56).
However, nature is not only stimulating and gravitating:
Of course nature has a dark side too. The face it presents to humanity is not
always friendly. Throughout most of human deep history there have been
predators eager to snatch us for dinner; venomous snakes ready with a fatal,
defensive strike to the ankle; spiders and insects that bite, sting, and infect; and
microbes designed to reduce the human body to malodorous catabolic
chemicals. The reverse side of nature’s green-and-gold is the black-and-scarlet
of disease and death. The companion of biophilia is therefore biophobia (Wilson
141).
‘As befits an enchanted island, Moreau’s island is both semi-alive and female, but not in a
pleasant way’ (Atwood In Other Worlds 159). Nature is no longer beautiful and calm, but a
wild and merciless ‘devouring femme fatale’ (Atwood In Other Worlds 156). Nature in Oryx
and Crake is a dangerous and unknown wilderness lethal in almost every aspect. Or at least
this is what Snowman experiences. Having grown up in an artificial environment in a
Compound Jimmy has never experienced nature in its wild and untamed form, so Snowman
feels estranged and out of his depth, when faced with the scenery that, in fact, should be his
natural habitat. According to Edward O Wilson the savanna was man’s first natural
environment and therefore human kind theoretically feels most at home in this setting.
The savanna hypothesis extended to include behavior stipulates that Homo
sapiens is likely to be genetically specialized for the ancestral environment so
that today, even in the most sequestered stone-and-glass cities, we still prefer it.
Part of human nature is a residue of bias in mental development that causes us to
gravitate back to savannas or their surrogates (Wilson 136).
Beauty has become artificial to the extent that Snowman does not know how to enjoy a
beautiful sunset without wishing to see it on high definition TV screens: ‘How glorious it
must have been when all ten of the Videocam screens were on … as it is the screens turn their
blind eye towards him, so he has to make do with the real thing’ (O&C 324). The real world,
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the natural becomes a lesser substitute for the replica, as was the case with physical beauty in
the pre-plague society.
However, after Snowman almost runs out of alcohol he is not able to get drunk as often
anymore, and when he does drink his hangovers are more severe than before (O&C 173). He
starts sensing his physical body, feeling its pains and pleasures, but he does not understand it,
because he has never learned how to: ‘These things sneak up on him for no reason, these
flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency’ (O&C 46); ‘The air is cool
and fresh … he inhales with pleasure’ (O&C 313). In the end, Snowman sees the beauty of
the world: ‘After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because
it is’ (O&C 429). It is as simple as that.
Snowman takes his promise to Crake so seriously that he protects the Children of Crake by
killing his own kind, the remaining original human beings. When leading the Crakers to their
new home, they encounter suffering and dying people and Snowman shoots them without
hesitating. He decides that he is doing the dying a favor, thus legitimizing his de facto killings
(O&C 412). By favoring the Crakers, saving them and shooting his own kind, Snowman has
given Crake’s project endorsement. Even if the Crakers bore Snowman and even if he laments
the loss of human company, Snowman seems to think more highly of the Crakers than of his
own kind. The Crakers are not the monsters, even if they have been genetically engineered
like Frankenstein creations. The real monsters were the human beings, and since Snowman is
the only one now left, he is well aware of his status: ‘Crake, he whimpers. Why am I on this
earth? How come I’m alone? Where’s my Bride of Frankenstein?’ (O&C 199)
Earth must be saved from Homo sapiens and after the red plague both flora and fauna seem to
thrive much better than prior to Crake’s euthanasia. By killing off the entire human race and
engineering a substitute Crake has simply taken the equation of the biosphere and replaced the
flawed element with a better substitute, in an attempt to make up for past devastations. So
Crake is not really the Frankenstein or mad scientist he appears to be at a first glance. He is
simply a product of his own context constructing a solution to the problem at hand. And with
no ethical council or regulatory agency there is no one to stop him. Even his own employers
gave him carte blanche and only saw the economic profit at the end of Crake’s project.
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5.2 Critical reception
Anthony Griffith is very skeptical towards the credibility of Oryx and Crake because of the
way Atwood uses technology:
The futuristic setting of the book cannot be too far hence because our current
technologies of e-mail, the internet, and DVDs all feature in the book and define
its imaginary society’s state of advancement. Such technologies are notoriously
ephemeral, and probably will all be replaced by new devices well within fifty
years. … In other words, there are no fantastic futuristic technologies such as
morphing, teleporting, or hyperdrive. That being the case, how believable are
Atwood’s examples? (193)
Atwood has revealed in an interview, that ‘Snowman was born around 1999, and is 28 at the
beginning of the novel, and events happen in Massachussetts, near Boston’ (Gussow E1). So
Griffith is right in his deduction that the novel is set in a not too distant future. His guess is
built on the observation that Atwood has chosen to use technology such as DVDs (and CDROMs and CDs) that are already dated today only ten years after the publication of the novel.
Griffith therefore dismisses the credibility of the novel on that account. Taking Griffith’s
reservations seriously, we may wonder: did the author blunder when she chose to include
DVDs and similar media? Was it a choice based on ignorance from Atwood’s side? Hardly.
Certainly, Atwood’s references to the digital media the use of which we are already swiftly
moving away from are neither coincidental or unconscious: these media are a persistent part
of Jimmy’s life and indeed represent an important part of it: Atwood mentions DVDs seven
times (O&C 11; 76;88;95;252;288;294), Jimmy uses CD-ROMs four times (O&C
61;89;229;288) and when rummaging a house in the ReJoovenEssese Compound, Jimmy
finds a pile of CDs (O&C 272).
The choice to use dated technology was made very deliberately to stress one of the main
arguments of Oryx and Crake: that the arts have lost their significance and have stopped
developing. If movies and music have ceased to be a factor and are no longer of interest to the
main public there is no point in developing the technology that communicates it. Mentioning
DVDs throughout the novel then simply draws attention to the status of what they
communicate. So when Griffith reads Atwood’s use of dated technology as a blunder he has
missed the point.
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Griffith’s reaction to her science fiction novel is exactly the reason why she resists the
categorizing. It carries too many expectations which her novels do not fulfill. She does not
want to mislead her readers and feels that the label ‘science fiction’ clearly would.
Griffith further criticizes Atwood for what he believes is an attack on genetic engineering:
Her message is that genetics dabbles in things that are unnatural and creepy and
will surely get us into a lot of trouble. … It uses genetic engineering as a
lightning rod for wrath aimed at the negative outcomes of science in general.
However, picking on genetics is inappropriate and misleading. … Atwood
seems to have taken the hype in the media as truth (192). … A danger of the
lightning rod approach to polemics is that whereas the high-profile structure
takes the hits, other, more menacing structures currently enjoying lower profiles
escape the lightning bolts entirely. … The misapplication of science is killing
our planet. The real crises need our attention, not purely hypothetical disasters
arising from genetics. The inherent mistake is in accepting uncritically the
profiles of science presented in the popular media. This is what Margaret
Atwood has done in Oryx and Crake. It is an unfortunate mistake, for it not only
harms the perception of the respectable science of genetics, but also distracts
readers from other, far more pressing and important scientific issues (195).
It may be a compliment to Atwood’s literary accomplishment that Griffith misreads her novel
on this point as well, but it is unlikely. Had he read her novel more carefully he would have
understood that her attack is not on genetic engineering or on science as such, but on the
contrary a critique of the humanitarian aspects of society. Furthermore, Oryx and Crake is not
an attempt at predicting the future (Gussow E1). Neither is it a criticism of genetic
engineering. What Atwood really attacks in her novel is the part humanities play in society,
the lack of involvement in society and the direction it is headed in. As has already been
established, Margaret Atwood is neither against progress nor technological advance. She is
well informed as to which sciences are more threatening than others and which do most
ecological damage. Griffith argues that genetic manipulation has given us more positive
advances than other sciences: ‘better food plants and animals, better clothing, new medicines,
and new approaches to human disease therapy’ (193).
By make genetic engineering the culprit of her novel, representing all the natural sciences
combined, Atwood is able to show us a caricatured and ridiculous version of the future. With
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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in mind, physically changing what it means to be human can be
an eye opener and provoke far more than other experiments.
What is at the heart of the novel is a criticism of society in general, not just of science: ‘It’s
kind of a cultural critique, she explains. How far should society allow biotech to be exploited
on the basis of commercial imperatives? And what are the moral and ethical responsibilities to
limit the application of biotech?’ (Louët 163).
Oryx and Crake is a dystopian satire with incorporated Menippean satirical elements, based
on our contemporary society. Atwood has, however, not made her use of allegory crystal
clear, creating a too familiar world with too familiar characters. Misinterpretations are
therefore not ruled out and Griffith is not the only one who has misread Atwood’s novel:
As in other works of science fiction, while its plot complications drive the
narrative, its powerful conceptual framework dominates the stage. For all its
lack in character complexity and realistic psychological motivation …. Readers,
however, might wish that Atwood had made a stronger effort to amuse us. Her
ability to sustain our interest is challenged by the story’s unremitting bleakness
and the lack of moral depth to its characters (Montello B8).
5.3 Pro or con science?
A natural question to ask, then, is; is Margaret Atwood against science? Is Oryx and Crake a
novel warning us against science in general? And is that also what the authors of the novels
she alludes to in Oryx and Crake were doing?
Swift certainly was not against science, but protested against the loss of connection with
reality from the Royal Society who set the tone of the day, floating on an island in the sky.
The ‘projectors’ of his novel are not evil but simply misguided.
Frankenstein has become the symbol of mad science gone wrong. Shelley was not against
science either, but against the thoughtlessness with which the scientist handled his
experiment, the way he himself was raised by society.
H. G. Wells also did not speak against science. Dr. Moreau’s sin was to take pride in his own
selfish ambitions and in his create his own ethics because society had made him an outcast.
Aldous Huxley criticized the mass-consumption society far more than he criticized science.
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And Atwood, too, is more concerned with society than with science in itself. ‘Despite the
negative tone of her book, Atwood stresses she is not antibiotech. “Biotech is not dangerous,
[it is] neutral”, she says. Only its uses ‘can be evil’, she adds, especially once business
interests kick in…. Biotechnology “is the biggest toy box in the world that we’ve now
opened,” Atwood says. The question is should those toys come with more health warnings?’
(Louët 163)
Society, on other words, gets the scientist it deserves. Science is neutral and is open to
interpretation. Its place in society, its funding, the level of technological advance and how it is
used is simply a symptom of the culture it is placed within. Thus neither science nor
technological advances are in themselves the problem: the question Atwood targets is how
they are administered and to what end. All of the mentioned authors were pro-science and
their novels are not, as it might be perceived at a first glance, warnings against science, but
warnings against the wrong use of the advancements it produces.
Science and technology are such an integrated part of our society that we cannot imagine a
world without them. What Atwood is trying to say is simply that we should treat our
technological advances with greater care, questioning to a higher degree the need for them
and the position they should hold in our lives.
The juggernaut of technology-based capitalism will not be stopped. Its
momentum is reinforced by the billions of poor people in developing countries
anxious to participate in order to share the material wealth of the industrialized
nations. But its direction can be changed by mandate of a generally shared longterm environmental ethic. The choice is clear: the juggernaut will very soon
either chew up what remains of the living world, or it will be redirected to save
it (Wilson 156).
6. Conclusion
In Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood has created a satirical version of the real world. The
world of Oryx and Crake runs on financial greed and fear of aging and dying. Society is
divided into two sectors: the privileged and the poor, the privileged being reduced to skilled
scientist and their families. People, especially those who live within the Compounds, are
estranged from wild and authentic nature, and through internet games we learn that the greater
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part of the animal species are extinct. Advances in genetic engineering, however, makes it
possible to create new animal species for fun, food, or as spare parts and for security. The
educational system, represented by the Watson-Crick Institute and the Martha Graham
Academy, is out of balance, with all of the weight in the scale of the natural sciences. By
applying the Menippean satirical form, Atwood lets the two protagonists, Crake and Jimmy,
represent each their faculty. Whereas Jimmy, who symbolizes the humanities, is ineffective,
passive and self-pitying, Crake, who represents the natural sciences, is active, ingenious,
productive and unattached. Crake holds and shapes the future, and Jimmy lets him do it,
following along without questioning anything. This imbalance leaves the natural sciences
without any regulations, and leaving the future to the scientists results in a logical solution to
the financial, ecological, climate and overpopulation problems the world of Oryx and Crake is
faced with. Crake solves these problems by killing mankind and replacing it with a new and
altered version: the Crakers. Society is driven by a financial greed and a pursuit of eternal
youth, and this drive has made men exploit nature to an extent where it becomes impossible to
regenerate it. Making the Crakers as extreme as possible, Atwood has therefore created a
satirical symbol of how much human kind needs to change to be able to survive in the climate
we are creating today while Snowman is melting in the sun. Atwood bases the novel on
tendencies in the real world, as has been discussed in the introductory part. What especially
concerns Atwood, as is evident in Oryx and Crake, is the divide between the natural sciences
and the humanities, the human-induced altering of the biosphere, and the medical industry
convincing the consumers to buy its products by introducing a variety of different ailments
and diseases that are difficult to diagnose. Atwood alludes to the four reviewed novels by
incorporating them into Oryx and Crake both in terms of characteristics, settings and details –
as has been discussed - but also in terms of the lessons they teach us. Gulliver’s Travels
shows us the consequences of too much control placed in the hands of a regulator sitting on
an island in the sky with no grounding, conducting ridiculous experiments. Mary Shelley
teaches us that society as the bad caretaker will produce scientists who lack responsibility for
their creations, and this can have grave consequences. In The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G.
Wells the sin of Dr. Moreau is the sin of pride and a pursuit of coldhearted, self-serving
intellectual research. The Doctor tries to manipulate nature, but cannot erase the wild an
untamed elements, which end up killing him. And Aldous Huxley demonstrates through
Brave New World how mass-consumerism and big corporations by applying technology and
indoctrination take control of how people lead their lives. Atwood integrated all of these
messages into her novel, but Oryx and Crake is not simply an inspired pastiche. Atwood has
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her own messages as well and has simply used the morals of the previously mentioned novels
as a platform for communicating her own statement. Margaret Atwood is neither against
science nor is she afraid of technological advancements What she is afraid of is a future where
the sciences are controlled by commercial interests and without any ethic regulation. Science
is neutral and simply a symptom of its social context. In a world without a counterpoint to the
sciences, as Atwood portrays in Oryx and Crake, advances within both science and
technology have no boundaries: society receives the scientist it deserves. Therefore, one of the
greatest criticisms Atwood makes in Oryx and Crake is, just as Edward O. Wilson presents in
Consilience, that the humanities need to reinvent themselves. They need to step up, take
responsibility and contribute to society by proving they are indispensable. The faculties need
to unite their knowledge in order for human kind to solve the problems we are faced with
today. The future portrayed in Oryx and Crake is not definite or final, and one of Atwood’s
main points is that it can still be altered if we react now. Leading the way, Atwood contributes
to the task of the humanities by writing her cautionary tale, contributing to the tradition of
visions about the future based on tendencies already existing in contemporary society.
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8. Abstract
Pernille Sommer Zacho Lützen, Århus Universitet, 2013: Imagining the worst but hoping for
the best: The Cautionary Tale of Science without Ethics exemplified in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake.
The present dissertation examines Margaret Atwood’s satirical and dystopian futuristic vision
in the novel Oryx and Crake from 2003 as an example of a cautionary tale. Atwood has
incorporated canonized literature into her novel to form a base for her modern-day fable, and
the thesis therefore opens by reviewing four selected critical novels about science and
technology. These are Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The reviews include a brief summary, and
it relates them to their own social context.
As a platform for the analysis of Oryx and Crake the thesis proceeds by introducing some of
the main social tendencies from Atwood’s own time. Atwood’s own context includes the
following aspects: the sciences gaining a controlling place in society enabling them to alter
the world, exemplified in this paper through the Manhattan Project; the American society and
some troubling tendencies such as pharmaceutical companies marketing sickness to sell more
medicine; the rapid extinction of animal species and the exploitation of the biosphere, which
result in an alteration of the climate, cited from Edward O. Wilson’s book The Future of Life;
and finally the debate between the natural sciences and the humanities, where Atwood alludes
heavily to Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge.
The dissertation presents an analysis of Oryx and Crake. The world of the novel is driven on
financial greed with the controlling companies selling products that prolong life, enhance
beauty and fight the diseases that the companies invent and plant themselves. Without a
regulator the sciences produce not only diseases, but also one astonishing genetically
manipulated animal or plant after the other.
Oryx and Crake takes place in a dystopian future where almost the entire human race has
been eliminated and replaced by a new, genetically designed and engineered human race, the
so-called Children of Crake. These Crakers were designed by Glenn/Crake, a young and
ingenious scientist, who also planned and orchestrated the elimination of the old human race.
Left to guide these new human beings in the aftermath of the destruction of the old race is
Jimmy/Snowman, the childhood friend of Crake.
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In the post-human world Jimmy changes his name to Snowman in the hope that this will erase
the sins of the past, but it does not and Snowman relives Jimmy’s life through a series of
flashbacks. These flashbacks tell the story of how and why Crake decided to kill off mankind
and replace it with a new and maybe better version. The Crakers were engineered to live in
the extreme climate, which has been created through thoughtless exploitation of nature.
Snowman barely survives under the extreme conditions, since he has hardly any knowledge of
how to do so.
Jimmy/Snowman is inefficient and wallows in self-pity for having lost his mother in his teens.
He is the counterpart to Crake, who is effective and collected. In the fable that is Oryx and
Crake, Crake represents the natural sciences and Jimmy/Snowman symbolizes the humanities.
By portraying Jimmy as a pathetic young man and Crake as the cool genius with a master
plan, Atwood underlines the divide between the faculties and their different approaches to
life. It is this discrepancy that is at the heart of Atwood’s message: the sciences, without a
counterpart in the humanities, a regulator that can set up parameters for what is ethically
acceptable, may well turn into a moral cesspool, especially if it is financially dependent on
commercial interests. Atwood stresses the importance of literature and links it with the
survival of mankind. Literature is essential, because it is a fictional way of exploring the
logical extremes of the way we are heading; this is where the cautionary tale finds its
quintessential importance.
Atwood has built the four reviewed novels into Oryx and Crake both by alluding to them, but
also by incorporating their moral. She has done so to support her own messages: that the dire
consequence of the decline of literature and the subsequent lack of ethics in Oryx and Crake
is the extreme human-induced climate change and the ensuing extinction of mankind.
None of the mentioned authors is against science. All of them are aware of the fact that
science is neutral and as such apolitical and impartial. And all of the authors were wellinformed in the scientific field they portrayed in their novels. None of the novels is therefore a
cautionary tale against science in itself, but they are warnings against the use of scientific and
technological advances without clear goals as to what end they are aimed at, and especially
why. Society gets the scientist it deserves.
Imagining the worst but hoping for the best, Pernille S. Z. Lützen 20070086