It was honestly a little difficult for me
to read Katherine Snyder’s 2011 article (full reference below) on Oryx and Crake. Since academia is now my
business, any hint of someone else doing exactly the same thing as oneself
makes you quite nervous, and leaves you feeling like someone beat you to the
punch – especially as I haven’t officially published anything yet in a journal
or whatnot. Still, it was a useful exercise, so here follows my immediate
thoughts:
Snyder discusses pre- and post-apocalypses,
analepsis and prolepsis, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory as applied on
post-apocalyptic fiction, Freud’s uncanny, and even the uncertainty inherent in
fantastic fiction as opposed to realistic fiction. In other words, the only
thing she is missing is Bakhtin’s chronotope and she would already have
pre-empted most of my thesis. Her definition of what I’ve termed ‘realistic
science fiction’ but which I’ve come to realize most people (Atwood included)
seem to term ‘speculative fiction’ is quite apt:
The novel teeters, and we teeter with it, on the unstable brink that separates real from imagined, now from later, an exercise that blurs the line between what is inside and outside the self, between what is already present in our world and what may be yet to come.
(Snyder 2011: 473)
But perhaps I shouldn’t feel threatened,
but rather validated, by Snyder’s article. After all, everything that has been
said and done has already been said and done (Adam One's comment on a limited moral keyboard springs to mind), and this just
means I am not alone in my musings. What Snyder does do is talk about Caruth’s
trauma theory in much more detail than I have, which was quite useful to me.
First of all, she wants to make a connection
between the major traumatic event in the novel (the apocalypse) and Jimmy’s own
personal apocalypses (the loss of his mother and pet Killer): “Losing one’s
mother at a tender age is not the end of the world. It just feels that way.”
(Snyder 2011: 473), in much the same way as readers of Shelley’s The Last Man have postulated that
Shelley’s own trauma (the loss of her family) was made “commensurate with
global history itself” (Elmer 2009: 356). Although I don’t fully agree with
this idea (the only personal trauma that explicitly causes the apocalypse was
Crake’s, and that discussion is not one Snyder takes up), Snyder does back her
thoughts up through liberal examples taken from the text. She discusses the way
the story itself is set up, from post-apocalyptic ‘present’ to analeptic ‘past’
scenes starting from Jimmy’s childhood and finally coalescing at the very end.
Snyder also talks about the present of the post-apocalypse, of how the “present-tense
narration of this new but compromised dawn hints at a traumatic past event yet
withholds the context that would allow the reader to understand what has
happened, or is still happening, or what it all means” (Snyder 2011: 477). So,
in essence, the ‘ungrasped’ idea of trauma theory, that one is not consciously
aware of the trauma despite it affecting your life constantly.’
The third part, where she talks about ‘traumatic
witness’, was probably the part that intrigued me the most, since it actually
had a discussion on how one can apply the idea of the traumatic witness (the
all-important third part to my post-apocalyptic chronotope) to Oryx and Crake. It was also at this
point when I realized exactly how powerful the idea of post-postmodern theory
may be. Consider:
The pandemic—a singular traumatic event of global proportions, yet one that replays past private traumas for the protagonist—marks the moment at which these two registers of the narrative collide, or the moment at which they are revealed to have been one all along.
(Snyder 2011: 479)
In other words, read symbolically
(deconstructively?) the whole narrative is more or less about Jimmy’s own
childhood traumas becoming manifest in the most obvious way imaginable. “The
trouble at home at once predetermines and is retrodetermined by the cataclysmic
world events around which the narrative is structured” (Ibid). But yet, but still! There are the other plots, the other
ideas, the bioengineering and the dystopia and all the rest. And then, from
this, she goes on to wonderfully define post-apocalyptic fiction based on this
idea of trauma theory:
It is this uncanny aspect of the protagonist’s experience, I contend, that is fundamental to the imaginative investments of the reader of post-apocalyptic fiction. Post-apocalyptic fiction serves as rehearsal or preview for its readers, an opportunity to witness in fantasy origins and endings that are fundamentally unwitnessable. We are horrified and yet thrilled to see ourselves and our world in the unthinkable plight portrayed here, and even more horrified and thrilled to see the origins of this plight in ourselves. (Snyder 2011: 479)
Thus, she returns to the actual powerful
message of the science fiction narrative: that it must in a way be read as ‘real’
(witnessable), that there must be that element of suspension of disbelief and
so on for it not to simply collapse into the (still very valid and powerful)
interpretation that the whole cataclysm is just an extension of Jimmy’s own
trauma.
At this point, Snyder goes into more
Freudian depths, something I think is a mistake. For one thing she brings up
the Oedipus complex when trying to explain the (to me still quite intriguingly
puzzling) deaths of Oryx and Crake. Although an acceptable enough explanation,
she makes the (in my view wrong) assumption that Oryx is “fatally infected”
(Snyder 2011: 481) and the actually patently false assertion that Crake would
likewise be thus infected: we know perfectly well that Crake is immune to the ‘super
bug’, having taken the same immunizing ‘cocktail’ as Jimmy did.
One interesting point she makes about
trauma, a point I had not thought of myself, is the idea that although trauma
by definition is the unconscious repetition of an event, Snyder claims the
possibility of “repetition with a difference, repetition as reworking”, in
other words that characters could actually deal with trauma in order to “remake
their present relation to loss” (Snyder 2011: 485) – perhaps for the better.
Again we return then to the dual meaning of apocalypse – the end of the world,
or a revelation of a new, better one – perhaps even through reworked trauma! Her
conclusion is, again, painfully close to my own (validation!):
Such fictions allow us imaginatively to rehearse the end, a rehearsal that itself stands as both traumatic symptom and potential cure, as acting out and working through, as repetition and repetition-with-a-difference. Our awareness that such apocalyptic visions of human futurity mirror our own inner fears and desires does not mean that all trauma, whether individual or collective, will be consigned to the past, but it does help us to confront our status as subjects of history by looking to the future. (Snyder 2011: 486)
A perfectly viable theory, this one: that
post-apocalyptic science fiction in essence is our own attempt at, through
endless repetition, perhaps eventually rework some of our unrealized traumas.
And this, dear friends, might very well fit nicely with some things Zizek (add
upside-down ^’s on the Z’s please) had to say about catastrophes, dystopian
zero points, and other such nice things. But – for a later post.
Elmer, Jonathan. 2009. “'Vaulted Over by
the Present': Melancholy and Sovereignty in Mary Shelley's The Last Man.”
In Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Summer2009, Vol.
42 Issue 2: 355-359.
No comments:
Post a Comment