Show and Tell

I’m interested in Butler's portrayal of sight, particularly in Bloodchild and The Evening and the Morning and the Night, in connection with her description of her own “radio imagination.” In both stories, the trauma of characters seeing, particularly seeing their own futures, seems to gesture toward representation problems. Gan has long been prepared for what awaits him with stories, diagrams and drawings, but he does not really understand it until he witnesses Bram Lomas’ horrific birth experience. In The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Lynn does not fully understand DGD until she comes face to face with patients in the ward, and Alan develops a more complicated perspective on Dilg, despite having read copious literature on what to expect, once he actually looks around there. Since seeing is so crucial for to each character's understanding of the world, I’m interested in why Butler often obscures the vision of her own readers. How are we to really understand if we cannot see?

Like Ellen, I initially imagined Lynn as a man (perhaps because I was overcompensating for assuming Gan was a woman until he revealed that he wasn’t). Furthermore, even when physical descriptions were provided, they did not always help me. For example, I could never quite conceptualize what T’Gatoi looked like. Butler provides a meditation, if not an answer, in her description of her own “radio imagination,” casting physical appearance almost as an afterthought in her work. She has never thought first in terms of what her characters looked like. This connection between not seeing and representing comes into play with Naomi Chi’s art. Having gouged out her own eyes, she works as a sculptor, representing what she can feel and, at least in Lynn’s assessment, representing it well – “in a way that seemed impossible for a blind sculptress” (56).

I feel, then, like there are conflicting messages on the need to see. In some ways, in the acts of representation that Butler and Naomi perform, it appears words and imagination are sufficient. Maybe the key is feeling, not necessarily in the tactile sense, although that’s where Naomi’s inspiration comes from. As I said, I couldn’t see the characters, but when they described the awful spectacles that had made them understand the truth far more vividly than words could, I could conjure up a sense of what they saw. Not necessarily an image, but a feeling, an understanding of the disgust of being exposed to the violence of bodily destruction.*

I’m left grappling with Gan and T’Gatoi’s discussion of seeing at the end of Bloodchild. T’Gatoi concludes that “humans should be protected from seeing,” but Gan argues instead for being “shown.” I don’t think Butler's exclusion of physical descriptions is meant to protect her readers. She shows us the truth in other ways, and reveals that vision in terms of feelings can be just as strong as vision in terms of sight. Even Gan couches his argument for showing in terms of the tactile, explaining that all Terrans see of birth is “pain and terror and maybe death” (29). I feel like I’m left struggling to put my understanding of vision in Butler’s world to words, but I guess that’s appropriate.

*Of course, I imagine I couldn’t feel it as strongly as the character could, since my main exposure to such drastic bodily harm still comes in the form of representation, though visual representation. I was impressed that Gan’s description of the birth scene could produce such a visceral reaction in me, but also wondered if I would have shuddered so much if I couldn’t produce some vision in my mind, a mixture of medical TV shows (the documentaries and the fictionalized) and, most recently, the disturbing imagery in Black Swan.

Bloodchild and MPreg

Okay, first of all-if you haven't yet come across the term "mpreg" and can't guess what it stands for, it's a shortening of "male pregnancy" and is mostly used in fanfic with slash pairings. I don't know enough about it to do more than speculate (I wash my hands of mpreg fics) but I guess there's an impulse to give a happy couple a baby and when the couple comprises of two men, one of them has to step up and be the bearer (because apparently surrogacies don't exist...?). According to this Wikipedia article of Fan Fiction Terms, mpreg is something that often comes with a warning. So, presumably, the Implied Reader finds it not to their taste, for whatever reason.

I go into this because in her afterword to "Bloodchild", Butler says, "'Bloodchild' is my pregnant man story" (30). The prevalent motif in the story itself, to me, was pregnancy. I read it mostly as a way of understanding how people deal with having children, how people raise their children to have children, how the process of child-bearing can be alternately vilified and deified. What makes this story's version of mpreg horrifying, rather than whatever mpreg is in fanfic (again, haven't read enough to make any sort of sweeping generalization, but I am aware of how female pregnancy often works in fanfics) is the effort taken to make it horrifying. Seeing Lomas birthing these "long, thick grubs" (16) fills Gan with disgust; he vomits, and weeps, seeing "red worms crawling over redder human flesh" in his mind's eye (17).

They don't look so bad now, but just wait until they lay eggs IN YOU. I understand why Butler had to work through her fears through storytelling. Image source: J. Eibl, U.S. Department of Agriculture, via Wikipedia

Until he is confronted with Lomas, and the truth about birth, Gan is able to believe that "this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together--a kind of birth" (16). He continues, "I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn't ready to see it. Maybe I never would be" (16-17). Suddenly confronted by the reality of the situation he has been prepared for all his life, Gan finds himself horribly, violently disgusted. The terms he chooses to represent this process, however, reveal a strange analogy with human reproduction itself, even though he attempts to establish human sexual reproduction as good and natural.

The story parallels the (Terran) male experience of interspecies pregnancy with the (Terran) female experience of human pregnancy. The clearest indication of this parallel is the interchangeability of Gan and his sister, Xuan Hoa--either will serve willingly as bearers of T'Gatoi's child(ren). Hoa, however, has another duty ahead of her: "to bear [her] own young" (21). When T'Gatoi points out that Hoa would find it easier to bear Tlic children than Gan, because "she has always expected to carry other lives inside her" (26), this similarity becomes a point of difference, as the other lives were always intended to be human (26). Interchangeable, parallel, but different, and not just in the species of their children; Gan has seen birth and accepts it knowing that he will be cut into and have writhing worms plucked from his flesh. He makes an informed choice, partly driven by fear, partly by the desire to protect his sister...and partly by love (what is love?). His choice is almost more meaningful now, because he has seen what he was not supposed to see, what T'Gatoi expected would turn him away from the duty he was raised to perform. Almost.

Gan's lack of real knowledge about the process of birth accompanies a belief that he does know, from "diagrams and drawings", and from T'Gatoi's efforts to "ma[ke] sure [Gan] knew the truth as soon as [he] was old enough to understand it" (13). This assurance gives him the self-confidence to help Lomas, though both T'Gatoi and Qui believe for different reasons that he wasn't supposed to see the act (10, 21). Gan identifies the effect that watching Lomas has on him, in contrasting himself with Xuan Hoa. He thinks "Hoa wanted it...She hadn't had to watch Lomas. She'd be proud. . . . Not terrified" (25). Without the actual knowledge that he gains by watching Lomas, Gan would be proud and self-assured, as he was before, as Hoa is now. After learning the truth (the truthier truth?), terror replaces pride. The truth about birth is one that T'Gatoi believes should be avoided (28) and that Gan believes should be welcomed (29).

I can't help but carry this parallel to its other side: human reproduction. If the knowledge that Gan gains through experiencing birth in this way is both more terrifying and more crucial than the knowledge gained from diagrams and expectations, then what of the total absence of this sort of experience with respect to human birthings? Gan's mother gave birth to "'huge' children" (14), hinting at some difficulty during the process. Gan believes that Hoa should give birth to "[h]uman young who should someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins" (26), but ignores the period of gestation, during which the developing embryo absorbs nutrients indirectly from the mother's blood. One could argue that the absence of a detailed glimpse into (human) pregnancy and birth is justified by most human readers' experience with and knowledge of birth, but there is a suggestion that human pregnancy and human birth is itself as terrifying and disturbingly alien as the interspecies parasitism masquerading as "a kind of birth" (16). First she alienates the reader by having a man bear the young, and then Butler draws the parallel experiences together to offer an insight into human fears, with the full powers of cognitive estrangement at work.

Birth! You should have seen this diagram in Sex Ed...right? Image source: Seth's post