Lost in Libra

by Allison Gross

Libra expertly interweaves multiple plot lines in its movement back and forth between Oswald’s life and the plot that begins with the goal of a missed assassination of the president that soon escapes its creator’s control. This construction seems simple enough, and in reading the story, it works ingeniously. But I would like to argue that the movement of the novel is indicative of another kind of flux in the life of its central character: Oswald. Not only is the reader continually consciously aware of Oswald within two simultaneous frames, but she is also taking into account her own preconceptions of Oswald as a historical figure. The assassination in 1963 carries such an impact, that any reader of the subject, even a fictional account such as Libra, cannot separate herself from what she knows (or does not know) of the event. How extensive she considers her knowledge is irrelevant. The pervasive nature of such occurrences (and the general feeling they evoke) is exactly that: pervasive, and therefore unavoidable. DeLillo tackles and creates this double-consciousness both in his writing of the novel and the internal story itself.

In this essay, I will examine the way in which DeLillo creates a sense of ambiguity in the character of Oswald, and how this creates a state of tension in the text. Significantly, the author’s project could not appear more readily in terms of any other event of the twentieth century, for no other has affected the kind of repercussions that Kennedy’s assassination has. The intrigue, the speculation, the mystery all continue, with no foreseeable end in the future. While maintaining what we know of the events of that day, DeLillo effectively fills in gaps and addresses questions – but not necessarily the ones most people consider pertinent. In visualizing the life of Oswald, DeLillo draws the reader into a relationship with a murderer few people can forgive and invents a history most readers have never considered. As such, he forces into focus general conceptions of history and how readers take the past into account.

In this way, DeLillo is rightly termed a postmodern novelist. For the purposes of my argument, I would here like to define what I consider modern histories in the text, and how DeLillo affects a postmodern break from these. I refer to the large, overarching History as the assassination of JFK itself, the actual death of the president, as well as the consequent murder of Oswald by club-owner Jack Ruby. These I consider to be the essential images that come to mind when individuals hear the date November 22, 1963. Along with this runs the sense of a more detailed history: the specific events of that day, the time and setting as well as the eventual investigation into the whole affair and the theories that resulted – what Keith Jenkins might call history in the lower case. As for DeLillo’s vision, he seems to draw on both these senses of history in his juxtaposition of Oswald’s sweeping ideas of history and the details of his life posited in a fictional, narrative space.

The reader must recall that as "true to the facts" as the novel seems, it is still "a work of imagination," (458) as DeLillo explains. Somewhere, in this insertion of modern histories into a postmodern text, the tension I alluded to above results. DeLillo’s considerations are not strictly black and white, but rather exert multiple pressures on the force of history, leaving the reader not solely to draw new conclusions, but really to remain self-conscious of any fixed decision. Both internally and externally, this essay will strive to examine the way this environment unfolds in the novel.

The reader’s first impression of Oswald comes from DeLillo’s depiction of him as an extremely awkward child and teenager – one that goes through the stereotypical difficulties of adolescence. Because of this, DeLillo paints a picture to which every reader may relate; essentially, he gives the history behind history in building Oswald’s life from the very beginning. This is significant in two ways: first, we understand Oswald as a individual full of complexities and personality (as opposed to strictly an icon/assassin), and second, we are aware of his communist tendencies and possible motivations for this partiality, well before they impact what most readers know of history. DeLillo seems to suggest that the difficulties Oswald faces early on lead him to communism and history as a type of solace, a way to comfort himself and create meaning in his life when so little exists.

His relationship with his mother emphasizes this absence (of meaning) in its elicitation of a sense of drudgery and conciliation: "They watched TV, mother and son, in the basement room. She’d bought a tinted filter for their Motorola. . . . When it got cold they banged the pipes to let the super know. They had a right to decent heat" (4). Oswald, unable to escape this overwhelming monotony (in which he locates no meaning) that threatens to consume him, confronts conflict regardless of where he turns: the kids at school tease him, his brother is out of the house, and his mother just can’t fully understand him. As a result, DeLillo’s depiction of the toil in which Oswald lives really does prepare the reader for his turn to communism, which promises the sense of community/connection lacking in his home life that somehow appears more accessible on a larger scale.

In addition to DeLillo’s portrayal of the cramped living situation, meant to more thoroughly explicate Oswald’s history, the reader skeptically takes into account the occasional slip into Mrs. Oswald’s explanation to an anonymous judge (culminating at the end of the book) that offers us insight into Oswald. Her speeches basically consist of a list of incidents in her son’s life that seem arbitrary in their inexplicable juxtaposition, but nevertheless undeniably comprise Oswald as an individual. The reader, ever aware that DeLillo works to own something deeper than Oswald’s involvement in JFK’s assassination, is always unsure as to what her dialogue means:

They have got him in an intake dormitory. They talk to him about is he a nailbiter. Does he have religious affiliation and whatnot? Is he disruptive in class? He doesn’t know the slang, your honor. . . . But they get on him about does he think he’s Billy the Kid. This is a boy who played Monopoly with his brothers and had a normal report card when we lived with Mr. Ekdahl. . . . I have said from early childhood he liked histories and maps. . . (11)

Throughout the novel, the reader picks up these speeches and carries the information around with her, assuming that at some point, she will find the significance in it all. I would argue that she never does.

However, this makes the information no less important. The relegation of the president’s death to a permanently haunting space doesn’t mean that DeLillo’s depiction of Oswald is strictly arbitrary. It simply points to the difficulties inherent in trying to make sense of history, how what happened in the past relates to the present (in terms of both fact and emotion). As I intimated above, perhaps Oswald’s isolation leads him to the library, where "he wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. . . . He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him (33). But such a cause-effect explanation is always problematic, for it ignores DeLillo’s implication that Oswald’s supposed alienation is self-imposed (his affinity for the zoo and skipping school) and fails to address the implicit suggestion that participation in Monopoly is somehow indicative of one’s personality.

The reader also infers multiple discrepancies (via DeLillo’s proposal of Oswald’s "true life") between the Oswald as his mother knows him, as his classmates know him, as the reader herself knows him, etc. and how he, apparently, knows himself. Inevitably, reading Oswald’s "story" creates difficulties and frustration for a reader torn between sympathy for a protagonist for whom she holds an inherent dislike and an inability to consolidate meaning out of the various elements of his life from which DeLillo draws. Indeed, DeLillo appears to work against what the reader initially views as his project from the outset, i.e. persuading his audience to look beyond the historical idea of Oswald. Opposing forces both within the reader and the novel point to the clash of numerous histories in absence of explanation. The actual struggle to create meaning, and not meaning itself, takes precedence here. This effectively reiterates the novel’s insistence that the reader not fix any one (therefore limiting) viewpoint of history. DeLillo’s ambiguous depiction then, while unsettling, is most fair to his subject; because we cannot go back, we can never know for certain.

DeLillo plays out this discord again in the serious imbalance in Oswald’s life that manifests itself in his ambivalent need for human connection. He appears to love his mother, but he cannot stand to live with her either as a child or as an adult with his wife. Watching her cook in their cramped apartment "he felt something between pity and contempt" (35). Yet this fails to correspond with the behavior Marguerite describes for the judge: "He . . . bought me a thirty-five-dollar coat with his first pay and . . . bought me a parakeet in a cage that came with a stand with a planter" (48). She works to make him part of her life by positioning him in a way that feels familiar to her – their shabby domestic existence, for instance. But her listing of events in his life serves to affirm that she really only possesses an idea of her son; the incidents in his life add up to form an image of a son of whom she seriously needs to make sense in order to validate her own identity as his mother, but she can’t.

Oswald feels as much: "He did not deny the value of what she (Marguerite) said or the power of the images she carried with her. These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self, and he let her voice fall through a hole in the air" (37). Here, according to DeLillo’s description, Oswald appears deeper than deep; not only does he recognize the importance of values that make the average person whom they are, but he feels a significance to life that represents something more, something even bigger. What the reader might construe as over-determination aptly evokes the sense of layering, confusion, and distance that pervade the entire novel via similar descriptions of Oswald. Consequently, the reader attempts to fixate him without success, to locate his "inner self" (without actually doing so), thereby supporting the type of history the novel advocates from the start.

DeLillo maintains this elusiveness in all his protagonist’s relationships. Oswald’s marriage to Marina again suggests some desire for connection with another human being. We soon forget his proposal to Ella ("I think I’m in love with her" (199)) in our need to believe he loves Marina, in our need to discover some deeper emotion in him. DeLillo writes of their being marked by fate for marriage, and the reader, continually inundated by the sharp and consistent effects of fate, accepts this because tormented as their relationship grows, they truly appear to need one another in the beginning (even if for different reasons). Along with the level at which each fulfills some kind of expectation and hope in the other’s life, DeLillo offers the reader love, plain and simple. Here she discovers facts little known to the general public, little known possibilities at any rate: that Oswald could have a mother, a brother, a wife, and a child; that he could experience the everyday joys and sorrows of life. Here, sympathy invades the reader’s perspective because DeLillo gives her something to which she can relate. Juxtaposed with the foreknowledge of his place in history, his love for Marina and June becomes difficult to stomach.

Hence, DeLillo delivers us a person of flesh in content, if not in form. I argue the lack of form in the sense that his previous proposal to Ella as well as his devotion to communism necessarily color all his activities – including his marriage. A dissonance between the actions of Oswald (in name) and the actual perpetrator of those actions again enters the narrative, casting a shady fissure in his person that lurks at the back of the reader’s mind. This separation renders itself "visible" in scenes where Oswald abuses Marina. In the first attack that occurs, DeLillo gives us no preparation. Though they disagree about Oswald’s mother, neither Marina nor the reader is ready for Oswald’s strike: "She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise" (230). Here, DeLillo offers no punctuation, no closure, no reason. The violence, which grows increasingly graphic after this moment, contributes to what I wish to indicate as the intangible nature of the beatings. DeLillo again places them amidst normal domestic activity (Marina doing the dishes, Oswald reading the paper), and in doing so, demands that the reader repeatedly consider what occurs, for it seems so out of place. And here I may be pointing out the obvious, i.e. abuse happens where you least expect it, but more than that, as characters, these scenes appropriate a surreal feel in DeLillo’s depiction. Where Oswald’s name hogs much of the story’s attention elsewhere, here we seldom see his name mentioned; he is relegated to the role of abusive husband, a pronoun – "he."

He slapped her on the side of the head and she took half a swing at him. He sat down and opened a magazine. She could tell he was turning the pages without really looking. She wanted something to throw. She grabbed a sheet of paper and crumpled it up and threw it at him. It bounced off his arm but he didn’t react. . . .

He hit her in the face. She sat in the chair, with leftover food in her plate. .

She covered up. He hit her again. Then he went back to his chair and picked up a book. (238-39)

Likewise, Marina becomes "she," and June, "the baby." Oswald’s uncontrollable hand directly conflicts with the reader’s earlier won sympathy, and the disgust these scenes evoke serve to reaffirm the reader’s initial dislike of "the man who killed JFK."

I emphasize this image, for DeLillo consciously couples his depiction of Oswald as an individual with the simultaneous awareness of him as an idea only. He confirms this strain in the inherent distance between Marina and Oswald. In some sense, we cannot believe Oswald actually hits her, or that Marina pathetically throws a piece of paper at him. These actions don’t correlate with what we’ve known of the couple up to this point (Oswald’s ineffectual control of his own life, Marina’s courage to pick up and leave Russia), and we work to understand how a man devoted to the cause of oppressed people could injure his own wife. DeLillo makes this inference especially problematic due to the previous anxiety wrought by uncertain conclusions about what it means to play Monopoly. Nevertheless, they make sense to the reader (who essentially separates Oswald’s individual history from that he shares with Marina); they seem to foreshadow an anger that absorbs the potential to murder the president, a frustration that escapes its instigator’s control. In this way, DeLillo gives the reader’s initial anger even more validation.

Unfortunately, at this point the reader has yet to consolidate all her emotions as a retrospective witness with the force of Oswald’s authority (or lack thereof) for the duration of the novel. Indeed, what the abusive scenes aptly depict is the ambiguous sense of adequacy with which DeLillo injects his protagonist. Aside from his awkwardness, for the duration of the narrative, Oswald knows what he wants, even if it alters with circumstance. He longs to go to Russia once he discovers his connection to communism, and though his Russian tutor tells him, "This is not the time for you" (112), he renounces his American citizenship and offers secrets to the Russian government to achieve his goal. Drastic as these measures appear, they signify a deep determination in Oswald, an ability to affect the change in his life that he deems important. And though the average reader may be aware of his time spent in Russia, still fewer are aware that he slit his wrist to prevent them from sending him back to America.

DeLillo’s construction of emotions behind this event force the reader to consider the will he exerts to meet his objective. Indeed, Oswald’s willingness to go to fantastic lengths for his goals (handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans) exhibits the agency he appears to possess via his strong resolution. I stress "appears," for like so many other attributes of Oswald’s life, the control he exerts always runs the risk of being superseded by the prevalent sense of chance in the novel – coincidence – which effectively negates any semblance of authority. His actions are extreme to the point of unbelievability. And the drastic nature of them always indicates a simultaneous lack of control, as if Oswald were desperate and vulnerable and would do absolutely anything (to reach Cuba, for example) in light of his ineptitude. In terms of Oswald beating Marina, this despondency registers as well – he cannot control his behavior; every movement seems dictated by something outside himself.

DeLillo’s repeated referral to chance/coincidence and the struggle to understand it plays an important part in the reader’s reception of this tension between competence and incapacity. David Ferrie, coincidence’s most outspoken proponent tells Oswald: "I’ve studied patterns of coincidence. . . . Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect" (44). In the novel, this science never fully emerges. Ferrie’s statement suggests that if we could understand coincidence, why events occur the way that they do, we could understand history and make sense of how Oswald, as DeLillo has created him, fits into that picture. Instead, throughout the text, the protagonist lives day to day in flux, between his attempts to control his fate and the unrelenting force of coincidence/history that already seems to have his story narrated and plotted without his knowledge. Already aware of where Oswald’s gestures lead him (ultimately), the reader witnesses him essentially falling into place, so that any measure he takes, such as offering information on the U-2s, actually obtains a haphazard (rather than calculated) air to it. I consider this an external tension, specifically one that involves the reader’s knowledge outside the book itself.

Alternately, an irony internally exists in Oswald’s commitment to communism. His efforts to employ command over his life directly contrast the sense of a great "equalizer" that is inherent to communism, which, in a sense, places all citizens on the same playing field (the same distinction of command). We have no way of knowing if Oswald, hypothetically placed in his ideal situation, could actually give up his attempts at control. For even in Minsk, in Russia, where he lives for a period, he cannot take the day to day drudge of the factory: "The plant is dull and regimented. Always go to meetings, always read the propaganda. Everything is the same. Everything tastes the same. The newspapers say the same things" (198). His ideological desires cannot pan out in his actual experience – a recurrence of the novel’s proposed disjuncture. In his mind, he builds a state of perfect communism, but in reality, no such state exists. Too close to his vision to see the materiality of his surroundings, Oswald’s theoretical ideals consistently clash with his physical encounters, and any conception of power that may have been part of his conscience lacks the ability to survive in such a precarious situation as his. Again, unaware of this, Oswald fumbles his way through a destiny seemingly pre-ordained.

And here, the double-consciousness of the novel sets in again, drawing on both external awareness of the reader and her relation to the novel/the history she knows, as well as a fuzzy culmination of her relation to Oswald and his struggle with control. DeLillo’s freedom to move the reader fluidly in time may not evoke great attention, but his confounding of this vibration with the constant presence of Oswald does. To observe that two plot lines occur simultaneously is nothing exceptional; what I wish to note is the fact that these are not two separate plot lines by any means; they are not simultaneous or mutually exclusive. Oswald’s character pervades both – in spirit and in action. Rather than give the background of each story as they occur before the assassination, converging at the point where Oswald enters the action of the conspiracy, DeLillo has Oswald act the role of himself and assassin (as the conspirators envision him) with absolutely no awareness that he is doing so. Hence Everett’s plans to construct his killer:

He would put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks. He would create a shadowed room, the gunman’s room, which investigators would eventually find, exposing each fact to relentless scrutiny . . . We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots. (78)

But Oswald is the lead character of two plots. In one, he struggles to formulate his own identity; in the other, the conspirators accomplish this for him.

Yet such a statement risks undervaluing the significance of this duality; DeLillo does not paint in simple black and white terms. Generally, reading Oswald’s story, the reader understands how his actions affect the world around him; others continually react to his choice of behavior. But in the other story, Oswald appears reactive rather than proactive; he conforms to an identity that others form for him. Just when Everett, Mackay, Parmenter, etc. think their search for him has failed, he conveniently pops up in New Orleans and opens up an office above Guy Banister. The reader never knows for sure what came first, Oswald or the mold of him. Consequently, all actions are already troublesome at the time they occur; as with the example above, the reader cannot discern whether Oswald wound up in New Orleans of his own accord (in an effort to work around the government’s dissatisfaction with his pro-Communist affiliations) or of the conspirator’s accord. Appropriately, the reader continues to compare these concurrent stories, just as she reads the novel in awareness of her own personal historical perspective.

Here lies the postmodern dynamic of DeLillo’s history: he renders it impossible for the reader to ever consider Oswald and the assassination from one perspective alone. Along with the reader’s idea of "present" run the multiple "presents" in the novel. It no longer makes sense to refer to one plot line as the present while relegating the other to past, for at the time of perusal each individual moment occurs now (and cannot escape the strain of other time frames). Whether affective or affected, Oswald never quits changing, never quits reshaping or reforming any one conception of his self. Perhaps most significantly, at the culmination of the novel, when the reader expects to feel the rage and surprise of the witnesses to Kennedy’s murder, DeLillo again plays with her sympathy in his depiction of Oswald's helplessness. Ferrie’s conversation with Oswald regarding the plan makes this inadequacy explicit:

I don’t know what they want me to do.
Of course you know.
Tell me where it happens.
Miami.
That means nothing to me.
You’ve known for weeks.
What happens in Miami? (339)

With these words, the reader finds it increasingly difficult to discern who bears the responsibility for the events that will eventually ensue. Oswald initially appears to be performing a role that "they" want him to, yet Ferrie himself hints that Oswald has chosen this position himself, rather than the other way around. This confusion ultimately confounds Oswald’s vulnerability as the assassin, for his work seems to be guided by an invisible force, something completely beyond him in scope and perspective. Instead of making it easier to detest Oswald, DeLillo’s depiction of his attempt to murder JFK as a kind of mechanical act, a process meant to be followed with no room for mistakes, actually draws sympathy from the reader once more. This statement supports a view quite the opposite of what the reader expects, i.e. that the mechanical nature of the act, the violence, warrants greater outrage. But in DeLillo’s version of events, Oswald doesn’t even succeed in delivering the fatal bullet. Instead, this responsibility falls to Raymo; Oswald must hide his impotent gun in the Book Depository.

The reader is terrified, but she can’t help but feel sorry for the character who failed to realize the sole opportunity he foresaw that held the potential to restore his confidence (if only a semblance) in himself in its fulfillment of his dream of "entering history." DeLillo makes it quite clear, however, that this entrance is subtle, without flashing lights, guns, and cameras. Oswald concurrently wants and does not want to be widely recognized. Perhaps in a vague way, he strives for something like the broad manipulation of coincidence – the ability to make events happen without being seen. At this point, no matter what avenue he chooses, he cannot win. He was safe in the shadows, but after he leaves the scene of the crime, Oswald’s life crumbles and spins into a downward spiral until the police catch up with him at the movie theater, his relaxed insistence that he is "just a citizen on foot" (409) echoing in the background. In a matter of days, maybe even hours, his imminent reunion with his family, what the reader takes as a small chance for renewal, dies with the president.

Because of this, Ferrie’s haunting prediction from a few months earlier takes on a more profound significance:

Think of two parallel lines. . . . One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. . . . It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny. (339)

As such, Oswald cannot escape the inevitability of his taking the fall for the president’s death, and his reconciliation in the end to his lifelong imprisonment seems to empower him even as it makes him more pathetic to the reader in his grave attempt to create meaning out of absolutely nothing – a cell, mere space. Ironically, Ferrie’s third line which has no history is precisely what finally puts Oswald in history. DeLillo’s treatment of this subject suggests that the chaos so prevalent in Oswald’s life also bears at least partial responsibility for the creation of history. While putting control in the hands of coincidence makes little sense considering the latter’s inherent relationship to chance and an absent authority (eliciting the same sense of uncertainty as Oswald’s disjointed life), the reader cannot deny it. The whole historical incident acts as the medium through which DeLillo displays the apparent reflection between history and the persons involved in making it. As with his multiple plots, they are not mutually exclusive or completely simultaneous, for the stories are repeatedly retold and refigured, the perceptions of people (in this case, Oswald) always already affecting perceptions of history.

Thus, Ferrie’s reference to Oswald as "Lee H. Oswald" rather than just Lee or one of the various pseudonyms by which he goes throughout the entire novel foreshadows Oswald’s eventual confusion over the appropriation of the title created by the media: Lee Harvey Oswald. DeLillo aptly describes the befuddlement and skepticism with which Oswald views the new persona that emerges for him outside the prison walls, for "Lee Harvey Oswald" indicates a person of whom Oswald appears to have no cognizance, again reaffirming the intrinsic disjuncture within the protagonist that the reader has viewed for the duration of the text. Oswald becomes a name, a figure, an idea, rather than an actual person. In this way, he completes his entrance into history as he had wished, finding strength in his notoriety and the project he sets himself of working out the "reconstruction" of his own crime.

But the inescapable distance between himself and an understanding of the image associated with the name, that icon that we find superimposed upon the title, along with Ruby’s subsequent murder of him, forever influence any semblance of satisfaction he may appear to build from his disappointment: "No one called him by that name. . . . It sounded odd and dumb and made up. They were talking about somebody else" (416). When people hear this name, they don’t think of him, but rather what he did. DeLillo, in his portrayal of Oswald’s nascent inability to enjoy his newfound station, renders his life concurrently meaningful and insignificant. In the end, Oswald, "who wore a dark sweater and looked like nobody from nowhere" (437) dies, while his name continues to haunt the public.

Because this haunting both begins and ends the novel, the reader establishes a more complex and (somewhat) complete understanding of history via the events of November 22, 1963, if not a clearer one. As DeLillo suggests through the voice of Ferrie, history lies somewhere in that "third line" that has no history of its own, somewhere in the massive amounts of data that Nicholas Branch is forced to sift through given him by the Curator, a man he’s never met. Branch’s confusion concerning the totally random evidence sent his way, his devotion to discerning the numerous possibilities, and the realization that perhaps his fate is the continual/never-ending reconstruction of this history, mimic the reader’s response to the events of Oswald’s life, in that both seem destined to never know what actually occurred that day. But the determination to do so, the need to clarify emotions and occurrences, in order to establish some sort of stability, manifests itself in the tension originating in the figure of Oswald. He forever escapes us, is always what we didn’t expect him to be, and the reader must grapple with the struggle that takes place between her hard-won sympathy and her instinctual reaction to the murder of JFK (horror).

Which is to say, as any historian will agree, history is not an easy subject. But as DeLillo shows us, it is a subject that warrants continual attention and redefinition. Rather than limit the reader strictly to the information put out by the Warren Commission, DeLillo insists she consider other possibilities, suggesting, as he ends with another elaborate rhetoric of Oswald’s mother, that history occurs in the probing of that vast and indefinable space that grows larger with every moment that separates us, now, from then.

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This page updated Decmber 20, 2001