Harvey

An interesting passage from the reading a couple nights ago:

"It occurred to Oswald that everyone called the prisoner by his first name. The Soviet press, local TV, the BBC, the Voices of America, the interrogators, etc. Once you did something notorious, they tagged you with an extra name, a middle name that was ordinarily never used. You were officially marked, a chapter in the history of the state. Francis Gary Powers. In just these few days the name had taken on a resonance, a sense of fateful event. It already sounded historic." (page 198, my edition).

It's pretty clear that Delillo is emphasizing the media's title for this man due to its similarity to the name Lee takes on after the assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald. First, middle, and last, very official.

The passage makes it seem like maybe Lee would be kind of pleased with how his image has been treated by the American public. People despise him, and in the story, it's not even his own actions or character which earn him his infamy, but we use all three names, and everyone knows them. It goes along with the smiling while he's being punched thing: it's unpleasant, but it's attention--a way to have some place in a society which has otherwise rejected him at every opportunity.

We briefly covered Delillo's names for Lee in class: how using the first name makes us sympathize and see him as a character, rather than a crazy assassin or political pawn.  Mr. Mitchell pointed out that historical texts generally use last names, and novels tend to use first names. This passage makes it seem like, on top of familiarizing Lee, using his first name kind of denies him his historical significance. He's just Lee; not even really behind the assassination, just a lonely dude. Which is sad. I feel like Lee deserves the grandiose name at least... not that he got it in an acceptable way at all (and not that anything he's doing at this point in the book is acceptable).

I just found a Slate article on the three-name assassin phenomenon. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/01/why_do_so_many_assassins_have_three_names.html

It's a little lengthy so I'll summarize. Basically it points out all the famous American assassins who go by their middle names (James Earl Ray, John Wilkes Booth, Lee, and apparently six others in the top twenty famous assassins). It proposes that maybe we use the middle name to avoid besmirching the other Lee Oswalds out there, but then goes on to point out that some of them went by their middle names before they became famous. Apparently Lee Harvey Oswald was introduced with his middle name on a talkshow before Kennedy's assassination. So the author proposes something that fits with Delillo's point very well:
"Would-be assassins might embellish their own names to sound more grandiose. (Middle names were a point of pride when they first became popular in the United States in the 19thcentury.)"
Can I just point out that the author of this article and I (inspired by Delillo's observation) both independently chose the word 'grandiose' to describe the three-name style. I love it when people are on the same page with weird little theories like this. 

Any thoughts on names and-the-like? Also, does anyone know how to switch back to normal font without undoing all of your formatting when you copy-paste something? I feel like Blogger is lacking in some fundamental word-processing abilities like this. I've seen other blog posts struggle with it too.

Libra

I'm really liking Libra. It's fun how the narration skips around from snapshot to snapshot--most quite vivid an creatively described. (I like his descriptions of the subway. Subways are very aesthetically distinctive places.) It's a little confusing, but I actually feel like the way that Delillo intersperses Lee's readings and thoughts with real-life experiences at various unspecified moments captures the distance that Lee keeps from the outside world--and the reality he finds in his books--very well.
"Richard Carlson as Herb Phil-brick, ordinary citizen, member of the Communist Party, undercover agent for the FBI. She tapped her fingers on the palm of her hand. Rise and shine. He saw a guy sitting backwards on a motorcycle, smoking a cigarette and looking into space," In this passage you can really feel that Lee's experiences (in this case his mother waking him up) are simply an insignificant nuisance; a brief distraction from his fantasies of joining a communist group and jumping across rooftops in dark clothing.
This description sort of makes him sound delusional, but honestly, I like little Lee. He seems like a smart guy. He's a little tortured and eccentric (and arrogant and inconsiderate), but sympathetic to be sure.
We watched a video in history composed of clips of news coverage during Kennedy's assassination. Just going off of vibes, Lee Harvey Oswald seemed like a pretty normal guy. I don't think anyone else in the class felt this way, but he seemed pretty intelligent, and somehow the most modern in his attitudes of anyone in the movie. You know how news people from the 60's have weird accents and seem kind of artificial? He wasn't like that. In fact, he seemed much more sane than he comes across in the book. He just kept asking for a shower and complaining that the cops were denying his rights. Maybe he was too calm, I don't know, but he certainly wasn't overtly insane.

The main way in which I haven't been charmed by the kid is his strange attitude towards his mother. He seems to hate her, which I don't understand and I'm sure she doesn't deserve. He also has a weird need for control, and the grinning while he's being punched is unsettling. And he may be interested in Marxism mostly for personal reasons (desiring fame, seclusion, what-have-you), rather than genuine social concern. But doesn't everyone believe what they believe for personal reasons on some level?
Anyway, there are some troubling aspects to his character, but I feel like the point that DeLillo is trying (and in my opinion succeeding) to get across is that Lee, however flawed, is not really at fault (I mean Lee the character, not Lee the person. The book doesn't seem to take its theories too seriously). He's just a pawn. Weirdly enough, the people scheming don't seem so at fault either.  They don't intend to kill Kennedy. (Although honestly I think that intending to lie to the entire American public in order to galvanize them against communism is almost more sinister than killing a single man. That's large-scale oppression, and given the awful things that have happened in this country and in others in the name of the American fight against communism, it's pretty unacceptable.)

A little observation: It says no one knows why Heindel goes by "Hidell" and then, a couple pages later at random the author throws in, "Hidell means don't tell". I don't know what to take from this other than the fact that secrets are a big theme in this book.

Kindred

There's something about Rufus that's--I don't want to say sympathetic because he's been doing terrible thing after terrible thing, but... like Mr. Mitchell was working hard to say tactfully in class, he's not as easy to hate as he could be. I think that this is due to the fact that he's exactly like a child, even though he's biologically been an adult for more than half the book. He throws temper tantrums, he wants his Mommy back and fears his Daddy and gets really attached to people. He still goes by Rufe. His whole role in the story is to be the incompetent fool that Dana keeps having to save and trying to educate: a very child-like role.
And we forgive children for a lot of things that we don't let adults get away with. Kids are allowed to be selfish and whiny and unpleasant. In World Since, we've been watching this movie, Kramer vs. Kramer, about two parents getting divorced. Their five year old can be really inconsiderate to his dad, who tries his best to take care of him after the mom leaves. But we don't blame the kid, we're just like, "aw, he's having a hard time and he doesn't know any better." So the same feeling tends to sort of apply to Rufus, at least in Dana's eyes, maybe not to all readers. He's had a pretty hard life (though not as hard as most of the characters in this book) and he acts like he's ignorant, so she's inclined to forgive him.

Sarah's an interesting character. I like the perspective Butler takes on her evolution into an Uncle Tom like character-- that it's unfortunate but understandable. "Uncle Tom" has come to refer to slaves that were too loyal to white plantation owners (and really to anyone who participates in their own group's maltreatment). It's a reference to the book Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, though an anti-slavery novel, is now famous for its problematic depiction of content slaves (many of which then became famous slave stereotypes). And actually maybe a better term to use would be "Mammy-like character", because the female domestic slave's name was Mammy in Uncle Tom's Cabin.  When Rufus calls her "Aunt Sarah", Dana is a little bit disturbed and thinks, "Aunt Sarah? Well, that was better than Mammy Sarah".
Sarah's not content as a slave, but she's opposed to escape attempts, at least after Luke is sold off for "just (going) ahead and (doing) what he wanted to"(138). I just like how Dana is at first disappointed in her for having this point of view and then comes to understand it.
We always hate peers that buy into messed up, oppressive systems at our expense. For example, in schools there can be some vitriol toward try-hards, brown-nosers, suck-ups. I assume that this bad-blood, at least in some circumstances, comes out of a feeling that those people are out-competing normal kids by working harder than they should be or caring too much about the boring stuff adults like. And it's easy to buy into this mentality. Like, who likes scabs? I don't like scabs in the abstract. But if you were actually put, firsthand, into a scab's situation, you'd probably have some sympathy. Scabs are in a tough place. My mom's union is actually considering a strike and she's worried about it because not getting paid enough is bad, but not as bad as being fired. Even though she wants them to succeed, she's not sure if she'd strike with them or not. Safety is appealing, and honestly, whether you're a striking worker, a rebellious pre-teen, or a slave, if you don't actually have a chance of changing the corrupt system holding you down, it could be smart to try to just make the best of your situation. Now the thing is that some slaves did escape, so trying wasn't pointless. But I can see why Sarah would feel that way, and after escaping and being brought back, so can Dana.

So it goes

I was talking to my mom about Slaughterhouse 5 the other day. She said that she had read it but didn't remember much, so I explained the plot to her and she bobbed her head up and down occasionally as if it seemed familiar.
"So he skips around in time and then gets put in an alien zoo..."
*head bobbing*
"And he's really pathetic so that the story doesn't seem like a traditional war story--doesn't glorify war."
*head bobbing*
"And whenever someone dies the narrator says 'so it goes'".
"OH! Right, that!"
I was amazed that that was just about the only thing she remembered: 'so it goes'. But it is one of the most distinctive parts of the narration, I think. It's explained at the beginning that it's a Tralfamadorian phrase--like "bless you", but for death.
By our standards, this is a very nonchalant way to address the end of a life. The whole narration is remarkably apathetic, but this little phrase takes it to an extreme, and I think that's the point. The Tralfamadorians don't care when people die, because they can still see the rest of their life-- it's simply the end of the millipede, which always has and always will exist in their own super-time*. "so it goes" is the perfect description for something inevitable and morally neutral.
I thought that Vonnegut was being really considerate by honoring a dog and the lice and other parasites that are steamed to death with the phrase. I was like, "wow, that's nice of him to consider them as important as people". But then he used it for an inanimate object (dead champaign) and I realized that it's not a really a matter of respect, it's just acknowledgement that something has come to an end.
Speaking of Tralfmadorian influences in the narration, I like how Vonnegut structures Slaughterhouse like a Tralfamadorian novel. He says he's done this explicitly early on, and then later we get to see what these novels actually look like: several short episodes, which together paint a picture of life. And they're read all at once, of course, so there's no plot or suspense; you know it all from the beginning just like we know about the climax of Slaughterhouse 5 from the beginning. Though we can't read the entire book at once, Vonnegut gives us the next best thing: an utterly mixed-up, disjointed, episodic timeline and summary of most of Billy's life in the first chapter. However, Slaughterhouse departs from theirs in that it definitely has a moral (or a couple).

*see my previous post if you dare

Issues with Time Travel in Slaughterhouse 5

 skip this post and read "so it goes" if you want something more book-related and understandable. 
There seem to be paradoxes in Vonnegut's portrayal of time. I don't mean this as an indictment of the book per se... it's still good fiction, and it makes as much sense as it needs to. I just wanted to try to flesh-out exactly what's been bothering me about the timeline. It's difficult to talk about. I apologize if I stop making sense.
My first issue is that the book assumes a super-time, like most time-travel stories. This is my term for a timeline which the time-traveling characters and usually the reader follow. I don't know if there's an actual name for this-- other people have probably also noticed that it's a thing.
When there are different versions of the same 2016 (for example, one like ours and one that's been decimated because the main characters accidentally went back in time and, like, detonated some nuclear weapon or something), it's obvious that there's a super-time. There's an earlier, unchanged 2016, and a later, messed up one--nominally in the same time, but in different super-times. There's a younger Dr. Who and an older one, even though each exists in any time period. Dr. Who is aging in his own super-time. The Tralfamadorians exist in every time at once, yet they change--chose to visit different times in different orders, choose to spend more of their super-time at the zoo than in wars.

 Vonnegut doesn't fall into the trap of letting things that have already happened change(not outwardly anyway--I'll come back to this)-- I have to give him credit for that. To Vonnegut, either 2016 is blown up or it's not--there aren't different 2016s in different states. This book's got a very deterministic outlook which wouldn't fit well with people reordering the past from the future. (Without freewill, what would make each iteration of characters different from the next--what would make it so that a previous version of each character hadn't gone back and blown up the world in the first place? I recognize that doesn't make sense. It's the best I've got.) Due to this consistency, the book's super-time is less obvious. It still exists, I think, and though I don't know that super-time is problematic, it sorta seems paradoxical to me to separate time as a medium you can travel through from your super-time that you exist in/progress in no matter what. Or, at least, it seems like you're not properly traveling in time unless you also travel through super-time.  And Billy does seem to be stuck in his super-time. He's progressing: learning about his past and his future. He gets dislodged in time at a particular point in his life, which implies that each time he returns to a point, he's a little different. He has different memories so he knows more or less about his future. So there are different Billys that people are interacting with at any point in time. Which Billy is Weary beating up in the German woods? all of them? a different one for each iteration of Weary?(super time sort of assumes infinite iterations of the same time period--one for every moment of super-time). This seems problematic to me.
Also, it's strange that, given that Billy is different every time he goes somewhere, he wouldn't do different things each time he visits an event. Even if you don't believe in freewill, it would be difficult to argue that different people with different experiences don't act in different ways--a Billy that's seen his death 20 times might act differently than a newly unstuck Billy. Is Billy just that passive, that no matter what he's been through he reacts in the same way every time he is in a certain situation? Even if "one of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters", that seems a little far fetched.

Confessions of a Semi-reformed Wallflower

It's very easy to sympathize with underdogs. It's clear that there's some cultural/social tension between the extroverted and fun-loving and the quiet and wallflowery--or the pagan and the monotheistic. (Reed kind of equates the two, but I think that one sort can exist without the other.) I think that the blame for this social tension lies, in our minds, with whoever is in charge; whoever has had the opportunity to do the most harm to the other side. In Mumbo, Jes Grew is, for the most part, the underdog, and the Atonists are "the powers that be" (Mr. Mitchell's words). I think this has been true for most of history as well: monotheism and western culture have, for whatever reason(s) (guns, germs, steel, and perhaps, if Reed is right, a desire to dominate) come out on top, and done extremely reprehensible things with this privilege.

But to middle-school-Natalie, Atonism was most certainly the underdog. I think that I wasn't alone in this perception. The word "wallflower" doesn't tend to evoke evil and controlling. It usually means quiet, nerdy, too awkward to dance: underdog.  I know it's hard to believe, but some people actually do find it fun to discuss snobbish things like, "if I stand in the water today am I the same person who stood there yesterday etc. etc."(Although I think it's usually the river that's not the same...is that the thought experiment Reed's referring to?) Unlike Moses's privileged, over-dog mom, these kids are generally not in a position of power in middle school.

Sympathy for the nerds, and blame on the socially dominant kids is a common theme in popular culture, especially in movies and tv shows centered around high school (Mean Girls, Freaks and Geeks, Perks of Being a Wallflower). There are very important aspects of the Jes Grew-Atonist dynamic which barely carry over at all in these stories, like the stuff relating to race and religion. However, there are certainly some parallels that would suggest that, by sympathizing with the nerds, they're being told from the Atonist point of view. Set is unhappy because he can't dance and no one likes him. Presented this way, he sounds like the homely but lovable main character of a quirky coming of age novel. You just have to ignore the murder and oppression and cannibalism.
Though I think Reed's metanarrative is a very useful one, taking the wallflower perspective doesn't rob these movies of their merit. I think that Atonism looks bad when it's in control, and Jes Grew looks bad (though objectively much less bad) when it's in control. Having fun is great, but quiet thoughtfulness is not objectively amoral.

 Coming out of an elementary school with a relatively introverted (and fairly white) student body, and entering a huge middle school full of Jes Grew was sort of terrifying. People were so confident, and they listened to all this unfamiliar music, and were so open with sexuality (I mean, by a goodie-goodie sixth grader's standards). Most of them were totally friendly to me, but life was not so fun as a wallflower, and in my mind that was in part because of them--the "cool kids".  I put (past tense) some blame on Jes Grewish things (like popular music) for my discomfort in middle school. I have to admit that I was a little bit of an Atonist--not explicitly racist, but also not understanding of cultural things with African American roots, like hip hop. Uni has helped me develop more of an appreciation for these things and realize the errors of my past beliefs (though I still can't dance).


An unimportant sidenote: I love that Freud's comment about America being a big mistake made it into both Mumbo Jumbo and Ragtime.

Michael Kohlhaas Walker

Today, feeling too lazy to get up off my coach to look for my hard copy of Ragtime, I briefly searched (in vain) for a pdf online. Though I didn't find what I was looking for, I did stumble across something very interesting: an audiobook of Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist.

At first I was confused as to why this seemingly unrelated German audiobook was mixed into my otherwise disappointing but relevant results. And then I kind of read it out loud in my head. "Kohlhaas", like "Coalhouse" perhaps? We've known that Coalhouse is a weird character: he doesn't seem to be real, but he still has a name that's not a title (unlike Mother, Father, Tateh, Little Girl, and all of Doctorow's other original characters except for Sarah), and he seems to be extra detached from Doctorow's narration. So I thought, "could he be a character that already exists in some other author's universe or vaguely based on a real person?-- something between real and a product of Doctorow's imagination?"

Well, according to Kohlhaas's Wikipedia page, he's based on a real 16th century German dude named Kohlhase who, after having his horses seized unjustly, "sought redress in the Saxon courts but failed to obtain it. Outraged, he issued a public challenge in 1534 and burned down houses in Wittenberg. Even a letter of admonition from Martin Luther could not dissuade him, and Kohlhase and the band he collected committed further acts of terror."

It's pretty obvious that the similarities in the names of the three characters are no coincidence. Our Coalhouse could have been based directly on the historical figure or on the character. (The "hows" instead of a "hays" suggests to me that maybe he was based off of the character, which would mean that we've got some multilayered history-fiction mingling going on. Pretty cool.)

I think it's too bad that the story of the original Kohlhase has no racial or even American significance at all; the analogy ends with the immediate story and misses out on the (very important) political context. But its still a cool allusion, and it makes it clear why Coalhouse has an actual name.