Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  In this domestic disagreement, the father’s jokey paranoia positions animal bodies as a diseased threat to human self-possession, but the dispute quickly transforms into a lesson for Jimmy about the animal quality of female bodies. Jimmy’s parents’ disagreement about embodiment comes to a head one day when Jimmy “cut[s] off some of his hair with the manicure scissors and set[s] fire to it with his mother’s cigarette lighter” (2004: 16). Jimmy’s experiment allows him to smell his own singed hair, and, thereby, revisit the feeling of embodied vulnerability he sensed at the animal bonfire. He conducts this solitary experiment using his mother’s domestic utensils, her “manicure scissors” and “lighter,” recalling his secret desire for her to “hammer away at the wall he’d put up against her” (21). However, when Jimmy is caught by his parents, they get into “an argument about the cigarette lighter, which wouldn’t have been there (said his father) if his mother didn’t smoke” (16). This argument ends dramatically when Jimmy’s mother slams the door behind her, at which point his father explains to his son, “women always get hot under the collar” (16). Notably, Jimmy’s father points to an unseen bodily dynamic at work, a specifically female heat that is at once natural and mysterious. He tells Jimmy aboutwomen, and what went on under their collars. Hotness and coldness, coming and going in the strange musky flowery variable-weather country inside their clothes—mysterious, important, uncontrollable. That was his father’s take on things. But men’s body temperatures were never dealt with … Why weren’t they? Why nothing about the hot collars of men? (17)

  Echoing his views about the burning of infected animals, Jimmy’s father describes women’s bodies as similarly porous and overheated. According to Jimmy’s father, the animals were likely contaminated by competitors that penetrated OrganInc’s security and seeded an illegitimate form of reproduction. In other words, the corporation’s patenting of life-forms is aligned here with a patriarchal paranoia of the cuckolded husband. Indeed, Jimmy’s father regards women’s bodies as suspiciously humid, suggesting that the “musky flowery” vaginal opening “inside their clothes” makes them “variable, … uncontrollable” and similarly penetrable. This combination of heat and liquidity also transforms women’s bodies into a “strange … country,” a foreign, tropical land that can only be safely assimilated if “collared,” clothed, colonized, or otherwise “dealt with” by corporate domesticity (17). Men’s bodies “are never dealt with,” and presumably do not overheat with an energy that exceeds their collars (17). They are unremarkable in the compounds because their bodies are presumably unmarked by any hidden animality or concealed nature. They are implicitly figured as the only pure humans in a world infected by dangerous hybridity.

  Corporate Domesticity: Reproduction, Maternity, and Escape

  Extracted and abstracted from female bodies, embryological reproduction is central to the biotech corporation’s economic and social power. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the origin and meaning of maternal interests are posited outside and prior to the organization of the compounds. In the corporate suburbia of the novel, mothers’ bodies are telescopically pushed out of the public sphere—where they might mix with others—and into the silence of a pre-discursive domesticity. Although trained as a scientist, Jimmy’s mother leaves her job to stay home with her son and fulfil her prescribed maternal role. Far from discovering the supposedly innate pleasures of unpaid labour, Jimmy’s mother finds herself distracted and depressed. Her son responds to this by attempting to provoke her attention: “more than anything, Jimmy had wanted to make her laugh—to make her happy, as he seemed to remember her being once” (2004: 31). And on rare occasions, Jimmy’s mother does appear receptive to her son’s prodding. She would prepare him “a real lunch … that was so arranged and extravagant it frightened him”—complete with “place setting[s]” and an “open-face” sandwich “with a peanut butter head and a jelly smile-face” (31). On these days “she would be carefully dressed, her lipstick smile an echo of the jelly smile on the sandwich and she would be all sparkling attention … [like] a porcelain sink: clean, shining, hard” (32). What is “frightening” to Jimmy in his mother’s “extravagant” performance is the “porcelain” rigidity and “jelly-faced” absurdity of the “maternal” role she is asked to perform. By comparing the mother’s meticulousness to a “porcelain sink: clean, shining, hard,” Atwood reminds readers that this former scientist’s lab has been replaced by a “sparkling” kitchen, where she painstakingly occupies herself. The cartoonish masking of her discontent behind a “smiling” performance of motherhood is what truly frightens Jimmy.

  Still, his mother’s performance—despite its apparent emphasis on clothing, makeup, and outward hardening—does not diminish Jimmy’s incessant prodding. During one of these lunchtime pageants, for example, Jimmy asks his mother for a cat or dog or parrot, and after she says no, Jimmy asks for a “baby sister” or “baby brother” (2004: 32). Interwoven with requests for animals and pets, Jimmy calls on his mother’s reproductive capacities (her maternal body) to be drawn into the trajectory of his own desire for companionship. One explanation for this demand might well be Freudian; nevertheless, Jimmy’s imposition cannot be dissociated from the broader context of “maternity” within biotechnological reproduction. Within the biotech suburbs, reproduction can be accomplished at will by mostly male scientists; little or no reflection is given to the specifically female embodiments, particularly ovum cells, with which embryological experiments often proceed. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jimmy’s mother responds to her son’s request by asserting “No means no!” (32). Here, the language of sexual assault is apropos in a corporate/domestic setting where egg cytoplasms are stored within male-dominated laboratories.

  Jimmy’s mother’s pointed refusal, “No means no,” also forecasts her subsequent decision to flee the suburbs, possibly with trade secrets, and to join the environmentalist group “God’s Gardeners.” This escape represents one in a series of key moments when the physical boundary between pleeblands and suburbs is punctured. As Katherine Snyder puts it: “Like those acts of biological sabotage that precede and follow it, his mother’s act of domestic and corporate sabotage reveals the permeability of the lines, the supposedly inviolable cordons sanitaires, that seem to separate inside from outside, us from them, home from them, home from away” (2011: 485). In this way, Jimmy’s mother’s boundary crossing anticipates Oryx’s infiltration of the compounds from the pleeblands, which, as I discuss later, is perhaps the most consequential instance of this boundary crossing.

  Corporate Domesticity: Videos, Bodies, and the Domestic Treehouse

  After his mother’s escape, but before Oryx enters the novel, Jimmy and his friend Crake (aka Glenn) turn to video games and online porn for their own type of contained escapism. They play, for example, “Barbarian Stomp,” a game that reduces historical conflicts to a generic struggle between rich imperial civilizations and their enemies, the “barbarian hordes”: “Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos … Petchengs versus Byzantium” (2004: 78). This game represents human history through a violent binary code ones and zeros, winners and losers. They also play “Blood and Roses,” a game “along the lines of monopoly” where players trade “human atrocities” for “human achievements” or vice versa, to reveal, at the end, the final tally of human history (78). Both of these games allow their players to survey history from its aftermath, a position the novel also apparently offers its readers via the “great rearrangement.” But rather than offering a metafictional device for reimagining history as a game, Atwood is more interested in how this conceptual flattening of history comes to inform Crake’s genocidal actions later in the novel. These games imply that all social struggles are already calculable within an economic matrix of competition, exchange, monopoly, and, ultimately, extinction. For the boys, the games become a transcendent framework within which history becomes a computable sequence of priced events. In order to tally the count, however, the game
s also depend on the structural force of apocalypse, extinction, or defeat through death. The games, therefore, escalate the problem captured in the popular slogan repeated by Slavoj Zizek at Zuccotti Park in 2011: “It is easy to imagine the end of the world … But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism” (9 October, 2011). To the extent that people internalize an ideology that treats “the market” as a transhistorical arbiter of all possible values, the revolutionary desire to be liberated from this totality can be perversely transformed into a nihilistic impulse to end the world, as is the case with Crake.

  As Jimmy and Crake continue to explore the dark networks of internet gaming, porn, and executions, the fraternal bond that develops between them sheds some light on various online subcultures and the cynical politics they espouse. For instance, along the way, the boys watch various video streams: “the Noodie News, … Felicia’s Frog Squash, … dirtysockpuppets​.​com, … and headsoff.​com,” where they watch “live coverage of executions in Asia” (2004: 82). Devoid of context, the boys are confused by what they’re actually seeing: “The coverage was usually poor on that site: filming was said to be prohibited, so it was just some desperate pauper with a hidden minivideocam” (82). Incredulous, Crake asserts that “these incidents were bogus, … rehearsed” and that the “bloodfests were probably taking place on a back lot somewhere in California” (82–83). Crake’s assessment is seemingly coloured by the “spot commercials” that accompanied executions on American sites like “ deathrowlive.com ,” which are produced like game shows: “At least the Americans put some style into it,” said Crake (83). But if the “executions in Asia” really take place in “California,” then why do they lack the signature “style” Crake attributes to the Americans?7 But when Jimmy presses Crake on this issue (“do you think they’re really being executed?”), Crake responds: “what is reality?” (83). By maintaining a degree of uncertainty about the authenticity of the killings, the boys are able to treat what are ostensibly state-organized and/or corporately sponsored executions as simultaneously transgressive and utterly benign forms of entertainment, not so different from the video games they play.

  Furthermore, the boys’ confusion about “what is reality” highlights both their distrust of and dependence on the internet and video reports for imagining the real world outside the bubble of corporate domesticity. They compulsively turn to images of sex and death for a grip on reality, and yet, no matter how grotesque, they are unable to convince themselves that such hardcore streams are not merely sinister simulations. In his discussion of snuff and pornography, Paul Preciado describes these genres as “questioning of the limits of representation” and “as a formal model of realism.” They are “radically postmodern” because, for Preciado, “the notion of snuff [like porn] is opposed to the dramatic or simulated and mimetic quality of all representation. On the contrary, [they] affirm … a desire for the real to exist in and by representation” (2017: 345–346). Although Jimmy and Crake apparently share this desire, the videos they watch never fully satiate it. The snuff and porn may promise to shatter the simulated quality of their lives inside the compound, but, for the most part, they only bring the boys closer together in an adolescent rejection of the world as fake.8

  In an exception that proves the rule, the boys do temporarily shed their cynicism when, one day, they visit the “HottTotts … global sex-trotting site” and see an eight-year-old girl “look over her shoulder … right into the eyes of the viewer—right into Jimmy’s eyes, into the secret person inside him” (89, 91). For Jimmy, this was “the first time he’d felt that what they were doing was wrong. Before, it had always been entertainment, or else far beyond his control, but now he felt culpable” (91). Jimmy’s “culpability” implies a connection to, and responsibility for, the proliferation of underage sexual exploitation that is real in these online streams. In this sense, what Jimmy assumes the girl sees in him are the economic, cultural, and technological networks that bind her body to his desire for raw reality. Jimmy interprets her look to say not only, “I see you… I see you watching,” but also, “I know you. I know what you want” (2004: 91). That is, according to Jimmy, she not only recognizes him as an anonymous and passive voyeur, but as a customer who is directly involved in making this all happen. Later on, the power of this nameless girl’s knowledge becomes fetishized when, as adults, Jimmy and Crake incredibly believe that Oryx is the same girl from the video—that she does know them, and, more importantly, that they know her too. But, of course, the boys’ fantasy that Oryx is the girl from HottTotts becomes their way of not really knowing or getting to know her. For the boys, Oryx is a symbol for “the real [made flesh] … in and by representation” as she steps off the screen and into their lives (Preciado 2017: 345).

  Much later on, after the apocalypse, Snowman reflects back on his mediated adolescence and theorizes it as a time when “the body” abandoned traditional cultural constraints. It was a period when “music and painting and poetry and plays” were superseded by executions and pornography, by genres where the real exists in and by representation:when did the body first set out on its own adventures? … After having ditched its old traveling companions, the mind and soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out the dramas for them or else bad company, leading the other two astray … It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made off for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase? But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance. (2004: 85)

  Snowman’s description of the body’s liberation from the soul and mind makes sense, in part, because biotechnologies can modify behaviours not only through discursive norms, but also materially or prosthetically. This supposed liberation of the real or natural body from culture is actually the subsumption of life to design or representation. The body need not be “sublimated” by civil institutions or cultural authorities when it can be nudged, redesigned, or tethered to life-giving techno-ideologies. For example, when Snowman imagines “the body” taking “off for the topless bar,” this obviously isn’t the natural body as such, finally stripped of cultural norms (2004: 85). On the contrary, this body is the consumer’s body, the male body, the white and hetero-body, the body rich enough to pay the cover and become a drunken, entertained body. If “the body,” as such, went to a topless bar, who or what would be topless? In the biopolitical context, there is no question about the body or the real, only questions about which bodies count as real bodies.

  We should not, therefore, interpret these genres of the real existing in and by representation as transgressions against the suburban world the boys live in. Rather, they are just renaturalizations of corporate domestic values, much in the same way as Gary Becker imagines neoliberalism as renaturalizing “family values.” Indeed, the rebuilt body that Jimmy sees “ditching” culture is not only aggressively masculine. It cynically finds other bodies to be simulations (bodies supported by welfare) or fetishized fantasies made flesh (poor, disposable, and racialized bodies). For this reason, Preciado warns against two “narrative traps” that plague the “theatrical relationship between pornography, snuff, and politics.” First, there is “the messianic temptation: someone will come to save us—some unique religious or technical force”—and secondly, “there is the apocalyptic temptation: nothing can be done, and the disappearance of the species is imminent” (2017: 346–347). Oryx and Crake demonstrates how these two narrative traps reinforce one another. From within the dystopia of corporate domesticity, the “messianic” and “apocalyptic temptations” become fused together. After all, Crake is trying to save the world by, in many ways, destroying it.

  Oryx and Genre

  Oryx and Crake is often described as a dystopian novel
, but, because it moves back and forth between the mid-twenty-first century and a timeless period after human extinction, it isn’t entirely clear how to interpret this appellation.9 Arguably, dystopias depict the structural causes of a fictional society’s social problems and offer an allegorical criticism of that system. Furthermore, as the critic Tom Moylan explains, dystopian texts don’t all agree about how or even if such governing systems can be overcome. Dystopian works, therefore, exhibit a continuum of positions from the “anti-utopian dystopia”—where the “hegemonic power” of the system is inescapable and the retention of “individual integrity” is the most anyone can hope for—to the “utopian dystopia,” where “collective resistance is at least acknowledged, and sometimes a full-fledged opposition and even victory is achieved against the apparently impervious, tightly sutured system” (2000: xiii). Some of the most “utopian dystopias” are labelled “critical dystopias,” a term coined by Katherine Burdekin to describe dystopian works that borrow “specific conventions from other genres,” blurring the genre’s boundary but not breaking it (2000: 190).10

  But even if we accept Oryx and Crake as a genre-blurring critical dystopia, how should we then analyse the novel’s integration of apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and/or catastrophic genres? And, equally important, how should we imagine the relationship between the catastrophic and the apocalyptic? In her book The Child to Come, Rebekah Sheldon draws the following distinction: “thinking the catastrophic requires the apprehension that all systems are unstable and groundless … By contrast, apocalypse … designates that which has always already been awaiting our discovery, now at the end of the quest literally unveiled” (2016: 41). While Sheldon’s definition of apocalypse as revelation remains operational in contemporary literature, many contemporary works also use the apocalyptic as shorthand for a catastrophic-catastrophe or a global disaster that splinters the social order beyond recognition. In this way, the apocalypse simply means the end of the world as we know it. If this secularized version of apocalypse unveils anything, it’s only that “all systems,” including those that make human life possible, are, indeed, “unstable and groundless.”