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M
argaret atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake is a dystopic and
satirical fable set in the aftermath of a biotechnological apoca-
lypse. A plague of horrific proportions, disseminated as a “Trojan
horse” virus hidden in a panacea sex pill, has liquefied most of the world’s
population, leaving the protagonist, Snowman, as the “Last Man” wandering
a landscape overrun by predatory phactory-pharmed GM hybrids and popu-
lated by a tribe of genetically engineered post-human noble savages.
When expressed concisely, the scenario of the novel appears hyperbolic.
Oryx and Crake is a text that mobilizes such a vast array of futurological
speculations and mythological and literary archetypes, however, that no
hyperbole is too absurd to describe it. Further, it is a text in which the
function and value of language, rhetorical and otherwise, is consistently
foregrounded.
The novel turns on a number of myths or archetypes. With the depic-
tion of cloned and genetically engineered life-forms and viruses comes the
Frankensteinian myth of ex-utero creation coupled with its Promethean twin
of forbidden knowledge and technology out of control. The ambiguity of
technoscience is foregrounded here, and the figure of the pharmakon — the
poison that is also a cure — works as a key theoretical index of this ambi-
guity. As is fitting for a post-apocalyptic novel, there is also the invocation
of the Last Man as survivor of the destruction and lone surveyor of all that
is left, and the figuring of the apocalypse as a cleansing renewal making
way for a millennial reign of peace. These myths are played out upon two
background frameworks: the framework of a biotechnological revisiting of
post-Cold-War eschatology; and the framework of a linguistic and literary
“magic” performed by capitalist producers upon willing consumers, and by
biotechnologists upon “nature.” Within these frameworks, the Last Man
is a survivor on two counts: he is a sole survivor of the destruction, but
106 Scl/Élc
* * *
The novel opens with Snowman living in a tree to avoid roaming packs of
“wolvogs” and other hybridized creatures. Both civilization and the environ-
ment have broken down, humanity has been reduced to a static tableau of toxic
corpses, and Snowman is left a scavenger, living off scrounged foodstuffs from
abandoned trailer parks, and avoiding the burning rays of an ozone-depleted
sun. Snowman also appears to act as caretaker to a group of naked innocents
called the Children of Crake. It slowly emerges that these “children” are the
biotechnological spawn of Crake’s massive R&D budget and the Paradice
Project, and that the genetically altered world Snowman lives in also came
about as part of that process.
Oryx and Crake 109
The book then begins to tell the story, in f lashback, of how all this
came about. It follows Snowman (a.k.a. Jimmy) through his life in the
Compounds, walled corporate precincts for the totalitarian biotech com-
panies that breed, amongst other organic contraptions, “pigoons” with extra
kidneys for xeno-transplantation. Early in his life, Jimmy befriends Crake,
a brilliant and somewhat diffident character whose intelligence and misan-
thropic ambivalence propel him quickly towards a career in the Compounds.
Crake later becomes the head of the top-secret Paradice Project housed in the
RejoovenEsense Compound, and it is this project that leads to the wholesale
breakdown of civilization and humanity that we witness at the opening of
the book. The book alternates between flashbacks to this past, and the pres-
ent, where Snowman undertakes a dangerous journey to the scene of the
crime, the Compound where Crake’s experiment began. The novel closes
with Snowman returning to his home to discover that he is no longer alone;
a few ragtag human survivors have made camp nearby, and he prepares to
either greet them or kill them, his fellow remnants of a defunct race.
With evident rhetorical glee, Atwood populates this biotechnological night-
mare with a number of satirical extrapolations from contemporary science and
multinational capitalism. Biotechnology and pharmaceutical giants with names
like HelthWyzer, OrganInc, and RejoovenEsense market a range of designer
drugs, happy pills, and cosmetic surgery make-over packages: HappiCuppa,
AnooYoo, NooSkin, BlyssPluss. Designer babies are ordered from Infantade,
Foetility, and Perfectababe. Simulated foodstuffs and the product of biotech-
nologically altered animals abound: “ersatz but edible” shrimp paste (272),
ChickieNobs Nubbins, SoyOBoy burgers and sardines. Laboratory-spliced
hyperanimals of all kinds roam freely: the snat, the pigoon, the rakunk, the
wolvog. In all, the world depicted is a fully altered world, and a fully alterable
world. This is a post-genomic world, a world in which genomic sequencing
is something that has already been surpassed, and that presents no barriers to
science. At the same time, this “high science” is echoed in a “low science”
that results in the aforementioned artificial foodstuffs. Hybridization, muta-
tion, and simulation are the primary orders of the day, and these logics are
threaded through culture and science at all levels.
Geopolitically, the world of the novel is divided into the producers and
the consumers, the “kings and dukes” (28) who oversee and control the pro-
cess of production, and the seething masses of the general public. Vaguely
reminiscent of a feudal monarchist state (I think of Prince Harry escap-
ing the castle and slumming it with Falstaff and the whores), this world
110 Scl/Élc
also invokes similar divisions in recent science fiction, such as the division
between the “Multis” and the “Glops” in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It.
Atwood manifests this divide between rich and poor, haves and have-nots,
in the splitting of urban environments into the Pleeblands — places of filth,
disease, poverty, bioterror, and chaos — and the Compounds — walled,
secure, tightly-controlled and policed districts of biotechnological and cap-
italist production.
The Pleeblands, once called “cities,” are characterized as places of unrule,
of chaos, of a dangerous, cloying multiplicity and plurality: “Asymmetries,
deformities: the faces here were a far cry from the regularity of the
Compounds. There were even bad teeth” (288). Even images of artistic
and self-expression are, here, made to appear as mutations, as if the desire
to express oneself artistically (as opposed to biotechnologically) is in some
way a maladaption. Indeed, mutation and pollution are the overriding fac-
tors of Pleebland life; manufactured bio-agents that liquefy their victims
circulate freely; visitors from the Compounds are encouraged to inoculate
themselves before entering, and to wear ‘nose cones’ to filter out microbes
and particulate matter; sexuality in the Pleeblands is open, raw and licen-
tious; prostitution and nudie bars abound.
There is the sense of a post-human bazaar economy, reminiscent of the
street scenes in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); there are cosmopol-
itan, clamouring spaces rich with variety, fecundity, sexuality, intrigue, and
the fluid exchange of biocapital: “There was so much to see — so much
being hawked, so much being offered”; “People come here from all over the
world — they shop around. Gender, sexual orientation, height, colour of
skin and eyes — it’s all on order, it can all be done or redone” (288, 289).
The isolation and free exchange of biological elements that are characteristic
of much biotechnological research, and their increasing particularization
and thus commodification, have reached an apotheosis in this society. The
Pleeblands are also both a testing ground or live-in laboratory for biotech-
nological and pharmaceutical possibilities, and an index of the changing
state, and status, of the “human,” given such great possibilities for modifica-
tion across all strata of biological being: epidermic, psychic, and genetic. In
the same way that biotechnological practices of “pharming” use the body
as a factory for the production of elements for xeno-transplantation, the
laboratory, here, moves out of its traditional confined space and into the
biosphere. The “experimental way of life” that Donna Haraway situates at
the root of the scientific laboratory is “liberated” in Atwood’s text, and set
Oryx and Crake 111
to run on automatic in the world at large (Haraway 15): “The whole world
is now one vast uncontrolled experiment … and the doctrine of unintended
consequences is in full spate” (Atwood 228).
The Compounds, on the other hand, are safe, controlled, biologically
monitored, and secure, and what they produce is done under the guise of an
altruistic desire to better human life. They represent the height of corpora-
tized, technoscientific, biotechnological culture. “CorpSeCorps” security
personnel patrol the borders, interrogate visitors, and investigate untoward
occurrences and suspicious persons. There is a distinctive lack of criticism,
or of a plurality of viewpoints; indeed, any dissenting voices that are heard
in the novel are usually heard posthumously, as a suicide turns into a murder
and rumours spread about what they knew and who knew that they knew.
In a speculative fashion, this scenario is a manifestation of the 1990s scene
in the United States that Donna Haraway describes in Modest_Witness:
The spectrum of science policy discourse in the United States in the
1990s makes even mentioning such things [as democratic participation
in technoscience or engaging in debates in education about science and
technology] appear to be evidence of hopeless naïveté and nostalgia for a
moment of critical, public, democratic science that never existed. (94)
The Compounds encapsulate corporate “yes” culture in a spatial metaphor
of bringing together into one place all those who have “opted in,” who have
internalized the goals, truth, and ethics of the company as their own, and
excluding or expelling everything that is threatening to this homeostasis.
The distinction between Pleeblands and Compounds turns on the way
in which biotechnological or manufactured agents and products are treated
and represented. The “hostile” bioforms of the Pleeblands are considered
quite distinct from the “friendly” bioforms of the Compounds: the pigoons,
calmly and benevolently producing superfluous human kidneys in their
bodies; the BlyssPluss pill and the NooSkin makeover, legitimate solutions
to “medical” problems. The Pleeblands are not “productive” in the same
way as the Compounds; they deal in revolt and disease, their “splices” are
destructive, not therapeutic. Another distinction on which the difference
between the Pleeblands and the Compounds turns is that between the arts
and science, in which the arts are debased through their association with
linguistic verbiage and ad copy, and the sciences are associated with the lofty
aims of rearranging the “building blocks of life” for capital gain.
Of course, there is a satirical dimension to the manner in which the dis-
tinctions between Pleebland and Compound are drawn up that renders them
112 Scl/Élc
fields, they function under the same set of cultural connotations (relations to
progress, development, the problematics of disease and death), and a strik-
ingly similar investment in the promise and in imagined futures or the virtu-
al. Donna Haraway unites these industries under the name “technoscience,”
reminding us to see the technical practices at the core of so much that hap-
pens today in the name of “science,” “medicine,” “health,” and “progress”:
“Technoscience extravagantly exceeds the distinction between science and
technology as well as those between nature and society, subjects and objects,
and the natural and artifactual that structured the imaginary time called
modernity” (3). Haraway’s technoscience is an important touchstone, as she
explicitly positions it as an ongoing material-semiotic or science-fictional
strategy of combination and category (con)fusion, a strategy of supplemen-
tarity, of the pharmakon.
Reflecting on the pharmakon in terms of contemporary society and its
fascination with medical science and a pharmaceuticalized lifestyle provides
an interesting context for understanding the ambiguous status of Crake’s
technoscience. In contemporary culture, questions regarding “what is a dis-
ease?” and “what is a cure?” are increasingly complex and even absurd given
the tight integration of, for instance, pharmaceutical companies and their
branding/marketing firms, not to mention the demands to maximize profit
placed on public companies by shareholders (questions of profit/loss, and
cost/benefit, are equally rendered absurd in this scenario). The documentary
Selling Sickness (2004) details the way in which pharmaceutical companies
such as GlaxoSmithKline are increasingly designing not only drugs to aid
in the treatment of “disorders,” but disorders themselves.
One of the world’s leading anti-depressants, Paxil, manufactured by
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), greatly expanded its markets by promoting
the drug for a range of new psychiatric conditions. Shyness is thus
transformed into “Social Anxiety Disorder” (SAD), constant worry has
become “Generalized Anxiety Disorder” (GAD) and premenstrual ten-
sion is now “Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD).
(SBS Television)
This medicalization of fringe aspects of “normal” life, coupled with the
pharmaceuticalization of ever-larger numbers of the populace (the film notes
that up to twenty-five percent of the U.S. population could be considered
candidates for Social Anxiety Disorder according to GSK’s definition of
the condition), points to a powerful codetermination of disorder and cure,
drug as remedy and drug as poison at the same time, in one and the same
114 Scl/Élc
drug; moreover, the identification of the “patient” — that is, the being who is
poisoned — is enacted in the same moment, in one and the same movement,
in which a market is identified and constructed.
The BlyssPluss pill Crake develops provides the simplest manifestation
of this logic. As Crake explains to Jimmy, BlyssPluss is to be marketed on
three characteristics: it will “protect the user against all known sexually
transmitted diseases,” “provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual
prowess,” and prolong youth (294). It is an all-purpose sexual cure-all. A
final characteristic Crake describes, which is not to be made public, is that
BlyssPluss would also sterilize the user, “thus automatically lowering the
population level” (294). Crake reminds Jimmy of the population problems
the world is now facing: “As a species we’re in deep trouble, worse than
anyone’s saying. They’re afraid to release the stats because people might just
give up, but take it from me, we’re running out of space-time” (295). This
characteristic too appears as a “cure,” although for a different ill. This pill,
which of course “sells itself,” is at the same time designed with a different
purpose in mind; the wholesale destruction of the human race. Having been
marketed worldwide, when the virus in the pill is activated, a global pan-
demic emerges as in any fantasy of global outbreak, complete with outbreak
centres dotting world maps with red flashing lights: “Then the next one hit,
and the next, the next, the next, rapid-fire. Taiwan, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia,
Bombay, Paris, Berlin. The pleeblands west of Chicago. The maps on the
monitor screens lit up, spackled with red as if someone had flicked a loaded
paintbrush at them” (324). Even this poison is, for Crake, a kind of cure for
the malaise of humanity as such. The sentences he makes with his fridge
magnets, which through the novel provide an index of his current preoccu-
pations, turn distinctly metaphysical and open-ended towards the end of the
book: “To stay human is to break a limitation”; “I think, therefore” (301).
Crake’s misanthropy — “We’re hormone robots anyway, only we’re faulty
ones” (166) — and his analysis of human frailty — the pettiness, addictions,
emotional entanglements, violence, and urges he reduces human beings
to — is solved by the two-part move of destroying the current human race
and introducing the “Children of Crake” from the Paradice Project as the
perfected “human” inheritors of the world.
Crake is a kind of bioterrorist of the inside, a pharmakeus who leads all
who follow him into opposition with themselves. He works within the sys-
tem of the corporates, but maintains an unpredictable streak of calculating
anarchy that allows him to be both inside and outside, poison and cure at
Oryx and Crake 115
the same time. Crake, who so perfectly manages to play the corporate game
that he is given an almost unlimited R&D budget for his Paradice Project,
ultimately wishes to rewrite all the rules of the human condition and begin
again with Version Two of the Human. Behind air-locks and locked doors,
in the secure heart of the Compound, and under the very noses of the
RejoovenEsense top brass, Crake builds the future of the human, and pre-
pares for the extinction of Version One, fervently engineering the end of the
society that feeds and maintains both the Compounds and the Pleeblands.
* * *
them, like hares and rabbits, to recycle their own feces two or three times a
week. Other convenient and biologically determinist splices involve borrow-
ing mating rituals from the baboons, and “the expandable chromosphores
of the octopus” (164). Through Crake’s reductionist technoscience, and
through the cut-and-paste naming strategies for the outcomes of biotech-
nological splicing, the function and power of language is explicitly linked
to the practices of technoscience and bio-informatics.
From a slightly different angle, there is a conflation made between gen-
etic diversity and linguistic diversity, or between race and language. Part of
the biotechnological eschatology that informs the book is the idea that with
the death of the human race comes the death of language. This is an idea
that is not uncommon in post-apocalyptic texts, generally figured within
a cold-war, nuclear scenario. For instance, Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley
Walker is written in a broken-down, post-apocalyptic pidgin English: “On
my naming day when I come 12 I gone fornt spear and kilt a wyld boar he
parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben
none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen” (Hoban
1). After the end of civilization and the decimation of humanity through
a nuclear war, survivors must rebuild not merely their technological infra-
structure, but their linguistic, cultural, and mythic infrastructure as well.
Scavengers for food and technology, the survivors must also be linguistic
scavengers, constructing new myths out of the remnants of old ones. The
language of the desert-children in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
evinces the same mixture of pidgin-English and reworked cultural myth.
Without going to the extremes of Riddley Walker or Mad Max, Atwood suf-
fuses her book with the sense of a lament for language, for words, and for
the creative endeavours conducted with words. At the opening of the book,
Snowman sits in his tree, trying to remember the sources and meanings of
phrases that pop into his head unbidden: “‘In view of the mitigating,’ he says.
He finds himself standing with his mouth open, trying to remember the rest
of the sentence” (5). Throughout the book, there is a constant sense that
language is slowly slipping away from him. He recites litanies of archaisms
to himself, reminding himself that he is the final archive and repository of
language and all that this entails: “‘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” (68).
Similarly, born in the relative vacuum of the laboratory, and bereft of
Oryx and Crake 121
Note
1
These quotations are taken from “spam” e-mail marketing messages I received during
2002-2003.
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