Dystopia, Feminism and Phallogocentrism in Margaret Atwood’S Oryx and Crake

Open Cultural Studies 2019; 3: 174-181 Research Article Javier Martín* Dystopia, Feminism and Phallogocentrism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0015 Received October 22, 2018; accepted January 28, 2019 Abstract: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is a very dark dystopian fable which introduces the reader to a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the planet Earth is on the edge of destruction, and human beings have been almost completely eradicated and substituted for a new, genetically-engineered, race. In this article, I am going to analyse the fundamental role phallogocentrism plays in the destruction of humanity and in the creation of a new world order populated by primitive but more ecological creatures. Keywords: Margaret Atwood, Canadian literature, feminism, dystopia, ecofeminism Introduction: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy Margaret Atwood’s status as one of Canada’s best known and most praised authors is such that, as J. Brooks Bouson points out, the author has been praised as “the public voice of Canadian letters [and as] Canada’s literary superstar” (1). Atwood’s extensive, complex and intricate corpus includes essays, literary criticism, poetry and fiction (both short stories and novels). Thus, it would be both unnecessary and unfeasible to offer a short biography here of a woman writer and who has sold millions of copies of many of her works and has won prestigious awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981), the Governor General’s Award on two occasions (1966, 1985), the Booker Prize (2000) and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2008). Nonetheless, I do consider it necessary to point out that throughout her highly heterogeneous and constantly mutating corpus, Atwood has always been preoccupied with such topics as women’s rights and their role in Western society, environmentalism and the effects, both positive and highly negative, of technology on citizens in an increasingly globalised world. As Ashley Winstead points out, “Like the monthly interest contract that generates dollars from a promise, Atwood understands the performative power and political efficacy of speculative narratives to be located in the agency of language itself” (231). This article will analyse Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, which is the first volume of the dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, which includes the above-mentioned Oryx and Crake (2003), together with The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). Dystopia, De-evolution and Feminism Like much other science fiction and/or speculative fiction novels, these three novels can be characterised as very dark fables, located in a not-too-distant future, in which homo sapiens’s technological and scientific hubris condemns our planet and our own species to extinction. Similarly to what happens in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) and Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982), in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, human beings have been able to improve technology to limits beyond their wildest dreams, but *Corresponding author: Javier Martín, Universidad de Córdoba, Córdoba, spain, E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2019 Javier Martín, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Public License. Dystopia, Feminism and Phallogocentrism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake 175 these improvements have been reached at a very high price, that of the apocalypse. Since the dawn of humanity, human beings have considered themselves to be the most perfect creatures on Earth. Consequently, we have positioned our species at the top of a pyramid which encompasses all living creatures on the planet. Thus, every ancient religion conceptualised gods and goddesses as anthropomorphic, both from a physical perspective and from a moral one. As is well-known, throughout history divine entities have tended to share human virtues and faults alike. This conception has been re-enforced by the majority of holy texts, such as the Christian Bible. As a quintessential example, I consider it relevant to quote the Bible’s Book of Genesis: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. (Genesis 1: 26) During the Middle Ages, theocracy placed God at the centre of both human lives and the universe. Nonetheless, men continued to have a privileged status, since mankind was created in God’s perfect image. Later on, during the Renaissance period, anthropocentrism became prevalent, and philosophers (even theologians) substituted human beings for God as the central focus of their study. With the advent of modernity and the rise of capitalism, science and reason replaced religion and philosophy. But the idea that mankind was better than any other species remained unchanged, as Darwin’s Origin of Species clearly corroborates. It would be extremely difficult to disagree with Darwin’s conclusions from a merely scientific point of view. However, from a moral perspective, the superiority of mankind becomes more dubious: for example, while men have been able to produce countless scientific, social and artistic wonders; they also have perpetrated the most indescribable acts of cruelty and atrocity towards the planet and their fellow humans. Human viciousness and lack of respect for the environment can be traced back to the very origins of the species. However, the exponential scientific and technological advancements that took place during the twentieth century allowed mankind to become exceedingly destructive, both to the planet and to itself. The influential philosopher Theodor Adorno affirmed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). In the wake of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, human-induced global warming, and so on, it becomes necessary to wonder to what extent is not equally barbaric to consider humans to be the most advanced species on this planet. Many contemporary American novelists have devoted some of their most valuable works to this exact question: are humans really superior to other species or, on the contrary, have we developed some sort of Derridean autoimmune disease which is destined to destroy itself, us, all other species and even the planet. It is not surprising that many of these authors were speculative fiction authors, science fiction authors or simply writers who embraced those genres when tackling this challenging and ominous question. The list of novels which depict a human-induced apocalypse is virtually endless, and ranges from Isaac Asimov to Thomas Pynchon (I am well aware of the fact that considering Pynchon as a science fiction author might be controversial, but I am also firmly convinced that many elements from Gravity’s Rainbow [1973], V. [1963], Maxon and Dixon [1997] or even The Crying of Lot 49 [1965] can be defined as science fictional). From the perspective of feminism, this topic is not new either, since as Soraya Copley states, “the pollution of the environment and of the food chain by reckless humanity is not a new subject in dystopian writing. It has been a major preoccupation in a range of feminist dystopian texts for over forty years, and it continues today with renewed emphasis on post-apocalyptic and eco-critical dystopia” (41). As a matter of fact, feminist dystopia is not new to Atwood either. As Cristina Nicolaescu explains in her analysis of the author’s 1972 novel Surfacing, “Ecofeminism builds a kind of bridge between these two theoretical groundings [“voice” and “subaltern” in Gayatri Spivak’s theory] and tries to link feminism and ecology in the sense that the oppression of women and the oppression of the environment are two issues, which are closely connected” (350-51). 176 J. Martín At this point it is important to mention that Atwood disagrees with the majority of critics who consider her speculative works to be dystopian, insisting that they are rather examples of “ustopia,” which she defines as “the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, each contains a latent version of the other” (“The Road to Ustopia”). Atwood’s definition of “ustopia” is fully coherent with Lyman Tower Sargent’s concept of “critical dystopia.” The latter includes speculative dystopian fiction written after 1980 and demands more careful reading, due to the many nuances it contains (1-37). Lee Rozelle is one of the few critics who agree with Atwood, declaring that, from an ecocritical perspective Oryx & Crake is closer to utopia than it is to dystopia (61). Another important critic who shares this same idea is Calina Ciobanu, who states the following: As Atwood figures it, however, the end of the Anthropocene is hardly the end of the world—it is simply the end of our world, the end of the world as we know it. As such, it is also an opportunity to imagine how a world that has been radically undone by that anthropo of the “Anthropocene” might come to reconstitute itself anew. (153-54) Oryx and Crake: It’s the End of The World… as We Know It The novel Oryx and Crake opens in media res, introducing readers to a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the environment has been almost destroyed and strange, genetically-modified flora and fauna reign. The desolation is absolute, and the ruins of former metropolis lie decadent, ominous and surreal: “These things [the abandoned and collapsing buildings] are not real.

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