History as Fiction Thoughts

When I signed up for History as Fiction, I thought that the books I would read in class would resemble books of the historical fiction genre. I never thought that actual fiction was going to be put in books telling the tales of history. "How can you put something totally nonsensical into the telling of history? Aren't history and fiction opposites? You can't just add any made-up stuff you want to!" were among a few of my thoughts when I started the course.

Then I got to reading the books, and I thought it was pretty cool that authors intertwined fiction in the telling of so many familiar historical events/people/periods. That's basically all I thought of the books in History as Fiction by mid third quarter. They're not messing up the telling of history, they're just making for an interesting story to read.

When I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I started to see that the incorporation of fiction goes beyond for just the making of a cool version of the story. The insertion of the Tralfamadorians highlighted the way we perceive war, among other things. Than Kindred came along, and I definitely took notice to what time travel did to the way we look at the antebellum south in the slavery era. Libra was on a different level of incorporating fiction to emphasize the dynamics of the oh so many conspiracy theories.

And when I look back on it, I can see that the fiction isn't just make-believe to spice up the story, it highlights important dynamics in history. The fiction isn't opposite to history, it gives us a clearer sense of what happened because history doesn't have all the important dynamics, it just has facts. Fiction can give us what it gives to fictional characters (motives, feelings, thoughts, intentions,...) because history misses out on that.

Is He Real?

As I first started reading Libra, I happened to always find myself seeing Lee as a fictional character. I mean, Lee is a fictional character in a sense but I just couldn't associate him with the Lee Harvey Oswald I learned about growing up. It's not like I always thought "How could this book portray this cold blooded murderer as an innocent and naive character?" it's just that Lee in Libra and Lee Harvey Oswald had no connections with each other in my mind, they were separate people/characters.

I have a few theories as to why I never associated the two. My first theory is that Lee is more fictional than Lee Harvey Oswald in a sense that Lee has everything a fictional character has. We get Lee's feelings, thoughts, motives, etc. in the book whereas in history all we really get from Lee Harvey Oswald is the the laid out facts. Another theory that I have, and this may be intertwined with my first, is that all I knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before reading Libra was that he killed the president. Thus, reading about Lee's upbringing, life while serving in the army, marriage, etc. was all new to me. The reason I can easily see this playing a big role in how I perceived Lee as a fictional character is because as I neared the assassination in the book, I kept seeing Lee meld more and more into a historical figure.  Maybe also by the point Lee's fictionality was withering away as I could look back on Lee's life in the book and understand why the assassination went down the way it did.

TMI

For the past few days, I've been wondering why there's so much confusion over the JFK assassination when there is so much evidence to work off of. With so much information about one event, and in so many forms, why are we so confused? I mean we have documents, the Zaprudder film, the trials, the list goes on. It only hit me during the panel presentations that having so much information is the very reason as to why the story can't easily be pieced together.  You can't possibly string all the facts and evidence together to form a coherent story.

The fact that the more information there is, the less we're sure about what happened is so ironic. It's like with every addition of pieces of evidence we have in historical events, (with JFK's assassination being a part of history now), the more the fictionality of the events comes up. We feel the need to fill in every single detail so we put things together when they don't really belong that way and we fill in the blanks with assumptions and guesses.

And, just to go off on a little tangent here, I feel as if this is why Libra is one of the most believable stories as to how the assassination was planned and taken out, not because I actually believe the story in Libra as a whole, but because the planning and the way the plan was taken out wasn't the "perfect" humans expect. Thus, the story shines in its authenticity in being realistic. I can easily see many dynamics of what happened in Libra actually having took place. Although these characters are made up, I can easily see a Raymo or Everett having planned out what they were going to do assuming Lee missed.

Alice and Rufus in the 1970s

So we know that Rufus would have loved to marry Alice had he lived in the 1970's, but would Alice have agreed to marry him? This question has been nagging at me for basically the entire book long. I would like to think that Alice and Rufus could have been a normal, loving couple had they lived in a later time period, but something tells me that it's not as probable as I think. We know that a lot of Alice's hate for Rufus stems from his being white. At one point Alice says that she'd rather sleep with ten black men than with Rufus. But if Alice and Rufus had lived in the 1970's, these racial barriers wouldn't exist in the same way they existed in the ante-bellum slavery era. Well, that's what I thought when I was mid-way through the book.

The truth is that an interracial couple still wasn't normal in the 1970s, as we can see from Dana and Kevin's relationship. Dana and Kevin get looks from people and also have no family support when they want to get married. What's interesting is that Dana has a more extreme reaction than Kevin to her family not giving support. Kevin is one who just brushes these things off and could care less (he even says something along the lines of let's just pretend we don't have family), while Dana is actually concerned when her family isn't happy with the marriage. This reminds me of Rufus who could care less about how the people around him think of how he loves Alice and how Alice is concerned about her reputation. Of course the time period in which Alice and Rufus live in affects how Alice feels about Rufus, but if Alice had so much hatred towards Rufus because of his being white in that time, and there still is something weird about being an interracial couple in the 1970s, I think it is highly unprobable that Alice and Rufus could have been in a normal relationship in the 1970s.

Why is Rufus Unlikable?

I find it quite weird that many people seem to link Rufus's dislikability  to the time period he was raised in. I thought that most people, like I, would point towards Rufus's inconsistent personality to blame for his dislikability. Rufus can prove to be a good person throughout the book at many scenes. He really can be playful, nice, gentle, and trustworthy when he wants to. The problem is he is very inconsistent with staying this likable person. Whenever he doesn't get what he wants, he flares up and totally pushes his concern for others' emotional and/or physical pain aside to ensure that he gets what he wants. Not only does Rufus push aside his concern for others' pain, but he also pushes aside his morals.

This is the main reason I find Rufus dislikable, he doesn't have a moral line within himself that he won't cross. You would expect that since Tom Weylin keeps his word with everybody, including slaves, that Rufus would do the same but he fails to keep his word with Dana and send the letter to Kevin. You would expect that since Rufus is generally nice and playful with the slaves (like Nigel, Sarah, and Carrie) that he wouldn't react the way he did to Sam simply talking to Dana about teaching his younger siblings. You wouldn't expect Rufus to forcibly rape Alice over and over again after he was childhood friends with her. But Rufus does all of this and more. He shows others that he can be a nice and trustworthy guy, and thus we the readers set a higher bar for him (that IS attainable), but he constantly lets us down, almost always because of his selfishness and inconsistent line of morality within himself and NOT because of the time period he lives in.

There's More to it than Eye-Witnessing

So I should've posted this almost two weeks ago... oh well better late than never.

Some time towards the end of our last school week, we got to writing about and then discussing the passage in Kindred in which Dana first witnesses a slave getting brutally beaten. I'm sure all of us can agree that the way this event is presented to us in the novel allows for us to have quite a different reaction to similar events that took place in the time period. In history classes ever since elementary school all we've been given was the facts and so getting on a more personal level of what a slave beating was like definitely allowed us to develop a more repulsive reaction to slavery.

As I was writing, and later as we discussed, however, I realized that I was only one of many who noticed that our reactions to the slave getting whipped was nothing compared to Dana's reaction. The obvious reason for that would be that Dana actually witnessed this slave getting beaten with her very own eyes while we comfortably sat in our sofas reading about Dana's reaction. But as I delved into the symptoms of Dana's severe reaction, I was reminded of a video I watched a while back. The video was about a Syrian father who had thought that his toddler son had been killed in one of the many massacres the Syrians had gone through (and are still going through today) but had found the son still alive and well. The video brought me to tears as the father and son cried and tightly embraced each other.

I was also reminded of the times when I had to do research for a research paper about a Syrian refugee camp. The research itself made me slightly depressed and saddened and I just didn't want to continue with my research or finish the paper altogether. The two connections I saw immediately between the video and my research and Dana's witnessing the slave getting beaten was: 1. My more extreme reaction to the video and Dana's reaction were similar because we had both witnessed the event before our very eyes (I certainly wasn't in Syria but I did see the video only a short time after the incident had happened) and 2. My wanting to stop researching for my paper is similar to Dana's tries to blur out the cries of the slave as he was getting beaten.

As I was writing down these thoughts in my notebook, I heard a comment that I found quite interesting and relateable. One classmate said that she was trying to experience or get closer to Dana's reaction by imagining what happened to the slave happening to a loved one. I looked over my notes and realized that I could easily imagine any of the atrocities happening to the Syrians, or any Middle Eastern, happening to me or my loved ones (in fact, I've on many occasions asked myself how would my family and I be in similar states to the Syrians and many other Middle Easterns experiencing such violence today). Similarly, maybe part of Dana's reaction had to do with the fact that she was black. She could easily imagine what happened to the slave happening to her (and it kinda does later in the book). Generally speaking, though, I think it's safe to say that when such violence is being done to your people, you feel so much more extremely, whether it's because you find it so relateable and can easily see it happening to you or someone you love or if there's a stronger connection between you and those of your same ethnicity.

Why Are the Tralfamadorians There in the First Place?

As I saw during the panel presentations, many see the Tralfamadorians as something Billy made up as a coping mechanism of his PTSD or simply to make more sense of life. While There are many reasons the Tralfamadorians were made for Billy in Slaughterhouse-Five, I definitely see more advantages of including the Tralfamadorians as something Vonnegut made up for himself.

From the first chapter, we get a sense that Vonnegut is having a hard time writing this book, whether it be that he doesn't want to glorify war or he finds it difficult to even write about the war in the first place, or both. Whatever it be, the Tralfamadorians help Vonnegut overcome his problem. From the Tralfamadorians point of view, there's nothing glorious about the war on earth, they simply see it as something that has happened, will happen, and will always happen in one of so many moments of time. The war has no special meaning to them. It's only humans killing more humans. There is no differentiation of German or American, and furthermore the Tralfamadorians see no pride in winning a war.They don't even focus on war because they only want to focus on the happy moments. Vonnegut adopts this apathetic-like sense of the Tralfamadorians when narrating how things happened from Billy's point of view, and thus this helps us to not think about the war in terms of which side is fighting which and but in terms of people dying who don't individually make a difference after the war is over.

The Tralfamadorians also help Vonnegut get the book done. Having the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five allows Vonnegut to switch to different time periods of Billy's life whenever he so chooses, which he does quite often. This allows Vonnegut to stop writing about a particularly depressing war scene if he can't go on and to switch to a part of Billy's of life when he wasn't in the war. This also helps Vonnegut to not have to remember everything that happened in Billy's life in a linear fashion, so Vonnegut doesn't have to write everything in order and draw all the connections from one scene to the other.

Including the Tralfamadorians has one last major advantage for Vonnegut. Instead of writing a depressing book about war, Vonnegut gets to focus on another, happier story that is all made-up, meaning he gets to decide where the story goes and exactly how it gets there. We as readers have already seen so many anti-war books and I for one definitely don't want to read a book that's only about the atrocities of war, nor does Vonnegut want to write one. The Tralfamadorians help to spice things up by making the book longer and more interesting to its readers.

So How Does This Whole Time Thingy Work?

Towards the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five, I was pretty convinced that Billy was some whacko who suffered from some kind of postwar insanity. I thought that Billy was constantly remembering his past memories of war only because of how scarred he was by the war. As the book went on, however, I started to believe that Billy was actually reliving his past memories of war. In a way, he was always time travelling to earlier periods of his life, although he never knew which period of his life he would be acting in next.

Until recently, I thought that Billy was always time traveling back in time from the present (it's pretty difficult to pinpoint the present in the book, but I believe it is right after Billy's article on the Tralfamadorians is published). But in a recent reading, Billy explains the entire scene right before his death and narrates exactly how he will die. It should be impossible for Billy to know the "future" if he's reliving events from his past. So, once again, I had to change my theory.

It was then that I finally took Billy seriously when it came to how he believed time works, that is, how the Tralfamadorians say time works. If we are to apply the way time works as the Tralfamadorians claim it works to Slaughterhouse Five, everything makes sense. There is a sense of the present, but time doesn't work linearly. This explains why Billy is always nonchalantly accepting what happens to him, because he already knows how everything is going to end anyway. This also explains why Billy is physically ageing like a normal human being as time goes by but always seems to be at the same mental level throughout all his time.

My final theory in a nutshell: There is a present in Slaughterhouse Five but there isn't a linearity to Billy's life, thus Billy experiences/ re-experiences moments of his life at random and already knows the outcome of his life.

Atonism

I'll just admit it, I am still thoroughly confused as to what Atonism is, so I decided to look it up online... which still didn't really help me. First off, I could barely find anything about Atonism itself, but I did find out that Atonism has to do with Aten. To sum up what I found in a nutshell, Aten was a radiant sun disk that was a manifestation of the sun god, Ra. During the reign of pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1367-1350 BC) Aten was taken to be the one, supreme god. The worship of Aten was manifested in the momentary monotheistic religion of Atenism in Egypt (after the reign of Amenhotep the Egyptians turned back to polytheism). So Atenism is supposedly one of the first monotheistic religions, but I still don't see how this ties into modern Atonism. All I know is that Atonism today has to do with Christians and Muslims, who are monotheists, but that's really the only connection I see.

When Atonism was first brought up in class, I felt as if the book portrayed Atonists badly, which led me to believe that the book was portraying Muslims and Christians badly. If you know me well, you know that I cannot stand anybody mocking my religion and its followers, or any of the other major religions, but what was I to say in class when I had no idea what Atonism was to begin with? I was also confused as to whether the book was actually portraying Atonists negatively in the first place or not (I'm currently pretty stuck on the answer being that the book does portray Atonists badly). And does the book portray all Muslims and Christians as being Atonist? Should I be offended about how this book portrays Atonists?

Postmodernism!

Is it just me, or did the first few chapters of Mumbo Jumbo scream Postmodernism? In class today, we talked about how the first chapter is like the first scene of a movie. The way the the wording is and the scene we can so vividly imagine just makes it seem as if we're watching a scene from a black and white movie. Now, this idea of the first chapter being like the first scene of a movie hit me immediately after I finished the chapter. I felt as if I was reading the opening credits to a movie after the climactic first scene that ended with 10,000 being dead by morning.

So, the first chapter is like a movie scene. Well that's not all. Towards the end of the first chapter, we get two italicized paragraphs. These two paragraphs, in a way, seem like an excerpt from a diary at the time. So Mumbo Jumbo moves from a climactic first scene onto a diary entry? Oh we're not done yet. We get a Louis Armstrong quote kinda in the middle of nowhere, followed by the definition of Mumbo Jumbo. And then we get the tiny chapter two that's narrated in a histroy textbooky kinda tone. The book does settle down after the first few chapters and starts to develop a more follow-able storyline, but this isn't to say that Mumbo Jumbo isn't postmodern because it  simply jumping from one type of media to another and constantly switching tones is just one of the many ways it screams Postmodernism.

Do the Revolutionists Just Die Off...?

In the last few chapters of Ragtime, we come across the ends of many characters, half of which are the revolutionists like Younger Brother and Coalhouse Walker. On the one hand, a reader can simply look at these deaths and say that Doctorow is following his characters to the end, after all, he is bringing the "era of ragtime" to an end. But I cannot help but think that maybe Doctorow is making a statement. In a  way, the causes that Coalhouse and Younger Brother fought for were quite noble ones, regardless of the way they fought for them. But the truth is, their fighting for the causes didn't do much on a large scale. Coalhouse ends up surrendering and getting shot. He dies, life moves on. End of that story. Younger Brother moves to Mexico. We don't even know exactly how he died. So in a way, the revolutionists die off without making significant changes on society.

This idea of the revolutionists just dying off gives off the sense that the society for which Ragtime takes place in doesn't change [drastically] itself, and that those who try to change society, fail (at least within the era of the book. Coalhouse would have totally made a statement had he lived at a later time). If you think about it, Tateh was also a revolutionist at the beginning and middle of the book. But later in the book Tateh gives up strikes and goes into movie making, making him the very successful Baron. It's not that Tateh switches sides and joins the capitalists, he (in a way) gives into society and decides to focus more on himself and his family, like most ambivalent middle-class men do.  Houdini, although thought of like a circus freak, pulls off a stunt and has to go slower so that it looks believable to the people. Harry K Thaw gets out of jail and joins the parade, for him being more upper-class means he basically gets what he wants. By the end of the book, so many characters have simply given into society. To generalize, the only characters to survive are those who just focus on their individual lives instead of the injustices of society.

History vs Fiction

Although this is from a while ago (the second day of school to be exact), I had to yet again bring up this question that I actually found to be quite intriguing: Which has a more emotional effect on its audience, history or fiction? Both genres have characteristics to their advantage that play to our emotions. On the one hand, history is real. The things we learn from history are actual things that happened in real life.  Also, being human, we kind of feel this weird obligation to feel sympathy when finding out about the dreadful events in history because they actually happened to real people. Fiction, on the other hand, has the advantage of being able to take us into the world and situation of the characters we feel sympathy for. We know exactly what the character went through and exactly how the character feels at certain points in their dreadful situations. Fiction, at least to me, also plays more to emotions because it simply is more about emotions. History is more about the larger, more important events that shaped, well, history. Still, if you want history to play more into the emotions of its audience then you can always change the way it's presented to make it more like fiction. For example, reading an autobiography can tend to have the same emotional effect as a fiction book in terms of how the audience is immersed within the character's world. And now one can say that, with this property of bringing the audience into the world of the character along with the fact that historical events actually took place, history plays (or at least has the ability to play) more to it's audience's emotions.