玛格丽特·阿特伍德小说《末世男女》中的虚拟、全球化与新原始主义(英文)

Virtuality, Globalization, and Neo-primitivism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

全球化是玛格丽特·阿特伍德在《末世男女》中所关注的众多精彩议题之一。事实上,在她广为人知的小说《使女的故事》及《末世男女》中,阿特伍德就对她长久以来深感兴趣的议题——存乎于虚拟与现实之间的暧昧状态——多所著墨,而人类与后人类之间暧昧不明的界线,则是另一个让阿特伍德也大为着迷的议题。换言之,早在《末世男女》里,阿特伍德就嘲讽性的批判科技狂痴于网络建构中、科技全球化之下的荒诞不经。在《末世男女》中,阿特伍德警醒吾人创造超级机械帝国,可能引发的社会与生态危机。本文中将援用印度生态学者范达娜·希瓦对于发展企业全球化实为新殖民主义之批判。于《末世男女》,阿特伍除了警告吾人世界科技化的后果,也深信自然即多样、即反抗的场所、即异于我们。在此,本文提出的新原始主义意味着重建自然神圣的魅力,尊重自然中既有的他者性。如保罗·霍肯在《永续宣言》里所言,阿特伍德鼓励吾人应从数字知识转换至生物知识,在我们宣称了解自然之际,应当承认自然里既存的他者性,对自然谦卑之需要,更是批判人类想成为超人,控制一切的科技野心之不当。

The globalization of the imagination is one of the most prominent issues that Margaret Atwood tries to address in Oryx and Crake. Actually Atwood has been obsessed with the liminal situation between the ＂virtual＂ and the ＂real＂ in her major novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, two of the most obvious examples. The ambiguity between human and posthuman is another liminality that fascinates Atwood. In other words, the rampant technophilia illustrated by the ubiquitous Internet in the globalization of culture is so vividly depicted in Oryx and Crake that Atwood urges us to confront with the current denatured culture emphasizing only the fabricated and artificial in the false dichotomy of culture and nature. In this paper, I also want to draw attention to the risk of homogenization that globalization might bring to us. I intend to argue that Atwood seems to imply that nature means ＂otherness＂ or ＂elsewhere＂ to the linguistic discourse. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood also wants to alert us to the danger of social crisis of the creation of a vast megamachine. The empire of megamachine encompasses transnational capital and the nation-state system and acts through the global industrialized technological system. I’ll also use Vandana Shiva’s critique of development and corporate globalization, which is seen as a transformation of colonization to read Atwood’s portrayal of the domination of the ＂other.＂ In this novel, Atwood intends to warn us against the technologizing of the world and insists on the faith in nature as difference, as the sites of resistance, as something other than or alien to us. Neo-primitivism here means the restoration of the appeal of the sacred to honor the otherness of nature. As Paul Hawken argues in ＂A Declaration of Sustainability,＂ Atwood also urges us to shift from electronic literacy to biological literacy to acknowledge the otherness of nature with its clear implication of the need of modesty in our claims to understand nature and its obvious critique of our technological desire to be supermen and bring everything under absolute control.