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Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, and produce, when it doesn’t require identification? What about more difficult cases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, or with more complicated protagonists? – Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy”

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. – Octavia Butler, Dawn

I didn’t agree to participate in this roundtable on Octavia Butler because I enjoy her writing, but rather because I don’t. My admiration for her storytelling is nothing short of begrudging; I have to work at it. And I’ve always been careful to attribute my resistance to matters of personal taste. Butler is, after all, a beloved award-winning writer in science fiction, a pioneer who helped open a space for communities of black speculative fiction writers that I adore, including Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemison, Tannarive Due, and Zetta Elliot. So if I find the slug-like aliens in Dawn nauseating or if the pedophilic undertones in Fledgling nearly keep me from finishing the novel, then I assume that’s my problem.

My displeasure doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Butler’s importance in my African American literature courses and I teach her fiction whenever I can, with her 1979 novel Kindred being the most popular. Students are eager to embrace the story’s invitation to see the interconnected perils of slave resistance and survival through Dana’s modern eyes, grateful that the narrative’s historical corrective comes at the comfortable distance of science fiction tropes. The book raises provocative questions for debate, although I admit to being troubled by how often readers come away from Kindred convinced that they now know what it was like to be enslaved. Too often, their experience with the text is cushioned by what Megan Boler characterizes as “passive empathy”: “an untroubled identification that [does] not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, passive empathy [allows] them familiarity, ‘insight’ and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences – and finally, a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure (266).

Much of Butler’s fiction doesn’t work this way, however. Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.
 

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It doesn’t matter to me that the Tlic can speak English and feel pleasure and build governing institutions, not when they look like that. In the story, they use humans of both sexes to procreate in what initially appears to be a mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship, at least until the main character, a young human male named Gan, begins to question the status quo. Butler’s description of Gan curled up alongside T’Gatoi, the Tlic who has adopted him and his family, is not really an image I want to grapple with for long:

T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (4)

T’Gatoi uses her authority as a government official to protect humans (called Terrans) in exchange for the use of their bodies as reproductive hosts. The balance of power between the two species tips back and forth in the interest of self-preservation and free will. Gan isn’t sure he wants to be impregnated – is he a partner or a pet? – but he ultimately submits under the terms of a negotiated relationship that takes into account both his discomfort with the T’Gatoi’s rules and his reluctant longing for her affection. T’Gatoi, too, has desires and cares for Gan. She also wants her Tlic children nurtured in a loving home if they are to survive. And while I admit that I can relate to these feelings and conflicted needs, this is a kind of intimacy that I’m willing to share with a pregnant man, not with a bug.*

Boler asserts that Western models of empathy are based on acts of “consuming” or universalizing differences so that the Other can be judged worthy of our compassion. Despite our best efforts, we end up using the Other “as a catalyst or a substitute” for ourselves in order to ease our own fears and vulnerabilities, rather than actively working to change the assumptions that shape our perspective (268). I’m in awe, then, of the way Butler’s science fiction heightens readers’ physical discomfort with characters like the Tlic in order to rebuff passive empathy and other modes of identification that absolve us of the need for critical self-reflection. T’Gatoi is the Other that I can never fully know. I can’t easily reduce her experience to my own, but I also can’t deny the prickle of recognition that comes from the emotional struggle between the Tlic and the Terrans. When Gan’s mother jokes, “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” I recognize her bitterness as a survival strategy, an attempt to upset a social hierarchy and dissociate from the Not Me.

So when I recoil at every reminder of T’Gatoi’s “ugliness,” I wonder what this emotion says about my approach to difference in society and in myself. How does my reaction to the unfamiliar outside the story, my unwillingness to engage the socially embodied strangeness of 2014, compare to the blustery panic of creepy crawly things I want to step on because they are small enough? (And what about those times when the bug is me?)

“Bloodchild” turns my personal readerly aversion into an ideological dilemma and advances the more challenging work of what Boler describes as “testimonial reading”:

Recognizing my position as ‘judge’ granted through the reading privilege, I must learn to question the genealogy of any particular emotional response: my scorn, my evaluation of others’ behaviour as good or bad, my irritation – each provides a site for interrogation of how the text challenges my investments in familiar cultural values. As I examine the history of a particular emotion, I can identify the taken-for-granted social values and structures of my own historical moment which mirror those encountered by the protagonist. Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated. (266-7)

Boler’s work on emotion and reading practices draws on her experience teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and other fictional works about historical events to make her case. But Butler’s science fiction thought-experiments also provide a framework for a mode of bearing witness that is just as complicated .
 

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In the 1987 novel, Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood), the main character models the task of testimonial reading against the “affective obstacles” that hinder awareness of “the power relations guiding her response and judgments” (265). These obstacles initially come in the form of extraterrestrials called the Oankali whose bodies are entirely covered with writhing, grayish-white sensory tentacles. They have rescued groups of human survivors, including a black woman named Lilith, in the wake of nuclear destruction on Earth. Awakened on their ship years later, Lilith is required to remaining in her room with one of the ugly creatures until she can look at them without panic. The aliens know that before Lilith can interact with their society without harming herself or others, she must grapple with her revulsion at their physical appearance:

[The Oankali] walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. …

“I don’t understand why I’m so… afraid of you,” she whispered. “Of the way you look, I mean. You’re not that different. There are – or were – life forms on Earth that looked a little like you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. “Is it something you’re doing?” she demanded, “something I don’t know about?”

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?”

“Several have tried to kill me.”

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?

“For trying to kill me?”

“No, before – to incite them.”

“No more than I’m doing to you now.” (16-17)

Entire chapters are spent detailing the process through which Lilith learns to view the Oankali named Jdahya without fear. Their exchange invites comparisons with the xenophobia and prejudice of our own world, of course; Lilith’s dark skin could easily elicit similar reactions. Untangling the “genealogy” of her emotional responses becomes even more daunting once she learns that the aliens have three sexes and the ability to manipulate the genetic material of other beings. She is repulsed one moment, curious the next. Unable to look away, she demands answers from Jdahya until her body’s refusal to accept what he is becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. It is then that she begins to ask questions of herself. “God, I’m so tired of this… Why can’t I stop it?” (26).

Butler turns Lilith’s reactionary apprehension into a more productive space for her and for us as readers so that we may all think more critically about the larger forces at work in our judgments of others. To me this is what makes Butler an exceptional storyteller, whether I like her writing or not. Equally important is the fact that Lilith’s encounter with this single Oankali is only a first step. She’ll have to leave the room, meet others, apply what she has learned. For my own part, I’m now half way through Adulthood Rites, the second book in Lilith’s Brood and it is slow going, but I want to finish. The story has been difficult and deeply rewarding for me in a way that I’ve come to expect from Octavia Butler, a reading experience not unlike the probing of limbs that turns to a series of caresses.

 

*Nnedi Okorafor also explores dynamics of power through human companionship with an insect-like robot in her terrific short story, “Spider the Artist.”

Works Cited

Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies. 11 (2) 1997: 253-73.

Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

—–. Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

Empathy and Iconicity, cont’d

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My most recent post on Lefèvre’s and Guibert’s The Photographer received some insightful, but contentious, comments that I haven’t had a chance to respond to. And since I don’t have much else to post about at the moment (copies of Chloé Cruchaudet’s Mauvais Genre and Rutu Modan’s The Property are both in the mail), I will respond belatedly to these comments, which came from Noah and Suat, here in the form of a post.
 

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Didier Lefèvre, Le Photographe

 
Noah’s comment:

I think there’s in general a question about whether empathy in these situations is helpful or useful. I think Suat wrote about this recently; engaging the West’s attention/sympathy isn’t always such a great thing for people experiencing war or human rights violations. Sometimes having us pay attention or having us put ourselves in your place is really dangerous/bad. (I think in general the Middle East probably wishes we’d stop paying attention to them, for example.) So, I guess I wonder whether the combination of photography/comics really changes the ethical calculus all that much. Obviously, failing to help a little girl in front of you is pretty repulsive, but framing the issue in terms of “if you don’t help you’re repulsive” — is that accurate? Or does art’s tendency to make geopolitical issues into a personal “you-must-help!” actually increase our tendency to try to solve other people’s problems by dropping bombs on them?

Probably the biggest thing we could do to help people in need throughout the world is (a) open our borders, and (b) end our crop subsidies. Neither of those really have much to do with representing the suffering of others in comics or photographs…which I agree raises really uncomfortable ethical questions.

Suat’s piece on the Walking Dead does make a powerful argument along these lines and I agree completely that humanitarian aid projects often hide pernicious forms of cultural and economic imperialism, whether you’re talking about immediately harmful cases such as US evangelicals driving hate legislation in Uganda or, more subtly, the way in which humanitarian aid from NGOs in post-conflict states like Sudan and Liberia has eroded their sovereignty by creating economic and political dependency. And certainly much of the funding for these humanitarian aid projects is generated through photography, video, copywriting, and art that aim to draw sympathy from their Western donors. So it is actually important, even necessary, that we be suspicious of cartoonists and photographers such as Lefèvre and Guibert (and while we’re at it, why not add Guy de Lisle, Joe Sacco, and company, to the list?) who deal in ethnographically oriented representations that seek an empathetic response from their readerships. But I don’t think the fact that discourses of humanitarian empathy are co-opted by American imperialist politics should lead us to dismiss or abandon artistic projects that elicit empathy towards those who suffer in faraway places. If anything, it should be the opposite.

However, it also doesn’t excuse artists from being uninformed about the perverse global circuits of “empathetic” Western cultural imperialism in which their work will inevitably find itself complicit. And so I guess another way of saying this is that what I meant by “ethical response” is very different from an impulse to simply donate or volunteer at, say, Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. I mean it in a more absolute sense, I suppose. A fully ethical response would involve exactly the kind of delicate critical concern that Noah’s comment demanded. Of course, one can only fail in the face of such an absolute demand but this shouldn’t stop people from working towards it. I also agree completely with Noah’s point that opening borders and ending crop subsidies (or de-commodifying food) would make a more meaningful impact on people in need throughout the world. But the world of representation and the world of “ethical action” are always caught in a dialectic with one another, so we shouldn’t pretend that they can be thought of separately.
 

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Guy Delisle, Pyongyang

 
Suat’s response to Noah’s comment:

Scott McCloud’s assertions about the iconicity of simple cartoon drawings are one of his more lasting contributions arising from Understanding Comics but I would also say that they are quite unprovable (how many things are in art?). In fact, from my point of view, the idea is anecdotally false or at least constitutes only a small part of the equation. For example, I found Persepolis thoroughly unmoving but found the Iranian movie, A Separation, considerably more humanistic and emotionally engaging. At least part of this is down to Satrapi’s poor cartooning skills. The idea that readers give life to stripped down iconic forms is nice but fanciful.

Similarly, Noah will be glad to hear that Lefevere and Guibert’s War Photographer stands very little chance of engaging anyone’s empathy. It’s been a few years since I read it but the lasting impression I have of it is my sheer irritation at the reading experience. For one, Guibert goes out of his way to make Lefevere a thoroughly unlikable person especially in the second part of the comic. More importantly, as is made clear in your article, the comic is entirely obsessed with his work as a photographer. It’s very much a “look at me” kind of comic. It has very little time for the people being photographed and one would be better served reading a book on the subject. I think this may be a subset of the self-centeredness elaborated on at length later in the comic.

I do agree that Lefèvre is almost as unlikable as Kevin Carter. But the narrative does insist on outlining a process of self-mortification and eventual transformation, which makes him, at the very least, forgivable. More importantly, I wasn’t trying to argue that Lefèvre is a sympathetic character. I think of him rather as a kind of focal point for the reader’s empathy towards the Afghani war wounded during the Soviet War. I might go as far as to say that it is somehow Lefèvre’s failure to be a good person that opens up a space for the reader’s empathy towards the latter’s photographic subjects. (And of course, the depiction and thematization of this failure is only possible through the addition of Guibert’s drawn panels).

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Jean-Philippe Stassen, Deogratias

As for iconicity, I don’t know how to defend my use of the term other than by calling on my own reading experience, which may not be generalizable. I do however believe that a correlation between iconicity and reader empathy might be proven through some sort of psychological experiment. Reader empathy has already been the subject of psychological experimentation, experimental designs are already in place, and it wouldn’t be too hard to add “iconicity” to the mix of variables, so why not? But I also don’t think iconicity is the only mechanism through which readers give life to drawn figures in comics and I worry that I may have sounded as if that’s what I think by opposing photographic realism and cartoon iconicity in such stark terms. And I certainly don’t think that iconicity is necessarily a defining characteristic of comics. Some of the most moving graphic novels I’ve read are those of Edmond Baudoin, which are more painterly than iconic. Let me add that my interest in these questions comes less from the angle of formal definitions concerning the nature of the medium than from the angle of empathetic reading. I’m interested in how it is that artists engage the empathy, and to a further extent, the ethical responsibility, of their readers. So I will need to reframe the question to reflect that better.

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Edmond Baudoin, Éloge de la poussière

The Tyranny of Comforters

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This was first published at Splice Today. I thought I’d reprint it since it touches on some issues raised in this comments thread.
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Usually we think of empathy as a generous emotion; a gift of love. Just as often, though, it can be a crabbed, demanding, jealous thing — an insistence that others act like, think like, and even be oneself.

Michael Chabon is a writer of literary fiction, which means that in many ways, even more than a politician, he is a professional empathizer. Last week he was plying his trade as a guest-blogger for Ta-Nehisi Coates. As a matter of course, he wrote about the Tucson shooting, and specifically about Obama’s speech.

His post on the subject was mostly about the distance he felt from the speech, the audience, and indeed, from the nation. He began the post by declaring, “I’ve been thinking about the president’s speech all night and this morning, how something about it left me feeling left out.” He acknowledges that he was moved by Obama’s vulnerability and his exhortation to live up to the memories of the victims, “And yet…”, he says:

Was it all the weird, inappropriate clapping and cheering? Or the realization that I am so out of touch with the national vibe that I didn’t know that whistling and whooping and standing ovations are, when someone evokes the memory of murdered innocent people, totally cool? I never would have thought that I’d spend so much of that solemn Wednesday thinking—first on publication of Sarah Palin’s latest piece of narrishkeit about the blood libels, then all through the memorial service—please, I beg you, can you not, finally, just shut up? It was distancing. Distracting. As he joined in, at times, with the applause, the president’s hard, measured handclaps, too close to the microphone, drowned out everything else in my kitchen right then, and seemed to be tolling the passing of something else besides human lives. I don’t know what. Maybe just my own sense of connectedness to the cheering people in that giant faraway room. I didn’t feel like applauding right then, not even in celebration of the persistence and continuity of human life and American values. And then I was ashamed of my curmudgeonliness. Those people, after all, many of them college students, were in a sports arena; architecture gives shape to behavior and thought. Maybe if the service had been held in a church, things would have played differently.

Chabon then goes on to sneer (empathetically, thoughtfully) at Obama’s final image in the speech; the moment when he suggested that Christina Taylor-Green, the nine-year-old killed in the shooting, might be jumping in puddles in heaven.

I tried to imagine how I would feel if, having, God forbid, lost my precious daughter, born three months and ten days before Christina Taylor-Green, somebody offered this charming, tidy, corny vignette to me by way of consolation. I mean, come on! There is no heaven, man. The brunt, the ache and the truth of a child’s death is that he or she will never jump in rain puddles again. That joy was taken from her, and along with it ours in the pleasure of all that splashing. Heaven is pure wishfulness, an imaginary solution to the insoluble problem of the contingency and injustice of life.

Chabon concludes by noting that the image was okay after all if you inverted it and saw it as a metaphor for loss.

But I’ve been chewing these words over since last night, and I’ve decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

So. That’s Chabon.

As for me, I spent most of “that solemn Wednesday” without any expectations in particular. As somebody without any connection to any of the victims, I didn’t even experience it as especially solemn. I didn’t watch, and don’t intend to watch, Sarah Palin make a fool of herself, because I know she’s a fool already, and why would I want to be irritated? I’ve enjoyed reading a number of pundits make fun of her, though (this is probably my favorite.)

I didn’t watch the president’s speech on Wednesday, either. In fact, I’ve been more or less avoiding news about the speech and about the people shot, because I find hearing about people getting shot upsetting. Especially young children — not because I’m empathetic or thoughtful, but because, like Chabon, I have a kid (he’s 7) and thinking about him dying makes me feel sick. I skimmed a transcript of the speech a day or so later. And I watched the video today because I was thinking about this article and felt like I had to.

The speech itself — well, it made me cry. I don’t know if that’s a testament to the president’s eloquence particularly. I cry pretty easily, and a bunch of people murdered for no reason is sad.

The cheering didn’t bother me. It’s odd, really, to think of it as an occasion for aesthetic approbation or denigration. People express grief in various ways. It seemed mostly like they were trying to let Obama and each other know that they were a community. Or maybe like Chabon says, they were just brainwashed by the architecture into behaving inappropriately. Whatever. I noticed that Giffords’ husband was clapping. I don’t feel I’m in a place to judge him.

As for rain puddles in heaven; yes, it’s trite. But it seems a little duplicitous to think of that triteness as causing Christina Taylor-Green’s parents more pain. If my son died, it’s not clear to me what anyone could say that would make things any worse or any better. Besides, you spout trite nothings when someone’s loved one dies, because what else do you say? A polished prose style is a lovely thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s an adequate response in all circumstances.

This, indeed, seems to be the cause of part of Chabon’s dyspepsia. Artists, especially successful artists like Chabon. receive such fulsome praises that I think they can occasionally mistake themselves for priests. Which is maybe why he felt qualified to proclaim with such certainty that heaven isn’t real and that death is just absence. To suggest otherwise is a stylistic error — rectifiable only by transforming the clumsy words of the President through the magical gifts of a real writer.

But I’ve been chewing these words over since last night, and I’ve decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

Job’s comforters are a standing reminder that most people will engage in condescending assholery if offered half a chance. No reason that a lauded author should be any different, I guess.

Still, it’s worth analyzing the exact nature of the assholery. Job’s comforters were jerks because they believed that Job was suffering for a reason. His injuries were his fault or they would lead to a greater good. The comforters believed they could read tragedy. They were its interpreters.

Chabon isn’t coming from exactly the same place, but there’s some overlap. He too, believes that the tragedy should speak to him. He is irritated when he is excluded. Why doesn’t the President move me, he asks? Why doesn’t the event address me? Why this talk of heaven when I’m not a believer? Why don’t all these people who I am not interested in — why don’t they all, as he puts it, “shut up”?

The answer to all of these questions, of course, is fairly straightforward. That answer is: “It’s not about you, Michael.” Even your empathy, however well expressed, doesn’t make it about you.

Of course, lots of people who weren’t immeditately affected feel personally connected to the shootings. I do too, to some extent. But it’s important to recognize that that extent is limited. The separation Chabon felt from the people in that arena wasn’t because the people in Tucson are gauche, or because Obama is a Christian. If those things matter at all, it’s only as symbols of the way in which each person is different; a mystery, one to another. Art and love and religion bridge the distance partially and sometimes, but not entirely, and not on demand. God perhaps can love and know each individual, but for a human to try to do so starts to look like blasphemy. Even if, or perhaps especially if, you don’t believe that God exists.