Mark Bold

“Think of two parallel lines,” he said. “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 comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. 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 to his destiny.”‘ [p339]It is this path to Lee Harvey Oswald’s destiny that Don DeLillo’s novel Libra explores. Recreating the dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, the deepest levels of the self of his protagonist is a monumental task, and develops into an amazingly rich study of character as well as a tightly plotted thriller.

We all believe we know the conspiracy theory from Oliver Stone’s JFK, the Zapruder footage reshown on Channel Five and new schemes dreamt up in internet chatrooms. Oswald the patsy, the CIA involvement, the impossible bullet trajectories and Castro. But these are always views from the outside, the investigations that show us remote possibilities and circumstantial evidence, the eyewitness testimony that makes us disbelieve the official versions. What marks DeLillo’s achievement is his analysis of the characters involved, a deeper investigation of the human beings involved in the political intrigue. First, he brings Oswald to life, so we can see into the interstices in his brief biography - his upbringing in various US cities and time spent in the Marines and his defection to Russia; the development of his political ideas and activism; his homelife. Oswald stops being a one dimensional iconic image from history and becomes a very real 24 year old man by the time he is embroiled in the presidential assassination.

Of course, the characterisation is speculative. But this is perhaps the greatest achievement of Libra. Where other novelists struggle to form a plot and create real characters to move it toward its conclusion, DeLillo has to pare away the multitude of plots and conspiracies and myths that surround the events of November 1963 and form a central narrative around which Oswald’s path to destiny can develop. DeLillo takes his two parallel lines and crosses between place and time, the crosswinds of history and fate that move assassin and target together. The novel is an explicit meditation on the nature of plots and destiny, on the belief we have in cause and effect. As the story develops, we are confronted with intrigue and dissembling, plots and counterplots. The Agency, Secret Service and FBI, anti-Castro groups and Communists all conspire with and against each other in a turbulent meshing of people and ideologies. A level of complexity is reached, DeLillo seems to suggest, where events take on a life and controlling ability of their own, where fate takes over from the chaotic intentions of all the characters involved.

“Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move towards death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot is no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of death outside the body, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred against the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot.” [p221]

Outside of the involvement of the main characters in his book, the famous historical characters such as Oswald and Jack Ruby, and their immediate family and friends, and then the shadowy figures moving behind official screens, DeLillo also has a character, almost like the author, who sifts through all the information and evidence concerning the Dallas assassination. It is a lifetime’s work, we are told, and this man Branch has been trying to make sense of the events for years, ploughing through more and more paperwork and film and news clippings and photographs, always provided with more by perhaps the most sinister presence in the novel, the Curator. Branch is in the same situation as the reader, having lived in the shadow of the assassination and being aware of so many of the contradictory versions of the event. He is trying to piece together a story from all these fragments, as we try to from the swirling plots in the novel, and DeLillo has from the historical record.

But Branch is analysing and assessing from a position remote in space and time. With DeLillo’s characters, we live through the years preceding the gunshots, and the places (from New Orleans and Miami and Japan, Russia, Texas and Dallas) and people involved. DeLillo’s narrative voice lets us into the dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, and some levels of the self of some of his characters, such as the initial conspiracy plotters Everett, Parmenter and Mackey. This is along one of his parallel lines, and their involvements and intrigues grow wider and more complex and eventually beyond their control. On his other line he develops the richer characters of Oswald and his mother and his wife. The portraits are developed against a detailed and vivid backdrop of domesticity that comments directly on US daily life, especially when contrasted with the influential backdrops of Oswald’s life in Japan and Russia. DeLillo often uses Oswald’s interior voice to remind us that he wished to write short stories that described everyday American life. This is the central achievement of the novel, in recreating this day to day existence with such forceful immediacy that we are drawn into the almost inevitable involvement of Oswald with the larger forces that sculpt history. DeLillo speculates about what the third line was that crossed the two parallel lines and led to Oswald’s involvement in a possible plot to kill Kennedy, but he is too intelligent to point at this or that conspiracy and instead leads us to think about an individual’s place in history and society, and the forces of fate, chance and hidden power.

DELILLO, Don (1988) Libra. London: Penguin.