A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Minnesota By
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NOWHERE TO GO BUT FORWARD: THE FICTION OF OCTAVIA E. BUTLER A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of Minnesota by Emily Kathryn Anderson in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dr. Lois Cucullu May 2016 © Emily Kathryn Anderson 2016 Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Lois Cucullu for all of her generosity and insight. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Eric Prindle for his love, support, and gentle encouragement. ii Table of Contents Introduction: The Seeds of Dissent: Science Fiction’s Radical Promise ......................................... 1 Disastrous Pasts and Hopeful Tomorrows: Octavia Butler Rewrites Apocalypse......................... 31 Radical Hope and Everyday Work: Octavia Butler Rewrites Utopia ............................................ 61 All That History Will Allow: The Use of Time in Octavia Butler’s Kindred ............................... 99 Almost Human, Always Reaching: Octavia Butler’s Cyborgs, Vampires, and Shape-shifters ... 124 The Future Is Now: Aliens and Other Alienated Bodies in Octavia Butler’s Fiction .................. 157 Afterword: Black to the Future Part II: The Legacy of Octavia Butler’s Oeuvre ........................ 195 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 205 iii Introduction: The Seeds of Dissent: Science Fiction’s Radical Promise “What good is science fiction to Black people? What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what ‘everyone’ is saying, doing, thinking—whoever ‘everyone’ happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?” – Octavia Butler, in an interview with Andrea Hairston Feminist Origins: The Roots of the Genre The twentieth century saw a transformation of science fiction. In a mere seventy years, the genre evolved from fringe stories printed on the pages of pulps and read almost exclusively by a small and homogenous group to a mainstream genre that has been lauded for its prophetic foresight, its acute political analysis, and its deep engagement with philosophy. Although the genre is now too expansive and varied to carry the weight of single purpose, it was, in its early years, imbued with the moral mission of enlightening its readers and making them more compassionate people through the exercising and expansion of their imaginations. In 1929 Hugo Gernsback stated that “not only is science fiction an idea of tremendous import, but it is to be an important factor in making the world a better place to live in, through educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life … science fiction will make people happier, give them a broader understanding of the world, make them more tolerant” (qtd. in Roberts, Science 68). Although certainly Gernsback’s confidence in science as a cure-all for 1 social and personal ills is distinctly antithetical to the postmodern critique of science that was to come decades later, his assertion that science fiction could make the world a more livable place by opening hearts and sharpening critical consciousness is still very much alive in contemporary science fiction. It is, perhaps more than any other popular genre today, an activist literature, arguably filling the vacuum left with the phasing out of both Victorian social realism and much of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Although most early science fiction was written by white men for an implied straight, white, male, adolescent audience, the genre has slowly expanded to include both writers and readers who are female, queer, and of color. As it became more inclusive and more illustrative of a broader spectrum of realities, science fiction also began to infiltrate the literary mainstream, as H. Bruce Franklin attests when he writes that, in the 1970s, “science fiction moved inexorably toward the center of American culture, shaping our imagination more than many of us would like to admit” (qtd. in Booker 1). Although the reasons behind its burgeoning legitimacy were many, Victoria Hollinger argues that science fiction owes its fairly recent popularity to postmodernity and the accompanying themes of estrangement, otherness, hybridity, and technology. She writes that “through the circulation of simulacra and the cyborging of the human body, experiential reality feels less and less connected to the ‘natural’ world and more and more like science fiction” (Hollinger 219). What we see, then, between the 1930s and 1970s, is a shift in science fiction’s purpose: if science fiction began as a genre meant to challenge and empower its readership through the celebration of scientific progress, it evolved into a genre meant to, somewhat ironically, reflect the difficulties of our modern age. In both cases though, the genre has historically sought to use dissonance to spark comparison and critique. If we take as a given that science fiction taps into the anxieties that permeate our modern world, it stands to reason that, despite its common depiction of future worlds, the genre is deeply 2 rooted in the present, and, by default, the past. From its beginnings, science fiction has been a predictive literature, but rather than groundless speculation, its prophecies are rooted in the assumption that the future will follow on a fairly straightforward trajectory from the present. Therefore, although it claims to be about the future, most science fiction serves as a critique of the present, a lament of the past, and a warning about the shape the future will take if our current society is not reformed or reimagined. Fredric Jameson comments specifically on science fiction’s ability to access the past when he writes that “one of the characteristics which makes science fiction a particularly fertile form of social critique is that it can be seen as breaking through to history in a new way—achieving historical consciousness by way of the future rather than the past” (qtd. in Miller 347). According to Jameson, accessing the past via the future allows for more dialogic and expansive perceptions of both time and causality and creates the possibility of previously unseen connections. Rose Braidiotti argues that this preoccupation with the present is “what distinguishes contemporary science fiction from nineteenth-century science fiction in that, rather than offering utopian scenarios, it reflects our sense of estrangement regarding the rapidity of current change. Science fiction, in other words, defamiliarizes the present, not dreams of possible futures” (151). While most science fiction depicts the future as a clearly traceable offshoot of the past and the present, Octavia Butler’s fiction is singular because she questions and often defies this trajectory. While she certainly assesses the past in a work like Kindred (1979) and examines the present effect of political policies in, for instance, the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9), she resists the urge to suggest that the future can be little more than a straightforward continuation of the present and actually suggests that such an attitude would end disastrously for humanity. Rather, Butler demands that her characters radically re-envision humanity, both socially and genetically. In the future worlds that Butler creates those who survive are aggressively hybrid and willing to 3 lose parts of themselves while taking on aspects of other/alien species in a relentless and completely necessary march towards cyborg identity. It is this identity, Butler asserts, that is humanity’s most promising chance for future survival, and embracing it will require humanity to change in ways that cannot be predicted through simple analyses of present and past states of being. In many ways, science fiction has always had the groundwork for a writer like Butler. Despite, or perhaps because of, its mostly white roots, science fiction is a literature intensely fascinated with encounters with otherness. These Others have taken on myriad forms, and the reactions to them range from the progressive to the reactionary, but nonetheless, the genre, as Donna Haraway writes, is “concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries between problematic selves and unexpected others” (qtd. in Janes 92). Gilles Deleuze echoes Haraway’s claim, stating that “science fiction is indeed all about displacements, ruptures, and discontinuities” (qtd. in Braidiotti 149-50). This disruptive encounter, whether it comes in the form of alien invasion, cyborg romance, or any other of the countless ways writers have fictionalized the meeting of self and other, has forced science fiction heroes and heroines to continuously reevaluate humanity and its subsequent values, practices, and communities. Darko Suvin, arguably science fiction’s most prolific and insightful critic, writes that science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement” (qtd. in Roberts, Science 7). Given the essential presence of otherness in the genre and the necessity of evaluating and reacting to this otherness, it was likely only a matter