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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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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. | 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: | 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. | 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.{{sfn|Heron|1988|p=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: | 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}} }} | {{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}}}} | ||
The same argument appears in ''Oswald’s Tale'' in a slightly more pointed form. While Mailer stops short of accusing J. Edgar Hoover of a blatant miscarriage of justice, the implication is clear: “Given Hoover’s conclusion in the first twenty-four hours after JFK’s assassination that Oswald did it all by himself, the word passed down the line quickly: FBI men would prosper best by arriving at pre-ordained results” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=612}} }} | The same argument appears in ''Oswald’s Tale'' in a slightly more pointed form. While Mailer stops short of accusing J. Edgar Hoover of a blatant miscarriage of justice, the implication is clear: “Given Hoover’s conclusion in the first twenty-four hours after JFK’s assassination that Oswald did it all by himself, the word passed down the line quickly: FBI men would prosper best by arriving at pre-ordained results” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=612}}}} | ||
A 1977 article in ''Foreign Policy'' confirms Mailer’s assertion. In the article Donald Schulz asserts that the lone gunman theory was the official | A 1977 article in ''Foreign Policy'' confirms Mailer’s assertion. In the article Donald Schulz asserts that the lone gunman theory was the official position of the State Department almost immediately after Oswald’s death. According to Schulz, “the evidence strongly supports that there was an overwhelming predisposition on the part of the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the commission itself to accept Lee Harvey Oswald as Kennedy’s lone killer, without adequately investigating other | ||
hypotheses and leads that might have led to different conclusions.” {{Sfn|Schulz|1977|p=58}} }} | hypotheses and leads that might have led to different conclusions.”{{Sfn|Schulz|1977|p=58}}}} | ||
In “''Libra'' as Postmodern Critique,” Frank Lentricchia argues against the novel’s basis in the elements of traditional social critique: “''Libra'' is a fiction | In “''Libra'' as Postmodern Critique,” Frank Lentricchia argues against the novel’s basis in the elements of traditional social critique: “''Libra'' is a fiction | ||
of social destiny, but one which largely sets aside the usual arguments of determinism based on class, social setting, ethnicity and race” {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1990|p=432}}. Here Lentricchia dismisses the novel’s very real engagement with issues of race and class, claiming that the role that these forces played in naturalist ~and presumably socialist! novels is replaced by the more totalized oppression of | of social destiny, but one which largely sets aside the usual arguments of determinism based on class, social setting, ethnicity and race” {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1990|p=432}}. Here Lentricchia dismisses the novel’s very real engagement with issues of race and class, claiming that the role that these forces played in naturalist ~and presumably socialist! novels is replaced by the more totalized oppression of | ||
“the charismatic environment of the image”: “DeLillo’s American tragedy is classless, not because he refuses to recognize the differences that class can make, but because the object of desire, what is insistently imagined in Libra as the conferrer of happiness, is never located in the privileged social space of those Fitzgerald called ‘the very rich’ ...” {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1990|p=436}. In other words, the object of aspiration is no longer material, but rather, to become the object of aspiration itself. Lentricchia’s reading is extremely sharp, but it also has the potential to reduce many of the characters in the novel to ethnic stereotypes, and to cast their struggles as a “modernist” anachronism. For example, Lentricchia writes: | “the charismatic environment of the image”: “DeLillo’s American tragedy is classless, not because he refuses to recognize the differences that class can make, but because the object of desire, what is insistently imagined in Libra as the conferrer of happiness, is never located in the privileged social space of those Fitzgerald called ‘the very rich’ ...” {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1990|p=436}}. In other words, the object of aspiration is no longer material, but rather, to become the object of aspiration itself. Lentricchia’s reading is extremely sharp, but it also has the potential to reduce many of the characters in the novel to ethnic stereotypes, and to cast their struggles as a “modernist” anachronism. For example, Lentricchia writes: | ||
{{ | {{quote| In the voice of Jack Ruby, DeLillo appears to have opened an escape hatch back to the earth of the robust ethnic life. The illusion of the essential health and purity of the ethnic voice—its self-possession—is strengthened by DeLillo’s narrative strategy in the Ruby sections of the book, his virtual disappearance as a narrator: not into “DeLillo” but into the objective dramatist who writes pure dialogue ... The illusion is of the ethnic voice’s accessability, its sincere public thereness. It feels good to be released through Ruby from ‘the world within the world’ ... the ethnic familiarity and charm of Ruby’s voice is a sort of code that tells us we are at last outside of the subterranean world of power.... {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1989|p=26}}}} | ||
in the Ruby sections of the book, his virtual disappearance as a narrator: not into “DeLillo” but into the objective dramatist who writes pure dialogue ... The illusion is of the ethnic voice’s accessability, its sincere public thereness. It feels good to be | |||
released through Ruby from ‘the world within the world’ ... the ethnic familiarity and charm of Ruby’s voice is a sort of code that tells us we are at last outside of the subterranean world of power.... {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1989|p=26}} }} | While the subsuming of racial, ethnic, and regional identities by the media spectacle is clearly DeLillo’s point and the source of his critique, Lentricchia doesn’t acknowledge the degree to which ''Libra'' depicts these elements as co-existent rather than mutually exclusive. In fact, it is the irresolvable tension between these two forms of identification that is reflected in Oswald’s schizophrenic ideology. And, as Lentricchia himself points out, it is Oswald’s point of view that dominates the novel: “The disturbing strength of ''Libra'' —and DeLillo gives no quarter on this—is its refusal to offer its readers a comfortable place outside of Oswald” {{Sfn|Lentricchia|1989|p=17}}. Thus, the relief the reader feels upon being “released” into Ruby’s voice equates ''Oswald’s'' worldview, and not DeLillo’s, with the “subterranean world of power” that makes the novel so claustrophobic. | ||
The most obvious refutation of Lentricchia’s assertion is DeLillo’s invention of Bobby Dupard, Oswald’s African-American cellmate, and confederate in the attempt on the life of General Edwin Walker. While Dupard’s lively and often funny commentary could be read as possessing the “ethnic familiarity and charm” and “accessibility” to which Lentricchia refers, its | |||
potential as comforting stereotype is belied by its cynical bite. As DeLillo suggests, the brig’s shifting power relations defeat any lasting form of solidarity. Such an analysis of power relations has more in common with a traditional left-wing critique than Lentricchia owns. Furthermore, DeLillo credits this analysis to Oswald. As Oswald watches Dupard’s beating, he | |||
can’t help but imagine ways to avoid his own. Nevertheless, he reflects on his own reaction: | |||
{{quote| [h]e hated the guards, secretly sided with them against some of the prisoners, thought they deserved what they got, the prisoners who were stupid and cruel. He felt his rancor consistently shift, felt secret satisfactions, hated the brig routine, despised the men who could not master it, although he knew it was contrived to defeat them all. {{Sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=100}}}} | |||
As DeLillo points out, the power structure of the brig is not equally oppressive to all; its cruelest divisions are along the lines of race and masculinity. Dupard is harassed with racist epithets and beaten for no apparent | |||
reason, while Oswald’s harassment is intended to impugn his masculinity. Although Oswald and Dupard are allied through their shared marginal status and desire to disrupt power relations, their political common cause never breaches the racial divide. Dupard’s solidarity with Oswald is real, but uneasy; his conversations with Oswald are marked by a good-natured but satiric wit. Instead of the mentor that Oswald is searching for, the “artful old con who would advise the younger man ... a grizzled figure with kind and tired eyes,” Oswald “wasn’t sure what he had here in Bobby R. Dupard” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=99}}. DeLillo underscores the divisiveness of race contained in the two men’s differing perceptions of the military. While both men joke about their mothers’ misguided faith in the armed services, it appeals to Oswald in ways in cannot to Dupard. Dupard comments: “I definitely get the idea they want to send me home in a box. The first minute I put on the green service coat, I look like I’m dead. It’s a coffin suit for a fool. I seen it on the spot.” Poor and disenfranchised though he is, Oswald is white. In his army uniform, where Dupard sees a dead man, Oswald sees an idealized self: “I liked the uniform ... It was great how it looked. I was surprised how great I felt ... I looked in the mirror and said it’s me.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=106}}}} | |||
Similarly, while Oswald emphasizes his and Dupard’s oppression by a common and faceless enemy ~“it” vs. “we”! Dupard underscores the isolat�ing effects of racism ~“they” vs. “me”!. Oswald tells Dupard, “''it’s'' the whole huge system; ''we’re'' a zero in the system.” Dupard responds, “''[t]hey'' give ''me'' their special attention. Better believe” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=106}}, emphasis added!. Unbeknownst to Oswald, the two men are also divided in their cosmologies. Dupard’s ide�ology is religious; Oswald’s political. In response to Oswald’s comment about ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' as a book about “us here and now,” Dupard responds, “I used to read the Bible.” In turn, Oswald’s version of a faith from which he’s fallen away is the Marine Corps manual: “... I read the Marine Corps manual ... Then I found out what it’s really all about. How to be a tool of the system. It’s the perfect capitalist handbook” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=106}}. | |||
Ideology, and later the brig, provide for Oswald the sense of destiny and meaning for which Dupard once turned to the Bible. As DeLillo points out, his atheism is intolerable for mainstream Americans. In the service he had once told Reitmeyer [that] communism was the one true religion: | |||
He’d been speaking seriously but also for effect. He could enrage Reitmeyer by calling himself an atheist. Reitmeyer thought you had to be forty years old before you could claim that distinction. It was a position you had to earn through years of experience ... maybe the brig was a kind of religion too. All prison. Something | |||
you carried with you all your life, a counterforce to politics and lies. This went deeper than anything they could tell you from the pulpit. It carried a truth no one could contradict. {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=100}} | |||
Despite Stacey Olster’s characterization of DeLillo’s Oswald as “almost a throwback to modernist alienation” {{Sfn|Olster|2002|p=49}}, DeLillo reads Oswald’s peculiarly cipher-like sense of self as a precursor of postmodern consciousness. As Lentricchia himself points out, the other figures in the novel have a concrete quality that Oswald does not. Not coincidentally they also have a connection to specific moments in history that, for better or worse, anchors their frames of reference in time and space. Thus, it is not Oswald, but the other characters in Libra who exhibit the modernist alienation of Olster’s argument. Unlike Oswald’s, the disillusionment of Jack Ruby, David Ferrie, Guy | |||
Bannister, Wayne Elko, and the disillusioned revolutionary Raymo stems from the failure of the ideological frameworks upon which they based their lives. | |||
In the experiences of Raymo, a Castro supporter who takes part in the assassination plot, DeLillo underscores the inextricable relationship between | |||
religion and ideology.{{Efn|see Whittaker{{harvtxt| | |||
Witness}} Raymo is embittered not only by the betrayal of the United States, but by Castro’s as well. His memories of the revolution reveal the qualities that made Castro such a powerfully inspiring, and devastating, figure: | |||
{{quote| He was with Castro in the movement ... Fidel was some kind of magical figure then ... Tall, strong, long-haired ... mixing theory and raw talk ... explaining everything ... He made the revolution something people felt on their bodies. The ideas, the whistling words, they throbbed in all the senses. He was like Jesus in boots, preaching everywhere he went, withholding his identity from the campesinos until the time was dramatically right.... From the first minute, Castro was inventing a convenient history of the revolution to advance his grab for power, to become the Maximum Leader. {{Sfn|DeLillio|1995|p=184–5}}}} | |||
As a kind of “Jesus in boots” Castro’s “mixing theory and raw talk” and “explaining everything.” seems to unify the most painful and insoluble dichotomy in human experience. Earthy and pious, simple and intellectual, | |||
Castro marries the bodily to the spiritual. His “preaching” of communist ideology explains the origin of people’s suffering, and like a religion, brings | |||
meaning to their lives. The mixture of “theory “and “raw talk” which translates the revolution into “something people felt on their bodies” makes the link between the personal and political manifest, and closes the gap between political theory and its practice. Finally, however, even Castro is revealed to have feet of clay. Not only does he rewrite history in order to achieve the | |||
power he supposedly eschewed, but his ideals are revealed to be hollow. | |||
Later, Raymo explains to Oswald, | |||
{{quote I used to believe the great thing of Castro was the time he spent in prison ... I used to say this is the man’s honor and strength. He comes out of prison with authority if he is sent there for his beliefs. It is completely different in Castro’s own prisons. We | |||
came out of La Cabana with anger and disgust. We were the worms of the CIA. {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=293}}}} | |||
In response to Oswald’s proud claim that he was sent to prison in the military “for politics ... Just like Fidel” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=293}}}}, and that going to prison for one’s beliefs is “a necessary stage in the evolution of any movement that cuts against the system ...”{{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=294}}}}, Raymo points out the extreme naïveté of Oswald’s idealization of Castro and of his faith in revolutionary ideology: | |||
Castro spent fourteen months in an isolation cell. He read Karl Marx. He read Russian. He told us he read twelve hours a day ... Always studying, always analyzing. Years later I saw the executions of men who fought by his side in the mountains ... I thought about it a lot ... and I’ll tell you my beliefs. I believed in | |||
the United States of America. The country that could do no wrong. With the great U.S. behind us how could we lose? They told us, they told us, they promise ... We have the full backing of the military. We went to the beaches thinking they would support us with air, with Navy ... What happens? We find ourselves in the swamps, lost and hungry, eating tree bark ... They disarmed us and fastened our hands in one big looping chain and | |||
put us in troop trucks to go to the nearest militia camp and there’s a plane passing right overhead and I call out ‘Don’t shoot boys, it’s one of ours.’ {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=294}}}} | |||
But Oswald is not quick to give up his faith in communism. In the brig he turns to communism to reconfigure his physical constraint as freedom from the constraints of his ego. There he relinquishes responsibility for his personal destiny. Instead of his own abasement, | |||
{{quote| [h]e tried to feel history in the cell. This was history out of George Orwell, the territory of no-choice. He could see how he’d been headed here since the day he was born. The brig was invented just for him, It was just another name for the stunted rooms where he’d spent his life ... He’d been headed here from the start. Inevitable ... Maybe what has to happen is that the | |||
individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the penalties and restrictions they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id. | |||
{{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=100-101} | |||
In ''Libra'' Oswald is torn between two conflicting frameworks: that of the Marine Corps, which glorifies the individual, and that of Communism, which subsumes it within a larger agenda. While The Marine Corps champions individual agency, his contact with the Party “didn’t see the individual,” and “never talked to Lee in a personal way” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=94}}. However, the Marine Corps also imprisons Oswald, first within it rules, and later, in the brig. As the guard in the brig reminds Oswald, “In this head we know our [Marine Corps] manual word for word ... In the final assault it is the ''individual'' Marine with his rifle ... who closes with the enemy and destroys him” {{Sfn|Mailer|1995|p=103–4}}}} | |||
For Oswald, the traditional “function” of ideology is reversed. Unlike the other characters in the novel, whose ideologies are an expression of their identities, which is to say, the sum total of their nationalities, ethnicities, and value systems, Oswald delimits his identity through the political ideology he adopts. If Oswald’s ideology can be characterized, it is an ideology of opposition. In the United States, where he is poor, he is a Marxist, and fixates on a life in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, where his salary supplemented and his work light, he feels oppressed by the lack of social freedom and the scarcity of high-quality consumer goods. As both DeLillo and Mailer point out in different ways, what looks like inconsistency in Oswald’s politics is really a misperception of his true motivation. Because the ultimate goal of Oswald’s ideology is establishing an identity rather than accomplishing specific political goals (that is, being rather than doing) it lacks content in the traditional, or perhaps “Modernist” sense of the word. It does not, however, lack context. For Oswald, Marxism serves several functions, the least of which are its ideals of collectivity and equality. More importantly, in the 1950s it was an obvious choice for someone looking, as Oswald was, to define himself in opposition to his environment. | |||
In ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'', Marxist ideology offers Oswald an opportunity to reconfigure his alienation from his peers as a positive choice. Its narrative of economic oppression and the subjugation of the weak by the strong confer meaning on Oswald’s marginal status. As a high school student, his discovery of the writings of Marx, Trotsky and Lenin open up a “world within the world” that simultaneously assuages his loneliness and frees him from the insularity of his peers and the stifling domesticity of his mother’s tiny apartment.{{efn|In an ironic{{harvtxt|12}} DeLillo imagines Oswald as a high school student sitting | |||
“cross-legged on the floor, scanning titles for hours,” in search of | |||
{{quote| books that ''put him at a distance from his classmates'', closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. ''He wanted subjects and ideas of historical scope'', ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time around him ... He’d read pamphlets, seen photographs in Life ... People of Russia, ''the other world''. {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=33}}}} | |||
. . . | . . . | ||
===Notes=== | ===Notes=== | ||