crimeculture

Fiction creating the historical in Don DeLillo’s Libra

by Janice Cormie, Birkbeck

The writing of history is the building of a cohesive narrative from an enormous array of conflicting and often unreliable sources. Historiography is therefore subject to many of the reality problems found in literature. More particularly, as with detective fiction, history is concerned with pinpointing the motivations and operations of its characters and with uncovering the truth about an event or sequence of events, using data supplied by witnesses and official sources, all of whom may or many not be reliable.

The term ‘historiographic metafiction’ has been coined to describe texts such as Don DeLillo’s Libra, [1] which use ‘imaginative reconstruction’ to think through ‘the problems of how we… have knowledge of the past.’ [2] Whereas in the past historical writing was privileged for its truthfulness, and literary texts tolerated as entertaining or artistic tissues of lies, both genres are now identified as ‘linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms… they appear to be equally intertextual.’ [3] ‘Postmodern historiographers approach history as a cultural construct, or… a narrative’ [4] ; postmodern fiction uses the past in ways that ‘prevent it from being conclusive and teleological’, [5] disrupting the narrative flow created by historical anticipation, and causing readers to revisit the supposed truths of history which are now revealed to be as unstable as fictions. These fictional texts raise questions about our relationship with historical knowledge, and force history to share with fiction its claim to truth by demonstrating that both are ‘discourses, human constructs.’ [6] This essay will examine the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Libra, a text that foregrounds the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction.

Libra is a playful novel, toying with our prior knowledge of the events it portrays. Historical novels involve ‘a mobilization of previous historical knowledge… instituting a narrative dialectic between what we already “know”… and … [what is seen] concretely in the pages of the novel.’ [7] To Libra we bring preconceptions about Cold War attitudes, the Kennedy-Camelot mythos, and cinematic horn-rimmed Feds wearing skinny ties, images shaped by movies and schoolbooks, our family albums. The past is shared, and it is also fabricated. Texts such as Libra suggest that all pasts are valid.

DeLillo structures his text around a compound, discontinuous narrative, with different historical moments irrupting upon one another. Lee Harvey Oswald’s historical span (almost a lifetime) is spliced into a much shorter countdown to 22 November 1963, arresting both movements and highlighting the way the past feeds into the present. The detective, Nicholas Branch, is fixed in a later historical moment twenty-five years on, constructed within his own constellation of events including for example the Iran-contra conflict, the Unabomber, and the expulsion of President Marcos from the Philippines.

Narrative convergence brings together the thread connecting physical locations – through which Oswald’s trajectory is traced – and the timeline of dates developing the multiple conspiracy plot. Both spatial and temporal journeys are drawn forward to their pre-known terminus by the teleological influence of historical record. Many references in the text telegraph events remembered by the reader, reaching into history to authenticate the fiction. The reader already knows what the ‘electrifying event’ (Libra 27) will be; it is only a matter of how it will unfold. Hints of a ‘hit’ in Miami four days before what we know happens in Dallas (Libra 304) set up an alternative potential line of history that the reader recognises as fiction, yet by juxtaposition illuminate the ‘real’ Dallas hit with the same quasi-fictional light. Before the ‘fact’ both roads are open, and the real seems as fictive at this point as the false, in a Schroedinger’s catlike manner. Character T.J. Mackey then makes the fictional choice to really assassinate JFK and not simply ‘miss’ (Libra 219-220). As this ‘history’ unwinds it develops along parallel branching lines of possibility, just as a fictional narrative does.

Oswald’s immersion in Marxism (Libra 34) does not prevent him from seeing history as an independent force, almost a volitional character with the power to direct individual human trajectories. He desires to enter history, but instead becomes ‘a subject, and object of a historically determined [Cold War] ideology.’ [8]   His interest in hidden history – ‘the hidden factors, the things that don’t get out’ (Libra 39) – presages the later conspiracy theories he and the assassination would attract. David Ferrie, a real/imagined character, calls history ‘the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us (Libra 321). Libra itself documents a secret history that, Branch thinks, may be ‘the history no one will read’ (Libra 60) except, of course, it is now being read.

Conflicting facts, the chaos factor of the real, mar the historical surface. Branch discovers ambiguities in the official records/texts of Oswald’s gunshot wound and his appearance/details (Libra 300), and questionable identifications/data in photographs. These are the contestible facts which coalesc into the received truth of history, calling all history into question. Fiction is not normally given this leeway; it is expected to be solid, unshakably consistent, narratively holeproof. Nonetheless both history and fiction are plotted and possess story arcs. The narration of history usually strives to give form to events with inciting actions, conflict-driven developments, and resolutions. This is a retrospective moulding of ‘truths’, whereas fictional texts are permitted to be built outward from their structure. Both history and fiction attract debate over their veracity/reliability. In both there is a narrator who presents the story through essentially biased filters. Both are mediated, textual – ‘we know the past… only through its textualized remains’ [9] - and hence vulnerable to the shortcomings of language, and the different ways language is received and interpreted by its auditors. In Libra these unreliable details ‘seem a foreboding of what is to come’ (Libra 300) – how many shooters or shots, where from, etc. ‘The simple facts elude authentication.’ Branch as historian/detective ‘concedes everything. He questions everything… to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened’ (Libra 300-301). The reader shares Branch’s perspective of ‘knowing’ and yet not knowing, of needing to read and interpret the multiple strands of narrative uncertainty. Branch knows it is too soon to draft the conflicting mass of data into ‘coherent history… Because the data keeps coming… The past is changing as he writes’ (Libra 301). This recorded history is ‘the data-spew of hundreds of lives’ (Libra 15) marked ‘by ambiguity and error, by political bias, systematic fantasy.’

Historiographic and fictional texts both constitute their subjects, deciding ‘which events will become facts.’ [10] Events are mutable and difficult to access; iterative transmission corrupts the signals. Fictions posing as alternative histories are a form of pastiche, even simulacra – versions of a past that never was. The past itself, reduced to residual texts long divorced from any ‘referents’, has become ‘a vast collection of images.’ [11] The reader arrives at Libra specifically aware of images of the Zapruder film and of Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald. These pictorial realities hover in the background and colour all that he reads. Fredric Jameson identifies the appetite for these images as a type of nostalgia, an ‘attempt to appropriate a missing past.’ [12] A reader engages with Libra not only for its literary art or for the mystery it elaborates, but also because it is a document of past times, close enough in time to have been lived through by many readers, filled with postwar references, brand names, domestic detail. ‘For Americans at least, the 1950s’ (and doubtless too the early 1960s) ‘remain the privileged lost object of desire.’ [13] Although both history and fiction supply a means by which to regain it, the strongest evocation will come via the literary text, as it allows more subjectivity, more active reader engagement.

Branch’s descriptions of the future fates of various characters (Libra 58) pull ‘real’ history back into the fiction to colour their remaining careers. Other characters are observed in the banal minutae of life, buttering toast or stirring coffee – grounding actions that lend verisimilitude and connect their ‘reality’ with the reader.  The text is littered with similes and sensory descriptions the reader can identify from his own experience and thus access the shared history. In the same way, we share the ‘larger’ JFK assassination event. ‘News’ items in the novel referring to the civil rights movement, political and military actions in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere, Mafia activity and Robert Kennedy, and the early stirrings of the Vietnam war are texts that constitute this historical moment.

The television screen is prominent in Libra as a locus of communication and data. It speaks to Oswald and his mother almost as a third member of the household. Marshall McLuhan, who was formulating his thesis on television during Kennedy’s presidency, points to the participatory nature of the medium, and to the ‘psychic and social disturbance’ its images can create. [14] ‘With TV, the viewer is the screen’, [15] receiver of data-carrying light impulses; the relationship is intimate. The availability of TV news, especially in reporting the ‘excellent TV image’ Kennedy, [16] creates instantaneous historical texts. In Oswald’s own death on live television DeLillo gives the character the image of himself being shot, and therefore an active participation in the event over and above merely receiving Ruby’s bullet. In both Kennedy’s assassination and Oswald’s murder history is recorded by not one but thousands of witnesses, appearing to eliminate ambiguity and establish historical consensus. Oswald’s TV death is perhaps the one ‘true’ thing among the facts and fictions in Libra, the focal point of the text, its climax and resolution.

Oswald’s different faces – Lee, Leon, Alek, Hidell, the Oswald constructed by the conspirators, the ambiguous Oswald of record – are multiple identities that falsify history. Compare this to Kennedy, who ‘goes around with ten or fifteen people who look just like him… You know why? Diversionary’ (Libra 141). Win Everett is forging a personal history for Oswald, fictionalizing a paper trail for subsequent investigators like Branch, and is confronted with the conflict of the real versus the fictionalized: the discovery of the ‘actual’ Lee Harvey Oswald subverts his own manufactured version – and potentially vice versa.

Kennedy’s assassination, ‘the first postmodern historical event’, [17] is narrated from the points of view of characters both real and invented, combining actual testimony (verbal and recorded) with fiction. The narration is slow, detailed, second-by-second, recalling readers’ experiences of the famous Zapruder footage which is usually viewed in stop-frame motion. The event is examined from several angles, echoing the theories of multiple shooters. We see JFK through viewfinders, rifle sights, camera lenses – a mediated separation previously noted by gunman Frank Vasquez (Libra 297-298): ‘It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead… It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything… how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed… if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act?’ Such falsification, the vulnerability of images, is a problematic of historical recording, and is grist to fiction as well as to conspiracy. The moment, it has been suggested, is ‘enacted with an acute sense of what will be its own representation.’ [18]

News footage of Oswald’s shooting by Jack Ruby is publicly available, [19] and it is evident that DeLillo has drawn on this as well as the Warren Report – the same sources used by historians. History is a scaffolding for the narrative edifice that is more concerned with coherent fictive structures than accurate reportage. The fictional version reinterprets the historical facts for a more subjective result, altering personnel and utterances to fit the characters’ developing personalities and the needs of the plot. The Jack Ruby of Libra is constituted, but so is the Jack Ruby of historical record. The Warren Report sums up Ruby as a disparate constellation of statements: ‘Ruby was extremely fond of dogs… was apparently somewhat sensitive to his identity as a Jew… was his own unofficial club bouncer.’ [20] This rollcall of traits is intended to add up to a picture of a real person, but is fragmentary and lacks the roundness of his other, literary self.

Libra shifts between historical reportage and character-centric fiction, the former the foil or setting for the latter. For instance, the Warren Report gives this evidence regarding the warning call made to police the night before Oswald’s transfer:

During the night… the local office of the FBI and the sheriff’s office received telephone calls from an unidentified man who warned that a committee had decided ‘to kill the man that killed the President.’ [21]

DeLillo reinvents this as

Then he called Russell Shively, his detective friend, at home… ‘They are going to kill that bastard Oswald in the police basement tomorrow during the transfer…’(Libra 434).

The effect is to personalize the character of Ruby and connect him to the network of fictional personnel, bringing them also into the sphere of truth. Naming Oswald is an important addition, as his name in its many variations is a feature of both the historical record and the fictional text; it returns him to the centre of things. ‘It occurred to Oswald that everyone called [downed U-2 pilot Powers] by his full name… Once you did something notorious, they tagged you with an extra name… It already sounded historic’ (Libra 198).

Likewise, the Warren Report describes superficially the moment before Oswald appears in the basement: ‘Someone shouted, “Here he comes!”… and the din increased.’ [22] DeLillo expands this to: ‘He heard voices saying, “Here he comes, here he comes”, and at first he thought they meant him… Vault noise, voices, hollow bouncing sounds filled the areaway, car engines, clanking equipment’ (Libra 437). The subjective viewpoint reinforces Ruby’s heightened paranoia in this moment. The author has used a straightforward historical remark, audible and explicable in the television footage, to create a subjective fictional unit that is more real than the ‘real’.

Branch’s reservoir of documents comes to encompass fiction in addition to ‘fact’, ‘twenty-five years of novels and plays… feature films’ (Libra 442). His investigation gives them equal weight with ‘true history’, at the same time that his own narrated detection work is added to this stock of ‘novels and plays’, an intertextual allusion. The reader approaches Libra as one more installment of these, a history in the slipstream, a layer of literary occlusion over unknown ‘reality’. The sum of this data is ‘an incredible haul of human utterance’, resembling ‘a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language’ (Libra 181). History as text equates to language. The Warren Report, Branch thinks, ‘is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred’ (Libra 181). Its twenty-six accompanying volumes contain slices of personal histories, all linked by their confluence in the moment in Dallas. Together the texts form ‘a ruined city of trivia where people feel real pain’ (Libra 182), a Tower of Babel of built of historical data and fictional, unreliable embellishments.

What Libra demonstrates, then, is the slippery nature of historical fact, the futility of separating the real past from the constructed, and the role of fiction in rescuing history from its inbuilt self-oblivion. The Lee Harvey Oswald we think we ‘know’ proves after all to have been built of the same stuff as imagination.

   

Bibliography

Thomas Carmichael, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II’, Contemporary Literature Vol. 34 No 2 (1993), pp. 204-218

Don DeLillo. Libra (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1988)

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988)

Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. by Thomas Docherty (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 62-92

JFK Video: The Dallas Tapes <http://media.myfoxdfw.com/JFKvideo> [accessed 22 March 2008].

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Sphere Books, 1967)

Christopher M. Mott, ‘Libra and the Subject of History’, in Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, ed. by Hugh Ruppersberg and Tim Engles (New York: GK Hall and Co. 2000), pp. 229-244.

Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1964)