Sunday Morning! “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler
When you write a dystopic vision of the future, I’d imagine you would hope to be short-sighted and incorrect. Octavia Butler’s Parable series has been described as prescient to the point of prophecy, a compliment she did not happily accept. Who would? “This was not a book about prophecy,” she explained to students at MIT:
“This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.”
With all of the trials of the recent past, there has been an ongoing reassessment of dystopian novels that feels a bit like a lottery drawing. Who was the most presciently pessimistic? Atwood? Orwell? Ballard? Some have made a good case for Butler’s Parable books; Abby Aguirre argues in the New Yorker: “for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler’s novel and its sequel may be unmatched.” It’s not a happy thought. Butler made notes for a third novel and had intended there to be five novels in the Parable series. She seems to have largely abandoned the idea, prior to her accidental death in 2005, because the novels were simply too depressing to write. This is not a world you’d want to spend much time in, and the books seem to be saying we’d better take steps to avoid winding up there.
Progress is piecemeal, and often precarious. It seems to me a common mistake to map a model of scientific progress, where we really do know a little more all the time, on to culture, where we arguably take as many steps back as forward and generally go from one mania to the next. Will tomorrow be better than today? Few Black writers would take that for granted, and certainly Butler would say let’s hope so. Things will certainly be different and, at some point in the distant future, we can imagine they could be better.
At this point in our history, a better world might be possible, but it will be a lot of work. What Butler did, in Parable of the Sower, was to take certain problems and extrapolate that we would not fix them (a safe guess) in the future: the environment would be further degraded; gun violence would be more prevalent; unemployment and a sort of corporate indentured servitude would become the norm; the ineffective government would do little; and most people would wall themselves off and escape into drugs and virtual reality fantasies. What was unnerving about the story, for me, was it was not a dystopia triggered by a nuclear war, an asteroid, or environmental collapse. To get there, we’d just have to do nothing.
Reading about some of the post-Soviet bloc countries and their ongoing problems, it’s possible to imagine dystopias as something we adjust to; the characters in Butler’s first Parable were mainly trying to live their lives in spite of- and often in denial of- the collapse of a social order. In the sequel, another inevitable pollutant arises: a demagogic politician seizes the popular imagination by promising to restore law and order and rebuild America as a Christian nation- literally, to “make America great again.” The coincidental slogan is a bit startling, but remember that neither Butler, nor Trump coined that promise- it’s an old saw in U.S. politics and demagogues are seldom if ever original.
Found on Redtreetimes.com
At the same time as the demagogue is trying to turn back the clock, our heroine Lauren Olamina is still trying to get her Earthseed community, named Acorn, to take root. The “religion”- more a guiding philosophy- is based on the notion of God as change, a continual process that humans can take creative part in, but never quite direct. A character in the novel calls this “Darwinian”; it also echoes Heraclitus’s “universal flux.” Another echo: Heraclitus believed the basic material of the world is fire, and here there are addicts of a drug called “pyro” that makes the user obsessed with fire. It seems as if everyone in this world is trying to escape reality to some extent; the ultimate dream of Olaminia’s “cult” is to take root among the stars. Thereby, humanity will avoid becoming “smooth dinosaurs, who evolve, specialize, and die.”
One of the things I like about this story is Butler makes it clear that people who are caught in the grip of a powerful passion are not exactly easy to live with. Having had a few recent conversations with proselytizers, I would compare it to having a screen between you and them; you just want to connect, while they’re always trying to complete the sale. Some of Olamina’s flock are swayed by the Christian/fascist demagogue’s promises of simple virtues and prosperity; she saves her own brother from sex slavery, only to have him abandon her and become a preacher in the new order. But Olamina can also be unforgiving herself and it’s clear where her priorities lie- with her belief system. Butler smartly tells the story in Olamina’s voice, through her journals, and that of her daughter, who is stolen and raised in an unloving Christian family and tracks down her lost mother, only to find she is less important to her mother than the fledgling cult. When we choose our beliefs, we also decide not to take other paths.
But, conversely, our beliefs, and the sense of purpose they carry, can keep us alive. Olamina loses her lover Bankole, her daughter, and her group is caputured and forced into a brutal “corrective” slavery, supposedly to make them Christian. In essence, they are pressed into a a life of work, abuse, and rape. Here, a white writer might have sugarcoated the reality, but Butler knows better. There is no silver lining to slavery, beyond killing the slavers. Their cruelty might be whitewashed by doctrine, but it’s still cruelty.
Meanwhile, Olamina’s daughter, in spite of growing up in another sort of cult, is discovering who she is. I liked that the daughter, who has never met her mother, also has a creative purpose in life: she writes scripts for the virtual reality “dream masks” that people use to lose themselves in- the shadows on their cave walls. She is an obvious stand-in for Butler herself. It would be all-too-easy to say that we “ignore reality” in our enthralling fictional worlds, but I think the author recognizes that this also makes us deeply human.
And, in a sense, all three of the family members- Olamina, her preacher brother, and her stolen daughter- are storytellers who are trying to help their people to imagine a better future world, and see the steps they might take to get there. Our stories can make our present reality less painful, and act as opiates, to be sure. But they can also save our lives.
So, what are YOU reading, playing, watching, pondering, creating, or envisioning this weekend?
