#102 = Volume 34, Part 2 = July 2007
Sherryl Vint
“Only by Experience”: Embodiment and the Limitations of Realism in Neo-Slave Narratives
“I lost an arm on my last trip home,” Dana, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), tells us on the opening page—it “wasn’t just stuck, but … somehow, it had been crushed right into the wall” (11). In the final chapter, we learn how. On her final time-trip back from the Maryland of her ancestors to her 1976 Altadena home, her arm from the elbow down—from “the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped” (261) in his attempt to prevent her return—has been left in the past. When she pulls away from the wall to which she is fused, she is left with an agonizing open wound.
Kindred is a key example of the neo-slave narrative, an African-American genre that investigates the history of slavery and reworks the nineteenth-century slave narrative tradition. Ashraf Rushdy argues that there are three kinds of neo-slave narrative: the third-person historical novel of slavery, the first-person narration of the life-story of a slave, and the recounting of the traumatic legacy of slavery on later generations (95). This schema separates historical novels from those that trace the continued effects of slavery into the present and neglects the importance of the fantastic.1 Both Kindred and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) complicate this system. The former refuses Rushdy’s temporal division, and both urge a rethinking of the relationship between African-American and fantastic literatures. Furthermore, both novels critique the limitations of realist forms and “objective” history to convey African-American history and thus can be considered examples of what Timothy Spaulding calls the postmodern slave narrative, a form that “force[s] us to question the ideologies embedded within ‘realistic’ representation of slavery in traditional history and historical fiction” (2). Spaulding also eschews specific mention of fantasy and sf, preferring instead to discuss “elements of the fantastic” (2) in a genre he associates with the postmodern. As Rushdy and Spaulding demonstrate, discussion of such novels within African-American literary criticism typically avoids engagement with the genre specifics of fantasy and sf. Likewise, sf scholarship on Butler often severs her work from the context of African-American neo-slave literature, positioning her instead in relation to sf conventions and precursors; in this way, Kindred’s minimization of such readily recognizable sf elements as are foregrounded in Butler’s other fiction—aliens, telepathy, post-apocalyptic worlds, genetic mutation—render it the most generically problematic of her novels.2 Both moves of genre policing unduly limit how we read Kindred.Instead of trying to sort out whether Kindred is “really” sf (how are we to understand its refusal to provide a scientific rationale for time travel?), we should instead consider how it enables us to think about sf in new ways. Just as realist representations must be understood not as the neutral reflection of “the way things are” but as ideological constructs, so traditional claims about what “counts” as sf should be understood as tending to exclude the perspective and experience of peoples of color.3
Kindred is one of many twentieth-century African-American texts to investigate the history of slavery and slave narratives through retellings of this experience,4 attesting that slavery remains an open wound in American culture. Using Kindred and Beloved, I will explore how fantastic neo-slave narratives revise and resist the tropes of nineteenth-century slave narratives, particularly their increased emphasis, influenced by Civil Rights and feminist struggle, on embodiment and embodied experience for understanding slavery. Morrison argues that nineteenth-century slave narratives were written for two reasons: to narrate a personal, historical life that is also representative of what the race experienced, and to persuade the reader, “who is probably not black,” that black people are human beings and slavery should be abandoned (“Site” 186). These aims were often in contradiction, and the dominant one—working to end slavery—sometimes required the other—sharing details of the life of the person and of the race—to be muted. The experience of slavery was often shaped to make it “palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it” (187).The aims and audiences for neo-slave narratives are very different. Although slavery has ended, its traumatic and continued effects on Americans, both black and white, have not been dealt with.
Kindred and Beloved express this through stressing the need to embrace embodied experience as part of the self. Both protagonists, Sethe and Dana, struggle to jettison the negative experience of slavery by becoming full subjects in the liberal-humanist tradition, rejecting the experience of self as abjected body and instead aspiring to live as the disembodied subject whose race and gender (white and male) are always present but never named. Neither can easily occupy this space, however, because this very model of disembodied selfhood is founded on the association of women and non-whites with the body and the irrational, animalistic, inferior qualities projected onto it. These novels show that the desire to inhabit liberal-humanist subjectivity is another kind of violence enacted by slavery, and they demonstrate that healing the fractures in American culture arising from slavery might best be accomplished through a personal healing of the rift between mind and body.
Authors of slave narratives struggled with a complex relationship to the body. The suffering body authorized and authenticated autobiographical accounts of slavery’s horrors, even as others invoked embodiment to deny full personhood to non-whites and women. Thus, identification of self with body bolstered the very system such narratives sought to end. Just as slave narratives had to rely on embodied authority while transcending the cultural limitations projected onto this body, so neo-slave narratives betray uneasiness about embodiment. Dana and Sethe struggle with the consequences of being black female bodies in a racist and patriarchal system, and both must learn that denying their embodied selves only allows the wounding of slavery to continue.5
Beginning on her twenty-sixth birthday, Dana is pulled back in time whenever the life of Rufus Weylin, her several times great-grandfather, is threatened; she returns to the present when her own life is threatened.6 Time travel enables Butler to fuse the fantastical with realist conventions, creating a work that is partly historical novel, partly slave narrative, and partly the story of how a twentieth-century black woman comes to terms with slavery as her own and her nation’s past. This time travel is not explained through any invention or scientistic cognition effect that would enable a straightforward classification of the novel as sf. Rather than seeing this as a problem, however, we might instead reflect upon the different thematic relationship to the motif of time travel Morrison’s refusal of explanation implies. In many time-travel narratives, the emphasis is on control of the timeline, on ensuring that the dominance of one’s “kind” persists into a future associated with progress: this is why one cannot kill one’s grandfather but can assassinate Hitler. This attitude can be associated with the Western paradigm of science as a relation to the world of dominance and mastery. African Americans have a quite different relationship both to science and to the idea of the future.7 Kindred’s present-day setting can be understood as being in the future imagined by nineteenth-century slave narratives, a future in which slavery has ended. This future is not the utopian one sf might rig through time travel, nor the dystopian one sf might use time travel to warn us about. Instead, Kindred focuses our attention on the fact that the future is not sufficiently different from the past; that, despite the Emancipation Proclamation, systemic racism persists in ways akin to the continuation of slavery.8 For authors such as Butler the reality of slavery and its unrelenting effects are thematically crucial; and combining the fantastic and the realist modes enables past and present to be mixed in such a way that the reader cannot simply treat the story as happening in a reality ontologically distinct from our own.
Morrison similarly suggests that realism is not sufficient for representing the experience of slavery. Beloved is the story of the haunting of Sethe, a woman who escapes from slavery with her children only to attempt to kill them all— successfully killing her eldest daughter—when she is threatened with the return to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law. Sethe is haunted by the character Beloved, a strange woman who is presented as both Sethe’s murdered daughter, returned as the adult she would have become had she lived, and the collective memory of those who died during the middle passage. The novel uses fragmented narrative and flashbacks to tell multiple stories simultaneously: Sethe’s experiences of slavery, her escape to freedom, her isolated life after the murder of her daughter, and the eventual healing that occurs when Paul D, a man who shared Sethe’s slavery, returns to her life and ultimately returns her to the community. Beloved reconnects Sethe with her memories of the past and with other people in the present.
This move away from realism marks an important shift between slave and neo-slave narratives. The preface to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a major influence on both novels, assures the reader that “this narrative is no fiction,” although she is aware that “some of [her] adventures may seem incredible” (5). Nonetheless, she urges readers to accept her narrative. “Only by experience,” she concludes, “can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is [slavery,] that pit of abominations” (5). In this and other nineteenth-century slave narratives, a particular kind of realism based in the author’s personal and thus authoritative experience is invoked as guarantee of truth.9 In rewriting the slave narrative tradition, both Butler and Morrison need to find other ways to establish the veracity of their texts: Butler’s time travel suggests that it is only through bodily experience that Dana can come truly to know slavery, while Morrison’s haunting rejects conventional distinctions between fact and fiction, arguing instead that there is a truth of the slave experience that has been left out of both traditional slave narratives and official discourses on slavery.10 Morrison calls her imaginings a kind of “literary archeology” that recovers a “truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write it (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it)” (“Site” 192, 193).
The emphasis on the body in both Kindred and Beloved draws upon content implicit in their nineteenth-century predecessors. Given both the importance of the body as a ground upon which African Americans were excluded from full personhood within American history and the fact that sentimental fiction, intended to produce a physical response in the reader, was the model for slave narratives, it is not surprising that the body figures so centrally in these more recent texts. The body is a site of ambiguity for both women and African Americans and therefore is doubly important in the female slave narrative tradition and in the contemporary rewritings that are women’s stories written by female authors.
Embodiment and the Slave Narrative Tradition. Historically, the body has served to justify the abjection of certain groups (women, people of color) and as the means through which collective identity and resistance to such destructive stereotyping has been articulated. Karen Sanchez-Eppler argues that “the social and political goals of both feminism and abolition depend upon an act of representation, the inscription of black and female bodies into the discourses of personhood” (“Bodily” 29). Authority to speak is “predicated upon the reinterpretation of their flesh” (30) so that it can provide evidence of personhood. As slave narratives aimed to show their black protagonists’ humanity, they required the demonstration of bodily suffering to guarantee authenticity and to spur the reader into sympathy, yet they also needed to avoid reducing the narrating subject to his or her suffering body. Katherine Fishburn argues that in their engagement with embodiment and the Western tradition of debasing the body, “ex-slaves were not trying to write themselves into Western metaphysics as equals to whites, but were instead, more radically and daringly, rethinking metaphysics itself” (xii). Such narratives critique the liberal humanist tendency to see ourselves as separate, autonomous, and isolated individuals, disconnected from others, and consistently “redefin[e] what it means to be human,” rejecting a subjectivity “based on the dualisms of mind and body, subject and object, self and other” and embracing a vision of “their necessary oftlineintertwining” (44). The influence of sentimental literature on slave narratives is also pertinent. Sentimentalism “is premised on an emotional and philosophical ethos that celebrates human connection, both personal and communal, and acknowledges the shared devastation of affectional loss” (Dobson 266). Given their drive to convince a (white) audience that it shares humanity with suffering black protagonists, it is fitting that slave narratives turn to sentimental tropes to convince their readers emotionally as well as intellectually that slavery must end.11
The very form of sentimental fiction rejects a mind/body split. As Fishburn argues, identity founded on connection rather than isolation incorporates the body as part of self and sees the self-in-relation rather than the abstract mind as the model for subjectivity. Sanchez-Eppler argues that “the success of a [sentimental] story is gauged, in part, by its ability to translate words into pulse beats and sobs,” a reading experience that “radically contracts the distance between narrated events and the moment of their reading, as the feelings in the story are made tangibly present in the flesh of the reader” (“Bodily” 36). This idea of the past being made tangible is vital to both Butler and Morrison. In Kindred, the past literally snatches Dana away from 1976 to antebellum Maryland. In Beloved, Sethe cannot escape the past because for her time does not move in a linear fashion. Instead, particular bodily sensations can return her to an earlier experience in which “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world” (35-36).
In these novels, the need to recreate the past as present points to the problem that the past has been repressed rather than acknowledged and hence continues to have effects. Like any repressed content, the root cause must be acknowledged and dealt with before the individual—or collective—subject can be free. The body becomes the site through which the work of recovering and healing is done.12 While nineteenth-century slave narratives primarily served to educate a white audience about slavery, provoking and recruiting their opposition to it, the audience for neo-slave narratives includes contemporary black readers who must come to terms with their own personal, familial histories of slavery. Butler and Morrison draw on the slave narrative tradition, but they revise it to serve the needs of a new community of readers who can see that emancipation was not sufficient to change the experience of African Americans but constituted only the first step in the journey to full personhood.
Butler and Morrison suggest that American culture, particularly African- American culture, continues to be wounded by a past with which it has not come to terms. They propose that accepting embodiment as self is necessary for this trauma to be resolved. Both deal with the continued haunting presence of a past, and use fantastic devices to confront readers with the antebellum period as an active part of our present. Both novels offer a corrective to official discourse by adding the interior life of the slave; both emphasize the importance of the body and embodied experience for coming to terms with the past of slavery and its pernicious effects; and both articulate a need to overcome a mind/body split, represented as a subject/object dichotomy, in order for their protagonists to achieve healing and psychic wholeness. The commonalities the two share should encourage us to rethink our definitions of sf, particularly in relation to the dynamic of extrapolation. Morrison and Butler address the continued relationship among past, present, and future, not only interrogating the degree to which slavery persists in the present of African-American experience, but also looking to a future in which this wound heals and a new model of racial community in the US becomes possible. Unlike the Campbellian extrapolative method, which creates a new vision of the future centered around a novum (usually a technological innovation), these narratives require us to acknowledge that singular innovations are not sufficient to transform a profoundly interconnected social world. Reading Kindred alongside Beloved places its problematic relationship to sf conventions in a new light. As much as realism is insufficient for representing African-American experience of the past, the dominant conventions of sf are insufficient for representing an African-American vision of the future.
Exorcizing the Past in Beloved. Beloved is positioned between official discourses about and lost experiences of slavery, between telling one’s story and being trapped in the discourse of another. Rather than exhaustively mapping its representation of embodiment,13 I will focus on its treatment of questions similar to those raised by Kindred. Beloved follows Sethe as she learns to be a subject after years of living as an object under slavery. Neither escaping slavery nor the Emancipation Proclamation is sufficient to end her existence as a slave because she remains trapped in a holding pattern, haunted by the loss of three of her children. As she tells Paul D, “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much!” (15). Sethe cannot learn how to live as a free subject because she remains trapped by the moment of loss when she “paid” for her escape. For Sethe, “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The ‘better life’ she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one” (42).
Sethe’s experience of slavery is recorded on her scarred body, particularly the scar on her back, named “a tree” for its pattern, which she received when whipped for protesting the theft of her milk while pregnant. She focuses, though, on the trauma of the theft, not the flogging, because it robbed her of the ability to provide sustenance for her children. Indeed, in the early parts of the novel, she cannot recognize herself apart from her role as a mother. While trying to escape, she continually refers to her need to reach freedom, not to be free but to get the milk she still carries to her children, who have been sent on ahead. Even at the limits of her endurance, she keeps going in order to deliver Denver, with whom she is pregnant, not out of any concern for her own life.
Frances Smith Foster notes that in antebellum slave narratives written by men, the dominant representation of women is as victims of sexual assault or as childless mothers (xxix). However, female-authored slave narratives present these same experiences in a different manner.14 Rather than “a monolithic characterization of slave women as utter victims,” they “barely mention sexual experiences and never present rape or seduction as the most profound aspect of their existence” (xxxiii). Similarly, Carolyn Sorisio notes a different representation of motherhood in female-authored slave narratives. The dominant stereotype saw mulatto women as inherently weak and unfit mothers, and black women as having only an instinctive, animal-like attachment to their offspring, in contrast to the more spiritual and lasting bonds formed by white mothers. Therefore, the degree to which Sethe sees herself in the role of caring mother rather than autonomous individual need not be a sign that she lacks a sufficient sense of self. Rather, her sense of herself in connection to her children resists stereotypes of black mothers and critiques the metaphysics of isolated subjectivity.15
Morrison also suggests that infanticide can be a sign of mother love. Using the tension between a positive reading of Sethe’s actions and a more conventional reading of them, Morrison refutes the negative stereotype of black mothers, but she also shows that slavery itself produces the very behaviors it then condemns as pathological in black women. In trying to deliver her milk to her children and to be a good mother, Sethe resists and rewrites the experiences of slavery that denied black women the opportunity to form lasting bonds with their offspring.16 By seeing herself as a mother first and a person second, however, Sethe also ascribes to an identity consonant with slavery’s definition of her as an object that breeds. By subjugating individualism to motherhood, she writes against the official discourse of slavery, while the tension between the admirable and disturbing aspects of her devotion to her children reveals one of the key subjective effects of slavery, its ability to pervert something as “natural” as a mother’s love for her own children. This is most apparent in Sethe’s decision to kill her children rather than let them be returned to slavery. She argues that the worst part of slavery was not what it could do to your body, but instead
That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. (251, emphasis in original)
Sethe fears not simply the violence of slavery being enacted upon her children but also its destruction of them as subjects, and she would rather sacrifice them than allow them to be objectified in the way she was. Kindred’s Dana draws a similar line around rape as the violation she will not accept. Both novels deal with how slavery objectified black women through the debasement of two moments of significant human connection, sexual intercourse and mothering, demonstrating the degree to which they did not “own” themselves and were excluded by definition from full personhood.
Significantly, Sethe’s list of what might happen to her daughter is limited to the period of slavery, but its enormities continue to happen in the racial conflicts of the US from Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights struggle, and into the present. Morrison argues that just as Sethe needs to come to terms with her past and the consequences that slavery has had on her body and person, American culture needs to come to terms with the past that haunts it, that is still out there, like rememories. Sethe fears this past’s continuation, telling Denver, “The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you” (36). Sethe does eventually accept a future and stop fearing rememories, but the conclusion emphasizes that this is “not a story to pass on” (274). It is a story that should not be repeated, passed on, in the way that Sethe fears it waits for Denver; but it is also not a story that leaves, the way “Some things go. Pass on” (35). The consequences of slavery remain integral to American experience.
Rather than avoid a future that she fears will only be like the past she escaped, Sethe becomes willing to be a subject who might undergo different experiences. She discovers that she can be her own “best thing” when she unites body and mind, accepting that the fragmented parts of her body can cohere into a whole. No longer thinking of herself as a body there to serve someone, whether her children through her breasts or the slave-owners through her labor, she accepts that her body is herself. This means accepting all that happened to it through slavery, accepting the dirtying she fears for her daughter; but she learns that she cannot remain an object to escape the pain that comes with embracing subjectivity, hope, and the future.
“Suicide or Worse” in Kindred. At first glance, Butler’s novel seems the opposite of Morrison’s: Sethe must move into the future in order to embrace her embodied subjectivity, while Dana learns by moving into the past. Butler puts a twentieth-century protagonist into the antebellum period, forcibly highlighting the ways in which her readers need to come to terms with this past in order to live in the present, let alone build a future. Kindred implies that we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction. While Sethe needs to acknowledge that she can become a subject as well as an object, Dana needs to discover that she is a body, an object, who might suffer the degradations of slavery. By using a contemporary protagonist, whose subjectivity has not been molded by nineteenth-century discourse, Butler can explore different aspects of the continued legacy of slavery.
Kindred considers the importance of experience for understanding the reality of slavery. Being black and knowing “the facts” is not enough. Instead, something equivalent to sentimental literature’s contraction of the distance between narrated events and the reading experience is required. Dana provides a doubled perspective on the past: as simultaneously a twentieth-century woman who intellectually distances herself from this era and a nineteenth-century woman whose body suffers the disciplinary technologies of slavery. Dana must understand herself as a specifically embodied African-American, female subject who is shaped and read by experience and discourse. Dana—and the twentieth-century black readers for whom she stands in—develops a more nuanced understanding of the choices faced by her ancestors, overcoming her previous conviction that she is different from earlier generations who were willing to submit. Through Dana’s ability to “pass” in the past, and the continuities developed between past and present,
Kindred further suggests that America as a whole has not moved far from the racial hierarchies that characterized the antebellum period.A key difference between Kindred and slave narratives is its far more explicit descriptions of violence. This is not simply a feature of the different sensibilities that mark audiences separated by a century or more; the increased violence in Butler’s novel and the willingness to talk about the sexual exploitation under slavery is integral to its concern with embodied experience. Where Jacobs elicits support for abolition, Butler challenges an audience who may have become contemptuous of “insufficiently radical” black ancestors. Through visceral violence and Dana’s response to it (she learns that embodied experience can erase her sense of rebellious subjectivity) Butler shows that disciplinary power produces slave mentality.
While Morrison focuses on Sethe’s need to learn to become a subject, Butler shows us that it is equally important for twentieth-century readers to realize what it meant to be(come) an object. To project one’s current consciousness back in time is not sufficient to recreate the experience of slavery. As long as Dana envisions herself as a disembodied subject, she deludes herself that the experience of slavery is safely contained in the past. Over the course of the novel, she begins to recognize that her subjectivity is not something that she can separate from bodily experience—it cannot remain hermetically sealed and unchanged by the enslavement and suffering she undergoes—and that mind and body are both parts of her self. A past that can affect her body affects this self. Once she realizes this, she is able to take action about the past instead of passively waiting for it to capture her.
Dana’s body is the mechanism of her time travel. At the moment of transfer, she feels a dizziness suggestive of sea-sickness and recalling the middle passage: it is a journey taken to serve someone else’s needs, at the end of which she finds herself in a new, dangerous, alien world. When she returns from her first, short journey to the past, she tells Kevin that although she knows the episode was real, “it’s becoming like something I saw on television or read about—like something I got second hand” (17). In this journey, Dana is only a spectator, returning to 1976 when a gun is pointed at her, the perceived threat triggering the time transfer. She has no control over how and when the past intrudes into and disrupts her present life. She is subject to Rufus’s needs, suggesting that even in the twentieth century she remains constrained by patriarchal and racist relations so long as she refuses to integrate body and mind.
The importance of embodied experience becomes apparent as Dana reflects on the inadequacy of knowledge gained from books in preparing her to survive in the past. Describing the beating of a slave that she witnesses on her second trip,17 Dana recalls that,
I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on.... I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. (36)
Shortly after witnessing this incident, Dana is physically assaulted by Patrollers. She returns to 1976 only after she has been beaten unconscious. She reports her experiences to Kevin, who finds them “crazier and crazier.” Dana responds, “To me, it’s getting more and more believable.... I don’t understand how it can be happening, but it’s real. It hurts too much not to be” (46). The more Dana experiences the antebellum world through her body, the more its reality is able to replace her sense of 1976 as home.
As the novel continues, Dana spends more of her time in the past because it becomes increasingly difficult for her return to be triggered, a consequence of Dana’s learning through embodied experience what her slave ancestors endured. The first time Dana is whipped, she tells us, “All I was really aware of was the pain. I thought Weylin meant to kill me.... By then, I almost wanted to die. Anything to stop the pain” (107). Her belief that the pain represents enough damage to kill her enables her to return to 1976. The next time Dana is whipped—after spending even more time in the past and witnessing the sufferings of other slaves—she cannot escape as easily. Although she tries to make herself believe that the whipping will kill her, she realizes “this was only punishment, and I knew it. Nigel had borne it. Alice had borne worse. Both were alive and healthy” (176).
Corporal punishment, threatened and actual, is a disciplinary technology that produces subservience. Although the plantation does not have the elegantly symbolic architecture of the panopticon, it is nonetheless a space of surveillance and normalizing power. As Foucault observes, disciplinary power does not simply control or constrain but actually produces the subject. Thus, the experiences of Dana’s body are able to shape and change her interior “essence,” belying the reality of any such entity. Just as Sethe was concerned about the dirtying effects slavery would have on her children’s subjectivity, Dana discovers that it is much harder to face the ways that slavery changes her than it is to face its physical suffering. While slave narratives insisted upon making the reader see African Americans as fully human subjects, Butler’s rewriting stresses how much the institution of slavery worked to deny this reality. Dana takes her status as a subject for granted until she is taken as an object by others and begins truly to understand the damage that slavery did to the subjectivities, as well as the physical bodies, of her ancestors. \
While Dana continues to separate her self from her body, trying to retain a sense that her “essence” is untouched by the objectification of her body, she condemns herself to the fragmentation that is slavery’s heritage. Ironically, Dana needs to learn to embrace what has been labeled object by this system, her embodiment. Butler thereby demonstrates how the bodies and minds of African Americans were affected by slavery and that healing was required by both. Although the moments of pain and torture are few in the text, their effects last throughout the narrative and into the present. The novel shows that even “benevolent” forms of slavery—in which Dana hopes to train Rufus—have pernicious effects.18 The psychological and emotional consequences of being less-than-human can destroy a person as surely as physical torments.
In Kindred, slavery combines aspects of both disciplinary and punishment power, a feature Robyn Wiegman argues is characteristic of the post-Emancipation strategies of racial terror enacted by groups such as the KKK. Dana is surprised at the absence of white overseers when she first arrives, although she quickly discovers that they are not necessary. The slaves discipline themselves because they fear reprisals to overt disobedience. Punishment is occasionally made into a public spectacle, and as Dana concludes of one such flogging, it “served its purpose as far as I was concerned. It scared me, made me wonder how long it would be before I made a mistake that would give someone reason to whip me” (92). The spectacle of punishment is, however, insufficient to maintain the smooth operation of slavery. It is also necessary for slaves to perceive themselves as constantly visible and thus to discipline themselves, but these mechanisms are also insufficient without the embodied experience of personal suffering. Another slave, Luke, explains his philosophy for attaining a measure of freedom within this disciplinary framework—“Might have to take a whippin’ for it later on, but if you want it bad enough, the whippin’ won’t matter much” (96)—but once Dana has been whipped for teaching a slave child to read, she finds she cannot share his tactic. The visceral experiences of antebellum Maryland not only teach Dana that the suffering of slaves is worse than she had imagined, but also change her sense of her own identity. She is whipped the second time because she tries to run away19 and after that there is nothing that she wants “bad enough” to risk another beating. Her choices, like the choices of her ancestors, are to submit or to die. She reflects, “The pain of my body was enough for me to contend with. But now there was a question in my mind that had to be answered. Would I really try again? Could I? … I tried to get away from my thoughts, but they still came. See how easily slaves are made? they said” (177, emphasis in original). Dana realizes that bodily experiences have made her a slave, rather than a person who merely appears to be a slave. The next time she is physically threatened by a white man, she capitulates because she “couldn’t face another beating so soon” (182).
Although she had thought of herself as someone who “played the slave, minded [her] manners probably more than [she] had to” (91), she now realizes that there is no distance between her and the plantation. She cannot maintain the distinction between herself as an emancipated black person and her ancestors as slaves. Commenting on the cook Sarah’s choice to continue serving the Weylins after they have sold all but one of her children, Dana reflects, “She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called a ‘mammy’ in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties” (145). Knowing slavery through her own body suggests to Dana that her ancestors’ choices under slavery cannot be judged by twentieth-century standards. In fact, she tells Kevin, “To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could. Much more” (51). When Kevin complains that she sounds suicidal, she responds, “Oh, but I’m talking about suicide, Kevin—suicide or worse” (51).
Just before her final trip to the past, she and Kevin discuss the risk that Rufus, who has now become an adult, will rape her. Dana insists:
“If I have to seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus’s sake, then he also has to accept limits—on his behavior toward me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.”
“If your black ancestors had felt that way, you wouldn’t be here,” said Kevin.
“I told you when all this started that I didn’t have their endurance. I still don’t. Some of them will go on struggling to survive, no matter what. I’m not like that.” (246)Rape is the final assault against her sense of herself as a twentieth-century subject that Dana refuses to accept. This is her stand for “suicide or worse”—she will kill herself or kill Rufus if he crosses this line, a risk she is willing to take even though it is unclear whether she will be able to return to her own time once Rufus is dead.
The centrality of rape to Dana’s narrative is important to the connection between narrative and personhood in the literary tradition, in which control of one’s own narrative equates to control of one’s self. Frances Ferguson contends that the psychological novel emerges from the struggle to tell a story of rape or seduction in Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), and more specifically from a confrontation between other people’s accounts (Lovelace’s reading of Clarissa) and one’s own account. This indicates why the issue of rape is so important to Dana. As she explains to Kevin, allowing Rufus to have sexual as well as physical control over her would make her into property. Ferguson argues that rape “dramatizes a problematic about the relationship between body and mind; although a rake like Lovelace may imagine that carnal ‘knowing’ includes knowing someone else’s mind, a character like Clarissa—virtuous even in her violation—suggests that one knows about mental experience as much in despite of the body as through it” (99). Like Clarissa, Dana insists on some part of her mind remaining untouched by the experience; once she realizes that bodily experiences shape this interior and cannot be separated from it, she feels the need to identify the physical experiences she will not endure. That she chooses to draw the line at rape, however, is problematic for Kindred and neo-slave narratives in general.
Fuller Stories and Full Personhood: Escape into the Future. Butler’s rewriting returns the experience of sexual abuse to the account of slavery. Rape overwrites or erases the will of the subject essential to liberal-humanist personhood, reducing self to raped body and installing the will or desire of the rapist in place of one’s own subjectivity. Dana believes rape to be something that would reduce her fully to her body in a way that other abuses have not. Rape signifies Dana’s experiences as a specifically female slave, and does so in a way consistent with the conventions of nineteenth-century female authors who refused to allow their sexuality or sexual violation to stand in for their identity. Dana’s refusal of rape seems part of this tradition, although Butler allows the threat of rape to appear in her text as part of her strategy to recover what is left out of official discourses.20 Unlike Sethe, Dana does not undergo the two things most specific to the female experience of slavery: rape and motherhood. Butler’s refusal to allow Dana to be a sexual victim is understandable, given the complicated history of gender discrimination in the contemporary Civil Rights and Black Power struggles,21 but while she posits this not-to-be-crossed line for Dana, she is aware that in historical reality most black women had no such luxury. Dana’s decision implies allegiance to patriarchal constructions of female chastity as crucial to female existence; it allows Dana to avoid a crucial aspect of the reality of female enslavement. The exploitation of black women under slavery and the racist construction of black sexuality is one of the ways in which this period of history continues to haunt American culture.22 The sexual exploitation of black women slaves is central to Jacobs’s Incidents. She is concerned that her bourgeois white readers not judge her too harshly for having children with a white lover out of wedlock, beginning her narrative with an apology for bringing such indelicate matters before the public and a plea to understand that she did not have the moral choice of sentimental heroines. Unlike Pamela, Jacobs could not hold out for the reward of sanctified marriage in exchange for her adamant chastity. She could only hope to obtain “something akin to freedom” by choosing a lover who was not also her master because “it seems less degrading to give one’s self than to submit to compulsion” (47).23
Dana is close to the sentimental heroines who would rather die than submit to rape,24 but unlike them she chooses to fight back—even though it might also mean her own death or exile—rather than commit suicide.25 When Rufus— inevitably, given his historically-situated identity—attempts to rape Dana, she stabs him. As he dies, Dana is pulled back to 1976, although she loses part of her arm in the process. By being willing to risk death, Dana is able to escape to the present, although not without cost. Although she could avoid being raped, the novel is premised on the fact that her very existence depends upon how her several times great-grandmother, Alice, could not. A free-born black, Alice is enslaved by Rufus after she is caught attempting to run away with her enslaved lover.26 Rufus nurses her back to health from injuries sustained in her capture, and clearly expects her to respond with gratitude and love, ignoring the conditions through which she came under his control. When she does not respond as he desires, he demands that Dana help him, announcing “I’ll have her whether you help or not. All I want you to do is fix it so I don’t have to beat her” (164). Dana refuses to convince Alice to submit, but does agree to present these consequences. She also refuses to offer Alice advice, telling her, “It’s your body” (167). Bitterly, Alice responds, “Not mine, his. He paid for it, didn’t he?” (167), stressing the erasure of subjectivity that comes with not “owning” oneself.27 Alice submits to Rufus, having two children, the second of whom is Dana’s direct ancestor, but when Rufus sells them, Alice commits suicide.28 Thus, although Dana is able to escape rape by insisting that it is something she will not endure, her refusal is in some ways a defeat.29 Survival comes at a cost: Dana must witness and acknowledge the mutilated and raped bodies of her ancestors, a history she has experienced first-hand and a fate that she has refused to fully accept for herself. Dana, like Butler’s typical protagonists, is a survivor who does not survive undamaged, and damage is not limited to herself because she requires her ancestors to survive what she could not.
The damage or change that time travel has enacted on Dana is embodied by the loss of her arm. She escapes her past, but at the cost of part of herself. It is also not by accident that Dana returns to 1976. In the year of the bicentennial, Butler reminds her African-American contemporaries of the physical cost of their existence, and reminds the American nation of this repressed history.30 The loss of Dana’s arm emphasizes the damaged bodies upon which both her personal history and the nation’s history are built. Her permanent change is a reminder that something is missing from the official discourse.31 Episodes in the novel dealing with struggles in Dana and Kevin’s life before the time traveling commences demonstrate that many of the problems created by this past continue in the present. As Lisa Long puts it, texts such as Butler’s refuse to let readers insist that slavery should be relegated to the past, but instead “insist that we cannot escape our racist history. They expose the way that those who attempt to bear witness to that history are ostracized, pathologized, and even institutionalized. And they offer physical wounds as expressions of the loss of safety and sense of personal coherence sustained while confronting that history” (480). Kindred functions as a corrective to the gaps in official discourse and as a warning that twentieth-century African-American identity should not be founded on denial of the mutilated bodies of one’s ancestors. If repressed, this history will simply return to control one, as Dana is controlled when she is snatched back in time. Dana’s refusal to accept rape acknowledges that her body is her self. She now better understands how African Americans were made into objects by slavery, and what they lost beyond the brute experience of physical torture. Dana is no longer controlled by the past when she takes action even at the risk of her own pain and suffering and admits that she is not separate or different from her ancestors and their bodily suffering.
Harryette Mullen sees in slave narratives the pattern of transformation from a body that is written upon by slavery to the body that writes the slave narrative. Butler’s fusion of fantastical time travel with more realist conventions reverses this trajectory. Dana, who is an unpublished author in her twentieth-century life, moves from being the body who writes to a body that is written upon by the experience of slavery. The first-person narrative suggests that Dana later becomes the body who writes Kindred. Just as Dana discovers that her reading has not prepared her for the material experience of the past, however, she worries that her narrative will not be believed. Standing outside the Historical Society with Kevin after searching for records about what happened after she killed Rufus, Dana comments, “If we told anyone else about this, anyone at all, they wouldn’t think we were so sane” (264). In the tradition of Jacobs urging her reader to accept her narrative as no fiction, even though it might seem incredible, Butler’s novel reminds us that there is more to truth and sanity than what survives in the official historical record.
Both Kindred and Beloved demonstrate the importance and fragility of being a subject rather than an object, the consequences of slavery that make this subjectivity so fragile, and the importance of the body as a site where slavery acts but also as a place of connection to others. Dana and Sethe are cut off from themselves when they are bodily cut off from their pasts, and they experience healing when they accept even their scarred parts. Through their emphasis on the body and healing the mind/body, subject/object rift, Butler and Morrison demonstrate the importance of neo-slave narratives, retellings that show us that this past is us, and that only by accepting this history as part of ourselves are we able to resist its pernicious influence and work toward the healing that might come with more complete stories.
Morrison and Butler are concerned with time in two ways: looking toward the past, they insist on the need to remember the historical realities of slavery, while looking toward the future, they anticipate our ability to move beyond this past and into a transformed world. Crucial to these transformations is the argument that the past must not be repressed or denied but acknowledged and incorporated into our collective understanding of reality. Sethe is trapped in the past so long as she fears the presence of the rememories surrounding her, but is able to reconnect with her community once she accepts the reality of the suffering she has undergone. Similarly, Dana and Kevin return to the present better able to understand the degree to which—and why—systemic racism continues to structure their experience. They return better prepared to resist such patterns through their fuller knowledge of their historical origins. Butler’s use of time travel differs from what we have been led to expect from conventional sf: she is not interested in a Jonbar point upon which to erect some counterfactual, in shaping or adjusting history, but in the affective and embodied connections that exist in and across time. Her concern is not with grandfather paradoxes, with securing the past, but rather with ensuring that the past is actually heard. Her time travel is used not to change the past (and thereby the future) but to change our understanding of it, which changes the present and opens up fresh possible outcomes for our future.32 Butler is concerned with the future and with the stories we tell about it, and reading Kindred in the context of neo-slave narratives encourages us to consider not only what has been left out of the official discourse of slavery and African-American experience, but also what has been left out of the “story” of sf through our practices of genre-construction. Butler’s engagement with the fantastic has as much to do with the neo-slave narrative tradition and its concern with the limitations of realism as it has to do with her engagement with sf conventions, here and in her other fiction. As Charles Johnson notes in Oxherding Tale (1982), form itself is a site of sedimented meaning;33 the re-engagement with tradition urged in the conclusion of Kindred applies to the genre of sf as much as to historical archives.
NOTES
1. Fantastic neo-slave narratives use such devices as haunting (Morrison’s Beloved and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora [1975]), time travel (Kindred), possession (Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata [1998]), fantastic anachronism (Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada [1976]), and space opera (Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand [1984]) to explore the experience of slavery.
2. It is possible to read all of Butler’s novels as neo-slave narratives since they are all concerned with the continued consequences of slavery, physical and psychological, on both slaves and enslavers. They examine questions of labor, violence, and dispossession, asymmetrical relations of dependence, and the need to built livable futures together with former oppressors. It is important to read Butler in terms of her relation to both the sf literary tradition (as constructed through the pulp and paperback tradition, as well as by academic criticism) and the African-American literary canon (which has emphasized “high” culture or the oral forms of folklore over genre fiction). Part of my purpose in bringing together Butler and Morrison is implicitly to question why Morrison is discussed almost exclusively in African-American literary criticism but rarely in scholarship on the fantastic genres, and why the reverse has (until recently) been true of Butler.
3. On the African-American relationship to technology, see Nelson and Williams.
4. Rushdy traces neo-slave narratives to the publication of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), arguing that their prevalence in subsequent decades resulted from changes in American life associated with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the consequent emergence of Black Studies programs in universities, and associated changes in the publishing industry.
5. Much work dealing with wounding, both personal and cultural, draws upon psychoanalytic theory, using the concept of trauma to describe that which cannot be assimilated into memory and must therefore be experienced as fragmented or symptomatic. Trauma theory has been extended beyond war to consider the Holocaust (LaCapra) and African-American slavery (Eyerman). Although I am concerned with wounding and healing, I am interested specifically in the materiality of trauma. I draw on the psychoanalytic tradition to the extent that it considers trauma as repressed experience, but, instead of seeing it returned to consciousness symptomatically, I argue that the past, as trauma, remains part of present, material experience.
6. At stake in the connection of bodies between Dana and Rufus is the history of the intermingling of black and white “blood,” a history denied by social practice and legal sanction. The discovery that her several times great-grandfather was a plantation owner surprises Dana, suggesting that African-American as well as white families have repressed this history.
7. Mark Bould’s essay in this issue develops this point in relation to Black Power sf.
8. Rushdy notes that this relationship to time and an imagined future is a well-established motif in African-American literature, despite neo-slave narratives’ innovative use of devices like time travel and haunting: “The narrative strategy Jones chooses for telling the story of Corregidora—in which slavery acts as the historical episode that inhabits and sometimes haunts the present—is innovative and yet also has a long history in African American writing. In some ways, this is the narrative strategy employed by writers in the 1890s, who used slavery to remark on the possible futures facing the nation a generation after the formal end of slavery” (94).
9. Even though it is written by a white woman, the most famous and influential anti-slavery novel,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), also attempts to place itself within this context. Stowe’s introduction positions her as a medium through which the stories of others reach the public. As Franny Nudelman notes, Stowe’s rhetoric suggests the need to negotiate the relationship between gender and authorship. As a proper lady, Stowe should not be putting herself forward so publicly in print. By presenting herself as medium, however, Stowe is able to claim the authority of authorship and preserve her gender identity. As Nudelman explains,While Stowe refashions the slave, the object of her text, as its agent, she presents her artistry as a form of enslavement. By transposing her own authorial agency and the helplessness of the suffering slave, Stowe can present her literary production as an exemplary instance of feminine self-denial. Her ability to receive her vision, and to translate it into novel form, is not a sign of personal ingenuity or political self-assertion but of her willingness to be inhabited by the suffering, the story, of another. Authorship is imaged, quite literally, as self-sacrifice: Stowe must put herself aside in order to become the medium for another’s experience. (943)
That Stowe appropriates the experience of those she represents and erases their voices, to a degree, is a consequence of this move to speak beyond what is authorized by her gender.
10. Morris’s novel is based on a newspaper account of an escaped slave, Margaret Garner, who when threatened with recapture, tried to kill her children and succeeded in killing one of them. Morrison read it while working on The Black Book (1974), a collection of documents describing the slave experience, and developed Beloved from the questions it raised about what might drive a woman to such actions.
11. Nudelman argues that this sentimental tradition within slave narratives refuses the distinction between subject and object, the body who suffers within the text and the reader who observes this from without, because the emotional identification is intended to make the reader become the protagonist. She notes that the body is key in achieving this collapse of positions: “because the body’s responses to pain externalize emotions, in pain the victim’s internal life becomes entirely visible, available to the observer” (949). Butler also erases these distinctions through time travel, allowing Dana, who functions as the sentimental reader’s representative, to become one of the slaves she knows about only from narratives.
12. The revisioning of the slave narrative tradition and the refiguring of bodies accomplished by these texts also requires us to rethink our attitude towards sentimental literature. Robyn Warhol argues that sentimental fiction is misunderstood if we read it as cathartic. Instead of discharging emotions and hence safely containing the emotions it provokes, sentimental fiction works to move the body both to tears but also to action based on the shared feelings it produces in the reader. She concludes that the reader’s tears “did not drain a reservoir of stored feelings, nor did it debilitate readers from taking action in the extra-textual world. Instead, crying created and promoted the feelings, which might then presumably serve as goads to action” (114).
13. Badt, Dobbs, and Henderson analyze the body in Beloved. Krumholz considers the pertinence of recovering history through spiritual healing.
14. For a detailed analysis of how black female bodies are read, see Guy-Sheftall.
15. Jacobs’s Incidents also refuses stereotypes of black women. Her refusal to write herself as victim is strategically positioned to refute contemporary “scientific” ideas about black, mulatto, and Caucasian women: “motherhood not only empowers Linda’s escape, but also gives her a reason to live. The most important decisions in Linda’s life stem not from what she wants as an individual, but rather from what is best for her children” (Sorisio 206).
16. The novel demonstrates slavery’s disruption of mothering in numerous ways, including Sethe’s failure to have a relationship with her own mother, Baby Sugg’s ignorance of the fate of her children, and discussions among black women about those babies who are not nurtured because they are a product of rape by white men.
17. Frederick Douglass posits the witnessing of a beating as the first moment at which he perceived the reality of his position as a slave. This knowledge, gained through the experience of another, indicates, as Fishburn argues, the importance to the slave narrative of bodies-in-connection as the ground for subjectivity.
18. Beloved also considers this idea through the Garners, the original owners of Sweet Home, who treat their slaves as something like well-trained and beloved pets.
19. Running away again shows Dana that embodied experience is superior to abstract knowledge. The ability to read and historical knowledge do not help her, and she is shocked to discover that she is less prepared for flight than slaves who have never seen a map and who have no certainty that the North is a refuge.
20. We should remember here, too, that Dana’s status as relative of Rufus also highlights what has been left out of official discourses that posit miscegenation as a risk of black male sexuality rather than a reality already accomplished by the sexual abuse of black women.
21. The masculinism and frequent misogyny of these movements is a consequence of the centrality of masculine identity to the status of personhood in American cultural experience. On the importance of masculinity to the Civil Rights Movement’s construction of black identity and autonomy, see Estes. The issue of rape is further complicated by the way hysteria about the “protection” of white women from black sexuality was used as a pretext for violence against black men. Rufus’s attempted rape of Dana is a reminder of the degree to which white men raped “black men’s women” under slavery, something that is particularly provocative when combined with sexualized justifications of lynching and segregation. Issues of race are complexly tied to those of gender and sexuality in African-American experience. The combination of denied sexual access to white women and evidence of white men’s sexual abuse of black women functions as key cultural symbols of the denied manhood of black males. This history often makes for problematic representations of gender in texts and cultural practice.
22. Gilman and Guy-Sheftall document the construction of black female sexuality as excessive to the point of pathology in nineteenth-century medical and social discourses. On the continued commodification of black female sexuality and the need for more positive images of it in American culture, see hooks.
23. Kindred develops many parallels between the love relationship in Incidents and Dana’s relationship with Kevin. In both, a black woman gains a degree of safety and power through the protection of a white man/owner. When Kevin arrives in the past and is asked if Dana “belongs” to him, he replies, “In a way. She’s my wife” (60), which provides her with a degree of protection. Jacobs was able to free her children by her white lover through his “largesse.” Sanchez-Eppler notes the explicit links between slavery and nineteenth-century feminist discourse about marriage, and Kindred also explores disturbing parallels between Rufus and Alice’s relationship—which can only be exploitative in its historical context—and Dana and Kevin’s relationship. At one point, Rufus tells Dana that he would marry Alice if he could, as Kevin married her. The novel further creates disturbing links between Kevin’s expectations of servitude from Dana as his partner and Rufus’ expectations of servitude from Dana as his slave.
24. Just as the heroine of the sentimental novel provides a moral education for the male protagonist, Dana attempts to re-educate Rufus to be a more humane slave-owner. Her efforts fail, however, because they pale in comparison to the powerful cultural forces shaping him as a slave-owner.
25. This decision to fight back is more in line with the male slave narrative which equates freedom with coming into masculinity, as most famously articulated in Frederick Douglass’s decision to hit the overseer. In such ways, Kindred fuses male and female slave narrative traditions.
26. It is worth noting that Alice forfeits her freedom precisely through acting on her own sexual desire.
27. Sadiya Hartman’s work on rape and the law as it pertained to slaves is important for understanding Alice’s comments. Hartman reveals that most cases of sexual violence against slaves never made it into court records, unless the case had to do with reparation for damages paid to the slave owner, or murder or assault charges brought against a slave who retaliated. Hartman points out that, “unlike other forms of violence like maiming or battery, rape was not penalized by slave statute, nor were owners likely to pursue suits for ‘trespasses’ on their property.… The ravished body, unlike a broken arm or leg, did not bestow any increment of subjectivity because it did not decrease productivity or diminish value—on the contrary, it might actually increase the captive’s magnitude of value” (95). Hartman’s work thus shows the degree to which Alice—a slave and woman—is doubly caught in a system of patriarchal, white supremacist logic that refuses to acknowledge her rights to herself as a person. It also points to a connection between rape, forced child-bearing and child-rearing, and the mistreatment of their children as the lines slave women might draw as something that makes death or destruction seem preferable to life under this system. Butler and Morrison, respectively, explore the consequences of rape or enforced pregnancy under slavery and their effects on enslaved women.
28. As with Beloved’s Sethe, the loss of her children is a more significant injury than her sexual violation. Such priorities are consistent with Jacobs’s representation of her own choices: like Alice, she is willing to tolerate the sexual liaison (although she does express a greater degree of agency in choosing the man), but feels compelled to escape when she believes her children to be threatened.
29. Jacobs’s narrative also ends with a kind of defeat. She finally escapes from fear of being returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law, but at a cost she does not want. A white friend and benefactor buys her from her persecuting owner, Dr. Flint (Norcum). This ensures her freedom, but she resents its having to be purchased for her. In her view, her freedom is something she innately “owns,” and therefore her preference would be to refuse the system of slave ownership entirely by refusing to be sold.
30. It is significant that Dana returns to her bicentennial present as a less than full body, reminding us that the nation’s constitution encoded blacks as three-fifths of a full person.
31. Christine Levecq argues that Kindred reengages with history in order to “profoundly question the process of discovering or recovering history” in postmodern, self-reflexive fashion and to insist upon the value of representational and realist literary conventions: “Kindred questions all forms of historical knowledge, by demonstrating the inescapable shaping or silencing of the past by perception, ideology, and language. But this skepticism does not stand in the way of a very realistic account of life under slavery” (453)
32. It is worth noting that Butler not only refuses the controlled version of the past/future relationship suggested by much dominant genre sf but also avoids the impasse of stalling at the moment where it is impossible to imagine the future beyond a revolutionary break that plagues black power sf. Less interested in rupture than in connection, Morrison and Butler suggest that our key to a better future lies in our ability to accept and integrate our heritage rather than in a radical leap over the problems of the present into some as-yet-unimaginable future.
33. Johnson writes that no form “loses its ancestry” but “rather these meanings accumulate in layers of tissue as the form evolves” (119).WORKS CITED
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ABSTRACT
This essay positions Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Toni Morrison’s Beloved within the slave narrative tradition, focusing specifically on issues of embodiment and authenticity. It argues that the fantastic elements in these novels demonstrate the limitations of realist representation and official discourse for capturing the subjective experience of slavery, while simultaneously revealing the importance of understanding such devices in relation to literatures of both the fantastic and the African-American canon. Both novels reveal the degree to which the consequences of slavery continue to disturb American culture, largely because this history has not been acknowledged and accepted. Through their emphasis on embodiment and the healing made possible by overcoming mind/body dualism, Butler and Morrison challenge the liberal-humanist model of subjectivity and argue for a model of self-in-connection consistent with the self expressed in nineteenth-century slave narratives.
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