I feel the central cause of "apocalypse" in Oryx and Crake is due to the obsession of humans (within the depicted culture) with perfection and self-preservation. Atwood discusses in detail the various companies that are developed within the culture to preserve human life. The pigoons at OrganInc speak largely to this effect. But there is also the aspect of sexuality and perfection within human life that has become an obsession. It seems as though the culture became so engulfed in their own ability controllable ability to sustain aspect or portions of "life" that the bare essentials were neglected and led to the "disease". The humans in this story forgot how to find balance in life. Everything had a quick fix developed in a lab it seemed. Jimmy, as a child, and his mother, were mildly in tune with this "balance". They understood the importance of nature and that some things aren't meant to be controlled by humans. Crake thought he could produce a perfect race by "playing god" and controlling various elements of growth and development. The novel speaks clearly to the devastating effects of his experimentation and its products.
It would be easy to view the apocalypse in this story to be purely biological in nature based on the notion that a "disease" wiped out the humans. But from this argument, it is also seen how a sociological shift in human priority produced a completely different type of apocalypse. Isn't that what an apocalypse really is? A dramatic change that alters things permanently. The "world" painted to us by Ms. Atwood, so vividly, is completely changed by the human obsession with perfection and self-preservation; an apocalypse in and of itself. Far before the onset of any biological devastation.
Ah, that need for balance. Your focus on the urge toward perfection and self-preservation really gets me thinking beyond the surface cause of human greed and selfishness . . . to a more elemental, primal need of humans that is not on the plot-surface of the novel. I think you are right about self-preservation. And maybe I could go so far as to say the fear of death is at the heart of the apocalypse. If so, isn't it ironic that Crake's obsession with self-preservation and staving off the death of the human race involves his own death . . . and, well, the death of the human race?!
ReplyDeleteMaybe it is obsession itself (such an odd human characteristic) that could cause the behaviors and events/conditions that bring on apocalypse. I'm just brainstorming here because your post seems to break out of circularity of cause/symptom/effect relations. Interesting, maybe, to contemplate a basic human "excess" as a cause of apocalypse.
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