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2039-6597
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Laura Giovannelli
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Between
Transhumanism
Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids. Tracing the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood's <em>MaddAddam</em> Trilogy
Text.Serial.Journal
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Essays
2022-11-24
2022-02-28
2022-11-30
2022-12-11
291-312
1
Laura Giovannelli
2022/11/24
10.13125/2039-6597/5127
291
Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, University of Pisa
2039-6597
24
Transhumanism
312
urn:nbn:it:unica-28852
Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids. Tracing the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood's <em>MaddAddam</em> Trilogy
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12
          Blackbeard and the Post-
     Anthropocene Humanoids: Tracing
     the Post/Transhuman in Margaret
       Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
                               Laura Giovannelli
Abstract
     This paper aims to investigate the meanings and phenomenologies of
the simulacrum as a materialisation of a hybrid, liminal and nomadic ontol-
ogy and as the result of biotechnological experiments that have redesigned
the animal/human along post-anthropocentric lines. The analysis takes its
cue from the post-apocalyptic setting of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, with
a final focus on the last book in the series. After the world population has
been decimated by a pandemic unleashed by Crake, the creatures he has
generated via transgenic technology emerge as the ‘fittest’ inheritors of the
Earth. Toby, one of the few human survivors, is involved in training them
in the Post-Anthropocene era. Attention will be paid to the Crakers’ identity
as humanoids hovering between an anthropological and a zoomorphic di-
mension. If capable of establishing bioegalitarian relationships with the eco-
system, such pseudo-primates also show uncanny and possibly transhuman
features that progressively come to the fore through their leader Blackbeard.


Keywords
     Margaret Atwood; MaddAddam trilogy; Humanoid; Posthuman
ontologies; Transhumanism




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039‑6597
doi: 10.13125/2039‑6597/5127
Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids




Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene
    Humanoids: Tracing the Post/
  Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s
         MaddAddam Trilogy

                                Laura Giovannelli



            Introduction: Nomadic interdependencies
     In a chapter entitled “Bodies”, included in a recent miscellaneous
volume dealing with the relationships between literature and the posthu-
man, Manuela Rossini makes some interesting observations on the episte-
mological and ontological shifts impacting on what ‘being human’ might
mean and imply today. Without taking anything away from the conse-
quential topic of Artificial Intelligence and cyborg subjectivities, it is the
following commentary on the organic crossing of species boundaries that
better contributes to laying the groundwork for our analysis:

         [The] latest research into animal cognition challenges the humanist
      assumption that “we” are special. Moreover, tissue and organ transfers
      between human beings and across species barriers destabilize
      apparently secure boundaries between self and other, making it more
      and more difficult to identify a core essence that constitutes “true”
      humanness […]. In the dominant imaginary and increasingly in
      reality, bodies become infinitely malleable, plastic and liquid, to be
      performed and invented anew. (Rossini 2017: 153)

     The points highlighted in this excerpt – neuroethology and animal
thinking, regenerative-medicine xenotransplantation, transcorporeal po-
rosity – are all informing principles critically addressed by Margaret At-
wood in her acclaimed post-apocalyptic trilogy comprising Oryx and Crake
(2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). While taking
notice of Atwood’s blending of dystopian and utopian elements, together



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with her positioning of those novels within the realm of ‘speculative fic-
tion’ (as opposed to the outer-space ventures and contact with aliens al-
legedly marking out ‘science fiction’ per se), this paper intends to approach
such works through the broader, genre-transcendent lens of contemporary
posthuman perspectives. In other words, it draws on the notion of the sit-
uated, co-constituted features of humanity in the light of its mutual entan-
glements and multiple relationships with the organic as well as inorganic
world. Ossified hierarchies, clear-cut dichotomies and absolutes have been
increasingly dismantled by anti-essentialist views that refrain from grant-
ing human beings a privileged status. Plurality and transformation, hy-
bridity and permeability are now frequently called upon to describe a sort
of nomadic ontology of ambivalence that needs to be explored in various
fields and across many scientific disciplines (be they theoretical, sociologi-
cal, anthropological, biological).
      As a participant in ecosystem processes of «co-habitation» and
«co-evolution» (Rossini 2017: 154), the human element is said to be «knot-
ted into interdependent networks that are both corporeal and discursive»,
in a constant intermingling «across machinic, animal, human, and microbi-
al textures» (ibid.: 157, 165). Rather than being curtailed by applying a tight
rational sieve, mutability, boundary-breaking and multiplicity are seen
as opening up new spaces for engagement, thus inviting us to re-imagine
a whole series of interrelations between humans and non-human actors.
Hence the idea of a rhizomatic network of interspecies dependencies, char-
acterised by a continuous flow of becoming which also implies a ‘becom-
ing with’. As underlined by Marco Revelli, posthuman paradigms lead to
a dislocation and metamorphosis of behavioural codes whereby Hybris is
to leave room for «Aidos, i.e. modesty and respect, in the awareness that
humankind can hardly be self-sufficient in the world» (Revelli 2020: 96, my
translation). Such an epistemic frame goes hand in hand with directions
and responsibilities that look at a nature-culture or co-evolutionary con-
tinuum and a «fusion-contamination» dynamic (ibid.: 97, my translation),
with a consequent decentralisation of the anthropic domain vis-à-vis other
(non-human) Earthbound species.
      From here, it is only a short step to tenets like multispecies eco-jus-
tice or, say, Donna J. Haraway’s meditations on human-animal encounters,
significant otherness and the material-semiotic bonds being consolidated
among species. In particular, Haraway’s «companion species» coinage refers

       to the old co-constitutive link between dogs and people, where
     dogs have been actors and not just recipients of action. Companion


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



      species also points to the sorts of being made possible at interfaces
      among different human communities of practice for whom “love of
      the breed” or “love of dogs” is a practical and ethical imperative in
      an always specific, historical context […]. Further, companion species
      designates webbed bio-social-technical apparatuses of humans,
      animals, artifacts, and institutions in which particular ways of being
      emerge and are sustained. (Haraway 2008: 134)

       Crucially, this coinage is cast as «less a category than a pointer to an
ongoing “becoming with”» (ibid.: 16), the closing syntagm sounding like
a mantra for a posthumanist worldview that distances itself from both
self-centred individualism and defeatist, nihilistic attitudes. In this respect,
it is of course hard to overestimate Rosi Braidotti’s advocacy for a non-du-
alistic, constructive understanding of the interactions between culture and
nature, human and non-human entities. That is to say, for a momentous
break with the Cartesian/Kantian legacy and an apparatus of exclusionary
strategies that have long served as markers of normalcy. When speaking of
the posthuman challenge, Braidotti stresses the fact that, if resting on the
assumption of the historical decline of humanism, posthumanism aims to
overcome the impasse gravitating around the human/anti-human binary.
It actually goes further in «exploring alternatives, without sinking into the
rhetoric of the crisis of Man. It works instead towards elaborating alterna-
tive ways of conceptualizing the human subject» (Braidotti 2013: 37). In a
nutshell, this discursive framework embraces an ethics of becoming that
would take shape through flows of multilayered relations among non-uni-
tary subjects and the establishment of affirmative bonds. Fatalistic views of
our current predicament ought to give way to the more positive grounds
of a supportive politics, joint activities and the search for creative oppor-
tunities to socially and morally reinvent ourselves. An enlarged sense of
community, intergenerational as well as interspecies solidarity should be
hailed as milestones along the highway to a truly sustainable future.
       However, a sharp dividing line stands out against this fluid backdrop.
Namely, posthumanism’s resistance to win a secure niche for Homo sapiens
and the unrelenting pursuit of his enhancement through science, prosthetic
implants, computerised technology and a futuristic agenda that even encom-
passes cryonics and mind uploading. In fact, the paradigm of superhuman
‘augmented’ subjects properly falls within the province of transhumanism,
alongside the goals of perpetual emancipation, techno-mediated transcend-
ence, and evolutionary overreaching. In contrast with the post-anthropo-
centric, ontologically inclusive horizon of posthumanism, transhumanist



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ideologies look forward to increasing human capacities and self-direction
by virtue of «science and technology, in all their variables», with an empha-
sis on rational thinking and progress that suggests how transhumanism still
«roots itself in the Enlightenment» (Ferrando 2013: 27).

                      A ‘humanimalised’ world
     The theoretical bulwark of transhumanism, which ultimately clings
to the androcentric axiom of Man as the measure of all things, could not
be farther from Braidotti’s conception of the self-organising force and au-
topoietic structure of living matter as such. In addition to this, some of her
reflections concerning animals provide insights into the post-cataclysmic
scenario of Atwood’s speculative novels, where new kinships across the
human/animal divide are provocatively envisaged both in the wake of
rampant genetic manipulations and thanks to a more positive process of
radical repositioning and alliances forged in the post-plague phase. While
warning against the perils of adopting a blindly utilitarian approach to
animal ontologies, Braidotti lifts the veil on the material repercussions of
a «zoo-proletariat» notion that has brought with itself a full-scale, centu-
ries-old exploitation of animals for hard labour, edible resources, scientific
experiments and various sectors of the economy:

        Animals like pigs and mice are genetically modified to produce
     organs for humans in xeno-transplantation experiments. […] In
     advanced capitalism, animals of all categories and species have been
     turned into tradable disposable bodies, inscribed in a global market
     of post-anthropocentric exploitation […] traffic in animals constitutes
     the third largest illegal trade in the world today. (Braidotti 2013: 70)

     As it happens, posthuman biogenetic capital and its profitable market-
ing is one of the key issues tackled by Atwood in her half-tragic, half-sar-
donic portrayal of a globalised, hypertechnological and post-national
society which, starting from Oryx and Crake, eerily projects the reader into
a not-too-distant possible future. Needless to say, this is a future where the
environmental ‘doomsday clock’ has finally struck, showing the nightmar-
ish consequences of ecological disaster, irreversible climate change, West-
ern overconsumption and the reckless depletion of planetary resources.
This is also a world in which ruthless consumerism joins ranks with an
advanced, sprawling form of capitalism and financial systems controlled
by megacorporations. Apparently nothing is immune to the imperative of


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



a rapacious neoliberal market that serves the interests of a leading cor-
poratocracy. If the steady march of digital technologies and media seems
unstoppable, so is the vicious grip of a political power that draws lymph
from income inequality and the massive gap between an elite plutocracy,
living in fortified compounds, and the poor masses, confined in the vio-
lence-ridden, unwholesome pleeblands.
      Not surprisingly, medical science and the healthcare system are sim-
ilarly swallowed up by such a monopolistic, business-minded network,
from the money-spinner incentivisation of cosmetics, wellness services and
plastic surgery to the appalling schemes of HelthWyzer. This big pharma-
ceutical corporation has gone so far as to spread new diseases by implant-
ing them in vitamin pills and other medications with the aim of keeping
demand high and ensuring the sale of up-to-date cures at inflated prices.
The bleak logic of this bio/necropolitics ends by sanctioning a downright
commodification of life via cutting-edge genetic engineering projects that,
again, place brand, visibility and the boosting of revenue, rather than
health protection, on top of their priority list. And here is where the motifs
of biogenetic capital, xeno-transplantation and disposable bodies are grad-
ually brought to the fore.
      As if slily compensating for the void left by species gone extinct or
deemed vulnerable – oryxes being among them, namely the Oryx dammah
and Oryx leucoryx – companies like OrganInc have been recruiting brilliant
scientists to carry out experiments in cross-species gene splicing. From the
proliferation of invasive, self-reproducing transgenic plants to a popula-
tion of bizarre animal hybrids, the possible world conjured up by Atwood
calls to mind a creolised zoo or park, to the point that it might be read along
the lines of «biopunk dystopia», a recent subgenre in the canon of «geneti-
cally engineered posthuman sf» (Schmeink 2016: 10)1. Market-driven and
disturbingly extravagant in the same breath, these specimens challenge
the constitutive levels of the biosphere and the working principles of nat-


      1
       Lars Schmeink further clarifies: «I believe that the rise of biology as the
driving force of scientific progress, the mainstream attention given to genetic en-
gineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project, the changing sociological
view of liquid modernity, and the shifting discourses on the posthuman form a
historical nexus that produces the cultural formation of biopunk […]. Biopunk
makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize liquid mod-
ern realities as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse,
and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet»
(Schmeink 2016: 14).


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ural selection by concurring with a man-made economy that interlocks
sheer utilitarianism with surreal, flamboyant transmutations. This is the
case with creatures like green phosphorescent bunnies (not exactly fan-
tasy-like, though, as confirmed by artist Eduardo Kac’s conception of an
albino rabbit in 2000), butterflies equipped with shocking-pink wings, or
Mo’Hair sheep, growing long colourful hair as a reservoir of hair exten-
sions for humans. But there is also a darker side to these weird mutants,
roaming free in a landscape reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s Island of Doctor
Moreau, in which acts of ‘biological blasphemy’ notoriously lie at the door
of the eponymous, deranged vivisectionist. In Atwood’s novels geneticists
are similarly intrigued by the idea of ‘playing God’, not unrarely getting a
kick out of their monstrous concoctions and having no deontological scru-
ples about the drawbacks and possibly unintended consequences of their
experiments. Quite scaringly, in fact, «the new transgenic species» will
manage to adapt «to life beyond their preconceived functions» (Schmeink
2016: 88) and anthropological purposes. Among the most blatant cases are
beings whose compound nature is encapsulated in their very names, con-
sisting in portmanteau terms and puns, as if retrieved with a vengeance
from Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. This hybrid offspring includes snats
(snakes-plus-rats), bobkittens (a genetic merger of bobcats and cats), wol-
vogs (a blending of wolves and dogs), and liobams (a lion-sheep splice).
      Before too long, the propagation of such garish variants coupled with
mankind’s lack of foresight turns into a catalyst for fear and anxiety, as the
progeny of a coarsened Frankenstein-like community of biogeeks starts
causing disruption and, as happens with wolvogs and liobams, violently
attacks people. What is more, in this brave ‘humanimalised world’, a major
step forward (or backwards?) is marked when Jimmy/Snowman’s father
and other genetic engineers at the OrganInc Farms Compound succeed
in moulding a very special kind of uplifted tribe, bearing similarities with
Wells’s Beast Folk in The Island of Doctor Moreau and George Orwell’s intel-
ligent swine in Animal Farm, to mention two classic hypotexts. That is the
tribe of pigoons, a lexical blend deriving from ‘pig’ and ‘balloon’ and re-
ferring to their stoutness. The elephantine dimension of such pigs is due to
their being designed as organ donors for humans. In other words, pigoons
are raised to house a foolproof assortment of spare organs for xeno-trans-
plantation2: their gene pool has been progressively adjusted by splicing in


    2
       Atwood’s prediction became real in September 2021, when the first inves-
tigational transplant of a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into a brain-


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



sequences of human DNA, including neo-cortex tissue, so as to manufac-
ture serviceable host animals. Unintended consequences will not be long
in coming, however, as clever pigoons provided with enhanced porcine
brain evolve into a well-trained legion of ‘post-animals’.
      Tough and aggressive, smarter but less sociable than their already
skilfull natural cousins, they will make life difficult for the HelthWyzer
system by escaping from the laboratories and continuing to develop prob-
lem-solving capacities and complex modes of interaction. Understandably
enough, throughout Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, pigoons are
seen as wasting no chance to retaliate. Afraid of being tracked, trampled
or eaten by these crafty hybrids, humans must consequently adopt tactics
of defence and counterattack, with the most sensitive people beginning to
recoil from the ‘cannibalistic’ idea of having pork products on their tables.
      There is no missing how this nefarious kind of boundary crossing
and physiological fluidity paradoxically frustrates sound practices of co-
operation and ontological relationality. Braidotti would identify it as a «re-
active bond of vulnerability» (Braidotti 2013: 50), a negative unity fuelled
by common threats and an interdependence imbricated into the texture
of contemporary biogenetic capitalism. Interestingly, though, this is only
half the story. As Atwood ushers in the motley community of MaddAddam,
one could turn again to Braidotti’s line of reasoning and observe how the
enforced, asphyctic conflations mentioned above are eventually overshad-
owed by kinetic re-significations taking place «on terms that are no longer
hierarchical or self-evident. They are fast-evolving and need to be renego-
tiated accordingly» (Braidotti 2009: 528).
      In the post-apocalyptic wilderness, where a condition of radical im-
manence and precarious survival is dramatically literalised, the «anthro-
pological machinery of humanism» cannot but subside and grapple with
the situatedness of «post-history» (Agamben 2019: 35, 19, my translation).
From this point of view, with reference to the mobile framework of Madd-
Addam, our suspension of disbelief is put to the test when learning that
most of the few human survivors are entering into dialogue with the once


dead human was completed by Robert Montgomery’s team at NYU Langone
Transplant Institute. The pig was raised at Revivicor Inc., a subsidiary of United
Therapeutics Corporation, a biotech company based in Maryland. More recently,
on 7 January 2022, a gene-edited pig heart provided by the same company was
successfully transferred into a living man. Research on xenografts and heterolo-
gous transplant has been in development for years, and there is little doubt that
Atwood was keen on annotating its progress.


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demonised pigoons. In post-historical times, these creatures are in fact no
longer approached as freely disposable bodies or antagonists, but as wor-
thy, equal members of a companion species (hence, in the trilogy’s third
book, the frequent use of the upper case in ‘Pigoons’ and their subsequent
recognition as ‘Pig Ones’). They will be working together with a part of
the human circle in an effort to make a stand against other enemies, that is,
the brutalised fringe of humanitas embodied by two former convicts who
continue to wreak havoc by raping, killing and committing acts of canni-
balism. These released inmates are the Painballers, a label stemming from
the savage reality game that, before the outbreak of the pandemic, death
prisoners were allowed to play against each other in exchange for freedom,
in an atmosphere thrillingly reminiscent of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger
Games.
      If, on the one hand, Atwood’s discourse hardly makes a clean break
with questions of violence and obdurate self-affirmation, on the other it
does not stand at odds with the trend of critical posthumanism that «sees
the human as a congeries, whose origins are multispecies and whose very
survival is founded on symbiotic relations with numerous forms of life on
earth» (Nayar 2014: 9). This intriguing ambivalence is all the more evident
when taking into account a crucial missing link between mankind and up-
graded pigs: an offshoot of post-Anthropocene humanoids, «animal-hu-
man hybrids» from our «biotech century» (Johnston 2019: 1) who might
be described as organic simulacra or avatars of an imaginary pre-Homo
sapiens species. Genetically engineered to be ‘primitive’ and somewhat
pre-human rather than cybernetic hyperhumans – as one would expect in
the age of biotechnology – these are the Crakers, so named after ‘Crake’,
the nickname of Glenn, a hallucinating, megalomaniac biologist and their
demiurgic creator.
      Fluctuating between the human and non-human poles, this lab-grown,
artificially resurrected family of hominids seems to incorporate, in a Deleu-
zian sense, a passage from iconic resemblance to a simulacral semblance
built on osmotic permutations and a seamless internalisation of difference.
Owing to their astoundingly diversified genetic makeup, the Crakers are
not comparable to clones of a preexistent unified model. On the contrary,
they challenge and overturn any endorsed prototype or monolithic iden-
tity. They are, literally, multispecies and one is tempted to cast them as a
hyperbolic, fictionalised reification of what Giorgio Agamben calls the last
political task of post-historical civilisation, boiling down to the «’integral
management’ of biological life» and the domain of physiology (Agamben
2019: 80, my translation).


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



                      Children of hope and despair.
                       An overview of the Crakers
      In the MaddAddam trilogy, the concept of an integral management of
biological life is tinged with ‘ustopian’ (utopian/dystopian) overtones, as
Atwood herself would say. As can be gathered from our remarks so far,
dystopia runs wild in most of the narrative, starting from the pre-plague
period – epitomised by a postmodern technophilic society succumbing
to alienation and corruption, dismayingly falling short when it comes to
moral values and affective ties – up to the Waterless Flood, a debased ver-
sion of the biblical Great Flood. As befits a condition of ethical impasse and
irrevocable decadence – no matter the stunning technological advance-
ments – the redemptive watery chaos ordained by Jahweh in the Book of
Genesis has now shrunk to the confines of a man-made catastrophe. In
this dismal scenario, the determination to eradicate human corruption
and make a new covenant with a selection of blameless survivors does
not emanate from an omnipotent and righteous God. It is Glenn/Crake, a
third-millennium hypostasis of the ‘mad scientist’, who, disgusted with
mankind’s meanness and incurable faults, takes it upon himself to wipe
it out and save a few chosen ones, so as to perpetuate life along a dif-
ferent trajectory. The Noah-like figure that he decides to spare is Jimmy,
his childhood friend from the affluent compounds. A selfish, weak-willed
copywriter and former arts student, Jimmy is clearly an implausible stand-
in for the Old Testament’s predestined patriarch. At the same time, he does
suffer the blow of the tragic demise of humanity, a horrifying event which
transforms him into the spectre of a Shelleyian Last Man, a flickering I who
is to adopt the moniker ‘Snowman’, in a sad nod to the Yeti, the ‘Abomina-
ble Snowman’ of Himalayan folklore. Under the sway of the post-apoca-
lyptic plight, he painstakingly works through trauma and memories while
fancying himself as the sole survivor of an ape-like species, an atavistic
relic helplessly languishing at the meta-anthropological ‘zero hour’ of the
end of the world.
      Nevertheless, Atwood does not allow crippling trauma and despair
to totally pervade her narrative, which unfolds according to a propagating
network of polyphonic, open-ended and boldly imaginative possibilities.
In a panoply of semantic slippages and contradictions, a feeling of hope
too is to be found in Crake’s plans, which pave the way for both a global
genocide – an «accumulation of sorrow» climaxing in «ecological grief»
and «a lament for a species» (Harland 2016: 587, 589) – and the thriving of



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a race of posthumans conceived as a viable alternative to Homo sapiens. His
transgenic humanoid children – the Crakers – are in fact better equipped
to engage in a Darwinian struggle for existence on a planet where adapta-
tion and the battle against the elements have gone through an imperilling
change of paradigm for decades. Well before Crake’s mass murder, and
even prior to the corporations’ scams and the biogeeks’ crazy interpola-
tions, mankind was caught up in its own strangling net: namely, the An-
thropocene, the geological epoch when human activities proved a huge
driving force negatively affecting the ecosystems and biodiversity of the
Earth. By precipitating a planetary disaster, Crake might be said to have
punished our eco-sins and sped up a looming transition to a post-Anthro-
pocene era, a new order of things where the centrality of Anthropo is blot-
ted out in favour of hybrid and rhizomatic ontologies.
      Let us briefly look at the tangled connotations associated with this mise
en scène of the fall of our contemporary world. Beginning with the semantic
field of despair and its dreadful outcomes, it cannot be ignored that Crake
opens the door to his innocent, peaceful and herbivorous replacements for
humanity through a heinous act of bioterrorism. Indeed, he masterminds
a pandemic by injecting a bioengineered killer virus inside a pill enticingly
called ‘BlyssPluss’, a wonder drug that he distributes worldwide with the
unwitting complicity of Jimmy. Advertised as an anti-ageing treatment,
a contraceptive and aphrodisiac, this ‘poisoned chalice’ is to cause lethal
haemorrhage and an accelerated decomposition of internal organs. Such is
the miserable fate in store for mankind and which the leader of the ecoreli-
gious cult of the God’s Gardeners, Adam One, had foretold in terms of the
‘Waterless Flood’, a dry pandemic wave capable of gnawing away at the
human body from the inside.
      On top of this, Crake takes advantage of his prominent position as a
member of the science class to tamper with the corporation-financed floor
models, which cover a customised variety of genetic modifications that par-
ents might be willing to order (and buy) for children tailored to their expec-
tations. Qualities such as a healthy growth and resistance to environmental
hazards are part of the package, quite in tune with the ironically evocative
name of the compound involved in the experiment: ‘RejoovenEsense’, a
word blend whose graphematic eccentricity is bound to captivate purchas-
ers like clever adspeak. The research conducted at RejoovenEsense provides
a springboard for Crake to start focusing on his Paradice Project. This is a
venture that sneers at the religious myth of an earthly Paradise, which the
atheistic biologist challenges with a gesture that smacks of a profane roll of
the dice (as hinted by the invented spelling of ‘Paradice’). Striking another


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



dark note is the fact that Glenn, the gifted, introverted science student, shall
quickly go by the alias ‘Crake’, a term literally referring to an animal (the
Rallina tricolor, a waterbird) but also a codename borrowed from Extinct-
athon, an online videogame he used to play with Jimmy when they spent
their leisure time together, smoking weed and watching violent videos.
Such a game tests the player’s knowledge (and subversive thoughts) con-
cerning extinct species, and it is no accident that the young misanthropic
scientist should become a grandmaster at it. The motif of the roll of the dice,
of gambling with life and death, creeps back and is possibly encrypted in
the red-necked crake itself. Curiously, this secretive bird has so far escaped
the net of detailed studies and its conservation status currently lingers on
the brink between a worrying loss of habitat in the Australian areas and a
condition of ‘least concern’ in several other regions of the world.
      The rosier strand of Atwood’s kaleidoscopic story comes to the sur-
face when attention is drawn to Crake’s commitment to preserving life
via his gene-spliced children. While getting ready to unleash the Waterless
Flood across the planet, he keeps his creatures sheltered in the ‘Paradice
dome’ laboratory, a futuristic, sanitised Garden of Eden where this small
tribe is raised like a circle of noble savages or Wellsian Eloi. Supposed to
repopulate the Earth, the Crakers must remain firmly anchored to a state of
innocence. This is why Crake makes sure that his girlfriend Oryx and, later
on, Jimmy might take care of them and monitor their mental growth by
means of suitable explanations and origin stories. Supplied with a genomic
sequence that conflates segments of human and animal DNA, the Crak-
ers are engineered as an ecosustainable species and hope is thus kindled
through a daring feat which, as it were, pivots on «imagineering» singu-
lar-plural bodies «for the posthuman future» (Rossini 2017: 164).
      From this perspective, Crake’s identity-morphing progeny vividly
testifies to an embodied process of co-essence and ‘becoming animal’. Their
genotypes and increase in physical stamina make them fitter to survive in
a posthuman environment. For example, their skin is UV-resistant and ca-
pable of repelling insects by giving off a citrus smell; their digestive system
is similar to that of a rabbit, so that they can easily assimilate raw plant
materials, such as leaves, roots, grass and berries. Further traits include
luminous green eyes, the habit of marking their territory with chemically
bolstered urine and a sort of therapeutic purring for wound healing. Like
many other mammals, they come into heat at regular intervals and mate
in polygynandrous groups, having sexual intercourse only when women
are in estrus (during ovulation, females emit a pheromone odour and their
backside turns blue, as do male genitalia).


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      Although their lifespan does not rise above the threshold of thirty
years, the Crakers can boast numerous metabolic advantages over Homo
sapiens. Designed to establish bioegalitarian relationships with one another
and the ecosystem, they are ‘meek and mild’ vegans flawlessly adjusted to
the post-Anthropocene habitat. Their refashioned neural complexes have
apparently freed them from the burden of reclaiming territory or produc-
ing clothing, tools, and weapons. Neither hunting nor farming is indispen-
sable to their survival, to say nothing of industrial manufacturing. Jealousy
and competitiveness, dominance and racism seem to have been genetically
nipped in the bud in these pseudo-primates with a tamed reptilian brain
and a thwarted mammalian neocortex.
      On the other hand, as one infers from these descriptions, the Crakers
are living proof of a juggled genetic blueprint that goes in tandem with
their quirky creator’s selective breeding. Docile, friendly and disarming-
ly childlike, they occupy a blurry midregion between prehistoric or ab-
original man3 and the mentally retarded adult. Or, in a more politically
correct phrase, they are impaired by a form of ‘intellectual disability’ that
their maker has programmed through a systematic curbing of their logi-
cal/symbolic thinking and emotional responsiveness (i.e., passion, feelings,
humour). Even the «fear of death is edited out of the emotive and cognitive
circuit» (Chen 2018: 188) of these naked beautiful humanoids and their
«stupendous naïveté» (ibid.: 190).
      Some of the most significant semantic slippages in Atwood’s trilogy
revolve around the Crakers’ identity, role, and potentialities in the long
term. As the post-apocalyptic dreariness dissolves to make way for cau-
tious optimism – with «the disappearance or fading of the concept of the
‘human’ into posthumanist, multispecies alliance» (Yates 2020: 413) – one
wonders if Crake’s artificial moulding of primeval indigeneity might be
a fair premise to begin history anew. True, as happens with J.G. Ballard’s
The Drowned World and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, the MaddAddam trilogy


    3
       As Paul W. Harland perceptively observes: «We witness the reverse of
the takeover of Neanderthals by H. sapiens. Here the gentle giants supplant the
clever but rapacious humans. In essence, Atwood performs an inversion of what
we experience in reading William Golding’s The Inheritors» (Harland 2016: 591).
Other critics, such as Mohr (2017: 54-62), lay emphasis on Atwood’s ideal of
multispecies justice and her cultural background, from Northrop Frye’s seminal
theories to Canadian animal stories. The main difference between our conclusions
and Mohr’s rests on the signifying power of the Crakers, about whom Mohr does
not tease out clues that might look back at the singularity of ‘old humanness’.


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seems to «propose animalization – going back to the beast – not as a regres-
sion but as an evolution, an overcoming of man’s limits and disharmony
with the world», towards the envisioning of «the ultimate utopia in an eco-
logical, properly posthuman perspective» (Micali 2019: 81-82). Nonethe-
less, living in the context of this odd Neolithic Age requires other efforts,
intermediations and crossings of the line that complicate the picture.
      As mankind makes its final exit in parallel with the already mentioned
process of radical repositioning and alliances, the Crakers emerge as vari-
ably less and more than humans. This is due not only to Crake’s pedigree
selection, but also – and more perturbingly – to the unintended or latent
consequences of his genetic manipulations. In MaddAddam, the fact that his
creatures, with their leader Blackbeard in the forefront, should gradually
follow the ‘forbidden path’ of symbolic thought and affectivity casts doubt
on the power and tenability of scientific jurisdiction. And this, in turn, begs
the question of whether a primordial core of humanity might reveal itself
as too deeply ingrained for any clever geneticist to splice it out once and
for all.

       ‘Little humanoids grow up’: Blackbeard’s agency
      Like its two forerunners, MaddAddam is a volume of several hundred
pages whose diegetic palimpsest hinges on a post-pandemic present im-
bued with references to the near past. Interspersed with lengthy flashbacks,
the narrative stores up personal and collective memories which help to as-
sess and make sense of an unfathomable contemporaneity. Yet, while Oryx
and Crake and The Year of the Flood work as twin novels with coalescing
epilogues and focusing on different groups of characters in a virtually si-
multaneous way, MaddAddam brings together all survivors, from humans
to transgenic animals and humanoids. When looked from within, this cho-
reography is more lively than one might suppose, in a typically Atwoodian
«combination of the frightening with the humorous» (Northover 2017: 122)
and a vivid rendering of everyday challenges.
      Besides the pigoons, Painballers, Jimmy and the Crakers, such a sun-
dry social mix includes former pleeblanders and God’s Gardeners’ adepts
– with a paramount role played by Toby, a forbearing and trustworthy
woman – alongside ex-associates of the MaddAddam clique. The latter,
whose palindromic denomination adds fuel to the ‘mad Adam’ isotopy
(the idea of mankind gone insane), were a splinter underground group of
God’s Gardeners bent on sabotaging corporatised governance and infra-



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structures. Their still-living leader is Zeb, Adam One’s brother, a tough
mountain man whose brave exploits and family roots are among the topics
that inform the narrative tapestry of MaddAddam. Zeb is another son of
the sadistic founder of the Church of PetrOleum and might be cast as the
originator of a complementary storyline bifurcating from Adam One’s eco-
spiritual mission and its pre-eminence in The Year of the Flood. MaddAddam
expands on the half-forgotten brother’s adventurous past, especially his
ordeals in the north and his killing and eating a bear to ward off death.
Here, Zeb and Toby become confidants, allies and lovers, and given that
Toby herself is the main (heterodiegetic) narrative focaliser, her partner’s
deeds contribute to adding flavour to her performances as a witness and
raconteur. Her audience – and enthusiastic pupils – are none other than the
Crakers, who enjoy listening and are eager to learn, like curious children
who cannot help interrupting their teacher’s discursive flow by posing lit-
eral questions or intoning songs. Having taken over from Jimmy as their
mentor and origin-stories fabulist, Toby must harness all her patience, dis-
cernment and communication skills to wrestle with their ill-timed interfer-
ences and soothe them through softened elucidations.
      These question-time/training sessions will produce astonishing re-
sults. They attest how the Children of Crake can actually depart from the
geneticist’s planned course and familiarise with an epistemology cotermi-
nous with symbolic thinking and theological beliefs, cosmogonical visions
and written codes, mythos as well as logos. Also thanks to only-too-human
Jimmy and Toby – who circumvent the deceased scientist’s will and para-
doxically convert him and Oryx into creator deities to be glorified – the
Crakers are encouraged to implement their cognitive armoury beyond the
sense of smell, songs and telepathic connection with genetically-engineered
animals. After internalising rules and rituals and fabricating effigies, they
will succeed in deciphering symbols and setting up a mythology for them-
selves. In many ways, then, the law of Crake-the-Father is broken by his
own ‘freakish offspring’, who is definitely more mutable and resourceful
than he had self-complacently surmised. As argued by Michaela Keck,
«[d]espite all the contemporary bioengineering and splicing, Atwood’s
post-humans bear a striking resemblance to the tall, strong, and supple in-
habitants of the ancient Blessed Isles» (Keck 2018: 31) celebrated by Hesiod
and Diodorus. Yet again, as a tantalising afterthought, one might speculate
what is likely to happen when this coterie of Mowgli-like bon sauvage (re-)
enters civilisation and a Rousseauvian circuit of social contracts.
      With its constellation of stories, stories-within-stories and journal re-
cordings, MaddAddam stands at a junction between a post-apocalyptic sur-


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



vival narrative and a mock-heroic saga where finding ways to coexist as an
‘interspecies tribe’ cannot be limited to neutralising the degenerate Painbal-
lers or guarding an outpost. Such variegated bioforms are to shape a policy
of co-habitation and identity-construction as a people, and this goal is seen
as gathering impetus through a befitting dialogue with the past, via story-
telling and epos. An active weaver of this post-pandemic web is of course
Toby, whose Egg story – announced by the over-explicative title “The Story
of the Egg, and of Oryx and Crake, and how they made People and Animals;
and of the Chaos; and of Snowman-the-Jimmy; and of the Smelly Bone and
the coming of the Two Bad Men” – opens the text as a Genesis account con-
veyed to the Crakers in very simple words. Innumerable tales follow and
overlap throughout the fourteen macrosections preceded by “Egg”, along
a chronological arc culminating with the Great Rearrangement enacted by
“good, kind Crake” in order to clear away anthropocentric chaos.
      If the flame of remembrance is kept alive by human mentors, the
Crakers are more than passive recipients or mimickers. One notices a pro-
gressive dampening of their guileless exuberance – typically punctuated
by an interjecting ‘Oh’, reminding of Friday’s ejaculatory ‘O’ in Robinson
Crusoe – and a dawning awareness personified by one of these humanoids,
named Blackbeard. As Atwood claimed in an interview, with a dash of
baffling irony, there is a «big question» (Atwood 2013) inherent in Black-
beard’s acumen and agency.
      Introduced at about one-quarter of the way into MaddAddam, Black-
beard is a keen, precocious boy who develops a particular attachment with
Toby:

         “What’s your name?” she says to the little boy.
         “My name is Blackbeard,” says the child gravely. Blackbeard,
      the notorious murdering pirate? This sweet child? A child who will
      never have a beard when he grows up because Crake did away with
      body hair in his new species. A lot of the Crakers have odd names.
      According to Zeb, Crake named them – Crake, with his warped sense
      of humour. Though why shouldn’t their names be odd, to go with
      their general oddity?
         “I am very happy to meet you, Oh Blackbeard,” she says.
         “Do you eat your droppings, Oh Toby?” says Blackbeard. ”As we
      do? To digest our leaves better?”
         What droppings? Edible poo? No one warned her about this! “It
      is time to go and see your mother, Oh Blackbeard,” says Toby. “She
      must be worried about you.” (Atwood 2014: 112-113)



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      This faltering and awkward dialogue, where Toby’s first reactions
teeter between sincere puzzlement and a patronising dismissal, functions
as a rough prelude to a fruitful relationship. Blackbeard will collaborate as
an intermediary (literally, as an interpreter and translator of the pigoons’
messages to humans), a writing assistant and, ultimately, a chronicler and
mythologiser himself. The following passage testifies to his having taken a
special interest in Toby’s authoring a diary:

         “Oh Toby, what have you been writing?” says Blackbeard, who’s
     come into her cobb-house cubicle – unannounced, as usual – and is
     now standing at her elbow. He’s peering into her face with his large, green,
     luminous, uncanny eyes.
         How had Crake devised those eyes? How do they light up from
     within like that? […] “I am writing the story,” she says. “The story of
     you, and me, and the Pigoons, and everyone […].”
         “There,” says Blackbeard. “Telling the story is hard, and writing
     the story must be more hard. Oh Toby, when you are too tired to do
     it, next time I will write the story. I will be your helper.” (Atwood 2014:
     456, my italics)

      This fast-growing boy’s habit of coming unannounced and peering
into his human guide’s face could in itself be an index of a disquieting
presence. Alerting us further is the stress on his wide gleaming eyes, re-
inforced through the use of a hyperconnoted adjective such as ‘uncanny’.
A final touch to this depiction is given by Blackbeard’s hinting at Toby’s
exhaustion and thus grabbing a chance to launch his offer to cooperate.
Over the course of MaddAddam, this transfer of authority will gain so much
ground as to transform the helper into a homodiegetic narrator, a bard and
proto-historian.
      As if redeeming Susan Barton’s less successful efforts to teach voice-
less Friday to write, in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Toby proceeds to instruct her
talkative pupil on how to make ink, use leaves as paper, hold a pen and
draw letters as signifiers related to sounds, objects, and the dynamics of
communication. As pointed out by Eduardo Marks de Marques in his illu-
minating article, Blackbeard’s expanding his preconceived niche seals «the
official entry of the Crakers into the symbolic world (or return to it, if we con-
sider the Crakers as posthumans who are, actually, pre-humans)» (Marques
2015: 143). In the face of Jimmy’s and Toby’s imminent death, Blackbeard
assumes control as the keeper of an oral as well as written tradition. He sets
out to canonise a ‘Craker mythology’ by claiming the celebrant’s role that



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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



was once of his human proxies and which places him on top of a hierarchi-
cal order. His donning the Red Sox cap – the «hat of Snowman-the-Jimmy»
(Atwood 2014: 435) – and performing a symbolic fish-eating rite, surround-
ed by a circle of fervid listeners, are accompanied by his authoring a Book,
which occupies the last ten or so pages of the eponymous closing section
of the novel. Here, the quick learner recovers Toby’s journal and begins
to insert his own appendage, with a view to ensuring a continuity from
«cosmogony to autonomous mythology to history» (Marques 2015: 144). If
still rudimentary, his vocabulary is now richer and his style more nuanced,
capable of toning down the ‘worst answers’ and highlighting those he de-
cides to endorse, such as an allegorical interpretation of Toby’s death as a
magic reunion with Zeb, both of them morphed into bears.
       Blackbeard’s Book (un)closes with a few compelling glimpses into
the present and near future, where the flow of ‘becoming with’ is further
hybridised by the approaching of a new human-Craker population (the
children of Ren, Amanda, and Swift Fox):

            Then Swift Fox told us that she was pregnant again and soon there
          would be another baby. And the fourfathers were Abraham Lincoln
          and Napoleon and Picasso and me, Blackbeard […].

             This is the end of the Story of Toby. I have written it in this Book.
          And I have put my name here – Blackbeard – the way Toby first
          showed me when I was a child. It says that I was the one who set down
          these words.
             Thank you.
             Now we will sing. (Atwood 2014: 474)

      The assertive epilogue of MaddAddam patently belies Crake’s schemes
and heightens our sensibility to the autopoietic, self-regenerating thrust
of biological networks. Correspondingly, the Crakers’ re-humanisation
risks to undermine trans-species ontology by letting an anthropological
(transhuman?) culturosphere sneak in by the back door. Differently put,
if the «discursive projects» relating to posthumanism «aim to decenter the
human by terminally disrupting the scripts of humanism» (Clarke 2017:
141), then the trilogy’s last book piquingly resists closure4.

      4
       The multifaceted quality of Atwood’s imaginary has however prompted
different responses. See for instance Simona Micali’s optimistic approach: «The
third book of the trilogy, MaddAddam (2013), has all the survivors converging, Jim-


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     To conclude, while the context of MaddAddam continues to be «thor-
oughly posthuman in biological terms» (Heise 2009: 508), it is difficult to
downplay the significance of Blackbeard’s acquisition of consciousness
and his somewhat high-handed attitude. Moreover, in spite of its oddi-
ty and various spellings in the novel, his name does raise the spectre of
the infamous murdering pirate mentioned by Toby, i.e. Edward Teach (ca.
1680-1718), whose notoriety in the Anglo-American world was of a piece
with his shrewdness, frightful appearance, and predatory drives. When
thinking of the red baseball hat that Atwood’s character wears at topical
moments, our mind instinctively goes to the real-life pirate’s habit of tying
lighted slow matches under his smoking hat5. The connection might be far-
fetched, and yet some lingering doubts persist. In order to lay that spectre
to rest, we could only hope that the fictional Blackbeard’s ‘craking’ should
not veer too much towards – or back to – cunning human eloquence.




my included, and the establishment of new relationships of trade and solidarity
among them. The Crakers will teach humans to enjoy sex more freely, to dismiss
individualism and to communicate with other animal species; the humans will
pass onto the Crakers an embryonic form of culture, which essentially consists of
the ability to understand and respect the subjectivity of others and to tell stories
[…] by assuming the right to authorship, Blackbeard has transformed the narrative
of the posthuman into a proper posthuman narrative» (Micali 2019: 210, 212).
     5
        In a further twist, Atwood might be winking at contemporary sportswear
products such as Edward Teach “Blackbeard” Trucker Cap (KM Paracord, UK), or
Blackbeard Pirate Flag Trucker Head (Surf, Wind and Fire, North Carolina, whose
logo incidentally features a surfing pig), which literally capitalise on Blackbeard’s
myth and, at the same time, demean it through large-scale commodification.
With reference to onomastics, I am thankful to Alessandro Fambrini for bringing
home to me the context and titular character of Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard (1964),
a sci-fi novel which, similarly to MaddAddam, deals with a devastated Earth and
entrusts a well judged witness – Greybeard himself – with the role of storyteller
and guardian of historical memory.


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



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                                The Author
     Laura Giovannelli

     Laura Giovannelli is Associate Professor of English Literature in the
Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, University of Pisa. She
co-edits the scientific journal Synergies. A Journal of English Literatures and
Cultures and is a founding member of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society. Her
research fields cover British Aestheticism, Anglo-American Modernism,
Postmodernism, Ecocriticism, postcolonial and contemporary literature in
English. Among her recent books are Interconnecting Music and the Literary
Word (2018, co-edited with F. Ciompi and R. Ferrari) and “A Green Thought in a
Green Shade”: Immaginario letterario e ambiente (2020, co-edited with R. Ferrari).

     Email: laura.giovannelli@unipi.it



                                 The Article
     Date sent: 31/03/2022
     Date accepted: 31/07/2022
     Date published: 30/11/2022


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Laura Giovannelli, Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids



                            How to cite this article
     Giovannelli, Laura, “Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Human-
oids: Tracing the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam
Trilogy”, Entering the Simulacra World, Eds. A. Ghezzani - L. Giovannelli - F.
Rossi - C. Savettieri, Between, XII.24 (2022): 291-312, www.betweenjournal.it




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