"There are only two things in the world. Things that are true.
And things that are truer than true."
--Weird Beard (Russell Lee Moore, a.k.a. Russ Knight),
KLIF disk jockey in Libra
I. Paranoias and paradigms: Who's afraid of Don DeLillo?
One of the most challenging qualities that Frank Lentricchia finds in
Don DeLillo is that he "offers us no myth of political virginity
preserved, no 'individuals' who are not expressions of--and responses
to--specific historical processes" ("Introducing" 241).
While most mainstream fiction of the Reagan era is marked by
regionalisms and privatisms that bespeak an alarming poverty of
imagination, DeLillo dares to project a world in its full political
complexity and to grapple with ideas that might make some sense of
events observed in the public sphere. Working within a culture that
was both postmodern and nostalgic, a culture that longed for the
pieties of laissez- faire economics and Euro-American bourgeois
individualism while its socioeconomic institutions were busily
breaking down any remaining space for individuals or individuality,
DeLillo recognized that the 1980s could not be understood without
attention to the problem of individual behavior in a social sphere
hypersaturated with the products of signifying systems. The
"seven seconds that broke the back of the American century"
(Libra 181) is a superb symbolic moment on which to focus
such attention, since it is obviously much more than a symbol.
To publish a historical novel that posited a plausible chain of events
leading to the assassination of John Kennedy was more than an act of
defiant imagination or political chutzpah; it raised the stakes for
the enterprise of fiction within a culture rapidly losing its
allegiance to written language as a practical means of organizing
experience. Libra makes the implicit claim that no matter
what one might believe of the lone-gunman theory or the Warren
Commission's report--in CIA master-researcher Nicholas Branch's view,
"the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved
to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred" (181)--the assembly of
explanatory narratives from the available evidence surrounding the
events at Dealey Plaza is as legitimate a concern for a novelist as
for any journalist, historian, or member of an investigative body.
Given the evidentiary problems surrounding this assassination, the
unexplained (or unsatisfyingly explained) deaths of participants in
these events and witnesses to them, and the proliferation of
conspiracy theories of varying degrees of credibility, the novelist
may in fact be on stronger ground than members of these other fields
in asserting truth claims about Kennedy's death.
This position depends on a precise characterization of the nature of a
historical truth claim. Libra achieves its disruptive
force by offering a fresh paradigm by which an event like the
Kennedicide may be understood. This paradigm1
is post-individualist, while accounting for individual actions and
decisions within social signifying systems; it refuses both the easy
gambit of universal skepticism toward the possibility of explaining
such an event and the equally easy temptation of overreaching causal
conjecture. It is immune to charges that might be lodged from opposite
directions: the accusation of credulity, involving the sense of
universal connectivity associated with conspiracy theory (regarded as
paranoid in both the vernacular and the Pynchonian senses), and that
of ahistorical nihilism, involving the disjunctivity of explanations
that lodge sole culpability with Oswald (and thus reduce an incident
with massive social causes and consequences to private motivation,
mere inexplicable insanity). DeLillo's text implies an interpretive
paradigm that neither overplays nor underplays its hand, connecting
events with participants' intentions while eschewing any model of
those intentions as deliberate, purposeful, or necessarily connected
with their outcomes.
-
Libra's reception among the guardians of a conceptual
border between fiction and the presumably nonfictional discourses of
history, politics, and journalism was venomous to an astonishing but
hardly inexplicable degree. Like Lentricchia, journalist Hal
Crowther assesses the vituperation directed at DeLillo by George F.
Will and Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post as a
significant barometer of the book's power, an indication of the
authoritarian paranoia that it arouses--a deeper and truer paranoia
than the accounts Oliver Stone, James Garrison, the aficionado of
the Austin bookstore's "Conspiracy" section in Slacker,
or any caller to a WBAI-FM talk show might conjure. Crowther posits
a credible reason why the paranoia in corporate journalism's higher
circles might mirror or exceed the paranoia in the lower: "At
the Post they love to talk about Watergate, but they
don't want to talk about Dallas. Establishment journalists know in
their guts that they chickened out on the biggest story of their
time and left it to fringe players and exhumers of Elvis"
(330).2
Both of the Post commentators are sniffishly dismissive
of the political implications of Libra, but Will also
makes an explicit case for historical disjunctivism: "It takes
a steady adult nerve to stare unblinkingly at the fact that history
can be jarred sideways by an act that signifies nothing but an
addled individual's inner turmoil" (qtd. in Crowther 323).
Characteristically, Will takes a reasonable-sounding position in
favor of willfully limiting the reach of historical reasoning. One
may safely presume that any historian, journalist, congressional
investigator, or novelist does desire "a steady adult
nerve," but Will's argument fails to consider why causal
inquiry must stop with the observation of individual pathology.
-
Oswald, as DeLillo represents him in Libra, is indeed
addled--afflicted, apparently congenitally, with a moderately severe
combination of dyslexia and dysgraphia-- and in constant personal
turmoil. Will's criticism thus seems not only disproportionate but
misapplied to this novel. In depicting a clueless gunman who bases
his actions on romantic adolescent notions of political destiny,
plays into the hands of nearly every conspirator or would-be
conspirator around him, and even carries the requisite familial
baggage for the privatistic banalities of Freudian interpretation
(absent father, domineering mother, and largely repressed but
recurrent gay desires), doesn't DeLillo provide individual-pathology
theorists with all the evidence they need? But the crucial
distinction here is between a reading that incorporates individual
pathology and an individualist, disjunctivist reading.
DeLillo's offense, beyond merely "exhibit[ing] the same
skepticism that was almost universal at the time the Warren Report
was released" (Crowther 323), is continuing the investigation
into and through the pathological individual. Oswald is pathological
without being particularly distinct from his surroundings.
-
Will and Yardley's wagon-circling responses to Libra
also resemble Tom Wolfe's comments about Noam Chomsky's theories of
the structural imperatives of the news media within the corporate
state, included in the documentary Manufacturing Consent
(1992). Wolfe derisively dismisses Chomsky's argument about control
over the limits of permissible public debate on the grounds that it
would require the manipulation of the media by a cabal of plotters,
presumably gathered in a single room--a laughably cinematic image of
organized malignity, mirrored from the right by Gen. Edwin Walker's
rant about the "Real Control Apparatus":
The Apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name.
We can't measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph.
It is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we
can't uncover. This doesn't mean there are no plotters.
They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet
members, philanthropists, men who know each other by
secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.
(Libra 283)
Because
his account of the Chomskyist critique adheres to the same
individual-intentionalist paradigm, Wolfe cannot imagine a
controlled discourse without conscious and practically omnipotent
controllers; because they refuse to entertain possibilities beyond
Warren Report orthodoxy and rational intentionalism, Will and
Yardley conflate DeLillo with the "fringe players and exhumers
of Elvis." To posit mechanisms by which fringe players operate
is hardly to embrace the fringe oneself. Like Chomsky elucidating
the hard-wired requirements of the information industry, DeLillo
outlines certain inevitable tendencies of organized sub rosa
actions, aware that those tendencies go into effect no matter who
does the organizing or why.
-
Cluelessness is indeed central to the actions of this novel, but it
is crucial to recognize that cluelessness in this political
atmosphere is by no means limited to Oswald. From Win Everett's
private mixture of motivations (only belatedly incorporating the
recognition that "the idea of death is woven into the nature of
every plot" [221]) to David Ferrie's sexual desires and
religious mysticism, private perceptions with distinct limits shape
the actions of each participant in the action of Libra.
A plot against JFK arises, but without the conscious guidance of its
master plotters. It is a conspiracy that Wolfe, Will, and Yardley
would not recognize, an overarching "deathward logic"
(221) that encompasses clever players like George de Mohrenschildt,
whose loathing for Gen. Walker elicits his only expressions of
strong emotion (55-56), and the CIA's Laurence Parmenter ("part
of the Groton-Yale-OSS network of so-called gentlemen spies . . .
the pure line, a natural extension of schoolboy societies, secret
oaths and initiations" [30]) along with willfully delusional
Birchers like Guy Banister, who spends late-night hours poring
masturbatorily over his "final nightmare file" purporting
to document "Red Chinese troops . . . being dropped into the
Baja by the fucking tens of thousands," and who "wanted to
believe it was true. He did believe it was true. But he also knew it
wasn't" (351-52). Each conspirator, seeing no further than his
own interests, fears, or desires for revenge, moves in a private
direction; the resultant vector of all these individual movements is
something no individualist interpreter dares call conspiracy.
II. Insects and insubordinations: A myopic-interaction model
An interdisciplinary model of collective behavior that develops its
own directionality, regardless of any single participant's agenda,
comes from the improbable intersection of two fields of study:
entomology (as practiced on an amateur basis by a budding physicist)
and computer science. Richard Feynman, recalling his home
experiments with ants' navigational behavior, finds that the insects
either move randomly or follow each other's trails, and that the
repetition of small deviations when they follow each other results
in a composite trail that gives the illusory appearance of order.
One question that I wondered about was why the
anttrails look so straight and nice. The ants look
as if they know what they're doing, as if they have a good
sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to
demonstrate their sense of geometry didn't work. . . . At
first glance it looks like efficient, marvelous, brilliant
cooperation. But if you look at it carefully, you'll see
that it's nothing of the kind. (95-96)
None
of Feynman's ants moves individually in a straight line, but the
collective movement nevertheless produces a straight line,
simulating purposeful effort.
Transylvanian computer scientist Alfred Bruckstein, working with
mathematical pursuit problems at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, has
formalized Feynman's conjecture, proving the theorem that an
initially disorderly series of pursuit paths will converge to the
straight segment connecting the initial point of departure, e.g., an
anthill, and the destination of the original "pioneer
ant," e.g., a recently discovered food source (Bruckstein
60-61). His model of "global behavior that results from simple
and local interaction rules" (62) has implications for robotics
as well as for the behavior of animal colonies. It also has
implications for the behavior of human organizations, at least
metaphorically--and perhaps, if one notes its resemblance to the
"political resultant" theory used in the field of
geopolitical decision analysis (Allison 7-8), literally as well.3
If "globally optimal solutions for navigation problems can be
obtained as a result of myopic cooperation between simple agents or
processors" (Bruckstein 62), can any form of multiple
myopia--perhaps the combined myopias of a disgraced,
"buried," and resentful CIA agent; a soldier of fortune
with no fixed address and undiscernible loyalties; a
disease-obsessed and mystically inclined pilot, sacked from an
airline job because of institutional homophobia, who contemplates
developing hypnotism as a weapon and claims to "believe in
everything" (Libra 314-15); and a dyslexic
political naif who daydreams of merging with the flow of
history--also give the appearance of directed movement?
In the national security state as depicted by DeLillo, myopic
interaction is not a human imperfection in an otherwise efficient
system; it is built into the system from the outset. During the
planning that resulted in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Everett and
Parmenter were part of a layered and deliberately fragmented
bureaucracy, described by DeLillo in parodically numbing detail:
The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted
of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers,
ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries,
heads of intelligence. They met for an hour and a half.
Then eleven men left the room, six men entered. The resulting
group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven
men left, four men entered, including Everett and Parmenter.
This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert
operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented
ought to know about these plans. Those members in turn
wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what
was going on in stage three.
Chances are they didn't. When the meeting in stage
three was over, five men left the room and three
paramilitary officers entered to form Leader 4. Win Everett
was the only man present at both the third and fourth stages
(20).
The
point of all this Beckettish enumeration is not simply that antlike
bureaucrats come and go, talking of Guantanamo, but that the form of
rationality peculiar to such organizations depends precisely on
minimizing the possibility that anyone might know enough to
comprehend the full narrative:
Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset.
In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence,
was not to know important things. The less he knew, the
more decisively he could function. It would impair his
ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or
in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what
they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking
about, or muttering in their sleep. . . .
It was the President, of course, who was the final
object of their protective instincts. They all knew that
JFK wanted Castro cooling on a slab. but they weren't
allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the
business they'd charged themselves to carry out. The White
House was to be the summit of unknowing. (21-22)
Resemblances
to the Reagan-Bush White House, the unpenetrating Tower hearings
into the Iran-contra phase of covert national security
operations, and the doctrine of "plausible deniability"
are perfectly coincidental, of course. But the plot against Castro,
taking grimly comic turns at first (poisoned or exploding cigars,
"a poison pen in the works . . . testing a botulin toxin on
monkeys . . . fungus spores in his scuba suit" [21]), then
culminating in the botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs, serves as a
kind of prologue-plot, prefiguring the myopically planned spectacle
of Dealey Plaza. When the control of public events requires the
diffusion of awareness and dispersal of control, it is unsurprising
that Everett's initial idea of a theatrically managed,
well-controlled near miss--as executed, or functionally interpreted,
by black-ops technician T-Jay Mackey and his team of shooters,
including "Leon" Oswald--goes out of control, its multiple
shades of signification simplified to the brutality of an actual
hit.
The tendency toward myopic interactions pervades the official and
unofficial national security apparatus, not only in the Bay of Pigs
fiasco but in the meetings that continue after the official
dispersal of groups such as Leader 4 and SE Detailed. "True
believers" like the men of Leader 4 may be too "overresponsive
to policy shifts, light- sensitive, unpredictable" (22) to
continue in covert operations, but they carry on meeting
obsessionally out of sheer momentum, a shadow-cabal without real
powers (and a caricature of Tom Wolfe's vision of conspirators).
Everett, the one agent who knew enough details of the anti-Castro
operations to serve as the Agency equivalent of a pioneer ant, is
relegated to the emasculated existence of a planted fake professor
at Texas Woman's University, repeating pointless movements:
Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges
of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic
strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter
evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad
to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning
routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need (16).
He
imagines a painting commemorating the confrontation of Leader 4 with
agents of the CIA's Office of Security, titling this canvas
"Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly" (24)--implying
religiosity and the Fall, not instrumental rationality, which they
have tried for a time and found inoperative.
III. Cinema and simulacra: The fallacy of forensic romance
Everett and his fellow ex-"clandestines" are drawn to
pointless activity as lapsing believers are drawn to ritual, no
longer convinced that their actions have political content, but
compelled to continue them nonetheless. They are not so much a
conspiracy as the simulacrum of a conspiracy, performing according
to a script whose composition is ongoing and is not under their
control. They have effects on history, but hardly the "personal
contribution to an informed public. . . . the major subtext and
moral lesson" (53) that Everett hopes will ensue, redeeming him
in the eyes of history. He fails to see that this romantic vision
(the truth seeing the light of day!) is incompatible with the
simulacral nature of postmodern political activity--that his plan's
complex elegance is unlikely to survive its implementation by field
operatives such as Mackey and Wayne Elko, who have consumed too many
images of themselves as Seven Samurai (145) to be reliable executors
of subtle instructions (much as follower ants simplify the intricate
paths of a pioneer ant).4
Once Everett has embraced the politics of the public image, hoping
to manipulate the media and the Agency through the perception of a
vengeful Castro--publicly raising the question of just what actions
Castro is seeking to avenge--he reveals his myopia: he forgets that
the politics of the public image tends to embrace you back.
-
It is practically inevitable that a consideration of Libra,
with its displacements of agency and its recurrent coincidences
between engineered events and happenstance ("It was no longer
possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent
of the plot" [178]), will lead to a Baudrillardian vision of
social processes. The use of Oswald, Boy Marxist, as the instrument
of the anti-Castroite conspiracy (a "negative Libran"
[315] whom Ferrie believes might flip in either direction) is a
clear example of Baudrillard's "Moebius-spiralling
negativity" whereby
[a]ll the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in
an endless whirligig. . . . Is any given bombing . . . the
work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation,
or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into
disrepute and to shore up its own failing power . . . ? All
this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the
objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of
interpretation. (30-31)
Even
the Post's pet conspiracy Watergate was a nonscandal to
Baudrillard, a show trial designed to create a "moral
superstructure" (27) behind which the amoral capitalist state
can function. To interpret such events as struggles of right and
left over rationally expressible questions of public
interest--rather than structural fictions obscuring the fact that
the Watergate break-in and cover-up, or whatever plot culminated in
Dealey Plaza, were closer to normative than exceptional state
behavior.5--is to
mistake vertigo for orientation.
Power, in Baudrillard's vision, both uses and fears simulacra. It
strives for a monopoly on simulation, punishing acts such as a
theatrical "fake hold-up" (39); it fears unsanctioned
simulation more than it fears violent transgression, precisely
because simulation "always suggests, over and above its object,
that law and order themselves might really be nothing more
than a simulation" (38, emphasis Baudrillard's). The
Everett/Parmenter/Banister/Mackey/Elko/Raymo/ Ferrie/Oswald
mechanism converts the near-miss, a simulation that might have
publicized sensitive covert operations, into a hit on Kennedy, a
shock that the state apparatus can ultimately absorb. Sociopolitical
structures could tolerate actual violence against this president,
but not symbolic violence against the system of signs that functions
as protective coloration for the operations of capital. "Power
can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and
legitimacy. Thus with American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered
because they still have a political dimension. Others . . . only had
a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders" (37).
-
Discourses of truth come in for rough treatment in Baudrillard's
world, and the figures in Libra who try to enact
discourses of truth are likewise disoriented and defeated. At the
opposite end of the plot from the hapless Everett, who thought he
could induce media hyperreality to do the work of the real, sits
Nicholas Branch, performing historical reconstruction from the
masses of evidence supplied to him by the Curator. Branch, the
would-be panoptical reader who can synthesize the entire mass of
materials into a credible historical truth claim, is at first driven
to complete his history whether or not anyone will ever read it. It
steadily becomes apparent to him, however, that he is performing a
simulacrum of research. His position is both a scholar's heaven,
with apparently infinite research materials provided instantly on
request, and a scholar's hell of overabundance and nonintegration;
his papery environment is hallucinatorily Borgesian, part Library of
Babel and part Garden of Forking Paths. Branch is Homo
documentarius, linear-thinking Gutenbergian Man, with his
logical and recombinatory faculties underscored in his surname,6
but his attempt at a definitive reconstruction of the Kennedicide
peters out as miserably as Everett's attempt to send true
information to the public.
-
For his naive belief in the possibility of a realist discourse about
Dealey Plaza, Branch receives a different form of knowledge, which
he comes to interpret as a form of punishment, from the sources he
depends on. He is damned to an eternal investigation, drowned in
information that is sensory as well as documentary, including the
contradictory, the irrelevant, and the gruesome. The primary texts
that the Curator continues to send him include not only the
obligatory Zapruder film (that most exhaustively scrutinized of
cinematic texts) but autopsy photos, "the results of ballistics
tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of
gelatin mixed with horsemeat. . . . an actual warped bullet that has
been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver.
We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now.
They want me to touch and smell. . . . The bloody goat
heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point"
(299). In place of the coherence of an explainable conspiracy, he
comes to see the plot as "a rambling affair that succeeded in
the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence
and fixed will and what the weather was like"--yet "[t]he
stuff keeps coming" (441), defying comprehension at Branch's
end of the plot just as events defied control at Everett's. Instead
of attaining the closure one expects from a narrative syntagm, the
successful completion of his forensic romance, Branch becomes the
Sisyphus of mediated information. He is still reading signs at the
close of the novel; he has still written little; he has accepted a
grim role as the goatherd of historical hell, keeper of the
unintelligible secrets of the state.
IV. Infocide
DeLillo's plot is a nightmarish parable of the transmission of any
type of consequential information through the public sphere under
late capitalism. The sender, mediators, and receiver of the message
(Everett, the other conspirators, and Branch, respectively) are all
maintained in a state of myopia throughout the process; the initial
message is replaced by an antithetical counter- message and never
reaches its true intended receiver, the politically responsible
public. This is precisely as ruling-class apologists of George
Will's ilk would have it, of course, with forensic interpretation
forestalled and political accountability rendered risible. Useful
communication is stultified under such conditions; the state's
literal control apparatus (from police to spies) becomes redundant,
if not vestigial, when much of the citizenry is occupied with
information-games that lack real referents and consequences. In
Baudrillard's glum description of daily life in the realm of
infinite simulation, there is "[n]o more violence or
surveillance; only 'information,' secret virulence, chain reaction,
slow implosion and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect again
comes into play. We are witnessing the end of perspective and
panoptic space" (54).
-
The capitalist polity, of course, has always had its own defensive
mythologies to characterize its processes as positively benign. The
theory of myopic interactions is by no means the only case of insect
behavior offering a metaphoric explanation of human behavior. If,
under this paradigm, a series of antlike actions in pursuit of
private interests combine to result in public calamity, one
formative myth of the early capitalist era uses another arthropod
collective to extol the processes that Adam Smith would
anthropomorphize and anatomize some 70 years later as capitalism's
benevolent Invisible Hand. Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of
the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, first
appearing in 1705, offers a conceptual structure remarkably similar
to Bruckstein's. His beehive prospers as long as it tolerates a rich
array of interlocking iniquities, but it loses both its wealth and
its power relative to other hives when it gives in to the impulses
of reform, economic leveling, and anti-imperalism. A critical
difference between these two images of human-
society-as-insect-colony is that Mandeville, while applauding the
system that transmutes private vices into public benefits, also
inverts the equation and identifies public-spiritedness itself,
on an individual scale, with disaster on the social scale.
Throughout the period of capital's social dominance, it seems, one
encounters a form of consciousness that wilfully refuses to form a
lucid and integrative social vision.
-
Mandeville's account of apian society is founded on the same sort of
macro/micro disjunction by which Feynman and Bruckstein explain
formic navigation: behavior that looks like error or disorder at the
individual level combines with other such behavior to produce order
for the collective. Like any capitalist utilitarian, pre-Marxian or
post-, Mandeville rationalized the glaring class distinctions among
his bees with the observation that "Industry/Had carry'd Life's
Conveniences,/It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,/To such a Height,
the very Poor/Lived better than the Rich before" (ll. 198-202).
This is the classical rationalization of inequities and iniquities
under capitalism; it would recur in the Reaganite trope of a rising
tide lifting all boats. And Mandeville's identification of social
reform as counterproductive, removing the incentives that drive the
invisible hand, would recur nearly three centuries later in Margaret
Thatcher's denouncements of any public policy based on compassion or
economic justice as tearfully sentimental, or "wet."
-
The same contempt for social interaction reaches a peak of comic
exaggeration in Libra when David Ferrie, joking with
Mafioso Carmine Latta (who will later manipulate Jack Ruby into
taking his role in the script) about the Cold War apocalypse that
might ensue if the U.S. tried to bomb Cuba to retrieve it from the
Communists for the mob, asserts a positive preference for
postnuclear Hobbesianism:
. . . I like the idea of living in shelters. You
go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The
sewer system is a form of welfare state. It's a government
funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being
independent, digging latrines in the woods, in a million
backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit. (173)
How
clearly can one distinguish this parodic hyperindividualism from the
attitude expressed in the Impeach Earl Warren signs7
and swastika graffiti that sends Weird Beard into nervous
premonitory improvisations? (381-82).
On a fundamental level, communication itself is at odds with the
belief system shared by Mandeville, Will, Reagan (the "Great
Communicator"!), Ferrie, Latta, Gen. Walker, and the looming
Bircher population of 1963 Dallas. This is a community that has been
immunized against community, unified in acceptance of fragmentation.
Much has been written about the proliferation of signifiers from
commercial culture in DeLillo's works, and about how these
intersecting messages shred the idea of an individual consciousness:
"a whole network of popular mythology, allowing DeLillo to show
how the possibilities of meaning and action are shaped by the
contemporary ethos of simultaneity and indeterminacy . . . .
Character, the transformation and realization of the novelistic
subject's depth through narrative time, is replaced by the notion of
character as a function of the frequently self-canceling languages
of representation in which the novelistic self is situated" (Wacker
70-71).
-
These environments are so oversaturated with disconnected messages
that they pose a risk of what one might call "death by
information"--a particular hazard for someone like Oswald, who
lacks (probably for hereditary neurologic reasons) the integrative
capacity that makes purposeful linguistic behavior possible. For all
his protestations about economic injustice, Oswald's image of
Communism is a consumer item, a boy's perverse fantasy of becoming
the Other the whole culture fears; the roles of Stalin and Trotsky
are natural outgrowths of teenage idol- worship, exotic alternatives
to John Wayne, in whose screen- sanctified presence he also bathes
while on mess duty at Corregidor (93-94). He forgets to visit
Trotsky's house in Mexico City, and "[t]he sense of regret
makes him feel breathless, physically weak, but he shifts out of it
quickly, saying so what" (358), like a visitor to Hollywood
missing part of a Universal Studios tour. Writing his Historic Diary
while in Russia, he is "[s]tateless, word- blind":
Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not
find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the
hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is
called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw
spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess the rest.
He
made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him
with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate,
powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be
elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get
a grip on the runaway world. (211)
Word-blindness
is not the same thing as ignorance: "He knew things. It wasn't
that he didn't know" (211). Spymaster Marion Collings gives
Oswald a recruiting speech about the interpretive importance of
context--"A fact is innocent until someone wants it. Then it
becomes intelligence. . . . An old man eating a peach is
intelligence if it's August and the place is the Ukraine and you're
a tourist with a camera . . . . There's still a place for human
intelligence" (247)--but Oswald is unsuited for this type of
cognitive work. He incorporates within his own cranium the
perspectivelessness and disconnection of the whole culture; he is a
living representative of a myopically interactive informational
realm.
Death by information goes hand in hand with the death of
information. In a hyperreal environment where messages are
infinitely reproducible and convertible, Collings' elision of the
two meanings of "intelligence" (the raw informational
material itself and the human skill at making sense of it)
metastasizes throughout the culture, and the former overcomes the
latter. As William Cain observes after discussing this passage,
"in American culture, there are always more facts, more
intelligence. . . . The irony is that the spread of information
fails to lead to clearer meaning and more finely focused
intelligence. People assemble knowledge, and its transmission from
person to person and place to place does signify, yet the import of
it all stays mysterious" (281). Such a quantity of information
ensures that little or no actual informing ever occurs.
-
Is the dominance of the myopic-interaction paradigm absolute? Does Libra
reinforce "what we darkly suspect about the postmodern
alteration of the mind" (Cain 281)? The bathetic but intensely
imagined monologue by Marguerite Oswald (448-456), patching together
incoherent cliches and insights until they achieve a desperate
coherence, concludes Libra in a minor key, but it is
hardly the same fatalistic minor key in which Baudrillard composes.
Implicitly, at least on a metafictional level, passages like this
imply that it is still possible to select information from the
ceaseless media Babel and combine it in ways that generate power (at
least if one has Don DeLillo's ear for the spoken American
language). The question remains whether the borders between
art-language and world-language are permeable.
-
For one alternative to communicative myopia, one can do worse than
return to the empiricist intelligence of Richard Feynman. The
ant-navigation paradigm is opposed in his text by a recurrent
behavioral model that equates global awareness of purpose with
problem-solving effectiveness. The most explicit description of this
informed-interaction model occurs in the long chapter "Los
Alamos from Below," where he recounts his experiences working
on the Bomb. Security interests have mandated the fragmentation of
knowledge--with a level of control and surveillance that can
properly be called paranoid, however justifiable under wartime
conditions--but Feynman intuits that disseminating more knowledge
about the project among technical workers will improve the quality
and efficiency of their work. Experience proves him right:
The real trouble was that no one had ever told these
fellows anything. The army had selected them from all over
the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment
--clever boys from high school who had engineering ability.
They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks.
And they would tell them nothing.
Then they came to work, and what they had to do was
work on IBM machines--punching holes, numbers that they
didn't understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing
was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there
has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing.
Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special
permission . . . .
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways
of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They
worked at night. . . . [A]ll that had to be done was
to tell them what it was. (127-128)
The bureaucrats who set up Special Engineer Detachment counted on
the efficacy of myopic interactions, under the assumption that only
a small coterie (analogous to the pioneer ant that knows the
location of the food) could be trusted with information about the
direction of the collective endeavor, but Feynman explicitly
demonstrates the superiority of informed interactions for certain
types of operations. What works for ants and assassins does not
necessarily improve results for engineers, and DeLillo's account of
the information-structures that produced the Kennedicide--regardless
of whether the specific events he imagines to occupy that structural
framework are veridical, a proposition unlikely ever to be confirmed
or disproved-- qualifies him as something like a conceptual
engineer. This status adds weight to his works' implicit claim to
have influence in the public sphere.
-
In Mao II, DeLillo extends and deepens the intimation
that the Gutenberg/Branch paradigm cannot make sense of the
postmodern era's public events. The transition from the world of Libra
to that of Mao II--perhaps a paradigm shift within
DeLillo's work to mirror the one he sees occurring in the political
world--becomes clear toward the conclusion of the latter book as
Bill Gray approaches death, sensing that his form of information is
in eclipse during the days of Moon and Khomeini ("'What
terrorists gain, novelists lose'" [157]). The literary world
where he once enjoyed ferocious debate with his friend and editor
Everson is in decline, eroded by the perks of capital ("'Who
owns this company?' 'You don't want to know.' 'Give me the whole big
story in one quick burst.' 'It's all about limousines'"
[101-02]). His belief that his actions have public consequences is
also in decline; his agreeing to meet with Abu Rashid's
hostage-holders represents the beginning of a prolonged suicide for
both Gray and his mode of thought. Moving eastward toward the
rendezvous and the grave, Gray sustains an inner monologue that
retreats from public observation into the myopic realm of personal
and familial nostalgia.
-
The individual artist in language, this plot implies, is obsolete
because he has always been bounded by, and bound to, his privacy--an
artifact of a social order that no longer exists. Yet Gray's
language is succeeded by a different language, that of Brita
Nilsson's camera. She does not refuse to participate in history; her
gesture to unmask the armed youth at the end of her meeting with Abu
Rashid dramatizes her willingness to be an active participant in
events, not a passive recorder (236). She, like DeLillo, is still a
public citizen and an artist who can surprise the public; her visual
language produces factual texts that are indeed selected--hardly the
panoptical god's-eye view of a would-be master historian like
Branch, or of the illusory "objective" news media--but
selected with the informed, receptive eye of a new kind of
informational engineer. Myopia, after all, is easily corrected with
lenses.
Department
of English
Rutgers University
millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu
Copyright © 1994 Bill Millard NOTE:
Readers may use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair
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purpose but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax to
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Notes
1.
I will designate this paradigm the "theory of myopic
interactions," borrowing the term from Alfred Bruckstein.
Bruckstein does not use the term "myopic interactions"
in his Mathematical Intelligencer article, but the
phrase is attributed to him in a brief description of this article
in Science (April 23, 1993). It is broader in scope
than the phrase he originally uses, "myopic
cooperation," since it allows for noncooperative or actively
antagonistic interactions such as those involving governmental
operatives and Oswald or Ruby.
2.
Whether they would still love to talk about Watergate after
talking about it with Baudrillard, however, is an open question.
3.
Graham Allison offers competing explanatory models for a
particularly intricate geopolitical test case, the installation of
Soviet missiles in Cuba. According to the "Rational
Actor" or "classical" model, the one most foreign
policy analysts and laymen have implicitly embraced, governments
make decisions monolithically as individual chess players do,
referring to specific defined objectives and calculating the
rational means of attaining them. However, the
"Organizational Process" and "Governmental
(Bureaucratic) Politics" models better explain the "intra-national
mechanisms" (6) that determine international behavior: each
apparent monolith or chess player is in fact a black box
containing competing organizations, interests, and individuals,
each of whom pursues distinct and only partially compatible
objectives. Analysis of the organization, routines, and relative
bargaining power of these components yields an understanding of
how participants come to make irrational decisions. I am indebted
to Katie Burke, MD, FACEP, for calling my attention to Allison's
work and its applications to medical and governmental decision
analysis, as well as to the argument presented here.
4.
Elko's identification of his paramilitary role with cinematic
models is made explicit, as is his own form of myopia, when he
muffs his task of killing Oswald at the arranged rendezvous site,
the Texas Theater, by waiting through the feature (Cry of
Battle) to "let the tension build. Because that's the
way they do it in the movies" (412), allowing police to
apprehend him instead. Staying for the second feature (War
Is Hell) after "Leon" is removed confirms Elko's
priorities.
5.
"In fact, the charges against Nixon were for behavior not too
far out of the ordinary, though he erred in choosing his victims
among the powerful, a significant deviation from established
practice. He was never charged with the serious crimes of his
Administration: the 'secret bombing' of Cambodia, for example. The
issue was indeed raised, but it was the secrecy of the bombing,
not the bombing itself, that was held to be the crime. . . . We
might ask, incidentally, in what sense the bombing was 'secret.'
Actually, the bombing was 'secret' because the press refused to
expose it" (Chomsky 81-82).
6.
Branch is among the first characters introduced in the book,
appearing within six pages of another Nicholas: one of young
Oswald's taunting truant companions in the Bronx, Nicky Black, who
"know[s] where to get these books where you spin the pages
fast, you see people screwing" (8). Referring to himself in
the third person as "the kid," collapsing the
distinction between written language and cinema with his primitive
porn, bearing the Devil's conventional given name (though
"the name was always used in full, never just Nicky or
Black" [8]), and vanishing from the book after a single
scene, Nicky Black is the sort of background character whose very
irrelevance to the narrative charges him with symbolism. When a
second Nicholas B. then appears among larger, more important
masses of paper, does the inference that DeLillo is setting up
early subtextual linkages between an obsession with textual forms
and Auld Nickie-Ben constitute interpretive overaggression?
7.
The irony of rightists calling for the impeachment of the very man
who would head the commission that performed a simulacral
investigation, thus protecting the plotters (in yet another
Moebius-spiral), is unlikely to be lost on many readers of Libra
but is probably lost on quite a few of the rightists.
Works Cited
Allison,
Graham T. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.
Baudrillard,
Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra," in Simulations.
Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983. 1-79.
Bruckstein,
Alfred M. "Why the Ant Trails Look So Straight and
Nice." Mathematical Intelligencer 15.2 (1993):
59-62.
Cain,
William E. "Making Meaningful World: Self and History in Libra."
Rev. of DeLillo, Don, Libra. Michigan Quarterly
Review 29.2 (1990): 275-287.
Chomsky,
Noam. Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis
and How We Got There. New York: Pantheon, 1982.
Crowther,
Hal. "Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist's Choices in the New
Mediocracy." South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2
(1990): 321-336.
DeLillo,
Don. Libra. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
---.
Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
Feynman,
Richard. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!":
Adventures of a Curious Character. Ed. Edward Hutchings.
New York: Norton, 1985.
"Follow-the-Leader
Math." (News report on Bruckstein's paper, with quote from
Bruckstein.) Science 260 (April 23, 1993): 495.
Lentricchia,
Frank. "The American Writer as Bad Citizen--Introducing Don
DeLillo." South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990):
239-244.
---.
"Libra as Postmodern Critique." South
Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 431-453. Originally
published inRaritan 8.4 (1989): 1.
Mandeville,
Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick
Benefits. Eighteenth-Century English Literature.
Ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., Marshall Waingrow, and
Brewster Rogerson. New York: Harcourt, 1969: 267-277.
Manufacturing
Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Dir. Peter Wintonick
and Mark Achbar. 1992.
Slacker.
Dir. Richard Linklater. 1991
Wacker,
Norman. "Mass Culture/Mass Novel: The Representational
Politics of Don DeLillo's Libra." Works
and Days 8.1 (1990): 67-87.
Copyright © 1994 Bill Millard NOTE:
Readers may use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair
Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. In addition, subscribers and
members of subscribed institutions may use the entire work for any
internal noncommercial
purpose but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax
to one person at another location for that individual's personal
use, distribution of this article outside of a subscribed
institution without express written permission
from either the author or the Johns
Hopkins University Press is expressly forbidden.
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