This is an academic paper I wrote based on Margaret Atwood's novel, Oryx and Crake
Literature is commonly known to be a commentary on society and within that, the genre of science fiction is a hypothetical warning of what society can amount to if we are not careful. Novelist, activist, and literary critic, Margaret Atwood, regards her work to be “Speculative fiction” (Barajas) because the technologies and cultures she features in this work already exist in our present-day world and are no longer theoretical. Oryx and Crake earns the title of “Admonitory satire” (Bouson, Joke-filled Romp 1), a novel that uses irony and comedic relief to ridicule the vulgarity in this pre-and-post-apocalyptic story. The brilliance of this plot lies in the nuance, detail, and purposeful wordplay that Atwood implements. Atwood uses witty literary devices to contrast the heavy subjects of the book, making this what she describes as a “Joke filled romp through the end of the human race.” (Bouson, Joke-filled Romp 1), This darkly comedic novel deals with an overarching theme of extremities: extreme violence, extreme sexual misconduct, and extreme misuse of biotechnology that involves a bioterrorist plot and a Final Solution story (Dvorak, 3). Through Atwood’s specific use of expression to trivialize serious topics as well as the predominant use of irony to comment on the absurdities in the novel, she ultimately satirizes the world of Crake and Jimmy as well as the world the reader lives in.
This novel is tumultuous and packed with many obscenities: violence, gore, and pornography. In essence, it tracks the lives of Jimmy, (who later becomes known as Snowman), Crake, and their mutual love: Oryx. The story begins in medias res but oscillates between pre-and post-apocalypse, using flashbacks as a tool to narrate the plot. The apocalypse, in essence, is a genetically modified revision of the human species that purges mankind of all “negative traits”, essentially wiping out the population (Squier, 1154). The main elements that this essay unpacks is Atwood’s overarching use of irony and subtlety of dark humor to explore this intricately catastrophic plot line.
Characters Jimmy and Crake become best friends in school but have a sadistic and toxic relationship from the outset. They spend most of their time playing violent video games and watching explicit pornography and execution-style murders on TV. Much of the humor and wit of Atwood’s writing lie in the nuances, particularly her choice of wordplay, which creates this scathing tone. Atwood incorporates a lot of made-up names of websites into her novel, which are often parodies of existingwords,s making them ironic in their meaning. A clear example of this is “Alibooboo.com” (Atwood, 48) a livestream event that the boys watched where, “various supposed thieves [had] their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick-wearers [were] stoned to death by howling crowds” (Atwood, 48). This mordant broadcast could also be a spoof on the real-life website Alibaba.com, the Chinese e-commerce and retail company. This is incongruous because Alibaba is a Chinese “Amazon-like” web front which is commercialized and capitalized where as “Alibooboo.com” is the antithesis of that monetized freedom. In fact, it is a program where capital punishment is broadcasted in countries such as China, a place of little individualism and capitalistic freedom. In describing these events using parody-like-websites and TV programs, Professor Brooks Bouson theorizes that Atwood “uses her narrative as a platform to voice her concern about a trend in contemporary culture that she finds troubling: the mainstreaming of violence and pornography into the mass culture.” (It’s Game over Forever 143), which is congruent with the analysis in this essay. Jimmy and Crake watched these broadcasts and made “sports-event commentary” (Atwood, 48) on these atrocities. This novel makes a hyperbolic observation about how people are often addicted to suffering and violence as part of self-amusement. Again, Atwood is taking intense content: both themes from the book and real-life and trivializing it through irony and dark humor.
Moreover, they also watched a lot of porn: “HottTotts” (Atwood, 52) was their go-to “kiddie-porn site” (Atwood, 182) The name alone should make readers squirm, nevertheless, it further adds to the dark comedic effect of the novel: the sexualizing of these “tots” through a macabrely humorous name. Jimmy and Crake mainly watched executions and porn, the height of vulgarity so much so that, “if you switched back and forth fast, it all came to look like the same event” (52). This is a disturbing report on how normalized explicit content is in society. In the academic journal, “It’s Game over Forever” Bouson, succinctly explains Atwood’s technique in portraying these subjects in such a way: “Even as Atwood expresses some of her deadpan humour in naming the forbidden sites Jimmy and Crake surf on the Internet – sites that provide live coverage of executions…she also conveys her uneasiness as she describes the degradation of culture in a society where violence and pornography have become cheap, and readily available, forms of entertainment.” (143).
Additionally, the video games Crake and Jimmy play become a major motif in the novel as Crake eventually pursues the “destruction of humanity in his [own] genocidal game of Extinctathon” (Bouson, It’s Game over Forever 144). “Extinctathon” (Atwood, 23) is a game where the player must figure out the extinct animal when given clues about genus, phylum, order, class etc. This game appealed mainly to Crake as there were Grandmasters who played the game and “had brains like search engines” (Atwood, 42), Crake too was described to be “brilliant weirdo” (Atwood, 114) and sought fellow “brainiacs” (Atwood,102). Not only did this game foreshadow the ending of this novel when Crake uses all these Grandmasters as the splicing people in the “Paradice Project” (Atwood, 179) but it is ironic because Crake goes from playing virtual games about extinct animals to working on the extinction of actual humanity in his genetically engineered apocalypse.
(Ayers)
This is a fan interpretation of what the game interface could have looked like. The writing includes direct quotes from the book and the artwork is very cleverly selected as it displays the skeletons of both the extinct species of antelope, Oryx and the bird, a Crake. The nicknames that two of the main characters went by. The “Abominable Snowman”, the nickname Jimmy takes on is not included in this picture because he survives the apocalypse whereas Oryx and Crake are part of the extinction.
(Hailstone)
This picture was taken from an anti-Trump protest in the USA. Margaret Atwood’s novels, and Oryx and Crake in particular, satirizes flaws in society. Scarily, these issues seem to become less like fiction and are slowly morphing into reality, making this sign a very clever protestation. This sign relates to the satirical attack Atwood makes on contemporary society’s abuses of genetic engineering and violence, as this theme is no longer bound to the pages of books.
Alongside the use of offensive colloquial videogames, websites, and television programs to ridicule the exaggerated violence and sexual crimes in the novel, Atwood uses irony to remark on the absurdities of the biogenetics and attempted human control over the environment. This is both a theme in the book and a satirical representation of real-life events. Author of the “Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood”, Marta Dvorak agrees with this exploration claiming, “Atwood favors grotesque realism, designed to degrade and mock” (125). Furthermore, Dvorak states that “Satire is arguably the common denominator in all the genres and modes Atwood visits – many of which are adapted to imparting a lesson” (134). Many of the technological advancements written about impart a message about further serving capitalist ideals in gaining profit at the expense of humanitarian needs (just like the videos and pornography). The reader is exposed to smaller incidences of misused biotechnology building up to the climax of Crake’s mastermind plan. Crake warns Jimmy that the largest pharmaceutical compound, “Helthwyzer “(Atwood, 29) creates diseases and products so that they can profit off the solutions to them. This is an ironic caveat for someone who too comes to create commodities on a personal agenda. Atwood offers an entertaining and exaggerated satire of commercial biotechnology, like the way Crake works in a compound called “RejoovenEsense” (Atwood, 88) a comedic play on the word Rejuvenescence. This denotes to the renewal of youth or vitality however, the project that Crake is working on is marketed as an experiment to cause “immortality” (Atwood, 172) but the truth is that it results in the opposite of this vitality. Crake comes up with a way to save the future of humanity but in doing so wipes out the whole generation of human life. These cynical phrasings and texts become part of Atwood’s trademark writing and weave themselves into the concept of exploring irony in her work as the labels she affords things are often a paradox of their use.
The name of Crake’s mastermind plan is “Paradice” a witty allusion to John Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost” a biblical story about the downfall of man. Here in Crake’s “Paradice Project” the collapse of man was manufactured unbeknownst to the public. Crake has two major creations that he falsely markets will give society a better chance at survival: a pill and a creation of a new species of humans, known as the Crakers. “The Pill would put a stop to haphazard reproduction, the Project would replace it with a superior method” (Atwood, 181). The “Blysspluss pill”, is a pill that promotes libido but unknowingly works as a sterilization to the population. Crake explains to Jimmy that the future of humanity is looking grim and “With the BlyssPluss Pill the human race will have a better chance of swimming.” (Atwood, 174). The irony is that this sounds rather altruistic of Crake, but his motives cause more harm than philanthropy. At the end of the novel, it is discovered that he has implanted a deathly virus into this well-marketed “birth control” pill with the help of the “Extinctathon” grandmasters-cum-bioterrorists. In addition, the next step of his plan is to replace humanity with the “perfect humans”: the Crakers.
“Atwood’s account of Crake’s genetically engineered, ecologically-friendly, vegetarian creatures reads like an extended joke” (Bouson, Joke-filled Romp 10). Crake creates these “floor model” (Atwood, 179) stereotypes of what he believes to be the flawless human. Their genetic makeup and descriptions are ludicrous since Crake handpicks the entire genetic build of these demi-humans to perfection, only for them to be left incomplete and lost in a post-apocalyptic world. The Crackers are aesthetically pleasing, looking like “Ads for high-priced workout programs” (Atwood, 115) and comedically named after “eminent historical figures (Atwood, 116). They eat leaves and grass and come into heat in intervals just like animals. They have built in mosquito repellent and sunblock, which allows the reader to deduce that there will be no further need for the textile industry and their bodies will also be able withstand the harsh effects of global warming. Moreover, Crake designed them that they “Lacked the neural complexes” (Atwood, 180) for problematic concepts like hierarchy and racism and “They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money” (Atwood, 181) Ultimately Atwood imagines a human subspecies that overtakes the traditional human, but it becomes a comical parody on what should be the “perfect” race.
As Jimmy witnesses the extinction of humankind, unable to believe what is happening, it all seems like “an illusion, a practical joke of some kind” (Atwood, 205). Jimmy is the only one, along with the Crakers that survives the pandemic. Post-apocalypse Jimmy changes his name to “Snowman” after the “Abominable Snowman” (Atwood, 6). This is Atwood’s trademark cynicism in nicknaming a character “Snowman” when he lives out the rest of his life on a beach. Snowman is left in the aftermath of destruction where he is constantly tormented by things that once held meaning. He is trapped in Crake’s idea of sustainability and immortality, which he despises him for. Bouson describes Snowman’s life as “a kind of living human joke trapped in the master Extinctathon game engineered by Crake” (It’s Game over Forever 153).
Moreover, another tongue-in-cheek situation is that Crake himself does not believe in God or a higher entity and in the creation of the Crakers the concept of God is eradicated. He “eliminated what he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons” (Atwood, 92). Since the Crakers become stranded in devastation and are only in the prototype stage of development they begin to ask where they come from and what creation was like. Snowman labels Crake as their Omnipotent maker. This is cynical because “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” (Atwood, 61). Jimmy becomes a sort of “improbable Shepard” (Atwood, 212) and the Crakers believe he communicates with Snowman through an abandoned watch that he finds in the aftermath.
This novel begins in medias res and comes full circle when the flashbacks and present-day story meet in Snowman/ Jimmy rummaging through the damage for things from his past life, which are rendered useless now. The watch that the Crakers believe is Jimmy’s connection to their God is a prominent symbol in the ending of the novel. Atwood includes these items of paraphernalia like the watch and a “red sox baseball cap” (Atwood, 4) or toothpaste “for a whiter smile”(137) in an almost darkly comedic way to constantly remind Snowman of the life he had before. However, the watch is “his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour” (Atwood, 4) to the Crakers the watch is a symbol of power, a medium to speak to Crake through. This is ironic because the power here is synonymous with wealth, but both these themes have little meaning at this point in the novel. Moreover, in this new world the watch is no longer of value, watches are useless and knowing the hour makes no difference. This world becomes ‘zero hour the era of no official time” (Squier, 1155). At the end of the novel all the biotechnology projects have become obsolete, and this ending becomes a parable and warning of what can happen when there is extreme misuse of technology and power. Atwood, throughout the novel uses elements of comedy, irony, parody, and antithesis to satirize these big issues in a tongue-in-cheek way. However, the culmination of all this cynicism just leads to an ending complete with depletion and dilapidation.
Atwood satirizes violence and absurd themes by using sarcastic phraseology and diction and she ridicules genetic modification by also exposing the irony of the detriment it causes, even when it seems to be at the aid of civilization. The extreme destruction and ultimate bioterrorism are rendered hyperbolic in the novel but are all a warning of the speculative fiction genre, as these issues may land up as up-and-coming concerns in the lives of the reader. As Susan Squier reflects, “This novel presents a brutal portrait of a world where the ethical burden of history has been reduced to videogames” and the implementation of biotechnology has ironically created a world less advanced than ever.
Works cited
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Virago Press Ltd, 2013.
Ayers, Chris. “Extinctathon from Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam”- Oryx and Crake Poster”. Redbubble, https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Extinctathon-from-Margaret-Atwood-s-MaddAddam-Oryx-and-Crake-by-cwayers/43800809.LVTDI
Barajas, J. “Margaret Atwood on the Dystopian Novels That Inspired Her to Write ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’” PBS NewsHour, 9 Sept. 2019, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/margaret-atwood-on-the-dystopian-novels-that-inspired-her-to-write-the-handmaids-tale.
Bouson, J. Brooks. “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-Apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 51, no. 3, Sept. 2016, pp. 341–57. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/0021989415573558.
Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘It’s Game over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 39, no. 3, 2004, pp. 139–56.
Dvořák, Marta. “Margaret Atwood’s Humor.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 124–40. Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/9781108626651.010.
Hailstone, Sara. “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction again: Crowds and Fiction”. Sons and Daughters, https://www.sonsanddaughtersjournal.com/latest-posts-1/sara-hailstone-crowds-and-fiction.
Squier, Susan M. “A Tale Meant to Inform, Not to Amuse.” Science, edited by Margaret Atwood, vol. 302, no. 5648, 2003, pp. 1154–55. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3835475.
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