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apophenia

                  The narrative structure of DeLillo’s Libra is (probably intentionally) as bewildering and disorienting as the real-life understanding of the event it describes. Yet in contrast to how the reader’s understanding of the plot is constantly elusive, one of the most prevailing themes in this novel is how the characters themselves are always very confident that they can find order in the chaos of the narratives they inhabit. Throughout the novel, these questions of patterns, order, and randomness appear in many different forms, and offer insights into larger themes.                   Lee is a striking embodiment of these questions. He is the human expression of the sense of confusion that permeates the historical record surrounding the Kennedy assassination: there exists an enormous amount of information and facts about him, but none of it makes his actual character and actions make any sense. And yet Lee himself is unafflicted by any existential doubt about his own inco
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information age of hysteria

                Back in January, at the very beginning of this course, we had various discussions about the nature of postmodernism and how we might understand it in our own lives. Through these discussions we ended up landing on the topic of memes, the distinctive “Gen-Z nihilism” brand of internet humor, and how the current popular culture we (by “we” I mean The Youth) have grown up in arguably incorporates tenets of postmodernism into our most fundamental worldview. As the novels we read have gotten progressively closer to the present day in terms of when they were set and published, it seems to get more and more interesting to look at how postmodernism in literature is related to the postmodernism that we see, now, in our everyday life.                 As we’ve been reading Libra , one of the ways it is different is how, compared to all of our previous novels, the historical event it is centered around is the closest to the present, and, as has been explained in various class dis
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O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A

Disclaimer: this blog post has nothing to do with what we’re reading in class, I was just thinking about some stuff and curious about other people’s thoughts on it. Also, I realize I kind of made Oklahoma seem like a terribly racist and awful musical which it isn’t. It’s a fun time, the music is good, everyone involved has been working very hard and doing a genuinely great job -- please do come see it!!               Wednesday is opening night for Uni’s production of Oklahoma! , a heartwarming story of two melodramatic love triangles and the good-natured (I think?) conflicts between the Farmers and the Cowmen. So far I’ve seen the whole thing about four times from the slightly-obscured viewpoint of the pit orchestra. In doing so I started thinking about the ways in which the musical Oklahoma! is actually really interesting to think about as an expression of many of the same themes we’ve been discussing about history as fiction in this class.                Like most of the books
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a long and disjointed discussion of morality, agency, and American history

             After being absorbed in Vonnegut’s borderline-nihilistic Tralfamadorian philosophy for about a month, you could be forgiven for being relieved to open up Octavia Butler’s Kindred instead. Finally, a character who actually cares about the plot, and who seems to actively seek to exercise agency and influence their own fate rather than resigning themselves to being another meaningless cog in the abstract machinery of history. And it’s true: for the first few chapters, it’s clear that Dana does genuinely care -- and not only out of the self-interest inherent in her task of saving her ancestor. When she meets Rufus when he is a child, she wonders if she can beat the odds of the time period and prevent him from becoming the kind of person his father is. When she first pieces together that he and Alice must be her own ancestors, she instinctively begins to think about Alice and Rufus being married when they’re older -- despite the fact that in 1976 Dana must know that logically
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Vonnegut's Humor

In my group’s panel presentation our article brought up the question of what Vonnegut actually meant with his humor. Our article claimed that the novel at face value presented two “antithetical” options: either Vonnegut’s humor was meant to inspire “political quietism” or it was meant to instill, with its lack of moral distinctions and constant irreverence towards literally everything, a need for both realism and actual meaningful societal change, in the reader. Our article also brought up evidence that Vonnegut himself seemed to fall, at least in his writing, more into the “fatalistic resignation” camp. In class discussion, there was no real straight answer, which makes sense. The novel offers plenty of material to justify either idea. For a novel that’s anti-war, there doesn’t seem to be many efforts made to make the reader angry about war’s injustices or violence: instead, all moral weight is essentially erased. The narration of the novel treats the death of both champagne and 130,
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finding a text

One of the central conflicts of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo is the narrative of how Jes Grew is struggling to “find its text.” Although it originally is ambiguous what, exactly, that means, it becomes clear that on some level there is a literal “text” that describes the history of Jes Grew and the world. However, like Jes Grew itself, this text has been suppressed by the Atonists and their wallflower order. The vivid story that Papa LaBas describes about Osiris, Set, and the rest of Jes Grew history is replaced by the more sterile, monotonous narrative that the Atonist view believes in In the larger context throughout the novel, there is a theme of events in the novel being obviously fictional, but nevertheless very parallel to real-life themes and ideas. For example it’s not exactly correct to say that Jes Grew “is” jazz music, or a specific type of dance, or something like that -- but it does suggest elements of all of those ideas. In a similar way, I think that the idea of Jes Gre
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kids these days

           In our (admittedly limited) trek into Mumbo Jumbo so far, the primary conflict centers around the rapid spread of jes grew and various characters’ reactions to it. Although it seems to have a lot of parallels with the spread of jazz music and other African-American art forms throughout America, at the same time, it’s not really clear what, exactly, jes grew is. The imagery and descriptions of it in the narrative conjure up the feeling of a disease, and it’s called a “plague” outright several times. But it’s also described as an “anti-plague” -- and the only consistent symptoms being so overcome with jes grew that the infected population begins dancing uncontrollably.            There’s also one more essential quality of jes grew that makes it uniquely alarming to the white lawmakers such as the one we meet on the first page of the novel: it originated in black communities, and now has begun to spread rapidly to whites as well. It is wildly popular and, in the eyes of those i
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