“And she opened him.”
One of the primary jobs of the fiction writer is confusion-management. How many characters can you get away with introducing on the first page? How and how quickly should you explain that this one is that other one’s sister-in-law?
Confusion, unlike suspense, is entirely unpleasant, so you’d think that the proper management strategy would be eradication. But notice the minor discouragement of opening a book and discovering, there before chapter one, an elaborate family tree. Confusion has been staved off, but so has faith in the author as host. Or think of the much more common fiasco of anxious exposition. (There goes Angie, thought Sally. Always acting like my sister even though she’s just my sister-in-law.) Confusion in a piece of fiction is like silence around a dinner table. No one enjoys it, and you’d do well not to let it become a major theme, but a bit of it, bravely borne, is often the price of true communion.
This business of confusion-management — a never-ending struggle even for the likes of Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald — is especially tricky for the science fiction writer, whose entire undertaking is, after all, confusing. Angie is not only Sally’s sister-in-law — she’s also in possession of the lunar crystal that, implanted just so in the base of the skull, imparts long life on all those who come from Sally’s home-planet. How to unsnarl that hairball of complexity? How to be sure that the reader will appreciate the intricacy and ingenuity of your world-building without subjecting her to a fusillade of bafflement?
Behold Octavia Butler. She is, among other things, a genius of confusion-management. Look on her works, ye muddled, and rejoice.
Her mastery shines most clearly in a story called “Bloodchild.” It’s about a race of aliens who, being unable to reproduce, have forced humans into a horrible sort of surrogacy. The aliens, who resemble three-meter-long scorpion sorts of things, implant their grubs deep inside humans’ bodies. The grubs thrive in their human environs, wriggling around so energetically that their pulsations are occasionally visible from the outside. And then, when the time is right, they’re “born,” i.e. the aliens cut the humans open and, with much delight, extract the worm-like, blood-slick grubs.
The first thing to say about all this is: yikes. The second thing is: what an astonishing quantity of information for Butler to get across! The fact that we’re on another planet; the existence of the aliens; the relation between the aliens and humans; the precise mechanics of those relations. And she needs somehow to cram all this into luggage that’s already brimming with the standard literary stuff of character and setting (just conveying that the narrator is a human boy would cause many writers to break a sweat).
Butler’s secret, and the secret to confusion-management generally, is: the intensity of her conviction. She believes in her world, and so do we. Notice how rarely we’re confused by stories people tell us in real life. However tangled (She’s my mom’s cousin’s dog), however temporally choppy (Oh, wait, I forgot to tell you that my landlord’s allergic), we can follow the thread. The storyteller is consulting an actual mental map, and our understanding is somehow tethered by that map’s existence, however hectic our present access to it. As long as Butler can keep us believing that she can see her world in its entirety — “not just in the part the camera sees,” as Raymond Chandler puts it — then we will follow her gladly through the fog.
Watch Butler in action in the story’s central scene:
The narrator, Gan, is relaxing uneasily with his family and their alien captor, T’Gatoi, when they hear a commotion outside. A strange man is staggering around sick. This man, it turns out, is full of grubs, and they’ve been busily excreting their poison into him. He can barely stay conscious.
Go slaughter an animal!, orders T’Gatoi. (An animal?, we wonder.) But off Gan goes, armed with a forbidden gun (humans aren’t allowed to have guns). He shoots an achti (a gazelle type of thing, I gather) and carries it back into the kitchen where the man appears to be dying.
Thank you, says T’Gatoi. There’s no need for you to stay around and watch.
But of course — despite knowing that whatever we’re about to see will be horrible — we want to watch. And so does Gan.
T’Gatoi ties the man’s hands and pushes them over his head. She rolls up the man’s shirt and gives it to him to bite. (Such is the tension of the moment that we too could use something to bite.)
“And she opened him.”
Just that, four words, given their own paragraph. The man’s body convulses, he makes noises such as Gan has never heard. I won’t tell you whether he lives or dies, or how all this bears on Gan’s own future as a grub-carrier.
But notice the restraint in that sentence. And notice how the restraint is not only an act of writerly courtesy (I’m always grateful when an author draws a curtain around an act of sex or gore) but also a solemn-faced demonstration of conviction. If Butler didn’t believe in her world, then she would — like Stephen King at his most twelve-year-old-boy-esque — relish the description. With a sound like burlap ripping and a smell like copper and spoiled meat… But because Butler does believe in her world — or because she understands the value of pretending to do so — she treats it with the pursed-lip horror of a witness recounting an atrocity.
And so we — with the innate capacities we bring to decoding the actual world — easily parse the story: the slaughtered achti is there as a kind of incubator for the newborn grubs; the humans are called Terrans; the grubs’ egg-cases have strange medicinal properties.
Each of us — whether we read science fiction or not — has significant practice at this sort of alien-planet-decoding. My daughter’s main occupation, in her first years of consciousness, has been puzzling over the data of the world. How does the baby get in there? How do you make forks? Do kids die? She learned, simultaneously, that germs existed and that one of them was going to necessitate the closing down of our world. She is — as Octavia Butler’s readers are — entirely absorbed; confusions barely register.