Libra and the Assassination of JFK: A Textbook Operation

JOSEPH KRONICK Libra and the Assassination of JFK: A Textbook Operation The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions Paul de Man I R assassinations, particularly when the site ofthe event is the Texas School Book Depository. As Don DeLillo's Libra makes abundantly clear, the assassination is a text, which is to say it is anything but clear. I do not refer to the all too familiar questions of conspiracies that were raised immediately following the assassination, left unsettled by the Warren Commission Report, and since renewed by Oliver Stone's JFK. Rather, history is a text, and not simply by virtue ofthe documentary evidence compiled by the Warren Commission with an inclusiveness that establishes the twenty-six volumes as a Menippean satire. Libra plays Borges to the Report's "Joycean Book of America";1 that is, Libra is a commentary, a work that has as much a propositional relation to itself as fiction as it does to reality. If the novel is a proposition about fiction and the assassination is a text, then Libra holds in its scales the undecidable balance between history and language. Although Libra does not, in the manner ofcertain Borges stories, present itselfas a synopsis ofa possible work, at 456pages, however, it is still short enough to be a commentary on the Warren Report and the numerous texts produced by those scholars of the assassination, assassinoloArizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 1, Spring 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 noJoseph Kronick gists—nevertheless, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Borges' "Theme ofthe Traitor and Hero."2 In Borges' tale we have both a historical event—the assassination of an Irish revolutionary leader who has betrayed his confederates—and "a fictional story about such an occurrence (though in reversed form)—Shakespeare's Julius Caesar."1 Rather than destroy Ireland's faith in its hero, Kilpatrick, the entire town, with the connivance of the traitor, stages his assassination after Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Macbeth, thereby turning the city into a theater. "That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable. . . ."4 The cyclic pattern implied by histotical repetition rests upon a spatial unity in literature, but this unity is undone by the temporality of imitation. In a 1964 review of Labyrinths, Paul de Man addresses the problem of consciousness and temporality, an issue that was to preoccupy him in several essays, particularly "The Rhetoric ofTemporality." He finds that Borges' style dissolves the "spatial substance" holding the "chaotic universe together" by transforming experience into a paratactic sequence, as Borges himself describes it: "random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man's whole life to two or three scenes."5 The temporality engendered by language dissolves the organic totality of the world, the spatial continuity that allows Ryan, the great-grandson ofKilpatrick, "to assume a secret pattern in time, a drawing in which the lines repeat themselves."6 For Ryan, a cyclical pattern links Kilpatrick to Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln. Time coheres in a spatial unity in which successivity is subsumed by repetition. For Borges, however, time is the constitutive element destroying the identity between the sign and its object: "This style in Borges becomes the ordering but dissolving act that transforms the unity of experience into the enumeration of its discontinuous parts."7 In place of the organic unity of history, we have an arbitrary linking of events—the murder of Kilpatrick is a plagiarism. The actors follow a script, written by the traitor's accuser, containing passages from Julius Caesar and Macbeth. The similarities between Kilpatrick's assassination and those of Caesar and Lincoln— all three occurred in a theatertransform the death of Kilpatrick into an allegory. The conspirators, Kilpatrick included, would seek refuge from history by borrowing from literature. Even Ryan, who finds "the passages imitated from Shakespeare . . . the least dramatic . . . [and] suspects they were interpolated Libra and the Assassination ofJFK1 1 1 so that some reader would discover the truth . . . resolves to keep silent his discovery. He...