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

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 {{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}} }}
+A 1977 article in ''Foreign Policy'' confirms Mailer’s assertion. In the article Donald Schulz asserts that the lone gunman theory was the official posi�tion 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}} }}
+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
+“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:
+{{qoute| 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}} }}
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