Assassination Aura

In his 2005 preface to Libra, DeLillo doesn’t focus on the historical consequences of the Kennedy assassination as they are traditionally understood—what it meant for international and domestic politics, for our understanding of covert intelligence and its role in a democracy, how it shaped relations with Cuba, what it did to “the American psyche,” how it inaugurated the period of social unrest that carried into the 1970s, and so on. These have all been discussed at great length, and continue to be debated. DeLillo focuses more on what the assassination has meant to us in less traceable ways—the “aura” that continues to surround the event, and the images and characters it has introduced into American popular discourse. It has become a story that is fascinating in its own right, apart from any argument about its significance. In part because of the deep uncertainty pervading any coherent account of the events leading up to and following the shooting of the president (which opens to door to a seemingly unlimited string of conspiracy theories), and in part because so many of the key moments were captured on film (the serendipitous “Zapruder film,” the shooting of Oswald by Ruby, broadcast live on television), the Kennedy assassination has become a part of American popular culture.

JFK conspiracy theories have become a “world within a world,” to quote DeLillo’s refrain in Libra. Even a timid excursion into the thriving online archives and discussion groups reveals an alternate universe of trivia, speculation, and strong feelings. There’s a kind of “fanboy” dynamic to a lot of this stuff—it is a world unto itself, not unlike that of Star Trek fans or Minecraft enthusiasts. The fascination makes a lot of sense, on one level: it’s a massive mystery story, full of bizarre coincidences and eccentric characters, international intelligence and counterintelligence, organized crime, and forensic analysis. As DeLillo’s “CIA historian” Nicholas Branch discovers, it is a giant, neverending “novel” that keeps rewriting itself as we read: “the Joycean book of America . . . in which nothing is left out” (182).

The assassination—its names, images, and intersecting narratives—has become a part of the American popular imagination in a way that no other assassination has. And this has a lot to do with why it’s such a quintessentially postmodern event. The images and names circulate in a way that has nothing in particular to do with politics, or conspiracies, or assassination. The phrase “grassy knoll” can never again be used to simply identify a feature of the landscape; a “schoolbook depository” is part of the national working vocabulary in a way that has nothing to do with depositing schoolbooks. There have been punk bands called the Dead Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Jack Rubies. DeLillo refers in his preface to the t-shirt image that circulated a few years back, where the iconic image of Oswald being shot in the gut by Jack Ruby was ingeniously refashioned to look like a punk band on stage:

“There at center stage is the mythic figure of Oswald, barking his sad and ragged love into a hand mike” (viii). Oswald totally looks the part of the punk frontman, and it’s easy to forget the fact that we’re looking at a man being fatally shot—a fatal shot that had enormous consequences for securing the mystery and ambiguity that continues to haunt this story. (And note the iconic Dead Kennedys DK logo spraypainted on the wall in the background—an additional and rather morbid meta-joke.) This is a great example of a meme that precedes the internet and Photoshop. In fact, the Oswald-Ruby-rocking-out image was itself made into a kind of “meta-meme” back in the early 2010s:

I can’t think of any other subject of widespread conspiracy theories that enjoys this kind of pop-cultural capital (with the possible exception of the Roswell UFO stuff—there’s a definite air of postmodernist camp surrounding that whole thing). We don’t see t-shirts with the iconic “falling man” photograph from 9/11 refigured as a stagediver or bungee-jumper (even typing such an idea feels deeply wrong); I’m not aware of John Wilkes Booth’s image being deployed for comedic or ironic effect fifty years after he killed Abraham Lincoln. For some reason, a combination of deep seriousness and ironic pop appropriation combine when we talk about the Kennedy assassination. The people who obsessively pore over the details of that day in November 1963 can seem like heroic, monkish seekers of truth, exposers of a deep-seated government coverup of one of the most important events in American history, or they can seem like deeply paranoid, obsessive freaks, denizens of the most rabbit-holey rabbit hole on the internet. There’s an undeniable compulsion to try to unravel this insane tangle of a story, and there’s also a little repulsion—a desire not to get involved.

The title of my previous post, “Conspiracy A-Go-Go,” alludes to one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Richard Linklater’s plotless 1991 classic Slacker. The film follows a seemingly random assortment of characters around Austin, Texas, on a random summer day; we stick with each character for a few minutes and then move on. This scene takes place in a used bookstore, as a young woman makes the mistake of browsing through the JFK Assassination shelf.

The putative author of “Profiles in Cowardice” here is a classic parody of the conspiracy theorist—when asked about himself, he launches into a kind of private language full of references and allusions, and it never occurs to him that she’s maybe not part of the cult. And under it all is a kind of nervous self-promotion. Most viewers probably identify with the woman, who just wants to look at some books in peace. She doesn’t even remember this dude from that class they supposedly took together. But he’s so myopically fixated on his private narrative, he can’t pick up on any of these social cues: conspiracy theorist as social misfit. When people start talking about the Kennedy assassination, there’s a tendency to roll the eyes and say, “Not all this crap about the grassy knoll again!” But at the same time, when I read Libra, it’s easy to get sucked into the story beyond the novel, of which the novel is a part. You can see how this guy might’ve gotten hooked.

Google “Lee Harvey Oswald” at your own risk.

Conspiracy A-Go-Go

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is a defining event of the twentieth century. People who were alive at the time like to recount where they were when they heard. It shook the nation to its core: a young, charismatic, and popular president who was on the brink of some major policy advances in civil rights to be killed so suddenly, so violently, and so publicly. Even if it were as straightforward a case as the official record still insists—Lee Harvey Oswald acting completely on his own initiative, to make a dramatic statement in support of Fidel Castro—the event would have loomed large, even in the assassination-heavy 1960s (which included the subsequent public killings of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, all of which followed JFK). It is obviously an event of enormous historical importance—a rupture in American democracy at a very sensitive time, globally and domestically.

But skepticism about the official account of the case arose almost immediately, and it has grown exponentially since. At this point, something like 10 percent of Americans believe the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, and a thriving cottage industry of conspiracy theorists—professional and amateur—has scrutinized and re-scrutinized every aspect of every marginal character connected to this case, and a startling number of narratives have emerged, implicating everyone from Lyndon Johnson to Fidel Castro to the CIA to the Soviets to the American mafia in various combinations and collusions. The JFK assassination marks the beginning of conspiracy thinking as a major subtheme of American cultural life. We explored this idea a bit in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (written less than a decade after JFK, his “theory” that Harding was assassinated clearly reflects this same kind of paranoia toward official records). It has become increasingly thinkable for Americans to assume that pretty much nothing is as it seems in government statements or mainstream media coverage (a tendency that has reached an absurd apotheosis with the current president denouncing all news media except his preferred source of propaganda to be inherently “fake”—what does it mean for the government to view itself as the target of a conspiracy by journalists?). Plots are unearthed around the assassinations of King and Malcolm X and John Lennon; more recently, the same kind of thinking has raised serious questions about the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (The Notorious BIG). The July 2024 assassination attempt against Donald Trump immediately spawned a number of conspiracy theories, and you can find extensive documentation of all the ways the campaign allegedly "staged" this event online. The assassination of Charlie Kirk (a postmodern General Walker) by a disaffected online groyper (a postmodern Oswald) was being viewed skeptically within a few minutes of the news. The official narrative of September 11, 2001, is so full of gaps that an organized movement of survivors, victims’ families, and professional skeptics has coalesced under the “9/11 Truth” banner—not all of them supporting any particular conspiracy narrative, but at least raising questions about what the Bush administration knew and failed to act upon in the months leading up to the attacks. Within hours of the announcement, in May 2011, of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by Navy SEALs, vocal skepticism had the Pentagon seriously considering releasing photographs of his corpse, simply to quiet suspicion surrounding the alleged “burial at sea.” (Whenever a body or a suspect is dispensed with so quickly, the familiar set of questions will arise.) And the penchant for conspiracy thinking has recently shifted from the Left to the Right: on January 6, 2021, as supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol, the narrative of the insurrection as a "false flag event," with the rioters as somehow both "Antifa" and FBI, started to emerge--and members of Congress continue to treat this conspiracy narrative seriously to this day. 

It has become reflexive for us to assume that there’s always at least one other level of reality that we are not privy to. We’re almost comfortable in the view that we don’t really have any idea what’s actually going on at the highest levels of power and influence, and the popularization of this mindset is traceable back to JFK.

This general state of paranoia and skepticism has obvious implications for how we understand history—in terms of its specific content, but also in terms of its truth claims. As DeLillo makes clear through the fictional Nicholas Branch, “official CIA historian,” trying to bring some kind of narrative order to the deluge of facts and data that have been compiled by the Warren Commission and the CIA itself, the more we know about the sequence of events and overlapping coincidences and cross-references leading up to the shooting of Kennedy (and the killing of Oswald soon after by Jack Ruby, and the not-statistically-anomalous deaths of so many people even tangentially related to the story in the years after), the less confident we become that we will ever have any idea what happened. But it’s clear that something happened, and for many people it's clear that it was something more than the official story lets on. We know there’s a history to be reconstructed, but an authoritative and fully satisfying reconstruction will never emerge. The same set of facts are interpreted and reinterpreted to suggest a dizzying range of possibilities. Plots are either drawn out of these facts, or imposed on them—and we can’t tell the difference. And any imposition of plot on a collection of disparate facts means engaging in an act of fictional imagination, as Hayden White would say. Any discussion of the topic necessarily merges fact and fiction; DeLillo simply makes this explicit in his “Author’s Note” at the conclusion of Libra: “This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.” The fascination and continued uncertainty, even after sixty years, surrounding the JFK assassination perfectly frames the theoretical concerns that are at the heart of this course.

Butler’s Subtle Metafiction

            On the surface, Kindred doesn’t seem such an obviously “postmodernist” novel as Mumbo Jumbo, with its typographical extravagence and seemingly arbitrary illustrations and misplaced publication information, or Ragtime, with its cavalier insertion of historical figures into apparently fictional situations, and its treatment of (meta)fictional characters like Coalhouse Walker as "historical" within the context of the novel. Aside from the “lowbrow” device of time travel, which bisects the narrative into two distinct historical contexts and allows for the same character to be present in both, the narrative moves in a conventional, plot-driven manner: once the reader accepts the time-travel trope, the narrative proceeds according to the conventions of realism. Butler alludes to the fact that a young Frederick Douglass would be growing up at this time somewhere not far from the Weylin Plantation, but Butler does not arrange to have Douglass make an appearance in the novel itself. For some of you, this more conventional or familiar kind of novel might be a relief from the disorienting experimental tweakings of Doctorow and especially Reed. Where they undermine and minimize plot, Butler has written an unapologetic page-turner. Most of our reading assignments (and the chapters themselves) end at “cliffhanger” moments, and the reader is compelled to move forward by the momentum of the narrative itself: How will Dana survive as a slave? Will she be able to locate Kevin and get him back to the 1970s? How will Rufus’s violent “courtship” of Alice play out? How does Dana end up losing her arm?

            We’ve talked in class about how common it is for postmodernist novels to reflect upon their own fictionality or constructedness within their own narratives. My early blog post on “Winslow Homer and the Light on the Eastern Seaboard” points out some of the ways that Doctorow anchors his depiction of the early twentieth century explicitly in other art forms, which calls attention to the “artistic” and therefore fictional nature of his own narrative. We might also cite moments where Doctorow’s narrator confesses to “limited information” in his efforts to “reconstruct” the actions and backgrounds of two of his fictional creations, Coalhouse Walker and Younger Brother—positing the narrator of historical fiction as a historian, even with regard to characters he’s entirely in control of (and as he takes all manner of creative liberties with actual historical figures like Houdini, Ford, or Morgan). Reed draws attention to the “novelness” of his novel on pretty much every page—from placing his opening chapter before the title page, to including signed “editorial” notes, where “I.R.” comments on the action in progress, to the general unabashedness about anachronism and conspicuous fictionalization of historical events. These novels don’t try to create an airtight illusion of reality in their fictional narratives; they revel in the fact that they are written, constructed, arranged by an author who is ultimately in control of the whole thing. And, as we’ve discussed in class, this is generally in keeping with the postmodernist view of history as a constructed, subjective arrangement of data and information into narrative (fictional) form. In postmodernist historical fiction, this isn’t mere “trickery” or gimmicks on the part of the authors (“Look at me! I can mess with the reader’s head!”) but part of the novels’ explorations of the fluid nature of historical truth and the potency of conventional metanarratives to influence our view of reality.

            But Octavia Butler doesn’t seem to go for any of that. She distinguishes her use of the time-travel trope from classic science fiction, claiming that her novel makes no attempt to “explain” the time travel in quasi-scientific terms. The characters themselves discuss time travel as a new fact that they have to come to terms with (as Dana puts it, early on, “I’m not sure it matters what we think” [17]), and once Dana and Kevin are transported, the narrative proceeds in strict realist terms. The realism is essential to the novel’s purpose of making the distant historical epoch of slavery feel present and immediate to the reader: Butler compels her modern-day readers to “travel” into a past they’d rather forget (or remain ignorant of), and through the force of plotting we become engaged in the story of Rufus and Alice and Nigel and Tom Weylin as Dana herself does. In a fairly traditional manner, the novelistic form serves to make the distant time more “present” in a reader’s imagination.

            There is nonetheless a subtle metafictional aspect to Kindred. Whenever an author makes her main character a writer—in this case, specifically an aspiring novelist, who is married to another novelist—we are encouraged to consider the character as a figure for the author herself. We know that at the time that she first “visits” Rufus, Dana has been hard at work on a novel, staying up late to write while holding down mindless temp work as her day job. What is her novel about? She never says, but we do know that her personal library contains a number of resources on Black history and slavery specifically—has she perhaps been contemplating this very historical period in her fictional work? Does the reader maybe pause and wonder if the book we hold in our hands (narrated, and thus “written,” by Dana) is the novel she’s referring to? Dana is three years younger than Butler herself, but they do share a number of biographical details in common (Butler was raised in Los Angeles and attended writing workshops at UCLA; she was in the early stages of a distinguished career as a science-fiction writer at the time she wrote Kindred). Time travel itself is a compelling metaphor for what any historian—or writer of historical fiction—engages in. By immersing herself in historical studies of the slavery era and especially in the many first-hand slave narratives that document the personal experience of living (and often escaping) as a slave, the author imaginatively transports herself to a distant time and imagines what it would be like to live in that time and place. Octavia Butler has no more of a sense of what slavery was “actually like” than anyone else living in the 1970s, but through research and imaginative projection, she can attempt to draw a persuasive and memorable and effective picture. For a novelist (and, Hayden White would argue, for a historian as well), this entails a powerful act of imagination. She “places herself” at the scene. When we watch, through Dana’s eyes, Alice’s father being beaten by the patrollers in chapter 3 of “The Fire,” an observer transfixed by the spectacle, horrified by the brutality and the tangible consequences of legal abstractions like an absence of any individual rights, the reader is placed in the same position as the author—bearing witness to the history, but unable to do anything to change it.

            In this way of framing it, any historical novelist practices a kind of time travel, even when the novel is consistently realist in its methods—when it attempts an airtight illusion of re-creating a bygone era, hiding its own artifice at every turn. By casting her narrative consciousness as a young Black woman writer like herself, struggling to pursue her dream in 1970s Los Angeles, Butler draws subtle attention to the artifice of her work. Like her character, she is drawn into her own story, forced to confront the painful and contradictory history of the nation that is celebrating its Bicentennial in the “present-tense” year in which the novel is set. In quite literal terms, the novelist-within-the-novel travels back in time and occupies the world her characters occupy, immersed in their stories. But just as Doctorow reminds us that all history is also the story of the moment in which it is written, Butler dramatizes the fact that her novelistic consciousness can’t help but be a product of the twentieth century—this is a postmodern slave narrative, where slavery is portrayed “first-hand” while also being framed in terms of historical distance. The character herself, like the novelist (or any historical novelist, or historian), must contemplate the connections between Rufus’s time and her own—and she must come to terms with the fact that both he and Alice are her ancestors. Slavery isn’t strictly a “Black experience” but an American experience. And Butler’s exploration of the idea that our character is profoundly shaped by our cultural and historical contexts, that we are all “playing roles” to varying extents—the idea that this era might “rub off on” Kevin and Dana, might change them in some ways that they can’t avoid—is also a quintessential postmodernist theme.

            There’s at least one explicit metafictional moment within the narrative itself—when Dana remarks, while trying to make Rufus understand her situation, “Time travel was science fiction in nineteen seventy-six. In eighteen-nineteen . . . it was sheer insanity” (63). Time travel is indeed science fiction in 1976—and the book I’m holding in my hand is labeled on its back cover as “Science Fiction/African American Literature.” In this fleeting moment, Butler seems to wink at her reader in something like the way Doctorow and Reed do. Dana can grasp the idea of time travel better than Rufus because it has become a more familiar concept by 1976: in 1819, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine hadn’t been published yet (and Rufus wouldn’t have read it anyway), and there were no comic books or movies or TV shows to make the concept thinkable. Fiction in this sense shapes reality—none of you flipped out over the idea of time travel in this novel, as you’ve all encountered it (in fiction) before, many times. Butler is indeed exploring the constructedness of her historical narrative, but in subtler ways than some of her contemporaries. For the most part, she just wants us to go along for the ride.

Notebook Prompt: "When had I stopped acting?"

About midway through her fifth visit to the Weylin plantation (in "The Storm"), as she's been enduring a long stretch without Kevin, Dana observes that she has been "getting used to being submissive" and remarks on her need for some "time to herself": "Once--God knows how long ago--I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?" (220).

In what ways is this lack of "distance" evident in "The Storm"? How has Dana's relation to this "alien time" changed over the course of the narrative? Do you see any loss of her 1976 self in these chapters?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook.

Notebook prompt: Does Dana "know" Rufus?

At the conclusion of "The Fight," as Dana and Kevin are attempting to "escape" from the Weylin Plantation on horseback, they are stopped by Rufus, who pulls a shotgun on them in a direct echo of the scene in "The River" at the very start of Dana's ordeal, when his father pulls a shotgun on Dana after she saves his son's life. This echo would seem to indicate that Rufus is "becoming his father" to a significant extent as he gets older. Dana explains her repeated willingness to give Rufus the benefit of the doubt as follows: "I kept thinking I knew him, and he kept proving that I didn't" (186).

Please take 5 minutes now to contemplate this scene and its implications in your notebook: Do you understand Dana's ambivalence about Rufus? Do you find him sympathetic at all, or is he utterly despicable? How does he compare to his father? To your idea of a "typical" slaveholder? How do you view his development as a character over the course of Dana's visits?

Notebook prompt: Dana as an eyewitness narrator

Reread the passage on pages 34-36 in of Kindred ("Just in time . . ." to "an urge to vomit"), where Dana is a first-hand eyewitness to the violent beating of Alice's father by slave patrollers.

What difference does Dana’s presence as a witness and narrator make in this scene? What’s it like to experience this scene through Dana’s eyes? What does this fictional narrative achieve that facts do not? Where are you as a reader in this scene?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate your response to this unsettling passage in your notebook. Come to class on Tuesday, October 28, or Wednesday, October 29, prepared to share some of your observations.

Notebook Prompt: The Present State of Jes Grew and Atonism

Near the end of Mumbo Jumbo, with Jes Grew fading out, Earline asks PaPa LaBas, “Is this the end of Jes Grew?” PaPa LaBas replies: “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning. It even precedes that little ball that exploded 1000000000s of years ago and led to what we are now. Jes Grew may even have caused the ball to explode. We will miss it for a while but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left. You see, life will never end; there is really no end to life, if anything goes it will be death. Jes Grew is life. They comfortably share a single horse like 2 knights. They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this” (204).

What is the current state of Jes Grew and Atonism in 2025? What does Reed’s historical narrative have to do with today? Do you see evidence of Jes Grew "springing back and prospering" in the years since the 1920s, or since 1971?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook.