Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

ISSN: 0159-6306 (Print) 1469-3739 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdis20

Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood and

the monstrous child

Jane Bone

To cite this article: Jane Bone (2015): Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood
and the monstrous child, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI:
10.1080/01596306.2015.1075701

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1075701

Published online: 11 Sep 2015.

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 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1075701

Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood and the

monstrous child
Jane Bone
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The future of childhood is often described in terms of utopian Childhood; dystopia;
thinking. Here, the turn is towards dystopia as a fertile source of environment; Atwood;
wild imaginings about the future. The dystopian literary fictions posthuman; monster
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featured here act as a message and are projections of an uneasy

future requiring a reader to see the present differently. Such
projections make reading dangerous as they create an alternative
world often disorderly and dismissive of contexts that are familiar
and safe. In these scenarios, the child is often a key figure. In the
work by Atwood (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood;
MaddAddam), the world is an environmental nightmare. The focus
is on MaddAddam, in which the child is an object of desire and
both monstrous and redemptive. A reading of MaddAddam as a
posthuman text is undertaken and it is argued that Atwood’s
dystopia creates a discourse of monstrosity (both weird and
beautiful) that contaminates thoughts about the child/children/
childhood and the future.

Introduction
Margaret Atwood’s trilogy – Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam – con-
stitutes a dystopian vision of the future that includes various child/animal/bird monstros-
ities and assorted bio-experimental weirdness. The contents of the trilogy may be
summarised as follows: the world as it is known and taken for granted is destroyed
(Oryx and Crake); its preservation is desired by an environmental cult called God’s Garden-
ers who hold on to tradition (The Year of the Flood); the backstory and some hope for the
future is provided (MaddAddam). Atwood does not spare any sensibilities, whether one has
a belief in, or gives a value to, scientific rationality, nature and spirituality or technology and
a pragmatic capitalism: all are flung aside and recreated in these fictions. In an endnote to
MaddAddam, however, the reader is alerted to the fact that ‘although Maddaddam is a
work of fiction, it does not include any technologies, or biobeings that do not already
exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 475).

Utopia/dystopia
The first utopian fiction is attributed to Sir Thomas More (2012), whose novel Utopia, first
published in 1516, described his vision of a perfect society. The garden of Paradise, featured

CONTACT Jane Bone jane.bone@monash.edu

© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 2 J. BONE

in so many myths and religious narratives, can be conceptualised as utopian – a place where
the world is new and unsullied before the introduction of the serpent, a symbol of desire and
destruction. Guattari (1992, cited in Warner, 1995, p. 418) mentions utopian dreams as a
means of ‘transforming this planet – a living hell for over three quarters of its population
– into a universe of creative enchantments’, and Warner also mentions Guattari’s questions
about the direction of technological advancement in his discussion of utopia.
Dystopian visions are often set in a disturbing and totalitarian future: Orwell’s
(2011) Nineteen Eighty-four, Huxley’s (2006) Brave New World, Atwood’s (1998) The Hand-
maid’s Tale. The dystopia may be post-apocalyptic in a world damaged by human activity
and disaster: Wright’s (2013) The Swan Book and Collins’ (2008) The Hunger Games. Accord-
ing to Disch (2003, as cited in Appleton, 2008, p. 10), in dystopian fictions:
… the author continues to pile horror on horror to preposterous and appalling heights. Yet
they should never be so preposterous and merely phantasmagoric as to escape the quotidian,
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accepted awfulness of the here and now. (Disch, 2003, cited in Appleton, 2008, p. 10)

The attraction of the dystopia is that it has roots in the everyday, whereas utopia seems
to be forever out of reach.
In order to reconceptualise the field of early childhood education, the idea of utopia
was strongly promoted in the influential book Ethics and Politics in Early Chlidhood Edu-
cation (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005). A utopia may be a perfect community, a place of dream-
like, even heavenly, qualities, and this influenced the vision for education proposed by
Dahlberg and Moss. Their notion of a perfect preschool featured an ethic of care, demo-
cratic principles and an image of the child as citizen with a right to educational spaces seen
as a series of ethical encounters. In 2014, Peter Moss affirmed this vision and also called for
‘new stories’ (Moss, 2014, p. 16). I look to fiction to provide a new story in the form of an
uneasy narrative, noting that these new stories not without what Rinaldi (2006) always
advocates for in terms of hope for the future. I argue here that through the creation of
a monstrous child that familiar (but contaminated) images of the child/children/childhood
persist.
Margaret Atwood has created a dystopia, a hell on earth created by environmental dis-
aster, a powerful version of her ‘speculative fictions as fables for our time’ (Howells, 2006,
p. 173). This trilogy constructs a world far from the unproblematic, cleansed and unpol-
luted scenarios usually imagined in connection with children. My reading of Atwood
accords with that of Howells (p. 161), who proposes that ‘perhaps the primary function
of a dystopia is to send out danger signals to its readers’. Picking up on these signals
forces me to ask new questions and to wonder whether the dystopias of popular
culture – for example, The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), The Maze Runner (Dashner
2009) and futuristic internet games (Atwood’s Extinctathon) – require deeper consider-
ation especially if they reflect the anxieties of young people about climate change and
fear of the future. Perhaps the return on neoliberal ‘childhood’, with its uneasy but
often unchallenged relationship to industrial childcare, and its de-politicicisation in
favour of the market since the 1990s (see Penn, 2011), together with inadequate critiques
of technological change, may connect to Atwood’s prophetic visions and make way for a
future run by corporations such as OrganInc, NooSkins, HelthWyzer, Nanotech Biochem
and CyroJeenyus: these being the corporations or compounds that make up Atwood’s
brave new world.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 3

Literary and posthuman influences

I introduce the fictional world created by Atwood and search out the monstrous child
whom she has imagined and brought to life primarily in MaddAddam, the final book in
the trilogy. Literary and posthuman theory, as well as the various discourses that construct
education, form the basis for analysis, favouring an overall postmodern view that ‘philos-
ophy and literature are on converging paths’ (Leist & Singer, 2010, p. 3). Leist and Singer
(p. 100) suggest that ‘human reflectivity and truth seeking imply some instability of human
experiences and truths’, and this is evident in Atwood’s dystopian fiction. The literary the-
orist and cultural critic Warner has long been interested in monsters (1994, 1995, 2014).
Her series of Reith Lectures, published as Managing Monsters (1994), explored aspects of
childhood and monstrousness and influenced constructions of childhood from a literary
perspective.
Posthuman theory destabilises the expected hierarchies, most dramatically the position
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of the human at the top of the pyramid, food chain or evolutionary scale. These concep-
tualisations presume that the human animal is ‘advanced’ or superior. Posthuman theory
does not support this notion and suggests a way for the human to be included within
animal and machine assemblages. This is a theory that challenges the discourses of edu-
cation whereby man is the thinking animal and all who fall outside this categorisation are
deficient. Braidotti (2013) states that the humanist project has been ‘highly regulatory and
hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination’ (p. 26). She describes a
movement from the binary of humanism/anti-humanism and proposes that the turn to
posthumanism gives rise to affirmative and alternative discourses.
My focus for the posthumanist reading undertaken here is Ferrando’s (2012) Towards a
posthumanist methodology: A statement. Her work reminds me that ‘posthumanism is
praxis’ (p. 9) and provides a framework for addressing the imaginary world of MaddAddam.
Important influences about the posthuman include Haraway (2008), Braidotti (2013), and
Wolfe (2010). My starting point is the assumption that a dystopia is a fertile breeding
ground for monsters.

MaddAddam childhood(s)
The MaddAddam world is partially peopled by children who have been abused and neg-
lected. Zeb, for instance, fantasises about Fenella, his older brother Adam’s absent mother.
He thinks that she would have been his ‘fairy-dust spirit helper’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 141)
instead of his real mother Trudy, who is self-serving and dishonest, with her ‘stand-by-
your-mealticket subservience’ (pp. 146–147). Adam (also known as Adam One) forms
God’s Gardener (the Maddaddamites), a back to tradition, eco-cult group who do not
take drugs and rely on herbal remedies and natural concoctions. This helps them to
survive the holocaust visited on humanity by Crake, a child who grew up in the com-
pounds and who loves Oryx. He apparently ‘got rid of the chaos and hurtful people to
make Oryx happy’ (Atwood, 2004, p. 12); others think he was just power-crazed. Crake
ensures the destruction of the human race through the invention of the BlyssPluss pill,
a drug that promises ecstasy but delivers destruction; by the time everyone realises
this, it is too late. Crake becomes the creator of the monster, a role like that of Dr Franken-
stein, who blurs the line between human and monster.
 4 J. BONE

Crake, or Glenn as he is first known to Zeb, has parents who treat him as ‘a footnote or
else a trading card’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 288), leaving ‘a lack, a vacuum’ (p. 288). This vacuum
is filled by computer games and Glenn shows an early lack of empathy for fellow humans
when, in a game with Zeb, he suggests it is wise to kill all the babies first because they have
‘a huge carbon footprint’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 290). Childhood in the book is a time spent
negotiating survival, and friendships involve bonding over ‘internet porn and complex
online games’ (p. 2). This may be in the ‘pleeblands’, the slums outside the high-end com-
pounds and sites of the corporations. Otherwise, the children in the compounds are not
any more fortunate than those in the slums as their parents are too busy negotiating
the impossibly complex world of the corporations and ensuring that they do not get kid-
napped and have their brain downloaded and wiped, or fired, and then exiled from these
privileged spaces.
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Dystopian narratives and discourses of childhood

Dystopian narratives support the idea of childhood as in some way endangered. Children
have value because their organs can be harvested (Ishiguro, 2005) or because they can
become a form of human sacrifice as in The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008). In these dystopic
scenarios, the child is a commodity and is special only in terms of utility. The discourse sur-
rounding species that are ‘endangered’ means more, rather than less, surveillance. Their
movements are tracked by cameras, see the ‘crittercam’ (Haraway, 2008, p. 252), and
science insists on invasive observation in order to ‘save’ the species. Endangered
animals are often kept in captivity and are vulnerable, protected and ‘at risk’, and
because of this, they are in need of rescue and human intervention. This, in essence, is
what has happened to the children in Atwood’s trilogy, who, while receiving accepting
protection in the compounds, are supposedly safe; otherwise they try to survive in the
pleeblands. At the same time, they are in the power of those who run the corporations.
Current discourses that surround notions of childhood include the idea that childhood
should be spent in nature (Griffiths, 2013), continuing a romantic discourse that contrib-
utes to the notion of endangerment, a categorisation that only applies to certain
species, not all. Only some species are picked out to be protected: for example, pandas,
not all bears. Children who are already privileged (rich, male and/or white) are categorised
as special and in need of well-supervised green spaces, while children in refugee camps,
mines or factories are left to take their chances.

Ambiguities
Atwood deals in ambiguity and unease. Describing Oryx and Crake, Schoene (2013) suggests
that ‘Atwood’s novel resists categorisation by integrating the best and worst possible
worlds, which not only overlap, but are intimately interdependent’ (p. 97). Her work does
not deal in binaries of good and evil but as Jameson (2009, cited in Schoene, 2013)
noted, the dystopian and utopian are intertwined. Likewise, the motivations of the protago-
nists in the trilogy (Crake, Oryx, Adam, Zeb, Toby, assorted others) are not straightforwardly
good/evil, hero/villain, god/wo/man. They require a different way of thinking and, in post-
human terms, this becomes thinking as ‘radical reflection’ (Ferrando, 2012, p. 9) rather than
as essentialist. A posthuman reading accepts that for some of Atwood’s characters the
human is no longer at the centre but gives value to other life forms, animal or alien.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 5

Crake destroyed humanity, but was it in a bid to save what remained? In a conversation
about why the pandemic virus was released, the following views are held by Manatee
and Tamaraw, two of the surviving humans who worked in Crake’s laboratory:
‘Maybe he was just very, very messed up’, says Manatee.
For the sake of argument, and to do him justice, he might have thought that everything else
was,’ says Tamaraw. ‘What with the biosphere being depleted and the temperature sky-rock-
eting. (Atwood, 2014, p. 171)

The Crakers, the people who Crake manufactured in the Paradice Dome, may have been
the antidote to this destruction, ‘his solution’ according to Ivory Bill (Atwood, 2014, p. 171),
his ‘prize experiment’ (p. 171).

Beautiful monsters
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Posthuman ambiguities are embodied in the monstrous new race created by Crake. In
order to create a better post-Apocalyptic world brought on by his own act of destruction,
Crake has made a group of perfected beings and it is here that Atwood’s monstrous child
emerges. This version of the monster challenges traditional beliefs and myths about mon-
strousness and as Warner (1994, p. 21) presciently suggested
monsters in the new, nightmare pandemonium of popular culture have something in
common which distinguishes them in a crucial way from the ancient Hydra or Medusa or Chi-
maera: they do n’t emanate from nature, but they’re either men – or man-made

In MaddAddam, the source of the monster is a gene-splice in the laboratory. Experimen-

tation on animals has made it possible to gene-splice people, and the child is a product of
the bio-inventiveness of Crake and his team. Characters in the book affirm that these
splices were always popular and desirable. Using the language of consumerism, one of
the humans remembers that ‘people were paying through the ceiling for those gene-
splices. They were customising their kids, ordering up the DNA like pizza toppings’
(Atwood, 2014, p. 57).
Crake takes this a stage further and the results of his gene-splicings are the Crakers. The
Crakers share their genetic background with the experimental and/or designer animals
who inhabit the book. A rabbit ‘glows in the dusk, a greenish glow filched from the iridi-
cytes of a deep-sea jellyfish in some long-ago experiment’ (p. 109). Later, in MaddAddam,
Toby looks into a Craker child’s eyes and sees that they seem backlit, she wonders if it is ‘a
luminosity feature, perhaps from a deep sea bioform’ (p. 450). In Atwood’s world, any con-
ventional idea of what might be natural is overturned; the world of MaddAddam is inhab-
ited by genetically modified animals: liobams, rakunks, bobkittens, pigoons, wolvogs and
snats. These are the ‘biolab hotshots’ (Atwood, 2004, p. 57) created because basically there
had been ‘a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the
guys doing it; it made you feel like God’ (Atwood, 2004, p. 57).

The monster child – Blackbeard

The Crake/God role is another ambiguity. The perfected people he creates are named by
Crake, playing out a strange version of the biblical Creation story that is first introduced in
 6 J. BONE

the computer game Extinctathon ‘Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names
the dead ones’ (author italics) (Atwood, 2014, p. 2). Blackbeard, the child/monster is
named as an irony, a joke, because ‘Crake did away with body hair in his new species’
(Atwood, 2014, p. 113). Crakers have extra skin on their feet, do not need to wear
clothes, do not grow old – ‘old is not something the Crakers have a word for’ (p. 113),
their genitals are blue and this signals sexual availability. They have been designed to
be very beautiful and perfect ‘like air brushed cosmetic ads’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 113).
When Toby (one of the surviving Gardeners) meets Blackbeard, she notices ‘he smells of
orange and of something else. Citrus air freshner. They all smell of this but the young
ones more’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 113).
In MaddAddam, one of the survivors Manatee says that Crake ‘put some accessories into
these guys nobody else even thought of. The built-in insect repellent: genius’ (p. 57). The
Crakers also show extreme empathy, the women can’t say ‘no’ to sexual advances, and the
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Crakers are plant eaters who graze, they are not only repelled by – but they repel carni-
vores, they have the ‘carnivore-deterrent element’ (p. 57). The adults have the ability to
purr and this purring is a healing aspect of their touch. Blackbeard knows that he has
been made, that he is a Child of Crake. The book implies that this act of creation may
become the basis of a new belief system whereby Oryx and Crake are gods. The
Crakers were made in the Paradice (sic) Dome or the Egg and they are receptive to new
rituals and old traditions; they appreciate storytelling, especially about where they
began. Monsters, as Warner (1994) notes, are especially interested in the myths of
origin because their own beginning is conceptualised as against ‘nature’.
The Crakers are confronting as they have desirable attributes but en masse these are
artificial and eerie. While familiar these are obviously chosen and standardised, the
person becomes a package or receptacle of what has been too easily and superficially
desired. In the seepage between human self as ‘natural’ and man-made and genetically
manufactured features as ‘culture’, the new version of monstrousness resides. The
Crakers are described by the human survivors in the book as ‘the creepo naked people
Crake made’ and ‘Frankenpeople’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 28). They are seen as something
grown, as in a Petrie dish, rather than born, laboratory products, ‘the vegetables’ and
‘walking potatoes’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 29).
Blackbeard, in his name and attributes, embodies the cyborg/hybrid/monster in his
ambiguity and defiance of convention and categorisation. He is introduced as he explores
Toby’s body, noting the similarities to the Crakers (two legs and two breasts), making the
point that the human has the potential to be equally strange to the monster. In Blackbeard
the discourses that invade education, health and related disciplines are disrupted (neuro-
science, genetic modification, intelligence, progress and potential). Despite this, the image
of the child as innocent, child of nature and ultimately redeemer and saviour of the world,
persists. Blackbeard exemplifies the perfected child and yet his monstrousness contami-
nates the secure areas where the perfected child is always thought to exist.

The perfected child/monster

The perfected child has been sought in neuroscience and in the explosion of research
about the brain; the emphasis on cognition in this version of the child has had a long
history (Shonkoff & Philips, 2000). More recently, and reminiscent of the old debates
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 7

about nature/nurture, the perfect child might be assumed to be found through genetic
modification and already perfectability has been established through pre-selection for
gender and disease. Some children are bred as ‘donor’ babies for siblings and decisions
about male/female survival made in utero are becoming so commonplace that Seymour
(2004) says it may soon become available ‘on the counter’ (p. 21).
These discussions take new forms in Atwood’s trilogy and the Crakers, as the perfected
species, are the focus of these concerns. In Maddaddam the human survivors often discuss
the work they were involved in for the corporations. In this conversation between these
ex-laboratory workers, the contested status of the Crakers is discussed, as follows:
Ivory Bill, Manatee, Tamaraw, and Zunzuncito have cleared their places and are deep into a
discussion of epigenetics. How much of Craker behaviour is inherited, how much is cultural?
Do they even have what you could call a culture, separate from the expression of their genes?
Or are they more like ants? (Atwood, 2014, p. 170)
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The splices that have relied on neuroscience are producing their own monsters and in
MaddAddam concerns centre on the pigoons (brain material added) and the Painballers
(brain reduced to the reptilian level). The pigoons are super-intelligent pigs that increas-
ingly cause unease in the surviving humans, as Manatee observes ‘I still feel kind of
weird about eating them. They’ve got human neocortex tissue’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 28).
The pigs indulge in human rituals, know about weapons and can communicate through
the Crakers, and they feel grief and are cunning. They are able to make a treaty and
form an alliance with the remaining humans. None of this is possible for the Painballers
who, despite their monstrousness, are still seen as ‘human’ as opposed to the pigs who
are conceptualised as ‘animal’ in a persistent anthropocentrism. The Painballers are fear-
some survivors of prisons who have been encouraged to fight to the death for their
own survival; their brain has been reduced to a basic survival mode only and their beha-
viours include cannibalism. The discussion of the fate of the Painballers is depicted in Mad-
dAddam as more problematic than eating pigoons and highlights the encompassing
humanistic perspective that in MaddAddam is conceptualised as illogical. The idea that
a Painballer might be rehabilitated or feel remorse is still discussed, despite the fact
that this is impossible. The pigoons are up for grabs, edible animals. Nevertheless, Zeb
notices that in the battle the pigoons are the smart ones, as he says ‘we’re just the infantry
as far as they’re concerned. Dumb as a stump they must think, though we can work the
sprayguns. But they’re the generals. I bet they’ve got a strategy all worked out’
(Atwood, 2014, p. 415). The Crakers are in a neither/nor space, the MaddAddamites say
that there is ‘no point in giving sprayguns to the Crakers, since you could never teach
them about shooting and killing people. They just aren’t capable, not being human as
such’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 253). From a posthuman perspective, these categorisations blur
and each becomes less knowable. The monster intervenes here as a disturbance to the
old certainties as humans, pigoons, Painballers and Crakers become ‘decentralised’ (Fer-
rando, 2012, p. 12) in posthuman terms.

Saving the world through words

Blackbeard is a strange mixture of innocent and wise; he embodies the child as saviour of
the world, a role that seems to be indispensable to human imaginings. In James’ (1992)
 8 J. BONE

dystopia, The Children of Men, set in a childless world, an infant appears at the end, always
the symbol of hope and renewal. Blackbeard is the chosen one in MaddAddam, a child in
the midst of the chaos who can cross borders, is vulnerable, but who assumes new respon-
sibilities mainly by being taught to read and write. The old knowledge, the ability to read
and write is the aspect of humanness that Toby hangs on to in MaddAddam. She wants to
write down some of the traditions, customs and healing potions from her God’s Gardener
days and she is driven to make a record of events, a record that she repeats at night to the
Crakers in the storytelling sessions that are part truth, part imagination. Blackbeard is the
chosen one despite the fact that as far as Toby is concerned his status as ‘real’ child is
uncertain. After meeting him, Toby asks ‘will he go back to the others and tell them dis-
gusting marvels, as real children – as children do?’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 115). According to
Warner (1994, p. 35), ‘children are the keepers and the guarantors of humanity’s repu-
tation’. Blackbeard is definitely bound up in this role through his relationship with Toby
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despite his monstrousness. Atwood gives the Craker children familiar traits; she under-
states the monstrousness of the children who are not depicted as crazy/instinct driven/
weird like the adults. While teaching him to write, Toby sees him showing the others
‘she finds him at the sandbox. He has a stick and the paper. There’s his name in the
sand. The other children are watching him’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 250). Toby asks herself
‘have I ruined them?’ (p. 250); she knows the power of words and sees herself as a potential
destroyer of these children of ‘nature’.
Being named, having words, reading and writing are the traditional differentiators
between human and not human. The written text is seen in posthuman terms as one of
many ways of communicating rather than essential, as Ferrando (2012, p. 11) says ‘post-
humanism can be performed in many ways’ and she mentions ‘alternative ways of
handing down history, such as oral history, proverbs and songs’ (Ferrando, 2012, p. 12).
It is implied that Toby is still faithful to the humanist traditions and writing is one of
them despite the fragility of paper. Toby knows that Blackbeard is other than human
but persists in teaching him to read and write while knowing that he may then fulfil
her fears as a result of this activity; she feels that teaching him to read and write will be
a rupture in his innocence. She asks herself ‘what comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws?
The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have
to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 250). These fears do
not stop her continuing to ‘educate’ Blackbeard. As the Chosen One, he is encouraged
to be different and to take on Toby’s role, wearing the red hat, eating the smelly fish
and telling the story in the ritual at the end of the day.
Atwood makes clear at this point that while appealing and beautiful that Blackbeard
has elements of monstrousness in his incomprehension of why he might do certain
things, and in the mechanical imitation of the rites and rituals that Toby maintains. At
the end of MaddAddam when he is taking on Toby’s role of storyteller, he repeats the
act of eating the smelly fish despite vomiting. Blackbeard can reproduce meaning, but
there is no evidence in the text that he can go beyond that. He is the archetypal clone,
the Frankenstein child who appears to be going through the same stages as the human
and yet who can only be thought of in quasi-human terms.
It is part of Craker monstrousness that they do not generate emotional states. They do
not feel fear and their mating rituals focus on the colour blue as a biological trigger, not
on love. Atwood’s construction of monstrousness involves beings who can only respond
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 9

to the pain, fear and happiness of others, and the emotional state of the monster is con-
ceptualised as a kind of projection. It is in their lack of emotion that the Crakers most
resemble machines and morph into automatons. This perceived lack of emotion is the
source of pity and fear for the human who makes contact with the monster. Toby is con-
stantly reminding the others that Blackbeard is ‘only a child’ and protecting him, because
‘he has no fear – or none that’s realistic – when it comes to people. He might go running
right out into the open, into the crossfire. Or get snatched as a hostage’ (Atwood, 2014,
p. 418).

Growing up monstrous
Blackbeard is represented as vulnerable and as child/monster, he remains caught in a
romantic vision of childhood. Blackbeard begins to grow up and infatuated with child-
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hood, Toby asks ‘why does this make me sad? (Atwood, 2014, p. 460). Blackbeard also
wants to have his own journal and records the stories he is told. Despite not needing
the actions of writing and reading in this future world,
MaddAddam reflects the posthuman problematic that Ferrando (2012, p. 13) calls ‘the
difficulty of including non-human voices’. The narrative devices in MaddAddam and the
introduction of writing enable this to happen and the narrative momentum is kept up. Fer-
rando (2012, p. 13) makes the point that at some time in the future ‘biological AI and
advanced robotics may become fully aware and able to express their phenomenological
perception of existence in a human accessible code … ’.
Until then and because of the space that opens between human/Craker/animal, there
are limitations. Ferrando (2012) acknowledges that the ‘epistemological recognition of the
encaged animal as an agent of knowledge can only be experienced by humans on an
empathic level, underlying the limits of current interspecies communication’ (p. 10). The
purring and singing of the Crakers, for example, is not understood or comprehensible
to human listeners.
In MaddAddam the narrative changes tone, the stories thread back and forth, voices
change and Atwood finds new and old ways of doing what Ferrando (2012, p. 13) says
that an effective posthuman text must attempt to do, that is ‘reflect the human experience
in its full spectrum’. Atwood uses language to convey changing relationships and affection
between human and monster.
Toby’s relationship with Blackbeard is described as precious because she sold her repro-
ductive eggs in the pleeblands and as a result of infection cannot have children. She
knows that Blackbeard is nothing like any child that she might have had but she still
feels love for him and protects him. She softens her stories to become something that
Blackbeard and the Crakers can accept as they soak up her words each night. They do
not have the power to discriminate between good and evil or between truth and
fiction and do not understand deception. Toby has to explain words and concepts to
them, words such as spirit, die, snow, frozen and smelly bone (meat).

Reading the human

In Oryx and Crake, one of the characters remembers some traditional words with nostalgia
and sees them as connections to the past and part of his identity:
 10 J. BONE

Hang onto the words’, he tells himself. ‘The odd words, the old words, the rare ones.
Valance, Norn, Serendipity, Pibrock, Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head,
these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been. (Atwood,
2004, p. 78)

The Crakers are the monstrous newcomers who are not familiar with the old world of
language games, erasures and word combinations that all serve to mask reality. During
an interview about a Wiki game FrontierVille, Atwood noted that words change percep-
tion and in this sanitised game, animals become ‘varmints’ and they are ‘clobbered’ not
killed. Euphemism is built into the game and she notes that this sanitisation of language
does nothing to address the bigger issues such as ‘the nature/human equation’
(Atwood, 2011). Atwood feels that this kind of language is used to reduce what she inter-
prets to be a fear of nature. Despite their linguistic challenges, the Crakers do not have
this fear and Blackbeard is at ease in the world that Toby finds so challenging. She finds
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it so odd that he trusts and believes what he is told and operates with so much con-
fidence; he may be monstrous but he also represents everything she has lost.
A feature of the monster is often not to be able to read the human, their motivations
and expectations, think of Frankenstein’s doomed attempts to get close to humans and
the sorrow of the Beast whose monstrousness is so misunderstood by everyone but
Beauty. The Crakers represent the possibility of being in the world without language as
the primary communicative tool. Atwood implies that their creator was critical of the
idea that language supports human superiority. Language is always used as the great
divide between man and animal and, from a posthuman perspective, this is problematic.
The Crakers, and Blackbeard in particular, operate in a zone different from that of the
articulate humans who talk about them but who find it hard to speak with them. In Mad-
dAddam the surviving humans discuss the Crakers and their otherness. Only a few of them
appreciate the communicative opportunities offered by the Crakers and most think of the
Crakers as defective.
Haraway (2008) points out that Temple Grandin, in her defence of autistic people, was
critical of the ‘explicit premise that all that is truly thinking must be linguistic’ (p. 371) and
repeats the premise that Grandin challenged ‘no language, then no subject and no inter-
iority worth the name’ (p. 371). Cary Wolfe (2010) expands this in his discussion of disability
studies and animal studies and calls for ‘new lines of empathy, affinity, and respect
between different forms of life, both human and nonhuman’ (p. 127) and puts forward
examples of the ‘inner narrative’ so long denied those who do not have conventional
language. Blackbeard communicates with the Pigoons, with Oryx (who is dead) and
with Fuck (a non-existent deity). Toby realises that she does not know how he does this
because ‘in the world of Blackbeard she’s deaf and blind’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 418).

W/riting
Changes of writing style accentuate different aspects of the book. The spliced words reflect
the world of the compounds and biotechnology. The semi-religious prayer-like ritual words
are reminiscent of the time of Adam One and the Gardeners, and Toby uses this style of
speaking in the storytelling sessions. At the end of MaddAddam, Atwood returns to a
device used in The Year of the Flood. AdamOne has insisted as part of his eco-cult that
environmental workers are honoured as green saints and each day is a celebration of
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 11

their achievements. In MaddAddam, in a section of the book called Rites, various feastdays
are celebrated, including The Feast of Cnidaria, ‘the jellyfish, the corals, the sea anemones,
and the hydra’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 453). Various environmental saints are honoured: Saint Jane
Goodall ‘fearless Friend of God’s Junglefolk’ (p. 165) and Saint Vandana Shiva of Seeds
(p. 255). The Crakers are encouraged by Toby to remember these days and have adopted
the calendar of the year as constructed by God’s Gardeners. This is a reminder of the
environmental issues that lie at the heart of the book and MaddAddam is after all an
account of what happened after the waterless flood. This, like the Paradice dome and
other religious references, echoes the Christian creation story, and this discourse threads
through Atwood’s dystopia. According to Howells (2006), ‘the issue of language and
power has always been crucial in the construction of dystopias’ (p. 165), and here language
is used to show that the people are deviating back to religion, implying that science has in
some way betrayed its promise. Despite their monstrous beginnings, the Crakers have a pro-
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pensity to want myths, rituals and gods/goddesses to admire and believe in. Blackbeard
takes over the storyteller role and manages to reproduce the ritual despite having to say
that he does not know why he does so many of the things required of him. The monster/
child is often caught up in the desires of others and tries to fulfil their dreams. Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) refer to the ‘good schizo dream’, a dream that in this case ensures
that the child and monster remain dependent, both ‘fully part of the crowd and at the
same time completely outside it, removed from it: … on the edge’ (p. 29).

Rearrangements
Atwood notes that any rearrangement of nature will have consequences, and sustainability
is the capacity to think about how humans can remain viable as ‘a mid-sized but unusual
mammalian species’ (Atwood, 2011, p. 28). In these statements, Atwood again challenges
complacency and decentres the human. She explains that sustainability in her terms is
complex and if our solutions are not right ‘we may be heading down a dark and ever-nar-
rowing tunnel with human oblivion at the far end’ (Atwood, 2011, p. 28). It can be inter-
preted as generous of Atwood to have created for readers of MaddAddam the child
Blackbeard who does give hope through his mixture of saviour/monster attributes.
Toby is the wise woman of the book who knows herself to be obsolete, a woman who
talks to bees, sees visions and has a memory of the environment nurtured by God’s Gar-
deners, even then in decline and destroyed in the aftermath of Crake’s pandemic. She
remembers that in those days:
… the children would do a little jellyfish dance, festooned with streamers and waving their
arms slowly, and one year they’d composed and performed an interminable play on the
subject of the life cycle of the jellyfish, which was uneventful. (Atwood, 2014, p. 453)

MaddAddam contains warnings that perhaps such sentimental ways of educated children
about the environment are just not enough, or at least that is a possible interpretation.
Atwood is cited as saying that biotechnology is ‘the biggest toybox in the world’ (Louet,
2005, p. 163) but notes that there are no health warnings on the box. The book carries remin-
ders that, to be childlike in response to serious issues, to get it wrong in terms of the environ-
ment and technology, may be to accept the monstrous in the human, in the self. The fate of
the monster is rarely happy ever after. Atwood reminds readers that the Children of Crake
 12 J. BONE

are designed to die at 35 years of age to make room for others, another aspect of the mon-
strous that is embodied in this hybrid gene-spliced mix and that raises more questions: evil
or sensible and sustainable? Blackbeard is engaging, a symbol of hope but he is also as a
monster, an unknown quantity, a cipher, repeating the stories, wearing the red hat,
eating the smelly fish, mating instead of loving, not understanding so many things and
not able to defend himself against human predators, he is prey, a sitting target. Like all mon-
sters, Blackbeard reveals our human vulnerabilities. Toby explains that this is what Crake got
tired of, he felt that humans had had more than enough chances; they had ignored all the
warning signs and were dominated by short-term self-interest and aggression. She reflects
on war and wonders if that is what Crake wanted to cut out ‘the grinning, elemental malice.
Begin us anew’ (Atwood, 2014, p. 54).

Conclusion
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Margaret Atwood’s trilogy is a dystopia that describes the challenges faced by the surviv-
ing population after an environmental disaster. Blackbeard is one of the Children of Crake,
a hybrid of the future, a product of gene-splicing in the laboratory, both monster and child
redeemer. Atwood describes the animals who were created in this way, and a variety of
characters are introduced from the pleeblands and the compounds (the past) and those
who inhabit the garden space as survivors for the future. I am unable to decide
whether the monsters who inhabit her work are to be feared or loved, desired or seen
as a pollutant. I have connected her work and my thoughts about the child/monster
with Ferrando (2012) and Braidotti (2013) and bring a posthuman reading to MaddAddam,
the final book in Atwood’s trilogy.
Through Atwood’s dystopian imaginings, I am challenged to consider the shortcomings
of education in terms of big environmental issues. It is time to advocate for less sentimen-
tality, to challenge anthropocentrism and to consider more deeply the effects of science
and what Atwood calls the big toybox of biotechnology. Braidotti (2013) critiques the con-
ventions of ‘normality, normalcy, normativity’ (p. 26) and it is these humanist norms that
have to be challenged in order to admit the monster. In my reading of Atwood, and in
terms of education, I take note of Braidotti’s (2013) contention that ‘there is a posthuman
agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and struc-
ture of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the
basic frame of reference for the human today’ (p. 40). In these gaps and moments of uncer-
tainty, the monster enters, disrupts and offers ways of rethinking the (post)human child.

Moontime
I will end by imitating the writing in MaddAddam as a tribute to Atwood. Her change in
style signals the environmental rituals enjoyed by the Gardeners and repeated by the
Crakers (see The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, pp. 453–463). The following is influ-
enced by information about the monster on Wikipedia:
The Feast of St Augustine of Wikipedia – moon waning
We celebrate the writing of Saint Augustine who, it may be forgotten, wrote about the
monster. The monster is often seen as a freak of nature, a sign that something is wrong
with the natural order. Here we celebrate the monster differently, the child as monster. The
word monster derives from monere (Latin) meaning to warn or instruct. There are parallels
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 13

here with children – they also bring warnings and instruct us and remind us to think about
their future. Children should not be seen in binaries of good/evil and we are reminded by
Saint Augustine that the monster need likewise not be seen in this overly simplistic way.
He did not see the monster as inherently evil, but as part of the natural design of the
world, a kind of deliberate category error. We give thanks for these category errors, for
those who are different, for those who remind us that the world can accommodate many.
We accord blessings to the monsters, ourselves, our children, and the children of the future
who are signs of hope to come and who may forgive us despite our many shortcomings.
Thank You. Good night.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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