Ba-Ding!

To end off the year, I wanted to share my reflection on this class as a whole. History as Fiction has prodded me to explore and challenge notions of history, truth, and language in ways that pleasantly surprised me. Taking time away from discussing purely plot to discuss the author, postmodern style, mixing of "real" and "fictional" characters to make a point, and ways in which we write histories has been both a joy and an academic endeavor I'm so happy to have been a part of.

Exploration of Ragtime's adoption of real people into flourishing characters and constructed people into historical figures was a perfect book to get me interested in postmodernism. As I was reading Libra, I noticed how much it reminded me of Ragtime in the way that it made the real fictional and the fictional real.

Mumbo Jumbo caught me by surprise, but its overwhelming presence of Ishmael Reed caused me to read it differently than I read other books. Every sentence in that book was meticulously planned out, hinting at deeper meaning or mocking you for thinking too deep.

The time travel elements of Slaughterhouse-Five and Kindred are executed very differently, but certainly both challenged the reader to rethink the way we view the past. My anthropology class experience really enhanced these books for me, pointing out real ways the world is reworking it's view of history.

Libra completed the unexpected task of making me like the character of killer. Perhaps this is the skill of postmodern works: taking something hated and making you see its humanity.

I thank you all for a wonderful semester, and many thanks to you, Mr. Mitchell, for leading such amazing discussions and providing amazing literature to us.

The Zapruder Film

There's something important in the grainy-ness of the Zapruder film. In watching it, over and over again, I realize that I really wouldn't wish it to be any clearer. In its current state, you get a general idea of each visual, without stomach-jerking precision. I don't wish to see anyone's head being blown open in HD. I am perfectly comfortable seeing it at a distance, and with the low quality of the film adding even more distance. I am removed. In no sense could I really imagine, in watching, that I am really standing where Mr. Zapruder stood, observing this horror.

The separation from the event over time and space was first established as I had never been formally educated on the Kennedy assassination. I knew he was on the list of Presidents assassinated, but I'd never really learned very much about him as a President or a person. I didn't know his stance on policies, I most certainly had no idea what the Bay of Pigs was. Being born close enough as I was after the event put me in the perfect spot where teachers didn't consider it "history" yet, but I was far enough after that the event was no longer part of normal conversation. Although I consider myself decently educated on world events through the twentieth century, I have learned more about JFK's assassination during this class that at any other point in my life.

Upon watching the film for the first time, I realized that it was low enough quality that I could watch it without feeling like I was going to hurl.

I'm fine seeing someone get chopped in half, if it's a special effect in an action movie. Seeing someone's head get blown apart, REALLY, is a completely different story. The separation, visually, physically, and emotionally, makes learning about Jack Kennedy's last moments a realistic option for me.

Dallas and the US as One

In reading the chapter 22 November, I realized that what stood out to me most was the way the crowd is described by DeLillo. It is as if all of Dallas is one organism, awaiting the visit of it's president. Every description gives the feeling of the collective group, all feeling the same, all acting the same, all equally ecstatic that Kennedy has come to visit.

Big D rising out of caution and suspicion to produce the roar of a sand column twisting.
                            -Libra, pg 393

Dallas as one, as a large beast. Throughout the chapter the reader sees more and more references to the crowd operating as one, giving a sense of community. One embodiment, so happy and wholesome in light of Kennedy's visit. So personally grateful. As time grew closer to the moment that Kennedy dies, I got a sense that the death marks a tragedy personal to Dallas. "Big D" has been personally hurt by the end of what has made it so happy and excited.

This communal hurt feels like a metaphor for how the whole country felt when they heard the news. As if something that belonged to them has been taken away, and Oswald has done the taking. Kennedy's death is more than a political hardship. He had previously belonged to the American people, and now he's been stolen away. The wording DeLillo uses is precise.

This feeling of personal connection to Kennedy is what makes this disputed event all the more electrifying to the public. Had it been someone nobody would have wanted to spend time with, perhaps the national tragedy of it all wouldn't have been so potent.

Jack and Jackie belonged to Dallas. Belonged to the nation. DeLillo makes sure we feel interconnected during the reading of this particular scene.

Lee as a character

It feels very strange to like someone who is going to be accused of first degree murder. 

DeLillo treats Lee as a character in a very interesting way, making him a troublemaker, flirty, nauseating, mysterious, and it makes him so intriguing that I find myself trying to blaze through the dated chapters just so I can get back to learning about Lee.

He is painted as a very sympathetic character, growing up in a society built against him, trying to rebel. His home situation is so sad, summed up by the repeated "they watched each other eat." I find myself wanting him to have a better life, to succeed. Not in the way that he seems to though. 

The portrayal of huge people like Oswald, similarly to any other famous person who has been blown up in our minds to inhuman levels, seems weird at first. Too personal almost. 

I am really enjoying DeLillo's take on Lee because it is so personal. The more personal the story, the more real it actually feels. The liberty DeLillo takes by filling in gaps, detailing parts of Lee's days that may or may not have happened, makes the facts come to life. 

I wait in anticipation of the November 22 chapter, where we see his actual thought process, or lack thereof. The journey from little Lee to Lee Harvey Oswald will be quite an epic bildungsroman. 

Narrative Kennedy: Obsessing over the Obsession

I distinctly remember an easy-reader book I used to like that told brief histories of the most recent First Kids. Inexplicably, Caroline and Jack were my favorite above all else. Although maybe not so inexplicable. Caroline’s peacoat made me stare, the portrait of the family kept my attention with the fashion and the good looks. That book failed to mention that the perfect family I had chosen as my favorites would be blasted open within a few years of the ages those kids were depicted as.

I grew up not being very aware of globally significant deaths. This was intentional on my mother’s part, not seeing the need in telling me all about these horrors before I was old enough to deal with it. But learning about the Kennedy assassination was never structured for me. It certainly will in the future, but it apparently hadn’t made it into my history books yet, and teachers left that part out when talking about our fine white selection of past presidents. I have to admit that this past week has given me more information about Kennedy than I have encountered in the last seventeen years of my life.

The fascination with this incident is conversely fascinating to me. It almost has become obsession over the obsession, turning Kennedy into a mysterious and godlike figure, and talking about it in heated online debates.

It seems to my quickly-learning brain that the real draw of the assassination is that it has become such a story. Some people see the most obvious story. Others see a second one deep below the surface. Still more probably come up with their own stories just to stir the pot a little. The obscure narrative makes our brains go haywire with emotions of excitement and sorrow and dread. It is the absolute novelty of the event that we have created that has given it the draw it has attained.

Box It Up and Put a Bow On It

Concluding the novel Kindred, I have re-read the sections regarding Dana’s arm loss and subsequent events as a result of that. There are many things to be said about the symbolism of this passage, but what caught my eye was how the police interact with this situation.

I see a lot of connection to how the loss of Dana’s arm is Octavia Butler explaining to the reader the gravity an experience like Dana had would have on her. Looking back at the trauma of slavery doesn’t leave us feeling particularly awesome, which is exemplified in the ripping apart of Dana’s arm.

Looking at the interactions of other’s to the loss of Dana’s arm shows a lot about what Butler interprets the interactions of people over slavery and other traumas. People are uncomfortable with trauma. Especially trauma that they have not felt or encountered before. The police assigned to figure out what happened to Dana really want Dana to just admit that Kevin was being violent towards her. They don’t know how to rationalize the situation any other way.

I feel this relates directly to the vast majority of us dealing with someone else’s trauma. If we can’t pinpoint it, rationalize it, we get extraordinarily uncomfortable or overwhelmed. I feel that this is a really unattractive quality of people, seeing as we would be a whole lot more peaceful if we could just try to conceptualize someone else’s pain.

So often does Dana encounter someone wanting to box her pain into neat boxes. Kevin also does this when he is trying to wrap his brain around the relationship Dana has toward Rufus. Instead of allowing it to be complicated and messy, Kevin gets frustrated and explains it in the easiest way he can: accuse her of infidelity. This has me thinking quite a bit about how Butler may be using these events to describe how white people try to box up the trauma of slavery felt by African Americans, not wanting to put in the effort to understand the complexities.  

Recovery: On 'Embers'

The entirety of the article Embers: Will a prideful city finally Confront its past? drives home the notion that the bombing of Dresden is not easy for anyone to digest.

After a seemingly insurmountable period directly after the attack, the people of Dresden and the surrounding areas are working, arguing, laboring over conflicting ideas on how to repair the mind of the city. Even the task of rebuilding the structure of the city that was obliterated is controversial.

"Do we acknowledge the destruction, or do our best to pretend like the city is as it was February 12, 1945?"

While reading this article I was constantly reminded of how Vonnegut has written a book about this very event, from the point of view of the future, but that mostly has detail of the before and after, not during the bombing. Many people in Dresden insist that the best way to cope with this horror of the past is to go back even further than the bombing, to before, as it lay an idyllic city for many. One explanation is simply that Vonnegut is making a comment on how difficult it is to discuss the bombing, but he also may have used this as a way of explaining the resulting trauma of the bombing. We definitely talked about this in class, where many ideas of the strangeness of the composition of the story were shared.

The feelings of many people in Dresden, to forget the event completely, seem to be mirrored in Vonnegut's book. Although he wants to tell the story, the book is mostly him seemingly avoiding telling it. As Mr. Mitchell illustrated for us in class, Billy must be so grandly far removed from the event of February 13, 1945, to even consider sharing it. Its horrible for him to think about otherwise, it seems. This initially seemed to me like Vonnegut describing the mental trauma of going through such an ordeal, but after reading The New Yorker article, it may even be a mirror of Dresden today.

The city is full of people who want to forget and people who want to open up the wound to heal it. A book that's goal is to tell the story, and yet wants to avoid it, seems like a compromise between these two opinions. I have no idea if Vonnegut was very aware of Dresden's politics at the time he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, but if he did, this would be a very crafty way of insinuating the divide being experienced.