tags: Grail myth, imagery/symbolism, , media, assassination, television
The Zapruder Film - The first time it was shown on national TV.
“This last voyage on the Roc? I’m too aware of all the archetypal patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest. That’s the only way I could deal with it, hiding all sorts of mystic symbolism in it. Remember all those writers who died before they finished their Grail recountings?...The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess would be to abandon it before I finished the last” (Delany 241)
It’s hard to imagine a way in which Samuel R. Delany’s allusions to the quest for the Holy Grail could possibly be more blatant. After Katin specifically recalls the way in which so many portrayals of the Grail myth have been incomplete, and then contemplates writing a retelling of the myth without completing it in order to avoid the jinx, Delany himself leaves his story incomplete – heavily suggesting that the reader consider the story of Nova itself to be, on some level, itself a retelling of the myth.
