| The Cold War can be considered the final grand narrative of modernity because of its deterministic influence on the making of knowledge in twentieth-century America. Likewise, Cold War events and the power of their individual narratives and images (their petits recits created the needed condition for the advent of the age of spectacle. The Cold War existed in this state of contradiction: the final grand narrative and the first postmodern spectacle. Examples of the literature of the Cold War period, what I have labelled the literature of spectacle, serve to both elucidate the social conditions of the age of spectacle and their relationship to our media society. Spectacular fictions also provide a means of examining the postmodern concept of historiographic fictionalization. Don DeLillo's Libra presents a Lee Harvey Oswald who manipulates the traces of his life to blur the image that he knows must enter the historical record. The Richard Nixon of Robert Coover's The Public Burning evolves to an intense consciousness of the contradictions of historiography that is realized only after he is brutally molested by Uncle Sam for the entire nation to witness, a rape that both strips Nixon of any remaining masculinity and thrusts him forward into America's Cold War history as the dark shadow of his future presidency looms throughout the novel. In The Book of Daniel, E. L. Doctorow's Daniel Isaacson attempts to counteract historiography (and the narrative of his infamous parents, the Rosenbergesque Paul and Rochelle) by writing his own story, telling his history as he feels it relates to the American experience of the Cold War. Daniel's self-history differs from Oswald's self-narratization because Oswald's text is intentionally fabricated, while Daniel realizes that his narrative is a fabrication of the nation's history. Likewise, the characterization of Nixon differs from that of Oswald, though both are inspired by their actual historical counterparts. While the Nixon of the 1970s greatly shapes the Nixon of the novel, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald remains an enigma of America's recent past, perpetually residing in the margins of unknowability. From this space of marginalization, DeLillo's Oswald emerges. |
