Final thoughts on Libra

Now that the course is almost over, it feels like a good time to actually look at what DeLillo is doing with the character of Lee Harvey Oswald. I haven't seen too many people really talking about this, and I think it really ties in a lot of the themes we've been working with this semester.

To start off, there seems to be kind of a split in class discussions between people who have sympathy with Lee and those who still see him as basically the guy who killed the president. I understand the second viewpoint, and especially the argument that Libra is a fictional work and shouldn't affect how we think of a historical figure like Oswald, but I think it's kind of missing the point. In my mind this novel isn't about developing an actual opinion on the Kennedy assassination, it's about getting into the mind of someone in an incredibly unique historical position. Almost no one has ever assassinated a U.S. president, and literally no one has ever been surrounded by the immense scrutiny and confusion that Oswald has been. He's an incredibly mysterious and engaging figure, who can be frightening no matter what narrative you shove him into. Many people seem particularly perturbed by the lone gunman theory: the idea of a single person one day deciding to shoot the president, with no discernible outside influence, and actually accomplishing it, seems so foreign and yet so chillingly simple that it almost begs the question of why more people don't do it. While DeLillo doesn't ascribe to that theory in Libra, he still examines how exactly the brain of someone like Oswald might work; and frighteningly, it doesn't seem all that different from anyone else's.

That's one of the main things about Libra to me; it's not about a story about how some sociopath went and murdered the president, it's about how a person with a relatively "normal" brain, however you define that, was pressured by a number of outside factors into committing a serious crime. It sort of reminds of The Stranger, in the sense that it involves someone who ends up being punished for a crime which they're "technically" guilty of, but which for a complicated set of reasons they weren't necessarily morally responsible for. Even if we see something foreign in the way Lee or Meurseult operate (and they are both at least eccentric characters), there's just as much there that we can recognize in our own thought patterns. I've spoken with several people who say they identify with Lee, because he really does seem like a stereotypical young person trying to find his way in the world. Even if I don't agree with some of the conclusions he comes to, I recognize why he's coming to them and what they mean to him. DeLillo has to get some credit for this; he's taken one of the most unpopular figures in American history and recast him as someone with his own set of internal struggles and unfortunate beliefs that just so happen to add up to put him in a very precarious position, mentally speaking. We see him do some terrible things -- beating Marina, shooting at Walker and Kennedy, and actually murdering a police officer -- but we see them from his point of view, in a way that lets us realize that he's not some meritless psychopath out to burn down society. These kinds of books are important because they offer a much messier but probably more realistic picture of how the world actually works, further from convenient narratives of good vs. evil or sane vs. hopelessly crazy. As far as I'm concerned that's a pretty big part of the point of reading books -- to offer different perspectives on situations that are otherwise easy to jump to uneducated conclusions about.

That last point reminds me of the article I presented on recently, which had a lot to say about the inability of language to accurately describe reality. While I think that's a fair point, and I had a lot of fun discussing it with the class, I also think it's something that has to be considered outside of just the realm of literature. We've set up a system where everyone's thoughts are mediated by language, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's absolutely incredible that we're able to invent situations in our heads that we've never experienced, and project the sense we have of our own consciousness onto people in those situations. At the same time, we have to be aware of our own limitations; no one will ever have a perfect understanding of a situation they haven't been in, because there's a big difference between a scene we've built up out of other people's words and one that we've actually seen and felt ourselves. Books like Libra can help with that by showing us a number of different perspectives on a single situation, and it especially helps that it's one we can actually see for ourselves. The several different points of view we get of the Kennedy assassination all fit with the actual Zapruder film we've all watched several times by now. Even if a video isn't a perfect representation of reality either, a video with so much cultural baggage attached, plus a long, varied explication that sometimes runs contrary to the normal narrative does at least give us a sense of our own need to be subjective about situations we haven't seen ourselves. 

Our Fascination With Famous Deaths

A few days ago I was watching a travel/food show called Parts Unknown with the chef Anthony Bourdain, in which he essentially travels around the world and talks to people, and then shows himself eating some of the local food and saying "mm, that's delicious." The particular episode I was watching took place in Libya, which of course had a revolution not too long ago. As a result, one of the things he visits while he's there is a memorial dedicated to all the people killed in the revolution in the city of Misrata. It's a fairly touching scene, where the local guide walks around a room covered in photos of war victims and points to the ones he knew personally. At the end, however, we see that there's a TV set in the center of the room, which is looping footage of the beating and execution of Muammar Gaddafi from 2011. This is a pretty jarring thing to have in a building that's otherwise full of serenic cloud wallpaper and dropped flowers, but to the guide it makes perfect sense. Since Gaddafi was responsible for the deaths of the people on the walls, those people's loved ones want to see nothing more than the camera-phone footage of their revenge. We then see a clip of a Libyan couple who are indeed staring intently at the TV set after having visited the photo of a loved one.

Naturally, this brought my mind to the scene from Underworld where a group of people holds a viewing of the Zapruder film on repeat. To be honest, I've always found the idea of watching the Zapruder film over and over again a little bit off-putting. Even if it is historically significant, it's still a video of a man being killed, and I've always kind of had the sense that that's part of the appeal -- that a big part of the reason people watch it isn't to determine the exact trajectories of the bullets, but rather because there's something fascinating about watching such a famous person die. I don't know exactly why the idea of watching a person's death for entertainment bothers me and I don't exactly have an explicit moral reason not to do it, but somehow the idea of claiming to watch something for its historical merit while really going for the perverse thrill of seeing such a shocking moment unfold rubs me the wrong way. At the same time, I have to admit to being genuinely interested in watching it in class, especially after it was so well explicated in Libra. Having had the experience of going into Oswald's head (or at least on possible version of Oswald's head) makes watching his brief "appearance" in the historical record a much richer experience. Is this what the people who watch the video over and over again are really feeling? Could I just be making up the idea that they're somehow thrilling in watching a man's head explode, when really they have a personal connection to the case that's as close as mine is now, even if it comes from more of a "what happened" angle than a "what was Oswald thinking" one? Or is imagining Lee up there in the book depository and waiting for him to do just sort of masking the part of me that actually enjoyed the actual tension and sudden release you feel watching the video, whether or not I want to admit it? It's hard for me to find a definitive answer, but my guess would be somewhere in the middle. I think that there is a part of everyone that does "enjoy," or is at least fascinated by, the death of a figure we imagine we know pretty well, and that part coexists with the part of us that intellectualizes that enjoyment by finding interesting facts about the film.

I'm still left with the question of why exactly people are so fascinated with famous deaths -- and more specifically, what differentiates the ones that inspire this fascination from the ones that are simply considered tragic. I feel like one part of it has to do with our personal investment in the situation; when we remember the impact of an event very vividly, like our generation does with something like 9/11, it becomes too uncomfortable to watch (and too socially unacceptable to appear to be enjoying). At the same time, I just said that it takes a certain amount of intellectual investment in order to get something out of the Zapruder film, or at least it did for me. After all, few people want to just watch a man get shot in the head, or if they do they would have difficulty admitting it to themselves. I think the difference is that with the JFK assassination, we're not really focused on the death itself. It's there and it's intense and it's jarring every time, but it's not really the point. We're not watching the video to watch JFK die, we're going into it with all kinds of ideas that we want to see realized and little side details we want to notice; essentially, we're distracted from the reality of the moment by our own preconceived notions. By comparison, watching footage of something that's harder to analyze outside of the deaths involved, like a terrorist attack or natural disaster, just brings up all the emotional difficulties we felt when the actual event occurred. In a way, that means that understanding Lee is a distraction from the reality of the Kennedy assassination -- while we gain a very interesting sense of what it would have been like to be Oswald in an incredibly unique position of assassinating the president, we lose the equally valid reality of what it would have been like to be Jackie, or a spectator in the crowd, or someone seeing a few frozen frames of the film in Life magazine, or Kennedy himself. That's one of the central complaints I have about Libra, about the Zapruder film, and about the narrative of the Kennedy assassination more generally: while everything it details is a very interesting history, it stills leaves out everything else but the central narrative. Even when DeLillo tries to escape this, with his changing perspectives in "22 November," the sudden switch from a character we know so much about and understand so well to random people off the street just underscores how closely tied we've become to Lee's personal story. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- Lee's story is incredibly fascinating, probably more so than that of anyone in the crowd, but that same fascination leads us to forget much of the context around it. And of course, that just leads us back to where we started, trading gawking at one trainwreck for another.

Jack Ruby in Libra

As soon as I realized which Jack the two strippers in "12 August" were talking about, Jack Ruby instantly became one of the most interesting characters in Libra to me. I have no idea how historical DeLillo's version of Ruby is, but I almost hope it's not too realistic; I'd hate to think I feel as much affection for an actual murderer as I do for this fictionalized one. Sure, he's not a good guy by any stretch of the imagination -- the sexism and occasional violence is a bit hard to excuse -- but you can't really blame him. It's not quite the same as with Lee, either. I have sympathy for Lee, and in a lot of ways I understand him, but he's never as immediately fun as Jack Ruby is. He's a very interesting character study, and DeLillo does a fantastic job using him to examine the human thought process and the ways it can go "wrong," but the separation he feels from other people does kind of extend to the reader. By comparison, Jack Ruby seems to feel almost no separation from other people; he's the definition of the sadly boisterous and out of touch middle-aged white guy, continually let down by how much stock he puts in people he doesn't really understand. We see him talk to the patrons at his strip club, or bring sandwiches to the cops, and think that he's a very friendly guy with good intentions, who for whatever reason doesn't actually get along with people all that well, and often goes a bit over the line of social convention.

One "type" he kind of reminds me of is that of the old man on the bus -- the kind who'll talk to complete strangers for the duration of the ride about how the Illini are doing or what the weather's been like lately. Maybe I'm biased due to how much time I spend on buses, but I feel a lot of sympathy for these kinds of people. They seem like people with fairly reasonable expectations of friendliness from other people who nonetheless seem completely out of touch with the realities of how the social world is structured. You don't talk to strangers on buses and you don't bring sandwiches to the cops out of nowhere, because even if those are positive actions, they're not expected and they make a lot of people a little bit uncomfortable. But still, these things aren't actually bad -- they come from a place of thinking the world is just a little bit better than it really is, and seeing that belief not work out in reality can be heartbreaking.

For Jack Ruby in particular, he has a lot of positive expectations that go nowhere. He wants to help people get off the street -- he goes into debt. He wants a loan from his mafia buddy -- Tony can't do anything to help him. He invents an all-new exercise/recreation tool -- no one hears about it except for his roommate and the Warren Commission. He expects respect as a successful business owner -- readers deride him for running a strip club. Jack just can't catch a break. When we consider just how badly his positive expectations get mangled on a daily basis, it makes it a little more understandable why he feels the need to drug himself and get in fights and have everyone reassure him that he doesn't seem "queer." It also fits in nicely with his patriotism -- the idyllic image of America he has in his head, which seems like something out of a 50's sitcom, has absolutely no basis in reality, but at the same time makes sense as something you would want to defend if you do happen to believe in it. And let's not forget, even with his massive debt and shoddy car, the life he has in Dallas is probably better than the one he had in Chicago. If he feels like he's fulfilled the American dream, then maybe that's as good as if he really had.

All this said, Jack is still a flawed character. No one who would commit an impulsive assassination is going to be spotless. But he's flawed in ways that are relatable, believable, and even endearing. Like the old man on the bus, he seems too good for this sinful (introverted, pragmatic, realistic) earth, and it's hard to blame him for trying to keep that image alive.

(Also, this is unrelated, but I really like that the owner of several strip clubs appears to employ exactly two strippers. Do we ever hear about anyone other than Double DeLite (maybe Don DeLillo's own would-be moniker?) and Randi Rider? I hope not.)

Oswald's Views On History

Now that we're 100+ pages into Libra, I can say that this is definitely more my taste than Kindred. That book was exciting, but Butler's writing never caught me the way DeLillo's does. Part of that might be the sense of humor; the JFK assassination is still a serious topic, but DeLillo obviously feels much more free to joke around in his writing than Butler did about slavery. Just to pick one thing, I've been really enjoying the wordplay with the name "Hidell," especially the rhyming. I know it's silly, but little things like that bring me more into a book, and in a weird way they make me take the ideas more seriously just by virtue of making pause and focus on them a little longer. I think that's something that a lot of writers don't quite get, that it's okay to have fun and joke around while still writing a serious book, and in a lot of ways humor can help you get your point across better than if you just stated it dryly.

One of the ways this comes across best is with the actual character of Oswald. In a lot of ways, we're supposed to find him ridiculous; here's this megalomaniacal kid with a punchable face who can't quite decide what he believes and tells the other marines all about Communism. When we look at him there's this whole sense where we can't quite believe that this guy is the one who changed so much so easily. It doesn't seem fair; he doesn't deserve to actually be as big as he thinks he is. That's the problem that a lot people have with Oswald, ultimately, and DeLillo definitely tries to cultivate that. At the same time, even knowing what we know, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the guy. Sure he's misguided, but the same part of us that hates him for his arrogance has to admire him for his conviction -- and that part, at least, isn't quite what DeLillo is making fun of. After all, he doesn't just say he's a part of history -- he's Lee Harvey Oswald, he'll be in the history books for as long as America is, and that's all basically just because he decided he could. For better or worse, he actually lives his beliefs about the world to an impressive extent.

The most interesting of those beliefs (at least to me) is his sense of what history means to the individual. We get a good amount of that in the Atsugi chapter, and it's all pretty great. DeLillo treads a fine line here -- you can definitely see the marks of a self-assured but cut-off young man with a tendency to dress up other peoples' views as his own, and whose level of knowledge doesn't necessarily go as deep as his level of determination. There's definitely a sense that he's adopted Marx's deterministic, big-picture view of history even if he doesn't explicitly say so. Basically, Oswald's idea (developed while he's in the brig) is that history is an enormous, relentless process, into which all individuals are eventually subsumed. "The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin... We live forever in history, outside ego and id." With that in mind we can start to understand some of his megalomania, and maybe identify some of the early sentiments that lead to his deciding to take history into his own hands. It really does help to humanize Oswald: even if we don't necessarily agree with the conclusions he comes to, we can at least recognize why he would choose to act the way he did based on them, and hopefully even that they're not totally unreasonable conclusions to come to. And this is where the style of writing really plays an important role. If all we got was a totally straight description of Oswald's beliefs at the time of the Kennedy assassination, it would be dense and somewhat inexplicable. By seeing Oswald's psyche develop, we get to understand a little better why someone might believe the things he did, and the little jokes (like Hidell) just bring it one step further: they show us that Oswald isn't just sitting around reading and coming to conclusions, he's actually actively thinking in the same way that anyone else would. If his mind works a little differently than most of ours, there's still something very human there; even the man who shot the president is capable of making little rhymes out of his private jokes. And for all that idea seems like it's just there so we can read some funny lines, what it implies really is important.

Some closing thoughts on Kindred

Now that I'm done with Kindred and have had some time to look back on it, I'm a little surprised by what sticks out in my mind. To be honest, starting the book I wasn't entirely thrilled. The writing itself wasn't grabbing me the way Vonnegut does, and even if the plot was exciting I was a bit worried that it wouldn't go in depth into any of the bigger questions. And while it's true that it's not Butler's style to explicitly meditate too long on a single issue -- unless you count the book itself as one long meditation on historical memory, which would be fair -- the questions she poses are big and have a lot of really even-handed evidence.

All of the main characters in this book have a specific purpose, or even a specific surrogate in mind. They aren't just there to give the book a few sets of eyes to experience the killer plot. The way the characters think is really integral to the "point" of the novel in a way that's not all that common to see, and that I really wasn't expecting going into this. To get the obvious out of the way first, Dana is very clearly a surrogate for Octavia Butler, in that she's drawn into a very conscious exploration of her historical past, even if Butler probably had a bit more control over her decision to write Kindred than Dana had over going back in time. I already wrote a blog post on Kevin and how he serves as a surrogate for the "normal" reader -- that is, someone who isn't too invested in the history, and is more just along for the ride, even if it's an occasionally horrifying and deeply personally affecting ride. The big difference we get between the two is that while his time in the past affected him, there isn't too much indication that the entire way Kevin thinks changes too much as a result of what happens, whereas Dana really does see some huge changes to her sense of self and her ability to feel empathy for others, or at least for certain others.

Maybe the most interesting character for me in terms of what he's meant to represent is Rufus. Of all the characters in the book he's probably the most complex, and easily the one who develops most. Dana's time travel allows us to quickly skip to different stages in his life without seeing the actual growth in between -- we just have to guess at it from the drastically different ways he acts. This allows us to understand him both as the innocent child we see in Dana's second trip to the past, and as the rapacious (yet somewhat sympathetic) slaveholder we see in her last. The abridged story of his personal development helps to humanize him, and to make us understand what he actually feels towards Alice and Dana. If Dana's first trip had been to a fully-formed Rufus already involved in his twisted "relationship" with Alice, our picture of him would have been remarkably different; there would have been much less incentive for us to look for a positive side to his character. This is a very important point that Butler makes: as much as we like to think of slaveholders as simply brutal monsters, the truth is that they were people like anyone else, coerced into play a role almost as much as the slaves themselves simply by virtue of their birth. That doesn't excuse their actions -- far from it -- but rather drives home the point that people today are not as far from our past as we would like to believe; there is nothing in our nature that stops us from becoming as abusive as Rufus. It all comes down to context.

Thoughts on Kevin

While reading Kindred, I kept finding myself thinking about the character of Kevin. To some degree that probably represents some of my own biases as a white male, but I think there's also just something innately interesting about the "other" character in a novel like this -- the one who isn't the direct nexus of whatever weird cosmic energy or magic familial connection or whatever it is that draws Dana back in time, but who is still affected by her disappearances, even before he goes back himself. If we accept the metaphor that Dana is meant to represent Octavia Butler, then Kevin seems clearly designed to mirror the reader's reactions in some way. On the big sliding scale of disconnection from the realities of slavery, he's about as far ahead of the reader as Dana is of the author. (The big sliding scale looks a bit like this: actual slaves>Dana>
Kevin>Rufus>Butler>reader.) On one hand, he does have first-hand knowledge that no one who hasn't been on a slave plantation could ever have -- he is clearly more personally affected by the institution of slavery than (presumably) any readers ever could be. On the other hand, it seems like most readers think his response to slavery is still inadequate, especially when we compare it to Dana's. He's still not quite "there," at least when we see him before he gets lost for five years, and even to the extent he connects to the time he sees it from a perspective that's closer to Rufus', as a free white man, and even a (fake) slaveholder.

The issue with Kevin almost accidentally becoming a slaveholder is especially illustrative. Just by virtue of being a white man in the antebellum South, he "deserves" to own other people. Even if he comes into the experience as someone who intellectually knows a lot about slavery and has strong views against it, the default position he falls into when he joins that society changes how people treat him, and that necessarily influences how he treats them. The slaves never talk to him, and everything he hears about them comes from the Weylins. As a result, he never learns to view them as real people the way Dana does fairly quickly. He is more progressive than Rufus or Tom, in that he at least thinks the slaves deserve to be free, but he doesn't quite think that they deserve to be free because they possess individual consciousnesses and desires. They're more just cardboard cutouts that fall into the "people" category in his abstract brain, and even if he's able to hold out against the influence of the Weylins, who want to put them in the "animal" category, he's never able to really intellectualize their existence as individuals. They seem like static historical images, like something taken out of a book or a movie, and his views on them come entirely from those kinds of sources.

Granted, Kevin doesn't keep up this attitude for the whole book. By the time he comes back to LA, after five years in the past, he's been thoroughly disabused of any ideas he had about slavery being "not that bad." It seems pretty clear that he's a different man, and that in a lot of ways he lived up to the moral tests of the time: after all, he helped multiple slaves escape. In a lot of ways you could argue that he did more good than Dana ever did in the past. And yet, he seems eager to escape his memories of the time. Even though he saw some terrible things, they were still just things he viewed from a distance. Not to minimize the trauma seeing a pregnant woman whipped to death, or being forced to run from your life from a pro-slavery mob would cause someone, but his position is still ultimately the same in Maryland as it is in California: that of a free man. He isn't forced to play by a totally different set of rules the way Dana is; for him his time in the past is just a slightly dirtier and more miserable version of his own life, akin to living in another (fairly awful) country for five years. As a result he's only affected by his experience as something he interacts with and observes, not as something that actually picks at his sense of self. As a result he is able to fairly quickly adjust to normal life after coming back, hanging out with his old friends as though he had been on a long vacation. When he goes back to Maryland in 1976 to look at the historical record about the Weylin plantation, he does so because he wants a sense of closure to a bad period in his life, whereas Dana wants a sense of continuity, to know what happened to the individual people she came to know after she left them. 

Ultimately, that's the biggest difference between Kevin and Dana: for Kevin, the past is the past. What happened then is inevitable, it's static, it belongs in a textbook. He sees time very clearly as a line: what happened to him in Maryland was definitively before. By contrast, Dana is not just dragged back in time; her ancestral past is dragged slowly parallel to her own life. In her mind she exists side by side with the Weylin plantation; it's more like another place than another time. The people in it are people, not actors or exhibits, and as far as she's concerned they're still living with her, the way old friends in a city you've moved away from still exists, and you could still bump into them someday. She'll probably live her whole life with that place and those people in her mind, aware of it not as an unmoving place in history, but as a living, breathing place that in some way still is -- because who knows, she might still get drawn back.

In a lot of ways this whole idea of a living place in the past reminds me of Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim's Dresden probably appears a bit more alive than Dana's Maryland, because he keeps going back so frequently and throughout his entire life, but it's a similar concept. There is place in both of their lives that so affected them that they keep it with them at all times. The people in it seem, in a lot of ways, more real than the ones in their "real lives," and events there are still going on even as the characters have physically moved away. As I write this I realize that this is one possible description of the kind of situation that brings on PTSD -- as a moment in time that's kept alive and parallel to one's own, in a way that no normal memory or intellectual footnote is ever going to be able to be. Not to diagnose Dana with something she shows no signs of -- I don't really even like diagnosing Billy with it -- but there's some degree there where you could say it would make sense.

Montana Wildhack

In my panel presentation today, we mentioned how Montana Wildhack showing up in Billy's zoo is proof that his entire experience of being kidnapped and brought to Tralfamadore is just a fantasy he has based on things in his life. She seems entirely drawn from the things that are "actually" going on as Billy constructs this fantasy; her name comes from the magazine he finds, and her appearance and personality are basically just adolescent wish fulfillment. As the author of our article points out, she is both attractive (Billy compares her to the architecture in Dresden) and compliant. He even goes so far as to say that she is drawn directly from "adolescent masturbation fantasies" -- a way for Billy to withdraw from the reality of his relationship with Valencia.

One of the reasons Billy decides to invent Montana, aside from just sexual fantasizing, is his desire to feel important without actual responsibility. The zoo itself is a representation of an ideal environment, safe and comfortable without having to worry about anything or work to keep it, and Montana is an extension of that. When she is brought to Tralfamadore, she asks to sleep with Billy without his doing anything, making him feel as though she is the one who is attracted to him despite the disparity in physical attractiveness between the two. Interestingly enough, when she has a child he feels no responsibility to stay and help take care of it; in the bookstore he seems to feel no guilt about leaving Montana on her own in the zoo. She simply doesn't register to him as a person, just an extension of his desires. Importantly, she also provides a convenient excuse for him to look back on the war: he can tell himself that he is only doing it because she asks him to, not because he wants to!

The biggest proof for Montana's invented nature is her locket. Everything about the locket calls back to other things from Billy's "real" life. First off, the picture in the locket of Montana's mother is described in exactly the same terms as her own pictures in the magazine -- "They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody." Secondly, the inscription of the serenity prayer matches the copy hanging on the wall in Billy's office. The only unique feature she has to make her seem like an actual human being with a history and personality is completely drawn from Billy's own experiences on Earth. 

Howard W. Campbell Jr. and Empathy in War

One of the minor characters that really sticks out in Slaughterhouse-Five is Howard W. Campbell Jr., the American-turned-Nazi. If nothing else, the image of someone clad in a cowboy hat and red/white/blue swastikas is something that's hard for most readers to forget. By including him in the novel, it seems like Vonnegut is just making a point about how the American ideals Derby talks about aren't as antithetical to fascism as people like to think. However, Campbell also appears in an earlier novel by Vonnegut, Mother Night, and his character in that book changes how we see him in Slaughterhouse-Five. 

In Mother Night, we learn that Campbell is actually a triple agent -- he broadcasts Nazi propaganda to the Americans as a way to transfer coded information to the Allies. He is actually apolitical, and has no attachment to the Nazi cause. While this might seem to dilute the message that Americans aren't as different from the Nazis as they believe, it actually really strengthens it. Knowing about Mother Night transforms Campbell from a cartoonish caricature to someone who actually really represents a person just like the other people listening to him talk. When Derby berates him, he is giving a speech about American values to someone who is actually much more important to the Allied war effort than he is. The idea that Campbell is only pretending to support this very upsetting blend of American and Nazi imagery, and is making himself seem passionate about something he personally finds ridiculous, fits very well with Vonnegut's idea of people making assumptions about the personal depth of their "enemies."

One of the moments in the book that best encapsulates this idea is the one where the German civilians watch the Americans get off the trains in Dresden. They're expecting people who are cruel and evil and dangerous, because they only think of them as their enemies in a struggle to survive. All of their problems are blamed on the Allies; it's because of the people coming out of the trains that all their male relatives are gone and there's so little food that their skin is waxy. When they see that the enemies they blame for their sallowness are just "broken human beings, like themselves," they laugh. It's a moment where all the rhetoric of war gets deflated. The only way you can convince yourself that killing other people makes sense as a way to achieve your goals is by believing that they are fundamentally different from you. Showing that even people who've convinced themselves that they're polar opposites are basically the same underneath and are just in different roles is one of the biggest things Vonnegut is trying to achieve in Slaughterhouse-Five. 

History As Fiction As History As Fiction: The Act Of Killing

Today after going home sick I decided to do what's traditional in such situations and watch documentaries on Netflix. The one I ended up watching was called The Act Of Killing, in which Anwar Congo, the leader of an Indonesian death squad responsible for over 1000 deaths as part of a larger genocide of over 1 million suspected Communists in the 1960's, is interviewed about and allowed to make a series of filmed reenactments of his actions. What he ends up creating turns out to be incredibly surreal, almost accidentally post-modern, and very relevant to what we've been discussing with regards to Slaughterhouse-Five, and the course in general.

The film begins 40 years after the start of the genocide, when Anwar Congo is an old man. In many ways he reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, but as one of the key perpetrators of the crimes he talks about, the questions he grapples with are very different. They tend to have more to do with individual guilt and the lengths people will go to to avoid facing their conscience. An added twist is that, like Kurt Vonnegut and the American veterans of World War II, Anwar is celebrated in Indonesia for his actions; according to the government and the common people, he and his cohorts are heroes for ridding the country of the Communist threat. We see enormous rallies where the organization he helped found, now a paramilitary organization with 3 million members, celebrate the murders he committed and gleefully reenact them -- in one case using the descendants of the people killed as conscripted actors. This culminates in an absurdist interview on national television where an upbeat reporter asks a cowboy-hat-wearing Anwar about the methods he used to execute Communists. 'He was just wiping them out!,' she says, grinning, over raucous applause. At another point in the interview the reporter asks Anwar whether or not he was influenced in his methodology by Western films; when he says yes, and details the ways he based his killings off of Mafia movies, she smiles again and says 'Isn't that interesting? It was just like the movies!' Cue further clapping.

This isn't the only time Anwar brings up the influence of Western film on his actions, and that's where the movie really ties in with some of the themes we've brought up in this class. It gets repeated over and over again that his gang started out by scalping movie tickets and watching the ones they couldn't sell. His favored method of execution, garroting, comes directly out of Hollywood gangster flicks and their cheap Indonesian knock-offs. He explicitly refers to himself as a 'gangster,' which he defines to mean a 'free man,' and boasts about extorting Chinese shopkeepers. When he films the reenactments of his murders, he does so based on his favorite styles of American cinema: Western, gangster, and musical. His favorite actors are the "badasses" Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and John Wayne. Even his style of dress is American, switching between cowboy hats and suits, and Hawaiian shirts and chinos.

All of this goes to show that, if nothing else, his sense of style is influence by American culture, which is admittedly not uncommon in the rest of the world; that doesn't prove that it has anything to do with his murders. However, there are also scenes where things get much darker. He and his friends have an idea of "sadism" as a positive trait, at least in certain circumstances. They argue over whether being sadistic is necessarily the same as being cruel; from their point of view, being sadistic means simply to kill with style. In one chilling section, Anwar talks directly about the influence of gangster movies in his ideas of sadism -- having seen bloody interrogations on the big screen, he sought to emulate them in real life. He then goes on to say that watching World War II movies in particular inspired him, because the actions of the Nazis were the most sadistic things to be seen on screen -- and he realized that he could do worse in real life.

An argument could still be made that Anwar is just using movies as an excuse, to absolve himself of personal guilt. And it would definitely be unreasonable to say that he only killed people because he watched violent movies; the Nazis he saw on screen weren't consuming cowboy movies to the same extent he was, and they still managed it. However, his attitudes towards the people he killed were very clearly affected by how he saw the 'bad guys' in American movies act. That he would be actively inspired by the behavior of Nazis, who don't tend to be portrayed very positively by Hollywood, lends credibility to the argument that any kind of war movie will end up glorifying violence, whether or not it has an anti-war message. This is especially important when we consider people outside the group of Western critics for whom those messages are written. What seems obviously against war to someone used to viewing films through a critical lens, who is aware of the mostly liberal context in which most are created, may appear to be the opposite to someone who has little conception of that context.

There's a lot I could say about this in relation to the ideas of cultural reappropriation in Mumbo Jumbo, but to cut this off before this turns into a full-length response paper on this movie (which I could definitely write if I thought anyone would be reading it), the way The Act of Killing blends the various genres of historical and fictional movies about violence is probably the best example I've ever seen of a post-modern history. It's a documentary, about people making fictionalized movies, based on things they really did, based on movies they've watched about other people doing similar things, which also influenced the way they actually did those things, all meant to question the parallel "official" versions of explaining those events. Together with the personal stories we hear people tell about their experiences during the genocide, from both "sides," and the narrative the filmmakers give of a black/white mass murder of innocent people, that leaves us with seven or eight different interpretations of the murders committed, to the point where it's almost impossible to tell what they were actually like, even as we watch people who know exactly what it was like, because they were there, try to grapple with the way their own internal metanarratives are twisting their memories! And yet despite all of this, I still feel like I learned a lot more from this movie than I would from a 'traditional' documentary. There wasn't too much explicit factual context, but I feel like it did a good job of illuminating the effects of Western media on other cultures and the personal impact of traumatic events on the people who commit them, which seems like a worthwhile trade-off for knowing more (arguably unnecessary, once you have the rough story) details about the events themselves.

Context and Reflection

I've been working on and off basically since the start of the class trying to figure out exactly what I think about how narrative works, specifically with regard to the first question we were asked, about the difference between history and fiction. To be honest I'm not sure how much of what I have at the moment is actually coherent (the last time I tried to explain in class it devolved into something I'm not sure was entirely English), but hopefully writing this down in a way that's a little more formal and public than my notebook will help me gather my thoughts.

Basically, anything we read is going to fundamentally consist of a bunch of ideas that exist in some author's head somewhere, that they've tried to articulate in whatever way they think is going to express those ideas the best. That goes for any written thing, really, from a history book to song lyrics to a novel to a blog post to a tax form. There are only really two variables: which ideas are being expressed, and how the author is expressing them. Ideally, we like to think that in a history book, the ideas being transmitted are the objective fact of something that could theoretically at one point have been observed, and maybe an interpretation of those events that comes as close to an even-handed look at the exact provable effects of everything that's being written about, and the way the book is written is just to be as clear and evocative as possible, to make sure the reader understands exactly what the author is saying. By comparison, fiction authors are "allowed" to make more biased interpretations; the ideas they're expressing are supposed to be shaped and muddled by all the other things going on inside the author's hide, to the extent that they're even allowed to put down words in combinations that make the reader imagine things that haven't happened and never could happen.

The image I've been working with to explain how writing works is to image the writer's brain as sort of a reverse of the Dark Side Of The Moon-type prism, where instead of a beam of light getting broken into individual colors, it's individual beams of information or context entering into the author's head, and one clear idea emerging. For a historical writer, the brain is supposed to just act as a smooth, clear medium to focus all the little bits of historical fact into one cohesive narrative that explains them in a totally objective way, unaffected by the material they have to pass through. In fiction it's expected instead that the author's head is full of unproven personal assumptions and biases that twist and bend the original, factual information into an interesting but fundamentally not "true" set of assertions and ideas. In both cases that single beam is what the author then shapes into the words that best serve the purpose of their concept. The problem with this assumption is that no human being has a brain made of totally clear, defectless glass; you just can't try to interpret something without adding your own personal spin on the story. Just the act of narrowing down an enormous flood of information into something a non-expert can digest will necessarily expose the author's own beliefs about what matters and what doesn't, and actually attaching meaning to the fact puree is never going to be an objective process -- no one could possibly know exactly what causes what in the infinite numbers of essentially random processes that make up day-to-day life. That's because no matter how dedicated an author may be, they aren't going to live their life consuming only pure, undiluted historical knowledge; there are going to be millions of other little beams of context coming from every other source in their life, from the time they were born to the time they die, that will muddle the historical narrative almost as much as the purposefully muddled fictional one. 

Since it's impossible to get an actual objective (ie unaffected by a human context) source for anything, the next-best thing seems to be just to accept that impossibility, and to try to consume information with the understanding that what you're seeing is less that clear beam of truth, and more a messy imprint of the inside of some other human being's head. 

The American Dream in Ragtime

It's been brought up more than once in class that Ragtime is a book that's not necessarily just about the 1900's, it's meant to draw comparisons between that time and the time it was written. More specifically, it tries to ask questions about a time that many Americans see as one of the high points of the nation's culture as it's classically imagined (maybe more in the 70's than now; the 50's seem to occupy that place today). When people think of the 1900's, their minds are immediately drawn to sandlot baseball, apple pie sitting on a flawless white windowsill, an American flag in front of every house, and immigrants Americanizing and making it big in a true meritocracy. At least when I imagine 1910, everything is sunny and green and there are kids playing nonstop in the streets. As a result, it's a time that gets pointed to (again, probably more in the 70's than now) as an ideal that we should be trying to return to. By challenging the preconceptions people have of the 1900's -- or, more accurately, by challenging the idea that the things we remember about the 1900's were actually good things -- Doctorow is trying to argue against the conservative political ideas aiming to return America to that "high point." One of the most important arguments that would have been around in the 70's, and which is still ongoing, is the image of the Americanized "outsider" getting rich quick, and it's a topic that Doctorow looks at in some depth in the novel.

There's a very clear divide in the novel between people who are "classically" rich in the sense of aristocratic WASPs like Harry K. Thaw, Stuyvesant Fish, and Pierpoint Morgan, whether they earned their own money or not, and the people who succeed financially but find themselves still somehow different from their respectable white American counterparts, like Harry Houdini, Tateh, and Coalhouse Walker. The behavior of the first group shows people who are fully comfortable in their positions of power; they feel like they deserve everything they have and more, by virtue of who they are. Morgan's belief that he is the descendant of pharaohs is an extreme example, but it fits with the general point; even if Thaw or Fish don't necessarily express that they're above "normal" people because of their blood, it's implied in their actions. All three of these characters do things that dehumanize other people and make it clear that they think of people "beneath them" -- Evelyn Nesbit, the circus freaks, or Morgan's servants -- as basically worthless. By comparison, the characters who are more outside the expected group for success feel more self-conscious and conflicted about their positions, which manifests itself in a number of different ways. 

In the case of characters of European origin, like Houdini or Tateh, success brings with it changes in their beliefs to make them fit more with how they imagine rich people to be. At first, both characters show at least some level of class tension against the rich, with Tateh's socialism the stronger example. However, as both get more and more successful, they seem to emulate more and more the rich people they know of -- especially the European aristocracy. Houdini comes to respect Archduke Ferdinand, despite the book describing him in very unflattering terms, and Tateh goes one step further, actually giving himself a false name and pretending to be a foreign noble. This change in name, which both Houdini and Tateh go through, also signifies an acceptance on the part of the two main Jewish characters' parts of their difference from mainstream American society. The names "Houdini" and "Baron Ashkenazy" are both stage names that play up the mysterious otherness of the people who take them, and probably contribute in some way to their success.

By comparison, Coalhouse Walker isn't willing or able to play up his status as outside the American mainstream. To his mind, he simply is American, black or no. As a result, his stage name -- assuming Coalhouse even is a stage name -- sounds all-American, exactly like the kind of thing a musician out of St. Louis would call himself. He doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't behave the way any other successful person would, which means he has the right to wear expensive clothes and speak formally and drive a nice car. When he comes up against working-class whites treating him as though he's beneath them even though, to his mind, he's as above them as a wealthy white person would be (in the JP Morgan-esque philosophy of the time), it causes him to suddenly realize just what the limits are on his success as a black man in the early twentieth century. If he was like Houdini or Tateh, who both accept that they are outsiders and embrace it, this wouldn't be so much of a problem; but since he considers himself as "American" as any white man, and he does everything he can to fit in with the image of what a respectable (white) American is supposed to be like, to have all that dismissed simply because of the color of his skin flies in the face of everything he's been working his whole life for. What's the point of going for the American Dream if your ceiling in that dream is still lower than everyone else's?

Post-modernism and Ragtime

I know it's kind of late to be writing a post about postmodernism, but I haven't really had the time before now. It might be kind of scattered since I'm basically just trying to collect a few things I've been thinking about that relate to the class but hopefully it'll make sense.

One of the things that's most helpful for me when I'm thinking about post-modernism is an idea I read somewhere (I think it was David Foster Wallace but I can't find the exact quote) that modern fiction should aspire to be a conversation between the author and the reader. The author shouldn't be writing in order to have something that can stand up and fulfill certain objective values of quality, but rather to elicit some reaction in their audience. In many ways that's the biggest difference between modernism and post-modernism: modernists tend to believe that there's an objective measure of how good a certain piece of writing is, and that all art needs to strive towards being objectively "good," whereas post-modernists believe that it's impossible to really quantify what's good and bad beyond the way it makes the people consuming it feel. Modernist fiction would be just as good if it existed in a vacuum, because it would still be measured against the same standards; post-modernist fiction depends on the audience to invent the standard. What matters isn't the words of the text themselves, it's what they make their audience think.

To use Ragtime as an example, Doctorow's narration never directly betrays any kind of direct judgement of the characters or events in the novel, and yet his opinions manage to be made clear. By this point in the book (midway through Part II), everyone is pretty aware of what Doctorow thinks of America in 1906, despite him never coming out and saying anything. Instead, his style (when writing his less individually-focused historical overviews, at least) tends to be somewhat whimsical and flip about things that almost any modern reader would agree are morally wrong. He knows that his audience is made up of people who will almost all agree that things like poverty balls and child labor are immoral, and so he doesn't need to guide us to those conclusions. He just needs to present the facts as he sees them, with maybe a few lines about "happy elves" or dim-witted workers to twist the knife a bit, and most readers will react with the same indignation that Doctorow himself seems to feel. By presenting casual racism and classism in the same tones as the more conventionally popular stereotypes of the early 1900's, he is able to shock the reader without necessarily feeling the need to tell them how they should feel about things they already feel strongly about. Of course, Doctorow does guide the reader to some extent; he spends enough time discussing social injustice that even without any explicit condemnations, we can still tell he cares a lot about the subject.

An even better way to see Doctorow's opinions than looking at the historical facts he draws attention to is to look at the ones he just makes up. Doctorow's embellishments of the historical record exist to hammer home a lot of the points he's trying to make, without him having to come out and say that, for example, capitalists at the turn of the century were too separated from the workers. This use of what could probably be called outright lying if it was presented in a less obviously fictional light to make points about actual history is an idea that wouldn't have been seen just a few decades before Doctorow. It makes the book resist easy categorization as clear "historical fiction" by the traditional standards, while still basically being a book that places a fictional narrative in the context of "actual" history. Importantly, Doctorow never actually says anything that contradicts the generally accepted historical narrative -- he just adds to it. This definitely isn't necessary in modern fiction (there are plenty of books that do completely contradict historical fact), but it makes it trickier to categorize exactly what it is that makes Ragtime not just a normal "historical fiction" novel. That's because actually leaving the realm of reality would nullify a lot of the point of the novel -- Doctorow is trying to show that the popular image of the 1900's is misguided, and to compare the problems of that time to those of his own, without coming out and saying anything outright, and the best way he sees to do that is to add little "white lie" vignettes to illustrate the problems. They serve to punctuate the factual overviews he gives and to remind us to keep the personal effects of what we read in mind. This is something that a more traditional writer would probably never have done -- they would have considered presenting the truth more important than presenting an idea, because the truth is something that can be defined (relatively) objectively, whereas an idea is something that exists only with the audience, and can even be misunderstood by them. Doctorow breaks from that tradition by believing, in a more post-modernist point of view, that the truth is important in a novel only so far as it gets the audience to understand something the author is trying to say. The conversation between the reader and the writer becomes more important than the factual legitimacy of the words on the page.