a long and disjointed discussion of morality, agency, and American history
After being absorbed in Vonnegut’s borderline-nihilistic Tralfamadorian philosophy for about a month, you could be forgiven for being relieved to open up Octavia Butler’s Kindred instead. Finally, a character who actually cares about the plot, and who seems to actively seek to exercise agency and influence their own fate rather than resigning themselves to being another meaningless cog in the abstract machinery of history. And it’s true: for the first few chapters, it’s clear that Dana does genuinely care -- and not only out of the self-interest inherent in her task of saving her ancestor. When she meets Rufus when he is a child, she wonders if she can beat the odds of the time period and prevent him from becoming the kind of person his father is. When she first pieces together that he and Alice must be her own ancestors, she instinctively begins to think about Alice and Rufus being married when they’re older -- despite the fact that in 1976 Dana must know that logically a child with a white father and a black mother in Rufus and Alice’s time period would most likely not come from marriage, or even a consensual relationship at all.
Rather than naivety or inadvisable optimism, it seems like Dana’s hopes in this respect are a natural reaction to what’s happening to her. When meeting a child for the first time, it’s natural to assume that they have a chance to grow up and become a good person. Given that her literal existence depends on the fact that Rufus and Alice must have a child together, Hagar, in order for Dana herself to be born, it’s also understandable for her to hope that it’s in a positive situation. But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that Dana’s hopes are less and less likely to come true. Rufus gives innumerable reasons for Dana to give up on him. He is ruthlessly manipulative -- he claims he “cares” about Dana, and “loves” Alice, but in reality he only cares about himself, using violence to force Dana and Alice to give him what he wants. Even so, Dana keeps hoping that her efforts will make a difference somehow. She asks herself why she is so willing to forgive Rufus for objectively terrible transgressions, but can’t find an answer. As Dana is forced into more and more morally ambiguous situations, the moral dilemmas become more pronounced, as she tries to make the right choices. The crux of her choices rest on the fact that she has to be complicit in Rufus’s rape of Alice in order to secure her own existence -- how can she do so, without being guilty herself?
Although it’s not immediately obvious, and although they are two drastically different novels, I think that in many ways this moral question Butler brings up in Kindred is rooted in the same idea as the moral question of Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five’s Tralfamadorian philosophy is striking to us because the events feel relatively immediate; although World War II is in our history books, the world in which it happened still feels familiar. We can sympathize very readily with Billy Pilgrim the optometrist who flies in planes and references Oz. We’re also very used to hearing the story of World War II, and people like Billy Pilgrim, as part of a familiar narrative of American history -- one which stresses American heroism and world-saving, and in which agency plays a crucial role. I don’t mean to say that this is a bad or inaccurate narrative in this case -- it’s unambiguously true that Americans made choices that led to winning World War II and defeating a genuinely terrible enemy, and that was a genuinely good thing. The key here though is that we’re used to being sure that choices -- of men like Billy Pilgrim, it’s implied by the history books -- are essential. So it’s jarring for us to see all of that thrown away with a simple “so it goes” and the continued affirmation that nothing anyone does really matters, because all of history will happen anyway.
Kindred is a fascinating contrast to Slaughterhouse-Five because the context, an early 19th century slave plantation, is so drastically different -- both in reality, and in our popular perception -- than Slaughterhouse-Five’s context of World War II. According to the same conventional narrative of history that stresses the modern relevance of American heroism in World War II, slavery is relentlessly agreed upon to be In The Past. American world-saving agency in the 1940s has continued implications today; but slavery, this narrative says, definitely doesn’t. The simple reason, I would guess, is that we (from the perspective of me, obviously, a white person) don’t want to identify with people who were participated in the system of slavery. It’s easier to either assume that they were different from us somehow -- that we would never get caught in that same trap of going along with a terrible societal wrong -- or to assume that that terrible societal wrong was just so relentless that it would have been impossible to resist. Either way, agency doesn’t play a part. Think of a phrase I’m sure we’ve all heard: “That’s just how it was back then.” It’s a view that leaves no one to blame.
This vision of slavery’s place in American history is, if you think about it, very similar to Vonnegut’s remark that everyone involved in his novel was nothing more than “listless playthings of enormous forces.” It raises the question: If Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian perspective switched places with Dana and Kevin, would our visceral reaction against it be so pronounced? Or would we find it easier to accept, because we already, in a way, accept a “so it goes” attitude toward unsavory parts of history when we don’t really want to face the ways they shape our society today?
In the same way that Vonnegut’s moral questions cause a strong reaction in the reader because they conflict with the narrative of personal agency in World War II, Dana’s moral dilemmas are compelling because they collide with widespread narratives of agency during the time period she lives in as well. In the two novels the question is approached from a different side, but it is, at the core, the same question. Can agency, and history, exist simultaneously? Or is “agency” a wishful myth perpetuated only when it’s convenient -- since when our enormous forces are good, we are their cause, while when they are terrible, we are only the hapless victims?
Rather than naivety or inadvisable optimism, it seems like Dana’s hopes in this respect are a natural reaction to what’s happening to her. When meeting a child for the first time, it’s natural to assume that they have a chance to grow up and become a good person. Given that her literal existence depends on the fact that Rufus and Alice must have a child together, Hagar, in order for Dana herself to be born, it’s also understandable for her to hope that it’s in a positive situation. But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that Dana’s hopes are less and less likely to come true. Rufus gives innumerable reasons for Dana to give up on him. He is ruthlessly manipulative -- he claims he “cares” about Dana, and “loves” Alice, but in reality he only cares about himself, using violence to force Dana and Alice to give him what he wants. Even so, Dana keeps hoping that her efforts will make a difference somehow. She asks herself why she is so willing to forgive Rufus for objectively terrible transgressions, but can’t find an answer. As Dana is forced into more and more morally ambiguous situations, the moral dilemmas become more pronounced, as she tries to make the right choices. The crux of her choices rest on the fact that she has to be complicit in Rufus’s rape of Alice in order to secure her own existence -- how can she do so, without being guilty herself?
Although it’s not immediately obvious, and although they are two drastically different novels, I think that in many ways this moral question Butler brings up in Kindred is rooted in the same idea as the moral question of Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five’s Tralfamadorian philosophy is striking to us because the events feel relatively immediate; although World War II is in our history books, the world in which it happened still feels familiar. We can sympathize very readily with Billy Pilgrim the optometrist who flies in planes and references Oz. We’re also very used to hearing the story of World War II, and people like Billy Pilgrim, as part of a familiar narrative of American history -- one which stresses American heroism and world-saving, and in which agency plays a crucial role. I don’t mean to say that this is a bad or inaccurate narrative in this case -- it’s unambiguously true that Americans made choices that led to winning World War II and defeating a genuinely terrible enemy, and that was a genuinely good thing. The key here though is that we’re used to being sure that choices -- of men like Billy Pilgrim, it’s implied by the history books -- are essential. So it’s jarring for us to see all of that thrown away with a simple “so it goes” and the continued affirmation that nothing anyone does really matters, because all of history will happen anyway.
Kindred is a fascinating contrast to Slaughterhouse-Five because the context, an early 19th century slave plantation, is so drastically different -- both in reality, and in our popular perception -- than Slaughterhouse-Five’s context of World War II. According to the same conventional narrative of history that stresses the modern relevance of American heroism in World War II, slavery is relentlessly agreed upon to be In The Past. American world-saving agency in the 1940s has continued implications today; but slavery, this narrative says, definitely doesn’t. The simple reason, I would guess, is that we (from the perspective of me, obviously, a white person) don’t want to identify with people who were participated in the system of slavery. It’s easier to either assume that they were different from us somehow -- that we would never get caught in that same trap of going along with a terrible societal wrong -- or to assume that that terrible societal wrong was just so relentless that it would have been impossible to resist. Either way, agency doesn’t play a part. Think of a phrase I’m sure we’ve all heard: “That’s just how it was back then.” It’s a view that leaves no one to blame.
This vision of slavery’s place in American history is, if you think about it, very similar to Vonnegut’s remark that everyone involved in his novel was nothing more than “listless playthings of enormous forces.” It raises the question: If Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian perspective switched places with Dana and Kevin, would our visceral reaction against it be so pronounced? Or would we find it easier to accept, because we already, in a way, accept a “so it goes” attitude toward unsavory parts of history when we don’t really want to face the ways they shape our society today?
In the same way that Vonnegut’s moral questions cause a strong reaction in the reader because they conflict with the narrative of personal agency in World War II, Dana’s moral dilemmas are compelling because they collide with widespread narratives of agency during the time period she lives in as well. In the two novels the question is approached from a different side, but it is, at the core, the same question. Can agency, and history, exist simultaneously? Or is “agency” a wishful myth perpetuated only when it’s convenient -- since when our enormous forces are good, we are their cause, while when they are terrible, we are only the hapless victims?
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