"Beware the People Weeping"

My initial reaction to last night's reading was that Jack Ruby is totally crazy.

First of all, while I understood that the Kennedy assassination was a huge deal and would therefore bring out irrational responses from the American public, Ruby's constant vomiting and complete and total sorrow just seemed strange and out of place. I knew from earlier chapters that he was extremely patriotic, but back then I had seen his gung-ho nationalism as having a slightly sarcastic undertone. It sounds bad to say, but it just didn't seem normal to me for a hard, abrasive man like Jack Ruby to love his country that much.

His dramatic response to the assassination, though, was decidedly sarcasm-free, which made me see his character in a different light. Quite frankly, I thought it was weird how distraught he was and foolish of him to kill Oswald, seeing as he could've been extremely helpful in implicating other people involved in the assassination plot had he been kept alive and interrogated. I'm not saying I was surprised that Jack was upset or that he wanted Oswald dead--I'm sure many, if not most, Americans felt similarly--but it did shock me that he was so over-the-top about his feelings, and that he acted on them so quickly.

However, I was soon reminded of another time when Americans were so shaken by the death of their president that they responded in rash ways that would have seemed completely out of line in any other context. I wrote a good chunk of my American History Seminar paper on the not-often-talked-about violence that consumed much of the North after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Jack Ruby's reaction would have fit into that narrative seamlessly.

A lot of Northerners felt betrayed and personally affronted by the Lincoln assassination, and lacking a better way of handling their frustrations, they took to the streets in anger soon after it happened. In Thomas Reed Turner's Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he depicts one instance of post-assassination violence:

On the street a man shouted, “I’m glad it happened.” In a moment, he was scuffed underfoot, had most of his clothes torn from his body, and was barely rescued by three policemen with drawn revolvers as he was being hustled to a nearby lamppost. (26)

Later he continues, emphasizing the extreme extent of people's distress:

One anonymous writer, who claimed to have been a copperhead, advised the government that its duty was to hang every rebel caught. He could have felt no worse had his own mother or father been slain and would personally volunteer to shoot every Southern man. (Turner 23)

What's perhaps more shocking, though, is that it wasn't just one or two crazy people who turned to such rash measures after the death of their president. Rather, the public as a whole seemed to accept violence as an appropriate response: "The Chronicle pointed out that the people had performed certain acts of irregular justice ‘which though not sanctioned by the courts will not be severely condemned by the most moderate and law-abiding citizens’” (Turner 28).

This concept is very much in line with what Jack Karlinsky promises will happen to Ruby if he goes through with killing Oswald. "Let me tell you something straight out," he says. "The man who gets Oswald, people will say that's the bravest man in America. [...] This act, they'll build a monument, whoever does it. It's the shortest road to hero I ever saw" (DeLillo 431).

Granted, this doesn't totally come true for Jack, as he does end up going to prison, but there is some evidence that people do indeed think of his act of heroic. He receives a telegram that reads:

HOORAY FOR YOU JACK. YOU ARE A HERO MR. RUBY. WE LOVE YOUR GUTS AND COURAGE. YOU KILLED THE SNAKE. YOU DESERVE A MEDAL NOT A JAIL CELL. I KISS YOUR FEET BORN IN HUNGARY LOVE. (DeLillo 443-4)

Thus, Ruby's overblown response to his president's death begins to seem a lot less crazy, or at the very least a lot less strange. Killing Oswald would've been a rash action no matter what the circumstances, but the fact that other people seem to affirm it as the right thing to do, and the fact that it mirrors what angry Northerners did following the Lincoln assassination, puts his crime into perspective.

It was a crazy thing to do, yes, but people in distress do crazy things, and there's no way to see them coming. It seems Turner was onto something when he titled his book Beware the People Weeping.

Sympathy for Lee

I find it sort of strange that, despite the fact that this entire novel is about the Kennedy assassination, the president himself really doesn't make an appearance in the book until he's shot in "22 November," and even in that chapter he says/does almost nothing. I feel like DeLillo does this so that the novel focuses more on his conspiracy plot and less on the tragedy of the assassination—more fiction, less history, in a way. It's as though the person being shot and the consequences of killing that person are not nearly as important as the shooter himself and the planning that went into his action.

On the one hand, I think this makes sense for DeLillo's novel. There really isn't a need to give Kennedy a role and have readers get to know him as a character before his death because that would change the tone of the novel in a way I think DeLillo does not want. It always toys with a reader's emotions a little to watch a character they're familiar with die, whereas watching the death of a man whose name we know because of its historical significance but to whom we haven't really gotten connected throughout the novel is, in comparison, no big deal.

However, I feel like making Kennedy a more or less faceless man and thereby eliminating a lot of the emotional responses a reader would have to his death sort of messes with the historical context of this novel. Before reading Libra, I would undoubtedly have seen Kennedy as the sympathetic character and Oswald as the villain because that's what my knowledge of American history has taught me to see. When reading "22 November," however, Kennedy seemed more like a lifeless pawn than a man, and while I wasn't exactly sympathetic to Lee (I find him a little weird and intolerably stupid at times, although I don't dislike him), I did feel more connected to him as a person.

It makes me wonder who DeLillo wants us to see as the "hero" of this novel. Obviously he doesn't want us to ally ourselves with Kennedy and read the novel merely as a tragic telling of his death because if he did, he'd give Kennedy more of a voice and allow readers to get to know him before killing him off. However, it seems at odds with my historical knowledge of the assassination for Oswald to be the hero because, even if he is a sympathetic, deep character in many ways, he is still an assassin, isn't he?

Yet, somehow Lee is shaping up to be something of tragic hero. When Ferrie tells him Kennedy's motorcade is going to pass right by his office building in the first "In Dallas" chapter, it honestly does seem like Lee has very little choice in whether or not he kills the president. It's as though, like the Tralfamadorians once said, there really is no such thing as free will in his case, and for that I have not choice but to genuinely sympathize with him.

Maybe, then, DeLillo's point is that there's never a clear-cut hero and clear-cut villain, but rather that there are always more layers that add nuances and complexity to historical events. Generally speaking, this is an idea that I would agree with; it's just that I didn't really expect an author to try to convince me that someone who made an attempt U.S. president's life is actually a sympathetic figure, and I certainly didn't expect him to succeed.

Response to the Zapruder film

Watching the Kennedy assassination video over and over again in class on Friday started to give me a different outlook on what Don DeLillo's doing in Libra. It brought me back to the scene where Nicholas Branch is being sent things like warped bullets and shattered bones, and he thinks:

The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, "Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is a lead penetrating bone."

They are saying, "Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not you beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter."

They are saying, "This is what it looks like to get shot." (DeLillo 299-300)

Originally when I read this passage, I was inclined to side with Branch and think that the contradictions and ambiguities are still extremely important, even if the end result of the plot will always stay the same. Juliana and I led class on the day that we talked about this reading and it seemed like most people felt the same way—that even though the only truly concrete thing we can ever know about the JFK assassination is that it ended with our president getting shot, it's still worth our while to study its history and try to make some more sense of it.

I still feel that way to some degree, but watching the assassination video so many times really drove home the, "This is what it looks like to get shot," idea for me because we literally were just watching a man get shot. By the time we'd seen the clip three or four times, I started to wonder why any of the conspiracy theories mattered; at the end of the day, it was a video of our president being killed, and anything someone might notice and use to jump-start some crazy theory should ultimately be a secondary detail.

Thus, while I'm hesitant to say it doesn't matter at all what the real story was behind the assassination, I feel much more aligned with the people who sent Branch the bloody goat heads and shattered bones. You can study the intricacies of the JFK assassination, but when you boil it all down, it will always be the story of a man's death. That may not be all there is to it, but isn't that all that matters? Regardless of the what kind of plotting you think led up to the assassination, doesn't it all add up to the same thing? Won't the Zapruder film always end in exactly the same way?

I guess, though, this kind of thinking leads to a very cynical view of history because if we never let ourselves dig deeper into tragedies, there'd hardly be anything for historians to study at all. Yet, I still think it's a worthwhile thing to keep in mind. It's certainly made me feel differently about Libra; where I was once intrigued by the complex web of coincidences making up DeLillo's plot, I now sort of wonder why it even matters. Watching the assassination video over and over again is like, "Yes, this is what is looks like to get shot," and it starts to seem ridiculous that we'd ever consider focusing on any other aspect of the event.

"Characters in plots"

First of all: WHOA. The blogger site looks completely different than it did the last time I posted something and now I am slightly discombobulated.

Anyways, I'd like to revisit a passage from Libra that we read kind of a while ago, but at the time I couldn't write about it because I was out of the country without a computer:

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He [Win Everett] would show the secret symettries in a non-descript life. (DeLillo 78)

This passage originally struck me because it really rang true with the work I've been doing on my semester project, linking unrelated events and people to create a plot and "show[ing] the secret symettries in a non-descript life." It amazes me how many coincidences you can find in history, how suspicious events seem when you look at them out of their original contex, and how well life lends itself to crazy conspiracy theories. In fact, DeLillo touches on this earlier in the novel as well:

It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that's what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish. (DeLillo 57)

Beyond this, though, it's also interesting to think that there are "themes and involute turnings" in our lives that "we have not allowed ourselves to see completely." To me, it suggests that all of our actions are somehow important in the overall history of things, just in ways we can't ever hope to really see because as individuals we have such a limited perspective of the world. It's almost like any small thing we do could end up setting into motion a change of events that we might never even know about, which is really unsettling, but also kind of cool, to think about.

Finally, the passage also reminds me a little bit of the Tralfamadorian idea of a moment being structured a certain way (I feel like I keep coming back to this concept, but it's so interesting and fits so well with the books we read!). The notion that we're all just "characters in plots," whether we know it or not, makes it seem like we have no real say in how our lives play out, but rather that the story of our world has already been written and we're all just playing our parts. I can't decide if I find this concept plain old creepy or, in a weird way, sort of comforting; I think it's a little of both.

Taking characters out of context

At the end of panel presentations last week, I was sort of conflicted by the fact that we were trying to predict how Alice would behave if she had lived in our time period instead of her own. On the one hand, I suppose it is an interesting question to mull over, but at the same time, I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion of her character.

Obviously, every person is a product of his or her time to some extent. However, exactly how much of a person's decisions are influenced by their environment, and how much simply depends on the person's nature, is a question we cannot reasonably expect to ever answer. Alice, along with Rufus and all the other characters in Butler's novel, could behave totally differently in different circumstances. Or, she could be totally the same. We can argue nature versus nurture forever and ever—and people certainly do—but at the end of the day, we'll never truly be able to know how much each of those factors plays a role in the development of a person's character and the way their lives ultimately play out, so why is it worth our time to even try to speculate?

It sort of comes down to the Tralfamadorian idea of a moment being "structured" in a certain way. Alice exists in the 1800s, and she always will, because that is the way time was set up and, no matter what happens, nothing's going to change that. Her choices exist entirely in tandem with her circumstances, and consequently it's only fair for us to judge them within that context. I mean, it's certainly interesting to observe characters outside of their usual environment, as we can with Dana and Kevin, but we can't really assert that just because they act a certain way in one time period means that they would behave similarly (or differently, for that matter) in another if we're not actually given the opportunity to see them in both situations.

Besides, how does it help us to know how Alice would behave in the present day—or in Dana's time—anyway? The fact that she exists in the 1800s is crucial to her character as we know it, and thus her behavior and decisions in that nineteenth-century context are the only important things to understanding her character. It doesn't make sense to try superimposing her life onto a 1970s backdrop because, at the end of the day, our speculations would say far more about how each of us individually view Alice than it would about Alice herself.

Thoughts on the ending of Kindred

After literally one hour of doing absolutely nothing other than cupping half a bottle of frozen Gatorade in my hands to inspire it to thaw faster, it has finally dawned on me to fill the rest of the bottle with room-temperature Gatorade, so that the frozen Gatorade makes the warm Gatorade drinkably cold whilst the warm Gatorade speeds up the melting of the frozen Gatorade. How does this pertain to Kindred, you may ask? It doesn't, actually, except that the sudden epiphany has signaled to me the apparent end of my post-soccer game braindeadedness, freeing me up to now begin my blog post—and begin I shall! Here goes:

Throughout the course of my short but satisfying lifetime, exactly six different novels have made me cry. Kindred, however, is the first novel I have ripped into six pieces after completion. (The only reason that statistic flies is because calculus textbooks don't count as novels, otherwise the drama of that last sentence would have to have been severely undercut.) But Nikita, you might wonder, didn't you say just yesterday that you liked the novel? To which I would respond: Why yes, sagacious blog reader, I did indeed say yesterday that "I do like the book, in fact; I genuinely find Butler's writing gripping and the premise of her novel interesting," and all that still holds true.

(Wowzers! Just two paragraphs in and this blog entry is already erring on the side of excessive cheekiness. I'll tone it down a bit.)

However, now having finished the novel, I can say that, even if I did overall enjoy reading it, I found it unbelievably frustrating and did not like the ending one little bit. In particular, I couldn't stand that Alice died. Anything else I might have put up with, but that really drove me out of my mind since she was seriously the only character in the entire novel that I liked from beginning to end (hence the ripping of the book; had she lived I totally wouldn't have done it).

What was frustrating to me about Alice dying before Dana killed Rufus was that it seemed to be the worst possible scenario. If she'd killed Rufus right after Hagar was born (or even earlier, although I understand that that would have complicated things severely), Alice might not have met the same end that she did, although admittedly her life might have just been made even more miserable by a new slave master. But, since Alice had already been driven to suicide before Dana killed her tormenter, the novel's dramatic ending confrontation just seems sort of rash and impractical because (1) it sends all the slaves to uncertain, but likely bad, futures, (2) it's far too late to help Alice at all and even leaves her children without the protection of a white father, and (3) it's such an ironic way to end a story whose point up until now has been that Dana's needs to preserve Rufus's life, not end it, and leaves me feeling like we've just made one long and miserable circle.

However, the worst part of the ending is that I really can't think of anything much better myself. I still think Dana should've just offed Rufus way back when he first became such a monster (I really hate Rufus and honestly see no redeeming qualities in him at all, which is significant because it's a stance I generally avoid taking on characters), even if that would have ended her own life as well (I mean, it's not like I was attached to Dana anyway), but I do understand that that wasn't ever really a plausible end to the story, nor would it have made a very interesting narrative to read.

I'm left, then, with the frustrating knowledge that, throughout that entire novel, there was really never any possibility of a happy ending. Perhaps it's childish to be upset by that fact, but what the hell—call me a child then. It aggravates me that, right from page one, Kindred shoved us all into a bottomless hole of a plot line that was uncomfortable to read about and from which there was never actually any escape, and if that is a foolish reason to not like an otherwise good book, then so be it.

But I don't know. Maybe Butler's purpose all along was to make us uncomfortable, and to prove to us that the world is ultimately hopeless, and to show us that, because we in the present day stand on the foundations laid by often unpleasant histories, we can never have truly happy endings. If that was the case (and let's be frank—it probably was), she succeeded. And admittedly, it's better for a novel to incite a vile reaction in a reader than no reaction at all.

However, none of that changes the fact that I'm woefully unsatisfied with the ending of Kindred. This, along with the fact that I've now downed enough Gatorade to make my stomach completely miserable, has put me in a grumpy enough state that I'm just going to end this here and go to bed.

Why I don't like Dana

I've had a really hard time coming up with something to blog about for Kindred, and I realized last week that it's not simply because I don't like the book. I do like the book, in fact; I genuinely find Butler's writing gripping and the premise of her novel interesting. The thing holding be back from truly engaging with the text, then, is not the plot but the characters; there's really not a single one in the book I actually like.

Generally speaking, I prefer first-person narratives to third-person ones because I like to get attached to a character and follow them throughout the novel. (If you recall from a much earlier blog post, the lack of stationary characters was one of the things I didn't like about Ragtime.) In fact, my three all-time favorite books are all in the first person, so I was reasonably excited that Kindred would be employing this traditional narrative device, unlike so many of the other books we've read this semester.

However, I've been consistently disappointed with Dana's character throughout the novel, which has completely undone the effects of a first-person narrative for me. I have a hard time relating to her and thinking of her as a real, likable person—and if I don't buy into her as a person, then why should I care about her story?

It bothers me how Dana approaches everything so rationally. I get that she's a very smart person, but I find myself looking for a less reasonable, more emotional response from her all the time, which I don't think is too much to ask of someone in her bizarre, out-of-this-world predicament. I can't stand it when she's kind of going along with the 19th century and then she'll take a step back in her mind and be like, "Okay, it's such-and-such a year, which means such-and-such has not happened yet, so I need to be doing such-and-such a thing, and blah blah blah"; it makes me want to slap her on the head.

Perhaps that made-up quotation was a very crude way of articulating exactly what Dana does that bothers me, but I can't think of any other way of describing the action. I guess, if you boil it all down, I'm angry because I think she thinks too much, which sounds like a strange bone to pick with a character, but honestly it's true. It goes hand in hand with her reading so much into everything Kevin does, clearly just looking for ways to liken him to the white supremacists she's met in the 19th century, even if there's not necessarily anything there in his behavior to warrant such analyzing.

Sometimes I just wish that Dana would have a breakdown. I can't sympathize with a character who's so freaking logical all the time—not to mention that her being that way makes it seem like she doesn't need my sympathy anyway, so consequently I'm even less inclined to give it. I think that, for a first-person narrative to really work well (work well in my mind, that is), the author needs to really try to endear their narrator to their reader. Sometimes they're successful in this endeavor and other times they're not, but with Dana I'm not even convinced that Butler's trying to make us like her. She feels very removed, despite the fact that we're occupying her head, and I think that'd be easily changed if her thoughts were just a little less put together and a little more natural-feeling.

I'm not saying a book can't be good if the main character's not likable, but it sure is a lot harder to care what happens in a novel if you don't care about the person to whom it's happening.