now that is bad
Now that is bad.
That’s respect.
And I want it.
‘What is Bad’, Michele Serros
What place for women in contemporary Los Angeles?
The American novel addresses the American Dream: it extols, condemns, yearns for, or parodies, the idea that in this nation, a ‘tabula rasa’, Eden can be re-established. In their depiction of the American Dream, its failings and triumphs, American authors have addressed some of the key concepts that have been used to define America and Americans – individualism, self-reliance, the frontier. But what happens to these themes and motifs in a post-modern, dystopian Los Angeles, when the frontier has run out and the protagonist has reached the end of the line, with nothing between them and oblivion (the ocean) but the beach? What happens when that protagonist is female, an ‘alien other’ in the hegemonic discourse? What happens when that woman is a woman of color? Is there a place of safety for women of color in Los Angeles, the location of the burnt-out, dried-up, and spent, American Dream?
Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 text The Parable of the Sower uses the traditional features of the American novel: the agrarian dream, the frontier, self-reliance, the search for identity; but she offers an alternate vision of what these themes mean for women in the present, and the future. The novel is set in 2024-2027, and depicts a dystopian future that is seeringly realistic in its suggestions for the ultimate consequences of late Capitalism. The LA revealed is a nightmare, not a dream, in which all the accoutrements of civilization have been restricted to gated communities, which endeavor to conduct life as we know it at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Outside these communities however, there has been an almost complete breakdown of the social contract. This is revealed both through description and through symbolism: even the dogs, once ‘man’s best friend’, have reverted back to their pre-domesticated behavior, hunting the weak and unprotected in packs. The protagonist, Lauren, describes the dogs as feral: “chiefly of animals: belonging to or forming a wild population descended from individuals which escaped from captivity or domestication.” The world outside is feral; walled communities like Lauren’s are the last remaining bastions of domesticity: here they work, cultivate crops, tend animals, maintain buildings, educate their children, share resources, and gather together as a community to worship God. Outside, such indications of ‘civilization’ have gone; women and children are targeted as weak, food is stolen rather than purchased or grown, animals have once again become predators of human beings, buildings are wantonly destroyed.
Within this dystopian future, Butler plays with the traditional motifs of American fiction, problematizing the idea of the Dream. Lauren is initially depicted as an individual in the mould of Huck Finn, defining herself in opposition to the world in which she lives. She is the only one who sees the eminent danger to her community, and once her community is destroyed, she sets off, alone: “I’m going north . . . I have no family, and I’m going.” This declaration of individualism is short-lived, however, as she allows Harry and Zahra to join her. Later, she persuades Harry and Zahra that other ‘people like us’ – women, children, men of color, former slaves, should be allowed to join their party also. When their group suffers a loss – Jill is killed trying to protect one of the children - Lauren comforts Jill’s sister Allie, thinking as she does so “in spite of your loss and your pain, you aren’t alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.” (277) Lauren has created a new community based on need, and a desire for better lives for the children. She has rejected the individualist values commonly depicted in American letters, replacing them with community.
Chicana Falsa plays with the tropes of American fiction as well. Like Butler, Michele Serros is interested in the creation of identity for a woman of color in postmodern Los Angeles. Butler and Serros both use the American episteme of ‘self-reliance’, considered to be a defining cultural characteristic, in order to reveal how women must negotiate their own path through the tropes of the culture if they hope to emerge as intact post-human subjects. Taking as a starting point Emerson’s seminal statement, from his essay entitled ‘Self-Reliance’, that “there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction . . . that . . . no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till,” the authors refute this ‘man alone’ ideology of personhood, replacing it with a means to personhood established through connection to the past, community, and the future. The narrator of Chicana Falsa establishes a matrilineal precedent for her pursuit of art; the last two sections of the text deal with this inheritance. In the poem ‘Manos Morenas’, the narrator is reconciled to her “working hands”, evidence of her blue-collar work, her “calloused income”, through a bodily identification with her mother’s hands, hands which nurtured and created.
Between a flagging career
And city college night courses,
My mother’s
Own tired hands
Patted homemade masa
Coaxed roses out of dead soil
Nurtured two babies
Typed term papers till
Three in the morning
. . . seldom lifted a paintbrush
but died an artist. (72)
In ‘The Gift’, this process of reconciliation with the multiple aspects of self is again linked to the mother, as the narrator becomes a writer through the impact of her mother’s faith and sacrifice. She links the act of creation explicitly to a connection with the future: “I thought of my future kids. Would they be big talkers and no walkers like me, their mother?” (79) Thus identity is created in opposition to the American episteme, self-reliance. Both Lauren and the unnamed narrator of Chicana Falsa are self-reliant, but their ability to be so stems from a strong sense of themselves as connected to their community, past, present and future.
Instead of following the westward movement common in American literature, Butler has her characters move from south to north, following instead the movement pattern of the Afro-American narratives of slavery. Like runaway slaves of the nineteenth century, Lauren’s underground railway heads towards Canada. The movement also inverts the trope in Western literature of the protagonist’s journey from country to the city. In The Parable of the Sower, this is reversed: the characters move from the city, locus of the burnt-out dream, and ‘light out for the territory’, looking, like Huck Finn, Thoreau, and Holden Caufield, for contentment in a new Eden reclaimed from the wilderness. This idea of the new Eden is problematised, however, as when they reach Bankole’s land, the physical site for their community, they discover that the nightmare has reached there also:
There was no house. There were no buildings. There was almost nothing: A broad black smear on the hillside; a few charred planks sticking up from the rubble, some leaning against others; and a tall brick chimney, standing black and solitary like a tombstone in a picture of an old-style graveyard. A tombstone amid the bones and ashes. (286)
Los Angeles is the place that the Dream runs out; literature set in LA tends to depict the end of the Dream or its inversion into nightmare. In LA, even the architecture is a pastiche, a parody of bourgeois dreams of Swiss chalets and Tuscan villas. Urban theorists see LA as containing aspects of all metropolises and megapolises within its boundaries: “there may be no other comparable urban region which presents so vividly such a composite assemblage and articulation of urban restructuring processes. Los Angeles seems to be conjugating the recent history of capitalist urbanization in virtually all its inflectional forms.” Key to an understanding of Los Angeles as the postmodern city is the repetition of words like assemblage, pastiche, parody, when describing it – these words are significant aspects of postmodern art - and their use to describe LA suggests that the city is perhaps the ultimate postmodern art event, encapsulating the ‘death of the author’, as its millions of inhabitants create the art simultaneously, unconsciously, subjectively. According to cultural critic Mike Davis, LA is “a stand-in for capitalism in general . . . it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.” This depiction of LA as the microcosm of all that is good and bad about life in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century has been reiterated by postmodern theorists like Frederic Jameson, who evoked Bunker Hill in his seminal essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, as a “concrete totalization” of postmodernity. Thus LA has become the symbolic locus of postmodernity.
Butler depicts the destruction of communal social values as being the inevitable result of our post-modern consumer culture. In her other works, the Xenogenesis trilogy, Butler suggests that human society has been destroyed, enabling an alien invasion, by what she calls the ‘human contradiction’ – that the two most prominent human characteristics are intelligence, and the urge to organize society hierarchically. In the Xenogenesis trilogy this contradiction has led to nuclear holocaust, and in The Parable of the Sower, it has led to domination, the re-introduction of slavery, social breakdown, and a resumption of the values of the wild west. History is repeating itself as tragedy.
Butler’s texts are critiqued as being biologically essentialist, as they appear to accept that there are sex-determined characteristics that mould human behavior. It is this adherence to an unfashionable idea that creates the tension between Butler and theorists of the postmodern, for whom the search for self has resulted in a rejection of the modernist binaries of male/female, mind/body, culture/nature. Critic Marilyn Mehaffy, in an interview with Butler, talks about this tension. “In your work, body-knowledge carries a great deal of authority, unlike most postmodernist thinking and writing which calculates the human body as primarily a discursive entity.” She attributes this postmodernist rejection of the body’s physical importance to the desire to destroy the hierarchies of raced and gendered bodies that have been used to control access to power. “For these postmodern thinkers and writers, race, gender, sexuality, are all metaphors.” Butler responds with a sentiment that is very unfashionable among theorists and critics, but that seems to have appeal within the popular culture, as her books are best sellers; “Because the body is all we really know that we have . . . all we really know that we have is the flesh.” This ideology is shown in The Parable of the Sower through Butler’s depiction of the disease that affects Lauren:
I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome” . . . it hurts, that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco . . . the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her.” (11)
Lauren is unable to separate her consciousness from her body, she literally ‘feels’ for others, and is thus forced into a kind of self-serving compassion that later develops into a deeper altruism. She knows her own flesh in a way that others do not, her body-knowledge serves her as well as her book-knowledge. Butler thus resorts to ‘difference’ feminism in her text; those who are ‘feminized’ through their uncontrollable empathy are those whose way is revealed to be the one to follow. Butler offers an alternative to the ‘human contradiction’ by showing a feminized model of power, in which empathy, compassion and maternal wisdom are the key attributes of the powerful. This aspect of Butler’s texts reveals her to be in opposition to postmodernism; as her novels tend to involve hysterisation, the identification of woman with the body, one of the four defining modes of modernism, according to Foucault.
If LA is the symbolic center of postmodernity, it stands to reason that Butler’s heroine must leave – Butler is arguing against the multiple subjectivities of postmodernism; she has as essentialist construction of gender, and her concerns are with modernist ideals; Earthseed is an attempt to impose another grand narrative onto human behavior. In The Parable of the Sower, Butler emphasizes the similarities between the diverse group who gather and seek refuge away from the city, despite their disparate ages, races, classes and gender. For Butler, it is enough that they are all searching to survive, and that they all seem to hold onto a sense of self that involves behaving in as civilized a manner as possible, given the circumstances. A postmodern text would involve itself in the differences between the members of this group, especially given the ‘melting pot’ nature of the group in question. Butler, in fact, argues against the city as location for the future, the city is past, burnt-up, just like the dream; to survive in this uncertain future, Lauren and her entourage must seek refuge in a more distant past, the New Eden the pilgrims sought.
The narrator of Chicana Falsa also seeks to find a place where she can survive, even flourish. Like Lauren, she narrates her own search for identity through life writing, but unlike Lauren, her style is postmodern. Lauren keeps a journal, a narrative with all the expected features of the traditional form – a beginning, an end, a progression from climax to climax. Chicana Falsa is a collection of disparate genres, poems, essays, short stories, memoirs. The text is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a kind of bildungsroman, in which the protagonist moves from innocence into experience, the traditional movement for ‘heroes’ in the ‘Western Canon’. However, Serros problematizes this movement: the narrator is not fixed, the center of the text does not remain static, instead it is fluid. The assumed narrator is a young woman much like Serros herself, but the inclusion of other voices ensures that conflation of the author and the text is not possible.
It is unclear if the narrative voice is constant, she is never named, and there is little suggestion of progression in this life writing. Instead the author builds up an aura of understanding through the multiple voices expressed within the various genres. We meet the presumed narrator, a young Chicana woman who is battling to define herself as multiple subjects: sheomanomanoman “chicana falsa” , an “HOMOGENIZED HISPANIC” (1), by other Chicanos; yet Anglos do not always recognize her as the ‘alien other’. The gym instructor thinks she is the cleaning lady, but she envies the Chicana woman at work, who is given special treatment by fearful Anglos; she is assumed to be white by a white woman who feels free to make racist comments to her because of an assumed shared understanding of what “the Spanish” are like. We also meet a young Anglo boy who wants to be Chicano: “leafblowers attached/ to the backs of dark-skinned gardeners . . . his new familia.” (34); a gangbanger who dies inscribing his tag on the postmodern city: “earned him/a loyal crew/customized baseball cap/TV tabloid exposé/and a toe tag.” (21); a young Chicano man who is fighting against others’ definitions of what it means to be Chicano: “This is my culture,/my entertainment,/nothing to laugh over,/This is me.” (30)
The penultimate poem, ‘Planned Parenthood: Age Sixteen’ suggests that the narrator is managing to reconcile herself to the various identities that make up her post-human subjectivity. In the poem, she outlines the sexual advice given by her family and Chicana friends, but then, “shunning the wise words/from my past,/I take the questionnaire/cross out ‘other’/to pencil in ‘woman of color’”. (65) She is refuting the hegemonic discourse’s naming of her as the ‘alien other’ and instead asserts a positive identity as a woman of color, an identity that excludes none of the myriad aspects of her persona. This assertion of identity is emphasized in the final story, ‘The Gift’, as the narrator describes the process of becoming a writer, not as an act of individual will, but as a consequence of family support, her mother’s example and belief in her: “I sat thinking of my mother, her gift to me, to work my gift. Why did she have so much faith in my dream of becoming a writer? . . . there were no more excuses . . . I made a space for some paper and began to write.” (79)
This sense of reconciliation suggests that Serros holds that, yes, there is a place for women of color in Los Angeles, despite its dystopian aspects, because it is the locus of postmodernism. For Serros’s narrator, the postmodern’s focus on multiplicity of voices, on disparate genres, on irony, allow a confused Chicana girl to assemble her identity from the multitudinous variations available in LA. Here, in the city of the postmodern, she can draw from the past:
So gotta keep doing
All the good things
Told to me
‘Cause someday,
at the gate,
Great aunt Linda,
Great uncle Willie,
And Warlord
Will be ready and awake
Waiting to welcome ME. (41)
But she can also draw on her peers, like the friend who starts a riot in a supermarket when she analyses and critiques the culture’s depiction of Latinos through the ‘text’ of a bag of frozen mixed vegetables: Latino Style Vegetables. She says of this friend “she left behind . . . me, thinking just how smart she really is.” (25) The proliferation of different texts in Chicana Falsa indicates the nature of life for Generation Xers in LA – street savvy, reading against the grain since infancy – Serros and her characters analyze the texts of mixed vegetables, clothing, music, cars, literary genres, food, language.
Is there a place of safety for women of color in Los Angeles? Both Butler and Serros debunk the creation stories of American myth, refuting the ideology of self-reliance with an re-positioning of the community, the mother, the family, at the center of the search for identity. Butler utilizes aspects of the American literary tradition to place her novel in the context of other American authors concerned with the corruption of late capitalism. However, Butler’s critique of Los Angeles’ symbolic import as the locus of the city as constructed in postmodernism means that her writing must be understood as essentially modernist in concerns. Butler conforms to a mode of feminist thought, ‘difference’ feminism, which is considered out-of-date by current feminist theorists. In contrast, Serros’s style and the post-human subjectivity she establishes for her narrator, indicate that Serros is a postmodernist, and as such, at home in the postmodern city. Given Barthes’ discussion of lisible (readerly) and scriptable (writerly) texts, one can suggest that The Parable of the Sower is a modernist, lisable text in which the reader’s grasp of meaning is author-directed; whereas Chicana Falsa is scriptable, the authority of the producer of the cultural artifact is minimized through the effect of genre-mixing, montage.
Bibliography
Alarcòn, Norma. ‘The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.’ Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology. Héctor Calderón and José Saldívar, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
Butler, Octavia E. The Parable of the Sower. (London: The Women’s Press, 1995)
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. (New York: Vintage, 1992)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘Self-Reliance’. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. I, fifth edition. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998)
Haraway, Donna. ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’ Socialist Review, 15.80, 1985.
Harvey, David. ‘Postmodernism’. The Condition of Postmodernity. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)
Jesser, Nancy. ‘Blood, Genes, and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Dawn.’ Extrapolation, Spring 2002.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L’Écriture Féminine’. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, revised edition. (London: Macmillan, 1997)
Mehaffy, Marilyn, and Keating, AnaLouise. ‘ “Radio Imagination”: Octavia Butler on the poetics of narrative embodiment.’ Melus, Spring 2001.
Rosaldo, Renato. Fables of the Fallen Guy. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Héctor Calderón and José Saldívar, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
Serros, Michele. Chicana Falsa. (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993)
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. I, A-M. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1993.
Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994)
That’s respect.
And I want it.
‘What is Bad’, Michele Serros
What place for women in contemporary Los Angeles?
The American novel addresses the American Dream: it extols, condemns, yearns for, or parodies, the idea that in this nation, a ‘tabula rasa’, Eden can be re-established. In their depiction of the American Dream, its failings and triumphs, American authors have addressed some of the key concepts that have been used to define America and Americans – individualism, self-reliance, the frontier. But what happens to these themes and motifs in a post-modern, dystopian Los Angeles, when the frontier has run out and the protagonist has reached the end of the line, with nothing between them and oblivion (the ocean) but the beach? What happens when that protagonist is female, an ‘alien other’ in the hegemonic discourse? What happens when that woman is a woman of color? Is there a place of safety for women of color in Los Angeles, the location of the burnt-out, dried-up, and spent, American Dream?
Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 text The Parable of the Sower uses the traditional features of the American novel: the agrarian dream, the frontier, self-reliance, the search for identity; but she offers an alternate vision of what these themes mean for women in the present, and the future. The novel is set in 2024-2027, and depicts a dystopian future that is seeringly realistic in its suggestions for the ultimate consequences of late Capitalism. The LA revealed is a nightmare, not a dream, in which all the accoutrements of civilization have been restricted to gated communities, which endeavor to conduct life as we know it at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Outside these communities however, there has been an almost complete breakdown of the social contract. This is revealed both through description and through symbolism: even the dogs, once ‘man’s best friend’, have reverted back to their pre-domesticated behavior, hunting the weak and unprotected in packs. The protagonist, Lauren, describes the dogs as feral: “chiefly of animals: belonging to or forming a wild population descended from individuals which escaped from captivity or domestication.” The world outside is feral; walled communities like Lauren’s are the last remaining bastions of domesticity: here they work, cultivate crops, tend animals, maintain buildings, educate their children, share resources, and gather together as a community to worship God. Outside, such indications of ‘civilization’ have gone; women and children are targeted as weak, food is stolen rather than purchased or grown, animals have once again become predators of human beings, buildings are wantonly destroyed.
Within this dystopian future, Butler plays with the traditional motifs of American fiction, problematizing the idea of the Dream. Lauren is initially depicted as an individual in the mould of Huck Finn, defining herself in opposition to the world in which she lives. She is the only one who sees the eminent danger to her community, and once her community is destroyed, she sets off, alone: “I’m going north . . . I have no family, and I’m going.” This declaration of individualism is short-lived, however, as she allows Harry and Zahra to join her. Later, she persuades Harry and Zahra that other ‘people like us’ – women, children, men of color, former slaves, should be allowed to join their party also. When their group suffers a loss – Jill is killed trying to protect one of the children - Lauren comforts Jill’s sister Allie, thinking as she does so “in spite of your loss and your pain, you aren’t alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.” (277) Lauren has created a new community based on need, and a desire for better lives for the children. She has rejected the individualist values commonly depicted in American letters, replacing them with community.
Chicana Falsa plays with the tropes of American fiction as well. Like Butler, Michele Serros is interested in the creation of identity for a woman of color in postmodern Los Angeles. Butler and Serros both use the American episteme of ‘self-reliance’, considered to be a defining cultural characteristic, in order to reveal how women must negotiate their own path through the tropes of the culture if they hope to emerge as intact post-human subjects. Taking as a starting point Emerson’s seminal statement, from his essay entitled ‘Self-Reliance’, that “there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction . . . that . . . no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till,” the authors refute this ‘man alone’ ideology of personhood, replacing it with a means to personhood established through connection to the past, community, and the future. The narrator of Chicana Falsa establishes a matrilineal precedent for her pursuit of art; the last two sections of the text deal with this inheritance. In the poem ‘Manos Morenas’, the narrator is reconciled to her “working hands”, evidence of her blue-collar work, her “calloused income”, through a bodily identification with her mother’s hands, hands which nurtured and created.
Between a flagging career
And city college night courses,
My mother’s
Own tired hands
Patted homemade masa
Coaxed roses out of dead soil
Nurtured two babies
Typed term papers till
Three in the morning
. . . seldom lifted a paintbrush
but died an artist. (72)
In ‘The Gift’, this process of reconciliation with the multiple aspects of self is again linked to the mother, as the narrator becomes a writer through the impact of her mother’s faith and sacrifice. She links the act of creation explicitly to a connection with the future: “I thought of my future kids. Would they be big talkers and no walkers like me, their mother?” (79) Thus identity is created in opposition to the American episteme, self-reliance. Both Lauren and the unnamed narrator of Chicana Falsa are self-reliant, but their ability to be so stems from a strong sense of themselves as connected to their community, past, present and future.
Instead of following the westward movement common in American literature, Butler has her characters move from south to north, following instead the movement pattern of the Afro-American narratives of slavery. Like runaway slaves of the nineteenth century, Lauren’s underground railway heads towards Canada. The movement also inverts the trope in Western literature of the protagonist’s journey from country to the city. In The Parable of the Sower, this is reversed: the characters move from the city, locus of the burnt-out dream, and ‘light out for the territory’, looking, like Huck Finn, Thoreau, and Holden Caufield, for contentment in a new Eden reclaimed from the wilderness. This idea of the new Eden is problematised, however, as when they reach Bankole’s land, the physical site for their community, they discover that the nightmare has reached there also:
There was no house. There were no buildings. There was almost nothing: A broad black smear on the hillside; a few charred planks sticking up from the rubble, some leaning against others; and a tall brick chimney, standing black and solitary like a tombstone in a picture of an old-style graveyard. A tombstone amid the bones and ashes. (286)
Los Angeles is the place that the Dream runs out; literature set in LA tends to depict the end of the Dream or its inversion into nightmare. In LA, even the architecture is a pastiche, a parody of bourgeois dreams of Swiss chalets and Tuscan villas. Urban theorists see LA as containing aspects of all metropolises and megapolises within its boundaries: “there may be no other comparable urban region which presents so vividly such a composite assemblage and articulation of urban restructuring processes. Los Angeles seems to be conjugating the recent history of capitalist urbanization in virtually all its inflectional forms.” Key to an understanding of Los Angeles as the postmodern city is the repetition of words like assemblage, pastiche, parody, when describing it – these words are significant aspects of postmodern art - and their use to describe LA suggests that the city is perhaps the ultimate postmodern art event, encapsulating the ‘death of the author’, as its millions of inhabitants create the art simultaneously, unconsciously, subjectively. According to cultural critic Mike Davis, LA is “a stand-in for capitalism in general . . . it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.” This depiction of LA as the microcosm of all that is good and bad about life in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century has been reiterated by postmodern theorists like Frederic Jameson, who evoked Bunker Hill in his seminal essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, as a “concrete totalization” of postmodernity. Thus LA has become the symbolic locus of postmodernity.
Butler depicts the destruction of communal social values as being the inevitable result of our post-modern consumer culture. In her other works, the Xenogenesis trilogy, Butler suggests that human society has been destroyed, enabling an alien invasion, by what she calls the ‘human contradiction’ – that the two most prominent human characteristics are intelligence, and the urge to organize society hierarchically. In the Xenogenesis trilogy this contradiction has led to nuclear holocaust, and in The Parable of the Sower, it has led to domination, the re-introduction of slavery, social breakdown, and a resumption of the values of the wild west. History is repeating itself as tragedy.
Butler’s texts are critiqued as being biologically essentialist, as they appear to accept that there are sex-determined characteristics that mould human behavior. It is this adherence to an unfashionable idea that creates the tension between Butler and theorists of the postmodern, for whom the search for self has resulted in a rejection of the modernist binaries of male/female, mind/body, culture/nature. Critic Marilyn Mehaffy, in an interview with Butler, talks about this tension. “In your work, body-knowledge carries a great deal of authority, unlike most postmodernist thinking and writing which calculates the human body as primarily a discursive entity.” She attributes this postmodernist rejection of the body’s physical importance to the desire to destroy the hierarchies of raced and gendered bodies that have been used to control access to power. “For these postmodern thinkers and writers, race, gender, sexuality, are all metaphors.” Butler responds with a sentiment that is very unfashionable among theorists and critics, but that seems to have appeal within the popular culture, as her books are best sellers; “Because the body is all we really know that we have . . . all we really know that we have is the flesh.” This ideology is shown in The Parable of the Sower through Butler’s depiction of the disease that affects Lauren:
I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome” . . . it hurts, that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco . . . the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her.” (11)
Lauren is unable to separate her consciousness from her body, she literally ‘feels’ for others, and is thus forced into a kind of self-serving compassion that later develops into a deeper altruism. She knows her own flesh in a way that others do not, her body-knowledge serves her as well as her book-knowledge. Butler thus resorts to ‘difference’ feminism in her text; those who are ‘feminized’ through their uncontrollable empathy are those whose way is revealed to be the one to follow. Butler offers an alternative to the ‘human contradiction’ by showing a feminized model of power, in which empathy, compassion and maternal wisdom are the key attributes of the powerful. This aspect of Butler’s texts reveals her to be in opposition to postmodernism; as her novels tend to involve hysterisation, the identification of woman with the body, one of the four defining modes of modernism, according to Foucault.
If LA is the symbolic center of postmodernity, it stands to reason that Butler’s heroine must leave – Butler is arguing against the multiple subjectivities of postmodernism; she has as essentialist construction of gender, and her concerns are with modernist ideals; Earthseed is an attempt to impose another grand narrative onto human behavior. In The Parable of the Sower, Butler emphasizes the similarities between the diverse group who gather and seek refuge away from the city, despite their disparate ages, races, classes and gender. For Butler, it is enough that they are all searching to survive, and that they all seem to hold onto a sense of self that involves behaving in as civilized a manner as possible, given the circumstances. A postmodern text would involve itself in the differences between the members of this group, especially given the ‘melting pot’ nature of the group in question. Butler, in fact, argues against the city as location for the future, the city is past, burnt-up, just like the dream; to survive in this uncertain future, Lauren and her entourage must seek refuge in a more distant past, the New Eden the pilgrims sought.
The narrator of Chicana Falsa also seeks to find a place where she can survive, even flourish. Like Lauren, she narrates her own search for identity through life writing, but unlike Lauren, her style is postmodern. Lauren keeps a journal, a narrative with all the expected features of the traditional form – a beginning, an end, a progression from climax to climax. Chicana Falsa is a collection of disparate genres, poems, essays, short stories, memoirs. The text is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a kind of bildungsroman, in which the protagonist moves from innocence into experience, the traditional movement for ‘heroes’ in the ‘Western Canon’. However, Serros problematizes this movement: the narrator is not fixed, the center of the text does not remain static, instead it is fluid. The assumed narrator is a young woman much like Serros herself, but the inclusion of other voices ensures that conflation of the author and the text is not possible.
It is unclear if the narrative voice is constant, she is never named, and there is little suggestion of progression in this life writing. Instead the author builds up an aura of understanding through the multiple voices expressed within the various genres. We meet the presumed narrator, a young Chicana woman who is battling to define herself as multiple subjects: sheomanomanoman “chicana falsa” , an “HOMOGENIZED HISPANIC” (1), by other Chicanos; yet Anglos do not always recognize her as the ‘alien other’. The gym instructor thinks she is the cleaning lady, but she envies the Chicana woman at work, who is given special treatment by fearful Anglos; she is assumed to be white by a white woman who feels free to make racist comments to her because of an assumed shared understanding of what “the Spanish” are like. We also meet a young Anglo boy who wants to be Chicano: “leafblowers attached/ to the backs of dark-skinned gardeners . . . his new familia.” (34); a gangbanger who dies inscribing his tag on the postmodern city: “earned him/a loyal crew/customized baseball cap/TV tabloid exposé/and a toe tag.” (21); a young Chicano man who is fighting against others’ definitions of what it means to be Chicano: “This is my culture,/my entertainment,/nothing to laugh over,/This is me.” (30)
The penultimate poem, ‘Planned Parenthood: Age Sixteen’ suggests that the narrator is managing to reconcile herself to the various identities that make up her post-human subjectivity. In the poem, she outlines the sexual advice given by her family and Chicana friends, but then, “shunning the wise words/from my past,/I take the questionnaire/cross out ‘other’/to pencil in ‘woman of color’”. (65) She is refuting the hegemonic discourse’s naming of her as the ‘alien other’ and instead asserts a positive identity as a woman of color, an identity that excludes none of the myriad aspects of her persona. This assertion of identity is emphasized in the final story, ‘The Gift’, as the narrator describes the process of becoming a writer, not as an act of individual will, but as a consequence of family support, her mother’s example and belief in her: “I sat thinking of my mother, her gift to me, to work my gift. Why did she have so much faith in my dream of becoming a writer? . . . there were no more excuses . . . I made a space for some paper and began to write.” (79)
This sense of reconciliation suggests that Serros holds that, yes, there is a place for women of color in Los Angeles, despite its dystopian aspects, because it is the locus of postmodernism. For Serros’s narrator, the postmodern’s focus on multiplicity of voices, on disparate genres, on irony, allow a confused Chicana girl to assemble her identity from the multitudinous variations available in LA. Here, in the city of the postmodern, she can draw from the past:
So gotta keep doing
All the good things
Told to me
‘Cause someday,
at the gate,
Great aunt Linda,
Great uncle Willie,
And Warlord
Will be ready and awake
Waiting to welcome ME. (41)
But she can also draw on her peers, like the friend who starts a riot in a supermarket when she analyses and critiques the culture’s depiction of Latinos through the ‘text’ of a bag of frozen mixed vegetables: Latino Style Vegetables. She says of this friend “she left behind . . . me, thinking just how smart she really is.” (25) The proliferation of different texts in Chicana Falsa indicates the nature of life for Generation Xers in LA – street savvy, reading against the grain since infancy – Serros and her characters analyze the texts of mixed vegetables, clothing, music, cars, literary genres, food, language.
Is there a place of safety for women of color in Los Angeles? Both Butler and Serros debunk the creation stories of American myth, refuting the ideology of self-reliance with an re-positioning of the community, the mother, the family, at the center of the search for identity. Butler utilizes aspects of the American literary tradition to place her novel in the context of other American authors concerned with the corruption of late capitalism. However, Butler’s critique of Los Angeles’ symbolic import as the locus of the city as constructed in postmodernism means that her writing must be understood as essentially modernist in concerns. Butler conforms to a mode of feminist thought, ‘difference’ feminism, which is considered out-of-date by current feminist theorists. In contrast, Serros’s style and the post-human subjectivity she establishes for her narrator, indicate that Serros is a postmodernist, and as such, at home in the postmodern city. Given Barthes’ discussion of lisible (readerly) and scriptable (writerly) texts, one can suggest that The Parable of the Sower is a modernist, lisable text in which the reader’s grasp of meaning is author-directed; whereas Chicana Falsa is scriptable, the authority of the producer of the cultural artifact is minimized through the effect of genre-mixing, montage.
Bibliography
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