I have read about half of DeLillo’s novels and so far Oswald is the deepest and most complicated character has has created. The Oswald chapters of Libra-named for Oswald’s astrological sign, symbolic of the suspended judgment in which he lingers-are the novel’s glory. That man, of course, is Lee Harvey Oswald, and Libra gives us in alternating chapters his bidungsroman-cum-tragedy from his youth in the Bronx through his period in Japan with the Marines and his defection to Russia to his falling in with the conspirators in New Orleans and his eventual death at the hands of Jack Ruby.
Their first plan is to simulate a communist assassination attempt against the President, but they eventually get around to plotting an actual assassination for which they will frame a young mysterious man with communist ties. A fictional hypothesis about the nature and purpose of the Kennedy assassination, the novel portrays a gallery of various intelligence operatives, right-wing extremists, Cuban exiles, and mobsters as they conspire to lure the U.S. Granted sufficiently rich accounts of beauty and usefulness, accounts capable of encompassing what we think of as knowledge and morality, this ethic has to our artists seemed superior to the murderous self-assurance of the Enlightenment’s worser offsprings, legitimate and illegitimate, such as religious fundamentalism and scientific socialism.ĭon DeLillo’s Libra is a bravura contribution to this tradition. Every abstraction, therefore, should be regarded as the aesthetic production that it manifestly is, and evaluated on its usefulness or beauty.
The ethical postulate here, compatible both with belief (because God works in mysterious ways) and skepticism (because what do I know?), is that the world will always elude every abstraction. Conrad’s and Faulkner’s broken and partial narratives, Joyce’s linguistically constructed reality, Woolf’s and Lawrence’s insistence on the unconscious, Borges’s self-parodic idealism, Nabokov’s “game of worlds,” and more. This is less some new thing, some modernism, than a resuscitation of pre-realist narrative modes, from meta-fiction to satire, from Homer to Sterne. Much of the literature of the 20th century is a warning against the dream of absolute knowledge. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone.
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