Tipping the Scales

David Ferrie really believes in astrology. This comes up quite a bit in his interactions with Lee, as he repeatedly brings up the fact that Lee was born under the sign of Libra. Libra is the sign of the scales, of balance, and so, astrologically, this means that Lee's life hinges on balance, ready to be tipped either way by the slightest outside influence.

I probably would have thought little of all of this were it not for the fact that the title of the book is, of course, Libra. This fact made me of think of the unstable Libran scales in the context of the novel as a whole, and specifically of the plot to assassinate Kennedy. What Mackey, Raymo, Elko et al. are trying to pull off is not an easy stunt. They are trying to kill the president of the United States in broad daylight in front of hundreds of onlookers (one of whom is armed with a video camera, even though they don't know it) without anyone knowing that it was them. Any minor hitch in their plan could screw up everything, either by preventing Kennedy's death or by revealing them as the culprits (or, worse, both), and so it is vital that they maintain that metaphorical balance. Really, killing Kennedy is the easy part of the plan - they are, after all, high-ranking government officials with lots of resources at their hands. The hard part is getting away with it. They need to find someone to help them by firing off a few shots from another direction so that they can blame him in a way that's convincing enough such that people won't strongly suspect that there's more to the story until it's too late to convict the true conspirators.

And the person that they find to do that job is Lee Harvey Oswald, a Libran himself. Unfortunately for Mackey, Raymo, Elko et al., Oswald is not a very trustworthy person, and the conspirators must tip his psychological scales to get him to cooperate with them (which is where Ferrie comes in). In a rather beautiful twist, the vast resources of the CIA are useless to them here. They have to convince Oswald to cooperate with them; a task that can only be achieved through interpersonal skills - an area unsuited to the expertise of the stereotypically cold, unfeeling, all-business CIA operatives.

Was Ruby In On the Conspiracy?

With so much of the novel leading up to Oswald's fateful shooting of Kennedy, it's easy to overlook the subsequent shooting of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby. In real life, the question of what, if any, conspiracy existed to assassinate the president must also cover Ruby's shooting of Oswald. Many have pointed to Ruby's ties to mob activity as evidence that Ruby was approached by mob members and told to kill Oswald to keep him from talking. DeLillo's portrayal of Oswald as someone who was, in a way, tricked into participating in the assassination supports this. We read Oswald's thoughts as he exits the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository - he plans to tell the truth to the authorities, to reveal that he was set up and that he didn't actually kill the president. This would be a perfect opportunity for DeLillo to portray Ruby as in on the plot. But he doesn't. He simply has Ruby absolutely sickened by the president's death and in utter hatred of Oswald. After a brief talk with his friend Jack Karlinsky, he decides to shoot Oswald. No conspiracy there.

Or is there? After all, it's Karlinsky who suggests that Ruby kill Oswald, and the same conversation between the two Jacks reveals that Karlinsky had been discussing the situation with Carmine Latta, who, as we have already seen, is a shady figure with mob ties and a deep hatred of Kennedy. Just the kind of person who would have helped orchestrate the president's assassination and just the kind of person who would want Oswald dead to keep him from talking.

DeLillo does, then, seem to strongly imply that the idea for Ruby to kill Oswald originated with, or at least went through, Carmine Latta, but he doesn't definitively answer this part of the mystery the same way that he does the shooting of Kennedy. Why does DeLillo leave this question open? Is it because he wants the novel to focus on the Kennedy assassination itself? Is it because the structure of the novel keeps him from adequately answering the question? Whatever the reason, DeLillo provides an interesting conclusion to the plot - after going into extreme detail in his explanation of the shooting of Kennedy, he fails to even definitively answer who was in on the shooting of Oswald.

McKennledy (or: All U.S. Presidents of Irish Descent Get Assassinated)

Seeing as how our current novel is all about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I've been looking for a good opportunity to write a blog post about what I find to be the most fascinating event in all of 1901 (probably even the entire 191st decade, although extending that to the entire 20th century might be a bit of a stretch): the assassination of President William McKinley. Unfortunately, I've struggled to draw parallels between the two events. They're really very different. Kennedy was shot from a very large distance, whereas McKinley was shot while touching his assassin (or at least while within a few millimeters of him). Kennedy's assassination might be the most disputed event ever; McKinley's assassination was about as cut and dried as it gets (his assassin, Leon Czologsz, was executed just 53 days after shooting McKinley). So I thought that I might be able to craft a blog post about how different the two assassinations were, but then I came across a pretty noteworthy similarity: Neither Czolgosz nor Lee Harvey Oswald really had anything against their assassinees victims. Oswald had that whole "agent of history" thing going on, and Czolgosz was just upset about the significant difficulties faced by immigrants in the United States (he himself wasn't an immigrant, but both of his parents were, so he faced many of the same obstacles) and ended up taking it out on the president.

So, since I can't really make anything out of that, I'll try throwing in the other two presidential assassinations. I don't know nearly as much about the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield as I do about the assassinations of McKinley and Kennedy, but I'll give it a shot.

Sorry, poor choice of words.

Anyway, John Wilkes Booth, unlike Czolgszwald (that really doesn't work as well as McKennledy, does it?) did have something specific against his victim. He was a confederate sympathiser upset that the South had lost the Civil War, and he blamed the result of the war on Lincoln (which, to be fair, is pretty reasonable). And then there's Charles Guiteau, the only one of the four presidential assassins that was actually insane. He had supported Garfield in the 1880 election (I'm not sure to what extent he did so; he may have just voted for Garfield) and believed that, because of this, he deserved a spot on Garfield's cabinet. When Garfield, who probably didn't even know who Guiteau was, did not include him in his cabinet, Guiteau got angry and shot the president.

Although all four presidents got shot, the manner in which the assassinations went down varied quite a bit. Booth and Guiteau just walked right up and shot their victims - Booth in a theater during a performance and Guiteau at one of Garfield's speeches. Then the government decided that it might be a good idea to put more effort into protecting the president, so Czolgosz had to get a little creative. At a "meet-the-president" event at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, where ordinary citizens got to line up for the exciting honor of shaking hands with the president (McKinley, an experienced politician, could shake up to fifty hands per minute - just what we all look for in our politicians), Czolgosz lined up to meet McKinley with his right hand wrapped in a makeshift bandage, so McKinley extended his left hand. All of a sudden, Czolgosz flexed his right hand to throw off the bandage and reveal a gun, which he promptly used to fire off two shots before being tackled by the person behind him in line. Of course, Oswald (and whatever conspirators there may or may not have been) took this up to eleven with what they did.

Libra briefly mentions the mysterious Curator sending Nicholas Branch a 400-page report about the similarities between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy. These weren't really "meaningful" similarities; they were just a set of bizarre coincidences (don't tell David Ferrie). If you don't know about these, you can easily find them online, but here are the ones that I remember:

• Lincoln was elected in 1860, while Kennedy was elected in 1960.
• Both presidents were succeeded by men named Johnson.
• Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was born in the year exactly 100 years before the birthyear of Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson (sadly, I don't remember what the common last two digits of those years were).
• Both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot by men known by all three of their names, and both assassins had a total of fifteen letters in their names.
• Lincoln was assassinated in Ford's Theater, and Kennedy was assassinated in a car built by Ford Motor Co. - a Ford Lincoln.
• Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and ran into a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran into a theater.
• A week before Lincoln was assassinated, he was in Monroe, Maryland. A week before Kennedy was assassinated, he was with Marilyn Monroe.*

*EDIT: Sadly, I have discovered that this last one is inaccurate.

Finally, I leave you all with one interesting fact related (in varying degrees of directness) to each assassination other than McKinley's (if you want to know more about that one, just ask me to e-mail you a copy of my semester project, although you may have to wait until after we present them in class), ordered by increasing degree of interestingness (shut up, that's totally a word):

• Pluto, the astrological symbol for death, was directly above Dallas when John F. Kennedy was born.
• Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration. In the photograph, he is standing just a few meters away from John Wilkes Booth.

And finally:

• Charles Guiteau intentionally chose a fancy-looking rifle to use to shoot James A. Garfield so that it would look nice in a museum after the assassination.

One Last Kindred Post

I could write a lot more about Kindred, but, for the sake of fulfilling the purpose of this blog, I'll try to make this my last Kindred post, after which I'll move on to other things.

I want to talk about Dana and Kevin's relationship. They seem like a nice "underdog" couple, as an interracial couple living in the 1970s. Sure, the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws across the country, was handed down in 1967, but interracial marriage was still frowned upon by many people, including some of Dana and Kevin's relatives, so I wanted their relationship to be a good one in order to disprove the critics. Unfortunately, there do seem to be some flaws in it. Kevin's behavior when they first met, as well as some of his later behavior (such as pressuring Dana to type his manuscripts) strikes me as somewhat demeaning and controlling, and I'm concerned that it may conceal abusive tendencies. While I'm sure that they do love each other, it often seems like their actions are driven by a sense that they have of what a marriage should be, in particular the concept of putting your spouse's interests above your own. The issue with this concept is that, if both people are doing it, you sort of get caught in an endless loop, as you could easily argue that doing something to further your own interests is putting your spouse's interests above your own, since your spouse puts your interests above his/her own. It's far healthier to reach a mutual understanding about who would benefit more from a given situation and whatnot. Kevin and Dana don't seem too comfortable with this dynamic, which becomes evident after Kevin is stranded in the nineteenth century.

When Dana returned to 1976 without Kevin at the end of "The Fall," I don't think that Kevin was doomed to stay in the nineteenth century for five years. It seemed clear to both of them at that point that Dana was whisked back in time whenever Rufus's life was in danger, so all that Kevin would have to do to bring Dana back would be to re-endanger Rufus's life. I think that part of the reason that he didn't do that was because it seemed to him to be unfair to Dana to bring her back for what likely would have amounted to a few more months, all in order to keep him from being stranded for several years. The thing is that Dana probably would have wanted Kevin to bring her back if he was indeed capable so that he wouldn't be stranded, especially since she would probably remain in 1976 for a similar amount of time no matter how much time passed between calls from Rufus.

I'm going to go off of my original topic a little here (which is why I'm not giving this post a "real" title), and talk about the time-travel "system" itself. As far as Dana and Kevin could tell, it worked like this: When Rufus's life is in danger, Dana goes to the nineteenth century. When Dana's life is in danger, Dana goes to 1976. Yet it took until eight months into her fifth trip back in time before she actually decided to take advantage of that by endangering her own life. She did say during her second visit that she didn't dare test the paradox, but I'm not sure why. If I were in her situation, I would gladly endanger my own life to get out of there, especially seeing as how life on the plantation seems like it would be worse than death. Attempting suicide is a win-win situation - either you go back home, or you die, both of which would be an improvement over the current situation! I could just jump off of a cliff and see if I returned to my own time before I reached the bottom. Now, it would be difficult to make myself do that, because it would require overcoming decades worth of constant beliefs that jumping off of a cliff is a bad idea, but I think that, given the circumstances, I'd manage. If I couldn't find a cliff, I'd come up with something else. There are plenty of ways to die.

Well, that seems like a nice and pleasant way to end my last Kindred post! I really enjoyed this book (although some parts were quite sickening). It could very well be my favorite book that I've had to read for school; it's right up there with Things Fall Apart.

The Butterfly Effect

Ever since her second trip to the nineteenth century, when she found out that Rufus was her ancestor, Dana was operating under the assumption that she was only being pulled back in time in order to keep Rufus alive long enough for him to father Hagar. When Rufus calls her for the last time, though, Hagar has already been born. Why does she still get pulled back then? The answer could have to do with the butterfly effect.

For those who don't know, the butterfly effect refers to the theory that one tiny, insignificant event could set off a chain of progressively more significant effects. The name comes from the thought that one flap of a butterfly's wings could ultimately lead to a hurricane somewhere far away from the butterfly, although its naming may have been influenced by a short science fiction story by Ray Bradbury called "A Sound of Thunder." The story follows a man who travels back in time and accidentally steps on a butterfly before returning to his own time, where it is revealed that that one butterfly's premature death led to words being spelled differently, people acting differently, and a different outcome in the recent presidential election (although, strangely, the two candidates were the same).

The butterfly effect may be more important in genealogy than in any other field. The birth of a person depends not only on each pair of that person's ancestors mating, but mating at the right time and probably under the right circumstances, in order for the right sperm to meet the right egg (this concept is explored in "Boy or Girl," by Cathleen Ward). As such, Dana's birth does not depend only on Hagar being born, but on her being raised under the exact right circumstances. Any minor change in her upbringing would probably lead to her having different children, even if she produced them with the same man.

As such, perhaps Dana did not return to the nineteenth century that last time in order to save Rufus, but rather to kill him. Being an orphan would certainly change Hagar's life enough for her to have different children - one of which, in this case, would end up being Dana's ancestor. Nonetheless, unless Dana's actions in the nineteenth century were exactly what needed to happen anyway, she would have been bound to make some mistake that would end up preventing her own birth. This tells me that Octavia Butler might not have been aware of the butterfly effect. This is definitely plausible - according to the Wikipedia page on the butterfly effect in popular culture, there were very few works exploring this concept before the 1980s.

Spoilers?

When it comes to popular fiction, it's a general rule that spoilers are bad. At any given point, anything within the logical constraints of the universe should be able to happen. A twenty-first-century novelist would be considered in poor taste to write a book in such a way that the readers know exactly what's going to happen.

These were the ideas that had long since been implanted in my subconscious when I opened Slaughterhouse-Five and read Chapter 1, which closed by revealing the last line of the book. Now, granted, said last line was "Poo-tee-weet?" which doesn't really reveal anything about the storyline, but that line told me right away that Kurt Vonnegut would not be following conventions with this book.

And Slaughterhouse-Five did in fact break that no-spoiler rule quite a lot, thanks to its Tralfamadorian influences. We jump around time with Billy, finding out the fates of characters and then returning to before they had met said fate. Almost every time that Edgar Derby is mentioned, Vonnegut reminds us that he's "doomed." Whatever he does, readers think "Oh, yeah, he's the guy that's going to get executed for stealing a  teapot." On an opposite note, after Billy's death scene, there can be no doubt that Paul Lazarro will survive the war. No matter what happens, he has to live in order to murder Billy in 1976.

Similar issues arise in Kindred. Our knowledge of the state of Kindred's world in 1976 gives us insight into certain events that must transpire in the nineteenth century. Obviously, the existence of Dana, as well as the information written in her family Bible, tells us that Rufus and Alice must produce a child named Hagar, who must herself live long enough to have children of her own. On a subtler note, the Bible also reveals the future of the relationship between Rufus and Alice: "Grandmother Hagar. Hagar Weylin, born in 1831. Hers was the first name listed. And she had given her parents' names as Rufus Weylin and Alice Green-something Weylin" (28). At some point, Alice evidently feels comfortable enough with Rufus to adopt his surname, relegating "Greenwood" to her middle name.

But let's go back to the idea of "spoilers" itself. Is it always applicable? Well, you can't spoil history. Nobody is going to to respond to a mention of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln with "Oh, come on; I hadn't made it to 1865 yet!" Mythology is in the same situation. The next step would probably be really old literature. Most people agree that it's OK to blurt out "Romeo and Juliet die in the end!" because it "spoils" something that's over 400 years old and that's ingrained very firmly in popular culture (in actuality, it's not a spoiler because the first page of the play reveals that they're going to die). Some people argue that it's OK to spoil the huge plot twist at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because, even though the book was published less than a decade ago, it's become so popular that few people don't already know what happens. I myself have gotten into multiple arguments about whether or not the big reveal near the end of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is "exempt from spoilers." Sure, it's the most critically-acclaimed video game of all time, and millions of people have played it, but I maintain that its events should still be treated as potential spoilers. Although the game came out in 1998, I didn't play it until 2011. I hadn't known about the big reveal, and I'm glad that I didn't (even though I totally saw it coming), so I believe that it should not be revealed for the sake of those who waited even longer than I to play it.

In general, the concept of a spoiler is difficult to pin down, which makes it difficult for writers to avoid it. Was Butler's reveal of the eventual change of Alice's surname intentional or not? Maybe it was, but the fact remains that stories that play withe remain particularly vulnerable to spoilers. Of course, there are always authors like Vonnegut who just decide to toy with that fact by revealing the book's last line in the very first chapter.

Kevin

We've talked a lot in class about the character of Dana, as well as those of Rufus, Tom, and the other members of their time period. The one character that we've mostly ignored, though, is Kevin. This is a shame - he's an interesting person, and his situation, although very different than Dana's, is still worth exploring.

Kevin's treatment of Dana when she starts traveling back in time is very admirable. When she returns for the second time after the fire incident and explains what's going on, he clearly has his doubts, but he immediately shelves them and comforts Dana as if he completely believed her story. His love for Dana really shines through, however, when he accompanies her on her third journey to the nineteenth century. In a way, Kevin is in more danger than Dana is in 1819. Yes, Dana has to live as a social inferior in constant fear of abuse, but only for a limited amount of time. Kevin, meanwhile, runs the risk of being trapped in 1819 for years if Dana returns to 1976 without him. If I were in Kevin's position, I would be terrified to travel more than a meter away from Dana. Kevin, however, does whatever he can to make Dana's life as comfortable as possible given the situation, at enormous risk to himself. That is true love and devotion.