Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo's "Libra, The Names", and "Mao II"

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature. http://www.jstor.org THOMAS CARMICHAEL Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo's Libra, The Names, and Mao II n its specific address to history, contemporary fiction has mostfrequently exploited the resources of intertextuality to make plain Hayden White's contention that there is no history without a full-blown metahistory, or equally, through the practices of what Linda Hutcheon has termed "historiographic metafiction," to call into question the claims to authority in historiography by uncovering history's status as narrative and unmasking its claims to an unmediated access to the real (Hutcheon 124-40). Don DeLillo's postmodern fiction participates fully in these projects, typically by setting a destabilizing narrative self-consciousness against a supposedly stable history that is represented or misrepresented in the fictional text. But DeLillo's fiction also invites us to read a prior text not as suppressing its instability, nor as site of textual authority to be subverted, but as representative of the very instability his fiction portrays as the generalized context of the postmodern condition. In this sense, the intertextual relationship in DeLillo's fiction is one neither of oedipal rebellion nor of grateful affiliation, but of incontestable dissemination, of endless trace and diff&rance.The general field of intertextuality has long been understood as the transformation of a prior text by a later one; this is of course the very definition of hypertextuality as it was presented by G rard Genette in his formalist survey of the possibilities of intertextual relations (14). But this signaling of an inescapable belatedness as the condition out of which every text is engendered suggests perhaps too static a model. These transformative interactions might well be read as creative rather than contingent; as John Frow points out, Contemporary Literature XXXIV, 2 0010-7484/93/0002-0204 $1.50 ? 1993 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System CARMICHAEL * 205"The identification of an intertext is an act of interpretation. The intertext is not a real and causative source but a theoretical construct formed by and serving the purposes of a reading" ("Intertextuality" 46). The intertextual relation is one in which origins are designated retrospectively, and this act of designation, again following Frow, transforms "the unity and self-presence of the text into a structure marked by otherness and repetition," a network of cultural codes and...

Reading History across Space: The Room of Theories as a Web of Multiple Times in Don DeLillo’s Libra

“…(11) Other critics have associated the account of Kennedy assassination with the postmodern condition referring to intertextuality, language and the fragmented self. In "Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo's Libra, The Names, and Mao II", Thomas Carmichael (1993) argues that DeLillo's fiction is "marked as a self-conscious contemplator of its own intertexts." (206) He continues to say that it is this intertextual space that makes his works postmodern.…”