Reproductive Futurism in Speculative Short Fiction
MA Thesis Comparative Literature
CONTENTS
Introduction………... 3
“Today’s Children […] Had No Future”: Afrofuturism and Indirect Investment in Octavia E. Butler’s Short Fiction………... 13
Grunting and Gesturing: Articulating the Future……… 16
Sterilize the Lot of Us: Indirect Investment in the Future………. 22
Conclusion.………. 28
“A True Daughter of Anarchy”: Going Sideways to Utopia with Ursula K. Le Guin……... 30
Walk Ahead into the Darkness: An Unviable Utopia………. 32
True Journey Is Return: Against Continuous Growth………. 37
Conclusion……….. 41
“My Fist inside Her Where a Baby Should Be”: The Queer Futures of Carol Guess and Kelly Magee’s With Animal……… 43
Wrong Needle, Wrong Species: An Unfamiliar Future………... 45
I Smashed Mine: Rejecting the Logic of Futurism……….. 51
Conclusion……….. 56
Conclusion………... 58
INTRODUCTION
“Hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us” (Butler, “The Evening 37). So declares Alan Chi, a character in Octavia Butler’s short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987) who is afflicted with the genetic disorder “Duryea-Gode Disease” (DGD). His announcement evinces an acknowledgement of the dangerous and contaminative potential of sexual reproduction. Indeed, Alan’s statement establishes a dichotomy between procreation as morally questionable and sterility as pure and virtuous. His invocation of a nebulous “they” evokes the spectre of an omnipresent state capable of exerting power over citizens’ reproductive capacities and thus of naturalising specific familial structures. The expression of desire for sterility becomes, then, both a reflection of and a retaliation against the underlying suppositions of a particular political programme. Yet, crucially, Alan’s call for enforced mass sterilisation registers as profoundly taboo, as is evident from the reaction of the protagonist, Lynn, who reflects that “sterilization […] would be like killing part of yourself” (38). Her reference to “killing” indicates a recognition of the eugenicist implications of Alan’s declaration while also characterising his refusal to procreate as somehow murderous. In this way, Butler implies that the unacceptability of Alan’s outlook pivots on his rejection of deeply entrenched norms concerning reproduction and familial structure.
These concerns animate current discussions within the field that has become known as the antisocial thesis in queer theory (Caserio et al. 819), which positions society as constructed in opposition to the figure of the queer. A 2005 panel discussion brought together a group of queer theorists to debate this antisocial thesis, with Lee Edelman and Judith Halberstam promoting political negativity and José Esteban Muñoz and Tim Dean advocating queer utopianism. Lee Edelman has been and remains the most influential proponent of the
the case that all politics are predicated on a logic of “reproductive futurism” (3). Edelman identifies reproductive futurism as an ideology that upholds heteronormativity and fetishises the figure of the Child, and which he locates in presidential public service announcements, newspaper columns, anti-abortion slogans, films, and novels alike. The central claim of No
Future is that queerness forms the antithesis to the future-oriented nature of politics, instead
figuring the death drive of the social order. Read in the light of Edelman’s argument, Alan’s desire for imposed sterility and for “the damned disease [… to] be wiped out in one
generation” (Butler, “The Evening” 38) reflects an understanding of the inextricable relation of reproduction to futurity. In fact, with this statement Alan makes a conventional claim about temporality by demonstrating an implicit faith in the strictly linear nature of the process of inheritance. Butler’s narrative troubles this assumption, however; given the late onset of the symptoms of Duryea-Gode Disease, a sufferer’s present is profoundly informed by their future, and the story’s denouement points to an alternative path for intergenerational relationality.
The temporal dimensions of reproduction haunt Butler’s fiction, as they do other works of contemporary feminist speculative fiction. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (1973) pivots on the question of whether an otherwise utopian society can justify that its continuation depends on the abject suffering of one child. The citizens who choose to leave Omelas and go “towards a place [which] it is possible […] does not exist” (117) stage Edelman’s call to reject a future that would mean a continuation of the injustices of the present. Despite this, amongst critical writing on Le Guin only Laurie Langbauer’s cursory mention of how Edelman would condemn this story’s “exploit[ation of] the child’s emblematic resonance” (91) links “Omelas” to a consideration of reproductive futurism. Even less scholarly attention has been given to Carol Guess and Kelly Magee’s short story collection With Animal (2015), about which Clare Archer-Lean’s paper, which
emphasises the stories’ treatment of issues such as fertility and maternity, is the sole scholarly publication. When the narrator of one of these stories, “With Egg”, suggests that those implementing the abstinence-only programme at her school behave “like the point had been to turn us all into successful parents” (77), she reveals their unquestioning faith in the value of child-rearing. These constraints lead the narrator into a series of destructive behaviours that signal her growing opposition to the social order of her school. These speculative literary works thus appear particularly suited to a consideration of the presentation and implications of reproductive futurism, despite the dearth of critical work on the subject.
The suggestion made by literary scholar R. B. Gill that speculative fiction might be defined by its ability to “conjecture about matters that in the normal course of things could not be” (72) points to the genre’s peculiar suitability for undermining overlooked norms. While Gill regards science fiction as “characterized solely by its dependence on scientific method” (72), the genre operates in broadly similar ways to speculative fiction, in that both consider possibilities outside of ordinary experience. I group the fiction I consider in this thesis as speculative, since it is this quality of refusing to operate within a realist understanding of the present which I regard as crucial for recasting naturalised ideas concerning futurity and reproduction. Indeed, much speculative fiction has of late given deeply ambivalent
representations of the familiar concepts of pregnancy, progeny, and inheritance. While work has been done on the representation of reproductive futurism and temporality in speculative fiction in recent years, the overwhelming majority of it addresses novels, in particular
twentieth-century feminist dystopias. Examples from recent years include Keeley B. Gogul’s and Megan Obourn’s writing on Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy with regard to normative
reproductive futurity and disabled futures respectively, Rebekah Sheldon’s examination of reproductive futurism in relation to Margaret Atwood’s novels, and Alexis Lothian’s
dystopian Swastika Night; each of these works explores and responds to Edelman’s polemic. Far less attention has been paid to short fiction, despite the fact that its orientation towards
temporality makes it peculiarly suited to an examination of reproductive futurism. Michael Trussler, a literary scholar who specialises in short stories, claims that “short fiction intimates how thoroughly our apprehension of historicity has been conditioned by sequential narrative forms such as the novel” (557), pointing to the radical impact that the short story form can have on our perceptions of narrative temporality. It is this lack of commitment to linear narrative that makes short fiction an appropriate medium in which to examine
representations of the future.
This thesis brings short fiction by Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin as well as the short story collection With Animal by writers Carol Guess and Kelly Magee into dialogue with critical theories that explicate temporality and respond to Edelman’s call to reject the future. These fictional works share a preoccupation with the embodied experiences, social
consequences, and ethical dimensions associated with reproduction. Of all the various representations of pregnancy that this thesis considers – including the transmission of a horrifying disease, artificial insemination with fish, and two schoolgirls nursing a monstrous hatchling – each balances concern over the inadequacy of the present with an attention to the tensions and ambivalences of characters’ relationships to the future. Many of these stories also constitute defiantly non-normative accounts of reproduction. Despite the disparities in critical attention to these works, each exerts a force on the contours of the genre of contemporary feminist speculative fiction, not only making room for but in fact centring explorations of queerness and futurity. These literary works, in their confrontation of issues of inheritance (genetic and otherwise), species survival, and the status of children, demonstrate the wide-reaching implications of reproductive futurism and present new understandings of the relation of reproduction to temporality. The stories thus both figure the impact of the Child
on the unfolding of historical time and consider alternative conceptions of temporality that a consideration of reproduction makes available.
Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism marks a significant intervention in the field of queer theory, and his argument radically confronts the future-oriented premise of all politics. With this concept, Edelman connects the double meanings of reproduction as both procreation and replication. His analysis focuses on how the figure of the Child in political and public discourse – not to be confused with literal, lower-case children – “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantastic beneficiary of every political intervention” (3). Edelman furnishes this claim with evidence from a variety of cultural sources that position the Child as the placeholder for a fantasy of vulnerability and protection as well as of sameness. In order to resist the inherent heteronormativity of this framework, Edelman argues, we must oppose the future itself – and thus all political hope. He in fact embraces the cultural designation of queers as hostile to every social structure, famously declaring “fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (29). It is this opposition to the social order that underpins Edelman’s proposition that the queer figures the death drive, being positioned against all forms of social viability. The impact that Edelman’s argument has had on queer theory indicates its usefulness as a critical practice in this field. The embeddedness of the Child in political programmes as well as in various cultural forms, from literature to film to news stories, is as widespread as its fetishisation as a symbol of innocence and vulnerability. In particular, the structuring of the future around the Child proves resonant to much of the fiction that I examine in this thesis.
Yet Edelman’s work fails to account for many of the temporal assumptions that underpin its argument. For this reason I turn to Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” (1981) for a framework for considering the conceptualisation of temporality in No Future. Kristeva draws attention to the Western sociohistorical tendency not to associate women with
historical time. Edelman’s argument reflects this tendency, given that it posits futurity as emerging through the Child without accounting for the forms of temporality that are
associated with reproduction. Kristeva identifies the qualities of repetition and eternity, which draw on “cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm” (16), as the only temporal forms that are traditionally linked to female subjectivity. It is this association with menstruation and maternity that, Kristeva argues, casts women as existing in “monumental time” (14), an atemporal space that exists in opposition to the masculine, linear time of history. Her suggestion that, for some, “linear temporality has been almost totally refused, and as a consequence there has arisen an exacerbated distrust of the entire political
dimension” (19) speaks to Edelman’s positioning of his project “outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears” (3). Kristeva, however, perceives value in participating in the historical time that Edelman opposes. What Kristeva’s work adds to an understanding of No Future is how Edelman’s argument is predicated on a limited conception of time as being unquestioningly linear.
Works that respond directly to No Future have also drawn attention to the implicit linearity of Edelman’s presentation of temporality. Sarah Ensor’s paper “Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity” (2012) provides the most developed example of this argument, giving a compelling alternative temporal framework to reproductive futurism through recourse to queer ecocriticism. Ensor seeks to reconcile the frequent calls of contemporary environmentalism to build a sustainable future and preserve the world for future generations with the antisocial turn that decries futurity as marred by heteronormative imperatives. She critiques antisocial queer theory as mimicking the logic of reproductive futurism in that it “continues to concretize and externalize the future, to treat it as the grammatical object of our transitive acts” (412). By calling attention to the simplistic understanding of temporality implicit in Edelman’s stance, Ensor clears the path for an
approach to the future that is characterised by neither utter rejection nor wholehearted embrace. Her key contribution is to posit the figure of the spinster as an embodiment of the future’s illegibility and unfamiliarity, allowing for an understanding of the future that builds on Edelman’s work without being constrained by his limited conceptualisation of temporality. For Ensor, the spinster figure undermines “the belief that queer subjectivity somehow
precludes an investment in futurity” (410), instead enabling “an approach that pays heed to nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figures” (410). It is this concept of indirect
investment in the future which best articulates Ensor’s characterisation of the future as being unfamiliar and emerging non-linearly.
While Ensor critiques Edelman’s assumption that the emergence of the future is a strictly linear process, she acknowledges the strong appeal of his call for no future. Her critical response to No Future find value in Edelman’s identification and rejection of the ideology of reproductive futurism and his repudiation of the Child; what she has difficulty accepting is his concomitant condemnation of the future-oriented nature of politics. Balancing an
acknowledgement of the radical potential of No Future with a continued commitment to
progressive politics, her paper considers the widespread impact of reproductive futurism while grappling with the simplifications immanent to Edelman’s account of it. Ensor develops a theory of futurity that adequately incorporates Edelman’s argument while remaining critical of its predication on a conceptualisation of time as being both legible and linear. Her practice of spinster ecology reworks temporality by promoting a “queer or avuncular stance” (419) that displaces the heteronormative family unit from the establishment of futurity. I find in Ensor’s work a productive overlap with the unsettling of accepted narratives of temporality and kinship that takes place in the fiction I discuss in this thesis.
My first chapter examines the presence of and resistance to reproductive futurism in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” (1983) and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
(1987). In the first section, I explore how Butler articulates the future through the Child, an association that Edelman suggests is typical of the ideology of reproductive futurism. I read Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds” within the context of Afrofuturism, a broad grouping of cultural artefacts that engage with technology and the future with regard to their intersection with Afrodiasporic experience. I thus read Butler’s depiction of children in this story as informed by an understanding of how knowledge of the past determines access to the future. “Speech Sounds” presents children as vehicles for the future, but it does so through an emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of knowledge of the past, rather than by affirming the value of reproduction. Read alongside Ensor’s promotion of the
“nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figure” (410), “Speech Sounds” reveals a future that emerges through a non-linear process of inheritance.
I engage with the portrayal of temporality more extensively in the second section, in which I consider how Butler evokes the future in “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”. With this story, Butler moves away from the Child in her vision of the future, instead enabling futurity through the establishment of unexpected non-familial bonds. Much of the narrative is rooted in an awareness of racist and eugenicist discourses, pointing to how the the fetishisation of the Child is just one facet of the cultural signification that encompasses the Child, and how this signification is primarily informed by race.1 “The Evening” also yields a more nuanced conceptualisation of temporality than does “Speech Sounds”, disassociating the process of care from genetic inheritance and depicting characters’ differing experiences of time. Both stories articulate the value of indirect investment in the future, maintaining a faith in the importance of forwards progress while establishing a less linear understanding of temporality.
1 In this thesis, I will be using the word “story” to refer to a particular work and the term “narrative” when
In the second chapter, I address the more ambivalent deployment of the Child in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) and “The Day Before the Revolution (1974). Indeed, the ambivalence of Le Guin’s engagement with the figure of the Child is crucial to her approach to futurity. In both stories, Le Guin sketches a utopian vision, creating a narrator who is evidently not objective and thereby casting doubt over the possibility of achieving that vision. Jameson’s writing on temporality elucidates the ways in which Le Guin pursues a utopian future without submitting to the replicative logic of reproductive futurism. Rather than insisting on forwards progress and growth, Le Guin conceptualises a temporality that proceeds through indirection and circularity. The first section explores the portrayal of the child at the centre of “Omelas”, whose presence both reinforces and subverts reproductive futurism. The story’s narrative layers events in such a way as to refuse to replicate the traditional chronological structure of much realist fiction, resonating with Ensor’s recognition of an “alternate, nonlinear, somehow askew futurity” (417).
The second section explores Le Guin’s presentation in “The Day Before” of the role of future generations in establishing futurity. Like “Omelas”, this story has a
non-chronological narrative structure, which, coupled with the ambivalence of its narrator
towards the future, allows it to articulate an understanding of temporality that does not follow the obsessive linearity and positivism of reproductive futurism. “The Day Before” values indirect and ambivalent approaches to the future, which can be read in line with what Ensor terms an “avuncular form of stewardship” (409). While Le Guin evinces some commitment to the Child that Edelman posits as the symbolic goal of all future-orientated politics, she refuses to reassert a linear understanding of temporality and thus exemplifies a conceptualisation of the future as not a replication of the present but an unfamiliar reimagining of it.
I build on these notions of the non-linear emergence and unfamiliarity of the future in the third chapter. In the first section, I look at how the story “With Fish” presents one
couple’s pregnancy with a shifting tone encompassing joy, ambivalence, and loss that reflects a parallel shift in the narrative’s portrayal of temporality. While Edelman’s thesis positions the future as a legible and concrete object, Ensor posits a model for the future based on the figure of the spinster aunt, whose future is “less traditionally familial, that is to say […] also less insistently familiar” (419). “With Fish” disrupts conceptions of reproduction and parenthood that are rooted in reproductive futurism, instead exhibiting an awareness of the unfamiliarity and unexpectedness of these processes.
In the second section, I examine the competing temporalities of childhood at work in the story “With Egg”. On the one hand, the narrative lays bare the reproductive futurist ideology embedded in abstinence-only curricula at US schools. On the other, it shows how this schooling leaves pupils woefully underprepared for the real difficulties that they face. The narrative is structured around this and other contrasts, such as the juxtaposition of the US school system’s standardised version of care with the protagonists’ genuine care for both each other and the creature they raise. It is this capacity for care for an unanticipated creature, as well as the unexpected ending of the story, that challenges reproductive futurist notions of the temporality of childhood and situates the future as unrecognisable and unexpected.
What follows is thus an attempt to resituate conceptions of futurity as they are
subtended by representations of reproduction in short speculative fiction. In doing so, I hope to broaden the reach of the critical conversation concerning literary works that, while thus far overlooked in terms of their presentation of reproductive futurism, reveal much that is of interest on this subject.
1
“TODAY’S CHILDREN […] HAD NO FUTURE”
AFROFUTURISM AND INDIRECT INVESTMENT IN OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S SHORT FICTION
Little has been written about Octavia E. Butler’s attitude towards reproductive futurism, despite Gerry Canavan’s claim that an “interest in reproductive futurity […] dominates many of Butler’s novels” (25). What work that does exist on this subject for the most part engages with her Xenogenesis trilogy, otherwise known as Lilith’s Brood.2 That Butler’s short stories have thus far been comparatively overlooked with regard to this subject suggests a discomfort with their surface-level reinforcement of reproductive futurism. Canavan is critical of Butler’s engagement, pointing to how “many of her ‘survivor’ heroines are forced to make terrible compromises and endure unthinkable hardships in the name of children” (25). To make this argument he draws attention to Lilith, the protagonist of the Xenogenesis trilogy who endures a nuclear war and is held captive by an alien race before being impregnated and giving birth to the child meant to usher in a new future. Butler demonstrates the same
tendency to position children as symbols of hope in her short fiction,3 a choice which Edelman’s polemic condemns as indicative of the “pro-procreative ideology” of “our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity” (12). While her writing often depicts dystopian futures, Butler invariably insists on ending her work on a note of optimism. “Speech Sounds” (1983) shows its protagonist succeeding in her search for a family and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987) ends with its protagonist’s discovery that the
2 See Gogul, Mann, Obourn. Each of these critics find in Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy a presentation of alternative
futures that do not adhere to the logic of reproductive futurism.
3 Here, and throughout this thesis, I use the term “symbol” as it is defined by Charles Sanders Peirce: “a sign
which is determined by its dynamic object only in the sense that it will be so interpreted [and which] thus depends either upon a convention, a habit, or a natural disposition of its interpretant, or of the field of its interpretant” (391).
disease she had viewed as a curse in fact grants her the ability to protect others. Butler herself acknowledges this consistent movement towards optimism in the afterword to her short story “Speech Sounds”: “I began the story feeling little hope or liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back. It always seems to do that” (85). This articulation, in its assertion of the need for retaining hope in the future, aligns with Butler’s broadly Afrofuturist sensibility.
Butler’s writing has been closely associated with Afrofuturism since the term’s inauguration (Dery 180), and it is this aspect of her work that can be read as enabling its presentation of futures that do not uphold the ideology of reproductive futurism. Mark Dery, who coined the term in 1993, defines Afrofuturism as encompassing “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture” (180). His emphasis is on the need to “imagine possible futures” (180) that defy those offered by dominant culture, which he suggests necessitates an engagement with and rediscovery of a collective history. The queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz cites Afrofuturism as a key philosophy that Edelman ignores in order to make his argument, suggesting that “theories of queer temporality that fail to factor in the relational relevance of race or class merely reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal” (94). His implication is that any consideration of queer futurity must account for the inadequacy of the present for those who are not a “white gay subject”. For Muñoz, reproductive futurism is an ideology predicated as much on whiteness as on heterosexual reproduction, meaning that Edelman repudiates a future that for some is uncertain, or even nonexistent. Butler’s fiction imagines futurities that extend beyond Edelman’s temporal structuring, insisting on the presence of black people in these futures. Her work thus elucidates a potential approach to the future that Edelman disavows, even as it relies on the symbolism of the Child that Edelman’s thesis so compellingly delineates. Butler’s
short stories “Speech Sounds” and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” both present dystopian futures in which the question of whether or not to have children is
paramount. While Muñoz asserts that Edelman’s “framing […] accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white” (95), Butler’s characters are never “always already white”, but rather explicitly or implicitly racialised as black. By
channeling hope for the future through the figures of black children, her work represents a deliberate effort to envision black futures, situating itself firmly within the Afrofuturist project.
It is therefore no coincidence that their portrayal of children disassociates the process of care from biological affiliation. While Butler’s fiction remains firmly on what Edelman refers to as “the side of those who are […] ‘fighting for the children’” (3), it also reveals a lack of faith in the heteronormative nuclear familial structure and demonstrates an awareness of what Ensor refers to as the “vertical axes of transmission and inheritance that define
reproductive futurism” (422). I take Ensor’s figure of the spinster as a “nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figure” (410) to show how Butler’s futures proceed through a non-linear process of inheritance and operate through indirect investment
In the first section, I consider how Butler’s positioning of the Child in “Speech Sounds” as not only a symbol of, but the mouthpiece for, the future coheres with Edelman’s characterisation of the ideology of reproductive futurism. I argue that this articulation of the future through the Child prioritises the communication of knowledge over the transfer of genetic material; this, coupled with the formation of a non-normative familial structure at the end of the story, shifts the story away from reproductive futurism and towards a non-linear understanding of temporality. The second section examines how “The Evening” develops this portrayal of the future by depicting its protagonist as choosing to dedicate her own future to caring for a community of people with whom she shares no biological connection. I suggest that this choice models a form of indirect investment in the future that the narrative explicitly
presents as preferable to reproduction. Both stories embrace a future whose emergence complicates the logic of reproductive futurism. While the symbolic value of the Child is prominent in these works, Butler’s presentation of futurity points towards an understanding of of a temporality that is subjective and non-linear.
Grunting and Gesturing: Articulating the Future
Despite containing perhaps the most striking example of the Child as a symbol of futurity in Butler’s short fiction, “Speech Sounds” complicates the logic of reproductive futurism by disassociating futurity from linear progression. The story is dystopian, depicting the California of a disease-ravaged near-future in which humans have become both illiterate and incapable of verbal communication. The disabling effects of the pandemic lead to widespread violence, amidst which Valerie Rye, a former professor who retains the ability to speak and understand spoken language, struggles to survive and find meaning in her life. The story concludes when Rye encounters two recently orphaned children who retain the ability to speak, whom she decides to raise and teach. This ending offers the intergenerational communication of knowledge of the past as a solution to the violence of the story’s present. Thus “Speech Sounds” evinces both a dependence on the Child as a symbol of hope and an anxiety to return to a prior state of existence, tendencies which Edelman decries as embedded in reproductive futurist ideology. Yet Butler’s narrative also reflects what Mark Dery refers to as the “troubling antinomy” to which Afrofuturism gives rise: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” (180). “Speech Sounds”, in which speech is mutilated – reduced to “grunting and gesturing” (71) – and historical documentation rendered illegible – as is evidenced by the “books […] burned as fuel (79) –
demonstrates the challenges of articulating a possible future when one has no access to the past.
“Speech Sounds” reinforces the association of the Child with the future through its insistence on the value of verbal communication. Rye frequently compares the people around her to animals, referring to her predatory neighbour as “the animal across the street” (80) and lamenting that “today’s children […] ran through the streets chasing one another and
hooting like chimpanzees. They had no future” (79). These descriptions draw on a racist discourse linking humanness with intellectual capacity, indicating that Rye perceives those who do not possess language as lacking humanity. As Maria Holmgren Troy notes, these examples of zoomorphism represent “some of very few instances of metaphoric usage in ‘Speech Sounds’” (76). Outside of these few instances, the narrative structure reflects the story’s preoccupation with the degradation of communication, being composed of short, factual sentences and almost entirely devoid of figurative language. The comparatively plain prose intensifies the significance of the few uses of metaphor, emphasising Rye’s sense of separation from those who lack the capacity for communication. Moreover, the explicit link that Rye makes between the children’s apparently animal state and their having “no future” implies that not only is language what distinguishes humans from animals, but also that the capacity for communication is necessary for working towards a new future. One of the few examples of figurative language in the narrative is the onomatopoeic “grunting” (71, 72), “squawk[ing]” (71), “roar[ing]” (71), and “hooting” (79) of the speechless characters, which amidst the otherwise bare prose reinforce the sense of chaos that comes with the inability to communicate. With her reference to “today’s children”, Rye alludes to the children’s and indeed society’s atemporal state, situating the Child as a signifier of the lack of forwards progression. This association is reinforced by the marked increase in figurative language towards the story’s conclusion, when the young girl, in speaking, “unknowingly gave Rye a
gift” (82), and Rye introduces herself to the children, “savoring the words” (83). Troy points out that these metaphors “are used in the context of successful communication, emphasizing the turnabout of the ending towards hope” (76). Read in the light of the previous instances of figurative language, in which metaphor is used to highlight the differences between those capable of articulation and those who are not, this language points to a future in which the power of articulation is reasserted. Thus this turn towards hope rests not only on the figure of the Child but also on the Child’s capacity to communicate with, and learn from, an adult figure.
Indeed, Rye’s commitment to not having children demonstrates that, in Butler’s schema, the Child alone is an insufficient vehicle for the future. When Rye meets a man called Obsidian who is able to read, and with whom she has a gestural conversation that touches on the deaths of her three children, she reflects that:
She had told herself that the children growing up now were to be pitied. They would run through the downtown canyons with no real memory of what the buildings had been or even how they had come to be. Today’s children gathered books as well as wood to be burned as fuel. (79)
Rye’s emphasis on the children’s lack of “real memory” of their environment and their willingness to use “books […] as fuel” indicates that she believes it is their separation from knowledge of the past that leads to the pitiful state of these children. This conviction is emphasised by the metaphor that casts the city streets as “downtown canyons”, signifying Rye’s view that these children’s world is constituted by a vast figurative as well as material emptiness. Samuel R. Delany, a science fiction writer and contemporary of Butler’s, says of Americans of African descent that “the historical reason that we’ve been so impoverished in terms of future images is because, until fairly recently, as a people we were systematically forbidden any images of our past” (Dery 190-191). “Speech Sounds”, too, connects a lack of
access to the past to an inability to forge a new future. Yet there is also a sense in which the narrative retains traces of Rye’s remaining hope. That the above passage follows immediately on from Rye’s memory of the loss of her three children implies that it is in part an attempt on Rye’s behalf to console herself for their loss. This is reinforced by the prefacing of her
thoughts with the phrase “she had told herself”, which suggests that they do not reflect Rye’s true feelings. Such continued hope is also evident towards the end of the story, when Rye finds herself unable to follow through on her decision to leave the two orphaned children to fend for themselves. Crucially, Rye’s realisation that “she would have to take the children home with her” (82) comes before the revelation that they are capable of speech,
demonstrating that her decision does not hinge on any hope in the future. Thus while “Speech Sounds” draws on the reproductive futurist “investment in the Child as the
obligatory token of futurity” to imply a connection between an understanding of the past and the possibility of a future, it does so without endorsing what would be for Edelman a “pro-procreative ideology” (12).
Rye’s avoidance of pregnancy and her lack of faith in a future for the human species characterise a response that can be read in line with Edelman’s promotion of the death drive of the social order. Edelman states that “the death drive names […] the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (9), and Rye appears to embody this stance. Rye makes
frequent references to her lack of will to live, claiming that “she had left her home, finally, because she had come near to killing herself” (77) and “to avoid […] putting her gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger” (79). The directionless shape of the narrative mimics Rye’s sense of purposelessness, as well as that of society at large. This purposelessness casts the world as having departed from the teleological linearity of historical time and entered an atemporal state. Though Kristeva regards this monumental time as “necessarily maternal” (17), in “Speech Sounds” it is opposed to rather than associated with maternity. The repeated
references to Rye’s gun, on which she depends for her survival, shore up her opposition to maternity as well as social viability. As the narrator implies by explaining that “in this world where the only likely common language was body language, being armed was often enough” (74), the threat of violence has become a stand-in for communication. Indeed, references to guns proliferate throughout the narrative, appearing at the moments when Rye experiences vulnerability – such as when being threatened by a stranger, experiencing jealousy towards Obsidian for being literate, and shooting the man who killed Obsidian. Yet the guns in “Speech Sounds” also pose a threat to their owners; that Obsidian is shot dead with his own pistol demonstrates the limits of their protective capabilities. When Rye chooses to protect the two orphaned children after witnessing the sudden deaths of three people, she justifies her decision by stating that “surely there had been enough dying” (82). By deflecting from this violence with the introduction of spoken language to the narrative, the ending of “Speech Sounds” rediscovers a form of social viability, and positions itself in opposition to the death drive of the social order.
Though “Speech Sounds” appears to promote kinship ties, it does not uphold the primacy of the heteronormative nuclear family unit. Rye clearly associates the loneliness and danger of her life with the loss of her family members, stating that “the illness had stripped her, killing her children one by one, killing her husband, her sister, her parents...” (75). By listing these deaths with rapidity and austerely spare diction, referring to her family members in terms of their relation to her rather than their names, Rye demonstrates her inability to face these losses directly. That the story begins with her attempt to make a dangerous journey in the hopes of finding her brother and two nephews, and that she immediately abandons this plan on finding companionship with Obsidian, demonstrates the centrality of kinship to Rye’s survival as well as to her sense of purpose. Indeed, Canavan claims that “Butler consistently deploys a logic of reproductive futurity in her fictions about survival: characters in her stories
survive insofar as, and perhaps because, they survive to have children; characters who are not able to complete the reproductive circuit tend to fall out of her narratives” (26). Yet the ending of “Speech Sounds” undermines this interpretation; while the story’s denouement occurs when Rye decides to care for two orphaned children, it also involves the death of Obsidian, who would have completed their nuclear family unit. Kristeva writes that “the refusal of the paternal function by lesbian and single mothers […] cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order” (30). That the story presents a family headed by a single mother who is not a blood relation of her children as providing the possibility for a new future
suggests a willingness to confront that social order. The refusal to situate the heteronormative nuclear family as the source of this new future suggests that the optimistic ending of “Speech Sounds” is not predicated solely on the logic of reproductive futurism. Amelia Z. Greene makes a similar point when she writes that in much of Butler’s fiction “the notion of kinship and familial ties extends beyond biological connection” (58). It is by overriding of the supposed primacy of biological connection that “Speech Sounds” tentatively promotes an asymmetric investment in futurity. In doing so, the story departs from the ideology of
reproductive futurism, upholding alternative kinship structures as capable of facilitating new futures.
“Speech Sounds” complicates the critical narrative that presents Butler’s fiction as dominated by an investment in reproductive futurism. While the story identifies children as vehicles for futurity, it also positions a capacity for communication as crucial to the challenge of envisioning a future. The narrative’s characterisation of those affected by the disease as successively “grunting” (71, 72), “squawk[ing]” (71), “roar[ing]” (71), and “hooting” (79) connects their lack of speech with animality. This association centres the importance of the transmission of information from one generation to the next, thus decentring the Child from the actualisation of futurity. Butler draws on concern over the erasure of black histories to
further emphasise the importance of communication, suggesting that knowledge of the past is necessary for the ability to articulate a future. The absence of speech in the story correlates to an absence of history, and thus it is through articulation, rather than the Child, that Butler connects past to future. Though “Speech Sounds” can be read as resonant with Edelman’s concept of the death drive of the social order, demonstrating Rye’s resistance to bearing children and society’s substitution of violence for communication, this resonance only serves to reinforce the dystopian quality of the story and the importance of upholding social
viability. It is the formation of a family unit that does not conform to reproductive norms of biological relation, but instead centres the importance of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, that signals a way forward for the future. In this way, “Speech Sounds” prioritises the power of articulation as a means of accessing futurity, and advocates for an indirect investment in the future.
Sterilize the Lot of Us: Indirect Investment in the Future
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” presents an even clearer endorsement of indirect investment in the future, one which directly challenges the primacy of
reproduction. The story depicts a world in which those suffering from the late-onset genetic disorder Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD) face educational discrimination and social stigma alongside the inevitability of eventually experiencing horrific symptoms including self-mutilation and mental deterioration. When Lynn, a young woman who has inherited DGD from both of her parents, discovers her ability to mitigate the more damaging symptoms in others suffering from the disease, she commits herself to a lifetime of caring for future generations of “DGDs”. There are clear parallels between Butler’s presentation of
temporality in “The Evening” and Sarah Ensor’s promotion of the figure of the spinster as a model for understanding the future. Ensor writes that “the spinster stands in a kind of slanted
or oblique relationship to the linear, vertical paradigms of transmission that govern familial notions of futurity” (416), and Butler offers a similar rejection of the presumed linearity and verticality of the emergence of the future. Unlike with Rye, Lynn’s refusal to have biological children does not lead to her adoption of a parental role at the end of the story, and this circumstance disassociates investment in the future from the process of genetic inheritance. The optimistic conclusion to the story occurs without recourse to the culture of the Child, and the narrative operates beyond the scope of the linear temporality imposed by reproductive futurism. Instead, “The Evening” promotes a form of investment in the future that is indirect but substantial.
The portrayal of DGDs in “The Evening” emphasises the discrimination to which they are subjected, producing a dystopian narrative that is more clearly informed by historical injustice than is “Speech Sounds”. The story begins violently, with an attempted suicide and two deaths on the first page alone, leading Lynn to explain that the stigma surrounding her condition “has inspired restrictive laws, created problems with jobs, housing, schools” (34). This rapid narrative expansion from a singular event to the listing of broad areas of social inequity immediately establishes the social conditions facing DGDs. Given that Butler’s fiction is deeply embedded in Afrodiasporic experience, critics have pointed to the ways in which the characters’ experiences mirror racist discrimination in the US. Isiah Lavender III calls “The Evening” “a race story”, arguing that “those suffering from the fictional genetic illness called DGD are in fact victims of cultural racism, figurative blackness, and racial Othering” (68). Butler’s depiction of not only the discriminatory practices in operation in schools and workplaces but also of repeated references to DGDs’ food as “dog biscuits” (35) and the social stigma that leads to their being treated like “lepers” (35) produces clear parallels with the treatment of black people in the US since the era of Jim Crow. That the narration in “The Evening” is autodiegetic (Bal, Narrative Theory 266) gives these injustices a
sense of immediacy, reinforcing the negativity of Butler’s outlook and demonstrating a preoccupation with the fact that, as Muñoz asserts, “the present is not enough” (27). The story traces the characters’ various attempts to find meaning in their lives, while
acknowledging the likelihood of their being preemptively forestalled; as Lynn states of her double DGD boyfriend, “as bright as Alan was, he might not get into medical school because of his double inheritance” (38). The reference to a “double inheritance” in particular recalls the race biology that formulated the one-drop rule and other forms of racial classification. Thus the allegorical implications of “The Evening” draw a connection between the “figurative blackness” of DGDs and their relationship to the present and to the future.
Reading “The Evening” as an allegory for racial Othering allows for an examination of how attitudes towards reproduction and the future are racially differentiated. Alan’s reaction to having DGD is to project his bitterness and anger onto the world, leading to a caustic rejection of reproductive futurity that appears to align with Edelman’s position. Not only has Alan undergone sterilisation, but he also plans to commit suicide as soon as he begins to experience symptoms. Yet Alan’s anger towards DGDs who have had children – including his own parents – indicates an opposition to futurity that stems from a logic that is very different to Edelman’s. Alan serves as the mouthpiece for much of the racist discourse surrounding reproductive rights, as is apparent from his complaint that “the damned disease could be wiped out in one generation […] but people are still animals when it comes to breeding” (38). This diatribe forms part of a conversation that Lynn recounts in full, a rare occurrence in a narrative that up until this point has had a fast rhythm (Bal, Narratology 110). Butler’s choice to slow the narrative pace at this moment allow these ideas to form a thematic response to the preceding events. Alan’s argument evokes a long history of eugenics that rests on appeals to reason and the classification of certain racial demographics as “animals”. Indeed, his earlier declaration that “hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us” (37)
recalls the practice of forced sterilisation in the US that disproportionately affected black women (Krase par. 27). Alan’s juxtaposition of a nameless “they” and “us” – as well as Lynn’s response that “I don’t want kids, but I don’t want someone else telling me I can’t have any” (37) – reinforce the implication that his attitude poses a risk to bodily autonomy and
reproductive rights. By having Alan voice his opinions from within a racist and eugenicist discourse, Butler casts doubt upon the validity of his opposition to the future. That Alan, of all the characters in “The Evening”, is the only one whose blackness the narrative makes explicit further solidifies the racial connotations of his words. By associating Alan’s rhetoric with eugenicist and racist ideology, the narrative provokes sympathy with his despair while still affirming the importance of working towards a future.
“The Evening”, as its title hints, is concerned with non-linear temporality. Butler introduces DGD as an illness that is inextricable from temporal concerns; in the very first paragraph, Lynn states that the DGD ward “was where I was headed no matter what. It was only a matter of when: now or later” (33). That Lynn speaks here in the past tense solidifies the certainty of her future; it is this inevitability of DGDs’ future condition that determines their behaviour and treatment in the present, affecting their dietary needs as well as their educational and job prospects. This projection of DGDs’ certain future into their present resonates with Edelman’s critique of futurism as “generat[ing] generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness” (60). In fact, one of the defining characteristics of the disease, for those affected by it, is that it takes away the future. This characterisation is maintained throughout the narrative, and Butler makes clear that it results from cultural rather than genetic causes. Responding to the claim that “healthy people say no one can concentrate like a DGD”, Lynn points out that “healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid generalizations and short attention spans” (36). Her statement demonstrates how the time
limit that DGD imposes on her life affects her relationship to time in her daily life. The late-occurring symptoms of the disease impact sufferers’ experience of the present, producing a narrative that rests on a non-linear conceptualisation of temporality. Here, the autodiegetic narration enables the reader to not only receive but in fact experience this understanding of time. Since these claims are made in Lynn’s own voice, their bald, factual tone reflects how Lynn’s perceived lack of time motivates her refusal of verbal subtlety or embellishment. By stressing the cultural reasons for this difference and directing criticism towards the majority group, Lynn’s comment connects the allegory of racial Othering in “The Evening” to the differing temporal experiences of DGDs and “healthy people”. In doing so, the narrative unsettles the naturalised temporal logic of reproductive futurism.
The story’s resolution occurs when Lynn discovers a means of contributing to the future. On realising that she possesses the ability to encourage uncontrolled DGDs to direct their energies in a healthier direction, Lynn decides to dedicate her life to this task. Unlike the conclusion to “Speech Sounds”, this ending does not rely on the logic of reproductive
futurism, since the figure of the Child makes no appearance. In fact Beatrice, the head of the Dilg DGD retreat, cautions against either Lynn or Alan having children. Her statement that “most DGDs have the sense not to marry each other and produce children” (51) contains an implicit but clear expression of disapproval towards DGDs who reproduce, though in a manner that is more measured that Alan’s earlier diatribe. Her language is devoid of emotion, using the dispassionate phrase “produce children” to condemn a lack of “sense”. This
contrasts with the more emotive language of “trust” that Beatrice employs when comparing her patients’ trust in her to “the way any blind person would trust her guide” (54). This metaphor also solidifies the non-biological and non-hierarchical nature of this relationship, pointing to the importance of intergenerational relationships that are not based on the parent-child paradigm. Butler’s promotion of these qualities resonates with Ensor’s offering of “the
figure of the spinster [… who] practices an avuncular form of stewardship, tending the future without contributing directly to it” (409). It is this manner of investing in the future on which the narrative resolution depends, and Beatrice, who functions as the spokesperson for it, can be read as a spinster figure in that she is presumably childless and her husband is now a patient at Dilg. In these ways, Butler demonstrates that Lynn’s relationship to those under her care will not be based on either heredity or the transmission of knowledge from one
generation to the next, but rather on a more horizontal affiliation that involves offering direction. Thus “The Evening” establishes a commitment to the future without depending on the figure of the Child. Instead, the narrative prioritises an “avuncular form of stewardship” over the parental model of investment in the future on which reproductive futurist ideology insists.
“The Evening” maintains a fierce commitment to the future without upholding the icon of the Child as its symbol. Butler’s depiction of the discrimination and stigma
experienced by DGDs encourages a reading of the story as a racial allegory, and thus offers a conception of futurity that is shaped by the racist history of reproductive rights in the US. While Butler’s portrayal of Alan is sympathetic, her implication of the compatibility of his views with eugenics and enforced sterilisation paints his nihilistic views as abhorrent. While this presentation suggests a narrative opposition to Edelman’s rejection of the future, “The Evening” does coincide with Edelman’s assessment of the generational succession implicit in the reproductive futurist conception of temporality. The characteristics of DGD, which shape sufferers’ present behaviour and treatment by taking away their possibility of a future, are inseparable from their impact on DGDs’ unique relationship to time. It is by discovering a means of contributing to the future that Lynn finds a purpose that depends not on
reproduction but on guiding her fellow DGDs away from destructive behaviour. Through its disassociation of futurity from either genetic inheritance or hierarchical affiliation, “The
Evening” refuses to adhere to the logic of reproductive futurism, instead advocating for indirect investment in the future.
Conclusion
Butler’s short fiction evinces an implicit faith in the value of futurity. Both “Speech Sounds” and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” reach their resolutions through identifying a method of working towards a future that is better than the grim present that these stories depict. On the surface, “Speech Sounds” finds an easy resolution in the discovery of children whose ability to communicate enables them to signify the possibility of a future. Edelman’s assertions about the fetishisation of the Child prove resonant to Butler’s
presentation of the breakdown of the family unit – signified by the presence of parentless children on the streets – as shorthand for the hopelessness of their lives. In “The Evening”, Butler associates the characters’ staunch opposition to having children with the discourse and history of racial eugenics and thus discourages a favourable reading of this anti-reproductive stance. Both stories link the protagonist’s complicated attitude towards reproduction to their lack of hope in the future, and thus reify the politics of the Child that Edelman outlines.
Yet Butler’s fiction does not surrender to the ideology of reproductive futurism in its pursuance of an optimistic ending; both stories conclude with a vision of futurity that neither models itself on the replication of the heteronormative nuclear family unit nor insists on the replication of the preexisting social order. While Kristeva criticises the “refusal of the paternal function” as failing to “propos[e] an alternative to” the social order that such a refusal
troubles (30), “Speech Sounds” conceives of a future social order that is rooted in the past. Though the story centres children in its conception of futurity, it does so to emphasise the importance of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Children are symbols not of their own innocence and vulnerability bur rather of the inaccessibility of the past. Butler’s
fiction demonstrates an awareness of the ongoing impact of history on the present, and she draws on historical experiences from within the African diaspora in the US in her
presentation of reproduction and temporality. In so doing, she depicts futurity as emerging non-linearly and unexpectedly. “The Evening” takes this conceptualisation of temporality further, explicitly prioritising indirect investment in the future over reproductive investment. Lynn, in her reluctant decision to care for future generations of DGDs, fortifies the narrative’s emphasis on the importance of forms of care for and investment in future generations that is not rooted in the preservation of the heteronormative family unit or the sanctity of the parent-child relationship.
Butler’s depiction of the non-linear emergence of the future allows for a productive response to the problem of reproductive futurism and Edelman’s critique of it. This portrayal dovetails with the portrayal of temporality throughout “The Evening”, in which DGDs experience time differently to “healthy people”. Reading these moments alongside Ensor’s writing on spinster ecology reveals these works as bypassing the “vertical axes of transmission and inheritance that define reproductive futurism” (Ensor 422) while still remaining
committed to forwards progression. In this way, Butler’s fiction operates without a whole-hearted endorsement of the logic of reproductive futurism yet remains continuously engaged in its search for a better future.
2
“A TRUE DAUGHTER OF ANARCHY”
GOING SIDEWAYS TO UTOPIA WITH URSULA K. LE GUIN
In the introduction to what is possibly her most renowned work, the novel The Left
Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes that “science fiction isn’t about the future” (The Left Hand xvi). Instead, she argues, the future is a metaphor of which the genre makes frequent
use. This declaration elucidates not only Le Guin’s approach to writing science fiction, but also how she uses the future as an imaginative space for exploring the present. While
establishing the novelist’s role as one of description rather than prescription, Le Guin engages with the future to work through questions of political and social viability. A prime example of this is her utopian fiction, two examples of which I turn to in this chapter. Fredric Jameson regards Le Guin’s works as gesturing towards humanity’s inability to conceive of utopia, suggesting that Le Guin’s emphasis is less on utopia than on “our own incapacity to conceive it in the first place” (Jameson, “World Reduction” 230). Indeed, Le Guin’s utopian vision is deeply ambivalent, offering up worlds where the compromises that their inhabitants make to create a utopia are perhaps too great. An important element of the fiction addressed in this chapter is that it grapples with the ever-present possibility of the inadequacy the utopia it depicts. This ambivalence as to the possibility of true utopia invites a critical connection between Le Guin’s utopian worlds and Edelman’s rejection of the future. Edelman’s assertion that the future is not only not worth pursuing but should in fact be renounced speaks to Le Guin’s portrayal of the inadequacy of utopia. Moreover, Le Guin maintains the figure of the Child as the emblem of futurity in her fiction, capitalising on its cultural associations with innocence and vulnerability. Yet, through its temporal structuring, Le Guin’s fiction resists the replicative logic of reproductive futurism.
Kristeva situates the cyclical time that she regards as culturally associated with female subjectivity in opposition to “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival – in other words, the time of history” (17); it is this latter understanding of time which Le Guin’s fiction critiques. While Butler maintains a faith in forwards progression, Le Guin establishes a less linear conceptualisation of temporality. This is one of the most radical aspects of Le Guin’s approach to the future, since it involves operating beyond the naturalised idea of constant growth. Jameson claims that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (“Future City” 76), yet in her utopian fiction Le Guin attempts to do the latter without doing the former. For Le Guin, then, active engagement with the future functions as a rejection of the assumptions
concerning progress and futurism on which the present moment is predicated. She insists on the future’s non-linear emergence from the present, an idea that is in keeping with Ensor’s challenging of “the notion of the future as a readily reachable and readily identifiable realm out there” (417). In doing so, Le Guin emphasises an understanding of time that prioritises circularity and sideways movement, pushing back against the temporal framework grounded in the fetishisation of progress and growth.
In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) and “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974), the use of non-chronological and layered narratives reinforces this reworking of temporal norms. These works are, respectively, the penultimate and final offerings in Le Guin’s short story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975). Although these stories take place on different worlds, this adjacent placement establishes a continuation from one to the next, as does Le Guin’s claim in her prologue to “The Day Before” that “this story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas” (Twelve Quarters 118). The
differences in tone, scope, and focus of these stories allow them to offer differing accounts of temporal progression, yet both refuse existing models of temporality. Jameson’s work on the
impact of capitalism on conceptualisations of time proves resonant to Le Guin’s fiction. In particular, his assertion that “it is essentially the inner dynamic of the market system which introduces into the chronicle-like and seasonal, cyclical, tempo of pre-capitalist societies the fever and ferment of what we used to call progress” (“World Reduction” 228) speaks to the establishment of cyclical, rather than linear, models of temporality within the utopian vision that Le Guin’s writing presents.
In the first section of this chapter I address the symbolism of the child whose existence is central to the plot of “Omelas”, demonstrating the ways in which the narrator exploits readers’ immersion in reproductive futurism to justify her flawed utopian vision. I situate Le Guin’s ambivalence as a strategic manifestation of the contradictions that characterise
reproductive futurism as well as means of suggesting the necessity of embracing a future, even one that is profoundly unfamiliar. The second section examines how the presentation of temporality in “The Day Before” aligns with the “avuncular form of stewardship” (409) that Ensor highlights in her development of the concept of spinster ecology. Though this story retains a stake in the ideological association of children with the future, it moves away from reproduction as model for temporal progression, instead prioritising rhythm and instability in its depiction of the future. While the dependence of Le Guin’s fiction on the Child as a vehicle for the future indicates its at least partial complicity in reproductive futurism, the temporal narratives that the stories produce do not cohere with the replication of sameness or ideas of progress and growth. Instead, temporality in Le Guin’s fiction operates through a circularity and sideways movement that allows for the embrace of a future without fetishising progress.
Walk Ahead into the Darkness: An Unviable Utopia
“Omelas” expresses this circularity through its narrative form, which is emphatically non-linear and abstains from mimicking a traditional chronological plot. The story does not
describe an individual life or lives but rather gives an overview of an ostensibly utopian
society from the perspective of an outsider to that society. There are therefore no characters – with the possible exceptions of the child on whom the narrative centres and the narrator herself – and the story lacks a chronological, causal narrative, being written almost entirely in the present tense. The story begins with a description of Omelas’s “Festival of Summer” (114) that emphasises the joy of the citizens and the beauty of their city. The narrator then invites the reader to imagine their own version of utopia if they find the one depicted in the narrative unconvincing; it is this apparent narratorial flexibility that first signals the ambivalence of Le Guin’s utopian vision. Concerned that her readers remain unconvinced, the narrator confides that the existence of this perfect society depends on the unremitting suffering of one child, who has been separated from their family and locked in a dark room without access to human affection. The existence of this child, as the narrator explains, is common knowledge to the all the citizens of Omelas. While most appear able to accept this compromise, those who refuse to instead walk away from the lights of Omelas and into the darkness, and it is this image on which the story ends. This ordering of events, coupled with the fact that each of the events that the narrator depicts is meant to represent multiple occurrences of that event, produces a temporal layering that establishes Le Guin’s approach to futurity as fundamentally different to the one mandated by reproductive futurism.
The narrator of “Omelas” draws on reproductive futurist ideology when she evinces a troubling willingness to evoke the suffering of a child as a metaphor for humanity’s
wrongdoings. The vivid and insistent detail with which the narrator describes the “mass of festered sores” (Le Guin, Twelve Quarters 115) on the child’s skin contrasts with her consciously vague construction of a society which “could perfectly well have central heating” (Le Guin,
Twelve Quarters 112) and in which there “ought to be beer” (Le Guin, Twelve Quarters 113). This
of the citizens’ happiness, forming part of a rhetorical strategy that makes utopia seem unattainable. By doing so, the narrator provides an illustration of how the “Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under seige [sic], condenses a fantasy of vulnerability” (Edelman 21); her tactic both makes readers complicit in the torture and compels them to feel the anger and pity felt by the citizens of Omelas. That she also states unequivocally that the citizens of Omelas “all understand that their happiness […] depend[s] wholly on this child’s abominable misery” (Le Guin, Twelve Quarters 115) without giving an explanation for this state of affairs is a deliberate excision of information, one that morally compromises the narrative premise. Since she is absent from the story that she narrates, the narrator is heterodiegetic (Bal, Narrative Theory 266), a fact which makes her intentions and biases – as well as the matter of how she came by the knowledge she imparts – unclear. The result is that the narrative, most of which is focalised by the narrator, becomes suspicious to the reader. “Omelas” hints at the fallibility of its narrator through the disjunction of the horrors of the child’s
predicament with the narrator’s calm – even flippant – justification of it. Laurie Langbauer suggests that “Le Guin maintains a rigorous ironic distance from her narrator precisely in order to explore the ways individuals make use of others in our regard of them” (102). The implication of this argument is that Le Guin’s production of narratorial distance critiques the narrative’s exploitation of the child’s suffering. This then creates a twofold understanding of Le Guin’s use of the figure of the Child, in that she relies on its emotive power while
simultaneously disavowing that very strategy.
The ambivalence with which Le Guin invests the figure of the Child allows the
narrative to work from within reproductive futurist discourse without fully adhering to it. The narrator’s description of how the child whose suffering sustains Omelas “can remember […] its mother’s voice” despite having been separated from her at a young age (Le Guin, Twelve
pathos that is rooted in the child’s awareness of the existence of a familial structure from which it is excluded. That the narrator makes no further mention of the child’s mother – or indeed of any other details about the child’s origins – enables the discursive as well as material isolation of the child from its wider community. Moreover, this scene occurs at what Bal would regard as a low frequency (Narratology 109) – that is, it represents multiple instances of the child crying out for help – and so reinforces the narrative’s exclusion of detail. It is this disavowal of the child’s relation to society at large that makes it possible for the citizens of Omelas to rationalise the continuation of its suffering. As a result of its isolation, the child represents no loss of what Edelman refers to as “a threatened familial futurity” (116) and so is able to persist in its anguish. The implied deficiency of the narrator, perhaps most evident when she unconvincingly asserts that the child “is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy” (Twelve Quarters 116), enables “Omelas” to stage a critique of the citizens’ discursive disavowal of this child and its pain. Le Guin’s deployment of the Child in “Omelas” is
informed by reproductive futurism but also by a subtle critique of its implications. Thus while the story’s suffering child becomes the locus for the possibility of a proclaimed utopia, its clearly dystopian state must be disavowed by the citizens of Omelas – and by extension the reader – for the narrative to cohere.
If Le Guin positions Omelas as a dystopia rounded up to a utopia, her sole gesture towards a possible better future occurs at the story’s end, when various citizens “leave
Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness” even though “it is possible that it [the place they are going to] does not exist” (Twelve Quarters 117). The narrator’s inability to describe the destination of these deserters demonstrates the unviability of their actions within the context of the narrative. In fact, the underhand operations of the narrative collapse at this moment of dissent; as Shoshana Knapp puts it, “unable to tolerate the immoral universe created by the narrator, they [the dissenters] walk straight out of the story” (80), and in doing so end it. The
