Final thoughts on Libra

Now that the course is almost over, it feels like a good time to actually look at what DeLillo is doing with the character of Lee Harvey Oswald. I haven't seen too many people really talking about this, and I think it really ties in a lot of the themes we've been working with this semester.

To start off, there seems to be kind of a split in class discussions between people who have sympathy with Lee and those who still see him as basically the guy who killed the president. I understand the second viewpoint, and especially the argument that Libra is a fictional work and shouldn't affect how we think of a historical figure like Oswald, but I think it's kind of missing the point. In my mind this novel isn't about developing an actual opinion on the Kennedy assassination, it's about getting into the mind of someone in an incredibly unique historical position. Almost no one has ever assassinated a U.S. president, and literally no one has ever been surrounded by the immense scrutiny and confusion that Oswald has been. He's an incredibly mysterious and engaging figure, who can be frightening no matter what narrative you shove him into. Many people seem particularly perturbed by the lone gunman theory: the idea of a single person one day deciding to shoot the president, with no discernible outside influence, and actually accomplishing it, seems so foreign and yet so chillingly simple that it almost begs the question of why more people don't do it. While DeLillo doesn't ascribe to that theory in Libra, he still examines how exactly the brain of someone like Oswald might work; and frighteningly, it doesn't seem all that different from anyone else's.

That's one of the main things about Libra to me; it's not about a story about how some sociopath went and murdered the president, it's about how a person with a relatively "normal" brain, however you define that, was pressured by a number of outside factors into committing a serious crime. It sort of reminds of The Stranger, in the sense that it involves someone who ends up being punished for a crime which they're "technically" guilty of, but which for a complicated set of reasons they weren't necessarily morally responsible for. Even if we see something foreign in the way Lee or Meurseult operate (and they are both at least eccentric characters), there's just as much there that we can recognize in our own thought patterns. I've spoken with several people who say they identify with Lee, because he really does seem like a stereotypical young person trying to find his way in the world. Even if I don't agree with some of the conclusions he comes to, I recognize why he's coming to them and what they mean to him. DeLillo has to get some credit for this; he's taken one of the most unpopular figures in American history and recast him as someone with his own set of internal struggles and unfortunate beliefs that just so happen to add up to put him in a very precarious position, mentally speaking. We see him do some terrible things -- beating Marina, shooting at Walker and Kennedy, and actually murdering a police officer -- but we see them from his point of view, in a way that lets us realize that he's not some meritless psychopath out to burn down society. These kinds of books are important because they offer a much messier but probably more realistic picture of how the world actually works, further from convenient narratives of good vs. evil or sane vs. hopelessly crazy. As far as I'm concerned that's a pretty big part of the point of reading books -- to offer different perspectives on situations that are otherwise easy to jump to uneducated conclusions about.

That last point reminds me of the article I presented on recently, which had a lot to say about the inability of language to accurately describe reality. While I think that's a fair point, and I had a lot of fun discussing it with the class, I also think it's something that has to be considered outside of just the realm of literature. We've set up a system where everyone's thoughts are mediated by language, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's absolutely incredible that we're able to invent situations in our heads that we've never experienced, and project the sense we have of our own consciousness onto people in those situations. At the same time, we have to be aware of our own limitations; no one will ever have a perfect understanding of a situation they haven't been in, because there's a big difference between a scene we've built up out of other people's words and one that we've actually seen and felt ourselves. Books like Libra can help with that by showing us a number of different perspectives on a single situation, and it especially helps that it's one we can actually see for ourselves. The several different points of view we get of the Kennedy assassination all fit with the actual Zapruder film we've all watched several times by now. Even if a video isn't a perfect representation of reality either, a video with so much cultural baggage attached, plus a long, varied explication that sometimes runs contrary to the normal narrative does at least give us a sense of our own need to be subjective about situations we haven't seen ourselves. 

Our Fascination With Famous Deaths

A few days ago I was watching a travel/food show called Parts Unknown with the chef Anthony Bourdain, in which he essentially travels around the world and talks to people, and then shows himself eating some of the local food and saying "mm, that's delicious." The particular episode I was watching took place in Libya, which of course had a revolution not too long ago. As a result, one of the things he visits while he's there is a memorial dedicated to all the people killed in the revolution in the city of Misrata. It's a fairly touching scene, where the local guide walks around a room covered in photos of war victims and points to the ones he knew personally. At the end, however, we see that there's a TV set in the center of the room, which is looping footage of the beating and execution of Muammar Gaddafi from 2011. This is a pretty jarring thing to have in a building that's otherwise full of serenic cloud wallpaper and dropped flowers, but to the guide it makes perfect sense. Since Gaddafi was responsible for the deaths of the people on the walls, those people's loved ones want to see nothing more than the camera-phone footage of their revenge. We then see a clip of a Libyan couple who are indeed staring intently at the TV set after having visited the photo of a loved one.

Naturally, this brought my mind to the scene from Underworld where a group of people holds a viewing of the Zapruder film on repeat. To be honest, I've always found the idea of watching the Zapruder film over and over again a little bit off-putting. Even if it is historically significant, it's still a video of a man being killed, and I've always kind of had the sense that that's part of the appeal -- that a big part of the reason people watch it isn't to determine the exact trajectories of the bullets, but rather because there's something fascinating about watching such a famous person die. I don't know exactly why the idea of watching a person's death for entertainment bothers me and I don't exactly have an explicit moral reason not to do it, but somehow the idea of claiming to watch something for its historical merit while really going for the perverse thrill of seeing such a shocking moment unfold rubs me the wrong way. At the same time, I have to admit to being genuinely interested in watching it in class, especially after it was so well explicated in Libra. Having had the experience of going into Oswald's head (or at least on possible version of Oswald's head) makes watching his brief "appearance" in the historical record a much richer experience. Is this what the people who watch the video over and over again are really feeling? Could I just be making up the idea that they're somehow thrilling in watching a man's head explode, when really they have a personal connection to the case that's as close as mine is now, even if it comes from more of a "what happened" angle than a "what was Oswald thinking" one? Or is imagining Lee up there in the book depository and waiting for him to do just sort of masking the part of me that actually enjoyed the actual tension and sudden release you feel watching the video, whether or not I want to admit it? It's hard for me to find a definitive answer, but my guess would be somewhere in the middle. I think that there is a part of everyone that does "enjoy," or is at least fascinated by, the death of a figure we imagine we know pretty well, and that part coexists with the part of us that intellectualizes that enjoyment by finding interesting facts about the film.

I'm still left with the question of why exactly people are so fascinated with famous deaths -- and more specifically, what differentiates the ones that inspire this fascination from the ones that are simply considered tragic. I feel like one part of it has to do with our personal investment in the situation; when we remember the impact of an event very vividly, like our generation does with something like 9/11, it becomes too uncomfortable to watch (and too socially unacceptable to appear to be enjoying). At the same time, I just said that it takes a certain amount of intellectual investment in order to get something out of the Zapruder film, or at least it did for me. After all, few people want to just watch a man get shot in the head, or if they do they would have difficulty admitting it to themselves. I think the difference is that with the JFK assassination, we're not really focused on the death itself. It's there and it's intense and it's jarring every time, but it's not really the point. We're not watching the video to watch JFK die, we're going into it with all kinds of ideas that we want to see realized and little side details we want to notice; essentially, we're distracted from the reality of the moment by our own preconceived notions. By comparison, watching footage of something that's harder to analyze outside of the deaths involved, like a terrorist attack or natural disaster, just brings up all the emotional difficulties we felt when the actual event occurred. In a way, that means that understanding Lee is a distraction from the reality of the Kennedy assassination -- while we gain a very interesting sense of what it would have been like to be Oswald in an incredibly unique position of assassinating the president, we lose the equally valid reality of what it would have been like to be Jackie, or a spectator in the crowd, or someone seeing a few frozen frames of the film in Life magazine, or Kennedy himself. That's one of the central complaints I have about Libra, about the Zapruder film, and about the narrative of the Kennedy assassination more generally: while everything it details is a very interesting history, it stills leaves out everything else but the central narrative. Even when DeLillo tries to escape this, with his changing perspectives in "22 November," the sudden switch from a character we know so much about and understand so well to random people off the street just underscores how closely tied we've become to Lee's personal story. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- Lee's story is incredibly fascinating, probably more so than that of anyone in the crowd, but that same fascination leads us to forget much of the context around it. And of course, that just leads us back to where we started, trading gawking at one trainwreck for another.

Jack Ruby in Libra

As soon as I realized which Jack the two strippers in "12 August" were talking about, Jack Ruby instantly became one of the most interesting characters in Libra to me. I have no idea how historical DeLillo's version of Ruby is, but I almost hope it's not too realistic; I'd hate to think I feel as much affection for an actual murderer as I do for this fictionalized one. Sure, he's not a good guy by any stretch of the imagination -- the sexism and occasional violence is a bit hard to excuse -- but you can't really blame him. It's not quite the same as with Lee, either. I have sympathy for Lee, and in a lot of ways I understand him, but he's never as immediately fun as Jack Ruby is. He's a very interesting character study, and DeLillo does a fantastic job using him to examine the human thought process and the ways it can go "wrong," but the separation he feels from other people does kind of extend to the reader. By comparison, Jack Ruby seems to feel almost no separation from other people; he's the definition of the sadly boisterous and out of touch middle-aged white guy, continually let down by how much stock he puts in people he doesn't really understand. We see him talk to the patrons at his strip club, or bring sandwiches to the cops, and think that he's a very friendly guy with good intentions, who for whatever reason doesn't actually get along with people all that well, and often goes a bit over the line of social convention.

One "type" he kind of reminds me of is that of the old man on the bus -- the kind who'll talk to complete strangers for the duration of the ride about how the Illini are doing or what the weather's been like lately. Maybe I'm biased due to how much time I spend on buses, but I feel a lot of sympathy for these kinds of people. They seem like people with fairly reasonable expectations of friendliness from other people who nonetheless seem completely out of touch with the realities of how the social world is structured. You don't talk to strangers on buses and you don't bring sandwiches to the cops out of nowhere, because even if those are positive actions, they're not expected and they make a lot of people a little bit uncomfortable. But still, these things aren't actually bad -- they come from a place of thinking the world is just a little bit better than it really is, and seeing that belief not work out in reality can be heartbreaking.

For Jack Ruby in particular, he has a lot of positive expectations that go nowhere. He wants to help people get off the street -- he goes into debt. He wants a loan from his mafia buddy -- Tony can't do anything to help him. He invents an all-new exercise/recreation tool -- no one hears about it except for his roommate and the Warren Commission. He expects respect as a successful business owner -- readers deride him for running a strip club. Jack just can't catch a break. When we consider just how badly his positive expectations get mangled on a daily basis, it makes it a little more understandable why he feels the need to drug himself and get in fights and have everyone reassure him that he doesn't seem "queer." It also fits in nicely with his patriotism -- the idyllic image of America he has in his head, which seems like something out of a 50's sitcom, has absolutely no basis in reality, but at the same time makes sense as something you would want to defend if you do happen to believe in it. And let's not forget, even with his massive debt and shoddy car, the life he has in Dallas is probably better than the one he had in Chicago. If he feels like he's fulfilled the American dream, then maybe that's as good as if he really had.

All this said, Jack is still a flawed character. No one who would commit an impulsive assassination is going to be spotless. But he's flawed in ways that are relatable, believable, and even endearing. Like the old man on the bus, he seems too good for this sinful (introverted, pragmatic, realistic) earth, and it's hard to blame him for trying to keep that image alive.

(Also, this is unrelated, but I really like that the owner of several strip clubs appears to employ exactly two strippers. Do we ever hear about anyone other than Double DeLite (maybe Don DeLillo's own would-be moniker?) and Randi Rider? I hope not.)