Parable of the Sower in 2021

 There are spoilers cast about this post like seeds in the fields, so be aware.

Parable of the Sower is my first foray into Butler’s works, and it took me two efforts to get past the first 50 pages, though that is due more to an accident of life than to anything in Butler’s novel.  The book, first published in 1993, is placed 30 years in the future, 2024.  I’m sure that future felt fantastical to readers in 1993, even though they could draw a line from point A to point B.  Here in 2021, Butler has proven to be disturbingly prescient.  Ecological disasters are on the horizon, economic disparity has only grown, and the Trump presidency has shown exactly how reactionary and oppressive conservatives and middle-of-the-road white liberals are.  I first picked up the book in late 2019 or early 2020, and what I read was too real for me to enjoy.  Yes, it’s plenty fantastic, but the distance from here to there didn’t seem large, certainly not large enough.  I had enough keeping me awake at night; I didn’t need my fiction to contribute to that sleeplessness.

 

Breathing ever so slightly better in April and May of 2021, many months into Biden’s presidency and in the wake of the attack on the capital, we took another stab at it.  The beginning was as difficult as ever, but my internal fortitude was much stronger than before.

 

Parable of the Sower is a wild read, and while it reminds me of a handful of other books, it is unlike anything else.  There are obvious comparisons to be made between this book and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was obviously written much later than this, and possibly influenced by it.  But having just read McCarthy’s book, being on a road full of unknown and hostile threats felt familiar.  Of course, Butler’s road is much more packed with foot traffic as the throng of people are refugees, looking for a place to live, which brings me to the other book I immediately compare it to: John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  I think this parallel is purposeful on Butler’s part and nodded to by the encounters they have on the road.  When we meet Emery, Tori, Grayson, and Doe in the final part of the novel, they are escapees from types of prison farms, where they are working off impossible debt created by the corporation that “employs” (read “enslaves”) them.  They are in the exact situation we see the Joad family attempt to avoid and then finally find themselves in near the end of Steinbeck’s book.  The reason Butler’s future feels so real and dangerous is because it is merely a more advanced and terrifying version of what has already happened.  As the government becomes more and more uninvolved in citizen’s lives, corporations are leaned on to hold up social order more and more, and of course they will do so in their own interest, and their own interest will always be financial.

 

The evils of capitalism are on full display in the novel, which presents a kind of libertarian dream-future.  The police and fire departments now pay for their individual services, no longer pretending to serve the public good.  The people are entirely abandoned by institutions of public good and are left to themselves.  If you’re rich enough to afford a strong walled community and use the police as your own personal brute squad, you won’t have a problem in this world.  If you aren’t, then not only are you vulnerable, but there is no path available for you to travel from your current condition to a better one.  Like all good science fiction, that’s not a glimpse at the future; that’s a re-presenting of the present.  This was true in 1993, and it is even more true in 2021.

 

There are two hopes presented by Butler, and both are riddled with perils.  The first is people.  We can rely on each other, and the extent to which we can do so is the extent to which we have hope.  First, Lauren and her families have their literal neighbors in their neighborhood, and later, on the road, they have those people they choose to make their neighbors.  As they increase their numbers, they increase their safety.  But of course, no one can just be trusted, in this world or that one.  Any half-ally is an open threat to everyone, so trust needs to be treated as a priceless resource.  Lauren is resourceful and clever, but her more important skill is being able to turn strangers into reliable allies. 

 

The second hope is Lauren’s philosophical religion, Earthseed.  I can’t remember reading any apocalyptic fiction where religion factored into the revolution and the hope.  A version of Christianity is at the core of The Grapes of Wrath of course, one that cuts out all the stuff used against the refugees, one that boils down to thing: we need to treat each other right.  Butler instead reject Christianity as being beyond salvaging.  It has been so warped and twisted by conservatives, that it is a tool to support the status quo, a tool to control people.  Lauren’s father tries to use it to its proper end, and while it hold the neighborhood together so far, it is of a dying world and cannot bring them forward. Earthseed, instead, is deigned to be eminently practical.  It is a religion of action and empowerment, not about who or what your worship, but about how you can turn what you see and know into something that can help you. Change is shapeable, but you need to see it, recognize it, and have a plan for it. Seeing it, recognizing it, and developing a plan for it is the lesson Lauren exemplifies for us again and again in the novel.  The older generation, and through their influence, many of Lauren’s generation, think that the times will go back to the way things were, but Lauren sees that they won’t.  She sees the future coming and plans for it. You can’t fight the tide, but you can be prepared to ride it.  That planning lets her survive the attack on her neighborhood and gets her moving north.  But Lauren is thinking much farther than the next step. She’s focused on the long goal, the eventual leaving of Earth to start a new civilization, and if that civilization is going to be worth founding, we will have to rebuild society as we know it, to shape it into what it can and should be.

 

It’s funny that I haven’t even touched upon the most sci-fi-y aspects of the novel, which are Lauren’s “sharing” and the drug that turns users into pyromaniacs who pain their faces, ‘ro.  Those elements are both really cool, and central to the book both in terms of plot and thematics, and yet they are the parts that stick with me the least.  Lauren’s hypersensitivity is an invisible disability, one that makes her life harder but never impedes her fully.  Thanks to the help and support of the others (and thanks to her own determination and care, of course) she is able to work within the confines of her abilities to do what she has to do and be who she has to be.  The use of ‘ro seems tied to the way that crack was introduced into Black American communities by the CIA. Because of the societal structure, ‘ro serves to destroy whole portions of society without ever threatening the wealthy and powerful.  The shrinking middle class is made more desperate to concede to corporate promises of protection at the price of the people’s freedom.

 

I was not smitten by Butler’s writing, but I was smitten by the ferocity of her thoughts and the unflinching gaze she holds on the world.  In a lot of ways, this was exactly the book I needed at this point in my life, looking ahead at the mess that America is in.  There are lessons to apply here, even as the book isn’t written to be a handbook.  I will certainly be exploring more of Butler’s books and mind because she feels important and relevant.

On the Road Again with Cormac McCarthy

 I read The Road initially sometime after it came out in paperback, in 2007, maybe?  It knocked me over and has stayed with me.  I heard the book referenced in some podcast I was listening to and decided it was time to re-read it.

 

This is just me yammering about the book, so I’m assuming that you’ve read it too.  If not, you’re going to find a ton of spoilers ahead, so if I were you, I’d go read it for myself first.

 

Jesus, this novel is amazing. I love everything about it: the writing, the characters, the world, the story, the subject, the pacing, the tone—it’s all gripping and stunningly beautiful and horrifying.  This novel walks the seemingly impossible line between minimalism and richness.

 

Let’s start with the structure, at the level of sentences on up.  The syntax is predominantly simple.  Often subordinate clauses are just made into a freestanding sentence fragment, as though the narrator was too winded to put it all into one sentence or too malnourished to think more complexly.  If you’ve read Blood Meridian, you know that McCarthy is skilled in the construction of a beautifully complex sentence.  The book has frequent section breaks but no chapter breaks.  The latter feature makes all the bits and fragments flow together like the calendarless days of the protagonists.  The former feature gives us the experiences in small chunks.  While this serves the obvious function of letting us jump between the dreary sameness of days in the post-apocalypse, it also creates the effect of fading in and out, missing time.  Sometimes only seconds pass between sections. Sometimes whole months. Sometimes we get a flashback.  Time within those section breaks is elastic and mysterious, and we readers never know where we are going to land.

 

I also love that the dialogue is without quotation marks, stripped down to these short exchanges that can be said in single breaths.  This is a world without the finery or such things as quotation marks or fancy adjectives and verbs telling us how the words were said.  Everything is presented in flat, grey tones like the ashes they lie in.  This presentation also comes with a great sense of vulnerability.  They only speak when necessary, and the exchanges are painfully tender or desperate, declarations of fear or assurances that there is no danger.  Then there are the repeated phrases, such as “I know” and “okay.”  In another book, these little words feel like filler, without weight or aftertaste.  Here, they are laden with emotions that can’t be spoken out loud, hit-and-miss efforts between the boy and the man to connect.

 

The boy and the man, our two protagonists, make this book simultaneously a coming-of-age story and a coming-to-death story, and they get at the heart of what The Road is about.  The Road is one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read or could ever imagine.  In many post-apocalyptic narratives, the protagonists are heading to some rumored or dreamed of safe haven where society can possibly rebuild itself.  Here, there is no hope of that.  Every day is a struggle for survival, but as you look down the titular road, there is no possible safe haven, no place where the sun is not obscured by ash, no hope that green grass will grow anew in time to revitalize the food web that has been laid to waste by the unnamed ecological disaster.  Death, either by other humans or lack of resources, is inevitable at whatever scale you choose.  At the heart of the novel, then, is what are we living for?  I imagine that in our answering that question, the book can serve as a kind of Rorschach test, as we each bring our own current views about life to the book.

 

The man’s wife doesn’t see a reason to go on, and we get that confrontation early in the book. The man declares that they are survivors, to which she responds “What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film” (55).  She says that her “heart was ripped out of me the night he was born” (57), presumably because his life made living necessary, and his life was necessary to live.  As she says to the man. “The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body” (57).  Without something to fight for, to defend, to take a stand for.  For the man, that’s the boy, of course.  But even the boy needs something to live for.  The boy expresses the desire to die several times in the novel, but he is given two things to live for: first, his father, and second, the “fire” they “carry” (83).

 

That fire is obviously the symbol of hope and rebirth, the promise of a new civilization, or the goodness in humanity.  In the morality play of his father’s telling, they are the “good guys,” looking for other “good guys” and avoiding the “bad guys.”  The tension between the man and the boy grows as that cosmology crumbles in the face of lived reality.  Seeing his father kill one man, leave a seemingly-abandoned boy behind, steal from a camp, resist feeding and warming an old man on the side of the road, and finally leaving another old man naked and without possessions in the middle of the road, the boy cannot resolve the tension between the stories he’s been told and the actions he’s witnessed. He sees his father,s failure as a betrayal of the fire they carry, but instead of disbelieving the tales he’s been told, he concludes that the preservation of the fire is entirely up to him.  After they leave the old man naked and alone, the man tries to explain his actions, saying “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” to which the boy responds, crying, “Yes I am. . . . I am the one.”

 

The father’s plan, all along, is to kill himself and the boy should the get into an inescapable danger.  If the boy dies, then he plans to kill himself, having no reason to go on.  In both cases, he wonders at different times, does he have the will to do it.  It’s a beautiful and painful question, and it gets right to the question of what we are living for.  To stop living takes more determination than living. We are wired to survive, the try to find someway to carry on.  Is it strength in him to soldier on with his son day after day, or is it weakness, exposing his son to danger and misery for the sake of seeing another day?  We will never know what he would have done had the boy’s sickness had claimed him, but we do know that, in the end, he was unable to have his son die with him.  He left his son alone with a few directions, a few belongings, and not nearly enough training.  Very likely, the boy could have met the same fate as the man left naked at gunpoint.  We see him do nothing in an effort to survive.  We feel how lost and heartbroken he is.  But someone stops for him as his father did not stop for that other boy.

 

And what does that ending mean?  How do we interpret it? What questions does it settle?

 

I don’t know. It gives the sense of hope, but that seems like a false sense to me.  We must ignore everything else we know about the world in order to interpret it hopefully, and the book gives us every opportunity to do so. The book ends so quickly after the boy connects with this other family, that it doesn’t let us dwell on the ash-covered world and the baby-eating survivalists who have been threatening our protagonists the whole novel.  Instead, there is talk of the “breath of God” and the image of a “brook trout in the streams in the mountains” (286).  And that last sentence: “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of a mystery.”  What the fuck is that about?  “[H]ummed of a mystery” is a phrase brimming with life and wonder, a drastically different tone than what we’ve had up to now.  Is it a sign that things will be okay?  Is it a kind of life-preserver for those of us who have traveled all this way and need some sign or hope before we close the book?  Could McCarthy not stomach his own bleakness at the end?  I don’t know.  I can’t read it hopefully, personally, because I’ve seen too much in the previous 280-some pages.  But maybe you can.

 

Oh, and speaking of hopeful, there’s something potentially hopeful in the vocabulary of the book.  While the syntax is simple, the vocabulary is not, or at least it’s not always simple.  McCarthy has an impressively large vocabulary, but the choice to bring it into this book and this setting is exactly that: a choice.  Words like “salitter,” “bollards,” “crozzled,” “loggia,” “palladian,” and “tidewrack”—just to name a few—had me running to the dictionary every couple of pages.  Why do that?  Are they just reminders of the lost world, like the burned ruins our protagonists travel through?  Or are they reminders of the fire itself, traces of cultures and society, the ingenuity and determination of humankind?  Likely both, I say, but whatever the reason, it feels ripe with meaning and possibility.

 

I didn’t even get to touch on such amazing scenes as Ely, the old man who is compared to the gods and Buddha; or the plantation on which human being are repeating history by holding captive and consuming victims for the plantation-occupiers’ own well-being; or the caravan of pregnant women and soldiers, like a scene out of a Mad Max film—the only thing in the book that resembles the Mad Max vision of a post-apocalyptic future; or the finding of the sextant, the only thing that the man finds beautiful in the whole book, an ancient tool used to guide wanderers when there were no shores, a perfectly apt tool, redolent with symbolic possibilities.  There are so many wonderful scenes and moments to talk about, analyze, and mine for meaning.

 

I will undoubtedly be returning to this book again someway down the road.  I can tell that my brain and heart aren’t done with it.  I’d love to hear about your own thoughts about and experiences with it.

Master of Atlantis: Charles Portis and the Absurd

 As I’ve said before, I first read True Grit after I learned that the Coen Brothers had begun production on a film adaptation of the book.  I thought that if the Coen Brothers found the book interesting enough to adapt, it was worth a read. I loved the book. But when I finished it, I didn’t feel any need to seek out Charles Portis’s other endeavors.  On the True Grit DVD (of course I have all the Coen Brothers’ films on DVD), there is a feature on Charles Portis and his other books.  It was that feature that made me put Portis’s collection on my Christmas list that year.  I’ve been reading through the books at a leisurely pace in chronological order (as is my wont).  Masters of Atlantis, then, is Portis’s fourth novel, and the fourth one I’ve read.

Portis has always had elements of the absurd in his novels, but the absurdities have always existed at the fringes of the tale.  Certainly, there is some absurd feature to all his protagonists, some obsession, or some set way of looking at the world, but the protagonists are a kind of hard center the reader holds on to as we travel through the absurdities of the world and the other characters the protagonist bounces off of. In Masters of Atlantis, Portis leans fully into the absurd at every level of his storytelling.  The tale is full of ridiculous people wanting ridiculous things and behaving in ridiculous ways.

Published in 1985, Masters of Atlantis tells the story of the rise and fall of the Gnomon Society, a secret society (that is often anything but secret) claiming to hold the sacred truths of the world collected by and known to the Atlanteans.  Lamar Jimmerson, a young American soldier in France at the end of the Great War, meets what is to the reader obviously a con man taking advantage of Jimmerson’s naivete and desire for something important and sacred.  This encounter sends the believing Jimmerson to Italy where he believes he’ll meet up with other Gnomons to partake in their society.  Instead of feeling had when he finds no trace of the society there, he decided he was being tested and must wait to be contacted.  From there, he meets another man, Sydney Hen, an Englishman, who, when told about the society and the text Jimmerson had received from his first encounter, wants in.  The two men take the study of that text—the Codex Pappus—seriously and create a full interpretation of the scribblings there.  More men come to them and they essentially start up the Gnomon Society.  The book follows the organization from 1917 to what must be the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. At their finest moment, Jimmerson can afford to live in a grand home in Burnette, Indiana that doubled as a Gnomon Temple.  Jimmerson married Sydney Hen’s sister, Fanny, and had a son, Jerome.  There were Gnomon branches (called Pillars) across the US, and the news was obsessed with them as both possible heroes and possible villains of the age.  But the new grew tired of the Gnomons and people grew uninterested in secret societies.  The Pillars dissolved.  There was a schism in the order with Sydney Hen split off from Jimmerson in their interpretations of the Codex Pappus.  Fanny found a career and moved away from Jimmerson, and Jerome, who never felt comfortable with his father, went with her.  The Burnette temple fell into disarray and the elevated freeway that was built to connect Gary to Chicago went up around the temple itself, the peak of the tower showing through the divided roadway. The novel ends in Texas, where Jimmerson and Hen are brought together again in the compound of one Morehead Moaler, the last Master of the last standing Temple, which is really a doublewide trailer.  The three old men are content with their lot, and there’s always the possibility of the Gnomons rising once more with the new cycle.

There are of course a host of characters who all find a place within the Gnomon Society, or in the case of a few permanently outside the Society in tension with it.  The absurdities lie in the way these characters feel about and respond to the Society and its goings on.  Jimmerson is a true believer, and he has little interest in how the Gnomons fair, though he does have enough of an ego to be played upon by other characters, primarily the mover and shaker, Austin Popper.  He has decided the Codex Pappus is truth, and he spends his life interpreting and building upon that truth with books and papers.  But his pursuit is silliness in terms of the book, and clearly no one reads his writings as we learn that one book was published without every other page missing, and no one notices for decades even though the book has been reprinted several times.  In fact, it seems that everyone involved in the Society are equal believers even as they claim absurd revelations about their own past lives as leaders in the Society. 

So what seems like a nest of conmen is never confirmed to be such.  Portis never steps in and tells us what “the Truth” is even though we are left to infer much.  The man in the opening who gives Jimmerson the Codex Pappus is only presented to us by what he says and does.  What seems obviously a ruse is never laid out for us as a certainty.  And Austin Popper is another case.  We do know that some of his statements are lies, and his ambition is clear to us, but what does he really do with that ambition and those lies?  He is content to sit in the dilapidated Red Room without luxury.  And at the end of the novel, his grand scheme is to live in a doublewide trailer with three old men.  There is obviously a core belief in the Society and its teachings. The absurdity comes in these characters having grand ambitions and cunning social interactions for what are the most meager ends.

However, this approach can make reading the book difficult, in that you don’t have a solid character to hold on to.  Even if you’re interested in following the course of this Society, you aren’t in a position to root for anything—you are along for the ride.  If you’re the kind of reader who is cool with being along for the ride (and in the hands of a skilled writer—which Portis certainly is—I am), then the journey through this absurd world is fun.  But I can see a number of readers having a problem with the narrative, either dropping out some ways in or making it to the end only grudgingly.  Judging by some of the reviews I’ve seen of the book, that seems right.

To me, the absurdities are not offputting because they are so perfectly human.  The Gnomon Society is often seen in light of other secret societies and cults, but how is it really any different than major religions and their major texts.  The texts are written by people, often cobbled together by other people, and then declared by a third group to hold all the answers and knowledge we need.  The gentle mix of con artist and true believers is the exact combination necessary to fuel the expansion of such a religion.  And to be clear, Portis is not mocking people who embrace religions, because those who are critical of them are just as absurd.  I loved the scene of the Texas committee hearing in which Popper is grilled about Jimmerson and the Gnomons.  The committee members are every bit as ridiculous if not moreso.  The fact is, we are a ridiculous species and the more we insist on knowing the truth about anything the more ridiculous we are.  If there is not grand meaning in the mysteries around us, then there are only absurdities in our insistence on their being grand meanings.

What I think makes the book enjoyable to read instead of painful, is the gentleness with which Portis approaches his subject.  I could see the argument that Portis is almost loving toward his creations, laying their absurdities bare and open to critique, but doing so without malice.  If it’s not love, then there is at least a feeling of camaraderie, an acknowledgment that as ridiculous as these people are, they are not especially ridiculous, no more than the rest of us.