Octavia Butler's Kindred is set apart from the other books we've read in class, Mumbo Jumbo and Ragtime, through its use of history. Mumbo Jumbo and Ragtime use real historical events and people but abstract them, creating an alternate version of history that says something about our own. Kindred uses a more realistic representation of history, and creates a story through that which reflects real issues.
True to postmodernism, Mumbo Jumbo and Ragtime blur the line between history and fiction, and often make little distinction between what's based on fact or fiction. For example, Ragtime's cast features both real and fictional characters that interact with each other, which questions how real history is. Similarly, in Mumbo Jumbo Ishmael Reed breaks literary conventions and frequently references and retells history. Kindred, on the other hand, has an element of realism that the other two lack. Even though there are fictional and fantasy elements, like time travel, it never fully alters history. The story is self contained in the sense that everything in the novel could happen without history or modern life significantly changing. This is very different from the other two books, where the scale of the events and use of historical figures would drastically alter history.
This aspect of Kindred doesn't make the events any less important, instead, it adds to a central theme of the novel, which is how ingrained slavery is within American history. Dana tries throughout the novel be a good influence on Rufus so that it will make a difference for in plantation's future. She has hope for this in the beginning, saying "...I would help him the best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice." (Butler 72) However, over the course of the novel, Rufus becomes more and more like his father, even worse at times, despite Dana's efforts.
The inevitability of Rufus's descent, that even something like time travel couldn't fix, sends a message of how deeply ingrained slavery was in American society. It also speaks to the 1619 project, and how important the discussion and agknowledgment of slavery and its consequences is when talking about American history. This shows how Octavia Butler's use of history in Kindred is strategic, and reinforces the themes central to the novel.
Hey Chloe! I really like the way you interpret the various avenues of postmodernism we have looked at in this class. Kindred is a very powerful example, especially in that the story it is depicting is so horrifying it doesn't need any falsified elements to leave a permanent mark on the reader (aside from the time travel to set the situation up of course). This goes to show the development of history and Butler's motivations in the novel. Great post!
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point here about how "history" means something different in the context of this novel, which somehow is both more "realistic" in its depiction of the historical era (without all the ironic undermining we see in Doctorow and Reed) AND more "fictional" in that no records of this particular plantation or the people who inhabit it will be found--Butler has invented ALL of her characters, but they are grounded in a more straightforward and realistic rendering of the *historical context*. So in this novel "history" means something like what it means for the 1619 Project: a set of circumstances, social and economic and political structures, power relations that shape the lives of characters in profound ways. So the fictional characters are like variables in a thought experiment, imagined individuals who represent realistic depictions of people who in fact lived and died and suffered anonymously. History would never have known the names of Nigel, Carrie, Sarah, and the others--and we realize how much of this actual history has been lost. Fiction can work to fill it in: if these people did NOT in fact live in this particular time and place, they sure COULD have.
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