HS.: *The Role of African-American Women Writers in American Literature*
Table of Contents:
Section Page
0. Introduction 1
1. What Science Fiction is and Why Women Write it 3
1.1 Defining the Term: 3
1.2 Women's / Feminist Science Fiction 4
1.3 Is Kindred Science Fiction? 5
2. Kindred in Light of Butler's Other Novels 9
3. Kindred's Part in a Discourse of Utopia 12
4. Conclusion 15
Bibliography 16
0. Introduction:
Despite the increasing quality, diversity, and literary influence of science fiction over the last fifty years, and despite the large number of `classics' grown from it (from Evgenij Zamyatin's We and, indeed, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and others), the term is still often used pejoratively. Probably as a consequence of this, critics often hesitate to use it on books acclaimed as `serious' literature. Even a book by somebody as `official' (and remarkable) a science fiction writer as Octavia E. Butler is rather called a `fantastic travelogue' or a `Neo-Slave-Narrative' than a science fiction novel. I am, of course, talking of Kindred.
While this is certainly a well-meaning approach (and while Kindred does stray from genre conventions to some extent), I think it has two drawbacks. It may give those readers and critics who still think `Sci Fi' is only about *rockets and ray-guns and little green men* the justification to go on thinking so, which does considerable injustice to the numerous writers who have far outgrown this cliché. Moreover, I am convinced that any piece of fiction can only be fully understood by incorporating its intertextual relations into one's viewpoint - and that genre makes for a large part of these relations, which may well be overlooked if one ignores or denies the work's genre.
In this essay, I will try to show two things: firstly, that Kindred is indeed a science fiction novel, despite some of its particular characteristics which seem to indicate otherwise, and that it is very much `in line' with Butler's other works; secondly, that reading it as science fiction (i.e. in light of the premises and traditions of the genre, especially of the increasingly influential `sub-genre' of women's / feminist science fiction) can lead to a more complete appreciation of the novel's literary and political merits.
I will begin by looking at a few of the countless definitions which have been applied to the term `science fiction', and the particular role it has played for women writers. Then I will look at Kindred, which has been described as *not really science fiction* more often than not, in terms of these definitions.
Next, in a kind of `relevant digression', I will briefly compare Kindred to some of Butler's other, more openly science-fictional novels, trying to make plain that the similarities outweigh the differences.
In the third part of the essay, I will examine the way in which Kindred tackles certain particular issues of feminist science fiction, mainly the attitude towards feminist utopias and dystopias inherent in the novel. These, as will hopefully become evident, are directly related to a genre tradition which, I think, has to be included into an analysis of Kindred in order to fully appreciate it.
1. What Science Fiction is and Why Women Write it:
1.1 Defining the Term:
The definitions for `science fiction' are countless, ranging, as Sarah Lefanu puts it *from the narrowly inclusive to the all-encompassing, and including the incomprehensible [...]. One must conclude there will never be agreement.* While this is certainly true, it is not particularly helpful in this case.
The `common denominator' of these definitions is the fact that science fiction plays with possibilities - `What if...?' (if space or time travel were possible, if we met an alien species, if a nuclear war killed most of Earth's populace, etc.). This has been summed up neatly by Alice Laurance, in describing science fiction as *fiction which takes place elsewhere, elsewhen or elsehow.* Science fiction, then, is characterised more by the relation of the events described to `reality', than by being set in the future or in outer space.
To use Samuel Delany's words, it is written in a particular `subjunctivity level'. *The subjunctivity for [naturalistic fiction] is defined by: could have happened. [...] In SF the subjunctivity level is changed once more... have not happened.* (italics Delany's) This includes
events that might happen: these are your... predictive tales. They include events that will not happen: these are your science-fantasy stories. They include events that have not happened yet. ... These are your cautionary dystopias. ... [They] include past events as well as future ones.
It is exactly this diversity, the multiplicity of options that science fiction offers to writers, which has made it especially valuable for women writers, particularly for feminists.
1.2 Women's / Feminist Science Fiction
It has frequently been pointed out that one of the problems women writers have been facing is the lack of a tradition which to relate to. In her essay *What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write*, Joanna Russ sums it up as follows:
Now, writers, as I have said, do not make up their stories out of whole cloth; they are pretty much restricted to the attitudes, the beliefs, the expectations, and, above all, the plots that are `in the air' [...] Novels, especially, depend upon what central action can be imagined as being performed by the protagonist (or protagonists) - i.e., what can a central character do in a book? [...] Our literature is not about women. It is not about women and men equally. It is by and about men.
Among the `myths' (she uses this term synonymously with `plot-patterns') available within Western culture, Russ argues, very few can be used for female protagonists - predominantly those of love stories. The solution she suggests is to *drop the culture's myths altogether*, and one of the places to look for new, unbiased myths, is science fiction, whose plot patterns are not *stories about men qua Man and women qua Woman; they are myths of human intelligence and human adaptability.*
By not limiting themselves to our world `as it is', women writers of science fiction have made available to themselves and their successors a whole range of new protagonists, settings and plots - creating utopias as well as dystopias; as Suzy McKee Charnas put it, *SF lets women write their dreams as well as their nightmares.*
The `freedom' of the science fiction genre, however, goes beyond freedom of content - it is also (and perhaps even more importantly) freedom of form. Science fiction novels have often borrowed, adapted, and played with other literary forms as well as plots. This formal openness, as Sarah Lefanu argues, *lets writers de-familiarise the familiar, and make familiar the new and strange.*
I would argue that Kindred makes use of both these freedoms to a large extent; yet it is usually denied the label of science fiction - even Octavia Butler herself said it was not, since *there is hardly any science in it.* But is that really the decisive factor in whether or not to call a work science-fictional? And if Kindred is not SF, what else is it?
1.3 Is Kindred Science Fiction?
Analyses of Kindred seem to employ a kind of double standard with regards to whether or not it is a science fiction book. In the introduction to the novel, for example, Robert Crossley draws on a comparison with H.G. Wells' Time Machine, a `conservative' definition of science fiction (`natural science, rigorously applied to fictional invention' - although he admits such a definition would make the canon `shrink dramatically'), and Butler's own statements to class it as `not science fiction'. Yet, a few pages later, when talking about Charles Saunders' essay *Why Blacks Don't Read Science Fiction*, he says that *Perhaps Saunders would have been more sanguine about the possibility of serious black science fiction if Kindred had been available when he wrote his essay.* Similarly, Michelle Erica Green calls Kindred a `fantasy of time-travel', arguing that it *is not interested in alien sciences, and can hardly be described as `science fiction.' Rather, the `aliens' in Kindred are all too human.* Yet, she discusses it, along with Butler's other novels, in direct comparison to clearly science-fictional feminist utopias and dystopias (Kindred, e.g., is compared to Marge Piercy's Women on the Edge of Time), to which she views Butler's work as a challenge.
I think Green is right in this (and will get back to the `utopia discourse' in the last section of this essay) , as is Crossley in making the novel a landmark in `serious black science fiction' - but why, then, the effort to put the book outside of the SF genre? Maybe, in part, to protect it from the pejorative connotations of the term - but from what I know about Butler's other novels, they seem no less deserving to be looked at seriously than Kindred does.
Speaking of connotations, I find the term `fantasy' more misleading concerning Kindred than even a conservative use of the term science fiction - due to its associations of `faeries and magicians' (although these are equally as unjustified for a lot of contemporary fantasy). Delany's definition of science fiction as speaking about things which `have not happened' (q.v. section 1.1) and Joanna Russ' discussion of it is helpful to do away with some of the terminological confusion of `science fiction' and `fantasy'.
Fantasy, according to Delany, reverses the subjectivity of `naturalism' from this could have happened to this could not have happened. In contrast to fantasy, science fiction deals not with the impossible, but with that about which one cannot (yet) say whether it is possible or not, it *avoids to offend against what is known to be known.* This accounts for the scientific theory used to support many of the assumptions (e.g., on light-speed travel) in science fiction.
Russ argues that science fiction *stands in some kind of paradoxical relation to both fantasy and naturalism [...] Certainly, most science fiction is naturalistic in style [which critics often ignore].*
According to Russ, this causes on part of the reader a particular kind of `suspended disbelief' not unlike that which satire works on:
One believes because the detail is in the book, disbelieves because the material is satirically exaggerated and hence absurd, believes because it is *only*an exaggeration of what, after all, does exist. This is very close to Brecht's verfremdungseffekt. What is familiar is made strange - one disbelieves; however, it is rooted in the familiar - one believes (or rather stops disbelieving) [...]
This relation, I think, is very much what happens when reading Kindred. The description of life in the Antebellum South is naturalistic (sometimes cruelly so) - `one believes'. However, the frame of the slave narrative is broken up by the `estranging' element of time-travel, which remains unexplained - `one disbelieves'. Yet, the intertextual relation with `genuine' slave narratives serves as a reminder that there were, indeed, people in such situations - `one stops disbelieving'. This alternation of being `drawn into' and being `pushed out of' the narrative, which echoes Dana's own situation, to me, is precisely what makes for the impact of the novel; it also puts it neatly in line with Lefanu's explanation of science fiction's value for women writers (q.v. section 1.2).
Another way in which Russ differentiates science fiction and fantasy concerns the `frame' of the narrative:
Fantasy usually carries a frame of some sort about it; science fiction usually does not. [...]. Fantasy is usually a loop with two ends [...]. Very seldom is the protagonist left facing the [fantastic]; in some way the story conducts us back to the familiar and safe [...]. Science fiction usually begins in medias res; we are plunged instantly into a strange world and we never return from it. A common pattern in science fiction is The Dislocated Protagonist - that is, the protagonist who finds himself in a strange place or a strange world at the beginning of the story with no knowledge of how he got there.
That Kindred follows the pattern of the `Dislocated Protagonist' should be obvious. One might argue, though, that Dana does return to the `familiar and safe' at the end of the novel. True, but beside the fact that I do not fully agree with Russ on this point (what about space expeditions returning to Earth?), I would consider this, at most, a transgression of conventions (which is partly what science fiction is about) - but not a reason to class it out of the genre.
What about the lack of a `scientific' explanation for Dana's transportation through time? I agree with Crossley that Butler may have
deliberately sacrificed the neat closure that [a scientific or pseudo-scientific explanation] would have given her novel. Leaving the novel's ending rough-edged and raw like Dana's wound, Butler leaves the reader uneasy and disturbed by the intersection of story and history rather than comforted by a tale that *makes sense*.
Again, although this may violate the more conservative `rules' of the genre, it is certainly not the only novel to do so and still be called science fiction. As Crossley points out, nowadays *[t]he proportion of science-fictional texts based on scrupulously applied scientific principles rather than on faulty science, pseudo-science, or wishful science is probably quite small.*
`Wishful science' includes `psionic' abilities such as telepathy and telekinesis, which are explicitly dealt with in some of Butler's other novels and a lot of other science fiction. In fact, one can probably assume an intertextual `triggering effect' in readers who are familiar with `psionics' - although no explanation is given for Dana's transportation, such readers may more or less automatically come up with one: Rufus' psyche was strong enough to call Dana to him when his life was in danger. The fact that Rufus remembers seeing or hearing Dana immediately before fits in with this, as `visualisation' is usually a component in descriptions of psychic displays (both fictional descriptions and, allegedly, `true' reports of them.)
I do not want to maintain that Butler consciously counted on such an intertextual reference in her readers, nor that one needs them to `understand' or appreciate Kindred, yet it seems worth pointing out that, for a well-versed `science-fictionalist', Dana's travels may be less `fantastic' than they appear to a reader approaching the novel from a `realist' point of view.
Having brought up a connection of Kindred with the `Patternist' novels - albeit an implicit one - I now want to look little more closely at some traits it shares with Butler's other books.
2. Kindred in Light of Butler's Other Novels:
At first glance, Kindred appears rather different from Butler's other works, which are much more unambiguously science-fictional. It is not situated in the future (as are basically all her other books, except for Wild Seed), and deals neither with mutant, physically or psychically gifted `super-humans' (as do the books of the `Patternist' series), nor with alien species (as does the Xenogenesis trilogy). There is no scientific element, either - no `time machine' accounts for Dana's transportation to the past and back (although, as I have hinted at, a reader familiar with science fiction may come up with an explanation).
However, there are a number of similarities. Dana, the protagonist, shares important characteristics with other Butlerian characters. For example, Alanna (or `Lanna', but the shared technique of name abbreviation by omission of first letter is certainly a minor detail), the central character of Survivor (1978, third book in the `Patternist' series) is described as follows: *Struggles and adjusts to survive regardless of odds against her or cost to her; is of strong mental fiber and has a strong self-concept; is stubborn; is noble and loving (risks the hatred of her people in trying to save them); [...]*
This synopsis of Alanna's mental and emotional characteristics could, I think, be applied to Dana just as well. She, too, is a `survivor' - she lives through all the physical and mental ordeals of her time as a slave. The odds are very much against her: she is, as she says herself, less suited to such a life than her ancestors, with regards to strength and endurance (q.v. Kindred, p 51) - while, one has to say, she also has some modern day knowledge (on malaria and cauterising wounds) and equipment (aspirins and Excedrin) to help her. Like Alanna, she has to adjust to a culture and situation radically different from what she is used to, to - time and again - *[rein] in whatever part of my mind I'd left in 1976.* Such a feat takes a `strong self-concept', as well as `strong mental fiber'. For somebody without the latter, a number of unwillingly undergone transports of more than a hundred years backwards in time, the return from which can only be achieved by barely escaping death, would have probably been enough to drive them mad (and Kevin's difficulties in re-orientating himself in 1976 are an example of what difference even a slightly weaker `mental fiber' can make). While Dana cannot afford too much `stubbornness' in her situation, her temper flares up quite a number of times - and beyond the personal necessity to save Rufus, there is certainly a `noble' and altruistic aspect to her actions. I do not want to overstrain this point; as a side remark, I would like to add that Mary (Mind of My Mind), for example, is summed up by Sarah Lefanu as someone *who can heal as well as kill.* - again, a description which holds true for Dana, too.
But beyond such similarities in character depiction - which could be accounted for merely by the fact that the books were all written by the same author (although all these characters prove themselves in plots of the science-fictional `have not happened'-type) - there are underlying concerns and issues that further make Kindred an integral part of Butler's `oeuvre'.
Crossley in part acknowledges this, saying that *Kindred shares with Butler's other works an ideological interest in exploring relationships between the empowered and the powerless.* In the third section of his introduction, he elaborates further on Butler's outstanding role within feminist science-fictional literature:
More consistently than any other black author, she has deployed the genre's conventions to tell [...] stories that speak to issues, feelings, and historical truths arising out of Afro-American experience. In centring her fiction on women who lack power, suffer abuse, and are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary, Butler has not merely used science fiction as a *feminist didactic* in Beverly Friend's term, but she has generated her fiction out of a black feminist aesthetic.
Again, the question is: If Butler is so consistent, why should Kindred constitute such a break in this consistency as he indicates? I think it does not. Just like her other books, it centres on a woman who lacks power, suffers abuse, and whose commitment to power over her own life is strong enough to finally kill her oppressor; it `deploys the genre's convention' (and, in part, transgresses them), to raise issues and convey historic truths originating from her experience as an African American.
However, Kindred is consistent with the rest of Butler's work in yet another aspect, one that Crossley can only hint at, since it is tied in with a strictly science-fictional discourse that he (by labelling it `not science fiction') excludes it from. This is what one may call a `discourse of utopia'.
3. Kindred's Part in a Discourse of Utopia
One of the aspects Crossley praises most highly about Kindred is that, rather than focusing on the *exceptional situation of an isolated modern black woman in a white household under slavery*, she depicts a large number of coloured characters and the complex relationships of their community, amounting to *enough of a critical mass of racial and sexual and cultural diversity [...] to make reading it different from the experience of reading the work of almost any other practising science fiction writer.*
This corresponds to the observations of Michelle Erica Green, who subtitles her essay on Butler: *Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias*. Green complains that
Many recent women's utopias deal with contemporary problems by defusing the differences that cause conflicts to develop among people. Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Gin experiment with biological androgyny as a means for ending the battle of the sexes. Marge Piercy and Melissa Scott explore futures in which skin color and racial identity are unrelated. [...] [M]any of the texts that challenge the gender status quo ignore, erase, and repress other differences among people.
Looking in detail at various of Butler's novels, Green then tries to make plain how Butler criticises and counteracts this tendency in her own utopias, for which *Difference, disagreement, and diversity provide the life force [...].* Similarly to Crossley, she notes the hard and testing situations that Butler's characters usually are subjected to, which cause all of them to *face the same dilemma: they must force themselves to evolve, accepting differences and rejecting a world view that centers upon their lives and values, or become extinct.* (emphasis mine)
This is, in a very literal sense, the dilemma which Dana faces. In order to ensure her own survival - or rather, to ensure that she is born at all - she must, as Green puts it, *cooperate with her white ancestors as they beat, rape, and murder her black ancestors [...].* - to the extent that she has to persuade Alice to consent to sleeping with Rufus; drastically violating her own ethics.
Green points out that Butler's tendency to emphasise the need for women to make sacrifices for their children's sake, her warning that improving the future may well be at the expense of the present, has been harshly criticised. However, she argues, while Kindred is Butler's most troubling book, it is also her most optimistic in many ways - mainly since it *insists absolutely that personality and behaviour are constructed within a social frame.*, disproving another accusation directed at Butler by some feminist critics, that she is an `essentialist'. Dana faces the horrifying realisation that, just as her being treated as a slave makes her behave like one, so does Kevin's treatment like a slaveholder drive him to act like one.
In Kindred, Green summarises, people *do not change because of humanist impulses or moral imperatives. They respond to the agency of others, either immediately or over time.* This, according to Green, is the optimism inherent in the novel: *[H]uman agency can change even the most dystopian world over time. [...] The work and the waiting pays off.* In Dana's own time, which remains her own time because of her work and patience, racial difference such as between her and Kevin can be `celebrated in marriage', while in the past it was `conquered through rape and domination'. Yet, the past has left its scars - on Dana as on all descendants of slaves. Butler *literally engraves the past onto the present by engraving Dana's body as a readable text*, she concludes, and also onto the `memory of the future'. Kindred contains, for us as members of Dana's time, a warning *of the dangers of complacency; it demands utopian thinking.*
Throughout her essay, including her look at Kindred, Green compares and contrasts Butler's utopias to those of other feminist science fiction writers. In my opinion, she is perfectly right in this respect - but such a comparison can only work on the grounds that one is talking about a piece of feminist science fiction. Moreover, readers can only appreciate Kindred as a valuable contribution to this discourse (which I think it is) if they read it as a part of it - if, in short, they read it as science fiction.
4. Conclusion:
I have tried to show that there is no reason to call Kindred anything other than a work of science fiction. Its `violations' of genre conventions are, in my opinion, nowhere near drastic enough to justify the search for a different term that many critics have undergone - especially since they have, after all, kept on looking at it in science-fictional terms. Moreover, in characterisation, plot conception and underlying issues, Kindred is very much in line with Butler's other novels, presenting her readers with additional aspects of ideas and concepts she is exploring elsewhere.
Not only is Kindred a science fiction novel, but it is an exceptionally good one, which uses borrowings from the slave narrative to convey a new, familiar yet strange, vision of, and insights into the slaveholding past of America. It takes a stand within a discourse of feminist utopias and dystopias, cautioning against oversimplification and resignation at the same time.
While it is certainly also interesting and valuable for readers who are not familiar with science fiction, or who chose to view it as something else, I am convinced that, for its merits to be fully appreciated, it should be read as science fiction.
Bibliography:
- Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. (Black Women Writers Series 2)
- Donawerth, Jane L. and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1994
- King, Betty. Women of the Future: The Female Main Character in Science Fiction. Metuchen, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984.
- Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism & Science Fiction. London: The Women's Press, 1988
- Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.