Chapter Nine: Quests and Questions of Consciousness: Margaret Atwood's Post-Human Futures

Literary studies highlight the importance of studying works of art in connection with their location and socio-historical settings, yet what must also be considered is the impact the work has on the consciousness of the reader or audience. The local and the global must be considered in terms of consciousness, together with the possibility of these consciousnesses being changed or augmented, a concept that encourages the possibility of evolution towards a higher level of interaction with the global population as well as with the natural environment. The concept of transnationalism-which implicates the connection between individual and collective consciousnessalready emphasizes the placement of identity being defined as beyond and independent of boundaries of nation or race. According to postcolonial theory, the present is always embedded in the re-memory of the past: new worlds cannot be created unless incorporating a telling knowledge of the old. Thus, we remember the future. While being based on an informed and critical memory of the past, Utopias in the imagination are also necessary for providing upcoming hope. They are crucial as critical points of opposition to oppression. New worlds, brave or not, must be created as parallel realities to address and challenge current creations of self and other, subject and object, friend and alien. As Lyman Tower Sargent postulates: dissatisfaction is the beginning of utopianism, and ultimately, utopianism is about the transformation of everyday life (2010:49).This chapter addresses issues of new Otherness and argues that we need to look more closely at how the shifting concepts of human kind (with both biological and ethical dimensions) are constructed in the contexts of both literature and life. Feminists throughout the twentieth century developed interests in the possibility of apocalyptic endings to the current known civilizations of the world, and project possible future disasters, either through war or devastating pandemics. The notion of consciousness must be asserted as not merely negotiable within that future, but crucial if there is to be a survival of our world. Margaret Atwood-despite claiming that 'human, however, does not necessarily mean 'wonderful' (1994: 132)-provides a challenging new map of humanity and contributes to the crucial debate on what it means to be in a post-human world.Margaret Atwood and the problematic search for new worldsThe Canadian author Margaret Atwood's novels have formed a central core of the exploration of women's consciousness in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. They challenge gendered roles in western culture through an unleashing of consciousness as a weapon for social change. Her novel, Alias Grace, for example accesses factual records of historical characters to problematise the ambiguities of deciphering history and truth, through the medium of female language. While being a novel that tries to deconstruct the notion of a woman's madness, Alias Grace continues to formulate a feminist aesthetic based on alternatives to logical male order. Even from the multi-optional viewpoints of one woman's life, new possibilities of analysing consciousness seem to be involved in this model. New language opens up the possibility for dynamic rewriting of reality. The language of writers, such as Margaret Atwood, often reflects a profound intuitive insight-one that goes beyond the normal surface level of words-to tap into a more subtle level of knowledge that augments the reader's receptive experience.This chapter examines three of Margaret Atwood's works, Surfacing (1972) and the first two novels of her Maddaddam trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009). These novels form a trajectory in many ways, since the concerns and themes relate to contemporary issues of agency, colonialism and neo-colonialism; control and conflict; and the impact of all of these on humankind's impact on the environment. …

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