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Document Type

Article

Abstract

In Libra (1988) Don DeLillo displaces Lee Harvey Oswald’s contradictory life story and the elusive event of the JFK assassination from their immediate national and domestic contexts to relocate them amidst various transnational contexts. A key to DeLillo’s remapping or deterritorialization is found in his inscription in his narrative of figural equivalents of technical means of reproduction. While Oswald’s life appears as a cinematic montage, a rapid shuffling of places of residence and projected identities, the assassination is rendered in accordance with the processes of the photographic, filmic, and televisual construction of images. Through his unconventional portrait, DeLillo acquires an ironic perspective on the afterlife of Oswald’s stardom and associated iconography, suggesting from the vantage point of the historical moment of his writing, the late 1980s, the difficulty of distinguishing between the spectacular effects of celebrity and categories of “ordinariness” and the “quotidian.” Readers of the novel witness the complex ways in which celebrity becomes entangled with notoriety as a consequence of transgressive actions that are retained as traumatic memories in the consciousness of a larger public. Oswald, as DeLillo sees him, is not a cipher emptied of psychic interiority but an icon of modern alienation or, more paradoxically, an icon of anonymity. His emotional and ideological investments in specific cities or nations undergo a performative acceleration that makes his trajectory difficult to place as he nears the fateful day in Dallas and his collision with world history. The background, moreover, to such a collision consists primarily in an ongoing struggle, with larger cultural and political implications, between different conspirators and factions over the control of images.

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