The Alternative Sexualities in Fantasy and Science Fiction Booklist gives Emma Bull's Bone Dance this succinct notation:
Bone Dance (hermaphrodite protagonist)
It's not often that you can tell from a two-word summary that someone has completely misread a novel. But I am pretty sure that anyone who calls Sparrow a hermaphrodite -- as some readers do -- has missed a critical distinction. Sparrow is not a hermaphrodite. Sparrow is neuter. Unless you realize this, I will argue, you cannot really understand the novel.
Indications of Sparrow's neuterity are, on a close reading, very strong. Sparrow says it zirself(1), asking Frances "Why am I neuter?" (p. 113). Earlier in the same scene, Frances calls zir "a mindless, soulless, sexless shell," and just in case we didn't get that, adds "genderless as a baby doll" (p. 101). Sparrow also describes zirself as "the palace eunuch" (p. 107). Josh, who has examined Sparrow, forgets himself and calls zir, not "he/she", but "it." This adds up to a pretty clear picture.
How, then, can some readers make this mistake? If I wanted to be uncharacteristically kind, I might suppose that they are merely trying to fit Sparrow into an inadequate range of available terms. Medically, true hermaphroditism is a condition of the gonads, without reference to genital appearance; and we, strictly speaking, know nothing about the state of Sparrow's gonads. Even if zie has none at all, as seems likely from Frances's description, that might be a reasonable extension of the word hermaphrodite, which already encompasses people whose gonads are undifferentiated and nonfunctioning.
But that interpretation would, I think, be excessively generous -- like the elaborate stories Star Trek fans concoct to explain away Paramount's inconsistencies. It requires people to know more than they generally do know. Based on my own experience, my guess is that one person in a hundred has any medically plausible idea of what a hermaphrodite is. Even among people with some medical background, I nearly always encounter the view that "hermaphrodite" means a person with a penis and a vagina. (As for "intersexual", forget it; maybe one person in five hundred knows what that means; and it's impressive how quickly people leap to the conclusion that "androgyne" is just a synonym for "hermaphrodite." What other group of people, here in the last half of the 20th century, is faced with otherwise sensible adults who project on them a mythical anatomy -- like pre-integration Southern children thinking that blacks' blood was green?)
I don't think, either, that the misunderstanding of Sparrow's nature is explicable by the usual excuse that readers "conserve cognitive energy," i.e., ignore anything that their noses aren't rubbed in. I think Sparrow's nature falls out of people's heads because they have, so to speak, no file drawer to put it in. Sparrow doesn't fit the standard view of gender.
Left to themselves, most people conceive of male and female as two separate spheres, with no intersection on the Venn diagram. But when someone comes up who does not fit this worldview -- like Sparrow -- they change the binary opposition into a continuum, forming an inverted bell curve:
The left side of this curve they call male. The right side they call female. The middle they call terra incognita, and then they draw in sea monsters and locate the kingdom of Prester John.
With some pairs of opposites, like dark and light, it makes perfect sense to speak of a continuum. Dark is the absence of light; hence all mixtures of dark and light are much the same, whether we call them dawn or twilight. But male is not the absence of female, nor vice versa; both are presences, which we choose to regard as opposed. So there is a difference between a person who is both male and female, and a person who is neither. We should really plot gender like this:
If you collapse this diamond onto a single axis, making sex a continuum, then you conflate "both male and female" and "neither male nor female" -- two ideas as different as "male" and "female" themselves. People who call Sparrow a hermaphrodite are putting zir at the top point of the diamond, when in fact zie clearly occupies the bottom.
This mistake is a misreading of the novel, but it is not alien to the novel. The Hoodoo Engineers make the same mistake -- and their mistake is critical.
The mistake begins with Sherrea, who, after reading the Tarot for Sparrow, gives zir a pendant with Legba's symbol. She makes this choice of symbols in part because, as she tells Sparrow later, she has realized that zie is neither a man nor a woman. Identifying Sparrow as a child of Legba, the hermaphrodite trickster, seems only sensible. But Legba resides at the top of the diamond; zie is a union of male and female. Sparrow, neither male nor female, is not and could not be Legba's child.
Later, China Black also identifies Sparrow as a child of Legba's. Her mistake is more remarkable because the loa Eshu has told her of Sparrow's significance, calling zir a dossou-dossa. As Sparrow says:
...The doussou-dossa is the child born after twins. Actually, it's dossou or dossa, depending on what sex the kid is. And in the spirit world, it's the neuter principle, the third point on the hoodoo triangle that connects the male and female points. (p. 137)
Just before she identifies Sparrow as a dossou-dossa, China Black gives a lecture on the loa that foreshadows the mistake she is just about to make:
The people in the towers don't think about the spirits. They don't know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two. (p. 136)
China Black only wants to count to three -- and thereby hangs the tale.
Before going further I must say something about mythical hermaphrodites. The popular imagination, unconstrained by exposure to intersexed people and innocent of all biology, supposes that a hermaphrodite must be, somehow, a man and a woman stuffed into one body. This disquieting notion can be resolved in several ways; one is to imagine that the body is divided into halves, like impalement in heraldry. But short of such a division, people seem to imagine the hermaphrodite as somehow more than other people -- a surfeit, an overplus, bursting with an excess of life. Zie is two people in one, if not more:
It cost another hundred guineas to have the Wiltshire Wonder suck you off and a cool two fifty to take Albert/Albertina upstairs because s/he was one of each and then as much again.
--Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
The Carter quotation illustrates another property of mythical hermaphrodites: they are imagined to have a surfeit of sex, as well as of gender. This idea goes back at least to the Renaissance, and probably much further; it only makes sense, in mythical logic. Even Zeus and Hera, in a dispute about sexual pleasure, call in the man/woman Tiresias as an expert witness.(2)
Sparrow doesn't fit this mold at all. Rather than an excess, zie embodies a paucity, an absence. "I'm not anybody" zie says (p. 102); and indeed, the Horsemen treat zir as a vessel to be filled. Zir response to sex is also at odds with the mythical picture:
...I didn't like to think that either Frances or Mick could hate me so much, or be so cruel without cause. I lay on my side hugging my knees, biting the inside of my mouth, while Mick and Frances made love in the next room. I didn't move until Sher knocked on both doors and said it was time to go. (p. 164)
On both scales, Sparrow is not merely other than, but opposite to, the mythical hermaphrodite -- as "neither" is the opposite of "both."
Mythology does not contain many personifications of the neuter principle; in fact, I know of no other. I think that's why Bone Dance strikes me as so different from everything that has gone before it. I think Emma Bull has created a new myth(3) -- not just patching together bits of existing ones, as we all do since Joyce and Eliot, but out of whole cloth, referring to other myths only by negation.
Why do such a thing -- apart from sheer love of the technical challenge? I think the answer comes in the scene in which China Black misclassifies Sparrow:
"That's Legba's symbol around your neck, you know.... It is always in Legba's veves: the figure for androgyny and metamorphosis. It is why Legba and all his cousin spirits keep the gates and the crossroads. Do you like practical jokes? Legba is a trickster."
She seemed to want a response, but I couldn't think of one. The gates I worked with had to do with semiconductor technology...Disguised as a chance pun, this is actually a mythic truth: Sparrow's hoodoo is electronics -- a new realm of experience, much in need of myths.(4) Where the man/woman Tiresias spoke the language of the birds, Sparrow, neither man nor woman, speaks the language of wiring diagrams; zie has a special relationship with manufactured objects, with the inanimate. Appropriately, zie is a child of Oya, the owner of cemeteries, one of the loa associated with the dead. But Sparrow zirself arises, not from the dead, but from the never-alive. As a manufactured human, zie is a made thing, in the same way that a VCR or a computer is a made thing, "hatched full-grown out of a box" (p. 113). Zie is neuter as all inanimate things are neuter.
The Hoodoo Engineers, misunderstanding Sparrow's nature, misprepare zir for the final conflict with Woreczi. When they perform the ritual to bind Sparrow's spirit to zir body, they may do Sparrow a service psychologically, but mythically they have it exactly backward. Sparrow will bring down Woreczi not by clinging to zir body, but by disappearing as zir body is possessed by Oya Iansa -- zie succeeds by absence. During this time, Sparrow's mind is "in a state of nonawareness," in a place that "wasn't warm or cold, welcoming or repellent, sweet or cruel," (p. 265) -- a neutral, or rather a neuter, plane.
Subsequently, Sparrow at last realizes that zie is Oya's child, and understands zir own true nature:
I wasn't a practical joke; I was the whirlwind.
Whirlwind: a marauding absence. Sparrow knows zirself as the incarnation of nothingness. And after such knowledge, the problem is, as Conrad put it, "how to live."
Even people who realize that Sparrow is neuter don't always get the point of Bone Dance. One yahoo on Fidonet said:
I thought Sparrow should have chosen a sex.... Be a guy, bulk up, get macho. Be a gal, bulk up, get feminine.
The misreading of Bone Dance I discussed in Part 1 was only muddled; this one is cretinous. Neuter is Sparrow's natural sex; to make zir change it at the end would be to mutilate the character. Yet there is a kernel of truth even in this. Something is wrong with Sparrow's gender.
Here we have to distinguish between Sparrow's neuterity and zir androgyny. Sparrow is neuter because zie is biologically and spiritually sexless. Zie is androgynous because zie allows some people to see zir as male, others as female. The one arises from the other: Sparrow can be an androgyne precisely because zie is neuter. Yet at the same time, zir androgyny is a tactic zie uses to hide the truth that zie is neuter. The novel suggests that it is an unhealthy tactic, one that distances Sparrow from zir friends. As Sherrea says:
"If you'd wanted to know anything about me, or Theo, you could have just asked. But then we might have asked you something, and whenever we did, you'd slither out of it until it was pretty clear that you wanted us to keep our distance....
"For instance," she went on, stronger, "there was when I found out you weren't a woman."
Sparrow is also painfully aware of the neuter myth -- a myth that is corrosive to identity. Sparrow's androgyny keeps people from finding out that zie is a cheval, a made thing. Zir sexless body is a symbol of the fear that "I'm not anybody" -- a symbol that comes clear on p.29 when Tia Luisa addresses Sparrow as munequita, "little doll".(5) Sparrow pretends to be something that zie is not, because zie fears that zie is nothing at all.
In the course of the novel, Sparrow sheds zir androgyny, or at least the particular sort of poisonous androgyny that zie has been practicing. That, at least, is how I interpret Sparrow's dream of the mirror:
I knew my own face. I had always used mirrors, to make sure I was unobtrusive, to be sure I looked as much like the people around me as I could manage. And so I knew my face, not as mine, but as a mirror and a blurry print of others. Now I knew I had to search this reflection for the real skin and bones, eyes and nose and mouth.
The next morning, Sparrow has lost zir chameleon quality: "'You look,' Frances said slowly, 'most remarkably like you.'" (p. 242).
It's not so surprising that some people think this revelation -- choosing a face -- should be followed by choosing a sex. Such people, I conceive, think that only the two sexes are something, while "both" and "neither" are, equally, nothing. For them a neuter is a doll, an inanamate thing, while a hermaphrodite is
[m]arvellous, indeed, but a marvellous monster, an exemplary being denied the human privilege of flesh and blood, an alien creature forever estranged.
--Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Both these conceptions are wrong. Sparrow does choose a sex, just not one of the two that are commonly recognized. Zie chooses to be neuter -- to be what zie is. But in order to do this, zie must overcome the myth of neuterity, with its overtones of nothingness, of absence. Perhaps it is in this -- recognizing zir own myths and overcoming them -- that Sparrow is most thoroughly human. Real people sometimes transcend the myths they enact, mythic characters never. And I have often observed that those who occupy the more popular corners of the diamond shed the myths of femininity and masculinity, when you become women and men.
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