“A world of slow decay” –
Extinction Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Literature
Hannah Klaubert | 10849343 University of Amsterdam Research Master Cultural Analysis
INTRODUCTION ... 3
ONE. Thylacine, Extinct ... 11
TWO. Oryx Beisa, Near Threatened, and Red-Necked Crake, Least Concern ... 25
THREE. Irrawaddy River Dolphin, Vulnerable, and Royal Bengal Tiger, Endangered ... 39
CONCLUSION ... 54
Hannah Klaubert | 2
We live in strange times, a little as if we were suspended between two histories, both of which speak of a world become “global.” One of them is familiar to us. It has the rhythm of news from the front in the great worldwide competition and has economic growth for its arrow of time. It has the clarity of evidence with regard to what it requires and promotes, but it is marked by a remarkable confusion as to its consequences. The other, by contrast, could be called distinct with regard to what is in the process of happening, but it is obscure with regard to what it requires, the response to give to what is in the process of happening.
Hannah Klaubert | 3
INTRODUCTION
The 2015 documentary Racing Extinction tackles illegal wildlife trade as one cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction which will, as has become clear by now, wipe a significant percentage of all existing species off planet Earth in foreseeable time.1 Already in its title the documentary points towards a major problem in framing extinction today: the tension between the singular tragedy of the loss of one type of giant manta rays, and a feeling of the absolute urgency of the matter, the scale and speed of the dying unprecedented since humans populated planet Earth. The causes for this extinction event range from habitat loss and -fragmentation, poaching, the spread of invasive species or deadly fungi through globalized trade to the carbonization of the oceans in anthropogenic climate change. The non-human species are disappearing fast; and it feels like we humans aren’t doing much to save them. On the contrary, the rise in extinction rates, currently more than 1000 times above the
“background rate” which accompanies evolutionary change in between peak periods, is almost exclusively ascribed to human activity. (Barnosky et al. 51f) It is closely entangled with Western imperialist movements and the spreading of a system possibly best described as “Petro-Capitalism”.2
Based on the exploitation of natural resources, this globalized system has had human population more than double since the 1950s, leaving little space and resources to the non-human habitants of this planet. (cf. Heise 10f)
1 For a discussion of the scientific research behind this information, see: Barnosky, Anthony D., et al. “Has the
Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction already arrived?” Nature 471.7336 (2011): 51-57.
2 For a more detailed account of the concept of Petro-Capitalism, see Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden
(ed.). Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. The concept can be useful in describing our current societal organization as it links our social histories to the exploitation of materials of the Earth which are inextricably interwoven.
Hannah Klaubert | 4
In this thesis, I will be looking at three contemporary Anglophone novels which engage with biodiversity loss and the concept of extinction: a) The Hunter (2000) by Australian author Julia Leigh, b) the first volume of US-based bestseller author Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), and c) Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry
Tide (2004). All three novels find their own specific ways of narrating how species extinction
is negotiated in human culture, drawing on as well as defying stereotypical narrative forms. As literary critic Ursula Heise has shown, species extinction is often represented along the lines of a classic tragedy, with a “last of a kind” figure in the center. The tragedy of massive biodiversity loss becomes an ersatz stage on which the alienation of the “modern” human from Nature is negotiated. (“Nach der Natur”, Chapter 2, 47f) However, the novels I have chosen also find more differentiated entry-points into the topic, dealing with the above described tension between different temporalities of the current ecological crisis and their ethical implications. I will now first give a first short overview of the theoretical discussions around species loss and extinction in contemporary cultural theory, to then introduce the main concepts and theoretical background I will be working with throughout my analysis. Lastly, I will give a brief rundown of my chapters before I go on to introduce my first object.
Extinction Theory. My engagement with the topic of species extinction was triggered
through a general interest in ecologically engaged philosophy and cultural theory in the last years. With a growing acknowledgement of the material and ecological forces involved in human sense-making and the ontological questions tagging along, cultural theory has come to address the problem of extinction more thoroughly. Two corner marks are Claire Colebrook’s
Essays on Extinction (published in two volumes, Death of the PostHuman and Sex After Life)
Hannah Klaubert | 5
however, use the ongoing mass extinction event as a departing point for their own
(post)human ontological quests – so that the fact of biodiversity loss is only a pathway to thinking about human extinction and the human condition in an age of (ecological) crisis. Therefore, these theories have proven mostly incompatible with my own research interests. On the other hand, a number of popular scientific books have investigated the history and workings of the current mass extinction, most famously David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo
– Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (1996) and Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History (2015). They provide fascinating historical accounts of the
rise of extinction as a concept in human thought, the ongoing extinction event and preservation efforts. Finally, at the intersection of these theoretical/philosophical and historical/scientific texts, above mentioned Ursula Heise has brought forward a very
extensive study of extinction narratives and genres of biodiversity loss in her 2010 Nach der
Natur – Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (“After Nature – Species Extinction and
Modern Culture”). In this book, she investigates the biological concepts, cultural narratives and rhetoric structures that shape our understanding of biodiversity loss. Her research, with its vast collection of scientific, theoretical, artistic and literary material, forms the background for my own engagement with species extinction and contemporary literature.
The year 2016 actually seems to be a pivotal moment in the critical engagement with biodiversity loss. Not only will a revised and translated version of Heise’s book be published under the title Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
(University of Chicago Press) this year; other forthcoming publications of 2016 include Ashley Dawson’s Extinction. A Radical History (OR Books), Myra Hird’s “Proliferation-Extinction-Anxiety and the Anthropocene Aesthetic” in the Critical Life Studies series of Columbia University Press, Vanishing America – Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the
Hannah Klaubert | 6
Origins of Conservation by Miles A. Powell (HUP), and Beth Shapiro: How to Clone a
Mammoth – The Science of De-Extinction (PUP). One other event scheduled for this year will
stir up discussion in the field of ecocriticism: 2016 also marks the target date for the “Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy” to decide on behalf of the “International Commission of Stratigraphy” whether the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, will officially be recognized as the current stratigraphic epoch. If they agree to accept the proposition, which was popularized in the early 2000s by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene will officially supersede the current official epoch, the Holocene. (Boes and Marshall 60)
The Anthropocene Narrative. The concept of the Anthropocene has already received a
lot of attention in cultural theory and artistic practice during the last decade. (Boes and Marshall 60) It not only unravels geological thinking through the introduction of a new stratigraphic period, but also intertwines geological and ecological with ontological questions. Whether or not the epoch will be officially recognized by the Stratigraphic Commission, we have to live with the immense ecological and geological shifts currently under way – and we have to recognize that we humans are their main cause. The
Anthropocene concept puts us humans as a geological force into the centre of the narrative, and at the same time dethrones the human as it defines us as one species among others on a planet which has existed long before and will persist after us. The Anthropocene dismisses human history as the only valid way of temporal structuring. Therefore, it also poses
narratological problems. In its narrative framework, human historic narratives compete with the unimaginable timescales of the entirety of geologic history, most often referred to as “geologic time” or “deep time”. But then, the Anthropocene also stands for an unprecedented
Hannah Klaubert | 7
acceleration of changes to the planet’s human and non-human populations and chemical composition. Those changes have their root in the imperialist movements of the last centuries and the globalized exploitation of natural resources and humans alike. Jason W. Moore has therefore suggested to replace the concept of the Anthropocene with that of the
“Capitalocene”, 3 which inscribes the social histories of exploitation into the geologic period. Both concepts have been critiqued thoroughly, both produce inclusions and exclusions in the way they seek to represent “humanity” across time and continents. 4 It is not my aim here to check these concepts against one another. What the discussions around the right way to represent ourselves in relation to geologic time scales and ecological disruption most simply shows, though, and what cultural theorists, artists and historians engaging with the
Anthropocene concept have proved sensitive to, is another point: how we narrate the current ecological crisis and our own position and agency in it has massive ethical and political implications. What is at stake here beyond a new geologic epoch is a self-reflexive positioning of humans against, or rather with, their mineral and organic neighbours. I will bear this in mind in my following analysis.
Extinction as Concept. Species loss was first accepted as a scientific fact in the early
19th century. Once it had dawned upon researchers that the fossils they were digging up and collecting en masse in the 18th century must stem from beings that no longer existed during their own lifetime, they started to form theories that disrupted creationist ideas on how
3 For more information on the Capitalocene concept, which has also been adopted by scholars such as Donna
Haraway, see: Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso Books, 2015. I also want to note here that of course these geologic time scales are in no way more “natural” or “original” than the human histories. All of these concepts are human ways of structuring time and linearity into a sense-making narrative beyond the human lifespan.
Hannah Klaubert | 8
species were appearing and disappearing from this planet. (Clayton 58) The discovery of the age of the planet opened up geologic time spans reaching far beyond human existence and made path for the idea that species were going extinct as part of a natural selection process. Charles Darwin popularized the concept of evolution in the mid-19th century, and with it the concept of a natural background extinction rate. 5 Since then, of course, it has become clear that this rate has risen from a common background rate to a massive-scale dying during the last centuries (the beginning of the extinction event is contested and positioned somewhere between 1500 and 1900, which already points towards its close entanglement with colonial movements). (Heise 19f) Today, biologists, activists and policy makers all over the planet are trying to preserve key species through nature reserves, breeding programs and more. But the accelerated extinction rate is gaining pace and has become one of the markers of human impact on the changing the organic structure of this planet – and an official marker of the Anthropocene.6 Furthermore, the two concepts are very closely related in another way: they entail thinking humans themselves as a species which will disappear from this planet sooner or later, thus making many efforts of preservation look minor in relation to this ‘bigger’ problem. Both the Anthropocene and species extinction are marked by these centrifugal forces which seem to make a clear ethical standpoint hard to delimit. The temporal torsions and narrative challenges of thinking or writing the Anthropocene also mark species extinction
5 Jay Clayton writes about the ‘discovery’ of geologic time and evolutionary theory: “Nineteenth century
geologists pushed back the age of the Earth, while astronomers and physicists calculated the death of the sun and the cooling of the planet. But evolution, more than anything else, altered our relation to time. It linked the individual not just to the familial ancestors but to generations back before the dawn of history, to the animal kingdom, and before that, to the protozoa. The future was changed as well. Posterity came to signify not merely lineal descendants, not even sacred eternity, but an impersonal futurity, a time beyond the individual, a time beyond even the species, a time that entailed the possibility of extinction.” (Clayton, 58) For further historical insight into the development of the concept of extinction, I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction
– An Unnatural History.
6 Cf. the website of the “Anthropocene Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy” for all the markers that are
Hannah Klaubert | 9
as a concept. In the following extensive analysis, I hope to be able to lay bare the challenges of narrating and representing extinction in its relation to the Anthropocene concept.
Structure. In my first chapter, I will be looking at the novel The Hunter by Australian
author Julia Leigh. It narrates the hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger, an animal whose loss has become a symbol for the horrors of colonial conquest in Oceania. The novel is concerned with above mentioned conflicting temporalities of species extinction in entangling the colonial past with the presence of geologic timespans. While the novel shines a light on alternative conceptions of a queer ecological futurity that is based on kinship and care – but therefore also has to confront loss and suffering –, the protagonist of the novel instead settles for an apocalyptic nihilism that leaves his problematic masculinity unquestioned and makes it possible for him to avoid all ethical reflection on extinction, death and loss.
In the second chapter, I will argue that while Leigh alludes to the problematic temporalities of extinction, Magaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake puts the focus on the
narrative and linguistic structures in which extinction narratives can operate. The novel, set in a post-apocalyptic future, plays with the genres in which extinction is represented (with the famous Red Lists of Endangered Species leading the way). The post-apocalyptic narrative standpoint of the novel furthermore positions the current species mass extinction as predecessor to inevitable human extinction, and also as the uncanny revenant of earlier extinction events. The subtraction and burning of their remains (in the form of fossil fuels) have made the Sixth Mass Extinction possible in the first place. The novel represents the species loss entangled in networks of exploitation that reach even to the genome of humans and non-humans.
Hannah Klaubert | 10
In the third and last chapter, I will consider The Hungry Tide, which more than the other two novels is concerned with the ethical questions that arise from the Sixth Mass Extinction event. I will therefore have a closer look at how this novel by Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh addresses questions of inter-species justice in a complex ecological and political environment. It addresses the “pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (Nixon 3) that characterize the current ecological crisis. In drawing a parallel between violence against vulnerable communities and non-human habitants of the ecological system of the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide spells out difficult ethical questions that have to be asked in the Sixth Mass Extinction. The tension between questions of representation and species extinction is also examined in the parallel that The Hungry Tide draws between the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of local languages – which, as it turns out, is not only a metaphorical relation.
It is this question of representation which drives my interest in these texts. After all, these novels are not more than fictional accounts of a series of events that in reality is not only tragic from an environmental ethics standpoint, but could also prove fatal to humanity itself. (cf. Heise 20f) What can they potentially reveal to us that goes beyond what we already know about the Sixth Mass Extinction event from scientific research and quantitative data analysis? It is that as humans, we have no other way but relating to our surroundings through stories. As Joanna Zylinska writes in the brilliant Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene:
If we humans have a singular responsibility to give an account of the differentiations of matter, of which we are part, such practices of account giving establish a constitutive link between ethics and
poetics. Indeed, we encounter ethics precisely via stories and images, i.e., through textual and visual
Hannah Klaubert | 11
These stories about species extinction carry conceptions of past and future, ‘us’ and ‘them’, that will inform our ethics and our relations to other humans and non-humans populating the Earth with us. Therefore, in this thesis I aim to map out these hidden implications of thinking the current mass extinction from a cultural theory point of view, and I will do so in analysing above mentioned three extinction narratives in contemporary Anglophone literature.
One. THYLACINE, EXTINCT
The Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial (with a pouch for the protection of the young on male and female specimen) which can open its jaw up to 120 degrees and has received its biologically wrong common name through the stripes that cover its lower back. The thylacine, or
Thylacinus cynocephalus in Linnean taxonomy, was hunted to extinction for supposedly
killing the livestock, children and innocent brides of the European settlers in the 19th century. A large sum was paid to any person who could bring a thylacine corpse to the town houses. (Crane 105) Habitat fragmentation, introduction of invasive species and disease did the rest. The last known thylacine, named Benjamin, died in captivity in 1936, only a few weeks after the species was declared critically endangered. Some video footage of the animal, which seems to have refused to procreate in captivity despite international breeding efforts, and a few taxidermied specimen are all that remain of the Tasmanian tiger today. (Crane 106f)7
Since its disappearance, though, uncountable rumours of sightings in the form of blurry
7 For further information on the extinction process of the thylacine, presumed causes and historic facts, see:
David Owen, Tasmanian Tiger: The Tragic Tale of How the World Lost its Most Mysterious Predator (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island
Hannah Klaubert | 12
pictures and videos have appeared and claim the “return” of the Tasmanian tiger. The
Australian government has put massive funds into a research project dedicated to re-breeding the thylacine from preserved genetic material – an undertaking that has since been abandoned without any substantial success. (Turner 63) Much of this tiger-craze, also manifested in the branding of uncountable consumer products and souvenirs, has been attributed to the
important role that the animal has come to play in discourses around the violence of colonial take-over not only against nature, but also against the native inhabitants of Australia and Tasmania. (Crane 113f)
In Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter, first published in 1999, a professional hunter who calls himself Martin Davis, or short “M”, rummages the forests of Tasmania in search for the last Tasmanian tiger. Following the rumours that claim the sighting of a tiger up in the woods, he sets out to find the animal, an undertaking which gets him in touch with both the local inhabitants of the remote Tasmanian valley and the hostile natural environment of the Tasmanian highlands. I will argue in the following chapter that the novel, though short and terse in style, a) plays with the divergent temporalities that collapse in the human imagination of extinction. Through counterposing geologic time frames and prevailing damage from a colonial past, The Hunter makes the centrifugal forces visible that emerge through thinking extinction as both a human-caused process deeply embedded in the social history of the past few centuries and a geologic event with precursors in the history of the planet itself. b) Furthermore, it explores, in a bold narrative move, how a heteronormative conception of the future (which is prevalent in much environmental ethics) is ultimately not fruitful in framing the current ecological crisis.8 c) Lastly, the novel exposes how facing the pervasive changes
8
This thought is of course routed in a much broader discussion of environmental ethics and the contested nature of the current ecological crisis; a re-evaluation of contemporary environmental ethics has especially been promoted by feminist scholars. See for example: Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis
Hannah Klaubert | 13
in ecology today can easily lead from an ethical environmentalism towards an apocalyptic and ultimately nihilistic vision of the future, a future which creates exclusions and favours a status quo over affective responses to biodiversity loss. In combining these three critical temporalities of species extinction, the novel creates a network of narratives that examine the ethics of extinction.
Human Time, Deep Time. In the novel, the problematic background against which the
hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger is positioned, is soon revealed. Right after his arrival on the island, M is confronted with the remains of a once flourishing economy based on the clearing of woodland, a time that he refers to as “(h)ard days, but days of plenty.” (15) After the rather unsuccessful establishment of agriculture this long gone time now manifests in the “vacant concrete plots” (4) of abandoned logging villages. The hostility and frosty silence of the Tasmanians that M as an outsider is confronted with, underline the impression of a country without perspective or future – a portrayal that Australian author Julia Leigh has strongly been criticized for.9
The entanglement between the colonial history of Tasmania and the extinction of the thylacine is examined more closely when M, during his hunt, stumbles upon a “ring of blackened stone and he imagines they might have been laid by the local aboriginal people, in the years they, the fullbloods, were almost driven to extinction.” (57)10 Confronted with these
of Reason. New York: Routledge, 2002; or more recently: Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. N.p.: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
9
Andrew Peek for example criticizes in the Australian Book Review that the novel simplistically opposes the “hippies and conservationist against backwoodsy yokels.” Cited from Crane, “Tracking the Tassie Tiger”, 111.
10 The first people of Tasmania, which M derogatorily calls the “fullbloods”, were willfully cut off of food
supply and starved by the rural colonialists in the first half of the 19th century. Only very few survived these
dreadful decades; the people of the Palawa are said to have become completely extinct with the death of a woman called Trugannini in 1876, who has now herself become a mythical ‘Last of a Kind’ figure. Cf. Smith, Nicholas. “The Return of the Living Dead: Unsettlement and the Tasmanian Tiger.” Journal of Australian
Hannah Klaubert | 14
(possibly non-authentic) signs, M’s thoughts travel to a historical episode that could easily have sprung from the author’s imagination, but is historically documented: It was proposed in the 1930s that an island offshore the coast of Tasmania, De Witt island (named after a Dutch crew member of Abel Tasman’s expedition) – a former ‘sanctuary’/de facto concentration camp for Aboriginal people in the 19th century – could be repurposed to become a sanctuary for the last Tasmanian tigers. This plan was never put into practice, though, as the animal went extinct before any of the necessary measures could be taken. (Paddle, 183f) This ‘anecdote’, which M thinks about briefly while wandering into the valley, serves, in and outside the novel, as a clear marker of how closely environmental destruction and Western imperialism were linked, how they were witnessed and thought of together, and how they were met with the same political ‘solutions’.
The rumours of the tiger sighting drive M deep into a remote valley in the Tasmanian forests. With short returns to his expedition base, an ill-kept old farmhouse inhabited by a mourning widow and her equally neglected two children, he spends day after day in the densely vegetated planes of a Tasmanian creek, systematically scanning the woods for footprints and setting traps for the tiger. He enters a space where a different temporality is overwhelmingly present as he marches “towards the valley, down an easy boulder-studded slope, the smooth legacy of an ice-cap spread over sixty-five square kilometres some 20 000 years ago.” (30) He asks: “What must the plateau have been like before? Ragged and jagged, teeming with animals, giant fauna now gone extinct.” (30) As M trails closer towards the tiger, extinction turns from a historical and political tragedy into a geological process, a natural repetition of the last five extinction events11 and the deed of a “two-legged fearsome
11 The last five mass extinction events that scientists have identified and commonly agree upon are: the
Hannah Klaubert | 15
little pygmy, the human hunter: a testimony to cunning, to mind over matter.” (31) The acknowledgement of the stratigraphically significant impact of humans on nature is accompanied by the realization that for the animal he is hunting, history is not of any
relevance: “The animal does not care for talk, or for history or for what passes for history. If the food is there and she is hungry, then she will eat: provenance is of no concern for she does not know concern.” (48) And that also for him, on his mission, historical reflection won’t give any orientation; “(…) what good,” he asks, “is history when he is not seeking all the tigers, but one tiger: the last one.” (66) The last tiger can only ever be the end of
something, it refuses history and thought.
This multi-temporality of deep time and colonial past and present is as interesting as problematic. Kylie Crane has argued that the constant re-awakening of the Tasmanian tiger seems to have a questionable function in Australian and Tasmanian culture: while playing with its image and memory, it also constantly declares the thylacine dead, as belonging to a past that no longer informs the present. (Crane 107) She places the semi-energetic efforts of the wild-life services to find and preserve the last tiger in the novel in this realm, as a fake-preservation of what is no longer allowed to be there, covering over the violence of the past inscribed in the loss of the species with a thin layer of environmental consciousness. (Crane 117) In this sense, the thylacine stories not only reflect upon the “particular histories of modernization” (“Last Dogs” 59) that Ursula Heise sees in contemporary extinction narratives, but overwrites them, smooths their edges along the lines of an unfortunate tragedy.
(251m years ago), the Triassic event (around 200m years ago) and the Cretaceous event (65m years ago). Cf. Barnosky, Anthony D., et al., table 1.
Hannah Klaubert | 16
At the same time, it unveils a temporal torsion which lies at the heart of the Anthropocene concept: that “zooming out” of human timespans and scales constructs humanity as a monolithic force in geologic time which overwrites the erratic pulses and violent movements that have led to the current ecological crisis. As Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg point out, the Anthropocene concept simultaneously de-naturalizes the ecological crisis (“mind over matter”) and re-naturalizes it through thinking about humanity as one species whose innate traits, like the ability to control fire, inevitably have summoned the current crisis. (Malm and Hornborg 65) It thereby plays out inter-species power hierarchies against intra-species injustice – instead of thinking about both, violence amongst humans and violence against the non-human world, as interwoven in complex ways. I believe that The
Hunter, like much other fiction and art with an ecological tenor, can help us to understand the
complex political implications of species-thinking and place multiple perspectives and time frames next to one another. It shows: To think the human as a species among others is to place us in conflicting time-frames. In presenting both the colonial history and deep geologic time as interwoven with a narrative that is clearly positioned in the slightly apocalyptic future (that is now), the novel helps to uncover the strange entanglements and knots of meaning surrounding extinction.
Queer Ecological Futures. In her study of extinction discourses, Ursula Heise
observes that there is a trend in the portrayal of the ‘last of a kind’, though often not
historically correct, as a female specimen, most often as a grieving wife and mother. (Nach
der Natur 52) We encounter the same trope in The Hunter – M’s informants have specified
that the tiger he is hunting is a tigress. This becomes a major factor in the way M approaches and imagines his prey. In the meticulous process of his systematic hunt, M’s thoughts start to
Hannah Klaubert | 17
circle around the figure of the tigress. He hushes away his dawning realization of her possible suffering, her animal-being and indifference towards him through the idea that what has made her survive to this date is a strong urge for procreation, the search for a mate. He tells himself and the reader: “And no, she does not spend her days in a sickly fashion, rather she greets each day as a new opportunity to track the scent of a mate. That is what propels her day after day across the plateau: immortality.” (66) Many critics have pointed out the uncomfortably gendered dynamics of M’s hunt, his growing obsession with his prey and the stable masculinity M seems to find in contact with nature. (Cf. Crane 117) This imbrication of wilderness and masculinity, reiterated in the novel again and again, is of course a classic trope of traditional nature writing. Leigh smartly employs this image of the “Natural Man”, as M likes to call himself, and renders it uncomfortable through almost comical repetition. (Cf. 4, 22, 147, 161) Kylie Crane has stressed that the narrative viewpoint, jumping between the third person and stream of consciousness-like passages in which the reader participates in M’s thoughts, is entirely focused on M. And as the reader is likely to empathize with the focalizer of the narrative, Leigh’s narrative voice evokes conflicting sympathies. (Crane 116) She gives the readers no possibility of escaping M’s vision, and forces them to participate in the re-iteration of stereotypes inscribed in the field of nature and gender.
On the one hand, I would argue, this gendered projection is clearly used as a mirror image for M’s own loneliness and incapability to form human relations. He is introduced early on in the text as “anchored neither by wife nor home, nor by a lover nor even a single friend.” (15) And suggestions are made that his only ever girlfriend has had an abortion, which is as close as he has come to having reproduced his own species. During his returns down to the farmhouse, M starts to grow fond of the two feral but imaginative and vivacious children and their mother, a young woman who has lost her husband, a biologist, up in the
Hannah Klaubert | 18
mountains. She tries to console her grief with sleeping pills, but seems to ‘wake up’ when M becomes part of the constellation. The slow formation of friendly or even familial bonds, though, is suddenly interrupted when the young daughter suffers from a terrible accident, leaving her in a far-off hospital with severe burns, the brother in a foster home and the mother in a mental hospital. It is certainly not a coincidence that only after this incidence, after M has lost connection to human society, after losing any sense of time, M will be able to find the last Tasmanian tiger and (spoiler alert!) kill her. In a classic narrative move,
protagonist and antagonist, hunter and tiger, are bound together by their fate of being alone forever – and their confrontation ends in tragic resolution. While M will hurry on to the next job, the death of the tiger marks the vanishing of an entire species. In this sense, the novel surely plays along the lines of classic tragedy, a narrative form that Heise identifies as generic to popular extinction narratives.
On the other hand, what Leigh plants into the head of her protagonist and through him into the reader’s is a doubt: that M’s projections, his phantasies of a secret hidden pup that the tiger feeds, a weak and dying mate somewhere in a cave, have nothing to do with the reality of the animal. As the reader will not be able to exit the focalization of the hunter, as the world presented to her seems so entirely formed by M’s ‘problematic masculinity’, fear of failure to complete his mission and failure to reproduce, the world beyond these focal points becomes as opaque as interesting. Even with another lonely mate somewhere, even with an urge for sex and procreation, the animal is bound for extinction as small populations in secluded environments commonly won’t be able to recover. As an animal of the past, the Tasmanian tiger has no future, hasn’t had one in a long time. So while M imagines an entire secret tribe of tigers hidden in an underground world, an “Atlantis” (117) from which the last thylacine has emerged as a messenger, we have no way of ever knowing how the animal
Hannah Klaubert | 19
relates to its own extinction and childlessness. It might not even care, and it quite certainly doesn’t care in the way we would want it to.
In her 2012 article “Spinster Ecology”, Sarah Ensor seeks to rethink what could be called a queer ecology in relation to (queer) futurity. She argues that current ecological thought (with slogans like “We’re saving the planet for our grandchildren.”) has a strong orientation towards the future with a focus on inheritance and procreation. It therefore reproduces a problematic heteronormative imperative and produces exclusions that stand in the way of a holistic environmental ethics, especially in a moment of ecological crisis where acceptance of loss and grief often seem as necessary as resistance in face of the cataclysmic changes. With Lee Edelman and his famous No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, she therefore argues for a refusal to engage in a (insistently transitive) reproductive futurism. However, instead of completely getting rid of the future through a negative intransitivity that she assigns to Edelman, Ensor suggests a queer environmentalism that is positively
intransitive in that it doesn’t reject the future as such, but constructs it from a queer
subjectivity outside the boundaries of reproduction, and outside of our capacity to control it. “Perhaps the question,” she writes, “is not the future, yes or no, but the future, which and whose, where and when and how.” (Ensor 414) Or as Heather Davis suggests: “In the face of no future for many species, queer theory’s insistence on negativity may provide a useful model for rethinking temporality, social reproduction, and kinship.” (Davis 241) A queer ecological futurity can help uncover the gendered, racialized lines along which much of the environmental crisis operates. Because in effect, both the crisis and many of the half-hearted efforts to face it work with an idea of an apocalyptic future that favours an ideological status quo:
Hannah Klaubert | 20
The extinctions we are currently facing project “no future” asymmetrically. The privileged, white, heteronormative, reproductive couple that becomes the figure of the political future that Edelman wishes to foreclose, or at least not to participate in, seems to become more powerful (…) rather than less. (Davis 242f.)
‘No future’ for the unprivileged, human and non-human, is accepted in order to afford futurity and progress for some; and thinking different, “queer”, possibly non-productive futures, is precluded.12 I would argue that The Hunter, precisely through overdrawing the masculine and heteronormative focalization through M, points towards such a queer
ecological future. As M slowly comes closer to the small non-functioning family that he first resists to be a part of, there is indication that coming into intimate contact with nature, in a parallel narrative line, also makes him understand the cruel realities of extinction, the loss and suffering that has happened so far, and that in fulfilling his mission he will take part in it. The accident, though, stops this internal development, disrupts the emergence of an ending that in some senses could be called happy (though it would surely not save the tiger from extinction); that would at least try to come to terms with loss, that would confront it instead of “sleeping it away”. When the sense of loss becomes too overwhelming, though, as it mostly seems to be when facing extinction, the “figure of apocalypse, then, seems far preferable to a world of slow decay.” (Davis 243)
Nihil Unbound. So what M decides to settle for is a figure of thought that is closely
related to much apocalyptic thinking in contemporary philosophy and also some strands of
12 Eben Kirksey has provided a fascinating glimpse into the new worlds and ecological assemblages forming at
the edge of environmental catastrophe: Kirksey, Eben. Emergent Ecologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
Hannah Klaubert | 21
ecological thought: a type of mereological nihilism.13 On one of his trips back to the valley for new supplies, M finds the house besieged by a group of “hippies” who want to attend a folk music festival in the area and have been invited by the ‘sleeping beauty’ to camp on the property. Sitting by a bonfire, they discuss the book that Jarrah Armstrong, the missing husband and researcher, has published before his disappearance, while presumably researching Tasmanian devils: the book called Bioethics for another Millennium seems to have pleaded for a fluid understanding of ecological systems where processes intertwine without beginning or end. One of the visitors sums it up like this: “Dust to dust, my fine friend, and dust is earth and earth is beautiful, and the rest, the real thing, that goes on too.” (107) M, who is sitting observantly in the dark behind the group of friends, comes to his own conclusions: “M does not talk. If everything is transformed, then what is extinction?” (107) Thus, he subsumes the extinction event under the natural occurring transformational
processes of Nature (with a capital N, nature as an unruly Darwinian wheel of progress); this makes it possible for him to subtract all ethical reflection and affective bounds from his mission of killing the last thylacine.14
Raymond Brassier, in his book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, has claimed that the very thought of (human) extinction, or in Nietzsche’s words, the
13 Mereological Nihilism is based on the idea that nothing apart from basic building blocks of life exists and
these smallest parts have no meaningful relation to one another, even though humans might (mis-)perceive such a relation. Also, Emily Apter provides a dense overview over the nihilistic tendencies in contemporary
ecological thought in her essay “Planetary Dysphoria”, Third Text, 27.1 (2013): 131-140. The authors she subsumes under this trend include Eugene Thacker, Ray Brassier, Jean Francois Lyotard, and Robin Mackay.
14 In Darwinian terms, species extinction is indeed no more than a necessary transformation and a sign of failed
adaption to changed circumstances. The accelerated loss of biodiversity is the logical consequence of the success of another species, homo sapiens, which in turn will also go extinct at some point in the future. Ironically, the loss of biodiversity might actually make it harder for humans to quickly adapt to changing climate and environmental destruction – which might prove fatal to our own species in the future.
Hannah Klaubert | 22
acknowledgement that after us, after life and death, ‘nothing will have happened’, can actually lead towards a binding of the trauma that comes with this very thought extinction:
Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose traces it bears. In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. (238f.)
What Brassier deals with here is, again, the troubling intrinsic tensions of the concept of extinction itself: if other beings can end, and do end undoubtedly, then also humans will end and so will any thought or meaning as it exists today. Extinction, if thought like this, is a concept that “kills itself”, can rob itself of meaning. And while Brassier suggests that the
adequation without correspondence (222) that lies in the recognition of this internal tension
can serve as a starting point for a contemporary philosophy (which to deliver he seems to fall short of), Heather Davis warns that transferring nihilistic/apocalyptic ideas (that she also sees to some extend in Lee Edelman’s refusal of future) into a biological or ecological context is ethically unproductive or even dangerous. She claims that ultimately the “(…) nihilistic, apocalyptic, or masculinist techno-fantasies of the future will only lead us to the continued reproduction of the social order.” (Davis 246) Again, though paying lip service to an environmental consciousness through evocation of the totality of the current crisis, the question remains how this kind of absolute catastrophism can actually become politically active. More than anything, it seems to lead dangerously close towards the same conclusions that M draws from the pseudo-spiritual meandering at the bonfire: that thinking ‘no future’ in the sense of a future without meaning, without thought, with only matter remaining, can ultimately stabilize actions that work towards the catastrophe.
Hannah Klaubert | 23
One question I have left unanswered so far is the following: Why on earth is M even out there, killing an animal that is already bound for extinction, risking his health and life to kill a specimen that has de facto ended a long time ago? M is paid by a US-American corporation to extract DNA from the tiger. Apparently a group of researchers has found that the DNA of the tiger could be used to develop dangerous biological weapons “capable of winning a thousand wars.” (40) How much of this heroic expectation has sprung from M’s wishful thinking is left unclear, but surely after having killed the tiger, he neatly extracts tissue samples and reproductive organs of the animal and burns the body in order not to leave any traces behind. Even though in the whole of the narrative of the novel this only plays a minor role, it opens up a whole new field of questions that are also closely related to the framing of extinction. From a biological perspective, Julien Delord argues, traditional definitions of extinction as either the death of the last of a species or the end of the reproductive processes in a species no longer hold true. (Delord 665) Instead, he says, in expectation of accelerated technological progress, we can actually declare many species that have already disappeared “potentially non-extinct” as there will soon be possibility to clone and revive any species quite easily. (665) Despite the very apparent flaws in this
argumentation and strategy (which DNA is preserved, which species are considered worth of a cloning process, if the animal has been lost through shifts in the ecological system or habitat loss, then where is the cloned animal going to live freely?), his argumentation points towards important questions: if we think about extinction from a materialist point of view, and in an age where the modification of DNA has become a normal practice, then can we even speak of and frame extinction in a Darwinian sense? Or, to borrow an expression from Jay Clayton and Stephanie Turner, what is extinction in Genome Time? In the following chapter, I will have a closer look at these questions through the analysis of another
Hannah Klaubert | 24
contemporary extinction narrative that has gained prominence among long-established science fiction fans as well as newcomers to the genre: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.
Conclusion. It is the strength of this brief novel The Hunter, I believe, that it unravels
and throws back together conflicting conceptions of past and future that the extinction concept entails. It alludes to the conflicting time-frames of geologic time and problematic human histories, in narrating how from passing over from one time-frame to another also challenges our perception of the currently ongoing mass-extinction. At the same time, it intertwines the ecological sensibilities with questions of gender. The protagonist structures his ethical orientation strongly along the lines of a heteronormative imperative of futurity through procreation. Once this orientating system is disrupted through an accident, though, he has no way of incorporating the experience of loss into an alternative future. Instead, he leaves any ethical considerations behind, packs up his bag and ruthlessly sets out to complete his mission. He accepts the extinction of the thylacine as inevitable. What is weirdly absent from the novel and therefore also from my analysis, I want to mention here before moving on. It is the animal itself, the Tasmanian tiger. It is a sad reality of this extinction event that the most common way animals participate in it is as cut-open carcasses or reproductive DNA-containers in some zoo’s breeding programme, as a record on a Red List, or as a haunting spectre of the past like the thylacine. The sixth mass extinction is very much a human business.15
15 Behind this stands of course a whole debate of human-animal relations and the nature of the animal as
addressed in the emergent discipline of Animal Studies, nudged by Jacques Derrida and others and now prominently advocated by Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, etc. Geologist Kathryn Yusoff has put forward a very fascinating discussion of the relation between representation of the animal and biodiversity loss; she writes that non-human beings of biodiversity cannot be represented, that they will always be “the invisible multitudes that exist and then do not exist somewhere out the corner of our eyes.” (586) Nonetheless, she argues, already the act of representation will configure a recognition of existence, and therefore a relation (often one of violence) – and
Hannah Klaubert | 25
Two. ORYX BEISA, NEAR THREATENED, AND RED-NECKED CRAKE, LEAST CONCERN
The IUCN Red List of Endangered Species holds an entry for the species Homo Sapiens, common name “human”. In the current version of 2015, it registers the status of this species as of “Least Concern” and the population trend as “increasing”.16 In the 2015 summary document, the list furthermore included 1,734,830 other species (vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, fungi and protists), of which 23,250 were registered as “threatened”. Careful estimates assume that 26 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians fall under this category.17 Of course, such seemingly complete lists have to be taken with a grain of salt as their range is necessarily restricted. Each inventory of biodiversity is created through a huge number of decisions that produce inclusions and exclusions. (Heise, Nach der Natur 86f)18 Kathryn Yusoff furthermore points towards the fact that a big part of the species that are disappearing in the current extinction event, especially on a micro-biological level, aren’t known to
humans and will therefore never be represented on any lists, despite their claim and aim for completeness. (Yusoff, “Aesthetics of Loss” 582) Nonetheless, as Ursula Heise stresses, these red lists have come to be the most prominent contemporary genre in which the
thus a responsibility: “By bringing these creatures into existence through representation we acquire
responsibility for and to their spectral beings, yet they are not present in this encounter as themselves, as full sovereign beings, but as a kind of haunting configured around a profoundly human sensibility.” (586)
16 Cf. entry Homo Sapiens under: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/136584/0.
17 See Pdf “Table 1 – Numbers of threatened species by major groups of organisms (1996–2015)” on the
Summary Statistics webpage of the IUCN: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics#Tables_1_2.
18
In Nach der Natur, Heise points out that there are two basic types of species inventories: one aims to produce a complete picture of biodiversity on this planet, the other is more focused on registering the current status of certain species to then promote their preservation. (86) The first one is hard to achieve as today the number of newly discovered species is actually still higher than the current extinction rates; furthermore, there is constant discussion about the correct taxonomy of species and sub-species already in the inventory. (87) The second type has to be based on the first kind of inventory, but needs to be removed from the above mentioned discussions in order to serve as the basis for political decision making. (88) In this light of this political task, the inclusion of the Homo Sapiens into the Red List is a political decision, to remind us that we are one species among more than 6000 mammals know today. (cf. 113)
Hannah Klaubert | 26
extinction of animals is negotiated, (Heise, “Nach der Natur” 100) striving for a completeness that she compares to the classic epos. (89)
In Magaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake the stepchild of such a “Red List” plays an important role. In the following analysis, I want to take a closer look at this highly acclaimed and frequently analysed novel. It positions the human in a dystopian future and the sixth mass extinction in the past. One could argue quite easily that it simply serves as a parody – and one with a wagging finger – reminding us of the catastrophes to come if we don’t change our behaviours. I would insist, though, that Oryx and Crake actually raises questions around the topic of extinction that go beyond a traditional moralizing ethics of biodiversity and
preservation. a) Firstly, the text is concerned with the linguistic structures of extinction, the forms, genres and ways in which we narrate, report and capture extinction. Through the play with these words, it again poses questions of representation and loss.19 In doing so, the text points towards the close relationship between animal extinction and human extinction; the concept of extinction is inextricably interwoven with species thinking and points out to humans the spot reserved for them in their own human-made taxonomies. b) Secondly, Atwood plays, as Calina Ciobanu puts it, with the assertion that “the clock on the Anthropocene is effectively running out” (Ciobanu, 153), but that the end of the
Anthropocene “is hardly the end of the world.” It alludes to questions that I have also posed
19 Again, I’d like to point to Kathryn Yussof’s analysis of the problematic relationship between representation,
preservation and biodiversity loss in “Aesthetics of Loss.” She writes: “One of the most visible ways in which the loss of biodiversity is brought to our attention is through the various aesthetic practices of conservation groups. (…)” (579) These practices immediately point towards their own insufficiency, thus laying open “the great multitude of life that eludes, or fails to collude, collaborate or cohabitate with our technologies of presence.” (580) In Oryx and Crake, the database taxonomies have become containers of loss, markers that represent what has long disappeared. Crake even takes this depletion of representation one step further when he uses the names of the extinct animals to give all his co-workers and friends names from Extinctathon – like the title-giving Oryx Beisa and Red-Necked Crake, his own nickname and the nickname of his lover. It might also not be a coincidence that “Oryx” is also the name of a recognized conservation journal, Oryx – The
Hannah Klaubert | 27
at the end of the last chapter: how can we even frame extinction from a materialist point of view? As announced earlier, I would thus like to unroll here a set of questions that connect the novel’s dystopian future with contemporary preservation efforts and policies: the
problematic nature of extinction in Genome Time. c) Lastly, the novel also positions the sixth mass extinction in a broader causality of capitalist exploitation of planet earth. It plays with the idea that the fossil remains of humans themselves will not only display the material, but also the social histories of humanity. It is in digging up the remains of another extinction event that the humans have come to destroy the ecosystems of the earth so thoroughly.
Extinctathon. In Oryx and Crake, the IUCN list sadly has come to contain only one
classificatory marker: EX or “extinct.” In the not-so-far but deeply dystopian future of the novel, most animals today assessed as critically endangered or even of “least concern” have shuffled off this mortal coil. The titular Oryx Beisa, an antelope which in 2016 has recovered from being hunted to the brink of extinction through extensive breeding programs, and the Red-necked crake, a waterbird today still very common in the South Pacific area,20 have disappeared from the earth. They survive only as a winning currency in a nerdy online game called Extinctathon. As I have mentioned above, Oryx and Crake is set in a dystopian future. The novel switches between two time frames: it starts off in a post-apocalyptic setting where the main character, Jimmy, struggles to survive in a landscape that has been completely depopulated from humans. As a classic ‘last of a kind’ figure, he wanders the deserted coastlands. The only living beings he encounters are the Crakers – amicable but rather dull post-human creatures – and the off-spring of genetically modified animals that have made an
20
Hannah Klaubert | 28
escape from the abandoned laboratories and meat-production facilities. The second narrative timeframe consists of Jimmy’s flashbacks. They bring the reader back into his childhood in a completely segregated and hyper-capitalist society. He narrates his blossoming friendship with the nerdy Crake, and his friend’s development into an ultra-rational misanthrope.
The “interactive biofreak masterlore game” (92) Extinctathon is one of the many ways through which Crake and Jimmy distract themselves from their dreary teenage lives. In the face of the other distractions that Jimmy and Crake engage in – stretching from child pornography to live beheadings – Extincathon seems a relatively innocent pastime. It greets the player with the following words: “EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?” (92) What then follows is a classic Who am I? game set up, where players can compete against each other by guessing a certain extinct species with as few questions as possible: “Then you’d narrow it down, Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, then the habitat and when last seen, and what had snuffed it. (Pollution, habitat destruction, credulous morons who thought eating its horn would give them a boner)” (92) The players can earn points through speed and precision, and the only help they have is the above mentioned complete list of extinct animals, “a couple of hundred pages of fine print” that catalogue, in Jimmy’s words, all the “obscure bugs, weeds and frogs nobody had ever heard of.” (92)21
Being used to more drastic stimulations, Jimmy becomes bored with this repetitive game quite quickly. We only find out later that Crake has kept on playing throughout his youth and that he has managed to become a “Grandmaster”. This opens up a whole new perspective on the game: it secretly
21 This catalogue also seems to reference another science fiction classic in which an animal list plays an
important role: in Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and less prominently in the movie adaption, Blade Runner, people carry around a catalogue in which all animals, their population status and current market value are meticulously recorded – as hardly any real animals are left on the earth and collectors search for them frantically.
Hannah Klaubert | 29
functions as a communication and organization tool for a group of radical environmentalists who use it to organize sabotage acts against the destructive forces that endanger both humans and the environment. This hidden function of the Extinctathon game can be read as a caustic comment on the current archiving and taxonomy rage; it relies on the assumption that there is a connection between knowledge of each species and the will to protect them: that whoever is patient and interested enough to learn by heart all extinct animals and plants will also have the will to engage in drastic action to save them. Even though the inventories play a main role in the understanding of bio-diversity on this planet, they cannot always guarantee political action and preservation. (Cf. Heise, 86) Furthermore, the name of the game, Extinctathon, with its allusion to the marathon, also ironically points towards something else: that it is a seemingly endless, exhausting race against time. It is fast and draining, but also
uncomfortably long (and Jimmy would say incredibly boring) – “racing extinction” at its best.
While Jimmy goes on to attend a mediocre art school and starts an unpromising career in advertising – the only area where his gift for words can be translated into money –, Crake is accepted into a prestigious natural science university. On graduation, he starts a career in a biotech corporation. During this time, he keeps on playing Extinctathon and it has profound effects on the way he is thinking. Being faced with the endless stream of extinct animals is a constant reminder that humans indeed are only one species among others, and that the way they are exploiting the planet is completely unsustainable: “Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit
reproduction in the face of dwindling resources.” (139) He shares his thoughts with the clueless Jimmy: “All it takes, said Crake, is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link
Hannah Klaubert | 30
in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.” (261) Crake, just like the IUCN, has added the Homo Sapiens to the Red List of possibly extinct species on this planet.
We learn only very late in the novel that what has brought Jimmy into the unfortunate situation of seemingly being the last surviving human on earth is a deadly virus developed by his friend Crake – a virus that Jimmy and his lover Oryx cluelessly helped to spread all over the world, thereby sealing the fate of humanity. The Extinctathon game not only
theoretically, but also practically, has helped Crake realize his misanthropic ideas. As
mentioned above, once Crake has become a “Grandmaster” of the game, he discovers that the game is actually used as a communication tool and platform of exchange by a group of loosely connected radical environmentalists. Through the game, these activists share ideas, tips and news on eco-terrorist attacks they implement all over the world, reaching from tar-eating microbes and viruses to the release of bio-engineered animals into the wild. Crake has become fascinated by their approach:
I thought at first they were just another crazy Animal Liberation org. But there’s more to it than that. I think they’re after the machinery. They’re after the whole system, they want to shut it down. So far they haven’t done any people numbers, but it’s obvious they could. (254)
‘Doing people numbers’ is a very euphemistic description of what Crake has in mind. Once he has come to the conclusion that human extinction is the best solution to the ecological crisis and overpopulation of the earth, he invites the Grandmasters from the Extinctathon into his compound. As a genius researcher, he has unlimited resources, and he incorporates the unsuspecting Extinctathon-Grandmasters into his project to efface humans from the earth through creation of a pill that promises endless sexual pleasure. The pill is greeted with
Hannah Klaubert | 31
enthusiasm, the deadly virus does its deed, and Jimmy witnesses the weeklong systematic genocide from a sealed-off laboratory space:
(…) the end of a species was taking place before his very eyes. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. How many legs does it have? Homo sapiens sapiens, joining the polar bear, the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowing owl, the long long list. Oh, big points, Grandmaster. (401)
As in this quote, throughout the novel Atwood plays with the linguistic structures that characterize red lists and the biological approach to the topic of extinction. In Jimmy’s flashbacks, the rhetoric of the Exinctathon game (“Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species”) continues to structure his idea of the apocalypse that has come upon him. Just like Crake, ultimately he can’t help but see the dying humans as the last species on the red list of animals, the last to cross the line in an endless Extinctathon that ironically the humans themselves have started.
Extinction in Genome Time. The concept of Genome time was first introduced by Jay
Clayton in his research on narrative and Darwinism “Genome time: Post-Darwinism then and now”). It is the attempt to capture what the deep immersion of humans into micro-biology, genetics and bio-engineering might actually mean for our conception of past and future. In many senses, it is the biological counter-part to geologic “deep time”. Clayton writes:
On the one hand, your genetic code is unique, a personal inheritance from your parents that defines key aspects of your identity and influences your singular destiny. (…) On the other hand, the genome has a synchronic dimension. It is a four-letter langue that runs through and beyond the individual, reaching back to the first primordial cell and forward to whatever future humanity may encounter. (Clayton, 59)
Thus, “(g)enome time fuses the personal timescale of everyday life with the immense impersonal timescales of the species” and, I would add here, with living structures in general as
Hannah Klaubert | 32
species and across geologic time spans. In genome time, the “past and future appear inscribed as theoretical possibilities within the virtual space of the code.” (Clayton, 59) The current
possibilities of thinking evolutionary histories, and specifically extinction narratives, under genome time has in many ways revised or even forestalled the absolute endpoints of extinction. (Turner, 59) Just like Julien Delord, whom I have mentioned in my first chapter, Clayton and Turner observe a reconsideration of extinction itself in a time where we have come to understand the nucleotides of DNA as the building blocks of life. (Turner, 59)
Because the effect of genome time is to erase traditional boundaries, the expressive forms most useful in this regard will be those that challenge boundaries between the human and the non-human, between the “nature” of the DNA molecule and the “nurture” of our engagement with it, between the temporal and the spatial, and between cultures of science and the activities of the rest of the world. (Turner, 76)
Echoing Judeo-Christian salvation narratives (cf. the trope of the zoo as Noah’s Ark in speaking about recent institutionalized efforts like the San Diego frozen zoo22), new methods in bio-engineering have in many ways shifted extinction narratives into a holding pattern where, while de facto the species are still becoming extinct at an extremely high rate, a future of some sort is now guaranteed. (Turner, 61)
The economic circulations of Oryx and Crake mostly are made of the products of heavy genetic engineering. After climate change and population growth have wrecked the Earth, food, clothes and pharmaceuticals come directly from the laboratories. Through a complete deconstruction of the Nature/Culture divide (also introduced in the constant quest
22 The Frozen Zoo initiative advertises their work in the following words: “The Frozen Zoo® constitutes a
crucial resource for facilitating advances in genetic and reproductive technologies for population sustainability. In a new collaboration with The Scripps Research Institute, our Reproductive Physiology and Genetics teams are using the resources of the Frozen Zoo® to study the potential for emerging stem cell technologies to rescue the northern white rhino from the brink of extinction. Our vision for the future is to develop an international network of cryobanks under the umbrella of a Global Wildlife Biobank that is dedicated to sharing resources and expertise and growing a worldwide legacy of irreplaceable reproductive and genetic material that can be used in support of species conservation.” Cf. webpage: http://institute.sandiegozoo.org/resources/frozen-zoo%C2%AE#.
Hannah Klaubert | 33
for “real” or “original” alias non-engineered products), Atwood introduces Genome Time into her narrative – and the misanthrope Crake as its most devoted fan. He takes this thought to an extreme: he is willing to end the existence of an entire species, the humans, and his own life, in order to replace them with genetically engineered post-humans who, he believes, only represent the best parts of human and non-human genome. They smell of insect repellent, ruminate leaves for the little energy they need, and feel no sexual desire. There is a future guaranteed after the apocalypse in Oryx and Crake – but humans and many animals and plants only partake in it as nucleotide sequences, and modelled after the megalomaniac and self-centred Crake. Again, I would like to echo here a quote that I have brought in earlier in relation to questionable conceptions of an environmental future: the question also in relation to Genome Time is not only “the future, yes or no”, but also “the future, which and whose, where and when and how.” (Ensor 414) What Atwood sets out to show here is thus that down to the genome, living beings are interwoven with the inclusions and exclusions of capitalist structures and negotiations of power. The future promised in Genome time might be a future of some sorts, but who will be creating it and who will be excluded is to be decided along the lines of privilege, race and gender and in the case of animals and plants often (though of course not exclusively) along the lines of cuteness, size, class (with mammals much more likely to be targets of preservation efforts than fish, not to speak of insects) or human standards of beauty. Just like religious salvation narratives, extinction narratives in Genome time don’t promise a happy ending for everyone.
Extinction as Revenant. Many critics have drawn upon the fact that Atwood herself rejects
the label “science fiction” for her writing. What she uses instead is the concept of “speculative fiction”, fiction that speculates about the future, but with a clear coalescence towards the present.
Hannah Klaubert | 34
(Cf. Atwood In Other Worlds) Her dystopian worlds allow for an “imaginative leap into the future, following current socio-cultural, political or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions.” (Snyders, 470) The stance of the novel is that of the apocalypse after the eco-apocalypse. When Jimmy and Crake are young, the mass extinction has already
happened, animals familiar to us today have disappeared. Atwood adds another layer to the drama in thinking, just like Crake, the events to their coercive conclusion, that is: the eventual extinction of humans and their disappearance from the earth. Nonetheless, the world of Oryx and
Crake is also deeply structured by our contemporary petro-capitalism, which relies on the
exploitation of both humans and natural resources. This brings me now to another way in which I see extinction represented in the novel: extinction as revenant.
In her essay on “Geologic Life”, Yusoff points towards the fact that, with its massive digging up of the mineral remains of the Carboniferous period, the current ecological shifts framed under the term Anthropocene are actually based on the reanimation of another extinction event, the “trajectory of one extinction feeding another”. (784) She writes:
Fossil fuels are a material condition that subtends contemporary geopolitical life. Massive biodiversity loss in its most simple expression is the battle over geography that has ensued in securing the material conditions for the reproduction of life in its contemporary geologic forms (…) – in unearthing one fossil layer we create another contemporary fossil stratum that has our name on it. (784)
It is in unearthing and burning the remains of another extinction event in the form of coal, gas and oil that the human subjectivity in its modern form has come into being. The game
Extinctathon in Oryx and Crake plays with this idea of the extinction as a revenant: much
like Chekhov’s gun, once the fact of extinction is on the table, it becomes very hard to ignore. The idea of species life and (human) extinction saturate the language and thinking of the main characters, especially Crake’s. Like the sixth mass extinction is a revenant, a spectre of
