Remember way back at the beginning of the semester, when we talked about Postmodern history? We thought about the different ways to display it: incomplete annals, complete omniscient annals, large-scale narratives implying smaller themes, "textbook" "unbiased" storytelling, and drawing connections that might not have been there (as Doctorow did in Ragtime.) At this point we could add a few more ways to tell History As Fiction™: Mumbo Jumbo told history by making up stuff based off of real events in order to paint a picture of history showing the themes he wanted to highlight. Slaughterhouse Five threw in elements of science fiction to illustrate the effects of WWII, and made a whole alien race that challenged the typical narrative of war stories (and, well, human life in general.) Kindred told history as an engaging, plot-driven story while keeping everything "historically true" in the world of the book. And now we find Libra telling two stories of different types and 'fictionalities.'
Style-wise, the location-based Lee story in Libra is closer to the Kindred or Ragtime way of doing things. The people in the story are almost all real (more so than in Ragtime), and the stories and motivations of the real characters are fictionalized because they weren't recorded. However, as noted in class, the Lee storyline is based more on facts than the FBI storyline, which concerns real events but many fictionalized people (perhaps like Kindred or Slaugherhouse Five).
But I want to focus on annal history: In an Annal such as the Annals of Saint Gall ("Charles fought against the Saxons," etc) we're given very little information. A more complete "list of events" might include births, deaths, and marriages, but even that is leaving out details. Historians would love to have that record, but it wouldn't create a narrative for the town (which is, debatably, the point of history.) So then you ask your deity of choice for an annal describing the feuds of the town, such as "Geoffrey beat up Paul for kicking Duke Gottfried's elderly cat." That gives a reason, but is not the whole story. I did a blog post on this messy topic a while ago, but the basic gist is you can't describe one event in history without connecting it to a thousand other previous events-- related to the Butterfly effect.
Part of the reason Nicholas Branch (and everyone who has tried to unravel the JFK assassination mystery) has trouble is that there is too much information. Hundreds of pages of documents (read: a detailed, researched annal of the locations, descriptions, thoughts, actions, and backstories of all the people in Dallas that day) don't help if you have a) no way to synthesize them and b) possibly not all the information. This, of course, is straight out of that postmodern history discussion: An omnipotent-annal history could work, but practically is impossible; the proliferation of conspiracy theories prove that more information doesn't necessarily mean a more definite answer, especially when theories suggest that information was falsely planted.
TL;DR The Warren Report and other clouds of information surrounding the JFK assassination are a bunch of facts (assuming they're true, not planted, somehow don't contradict). With all the conspiracy theories surrounding the "facts," it doesn't make a good case for "more information = more accuracy."
I remember last year when the JFK reports came out people didn't really talk about them too much. I think this is partly because of what you're saying here. It's impossible to keep things annal, like it's all in context and in bias, and impossible to write history otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you. I think that if we only knew a specific fact about something as complex as the Kennedy Assassination, we'd never truly understand the full picture of the event. As humans, when we hear a specific fact we naturally try to connect it to something else we know and attempt to create a narrative. For example, if we only knew "Win Everitt was upset at the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion" we'd not actually be able to learn anything else about the JFK Assassination without more facts connected into a narrative, such as Libra is.
ReplyDeleteIf the assassination happened as portrayed in Libra, then no theory based on "the facts" will be able to get it because part of the plot is that there are no facts left behind. Ultimately, any way of telling history is based on annals: These things happened in this order. The things added on top, the why and the narrative, rely on the facts. So they're all vulnerable to missing/false evidence.
ReplyDelete-Reed
I think we probably have to distinguish between information and evidence. Information is (relatively certain) knowledge of a past event, but evidence only points to the event. An annul contains relatively pure information, but most of what Branch has is evidence. If we wanted to create a narrative of the Kennedy Assassination, infinite information would make it much easier. Unfortunately, when we mainly have evidence, and then it is a matter of interpreting that evidence, and that is problematic.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a blog post on a similar topic a while ago, if you want to check it out: http://adityayedetor.blogspot.com/2018/04/what-if-we-knew-everything.html