"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.

So it goes

It seems like every book we've read so far this semester has ultimately left me with a picture of history as a fate-driven and largely unchangeable cycle. Yet, as bleak as that perception may sound, not every book we've read has itself struck me as pessimistic.

Ragtime definitely left me with a predominantly hopeless lease on life. As I believe I touched on in a previous blog entry (although I may just be imagining that), I saw Ragtime as depicting everything a person does or tries to do as ultimately futile in the grand scheme of things, since history will just continue to take its cyclical course regardless. I felt as though every seemingly monumental plot point in the novel ended up being ultimately meaningless and, thus, was left wondering what the point of anything really was anyway.

Mumbo Jumbo, on the other hand, gave off a very different message about history, in my opinion. Granted, like Ragtime, the novel certainly suggested that everything was merely part of a cycle—Jes Grew was destined to die out because it is in its nature to rise and fall and rise and fall over and over again. However, the last few scenes of the novel saved this message from coming off as bleak to me. PaPa LaBas seemed so content with the cyclical nature of history that I too adopted an optimistic viewpoint. After all, Jes Grew didn't really fail just because it died out; rather, its ability to die out and come back again was one of its strongest and most important qualities.

With Slaughterhouse-Five, however, I'm less sure what I consider the overall message. At first, I found it at least somewhat hopeful because, even though the novel came to the eventual conclusion that wars are essentially inevitable and that we really don't have any free will to stop bad things from happening, the Tralfamadorians were clearly not at all fazed by this. By looking only at the good moments, they controlled what they perceived of the world, despite the fact that they couldn't control the world itself.

However, I'm not sure this Tralfamadorian mindset can be my overall takeaway from the novel because, while it is a beautiful way to look at life, it goes against everything I've ever been taught about dealing with conflicts and injustice. If the whole point of the novel is that Vonnegut's looking back on Dresden because he needs to for his own good, as well as for the good of those who know very little about the bombing, then it seems unlikely that he would want his readers to adopt a mindset in which they simply do not look back on painful memories, but rather pretend that they do not even exist.

I guess it would be easy to argue, then, that Vonnegut finds the Tralfamadorian view a little bit silly, which would be supported by the fact that they are aliens after all. However, just as I don't think he wants us to take their ideas at face value, I don't think he wants us to simply write them off either. Their complacent attitudes may seem somewhat crazy in that they're so much more accepting of imperfections and numb to emotions than we're used to, but at the same time we know in the back of our minds that there's quite a lot of truth to their ideology.

Thus, the outlook on life that I take away from Slaughterhouse-Five is not quite the optimistic one of a Tralfamadorian nor the pessimistic one of a soldier scarred by war. By superimposing history and science fiction, Vonnegut offers his readers a picture of how cruel and unforgiving the world can be, but also gives them an understanding of how, no matter what, life goes on. Somehow we must learn for ourselves how to unify those two ideas.

Thoughts I didn't want to litter my last post with

I'd originally intended to include this in my previous post, but then that ended up becoming coherent enough that I didn't want to throw in a largely unrelated idea that might mess it up. So, I'd like to mention that, while in my other post I only really discussed the second part of the sentence, "There isn't any  particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep," I was also really intrigued by the first part of it.

The idea of an author choosing a medley of seemingly unrelated moments and putting them all together to tell one particular story or make one particular point reminds me of reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Black Swan Green last year. I think it's really interesting how scenes don't have to seem terribly significant on their own to fit into and play significant roles in a larger narrative; it makes me wonder, if I were to have to tell the story of my life in just a few scenes, which scenes would I choose? I've been mulling over it since A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and have yet to come up with more than one childhood memory I consider deceptively unimportant yet ultimately life-changing enough to meet the qualifications (lucky I'm only 17 and have more time, else that would make for an incredibly boring life story), but it is interesting food for thought.

☆      ☆      ☆

While looking for the passage on Tralfamadorian fiction, I also happened upon a page I had dog-eared to go back to presumably so I could write a blog entry about it, but on further observation I don't really have enough to say on it to warrant an entry of its own, so I'll just piggyback it onto this thing. The passages is as follows: "Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life" (137).

This detail reminds me a lot of Septimus and Rezia from Mrs. Dalloway. Septimus, much like Billy, is thoroughly scarred from his experiences in war, and for both of them this seems to result in their impulsively marrying women they don't actually love. I think it's interesting because Billy and Septimus both seem fairly numb to emotion, which one could argue was either caused by or amplified by the trauma they underwent at war, and with that in mind, both of their marriages look to me like desperate attempts to trick themselves into believing they feel emotions like love, when in reality they just don't seem to.

Tralfamadorian novels

I really liked the passage towards the beginning of Chapter 5 about Tralfamadorian fiction because it made their otherwise alien philosophies about time a lot more clear and accessible to me. I had originally had a difficult time understanding how it was that Tralfamadorians could see the world in four dimensions, simply because as a human I can't see all of time laid out before me, so naturally it's a bizarre concept to wrap my head around.

However, the Tralfamadorian take on fiction is one that I can understand quite easily. "[E]ach clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene," a voice through a speaker explains to Billy. "We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after another. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments all seen at one time (111-2)."

The idea of reading something "all at once, not one [scene] after another," is one that really resonates with me. Granted, when I literally read a book, I am admittedly just reading one scene after another, but after finishing a novel, particularly a good novel, I feel like I read it all at once because in my mind it just becomes one whole picture.

Furthermore, it is that whole picture, not the individual scenes, that makes me get attached to a novel. In fact, the reason I'm sometimes hesitant to read my favorite books over again is because I know I'll have to suffer through the whole chronology of scenes, which includes both the good and the bad moments, to get back to that feeling of the story being one complete whole. Take, for example, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It's one of my all-time favorite books, but I hate rereading it because, while I enjoy the beginning and absolutely love the ending, the middle is so painful to get through because the not-yet-mature (I say "not-yet-mature" rather than "immature" because by the end he is mature, not because my vocabulary is so limited that the latter term is not in my repertoire) main character becomes so frustrating and intolerable.

However, I still love the book even though I hate the middle because ultimately, as the Tralfamadorians so sagely put it, "there is no beginning, no middle, no end." What I remember of the book when I'm not literally reading it is the overall picture it creates in my mind—"an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep."

In light of that, sometimes I wish I could just swallow a book I've already read and know I like so I could have the whole feeling again without having to go through all the individual parts again. "Swallow" is a strange way of phrasing it, I know, but in all the time I've pondered over this (and I'd come up with this terminology long before starting Slaughterhouse-Five), I've never been able to come up with something better, so I'll just go with it. All it means, really, is that I'd love to be able to absorb a collection of scenes all at once like the Tralfamadorians can, rather than individually like humans have to.

However, even if we can't "swallow" novels, we can think of them in retrospect as whole stories not defined by rigid chronology, just as the Tralfamadorians think of the entire world. Thus, it becomes a little bit easier for us—or at least, for me—to get a handle on this Tralfamadorian fourth dimension. We'll never be able to literally see time like they can, but the analogy to literature at least gives me some kind of understanding of what seeing time might feel like to them.

More on yesterday's topic

I went running today (weird, I know) and for some reason spent the whole time thinking about the post I wrote yesterday about Reed's portrayal of white characters (weirder still). In light of this, I want to revisit the topic and partially, but certainly not entirely, recant.

I still think the fact that Reed depicts his white characters as fundamentally unable to be genuinely engaged in Jes Grew suggests that different cultures cannot ever completely blend, and I still think that this is an extremely backwards idea. However, yesterday I felt like this notion was completely outdated—like Reed was buying into a 1920s mindset even though he was writing 50 years later. Now, after much further consideration (I do some of my best thinking on the treadmill), I'm not so sure.

It's pretty nice to think of America as a melting pot, and I guess I almost always have. But you know what? That's really not accurate. America is diverse, yes, but I wouldn't call it a "melting pot" exactly because that term implies the blending and mixing and, well, "melting" together of diverse cultures, and I'm not sure America can honestly boast that.

Maybe this is just due to our natural human desire to be with people we're in some way connected to, but the fact is that people in this country all too often splinter off into little groups, neighborhoods, etc. based on their race. It happens within basically every community, be it a school, a city, or the country as a whole, and on some level I think it does make sense. The chances are decently high that people who share an ethnic background might also share aspects of culture like food, language, and religion that makes it natural for them to gravitate towards each other.

However, at the same time, I don't see how we can consider ourselves a "melting pot" of a country if we're still divided in this way even now. Maybe outright racism has by now become taboo, but I don't see how this kind of self-imposed segregation between races is all that much better.

Reed makes Hinkle Von Vampton and Hubert "Safecracker" Gould look like bumbling, out-of-place idiots when they try to take part in the Harlem Renaissance scene and speak the Jes Grew language, but he's not being totally unreasonable when he does this because we as a society see people who try to cross racial borders in this light all the time, whether we do so intentionally or not. Sure, this is America where nothing can stop you from reaching your goals if you work hard enough or whatever, so no one's going to stop the Eminems and Jeremy Lins and [your favorite racial-stereotype-defier's name here]s of the world from being successful, but I think anyone who claims we see them in the exactly same light as we see their non-stereotype-defying colleagues is being a little ignorant. They baffle us, plain and simple—and in more or less the same way that Coalhouse Walker baffled Father in Ragtime, too.

(Largely unrelated but interesting side note: When I was discussing this with my mom over dinner today, I had settle for Vanilla Ice as a white rapper example instead of Eminem (generational gap, it would seem), which inspired me to Wikipedia him a little while ago and did you know his real last name is "Van Winkle," which sounds very similar to "Hinckle Von Vampton"? I mean, obviously Mumbo Jumbo predated Vanilla Ice's career, so this is entirely a coincidence, but I thought it was kind of interesting given that he and Von Vampton are similar in that they are white men trying to be a part of traditionally black culture. Anyways.)

What's funny to me at least is that I'd hardly paid any attention to this phenomenon until my run today, despite the fact that I've lived in this society all my life. I think the reason is (and I know I'm getting farther and farther from Mumbo Jumbo as I go, for which I apologize) that I've had a fairly poor sense of my own racial background for most of my life. I mean, I know where my parents are from, but as their both from entirely different countries, I've never felt as connected as I'd like to either half of my ethnic background, and thus the culture with which I most identify has always been, well, just American, whatever that is.

Consequently, I guess I've done a pretty good job of ignoring race dynamics for most of my life. But even then, if I really stop and think about it, I can't say I haven't ever noticed self-imposed racial segregation to some degree because I have, just not completely consciously. I mean, I'd be lying to say I've never felt a little odd arriving in some nearby town for a soccer game and finding the other team to be entirely white and blonde. I'm not sure how much it bothers me exactly, but I've certainly noticed it.

Yet, (and I'm really digressing here) there's a lot about race dynamics that I hadn't really noticed before simply because I've always grown up in fairly white-dominated communities. And that, really, is the problem with self-imposed racial segregation—it creates ignorance. The other day, for example, I was playing around with U.S. Census Bureau's website (not normally how I spend my free time, but very interesting if you ever want to try it) and for kicks I looked up the "QuickFacts" for Ann Arbor, Michigan—my hometown until I came here sophomore year—and compared them to those of Detroit, and quite frankly I was put off by the discrepancies.

Ann Arbor, according to the 2010 census, was 73% white and 7.7% black (I'm ignoring other races for now because these two seem to be the largest players in Mumbo Jumbo and that keeps things simple for my demonstrative purposes), whereas Detroit—just half an hour away, mind you—was 10.6% white and 82.6% black. Those are practically different worlds! And no, I don't need anyone to explain to me how such a discrepancy arises because I'm fully aware of the whole "affluent college town vs. struggling big city" deal, but I don't know; I still have a problem with it. Remember yesterday when I said, "Does Reed think we'd all be better off if each race had its own little corner of a city and no one ever tried to cross over at all?" Well, HELLO. That is completely what's happening here, and yet it never once struck me in all the many years I lived in Ann Arbor.

So, to reign this tangent back in and finally get to a point, I still take issue with Reed's suggestion that a white character can never really be a part of the Jes Grew movement, but I'm no longer pinning the blame on him for adopting an outdated mindset. Rather, I'm going to pin the blame on our society (I tend to think blaming society is a lovely solution for problems no one can solve (kidding)) for still conforming to that mindset. I can't reasonably get mad at Reed for not presenting early twentieth-century America as a blossoming melting pot if it's not even a melting pot now, practically one hundred years later.

Hypocrisy in "Mumbo Jumbo"

I think Ishmael Reed's portrayal of white people and white culture would strike me very differently had Mumbo Jumbo been written some fifty or sixty years earlier than it was (effectively removing the whole "historical" aspect, I know). On the one hand, he does an impressively good job of taking the onesided way we're used to seeing white writers from the early twentieth century depict their black characters and turning it on its head. Such a portrayal may not be quite fair to his white characters, but I would excuse that had Reed written the novel a hundred years ago with the intention of making a statement that would rub people the wrong way and really make them think.

However, given that Mumbo Jumbo is only looking back on the early twentieth century when it was actually written in the '70s, Reed's portrayal of white culture and characters actually strikes me as a little hypocritical. If his point is to mock the idea that anyone would consider the spread of jazz culture a threatening "epidemic," then it seems counterintuitive that he'd also present any white character, be it Thor Wintergreen or Hinkle Von Vampton, who tries to engage himself in said culture as both idiotic and ultimately malicious.

I guess I don't understand how the Wallflower Order can seem so evil for wanting to stop the spread of Jes Grew when Reed himself won't allow his white characters to take part in or even just display a genuine interest in the movement. If this is a book that affirms dividing society along racial lines, then what the Wallflower Order is trying to do should not seem out of line. But, if this is a book about the spread of culture, then race should not be the divider that it is.

By forbiding his white characters from taking part in Jes Grew and presenting them as foolish when they try to, Reed seems to suggest that there is some sort of inherent barrier between people of different races that makes it so they can't ever truly understand each other. To an extent, I grant that this is maybe somewhat true (enough qualifying statements for you?)--that no matter how hard you try, you can't ever completely understand a culture to which you do not belong or the plight of the person whose life is fundamentally different than your own. However, I also see it is highly problematic.

Is Reed suggesting, then, that cultures cannot ever blend, or that segregation along racial lines is inevitable and, therefore, not something that people should even try to fix? I'm on board with him that the Wallflower Order is completely ridiculous in seeing the spread of jazz culture as a disease and feeling that their civilization will crumble entirely if they don't stop it, but it doesn't sit well with me that Reed also portrays Thor Wintergreen as a traitor and Hinkle Von Vampton as a deceptive double agent. Perhaps they can't ever completely be a part of Jes Grew (although I'm not sure I see why exactly they can't), but is it really so terrible of them to try? Does Reed think we'd all be better off if each race had its own little corner of a city and no one ever tried to cross over at all? Sounds like a pretty outdated opinion to me.

Thus, while I do think Reed makes a statement with his unforgiving portrayal of white culture, it feels to me a little out of place. If he wants to critique the mindset of a particular time period, he can't just buy into it himself, albeit from a slightly different angle, because isn't that just stooping to their level?

It all makes me wonder what Reed's point is--is he in favor of the spread of jazz culture or against it? If the former is the case, as I originally thought it was, then he can't present Jes Grew as a movement that is liberating to one race yet fundamentally inaccessible to another.

Postmodernist history and "Housekeeping"

The most unbelievably fortuitous thing happened to me just now.

In class today, while I was rather more animatedly than usual trying to get my thoughts together, I tried to reference a passage in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (which perhaps only my classmates from Coming-of-Age Novel have read, but it was a good book and I'm going to talk about it anyway even if not everyone else has read it). However, for the life of me I couldn't actually remember how it went, nor could I quite articulate what my point was in referencing it.

So, when I got home, I first sedated myself a little bit with a cup of tea and then got out my copy of Housekeeping to look for the passage in question. Unfortunately, having not read the novel in almost a year, I had no idea where to begin my search, and Google proved entirely unhelpful by only turning up results regarding, well, the literal keeping of one's house. So what, you may ask, did our quick-witted protagonist (by which I mean myself, obviously (yes, I am indeed being sarcastic)) do next?

WELL. She was suddenly hit by the promising realization that she'd had to keep a reading journal last year in Coming-of-Age Novel, which she located with unprecedented speed in her recently cleaned room to find that not only had she written an entry on the passage, but she had also cited it—with page numbers!—in her journal. So, while this entire anecdote is not exactly paramount to the overall topic of this blog, I think it's still worth sharing because I am simply reveling in the incredible amount of foresight displayed by the March 26, 2011 version of me in writing such a specific journal entry.

Anyways, it sort of dawned on me in class today that my frustrations with the postmodernist perception of history are oddly similar to my frustrations with the transient attitude presented in Housekeeping (although I was considerably less vocal about the latter). I find both philosophies interesting to think about and agree with both to an extent; however, they also both strike me as ultimately ignorant of the fundamental desire to hang onto the past that I personally believe is one of the things that makes us all human.

If you're missing the connection, think of Houdini trying to immortalize his mother by plastering pictures of her all over his house. Doctorow seems to find it foolish of him to even try to preserve her image after her passing because, as postmodernism argues, there's simply no way of ever creating a completely accurate portrayal of something that no longer exists—history can never fully rid itself of its many fictional aspects.  Thus, postmodernism tells us that it is and always will be futile to attempt to hang onto the past or to depend upon it as an absolute truth because, at the end of the day, nothing is an absolute truth—or at least, nothing is inherently any more true than anything else.

Housekeeping, meanwhile, seems to send readers away with more or less the same message. Sylvie's transient lifestyle proves to us that nothing is static, and that it's silly and pointless to try and hold onto the past because it's always going to slip right through our fingers. Indeed, she all but literally equates history and fiction by reading old newspapers purely for entertainment's sake—something that doesn't line up with our traditional view of newspapers as factual works meant to document real-life events, rather than as stories no inherently truer than those a novelist writes.

It doesn't seem to matter to Ruth, either, how real or true things are. "I remember her neither less nor differently than those I have known better," she says of a woman whom she saw once on a passing train but never actually met (Robinson 55). It reminds me of how, in Ragtime, Coalhouse Walker's story ends up impacting us readers "neither less nor differently" than those of characters who actually existed in real life. Thus, in both Doctorow's and Robinson's presentations of the world, no person, thing, or idea, it seems, can claim to be at all more real or important in the grand scheme of things than anything else.

All these connections make me wonder if Housekeeping is actually intended as a postmodernist text. I didn't think so when I first read it, but I also had little to no understanding of what postmodernism actually was at that point either. Going back over it, I'm not as sure. On the one hand, it does seem a little postmodernist in its philosophies, but at the same time, there's something about the story and the writing that's so pretty and quiescent that for some reason it reminds me much more of a 19th-century novel (it did at the time that I read it too, I remember).

Apparently, though, some people do take it as a postmodernist text—so says my Google search. In particular, I found an interesting passage from an online book called The Novel After Theory by Judith Ryan that deliberates this:

Shortly before the publication of Gilead, an interviewer asked Marilynne Robinson whether Housekeeping could legitimately be described as a postmodern novel. Robinson replied that much of what is termed postmodern is not substantially different from the structures and issues at work in a novel like Moby Dick. Nineteenth-century writers, she went on to explain, "just knew a great deal about the problem of knowledge." Indeed, she emphasized that these writers confronted the paradoxes inherent in consciousness and experience in a spirit of intellectual exhilaration rather than despair as many people might today.

This, I think, does a better job of highlighting my issue with the postmodernist take on history than I myself did in class today. It's not "the problem of knowledge" itself that doesn't sit well with me—at least, not entirely—because I'm fairly on board with that point. I understand that people are too inherently biased to ever present something exactly as it is or was and appreciate that postmodernists like Doctorow want to challenge their readers not to take what they've been told of history at face value.

However, I do still have a problem with the postmodernist idea of history, and that lies in the issue of "despair" raised by the end of the passage above. I suppose I don't entirely think that people like Doctorow take postmodernism so far that they entirely eliminate the possibility of life having a point—of us all being part of a larger history that actually is true enough to hold onto and to form some sort of purpose out of—but I do think they come dangerously close, and that's why I don't feel completely comfortable thinking too deeply into the concept.

See, as I just barely touched on at the beginning of this post, the reason that I can't quite accept the postmodernist view of history and never totally put my heart into Housekeeping is that I'm not okay with the idea that everything is transient, and everything depends on our interpretation, and everything is, in a way, fundamentally unknowable. I understand the rationale behind such a philosophy and legitimately see truth in it, but I can never completely buy into because I feel like it contradicts my basic human need to have something to latch onto and base life's purpose upon. I know that's an imperfect and unrealistic thing to need, but I for one am under the impression that that's just how human beings work—we can't simply accept that there's no such thing as a solidly true history because then what does that say for the present? Not much.

This brings me (finally) to the original Housekeeping quotation that sparked this entire blog entry, which is as follows:

In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains the earth is most ceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next rising, in hillock and tumulus. (Robinson 87-88)

It may be slightly underwhelming given all the effort I put into finding it, but I think it hits on a very important idea, which is that where we are now is entirely based on our history. The idea that we're "step[ping] on fossils," to me, suggests that the past is what has built up underneath us to make the earth we stand on. So, if postmodernism steals from us the legitimacy of that past, we're left with no ground on which to support ourselves.

Thus, while the acceptance displayed by Robinson and Doctorow of life's lack of one universal truth does seem very ideal, I just don't see it as realistic. If everything is as meaningful as everything else, then everything is also as meaningless, and that's a philosophy that I don't feel can mesh well with human emotions and that need for stability that we all naturally have.

Cue long, drawn-out sigh: Siiiiigh.

It irks me a fair bit that I just read a book in which at least half, if not more, of the main characters died at the end and never for a moment felt even the slightest pang of sadness. Or happiness, or heart-warmed-ness, or any other tender emotion for that matter. I felt a lot of anger, if that's at all important, and at exactly four points—I counted—was at least somewhat amused and came close to chuckling.

In all seriousness, though, I really am disappointed when I look back on Ragtime and think about how little emotion it elicited from me, despite all the potentially interesting plots it introduced at various points. Quite honestly, I feel cheated—like there was so much to know about all of the characters in this novel, and yet they're still basically strangers to me even now that I've read the whole thing.

Take Younger Brother, for instance: He was with us throughout the entire book and, on the surface, seemed to follow an extremely interesting path from when we first met him to when he finally passed away. Yet, as much as I've read about Younger Brother, I don't feel connected to him in the slightest. He's an intriguing character, yes, but that's all he'll ever be to me; he just doesn't feel like a person. He has a body, he has a mind—and a rather fascinating one at that, I admit—but one thing Doctorow neglects to give him, along with virtually every other character in his novel, is a heart. He's just the bare skeleton of a character—a hollow Tin Man, if you'll pardon my cheesy allusion to The Wizard of Oz—and consequently, he's never really going to mean anything to me. Heck, I don't even know his name.

The sad thing was that these characters had backstories; it was just that Doctorow refused to acknowledge them most of the time. The passage at the very beginning of Chapter 29, for example, was one of my favorites in the novel because it suddenly made Father so much more real and more human. However, it was remarkably short-lived, and I was yet again left disappointed, as I was so many times throughout this novel.

What's worse is that I can't chock all these woefully unsatisfying characters up to Doctorow's being a bad writer—or, I could potentially chock it up to that, but I can't chock it up to his being unintelligent. Good writer or not, he definitely knew what he was doing with this novel and portrayed the characters so emptily because that was how he wanted them portrayed. Thus, I wonder what the point of it all could possibly have been. I don't feel like I really learned anything about the time period, as there were so many complete falsehoods sprinkled in with facts that I couldn't rely on anything I read without checking it elsewhere first; I don't feel like I got a deep message out of the novel, as every seemingly didactic passage was either undercut by sarcasm or contradicted later in the book; and, finally, I don't feel like I enjoyed the experience at all because I couldn't relate to the characters. So why did I even read it to begin with?

Unfortunately, I don't have any answer for that question better than, "I had to read it for class," which is sort of a shame, if you ask me. Doctorow outlined so many plots throughout the course of Ragtime that could have made for powerful, interesting stories all on their own, but he never let me delve deep enough into any of them to actually be moved. I can honestly say that I just read a book, but I'd hesitate to say that I read a novel because a novel is a work of art and, in my opinion, words on a page don't constitute art unless the author's heart is actually in them, and I just didn't get that sense with Ragtime.

But, at the same time, I do have to say that I think Doctorow probably accomplished whatever it was he wanted to accomplish with Ragtime because I wouldn't for a moment believe that he was originally trying to write a moving, emotional novel and just failed miserably at it. I can't say I know what exactly he was trying to write—in fact, to be perfectly honest, I haven't the slightest clue what on earth it might have been that he wanted to write—but whatever it was, it wasn't the kind of novel I like to read.

The funny thing is that it wouldn't have been hard at all to make me feel connected to just one of Ragtime's many characters; I'm really kind of a softy when it comes to novels and quite likely would have cried at at least one, if not all, of the many deaths in the book had one of my favorite authors written it. But, you know, pulling on readers' emotional strings just doesn't seem to be E.L. Doctorow's thing, PoMoMoFo that he is (new term I just made up; stands for Postmodern Mother-FILL IN BLANK YOURSELF and quite frankly is meant to be sort of derogatory).

So, whatever. If he'd rather sit at his computer and smirk at how delightfully ironic he is, he can be my guest. Just don't expect me to read any more of his works.

"Hammertime" by N.S. Dutta

If you can't groove to this
Then you probably are dead.
[...]
Break it down
Stop... Hammer time.

— MC HAMMER

[Bear with me here, but I don't want to rewrite the entire novel, so we're just going to cut to Chapter 19.]

But Snoop Doggy Dogg's album did not put him at the top of the entertainment pyramid. No man occupied that lofty place. Rather it was a bird.

The nest of Big Bird was at 123 Sesame Street. The great artiste came to work every morning adorned in lemon yellow feathers, orange legs with stripes of bubble gum pink, and three-toed feet. He affected colors slightly bothersome to the eye. When he stepped out of his nest a loose feather fell around his feet. One of the children who had rushed out to meet him picked up the feather and tucked it under the ear of nearby young girl. The girl thanked him profusely. In the meantime Big Bird had marched onto the street, children, adults, and even some fellow muppets circling him like they too were birds. Big Bird carried his gold-colored head high. He was at this time in his twenty-fourth year on the air—a burly eight-footer with a large body of dense yellow feathers, yellow wings, and bulging excited eyes set so close together to suggest they were made of plastic. Accepting the obeisances of his neighbors, he strode to his preferred stoop, a modest set of steps before a richly green door where he was visible to everyone and everyone to him. He was joined in his theme song. He was wearing a smile and enthusiasm. He sat down in front of the door, and ignoring Cookie Monster's letter of the day which was usually the first thing he looked at, said to his neighbors I want to meet that gangsta fellow. What's his name. The West Coast rapper. Snoop Doggy Dogg.

He had sensed in Snoop Doggy Dogg's album a lust for fame as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet. Big Bird was that classic avicular hero, a bird hatched to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and pluckiness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight. He was familiar with all 26 letters of the English alphabet. He had once performed a duet with Diana Ross that had saved her from has-been-cy. He had single-wingedly bolstered the self esteem of the American public by making them all feel good about themselves as children. Moving about on his two large feet he crossed all borders and was at home everywhere in the world. He was a monarch of the flourishing, vivacious kingdom of Sesame Street whose sovereignty was in every heart granted. Commanding friendships that beggared royal fortunes, he was a revolutionist who left to presidents and kings their territory while he took control of the minds and allegiances of their youth. For years he had surrounded himself with parties of friends and acquaintances, always screening them in his mind for personal characteristics that might warrant even more regard for them than he already emitted. He was invariably pleased. Everywhere men bowed to him and women cooed with affection. He knew as no one else the deceptively warm and inviting reaches of unlimited success. The ordinary operations of his intelligence and instinct over the past twenty-four years had made him preeminent in the affairs of neighbors and he thought this said little for the residents of Sesame Street. Only one thing served to remind Big Bird of his being an animal and that was a quintessentially birdlike quality that had colonized his nose and made of it a beak of the monstrously large type that would only be rivaled by that of George of the Jungle's pet Toucan several years down the road. This affliction had come to Big Bird at birth. As he grew older and richer the beak grew larger. He learned to stare down people who looked at it, but every day of his life, when he arose, he examined it in the mirror, finding it indeed loathsome but at the same time exquisitely satisfying. It seemed to him that every time he performed a song or resolved a conflict or learned a new word, another inch was tacked on at the base of the giant feature. His favorite story in literature was a tale of Theodore Seuss Geisel's entitled "The Sneetches," which told of extraordinarily lovely creatures whose beauty was perfect except in those who lacked a small green star on their stomaches. When Sylvester McMonkey McBean, a fix-it-up chappie, made them go through a machine designed to rid them of this imperfection, the stars appeared; but as all the Sneetches were thereby indistinguishable, their specialness died. To Big Bird, the magnitude of his horrendous beak was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.

Once, years before, he had arranged a dinner party at his residence on Sesame Street in which his guests were the dozen most powerful children's television stars in America besides himself. He was hoping the collected energy of their minds might crumble the twigs of his nest. Fred Rogers startled him with the news that he was chronically constipated and did a lot of thinking on the toilet. Barney dozed over his brandy. Kermit uttered inanities. Gathered in this one room the entertainment elite could think of nothing to say. How they appalled him. How his heart quaked. He heard through his brain the electric winds of an empty universe. And he asked himself Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street.

*Just for the record, I'm not throwing the extra "Doggy" in "Snoop Doggy Dogg" for no reason; that was his official name when he released his debut album in 1993, when "Hammertime" is set. As we all know, historical accuracy is not something "Ragtime" takes lightly, so I made sure to do my research.

**I will probably write something a little more serious and insightful later in the week, but I have to say I think it is mildly significant to note that the ridiculousness of this passage is really not my doing; I just switched up the characters a little.

First impressions of "Ragtime"

With a few exceptions, I generally don't like to write off novels as inarguably "not good" because I don't think I'm qualified to make such an assertion—nor is anybody else really, since what is and isn't good is a totally subjective matter. So, I'm not going to say that Ragtime is not good. Rather, I will simply say that I struggle very greatly to understand how it can possibly be perceived by a sane human being as anything other than not good.

For one thing, I just don't like the writing style at all, which is sort of weird because I normally enjoy narrators that are a bit austere and detached. I loved Hemingway last semester, for example, but Doctorow's voice is not creating the same effect for me at all. While I felt like Hemingway's short sentences had a lot buried underneath them, Doctorow's just sound dull and list-like; they annoy me. Maybe it's partly due to the fact that Ragtime's also in third person, whereas The Sun Also Rises was told by a character I really liked, but either way, I'm having a very hard time getting into the narrative voice.

Beyond that, I'm also finding the plot pretty unilaterally infuriating. The only times I find myself actually getting into the story line is when I forget completely that I'm technically reading about real people—this happens mostly with Evelyn Nesbit, since I hadn't even heard of her until opening this book—and even then I often struggle to understand what Doctorow's point is. It irritates me mostly that he deliberately chooses to use historical figures, as opposed to plain old fictional characters, but then proceeds to use them in what seem to be largely random and meaningless ways.

I definitely don't think a good historical novel needs to be entirely accurate, but I have a hard time buying into Doctorow's story when he's so deliberate and over-the-top about those aspects of it that are inaccurate. I feel like he's just waving scenes in our face and trying to tease us with them in a, "Hey look what I can make these people do—I bet it'll weird you out," kind of way. So much of the novel strikes me as Doctorow simply flaunting the fact that he's the author and can bend history however he wants, rather than actually trying to make a point.

And you know, not everything has to have a point. Doctorow is perfectly right in thinking that he, as the author, can make his characters do anything in the word he wants, regardless of the fact that most of the people he's writing about have real-life identities too. I mean, if I were writing a historical novel, I'm sure I'd get a huge kick out of having one famous person make obscene gestures at another famous person through the bars in his jail cell too. However, just because I'd get a chuckle out of writing it doesn't mean anyone else in the world would find it as interesting to read.

So, it's not the fact that Doctorow seems to think himself pretty cool for being able to throw all these historical figures together in such absurd scenes that I have a problem with; honestly, all power to him if that's a favorite pastime of his. Rather, I'm just irked that he seems to expect people to read it and be equally enamored of his craftiness. I mean, if he's not even going to pretend like he's trying to write a convincing novel, then I don't see why I have to pretend like I think it's good.

However, just like I won't explicitly coin this a bad book, I also won't say that Ragtime legitimately has no point; to some people I'm sure it does. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people—not yet, anyway. At the moment, all I see in Ragtime is a compilation of absurd, random scenes mixed in with the occasional glimpse of humanity, with the former heavily outweighing the latter. But, hey. It's possible Doctorow will surprise me with a great ending that saves the whole story for me, so I suppose I won't jump to conclusions just yet.

(The uncomfortable thing, though, is that I just checked and apparently Doctorow is still alive. Normally books I read for class are written by dead people, which makes me feel totally guiltless in criticizing them—Charlotte Brontë, for instance, has been dead for more than 150 years, so I think it's safe to say she no longer has the ability to give a hoot what people think of Jane Eyre, which is excellent news for me. Now that I know Doctorow's alive, however, I feel like this blog entry just bullied an 81-year-old man, which is, by most standards, not cool. Oh well.)