Hyperrealism As Seen Through Libra Research Paper

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Hyperrealism in Literature

The following criticism was made by Michael Rizza on Don DeLillo's Libra:

In Libra, Don DeLillo offers solace for the issue of achieving historical certainty; however, despite rendering fictive order to historical confusions, the attempt to describe events, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, has been complicated by him, through transferring individual agency to external forces. Rejecting these forces' caricatures by astrology, paranoia and conspiracy, he lets characters makes decisions (Rizza 2008). Nevertheless, independent actions, apparently initiated by characters, become a system's products, while design springs from and in spite of individual intentions. Though chaos and system theories help shed light on the conjunction of determinism and randomness, the individual is incorporated in the global. Moreover, the unstable identity of Oswald is performative; he performs for a changing audience, which dictates every new act.

While the above critique has its views, I would agree with it. A hyperrealism perspective is taken by DeLillo that explains history using a fictive order. It does, however, get very complex and veers off the logical path. DeLillo's account in Libra imitates post-print media. This paper will show evidences of how hyperrealism is brought about by DeLillo in Libra, and the complications arising as a result.

Firstly, what does hyperrealism mean? Hyperrealism denotes a category in art, e.g. A painting that looks like photography of high resolution. It is deemed as one among photo-realism's highest forms because of the techniques employed in making the work (Horst 2006). It is usually used in independent art style and movement seen in Europe and the U.S. from the early years of this century. How exactly DeLillo applies hyperrealism in Libra is discussed here.

Libra Summary

A fictionalized narrative on John F. Kennedy's assassination, Libra gives readers the literary equal of a docudrama. This version by DeLillo on the famous conspiracy theory appears to be developed on the basis of the Iran-Contra scandal: The murder of the President is done by a gang of fanatics who believe in the diction that the governance is far too important a subject to be left to the government (read politicians). A ring of traitorous intelligence agents, Cuban expatriates, and mobsters stage an attempt at assassination; its failure is meant to incite Kennedy into overthrowing Castro (Solomon). The plan backfires when an estranged pawn in smarter, deadlier hands, Lee Harvey Oswald, proves a more accurate, if, as it turns out, deadlier shot than was anticipated. Gritty, grim and dismal, the tale lacks DeLillo's typical off-the-wall comedy that is seen in his other works. Revealing the trial of Oliver North and Iran-Contra inquiries might have made this plot appear entirely very probable; or the subject of President Kennedy's death might still be overly emotionally-charged to enable readers to enjoy a narration of its intentional creation.

Don DeLillo and Post-Print Media

The author's often- claimed statement that his writing is in disagreement with the culture depicted by him gives rise to a critical enigma that characterizes his novels and is generally rife in postmodern works of fiction, i.e. DeLillo's narrative brings up the question that is it feasible for writers to write fictional works which aren't in turn assimilated by the forces of culture from which they arise (Parrish, 1999). DeLillo's outstanding skill in constructing novels with conflicting narratives that are inflected using varying media representations (like radio, music, video, television, film, photography) have been consistently appraised by critics.

However, to many a reader, DeLillo's nearly uncanny skill in recreating in his tales the ontological unpredictability that typifies postmodernism is contradictory to the goals of fiction. Commenting on Libra, John Johnston states that it conveys a fundamentally un-representable diversity, of which every single manifestation is interwoven with contradictory versions and corrupted physical evidence. It is suggested by Glen Thomas that information, in DeLillo's novel, doesn't coalesce and stays stubbornly fragmentary. Another critic, while talking about Mao II, opines that while reading this work, one misses a traditional novelistic characteristic- the attempt at communicating a culture's distinguishing accents. The irony repeatedly faced by critics is that the skill of DeLillo in deconstructing traditional novelistic characteristics is largely what helps his work capture postmodern culture's distinguishing accents (Parrish, 1999).

Readers, therefore, are found to be in a critical quandary. They enjoy the brilliance of his mimicry on multimedia- his proficiency at transmitting various media forms using his account seriatim (Parrish, 1999). Readers are worried that DeLillo is an impressionist co-opted by narrative forms replayed by him, owing to his narrative mimicry's success; this suggests the difficulty he faces in successfully being innovative as well as up to speed in his work. Faced with a difficult, demanding writer such as DeLillo, critics, understandably, have entreated leading postmodern theorists: Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Hayden White, Jean Baudrillard, Linda Hutcheon, and Paul de Man, for a vocabulary to address the intellectual issues arising from DeLillo's narratives (Parrish 1999).

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Indeed, because DeLillo's work involves envisioning how contradictory postmodern methods collide, it opposes the coherence demanded by theory. In a bid to explain the accomplishment of Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, it is asserted by Jorge Luis Borges that all novels are ideal planes inserted into reality's realm. Using this notion, Borges questions that, why are we disturbed if Hamlet becomes Hamlet's spectator and Don Quixote reads Quixote? In response, he states that such inversions indicate that if a fictional work's characters can be spectators or readers, we, i.e. its spectators or readers can be fictional. While Borges describes a culture which watches live acts and reads printed text, DeLillo writes for one that views and records. Cameras, movies and TV constitute the media by which people know themselves (Parrish, 1999).

The circumstances that surround Kennedy's assassination by Oswald from various perspectives carried some sort of air of reflectivity, or self-referential characteristic for DeLillo, especially with regards to the historically-conscious killer. Oswald, a self-watcher, who resides in random places, is shown to mull over his coincidental links with Kennedy; he steps out of himself and witnesses, together with the crowd, his own response to the bullet by Jack Ruby, incriminating the masses and making them party to his death. This kind of self-reference links to a systemic reality- an identification of difference, similarity and the relation between the whole and the part (Thomas 2001). It is, primarily, a kind of self-musing rising from late capitalism and the age of information; in case of Oswald, proletariat self-actualization eventually assumed its Marxist motivation and incorporated a profound yearning- that of inclusion in radio, popular magazines and film. At first, Oswald's approach for controlling things includes learning about life's struggles through communist meta-accounts. However, later on in the story, he visualizes himself sitting in Look or Life magazine's reception area, holding his own tale- of a former marine who penetrated the Soviet's core- in a Moroccan leather binder. Where failure of Soviet programming is seen, the appeal of a totalized media finds success (Thomas 2001).

DeLillo writes that Oswald was in agony and everything was abandoning him, every feeling at the ends crumbling in space. He understood what being in pain meant (DeLillo, 1991). All one had to do was watch it on TV, and see his arm across his chest, mouthing an "oh" of awareness. Words and thought were obliterated by pain, and nothing was left for him except the bullet's pathway.

By this description of the death of Oswald, DeLillo implies that, in a way, the assassin is liberated through his own demise. Irreversibly disembodied and freely floating as a part of televisual radiation waves that we are surrounded by, he embodies an ultimate conjunction of the continuous and the discrete wherein the human goes beyond bodily form and enters history as well as the society's consciousness (Thomas 2001). DeLillo, using apt symbolic visual accent, portrays a final picture of Oswald in the form of a masked stranger dropping through aerospace, shorn of his heartbeat. It is not surprising that the entireties faced by Oswald, be it textual or social, become ever more confounding to him given that he cannot gain entry into the symbolic realm. Also unsurprising is the fact that, consequently, owing to his inability to escape Lacan's 'imaginary', he resides in a dream world. This kind of self- limitation would explain Oswald's focus on the symbolic, on images rather than words: relying on visuals or according to Lyotard- the 'figural'- and turning into a compensation for conversational inadequacies. Thus, to a certain extent, readers are left with complex thoughts pertaining to Oswald.

Libra, initially, seems to give readers Lee Harvey Oswald's fictionalized portrait through a Maileresque 'real life novel' on Kennedy's assassination. This real documentary fiction, however, is made complex by showing Oswald entangled in a conspiracy inspired by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); this, in turn, links the novel to both the intelligence-conspiracy thriller subgenre and to investigative journalists' growing "nonfictional" efforts to finally shed light on the "truth" regarding Kennedy's assassination (Johnston, 1994). Using such a generic complexity, DeLillo can use fiction as….....

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