I liked Kindred, I liked it a lot -- I forgot how nice it was to read books that I actually, truly was interested in. I'm not saying that the other books we've read haven't been good or even that I didn't like them, I'm just saying that if I was walking through a bookstore, Kindred would have been a book I would have picked out on my own.
That being said, I'm conflicted about the ending. Dana killed Rufus, which was some closure for me, but she comes away permanently scarred by her "adventures." The ending is happy, sure, but there isn't a sense that everything is going to return to normal after the danger has passed -- and I'm not sure if I like that or not. It's certainly atypical, I think, in some ways. It kind of annoys me how when she and Kevin take their trip to what used to be the Weylin plantation and they can't find the house, or very many records, really. But at the same time, I think that's really neat of Butler to do.
Kevin and Dana often find themselves thinking of the plantation as "home," even though they don't really like that association. By leaving barely any trace of the plantation, maybe Butler is trying to say something along the lines of, well, maybe Kevin and Dana don't have a home anymore? That, after what they've seen, they can no longer fully integrate themselves into the 1970s society that used to be their home, and that the home they made for themselves in the 19th century has disappeared.
And then there's Dana's arm. It's gone, she left it in the past -- well, they cut it off, but metaphorically speaking, she left it in the past. Her arm is still being crushed by Rufus, in a way, but it's detached from her body. Is that good or bad? There is a part of her that's still being controlled by her ancestor, but she no longer has it with her.... I realize I just repeated the same sentence, but the way I said it in my head emphasized its importance somehow.
Maybe the idea of losing her arm is simply Butler's way of showing us that after looking at the past in great detail, you can never really be whole again. Maybe she's saying that you leave a part of you in that time and you never really get it back. Especially when examining history as gruesome and as horrible as antebellum south -- no one comes away from human atrocity unscathed.
So, maybe it's just that I don't like that message. Why don't I like that message? Perhaps it's just not the happy, hopeful message that I'm used to -- the idea that everything's going to be okay. But even though I don't like it, I think it's a really refreshing idea somehow -- it's not boring and simple and cathartic, it's unsettling and disturbing, and that's probably how we should feel after reading something about slavery.
1 comment:
I agree that the unsettled ending (what the Crossley essay in my edition describes as "jagged") is appropriate to Butler's story. In a sense, *history* doesn't provide a "happy ending" to the story, so anything that pushed in too positive a direction (Rufus reforms entirely, frees his slaves, moves north and becomes an abolitionist) would have been disappointing in the other direction--a flimsy palliative to make us feel better about an aspect of American history we shouldn't feel good about. As Butler remarked, "slavery didn't leave people quite whole," and I like the idea that Rufus is "still" pressing down on Dana's arm, symbolically, for the rest of her life, even after all physical trace of the place and time has turned to dust. In this light, the effects of slavery are both everywhere and not clearly visible.
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