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).

Oswald’s Tale and Libra, then, are expressly political works. Oswald’s bid for selfhood complicates Executioner’s nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald’s crime as an Emersonian act of self-making—both audacious and peculiarly American. For DeLillo, Oswald’s act of murder adds an unsettlingly literal dimension to Gilmore’s last-ditch negative agency: The predication of Oswald’s life on Kennedy’s death suggests a kind of zero-sum game in which celebrity status confirms personhood.

As the depictions of Mailer and DeLillo make clear, the existence of such a figure as Oswald, or more accurately, such a peculiarly unmoored Oswald, has broader and more ominous ramifications than Poirier may have supposed. These biographical narratives are unsettling not merely in what they allege about Oswald, but in what Oswald suggests about the nature and formation of American identity. As Marita Sturken points out, “Within the national discourse, the stakes of biography are high; the meaning of certain life stories helps to shape the way the nation and its history are defined” (45). 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 134 { 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).