Novelists as Prophets: The Examples of Celeste Ng and Octavia Butler

Good, creative novels are beneficial for their readers not just for the enjoyment they induce but also for the ideas they produce. This post is about two dystopian novels, one published earlier this year and the other back in 1993.

Celeste Ng is an American novelist whose parents were born in mainland China and in Hong Kong. Ng (b. 1980) became widely known with the publication of Little Fires Everywhere in 2017 and the eight-episode 2020 streaming television series based on that book.

Although I found Ng’s 2017 novel a good read, I was more impressed with her 2022 novel Our Missing Hearts. The title of Steven King’s Sept. 22 review in The New York Times sums it up well: “Celeste Ng’s Dystopia Is Uncomfortably Close to Reality.” 

Following what is called the Crisis, the federal government seeks to make the U.S. great again. This is attempted partly by the passing of the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT).

Under PACT, questionable books are not only banned, those found offensive are pulped and turned into toilet paper.

Further, because of what is believed to be a major economic/cultural threat by the Chinese, there is considerable opposition to anyone who looks Asian. The main characters of Ng’s novel are a Chinese American woman married to a White man and Bird, their 12-year-old son.

The children of parents considered by PACT to be culturally or politically subversive are “re-placed” in foster families. Consequently, Bird’s mother goes missing in order to spare him from being re-placed.

The impact of Ng’s novel was lessened somewhat by the midterm elections, which turned out to be a win for democracy and a loss for the MAGA voters and the authoritarianism they were (many perhaps unwittingly) supporting. Prejudice against Chinese/Asians, however, may continue to increase.

Perhaps to a small degree, the election turned out as it did because of what can be called self-negating prophecy. Sometimes things don’t happen as predicted because enough people take action to keep those dire predictions from being fulfilled.

In that way, novelists, and especially those who write creative dystopian novels, can be seen as prophets who declare what will happen if appropriate steps are not taken to prevent those dreadful situations from taking place.

Let’s hope that is also true with regard to a second novelist I am currently reading.

Octavia Butler is an engaging Black writer whom I was not aware of until recently. More than thirty years ago she planned to write a trilogy of dystopian novels. The first of those is Parable of the Sower (1993), and it was followed by Parable of the Talents (1998).**

Unfortunately, Butler died in 2006 at the youngish age of 58 before she finished the third volume. I have just finished reading Butler’s chilling first book and have started to read the sequel.

Beginning in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, Parable of the Sower takes the form of a journal kept by Lauren, a precocious African American teenager—and religious “philosopher.”

In that 1993 novel, climate change, economic recession, and extensive misuse of drugs lead to a total breakdown of society. Beginning in 2024, Lauren experiences horrific loss and suffering, which ends to an extent for her and her companions with the founding of a religious community in 2027.

(Early in the sequel, Butler has Lauren writing about one of the candidates for the 2032 presidential election in the nation still beset by ongoing societal problems. His appeal to the voters is, “Help us to make America great again.”)

Perhaps sometimes “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,” but they are more effectively written in books by novelists such as Celeste Ng and Octavia Butler.

May we be smart enough to understand what such novelists are saying and proactive enough to help their dystopian novels to become self-negating prophecies.

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** Here is the link to “Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to ‘Make America Great Again’,” a long, July 2017 article in The New Yorker. June (my wife) doesn’t like to read dystopian novels, but she found this article about Butler to be quite interesting.

Interpreting the Resurrection of Jesus

Even though today is Good Friday, this article is about the Easter story and how Jesus’ resurrection can be affirmed by contemporary people.

A Novel Interpretation

The writing of this article was spurred by my reading of a novel: Martin Gardner’s The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973, 1994). After finishing it in 2012, I wrote this in my “books read” record: “One of the most challenging theological novels I ever read. A book of great profundity and erudition.”

Last month I finished reading Gardner’s book for the second time—and I was impressed and disturbed by it again.

If you haven’t read the novel, I don’t necessarily recommend it. Why? Because debunking the resurrection of Jesus is one of the main themes of the book.

At the beginning of the novel, Peter Fromm is a precocious, fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christian boy from Oklahoma who chooses to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School. There he is “slowly but surely” led by Homer Wilson, his mentor who is a part-time professor and a Unitarian minister, to question and then to reject many of his Christian beliefs, including the reality of Jesus’ resurrection.

On Easter Sunday, shortly before he is scheduled to receive his doctor’s degree, to marry, and to be ordained and assume a full-time church position, Peter preaches at his mentor’s church—and has a dramatic psychological breakdown.

Questionable Interpretations

In spite of being a minister and seminary professor, early in the book Wilson acknowledges, “I do not consider myself a Christian except in the widest, most humanistic sense. I do not, for example, believe in God.”

Homer Wilson spends considerable time discussing theological ideas with Peter, who gradually begins to discard belief in the reality of the resurrection—along with ideas about the transcendence of God. So Peter comes largely to adopt what Wilson calls “secular humanism.”

Wilson tells Peter that one who preaches to modern people has “to choose between being a truthful traitor or a loyal liar.” In order to serve in a paid church position, he believes, it is necessary to choose the latter: that seems clearly to have been Homer’s choice, and Peter also apparently comes to accept that position. The duplicity of that choice, however, leads to Peter’s breakdown.

Much of the problem in accepting the reality of the Easter story centers on the interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection as being the resuscitation of his physical body. Peter assumes that that is the view of resurrection found in the New Testament.

Of course, Peter also considers, and rejects, Jesus’ resurrection as simply the spirit or idea of Jesus being “resurrected” in the minds of his disciples.

Recommended Interpretation

My interpretation of, and belief in, the resurrection is based on firm belief in the reality of God and in transcendence. Thus, my affirmation of the reality of Easter is grounded in a worldview quite different from that of secular humanism.

If one believes, as Homer Wilson and then Peter Fromm did, that the physical world, which can be fully examined by science, is the totality of reality, then resurrection cannot be affirmed in any historical sense.

My views are in general agreement with those of the eminent New Testament scholar N.T. Wright as summarily presented in his book Surprised by Hope (2008), which I highly recommend.

For me, and for Wright, Jesus’ resurrection can be, and must be, understood as something other than literal resuscitation and certainly as something other than a metaphorical, completely non-historical story.

Firm belief in God and transcendence, however, makes affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection possible, understandable, and a matter of great joy and hope.

Happy Easter!