Parable of the Talents/Beloved

The internal recognition and gradual overcoming of self-sabotage constitute the prism through which I wish to interpret Lauren’s actions in Octavia Butler’s novel, Parable of the Talents (1998). I first encountered the fragments of this prism within Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), and specifically within Morrison’s own interpretation of her novel in a 1987 interview with The New York Times. The story of Beloved has been so widely paraphrased that is has become self-evident. This is a particularly dangerous development in that it denies potential readers the fresh, unique pain of finding self-recognition and eventually self-knowledge within Morrison’s words. In my interpretation, the story goes like this: during the 1850s, a 25-year old enslaved woman named Sethe escapes from a Georgia plantation with her four children and arrives in Ohio to begin her life as a free woman. However, shortly after Sethe’s arrival, her former master, Schoolteacher, follows her to Ohio to capture Sethe and her children to return them to slavery. Rather than allow her children to experience the rape, abuse, and dehumanization she endured during slavery, Sethe chooses to slit the throat of one of her infant daughters and attempts to kill the others. Schoolteacher is horrified by Sethe’s actions, declares her a madwoman, and allows her and her surviving children to live “free” in Ohio. Then, nearly two decades after the infant’s death, Sethe encounters a strange 19-year old Black woman named “Beloved” (which was the only word Sethe could afford to engrave on her dead daughter’s tombstone). Sethe, convinced that this teenage girl is her daughter returned, allows Beloved to slowly take over her life, her dreams, her family, and her relationships. Eventually, Sethe’s other adult daughter, Denver, chooses to leave the toxic environment fueled by Sethe and Beloved’s caustic obsession with each other in order to find community and a life for herself in the present and the future.

 In the Times interview, Morrison speculates that she wrote Beloved while she was “considering certain aspects of self-sabotage, the ways in which the best things we do so often carry seeds of one's own destruction.” For Morrison in the interview, Beloved was not strictly a novel about American chattel slavery, but rather a story of “the interior life of some people, a small group of people, and everything that they do is impacted on by the horror of slavery, but they are also people.” Morrison’s insistence that the formerly enslaved characters which populate her novel “are also people” is a small but important reminder of the inadequacy of the classification of Beloved as a neo-slave narrative. Or rather, the work that Morrison does in Beloved to identify patterns of intergenerational trauma and systemic violence that make self-sabotage a raced and gendered problem is a reminder of the (intentional) inadequacy of the genre of the neo-slave narrative itself. What qualities make one eligible to be a slave? Which slavery are we talking about? When did it begin? When did it end? How are we to distinguish “authentic” representations of slavery from the false ones? And how might the imposition of a requirement of authenticity onto novels about people who were legally, economically, politically, biologically, and archivally subjected into “Blackness” through slavery further entrench self-sabotaging behaviors among contemporary Black people? And how might the pervasive mis-reading of Sethe’s actions after Beloved’s death as a heroic and “authentic” portrayal of the archetype of the Strong Black Woman rather than a disorienting and tragic loop of self-sabotage limit (Black) women’s ability to imagine a society in which they are truly free and therefore totally unrecognizable to themselves?

 

The questions I’ve asked here find an array of answers within the characters and plot lines Butler creates in Parable of the Talents. Talents takes place nearly two centuries after Beloved and has never been classified as a neo-slave narrative, unlike Butler’s first novel, Kindred (1979). However, I find that Talents is an equal, if not superior, interlocutor for Beloved because of Talents’ depictions of technologies, belief systems, and personal traumas which make the conditions of enslavement and self-sabotage seem inescapable and unavoidable. In fact, I argue that in Talents, Butler demonstrates how belief systems and personal traumas are technologies of subjection. An example of this blurring of belief, trauma, and technology occurs in Lauren’s description of the “collar” control devices:

 

 "the whole business [of being collared] sounds a little like being a sharer—except that instead of sharing what other people feel, the wearer feels whatever the person holding the control unit wants him to feel. This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person's whole life. I've heard that some collared people kill themselves, not because they can't stand the pain, but because they can't stand the degree of slavishness to which they find themselves descending" (Butler 81).

 

The traumatizing experience of being “lashed” with the collar and subjected to the whims of a master generates a belief system which is totally limited to “needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master.” Within this description, the lived definition of the word “pleasure” to the collared subject could not extend beyond the imagination of the captor. Such a dynamic mirrors Schoolteacher’s belief in Beloved that “definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.” The capacity to delimit the imagination and regulate the bodies and language of millions of subjects forms the basis of power in both Talents and Beloved. Talents distinguishes itself from Beloved though in that its protagonist, Lauren, retains proprietorship over her own imagination. This allows her to create a belief system—Earthseed—which helps her learn from and move past the series of tragedies she experiences.

The contrast between Lauren’s “positive obsession” with Earthseed and the collared subjects’ internalization of their masters’ definition of pleasure drives me to explore with all of you the technologies of liberation (or of freedom? Self-empowerment?) which exist in Talents. I’d like to define “technologies of liberation” as activities which encourage people to end a cycle of self-sabotage that was initially caused by enslavement, abuse, and other forms of trauma. These activities would teach individuals to trust their own judgement and imagination, develop and adhere to their own core values or principles, and establish boundaries or non-negotiable requirements for what people and behaviors they tolerate in their lives. These technologies are, as Lauren makes evident in her Earthseed verses, necessarily dynamic, developed through the rigorous pursuit of self-knowledge and reconciliation with the inevitability of pain. 

 

For example, Lauren’s Earthseed verse in chapter 16 states that “The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. It is to become new beings and to consider new questions. It is to leap into the heavens again and again. It is to explore the vastness of heaven. It is to explore the vastness of ourselves” (Butler 274). American slavery offered the enslaved few opportunities to “explore the vastness of heaven” (and yet they did, though we often lack the records). Schoolteacher’s pursuit of Sethe and her children pushed Sethe to believe that infanticide was the only way for her children to “leap into the heavens again and again.” And, perhaps sadder still, Sethe’s traumatic experiences during slavery cause her to create a belief system in which “The one set of plans she had made—getting away from Sweet Home [plantation]—went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.” To cease planning one’s own life is to surrender control of it to another—always a master, and usually in the form of an abusive lover, job, or family. Self-sabotage happens when the plans other people have for you become more significant than the ones you imagine for yourself. 

Lauren’s plans to become a “new being” and consider new questions form the basis of her belief in the destiny of Earthseed and her refusal to self-sabotage. Lauren hones her imaginative skills through writing Earthseed poetry, and these verses reinforce Lauren’s trust in her own judgement. Through writing, she comes to believe that the individual Truth she discovers on the page can manifest in other areas of reality. An example of this belief appears in her defense of Earthseed when talking to her brother Marc. Lauren says: “All the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn't make any of them up” (Butler 125). The “patterns” which Lauren identifies in these various intellectual models constitute her core values or principles that she uses to guide her life and her dream of Earthseed. The ideas within these disciplines are only useful to Lauren insofar as they are in alignment with her core values and therefore also her life’s larger purpose—Earthseed.

Lauren also filters the people in her life through the sieve of her core values and larger purpose. In Parable of the Sower, we see Lauren gradually become more comfortable with sharing her verses with a select group of companions like Harry and Zahra. Their acceptance of her beliefs and the actions they take to help Lauren materialize Earthseed in the form of Acorn constitute the basis of Lauren’s trust in and love for them. Through these small initial acts of sharing her dreams, Lauren develops the confidence to require that everyone within her circle at the very least understand that Earthseed is an idea of great value to her. The people Lauren keeps close in her life become a mirror of her principles and affirm her desire to “take root among the stars.” When surrounded by an entire community of positive mirrors in Acorn in Talents, it becomes nearly impossible for Lauren to engage in any of the self-sabotaging behaviors that dominate Sethe’s life in Beloved. Lauren and Sethe both free themselves from the material conditions of enslavement, but only Lauren (like Denver) attains the understanding that having a community which mirrors your core values and higher purpose is also a technology of liberation. Such a community is essential to developing a dynamic, resilient, imaginative identity which exceeds a legacy of slavery or trauma.

 

 

In the interest of retracing Lauren’s path to Earthseed and Acorn within our own community, I’d like for us to work through these questions together: 

 

—How does Lauren process pain? 

—How does Lauren strategically use her judgement?

—How does Lauren train herself to use her hyperempathy as a skill?

—What are Lauren’s core values and principles? 

—What boundaries or requirements does Lauren establish? What are they? (Why) are they                   effective?

—What steps does Lauren take to make Acorn and Earthseed a reality?

—How do the people around Lauren support her dream of Earthseed?

—How does Lauren use her Earthseed verses to survive difficult experiences?