Given Margaret Atwood’s avowed interest in evolutionary biology (Atwood 2003), it is not surprising, therefore, that on the first page of the novel Snowman awakes to find himself stuck in a tree (2004: 3–4). Flung out on his human branch, Snowman is a strange, apparently pure-bred animal compared to the hybrid-species living around him. In an echo of this opening scene, near the end of the novel, Atwood returns to the image of Snowman in a tree, where he contemplates and connects his “arboreal vantage point,” his arboreal ancestors, and the very concept “Arboreal, a fine word” (2004: 358). Although I discuss this second tree at length later in the chapter, Atwood’s repeated use of the symbol also points to the tree’s unique position in western thought. In their philosophical work on the “Rhizome,” for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue against the “arborescent model” of thinking, which they associate with the containment of differences within the binary branches of an organic whole. For this reason, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, [and] all of philosophy” (1987: 18). Within this context, Atwood’s trees are imaginatively charged figures that unearth deeply rooted structures of thought and histories of racism.
In the opening scene of Oryx and Crake, for example, Atwood hints at a connection between Snowman’s tree and the arboreal symbol of western imperialism when an apparently random thought pops into Snowman’s head: “it is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity” (2004: 4). Puzzled by his own internal monologue, Snowman conjectures that he’s unconsciously “quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials” (4). The sudden appearance of imperial discourse “written in the aid of European colonials” must colour any interpretation of Snowman’s tree. These sorts of imperial directives, after all, were meant to preserve the colonizer’s self-regard as civilized and, therefore, positioned above the lower natives. The neurotic “colonial” mantra—“adherence … maintenance … and preservation”—recalls how “directives” from Europe produced forms of rationality, or “sanity,” that depended, above all, on mindless “adherence” to disciplinary “routines” in order to preserve the fiction of white superiority.1 In his 1877 last will and testament, for example, Cecil Rhodes proudly proclaims the British Empire’s intention to “promote the best interests of humanity,” but in a different essay written the very same year, “Confessions of Faith,” Rhodes writes “we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses” (Rhodes 1877). In other words, the colonial “directive” which we must keep “steadily before our eyes” is not Empire’s feigned support for humanity, but rather its “routine” use of species difference (and arboreal models of evolution) to construct racial hierarchies within the category of the human.
With this historical context in mind, Atwood’s post-apocalyptic vision confronts Snowman with something disavowed in the suburban compounds in which he grew up: evolution and speciation are almost certainly influenced by the transfer of genes between species; only rarely are they caused by random mutations or pure genius. Reckoning with this fact would productively challenge the arboreal system and its biopolitical history. Indeed, the entire post-apocalyptic section of the novel could be read as the story of Snowman coming down from his tree to finally see evolution in its posthumanist incarnation as a field of ongoing biological relationships that supersede any inviolate notion of species difference.
Of the three novels that comprise the MaddAddam series, Oryx and Crake most clearly opens up an interdisciplinary conversation with contemporary biologists and theories of evolution. In interviews about the novel, Atwood has highlighted the influence of biologists like Stephen J. Gould and E.O. Wilson on her work, and several key aspects of Oryx and Crake can be traced back to Lynn Margulis’ influential study Acquiring Genomes: The Theory of the Origins of Species (2002). Like Atwood, Margulis questions the sociobiological trope of “mutation” in the production of an evolutionary tree of life. Margulis points out that mutation is almost always found to be either detrimental to survival or responsible for only very minor genetic change. Instead of extrapolating speciation from mutation, Margulis mounts an argument, based on compelling evidence, that symbiogenesis2 is the primary cause of speciation. Revising the tree of life, she points out, “the acquisition of heritable genomes can be depicted as an anastomosis, a fusing of branches,” [noting that] “such evolution requires new thought processes. New metaphors to reflect on the permanent associations are needed” (2002: 15, emphasis added). Particularly at the cellular level, Margulis reimagines the stickiness and porousness of biomaterial touch. And Margulis is adamant that “the minimal unit of life is the cell,” arguing that “genes by themselves, like viruses, are unable to produce cell material, which is mostly protein” (2002: 40). In this way, Margulis’ theories participate in a much larger reorientation of microbiology away from DNA as a sovereign (or selfish) molecule within an otherwise passive cellular environment.
After the anticlimactic completion of the Human Genome Project (1990–2003), the “cellular turn” in “postgenomic” microbiology has deemphasized the absolute value of DNA as the autonomous script for gene expression, emphasizing instead the interactive relationship between genes and the cellular conditions that surround them. As Sarah Richardson, a historian of science, puts it, “scientists across many fields have suggested that the key to human health and behavior will not be found in genomic code but in the delicate networks of gene regulation in their biochemical, cellular, and ecological environments” (2015: 234). Using postgenomic techniques, segments of the genetic script can be silenced, replicated, triggered, reversed, or reprogrammed using tools that often mimic microorganisms; for instance, the CRISPR-Cas9 technique for gene editing—hailed as a major breakthrough in genetic engineering—was developed by mimicking the gene-snipping immune systems of certain bacteria.
In a troubling trend, however, some biologists have taken to proclaiming that bacteria and other microorganism are the original biotechnicians, performing a labour that scientists are only learning to mimic. Margulis, for example, argues that “the real genetic engineer is the microbe; the scientists and technicians are merely go-betweens” (2002: 41). In a similar vein, John Archibald explains that “biotechnology is … not as ‘unnatural’ as one might think … evolution has been ‘plugging-and-playing’ with molecular components of life from the very beginning” (2014: 2). While the postgenomic recasting of biotechnology rightly challenges the traditional arboreal model of evolution by foregrounding lateral-gene-transfers, endosymbiosis, and gene regulation, it must resist the urge to naturalize the “plugging-and-playing” with genes as a timeless, vital process. That is, when the labour performed by biotechnicians is represented as merely mimicking microbes, it becomes imaginatively subsumed and encompassed by the image of microbial life processes. If microbes are “the real genetic engineers,” then genetic engineering threatens to appear like merely an elaboration of automatic, pre-historical, biological process, rather than as a form of labour performed within a biotechnological industry with specific economic and political interests.
While it is crucial to acknowledge the insights of postgenomic research, Atwood clearly warns against depoliticizing biotechnology by somehow equating scientists’ interventions with everyday microbiological processes. For Atwood, biotech is inseparable from the political economies and histories that invest it with meaning and power. Oryx and Crake reveals how contrasting residual and emerging models of evolution produce irreducible contradictions within corporate biotechnology: in order to produce the hybrid creatures that make these corporations profitable, scientists depend on the interoperable movement of biological material between species. Thus, for technical reas
ons, scientists must adopt a new materialist attitude towards hybridity and a working understanding of symbiogenetic evolution. And yet, for old materialist or political-economic reasons, these exchanges must not be allowed to undermine an arboreal or hierarchical model of speciation. Above all, the corporations require the ability to identify, secure, reproduce, and patent individual “hybrid” species as copyrighted commodities. One way in which Atwood poses this contradiction in the novel is through the ChickieNob, one of her most perplexing creatures.
ChickieNobs: Repugnance and Neoliberal Families
In a richly satirical scene near the middle of the novel, Crake takes his friend Jimmy on a tour of the biotech laboratories at the prestigious, corporately owned, Watson-Crick Compound. Here, Jimmy and the reader are introduced to a series of comically flawed inventions. There are the geologically modified rocks that “absorb water during periods of humidity and release it in times of drought” but still “explode” in “heavy rainfall”; there is “smart wallpaper” that is supposed to change colour to match one’s mood but can’t yet detect a difference between “drooling lust and murderous rage,” shining “erotic pink when what you really need [is] a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red” (2004: 201). This scene broadly alludes to Gulliver’s tour of the “Grand Academy of Lagado” in the “Laputa” section of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Like Jimmy, Gulliver encounters a series of hare-brained scientific experiments, including a project to “reduce human excrement to its original food,” and a “new method for building houses, … beginning at the roof and working downwards towards the foundation” (1960: 146). Indeed, in the epilogue to Oryx and Crake, Atwood directly quotes Gulliver’s Travels to establish her intention to “relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style; because [her] principle design [is] to inform you, and not amuse you.” Like Swift, Atwood’s comic mode is satirically instructive only insofar as the reader moves beyond mere amusement at ridicule to encounter the “plain matter” before them.3 Along these lines, it is important to read Atwood’s satire of the biotech compound not only as an amusing send-up of genetic experimentation, but also as a satire of those who might dismiss such projects outright.
A striking example of “plain matter” is unveiled at the end of Jimmy’s tour when he encounters the “horrible … ChickieNobs,” one of the biotech compounds’ most perplexing and profitable inventions (2004: 203). Described as an “animal protein tuber,” the ChickieNob has a “bulblike … head in the middle,” consisting solely of a large “mouth opening at the top” with “no eyes or beak or anything” (2004: 202). Out of this bulbous head grows “twenty thick fleshy tubes,” which sprout into chicken breasts at each end. According to the corporate scientists, the ChickieNob “feels no pain” because all “brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation and growth” have been removed (203). Stripped down, the ChickieNob is Atwood’s attempt to “relate the plain matter” of bare life “in the simplest manner and style”: as a knotted figure, animal, machine, object, and food, the nob reaches out and holds together multiple arguments about the social and economic organization of reproduction. In particular, the ChickieNob connects the twin neoconservative and neoliberal responses to biotechnology, as I will discuss later in this chapter.
Jimmy’s initial reaction to the ChickieNob is one of absolute repugnance. He thinks, “this thing was going too far,” and he describes the ChickieNob as a “‘horrible’ … nightmare” (2004: 202). Jimmy’s disgust recites a familiar discourse about biotechnology that shaped much early twenty-first-century experimentation, particularly in the United States. Over the past eighteen years, the most influential champion of repugnance has been Leon Kass, the head of President G.W. Bush’s Council of Bioethics and a well-known neoconservative thinker.4 In his anti-cloning treatise “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” published in the New Republic less than a year after Dolly the sheep was born, Kass claims that nearly all humans automatically feel repugnance at the prospect of human cloning, and that this repugnance represents a “revolt against the excesses of human willfulness” (1997: 20). “Repugnance,” Kass argues, “may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity” (1997: 20). Thus, Kass depicts an estrangement between the “core of humanity” and “human willfulness,” conjuring up an intra-species culture-war, where the “central core” is repulsed by the excessive, peripheral, and wilful elements of humans.
Whom, exactly, Kass has in mind when he talks about “willfulness” eventually becomes very clear, but it is important to first highlight his strategic use of evolution and the image of branching speciation to naturalize his vision of “core humanity.” While repugnance supposedly fortifies the “central core” of humanity against the incursions of “human willfulness,” repugnance must also police the entire tree of life—that whole ordering of species through which “humanity” emerges paramount. Along this evolutionary vein, Kass claims the following: “it is impossible, I submit, for there to have been human life—or even higher forms of animal life—in the absence of sexuality and sexual reproduction. We find asexual reproduction only the lowest forms of life: bacteria, fungi, algae” (1997: 21, emphasis added). Interestingly, for Kass, a species’ mode of reproduction, but also its “sexuality,” determines its “highness” or “lowness.” Or, put differently, Kass presumes a straightforward alignment of “sexuality and sexual reproduction.” Indeed, Kass evokes the “inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself” not only to split off lower asexual species from higher sexual species, but also to blame “feminism and the gay rights movement” for somehow stymieing “natural heterosexual … preeminence.” (1997: 18). Here then, he casts feminists, gay people, divorced mothers and bioscientists as “repugnant” figures of “excessive… willfulness” threatening the “central core” of humanity, which, according to Kass, is predictably heterosexual and patriarchal.
While Jimmy’s feelings of repugnance echo some of Kass’ neoconservative views on biotechnology, Atwood deconstructs this attitude by mixing in her novel indeterminate images of body parts and overdetermined symbols of abject desire. Initially, Jimmy’s disgust is with the idea of eating a ChickieNob: “It would be like eating a large wart” (2004: 203). A wart, in this context, refers to an abject skin growth caused by a virus and often associated with touch and contagion. Perhaps the most abject warts are genital warts, caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), which is “so common,” according to the CDC, that “most sexually-active men and women will get at least one type of HPV at some point in their lives” (CDC 2017). Arguably, then, Jimmy’s fear of eating a wart not only points to the conspicuous absence on a ChickieNob of any apparent body parts (face/buttocks/genitals) where a “wart” might grow, it also accentuates a lurking dread about the conspicuous presence of the ChickieNob’s large mouth/anus/vagina. To the extent that the ChickieNob’s organic “opening” poses, in part, as genitalia writ-large, Jimmy’s fear of “eating” a “nob” might also be read as an overdetermined fantasy for something like oral sex or a form of communicable touch that is pleasurable. Repugnance, however, tries to expel these sparks of desire by imagining the Chickie-flesh as an enveloping, diseased sexual organ. If the ChickieNob’s large reproductive mouth makes its flesh both consumable and consuming, then repugnance is legible here as a fear of sexual touch (genital warts) and invagination (vagina dentata). Helplessly curious, however, Jimmy wonders “what’s it thinking? … are they on the market yet?” and imagines that if he ate one, “maybe he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference” (2004: 202). In this way, repugnance, or simple disgust, is an incomplete description of abjection, which is the anxious expulsion of something that remains essential to one’s “core” identity and desires. Described as an “animal protein tuber,” the ChickieNob, much like Margulis’ symbiotic microbes, (re)fuses the bifurcation between sexual life (animal) and asexual life (tuber). That is, the ChickieNob is a symbol of abjection, in part, because it acknowledge
s and makes tangible the massive amount of asexual and interspecies reproduction already taking place at the “core” cellular level.
Yet, for Kass to acknowledge this ongoing biomaterial interaction would upset the arboreal structure that positions humans as evolutionarily superior to all other living beings. Ironically, however, in order for Kass to split human beings off from all other sexual animals, he introduces his own “opening at the top” whereby humans are conceived not through sex per se, but instead, through a self-conscious act of ouroboros or self-swallowing. Kass begins this argument by asserting that sexual reproduction “means perishability”: “sexual desire, in human beings as in animals … serves an end partly hidden from … the self-serving individual” (1997: 22). Therefore, “whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise” (1997: 22). Around the “know it or not,” “partly hidden” nexus of sex and death, “genitalia” emerge as a biopolitical tool for “voting” humans elect. Whereas animals simply “evince” the death drive “blindly,” for Kass, “only the human beings can understand, … as we learn so powerfully form the story of the Garden of Eden, [that] our humanization is coincident with sexual self-consciousness” (1997: 22, emphasis added). In other words, humans are exceptional because they realize their genitals are trying to kill them. For this reason, Kass concludes, “sexual desire humanly regarded is … sublimated”: lust is transformed into love, desire into eros, and, above all, humiliation becomes the sign of “humanization” (1997: 8). Ultimately, therefore, human superiority is not grounded in some material difference; rather, “humanization” is a question of self-conscious sublimation or the intentional repression of animal desire. Not only does this sexual self-consciousness directly confound Kass’ earlier claim to the “inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself,” but it also produces a species of shame that finds the shamelessness of life repugnant (1997: 2). This is an entirely disingenuous evocation of shame because shame, for Kass, is really a badge of honour, the quality that supposedly allows humans to rise above other animals in a prideful fantasy of transcendence. This is Kass’ opening at the top: humans are not created materially through sex; they are created or cloned asexually through “sexual self-consciousness.” It is not incidental, of course, that this asexual reproduction of the human through self-consciousness expurgates the maternal.
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