Conspiracy Theories

In today’s panel-presentations, a lot of the discussion revolved around the credibility of stories, conspiracy theories specifically. I certainly agree with the conclusion that as more facts are presented, it ironically creates a less believable narrative. This relationship functions because of the imperfect nature of the world we live in, and the fact that nothing is really going to go exactly as planned. So when an overwhelming number of facts align perfectly together, it alerts any person and shows that the conspiracy theory has reason to be doubted.

In relation to Libra, the potential overly perfect narrative of the JFK assassination is definitely absent, because DeLillo believes that words will never capture the actuality of the moment anyways, and leaves room for interpretation. When it was published, critics initially claimed otherwise by saying that DeLillo is trying to convince of a completely wrong story of events leading to the assassination. However, such critics misunderstood DeLillo entirely, because he himself is aware of the impossibilities in such a task with the unlimited information on the event. DeLillo gives us a novel that has many representations as to what could have happened, which opens up the range of interpretation. For example, his character Raymo is completely fictional, but by including him, DeLillo acknowledges the entire category of people who could have had a major role in the assassination plot but disappeared. Raymo is a representation of all those people.

After class, I was talking with Quyen about the discussion and something pretty interesting happened. I opened up the conversation by talking about the idea of coincidence in the novel and DeLillo’s approach to explaining it, and soon enough she was telling me what was on her mind. She had been thinking of the reason why people search for conspiracy theories. Recently in US History we have learned about the illusion of American Omnipotence, the concept that the US has decided to make everyone’s business their own, feeling that they have the right to do so. Quyen related the US needing to know everything to the individual level of every person who creates conspiracy theories. As she was explaining, I stopped her mid-sentence in an exclamation because I realized a cool phenomenon. I realized that in creating a theory about why people create theories, she was doing exactly what she was explaining. In other words, I proposed to her that she was proving her own point. While she was not necessarily stringing events together and the like, she had a need to know what was going on, and projected a theory upon the matter. It *coincidentally* happened that she was talking about exactly that: placing theories on situations to fulfill intellectual desire. Evidenced by what I saw Quyen doing, we have come to the agreement that it does make sense that the motivation behind conspiracy theorists is related to the idea to have a sense of awareness about information and their implications.

Partly because of the motivation, I have also concluded, as mentioned, that conspiracy theories often times fail to be believable. The desire to be aware of everything inherently lends itself to over supplying information. But DeLillo does manage to quench any feelings of doubt you might expect when opening up Libra for the first time (based on subject of the novel). Even though it is a narrative about the JFK assassination, it is a fiction. Not a history, but a fiction. Returning to the very first ideas of this course, acceptance of Libra is in accord with the idea that fiction has the potential to be more believable than history. In the case of constructing a novel for the events surrounding JFK, I believe that is absolutely true.