Always Coming Home

 Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home may be one of the most unusual novels -- if that's what to call it -- ever written. It has a central story, that of "Stone Telling," and like many other works of speculative and fantastic fiction, it has maps, charts, and a lexicon of its invented language. But the level of detail is much greater than what most would expect, and the guiding structure is not that of a conventional novel at all; it's more like an anthropological study of a people -- the Kesh -- who, although they don't exist (yet) are studied as though they did. Some texts are pure narratives, whether Stone Telling's longer ones or the short stories, both mythological and historical; others are purely informational, written from disinterested position of a social scientist. And, in the midst of all this, a character named "Pandora" does her best to question, to trouble, and to interrupt any too-easy understanding of the whole, occasionally in dialogue with someone who, though she is the "author" of parts of the book, is not -- apparently -- completely in charge of it. When first released in 1985, the book came in a case which included a cassette tape of the "music and poetry of the Kesh"; now, in this digital age, there are links whereby this same material may be purchased and downloaded online.

In creating the multi-layered text that is Always Coming Home, Le Guin draws upon not only her experience as a writer of science fiction, but on her childhood memories and the world of her parents. Her father, Alfred L. Kroeber, was an eminent anthropologist who worked with many of the world's lesser-known tribes, and for a time took Ishi -- described as "the last wild Indian in America," the only surviving member of his tribe -- into his home. Ishi was studied extensively, and lived out his last years with the Kroebers; Alfred's wife Theodora wrote her own account, Ishi in Two Worlds, which became a best-selling book on its publication in 1961. Sadly, by that time Ishi was long dead, his life and then his body made the subject of scientific study. His brain, in fact, was retained by the laboratory after his burial, and was only re-united with the rest of him after public criticism, a story documented in the book Ishi's Brain. Ursula Le Guin didn't speak much about these histories, but certainly her parents' careers and writing must have influenced her, along with the curious traces of this man and his vanished culture.

For the "Kesh" people, too, live in California -- or what was California. The maps show that the central valley of California, where so much of its and the nation's produce is grown, has by this future time been completely inundated, and now forms an "Inland Sea." But the river that empties into this sea, and alongside which the Kesh dwell, is easily recognizable; this is the Napa River, its name worn down to simply Na in this future world. And the Kroeber's summer home, too -- with the curious name of "Kishamish" -- was in the valley of this same river.

Now, thirty-four years after the original version, comes a new "Author's Expanded Edition," apparently one of the last things Le Guin worked on before her death in 2018. It offers, most centrally, an extension of the other novel within a novel, "Dangerous People," but there are also some additional poems, as well as a couple of fascinating interviews about how the process for the book -- particularly the collaboration with Todd Barton, and how the Kesh's musical instruments were "built" -- for fans of the book, it's one last treasure trove of information.

Kindred

 In many ways, Octavia Butler's Kindred walks the same ground as Whitehead's Underground Railroad -- only here, a mysterious, invisible vortex of some kind draws Dana -- and later her husband Kevin -- back into her family's past, no train or tracks required. But the most central difference -- the one that haunts Dana from the moment she realizes Rufus's identity -- is that her battle for what's right, and even for her own survival, is caught up with the fear that -- unless she turns a blind eye on these past atrocities -- she herself will never come into existence. Of course, that's the old time travel paradox: if by traveling into the past, Dana alters the universe in some way that means she'll never be born, why then she wasn't born and therefore couldn't have existed in order to travel into to past.

And then there's one other aspect of these stories that's quite different from Whitehead's book, or even Billy Pilgrim's coming unstuck from time -- the things Dana brings into -- and back from -- the past are persistent, whether it be manumission papers or a swollen jaw. And then there's this curious discrepancy of time -- though they've been in the past, even for years, when Kevin and Dana return to their "present" of 1976, only a few moments have passed. Kevin manages this disorienting aspect of their time travel less well than Dana; in the time in the past when they were separated, he seems to have taken on a different, harder kind of burden, one that he can't bring himself to discuss with her. At the same time, Dana's efforts to engineer the past grow more convoluted and perilous -- for, even as she sees Rufus grow increasingly blind to the violence and harm he sows, she can't know what she risks if she kills him --until she does.

The Underground Railroad, Part II

Thuso Mbedu as Cora

Once Cora and Caesar get on board for their first ride on the Underground Railroad of Whitehead's novel, we begin to realize that their journey on this newly "real" route is both a physical and a metaphysical one. Upstairs, while they ride, some crazy deity or another -- maybe it's Anansi, maybe Brer Rabbit -- shakes up the dice of history and scrambles up a new reality, new social structures, new laws. The only rule seems to be that the pieces of it have to have actually happened, somewhere in the quilted, torn, and roughly-mended American past which is all too present in these pages.

There are some "tutor texts" amidst the jumble, particularly Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Frederick Douglass's Narrative, but there are many others. Historical events bubble up to the surface of time like poisoned oil, among them the infamous "Tuskegee Experiment," where African-Americans with latent syphilis were, for forty years (1932-1972) given pretend "treatments" by the U.S. Public Health Service, while more than 100 study participants died of the disease and its complications. Not all the incidents come from American history either; there are overtones of the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews, as well as the slave rebellion against the Roman Empire led by Spartacus in 73 BC. But the worst of these permutations are home-grown, and in them the past of the United States comes back to haunt these grounds; even Cora's ultimate journey -- apparently one on the Oregon Trail -- is woven out of that braid.

I'm also asking everyone to watch at least the first episode of Barry Jenkins' adaptation of the novel, which is available from our corporate overlords at Amazon -- if you happen to have a Student Prime membership or trial membership, it's free.

The Underground Railroad, Part I

Colson Whitehead is a writer whose fictions have always traversed reality in strange ways. From his début novel, The Inuitionist, which is set in an imaginary conflict between two different schools of elevator inspection, through to Apex Hides the Hurt, a novel about an advertising writer whose specialty is giving new names and tagline to old products -- including towns and cities -- Whitehead has followed his own particular muse. Some of his novels, such as The Colossus of New York and John Henry Days, are apparently so offbeat that their current Wikipedia entries are practically blank! And yet, with The Underground Railroad, a far wider readership discovered an embraced Whitehead; the book won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

What if? In a manner reminiscent of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Steven Millhauser, Whitehead's fictions are often driven by a single fantastical conceit; in this case, a strikingly simple one: what if the "Underground Railroad" were actually a railroad that ran under the ground? Everything else in the novel could be said to flow "realistically" from this single central conceit -- although, as you'll see, there are some permutations that follow which re-shape the fabric of that reality at every station of the train.

We will take this train a few stops at a time: this week, we'll be reading just the first three: Ajarty, Georgia, and Ridgeway. Some of the stories will seem familiar, although what's familiar is the most painful: a multigenerational saga of a family sold off into slavery, cruel slave masters, and a desperate attempt to escape them. This is no Roots, though -- Whitehead pulls no punches, and the visceral suffering and mental anguish of slavery have never been more acutely captured. And yet, on top of or within that hard reality, a strange, uncanny secondary reality arises. Not to be glib, but it's somewhat like the 'butterfly' theory of time travel -- when one steps on a butterfly, all kinds of alterations are made in the future that follows, entire epochs or empires may fall or never have risen. Some of these alterations may be disorienting, but all are deliberate; many are infused with the aura of other key texts in the African-American literary tradition. Like variations on a theme, they repeat, but with a difference.

So, in your responses, try to think of each section in the context of the others, somewhat like longer versions of Billy Pilgrim's unstuck leaps, only this time connected by a train. What changes at each stop? And what is the significance of those changes, to you?

The Handmaid's Tale (film)

Could the United States be converted into fundamentalist utopia -- the 'Republic of Gilead' -- and the status of women be demoted to Old Testament proportions? It seemed possible in 1985, when Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, and even though the political muscle of evangelical sects has diminished a bit since then, but not the peril of an authoritarian regime. And, to a degree almost unimaginable in the 1980's, the Internet has muddied the waters of reality, creating a new sort of primordial soup, from which all kinds of new monsters may yet be slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Religious fervor is one thing, but chaos is another.

In 1990, the novel was adapted as a film. Things looked good at the start, with Harold Pinter (later a Nobel laureate) set to write the script, and an A-list cast was lined up that included Robert Duvall as the Commander, Faye Dunaway as Serena Joy, and Natasha Richardson as Offred. The original director, Karol Reisz, had wanted thousands of extras for the crowd scenes, along with other big-budget set pieces; when the studio nixed these, he quit, and was replaced by Volker Schlondorff. Pinter, claiming he was "exhausted," begged off doing any of the script changes Schlondorff requested, giving him and author Margaret Atwood "carte blanche" in rewrites, and later trying to have his name taken off the script. Another day in Hollywood.

Given all that, it's remarkable that the film is as strong, as coherent, and as passionate as it is. Certainly, it was far ahead of its time in many ways, and despite its modest production values conveys an uncanny feeling that such a world might still, a third of a century later, be just around the corner.

The (graphical) Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale 

first appeared in 1985, at a time when its dystopian religious-state future seemed to some to be -- potentially, at least -- just around the corner. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority organization had emerged as a major political player, along with other evangelical leaders; many decried the rising tide of "secularism" and demanded that their God combine forces with the state. At the same moment, the expansion of mass media -- tame by today's standards, but notable at the time -- gave many the feeling that, with the vast increase in cable channels and the abolishment of the "Fairness Doctrine," the possibility of state control of the media was a real and present danger.

How naive some of these fears seem today -- not because they were groundless, but because when these things really came to pass, they were a good deal more insidious -- and darker -- than anyone back then could have imagined. It's little wonder that the novel has come back into prominence today; Atwood herself has written about the power it's had in its new (juxta)position. The current television series starring Kate Moss is certainly one sign of this renewed relevance; this graphical adaptation by Renee Nault is surely another. Nault, like Atwood, is Canadian, which certainly gives her an ideally parallel perspective on Canada's irksome southern neighbor, but she's also a generation younger, a native of the dynamic, cosmopolitan province of British Columbia. Her style is very much influenced by other arts of the "Pacific rim," drawing in particular from that of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. In particular, the presence of red in a dark world is even more dramatic -- not only is it, of course, the color of the habits assigned to handmaids, but it's the color of blood. It's a bright, bright red, spilling onto and over the frames and margins of the page. Nault has talked about her approach, but bear in mind that, as with our other books, it's we the viewers and readers of this book in whose eyes and hands the ultimate judgement of her success rests. 

The Stepford Wives

The novelist Ira Levin can claim credit for two novels -- the other being Rosemary's Baby -- that were the basis of classic horror/sci-fi films of the '60's and '70's. With Stepford, Levin tunes in on many of the issues of the day -- urban flight to the suburbs, feminism, and the pressures of conformity -- without in any way making it an "issues" novel -- it's been called a "satirical thriller," and that probably comes as close as any other phrase to describing his subtle yet sardonic portrait of an independent woman in a suburb filled with women who don't just act robotically, but are in fact robots. built deep in the bowels of the mysterious "Men's Club."

The fascination with the idea of human automata or robots goes back to the earliest days of modern technology. In the early 1800's, Henri Maillardet built astonishing automata, including one which could write poetry and draw. This figure, amazingly, was found in a state of disrepair after having been damaged in a fire; on its being restored and wound up, it made a number of drawings, including one one under which it wrote "Ecrit par L'Automate de Maillardet" -- Written by the Automaton of Maillardet -- in a sense, it identified itself.

The quest in more modern times has been to create a robot which is as similar in its outward capabilities as a human being, and yet most of its fictional and film incarnations have been hostile rather than kind: cyborgs such as the Terminator, organic humanoids such as the Replicants in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, or the Borg of Star Trek, whose famous taglines are "resistance is futile," and "you will be assimilated." Friendly robots have not fared so well; the best, such as Robin Williams' Bicentennial Man, have been vaguely pathetic in their never-ending quest to reach a humanity that is denied them.

Levin's genius -- and the genius of the 1974 film version, starring Katharine Ross -- to imagine robots who are nothing if not built to please -- men, that is -- but whose ultimate significance to the women they replace is a total loss of identity, followed by a death that will never be reported in the Stepford Chronicle.  They're entirely technological, but in other respects much like their organic counterparts in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

There are a few interesting differences between the book and the film, most significantly its ending, a fade-to-black that suggests that the knife goes in a rather different place. The book also introduces a black couple new to Stepford, Ruthanne (a children's book author) and her husband, Royal. It's a feint -- sexism trumps race, and while Ruthanne is useful to the book's last pages (it's through her eyes that we see Joanna's replacement), there's a strong implication that she, too, will soon be Stepfordized.

As an aside, the novel explicitly mentions the urban legend about the Abraham Lincoln animatronic (designed by Disney engineers for the 1964 World's Fair) going 'crazy.' It didn't, but a frequently posted online video shows that it had other, equally bizarre, troubles. The adventuresome might also check out the TV sequels, Revenge of the Stepford Wives and The Stepford Children -- for even more animatronic weirdness.

BONUS: Here are some more details on the film's reception, including an article about the reaction to the film from a group of leading feminists of the day.