Recovering (from) the Double: Fiction as Historical Revision in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

When Minority American Fiction Writers engage the history of their country, they inevitably find themselves committed to a dualistic and vexed task of deconstruction and recovery. As Saidiya Hartman argues, “Writing the history of the dominated requires not only the interrogation of dominant narratives and the exposure of their contingent and partisan character but also the reclamations of archival material for contrary purposes” (10). Octavia E. Butler negotiates such a difficult task with Kindred, a novel that is both a realistic representation of the antebellum South and a fantasy of time travel, a retrieval of history through imagination. If, as Dominick LaCapra suggests, we are at a methodological impasse in our attempts to write history in the guise of either positivism or radical constructivism, then Butler can be said to anticipate such an impasse, making it rhetorically and psychically productive. For Butler, fiction is useful because it is not trapped into choosing between these two models of history, yet it can potentially and responsibly answer to the pressing impetus to “set the historical record straight.”¹ Forcing her readers to confront repressed anxieties about racial difference and slavery’s traumatic repercussions on the nation as a whole, this time travel fantasy poses and attempts to solve the beguiling problem of history’s seemingly Janus-faced genre: as factual truth to be recovered or (collective) memory to be constructed.

Ultimately, the task of undermining the master narrative of American history, one that has repressed the sordid and traumatic memories of the past, and rewriting that narrative into one that can sustain and reincorporate the repressed memories is a curative, or potentially curative, project.² Trauma theorists Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart argue that memory is a malleable construct that can be restructured in order to make the narratives provided by history more supportive of a curative end: “Once flexibility is introduced, the traumatic memory starts losing its power over current experience” (178). As Dana, the protagonist of Kindred, travels back in time to antebellum Maryland, she engages with and modifies not just memory but also history, a fantastic journey representative of the discursive manipulation of history that fiction as a genre accomplishes. Butler achieves this dual effect—of Dana’s travel as an individually curative narrative of memory and the story of her travel as a communally curative narrative of history—by characterizing the two temporal settings, the past and the present, and two of the main characters, Dana and Alice (Dana’s ancestor), as doubles of each other. This doubled imaging highlights the intimate connection between the past and the present as well as the need for both Dana and the novel’s readers to recognize the significance and source of the doubling across temporal and ego boundaries. By attending to the spatial, temporal, and psychic doublings, this essay seeks to appreciate Butler’s simultaneously fictional and metafictional attempt to make history and memory productively curative—to serve as both a recovery of repressed historical narratives and a recovery from repressed traumatic memories.

Kindred’s temporal, psychic, and thematic doublings can be understood in terms of a collective theoretical framework of trauma theory, Du Boisian double consciousness, and the literary trope of the uncanny.³ In bringing together theories inspired by Freud and the Du Boisian concept of double consciousness, I am myself performing a doubled critical move apropos to the complex matrix of doublings constituting Kindred’s fictive realm. Trauma/the uncanny and double consciousness are leading terms of two critical traditions, psychoanalysis and African American studies, that suitably and usefully echo each other, especially as they relate to Butler’s narrative choices and performances. The novel’s repeated image of the home additionally serves as the locus for each of these theoretical discourses. For trauma theory, the home functions as the site of received inherited trauma, or what Dominick LaCapra refers to as the “transgenerational transmission of trauma” (39 n.49). LaCapra also refers to such narratives as “founding traumas,” which can “paradoxically become the valorized or intensely cathected...