In Chapter 2 of Hayles’ book she talks briefly about the idea of language as a code (in a word processor), as a close relationship between the physical form of the printed words and the ideas that they invoke. How does Atwood’s use of language and word choice help to transmit her ideas, making the story and characters more relevant to us as readers?
ENGL 360 | Future Perfect Human
Prof. Myra Seaman | Fall 2016
Much like Ishiguro’s novel, Atwood draws readers in with an intense sense of intimacy while also repelling them with elements of the foreign, often simultaneously. In some ways, the world that precedes the “snowman” world seems much like our world. There is a nuclear family, a system of economy, and otherwise all signs of domestic life. However, it is Atwood’s positioning and twisting of that which seems normal that makes her novel more relevant (and disturbing) to readers. An incident with a “fanatic” is feared at his father’s workplace because she carries a bottle of a “bioform…some vicious Ebola or Marburg splice, one of the fortified hemorrhagics” (53). As readers, we understand these words to be the name of vaguely understood diseases. Consequently, we understand the danger they may present. But, troublingly, Atwood’s description of the danger posed by woman involves the use of scientific names of diseases, as well as calling them “bioforms.” At the same time, however, the narrator (ostensibly Jimmy / Snowman) begins his list of diseases with “some,” hinting at a degree of routine in the incident itself. As Hayles writes in chapter 2, the “transmission of information is never neutral.” In Atwood’s novel, the detached and slightly inverted normalcy contained in Snowman / Jimmy’s remembrances truly bring the reader into the very weird world of the novel.
Atwood also continues her purposeful word choices in the portions of the novel dealing with time of Snowman. In particular, Snowman’s interactions with the Children of Crake contain semblances of a religious tone. Speaking as a kind of enlightened one, Snowman tells the children, for instance, that “these are things from before” and that “these things are safe” (7). Snowman’s prophet-like relationship to the Children is chiefly made clear through this linguistic framework. Snowman himself admits that in his interactions with the children, he must be a “soothsayer”(7). Atwood maintains this relationship throughout the novel by choosing to depict Snowman as instructing the children in direct sentences while simultaneously constructing, for example, an origin story for the children themselves. The effect of this is strong on the reader, as we are reminded of our own religious language and the language of the laws that attempt to govern our world. By observing Snowman’s words to the children, the reader is drawn to strange view of a strange relationship.