thoughts on this course

Overall, I really enjoyed History as Fiction. I think it's a really interesting topic for an English class as opposed to say, a history class or philosophy class. Lots of the things we dealt with could have fit in either of those courses, but it was nice to look at it from a literary standpoint.

I'm surprised that there were so many books that could work for this course. I mean, I know there is a whole genre of historical fiction, but for there to be that amount of books with a metafictional aspect, I was shocked by. I think this metafictional aspect brings in the philosophical thoughts to the equation, and that is what makes the course mentally challenging.

Sometimes, during our discussions, I would find myself contemplating the big questions, especially when Mr. Mitchell would ask things like, "what is history?" That's not exactly something you can answer in a sentence or two. But even if we never figured out a concrete answer, those questions that led to discussions, supported by the books we were reading, helped me to think about the true nature of history and fiction (if there can be a
"true" nature).

Although this course was a lot of work, I really liked the variety of the assignments. There was reading, blogging, big papers, small papers, and presentations. It was difficult to get through everything, but it was never boring to accomplish, and in the end, I felt like I had created something worthwhile to read and listen to.

Thank you, Mr. Mitchell, for an amazing two semesters during my senior year; you have made me a better writer, reader, and ultimately, a thinker.

I wanted to quickly clarify one of the comments I made in class yesterday, this having mainly to do with my feeling that the actual scene where Lee shoots Kennedy is anticlimactic. It wasn't that it was different than the climax I was expecting, it was just that at the end of the section, I wasn't actually sure whether or not the President had been shot.

While I was having my difficulties articulating this fact to the class during discussion, I tried to figure out exactly what it was that made me unsure about the scene. I think I finally found it. This scene occurs on page 396, and it is the top section where Lee actually pulls the trigger. My problem, and perhaps this was just unobservantness on my part, but DeLillo never actually says, "Lee shot the president."

Granted, this might be a little too obvious to be at all literary, but he could have at least said something along the lines of "Lee fired," or "the president was hit." As the scene is, the only references to the gun going off are vague to me because I know nothing about guns. To me, I'm not really sure what "Lee turned up the handle, drew the bolt back," and "Lee drove the bolt forward, jerking the handle down," actually mean. Does that mean he shot the gun? Does it mean he was preparing the gun to be fired? I don't know. I guess I took it as being his preparation for the shot, loading the gun and things like that.

I suppose I should have taken the president's reaction as a hint, but that could have been a reaction to many things, and I guess I just didn't put two and two together. So, in the end, it wasn't that the scene wasn't exciting enough for me or anything like that, it was just that when I came to the page break, I was thinking, "wait, did he just shoot Kennedy?!?" which I feel like shouldn't have been a question I should ask in a book that is entirely about this event.

One scene that I'd like to talk about briefly is the scene with the two Jacks. One of them is Jack Ruby, who is talking to another Jack about getting a somewhat Mafia-affiliated loan. In this scene, they are sitting in the back room of Ruby's club, and the dialogue is quite unique, and posed some problems to some readers in our class.

To me, the dialogue was written in the vernacular, verbatim as it would be spoken in a conversation. Some qualities of this involved not directly referencing important topics in the conversation, but merely hinting at them because both parties knew what was being discussed. This is what would happen in a normal conversation; no one is going to have a conversation with someone who also knows the whole situation and explain every little detail for the benefit of those listening. If you were eavesdropping, you probably wouldn't understand everything that was going on, because everything would be explicitly spelled out.

Another quality of this conversation was that it wasn't always exactly grammatically correct. Sometimes we say things that don't actually make sense were you to deconstruct them or write them, but that make absolute sense when you're speaking. One instance of this that came to mind is when people say "No, I know." Normally, you would say "Yes, I know" because you would be agreeing with whatever the other person had just said. However, what we are denying is the assumption that you didn't know whatever they had said. Sorry, kind of a tangent, but I think it's interesting. 

I really enjoyed this vernacular-ness because it felt like a real conversation. Some readers felt like it seemed unnatural and were really confused by it, but I liked it so much better. I felt like I was in the flow of the conversation, and by picking up little bits and pieces, I even felt like I was a part of the conversation.

CIA strippers.

In the scene where we get a background look at Jack Ruby's club in Don DeLillo's Libra, there's a very interesting parallel that I didn't notice until I was leading the class discussion of that chapter. This parallel has to do with double lives, and specifically those of the CIA agents and the strippers.

In the cases of both the CIA agents and the strippers, each have a public and private persona and life. With people like Larry Parmenter, the public life has to do with day to day household chores, and there is even a scene where we see him helping his wife carry groceries into the house. When you contrast this mundane task that everyone does with Parmenter's secret CIA life, the difference is striking. Parmenter has to lead such a double life because he can't even tell his wife about the things he does at work. To think that there are all of these ideas and this secret knowledge stored up in his head when on the outside, he just looks like a helpful husband helping with chores.

I drew a parallel between this juxtaposition with Parmenter and with the strippers at Ruby's club. When we first see the strippers, we see them backstage discussing things like wages. This seemed striking to me because when we think of strippers, the first image that pops to mind is a woman performing on a stage of some kind. As Mr. Mitchell pointed out, even though they are revealing their body, in a way they are masking themselves because you don't really get to know who they are by simply watching them. You are much more likely to learn something by listening to their mundane backstage conversations.

I hadn't really drawn this parallel until I asked the class what they thought of the strippers and how we get a view of them that we don't normally see. Nobody seemed to have thought about this, so I figured I should explain why I thought it was interesting. And this is what I told them!

brief first thoughts on Libra

Don DeLillo's Libra strikes me as being a really promising book. It has the same tone as Mumbo Jumbo in that you're not always quite clear as to what is going on, and the narrator is kind of vague and mysterious, but it has narrative content that reminds me of Kindred. I am much more engaged in this story because I feel like things are actually happening and I can relate to the characters, which always makes me more interested in the story.

While I didn't always like the blatant postmodernist-ness of Mumbo Jumbo, Libra doesn't make me as angry when it says vague things and releases important information without any warning. I think this might have something to do with the subject matter, because I am really interested in the CIA and in politics and international relations. I really like thinking about conspiracy theories, so a book that is going to provide a back story for one of the most conspiri-cized events in history is really exciting.

I like how DeLillo switches back and forth between Lee's past and his narrative, and the retired CIA operatives and their personal story. This book seems really exciting and I can't wait to get into it!

final thoughts on Rufus.

While this in no way will encompass everything I've come to think about Rufus (because I don't think such thing is even possible), I just wanted to give my last impressions about the boy we've watched grow up throughout Kindred, especially focusing on the last scene that he is with Dana.

Throughout the book, I couldn't help but liking Rufus. To me, he was a generically good guy who was merely a product of his culture and society, thus making him do bad things. This could just be wishful thinking, benefit of the doubt, etc., but I'd like to think I'm right. Moving on, I always felt bad for him when he did bad things because I felt as though he was just acting out. He drew a gun on Kevin and Dana because he didn't want them to leave him. Instead of knowing how to express himself and explaining his emotions to make them understand how much he needs them, all he can think to do is threaten them to stay.

Another example of this poor expression occurs with Alice. I believe that Rufus actually loves her (or at least believes he loves her) but just doesn't understand how to express it in a way that she will understand and that will make her love him back. He wants her, he loves her, he gets her. The rape and all the acting out associated with Alice is all part of a misguided attempt to win her trust and her love. Rufus loves his childhood friend, he just doesn't know how to show it.

With regards to the last scene, and Rufus's attempt to rape or seduce Dana, all I see is desperation. Here is a man who has been abandoned by people he cares about through his entire life. We hear about his nightmares that Dana will leave and not come back, or will return but not save him. In this final scene, we Rufus devastated by the death of a woman he actually loved, and the confusion of loving his half black children, yet also owning them, and the subsequent contradictions associated with slavery.

I feel sorry for Rufus, and it is because I see all of this desperation that, in the end, I like him. I pity him a lot, but I think that rather than him being a genuinely bad person, he is more a product of his awful society.

divide by 2 and add 7..?

One thing that I was wondering as I was finishing Kindred is what effect Kevin's five year separation from Dana had on their relationship. For Dana, this separation was only several months, but we have several references from Butler that this time lapse has aged Kevin significantly. He was already older than Dana to begin with, and my musings led me to wish that Butler had given us more insight into their relationship once they returned to the present day together.

Kevin is already about ten years older than Dana (if I remember correctly), and this additional span of five years that he's stuck in the past without her merely adds distance between their ages. This is a pretty significant age difference, but Butler never seems to let on that anything has changed between them. While Mr. Mitchell did make the point earlier about Butler letting on to a potential "generational gap" between the two in certain situations, nothing else is every said about their age gap, even though, if I were in their position, I think it would affect me a lot.

For one thing, Kevin has now experienced a lot more than Dana has. Dana, while she's been having kind of a rough time of it, has only experienced life on the Weylin plantation. Kevin has had to make a way for himself and live by his wits up North, and we can see that what he's seen has changed him. I wonder that this would not make him jaded and cynical towards present day, and even to Dana. In some ways it does; springing to my mind is when he makes the reference to the woman he saw dying in childbirth, and this memory being spurred by a commercial on television. There we see the effect his experiences have had on him, but it doesn't show up in his relationship with Dana at all.

For me, the story would have been enriched by Butler's letting on that the couple has some issues between them to work out, perhaps having to do with their increased age disparity, or perhaps by Kevin's new experiences. As I saw it, there was an unrealistic (if this term is even relevant with a book like this) amount of calm in their relationship. I doubt that after not having seen your wife for five years that you would immediately adjust to her again, and that your only problem would be adjusting to your new house. Somehow that doesn't strike me as the natural course of things.

However, never having been in this situation, I wouldn't know for sure, but I would have liked it if Butler had given us a little more detail with regards to this aspect of Dana and Kevin's relationship.