You know you're in trouble when characters cannot find a way to resolve their "issues" within the space of 370 pages. If our fiction places us with insurmountable obstacles to a fulfilling life, when we cannot even imagine what it might look like to be happy campers, when the best we can do is always already second best...well, like I say, you're in trouble. But so is your culture. Or, perhaps, I would propose: so is our culture.

In her novel _Oryx and Crake_(2003) we are treated to another 'end -of- the-world' narrative. This is a particularly good one, as I remember, because some of the best descriptions I've ever experienced of technical brilliance and sensuous enjoyment find their way into the subconscious. But my focus here is on the condition of those engaged in applied rhetoric, another way of saying the field of composition.

"Martha Grahma was falling apart. It was surrounded by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials--sheets of tin, slabs of plywood--and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle finger at the train, shouted something that the bulletproof glass hut out.
The security of Martha Graham was a joke. The guards were half asleep, the walls could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf...The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who'd apparently mowed quite a swath in her day... a lot of what went on at Martha Graham was like studying book-binding or Latin: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything, though every once in a while the college president would subject them to some yawner about the vital arts and their irresistible reserved seat in the big red-velvet amphitheatre of the beating human heart.
Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills: a motto that could be thought of as the English version of Ars Longa Vita Brevis.
Jimmy (our would be rhetorician) had few illusions. He knew what would be open to him after passing through Problematics with his risible degree. Window-dressing is what he'd be doing....his choice after Advanced Mischaracterization and Comparative Cultural Psychology would be a choice between well-paid window dressing for a Big Corporation or a flimsy cut rate salary at a borderline one."

How far can we fall? How far? Gorgias and Phaedrus. Isocrates and Aristotle. Boethius and Cicero. Kenneth Burke and Stephen Toulmin.

The last one out turns off the lights.

MGGreer