ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches Atwood’s recent dystopian/post-apocalyptic trilogy through the lens of traumatic memory. Invoking Ulrich Beck’s formulation of modern risk society, Roger Luckhurst posits that trauma’s cultural ubiquity reflects the damage caused by capitalist risk society. Following Luckhurst’s tack, I propose that trauma and risk form the critical terrain of contemporary Western dystopian fiction, emplotted most fully by Atwood’s trilogy, which imagines a post-apocalyptic and nascent posthuman future ensuing from a neoliberal dystopian past. Narratologically, the trilogy’s “dialectic of trauma” organizes the novels’ temporality, so that the protagonists’ reliving of traumatic memories illustrates Atwood’s warning about how democratic societies can give way to dystopian hyper-capitalism, which then produces the ultimate trauma of an engineered apocalypse. Yet rather than resign memory entirely to the post-traumatic symptom, Atwood’s trilogy, as it progresses, shifts the locus of memory from traumatic repetition to a narrative “working through” of the past that opens up proto-utopian possibilities for the future. Utilizing Paul Ricoeur’s conception that history and fiction borrow from each other to give shape to time, I delineate how in MaddAddam, Atwood effects a doubling of the narrator as a historian of traumatic memory. Atwood’s own narrative of a dystopian/apocalyptic history gets radically rewritten by her protagonist Toby as a mytho-history that will serve as the collective memory for the human/posthuman survivors. Memory, then, even after the end of the known world, continues to function as the basis of the utopian impulse.
