precis: Societal Ills
Octavia Butler’s "The Evening
and the Morning and the Night," is a short story of science fiction, which
explores the implication of a modern society and it’s adverse advancements on
the people. Butler’s story can also be read as a metaphor for how
society copes with difference in particular its treatment of people of color, and
specifically the black and brown women’s role in societies scientific research
and development. Butler’s short
story functions as a critique of scientific “progression” as a regression in
respect to compassion and empathy. These issues are seen from an individual’s
perspective and bring up subjects such as: racial superiority, social
Darwinism, and divides in society on a number of different levels while also
critiquing Modern medicine under this guise.
Butler writes about this fictional experience through
the lens of a 20 something year old girl, Lyn Mortimer, who is afflicted with a
degenerative genetic disease imagined by Butler, which is a combination of the
three existing conditions: Huntington's disease, phenylketonuria (PKU), and
Lesch-Nyhan. The imagined disease is called Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD). DGD entails a short
lifespan due to a victim’s obsessive desire to self-harm. The self-
mutilation and psychosis are due to a delusion of being trapped in their
skin or in a body of which they feel they don’t belong. To delay the onset of these symptoms, which are inevitable
later in life, there is an enforced restrictive diet of nutritional biscuits. Needless
to say those with DGD don’t have a very positive outlook due to the knowledge
of their violent predetermined futures.
DGD came
about after the discovery of a cancer cure. After the cure was administered to
a large number of people, the ineffective antidote mistakenly caused the genetic
mutation DGD, found in the children of its consumers.
The people put their trust
in institutions time and again that have historically wronged many and believed
in their supposed beneficial technologies that assume power over all our bodies.
By law
the DGDs were required to ware an emblem that signifies they have the disease,
much like past historical events that used similar methods of identification. The
emblem’s can be seen as a tool to further the prejudice and marginalization of these
bodies by marking them as “other.” DGDs are considered a dangerous liability
and are compared to delinquents, and as a result are controlled and denied the
freedom of a healthy person. The story
has a very specific atmospheric quality in which you are able to feel the societies
segregation and exclusionary tactics and the way in which those afflicted are
alienated in the same ways ethnic and disabled bodies are historically
discriminated against.
Lyn tells her story of having two parents both afflicted with
DGD and how their life’s had a tragic ending. As Lyn put it, "So they had
trusted God and the promises of modern medicine and had a child. But how could
I look at what had happened to them and trust anything?"
Because of these
events, Lyn longs for agency, independence, and self-determination from an
early age; fearful that she will just fade away. Facing a very grimly set future
she attempts suicide, which is common among those afflicted by DGD. She
describes the life of an individual who
is looked down upon in a society as a failed experiment and is treated as a
danger to not only herself but also those around her. Through medical
literature and horror stories DGDs loose trust in themselves and when they
begin to enforce certain laws of nature upon their own bodies, eugenics and
sterilization come into the story. Lyn was very aware of the traumatic nature of
the illness as she was marked by visiting a DGD ward as a kid, still she did
not want to be told that she could not have children. As a lady, She wanted to
feel like she had autonomy over her body. As seen in her conversation with Alan
a boyfriend also born to two DGD parents, ““Do you want someone else telling
you what to do with your body?" I asked.
"No need," he said. "I had that taken care of as soon as I was old enough."
This left me staring. I'd thought about sterilization. What DGD hasn't? But I
didn't know anyone else our age who had actually gone through with it. That
would be like killing part of yourself? Even though it wasn't a part you
intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead.””
"No need," he said. "I had that taken care of as soon as I was old enough."
This left me staring. I'd thought about sterilization. What DGD hasn't? But I
didn't know anyone else our age who had actually gone through with it. That
would be like killing part of yourself? Even though it wasn't a part you
intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead.””
Butler is concerned with time and how this plays into the psychology
of someone with a degenerative disease a symptom of that being a drive and concentration
on leaving a mark before their time is due. Lyn explains, “We probably wouldn't last very long, anyway.
These days, most DGDs make it to forty, at least.”
Lyn struggles with the idea that all her hard work and focus
is discredited and seen as a special gift or having the genetic predisposition
for success. Lyn says, “Hell, I
knew what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time.
Whatever I did was just marking time… I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.” When ones time is limited the way that they perceive human accomplishment is altered.
Whatever I did was just marking time… I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.” When ones time is limited the way that they perceive human accomplishment is altered.
1 comment:
Your opening sentence is so general it doesn't say very much, so I would start with your second sentence, in which you are much more specific and draw the reader into your project. To be honest, I often end up deleting my first sentences in final edits. Maybe all a first sentence needs to do is get you writing. If I were to replace rather than simply remove that first sentence, maybe it might mention that the story both comments directly on the stakes and human costs of health panics (of which it is a fictional one) familiar from flu to HIV to SARS to Ebola, but also uses the figure of the body defined by disease as an allegory through which to capture and an analysis through which to clarify a host of other lived experiences of radical marginalization, sexed, raced, aged, differently enabled and onward.
Your summary of the story manages to contain lots of the key plot points and themes, and of course the whole point of a short precis is to impose the discipline of making choices as to which details you think are the ones that matter in an argument enough to mention… but that said, I really think you should have talked more about how the story resolves. It makes sense that you devote so much time to the setting and set-up of the story since these establish the terms on the basis of which we will compare the fictional scenario with all the real-world problems it illuminates. But if a precis summarizes an argument, and an argument is a claim supported by reasons and evidence, then a precis summarizing a story as an argument (this can be tricky, but very enlightening) will often think the development of the plot as something like the development of an argument, the marshaling of reasons and evidence and entailments to lead to a conclusion…
From this perspective, the arrival at the utopian space of recuperation and overcoming represented by the Institute becomes especially interesting in the story, given the way it introduces as many questions and problems as it does answers. Why does Butler actually provide her protagonist an apparent miracle but at the cost of making her closest ally a person she congenitally can't abide while at once alienating her from her boyfriend who hitherto had been her greatest consolation?
Is the idea that natural hierarchies emerge among groups of sufferers from the condition suggests a weirdly behaviorally engineered kind of fantasy of social life that may be as much a comment on the norms of our eugenic-biogenetic consumer age as the discussion of hygienic biscuits and dehumanizing badges? Also, how do we think through the ways this disease-condition conditions the unease of prevailing biopolitical discourses of subhumanization and superhumanization? In the end of your precis you write in a moving way about the fatality and folly of a life marking time marked with death. This is crucial. But to that I would add, how much more strange to think, if think so we do, that Lynn has become by the end of the story, something like a comic book superhero?
Good writing, good thinking, good job!
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