Ecological apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy

Abstract

Atwood comments that her MaddAddam trilogy is neither apocalyptic nor utopian. Nor is the Waterless Flood, the central catastrophic event around which the various narratives of the trilogy cohere, an ecological catastrophe, but, instead, is the consequence of an act of bioterrorism meant to forestall such a possibility. Nonetheless, it is argued, following Laurence Coupe’s mythic schema, that Atwood’s trilogy can be understood in an alternative sense of apocalypse, that of revelation, an imaginative exploration of possibilities rather than the end of all possibilities that a literalist interpretation of this key biblical myth entails. The study uses Coupe’s mythic schema to analyse some of the biblical myths that Atwood employs in her trilogy and builds on Watkins’s distinction between monologic, pessimistic and tragic male apocalyptic fiction and dialogic, optimistic and comic female apocalyptic fiction. It shows how the polyphonic structure of the whole trilogy transcends the apparent pessimistic content of the novels, particularly of the first instalment Oryx and Crake, pointing imaginatively to permanent possibility and hope, even if the future may be post-human.