Free Will and Wanton Lust

 

octavia-butler

Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling is two books in one. Like a pre-fab house with the world’s most fascinating basement, everything above ground feels thin and standard issue, but lurking beneath is a troubling look at slavery from the point of view of a sympathetic slave master, who never quite realizes what she is.

The primary narrative of Fledgling concerns a character named Shori, who awakens without her memory following an unknown violent tragedy. Shori, it turns out, is an Ina, a race of humanoids that developed in parallel to humanity who are, basically, vampires. They suck blood, the sun hurts them, they live almost forever, and they have what anyone who was into Vampyre the Masquerade can tell you are thralls, humans whom they have bewitched through repeated biting. Except here, the thralls are called Symbionts. They provide a steady food source and other somewhat vague physiological benefits to their Ina, and in turn they get to live for around two hundred years, are immune to disease, and get a whole host of other benefits.

The novel’s plot revolves around Shori trying to relearn who she is and, eventually, find justice for the murder of her parents, her siblings, and her first group of human Symbionts. While excellently plotted, the actual story of Fledgling leaves much to be desired.  Often, the story appears to be an excuse to do a lot of world-building about Ina that never fully pays off, and a kind of Mary Sueism leaks into the book’s protagonist. There is nothing wrong with Shori as a character beyond her memory loss. She is completely devoid of flaws, and all her struggles are external in nature. She spends nearly all the book being told by everyone around her how great she is. She is physically and intellectually superior to every other character in the book. Her only seeming fault—her temper, which arrives abruptly right before she is told she needs to learn to control it—is only a challenge because the hidebound rules of Ina decorum frown on it. The villains in the book are essentially Nazis, and there’s never any question about whether justice will be done during Fledgling’s courtroom drama second half, because Ina can smell whether or not people (or fellow Ina) are lying. The allegorical aspects—Shori is black and all other Ina are white, Shori is the product of genetic mingling between humans and Ina etc.—are transparent and heavy handed. It’s a fun page-turner, good for a lazy weekend or long flight, but not exactly up to Butler’s well-deserved reputation as a trailblazing science fiction writer.

Again, ignore the house and take a trip down to its basement. Pry up the floorboards and look around a bit for the bodies buried there, and you find much more fascinating material. As Noah discussed recently, Fledgling is a book that works in part by trapping you in the narrator’s head. Shori and the reader have a kind of soul-bond. As she has lost her memory, we begin in the exact same place as she does, learn what she learns, when she learns it. We never escape her subjectivity; her experience is our experience. But as in many books with a clearly defined first person narrator, there are paths into that experience that Shori can’t see, but that we are free to roam around in and explore.

This different understanding largely revolves around Symbionts, or as we would probably call them, slaves. The bond with Symbionts is formed through a venom the Ina infect them with. After a few bites, the venom is addictive and, if a Symbiont is ever separated from their Ina for too long, fatal to the Symbiont. It also destroys their free will. Not only are they unable to disobey their Ina’s command, once bitten even for the first time, they feel pulled towards the Ina, wanting what the Ina wants, wanting to serve. Once bound, Symbionts will die if separated from their Ina for to long.

Thus, even though the Ina talk about the ethics of their Symbiont system with quite a bit of lofty rhetoric about consent, consent is actually impossible. Once bitten for the first time, a prospective Symbiont is going to want to be a Symbiont, because they are going to want to please the Ina who has bitten them. The only regime governing how Ina treat their Symbionts are social norms. The current norms are egalitarian. Symbionts are supposed to consent to becoming Sumbionts, you aren’t supposed to boss them around unless absolutely necessary—a necessity that comes up far more often than the well meaning liberal Ina would like to admit—and talking about them like they are inferior is gauche. The villainous Silk family use their Symbionts as pawns and, we are led to believe, treat them barbarously, and there is nothing the other Ina can (or want to) do about it. The eventual trial revolves largely around the Silk’s crimes against Shori’s family, short of outright murder, there is nothing Ina are legally forbidden from doing with their Symbionts.

Having lost her memory, Shori is free from the socialization of having grown up the benefactor of an oppressive social order. Shori adores her Symbionts, and feels closely tied to them, and something about this system troubles her, even if she remains unable to articulate what it is. All of that articulation is left up to her “first” (Ina must have a group of Symbionts so they don’t kill them by feeding from them too often and the feeding process is overtly sexual, so the Ina-Symbiont relationship comes to resemble a shared marriage with a primary partner and several secondaries), a white man named Wright. Shori binds Wright to her before she re-learns what the Symbiont-Ina relationship entails, and he grows increasingly resentful about his role and their relationship as the novel progresses. While some of this is couched as a critique of heteronormativity—he’s angriest at having to share her with another male Symbiont—you can feel Fledgling pull sympathetically towards Wright’s problems with the world he has been forced into. Late in the novel, Shori casually takes up the Ina habit of replacing a Symbiont’s last name with the word “sym” and the name of the Ina they are bound to, erasing the human’s individuality. Wright responds:

“Sym Wayne?” Wright said, frowning. “Is that how you say it, then, when someone is a symbiont? That’s what happens to our names? We’re sym Shori?”

“You are,” I said.

“Something you remembered?”

“No. Something I learned from hearing people talk.”

The moment of a forced name-change is an important plot point in many slave narratives, from Roots to 12 Years a Slave, whose action is only resolved when Solomon Northrup reclaims his name.  It’s vital that this moment comes late in the book, after Shori has begun to be welcomed into Ina society. As she becomes more Ina, her patience for the very human needs and dignities of her Symbionts lessens, and her complicity in their oppression becomes less noticeable to her.

Wright never breaks with Shori. In fact, his growing discontentment goes nowhere. Other Ina assure Shori that Wright will “come around” one day, but there’s no real evidence that this is true. He has no choice but to stay with Shori, and, while he’s in love with her, is unclear whether or not that love is real.

Fledgling is much trickier than it initially seems. While its surface story is a straightforward allegory about race and white supremacy, its b-plot takes the same victim of oppression and turns her into an oppressor. The book further scrambles our ready-made categories by situating the narrative inside the head of a black, female slave master and making a white man the voice of human dignity. It’s a fascinating and troubling look into how systems of oppression justify and perpetuate themselves, told from the perspective of someone who thinks they’re in a YA supernatural coming of age novel.

It could be that part of why Fledgling feels so unsatisfying as a novel yet so thematically rich is because it was conceived as being part of a series. There’s no evidence of this beyond the text itself, other than Butler’s penchant for serialization. But it could be that the plot feels unfinished because its primary purpose was to keep us interested while we learned a hundred pages or so of exposition about Ina customs, history, biology and religion that would be important later. It could be that Wright and Shori’s relationship—the key relationship in the book, and, at first, its apparent subject—does not resolve in this book because it was meant to in a future volume. This would help explain why Shori’s arch-enemies are left alive in the book’s conclusion as she goes to live with a new family that has not been fully developed yet, and why the book hints at growing factionalism within the Ina, pinned to the question of the species’ origin, that may break out into civil war.

Sadly, we’ll never know. Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler’s first book after a lengthy hiatus, would prove to be her last. She died suddenly, as the story goes, on book tour, promoting it. Of all the aspects of Fledgling that are richly, deliciously troubling, this may be the most. That Butler wrote a book in part about people so desperate to cheat death and loneliness that they would agree to be enslaved, right before her own life was cut so tragically short.

9 thoughts on “Free Will and Wanton Lust

  1. I think Butler handles these issues better in the Xenogenesis series, where the good-guy alien sex slavers are presented with considerably more ambivalence. They’re both saviors and imperialists, and that’s talked about in a way that makes it clear that Butler’s loyalties are divided, just as are the loyalties of her characters.

    Whereas with Fledgling you really do feel like you kind of have to read against the book to Shori as evil or as a slaver.

    For example, there’s that moment in the book where she offers Wayne his freedom if he wants it, and he turns it down. You can still argue it’s somewhat ambivalent, but it’s hard not to see it as a fairly deliberate effort to put Shori in the right morally. Whereas the aliens in Xenogenesis, for all their beneficence, are not willing to let the humans go, and never suggest they are.

  2. Keen observations, Noah. I think that some of this lack of ambivalence comes from getting Shori’s actions and thoughts solely from her POV. But I’m also not sure if, having bitten Wright multiple times already, his choice is really a choice. And he even says it doesn’t feel like a real choice to him.

    I don’t think the book presents Shori as evil, nor do I even think reading around (or against) her POV would reveal that. I think it portrays her as gradually participating more and more in a system that is, at its core, evil but which has evolved over time to mitigate that evil to the greatest extent that it could.

    There’s a lot of things in the book that are deeply troubling, but, because we’re trapped in Shori’s POV, are not presented as such. Like that the Silks are only on trial because they’ve murdered other Ina and other Ina’s Symbionts. Had they merely tortured and killed their own Symbionts, no one would care. Shori’s instruction not to mistreat or coerce her Symbionts is justified out of her own self-interest (it will be psychically taxing for her to do so) rather than theirs. Or the name change thing. I have to imagine, given Butler’s thematic obsessions over the course of her career, that these aren’t accidental, or the result of carelessness on her part. And I think Wright exists in part to enable us to read against Shori throughout, even while finding her POV sympathetic and understandable.

    (None of this is in contradiction to your assertion that she’s handled this better elsewhere, it’s just what makes the book interesting to me.)

  3. “I think that some of this lack of ambivalence comes from getting Shori’s actions and thoughts solely from her POV.”

    The Xenogenesis books are from only one POV though (one each.)

    I also think the difference has to do with the fact that she’s made Shori black here.

    It’s not exactly clear that you’re supposed to find the Ina evil, exactly…. The relationship between Ina and humans isn’t exactly slavery, or doesn’t have to be seen as slavery. It could be seen in the context of BDSM, too, or love. The relationship between Shori and her syms could be seen as pedophilia too, remember. That’s a reading of the relationship as “evil” which is possible, but not really supported by the book.

    I’d also say that, given the fact that these things keep showing up in Butler’s work, the relationship between Ina and her syms, including the dominance/submission aspects, are supposed to be erotic and sexy. Butler is into tentacle sex and vampire sex and bdsm and queerness of various kinds, and expects her readers to be into them too. So there’s that.

  4. Again, really good points. The thing that makes this different from BDSM for me is that humans lose free will for a period of several days when they are bitten and permanently when they become Symbionts. Again, the Ina we hang out with over the course of the book have social codes against abusing this lack of free will, but the humans still are missing it. That’s what makes it slavery to me. All matters of consent are basically beside the point of the Ina/Sym relationship. Wright even asks whether he can be sure he legitimately wants to be a sym or not, given that he has a chemical flowing in his veins that makes him devoted to and in love with Shori.

    This is also making literal what is performative (or, perhaps, metaphorical) in a BDSM setting, which is why it’s also erotic. I thought about writing a separate piece about how genuinely troubling the sex stuff is in the book, not because of the kink factor, but rather because Shori appears to be an 8-11 year old girl.

  5. Yep; I saw something online where someone was talking about it and was completely freaked out. It reminded me of the child/adult relationship in Twilight. I think it’s…Twitchell, is that his name? He’s got a book about incest in lit and talks a bit about vampires….

  6. Great post, Isaac. I taught Fledgling in my contemporary fiction course, and this is precisely the reading I had to lure out of my students during discussion. It’s a disturbing novel in part because it’s clearly incomplete. Butler set all this groundwork for the vampire-master critique presumably to come out in the next, never-written installment.

  7. Hey, I only came across HU a few days ago and am loving it. Thanks all.

    After being recommended Octavia Butler a long time ago I’ve just finished reading the Seed to Harvest omnibus of the Patternist series. I was majorly disappointed: characters with no interest to them and haphazard development, clunky dialogue, not very interesting plots. The world building was interesting but seemed… meaningless, culminating in pointless war between two races created by men who use sex and family to grind everyone else down. That seemed to be the only kind of power dynamic through all four books – abuse of traditional male power constantly justified as natural, or an unrestrainable impulse, or for the ‘good of the race’. And how resistance to it is futile.
    The one book I did enjoy was Wild Seed – because it focussed on developing and exploring Anyanwu as a character, spent a long time on the struggles around power in her head and describing the joy and wonder of her abilities. I was so excited by that first part – the rest were a chore to drag myself through.

    Am I missing something obvious? Were these novels just way more important in the 70s than they seem to me now? Is Butler’s other work more interesting? What should I read next in order to discover her genius? Reading the above, Fledgling isn’t sounding that attractive to me right now.

  8. I think Butler is always interesting, but also often very uneven. I love Xenogenesis. Kindred is also great. I’d recommend those two; I’ve had folks who didn’t like any other Butler enjoy those.

  9. “Were these novels just way more important in the 70s than they seem to me now? Is Butler’s other work more interesting?”

    “Parable of the Sower” was written in the 90s but it probably turned me off Butler forever. Pretty sure that’s one of the her most read/admired books.

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