Time Travel as a Narrative Device in Octavia Butler's Kindred
The plot of the novel Kindred follows Dana, a 1970s Black woman, who faints and is unexpectedly transported back to the 1820 South. This book uses time travel as both a fantasy plot twist and as a display to examine the horrible realities of slavery and its longstanding impact on modern society. Through Dana's eyes, we're dropped into the world of the 1800s, experiencing the oppressive and unjust conditions ourselves. This storytelling approach also helps us understand the connections between historical segregation and today's trends of inequality.
I think time travel in Kindred is meant to act like a bridge to connect two extremely different periods. This device lets Butler "travel" through centuries, combining the past and present in a way that stresses their connected narratives. As Dana goes back and forth through time whenever Rufus calls her in a time of distress, the reader can reflect on what it's like to really live as a slave with the juxtaposition of Dana's normal life in the 70s.
I also think that Dana's knowledge of what life was like in the late 1900s makes her much more like the reader versus if she was just a slave the whole time. By transporting a modern character like Dana into the antebellum South, Butler gets to a level of immersion that is really hard to copy in a historical story. The time travel element is necessary because it removes the detachment that we can experience when we're learning about history from a distance. For example, reading about a historical event in a textbook is much less impactful than living through it. Instead, Dana's journey back in time forces her and us to confront the realities of slavery as they are. All of her realizations are what we are realizing at the same time, and I think this is a really powerful tool that is unique to Butler's writing.
Another trend I noticed was how Octavia was using time travel to highlight the continuity between the past and the present, and how historical events shape current issues. Through the comparisons of Dana's many journeys back and forth, we can see that the remnants of slavery still influence modern society. As Dana lives through both timelines, she encounters things like violence as a form of coercion, white supremacy/privilege, resistance to social change, and more. While these attitudes and beliefs were more pronounced in the past, she still experiences them in her normal life.
Overall, I think the time travel device Butler used throughout the story was really impactful and made the narrative a lot more profound and emotional. I've never been so "close" to someone who experienced the horrors of slavery, which is something unique to this book, and I think the author did a great job depicting it.
Hi Aryan, nice post. I definitely agree that the elements of time travel throughout Kindred made the narrative a lot more impactful. You make a good point about "closeness" - Dana's perspective forces readers to understand what it would be like travelling back to the past and experiencing the past for themselves. It's much harder to brush things off as "a different time" or "more common back then". We have to internalize what it was really like living in the past.
ReplyDeleteI definitely think its interesting how the author makes no attempt to explain the time travel phenomenon. The author makes a point of avoiding this irrelevant piece of the narrative puzzle and forcefully throws you into a hypothetical world that talks about the impacts of slavery on a someone with a more modern mentality. Over the course of the narrative, this ability to clash the relative present with the past really puts into persepctive the ability of the system of slavery present in America at the time to subdue any beliefs of resistance and force and members of the system, regardless of what time period they might be from. Although Dana doesn't choose to integrate into the system and tolerate some of its ideas, by the end of the book, we see her playing a certain role on the plantation and be forcefully subject into the same torture and abuse as those who had been living in the 1820s their whole lives. In a sense, the phenomenon is never displayed as the important part. We as readers are too invested in Dana's surivival and Dana herself is too concerned with staying alive to overexamine why it is that this is happening to her and the book is too concerned with examining the social ramifications of the meeting of the more progressive values of the present with the degredation of the slavery the past.
ReplyDeleteGreat job pointing out the various effects of the time travel in the novel. To add, another crucial aspect of the time travel is the fact that it happens whenever Rufus is at a risk of dying. This places Dana at a weird position, making her responsible for keeping Rufus as to keep herself alive, and later sets up very twisted moral dilemmas as Dana tries to juggle her kinship to both Rufus and Alice. The impossible situations she finds herself in due to the time travel goes to show how the suffering and pain of the then-enslaved people continues onto present day black people's lives.
ReplyDeleteHi Aryan! I really like your blog. Your points about how the time travel makes the reader relate more to the protagonist I believe to be quite insightful. I found that it was much easier to empathize with Dana because I felt like she was 'one of our time period,' where if she was portrayed as always a slave, I may have disconnected her from myself. Because she starts out as a freed modern person, the reader is much more likely to develop a personal connection to Dana and experience more emotion through the novel. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI've always been really intrigued and simultaneously perplexed by Butler's usage of time travel in Kindred, because I really enjoyed it as a plot device, yet there's just no explanation of why it's happening. I almost feel like I like it without the explanation and wanna keep that sense of mystery, But one thing that I gradually wondered as we read more, and soon Alice started becoming more prominent as a character is: Why does Dana only travel when Rufus is in danger, when Alice is just as much of an ancestor as Rufus is? Then just building upon that a bit, what would have happened had Alice died before Hagar was conceived? And would Dana be on better terms with Alice had she also traveled back when she was also in danger?
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that Butler uses time travel a pretty interesting way to bring the present closer to the past. Like you said, it makes it much harder as readers to distance ourselves from the past and by letting us see in to Dana's mind it almost makes it more real, even if the weylin plantation wasn't. It still reveals more about the experience of slavery. I also think it's interesting how the time travel is pretty much solely a device used to put Dana in the past and Butler tries to avoid talking about the details of it. It puts more of the focus on Dana and her experiences rather than the time travel itself.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting post! I also wrote about time travel for mine, but I looked at more how the time travel itself worked rather than looking at it in terms of the book. I also appreciate your discussion of how by using time travel, Octavia Butler forbids the readers of Kindred from being detached from the novel––you can't really put the book down when, say, Dana is being beaten––you have to keep reading and understand the atrocities of slavery.
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ReplyDeleteI think that your point about the importance of Dana's modern life before the events of Kindred is a big part of the novel. Removing the detachment of a standard historical novel is something that can really drive home the emotional weight of the story. I think it's also important to think about the fact that the "modern" setting of Kindred was almost 50 years ago and what has changed about the modern portion of the novel and not just the historical portion.
ReplyDeleteThere's definitely a lot to be said about just how emotionally striking Kindred is as a novel. I've read several non-fiction narratives of what slavery was like (i.e. Booker T. Washington, Harriet Jacobs, etc.), and they're all incredibly captivating because they describe how terrible day-to-day life was when you live under a system that allows you to be owned by someone else. However, even with how cruel/striking the details of these non-fiction books were, they still purposefully avoided some of the worst aspects of slave-life (partly because white people didn't want to publish things that put white people into too bad of a light at the time, and also because it's hard for writers to have to re-live all their trauma on paper). I think Kindred is kind of "unbounded" in this sense, because it can represent how horrific slavery was without cutting any corners.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that this story would've played out way differently without the aspect of time travel. By bringing a more "contemporary" character to an older time period, Butler bridges a gap that would've existed had she just written from the perspective of a slave in the 1800s. Dana's modern perspective adds so much more depth to the plot and gives the story a different and new angle. Not to mention it makes Butler's story unique in comparison to other slavery narratives.
ReplyDeleteOne way to read/interpret the aspect where Dana has no explanation or logical justification for the time travel could be to read it metafictionally, as a kind of "comment" on the nature of history, and specifically the nature of the traumatic history of the slavery era. To put it roughly, by this logic, a Black person in the contemporary United States can't "choose" to consider seriously the impacts and legacies of slavery--revisiting and contemplating the far-reaching effects of this system on all aspects of contemporary American life is a *necessity*, and the novel's involuntary "history lesson" might be read as a way of saying that ALL Americans need to revisit this painful history and actually grapple seriously with its implications. To put it simply, this novel will not "let" slavery remain comfortably in the past.
ReplyDeleteAnd with Kevin also being dragged involuntarily into this past, we might view the novel in light of the panic over the 1619 Project as making a case for why *white* readers should also be compelled to take this historical journey, however "uncomfortable" it makes them.
I completely agree with you, the time travel device Butler utilized throughout the novel allows us (the readers) to feel uncannily close to Dana and by extension the slaves on the plantation. We truly feel like members of this plantation and as a result we get a deeper understanding of how slavery effected people not just in a general sense but we get understand how slavery impacted people as individuals. Overall, Great Post!
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