WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 176

the drives and fear of death that had plagued humans, and began to live in harmony
with a slowly recuperating planet. This plan depended on the genetic splicing and
other forms of engineering making the Crakers not only a new environmentally-
attuned species, but also the creators of a new form of social development. A central
part of Crake's expectation was that, without such triggers as sexuality and the
endless competition for resources, his improved creations would not follow the
cultural path that had so influenced humans. Crake derides the art produced as a
consequence of the prevailing human culture based on desire and fear, advising
Jimmy:
Watch out for art , Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble .
Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next
they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and
sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.
(ibid.: 430)
But for all Crake's genetic manipulation, he admits that he cannot erase dreams and
singing, which he recognises are hard-wired into the Crakers as much as into
humans (ibid.: 419). These attributes, plus the questions the Crakers subsequently
ask Snowman once Crake's plan has been activated, the stories Snowman tells
them, their own processing of the information, and the symbolic signs and actions
that they create, show the Crakers beginning to fashion rituals and belief systems
that approximate human art and religion. So, for example, after Snowman returns
from a brief journey back to Paradice, the Crakers tell him: 'We made a picture of
you, to help us send our voices to you' (ibid.: 430). Given their reverential attitude
to Snowman, we can tick art and idols off Crake's cultural list. Can Linear B—an
archaic Greek script that combined syllables and pictographs, and that underpinned
some of the intellectual achievements of Greek civilisation—be far behind? Or
kings, slavery and war?
Such cultural developments, as repulsive to Crake as they might be, nevertheless
require centuries, if not millennia. The question arises, whether, given wolvogs,
pigoons, surviving humans and the environment itself, the Crakers stand any
chance of surviving even a year. As regularly happens in Atwood's novels, she gives
us no clues as to the likely outcome. Subsequent to Oryx and Crake she published
another novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), which took the major planetary
catastrophe of the earlier novel, retained some of its major characters such and
Snowman, Crake and the Crakers, but interpreted them through a different lens,
concentrating on another group of survivors, God's Gardeners. The Year of the Flood
did little to resolve the questions provoked by Oryx and Crake (not that it was
designed to do so). Atwood apparently plans a third instalment of this narrative,
though it is unclear quite what this might entail. Not that we need these
supplementary texts to interpret Oryx and Crake , and in fact their existence (or
projected existence) reminds us of the creative diversity of interpretation itself. In
projecting on from the end of the narrative of Oryx and Crake , without venturing