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SECRET AGENCY: AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM IN OSWALD'S TALE AND LIBRA.

Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale and Don DeLillo's Libra are expressly political works. Oswald's bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald's crime as an Emersonian act of self-making--both audacious and peculiarly American. Libra's critique of Oswald...

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Published in:Mailer Review Vol. 3; no. 1; pp. 133 - 173
Main Author: BALTER, BARRIE
Format: Article
Published: Norman Mailer Society Fall2009
Subjects:
Mailer, Norman, 1923-2007
Oswald's Tale (Book)
DeLillo, Don, 1936-
Self
Consciousness
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        Mailer, Norman, 1923-2007
        Oswald's Tale (Book)
        DeLillo, Don, 1936-
        Self
        Consciousness
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          Mailer, Norman, 1923-2007
          Oswald's Tale (Book)
          DeLillo, Don, 1936-
          Self
          Consciousness
      ab: Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale and Don DeLillo's Libra are expressly political works. Oswald's bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald's crime as an Emersonian act of self-making--both audacious and peculiarly American. Libra's critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. Mailer and Don DeLillo follow the trajectory of a seemingly unremarkable man who claims a role in history by killing the president of the United States. Unlike "empirical" accounts of the assassination, the narratives of Mailer and DeLillo posit for Oswald a culturally significant motive that is at once personal and expressly political: When Lee Harvey Oswald fires on Kennedy he doesn't just end the President's life, he begins his own.
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