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

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 Mailer and DeLillo’s Oswald embodies American ideals surrounding individual freedom and personal agency. As a result he is ''both'' villain and hero,
 and his life story functions as a kind of case study.
+In ''Oswald’s Tale'' and ''Libra'' the overdetermined faith in the transformative power of individual action suggests not confidence, but a profound anxiety about the possibilities for personal agency. What is important in
+{ the mailer review
+understanding the provenance of DeLillo and Mailer’s neo-Emersonian
+Oswald is how this loss of faith paved the way for a return to conservative
+values in the 1980s.
+''Libra'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' are, of course, not only reflections of the Reagan
+era; they are also incisive responses to specific events of the period. ''Oswald’s
+Tale'' is the product of concrete historical forces, as well as more pragmatic
+goals. ''Glasnost'' allowed Larry Schiller, and therefore Mailer, the dual rewards
+of exclusive “scoop” and almost guaranteed profitability. The novel was Mailer’s third collaboration with Schiller and Mailer refers quite matter-of-factly
+to his attraction to the material’s novelty. According to him, “One stimulus
+to the writing of this book was an offer from the Belarus KGB to allow a look
+into their files on Oswald … [I]t was … the equivalent of an Oklahoma
+land-grab for an author to be able to move into a large and hitherto
+unrecorded part of Oswald’s life” (''Oswald’s Tale 349''). But Mailer’s comments
+also suggest a journalistic verve for investigation, and the inborn skepticism
+that often makes his analyses so trenchant: “Of course, the task in Russia had
+not been to look for such an answer.... this was not a search for a smoking
+gun … it was more one’s aim … to set up a base camp on the slopes of such
+a mystery” (''349''). More importantly, Mailer underscores the role the huge
+political changes of the early 1990s played in gaining access to the information that made ''Oswald’s Tale'' possible: “[T]he end of the Cold War encouraged Russian and Byelorussian acquaintances of Oswald to loosen habits of
+discretion formed under Stalin and preserved by Brezhnev” (''349'').
+The implicit question posed by both narratives is whether Oswald represents an aberration, or the logical conclusion of the potentially destructive
+aspects of American individualist values. For Mailer, whose abiding interest in the figure of the Sociopath-as-heroic-individual is central to his work, the ambiguity of the boundary between the two is nothing new.
+What is new is the ''political'' specificity of Mailer’s metaphor. In ''Executioner'', he compares Gilmore to Houdini, dangling him between Romantic
+self-sacrifice and Karmic responsibility. In ''Oswald’s Tale'', Emerson and Hitler represent the twin poles of Oswald’s self-perception. As in Gilmore’s case, Mailer clearly admires Oswald, but doesn’t shrink from revealing the will to power that unites the moral duality he sees in Oswald’s character. But Mailer’s critique of Oswald is not simply an isolated psychological portrait—it is a social critique. Although he deliberately avoids answering the question of Oswald’s “normalcy” or aberrance, his suggestion that the reader consider Oswald a kind of everyman places the onus for the creation of such a person, on American life. In summing up the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, Mailer suggests that the fundamental desires of a presidential assassin are not so far removed from our own: “Let us, then, say farewell to Lee Harvey Oswald’s long and determined dream of political triumph, wifely approbation, and high destiny. Who among us can say that he is in no way related to our own dream?” (''Oswald’s Tale 790–91'').