The overall narration of Don DeLillo's Libra can be simply described as cold. However, it is a surgically precise tone somehow manages to interweave a linguistic style that can feel creepily poetic. This oxymoronic tension is especially evident in the climax in the chapter "November 22." The juxtaposition of the beginning of "November 22" against the explosive sensory overload of the shooting of John F. Kennedy creates a disturbing experience that gives even more weight to the assassination.
The buildup to the shooting is read with a clarity that feels detached. It progresses as usual, continuing to narrate monotonously as if November 22nd doesn't actually have any weight. Like the previous chapters, it is mostly set into paragraphs of an almost bureaucratic tone. For example, "...the miscellaneous train of rented convertibles, station wagons, touring sedans, Secret Service follow-up cars, communications cars, buses, motorcycles, spare Chevys, Lyndon, Lady Bird, congressmen, aides, wives, men with Nikons, Rolliflexes, newsreel cameras, radiophones, automatic rifles, shotguns, service revolvers and the codes for launching a nuclear strike" (DeLillo 392). This is a particular sentence that exemplifies this tone. It is intentionally list-like and draining to read. It's goal is to get the reader sucked into the drone-like logistics so that the eventual detonation of violence feels like a betrayal of the narrative's previously established "rules."
Then, the language fractures and completely transforms in an instant. Rather than the expository nature of paragraphs, DeLillo uses short, percussive sentences to describe the first shot:
"He fired through an opening in the leaf cover.
"When the car was in the clear again, the President began to react.
"Lee turned up the handle, drew the bolt back.
"The President reacted, arms coming up, elbows high and wide.
"There were pigeons, suddenly, everywhere, cracking down from the eaves and beating west.
"The report sounded over the plaza, flat and clear.
"The President’s fists were clenched near his throat, arms bowed out.
"Lee drove the bolt forward, jerking the handle down" (DeLillo 395-396).
The flowery prose that is to be expected of a usual novel is replaced with a scene made entirely of jump-cuts. It plays like rapidly switching between cameras, brutally subverting the previous narrative style. However, DeLillo still uses this opportunity to inlay a level of poetic styling. The impact of the third shot on JFK is described in a far more grotesque fashion but still maintains the briefness and staccato-like narration: "A terrible splash, a burst. Something came blazing off the President’s head. He was slammed back, surrounded all in dust and haze" (DeLillo 400). This lyricism does not beautify JFK's death, nor is it meant to beautify it. It amplifies the horror, forcing the reader out of the "observer" state of exposition and tossing them into the sensory reality, similar to the depiction of whippings in Octavia Butler's Kindred. "...the sleet of bone and blood and tissue struck him in the face," (DeLillo 399) and the "pale spray" of blood on a bystander's arms (DeLillo 401) turn this novel from a told story to the closest thing to physical experience a book can bring.
In conclusion, the stylistic clash between the sterile language of the conspirators and the horrific, visceral account of the murder shows that it is simply impossible to write an account of these events with the contained neatness of a historian's report. The short, simple phrases—loaded with images like the pink-white jets of tissue rising from a head or the nervous static in the air as the perpetrator attempts to flee—add a grotesque beauty to the already complex narrative style. The climax of Libra demonstrates that the description of an event that is closest to the truth is ironically the furthest from the clinically objective narrative.
Hi Leo! I really resonate with your analysis of the language. I found your comparison to the depiction of whippings in Kindred insightful. They both use a vivid sensory reality to force the reader to face the event like they were there physically. DeLillo, like a lot of other postmodern authors, seems to be trying to make the reader feel more like an active participant than an observer. Great post!
ReplyDelete"Jump cuts" is a great way to describe the narrative structure in "22 November," and indeed a film of sorts is one of the primary source materials for this narrative, the Zapruder film. So many of the little details (the sun glinting off the limo, the movements of the people watching the motorcade, the acceleration of the limo as it disappears under the overpass) are drawn directly from this film, but at the same time, as you note, DeLillo also starts shifting perspective throughout this scene. We are up in the sixth-floor window with Oswald, then on the sidewalk watching, then alongside Abraham Zapruder as he films, then in the pov of Raymo behind the fence. The examples of detached, just-the-facts-style narration you cite are also somewhat unique to this chapter, and seeing the sentences aligned like this, I note how their FORM seems like an unquestioned statement of fact--"these things happened, precisely like this." It really creates a satisfying illusion of a plot coming together and a "comprehensive" account of "what happened" on that day. Even if we're aware on another level how many fictional elements are a part of that picture.
ReplyDelete