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‘Doomed by Hope’: Environmental Catastrophe and the Structured Ignorance of Risk
in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, The Pennsylvania State University
‘If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next — if you knew in
advance the consequences of your own actions — you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone.
You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never dare to’. (Atwood, The Blind
Assassin)
Margaret Atwood’s fiction has explored the social and political dynamics of risk since at
least the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985. In that famous novel, environmental
degradation (especially from chemical pollution and nuclear radiation) is identified as a
contributing cause of the decline of birthrates in the ‘pre-Gileadic’ United States, setting the
stage for a new ‘sexual revolution’. In her more recent speculative novels, particularly Oryx and
Crake (2003), the unchecked progress of climate change — evident in rising sea levels, shifts in
weather patterns and seasons, and ozone depletion — joins the unchecked progress of genetic
engineering to become a double-stranded thread woven through a cautionary text regarding
social and political (d)evolution. It would be easy to read the novel as simply a condemnation of
the contemporary version of the fall of the hubristic scientist, the would-be Creator, the new
Frankenstein. Indeed allusions to that tale and others — The Island of Dr. Moreau springs to
mind — invite such conclusions, and they are not incorrect.
But things are rarely simple with Atwood, and this ‘slippery’1 narrative is no exception.
Its many intertextual resonances, not just of science fiction(s), but also of Last Man and survivor
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tales from Defoe to Shelley to Shute, lend Oryx and Crake its air of familiar and inevitable
doom. Granted, Atwood’s ironical playfulness—displayed in the conception of all manner of
hybrid creatures, and in the clever invention of punning names—is a far cry from these authors’
high seriousness. And the genotechnologies and climate-change trappings seem new. But in fact
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein we glimpse the former, and in The Last Man, we watch the
weather, in an apparent acknowledgement of a crack’d universe, fluctuate wildly during a viral
holocaust. So what is Atwood after, and why is it so hard to tell? Atwood’s intention is further
obscured by her controversial insistence that what she has been writing since The Handmaid’s
Tale is not science fiction, as the obvious allusiveness to such narratives might suggest, but
‘speculative’ fiction. This distinction prompted derision and outright ire from many readers, who
saw it as specious, and motivated by literary snobbery pure and simple. While even the gentle
Ursula LeGuin could not see the sense in it, Atwood has never really repudiated it.
To consider why the apparently specious distinction ‘matters’ to the author enough to
maintain it is to approach what is most complicated about Oryx and Crake, and perhaps what
Atwood sees as distinct in her work. Atwood seems to want to deflect attention from the
‘science’ that pervades the book, noting that she has in fact invented nothing, introduced no
science that we do not already have and that scientists are clearly capable, with sufficient time, of
developing to finer levels of sophistication and viability. In this deflection we see reflected,
albeit at an angle — which is to say, ironically — a deeper speculation: not concerning genetic
technology per se; and certainly not concerning any notion of an inherent evil residing in such
technologies. Atwood is anything but anti-science, the product of a family of scientists, as she
likes to point out. But her vision is fundamentally ethical, and what troubles her in this novel, as
it did in the previous one, is not knowledge-gone-bad, but ignorance. Not the ‘simple’ ignorance
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of the uneducated; rather, the complicated kind that smart but inattentive people, people who
should know better, not only tolerate but consent to. What makes Oryx and Crake distinct, in
other words, is its effort to peel away the layers covering the structuring of ignorance. Atwood’s
purpose is to the production of ignorance, which Linda Alcoff has described as a ‘substantive
epistemological practice in itself.’2 I argue in this essay that inattention to and ignorance of risk
is at the heart of this novel, which examines not simply the risk, moral or otherwise, that socalled ‘pure science’ brings; but also the way human beings blind themselves to risks that should
be apparent. The eventual catastrophe in Oryx and Crake is not caused by problems inherent to
science, fictional or otherwise, but by the cultivation of what its hero calls ‘structured ignorance,’
itself a ‘substantive epistemological practice’, a deliberate way of not knowing.3
Atwood’s concern with epistemology and its relationship to risk, which surfaces in The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985), is fully in the foreground of in Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood mines
the predilection of modern society to ignore the risk we ourselves present to the survival of our
kind and our planet, much less our political freedoms. In this cultural moment, the ‘cutting
edges’ of western science seem to be the ‘actual’ and the only ‘believable’ horizons of progress,
reinforcing hegemonic global capitalism and corporatised technology. Alternative narratives of
progress and alternative conceptions of risk and reward therefore become un-imaginable,
because they are not motivated by models of economic growth and profit that determine what
“progress” is, and what is “valuable”. What we regard as “cutting edge” work4 almost always
means scientific work. But that work may be as likely define a horizon at the world’s end, as it
is to open up new terrains for human exploration. Avoiding the former result depends upon more
than knowing the science. It depends on knowing the desires, psychological and ideological,
driving the science and the story that society tells about itself in relation to that knowledge. That
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story — where it comes from, how it gets structured, who gets to tell it and who has to listen,
who sees it as ‘gospel truth’ and who recognises it as a fiction, truthful or not, who or what is at
risk in the telling and living of the story, and who is not — that story is the one Atwood is really
interested in. The riskiest business we engage in today is not business of science, but the busyness of looking elsewhere, while our story is written for us.
This business of risk and the riskiness of corporatised techno-sciences have been modeled
by recent sociologists, practically contemporaneously with the composition of this novel. Most
strikingly, Ulrich Beck’s groundbreaking study, Risk Society (1986; translated into English in
2005), tells a story about contemporary society’s blindness to risk and abdication of political
power to corporate entities so parallel to Atwood’s that reading the two texts together is uncanny.
Atwood presents in Oryx and Crake one ‘worst-possible’ outcome of the systems model Beck
constructs, and she shares his conviction that perceptual inattention5 to the moral and political
risks, not to mention the physical or environmental ones, is the real hazard to humanity. Atwood
and Beck also share the conviction that understanding how to ‘see’ the ‘unforeseen’ as always
already visible as a real possibility, is critical. Beck has defined ‘risk society’ as an ironical
version of contemporary society, in which a ‘reflexive modernity’ develops alongside an
evolving ‘risk consciousness.’6 This evolution challenges a long-standing faith in the inherent
‘goodness’ of industrial and technology advancement, and marks a shift in historical
consciousness. The shift is away from the ‘present-day’ context of technology’s immediately
foreseeable benefits, and toward a wider, future-oriented context in which the unforeseen would
be more fully accounted for. This critical and reflexive self-consciousness of benefit and risk
approaches what I think Atwood would call a ‘speculative sensibility’. In this way, Atwood
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points us toward the epistemological value of speculation, and indeed of the imagination —
social rationality7 rather than scientific rationality.
I
The ‘Myth’ of No-Risk Progress
Grounding his analysis of risk society in the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment belief
in ‘progress,’ or rather in a specific definition of progress, Beck locates the ideological engine of
modern industrial society in the Enlightenment faith in science’s objectivity, a faith so deep as to
delegitimise the claims of subjective experience, and dismiss the risks of scientific ‘fallibility’.8
Because the ‘monopoly on rationality’ is fiercely protected and masked by the corporate and
industrial interests whose money makes scientific (technological) modernisation possible, the
most severe risks of civilization become invisible. The very unreality of the most dangerous
possibilities means they are intangible, unmeasurable and unverifiable, in other words, mere
speculation.
Beck grounds his analysis of risk society in the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment
belief in ‘progress’; or rather a specific definition of progress, grounded in an unchallenged faith
in science’s rationality ‘and thus’ its legitimacy and indeed ‘infallibility’.9 Furthermore, ‘the
systematic nature of [Western] modernisation’ is mirrored in, and driven by, technological
systems that, ‘as such’ are regarded as progressive, objective, and right. The sciences’
‘monopoly on rationality’ short-circuits criticism or warnings about risk, whether environmental
or ethical; such criticism is typically dismissed by ‘the experts’ as irrational, emotional, the
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ignorant delusions of people who don’t know, and can’t know, because they’re not experts
themselves. Because the monopoly on rationality is also fiercely protected and masked by the
corporate and industrial interests whose money makes technological progress possible, the most
severe ‘risks of civilization’ — catastrophic environmental damage, nuclear holocaust, or, as in
Atwood’s novel, a viral holocaust wiping out humanity as we know it — such hazards typically
escape perception.
What Beck calls a ‘systematically conditioned blindness to risk’10 obscures the fact that
modernity-as-technology ‘produces what it denies’: hazard. Hazard is thus not only the byproduct as it were of modern (that is, technological) progress; it is the very condition of its
possibility. Beck argues that modernity is thus shown to have ‘become the threat and the promise
of emancipation from the threat that it creates itself’11. In an ideological catch-22, the
technological imagination can’t imagine the ‘unknown and unintended consequences [that] come
to be a dominant force in history and society’12; it can imagine only what it has imagined, and
the story it tells about itself functions as a myth, one ‘created by the system’ of scientific
infallibility and modernisation.13 The mythical infallibility of this system is also, according to
Beck’s analysis, inevitably related to the grip of post-industrial capitalism and to what he calls
the ‘logic of wealth [that] asserts the incompatibility of distributions of wealth and risk’.14 Risk is
deemed irrelevant in the context of this ‘logic of wealth,’ whereby the infallibility of profitmaking as an inherent ‘good’ enables further technological and social progress toward a vision of
utopian perfection; the more wealth that can be produced, the more it is ‘worth the risk’. And
when technology is yoked not only to pursuit of a perfect or fully achieved modernity, but also to
the pursuit of profitability, we find the kind of (il)logical frameworks, moral and
epistemological, which ground Beck’s paradoxical warning that ‘the sources of danger are no
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longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but a perfected mastery over nature’.15 While
science fiction writers as early as Mary Shelley have warned of this difficulty, Beck singles out
what Bounos calls the ‘current “gene rush”’16:
The fear of the ‘advances’ in genetic technology is widespread today … All this takes
place, however, like an obituary for decisions taken long ago. Or rather, no decision ever
occurred … The age of human genetics, the reality of which people are debating today,
actually started long ago. One can say ‘no’ to progress, but that does not change its
course at all. Progress is a blank check to be honored beyond consent and legitimation.17
Scientific rationality systematically conditions perceptual blindness to risk by insisting
that only the experts can ‘know’ the nature of scientific “truth,” and thus only they can now the
true risks. The ‘status’ of any single individual in society depends on whether s/he is one of the
‘have’s’ or ‘have-not’s’: whether or not s/he possesses the knowledge that ‘matters’ (scientist or
lay-person); whether one is male (have’s) or female (have-not’s); white or of colour; western or
non-western. No matter which of these oppositions is at play (and of course they are often at play
together), according to Beck, one real outcome of this perceptual inattentiveness on both sides is
the malignant growth of political tyranny. The raison d’etre of an emergent political tyranny is
simple: to project, realise, and then enforce a narrowly conceived utopian vision of ‘something
like a perfect system … to establish perfect control, some kind of dictatorship in everyday life’.18
Because every arm of these systems works to support the ‘naturalness’ of that system’s structure
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and motives and hence to enervate dissent, both risk and decision making are removed ‘from the
roles of public inspection,’ and thus from individual influence. In this way, Beck’s model
explains, the systemic technologisation of society insidiously undermines liberal politics, robbing
individuals of the ability to steer the direction of society before they are even aware: ‘Technoeconomic development thus falls between politics and non-politics … [N]ow the potential for
structuring society migrates from the political system into the sub-political system of scientific,
technological and economic modernisation’.19 Political agency is gradually, willingly even,
handed over by individuals who are no longer able to see the drama going on behind the scenes;
that agency is accumulated, instead, by the corporatised governments that increasingly monitor
and direct both public and private lives of citizens.
II
Risky Business: ‘I can’t afford to know’
I mentioned above that Atwood’s interest in risk dates from as far back as The
Handmaid’s Tale, and I would go so far as to describe that novel as the “prehistory” to the
usurpation of female reproduction by masculinist genetic technologies in the later novel. The
Handmaid’s Tale is from a certain angle very much about risk, with its narrator, Offred,
alternately abject and insubordinate, tracing the manner in which women’s general
inattentiveness to, and complicity with, male privilege allows the Gileadic political takeover to
occur under everyone’s noses. As she considers the comforts and freedoms of ‘the time before,’
Offred is able to see the ways in which complacency, and the illusion of ‘choice’ and freedom,
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encouraged a complacency born of ignorance: ‘We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t
the same as ignorance, you have to work at it’20— at not seeing, and not hearing, the newspaper
stories reporting the declining birthrates, stolen babies, and, eventually, ‘corpses in ditches or the
woods, bludgeoned to death’.21 But these things were, as far as she and her friends were
concerned, ‘bad dreams dreamt by others … awful without being believable … We were the
people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It
gave us more freedom’.22 Now, she realises how delusory was this sense of safety and
invisibility, and how risky the complacency: ‘Nothing changes instantaneously,’ she adds; ‘in a
gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it’.23
The apparent invisibility of risk and the epistemology of ignorance in pre-Gileadic
America are grounded in just the kind of ‘systematic conditioning’ that both causes and is caused
by intellectual laziness. This laziness, call it complacency, or even complicity, turns out to be the
riskiest thing of all, particularly from a political point of view. In The Handmaid’s Tale the
political tyranny of Gilead — Atwood’s version of that ‘dictatorship in everyday life’24 —
carries with it a tight control of what is to be known and what is not. In the aftermath of the
Gileadic revolution, therefore, knowledge of ‘what’s going on’ becomes the most valuable
commodity. Trying to ‘see’ what’s going on by determining what is being hidden becomes the
riskiest possible occupation. ‘The greater the risk the greater the glory,’ quips Offred,25 knowing
that defying Gilead brings either death or freedom, little in between. Bargaining for knowledge
with her own life, finding ‘something to exchange,’ is Offred’s ongoing trial. Because of her
affiliation with the Commander, much that is hidden is made visible to her, if she chooses to
look. It is that choice of course that the members of Mayday ask her to make. When she retreats
in fear, however, she self-reflectively — and ironically — understands what she is giving up: ‘I
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would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was’.26 Choosing knowledge is
to choose risk—and to see how easily and how systematically and ignorance is produced.
Choosing ignorance is turning away from the responsibility of knowing, and from the
responsibility of doing something about what one “knows” to be reprehensible.
This connection between choice and responsibility is at the center of Oryx and Crake.
The novel opens with the hapless hero, Jimmy, a.k.a. ‘Snowman’ (his chosen, post-apocalypse
name), mourning his ‘shipwreck’ in a decimated world. ‘Shipwreck’ is his term for his new life,
and the allusion to Defoe becomes more and more prominent as Jimmy consider how to live
“after history” as it were. The reader accompanies Jimmy through his reluctant education into
reflexive modernity as he ruminates on his own complicitous role in the crisis that has left him
apparently alone in the world, along with a group of bioengineered creatures that he does not
regard as human. His complicity is obscure, because that responsibility is so indirect: The cause
of the holocaust that kills off the world’s population is an engineered virus that is created and in
fact set loose the eponymous Crake, Jimmy’s childhood friend, and a scientific genius. The virus
was implanted in a pill Crake also invented, called ‘BlyssPluss’. This success of this
pharmaceutical breakthrough is its effectiveness in eliminating the risk of unhappiness by also
eliminating the risk of a desire that cannot be satisfied. According to Crake, this will be man’s
saving grace — in a convenient pill form —in that it gives human beings what they have always
wanted: ‘perfect’ sexual pleasure; the control of conception (though this is through temporary
and also undisclosed chemical sterilization); and best of all elimination of the root cause of
human violence and war: sexual competitiveness and frustration. The pill guarantees emotional
as well as physical satisfaction from every sexual act. Crake’s thesis regarding human nature
undergirds the project that hundreds of scientists worked on with him, culminating in the
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production of ‘perfect’ human beings, the so-called Crakers, genetic hybrids whose basic human
genetic foundation is enhanced with various desirable features from animals. These creatures are
made in order to realise Crake’s vision of a peaceful utopia, a heaven on earth that is rid of the
sexual competition that he regards as the root cause of all human violence. What none of his
colleagues predicts — and what not even Jimmy foresees — is Crake’s intentional loosing of an
almost universally fatal virus designed to rid the world of the ‘old model’ of human being,
clearing the decks for the Crakers to begin ‘a new world,’ a Paradise of Crake’s own design.
Lack of foresight, born of intellectual laziness, in fact characterises nearly all of the
scientists we meet in this novel, including Jimmy’s own father, a ‘genographer’ at OrganInc
Farms. None of them imagines the real possibility of any global catastrophe from their
biotechnological inventiveness, though they do talk about the corporate experiments in hybrid
animals gone awry, and the smuggling of a virulent ‘bug’ out of the supposedly airtight security
of the labs. A colleague of Jimmy’s father speculates it was done on purpose to ‘drive up the
prices. Make a killing on their own stuff, that way … Two can play at that game’ concludes the
man; ‘“Any number can play,” said Jimmy’s father’.27 I’ll return to game and ‘numbers’ trope a
bit later. But ‘innocent’ mistakes of science and less innocent manipulations of it are consistently
dismissed as ‘real’ risks; after all, to ‘create an animal was so much fun … it made you feel like
God’.28 Those individuals who begin to challenge the nature of this kind work, protesting both
environmental and social risks, are not tolerated. Indeed they are silenced, often permanently.
Crake’s own parents are killed for being dissenters; first his father, who ‘accidentally’ drives off
a bridge; and then his mother, who, discovering what her husband was close to exposing, is
herself ‘accidentally’ infected by a hemorrhagic virus that more or less liquidates her.
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Closer to home for Jimmy: his own mother, a microbiologist, begins challenging the
ethics of what she, her husband and their colleagues are doing. When we meet her, she is a ‘stay
at home mom’ — probably not by choice, Snowman later realises. She’s despondent and bitter;
‘she [feels] like a prisoner’. Her fears and ethical objections are dismissed by her husband, who
believes she needs to ‘see someone,’ as clearly her ‘neurotic guilt’29 indicates there’s something
‘wrong’ with her: ‘Don’t think I haven’t suggest it,’ he says to a colleague who suggests therapy,
‘but she wouldn’t go. … She’s got her own ideas’.30 She does indeed, and one day she
demolishes both her husband’s and her own computers, and defects as it were, not to be seen by
Jimmy again until ‘the authorities,’ who interrogate him for years afterwards, show him a video
of his mother being executed. The greatest risk to the social system whose development this
novel outlines is the whistle-blower, as Beck notes — the one who brings to light the invisible
risks to society, insisting like Jimmy’s mother that ‘It’s wrong, the whole organization is wrong,
it’s a moral cesspool and you know it’ (56).31
Jimmy had overheard this accusation long ago, before, as he recalls, the month of March
was not ‘hot as hell’, the ‘punishing sun’ looking like a ‘hole burnt’ in the ‘bleached sky’; before
autumn leaves stopped turning colors, and rains came daily; before ‘the sea-level rose so quickly,
and there was that huge tidal wave’.32 Some people, the narrator tells us, had their doubts, despite
the claims of ‘glossy and discreetly worded’ OrganInc brochures and promotional materials, as
‘time went on and the coastal aquifers turned salty and the northern permafrost melted and the
vast tundra bubbled with methane, and the drought in the midcontinental plains regions went on
and on, and the Asian steppes turned to sand dune, and meat became harder to come by’.33 But
those doubts, evidently, were as far as things went; and the unresponsiveness to the obvious
environmental degradation brought on by climate change foreshadowed the lack of attention to
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obvious risks associated with genetic technologies. As Jimmy agonises over his own lonely
survival, he recalls how genetic manipulation of pigs, for the purpose of growing extra human
body parts, was explained to him once he was quote-unquote ‘old enough’. He wonders now,
how this had ever made any sense to him:
Old enough, Snowman thinks as he scratches himself … Such a dumb concept. Old
enough for what? To drink, to fuck, to know better? What fathead was in charge of
making those decisions? For example, Snowman himself isn’t old enough for this, this—
what can it be called? This situation. He’ll never be old enough, no sane human being
could ever …34
Thus begins the self-examination of his own blindness to the risks that were in front of
him, risks that some had identified. At first, his accusations lead only to denial: ‘“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 [says the narrator]. Even he isn’t convinced by it. But now
he’s weeping again’.35 Jimmy’s ‘theatrics’ here emphasise not simply a desire for absolution, but
also his contextualization of ‘this situation’ as ‘an historical drama’ directed by some unseen
hand, those ‘fatheads,’ presumably. Lacking control, he would absolve himself from personal
responsibility. But, this scene is a ‘bad performance’ because Jimmy already knows otherwise:
‘How could I have missed it?’ he asks himself later; ‘There had been something willed about it
though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and
then he had become one. He had shut things out’.36 Like Offred before him, Jimmy has worked
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at not thinking about climate change, genetic accidents, ‘escaped’ viruses, and moral cesspools.
‘We lived in the gaps between the stories’ concluded Offred; Jimmy similarly observes that
‘there are a lot of blank spaces’37 in his memory of ‘the time before,’ not because he’s forgotten
but because much of what was there to remember, he did not see, ‘turning a blind eye’.38 ‘There
were signs,’ he realises now, ‘There were signs and I missed them’39; ‘I listened, thought Jimmy,
but I didn’t hear’.40 While Jimmy cannot be blamed for being himself the “product” of this
structured ignorance, he cannot help but wonder whether he is not in some way responsible for
‘turning out’ as he did. As a child, we see that he was attentive, and saw things. The story of his
childhood describes the dulling of his faculties, not the refinement of them.
It is unfortunate that Jimmy’s mother didn’t stick around long enough to guide her child,
whose future she foresees. The abandoned Jimmy grows himself into a normal enough but
disaffected and inattentive teen, interested more in laying women than cultivating any ‘useful’
intellectual talent. His rudderless life is thus directed for him, and after graduation he ends up —
not being ‘a numbers person’ — at the arts-oriented Martha Graham Academy (‘named after
some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century’41), an institution that only verifies his
social irrelevancy among an elite class of technocrats:
The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered —
at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power — an archaic waste of time. Well,
then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its
defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless?
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Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete a book
was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.42
The Academy is simply a holding place these days for similarly unmotivated young people, its
mission having suffered a ‘kind of attrition — this erosion of its former intellectual territory’.43
Thus the classes in music, dance, acting, filmmaking and visual media are generally regarded by
Compound residents like Jimmy’s father as comparable to ‘studying Latin, or book-binding:
pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything, though every once in a
while the college president would subject them to some yawner about the vital arts and their
irresistible reserved seat in the big red-velvet amphitheatre of the beating human heart’.44
Tapping unwittingly into the vein of Wilde’s ironical epigrams (‘All art is quite useless’)
and of Burne-Jones’s declaration of unrepentant aestheticism (‘The more materialistic science
becomes, the more angels shall I paint’) Jimmy begins to apply himself. He majors in the art of
words, called ‘Problematics’ (nicknamed ‘Spin and Grin’) with classes in ‘Applied Logic,
Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and
Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology’. Hoping to train artsy young
people for some sort of useful function, Martha Graham touts its newly found ‘utilitarian aims’:
‘Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills, ran the motto underneath [Martha Graham’s]
original Latin motto, which was Ars Longa Vita Brevis’.45 Jimmy understands that his ‘risible
degree’ prepares him only for a trivial life, ‘Window-dressing … decorating the cold, hard,
numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage … The prospect of his future life stretched before
him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary
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subordinate clauses’.46 Nevertheless, or perhaps consequently, Jimmy develops during this time
‘a strangely tender feeling’ toward old words such as ‘wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine,
adamant … as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue
them’.47 The metaphor comparing words to parentless offspring of the imagination resonates
forward and backward in this novel, as Jimmy’s parents, one literally (his mother), one
figuratively (his father), abandon him; and as he finds himself, years later, dutifully looking after
the nonbiological offspring of his former friend, Crake.
Crake’s career develops entirely differently from Jimmy’s,48 though as adolescents they
spent the same countless hours watching snuff films, live executions, or pornography, and
playing complex on-line games, such as Extinctathon (‘Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named
the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones’),49 that foreshadow Crake’s future
aspiration to recreate a perfect form of humanity. Crake, a ‘numbers person’ par excellence, is
admitted to the Watson-Crick Institute, the Compounds’ top institution, where the next
generation of leading scientists, the real leaders of this 21st-century world, are trained. Compared
to Martha Graham, located in the Pleeblands, dismally down at the heels and ‘behind the times,’
Watson-Crick is ‘a palace,’ with ‘extensive grounds’ exhibiting genetically altered plants,
flowers, and even ‘living’ rocks or ‘neoGeologicals’;50 in fact, the institute is itself a ‘palace of
art,’ not simply of contemporary art, but visionary art. Crake’s beautifully appointed suite and
first-class class and lab facilities effectively reduce Jimmy, on his first visit, to feeling ‘more and
more like a troglodyte’,51 an historical anachronism along with the arts he studies.52
Crake’s research, on the other hand, is, literally, the future. His unit is called Paradice:
‘What we’re working on his immortality’.53 Crake considers ‘how much misery’ could be saved
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through genetic alternations that would eliminate sexual competition — programming ‘only pairbond[ing] for life, like gibbons,’ or else ‘total guilt-free promiscuity,’ behaviors that ‘would
always succeed,’ mankind could eliminate the ‘torment’ and violence that precipitate from
‘biological mismatches’.54 While the Pill of the twentieth century controlled reproduction, ‘the
Project’ of the twenty-first begins with the invention of the ‘BlyssPluss Pill,’ which would not
only ‘protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases’ and ‘prolong youth,’ but
would also ‘provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with a
generalised sense of energy and well-being, thus reducing the frustration and blocked
testosterone that led to jealousy and violence, and eliminating feelings of low self-worth’.55
Crake regards this as an ‘elegant concept’ that would not only quell any sense of unfulfilled
desire, sexual or otherwise, but reduce populations, save resources, and ‘confer large-scale
benefits’ not only on individual users and on ‘society as a whole,’ but ‘on the planet … it was
going to be global’.56 The perversity of this modest proposal is not lost on Jimmy, but his
languid will can do nothing to stop the slide down this slippery ethical slope. As Beck reminds
us, ‘[t]he center of risk consciousness is not in the present but in the future’.57 Jimmy’s
complacency means that his attention is never directed toward the future, but only on the present.
He is thus ‘immune’ from the rational fears that he might have had, projecting forward, just as he
is literally immune, thanks to Crake’s surreptitious inoculation, from the engineered virus that
exterminates everyone else.
By the time the novel opens Jimmy/Snowman is beginning to admit of his culpability:
Sleeping one night in a bed where ‘a dead man used to sleep,’ Jimmy muses that that man ‘never
saw it coming. He had no clue. Unlike Jimmy, who’d had clues, who ought to have seen but
didn’t’.58 This seems all the more reprehensible because Jimmy, once an outsider to the system,
18
is pulled in by Crake to work as the head of marketing and ‘wordserf,’ as writers are derogatorily
nicknamed. Jimmy’s own anachronistic interests in art and creative language are co-opted to
serve the interests of the ‘technological imagination’59 which takes over Crake’s vision of the
world. ‘The media’ are typically critical to the maintenance and ‘progress’ of the modern
ideological regimes, and this one is no exception, insofar as the media launch arguments
‘designed,’ like the products of technology themselves, to dispel the ‘counter-science’ of protest.
As Beck notes, ‘Good arguments, or at least arguments capable of convincing the public, become
a condition of business success. Publicity people, the ‘argumentation craftsmen’, get their
opportunity in the organization’.60 Jimmy takes up the opportunity, a betrayal to which he has
remained oblivious until now. Intimately familiar, for years, with Crake’s ideas and developing
sensibilities regarding humanity, nature, and human nature, Jimmy’s employment by Crake at his
company, AnooYoo, is, just for starters, a betrayal of the art he’d championed as the pinnacle of
‘human meaning,’ as opposed to the sciences.61 In realising this, Atwood according to Cooke
‘exposes a deeper seam at which the material and the semiotic meet: the biotechnological and
capitalistic manipulation of nature, technology, and the human’.62
It is not clear Snowman ever realises the depth of his betrayal of his mother, but he does
seem to recognise the depth of his complicity with Crake, whose final words to him before
dying, ‘I’m counting on you,’ haunt Snowman throughout the narrative. ‘I’m counting on you’
— Crake is still playing a numbers game, and he seems still to be winning. This late allusion to
‘the numbers game’ in this novel points to the fact that the scientists — the ‘numbers people’ —
also ‘play’ the numbers; ‘two can play at that game … any number can’ is our first, early
glimpse of the way the numbers people in this novel conceptualise what they do, and why they
do it. They take risks, because they want to win. The hazards are worth the reward: if not the
19
wealth accrued through corporate profitability, then the reward of civilization’s ‘progress’
through technology. Crake’s years of youthful on-line gaming in competition with various Grand
Masters around the globe prove not to be idle entertainment, as it is for Jimmie. Rather, it is his
gradual education in and mastery of an intricate game of ‘calculated’63 risk-taking and reward
that mimics the technological civilization he enters. Thus Snowman’s sad insight: Crake himself
— the master of the knowledge — embodied the greatest risk to mankind: the arrogant dismissal
of any notion of ‘hazard’ in the unchallenged ‘scientization of culture’64: ‘The whole world is
now one vast uncontrolled experiment — the way it always was, Crake would have said — and
the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate’.65 With characteristic irony, Atwood
symbolises this fact in the name of Crake’s compound, where his ‘second creation’ takes place: it
is called Paradice, spelled with a C, and thus it evokes the kind of aural or typographical pun that
Atwood enjoys. Crake’s ‘paradise’ is a ‘pair of dice,’ hazardous, a game of ‘hazards’.
Etymologically, the word ‘hazard’ comes from the Arab word for ‘a die’; it is a safe bet that
Atwood knows this. Taking on the hazards of innovation is the only way to ‘win,’ and ‘winning
meant you inherited a wasteland’.66 It was a bankrupt vision, after all.
III
Conclusion: ‘What are our saving graces?’
Atwood’s tropes of invisibility, ignorance and immunity throughout the novel point at her
central fear: In presenting a catastrophic vision of a society without ‘risk-consciousness,’ without
skepticism and doubt, the myth created by the system becomes the reality. We are all the way
back at Plato’s cave — though as Bounos suggests, the ‘dark comedy’ of this ‘bizarre postcatastrophe reality’ is itself a ‘grand game-like illusion’67 designed precisely to reveal the
illusions of reality produced by the technological myth of perfection. The mythological nature of
20
Crake’s project is nowhere better exemplified than in the stories Snowman invents about Crake
and his partner Oryx, both of whom elevates into godhood for the Crakers. By this time, though,
Jimmy has seen ‘the sciences’ monopoly on rationality … broken,’68 and the logic of his own
mythology falters; he can’t keep track any longer of the many lies he’s told to disguise the gross
immorality of the Crakers’ creator. From The Handmaid’s Tale to Oryx and Crake to The Year
of the Flood, Atwood consistently warns that some dreams are ‘overly optimistic projections of
[one’s] own mind. … How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were
merely a shimmering?’69
While Atwood notes that every novel begins with this question, ‘What if?’, her sense of
her own speculative project is to confront what she regards as an oncoming ‘perfect storm’ in
human history: the confusion of rationality and passion, of morality and egoism, of technology
and art: ‘The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re
already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop
us? … It’s not a question of our inventions — all human inventions are merely tools — but of
what might be done with them’.70 What if, in other words, there is no ‘promise’ in the future,
since we live, now, in an age of general ‘immiseration’71 and threat? As I’ve argued implicitly
throughout this essay, ‘responsibility,’ both individual and corporate, becomes therefore
Atwood’s great subject, creating texts that, Janus-like, look backward and forward, speculating
on both the obscure motives and even obscurer consequences of what has happened already, and
on what, in a possible future, could happen based on the footprints left by individual, as well as
by corporate, national, or global bodies. The protagonist of this speculative romance lives at that
temporal hinge, that edge of time at which ‘what exists and what might exist are windowed
together at the core of reality’.72 In a speculative romance, there can be no conclusive ending.
21
Atwood has commented that ‘I like to leave the endings open’73; but of Oryx and Crake she says,
more specifically, ‘I don’t know what Jimmy’s going to do, what he should do’.74
Atwood has lamented in post-9/11 interviews how easily we ‘hand over’ our own
political freedoms, and violate those of others, in the face of such inchoate enemies as, for
instance, ‘Islamic extremists’; how quickly we harden our vision of the world against ‘the other,’
and protect ourselves with the walls, literal and metaphorical, that we imagine will ensure our
safety. Thus the ‘blinders’ of Offred’s uniform; thus the many walls that obstruct free
movement, and the Wall that becomes the backdrop, literally, of Gilead’s reprisal against dissent.
Thus Crake’s bubble-dome compound, which he calls ‘Paradice,’ its walls and gates insulating
and isolating this center of power ‘from the roles of public inspection’.75 Indeed so close is
Atwood’s presentation of risk to Beck’s analytical model, that her narrator even records the
public’s desire for the times when ‘voting still mattered’. The novel’s citizens recognise too late
that their passive acquiescence to the political self-legitimation of technological society has
ceded their power to others. Like the handmaid Offred before him, Snowman now sees, too late,
what he looked at for years and didn’t see: the unwitting — or was it ‘witting’? — complicity to
a ‘perfect system’ that gradually undercut individual free will and social freedom in the interests
of corporate success and an energetic dedication to (technological) progress.
Atwood’s own narrative examination in her speculative trilogy of the duplicitous ethics
and politics of modern risk unconsciousness, and points to the ways in which capitalist and
scientific myths of progress, bolstered by promises of financial, technological, ‘and thus’ social
progress, undermine the very premises of objective science, blinding experts and laypersons
alike to the perception of possible or even likely negative consequences. With respect to climate
22
change as well as the other forms of gross and often grotesque manipulations of nature — such
as genetic engineering, Atwood warns against being ‘doomed by hope,’ as Crake puts it;76 that is,
doomed by an unexamined desire for ‘more and better’ that may ‘eventually overwhelm’77 our
own future, as it did the Snowman’s and Crake’s. If that happens, Atwood grimly proposes, the
fault will be our own, the privilege of ignorance having betrayed us by offering false images of
reality, and of what the future could, and should, look like. On the other hand, however, Atwood
does not regard herself as a utter pessimist: what her novels also show us is that cultivation of a
kind of reflexive modernity, one in which science’s essential skepticism is ‘turned on itself,’78
and in which the ‘circle of self-disempowerment and loss of credibility’ that creates victims of
the rest of us mere human beings — or ‘neuronormals’ as Crake calls us — is broken. Such
reflexivity, Adam and Van Loon remind us, ‘requires us to be meditative, that is, looking back
upon that which allows us to reflect in the first place’.79
I end by suggesting that through her examination of the epistemology of ignorance in the
context of gender tyranny in The Handmaid’s Tale, and in the context of the epistemological
‘tyranny’ of a corporatised regime of technology and scientific knowledge in Oryx and Crake,
Atwood points us toward the epistemological value of speculation itself to identify ‘potential
harm’.80 Beck reminds us that the temporal ‘not-yet’ of risk demotes the perception of such
possibilities to ‘fictions’ that can be dismissed as ‘improbable’ and thus somehow ‘untrue’; thus
unwanted criticism of or interference with risky ventures is often dismissed as ‘mere
speculation’. But that speculation is, of course, precisely what is needed to identify the true risks
of any innovation: it is willed foresight. Where social theory such as Beck’s can help us
‘transform ‘the language of risk’ from the ethos of calculation (and binary logic) to the ethos of
mediation,’81 for Atwood the critical next step is to ask how that mediation will take place:
23
‘What are our saving graces?’ (emphasis added). For this writer, of course, the answer has
always been, story telling, art — imaginary fictions that also represent ‘a certain kind of truth’
that cannot be discovered any other way, and that are inevitably tethered, if only loosely, to
social ‘facts’. 82
Atwood’s probing in Oryx and Crake of the growing schism between science and art,
between scientific and social rationalities, highlights her own consistently held conviction that
without an understanding of the situatedness of our own knowledge, we will never counteract the
blindnesses to risk that our ‘cultural climate of positivism’ as Adam and van Loon put it, creates.
It would be simply a mistake to say that Atwood, who likes to remind us she comes from a
family of scientists, is anti-science. Rather, she fears the ways in which science’s so-called
objectivity obscures its relationship to human desire, and to social and political structures. As
she has observed more than once, ‘It’s not biotech that’s dangerous … [i]t is people’s fears and
desires,’83 so strong is our society’s commitment to ‘particular establishments of expertise and
knowledge/power’ and thus to ‘[perpetuate] … the denial of the fundamental ambivalence and
indeterminacy of risk as something that has not yet happened’.84 Art and literature are products
of social rationality which enable us to imagine, and thus to see or reveal, the risks that the
technological imagination of corporatised science in particular strives, almost but not quite
inevitably, to keep invisible; as Grayson Cooke notes, this is a novel ‘in which the function and
value of language, rhetorical and otherwise, is consistently foregrounded’.85 Because art can
reframe issues of knowledge, truth, risk, it can offer, by speculating upon, different ways of
imagining the future, calculations based on emotional and ethical ‘data,’ the information
provided by subjective experience, rather than on the unchallenged myths of objective science.
Without the ‘play’86 of imagination within and among individuals, Atwood cannot imagine an
24
historical trajectory forward, and it is irresponsible to demean the imagination’s unique
accounting of the relationships between desire and reality.
Provoked recently by what she sees as a war against the arts by leaders of contemporary
culture, ‘politicians among them — [who] have done their best to finish [art] off,’ Atwood fired
off a fervent defense of art:
As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world. At first it
drove only the human world, which was once very small in comparison to the huge and
powerful natural world around it. Now we’re next door to being in control of everything
except earthquakes and the weather.
But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do
with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the
shadowy forms of thought and feeling — Heaven, Hell, monsters, angels and all — out
into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better
understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may
be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime or even a duty, but a necessity;
because increasingly if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.
Therefore, not farewell, dear reader/voyager, but fare forward.87
Even here, Atwood cannot resist a reminder of the double-edged sword that is the imagination:
source of visionary creativity, in the arts and sciences; source of dangerous projections and
25
misguided illusions of power. But Atwood rarely allows her readers to forget that art’s critical
role of mirroring back to us who we ‘really are’ is itself be realised only when society is free,
free enough, to permit artists a stab at getting to the truth’ as they see it, and when readers or
spectators are free and courageous enough to be guided on an artist’s journey through the
Heaven, or the Hell, that a work of art may reveal. Both kinds of freedoms are grounded by the
duty — the moral responsibility — each human being has, to understand how far we are from
heaven, and how close we are to ‘Hell, and all’. Because of this insistence on art’s affiliation
with ‘some kind of standard of humanity’ Atwood’s own stance has always been, and will
always be according to her, one of protest and speculation ‘which any such regime is going to
violate. They will violate it saying that it’s for the good of all, or the good of the many, or the
better this or better that. And the artists will always protest and they’ll always get shot. Or go
into exile’.88
While always assuming the risk of humanity’s failure, Margaret Atwood remains
staunch in her defense of humanity’s imaginative capacity to express ‘something that is true to
itself’ and offer thereby ‘a revelation of the full range of our human response to the world — that
is, what it means to be human, on earth. That seems to be what ‘hope’ is about in relation to art.
Nothing so simple as “happy endings” … An approach to perfection, if you like. Hope comes
from the fact that people create, that they find it worthwhile to create. Not just from the nature of
what is created’.89 For Atwood the ‘rapture’ of experience is the recognition of the absolute
necessity of the other, though Atwood remains, because of her simultaneously backward-andforward glances, ultimately more interested in the moral dimensions of individual character and
of political entities. Art’s promise is one way of being nowhere which can transform who, and
26
where, we are.
1
So the novel is characterised by my friend Ralph Goodman at the University of Stellenbosch,
whose own work on monstrosity and narrative made him a sensitive reader of an earlier draft of
this essay. Also, my thanks go to Deb Tollefsen (University of Memphis), and colleagues Nancy
Tuana and Susan Squier at Penn State University for their comments and encouragement as I
worked through the early stages of this paper.
2
L. Martin Alcoff, ‘Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types,’ in Race and Epistemologies of
Ignorance, N. Tuana and S. Sullivan (eds.), Albany, SUNY Press, 2007, p. 39.
3
Obviously key here is work by Robert Proctor and others in the collection Agnotology, R. N.
Proctor and L. Schiebinger (eds.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008. See esp. Proctor’s
opening essay, ‘Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Product of Ignorance (and
Its Study)’, pp. 1 – 36.
4
Note that even the words ‘cutting edge’ function as an ambiguous, if minor, trope in this novel
— not simply as the ‘edge’ that reveals something new, but also as a cutting edge that wounds. I
am interested in the connection between this trope, therefore, and recent theorizing about
‘edgework,’ or voluntary risk taking; see S. Lyng’s valuable summary, ‘Edge, Risk, and
Uncertainty’. In this context, it’s worth mentioning one theory, albeit a disputed one, of the
etymology of the English word ‘risk’: The ancient Greek ριζα means ‘cut from firm land’; later,
the Latin risicum came to mean ‘cliff’. Associated with this etymology is also a story:
Odysseus’s mythical encounter Charybdis, from whom he tries to escape at the cliffs of Scylla,
and where his ship was destroyed. By this etymological account, the original metaphorical
27
association of the word with ‘difficulties at sea’ is carried forward into various European
languages, at the beginning of the Renaissance (F. risque; G. Ryskco; Sp. riesco; It. risico), when
politics and economics pushed maritime exploration to the edges of the known world. The word
is thought to have come into English through Spanish or Portuguese, ‘where it was used to refer
to sailing into uncharted waters’ (see www.dnv.com/focus/risk_management/more_
information/risk_origin; also see J.-P. Dupuy, ‘Conceiving Extreme Events’ (2010), at
www.annales.org/re/resum-anglais/2009/anglais-re-57.html).
5
See essays by L. M. Alcoff (‘Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types’, pp. 39 – 58), A.
Bailey (‘Strategic Ignorance’, pp. 77 – 94) and L. Code (‘The Power of Ignorance’, pp. 213 –
230), all in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Also see B. H. Erickson, ‘The Structure of
Ignorance’, Connections, vol. 19 (1996), pp. 28 – 38.
6
U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans M. Ritter, 1986, London, SAGE
Publications, 2005, p. 34.
7
Ulrich Beck’s defines the term “social rationality” in opposition to scientific rationality. Thus
throughout this paper, the use of that term refers not to any sort of crass utilitarianism “Taylorist
project of rationalizing industry”, which Margaret Atwood would certainly not endorse. I am
grateful to Susan Squier for prompting me to clarify Beck’s use of the term, and for all of her
valuable suggestions for revision.
8
Risk Society, p. 58.
9
Risk Society, p. 58.
10
Risk Society, p. 60.
11
Risk Society, p. 184.
28
12
Risk Society, pp. 21 – 22.
13
Risk Society, p. 233.
14
Risk Society, p. 154.
15
Risk Society, p. 183.
16
Risk Society, p. 140.
17
Risk Society, p. 203.
18
Risk Society, p. 203.
19
Risk Society, p. 186.
20
M. Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale, New York, Random House, 1985, p. 56.
21
Handmaid’s Tale, p. 56.
22
Handmaid’s Tale, p. 57.
23
Handmaid’s Tale, p. 56.
24
Risk Society, p. 30.
25
Handmaid’s Tale, pp. 112 – 13.
26
Handmaid’s Tale, p. 262.
27
M. Atwood, Oryx and Crake, New York, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003, p. 18.
28
Oryx and Crake, p. 51.
29
Oryx and Crake, p. 57.
30
Oryx and Crake, p. 25.
31
It is interesting to note just here that Offred’s mother, an early activist against the ‘system’ of
sexism that ultimately becomes the state of Gilead, is also a kind of moral touchstone in that
novel. She too appears on film before her child, in a news clip Offred sees of the so-called
29
Colonies, where intransigents are sent to die a slow death from overwork and radiation
poisoning.
32
Oryx and Crake, pp. 89, 178, 11, 63.
33
Oryx and Crake, pp. 23, 24.
34
Oryx and Crake, pp. 23.
35
Oryx and Crake, p. 45.
36
Oryx and Crake, p. 184.
37
Oryx and Crake, p. 4.
38
Oryx and Crake, p. 260.
39
Oryx and Crake, p. 320.
40
Oryx and Crake, p. 342.
41
Oryx and Crake, p. 186.
42
Oryx and Crake, p. 195.
43
Oryx and Crake, p. 187.
44
Oryx and Crake, p. 187.
45
Oryx and Crake, p. 188.
46
Oryx and Crake, p. 188.
47
Oryx and Crake, p. 195.
48
On the ‘paired opposition’ of Jimmy and Crake, see: J. B. Bouson, ‘”It’s Game Over Forever”:
Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake’, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, vol. 39, 2004, pp. 140 – 42; D. DiMarco, ‘Paradice Lost, Paradise
Retained: Homo Faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake’, Papers on
Language and Literature, vol. 41, no. 2, 2005, pp. 179 – 181.
30
49
Oryx and Crake, p. 80.
50
Oryx and Crake, p. 200.
51
Oryx and Crake, p. 201.
52
Bounos discusses Atwood’s interest in ‘another trend in contemporary culture that she
envisions becoming deeply entrenched in the future: the trivialization of the creative arts’ in his
discussion of Jimmy’s and Crake’s schooling (‘Game Over’, pp. 145 – 46).
53
Oryx and Crake, p. 292.
54
Oryx and Crake, p. 166.
55
Oryx and Crake, p. 294.
56
Oryx and Crake, p. 294.
57
Oryx and Crake, p. 34.
58
Oryx and Crake, p. 276.
59
Risk Society, p. 180.
60
Risk Society, p. 32.
61
As S. Barzilai puts it, ‘the numbers man did a word-number on the humanist’ (‘’Tell My
Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet’,
Critique, vol. 50, 2008, p. 91). On the debasement of the arts and the troubled relationship
between science and marketing as word-craft, see G. Cooke, ‘Technics,’ pp. 111 – 18.
62
Cooke, ‘Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,’ Studies
in Canadian Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, p. 117.
63
On the theoretical connection between risk and ‘the numbers,’ see B. Adam and J. Van Loon,
The Risk Society and Beyond, p. 5: ‘The perception of risk entailed a particular relationship to an
essentially unknown future whose likelihood of coming about could nevertheless be calculated
31
on the basis of extrapolating from past occurrences: a calculated socio-cultural response to
potential anticipated happenings. Risk assessment and behaviour of this kind is a question of
mathematics irrespective of whether the risk is explicitly or implicitly calculated [Adam, 1995]’.
This is the conception of risk Crake understands; it is, however, a kind of risk calculation that no
longer works. This kind of modern risk is defined by Beck as a ‘structural condition of advanced
industralization’; as such, the hazards systemically produced ‘cannot be grasped through the
rules of causality, and cannot be safeguarded, compensated or insured against’. The numbers
game has new rules; the future is no longer ‘calculable’ (Risk Society, pp. 6 – 7).
64
Risk Society, p. 185.
65
Oryx and Crake, p. 228.
66
Oryx and Crake, p. 80
67
‘It’s Game Over’, 141.
68
Risk Society, p. 29.
69
M. Atwood, The Year of the Flood, New York, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009, p. 165.
70
M. Atwood, Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970 – 2005, London, Virago Press, 2005,
p. 323.
71
Risk Society, pp. 51 – 52.
72
This quotation comes from J. Winterson’s The PowerBook, New York, Vintage, 2000. See A.
Cole’s exploration of what I am calling the ‘Janus-like’ glance of this narrative backward and
forward — and of the way the novel ‘recalls a present which is, as yet, the reader’s future’ (‘In
Retrospect: Writing and Reading Oryx and Crake,’ Philament, vol. 6, 2005, p. 1
(www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament). Cole usefully refers to the novel’s method of
32
‘imaginary retrospect,’ and contrasts this method with that of Lauren Olamina, in The Parable
of the Talents (‘In Retrospect’, pp. 2 – 3).
73
M. Halliwell, ‘Awaiting the Perfect Storm’ in Waltzing Again: New and Selected
Conversations with Margaret Atwood, E. G. Ingersoll (ed.), Princeton, NJ, Ontario Review,
2006, pp. 261 – 62.
74
B. Bethune, ‘Atwood Apocalyptic,’ Maclean’s, vol. 116, 2003, p. 49.
75
On the ‘loss of function’ of the public in politics, a kind of ‘self-disempowerment,’ see Risk
Society, pp. 187 – 200 and pp. 225 – 28. Atwood herself asks the question, on the novel’s
elaborate website, ‘what would happen if the reins of progress slipped from our hands?’ (website
no longer accessible; quoted by Storey and Storey, http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index?id=607,
n.p.).
76
Oryx and Crake, p. 120.
77
Oryx and Crake, p. 295.
78
Risk Society, p. 232.
79
Risk Society and Beyond, p. 7.
80
Risk Society and Beyond, p. 2. In saying this, I am of course alluding to the famous, usually
derided, distinction that Atwood makes between science fiction and speculative fiction. For a
survey of responses to this distinction, see: Cooke, ‘Technics’, pp. 106 – 8 and 123.
81
Risk Society and Beyond, p. 2.
82
The Atwood quotation comes from her essay, ‘My Life in Science Fiction’, Cycnos, vol. 22,
2006, http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=616, n.p. Beck acknowledges the possibilities
of the imaginative arts to counteract epistemologies of ignorance by foregrounding, in the stories
33
and scenarios they construct, the political nature of wider social constructions of risk, not to
mention of objectivity and rationality. U. Heise carries Beck’s observation further in suggesting
that the fact that ‘representing’ risk to others means giving a shape to something ‘unreal,’ and
being able to tell a story about it. Therefore ‘a consideration of risk and the kind of narrative
articulation it requires has potentially important implications for the analysis of narrative form’
(‘Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel’ in The
Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction,
Champaign, Ill., Dalkey Archive Press, 2004, p. 263. Such implications may, and have, caused
writers and artists to consider modifying ‘established templates’ of risk scenarios — that is, such
genres as detective stories, the pastoral, the gothic, the bildungsroman, tragedy, even epic
(‘Toxins’, p. 275). This wonderfully provocative suggestion take me beyond the scope of this
essay, but Heise’s argument does play, I think, into Atwood’s insistence on ‘speculative,’ rather
than ‘science,’ fiction.
83
S. Louet, ‘Profile: Margaret Atwood’ in Nature Biotechnology, vol. 23, 2005
(www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v23/n2/full/nbt0205-163.html), n.p.
84
Risk Society and Beyond, p. 5.
85
Cooke, ‘Technics’, p. 105.
86
‘Play’-ful is a term Atwood uses to characterise the mind and the work of her friend and
contemporary, Angela Carter: ‘Perhaps play is the operative word — not as in trivial activity,
but as in word-play, play of thought, or play of light. Despite her skepticism, her down-to-earth
practicality, and an undertone of muted and sometimes fatalistic sadness, the imagination was
mercurial, multi-sided … She was born subversive, … [s]he had an instinctive feeling for the
34
other side, which included also the underside, and for the other hand, the sinister one’ (Curious
Pursuits, p. 156).
87
M. Atwood, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context,’ PMLA, vol. 119, 2004, p.
517.
88
M. Atwood, Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, E. G.
Ingersoll (ed.), Princeton, Ontario Review, 2006, p. 183.
89
Waltzing Again, p. 220. E. Ingersoll concludes elsewhere that ‘[a]s she [Atwood] becomes
more intensely concerned with the survival of the civilization that generates and celebrates art,
including her own writing, it ought to be no surprise that she will continue to find it difficult to
contain her fascination with what-if propositions within the confines of conventional fiction’
(‘Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake’, Extrapolation, vol. 45, 2004, pp. 174 –
75.