Rape in Science Fiction

Reading zuzu's complaint about the attention a rape inevitably focuses on everyone but the perpetrator reminded me of something I'd drafted a few months back but didn't post.  At the time, I'd just written about rape in comic books literature and didn't want to seem fixated on the subject.  I also didn't want to put Adam Roberts—author of the novel I'll be discussing—on the spot.  But with Adam vacationing in the southern France and the other post nestled in the archives, I feel more comfortable starting this discussion.

Adam's novel Salt describes the colonization of a distant planet by religious fundamentalists.  Getting to that planet takes 37 years, during which time tensions between the different religious factions build.  After landing, the factions settle on opposite ends of the Great Desert.  Despite this distance, the Senaarians—a hierarchical, imperialistic culture—and the Alsists—a radically libertarian culture which, oddly, embraces a recognizably New Left strain of communistic thought—eventually come into conflict. 

For the first 226 pages, the novel switches from the self-hagiography of the Senaarian dictator, Barlei, and the man who would become a leader in the Alsist resistance, Petja.¹  Initially, Barlei's voice dominates, and so the reader's sympathies fall largely with the Senaarians, who seem to lodge just complaints against the free-loading Alsists.  Barlei will wax poetic for pages about how the Senaarians labored to find a way to move in open air despite the chlorine gas which hugs the planet's surface; whereas Petja will say "Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask.  It was a clever thing" (43). 

Knowing Adam's love of Robert Browning, I can't help but consider these dualing dialogues—presumably drawn from the memoirs of both men—as self-serving in the extreme.  Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I doubt it.  Barlei seems more trustworthy at first, but as his manipulations of even inconsequential truths begin to pile up, his revisionist ethos becomes increasingly troubling.  Chapter-by-chapter, the reader's sympathies drift to Petja and his open, non-hierarchical, sexually-liberated society. 

And when I say "sexually-liberated," I mean it.  Alsists frequently walk up to each other, ask if they desire sexual pleasure, and give and/or receive it.  As one might guess, this utopian version of the free-love movement is reviled and condemned by the strict law-and-orderists of Senaar.  But it works in Als.  Everyone seems happy with the hedonistic gender equity they've created.  As the details of Alsist life are revealed, Barlei's voice and the strictures it demands become increasingly strident.  Here, then, is where the reader's sympathies turn to the Alsist position.  (They're the Palestinians in this allegory.) 

But there's a catch.   A Senaarian ambassador is stranded in Als when the war begins.  Petja, about to leave Als to wander the Great Desert, agrees to ferry her into Senaarian territory.  At this point in the novel, all reader sympathy is with Petja and the Alsists.  The Senaarians inch closer to employing a flimsy pretext to invade and slaughter the Alsists, so as Petja leaves, reader sympathy lies almost exclusively with the Alsists about to be sucker-punched.  As Petja and the ambassador, a woman named Rhoda Titus, move through the desert, their apprehensions about each other slowly disappear.  They become more friendly, more collegial as the trip continues ... until, that is, Petja rapes her.

I say "rape," but in Petja's mind, it's a culture clash.  He's recognized their mutual attraction and acted upon it in a typically Alsist manner.  He construes her struggles as typical Senaarian repression, an inability to reliquinsh duty to pleasure.  The reader, however, is fully conscious of the fact that Rhoda Titus is being raped.  All of the sudden, all sympathetic identification collapses.  Petja mistakes her struggles for signs of cultural difference, while the reader, fully cognizant of what is happening, cannot fathom an appropriate response.  (I should note that such moments are characteristic of Adam's novels.  Their selling point, even.)  Why?

Because there is none.  The dictatorial Senaarians don't deserve sympathy just because one of them has been raped.  In fact, their genocidal streak becomes more apparent after Titus returns to Senaar.  But we can no longer sympathize with the Alsists, as their ideology allows the rape to occur.  Had Titus been an Alsist, she would have simply, directly declined Petja's advances.  But as a Senaarian, she kept her mouth shut, struggled in vain, and had her struggling mistaken for something else.  Compounding the discomfort is the reader's knowledge that if Petja had been able to understand the reason for her struggle, he would immediately desist.

However, the most striking aspect of the novel is that, in its final pages, the dialogue of Barlei and Petja vanishes and is replaced by that of Rhoda Titus.  She gets the last word in a novel otherwise devoted to the movements who conflict her rape was involved in.  I think this a brave, bold move by Adam, especially considering the prejudices of many a science-fiction fan.  But I wonder what those of you who've read the book—as well as those of you who haven't—make of this Ulysses-esque granting of the final word to the wronged woman.

Because Adam has created a situation of such moral complexity that it haunts—there's no other word for it—it haunts readers for months.  It does so largely because Titus gets the final word.  That gesture instantly reorients the entire novel around that singularly disturbing moment.  There are a number of questions I could ask, but before I do, I should say that if I've failed to communicate the emotional complexity of this moment, please say as much and I'll elaborate.  Describing a scene in detail without ruining an entire novel is difficult business, and I'm not sure I trust my ability to practice it.

¹ Calling him a "leader" masks the moral dilemma Petja struggles with almost every page of the novel.  The idea that he "possesses" the forces he leads, that they are "his" men, is anathema to Alsist ideology.  But, for the moment, it's convenient enough shorthand for what he becomes.

Comments

[Natalia]

Wow, this is really good! I enjoy sci fi (though I've never read this particular work), but I have to say, a lot of time women are so hyper-sexualized and drawn out of all proportion that they become caricatures. But this makes me want to read the book!

[Bryan]

A fascinating article, especially for someone who hasn't read the novel in question. I'm not sure how much I'm willing to agree with your assertion that "we can no longer sympathize with the Alsists, as their ideology allows the rape to occur." Of course, I haven't read the book, so I may be talking out of my ass here, but it seems from your descriptions that it's not so much the Alsist ideology that allows/encourages rape but rather their understanding (or lack thereof) of Senaarian culture. Given a little education, I would assume that the Alsists would understand just why rape was wrong, right? They don't seem as unsympathetic as they do ignorant, which can always be remedied.

[brad]

Sir,

You are an English major. Why do you use the INCORRECT "can't help but"? It's a double negative! Don't you mean "can't help" or "can but only"?

Seriously, this mistake is not something a graduate student of English should make.

[Armchair Anarchist]

'Salt' was the first of Adam's books that I read, and was a real culture shock - as you point out, SF is not well known for its sensitive treatments of such topics, and to encounter such a frank addressing of rape was quite off-putting at first. But, following as it did the crafty changes in perspective, it really drove the hook home, and I continued reading with a sense of almost horrified fascination - "Did he actually write that?", I kept thinking, as I kept turning the pages. I simply had to know how it all worked out, for better or for worse.

As I remember it, Titus getting the last word is a fitting (but far from comforting) denouement. There was no sense of justice as such, but an overwhelming sense of...well, realism, I guess; a feeling that there had been no attempt to 'happily-ever-after' the tale, which would have cheapened the work immensely. It wouldn't have worked any other way, I think.

Regrettably, I encountered the book before I started taking notes on everything I read, and hence my memories are not detailed enough for me to really launch in on this discussion properly. I shall enjoy watching it continue, though - and I'll have to add 'Salt' to the to-read pile once again.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Natalia, you're certainly correct to note the dearth of believable female characters in sci-fi. It almost seems market-driven sometimes, like the presence of something resembling a real woman would detract from the escapist fantasies sci-fi readers expect. The exceptions always seem to be written by women, which is a sorry bit of essentialism, no doubt.

Bryan, actually, that's a stronger reader than mine, which I short-cutted to prevent the post from getting too long. At the same time, however, there's a real sense in which the ideological divide between the cultures is so vast that education may not work. Petja can't read Titus's reactions, ever, but now that I think about it, what's interesting is that neither can the Senaarians who debrief her. Her experience, no doubt as common within Senaar as any other human community ever, is something the men who debrief try to re-write. I can't find the particular passage, but I'll come back to this later, when I address the topic more generally.

Brad, I wrote "can't help but" for the same reason I wrote "not unfair" the day before; namely, for effect.

Armchair Anarchist, I agree 100%. Adam doesn't compartmentalize the rape, and its effects taint the rest of Petja's narrative, and linger with Adam's readers.

[K. Munoz]

Isn't "not unfair" just a compressed littotes? And "can't help but" isn't a double negative, anyway: the "but" is exceptional, not negative.

[Adam Roberts]

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/ra/#11018" target="new"> Just posted a comment at The Valve on this; but thought I might add a niggle or two to the debate over here too. I don’t know how far a writer, and a male writer in particular, is justified in writing about an event like rape. Really, at all. That perhaps sounds sappy, or disingenuous (given that I have written about rape on more than one occasion) but I mean it. Anything that enables the reader (or in a film, the viewer) to gloss over the hideousness of it becomes morally culpable, I think. But the difficulty then becomes one of dramatic deadness. Any text that simply reiterates the (I use the word awkwardly, not meaning it insultingly) pieties on a given topic are bound to fail. A dramatisation of racism that simply says ‘racism is very bad’ isn’t redeemed by the fact that, truly, racism is bad. More purchase on the topic is needed to make effective art.

One of the things I was trying to do in that novel was to try and excavate certain assumptions about rape, especially in the aftermath of the stories of rape used as a weapon of war in the former Yugoslavia (a tactic, as commentators dolefully pointed out, as old as war itself). These assumptions took the form of articulations of the nature of, for instance: ‘Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power’ or ‘The idiom of rape is not sex, it’s violence’ and so on. But I don’t see how eros can be separated out from the matter. I mean male eros, of course; I’m not sure that male sexual investment is a quantity that can be schlepped from place to place, or converted like currency, or excerpted and excluded from any given interaction. It’s the principle of exchange itself, not any given currency. (Pah. And now I’m conscious that I seem to be straying into risible inarticulacy, as if I’m saying male sexuality is not a truck, it’s http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/02/sen_stevens_hilariou.html" target="new"> a series of tubes. Or ‘toobs’. Which is may well be, for all I know).

My favourite line in Frasier is a comic riff on the same theme. Frasier is bickering with his girlfriends and she accuses him, inter alia, of ‘using sex to get what he wants’. He’s flabbergasted: ‘how can I be using sex to get what I want? I’m a man! Sex is what I want.’

Not many laughs in Salt, for various reasons; but I suppose a textual approach to its unpleasant subject, rape, that takes for granted sex as a component in rape, in the same way that violence (of course) is a component, and power (ie humiliation of the other); but in a tangled symbolic interpenetration.

Sorry for the clumsiness of expression in this comment; my brain is feeling dull today.

[Rich Puchalsky]

During the course of an online discussion about Banks' book _Inversions_ (his worst-ever book, in my opinion), I pointed out the contrast between the ever-dramatised and present threat of rape of the female protagonist, and the way in which the rape of the male protagonist of _Use of Weapons_ was handled (that being his best-ever book, in my opinion). At least one person wrote back, surprised, and I don't think that many people had really noticed the rape in _Use of Weapons_. The main character in that book was captured by bandits, they rape him and try to cripple and kill him, but he escapes. And that's pretty much it in terms of lingering trauma; the event is subsumed within the general trauma overload that is this particular character's life, in which his self-chosen, self-destructive soldier/secret agent's career means that people are often attempting to kill or damage him.

But I think that captures something about authorial writing about rape. These were a pair of books, each about a trained agent of a culture that does not acknowledge gender distinctions. In one, the rape is pretty much shrugged off, it's part of the general damages that the protagonist runs into as part of his life. In the other, it's the engine for the book. There appears to me to be something questionable about that.

In the first book, the author enables the reader "to gloss over the hideousness" of it, at least in comparison. Well, yes, but. Not glossing over it means using it dramatically. Investing it with a whole lot of concern about male sexuality means that inextricably, the book becomes about male sexuality and its (essential?) connection to power -- and that's not really a subject that brings out a female character as her own person.

Anyways, this isn't about your book(s), Adam, since I've still read only _Stone_. I promise to read more of them soon.