Thank you, Hannah, for your thoughtful post about Oryx and obsolescence. I, too, was taken by her as a character, and wondered about her place in the narrative. I focused on her role as the interpreter between the Children of Crake and the neocapitalist system that created them.
I want to bring in a text that we have not read for this class (apologies!), but one that is in direct conversations with readings like Mark Goble’s “Obsolescence,” and to an even greater extent, Walter Benn Michael’s “Posthistoricism” from last week. The text I’m referring to is Chela Sandoval’s Methodologies of the Oppressed. To briefly—and, I’m sure, reductively—summarize it here, Sandoval argues that Benn Michaels, Jameson, and others have persuasively diagnosed the issues of the contemporary late-capital age, but where Benn Michaels sees diffuse, neocolonial, identity-instead-of-ideology postmodernism as intractable, and “difference” as exchangeable and flattened, Sandoval reads against and under this movement, arguing that oppressed peoples (and she writes specifically of Third World Feminists), have been living under these neocolonial conditions for much longer than “First World” peoples, and that oppressed groups have developed effective strategies for manipulating and understanding these neocolonial conditions. She sees believes that by taking up strategies of oppressed groups—“oppositional conciousnesses”—we can find positions both inside and outside the postmodern neocolonial state, and thus find a position from which we can critique the system that encompasses us.
I bring this up because this gave me a possible answer about Oryx’s role in the text and her importance as a go-between from the scientists and the Crakers. To me, it was crucial that she was the only character we see from “outside” the system of labs and Compounds. While there are certainly Pleebs and others in the book, they are not individually described, and their backstories and conciousnesses are not explored; they are simply the lowest rung of this Compound-ing, engineering society. The fact that she is the only central character marked as non-White is also of note to me, and her backstory, as Hannah elaborates, clearly places her as part of the oppressed peoples that Sandoval focuses on; through flashbacks and Jimmy/Snowman’s prying, we see that she has lived and been conscious of a system in which humanity is always already viewed as excess, and she knows that the system has no care for her as a Subject. For me, this explains why she is so uninterested in Jimmy/Snowman’s questions about her past; on page 117, Jimmy insists to her, “Why won’t you tell me?” and she responds, “Why do you care.?…I don’t care. I never think about it. It’s long ago now.” She—because of her terrible history of abuse, rape, and commodification—sees the neocolonial age they are part of for what it is, and realizes her position within it.
Jimmy finally realizes the obsolescent quality of the lists of words he repeats, thinking, “There was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them” (261). Immediately after realizing this, a procession of naked young girls like Oryx parades before him, and he thinks, “There was something—a threatening presence—behind the trees. Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger…,” noting that “the girls,” unlike himself, “had a ruthless wisdom” (261). Oryx is the mediator between the Crakers and the humans, and her eye is the portal through which Crake enters the Maddaddam Internet world, because she can see her “Humanness” for what it is—oppressive. While Jimmy/Snowman (“Whiteman”?) clings to his obsolete words and ideals, Oryx existing on the “bleeding edge,” showing the reader connections “within a global ecology,” revealing “the extreme disposability of the recently outmoded,” as she sheds her pasts and communes with possible futures (Goble 162).
