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

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SECRET AGENCY: AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM IN OSWALD’S TALE AND LIBRA:

in 1979 The Executioner’s Song explored the life of a man “who assumes …the role that history has given him” after he murders two private citizens. In Oswald’s Tale (1995) and Libra (1988), Norman 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 Warren Commission Report, scholarly histories and newspaper articles) 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. In that moment Oswald transforms himself from “a zero in the system” (DeLillo, Libra 106) to “a prime mover, a man who made things happen” (Mailer, Oswald’s Tale 605).

If, as Myra Jehlen comments, "projections of the future generally sum up the past” (49), these narrative projections of the past clearly comment on their present. Although the accounts of DeLillo and Mailer differ stylistically and thematically, both place Oswald’s assassination of John F. Kennedy in their respective contemporary context. The journey from “a man” who assumes an assigned role in history to “a zero” who changes it points to a profound shift in the perception of individual agency that came to fruition in the 1980s. The nature of the shift is not contained in Oswald’s desire to transcend his marginality (which he shares with Gary Gilmore), but his response to it. While the authorial incarnations of Gilmore and Oswald are sometimes accurately compared (Olster, DeCurtis), their cosmologies and senses of self are in diametric opposition. Mailer’s Gilmore is a fatalist. Although he contends mightily with his circumstances, he accepts their strictures as inevitable. The Oswald of Mailer and DeLillo is quite the opposite. Rather than submitting to fate, Oswald casts himself as its agent. By assassinating the President, Oswald quite literally escapes his subjectivity to fate and confirms retrospectively his grandiose sense of himself as an important man.

Accordingly, Oswald’s act is not essentially self-destructive. Rather, it is self-constructive in a way Gilmore’s crimes were not. As Richard Poirier argues, this act of self-creation, of individuation, is not only personal, but innately political: “[A]ny effort to find accommodation for human shapes or sounds is an act that partakes of political meaning”(Performing viii). Poirier’s notion of the “performing self ” as a political self encompasses both authors depiction of Oswald and the specific goals of their authorial projects: “[T]his activity, when it is found in writing, offers a traceable exemplification of possible political and social activities” (viii).