This is the 30th anniversary of Oliver Stone’s scabrous film, JFK. Stone played fast and loose with the facts to hold the military-industrial complex’s feet to the fire. The government had to kill JFK, Stone maintained, because JFK would have quashed Vietnam and other CIA shenanigans.
Conspiracies highlight the storytelling at the heart of history by taking the facts and telling a different story.
This week, I’ve picked up two novels that attempt to tell the truth in fiction. Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) tells the story of Lee Harvey Oswald with a mixture of historical and fictional characters. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) tells the story of three men who conspired to kill Kennedy and succeeded. The books offer two different styles of telling the truth in fiction.
DeLillo tells a postmodern tale. “This is a work of imagination,” he tells the reader in a postscript. “I’ve altered and embellished reality.” Nothing surprising there. But DeLillo’s motives are postmodern: a skepticism about metanarratives and the ability for anyone to tell the truth. He chooses to write a novel about the assassination because the story demonstrates the impenetrability of historical fact. All history is subjective. “The writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events,” Oswald thinks in the novel. Fiction takes a historical account of the crime to its logical conclusion. DeLillo’s narration raises more questions than it answers. He goes inside various characters’ heads, jumps in time, and makes up reasons for historical details while leaving others unexplained. DeLillo tells his story in such a way as to make us understand and feel the weight of the assassination’s
Ellroy tells a gritty tale in often obscene language. Eschewing DeLillo’s aestheticized and philosophical approach, Ellroy makes it his job to get ugly and burn historical myths to the ground. “It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars,” Ellroy writes. “It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here’s to them.” Ellroy gets the “gutter” part right. It’s as though Ellroy has committed himself to tell how the heathen rage (cf. Psalm 2) without revealing the punchline that the Lord holds such earthly power brokers in derision.
DeLillo more effectively evokes the reader’s meditation on God’s providence, the governance of the world that eludes the control of any individual or group. Ellroy more effectively evokes both the disgust of sin and the nasty, brutish, and short world corrupt men and women fight to control. DeLillo shows that transcendence without God is impossible. Ellroy reveals the ethical depths to which covenant-breakers fall.
Experiments in Criticism 