Lecture Summary

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993. New York: Warner Books.

1 The formal element

2 The sf element

3 The self-reflexive element

4 The Messianic element

5 The religious element

6 Excerpts from Butler’s 1999 interview

2 The sf element: consists of a balance of opposites between a dystopian and a utopian vision of human possibilities. A futuristic world is portrayed as increasingly anarchic and violent; but advances in science are represented as making space-travel possible, opening up the option of a spread of humanity to other worlds.

Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet. (18)

Mars is a rock—cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth. (18-19)

That station has been detecting new worlds for a dozen years now, and there’s even evidence that a few of the discovered worlds may be life-bearing. (73)

The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars…” (199)

3 The self-reflexive element: the act and activity of writing gets recognized within the novel as (a) record of events and thoughts, (b) as a heuristic, helping the protagonist understand herself better, and (c) as the texts constitutive of a new religion. The last category is introduced into the narrative as quotations and epigraphs, that is, as a form of intertextuality that frames the on-going narrative.

Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. (46)

Sometimes writing about a thing makes it easier to understand. (100)

I have to write. I have to dump this onto paper. (116)

I have to write. I don’t know what else to do. (141)

“A lot of it isn’t very poetical,” I said, “But it’s what I believe…” (178)

I took out my notebook and began to write up the day’s events… (190)

4 The Messianic element: The individual’s discovery of a purpose and meaning to her own life, and to life in a chaotic world, in the form of the discovery or founding of a new religion, is based on two features: her hyperempathy, and her attitude to change. Her hyperempathy becomes a Christ-like capacity to experience the suffering others feel as her own. Fellow-feeling is thus affirmed through the sharing of suffering. Pain is made redemptive, vulnerability into a potential strength by forcing compassion to toughening itself to necessary violence .

Hyperempathy

… my hyperempathy syndrome … It’s delusional. Even I admit it… I still bled through the skin when I saw someone else bleeding. (9-10)

That hyperempathy shit of yours would bring you down even if nobody touched you. (97)

If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things. They could kill if they had to, and bear the pain of it or be destroyed by it.

I don’t get the damage. Just the pain. (171)

The six inch blade went in to thee hilt. Then, in empathetic agony, I jerked it out again. (210)

5 The religious element: The protagonist becomes the exponent of the view that an intelligent and purposive adaptation to change is the best mode of living.

God

God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. (22)

We give lip service to acceptance … Then we go on to create super-people—super-parents, super-kings and queens, super-cops—to be our gods and to look after us—to stand between us and God. (23)

A victim of God may … Become a shaper of God (27)

“Thou shalt not Kill,” Coy whispered.

“Nehemiah four,” Dad said. “Verse 14.”

“… and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives and your houses.” (63)

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change. (70)

“I was looking for God,” I said…

“Change.”…

“But it’s not a god. It’s not a person or an intelligence or even a thing. It’s just … It’s a truth…. I don’t claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way.” (195)

“God is Change,” I said.

“Olamina, that doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means everything. Everything!” (294)

The Messiah

I believe in something that I think my dying, denying backward-looking people need. (22)

6 From ‘A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler’, May 1999, Pasadena, California.

Web Source: http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/85/184/interview9151.html

Was the idea for Parable of the Talents already planned when you wrote Parable of the Sower?

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were originally intended to be only one book. I intended to write the fictional autobiography of Lauren Olamina—her story of her struggle to spread her beliefs in the hope that those beliefs would redirect people away from the chaos and destructiveness into which they have fallen and toward a consuming, creative long-term goal. I knew what I wanted to do, as Olamina knew what she wanted to do. But like Olamina, I didn't know how to do it. I had written the events of Parable of the Sower and perhaps seventy-five pages more when I realized that I had a much longer book than I had planned. I looked back and found a way to end Sower. Then I began trying to write Talents. Problem was, I had come to like Lauren Olamina and Acorn. Olamina's God was Change, but I didn't want either her or Acorn to change—at least not drastically. And yet both had to. Conflict is the essence of story. And anyway, Olamina wanted to change the world. She couldn't do that by living a quiet, comfortable life in Acorn. Knowing this didn't help me. I kept rewriting the first 150 or so pages of Talents and heading up one blind alley or another. I couldn't seem to tell Olamina's story no matter how hard I tried. It was incredibly frustrating. I hadn't liked Olamina when I began Parable of the Sower because in order for her to do what she was bound to do, she had to be a power-seeker and it took me a long time to get over the idea that anyone seeking power probably shouldn't have it. I had to remind myself again and again as I strove to write Sower that power is only a tool like any other tool—like money, like knowledge, like a hammer, even. It's the way tools are used that's important. It's the way they're used that's good or bad. I knew this of course, knew it intellectually. I had to come to know it emotionally before I could write the novel. This I did at last. And by the time I had finished Sower, I had come to like Olamina far too much.

Why have you described Parable of the Talents as a novel of solutions?

Talents is intended to be not only a continuation of Sower and of Olamina's life, but of people trying either individually or in groups to find some way out of their trouble. Olamina herself is doing this through Earthseed. She's blundering. She doesn't know how to "spread the word" effectively. She isn't sure she can do it. She only knows that it must be done. Other people know different things. Some know they must endure. They must settle for what they can get, expect less, adapt to an existence closer in some ways to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first.

…. When I was researching religions in preparation for writing Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, I ran across the story of the temptation of Buddha. Buddha was tempted not only by the promise of wealth, greatness, and beautiful women, but by responsibility, by duty, by the fact that his father was a king. It was his responsibility to inherit the throne and look after the welfare of his people. He had no business going out to seek enlightenment, no business traveling and teaching and seeking to ease suffering. He resisted the temptation. It was, I thought, the most interesting temptation I'd ever run across. Clearly, I kept it in mind.