Yearly Archives: 2014

Utilitarian Review 7/5/14

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On HU

Our Octavia Butler roundtable continued:

I asked folks to tell me their most and least favorite Butler novels.

I wrote about Octavia Butler as romance novelist, and Laura Kinsale as sci-fi author.

Vom Marlowe reviewed Butler’s Wild Seed.

And then the roundtable took a sort of pause as people didn’t quite have their pieces in…but it will resume next week!

In the meantime,

Adrian Bonenberger examined the movie-making talents of radical Islamic insurgent group ISIS.

Chris Gavaler wrote about the first comic book and the comics artists of Lascaux.

And I provided an index of all my writing on Orange Is the New Black, plus some responses to critics.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about Orange Is the New Black, gender stereotypes, and male representation. This turned into a viral hate read this week, if you missed it.

At Salon I did a list of great double entendre songs.

At Splice Today I wrote about

— the great Al Green song I Can’t Get Next to You; better than Robin Thicke!

—Obama, generic democrat, with maybe slightly less hawk.

At Bitch I wrote about Ariel Schrag’s lovely new novel Adam, about a cis man passing as a trans man.
 
Other Links

Steven Heller on the long-running comics anthology World War 3.

Mary McCarthy on the perils of sex in a hot tub.

Jill Filipovic has a nice piece on the Hobby Lobby decision.
 

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Orange Is the New Black: Index for the Haters, and Response to Critics

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So I had a post on Orange Is the New Black become a viral hate read over at the Atlantic this week. In celebration (?) and as a low key way to post without posting on the fourth, I thought I’d provide an index of my writing on the show for those who are curious. The articles are arranged chronologically in the order they were published.
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At Public Books, Orange Is the New Caged, on how the first season picks up on tropes of femininity and lesbianism from the 1950 women-in-prison film Caged. (This is part of a roundtable at Public Books; lots of other good essays on the series by other folks there too if you want to browse around.)

At Splice Today, The Crassness of Orange Is the New Black, on how the first season adds sex and deviance to the memoir.

At the Atlantic, “A Lewd Reminder of How Tame Oranges Is the New Black Really Is”, in which I compare the first season to the 1974 film Caged Heat, and talk about political and sexual fantasies.

Right here at HU, Orange Is the New Black: Episode 7 Hate Blogging, in which I blog my way through a second season episode.

At Splice Today, Prison and White People, in which I talk about why focusing on Piper’s white privilege misses out on the way that institutional racism is not her friend.

And finally, the hate read at the Atlantic, Orange Is the New Black’s Irresponsible Portrayal of Men, in which I argue that the show’s relationship to male prisoners is problematic.

There were a number of online responses to the piece, most of them not really all that useful from my perspective. A couple of the more interesting ones were by Alyssa Rosenberg and Madeleine Davies. This piece by Sonny Bunch is probably the best though; mean-spirited and clever.
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What the hell; might as well respond briefly. Alyssa’s piece argues that it would be more strategic for me to criticize some show other than Orange Is the New Black. Her reasons are somewhat unclear; as far as I can tell, the argument is partially that OITNB is relatively good, and partially that it has a relatively small audience, so I’d be better criticizing NCIS, or whatever. To the first point, I’d say that whether the show is good or not is part of the question at issue; just because Alyssa thinks it is isn’t a reason for me to toss over my own opinion and write about something else. For the second…you don’t influence people based on what show you talk about, in any direct way. You influence people based on the reaction to what you, yourself, are writing. And as far as being strategic and getting my message out…this was one of the most popular things I’ve ever written (for better or worse.)

Alyssa concludes by saying, “If we want a culture that tells a wider variety of stories, we need to work on moving culture at the mainstream, rather than simply at the margins,” but that seems to assume that my criticism is going to move NCIS or OITNB in some direct way. I really doubt that that’s the way these things work, particularly. You move people through criticism the way you move people with any art; sporadically, confusedly, maybe if you’re lucky but generally not, depending on a lot of factors. The idea that you move the mainstream by talking about a mainstream show and move the margins by talking about a marginal show strikes me as really simplistic (not least because, for example, Alyssa probably wouldn’t even have written her post if I had been writing about something other than OITNB.)

Caroline Small on facebook also pointed out that culture often moves not by moving the mainstream, but by changing the margins, which then shifts the center. Which I think certainly can be the case, at least.

Sonny Bunch in his response to my piece sneers at the whole idea of thinking about representation in art, arguing that doing so isn’t criticism. He says that:

There’s also the obvious point to be made that this isn’t “criticism” in the traditional sense: there’s little discussion of craft or storytelling, no sense of how the authors of the program help us understand the world they’ve created. It’s a simple collection of grievances that can be summarized thusly: “Why aren’t you telling the story I think needs to be told and why have you portrayed a group I believe needs defending in an unflattering light?

What’s really funny about this is that it’s gloriously self-refuting, and utterly unaware of it. After all, Bunch isn’t looking at the craft of my essay; he’s not trying to figure out how my essay forms a coherent intellectual world. He’s just listing grievances, and asking, “why aren’t you writing the kind of criticism I want you to write?”

I’d argue (contra the somewhat confused Bunch) that Bunch’s criticism is entirely defensible as criticism, because engaging with the ideology and the preconceptions of the work you’re looking at is a legitimate critical project. The problem with Bunch’s view isn’t that he engages with my ideology and my preconceptions; the problem is that he’s not a very attentive reader, and so isn’t alert to the fact that I have quite a bit to say about craft, about storytelling, and about how the program creators help us understand the world they’ve created (hint; they do it in part through gender stereotypes.)
 
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The First Comic Book

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The world’s first comic book, Lascaux, was published in France 17,000 years ago. It was a single edition, printed on limestone, and arranged in a pair of strips over 128-feet long. The title refers to the medium (“lascaux” is French for “limestone”), but it is also the genre (cave drawings) as well as the specific work of art. Similarly, “pulp fiction” refers to magazines printed on paper made from wood pulp but later came to mean the tales themselves, eventually inspiring Quentin Tarantino to adopt the term as the title of his 1994 film Pulp Fiction.

Most reviewers refer to the Lascaux creators as “Cro-Magnons,” a generic designation which in this case might literally be true. The bones of the first so-called Cro-Magnons were found in a hole (“cro” in French) on property owned by a farmer named Magnon in a nearby town. Cro-Magnons are people of Magnon’s hole. More specifically, the creators of Lascaux were a loose collective of artists of the Neolithic Publishing Period who signed their work with a symbol resembling the head of a four-pronged pitchfork. This signature has been compared to a graffiti tag, but since it also appears in other caves of the region it probably denotes a clan or congregation and is mostly likely a corporate logo, similar to the globe Atlas Comics used before becoming Marvel in the 1960s. It may also be an umbrella logo like the circled “DC” icon that linked National Allied Publications with its affiliate branches All-American Comics and Detective Comics in the 1940s.
 

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Since Lascaux was published before France passed its first law protecting authors’ rights in 1793, the artists’ heirs retain no proprietary rights. A court challenge could argue that the 1940 discovery of the cave signifies a new “first” publication, but since copyrights lapse into public domain after seventy years, the point is mute. Four Pronged Publishing went out of business millennia ago and so collects no royalties on the postcards, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and other gift shop memorabilia appropriating Lascaux artwork.
 

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Legal issues aside, the work has influenced comic books for centuries. Reviewers often liken it to Michelangelo’s most acclaimed graphic novel, the Sistine Chapel. The comparison is apt, as the Lascaux artists also painted religious imagery on the ceilings of a temple while lying on their backs suspended by wooden platforms. The scope is also similar, with the largest bull drawing spanning seventeen feet. Michelangelo, however, worked in distinct panels, while Lascaux includes no formal frames or gutter, prefiguring Will Eisner’s use of open page space. The absence of captions and word balloons also influenced later works by Jim Steranko and Alan Moore.

Walt Disney borrowed animation techniques from Four Prongs too. Many of the horses and bulls in the Lascaux are drawn at angled perspectives with the closest front leg straight and the second front leg bent and slightly detached from the body to suggest motion. A single animal may be drawn multiple times in an overlapping row, with head or back end incomplete, to evoke forward progression—a technique copied by numerous artists suggesting the movements of speedsters Flash and Quicksilver. When viewed with Four Prongs candle technology (a hollowed rock filled with reindeer fat and a juniper wick), the moving animals flicker like nickelodeon images.

The artists also innovated crushed minerals for their palette, even for black, avoiding the charcoals favored by their contemporaries. Curators comment on the flawlessness of the artists as revealed by the lack of a single false or erased line in all Lascaux. This impression, however, may be due to the now invisible lines produced by one or more “pencilers” that later “inkers” effectively obscured as they finalized the pages. Credit is also due to the nuanced style of the colorists, whose muted amber bulls influenced Lynn Varley’s award-winning work in The Dark Knight Returns.

Sadly, after its republication in 1940, Lascaux was no longer preserved in its clay-sealed micro-climate—the geological equivalent of an acid-free mylar bag—and so it has been significantly downgraded from its former near-mint condition. As a result, reprints are flooding the market. Lascaux II—a painstakingly reproduced concrete tunnel located near the original—opened in 1983, Lascaux III is currently on tour, and Lascaux IV is in production.

While Lascaux has thrilled equine and bovine enthusiasts for thousands of years, casual readers should be prepared for a narrative told without human main characters. The comic book’s single human figure is located on the cave’s most inaccessible panel and, where many of the bulls and horses possess a slight and mildly Cubist quality of abstraction, the lone man is essentially a stick-figure with what may be a bird’s head and is most definitely a penis. This may in fact be the falcon-headed Horus or the ibis-headed Thoth, both of whom sojourned in Gaul before settling in the Nile valley. Fans of their adventures will also enjoy the comic books of ancient Egypt.
 

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Movie Review: Clanking of Swords IV

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Much media attention has focused on the capabilities of ISIS’s propaganda wing, a smart and decentralized group of well-funded jihadis who have produced one of the most vibrant – and, many say, most effective – bodies of artistic work to emerge from the region in recent memory. Their latest offering, fourth in the “Clanking” franchise, is light years ahead of its predecessors, which, it must be admitted, were little more than videos of ISIS fighting against Assad’s fighters and Al Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate (Al Qaeda has disavowed ISIS).

“Clanking of Swords IV” (caution – viewer discretion HEAVILY recommended, it is an exceptionally vicious film – and some versions offer “Clanging” instead of “Clanking”) is dedicated to the proposition that only violence can cleanse the Middle East. With the redemptive power of violence as its philosophical center, the film aims to unify those competing narratives of violence we know from YouTube and LiveLeak, the badly-recorded battles wherein people die or are hurt in all the surprising ways one encounters in war.

“Clanking” begins with a geopolitical statement: a zoom-out shot of the Mesopotamian region that ISIS intends to rule. The perspective descends to a quad-copter drone hovering over the city of Falluja. The drone flies over formations of fighters, and lines of pickups and old military 2 ½ ton trucks filled with fighters and heavy-caliber machineguns and staged for attack, then heads back into the sky, at the midway point between four roads, spinning around faster and faster, creating a whirlwind-like effect, which resolves into a battle where ISIS is attacking the Iraqi military. The battle doesn’t last long, and includes the now-obligatory picture of American-style military vehicles under heavy fire, with repeated invocations to Allah. “Clanking’s” introduction then spends time recording some of its fighters delivering speeches, and dedicating themselves to the cause of establishing a super-national caliphate in the region.

From there, the film moves between scenes wherein people renounce their citizenship in various Middle Eastern countries, pledging homage to a new Caliphate by tearing their passports, and various iterations on the theme of battle. ISIS hunts down rival Sunni gangs by conducting drive-by shootings. ISIS hunts down Shia military and intelligence apparatus officers with a special squad dressed like Iraqi Army commanders. Fighters deliver victorious speeches, or inveigle against western influence. ISIS offers clemency to those who convert to the Sunni faith, or turn in their arms. Fighters snipe unsuspecting Iraqi soldiers, detonate IEDs, force prisoners to dig their own graves, tear up more passports. Fighters execute more captured members of the Iraqi military apparatus.

The cinematography is effective, accompanied, unaccountably, by the sound of a sword being sharpened, or possibly unsheathed – and certainly not “clanging” or “clanking.” More on the name of the film later. The cuts between scenes are professional and effective, and particularly devastating IED strikes and checkpoint attacks are rewound and played back in slow motion, creating a response in the viewer that can only be described as enthusiastic expectation. At least, in viewers like myself who are accustomed to scenes of violence, having been to war. Well adjusted viewers should find such scenes horrible, sick, and almost unwatchable.

The point of the film – although historians will likely debate this in years to come, depending on how effective the ISIS brand is in Iraq and Syria – is twofold. First, to create fear in viewers loyal to Iraq and citizens who (according to the point of view of ISIS) collaborated with the regime. Second, to attract new members by demonstrating ISIS fighters’ prowess in battle. The film does both of these things successfully – and it would be successful, I think, whether or not ISIS were especially active on the battlefield, as it is now. The violence is graphic, and real. The killings and attacks are chosen with an eye toward casting their enemies in the most pathetic light possible – in no frame does the Iraqi Army fight back with tenacity, save by implication. Each finishing shot of a battle is triumphal, featuring dead Shia Iraqi soldiers and police, as well as weapons seized. The sniper victims are killed in ways that render them laughable, and there are usually subtitles that ensure viewers interpret the action in a way that is as generous as possible to ISIS.

The subtitles, as well as cut-away scenes narrated by one of the filmmakers, condemn each of the victims, and the government in general. At one point near the end of the film, the group of ISIS soldiers who are hunting down regime “collaborators” enters the home of a “tyrannical” member of the Iraqi counter-terror effort – a colonel. They show pictures of him working with the Americans, and smiling. They then execute him by cutting his head off, and placing it between his legs. He struggles. The film states that “the mujahedeen will not sleep in the face of injustice.”

Overall, the film views like the most extraordinarily violent action movie you’ve ever seen. The filmmakers do an excellent job of capturing scenes using high-quality cameras, and the bloodiest parts are celebrated and revisited throughout the film. It is a meditation on violence and revenge, and it’s impossible to watch the movie without concluding that the events that are happening in the Middle East will not be resolved easily, and are bound to get worse – which boggles the mind – before they get better.

The only weak point in the movie is that whomever translated the movie chose a terrible title. “Clanking of the swords” is ridiculous to western ears, and regardless of the intention – to echo a popular song, or some relevant event from whatever past ISIS seeks to reference – it fails to inspire the same level of dread as the film itself. This wouldn’t merit discussion if the title weren’t stereotypically laughable – the signifier by which people are first introduced to the movie / documentary is absurd, and will only elicit contempt among English-speaking viewers. ISIS would likely claim that Americans and Europeans are not part of their target audience – their audience is people who sympathize with their cause, but haven’t yet picked up a weapon to fight. Calling it the “fourth” installment, and encouraging interested individuals to dig into the recent past of ISIS, before it was a nation-beater, is a further mistake. But perhaps the people who chose the name can be forgiven for catering to jihadis who had already watched the first three “Clanking” videos, and had developed emotional attachments – they probably didn’t expect to go so far, so fast. They couldn’t have expected that America would return to Iraq, giving U.S. soldiers and Air Force pilots an opportunity to make a sequel of their own: “Exploding of the Smart Bombs III.” Coming this July.
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Adrian Bonenberger is a freelance journalist, author of the epistolary war memoir “Afghan Post,” and helps run veteran intellectual blog “The Wrath Bearing Tree.” His twitter handle is @AHBonenberger.

Wild Seed: A Curious Love Story About Family

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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The premise is simple:

Anyanwu is a woman who can shift her physical form into any shape. She is a healer, she is feminine, and she is by nature immortal.

Doro is a man whose spirit moves from one body to another, thereby destroying the host’s spirit and eventually the body. He is a killer, he is masculine, and he is by nature immortal.

Wild Seed is about their relationship. Mother and father to generations. Wife and husband. Ally and enemy. Lover and beloved.

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The book begins in 1690.

Doro has been alive for thousands of years, and he whiles away the time by collecting people with special powers and breeding them.

Doro can use any body, but bodies of people with special powers last longer. He is also painfully lonely, as the lives of everyday humans flash by in the blink of an eye. He’s stopped seeing people as individuals and begun to see them as a people, a group, a line of descendants. In regards to individuals, Doro is casually cruel, but in regards to the entirety of a people, he is both caring and loyal, expending significant time, energy, and resources to assure his people are safe and cared for.

The story starts when Doro finds Anyanwu, who is living as an old woman in a town made up of her descendants. She is the resident witch, a healer and a priestess. When Doro meets her, Anyanwu has lived through many cycles where she taken on a youthful body, married, born children, and allowed her body to age, before repeating the process.

The story draws sharp parallels between Doro, who is creating descendants and villages and peoples, and Anyanwu, who is creating descendants and villages and peoples.

Doro breeds his people, sometimes demanding sisters and brothers or daughters and fathers breed, but he’s set himself apart from them, as though the people are toys.

Anyanwu bears her children herself, bringing them into the world from her own body. She is a part of the process, a living member of the peoples she creates.

The book has a number of themes, including slavery, the shifting nature of morality, the ability to mimic gods, the nature of marriage.

What I found absolutely fascinating was the author’s ability to shift my perspective on Doro, from monster to person, and back again, and how his relationship with Anyanwu changes them both over time.

I’ve read many books about antiheroes, including stories where the antihero is the lover-hero-husband archetype. I’m sure most people have read some version of the misunderstood-but-sexy vampire romance.

Those stories often have a redemption storyline, but Wild Seed is not that story. Frankly, I find that refreshing.

Doro is a monster, and he remains a monster.

The first time we (and Anyanwu) see Doro body-hop, he kills a child. Does Doro do this to save his own life? No. He does it because a ferry owner is annoying him, and he’s going to teach the obnoxious upstart a lesson.

Doro ends up killing both the child and the ferryman, and he doesn’t feel anything but a bit of pleasure because taking over the ferryman’s body means he’s no longer suffering a cold.

There is no redemption, at least in my book, for random child-killing to teach others lessons. There just isn’t. Doro is a really awful person, full-stop.

The way Butler arranges this story, Doro has the power to kill Anyanwu, to hurt or manipulate or enslave her children. That puts a lot of power into his hands, and she must learn to accept and live with his terrible nature, or die and leave her children at risk.

Doro has been using terror, killing, threats, to order his people around for literally millennium, and he’s quite good at it. I was nervous for Anyanwu–“Don’t make him angry, Don’t make him angry,” I chanted at her, as I read.

In the first part Anyanwu is appalled by Doro’s actions, but she remains able to accept him, as a lover and husband. The world is a harsh place, and Anyanwu’s cultural background (exposing children born with birth defects, killing in self-defense, war, slavery) makes her acceptance of Doro both understandable and plausible.

She is in a terrible position, and that, I think, is the crux of this story.

If Anyanwu agrees to Doro’s demands, he will not harm her children. But if she agrees to his demands, she will also have more children–more hostages to fate. His power over her will increase.

The one temptation, the one benefit instead of threat, that Doro offers Anyanwu is that someday, he will give her children who will not die. No mother, Doro says, should have to watch her children die.

And so Anyanwu says yes.

But the story does not make the yes easy, because monsters are still monsters. This is not a sulky emo vampire story, where brooding under a window is the worst that the antihero gets up to. No.

Doro keeps killing people.

Deliberately. Casually. Cruelly.

And yet, he also, in his own way, cares about Anyanwu, and with the help of his son Isaac (who he marries to Anyanwu, because this story is just full of that kind of thing), Doro slowly begins to see that Anyanwu holds power over him, just as he holds power over her.

The one thing that Doro tempts Anyanwu with is the one deep desire he has–to have someone who will not die, who is not gone in the blink of an eye. Anyanwu is the only person who can challenge him, because she is the only one who is not ephemeral.

Doro’s plight, the plight of being alone for three thousand years, is made more real by the shifting nature of the narrative. Anyanwu’s early husbands are nameless, her children also nameless, sons or daughters, nearly placeholders. One husband, Isaac, is bright and shining and individual, but most of her lovers or husbands are not.

The lack of names struck me as a curious choice for a spec fic writer, for in my misspent youth, I certainly read many stories that had long involved cross-referenced name glossaries in the back.

But I think the choice was deliberate and meaningful.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with my sister in law. She was going to a wedding out of state. “Oh, a friend?” I asked. “No, my cousin. So of course, I had to go.”

I said something like, “Oh, you’re particularly close?”

No, she said, but it was her cousin. Of course she had to attend the wedding of a cousin.

Ah, I thought, and I asked, “How many cousins do you have?”

Two, it turned out. One on one side, one on the other.

Me? I’m not sure, actually, but we passed a hundred a while ago (yes, my family is Catholic).

I think Butler, regardless of her own family’s personal size, must have been acquainted with the sort of sprawling-family-induced mental flailing that I do when asked how many cousins I have.

The kind of close kin relationships that are often depicted in fiction is not necessarily inherent in blood-tie based relationships. With ten siblings, it’s possible to be closer to some than others, and I suppose the same would be true with successive husbands or children, if one had (literally) hundreds of years of living.

The marvel of Butler’s world was that I felt it, that she brought about in me a kind of mental shift, the idea that loved ones would be transitory, that descendants could be ‘sons’ instead of named individuals, that husbands could be so frequent as to be more of a job than a loved one.

But Doro.

Doro was the most surprising part of all.

So there I was, reading along, as the monster begins to realize that without Anyanwu (who leaves him), he will be truly and completely alone. Doro begins courting her, and, to please her, he chooses the body of a small man like those of her people.

Aw, I thought, that’s very sweet.

Then I stared at myself in horror, because killing someone so you can wear their dead body to please a lover is more, you know, sociopathic than sweet. And yet, I can see why he’d think it was a good way to woo Anyanwu. He has to take bodies anyway, might as well pick a pretty one, right?

Such is the power of fiction to play mind-games and what-ifs.

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Isaac, Doro’s son and Anyanwu’s named husband, is the one who convinces Anyanwu to bow to Doro’s will, and I think it is his wisdom that the story most effectively explores.

For Isaac, there is no escape from Doro’s power. He is mortal, he is comparatively frail. What Isaac tells Anyanwu is that Doro is a monster, he will be terrible whether Anyanwu bows to his will or not. But, if Anyanwu stays, if she tries, she might mitigate some of the casual cruelties Doro commits.

And, in the story, this does eventually come to pass.

It takes a couple hundred years for Doro to realize that he is terribly lonely, that he loves Anyanwu for her own sake (and not just for the power of her bloodlines or use as a broodmare). There is a beautiful, moving scene where Anyanwu has decided that she is done with life, and that she will leave Doro, and to do that, she will go into her own body, turn it off, kill herself.

Doro lays on her breast, weeping, and he begs her to stay.

She does, in the end, agree to stay, to live. Anyanwu chooses life. And Doro agrees to some of her demands, reduces his casual killing, is less monstrous, but that doesn’t change that he is a monster. A monster who has killed some of Anyanwu’s friends, descendants. Anyanwu is perfectly well aware of this, she hasn’t somehow decided he’s gotten better or become redeemed.

Their story doesn’t end with some kind of pure reconciliation, although there is reconciliation, there is hope. It’s more of a carefully negotiated truce.

Anyanwu understands Doro, as I think the reader is intended to understand Doro, without approving of him. He’s really quite an awful person, even as he has moments of care and tenderness.

I dipped my toe into some of the criticism surrounding this book, and much of it involved the dichotomies Butler creates. (Certainly there are plenty.)

What I found to be satisfying in this story was the unflinching portrayal of living with a devil’s choice, handed to you by a monster. Many of us in the world have been handed a less than square deal–is it better, for instance, to stay in a corrupt system and try to help, or is it better to just get out? At what point does the world become too hard to bear? Is it possible to love someone with compassion, to see the good in them, while also being fully aware of their awfulness?

I think there are never any easy answers to these questions, and in fact, I think universal answers are not helpful, but this story was a particularly beautiful exploration of them.

 

How Do You Say “Love” in Alien, or Vice Versa?

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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In her short story “Speech Sounds”, from the Bloodchild collection, Octavia Butler imagines a world in which a mysterious plague has robbed most people of language — both speech and written. The story opens as the protagonist, a former freelance writer who can still speak but not read, sees a dispute on a bus.

People screamed or squawked in fear. Those nearby scrambled to get out of the way. Three more young men roared in excitement and gestured wildly. Then, somehow, a second dispute broke out between two of these three — probably because one inadvertently touched or hit the other.

The first time you read this, it’s not especially clear that the combatants can’t talk to each other; their screams and squawks, gestures and roars, seem figurative — a description of chaos, in which communication becomes irrelevant because of anger and fear and violence. It’s only as you go along that you realize the description is literal; people are really screaming and squawking inarticulately, because no one can speak. A scene that seems familiar is actually strange. The people who we think we recognize as ourselves, under stress, are actually separated from us by an insurmountable barrier; we think we understand them, but we don’t; we think they are speaking to us but they aren’t. Through a trick of language, a realist anecdote becomes science fiction, and the world, and those in it, become more alien than we thought.

In her historical romance, Flowers From the Storm Laura Kinsale’s hero, Christian, the wealthy powerful rakish Duke of Jervaulx, suffers a brain hemorrhage which robs him of the power of speech. He ends up in an insane asylum, where he is cared for by Maddy, a Quaker and coincidentally the daughter of a friend. Jervaulx’s loss of speech seems like it should put him beyond communication, or shut down his ability to communicate with Maddy. But instead, somewhat miraculously, it makes it possible for them to love each other, both because his illness is the cause of bringing them together and by making her understand him better.

She lifted her head. He wasn’t a two-year-old. He had not lost his reason.

He isn’t mad; he is maddened.

The thought came so clearly that she had the sensation someone had spoken it aloud….

Jervaulx had not lost his reason. His words had been taken away. He coulcn’t speak,and he couldn’t understand what was said to him.

Christian’s silence enables Maddy to hear something which Kinsale strongly suggests is the voice of God. And what the voice tells her is that the stranger she thinks she sees is not actually a stranger. Through a trick of language, the other, beyond reach, becomes an intimate, and tragedy moves towards romance.

For both Butler and Kinsale, then, genre is built around language and the loss of language. And if both depend for genre on who understands what, it seems like you could understand them both as part of the same genre, depending on how you listen to them.

It’s not too difficult to see “Speech Sounds” as a thwarted romance; the main plot of the story involves the protagonist, Rye, tentatively falling in love with a man she calls Obsidian; they have sex, decide to stay together, and he is then suddenly killed. If the story starts by making you perceive the everday as alien sci-fi, it moves on to contact between stranger’s, a quick flowering of love from the storm.

By the same token, Flowers From the Storm can be read as science-fiction. It’s set in the Regency period, with rules and customs which are certainly as alien to the contemporary reader as Butler’s familiar post-apocalypse. A good bit of the story is told from Christian’s perspective, and so you see the alien world speak to him in an alien language. “Weebwell,” she whispered. “Vreethin wilvee well.” The Quaker woman, with her rituals and strange taboos (no lying, using “thee” and “thou”) is seen by Christian, too, as other and distant; he becomes the readers’ point of identification, a stranger in a strange land.

Both Butler and Kinsale are writing in a genre of difference — a genre that can broadly encompass both sci-fi and romance. This focus on difference is also, as Lysa Rivera says of Butler’s work, a focus on marginalization. Those who are seen as different are also marginal. When everyone else loses language, Rye, who retains it, becomes a potential target of jealousy and violence. Christian is rich and powerful, but when he loses language he becomes a madman, marginalized and subject to arbitrary imprisonment and punishment.

It’s significant that these differences and marginalizations are, literally and figuratively, a byproduct of language. This is true on multiple levels. Both Rye and Christian are marginal, or marginalized, because of their relationship to speech, or words. But they’re also marginalized because of their positions within an arbitrary fiction. Butler has created a future world, and placed Rye on the margins within it; Kinsale has created a past world and placed Christian on the margins within it. The characters’ struggles with language could be seen then as a kind of awareness of their own status as subjects to, and objects of, language. Their speech is wrong because they’ve been spoken wrong.

If the characters are positioned through language, the same can be said of the authors. As Rivera pointed, out, Butler’s work can be seen as marginal in many ways — it’s by an African-American woman, which is a marginal identity within science-fiction; and it’s science-fiction, which is a marginal genre in terms of literary credibility and academic interest. In comparison to Laura Kinsale, though, Butler is certainly more centrally positioned in numerous ways; sci-fi has more credibility than romance, and Butler is fairly well-established as an object of academic inquiry in a way Kinsale certainly isn’t (there’s a lengthy entry for “Speech Sounds” on Wikipedia; none for “Flowers From the Storm”). Marginalization and difference, for both authors, isn’t an absolute, but a function of their relative position to genre and to speech. Who is different, and from what, depends on what, or how, you’re talking about, or to.

So who is the person talked to? Arguably it’s you, the reader. In both Butler and Kinsale, language positions you as other, trying to understand, and as intimate, comprehending and empathizing. Language alienates and seduces; it conveys the terror of difference and the joy of bridging it — or, alternately, the joy of difference and the terror of bridging it. Language, that intimate betrayer, makes you each book’s monstrous invader, and each book’s lover.

Octavia Butler — Best and Worst

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OEB

So we’re in the middle of an Octavia Butler roundtable, I thought it’d be fun (maybe) for people to talk about which of her works are their favorites and which are their least favorites.

My favorite book of hers is Dawn, from her Xenogenesis series (which I’ve written about here among other places.) I just love the way it presents a standard aliens-as-colonizers narrative in such a way that the colonizers are both repulsive and sympathetic. The flatness of her prose here feels like it both conceals and accentuates the complexity of what she’s doing with empathy. It’s an interesting comparison with Gwyneth Jones, who touches on many of the same themes and ideas in a more knowing, ironized, and deliberately academic way. I love Jones, but there’s a lot to be said for Butler’s approach too, which presents everything almost transparently; it feels almost like a YA novel about growing up to be a tentacled sex monstrosity.

As for my least favorite….I read “Wild Seed” a long while back, but I found its presentation of gender difference (male, bad! female good!) to be pretty irritating. I just read Butler’s short story collection “Bloodchild”; the last story, “Martha”, in which a black female sci-fi writer is asked by God to save the world through vivid dreaming seemed both overly cute and nakedly self-aggrandizing.

For the rest of her books I’ve read, I quite like Kindred, didn’t like Fledgling much, and I think that’s all I’ve read.

So what about you all? What’s your favorite and least favorite Butler?