Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: The Individual and Society
- 1 The Princess Casamassima (1886)
- 2 The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. (1910/63)
- 3 All the King’s Men (1946)
- 4 Solar Lottery (1955)
- 5 The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
- 6 The Parallax View (1970)
- 7 Libra (1988)
- 8 The Dead Zone (1979)
- 9 11/22/63 (2011)
- 10 Big If (2002)
- 11 Checkpoint (2004)
- 12 The Good Father (2012)
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: The Individual and Society
- 1 The Princess Casamassima (1886)
- 2 The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. (1910/63)
- 3 All the King’s Men (1946)
- 4 Solar Lottery (1955)
- 5 The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
- 6 The Parallax View (1970)
- 7 Libra (1988)
- 8 The Dead Zone (1979)
- 9 11/22/63 (2011)
- 10 Big If (2002)
- 11 Checkpoint (2004)
- 12 The Good Father (2012)
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
All the novels discussed here have in common that they both question and affirm individual agency in society through a representation of an extra-electoral intervention into politics, although their positioning within the spectrum this suggests varies quite strongly. Even The Manchurian Candidate puts a heroic individual next to the utterly abulic protagonist, and the two mark the extremes of the self-directed and other-directed assassin. For all its complications, the trope of assassination, of voting with a bullet, is an exceptional site of the political imagination in which the conflict between individual and society is visible in a condensed form, an aesthetic laboratory in which experiments and fantasies are played out, tested, rejected, or asserted, and where they closely intertwine with related fantasies of masculinity, transgression, and other aspects. Remarkably, this also entails an imagination of the politics and ethics of fiction, the power of literature to intervene in society and politics, the individual text going against the grain (or with the flow) of its cultural context. Many of the main characters in the novels discussed here are (aspiring) writers: Jack Burden in All the King’s Men and Graham in The Parallax View are journalists; Oswald in Libra would like to be a writer of short stories about America; Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima has literary ambitions; Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate writes a newspaper column; Jacob Epping in 11/22/63 writes a crime novel on the side; Felker in Big If is literally writing assassination plots for the Secret Service; Carter Allen Cash in The Good Father keeps a journal we get to read; and Jay in Checkpoint admits he gets “jittery when I try to write” (C 87). If they are not themselves writing, they—most notably John Smith in The Dead Zone—repeatedly compare themselves to literary figures in their struggle with agency. The imagination of the assassin, an individual changing the world or his or her society, thus parallels that of the writer, and one can read this as a metacommentary made by political novels on the politics of fiction. Like the agency of the assassin, the agency of the text is both affirmed and denied, oscillating between the two extremes of power without conclusively settling on one.
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- Vote with a BulletAssassination in American Fiction, pp. 177 - 182Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021