Four years ago at the start of the Covid pandemic I read The Parable of the Sower for the first time and felt like it was speaking directly to me and about the moment we were in: the desire to return to a past that never really existed, as “Make America Great Again” appears in the novel, as well as the effects of global warming and social collapse. I talked about how even though it’s an end-of-the-world novel, it goes beyond what we think of as apocalypses. In particular why it’s a good way to build on but go beyond the religious themes of apocalypse.
Reflecting on it now I find another way that this secular, decidedly atheist book fits in the apocalyptic tradition and also seeks to escape it. This is that even though we’re in a different place than we were four years ago, it still feels like it’s addressing me, talking about today. And precisely this feature of looking like it’s talking about the reader’s own time is a classic feature of apocalypse and apocalyptic thought.
- More strictly speaking, this is a Dystopian novel. What is a Dystopia–how is that like an apocalypse? End of world, things heading south. Different: no divine plan.
- Keeps seeming like it’s talking about today: president is a placeholder for nostalgia. Already in 2017 people thought it was about Trump, now it can seem like it’s about Biden such as his speech, “Fundamentally nothing will change”
- Writers keep seeing today in it–for example there have been several pieces discussing how Butler was reflected in Beyonce’s Lemonade, even though nobody mentioned anything specific.
Transcript of original podcast:
I’m going to talk about I think this science fiction novel is a perfect book to cap off a class that’s mostly focused on ancient apocalyptic literature.
And in particular, I’m going to talk about what it says about the things we face today that feel apocalyptic and also why reading it surprised me so much, why it still feels so fresh as a book. For example, it took me a while to realize that it talked about apocalyptic themes,the sorts of destruction like climate collapse that can feel like the end of the world, and that really are the end of some people’s worlds but that this is not just another apocalypse that the book goes far beyond that.
In particular there are two main themes I’m going to talk about and first as usual I’m just going to give a little out on the two main points today. And then I’m gonna go into more detail, illustrating it with some passages from the book.
The first of the two main points is the book’s urgency:
Even though it was published in 1993, it still feels like it’s about today, specifically about California, but there are a number of things that the book focuses on: the terrifying consequences of inequality and climate collapse, as well as a kind of a conservative, almost nostalgic resurgence in the government. So there are things that we could recognize when we read it, then we’ll talk a little bit about why that is.
And then the second main point is the way it draws on. but goes beyond apocalyptic thought, the way it does something really new with it, and in particular it draws on the religious imagination, most explicitly in a number of biblical references ranging from Noah’s flood, which is of course the first end of the world that appears in the world, Genesis chapter 6 through 9, but also on the question of whether the universe is just. It draws on Job for this, and then it gets its title from the very conclusion of the book, which talks about the parable of the sower from the Gospels in the New Testament.
So while it draws on the religious imagination, imagination, including the apocalyptic imagination, it’s not really an apocalypse novel. One example I’ll get into more.
In all of the apocalypses, classic ones of the book of Daniel, the book of Revelation, the book of Enoch, as well as other things like the Sibylline oracles, there is a distinct timetable. There’s a clear cut divine plan. plan, and at the end God totally transforms and totally redeems the universe. There’s a lot of suffering and horror, a lot of stuff blows up, but there is a clear happy ending where the righteous are absolutely and conclusively saved by God.
In this book that divinely led salvation doesn’t happen, God doesn’t step in and there is no rapture, there’s no eternal salvation. But there is an interesting human made goal that we actually see being created over the course of the book, a goal to aspire to. So it uses vital elements of religious thought, such as the pieces of scripture I mentioned. And it also shows the creation of a new piece of scripture in the form of the book that the protagonist is writing, which she calls “Earthsea,” the books of the living.
It also comes to grips with religious ideas. One of the most important being the idea of God, namely the idea that there is a bigger order out there that we’re in touch with somehow, interacting with somehow. But what really is that bigger order? What are the rules? It puts those fundamentally religious questions, and the visions that its protagonist has in answer to them, in confrontation with some things that don’t seem to fit any orderly view of the world, with the chaos, violence, problems of hunger, shelter, uncertainty, climate change, those aspects of human experience that seem to defy simple or traditional religious answers. And I think that this tension becomes a real dialogue and is the place where the book’s probably most vital and interesting ideas happened.
The reason this felt to me like such an interesting way to wrap up the course is that awereness of the apocalyptic imagination and being aware of the power of religious thought does not mean to just repeat it or blindly accept it. There are physical forces in the book, human violence, economic scarcity, both triggered by climate collapse that the characters have to deal with. This is a larger overarching reality, and this actually is is eventually what the character Lauren Olamina calls God, this bigger force outside of you that is going to change you and you’re going to have to work to change it to somehow partner with it.
So the book’s argument, unlike in classic apocalyptic literature, is not not that this is all pre -planned and unchangeable, that everything is just happening according to a pre -programmed divine plan but rather change is something you have to come to grips with, everything that you touch changes, you change everything you touch. And then the book sees religion as a way of doing that, as a way of what the writer and the character calls shaping God.
Now I’m going to go into more detail about why it feels so contemporary to me and I think to other people who’ve read it there was a New Yorker article maybe a year ago about how it predicted the election of Donald Trump or something like that which I think is a little exaggerated But one thing it does tell you is that really,
you know, kind of brilliant, insightful writers like Butler can often put their finger on deep forces in history or American culture. And then we recognize them. We can see where they, where they pointed it out or put their finger on it. So why does it have such a connection? Why does it feel like it’s about us, in ways ranging from geography to its discussions of ethnicity and race to climate change and the violence that vulnerable people often suffer? In the previous class we talked before about its literary qualities. that is how it presents its characters, how it presents its vision of the world, and how it communicates to the reader, as well as its Californian and American qualities.
Of course, it’s literally about here in that it’s about a journey from a mid -sized city in southern California. to a rural area in Northern California and Another way that it’s about here is that Octavia Butler was literally from here She grew up in Southern California and went to the same school that at least one of one of the folks in this class studied at Pasadena City College So in that way it’s a California novel with based in California’s really distinctive geography but also it deals with some Important American as well as world themes and one of them is Ethnicity and what what ethnic or racial difference means, how it works and there’s a subtle thing that she does here that you can read maybe without even noticing it but this is that she leaves a lot up to the reader to think about and figure out in terms of who these characters are and what what that means and there’s this wide range of ethnic or racial differences that the characters have and also the things that that bring them together.
So often novels will just list each character’s appearance, age, or other main qualities. qualities. When they’re first introduced, you know, she was a tall woman with long black hair and, you know, blue eyes, you know, who carried herself like a soldier or official, you know, something like this. And it almost, you almost get it, it almost feels like a video game character or a role -playing game character where they’re just kind of, a set of features. Strength, intelligence, appearance, race. Like Dungeons and Dragons or video game stats, I’m a, you know, strength level nine, intelligence level eight, appearance level five half orc or half elf or something like that. So in a lot of literature as well as in movies, this ends up resulting in a kind of a distorted and unrepresentative white based world where, and we’ve probably seen this in books where the characters are all assumed to be white and then suddenly if they say, “Oh, and then a burly Asian man entered the store,” or, “She was black, but everyone else with her looked Latino.” So it only mentions ethnicity then when it differs from a supposed white norm. And one striking thing about this book is that she doesn’t mention people’s ethnicity immediately, that many of the protagonists are black, other Latino, and some others white or other identities. She just lets you figure that out and she just kind of drops references to it, which, you know, in a lot of ways is a lot more realistic way, you know, that people don’t always wake up in the morning and the first thing they think is, you know, good golly, I sure am, you know, white or Latino or Asian in the morning, they just think, oh, I have to get going I slept late, or just I’m who I am. The identity may come up only if they’re made to think about it by their environment. But, and I want to note how interestingly she does this also with appearance, the relative beauty or, you know, attractiveness or unattractiveness of a character is often mentioned at the beginning and kind of defines them, right? And I think this is the larger point is that she’s attentive to things like appearance or ethnicity, but it never, never purely or earlier. simply defines someone.
And there’s an interesting line here. She’s talking about one of the characters who’s very conventionally beautiful. It occurred to me then that this guy liked her. That could be a problem for her later. She was a beautiful woman and I would never be beautiful, which didn’t bother me. Boys had always seemed to like me, but Zahra’s looks grabbed male attention and she talks about how in the current chaotic climate this could be a problem. But what’s interesting is that you get two thirds of the way through the book before she even mentions whether she’s thought to be particularly attractive or not.
So even as the character Lauren seems very at home, home with who she is and the extended family she’s a part of, it seems very at home with who they are. She’s also very aware that some of the rest of the world is not and so for example there’s a mention of how at some points having white faces faces or white figures in your group might help keep you safe about how these new company towns that are maybe a little bit like an Amazon fulfillment center, but on a larger scale, they’re wondering if they’ll they’ll even accept non white people. So there’s there’s a clear eyed awareness of racism and of a kind of a white power structure that still exists.
Another striking and very contemporary feeling thing is the this idea of a kind of a nostalgic desire for a return to order or return to business as usual in politics and as a kind of a resistance to the change in the world so she says there’s some discussion about the new president and someone says well my mom could be right about the new president is named Donner he could do some good no no Donner is just kind of a human banister Warren says a what I mean he’s like a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into the future. He’s nothing, no substance, but having him there the latest in a two and a half century long line of American presidents makes people feel that the country and the culture they grew up with is still here, that we’ll get through these bad times and get back to normal.” And this is something that Lauren is very aware is not actually going to happen.
But she also says that climate change is going to force people to realize that the world is never going to go back to the good old days. And she talks about how even earlier it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things even could change, too. Things are changing now. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague, so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back, but things have changed a lot and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step -by -step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world and now they’re waiting for the good old days to come back. for the old days to come back.
This theme of climate change really pervades the whole book and it’s striking to realize that climate scientists knew about this stuff in the 70s, even before, but by in publishing in 1993. Butler has a the scene it’s amazing in a number of ways she just mentions that her mom whose name is or her stepmom whose name is Corey which is short for Corazon she says she speaks to me in Spanish her own first language and felt like a kind of intimacy and she’s asking her mom why at one point people couldn’t really see the stars very well at night because now the stars are crystal clear every night when there isn’t clouds. And her mom says city lights. Back then we had them that’s why we couldn’t see the stars lights progress growth, all those things that were too hot and too poor to bother with anymore. anymore.
So this sense of kind of nostalgia and a sense of a loss of possibility. Progress and growth are things that we don’t even have time to think about. In a scene right after that, it rains for the first time in six years and she talks about what an amazing experience it is and how everybody tries to capture the rain, how it’s going to be, how it’s going to be. water is now. And in fact, a lot of the book involves water, as they eventually go on this journey north, one of the main things they’re trying to find is a place where water isn’t so scarce and so valuable.
Fires of course are described as raging out of control. But for the protagonist, this action is one of the main things they’re trying to find is a place where water isn’t so scarce… connects to a kind of an openness to change that these horrible things are also an awareness that the world can be different in good ways as well. That’s one of the kind of surprising qualities of the book.
Now we’ll get into this larger issue of how it draws on, but really goes beyond Apocalyptic thought and does something new with it. The book is very very conscious of injustice and inequality and there are a number of horrifying scenes of abuse of loss of small children tossed tossed dead over the wall like a sack of garbage and she loses her father and never even expects to see him again.
But before that she talks about how her favorite book of the Bible is Job and her father is a Baptist preacher and she says, “I think that book says more about my father’s book of the Bible is more about my father’s book of the Bible is more about my father’s book of the Bible. in particular and God’s in general than anything else I’ve ever read.” So this is going to be her critical take on previous religion, on normal religion. In the book of Job, God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it.
Okay, she says, “That works, that Old Testament God.” God, Hebrew Bible God, doesn’t violate the way things are now. He sounds a lot like Zeus, a super powerful man, playing with his toys. The way my youngest brother played with toy soldiers. Bang, bang, seven toys fall dead. If they’re yours, you get to make the rules.” But then she says,
“What if all of that is wrong? What if God is something else altogether?” And this is the new vision of God. She’s She’s articulating, “We do not worship God.” This is from this book of her Ideas or sayings that over the course of the book becomes a kind of scripture:
We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, we shape God. And God is change.
So this is in the history of, at least of Judaism in Christianity, this is a somewhat strange and even heretical viewpoint in late antiquity.
This was known as theology, the idea of doing work on God, and it’s something that’s still important in some aspects of, for example, Kabbalah and Judaism. But there the theology and metaphysics are very different.
The idea is that we are are all sparks or pieces of God, so it’s really God acting on God. And the theory, the notion of religion in this book is a little different.
And we’ll, we’ll, I’ll talk a little more about it. And then I’ll, probably in the next lecture, I’ll talk really focus on that. But so there are these references to Job and in this kind of divine injustice or almost apathy to human conditions.
But there’s also a reference to how if you don’t act to shape God, to act on God, then she says in her earth seed writings,
“a victim of God may, through a shaper of God,
or a victim of God may, through shortsightedness and fear, remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.
And it’s a really scary image, God’s prey. But that actually does appear in the Bible, that image of God as a hunter, or some kind of menacing being tormenting the speaker. Actually it’s a very good biblical image it appears in strongly in the book of Lamentations as well as in the book of Job so it resonates with these but she really goes beyond this and it is not and so there’s also a big a big scene where she talks about the story of Noah.
Noah, in particular, she hears her father preaching from Genesis 6. God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of his thoughts and of his heart was only evil and God regretted he’d made man and the Lord said,
“I will destroy man whom I’ve created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fouls of the air for it repenteth me, that is, I regret that I’ve made them.” But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
And she says,
“Her father focused on the two -part nature of the situation. God decides to destroy everything except Noah, his family, and some animals. But if Noah is going to be saved, he has plenty of hard work to do.”
And this is a big theme of the book that, in order to partner with the great force of God, of the world, we need to learn from and act on them, act on the world. And again, this is this is why it’s more than an apocalypse novel. Because remember that in apocalyptic thought, there is a clear and certain pre -programmed divine timetable. There’s a set of events that God has decided beforehand are going to happen.
and there is nothing we can do about it. So unlike in this book, you can’t shape God, or if you learn something from God, you can’t act on it.
That doesn’t really matter. So in Daniel, there’s four predestined periods of history that are dominated by four different kingdoms to be finally followed by a divinely ruled kingdom. that will last forever. Parts of the book of Enoch, and in the Sybilline oracles. Everything is organized into units of seven, cosmic weeks, or 10, also a number they like.
But in this book, instead, there is a human made goal to aspire to. And the meaning of earth seed, ultimately, for Butler is that “we are to become the seeds of Earth that are planted eventually in the stars.” So to take our forms of life and our forms of possibility eventually beyond Earth. And that becomes this goal that the characters aspire to and that helps lead them forward. So it draws on vital elements of religious thought such as scripture and this idea of a larger force that we’re participating in. And in particular, the character, as we’ll talk about, creates what becomes scripture.
So this is another really interesting aspect of the book is that it’s like being there at the creation of something that’s going to become the Bible, the Quran. What would it have been like to be Moses? Moses, to be Muhammad, to be Jesus or the person who’s writing down the sayings of the Gospels? And there’s a really interesting difference here, again, that makes this more than just another example of a religious book or religious text, which is there’s no supernatural vision. She never has a journey to heaven. She never has a dream. or an overpowering religious experience. What she has instead is empathy, overpowering empathy, and this is another interesting quality of her character is that she’s got what’s called hyper empathy, which is depicted not as a superpower or a vision, but a disability that she is so sensitive to other people’s suffering. Suffering or other experiences, including experiences of pleasure, that she is overcome by them when she sees somebody else having a strong physical reaction. And I think that this ties in really, really nicely with this idea that she says God has changed, we change everything we touch, but we are changed by everything we touch or come into contact with.
So Lauren’s quality of hyper empathy, makes her kind of a symbol for this concept that she’s also preaching. But again, this is not a conventional religious book. And in fact, you get a sense of both the power of religion and then her critical hard -nosed view of realities beyond religion or beyond conventional religion, I should say. When at her father’s funeral, one of the members of her community named Kayla Talcott began an old song. Others took it up, singing slowly but with feeling. We shall not we shall not be moved. I think it might have sounded pitiful if it had been started by a lesser voice, but Kayla has a big voice, beautiful, clear and able to do everything she asks for of it.
And later, also Kayla has a reputation for not moving unless she wants to. So this seems very powerful. And then, but then she reflects on it critically at the end.
She says, I’m no good at denial and self deception. This was my father’s funeral that I was preaching at, but it was also a funeral for our community. And she’s talking about the violence that’s starting to encroach on their community,
which they’ve built this little walled, kind of walled small town, but the increasing chaos and violence outside, she knows is gonna break down the wall.
And she says, “Because as much as I want all the things that I said to be true at the funeral, they’re not. We’ll be moved, all right?
It’s just a matter of when, by whom, and in how many pieces.” It sounds pretty brutal, right? That she’s saying, like, “Oh, all this churchy, we shall not be moved stuff is–in the end, bogus, it’s fake, we’re going to be moved. But here she makes her point about this new view that she’s developing. Namely that we are going to be moved, things are going to change. It’s a question of, in this case, whether we move ourselves proactively, whether we take initiative and get to move in one piece or whether we wait for a forces passively to act on us and we might get chopped up into pieces so it’s very grim but also as I’m suggesting there’s a strong sense of possibility here that I think is really distinctive.
I’ll now start to wrap things up now by talking about this experience of what it’s like for her to create this kind of scripture that isn’t revealed. This is not a scripture that’s supposed to come directly from God, it’s supposed to come from her own insights, and she talks about this. “I’ve never felt that I was making any of this up, “ that is, these notes and these ideas that she’s writing in her book. “I’ve never felt that I was making any of this up. that I was making it up myself, not the name Earthseed or any of it. I mean, I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. I wish I could believe it was all supernatural and that I’m getting messages from God, but then I don’t believe in that kind of God. All I do is observe and take notes trying to put things down in ways that are as powerful, as simple, and and as direct as I can feel them. I can never quite do it. I keep trying, but I can’t”
And then she also makes this really interesting argument about why why this stuff is credible. That’s very very interesting, and this is closer to the end of the book. A bit further in the plot, someone is um being critical of her, the idea she’s propounding and the person says you believe in all this earth seed stuff don’t you? Every word I answered but you made it up. I reached down picked up a small stone and put it on the table between us. If I could analyze this and tell you all that it was made of would that mean I’d made up its content? He didn’t do any more than glance at the rock and kept his eyes on me. So what did you analyze to get Earthseed? Other people, I said, myself, everything I could read, hear, see, all the history I could learn. My father was a minister and a teacher. My stepmother ran a neighborhood school. I had a chance to see a lot.
So this harks back to one of another one of the major themes of the course, I think,
which is the relationship between apocalypses and science. And we’ve talked about how some of these early apocalypses, like the book of Enoch, in particular, the astronomical portion of Enoch, actually contain some of the best science of the time. And it’s paradox. paradoxical that it was in this, it’s in this otherworldly revelation Enoch has taken up and shown the universe by the Angel Uriel. But the astronomy and math in it seems to be from some of the best stuff that actually the Babylonian astronomers and scholars had come up with.
So why is there this kind of serious treatment of the physical world, this attempt to analyze in a precise way, analyze nature in apocalypses and what we’ve talked about before is how apocalypses are about creating a big picture, a big picture of history, a big picture of how the universe works, and because of that a picture of how human beings fit into it.
Now of course, this is often done in a way that that we would not call rational.
There’s the four periods of history or the seven periods of history or the ten periods of history that I mentioned earlier. Ultimately, these are just numbers that made sense intuitively to people or were traditional. They were not based on rigorous observation of what was happening in the universe, but the desire to to find a framework, to find out what’s actually under the hood of the universe, to find out the bigger patterns, is a kind of an apocalyptic quest that we saw continued in a lot of Western thought that had some impact, including theories of the universe. of history.
So people attempting to make theories of what the main forces in history were.
You can draw a line from some apocalyptic thinkers to even to philosophers like Hegel or Marx or others. And so to conclude, I think we were talking about whether all apocalypses are the same, whether it’s all just imagination. And the argument of this book is that that attitude is wrong and dangerous. If you view the powerful forces shaping the world as God, as the main character Lauren does, that passive attitude would mean to become God’s victim or plaything. And so instead, she talks about… religion and the religious imagination as a way of shaping the world, as a way of acting on God, but that those kinds of hard observable forces in the world, whether those are inequality and violence or climate change, are things that you do not play around with or wish away. They’re things that you observe.
You try to observe these patterns, you analyze them, you try to learn from them and then you, in order to, as she says, partner with God to not become God’s plaything or victim, you figure out how to respond to them, how to ride with the change and even how to act on it. it. So that’s the first big takeaway I’d give from the book. And so for the second podcast, we’re going to wrap up this book and then talk about another amazing book called The End of Days by Gershon Gorenburg,
which is about how Jewish, Islamic, and Christian Apocalypse. apocalypticism all kind of play into each other around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and how each group can become a character in another group’s apocalyptic imagination but about how this has very real consequences.
All right, so thank you for listening and yeah, stay safe out there.
sethlsanders 