Genre to the rear, race and gender to the fore: the novels of Octavia E. Butler

Literary Review, Spring, 1995 by Burton Raffel

Just as you cannot always tell a book by its cover, so too you cannot always know a novel by its apparent or even by its declared genre. Is Crime and Punishment merely a detective (or mystery) novel? Huck Finn simply (as Mark Twain once said of it) "another boy's book ' War and Peace merely historical, The Trial only a Mittel Europa Perry Mason drama? Is Middlemarch (as its title page proclaims) nothing more than "a study of provincial life"?

A book's transcendence of straightforward genre distinctions can be in part thematic, but is mostly a matter of execution: far more importantly than its intention, what a novel does with its chosen materials stands directly at the heart of its achievement, as it also defines its very nature. Whatever his own artistic imbalances, no one knew this better than Henry James: "There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures, but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning . . . It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms . . . and when the mind is imaginative . . . it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations." In this 1884 essay, "The Art of Fiction," James therefore lays down one standard: "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." Or, as the equally but on the face of it oppositely dedicated D.H. Lawrence put it, in a pair of essays published in 1925, "The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.... The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships . . . the one bright book of life."

Operating as I try to do, more or less according to the standards set out by James and Lawrence, I have just finished reading, seriatim, eight of the ten published novels of Octavia E. Butler, initially drawn on by the utterly unexpected power and subtly complex intelligence of her extraordinary trilogy, Xenogenesis,(*) but sustained and even compelled by the rich dramatic textures, the profound psychological insights, the strong, challenging ideational matrices of virtually all her books. And in my seventh decade of reading fiction, there are not many novelists, neither those so bubbly light as Wodehouse nor even so broadly and diversely rewarding as Dickens or Balzac, Proust or Thomas Mann, who could have held me so long or so closely. Every one of these eight novels (and I stopped at eight only because I could not easily find her second and third books, some fifteen years out of print) was published under the explicit rubric of "science fiction," but four completely transcend the genre and only one is, though neither weak nor bad, less than absolutely first-rate. Perhaps just as significantly, I do not think any of these eight books could have been written by a man, as they most emphatically were not, nor, with the single exception of her first book, Pattern-Master (1976), are likely to have been written, as they most emphatically were, by anyone but an African-American. Butler's work, in short, is both fascinating and highly unusual, representing-not only in my mind, but to the growing number of critics and scholars being drawn to it-a richly rewarding and relatively rare fusion of sensibility, perception, and a driven, insightful intelligence.

That this is serious literature I have no doubt. But I must stress from the start that Butler is not, like some science fiction practitioners, overtly (and is never, like more than a few, over-bearingly) "literary." Her prose is crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact, but not in the least directed at calling attention to itself(**) The moving final paragraph of the Xenogenesis trilogy-the title signifying "the fancied projection of an organism altogether and permanently unlike the parent"-is thus a model of quietly passionate writing:

I chose a spot near the river. There I prepared the seed to go

into the ground. I gave it a thick, nutritious coating, then

brought it out of my body through my right sensory hand. I

planted it deep in the rich soil of the riverbank. Seconds after

I had expelled it, I felt it begin the tiny positioning movements

of independent life.

Carefully, expertly crafted, deeply satisfying as it is to the reader of more than seven hundred preceding pages, and tautly, firmly resolving as it does the major plotline question, this is nevertheless determinedly functional, essentially unobtrusive prose-unlike, say, the highly literary writing of Samuel R. Delany (the only other black s.f. writer of major status): "It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists. like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked." Delany makes it work; as Henry James noted, the very good are very good. But more typically, "literary" s.f. prose reads like the early work of a writer who has since learned better, Walter Jon Williams, whose Ambassador of Progress opens, with a selfconscious flourish, "In a storm of rain, its brightness a steadier glow among lightning flashes, the shuttle dropped into the high pasture, scattering alarmed cattle who ran in a clatter of bells for the sheltering trees." One can go a good deal farther down the literary ladder; this is for my purposes quite far enough. Plainly, Octavia Butler does not thus tongue a golden-mouthed trumpet, summoning the worddrunk flocks to drink from her overflowing flagons of sweet-scented nectar.