Time and Travel in The Dispossessed and Kindred - Term Paper Example

?Time and Travel in The Dispossessed and Kindred The great science fiction Isaac Asimov, when asked to explain the difference between science fiction and fantasy, once said that science fiction, with its grounding in science, is possible, whereas fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not. Based upon this definition, Asimov would probably characterize the time travel in two novels, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, very differently. Like many SF novels, time travel is an important element in Kindred, but according to Asimov’s definition, it is more fantasy-like than SF-like. Butler would agree with Asimov; when asked to label her novel, she has called it “a grim fantasy.” How time travel occurs in Kindred is never explained; the novel’s protagonist Dana simply feels dizzy from time to time and travels back in time, to pre-Civil War America. It is a mystery to her and to her husband, but they try to deal with the situation they have found themselves in, anyway. The only way she is able to return back to her own time is to feel threatened and in danger of dying. She even tries slitting her wrists in order to return to her own time. Each time she travels back in time, her stay on the plantation becomes longer—at first only a few minutes, and then several days and months. She disappears from the present as she travels, but at first for a few seconds and then for several hours. It seems as if Dana time travels to the past every time Rufus is in some kind of mortal danger. The first time she travels, he is drowning; the second time, she saves him from dying in a fire. She discovers that the reason he “calls” her to the plantation is that he is her ancestor and it is her duty to save him so that she is preserved in the future. At the end of the book, however, she ends up killing him and experiences horrible consequences as a result—the mangling of her arm when she returns to the present. Perhaps the real reason she has to time travel is because it is Rufus’ destiny to die, and there is nothing she can do to prevent it. Although Butler was already established as a successful science fiction writer, one of the few African Americans in a white male-dominated field, the time travel in Kindred, is incidental. It is simply something she uses to illustrate her thesis about the horrors of slavery. When the novel is shelved in libraries or bookstores, even though Butler is well known as a writer of science fiction, it tends to be placed with African American literature because that creates the same feelings as the works of other female African American writers. Like all science fiction, though, Kindred is speculative: What would happen if a modern person got the opportunity to experience slavery first-hand? Time travel is used as a literary device to pursue her thesis, and to investigate how a sympathetic modern character would react in the setting of slavery. An example is Dana’s reaction to seeing a slave being whipped: I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit. I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t laid nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves (Butler 36). Even though it definitely science fiction/fantasy, Kindred has the feel and structure of a slave narrative. Dana, and Butler’s audience along with her, travels to the past so that they can experience it and understand the impact of history, and more specifically, of slavery. Dana travels from freedom to enslavement, like her ancestors did when they were taken from Africa and enslaved in America, never to return. She goes through the same horror as her slave ancestors, and the time travel she experiences is just as confusing as the voyage they experienced. Dana attempts to explain this to her white husband, after reacting to him with fear after she returns: “To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could. Much more” (Butler 51). In this way, Kindred is more a slave narrative than it is a science fiction or fantasy novel. It uses many traditional aspects of science fiction and fantasy to achieve the writer’s goal of putting her audience in the experience, like her protagonist, of the horrible realities of slavery, with all its injustice, cruelty, and violence. The literary device of time travel, so often used in fantasy and science fiction, is as stated previously, incidental. Consequently, the mechanics of time travel matter very little in the novel, so when one tries to place any logic on those mechanics, one fails miserably. Asimov, then, would agree that Kindred is fantasy more than science fiction, even though it uses time travel, a device used more often in science fiction than in fantasy. As a result, time travel in the book follows no logic, and unlike science fiction, which should follow science and facts more closely, it does not have to. In other words, Kindred is both more than a slave narrative and more than a fantasy novel. Time travel as a literary device is what sets it apart from other slave narratives, and the inclusion in the world of the slave makes it more than a fantasy novel. Whereas time travel is featured prominently in Kindred but is incidental, time travel in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed is not as prominent, but ends up being more important than it seems. The book is structured to provide the experience of going back and forth in time. Its setting is Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti, which is featured in some of LeGuin’s other books and short stories. The chapters take turns in terms of setting—even numbered chapters are set on Anarres, while odd-numbered chapters on set on Urras. Chapter one brings its readers to the middle of the story; the second-to-the last chapter ends before the events described in the first chapter. LeGuin structures her book this way to encourage readers to question their perceptions of time, which is a theme of the novel. Westerners tend to think of time sequentially; that is, one event following another in a sequential fashion. LeGuin challenges this way of viewing time, and subverts our culture’s view of time by placing the beginning and end of the story and of the narration in places other than the beginning and end of the novel. Consequently, the reader experiences time travel in a philosophical sense. Time travel in The Dispossessed occurs mostly in a theoretical sense. The novel’s main protagonist, a genius scientist named Shevek, seeks to unite the seemingly contradictory viewpoints of time—Sequency, or the concept that time moves forward in a linear fashion like an arrow, as modern Westerners view it, and Simultaneity, or the concept that all times are present at once and that we are the ones that move. Shevek wants to develop what he calls a General Temporal Theory that will, among other things, make instantaneous communication possible across space and space travel more efficient. His theory also has the possibility of making time travel possible. Shevek explains his theories in this way: “‘What they want,’ he said, ‘is the instantaneous transferral of matter across space. Transilience. Space travel, you see, without transversal of space or lapse of time’” (LeGuin 343). Shevek faces a conflict in regards to his theory because his home, Anarres, does not encourage free scientific inquiry, in spite of its utopian society. As a result, he is unable to complete his work because its government, which LeGuin has modeled after the Soviet Union of her day, has developed into a bureaucracy based upon the assertion of custom and the pressure to conform. Shevik is in the midst of what another character calls the “inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind” (165), which does not welcome Shevek’s revolutionary theories because they are radically different than conventional physics. Although he is not barred from his studies, he is ignored, ostracized, and underfunded. His theories, which are explained in the novel, are weaved throughout the narrative. In this way, The Dispossessed is a more “scientific” novel than Kindred, and better fits Asimov’s definition of science fiction. The only solution, at least to Shevek, is to travel to the wealthy and decadent Urras, which although it is almost completely isolated from Anarres, is more open to his theories. He thinks of his journey there not only as a way to complete his General Theory, but as a mission to reunite the two worlds, and to reintroduce Anarres and its ideals to the rest of the universe. Both Kindred and The Dispossessed are travel narratives, and like travel narratives, they are more about the main characters’ inner journeys—Dana in a more fantastical method through the device of time travel, and Shevek in a more literal and scientific sense through his physical and often treacherous movement through space. Much of African American literature consists of travel narratives, as its characters move from slavery, real or internal, to freedom. Shevek’s internal journey is depicted in The Dispossessed by the way LeGuin presents his story. The even-numbered chapters of the novel, which take place on Anarres, focus on the background of Shevek’s life and the events that led up to his decision to leave his home, while the odd-numbered chapters depict his journey to Urras occurring in present time. A common phrase in the novel is “True journey is within” (386). The Anarres chapters have less plot and more exposition, while the present-time thread has more plot and moves faster in its story. LeGuin does this not only to depict a different way of depicting time, like Shevek’s theories, but to explain the utopian society of Anarres. Her exposition, told from the perspective of a native, is effective but can be slow-moving and not as engrossing as the other chapters, which involve political intrigue, the questionable motives of Shevek’s hosts, interstellar politics, and provide most of the novel’s tension, especially at its climax near the end of the novel. The structure of The Dispossessed provides the reader with the feeling of moving from one time and space to another, but actual time travel moves us through time and place in Kindred. Kindred’s movement is more literal, but fantastical at the same time, while the movement through time in The Dispossessed is more theoretical and scientific. Despite this difference, both LeGuin and Butler present their different ways of using time and time travel for the same reason: to contrast two cultures. Butler presents the disparity between modern twentieth century life with the despair and hopelessness of slavery. Butler chooses the year 1976, which represents freedom, the bicentennial of American independence that depended upon the enslavement of many of its inhabitants. Butler wants to depict how the past continues to influence the present, even for Dana, a contemporary black women who, unlike her ancestors, is her own person with the freedom to go wherever she wanted, and to even marry a white man. The purpose of LeGuin’s movement through time, provided through her narrative structure, is to depict a utopian society, but demonstrate that it is not as perfect as one would think it would be. There are aspects of Anarres that are utopian, presented as a pure society that follows its own theories and ideals as compared to Urras. The novel, however, is subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” When it was first published, it had no formal subtitle, but the phrase was on its jacket and throughout the years, was informally adopted. One of the major themes of The Dispossessed is the ambiguity of different notions of utopia. Anarres is an anarchist state, created after a revolution, when the revolutionaries were permitted to reside there, in spite of its sparseness and harshness. Urras, by contrast, is an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the lower classes. The citizens of Anarres are “dispossessed” by political and economic realities. In other words, they are not dispossessed only by political choice, but by the lack of natural resources of their home. One of the most interesting similarities between The Dispossessed and Kindred is that they could have shared titles. Butler’s title obvious combination of two words: “kin,” which means “family,” as Rufus and her fellow slaves are to Dana, and the Dred Scott decision, which strengthened the legality of human ownership in America. The title depicts two important themes in Kindred—the connection we have with our ancestors and with the events of the past, and the concept of ownership in the institution of slavery. Ownership of other human beings is what makes, for slaves, life unbearable and dangerous, and is at the heart of slavery. Dana goes back and forth from being a free, self-determined individual to property owned by someone else, and the experience is horrifying, as it should be. In this way, Butler effectively brought her readers into the experience of slavery. In some ways, the slaves in Kindred were more dispossessed than the citizens of Anarras and Urras in The Dispossessed. What made the characters in LeGuin’s novel dispossessed, however, even Shevik with his complicated scientific theories he was sure would free him and his people, was the political and economic conditions they found themselves in. LeGuin’s utopia is not perfect and has sinister underpinnings. Things are never as they seem, even to its participants, and that is certainly the case in The Dispossessed. Both Kindred and The Dispossessed are science fiction novels that use standard conventions of the genre to illustrate and emphasize their main thesis. Both use the convention of time travel—Kindred in a more conventional way, but more in the tradition of fantasy, and The Dispossessed in a more unconventional way. Kindred’s use of time travel gives no attention to the scientific theory and mechanics of time travel. Kindred has often been characterized as slave narrative or African American literature, for it contains many of the same elements of those genres. The Dispossessed, while structurally more a science fiction novel than Kindred, also uses standard science fiction conventions, but in unconventional ways, like the way she structures the narrative. Isaac Asimov would certainly agree that based upon the books’ use of time travel, Kindred should be labeled as fantasy and The Dispossessed as science fiction. Works Cited Butler, Otavia E. Kindred. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. 1979. Print. LeGuin, Ursula. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1974. Print. Read More