Evidence

I didn't really expect my panel presentation today to incite that much discussion but where it went was really interesting. The idea that historical events don't inherently have meaning and the meaning is only created through a constructed narrative is interesting -- there are all these searches for the one perfect thing to describe an event but we have to accept that it's never going to happen.

The Zapruder film is one example -- you'd think a film of the event would lay questions to rest but it just adds to speculation. People extrapolate, especially when the footage itself is blurry like it is in the Zapruder film. People come up with a narrative and incorporate certain pieces of evidence as they see fit, pushing the rest to the side. 

The Nicholas Branch parts of Libra seemed to me a little out of place in the rest of the book but by themselves I liked them. The amount of evidence for the JFK assassination, or for that matter, most fairly recent historical events, is overwhelming. It used to bother me a lot, that I would never know the absolute truth about an event -- even with all the newspapers and summaries I read, they're all leaving something out. This class has changed my ideas on that -- now I realize that a narrative is necessary.  The books we read in this class were really interesting and I came to appreciate the way the authors play around with history. 

Scripted

One thing Libra keeps bringing up, especially in the later chapters, is the idea that Lee's life is plotted out for him, and there are outside forces influencing him. "Who arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald?" his mother wonders in the final chapter.

David Ferries talks about this a lot. "You see what this means," he says to Lee when he's trying to convince him to shoot the JFK. "How it shows what you've got to do. We didn't arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don't have that kind of reach or power. There's something else that's generating this event. A pattern outside experience."

I think this kind of thinking is appealing -- maybe Lee has the potential to assassinate the president but it's not really his decision... this has a lot of parallels with the Tralfamadorian philosophy -- the moment is structured that way and we are all merely bugs in amber. 

It's interesting, then, what Lee thinks in the jail cell later -- he finally comes to terms with his fate and begins to kind of emabrace it. Before, he wanted to tell everyone that he was only a pawn in a much larger game, but then he decides to kind of relent and buy into the story, even embellishing it further. This is like the character in Everitt's script coming to life. 

Beryl

On Wednesday we brought up the fact that the women in Libra seem to be kind of on the sidelines. One of the female characters who doesn't get a lot of time but who I think is really interesting is Beryl, Larry Parmenter's wife.

From her introduction I liked DeLillo's description of her on page 124, especially: "She had a dry way of delivering friendly insults directly into people's chests. She walked softly swaying into a room and you could sense anticipation in the group. They began preparing their laughter before she said a word."

My favorite part, though, was the description of her pastime: "She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because they were the things that tell us how to live."

At first I thought this was kind of sad, that this is what she spends her time doing, but after this paragraph I realized this is kind of like what people do on social media now -- sharing news stories and links (like clippings) as communication, and it made me like Beryl even more.