Oswalds Wake: Representations of JFK's Alleged Assassin in Recent American Literature

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 GEOFF HAMILTON Oswalds Wake: Representations of JFK=s Alleged Assassin in Recent American Literature Arriving in Moscow on 16 October 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald was met by Rimma Shirakova, an Intourist Representative responsible for showing the young American around and informing interested parties of his intentions. On Oswald=s twentieth birthday two days later, Rimma took him on a tour of Lenin=s tomb. She also presented him with a copy of The Idiot. An ungenerous observer would note the aptness of the title, but it is the choice of author that is most significant: Oswald is uncannily Dostoyevskian, and seems almost to have arrived in Russia solely to fraternize with the spirits of the nation=s underground men. Had Oswald made his way through all of Dostoyevsky=s works B and such an achievement is conceivable for this dyslexic but obsessive reader B which of the novelist=s characters, one wonders, would have seduced him most profoundly? Prince Myshkin=s alienated saintliness may have seemed to Rimma a correlative of the odd duck Oswald=s, but benevolence, however transposed, was never the keynote of the ex-marine=s inner symphony. Philosophically justified murder (or something close to it) was to be Oswald=s route to lasting infamy, and one imagines him brooding on his likeness to Raskolnikov. A certain few are given special licence, he must have thought, and those few must fulfil grand designs. Alas, Oswald=s misfortune, of which he was often aware, was that he was more Smerdyakov1 than Raskolnikov, more ignoble runt-bastard than ennobled transgressor. There would be murder, and there would be reasons behind it, but there would be no cleansing trial, no soul mate to share the penance and redemption. 1 The Brothers Karamazov yields a bounty of Smerdyakov-Oswald parallels. The book=s late chapter >A Treatise for Smerdyakov= includes these remarks by a lawyer in the Fyodor Pavlovich murder case, which, incidentally, the deceased Smerdyakov is not able to attend: >@Gentleman, let us turn only to the facts and see what the facts tell us. If Smerdyakov killed him, how did he do it? Alone or with the assistance of the prisoner? ... A man who could conceive such an audacious, savage act, and carry it out, tells facts which are known to no one else in the world, and which, if he held his tongue, no one would ever have guessed!@= (Dostoevsky, 751). Casting Oswald in his proper role has been the source of enormous controversy from the moment of his arrest on 22 November 1963. When the 652 geoff hamilton university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 manacled prisoner shouted >I=m a patsy= to frenzied reporters, he set in motion, no doubt with some cunning, an ever-growing skein of speculation that has since engorged threads of conspiracy trailing off into the highest echelons of Cold War power. Voicing the world=s incredulity, Jack Ruby remarked on the day before his own crossing of the line: >@It=s hard to realize that a complete nothing, a zero like that, could kill a man like President Kennedy. It=s hard to understand how a complete nothing could have done this@= (Posner, 379). For many observers, Oswald remains too small a figure to be responsible for the crime he is said to have committed. Surely there had to be something else, something more complex involved beyond this smirking loner miscast in so portentous a drama. Conspiracy theorists have had much to work with, of course, for the facts in the case are tantalizingly equivocal. Predictably, exuberant fusions of investigative and imaginative work have left Oswald more exercised than exorcised: running the treadmills of a thousand speculations, his legend grows more bulky every year. While journalists sighed with relief at the publication of Gerald Posner=s 1993 book Case Closed, which dismissed the leading conspiracy theories and reaffirmed the conclusions of the Warren Report, dissenting voices, some of them compelling, have kept the debate alive. A recent article by D.B. Thomas, for instance, published in Science and Justice in the spring of 2001, has renewed interest in...