nice try

Lee and Identity

We talked a lot today about Lee having issues with a concept of self. He has a certain willingness to maintain the difficult position of being a communist sympathizer in the marines, but his idealism as a marxist is almost constantly undermined in a fashion that can't help but remind me of Joyce. Much of Lee's character is left very ambiguous, so the question becomes that if it hard for us to know who lee is does he even know? Is that smile holding the powerful secret of the true interpretation of who Lee really is or does he have no clue just like everyone else and is laughing at the absurdity of his own situation?

I think one important aspect of Lee as a negative Libran is the sense in which he is influenced by others because he doesn't know who he is and is looking for someone to craft an identity for him. It is possible to read his struggle to merge his life with a marxist version of history as a surrender of the struggle to forge his own identity and instead embrace his role in history. This becomes nearly literal for him with Win Everett who tries to create an entire other persona for Lee, when he is with the Russians they remark that they believe defectors go to Russia to be given "a second and safer identity." Lee because he is a spy and a double agent is constantly having various  personas created for him and being taught how to be different people.  It is hard to see this as Lee purely taking on other peoples roles because he is never just who people say he is, he simultaneously fulfills multiple interpretations of who he is without ever being just one of those interpretations. 

It is fascinating that at the end of the novel Lee would seem to finally accept a role, his epiphany in which he decides to become the lone gunman could be seen as his acceptance of a role someone else has written for him. Ferrie's talk that he has been pulled towards this by fate and Lee's fatalistic acceptance of the fact that he must shoot Kennedy further reinforce Lee giving into a role created for him, this time by fate rather than a plotter. Because Lee is such an ambiguous figure in this novel I am unwilling to say whether at the end Lee becomes the easily influenced negative Libran who accepts roles written for him, I think the question of which Lee is is still very much up in the air, and Lee never really got the chance to decide for himself as he is killed at an incredibly young age.

The Night Lee Spent in Prison

In our class discussions we mostly focused on lee’s time in prison as an example of DeLilo keeping Lee ambiguous. Lee sees himself going through an intensely transformative experience that all the great men of history have undergone and we see him doing 28 days in the Brig for a minor offense. The passage in which his cell mate masturbates is a prime example of this, Lee looks for some sort of crafty older figure in prison to show him the ropes and he gets this instead.
    What is interesting though is that Lee does undergo a transformative experience but it is not a personal realization in his cell, it is a lesson beaten into him by a prison guard when Lee tries to use the bathroom. Lee and another man are quizzed on the marine handbook the other man is beaten because he does not know, Lee is beaten because the guard thinks he is arrogant to assume he can give a correct answer. I think this is the point where Lee, who had studied the Marine handbook frantically ever since he was a small child, loses some sort of faith in the concept of being a marine and any tolerance for being part of the U.S. which he believes to be a police state.
    What I find most interesting about this is that just like at the end of the novel, when Lee seems reluctant to shoot JFK and does it anyway and then undergoes a transformative experience. Here Lee, who believed in his ability to transform himself in prison, does not transform himself but is transformed. He seeks out history in the prison, but doesn't find it in the contemplative time in his cell as he expected, he finds it in the prison beatings. Lee is swept into history even when he tries to join it, foreshadowing some of Ferrie’s mystical beliefs about the nature of history.

Kindred's Portrayl of Slavery

The way slavery is portrayed in Kindred is very similar to the ways slavery has been portrayed in novels going all the way back to the civil war itself. One of the primary arguments abolitionists made was that slavery was bad for everyone because it  made white slave owners amoral and caused great suffering to the slaves. While nowadays the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is remembered mostly for it's establishment of certain stereotypes, when it was published it was so controversial because it portrayed the way in which even largely benevolent white slave owners must do monstrous things to function in a slave owning society. While we would view much of that novel as naive, the fundamental argument that it makes and that was made by many abolitionists is still the primary way slavery is portrayed.
          The way in which rape is portrayed as an essential part of slavery is also a common aspect of abolitionists arguments. Uncle Tom's Cabin portrays slave owners sexually exploiting some of the young women they own. Interestingly the North often used this as an argument against slavery not only from moral grounds but also because it violated their own ideas of racial purity. I remember doing a research paper freshman year on Abraham Lincoln in which he argued that slavery should be abolished because the majority of what he called "mulattoes" came from the south. While he wasn't going to just come out and say that this was because slave owners tended to rape slaves, it is strongly implied.
       I don't mean this as an insult to the originality of Octavia Butler, in fact we could see it as proof that her portrayal of slavery was accurate, as other novelists writing at the time of slavery described it similarly. But it also meant that for me the aspect that was most interesting was the way in which slaves internalized the violence and became used to it. The children playing "auction" and Dana's own gradual adoption of the postures of slavery. While I'm sure this has been described before somewhere, most accounts I have seen focus on the explicit violence of whippings and the like rather then the everyday destruction of human dignity which Butler portrays so well.

The "Straight Man" in Kindred

Kindred is the novel which feels the least postmodern of all the novel's we've read this semester. It feels like much more of a conventional sci-fi novel, and while it raises questions similar to those raised by many other novels in this course it employs a technique that none of the others do. Kindred has what is often referred to as a "straight man", a term which in sci-fi refers to any character who, for any number of reasons is as much an outsider in the sci-fi setting as the reader and so gives both a convenient mechanism for exposition and allows the reader to relate to someone who is also an outsider in the setting. Neo from The Matrix is a classic straight man, he is unaware that the world he is living in is a fake and so it must be explained to both him and the audience how the matrix functions, and the audience relates to him because they live in a world identical to Neo's matrix.
            Dana and Kevin are both straight men in kindred, we can relate to them because they come from a similar time period and can explicitly discuss many of the things the reader is thinking about when the reader sees the 19th century south. None of the other novels we have read involve a straight man. Slaughter House Five also involves a time travel mechanic but while Dana tries to figure out what's happening in Kindred Billy Pilgrim just sort of is pulled along blindly . The World of Mumbo Jumbo but no one in the novel even bats an eye at the idea of culture war being carried out literally by secret societies.
         I think many of my classmates have found kindred to be their favorite book in the course because it uses a technique which seems much more familiar to them, and which exists to facilitate a more conventional linear plot than many of the other novels we have read.

How bleak is the Tralfamadorian philosophy anyway?

Billy's Tralfamadorian philosophy is seen by him as extremely comforting, as it gives the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, which in his case is almost everything. Others see his denial to ever try to answer the "Why" question about life as horrifying because it implies that the events of life are entirely arbitrary. The outlook of the book is also complicated because even among the numerous horrifying moments there are many of simple beauty and human goodness, how does it effect these moments if there is no "why" to any of them if they all occur arbitrarily and without purpose.  One thing we have to take into account is that Billy is already an exceptional character, not only is he in no way aware of the narrative and discourse that is applied to war he has almost no agency in anything in the novel. The entire war he is either led around as a prisoner or follows Robert Weary, it's easier for him to just go with the way the moment has been structured.
         While to us the outlook that our lives are arbitrary and that we have no freewill is maybe terrifying it's possible that for Vonnegut and for Billy there is a comforting almost therapeutic power in giving up on explaining  the "why" of such horrible and such deep things. Vonnegut seems to feel some deep responsibility to explain Dresden and to communicate to others what really happened there, abandoning the "why" and leaving the event in some ways inexplicable helps him remove a burden. But this provides us with no framework for making the philosophy comforting for those who are not the damaged remainder of the children's crusade unless we believe that trying to impose some sort of narrative on our life (perhaps this is the duty-dance with death) is inherently stressful and giving up on it, which is incredibly hard to do is comforting. Perhaps rather then being damaged Billy and Vonnegut have simply been given the ability to give up on trying to impose meaning on their lives in a way that would be hard for us.
         I don't think so though because the fact that both titles fit seem to imply the acceptance of both the senselessness of  war and life in general and the necessity of dancing around death, of festooning it, of trying to give meaning to it because ultimately art is the duty dance with death. I think one of the core themes of this novel is reconciling the tension between these two ideas and I don't really have a way of doing that yet. But it's interesting to try I suppose.

Billy Pilgrim and PTSD

It is undeniable that there are certain ways in which Billy pilgrim being unstuck in time parallels PTSD. The sense in which he has no choice but to constantly experience the war, and the ways in which these experience tend to occur (or recur) based on experiences that remind him of the war. The fact that he didn't start speaking about Tralfamadore until after the plane crash and the ways in which it mirrors some of Kilgore Trout's novels gives us reason to believe that Billy's beliefs might be a sign if severe trauma. In addition the constant chorus of "Billy Pilgrim says" means it isn't necessarily established within the universe of the novel whether Tralfamadore actually exists or not. While it's probably a common and perfectly acceptable reading of Slaughterhouse-5 to say Billy's time travel is a metaphor for PTSD, and the philosophy as a testament to how horrible war is. I would argue that such a reading is very likely to undermine the validity of Billy's philosophy, and that that isn't necessarily a bad thing just something we need to be aware of.
Even leaving out all the problems our society has with mental illness and the ways in which labeling Billy PTSD can be seen as giving him a status as an abnormal person who's perspective must be fixed, regarding his philosophy as a testament to the damaging effect war has on people undermines his philosophy.  The article we presented on Thursday Gothic "Un-representations’ of Terror in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 does just this. While the article doesn't focus on the relationship with PTSD the idea that Billy being forced to adopt this philosophy as a form of denial of the terror of war because answering the question "why" with regard to Dresden would have consequences so powerful Billy must deny them changes Billy's realizations about the nature of reality into denials of it's nature. It could almost be seen as a defense mechanism by us against the prospect of having to apply Billy's philosophy to our lives, if Billy's mindset, which forces him to give up trying to give meaning to the events of his world, is just a result of the horrors of war then it is simply a sign that we shouldn't engage in war anymore because it leaves people this jaded. The flip side of this is that then because we have never been exposed to the horrors of war and because billy's philosophy is only a product of trauma not a real insight into our world we don't have to give up on trying to answer the "why me" questions, a thing that I doubt any of us are willing to give up on.
Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, many people might find Tralfamadorian philosophy paralyzing and fatalistic rather then comforting and so want to use it is a testament to the wrongs of war then a legitimate philosophy. I think it's just important to realize how  easy it is to undermine his philosophy by emphasizing it's traumatic origins (though talking about the origin of any of Billy's mindset makes little sense in the context of non linear time), and so we should be wary of overemphasizing the PTSD aspect of billy is we want to treat the philosophy seriously.