To Touch Solid Evidence: The Implicity of Past and Present in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

Abstract

Both law and common sense hold that responsibility follows a chrono logical causal direction: one can be held directly responsible only for actions coextensive with one's life, and for which one is a proximate (rather than remote) cause.' This conception of responsibility assumes, in effect, that only the present has standing and is real: the past is gone, while the future has not yet happened. The resulting lack of concern for individuals of other times relieves one of any relationship to them. From such a premise arises, for example, much of the resistance to reparations for American slavery. Like some responses to that controversy, Octavia Butler's novel Kindred (1979) dramatizes a different conception of respon sibility. This conception sets aside concerns about culpability or complicity to instead focus on what I term "implicity." This term describes two sides of our entanglement with prior versions of the world: our habit of accord ing a privilege to the present and the misrecognitions of the past that may follow from that habit. In doing so, Butler shows the ultimate inadequacy of such terms as "past," "present," "future," and even "history" to encom pass the unstable and even threatening relationship between contempo rary individuals and prior versions of the world. Kindred demonstrates that our agency is never separate from our responsibility as actors in a much greater temporal web of action, despite our desire to believe otherwise. In the larger project from which this essay is drawn, I trace an African American literary discourse in the American and black public spheres in which concepts of time, agency, and desire are intricately linked. African American writers have long been concerned with temporality, whether dealing with constructions of humanity that placed slaves outside of his torical Western time, with the exploitation of the days, hours, and life sto ries of black laborers, or with political rhetoric that was meant to uphold white power over time. In discussions of white supremacy's use of time to limit black agency, they have also shown the ways that African Americans have come to consciousness about this problem, and rearticulated time to support