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.
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.
There are certain extreme acts--suicide, murder--that, once committed, seem to define the entire life leading up to them. It's somehow impossible not to look at Lee's entire life as leading up to the one extreme act, and to see it as defining him in some essential way. He becomes an assassin--as you say, a rare and exclusive category indeed. But DeLillo's narrative (and this does seem to fit Lee's life story in a nonfiction vein as well) makes clear that this is a somewhat arbitrary and almost casual decision on his part. No matter what plotline we believe, he can't be seriously contemplating it until a week or so before it happens, and that's particularly scary to contemplate--assassination as a crime of opportunity. It's connected to various themes and psychological dispositions--in retrospect, it's possible to see him as the kind of guy who "would" do something like this. But this is a retrospectively imposed narrative, and it's important to see it as in no way inevitable.
ReplyDelete(Or, once we've done something, no matter how unexpected, we become the kind of person who "would" do that thing.)
And I think this is also an important insight about history. Nothing is inevitable--it only looks that way in retrospect (the moment becomes structured that way once it passes). The future is unwritten. It's always still possible to change the course of events. But then again, Lee's example demonstrates what a scary and grave possibility that can be. One simple act can shape the course of world history.