Historian to Participant
The second time Dana goes to Maryland, she witnesses the brutal whipping of Alice's father lying on the ground nearby. She watches "the man's body [convulse]" (36) as he gets whipped, slowly having his resolve chipped away. It gets to the point where Dana is physically pained just from witnessing it. As she says, "My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn't they stop!" (36). Before the scene is finished, Dana is holding back vomit.
In this moment, we witness the blurring of the line between historian and participant in history. And while this scene by far isn't the most obvious example of participating in history (since the entire rest of the book is also about that), it is an important scene due to the switch between witnessing and being in the slave era. In this scene, Dana experiences feelings that she didn't expect from just watching the beating take place. Despite having "seen people beaten on television and in the movies" (36), she wasn't prepared for it in the moment. Despite all that she had read and researched, she didn't know how to react, and it led to her almost giving herself away in disgust.
This problem of distinguishing between historian and participant is something Dana fights with constantly throughout the book. She's trying to play into the system as an actor of some sort, yet is slowly being drawn into the way things work. She wants to hold on to her 1976 identity as much as possible, yet she can't give that identity away. And it's hard trying to figure out what side of the coin she wants to follow, or is able to follow. You get the sense that she's trying to stay an observer to everything that's going on, waiting things out until she can go home. But the only way to do that is to join the plantation, participating in the goings-on of the slaves and Rufus.
Especially with her 1976 ideas about the time period, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay acting and not fall in to the time period. During the whipping scene I talk about above, I read this scene as Dana having a subconscious desire to experience the pain that Alice's father feels. Like she wants to know more about what it's liked to be whipped, or she wants to share the pain Alice's father is feeling, both as his descendant and as a historian trying to better understand the experience. It suggests this idea that in order to truly understand history, you have to participate in it.
This divide between seeing and experiencing is the problem that I feel like Butler is trying to get at with Kindred. How can we, as readers or modern-day observers, really appreciate everything that has happened in the past, especially with such an open wound as slavery? We all have something in us that is morbidly curious to know what things were really like back then. And there's never going to really be a way to reach that level of knowing. Heck, the closest thing we have to knowing what it was like is Kindred, which is still a novel written in 1976. We can't really understand history unless we experience it firsthand, and when we do, we become a part of it. When we discuss Kindred and how it's take on history compares to the rest of the books we read, it's unique in that it says that we have to confront history head-on. Only then will we really get that urge to vomit.
In this moment, we witness the blurring of the line between historian and participant in history. And while this scene by far isn't the most obvious example of participating in history (since the entire rest of the book is also about that), it is an important scene due to the switch between witnessing and being in the slave era. In this scene, Dana experiences feelings that she didn't expect from just watching the beating take place. Despite having "seen people beaten on television and in the movies" (36), she wasn't prepared for it in the moment. Despite all that she had read and researched, she didn't know how to react, and it led to her almost giving herself away in disgust.
This problem of distinguishing between historian and participant is something Dana fights with constantly throughout the book. She's trying to play into the system as an actor of some sort, yet is slowly being drawn into the way things work. She wants to hold on to her 1976 identity as much as possible, yet she can't give that identity away. And it's hard trying to figure out what side of the coin she wants to follow, or is able to follow. You get the sense that she's trying to stay an observer to everything that's going on, waiting things out until she can go home. But the only way to do that is to join the plantation, participating in the goings-on of the slaves and Rufus.
Especially with her 1976 ideas about the time period, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay acting and not fall in to the time period. During the whipping scene I talk about above, I read this scene as Dana having a subconscious desire to experience the pain that Alice's father feels. Like she wants to know more about what it's liked to be whipped, or she wants to share the pain Alice's father is feeling, both as his descendant and as a historian trying to better understand the experience. It suggests this idea that in order to truly understand history, you have to participate in it.
This divide between seeing and experiencing is the problem that I feel like Butler is trying to get at with Kindred. How can we, as readers or modern-day observers, really appreciate everything that has happened in the past, especially with such an open wound as slavery? We all have something in us that is morbidly curious to know what things were really like back then. And there's never going to really be a way to reach that level of knowing. Heck, the closest thing we have to knowing what it was like is Kindred, which is still a novel written in 1976. We can't really understand history unless we experience it firsthand, and when we do, we become a part of it. When we discuss Kindred and how it's take on history compares to the rest of the books we read, it's unique in that it says that we have to confront history head-on. Only then will we really get that urge to vomit.
This is a nice summation of what fiction can offer to traditional historical narratives: "the urge to vomit." Your post reflects the fact that Butler herself doesn't have any more experience with slavery than any of us, except through the exercise of her imagination combined with research. So traditional history is given emotional and even physical reality through the skillful creation of a fictional scene and characters--the difference between reading about a whipping and experiencing one, paradoxically, is reflected in *writing* that depicts a character who has read a lot about such things (and seen them depicted in movies) but who is ill equipped to handle them in "real life."
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