Elizabeth Gargano: How Parables Teach Us Who We Are

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In my contemporary fiction class at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I often teach Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a classic dystopian futuristic novel. Written in 1993, Butler’s novel begins in what then seemed a distant future, our current year of 2024. Lauren Olamina, the novel’s protagonist, leads a ragged band of followers through an America that is coming apart at the seams. Climate change has led to serious droughts and food shortages across the country, elections are a meaningless charade involving power-hungry candidates who no longer attempt to govern, and gangs of desperate thieves and drug addicts roam the country, frequently setting whole neighborhoods on fire. Lauren and her band of stragglers are heading north, away from their dying cities, hoping to find a place where rain still falls, crops can flourish, and ordinary people can live without shutting themselves up within walled communities and bunkers. 

Butler is an intriguing and complex figure; as a black writer of science fiction exploring issues of social justice and promoting an eco-critical view of the planet, she received little initial support, and worked menial jobs in order to keep writing. Born in 1947 in the heart of the Jim Crow era, she was told by a well-meaning aunt that black people “can’t be writers.” By the time she published Parable of the Sower, however, her previous sci-fi novels had already garnered her national recognition; two years later, in 1995, she won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called the “genius grant,” for pioneers in various fields (including writers and artists) who exemplify “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits” as well as “a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Butler’s novel fascinates me, in part because of its exploration of parables, and how they help us to reflect on, and evaluate, our own experience.  A parable is a very specific kind of story. Brief and simple – at least on the surface – it hints at an underlying meaning that eludes us at first, and later becomes clear, or at least clearer, as we ponder it; in other words, a parable opens its meaning to us only when we live with it for a while, mulling it over and seeing it from multiple perspectives. 

Butler’s novel challenges us to engage with parables on many levels. Raised as a strict Baptist (like Butler herself) Lauren can no longer find meaning in the religion of her childhood. Instead, she challenges herself to develop her own religious and philosophical vision. As she narrates her story in diary form, Lauren also inserts her own spiritual musings, poems, questions, and parables; these italicized passages, jotted down at quiet moments, serve as a counterpoint to Lauren’s everyday actions and struggles. Butler’s novel calls us to see Lauren from two different perspectives simultaneously – both as an active protagonist fighting off the thieves who have attacked her and her friends, and also as a synthetic thinker who understands that she herself, in the urgent struggle to survive, could easily become a thief; whether she wants to or not, she can’t help seeing the underlying connections between herself and those she designates as her “enemies.” 

Butler’s novel draws on a number of religions, from Christian parables and Zen koans to the lessons of the Tao te Ching. As Butler has acknowledged, she modeled Lauren’s mystical parables, in part, on the poems in the Tao te Ching, a work which both celebrates and undermines a dualistic vision of the world. According to the Tao, our world is caught in an endless contest between day and night, light and darkness, harmony and discord. But as these opposite forces engage in a dramatic and flamboyant struggle with each other, they are both necessary to bring the world into being. They are simultaneously enemies and partners: their battle is also a dance. 

Lauren is especially open to this synthetic view of life, because of a physical and emotional condition that she describes as hyperempathy. From birth, she experiences her fellow human beings’ emotions and sensations. When she fights off an attacker and fatally stabs him, she suffers through his excruciating pain as he dies. When she forces herself to shoot a wild dog that has mauled a child, she collapses helplessly on the ground. In Butler’s futuristic world, Lauren’s hyperempathy results from her mother’s addiction to a mind-altering drug during her pregnancy; at the same time, as the novel juxtaposes Lauren’s actions with her spiritual musings, we can’t help seeing her empathetic suffering as a parable of the interconnectedness of all living things; along with those she loves and those she hates, Lauren, like all of us, is caught in a recurring cycle of joy and pain, creation and destruction.

The title of Butler’s novel alludes to “Parable of the Sower,” a well-known story recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; in fact, the novel ends with Lauren and her cohorts reading this parable at a memorial service for all the friends and family members they have lost. While Jesus speaks in parables throughout the New Testament, only the Gospel of Mark contains an explanation of why he so often transmits his ideas through stories. The oldest of the Gospels, as scholars now recognize, Mark’s Gospel is also the briefest. It ignores the story of Jesus’s birth and makes short work of his legendary appearances to the disciples after his death. But what it does record, in analytical detail, is Jesus’s love of parables. In one striking passage, Jesus delivers what we might call a “lesson in storytelling,” teaching his disciples how to interpret his parables. He speaks in parables, he tells them, so that his stories will not be easily understood. This contradicts our general assumptions about the purpose of Jesus’s stories; a Biblical story, we tend to think, aims to teach a clear message, made more memorable by its dramatic flair. The characters and events help us remember a spiritual truth or meaning. In contrast, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus asserts that he intends to puzzle his listeners, so they will have to struggle to decipher his meaning. He goes on to promise his disciples that he will explain the secret meanings of his stories if they ask him. Yet he also hints that a period of struggle and puzzlement is important to the process of engaging with a parable. 

Like Zen koans, which often ask us a question that seems to have no answer, a parable sets us thinking and questioning.  A frequently cited koan – “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” – exemplifies this process of self-interrogation and exploration. Even while we search for “the one true answer” to the question, we already suspect that we will never find it. Instead, it is our very process of questioning, our growing understanding of how little we know about reality, that serves as a provisional answer. 

Or, to put it another way, as the koan works its way into our minds, it makes us question the fixed categories that we so thoughtlessly rely on in our daily lives. If we try to imagine the sound of one hand clapping, we have to confront our assumed opposition between sound and silence. But what about the many sounds that we are not hearing at this moment, even though they are shaping the world we inhabit? What if we were to try and imagine the many voices, cries, prayers, and arguments that are taking place in the houses on our street, the streets in our city, and the endless cities scattered across our planet? What about the sounds that other species can hear, but that we can’t? Why do we choose to listen to some voices, but close our ears to others?

A Zen koan asks us to maintain two perspectives at once. On the one hand, we need the mental categories that allow us to function in our society and our world. On the other hand, we also need, at times, to allow those categories to become transparent – to see through the limitations of the senses in which we are embedded. If a Zen koan calls us to answer a paradoxical question that involves destabilizing the categories that we take for granted, a parable beckons us to piece together and connect the events of a mysterious and evocative story. In both cases, it is our process of making meaning that matters. 

In keeping with this idea, “The Parable of the Sower,” as recorded in the Gospels, focuses on how we make meaning of the words we hear. In this famous story, a farmer sows seed with abandon, scattering it in rocky places where there is not enough soil to nourish it, on a path where birds will devour it, and among thorns that will choke the young plants. Only in a few places can the seed take root. According to one interpretation of this parable, we are the terrain in which ideas take root; we can choose whether – and how – to nurture them. I won’t try to dispute that some fundamentalist Christian readers might read the parable differently, as a simple story about salvation and damnation. But, of course, that only illustrates how elusive parables are, and how they shapeshift into different meanings, depending on who is reading them. How we wrestle with, and interpret, a given parable, teaches us a lot about who we are.

In Butler’s novel, Lauren draws on Jesus’s “Parable of the Sower” to construct her own parable; she compares human beings to seeds, “airborne, windborne, and waterborne.” She describes the strange journey of seeds from place to place, reminding us that our lives are contingent, directed by powerful forces that we can’t always name or identify. At the same time, she argues, we have an incredible power to regenerate, to grow and adapt, even when the environment seems inhospitable or challenging. Acknowledging that we live in the midst of uncertainties, she nevertheless invites us to keep developing – and questioning – the open-ended narrative that adds up to a life well-lived. In other words, she invites us to create, and ponder, our own parables. 

Copyright 2024 Elizabeth Gargano

Elizabeth Gargano is Associate Professor English at University of North Carolina — Charlotte. Her publications include a novel Cassandra’s Eye (Belle Lutte Press, 2000).