Butler, Barthleme, & Saunders
Barthleme’s technique of arresting expectations of continued escalation allow him to pause and explain the events unfolding at the school. But also propel them forward in unexpected and compelling ways which break the reader’s understanding of the current narrative pattern. If we map Saunders’ use of Freitag’s triangle over time (above), we might see where Barthleme does this, and what happens next as the escalation increases. As Saunders illustrates, there is a pattern of initial exposition, where we learn that there are a growing number of deaths associated with the school, at this stage trees and snakes. But Barthleme arrests the pattern early by providing an explanation for why the snakes died, due to the boiler getting switched off because of union action. It’s a moment which immediately arrests the pattern being established, but is repeated and reinforced as a couplet immediately afterwards by the herb garden dying because of over-watering by the children. Both examples provide a rationalization for the deaths, one political and one the over-zealous behavior of the children, but they establish a grounding from which Barthleme can then accelerate.
In the following accelerated sequence of deaths, the victims are all animals. First gerbils, then mice, a salamander and then the tropical fish. In using such a sequential escalation, Barthleme propels the narrative forward, and grabs the reader’s hand in bringing them along in that forward motion. The escalation quickens and the stakes made higher before Barthleme arrives at another moment of pause, where as Saunders describes, Barthleme winks towards the reader in understanding that he of course knows that tropical fish are often doomed to live short lives. But he again couples two of the deaths together. Earlier he’d done it with the snakes and the herb garden, this time it’s the tropical fish and the puppy. These aren’t just illustrative of the escalating moral complexity of the deaths, but also serve as a fulcrum after which the deaths become human. As with the gerbils, mice, salamander and fish, there is another rapid acceleration of deaths beginning with a Korean orphan, then a series of parents, then classmates, and finally a violent murder.
Only here at the most violent crescendo of the piece does Barthleme introduce the apex which all of this escalation has been building towards. The existential ‘where did they all go?’ In a wonderful sequence which wrenches the reader out of the pattern of escalation but also grapples with the complexity of answering the question, Barthleme also changes the language and diction of the children themselves:
Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of –
The last sentence is itself arrested, and even coupled with a change in diction, the narrative is still moving forward as it begins to signal deceleration. In a final concluding escalation, Barthleme introduces the teaching assistant Helen, and the promise of an amorous demonstration, all of which only builds towards a further ambiguous ending where a gerbil politely knocks on the classroom door. The children, and we as readers, cheer wildly.
The piece is challenging in that it never affords a degree of comfort in establishing pattern or premise for the events at the school. Even the briefest explanations we get are only momentary pauses along a bigger trajectory which culminates in one of the biggest questions of all. But in doing so, Barthleme offers a restless path for the reader, where we’re never allowed to get too comfortable in one place for long. Deaths move between calmly explained and rapidly escalated as much as they sit beside named ambiguous characters who only get introduced in the conclusion. Broadly following Frietag’s triangle, the piece follows a linear narrative in time, but one which rises and falls in action, disorienting the reader with detail which breaks the pattern of escalation.
If Barthleme’s The School asks us to ride along with a pattern of escalation, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild transports us with alien language, reproduction ritual and the ethical issues motivated by human harvesting to propel forward a disturbing and visceral tale of parasitic invasion. Butler’s language is disorienting in its initial exposition of reproductive ritual expressed by the alien race towards their human hosts, whom they implant with their eggs in return for protection. Where Barthleme’s protagonist is anonymous, Butler’s is identified as a young boy, Gan, who initially understands the rite of alien impregnation to be a privilege, but changes his perspective when he is forced to perform a brutal and violent cesarean section on a pregnant male abandoned by his keeper, and who is being eaten alive by the alien larvae which have begun to hatch within him, consuming him from the inside out. Butler escalates through the narrative of descriptive ritual, describing the relationships and customs between the species, and the biology of the implantation process before ripping away the descriptive veil and introducing a violently graphic episode where the humans, and us as readers, are asked to make some critical ethical choices. For example:
And she opened him.
His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore himself away from me. The sound he made… I had never heard such sounds come frm anything human. T’Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away blood. His blood vessels contracted, reacting to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed.
I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn’t know why I hadn’t already. I couldn’t possibly last until she was finished.
For Butler’s narrator, seeing such a devastating procedure results in suicidal thoughts as the violent narrative climax de-escalates. Gan questions the relationship between the aliens in the humans, before ultimately acquiescing to be implanted by the host alien in return for being able to keep an illicitly acquired gun, as well as love and protection. If Bartheleme’s narrator disregards the conflict we might feel over so many deaths, Butler’s draws the conflict of a single death in violent close-up, and the conflict for Gan is one of being in the system which surrounds him and his continued participation within it. Barthleme asks a single large question about systems of life’s meaning in his climax, but it isn’t one about the role of physical violence as it is for Butler’s Gan.
Both pieces establish places of protection inside of which the events happen, but both climax when they are afforded the opportunity to violently break from that convention. Barthleme’s breaks out of the framework of the school when it asks a question about what happens after death, and Butler’s breaks out of the protective cocoon of the preserve when it shows the violence inherent in the implantation and harvesting procedure. In doing so, both authors provide compelling, arresting moments of pause and reflection. Less so Saunders’ gas stations, more quiet altars of meditation as the cacophony of escalation recedes, the negative space of the climactic moment occurs, and the quietening decrease in volume towards the finish begins.
When Barthleme asks where did they go? it is a vacuum into which all the preceding elements of escalation are thrown. Similarly with Butler, when she writes And she opened him it performs the same task of taking everything which has come before it and hurling it into that emptiness. The climactic moments of both pieces get their volume and velocity from Saunders’ escalating escalation, but render it silent in its explosion and execution. In doing so, the reader is thrown out of the previous pattern of reading, and can only take up the remaining sense-making tools both authors offer as the volume diminishes towards their conclusions.
