Traversing the fantasies of the JFK assassination: conspiracy and contingency in Don DeLillo's 'Libra.'

Publication: Contemporary Literature

Publication Date: 22-SEP-98

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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press

In his notorious denunciation of Don DeLillo, George Will argues that the conspiracy-driven Libra (1988) smacks of paranoia and constitutes an "act of bad citizenship." While Will's charge of "bad citizenship" has been contested vehemently by DeLillo's defenders, the equation of DeLillo and paranoia has gained widespread acceptance. Indeed, DeLillo's fiction returns again and again to the related themes of conspiracy and paranoia, culminating in Libra with an exploration of the traumatic kernel of the American political unconscious that has generated more conspiracy theories than any other single event in recent U.S. history: the JFK assassination.(1) No wonder DeLillo has been hailed as "chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction" (Towers 6). If we needed any confirmation of DeLillo's cultural cachet among the paranoid left, a sly allusion to his short story "The Angel Esmeralda" (1994) on The X-Files should quell any doubts. At the conclusion of the episode entitled "Never Again," Agent Mulder informs his partner Scully that they will be going to Dallas to investigate the mysterious appearance of a missing girl's image on a billboard, the very same miraculous event at the center of DeLillo's story.

Several literary critics have sought to redeem DeLillo's alleged paranoia as a form of social critique. For example, Patrick O'Donnell attempts to rescue not just DeLillo but the concept of paranoia from "irrationality." Since Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964), paranoia has been equated with conspiracy theory and has conveniently served as a marginalizing label, well suited to dismissing challenges to the dominant liberal system as "irrational" and a form of social or political pathology. O'Donnell rearticulates "cultural paranoia" as "a mode of perception" attuned to the realities of late capitalism; it constitutes "a way of seeing the multiple stratifications of reality, virtual and material, as interconnected or networked" (182) in "an attempt to make order out of chaos" (204).(2) DeLillo, however, rejects the categorization of Libra as paranoid: "I think it's a clear-sighted, reasonable piece of work which takes into account the enormous paranoia which has ensued from the assassination.... They're [DeLillo's novels] about movements or feelings in the air and in the culture around us, without necessarily being part of the particular movement" ("`Outsider'" 66). What remains incomprehensible for Will and implausible for apologists such as O'Donnell is how DeLillo remains detached from this "enormous paranoia" when Libra describes a conspiracy that leads to the assassination of JFK.

Frank Lentricchia identifies the most glaring problem for a paranoid reading of Libra in the importance of contingency in the advancement of the assassination plot: "The true paranoid does not believe in chance or accident .... DeLillo, by his insistence on the chancy appearance of Oswald, presses us to rethink the question of Oswald outside the framework of conspiracy" ("Libra" 203).(3) Such a reading of the novel, however, is perfectly consistent with The Warren Commission Report, which strives to paint a picture of Oswald "outside the framework of conspiracy" for its own ideological purposes. The "lone gunman" theory offered by the Warren Commission represents an explanation carefully constructed to achieve ideological closure and restore the status quo by reducing the assassination to a "random" historical occurrence. DeLillo certainly does not intend to endorse the institutionally sanctioned contingency theory of this traumatic event concocted by the Warren Commission, primarily because its account of Oswald forecloses the social contradictions of American society which produced Oswald. The difficult task accomplished by DeLillo in Libra consists in holding conspiracy and contingency in dialectical tension and examining the ways in which each undermines the other. Ultimately, DeLillo's intervention in the JFK assassination debate refuses to offer solace in the form of closure on this traumatic event and rejects the social realities constructed by these conspiracy and contingency theories.

DeLillo encapsulates this dilemma of historical causality in a dual narrative, thereby formulating the JFK assassination as the result of both conspiracy and contingency. Lentricchia describes the basic contours of this dual narrative: "What he has done in Libra is given us one perfectly shaped, intention-driven narrative while folding within it, every other chapter, a second narrative, his imagined biography of Oswald, a plotless tale of an aimless life propelled by the agonies of inconsistent and contradictory motivation" ("Libra" 201). Within these interconnected narratives, DeLillo "traverses" the underlying social fantasies of conspiracy theories and contingency theories, the two diametrically opposed conceptions of "social reality" at work in the interpretation of the JFK assassination.(4) Conspiracy theories represent a social fantasy in which a hidden agent pulls the strings, drawing a series of seemingly unrelated events or coincidences into a meaningful constellation. Contingency theories, on the other hand, generate an equally phantasmic vision of society in which pure chance determines events. While conspiracy and contingency theories differ in their respective visions of social reality, they serve the same ideological function: to explain the failure of society to constitute itself as a harmonious whole.

Slavoj Zizek suggests that conspiracy theories presuppose the existence of a fantasy figure he calls "the Other of the Other," an "invisible Master" responsible for the secret manipulation of history. Within Libra, DeLillo dissolves the existence of "the Other of the Other" by envisioning a plot which negates the causality grounded in intention and control that such a figure implies. DeLillo subverts the fantasy frame of conspiracy theories by demonstrating the role of contingency, what he refers to as "chance and coincidence," in the assassination of JFK. While this emphasis on the role of contingency undermines conspiracy theories, DeLillo also unravels the contingency theory unveiled by the Warren Commission by illustrating the ways in which Oswald is a necessary product of the American social system, rather than an external element introducing corruption into an otherwise sound social fabric. For DeLillo, Oswald represents a "symptom" of American society, "a fetish which simultaneously denies and embodies the structural impossibility of `Society'" (Zizek, Sublime Object 126). In DeLillo's portrait, Oswald embodies not only the social antagonisms, such as class struggle, repressed in fantasy conceptions of the idyllic American way of life, but also the social contradictions inherent to consumer capitalism, primarily the antithesis DeLillo delineates between the utopian promise of "consumer fulfillment" and the alienation of being a "zero in the system." DeLillo dismantles the fantasies supporting these rival versions of social reality and rejects their ideological compensations, namely, belief in the fundamental health of American society.

Traversing the Fantasy of Conspiracy Theory

In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the reassessments of the Kennedy assassination attending the release of Oliver Stone's JFK, the debunking of conspiracy theory has become a virtual genre in its own right. Meticulous research, expert testimony, and the cross-examination of "witnesses" represent the modus operandi of this project which seeks to restore rationality to the public discussion of the traumatic event in question, whether it be the Kennedy assassination or the crash of TWA Flight 800. DeLillo's critique of conspiracy theory proceeds differently. For DeLillo, the "facts" of the case are not transparent but resemble "a kind of mindspatter" (Libra 181). Subsequently, the theories erected on the basis of these "facts" are "marked by ambiguity and error, by political bias, systematic fantasy" (15). DeLillo abandons the pursuit of "the Truth" in order to explore the dynamics of this "systematic fantasy," in which conspiracy theory offers certain ideological satisfactions and compensations.

In Libra, DeLillo describes the JFK assassination as "the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century" (181), an event whose principal traumatic effect has been the loss of "a sense of a manageable reality.... We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then" ("`Outsider'" 48). According to Gordon S. Wood, conspiracy theory attempts to master this chaos by "attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals" and represents a "major means" by which individuals have "ordered and [given] meaning to their political world" (411). Contrary to Richard Hofstadter's canonical equation of conspiracy theory with paranoia, Wood traces conspiracy theory back to the Enlightenment as "a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men" (429). For Fredric Jameson, conspiracy theory resembles his project of "cognitive mapping" in its desire to make sense of the social totality. However, conspiracy theory often sets the stage for the eruption of the irrational in the guise of fantasy conceptions of the enemy as, in Hofstadter's words, "a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman.... Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself" (32). The derailment of conspiracy theory into the realm of social fantasy constitutes one of the reasons why Jameson calls conspiracy theory "a degraded attempt... to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system" (Postmodernism 38).(5)

Conspiracy theory restores our grip on reality by erecting the fantasy figure of a hidden agent, "the Other of the Other," secretly pulling the strings, a move which posits a hidden order behind the visible chaos or contingency of social reality. In keeping with Wood's notion of the ideologically compensations offered by conspiracy theory as a means of ordering the political world, Zizek asserts that conspiracy theory "provides a guarantee that the field of the big Other [the symbolic order that regulates social life] is not an inconsistent bricolage: its basic premise is that, behind the public Master (who, of course, is an impostor), there is a hidden Master who effectively keeps everything under control" ("I Hear" 96-97). By resurrecting the fantasy figure of an "invisible Master" who accounts for the perceived inconsistencies of society,...

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