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.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, April 11, 2014
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.
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.
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