Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One Generation Away

I find it difficult to tell whether Atwood’s dystopian fantasies are meant as constructive social criticism or as sarcastic prophecy. Recent headlines suggest that her prophetic skills dominate, and with them her anticipatory sarcasm.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement, for example, the British actress Joanna Lumley is reported to be fervently hoping that “not all men are bad” [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainm...]. As Spencer Tracey said in the 1955 film, Inherit the Wind, when told by the trial judge in the Scopes monkey case that he hoped that Tracey wasn’t mocking the court, “Your Honor has every right to hope.” So, no Joanna, it’s hard to find a good one; but please go on hoping.

I think it’s fair to say that there is little hope for males in Oryx and Crake. Certainly not for the protagonists of Jimmy/Snowman nor the eponymous Crake who are both thoroughly misogynistic from puberty onwards. They humiliate females in their fascination with kiddie-porn and their fantasy of women as either saints or incompetents. But the oblique references to male oppressors goes far beyond the characters of the story. If I interpret Atwood correctly, she includes Adam Smith, Moses, Freud, Darwin, Gandhi, and perhaps even the genetic scientists Watson and Crick as symbols of a male-dominated corporatocracy.

And she’s undoubtedly right: The XY genetic make-up is clearly defective. After all how does one otherwise explain the recent tragedy in Toronto in which ten people were killed and another fifteen seriously injured [https://www.thelily.com/who-are-incel...]? This insane atrocity was carried out by a so-called ‘incel’, that is, an involuntarily celibate male. His murderous grievance was against women because they found him sexually unattractive. His considered strategy for revenge was random homicide by motor vehicle. One such nut-case would be embarrassing for man-kind; but it is reported that more than 40,000 men subscribe to a Facebook account which promotes an Incel Movement.

Atwood’s anticipation of the Incels is remarkable. Crake is a Jim Jones-type of scientific genius who is responsible for a world-wide genetic make-over. Part of the Crakian genetic re-design for humanity - thereby creating the ‘children of Crake’ - is the ritualization of sexual activity so that males don’t feel bad when rejected by prospective female mates. Otherwise the world would continue to be plagued by “... the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could escalate into violence. Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can’t have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in.”

As a solution, the losers in courtship rituals in Crake’s new world immediately lose all sexual desire - as well as their glowing blue penises - as soon as they receive the negative news. Men are pigs and are in need of fundamental reconstruction in other words - even by their own assessment.

Or more accurately, men are ‘pigoons’ according to Atwood’s story-line. Pigoons are one of the many new species created by modern genetic ‘splicing’. In this case: of pigs and raccoons. Other varieties include rakunks, snats, wolvogs, bobkittens, spoat/ giders, and rabbits that glow with the genes of jellyfish. These invasive and predatory animals are mis-attributed as the ‘Children of Oryx’. This is another misogynistic swipe since Oryx is an Asian girl sold into slavery who becomes both a porn-star and Jimmy’s feminine muse (a dig at Jung?) whenever he has enough booze to stimulate alcoholic hallucinations.

One might think that Atwood’s literary reach might have exceeded her intellectual grasp in conceiving such strange creatures as pigoons. But in today’s news appears the astounding announcement that pigs’ brains are now being kept alive outside their bodies [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetec...]. The scientists involved (apparently all of them men) believe that it is possible to repeat this remarkable feat with any mammal. And that, therefore, inter-species splicing is indeed feasible. Human immortality, some believe, is at hand. The children of Crake indeed: “... human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.”

It is not just their genes that are questionable. Male minds are philosophically harmful in their rationalization of male power as beneficial in an Invisible Hand sort of way. The benign logic of competitive personal ambition - for advancement, for reputation, for wealth, for making the world better - is a mere excuse for power-seeking. The male mind is warped in its essential isolationism: “He [Jimmy] wanted to be himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient.”

The quest for power ensures only one thing: an increase in the destructiveness of power. Another way of saying the same thing: an increase in power requires exploitation - of the environment, of animals, and of other people, particularly of women. Someone or something always loses in the competitive hormonal struggle. “Crake made the Great Emptiness,” say the men.

The zero-sum game in the male-dominated world is enshrined by the children of Crake in its creational mythology:

“Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by 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 the animals can’t talk.”

Crake, in other words, not only eliminated sexual rivalry, he also destroyed the possibility of intelligent conversation. Even Jimmy, his disciple and quondam advertising copywriter, recognizes the profundity of the loss: ‘“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”’

Crake’s debasing of language is actually part of an ideology: “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.” This ideology is, I think, the central theme of Oryx and Crake. It is an ideology of chaos, of irrational rationalistic inquiry and technological development, an ideology which conforms to the competitive, driven strangeness of masculine ‘nature’.

The latest headlines from California about Bill Cosby’s conviction make it difficult to disagree with Atwood at any point. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...].

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