As a humanist leech, I sometimes feel left out of certain SF authors’ visions of the future. In Starship Troopers, disciplines like philosophy are entirely ceded to the sciences—viz. the constant references to “mathematically verifiable moral truths.” And this is to say nothing of the uses of mimetic representation—a curious absence, given that such visions of the future are made via a sort of mimetic representation. We talked in class about whether there was art on Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness. In Lilith’s Brood, Butler explicitly states that there isn’t art among the Resisters. This comes up when it gets revealed that, prior to the war, Gabe used to be an actor by profession. What’s particularly interesting, though, is the way aesthetic experience gets linked with the tactile communication that takes place between constructs and Oankali.

At first, Akin clearly has no idea what it means to be an actor. He describes the phenomenon of performance art in descriptive terms that turn out to be sort of alarming: “Gabe had been an actor. People gave him money and goods so that he would pretend to be someone else” (408). Aside from basic cultural miscommunication, Akin’s objections to Gabe’s acting look, at first, pretty Platonic. “‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you any stories?’ [Gabe] asked Akin. ‘Yes,’ Akin said. ‘But they were true’” (408). Here, Akin’s idea is that fiction—or, probably, any other form of mimetic representation—is not a useful endeavor because its empirical falseness renders it a less good way to communicate between persons information about human-/Oankali-nature, the given world, etc. Plato, of course, makes this objection in Book X of the Republic.

This dovetails unsettlingly with the state of utter destruction that has been wrought on Earth by this time in the novel. “‘She never told you about the three bears?’ ‘What’s a bear?’” (408). This perspective shift renders impotent Akin’s attack on acting as well as Gabe’s defense of same. At a certain point, the biological mandate to survive trumps any sort of demands that aesthetic objects impose on us. Art pales in the face of death—or, in this case, extinction. I take this to be a really useful observation that perhaps SF authors, in general, are in a better position to make than other fiction writers.

Gabe’s performance of Lear for Akin is described simply as a transformation: “Gabe became an old man” (408). Despite his initial reservations, Akin has a powerful experience of empathic substitution: “Somehow…he felt what Gabe seemed to want him to feel. Surprise, anger, betrayal, utter bewilderment, despair, madness….” (408). A wide range of the human experience suddenly becomes available to Akin, and he experiences it immanently. It’s an incredible fact about art that it can make subjective experience communicable between persons; that it should also do this between species says something about the real (potential) power of representation in the universe of Lilith’s Brood.

Afterward, when Akin attempts to describe to Gabe his experience as an audience, he describes it as being similar to a form of communication unique to the Oankali: “It’s like what we do—constructs and Oankali. It’s like when we touch each other and talk with feelings and pressures. Sometimes you have to remember a feeling you haven’t had for a long time and bring it back so you can transmit it to someone else or use a feeling you have about one thing to help someone understand something else” (409). There might not be a better way to paraphrase the purpose of art than to say it’s “talking with feelings and pressures.” The humanist tradition, it turns out, survives, albeit in a semi-recognizable form. But that seems to be a theme in the novel.