Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1

Return to Contents»

Transnational Oswald: Relocating DeLillo’s Libra / Michael Mirabile

Abstract: In Libra (1988) Don DeLillo displaces Lee Harvey Oswald’s contradictory life story and the elusive event of the JFK assassination from their immediate national and domestic contexts to relocate them amidst various transnational contexts. A key to DeLillo’s remapping or deterritorialization is found in his inscription in his narrative of figural equivalents of technical means of reproduction. While Oswald’s life appears as a cinematic montage, a rapid shuffling of places of residence and projected identities, the assassination is rendered in accordance with the processes of the photographic, filmic, and televisual construction of images. Through his unconventional portrait, DeLillo acquires an ironic perspective on the afterlife of Oswald’s stardom and associated iconography, suggesting from the vantage point of the historical moment of his writing, the late 1980s, the difficulty of distinguishing between the spectacular effects of celebrity and categories of “ordinariness” and the “quotidian.” Readers of the novel witness the complex ways in which celebrity becomes entangled with notoriety as a consequence of transgressive actions that are retained as traumatic memories in the consciousness of a larger public. Oswald, as DeLillo sees him, is not a cipher emptied of psychic interiority but an icon of modern alienation or, more paradoxically, an icon of anonymity. His emotional and ideological investments in specific cities or nations undergo a performative acceleration that makes his trajectory difficult to place as he nears the fateful day in Dallas and his collision with world history. The background, moreover, to such a collision consists primarily in an ongoing struggle, with larger cultural and political implications, between different conspirators and factions over the control of images.

Introduction

<1> In addition to specifying the social significance of mass-media constructed identities, critical discourses on stardom have registered decisive transformations in the culture of celebrity itself. Once understood as the opposite of what is regularly classified as “ordinariness,” stardom has entered a different phase in the past three or four decades and especially in recent years, has taken “a demotic turn” according to Graeme Turner (497), with vital links to everyday life. [1] Instead of constituting a separate, rarefied sphere of activity—“an elite and magical condition”—characterized by modes of conscious exhibition (Turner 498), the lifestyle of the celebrity now often approximates modes of habitual action. Of course change in one direction has its corollary in another: as the celebrity comes closer to retracing patterns of nondescript behavior, the non-celebrity cultivates a performative sense of self. This convergence between categories of the extraordinary and the quotidian, the singular and the commonplace, can be detected in various cultural phenomena: from the tabloid and the gossip column, which presume to expose the “real life” shortcomings of stars for public scrutiny, to the ever-expanding reality television genre and the latest internet sensations, which by employing new media technologies promise the elevated status of stardom to participants and consumers drawn from the general population.

<2> If “demotic” has, revealingly, been preferred to “democratic” in several commentaries on the altered conception of stardom (see Turner 495-99; Hearn 619-20; Gamson 1067-68), it is mainly for reasons of delimiting claims for the greater interactivity of celebrity—qualifying the so-called “democratainment thesis” (Turner 496). [2] Alison Hearn acknowledges important decentralizing trends in the contemporary cultural scene; but at the same time she insists that participation in reality television programs, for instance, “involves the self-conscious development and management of a public persona based on templates of the ‘self’ supplied by corporate media culture” (619). It would thus be easy to overstate the “positive byproducts,” such as “the openness, the accessibility, [and] the diversity” encouraged by “the multiplication of outlets and formats” (Turner 497, 498). A more plausible explanation is that the far-reaching consequences of this multiplicity include conditions productive of what Hearn identifies as “the spectacularization of the ‘self’,” which is symptomatic of “the new surveillance economy” and “the ascendance of the virtual-life” (620, 621). In Joshua Gamson’s view, we conduct our lives with an “expectation that we are being watched,” indicating “a growing willingness to offer up private parts of the self to watchers known and unknown” (1068). Self-surveillance follows upon the pervasiveness of scopic regimes; it entails their psychological introjection or internalization. I find that less attention in these analyses is given to possibilities of spectators’ differential engagement with images of stardom as they are transmitted across cultural boundaries and consumed at various sites—processes that likely determine the reception of cases in which fame is closely tied to infamy or notoriety. Nevertheless their insights into self-surveillance directly inform my focus on the reconstruction of a particular case study.

<3> Retrospectively imposing the historical moment of his writing onto the recent past, Don DeLillo conveys two changing aspects of celebrity culture in his 1988 novel Libra, a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald: stardom’s increasing continuity with its seeming antithesis, the ordinary, and the commodity of stardom’s recirculation among transnational spaces of relay and exchange. Indeed, the well-known if overly typological general profile of the political assassin of the twentieth century exemplifies the new construction of fame to a considerable degree. This profile, in turn, applies to Oswald because of its description of the emergence of someone—“a zero person in a T-shirt” who “looks like everybody” (421, 300), in the words of the novel—from the “crowd” or the massive aggregate of people; because of its account of an individual who ultimately attains “a celebrity in anonymity,” as Mark Seltzer notes in his study of the related (at least in this respect) notoriety ascribed to serial killers. Paradoxically distinguished by “the chameleon-like yielding of identity to typicality” (Seltzer 130), the killer or assassin is suddenly removed through transgressive action from obscurity to a place of remarkable dimensions—to where the destructive impact on society of that action is reproduced and witnessed on a mass scale. The author’s oft-discussed media-conscious sensibility, I argue, is specifically post-JFK and post-Vietnam, which means it is marked by the formative coverage of assassination and war, by the major “media events” of his generation, that he watched so carefully and frequently revisits in his fiction.

<4> In Libra DeLillo relocates the enigmatic, resonant figure of Oswald by mapping his trajectory onto an expansive space that exceeds national boundaries and, in the process, the perspectives of domestic politics. Critics tend to see DeLillo’s portrait of Oswald as that of a cipher caught in the deterministic meshes of history, a “symptomatic quilting point” (O’Donnell 50) or representative of “deterritorialized subjectivity” (Johnston 181), and one consciously emptied of motive and traces of interiority. The approach certainly contrasts with the tragic, depth-psychological vision of Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995). By his efforts at zonal emplacement, however, DeLillo pushes back against familiar dichotomies and ideological formations (destiny vs. agency, conspiracy vs. contingency, communism vs. capitalism), reconstructing personae perceived in light of Oswald’s refusal of American national identity and racial whiteness as well as his temporary occupation of various geographical and cultural spaces. The primary purpose of this article is to examine the complex relation of identity to scene offered in Libra. To that end, my reading of the novel alternates between a concern with the polarized outcomes of the dyadic link of individuals to a larger collective reception: to stardom and its space of spectacular effects, on the one hand, and to utter obscurity or a corresponding “blank space” (DeLillo, “Aura” ix), on the other—from separation from the general population to immersion in it. The life narrated in Libra is projected as a constant and rapid shifting to and from these opposed possibilities. Each stage prior to the JFK assassination and the final reappropriation of Oswald as infamous icon seems to reference at the same time an intoxicating encounter with powerful historical forces and with a dispiriting sense of irrelevance contingent on the attention or inattention in the scene of a presiding (albeit frequently imagined) audience or public.

I. Fictional Biography as Montage-Effect

<5> Pursuing his subject’s seriocomic itinerary through the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, DeLillo situates Oswald in accordance with his varying self-identifications and associated places of residence: from Creole (childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in New Orleans), to metropolitan and multicultural (another part of childhood in the Bronx), to internationalist (defection to the Soviet Union), and to broadly cross-cultural (military service in Japan) and hemispheric (brief visit to Mexico City). Then there are his repeated imaginary flights to Havana, which he upholds as his redemptive destination after the disillusioning experience in Minsk but never lives to see. As the narrative unfolds toward Oswald’s climactic entry into “the Dallas labyrinth” and the anticipated scene of political violence (301), the site linked to the assassin becomes increasingly global or transnational. Its immediate backdrop, moreover, is geopolitical, suggesting the implosive force of the United States’ international role as a military superpower.

<6> Likewise the central yet elusive event of the JFK assassination, as rewritten in Libra, opens and closes on a world stage. Dallas serves for DeLillo as a “mediascape” in Arjun Appadurai’s full sense of the term, both an unbounded cultural landscape and object of medial representation that accounts for “global cultural flow” and the “large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes” available to spectators (55, 60). When the momentous day arrives, Oswald’s involvement in the shooting of the President appears both purposive and accidental. And its significance proves inseparable from its photographic, filmic, and televisual reproductions. By inscribing figural equivalents of these technical devices in his rendering of the event, DeLillo frames the action as part of a mass media spectacle that he eventually undermines. (Such a procedure is also employed in the portrayal of Jack Ruby’s subsequent murder of Oswald—an act that is captured on live television.) One of several implications at the conclusion is that by subjecting the assassination, “an aberration in the heartland of the real” (15), to endless repetition, to viewings and re-viewings, we collectively identify Oswald as a figure of celebrity as well as notoriety and the details of November 22, 1963 as constitutive of an indelible popular iconography. From another perspective, the mass media appropriation and the novel comprise competing narratives: whereas iterability prolongs the temporality of the event, DeLillo defamiliarizes a recognizable assemblage of images by means of an expanded spatiality. More exactly, the mimicry of technologies of reproduction has an outcome that directly counters that of media coverage. Instead of spectacularization, Libra offers quasi-forensic close-ups of actions and freeze framing of their accompanying gestures. The idiosyncratic strategy unexpectedly lends the moment the complexity of history—the intersection of randomness and plotting.

<7> Oswald’s constellative, networked, and mobile story of spaced out linkages in Libra is told less by description than by a series of recurring thought-images that are introduced and then reshuffled in a manner resembling a continuous cinematic montage. At times they appear as notions passing fleetingly through his consciousness; at others they derive from the evocative background noise of everyday life: “There is a world inside the world” (13, 47, 153, etc.). Above all else, Oswald’s early years are characterized by movement: his family changes addresses twenty-two times by his eighteenth birthday. As conflicting emotional states place him at the limits of Libran psychic balance, new settings conjure up personal mythologies: “Trotsky in the Bronx, only blocks away” for New York (101); “Strange days in the fabulous East” for Atsugi, Japan (85). [3] His stereotyped thinking is again revealed in his visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City: “Mexico City. Ancient and modern. Sprawling yet intimate. A city of contrasts” (355). When the embassy official welcomes him to the city, Oswald expects him to add, “Hotbed of intrigue” (356). Rather than regarding DeLillo’s Oswald as marked by a perpetual subjective emptiness, acted on by external events, it is, I think, more productive to picture his various self-constructions as momentarily realized but, due to the same accelerated alternation from place to place and from obscurity to stardom, as unstable over even minimal lengths of time. In the post-assassination survival of Oswald, in his assumption of the form of an icon of subversive action or (more prophetically) an icon of anonymity, we receive his lingering after-image within a framework of notoriety or infamy. And that framework is determined, to apply terms from Barry King’s analysis of celebrity culture, by “the general mechanism of fetishism” and by a notion of stardom that “is the ultimate development in this process of personality-based fetishism” (15). Fetish-object of an otherwise irrecuperable point in recent history, the Oswald icon and its almost immediate public consumption shape Libra’s schizoanalytic portrait, accounting for Oswald’s prototypically alienated as well as his other—no less performative—personae.

<8> To his projections onto geo-cultural spaces correlate exchangeable identities that he cultivates at distinct stages of his life, including working-class protagonist, disturbed “lone gunman,” scapegoat, and radical political theorist. Still, however much they may lack self-consistency and may ultimately collapse under the weight of contradiction, the ideological investments of Oswald, on the one hand, and those of the right-wing conspirators, on the other, at least at selected times (at fixed frames along the film strip) form identifiable patterns. For Oswald, the acceptance of a particular view of the world depends on his recognition that, as one hailing from a “Piss-poor” background (56), he remains “a zero in the system” of 1950s and 1960s consumerism (40, 106, 151, etc.). We hear an echo and elaboration of this in his response to his KGB contact’s question of whether Francis Gary Powers, the captured pilot of the famous 1960 U-2 spy plane incident, is “a typical American”:

I would say a hardworking, sincere, honest fellow has found himself in a position where he is being crushed by the pressure exerted from opposite directions. That makes him typical, I guess. (198)

After the unsatisfying adoption of the subject position of an anonymous Minsk factory worker, Oswald’s attachment to the Soviet Union, a nation he once uncritically imagined as “the grand theory come to life” (104), is soon displaced onto Cuba, “the moonlit fixation in the emerald sea” (22). While the conspiracy to orchestrate a “spectacular miss” (51), a deliberately misdirected shot at President Kennedy with the intent of eliciting public approval for an overthrow of Castro (on discovery of the communist affiliations of the scripted gunman), is explicitly driven for the ex-CIA agents and soldiers of fortune by reactive politics: by retrenchments against civil rights and youth cultures that they perceive to be aligned with the Kennedy administration. Originally planning for the (non)assassination to take place in the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami—“The message would be clearest there” (52)—, the conspirators in DeLillo’s version of events design the action to redeem the Bay of Pigs catastrophe. For, it is further noted, “Miami has an impact, a resonance. City of exiles, unhealed wounds” (223).

<9> DeLillo’s insistence on Oswald’s unwillingness to acknowledge racial whiteness as a marker of his identity is decisive for the novel’s pull toward transnationalism. A first glimpse of this appears in his conversation in Minsk with Marina Prusakova, to whom he will be married. Asked where Texas is, Oswald says, “It’s where General Walker lives. The head of all the ultra-right hate groups in America” (208). Having settled with his family in the Fort Worth area, he is joined by a fictional African-American character, Bobby Dupard, in his failed effort to assassinate General Edwin A. Walker, the segregationist and anti-communist who led the opposition to the integration of the University of Mississippi. Later when speaking with his friend George de Mohrenschildt, a “multinational man” and “complete continental” loosely connected to a number of intelligence gathering networks (58, 53), Oswald explains support for Walker: “He’s only reflecting the feelings of what most people think. What Walker says and does, this is white America” (245). By absenting himself from this majoritarian population within the United States, he comes to identify with oppressed classes of people. Yet it is an impulse that exists in tension with his experience of a more general intersubjective rupture, which distances him from all group identities. Following the early episodes in Japan and Russia, the novel’s plot shuttles mainly from setting to setting along the Miami-New Orleans-Dallas corridor, and the expressions of Oswald’s leftism change from earnest advocate of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans to erratic “Hunter of fascists” in Dallas—according to what may be Marina’s reflexive post-scriptum (290). [4] Ironically, although the regional backdrop of his actions, the Sun Belt and the demographic and political shift it signaled in the early 1960s, is characterized over his lifetime by greater ideological rigidity, Oswald’s identity becomes more fractured. He appears to some as a mass of self-canceling facts: “He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud . . . ” (300). The symbolism of “the Walker affair” is also distorted by the confusions of its agent (288). Hoping, for example, to attract Castro’s attention and to step onto the world stage by making the attempt on Walker’s life on the second anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, Oswald misjudges and, as Dupard informs him, chooses a date from a week before the anniversary.

II. “The Man Who Stands in the Blank Space”

<10> Returning in 2005 to his novel seventeen years after its publication, DeLillo writes an introduction to Libra entitled “Assassination Aura” in which he considers the persistent prominence that the JFK assassination holds among our collective memories. Here the auratic value assigned to the event is inextricably tied to its elusiveness, prompting the author to make explicit the dissolution of boundaries between the extraordinary and the ordinary: “Some stories” in our culture, he observes, do not yield resolutions but “undergo a kind of condensation, seeping into the texture of everyday life, barely separable from the ten thousand little excitations that define a routine day” (vii). The documentation provided by the Zapruder film, the Moorman photograph, and other artifacts may fall well short of twenty-first century digital standards of visuality, provoking ever more “haunted speculation”; since even the relative absence of “the retrieved instancy of film and videotape” (vii) only reinforces what was “the final theme” of Libra all along: “modern technology” (viii). [5] In the novel’s stylistic tour de force, its reconstruction of the assassination in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, DeLillo’s deployment of figural equivalents of technologies of reproduction is especially distinguished by his preference for the close-up’s focus on small, seemingly incongruous details: a tear in a shirt, sunglasses dangling from someone’s hand, boxes stacked in the Book Depository building, etc. The event does not, Patrick O’Donnell maintains, bequeath to us a lasting “sacramental relic of the ‘real’” (45). It is told from multiple perspectives (Oswald’s, Jacqueline Kennedy’s, a secret service agent’s, various bystanders’, etc.) and in short flash-like sentences, which give it the appearance of a series of sudden, incompletely registered movements.

<11> While the structuring enigma remains inaccessible, at the micropolitical level individual perceptions in the moments of traumatic impact possess an almost blinding force of illumination. The terms of DeLillo’s retrospective commentary, namely the invocation of a Benjaminian aura that penetrates the least conscious and most habitual of activities, herald its decay as well. Yet the anomaly of the JFK assassination’s place in American cultural history is that repetition does not exhaust its fascination. The more relevant conjuncture lies between the subject of technology and Benjamin’s account of the transformative potential of “screened behavior” or “filmed action” and the cinema generally [6]:

With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly “in any case,” but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them... We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. (Benjamin 265-66)

DeLillo approximates an authorial camera-eye that paradoxically widens the parameters of the action, the surrounding mediascape, by minute points of concentration, like those that produce Benjamin’s expanded space. In the gaps separating DeLillo’s broken sentences during the transpiring actions involved in the assassination, readers inevitably forge associations that are not specified on the page. Just as the imperfect visual records represented by the frames of the Zapruder film, their faded colors and darkening shadows, have the power to disinter an “optical unconscious” consisting in a storehouse of images drawn from the popular imagination. If any difference obtains within this close parallel, it is one of emphasis: between Benjamin’s optics of inclusion that derives from clarifying technology (seeing what was unseen) and DeLillo’s optics of omission that stresses discontinuities (imagining what was unseen).

<12> To be sure, “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (181) indicate the end of consensus politics and its ideology of “the vital center,” as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once promoted it. They anticipate the now proverbial split of the American electorate into largely non-transferential factions of the right and the left. No less certainly, the assassination acquires in Libra the valuation frequently attributed to an exemplary postmodernist happening: through its interpretive open-endedness, its intermedial engagement with the means of spectacle, and its capacity to generate narratives and counter-narratives. This reading finds particular confirmation in the interpolated scenes of the archivist Nicholas Branch, whose work seems to be a direct illustration of the diminished efficacy of Lyotard’s “grand narratives.” Charged with the daunting task of compiling data for a comprehensive “secret history” of the assassination (15), Branch, a character invented by DeLillo as a kind of metafictional stand-in for both reader and author, assesses the Warren Commission Report, “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred” (181), “the Joycean Book of America . . . the novel in which nothing is left out” (182). Before long, readers know that a totalizing hermeneutic is impossible under these conditions. When we encounter Branch again, he is still dutifully absorbed in his research yet no closer to a conclusion, and now “Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper” (378). In addition to calling forth the conceptual frameworks of political symptomatology and postmodernism, of historicity and cultural reproducibility, such a strike at the heart of power allows for the appearance on the center stage of public life of a flickering, oft-denied image of the fragility of American regional-hemispheric and transcontinental hegemony in a world remapped by enhanced interconnectivity and dispersed meaning. This is the very backdrop for Oswald’s transformative attainment of infamy and celebrity. His mutable, fractured identity embodies this dispersal to a degree, making his arrival on the Dallas scene deeply ironic. But his character counts as only one of several crucial embodiments in the novel, with each pointing to some more or less transnational space beyond the horizon of the polarized distribution of authority in the Cold War era of rival superpowers and proxy wars.

<13> At the same time “history,” secret or otherwise, remains contested terrain throughout Libra. Numbered among its iterations are Oswald’s only partial understanding of its more complex Marxian sense as involvement in the “struggles that went on around him” and (248), by contrast, David Ferrie’s paranoid appropriation whereby history equals “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us” (321). Neither causation nor concealment is necessarily privileged in the novel. Similarly the accretion of meanings shaped by Oswald’s habit of imposing personal myths on diverse geographies proceeds under occasional threat of dissolution into a “blank space” whose edges blur in the memory. The densely contextualized, atmospheric, and above all inhabited places of Oswald’s life, cities such as New Orleans and Dallas, have as their stark juxtaposition some non-signifying absence momentarily occupied in those fateful seven seconds on November 22, 1963 by the perennially obscured “man on the grassy knoll”—perhaps the most difficult to recuperate and hence most auratic aspect of JFK assassination lore (442). In his 2005 introduction, DeLillo reflects on the decision to posit the presence of “the second shooter” in his attempt to write against the grain of the history (viii), at least as it was officially chronicled in the Warren Commission Report of 1964, by depicting this previously specular figure—retrieving him from the “visual and aural static” surrounding the event—and giving him a name and backstory (vii). The authorial intervention includes having him belong to a small community of Bay of Pigs veterans, elements of which are in turn said to be working covertly with the CIA and the Mafia to reclaim Cuba. Nevertheless DeLillo suggests that the character represents only a provisional, compositional solution to an intractable epistemic problem and that the features of identity are negligible in this case: “He is simply the man who stands in the blank space” (“Aura” ix).

III. “The World Gone Inside Out”

<14> Applying the thesis concerning self-surveillance that results from a “demotic turn” in celebrity culture to DeLillo’s related yet distinct relocation of Oswald, as first potential then as alleged assassin, I concentrate on the significance of how Oswald’s suspicion of being constantly watched is more evident when his participation in both the (non)assassination and assassination plots becomes more active. The idea of being observed, subjected to surveillance, by some unidentifiable individual or institutional agency may assume the form of simply being followed, as when he thinks that he sees the conspirator T. J. Mackey during the Mexico City trip. Much closer, however, to notions of an unbounded mediascape and what Alison Hearn calls “the new surveillance economy” (620) with the capacity to reach into our private lives is Oswald’s recurring perception that “he was in the middle of his own movie” (370). Even in his most habitual movements, entering (for example) a bar’s restroom, Oswald momentarily intuits a surrounding reconstruction of his environment in accordance with screen technologies, as he “stood there with a static around him, like space is crisscrossed with gray lines” (320). Later watching with Marina the 1954 movie Suddenly on television, which stars Frank Sinatra as a war veteran planning to assassinate the President of the United States, “He had an eerie sense he was being watched for his reaction.” He is watched as he is watching: “He felt connected to the events on the screen. It was like secret instructions entering the network of signals and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission” (369-70). Consequently Oswald not only becomes aware of his own actions and gestures but also more motivated to refine the various identities he adopts. The splitting of his personality reflects the “heightened consciousness of everyday life as public performance” specified by Joshua Gamson (1068). It is a process that determines Oswald’s projection of his final identity as a political assassin.

<15> Like that of George de Mohrenschildt, the character of David Ferrie is based on a historical person who, again like George, enacts in Libra a mediating positionality between Oswald and the conspirators, bringing their divergent intentions into alignment. But unlike the worldly George, who shares Oswald’s revulsion for “the segregationist rage” (271) that “the Birchers and States Righters” often direct at President Kennedy (372), Ferrie lingers at the fringes of American Red Scare political discourses. Indeed, it is asserted that Ferrie, an eccentric ex-commercial pilot and shadowy intelligence organization operative, “had devised a theology based on militant anticommunism” (174). A vividly drawn figure in the novel, Ferrie also functions for DeLillo’s retelling as one capable of advancing the plot toward its conclusion and “placing” Oswald at the scene in Dallas. Prior to this, he demonstrates his commitment to exacerbating Oswald’s confusions about politics by leading him to a state of ideological incoherence. Mockingly calling Oswald “Leon,” after Trotsky, he admits that he has “a way of creeping into people’s minds” and influencing their thoughts (314). The two men meet through mutual links to “544 Camp Street in New Orleans, the most notorious address in the chronicles of the assassination” (59), home of the detective agency of Guy Banister, formerly of the FBI and publisher of racist newsletters who believes that Communist China is currently “massing troops in Baja, California” (66). Implausibly enough (but true to the historical record), the same office is shared by Oswald as the tiny headquarters for the New Orleans chapter of the (pro-Castro) Fair Play for Cuba Committee. If this site does not provide a sufficient basis for contradiction, for the misreading of motive, Ferrie’s insidious voice pushes the confusion further, as it issues from a man compelled by an apocalyptic vision and agenda best indicated in his reinterpretation of the astrological sign that DeLillo chooses for the novel’s title. For Ferrie, a self-conscious Taurean, the constellation formed of Oswald’s stars does not promote stability or holistic balance but, in Kathryn Hume’s interpretation, “the negative [sense of Libran] of being easily pushed in either direction” (152). Ferrie wonders “Which way will Leon tilt?” and urges him to

Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. (339)

Or, as he states the matter more directly, “This boy is sitting on the scales, ready to be tilted either way” (319), but is, regardless, destined for a kind of fame. The “third line” allows, in other words, for the formation of a hybrid spatiality (and temporality) in which the lines of politics and stardom intersect. When Oswald asks Ferrie if he believes in astrology, he replies, “I believe in everything” (315).

<16> Paranoia, by its immanent and self-replicating logic, ensures that Oswald’s story resists familiar allegiances and conventional rationalities. For the reader there is, to be sure, the obvious danger of becoming immersed in Libra’s conspiratorial atmosphere. The well-known “paranoid style,” as DeLillo sees it, belongs to a pathological politics on the order of the wildly spun fantasies of Ferrie, who claims to have welcomed a disastrous outcome to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of living in a fallout shelter. Despite the ubiquity of extremist rhetorics DeLillo’s narration maintains a critical distance from them, focusing instead on how they contend with more liberatory views of the future and how each imagines a separate space between Deleuzian “lines of flight or . . . destratification” or “deterritorialized intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari 3, 32). By novel’s end that focus turns still more exactly to the ways in which the scenic details of the assassination amount to a stage of sorts, the charged locus of meaning transmitting the “reconverted waves of Televisionland” (51), for a struggle over the control of images. This agonic reorientation might be regarded as the departure for an exposition of a typically postmodernist thematic; but the tendency that DeLillo discerns is not always reducible to conditions of hyperreality. Rather, the Kennedy administration holds a historical importance for the postwar age of television, or a particular phase of the medium’s development wherein public figures are remade by the apparatus into popular icons through near-constant exposure, with President Kennedy’s persona offering a highly telegenic presence to the nation.

<17> The President’s image, one of political stardom, proves so influential in the pages of Libra as to provoke intense feelings of either possession or resentment. For Marina, Oswald’s Russian wife who tries to adjust to the peculiarities of life in the United States, to its massive supermarkets and material excesses, the figure of Kennedy is without spatial or temporal bounds, erotically mapping the American landscape “as though he floats . . . entering dreams and fantasies, entering the act of love between husbands and wives. He floats through television screens into bedrooms at night. He floats from the radio into Marina’s bed” (324). For Banister, conversely, ideology often serves as a convenient cover for a more fundamental hostility to celebrity culture’s encroachment onto politics; hostility, that is, to “the kind of gleaming imagery that marked every move the administration made” (51). “Banister’s rage toward the administration,” we are told, “was partly a reaction to public life itself, to men who glow in the lens barrel of a camera. Kennedy magic, Kennedy charisma” (62). And somewhere between these dissimilar emotions lies Oswald’s ambivalence toward the President, a combination of identification and disavowal, which at times may slip with relative ease into one attitude that persists to the exclusion of the other. Contrary to DeLillo’s delineation of the fault lines in the struggle for control of images, readers will likely construe Marina’s enthralled fascination with and Banister’s dismissal of the JFK iconography as flip sides of the same coin. As Chris Rojek maintains, with the celebrity or public figure “hatred is never far from the surface of adulation” (389). Or, as Gamson characterizes the contradictory logics of celebrity identification, “Admiration and resentment, honor and suspicion, egalitarian and hierarchical impulses have . . . been precariously held together” but collapse when the extraordinary and the ordinary become indistinguishable (1063-64). The overriding point of commonality is that both Marina and Banister unconsciously acknowledge the power of images in the society of the spectacle.

<18> Libra additionally marks a shift in DeLillo’s literary career, arriving just after White Noise (1985) and before Mao II (1991). Moving further from White Noise’s concentration on the domestic consumption of images, on television as an interlocutor in the suburban family dialogue, and closer to Mao II’s interest in the transnational circulation of images and the alternative meanings attributed in different geographies to catastrophic events, DeLillo conceives of even the national settings of Libra as only preliminary to their relocation. The difference between these novels that chronologically bracket Libra is observable in their respective constructions of the medial interface. Whereas the characters of White Noise repeatedly comment on their remoteness from the floods, plane crashes, and violent crimes that are transmitted by television until their town is beset by an ecological disaster (which is then subject to a media blackout), the characters in Mao II establish affective attachments to the war and crowd scenes they witness unfolding in other parts of the world. Mao II, which was in part inspired by the Rushdie affair of 1989, may be no less cynical than other fictions by DeLillo about the possibility of collective resistance to the false promises of an image-fixated society. Yet, as we trace the routes of circulation and recirculation that images take across borders, we recognize how the signification of mass media messages may be radically altered upon their reception by distinct communities. Libra, I propose, looks forward to this aspect of the later novel and to DeLillo’s subsequent fiction—especially Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007)—because the montage that constitutes Oswald’s biography, whose frames or units are then accelerated in the concluding pages when he approaches his culminating attainment of notoriety, is not characterized by enclosure but by an outward gravitation.

<19> As the novel provides its multi-perspectival rendering of the assassination, finally, it reveals yet another means by which the opposition of spectacular spaces of stardom to blank spaces of obscurity no longer holds. And Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who murders Oswald, likely figures for the author as an embodiment of the disorientation attendant on the event or, in particular, its aftermath. While his actions initially appear in Libra to lack clear motivation, they cohere and acquire significance around the question of representation—where we see “the world gone inside out” (227), as Marina aptly pictures the simulacral universe projected by television. Ruby declares that his purpose is to protect the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, from the scrutiny of the press and to redeem Dallas in the eyes of the nation. But in DeLillo’s hands his quest becomes a futile exercise in incomplete mimeticism, a repeated failure to assume an impossible, phantasmatic identity modeled on hyper-patriotism. Convinced, on a friend’s remark, that “people want a blank space where [Oswald’s] standing” (431), he manages, on the contrary, to prolong a situation of extreme collective anxiety. The factors that allow Ruby’s and Oswald’s life trajectories momentarily to cross play out like a caustic explication of the pitfalls of celebrity when it is inextricably linked with notoriety. Then, in a stunning reversal of Ruby’s expectations, he eventually realizes that far from concealing the originary crime he is believed to have participated in it. “He begins to merge with Oswald,” and by the novel’s end “Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the President’s assassin. He is the man who killed the President” (445). Despite such a striking claim, the visual superimposition of the image of the assassin’s murderer onto the image of the assassin does not, in the long run, remove Oswald from the sphere of infamy. At our contemporary post-9/11 juncture that compels us to read even DeLillo’s earlier fiction under “the pressure of 2001” and thus to highlight in Libra transnational contexts for the JFK assassination because of the (by comparison) transparently worldwide scope and impact of the terrorist attacks (Boxall 157), Oswald has, if anything, assumed by the extended afterlife of his corresponding icon status a more prominent place in the historical consciousness of transgression and trauma. Simultaneously, the figure of Ruby and the circumstances and motives behind his actions have drifted into deep obscurity.

<20> Of course the frame of reference for DeLillo’s narration here of Ruby’s mainly temporary ascent to the level of ironic stardom is the wider mediascape, a concept, again, that combines words that designate apparatus and landscape. It is a “scape” but not exactly like the television screen where actions lose their specificity and identities are exchanged (321). The emphasis is most dramatically registered in scenes portraying Beryl Parmenter, the wife of one of the conspirators, and her hypnotic, transfixed reaction to televised violence. Constituting a “traumatic instance[] of witnessing” (583), according to Jeremy Green, Beryl’s experience involves an effacement of the private and public spheres and her consequent feeling as if the Dallas police officers, the “men in dark hats, in gray hats with dark bands, in tan Stetsons” on the screen, who subdue Ruby after he shoots Oswald “were in her house” (446); as if they had crossed over and thus blurred the cathodic divide between active involvement in an event and passive domestic spectatorship. Quite differently, however, most of the places in Libra do not dissolve into an absence of differentiation but accumulate layered meanings and transnational contexts by echoing or visually rhyming with other—often geographically distant—places. Oswald’s disillusionment in the Soviet Union, as a most resonant case in point, only finds its full significance in DeLillo’s narrative through comparison with the “loneliness” and alienation he experiences when he walks “in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings” of downtown Dallas—an even “vaster isolation” than he formerly knew (248). Likewise the Miami of the novel draws on cultural associations with Havana and vice versa. And the assassination itself turns out to be inseparable from—to reverberate with—atrocities and acts of political violence from around the world. With Libra DeLillo begins to adopt a properly global perspective.

Notes

[1] There is some dispute over the exact historicity of this transformation. Joshua Gamson, for instance, reaches as far back as the late 1940s, when the traditional Hollywood studio system, “where celebrity was [once] tightly controlled [and] it was possible to build and maintain images of extraordinariness,” lost its exclusive hold over its talent and “celebrity production became dispersed” (1063). But elsewhere in the same article his tracing of such dispersal to the late twentieth-century re-emergence of tabloid culture, which “explod[ed] in the 1970s” (1064), coincides with historical narratives found in Hearn, Rojek, Turner, and others.

[2] Hearn succinctly challenges democratizing views by stating that “becoming part of the immersive television experience [through participation in a reality television program] involves adopting a ‘persona’ consonant with its dictates” (621). Likewise for Turner, “the democratainment thesis,” whose optimistic reading of the medial interface he finds represented in John Hartley’s Uses of Television (1999), overlooks the frequency with which those who suddenly become celebrities will be subject to “the destructive cycle of discovery, exploitation and disposal” (498).

[3] Many of these phrases, such as “There is a world inside the world,” recur throughout the novel, making thorough citation difficult. Similar, however, to the relational principle of montage or collage, their meaning changes according to narrative context. The “system” from the words “zero in the system,” for instance, usually references that of postwar American capitalism. But when the phrase reappears in a scene in Mexico City after the Cuban embassy’s denial of Oswald’s visa, his perception is of a pervasive “bureaucratic trap” that he cannot escape regardless of where he is (357).

[4] This refers to the “curious” (56), infamous “backyard photograph” in which Oswald poses with a rifle and copies of the magazines The Militant and the (Daily) Worker (278). Continuing with his speculative take on the material evidence, DeLillo suggests that a sardonic inscription on the back of the photo, written in Russian, is the work of Oswald’s wife Marina and intended for George de Mohrenschildt, who also belonged to the Russian émigré community in Dallas / Fort Worth. It is translated as “Hunter of fascists—ha ha ha!!!” (290).

[5] Several critics writing on Libra address the role played by mass media technologies. In Johnston’s schizoanalytic, Deleuzian reading, the JFK assassination introduces “a new audio-visual regime in which public discourse is defined by mass media images” (187). For O’Donnell, stress is placed in the novel on the failure of the media to represent the assassination; consequently the event becomes “a blank in the symbolic universe” (46). Green addresses these questions as they apply to several novels by DeLillo, concluding that “DeLillo’s dystopian vision imagines an increasingly mystified everyday reality, one rendered cryptic by the new visual technologies” (585).

[6] Here I use alternative translations of Benjamin’s celebrated “Work of Art” essay to retain the operation of screening (“screened behavior”) in Harry Zohn’s earlier translation (Illuminations, Schocken, 1968) and yet to indicate the specifically cinematic element (“filmed action”) of the more recent translation for the Harvard edition (volume 4) of the selected writings.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” 1936. Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 251-283.

Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

DeLillo, Don. Libra. 1988. New York: Penguin, 1991.

---. “Introduction: Assassination Aura.” 2005. Libra. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Gamson, Joshua. “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture.” PMLA 126.4 (October 2011): 1061-69.

Green, Jeremy. “Disaster Footage: Spectacles of Violence in DeLillo’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (Fall 1999): 571-99.

Hearn, Alison. “‘John, A 20-Year-Old Boston Native with a Great Sense of Humor’: On the Spectacularization of the ‘Self’ and the Incorporation of Identity in the Age of Reality Television.” The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David Marshall. London: Routledge, 2006. 618-33.

Hume, Kathryn. American Dream / American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2000.

Johnston, John. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

King, Barry. “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form.” The Velvet Light Trap 65 (Spring 2010): 7-19.

O’Donnell, Patrick. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Rojek, Chris. “Celebrity and Religion.” The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David Marshall. London: Routledge, 2006. 389-417.

Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London: Routledge, 1998.

Turner, Graeme. “Celebrity, the Tabloid and the Democratic Public Sphere.” The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David Marshall. London: Routledge, 2006. 487-500.

Return to Top»

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.