Negative Utopianism and Catastrophe in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

This article considers Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy as an exemplar of the principle that dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives often serve as vehicles for utopian hopes in anti-utopian historical moments. The trilogy expresses utopian possibilities through the procedures of negative utopianism: a set of discursive practices oriented toward utopian horizons but informed by the principle that utopia cannot be represented from a position within ideology. The Crakers and the God’s Gardeners are the two utopian entities in the trilogy, and the social content attributed to them is generated through two qualitatively distinct approaches to utopian representation that Fredric Jameson has theorized using the Greimasian semiotic rectangle. Both entities fail, but the trilogy places utopian hope in the possibility for their combination, facilitated by an apocalyptic catastrophe that creates space in the world of the trilogy for alternative configurations of the social. These alternatives, however, are deferred beyond the trilogy’s conclusion.