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Monday, July 31, 2006
Rape in Science Fiction
Reading zuzu’s complaint about the attention a rape inevitably focuses on everyone but the perpetrator reminded me of something I’d drafted a few months back but didn’t post. At the time, I’d just written about rape in comic books literature and didn’t want to seem fixated on the subject. I also didn’t want to put Adam Roberts—author of the novel I’ll be discussing—on the spot. But with Adam vacationing in the southern France and the other post nestled in the archives, I feel more comfortable starting this discussion.
Adam’s novel Salt describes the colonization of a distant planet by religious fundamentalists. Getting to that planet takes 37 years, during which time tensions between the different religious factions build. After landing, the factions settle on opposite ends of the Great Desert. Despite this distance, the Senaarians—a hierarchical, imperialistic culture—and the Alsists—a radically libertarian culture which, oddly, embraces a recognizably New Left strain of communistic thought—eventually come into conflict.
For the first 226 pages, the novel switches from the self-hagiography of the Senaarian dictator, Barlei, and the man who would become a leader in the Alsist resistance, Petja.1 Initially, Barlei’s voice dominates, and so the reader’s sympathies fall largely with the Senaarians, who seem to lodge just complaints against the free-loading Alsists. Barlei will wax poetic for pages about how the Senaarians labored to find a way to move in open air despite the chlorine gas which hugs the planet’s surface; whereas Petja will say "Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. It was a clever thing" (43).
Knowing Adam’s love of Robert Browning, I can’t help but consider these dualing dialogues—presumably drawn from the memoirs of both men—as self-serving in the extreme. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I doubt it. Barlei seems more trustworthy at first, but as his manipulations of even inconsequential truths begin to pile up, his revisionist ethos becomes increasingly troubling. Chapter-by-chapter, the reader’s sympathies drift to Petja and his open, non-hierarchical, sexually-liberated society.
And when I say "sexually-liberated," I mean it. Alsists frequently walk up to each other, ask if they desire sexual pleasure, and give and/or receive it. As one might guess, this utopian version of the free-love movement is reviled and condemned by the strict law-and-orderists of Senaar. But it works in Als. Everyone seems happy with the hedonistic gender equity they’ve created. As the details of Alsist life are revealed, Barlei’s voice and the strictures it demands become increasingly strident. Here, then, is where the reader’s sympathies turn to the Alsist position. (They’re the Palestinians in this allegory.)
But there’s a catch. A Senaarian ambassador is stranded in Als when the war begins. Petja, about to leave Als to wander the Great Desert, agrees to ferry her into Senaarian territory. At this point in the novel, all reader sympathy is with Petja and the Alsists. The Senaarians inch closer to employing a flimsy pretext to invade and slaughter the Alsists, so as Petja leaves, reader sympathy lies almost exclusively with the Alsists about to be sucker-punched. As Petja and the ambassador, a woman named Rhoda Titus, move through the desert, their apprehensions about each other slowly disappear. They become more friendly, more collegial as the trip continues ... until, that is, Petja rapes her.
I say "rape," but in Petja’s mind, it’s a culture clash. He’s recognized their mutual attraction and acted upon it in a typically Alsist manner. He construes her struggles as typical Senaarian repression, an inability to reliquinsh duty to pleasure. The reader, however, is fully conscious of the fact that Rhoda Titus is being raped. All of the sudden, all sympathetic identification collapses. Petja mistakes her struggles for signs of cultural difference, while the reader, fully cognizant of what is happening, cannot fathom an appropriate response. (I should note that such moments are characteristic of Adam’s novels. Their selling point, even.) Why?
Because there is none. The dictatorial Senaarians don’t deserve sympathy just because one of them has been raped. In fact, their genocidal streak becomes more apparent after Titus returns to Senaar. But we can no longer sympathize with the Alsists, as their ideology allows the rape to occur. Had Titus been an Alsist, she would have simply, directly declined Petja’s advances. But as a Senaarian, she kept her mouth shut, struggled in vain, and had her struggling mistaken for something else. Compounding the discomfort is the reader’s knowledge that if Petja had been able to understand the reason for her struggle, he would immediately desist.
However, the most striking aspect of the novel is that, in its final pages, the dialogue of Barlei and Petja vanishes and is replaced by that of Rhoda Titus. She gets the last word in a novel otherwise devoted to the movements who conflict her rape was involved in. I think this a brave, bold move by Adam, especially considering the prejudices of many a science-fiction fan. But I wonder what those of you who’ve read the book—as well as those of you who haven’t—make of this Ulysses-esque granting of the final word to the wronged woman.
Because Adam has created a situation of such moral complexity it haunts—there’s no other word for it—it haunts readers for months. It does so largely because Titus gets the final word. That gesture instantly reorients the entire novel around that singularly disturbing moment. There are a number of questions I could ask, but before I do, I should say that if I’ve failed to communicate the emotional complexity of this moment, please say as much and I’ll elaborate. Describing a scene in detail without ruining an entire novel is difficult business, and I’m not sure I trust my ability to practice it.
1 Calling him a "leader" masks the moral dilemma Petja struggles with almost every page of the novel. The idea that he "possesses" the forces he leads, that they are "his" men, is anathema to Alsist ideology. But, for the moment, it’s convenient enough shorthand for what he becomes.
Comments
I haven’t read _Salt_—yes, I know I should read more of Adam’s stuff—but it sounds like if you want to interpret it, a working knowledge of Ian Banks’ books would help. The Alsists and their conflict with an authoritarian culture sound like a Banks reference / critique, though not as clear a one as in _Stone_. Basically, as a British high-concept leftist SF writer, I don’t think that Adam can avoid Banks and anxiety of influence.
So I’ll go right into the critique of Banks that Adam may be referencing. Banks’ work often revolves around a kind of revulsion at domination, but this revulsion is also used in a reader-manipulative style to power the writing. A fictional rape is set up by an author in order to be observed by a reader. zuzu wrote about the attention that a rape focuses on everyone but the perpetrator; in this case, the writer is the actor. This scene seems suspiciously utilitarian, does it not? The novel must be complexified, so chalk up another fictional female victim who gets a viewpoint only after the crime.
As in _Stone_, this may function as an implicit critique of the pressures of narrative convention. In an Iain Banks book about his fictional anarcho-communist free-sex culture, the Culture, there must always be a moment in each book in which the Culture is revealed to have a dark side. This isn’t because Banks discredits his utopia in any fundamental sense, it’s because readers would be unable to accept conflict in a novel in which one side was wholly good. It sounds like Adam may be saying something about that here.
The Alsists and their conflict with an authoritarian culture sound like a Banks reference / critique, though not as clear a one as in _Stone_.
I took the whole book as a rather explicit reference/critique of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I think that is the anxiety of influence that informs both Roberts and the Culture novels.
Had Titus been an Alsist, she would have simply, directly declined Petja’s advances. But as a Senaarian, she kept her mouth shut, struggled in vain, and had her struggling mistaken for something else.
Wouldn’t a simple, direct declining of Petja’s advances, in these circumstances, also have been read as that ol’ Senaarian repression acting up again? Also (perhaps, just perhaps, having read the book would help here) I don’t understand what the “typically Alsist manner” of acting on sexual attraction is. At one point you say they ask each other if they want sex, and then later it’s as if they just walk up to each other and go at it based on their own personal hunches. But that’s not asking. (And in the latter case rape might not really be that uncommon, after all—replace “is repressed but really wants it” with “is just playing around/likes it rough”.) I suppose what I don’t understand is how the incident reflects on the Alsist society as a whole, rather than on the unreflectiveness/lack of imagination of one of its members.
Salt reminded me very much of The Dispossessed, with the assumption that the anarchist society would be utopian (if a little flawed) replaced by the premise that it would merely be different and not necessarily superior.
The moral complexity of the novel is haunting, but although Titus gets the last word, it’s Petja that stayed with me the most, because there’s a real skin-crawling horror about the character that sets him apart (for me) from the other players.
We learn early on that Petja wasn’t raised in anarchist innocence; he was born in a hierarchical society, and plainly didn’t enjoy the experience. This colours many of his actions, because it means he has some experience of non-Alsist society. He really shouldn’t be as completely incompetent at comprehending the Senaarians as he affects to be, and at many points in the narrative he’s well-placed, with a little perspicacity, to sense and defuse the incipient confrontation with them. As things progress there begins to seem something pathological about his blindness, perhaps some powerful temptation toward hierarchy that still taints him and that he’s suppressing to the point of over-compensation.
On this reading, the rape of Rhoda Titus is the suppressed urge to dominance breaking through. Petja’s narration of the act is eerie, in no small part because it boils down to bog-standard rapist psychology—he’s telling himself that whatever weird tics she showed on the surface, deep down she really wanted it. No mere case of crossed cultural wires, this is the sign that there’s something quite sick about Petja, and that Rhoda afforded him the opportunity to act out his sickness outside the Alsist community (and thus without having to account for it to fellow Alsists) just as the war finally affords him the chance to act out his pathology within it.
I don’t understand what the “typically Alsist manner” of acting on sexual attraction is.
If I’m remembering correctly the Alsists have some mixture of intuition and straightforward request going on, with a kind of loose mob justice enforcement mechanism to prevent rape from becoming too frequent. I might not be remembering correctly, though, it’s been a while.
I haven’t read The Dispossessed in ages--nor have I ever read Banks, something I should remedy, I know--but influence aside, I don’t think Adam’s trying to solve a narrative problem by writing the rape into it. For one, it doesn’t reflect poorly Alsist society per se, merely the way it interacts with others. Had their been no invasion, no contact, this wouldn’t have been a problem, as internally, the society would’ve (and did) function perfectly.
Ben, Doctor Slack’s memory is trustworthy, although I’d add to that had she declined him when still in Als, he simply would’ve asked someone else. Remarkably, Adam creates enough of a sense of Alsist norms without outlining them, specifically. We get Barlei’s dismissive account of them, and Petja’s defense of them, but we know enough to only trust Petja ... who, I should’ve made clear, wrote about the rape in a memoir intended for public consumption. Presumably, any other Alsist who read it would’ve been equally as confused as Petja was in the moment. (This also raises the issue of the exact status of the novel. What kind of document is it that it combines two memoirs and single recollection? It’s being written for posterity, but I’d assume the books wouldn’t have been combined. Then again, I get a little obsessed with “status of the material object before me"-type considerations in literature.)
Doctor Slack, in addition to the wonderful memory, you’ve a sharp critical eye. Why I skipped over his life prior to becoming an Alsist, I don’t know. Only I’m not sure where that gets us: an indictment of hierarchical societies? the hold the norms we first acquire have over our entire lives? an inherent, essential desire to dominate?
NOTE: A parallel conversation on Acephalous, c/o compulsive x-posting.
Scott: “influence aside, I don’t think Adam’s trying to solve a narrative problem by writing the rape into it”
But he did, according to your description, solve a narrative problem with it—one of how to complexify the end of the novel. It doesn’t really matter whether this works by affecting a previously sympathetic character or a previously sympathetic society. Perhaps I don’t mean a narrative problem, but a structural one?
The question of the source of the criminal behavior of the protagonist (a common element in Banks) is an ongoing problem in his work. He often does seem to be implying an essentialist view of male sexuality, as linked to a shameful desire to dominate, but that goes against his prior commitments to non-essentialism. If the problem was one restricted to hierarchical societies, the Culture books shouldn’t see as much of it as they do. Of course, the Culture people affected by it are supposed to be extremely unusual within the Culture, but that brings up the question of why Banks thinks they’re more interesting than the common people of the Culture. That’s an inherently political question, I think.
Actually, the serious SF author whose rape scenes I probably find most problematic (at least in her minor works, which are pretty much all I’ve read) is Octavia Butler. _Patternmaster_ has a horrible, annoying “rape of the female protagonist to piss the male protagonist off” motif. _Xenogenesis_ has aliens which empower the female protagonist in various ways except, mysteriously, for protecting her from attempted sexual violence. _Parable of the Sower_ (which I’ve only read the beginning of) starts with the same thing; dramatic tension through the constant threat of rape.
Of course, pointing out that women do live under the constant threat of rape in most societies is a valid feminist goal. But in this case the use appears to be for dramatic effect. For instance, in _Parable of the Sower_, the protagonist makes friends with a 3-year-old at the beginning of the book, who is promptly shot through a designed-to-be-bulletproof gate. Why? Because it’s more affecting to the reader than to have her die through sudden and relatively unlikely violence than to have her die of something less dramatic in a breaking-down society, such as dysentery.
This book sounds like a fantastic prompt to questions, and an enticing piece of speculation-as-novel. But - and maybe this is a tacky question - is Salt a good novel? If someone says ‘Yes’ I’m gonna buy it. And which of the Culture novels should one read first? I’ve read about Banks and am intrigued, but again, I worry that I’m gonna love the ideas and loathe the writing, and thanks but I already did the grad school thing. :)
For the Culture novels, _Use of Weapons_ is probably the best, _Consider Phlebas_ is chronologically the first (but they need not be read in order).
waxbanks: Yes, Salt is a good novel.
Scott: Only I’m not sure where that gets us: an indictment of hierarchical societies? the hold the norms we first acquire have over our entire lives? an inherent, essential desire to dominate?
I’d be inclined to say some mixture of the first two.
I’ve not read the book and have nothing to say about the rape. But, I do want to make a comment about the underlying premise of two societies, one authoritarian, the other egalitarian. Perhaps the most interesting bit of evolutionary psychology I’ve read is a book by Christopher Boehm entitled Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Boehm argues that human social nature rests on a dual foundation. There is an inheritance from non-human primates that is strongly hierarchical and authoritarian and there is a uniquely human component that is fundamentally egalitarian. He’s a bit vague about the genetic basis of this human component, but he does think it’s genetic.
He argues that these two components are more or less in an uneasy balance in the most primitive human societies, hence their strong egalitarian cast. Once groups settle into permanent villages and towns, social structure become more complex and the older hierarchical mechanisms come to dominate. More generally, I’d like to think that, while we have these two modes of social interaction, there is no brain system that allows one to dominate over the other. Hence there is the sort of unresolvable tension at the neural core of our social being.
It’s an interesting book. And has a certain obvious relevant to Salt, and many others as well. For example, I read the Claudio-Hero plot in Much Ado About Nothing is grounded in the hierarchical primate social mechanisms while the Beatrice-Benedick plot is grounded in the specifically egalitarian human mechanisms.
[Note that others have made a similar argument about a dual-human nature. I’m thinking particularly Boyd and Richerson.]
Sorry but this just seems weak:
“I say “rape,” but in Petja’s mind, it’s a culture clash. He’s recognized their mutual attraction and acted upon it in a typically Alsist manner. He construes her struggles as typical Senaarian repression, an inability to reliquinsh duty to pleasure. The reader, however, is fully conscious of the fact that Rhoda Titus is being raped. All of the sudden, all sympathetic identification collapses. Petja mistakes her struggles for signs of cultural difference, while the reader, fully cognizant of what is happening, cannot fathom an appropriate response.”
Petja ‘mistaking’ her struggles hardly reflects on Alsis society. It really comes across as a poor narrative devise since men have been making similar ‘rape excuses’ for ages. Mainly it seems to reflect on Petja. Not having read the book it’s hard to comment but it comes across in the review as very obvious reader manipulation.
An excellent example of a text that involves complexity of rape and cultural conflict would be “A Passage To India” where we never know with certainty if the assault actually took place. That allows for ambiguity in analysis and makes ideology much more relevant.
Also in the context of Science Fiction ‘Kampus’ by James Gunn has a very impactful Rape that ties well meaningfully into the story and really haunts the reader (ok, this reader).
“Because there is none. The dictatorial Senaarians don’t deserve sympathy just because one of them has been raped. In fact, their genocidal streak becomes more apparent after Titus returns to Senaar. But we can no longer sympathize with the Alsists, as their ideology allows the rape to occur.”
Now this is an interesting response ‘their ideology allows the rape to occur.’ That is a very strange conclusion to draw. Do we lose sympathy for the desert because its isolation allowed the rape to occur? Do we lose sympathy for Titus because her physical weakness allowed the rape to occur? Why don’t we dislike the Senarrians even more because their ideology didn’t train their woment to protect themselves from rape. It’s very odd to conclude that it was the ‘ideology’ that allowed the rape to occur when their exist a very large number of other factors that contribute directly to the rape ocurring. Not the least of which would be Petja. Oh, and of course the author deciding he needs a rape to change the audiences attitude. Sorry this just comes across as highly manipulative on the part of the author.
Sorry I don’t intend to sound strident but this review just strikes me as odd.
Having been away, and returning to this find very interesting post and discussion, I’ve been a bit inhibited from adding my ha’pennorth of opinion for fear of pandering to my ego’s ravenous and unappealing appetites. Thanks to those who say nice things about my novel; it was my first and I have a softspot for it. Which is peculiar, given how unremitting and bleak a book it is, but there you go: you love your kids, even the depressed ones. But rather than go on about my own writing, I’ll add one observation to the general mix.
The year Salt came out I did a Q&A with the British SF Association, and one of the questioners asked about the rape. She noted that there seemed to be a real rash of rape-themed British SF books; was I aware of this, was I writing self-consciously to this as a theme, why were SF writers suddenly so interested in this subject?
It’s true that there were lots of SF books about rape that year. Perdido Street Station is one, although I’ve always felt that the rape in that book (it’s a brilliant book) is one of its least effective aspects: the idiom of ‘choice’ that Mieville uses to frame the event doesn’t quite convince me. Another big book in which there’s a deal of rape, though handled much more matter-of-factly, is Mary Gentle’s Ash; and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents includes some immensely distressing rape scenes. All these books were shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award that year (Mieville won), which gave added focus to the idea that rape was the year’s fascination. Another book from that year that should have been shortlisted but wasn’t, and which is also built in part around a powerfully handled rape scene, is Reckless Sleep by my friend Roger Levy.
Why so many books about rape? I don’t know, even though I added to the clump. I really don’t. When I was asked the question I burbled incoherently about the laddish provenance of SF, and the sense that it was moving through a number of phases in its attitude to women: moving, in other words, beyond the 1970s feminist positivities (I mean, positivities about the potential of women, not about their actual experiences of being-in-the-sf-imagined-world) and the 1980s-90s celebration of polymorphous perversity, into a grimmer period of coming-to-terms with how enormously power-fantasies, and sexualised power fantasies in particular, informed early century SF. But this may well be quite wrong. Women are the victims in all the texts I’ve just mentioned, but a famous Clarke winner from 1997 is Russell’s The Sparrow, and the rape victim there is a man, and a priest to boot, so perhaps its not exclusively gendered. Mind you, I don’t have a very high opinion of The Sparrow.
I don’t think that rape is as prevalent a theme in SF nowadays ... this year for instance. What was it about 2000 that made it so widely handled a theme? I don’t know.
Incidentally, thank you Bill for bringing the existence of Boehme’s book to my attention. What a fascinating, if vaguely-loopy-sounding thesis. I am going to try and get hold of a copy.