War in Reverse

For all of the Tralfamadorian time travel that he experiences, Billy Pilgrim is always moving forward in time. Directly after living one instant of his life, he lives the next, even though he occasionally skips a bunch of instants by traveling either forward or backward in time. Never, however, does he go through a period where he lives one instant and then immediately lives the instant directly before it - with one exception. On his daughter's wedding night, Billy can't sleep, knowing from experience that he is about to be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. He gets out of bed, goes downstairs into his living room, and turns on the television - and he suddenly begins living in reverse. He isn't skipping through time, his usual method of time travel; he is moving through time at a normal speed, only backwards.

He spends this period of time reversal by watching the late movie that happens to be on television - backwards. It's about World War II, so he sees German soldiers sucking bullets and shell fragments away from U.S. airplanes, and U.S airplanes removing the destruction from a ravaged German city. When the planes get to England, they ship the weapons back to the United States, where factory workers, mostly women, dismantle them and send the materials away to be buried in the Earth. The soldiers then turn into high-schoolers, and Billy extrapolates that Hitler, along with everyone else, turns into a baby, and "all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve" (75).

When I first read this, I thought that it was a wonderful way of looking at things. This movie depicting the horrors of war and destruction could, simply by being watched in reverse, be transformed into a heartwarming story about soldiers miraculously healing each other, destroying weapons, and working together to create two perfect humans.

"But wait," I then realised. "This is the opposite of what really happened." Indeed, this wonderful story, by virtue of the fact that it is reality played in reverse, literally depicts the polar opposite of what actually happened. What actually happened, then, must therefore be entropy in action, a perfect situation getting worse and worse and worse. That's the true takeaway from this scene, and, in a way, the novel as a whole. The war was not glorious. The war was the very opposite of the perfect story told by the movie in reverse. The war consisted of mindless destruction, of people who could be using their energy to make the world a better place instead using it to destroy each other. That's what this war, and all other wars, really meant.

Religion in Mumbo Jumbo

It's clear from early on in Mumbo Jumbo that Ishmael Reed is not attempting to portray Christianity in a positive light. Christianity is at the heart of the Atonist movement, with the Knights Templar utilising Christian dogma to justify what they do. All of this goes without saying, but what's interesting is Reed's depiction of other religions, as it turns out that they're also portrayed negatively.

The two primary religions to use as examples are Egyptian mythology and Judaism, which appear and intertwine with each other during PaPa LaBaz's narrative at Villa Lewaro. Reed's telling of Egyptian mythology is firmly grounded in the actual mythological stories. One of the most famous stories in Egyptian mythology is that of Set's triumph over Osiris, in which Set tricks Osiris into trapping himself in a coffin, which Set's minions then destroy, fragmenting Osiris's body into countless pieces. Isis and Horus subsequently vow to avenge Osiris, working to rebuild his body while dodging several attempts by Set to kill them. This all happens in Mumbo Jumbo mostly by the letter, albeit with the added element of the struggle between Jes Grew and Atonism. But from there, things get a bit odd. Isis, Horus, and Thoth sort of disappear, and Set goes insane. What the original mythology depicts as an ongoing struggle between order and chaos that oscillates back and forth but never swings too heavily toward either side, Mumbo Jumbo depicts as a rapidly deteriorating situation that doesn't really turn out well for anyone.

And then there's Judaism. Now, I'm not Jewish, so I could be completely wrong here, but I'm under the impression that Moses is sort of the central figure of Judaism. He didn't found it, so he's not quite the Jewish equivalent of Jesus or Mohammed or Siddhartha, but I still get the sense that he's the most important. Ishmael Reed takes this sacred image and turns him into a corrupt, power-hungry man whose entire life is a strange kind of disaster that almost hurts to watch. He goes to so much trouble and takes advantage of so many people to acquire the Book, only to fail miserably when he tries to use it.

There are a couple of other religions that are given brief mention, such as Islam, which features in one scene: the conversation between PaPa LaBas, Black Herman, and Abdul Hamid. It too is portrayed negatively, being called restrictive and close-minded in much the same way that Christianity is.

Interesting "Annal"ysis

While I was reading Hayden White's "Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" a couple of weeks ago, I was really struck by White's interpretation of the Annals of Saint Gall. The first thing that came to mind was his response to the fact that the annals consist of a list of every year in the relevant time period, only some of which have a corresponding event. White has plenty to say about this, but the gist of his argument can be summed up by three of his sentences:

This time has no high points or low points; it is, we may say, paratactical and endless. It has no gaps. The list of times is full even if the list of events is not.

It's an interesting concept. The comparison that I came up with was that between the annals and a person who decides to begin keeping a diary, making sure to add an entry each day but not wanting to include anything but the most important happenings. It's likely that several entries in this diary would consist of nothing more than something along the lines of "nothing of note happened today." This is basically what White is saying is going on in the Annals of Saint Gall. Its writers are noting that there was, for example, a year 724, but that nothing that happened in that year was important enough to include in the annals.

A second interesting thing that White discusses is the authors' choice of events to include in the Annals of Saint Gall. In the first nine years of the period covered by the annals, five events are included:

• Hard winter.
• Duke Gottfried died.
• Hard year and deficient in crops.
• Flood everywhere.
• Pippin, the mayor of the palace, died.

All five of these events relate to either severe weather patterns or deaths of important people. As the annals continue, these themes remain prevalent, with the added category of military battles. White has this to say about the selection:

All of the events are extreme, and the implicit criterion for selecting them for remembrance is their liminal nature. Basic need - food, security from external enemies, political and military leadership - and the threat of their not being provided are the subjects of concern...

It's all really interesting commentary and, although the article was tedious to read, I feel as though I gleaned something from it. That's always nice.

Interconnectedness of Epic Proportions

We've encountered a lot of different storylines in Ragtime so far, but all of these storylines intertwine to an extent that I don't think I've ever seen in a novel before. It's not just that one storyline connects to the next, which connects to the next, and so on in a big chain; each storyline relates to several others in a complex web of interconnectedness.

At the beginning, the three main storylines are that of the Family, that of Harry Houdini, and that of the whole White-Nesbit-Thaw affair. Each of these three connects to both of the others - Houdini's car crashes in front of the Family's house and he chitchats with them while he's waiting on repairs, Houdini meets Harry K. Thaw at the Tombs in a particularly disturbing scene, and Mother's Younger Brother meets Evelyn Nesbit inside Emma Goldman's room in an even more disturbing scene.

There are other storylines, of course. Nesbit and Goldman met in the first place through Tateh and his daughter, who, along with Nesbit, made an appearance during Sigmund Freud's parade through New York. Tateh, Mameh, and their daughter, right after they were introduced in the story and well before Nesbit came into the picture, took a train to Madison Avenue and looked at a row of mansions that outraged the socialist in Tateh and were designed by none other than Stanford White. After learning of Nesbit's identity, Tateh took his daughter and left New York, and his travels just happened to take him through New Rochelle, where he just happened to be passed by by Mother and her son, the latter of which shared a long gaze with Tateh's daughter. After that, they passed through Bridgeport, which Doctorow specifically identified as the burial place of Tom Thumb, whose widow, of course, had spoken to Harry Houdini.

Houdini, meanwhile, was about to embark on a trip to Europe to do some soul-searching. At about this time, he felt particularly outdone by Robert Peary, who had just discovered the North Pole (well, maybe...) - with Father aboard his expedition. While in Europe, he purchased a Voisin biplane and learned to fly it, leading to the appearance of one final historical figure in the first part of the book - the now-iconic Austro-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose entry into the story harkens back to Houdini's original meeting with the Family and the little boy's last words to him: "Warn the Duke."

The Incompleteness of Fiction

For all of its incomprehensibility, the reading from Postmodernist Fiction by Brain McHale did contain one passage that really made me think. It begins with an excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew:

It is a rather odd house, to say the least. There is the living room and the den, but we have not been able to find any other rooms. It seems as if there are other rooms, but when we approach them, they are - I don't quite know how to put this - they are simply not there! There is no kitchen, no porch, no bedrooms, no bath. At the side of the living room, a staircase leads "nowhere." Oh, I don't mean to say that it disappears into empty space, it simply leads to a kind of . . . haziness, in which one knows there is supposed to be a hallway and bedroom doors: but there is absolutely nothing.

McHale then offers his own commentary:

All houses in fiction are like this, partly specified, partly left vague. Normally neither the reader nor the character who shares the same world with such a house notices this vagueness; Sorrentino's characters, however, are aware of being inside a fiction, and so find this house anomalous, with its permanent gaps where a real-world house would be ontologically determinate.

It's certainly an interesting observation. Authors of fiction, after all, must create entirely new realities in for which their characters to live, and individual aspects of these worlds need only be defined when it is convenient for the authors to define them. All other characteristics of the worlds remain ambiguous. The main character of a work of fiction, for example, might have a nuclear laboratory in his basement. Until the author confirms or denies this fact, either directly or through implication (i.e., "the basement of the house was entirely unfinished and completely empty, save for a single storage cabinet near the foot of the stairs"), it is impossible to know whether or not such a fact is true. It is then up to each individual reader to decide things like this for themselves. Although it would be unorthodox for a reader to spontaneously decide that there was a nuclear laboratory in the main character's basement, readers are likely to disagree on more minor details, such as what color the character's bedroom walls were painted, or whether or not the town library that the character often visited was within walking distance of his house. Each reader effectively draws a mental map of the world in which the story takes place, often having to tweak various details as they are revealed by the author.

So What are "History" and "Fiction," Anyway?

The terms "history" and "fiction" seem almost antonymous. The former refers to things that have happened, and the latter refers to things that have not; that someone made up. So how can these two ideas possibly combine to form such a thing as "historical fiction"? The way I see it, they can do so in one of three main ways:

1. Historical Setting, Fictional Plot:
Many historical fiction novels are just like any other works of fiction in that they tell of events that simply never happened. They do, however, place these fictional tales in a historical setting, making it so that they could plausibly have happened at some point in the past. The first book that pops into my head when I think of historical fiction is Rover, a book that I read several years ago. This novel tells the story of a Scandinavian girl (whose name I cannot remember) and her dog (whose name you can probably guess) through a Viking attack on their village that culminates in the girl being taken into slavery. The book then follows her subsequent life as a Viking slave. Now, it is certainly true that the Vikings attacked villages and took slaves, but the particular girl whose tale is told by Rover never existed. Her story, however, is typical of those of the thousands of girls taken as Viking slaves.

2. Historical Plot, Fictional Details:
Some works of historical fiction actually do tell of an actual event that happened in history. Take Ragtime, for instance. There was a person named Stanford White who was murdered by Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh during a performance of "I Could Love a Million Girls." The details of the murder and subsequent criminal case, however, do not match exactly those related by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Ragtime, then, tells of a historical event with the help of fictional details, this blurring the line between history as fiction.

3. Historical Plot, Fictional Context:
This last one is a little hard to generalise. It is probably best exemplified by Libra, which tells the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a very well-known historical event, but which makes up an explanation as to why it happened that greatly differs from the official story. The main plot of the book is mostly non-fictional, but the set-up and behind-the-scenes action are definitely fictional.