I was browsing the internet when I found (I don't remember how) an article called "Don DeLillo's Libra: History as Text, History as Trauma" by Leonard Wilcox (you can find the full text via a search of online databases through the Illinois library site). I remember thinking that this seemed perfect for History as Fiction. There are many interesting ideas raised by the article, but a few specific ones struck me. One was that the event which DeLillo was working with -the Kennedy assassination- was one of the first truly postmodern events in history. This makes sense in some ways. A man, previously unknown to most, shoots a gun from the window of his workplace and kills a man passing in a car. Probably makes the local paper. But wait. The man who was shot happens to be the president of the United States. Now it's international news. Jack Kennedy has been shot and killed in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It startles many people, particularly because much of America loved him and he was being relatively successful in office so far.
Another thing the article pointed out is that Lee Harvey Oswald is not a figure in history without the media portrayals. The newspaper articles are all we typically get of him and his life. Because of this, he is fairly unknown as a person and as what we typically think of a s a developed character. Therefore, DeLillo had little material to work with when he was writing Libra. Or, rather, he had a lot of leeway (no pun intended) in constructing a character for Lee Oswald. What DeLillo does, then, is make Lee a character who strives to be an important person, without really being one until he assassinates Kennedy. Lee's written history is just the fact-based fiction created by the media, so DeLillo builds a fictional history around it. That right there is some historiographic metafiction, a term coined, according to the article, by Linda Hutcheon to describe Libra. This is done as well with the actual events of November 22.
The article cites Slovoj Žižek with saying that truth can not truly be represented or symbolized, but that cannot truly capture the full truth without letting some creativity come in. Therefore, no historical narrative is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, undermining both the judicial system and the Warren Report. DeLillo knows this. Libra is not meant to be truth, necessarily, or to be taken as a legitimate conspiracy theory. DeLillo just uses Libra to make readers confront the ambiguity that surrounds the assassination of JFK. We as readers can be strung along, not with suspension of disbelief necessarily, but with the idea that maybe there's truth in it, for a whole novel just to wonder, is any of this real? We have to go look up what is factual and what was DeLillo's imagination. This means Libra was successful. It proved to us that the ambiguity is real, that it could cause us to question the truth. It proved to us that history and fiction are not that far away from each other when ambiguity comes into play.
Article:
http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=d7c82b9c-48f4-4937-ab90-e1550de58488%40sessionmgr102
