The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower"Author(s): Jerry PhillipsSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 35, No. 2/3, Contemporary African AmericanFiction and the Politics of Postmodernism (Spring - Summer, 2002), pp. 299-311Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346188 .Accessed: 14/09/2011 20:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to NOVEL: AForum on Fiction.

http://www.jstor.org

The Intuition of the Future:

Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

JERRY PHILLIPS

In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argues that one strain in "the historical tendency of modernity" was horribly dramatized at Auschwitz (2). Auschwitz showed what "the rationalizing, designing, controlling dreams and efforts of modem civilization are able to accomplish if not mitigated, curbed or counteracted" (93). Bauman points out that the Holocaust was at bottom "a means to an end," a pathway to utopia (91). The National Socialist state em-

ployed genocide as "an element of social engineering" with the aim of bringing about "a social order conforming to the design of the perfect society"-a society purged of the unfit and the racially inferior (91). The bloody utopianism of Nazism has thrown into relief the dystopic aspect of modernity: not simply the advance of rationalism and enlightened civility, modernity is also the advance of rationalized barbarism and naked terror. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, the modern writer was faced with the immense problem of how to recuperate mod- em utopia. The writer was obliged to consider whether it was still possible to hold faith in, and to make art in the name of, the perfectionist claims of

modernity. It was in this context that Lewis Mumford counseled, "[i]f our civilization is

not to produce greater holocausts, our writers will have to become something more than merely mirrors of its violence and disintegration; they, through their own efforts, will have to regain the initiative for the human person and the forces of life.... For the writer is still a maker, a creator, not merely a recorder of fact, but above all an interpreter of possibilities. His intuitions of the future may still

give body to a better world and help start our civilization on a fresh cycle of ad- venture and effort" (Mumford 109-10). As Mumford sees it, the highest office of the writer is to wrest from a barbarous world, in which catastrophe looms large, the positive sense of a "better world," even an ideal world, that is somehow im- manent in the deadly facts of our social condition. The writer has the responsibil- ity to restore dynamic possibility to social processes that seem static, permanent, and untranscendable. By exploring "possible worlds," "intuitions of the future" that critique the present as we know it, the writer recovers purposive human time, the sense that history is not something that simply happens to us, irrespec- tive of our will and desires, but is, indeed, ours to make. In short, the responsible writer defends human agency as a necessary existential value, or what William James called a "living option," a hypothesis which "appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed" (199).

Mumford's definition of the writer as an "interpreter of possibilities" and his claim that utopia is modernity's most urgent question provide useful points

NOVEL [ SPRING/SUMMER 2002

of departure for understanding Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), a fu- turistic novel that explores latent and manifest tendencies (with regard to both

utopia and dystopia) in the postmodern condition. Insofar as one accepts Bauman's assertion that "the history of modernity in general" (77-78) remains unfinished, then one has to regard postmoderity as the extension, or perhaps the intensification, of certain contradictory tendencies within modernity itself.'

Butler's futurism similarly intensifies the contradictions of modem society. In particular, Parable of the Sower reflects on two classic pathways to modem uto-

pia or, as Bauman puts it, "the design of the perfect society" (91): first, the appli- cation of bureaucratic rationality to socioeconomic problems through the agency of the state; and second, the constitution of communities of "them" and "us"

through the politics of race. Butler's main concern is to incite her readers to "con- sider alternative ways of thinking and doing" (Butler, "The Birth" 134). Parable of the Sower seeks to reinvent the utopian vision at a time when utopia allegedly has been rendered impossible, not least by the two pathways mentioned above, which have Auschwitz as their ultimate possibility. In this regard, the novel ad- umbrates that paradoxical aestheticism which Fredric Jameson identifies as char-

acteristically postmodern: the project of "Utopianism after the end of utopia" (154).

Parable of the Sower is set in California in the year 2024. Butler depicts the

golden state in the imagined near future as representative of all the sickness of our present world. In 2024, Los Angeles has become an "oozing sore" (96), a "carcass covered with too many maggots" (8); "there are fewer and fewer

jobs"-children are "growing up with nothing to look forward to" (13); "debt

slavery" is rampant-in general, "workers are more throwaway than slaves" (291); "there are too many poor people" (47)-"living skeletons" (79) are every- where visible; "thieves, rapists and cannibals" haunt the streets and freeways (259); "crazies" have banded together with no other purpose in mind than to "burn-the-rich" (145); "private armies of security guards" (104) protect "estates, enclaves, and businesses" (35); "there are at least two guns in every household"

(34)-gunfire is so common people no longer attend to it. Those who have eyes to see are sharply conscious of the fact that "things are unraveling, disintegrat- ing, bit by bit" (110), that, fundamentally, "the world is falling apart" (247).

Butler's portrait of twenty-first-century California combines empiricism with speculation, extant facts, and facts that are (possibly) in the making. Madhu

Dubey writes that "[t]he dystopia presented in Parable of the Sower is so closely extrapolated from current trends, as Stephen Potts observes, that it produces a shock of familiarity rather than estrangement" (106). But (and this is the crucial

point) the future in toto is not yet with us and might still be avoided if we take the requisite actions. As the novel puts it, "We haven't hit bottom yet" (Parable 294) in our descent into the abyss. Butler's perspective on historical time is

authentically prophetic. "[T]he task of the genuine prophet," notes Martin Buber, "was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (197). The true prophet does not foretell an inevitable future, but warns of likely consequences should a present course of action continue. Butler's apocalyptic

1 This is the argument advanced by Jameson and Eagleton.

300

JERRY PHILLIPS | UTOPIA AND CATASTROPHE

vision of the American future is nothing so much as a "weapon for averting ca- tastrophe," to quote R.W.B. Lewis (235). By dramatizing historical time as mov- ing in the direction of the disastrous end of the world, the apocalyptic narrative throws into relief its dialectical opposite, historical time as the renewal of life, the journey towards utopia. As Eric Rabkin notes, such narratives display both "the consequences of our social values" and "the meanings of our wishes" (xv).

The prophetic perspective and postmodernity seem to cut in different direc- tions. Jean-Franqois Lyotard has argued that "incredulity toward metanarra- tives" (i.e., foundational values) is the defining characteristic of the postmodern sensibility (xxiv). Where prophecy intuits a likely future on the basis of tenden- cies within the present (thus assuming the unfolding of a sufficient course of events), postmoderity emphasizes that all is uncertainty, contingency, and un- predictability. As an exercise in utopianism after the end of utopia, Parable of the Sower aligns itself with both prophetic and postmodern values. On the one hand, the novel rejects the idea that metanarratives can be sensibly dispensed with: metanarratives lend psychological force and ethical direction to human agency. In their absence, the individual too readily lends herself to barbarous social prac- tices which appear as timeless Necessity. On the other hand, the novel rejects the telos of what Lewis calls "the secular apocalyptic tradition" (191), which posits social revolution as the key transformative force in human history.2

And thus the sense of the redemptive or salvific potential of human agency is radically diminished in scale. Indeed, one can pose the question of the extent to which Parable of the Sower regains the "initiative for the human person" (Lewis 109). For, in denying the possibility of revolutionary transformation, the novel perhaps succeeds in doing the opposite of what its author intended: consolidat- ing the crushing facticity of our present world, in which the ideal of the whole human person has all but vanished. In other words, at one level, Parable of the Sower transcends postmoder "incredulity"; but, at another level, it bolsters the fatalism implicit in diminished utopianism. The latter tendency leads to a nar- rowing of moral vision that I shall argue has ominous significance for how we might imagine a transformative politics to set against the deepening barbarism of our time.

Parable of the Sower is written in the form of a diary as kept by a fifteen-year- old African American girl. Lauren Olamina, the diarist, lives behind walls in a besieged "cul-de-sac community" (10), an "island surrounded by sharks" (44). In order to keep at bay the hordes of "street poor" who live without the walls, Lauren's community establishes "a regular neighborhood watch" (63) of armed residents. A communitarian ethos binds the community together. "We all know each other here," says Lauren's father, "we depend on each other" (31). Thus,

2 Lewis observes: "the secular apocalyptic tradition which, descending through the imaginative responses to the American and French Revolutions and catching fire again with the Russian

upheaval, has focused less upon the grand conflict than upon the millennium it will usher in" (191). The secularization of apocalyptic temporality into Enlightenment historicity reaches its

apotheosis in the revolutionary project of Marxism. It is this project, above all, that postmoder thinkers like Lyotard are apt to critique. However, they perhaps throw out the baby with the bathwater: for in rejecting Marxism they lose sight of revolution as a force within human

history.

301

NOVEL i SPRING/SUMMER 2002

Butler presents militarized "privatopia" as one version of an ideal society (notwithstanding the degradation of utopian imaginings).3

Although Lauren finds it impossible to conceive of life "without walls" (51), she recognizes that the apocalyptic world beyond the walls makes plain "illu- sions of security" (118). Privatopia, the walled or gated community, is, at bottom, a fantasy of escape, that one can be in the world without having to live through the sharp contradictions that the world presents. Lauren sees that a community based on such bad faith has little hope of averting eventual catastrophe.

The notion that one can be in the world without being really of it implies a providential rather than existential sense of the human condition. The former expresses faith in the progressive unfolding of a necessary order decreed by God, while the latter accepts contingent possibility as shaped by concrete human ac- tion. The "horrible shape" of the world, its definite tendency towards catastro- phe, makes it well-nigh impossible for Lauren to accept the metanarrative of Providence, that God is a "kind of super-person" (13) who will "look after us" (23). Nor will she accept the idea that God is "nature" or an "ultimate reality" (13) that we cannot know.

For Lauren, "God is change" (15). The proposition that "God is change" brings to the fore Butler's concern with immanence in historical process, the way that time speaks to the unfolding of latent possibilities in the world. In Lauren's view, change or God has no necessary direction and is devoid of anthropomor- phic qualities like good and evil. As she puts it, "I'm not some kind of potential Job, long-suffering, stiff-necked, then, at last, either humble before an all- knowing Almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn't love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is" (22). Change has constructive and destructive aspects; it is the most "per- vasive power" in the universe (242). "Everyone knows that change is inevitable," reflects Lauren (23).

Conceived as the force of the world, the concept of change leads to a dialec- tical view of reality. According to David Harvey, "dialectical thinking empha- sizes the understanding of processes, flows, fluxes, and relations over the analy- sis of elements, things, structures, and organized systems" (49). Clearly, a dialec- tical sensibility underpins Lauren's belief that "[e]verything changes in some way, size, position, composition, frequency, velocity, thinking, whatever. Every living thing, every bit of matter, all the energy in the universe changes in some way" (Parable 195). To grasp the world in perpetual motion is to confront the problem of future possible worlds. Which is to say, one is obliged to consider the conditions under which an intuition of the future is concretely realized as social reality. Lauren rejects simple determinism: she holds that we shape change and change shapes us. Lauren's insights lead her to develop a new religion, a new ethics of Being: Earthseed.

3 Davis has produced the most comprehensive analyses to date of the militarization of California's urban culture. Like Butler, Davis perceives a sinister social order taking shape in this development. I borrow the term "privatopia" from McKenzie, whose study of homeowner associations and residential private communities illuminates the real historical context of Butler's treatment of the city. See also work by Dubey, who keenly delineates this trend.

302

JERRY PHILLIPS | UTOPIA AND CATASTROPHE

Throughout the novel, Lauren explores the implications of Earthseed in her Books of the Living. She avers that, if "God is change," and change shapes us, then human beings should assert their will and shape change in accordance with their needs and desires. In brief, human beings should aspire to shape God. Lauren's concept of God gives her a basis on which to build "a future that makes sense," in a present moment that seems all but determined by a "rotting past" (70). Her God does not permit her to escape the fundamental burden imposed upon us by existential time (a time without necessary direction): that "the self must create its own reasons for being" (231) and cannot hope to find them in a non-human, transcendental realm.4

When an army of the street poor attacks and destroys Lauren's community, she understands that her exploration of Earthseed, as a philosophy of life, will now proceed on the terms of open-ended practical activity as opposed to pure contemplation. She has no choice but to test out the pragmatic proposition that "[b]elief initiates and guides action-Or it does nothing" (41). With the violent deaths of her brother and father, Lauren is left alone in the world, and all the walls between her and the feral barbarism of Southern California have at last come down. She realizes that she is "one of the street poor now" (140). In order to escape the fate of being "some kind of twenty-first-century slave," Lauren re- solves to make her way to one of the "northern edens," either Washington State, Oregon, or Canada, where things are allegedly better (151, 190).5

In her capacity for adventure and self renewal, Lauren is presented to the reader as a moral exemplum.6 She is "life that perceives itself changing" (112)-and thus she possesses what her society can no longer give her, even as it is existentially necessary for the human way of being, namely, a definite sense of direction and purpose. "A victim of God may, through learning adaptation, be- come a partner of God," contends Lauren, and "[a] victim of God may, through forethought and planning, become a shaper of God" (27). In contrast to the resi- dents of Privatopia, who seek to avoid the realities of the world, Lauren genu- inely transcends the "chaos" without, because she understands that only by working through the contradictions of the world does one move beyond them.

"I am earthseed," writes Lauren in her diary, "Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we'll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place" (69). In Lauren's formulation of a future possible society-an Earthseed community-that arises out of, and yet negates, the world as we know it, the utopian aspect of space stands in dialectical contrast to the dystopian character of place. What, then, are the objective forces that trans- form vital space into deadly place, that arrest "processes, flows, and fluxes" and make of them the "structures and organized systems" that now threaten

4 One is strongly reminded of the humanistic existentialism of Sartre-and with good reason. When Lauren describes the philosophy of Earthseed to Bankole, he replies, "it sounds like a combination of Buddhism, existentialism, Sufism and I don't know what else" (234).

5 The south-north trajectory of the action of Parable of the Sower calls to mind the fundamental narrative pattern of that early utopian form in African American letters, the slave narrative.

6 Butler's heroines are typically concerned to explore human potentiality in a world of definite limits. For discussions of this theme in Butler's work, see Foster, Salvaggio, and Govan.

303

NOVEL I SPRING/SUMMER 2002

catastrophe? Parable of the Sower identifies two principal agents of destruction: the business corporation and the militarized state.

Lauren notes that the new president, elected in 2024, "has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend 'overly restrictive' minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees" (24). This explicit allusion to contempo- rary neoliberal economic policy, which promotes the demands of capital over the needs of labor, reveals one aspect of Butler's understanding of modem dystopia: the reduction of community to market economy.7

Parable of the Sower depicts a harrowing world in which market exchanges and private property are the exclusive means of organizing social life. On the one hand, Butler portrays certain aspects of late capitalism-its atomistic culture, its elevation of profits over people, its volatile race relations, and its ecological destructiveness-as dystopia achieved. On the other hand, she intimates that the present has not yet exhausted its barbaric potentialities; cannibalism, widespread terrorism, and brutal social repression are the defining characteristics of the ter- rible future that possibly awaits us-a dystopia imagined. Lauren notes that, for those who can afford it, security can be purchased. However, the real price of

security is political freedom: "safety and comfort" (109) are available only in

company towns or "privatized cities" (114), social forms that degrade the mean- ing of citizenship. Lauren sees that the reduction of community to the terms of a corporate order is bound to culminate in tyranny, or what she calls twenty-first- century slavery (151).

According to Lauren, the moral destiny of earthseed is "to take root among the stars" (75)-in plainer terms, to create "some kind of community where people look out for each other" (200). But this spiritual and political ideal is ren- dered impossible by a social order based on stark economic polarities, namely, "walled enclaves of the rich" (221) and grim ghettos of the poor. Parable of the Sower contends that human purpose has been lost at not merely the individual level, but also at the widest social level. By bending the future back into the present, the novel shows us that late capitalist society cannot generate a future worth believing in. Indeed, insofar as an alternative society is deemed impossi- ble, insofar as history is considered at an end, the only authentic image of the future must be the present, with all its manifest shortcomings. In this regard, the postmodern claim that "the grand narrative has lost its credibility" and that this is particularly true of "narrative[s] of emancipation" (Lyotard 37), severely restricts what we can imagine as political possibility. Such claims render us im- potent in a world of our own making. This scenario Butler finds intolerable: her novel repeatedly states the argument that "without positive obsession, there is nothing at all" (1).

The social disintegration brought on by a market system, based squarely on the competitive drive for profits, with all else going to the wall, leads to the ero- sion of moral community. The result is an atavistic, nihilistic world in which people are either predator or prey. Butler was surely influenced by Thomas Hobbes's description of the state of nature in her imagining of the American

This process is insightfully analyzed in Herman.

304

JERRY PHILLIPS | UTOPIA AND CATASTROPHE

future. According to Hobbes, people in the state of nature have "no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (186). Butler follows in the footsteps of Hobbes by linking the break- down of social order to the advent of "leviathan," the all-powerful state.

With social control rather than justice as its primary goal, the state estab- lishes quasi-permanent "structures and organized systems" which secure the interests of the few at the expense of the many. Butler suggests that, caught in the vise between corporate tyranny and state authoritarianism, the individual suffers a crushing loss of self-identity: neurosis and psychosis become normal states of

being; murderous impulses are given release; the death-wish takes hold.8 The end-result is a people well prepared to accept something like fascism. As Lauren

puts it in a key passage:

When apparent stability disintegrates, as it must-God is change-people tend to

give in to fear and depression, to need and greed. When no influence is strong enough to unify people they divide, they struggle, one against one, group against group, for survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, they create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill and kill.... [Ulntil one of them becomes a leader most willfollow, or a tyrant mostfear. (91)

Throughout her oeuvre, Butler has always been interested in the fascistic aspects of modem society, the sense in which power systems generate "patternmasters" who seek dominance over others through one means or another.9 As the milita- rized police state replaces the welfare state as the measure of social control in our time, Butler implies that fascism looms over the future as catastrophic possibility. In 2024, patterns of race and class dominance have hardened to the point where

they have genocidal implications-others are those I must kill.

8 Like other works in the utopia/catastrophe school of speculative fiction (say, Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column [1890]), Parable of the Sower is essentially a critique of "civilization and its discontents." Freud's analysis of the link between class society and the psychic disintegration of the individual is directly relevant to the world depicted in Parable of the Sower. "If ... a culture has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its

participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion ... it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share.... It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its

participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a

lasting experience" (Freud 15).

9 Butler's analysis of the philosophy of power systems has taken varied forms in her books. However, such forms are united by a controlling vision of human potentiality, which Butler describes in the following terms: "My characters are told that human beings have two characteristics that are fine and conducive to the species survival individually, but are a lethal combination. The first of those characteristics is intelligence and the other is something that can be projected through history-something that keeps showing up in us that has been doing a

great deal of harm: It's hierarchical structure/behavior. The combination, because intelligence tends to serve the hierarchical behavior, is what may eventually wipe us out" (qtd. in Beal 17). Here, Butler makes explicit her interest in the real possibility of universal disaster.

305

NOVEL | SPRING/SUMMER 2002

Butler conceives Lauren as a symbolic negation of the psychopathology of atomized, corporate society. Lauren suffers from "hyperempathy syndrome" (102), the capacity to feel what others feel, be it pleasure or pain. Lauren is a "sharer," a person whose sense of self is phenomenologically bound up with the

humanity of the other. Unsurprisingly, the doctors of the corporate order view

hyperempathy as a psycho-physical malady, "an organic delusional syndrome" (10). But Lauren would have us understand it as a utopian political value. She

poses the question: "If everyone could feel everyone else's pain who would tor- ture?" (102). If men and women realized their potential as social beings, if they lived by the axiom that "from one, many; from many, one" (283), then how much more difficult it would be to starve, rape, exploit, terrorize, and murder the other? Indeed, in a hyperempathetic world, the other would cease to exist as the

ontological antithesis of the self, but would instead become a real aspect of oneself, insofar as one accepts oneself as a social being. Earthseed is the practical ethics of this heightened consciousness of what it means to experience being as, irreducibly, being-with-others.

In the modem era, the master pattern of race thinking has largely deter- mined the meaning of human diversity, with deadly consequences. As Lauren traverses the "crazy," "desperate," and "dangerous" world of the future, the novel foregrounds an old American fantasy: the coming war between the races. In Butler's novel, that fantasy plays out "[o]n the street," where "people were

expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind" (31). And Lauren ob- serves that "[m]ixed couples are rare out here," because "mixed couples catch hell" (186, 153).

Few elements of the present are more charged with apocalyptic potential than the current racial formation of American society. Inner city ghettos of the

poor are increasingly isolated. Incarceration rates and chronic levels of unem-

ployment for young persons of color ominously point to what Sidney Willhelm called the fact of "black obsolesence" in North America. In Who Needs the Negro? (1970), Willhelm argues that the growing superfluousness of the poorest African Americans could lead to their eventual extermination. Holocaust scholar Richard Rubenstein contends that Willhelm's analysis "deserves more attention than it has received" (112n). Rubenstein notes that the precondition for genocide is the

political transformation of a people into the "living dead," and this is done by imagining them as superfluous to the social order. As Rubenstein puts it, "[t]here could come a time when bureaucrats might attempt to eliminate all of the ills as- sociated with urban blight, such as crime, drugs, and unsafe streets, by eliminat-

ing those segments of the population that are regarded as most prone to social

pathology" (86). Bauman concurs with Rubenstein's assessment that the possi- bility of genocide resides within "the house of modernity" (Bauman 17). Bauman observes that "none of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible has

truly disappeared and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities and principles from generating Auschwitz-like catastrophes" (11). To the extent that it speaks to immanence within the social realities of the

present, Parable of the Sower suggests that genocide-the ultimate human

catastrophe-is a latent tendency within our socioeconomic order. Fascism may

306

JERRY PHILLIPS | UTOPIA AND CATASTROPHE

well come about on the politics of "hate" and "fear," and its ultimate logic, as we well know, is the bloody sacrifice of scapegoats to right the world.

If one compares Parable of the Sower to The Turner Diaries, an overtly fascistic novel, one sees in the latter the same apocalyptic imagining of the American fu- ture. However, Butler's novel employs a race-transcendent communalist ethics to frame a sense of hope, whereas The Turner Diaries portrays white supremacist solidarity as the ultimate (utopian) value. The Turner Diaries frames hope in the triumphalist terms of a ruthless race war, in which strong white warriors regain their lost birthright in North America by murdering all the "inferior" races, especially blacks and Jews. To imagine genocide as a worthy moral project is to give it a possible existence in the world; it is to make of it a "living option." In this regard, as a work of the moral imagination, Parable of the Sower has to be read in concert with precisely the most fascistic versions of the future; for it is only in this light that one can fully comprehend its prophetic message-we can still avert the worst by taking purposeful concrete action.

Lauren's Books of the Living strongly assert the value of a transcendent con- sciousness, which sees hopeful possibility in the deadliest of seemingly arrested states. Butler has stressed that "I don't write utopian science fiction because I don't believe that imperfect humans can form a perfect society" (qtd. in Beal 14). Nonetheless, in its indictment of existing barbarism, Parable of the Sower does of- fer a vague blueprint of what, ideally, ought to be. It is precisely this sense Qf the ideal political imperative that has come under attack in postmodern thought. Lyotard counsels against utopianism on the grounds that "we all know" that "a pure alternative to the system ... would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace" (89). But if alternatives are ruled out of the realm of political possibility, then no other system but the present one is truly imaginable. Butler's novel advances a thesis with which few would disagree: "human beings are good at creating hells for themselves" (234). But without the concept of "heaven," hell loses its significance as a measure of human failing; it simply be- comes the reflection of what we are and what we must be, because we know no other way.

Parable of the Sower rejects fatalism in favor of emancipatory human agency. Butler would most likely agree with David Harvey that "it is not change per se that has to be explained, but the forces that hold down change and/or give it a certain directionality. There is no single moment within the social process devoid of the capacity for transformative activity" (105). In the wilderness of the apoca- lyptic world, Lauren manages to create an earthseed community, a "harvest of survivors" (93). She gives the commune the fitting name of "Acorn," for to see a forest of oak trees as latent in a handful of acorns is to see the world as radical possibility. One sows as one reaps, which is to say, conscious human activity is the key force in determining social evolution.

The Acorn commune is not socialist in the manner of, say, Robert Owen's New Lanark; nor is Acorn an anarchist community like the Annares society de- scribed in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974). Acorn does not represent a pure alternative to the dystopian world without. In many ways, it is caught up in the very contradictions it seeks to transcend. For instance, the commune is

307

NOVEL | SPRING/SUMMER 2002

unable to escape the rule of the market and the violence that attends a private property order. "I think that any serious money we make here will come from the land," says Bankole, the proprietor of the land where Acorn is situated. "Food is gold these days, and we can grow food here. We have guns to protect ourselves, so we can sell our crops in nearby towns or on the highway" (288). I

suggest that Acor is best viewed as a kind of left-wing communitarian survival- ism. Lauren voices its fundamental ethos: "The world is full of crazy, dangerous people. We see signs of that every day. If we don't watch out for ourselves, they will rob us, kill us, and maybe eat us. It's a world gone to hell and we've only got each other to keep it off us" (257). As opposed to the fascistic, wider world where

people seek only their "kind," Acorn is a community that embraces diversity, in terms of race, class, and sexual identity: its members are black, white, Asian, and Latino, rich and poor, gay and straight. However, Butler makes clear that Acor is not so much "heaven on earth" as the modest attempt to realize that ideal.

Heaven beyond the world does not exist, so if we would occupy heaven, we have no choice but to fashion it in the here and now. However, Lauren realizes that in a world become hell, her harvest of survivors might well have to domi- nate, rob, terrorize, and even kill outsiders. "[I]f people threaten us or our crops," says Lauren, "we kill them.... We kill them, or they kill us. If we work together, we can defend ourselves" (288). The absence of a social revolutionary force in the

imagined American future makes a politics of survival the only means of avert-

ing the coming catastrophe.10 In the last analysis, it is arguable that survivalism, in any form, is a positive transcendence of the barbarous "power struggles" of our time. Survivalism represents "adaptation" to a violent world, and in this re-

spect it severely compromises the fundamental premise of existential time-that authentic free acts are always possible, and the dawning of each new day is the demonstration of this truth.

I have argued that Parable of the Sower must be read in the light of the central

problematic of modernity (only intensified by the postmodern turn): how to dis- cover a pathway to utopia, when all pathways thrown up by modernity itself-in

particular, the dystopias of fascism and Stalinism-have collapsed utopia into

catastrophe. Utopianism after the end of utopia names the project that Butler ex-

plores. However, a utopianism that has shrunk to the dimensions of survivalism is perhaps part of the problem rather than its solution. Notwithstanding its im-

plication in the money economy, Acorn's distinct agrarian character-the fact that its relation to the land is "more like gardening than farming" (288)-would seem to make it an anti-modern undertaking, not unlike a type of the utopian commune that sprang up in the nineteenth century as part of the revolt against industrialism. But the supposition that Acorn is an anti-modern project misses a crucial point about its distinctive human elements.

10 Consider in this regard Jack London's apocalyptic novel, The Iron Heel (1907). Like Parable of the Sower, The Iron Heel portrays a barbaric world in which fascism looms on the horizon. However, London places at the center of his novel a revolutionary movement, that labors

mightily to send history in another direction. The Iron Heel is not necessarily more aesthetically satisfying than Parable of the Sower, but, in terms of the moral imagination, the former moves the reader to value subjective freedom over objective necessity in a way that the latter perhaps does not.

308

JERRY PHILLIPS I UTOPIA AND CATASTROPHE

Butler's presentation of Acorn as a hopeful experiment in enlightened com- munalism (a communalism that transcends differences in race, class, gender, and

sexuality) is itself a statement of faith in one (utopian) tendency of modernity: its existential undoing of all forms of chauvinistic particularism, the way it obliges the subject to come to terms with ever-widening possibilities of human identity. Acorn proposes nothing new in the realm of political economy; however, as an ethics of culture, it promotes the essential superiority of human diversity to the taxonomic systems imposed by sinister patternmasters. Bauman argues that "the modem drive to a fully designed, fully controlled world" is typically negated by "the pluralism of the human world" (93). From this perspective, the pluralism of Acorn affirms the hope that what is the best in the house of modernity will win out over what is worst.

An unwillingness to go beyond the vaguest blueprint of the good society marks utopianism after the end of utopia. One has only to compare Parable of the Sower with, say, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), which depicts a totally reconstructed world, to see how confidence in utopian projects has drasti- cally declined. Or, perhaps, the chief value of literary utopias does not reside in their depictions of particular ideal societies, but rather in the fact that such depic- tions, to quote David Ketterer, cause "a metaphorical destruction of that 'real' world in the reader's head" (13). In other words, literary utopias foreground the ideolo- gies that affirm the natural aspect or timelessness of a given social order. By juxtaposing ideology with compelling moral ideals, the literary utopia, however diminished in its ambitions, still makes it possible to derive an ought from what is. On the one hand, Butler's reduction of utopianism to survivalism is based on the pragmatic axiom that vital truth is a consequence of action and does not lie beyond the subject in a realm of grim necessity as Marxists and others have sup- posed. On the other hand, the removal of social revolution as at least one possi- bility for the future has the effect of making us feel that disastrous times are destined, that we are merely reeds borne along by the river of time. Butler would have us swim against the current. She extends a hand to the desperate swimmer who struggles to make the shore. But she is all too aware, as only prophets can be, that "drowning people sometimes die fighting their rescuers" (54).

Works Cited

Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Beal, Frances M. "Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler: Black Women and Science Fiction Genre." Black Scholar 17 (1986): 14-18.

Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." Pointing the Way: Collected Essays by Martin Buber. Ed. Maurice S. Friedman. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. 192-207.

Butler, Octavia. "The Birth of a Writer." Essence 20 (1989): 74-79, 132-34.

309

NOVEL I SPRING/SUMMER 2002

. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 1995.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage, 1990.

. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and The Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage, 1998.

Dubey, Madhu. "Folk and Urban Communities In African-American Women's Fiction: Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." Studies in American Fiction 27 (1999): 103-28.

Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Foster, Frances Smith. "Octavia Butler's Black Female Future Fiction." Extrapolation 23

(1982): 37-55.

Freud, Sigmund. The Future of An Illusion. Trans. & Ed. James Strachey. New York:

Norton, 1961.

Govan, Sandra Y. "Connections, Links, And Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction." Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984): 82-87.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.

Herman, Edward S. Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics and the Media. Boston: South End, 1995.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

James, William. "The Will To Believe." Pragmatism and Other Writings. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 2000. 198-218.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke

UP, 1991.

Ketterer, David. New Worlds For Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1974.

Lewis, R.W.B. "Days of Wrath and Laughter." Trials of the Word: Essays In American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965. 184-235.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge. Trans. Geoff

Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

McDonald,.Andrew. The Turner Diaries. Hillsboro, WV: National Vanguard Books, 1978.

310

JERRY PHILLIPS | UTOPIA AND CATASTROPHE 311

McKenzie, Evan. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.

Mumford, Lewis. In The Name of Sanity. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1954.

Rabkin, Eric S. "Introduction: Why Destroy the World?" The End of the World. Ed. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983. vii-xv.

Rubenstein, Richard. The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future. New York: Harper, 1975.

Salvaggio, Ruth. "Octavia Butler and the Black Science Fiction Heroine." Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984): 78-81.

Willhelm, Sidney. Who Needs the Negro? Hampton, VA: UB & US Communications

Systems Inc., 1993.