Hazy Boundaries

I realize the post is awkwardly titled, and no this isn't a trashy spin off song to Blurred Lines, but instead I'm referring to the hazy boundaries between history and fiction. Coming into the class this semester I saw history and fiction as polar opposites, with no ambiguous gray areas. History was history, it was fact, it was the veritable truth, and it was what we were taught academically. Fiction on the other hand was a manmade product of the imagination, conceived solely with the purpose of being read for pleasure and entertainment. History was confined to the pages of textbooks and fiction only appeared in the chapters of a novel. As the class dragged on, I later came to realize that there was a lot of intersectionality between the two. Not all fiction was history, but essentially all history is, in some aspects at least, fictional. History by definition is the recorded accounts of past events, but we find that these events are almost always recorded by those who weren't present or even alive in these monumental moments. History acts like a collective memory of society, in which bits and pieces of memories of witnesses and survivors are threaded together into a story until it feels real. But, as we all know, memory is a very finicky thing, and just psychologically speaking, highly unreliable. As we rely on a smattering of memories to come together to form our perception of history, we invite in so much more with each account. We leave room for biases, forgotten details, overarching story lines, and intimate subplots, until we're left with humanity embedded into our histories. Every bit of history we've learned thus far comes with the baggage of time and perspective, and varies from how we've learned it. It's actually ridiculously logical how closely related history and fiction are, I'm just surprised it took me a whole English class to finally acknowledge it.

Caught on tape!

It seems that having concrete "proof' of something tends to further increase suspicion. Who actually killed Caesar (crazy example, I realize)? We have no tangible proof of the murder but we unquestioningly believe what recorded history tell us. Instead, cases like JFK's assassination with tangible video evidence lead to hundreds of conspiracy theories, each wilder than the last. Though Delilo's take on things is highly fictionalized, when compared to many of the other theories and plots that exist alongside it, Libra seems very tame and rather believable. As we watched the clip in class today I couldn't help but realize that the first time I would have seen it, I would have been absolutely transfixed by the injured Kennedy and struggling Jackie O. The end frames in which Jackie clambered over the seat to tend to Kennedy in her signature pink suit would've definitely been my highlight, and like everyone else in the audience, I wouldn't give a second thought to much anything else. Watching the very same clip after reading Libra makes for a completely different experience altogether. Though the murder still remains the focal point of the clip, for me, the person of interest immediately shifted from JFK to Lee. Lee, to most people watching the clip, remains an infamous, static individual, known only for the murder. To us, Lee is a multidimensional character who we've seen grown up with his own share of struggles and principles. Watching his life culminate to this moment has us holding our breaths in an entirely different kind of anticipation as we try to see traces of the young man we've come to know personified through video. I guess in a sentence, watching the clip before Libra was like watching a documentary and watching after Libra was like watching a movie adaptation of the book.

Drawing Parallels

Perhaps a little late for this post (I'm ignoring the weekend reading), but I can't help kind of laughing at the overt parallels Oswald keeps drawing between himself and Kennedy. Maybe laughing is not quite the right word for it, but there's definitely a cruel sense of irony in the analogies that make it darkly humorous. Instead of the the usual convention of show don't tell, Delilo is blatantly telling us, the readers, about the similarities Oswald and Kennedy share. Brothers named Robert, pregnant wives, both have strange handwriting, and various other eerie similarities. While we did have a fairly quiet discussion in class about belief in coincidence, I do have to be open about my pretty firm beliefs in some superstition. The crossing of Kennedy and Oswald's paths in Dallas, is almost too perfect of a situation to be merely coincidental, and I'd have to concede that it was orchestrated by workings outside of our knowledge. I wonder if Oswald had been uninvolved in this whole plot if he would have maybe been a fanboy of Kennedy's much like Marina is a huge devotee of Jackie O. Despite his ultimate role in Kennedy's life, or rather the end of it, you can't help but notice the traces of admiration that sneak into Oswald's thoughts as he compares himself to Kennedy. And perhaps the parallels Oswald notes between himself and Kennedy help for him to see himself as of more historical significance.

The American Icon

Not really touching on Libra, but more commenting on John F. Kennedy's legacy in America as a whole. Assassinated in 1963, it always strikes me how much of an emotional reaction his name seems to invoke still more than 50 years later. Often seen as the harbinger of a prosperous and optimistic new time in America, his untimely death shattered the dreams of many Americans who continue to hold onto the belief that his life could have turned around many of the darker events in American history that later ensued. Despite not being in office long enough to make too much of a change in the lives of the average American citizen, JFK remains one of our most beloved presidents. Though his assassination definitely aided in creating a bond between posthumous JFK and the American public, we are obviously deeply sympathetic of his premature death, there must be other reasons for his feverish popularity. Maybe it was the way he was ushered into the white house, the first democrat to win the election in a long time, or maybe it was just the way he exuded charisma, he was, after all, notorious for his extramarital affairs. And though we may associate Kennedy with an image of youth and vitality, he had actually ben suffering from a plethora of illnesses from childhood, all of which he treated with an incredibly extensive drug regimen. To me it seems his lesser attributes have always been brushed aside in order for us to have in JFK what we seek most in a leader, a hero. Though automatically we may associate heroes and leadership with war heroes whose stories of sacrifice we hold up to the highest esteem, the American public has always sought also sought a sort of wild, virile, yet magically inspirational hero to lead us. In Kennedy the country almost found what we had wanted, but only for a few short moments before he too was snatched away.

Final Thoughts on Kindred

I touched on this issue in my reaction paper, but I found that what stuck with me most after finishing Kindred was a question more than a lesson or any sort of complete thought. I was forced to contemplate how much of who I am, or who I think I am, is just a direct a result of the environment I was raised in. I never really thought about who I could've been without a social context to define me; how can you be a good person if there isn't a set standard to be compared to? So the question still begs to be answered, are we who are because of our inherent natures, or is the bulk of how we act determined by the culture we grow around? What even is an inherent nature? With Dana's case, she is a progressive, independent woman in the 70's who then is forced to act behave and live like a slave in the 1800's. As time passes, she eventually stops acting altogether. She acclimatizes to her role as a slave because those are the circumstances she is dealt, and what she gradually grows to think of as 'normal'. Of course her exposure to the modern world still garners strong reactions towards the "diseased" mentality behind institutionalized slavery, but Dana herself unwittingly becomes an unquestioning part of the system as she spends more and more time in the past. As she assimilates into the community of slaves on the Weylin plantation, the lines between Alice and Dana blur when we begin to view them together in similar situations. Alice acts as a parallel to Dana in the antebellum south, and we consider the possibility that Dana might have been exactly like her, in thoughts and sentiments, if she had been born and raised in that time period. Alice too, in other circumstances, could've grown to be just like Dana. I guess it seems like a very simple observation that most people have given thought to, but before reading the novel I never really realized just how much weight our environment plays in shaping us as individuals. Me personally? I'm a pretty flexible person that can bend in a lot of directions, and I definitely think that different situations could have fostered completely distinct Tanisha's. So strange to think about who we are without background conditions to explain for it.

The Evolution of Rufus Weylin

When we first encounter Rufus Weylin, he's small, nonthreatening, and innocent. Dana, who claims to not even like kids very much, is almost immediately fond of him, and seems unquestioningly set in her resolve to protect his life. Hoping to influence him into thinking outside of the norms of his society, it is a slow betrayal for the readers and Dana to watch Rufus grow into the mold of the men of his time. The level of complexity to Rufus's character comes from our inability to place him as inherently bad or good, his actions almost always still manage to evoke the smallest slivers of sympathy. Initially still unmarked by the horrors of the institutionalized dehumanization, as Rufus grows older he becomes more set in the way of his father before him. Growing up he treats Dana as an equal, if not a superior, who he acknowledges as more knowledgeable than himself. He seeks her advice and never belittles her, paying her an amount of respect that he does not even award to his mother. As time goes on he begins to treat Dana more and more like how he views other slaves on the plantation. He increasingly begins to resort to violence as a means to achieve his ends, and takes advantage of his position of power to leverage decisions to work in his favor. Ultimately Rufus becomes completely indoctrinated into the slavery ideology, and when confronted by Dana about a slave sell, he responds reflexively by calling them his property. Still we can't help but feel the tiniest bit of conflicted emotion when we see him carry out his horrendous behavior. With his repeated rapes of Alice, we are reminded of his 'love' for her, with his disregard for his mother, we think of the abandonment he felt, and with the eventual attack on Dana we might even for a split second think of the grief he must be suffering from the loss of his family members. Ultimately there is no justification for the sheer abhorrent nature of his actions, but we are left considering the fact that he is a product of his time and environment, and are still swayed by our attachment to the child we knew him as.

Questioning Sanity

Billy's state of sanity is a question that seems to keep coming up time and again in our discussions. At first I really considered the question, but then, especially after the pair of panel presentations today, I realized his mental stability really isn't essential to what we as readers take away from the novel. I hesitate to class anyone as 'mentally unstable', and I think we collectively as a society are reluctant to throw that term around. It's hard to put that label on someone when they aren't a threat to themselves or society. If Billy has a way of thinking that deviates from the norm, does it really need to be addressed? Like we pointed out in class, several of the characters in the book seem to have their own fictionalized version of themselves, each to a certain degree detached from their realities. Getting at a question that was posed earlier in class today, I would argue that it is inherent in human nature to use our imagination as a means of escape. Even the way we look back on things are affected as individual human memories are some of the most flawed accounts of personal history. Imagination is our natural form of escapism, and ultimately through this Billy is able to confront his most painful memories from the past. In a roundabout way while skirting around the events at Dresden, Billy is forced to recount it and come to terms with it in a way that still feels surprisingly comfortable. Maybe it's because I know I personally tend to block out painful memories until I feel strong enough to revisit them, but I can relate to Billy's more unique line of thinking as a coping mechanism. I wouldn't question his mental stability, but at the end of it, his sanity really doesn't matter.