Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Postmodernism, Apocalypse, and Rapture – Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (2024)

The publication of the novel MaddAddam[1] in 2013 completes Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of the same name. Oryx andCrake (2003), the first published novel of the series, oscillates between a dramatizedpresent of apocalyptic ruin and a tour de force account of the wastelandic events leading up to thatruin. Both past and present are focalized through Jimmy-Snowman, who has split himself into Jimmy(his corporate-world identity) and Snowman (his postapocalyptic identity, in which he mourns whathas been lost as well as his own beguilement). Also shifting between the past and the present apocalypse, TheYear of the Flood (2009) focuses on the stories of two women (Toby and Ren) who are notpart of the corporate wonderland, thus revealing what it is like to be part of the 99% that make upthe pleebland. Finally, the post-apocalyptic MaddAddamportrays a ragtag band of human survivors and the Crakers, the ecological humanoidsdesigned to replace humanity, as all begin anew in a ruined world.

Each novel in the trilogy revisits events leading up to the “year of the flood,” constantlyretelling its portents (Bouson 10). These portents take many forms: ecological, economic, political,cultural, and spiritual — all vital driving factors in what has produced the near end of the world.However, as I see it, Atwood casts postmodernism, particularly as it emerges in the theories ofLyotard and Baudrillard, as the driving force behind them all. In much of her work, Atwooddemonstrates that she has a pulse on the cultural zeitgeist, including postmodernism in its variedforms. Throughout the trilogy, there is some Derrida, some Foucault, some Jameson, but it isLyotard’s emphasis on the utilitarian and performative and Baudrillard’s emphasis on simulation thatbecome the subjects of Atwood’s critique.[2]This marks a shift in Atwood’s thinking. The Handmaid’sTale, frequently seen in relationship to Oryx andCrake,[3] celebrates postmodernismas a means of subversion, as a way to destabilize an ultra right-wing Gilead that imposes itsmonomaniacal religiosity on nearly everyone (Raschke 263-64). However, the post-modernism of the1980s is not the postmodernism of the twenty-first century. The trilogy, in effect, dramatizes thepostmodern condition gone amuck. The once subversive alternative narratives have given way to animplosion of meaning and inefficacy of agency that has produced a kind of cultural paralysis.Co-opted and corporatized, postmodernism’s multiplicity of narrative has become a means to distractand beguile the public. In spite of its heterogeneity, postmodernism has produced a lack ofimagination bordering at times on a literalism metonymic for not being able to think one’s way outof a cultural box. This postmodern condition is indeed the conundrum of the MaddAddam trilogy with Atwood, in a narrative twist at the end ofMaddAddam, giving the narration for the entire trilogy tothe literal-minded Crakers. This subtle shift in narration, which sends us back to Oryx and Crake for questions regarding “who tells,” changeseverything. It becomes the palimpsest for understanding what the trilogy critiques and its gesturestoward remedy.

By the end of MaddAddam, it is clear thatBlackbeard has transcribed and compiled the stories of MaddAddam and The Year of the Flood. After Tobywanders off into the woods, Blackbeard takes it upon himself to put together the stories Toby hascollected — a bit like Pieixoto, who arranges Offred’s tapes in TheHandmaid’s Tale. In giving the “Book that Toby made” (MaddAddam 385) to the Crakers, Blackbeard lists the stories that Toby has written down:Oryx, Crake, Zeb, Adam, Pilar, Rhino, Katrina WooWoo, March the Snake, all of the MaddAddamites,Swift Fox, Amanda, Ren, and Snowman-the-Jimmy (385-86). This compilation accounts for the narratedstories in both MaddAddam and The Year of the Flood.[4] It doesnot account, however, for Jimmy-Snowman in Oryx and Crake.Who then tells JimmySnowman’s story?

Who sees in Atwood’s trilogy is fairly clear; whotells is trickier. While isolated at AnooYoo in The Year of the Flood, Toby, who initially appears to be the narratorof MaddAddam, accentuates this distinction when she beginswriting on notepaper graced with images of “kissy lips” and a winking eye (YF 163, 237)[5]— in other words, images that prompt us to consider who sees and who tells. In Oryx and Crake, the narrative is focalized through Jimmy while, inTheYear of the Flood, it is focalized through Ren and Toby. InMaddAddam, we see primarily through Toby’s eyes, althoughthis becomes complicated since what Toby sees at times is conveyed through Zeb, whose voiceintermittently becomes that of Adam, the Rev., and Trudy. Even more complicated, though, is whotells in Oryx and Crake. Noting the shifts between the“fictive present” and past memories and fantasies in Oryx andCrake, Coral Ann Howells notes how Snowman’s story “is refracted through an omniscientnarrative voice” (171). Howells clearly identifies another voice beyond Snowman’s, and since thereare no other humans present in Snowman’s rubble-plagued world until the very end of Oryx and Crake, this assumption of omniscience seems to be the onlyplausible explanation. Jimmy thinks of keeping a journal (as Toby did), but in his semi-deliriousstate living in a tree he never writes down a word. MaddAddam, however, violates the narrative expectations laid out in Oryx and Crake: there is no omniscient narrator. In MaddAddam the diegetic plot begins with a chaotic, uncomprehendingcamera-eye recording of the untying of the Painballers. It concludes with Blackbeard, as the authorof “The Story of Toby,” giving us three alternatives for what happens to Toby, all the whileadmitting that he actually does not know her fate: “Where [Toby] went I cannot write in this Book,because I do not know” (390). This lack of omniscience then calls into question the narration ofOryx and Crake. The only ones left to tell are the Crakersand their descendants.[6] They are the onlyones who bear witness to Snowman’s tale. And the stories they tell (those belonging to Jimmy andSnowman, distinct from those of Snowman-the-Jimmy) are not included in Blackbeard’s list ofcollected stories. Thus, The Year of the Flood andMaddAddam (excluding “BOOK”) have been compiled by theCrakers, with some added narrative flourish, and Oryx andCrake (and the section “BOOK” from MaddAddam)are written by them.[7]

Other evidence of the Craker narration in Oryx andCrake emerges in an initial narrative voice that is characteristic of the Craker mind: aproclivity for literalism and consistency, as well as positive attitudes toward sex and a desire forhappy endings. The noted “revisions” in the text suggest just that. The first revision changesSnowman’s habit of not dipping a toe in the lagoon “even at night, when the sun can’t get at him” to“especially at night” (6) — the reasoning for which is explained later in Jimmy’s fear of thepigoons and wolvogs. This revision and others like it suggest a shift from what seems to beSnowman’s perspective to some other voice who is editing his past for consistency. The secondrevision follows the Coleridge quote “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!”(232-33). In Oryx and Crake the line reads “Revision:seashore” (10).[8] In its changing of “sea” to“seashore,” this revision indicates that whoever is narrating Oryx andCrake has no awareness that Jimmy is quoting Coleridge nor any understanding that thepoem places a high value on metaphor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which is interwoventhroughout Oryx and Crake, dramatizes a crime againstnature, which has obvious resonance for Atwood’s trilogy. However, a more subtle and revealingreading of Coleridge’s poem is its chastisem*nt of literalism as the death of imagination. The thirduse of revision emerges in the change of “tart” to “professional sex-skills expert,” a change thatreflects the Crakers’ lack of understanding of slang and their positive attitude toward sex — hardlycharacteristics particular to Jimmy (11). In commenting on the prospects for “sustainability” or“housebreaking the human animal,” Hannes Bergthaller presciently observes that Oryx and Crake provides “only a terrifying literalist answer” to theproblems it engages (737) — an observation that cannot be fully appreciated until the culmination ofthe trilogy in which the Craker narration is revealed.

Grammatical errors and errors of usage also indicate someone who is still learning alanguage: Jimmy, for example, is described as hiding from the sun “inunder the shade of the trees” and as “[leaning] against a tree, listening to the noisesoff ” (6, 168; emphasis added). Typical of the Crakers —for example, “what is toast?” (OC 97) — is an occasionallack of understanding of words, even within the same scene. Snowman’s tears are initially describedas “salt water” that is “running down his face”; a page later, this “salt water” is identified as“tears” (11-12). There are, as well, odd uses of metaphor and idiom. Night is described as “dark asan armpit” (107), and Jimmy picks fruit from “life trees” (176). “Fish” in Oryx and Crake, suggests a shift in perspective, with the Crakersbeginning to be designated as “people” — a concept that is still being debated in the latter part ofMaddAddam. Moreover, the story of how Snowman was onceJimmy (the “Once upon a time” that begins “Bonfire”) provides the Crakers with what they haveconstantly desired: the real story of their origin (15). This is the more sophisticated and laterversion of Snowman’s and Toby’s creation stories, which run parallel throughout Oryx and Crake and MaddAddam.

Finally, as a new species, the Crakers have a limited repertoire in their production ofstories. Jimmy, as a child, sounds very much like the young Crakers: “Why were the cows and sheep onfire?” and “What’s a disease?” (19). The Crakers, similarly, can utilize only materials to whichthey have been exposed. Crake’s character, as Michiko Kakutani notes, can be seen as rather“cardboardy.”[9] Given a Craker narration,though, that “cardboardiness” becomes perfectly explicable, in that Crake is beyond theirimaginative repertoire. The Crakers, moreover, can tell only what they know. Oryx and the othertrafficked girls are all forced to pee in a row — like the Crakers do (124). For both Snowman andToby, the red baseball cap and the shiny watch initiate story time and a conduit to Crake as theall-knowing omniscient narrator in the sky. Tellingly, as the story of Oryx is revealed, it issupposedly the allknowing “shiny watch” belonging to sex-trader Uncle En that keeps Oryx and theother girls from running. Oryx tells Jimmy that Uncle En “would always know where they were: all hehad to do was hold his shiny watch up to his ear and it would tell him, because there was a littlevoice inside it that knew everything” (127-28). Oryx later asks Uncle En if she can “listen” to his“watch” (133) — just as Snowman and Toby, at the command of the Crakers, listen to Jimmy’s watch.The correlation offers a much more sinister twist to the stories that Snowman and Toby concoct toplacate the Crakers. And it adds a more sinister twist to the rather too chirpy diegetic survivalending of MaddAddam, which extends from “Moontime”[10] to the end of the novel. The “garden isprogressing well”; the “Mo’Hair flock is increasing”; improvements such as the installation of“functioning solar units” are being made. There is singing, dancing, music groups, meditations, andpeace with the pigoons. After Toby’s death, Swift Fox becomes pregnant again, this time by theCraker “fourfathers,” of which Blackbeard is one. And there are babies — many Craker hybrid babies.With the exception of Blackbeard’s declaration of authorship, MaddAddam ends with an affirmation, “a thing of hope” (390). All’s well that ends well.Why then am I not consoled?

If The Year of the Flood concludes with a“bitter-sweet, almost fairytale-like ending,” as Hannes Bergthaller suggests (741),[11]MaddAddam does so even more emphatically. The “it will befine tomorrow” fairy tale that concludes MaddAddam,though, is not the end of the trilogy; it is thisnon-ending that drives the interpretation of the series. MaddAddam’s final two chapters (“Book” and “The Story of Toby”) accentuate again thequestion of narration. At the end of MaddAddam, Blackbearddeclares, “This is the end of the Story of Toby. I have written it in this Book” (390). Initially,it seems that Blackbeard has authored only “The Story of Toby.” Blackbeard, however, also declaresthat he has written “The Story of Toby” in “this Book” (the title of the final section and chapterof MaddAddam he has compiled), which suggests that he hashad a hand in the writing of “Book” as well. The trilogy keeps propelling us backward to otherchapters, back to enactment of the palindrome of its title.

In this light, Oryx and Crake can be read as thelater text — both aesthetically and chronologically. It stages an earlier event (JimmySnowman’s lifebefore and after the apocalypse), but it is written during a later time. Following the logic of thepalindrome, Snowman’s death at the end of MaddAddam is hisbeginning — the beginning of his narrated story. As narrators in Oryxand Crake, the Crakers are no longer the talking, purring vegetables of theirpredecessors. They still struggle with aspects of language, but they have also become quite adept atusing it: “A breeze riffles the leaves overhead; insects rasp and trill; red light from the settingsun hits the tower blocks in the water, illuminating an unbroken pane here and there, as if ascattering of lamps had been turned on” (95). Such an aesthetic description could rival that of anyof human creation and seems to vindicate Crake’s “sweetly [wiping] everybody else off the face ofthe planet” to make room for a new, kinder, gentler transgenic species (MaddAddam 264). And the planet, in some ways, is better off. Gone arethe CorpSeCorps who expunged anyone challenging their unchecked consolidation of power. Gone, too,are the pharmaceuticals who embedded in their vitamin supplements hostile bioforms. Gone are thehookworm-like ChickieNobs and the dizzying high-tech everything that produced an untethered world.All gone. The planet, unimpeded by our further environmental meddling, is teeming with new life,even familiar life — the chirping of birds, the usual noises of “faraway barking of dogs, thetittering of mice, the water-pipe notes of the crickets, the occasional grumph of a frog” (YF 5). It is as though Atwood’s trilogy answers Shelley’s taunt in“Mont Blanc”: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’simaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?” (142- 44). The resounding answer seems clear: stillhere — and doing much better without you, thank you very much. As Gerry Canavan suggests in hisdiscussion of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, if “Crake’s murderous, Frankensteinian actionsdo indeed usher in a kind of utopia, then, we must understand that it is not a Utopia for us­ —not for us the way we now are, the way we now live” in a“pseudo-utopia of late capitalism.” (154). This system, along with “the subjectivities andideologies it produces,” as Canavan rightly contends, “isgenuinely doomed” (154). In this scenario, we, as a human species, are toast — like thetribe of Zebulon, one of the legendary ten lost tribes of Israel, which, after being exiled, becameextinct, their history lost (Wigoder 783-84). Gone, too, is art — that potentially transformativecatalyst of the human spirit. All that is left are literary memes — lines quoted without context:“All, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea” (OC 10). It isBlood and Roses, and Blood won.

Is then the MaddAddam trilogy simply a bildungsroman for the Crakers? If, indeed, we as a human species aredoomed either through obliteration or through biogenic replacement, there is not much to do exceptride out the apocalypse — a stance Atwood deplores in Payback, whose last chapter depicts anoblivious, pleasure-driven Scrooge who, a bit like the Crakers, prefers to fast-forward through anynegativity. Published in 2008 and frequently seen as a parallel text to The Year of the Flood (2009), Paybackdramatizes two alternatives: the planet’s protection or its destruction.[12] Likewise MaddAddam, too, poses a choice. One is the blithe acceptance of the belief that “it willbe fine tomorrow,” echoed three times in various contexts on MaddAddam’s last page alone. The phrase,occurring frequently in Atwood’s novel, alludes to a central line from To the Lighthouse, the source for the second epigraph in Oryx and Crake. In Woolf’s novel, the phrase “it will be fine tomorrow” ostensiblyhighlights Mrs. Ramsay’s and Mr. Ramsay’s differing opinions about the weather, but, in actuality,accentuates their differing epistemological positions. Toward the end of MaddAddam, the pigoons lead the Bacon Brigade back to the ParadiceDome, where the very mortal bodies of Oryx and Crake are discovered: “There are two destroyedskeletons on the floor of the airlock. The bones have been gnawed and jumbled, no doubt by animals.Rags of mouldering cloth . . . a dirty pink ribbon tied in the long black hair of one of the skulls”(MaddAddam 356). Looking at Blackbeard, Toby “can see thesudden fall, the crash, the damage” (356). Thus, when MaddAddamconcludes with the overly saccharine happily-ever-after ending that gives us many babies,with Toby possibly morphing into a bear, and with “Tomorrow is another day,” which is “a thing ofhope” (390), the effect is unsettling. This whole idea of surviving the apocalypse is a fairy tale.In fact, “in French, the equivalent formula for ‘they lived happily ever after’ is ‘ils eurentbeaucoup d’enfants’: ‘they had many children’” (McCrea 8). Along with the questions posed by thenarration, this happy survival fairy tale should send us back to Oryxand Crake — back into the seeds of our apocalypse.

Those seeds lie in the postmodern condition — a condition that is doubly mirrored in thetrilogy’s pre-apocalyptic world and in the Craker creation. Coined by Jean François Lyotard, andamplified by Jean Baudrillard, the postmodern condition embodies that state in which the real isinfinitely indeterminate. Both theorists become part of Atwood’s central critique of postmodernism.For Baudrillard, postmodernity has been a gradual untethering of representation, as reflected in hisfour stages of simulation. In the first stage, there remains a close resemblance between the imageand the referent. In the second stage, noted as the beginning of simulacra and simulation, thedifference between what is true and what is false is no longer possible. In a world where a copy ofa copy of copy prevails, the original representation can no longer be located. The third stage,linked with sorcery, uses the image as a guise to hide the reality that there is nothing there. Ituses presence (an oversaturation of information) to mask absence. The fourth stage has no connectionto reality at all (Simulacra 6). Postmodernity is thusmarked by a simulation of presence that ultimately masks a vacuum. Ideology or “a corruption ofreality through signs,” which could still be corrected (see Gilead, for example), gives way insteadto simulation — “a short circuit of reality” and a “duplication through signs.” Restoration is a“false promise” because there is simply nothing there to restore (Simulacra 27). Referents have no connection to an external reality, a principle thatalso defines Crake’s rules: “no name could be chosen” that had “a physical equivalent” (OC 7).

In a strange replication, Crake’s rules, though, already apply to the pre-apocalyptic worldthat Jimmy and others inhabit. Jimmy’s mother, in rare moments, “was like a real mother and he waslike a real child” (OC 30), and his father seemed as thoughhe were “auditioning for the role of Dad” (OC 52). Gameslike Barbarian Stomp (See if You Can Change History!) and Blood and Roses supersede any historicalreal. Baudrillard contends, “Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is alsothe extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc.” (Simulacra 49). Historical and cultural narratives can provide a counter to the narrativeof postmodern untethering. However, once the expunction is forgotten, the possibilities forresistance become irretrievable. How does one mourn what one never knew? Crake tells Jimmy, “All ittakes . . . is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything” and then “it’s gameover forever” (OC 223). And most of the past has alreadybeen exterminated in Oryx and Crake. Snowman’s memorywanes, and pieces of the past, including a literary past, emerge without any connection to theirreferents. This “desert of the real itself ” (Simulacra 1) is the fourth stage of Baudrillard’s simulacra. In thisstage, the free-floating image “is its own pure simulacrum” and all “referentials” are liquidated(6). It is not that this hyper-reality is fake (that would suggest an oppositional mode in which onecould still compare real and fake); it is “another type of ‘reality’” that has become reality itself(Lane 100). While watching some of the top internet sites — hedsoff.com, brainfrizz.com — Jimmy asksCrake, “Do you think they’re really being executed? A lot of them look like simulations” — to whichCrake replies, “You never know” and “What is reality?”(OC 83). Echoing Jimmy’s questioning of whether on-lineexecutions are simulations, Zeb in MaddAddam wonders if theintestinal parasites in the game he is playing have any basis in reality (198). Game, thus, becomesindistinguishable from reality. If what is real cannot be known, why waste time staging a protest?It may be only a simulation. This constant state of simulation ultimately provides a perfect smokeand mirrors for those in power to do as they please — for example, to implant new diseases inpharmaceuticals to increase future profits.

This Baudrillarian blankness has at least one other key implication. It provides anexplanation for Crake’s death sweep. While at HelthWyzer, Zeb observes that although Glenn (Crake’spre-apocalyptic identity) seems to have “no scars, no bruises, and no difficulty eating his meals,”something haunts him. Zeb concludes, “Nothing definite, perhaps. More like a lack, a vacuum” (236).It is an affliction Zeb also sees in himself when he catches himself “unawares in the mirror”(MaddAddam 236). In other words, it is an affliction of anera: what Baudrillard describes as a state of seeming plentitude in which information abounds (theinundation of everything in Oryx and Crake) but whichultimately yields only emptiness — a vacuum that produces metaphysical despair (Ecstasy 34).

Lyotard’s theories of the postmodern also infuse the trilogy. More sanguine thanBaudrillard, Lyotard sees the multiple narratives that constitute postmodernity as a means ofresisting tyranny.[13] Noted for hisproclaimed death sentence for any grand narrative’s ability to capture the complexity of thepostmodern condition, Lyotard champions instead a host of smaller, more localizedmicronarratives.[14] Indeed, since manynarrative voices emerge in the trilogy, Atwood may not have abandoned the postmodern narrativeentirely.[15] Yet within this multiplicityalso lie an ineffectuality and paralysis. The Year of theFlood makes explicit what is implicit in Oryx andCrake — a world that is heterogeneous, one in which pluralism reigns but is equallyineffectual. Outside the scientific Compound, there are many available, localized options, at leastin the pleebs where most people live. If a pleeb, one can become immersed in the consumer culturethat sells NooSkins and AnooYoo, join a gang, or become absorbed in the new techno culture or thelatest sex trot (or in both together, virtual or real). One can dress up as a fish, complete with ascaly suit, and provide sex to wealthy clients. One can join a religious group — the Pure-HeartBrethren Sufis, the Lion Isaiahists, or the Wolf Isaiahists (39). But, if a pleeb, it doesn’t reallymatter what one does because none of it affects the power, money, and decisions wielded by thescientific Compounds.

In fact, what has enabled that power is a narrative plurality in which no narrative can belegitimized. As Lyotard suggests in The PostmodernExplained, questions of “What ought we to be”and “What might we doin order to be that” are no longer legitimate (48). Theresult, however, has not been a more equal playing field for all involved, as Lyotard imagined. Whathas evolved instead in late postmodernism, in which all narratives are possible and all equallyde-legitimatized, is an emptying out — a power vacuum that has enabled an even more formidable powerstructure to take hold. The Crakers are, in part, a metaphor for precisely this postmodern dilemma:Toby muses, “It’s tempting to drift, as the Crakers seem to. They have no festivals, no calendars,no deadlines. No long-term goals” (MaddAddam 136). Theyblithely inhabit the eternal present. Moreover, the Crakers are différance to the hilt.[16]Each one of them is a different skin colour: “chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream, honey” (8). Butthis presentation of diversity is shallow, one in which a different skin colour is donned like adifferent-coloured garment. The Crakers, at least to some extent, suggest a “Benetton-styleembodiment of diversity,” in which multiculturalism is more of a “brand” or “label” (Titley andLentin 12). Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, thus, observe, “Note how many corporate and public imagesof smiling and harmonious diversity present, Benetton style, images of smiling, harmonious andfiscal solvent diversity” (21). This outward Craker plurality mirrors what Angela Laflen defines asa “new mass uniformity of thought and action” in the pre-apocalyptic world (108).[17] Such a plurality results in inefficacy andnearly total subordination. Repeatedly pleading in effect, “Oh Snowman, tell us what to do, pleasetell us what to do,” the Crakers are the perfect corporate citizens. With the exception of God’sGardeners, many of whom become co-opted into Crake’s biogenic plans, resistance in the first twonovels is almost moot. Most people are too encapsulated in their own micronarratives to payattention to what is going on in the Compounds. The plurality of narratives serves as a diversion —a pretense of possibilities that levels any challenge to another narrative. Whoever wins is best at“language games”[18] — and that would bethe Compounds at least up to the year of the waterless flood. It is performativity (not justice orinjustice) that determines the worth of an action, a principle Atwood critiques. The levelling ofall narratives makes any opposition invisible. Those in power rely on the postmodernity of narrative— on the perception of its hipness, of its progressiveness. It is how the Compounds, a metaphor forcorporate power elites, get away with it.

It is indeed this levelling of narrative that initiates the diegetic narrative of MaddAddam. The Crakers, believing everyone must be helped, untie thePainballers: “This rope is hurting these ones. We must take itaway” (13). For the Crakers, the Painballers’ perspective is just as important as theones belonging to Amanda and Ren. What better way to diminish dissent than to flatten any grievanceas just another perspective. For the Crakers, the trauma of sexual violence is simply one narrativeamong many, which perhaps explains their narrative inability to understand the plight of Oryx. TheCrakers further see no reason not to give the Painballers what they want (“the stick thing”) — shareand share alike — a decision that would have destroyed them had Toby not intervened. Postmodernityhas created a kind of flatness that obliterates any distinction. As Laflen observes, Oryx and Crake gives us a world in which visual culture, in itsproliferation of the sign, obliterates the ability to see with any discernment. Subsequently,“viewers lose the ability to distinguish between images that are important and those that are banal”(114). Thus, the depicted “global village” in Oryx andCrake “draws little distinction between images of prisoners being executed in Asia, childp*rnography, and political speeches” (Laflen 114).[19] They all blend hopelessly together, making it difficult to address any afflictions. Itis a bit like tuning into the daily news on the internet.

Whether contemplating Oryx and Crake’s reproof ofsex trafficking or the dehumanization emanating from globalization, the “marketing” of death anddisease for economic gain by multinational “super corporations,” what Sarah Appleton aptly terms the“Corpocracy” (64), one can see that the repercussions of these phenomena are quite real. Likewise,so are the Frankensteinian transgenics, the slow desensitizing of virtual violence and p*rnography,and the effects of the instrumentalism that drive the pre-apocalyptic world. All are central issuesin Atwood’s critique.[20] Yet locating theconcrete reality in any of these issues, let alone finding an effective means to resist, becomesnearly impossible. Posing initially as “honest and trustworthy, friendly as daisies, guileless asbunnies,” the Corps avoids revealing its real nature as “tyrannical butchers” (YF 266). As a network of power that provides no singular site againstwhich a protest could be lodged, it then extends its “tentacles” in every direction, permeatingglobal boundaries and markets (YF 25). In response to theencroaching power of the Corps, Zeb muses that “Old-style demonstration politics were dead” and that“any kind of public action involving crowds and sign-waving and then storefront smashing” wouldresult in being “shot off at the knees” (MaddAddam 242).Resistance of any kind, in effect, is dead. Resist, and you fall off a bridge — “Blood gumbo”(YF 244).

Even more effective than fear-mongering resistance into a stilted silence, however, is apostmodernizing of resistance in which the production of nonidentity makes moot any sense ofresistive agency. This production of nonidentity emerges in a freedom of localized narratives thatthrive through what Michael Spiegel describes as “crisscrossing and overlapping authorities broughtabout by economic globalization” that produce “social and political schizophrenia” (126). Whatemerges then are “multiple and often contradictory loyalties that can only be reconciled through thefragmentation of the collective, continuous self into a patchwork of distinct and dissociatedidentities” (126). Crake, for example, “appears to think and identify as a commodity,” to “bothcollude with the system and conspire against it” (128). Ren and Amanda both manifest a survivalistspirit, but both also define themselves as commodities.[21] Moreover, Toby, Amanda, and Zeb are constantly forced to piece togethernew identities in order to survive — part of the corporate game that just keeps them running. Notonly has postmodernism lost its subversive edge but it has also become a conduit for corporatecontrol. The autonomous, unified self indeed may be a fantasy, but by embracing the fragmented andcommodified nature of the postmodern self as avant-garde thinking, one falls into the trap ofrevelling in powerlessness as some kind of triumph. One cohesive narrative may no longer bepossible, but discounting all cultural and historical contexts pre-empts the potential for makingconnections — for finding a resistive narrative. These are brilliant tactics that enable powerstructures to act unimpeded.

And art? Oryx and Crake’s Martha Graham Academy,the liberal arts college, reflects the status of Knowledge defined in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: Is it useful? Is it efficient? Is itprofitable? Is the curriculum à la carte? Thus, we get a new “curricular emphasis” in the “Contemporary arenas”: Webgame Dynamics, Image Presentation, Pictorialand Plastic Arts — all of which prepare their supplicants for advertising slick adages for AnooYooor HelthWyser (OC 188). Literature, in effect, “shares aspot on the endangered species list” (Laflen 112). If art does present a resisting message, no oneis paying attention. Amanda tells Ren in The Year of Floodthat she is “sending a message” in her art. To Ren’s warning that she will get in trouble, Amandareplies that it is “okay”: “They won’t understand it” (57). Amanda uses bioforms in her art and thentakes pictures of their dissolution. One project involves the arrangement of cow bones, later to betopped with pancake syrup and consumed by insects.[22] In another project, “The Living Word,” Amanda, in Derridean fashion, makes “wordsappear and then disappear” (304). Amanda’s art, at first glance, seems simply whacky (particularlywhen topped with the pancake syrup), but a closer look reveals that it dramatizes the postmoderncondition in which the signified is constantly vanishing. More importantly, in conjoining thisinstability with dissolution, Amanda demonstrates how the postmodern gestures toward extinction.Amanda, in effect, is narrating the drama of extinction that is already occurring, one to which noone is paying much attention.

This postmodernist romp through contemporary culture in MaddAddam ultimately calls attention to the vital need for narrative in the face ofpostmodernism’s levelling of narrative. The dire consequences of gene splicing, transgenicengineering, and “using up the earth” matter.[23] It goes without saying that all who read Atwood through an environmental lens see thisas a kind of “moral imperative” — not as simply another narrative on an infinite menu.[24] Emphasizing Atwood’s commitment to ethics andto an eco-spirituality, Shannon Hengen maintains that Atwood drives her readers to address theirspiritual debts in order to find some balance in the universe (134-35). Likewise, J. Brooks Bouson,in “‘We’re Using Up the Earth,’” suggests that Atwood has “long talked of the moral imperative thatdrives her work” (23).

“To splice or not to splice” is not, as the postmodern would have it, just one of manypossible narratives. It is not, as Lyotard claims in The PostmodernCondition, the triumph of “incommensurable” discourses (23). Typical of the playfulnessat the heart of the postmodern, the gene splicing in Oryx and Crakeinvolves “a lot of fooling around,” an “after-hours hobby” (51), a kind of game: Why notcross a raccoon with a skunk? But there are realrepercussions to this gaming. Observing the results of this fooling around, Toby, in TheYear of the Flood, notes how astoundingly quickly the greenrabbits, the bobkittens, and rakunks multiply (15). Commenting on Oryxand Crake, Atwood has said, “If you are going to do gene splicing, you’re going down avery strange path indeed. If you are going to do it on humans, you have to ask yourself, do you wantthe human race to remain human?”[25] Thequestion posed belongs to the realm of ethics, inoperative in the Compounds; that is the purview ofthe defunct grand narratives.[26] Yet ifPayback functions as a parallel text not only to The Year of the Flood but also to the trilogy as a whole, what isrequired is a stand. As Scrooge in Payback becomesincreasingly agitated over the decimation of the earth — “the thawing tundra” emitting “immenseclouds of methane gas,” the “rising sea levels,” the “superforce cyclones” — he asks the guidingspirit (“The Spirit of Earth Day Present”) if he can “stop all this,” to which the spirit replies,“International laws in this area are hard to achieve . . . because no one can agree on what’s fair”(193). In other words, no one can decide on a narrative.

Indeed, the ubiquity of ever-increasing diversions, what Fredric Jameson observes as thedistracting quality of postmodernism (ix), feeds this narrative inefficacy. Zeb notes that Bearlift“lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they weresaving something” (MaddAddam 59). Other diversions simplyprovide distraction: HottTotts, Nitee-Nite, Extintcathon, Spandrel, Weather Monsters, and the rabidconsumption of plot-driven entertainment, which in the post-apocalyptic world has morphed into thehappy stories demanded by the Crakers. Advising Toby on story time for the Crakers, Jimmy counsels,“Stick with that plotline,” and Manatee suggests, “Tell them a happy story . . . [v]ague on thedetails.” Such storytelling, Manatee continues, keeps them “placid” (265, 44). What the Crakersdesire, though, is much like the plot-driven narrative we are given in MaddAddam, much like the too chirpy, too neat survivalist ending of the post-apocalypse.After all, nearly all of our favorite characters are there at the post-apocalyptic party, sipping onbad coffee and munching on kudzu pancakes.

However, given Atwood’s propensity for doubling, it is not surprising that the Crakers servea double function. The Crakers are us, adrift in the postmodern world: our current present. And theyare our alien future, or more aptly our lack of a future. The cheerful diegetic ending of MaddAddam mirrors our own complicity in Craker complacency, in a toocozy survival narrative that is, in fact, driving us closer to apocalypse. However, like Scrooge inPayback, we still have a choice, even though the Crakernarration clearly suggests our “toastedness.”

That the narration in Oryx and Crake is beingdriven by Craker hands initially produces a kind of horror that conjures the unimaginable — thenonexistence that is one possibility of mortality. It also means the end of human art, which ismemed throughout the trilogy — phrases from innumerable works repeated without connection, withoutcontext. The Crakers in Oryx and Crake have grown immenselyin their understanding of the complexity of language, but the allusions to art remain opaque. Onlythe fragments remain. Allusions to To the Lighthouse appearthroughout the trilogy, particularly in MaddAddam: the use, in various forms, of the line “it will be fine tomorrow”;the repetition of “Time Passes” (the title of the middle section of Tothe Lighthouse, in which destruction reigns throughout most of the chapters); and theadoption of a mother figure who, presiding over a long dining table, attempts to assuage thepost-apocalyptic blues. The most resonant allusion, however, is to the end of Woolf’s novel. In thefinal line of To the Lighthouse, Lily, the artist figure,declares, “I have had my vision” (209); Toby echoes these words at Pilar’s grave, morphing them intoan over-the-top mushroom-inspired epiphany in which she is communing with feral pigs. In Oryx and Crake, Woolf’s novel becomes an echo without context.[27] It is Baudrillard’s fourth stage simulacra, inwhich the free-floating image is its own referent.

Behind this loss, however, looms another narrative presence who, in a waving of a Prosperianhand, emerges through Oryx and Crake’s framing epigraphs,through the ironic market voice that begins MaddAddam, andthrough the multiple literary allusions, including ones to Atwood’s own work. First of all, thesecond epigraph to Oryx and Crake from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse places the trilogy in a philosophical context.To the Lighthouse is, to some degree, a novel about frames and how those frames determine what we see —whether we think it will be fine tomorrow or not. To theLighthouse also addresses the destabilization of the grand narratives (a mark ofpostmodernism that actually dates back to modernism — despite many postmodern claims to thecontrary). This second epigraph, through Lily, poses that decentering question: “Was there nosafety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle andleaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?” (180). In other words, is there no Archimedeanpoint? The first epigraph, from Swift’s Gulliver’sTravels, provides a clue for interpreting thisdestabilization, that is, through satire.[28] What ultimately is a liberation from imprisoning narrative frames in To the Lighthouse (and ultimately in Lyotard’s postmodernism) becomesa conduit for apocalypse in Atwood’s trilogy.

What frames MaddAddam is the hyperbolic voice ofthe corporate market that introduces the novel. Just as Payback, published in 2008, functions as a parallel text, so, too, does Atwood’sNegotiating with the Dead, published in 2002. Discussingwriters, their influence, and the conundrum of inspiration in a market-dominated world, Atwood inNegotiating with the Dead expresses hope that the storytold will speak beyond market demands. Thus, the market-driven plot summary that introducesMaddAddam provides a frame for the plot-driven novel thatfollows.

I dare say that Atwood’s trilogy is The Waste Landof the twenty-first century. Like Eliot, who stages the final fragments of The Waste Land as a way out of the wasteland, Atwood stages, with awinking eye, the Craker narration as a means of both shocking us into seeing our extinction andshocking us out of the “I won hormones” (MaddAddam 297)that infuse so many survival narratives. The epigraphs and the introduction to MaddAddam suggest another narrator behind the Craker narration, onewho alludes to many of her previous works: the Scrabble words in TheHandmaid’s Tale, the explorers of Strange Things(Crozier and Shackleton), the choice for afuture in Payback, and the role of the artist in Negotiating with the Dead. Scrooge in Payback is offered two futures: the one in which we, and the planet, thrive, and theother — the one in which “chaos, mass death, the breakdown of civic order” (Payback 201) ensues: “Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria /Vienna London” (Eliot 373-75). Rubble: “Sandcastles in the wind” (OC45).

Like Scrooge in Payback, we are being given asecond chance — one defined by connection and transformation. If we see the world differently, wemight treat it differently — and then, who knows, we might survive. As Shannon Hengen observes, wesee hints of a change in Snowman when he “feels a ‘surge of tenderness and joy’ as he watches acaterpillar spiraling down on a thread” (136). Snowman goes on to note that “there will never beanother caterpillar just like this one” (41). It is the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes(285). Like in Payback, “the albatross” can be “saved”(199). Atwood’s trilogy thus encourages its readers to “suffer a sea change.” The last chapter ofOryx and Crake begins with Jimmy waking to the waves andobserving the horizon: “On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadlyglow. Strange how that colour still seems tender” (371). It is the same phrasing that begins thenovel, only with an addition: “He gazes at it with rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away, as if by some large bird ofprey. After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful?” (371). Herein liesthe hope, not in the false survivalist ending of MaddAddambut here, in the alternative that prods us toward seeing that sunrise tinged with agreyish haze and a rosy deadly glow that begins Oryx and Crakeas Jimmy sees that same sunrise at the end of Oryx andCrake — not just as a deadly glow — but as Rapture.