Some Thoughts on Don DeLillo's novel, Libra (1988)

 

I picked up a copy of Don DeLillo’s fascinating novel, Libra, at the Friends of The Library of Hawaii gigantic used book sale. (How I missed this when it came out in 1988 is a mystery). Twice through the text, now, a number of things have piqued my interest.

… The Elements of Tragedy 

(I use the terms "tragic" and "tragedy" here in less than the classical sense. There's nothing noble about Oswald. Still, I think the words are apt.)

At the top of my list is the degree to which DeLillo portrays Lee Harvey Oswald as a quintessentially tragic figure. This may very well be the novel’s greatest achievement … as well as its most disturbing. DeLillo does not excuse Oswald. Nor does he sentimentalize him or turn him into a misunderstood anti-hero. He presents him as a painfully ordinary human being; a human being who is needy, confused, alienated, resentful and one who is desperate to matter.

Oswald wants to be somebody. Hence his need for recognition. He wants to participate in something larger than himself. Hence his ideological fantasies. Combined with his fundamental loneliness, he is the perfect target for those who understand and know just how to manipulate him. The tragedy here is not simply that Oswald commits a heinous act. It’s that he spends his life imagining himself as the author of history but, in DeLillo’s telling, he’s merely its instrument.

 … Like Flies to Wanton Boys

This relates directly to another aspect of the novel that deserves some attention. It might even be argued that this is the book’s main theme. Oswald possesses, as do those who conspire to use him, an extraordinary faith in the power of individuals (or small groups of individuals) to shape enormous historical events. In Libra, the Kennedy assassination becomes a metaphysical experiment: can a handful of people alter the course of history? Can a half-dozen or so individuals working in the shadowy, liminal areas behind the scenes manufacture an event so momentous and so consequential that the world afterward is fundamentally different than the world before?

In the imaginative world of Libra, the answer is an emphatic yes. What makes that belief so unsettling is the willingness of those individuals to pay any price to achieve their goal. Human beings are chess pieces in a game that few others even know they’re playing. Morality is subordinated to historical outcomes.

Oswald shares this mindset, this fantasy. He wants to believe that an individual can transcend insignificance through a single, decisive, incandescent act. The conspirators – his handlers – recognize a kindred spirit when they see one and they pounce.

… The Persistence of Memory

DeLillo’s narrative technique in the book is also worth a mention. In Libra, the reader is confronted with anything but a conventional historical novel that moves predictably from point A to point B. Instead, it fractures time and shifts perspectives without warning. It then circles back, jumps forward and, in the process, allows seemingly unrelated pieces of experience to accrete meaning.

 

What’s remarkable to me here is the way this mirrors the working of human memory. We don’t remember our lives as coherent, continues narratives. We remember fragments … a conversation here, an image, a sensation there, a random name or a vague location. Later, another fragment surfaces and connects with something else we had, for a time, forgotten. If we are lucky, we have an “aha” moment and we remember. We continually reconstruct our past from pieces. That’s the way the plot of Libra emerges too.

The narrative technique utilized in the novel is thus sublimely appropriate for a book about the JFK assassination. Think about it. That event, like maybe none other in American history, has itself become a kind of collective memory. It’s part history. Part myth. Part unresolved narrative. DeLillo never simply tells the reader what happened. Rather, he recreates the experience of basically trying to assemble what happened from fragments. The CIA historian, Nicholas Branch, becomes the living embodiment of this process. The fractured form isn’t just stylistic. It mimics the way both individual and collective memory actually work.

When all is said and done, therefore, Libra is not a novel about “solving” the mystery of Kennedy’s assassination. It’s about our overwhelming desire to turn the scattered pieces of the past into a coherent picture; as well as about the ultimate futility and frustration inherent in that effort.

*In the process of writing this post ... this story, Curtain Rods, bubbled forth.