Octavia Entry #3

Jesse Hutchings

Lysa Rivera

ENG423; Butler

Journal Entry #3

            “Most important, though, the boy was not human.

            Eli could not accept this. Again and again, he tried to teach Jacob to walk upright. A human child walked upright. A boy, a man, walked upright. No son of Eli’s would run on all fours like a dog.

            Day after day, he kept at Jacob until this the little boy sprawled on his stomach and screamed in rebellion.

            “Baby, he’s too young,” Meda said not for the first time. “He doesn’t have the balance. His legs aren’t strong enough yet.”

            Chances were, they never would be, and she knew it. She tried to protect the boy from Eli. That shamed and angered Eli so that he could not talk to her about it.

            She tried to protect his son from him!

            And perhaps Jacob needed her protection. There were times when Eli could not even look at the boy. What in hell was going to happen to a kid who ran around on all fours? A freak who could not hide his strangeness. What kind of life could he have? Even in this isolated section of desert, he might be mistaken for an animal and shot. And what in heaven’s name would be done with him if he were captured instead of killed? Would he be sent off to a hospital for “study” or caged and restricted like ven the best of the various apes able to communicate through sign language? Or would he simply be stared at, harassed, tormented by normal people? If he spread the disease, it would quickly be traced to him. Je would definitely be caged or killed them.

            Eli loved the boy desperately, longed to give him the gift of humanity that children everywhere else on earth took for granted. Sometimes Eli sat and watched the boy as he played. At first, Jacob would come over to him and demand attention, even try, Eli believed, to comfort his father or understand his bleakness. Then the boy stopped coming near him. Eli had never turned him away, had even ceased trying to get him to walk upright. In fact, Eli was finally accepting the idea that Jacob would never walk on his hind legs with any more ease or grace than a dog doing tricks. Yet the boy began to avoid him.

Eli was slow in noticing. Not until he called Jacob and saw that the boy cringed away from him did he realize it had been many days since Jacob had touched him voluntarily.

            Many days. How many? Eli thought back.

            A week, perhaps. The boy had ceased to come near him or touch him exactly when he began wondering if it were not a cruelty to leave such a hopeless child alive.” (594, Butler. Clay’s Ark.)

This passage is very interesting to me for many reasons and, of course, is very important to the overall plot of the story. It describes what the earliest years of life for Jacob are like as the offspring of the infected Eli. Until this point, there hasn’t been any offspring of the infected and this candid and foreboding look at what this “life” has to offer is chilling.

The description from this passage gives us an impression of Jacob and what would come to be “his kind” or, in Patternmaster, the “Clayarks.” When Butler chronicles Eli’s worries about Jacob and says, “If he spread the disease,” we get some clear foreshadowing that Jacob would indeed spread his disease. Jacob’s behavior seems to be very similar to that of a feral child – a child that has gone through the developmental years of childhood held captive without access to the outside world or in solitude. Children who aged in the solitude of nature, rare cases as they are, have been known to walk on all fours seemingly in imitation of the animals they encountered. As Butler’s work in Wild Seed and Patternmaster often draws our attention to what about our human sentiments are “natural” or “ethical,” it seems unnervingly appropriate that the offspring of a “disease” in one of her stories behaves like a child deserted in nature. This question of “nature” and especially of “human nature” becomes a motif as the infection causes people to experience fits of carnal desire – including but not limited to violence and rape.

Another reason why I liked this passage was because of the style it was written in. The tone of the paragraph starting out with: “And perhaps Jacob needed her protection…” can be read almost as comedic, if it weren’t lamenting such serious problems. When I was reading through it myself, I replaced Jacob’s disturbing developments with something silly like having an incurable fascination with walking around in a clown costume or refusing to put clothes on at all. If his problem were comical, these vehement lamentations would become highly satirical and amusing and might sound something like a Saturday Night Live skit. Of course, all of this is entirely unrelated to serious discussion of the story, plot, and social critiques but sometimes I think we should take a closer look at Butler’s writing style. Her style is, after all, a very dynamic and expressive one in which the tones can shift from being grim and dry to that of someone bawling dramatically. When you compare the paragraph I just mentioned with the shorter one starting with “Eli was slow in noticing…” this drastic reshaping in tone becomes strikingly apparent. This is a characteristic of Butler’s writing that is evident throughout the Seed to Harvest series.

In the natural world, animals can be known to abandon their young if they are different in the way that Jacob is. If a silver-back gorilla were to walk around exclusively on its hind legs, it might not be accepted as part of its group and be rejected violently if necessary. In Clay’s Ark, the human race is posed with a similar problem. Of course, we already have some problems that are similar to this with defective births (Down’s syndrome, for example) and we have responded in much the same way that Eli has to Jacob’s condition (in the passage). If a person is born with a genetic defect, we accept them into society and provide them with what roles they can handle. We nurture and take care of them as best we can. Jacob’s infection is slightly different in that it urges the carrier to reproduce and spread the orgasm that causes it. This poses us with the possibility that we might be destroyed, as a species, if we do not destroy the carriers of the organisms. So, do we kill them?