I'll Be Nice When I'm a Spy

Throughout our reading of Libra we have struggled with Delillo's sympathetic portrayal of the most notorious assassin in American history. Although at first I kind of hated Lee and his teenage pseudo intellectualism, by the end of the book I couldn't help but feel for this man who wanted something so bad, was trying so hard to get it, but for whom apparently the only thing standing in his way is his own incompetence. The way I see it, Lee wants two things: he wants to connect with people emotionally and he wants to be a capable and consequential world class spy (these two things seem to contradict, but I won't go into that here. For more on that, see my Libra paper!!!). Lee wants to belong with or to someone the way in which he's never truly been able. And, he wants to be the man in a suit in a smokey bar, playing world powers off of each other. I think this is an important distinction; he doesn't just want to be a player in history, he wants to be a deep thinker and a decision maker.

Unfortunately, Lee has spent his life failing on both of these fronts, as 400 pages of Libra will well attest to. 

But here's my theory: Lee's feelings of inadequacy on these two issues are connected. Because when (and only when) Lee does manage to feel like he's playing the important historical role he was always supposed to play is when he finally manages to empathize with people. He feels like he really connects with Konno, Leon and David Ferrie. The first two are people he's trying to give American secrets to, and the third convinces him to kill the president. It is when he's riding on the high of successfully getting into the USSR that he woos and marries Marina (who would have guessed little Ozzie the Rabbit would ever get married??) . And finally, right when he's standing in the third floor window of the Dallas book depository, waiting to assassinate the president? He's thinking about Jackie Kennedy, and how he wants her to look good in photos, for her sake. He thinks Governor Connolly would have liked him a lot. He seems at ease, and his concern is only for others. I can't totally figure why, but it seems like Lee is crippled socially when he feels unfulfilled in life. 

Plot within a Plot within a Plot

In class, we discussed the alternating threads of Libra, the parts which follow Lee Harvey Oswald's life, and the sections which follow the conception of an attempt on the president's life by ex CIA agents (the "plot plot"). I would argue there's a third story being told here, a third message Delillo is trying to convey. As someone writing about a topic (and presenting a view on said topic) that is commonly considered the realm of crazy conspiracy theorists, he also has to convince the reader to take his novel seriously. I think he so far has accomplished that goal very well, using a number of tactics.

First, is his portrayal of Oswald. He doesn't just seem like the kind of crazy guy who would try to shoot the president (though he does very very much seem like that guy) he also seems like the kind of guy who would be susceptible to suggestion. In his early years, Lee's obsession with Marxist literature makes me see him as someone desperately searching for a group to identify with. He loves the "idea" of Russia, not just the vastness of it. He looks around himself in New Orleans and doesn't see anyone he connects with, but then he reads his Marx and believes he's found someone with a similar way of thinking, a similar intellect. Whether or not he would get along with Marx is besides the point, its just important that Lee is looking for a cause and a group he can be a part of. We see this later in Japan when he's finally found somewhere he feels comfortable and is so relieved he tries to maim himself to stay there. Also in Japan, we meet Konno, who introduces us to the idea that when a smart, older man listens to Lee and talks to him about politics, Lee will be very receptive. He might even be willing to betray his country to that older man's association, which could be of use later.

Second, in the other narrative, Delillo works to paint the CIA agents as real people with legitimate motives, not the vague, unnamed members of organizations with somber names like "CIA", "FBI" and "Illuminati". I think Delillo distances his story from conspiracy theories by subverting those tropes we associate with such theories. He doesn't portray the CIA acting unanimously, he gives us Win Everett, a man with a wife and daughter resenting his forced retirement. He gives us T-Jay Mackey, a man who may have PTSD from the Bay of Pigs, who felt personally abandoned by his government there. He gives us Laurence "Larry" Parmenter, who "hummed something that amused him". These are people. And we see their (not unreasonable) plot build from the ground up.

Mildly Incestuous Undertones

Dana and Rufus officially have the most complicated relationship in history. The competition is over, folks. I've given up trying to characterize it because it changes throughout the book. But, adding a level of complication to that, while the transitions in their relationship must seem gradual and organic to Rufus, Dana probably has whiplash, trying to understand the child she met a few days ago as the adult standing in front of her.
On the one hand, one of the first things we learn about Rufus is that he's her ancestor, her great great [ad continuum] grandfather. Which makes the mother figure role she starts to occupy funny; the family tree actually goes the other way around. It makes sense that Rufus sees her this way: she shows up when he's in trouble, she reads to him, she takes care of him when he is sick. She even chides him the way a mother might, gently correcting him when he is a child. Obviously the situation cannot be read straight this way; Rufus sees Dana as racially inferior and occasionally tells her what to do in a way (I hope) most of us never do to our moms, but I think the evidence is there. For example, Margaret actually gets jealous of Dana when Rufus clearly prefers her reading.
The older Rufus gets, though, the less I see this mother-child dynamic. I suppose this makes sense as Rufus and Dana no longer have very disparate ages, but I am still SUPER creeped out by what this dynamic is being replaced with. Rufus, especially after the death of Tom Weylin, starts to see Dana as a wife figure. To where we have read he doesn't seem interested in "consummating" this "marriage", thank God, but rather he sees her as his "emotional" wife and Alice as his "physical" one. This idea is discussed by Dana explicitly after he calls them two halves of the same woman. If their physical appearances have maintained as similar as they were described early in the book, I would imagine this would be an even easier view to have. Its as if Rufus replaces the mutual wanting and loving he wanted with Alice, with Dana, who does actually love him in some way. He even tries to separate her from her real husband, Kevin, by refusing to mail Dana's letters to him.
It is difficult to picture all of these types of relating with another person into one relationship. Admittedly, its probably easier for Rufus. He doesn't know Dana is his own kin. He doesn't think of Dana as someone he grew up knowing, as she constantly disappeared for years on end. But from Dana's perspective, Rufus shares her gene pool and was a young child like two months ago. Ick.
I think this says more about how complicated long term time travel makes relationships than anything else. Additionally, it may say something about a culture in which a man's relationship with his mother might be similar in nature to that with his wife and that with his slave. All of a slave master's relationships are equally one sided and based in control. Maybe that's why Rufus doesn't find any of this as uncomfortable as I do.

But why does it go? And where?

     After finishing Slaughterhouse Five, I am left uncertain as to what Vonnegut means by his constant chant of "So it goes" after every mention of death. I read the book last year for a book talk. Then, I read the phrase as strictly ironic. I thought it was supposed to call to the reader's attention how war makes death so commonplace that we become cold to its tragedy, and that Vonnegut viewed this dispassion as a strictly bad thing. Going through the book a second time, I'm not so sure. I think it totally could be read straight. As in, time is a construct; what will be, is was and always will be; just let life happen.

     On the one hand, the way the Tralfamadorians talk about war just sounds like you're supposed to disagree. "We have wars as horrible as any you've ever seen or read about. There isn't anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments." Now I can read this one of two ways. One of them is that the Trafalmadorians collectively have an unhealthy amount of denial indicative of a compromised mental state. The other is that there's some massive, Orwellian government enacted brainwash going on in Tralfamador. Either way, I can't take their advice to Billy seriously and I don't think Vonnegut does either. Additionally, Vonnegut compares himself to Lot's wife. She looked back. She cared about the death and destruction behind her. So too then must Vonnegut.

     But at the same time, Billy seems happy, viewing life so passively. He's got more inner peace than anyone in the book who has passion and cares when people die. And these characters, the ones who try to create meaning and narrative in their lives are almost universally portrayed as ridiculous. No one reads Roland Weary's inner monologue of the constructed dramas of his life and thinks "I want to be just like him". Edgar Derby's impassioned speech on American Ideals falls flat. Valencia wants to believe Billy is deep and she cries out of love for him but Vonnegut does not encourage the reader to take her seriously. More often than not, she's seen gorging herself on candy bars. 

     It's such a weird thing, because I truly believe Vonnegut sets out to write an anti-war book. And what's the point of writing an anti-war book if you subscribe to Billy Pilgrim's worldview? If you believe we're all listless playthings of forces beyond our control, why does it matter what you think of war? War will happen. You might as well write an anti-glacier book. Furthermore, if death means nothing, why be opposed to wars?

     But the more we talk about this book, the more evidence I see for Vonnegut's sympathy to Billy's worldview. I can't reconcile the anti-war Vonnegut and the Zen Vonnegut, but they seem too at odds to coexist. I'll keep trying to figure it out.

Wishy Washy Mumbo Jumbo

For a guy whose whole argument relies on the cultural conflict he describes being centuries old and spanning the entirety of civilization, Reed's evidence is drawn from a pretty narrow perspective. This is my main problem with Reed's argument in Mumbo Jumbo. From what I understand, he is saying that Western culture and monotheism, which are stiff and unforgiving, have been oppressing other cultures and polytheism, which are fun and accepting, for millennia. I think his societal commentary can be very accurate when applied to 1920s or 1970s American race relations, specifically between whites and African Americans.  I am less convinced when Reed claims this same dynamic uniformly exists at a larger scale. I told myself, "That's okay. He's just using hyperbole to make his main point, which is about 1970s America, not the whole world." But flipping through the book, I am less convinced of this excuse. The idea that the dynamic is universal is all pervading. It's clearly one of the main themes of the book. Reed never misses a chance to reiterate that this war has been going on for centuries, all over the world. The Ancient Egypt section seems to exist to illustrate this point.
Basically, my issue is that while Reed claims this is a universal conflict, the "western civilization" side is clearly based only on American Puritan culture, and the "all non-Western civilization" side is only African cultures (which Reed lumps together as being uniform despite the size and diversity of Africa). My reasons for this are several.

First, Reed seems to be at a loss as to how to characterize Islam. There are many things which make it sympathetic to him. It has, at least in the United States, become a symbol of Black power. It is constantly at odds with that Atonist institution Christianity. It came from and is primarily practiced by people from the Middle East. On the other hand, it is monotheistic. It shares roots with Christians and Jews. As such, Abdul is one of the only "grey" characters in a novel that divides most characters into two teams pretty neatly. Adbul's burning the Book of Thoth is definitively Atonist, but if we see this as a denunciation of Islam, it only happens at the end of the novel. Either way Reed landed on the Islam issue, it would weaken his argument. He would either have to call a non-western culture Atonist, or a monotheistic culture Jes Grew(ist?).

Islam is at least mentioned. Reed does not acknowledge non-Western cultures which have been stereotypically portrayed as restrictive. Ancient Japan, China and India all had strict social systems and norms which in many cases did not allow expressive emotion. But Hinduism is about as polytheistic as a religion can get. Not exactly strong evidence for Reed's proposed meta-narrative.

Finally, Reed's characterization of Atonism reminds me more of Puritan Americans or stereotypical WASPs than anything else. Perhaps it also conjures of an image of repressed middle age peasants, but it does not all of Western culture for the past 10,000 years. I'm not even thinking of fringe groups. Ancient Rome is often considered the cradle of Western Civilization, and they were a bunch of polytheistic, sexually adventurous libertines.

Maybe America is oppressed. Maybe Christianity is oppressing. Maybe African American culture is liberating. But Reed generalizes these statements so far, that, in my opinion, he ultimately undermines his own argument.

Medieval Dance Parties of Death

Reading the first chapter of Mumbo Jumbo's description of Jes Grew, something sounded familiar. Probably somewhere around page six, I realized what it was. Reed appears to describe spontaneous dancing as a disease, an epidemic even, as yet another ridiculous or odd to make the reader go "okay, maybe this is happening in an actual historical time period, but this is all fictional" and be reminded that they have a book in their hands. They are reading made up words and not a historical account. It has the added benefit of being a very entertaining thing to imagine. We laugh at the ridiculousness of it.

The thing is, dancing plagues are a totally real thing.

I had to google this to make sure I had not just dreamed reading about them years ago, but it's true. Dancing mania spread throughout Europe many times, predominantly in the 14th and 17th centuries, but the oldest documented case was as early as the 7th century. It affected thousands of people, and to this day has no commonly accepted medical explanation. These weren't just huge parties later decried as unhealthy; men, women and children were all affected and danced to the point of passing out. In one of the most well documented cases, the outbreak in Strasbourg, Alsace in 1518, four hundred people danced over the period of a month. Many died from heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. Various records from the time exist that agree the afflicted were dancing, not having seizures or other medically explainable symptoms. Three centuries earlier, in 1278, two hundred people were compelled to dance across a bridge, which collapsed under the combined weight. The number of outbreaks is surprisingly large and spans across centuries, but there have been no documented cases since the 1600s.

Whether or not Reed based his Jes Grew off of historical dancing plagues is unclear. I haven't seen much evidence to support his being aware of their existence, but I'm not sure what such evidence would look like. Realizing dancing plagues are real, though, felt very similar to first hearing about Michael Kohlhaas. Both Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo are set in real historical time periods and chronicle real events, but with obviously fictitious elements added in. The distinction between historically accurate and not usually seems pretty obvious, or at least can be satisfied by a quick Google search. It is a comforting distinction to be able to make. Yet in both cases, there is a much older historical basis for something we have assumed to be made up. It is a little unnerving, as the line become fact and fiction becomes increasingly blurred.

The Endurance of a Duplicated Event

I've noticed a recurring theme while reading Doctorow's Ragtime. I'll call it duplication, though it might be more accurate to say "the same thing happening or existing repeatedly, sometimes in a different form". The little boy fixates on this in Chapter 15, playing the same records over and over "as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event" and stares at himself in the mirror for hours, entranced by the idea of creating a second self. He wholeheartedly believes his grandfather's stories, which describe bodily forms as fluid, changeable. The boy's obsessions call to mind Morgan's belief in reincarnation, specifically his belief that he himself is the reincarnated form of an Egyptian pharaoh. The same being, different forms, over and over.

Ford, too, believes in reincarnation, in more ways than one. His assembly line creates the same exact car, over and over. It's workers are interchangeable; any position is fluid; various people might fill the same position over time, but their purpose in the machine is the same. To move away from the abstract a bit, Tateh appears to literally invent the flip book (although a quick Wikipedia search tells me they existed as early as 1868) which show the same scene, over and over, the exact same each time.

I can't figure out though, why Doctorow focuses on this. It is clearly intentional (if nothing else the boy's fixation on duplication is explicit). Is this Doctorow calling to our attention the nature of his novel, viewing historical fiction as a duplication of the past and wanting us to consider and acknowledge the genre's inherent imperfection? An interesting thought, but I'm more inclined to think right now it's a nod to a theme of the period he's writing in. Perhaps everyone is so obsessed with re-creating things because music stored on a disk, the assembly line and mass production are the exciting new inventions of the Ragtime Era.