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(2015
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2015 (Index) Essay 1: Compare, contrast, and evaluate Narratives of the Future |
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Oz(zy) Martinez
6.30.15
NonManifest.
Narratives of the future tend to have several similarities in common.
Though technologically speaking they can vary from a progression of the
natural form to a primitive regression, futuristic literature is most often
concerned with man’s eventual fate. If man has a beginning then he must
therefore have an end, and where we can chart and understand man’s origins
through anthropologic and historic perspectives, only literature can delve into
the messy web of potentialities. Science can extrapolate given facts and attempt
to provide different possibilities, but to stray and make claims without
empirical observation is the antithesis of the scientific method. So Literature
is it, literature gets to make the big claims, and the predominance of
futuristic literature is the unknown eventualities of the human race, the
uncharted water of limitless potential futures, and to give hope or hindrance to
them.
One could argue that The Revelation of
John and Octavia Butler’s Parable of
the Sower are both ultimately
optimistic strolls through the apocalypse, but by vastly different means. Both
are heavily centered on humanity suffering its consequences, reaping what it has
sowed, but the paths set before man
are vastly different. Revelation has
a clear gulf between the saved and not saved, righteous and fallen, and leaves
no room for improvement of one’s station once the divine wheels are set in
motion. Parable gives humanity the
option to correct itself, using those divine wheels as the causal agents for
improvement. “God is Change. Change is God” Olamina writes repeatedly in her
journal, correcting the biblical sentiments of her father that things must be
the way they are simply because they are what they are. She herself is the first
example of mutation, having broken from her father’s line and forming her own
identification of God, and therefore man’s. There is an embrace of change, but
it comes at the price of successive generations. Olamina knows she can’t change
her father’s ways or those of the other adults, and focuses on the children
instead to teach them to better and ready themselves adequately for the next
eventual challenge to their way of life.
Revelations
does not give that option, giving no options but a single method of survival,
effectively asking believers to double down on their faiths or risk death and
damnation. One path, one fate, one potentiality.
Sower provides two: one of your
fathers, and one of your own. Olamina’s optimistic path, Earthseed, isn’t
Butler’s solution, but also carries the same proud sin of
Revelations. When discussing
Earthseed’s eventual fate, companion Bankole warns her, “if you get people to
accept it, they’ll make it more complicated, more open to interpretation…” to
which Olamina denies the reality with an emphatic “Not around me they won’t!”
(262). Olamina also feels humanity has one path to salvation, and that it’s
hers. If we deconstruct the name ‘Olamina,’ we find it resembles ‘Animal’ with
an attached ‘O.’ In the sequal to Sower,
Olamina’s daughter views her mother as “selfish, destructive, and extremely
dangerous, a zealot willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the Destiny
[Earthseed]” (L.A.Review). From this perspective, Earthseed isn’t the answer to
anything, but a progressive evolutionary step, one step above survival, to have
an imagined fantasy drive to sustain and stimulate survival when processing past
the immediate. It is comfort in the abstract, but understandably unreal.
Understanding that, we can apply it to a reading of
Revelations. Where Olamina is
promising a better life for descendants in the midst of fire,
Revelations is promising hellfire in
the absence of it. Sower’s ultimate
message is about adaption; not the bible, not god or Earthseed, but using it,
taking it, and reapplying it to maximize one’s own benefit. Everything is a
means to an end, but never an end in itself.
H.G. Wells The Time Machine goes one
step further with man’s evolution. Like
Sower, the main concern is what will happen given our current progressions,
and while Sower and
Revelation were to reflect the
inequities of their respective times in hopes to frighten its readers of the
repercussions of their hedonism. John of Patmos wrote
Revelations response to Roman rule,
and Octavia wrote Sower in the early
90’s when the United States was bracing itself for the impending crime wave that
had been growing exponentially since the 70’s, incorporating into her novel the
model of ‘superpredators,’ “feral youths devoid of impulse control or remorse”
(NYTimes). Time Machine doesn’t
concern itself (solely) with the
immediate repercussion of his environment, though much talk is given to the
economic faults of communism, the scope goes far beyond that to ask a basic
question of man past the apex of evolution, when impetus to strive is
nonexistent. Wells abandons the human problem and asks about the end of all
species, of all life, using humans as the central metaphor, that competition is
crucial to higher adaptive survival, or creature contentment will render the
subject alive but powerless. Evolution isn’t volitional as it appears in
Sower, but inevitable.
Eschatological literature is compelling because not only does it warn but it
prepares us for the consequential brunt of our actions. By the mere fact of
espousing the worst case scenario we make it real enough to transmit the idea
unto another, and once understood by another it can be further tested and
deconstructed, probed and questioned, adopted or adapted to. Keeping it secret
gives it further potential to exist because the reality of it can creep, whereas
observing and acknowledging potential paths destroy their existence by rendering
them vulnerable to the light of truth. In this way do I think
Sower,
Revelation, and
Time Machine are successful, in their
potential warnings by extrapolations, giving unto the world a fate they’d rather
not have manifested. The futuristic literature read so far has not been one I
expect the authors were hopeful for.
The pivot of this argument are the short stories collected in Virtually Now.
Both “Better Be Ready” and “Somebody Up There”
provide microcosms of potential futures, not aiming to make sweeping
generalizations about rights and wrongs but individual navigations in
theoretical everyday lives. The tone of these short stories varies greatly by
being mostly tongue in cheek humoristic approaches to tackle larger more
frightening concepts. For example, the protagonist in “Better Be Ready’s” is
caught at a crossroads of following natural tradition of binary gender types or
adapting to modernity in acceptance of his best friend. The
surname Glass, hints at the mutability of his condition. Glass itself has
the physical properties of a solid but is technically a supercooled liquid,
existing then as both and neither, situated somewhere on the spectrum. “Better
Be Ready” diverges from the linear
aspect of life by presenting conditions mutable in the present, not set in stone
like Revelations nor beholden in
respect to the prior or coming generations
like Sower or even to an extent
Time Machine. The therapist character
Terry has an androgynous name that means “ruler of the people.” Terry does goad
Byron into being more open with his sexuality but that shouldn’t be taken as
indicative of a personal agenda, but an ability to force people to openly
acknowledge their own spectrums and not feel so confined to them, ripping away
the power of the unknown by merely acknowledging it. The central core of “Better
Be Ready” is less about challenging
stereotypes but acknowledging the world on a deeper baseline of lives without
the impositions of the external world forcing our expectations.
This individual destiny is put to its greatest test in “Garden of Forking
Paths.” Despite the superficial war story, “Garden”
questions the theory of multiple universes interacting dependently and
independently of each other, as well as predetermination. When Yu Tsun murders
Albert, he is recreating the death of his ancestor, murdered in cold blood by a
stranger. Time lurches from linear to branching and almost cyclical, proposing
that this future murder is the catalyst for the prior understanding of the
narrative, this death required in place to set in motion the events beginning
and culminating with this murder. Despite the central question concerning a
multitude of potential realities, when Albert says to Yu Tsun. “In one of them
[paths] I am your enemy,” he is offering Yu Tsun one of two paths to take.
However, it could also be argued that there is no true splitting, and that this
is the destined nature of reality: Yu Tsun fulfilling the murder of a stranger,
but also of unconsciously adopting Albert’s suggestion of hostility. Though we
are presented with Yu Tsun choosing his own destiny, Borges makes it clear to
insinuate that he may have just been unconsciously reacting to the defined
stimuli around him. Nevertheless, the power of “Forking Paths”
is its ability to be interpreted, much like the labyrinthine eponymous, each
minute perspective causing a fracture from its parent timeline. The compounded
splintering of potential existences sets the stage for further abstract thought,
not relegated to a branching from this point forward, but from the very birth of
the cosmos, ourselves a long point down the cosmic branch containing life,
carbon based at that, with this degree of fine tuning of the of the forces; in
the idea that things can exist, and freely, there is no potential thought or
reality that could not exist in an infinitely exponential creational process.
Might we be so arrogant to think that it is only by a conscious human decision
that universes can branch, and not think of the stochastic nature at the
subatomic level, or even further at the potential individual vibrations of the
most fundamental string level, we would critically delude ourselves of the
grandness of life itself. However, if we can argue that atom’s have no decision
making capabilities and are forever static in their movements, then why not
further argue we ourselves are as equally limited. Borges at least gives fuel to
this fire of argument.
Revelations sets humanity on an unalterable course from its beginning in
Genesis; Sower allows humanity change
but relegates its power to the following generation to enact it; “Better Be
Ready” allows humanity in the
immediate to decide its own fate; “Forking Paths”
gives the small solace that all universes occur simultaneously of all
varieties, and seems to challenge humanity to strive and grab that which it
desires most. Contrasted with these would be the short stories “Bears Discover
Fire,” and “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” which deal far less with navigating the
complex moralities of potential time scales and instead offers comforting
co-operations between man and nature, allowing both to mature in the presence of
the other. In “Bears,” the
hibernation patterns of bears are upset due of human interaction, but the bears
come to evolve past the need for hibernation and develop the ability to learn
and remember. “Somebody” extrapolates life in the tech heavy future and
relativizes it into being nearly mundane. People still bicker over car types and
the human condition is still prone to its insecurities; “Somebody”
assures that despite the technological progressions of the future, life will
still carry on like it always has, and by this fact, rips away the fear of the
strange yet familiar future. Despite the fact that bears are now holding
tribunals in the woods or that computers can read and project our minds, life
goes on, like it did yesterday.
The material for the class has so far been split evenly into both optimistic and
pessimistic perspectives on humanities future. In a sense, they’ve all followed
the rhythm of The
Time Machine, expecting cataclysmic
horrors to await us eventually, but life continuing normal in the immediate
future, essentially of the gradual time scale evolution works by.
Two Citations of Note:
Canavan, Gerry. “’There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New
Suns’: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables LA Review of Books. June 9,
2014.
Haberman, Clyde. “When Youth Violence Spurred ‘Superpredator Fear.”Ner York
Times April 6, 2014
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