Analysis Of J. Brooks Bouson's Oryx And Crake

In the dystopian world Jimmy inhabits in Oryx and Crake, the humanities are of little relevance, as J. Brooks Bouson states: “In Jimmy’s world, the creative arts, no longer valued by the culture, have lost their vitality” (144). Instead, they have been replaced by science and technology as the fields of study of most importance. Since the majority of people living in the compounds are ‘numbers people’ and work for the laboratories in the compounds, Jimmy as a ‘word person’ is isolated and in his own way, special. Accordingly, Danette DiMarco declares that "Jimmy’s humanistic tendencies socially marginalize him […] [e]ven as he is part of the privileged, scientific community because of his family background" (171). Jimmy is neither interested
Students are taught acting, singing, dancing, film-making, and video arts there, but “Problematics was for word people, so that was what Jimmy took” (219f). At college, Jimmy writes his papers himself, which is “eccentric” (229) and likes to spend time at the library, browsing old, obsolete books, and looking for “words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer [have] a meaningful application in today’s world” (230). So Jimmy is completely aware of the humanities’ situation, not least because the college is in no good shape (217), but nevertheless takes his studies very seriously. Furthermore, due to his love for books, the printed form as well as the one saved on CD-ROM, Jimmy is very literate and knows historical facts, which even his genius friend Crake has no idea about (89). Angela Laflen emphasizes that "[e]ven in its degraded form, Jimmy finds meaning and beauty in art, and the quite different reactions that Jimmy and Crake have to art signal the major difference between them" (116), which will be further regarded later on in this
His task is to throw old books out and decide which ones will be digitalized. He soon loses this position, because he cannot convince himself to dispose of any books (Atwood 283). This again shows Jimmy’s appreciation for language, since he cannot decide which book is more worthy of staying a part of the cultural memory. For him, all books are worthy of that. After being temporarily unemployed, Jimmy is employed at Anooyoo. There, the promotion of products is Jimmy’s task, so he “[cudgels] his brains and [spends] ten-hour days wandering the labyrinths of the thesaurus and cranking out the verbiage” (291) and “[o]nce in a while [he makes] up a word” (291), but while “[h]e should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, […] he was depressed by it” (292). Although he gets some praise for his work, he does not feel fully appreciated, since he is so satisfied with it, he even convinces himself about a product (296). Yet, his depression is not only about lack of praise, but because Jimmy advertises products he would normally find repellent and his beloved words help AnooYoo to sell these products to clients who are victims of society’s unbound consumerism, as Monica Germanà affirms: "It is Jimmy's job, after all, to manipulate language to sell the products of the scientific world he is apparently at odds with"