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Ana Olos:

MARGARET ATWOOD’S ORYX AND CRAKE

When the Frankfurt book fair concentrates an international participation of great writers, the capital of Germany has to offer its lovers of literature unique events as well. Thus, on the night of October 10, 2003, Margaret Atwood appeared beautiful, and brilliant to the audience eagerly waiting for her in the conference room of the Ethnographic Museum from Dahlem-Dorf, Berlin. The most famous Canadian author had been invited by Schleicher’s bookshop for the launch of the translation into German of her latest book Oryx and Crake. The host of the event was visibly crushed by the honour to present a potential Nobel prize winner as he would later say.

Margaret Atwood introduced her book stating that it begins, like the Illiad - among others - in the middle of the story, but in no other way similar to it. The protagonist, Snowman - re-named after he had been formerly Jimmy - comes down from a tree and is surrounded by the Crakers, a new species of beings: innocent, very beautiful, of various colours, intermittently monogamous, “seasonal” as certain parts of their body turn blue when they are ready to mate, something that happens only each fourth year. They can heal by purring like cats that produce ultrasounds with frequencies used in therapy as proven by scientists. The fragment the author began with (entitled “Flotsam” in the book) illustrated the relationship between Snowman - the dirty, smelly, man, wearing a baseball cap - and the Crakers who had found “things from before” (also “flotsam”) and wanted to know whether they hurt, because they feared the “booby traps from the past”. Then, the Crakes wanted to take a better look at the bearded old man because, as they had never seen snow and did not know what a snowman was like. Snowman, seemingly the last representative of a world destroyed by some cataclysm, explained his otherness patiently, the way one talks to children.

The excerpts in German, read by Carmen Maja Antoni from the Berliner Ensemble, were about the “past”. First, she “interpreted” Snowman’s memories (in teenagers’ jargon) of his student days at Martha Graham Academy. The audience reacted laughing, the way another audience had done it just a week before, when, on the anniversary of Germany’s unification, Christa Wolf had read from her latest book, A Day in the Year, at the Berliner Ensemble.

Introducing a new fragment, Margaret Atwood told about nowadays surprising genetic experiments that have allowed the appearance of phenomenal creatures such as the luminous green rabbit, very much like a jelly fish, “created” at the request of a magician who wanted to impress his audience while performing his act in complete darkness. Then she read another touching piece with the Crakes asking questions, quoted a poem, and ended with Snowman’s definition of “toast”, a parody of our way of explaining things to children, much enjoyed by the public.

The following excerpt in German, about the Watson-Crick institute of genetic experiments, was in the same jocose tone, making the audience laugh. On request, Maja read about the BlyssPluss Pill made at the institute, one of those “miraculous” pharmaceutical products whose advertisements spam our mail every day. The funny thing was that I actually had in my handbag some such “plus” pills - well, only to enhance my fading memory -, but I suspect I had not been the only one who was taking one or another kind of “plus” pills.

The second part of the evening was reserved for “discussions”. The host from the bookshop monopolised the right to ask most of the questions. He insisted on the continuity between The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, and wanted to know why Margaret Atwood wrote those dystopias. The author patiently explained that she writes books because she cannot resist writing them, because the idea does not go away, and quoted Edmond Hillary’s saying he had climbed that peak in the Himalayas just “because it was there”. As if discretely counteracting the host’s insistently calling the book as a dystopia, the writer stressed that neither The Handmaid’s Tale nor Oryx and Crake contained anything that could not be supported by facts. Asked about the difference between “satire” and “dystopia”, Margaret Atwood said that she was not even sure whether the book could be defined as a satire, for in order to write a satire you have to be quite away from reality. To support her affirmation, she mentioned Bill McKibben’s book on genetic engineering, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. It was published simultaneously with Oryx and Crake, and though about real scientific experiments, could be read as a satire by the outsider. It is very hard to write satire in the traditional sense or about scientific experiments - she said - for when the book comes out, somebody has already done it.

Margaret Atwood traced back her interest for science to her family environment. She grew up among biologists, her father had been an early conservationist ecologist, her brother - a doctor, and now, her nephews also work in sciences or engineering. Therefore most discussions in the family - even around the table at Christmas - are on scientific topics and though herself is “the black sheep of the family” she has “to keep her hand in”. Had she followed the family tradition, she should have been “cloning potatoes” now, instead of writing books. Along such family discussions she realised that scientists are rather skeptical concerning the future of mankind, as you cannot take away one part of Nature putting back nothing instead. Still, Oryx and Crake is by no means against science. It is based upon facts, research, and information stored along the years. (I thought of the long list of acknowledgments at the end of the book and the invitation to visit the web site on Oryx and Crake). As concerns utopias, Margaret Atwood thinks that since the 19^{th century, the old type of utopias - about making things perfect - are not believed in any more. Societies have changed and people are not very good at making heaven, though they are very good at making hell.}

The members of the audience were rather shy about asking questions. Maybe not all of them had read the book yet. A general question about the difference between American and Canadian literature got a general answer and two anecdotes. To learn more about writers’ opinions concerning the process of creation, Atwood recommended her Negotiating with the Dead, published in 2002. On the spot, she gave a memorable image of the way a book is born in her mind, as the vision of a village on a hill seen from the distance, an interesting place to visit. The closer you get the more complicated things become, something that applies perfectly to the reading of her books, the more so to Oryx and Crake.

Although that night I discovered new dimensions of the writer and her work, I could not forget my initial reception of Oryx and Crake and my associating it with Bernard Shaw’s “unpleasant plays”. The presence of the actress from Brecht’s play was a subtle supplementary reinforcement of the idea that the book contains a lot of food for thought.

Two Epigraphs - a double hook to catch the reader with

I had thought of the epigraphs and their importance before seeing the questions for discussion on McClelland’s web site of the book. But the importance and meaning of the epigraphs become more evident only after the reading the whole book.

The first epigraph - from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels - suggests that the writer’s “principal design” is to inform and not to amuse relating “plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style”, i. e. to offer facts instead of a “strange improbable tale”. The second epigraph - from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse - establishes ironically the connection between modern times and the Enlightenment, the temporal gap suggesting both the similitude and difference between the “age of reason” and the scientific mind of the twentieth century. In a quite different tone than Swift, with interrogative sentences - that at re-reading suggest the naive amazement of Crake’s children when they question Snowman about the past -, the motto from To the Lighthouse shows consternation at the irrational behaviour of those who had led the world to a catastrophe: “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of the tower into the air?” (One should not forget that the much awaited boat trip to the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s book comes after the war and the protagonist’s death.)

The first surprise at reading the epigraphs comes from the pairing of the two authors, that contrasts the male voice of “reason” with the poetic female voice of “intuition”. This creates a high-strung tension in the reader’s expectations. If one thinks of the two authors’ biographies, there is a story of psychic depression with both. Swift, the rational, satirical writer, was not only a member of the Scriblerus Club but also a financial experimenter struck by the stock exchange disaster of the South Sea Bubble. He ended in disgust with humanity and insanity. But the violent pamphleteer had also written letters in baby-language to Stella and, later on, poems for Vanessa. Though quoted as a utopian writer (situating one of his imaginary worlds in British Columbia), he is paradoxically read nowadays as a writer for children. Had he lived in the 20th century, he could have ended as Jimmy, alias Snowman.

Virginia Woolf, due to her time’s prejudices against women, was deprived of the academic education given to her brothers, had been the victim of child abuse, and was terrified by the war. All these affected her mental stability and made her finally commit suicide rather than live through another epoch of chaos. But she was also an excellent literary critic, publisher and promoter of great writers like Joyce and Eliot. Today she is most valued by feminists for her A Room of One’s Own. Had she been born later, in a third world country, she could have ended as Oryx.

Snowman / showman /shaman /sham

Why did Margaret Atwood chose “Snowman” as a second name for her main character? Is it because we have all experienced the sadness at the sight of our own snowman’s gradual degradation? Or is it rather because Aboriginal people have lots of words for naming snow? A book on Canadian folklore tells that the Sasquatch / Bigfoot - a wild ape-man of the woods - is one of the two current embodiments in the North American monster lore on the West Coast. The other is the Ogopogo. As the latter has given rise to the Ogopogo Serendipity Society (Fowke 260), and “serendipity” is one of the “old” words obsessing Margaret Atwood’s Snowman, the allusion to his being a monster is evident. (One cannot but remember Margaret Atwood’s essay on monsters as part of the Canadian imagination.) Sasquatch is the same with the internationally known Yeti or the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (Fowke 252). Margaret Atwood sets the beginning of her book on a sea shore, perhaps as an allusion to the catastrophe of global warming, witnessed by her while on a boat in the Arctic where she wrote several chapter of Oryx and Crake. (www. mcclelland...)

There are two main stages in the character’s development. First, he is Jimmy, living with his scientist parents in an experimental Compound (OrganInc Farms). His mother, realising the disastrous consequences of their work refuses to go on and defects, not before Luddite-like destroying their computer. Since then, Jimmy has been exposed to the permanent supervision and the pressure of the CorpSeCorps - the private security forces. Crake, the exceptionally intelligent but also traumatized boy, whose scientist father had been driven into death by the same security forces, takes Jimmy’s mother’s place. In comparison with Crake:

“Jimmy was a mid-range student, high on his word scores but a poor average in the numbers columns. [...] If he had been from a Module school, or - better - from one of those dump bins they still called “the public system”, he’d have shone like a diamond in a drain. But the compound schools were awash in brilliant genes, none of which he’s inherited from his geeky, kak-hearted parents, so his talents shrank by comparison. Nor had he been given any extra point for being funny.”(174)

The system of streaming separates the two friends. Jimmy qualifies only for the “humanist” Martha Graham Academy, while Crake is “bought” by an elite institution for “brainiacs”. Jimmy’s best chance at graduation is to work in advertising and, later on, Crake will use him in the promotion campaign of the BlyssPluss Pill. His family environment, the education received in special schools, video games, Net surfing, and his friend’s influence will finally turn Jimmy into the “abominable Snowman”. Jimmy acquires his new identity after having killed Crake in revenge for his lover’s death but also in self-defense. He adopts this “dubious label” - Snowman - breaking one of Crake’s rules according to which “no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent - even stuffed, even skeletal - could not be demonstrated.”(8) He even enjoys to identify with “the Abominable Snowman - existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward pointing footprints” (8) Though a monster himself, he gets heroic dimensions in his own eyes as a monster-slayer. In the reader’s mind, the location of Snowman on the sea coast and his appetite for fish are reminding of Hemingway’s Old Man and his heroic fight with the huge fish. The postmodern old man seems to have exhausted any desire for great deeds, expecting the “children” to feed him in a fake ritual. In comparison with the innocent children of Oryx and Crake, he is the voice of experience. As he is the only one with a memory and remembrances, his motto might be “Je me souviens.” He can pretend to be both shaman and civilizing hero - the one who knows the route back, as described by Eliade (275) - , because he had led the children out from Crake’s “Paradice” in order to save them. Only he knows that truth that the “bubble-dome” is the place of an endgame, the scene of murder. But his “ritual journey”, instead of a pilgrimage - though dangerous -, is that of a scavenger of the deserted cities in search of food for his survival.

When the Crakers want a story in exchange for every slaughtered fish, Snowman, knowing the laws of barter (“Well, I owe them, Snowman thinks.”), becomes their mythmaker. He produce parodies, mixtures of myths and scientific theories (like his story about the initial chaos), first orally then “scribbling”. Snowman’s “invocation”, uttered under his breath, is: “God of Bullshit, fail me not.”(102) Though he knows that he is only a sham (instead of a shaman), he still continues to lie, the way politicians do: “Right, says Snowman. Is there no end to this shameless invention? He feels like crying. [...] Their adulation of Crake enrages Snowman, though this adulation has been his own doing. The Crakers, who have accepted his “beastly appetite” and his “monstrousness” (101) are still “praising his fabrication, a fabrication not unmixed with spite: Crake was against the notion of God, or of gods of any kind, and would surely be disgusted by the spectacle of his own gradual deification.”(104) At times, Snowman becomes pathetic, like the wolf in folk tales: “I’m your past, he might intone. I’m your ancestor, come from the land of the dead. Now I’m lost, I can’t get back, I’m stranded here, I’m all alone. Let me in!” The reader is tempted to hear also the echo of another... Wolf, with his You can’t go home again. Making allowances, there is another possible interpretation of Snowman:

“Maybe he’s not he Abominable Snowman after all. Maybe he’s the other kind of snowman, the grinning dope set up as a joke and pushed down as an entertainment, his pebble smile and carrot nose an invitation to mockery and abuse. Maybe that’s the real him, the last Homo Sapiens, a white illusion of a man, here today, gone tomorrow, so easily shoved over, left to melt in the sun, getting thinner and thinner until he liquefies and trickles away altogether. As Snowman is doing now. He pauses, wipes the sweat off his face, drinks half of his bottle of water. He hopes there will be more somewhere soon.” (224-25)

Willy-nilly, Snowman’s showmanship has to end when he discovers, like another Robinson Crusoe, the footprints in the sand, realising that he is actually not the Last Man in history - as he might have thought inspired by Fukuyama’s book. He is just one of the survivors of the epidemics created by the BlyssPluss Pill project, just one of those who had taken the antidote to be protected. Watching the Crakers who have already invented art and have a leader, too, Snowman has to admit that history repeats itself. As the narrator suggests, Snowman’s function is to serve as “a reminder to these people, and not a pleasant one, he’s what they may have been once”. (106) Or shall we say that he is what we are?

Jimmy/Snowman is a re-embodiment of the typical character of the comic epic in prose, the funny, sensuous, middle class man, guided mainly by his survival instinct, a Leopold Bloom in the advertising business a century later or, to quote a poetic variant, a kind of new Apeneck Sweeney.

The artificial paradise of Watson Crick ( a garrison?) and the Projects

The Watson-Crick Institute - a kind of new Lagado -, where Crake works, is named after the Canadian born John Broadus Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, and Francis Crick who, author of Man and his Future (London, 1963), had suggested a tax on children. (Maynard Smith 167) The location of the institute outside the “pleeblands”(the cities) corresponds to the postindustrial tendency to leave the metropolis, as Mircea Eliade had shown, and “to seek refuge in the suburbia - luxurious and peaceful neighbourhoods arranged with utmost care in paradisiacal landscapes”.(269) This is - says Eliade further on - a metamorphosis of the American millennarist ideal, connected to the eschatological mission of attaining once again the perfection of early Christianity and restoring paradise to earth” (269). The institute mascot is the bronzed statue of the spoat-gider, the goat-spider that had been created at the turn of the century in Montreal as a producer of raw material for bulletproof vests, and this would be one of the few open references to Canada in the book. Margaret Atwood’s mordant irony makes the readers aware - if they hadn’t already been - of those “wonderlands” of simulacra re-produced all over the world as outposts of the global village. The “earthly paradise” of Watson-Crick is a security-walled artificial garden with “beautiful” grounds, the work of the “JigScape Faculty”, and plants created by the students in “Botanical Transgenics (Ornamental division)”. In order to defend this world, there are strict security measures and permanent supervision, reminding of garrisons. The institute - as a self-contained unit - may recall also Plato’s Republic, the more so as its community is divided into three classes - in which we may recognise the division of nowadays world as well - : the invisible managers, corresponding to Plato’s husbandmen, the scientists/specialists as the former craftsmen, and the guardians who protect the “brainiacs” and their achievements. But, as Lewis Mumford commented during the sixties on an idea “least palatable” to the science-oriented generation of his time:

“abstract intelligence, operating with its own conceptual apparatus, in its own self-restricted field, is actually a coercive instrument: an arrogant fragment of the full human personality, determined to make the world over in its own over-simplified terms, wilfully rejecting interests and values incompatible with its own assumptions, and thereby depriving itself of any of the cooperative and generative functions of life - feeling, emotion, playfulness, exuberance, free fantasy - in short, the liberated sources of unpredictable and uncontrollable creativity.” (10)

The two main achievements of the institute, the Pill and the Project, are linked: “The Pill would put a stop to haphazard reproduction, the Project would replace it with a superior method. They are two stages of a single plan you may say.”(304) Both appear as if continuations of the 19th century Oneida community experiments in profitable business on the one hand, and in eugenics, on the other hand. The Pill, as the principal “money-spinner”, works the way the Oneida community implemented their idealistic principles by selling traps for killing animals. (Loockwood186). Perhaps this had triggered another satirical interpretation of the Oneida, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, in which, one of the community’s founders, Dr. Noyes, appears as impersonating Noah. The three-in-one BlyssPluss Pill, designed at the RejoovenEssence unit, though with a deadly virus embedded in it, is advertised as a panacea, meant to satisfy the American cult of health and youth characteristic to their utopian vision (discussed also by Eliade 268).

Besides the two main researches, there are many other, reflecting nowadays “project” craze, apparently stimulating creativity, but mostly for getting financial support from national or international foundations and institutions. Among the student projects, there is the so-called “Moses Model” for “dependable supplies of fresh drinking water in times of crisis” whose slogan is “Just Hit it With a Rod”, a memorably funny example. (200) The “ NeoAgriculturals” create “chicken parts” to have only the desired food without waste, a reversal of the pigoons project of the OrganInc Farms producing multiple organs for transplants. The laboratories of “BioDefences” have created the “wolfogs”, dogs that look nice but are dangerous. While leading his friend on the tour of “wonders”, Crake offers also his philosophical thoughts: “Nature is to Zoos as God is to churches.” The walls are there “Not to keep us out but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” (206)

Crake the superscientist and his hubris

The former Glenn turned into Crake, not forgetting that his father had been killed by the security forces, seems at the beginning to try to outwit the system. But, as a result of his becoming a member of the “chosen” people - the scientific elite -, he is determined to pursue his own “utopian”, “perfectionist” projects by any means. Crake’s project to create a new race of people, using the “paradice” method, seems to be inspired from the “stirpiculture” applied in the Oneida community. Crake’s unit, “Paradice”, is a kind of Garden of Eden and he (imitating MaddAddam) has taken over the function of god. Like the other super-scientists, he is concerned only with the achievement of his “dream” that is actually a “nightmare”, as Jimmy observes watching him while he is sleeping. Crake disregards all moral principles, both his lover and his friend being used without scruples. In order to make space for the new species created by him to bread, Crake - the former Glenn who has now become grand master of the “Extincthaton” game - approves the deadly effect of the BlyssPluss Pill, but takes care to protect himself from the plague. This is also fact in fiction, as it reflects the lack of reason of both scientists and politicians who endanger the very life on the planet in their pursuit of profits for their own good.

Margaret Atwood’s essay originally written for the Book-of-the-month Club contains the “what if” of Oryx and Crake in the form of some rhetoric questions that not only scientists but all of us should ask: “what if we continued down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got to stop us?”(www.mcclelland)

Nobody tried to stop Crake in his experiment, not even Jimmy, though he did not like it. He acted only when his own life was threatened. But it was too late.

Oryx - postmodern Beatrice, Beauty and Handmaid

Oryx, the former little girl whose image - when she was only eight like Dante’s Beatrice - , had charmed the two boys while surfing on a porn site, reappears at Watson-Crick. Oryx, sounding like the name of a precious stone or constellation, could be associated with Matrix that is a female animal for reproduction, and means also uterus. She must be Oryx because she comes from the oriens and is at the origo of the new race. But it is proper for her to be Oryx because she is not anorexic - orexis meaning appetite. Perhaps she is Oryx because both Jimmy and Crake are in love with her. She is Oryx - a symbol of natural beauty, because her name associates in our mind with “Oriflame”, the much-advertised brand of cosmetics. But the name suggests also geometry and the various symbols denoting the centre of the circle or the unknown entities.

Her image, found on the site for global sex makes the boys fall in love with the virtual girl. She exists mainly as a character in various stories:

“There was Crake’s story about her, and Jimmy’s story about her as well, a more romantic version; and there was her own story about herself, which was different from both, and not romantic at all. Snowman riffles through these three stories in his head. There must once have been other stories of her, the story of the man who bought her after that, and the third man’s story - the worst man of them all, the one in San Francisco, a pious bullshit artist. But Jimmy had never heard those. (114)

When Snowman discovers the real girl, now Oryx, at Watson-Crick, she is employed by Crake, on the one hand to help to teach “the children”, on the other hand, to help him in the promotion campaign of the pill, by which she attains the position of a successful business-woman. Though she “belongs” to Crake, she does not hesitate in becoming also Jimmy’s lover. But “Crake in Love” is an ironic chapter title, for the super-scientist cannot really love anyone. Though objectified and victimised most of her life, Oryx is still a survivalist. When Jimmy shows her the printout and asks what she was thinking of when the picture was taken, she says: “I was thinking [...] that if I ever got the chance, it would not be me down on knees.” (92) But freedom, prosperity and love, prove to be illusions with her, too. She has the fate of all the other “handmaids”, being sexually and economically exploited and finally “executed”. In comparison with the male characters, she plays a minor part, but she is important because, like Jimmy’s mother, she feels responsible for her deeds. She is horrified when she learns that she had been used by Crake to promote a deadly drug, but she can do nothing to change what has been done because she is powerless. On finding out that she has shared the truth with Jimmy, and thus betrayed him, Crake cuts her throat with his jackknife, as a final proof of his ruthless, violent, nature. Beauty has no place in the world of monsters. Jimmy, expecting the same treatment, does not hesitate to be the first one to act.

Jimmy and Crake, both represent human society, characterized by another female character in the book, the artist Amanda Payne, as a sort of monster itself:

“ its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be obsolete plastic junk.”(243)

A new race: the children of Oryx and Crake

Oryx appears in Snowman’s creation-myth for the new “aboriginal” people as a bird-like mater genitrix, perhaps a Phoenix. “The children of Oryx”, says Snowman,

“had been hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full with animals and birds and fish, and the other full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the children of Crake had already been created then, and they’d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why animals can’t talk.” (96)

The Crakes are the new “homo naturalis” or “noble savage”, innocent and naiv in the beginning. Nevertheless, they give us the feeling of deja vu. We have already met them somewhere, if not during the sixties, then later, dying of AIDS. Or just in those children’s drawings for the UNICEF, singing and dancing barefoot at youth festivals. Maybe we saw them mating when blue, naked on the sea shore, or meditating around some bearded guru, eating only vegetables and healthy, organic food, smoking joint from time to time, and committing suicide in group...Maybe we have read about them in Huxley’s Island or have heard their voices singing, together with a mega star accused of child-abuse, “We are the world...” Or, are they today’s test-tube babies and tomorrow’s clones?

Fiction, fiction, four times fiction, utopia / dystopia, nowhere, now here

The library classification of the novel (as the subtitle specifies) suggests four thematic layers: 1.Triangles (Interpersonal relations); 2.Genetic engineering; 3.New York (State); 4. Male friendship. All four define the book as “fiction”, with the same determination like the host’s in Berlin when called the book a dystopia, that is a negative utopia, or to be more precise, as a dictionary suggests its translation “difficult place”, or with reference to its medical use: a displaced organ. Margaret Atwood, in an interview with Eleanor Case and Maggie McDonald, states that Oryx and Crake is certainly not science fiction, “it is fact within fiction”. In her essay about working on the book, the writer confesses that what worries her right now is “the world of Oryx and Crake”, the facts behind fiction: child slaves, global warming, media violence, genetically altered species”, to which we might add our own worries. Joan Smith, recognizing as facts the vacation communities on the west shore of Hudson Bay, the watching of “gen-mod” coffee wars on TV, demonstrations like the one with Jimmy’s mother in front of the Happicuppa head office etc., thinks that these “give the novel an almost documentary feel”.

Maybe the best classification of book would be as “speculative fiction”, a term used by the writer herself in her essay on the book, a species in full bloom as it is proved also by the latest Descant collection of texts in whose preface by Karen Mulhallen there is a beautiful quotation form Oryx and Crake. The insistence on morality and the danger of being, nowadays, in a “moral peril”, connects speculative literature to Swift’s “moral fable”. Meditating on humanity’s progress, Margaret Atwood paraphrases George Meredith’s thoughts: “no matter how high the tech, homo sapiens sapiens remains at heart what he’s been for tens or thousands of years, the same emotions, the same preoccupations”. (www. newscientist.com...)

The writing of the book had begun in March 2001, while Margaret Atwood was still on the tour with the Blind Assassin in Australia, where she saw the red-necked crake and the cave complex. But her work was interrupted by a most unsettling event. While she was waiting for a flight in Toronto airport, thinking of part 8, someone came to say that there was no flight because it was the 11th of September. Her book was hardly published when the SARS epidemic broke out. It is true that we have not witnessed the very end of our entire civilization yet, but the threats are here and now. The world ends each day in one part of the globe or another. Each day the survivors of various catastrophes have to start anew.

Speculative novel, cautionary story, moral fable, technological utopia, dystopia, Southern Ontario Gothic, whatever we may call it, Oryx and Crake covers practically all the topics treated in a comprehensive anthology on the subject of utopias and utopian thought, published by Frank E. Manuel in the mid-sixties, with the promise to resume the discussion in 2000. It is another proof that artistic representation has the extraordinary power to illustrate ideas, enhance the readers’ awareness of the world they live in, and stimulate their conscious response to the menaces of any type that may endanger life on the planet and in the universe. Let us hope that those responsible with the progress of science and technology and the politicians of our age will take into account a great writer’s warning and stop playing their MaddAddam games until it is not too late.
 

Atwood, Margaret, 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland: Nan A. Tales Doubleday.

---, 2003. “Writing Oryx and Crake”, http: //www.mcclelland.com/ features/oryxand crake/essay.html.

---, 2003. “Life after man”. Interview. The New Scientist. http://www mcclellandand. com/ features/oryxandcrake/except/html.

---, 2003. Interview with Eleanor Case and Maggie McDonald. http:// www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.j.sp2id=ns23931.

Eliade, Mircea, 1963. “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology”. Manuel: Utopias and Utopian Thought, 260-280.

Fowke, Edith, 1979 (1976). Folklore of Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stuart.

Lockwood, Maren, 1966. “The Experimental Utopia in America”. Manuel: Utopias and Utopian Thought, 183-200.

Manuel, Frank E. (Editor), 1966. Utopias and Utopian Thought. Boston: Souvenir Press (Educational & Academic) LTD.

Mulhallen, Karen, 2003. “Preface”, Descant 122, 34/3, 11-13.

Mumford, Lewis, 1966. “Utopia, the City and the Machine”. Manuel: Utopias and Utopian Thought, 3-24.

Smith, Joan, 2002. “And pigs might fly”. http: // books.guardianco.uk/ reviews /generalfiction/0,612,953225,00.html.

Smith, John Maynard, 1966. “Eugenics and Utopia. Manuel: Utopias and Utopian Thought, 150- 168.

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