Negotiating Genre and Captivity: Octavia Butler's Survivor

Abstract

Negotiating Genre and CaptivityOctavia Butler's Survivor Maria Holmgren Troy (bio) Throughout her oeuvre, African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler has has focused her fiction on alternative family constellations, many of which have included extra-terrestrial aliens. In some of her stories, the figure of the orphan plays a leading role.1 One of these orphans is Alanna in Survivor (1978), who grows up as a wild child outside civilization on a future Earth. The story of Alanna's life as a teenager and young adult is one of adoption, negotiation, and adaptation. Like quite a few of Butler's protagonists, she has to deal with the repercussions of a mixed heritage and of being a woman of color in an intolerant, patriarchal community. There is also a mixture and negotiation of genres in Survivor: although it is clearly a science-fiction novel that both uses and revises major themes of that genre, I will show that the novel also engages with the genre of the Indian captivity narrative.2 I will suggest that Butler employs the orphan of color as a figure of difference as she draws on these genres, which have traditionally featured white protagonists and addressed white audiences. Indeed, Butler's novel and protagonist demonstrate the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of the captivity narrative as a carrier of cultural memory. As Jan Assmann has observed, cultural memory is "made visible in signs, symbols, images, texts, and rituals" (95). It forms the basis of, for instance, communal and national belonging and can have a bonding and even normative function. Written texts in particular open up new possibilities for cultural memory, since what is written down can be stored. Thus, the written text can serve both to perpetuate memory, to canonize it, and to change and challenge it, as different parts of a text can be activated by different readers and writers over time.3 In the latter sense, writing works as a "locus of latency" for cultural memory (Assmann 98). The Indian captivity narrative is a particularly interesting case in terms of American cultural memory; it has circulated for different purposes and in different forms since the seventeenth century, and, as Frances Roe Kestler observes, "the Indian captivity narrative forms a vital segment of American literature today, not only for its unique position as a separate genre, native in origin, but also for its influence on other types of writing as well as on our National culture" (xiii). Among other things, the captivity narrative has generically functioned as spiritual allegory, political propaganda, sensational adventure literature, and ethnological and historical account.4 The theme of Indian captivity also became important to American poets, playwrights, and novelists in the nineteenth century, as a national literature was shaped, and there are traces of the captivity narrative in sentimental, gothic, and historical fiction (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 37–38). Apart from its occurrence in different kinds of written accounts, the captivity narrative [End Page 1116] has spawned folkloristic tales, ballads, and legends (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 176). In the twentieth century, the theme of Indian captivity was used in films and TV series, and the structure and imagery of the narrative have been used to shape not only adventure stories in most if not all popular fiction genres (Slotkin 25), but also accounts such as hostage narratives and narratives of alien abductions (Panay; Scott; Sturma). Richard Slotkin has argued that the captivity myth is integral to what he calls the frontier myth. This myth is central to a specifically American ideology and identity, configured as white and Christian in opposition to Indian and savage, and it figures in a large number of different cultural and political contexts throughout American history. Slotkin uses the term "myth" in the sense of a story from a society's history that "through persistent usage" gains "the power of symbolizing that society's ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all of the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain" (5). He states that through frequent retellings and deployments as a source of interpretive metaphors, the original mythic story is increasingly conventionalized and abstracted until it is reduced to a deeply encoded and resonant...