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The “Pandemic Uncanny” in Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy: Rereading from the Perspective of Covid-19 Helen E. Mundler

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The “Pandemic Uncanny” in Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy: Rereading from the Perspective of Covid-19 Helen E. Mundler BACLS Virtual Conference, 26 June 2020, Crisis in Contemporary Writing The “Pandemic Uncanny” in Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy: rereading from the perspective of Covid-19 Helen E. Mundler The “state of emergency” in which we live is not the excaption but the rule. (Joseph Masco, 5). This short paper constitutes a report on my recent work on the pandemic in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. As Masco, among others, has pointed out, the 21st century is one of crisis, and its literature reflects this (Masco, 5). My current project is on rewritings of the Noah myth in a number of contemporary novels, and the flood in Genesis is often deployed metonymically or metaphorically, so that acts of terrorism, climate change or nuclear violence are represented by or accompanied by a flood. Pandemics, have been part of this category from the beginning, since they feature in my corpus, most notably in Margaret Atwood’s trilogy. But since the Covid-19 crisis, when the pandemic became real rather than symbolic, I have found that I have been reading these texts differently. Gradually, this rereading crystallised into a theory of the pandemic uncanny – in other words, lived experience fed back into a theoretical framework. What do I mean by the pandemic uncanny, and where did this idea come from? I drew on the work of Saint-Amour, Masco and Hurley, all of whom describe the nuclear uncanny, but also went back to Freud’s essay on the uncanny, which begins with an exploration of the terms “heimlich” and “unheimlich”, the first meaning homely, the second unhomely – and the oddity of this pair of terms being that in some usages they coincide, so that the one contains the seeds of the other, or even shifts to mean its own opposite. This led me to my first point, which was an exploration of the unhomeliness of the context in which Jimmy is set in Oryx and Crake. With reference to Baudrillard’s work on hyper- reality (43) and Jameson’s idea of a past which is both hackneyed and inaccessible (18), I looked at the places where Jimmy lives, none of which in any way resemble “home”, from the jumble of reproduction houses in the compound, through the mouldering dorms of Martha Graham, to the suite in “Paradice” which contains a dining table, Jimmy’s first, to which no guests will ever be invited. Each of these places provides a flickering alternation of homely/unhomely, familiar/alienating. This first point is based on the early part of Freud’s essay, before he gets onto his main theory of the uncanny, but it in turn led me to consider the unhomeliness which is evident in Oryx and Crake as a whole. For Joseph Masco, the uncanny aspect of the nuclear threat resides in the fact that life for those living after the first use of nuclear bombs seemed to be lived in a “temporal ellipsis” (Masco, 28): that 1 is to say that people were simply waiting for the end of civilisation in the form of the next bomb. While this point can be approached via the various theories of Frank Kermode and James Berger on the need of human beings to imagine endings, it can also be allowed to speak for itself – that is to say, it becomes very difficult to maintain a “normal” mental state if the end is imminent, and we can, as Lifton says, “lose our psychological moorings” (1). Rereading Oryx and Crake allowed me to see that there is a sense in it of waiting of the end which renders much of life uncanny, but that there is a chain of diminishing degrees of the uncanny in the trilogy. The prospect of a sudden and horrible ending to normal life is tamed in The Year of the Flood by the lore of the God’s Gardeners, according to which it is willed by God, and there is some prospect of salvation, both from the Waterless Flood itself and in the afterlife. Finally, in the Cobb House where the survivors live together in Maddaddam, the uncanny is absent – a home has been created, even if it will not be Jimmy’s home for long. My two last points delve deeper into theories of the nuclear uncanny and apply these to the pandemic. Firstly, I have shown that radiation as uncanny is something that can transferred to the pandemic. The Covid-19 virus, like radiation, is invisible and intangible, but wreaks terrible and often long-term damage; it is a cause of anxiety and an inability to live comfortably in the world. Secondly, I have taken up Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed in the uncanny, notably in the form of the animistic (see Totem and Taboo as well as “The Uncanny”). This is something which both Masco and Hurley explore, commenting on the return of the indigenous in the naming of test sites and so on during the Manhattan Project. The return of the repressed also takes animistic forms in my reading of the Atwood trilogy, but in a different register: notably, weather becomes animistic to the point where it is a non-human agent, a foe which must first be controlled, and then against which one cannot win. Like many of the frightening aspects of Oryx and Crake, this is tamed and controlled by Jimmy by being turned into a myth for the Crakers: Crake sends the weather, Crake is responsible (Maddaddam, 31). The Crakers live, instinctively, in an animistic world. The other main aspect of animism-as-uncanny in my reading of the trilogy concerns the way in which human beings are, in the case of a zootic pandemic, brought closer to the animal kingdom and confronted once more with the lack of differentiation of human and animal, a repeat of, or a variation on, the dilemma raised by Darwin in Victorian times (see Beer). Although the JUVE pandemic is not zootic, there is a blurring of the animal/human distinction in the Maddaddam trilogy which is particularly evident in the intelligence and capacity for speech of the pigoons. 2 References Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake, London, Bloomsbury, 2003. - Maddaddam (2013), London, Virago, 2014. - The Year of the Flood, London, Bloomsbury, 2009. Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994. Berger, James, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Mineappolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Freud, Sigmund, “Totem and Taboo”, Totem and Taboo and Other Works (1913-14), Standard Edition, vol XIII, 1-162. Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny” (1919), An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol XVII, 217-252. Hurley, Jessica, “The Nuclear Uncanny in Oceania”, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies; Paris Vol. 41, N° 1, (Autumn 2018): 95-105,158. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1966), London/Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1968. Lifton, Robert Jay, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, New York, Harper Colling, 1992. Masco, Joseph. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Saint-Amour, Paul K. “Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny,” Diacritics 30.4 (2000): 59-82. 3 .
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