Death and the “Paradice within” in Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

In their introduction to Milton in Popular Culture, Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory Semenza suggest that it is the sublimity of Paradise Lost that accounts for Milton’s influence on fantasy and science fiction. Writers of science fiction (SF) have been inspired by the epic’s “otherwordly settings, grand conflicts of good and evil, heroes who determine the fate of their worlds, space travel, warfare, [and] futuristic visions.”¹ Science fiction has become the generic repository for the marvels and wonders that were once the domain of the epic.² In addition to the sublime, however, there is a second line of descent from Milton’s Paradise Lost to contemporary SF. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first science fictional rewriting of Paradise Lost, focuses not on the otherworldly spectacle of Paradise Lost but on the ethical dilemmas of creation.³ As early as the seventeenth century, proto-science fictional works became vehicles for rethinking the myth of the Fall, and SF continues to offer a generic home for the rewriting of the Fall myth.⁴ In this essay I show how Margaret Atwood’s 2003 dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, fits into this tradition. Milton’s version of the myth of the Fall has been definitive for English-language literature, yet the epic’s substantial legacy in science fiction suggests that Paradise Lost has also provided material for the rewriting of this myth in new forms and to alternate ends.

Oryx and Crake is the eleventh novel by the prolific and award-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and her third that might be labeled science fiction. Oryx and Crake, like Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, uses the estranging techniques characteristic of SF to diagnose and critique the dangers of the contemporary political climate.⁵ In each case, Atwood creates a near-future fictional world in which the consequences of current cultural and technological trends—religious fundamentalism and nuclear radiation in The Handmaid’s Tale, human-made climate change in Oryx and Crake—can be explored through extrapolation. Atwood is not primarily a genre author, and she has frequently distanced her work from science fiction, preferring the term “speculative fiction.” Atwood distinguishes between the two based upon the degree of invention that each permits. Speculative fiction, she maintains, includes no impossibilities, “no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians.” Atwood believes that her novels differ from science fiction because they invent “nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.” Atwood therefore defines Oryx and Crake as an extended game of what if: “what if we continue on the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope?”⁶ As I demonstrate in this essay, Oryx and Crake explores the possibility of environmental catastrophe—including the collapse of human civilization and its potential for rebirth—through an extensive engagement with the Fall myth, which is also a story of origins and of catastrophe.

Previous to Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s most prominent allusion to Milton’s poetry appears in The Handmaid’s Tale, where Milton’s reflection on the parable of the talents in “When I consider how my light is spent” becomes part of the protagonist’s indoctrination into coerced reproductive labor.⁷ Milton’s poem (and by extension Milton) is aligned with the oppressive patriarchal authority that the novel details so terrifyingly: “They also serve who only stand and wait, said Aunt Lydia. She made us memorize it. She also said, Not all of you will make it through. Some of you will fall on dry ground or thorns. Some of you are shallow-rooted.”⁸ Offred remembers the line from Milton’s sonnet, which is more threat than promise, during her ordeal as a Handmaid, and the allusion initiates the novel’s nuanced exploration of the possibilities of passive and active resistance. In Oryx and Crake Milton’s poetry appears in a more positive context, but here, also, a key line from the Miltonic canon signals Atwood’s reworking of some of Milton’s most characteristic concerns. Scholars have...