In an interview conducted by Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, Octavia Butler was prompted to discuss the importance of bodily inscription in writing, to to which she responds that the body is "all we really know we have...all we really know we have is the flesh." » (Mehaffy and Keating, 59) Butler's concern to save the "flesh" through writing is a persistent theme in his novel, Parable of the Sower. It tells the story of protagonist Lauren Olamina, as she leads a community of individuals on the Pacific coast while writing and teaching a religion based on the acceptance of change and difference as God. Lauren writes Earthseed: The Books of the Living, through short philosophical passages scattered throughout the novel; “I wrote to flesh out my journal entries,” says Laura (Butler, 216), because her writing embraces both the female mind and body. Earthseed, the fictional religion introduced by Butler, encapsulates an intrinsically feminine discourse; This concept of "fleshing" and the epistolary style used by Butler are simultaneously compatible with Hélène Cixous's manifesto for women's writing, "The Laughter of the Medusa," an exhortation to a "feminine mode of writing." The narrative incarnations of Butler's fiction advocate a spiritual reclamation of "flesh" as the primary site and signifier of knowledge and communication, both personal, as Lauren's diaries suggest, and collective, in that its doctrine has the function of socially bringing together its followers, both material and narrated. uses what she calls “body knowledge,” which does not necessarily or literally involve renouncing the flesh, but rather reinventing and reassembling it within an ethic of survival. Say No to Plagiarism Get a tailor-made essay on “Why”. "Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"?Get the original essay The Parable of the Sower is essentially an analogy drawn between the culture of Earthseed, which Lauren painstakingly applies to her experience, and the grand narratives of Christianity and capitalism, which are rigorously applied to ours. Each is a way of giving form and meaning to existence, in the same way that narrative itself tends toward a similar “fictitious” ordering of experience. Butler positions herself in this analogy by “writing” herself into the literary economy of SF and empowering the undervalued female voice in that economy. Thus, Butler alludes to a conceivable reality but at the same time challenges the validity of the forms we use to give shape to it. Hélène Cixous aimed to make the figures of femininity in the theory of writing literal and to explore the consequences of this lateralization. She did not simply privilege the “feminine” half of an existing binary opposition between “male” and “female”; like other writing theorists, she questions the very adequacy of logic to name the complexity of cultural realities. Her essay opens didactically, as she asks women writers to write themselves into the text: The woman must write herself: she must write about women and bring women to writing, of which they have expelled as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons. by the same law, with the same fatal aim. The woman must place herself in the text - as in the world and in history - through her own movement. (Cixous, 1942) The act of a woman “writing” herself is applicable in both a fictional and an authorial sense; while Butler uses his novel as a platform for activity andfemale empowerment, Lauren, in a metafictional sense, points to her own writing as a platform for her religious teaching. One of his doctrinal passages says: “We are Earthseed. We are self-aware flesh, seeking problem-solving… We are maturing Earth life, Earth life preparing to move away from the parent world. , which emphasizes the corporeality associated with the teachings of Earthseed. The passage summarizes the “essence” of Earthseed; the pronoun “we” represents the community aspect of a reinscription of the body in religious doctrine. When Butler's passage is read in conjunction with Cixous's proposal, similarities emerge: first, Butler and Cixous are inherently concerned with community and collective thought, second, both consider the oppressive context in which they write. Cixous recognizes the dominant patriarchal force that has tormented her literary space, as she is “violently driven out of the body”; while Lauren constitutes Earthseed as a deviation from the "parent world" that has ravaged her own community. The concept of writing describes everything about writing that can neither be subsumed into an idea nor matched exactly to empirical reality. It encompasses the “textuality” of all discourses, and Hélène Cixous can be considered responsible for the discourse intrinsically specific to women. Cixous does not privilege the “feminine” half of an existing binary opposition between “male” and “female”; just like her contemporary writing theorists, she questions the adequacy of this opposition to qualify the complexity of cultural realities. Cixous attenuates this opposition in the following extract: “I maintain unequivocally that there is a marked writing: that, until now, in a much more extensive and repressive manner than has ever been suspected or admitted, the he writing was directed by a libidinal and cultural system. — therefore a political economy, typically masculine —… (Cixous, 1945) It becomes obvious that an inconsistency lies at the heart of Cixous' work: his insistence on the two incompatible logics within women's writing. Primarily, Cixous asserts that women's writing is characterized by explicitly feminine body parts that have been repressed by traditional discourse and must be expressed by the woman writer. However, it also promotes the use of feminine writing for both men and women. It is perhaps more appropriate to interpret Cixous's "body" as that of any transgressive or desiring individual; it is conceivable that it was his interpretation of the body itself that was repressed. The “body” may not even be a physical body, but rather figurative bodies that may or may not possess power. Traditionally, power, authority and law have dominated the male body; but, since no real bodies are depicted, both men and women would have access to comments about the body. By writing as if the female body could assert itself, Cixous's feminine writing frees it from invisibility and, simultaneously, does not make it a new model for the universal human being. The new opposition is not between male and female, but between a logic of the One and a logic of heterogeneity and multiplicity. Considering Cixous's contemplation of "unity" and "multiplicity," Lauren's Earthseed can be analyzed through this dichotomy. Regarding community, Lauren writes Earthseed's narrative as follows: “Civilization is to groups as intelligence is to individuals. It is a way of combining the intelligence of several people to achieve continuous adaptation of the group. » (Butler, 101 years old) Earthseed restson the need for collective support; community participation, as in most doctrines, is necessary for the maintenance and survival of the discipline. Lauren, by including corporeality in her dogma, allows the spiritual process to be applicable to any body. His story explains: Earthseed. I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. A day. I think there will be many of us. And I think we'll have to move further and further away from this dying place... I never felt it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. (Butler, 78) The seeds of the Earth are inherently malleable. , although it is not vulnerable to manipulation. Lauren resists the patriarchy that prevails in her community, which she calls "a place that is dying." Lauren’s language is neither demanding nor didactic, but as Cixous theorizes: “Her language (of women in general) does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. » (Cixous 1955) These ramifications on language resonate with Cixous, as Lauren characterizes his religious discourse as a means of “discovery rather than invention, of exploration rather than creation”. According to Lauren, Earthseed's followers are already implicated as both agents and objects in the spiritual hierarchy that saturates her community. Regarding the function of religion in the secular literary space, Butler, in the interview, comments on the function of Earthseed: “Lauren uses religion as a tool. So I use this tool as something that she can use to help the people who follow her…” (Mehaffy and Keating, 62) Butler uses, to her advantage, the metafictional conventions of SF; Butler situates Lauren as a vehicle to deliver Earthseed material, in order to present her own spiritual and literary agenda. Gregory Jerome Hampton, in his publication Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens and Vampires, examines the importance of religious doctrine and the "body" in Butler's fiction, in which he states: Religion is a tool intended to criticize. the real world in the limitless laboratories of our imagination... By mixing SF with religious themes, Butler's fiction encourages readers to question the social values ​​that mark marginalized bodies. (Hampton, 84) In the context of Lauren's religious writings, and by extension, Butler's contribution to SF, it is obvious that the novel Lauren, as the architect and defender of Earthseed, must rhetorically announce its doctrine in a way that persuades her to follow through with thinking beyond the “parental world.” The epistolary style that structures Butler's novel allows the narrative to embody both Lauren's thought processes and the doctrinal material, making them accessible uniquely to the reader. It is assumed that minor characters do not receive the same vision, causing dialogues such as that between Lauren and Harry. Harry is skeptical of Lauren's religious fabrication, but more importantly, of his own identity: So let me read something. Let me know something about you that's been hiding. I feel like... like you're lying. I don't know you. Show me something about you that's real. (Butler, 195) Harry, in asking to read Lauren's diary, assumes that Lauren's identity is "hidden" or encoded in her writings. Identity, or “truth” as Harry suggests by classifying Lauren as a “lie,” is revealed in the embodiment of writing; Cixous affirms this inscription of “truth” when she states “that by writing herself, the woman will return to the body that has been more than confiscated from her, that has been transformed into the strange stranger on display.” » (Cixous, 1946) Butler herself,in the interview, asserts the correlation between inscription, the body and perceptible identity: a person's body can only be known through language or another means of representation. In other words, the body is something that only language and narrative can bring to life and make known to ourselves or others. (Mehaffy and Keating, 59) Essentially, literary composition mitigates the display of “strangeness or strangeness” that outsiders, like Harry, perceive. Lauren's physical body and presence cannot be properly or precisely understood as "real", and sequentially, identity remains obscured; Storytelling embodies what is “real,” and for Lauren, it is essential to the preservation and progress of Earthseed. The “libidinal economy” that Cixous opposes to feminine writing refers to the system of exchange linked to sexual desire, which it is mainly characterized as being intrinsically masculine, to the extent that it is active and not passive; therefore, only one desire can work at a time. This type of economics can be applied to various social systems, such as the literary economy in which Butler writes, or the clerical economy that permeates Lauren's gated community in Los Angeles. Cixous illuminates the privilege of masculinity in such economies: Sexual opposition, which has always worked for the benefit of man to the point of also reducing writing to its laws, is only a historical-cultural limit . There is, there will be more and more quickly pervasive from now on, a fiction which produces irreducible effects of femininity. (Cixous, 1949) Lauren operates under similar circumstances before heading north, as her community, particularly women, experience oppression from Richard Moss' religious movement: Richard Moss created his own religion, a combination of the Old Testament and historical practices of West Africa. . It states that God wants men to be patriarchs, rulers and protectors of women, and fathers of as many children as possible. (Butler, 36) Moss has authority in the “libidinal economy” precisely because he is a man; its religion depends on the concepts of "dying world" and "parent world" which Lauren innately opposes, and subsists within the "historico-cultural limit" of West African practices. Likewise, Lauren opposes the conventional presidency that permeates her disappearing society; she complains that “Giving is just a kind of human handrail… like a symbol of the past that we can cling to as we are pushed into the future.” He is nothing. No substance. » (Butler, 56) Male influence and action, although unethical and socially unproductive, take precedence in the political systems that structure the novel. Lauren's opposition is provoked in two ways; on the one hand, his religious discovery is futuristic, flexible and progressive, and on the other hand, because masculine corporeality is absent. The male body does not need to be represented in a patriarchal space because it is innately superior, whereas the female body relies on narrative embodiment for its representation and tangible recognition. Earthseed, initially, presents a “genderless” God; rather, a God who symbolizes change, discovery, and self-reflexivity. Lauren states that “Earthseed is about current reality, not supernatural authority figures. » (Butler, 219). Whether conscious or not, it ignores the gender construct that frequently accompanies religious figures and focuses on an applicable version of God that any follower can identify with. . While talking with her traveling companions, Zahra and Natividad, Lauren is baffled by the question.