Paradise in Hell: Mapping Out Ustopian Cartographies in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Abstract

The paper examines Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from the fertile lens of cartographical studies of space. Initially, it explores the relationship between cartography and Atwood’s literary oeuvre. Then, it draws upon Foucault’s theory of heterotopia to consider its relevance to Atwood’s Ustopia. It seeks to fill in the gap in the critical studies written on Atwood’s ustopian trilogy. The paper explores how Atwood has diegetically constructed ustopian cartographies in which dystopian spaces are permeated with heterotopic locations of utopian resistance. It attempts to elucidate that the diachronic analysis must be complemented by a synchronic analysis of space. It develops the hypothesis that the ustopian cartographies of the spaces occupied by the characters in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy have resolved the tension between utopia and dystopia. By theorizing the cartographies of her ustopia, Atwood establishes herself as a literary cartographer.

Introduction

The 20th century has witnessed despair and frustration to the extent that “the name of this world is dystopia” (Moylan, 2013, p. 42). Dystopias function as “challenging cognitive maps” of imagined spaces “that are even worse than those that lie outside their authors’ and readers’ doors” (Moylan, 2000, p. xi). These maps unveil social ills by alluding to what is wrong with the present spaces. Utopian thought helps in perceiving the possible causes that led to the constitution of dystopian spaces, and the possible means of establishing better locations. Utopian spaces assume political positions of resistance in the face of the closed dystopian spaces of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, studies on cartographies and literature have gained increasing popularity in academic circles due to the movement of renewal in cultural geography and the emergence of new approaches, especially the strengthening of humanistic geography (Brosseau, 1994). This results in the emergence of research that highlights the geographic and cartographic elements found in literary narratives. Thus, the literary text serves to explore the spatial dimensions in the world of literature to reveal its cartographic and imaginative character. In this respect, Hones (2008) observes that literary cartography takes on new directions and new inspirations in the interdisciplinary environment.

Knowing how literary critics think spatially and how cartographers think literarily helps to establish a dialog between different disciplines to understand text cartographies as coexisting and reciprocally co-productive (Hones, 2008, p.1314). Such a spatial turn in literature is “based on the increasing popularity of such vogue terms as “literary cartography,” “mapping,” “literary topography,” “heterotopes of literature” etc.” (Hess-Luttich, 2012, p. 1). Studies on space and locality have proposed to complement the historian’s diachronic look with a synchronic vision of space and locality. The theorists of spatiality refute the long-held idea that space is “an inert container [. . .] a box where cultural history ‘happens’”; and redefine it as “an active force that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth” (Moretti, 1998, p. 3). Through utopianism, cartographies of spaces, places, and landscapes can be projected in the literary text to produce new meanings. Utopianism, thus, offers a possible “image” of place that metaphorically symbolizes freedom. The utopian text maps “the de- and re-territorializations of social desires” to offer “a radically new and deeply spatialized kind of political, social, and cultural formation” (Wegner, 2002, p. 49).

This paper studies the relationship between ustopia and cartography in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Such a study deserves an analysis beyond the conventional forms of investigation in the light of recent discussion on spatiality in literature and the influence of new approaches in the debates on cartography that invite readers to rethink maps. In her oeuvre, Atwood shows an increasing interest in the metaphorical potential of maps. She employs cartographic tools to reveal her ustopian plots and stories. Different approaches of cartography and spatiality are presented to strengthen the interdisciplinary dialog between Atwood’s trilogy and cartographic representations. Concepts such as “ustopia,” “critical utopia” and “critical dystopia” can open new avenues for the study of the interface between Atwood’s trilogy and cartography as sociocultural practices. This study aims to question and break the rigid structure of Atwood’s narratives in the MaddAddam trilogy to move the plots closer to the simultaneous and relational nature of maps.

The three novels of the trilogy are: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). In this article, I explore ustopian cartographies of utopian and dystopian spaces, places and locations in Atwood’s Trilogy in order to examine how Atwood manages to draw ustopian cartographies in her trilogy. To what extent do these cartographies resolve the tension between utopia and dystopia? Does Atwood establish herself as a literary cartographer? Atwood’s trilogy, MaddAddam contrapuntally represents two cartographical types of spaces. Despite its prevailing dystopian spaces, the trilogy implicitly presents other utopian spaces that contain the possible potential of turning the dystopian spaces to better ones. Despite the cornucopia of studies on the trilogy, none is found to investigate it from cartographical perspectives of space. This paper explores how Atwood has diegetically constructed dystopian spaces permeated with heterotopic locations of utopian resistance.

Atwood’s Ustopia: Cartography and Heterotopia

In “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia,” Atwood has drawn the cartographies of ustopia, which is a combination of both utopia and dystopia as “each contains a latent version of the other” (Atwood, 2011, p. 66). Atwood (2011) argues that ustopia offers covert utopian locations (Paradise) in the infernal spaces (hells): “within each utopia, a hidden dystopia; within each dystopia, a concealed utopia” (p. 85). By creating her ustopia, Atwood places herself as a literary cartographer who highlights the spatial roads through which she “generates norms, particular models of readability, that produce a particular type of geography” (Brosseau, 1994, p. 349). By defining her “ustopia” in opposite cartographic terms, Atwood shows how her ideas, thoughts, and concepts are relative and simultaneous. By relating her ustopia to cartography, she invites the readers to pay more attention to ways of reading her texts as ustopian maps, to bring the two areas closer together. Therefore, the paper attempts to show that Atwood generates ustopian cartographies that are socially and spatially significant. Thus, there is a need to discuss how ustopia is related to other terms of utopianism and spatiality. The paper presents transdisciplinary perspectives on Ustopia and cartography from the point of view of Foucault, one of the major thinkers of spatiality. Such approaches are characterized by their plurality, multi-vocality and polysemy and are not mutually exclusive.

Etymologically, utopia means both a non-place and a good place (Viera, 2010, p. 4). More’s Utopia describes an imaginary space “an island” with a harmonious and extremely controlled society, presented as having places that make it the happiest in the world. Dystopia, in turn, is a term that has been coined in the 18th century (Claeys, 2010) and later used by John Stuart Mill (Sargent, 2010), but only popularized in the middle of the 20th century, through literature. Utopianism is “social dreaming – the dreams and nightmares” (Sargent, 1994, p. 3). The metaphor of dreams and nightmares shows that utopias and dystopias can be two sides of the same coin. Utopianism has three faces: “literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory” (Sargent, 2010, p. 5). In brief, utopianism is a social phenomenon that is expressed in various ways, where there is a dream and desire for a better life. It has three main formal elements: “the alternative society,” “the protagonist specific to utopias” and “the ideological contestations in the text” (Moylan, 1986, p. 36). The alternative society is a space projected with its political and economic structures. Unlike the realistic novel, the alternative social space of utopia is not the backdrop or a décor against which actions occur. It has a critical objective in representing a heterotopic space, whose locations are “based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis” (Suvin, 1979, p. 49). Thus, utopia does not only offer an alternative space but also an alternative time. This is relevant to the idea of the “chronotope” which “expresses space/time relations that reflect certain social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of human individuals in this particular space and time” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 233). Appropriating Bakhtin’s concept to the utopian genre, “the utopian chronotope” is defined as “a means for uncovering social contradictions that employs a certain way of expressing time’s fullness” by locating “the harmonious condition of the individual and society in the utopian space and time” (Teslenko, 2003, pp. 26–27). In utopia, the alternative space is endowed with an alternative time. Each utopian space is imbued with a distinctive ideology that contradicts the real time ideology.

Dystopias have become the major trend of utopian writings in the 20th century. They are the representation of social control for the creation of a nightmarish social space. They represent social fears and anxieties of humanity in an extrapolated way. All dystopias represent different speculations about negative possibilities for the future of humanity. A dystopia is a negative utopia, that is, “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (Sargent, 1994, p. 9). Both utopia and dystopia “attempt to order space or particular spaces that were nowhere and produce the conditions of an ordered and stable society that was somewhere” (Hetherington, 1997, pp. 65–66). Atwood’s Ustopia can be appropriated to the concepts of critical utopia/dystopia of Sargent (2001) and Moylan (2000). Critical dystopias emerge to “negotiate the necessary pessimism of generic dystopia with an open, militant, utopian stance” (Moylan, 2000, p. 195). Such critical dystopias break with the hegemonic closure of the alternative fictional spaces or the maps of hell by mapping a paradise amid hell. They present a worse fictional social space that “normally includes at least one eutopic enclave” (Sargent, 2001, p. 222). The only difference between Atwood’s Ustopia and critical utopia/dystopia is the idea of exclusiveness. In critical utopias/dystopias, the spaces are already defined as utopias or dystopias with counter stances. However, in Atwood’s Ustopia, there are no borderlines between what is utopian and what is dystopian. It is characterized by the latency of both genres. The latency and unexclusiveness of the term are apparent in the narrative of the MaddAddam trilogy where utopian and dystopian are simultaneously interweaved without giving a voice for one over the other. Therefore, Mitchell (2020) asserts that ustopia is “a more sustained interaction of utopian and dystopian impulses” (p. 195).

The relevance of Atwood’s “Ustopia” to Foucault’s “heterotopia” is significant. Foucault has laid the foundation for the cultural analysis of space. Such an analysis is characterized by “simultaneity, juxtaposition, the near and far, the side-by-side, and the dispersed” (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986, p. 22). The simultaneity and juxtaposition are the chief characteristics of Atwood’s “ustopia.” Through ustopia, Atwood attempts to offer a simultaneous actualization of utopia and dystopia in her narrative. According to her, ustopia is the simultaneous combination of “the imagined perfect society and its opposite” (Atwood, 2011, p. 66). Foucault and Miskowiec (1986), in turn, introduce his concept of “heterotopia” as a space of resistance that is located against the surrounding forces of oppression. This term establishes the juxtaposition of two opposite “topoi” or places as suggested by the prefix, “hetero.” Heterotopias “identify multiple places that were set apart from, while still existing in, the larger world – worlds within worlds and placeless places or places out of place” (Karkov, 2020, p. 19). The significance of these heterotopias lies in the disruption and the resistance of any familiar patterns of thought or ideology. According to Foucault and Miskowiec (1986), heterotopias are “counter-sites” that “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (p. 24). By combining the obverse and the reverse elements of utopia and dystopia in one term, ustopia disrupts the familiarity of both notions and suggests their latency in each other. This means that ustopia, like heterotopia, is a space of resistance where utopia and dystopia are co-existing, but both are “outside of all places” or “placeless places” (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986, p. 24). Thus, the relevance of Foucault’s “heterotopia” to Atwood’s “ustopia” can enrich the analysis of the ustopian cartographies of space in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood’s cartographical thinking in theorizing her Ustopia reveals “a form of play with possibilities and a practice of moving geographic thought in new directions” (Cameron, 2012, p.585).

Caquard (2013) envisions the inspiring relationship between cartography and narratives. He notes that “the spatial turn has produced a keen interest in maps and cartography” (p. 140). Cartography has begun to encompass mapping as a conceptual framework for better understanding the structure of novels. In establishing her “ustopia,” Atwood has seized on the idea of mapping the “dire cartographies” as a metaphor to explore the relationship between herself as a literary cartographer and the ustopian places responsible for structuring her work. By writing about the “dire cartographies” of her ustopia, Atwood shows her concern with the question of how to map, describe, and explain her ustopian places. In this way, she explores the spatial narrative of her ustopian cartographies. Atwood’s literary cartography considers “the multiplicity of stuff that is on the earth’s surface, the things that can be thought about it, the words that can be said about it” (Ryden, 1993, p. 16). By talking about the roads to her ustopia, Atwood has begun her work with the map as her goal. Therefore, she has realized that to know a place, a more complex and deep reading of the environment is needed to make the transition from the real world to the imagined one.

Dystopian Spaces in the Maddaddam Trilogy

In the MaddAddam trilogy, there are four dystopian places: corporatopia, privatopia, ecotopia, and gynotopia. Each of the four terms denotes the nature of the space occupied. Atwood extrapolates the capitalist principle of profit generation to create dystopian places in which corporations, privatization, ecological abuse, and patriarchy dominate all social spheres. This results in representing dystopian spaces characterized as “one vast uncontrolled experiment” (Atwood, 2003, p. 228). The dystopian spaces in Atwood’s trilogy constitute heterotopias that “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986, p. 23). They do not represent or reflect a real status quo. However, they represent a future world that is worse than the present. They disrupt the uniformity and monotony of the real space. Therefore, these dystopian spaces are heterotopic spaces of resistance. They negatively disrupt power structures of the prevailing real community and refuse to conform with its established order. Certain spaces will always escape its grasp and disrupt the prevailing order. It is important to recognize that the utopian/dystopian writer is different from the realistic writer. The former looks for both the real and the imagined spaces and endow them with his/her experience. On the contrary, the latter fixes his/her eyes on reality “to record what he/ [she] sees before his/ [her] eyes.” Lacking a critical utopian reasoning, the realistic writer “neither explores a possibility nor tries to discover an orientation” (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 178). In contrast, the utopian/ dystopian writer goes beyond to “proclaim and desire the impossible” (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 36). This is evident in the contrapuntal reading of the ustopian cartographies of Atwood’s trilogy.

Within the dystopian cartographies of corporatopia in the trilogy, there is no strong or centralized state. Such dystopian cartographies easily locate hegemonic power that causes the oppression in the society. There is a state, a government made up of politicians, but this government is under the control of large corporations. This location is narrated through the remembrances of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. In the trilogy, the absence of the political class symbolizes the erasure of the state and the weakness of the political class. In Oryx and Crake (2003), Jimmy and his friend, Crake, discuss “world political leaders” who “were toppled and replaced with such rapidity that it hardly mattered,” (p. 82). The political class, it is implied, are merely sock puppets, corrupted and manipulated by corporate power. In MaddAddam (2013), some aspects of the political relations of this dystopian space are revealed. Zeb tells Toby how he traveled part of the world acting as a hacker where “politicians were setting nets for other politicians,” (p. 174). The association of politicians with hackers implies the illegal use of private information to win elections or get favors.

In Oryx and Crake (2003), political elections have become irrelevant, with older residents in the corporate compounds, where Jimmy grows up complaining: “Remember when voting mattered?” (p. 63). In MaddAddam (2013), the act of voting is linked to electronic ballot boxes, demonstrating that there is a whole business dedicated to hacking the votes and manipulating election results. Zeb tells Toby that, as a young man, he worked for “Ristbones, an outfit that specialized in the hacking of electronic voting machines” (p. 175). He notes that the voting machines belong to a corporation—“nobody really wanted to go back to the old paper system, and the Corp that owned the machines, picked the winners” (p. 181). The trilogy offers “a capitalism that achieves its authoritarian ends without the intervention of a centralized state” (Vials, 2015, p. 237). In the dystopian space, “the power of the authoritarian state gives way to the more pervasive tyranny of the corporation” where everyday life is “reified, exploited, and commodified” (Moylan, 2003, p. 135).

The privatization of the government affects the social construction of the diegetic space. The characters are directly affected negatively by such fictitious social spaces. This dystopian space is not only a worsened version of the capitalist societies, but also an oppressive location within the fictional space. In this privatopia, public services are portrayed as bankrupt, in decay or non-existent because they were privatized. In Oryx and Crake (2003), Jimmy moves with his family from the OrganInc Farm Compound to the HelthWyzer Compound, where “Jimmy went to the HelthWyzer Public School” (p. 54). However, the school is not open to the general public. In the pleeblands, the location of the poorest commons, schools are described as “dump bins they still called ‘the public system’” (p. 174). The contrast between the schools of the Compounds and those of the pleeblands maintains the social abyss between two different locations in the dystopian space.

At the outset of The Year of the Flood (2009), the location of public health in the dystopian space is depicted. Toby’s mother becomes seriously ill and does not get adequate treatment, as “[n]obody could get public wellness coverage” (p. 26). Toby’s father ends up selling everything for the treatment of his wife. She cannot resist and ends up dying, which results in his suicide. Moreover, the corporations themselves create new diseases to sell their treatments. In Oryx and Crake (2003), Crake reveals to Jimmy that HelthWyzer is manufacturing diseases to continue profiting from treatments: ““don’t they keep discovering new diseases?” “Not discovering,” said Crake. “They’re creating them.” (p. 211). Therefore, public health is not just scrapped to make people resort to company treatments, but manipulated unethically to generate maximum profit.

In the trilogy, the public security proves to be a total failure. In contrast, at the outset of Oryx and Crake (2003), a private security company called, CorpSeCorps, serves corporations. In The Year of the Flood (2009), CorpSeCorps represent the privatization of the police and general social security. In one of Toby’s early memories, “the CorpSeCorps were consolidating their power. They’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations” (p. 25). The privatization of the police implies the logic of product and consumption. The pleeblands are full of criminal gangs and gangs and that “the CorpSeCorps run the mobs” (p. 48). This highlights corruption due to police privatization. CorpSeCorps not only profit from the violence of the pleeblands, but also actively profit by allowing crime to occur: “The local pleebmobs paid the CorpSeCorpsMen to turn a blind eye” (p. 33). In brief, the privatization of the police in the dystopian locations of privatopia results in a monopoly of violence. Thus, Toby “would be in trouble as the daughter of an admitted lawbreaker” (p. 27). Toby is forced to bury her father’s body wrapped in garbage bags in one courtyard and to escape to one of the worst parts of pleebs, the Willow Acres or as the locals call it “the Sewage Lagoon” (p. 30).

As for the location of media in this privatopia, there is a need for constant vigilance over the residents of the Compounds, as there could always be a danger of information leaking to neighboring corporations. In The Year of the Flood (2009), when Ren leaves the God’s Gardeners and the pleeblands to return to the HelthWyzer Compounds with her mother, she uses an illicit cell phone to maintain contact with her friend Amanda. To make a call, she locks herself inside her bedroom wardrobe since “It was a crime to have an unregistered phone, and the CorpSeCorps could track such phones” (p. 224). The social space is monitored by the compounds. Such surveillance results in a lack of freedom within these dystopian locations. The lack of mobility is often felt by the characters as suffocating or limiting, as Jimmy’s mother, in Oryx and Crake (2003), claims to feel a “prisoner” (p. 53). Furthermore, in MaddAddam (2013), the media does not have the objective of bringing the truth to the population, as it is under the control of large corporations. Adam One demonstrates to Zeb that the “press is Corps-controlled” (p. 255). Adam One demonstrates the power of information control to maintain the dystopian space.

In the trilogy, there is a division between people who work with numbers and people who work with words. The former often become prestigious corporate scientists while the latter have a much harder time getting good jobs. In this privatopia, numbers people are worth more than word people. Jimmy, as a word person, gets a job to work in the promotion and marketing of the products of a minor corporation Compound called AnooYoo. His work was “to cudgel his brains and spend ten-hour days wandering the labyrinths of the thesaurus and cranking out the verbiage” (Atwood, 2003, p. 248). Jimmy gets a job that pays poorly to do a complicated and frustrating job. In contrast, Crick, as a numbers person, starts working as a boss on his own project at the RejoovenEsense corporation after graduation. Jimmy, as a word genius, becomes underemployed, while Crake, as a numbers genius, becomes “a rich loony” (Atwood, 2009, p. 305) at a young age. Linguistic reduction and control are typical characteristics of dystopias where they “symbolically stand in for other forms of social (ideological, political, institutional) control” (Cavalcanti, 2000, p. 152). Moreover, the conflict of spaces in the text “has often turned on the control of language” (Moylan, 2000, p. 148).

The dystopian cartographies of ecotopia results from the ecological imbalance, caused by human actions. The idea of dystopian spaces has “seen a gradual and inexorable increase in its elaboration within the context of ecological mysticism and science” (Stableford, 2014, p. 263). In the trilogy, there are corporations that command biotechnological experiments to profit from the production of various products and services. These experiments raise several serious ecological and ethical questions about the rights of non-human animals. The environment has deteriorated in these spaces. The corporations of this dystopian space dramatically alter the planet’s environment. In Oryx and Crake (2003), the state of the places can be perceived through the complaints of Jimmy’s mother of “how everything was being ruined and would never be the same again, like the beach house her family had owned when she was little” (p. 63). In these spaces, several species are extinct such as oryx and the bird crake. Other extinct animals and plants are mentioned as codenames such as the black rhino, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the swift fox, polar bear, Indian tiger, the Lotis blue and the White Sedge.

In Oryx and Crake (2003), Crake has access to confidential demographic reports according to which humanity was in big trouble because of environmental depletion: “demand is going to exceed supply for everyone” (p. 295). Several species of animals are exploited and reduced to mere products of corporations. This exploration appears linked to genetic engineering, in the creation of new animals for market purposes. In Oryx and Crake (2003), the treatment that the pigs received at the OrganInc Farms is reduced to mere receptacles for human organs: “The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host” (p. 22). The place where the piglets were kept symbolizes the utilitarian character of these spaces: “They were kept in special buildings, heavily secured: the kidnapping of a pigoon and its finely honed genetic material by a rival outfit would have been a disaster” (pp. 25–26). In brief, the majority of the population in these spaces seems insensitive to the pains of animals. In general, the dystopian attitude is that humans have every right to dominate and manipulate other species, if it generates profit.

Atwood draws Ustopian cartographies full of dystopian spaces for the exploration of the female body. The exploration of the female body contributes to the dystopian spaces that draw “a futuristic space in which women’s social roles have been thoroughly dominated and severely limited by a patriarchal order” (Cavalcanti, 2000, p. 20). In Oryx and Crake (2003), after one of the many fights with his then wife, Jimmy’s father says to his son, “Women always get hot under the collar. She’ll cool down. Let’s have some ice cream” (p. 16). The narrative voice claims that female bodies are treated as “mysterious, important, uncontrollable” while those of men “were never dealt with; they were never even mentioned” (p. 17). The cartographies of the dystopian spaces in the trilogy depict all female characters as sexually abused.

Early in Oryx and Crake (2003), Ramona is described as a “tech genius,” but her position is simply that of Jimmy’s father’s laboratory assistant. When the latter leaves the OrganInc Farms residential compound and moves to the HelthWyzer corporation compound, Ramona goes with him, as she was an “invaluable asset” (p. 53). She is described as an item of value though she is a “genius.” By contrast, Crake, who is a male genius, becomes the chief scientist of his own project at RejoovenEsense shortly after graduation. CorpSeCorps’ location in this space demonstrates the abuse of the female body and sexual slavery by debt. Toby runs away, leaving the house behind, so as not to become a possible sex slave. Without identity, she ends up getting a job at SecretBurguers, whose manager, a man named Blanco, was in the habit of choosing some of the employees to rape and torture. He “had friends in the CorpSeCorps” (Atwood, 2009, p. 36); so, it was impossible to report him. Thus, Toby soon becomes Blanco’s sex slave, living in a true patriarchal hell of exploiting her body and silencing her voice. In this location of patriarchal hell, “men dominate, oppress and exploit women” (Walby, 1990, p. 20). In brief, the domination of women is a structural aspect of the dystopian space of the trilogy.

Feminist dystopian cartographies “overtly thematize the linguistic construction of gender domination by telling stories about language as instrument of both (men’s) domination and (women’s) liberation” (Cavalcanti, 2000, p. 152). Language is used as an instrument of domination in Oryx’s trajectory. When she begins to narrate her story to Jimmy, Oryx says she could not remember the language she spoke as a child. She finds herself speechless, as she tells Jimmy that “she did remember that the clumsiness of the words in her mouth, the feeling of being struck dumb” (Atwood, 2003, p. 115). The liberating power of language for women in feminist dystopian spaces occurs through “the textual construction of feminist utopias of/f language,” (Cavalcanti, 2000, p. 175). The feminist dystopian spaces are “materialized by means of narrative, and therefore, of language” (Cavalcanti, 2000, p. 175).

Utopian Spaces in the Maddaddam Trilogy

The existence of utopian spaces amid the dystopian spaces of the trilogy is contrapuntal in Said’s (1993) term. The contrapuntal technique exhibits a counterpoint that addresses both the perspective of dystopia and the resistance to it (“counter-narrative”). The critical utopianist is engaged in counter-narrative to the dystopian spaces inherent in the society. Such a contrapuntal utopia involves “a simultaneous awareness” of both dystopian and utopian spaces from which “new narratives” emerge (Said, 1993, p. 50). The counternarrative of the trilogy lends itself to the Foucauldian heterotopia. Yoshino (2010) states that “heterotopian imagination contrasts with the utopian imagination in standing against the totalitarian state” (p. 217).

Critical utopia/dystopia is contrapuntal in establishing equal and interdependent relations between spaces different in nature. These features characterize the trilogy as a critical dystopia, which is an “open, militant, utopian stance that not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the text’s alternative world” (Moylan, 2000, p. 195). Such dystopia “includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopian be overcome” (Sargent, 2001, p. 222). In the trilogy, there are three emerging utopian cartographies: eco-utopian, revolutionary utopian, and post-human that represent the discourse of resistance. In the Foucauldian sense, they are heterotopic as they positively disrupt power structures not only of the prevailing real community but also of the imagined dystopian places.

Such utopian places of Atwood’s Ustopian cartographies are implicitly drawn to transform the dystopian ones into spaces charged with utopian possibilities. Thus, Atwood as a literary cartographer, draws ustopian cartographies in which she transforms her physical reality to show the place as it should be (utopia) or as it could be (dystopia). In mingling both utopia and dystopia, Atwood offers ustopian cartographies where dystopian places are imbued with utopian meanings. This is relevant to the concepts of critical utopia/ dystopia that challenge the closure usually associated with utopian thought. In this sense, Atwood’s ustopian cartographies in the trilogy recognize that “societies and spatialities are shaped by continuous processes of struggle” (Harvey, 2000, p. 190). The trilogy does not introduce its readers with “a stable world already made and discovered” but takes them “through the dialectics of making a new socio-ecological world” (Harvey, 2000, p. 190). Thus, the trilogy establishes new cartographical configurations, to open new spaces. In reviewing ustopian cartographies of the trilogy, one can find them offering a possibility of cartography that simultaneously seeks to disrupt, subvert and reconstruct the plurality and multivalency of its mappable imagined universe.

Eco-utopian cartographies are drawn by God’s Gardeners who seek a way of life radically different from the modus operandi of the dystopian spaces. The location of God’s Gardeners advocates a deep ecology of communion with other species of animals. Their location is self-sustaining gardens hidden on the outskirts of the pleeblands. Their costumes are simple and lack technological equipment. They dwell in a space in which they live together for the mutual benefit. The eco-utopian cartographies of the God’s Gardeners are places of rescue against oppressive agents. God’s Gardeners have rescued Toby from the hell she was living. When she is taken to the hideout of the Gardeners, she is faced with an ecological utopian space compared to the desolate places of the pleeblands: “It was as if a large, benevolent hand had reached down and picked her up, and was holding her safe” (Atwood, 2009, p. 43). This location is presented as a eutopic island within dystopia or as a paradise within a hell. In The Year of the Flood (2009), almost all the action takes place within the sect which is presented as an inverted mirror of the dystopian fictional space of the trilogy. While in the dystopian spaces, places are fortified condominiums for the elites, the God’s Gardeners welcome anyone who wants to come. God’s Gardeners give room to fugitives who escape oppression such as Toby, Jimmy’s mother, and Amanda. In a dialog between Ren and Amanda, it is clear that, had it not been for the Gardeners, the latter would have been living on the streets: “she didn’t really live anywhere: she was sleeping in a squat somewhere, or worse’” (Atwood, 2009, p. 76).

Schools in these utopian cartographies are places where children learn practical survival skills; the children develop an ecological and social awareness opposed to the logic of technical education in corporate compounds. Living with the Gardeners, Ren has studied various courses on recycling, culinary arts, sewing, mental arithmetic, bees and mycology, and many other (Atwood, 2009, p. 61). Education in this utopian location has a type of ecological ethics totally different from the utilitarian character of genetic engineering training in the dystopian spaces of the trilogy. God’s Gardeners show their ecological awareness in their attitudes toward the planet and other species, which is totally opposed to the exploitation that occurs in dystopian spaces. In this eco-utopian location, the relationship between the humans and non-humans is “one of loving-kindness and kinship, for Man in his unfallen state was not yet a carnivore” (Atwood, 2009, p. 12). This location is a type of ecological countercultural space in opposition to the dystopian social spaces in force. Thus, as a utopian locus, this location is an open space of opposition to the hegemonic and dystopian system in the trilogy.

Utopian thought, in Levitas’s contention, has three main functions: “compensation, critique and change” (Levitas, 2001, p. 28). It offers an alternative utopian space that compensate for the dystopian space. It also provides a critique to the real status quo in an attempt to change it for the best. These functions have been achieved in the eco-utopian location of the God’s Gardiners. First, it is a compensative utopian alternative locus that has a form of social functioning that, although not perfect, can be considered as better than that of the dystopian spaces represented in the trilogy. Second, it offers a social critique of the dystopian practices through the sermons of Adam One, and through the practices of the sect. Third, the Gardeners represent a space of social change, achieved at a microsocial level. They have no plans to cause a total revolution in society. However, their teachings, preachings, and practices have even spread to the point of calling the attention of CorpSeCorps. In the post-apocalyptic space-time, Zeb tells Toby that: “The God’s Gardeners was getting too big and successful for the CorpSeCorps. To them, it looked like a resistance movement in the making” (Atwood, 2013, p. 332). In brief, the locus of the God’s Gardeners is an alternative utopian among the dystopian social spaces. Despite its imperfections, this locus is a kind of utopian enclave. Such an enclave, however, is not definitive, but extremely important for the utopian possibility in dystopia. In the posthuman space at the ends of the trilogy, some of the members of God’s Gardeners survive to occupy a hybrid space of humans and Crakers.

The revolutionary utopian cartographies are occupied by a bio-terrorist group called MaddAddam. In Oryx and Crake (2003), Crake tells Jimmy that he has discovered that there is a secret virtual room that serves as a meeting place for a group that was provoking terrorist attacks in order to overthrow the dystopian spaces. In Crake’s words, “‘It’s a group’, said Crake. ‘Or groups’” (p. 215). The group has undertaken bioterrorist attacks on several corporations such as ChickieNobs and Happicuppa coffee plantations. Crake analyzes the location of this group as a location of resistance to the hegemonic dystopian spaces. The revolutionary nature of their location is established. In Crake’s words, “they’re after the whole system, they want to shut it down” (p. 217). MaddAddam is an underground group founded by Zeb and other ex-God’s Gardeners. They are “Top scientists—gene-splicers” who “hated what the Corps were doing” (Atwood, 2009, p. 333). These scientists produced the bio-forms that attack the dystopian locations. They have revolutionary utopian goals, according to which “the planet could repair itself” on the destruction of the infrastructure (p. 333). The group occupies a utopian space to transform society through causing a revolution against the dystopian hegemonic spaces. Their location represents a utopian enclave of resistance and a transforming agency. They are acting against “the corporate powers that are ruling and destroying the world” as a group of “eco-activist scientists and eco-warriors commit public acts of bio-resistance” (Bouson, 2011, p. 20). They break the dystopian machine and establish a new more harmonious order on ecological issues. Unlike God’s Gardeners, who have a physical place where people live “a better way of being,” this group opposes the dominant system by attacking the machinery that maintains it. The space between the two brothers, the energetic Zeb of MaddAddam and the pacifist Adam of God’s Gardeners is ambivalent. The utopian loci of both groups represent two opposite faces of resisting spaces against dystopian ones.

The third utopian cartographies are occupied by hybrid humanoid beings created through genetic engineering called Crakers or Children of Crake and who are described by Snowman as beautiful and friendly people. In Oryx and Crake (2003), a post-apocalyptic space is apparently inhabited by the last man, Snowman. It is established that civilization has been destroyed and that this Snowman lives alone, haunted by fragmented memories in a fading process. According to the narration, “there are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where memory used to be. Rubber plantations, coffee plantations, jute plantations” (pp. 4–5). The Crakers are “a group of the children” (p. 6) who do not have a reference to the human space of Snowman. Their women are “admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs. No body hair” (p. 100). Unlike their human counterparts, who have wounds caused by insect bites, all Crakers have a smell “like a crateful of citrus fruit” (p. 102), that allows them to occupy this post-apocalyptic location full of insects. Their “irritating qualities” of “naive optimism,” “open friendliness,” “calmness,” and “limited vocabularies” (p. 153) are totally devoid of the human impulse for violence. There are special chemicals in their men’s urine to ward off predators and to do something important besides raising children (p. 147). This demonstrates a certain maintenance of gender roles in patriarchal society. All Crakers have the ability to purr like a cat, this being a healing auto-mechanism for minor wounds, something Crake has copied from cats when he discovered that they purr “at the same frequency as the ultrasound used on bone fractures and skin lesions” (p. 156). They are “vegetarians and eat mostly grass and leaves and roots” (p. 158). Their sexuality is similar to that of non-human animals. Women enter heat “once every three years” (p. 164), with their blue buttocks and abdomen, and invite four men to mate, so that this quintet will copulate until the woman becomes pregnant. Snowman reflects on the consequence by saying that “[s]ex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing, conducted in the dark and inspiring suicides and murders” (p. 165).

In this posthuman location, Crake considers the humanoid creatures of the Crakers to be superior. He uses genetic engineering to mix the human genome with that of other animals to improve humanity. As he states: “Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first” (p. 164). He claims that the Crakers project was inextricably linked to another project of the commercialization of a pill called BlyssPluss. Although he tells Jimmy that this pill would serve to solve people’s sexual problem, it serves to spread the virus to decimate humanity. The Crakers are open for perfect adaptability within their plan to destroy human space and turning it into a space of greater harmony between species. Crake seeks to restore ecological balance, to end corporations, to establish a better world, and to subvert the anthropocentric position of man in the world. This location is that of “judgment, catastrophe and renewal” (Rosen, 2008, p. xxii) where Crake makes judgment of humans, initiates a catastrophe that destroys them by using the viral BlyssPluss pill, and renews humanity with his perfected, reduced, post-human Crakers. Although they are utopian alternatives, Crakers are still, imperfect creatures. Toby tells them that “Crake got rid of the chaos and the hurtful people [. . .] to clear a safe place for you to live in” (Atwood, 2013, p. 4). The location of Crakers is totally hidden, as they are in Project Paradice inside the RejoovenEsense Corporation Compound where Crake has created them. They are “totally chosen babies that would incorporate any feature, physical or mental or spiritual” (Atwood, 2003, p. 304). The very survival and development of the Crakers depends on the apocalypse that decimated humanity.

Conclusion

The paradox of “paradise in hell” shows the ustopian cartographies of space occupying a space that resists any closure. Theories of space have offered a fertile ground upon which the cartographies of ustopian space have been drawn in Atwood’s trilogy. The trilogy serves as a basis for contrapuntally structuring spaces to show them together with their resisting heterotopias. Both utopian and dystopian spaces are configured as sides of the same coin. The existence of both utopian and dystopian spaces side by side creates a hybrid space of representation. In constituting spaces simultaneously, Atwood resists closure to show utopian cartographies amidst dystopian spaces and vice versa through the open, ambiguous ending of her Ustopian trilogy.

Atwood manages to map out intertwined “ustopian” cartographies of space that show the entire utopian and dystopian spaces in continuous dialectical relationship. The entire narrative of the trilogy presents ustopian cartographies of space in which dystopian places are in contrapuntal dialectical relationship with utopian enclaves. Read from the lens of spatial theories of Foucault, Atwood’s trilogy offers heterotopic Ustopian cartographies that constitute a space of both hope and resistance. The space of hope ensures that even in the darkest places of dystopia, there is a utopian exit from the dystopian spatial labyrinth. In the same manner, the space of resistance ensures that Ustopian cartographies have resolved the tension between utopia and dystopia. In such Ustopian cartographies, each dystopia begets its utopian possibility. Politics, ecology, feminism, industrialization, privatization, and post humanity are spaces with contrapuntal dimensions in Atwood’s ustopian cartographies. Each ustopian space offers different utopian and dystopian places side by side without privileging one over the other. In short, Atwood’s trilogy is about ustopian cartographies in which dystopian places are infused with utopian possibilities to create a world in-between any extremist ideologies.

As such, Atwood presents herself as a literary cartographer whose trilogy functions as a literary cartography of ustopian spaces. The trilogy creates a figurative or allegorical representation of ustopian spaces. The three novels that compose the trilogy provide complementary figurative or allegorical images of the ustopian world and the place of humanity in that ustopia. The ustopian narrative of the trilogy itself becomes a form of map-making of both dystopian and utopian spaces and places. Through these ustopian cartographies of space, Atwood lures readers to make sense of that world. In this sense, the combination of fiction and reality, fact and fantasy, real and imaginary spaces, together with innovative ways of presenting ideas and information, can be considered an enriching initiative for both cartography and literature.