Utilitarian Review 6/28/14

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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In order to keep relevant, the contemporary film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy would update its nuclear holocaust to apocalyptic climate change. With a few exceptions, most of the end-of-times imagery can remain unchanged. Mass rioting and civil wars erupt over deadened landscapes and disintegrating cities. All seems lost. Then: an alien race, the Oankali, swoops in from space, scooping up the last surviving species, humankind in particular.

The Oankali also restore Earth to pristine, pre-Industrial health, yet Butler treats this like a neutral fact, important to the world building, (literally,) and not singled out for the miracle that it is. This would change in the modern movie remake. In the book, the humans seem barely appreciative, and quickly move onto other concerns. They take the healed planet for granted, but as victims of an atomic war, they were never responsible for its loss. Everyone blames the few military plutocrats who pushed the button. The Oankali try to prevent the redevelopment of technology, which irks a great many survivors. How could innocent people not wish to restore everything that was stolen from them—houses and streets and mines and guns and all?

In the hypothetical film update, the world is destroyed by the narrowness of the human race, albeit orchestrated by these same military plutocrats. No one prized the environment above all, and everyone lived unsustainably. The blame becomes collective. The equators flood, and food and water run out. The humans are widely aware of their hopelessness as they approach the end of the world. Then: almost divine intervention. Redemption. The audience watches the human survivors emotionally leveled, toppled by grace and humility, rapture and grief. Cue swelling strings, a long pan over waterfalls, or intact glaciers. Hands sifting the soil. They could easily reapply the John H Williams score from Jurassic park—the part when the jeeps pull up into a field of Brachiosauri.

In this version, it’s also easier to imagine humanity consenting to what the Oankali require in return—to interbreed with them completely, leaving no further generation of purely human beings.

Would humanity still value Earth, if humankind had to take the fall, and extinguish itself instead? The reverse narrative is far more dominant—humans racing out in spaceships for a replacement planet. Interestingly, the Oankali believe that letting the human species continue as is constitutes mass-suicide. ‘The Human Contradiction,’ the mixture of intelligence and hierarchical behavior, will always guide humankind to utter destruction of themselves and the Earth. The Oankali believe they are offering a way out—humans may not survive, but their genes can.

It is eventually revealed that the Oankali plan a parallel fate for Earth. They had to save the environment to have something to feed their animalesque spaceships. Once these ships reduce Earth to a desolate core, the half-Human, half-Oankali people will take off in search of more intelligent life to augment. Sadly, this development comes too soon in the books, nullifying what had been a beautiful, difficult paradox. Why not resist, if they’re destroying the Earth as well? So what if the solar system will be eaten by the sun, or a passing black hole, in the matter of aeons? Perhaps humans will outrun it. That’s what the Oankali are doing. The movie version breaks down in development hell.

Power, Change and Science Fiction

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Lysa Rivera

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Octavia E. Butler, the most influential black American woman science fiction writer of the twentieth century, wrote to confront and understand power, an essential part of the human condition that she found entirely “fascinating.”[i] From the Patternist trilogy to Fledgling, her final published novel, Butler rarely flinched from using science fiction to ponder the depths to which people (and aliens) will go to ensure survival and growth. Stories of aliens colonizing war-ravished humans, masters subjugating slaves, men raping women, capitalists exploiting workers, and humans destroying the planet all speak clearly to this stubborn preoccupation with power. They also speak, of course, to what Butler often called the “Human Contradiction,” namely, the tendency to put our innate human “intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior.”[ii] For Butler, humans are born with the capacity to be both extremely intelligent yet equally hierarchical – “characteristics” that she saw as evolutionarily necessary for human survival. Both traits can, if left alone, promote the survival of the species, but as the imaginary histories and futures reveal throughout Butler’s work, a different outcome unfolds, proving entirely that “the two together are lethal.”[iii]

Butler’s interest in the inner-workings of power owes a great deal to the fact that she experienced life from the margins. She was black, female, and (for most of her life) working class. Of course, to say that Butler wrote about power because she herself lacked it is somewhat obvious. As she has already observed: “one of the reasons I got into writing about power was because I grew up feeling like I didn’t have any.”[iv] Not so obvious, however, is the fact that Butler also wrote from another kind of margin: the genre of science fiction. Often relegated to the category of pulp fiction or pop culture, science fiction has endured what Samuel R. Delany has famously called a type of literary “ghettoization,” or the tendency to see science fiction “as a working-class kind of art,” that as such “is given the kind of short-shrift that working-class practices of art are traditionally given.”

Yet where there is power, there is resistance. Where there are centers, there are margins. And where there are ghettoes, there are stories of survival, resilience, and transformation. For although the lived realities of marginalization are not pretty, marginality can also generate counter-narratives and alternative perspectives. As bell hooks has already observed, marginality “offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”[v] And what other genre than science fiction is more equipped to explore radical – even alien – perspectives and wield alternatives to the status quo? It is no wonder Octavia Butler, a self-described introvert and a woman of color, was drawn to science fiction, a genre that she believed attracted “the out kids…People who are, or were, rejects.”[vi]

The sheer power of Butler’s interest in power emerges with stunning vividness in Parable of the Sower, my personal favorite of all her novels. Like so many post-apocalyptic cyberpunk texts, Parable begins after the fall of civilization as we in the late twentieth century U.S. have come to know it. Gone are the middle-class, basic social services (all of which have been privatized), and clean air and water. In their place is a United States in rapid decline where the majority of its subjects are living on the streets or as “debt” slaves in gated communities that function more like prisons than anything else. When I teach this novel, written the same year as the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, my students often respond with despair. “This is too close to home,” as one put it last quarter. And, yet, this is precisely the response Butler wanted. She wrote it as a cautionary tale: “If we keep doing what we’re doing, here’s what we might end up with.”[vii]

With Parable, though, Butler not only mirrors for us the deadly consequences of unbridled capitalism and environmental destruction. All of this is there, sure. But what she also offers us is a paradigm for change and resistance. I am speaking, of course, of Earthseed, a new religion that Butler, through her protagonist Lauren, imagines as an alternative to dominant Western religions. In fact, Parable comprises two texts: the dystopian reality into which we are thrust and the “Book of Living,” Earthseed’s mission statement, snippets of which are placed at the beginning of most of the chapters. Rooted in a philosophical view that reveres nature, acknowledges the constant of change, and insists on the need for collaboration and community, Earthseed is Butler’s alternative to Christian fundamentalism and its tendency to subordinate the creative and transformative potential of human action to an authoritative, patriarchal, and ultimately oppressive Christian God. With Earthseed, prayer gives way to practice, belief is always attended by action, and Change is both positive and inevitable:

As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding and yielding,

Sculptor and clay.

God is infinite Potential.

God is Change.[viii]

Here, in the midst of what can only be described as a type of hell on Earth, Butler articulates a counter-narrative. Here, despite her belief that humanity is innately prone to self-destruction – remember her thing for ‘power’ – Butler dares to imagine an alternative. And this alternative is not outside of us or from the outside: it is a return to our potential to create, to shape, and to change.

In sum, Octavia Butler has left a mark not only because she was the first black woman science fiction writer to make a name for herself, or because she is the first science fiction writer – male or female, black or white – to win the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Grant. She has left her mark because through stories like Parable Butler has proven that marginality can be productive, powerful, and transformative. For although she wrote after the steady decline of the Civil Rights era and during a time (1980s-1990s) in which the black underclass grew exponentially – as it continues to do so today – Butler never ended at hopelessness. Like her marginalized black women protagonists, who always seem to be drawn to writing and collaboration, Octavia Butler is the ultimate ‘radical’ postmodernist whose stories provide a safe space to question, shape, and transform the worlds within and without us.
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[i] Conversations with Octavia Butler, 173

[ii] Lilith’s Brood, 467

[iii] ibid., 37

[iv] Conversations, 173

[v] bell hooks, “Marginality as Site of Resistance,” 341

[vi] Conversations, 5

[vii] Conversations, 167

[viii] Parable of the Sower, 270

Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Qiana Whitted

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, and produce, when it doesn’t require identification? What about more difficult cases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, or with more complicated protagonists? – Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy”

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. – Octavia Butler, Dawn

I didn’t agree to participate in this roundtable on Octavia Butler because I enjoy her writing, but rather because I don’t. My admiration for her storytelling is nothing short of begrudging; I have to work at it. And I’ve always been careful to attribute my resistance to matters of personal taste. Butler is, after all, a beloved award-winning writer in science fiction, a pioneer who helped open a space for communities of black speculative fiction writers that I adore, including Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemison, Tannarive Due, and Zetta Elliot. So if I find the slug-like aliens in Dawn nauseating or if the pedophilic undertones in Fledgling nearly keep me from finishing the novel, then I assume that’s my problem.

My displeasure doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Butler’s importance in my African American literature courses and I teach her fiction whenever I can, with her 1979 novel Kindred being the most popular. Students are eager to embrace the story’s invitation to see the interconnected perils of slave resistance and survival through Dana’s modern eyes, grateful that the narrative’s historical corrective comes at the comfortable distance of science fiction tropes. The book raises provocative questions for debate, although I admit to being troubled by how often readers come away from Kindred convinced that they now know what it was like to be enslaved. Too often, their experience with the text is cushioned by what Megan Boler characterizes as “passive empathy”: “an untroubled identification that [does] not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, passive empathy [allows] them familiarity, ‘insight’ and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences – and finally, a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure (266).

Much of Butler’s fiction doesn’t work this way, however. Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.

bloodchild

It doesn’t matter to me that the Tlic can speak English and feel pleasure and build governing institutions, not when they look like that. In the story, they use humans of both sexes to procreate in what initially appears to be a mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship, at least until the main character, a young human male named Gan, begins to question the status quo. Butler’s description of Gan curled up alongside T’Gatoi, the Tlic who has adopted him and his family, is not really an image I want to grapple with for long:

T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (4)

T’Gatoi uses her authority as a government official to protect humans (called Terrans) in exchange for the use of their bodies as reproductive hosts. The balance of power between the two species tips back and forth in the interest of self-preservation and free will. Gan isn’t sure he wants to be impregnated – is he a partner or a pet? – but he ultimately submits under the terms of a negotiated relationship that takes into account both his discomfort with the T’Gatoi’s rules and his reluctant longing for her affection. T’Gatoi, too, has desires and cares for Gan. She also wants her Tlic children nurtured in a loving home if they are to survive. And while I admit that I can relate to these feelings and conflicted needs, this is a kind of intimacy that I’m willing to share with a pregnant man, not with a bug.*

Boler asserts that Western models of empathy are based on acts of “consuming” or universalizing differences so that the Other can be judged worthy of our compassion. Despite our best efforts, we end up using the Other “as a catalyst or a substitute” for ourselves in order to ease our own fears and vulnerabilities, rather than actively working to change the assumptions that shape our perspective (268). I’m in awe, then, of the way Butler’s science fiction heightens readers’ physical discomfort with characters like the Tlic in order to rebuff passive empathy and other modes of identification that absolve us of the need for critical self-reflection. T’Gatoi is the Other that I can never fully know. I can’t easily reduce her experience to my own, but I also can’t deny the prickle of recognition that comes from the emotional struggle between the Tlic and the Terrans. When Gan’s mother jokes, “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” I recognize her bitterness as a survival strategy, an attempt to upset a social hierarchy and dissociate from the Not Me.

So when I recoil at every reminder of T’Gatoi’s “ugliness,” I wonder what this emotion says about my approach to difference in society and in myself. How does my reaction to the unfamiliar outside the story, my unwillingness to engage the socially embodied strangeness of 2014, compare to the blustery panic of creepy crawly things I want to step on because they are small enough? (And what about those times when the bug is me?)

“Bloodchild” turns my personal readerly aversion into an ideological dilemma and advances the more challenging work of what Boler describes as “testimonial reading”:

Recognizing my position as ‘judge’ granted through the reading privilege, I must learn to question the genealogy of any particular emotional response: my scorn, my evaluation of others’ behaviour as good or bad, my irritation – each provides a site for interrogation of how the text challenges my investments in familiar cultural values. As I examine the history of a particular emotion, I can identify the taken-for-granted social values and structures of my own historical moment which mirror those encountered by the protagonist. Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated. (266-7)

Boler’s work on emotion and reading practices draws on her experience teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and other fictional works about historical events to make her case. But Butler’s science fiction thought-experiments also provide a framework for a mode of bearing witness that is just as complicated .

In the 1987 novel, Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood), the main character models the task of testimonial reading against the “affective obstacles” that hinder awareness of “the power relations guiding her response and judgments” (265). These obstacles initially come in the form of extraterrestrials called the Oankali whose bodies are entirely covered with writhing, grayish-white sensory tentacles. They have rescued groups of human survivors, including a black woman named Lilith, in the wake of nuclear destruction on Earth. Awakened on their ship years later, Lilith is required to remaining in her room with one of the ugly creatures until she can look at them without panic. The aliens know that before Lilith can interact with their society without harming herself or others, she must grapple with her revulsion at their physical appearance:

[The Oankali] walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. …

“I don’t understand why I’m so… afraid of you,” she whispered. “Of the way you look, I mean. You’re not that different. There are – or were – life forms on Earth that looked a little like you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. “Is it something you’re doing?” she demanded, “something I don’t know about?”

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?”

“Several have tried to kill me.”

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?

“For trying to kill me?”

“No, before – to incite them.”

“No more than I’m doing to you now.” (16-17)

Entire chapters are spent detailing the process through which Lilith learns to view the Oankali named Jdahya without fear. Their exchange invites comparisons with the xenophobia and prejudice of our own world, of course; Lilith’s dark skin could easily elicit similar reactions. Untangling the “genealogy” of her emotional responses becomes even more daunting once she learns that the aliens have three sexes and the ability to manipulate the genetic material of other beings. She is repulsed one moment, curious the next. Unable to look away, she demands answers from Jdahya until her body’s refusal to accept what he is becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. It is then that she begins to ask questions of herself. “God, I’m so tired of this… Why can’t I stop it?” (26).

Butler turns Lilith’s reactionary apprehension into a more productive space for her and for us as readers so that we may all think more critically about the larger forces at work in our judgments of others. To me this is what makes Butler an exceptional storyteller, whether I like her writing or not. Equally important is the fact that Lilith’s encounter with this single Oankali is only a first step. She’ll have to leave the room, meet others, apply what she has learned. For my own part, I’m now half way through Adulthood Rites, the second book in Lilith’s Brood and it is slow going, but I want to finish. The story has been difficult and deeply rewarding for me in a way that I’ve come to expect from Octavia Butler, a reading experience not unlike the probing of limbs that turns to a series of caresses.

*Nnedi Okorafor also explores dynamics of power through human companionship with an insect-like robot in her terrific short story, “Spider the Artist.”

Works Cited

Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies. 11 (2) 1997: 253-73.

Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

—–. Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

Octavia Butler Roundtable Index

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This is the index for our Octavia Butler Roundtable. Posts are listed in chronological order.

Qiana Whitted — “Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler”

Lysa Rivera — “Power, Change, and Science Fiction”

Kailyn Kent — “Deus Ex Machina By Alien”

Octavia Butler: Best and Worst

Noah Berlatsky — “How Do You Say ‘Love’ In Alien, Or Vice Versa”

Vom Marlowe — “Wild Seed: A Curious Love Story About Family”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs — “When Goddesses Change”

A.Y. Daring — “When Loss Becomes You”

Julian Chambliss — “The Body Envisioned: Octavia Butler”

Noah Berlatsky — “Pattern Flattener”

Charles Reece — “Is Survival Always The Best Option? Pessimism, Anti-Natalism, and Blood Children”

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To see all HU posts on Octavia Butler, including those from before the roundtable, click here.

The Adventures of Irma Vep

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

The list of superhero movies made since the 1978 Superman continues to grow exponentially, but I try to give a quick visual nod to each while lecturing in my Superhero course. After class a student told me I made the same remark three times:

“I never saw this, but I hear it’s terrible.”

There’s nothing so pleasantly humbling as a student spotting my professorial shortcomings. I make no apology for not seeing EVERY superhero film in existence, but the three I dismissed—Supergirl (1984), Cat Woman (2004), and Elektra (2005)—all feature female protagonists. In fact, my student noted, they are the ONLY superhero films to feature female protagonists on my list. I could blame Hollywood (is it really that hard to make a Wonder Woman movie?), but as a belated apology, let me offer a corrective instead.

I have seen and thoroughly recommend cinemas’ first catwoman. Not Halle Berry or Michelle Pfeiffer—not even Lee Meriweather from the 1966 Batman spoof. The original bodysuited catburglar padded across screens a century ago. Silent age actress Musidora played the anti-heroine Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade’s seven-hour serial Les Vampires back in 1915.

Vep (her name’s an anagram) is not a vampire of the blood-sucking variety but the leading member of a crime syndicate terrorizing Paris. Technically Philipe Guérande, the “star reporter” investigating the Vampires, is the serial’s hero, but after debuting in the third episode, Vep dominates. She’s the Vampires’ second in command, out living each of the four Grand Vampires she works beside. They all have their nefarious skill sets—disguise, poisons, paralysis glove, hypnotic eyes, even a retractable cannon fired from an apartment window—but none are as memorable as Musidora in a black bodysuit. She has a bit of the shapeshifting Mystique in her too, since she assumes the identities of her aristocratic victims so seamlessly. She and her Vampires also push the limits of early twentieth century technology, recording a millionaire’s voice on a wax cylinder and playing it over a telephone to authenticate a forged check.

But they’re not thrill-seeking pranksters. Episode one opens with the report of a police inspector’s decapitated body found in a swamp. Thirty minutes later, Philipe is opening a box with the missing head. Vep and her crew later dispatch a businessman with a hair pin through the back of his skull then shuck his body from a moving train. They murder a ballerina because she’s rumored to be Philipe’s fiancé. They also have a knack for lassoing nooses around people’s necks and yanking them from balconies.

But the image that most haunts me is the ball thrown by a baron for his niece—really the Grand Vampire and Vep in disguise. The Parisian aristocracy gathers for the baron’s midnight “surprise” to find the windows boarded and toxic gas flooding through the vents. Feuillade’s camera is more stationary than many silent film directors’, but he’s a master of deep focus, staging a cascade of background and foreground action within a continuous frame. The gowned and tuxedoed guest flail and wilt across furniture and floors in a tableau of slaughter—followed by the silhouetted Vampires entering through a pair of backlit doors in the distant wall to plunder their jewels. When the police tear the planks from the windows the next morning, the guests miraculously revive (contradicting the verb “asphyxiate” in the translated intertitles).

Despite the mayhem, Feuillade seems to be rooting for Vep. When Philipe and his comic sidekick capture Vep, she looks like a classic damsel-in-distress. If you watched episode nine out of sequence, you would mistake her for the heroine, valiantly struggling against her kidnappers. In fact, Vep, more than all the plundered jewels and bank accounts, is the serial’s prize. The first and second Grand Vampires battle against the rival criminal Moreno not just for control of Paris but of Vep. Moreno falls for her, hypnotizes her into loving him, and next she’s gunning down her former boss. When the captured Moreno is executed between episodes (I suspect the actor was called away on war duty), the next Grand Vampire, Venomous, proposes.

Philipe’s wedding (Feulliade, apparently filming on the fly, introduces his fiancé with equal haste) occurs between episodes, but the final, “The Terrible Wedding,” features the Vampires in rambunctious celebration (I rewound the bodysuited dance duet to watch twice). Again, if watched out of sequence, the gangs looks like a fun-loving pack of pals—until Philipe and the police break in and gun them down. Some scramble for the balcony, but Philipe has sawed the floor so they plunge to the cement below where they writhe and die. It’s a surprisingly brutal ending. Only Vep escapes, sneaking to the basement where the heroes’ captured brides are imprisoned. But Philipe has already lowered a gun to them, and his wife shoots Vep dead just before the heroes enter, embracing their wives before Vep’s corpse. The End.

Feulliade may have been shooting for gritty realism (Paris had recently suffered the reign of the very real Bonnot Gang), but the accumulative effect is surrealism. He also established a host of action tropes still being duplicated— a chase atop a moving train, a hero yelling “Follow that cab!” as he leaps into a backseat, a bad guy swallowing a hidden cyanide capsule, and (since the capsule only induced a temporary comma) a prison break.

Feulliade had ventured into crime serials with Fantomos the year before, but Les Vampires inspired him further, shooting with the same cast for Judex and The New Mission of Judex. The effect is further dizzying, since it’s Musidora, not the titular hero, in the opening scene. Despite the name change, Vep is back, plotting more impersonations and seducing Santanas, the second Grand Vampire—only now he’s some evil banker. Philipe’s been demoted to the hero’s extraneous brother, but his comic sidekick is front and center as a bumbling detective, the proto-Clouseau. It’s like watching the latest Joss Whedon production, waiting to see which Buffy or Firefly or Dollhouse actor is going to appear next.

Despite hiring a playwright to give Judex relative continuity, Feulliade repeats a few of his Vampire tricks—like throwing a sack over a good guy’s head so when he switches bodies and escapes the bad guys murder one of their own. Sadly when Musidora’s body washes ashore in the final episode, Feulliade doesn’t reprise her for the sequel—so maybe it’s just as well all the prints are lost. The closest we have to a Les Vampires remake is fellow French director Olivier Assayas’ 1996 Irma Vep—a meta-film about the making of a remake (which I also recommend). So pay attention Hollywood. Cinema’s original supervillainess is waiting for her reboot.

A Foolish Eclecticism

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

My cousin Ben H. Winters wrote to ask me to contribute to his reverse blog event timed to coincide with the release of the third novel in his Last Policeman series, World of Trouble. The book is a sci-fi detective genre bending mas-up about tracking down murderers at the end of the world.

As that description indicates, Ben’s novel crosses genres, and he saw a bit of a parallel with my criticism, since I write about lots of different genres (YA, and comics, and sci-fi, and literature, and romance, to just stick to print ones.) And, for that matter, for a blog that’s ostensibly about comics, HU is quite eclectic when it comes to what genres we cover. We have posts on wine, posts on fashion, posts on film and posts on music, just for starters.

So, Ben asked me, what’s with that, exactly? Are there benefits to crossing genres? Or does it just sow confusion?

The answer is maybe some of both. There are definitely disadvantages to eclecticism. The main downside is that aesthetic experience in our culture is organized, often quite intensely, around genres. Lots of folks of course have different genre interests — but nonetheless, if you go to a comics website, you tend to want to read about comics, not fashion or music or wine. So just in terms of marketing and retaining an audience, crossing genres as often as we do at HU can be a bad idea. You confuse the brand.

Crossing genres can also be uncomfortable in other ways. Genres aren’t just category designations; they’re communities. Refusing to embrace one genre means to some degree that you’re refusing to fully occupy one community — and that means people can end up seeing you as untrustworthy or as an interloper. I’m interested in romance novels and comics, for example, but I’m not exactly in the fandom of either, which means I haven’t necessarily read as much as people who are more fully committed. I’ve had both comics fans and romance novel fans be super-welcoming, and interested in what I have to say. But I’ve also had people from both communities basically argue that I don’t have enough expertise to speak, or that I’m morally compromised when I talk about the genres because I’m an outsider.

I don’t mean to dismiss those critiques. It can be difficult, or uncomfortable, or problematic, to write as an (at least partial) interloper. Just as it can seem needlessly alienating, I suppose. to write fashion posts on a comics blog. Still, I think it’s worth doing both for a couple of reasons.

First, I get bored writing about the same thing all the time. I like many comics, and I like many romance novels, but I don’t want to just read and write about comics, or just read and write about romance novels. I doubt that that’s especially unusual or anything — most people have different interests and like to dabble in different things to some extent. But fear of boredom is a big part of the impetus for me to try new things and write about new things, so I thought I should mention it.

The second reason is a little more involved. Maybe I can explain best through a book by Carl Freedman called “Critical Theory and Science Fiction.” In the book, Freedman points out that while we usually think of art being broken down into genre, it’s actually more accurate to say that genre precedes, or defines art. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are art. Shakespeare’s laundry lists are not art. The genre of plays are seen as aesthetic objects, worthy of analysis and fandom. The genre of laundry lists, not so much. Recognition of genre, then, precedes the perception of art. For art to be art, it needs to be in the right genre.

I think this is true beyond just laundry lists and plays. Freedman points out that sci-fi, by virtue of its genre, has often been seen as lesser or marginal — Samuel Delany’s novels aren’t laundry lists, but they’re not quite perceived in the same ways as (say) Borges’ stories either. Romance novels are even more denigrated. Wine often isn’t exactly seen as an aesthetic experience at all — or at least not as one that can be usefully discussed alongside film or television or literature.

The question here might be, so what? Why does it matter if people want to think about comics rather than fashion, or literature rather than romance novels?

Sometimes, maybe it doesn’t matter all that much. But, as genres are social constructions, the way they’re manipulated can also have social effects, for better or ill. Freedman notes that African-American literature, for example, is often treated as a specialized genre, marginal to capital-L literature. Romance’s denigration has a lot to do with the way it is perceived as art by and for women — which is why fashion is often seen as not-quite-art as well. Genre designations tell us what is important, what has quality, what is of interest. And they do so in a way that is often beyond analysis, because the recognition of, or use of, genre, precedes, and creates the grounds of, the analysis itself.

Which is why I’m interested in trying to engage with different genres, and to think about the ways (for example) in which comics fandoms and romance fandoms are similar and different, or to include posts about video games alongside posts on Trollope. Genre shapes how we look at art, and so at life. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily— but it seems worth shaking it up occasionally too, if only to see who’s being left out of which landscapes. As in Ben’s books, a different investigator can maybe help you see where the world ends, and where others might start.
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A slightly edited version of this, complete with significantly more amusing illustration captions, is cross-posted over at Ben’s blog. Variant blog posts for completeists!

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2014