SPECIOUS ORIGINS

Rosie Jackson reads some prophetic fictions

Eva Hoffman The Secret (Vintage 2003) 6.99

Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake (Bloomsbury 2003) 16.99

Salley Vickers Mr Golightly’s Holiday (4^th Estate 2003) 16.99

Stories of the origins of our species have always fascinated us. Provoked by the huge mystery of our existence, they are the very lifeblood of legend and myth, of the Bible and all sacred narratives. Yet as science came increasingly to displace religion in modern times, fantasies of creation shifted from the heavens to the earth and grew darker, sinister and more monstrous.

Not surprisingly, women writers have been particularly drawn to exploring issues of reproduction, and the dangers of unnatural creation. Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) was the first in this tradition, showing with graphic effect the horrors consequent on tampering with the origins of life. When man presumes to play God, removing the site of conception to the laboratory, the result is both travesty and tragedy – not only for the victims of the scientist’s creation, but for that clumsy hybrid itself, the monstrous progeny that is neither man nor beast. `My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.’

Marge Piercy’s novel Body of Glass (1991) pursued a similar theme, weaving together brilliantly the stories of a seventeenth century golem and twenty-first century robot. And now a timely fiction by Eva Hoffman, The Secret (2003) has another unnaturally conceived being – this time a woman, created through technological cloning. By writing from the point of view of this artificial double, presenting her experience with incredible passion and compassion, Hoffman - like Mary Shelley before her – persuades us of the harrowing reality of unnatural reproduction from the inside. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the clone suffers prolonged anguish over her identity: if she is an exact reproduction of the original, a mere replication, where is she to find her self, or her humanity? Indeed, can she claim to be `human’ at all?

Her relation with her original, her `mother’, is less symbiotic than horribly claustrophobic. `The idea of infinite replication made me feel nauseous… I looked at her and the vertigo returned… I knew that in me, in my body, time repeated itself in some ghastly glitch, a hiccup, a mechanical snag. I looked at her face, which was going to become mine, and I knew that I had already been. There was no necessity, no need or reason for me to be all over again. I was a superfluity, a technical non-being.’

It’s a moving, disturbing, thought-provoking and persuasive tale, the writing eloquent and compelling. For the first time, I felt I understood the enormity of the ethics and politics surrounding these issues, not on the level of abstract debate, but in the heart and guts as imagined, lived experience. And not once did I doubt the potential authenticity of events: its futuristic setting of 2025 felt disturbingly near. I was especially haunted by the refusal to disclose the specific part of the body in which the narrator’s life began: from that point on, her name – Iris - seemed no coincidence.

Margaret Atwood’s canvas is rather wider and therefore less passionately focused in her futuristic novel Oryx and Crake (2003).  She gave another chilling vision of the future in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), where women are nothing but breeders denied basic human rights, but here her dystopian imagination has gone even further. Male scientists have now taken unto themselves the whole business of reproduction and created, in Paradice dome, a genetically modified group of humanoids: the Crakers. Named after their scientist `father’ Crake, they are designed to be a perfect race, physically beautiful, their skins immune to IV light and their impulses predictable. They have no possessions, no unruly urges towards sex, religion or aggression; they even recycle their own excrement! Nor are they the only newly engineered breed. Other genetic mutations, bred by a company called OrganInc Farms (one of Atwood’s many clever neologisms), include wolvogs, snats, chickienobs and pigoons – the last, monstrous hybrids used to grow human organs for transplants.

Oryx and Crake is a large, ambitious novel, scrupulously researched, and a powerful indictment of eugenics, genetics and the dangers of globalization.      

Its male narrator, once Jimmy but now `The Snowman’ (abominable), looks back from a post-apocalyptic future (the actual nature of the global disaster is not revealed until the end of the novel). He is the last of his species, the last of the human race – again reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s other major fantasy, The Last Man (1826), set at a similar time in the future and also predicting a plague which culls humanity.

The Snowman is a kind of latter day Crusoe, struggling for survival and marooned in a landscape where humankind is notably absent. In his lonely remembrance of times past, he struggles not only to survive physically (he’s starving, sleeping rough, living on scavenged food) but also has to battle to recall a vocabulary and culture that have become redundant. `“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.’

Atwood’s dystopia is all the more disturbing by deriving not from somewhere alien but from our current reality: all the worst aspects of our contemporary world are simply isolated, exaggerated and projected into the norm of the future. (Orwell is one of her heroes; Animal Farm and 1984 clear models). It’s like holding up a giant magnifying mirror to what already is: multi-nationals run the world; food is synthetic; human relationships are merely functional; the climate is subject to sudden changes with intolerable heat and violent storms; viruses are modified and used for population control; the rich live in protected compounds while their employees live in the more deprived `pleeblands’. It’s a society of internet pornography, degraded literacy and culture, with the TV delighting in live executions, and language and art being the actual prey of violent computer games. Genetic modification is but the most extreme example of profit mattering more than people – on a quite literal level, for people cease to exist. Clearly, this is less fantasy than bitter, exaggerated realism. As Atwood insists, it’s less science fiction than `speculative fiction…. It could really happen.’

It’s true that Oryx and Crake is an immensely rich novel of ideas: intriguing, engaging, even perhaps worryingly prophetic, for the events leading to the genetic disaster are indeed horrifyingly possible. But like many allegories, it remains more interested in its thesis than in fully fleshed characters. An increasingly tiresome catalogue of Snowman’s day to day survival takes up much of the narrative rather than any sense of his inner world, and I felt little engagement with him. Both he and the other main `characters’, Oryx (a child prostitute who becomes the object of desire for both Jimmy and Crake) and Crake (the Frankenstein like scientist) are less than convincing (they are all named after extinct creatures). Their love triangle stretches credulity, its melodramatic ending limp and leaving the heart uninvolved. Atwood’s focus may be wider and more ambitious, but it’s at the cost of the inner intensity and passion of The Secret; on a human level, something is missing. Far from inspiring or prompting me to engage in activity which might help the world, Atwood’s deeply cynical vision left me vaguely depressed and morally paralysed.

Perhaps it’s one of the problems with dystopias, which are after all, like satire, negative versions of the imagination. They may give gloomy prognoses to try to warn us away from a certain path into the future, but without some positive vision, are they not hidebound and darkened by the very thing they seem to attack? Oryx and Crake may be a masterly indictment of where our capitalist and technological society seems to be heading, but with its lack of hope and humour (other than its verbal plays and dark, sardonic cleverness), its lack of heartfelt-ness, is it not missing some of the very humanity whose loss it pretends to be lamenting? Is it not another symptom rather than a cure? Of course we need to keep our eyes open to see what we need to avoid, but what if these are eyes wide shut? Is not some kind of yes, however tentative, as necessary as a prolonged and cynical no?

Of course dystopias have always been more persuasive and powerful than utopias, for they are easier to imagine and convey. Paradise Lost has always been seen as superior to Paradise Regained. It’s not easy for us to fully imagine God, let alone put Him or anything divine into a novel. Yet Salley Vickers takes exactly that risk in her latest novel, Mr Golightly’s Holiday (2003). This gives us another account of our origins altogether. Its eponyomous hero visits rural Devon and gets drawn into a battle between light and darkness, angels and devils… If contemporary life is a soap opera, Golightly is its author, turning it back into a rather more divine comedy… but that’s giving away the plot.

Vickers, unlike most modern authors, works unapologetically in a `comic’ as opposed to `tragic’ mode – terms she adapts from critic Northrop Frye. `It (the comic) merely implies a particular slant of vision, one which sees the potential, deep in the core of human affairs, for misfortune’s alternative – a view which may in fact encourage just that possibility.’ And at a time when it is all too easy to recreate pictures of gloom and write prognoses of disaster, perhaps it is more imperative than ever that writers, artists and all who believe in the power of the imagination, do not take the easy option of simply mirroring and thereby magnifying what is broken, but do the more difficult (and commercially unpopular) thing: of helping us to remember and believe in higher, more fully human and redemptive possibilities - and thereby help bring them into being.

Rosie Jackson is a novelist and short story writer. Author of Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion and The Eye of the Buddha, she teaches and runs writing workshops in the UK and US.

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