Week 13: Margaret Atwood's Literary Speculation

Literary Speculation is the one genre that completely aligns with my way of thinking. Reading speculative literature is giving me permission to think on a deeper level about the story I'm reading. Although I do this with every story, and I often learn much from it, some works are meant for this literary thought processes.

I've read Margaret Atwood before, but I read some of her Oryx and Crake for this entry. The main character, Snowman is in a dystopian version of the USA. When he wakes up, he doesn't remember that "nobody nowhere knows what time it is." Since Snowman is experiencing holes in his memory, it's easy to say other people are experiencing the same, and it's no coincidence that he doesn't remember a quote he recited, but "has the feeling he’s quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another." The writer goes on to note that Snowman "can’t recall ever having read such a thing, but that means nothing". Someone is wiping memories, keeping secrets from the past, and controlling human intelligence, but for what reasons?

Snowman is from the time no one remembers, yet the children he interacts with have no idea what the remnants of the old world are, yet they discover it like treasure. Atwood describes him just as a homeless person would be in today's world. He stinks, he's grumpy, and he pees on one side of a tree, eats on the other, and sleeps in the branches.

Atwood is using elements of science fiction tropes (with a dystopian land, and people not having any contextual history to recall) to make literary statements about the amount of control the government has on us. As Atwood likes to, her literary lessons can be traced back to commentary about the present world. For example, the way the kids treat the homeless Snowman is extremely different than how kids would treat the homeless in today's society. Homeless people are often victims of abuse and bullying because no one cares about them, however, in Margaret Atwood's story, the kids talk to him every week. She obviously wants us to think a little differently about the way we treat our folks without shelter.