Butler’s Narrative How-To

Butler’s novel takes the form of entries in a fictional diary by her protagonist, the precocious Lauren Oya Olamina.³ Spanning roughly three years of narrated time, the novel forms a sort of dystopian bildungsroman as Lauren comes of age in a United States destabilized by climate change, rising sea levels, and political and economic breakdown. Each chapter (not necessarily a single day’s entry in the diary) also begins with an excerpt from a text within the text, the “Book of the Living,” a collection of Lauren’s religious poetry and what will (or perhaps has) become the sacred text of a new Afrofuturist religion she founds called Earthseed. Temporally, as my verbs indicate, there is some complexity between these intratexts and the primary narrative. While the diary entries include descriptions of writing these verses, and eventually the self-conscious attempts to convert followers, the verses as they are mostly presented within the text—boldfaced epigraphs—are [End Page 271] seemingly quotations from a later, perhaps published edition of the religious text. Just as the events of the novel are set in Butler’s future, the source of the epigraphs are an even more distant future, after the completion of the novel’s (and even the sequel’s) events. This seems to imply that in addition to the narrative voice of Lauren there is an obscured and voiceless editor or compiler. Lauren, as the voice of her new religion, speaks to readers from beyond a climate apocalypse and suggests ongoing human survival. This faith in a future, knowing it all turns out okay, creates a tenor of hope. Precisely the mixing of temporalities and narrative positions enables Butler’s cli-fi georgic to take a subtly teleological form. The work, the form suggests, will pay off. Such hope allows the novel, despite a bleak portrait of the climate-changed future, to present a cli-fi of hope.

Assured and achievable goal orientation is also the great animating drive of what we might call “how-to narratives.” As a seemingly infinite number of YouTube videos and countless aisles in bookstores (all labeled nonfiction) attest, there is a great hunger for narratives that teach readers and viewers to do something. The promise of such narratives is straightforward: if readers replicate the steps, we will get a similar result. Rene Girard’s famous concept of “mimetic desire” is the brilliant observation that such a mode of “how to” reading extends to affective experiences as well as material tasks (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). Yet in Sower, and I would venture to say in much cli-fi, readers such as my students move from the more abstract cultural desires Girard explored to pragmatic advice on how to be—what they can do—in the face of climate change.

The very fact that the narrative is structured as a journal prompts us (as well as the hosts of the podcast) to read Lauren’s story didactically. Journals or autobiographical narratives often present a life as a series of steps. Famous examples include the autobiographic modes of such texts as Robinson Crusoe or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, or most importantly in the case of Sower, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The first-person voice itself suggests the protagonist’s life is exemplary and worthy of emulation as a saint or a lawgiver. At the same time these [End Page 272] first-person texts provide an experiential roadmap of thoughts and feelings—examples of how meaning can attach to actions. As demonstrated by several references to Douglass in the text, as well as a resurgence of slavery in Butler’s maximally precarious America, the most pertinent autobiographical genre for Butler is the American slave narrative. Though the temporality is different (slave narratives are rarely “real-time” diaries) they are certainly “how-to” guides. In Butler’s case, instead of the traditionally “American” and Franklinesque virtues of thrift, sobriety, civic spirit, and moderation, Sower offers Douglass-like agrarian survivalist virtues such as self-reliance, preparedness, decisiveness, and especially mutual aid.

Lauren’s demonstration of these virtues arises from the estranged California storyworld built by Butler. The first half of the novel narrates the inexorable decline of a neighborhood in a fictional Los Angeles suburb called Robledo, often through Lauren’s introspective observations of that decline.⁴ The novel opens with her taking stock of her options as a fifteen-year-old disabled African American girl. In doing so she critiques her father, with whom she shares a birthday and who is the informal neighborhood leader and preacher. The neighborhood itself is a walled enclave of multiethnic family households. In this near future California employment is scarce and precarious. Although Lauren’s father is dean of a local community college, he commutes on bike through the dangerous surrounding slums when not working remotely from a home computer. Despite this job he does not earn enough money for food security, and in addition to family fruit and vegetable gardens he draws on local ethnobotany to teach the neighborhood to make bread from acorns of native oaks. Lauren’s stepmother also has a PhD, but she mainly works without monetary compensation teaching neighborhood children and maintaining the household. People mostly do without electricity, and gasoline seems out of reach for private citizens. The novel begins during a six-year drought; water is so expensive that bathing is a dangerous sign of wealth. The few trips Lauren takes beyond the walls of her neighborhood are group expeditions into the nearby canyons for militia-like firearms training as a defense measure. Fire is a constant threat and [End Page 273] a recurring nightmare for Lauren, not least because firefighters are privatized and fee-for-service. Rampant drug addiction and violent gangs dominate society beyond the walls of her home.

As many readers have observed, there is obviously much in this speculative portrait that reflects 1990s Los Angeles. When Butler published Sower the city had just experienced the insurrections of 1992 (her characters justly have a deep mistrust of a corrupt and in-effectual police force) and a historic six-year drought (Davis 21). The government in the novel is a logical ad absurdum version of small government ideology, having atrophied to the point where all that remains are taxes that seem to do nothing more than legitimize land ownership. All these nova help a historically knowledgeable reader to recognize—and critically measure—the distance between such extrapolations and the historical world and news headlines readers experience daily. Matthew Nilges argues this is a depiction of the social breakdown in an explicitly “post-Fordist” economy while Stephanie LeMenager focuses on the affective weight Lauren represents living in Butler’s imagined “everyday Anthropocene.” (Nilges 1333; LeMenager 223).

But Sower’s Anthropocene is not all new. It is also a resurgence of the past for both good and ill. Robledo, an embattled colony struggling for self-sufficiency, is a desperate echo of greater LA communities such as Riverdale, Anaheim, and Butler’s own hometown, Pasadena. These California towns were founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as small, intensive, and even utopian farm colonies under an agrarian ideal that imagined them as havens from accelerating capitalism. By the 1920s the pattern had created “a distinctive landscape of smallholding agricultural communities” in the LA area (Brown 109). The promise of “a little land and a living” has been a motivating US story since Crèvecœur and Jefferson, and at the turn of the twentieth century the “Little Lands” movement was a central component to the California dream and rapid development of greater Los Angeles (Hall). Robledo is a fictional counterpart to these towns; a reversion to a prior semiagrarian form of life caused by a resurgence of precarity. Robledo mirrors the “little landers” of 1920s Southern California in that each household, as a hedge against the insecurities of the larger [End Page 274] economy, grows its own food, but the fictional town also has major differences. Unlike those communities, which often had explicitly white supremacist covenants, Robledo represents the racial diversity of Butler’s early 1990s California. And in part due to white suspicion and antagonism toward this diversity, the community must actively defend itself from attack and theft with walls and neighborhood guards (recalling Black self-defense in the Jim Crow South or the California history of the Black Panthers).

As the novel proceeds the older generation ultimately fails to adapt to the changed world of the Anthropocene. Ingrained habits of isolation (each family for itself) and obsolete expectations of employment prevent the town leaders from recognizing the severity of their situation. Lauren, in the first half of the novel, models clearer historical vision. She sees catastrophe looming while most of the inhabitants remain mired in denial. In one conversation, Lauren attempts to convince her white friend Joann of the seriousness of the situation, embedding Butler’s plea to her readers in the narrative. After a young child dies of neglect in the neighborhood the two teenage girls discuss the state of their world. Butler’s combined list of returned diseases, weather catastrophes, eroticized addiction, and social failure and precarity is delivered as fictional news, a crucial venue of LeMenager’s “everyday Anthropocene.” This discussion clearly takes the most obvious step of the defamiliarizing novum (at least for 1993). The world has been estranged, a bit. Here the cli-fi function takes center stage, envisioning a world upended by climate catastrophes. While Lauren’s friend objects that no one can read the future, Lauren’s reply is all too familiar: “You can . . . if you want to. It’s scary, but once you get past the fear, it’s easy” (55).

Land, Labor, and Mutual Aid

While slow apocalyptic collapse provides the novel’s dystopian prognosis, Lauren also provides a prescription. For the first half of the novel Lauren’s work is primarily self-educational. In describing her education, she lays out a survival curriculum for readers not unlike Douglass’s account of his clandestine personal literacy scheme. As readers, we learn from Lauren’s example how to be and what to do when faced with impending catastrophe. What she [End Page 275] and the narrative do not demonstrate is the white supremacist apocalyptic narcissism of a survivalist, settler “jeremiad” that happily imagines a reactionary primitivism or resurgence of patriarchy as outlined by Brittany Henry’s reading of Survivors or seen in the World Made by Hand novels of James Howard Kunstler or even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Henry 72). While there is “prepping” Lauren can hardly be considered a prepper in 2010s sense. Instead, like Douglass, Lauren is an auto-didact of liberation, with a bioregional slant. Where Douglass emphasizes rhetorical power and political speech, Lauren pursues practical agricultural and ecological knowledge. She relies on a small library of “three books on survival in the wilderness, three on guns and shooting, two each on handling medical emergencies, California native and naturalized plants and their uses, and basic living: log cabin-building, livestock raising, plant cultivation, soap making—that kind of thing” (Butler 58). These are the “appropriate technology” to her world of dwindling material and technological opportunities. In addition to the value placed on this how-to knowledge, Lauren takes other practical preparatory action, from firearms training for self-defense to keeping a backpack full of emergency supplies ranging from water purification tablets to seeds. When her friend asks her if she is trying to learn to live off the land, she replies:

I’m trying to learn whatever I can that might help me survive out there. I think we should all study books like these. I think we should bury money and other necessities in the ground where thieves won’t find them. I think we should make emergency packs—grab and run packs—in case we have to get out of here in a hurry. Money, food, clothing, matches, a blanket

(58).

When her friend accuses her of “reading too many adventure stories” Lauren notes that this is serious (58). An unwillingness to prepare is a failure of imagination, not an indulgence. We need to imagine the future, but we ought not be paralyzed by it.

In the novel’s context of a fast-failing democracy, Lauren’s steps form what Sylvia Mayer and LeMenager note are “prescriptions for collective liberation evident in the genre of the American slave narrative” (LeMenanger 224). They are also typical of bioregional-ist [End Page 276] how-to literature like the Whole Earth Catalog and the thriving subcultures of heritage crafts, homesteading, and DIY community activism. While the novel itself doesn’t teach us how to make acorn bread, it does teach us that learning to make acorn bread is a worth-while endeavor—that, as Lauren’s Earthseed intratexts remind us, “Belief / Initiates and guides action—/ Or it does nothing” (Butler 47). The novel provides readers with both an attitude and examples of the steps that such an attitude enables—while remaining surprisingly tolerant of difference and distributed power.

Eventually, as the neighborhood’s remaining social cohesion is worn down by violence and theft, a final cataclysm marks an abrupt and complete breaking point. At the halfway point of the novel, the neighborhood is invaded, pillaged, and burned. Lauren and others are raped as most of the inhabitants are killed. Narrowly escaping with her life, she is left alone in what is seemingly nightmarish Hobbesian urban carnage. For Lauren every preexisting social structure has broken down, from the federal government to her own family. Yet rather than remaining a bleak dystopia or reestablishing a patriarchal white order, Lauren and Butler’s other characters develop a resilient, mutualistic, and democratic social unit. Lauren, after this traumatic but cleansing fire, no longer has anything to lose and begins a climate refugee sojourn toward a new social organization, religious ideology, and bioregional agrarianism.

Moving beyond self-education, the second half of the book is more concerned with imagining a basis for social trust and mutual aid in a world of extreme precarity and polarized, racialized violence. While scholars regularly note that the eventual community Lauren helps to form is “the first post-apocalyptic frontier development” (Allmendinger 126) that shapes “an overtly collective narrative of political development and creates an evident utopian horizon in her critical dystopian contribution” (Moylan, Scraps 237), the mechanisms of this formation as they are presented in the novel deserve elaboration.

According to Brittany Henry, reactionary survivalist fantasies such as James Wesley Rawles’s Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse root “Christian survivalist politics in a US settler colonial imaginary” that is both white supremacist and patriarchal. Such [End Page 277] narratives are driven by an implicit social Darwinism, in which the strong dominate the weak, based on “military and reproductive capability . . . marked by a violent self-defensive capacity” (Veracini 78). In many ways Sower seems to fall into this pattern of settler colonial reinscription. The novel presents the refounding of a new settler colony, albeit a multiracial one, perhaps in the model of Black Exoduster communities in Kansas during the late nineteenth century. Moreover, Lauren, upon first beginning her northern journey, disguises herself as a man, hinting toward patriarchy as much as gender fluidity (she is described as tall and having a deep voice, like Butler herself). Furthermore, self-defense and a willingness to kill to survive while protecting women and children structure the repeating crises of the second half of the book. And while these events may highlight the clear racist double standard of conservative American gun culture, they also downplay two crucial features of the plot: Lauren’s “hyperempathy” and the portrayal of spontaneous mutual aid as a counterweight to supposedly Darwinian survivalism.⁵ Though certainly a feminized disability, as elaborated by Anna Hinton, Lauren’s hyperempathy also serves as a “biological conscience” that checks her from inflicting undue pain on others, and may actually incentivize her to reach out to others perceived as weak (Butler 115). Easily overlooked amidst the novel’s gun fights, these two features extend a tradition of anarchic agrarian resistance rather than the frontier myths of settler colonialism.

As the characters walk northward searching for more abundant rainfall after climate change has destroyed southern California’s water infrastructure, Lauren slowly builds the small, egalitarian, and multifamily community with other marginalized people by offering them aid. Her fellow travelers include an older Black doctor who remembers the good old days and reminds her of Frederick Douglass, a family of formerly enslaved mixed-race Latinx “sharers” (people who share her disability of literally feeling others’ pain or pleasure), and more examples of a modern underclass. Although Lauren is quickly seen as a leader due to her decisive manner, all are free to leave as they wish, and some do. She is the leader by acclamation and consent, not violence or coercion. For each member of the growing community the benefits of joining, especially the positive [End Page 278] freedoms that come only in community, such as safety, shared labor, and the experiential camaraderie of common goal, all make giving up frontier individualism well worth it. This is the positive anarchy imagined in the critical anarchist tradition of Kropotkin and Bakunin, or even Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (2009). As scholar of agrarian resistance James C. Scott defines anarchy, we see “cooperation without hierarchy or state rule” (xii; emphasis original). Mutual aid of the sort that fills the pages of Sower is the primary lesson of the didactic novel.

In the final chapter of Sower, in fact, there is a more complete portrait of such political anarchism in action. The group is arguing about whether to stay on the isolated northern California land owned by the doctor Bankole after discovering that the family living there has been killed. The deliberation takes place around a campfire, with each adult member of the small group weighing the options in turn before informally casting their vote—eventually all decide to stay, even the young white man who hesitates because he “wants to own something” and has trouble imagining labor outside of employment (322). But, when it becomes clear that what little employment remains has descended to the level of slavery or the enforcement of slavery, he too stays. Crucially, we see that such democratic anarchy—the cooperation without hierarchy or state rule—is enabled and grounded by access to land, the cornerstone of all political agrarianism.

This founding of a diverse communal village disrupts the vision of white supremacist preppers and the dominant American imagination that associates rurality with whiteness, or agriculture with industrial capitalism. Instead Butler gives voice to a strain of self-reliant nonwhite agrarianism in the service of those whom the power structures have failed. Her protagonist even takes as a lover an older Black man (Bankole, the aforementioned doctor who is linked to her father by age and a shared African diaspora political ideology). As mentioned above, it is his rural, well-watered land that becomes the site of the reborn agrarian colony of Acorn, refreshed from individual and patriarchal ownership, but not fully disconnected from belonging or history. Like an oak savanna, the social ecology has been purified through fire. On the final pages she compares [End Page 279] Bankole’s appearance to a portrait Frederick Douglass, who was a fierce advocate of Black land access and the liberating power of community, as well as of self-reliance and righteous self-defense. This Black agrarian tradition extends to the present: if Lauren were carrying real recently published books, she’d almost certainly have Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018). Butler stands in this lineage as a thinker who envisions the knowledge and traditions of farm labor as a way to resist intersecting power structures. For her and for her georgic readers, this sort of everyday political anarchism can be a method for how to survive and resist the effects of both unjust power structures and the climate change they have caused.

At the same time, this focus on land and regrounding a community built on mutual aid and care does not solve the issue of indigeneity. It should certainly be noted that Sower, for all the characters’ diversity and inclusion of identities, largely elides ongoing Native presence or land claims. Lauren remains uncomfortably near to perpetuating the old frontier settler myth of the vanished Indian replaced by the newly native settler. As readers perhaps more in tune with Indigenous struggles than Butler in the 1990s, we still have work to do in enacting a mutual aid agrarianism that can mitigate such settler legacies.

Yet such wishes for things not included in this nearly thirty-year-old novel do not amount to a very fruitful or historical criticism. I therefore turn once more to questions of form. For ecocritics and western studies scholars participating in what some call a turn toward new formalism, understanding the particular formal or narratological features of cli-fi has made an intriguing project (Levinson 568). And since ecocriticism has long understood itself as an avowedly political project, much cli-fi criticism focuses on the environmentalist political potential of climate stories and their forms. Yet as Greg Garrard notes, politicized ecocriticism (like my discomfort noted above) means “at worst, the author’s supposed exclusions and elisions are the pretext for unilluminating performances of scholarly self-righteousness” (107). In light of [End Page 280] Garrard’s warning, I hope to approach Butler’s novel, then, not only with an eye toward its novel politics but also by looking at how reading and learning are represented. Doing so uncovers what the novel teaches readers to do through the political ideas it represents.

My interest in the didactic function of cli-fi arises from another pair of modes perhaps familiar to scholars of western literature and ecocriticism: the pastoral and georgic. Ecocritics have both celebrated and critiqued the pastoral mode defined by the imagined harmony between human society and the nonhuman natural world that surrounds it. Yet this pastoral mode imagines the primary human activity to be leisure. Whether put to a scientific pursuit of knowledge or the creation of art, nature is imagined as the beautiful but separate sphere of purity. The georgic, however, is concerned with nature as the site of labor: how do we eat? What must we do and how should we do it? While georgics do celebrate natural beauty and processes, the mode imagines humans as partners and fellow creatures in the larger-than-human world. Georgic, following the definition of Timothy Sweet, is literature that takes as its concern “not the retreat to nature or the separation of the country from the city, but our cultural engagement with the whole environment” (5).⁶

In its romantic frontier versus postwestern aspect, this opposition has been well documented in the pages of this journal and beyond. Generally speaking, the division hinges on a distinction between representations of nature as a space for leisure (and imperial adventuring) or a space for work (the labor of belonging and dwelling). One of the distinctive features of the georgic is its linkage of a didactic narrative (that is, georgics are almost always practically instructive). The georgic mode hopes to teach people what to do in nature, thereby suggesting better ways they might be. Georgics, by centering the importance of labor as an inescapable reality of human metabolism within nature, have an inherent materialist and often bioregional tendency. After all, keeping bees in Campagna is not the same labor as producing cotton under enslavement-based capitalism, growing beans in Walden Woods, or raising corn in a Hidatsa village along the Missouri. Yet georgics also often have a utopian slant, suggesting that a better world is possible—if we work for it. [End Page 281]

It may be objected that the georgic mode is inextricably settler colonial, both in its strict poetic version and as a looser collection of affects, attentions, and attachments. Margaret Ronda, for example, summarizes the dominant view that “the genre naturalizes imperial-nationalist ideology through portraits of virtuous cultivation” (58). But this is a problem more of definition than of essence. By expanding our field of vision to include more agricultures, we can see alternative aims of the georgic—from Thoreau’s ironic georgic of resistance to industrial capitalism to Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist reimagining of race, labor, and landscape to Indigenous narratives of farming traditions—we can readily see that labor in nature is not always nationalist, capitalist, or neoliberal. Reading Butler’s Sower as georgic presents a vision of Anthropocene survival and perhaps flourishing that parallels these alternative georgic examples in sometimes complex and even perhaps frustrating ways.

While they would not have named it as such, reading the didactic aspects of Sower came naturally to my students. Reading didactically of course focuses on the “instruct” half of Horace’s famous dictum that literature should “instruct and delight.” In this georgic cli-fi mode of reading part of the narrative tension comes from problem solving. As problems present themselves they are narratively solved—and readers get both aesthetic satisfaction and a sense that we have learned (how to do) something. This motivation and framework for reading narrative is seemingly readily available. Readers of novels often look for actions they can replicate. For my students a Girardian mimetic desire fueled everything from detailed consideration of our own hypothetical (or not, perhaps) bug-out bags to students curiously mapping Lauren Olamina and her companion’s refugee route north and west along the freeways of Southern California.

To approach Sower as a georgic is thus to read the novel attuned to the work that is represented and the teaching work that the novel itself is doing, as well as the ethics or politics represented as flowing from that labor. In doing so, we see both a prognostic and prescriptive dimension. Writing in the 1990s, Butler discerned several important social and environmental forces shaping southern California, and used their frightening prospect to both critique the [End Page 282] dominant frontier mentality of California while also seeking to “articulate an African American environmental West” that might hold together (Goldberg 26).

For Butler that West is California—a place that, as I noted above, has been frequently subjected to utopian imagination. As with much of the American West, it could even be argued that “climate fiction” had a role in colonization as settlers were drawn to promises of a mild and well-watered climate. In the twentieth century, as Mike Davis documents in his classic environmental history of LA, the mind bogglingly swift and destructive residential development of greater Los Angeles was premised on fictions of climactic stability and pastoral images of those same citrus orchards and ranchos founded as havens from capital (59–65). With the rare Mediterranean climate the residents still mostly enjoy, California continues to be regularly presented as a climate utopia.

The abundance promised by pastoral visions of California of course obscures the long history of colonization, war, land seizure, and labor exploitation that has made the Central Valley into an almost unfathomably productive food factory. In California the divide between the alluring promise of self-sufficient agrarian living à la the “little landers” of suburban Tujunga versus the labor conditions of the United Farm Workers remains as stark as ever.⁷ Through large scale terraforming (as Kim Stanley Robinson has labeled the canals that water Los Angeles) the climate of California has indeed been made nearly utopian—for agribusiness and real estate developers (the farcical antics of Arrested Development come to mind).

In approaching Butler’s novel as a cli-fi georgic we can ask not only about her visions of what climate change might mean for the economic and material networks that structure the daily lives of her characters, or even the emotional and affective resources that allow her characters to navigate this altered world with mostly narratively satisfying success. Rather, we can look for her narration of the formal structures that link labor with knowledge to create a communal space for both survival and pragmatic flourishing in a world where both the physical and social climates are increasingly hostile. The linkage of survival and flourishing may be utopian [End Page 283] in the sense that it is imagined to be based on something like spontaneous human decency, but it is not utopian in the sense of unachievable idealism. The reality of mutual aid has been a cornerstone of grassroots and anarchist political thought for at least a century, as Kropotkin’s rebuttal of Social Darwinism, Mutual Aid, argued over one hundred years ago.

And so by reading Butler’s novel as an example of cli-fi in a georgic mode, it becomes a handbook of sorts. This handbook echoes agrarian anarchist political theories and reverberates with the history of African American rural resistance and mutual aid. It looks forward to a desirable future despite climate change, something Sarah Jaquette Ray has noted can feel very nearly impossible to young people today who “could not visualize a future” when asked (2; emphasis original). By leaning into the didacticism, we can understand how readers approach cli-fi not only as an “imagined history of the future” in Fredric Jameson’s famous phrase but also as the recovery of a usable past. While it is easy to say that climate change “changes everything,” Butler’s novel dramatizes the observation that for many subjects of colonial power the world has already ended. Those communities have not merely survived, but live vibrantly reimagined lives. As readers of climate fictions, we can recognize the radical opportunities opened up by such narrative ethics of labor, mutual aid, and bioregional belonging.