On the style of Octavia Butler's Patternist novels

People routinely slam the prose styling of Octavia Butler (as I would demonstrate with citations and quotations were the new TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents), but reading the Patternist novels according to the chronology internal to them has me appreciating the gentle relentlessness of her prose.  However, sometimes I think the critics have a point:

"What does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu.  (Wild Seed 41)

That just scans something awful.  In all seriousness, though, rarely is the reason behind an editorial error so obvious or so indicative of an author's stylistic tics.  In Wild Seed, Butler wed her characters to her prose, such that the latter's stolidity became evidence of the former's hard-fought restraint.  (It is, after all, a novel about two people who spend their unnaturally long lives finding excuses not to murder each other.)  She did so deliberately because, at this point in her career, she could.  The novels were published in this order: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984); but they move through narrative time in this one: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

I'll discuss how her interest in evolution is, fundamentally, a narrative one (and in so doing, discuss how this interest's inherent in all evolutionarily-inflected narratives, including Darwin's) at some point in the near future.  For the moment, what fascinates me is how the elder Butler crafts the prose of the later novels in such a way that it "develops" into the style of the earliest one (Patternmaster).  Were she actually a Dickian hack ("sophisticated ideas communicated in pedestrian prose," as Consensus Q. Amalgam would have it), such a feat would be beyond her; but comparing the occasionally dense and ornate prose in Wild Seed (which shares formal concerns and historical content with 1979's Kindred) to the more direct, straightforward prose of Clay's Ark—written nearly half a decade later—it is difficult to imagine that the latter's resemblance to Patternmaster is anything other than intentional.  When she was young, she couldn't help but write of the future in spare and quotidian manner; but by 1984, she could adopt a transitional voice, something that approximates in complexity the difference between 1977's Mind of My Mind and 1976's Patternmaster. 

While it may seem odd to call attention to the refinement of her narrative voice, it is essential to understanding the refinement of the thought processes it develops alongside: the series is unusual in that, as Butler said, she invented a society that was conceptually fascinating, but instead of going on to invent another, she became interested in how that one could possibly have come to be.  The fact that eugenics and alien invasion were, for her, the answer is troubling, but I'll leave the how and why of that for a later post. 

Comments

[Andrew]

I just finished Patternmaster, actually, taking your advice to start there. I certainly wasn't bothered by the prose--it just seemed to me like straightforward YA-level diction and syntax, but nothing obviously maladroit about it. What you say about her shaping her style to fit the internal chronology of the books is fascinating, though. I'm looking forward to reading the others.

[SEK]

I still think that's the place to start with the Patternist series.* There's something to be said for knowing the outcome before seeing the process, since the series is dedicated to exploring the development of the latter. I'd recommend going to Wild See, then moving through the narrative instead of chronological progression. (I will, however, most likely change my mind on this tomorrow, when I'll likely have finished re-reading Mind of My Mind.)

it just seemed to me like straightforward YA-level diction and syntax, but nothing obviously maladroit about it.

The comparison to Dick is a bit muddled, but the thickness of it isn't mine -- someone else made it without realizing that, at its worst, Butler's prose is pedestrian whereas Dick's, at its worst, openly offends literary sensibilities.

*Note to self: Do you italicize the name of a series when it's not the title of a work in it? The MLA Handbook treats "series" to mean stuff like "Topics in English Linguistics," and says no italics/underline.

[Martin Wisse]

"Dickian hack"?

[PaulR]

"TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents"

Um, use a plain text editor as a go-between. Say Notepad, or TextEdit, or gedit.

"MLA Handbook"? Member of the Legislative Assembly Handbook?

[Ahistoricality]

"Modern Language Association" aka the people who ruined footnotes.

[Adam Roberts]

So, wait, are you saying that Obama wrote Butler's novels? Or Ayers?

[SEK]

So, wait, are you saying that Obama wrote Butler's novels? Or Ayers?

Definitely Obama. You can tell by the way they both use the words "black," "education," "the," and "of." So, like I said, definitely Ayers.

"Modern Language Association" aka the people who ruined footnotes.

You should've seen the look on a committee member's face when I tried to argue for the superiority of Chicago . . . actually, you probably have: just look in the mirror when you encounter something written in MLA format and there it is.

Um, use a plain text editor as a go-between. Say Notepad, or TextEdit, or gedit.

Then I lose all the formatting, and have to re-do it by hand. It'd actually be faster for me to re-type and incorporate HTML on the fly, but that's still awful tedious. Really, the only reason I'm complaining is that I used to be able to Ctrl-v into the TypePad rich text editor but can't anymore. Same with Wordpress and Blogger, for that matter. It's really just my annoyance that their version of an "upgrade" makes my life that much more difficult.

"Dickian hack"?

Sorry, I'd hoped my shorthand would be understand: the complaint made against Butler---and sci fi generally---usually comes from some asthete who's had a friend push one of the clumsier Philip K. Dick books on them. I don't buy that Dick was a hack per se, but his prose was frequently outstripped by his need to get ideas down, and he was, by admission, inimical to revision-for-style. If he changed his mind about the execution of an idea, he would rewrite and pay more attention to his prose, but he wouldn't rewrite solely because of this awkward series of sentences or clumsy tonal shifts. "My readers won't notice, and if they do, they won't care, because that's not why they read me" captures his approach. (That's not an actual quotation, for the record, just me summarizing his position.)