Hyperrealism in DeLillo's Libra: History, Media, and Identity

Introduction: Hyperrealism and DeLillo's Libra

Michael Rizza offered the following criticism of 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 the caricatures of these forces through astrology, paranoia, and conspiracy, he lets characters make decisions (Rizza 2008). Nevertheless, independent actions apparently initiated by characters become the products of a system, 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 into 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 carries considerable weight, it is one that invites agreement. DeLillo takes a hyperrealist perspective that explains history using a fictive order — one that nevertheless becomes very complex and veers from a straightforward logical path. DeLillo's account in Libra imitates post-print media. This paper presents evidence of how hyperrealism is brought about by DeLillo in Libra and examines the complications arising as a result.

What, precisely, does hyperrealism mean? Hyperrealism denotes a category in art — for example, a painting that looks like a high-resolution photograph. It is considered one of the highest forms of photo-realism because of the techniques employed in producing the work (Horst 2006). It is typically associated with an independent art style and movement that emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of this century. The discussion below explores exactly how DeLillo applies hyperrealism in Libra.

Libra: Plot Summary and Context

A fictionalized narrative of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Libra gives readers the literary equivalent of a docudrama. DeLillo's version of the famous conspiracy theory appears to be developed on the basis of the Iran-Contra scandal: the murder of the President is carried out by a group of fanatics who believe that governance is far too important a matter to be left to politicians. A ring of traitorous intelligence agents, Cuban expatriates, and mobsters stage an attempted assassination; its failure is intended 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, and ultimately more lethal, shot than was anticipated.

Gritty, grim, and dismal, the novel lacks the off-the-wall comedy typically found in DeLillo's other works. The unfolding of the Oliver North trial and the Iran-Contra inquiries might have made this plot appear entirely plausible; alternatively, the subject of President Kennedy's death may still be too emotionally charged to allow readers to fully appreciate a narrative of its intentional construction.

DeLillo and Post-Print Media

The author's oft-cited claim that his writing stands in disagreement with the culture it depicts gives rise to a critical enigma that characterizes his novels and is generally prevalent in postmodern works of fiction. Specifically, DeLillo's narrative raises the question of whether it is feasible for writers to produce fictional works that are not, in turn, assimilated by the cultural forces from which they arise (Parrish 1999). DeLillo's outstanding skill in constructing novels with conflicting narratives inflected through varying media representations — including radio, music, video, television, film, and photography — has been consistently recognized by critics.

However, to many readers, DeLillo's nearly uncanny ability to recreate in his fiction the ontological unpredictability that typifies postmodernism appears to contradict 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. Glen Thomas suggests that information in DeLillo's novel does not coalesce and remains stubbornly fragmentary. Another critic, writing about Mao II, notes that while reading the work, one misses a traditional novelistic quality — the attempt to communicate a culture's distinguishing accents. The irony repeatedly encountered by critics is that DeLillo's skill in deconstructing traditional novelistic characteristics is precisely what allows his work to capture postmodern culture's distinguishing accents (Parrish 1999).

Readers are thus placed in a critical quandary. They appreciate the brilliance of his multimedia mimicry — his proficiency at transmitting various media forms seriatim through his prose (Parrish 1999). At the same time, they worry that DeLillo is an impressionist co-opted by the narrative forms he replays, given the very success of his narrative mimicry. This difficulty of being simultaneously innovative and current is a recurring challenge in his work. Faced with a demanding writer such as DeLillo, critics have understandably turned to 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 his narratives raise (Parrish 1999).

Indeed, because DeLillo's work involves envisioning how contradictory postmodern methods collide, it resists the coherence demanded by theory. In explaining the achievement of Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges asserts that all novels are ideal planes inserted into the realm of reality. Using this notion, Borges asks why we are disturbed when Hamlet becomes Hamlet's spectator and Don Quixote reads Quixote. He answers that such inversions suggest that if a fictional work's characters can be spectators or readers, then we — its spectators or readers — can, in a sense, be fictional. While Borges describes a culture that watches live acts and reads printed text, DeLillo writes for a culture that views and records. Cameras, movies, and television constitute the media through which people come to know themselves (Parrish 1999).

Conclusion: Fiction, History, and Mass Media

Libra thus offers rich material both for an evaluation of Don DeLillo as a writer and a probe into the power of novelistic representation of mass media. The narrative imitates post-print media in form and content alike, situating it as a landmark work in postmodern American fiction. DeLillo's hyperrealist approach — layering fictive order onto historical confusion, and allowing individual agency to dissolve into systemic forces — ultimately produces a text that is as much a meditation on how reality is constructed through media as it is a novel about a historical assassination.