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ABSTRACT
The essay argues that the Crakers—genetically modified human beings appearing in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy—should be seen not only as a result of techno-scientific brilliance but also as a product of artistic creativity. Starting with close reading of several passages which indirectly but effectively indicate that the Crakers should be regarded as a form of art, the essay then moves on to the consideration of probable predecessors of the kind of artistic creativity that the Crakers represent. Models for Crake’s creation of human beings are seen in the avant-garde idea of the New Man, which goes back to the first half of the twentieth century, and in the more recent transgenic art. Crake’s creative act is also shown in the context of the classic works of literature which deal with a similar theme, namely Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells.
Notes
1. It has to be pointed out here that even Crake’s plague could be seen from an aesthetic perspective. It might be said that the scale of the horror unleashed by Crake, an almost total annihilation of mankind, could arouse the sublime emotions of terror and awe, and the sense of the sublime was often a desired effect in Romantic art. In Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime Cian CitationDuffy argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley often invokes the sense of the sublime in the context of political violence. What is more, “Shelley’s writing does not merely use sublime natural processes to figure ‘awful’ political processes. Rather, his writing repeatedly understands and figures political history as a function of natural history. And within this schema, violent revolution emerges as an ‘awful’ natural phenomenon—as a worrying instance, if you like, of the natural sublime” (11).
2. Even when he finally develops a relationship with Oryx, a beautiful immigrant with whom Jimmy is deeply in love, the exact nature of this relationship eludes Jimmy’s understanding. Crake makes Oryx his employee, and uses her to disseminate the killer virus all over the world, although she is totally unaware of its deadly qualities, thinking it to be a mixture of a contraceptive and a sexual potency drug. Then, immediately after the outbreak of the pandemic, when she realizes that she was an unwitting accomplice in Crake’s deranged scheme, he kills her by cutting her throat.
3. Crake’s apparent lack of interest in sex could be interpreted with reference to the figure of Frankenstein. It could be argued that Crake’s sexual energies are transmuted into creative impulse, so that nature, which is the object of his genetic experimentation, assumes female qualities in the manner in which nature assumed female qualities for Frankenstein when he was creating his monster. As Kevin Hutchings notices, “Frankenstein imagines nature as actively resisting his sexualized advances: As if averse to his rational inquisition, she hides behind ‘fortifications and impediments’ in order to prevent him and other scientists from entering her private ‘citadel’” (184).
4. Here one can see another important parallelism between Crake’s art and that of the avant-garde—although the speaker of Rilke’s poem imagines that the statue is telling him that he should change his life, Sloterdijk indicates that “Modernity is the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves—or with both at once” (323).
5. A kind of mixture of these two revolutionary approaches to art—Constructivists’ and Muraviev’s—can be seen in what Oliver A. I. Botar calls “biocentric constructivist discourse,” visible in the writing of Berlin-based Constructivists in the 1920s (315). Botar argues that Berlin Constructivists, among them most prominently László Moholy-Nagy, were influenced in the 1920s by writings of Raoul Heinrich France. According to Botar, France represented German biocentrism, which, “based on scientific trends such as Darwinism and biologism, and on a kind of materialist nature romanticism, rejected anthropocentrism, and espoused a neovitalist and ecological view of the world. Aspects of organicism, vitalism, monism, holism, Lebensphilosophie [Life philosophy], and Kropotkinian anarchism, can all be subsumed under the rubric of biocentrism” (318). Influenced by biocentrism, Moholy-Nagy claimed that “art may press for a socio-biological solution of problems just as energetically as social revolutionaries may press for political action” (Moholy-Nagy qtd. in Botar, 319). What he means by this energetic pressing of social revolutionaries may be suggested by the activities of his first wife, “a staunch anarcho-Communist” (Botar 325) who, shortly before meeting Moholy-Nagy for the first time, took part in the bloody fighting for the Bremen Soviet Republic in 1919.
6. This political variety within the same avant-garde movements could be explained as stemming from the general atmosphere of the time. As Robert Wohl points out, the mentality of the generation of 1914, with its activism, its pragmatism, its belief in the power of will to reshape reality, its pessimism about the past, and its dedication to the creation of a new world and a new man, was what gave radicals of the Right and radicals of the Left the feeling that they were somehow secretly related and what made it possible for them to pass from one camp to another, as so many of them did. (231).
7. Futurism influenced the Vorticist avant-garde movement in England. One of the artists associated with Vorticism, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a manifesto written while he was fighting in France claimed that war is “a great remedy” as it “takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trades crises have shown us” (163). The manifesto was published in autumn 1915, after Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in action.
8. As Emilio CitationGentilo indicates, “[t]he Futurists were amongst the first Fascists; Marinetti became a member of the central committee of the Fasci di combattimento; Fascism drew much inspiration from the Futurist party programme” (9).
9. A few years before the publication of Oryx and Crake the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk delivered a lecture in which he was expressing his views on the issue of genetic modification of human beings. According to Frank Mewes, in his controversial lecture, “contrary to many critiques leveled against him, [Sloterdijk] neither recommends nor condemns the genetic planning of human life” (11) but only raises questions. What is more interesting in the context of fascist dreams of the New Man is the fact that Sloterdijk in his lecture was using vocabulary that since the 1930s has come to be associated with the Nazi rhetoric, so that some critics accused him of deliberately referring to the Nazi project of eugenics. As Imre Karacs argues, one word in Sloterdijk’s lecture is particularly significant, namely “selektion.” According to Karacs: “This word does not crop up in the German language very often these days. It was once used in—among other places—Auschwitz to denote the procedure whereby Dr Josef Mengele and his fellow ‘scientists’ determined which inmates were to be sent to the gas chamber and which were to be spared on any given day” (Karacs). A few years after the lecture Sloterdijk published a book which may be seen as the development of his lecture. For the title of the book he chose the same phrase which inspired Crake: Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
10. Thus, transgenic art is a development that both Muraview and Berlin-based biocentric Constructivists would certainly welcome.
11. The cover of the paper edition of Oryx and Crake published by Virago Press has a green fluorescent rabbit in its center.
12. There is also a personal reason for Crake’s hate of mankind. His father, in Crake’s words, “believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot” (215), but he was murdered after he discovered that the company for which he was working had engineered a serious disease so that profits could be made on selling medicines for it.
13. In fact, it was not Hegelians who were the first to present the telos of Man as living in harmony with Nature. Already in ancient times Stoics were describing their ideal Sage in similar terms: “These ideas go back to the Old Stoa, and can be traced at least as far back as Chrysippus. While defining the moral goal as life in conformity with nature, Chrysippus specified that he understood by this term both universal Nature and that nature which is peculiar to humankind” (Hadot 130). What is also noteworthy here is that Stoic philosophy was a “technology of the self”—the cultivated self was considered to be a result of working on it in a craftsman-like manner (Long 26–27), in the same way that a work of art was a result of craftsmanship, there being then no difference between artists and artisans (O’Leary 128). In consequence, Epictetus could “speak of the self as a statue which must be worked, while Seneca makes a comparison between the self as a work and one’s furniture as works” (O’Leary 134). When Jimmy looks at the female Crakers he notices: “But these new women are neither lopsided nor sad: They’re placid, like animated statues” (115). This allusion could, first of all, refer to the story of Pygmalion, but there is certainly a touch of Stoicism in the Crakers’ peacefulness of mind.
14. As Anne K. Mellor indicates, writing the novel Shelley had both versions of the myth in her mind: Prometheus plasticator, who created men from clay, and Prometheus pyrphoros, who stole fire from gods to give it to humans (79).
15. There is another echo of Percy Shelley in Crake’s relationship with Oryx, when he invites Jimmy to live with them in the laboratory compound, most probably knowing that Jimmy is desperately in love with her. In this way he creates a triangle in the image of those for which Percy was notorious. Mellor, for example, writes about “Percy’s pressure on Mary, during the winter and spring of 1814–15, to take Hogg as a lover despite her sexual indifference to Hogg” (82). In Atwood’s novel there is a scene when, in bed, Jimmy asks Oryx:
“You always do what Crake tells you?”
“He is my boss.”
“He tell you to do this?”
Big eyes. “Do what, Jimmy?”
“What you’re doing right now.”
“Oh Jimmy. You always make jokes.” (368–69).
16. In fact, it could be said that their beauty is the only measure by which his act can be vindicated also from a scientific perspective. If the aim of the scientific method is to verify the truth of the thesis, then it could be said that the truth of Crake’s thesis of the superiority of the Crakers over the original humanity lies in their beauty. In this way the creation of the Crakers reflects the enigmatic wisdom of the words: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Keats 794).
17. An artist mentioned by Baker as saying: “I trust objects so much. I trust disparate elements going together” (82).
18. Crake’s apparent belief in the certainty of his method of obtaining desired characteristics in an organism solely by means of genetic modification may be seen as an example of what is called genetic determinism—a conviction that the design of genes is exclusively responsible for their expression and thus for the way in which an organism functions. Epigenetics and epigenomics—which investigate how gene activity is enhanced or limited by multiple factors, both external and internal to the body (CitationLock 224)—started to undermine the belief in the genetic determinism at the end of the twentieth century.
19. Crake cuts Oryx’s throat in the presence of Jimmy, who is armed with a gun.
20. Before he actually creates the monster, Frankenstein enthuses about his experiment: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (80–81).
21. This pursuit also places Atwood’s trilogy in another category of fiction—post-apocalyptic.
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Notes on contributors
Sławomir Kozioł
Sławomir Kozioł, PhD, is presently a lecturer at the University of Rzeszów, Poland. His academic interests include social space, pop culture, modern art, new media, genetic engineering and post-humanism, as well as literary representations of these subjects.