Seite - 38 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

nomical, technological, and climatological givens of our present moment.”18 This future simulation in which the large corporations have replaced the state as an institution clearly entails a critique of the neo-liberal capitalist world of today. Some critics like J. Brooks Bouson reduce the phenomenon to an “ev- er-spreading and deadly ‘virus’ of Americanism”,19 whereas I want to argue that “Americanism” is only the most obvious symptom of a global capitalist system that has its roots in European colonial trade and the debt-based economy. The link between its creeds and practices, on one hand, and ecological degra- dation, on the other, is made explicit in the novels through descriptions of the devastated state of the natural world as a backdrop. As Sybille Machat propos- es, “Margaret Atwood spins current environmental concerns of the early 21st century into the future and bases the physical world of the novel on their con- tinuation.”20 In Oryx and Crake this is expressed as follows: “the coastal aquifers turned salty and the northern permafrost melted and the vast tundra bubbled with methane, and the drought in the midcontinental plains regions went on and on, and the Asian steppes turned to sand dunes.”21 For the inhabitants of this near-future world, suppression thus becomes an important survival strate- gy, as Toby, one of the two focaliser characters of the second novel, The Year of the Flood, remembers: [She thinks:] I knew there were things wrong in the world, they were referred to, I’d seen them in the onscreen news. But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else. By the time she’d reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. […] Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.22 At the time, before joining the eco-religious sect the God’s Gardeners, Toby is an ordinary citizen of the near-future version of the United States, exemplify- ing the state of consciousness that is normal or necessary for its profoundly estranged subjects. Spatially, this world is segregated into the compounds, where the corpo- ration’s employees live in gated communities, and the pleeblands, which are ghetto-like, quasi-anarchistic places. Life in the compounds as described retro- spectively by Snowman/Jimmy is furthermore characterised by artificiality and a 18 Snyder 2011, 471. 19 Bouson 2011, 17. 20 Machat 2013, 107. 21 Atwood 2004, 29. 22 Atwood 2010, 284–5. 38 | Stephanie Bender www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 31–50