德里罗访谈.docx

1、德里罗访谈Exploring Libra and the Assassination of John F. KennedyBYANTHONY DECURTIS|November 17, 1988The train ride from midtown Manhattan to the picture-book Westchester County suburb where novelist Don DeLillo lives offers a capsule view of virtually the entire spectrum of American life. After leaving

2、 Grand Central Station, the train comes up from underground at Ninety-sixth Street on Manhattans East Side, rolls serenely through Harlem, then crosses the Harlem River and enters the devastated landscape of the South Bronx.The journey continues through the North Bronx, the working-class neighborhoo

3、d where DeLillo, whose parents were Italian immigrants, grew up and attended college at Fordham University. Finally, the train passes into Westchesters leafy environs.At DeLillos station, the author and his wife, Barbara Bennett, are waiting. The sun is blazing, and the August heat is crushing. Like

4、 the train trip, which links the quotidian splendor and the nightmarish underside of the American dream, the brutal weather seems appropriate. This is the last comfortable moment youll have for a while, DeLillo says with a smile as he gets into the car. The car is air-conditioned, but the house isnt

5、.One of the major voices in American fiction for nearly two decades, DeLillo, who is now fifty-one, rarely grants interviews. He lacks the necessaryessary self-importance, as he puts it. Im just not a public man, he says. Id rather write my books in private and then send them out into the world to d

6、iscover their own public life. But the publication of his ninth novel,Libra a fictional account of the assassination of John Kennedy, told from the perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald has prompted him to speak.Librais easier to talk about than my previous books, DeLillo says. The obvious reason is its

7、grounded in reality and there are real people to discuss. Even someone who hasnt read the book can respond at least in a limited way to any discussion of people like Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby. It is firmer material. Im always reluctant to get into abstract discussions, which I admit my earlier novels

8、tended to lean toward. I wrote them, but I dont necessarily enjoy talking about them.Still,Librawhich is DeLillos first best seller and a nominee for a 1988 National Book Award for fiction is more of a culmination than a departure. DeLillos first novel, American, which appeared in 1971, ends in Deal

9、ey Plaza, in Dallas, the site of the Kennedy assassination, and references to the slaying turn up in several of his other books. In 1983, DeLillo wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about the impact of the assassination twenty years later. Titled American Blood, that essay effectively serves as a prcis

10、forLibra.Moreover, rather than advancing yet another the-ory of the assassination,Librasimply carries forward the themes of violence and conspiracy that have come to define DeLillos fiction. This is a work of the imagination, he writes in the authors note that concludes the book. While drawing from

11、the historical record, Ive made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination. Instead, he hopes the novel will provide a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation t

12、hat widens with the years.InLibra, DeLillo describes the murder of the president as the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. But this cataclysm differs only in scale from the killings that shatter complacent, enclosed lives in the novelsPlayers(1977),Running Dog(1978) and The N

13、ames(1982). Similarly, the college-football player who is the main character inEnd Zone(1972) and the rock-star hero ofGreat Jones Street(1973) both achieve an alienation that rivals the emotional state DeLillo sees in Lee Harvey Oswald. Apocalyptic events profound in their impact and uncertain in t

14、heir ultimate meaning shadowRatners Star(1976) andWhite Noise(1985), just as the assassination does the world ofLibraand our world, a quarter of a century after it occurred.This interview takes place in DeLillos back yard; afterward well head to a diner on the town square a village center like somet

15、hing out of the Fifties, DeLillo says approvingly for a late lunch of burgers, fries and Cokes. In his yard, DeLillo sits on a lawn chair and sips iced tea. Fortunately, the yard is shady, and the sky clouds over a bit. Even so, the heat, the humidity, the lush green of the grounds and the eerie din

16、 of cicadas give the scene an almost tropical feel. DeLillo wiry and intense, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt open at the collar, speaking with deliberate slowness in a gripping monotone seems the image of a modern-day Kurtz, a literary explorer of the heart of darkness comfortably at home in the su

17、burbs of America.The Kennedy assassination seems perfectly in line with the concerns of your fiction. Do you feel you could have invented it if it hadnt happened?Maybe it invented me. Certainly, when it happened, I was not a fully formed writer; I had only published some short stories in small quart

18、erlies. As I was working onLibra, it occurred to me that a lot of tendencies in my first eight novels seemed to be collecting around the dark center of the assassination.So its possible I wouldnt have become the kind of writer I am if it werent for the assassination.What kind of impact did the assas

19、sination have on you?It had a strong impact, as it obviously did for everyone. As the years have flowed away from that point, I think weve all come to feel that whats been missing over these past twenty-five years is a sense of a manageable reality. Much of that feeling can be traced to that one mom

20、ent in Dallas. We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then.A character in the novel describes the assassination as an aberration in the heartland of the real. We still havent reached any consensus on the specifics of the crime: the number of gunmen, the num

21、ber of shots, the location of the shots, the number of wounds in the presidents body - the list goes on and on. Beyond this confusion of data, people have developed a sense that history has been secretly manipulated. Documents lost and destroyed. Official records sealed for fifty or seventy-five yea

22、rs. A number of suggestive murders and suicides involving people who were connected to the events of November 22nd. So from the initial impact of the visceral shock, I think weve developed a much more deeply unsettled feeling about our grip on reality.You have been interested for a long time in the

23、media, which certainly played a major role in the national experience of the assassination. Television had just made its impact on politics in the 1960 election, and then for the week following the murder, it seemed that everyone was watching television, seeing Jack Rubys murder of Lee Harvey Oswald

24、 and then Kennedys funeral. Its as if the power of the media in our culture hadnt been fully felt until that point.Its strange that the power of television was utilized to its fullest, perhaps for the first time, as it pertained to a violent event. Not only a violent but, of course, an extraordinari

25、ly significant event. This has become part of our consciousness. Weve developed almost a sense of performance as it applies to televised events. And I think some of the people who are essential to such events particularly violent events and particularly people like Arthur Bremer and John Hinckley th

26、e would-be assassins, respectively, of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan are simply carrying their performing selves out of the wings and into the theater. Such young men have a sense of the way in which their acts will be perceived by the rest of us, even as they commit the acts. So there is a deepl

27、y self-referring element in our lives that wasnt there before.You refer to the assassination at various points in novels prior to Libra, and of course, you wrote an essay about the assassination for this magazine in 1983. What finally made you feel that you had to pursue it as the subject of a novel

28、?I didnt start thinking about it as a major subject until the early part of this decade. When I did the 1983 piece in ROLLING STONE, I began to realize how enormously wide reaching the material was and how much more deeply I would have to search before I could begin to do justice to it.Possibly a mo

29、tivating element was the fact that Oswald and I lived within six or seven blocks of each other in the Bronx. I didnt know this until I did the research for the ROLLING STONEpiece. He and his mother, Marguerite, traveled to New York in 52 or early 53, because her oldest son was stationed at Ellis Isl

30、and with the Coast Guard. They got in the car and drove all the way to New York and eventually settled in the Bronx. Oswald lived very near the Bronx Zoo. I guess he was thirteen and I was sixteen at the time.Did it seem odd that some reviews evaluated your theory of the assassination almost as if i

31、t were fact and not fiction?Inevitably some people reviewed the assassination itself instead of a piece of work which is obviously fiction. My own feeling at the very beginning was that I had to do justice to historical likelihood. In other words, I chose what I consider the most obvious possibility

32、: that the assassination was the work of anti-Castro elements. I could perhaps have written the same book with a completely different assassination scenario. I wanted to be obvious in this case because I didnt want novelistic invention to become the heart of the book. I wanted a clear historical center on which I could work my fictional variations.Apart from the personal reason you mentioned, why did you choose to tell the story from Oswalds point of view?I think I have an idea of what its like to be an outsider in