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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra (view source)
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{{byline|last=Balter|first=Barrie|abstract=Norman Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale'' and Don DeLillo’s ''Libra'' are expressly political works. Oswald’s bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald’s crime as an Emersonian act of self-making—both audacious and peculiarly American. ''Libra''’s critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. Mailer and Don DeLillo follow the trajectory of a seemingly unremarkable man who claims a role in history by killing the president of the United States. Unlike “empirical” accounts of the assassination, the narratives of Mailer and DeLillo posit for Oswald a culturally significant motive that is at once personal and expressly political: When Lee Harvey Oswald fires on Kennedy he doesn’t just end the President’s life, he begins his own. |url=https://prmrl.us/mr03bal}} | {{byline|last=Balter|first=Barrie|abstract=Norman Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale'' and Don DeLillo’s ''Libra'' are expressly political works. Oswald’s bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald’s crime as an Emersonian act of self-making—both audacious and peculiarly American. ''Libra''’s critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. Mailer and Don DeLillo follow the trajectory of a seemingly unremarkable man who claims a role in history by killing the president of the United States. Unlike “empirical” accounts of the assassination, the narratives of Mailer and DeLillo posit for Oswald a culturally significant motive that is at once personal and expressly political: When Lee Harvey Oswald fires on Kennedy he doesn’t just end the President’s life, he begins his own. |url=https://prmrl.us/mr03bal}} | ||
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Lentricchia’s acute reading of ''Libra'' reveals the ways in which DeLillo and Mailer’s accounts are different. While critics have read both ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' as “postmodern” works, they are more accurately critiques of the political, cultural, and economic changes that comprise the notion of postmodernity. However, the two works locate their critiques of “late capitalism” quite differently. While ''Libra'' is a critique of a newly minted American self, most understandable in psychoanalytic terms, Mailer’s critique centers on the environmental factors (social and political) that made a figure like Oswald necessary. Yet DeLillo’s psychological portrait of Oswald differs substantively from Mailer’s temporal contextualization of Oswald’s ideology. In DeLillo’s Oswald Lentricchia sees the birth of the postmodern individual, a media-created American, who truly exists only in the bright lights of the camera. | Lentricchia’s acute reading of ''Libra'' reveals the ways in which DeLillo and Mailer’s accounts are different. While critics have read both ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' as “postmodern” works, they are more accurately critiques of the political, cultural, and economic changes that comprise the notion of postmodernity. However, the two works locate their critiques of “late capitalism” quite differently. While ''Libra'' is a critique of a newly minted American self, most understandable in psychoanalytic terms, Mailer’s critique centers on the environmental factors (social and political) that made a figure like Oswald necessary. Yet DeLillo’s psychological portrait of Oswald differs substantively from Mailer’s temporal contextualization of Oswald’s ideology. In DeLillo’s Oswald Lentricchia sees the birth of the postmodern individual, a media-created American, who truly exists only in the bright lights of the camera. | ||
DeLillo’s critique of the postmodern self enacts Lacan’s theories of identity formation. Like a child suddenly recognizing himself in the mirror as an entity separate from his mother, Oswald’s sight of himself on the television monitor brings provides his first purely objective sense of himself. As he looks into the camera and “could see himself shot . . . and watched himself respond to the augering heat of he bullet,”{{sfn|DeLillo| | DeLillo’s critique of the postmodern self enacts Lacan’s theories of identity formation. Like a child suddenly recognizing himself in the mirror as an entity separate from his mother, Oswald’s sight of himself on the television monitor brings provides his first purely objective sense of himself. As he looks into the camera and “could see himself shot . . . and watched himself respond to the augering heat of he bullet,”{{sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=439}} he finally “feels” himself in the self-other relationship that, according to Lacan, is necessary to define individual identity. Dying, he enters “the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia” where he finally feels the defining sense of “Me-too and you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.”{{Sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=440}} Lacan describes the mirror stage as “an identification,” and as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.” According to Lacan, it is the moment in which “the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it . . . its function as the subject.”{{sfn|Lacan|1977|p=2}} Oswald is conflicted. While he is drawn to assuage his loneliness by subsuming his identity into a larger consciousness (to “merge himself in . . . history”),{{sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=87}} his narcissistic drive to escape the pain of being subjected to history proves stronger. DeLillo underscores Oswald’s self-objectification as Oswald fires his first shot at Kennedy: “There was so much clarity Lee could watch himself in the huge room of stacked cartons . . . He fired off a second shot.”{{sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=398}} | ||
While Mailer’s social critique is trenchant, his speculations and attributions of motive to his “real characters” are often less carefully delineated than he claims. Furthermore, the act of “fictionalizing” is not confined to inclusion (“making up dialogue”), but is equally susceptible to exclusion. Ultimately, ''Oswald’s Tale'' rejects the power of empirical evidence to convey a reliable image of “truth.” Unlike DeLillo, Mailer denies the reader the comfort of narrative closure or the promise of meaning. After following Mailer through almost eight hundred pages of interviews, testimony, and authorial speculation, the reader is confronted by a mischievous hook: “Did Oswald do it?” What follows is not a piece of formerly withheld “evidence” of Oswald’s innocence or guilt, but a disquisition on the ultimately opaque nature of evidence itself: | While Mailer’s social critique is trenchant, his speculations and attributions of motive to his “real characters” are often less carefully delineated than he claims. Furthermore, the act of “fictionalizing” is not confined to inclusion (“making up dialogue”), but is equally susceptible to exclusion. Ultimately, ''Oswald’s Tale'' rejects the power of empirical evidence to convey a reliable image of “truth.” Unlike DeLillo, Mailer denies the reader the comfort of narrative closure or the promise of meaning. After following Mailer through almost eight hundred pages of interviews, testimony, and authorial speculation, the reader is confronted by a mischievous hook: “Did Oswald do it?” What follows is not a piece of formerly withheld “evidence” of Oswald’s innocence or guilt, but a disquisition on the ultimately opaque nature of evidence itself: | ||