So, we very briefly touched on this in class today, but I was interested in the parallels between Oryx and Crake and Xenogenesis. Clearly, the biggest parallel was that the human race ends up wiped out and reformatted against its will, for its own good (or so someone claims). The narration of both novels takes place at least mostly in the immediate aftermath. The initial struggle for survival removes the capacity to act in the ways that initially caused the downfall of the human race, but in both novels, there’s the suggestion that this fix is temporary, and the situation will degenerate in to what it was before. This shows up through the reappearance of guns in Xenogenesis, as well as the overall degeneration of the resister colonies into violence. In Oryx and Crake it manifests in the effigy the Crakers build of Snowman. Crake “programmed” them through genetic engineering not to have the capacity to create abstract art, because he thought it was tied in to a tendency to invent religion, and then to wage war. Even if he’s wrong in making that connection, the fact that they do have the capacity create these abstract figures suggests that he may not have successfully removed more explicitly harmful human characteristics. “Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war” (361). Then the mass slaughter of humanity would have occurred for absolutely no reason at all. Both books present the “better” reconstructed human race as transient, suggesting that the efforts to fix us are futile.
I think the most important difference between the two novels is what happened before the restructuring of humanity occurred. Both the Oankali and Crake saw the destruction of the human race as inevitable, before it happened. Crake make a preemptive strike and he wiped the human slate clean before it imploded so he could impose his own perception of what humanity should be. The Oankali recognized the fatal flaw of the humans before the nuclear holocaust happened, but did not step in to prevent the damage. They waited out the inevitable death and destruction, and then swooped down on the planet and performed their human reformatting, and which point they could present themselves as the saviors of the human race, as they performed their biological imperative. They seem more like the vultures that plague Snowman as he walks across the newly formed wasteland than saviors.
So which is worse, the actions of Crake, or the inaction of the Oankali? Both are delusional in that they believe they are acting in the best interest of humanity. But Crake at least realizes to a certain extent that he may have gone a little too far. He can’t let himself see his own creation. He put in an official standing order for Jimmy to take over if “anything happens” to him and mentions that at that point Oryx wouldn’t be around either, suggesting that he planned his suicide long before the actual event (320). Some form of guilt or uneasiness had to have overcome his megalomaniacal tendencies not to get the satisfaction of watching his children flourish. The Oankali experience no such pangs of guilt, they are happy not to even leave any human akjai before Akin fights for that right. And though they did not orchestrate the mass murder of millions of humans in the same direct manner that Crake did, they certainly did nothing to stop it.
So I’m curious, who do you guys think is more nefarious? Crake or the Oankali?