The focus of Kindred is not meant to be time travel. Octavia Butler has said that she was “trying to get people to feel slavery” that she was “trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people." Time travel however does seem like the perfect way to help us to better understand slavery and its effects. By having someone from closer to our time go back and experience slavery, we can feel more connected to it. While reading this novel, readers cannot look at slavery in the United States as just something of the past, something that isn’t relevant anymore. We are drawn back in time with Dana and get to experience the horrors of slavery firsthand, not through the lens of a history book.
Contrary to what we discussed in class, for me, rather than adding a buffer, time travel takes one away. Slavery has its effect on someone from close to our time; someone who has only ever known freedom gets thrust back into a time where her life has little meaning, where she is not legally or socially allowed to be married to her husband, and where teaching a child to read merits a whipping. Since the novel is also written in the first person perspective, another layer of buffer is taken away. We experience the things that happen to Dana from her point of view; this allows us to become more connected to her and feel more for her as she struggles with living in a time of slavery. As I am reading the novel I find myself thinking about what would happen if I were thrown back into a time period like this.
At one point Dana compares the ante bellum whites to Nazis in Germany, “Like the Nazis, ante bellum whites had known quite a bit about torture-quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn” (pg 117). This comparison made me think about being transported back (to the not so distant past) into a Nazi occupied part of Europe. How would I handle being transported through time to help my relatives? Would I stay strong despite having a large portion of the population against me? The time travel aspect of the novel actually allows me to connect more to the characters and its purpose. Octavia Butler once said that “I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.” Reading Kindred allows us to think about exactly that; in the context of this novel, someone we know or even us ourselves could be put in a similar situation.
I felt the same way about the time travel aspect of the book. While we talked about how the time travel both adds a buffer and also takes it away, I couldn't help but more fully feel the latter. I suppose because Dana had a more similar starting time to my own than an antebellum slave that as she experiences her reality collapse into another, it makes me place myself in her shoes more.
ReplyDeleteI find this in itself an interesting point: from the quotes above, it sounds like Octavia Butler tried with this book to get the reader to empathize with Dana to the point where they can "feel slavery". So while Dana's realities are collapsing together, the author's purpose may be to get the reader's reality to collapse into Dana's -- to force us, through words, to be unable to distinguish between realities for at least a little while.
This ideal reading experience coincides with the use of first-person narration. The tone of the piece, the perspective, the time-travel device -- all of this, at least for me, allows me to temporarily confuse my story with that of Dana.
If the author is to be believed, collapsing the reader's original perception of reality into another one has its benefits. The natural state of things is that people can only experience one perspective of reality at a time -- but writing breaks down the barriers between people just as books can choose to ignore the distinctions between life and death (as in O'Brien's work) or truth and lies. Empathy is what happens when the boundaries break down -- when, for a moment, the rigid rules of what the reader knows about reality don't shield them from another person's emotion.
Dana and Kevin are both writers, and they are the ones who experience the collapsing together of realities. I find this to be significant, a commentary on the ability of writing to allow people to perceive in ways that might otherwise be beyond the scope of their perspective.
After reading Kindred, I had a jaw ache all night from clenching it during high-tension scenes, and I woke up with nightmares at several points in the night. Whether or not time travel is possible, whether or not something like this story could be true, doesn't matter.
My reality has been affected -- the original boundaries of my thoughts have been realigned. Empathy is the mixing of contradicting truths, like splashing 1976 into the antebellum south, or throwing the reader into the shoes of someone a long way from home.
I disagree with your idea that time travel takes the buffer away. I believe that this science fiction is what causes the buffer to exist in a story that, without it, would have no buffer. The idea of time travel is just so out there and, up until now, has been deemed impossible, that it causes the reader of the book to take this novel with a grain of salt. The impossibility that is introduced to us causes us to question the validity of Dana's experiences. Although the buffer does exist, I still think Kindred takes the lack of a buffer to a whole new level.
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