In Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
In The Klamath Knot, David Rains Wallace writes that “[b]oth science and religion are mythologies, in the sense that each provides the individual with an account of the origins and meanings of life” (8). In other words, science and religion are both systems of knowledge that are used to explain and examine the place of humanity in nature. With this in mind, my paper analyses Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (henceforth Tide) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (henceforth Oryx), arguing that both texts present two different ways of understanding and reconciling scientific and mythological views of the natural world. These differing epistemic perspectives in turn shape the characters’ perceptions of nature in either text. More specifically, Tide demonstrates that both science and Sundarban myth are symbiotically compatible lenses with which one may perceive nature. In Ghosh’s text, the reconciliation—even syncretic interweaving—of scientific and mythological narratives is emblematic of nature as sublime and complexly ambivalent. Thus, Ghosh’s text advocates a mindset of respectful humility for cultural stories and perceptions of nature, as well as the physicality of nature itself made manifest in the Sundarbans. Conversely, Oryx suggests that a misuse of science, or manipulating nature both technologically and discursively, leads to a degradation of nature. This is also paralleled by a degradation of the religious creation myths surrounding nature. Old and new myths alike are revealed as bathetic and futile, characterised by a hollowing out of the meaning-making potential of both science and religion that contributes to the existential angst pervading Atwood’s postnatural dystopia. Atwood thus spins a cautionary tale against anthropocentric manipulations of science. She suggests that human knowledge and culture—indeed, even human existence—are predicated on the ways in which we view and respond to nature via both scientific and religious discourses.
In Tide, the religious narratives of the Sundarbans depict nature as a complex and ambivalent force in the dual personified figures of the fertile mother Bon Bibi and the malevolent demon Dokkhin Rai. Bon Bibi is depicted as “Mother of the earth” who “gave [Dukhey] reassurance” with “words of kindness” (Ghosh 357). Bon Bibi seems to represent the nurturing, benevolent aspects of nature and its capacity to sustain life. Even as Bon Bibi stands as “the forest’s protectress” (354) and “took [Dukhey] in her lap with a gentle caress” (359), she also embodies the epitome of domestic sustenance: the feast that she summons for Dukhey is described as “so fine, so ambrosial, that some began to say it was hardly credible” (357). In contrast to Bon Bibi’s generosity, Dokkhin Rai is portrayed as a taker rather than giver of life. He is characterised by his “devil’s desires” and “appetites” for human flesh, as embodied in his chosen avatar of the tiger (359). The demon’s “appetites” are notably described as threatening natural phenomena: “like a flood in spate” and “that vast maw” (359). Together with his guise as a tiger, these phrases personify the threatening and consumptive aspects of the mangroves in the figure of the deva. In short, the Dukhey narrative suggests that nature is its own double. Nature is best understood as embodying many contradictions at once: deity and demon, nurturance and threat, benevolence and malevolence, life and death, and the consumption of “rice” and “salaan,” but also of “human flesh” (357, 359).
Local mythic narratives allow human beings to examine both the nurturing and violent aspects of nature in two distinct personifications of the landscape of the Sundarbans. As Wallace writes, Dukhey’s tale thereby “help[s] make sense of an often confusing, sometimes frightening physical world” (8). Yet, this sense of confusion is perhaps not resolved by Dukhey’s tale; nature in Tide, as examined through the lenses of myth, retains a perplexing ambivalence. Even seemingly one-dimensional, archetypal characters like the benevolent mother and malevolent demon are rendered multi-dimensional; both are depicted as sharing similarities although they are different. Thus, the myths of the Sundarbans further highlight nature’s complexity beyond a mere set of binaristic divisions. For example, Kusum’s prayers to Bon Bibi go unanswered when she fails to protect Kusum’s father. Although Kusum “never once stopped reciting Bon Bibi’s name” as the tiger stalks her father, he is still ultimately killed (109). Kusum’s epithet for Bon Bibi—the “Mother of Mercy”—thus becomes darkly ironic when contrasted with the vividly violent description of her father’s death: “she heard the sound of his bones cracking as the animal swiped a paw across his neck; she heard the rustle of the mangrove as the animal dragged the corpse into the forest” (109). Although Dukhey is guarded and saved, Kusum’s father is not, dying in the enactment of a real-life parallel to Dukhey’s story. Horen also informs Kusum that Bon Bibi “chooses to call those who are closest to her” (109). Here, the word “closest” embodies both the intimacy of the Mother’s embrace, as well as the fact that obeying the “call” and stepping into Bon Bibi’s otherworldly realm is also an act of relinquishing one’s life. The Mother of Mercy, then, does not just embody the embrace of life, but also that of the afterlife, taking away life just as easily as she offers it.
Just as Bon Bibi defies the nurturing Mother archetype when she cannot (or chooses not to) protect everybody, Dokkhin Rai also offers up a natural bounty of his own, arguably in a direct parallel to Bon Bibi’s feast. On the one hand, Dokkhin Rai’s “bees began to swarm” like “a demon host” or “army” that “came flying, raising a storm” as they “numbered in lahks” (355, 356). The frightening and violent metaphors used to describe the bees again associate the demon with an image of nature as a deadly threat. Yet, Dokkhin Rai’s bees are also emblematic of nature’s wealth. Just as Bon Bibi summons a feast for Dukhey, the bees “load [Dhona’s] boats within the hour . . . full to the brim, every single one” with honey (356). Similarly, they offer “a rich load of wax” to Dhona, who then pours honey into the river, wherein “the brackish tides turned sweet and mellow”: an incongruously saccharine description when associated with the fearsome Dokkhin Rai (356). When Bon Bibi’s “call” is associated with death and violence, just as Dokkhin Rai harnesses the Sundarban’s natural riches to reward Dhona, the two mythic faces of nature are further rendered complex.
Similar to myth, science in Tide is also used by humanity to comprehend natural phenomena. Rather than positioning science and mythology as incompatible and antithetical narratives[1], Ghosh suggests that both discourses are a symbiotic means of examining nature’s complexity, allowing humanity to synthesise “a workable key to life” (Wallace 8). In fact, myth and science seem to intermingle in Tide. Using Ghosh’s own metaphor, “the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable,” as are the boundaries between the two systems of knowledge (7). Tide, then, seems to posit that mythical and scientific discourses are examples of what Mikhail Bahktin refers to as “languages” present in literature, or “specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (676). Yet, science and myth do not remain distinct; rather, the novel explores how “literature weaves discourses together from disparate social sources” (674). In Bahktin’s words, then, Tide is a “unitary plane” that allows these languages of myth and science to engage in mutually constitutive dialogue (676).
Ghosh therefore facilitates the harmonisation of science and myth, creating a new form of narrative that encourages humanity to appreciate nature’s complexity and sublimity. For example, Piya’s contemplations on mangrove crabs are ecological treatises that bridge mythological and scientific knowledge. In fact, she even de-centers humanity by positing a kind of ecocentric humility in the face of natural phenomena. Piya’s existential ruminations at this point in the novel are markedly scientific; she “recalled a class in which the teacher had demonstrated how some kinds of crab actually laundered the mud they lived in” (Ghosh 142). Piya’s—and Ghosh’s—word choice also borrows heavily from scientific language; she refers to the crabs as “represent[ing] some fantastically large proportion of the system’s biomass” and a “keystone species of the entire ecosystem” (142, emphasis mine). Piya thereby demonstrates that science in Tide is not an innately anthropocentric system. Science does not reify “a radical division between the agency of the rational human as subject and the inert passivity of nature as object” nor “tell a story about meanings and values as the sole property of humans” (Grassie 7). Rather, Piya uses her thoughts on ecology as a new form of explanatory myth, ultimately opening herself up to other beings to question anthropocentric paradigms: she “had thought of these concepts—keystone species, biomass—as ideas that applied to things other than herself” (Ghosh 142). Indeed, Piya’s contemplations on science are tied directly to mythical, deterministic discourses that are acknowledged as larger and more powerful than herself: “it was not her own intention that had brought her here today: it was the crabs . . . Perhaps it was the crab that ruled the tide of her destiny” (142). The figure of the crabs, then, unites Piya’s modern and scientific, yet existential and cosmological ruminations with the thoughts of “the ancients [who] had included a crab in the zodiac” (142). Through Piya, then, Ghosh literally demonstrates how an appreciation of science develops into an appreciation of past myths sourced in nature, as well as an appreciation of nature itself, all of which are sources of knowledge in their own right.
In contrast to Piya’s scientific yet quasi-transcendental, life-giving anecdote of the crabs who “kept the mangroves alive by removing their leaves and litter” (142), Nirmal understands the crabs as an erosive, destructive force of nature: one allied with the tides and gradually eating away at the stability of the land. Yet, such a contrast does not invalidate either narrative; rather, nature in the form of the crabs is revealed as yet another ambivalent phenomenon: an interplay between decay and life, construction and destruction. In Lusibari, Nirmal teaches Fokir to investigate the natural phenomena of the Sundarbans empirically: “put your head to the badh and listen carefully” (205). He tells Fokir, “Even as we stand here, untold multitudes of crabs are burrowing into our badh. Now ask yourself: how long can this frail fence last against these monstrous appetites—the crabs and the tides, the winds and the storms?” (206). Where Piya sees the crabs as a guiding force that nurtures both her and the mangroves, Nirmal foregrounds their erosive potential. He allies the microcosmic erosion of the crabs to macrocosmic, dangerous natural forces like “the tides, the winds and the storms.” Just as science and myth, synthesis and degradation are mutually constitutive, so do Piya’s and Nirmal’s account of the crabs (re)constitute each other to portray nature as complex.
This interplay between natural construction and destruction is echoed in Nirmal’s literary piece on the Sundarban’s tides near the beginning of Tide: “some days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up new shelves and sandbanks where there were none before” (Ghosh 7). Indeed, Nirmal’s use of geological study to shed light on the inner workings of the continents also evinces a respect for natural forces larger than humanity, marrying scientific and mythical discourses in much the same way as Piya does. Nirmal imagines himself teaching schoolchildren “that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and hidden Ganga . . . Put them together and you have what is by far the greatest of the earth’s rivers” (181). Similarly, he allegorises the plate tectonics that caused India to break off from the Antarctic continent as “the story of the Greek goddess who was the Ganga’s mother” (181). This is yet another instance of natural creation and destruction, wherein the schoolchildren “would see [Tethys] dying but they would shed no tears, for they would also see the birth of the two rivers in which her memory would be preserved, her twin children—the Indus and the Ganga” (181). Here, Nirmal equates the geological study of the Tethys Sea and Ganges River with a dramatic saga involving their mythological counterparts. The result is a hybrid story that elevates natural phenomena to the status of a syncretic epic myth that spans both Greek and Hindu pantheons. A synthesis of mythological, scientific and natural histories—as stories, languages, or perhaps even generic modes—thereby allows Nirmal to appreciate the “hidden” aspects of nature. Indeed, as Nirmal himself remarks, “Why should a schoolmaster deny that which even the old mythmakers acknowledge?” (182). Thus, Tide posits a successful reconciliation of scientific and mythical ideas on nature, in turn unifying contradictory concepts such as destruction and synthesis, past and present, the human Self and the sublime natural Other.
Although Tide renders such epistemic symbiosis possible, Oryx suggests that both mythical and scientific discourses are rendered ineffectual—even bathetic—by the linguistic and environmental degradation in Atwood’s dystopian universe. Oryx abounds with instances of how the language of old gradually begins to slip away from Snowman, leading to the decay of pre-apocalyptic systems of knowledge. For example, when Jimmy attempts to recall the word “Mesozoic,” he finds that “[h]e can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can’t reach the word. He can’t attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning” (Atwood 42). In a post-apocalyptic world (mostly) devoid of other human beings to communicate with, Jimmy finds that language itself begins to slip from his grasp. The “dissolution of meaning” in language is then tied to the dissolution of Jimmy’s self, sanity and knowledge. Shortly after Jimmy attempts to recall nutritional facts about sausages, Atwood writes, “He used to know. What’s happening to his mind? He has a vision of the top of his neck . . . Fragments of words are swirling down it, in a grey liquid he realizes is his dissolving brain” (175). The equation of “fragments of words” with “his dissolving brain” highlights Jimmy’s linguistic, epistemic and perhaps even corporeal loss of self in Oryx’s dystopian universe.
Moreover, this decomposition of language also leads to the de-composition of myths and stories of the past which, again, parallels the epistemic damage to Jimmy’s mind and body. When Jimmy mulls over how best to explain the concept of “toast” to the Crakers, he finds that words themselves become empty when their physical referents are no longer present in his dystopian surroundings. Atwood writes, “Toast is when you take a piece of bread – What is bread? – Bread is when you take some flour – What is flour?” (112). Here, Jimmy attempts to connect a chain of words to create meaning. Yet, the constantly disrupted linkages between the words only serve to flesh out how language itself has become hollow, failing to construct coherent semantic bonds between concepts. Interestingly, Jimmy attempts to fill in these vocabularic gaps with various self-styled meanings, evoking fantastical fables from the distant pre-apocalyptic past:
Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. (Atwood 113)
However, to the 21st century reader of Atwood’s text who is all too familiar with the concept of toast, such hyperbolic references can only come across as nonsensical and bathetic. Indeed “[t]oast cannot be explained by any rational means” may be read as a self-reflexive statement. The elevation of toast to the status of mythic device literally defies rationality; the concept of toast itself gives way to a series of irrational false-myths: fake “rituals,” enacted by non-existent “fetishists” (113). And just as “toast” means everything yet nothing at all, so does Jimmy’s attempted recourse to the myths of the olden days. In retelling and recomposing a violent yet hollow toasty mythological history—or, literally, “regurgitat[ing] in verbal form the sins and crimes of [his] past lives”—Jimmy ends off with “Toast is me. I am toast” (113). The double entendre here suggests that Jimmy attempts to place himself at the core of these ostensibly sublime stories of toast. However, he cannot escape the mundane, 21st century connotations of “I am toast.” He, too, is burnt out and symbolically destroyed by these irrational tall tales.
Atwood thus implies that the mythological tales of the past—perhaps even the ability to construct coherent myths—are toast, too: conflagrated in the apocalypse. Indeed, Jimmy’s moniker of Snowman also reflects how the environmental degradation in his post-apocalyptic surroundings also discursively damages myths, stories and even Snowman himself. The loss of snow in Oryx directly leads to the loss of meaning in language, and subsequently to a melting-away of Jimmy’s self: “To [the Crakers] his name is just two syllables. They don’t know what a snowman is, they’ve never seen snow” (7-8). Similarly, just as Jimmy loses a coherent grip on his identity, so does his adoption of an epithet derived from myth also foreground a loss of the myth itself. His new name is described as a “dubious label. The Abominable Snowman– existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints” (7-8). Here, both Jimmy’s own story and the story of the Abominable Snowman fade into a liminal state of near-invisibility: an existential crisis born of dead myths. The snow, the words, Jimmy and the Abominable Snowman are all “existing and not existing” and “known only through rumours and through [their] backward-pointing footprints,” but never through the solidity of [their] corporeal being.
Nevertheless, in the face of this epistemic crisis of being, Jimmy does attempt to furnish the Crakers with new myths that explain the state of their world and their existence. Initially, Jimmy offers a glimpse of the salvific potential of stories by weaving new creation myths. He describes how “Crake took the chaos, and he poured it away . . . [T]his is how Crake did the Great Rearrangement and made the Great Emptiness. He cleared away the dirt, he cleared room” (Atwood 119). The Crakers then respond, “For his children! For the Children of Crake!” (120). Likewise, Jimmy recalls how “Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango” (110). Both the Crakers and Jimmy thereby participate in mutual storytelling, evoking quasi-legendary events like the “Great Rearrangement” and “Great Emptiness” that elevate Crake to the level of Creator-God. Similarly, Jimmy recalls how “the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself” (110). This establishes Oryx as a sacred reiteration of the feminised Earth-mother archetype; she creates through symbolic birthing and her body. Thus, Jimmy attempts to create new myths for the Crakers, instilling their existence with a sense of mythological purpose and fulfilling myth’s age-old pedagogical purpose: “a handy way for older people to explain to younger ones how things became the way they are” (Wallace 9).
Although Jimmy attempts to construct a new epistemic world order through self-written myths, science in Oryx is misused for capitalistic ends. This ultimately serves to disenchant Jimmy’s mythology, rather than reinforce the sublimity of myth as in Tide. Myth itself becomes commodified, secularised and deflated by Oryx and Crake’s manipulation of science and technology as tools of capitalism. Rather than a sacred Magdalene of the wilderness, Oryx is subsequently revealed as a mortal employee. She has been hired by Crake to instruct the Crakers in “botany and zoology,” which have been bluntly demystified as “[s]imple concepts, no metaphysics . . . In other words, what not to eat and what could bite. And what not to hurt” (363). Moreover, Oryx’s sacredness is destabilised by the text’s awareness that her role as messianic tutor is merely performative staging. She enters through “a reconforming doorway concealed behind dense foliage” (363), evoking an actress stepping onto the stage through a hidden entryway. Her “protective spray” and “luminous-green gel contact lenses” also symbolise a false façade that deceives the Crakers, with make-up evoking that which is made-up and make-believe (365). Indeed, the text dramatises Oryx as a stage actress going through all her roles:
Enter Oryx, stark naked and pedagogical in the Crakers’ inner sanctum; or, Enter Oryx, towel around her hair, emerging from the shower; or, Enter Oryx, in a pewter-grey silk pantsuit and demure half-high heels, carrying a briefcase, the image of a professional Compound globewise saleswoman (Atwood 362).
Thus, Oryx literally acts out her mythic yet staged roles as Earthmother and Teacher. The presence of the shower—a backstage space where a non-made-up, so-called “real” Oryx is revealed as an actor-employee—consistently reveals the Craker’s goddess as a mere performative lie. The Oryx creation myth thereby becomes troubled by its simulated, ersatz double, becoming torn between truth and fiction, and two disparate concepts of acting: as divine agency, but also as staged deception.
Similarly, the test space that Crake creates for his “Children” is described as “only the curved ceiling of the bubble-dome, with a clever projection device that simulated dawn, sunlight, evening and night. There was a fake moon that went through its phases . . . There was fake rain” (355). The name of Crake’s facility—Paradice—and the phrase “Paradice is lost” (362) evokes yet another old mythic narrative: Milton’s great Biblical epic, Paradise Lost. However, the misspelling also “dices” the word and concept of “Paradise/dice” into pieces, revealing this new Eden as a mere pirated copy borne of Crake’s manipulations. The grandness of the Crakers—“Crake’s life’s work”—is similarly deflated when Crake reveals to them Jimmy as products: “floor models” like those in “furniture stores” (355). Instead of an almighty Creator who brings order, Crake is revealed as a mere capitalistic controller of technology—or even a twisted furniture salesman—who constructs a “fake” and “simulated” microcosmic world and its commodified inhabitants. Oryx thus suggests that the misuse of scientific discourses and technologies in Atwood’s universe leads to a profaning of myths past and present. Indeed, this “emphasis on manipulation, control, prediction, power, and singular rationality” prove to be “important elements of the scientific culture” in Oryx, leading to the decay of language, stories, the physical environment and ultimately humanity itself (Grassie 8).
In conclusion, Tide presents a potential symbiotic relation between myth and scientific discourses. Both epistemes are interwoven by Ghosh to create a new mythical narrative voice that bridges these two modes of meaning-making, encouraging both humility and appreciation in the face of natural phenomena. Conversely, Oryxdemonstrates that a misuse and manipulation of scientific and capitalistic narratives leads to a dystopian outcome, wherein language, myth, nature and humanity are all commodified and driven to ruin. Analysed together, perhaps the two texts suggest that science is a double-edged sword. Scientific discourse can bolster mythological narratives, grant humanity purpose of existence and reify humanity’s place in the natural world. However, a misuse of science can also destabilise these foundations of civilisational purpose. Perhaps science—as a narrative but also when made manifest as technology—is not inherently anthropocentric or ecocentric. Rather, science and myth have the potential to open up new worlds and new ways of seeing the world, anticipating fresh, syncretic narratives that could potentially extend in either one of these speculative directions.
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[1] Interestingly, my search for secondary sources for this essay demonstrated that the titles of many scientific books imply that they seek to disprove any so-called “non-factual” myths surrounding scientific discourse. For example, the title of Milton A. Rothman’s The Science Gap: Dispelling the Myths and Understanding the Reality of Science suggests that myth and science are not only antithetical, but that the “reality” embodied by science is always superior to the concept of a “myth” which must be “dispelled”! In short, the tendency in contemporary scientific discourse seems to be a valorisation of science in favour of dismissing myth as outmoded, untrue and existing only to be disproven. As mentioned in the introduction, I posit that Ghosh’s text questions this opposition between scientific and mythical systems of knowledge, instead suggesting that both epistemes offer humankind complementary perspectives on nature’s complexity.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. 2003. St Ives: Virago Press, 2013. Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael
Ryan. 2nd ed. London: Blackwell, 2004. Pdf file.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. 2004. London: Harper Collins, 2005. Print.
Grassie, William John. Reinventing Nature: Science Narratives as Myths for an Endangered Planet. Diss.
Temple University, 1994. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1994. Web.
Wallace, David Rains. The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution. California: University of
California Press, 1983. Web.
Other Works Consulted
Cornell, Drucilla. “Feminine Writing, Metaphor and Myth.” Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the
Boundaries. Ed. Stephen Boos and Dorota Glowacka. New York: State University of New York Press,
2002. 161-85. Pdf file.
Crist, Eileen. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129-47. Web.