Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia

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Acknowledgments

This article was originally delivered in significantly modified form as “Parables of the Trickster” at the “Octavia E. Butler Studies: Convergence of an Expanding Field” conference at the Huntington Library in June 2017. I thank Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey for their support of the essay in both its forms, as well as the other conference attendees for their questions, comments, suggestions, and friendship.

Notes

¹ See Canavan, Octavia E. Butler (2016), chapter 6, “God of Clay.” For details on the way the failed Trickster narratives eventually mutated into Fledging, “Amnesty,” and “The Book of Martha,” as well as into other incomplete works existing only in the Huntington Archives, see also chapter 7, “Paraclete.”

² I argue that the estate should feel empowered to publish that fiction, over and against Butler’s stated wishes to the contrary when necessary, in my essay “Disrepecting Octavia” in Lumenescent Threads.

³ Quite a few of the sketches take this connection to St. Paul quite far, imagining Imara as a Earthseed skeptic or even a reporter who has gone undercover to expose what she sees as a cult.

⁴ However unintended, Butler has anticipated us all here: in giving us the fragmentary, multidirectional story of a flock that does not quite know what to do with itself once its prophet is gone, she has surely foretold our own situation as Butler scholars post-2006.

⁵ A last footnote to Octavia E. Butler would direct you to chapter two on the Patternist series, which discusses the mostly unwritten Missionary stories as an unrealized Asimovian or Heinleinian future-historical “saga” that gave birth to Butler’s later space fictions (including both the Parables and Xenogenesis).

⁶ See, for instance, OEB 2061, with proposed characters based on personality types ranging from Issac Asimov, Ernest Hemingway, Harry Truman, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton to Gregory Benford, Roy Cohn, Newt Gingrich, George Bush, Richard Nixon, and Clarence Thomas, often with the genders switched to allow for greater female representation in the story. The conflict between Olamina and the people who named the ship seems reflected in the conflict between the different sorts of people in the colony, not least of all in the attitude they take toward Olamina’s teachings.

⁷ Butler may have been influenced here by what is called Dunbar’s number—the number proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar of the total number of people with whom the human brain can sustain ongoing social relationship. The idea has been popularized in a wide variety of outlets and contexts, including Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller The Tipping Point. Undoubtedly there is an element of personal nostalgia here, too, as well as civilizational nostalgia: Butler’s notes on the housing groups frequently reference the town of Victorville, California, a community on the edge of the Mojave Desert where she briefly lived with her grandmother when she was very young—a place where “you could stand in the center of town and look out both ends” (OEB 2076).

⁸ To gloss Butler’s complicated argument here quite briefly, what she is imagining here is that the most successful men (by whatever measure) will still be driven by maladaptive sexual desires to select narrow-hipped women over wide-hipped women—and that such women “will be more likely to die in childbirth or manage to produce only one child,” especially after the collapse of technologized society in a place like Bow. Thus—in a darkly eugenic vision parallel to something like the film Idiocracy (dir. Mike Judge, 2006)—she imagines the less-desirable men producing more offspring due to the reproductive superiority of their putatively less-desirable, wide-hipped wives, and thus eventually having both their genes and their more-backward-looking social attitudes becoming dominant in the colony. See again OEB 2033.

⁹ Butler’s earliest visions of Olamina actually veered much closer to “bitch goddess” than the synergistic Olamina of leadership style #5; some original drafts of the Parables at the Huntington see a middle-aged Olamina as a stone-hearted warrior-woman, personally executing dissidents.

¹⁰ Butler seems to have imagined this division of labor as having its origins in the original transfer to Bow, in which some portion of the colonists needed to be always out of hypersleep in order to run the ship; in one version of the narrative (c. 2002) she imagines colonists asking each other “what year did you do your ‘crew year’” (OEB 2100).

¹¹ Fredric Jameson similarly reads The Dispossessed as “a sociopolitical hypothesis about the inseparability of utopia and scarcity” (277).

¹² The copy of this writing that exists in the Huntington was later highlighted by Butler to show its importance and usefulness to her as proto-writing for Trickster.