Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games

Abstract

In this article I shall focus especially on the dialectic between the dystopian city and the post-apocalyptic landscape, on the means of transgressing the imposed boundaries (social, biological, and religious) as they are staged in Margaret Atwood's dystopia, The Year of the Flood and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games. I shall also compare it with the dystopian turn in the contemporary imagination, both visible in a large amount of dystopian movies and in popular novels such as Hunger Games or Divergent trilogies.

Full text

Caietele Echinox, vol. 27, 2014 : Paysages et utopies
297
ABSTRACT
In this article I shall focus especially on the
dialectic between the dystopian city and the
post-apocalyptic landscape, on the means of
transgressing the imposed boundaries (so-
cial, biological, and religious) as they are
staged in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, The
Year of the Flood and Suzanne Collins’
Hunger Games. I shall also compare it with
the dystopian turn in the contemporary
imagination, both visible in a large amount
of dystopian movies and in popular novels
such as Hunger Games or Divergent
trilogies.
KEYWORDS
Heterotopia of Deviation; Survival; Pastoral;
Dystopian Boundaries; Transgression; Geo-
criticism.
ANDREI SIMUŢ
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,
Romania
andrei.simut@gmail.com
Any observer of the contemporary
trends in film and literature can notice that
we are witnessing a striking revival of the
dystopian imagination, which discloses a
certain concern with the ongoing crisis of
the present/ future order of things (the
spreading of the policies of surveillance, the
widening gap between social strata, the en-
vironmental problem), a concern manifested
both by the intellectuals, artists or filmmak-
ers, and by the public.1 To put it differently,
the age of divisions, inequalities and depres-
sion proves highly inspirational for dysto-
pias. The temptation to transgress these im-
posed boundaries fuels their narratives. The
last six years has revived the dystopian
(sub)genre both in science fiction mainstream
production, but also in canonical literature
and popular novels. Novels such as The Giv-
er, Hunger Games, and Divergent have all
already turned into successful movies. The
allegorical dimension is present in all these
examples which tend to formulate “inverted
analogies” with present aspects of the social
realm. Fredric Jameson has considered alle-
gory to be a feature of postmodern paradigm,
a displacement of the Modernist aesthetic of
the Symbol (Jameson, 1991, 115), although,
in my opinion, the postmodern dominant has
ended, and this return of the dystopian imag-
inary in all forms of the cultural production is
also a proof for this change.
Andrei Simuþ
Dystopian Geographies in
The Year
of the Flood
and
Hunger Games

Andrei Simuţ
298
Margaret Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy (com-
pleted in 2013) is also sig-
nificant, since it implies a conceptual ten-
sion between dystopia, anti-utopian criti-
cism, apocalyptic and eco-utopian promise.
The Year of the Flood (2009) operates a
shift of perspective when compared with the
first novel of the trilogy, Oryx and Crake
(2003), and I shall examine the significant
differences. All these recent dystopias seem
to suggest the idea that certain aspects of
our reality and social system resemble more
and more to the dystopian fears. Even
though Divergent and Hunger Games trilo-
gies are set in the far future, they tend to
refer precisely to the present realities and
employ the allegorical form. Atwood’s nov-
els, more complex both in their subject mat-
ter and in their discourse, are increasingly
ambiguous in their formulated dilemmas.
The overt criticism of the scientific utopia in
Oryx and Crake and its dire dystopian con-
sequences acquire new meanings in The
Year of The Flood, where the apocalyptic
dimension restores hope especially with the
story of God’s Gardeners, told from the
perspective of two feminine narrators, Toby
and Ren. The end of the human race (the
dissolution of its human features and the
literal extinction of the human species
through the pandemic) is rendered almost as
a necessary event by Jimmy’s narration and
Glenn (alias Crake)’s ideas. Those two char-
acters are almost absent in the Year of the
Flood, where their cynical approach to-
wards the ends of man is compensated by
Adam One’s messianic and pacifist eco-
pedagogy, restoring the biblical herme-
neutic.
Dystopian boundaries and transgressions
These recent dystopias can be fruitfully
analysed with a few important concepts for-
mulated by geocriticism (from Lefebre to
Westphal), since they stage complex rela-
tionships between imposed boundaries and
the (im)/possibility of their transgression,
and because every transgressed boundary
triggers virtually limitless consequences up-
on their characters and their fictional world
(this is especially the case with Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy). In fact, dystopian fic-
tion has always been inspired by this tension
between polis and nature, between the space
of individual freedom and the space of con-
trol, between striated, homogenous space
and “smooth” space (in Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s terms). The proliferation of these dys-
topian scenarios signals an increased aware-
ness of the fact that the smooth space finds
itself threatened by the striated space of
control (Westphal, 2011, 40).
MaddAddam trilogy stages a complex
system of transgressions: spatial (Com-
pounds and pleeblands vs the margins), tem-
poral (the advanced techno-scientific elite
vs the technophobic Gardeners, before and
after the “Waterless Flood” – pre-apocalyp-
tic dystopian world vs post-apocalyptic land-
scape), biologic (human vs sub-human vs
post-human; genetic engineered species vs
natural ones). In stylistic terms, the first two
novels of the trilogy stage a dialogue be-
tween the pre-apocalyptic dystopian world
set in the near future and the post-apoca-
lyptic world when humanity has been extin-
guished by the virus devised by Crake, and
the author manages to convey this sharp
contrast using the character’s memories and
flashbacks: Jimmy and Toby through free
indirect discourse and Ren through first
person narrative. The post-apocalyptic pres-
ent is rendered through the present tense
verbs, thus acquiring a filmic immediacy

Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games
299
and strangeness, and the lost world in past
tense, being subject to various retrospec-
tives and subjective versions.
In terms of spatial representation of the
pre-apocalyptic world, Atwood’s trilogy can
be termed as heterotopia, since it perfectly
fits the well-known Foucaultian description:
it is a “kind of effectively enacted utopia in
which all the real sites are simultaneously
represented, contested, inverted”, being at
the same time “absolutely different from all
the sites that they reflect” (Foucault, 1986,
22-27). Our present-day scientific develop-
ments and realities are present, may be rec-
ognized, but at the same time their descrip-
tion renders them uncanny. Atwood has un-
derscored the difference between her fic-
tions (the concept is “speculative fiction”)
and the typical science fictional novel, and
emphasizing in her afterword to Madd-
Addam that:
it does not include any technologies or
biobeings that do not already exist, are
not under construction, or are not pos-
sible in theory. (Atwood, 2013)
The same can be stated about the or-
ganization of the social system and its
reflection in the space geography of the
novels. “The pre-plague life” is dominated
by a techno-scientific elite inhabiting the
Compounds, a sort of gated communities,
fortified Corporations where the access is
strictly controlled and the territory outside
the walls, the chaotic “Exfernal world” of
the pleeblands, under the strict surveillance
of the CorpSe Corps. At the periphery of
this corporatist metropolis lies an undefined
territory of ruined, abandoned buildings
where the Gardeners camp and hide, trans-
forming it into an alternative chain of “roof-
top gardens”, into a nomadic, smooth space,
permanently threatened by the intrusions of
the polis, represented by CorpSe Corps a-
gents. The Year of the Flood is the story of
this transformation of a
smooth space into a striated
one, a conquest which is al-
most complete when the virus wipes out all
the boundaries, restoring its archetypal
smoothness and nomadism (Westphal, 2011,
40).
Heterotopies of deviation
One perfect example of a “heterotopy
of deviation” (Foucault’s term for rest
homes, psychiatric hospitals or prisons, the
place for those who deviate from the norm)
is, in Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the
Painball Arena, very similar to the Arena
where the “hunger games” take place in
Suzanne Collins’ novel, both descriptions
suggesting a space where punishment and
death are ritualised. Both authors describe
an enclosed forest, where the individuals
(condemned criminals – Atwood; selected
tributes – Collins) fight each other for life,
until the others are killed, a place where
survival becomes almost impossible. Those
who manage to return from the Painball
arena suffer a mutation that expurgates them
from the human realm. The complex tableau
of transgressions present in Oryx and Crake
is completed with a new type, which crosses
the human features and regresses to the sub-
human. This is just one instance of the wide
spectrum of extreme deviations present in
Atwood’s trilogy and is resumed by Toby in
a phrase that synthesizes the main process
that governs her fictional-dystopian world:
“you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d for-
get there ever were any lines” (Atwood 2009,
118). The “long term Painballers” are those
who refuse to get out when their term ends,
and this category illustrates the most extreme
primitivism, the sub-human condition (canni-
balism becomes a common practice).
This regression into a sub-human state
is present in Hunger Games: Katniss is

Andrei Simuţ
300
terrified by when she re-
members a similar case of a
tribute who went savage af-
ter winning the competition and who fed on
his victims (Collins, 2008, 173). Even though
Hunger Games emphasizes the limitless ca-
pacity of the Capitol to invent new rules and
the impossibility to predict them, there is
however an apparent limit to this transgress-
sivity and that is cannibalism, but Katniss
fears that the longer they stay in the Arena,
the more susceptible the competitors be-
come to such practices. At the centre of the
novel there is a contradiction between the
author’s intention in showing the reader the
most extreme effects this mass media exper-
iment has on its subjects (whether is about
the competitor or the spectators) and the de-
sire to maintain the novel’s protagonist as
the main recipient for humanistic ideals (free-
dom, kindness, generosity). This becomes
one of the major deficiencies of the plot:
although the possibilities seem limitless re-
garding the situations the hero has to face in
this arena where only one tribute has to sur-
vive, the author has only a few options in
order to keep the profile of her character
and also keep the main rule of the Hunger
Games (“the real sport of the Hunger Games
is watching the tributes kill one another”),
and that is to eliminate all the other compet-
itors through other means except Katniss di-
rect action. A good example in this sense is
when, isolated in a tree, she is surrounded
by the most cruel competitors, the Career
Tributes, led by Cato (who has a similar
savage profile with Atwood’s Blanco) and
she tears down on a swarm of mutated bees
(the tracker jackers) eliminating a few other
tributes and thus managing to escape.
In Oryx and Crake the narrative per-
spective belonged to Jimmy/ Snowman,
who was the perfect vantage point for ob-
serving the extinction of humanity since he
as the companion to the scientist who de-
vised it, namely Glenn, alias Crake. In The
Year of the Flood, the narrative point of
view changes, shifting between two femi-
nine characters, Toby and Ren, and being
more intimate, secluded and marginal, ob-
serving the events from a more distanced
perspective, the distance from the centre
(the Paradice Dome where the new virus
and the new race are conceived) and the
margins (AnooYoo Spa, Scales and Tails
and the Edencliff Rooftop Garden where
Toby and Ren are usually located) in-
creases. The author must keep Toby and
Ren’s vantage point of view, as witness to
the apocalyptic events, the same privileged
perspective that Jimmy the Snowman had in
Oryx and Crake. The new emphasis in The
Year of the Flood is on the periphery: Toby,
Ren and The Gardeners are all marginal,
victims (Ren or Toby) of the system and/or
a nascent alternative to the hegemonic order
(The Gardeners). Oryx and Crake was the
account of an imploding centre both themat-
ically (the virus was devised by the most
powerful corporation) and narrative (no oth-
er character challenged Jimmy’s version of
the main events; from his perspective, the
whole Crake’s apocalyptic plan was meant
to seek revenge for his secret affair with
Oryx, in order to leave Jimmy as the sole
survivor). The Year of the Flood is con-
ceived as a narrative account of the periph-
ery, alternativity, margins and it is signifi-
cant for this new paradigm in the dystopian
narrative, along with Hunger Games, Diver-
gent and also a few dystopian films (The
Snowpiercer, Elysium, In Time): these nar-
ratives choose their protagonist from the
lower social strata, adopting a marginal
point of view towards the social system de-
scribed. The hero’s journey starts from these
“deviant”, excluded margins, towards the
oppressive centre of the authority. The
classic dystopias of the twentieth century
(We, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New
World) selected their main character from
the upper social strata, close to the top of

Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games
301
the hierarchy, and the journey towards free-
dom was from the centre towards the pe-
riphery. Margaret Atwood’s earlier novels
have been frequently scrutinized regarding
their thematic concerns with the margins
and the problem of the boundaries, Alice
Palumbo’s essay is the best example (Pa-
lumbo, 2009). The feminine narrators/ char-
acters in The Year of the Flood and Madd-
Addam resemble the style of the classic
Handmaid’s Tale, but the recent novels
have a more complex narrative combination
between Toby’s free indirect discourse and
Ren’s diary.
The vantage point of the narrator
Atwood manages to maintain this priv-
ileged perspective necessary both for an
apocalyptic novel and for a dystopia in The
Year of the Flood through these characters:
Toby and Ren are nomads, condemned to
restlessness and continuous movement
through the social layers, and forced to
numerous transgressions. Atwood places
them at the right spots in order to observe
the entire dystopian geography with its zones
and divisions by creating a threatening an-
tagonist who pursues Toby throughout the
last two novels, namely Blanco, a “long-
term Painballer”. This character has a pre-
cise narrative function, adding dynamism to
the plot: through Blanco we are conveyed a
precise image of the practices employed by
the overwhelming and sinister force of con-
trol, suggestively called CorpSe Corps.
Blanco best exemplifies how humanity has
regressed to a sub-human condition (a serial
killer who runs a food chain, SecretBurg-
ers), when violence has become common
practice, and the most abominable crimes
are tolerated. Because of Blanco, Toby is
forced to leave her job at Secret Burgers and
seek refuge at the God’s Gardeners, a green
religious sect that rescues “the deviants”
from the absurd norms im-
posed by the Corporations,
and also the excluded.
Because of the same sinister character,
Toby is forced to leave the Gardeners and
radically change her identity, having her
fingerprints and voiceprint replaced with
surrogates by a Chinese doctor, opting for
another radical transgression: she becomes a
totally new being, with a different name
(Tobiatha), in order to be accepted for a job
at the one of the Compounds. The spatial
transgression of an unsurpassable boundary
between a gated community (where the
destiny of humanity is shaped) and the rest
of the territory (where chaos prevails)
literally means for Toby embracing the
post-human condition. In fact, both Toby
and Ren have the biographies of permanent
nomads (the same goes for Adam One, Zeb
and the other Gardeners), and this perma-
nent mobility triggered by the most extreme
insecurity is not dissipated after the Event
(“The Waterless Flood”), when Blanco and
other Painballers survive and force Toby out
of her static sheltered condition. She be-
comes the typical post-apocalyptic wanderer
through a space of the pastoral, which has
eluded all types of spatial boundaries, leav-
ing only the proof of the monstrous trans-
gressions: from human to post-human, and
from nature to bio-engineered species. All
the characters left alive (Jimmy’s illusion that
he is the last man ends at the end of Oryx and
Crake) are forced to enter the new space of
wilderness and of the unknown forces and
external obstacles. Here Atwood fully re-
vives one of the main thematic concerns of
her fiction and essays, namely survival, also
a central experience for the entire Canadian
literature (Ridout, 2009, 35). In MaddAddam
trilogy, the obstacles are no longer internal-
ised, “the life plan” of the characters becomes
blurred and uncertain, and the dull existence
in an everyday urban environment is elevated
to a nearly heroic story of survival.

Andrei Simuţ
302
Nature transformed: heterotopias
and heterochonies
One of the most important focus of the
new dystopias is the space of complete sur-
veillance, where no alternatives of evasion
seem to be left for the protagonists. Hunger
Games describes a simpler spatial organi-
sation, and more centralised than in Madd-
Addam trilogy, which reflects both the fourth
and the fifth heterotopic principle described
by Foucault: at the centre there is the
Capitol, the place of the ultimate power of
control over the rest of the territory, divided
into the Twelve districts, surrounded by nat-
ural obstacles (mountains) and artificially
maintained in a state of primitivism and
poverty. Hunger Games reflects the open-
ness of the heterotopia to the heterochro-
nies: the Capitol and the districts seem to
belong to different slices of time, separated
by decades of evolution/devolution. This
gap between the advanced technology of the
centre and the regression of the rebellious
margins is present in The Year of the Flood,
but in a different manner: the Gardeners
programmatically avoid any use of the tech-
nological devices, continuing a neo-Luddite
technophobic tradition. For them, any
technological device becomes the synonym
for surveillance and consequently oppress-
sion, exclusion and anonymous death by ac-
cident (they repeatedly invoke such out-
comes for their members, for those who
have undisclosed the policies of their corpo-
rations, the ironic word is “corpicide”). One
of their most important teaching regards
their exclusive reliance on memory, on an
oral culture and a regression towards the
apocalyptic time of the early Christianity:
Beware of words. Be careful what you
write. Leave no trails. (…) The Spirit
travels from mouth to mouth, not from
thing to thing: books could be burnt,
paper crumble away, computers could
be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives for-
ever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing. (At-
wood, 2009, 7)
Their avoidance of the written word
alludes to the well-known dystopian tradi-
tion and suggest that under the guise of
Corporations the worst totalitarian practices
have returned:
As for writing, it was dangerous, said
the Adams and the Eves, because your
enemies could trace you through it, and
hunt you down, and use your words to
condemn you. (Atwood, 2009, 7).
The Gardeners have even adopted a
medieval style of clothing (compared to
medieval monks) and openly rejected all
“the shimmering things” of consumerism,
including phones and their cameras. Their
iconophobia is simply resumed as “if you
can see it, it can see you!”, an ironic al-
lusion to the Orwellian tradition. The perva-
siveness of technology cannot be easily
overcome, since none of the Gardeners
seem to be immune to its fascination: Ren
longs for the camera phones, and Toby finds
a laptop in Adam One’s room (later the
author discloses the purpose of this: or-
ganised bioresistance through hacking).
In Hunger Games, the heterochrony is
a structural principle: Capitol seems the
analogous image of the present, depicting a
society of whose main functions are regu-
lated by the necessities of spectacle and
consumerism, while the Twelve Districts
are artificially kept in an older version of
the mode of production, close to the nine-
teenth century industrialism: Katniss’ Dis-
trict 12 are coal miners who fight with
starvation, poor health, and are forced to
recourse to hunting and fishing, which are

Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games
303
pre-agrarian modes of survival (this is why
Katniss survives in the arena). Later, al-
ready selected as a tribute, and with an un-
certain fate, Katniss will find out about the
other District’s occupations (District 11 – ag-
riculture, 4 – fishing, 3 – factories): the total
isolation of the districts from one another is
emphasized and their utter dependence on
Capitol’s whims and new rules. The scarcity
of food in her District and fight for day-to-
day survival are summed up by Katniss in
front of a typical feast at the Capitol, her
first meal upon arrival:
I try to imagine assembling this meal
myself back home. Chickens are too
expensive, but I could make do with a
wild turkey. I’d need to shoot a second
turkey to trade for an orange. Goat’s
milk would have to substitute for
cream. We can grow peas in the gar-
den. I’d have to get wild onions from
the woods. I don’t recognize the grain;
our own tessera ration cooks down to
an unattractive brown mush. Fancy
rolls would mean another trade with
the baker, perhaps for two or three
squirrels. (Collins, 2009, 79)
At first glance both Atwood and Col-
lins seem to continue the long dystopian
tradition, whose main characters are experi-
encing the most idyllic communion with
nature and whose only protection from the
totalitarian intrusion is to be found in the
pastoral, seeking refuge in the wilderness
(Katniss) or avoiding the consumerist en-
trapment (the Gardeners produce their own
food and resources). Yet both authors break
with this tradition. The heterotopic space of
the Arena is the place where the authority
(CorpSe Corps – MaddAddam; Capitol –
Hunger Games) manages to generate a per-
fect simulacrum of nature, replicating its
speies through mutations (a main concern
for both authors). In this respect the bees
play a crucial role in both
novels. In Hunger Games,
Katniss manages to break
her entrapment with a help of a new species
of mutated bees, the tracker jackers, created
in the laboratory by the Capitol and strate-
gically placed near every District to main-
tain the imprisonment of its citizens, and
their isolation (they provoke death, halluci-
nations, madness and they hunt down those
who destroy their nests – the idea of halluci-
nations turning to madness could have been
more fruitfully explored). Atwood offers a
more disturbing version of the nature trans-
formed into a limitless space of surveil-
lance: the “Exfernal powers” devise a new
species of cyborg bees, able to track down
every deviance from the norm. Another cru-
cial example of nature turned to simulacrum
from the Arena in Hunger Games are the
poisonous berries that imitate the real ones,
another means to eliminate the other com-
petitors, and to emphasize Katniss revolt
against the final changing of rules, when the
Capitol demands only one winner, and the
romance between Katniss and Peeta is in
full bloom (Collins, 2008, 200). However,
at the end of the first volume of Hunger
Games Katniss witnesses the most disturb-
ing mutation of all, the other tributes seem-
ingly transformed into animals/monsters:
(…) in that moment I realize what else
unsettled me about the mutts. The
green eyes glowering at me are unlike
any dog or wolf, any canine I’ve ever
seen. They are unmistakably human.
And that revelation has barely regis-
tered when I notice the collar with the
number 1 inlaid with jewels and the
whole horrible thing hits me. (Collins,
2008, 405).
This unusual hypothesis can be read
either as referring to the fictional world of
the novel or to the present of the reader. The

Andrei Simuţ
304
tributes turned into venge-
ful animals is a metaphor
for the transformation un-
derwent by all the competitors and the view-
ers of the Hunger Games. It can be an al-
legory to the brainwashing process that is
analogous with the one in the present, the
spectacle of violence and hatred in current
mass media. It can also stand as proof that
the dystopian experiment of the Capitol has
succeeded over its subjects.
Apocalyptic alternatives
and eco-utopian promises
Not only the story in The Year of the
Flood is complementary to that in Oryx and
Crake, but also its dystopian description of
the pre-plague life which opens to an alter-
native, that represented by the God’s Gar-
deners, an alternative which is both pastoral
and apocalyptic. The contrast is present in
the post-apocalyptic world between the pas-
toral (nature restored) and the anti-utopian
aspect of Crake’s new humanoid species,
and between the pastoral and the menacing
presence of the savage Painball survivors,
who can threaten the whole system of val-
ues that Snowman has conceived for the
Children of Crake (they lack the notion of
evil and cannot grasp the differences with
the humans around them), especially in
MaddAddam.
Ren and Toby share the same impor-
tant apocalyptic desire with Jimmy and the
Gardeners: the apocalyptic end of humanity
becomes a compensatory projection, as the
first type of reaction to a world where bar-
barism and unbridled scientific progress
have definitely mingled, where nature has
been completely destroyed (all species gone
extinct), and the splicing of genes had
generated infinite mutations. One of Toby’s
reflections sums up the entire set of analo-
gies with the present:
By the time she’d moved to college, the
wrongness had moved closer. She re-
members the oppressive sensation, like
waiting all the time for a heavy stone
footfall (...) everybody knew. Nobody
admitted to knowing. If other people
begun to discuss it, you tuned them out,
because what they were saying was both
so obvious and so unthinkable. We’re
using up the earth. It’s almost gone.
You can’t live with such fears and keep
on whistling. The waiting builds up like
a tide. You start wanting it to be done
with. You find yourself saying to the
sky. Just do it. Do your worst. Get it
over with. She could feel the coming
tremor of it running through her spine. It
never went away, even among the Gar-
deners. (Atwood, 2009, 285)
The Gardeners, “the fugitives from re-
ality”, led by the messianic figure of Adam
One, create the most important heteropia in
the novel, the alternative to the “striated
space” of the Corpse Corps, a nomad, smooth
space in a permanent reconfiguration at the
margins of the dystopian corporatist city. If
it were to use a Deleuzian term, it could be
said that The Gardeners have a rhizomic,
alternative type of organisation, in contrast
to the State apparatus, opposing both the hi-
erarchical and the totalitarian mode exem-
plified by the rest of the society described
by Atwood. This is the reason why they suc-
ceed in generating the collapse of the main
hegemonic network, replacing it with an
alternative one, endlessly generating alter-
natives. The main Gardener group is chal-
lenged itself by a nascent alternative to the
movement gravitating around the messianic
and the pacifist Adam One: his brother Zeb
decides to take direct action and put into
practice his brother’s apocalyptic teachings,
in a more literal sense, employing the de-
structive power of science towards the arte-
facts of civilization.

Dystopian Geographies in The Year of the Flood and Hunger Games
305
Conclusions
The Gardeners are Atwood’s complex
and memorable synthesis between a con-
temporary extreme version of ecologism
and the apocalyptic messianic tradition of
early Christians. Towards the end of The
Year of the Flood this singular mixture be-
comes strikingly evident. Adam One’s ser-
mons open each new chapter, and Atwood
brilliantly illustrates the progression of his
messages from a pacifist, non-violent and
still humanistic vision towards a millenarian
version, resembling John of Patmos, but in a
much more radical version:
Do we deserve this Love by which God
maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve
it as a Species? We have taken the
World given to us and carelessly de-
stroyed its fabric and its Creatures.
Other religions have taught that this
World is to be taken up and rolled up
like a scroll and burnt to nothingness,
and that a new Heaven and new Earth
will then appear. But why would God
give us another Earth when we have
mistreated this one so badly? No, my
Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be
demolished, it is the Human Species.
(Atwood, 2009, 508)
The chaotic tribulation preceding the
final demise of civilization and the extinc-
tion of mankind are interpreted as signs for
the final Judgment on contemporary Man,
according to the biblical hermeneutic. Adam
One’s quoting Isaiah 34 is of great signifi-
cance in this sense, showing civilization in
ruins and replaced by man’s fellow crea-
tures (Atwood, 2009, 443). The principle of
hope for a new heaven on Earth, in the
absence of man’s destructive actions is also
present:
How privileged we are
to witness these first
precious moments of
Rebirth! How much clearer the air is
now that man-made pollution has
ceased! (…) Does not the Dove sym-
bolize Grace, the all-forgiving, the all-
accepting?(443)
The atheist, post-humanist Glenn/ Crake
receives in The Year of the Flood a religious
response, and his mundane extinction of hu-
manity is interpreted as a divine punishment
by Adam One, who reverses man’s singular-
ity in a forgiving nature:
All creatures know that some must die/
That all the rest may take and eat/
Sooner or later, all transform/ Their
blood to wine, their flesh to meat./ But
Man alone seeks Vengefulness/ And
writes his abstract laws on stone/ For
this false Justice he has made,/ He
tortures limb and crushes bone. (At-
wood, 2009, 511).
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This work was supported by Romanian
National Authority for Scientific Research
within the Exploratory Research Project
PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.
Note
1 One good example is the viral campaign
“Stop watching us!” which has sprung de-
bates on the internet in 2013.