Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake

Long ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes had lived in castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the ramparts so you could pour hot pitch on your enemies [. . .] and the Compounds were the same idea. Castles were for keeping you and your buddies nice and safe inside, and for keeping everybody else outside. (28)

Much later in the novel, Crake builds the Paradice dome within the already walled-in RejoovenEsence community, eschewing the public domain even more. The entire fabrication of Paradice demands that Crake don a metaphysical, Crusoe-like attitude, and his early socialization into such a way of knowing has, no doubt, validated this vision.

Educational utilitarianism serves as a critical enclosure in both boys' lives as well. Reminiscent of the Dickensian portrait of education in his Hard Times, Snowman recalls that his junior high Life Skills class tried to provide students only with directly useful information. As the class motto ran, "We are not here to play, to dream, to drift. We are here to practice Life Skills" (42). In this class students practiced

Double-entry on-screen bookkeeping, banking by fingertip, using a microwave without nuking your egg, filling out housing applications for this or that Module and job applications for this or that Compound, family heredity research, negotiating your own marriage-and-divorce contracts, wise genetic match-mating, the proper use of condoms to avoid sexually transmitted bioforms. (42)

While some of the skills seem to focus innocently on the quotidian aspects of living (using a microwave, for example), others more obviously reflect educational efforts to perpetuate the style of living-an elitist one at best-that is expected to occur within the Compounds (e.g., wise genetic match-mating). There is no analysis of why such skills are important in life, or who claims such skills are crucial in good living, let alone the ethical dimensions integral to such a process. Later, Jimmy enrolls in a public college, Martha Graham, where he discovers that the school's original Latin motto Ars Longa Vita Brevis had been given an addendum: "Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills" (188). Chances are the English translation bears the real weight of the work that is to be accomplished at Martha Graham, especially since "the enthusiasm of the dedicated artsy money had waned" and "the curricular emphasis had switched to other arenas" (188). Martha Graham had become a school whose main area of content was "no longer central to anything," interesting but tangential to "real" life, like "Latin, or book-binding" (187). Even the once popular visual arts had been lost to technological advances; "[a]nyone with a computer could splice together whatever they wanted, or digitally alter old material, or create new animation" (187). In a search to regain an identity, Martha Graham made "everything" have "utilitarian aims" (188). Compound life's tendency to provide a less-than-liberal approach to education in Life Skills class merely plays itself out at a higher level in college.