Octavia e butler historical fiction12/12/2023 ![]() ![]() By attending to the spatial, temporal, and psychic doublings, this essay seeks to appreciate Butler’s simultaneously fictional and metafictional attempt to make history and memory productively curative-to serve as both a recovery of repressed historical narratives and a recovery from repressed traumatic memories. This doubled imaging highlights the intimate connection between the past and the present as well as the need for both Dana and the novel’s readers to recognize the significance and source of the doubling across temporal and ego boundaries. Butler achieves this dual effect-of Dana’s travel as an individually curative narrative of memory and the story of her travel as a communally curative narrative of history-by characterizing the two temporal settings, the past and the present, and two of the main characters, Dana and Alice (Dana’s ancestor), as doubles of each other. ![]() As Dana, the protagonist of Kindred, travels back in time to antebellum Maryland, she engages with and modifies not just memory but also history, a fantastic journey representative of the discursive manipulation of history that fiction as a genre accomplishes. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart argue that memory is a malleable construct that can be restructured in order to make the narratives provided by history more supportive of a curative end: “Once flexibility is introduced, the traumatic memory starts losing its power over current experience” (178). ![]() Ultimately, the task of undermining the master narrative of American history, one that has repressed the sordid and traumatic memories of the past, and rewriting that narrative into one that can sustain and reincorporate the repressed memories is a curative, or potentially curative, project. For Butler, fiction is useful because it is not trapped into choosing between these two models of history, yet it can potentially and responsibly answer to the pressing impetus to “set the historical record straight.” 1 Forcing her readers to confront repressed anxieties about racial difference and slavery’s traumatic repercussions on the nation as a whole, this time travel fantasy poses and attempts to solve the beguiling problem of history’s seemingly Janus-faced genre: as factual truth to be recovered or (collective) memory to be constructed. If, as Dominick LaCapra suggests, we are at a methodological impasse in our attempts to write history in the guise of either positivism or radical constructivism, then Butler can be said to anticipate such an impasse, making it rhetorically and psychically productive. Butler negotiates such a difficult task with Kindred, a novel that is both a realistic representation of the antebellum South and a fantasy of time travel, a retrieval of history through imagination. ![]() As Saidiya Hartman argues, “Writing the history of the dominated requires not only the interrogation of dominant narratives and the exposure of their contingent and partisan character but also the reclamations of archival material for contrary purposes” (10). When Minority American Fiction Writers engage the history of their country, they inevitably find themselves committed to a dualistic and vexed task of deconstruction and recovery. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |