Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Staging Slavery

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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I was both surprised and delighted 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture. Some, however, were gnashing their teeth. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example called 12 Years “an arthouse exploitation gift to masochistic guilty liberals hungry for history lessons,” while John Demetry at CityArts argues that the film denies Northup specificity or consciousness, turning him into “a cypher representing Black hopelessness.” Both argue that other films are more insightful and respectful in their treatment of slavery—and in particular, both mention Charles Burnett’s 1996 film Nightjohn, which has almost no popular profile and which, like 12 Years, was created by a black director.

There’s no doubt that Nightjohn is distinct from other slavery films in a number of intriguing ways. Originally screened as a TV movie on the Disney Channel, it embraces the smaller-scale, living-room format. The plot centers on Sarny (Allison Jones), a young, avidly curious girl whose life as a slave is transformed by her owners’ purchase of Nightjohn (Carl Lumbly), who offers to teach her to read.

Putting literacy at the center of the story allows Burnett to avoid many of the standard slavery tropes. Though there are violent scenes in the movie, the main drama is not around physical endurance or resistance, as in Glory, Amistad, 12 Years, or the less well-known Sankofa. Instead, the drama is about intellectual achievement as a reclamation or assertion of self. Reading means that Sarny can write passes to help friends escape; it means she can manipulate white people to her own advantage and to the advantage of her community. Knowledge is power, and if slaves can learn to read, they can obtain that power.

Nightjohn, a runaway who had made it to the North, returned into slavery to teach other slaves to read. This recalls Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo (also from 1996), in which the protagonists’ father, a freeman, agrees to become a slave to marry the woman he loves. In both cases, the moral is not self-abnegation, but rather self-assertion—an insistence that slavery is not the most important truth, and does not define black people. They are not just victims, but human beings who, even in extremis, can pursue human goals such as knowledge, teaching, or love.

Yet, for all its focus on intellectual development, the interiority that Nightjohn imagines is an oddly public and dramatic one. Sarny’s lessons, for example, coalesce all at once while she is in church reading the Bible—suddenly the individual letters fall into place, and ta-dah! she can read. The moment is so powerful that she starts to cry, and the white minister thinks she’s been saved. “Yes, I am saved,” she agrees when asked, and is then baptized. The scene is equates, or conflates, the ability to read with religious salvation or awakening, making the attainment of reading a kind of mystical right of passage, complete with ceremonial trappings.

Along the same lines, the climactic scene of the film occurs, again, in church, in front of the entire community. Sarny’s owner, Clel Waller (Beau Bridges) threatens to start shooting slaves until one of them tells him who has written the passes for two escapees. Sarny defuses the situation by obliquely threatening to expose the fact that Clel’s wife has been committing adultery with the town doctor. Sarny knows about the affair because she was the one who carried notes back and forth; her ability to read gives her a weapon.

These scenes are meant to demonstrate that private knowledge is not merely private; learning to read for the slaves is a political act, with political ramifications. And yet, those political ramifications are actually somewhat undermined by the rank implausibility of the set pieces. People don’t actually learn to read all at once. Blackmail can be effective if applied cleverly and surreptitiously, but flaunting his spouse’s adultery in the face of a man with a gun pointed at you is not likely to result in a positive outcome. In his enthusiastic review of the film, Jonathan Rosenbaum characterized the movie as a kind of “fairy tale.” But the departures from realism here feel less like magic or dream logic, and more like standard film contrivance—drama for the sake of drama, and/or for the sake of communicating the requisite moral at sufficient volume that it can be deciphered in the nosebleed seats.

The didactic staginess is perhaps appropriate for a film about teaching. But it’s also somewhat disappointing, not least because it’s so familiar. Movies about slavery—whether Amistad or Glory, 12 Years a Slave or even Django Unchained—all have about them a sense of the educational spectacle as growth experience. There are probably a number of reasons for this. Films (even TV movies) are wedded to their status as events; it’s hard for a movie to resist the urge to be larger than life. Slavery is so intimately linked to ongoing racial disparities, and so relatively little explored on screen, that the impulse to say something definitive must be nearly overwhelming. Whatever the combination of factors is, though, the fact is that most movies about the subject are couched to some significant degree as “history lessons,” to use Rosenbaum’s dismissive characterization of 12 Years. And as a result the people in the films tend to turn into tropes, or icons, or curriculum enhancements. Like Nightjohn telling Sarny that the “A” is standing on its own two feet, the symbolic message can erase individuality and ambiguity, so that the letter means its image rather than all the things it can spell.
 

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12 Years a Slave as Torture Porn

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Cultural critics and politicians have long worried that media violence would lead to real-life anti-social behavior. Earlier this month, Armond White, CityArts film critic, may have provided an unexpected confirmation of those fears. White was so incensed by the very violent 12 Years a Slave that, according to a number of witnesses, he allegedly shouted obscenities at its director Steve McQueen during the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony.

White denies he was heckling, and I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of the expulsion, but I do want to discuss more about violence and its effects, an issue that’s at the heart of White’s loathing of 12 Years A Slave. In his review of the film, White says that 12 Years, about a Northern black man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, confuses “[b]rutality, violence, and misery… with history.” He argues that director McQueen is interested in “sado-masochistic display,” and compares the results to The Exorcist and torture porn films like Hostel and Saw. For White, the film is detestable because it focuses unrelentingly on violence as violence; “This is less a drama than an inhumane analysis,” he thunders, and is especially angry that there’s no sign that the protagonist, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has “spiritual resource or political drive.” He concludes, “Patsey’s completely unfathomable longing for death is just art-world cynicism. McQueen’s “sympathy” lacks appropriate disgust and outrage but basks in repulsion and pity–including close-up wounds and oblivion.”

This discussion of Patsey (Lupita Nyong‘o) seems at first quite confusing. There is nothing “unfathomable” about her despair; in the narrative, she’s a slave who is constantly raped by her owner, causing the jealous mistress of the house to beat and torment her relentlessly. She is violated and abused over and over; it’s not at all difficult to imagine that she might long for death. For that matter, in Amistad, which White admires greatly (it was his best film of 1997) there is an almost exactly parallel situation, in which a woman faced with the horrors of the middle passage kills herself and her baby by falling over the side of the ship. Why is her decision fathomable, while Patsey’s is not?

I think that what White is reacting to is the way that violence is or is not framed as meaningful. Spielberg (who White adores) is a filmmaker of compulsive—one might even say facile—lucidity. He is careful to tell you again and again why something happened, and how it fits into the narrative.

Amistad shows numerous examples of violence, including whippings, drownings, stabbings, forced starvation, torture, and on and on—the body count, which includes dozens dead, is substantially higher than 12 Years. But all of these incidents of violence are carefully placed in a recognizable framework. The slave uprising and the murder of the white sailors that open the film, is a straightforward revenge story, nestled comfortably in Hollywood convention. The violence against the slaves is told in flashback in the course of the film’s extensive courtroom drama; it is evidence presented to sway the court and (presumably) the movie viewers. Any confusing bit (why did the slavers choose to drown so many of the slaves they planned to sell?) is carefully examined and explained in the course of cross-examinations. Even the suicide of the woman mentioned earlier is girded round with sense—she exchanges a glance with Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) before she goes over the edge, and he nods at her meaningfully, as if to validate and interpret her choice for the viewers. Similarly, Spielberg at first does not translate the Africans’ dialogue so that the violence done by and to them is (for most Western viewers at least) unspoken and uninterpretable. But as you go along the film interprets (directly and metaphorically) and contains the violence, until all of it is crystalline. By this alchemy, violence becomes empathy and triumph. The story of the injustice and violence done to the crew is told in order to win them the understanding of the court/movie audience, which in turn opens the gates to freedom—from slavery then and, by implication, from inequity now.

12 Years A Slave, as White says, does not make violence so fathomable. In one of the movie’s most striking scenes, Northup’s owner attempts to hang him. He’s interrupted and driven off by a man acting on behalf of Northup’s former owner, Ford, who has not been fully paid for Northup. The interrupter then goes off to fetch Ford. Even though the hanging has been stopped, no one bothers to cut Northup down. Instead he stands there for an indeterminate, endless time, his feet shuffling on the ground, choking, as McQueen’s camera watches mercilessly and the life on the plantation goes on around him, the only respite being when another slave scurries up furtively to give him a drink of water.

Eventually, Ford arrives and releases Northup, but there is never any explanation for the torture he underwent. It has no meaning except itself; the image of it, the length, the spectacle, overwhelms the narrative. Violence here is only violence. Similarly, Northup’s kidnapping and ordeal is not presented as leading to a politically hopeful or uplifting end. Northup does not gain by witnessing the violence, and it isn’t clear how the viewer gains either. Nothing, as White says, is presented “in order to verify and make bearable the otherwise dehumanizing tales.” White insists that “Art elates and edifies,” but violence in 12 Years A Slave does neither. It just sits there, an open wound, and when you it ends, you’re not enriched or educated. You’re depleted. Violence makes you less, not more.

One example of that torture-porn genre with which White dismissively groups 12 Years is a 2009 horror film called Martyrs. The plot centers on a quasi-religious conspiracy of torture. The brutalizers believe that inflicting pain on innocents will beatify those innocents, and transform them into saints, who will then, before death, offer a profound message to the world. White argues that 12 Years “accustoms moviegoers to violence and brutality” because it sadistically refuses to make its violence speak. Martyrs, though, suggests that people are accustomed to violence not through exposure, per se, but through narrative rationalization. Making violence speak—as evidence, as uplift, as spur to empathy—justifies it and excuses it. 12 Years refuses to make violence part of a bigger story. It doesn’t want you to see violence and feel elated or edified, like the torturers in Martyrs who whip their victims in the name of catharsis. Rather, 12 Years wants you to look at violence and say, with White, “I wish I never saw it.”
 

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Utilitarian Review 7/12/14

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On HU

Robert Jones, Jr. on giving up on mainstream comics.

Matt Thorn with a brief note on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Octavia Butler as uncomfortable foremother.

A.Y. Daring on wound as identity in Kindred.

Julian Chambliss looks at what scholars study when they study Octavia Butler.

Me on Octavia Butler’s mediocre prose and why it matters.

Chris Gavaler on how Fantax shows that the French know their way around super-hero violence.

I think we’ve got a couple more Octavia Butler posts next week, but then that’s it, and we’ll be back to regular old posting!
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Salon I have 19 songs that show that Jimi Hendrix was not a token.

At the Atlantic I argue that Elvis invented nothing and stole nothing.

At Splice Today I write about the great conservative novel, Gone With the Wind.
 
Other Links

Jeet Heer on Harold Gray and the limits of conservative anti-racism.

Armond White on the mediocrity of Roger Ebert.

Elias Leight on new albums by Joe and Trey Songz.
 
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Pattern Flattener

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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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Most of the posts in the Octavia Butler roundtable (including my earlier post) have been fairly laudatory of Butler’s work. And there’s certainly a lot to like in Butler’s novels. She tackles complicated themes in imaginative ways and manages to be quite repulsive while doing so. Not many folks out there walk the line between slavery narratives and tentacle sex. Hard not to cheer for that.
 

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But, while I like Butler quite a bit, I do have some reservations. The main one being that she’s not a very good writer.

Of course, Butler is a good writer in some ways. As I said, she’s very inventive and thoughtful; she has lots of ideas; and she explores them in interesting ways. Still, reading her, you can’t help but notice that her prose rides a fine line between uninteresting and actively insipid. Yes, there’s tentacle sex, but it’s tentacle sex described with all the fever and poetry of a long, leisurely session at your tax accountant’s. Mutant eternal killer demons speak from out the ages with the somnolent laconic lack of affect of a Calvin Coolidge. Apocalypses of multivariant forms all land upon an unsuspecting earth like wire service news bulletins. Characters of diverse class, race, and ethnicity, whether blood-sucking vampires or gelatinous fern assemblages, all speak with a default mid-range vocabulary, eschewing figurative language for bland glops of transparent earnestness.

Here, for example, is Mary, a troubled young African-American girl who is coming into her own as a massively powered telepath who can read the minds of hundreds and hundreds of other psis all bound to her will. She has just defeated her only rival for power. It’s an emotional moment. Right?

Not so much.

They cremated Doro’s last body before I was able to get out of bed. I was in bed for two days. A lot of others were there even longer. The few who were on their feet ran things with the help of the mute servants. One hundred and fifty-four Patternists never got up again at all. They were my weakest, those least able to take the strain I put on them. They died because it took me too long to learn how to kill Doro. By the time Doro was dead and I began to try to give back the strength I had taken from my people, the 154 were already dead.

he sentences sit there in a Hemingwayesque funk, desperately hoping that the short. simple. structure. will lead you to think that the passage is economical, even though she keeps repeating the same not especially revelatory information with a distant, feeble ruthlessness. They were the weakest, and they could not take the strain; they were dead, and then they were dead, and at the end of another sentence, they’re still dead.

Perhaps you could argue that Butler is deliberately using a simple voice to convey Mary’s consciousness here — but, again, Mary is supposed to at this point be an incredible mutant superconsiousness. What is it like to be inside the head of someone who is inside the head of hundreds of other people? How must it feel to know all those other people’s lives and vocabularies? If Samuel Delany or Gwyneth Jones or Joanna Russ or any number of Butler’s compatriots in the realm of gender-bending avant sci-fi art were writing this, Mary’s consciousness would be multi-vocal and strange — it would mirror alienness in its syntax and grammar and language. Mary wouldn’t just say, “Hey! I’m different! How about that?” Her voice would be part of the meaning of the novel. But it’s not, because it can’t be, because Butler has no interest at all in language, the supposed tool of her trade.

There are times when the lax limpidity of the prose does work thematically, at least up to a point. “Dawn” and “Fledgling” can both be read as coming-of-age novels, with the protagonists growing up to discover their true selves as tentacled imperialist monstrosities and vampiric incestuous slaveholders, respectively. In these books, you could argue, the flatness of the prose (and as a result of the affect) has an almost satirical fillip; the default of bland genre becomes a patina of normalcy over a pit of perversion and alienness. The nice, easy story isn’t so nice and easy — or possibly vice versa.

Still, it seems pretty clear that, in many respects, better prose would in fact result in better books. In “Wild Seed” and especially in the earlier “Mind of My Mind”, Butler creates careful moral dilemmas, only to have them sag beneath the damp uselessness of her style. Doro, the eternal mutant who survives by jumping from body to body and killing his hosts, is, as I’ve said, completely unconvincing; when he speaks he sounds not like an all-powerful parasite, but like mid-range science-fiction narrator explicating.

Even worse is the fact that the rest of the characters are equally indistinguishable and bland. Doro is supposed to be a monster, destroying person after person — but the people he destroys aren’t real. We never feel any deaths, because the characters are just chits Butler moves around the page. It’s almost as if Butler is Doro; he sees humans mostly as personality-less puppets to manipulate through his plots, and Butler treats the humans as personality-less puppets to manipulate through her plots.

This is especially painful in “Mind of My Mind” where Butler switches point of view characters repeatedly, in an effort (presumably) to have us get to know each one. But instead, what we get to know is that they’re all the same. In theory, if we actually could tell one from the other, we might feel some sort of loss when Mary pulls them into her pattern, and they abandon their independence. But it never happens, because they were never individuals to begin with. Similarly, the Patternists take over the minds of normal humans (mutes) and enslave them. But it’s hard to much care when the humans are blandly uninteresting before being slaves, and then blandly uninteresting afterwards. How can you provide a moral meditation on human individuality when you’re unable to create an even passable representation of an individual human?

In her post on Butler and empathy, Qiana Whitted says that she is impressed with the way that Butler creates repulsive insect-like aliens as a barrier to empathy. It’s true that Butler’s aliens can be squicky, and that can in some cases be a way to withhold empathy, or insist on difference. But those insisted-on differences in Butler’s work rarely go more than squick-deep. Bodies in Butler may be wildly heterogenous and imaginative, but her language is always the same untrammeled non-thing, scooping up tentacle creature and vampire alike in its unwavering similitude. Everybody thinks alike and talks alike, which means that on the level of the prose, which is the essence of the book, Butler often seems unable to think difference at all. Maybe that’s why her books can seem oppressive — not because she has a bleak vision of human intolerance for strangeness, but because the pattern in her books is too flat to allow the strangers called humans any life of their own.

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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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.