When we watched the Zapruder film in class, I wasn't as emotionally charged as I thought I would be. The dichotomy of the film being the quality of a home movie and, at the same time, one of the most shocking and important films in American history gave it an odd, creepy quality. I was most surprised by how little emotion the film carried, especially compared to Libra. The fact that is has been studied frame-by-frame to look for evidence further detracts from it’s emotional power.
Libra offers a narration to the Zapruder film that is grounded in history, but filled with human emotion. For example, the narration of the little girl and the secret service man who thinks to himself that the man taking evasive action is a vet. The small human moments give the story a strong emotional force. This is also seen in Marguerite's narration at the end. History books don’t consider the grief of a mother. Delillo also makes the reader sympathetic for Lee, one of the most hated figures of the 20th century. This goes to show the power fiction has over history to convey deeper emotions than just good and bad.
And "the grief of a mother" is maybe an aspect that's more germane to fiction than history--it's not necessarily going to change anyone's interpretation of events, or their significance, to know that a woman was grieving as her son was suddenly the most notorious man in America. But in terms of filling out the *story*, of finding the human lives amid the headline-grabbing events, it's absolutely essential.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the fact is that Marguerite Oswald takes up many many pages of the Warren report, and she was interviewed *at length* by the commission. And she didn't have all that much to tell them, seeing as she was out of touch with Lee for the entire year preceding the assassination. She spoke of her grief and her struggles raising her sons, essential background to the circumstances of Lee's childhood, but nothing that could explain the really pressing questions surrounding the crime. But in this case (and it's part of the quirkiness of the WC report, as DeLillo describes it, that it casts such a wide net), history actually did record the grief of a mother.