Okay, I'll admit that a single novel does not constitute a "heaping helping," but Butler's Kindred has got so much going on, both in terms of plot and in terms of its sheer awesomeness, that its force--on the sociological, psychological, intellectual, political, and emotional levels--is much greater than its mass times its velocity--or whatever the formula for determining force is (hey, I'm no physicist).
***Now's as good a time as any to remind anyone out there reading this (I know, I know, no one's reading it) that these are ideas formulated prior to ANY formal research--this blog is meant to be a space in which I can work through my ideas about the texts myself before turning to any outside sources. I might mention sources I've already read as a means of framing my approach to a given text, but I won't return to those texts. So if you read this and find yourself thinking, "Whoa, that's really, really dumb," or, "Um, that's the standard reading of this text, why bother writing it down?", please recall this caveat, and (if you're so inclined) pity me my feeble insights.***
Even those who have not read Kindred but are even moderately interested in science fiction, African American fiction or literature of the 1970's will be familiar with its plot: On June 9, 1976 (her 26th birthday), the protagonist, Dana, is inexplicably transplanted in time and space from her brand new home in Altadena, CA, to a rural plantation in antebellum Maryland, "called" there somehow by the progenitor of her family line, Rufus Weylin. The scion of a plantation and slave-owning family, Rufus "communicates" with Dana across space and time by wrenching her out of her contemporary surroundings whenever his life is in immediate peril, which, because he can be foolish and self-destructive, is often; Dana finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to save his life in order to ensure her own existence in the future, no matter how horribly he treats her or the slaves whose fates are determined by his whims.
Dana (and once, because of his physical proximity to her, her husband, Kevin) is "called" by Rufus in this way six times, and while years may pass between her visits to the Maryland plantation, the intervals in her present-day are often mere moments. Similarly, a year spent enduring the indignities and compromises of slavery under the Weylins can translate to just a few hours of missing time in her "real" life. Each time Dana returns to 1976, her trials and sufferings are etched a bit more indelibly on her body--through the scars from beatings and whippings, through the accelerated aging that comes not only from the passage of time, but from the endurance of loss, sorrow and hard labor. She returns from her final visit, significantly, on July 4, 1976. She leaves her left arm behind.
When readers want to quibble with Kindred, they tend to point to a few standard "flaws": those who are inured to and enjoy the conventions of the socially critical realist novel object to the stilted, occasionally didactic dialogue and the lack of any satisfactory explanation (or, for that matter, any attempt at explanation, period) for Dana's "time travel"; fans of historical fiction are often uncomfortable with the novel's in-your-face anachronistic play (bringing aspirin into the early 19th century, for example, or academic texts on slavery that speak of the institution retrospectively). Science fiction and fantasy die-hards argue that, despite its Orwellian time-travel theme, the novel is not "science-fictiony" enough, nor does it seem to pay any mind to what are generally regarded as the basic rules of time travel, the chief of which always seems to involve the time-traveler's acceptance of the inevitability of what has already come to pass and her inability to impact the course of future events.
But for me, what makes this novel so extraordinary is its deft utilization of, as well as its defiance of, each of these genre's conventions in the service of the work it is trying to do.
Here's a short and probably confusing example of what I mean (bear with me, these ideas are still in a very embyonic stage): If the typical 19th century example of the realist novel's claim to "reflect" reality is dangerous because it can actually consolidate and perpetuate certain destructive ideological constructs by "suturing" the reader to the dominant cultural Imaginary in a way that cinema would come to exemplify in the 20th century, then Butler uses the comforting conventions of realism to anchor us to this otherwise profoundly dislocating text. At the same time, she forces a collision between the conventions of realism and those of science fiction in order to pull the rug out from under us, undermining realism's "seamless" reflection of reality by repeatedly rupturing it with radical intrusions of what would logically be considered impossible. The result is a text that refuses to be "reasonable," that invites us to question the limits of the possible, to violate the secure distance that conventional realist novels allow us to maintain from the subject matter, to escape the boundaries of "reality" as reflected in the realist novel, and to interrogate the means by which such boundaries are created and imposed.
The anachronistic elements of the text--the violations of the rules that govern historical fiction that might be called "gambling against history" (83)--have, or have the potential to have, a similar effect on the characters Dana encounters in Easton, MD, as the violations of realism are meant to have on the reader. The wonders contained in Dana's duffel bag, as well as the rational impossibility of Dana herself, creates a fissure in the fabric of what can be accommodated within the synchronic plane of the present, a fissure that speaks in different ways to those she encounters, be it the members of the Weylin family or those of Dana's improvised family--Luke, Alice, Nigel, Carrie, Sarah, Tess, etc. Whether they "read" Dana as something threatening or as a window of opportunity (and almost every character, black or white, regards her with some degree of ambivalence), her very presence opens up the possibility of something other than what they know.
Meanwhile, the way that Butler handles the trope of time travel goes so profoundly against the grain of conventional time-travel narratives that the common tendency to categorize the novel as science fiction seems fundamentally misguided. The novel seems, rather, to belong to a genre that might not exist yet, one that has much in common with the way that magical realism negotiates the politics of the possible, but which isn't quite magical realism for reasons I'm not sure I can put my finger on just yet. Time travel here seems to comment, on one level, on the psychological effects of the kind of research an author must do in order to undertake such a project in good faith, as well as the degree of closeness to the historical material one must strive for in order to write about such material honestly.
I say "honestly," a word that comes so close to the problematic term "authentically," because I think that Butler was deeply concerned with her distance from the material and the difference between thinking about the experience of slavery--regarding it from across the span of history, a privileged vantage point that allows for quick, often unjust conclusions, judgments and dismissals--and feeling it, being forced into the same positions, literally becoming and being the subject rather than the "subject matter" as an object of analysis. Dana reflects upon this difference herself after witnessing slave children playing a game in which they "performed" a slave auction. Deeply disturbed, she tells Kevin, "' You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer... I can understand that because most of the time, I'm still an observer. It's protection. It's 1976 shielding and cushioning 1819 for me. But now and then, like with the kids' game, I can't maintain the distance. I'm drawn all the way into 1819, and I don't know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that'" (101).
Time travel in this novel serves the purpose, for Dana, of forcing her inability to "maintain the distance." Perhaps the most persuasive illustration of this phenomenon occurs early in the novel, in the "Fire" section, when Dana hides in the shadows while a man is whipped by the patrollers in front of his wife and child. She says, "I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip... I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn't lain nearby and smelled their sweat and heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me" (36).
The story of Dana's experience is both an invitation and an injunction from Butler to the reader: we must struggle to minimize the distance between us and history if we are ever to acquire the tools to transform our present. Perhaps it would be better, even, to say that the text performs or models an exaggerated version of the kind of reading style it requires, a kind of call and response between the text and the reader that demands her imaginative immersion in the world it describes as well as her participation in the construction of its meaning. In a way, Kindred is a variation on the reading primer, a claim that only gains force when we consider the emphasis Butler places on reading, the teaching of reading (from stolen primers, no less), and reading's capacity to pry open horizons of possibility even as it creates risk in the world of the text (risk and possibility are inextricably linked in the text, as in life). The agents of change in Kindred are learning to read; the embodiments of the dominant social order are at best semi-literate and enjoy being read to. It's as though Butler, through Dana's experience, assembles a highly figurative, yet illustrative, guide to learning how to "[read] too much" instead of "too little" into whatever you're taking in (100).
The stakes of learning how to "read too much into" something are high; the reader risks being tasked with the responsibility to take action against the social injustices she's figuratively "witnessing," and yet may find herself overwhelmed by the numerous forces that prevent the transformation of the dominant social order. And yet the book's very premise is based upon the vast difference between Dana's world and Alice's, proof that social transformation is possible, even if the work of social justice never seems to be completed.
It would be interesting to read this book alongside something like Paradise. Like Beloved, Paradise is concerned with making the invisible presences of history visible, with illustrating how the past obtrudes into the present, with showing how ideology and power structures curtail our attempts to change ourselves and our worlds, and with tasking the reader with the responsibility to recognize that the Other is always invisibly present in ourselves; unlike Beloved, it is set, like Kindred, in the late twentieth century. Time travel is not a formal preoccupation of Paradise, but travel itself (in the form of exodus, in the form of escape, in the form of fugitivity) certainly is, and both Morrison's privileging of what she calls "in-sight" (the ability to see beyond what is visible, to feel our way into the Other in ourselves)--and of the related concept of "re-memory" (imaginatively entering into voids in the historical record in order to breathe life into historically distant, absent or silenced subjectivities--in other words, re-membering them in the sense of putting the scattered and far-flung parts back together through "in-sight") seem to connect to Butler's insistence on "reading too much into" what you see. Neither author creates texts that can easily congeal into one set reading that might easily be co-opted as an ideological vehicle; these novels make sport of ambiguity, allow for improvisatory readings, call for audience participation, and refuse to be pinned down. I think that Paradise and Kindred could be potentially classified as what I'll call for now, for lack of a better term, "the performative novel."
In the Cross-Hairs:
1) Though this novel does not qualify as an example of Afro-futurism, Butler is ranked among the Afrofuturists. It might be worthwhile to read a novel like this alongside Will Alexander's The African Origins of UFOs, for the formal technique and generic confusion more so than the thematic emphases.
2) For a sense of the political complications surrounding acts of "re-memory" and "in-sight," it's useful to consider Kindred, Beloved, etc., through the lens of Spivak's go-to essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?". Considering Alice's suicide and the book's attempt to resurrect her subjectivity alongside the Spivak essay might make for some interestin' doin's.
3) For an exploration of where and how the aims of Kindred align with the objectives of magical realist texts, it might be helpful to take a look at the title essay of Kumkum Sangari's Politics of the Possible.
4) Kindred will soon be a graphic novel (I can't wait!); it might be worth pursuing the ways in which the reading style demanded by the novel maps onto the reading style demanded by graphic novels in general.
5) Wai Chee Dimock's essay, "Literature for the Planet," ventures some exciting observations about reading's ability to disrupt the synchronic plane of "now," opening horizons of change. Her argument centers mostly around reading in translation--how being introduced to new verb tenses can actually alter a reader's sense of what is possible--but her argument is quite suggestive and could be used to frame an argument about Dana's introduction of reading into the lives of her plantation "family." For that matter, there might be some way of reading Kindred alongside the other novel I found Dimock so useful for, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.
