Butler’s Subtle Metafiction

            On the surface, Kindred doesn’t seem such an obviously “postmodernist” novel as Mumbo Jumbo, with its typographical extravagence and seemingly arbitrary illustrations and misplaced publication information, or Ragtime, with its cavalier insertion of historical figures into apparently fictional situations, and its treatment of (meta)fictional characters like Coalhouse Walker as "historical" within the context of the novel. Aside from the “lowbrow” device of time travel, which bisects the narrative into two distinct historical contexts and allows for the same character to be present in both, the narrative moves in a conventional, plot-driven manner: once the reader accepts the time-travel trope, the narrative proceeds according to the conventions of realism. Butler alludes to the fact that a young Frederick Douglass would be growing up at this time somewhere not far from the Weylin Plantation, but Butler does not arrange to have Douglass make an appearance in the novel itself. For some of you, this more conventional or familiar kind of novel might be a relief from the disorienting experimental tweakings of Doctorow and especially Reed. Where they undermine and minimize plot, Butler has written an unapologetic page-turner. Most of our reading assignments (and the chapters themselves) end at “cliffhanger” moments, and the reader is compelled to move forward by the momentum of the narrative itself: How will Dana survive as a slave? Will she be able to locate Kevin and get him back to the 1970s? How will Rufus’s violent “courtship” of Alice play out? How does Dana end up losing her arm?

            We’ve talked in class about how common it is for postmodernist novels to reflect upon their own fictionality or constructedness within their own narratives. My early blog post on “Winslow Homer and the Light on the Eastern Seaboard” points out some of the ways that Doctorow anchors his depiction of the early twentieth century explicitly in other art forms, which calls attention to the “artistic” and therefore fictional nature of his own narrative. We might also cite moments where Doctorow’s narrator confesses to “limited information” in his efforts to “reconstruct” the actions and backgrounds of two of his fictional creations, Coalhouse Walker and Younger Brother—positing the narrator of historical fiction as a historian, even with regard to characters he’s entirely in control of (and as he takes all manner of creative liberties with actual historical figures like Houdini, Ford, or Morgan). Reed draws attention to the “novelness” of his novel on pretty much every page—from placing his opening chapter before the title page, to including signed “editorial” notes, where “I.R.” comments on the action in progress, to the general unabashedness about anachronism and conspicuous fictionalization of historical events. These novels don’t try to create an airtight illusion of reality in their fictional narratives; they revel in the fact that they are written, constructed, arranged by an author who is ultimately in control of the whole thing. And, as we’ve discussed in class, this is generally in keeping with the postmodernist view of history as a constructed, subjective arrangement of data and information into narrative (fictional) form. In postmodernist historical fiction, this isn’t mere “trickery” or gimmicks on the part of the authors (“Look at me! I can mess with the reader’s head!”) but part of the novels’ explorations of the fluid nature of historical truth and the potency of conventional metanarratives to influence our view of reality.

            But Octavia Butler doesn’t seem to go for any of that. She distinguishes her use of the time-travel trope from classic science fiction, claiming that her novel makes no attempt to “explain” the time travel in quasi-scientific terms. The characters themselves discuss time travel as a new fact that they have to come to terms with (as Dana puts it, early on, “I’m not sure it matters what we think” [17]), and once Dana and Kevin are transported, the narrative proceeds in strict realist terms. The realism is essential to the novel’s purpose of making the distant historical epoch of slavery feel present and immediate to the reader: Butler compels her modern-day readers to “travel” into a past they’d rather forget (or remain ignorant of), and through the force of plotting we become engaged in the story of Rufus and Alice and Nigel and Tom Weylin as Dana herself does. In a fairly traditional manner, the novelistic form serves to make the distant time more “present” in a reader’s imagination.

            There is nonetheless a subtle metafictional aspect to Kindred. Whenever an author makes her main character a writer—in this case, specifically an aspiring novelist, who is married to another novelist—we are encouraged to consider the character as a figure for the author herself. We know that at the time that she first “visits” Rufus, Dana has been hard at work on a novel, staying up late to write while holding down mindless temp work as her day job. What is her novel about? She never says, but we do know that her personal library contains a number of resources on Black history and slavery specifically—has she perhaps been contemplating this very historical period in her fictional work? Does the reader maybe pause and wonder if the book we hold in our hands (narrated, and thus “written,” by Dana) is the novel she’s referring to? Dana is three years younger than Butler herself, but they do share a number of biographical details in common (Butler was raised in Los Angeles and attended writing workshops at UCLA; she was in the early stages of a distinguished career as a science-fiction writer at the time she wrote Kindred). Time travel itself is a compelling metaphor for what any historian—or writer of historical fiction—engages in. By immersing herself in historical studies of the slavery era and especially in the many first-hand slave narratives that document the personal experience of living (and often escaping) as a slave, the author imaginatively transports herself to a distant time and imagines what it would be like to live in that time and place. Octavia Butler has no more of a sense of what slavery was “actually like” than anyone else living in the 1970s, but through research and imaginative projection, she can attempt to draw a persuasive and memorable and effective picture. For a novelist (and, Hayden White would argue, for a historian as well), this entails a powerful act of imagination. She “places herself” at the scene. When we watch, through Dana’s eyes, Alice’s father being beaten by the patrollers in chapter 3 of “The Fire,” an observer transfixed by the spectacle, horrified by the brutality and the tangible consequences of legal abstractions like an absence of any individual rights, the reader is placed in the same position as the author—bearing witness to the history, but unable to do anything to change it.

            In this way of framing it, any historical novelist practices a kind of time travel, even when the novel is consistently realist in its methods—when it attempts an airtight illusion of re-creating a bygone era, hiding its own artifice at every turn. By casting her narrative consciousness as a young Black woman writer like herself, struggling to pursue her dream in 1970s Los Angeles, Butler draws subtle attention to the artifice of her work. Like her character, she is drawn into her own story, forced to confront the painful and contradictory history of the nation that is celebrating its Bicentennial in the “present-tense” year in which the novel is set. In quite literal terms, the novelist-within-the-novel travels back in time and occupies the world her characters occupy, immersed in their stories. But just as Doctorow reminds us that all history is also the story of the moment in which it is written, Butler dramatizes the fact that her novelistic consciousness can’t help but be a product of the twentieth century—this is a postmodern slave narrative, where slavery is portrayed “first-hand” while also being framed in terms of historical distance. The character herself, like the novelist (or any historical novelist, or historian), must contemplate the connections between Rufus’s time and her own—and she must come to terms with the fact that both he and Alice are her ancestors. Slavery isn’t strictly a “Black experience” but an American experience. And Butler’s exploration of the idea that our character is profoundly shaped by our cultural and historical contexts, that we are all “playing roles” to varying extents—the idea that this era might “rub off on” Kevin and Dana, might change them in some ways that they can’t avoid—is also a quintessential postmodernist theme.

            There’s at least one explicit metafictional moment within the narrative itself—when Dana remarks, while trying to make Rufus understand her situation, “Time travel was science fiction in nineteen seventy-six. In eighteen-nineteen . . . it was sheer insanity” (63). Time travel is indeed science fiction in 1976—and the book I’m holding in my hand is labeled on its back cover as “Science Fiction/African American Literature.” In this fleeting moment, Butler seems to wink at her reader in something like the way Doctorow and Reed do. Dana can grasp the idea of time travel better than Rufus because it has become a more familiar concept by 1976: in 1819, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine hadn’t been published yet (and Rufus wouldn’t have read it anyway), and there were no comic books or movies or TV shows to make the concept thinkable. Fiction in this sense shapes reality—none of you flipped out over the idea of time travel in this novel, as you’ve all encountered it (in fiction) before, many times. Butler is indeed exploring the constructedness of her historical narrative, but in subtler ways than some of her contemporaries. For the most part, she just wants us to go along for the ride.

Notebook Prompt: "When had I stopped acting?"

About midway through her fifth visit to the Weylin plantation (in "The Storm"), as she's been enduring a long stretch without Kevin, Dana observes that she has been "getting used to being submissive" and remarks on her need for some "time to herself": "Once--God knows how long ago--I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?" (220).

In what ways is this lack of "distance" evident in "The Storm"? How has Dana's relation to this "alien time" changed over the course of the narrative? Do you see any loss of her 1976 self in these chapters?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook.

Notebook prompt: Does Dana "know" Rufus?

At the conclusion of "The Fight," as Dana and Kevin are attempting to "escape" from the Weylin Plantation on horseback, they are stopped by Rufus, who pulls a shotgun on them in a direct echo of the scene in "The River" at the very start of Dana's ordeal, when his father pulls a shotgun on Dana after she saves his son's life. This echo would seem to indicate that Rufus is "becoming his father" to a significant extent as he gets older. Dana explains her repeated willingness to give Rufus the benefit of the doubt as follows: "I kept thinking I knew him, and he kept proving that I didn't" (186).

Please take 5 minutes now to contemplate this scene and its implications in your notebook: Do you understand Dana's ambivalence about Rufus? Do you find him sympathetic at all, or is he utterly despicable? How does he compare to his father? To your idea of a "typical" slaveholder? How do you view his development as a character over the course of Dana's visits?

Notebook prompt: Dana as an eyewitness narrator

Reread the passage on pages 34-36 in of Kindred ("Just in time . . ." to "an urge to vomit"), where Dana is a first-hand eyewitness to the violent beating of Alice's father by slave patrollers.

What difference does Dana’s presence as a witness and narrator make in this scene? What’s it like to experience this scene through Dana’s eyes? What does this fictional narrative achieve that facts do not? Where are you as a reader in this scene?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate your response to this unsettling passage in your notebook. Come to class on Tuesday, October 28, or Wednesday, October 29, prepared to share some of your observations.

Notebook Prompt: The Present State of Jes Grew and Atonism

Near the end of Mumbo Jumbo, with Jes Grew fading out, Earline asks PaPa LaBas, “Is this the end of Jes Grew?” PaPa LaBas replies: “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning. It even precedes that little ball that exploded 1000000000s of years ago and led to what we are now. Jes Grew may even have caused the ball to explode. We will miss it for a while but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left. You see, life will never end; there is really no end to life, if anything goes it will be death. Jes Grew is life. They comfortably share a single horse like 2 knights. They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this” (204).

What is the current state of Jes Grew and Atonism in 2025? What does Reed’s historical narrative have to do with today? Do you see evidence of Jes Grew "springing back and prospering" in the years since the 1920s, or since 1971?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook.

Hip-Hop Jes Grew

Ishmael Reed is certainly a “specialized taste”—his fiction is difficult, evasive, at times maddening and perplexing. He may not become your new favorite writer, and you may not be giving copies of Mumbo Jumbo as birthday gifts anytime soon. (Although more than one former student of History as Fiction has named it as their favorite novel from any of my classes.) Some of you have probably been hating it, but some have been getting into this novel, finding its playful and irreverent qualities fun and interesting. I hope that most of you are at least enjoying Reed’s absurdist, cartoonish humor. But I know that others have been turned off, and that’s just the way it goes with art like this—not everyone is going to respond with the same enthusiasm. Reed isn’t setting out to write a bestseller, and the novel is designed to be challenging, upsetting, and provocative.

But don’t you agree that this is interesting stuff, however dizzying it might be to work through? That a book which appears to take such a light, loose, and irreverent view of capital-H History is also at the same time so deadly serious about the importance of history? Because this whole Jes Grew/Book of Thoth story is all about history—an “unofficial” cultural history that has been suppressed, gone underground, denounced and marginalized by “official” voices and finding expression in creative, veiled, surreptitious ways. Its expression is policed by a range of gatekeepers that often do operate like secret societies, controlling and regulating the spread and distribution of culture (academies of higher learning, the publishing industry, record labels, promoters, radio programmers,  “the algorithm,”  and so on). These gatekeepers often function in ways that are demonstrably white supremacist, and the history of the twentieth century presents one instance after another where white/mainstream audiences are “protected” from music and dance and art that is “too Black.” Reed’s secret-society narrative might seem paranoid or hyperbolic, but history makes clear that, for whatever reason (Atonism, racism, low self-esteem, anxiety about maintaining “standards”), older American white folks tend to get in a tizzy when younger American white folks start dressing, talking, moving, and thinking like younger American Black folks.

When Jes Grew emerges, it is hard to recognize at first. It doesn’t appear to be anything particularly significant. It pops up in the least likely places, outside the mainstream institutions of academia, finance, media, and culture. It is sometimes “mistaken for entertainment,” as PaPa LaBas puts it (174). It might appear to be a passing fad, a fleeting trend. But it has the capacity to change the world by way of a potent combination of rhythm and Text. It makes people’s heads bob, and it captures their ear, their gut, their knees, and whatever additional body parts might respond to rhythm. But at the same time it engages the mind with narrative and word play and history and punchlines and aesthetic manifestoes and mythology.

Does this description ring any bells for you?

The South Bronx, New York City, the mid 1970s. A more neglected, institutionally ignored and marginalized location would be hard to imagine. Completely off the radar of the mainstream media and culture industry (concentrated just across the East River in Manhattan), no one could have predicted that loosely connected groups of poor Black and Latino kids in one of the most desperately struggling neighborhoods in the nation would be inventing a set of interconnected art forms—visual art (graffiti), fashion (Filas and a Kangol), dance (breakdancing), rhythmically driven music (break beats, lifted from funk, disco, soul, and R&B records), and, perhaps most crucially, spoken words, poetry in the oral tradition—that would eventually transform popular culture around the world. And, like with Congo Square and New Orleans with their Haitian connections, in the South Bronx we once again have a crucial infusion from the West Indies—Jamaica and its “sound system” culture. When PaPa LaBas points out that “slang is Jes Grew too” (214), Reed seems to pretty much predict the emergence of hip-hop, and the epilogue as a whole (which is set in the “present,” 1971, with LaBas at age 100 giving his annual guest lecture on Jes Grew and the Harlem Renaissance) strikes me as an uncanny anticipation of where Black culture in America was in fact headed at the time Reed was writing. There’s an optimism about the end of the novel, despite the fact that the Book of Thoth has been destroyed (the translation is still out there somewhere!) and Jes Grew has died out. LaBas assures Earline, “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning. . . . Jes Grew is life. . . . They will try to repress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this” (204).

To follow the structural logic of Reed’s fictional-historical narrative, jazz, blues, R&B, and funk have all been compromised, weakened, watered down, and prevented from “finding their text”—significant, culture-changing developments that have all been widely influential and generally underappreciated, but have all witnessed commercially more successful “white” versions, cleaned up and repackaged for white consumption (swing, beer-commercial blues, rock-n-roll, disco). (If this is news to you, see Public Enemy’s “Who Stole the Soul?” for a history lesson.) 

It’s too long a story to fully unravel here, but hip-hop has proven remarkably resistant to the traditional forms of Atonist suppression: there have been a wide range of Black-owned and Black-run labels; artists have been able to maintain an unprecedented degree of creative control over their work; the artform has been aesthetically self-policing from the start, sorting out the “real” from the wack or phony. Its integrity has not apparently been compromised by white participation (Grammy awards for Macklemore over Kendrick Lamar notwithstanding). It hasn’t been co-opted or bought or stolen. 

When the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill (1986) skyrocketed to become the highest-selling rap album of all time (to be displaced eventually by Vanilla Ice’s To the Extreme [1990]), it looked to some like the same old story—Black cultural forms appropriated and imitated by whites who then become superstars, while the originators wallow in comparative obscurity. The Beastie Boys were embraced by MTV and white radio in a way that L.L. Cool J was not. But this isn’t how it shook out, for a number of reasons. White people have participated in hip-hop from the beginning, and the culture has always had an awesomely forward-thinking and generally embracing view of its diverse audience—the more people with their hands in the air, the better the show. The most important label in the early years of hip-hop, Def Jam, was started by a Jewish kid from Long Island in his dorm room at NYU. But the roster of significant artists remains almost exclusively African American, which, fifty years into its history, represents a total departure from the Paul Whiteman/Elvis/Clapton/Bee-Gees model of appropriation. The Beastie Boys and Eminem and El-P and Mac Miller (and others) must earn respect on the basis of their skills; they succeed in hip-hop despite being white, not because they are white. 

I won’t go so far as to assert definitively that Jes Grew has “found its Text” in the form of hip-hop (especially as contemporary hip-hop generally seems uninterested in lyricism), and it would be naïve to deny that in many ways the culture has been compromised in its transition to multibillion-dollar international industry. (This has indeed long been a source of discussion and self-analysis within the genre itself.) But the familiar methods of repression have not worked in the familiar ways. The culture that “just grew” out of abandoned, dilapidated playgrounds in the South Bronx has flourished to a truly astonishing degree, and—moreso than jazz, blues, and R&B—the text is an absolutely vital aspect of its appeal. Rap revels in its willingness and ability to say whatever the hell it wants in a proud and defiant manner, without innuendo or other forms of veiling, and yet it remains vitally poetic and figurative and persistently innovative in its uses of language. It has turned “slang” into an aesthetic playing field, with possibilities for multilayered signification, storytelling, personal expression, social commentary, and yes, the passing on of history—its own, and that of the nation. More than any other form I know of, rap is often self-referential, “about” hip-hop itself—where it’s going, where it’s been, what is and is not “real.” It pays homage to its luminaries (Biggie, Tupac, Left-Eye, Jam Master Jay) and educates its listeners on its own history through allusion and cross-reference. It delights in offending the sensibilities and moral standards of the cultural gatekeepers, and it is unapologetic in its typical defiance of criticism.

In short, I propose, even though he’s not literally writing about hip-hop, Reed’s novel suggests that hip-hop is of world historical importance, and not only—or not even—because it is lucrative. (Although, given its origins in poverty and its potential to elevate its artists and executives to rarefied heights of wealth and cultural influence, there is also world-changing potential in its profitability, too.) It is of world-historical importance because it has taken hold. It was repressed in all the usual ways early on—denounced, ignored, mocked, derided as “noise” or “not music” or “not original” or “incoherent mumbo jumbo.” But its spread—fueled by the beat, which Reed traces all the way back to ancient Africa—could not be contained, despite the best efforts of the Atonists over at Fox News.

Notebook Prompt: What Do We Do with Chapters 52?

Starting with the first of the two chapters 52, PaPa LaBas launches into his lengthy "back story" to the case of the missing Text, tracing the origins of this modern-day conflict all the way back to ancient Egypt. 

How would you classify the writing in chapters 52? Is this history? Fiction? Mythology? How does this section fit with the style and reality-status of rest of the novel? Is there any sense in which this narrative represents a valid alternative history, despite all of the conspicuously fictional aspects of the story?

Please take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook now, and post one sentence from your notebook in the comments section below.