Deconstruction Of Historical Memory

As a postmodern novelist,Don DeLillo(1936-)puts his concern on the contemporary American society and culture.However,his novels about history don't follow the traditional historical narrative routine and isolate the history from retrospection on the reality.Instead,he presents a postmodern reflection in the writing of history.He constructs history into a multidimensional space by applying the strategies of spatial narrative and displays a recollection of memory and examination to history from different angles.His work,Libra starts from the memory of the assassination of Kennedy and recreates a kind of narration and memory in both real and fictional spaces.This thesis takes Libra as the research object and employs spatial narrative as main theory and postmodern cultural studies as subsidiary.Its aim is to analyze the author's postmodern view of history in the writing of historical events with the methods of literature research and close reading.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The first part includes the introduction of author,Libra,researches statues abroad and at home,as well as the theory of spatial narrative.Most of researches on Libra are interpreted from the postmodern culture,terrorism and so on.But the interpretation from spatial narrative is still to be deepened.DeLillo creates a multiple historical space by adopting the strategy of multi-perspective narration without the limitation of time and space in this work.Through this way,it conveys the memory and reflection of historical subjects and groups.By analyzing it from the theory of spatial narrative,the author's postmodern view of history could be dug in depth and new ideas may be offered to the study of DeLillo's novel about history.The main body includes chapter two,chapter three and chapter four.Chapter two focuses on three medias of historical writing: Libra,Warren Commission Report and Dallas and discusses their spatial characteristics of reality and fiction,as well as the relationship between them and history.It could be discovered that the novel itself,official report and the scene where the event happened are all real and fictional.They build a bridge of memory between real and fictional world all together.In this respect,history is deconstructed and reconstructed.Chapter three applies Foucault,Soja and Lefebvre's theory of space.The individual memory about protagonist Oswald is analyzed from three aspects: heterogenerous space,social space and psychological space.The immigration of family forms a heterogenerous space with indeterminacy in his life.Such a space has deprived him of the capability to build a stable and healthy character and generated into him a sense of alienation,depression and seclusiveness.The library is open and heterogenerous for him,too.Though it has provided him with a refuge at heart,it has also strengthened his depression and frustration to reality later in his life.In social space,he has been always the bait of conspirators in the process of his passive struggling and made constant suppression and subversion.As for Oswald's psychological space,it could be found that he has been always pursuing historical subjectivity.His psychology has changed from the hope for society to the depression of it.To assassinate president seem to be the best way to have a name in history.Thus,a multidimensional space is constructed in the novel.It not only subverts the memory and cognition to historical subject,but reconstructs a kind of social memory which is unable to be recorded in historical books.Chapter four examines the collective memory conveyed by several historical subjects.The coperformance between Oswald and conspirators uncovers the political engagement in the development of history.Marguerite's confession exposes Oswald's true self in his life background.Branch's collection of facts is the reflection of modern society's exploration and desire for historical truth.The conversion and juxtaposition of three narrative spaces reveal the formation and development of individual memory.On the whole,they construct a kind of collective memory about history.Chapter five is the conclusion.It can be viewed from the analysis above that DeLillo completes his postmodern reflection on the history by deconstructing and reconstructing subjects' memory in different narrative spaces.His aim is to deconstruct the traditional cognition of human subjects and reconstruct a new postmodern historical cognition: True history consists of many possibilities.