ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how Margaret Atwood invokes Macbeth in her novel Oryx and Crake as an exploration of the fallen state of media within the novel’s near-futuristic landscape. In her novel, a young online exhibitionist with a constant live stream of her life occasionally takes to reciting scenes from Shakespeare’s play. Her recitals speak to the young Jimmy, the youthful incarnation of the novel’s postapocalyptic protagonist, Snowman. Jimmy and his best friend Crake, who will one day set in motion an apocalyptic chain of events, watch television after school. They watch pornography and videos that portray the death and dismemberment of criminals, the dislocation of the poor. They watch with the deadened senses of individuals to whom every form of cruelty has become normal. They are part of a species in which empathy has largely been stamped out by overexposure to the cruelest behaviors. Yet, their world is not one which feels distant or foreign; rather it seems all too like the world we occupy with the slightest exaggerations, pushing what seems familiar just over the horizon of the possible. And into this fallen media landscape comes the specter of Shakespeare. The chapter focuses on the way in which we are all co-conspirators in the destruction of the planet, and how we are all in positions, much like Snowman and Macbeth, of observing the post-fall world from within a traumatized consciousness. History has unfolded, and now we are in the position, as Donna Haraway has written, of “staying with the trouble.”
