Hang on to the Words : Knowledge Tokens, Hierarchies, and Concurrent Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Sammanfattning: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy has received substantial critical attention inthe fields of ecocriticism, the ethics of bioengineering, and feminist theory. However, the vast majority of this criticism has focussed on Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, the first two books in the trilogy. By displacing human narrators in MaddAddam, the third and final book, Atwood re-contextualises the entire trilogy asno longer being a meticulously researched speculative fiction, and instead a type of fable, along the lines of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” Through this shift, Atwood asserts the need to replace the perception of a progression of metanarratives in contemporary cultural thought with concurrent, transitory micronarratives. This thesis is divided into three main sections, each examining the different communities which Atwood depicts. The first section uses the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-François Lyotard on the state of knowledge in the postmodern habitat to explore how Atwood presents a fracture between scientific and narrative knowledge, which the Compounds in her novels propagate to impose a hierarchy over their citizenship. The second section moves to a more character focussed perspective, using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s development of ‘homosocial’ triangles, it examines how the character Crake internalises the enforced societal hierarchy between scientific and narrative knowledge, and uses these non-sexual terms to perform a sexual triangle containing himself and other characters. The final section explores the shift of perspective in the third novel, and how the displacement of humanity as the centre of the narrative exposes the unsustainable position of appealing to metanarratives of progression. Through this analysis, Atwood can be seen to be exposing the fallacy that new knowledge usurps old knowledge, and that all contexts of understanding exist simultaneously, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing where they have interpretive utility.