Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Placental Economy: Octavia Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Speculative Subjectivity

2007; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436920701708044

1545-5866

Laurel Bollinger,

Reproductive Health and Technologies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I would like to thank D.S. Neff and Diana Bell for their invaluable help with various stages of this project, as well as the anonymous readers for LIT, whose inquiries and suggestions made the essay's argument much clearer than it would otherwise have been. Errors and infelicities remain, of course, my own. Notes Indeed, Irigaray occasionally stresses that women must come to understand their maternal identities not in the procreation of actual children only, but also in a wider range of creative endeavors. See “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother” in Sexes and Genealogies. Such an understanding of the role of the placenta is also prevalent in West African traditional beliefs, where the placenta is understood as a guardian twin who has protected the baby through gestation and retains its purity after birth as well. The human placenta is seen as a double of the divine placenta used in the creation of the world. See “The Placenta in West African Myths and Rituals” in Bonnefoy. To see how varied such descriptions may be, it may be useful to compare Rouch's to Matt Ridley's more recent account of the placenta. Citing research suggesting that the placenta's formation depends upon genes inherited from the father, Ridley characterizes the relation between the placenta and the mother in terms of competition, seeing the placenta “not as a maternal organ designed to give sustenance to the foetus, but more as a foetal organ designed to parasitize the maternal blood supply and brook no opposition in the process” (Genome 209). He describes the placenta as the father's voice, as it were, in an argument “about the details of how much of the mother's resources the foetus may have,” explaining that “[t]he father's genes in the foetus…do not have the mother's interests at heart, except insofar as she provides a home for them. To turn briefly anthropomorphic, the father's genes do not trust the mother's genes to make a sufficiently invasive placenta; so they do the job themselves” (Genome 209). Both Rouch and Ridley depend upon metaphors to characterize the placenta, but their assessments of the mediating nature of its role vary widely. Allison, however, sees this focus as a weakness in Butler's work. Early critics were also quick to recognize power as a central issue in Butler's work. See particularly Govan. Butler has noted this issue in her own writing in interviews, saying to Allison Stein Best “I used to write a lot about power without sitting down and thinking about it. I wrote about power all the time. I caught myself doing it, and I realized one of the reasons was that I felt so powerless. Power fascinated me: how people get it, what they do with it, what it does to them” (qtd. in Best 8). Even early critics of Butler's work saw symbiosis as a central concern, although Butler's early novels seemed to suggest parasitism rather than mutualism. As Ruth Salvaggio explains about the short fiction, “the parasite-host relationship might well serve to explain the precarious and often disturbing connections between people that we encounter…. It is this bond, like the mental links in Butler's patternist novels, that at once gives rise to all the conflict in Butler's fiction, and all the promise of reconciliation and renewal as well” (40). But given the positive construction Salvaggio reaches about the bonds, symbiosis seems the more appropriate term. The term “Red Queen race” is used by evolutionary biologists to account for parallel evolution in linked species, where advances by one species threaten the survival of another and so trigger a reciprocal evolutionary move. The usage refers to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where the Red Queen explains to Alice that they must run twice as fast to get anywhere—their speedy journey only enables them to stay in one place. In evolutionary terms, species are locked into a continual race to outdo one another, resulting in a stalemate of sorts as their linked evolution keeps pace with one another. As Matt Ridley explains, “In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive…. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate” (The Red Queen 19). Clearly, Butler's construction of the gradual failure of the Tlic to reproduce in their planet's available host species suggests just such a Red Queen move. Her interest in biology suggests that Butler would have been aware of the Red Queen principle, in theory if not by name. Certainly the fact that Tlic larvae release a deadly chemical into the host's body upon hatching suggests one move in such a Red Queen race, presumably generated in response to the evolutionary success of potential host animals in eliminating such eggs (chemically or physically; Butler doesn't specify). Helford seems not to recognize this evolutionary implication in her discussion, suggesting that the Tlic preserve human intelligence because “Cooperation is the only way to ensure that humans do not become like the unthinking native animals which destroyed the eggs to protect their lives. Only sentient and rational beings can trust that the grubs will be removed before killing their host” (268). But in Red Queen terms, such intelligence isn't particularly at issue, and may actually be a threat. The chemicals released by the larvae before hatching make the host sick and ultimately incapacited; only an intelligent species would recognize the onset of a generalized illness as preceding a hatching, and possibly remove the grubs themselves at that point. In evolutionary thinking, the advantage to the Tlic of human hosts lies in the fact that the species did not evolve in competition with one another, meaning that, in reproductive terms, the Tlic are ahead in the Red Queen gambit. Here I would disagree with critics who have seen Anyanwu “demand[ing] and receiv[ing] respect as [Doro's] equal,” as Robin Roberts claims (141), or even Sandra Govan's claim that “each of Butler's heroines is a strong protagonist paired with, or matched against, an equally powerful male” (84). (“Bloodchild” reverses the genders, but otherwise the dynamic is the same.) Because Butler is so interested in exploring the boundary between submission and resistance, her male characters must be more powerful than the female protagonists—or else there would be no submission to record. The women may finally be shown to have more strength of will, but in each novel they are less physically or socially powerful than the men (or aliens) who serve as sometime-antagonists of the novels. (I qualify “antagonist” because familial dynamics between the men and women often recuperate the antagonist, making him a love interest in a mechanism not unlike genre romances.) Even the Parable books, in which there is no male antagonist per se, show the female protagonist often defeated physically, although not mentally, by the powers of the society she opposes. Only Fledgling seems to vary from this pattern in that the central figure is more powerful than the humans she comes to control. For convenience, all citations to the three novels will be made to Lilith's Brood, as the most readily available edition of the novels. The novels present a more unified vision than does the Patternmaster series, and were originally published in a much tighter time period than the other series. Information on the structure of the placenta is taken from Gray's Anatomy. Interestingly, Gray's describes the “villi of the chorion” as “numerous finger-like processes” which “project” from the outer surface of the placenta into the uterine wall and are sometimes described as resembling “tufts of seaweed” (Gray 1161). Such a description matches the tentacle-nature of the Oankali more generally. In one telling example, Butler constructs Lauren Olamina's father and stepmother as college professors who nonetheless cannot afford to enable Lauren to attend college herself. Butler thus suggests that decreasing support for public services impoverishes even those currently within the middle class. Butler's consistent preoccupation with longevity seems a particularly bitter irony, given her own premature death at age 58. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLaurel BollingerLaurel Bollinger is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she specializes in American literature. She has published on Stein, Twain, James and Faulkner, and is working on a project examining images of symbiogenesis in contemporary science fiction.