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

Written by
Barrie Balter

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Abstract: Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale and Don DeLillo’s Libra are expressly political works. Oswald’s bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald’s crime as an Emersonian act of self-making—both audacious and peculiarly American. Libra’s critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. 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 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.

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URL: https://prmrl.us/mr03bal

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” to “a prime mover, a man who made things happen.”

If, as Myra Jehlen comments, “projections of the future generally sum up the past,” 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 2002, DeCurtis 1991), 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.” 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.”

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.” 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 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.” 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.” 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.”

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?”

Libra’s critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. In referring to Oswald as a cultural “production,” Frank Lentricchia also posits him as a metonymic American. But while Mailer brings Oswald to “America” (Oswald is like all of us), DeLillo brings the nation to Oswald (we have become like Oswald). In Libra it is not Oswald that is aberrant, but Americans themselves. According to Lentricchia, “DeLillo does not … imply that all Americans are would-be murderous sociopaths. He has presented a far more unsettling vision of normalcy, of an everyday life so enthralled by the fantasy selves projected in the media … that it makes little sense to speak of sociopathology or a lone gunman. Oswald is ourselves painted large, in scary tones, but ourselves.”

Lentricchia’s acute reading of Libra reveals the ways in which DeLillo and Mailer’s accounts are different. While critics have read both Libra and Oswald’s Tale as “postmodern” works, they are more accurately critiques of the political, cultural, and economic changes that comprise the notion of postmodernity. However, the two works locate their critiques of “late capitalism” quite differently. While Libra is a critique of a newly minted American self, most understandable in psychoanalytic terms, Mailer’s critique centers on the environmental factors (social and political) that made a figure like Oswald necessary. Yet DeLillo’s psychological portrait of Oswald differs substantively from Mailer’s temporal contextualization of Oswald’s ideology. In DeLillo’s Oswald Lentricchia sees the birth of the postmodern individual, a media-created American, who truly exists only in the bright lights of the camera.

DeLillo’s critique of the postmodern self enacts Lacan’s theories of identity formation. Like a child suddenly recognizing himself in the mirror as an entity separate from his mother, Oswald’s sight of himself on the television monitor brings provides his first purely objective sense of himself. As he looks into the camera and “could see himself shot . . . and watched himself respond to the augering heat of he bullet,” he finally “feels” himself in the self-other relationship that, according to Lacan, is necessary to define individual identity. Dying, he enters “the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia” where he finally feels the defining sense of “Me-too and you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.” Lacan describes the mirror stage as “an identification,” and as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.” According to Lacan, it is the moment in which “the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it . . . its function as the subject.” Oswald is conflicted. While he is drawn to assuage his loneliness by subsuming his identity into a larger consciousness (to “merge himself in . . . history”), his narcissistic drive to escape the pain of being subjected to history proves stronger. DeLillo underscores Oswald’s self-objectification as Oswald fires his first shot at Kennedy: “There was so much clarity Lee could watch himself in the huge room of stacked cartons . . . He fired off a second shot.”

While Mailer’s social critique is trenchant, his speculations and attributions of motive to his “real characters” are often less carefully delineated than he claims. Furthermore, the act of “fictionalizing” is not confined to inclusion (“making up dialogue”), but is equally susceptible to exclusion. Ultimately, Oswald’s Tale rejects the power of empirical evidence to convey a reliable image of “truth.” Unlike DeLillo, Mailer denies the reader the comfort of narrative closure or the promise of meaning. After following Mailer through almost eight hundred pages of interviews, testimony, and authorial speculation, the reader is confronted by a mischievous hook: “Did Oswald do it?” What follows is not a piece of formerly withheld “evidence” of Oswald’s innocence or guilt, but a disquisition on the ultimately opaque nature of evidence itself:

[O]n one can go, trying to explore into every last reach of possibility, only to encounter a disheartening truth: Evidence, by itself, will never provide the answer to a mystery. For it is in the nature of evidence to produce, sooner or later, a counterinterpretation to itself . . . It will be obvious to the reader that one does not (and should not) respect evidence with the religious intensity that others bring to it.

DeLillo’s stance is diametrically opposed to Mailer’s. In both the DeCurtis interview and the author’s note at the end of the novel, DeLillo makes it clear that he views the role of fiction (and authors) as not simply descriptive, but also as redemptive. Not only can fiction “rescue history from its confusions” by “filling in its blank spaces,” but “the fiction writer tries to redeem the despair” that arises from the failure to construct coherent narratives, like his fictional librarian Nicholas Branch.

DeLillo and Mailer present indeterminacy as an escape from opposite problems, but both writers ultimately reinscribe the power of the authorial voice to order an otherwise unmanageable universe. In both novels, the stakes of agency are stratospheric. For DeLillo, indeterminacy is a “refuge” from “being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities” while for Mailer it provides an exit from self-delusion. At its core, Libra functions as a gloss on Oswald’s famous protest that he was “just a patsy,” presenting Oswald as the victim of the Debordean spectacle, falling prey to an illusion of mastery that ultimately robs him of consent. Although Oswald believes that, through Kennedy, he is controlling his fate, his path is preordained in the plotting of Libra. Mailer, too, explores the notion of the assassination as a kind of fool’s game, but in Oswald’s Tale the true “patsies” are seekers of the truth, who, to the extent that they seek answers, are metaphors for the reader.

Libra and Oswald’s Tale cast Oswald retrospectively as curiously postmodern, or in Mailer’s case, post-Cold-War individual. This placement is why DeLillo and Mailer’s depictions of Oswald have a disorienting “back to the future” quality. In them he appears to be both an avatar of future American selves and an anachronistic “throwback to modernist alienation.” In this way, Oswald both creates and is created by what Thomas Carmichael calls “the first postmodern historical event.”

One of the reasons for the temporal disorientation of Libra is that the perception of the Kennedy assassination as the primal loss of American innocence is by its very nature a retrospective notion. Although DeLillo sees the Kennedy assassination as the point of origin for Bell’s “end of ideology,” it is likely that the opposite is more historically “true,” which is to say that DeLillo’s perception of Oswald is itself a product of the post-Vietnam period. This is why Carmichael characterizes the assassination as a kind of year zero that alters the future and reframes the past, referring to it as both “the original site of a contemporary nostalgia” and “the moment at which all that follows in the postmodern period was violently interjected into contemporary experience.”

DeLillo and Mailer pinpoint the Kennedy assassination as the origin of a kind of existential crisis for the nation. In the Rolling Stone interview, DeLillo claims that the true legacy of the assassination was a loss of meaning: “[W]hat has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is not the plot . . . but the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity.” While Mailer may not share DeLillo’s “big bang theory” of contemporary consciousness, he does suggest that the enduring attraction to the conspiracy theory of the assassination (and the attendant status such a theory confers upon Oswald), stems from the nation’s need to impose meaning on the event. In Oswald’s Tale he points out that if Oswald was indeed a lone gunman, who is to say, “a petty figure, a lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a . . . president, then . . . [t]here was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe.” This sense of “randomness and ambiguity” permeates both Libra and Oswald’s Tale. Its attribution of causality to unpredictable and uncontrollable forces renders political ideology irrelevant and the notion of centralized power an illusion.

Mailer’s depiction concerns Oswald’s interactions with an increasingly ambiguous power structure. As he makes clear in his interview with Robert Begiebing, Mailer’s perception that power is no longer centralized in the traditional political organs began in the 1980s. According to Mailer, “In the sixties I used to see it as the FBI and the CIA being sinister. Now I suppose it has moved over to the idea that such things as television and plastics are getting us much closer to totalitarianism that the FBI or CIA ever would.” Mailer’s indictment of television and “plastics” is not unlike DeLillo’s in spirit, but differs in its focus on specific political changes that had become apparent in the 1980s.

DeLillo and Mailer’s neo-Emersonian Oswald is a product of the Reagan era. In neither novel is Oswald hostile to Kennedy’s politics, or particularly enamored of those of the Soviet Union. Instead, both accounts present Oswald’s Marxist ideology as the logical vehicle for both the expression and maintenance of his sense of alienation. That this oppositional status is crucial to his sense of himself is indicated by his rejection of both systems. In the United States Oswald idealizes the social and economic cohesion of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union he yearns for the economic and personal freedoms of the U.S. But in DeLillo and Mailer’s critique, Oswald’s “disloyalty” is also evidence of the failure of ideology itself. Having been among the very small number of people who had lived under both systems, Oswald had a unique vantage point on what would later become a received sentiment. Among Oswald’s papers is a tract containing what might be described as a mission statement. In it he writes, “I have lived under both systems. I have sought the answers, and although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not.”

In an interview in The Bloomsbury Review, Mailer characterizes Oswald as a Libertarian, but the material in Oswald’s Tale actually presents him as a reactionary. In spite of its (somewhat warranted) respectful treatment of Oswald’s political writings, Mailer’s account suggests that Oswald’s opposition to centralized power is less a bid for negative liberties than a protest against any externally-imposed structure. In the same interview Mailer comments: “[Oswald] didn’t believe in the Soviet Union, didn’t believe in America, didn’t believe in capitalism, didn’t believe in government.”

By the 1980s, Oswald’s political disillusionment looked remarkably contemporary. As Mailer points out, “A lot of his ideas are held by people today.” DeLillo and Mailer’s novels of the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, are characterized by the emergence into this seemingly post-ideological world. Their accounts of the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination are the logical conclusion of a broad-based move away from a notion of politics as a source of progressive action. Executioner’s critique of “the system,” for example, is essentially Modernist in nature: Unlike its later counterparts, Executioner addresses the failure of a specific ideology (in this case the ideals of the American dream); in this sense its vision is specifically progressive, and the disillusionment it expresses is a product of the very lost “coherent reality” to which DeLillo refers. In contrast, while DeLillo and Mailer configure Oswald’s ostensibly “political” crime as highly personal, it is only superficially linked to his ideology or the specific circumstances of his life. In this context, Gilmore’s crimes of passion are in some ways more rational and more “political” than Oswald’s pre-meditated “hit.” Despite the media’s depiction of Gilmore’s shootings as “motiveless,” Mailer presents them as a direct response to Gilmore’s monstrous sense of thwartedness. By casting the murders as vengeance for the denial of Gilmore’s basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Mailer imbues them with a political significance that Oswald’s act ironically now seems to lack.

Despite their rather obviously political subject matter, the novels’ depiction of their “prime mover” as both apolitical and solipsistic would seem to argue in favor of Irving Howe (1957) and Frederick Karl (1983)’s view of the American political novel as a kind of mythic beast. Between their “postmodern” assertion of the ultimate meaninglessness of both facts and events and the attendant discrediting of internally political content, it would be worthwhile to ask why either Oswald’s Tale or Libra should be construed as political novels at all. This question raises again the vexed issue of whether the political nature of a work lies in its content or its representation of that content. However, to the extent that one of the central preoccupations of postmodern criticism is the relationship between aesthetics and ideology, a distinction must be made not only between the “real” or historical Oswald and the Oswald of DeLillo and Mailer’s imagining, but also between Oswald’s ideology, and that of his “authors’” representational strategies. And while the issue of “postmodernity” as it pertains to either representative strategy or temporal positioning is itself “political,” the location of its “political” nature is so confounding as to make the argument moot. Is Delillo’s “TV” Oswald, whose protean identity, or “absence of substantial and autonomous selfhood” more “postmodern” than Mailer’s master-manipulator? Or, is Mailer’s self-conscious metanarration and interrogation of the “characters’” testimony more truly “postmodern” than DeLillo’s fictionalized faithfulness to what he felt was the “truth” of the historical record?

The ironic “problem” with attempts to assimilate both notions of the political nature of texts is that while they may not be mutually exclusive in terms of political goal, they are so in terms of political “content.” This problem is exemplified by a curious reversal evident in critical discussions of Libra and Oswald’s Tale. While there are dozens, if not hundreds of scholarly articles that address Libra as an avatar of some aspect of a new postmodern consciousness (either of literature or of the self), Oswald’s Tale has been virtually omitted from academic discussion. Although Mailer’s novel was widely reviewed in the popular and literary press (the Nation, the New York Times, the Atlantic), it was barely discussed in peer-reviewed literary journals. The simplest explanation for this omission could be the sheer volume of Kennedy assassination narratives in publication by 1995. The perception of these accounts as a kind of cottage industry had dogged Libra seven years earlier, and very likely contributed to Oswald’s dismissal as a species of pop journalism rather than “serious” literature.

More important, and more likely is the perception of Oswald’s Tale as dated, or at least oddly devoid of critical subject matter. To put it simply, in a universe in which “context is now text,” critics found DeLillo’s indictment of our subjection to mass media a richer source of cultural critique than Mailer’s exhaustive account of the workings of human passions and political institutions. In such a critical climate, Mailer’s very rationale for the writing of Oswald’s Tale excludes it from the category of “political” critique. As a self-described “close reading” of The Warren Commission Report, Mailer’s narrative embraces the very critical mode and faith in representation that poststructural literary criticism has rejected as de-politicized:

For two generations of Americans, the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes ... have become a species of Talmudic text begging for commentary and further elucidation . . . [T]he twenty-six volumes will also be a Comstock Lode of novelistic material, not of much use in solving a mystery . . . but certainly to be honored for its short stories, historical vignettes, and vast cast of characters....”

Mailer’s offering of Oswald’s Tale as straightforward assessment of the political climate of the Cold War was read as similarly outmoded. In his view the political nature of Oswald’s Tale is more or less transparent:

If we obtain nothing else, we can count on gaining a greater understanding of the dominant state of our political experience in these decades of the Cold War, for Oswald, willy-nilly, became one of the leading actors in this tragicomedy of superpowers who, with limited comprehension, lived in dread of each other.

Ironically, however, the very “postmodern critique” that Frank Lentricchia suggested made Libra so powerful and so topical in 1988 makes it strangely limited in 2009. Libra’s occasional one-note quality is neither Delillo’s “fault” nor seemingly his intention, but instead a product of changing social and critical times. It is also a testament to Lentricchia’s great influence as a critic. In any case, Libra’s reception as a specifically “postmodern” novel has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring the more concrete elements of its political analysis. Perhaps because DeLillo engages less than Mailer with Oswald’s specific ideology, critics have virtually ignored its role in the novel, preferring to focus on its critique of Oswald’s susceptibility to the heroic fictions of pop culture. Ironically, in post-structural terms DeLillo’s depiction of Oswald’s ideology and Jack Ruby’s motivations is remarkably apolitical in that, unlike Mailer’s, it hews remarkably close to received interpretations of the historical record.

In the case of these two novels, the most useful way to address the relationship of “the postmodern” to “the political” would be to see them as co-existent rather than mutually exclusive Despite the temptation to oppose “internal” political content (Executioner’s broad-scale critique of the late 1970s, or that of the proletarian/collective novels of the 1930s) to the “external” or “contextual” political nature of representation itself (present in all texts) it is more accurate to see both ways of reading as serving the same ends. What is more important than the location of a political critique is its function. In terms of their “postmodern” representational strategies, Libra and Oswald’s Tale are both “political” in that their rejection of structure—the reassuring frameworks of ideology, empiricism, and government—challenges official (state) versions of a nationally and culturally constitutive event. Both novels lay claim to extensive empirical evidence (the Warren Report and personal interviews) regarding the Kennedy assassination without reaching any conclusions regarding its “truth” or meaning. This stance questions the reassuring order represented by the testimony of solid citizens and ideologically transparent FBI men, and by implication, the legitimacy of the Warren Commission as representative of the state. This challenge to the status quo is one of the defining characteristics of what John Duvall (2002) calls “productive postmodernism,” but it is also the central assumption of any left-wing political novel.

Thus, in spite of their “postmodern” metacommentaries on Oswald as a cultural signifier, Libra and Oswald’s Tale have more in common with the socialist/proletarian novels of the thirties and forties than might be supposed. Mailer and DeLillo’s reading of Oswald as both a producer and a product of social forces, rather than simply as “a private individual operating in the ‘private sector.’” forms a clear link to the more “traditionally” political novels of the first half of the twentieth century. While their narratives propose a more complex vision of individualism (both isolating and liberating) than their precursors, neither Oswald nor the other figures in the novels is ever presented as truly divorced from their social and cultural circumstances. In contrast to the novels of “the new regionalists of and for the Reagan eighties” DeLillo and Mailer “offer us no myth of political virginity preserved, no ‘individuals’ who are not expressions of—and responses to—specific historical processes. More important than the question of whether Oswald is a “modern” or a “postmodern figure” is the fact that both novels foreground individual agency as a specific response to social and political forces. In both Libra and Oswald’s Tale, Oswald is driven by the need to negotiate his identity between what the novels argue are mutually exclusive poles of individual and community.

The fact that these works discredit the possibility of a purely empirical account of the assassination suggests that their “meaning” lies not in what they may allege, but rather, in their power to reveal what is at stake for “the way the nation and its history are defined.” This is why the most obvious divergence between the two narratives is surprisingly easy to overlook: In DeLillo’s version of the assassination, Oswald is not the assassin. Although he hits Kennedy, he does not fire the fatal shot. On the other hand, in Oswald’s Tale Mailer avoids explicitly linking Oswald with the definitive bullet (using caveats such as “Innocent or guilty” and “. . . if one supposes that he did shoot Kennedy”), but systematically shoots down most of the evidence to the contrary. David Courtwright is one of the very few critics to take up what would seem to be an important argument on DeLillo’s part: that Oswald was innocent. In “Why Oswald Missed” Courtwright addresses the very point that the notable absence of other commentary makes clear. In both narratives, the nature of the fatal shot is treated as an incidental rather than central element. Although Glen Thomas lumps Libra (and presumably Oswald’s Tale) into the hundreds of “reevaluations of the assassination,” neither work is “about” Oswald’s guilt or innocence, or even whether he acted alone or as part of a conspiracy.

In interviews, both Mailer and DeLillo have made it clear that their own judgments concerning Oswald’s role in the assassination are not only surprisingly unchallenging to the final conclusion reached by Warren Commission, but immaterial to their novels. DeLillo has reportedly dismissed Oliver Stone’s sensationalizing conspiracy film JFK as “Disneyland for paranoids,” and rejects the plotting of Libra as nothing more than a plausible device: “‘I don’t think there was any orchestrated attempt by established offices in any intelligence agency ... I purposely chose the most obvious possibility-that the assassination was engineered by anti-Castro elements-simply as a way of being faithful to what we know of history.’” Mailer also leans toward the theory that Oswald acted alone, but interprets the terms “conspiracy” and “secret agent” rather broadly. When asked, by a Newsweek journalist for “the bottom line,” Mailer responds, “I think he did it by himself, but I think he was leaned on by the FBI and the CIA, which is why there was that tremendous effort at cover-up. Oswald was a do-it-yourself guy. It’s hard to see him giving his gun to someone else. It would have been like him giving his wife to someone else.”

Mailer implies, that for state purposes, empirical evidence was far less important than bringing in the necessary verdict. Although he favors the Lone Assassin theory, Mailer suggests that the evidence alone wouldn’t have been enough to convict Oswald:

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!

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” }}

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.” }}

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” . 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:

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Works Cited

• Begiebing, Robert (1988). "Twelfth Round: An Interview with Norman Mailer". In Lennon, J. Michael. Conversations With Norman Mailer. Jackson: U of Mississippi P. pp. 306–330.
• Bell, Daniel (1962) [1960]. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Collier Books.
• . . .
• Carmichael, Thomas (Summer 1993). "Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo's Libra, The Names, and Mao II". Contemporary Literature. 34 (2): 204–218.
• DeCurtis, Anthony (1991). "'An Outsider in This Society': An Interview with Don DeLillo". In Lentricchia, Frank. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke UP. pp. 43–66.
• DePree, Peter (April 1996). "Oswald's Ghost: An Interview With Norman Mailer". The Bloomsbury Review: 3.
• DeLillo, Don (December 8, 1983). "American Blood". Rolling Stone. p. 21.
• — (1988). Libra. New York: Viking.
• Duvall, John (2002). Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies. Albany: SUNY UP.
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