Chronotopes and Cyborgs: Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Fay Weldon and Marge Piercy

Abstract

Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) are obvious examples of what Pearce terms the “polychronotopic” text. Picking up on what she reads as one of Bakhtin’s most suggestible phrases, “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible”,² its application to Butler’s novel adds a further dimension to its gendering. Dana, the central protagonist of Kindred, is a Black woman writer who, on her twenty-sixth birthday, the day after she moves house with her white husband Kevin, is suddenly projected back in time into a nineteenth-century slave America. There she comes face to face with two of her distant ancestors: Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner and Alice, the Black “free-” woman who will be bought back into slavery by him for choosing the “wrong” man and, later, bear Rufus’s children. In the process Dana comes face to face with a mirror image of her own relationship with Kevin, projected backwards into a new chronotope that has a significant material effect upon both her own subjectivity and personal relationship.

The very notion of compression refers to diminished distance among parts … Such mechanisms are related to technological speed-up and … the rate of transport of people, sound, pictures and any other forms of information …¹