(Kindred) Octavia Butler's Blurred Boundary Between Past and Present

 

Octavia Butler's Blurred Boundary Between Past and Present

***Disclaimer: There will be spoilers***

        Octavia Butler's Kindred uses time travel to revisit the forgotten history of slavery in the American South, highlighting the institution’s forceful environment and induced hierarchy. Dana, a black novelist, is forcibly summoned into the slavery-driven antebellum south of 1815, her abnormal connection with Rufus Weylin bridging their two seemingly separate realities derived from the same historical source. As a modern figure, Dana’s presence in the past and her minuscule yet critical effects on Rufus and the Weylin plantation symbolize Butler's apparent collapse of the sequential flow of time (the present existing and affecting the past). However, along with Rufus's continuous life in the past, Dana’s existence and return to the present with permanent physical injuries, emotional trauma, and 1815 environmental acclimation from the antebellum south signifies Butler's preservation of her fictional universe's temporal sequentiality (the past's absence in but enduring effect on the present). Meshing events from convergent timelines into an unembellished narrative, Butler uses time travel to portray a postmodernist depiction of time and reality, blurring yet not completely collapsing the boundary between past and present.

In Kindred, Butler appears to crumble the distinction between past and present as Dana travels to and directly interacts with Rufus’s slavery-driven world in 1815. Throughout the novel, Dana consistently appears in the Weylin residence, affecting Rufus’s life, actions, and plantation management. When Dana first travels back to 1815, she describes her first encounter with and successful resuscitation of the drowned child Rufus, narrating, “I put him down on his back, tilted his head back, and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I saw his chest move as I breathed into him [...] Moments later, the boy began breathing on his own — breathing and coughing and choking and throwing up and crying for his mother” (Butler 13-14). In this scene, Dana, from 1976 California, is present in the 1815 past and saves an inhabitant of that past, the child Rufus, from death by suffocation. If Dana had ignored this half-dead young boy and refused to use her modern knowledge of CPR to restart his breathing, Rufus would have most certainly died in the river before his inept mother and unforgiving father could fish him out. Dana’s presence and actions in the past and her application of modern knowledge in this situation save Rufus’s life, profoundly impacting the boy’s future and the futures of other characters he will now encounter. Dana’s role as an entity of the present affecting the past occurs every time she travels to 1815. Here is a more concrete example of a significant influence Dana had on Rufus and the past: When she returns to the Weylin plantation only to find Alice dead, Dana persuades Rufus to free his and Alice’s children, Joe and Hagar, saying, “‘Two certificates of freedom, Rufe, all legal. Raise them free. That’s the least you can do.’ [… Two days later,] he took me to town with him, took me to the old brick Court House, and let me watch while he had certificates of freedom drawn up for his children” (Butler 251-252). In the slavery-driven society of 1815, Joe and Hagar, two children born of a slave mother, would inherit their mother’s social status and become slaves as soon as they grew enough to handle slave labor. As a white man nurtured by this slavery-generated environment his entire life, Rufus would naturally gravitate in favor of this class arrangement no matter how “compassionate” he is due to their familial ties. With her modern ideology, Dana confronts and blames Rufus for Alice’s death, stimulating his guilt and guiding him to free his children in reparation. Without Dana’s persuasion, Rufus would have never freed Joe and Hagar to atone for his involvement in Alice’s suicide because no one but Dana could confront him, demand his accountability, and advocate for Joe and Hagar’s freedom as his method of atonement. By convincing Rufus, Dana ensures the freedom of Joe and Hagar, impacting the future experiences of the Weylin family. Focusing on Dana to portray the backward temporal idea of the present existing in and affecting the past, Butler appears to paradoxically destroy the veil between past and present.

Although modernity’s effects on the past convey a collapse of temporal sequentiality, Butler preserves this boundary between past and present via ancestry and nonparticipation. Frequently traveling back to the past, Dana begins to believe in a self-generated purpose for her travels back to 1815: She believes that she must secure the birth and later freedom of Hagar by matchmaking Alice and Rufus to ensure her continued existence in 1976 (since Dana is Hagar’s descendant). These Back to the Future principles promoting Dana’s ancestral safeguarding illustrate this accurate temporal fact of the past’s absence in but enduring effect on the present, lightly preserving this boundary between past and present in Butler’s Kindred. When Alice successfully gives birth to Hagar, Dana narrates her reaction, describing, “I felt almost free, half-free if such a thing was possible, half-way home [...] The danger to my family was past, yes. Hagar had been born” (Butler 233-234). Although she feels only “half-free” because she still needs to persuade Rufus to free Joe and Hagar, Dana is relieved because Hagar, her ancestor, has been born successfully and her lineage is secured, ensuring Dana’s continued existence in the present (1976). This situation exemplifies the orthodox view of a past event (Hagar’s birth) occurring before and affecting the present (Dana’s existence in 1976) due to the two characters’ linked bloodline. Butler also accentuates this Back to the Future view when Dana loses her arm when traveling back to the present. Explaining this painful experience, Dana details:

I pushed him away somehow — everything but his hand still on my arm [...] I was back at home — in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it — or growing into it. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall [...] It was the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped. (Butler 260-261)

Despite Dana and Kevin previously traveling to the past together as he holds her, Rufus cannot travel to the present with Dana when he holds her in the past as she returns to the future. Instead, he holds Dana’s arm in 1815, amputating “the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped” when she completes her transfer to the present. Rufus’s inability to exist and travel to the present exemplifies the nature of the past from the orthodox point of view: an entity of the past cannot exist in the same state in the present (Rufus is dead but his body is not decomposed in the past, but it is in the present). Thus, Rufus holds Dana back instead of Dana pulling Rufus forward, resulting in Rufus amputating Dana’s arm and the past affecting the present once again. Through Dana’s attempts to recreate her own ancestry in 1815 and Rufus’s inability to travel to the present, Butler embraces this orthodox (Back to the Future) view of time, preserving her novel’s temporal sequentiality (the past’s absence in but enduring effect on the present). Using time travel, Butler simultaneously destroys and preserves the natural order of time, blurring the boundary between past and present with ambiguity.

With this blurred boundary between past and present, Butler portrays a slavery-driven environment from an insider yet modern point of view, revealing slavery’s enduring effect on the present. Using time travel, Dana’s acclimation to the slavery-driven environment of 1815 fluctuates between “intensified periods” where Dana is forced into submission to survive or secure her lineage, and “resting periods” where she recovers her sanity and modern values in 1976. Creating this slow yet tense acclimation to slavery, Butler highlights the forceful environment of the Weylin plantation and the traumatic experiences faced by its personnel who have lost their bodily autonomy from Dana’s modern, slavery-acclimated point of view. Furthermore, these traumas, especially those experienced by Dana herself, mark slavery’s enduring effect on the present. Questioned on the reason behind Dana’s arm’s amputation, Butler explained her thoughts considering Dana’s extensive experience with slavery, saying, “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole” (Butler 267). In this quote, Butler states that “Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole,” connecting Dana’s loss to the slavery-driven environment she had extensively acclimated to and was now trying to leave. After leaving the past, Dana permanently lost her arm and will be impaired for the rest of her life. Although Dana left slavery behind in the past, it still affects her in the present, both physically and mentally (her acclimation to slavery and 1815 still remains). In a broader scope, Dana's physical and mental traumas are just a couple of examples of slavery’s effects on the present. Carrying the discriminatory ideologies of the institution, racism continues to prevail in our modern society. In essence, Butler uses her blurred temporal sequentiality to depict the 1815 slavery-driven environment from an insider but modern 1976 point of view and disclose to the reader the effects of slavery persisting today.