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.
Friday, May 16, 2014
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.
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.
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.
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