Rooms and Dreams
I noticed that two motifs in Libra are rooms and dreams. Throughout the novel, different characters mention rooms and dreams, and I think these motifs serve to build the characters of Lee and Branch.
Lee's life brings him from small room to small room. Marguerite Oswald mentions that Lee lived in cramped spaces early in his life, and I believe this starts his development into the Lee Oswald that killed Kennedy. While Lee is in Japan, DeLillo writes, "Louisiana, Texas were lies. They were aimless places that swirled around the cramped rooms where he always ended up. Here the smallness had meaning." For Lee, the world outside of small rooms is vast, confusing, and intimidating. He finds meaning in small rooms: his childhood apartment room, Japanese box rooms, brig cells, KGB holding cells, his soviet home, and the cell where he is held after killing Kennedy. It is in these confined spaces that Lee dreams of reaching into the greater world and becoming a one in the system. Even when killing Kennedy, he places himself in a cramped sniper's nest made of cardboard boxes, resembling a small room. When Lee is forced to act outside of a small room, killing a cop in broad daylight, he finally becomes a historical figure.
Branch writes his secret history of the assassination in a small room, and DeLillo writes, "This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms." In one of Win Everett's chapters, he writes, "Please let me sleep but not dream. Dreams sent terrors you could not explain." The Curator sends Branch material on the Kennedy assassination which only grows stranger and stranger. Eventually, Branch is sent "shattered bone and horror." Is the Curator a dream? A dream that every event in history must connect into a conspiracy?
Lee dreams inside small rooms, but only realizes his aspirations outside of his comfort space. His dreams send him into a terror that Dellilo can only explain by crafting a fictional narrative and connecting the histories of men inside small rooms.
This is an interesting and very specific focus, amid this sprawling novel. I'm reminded of the passage after Lee's arrest, as he's contemplating the possibility of life in prison--not surprisingly (and harkening back to his ideas about Trotsky and other political figures serving their time as "political prisoners"), Lee starts to actually warm to the idea of himself as the most famous prisoner in America. He imagines historians and journalists visiting him for interviews--as indeed, if Ruby had not assassinated him before he got a chance to talk, he would have been sought out. Imagine how the Warren report would be different today if it had lengthy interviews with Oswald to build on. Knowing our boy Lee, though, we shouldn't assume that testimony would be any more revealing or truthful than anything else he'd said and done in his life. It's all too easy to imagine a guy like this, at the center of attention, really enjoying stringing everyone along, indulging his fictions and fantasies.
ReplyDeleteBut the line where he resolves to "name every name" reminds us that, even amid his radical unreliability as a narrator, he may have had a pretty interesting story to tell.
This is a really cool theme that I definitely didn't notice in Libra. Good find!
ReplyDeleteYour focus on rooms and dreams is very interesting! It is enlightening to see how Lee travels the world but is still confined to small, cramped spaces. Although unwilling to leave these small spaces, Lee begins to constantly yearn for acknowledgement and importance in the larger world he wishes to fully assimilate into. This makes him an easily manipulatable target from the views of others who have been experiencing this larger criminal world for a long time.
ReplyDeleteI like how your posts have always focused on a specific thread inside novels that are hard to notice. The constant prevalence of rooms is interesting to me. You connected it very well by showing that only his actions outside of his room or comfort space can bring him to historical fame. I think I agree with you that killing the cop and fleeing is the moment where Lee is thrusts from being a wallflower of the historical events he witnessed to the man in the center of it. Great post!
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