Plots Move Towards Death - Looking Back

Around midway through Libra, there was a particular, very meta, very self-aware passage about plots and death. I have quoted it in full, for reference, but the context is basically that Win Everett is thinking about the Cuban invasion plan. You can find the whole scene on page 221.

Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. […] He’d already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn’t a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.

So, we all know how this ends up working out. When we first read the passage, and even more now, now that we know that Win was basically pushed out of the plot, and all pretext of missing Kennedy was totally abandoned, we know that the CIA plot ends in death.

Seeing as Win is entirely DeLillo’s creation – there never was a Win Everett in the historical record – this passage is an especially meta analysis of this novel, and, in my opinion, other novels as well. I think the way the Libra plot moved towards death was very interesting, because it happened slowly and then all at once. What I mean by that is that for a large part of the book the plot was that they would shoot the secret service member, but very quickly, the reader finds out that Lee is actually being instructed to shoot to kill, and there is even a backup marksman being put in place just in case Lee misses. The plot goes from intimidation to murder very quickly. But outside of what the Cuban plot is, the literal plot of the novel is moving to murder. When a reader picks up Libra and read the name Lee Harvey Oswald, all they are looking for is the moment Lee shoots Kennedy. The point of the novel is to explain that moment, so literally, this plot is moving towards death. When a reader picks up the novel, they know that. There is no spoiler in saying that Kennedy is shot, or that Lee dies, in fact the novel relies on readers knowing these facts, because without this knowledge, the first part of the novel seems very pointless and nonsensical – why should we care is some rando goes to Russia and a group of salty CIA agents conspire to shoot at a secret service agent? The thing driving this book forward is the knowledge that on 22 November, there is death. So, both the plot of the novel, and the plot that the CIA agents plot about move towards death, the former in an expected way, while the latter perhaps not. I liked this idea of plots moving towards death, so I started thinking about novels we read for this class, and what their plots were like.

To take it all the way back, there’s Ragtime. The plot of Ragtime moves towards death, but not in as an explicit a way as Libra. For the first part of the book, it’s even difficult to pin down a conflict in the novel – it’s just the family dynamics shifting around – but as soon as Coalhouse’s car is vandalized, the tone of the novel shifts. I think it doesn’t take long for readers pick up that this action will have serious repercussions, especially when Coalhouse begins to be increasingly militant about his actions. When him and his followers barricade themselves into the library, it’s all over – I think from that point on, it’s clear that Coalhouse will not survive to see the end of the novel. In this way, Coalhouse’s plot certainly moved towards death – the main plot of the novel revolves around Coalhouse, and the novel ends right after Coalhouse is killed.

Next is Mumbo Jumbo. There are two elements of death in Mumbo Jumbo – the deaths of characters and the death of jes grew. First off, one of the main plots of Mumbo Jumbo is the Wallflower Order hunting down the Mu’tafikah. For example, Biff Musclewhite, who succeeds in killing Berbelang. But in addition, outside of just trying to kill the Mu’tafikah, the novel is about killing jes grew. For one, the reason the Wallflower Order is trying to kill the Mu’tafikah is because they are spreading jes grew. The novel begins with the mayor finding out about jes grew, and with the idea that jes grew needs to be stopped immediately. The book explores jes grew in the present (of the novel), the past, and then eventually the future, when jes grew meets its end. Overall, the novel moves towards the end of jes grew, and so, towards death. Mumbo Jumbo is slightly different from the other novels we discuss though, in that we are given a ray of hope after death – at the end of the novel, it is implied that although jes grew in its ‘20s jazz form died, it lives on and will continue to live on in black culture. Even in class, we spent time talking about jes grew in the modern world – through media such as rap and hip hop.

After that is Slaughterhouse-Five. The plot of this novel is, from the beginning, set up to lead towards death. We are told this over and over again by the initial narrator, and the novel is spent leading up to the fire-bombing of Dresden. The entire point of the novel is unearthing this widescale violence and death, and so here, the plot of the book literally moves towards death, both as an event and as a broader concept. Not to mention the fact that the Tralfamadorians reveal where all of the history of the universe is leading – to a fiery heat-death caused by an explosion, so literally all plots will lead to an inevitable death. The Tralfamadorians exemplify “plots move towards death” when they talk about wars and atrocities as things they can’t prevent.

         Finally, Kindred is also pretty clearly set up to be a book that moves towards death. To start, the reason Dana is sent back to the past is when Rufus is in deathly trouble, and she is sent back to the present when she fears for her life. The plot is literally governed by the presence of death, as Dana is shepherded from one deadly situation to another. In addition, very early on it becomes clear that the only way for Dana to get out of this loop is for Rufus to die. Because of this, the book moves towards the inevitable death of Rufus, and the plot is pretty clearly set to end then, seeing as the reader knows that Dana survives.

         I don’t know is DeLillo intended for this little section to mean as much as I attributed it to mean – maybe it was just about the Kennedy plot and its inherent end in violence – but regardless, death is an important trope in literature in general. I think all plots move towards death because for humans, with our emotional minds and short lifespans, there is nothing more tragic and consequential than death. All plots move towards death because death is an author’s trump card - something to pull out for a grand statement or powerful finale. And beyond literature, all plots really do move towards death – countries are defined by wars, diseases by the number of people they kill, conflicts by body count. Not to be too emo, but all of our plots as humans will end in inevitable death. I think it’s interesting how so much of what we read holds this common thread of moving towards an ultimate death, and once I started looking for this idea in other literature and media, it started to jump out at me a lot more.

And so, this blog post, and this class, comes to a close. The plot of our little 5^th hour class is nearing its own death, as seniors graduate, and juniors move on to take different English classes, scattered throughout the halls of uni. It’s been a great semester everyone, I feel like I learned a lot, and I’ll definitely miss our awesome discussions!