Butler and Shammas

What Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Anton Shammas’ Arabesques share is a looping kind of disregard for time and space within the encompassed field of their narratives. Even disregarding the impossibilities of different forms of time travel introduced in both novels and the very different settings of time and place and attitude, there is a very similar continual expansion and contraction of narrative scope and movement that occurs in both novels that produces varying effects. In Kindred, the force with which Dana is first yanked into Rufus’ 1800s Southern plantation is extremely dizzying and abrupt, to the effect to where not only is the reader, along with Dana, caught completely unaware, but that the abrupt change in language on the page itself also triggers this strange nausea. The “pale, almost colorless eyes” of Kevin and the  concerns of “nonfiction” and “bookcase” ordering were neatly grounding in a sort of domestic, interior way (Butler 13). In the next instant, in a space of only several intervening words, the scene becomes one of not only the “outdoors,” but the specificity of the “green” “ground beneath trees” (Butler 13). Though the prologue and foreshadowing of “trouble” and “the day I met Kevin” would seem to wish to indicate a forthcoming shift in scene, the violence of the ensuing temporal rift moves beyond expectation (Butler 12). The agency of the prologue as a type of beginning-at-the-end type of hook into the story works in a similar manner as memory is commonly expected to, mirroring our natural, collective patterns of understanding one anothers’ experiences through cause and effect. This way of drawing the reader into the story almost seems natural enough to avoid causing alarm, but the utter incongruity between the memory’s trigger and the contents of the memory itself parallel the disorienting rift that Dana herself experiences.

In contrast, although Shammas’ first shift from Part One: The Tale to Part Two: The Teller: Père Lachaise is also greatly divergent in content, style, and temporal reality, it does not express the same level of surprise at itself. The “red candies of memory” (Shammas 73) and her “red hair” (Shammas 77) may seem almost too easy of a connection to make, but it is precisely these small comforts of familiarity and easily traceable leaps of thinking which ease the weight of memory’s unknowable connections. The shift comes more naturally for Shammas than Butler this first time and in subsequent shifts, partially with the aid of the gradually easing quality of the third person. With this slight remove, it is no longer the reader’s responsibility to make sense of the dizzying move- for if the narrative itself pays no particular heed and finds nothing alarming in its sudden shift, then the situation must be contained and safe.

Through the different but similarly vast playing fields of both novels, one from 1970s California to 1800s pre-Civil War Maryland and the other from a 150 year long Israeli history to the modern day cornfields of Iowa, it would seem that Kindred and Arabesques would produce similar expectations to memory, their effects in contrast produce a richer if not understanding, then acknowledgement, of the power of memory. Whereas Dana fears and is physically and emotionally tormented by the literal pull back into the memories of her literal but unlived past, Shammas’ tale and characters seem to be greatly enriched and benefited by all the forgiving slowness and range of time. Whereas Dana’s memories seem to be chasing and closing in on her not only through the intense race relation tensions produced by her fall into history but through her inability to control her temporality except through grievous harm, Shammas’ woven memories show memory in the slow light of introspection and weaving. It seems that agency may be comprehended in the way connections are formed between moments of memory; when the events of the present day cease to interfere (creating new memories even as the old are being reviewed), memory can finally take center stage at its own pace. It is interesting to see how both novels play with the differing speeds and the ensuing pushing and pulling at which memory and real life seem to wish to occur.