Our final book of the season is Atwood’s dsytopic Oryx & Crake: an excellent book, as it happens, to read immediately after Gulliver’s Travels.
No coincidence that Atwood’s opening epigram quotes Gulliver. O&C may not be a Juvenalian satire in Swift’s mode, but when Jimmy tours the self-damning ‘wonders’ of Watson-Crick (Wolvogs), it bears more than a passing resemblance to Gulliver touring Lagado Academy’s ludicrous Projectors.
All page numbers are from the Anchor books paperback
This story is ripping tale & a terrifying social critique that haunts me as all good novels should. When I was asked this month to help brainstorm an essay on The Future of the University, I thought first (direly) of Martha Graham & Watson-Crick. Corporate bidding wars & “Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills”! (Applied Rhetoric,188)
Ars Longa Vita Brevis.
The full quote of M-G's motto, by Hippocrates, translates:
"Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experience misleading, judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.”
Indeed.
Last year, when I read the Harpers essay preceding Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, I also thought of Oryx & Crake.
Klein, like Atwood, explores a certain apotheosis of capitalism: disaster-inspired privatization & the dismantling of the public sphere. Klein titles the chapter discussing this: Disaster Apartheid: a world of green zones and red zones—a description not unfamiliar to the Corps compounds & pleeblands of Jimmy’s world.
“With emergencies on the rise,” writes Klein, “government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their can’t-do state, the parallel corporate state will rent back its disaster infrastructure to whoever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear.” (p. 419)
As a journalist, Klein (fore)sees society divided into those who can & cannot afford to replace public services with private services, the middle class fleeing to “green zones” of security within the poverty & violence-ridden exteriors. “[A] new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies...Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already.” (420)
CorpSeCorp as Blackwater, for instance. Upscale hospitals, Baghdad’s Green Zone, New Orleans’ Sandy Springs--a ‘contract city’ ‘with no governmental processes in place’---these suggest real life prototypes of HelthWyzer & Paradice.
And this is what categorizes Oryx & Crake as ‘speculative fiction’, rather than true science-fiction. As in PD James’ excellent Children of Men or McCarthy’s The Road, even Huxley’s sci-fi borderline Brave New World, no law of physics is broken, no invention unprecedented. What’s here only extrapolates upon scientific, cultural & economic trends already in motion.
Glowing rabbits, for example. Entirely without preaching she shows, unnamed: Global Warming. Web porn. GMOs. The freedoms we willingly sacrifice for security. Even the Methuselah Mouse (22). The fun is in its imaginative departures; the punch is in its plausibility.
This was great fun to read for the group. I hope you have a grand final discussion. Happy reading, everyone. Don’t be a stranger!
~ A. Campisi
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Discussion Questions & Suggestions
• Satire? Do you think O&C is a satire? (CorpSeCorp? And yet....) How & why or why not? Why flag Gulliver?
• What do you make of the epigram from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse?
• Education: Here we see bidding wars for students; an evolved value & purpose to an education; an economic class division between arts & sciences; generalized illiteracy; a selective amnesia of history; the comparative roles of “Student Services”.
Although it’s clear which skills & fields this society values, & the author herself is obviously a ‘word person’ (several of Atwood’s close relatives are scientists), the descriptions of each institution play out in scenes sparing neither side its particular degradations, disgrace, damning (a)morality, or ridicule.
→ What's the critique here?
→ Do you see academia heading in this direction?
• Class. Talk about economic class.
Here’s the rich /poor gap in extremis: the compounds vs. the pleeblands; the elimination of the middle class. I admire this book for deftly creating a (literal) bubble of privilege & class freedom that allows Jimmy & Crake—as many actual people of their class—to be completely unmoved by the rest of the world. After all, at most we glimpse that world at a cool remove: through highly mediated websites like Brainfrizz & HottTotts.
With them, we are so perfectly apart from it that it’s shocking on page 257, so late in the book, when we suddenly see “shots of boondocks war in some arid mountain range across the ocean, with close-ups of dead mercenaries, male and female; a bunch of aid workers getting mauled by the starving in one of those dusty famines far away.” Mountains? Famines? Aid workers? Even the reminder that there is a government is startling.
• Jimmy’s Mother. One nagging exception to their ability to ignore the outside world is Jimmy’s mother, who’s out there somewhere: involved. What’s the purpose of her character?
• Don’t Let Me Down. Jimmy is told “Don’t let me down” three times, once by his mother, then Oryx, then Crake. What do each of them mean? Why is it repeated?
• Games & porn. “The body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.” (85) Talk about their early influences of choice: the pornography; the games: Barbarian Stomp: see if you can change history! (they can); Blood & Roses; Three-Dimensional Waco; Extinctathon; Kwiktime Osama.
→ How do these instruct & influence each of them?
→ Of all their adolescent diversions, which was your favorite invention? Which one troubled you the most & why?
→ What do these sites say of the economy driving them? “It was amazing what people would do for a couple of lamb chops or a chunk of genuine brie.” (85) What lines have these crossed that are still intact (more or less) today? How close do you think we are to any of these in particular being so easily available or popular?
• Happicuppa. Which everyone continues to drink despite the genetic manipulation, economic devastation & social upheaval it causes “elsewhere.” Why? Does this remind you of any real world events?
• ChickieNobs. Would you eat them? Advocate for them? Why or why not?
• Do you think BlyssPluss would sell today? Why or why not?
• Oryx. What does she (& her particular history) bring to this story? Why does Crake love her, do you think? Why does Jimmy? What do you make of her fate?
• Crake asks: What’s real? We already genetically engineer our food plants & animals, our medicines, our bio-weapons, in growing possibilities our children. Visiting Watson-Crick, Jimmy looks at the ChickieNobs, the wolvogs, & it's asked: “Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?” (206)
Can you answer these questions? Where IS the line?
• Crake says: “Nature is to zoos as God is to churches....Those walls and bars are there for a reason...Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.”
“Them?”
“Nature & God.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy.
“I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.”
Do you believe in Nature with a capital N? What does that mean?
• After the fall, Jimmy imagines Crake’s retort: “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment—the way it always was...and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.” (228) IS this the way it always was? Has Crake’s interference fundamentally changed the world’s natural order?
• Our Stranger, Snowman, asks: Why me? Why him?
• WHY? Why did Crake do it at all? Do you think it turned out as Crake imagined it?
• The Stranger: discuss our final book in terms of the theme.
• Defoe. Who knows the literary reference in the chapter 15 title: Footprint? Why invoke this here? What do you make of the allusion?
• Rewriting Creation: both literal & mythological. The new gods. Talk about Snowman’s relationship with the Crakers.
• What is Snowman’s responsibility to the Crakers?
• Symbolic thinking. Apparently Crake fails to eradicate ART, SPIRITUALITY, & DREAMS. What’s going on with this authorial choice? Why did he want to eliminate them in the first place?
• The last page. How would you face your own kind? What’s going to happen next?
