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Plunging Into History
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14667 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1988 |
2,616 Words |
| Author
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Morris Philipson
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LIBRA
Don DeLillo
New York: Viking, 1988
456 pp., $19.95
Libra is the seventh sign of the zodiac in astrology, represented by a pair of scales or balances—the kind used in images of Justice blind to anything but the delicate measurement determining responsibility in maters of criminal justice. Author Don DeLillo has used this reference to entitle his novel about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, giving it two symbolic resonances in relation to the book as a whole. One is explicitly suggested within the novel by a conspirator pointing out to Lee Harvey Oswald that Libra is his astrological sign, trying to persuade him to tip the scales in the direction of participating in the assassination attempt. The other, more broad implication associated with the scales of justice image related to the author's intention in making this imaginative reconstruction, in subtle and powerful detail, of the purposes and cross-purposes, deliberate and accidental, that might have been woven together to result in the disastrous events of Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The novel offers the reader the chance of weighing these factors in the balance, of satisfying the all-too-human desire to understand and comprehend, and of tipping the scales of belief in one direction or another.
DeLillo offers us the opportunity to imagine the reality of those who participated, fulfilling the prediction of one of the characters in his novel, supposedly writing a secret history for the CIA: "We will follow the bullet trajectory backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams." To achieve his purpose, DeLillo brings together the techniques of two great literary traditions. In the power of plot to make the audience see how actions result in consequences that had not been anticipated, Libra recalls classical tragic drama. The novel focuses on external behavior as a means of revealing human character. On the other hand, the gradual development of the novel from the "new stories" of the late Renaissance through the master fictions of the nineteenth century, from Dickens to Tolstoy, largely provides insights into character through demonstrations of how someone else's mind works, to a certain extent regardless of how he or she behaves. It is that sense of experiencing a character from the inside that is the unique accomplishment of fictional artistry—such that Ortega y Gasset declared the unique power of the novel at it best to be the demonstration of "imagined psychologies." The combination of elements from these two traditions makes Libra an exceptional literary accomplishment.
What 'Broke the Back of the American Century'?
Why was the assassination of President Kennedy of such great importance to the author that he has created this novel with the seriousness of Greek tragedy? The answer may lie in an expression he uses part-way into the book describing his historian's hope of arriving at a comprehension of "the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century." That is a line of poetic intensity worthy of a metaphysical poet like John Donne. Surely it is not only that a president of the United States was assassinated, for that has happened before and more often than not with no conspiracy involved. But none of those previous presidents—no matter how admirable they were in the eyes of devoted followers—possessed the glamour, the charisma,
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