Media Images and the Subversion of Conclusive Historical Narratives

in Historiographic Metafictional Depictions of the

Rosenberg Executions and JFK Assassination

by

Christian Ledwell

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August 2009

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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) Table of Contents

Abstract v

Acknowledgements vi

Chapter One: Introduction 1

Chapter Two: "Fraud of Spectacular Dimension": Subverting Constructions of the Rosenbergs in E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel 13

Chapter Three: "The Sam Slick Show": Robert Coover's Subversion of Media

Representations of the Rosenbergs 35

Chapter Four: Historiographic Metafictional Opposition to the Warren

Commission Report in Don DeLillo's Libra 54

Chapter Five: "A Moral and Just Psychopathology": Hyperreality and the

Therapeutic Use of Fictions in J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition 76

Chapter Six: Conclusion 92

Bibliography 100

iv Abstract

This thesis examines the subversive political usage of the genre historiographic

metafiction, with a focus on novels about narrative constructions of Julius and Ethel

Rosenberg's executions and President John F. Kennedy's assassination. These events are

significant to contemporary historiography because they demonstrate the increasing

importance of media images in the formation of historical narratives, and because they are clear examples of the influence of political agendas on the creation of conclusive narratives by popular media and state officialdom. The thesis will explore the resonances of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard's theories of media images' detachment from objective reality with Linda Hutcheon's view of textual instability in historical composition. Historiographic metafiction criticizes the presentation of media images as texts that provide objective historical knowledge, and novels within the genre make the politically subversive argument that the state does not possess privileged access to historical truth.

v Acknowledgements

I would like to thank and acknowledge my supervisor, Dr. Anthony Enns, for his generosity with his time and expertise. His enthusiasm for scholarship and the respect with which he treats students made working with him a privilege.

I would also like to thank Dr. David Evans and Dr. Trevor Ross for acting as readers, as their thorough and attentive revisions improved the thesis immensely.

vi 1

Chapter One: Introduction

Though postmodern fictions take a stance of radical skepticism towards fixed positions—be they political, historical, or moral—the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction is a useful political tool to undermine historical narratives that are presented conclusively by mainstream media and state officialdom in order to garner popular consent for state actions. Two significant examples of this type of narrative in the later part of the twentieth-century are the state's narrative about Julius

and Ethel Rosenberg's roles in passing secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet

Union and the lone gunman narrative of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Historiographic metafictions authored against official narratives of these events stress the impossibility of gaining objective historical knowledge and oppose the pro-state political motivations that lead such narratives to be presented as definitive. The

Rosenbergs' trials and President Kennedy's assassination were landmarks of television's increasingly important role in disseminating narratives of historical

events, and the postmodern novels discussed in this thesis subvert the use of media

images as conclusive evidence in contemporary historical composition. E.L.

Doctorow, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo and J.G. Ballard argue that media images are

flawed representations of historical objectivity that are as malleable to the political motivations of narrative composition as written representations of history.

Historiographic metafiction presents self-conscious falsehoods that stress the problematics of gaining access to any objective historical moment and draw attention to the way in which historical narratives are composed. Linda Hutcheon writes that 2 historiographic metafiction "acknowledges the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today" (114; Hutcheon's emphasis). She unpacks this statement: "We know the past (which really did exist) only through its textual remains ... There is not so much 'a loss of belief in a significant external reality' as there is a loss of faith in our ability to (unproblematically) know that reality, and therefore to be able to represent it in language" (119; Hutcheon's emphasis).

Postmodern texts in this genre demonstrate that historical narratives exist in a discussion with other competing narratives of the same event, and intertextuality is used in order to create this sense of narrative plurality. Hutcheon asserts that intertextuality shows that "to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological" (110). Historiographic metafiction calls into question claims of objectivity in nonfictional historical writing, positing that it is impossible for the subject to gain objective comprehension of any historical moment, as history is always textually mediated.

However, Frederic Jameson argues against the relativism implied by historiographic metafiction's notion of the impossibility of objective historical knowledge. He writes,

[The historical novel] can only 'represent' our ideas and

stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes

'pop history') ... [Cultural production] can no longer gaze

directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of

the past which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato's 3

cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its

confining walls. (25)

Jameson fears that there are dangerous political implications if the individual cannot relate to history empirically—if "we are condemned to seek History by way of our pop images and simulacra of that history" (25). Contrary to Hutcheon's claim that

"there are only truths in the plural, and never one Truth" (109), Jameson holds that the subject should strive to form conclusive narratives through the process of

"cognitive mapping" (52), and that these maps will counter postmodernism's problematic "weakening of historicity" (6). Cognitive mapping's political efficacy stems from the individual's ability to comprehend structures of power despite the disorienting organization of decentralized post-industrial capitalism; cognitive mapping "require [s] the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality" (52). Jameson argues that political movements will grow from collective action on the part of individuals who have achieved cognitive maps, and the fulfillment of cognitive mapping's aesthetic will create "a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (54). For Jameson, the subject is not only fully capable of coordinating historical knowledge into a meaningful pattern, but this ability to create a fixed position for oneself is prerequisite to the subject's potential for political opinions capable of counteracting the harmful aspects of globalized capitalism.

Jameson asserts that weakened historicity is brought about by the aesthetics of postmodern culture, leading historical narratives to become 'pastiche.' These 4 narratives operate in a similar manner to parody but are distinguished by their political flaccidity: "[Pastiche] is a neutral practice ... without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse ... Pastiche is thus blank parody"

(17). Situationist Guy Debord also responds to the lack of fixed subversive political stances in postmodern culture, theorizing that capitalist states' use of the media brings about a 'society of the spectacle;' Debord posits, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (4). For Debord, the spectacle prevents cognitive mapping because it "is the image of the ruling economy" (14) through which "the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior ... [the world] can no longer be grasped directly" (18). Debord rejects the notion that media culture allows for free discourse, asserting that the spectacle acts to marginalize dissent: "[The spectacle] is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society itself, where all other expression is banned" (23). Debord's spectacle radically alienates the subject from objective reality, and any subversive political action must first call attention to the spectacle's operation in favor of the powerful. Like Jameson, Debord maintains faith in the possibility of navigating postmodern culture to create a coherent, fixed political position through the subversion of the spectacle. Conversely,

Hutcheon argues that although the subject cannot create such a fixed position, the state's power can nonetheless be subverted through calling attention to its use of such falsely absolute positions towards history.

Jean Baudrillard shares Hutcheon's belief that objective historical knowledge is impossible, arguing that the dissemination of media simulations has brought about 5 a hyperreal environment in which signifiers are independent from the objectively real signified; through the precession of simulacra, "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it" (1). Debord's belief that objective political truths are simply masked by the operations of the spectacle is no longer tenable in Baudrillard's model, in which second-order simulacra has been displaced by autonomous third- order simulacra:

We are witnessing ... the very abolition of the spectacular.

Television ... is no longer a spectacular medium ... The

medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the

confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the

first great formula of this new era. There is no longer a

medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and

diffracted in the real. (30)

For Baudrillard, media simulations do not simply interfere with knowledge of objective reality; cognitive mapping is impossible because these simulations have become the foundation of all knowledge and no longer refer to reality. Baudrillard argues that hyperreality is omnipresent and inescapable; his conception of the relationship between objective reality and hyperreality is elucidated by his argument that the Gulf War was a "non-event" (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place 24).

Baudrillard does not deny that real atrocities took place, but rather argues that the mediated reflections of these atrocities entirely eclipsed those objectively real atrocities to the point where "the isolation of the enemy by all kinds of electronic interference creates a sort of barricade behind which he becomes invisible" (43). 6

With the objective reality of the war masked by mediations, reality became malleable to fictional narratives influenced by authors' political opinions, which in the mass media are overwhelmingly in favor of the state. Baudrillard explains, "The media promotes the war, [and] the war promotes the media" (31). The precession of simulacra in the postmodern era alienates the subject to the extent that he cannot assert a cognitive map of history and even his map of himself as a subject is problematized.

Jameson's conception of a postmodern subject who can achieve a heightened position through cognitive mapping shares modernist subjectivity's application of reason to fragmented culture, though Jameson argues that postmodernity presents a greater degree of fragmentation than modernity. Though Jameson sees his conception of postmodern subjectivity as distinct from modernist subjectivity, Hutcheon goes as far as to claim that his wish for a renewed sense of historicity is a wish to retain a modernist subjectivity:

In article after article in the 1980s, [Jameson] repeatedly

yearned for what he called 'genuine historicity' in the face of a

postmodernism which, in his words, was 'an elaborated

symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived

possibility of experiencing history in some active way.' And

yet, it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of 'lost authenticity'

that has proved time and time again to be paralyzing in terms

of historical thinking. Indeed Jameson's position has been

called both regressive and defeatist. Is Jameson's implicit 7

mythologizing and idealizing of a more stable, pre-late-

capitalist (that is, modernist) world not in itself perhaps part of

an aesthetics (or even politics) of nostalgia? ("Irony,

Nostalgia, and the Postmodern" 203)

Richard Sheppard explains modernist subjectivity's roots in Enlightenment subjectivity: "Many of the modernists had, during their youth, been imbued by their liberal human background with the Enlightenment belief that it was possible for Man increasingly to understand, rise above, dominate and utilize the external world by means of his logos" (8). Sheppard distinguishes the modernist subject by the rejection of the Enlightenment belief in reason's complete dominance over forces of unreason, examples being Freud's introduction of the unconscious and Modernist artists' explorations of the role of dreams, psychopathology and mysticism, all of which acknowledge the significant influence of the non-rational. Sheppard contrasts modernist and Enlightenment subjectivity: "Man was reinstated as the centre of things but not necessarily regarded as the measure of all things ... human reason, while retaining its centrality, was not over-estimated vis-a-vis the powers of unreason inside and outside human nature" (39). Though the modernist subject was alienated, reason provided him with a center on which to assert his subjectivity. Jean-Francois

Lyotard argues that postmodernism debunks the notion of the "emancipation of the rational or working subject" (xxiii) that is essential to Enlightenment and modernist conceptions of the subject. Whereas the modernist subject was "still able, either literally or imaginatively, to seek out alternatives or geographical enclaves which had not yet been colonized by the media or the leisure industry" (Sheppard 41), the g subject's autonomy in the modernist formulation is problematized by Baudrillard's claim that postmodern subjectivity cannot escape the influence of media simulations.

And while modernist subjectivity is, as Leonard Wilcox describes, a "dialectic of alienation and inner authenticity" ("Baudrillard" 347), the postmodern subject is alienated by cultural influences such as the popular media to a point where inner authenticity is threatened by the lack of objective authenticity—a stable identity could only be brought about by an externally-authored, fallacious metanarrative. Jameson rejects the integrated subject, but cognitive mapping remains a strategy by which individual reason can be used to navigate cultural fragmentation—a strategy

Hutcheon calls impossible, believing that no such subjective position can be consolidated. Hutcheon's conception of postmodern subjectivity wishes to escape the dangerous political trappings of the Enlightenment or modernist subject, which

Lyotard explains:

In the context of the narrative of freedom, the State receives its

legitimacy not from itself but from the people ... the State

resorts to a narrative of freedom every time it assumes direct

control over the training of 'the people,' under the name of the

'nation,' in order to point them down the path of progress. (31-

2)

Lyotard asserts that a narrative of the subject's emancipation is easily manipulated by the capitalist state to promote unquestioning nationalism. Jameson criticizes historiographic metafiction for relativizing history to the point of political irrelevance, but this argument overlooks cases in which historiographic metafiction's emphasis on 9 narrative plurality is used effectively in order to question the dogmatic use of singular

narratives by the state.

This thesis will focus on novels that discuss two such historical narratives: the

American justice system's narrative of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg which led to their

to executions, and the Warren Commission Report's narrative of President John F.

Kennedy's assassination which asserts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the

murder. In addition to showing importance of political motivations on historical

composition, I have chosen these events because they also demonstrate the important

role of media images in contemporary historiography. E.L. Doctorow's The Book of

Daniel and Robert Coover's The Public Burning present the 1953 Rosenberg

executions as historiographic metafiction to make the political argument that the

couples' executions were a gross misuse of the American state's power. The

Rosenbergs' trials coincided with the rise of the television in America, and the

narrative that the Rosenbergs were responsible for Soviet nuclear capabilities was

dogmatically presented to American citizens. Like Doctorow's and Coover's

political fictionalization of the Rosenbergs' case, Don DeLillo's Libra and J.G.

Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition present the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy as historiographic metafiction in order to call into question the Warren

Commission Report's definitive lone gunman narrative. The assassination marks an

important cultural shift in media images' role in the composition of history: any

narrative of the assassination must place its own interpretive structure upon images

such as the Zapruder film, Oswald's 'backyard photographs' and Oswald's death on

live television. Like written historical texts, these images fail to encapsulate the 10 historical moment objectively. As with the popular media's depiction of the

Rosenbergs, the Warren Commission Report purports its narrative to be conclusive and demands acceptance of this narrative as a function of rational American citizenship, as the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes of accompanying evidence present its findings as straightforward empirical conclusions. Contrary to

Jameson's claim that historiographic metafiction's conception of historical composition is politically flaccid, these four novels' depictions of the Rosenberg executions and the JFK assassination are strong political statements that destabilize narratives presented by the state as definitive in order to demand dogmatic acceptance of state actions.

By stripping away historical certitude, historiographic metafiction can more incisively explore the multivalent political function of texts that record an historical moment. Debord comments:

One aspect of the disappearance of all objective historical

knowledge can be seen in the way that individual reputations

have become malleable and alterable at will by those who

control all information: information which is gathered and also

... information which is broadcast. (18)

In their highly politicized media landscapes, the Rosenbergs' and Lee Harvey

Oswald's subjectivity became malleable to competing political viewpoints when reduced to images and placed in various contexts. Attempts to self-author a media image are unsuccessful in instances such as Ethel Rosenberg's invitation of the press into her home after her husband's arrest to depict herself as a typical American 11 housewife, or Oswald's presentation of himself in his backyard posing with Marxist journals and a Mannlicher rifle before his attempt to assassinate General Walker.

Oswald's attempted self-portrayal as a Marxist is seen by DeLillo as one instance in a long pattern of Oswald's failure to self-author an identity, as his intentions for the photographs was drastically altered when one was used on the cover of Life magazine to present him as a lunatic lone gunman in support of the Warren Commission's findings.

Against Jameson's claim that historiographic metafiction relegates the reader to ephemeral Pop history and that "the political form of postmodernism ... will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale" (54), this thesis will examine the way in which four works of historiographic metafiction create a subversive political vision through the rigorous examination of images that dominate the popular consciousness in recent historical events. Rather than authoring non-fictive cognitive maps that create counter- narratives to the American state's version of the Rosenbergs' executions or President

Kennedy's assassination, these novels acknowledge their status as fiction in order to focus on how the state uses images to create hegemonic narratives. There is a spectrum of opinion across these four authors about the capacity for political reform if dominant state narratives were to be successfully debunked: Ballard promotes an anarcho-libertarianism and takes the Baudrillardian view that the postmodern subject cannot escape the hyperreal, Coover is not prescriptive in any sense other than his call for a radical opposition to state narratives, Doctorow is a humanist social democrat who remains cautiously optimistic about the political potential of the left, and DeLillo 12 hopes that increased discussion of the JFK assassination will lead the United States government to release files about the event. But despite their political differences, these novelists demonstrate the worth of exposing the political motivations that inform the state's construction of conclusive historical narratives and emphasize that the narratives presented through media images should not be held to be self-evident. 13

Chapter Two: "Fraud of Spectacular Dimension": Subverting Constructions of

the Rosenbergs in E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel

In his 1953 essay "Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs," Leslie Fiedler famously asserts that two different Rosenberg trials took place; Santiago Juan-Navarro summarizes the two trials distinguished by Fiedler as "the literal one in which the US justice system tried a case of espionage, and a symbolic one quickly transformed into

Cold-war propaganda by both sides" (87). E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel concerns itself with the latter, fictionalizing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's trials and executions in order to study the events as a socio-political phenomenon. Doctorow says, "I wrote The Book of Daniel from the point of view of someone who doesn't know whether they're guilty or not. I didn't know, but thought during the writing I'd decide. It became apparent, however, that I would never know, and there were better questions to ask" (Interview with Arthur Bell 127). Doctorow recasts the Rosenbergs as Paul and Rochelle Isaacson; the Isaacsons' son Daniel ostensibly authors The Book of Daniel, and Morton Levitt notes that he is "the child of a public sacrifice, Isaac's son" (163). Daniel writes from the library of Columbia University in the late 1960s, and the novel places the Old Left of which the Isaacsons were a part in the context of the New Left. Brian Dillon remarks that the author of the Hebrew Book of Daniel also "lived in one period of persecution and wrote of an earlier period of persecution"

(369), as that text describes the Babylonian exile but was written during the

Maccabean revolt. However, The Book of Daniel's Hebrew namesake acts as only one of many intertexts, and Doctorow's work of historiographic metafiction is written 14 as a refutation of grand narratives, religious or otherwise. Daniel writes the novel instead of completing his Ph.D dissertation, rejecting the objective argumentation demanded by the dissertation in order to engage with the political implications of the narrative murk surrounding his parents' executions. Segments of the dissertation are interspliced throughout the novel, but the objectivity of the third-person voice in these sections is repeatedly undercut; Juan-Navarro comments, "Daniel's parodic intentions frequently become evident by his abuse of academic formulae such as the expression

'many historians have noted this phenomenon' repeated excessively throughout certain historiographic discussions" (81). The historical arguments Daniel puts forward in these excerpts are critical of American post-Second World War policies such as the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and though his arguments are coherent and tenable, Levitt argues, "[Daniel's] historiography is Revisionist but unresolved: his parent's innocence cannot be proven, his sister's agony not undone"

(161). As documenting history in a voice of objectivity fails to adequately address his parents' case, Daniel juxtaposes disparate textual remnants in order to study the cultural-historical moment in which the Isaacsons were executed, and his rejection of singular narratives is necessary in order to be politically subversive in his own cultural-historical moment.

Hutcheon and Jameson both use The Book of Daniel as evidence for their respective arguments. Jameson contends that, although Doctorow is "one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the United States today" (21), he is

"the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition: no one with left 15 sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present" (24-

5). Jameson is troubled by the impossibility of cognitive mapping brought about by

Doctorow's assertion that objective historical knowledge is inaccessible. Conversely,

Hutcheon argues that although Doctorow implies "that there can be no single, essentialized, transcendent concept of 'genuine historicity' (as Frederic Jameson desires)" (89), this rejection of genuine historical knowledge allows Doctorow to approach the leftist beliefs he espouses without capitulating to dogma:

The Old Left is presented as ultimately self-defeating,

paranoid, overly intellectual. However, it is they who are

killed by the threatened State; the New Left (Susan) seems

content to kill itself. In this, the novel can also be seen as

putting into question the Marxist orientation of the future.

There is little of the Utopian in the postmodern, given its

lessons of the past. (215)

Though objective knowledge of the Isaacsons' guilt or innocence eludes Daniel, his historiographic metafiction attempts to undermine the state's narrative about his parents in order to counter the state's use of the executions as a symbol of the consequences of transgressing against its authority. Daniel engages in protests against the Vietnam War to enact this rejection of conclusive state narratives. Daniel's disavowal of Marxist Utopianism stems from his intimate knowledge of the difficulties of achieving leftist reform, yet he comes to posit political subversion as 16 the most moral form of citizenship because of its capacity for this reform, even if its moral ideals far outstrip its political outcomes.

The Rosenbergs' trials allow Doctorow to comment on politics and historiography simultaneously because political legal trials represent a social effort to achieve narrative consensus. He explains:

Consider those occasions—criminal trials in courts of law—

when society arranges with all its investigative apparatus to

apprehend factual reality ... The most important trials in our

history ... are those in which the judgment is called into

question: Scopes, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs. Facts

are buried, exhumed, deposed, contradicted, recanted. There is

a decision by the jury and, when the historical and prejudicial

context of the decision is examined, a subsequent judgment by

history. And the trial shimmers forever with just the

perplexing ambiguity characteristic of a true novel. ("False

Documents" 23)

Doctorow's opinion about the tailoring of nonfictional narratives to political viewpoints is apparent in his parody of the polemic nonfictional discourse on the

Rosenbergs, which includes such works as Walter Schneir's Invitation to an Inquest and Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton's The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.

Daniel describes a similar discourse on the Isaacsons: "All possible opinions are expressed, from Sidney P. Margolis famous Hearst philosopher (Spies on Trial) to

Max Kreiger liberal bleeder (The Isaacson Tragedy)... There is no substantial 17 difference in these opinions. To say nothing of their prose" (227). Though Daniel comes to a leftist political consciousness, he refuses to accompany this consciousness with a dogmatic belief in his parents' innocence; his acceptance of ambiguity in historiography is accompanied by his acceptance of ambiguity in politics, and he criticizes both his parents' dogmatic Marxism and the state's conclusive legal narrative of his parents' actions.

In addition to his criticism of nonfictional reconstructions from the decades following the Rosenbergs' trials, Doctorow thoroughly repudiates the narratives formed by the Rosenbergs' contemporary media amid McCarthyite hysteria.

Criticism of The Book of Daniel frequently notes the novel's use of written texts:

Dillon discusses Biblical parallels, Juan-Navarro and Sangjun Jeong contrast The

Book of Daniel with nonfictional interpretations of the Rosenbergs, and Andrew

Pepper explicates Doctorow's relationship with leftist and Marxist theory. However, there is little critical discussion of the role of mass media images, which also serve as significant texts informing the narrative used to condemn the Isaacsons. Doctorow explains that The Book of Daniel is structured to mimic the effect of television programming:

I told people when Daniel was published it was structured like

Laugh-In. They thought I was not serious. But the idea of

discontinuity and black-outs and running change on voice and

character—it was that kind of nervous energy I was looking for

... Anyone who has ever watched a news broadcast on 18

television knows all about discontinuity. (Interview with

McCaffery 41)

Doctorow portrays McCarthyite media reportage as suggesting intimate connections between unrelated events involving communism, such as the Rosenbergs' trials and the Korean War, because discontinuous presentation invites the viewer to fill in missing links through gestalt. Doctorow's historiographic metafiction also makes use of discontinuity, but Daniel's inability to decide upon any single narrative of his parents' actions draws attention to the gaps between images in order to undermine the state's abuse of power through its construction of a singular narrative about the

Rosenbergs.

In a passage that echoes Doctorow's above comment on the ambiguity of political trials, Daniel asserts:

I worry about images. Images are what things mean. Take the

word image. It connotes soft, sheer, flesh shimmering on the

air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes

images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a

small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they

are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the

individual's calloused capacity to feel powerful

undifferentiated emotions of longing and dissatisfaction and

monumentality. They serve no social purpose. (71)

'Image' is used in this passage to refer to both media images and reductive historical narratives—Daniel asserts images to be fragmentary textual remains that 19 incompletely describe the objective reality they mediate. Geoffrey Gait Harpham reads this paragraph's meaning to be "that [images] are modes of liberation and of torture ... Perhaps the only constant property of images is their utter potentiality: they can perform any function, acquire any characteristics" (83). But despite images' malleability, Daniel's narrative shows that the interests of the state are overwhelming represented by the mainstream media. Although Doctorow is in agreement with

Hutcheon and Baudrillard that objective history is accessible only through its flawed textual reflections, he makes the Debordian argument that the image's detachment from its referent is used by the state to reinforce its power. Daniel's statement that images serve no social purpose is counter to Debord's thesis that the society of the spectacle is a social configuration, and this is because Daniel is wrong: he repeatedly demonstrates the state's use of media images against his parents. That Daniel is wrong should not be seen as a mistake on Doctorow's part; rather, it underscores the fallibility of Daniel's third-person assertions. Doctorow agrees with Debord about the need for subversive action against the state and mainstream media.

Doctorow criticizes media images that purport to be apolitical, and Daniel reacts to a headline in a celebrity magazine:

Does Dick Really Love Liz? Let me indicate my good faith by

addressing myself to the question. I don't think he really loves

her. I think he is fond of her. I think he enjoys buying her

outlandishly expensive things and also an occasional tup in

bed. I think he loves the life, the camera's attention, the

ponderous importance of every little fart he makes. I think he 20

loves fraud of spectacular dimension. I think if they were put

on trial for their lives, he might come to love her. (8)

Though the magazine article about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's relationship is ostensibly divorced from politics, Daniel characterizes it and reportage on celebrity culture generally as part of what Debord calls "the image of the ruling economy" (14). Daniel implies that the escapism offered by celebrity culture contributes to apathy towards the political agendas that influence the media's formation historical narratives. Though the resonance of Doctorow's phrase 'fraud of spectacular dimension' with Debordian theory may be unintentional, Daniel's perception of the political danger inherent in celebrity culture's prevalence clearly resonates with Debord's argument that the society of the spectacle acts on behalf of the state through the obfuscation of objective realities. The paragraph closes with the suggestion that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's insincere relationship might gain authenticity if they were forced into political trials like the Isaacsons' trials, but the implication of Daniel's statement is that the reduction of the Isaacsons to media images allowed for the creation of an unreal sensationalist narrative to be presented with equal importance as the sensationalist reportage of film stars' love lives.

Though Daniel rejects his parents' Marxist beliefs, his criticism of the media takes after the example of his father, who vocally applies Marxist analysis to any and all cultural intertexts including radio commercials, cereal boxes, and comic books, the latter of which he used to show Daniel how to "recognize and isolate the insidious stereotypes of yellow villains, Semitic villains, [and] Russian villains" (35). This attitude towards popular culture is shared by the Isaacsons' circle of Marxist friends, 21 where "if you could recognize a Humphrey Bogart movie for the cheap trash it was, you had culture" (32). The conservative opposition to subversive political popular culture is clear in Doctorow's depiction of the historical riot at Peekskill following a

Paul Robeson concert, where the bigots who attack the concert-goers taunt them as

"Jew. Commie. Red. Nigger. Bastard. Kike" (49). In grouping anti-Semitic, anti- communist and racial slurs together, this scene demonstrates the way in which

Robeson's songs' communistic message of equality is seen as a part of a larger threat to the hegemony of capitalist Anglo-America. This fear is likewise seen in the Un-

American Activities Committee's opposition to subversive art in Hollywood; Paul writes to Rochelle while in prison, "Hollywood [has been] long since purged of its few humanitarian filmmakers" (196-7). Despite his relentless criticism of the media,

Paul owns and operates Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair, naively underestimating the political importance of media technology in creating narratives that support the state. Daniel narrates, "There were tubes and condensers, and speakers and soldering irons and wires—a technology that was neutral and had no ideological significance.

No, that's wrong. He merely relented in noting it" (39). Shortly before the

Isaacsons' arrest, a crowd gathers outside of their store to see the first television to have arrived in the neighborhood. The crowd initially frightens Rochelle, who mistakenly thinks that they are assembled to witness Paul being arrested for his

Communist Party affiliations. The irony of this scene is that Doctorow indicates that

Rochelle should'be afraid of the television because of its political influence on the national perception of her and her husband's actions in their subsequent trials. Television's ascendancy during the Isaacsons' trials allows the couple to become the scapegoats for a panoply of American social ills. The notion that the

Isaacsons were the responsible for the Korean War is paranoid, but Daniel shows how the media facilitates this charge against his parents:

The picture I save of my mother shows her walking down the

front steps of our house, holding her arm up to shield her face

from the camera. Or is her arm out in the threatening gesture

the caption claims? ... The story describes her attitude as

defiant. In the new dimension of life we are spread into

headlines and news broadcasts. Our troops are being captured

and killed. (121)

This passage's addendum about the Korean War is discontinuous from the discussion of the Isaacsons' case, but the two events seem causally related when presented concurrently in newspaper coverage because, in the binary politics of the early 1950s, both involve communists. The effect of this paranoia on the Rosenbergs' trials is clear in Judge Irving Kaufman's sentence:

I consider your crime worse than murder ... I believe your

conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb

years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect

the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist

aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding

50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent

people may pay the price of your treason. (Kaufman) 23

Kaufman's sentence synthesizes disparate events into a single narrative in which the

Rosenbergs are responsible Soviet nuclear capabilities and thus the Korean War;

Doctorow sees television reportage acting on behalf of state abuse of power in that it encourages such reductive narratives through the presentation of discontinuous images. The FBI arrests Paul the morning after the Isaacsons' store exhibits the neighborhood's first television, and Daniel depicts his childhood confusion as a headline: "The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union ..." (116). In Doctorow's study of the Rosenberg trial as a socio­ political event, Daniel's parody of his youthful confusion documents the close link between television broadcasting and anti-communist fervor that is highly significant to the state's construction of a narrative about his parents. Daniel's mistake belies the operation of television as a state weapon; in the theater of Cold War politics, the control of information possible through television acts to enforce the Manichean notion of American nationalism as a categorical good and communism as categorically evil, presenting falsely conclusive historical narratives founded on reductive images.

Rejecting such objectivity, Daniel is critical of both the Communist Party

(CP) and the American legal system; though The Book of Daniel promotes subversive politics, it is frank about the problematics of the Old Left in order to warn against their repetition. The novel's epigraph from the Hebrew Book of Daniel foregrounds the use of hegemonic images in the persecution of minorities: "Then a herald cried aloud, To you it is commanded, O people, nations and languages ... ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up: And 24 whosofalleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace" (i). The Isaacsons are executed by electric chair—America's fiery furnace—because they threaten the American state, which expresses itself through the media's presentation of historical events. Dillon explains that in the

Hebrew text, Daniel's three fellow Israelites "refused to worship Nebuchadnezzars' god or the gold image he set up. Their faith in their deity led to the divine intervention that spared them" (368). Significantly, Doctorow's novel diverges from the Hebraic text in that the CP not only fails to intervene in the Isaacsons' execution, they instead severs all ties with the couple following their arrest. This betrayal is exacerbated by anti-communist sentiment that excludes dissenting voices from the media, and Daniel notes the conservative dominance over subversive images:

"Everything that could be connected to the Communists took on taint... Pablo

Picasso, because he had attended the Communists' World Peace Congress in Paris and painted doves for peace. Doves. Peace" (118). But like their conservative

American rivals, the CP is shown to manipulate the historical record with an equal disregard for the Isaacsons; Daniel writes, "[My father] and my mother were written out of the Party. They were erased from the records" (123). The CP's manipulation of written records provides another example of the prevalence of textual instability in historical composition, and both the state's and the CP's narratives of the Isaacsons are motivated by political concerns rather than a concern for historical objectivity.

Doctorow is also critical of the New Left, which Daniel's sister Susan joins in the hope of vindicating their parents; Jeong asserts, "For Susan knowledge of the past means romanticizing history. The possibility that her parents are less than completely innocent is simply unthinkable for her" (141-42). However, the New Left is uninterested in the Isaacsons, and Susan's political disappointments contribute to her suicide attempt; she cryptically tells Daniel, "They're still fucking us" (9), which he later deciphers as a reference to the New Left's apathy towards their historical forebears. Following his sister's suicide attempt, Daniel finds in her possessions "one picture poster, 36 x 24, used in demonstrations. Like new! Black and white double portrait depicts Isaacsons two faces historical curiosity cheap very cheap worthless ... amuse your friends with this historical curio" (30). The commercial language used in this description parodies the assimilation of the subversive image into the society of the spectacle, stripping the image of its historical and political importance. Daniel learns that Susan was on her way to give the poster to Artie

Sternlicht, a New Left leader who Carol Harter identifies as "an Abbie Hoffman or

Jerry Rubin type" (37). In the first of Daniel's two visits to Sternlicht's apartment, he finds the counterculture figure being photographed and interviewed by

Cosmopolitan magazine. Sternlicht does not see his image as being co-opted by the media, and instead believes that media coverage allows him to effectively subvert the state. He describes his rejection of the Old Left's methods:

How do you make a revolution? ... You don't preach. You

don't talk about poverty and injustice and imperialism and

racism ... Look there, what do you see? Little blue squares in

every window. Right? Everyone digging the commercials.

That is today's school, man. In less than a minute a TV

commercial can carry you through a lifetime ... Commercials are learning units. So like when the brothers walk into the

draft board down in Baltimore and pour blood all over the

induction records—that's the lesson ... and tearing up your

flags, American flags, on Flag Day! You dig? Society is a put-

on so we put on the put-on ... We'll be on television. We're

going to overthrow the United States with images. (139-40)

In attempting to use the media to subvert the status quo, Sternlicht asserts that his political stance is distinct from both Marxism and capitalism: "[The old American

Communists] were into the system. They wore ties. They held down jobs. They put people up for President... They were Russian tit suckers. Russia! Who's free in

Russia ... The American Communist Party set the Left back fifty years. I think they worked for the FBI" (150). Sternlicht shares Paul Isaacson's naivety towards media technology: his image and voice are incorporated into the capitalist media without any substantial subversion, and his apathy towards the Isaacsons' executions exemplifies the blindness to political realities that Debord argues is created by media culture through its collusion with the capitalist state.

Sternlicht's theory of revolution-through-media is reflected by his apartment's furnishings, which consist entirely of "a mattress, a table, a color TV and a collage"

(150). Sternlicht's girlfriend Baby explains that the collage began as a way to stop drafts from coming through the wall, but the piece has become the emblem of

Sternlicht's revolutionary philosophy. Titled "EVERYTHING THAT CAME

BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME!" (136), the collage is composed of a wide range of cultural viscera: 27

Pictures, movie stills, posters and real objects. Babe Ruth

running around the bases, Marlon Brando on his bike, Shirley

Temple in her dancing shoes, FDR, a bikini sprayed with gold

paint, Marilyn Monroe on her calendar, Mickey Mouse ... a

diaphragm sprayed with silver paint, a cluster of cigarette butts,

a Death of a Salesman poster, a young Elvis, a black man

hanging from a tree, a white man selling apples for 5 cents.

(135)

The methodology of Sternlicht's collage is similar to the Situationist International practice of detournement, which Debord describes as "the opposite of quotation ... A fragment torn from its movement, and ultimately from the global framework of its epoch and from the precise choice, whether exactly recognized or erroneous, which it was in this framework ... [it] has grounded its cause on nothing external to its own truth as present critique" (208). Sternlicht's collage employs discontinuity in a similar manner as historiographic metafiction, juxtaposing images to draw attention to their political meanings, suggesting that the proliferation of the entertainment industry acts to obscure abuses of power by the state. Harter states, "The terrible disparateness of

[Sternlicht's] wall is thematically consistent with Daniel's own conclusions and his own book has a montage, if not a collagelike quality" (37-8). But though Doctorow's and Sternlicht's approaches to media culture are similar, Hutcheon explains, "What discredits [Sternlicht] in the novel is equally his self-indulgent romanticism and his ineffectual politics" (203). The New Left leader errs in his belief that he can formulate a revolutionary philosophy that stands outside of media culture. Sternlicht 28 tells Daniel that if Susan had delivered the "Save the Isaacsons" poster for the collage, "We would slap it up there on the wall... She would have done it, and she would have been done with it" (152). Whereas Sternlicht refuses to engage with the

Isaascons and the Old Left because he wishes to make his politics independent from the debasement of media culture, Daniel understands that his submersion in media culture is irreversable and thus he creates a textual subversion of media images used by the state to construct conclusive narratives. Doctorow's historiographic metafiction subverts the dominance of hegemonic narratives propagated by the media more effectively than Sternlicht's collage because it accepts that narrative formation relies on flawed texts, leading Daniel to challenge both the state's past narrative of the Isaacsons and present narrative of Vietnam.

Daniel lacks his sister's faith in their parents' innocence, seeing the martyrs of the "Save the Isaacsons" poster as an image projected by a falsely conclusive liberal narrative: "My mother and father, standing in for [the couple in the poster], went to their deaths for crimes they did not commit. Or maybe they did commit them ...

How do you spell comit? Of one thing we are sure. Everything is elusive ... You've got these two people in the poster, Daniel, now how you going to get them out?" (43).

Like Doctorow himself, Daniel begins writing with the intention of discovering the objective truth of whether or not the Isaacsons were guilty but, recognizing the impossibility of that task, instead finds that more important political concerns stem from the case. After his experience with Sternlicht, Daniel is won over to his sister's position that the Isaacsons' executions need to be investigated further because they remain important examples of the abuse of state power. In order to show his 29 understanding of images' importance in creating narratives, Daniel creates a poster of himself for sister's benefit as she expires in a mental institution: "Standing on a chair he tapes the poster as high as he can on the wall facing her bed ... The poster is a black and white photograph of a grainy Daniel looking scruffy and militant. Looking bearded, looking clear-eyed. His hand is raised, his fingers make the sign of peace"

(211). Donating his trust fund to create a foundation that will research their parents' case, Daniel's engagement with the New Left attempts to draw attention to the constructed nature of historical narratives in order to counter the state's abusive constructions.

Doctorow illustrates the conservative opposition to the New Left through

Daniel's participation in an anti-Vietnam march in Washington that ends with the protestors being beaten by the police. Daniel notes the media's presence at the protest—"movie cameramen walking backwards photograph our faces" (251)—but does not link their presence to an overtly oppressive agenda, as he does in his parents' case. Instead, the media is an inevitable presence, and the final section of The Book of Daniel suggests the development of American society into a state of Baudrillard's third-order simulacra. In the novel's climax, Daniel meets with Selig Mindish to gain access to an alternative narrative—ideally one that is more objectively true—of his parents' historical actions. Mindish is a David Greenglass figure who acted as the state's witness in the Isaacsons' trials, and Daniel finds him in the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland. Disneyland figures prominently in Baudrillard's theory of third-order simulacra as a location in which the hyperreality of America is most evident; he asserts that "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us 30 believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it... belong to the hyperreal order" (12-3). Jeong remarks on the parallel being drawn between the police brutality in Washington and the media images in

Disneyland: "Disneyland represents a form of the power of the state different from the one he experienced in front of the Pentagon. As a more sophisticated and subtle means of controlling thought and society, it co-opts culture and manipulates people in the guise of fun and entertainment into rejoicing in the oblivion of the self and history" (146). Daniel's meeting with Mindish is a failure, as Mindish only vaguely remembers him and has nothing to offer in the way of historical narrative. Daniel's inability to draw any form of historical narrative from an individual who was physically present during his parents' trials displays the extent to which objective historical knowledge is subsumed by hyperreality. Disneyland is a natural habitat for

Mindish's historical amnesia:

It is clear that few of the children who ride in the Mad Hatter's

Teacup have read or even will read Alice ... Most them will

only know Alice's story through the Disney film, if at all. And

that suggests a separation of two ontological degrees between

the Disneyland customer and the cultural artifacts he is

presumed upon to treasure in his visit... What is being offered

does not suggest the resonance of the original work, but is only

a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a

lie. We find this radical process of reduction occurring too with

regard to the nature of historical reality. (288) 31

Before his visit to Disneyland, Daniel already shared Hutcheon's opinion that the subject is separated by at least one ontological degree from historical reality by the text that mediates the objective moment, but in Disneyland—which Hutcheon calls

"the incarnation of a debased intertextuality" (138)—he finds the dissolution of historical knowledge into hyperreality, in which objective history is only faintly refracted through images that are degraded reflections of other images, a removal of two or more ontological degrees.

Daniel believes that Disneyland, like American culture more generally, employs images to promote capitalist consumer culture:

The ideal Disneyland patron may be said to be one who

responds to a process of symbolic manipulation that offers him

his culminating and quintessential sentiment at the moment of

a purchase. The following corporations offer shows and

exhibits at Disneyland: Monsanto Chemical Co., Bell

Telephone, General Electric, and Coca-Cola ... Obviously

there are political implications. (289)

Disneyland's political effect on historical composition is implied in Daniel's observation: "One cannot tour Disneyland today without noticing its real achievement, which is the handling of crowds" (289). The media's use of hyperreality acts to preclude dissent and overwhelmingly supports an Anglo-

American capitalist lifestyle; Daniel notes that in Disneyland's crowds, there are

"disproportionately small numbers of black people, of Mexicans ... There is an absence altogether of long-haired youth, heads, hippies, girls in mini-skirts, gypsies, 32 motorcyclists" (290). This exclusion of minorities and subcultures mimics the way in which historical narratives exclude the narratives of those dominated by and forced to assimilate with hegemonic culture; Daniel reacts against high-school textbooks that tell of America's "taming of the barbaric Indians, our brave stand at the Alamo, the mighty railroads winning the plain" (187). Daniel argues that conclusive narratives removed by either one or two ontological levels serve to create passive acceptance of the state's narratives of its actions, and thus he embraces his ontological distance from objective historical narratives in order to subvert such narratives.

Doctorow summarizes the relationship between images and historical composition: "Facts are the images of history, just as images are the data of fiction"

("False Documents" 24). Harpham interprets this statement: "Although the image is a subordinate unit of narrative, it is also the distillation of an entire narrative" (83).

Though Doctorow asserts images to be eminently malleable, the media's use of images to form a conclusive narrative about the Isaacsons is highly political, and

Daniel's stepfather Robert Lewin tells him, "Long before their trial the Isaacsons were tried and found guilty in the newspapers" (221). The media finds the Isaacsons guilty in the court of public opinion, colluding with the state that finds them guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage in a court of law. The charge of conspiracy to commit espionage is itself antithetical to the tenets of historiographic metafiction, as it requires the testimony of only a single conspirator for a conviction. Daniel reflects,

"By the rules of evidence in this trial the verdict is foreordained. If the testimony of

Mindish is admitted as competent, the conspiracy is proved. Because it would not be admitted except under the assumption that a conspiracy existed" (191). Mindish's 33 deterioration into the mental state in which he eventually appears in Disneyland is indicative of a more general cultural descent from a Debordian society of the spectacle—in which media images obscure objective political realities as an expression of the capitalist state—to a state of Baudrillardian hyperreality, in which media images refer only to other images and exploit apathy towards the formation of political narratives for the state's ends.

Doctorow calls himself part of "the pragmatic, social democratic left—the humanist left that's wary of ideological fervor ... [because] clear, definitive ideologies have all discredited themselves by their adherents" (52). This position requires constant revision and adjustment, but he argues it is politically ethical and necessary because of its capacity for reform:

What happens, sometimes, is that those proposals that the

radical has made in one generation become the liberal or even

the conservative dogma of the next... A clear example is

Emma Goldman's feminist stand on abortion and contraception

... Or Deb's endorsement of the radical idea of social security.

(Interview with Paul Levine 68)

Daniel ends the novel by joining a protest that has closed the Columbia library in which he has written his novel. He accepts the impossibility of a fixed and immutable political position like his parents' Marxism, and this recognition refines his dissent against the state's narrative of the Vietnam War which, like his parents' case, is justified as a geopolitical necessity in a Manichean battle against communism. In taking up direct political action and leftist belief, Daniel avoids the naivety towards 34 media technologies that marred his father's and Sternlicht's leftist ideologies. He instead recognizes media images as flawed reductions of objective history, and his historiographic metafiction calls attention to the flawed nature of the state's narrative of Vietnam, as well as its flawed narrative of his parents. Although his parents' guilt or innocence is left open-ended, Daniel's subversion of the media images that acted to form a falsely conclusive narrative about his parents' actions emphasizes that narrative manipulation in the past speaks to narrative manipulation in the present. 35

Chapter Three: "The Sam Slick Show": Robert Coover's Subversion of Media

Representations of the Rosenbergs

Like The Book of Daniel, Robert Coover's The Public Burning engages with the symbolic Rosenberg trials posited by Leslie Fiedler in "Afterthoughts on the

Rosenbergs." However, Fiedler's essay sides with the state's decision to carry out the executions, calling the Rosenbergs' behavior leading up to their deaths a "parody of martyrdom" (38). Molly Hite argues that this phrase "suggests the ultimate unreality of the event" (86) and that to "neutralize the public effect of the executions ...

[Fiedler declares] the Rosenbergs unreal, by virtue of the fact that they had been constructed from the outside by Communist doctrine and mass culture" (89). Like

Hutcheon, Coover asserts that such flawed, externally authored constructions of the

Rosenbergs are the sole means of gaining knowledge of their objective historical actions. While Doctorow's Daniel only fully recognizes the hyperreality of American historical composition in The Book ofDanieVs conclusion, Coover's parody of the state's narrative about the Rosenbergs acknowledges this hyperreal media landscape from its outset, introducing "an Entertainment Committee ... chairmanned by Cecil

B. De Mille" (5) who are commissioned to create a reenactment of the executions in

Times Square that will take place simultaneous to the actual executions. Fiedler argues that the state's execution of the Rosenbergs was justified because their defenders supported an unreal symbol fashioned by political ideology, but Coover argues that the state's construction of the couple was equally unreal, that such unreality is inescapable in the American media landscape, and that any state narrative 36 which claims absolute objectivity does so out of repressive political motivations.

Several critics challenge the political effectiveness of Coover's historiographic metafictional parody. Margaret Heckard argues that Coover's conception of political history is ineffectual because it is not prescriptive: "Writers of metafiction have no faith in satire as a reforming instrument. They tell their readers how to take life (as a joke) rather than tell them what to do about it" (217). Mazurek similarly argues that

"politics becomes reduced to the celebration of liberation in the 'openness' of the text, in the act of writing itself (41), and Pughe questions whether Coover's novel should even be considered metafiction: "My response to 'metafictional' readings ... is ambivalent... The presentation of the Rosenberg case in Coover's novel is not just one of several possible constructions of random events" (74). However, The Public

Burning's subversive political argument hinges on the novel's status as metafiction, as it presents a highly contentious political trial in a self-consciously fictional way to show that the state does not possess privileged access to historical truth. Coover does not present the Rosenbergs' deaths in terms of entertainment images because he takes them lightly, and Hutcheon asserts:

Novels like The Public Burning or Ragtime do not trivialize the

historical and the factual through their 'game-playing'

(Robertson 1984) in their metafictional rethinking of the

epistemological and ontological relations between history and

fiction. Both are acknowledged as part of larger social and

cultural discourses which various kinds of formalist literary

criticism have relegated to the extrinsic and irrelevant. (121) 37

Lance Olsen shares Hutcheon's opinion of The Public Burning's political subversiveness, linking its critique of the unreality of the media landscape to

Debordian and Baudrillardian theory:

This is Debord's world, Baudrillard's, ... [it includes] emblems

of various components of American culture, politics to sports,

cooking to science, literature to journalism to comics, all of

whom have themselves simultaneously become entertainment

and showed up this evening as the ultimate entertainment.

(Olsen 56)

Coover's historiographic metafiction draws attention to the merging of political images and the entertainment industry to show that both present fictitious narratives.

Like Doctorow, Coover asserts that the media's presentation of political narratives alongside entertainment images serves to trivialize important political events and thus create passive consent for state abuses of power. Olsen notes that "the thematics of simulacra, of course, pervade The Public Burning ... politics becomes a sales campaign" (58). Olsen connects the Baudrillardian aspects of Coover's parodic mistreatment of the historical record to Hutcheon, as both Baudrillard and Hutcheon are concerned with the textual representation's inability to comprehend objective reality:

Surely the largest simulacrum in The Public Burning turns out

to be The Public Burning itself: a novel that mimics historical

reality. By mixing magic and documentary power, it

intermingles and confounds the two impulses—giving us, as it 38

were, a lens of each to look through with our own readerly 3-D

glasses, thereby engendering a historiographic metafiction. (59)

Olsen's article does not develop this connection between media technologies and historical narratives further, but it is of eminent importance to the political efficacy of

Coover's novel, whose goal Olsen observes to be to "disrupt all centers of authority

(political, mythical, analytical, and so forth)—including his own—while through the radical incongruity of the novel's form, he attempts to investigate, reveal, and short- circuit hyperconsumer capitalism's repressive impulses" (66). Historical authority is also a central target, as the state's execution of the Rosenbergs was made possible by the composition of a conclusive historical narrative in which the couple was at the center of a global communist conspiracy; Coover explicitly portrays the media as a weapon of American nationalist triumphalism because it grants the state manipulative influence over historical composition. This chapter will develop the political implications of Coover's historiographic metafiction, arguing that The Public Burning effectively subverts state and media narratives.

Similar to Doctorow's characterization of television as a state weapon, Coover writes that in the days leading up to the Rosenbergs' executions, "Television set production is up 70 percent... doing even better than pornography and missiles"

(215). While missiles are commercially successful because of their role enforcing

America's political will abroad, Coover portrays television as equally necessary for

America's Cold War strategy because of its role ensuring domestic support through the dissemination of pro-American narratives. Paul Maltby writes, "mass- communication systems like the press are shown to amplify and repeat political 39 messages to the point where meanings congeal into fixed, monolithic patterns" (121).

But in addition to bombarding the American public with deceptively conclusive news stories, media coverage also conflates political and entertainment narratives; this trivialization of political narratives acts to create passive assent to state power.

Coover describes the influence of Cold War political concerns on the media's composition of narratives: "We were caught up in something that more resembled myth than reality; and the Rosenbergs, it would seem ... were insignificant in every way, except for the manner in which they played out their archetypal role as scapegoats... The press, while technically free, was seriously intimidated" (Interview with Larry McCaffery 116). Coover intends to subvert the power of the state by showing how political narratives are composed using media images; he writes,

"There's something very magical about TV, everything seems to happen at once on it, the near and the far, the funny and the sad, the real and the unreal" {Public Burning

277). Objectively true historical narratives are impossible in this hyperreal environment, and Coover emphasizes the flawed and malleable nature of media images in order to subvert their use by the media as evidence for falsely conclusive narratives.

The Public Burning's narration alternates between Richard Nixon and an omniscient voice who Thomas Pughe calls the "general chronicler ... an organizer of different discourses from various areas of public life, but mainly from popular entertainment and the mass media" (68). Nixon's first-person voice and the general chronicler's third-person voice both fail to describe history objectively. Nixon publicly supports the state's narrative of the Rosenbergs because he recognizes that it 40 is a politically necessity, but he privately calls it "The Crime of the Century, by J.

Edgar Hoover" (131) and explains that he suppresses his personal doubts about its conclusiveness: "Working backwards, like a lawyer, it all came unraveled" (131).

Similarly, the general chronicler revels in an acknowledged removal from objectivity as a type of religious grace: "'Objectivity' is in spite itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions; facts emerge not from life but from revelation" (191).

Lacking objectivity, the general chronicler's omniscient narrative voice can only describe a collage composed of flawed media representations that claim to demonstrate the Rosenbergs' mythically proportioned guilt. Time magazine is

America's Poet Laureate, and Sangjun Jeong argues that the magazine represents "the power of the press ... It attempts to give form to the permanent flow of overabundant and unstructured information" (172). Life magazine is portrayed as "Time's visionary kid brother" (21), and Raymond Mazurek comments, "The 'objectivity' of The [New

York] Times creates a silent reinforcement of the hegemony of American ideology in a world where true mimesis is impossible" (35). Coover's parody of these dominant media sources suggests that in the absence of historical objectivity, narratives claiming to possess conclusive truth are fictions that stem from their authors' political views—in the case of mainstream media during McCarthyism, fictions which support dogmatic nationalism.

Media outlets use images to legitimate and distill their written narratives, and

Nixon observes the ways in which the Rosenbergs' appearances contributed to their being found guilty: "Julius moved like a whey-faced automaton in his stiff blue suit.

The jurors called Ethel's courtroom composure 'steely' and 'stony' ... They just 41 couldn't play the bourgeois act straight... The electorate, needless to say, were not fooled" (128). The star-spangled Uncle Sam made famous by army recruitment posters personifies media images' capacity for ideological manipulation. Coover's

Uncle Sam is American triumphalism incarnate and the ringleader of the festivities in

Times Square; he explains his view of historical composition: "All courtroom testimony about the past is ipso facto and teetotaciously a baldface lie, ain't that so?

... Like history itself—all more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say" (86). Uncle

Sam is the ultimate image in a wide-reaching media culture that works in tandem with the state to form falsely definitive pro-American historical narratives.

Coover's Nixon is Uncle Sam's pupil and devotee, and this devotion is reflected by Nixon's immersion into the media. Nixon describes himself as a "newspaper nut"

(54) and recognizes the importance of creating his own positive media image, musing that "the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles" (46). Thomas LeClair calls Coover's Nixon "an initiant into the media decade in which overinformation, overconnectedness, the fusion of fact and fiction, and the resulting fear of losing control or going insane are no longer a topic because they are no longer even realized as such" (67). The chapters narrated by the Vice-President detail his inner monologue, and his law-school training makes him sensitive to gaps and illogic in the state's case against the Rosenbergs. However, Nixon says, "Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists" (136), and when faced with ambiguities, Nixon sides with the state's version of events because of his dedication to America ideology and its avatar, Uncle Sam. Nixon criticizes the Rosenbergs'

Marxist beliefs as a quixotic attempt to act as part of "some kind of universal and 42 inevitable history" (407), but Coover shows that the Vice-President's dogmatic pro-

Americanism foists an equally false sense of conclusiveness onto historical ambiguity. While discussing photographs of his wife, Nixon demonstrates the manner in which narrative interpretation is used to remove paradox from images:

"Without having to say a thing, [Pat] became my arbiter, my audience, guide, model, and goal. Sometimes she felt she did have to say something, but it was usually better when she kept quiet. She looked good in photographs. I understood myself better when I looked in those photographs" (55). Nixon places a singular narrative onto the photograph of Pat Nixon to remove any sense of conflict; the solace he finds in mute photographs is symptomatic of the media's construction of narratives out of political images in order to remove ambiguity and exclude dissenting narratives.

Nixon is not alone in his full immersion into the ascendant media culture; in the chapter "High Noon," Coover depicts Eisenhower as equally subservient to media simulations, and the President's anti-communist behavior is framed as an attempt to mimic Gary Cooper. Coover explains in an interview: "High Noon was Eisenhower's favorite movie—he used to go down to the basement of the White House, put it on and fall asleep in front of it" (Interview with McCaffery 120). Coover construes the

President's admiration for Cooper's cowboy persona as an expression of his privileging of a masculinist Anglo-American identity to the exclusion of minorities and subcultures—Doctorow's remarks on the absence of these groups from

Disneyland makes a similar point about media culture's privileging of an Anglo-

American identity. Paul Maltby writes that High Noon "is used to provide a parodic frame of reference for exploring [the] native/alien dimension of nationalist 43 consciousness. Thus (native) Eisenhower ... [must confront] the members of the

(alien) Rosenberg Defense Committee, who are predominantly of Jewish-East

European descent" (113). Coover depicts Eisenhower conceiving of his denial of clemency to the Rosenbergs as the type of Manichean showdown familiar to

Westerns: "It is nearing High Noon, and none but President Dwight D. Eisenhower alone stands between the atom spies and death" (220; Coover's emphasis). The influence of High Noon on Eisenhower's decision not to spare the lives of the "A- bomb rustlers" (237) parodies the influence of close-ended narratives propagated by the media more generally; like Nixon, Eisenhower refuses to engage with the narrative ambiguities of the Rosenbergs' case and instead accepts a conclusive pro-

American pattern placed on hyperreal textual reflections of the couple's objective historical actions.

Coover notes, "Hidden within the High Noon story is the pacifism subplot, represented by the Grace Kelly character, which links to a similar sort of subplot running under the execution drama" (Interview with McCaffery 121). The Public

Burning shows dissent to be repeatedly marginalized by the pro-state media culture, which forces it to become subplot. Early in the novel, Rosenberg supporters sabotage the preparations in Times Square:

The wires have been pulled on the electric chair and a manikin

has been strapped into the seat, dressed up to look like Uncle

Sam with a Hitler moustache. Bombastic handbills, instruction

sheets for clemency vigils, tattered bunting, and dirty pictures

showing President Eisenhower and all his Cabinet in 44

compromising positions litter the streets. (40)

The pro-American audience asks "Where is Uncle Sam" (44) and, as in a comic-book, the American "Superhero" (63) Uncle Sam arrives to vanquish the encroaching forces of evil; he "wipes away the Phantom's debris ... [and] wipes the obscene slogans off the wall" (64). The mainstream media's role in marginalizing dissent is shown by the imprisonment of protestors in Walt Disney's Whale, which is being used as a jail for pro-Rosenberg elements: "From the belly of the Whale comes a woman's scream: 'In memory of the Rosenbergs!'—and the Whale begins to rumble and tremble as though with fearful indigestion, an indigestion that sounds like a lot of hysterical amateurs trying to sing 'Go Down, Moses!'" (499; Coover's emphasis). This metaphor of imprisonment in Disney's Whale shows that counter-narratives presented by protests against the state's narrative justifying the executions are unable to gain mainstream acceptance because of the dominance of the state's narrative in the mainstream media.

The tremendous press coverage of the Rosenbergs' case does not allow the couple to stand alone as media icons in Nixon's mind, and he perceives them through comparisons to celebrities: he describes "Julius ... scowling and wallowing like

Groucho Marx" (126) and, when he meets Ethel in person, says that she looks "like

Audrey Hepburn ... whom I'd just seen on the cover of some magazine" (439).

Picasso's sympathetic renderings of the Rosenbergs surface on several occasions, and

Nixon complains:

Cartoonists had a heyday with [my face]. Not even Julius

Rosenberg, who had a genuinely sinister mug, right down to 45

the weak chin, pointed nose, and pencil-line moustache had

had to take the kind of punishment I'd received every week

from Herblock and others. Picasso had even made the

sonuvabitch look handsome, very Anglo-Saxon. (186)

Nixon finds Picasso's Julius Rosenberg sympathetic because he is made to look more

Anglo-American, the implication being that Julius' non-Anglo features make his face sinister. In this context, Nixon's constant characterization of others in terms of film actors shows the dangerous political impact of the entertainment industry. Nixon remarks, "On my desk lay Picasso's doodles of the Rosenbergs. Julie resembled

Ronald Colman, only more scholarly, while Ethel had a kind of Little Annie Rooney look—the lost waif (313). The need to refract the accused arch-communists through comparisons to an Anglo-American film star and a cartoon strip emphasizes that the entertainment industry's exclusion of minorities and subcultures works in tandem with the state's oppressive nationalist agenda. Subversive images like Picasso's are dominated by the pro-state entertainment industry. The exclusion of positive depictions of minorities in media images reflects the exclusion of minorities' interests in singular historical narratives tailored to support state interests. Though Picasso's images fail to save the couple from execution, Coover's fierce engagement with hyperreal simulations of historical objectivity shows that a recognition of the fictionality of singular historical narratives is necessary for subversive politics; his emphasis on the hyperreality of the texts on which state narratives are grounded allows his novel to effectively undermine the state's certitude about the magnitude of the Rosenbergs' guilt. 46

The President and Vice-President's adherence to deceptively conclusive narratives formed by the media is necessary to maintain their positions of power within the state whose self-interest they serve dogmatically. For citizens who do not hold positions of political power, Coover portrays the media's influence on historical narrativization leading not only to dogmatism, but also to confusion. Coover demonstrates this through the experience of a man who attempts to navigate the preparations in Times Square while still wearing 3-D glasses after having viewed the horror film House of Wax, which the general chronicler explains was "made by a one- eyed man, is all about reality and illusion, and famous people going up in flames"

(216). Coover illustrates the impossibility of Jameson's cognitive mapping within the hyperreality of the American media landscape, as the man's attempts to synthesize such maps through his 3D glasses only leads erroneous conflations: "Through one eye he learns that President Eisenhower has encouraged the reading of Marx and Stalin"

(285). Coover parodies the absurdity of the man's search for teleology as his conflation of media images builds into a millenarian nightmare:

It's all coming together ... into one image that has been

pursuing him through all his sleepless nights, the billowing

succubus he's been nurturing for nine months now, ever since

the new hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok: yes, the final

spectacle, the one and only atomic holocaust, he's giving birth

to it at last. Like the mad artist [from House of Wax] we're all

going to die horrible fiery deaths. (286)

Alienated from objective history by hyperreal media images, the man constructs a 47 fictional but conclusive narrative about the chaos he witnesses, seamlessly melding the political images of hydrogen bomb tests with images from the film he has just viewed. Coover argues that media images' failure to capture historical events objectively causes the narratives told about political events such as the Eniwetok tests or Rosenberg executions to be just as fictional as House of Wax. Lois Gordon notes,

"No longer able to distinguish fact from fantasy, [the anonymous man] is incarcerated in the Walt Disney whale exhibit reserved for lunatics and criminals" (72). Coover suggests that hyperreal simulations are inescapable in America and, although the man's vision is exaggerated to millenarian proportions for comic effect, the scene suggests that death is the logical conclusion to singular narratives formed from media images, including both the man's narrative of Times Square and the state's narrative of Rosenbergs' crimes. Coover explains, "The idea of seeing different images through two lenses ... became a metaphor for the ambiguities and paradoxes of the moment that were leading straight to the grotesque deathhouse conclusion" (Interview 123).

The Rosenbergs' executions are the conclusion of a reductive narrative that describes how the Soviet Union came to possess the atomic bomb, presented to the public in the place of an engagement with the ambiguities or contradictions of Cold War politics.

In proposing High Noon and House of Wax as metaphors for the media's effect on historical composition, Coover links the media's fictions to oppressive nationalist politics. He describes J. Edgar Hoover's career as "contemporaneous with that of

Mickey Mouse" (15) and later develops this connection further: "The genius behind the sideshows and vendors' gimmicks is the Grand Master of the Spin-Off, Walt

Disney ... learned the trick from the granddaddy of them all, J. Edgar Hoover of the 48

FBI" (281). Like Hoover, Nixon is a state employee who successfully manipulates the media for political ends through his Checkers speech. The Checkers speech was a landmark in the political use of television in America that Matthew Robert Kerbel notes "proved television's value as a tool for moving millions of people" (33). In

Nixon's defense of his financial dealings, he portrayed himself as honest, humble and middle class; David Greenberg writes that the speech created "the quintessential expression of Nixon's populist image" (32) but is also "remembered by his critics as the ultimate expression of his phoniness" (31-2). Published in the wake of the

Watergate scandal, The Public Burning criticizes the persona Nixon presents in the

Checkers speech as a fictitious construction—the straightforward honesty he claims in the speech is made ironic by the readers' knowledge of his resignation as President because of corruption. However, Coover's Nixon remains unaware of the extent of his own duplicity and reminisces, "I determined to face the Eye in its nakedest form: the television camera ... I would bare my soul and my bankbook before the nation"

(308). The hyperreal inauthenticity of Nixon's sentimental speech is ironized by his pride in the compliments he received afterwards: "Darryl Zanuck the movie mogul called me up afterwards to tell me it was 'the most tremendous performance I've ever seen!'" (311). Because of his own faith in the media, Coover's Nixon is convinced of his own authenticity by the overwhelmingly positive response to Checkers, and

Gordon asserts, "As Nixon gets more and more into his fantasy (defined by both the

Horatio Alger myth and Hollywood), distinctions between his inner and outer worlds blur. Both are, in fact, defined by the same cliches and myths" (74). Nixon's inability to form narratives that are distinct from the media's fictions is further 49 evidenced by the romantic fantasy he briefly entertains about himself and Ethel

Rosenberg; Bernhard Reitz posits, "In his yearning for Ethel [he] tries to rewrite the script into a cheap melodrama" (237). Hite also observes the media's influence on

Nixon's revised vision of Ethel: "For Nixon, the real Ethel Rosenberg is not the activist constructed by Communist ideology. The real Ethel Rosenberg is the sexual stereotype constructed by popular magazines, movies, and soft-core pornography"

(97). Ethel Rosenberg's interest in stage acting is mentioned throughout The Public

Burning and Olsen writes, "It often seems that the Rosenbergs, along with most of the other characters in the novel, are actors who don't have any bedrock personalities beneath their facades ... they are nothing but their acting, an infinite regression into masks" (59). The unreal personae adopted by Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg in their death-house love scene act out an alternative fiction to the one that has been imposed by the court and media, and Coover uses this episode to show the impossibility of escaping media fictions because of the ontological removal from objectively true historical narratives.

Nixon appears on the Times Square stage after his flirtation with Ethel to deliver his "Pants Down for America" speech that incorporates quotations from the

Checkers speech in order to highlight its falsity. Nixon manages to convince the

Times Square audience to drop their pants in order to justify his own pantslessness, and Coover connects jingoistic rhetoric to the use of television as a state weapon:

We must communicate the facts and save the American dream

because it is related to the innermost striving of the whole

world! ... And I can promise you that we will usher in an era 50

unbelievably prosperous with three television sets in every

garage—I mean, automobiles. (481; Coover's emphasis)

Nixon's rhetoric uses the American dream and Horatio Alger myth as a means to garner support for state actions, and his Freudian slip suggests that television is a state tool that creates popular consent for its actions. However, Nixon continues to be oblivious of his own subservience to media fictions, and when the crowd laughs at him partway through his address, he thinks,

Let them laugh ... This is a generation that wants to laugh, a

generation that wants to be entertained, thanks to the movies,

TV—a sea of passivity, but so much the better for us

swimmers. I stare boldly out at them, mob and cameras alike,

feeling very much in control of things once more. (477)

The control that Nixon feels is illusory; his power is derived from his surrender of his free will to dogmatic pro-Americanism and the repression of his own free thought in favor of reductive media narratives. This is seen in his post-execution reflection that parodies his choice to act according to the state's version of Ethel rather than according to his romanticized version of her: "She'd died a death of almost unbearable beauty. In fact, it was unbearable—that was probably why we'd all fought our way up to the switch when the electrician bungled it" (524). Lacking free will, Nixon is reduced to a media symbol of the state and can only act in terms of nationalist dogma; he is as beholden to media fictions as the rest of the crowd in

Times Square.

The executions in Times Square represent a final capitulation to hyperreality. 51

The audience is composed of contemporary political figures such as Eisenhower,

Nixon, and the entire U.S. Senate; historical political figures such as George

Washington; directors, actors, and professional athletes from the entertainment industry; and purely fictitious characters such as Mickey Mouse and Betty Crocker.

This spectrum of real and unreal figures exemplifies the state's accumulation of myths that have become accepted as relevant aspects to American identity in the age of televised media. Watching Ethel Rosenberg being led to her death, the audience deems the empathy they feel for the condemned woman to be a communist trick:

"Against their will, the people in fact admire and pity it, even as they fear it: this frailness—the Phantom's last weapon!" (508). This last vestige of authenticity is actively rejected in favor of the crowd's belief in the identity the media has constructed for Ethel as an arch-communist spy. Just as Nixon views the Rosenbergs through comparisons to celebrities, the crowd experiences the Rosenbergs' deaths as a form of media simulation: Julius' electrocution is described as "reminiscent of the classic mad-doctor movies—only more close-up" (510), and in the second attempt to electrocute Ethel, "[her] body ... is whipped like a sail in a high wind, flapping out at the people like one of those trick images in a 3-D movie, making them duck and pray for deliverance. Her body, sizzling and popping like firecrackers, lights up with the force of the current" (517). The Rosenbergs' deaths are inseparable from the media's process of making fictions and, reciprocally, these fictions justify the state's actions.

Coover's description of the electrocutions as entertainment images shows the impossibility of escaping hyperreal simulation, and his depiction is a denunciation of the cruelty inherent in the state's manipulation of such media images to form 52 conclusive narratives that reduce Cold War ambiguities into a Manichean nationalist morality play for the American public.

The executions do not shake Nixon's faith in the American media as the provider of holy and infallible narratives, and he says, "[The Times Square pageant] was like something out of Fantasia or The Book of Revelation" (526). However,

Nixon's status as a victim of state power, like the rest of the American public, is made eminently clear in the novel's final scene in which Uncle Sam rapes him. Nixon's power as Vice-President relies on his unwavering subservience to American jingoism; the powerlessness created by this dogmatic adherence to pro-American ideology leads him to become a hollow image of state power. Uncle Sam's rape represents the pro-

American media's ruthless overtaking of historical narratives and individuals. Uncle

Sam explains that executing the Rosenbergs leaves only their media image, which can be fit into his narrative of American history: "[Ethel's] part of me now, both her and her brave engineer, just as much as Pocahontas, Billy the Kid, or Bambi—" (531).

Following the rape, Nixon commits himself fully to his oppressor in the closing lines of the novel: "Whatever else he was, he was beautiful (how had I ever thought him ugly?), the most beautiful thing in all the world. I was ready to do at last what I had never done before. '/... I love you Uncle SamF I confessed" (534). These lines resonate with the closing lines of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[Winston Smith] looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother.

The colossus that bestrode the world! ... Forty years it had

taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the

dark moustache ... But it was all right, everything was all right, 53

the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

He loved Big Brother. (300)

Like Winston Smith, Coover's Nixon expresses his love for an image that represents the oppressive agenda of the state, and Coover suggests that the state's conclusive historiography expressed through reductive images is appealing even when it is known to be false because the worship of power is easier than an engagement with historical ambiguity.

Coover recognizes the impossibility of gaining access to a historical narrative that is more objectively true than the state's narrative because of the fragmentary nature of the texts that mediate the Rosenbergs' history. But having made this recognition, Coover engages with the social and cultural discourses about the

Rosenbergs that rely on these flawed textual mediations in order to display the fictionality of the state's narrative and subvert this narrative through parody. Maltby argues, "The dissident postmodernist writer has little confidence in the possibility of a truly autonomous critical perspective. This attitude [is] derived from a view of postmodern consciousness as unable to transcend, or at least entirely free itself, from society's hegemonic codes" (99). Through Coover's radical engagement with these hegemonic codes, he undercuts the presentation of historical narratives as doctrine by the media and opposes the oppressive political agendas that inform these narratives.

Hyperreality is inescapable for Coover, but he argues that the continual emphasis on media narratives' status as fiction to be a necessary form of dissent and an effective manner of opposing the harmful effects of the state's deceptively conclusive historical narratives. 54

Chapter Four: Historiographic Metafictional Opposition to the Warren

Commission Report in Don DeLillo's Libra

The assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and its effect on America as a cultural event is a recurring theme throughout Don

DeLillo's novels: his first novel Americana concludes with protagonist David Bell driving through Dealey Plaza blowing his horn in a gesture that Jeremy Green suggests "links his own splintered sense of self to the rupture in American history that took place in Dallas" ("Libra" 95), and the Zapruder film makes several appearances in DeLillo's opus Underworld. DeLillo describes the Zapruder film in a 1983 Rolling

Stone article as "our major emblem of uncertainty and chaos" ("American Blood" 24) and enumerates several points of contention surrounding the President's murder:

We are not agreed on the number of gunmen, the number of

shots, the origin of the shots, the time span between shots, the

paths the bullets took, the number of wounds on the President's

body, the size and shape of the wounds, the amount of damage

to the brains, the presence of metallic fragments in the chest,

the number of caskets, the number of ambulances, the number

of occipital bones. (22)

These disputes about the moment's objective historical truth exist in spite of the

Zapruder film's depiction of the assassination, and Green writes that "[for DeLillo,] the Zapruder film is ... an 'atrocity exhibition' (in J. G. Ballard's apt phrase) which appears to show everything but tells nothing" ("Disaster Footage" 593-4). DeLillo 55 incorporates images from the media spectacle surrounding the assassination into his narrative in order to defamiliarize them and point to their multivalency, as differing narratives of the assassination place widely divergent interpretations upon them.

DeLillo portrays a Baudrillardian landscape in which, through media images, a hyperreal model has come to precede the real; like Hutcheon, he portrays this trend in order to mark the disparity between the objective historical moment and the texts that describe it.

The political efficacy of DeLillo's historiographic metafiction is brought out by the debate over George Will's review in the Washington Post entitled "A Shallow

Look at the Mind of an Assassin," in which Will calls Libra an "act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship" (A25). Will's criticism reacts against Libra's discursive engagement with the Warren Commission Report, which one character in

Libra calls "the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to

Iowa City and lived to be a hundred" (181-2). Skip Willman argues that "for Will, the health of the American system, its status as a harmonious whole, must be defended from DeLillo's 'attack'" (418) and that the Warren Commission's narrative "hinge[s] upon the exclusion of Oswald from the American social system" (419). Willman shows that Will's argument contains the implicit political view that it is American citizens' duty to give unquestioning support to the state's narrative of the assassination. DeLillo's fictional conspiracy does not aspire to explain the assassination in its totality, but is instead a repudiation of the Warren Commission's claims to have accomplished an objective historical narrative. Whether or not

Oswald acted as a lone gunman is less important politically than the need for American citizens to be able to question narratives put forward dogmatically by the state, and Will's accusation of bad citizenship attempts to exclude DeLillo from the

American social system like the lone gunman narrative excludes Oswald. DeLillo's narrative is an act of dissent against this type of jingoistic absolutism, calling for a recognition of plurality in the composition of history and refuting the state's claim to have privileged access to historical truth.

Though Libra has been discussed as historiographic metafiction by a number of critics, this chapter will focus specifically on media technologies' role in providing historical intertexts in the novel. DeLillo's argument about historical composition is politically relevant because it critiques the way in which narratives of contemporary events are formed; President Kennedy's assassination marks an important cultural moment in which the reliance of contemporary narrative composition on images and the flawed nature of these images became eminently clear. Libra's criticism of media culture exemplifies historiographic metafiction's political relevance in undermining the state's narratives, and Will's indictment of the novel shows that DeLillo's criticism is seen as legitimately threatening.

DeLillo's fictional account of the assassination takes the form of a conspiracy initiated by rogue CIA operatives and carried out by expatriate Cuban shooters.

However, DeLillo is emphatic that Libra "makes no claim to literal truth" ("Author's

Note" 458) and clarifies in an interview: "I chose what I considered the most obvious possibility: that the assassination was the work of anti-Castro elements. I could perhaps have written the same book with a completely different assassination scenario" (Interview with Anthony DeCurtis 50). Libra's conspiracy is an alternative 57 to what Stacey Olster calls the "lone gunman master narrative" (43) of the Warren

Commission Report. The Warren Commission's narrative seeks to construe Oswald as a deviant psychopath, and the assassination thus becomes a depoliticized random occurrence. Conversely, conspiracy theories that attempt to describe the events objectively seek to ascribe highly political significance to every detail of the assassination. Willman writes, "Conspiracy theory resembles [Jameson's] project for

'cognitive mapping' in its desire to make sense of the social totality" (409), though

Jameson is clear that "conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt — through the figuration of advanced technology — to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system" (38). A worthwhile comparison can be made between Libra and Oliver Stone's JFK, which also presents a conspiratorial fiction. Stone asserts that his 1991 film is a "counter-myth" (Riordan

355) to the Warren Commission Report through a retelling of Jim Garrison's public prosecution of a conspiracy theory; the film problematically ascribes a totalizing narrative that Green calls "a coup d'etat carried out on behalf of the military- industrial complex" (96). DeLillo comments on the film: "I don't think it was anything but an example of a particular type of nostalgia: the nostalgia for a master plan, the conspiracy which explains absolutely everything" (Interview with Maria

Nadotti 94). Though Stone, like DeLillo, acknowledges that his work is fiction,

Libra's political strength and effective critique of the Warren Commission Report derives from its status as historiographic metafiction: rather than simply providing an alternative degraded cognitive map of the event, DeLillo casts doubt on the Warren 58

Commission Report's narrative of the assassination by criticizing the conclusiveness of the images and texts on which its historical narrative are founded.

Hutcheon explains that narration through multiple points of view is a common trope in historiographic metafiction that is used to "problematize the entire notion of subjectivity" (117) in order to show that the subject is unable to achieve an empirical position in which he can comprehend a historical event in its totality. Libra is narrated by multiple centers of consciousnesses to demonstrate the way in which each character's understanding of the events surrounding the assassination is partial.

DeLillo's assassination does not take the form any single conspirator intends for it: for instance, Win Everett initiates the plot with the intention to stage a "spectacular miss" (51) that will spur an American invasion of Cuba. As more conspirators become involved, the plot morphs into an attempt to kill President Kennedy, and

Everett notes: "Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move towards death ... a narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men" (221).

This metafictional comment is a generalization about the distrust of ambiguity in narratives—historical and otherwise—and Libra undermines the notion that any conclusive historical narrative can describe the events in Dallas without an acceptance of some degree of ambiguity. DeLillo describes Everett authoring a profile for the conspiracy's patsy:

He felt marvelously alert, sure of himself, putting together a

man with scissors and tape. His gunman would emerge and

vanish in a maze of false names. Investigators would find an

application for a post-office box; a certificate of service, U.S. 59

Marine Corps; a Social Security card; a passport application; a

driver's license; a stolen credit card and half a dozen other

documents—in two or three different names, each leading to a

trail that would end at the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. (146)

Like Hutcheon, Everett understands that history is composed of its textual remains. In composing a patsy from "pocket litter" (53), Everett also understands the role of ambiguity in the composition of history. He says, "His gunman would appear behind a strip of scenic gauze. You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery.

This is what makes it real" (147). Everett does not need to create a fully realized back history for the scapegoat because he understands that by creating textual remains that are suggestive, the gaps will be filled in through gestalt as various narratives are composed. Though Everett has a thorough understanding of how historical narratives are written, DeLillo does not grant him excessive power as the secret compositor of the historical record: the narrative he authors about the framed gunman is intended to lead "investigators to learn that Kennedy wanted Castro dead ... and that Castro or his senior aides decided to retaliate" (53). This narrative does not enter the historical record, as the Warren Commission instead portrays Oswald as an aberrant, disaffected individual whose action was devoid of political intent and was instead driven by a need for media recognition.

DeLillo's Oswald desires historical significance from adolescence and is attracted to the Marxist conception of history; he attempts to read dense Marxist theory despite his dyslexia. Television and other media are prevalent in DeLillo's account of Oswald's life, and various media are shown to undercut the development 60 of political consciousness. DeLillo describes the adolescent Oswald who is unaware of the Rosenberg case:

A woman on the street... handed him a leaflet at the foot of

the El steps. Save the Rosenbergs, it said ... He walked home,

hearing a lazy radio voice doing a ballgame. Plenty of room,

folks. Come on out for the rest of this game and all of the

second ... he folded the leaflet and neatly put it in his pocket to

save for later. (13)

The voice on the radio is shown as an obstacle to Oswald's consciousness of the

Rosenberg case, taking precedence because of the ease with which it is consumed.

Because of his problematic literacy, DeLillo's Oswald conceives of history primarily through media images: "He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope ... He'd seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thin-bodied women with scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world, the secret that covers one- sixth of the land surface of the earth" (33). When Oswald does come to an opinion of the Rosenberg case later in his adolescence, the media's influence on his conception of history causes him to hold individual politicians responsible for broad social phenomena. He tells one of his classmates, "It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. Guaranteed. They're the ones responsible ... Ike is a well-known boob. He could have stopped the execution" (39). His classmate responds skeptically, "Like a movie, I suppose?" (39), and DeLillo insinuates that Oswald's understanding of the case holds the President and Vice-President responsible because of the narrative he has extrapolated from media images. This episode not only serves 61 to foreshadow Oswald's decision to shoot at President Kennedy, but also foregrounds media images' importance in forming narratives in Oswald's understanding of history.

Though Oswald is initially drawn to Marxism and frequently declares himself to be a Marxist-Leninist throughout his life, DeLillo portrays the numerous political contradictions inherent in Oswald's actions: he joins the Marines and serves in Japan, defects to the Soviet Union where he meets his wife, then returns to the US and defects back to the CIA despite his continued activism in support of Castro's Cuba.

The irrationality of these contradictory political affinities is portrayed in Libra as part of Oswald's fragmented postmodern subjectivity. In his wish to become a historical figure, he attempts to subjectively map the true pattern of history and the impossibility of this task brings about his political reversals, as he will undertake any action that he thinks may gain him historical relevance. His belief in his subjective capacity to understand history objectively is reflected by Libra's epigraph, taken from one of Oswald's letters to his brother: "Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one's own personal world and the world in general"

(1). DeLillo portrays Oswald's quixotic wish to merge with history as the flaw which makes him malleable to contradictory political agendas, and Hutcheon explains that narration through multiple consciousnesses like that of Libra is meant to show the

"problematized inscribing of subjectivity into history" (117-8). Oswald's difficulty in establishing a historically relevant subjectivity is shown through his constant variation on his name, and he takes on such monikers as Lee Oswald, Lee H. Oswald,

A. J. Hidell, Ozzie, Alek, O.H. Lee, and D. F. Drictal; he is finally buried under the 62 pseudonym William Bobo. In cycling through these names and aliases, Oswald identifies himself with Marxist historical figures: "Trotsky was not his real name.

Lenin's name was not really Lenin. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names" (34). In one passage in which Oswald is mentally rearranging his aliases, he asserts, "Hidell means don't tell. The id is hell" (101). This Freudian wordplay suggests that his desire for a new name reflects a desire to escape from the irrational elements of his unconscious and achieve a purely rational Enlightenment subjectivity that will align with a purely rational conception of history. The disparity between the Marxist figures' birth names and their names in the historical record exemplifies the disparity between the individual and his historical image; Oswald's notion that history is a rational, teleological process is primarily derived from his interactions with media images. The irony of Oswald's desire for a new, historically relevant name is that

'Lee Harvey Oswald' is eventually foisted upon him by the media, and his failure to author his historic name reflects his failure to author the historical narrative of his subjectivity; instead, he is subsumed into the lone gunman narrative which has been authored for him.

DeLillo makes a metafictional comment on Oswald's failure to author his own narrative by using historical documents as intertexts to portray Oswald's desire to write. One such intertext is Oswald's application to Albert Schweitzer College in

Switzerland, on which he lists his vocational interest: "To be a short story writer on contemporary American life" {Libra 134). DeLillo also incorporates Oswald's

"Historic Diary" and "The Kollective," a sociological essay written about the Soviet 63

Union while Oswald lived there. DeLillo's Oswald provides the latter to CIA operative and conspirator George de Mohrenschildt in order to prove his importance to the American Secret Service, but the document only serves to convince de

Mohrenschildt that Oswald is a prime candidate to fill the role of the conspiracy's pre-authored patsy. Oswald's Historic Diary is fragmentary and factually flawed:

"He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right"

(211). Because of Oswald's inability to author himself as a subject, he is easily subsumed by the lone gunman profile that Everett has authored. Greg Tate comments, "In the metafiction that is Libra, every other character seems to be creating a fictitious Oswald, preying on Oswald's impassioned sense of self-destiny and limited self-knowledge—even Oswald, who endlessly invents and reinvents his own myth" (32). Oswald's inability to author himself through language is similarly reflected by his inability to author himself as a media image.

DeLillo's American characters take the media's omnipresence for granted; during Oswald's time in the Soviet Union, he is "surprised to hear that [television] broadcasting started at six in the evening. It was one of the strangest things he's heard since crossing the ocean" (162). When Oswald returns to the United States after his marriage to Marina, the growing potential for the ordinary citizen to become a media image is described:

One evening they walked past a department store ... Marina

looked at the television set in the window and saw the most

remarkable thing ... It was the world gone inside out. There 64

they were gaping back at themselves from the TV screen. She

was on television. Lee was on television, standing next to her,

holding Junie in her arms ... She kept walking out of the

picture and coming back. She was amazed every time she saw

herself return. (227)

The experience of becoming a televised image is strange to Marina because of her

Soviet upbringing, but Lee recognizes that media images are a necessary part of gaining the historical notoriety he desires. While planning his assassination attempt of the arch-racist John Birch society organizer General Edwin Walker, he first turns the General's home and the surrounding area into images in order to simplify and comprehend them: "He began taking pictures of Walker's house ... He photographed the lattice fence behind the house ... He took some pictures of the railroad tracks where he could hide the gun if necessary. There is a world inside the world" (277).

Oswald then has Marina take the infamous backyard photographs that depict Oswald posed with Marxist journals and his Mannlicher rifle, which was later involved in the

Kennedy assassination. Oswald explains the narrative he intends the photographs to convey:

He had a thirty-nine-week subscription to Time. He imagined

the backyard photograph in Time. The Castro partisan with his

guns and subversive journals. He imagined the cover of Time,

a picture seen across the socialist world. The man who shot the

fascist general. A friend of the revolution. (281)

In Oswald's formulation, the photos will depict him as a Marxist figure who 65 undertook a highly political action in shooting General Walker. The irony, of course, is that when one of the photographs did appear on the cover of Life, it was used to support the Warren Commission's interpretation of him and depoliticize his actions as a lunatic lone gunman.

Debord elucidates the problematic of Oswald's Marxist intentions for his photographs, positing that the need for recognition as a media figure is an effect of radical alienation brought about by the society of the spectacle. The pursuit of this perceived need only serves to heighten the alienation of the postmodern subject: "The more [the subject] accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires" {Society of the Spectacle

30). Counter to the Warren Commission Report's depiction of Oswald as psychologically aberrant, DeLillo portrays Oswald's desire for a mediated self- representation as a widely experienced American trend; Olster asserts that "DeLillo's

Oswald is not the disaffected American, as the role of lone gunman would suggest, or even the lunatic American ... but every American" (51). In Oswald's failed assassination attempt of General Walker, he does act as a lone gunman, but Leonard

Wilcox notes that even the lone gunman is "a quintessentially American archetype relentlessly recycled in Hollywood film" (342). DeLillo shows Oswald interacting with this archetype by watching John Wayne movies while in the Marines; when he later becomes embroiled in the conspiracy against Kennedy, he watches a double feature of Suddenly—in which Frank Sinatra plays a Presidential assassin—and We

Were Strangers about an American plot to assassinate Cuban leaders in the 1930s.

These films prompt Oswald to remark on the deathward tendency of plots previously 66 noted by Win Everett: "Lee knew [Sinatra's character] would fail. It was, in the end, a movie. They had to fix it so he failed and died" (369). Oswald's comment is prescient of own role in the narrative formed to explain Kennedy's assassination, but this foreboding intuition is overpowered by his need to achieve media recognition;

Oswald responds to We Were Strangers as "an old scratchy film that carried his dreams ... Lee felt he was in the middle of his own movie" (370). In Baudrillardian fashion, the hyperreal takes precedence over the real, and Oswald's need for media attention takes on a role of equal importance to his need for historical political recognition.

The conspirators against Kennedy successfully convince Oswald to enter their plot because they play to both of these two impulses: his desire to be recognized in the media and in politics. Conspirator T. J. Mackey says that the conspiracy's patsy should be a leftist because "if he thinks he's operating on the left, pro-Castro, pro-

Soviet, whatever his special interest, we'll help him select a fantasy" (75). Oswald is

shown to be a Kennedy supporter; he says, "What Kennedy is doing for civil rights is the most important thing" (235). However, his need for media attention creates the political confusion that leads him to act against a President whose policies he supports. Libra's title refers to Oswald's astrological sign; conspirator Clay Shaw says that in Oswald, the conspiracy finds "the negative Libran who is, let's say, somewhat uneasy and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap ... balance is the key" (315). But though Oswald fits well into the conspirators' designs, DeLillo demonstrates the role of coincidence and contingency through David Ferrie—the defrocked Catholic priest, Air Force pilot, hypnotist, amateur cancer researcher, and militant Anti-Castro activist who is invariably a central figure in conspiracy theories of the assassination. In DeLillo's fiction, Ferrie typifies the influence of irrational forces in the plot against JFK; he tells Oswald that his role in the conspiracy is mystically foreordained: "Think of two parallel lines ...

One is the life of the Lee H. Oswald. The other is the conspiracy to kill the President.

What bridges the space between them? ... There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self (339).

Through Ferrie, DeLillo comments on the innumerable coincidences and symmetries that appear throughout the network of relationships that surround the assassination, from which innumerable various narratives can be built; Oswald notes striking similarities between himself and Kennedy: "[He] [d]id military service in the Pacific, like Kennedy. Poor handwriting, terrible speller, like Kennedy. Wives pregnant at the same time. Brothers named Robert" (336). The fictional conspiracy that DeLillo portrays is not a masterfully crafted plot that is carried out flawlessly, but rather a series of increasingly malicious intentions that escalate into the successful murder the

President and are influenced by chance as much as design.

Just as Oswald's political intentions are closely intermingled with his relationship to the media, the conspiracy's political antipathy towards Kennedy is partially motivated by hostility towards Kennedy's media image. DeLillo writes,

Banister's rage toward the administration was partly a reaction

to public life itself, to men who glow in the lens barrel of a

camera. Kennedy magic, Kennedy charisma ... Do you know

what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets. 68

The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government

... secrets of the end of the social order. (62-68)

Banister and other conspirators react against the social change represented by

Kennedy's image such as the Civil Rights movement. In the increasingly televised media landscape, the conspirators and Oswald exaggerate the symbolic political function of the President of the United States and personalize large sociological and political events in the Head of State: Oswald holds Eisenhower and Nixon responsible for the Rosenbergs' executions, and—in addition to their opposition to the Civil

Rights movement's reforms—the conspirators place the blame for the failure of the

Bay of Pigs invasion squarely on Kennedy. As the conspirators' anger turns into a plot to assassinate JFK, the media affects them in many of the same ways as it affects

Oswald. This accords with Baudrillard's view of the assassination, which he posits was primarily intended for the President's image: "The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political, political substance" (24). The effect of Kennedy's media image is also portrayed through Marina Oswald's more mundane obsession with the President: "She wondered how many women had visions and dreams of the

President... He floats through television screens into bedrooms at night. He floats from the radio into Marina's bed" (324). Kennedy's image has penetrated Marina's subconscious, and DeLillo had depicted something similar in White Noise when brand names penetrate the subconsciousness of Jack Gladney's daughter Steffie so that she mutters the words "Toyota Celica" (155) in her sleep. Even Kennedy's assassin

Frank Raymo notes the difficulty of distinguishing the President from his image, and notes the appearance of simulation created by a sniper rifle: "You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred miles away ... It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube" (298). Although Raymo's comment exhibits a consciousness of Hutcheon's distinction between objective reality and its reflection in images, he understands he is committing an objectively real action by shooting the President. However, Raymo's comment nonetheless provides further evidence that DeLillo is suggesting the conspirators' political and social intentions are bound up with a belief that an assault on the President's image is necessary because of the political and social values it represents.

DeLillo's narration of the assassination in Dallas continues to emphasize

President Kennedy's presence in the national consciousness as a media image, narrating the way in which the President's media image precedes him: "He looked like himself, like photographs, a helmsman squinting in the sea-glare, white teeth shining" (392). DeLillo's narration at no point shifts to Kennedy as the center of consciousness, reinforcing the point that the murder relegates him to the Zapruder film and his other media images. DeLillo's narrative of the disputed facts of the assassination leaves it unclear whether or not Oswald hits Kennedy below the neck with his first shot through leaf coverage, portraying a bystander who hears two shots with the implication that Raymo fired the second. Oswald's second shot hits

Governor Connolly, his third shot misses, and Raymo fires the shot to the head that kills the President. DeLillo describes this moment with attention to Abraham

Zapruder's presence: "A misty light around the President's head. Two pink-white jets of tissue rising from the mist. The movie camera running" (400). Oswald is 70 subsequently arrested in the movie theatre where he hides after shooting Officer

Tippit, and DeLillo describes the media scrum that follows the event:

[Oswald] heard his name on the radios and TVs. Lee Harvey

Oswald. It sounded extremely strange. He didn't recognize

himself in the full intonation of the name. The only time he

used his middle name was to write it on a form that had a space

for that purpose. No one called him by that name. Now it was

everywhere ... It sounded odd and dumb and made up. (416)

The foreign name that accompanies Oswald's ascendance into a media image serves to further isolate Oswald, and on reaching prison he asserts: "A cell is the basic state, the crude truth of the world" (418). Oswald fails to position his subjectivity within a purely rational conception of history, and the media celebrity 'Lee Harvey Oswald' who enters the historical record is a flawed representation of the real Oswald who remains mired in his subjectivity, unable to comprehend history objectively.

Oswald's inability to author the historical narrative of his subjectivity continues to be played out in his execution on live television by Jack Ruby. DeLillo's fictional conspiracy does not extend to include Ruby, whose motive for shooting Oswald is that he is overwhelmed by the shooting as a media event: "All day he'd watched TV at various points in his circuit of downtown Dallas. This death was everywhere ... So much impact and reaction. It was almost as though they were reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus" (428). Ruby's action only further perpetuates the media frenzy and Oswald is simultaneously 'shot' by Ruby, photographers and television cameras.

Oswald's goal to merge his subjectivity with objective historical reality is foiled as he 71 sees himself become reduced to a media image: "He could see himself shot as the camera caught it. Through the pain he watched TV ... He watched in a darkish room, someone's TV den" (439-40). As media technologies capture Oswald's death, they simplify the contradictions and complexities of his subjectivity into a two- dimensional image on which a narrative can be placed. Beryl Parmenter—the wife of one of the conspirators who, in another of the novel's coincidences, runs a picture- framing shop—watches the film of Oswald's death as it is replayed endlessly on her television. Despite her aversion to the atrocity depicted in the images, she continues to watch and says, "He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. He himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes part of another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying" (447). Parmenter's reaction is representative of the American public coming to an understanding of the events through the media. DeLillo's interest in JFK's assassination as a cultural event is clear in Parmenter's need for some form of emotional closure, and she asks if the media intends to provide this closure through the repetitious broadcasting of the murder: "Why do they keep running it, over and over? Will it make Oswald go away forever if they show it a thousand times?" (446). The Warren Commission Report's lone gunman narrative takes precedence over the objective historical events by placing its interpretation on the images of these events, and closure on the event is problematized by the flaws and ambiguities of the Report. DeLillo's historiographic metafiction implies closure is not possible because some degree of ambiguity will always surround the nationally traumatic event; thus Libra defamiliarizes the images of the events to show the political importance of one's freedom to question the 72 problematics of the state's historical narratives.

Libra depicts the unlikelihood that an objective cognitive map of the event can ever be accomplished through Nicholas Branch, a CIA employee who has spent decades writing the "secret history" (15) of the conspiracy. Branch is unable to author a definitive narrative despite an unlimited access to data and information through the

CIA's resources: "There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions" (58). Branch's name plays on the circuitous networks that can be formed from the data, and Wilcox notes the similarity between Branch's and Hutcheon's conceptions of history: "Branch is increasingly confounded by the problem that historical events are inevitably textual, and as such they are unstable ... Their significance 'branches' in multiple directions"

(341). Branch understands the essential outline of the conspiracy and firmly grasps that, though it was initiated with clear political motivations, "the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like" (441). Branch's office is a small room packed with documents and photographs; like Oswald's jail cell, these close quarters act as a symbol of the limitations of his subjectivity. Just as neither Everett nor any other single conspirator was entirely successful in authoring the plot, Branch demonstrates that no single historian is capable of authoring an objective narrative after the fact, as any interpretative narrative is written from a restricted subjective position. Wilcox comments that "Branch's empiricism ultimately falters and folds back on itself, leading to a radical skepticism about ordinary claims to knowledge" (344), and this 73 historiographic metafictional view of history allows Branch to defamiliarize himself from the dominant interpretations placed on images of the assassination. He remarks on the various and contradictory narratives told by photographs of Oswald: "He looks like everybody. In two photos taken in the military he is a grim killer and a baby-face hero" (300). Branch understands that photographs do not grant a privileged access to

Oswald's identity or the objective truth of the assassination. This quandary is concisely portrayed in Branch's attitude towards the Zapruder film, and he responds to an enhanced version of the film sent by the Curator of the CIA: "Even though he has reached firm conclusions in this area, Branch will study the computerized version of Zapruder. He is in too deep to stop now" (441). Though Branch has a subjective interpretation of which frames depict different shots, he continues his study of the textual fragments in a vain attempt to grasp the objective narrative that he has been hired to write.

Branch's and historiographic metafiction's larger proposition about historical knowledge remains debated, and Heinrich Ickstadt prefaces his reading of Libra by cautioning that "the dizzying relativism implicit in [Hutcheon's] position (are all fictions equally true or false? [Ajre some more 'real' than others?) requires a commitment beyond mere skepticism" (300). Libra ends with Marguerite Oswald's reaction to her son's portrayal in the media; she asks, "What about the boy in the casket? Lee in a suit and nice tie looking completely different from the scarecrow on in the newspaper and TV" (453). Marguerite wishes to author her own humanizing narrative of her son, and says, "I will write books about the life of Lee Harvey

Oswald. I have information pertinent to the case ... There are stories within stories, 74 judge" (450). By ending the novel in the voice of Oswald's mother, DeLillo shows the way in which historiographic metafiction's 'dizzying relativism' acknowledges the multiplicity of viewpoints of any historical occurrence, with the implied argument that by portraying themselves as definitive, the Warren Commission and mainstream media's version of Lee Harvey Oswald marginalizes relevant counter-narratives such as Marguerite's humanizing version of her son.

DeLillo's argument that we need to question the Warren Commission's narrative is based on his suspicion of the images used to support the Warren

Commission's findings, which he sees as flawed intertexts rather than totalizing explanations of the events they capture. Wilcox explains DeLillo's relationship to

Baudrillard in White Noise:

In his depiction of a Baudrillardian landscape ... DeLillo

differs from Baudrillard in one important respect.

Baudrillard's position towards the postmodern world is

ultimately one of radical skepticism; finally there is nothing

outside the play of simulations, no real in which the radical

critique of the simulational society may be grounded.

DeLillo's writing, on the other hand, reveals a belief that

fictional narrative can provide critical distance from and a

critical perspective on the processes it depicts. ("Baudrillard"

363)

Libra is an attempt to provide this critical distance from Lee Oswald and the assassination in order to question the Warren Commission Report effectively. But 75 despite the distinction between Baudrillard and DeLillo that Wilcox observes,

DeLillo and Hutcheon share the same view of historical composition: both see any narrative of historical events as a fiction because of its reliance on flawed texts, and believe that this recognition is necessary to understand the social function that historical narratives serve. Though DeLillo is critical of the efficacy of Stone's engagement with the Warren Commission Report, he notes the benefits of Stone's film: "Some people think the movie raised the level of political discourse and others think it prompted the government to open secret files. This is good" (Interview with

Maria Nadotti 94). Libra remains a politically useful critique of the American government's creation of a false sense of closure on the assassination; the novel is an insightful study of the important role media has come to play in the formation of historical narratives since the late 1950s. With its monumental textual fragments, dispersive network of relationships, and opaque media images, the JFK assassination provides an important example of need for citizenship to be able to dissent against the state's claim to have access to historical truth. Chapter Five: "A Moral and Just Psychopathology": Hyperreality and the

Therapeutic Use of Fictions in J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition

Whereas DeLillo uses the ambiguity of historiographic metafiction to create critical distance, J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition portrays a media landscape in which signifiers have displaced signified reality to such an extent that any such commentary on an objective real is impossible; Baudrillard comments on Ballard's

Crash, which takes up many of the same themes as The Atrocity Exhibition: "There is neither fiction nor reality—a kind of hyper-reality has abolished both. Even critical regression is no longer possible" ("Ballard's Crash 319). Ballard portrays the nightmarish effects on the psyche that he sees being brought about through the trivialization of violent media images; as Paul Hegarty notes, "Ballard (like many of the figures in his novels) has done all that we can do faced with simulation: observe it, and adopt a radical passivity, be radically immersed" (156). Though Ballard clearly disapproves of the media landscape he depicts, he believes that hyperreality precludes positions outside of itself from which any truly revolutionary action would be possible. Baudrillard summarizes this problematic:

The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real

is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer

possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of

hypersimulation or offensive simulation, that is posed.

{Simulacra and Simulations 19) 77

The Atrocity Exhibition's radical immersion into hyperreality attempts to find a subjective use for the interplay of signifiers; Ballard sees the media landscape providing an arena in which to remedy one's psychopathologies, and states his intention as "the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology" (37). But despite

Ballard's radical passivity, The Atrocity Exhibition's historiographic metafictional portrayal of President Kennedy's assassination remains a subversive political statement against the Warren Commission Report's lone gunman narrative. The

Atrocity Exhibition makes reference to a number of the major political events of the

1960s, but Ballard explains:

I think the key to that book was Kennedy's assassination in

Dallas, which I saw — and still do see — as the most important

event of the whole of the nineteen-sixties ... The whole

tremendous explosion of the mass media, the way politicians

and advertising corporations were using them — well, it was to

try to come to terms with all this. It seemed to me it was

creating a landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic

novel; we were living more and more inside a strange,

enormous work of fiction. (Interview with Linnett)

Though Ballard believes historical objectivity is impossible in the postmodern media landscape, The Atrocity Exhibition makes a strongly subversive political argument by proposing that the Warren Commission Report's narrative is fiction and suggesting that the popular media uses historical images to construct conclusive narratives in order to garner consent for state actions. 78

The Atrocity Exhibition's condensed novels each present the psychopathological conceptualizations of the protagonist, who Michael Delville calls

"a kind of portmanteau entity" (22-3) and I will refer to as T-.' These conceptualizations represent T-'s attempts to form a cognitive map of the fragmentation he experiences as the combined result of the hyperreal media landscape and his psychological degeneration. The chronologically disjointed condensed novels portray different yet simultaneous versions of T-, and his subjective plurality reflects

Hutcheon's argument in favor of narrative plurality: "[Postmodern novels] assert that there are only truths in the plural, and never one Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just other truths" (109). Similarly, each version of T- is equally true despite his various names and highly variable psychopathological fictions about objective reality; Ballard explains, "Each of the main stories in that collection describe the same man in the same state of mental crisis, but they treat him, as it were, at different points along a spectrum" (Interview with Linnett). As opposed to Libra's use of narration through multiple points of view in order to problematize subjectivity, The

Atrocity Exhibition employs what Hutcheon calls an "overtly controlling narrator"

(117) for the same end; T-'s inability to conceive of himself as a consolidated subject and his inability to assert an objective narrative of history both stem from the hyperreality of the media landscape. Adrian Pocobelli posits that The Atrocity

Exhibition's structure has "the look of an unspoiled film negative" (20), and this metaphor astutely links the novel's disorienting form with the primary concerns of its content: mass media's destabilization of the subject's ontological position and ability to cognitively map objective reality. 79

Like DeLillo's Oswald, T-'s relationship with the world is primarily visual.

Hutcheon writes that "historiographic metafiction appears ... willing to draw upon any signifying practices it can find operative in a society [as intertexts]" (133), and

Ballard makes use of Surrealist paintings as key intertexts in order to portray T-'s frayed psychic response to the prevalence of violent imagery. He notes, "In 1966 ... the surrealists had not yet achieved critical respectability, but the hidden logic of that decade made complete sense in terms of their work. Readers will have noticed that, by contrast, there are almost no references to literary works" (139). Ballard posits that the media's imposition of fictional narratives onto historical images, particularly violent images, causes the type of conflation of disparate elements seen in Surrealist artworks; he argues that the media in the 1960s "created something very close to a gigantic art gallery with a lot of very lurid paintings on exhibition ... Psychopathic strains which were normally either ignored or suppressed were beginning to use the media landscape to express and reveal themselves" (Interview with NME). Though

T-'s cognitive maps are ludicrous distortions of objective reality, Ballard believes that the hyperreality of the media landscape makes this type of psychopathology a generally experienced state. Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva explains that because hyperreality is inescapable, T- willingly engages with media atrocities to "[reenact] incomprehensible events of trauma with the intent of grasping and absorbing them, of turning them into cognitively mastered and no longer psychically tormenting and disquieting experience" (389). The Zapruder film is a central set of images that plague T-'s psyche, and he thus attempts to re-create the assassination as a subjectively useful fiction. Dr. Nathan, the only consistently rational voice throughout 80

The Atrocity Exhibition, explains that "[Traven] wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense" (50). T- finds the Warren Commission Report's conclusive narrative to be an unsatisfactory fiction, and Ballard suggests that individuals need to reconfigure such historical fictions into subjectively beneficial fictions for therapeutic purposes.

Ballard asserts his incredulity towards the findings of the Warren Commission

Report:

[It] is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a

work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be).

The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships

between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book

Depository ... the bullet trajectories and speed of the

Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles—'The

Subsequent Bullet That Hit,' 'The Curtain Rod Story,' 'The

Long and Bulky Passage'—together suggest a type of

obsessional fiction that links science and pornography. (40)

Ballard's suggestion that the Warren Commission Report might be pornographic is not simply exaggerated slander of a narrative that he wishes to undermine. Instead, it is linked to the 'death of affect' that Ballard sees as a symptom of hyperreality. He explains that "pornography is sex with the emotions deleted" (Interview with Weiss) and calls it "the most literary form of fiction—a verbal text with the smallest attachment to external reality" (53). Science and pornography negate emotional response by the removing concern for individual subjectivity; as Susan Sontag asserts 81 in an essay that Ballard commends in his notes, "Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals" ("The Pornographic Imagination" 51). The death of affect appears in The Atrocity Exhibition as a default attitude held by Dr. Nathan and other medical professionals that T- has only recently come to fully embrace. Dr. Nathan explains,

Travers's problem is how to come to terms with the violence

that has pursued his life—not merely the accident of violence

and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic

horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the

real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in

what we might term 'the death of affect.' Consider the most

real and tender pleasures—in the excitements of pain and

mutilation ... in our moral freedom to pursue our own

psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of

abstraction. The only way we can make contact with each

other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the

conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology

is the conceptual system of sex. (116-17)

T-'s insanity is a metaphorical exaggeration of the normative psyche within a hyperreal media landscape—though Dr. Nathan and others are sane, they witness and participate in violence and psychopathology through the media's projection of images of atrocities and sex symbols. This can be seen in Dr. Nathan's description of T-'s love affair with Karen Novotny: "As far as Talbert is concerned the young woman is 82 a mere modulus in his union with the film actress ... Surely it's self-evident—

Talbert's intention is to have intercourse with Miss Taylor, though needless to say not in the literal sense of that term" (83-4). T-'s conflation of Karen Novotny with

Elizabeth Taylor is psychopathological, but Ballard's suggestion is that the media's construction of female celebrities as sex symbols has led to a confusion in which the conflation of one's lover and celebrity is unavoidable. For Ballard, T-'s psychopathologies are literal interpretations of broadly experienced psychopathological tendencies in mass media-dominated cultures.

Though T- and Dr. Nathan's occupation as doctors in a psychiatric hospital demands the emotional austerity of the death of affect, the numerous atrocities in the media—from the highly political to the apolitical deaths of celebrities such as

Marilyn Monroe or James Dean—persist in causing psychic distress. Having lost his ability to respond emotionally to the media's depictions of atrocities, T- reconceptualizes these events in ways that make subjective sense. President

Kennedy's death was a landmark in the ascension of hyperreality because, Ballard explains, "Kennedy was himself largely a media construct, with an emotional appeal that was as calculated as any advertising campaign. His life and death were both complete fictions, or very nearly" ("Interview with Jeannette Baker"). Kennedy's assassination is highly significant to T-'s fragmented subjectivity because, according to Ballard, "his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular psyche that have not yet closed" (AE 52-3). In

Ballard's formulation, the Warren Commission Report's claim to objectivity neuters 83 the emotional response to President Kennedy's death, and this false conclusiveness is all the more politically harmful because it is used to mask "hidden agendas" (52).

The hidden agendas Ballard observes are not the hidden agendas of conspiracy theories that describe the assassination, in which a single plot to conceal truth from the public penetrates every level of the American government. Ballard has little interest in whether or not the JFK assassination was a conspiracy or in finding a second shooter, as he believes that the historical moment is made too remote through mediation for any objective knowledge of it to be gained. Because he sees historical composition as a process of fictionalization, Ballard condemns the media's and state's presentation of falsely conclusive narratives in order to justify state actions. He writes that the worst manifestation of the "hidden logic at work within the mass media"

(152) in both Britain and America throughout the 1960s was "the inadvertent packaging of violence and cruelty like commercial products" (152). He elaborates:

Our TV sets provided an endless background of frightening

and challenging images—the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam,

the Congo civil war, the space programme—each seeming to

catalyse the others, and all raising huge questions which have

never been answered ... I have tried to identify what I see as

the hidden agendas. Also, clearly, my younger self was trying

to understand my wife's meaningless death. Nature's betrayal

of this young woman seemed to be mimicked in the larger

ambiguities to which the modern world was so eager to give 84

birth, and its finishing line was the death of affect... which

seemed inseparable from the communications landscape. (125)

T-'s conceptualizations demonstrate the futility of attempting to find a single underlying cause for the various atrocities of the 1960s; Dr. Nathan describes a motorcade T- had assembled as "a mobile psycho-drama which recapitulates the

Apollo disaster in terms of both Dealey Plaza and the experimental car crashes examined so obsessively by Nader" (73). The goal of this experiment is to find a underlying cause for these events; though the Apollo disaster and JFK assassination do not share a single cause, T-'s confusion stems from both atrocities having been reduced to images that cause him psychic distress because they cannot be satisfactorily explained. The objective detachment of the lone gunman narrative disaffects individuals from the horror of atrocities they witness as images; Ballard sees the media's and state's fictions as attractive because they offer consoling explanations for ambiguous historical events. In composing his historiographic metafiction, Ballard stresses these narratives' fictional status because the state and media create conclusive historical narratives with ulterior motives besides consolation, such as garnering consent for state actions. Rejecting the lone gunman theory of President Kennedy's assassination, T-'s narrative process attempts to arrive at an internally coherent narrative that, though fictional, is subjectively useful as a therapeutic assuagement of psychopathological tendencies.

Baudrillard asserts that Crash portrays "bodies and technology fused, seduced, inextricable from the other" (315), and the same holds true for The Atrocity

Exhibition. T- calls President Kennedy the "victim of the first conceptual car crash" 85

(29), and car crashes figure prominently in Ballard's fiction because they are an explicit example of the meeting of commodity fetishism promoted by media narratives and one's physical body. Delville observes that car crashes lend themselves to Ballard's "interest in decoding the libidinal strategies at work in the technological landscape" (29). T- asserts that "the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event—a liberation of sexual energy—mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President"

(27). In the same way that T- psychopathically conflates Karen Novotny with

Elizabeth Taylor, he also re-conceptualizes Novotny as Jacqueline Kennedy in another attempt to find symmetry in the external landscape, describing his mistress

"carrying the Jackie Kennedy wig as carefully as she could in both hands" (48). The chapter "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" depicts a set of statistical data collected from psychotic patients who wish to recast the assassination with the

First Lady as its target in order to focus and release sexual energies:

Assassination fantasies in tabes dorsalis (general paralysis of

the insane). The choice of victim was taken as the most

significant yardstick ... Results (percentile of 272 patients):

Jacqueline Kennedy 62 percent, Madame Chiang 14 percent,

Jeanne Moreau 13 percent, Princess Margaret 11 percent...

Choice of assassination site varied from Dealey Plaza 49

percent to Isle du Levant 2 percent... On the basis of these

studies a model of the most effective assassination-complex 86

was devised. The presence of Madame Chiang was an

unresolved element. (141)

This use of the atrocity demonstrates the subject's radical alienation from the objective historical moment; Jameson's cognitive mapping is an impossible task for

Ballard's subject, who has no means of escaping hyperreality and therefore must participate in the creation of new fictions. The death of affect which neuters subjective emotional responses to mediated atrocities is not accompanied by an objective understanding of these events; Ballard suggests that the ambiguity of these violent events become psychologically disturbing and thus they need to be reformulated into fictional narratives that feign objectivity for subjectively therapeutic purposes. Beginning with an allusion to Baudrillard, Ballard's note for

"Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" comments:

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a

territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic

imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content.

How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising

and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential

campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms

indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or

deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our

unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV

screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love,

and injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these 87

charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can

only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios. (145)

T-'s emergency scenarios are psychopathological but, when T-'s wife asks whether her husband was a doctor or a patient in the asylum, Dr. Nathan responds, "Neither category seemed valid, nor for that matter mutually exclusive" (69). The results of

Ballard's mock survey reflect the psychopathological state of mind brought about by hyperreality because of its frequent presentation of atrocities which cannot be objectively explained; re-constituting the JFK assassination in a manner that makes subjective sense is the only beneficial approach to the atrocity within the solipsistic logic of the media landscape.

Ballard clarifies that T-'s radically narcissistic subjectivity is a foil for exploring cultural trends and claims that The Atrocity Exhibition's protagonist is not

T- but "the communications landscape, the intersecting mirages of fiction and reality with which we all live ... It's not important to me to investigate an internal sensibility, as the great modernist writers did" (Interview with Fuchs and Korber).

Lutzkanova-Vassileva explains that Ballard "comes to recognize in the regimes of media technology the causes instigating the transition from individual to cultural pathology" (391-2). The fictions that T- composes to make sense of the Kennedy atrocity are culturally irrelevant; they are fictions that co-exist with numerous other fictions and only speak to his individual psychology. The totalizing narrative of the

Warren Commission Report might be capable of bringing comfort to the individual psyche, but Ballard shows that the social function to which it aspires—bringing 88 closure to all observers with an objective narrative—is preposterous in the hyperreal landscape.

The Atrocity Exhibition concludes with a final attempt on T-'s part to reconstitute a cohesive narrative of the assassination in the chapter "The

Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race."

Stephen Busonik reads The Atrocity Exhibition as maintaining a loose form of chronological progression in which T- gradually degenerates; he writes that the novel

"ends in pessimism which is only partially mitigated by the burlesque of the final chapter ... T has lost his inner World War because of his ultimate failure to rebel against the network of social constructs which (de)form his psyche" (209). I find

Busonik's claim questionable: my reading is that T-'s intention is not to rebel against the hyperreal network in which he exists, but rather to reconfigure it into a format that is subjectively therapeutic, the result of which is displayed in this final chapter. This therapeutic usage of hyperreality rejects the media's historical fictions in order to treat the psychic disturbance caused by atrocities' inexplicability; historiographic metafiction offers the freedom to explore psychopathology outside of the constraints of the state's falsely conclusive narratives. Because all the chapters in The Atrocity

Exhibition describe T-'s conceptualizations, I argue that T- is also the author of the final chapter and that the change in the narrative voice indicates T-'s best effort to mimic an objective narrative voice; his co-optation of the lighthearted, sports- commentator tone—a narrative style familiar from television—serves to demonstrate his inability to conceive of the event outside of a mediated context. Though the cognitive map that T- ultimately devises for President Kennedy's assassination is 89 completely detached from objective reality, its fiction is internally coherent and subjectively beneficial in a different manner than the internally coherent Warren

Commission Report. The chapter is prefaced by a note that foregrounds it as a necessary alternative to the state's narrative: "The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, raised many questions, not all of which were answered by the

Report of the Warren Commission. It is suggested that a less conventional view of the events of that grim day may provide a more satisfactory explanation" (171). This note suggests that the chapter not only has an equal claim to historical legitimacy as the Warren Commission Report, but that it is also more effective in bringing closure to the individual. The downhill motor race presents the assassination with a new set of relationships: Oswald fires a starting pistol, and President Kennedy and Vice-

President Johnson are rival racecar drivers. JFK's death becomes a trivial detail of the race: "Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example" (172). "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a

Downhill Motor Race" recreates the disaffection caused by the media's trivialization of atrocity images, and the pre-fashioned role it assigns to Oswald as starter satirizes the manner in which the Warren Commission ascribes the archetypal role of lone gunman to him. The passage that ends The Atrocity Exhibition draws attention to the de-emphasis of ambiguity in the formation of conclusive narratives:

The Warren Commission. The rake-off on the book of the

race. In their report, prompted by widespread complaints of

foul play and other irregularities, the syndicate lay full blame 90

on the starter, Oswald. Without a doubt Oswald badly

misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who

loaded the starting gun? (173)

This final question urges the clarification of an ephemeral detail, but a subjectively adequate narrative of the event has been reached. Contrary to Busonik's reading, T-'s conceptual downhill motorcar race serves as an internally coherent narrative in which the cause and effect of the events captured in the Zapruder film are fully explained.

This farcical cognitive map provides Ballard's protagonist with subjective meaning, as he is unable to approach the assassination objectively in its terrifying incomprehensibility. The patent falsity of T's conceptualization of the President's death—which he creates in order to achieve closure on the atrocity—suggests that the

Warren Commission's claim to have achieved a conclusive cognitive map of the event is similarly farcical.

For Ballard, images within hyperreality can only be used beneficially if they aid the subject to safely carry out violent and psychopathological fantasies. This concept is unsettling, but Delville posits that Ballard is "neither a moralist nor an apologist, but a visionary observer of what he perceives as the cold post-morality of a fragmented narcissistic age" (30). Baudrillard makes the similar claim that "the moral gaze ... cannot touch [hyperreality]. Crash is hypercritical, in the sense of being beyond the critical" (319). In his attempt to find the parameters of a "moral and just psychopathology" (AE 37), Ballard belies an extreme cynicism as to the possibility of reversing the mass media's increasing influence and sees the death of affect as inevitable. Classifying The Atrocity Exhibition as post-moral or hyper- 91 critical recognizes Ballard's skepticism as to whether the individual can achieve the critical distance necessary to compose objective historical narratives; any counter- narrative to dominant narratives like the Warren Commission's will necessarily be composed from hyperreal images and flawed texts, and therefore can only offer further fiction. Though it is not morally prescriptive, The Atrocity Exhibition remains political in that it encourages the individual to adopt a stance of radical skepticism towards the state's narrative of the JFK assassination. Ballard is emphatic that the state and media purport to have objective comprehension of the images of the atrocity with hidden agendas such as the reinforcement of state power. Because Ballard sees the death of affect caused by media culture as inescapable, The Atrocity Exhibition's historiographic metafiction suggests that narrative plurality is a means to formulate subjectively therapeutic descriptions of psychically disturbing atrocities. Rejecting the state's and the media's conclusive lone gunman narrative of the JFK assassination is necessary because the demand for dogmatic adherence to this narrative is used to maintain and protect statist agendas. Ballard suggests that rather than attempting to work through the logic of the Single Bullet Theory, the disaffected individual is better served by creating his own fiction. The narcissism of this therapeutic approach to history is undeniable, but within a hyperreal media landscape, Ballard argues that this approach manages to at least escape blind assent to harmful political structures used to create dogma. 92

Chapter Six: Conclusion

Rosenberg co-conspirator Morton Sobell claimed in a 2008 confession that

Julius Rosenberg did in fact provide "classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb"

(Roberts) to the Soviet Union. Though Sobell asserts Ethel Rosenberg was innocent,

Roberts writes, "Grand jury transcripts indicate that Mrs. Rosenberg was aware of the conspiracy," implying that the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage was legally justified. Roberts' point of contention with Sobell about Ethel Rosenberg's innocence demonstrates the role of conflation in the media's process of historical composition: the New York Times article describes Sobell's confession as if a conclusive narrative of the Rosenbergs' historical actions has been approximated, but Roberts diverges from Sobell's narrative in order to interject his own subjective view of the case. As

Hutcheon argues, any historical narrative that claims objectivity is formed from various flawed texts that do not reflect history objectively, and Roberts' conclusive narrative conflates distinct, non-objective texts to form a coherent whole.

The Rosenbergs' son Robert Meeropol, who has worked extensively to encourage a reappraisal of his parents' case, did not challenge the factuality of

Sobell's confession, nor did Walter and Miriam Schnier, who had argued in their book Invitation to an Inquest that the Rosenbergs were innocent of all wrongdoing.

But though Sobell's confession is not glaringly flawed, Coover's and Doctorow's novelistic treatments of the case, which emphasize the dangers inherent in the belief that singular narratives can grant access to historical truth, suggest that we should not accept his account of the Rosenbergs' history as final or definitive. Hutcheon writes, 93

Both [Coover and Doctorow] ... argue that the victims are

victims partly because they are traditional (if Marxist)

humanists and have unquestioning faith in both history and

reason. For them, the recording texts of history (newspapers)

must tell the truth ... [Documentary sources as well as the

narrative form of history come under as serious scrutiny in this

kind of fiction as they do in the philosophy of history today.

(56)

Sobell's confession should be viewed as one more narrative authored from a subjective position from which history cannot by comprehended objectively. Though

Rosenberg defenders accept Sobell's narrative as credible, the confession remains part of a highly diverse discourse and considering it final would fail to recognize the way in which dogmatic belief in conclusive narratives was the central problem at the root of both the Rosenbergs' pro-Soviet views and the American state's jingoistic justification for the executions.

Historiographic metafiction remains politically relevant because the media persists in presenting conclusive narratives, and its critique of media images as fallible texts is all the more necessary because of the increasing reliance on images rather than written texts in historical composition. Coover and Doctorow show the way in which the media's depiction of the Rosenbergs' trials misused fragmentary texts to construct a narrative that infused the case with political meaning that extended far beyond a trial intended to determine the guilt or innocence of two individuals for specific crimes. Narratives about the Rosenbergs demonstrate the 94 degree to which political motives influence the creation of historical narratives: both the leftist claims of the Rosenbergs' complete innocence and the rightist accusations that the Rosenbergs were responsible for Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities—and thus the Korean War—are fictions created to describe the Rosenbergs' unknown objective actions. Doctorow and Coover do not subvert the state by authoring flawed narratives that claim the Rosenbergs' innocence; instead, their historiographic metafictions study the way in which the presentation of singular narratives in the media is linked to abuses of power by the state.

Similarly, DeLillo's and Ballard's dissenting works of historiographic metafiction challenge the state's claim to possess access to narrative objectivity about

President Kennedy's assassination. Libra and The Atrocity Exhibition emphasize narrative ambiguity in order to avoid the pitfall of responding to the Warren

Commission Report's lone gunman narrative with a flawed counter-narrative that claims an equally problematic objectivity—the tack taken by the numerous conspiracy theories about the assassination. The media supported the Warren

Commission's definitive version of the events and interpreted images as empirical verification of that narrative, as is seen in Life's use of Oswald's backyard photograph as proof of his lunacy. Baudrillard writes that media images are used to provide a false sense of historical realism: "Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, 'objective' form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it" (48). DeLillo and Ballard share Baudrillard's conviction that media images are flawed, hyperreal texts that do not contain self- evident narratives. 95

Lyotard writes that because of the subject's ontological removal from objective historical knowledge, "narratives' reference may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is contemporaneous with the act of recitation" (22). Historical narratives serve political or moral functions in the present, but mask their status as fiction in order to bring about dogmatic acceptance of these political or moral agendas; Lyotard writes, "What is transmitted through ... narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond" (21). American historical narratives exclude not only the Rosenbergs and Lee Harvey Oswald from the national social bond, but also those who question the state's narratives about their actions. Counter- narratives are criticized on the basis of their authors' political motivations, as is seen in George Will's assertion that Libra is symptomatic of "the virulence of the loathing some intellectuals feel for American society" (A25). However, the state's conclusive narratives are not acknowledged to similarly be the product of political motivations.

State narratives are accepted as historically credible due in large part to their active dissemination by the mainstream media. Historiographic metafiction's continued political relevance is found in its call for closer attention to the texts that inform the state's and media's conclusive narratives, as these texts invariably fail to crystallize historical events objectively.

The treatment of media images in dissenting works of historiographic metafiction is similar in its methodology to Situationist International's practice of detournement, juxtaposing disparate images in order to draw attention to their underlying political implications. For Situationist Guy Debord, the society of the spectacle acts to hide objective reality on behalf of state power and capitalism: 96

One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social

activity ... Lived reality is materially invaded by contemplation

of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular

order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is

present on both sides. (8)

Debord posits that detournement can subvert hegemonic images in order to gain access to a true Marxist politics that is obscured by the society of the spectacle. When discussing the power of worker's Councils, Debord claims:

It is precisely in this power where the problems of the

proletarian revolution can find their real solution. This is where

the objective conditions of historical consciousness are

reunited. This is where direct active communication is realized,

where specialization, hierarchy and separation end, where the

existing conditions have been transformed 'into conditions of

unity.' (Thesis 116, The Situationist International Text

Library)

However, whereas Debord sees class consciousness as a truthful philosophy accessible through subversion, historiographic metafiction's detournement of media images suggests only endless alternatives will be created, all of which are fictional.

DeLillo's Nicholas Branch asserts his skepticism that a "plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions" {Libra 58) can be obtained, and DeLillo creates a fictitious alternative to the Warren Commission Report in order to call attention to its constructed nature. Libra attacks the nationalist ideology that influences the state's narrative and emphasizes the fallibility of the images such as the Zapruder film that the Warren Commission and popular media present as self-explanatory when employed in favor of the lone gunman narrative. DeLillo depicts a Baudrillardian landscape in which media images have taken precedence over the objective reality they signify: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody.

It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real" (Baudrillard 2). Like

Hutcheon, Baudrillard does not deny that objective reality did exist, but instead denies the accessibility of this reality in any textually unmediated way in the postmodern era. Similarly, J.G Ballard, Robert Coover, and EX. Doctorow portray historical composition to be irrevocably distorted by hyperreal images. Coover's

Uncle Sam is a parody of faith in fictitious media images and the brutality of the nationalist ideology that this faith entails, Ballard's "The Assassination of John

Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" parodies the notion that a subject within a hyperreal media landscape can constitute cognitive maps of distant historical events, and Doctorow's protagonist Daniel comes to terms with the hyperreality of American historical composition in his visit to Disneyland. Accepting the inaccessibility of objective historical narratives, these authors criticize the political agendas underlying the media's presentation of conclusive narratives about the Rosenbergs, President Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald that intend to bring about dogmatic belief in the political righteousness of state actions.

Though the four novelists discussed in this thesis all subvert the media's composition of historical narratives that collude with state interests, they differ slightly in their opinions of how one can best act upon the recognition of mainstream 98 media's political bias. Ballard promotes the individual's use of media images for the creation of therapeutic fictions, forming conceptualizations that—though they fail to objectively describe reality—act to pacify one's psychopathological tendencies.

Coover's novel is a defense of free speech and powerful rejection state and media narratives, and Doctorow's The Book of Daniel concludes with Daniel joining a protest outside of the Columbia library, suggesting that a rejection of state narratives should be accompanied by direct action. DeLillo portrays a conspiracy involving the

CIA, which he justifies by calling it "the most obvious possibility" (Interview 50), but acknowledges that his version remains a fiction. His rejection of the state's narrative is an attempt to engage in a more free political discourse, and is a demand for the state to act with transparency in its dealings.

Doctorow, Coover, DeLillo, and Ballard share the notion that writing self- conscious fictions that oppose falsely conclusive historical narratives of the state and media effectively subvert jingoistic ideology, though this subversion did not prevent

U.S. politics from shifting to the right wing in the last quarter of the twentieth- century. Though postmodern literature has not had a great effect on popular politics, historiographic metafiction's philosophy of history remains politically relevant.

Hutcheon responds to Frederic Jameson's assertion that a renewed sense of historicity is needed to be subvert globalized capitalism:

To Jameson's lament that the historical novel can no longer

'set out to represent the historical past' (71), novels like The

Public Burning and Ragtime reply that it never could—except

by means of seemingly transparent conventions. To his lament 99

that all fiction today can do is "represent' our ideas and

stereotypes about that past' (71), these novels reply that this is

all they have ever been able to do, and that this is the lesson of

the entire crisis in modern historiography. (212)

Historiographic metafiction acknowledges that political motivations necessarily influence narrative composition, and these authors' political positions are transparent; however, they do not claim to possess access to objectively true narratives, and the reader's agreement with their politics does not require dogmatic support for a narrative. The tenets of historiographic metafiction are politically important in the contemporary media landscape as the interpretation of hyperreal images gains influence over historical composition; the genre shows that these images elude definitive narratives and that any interpretation claiming to be final and irrefutable contains political bias. Baudrillard writes, "History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth" (43), and such myths become politically dangerous when they are used in order to preclude dissent against abuses of power. New narratives about the past such as Morton Sobeli's confession allow for the historiographic community to alter its consensus of an event but, as with scientific consensus, new information consistently draws attention to the erroneous nature of all previous consensuses. The stance of radical skepticism adopted by authors of historiographic metafiction toward the state and media's narratives allows citizens to hold their governments responsible for their use of power by freely questioning the narratives created to justify governments' actions. 100

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