Oryx, Oblivion, Obsolescence?

Hannah Borenstein

As a non-literary scholar I take this opportunity of starting the conversation by orienting, at least the beginning of the discussion, around Oryx. I do this, mainly, because her general construction as a character and purpose in the text, especially in relationship to the supplementary material, has been really perplexing for me. I could conjure up a post about Extinctathon, database narratives, or the various binaries at play – human/non-human, nature/synthetic, sciences/humanities, etc., most of which actually pit Jimmy/Snowman up against Crake.

Broadly speaking, what is Oryx doing here? Why does Atwood make her such a vulnerable, delicate, and detached female character? And why does she have this long, drawn out, traumatic past?

In Chapter 6 when we’re taken through the vague cloudiness of her history – being sold in a rural village, forced to sell flowers, then her body, then pornographic videos, and so on, through Jimmy, we experience the telling of an essentially disembodied tale. Oryx seems so removed from her own experiences she gets confused, not even simply irritated, by Jimmy’s questions and frustrations to really make her feel something.

The notion of love is completely absent for Oryx:

“Also, said Oryx, they had no more love, supposing they’d had some in the first place. But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that – sensed they were worth something” (126).

However, embodied money-value, a trend we certainly saw in Snow Crash, seems to be something she must fully embrace.

I turn to Mark Goble’s chapter “Obsolescence” for some guidance here, because (once again, not a literary scholar with a poor understanding of the paradigm of modernism in literature) I found the notion of “planned obsolescence” intriguing and potentially useful. If industrial modernity invented obsolescence as technological development that would invariably render previous technologies obsolete, Marx’s notion of productive consumption, in which the commodity’s obsolescence reinforces capitalism’s drives, how is Oryx circumventing, if she is, this form of obsolescence.

Is her desirability, aesthetically driven but also predicated on the absence of any resistance to being commodity, what makes her one of the last figures to be obsolete? Jimmy’s mother, one of the few other female characters in the text takes a different route, unable to adapt to this worker-driven world, and ends up leaving her fmaily .

Does Atwood use Oryx, give her such an extreme an unrelenting past, as a means of demonstrating just how little we’ll have to care about love, to remain important to capitalism’s logic? To resist obsolescence? Someone that doesn’t care about her origins, histories, exploitations? Or does her extreme vulnerability serve to mold Jimmy and Crake (which could also be a meta-narrative) and force them to interact (Jimmy, overwhelmed with pity, but driven by desire) and Crake (re-making her into an object of desire and utility) act and respond? I hope these genuine questions of mine are not too basic and trivial, but would be curious to hear others’ thoughts/opinions.

2 Replies to “Oryx, Oblivion, Obsolescence?”

  1. I think Hannah asks an important question concerning Oryx’s presence/function in the novel, and to what extent Oryx is circumventing obsolescence. She has been mythologized by Crake’s children (and thus avoids becoming obsolete) in a post-apocalyptic scenario where the ruins of a hypermodern, commodity-driven, post-industrial capitalistic society are not even recognized as such. But we should also keep in mind that Oryx, as a consultant for the global supply chain of BlyssPluss Pills, functions as a literal carrier of a soon-to-be obsolescent capitalism. As Crake says, “[the pill] would become a huge money-spinner. It would be the must-have pill, in every country, in every society in the world…The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history” (295-6). The pill commodifies desire itself, since it provides an unlimited supply of the libido while at the same time promising an unlimited release of that libido. The pill allows the user to release desire (thereby extinguishing it) while also propelling the demand for more desire, following the logic of consumption where the dissolution of products spurs new production, or what Marx calls “complet[ing] the product as product by dissolving it.” There is an uncompromising causal logic, then, to the extinction event Crake sets in motion: the “tide of human desire” drives itself to its own dissolution by obviating human demand – in other words, by confronting its own obsolescence. Since what is being circulated (sexual energy) is considered a basic biological human condition and the most important variable in human history (293), the obsolescence of that condition would put an end to history. By disseminating the consumption and dissolution of human desire, Oryx and Crake thus operate in the ‘will-have-been’ modernist logic that, as Goble applies to cyberpunk writers, “gets projected onto the latest gadgets” in order to imagine the “contingency and transience of commodity worlds” (153). Through Crake’s eyes, biological capitalism necessitates the end of capitalistic human biology.

    But in returning to the question of Oryx, I do think she is a very puzzling character because she participates in commodity fetishism but also outlives it by entering the cosmology of the Crakers. She is trafficked as a sexual commodity throughout the novel, but her image (secretly fetishized by Jimmy; used as a hacking portal for the MaddAddam group) becomes a significant object in the way it resists circulation and commodification. Her image also seems to have a Benjaminian “aura” that evokes impossible distances (both spatially and temporally). She is connoted with a non-Western and premodern mode of buying and selling, and the spectacle of her sexualization and infantilization – captured on a still frame – conforms to “a way of looking” that derives nostalgia for the “timelessness or slower temporalities of other peoples, places, and nations” (Goble 161-162). To me, Oryx seems to be a triple captive – not only is she physically trafficked; not only is her image appropriated into the sphere of MaddAddam’s potentially revolutionary energies; but she figures as the retention or “regression in the present” – a “return to and reestablishment of old things” – by which modernist capital outlives its own supposed obsolescence through its global appropriation of the non-Western and pre-modern (Goble 250).

  2. I posted underneath Hannah’s because for some reason I can’t find a way to publish a new post on this site – when I click on the Obsolescence category WordPress tells me the page can’t be found.

    Apologies.

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