The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra: Difference between revisions

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 {{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}}}}
+The young Oswald identifies with the loneliness of the revolutionaries, and their struggle against a common enemy: “These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these
+men ... they felt it and waited” {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=34}}. The narrative of revolution, also makes sense of Oswald’s daily life and grants dignity to his marginal social position: “He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day” {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=34}}. Later, when Oswald is stationed in Japan as a Marine, his fascination with communism is strengthened by its potential to confer upon him the trappings of adulthood. For a nineteen-year-old Private teased for his small stature and high-strung personality, its association with intellectual, social and sexual sophistication is irresistible.
+Oswald’s discussions with Konno, a mysterious figure he meets in a nightclub while stationed in Japan lessen his sense of isolation, and counter the humiliation of his army experience. Konno, who is suggested to be a Soviet agent, is master of a skillful totalizing rhetoric that assuages Oswald’s hunger for meaning by placing his struggles in the context of a common human
+experience. Soon, Oswald “counted on these discussions with Konno, who was able to argue Lee’s own positions from a historic rather than personal viewpoint” {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=88}}. Through his association with Konno, Oswald also has his first sexual experience, which underscores his new sense of destiny and belonging. In the woman’s room,
+{{quote| [h]e felt different, serious, still. He was part of something streaming through the world ... The moment had been waiting to happen. The room had been here since the day he was born, waiting for him, just like this, to walk through the door. It was just a question of walking in the door, entering the stream of things. {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=84}}
+Although Oswald craves connection, DeLillo and Mailer return repeatedly to his bid for singularity. In different ways, both authors see Oswald’s
+fascination with fame as the result of the nebulous boundaries of his personality, which necessitate defining himself in opposition to his environment. Because of his competing needs to merge and individuate Oswald is most comfortable in anonymity, as an outsider. In Japan, where he is serving in the Air Force, Oswald walks alone, literally losing himself in the “mazes of narrow streets mobbed with shoppers.” There, as DeLillo points out, “[h]e was remarkably calm. There was something about being off-base, away from his countrymen, out of America, that took the edge off his wariness eased his rankled skin” {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=84}}
+Mailer pinpoints Oswald’s sense of himself as an exceptional person as the source of an unbridgeable rift between Oswald’s political ideology and his personal goals. Unlike Gilmore, whose fatalism and belief in Karma complicated his individualism, Oswald “always felt that he was extraordinary personally and that he had to do something extraordinary” {{Sfn|DePree|1996|p=3}} In this way, Gilmore and Oswald’s positions are oddly reversed. Despite Gilmore’s individualist and determinedly anti-social stance, he was primarily motivated by the desire for ''affinity''. As Mailer contends, “Gary wanted freedom and love ... he wanted to be with Nicole” {{Sfn|DePree|1996|p=10}}. Oswald’s self-perception on the other hand, was more conflicted. His desire to see himself as a Lukacksian Great Man runs contrary to his wish to “lose himself in
+history ... outside the borders of ego and id” and “to merge his life with the greater tide of history” {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=87}}. In short, while Oswald claimed to abjure the notion of the individual in favor of community, ''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' oppose his desire to merge with history to his solipsistic desire
+to control it.
+Mailer and DeLillo see Oswald’s marriage as symbolic of the split between his personal and political lives. In keeping with their dissimilar worldviews, however, the two authors characterize the split differently. In a letter to his brother, quoted in the body of ''Oswald’s Tale'' and on the frontispiece of ''Libra'', Oswald claims that for him “happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home ... Happiness is taking part in the struggle where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world and the world in general.” For DeLillo, Oswald’s vacillation between the intimacy of domestic partnership and the broader fellowship of communism is a choice between two mutually exclusive sources of belonging. For him, domestic life
+inextricably links belonging with consumption:
+{{quote| He got Marina settled in bed, then sat next to her ... he felt the power of her stillness ... and of the child she carried. He would start saving right away for a washing machine and a car. They’d get an apartment ... their own furniture for a change, modern pieces ... these are standard ways to stop being lonely. {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=371}}.
+But DeLillo also suggests a certain ideological ''naïveté'' on Oswald’s part. Oswald is surprised to find that his Soviet friends place the most value on their private lives:
+{{quote| He talked to his friends about Cuba, surprised to find they weren’t passionate about the subject ... Chocolate was expensive. These people had a vicious sweet tooth. Always a crowd at the local confectionery. Life was small things Chocolate, a record player, a meal at the automat. {{Sfn|DeLillio|1988|p=199}}}}
+Mailer makes the same observation in ''Oswald’s Tale''. Like the young Soviets in ''Libra'', Marina inhabits only the small-scale landscape of her personal experience: “Of course Marina’s grandmother used to tell her, ‘Politics is poop!’ How Russian is such an attitude: My private life is my only wealth! She was in this sense the worst possible wife for Oswald” {{Sfn|Mailer|1988|p=555}}.
+As Mailer’s inclusion of Marina’s testimony indicates, her derision of Oswald’s activities spurred him on in his political pursuits and alienated him from their marriage: “You see, when I would make fun of him, of his activity ... he said that I didn’t understand him and here, you see, was proof that someone else did, that there were people who understood his activity” {{Sfn|Mailer|1988|p=555}}. As Mailer points out, The Oswalds’ opposing orientations to life also creates conflicts in Oswald himself: “We come back to his basic dilemma: To which half of himself will he be faithful—his need for love, or his need for power and fame?” {{Sfn|Mailer|1988|p=555}}.
+In ''Libra'', the fictionalized version of rogue agent David Ferrie is the mouthpiece for DeLillo’s shrewd assessment of Oswald’s ideology. Ferrie sums up Oswald’s attraction to radicalism: “I think you’ve had it backwards this whole time. You wanted to enter history ... What you really want is out. Get out. Jump out. Find your place and name on another level” {{Sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=384}}. Ferrie also tries to convince Oswald that the plan that has been conceived for Oswald to carry out is both Oswald’s destiny and his own creation. Pointing out that Kennedy’s motorcade will pass the building where Oswald works, Ferrie tells him, “There’s no such ''thing'' as coincidence ... it happens because you make it happen ... You see what this means. How it shows what you’ve got to do ... There’s something else that’s generating this event. A pattern outside experience. Something that jerks you out of the spin of history” {{Sfn|DeLillo|1988|p=384}}
+While Libra presents Oswald’s Marxism as a kind of exoskeleton for his amorphous ego, ''Oswald’s Tale'' configures his politics conversely as an expression of that ego’s demands. But Mailer’s Oswald is also a vehicle for Mailer’s own concerns. In this sense ''Oswald’s Tale'' is like a number of Mailer’s other works of “entrepreneurial” journalism which, Morris Dickstein notes, must be read through the lens of “old Mailer obsessions, which sometimes obstruc[t] our view of the subject.”{{Sfn|Dichstein|1988|p=161}}. These “obsessions, ”which also include war, masculinity, and homosexuality, shadow Mailer’s otherwise sharp critique of Oswald’s radical individualism and his depiction of Jack Ruby’s relationship to Jewish and American identity.
+In terms of specific ideology, Mailer’s Oswald is a far more protean figure than DeLillo’s. Unlike DeLillo, Mailer depicts Oswald’s political rhetoric as contradictory. Here Mailer is on solid ground, particularly because his assertion is based on historical documents to which DeLillo did not have
+access. Here Mailer cites KGB transcripts in which Oswald argues with Marina. Now that Oswald wants to return to the U.S. he argues in favor of the very elements of American life he denigrated when he renounced his citizenship. Ironically, he cites the wish for property as his reason for returning to the U.S., and chides Marina for her disinterest in private ownership. In direct opposition to his statements in the letter to his brother, Oswald offers Marina the pleasures of a private life, which he implies will provide her with everything she needs:
+{{qoute| LHO: You’ll never have anything here, but over there you’ll have
+your husband and everything.
+WIFE: ... What will I do there? I’ll sit at home the whole time
+and that’s it.
+LHO: ... But you’re going to live with me there. You’ll have
+everything ... What do you have here? One room ... and even
+that isn’t yours.
+WIFE: We live here, it’s ours.
+LHO: ... I don’t sense that it’s my own ... I don’t get any feeling
+it’s mine... .
+WIFE: Idiot, you don’t understand anything.(''mimics him'') Property, property.
+LHO: You don’t understand this concept of property ... I want to live there because the standard of living is high.
+{{Sfn|Mailer|1988|p=199}}
+Mailer doesn’t attempt to resolve the contradictions inherent in Oswald’s ideology. Rather he reads in them retrospectively the potential to commit an act like the one Oswald committed: “[A] man who can have congress with Stalinist and Trotskeyite organizations at the same time when they have been implacable enemies for close to three decades, may be ready to deal with any political contradiction if it will advance his purpose” {{Sfn|Mailer|1988|p=515}}. More importantly, Mailer’s comments suggest a certain amount of admiration for Oswald’s ''realpolitik''. Rather than seeing Oswald’s politics as contradictory, he is able to see them in a dialectical relationship, and hence, in constant flux:
+{{qoute| I’m a great believer that if you advance an idea as far as you can and it’s overtaken by someone who argues the opposite of you, in effect you’ve improved your enemy’s mind. Then someone will come along on your side and convert your enemy’s improvement of your idea and convert it back again. I’m nothing if I’m not a believer in the ''dialectic''... The thought of everyone thinking the way I do is as bad as any other form of totalitarianism. {{Sfn|Begiebing|1988|p=329}}
+Neither Oswald’s politics nor his personality was easily amenable to its environment. To a large extent this was the inevitable effect of his oppositional nature, but this trait itself was at least partially the result of socioeconomic factors. Like Gilmore, Oswald was somewhat of a fish out of water in his own time. Morris Dickstein’s depiction of postwar American society as a time of “peace, prosperity and galloping consumerism” ~Leopards 17!, and when the advent of “the new therapeutic culture of psychoanalysis” was “gradually replacing [the] social consciousness” of the Depression ~Leop�ards53! suggests that Oswald’s ostensibly left-wing politics were, in the affluent and contented atmosphere of the postwar, a throwback to the oppositional stance of the Old Left progressives of the 1930s. Given Oswald’s social and economic marginality, such identification on his part is not surprising. As the son of a single mother who barely earned enough to pay the rent on their series of “small rooms,” Oswald hardly felt the benefits of postwar prosperity. The “supermarkets, air-conditioning ... and dishwashers” that could be “taken for granted by middle class Americans by the 1960s ...” ~Leopards 17! were not part of his experience. Generationally, Oswald should
+have been a part of the New Left, but his social conservatism and defensive enforcement of gender roles
+ would most likely have alienated him from his
+peers. Temperamentally, Oswald was suited to neither affiliation, a conflict played out in the “double life” engendered by his simultaneous attraction to “Karl Marx and the U.S. Marine Corps manual” {{Sfn|Mailer|1988|p=372}}
 . . .