Regardless of whether such a catastrophic-catastrophe is possible, it is certainly imaginable. And popular representations of accumulating chaotic forces become excuse and alibis for further investments in policing and defending against a cataclysmic future. In other words, representations of apocalyptic chaos are central to the hold of dystopian power. Sheldon calls this “catastrophe-as-protection: [a] counterintuitive formulation that bears the name apocalypse, the ultimate unveiling of the future’s potential for harm that both military plans and cultural productions elaborately routinize, telegraph, and enjoin” (2016: 47). For example, Crake cites “demographic reports” that show humans “as a species … in deep trouble” to justify his “prophylactic” technology—the BlyssPluss pill, which not only secretly sterilizes humans who take it, but also allows the Paradice compound to monopolize future humanoid evolution (2004: 293–295). We might, therefore, read the post-apocalyptic outcome of novel as an extension of—rather than a break from—the dystopian power to renaturalize or reproduce the real body in and by representation. In as much as the Crakers represent the securitization of real or transhumanoid reproduction against the threat posed by underdeveloped old-humans, one might think of this as an anti-utopia-dystopian or a transhumanist interpretation of the novel.
Alternatively, because the Great Rearrangement is an overdetermined event, one might interpret it as a revolutionary story that reconfigures the generic relationship between dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives. Along these lines, Gerry Canavan argues that the “science fictional imagination of apocalypse functions today as the post-modern version of [Fredric] Jameson’s called for ‘radical break,’ which is ‘the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative [to capitalism] is possible, that there is no alternative to the system’” (2012: 139). In other words, the dystopian totality of the biocapitalist system can be confronted only through a historical break or “the strident insistence that things might yet be otherwise—however that might happen, and whatever else we might become along the way” (2012: 156). The real problem, therefore, is not that global capitalism has made it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The relative ease with which we imagine the end of the world is not, in itself, a problem. How we interpret this end is the crucial question. For Canavan and others, we might understand these apocalyptic visions as historic breaks that anticipate a future wherein humans finally recognize (among other things) the posthuman biological commons that have “always already been awaiting our discovery” (Sheldon 2016: 41).11 In a sense, because the Crakers have “no family trees,” they mark a clear break from corporate domesticity and its social order; sexuality for them is no longer an oedipal drama of shame or death, and kinship is no longer nuclearized by trees of money or blood.12
While this revolutionary understanding of Oryx and Crake is both persuasive and satisfying, one might understandably have some reservations about this reading, and its apparent willingness to move quickly over Crake’s genocidal decision to wipe out human beings. Of course, the novel’s satirical tone and melodramatic treatment of the apocalypse encourage figurative interpretations. But even so, it is not only Crake’s arrogance and heartlessness being satirized here; the satire would also logically attach itself to Atwood herself and her own reliance on a figurative apocalypse to write herself out of the dystopian world. In other words, Oryx and Crake’s satirical treatment of mass death also exposes a sincerely felt problem that Canavan also shares: “the difficulty and necessity of finding some sort of alternative” to the current dystopian world (2004: 154, emphasis added). This brings us back, once again, to Preciado’s warning about the “messianic” and “apocalyptic” narrative traps. No person, god, or techo-thing will save us, not even hyper-rational scientists. And yet, we cannot just give up because in all likelihood neither the apocalypse nor revolution is imminent.
A slightly different way to characterize this genre problem is to turn to Oryx, a figure whose meaning and motivations are overdetermined in ways that parallel the novel’s overdetermined resolution. Well before the Great Rearrangement, the dystopian thematics of control begin fracturing when Oryx, a pleeblander, infiltrates the biotech compound. Although her name appears in the novel’s title, literary analysis of Oryx has followed a familiar path. Earl Ingersoll, for example, analyses Oryx primarily through Jimmy and Crake’s eyes as a passive figure who serves as Crake’s “whore” and Jimmy’s “mother” (2004: 165). Ingersoll suggests that Oryx is “pressed into service” at the compound; she is the innocent victim of Crake’s cunning, “the ultimate manipulator” (2004: 165, 166). Likewise, J. Brooks Bouson’s claims that both Jimmy and Oryx are “unwitting players” in Crake’s plan, and that Oryx represents the “sex-addicted postfeminist world” (2004: 147). She is both a “fantasized object of desire” and an object lesson in “the baneful social and economic effects of global climate change on the poor of the world” (2004: 147). Because “Oryx is vague and evasive about her traumatic past,” Bouson argues, she acquires “a kind of general representative status as a female sexual victim and commodity in the novel’s scheme” (2004: 148). And even where Stephen Dunning finds Oryx to be the “abiding mystery at the heart of the story,” Oryx is only really intelligible for Dunning as a projection of Jimmy and Crake’s desires:Oryx proves even more elusive, both about her relationship with Crake, and indeed about her own life. She refuses (and has effectively been denied the opportunity) to speak of (or for) herself, preferring to deflect her interrogators by addressing the inarticulate urges of their bodies; thus, she both secures herself against penetrating intellectual curiosity and becomes the site of perpetual mystery, a space within which the narrator (and likely Crake himself) ‘writes’ his own sense of the Other. (2005: 92)
While Dunning notes Oryx’s “refusals” and “preferences,” her motivations remain a “mystery” because she refuses “to speak of (or for) herself.” Oryx functions as a surface that both deflects and reflects the viewer’s fantasy of the Other. And it’s true, Oryx does repeatedly deflect Jimmy’s leading questions about her life. But more than merely “securing herself against” the “penetrating intellect” of her “interrogators,” Oryx is the only pleeblander to penetrate the compounds’ security systems. Indeed, Oryx alone has access to the “inner sanctum” of the Paradice lab where she teaches the humanoid Crakers how to survive outside the compound: “what not to eat and what could bite. And what not to hurt” (2004: 310). Moreover, if we take Oryx at her word, there are relatively straightforward ways to interpret her motivations as more than merely self-defence or the product of Crake’s manipulation.
Oryx’s entrance into the novel is directly associated with the novel’s transition from dystopian control to apocalyptic release: “now he’s come to … the place in the tragic play where it would say: Enter Oryx. Fatal moment” (2004: 307). Furthermore, she is the only pleeblander to breech the physical and symbolic boundary between the compounds and pleeblands, a spatial divide that mirrors the novel’s temporal divide between the dystopian and the post-apocalyptic settings.13 And while Oryx clearly demonstrates a canny self-awareness when interrogated by Jimmy inside the domestic compounds, Oryx is also pretty clear about her commitments to combating climate change, decreasing the population, and embracing biotechnology as a means for change. She distributes pills for the BlyssPluss project that, as far as she knows, “prolong youth,” “increase libido,” and secretly sterilize “male and female alike” (294). She also oversees the education of the species she believes will replace infertile humans on earth. Although Oryx likely doesn’t know about the lethal disease carried in the BlyssPluss pills, she does know, as does Jimmy, that the twin programmes (BlyssPluss and Paradice) will, over the long run, replace human life with Crakers.14 And contrary to the depiction of Oryx as a mysterious, passive object of others’ desires, she tells Jimmy flatly, “I believe in [Crake’s] … vision,” and “there are too many people and that makes the people bad. I kn
ow this from my own life” (322). To ascribe Oryx’s commitments to Crake’s “manipulation,” as Jimmy does, is to ignore what Oryx “know[s] … from [her] own life” as a former prostitute whose homeland in Southeast Asia was devastated by drought; it also denies her willing participation in the destruction of corporate domesticity.
But what is Oryx’s will? Jimmy’s repeated attempts to substitute what Oryx knows from her life with his own beliefs about her life are clearly mis-recognitions of Oryx’s will. Jimmy’s blanket condemnation of sex-work as inherently exploitative (never mind his own virtual participation in this economy) is met by Oryx’s observation, “you don’t understand me, Jimmy” (2004: 316). Oryx points out that Jack, a porn-director, never did “anything with [her] that [Jimmy] doesn’t do,” except that he “taught her English” and was poor, like her. Oryx not only reaffirms her affiliation with the poor beyond the compounds, but she also likens sex with Jimmy to pornography; she invites Jimmy to reflect on the coercive dynamics that shape their own relationship. When Jimmy protests and argues that their sex isn’t “against her will,” Oryx laughs and asks, “what is my will?” (141). The question, in itself, is a wilful expression; it is a dare. Will you recognize my will or will you substitute it with your will? What is your will? Is it what you think it is? Is it yours or is it shaped from without?
At this point, the reader might conclude that Atwood has designed Oryx as a character, like Melville’s Bartleby, whose internal will is both clearly present and entirely illegible. Any attempt to move beyond this impasse might replicate the forms of appropriation staged by Jimmy. But, alternatively, we might approach this question of the will by returning to Leon Kass’ argument about the “excessive human willfulness” that supposedly threatens “core humanity.” For Kass, human wilfulness—which he associates with homosexuality, feminism, and bioscience—ends up attacking the “core” of the species; it is a destructive and apocalyptic force that must be quelled by the moral and aesthetic force of repugnance. In apparent contrast, neoliberalism seemingly valorizes individual human wilfulness and willpower. Every choice one makes contributes to and is a reflection of one’s personal freedom and human capital. Under neoliberalism, there is no hiding from one’s will and responsibility for that will. Or, as Sara Ahmed puts it, “an account of will is an account of becoming accountable, of becoming guilty” (2014: 29).
In other words, by approaching Oryx’s question “what is my will?” from the joint context of neoconservative and neoliberal thought, we might understand how she subverts these discourses and offers a line of flight. Consider Jane Elliot’s reading of Oryx as “the exemplary neoliberal subject of interest … [who] experiences herself as what Chicago School theorist Gary Becker famously called a ‘decision unit’” (2013: 352). According to Elliot, Oryx “sees herself as someone who chooses how to use her resources in order to best serve her interests, rather than as a dominated subject serving the will of another” (2013: 352). But what happens when we supplement Elliot’s reading of Oryx as an “exemplary neoliberal subject” with Gary Becker’s equally important commitment to neoconservative family values? Becker’s paradigm of neoliberal subjectivity assumes that the most economically efficient mode of self-interest for women is gendered subjugation. Becker believes that sexual difference equals “differences in productivity,” which, in turn, “reinforce” sex inequality at the level of accumulation and human capital (1993: 62). In other words, “the exemplary neoliberal [female] subject” willingly subjugates herself to an economic logic that leads to a neoconservative vision of sexual difference: a form of corporate domesticity.
But Oryx is not necessarily an “exemplary neoliberal [female] subject.” Although she performs certain gendered tasks, she remains wilfully defiant or unwilling to accept Jimmy’s view of her as either passively manipulated by Crake or rescued from the misogynistic pleeblands. On the contrary, she wilfully participates in actions meant to gradually dismantle the dystopian order. However, unlike Crake, Oryx is not interested in bringing about an accelerated end to human life. Oryx wills a generational transition to posthumanism and, in so doing, she imagines a temporality after dystopia but before apocalypse—or hybrid temporality. This is also the temporality the reader encounters as they move back and forth between the dystopian and apocalyptic sections of the novel. One might conceive of this as an aesthetic space wherein neither genre has complete hold of the narrative; it is also the space wherein the wills of both Oryx and Atwood are legible. Rather than choosing between the dystopian present and an apocalyptic break, Atwood wilfully and fitfully remixes the temporal relationship between these genres. Atwood, therefore, offers us a form and aesthetic experience that resists both the “messianic” and “apocalyptic” conclusions. In Oryx we might locate the will to escape these genres of futurity.
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