Like many residents of Knox County, I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as part of the Knox Reads! program put together by KR Associate Director of Programs Abby Serfass for the celebration of Atwood’s visit to Kenyon on November 10 for the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. I read my copy of Atwood’s novel this weekend on airplanes, in airport boarding areas, and in a roadside motel in rural Iowa, which added a nice dash of techno-angst and prairie bleakness to its dystopian vision, but the question that stuck with me as I finished the book was, why is it so much fun to read about apocalypse?
The word most used about Oryx and Crake, based on the reader responses on sites like Amazon, is “grim.” And there’s no question that the story is a bleak one: the lone survivor of a global pandemic struggles to survive a nightmare world of genetically modified predators while simultaneously remembering his own part in this act of bio-genocide and acting as shepherd to a new species of simplified humans designed to have no higher reason, no intellectual ambition, and no destructive impulses. But this image of devastation is really the book’s second apocalypse: the first is an ecological, political, and economic catastrophe that has taken place before the book begins, in which the human race has devoured the world’s natural resources, retreated from the flooded coastal cities, and split into a brutal class structure ruled over by a techno-elite who live and work in secure corporate compounds (OrganInc, AnooYoo, RejoovenEsense) that produce bio- and genetically- engineered products for consumption by the residents of the pleeblands that lie beyond their gates. The novel’s narrative is divided between two dystopian visions: a world still recognizable as an extension of our own media and consumer economy, where teenage boys watch internet porn (HottTotts) or play violent video games (Extinctathon, Three-Dimensional Waco, Kwiktime Osama), and an even bleaker post-apocalyptic world that is the logical result of all that violence and bio-manipulation, where only the genetically-modified mutants survive.
So, a bleak vision? You bet. Yet as I sat in coffee shops and airport boarding areas reading my paperback copy of Atwood’s novel this past weekend, I was twice approached by fans of the book who told me how much they’d loved it. So what’s the pleasure in reading ??? or writing ??? about the end of the world? The easy answer is that this apocalyptic vision catches the spirit of our historical moment, with its genetically-modified glow in the dark rabbits and equally synthetic color-coded terror alerts. But there’s nothing new about taking pleasure in the apocalypse: just look at how vivid the language of the Bible becomes in the Revelation of St. John, or any of the medieval dream visions that grow lush in their imagination of world’s end, and you realize that something in writers comes to life as the world dies. Atwood’s done some truly scary thinking about the fragility of human culture: all it would take, she notes, is the loss of one generation for our whole technological culture to collapse, since even if we left instructions, we’ve so depleted the available surface metals that there’d be no resources with which to rebuild, and without advanced technology, no way to dig deeper. But one can also feel a gleeful quality in her prose as she imagines her nightmare future: just the names of the products sold by these biotech companies (BlyssPluss, Dreamkidlets. Cribfillers Ltd.) and the accompanying advertising slogans (“Blue Genes Day? Try SnipNFix! Heal Your Helix.”) or the spectacles of violence available on the internet (deathrowlive.com, hedsoff.com) reveal a pleasure in comic verbal play that doesn’t simply reflect the degraded values of this future, but rather suggests how much fun it is for a writer to imagine the worst. Novels like Oryx and Crake or Cormac McCarthy’s recent post-apocalyptic fable The Road are part of a tradition that extends back through DeLillo’s White Noise and the literary apocalypses of the nuclear era (A Canticle for Liebowitz, On the Beach, Alas, Babylon) all the way back to Gilgamesh and the burning towers of Troy. The fall of a civilization is both horrifying and perversely satisfying, as the writer calls out warnings like a prophet starving in the desert against a culture with no time for art, literature, wisdom, or foresight. (And let’s face it, cultures have never valued art or artist until they can be commodified as forms of commerce or display.) Such novels offer scathing cultural satire, but also a form of revenge fantasy, the literary equivalent of sarcasm for those of us standing against the wall at the middle-school dance of culture: we may not be beautiful or popular, but one day those shallow, genetically-blessed kids grinding away out on the floor will be depressed soccer moms and auto mechanics. Apocalypse is coming, we mutter, and we want to be there to see it!
Here’s Crake, Atwood’s engineer of apocalypse, on the biological purpose of art:
“The male frog, in mating season,” said Crake, “makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs ??? it’s been documented ??? discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is“ So that’s what art is, for the artist. An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”
Change “getting laid” to getting heard, and you start to see the cultural imperative for the writer to imagine apocalypse. If we start with the assumption that the culture is hollow at the core, then all one has to do is bring on an apocalypse to blow out all the clutter of daily life, and you’ve got a nice drainpipe to amplify the voice. In these terms, the apocalyptic novel becomes less prophecy or cultural critique than writing in its purest form, as the imagination can quite literally run wild, like a child in a rage, trashing his room. There’s a cathartic pleasure in that gesture, and a strain of masochism as well, since the first thing to vanish in any apocalypse would be literature. But the literary imagination averts that threat, asserting its creative power even in these acts of destruction. Such stories work in the same way Bruno Bettleheim suggests that fairy tales function within the psychological development of children in his classic book The Uses of Enchantment: they make the world strange and terrifying, but also contain that terror and affirm the capacity of the imagination to create meaning even at its vanishing point.
I’m reminded here of Robert Oppenheimer’s account of watching the first test of the atomic bomb, when a verse from the Bhagavad Gita came into his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Accounts of those tests of the technology of apocalypse all describe its unearthly beauty, and while Oppenheimer apparently got the quote wrong, his response reflects the mind’s impulse to turn images of destruction into poetry. In a sense, this is the impulse to culture that stands in opposition to scenes of apocalypse. Even the worst thing in the world can be made strangely beautiful by the power of our metaphoric minds.