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)

Revision as of 18:32, 21 June 2021

21,217 bytes added , 21 June 2021

no edit summary

AWalker

17

edits

@@ Line 37: / Line 37: @@
 {{quote|[O]n one can go, trying to explore into every last reach of possibility, only to encounter a disheartening truth: Evidence, by itself, will never provide the answer to a mystery. For it is in the nature of evidence to produce, sooner or later, a counterinterpretation to itself . . . It will be obvious to the reader that one does not (and should not) respect evidence with the religious intensity that others bring to it.{{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=775}}}}
-. . .
+DeLillo’s stance is diametrically opposed to Mailer’s. In both the DeCurtis interview and the author’s note at the end of the novel, DeLillo makes it clear that he views the role of fiction (and authors) as not simply descriptive, but also as redemptive. Not only can fiction “rescue history from its confusions” by “filling in its blank spaces,” but “the fiction writer tries to
+redeem the despair” {{Sfn|DeCurtis|1991|p=56}} that arises from the failure to construct
+coherent narratives, like his fictional librarian Nicholas Branch.
+DeLillo and Mailer present indeterminacy as an escape from opposite problems, but both writers ultimately reinscribe the power of the authorial
+voice to order an otherwise unmanageable universe. In both novels, the stakes of agency are stratospheric. For DeLillo, indeterminacy is a “refuge” from “being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities”
+{{Sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=458}} while for Mailer it provides an exit from self-delusion. At its core,
+''Libra'' functions as a gloss on Oswald’s famous protest that he was “just a patsy,” presenting Oswald as the victim of the Debordean spectacle, falling prey to an illusion of mastery that ultimately robs him of consent. Although
+Oswald believes that, through Kennedy, he is controlling his fate, his path is preordained in the plotting of ''Libra''. Mailer, too, explores the notion of the assassination as a kind of fool’s game, but in ''Oswald’s Tale'' the true “patsies” are seekers of the truth, who, to the extent that they seek answers, are metaphors for the reader
+''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' cast Oswald retrospectively as curiously postmodern, or in Mailer’s case, post-Cold-War individual. This placement is why DeLillo and Mailer’s depictions of Oswald have a disorienting “back to the future” quality. In them he appears to be both an avatar of future American
+selves and an anachronistic “throwback to modernist alienation”
+{{Sfn|Olster|2002|p=48}}.
+In this way, Oswald both creates and is created by what Thomas Carmichael calls “the first postmodern historical event” {{Sfn|Carmicheal|1993|p=207}}.
+One of the reasons for the temporal disorientation of ''Libra'' is that the perception of the Kennedy assassination as the primal loss of American innocence is by its very nature a retrospective notion. Although DeLillo sees the Kennedy assassination as the point of origin for Bell’s “end of ideology,” it is likely that the opposite is more historically “true,” which is to say that DeLillo’s perception of Oswald is itself a product of the post-Vietnam period. This is why Carmichael characterizes the assassination as a kind of
+year zero that alters the future and reframes the past, referring to it as both “the original site of a contemporary nostalgia” and “the moment at which all that follows in the postmodern period was violently interjected into contemporary experience”.
+{{Sfn|Delillo|1988|p=207}}.
+DeLillo and Mailer pinpoint the Kennedy assassination as the origin of a kind of existential crisis for the nation. In the Rolling Stone interview,
+DeLillo claims that the true legacy of the assassination was a loss of meaning: [W]hat has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is not the
+plot ... but the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity”
+{{Sfn|Delillo|1983|p=22}}. While Mailer may not share DeLillo’s “big bang theory” of contemporary consciousness, he does suggest that the enduring attraction to the conspiracy theory of the assassination (and the attendant status such a theory confers upon Oswald), stems from the nation’s need to impose meaning on the event. In ''Oswald’s Tale'' he points out that if Oswald was indeed a lone gunman, who is to say, “a petty figure, a lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a ... president, then ... [t]here was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe”
+{{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=606}}. This sense of “randomness and ambiguity” permeates both ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale''. Its attribution of causality to unpredictable and uncontrollable forces renders political ideology irrelevant and the notion of centralized power an illusion.
+Mailer’s depiction concerns Oswald’s interactions with an increasingly ambiguous power structure. As he makes clear in his interview with Robert Begiebing, Mailer’s perception that power is no longer centralized in the traditional political organs began in the 1980s. According to Mailer, “In the sixties I used to see it as the FBI and the CIA being sinister. Now I suppose it has moved over to the idea that such things as television and plastics are getting us much closer to totalitarianism that the FBI or CIA ever would” {{Sfn|Begiebing|1988|p=321}}. Mailer’s indictment of television and “plastics” is not unlike DeLillo’s in spirit, but differs in its focus on specific political changes that had become apparent in the 1980s.
+DeLillo and Mailer’s neo-Emersonian Oswald is a product of the Reagan era. In neither novel is Oswald hostile to Kennedy’s politics, or particularly enamored of those of the Soviet Union. Instead, both accounts present Oswald’s Marxist ideology as the logical vehicle for both the expression and maintenance of his sense of alienation. That this oppositional status is crucial to his sense of himself is indicated by his rejection of both systems. In the United States Oswald idealizes the social and economic cohesion of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union he yearns for the economic and personal freedoms of the U.S. But in DeLillo and Mailer’s critique, Oswald’s “disloyalty” is also evidence of the failure of ideology itself. Having been among the very small number of people who had lived under both systems, Oswald had a unique vantage point on what would later become a received sentiment.
+Among Oswald’s papers is a tract containing what might be described as a mission statement. In it he writes, “I have lived under both systems. I have sought the answers, and although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not”
+{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=302}}.
+In an interview in The Bloomsbury Review, Mailer characterizes Oswald as
+a Libertarian {{Sfn|DePree|1999|p=3}}, but the material in Oswald’s Tale actually presents
+him as a reactionary. In spite of its ~somewhat warranted! respectful treatment of Oswald’s political writings, Mailer’s account suggests that Oswald’s
+opposition to centralized power is less a bid for negative liberties than a protest against any externally-imposed structure. In the same interview Mailer comments: “[Oswald] didn’t believe in the Soviet Union, didn’t believe in America, didn’t believe in capitalism, didn’t believe in government”.
+By the 1980s, Oswald’s political disillusionment looked remarkably contemporary. As Mailer points out, “A lot of his ideas are held by people today” DeLillo and Mailer’s novels of the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, are characterized by the emergence into this seemingly post-ideological world. Their accounts of the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination are the logical conclusion of a broad-based move away from a notion of politics as a source of progressive action. ''Executioner’s'' critique of “the system,” for example, is essentially Modernist in nature: Unlike its later counterparts, ''Executioner'' addresses the failure of a specific ideology ~in this case the ideals of the American dream!; in this sense its vision is specifically progressive, and the disillusionment it expresses is a product of the very lost “coherent reality” to which DeLillo refers. In contrast, while DeLillo and Mailer configure Oswald’s ostensibly “political” crime as highly personal, it is only superficially linked to his ideology or the specific circumstances of his life. In this context, Gilmore’s crimes of passion are in some ways more rational and more “political” than Oswald’s pre-meditated “hit.” Despite the media’s depiction of Gilmore’s shootings as “motiveless,” Mailer presents them as a direct response to Gilmore’s monstrous sense of thwartedness. By casting the murders as vengeance for the denial of Gilmore’s basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Mailer imbues them with a political significance that Oswald’s act ironically now seems to lack.
+Despite their rather obviously political subject matter, the novels’ depiction of their “prime mover” as both apolitical and solipsistic would seem to
+argue in favor of Irving Howe and Frederick Karl’s view of the American political novel as a kind of mythic beast. Between their “postmodern” assertion of the ultimate meaninglessness of both facts and events and the attendant discrediting of internally political content, it would be worthwhile to ask why either ''Oswald’s Tale'' or ''Libra'' should be construed as political novels at all. This question raises again the vexed issue of whether the political nature of a work lies in its content or its representation of that content. However, to the extent that one of the central preoccupations of postmodern criticism is the relationship between aesthetics and ideology, a distinction must be made not only between the “real” or historical Oswald and the Oswald of DeLillo and Mailer’s imagining, but also between Oswald’s ideology, and that of his “authors’” representational strategies.2 And while the issue of “postmodernity” as it pertains to either representative strategy or temporal positioning is itself “political,” the location of its “political” nature is so
+confounding as to make the argument moot. Is Delillo’s “TV” Oswald, whose protean identity, or “absence of substantial and autonomous selfhood” {{Sfn|Delillo|1988|p=447}} more “postmodern” than Mailer’s master-manipulator? Or, is Mailer’s self-conscious metanarration and interrogation of the “characters’” testimony more truly “postmodern” than DeLillo’s fictionalized faithfulness to what he felt was the “truth” of the historical record?
+The ironic “problem” with attempts to assimilate both notions of the political nature of texts is that while they may not be mutually exclusive in terms of political goal, they are so in terms of political “content.” This problem is exemplified by a curious reversal evident in critical discussions of ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale''. While there are dozens, if not hundreds of scholarly articles that address ''Libra'' as an avatar of some aspect of a new postmodern consciousness (either of literature or of the self), ''Oswald’s Tale'' has been virtually omitted from academic discussion. Although Mailer’s novel was widely reviewed in the popular and literary press (the ''Nation'', the ''New York Times'', the ''Atlantic''), it was barely discussed in peer-reviewed literary journals. The simplest explanation for this omission could be the sheer volume of Kennedy assassination narratives in publication by 1995. The perception of these accounts as a kind of cottage industry had dogged ''Libra'' seven years earlier, and very likely contributed to ''Oswald’s'' dismissal as a species of pop journalism rather than “serious” literature.
+More important, and more likely is the perception of ''Oswald’s Tale'' as dated, or at least oddly devoid of critical subject matter. To put it simply, in
+a universe in which “context is now text” {{Sfn|Jehlen|1994|p=42}}, critics found DeLillo’s indictment of our subjection to mass media a richer source of cultural critique than Mailer’s exhaustive account of the workings of human passions and political institutions. In such a critical climate, Mailer’s very rationale for the writing of ''Oswald’s Tale'' excludes it from the category of “political” critique. As a self-described “close reading” of The Warren Commission Report, Mailer’s narrative embraces the very critical mode and faith in representation that poststructural literary criticism has rejected as de-politicized:
+{{quote|For two generations of Americans, the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes ... have become a species of Talmudic text begging for commentary and further elucidation ... [T]he twenty-six volumes will also be a Comstock Lode of novelistic material, not of much use in solving a mystery ... but certainly to be honored for its short stories, historical vignettes, and vast cast of characters....”{{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=351}}}}
+Mailer’s offering of ''Oswald’s Tale'' as straightforward assessment of the political climate of the Cold War was read as similarly outmoded. In his view the political nature of ''Oswald’s Tale'' is more or less transparent:
+{{quote|If we obtain nothing else, we can count on gaining a greater understanding of the dominant state of our political experience in these decades of the Cold War, for Oswald, willy-nilly, became one of the leading actors in this tragicomedy of superpowers
+who, with limited comprehension, lived in dread of each other.{{Sfn|mailer|1995|p=353}}}}
+Ironically, however, the very “postmodern critique” that Frank Lentricchia suggested made ''Libra'' so powerful and so topical in 1988 makes it strangely
+limited in 2009. ''Libra’s'' occasional one-note quality is neither Delillo’s “fault” nor seemingly his intention, but instead a product of changing social and
+critical times. It is also a testament to Lentricchia’s great influence as a critic. In any case, ''Libra’s'' reception as a specifically “postmodern” novel has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring the more concrete elements of its political analysis. Perhaps because DeLillo engages less than Mailer with Oswald’s
+specific ideology, critics have virtually ignored its role in the novel, preferring to focus on its critique of Oswald’s susceptibility to the heroic fictions
+of pop culture. Ironically, in post-structural terms DeLillo’s depiction of Oswald’s ideology and Jack Ruby’s motivations is remarkably apolitical in
+that, unlike Mailer’s, it hews remarkably close to received interpretations of the historical record.
+In the case of these two novels, the most useful way to address the relationship of “the postmodern” to “the political” would be to see them as co-existent rather than mutually exclusive Despite the temptation to oppose “internal” political content (''Executioner’s'' broad-scale ''critique'' of the late 1970s, or that of the proletarian/collective novels of the 1930s) to the “external” or “contextual” political nature of representation itself (present in all texts) it is more accurate to see both ways of reading as serving the same ends. What is more important than the ''location'' of a political critique is its function. In terms of their “postmodern” representational strategies, Libra
+and ''Oswald’s Tale'' are both “political” in that their rejection of structure— the reassuring frameworks of ideology, empiricism, and government— challenges official (state) versions of a nationally and culturally constitutive event. Both novels lay claim to extensive empirical evidence (the Warren Report and personal interviews) regarding the Kennedy assassination without reaching any conclusions regarding its “truth” or meaning. This stance
+questions the reassuring order represented by the testimony of solid citizens and ideologically transparent FBI men, and by implication, the legitimacy of the Warren Commission as representative of the state. This challenge to the status quo is one of the defining characteristics of what John Duvall calls “productive postmodernism,” but it is also the central assumption of any left-wing political novel.
+Thus, in spite of their “postmodern” metacommentaries on Oswald as a cultural signifier, ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' have more in common with the
+socialist/proletarian novels of the thirties and forties than might be supposed. Mailer and DeLillo’s reading of Oswald as both a producer and a product of social forces, rather than simply as “a private individual operating in the ‘private sector’” {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1989|p=2}} forms a clear link
+to the more “traditionally” political novels of the first half of the twentieth century. While their narratives propose a more complex vision of individualism (both isolating and liberating) than their precursors, neither Oswald nor the other figures in the novels is ever presented as truly divorced from
+their social and cultural circumstances. In contrast to the novels of “the new regionalists of and for the Reagan eighties” DeLillo and Mailer “offer us no myth of political virginity preserved, no ‘individuals’ who are not expressions of—and responses to—specific historical processes”{{Sfn|Lentricchia|1989|p=2}} More important than the question of whether Oswald is a “modern” or a “postmodern figure” is the fact that both novels foreground individual agency as a specific response to social and political forces. In both ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'', Oswald is driven by the need to negotiate his identity between what the novels argue are mutually exclusive poles of individual and community.
+The fact that these works discredit the possibility of a purely empirical account of the assassination suggests that their “meaning” lies not in what
+they may allege, but rather, in their power to reveal what is at stake for “the way the nation and its history are defined”{{Sfn|Sturken|1997|p=45}}. This is why the most obvious divergence between the two narratives is surprisingly easy to overlook: In DeLillo’s version of the assassination, Oswald is not the assassin. Although he hits Kennedy, he does not fire the fatal shot. On the other hand, in ''Oswald’s Tale'' Mailer avoids explicitly linking Oswald with the definitive bullet (using caveats such as “Innocent or guilty” and “... if one supposes that he did shoot Kennedy”), but systematically shoots down most of the evidence to the contrary. David Courtwright is one of the very few critics to take up what would seem to be an important argument on DeLillo’s part: that Oswald was innocent. In “Why Oswald Missed” Courtwright addresses the very point that the notable absence of other commentary makes clear. In both narratives, the nature of the fatal shot is treated as an incidental rather than central element. Although Glen Thomas lumps ''Libra'' (and presumably ''Oswald’s Tale'') into the hundreds of “reevaluations of the assassination,” {{Sfn|Thomas|1997|p=107}} neither work is “about” Oswald’s guilt or innocence, or even whether he acted alone or as part of a conspiracy.
+In interviews, both Mailer and DeLillo have made it clear that their own judgments concerning Oswald’s role in the assassination are not only surprisingly unchallenging to the final conclusion reached by Warren Commission, but immaterial to their novels. DeLillo has reportedly dismissed Oliver Stone’s sensationalizing conspiracy film ''JFK'' as “Disneyland for paranoids,”
+and rejects the plotting of ''Libra'' as nothing more than a plausible device: “‘I don’t think there was any orchestrated attempt by established offices in any
+intelligence agency ... I purposely chose the most obvious possibility-that the assassination was engineered by anti-Castro elements-simply as a way of
+being faithful to what we know of history’” (qtd. in Heron 1). Mailer also leans toward the theory that Oswald acted alone, but interprets the terms
+“conspiracy” and “secret agent” rather broadly. When asked, by a Newsweek journalist for “the bottom line,” Mailer responds, “I think he did it by himself, but I think he was leaned on by the FBI and the CIA, which is why there was that tremendous effort at cover-up. Oswald was a do-it-yourself guy. It’s hard to see him giving his gun to someone else. It would have been like him giving his wife to someone else” {{Sfn|Sawhill|1995|p=60}}
+Mailer implies, that for state purposes, empirical evidence was far less important than bringing in the necessary verdict. Although he favors the Lone Assassin theory, Mailer suggests that the evidence alone wouldn’t have been enough to convict Oswald:
+{{quote| In my mind there’s a 75 percent probability that [Oswald]’s the lone assassin, but I don’t consider the case closed. If I had been his lawyer, I could have gotten him off. I’ll bet any decent lawyer could have gotten him off. Unless you had a hanging jury, the
+jurists would have to have a reasonable doubt. There’s too many loose ends. The biggest loose end would have been the magic bullet. That ... alone is enough to get a guy off! {{Sfn|DePree|1996|p=3}}
 ===Citations===
@@ Line 53: / Line 135: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1971 |title=The Performing Self |url= |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Sturken |first=Marita |date=1997 |chapter=Personal Stories and National meanings: Memory, Reenactment, and the Image |editor1-last=Rhiel |editor1-first=Mary |editor2-last=Suchoff |editor2-first=David |title=The Seductions of Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Menand |first=Louis |date=2002
+|chapter=Norman Mailer In His Time|editor-last=Farrar
+|editor-first=Strauss |title=American Studies }}
 {{Refend}}