One of the things that really stood out to me was just the chaos at the police station, all the reporters everywhere and the police trying to get through this massive crowd of people with microphones. I started to wonder about what news is, as all the reports they released that had such gaping holes in information or made such jumps and twisted the story.
When reading Libra, it was really interesting to imagine what Lee thought during all of that. On page 417, it is described this way.
"Hell and bedlam. Crowds jammed clear back out to the hall. Reporters still trying to press in, just arrived from the East Coast and Europe, faces leaking sweat, ties undone. The prisoner stood on the stage in front of the one-way screen used for lineups. His hands were cuffed behind him. Reporters shouting out to him."
I also like how Lee keeps pointing out that they were all shouting questions but no one was listening to his responses, they couldn't hear.
But it gets really interesting when you are inside Lee's head and he is thinking about they ways he could play the story. Does he name all the names? Does he take any of the guilt?
This is just a "History as Fiction" moment. The character is consciously playing with history, considering whether to reveal more or less of the truth. It just reinforces that even what people say can be leaving out important information or slanting a story a certain way.
This has really struck me as I have been working on my own piece of post-modernist historical fiction and as I write even basic news for the Online Gargoyle. When I look at what is recorded in newspapers (historical for my semester project or contemporary stories I edit), it is so slanted by what people say and what the author chooses to included that it makes it hard to know what actually happened.
I mean, how many times as an Online Gargoyle author have I had to leave out information because it wasn't "relevant" or succinct or publishable, and yet that information could change the way you understand the story? Probably more than even I think.
And then the news stories that I've been reading for my project, it is amazing how many of them contradict each other about very basic stories about how the dishwasher was invented. You would think that the inventor must have told two stories, the way the articles divide so neatly between two narratives.
I bet somewhere out there there is a novel that totally plays with the idea of the newspaper as a frequently cited source of "history" and how really newspapers often print a lot of fiction as well.
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And consider the added level of complexity to Oswald's contemplation of how much to tell them--he's not just "secretly manipulating history" himself when he decides "how to play it"; it's a question of blowing the lid off this other plot that's much larger than him. This is why the plotters wanted him dead before he was even arrested, and for the paranoid mind, it gives a clear motive for why someone might prompt Jack Ruby to take him out *before* he can talk. An open trial *might* have brought the underlying truth to light (all of it? some of it?), but eliminating Lee's ability to even figure out how he'll "play it" dooms the story to the realms of paranoia and speculation. (It's why those pictures of Lee in his final days are so compelling--and DeLillo taps into this here: what's he thinking? what does he know?)
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