Abstract
Coined by Linda Hutcheon, historiographic metafiction refers to self-reflexivity-featuring historical novels that blur the boundary between fiction and history. One of the representative works in this genre is Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), a fiction based on the JFK assassination. In weaving the incident into an imaginary CIA conspiracy, the fiction defies the official theory of the assassin Lee Oswald as the lone gunman. Firstly, this paper reveals that the research paradigm on Libra has been confined to analyzing its entanglement with the JFK assassination-related historical materials including the Warren Commission report. As a consequence, DeLillo’s portrayal of the Orient has been neglected. This paper spotlights these rarely-discussed Oriental elements to unveil that in Libra DeLillo installs but eventually by imaging a reversed Orientalism subverts the postwar American discourse where the U. S.-Japan alliance is Orientalized as the romance between an American man and a Japanese woman or as parenthood with America as a mature adult and Japan as an immature child. This study further argues that the fiction can be perceived as an antipyretic that reduces the fever of the American century, i.e., deconstructing the narcissistic ideology that celebrates the political, economic, and cultural domination of America as one of the two superpowers following the end of World War II. Finally, this paper, by resituating Libra in the context of American discourse on Japan in the 1950s, unsettles the prevailing research paradigm of historiographic metafiction and provides an alternative context to that of the JFK assassination for interpreting Libra.
Presenters
Lijun WangStudent, Doctoral Program, The Graduate School of Language and Culture at Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Don DeLillo, Libra, Historiographic Metafiction, Orientalism
