In a book that focuses on bringing out the human nature of the larger than life historical figure of Lee Harvey Oswald I've continually found myself drawn to him and how I can relate to him and the way he feels throughout the novel. Probably more than any other character in the book I recognize the desire he has to be part of something bigger, to enter history and be recognized. Not to say that I condone the way he's went about doing it, but he really did succeed in catapulting himself into the international spotlight, and he's stayed under a similar level of scrutiny and attention for many decades. His frustration with his lack of a voice and general depression with the state of politics lends a very sympathetic air. To put it bluntly, I can understand why he might have felt so strongly a desire to be a known figure in history when the world has otherwise snubbed him most of his life.
As a result I can't help but compare myself in various ways to Lee. One of the most interesting reflections I have is on the extent to which I, as an individual similar to Lee's level of notoriety for much of his life, might be able to enter in to the limelight as he was able to. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about him I find is the extent to which he is able make himself known without actually having anything particularly noteworthy about him. He's not especially good at anything--while he makes an earnest effort to stay educated and inspired he's by no means a genius, and he has no wealth to speak of that could be leveraged. In fact as I was first reading Libra I was almost annoyed by the extent to which Lee believed he would become a figure of historical controversy. And yet here we are.
While there is a certain extent to which Libra plays with the idea of Lee being driven by "the universe", but I think an even more interesting angle is to consider the idea that there really is nothing special about Lee apart from the fact that he has a desire to make himself known. To what extent would it be possible for me to become the next Lee Harvey Oswald? And I don't mean to suggest that I have plans to assassinate anyone, but the question of how far removed from "history" any of us really are is a legitimate question. I would say that in our contemporary context, with the advent of the internet, being famous is easier than it ever has been. Yet, I think most of us live our lives without any expectation of ever being a part of mainstream history. What Delillo--and even Adam Gopnik when he remarks on the connection between the seedy basement plotter and the president himself--makes us ponder is what really is the distance between the common place person and the historical records. Perhaps that separation is merely one that we live our lives never deciding to try and break out of?
It has occurred to me that _Libra_ could be included in the Coming-of-Age Novel course, especially if we only focused on the "Lee chapters." His big-dreaming sense of himself, and his dissatisfaction with the degree to which the world seems bent on ignoring him, fits the paradigm of that course so well. We excuse Stephen Dedalus's tendency to dramatize his own life, because he grows up and shows that he IS in fact a genius (outside the bounds of the novel's narrative, of course--we have no "internal" confirmation). We didn't mention it specifically in class, but DeLillo twice cites Lee's stated intention to "write short stories on contemporary American life" while in Russia. I'm pretty sure he's getting this from something Oswald did tell the KGB, and it's interesting to think of him as a kind of failed artist (another common way a young protagonist might want to make his/her mark on the world). There is a kind of ideologically driven performance art to Lee's way of being in the world--he "creates" the fiction of himself as much as Win Everett does, and in this respect, he's not all that far from Dedalus.
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