Postmodernism in Octavia Butler's Kindred
I think we can all agree that, out of the books we've read so far, Kindred was the easiest to read and comprehend. In addition to its more approachable prose, the plot of Kindred is quite a bit more clean-cut, more similar to that of a modern fiction novel than something crazy and experimental like Mumbo Jumbo. Now, this got me thinking: in what ways is Kindred similar to the other books we've read this semester? At first glance, Kindred seems pretty different from both Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo, since Butler isn't trying to pull of anything particularly wacky in her writing. It lacks that sort of "non-conformity"--whether it be Doctorow's textbook-like narration or Reed's sudden perspective shifts--the deviation from the standard that we've grown so accustomed to through our experiences with postmodern literature is seemingly missing in Butler's novel. And yet, Kindred is doing the exact same thing as the other books in a totally different way.
At face value, all three novels, Kindred, Mumbo Jumbo, and Ragtime are centered around a shared concept: exploiting loopholes in historical records in order to create a plausible alternate version of the past. Though, Kindred adds an interesting twist to this. Instead of utilizing existing history and then building upon that, Butler writes her own version of history from the get-go by means of Dana's time travel. To me, using time travel to literally rewrite, and by association, have full control of history is such a cool and blatantly postmodern idea. So, in a way, Kindred's loophole-finding is even more extreme than that of the other texts we've read, since Butler doesn't even have to constrain her writing to account for specific events or historical figures. Instead, through Dana, she's able to directly influence the past, which serves as a powerful commentary on the control of historical narratives and the subjective nature of historical interpretation.
Another thing I noticed was the way in which Butler executed the "you can't prove it did or didn't happen" thing very similarly to Doctorow. Specifically, in the last section of Kindred, we see Dana revisiting the house where she had stabbed Rufus before returning to the past. In the scene, Dana remarks that "Rufus was assumed to have burned to death. I could find nothing in the incomplete newspaper records to suggest that he had been murdered, or even that the fire had been arson." (Butler 284), actively underscoring the incompleteness of the historical records just as Doctorow had in his pseudo-historical scenarios in Ragtime.
So basically, Kindred is just as postmodern as the other books we've read, even though it doesn't give off that impression to begin with. The combination of more mainstream-targeted prose and postmodernist themes is quite an interesting one, and not one I would've expected after reading the likes of Mumbo Jumbo. Personally, I'd assumed that "postmodern" was a term reserved for subversive and experimental narratives, so Kindred's apparent simplicity originally threw me off a little. Still, I actually enjoyed reading the novel while uncovering the little pieces of postmodernism thrown in here and there.
I agree with the fact that Kindred is as postmodern as the other books. I think you missed the part about postmodernism where the past is being shaped by the future, which is true not only physicially through dana, but also our perception. Rufus is completely fine with what he is doing, yet we readers and Dana are appalled at what is happening. I also like how there is no objective truth since Dana becomes increasingly unreliable and affected by the system.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how in some ways Butler has much more restraint with her use of postmodernism, but also uses it much more blatantly with the time travel. I agree that the time travel is partly a way for Butler to "rewrite" history and show how much control the author has over history, but I think it's also a way for Butler to bring the present closer to the past through Dana. I think that's also showed by how Dana gets slowly more accustomed to the plantation and the world of 1800s Maryland.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in these "false documents" that you mention as well. Although Kindred, Ragtime, and Mumbo Jumbo try to exploit potential loopholes in the intricacies if history we're not sure about, I think it's important to note how much more real Kindred feels than the other novels. Both Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo seem like conspiracy theories to an extent (in the sense that we're not completely sure they're fake, but we have no evidence to say the stories are true). However, I've read some non-fiction narratives from slaves in the antebellum south and they shared a lot of similarities with Dana's descriptions; although Dana is fictional, her story feels very much real.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with how Kindred is postmodernist. But I think Butlers control of the past is heavily constrained by actual experiences of slaves. The story of the Weylin plantation is fictional but its based entirely off how slaves and plantations were run back then, in other cases like Ragtime its the author filling in gaps of history and can add their twists to it. The ending is also impactful as you could imagine how complex life on the Weylin plantation could be across all the other plantations but in the present the cruelty and atrocities have been glossed over for the telling of history.
ReplyDeleteI've thought about how _Kindred_ might work differently if Butler had gone more all-in on the obviously "postmodern"-style experimentation and play with form and convention like we see in Reed, or if she had chosen to work in more "real" historical material like we see in Doctorow. We do get a quick reference to the fact that, somewhere nearby, a young Frederick Douglass would have been growing up, but otherwise, all of the people in Butler's novel are fictional, invented, placed within a conventionally drawn historical setting. One effect of this (to my mind) is to emphasize the commonplace and ultimately anonymous nature of something as vast and systemic as "slavery"--we see a *system* that shapes these people's lives, expectations, realities in every way, but there's also something both realistic and chilling in the way that Dana and Kevin can find no historical trace of the plantation when they return to the spot in 1976. The novel reminds us that slavery as a system was a definitive factor in millions of people's lives throughout a vast swath of the country (and it shaped lives in free states, as well)--a kind of shift away from the "Great Man" theory of history, where larger-than-life figures have outsized impact on the larger historical narrative. Instead, we get the nightmare of everyday life in the drudgery, banality, and casual cruelty of the Weylin plantation. Part of the *point* in this view is the fact that this is not the "worst" possible plantation--there is nothing particularly distinctive about it at all, in fact. In this way, Dana visits and becomes immersed in an "era" and a "system" rather than stepping into a specific and familiar historical narrative.
ReplyDeleteI think that your comparisons are very accurate and agree that while Butler hasn't necessarily conformed to what we might expect a postmodernist novel to look like, she undeniably incorporates numerous different elements into her work. Obviously, the time travel aspect of Kindred embodies a nice archetype of the postmodernist tradition but I think that we were too familiar with it as a literary device from its prevalence in contemporary fiction to have immediately recognized it as subversive in the same way we saw certain aspects of Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo.
ReplyDeleteYou make a great point, I wasn't really able to see the postmodernist concepts in Kindred at first, but Butler really does build a story out of false documents + does a Doctorow; "none of this exists anymore today/was lost to time". There's probably other postmodern aspects of Kindred, but you focused on a lot of the ones I noticed.
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