조직 안팎 개인의 상대적 자율성과 양극체제: 돈 데릴로의 「리브라」와 "시스템 속의 무"

Abstract

The intelligence agency based on numberless cell organizations, due to its primary concern for secret activity, renders individual agents to take their relative autonomy. As too many cooks spoil the broth, if autonomous individuals are intertwined with each other, the original goal of the agency will be shaken by the power of contingency. All sorts of rumors can be invented, and various means of detecting the clear-cut enemy will be contrived like some activities of risky espionage. Such a bi-polar system paves the way for burgeoning the conspiracy theory. Adopting the life of Lee Oswald as a template of storyline exposition, Don DeLillo's Libra weaves the different perspectives together to get access to the truth of the JFK assassination. Oswald is drawn to the conspiracy by the people who are ready to show their relative autonomy. However, deserted by both America and the Soviet Union, the lonely Oswald is treated as a trivial component of the huge organization, a meaningless thing. Successfully killing JFK, he comes to prove the most influential power of relative autonomy with his intelligence. Through his power of relative autonomy, Oswald negates blindly pursuing the requests of bi-polar superpowers. His affirmative self-fashioning, too, reveals its limitation, for he is trapped by the unreal world created in mass media. Thus, the narrator not only criticizes the bi-polar system but describes Oswald as a by-product of dichotomous epistemology.