Text-to-Text connection: Oryx and Crake and The Greatest Show on Earth

When I taught seventh grade, I emphasized the importance of making connections with the text while we read.  Each week I would ask my students to fill out a 'reading log' on which they'd need to elaborate on at least one connection they made to themselves, the world, or to another book.  The idea behind connections is that making connections boosts comprehension and makes reading more enjoyable.  We remember what we've read, relate more strongly to the characters, and we ask more (and most likely better) questions.

Honestly, I don't know how much I agree with this idea.  On one hand, activating prior knowledge and making self-text connections could definitely build empathy--which is one of the main functions of literature, in my opinion.  It does help me remember things, and making connections helps the story become more personally meaningful. But on the other hand, making connections can be distracting if don't monitored carefully.  Readers can be quickly distracted by the connections they are trying to make and forget about what they are reading.  During a class discussion, for example, classmates are more interested in talking about their dreams than Jonas' dreams in The Giver.  After that, it can spiral out of control.

I often make connections, but I think most of them happen on a subconscious level.  I'm often reminded of a past experience or bit of knowledge while I read, but I don't often think too much on it because I feel like it's inconsequential.  I don't want to get distracted and lose focus on what I'm reading.

Lately, however, I have developed the habit of reading several books at a time (sometimes more than 5).  It's both challenging and rewarding to read this way.  It's challenging because sometimes it's hard to keep the plots or information all straight in my mind, but it's rewarding because I am never bored.  Another way it's rewarding is that it enables me to make connections between texts as I read them concurrently, and perhaps the best illustration of this reward is the connections I was able to make between Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Oryx and Crake is a chilling portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was wrought by the hands of a mad bio-engineer, Crake, hell-bent on perfecting nature.  One of his 'projects' causes a massive, world-wide plague that seems to knock out humanity entirely.  He leaves one of his employees and childhood friends, Jimmy AKA Snowman, in charge of his greatest creation, the Crakers, a group of masterfully engineered humanoids (though not homo-sapien sapiens), who are supposed to inherit the earth.  In his isolation, Snowman recounts the events leading up to the plague and describes the world from which he came, a world run by dangerous and powerful corporations that create hybrid animals and amazing pharmaceuticals.

Given it's distopian content and it's fairly far-fetched premise, many readers have called Oryx and Crake a work of science fiction.  Atwood, according to Wikipedia, rejects this classification, claiming it doesn't deal with technology that hasn't been invented yet.  She prefers to call it speculative fiction.  Indeed Atwood's claim may have some bearing, as Professor Dawkins points out in his book.  On the idea of GMOs, Dawkins has the following to say:

Today we curse the way our predecessors introduced species of animals into alien lands just for the fun of it. The American grey squirrel was introduced to Britain by a former Duke of Bedford: a frivolous whim that we now see as disastrously irresponsible. It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes: transporting, for example, ‘anti-freeze’ genes from Arctic fish into tomatoes to protect them from frost. A gene that gives jellyfish a fluorescent glow has been borrowed from them by scientists and inserted into the genome of potatoes, in the hope of making them light up when they need watering. I have even read of an ‘artist’ who plans an ‘installation’ consisting of luminous dogs, glowing with the aid of jellyfish genes. Such debauchery of science in the name of pretentious ‘art’ offends all my sensibilities. But could the damage go further? Could these frivolous caprices undermine the validity of future studies of evolutionary relationships? Actually I doubt it, but perhaps the point is at least worth raising, in a precautionary spirit. The whole point of the precautionary principle, after all, is to avoid future repercussions of choices and actions that may not be obviously dangerous now.

Obviously we are on the cutting edge of the technology that Atwood harangues in her book.  Dawkins' paralleling gene splicing with introducing non-native species into an environment is, I believe, apt.  I don't think Dawkins is foreshadowing the kind of grizzly future Atwood describes, but he is pointing out the recklessness or irresponsibility of tampering with billions of years of natural selection.  There's probably a reason nature takes so long to evolve.

Oryx and Crake was not the best dystopia I have read, but it was a dandy.  It's very mature at times, and I wouldn't recommend it for younger readers, but high school age and up would probably be suited just fine for this rewarding and compelling read.